The Wilderness

STORY OF THE LOVE LETTERS

He crouched on the bedroom floor, spread out the paper, and drew plans. A large cube of glass here and another smaller one here, joined by a corridor. The low elevation, the seamless joints of glass, the lights embedded in the ceiling. An Irving Berlin record played through and began rotating silently as he worked. He glanced towards the money under the bed and set his thoughts back to the evening after they had decorated The Sun Rises.

He replayed it: Rook and Eleanor had gone to stay at Sara's house; Eleanor often did this because she hated to be alone on the moors, and that night she was paranoid and spooked because of all they had smoked, and because of Joy's odd appearance at the door, and the likeness of her to the sign. She couldn't get it from her head that Joy was a ghost. The two women had not taken to each other at all. Joy had expressed— with her lazy feline lack of expression — huge enthusiasm for staying at The Sun Rises alone in all that darkness that was so lacking in London, where she lived, from which she was escaping for a few days. And so it was settled, and it was just him and Joy left there with a storm coming in and the rain beginning to fall.

After Eleanor and Rook had gone, then, Joy had set foot on the white garden, realised that the concrete was still setting, and drew her foot back. She hopped onto the wall instead and walked around it to meet him. It was windy and getting dark, and in the distance Rook and Eleanor were making their way on bikes along the road. She sat on the low wall and, with long young fingers, folded her ear in half.

“I've run away from home,” Joy yawned. “I can't decide whether to go back or go to America.”

He looked up to the heavy sky. “America.”

“Oh?” She arched a brow. “Have you been?”

“On my honeymoon. I recommend getting a car and just driving and driving until you reach the sea.”

“And then?”

“Driving back again.”

She inspected the fine layer of concrete on the bottom of her silk shoe but seemed unbothered by it. “You don't have to stay and look after me by the way.”

He laughed at that, at the idea of looking after this woman. Then the rain had begun to fall, fluttering at first on the wind and then coming sudden and heavy; his thoughts were still muffled from the cigarettes they had smoked, and by contrast the rain was cold and soothing. He had no urge to go indoors.

“Let's go for a walk,” Joy said, jumping from the wall. “You know the way animals huddle from the rain — well I can't bear that, huddling. The rain has to be faced.”

She grinned and stalked out of the garden, across the concrete, and he followed, leaving their two sets of prints across it. As they walked he told her about the glass house he wanted to build and they linked hands — some solidarity against the rain perhaps, or some instinct to play their parts without unnecessary loss of time. They trudged half a soaked hour to a place from which they could see the Junk, a sunken house like a forgetful old man making his way somewhere, and behind it, in the dusk, the line of birch scrub like thin white limbs. And behind that, the great chimneys of the steelworks and the gas flame aglow in the rain, purple and unextinguishable.

“Yes, here,” she had said. “Build your house here, so that the house is framed by the factory, d'you see?”

She cut a rectangle in the air with her long arms. There was a coarseness about her, an enthusiasm that overlooked the mud on her hem and shoes; her dyed red hair was the rebel in a massive flat conformist landscape. He both liked and disliked the crude words she used to describe the house that she envisaged there, he liked and disliked it that she so easily shared his vision — excavate some land, the water table is so high here (look at the rain pooling already underfoot) — build a floating glass house like a lantern, hang silk in its windows so it glows against the black, green silk, purple silk, yellow silk. He liked and disliked her, and where the like and dislike met and cancelled out there was him, himself, some lost person found.

“Green silk, purple silk, yellow silk,” she said, and turned amber eyes to him. Two molten castoffs from the sun, he thought. Two coins. Planets.

“You're immortalised,” he said without thinking.

She wiped rain from the end of her nose and flicked the drops into the torrent around them. “At last!”

He smiled. “The woman on the new sign of The Sun Rises is you.”

What was he saying? What nonsense. What a dishonour it was to his wife, from whose imagination the painting had come.

“Apt then, Jameson.” (It was not the first time she had called him by his surname, as if they were partners in crime.) “Because I fully intend to be an alcoholic when I grow up.”

“A good ambition.”

“May as well have ambitions you can achieve. My family is full of not-quite-but-almosts.”

He stared out across to the Junk, felt rain run down the back of his neck. Joy wrapped an arm around him. “I don't think you're like that, Jameson. You'll make it.”

“We're huddling,” he said, and moved away.

With Helen he would never be so abrupt, too protective over her, too concerned with keeping her happy. Joy just smiled, shook the affection from her hands, and laughed one single ha! as if she had caught him out.

They made their way back to The Sun Rises. Reminded of it by the mud that was caking their legs he began talking about the myth of the golem, how the golem, in Jewish mythology, was a creation of the holiest of holies. The holy man would make himself a golem out of mud to prove that he, like God, was capable of creation. Then he would bring the creature to life with spells; the golem, brainless, without its own agenda or heart, would serve the holy man as a slave serves a master.

“We are virtually made of mud,” Joy had said, flapping the sodden yellow material of her dress. “Never mind the golem.”

They ran the rest of the way. Back at the pub they filled Eleanor's bath deep with hot water and got in fully clothed, shoes and all, until the water was brown. What he did not mention to Joy, what he would not want her to know, was that Rook had always joked — in a perfectly serious way — that he was Rook's golem, his dumb unfinished creature. And it had always seemed to be a harmless childhood game, all those play fights, always losing to Rook even when he could have won, always being controlled one way or the other. The thought of it through adult eyes sickened him. Then there he was in a bath with Rook's granddaughter, and it could go any way. Any way he wanted it. Rook had no part in this even though Joy was one of his own, his clan — he had no part in what happened next.

They had peeled their clothes off and climbed into Eleanor's huge bed dripping, ignoring the untidy lovelessness of the room around them. Outside the bedroom window the new sign banged and swung in the wind. No words were spoken at all, none were needed, and anyhow the creak of the ancient bed did enough to fill the silence. Never, never had he felt so utterly aligned to another human being. Afterwards, as she rose from the bed and bent to her sodden dress, he bent with her.

“I love you,” he said.

“And me you, all of a sudden.”

She had taken the leaf from the silk of her shoe and stuck it on his arm. He thought of how they were positioned, hunched double on the edge of the soaked bed, their heads pressed together.

“We're huddling.”

She smiled like a cat, like a cat that has just seen an open door.

“That won't do, Jameson. That won't do.” She sat upright, stretching out her long spine, her skin taut and chalk white. She stood, pulled on her yellow dress which clung to her skeleton. A gunshot rang out over the moors — deer culling, he thought. Deer killing. And he briefly weighed the words for their difference while Joy cocked her head towards the rain pelting down the windows, then narrowed her eyes.

“Guess what,” she said. “You've persuaded me. I'm going to go to America.”

He leaned forward a fraction and touched her hair. “Don't.”

“I'm going to go to America. Going to leave this rain behind.”

So that was then, and some short time after that Joy went without a word, and some time after that came the money, and the paint on the sign outside The Sun Rises faded a little in the heat of the summer. Some time in amongst these times Eleanor's love letter came, declaring what she would never declare (or so she said) to anybody else, and saying also that she knew about Joy without him having to say a word — she knew, she just absolutely knew — instinct and jealousy told her so.

Eleanor's take on his encounter with Joy was painfully tender. As she saw it, Joy entered the garden as tall and unapolo-getic as a sunflower, wearing a yellow dress and yellow shoes, and he, some dashing quixotic figure exhaling smoke, decided to deflower her. And when the moment came it was unequivocally wonderful, because the sunflower succumbed to his charm, and he to hers, and they were suspended from themselves and from time like dandelion clocks floating on the breeze. When they landed reality hit. He went back to his wife, she went to America. There was no remorse, only happy memories that would begin eventually to feel like dreams. He wondered how accurate this would prove to be, whether remorse would come. And he wondered how many times Eleanor had gone over and over the scenario in her head, poor Eleanor, relaying it with spelling mistakes, promising she would tell nobody what she knew.

Though she intended for her words of love to hit hard, they instead landed on him so lightly. Toy words. So insubstantial compared to his compressed, shrinking, infinitely dense memory of Joy.

Joy didn't write. Nothing came. He decided to cast her memory aside. The more he reflected on it the more he thought of how impassive she had been, and he wondered if he had perhaps taken advantage of her. She was very young. Rook's granddaughter. And he Rook's son in all but blood, in all the ways that were supposed to count. There was a sickly feeling of perversion, if not incest then something else which he could no longer put down to mere infidelity. As he read the lovely scenario in Eleanor's letter he was forced to confront its opposite scenario, that he had perhaps forced Joy into sleeping with him. Of course he hadn't forced her — but had he? How could he know for certain?

Even more distressing was that he did not feel guilty, neither for Helen nor for Joy. He felt new. Visions of his glass house buoyed him until the coach house began to bleach out around him, and when he and Helen took to their Conception Events he focussed on his sudden hunger for another child and on the being that would become Alice. Helen had described her (you think hard enough, she said, and your thoughts will be the case). Pretty, average height, she will have long fingers and small ears and lilac eyes, a little elfin, honey skin, freckles, her father's strong nose. All this was very well, he thought, but not enough. She would have Joy's height and arrogance, she would not be all good and all God, and lilac eyes were fine but Alice's eyes would be indecisive and refuse to settle for lilac alone.

Upstairs the money sat under the bed in surprisingly few neat piles — a thousand pounds did not look much when it was stacked. It had been there for some weeks, and in those weeks he had made investigations into the ownership of the Junk, except that the task was far harder than he had imagined. The house belonged to a woman called Mrs. Crest, but nobody could find her. She had bought it several years before, in 1956, but never lived there, and left it to fall to its current state.

He chased up all the possible leads until they ran dry; he made enquiries, rural communities had strong grapevines— but nobody knew of Mrs. Crest. Some had vague memories which turned out to be mistaken and some knew Mrs. Crest senior before she died, and there was an illegitimate son, or daughter, or no, that was a different Crest or maybe even a Croft, no, to be honest nobody paid much attention to those decrepit little houses. They were much more interested in the people on the new estate with the car, or the people who were going on holiday to Australia by plane (it was taking them three days, they had to stop all over the world). Nobody went on holiday to Australia by plane, if they went there they stayed for good. Mrs. Crest, probably, had done this. Probably never coming back.

He took his wife and child across the moors and drove them right out to the prison, wanting to show Helen where the new building would be, wanting to show her for once what he did.

“I suppose you could just — well, have the house and land,” Helen suggested in the car, in response to his long exposition of the problem.

He smiled. “Steal them?”

“No, use them. And if Mrs. Crest ever came back you could sort it out with her then.”

“And if she didn't?”

“Well then no harm done.”

“Helen, God would not approve.”

“Don't simplify everything. Right and wrong come in shades of grey. You always try to simplify things to on or off. You're, what is it? Binary. You're Binary Man.”

He laughed and wound the car window down to throw his cigarette out.

“If you've tried everything you can to find her, Jake, and she's just disappeared, then — well,” she looked out at the manor house ahead, the stone lions at the gates, and played with her wedding ring. “Those lions are very striking. Are they to protect the prisoners from the outside or protect the outside from the prisoners? Anyway, about Mrs. Crest, it's just a suggestion.”

“It's a really charming suggestion. I mean, what's property anyway? Why not just take what you want and then just settle it afterwards if needs be. No harm has ever come from people taking land from each other.” He shrugged in jest. “It's just land. The Palestinians, they don't mind. And that footpath we got rid of when we built those houses in Bromley, the local community didn't mind that at all, that's why they campaigned for two days in the rain to get it back. Pedestrians shouldn't be walked all over!”

Helen glanced at him and tucked her hair behind her ear. “It's just a forgotten little piece of land, Jake.”

“And with those words a thousand wars have begun.”

They drove past the NO ENTRY signs and parked by the manor house in bays marked NO PARKING, where the first foundations were being dug up against the manor. Land for the grounds was being levelled, the topiary uprooted, a small fountain removed, the security fencing marked out by stakes and tape in a wide circle as far as the eye could see. As they walked around Helen became sullen and hugged Henry who, always deferential to her, was sullen, too. She was upset by the idea of imprisonment, she was upset by her inability to conceive straight away, she was tearful with pride at her husband's work, even if she could not condone it, she said the flatness no longer scared her but made her melancholy. She said she was sorry for being such a terrible wimp, and she smacked a kiss on Henry's cheek.

And then a month later a letter arrived from America. In it Joy said that she had got his address from Eleanor and that she hoped he didn't mind her writing, but in the two months since she had left England she could not stop thinking of him. She even recalled a bruise he had had on his leg. She had met a man in California, a rich man who owned vines, and she was wondering whether to marry him — what did he think? If she did she would have to become a Jew, have a proper Jewish wedding (what if, she joked, she became his golem?). Did he think that was too big a step? Should she?

The letter caught him off guard. He had not expected Joy to think of him and his bruises, or at least to think of them only in hate. He put the letter in a satchel and stuck it under the bed with the piles of money, as if under-the-bed had become a mythical place for all expectant things, as if Mrs. Crest herself would turn up there. As he drove out to get fish-and-chips that evening he mulled the letter over in his mind, his heart reeled despite his head knowing better; Joy, he repeated to himself.

He came home and Helen poured him a beer, made herself a cup of tea, got forks, salt, and vinegar for the chips. They ate in front of the fire, and when they had finished eating Helen fed the fire with the newspaper, making the flames spit with fat. Last woman in Britain hanged. Dog goes into space. Fifty thousand jobs lost. Russia tests nuclear device. Monkey goes into space. He watched the news burn with pieces of fish batter. Helen leaned forward and took a triangle of paper that had dropped down through the grate, not that day but some day previous, and she asked what it was, the writing on that corner of paper. He told her it was a letter from Eleanor simply because he couldn't manufacture a lie any faster. Saying what? she asked. Saying that she is in love with me, he replied. Poor Eleanor, he had not meant to make her emotions public, it just came out in the rush of things.

Helen frowned. Why are you burning it? she asked. You should never burn love letters. Love letters are okay? he asked. Yes, they are okay — so long as they are one-way. She patted his leg, put the corner of Eleanor's letter back into the grate as if that place of salvation was where it rightfully belonged, and turned the lounge lights off. Except for the firelight they were in darkness.

Look, she said, pulling up her skirt, taking off her petticoat. As the satin rubbed against her stockings the material flashed, green sparks of static. It was such amusement to her. Look at me flashing!

He smiled and watched the flames, drenched in chip fat, glow a similar green. Then she redressed, turned on the lights, sat looking into the fire. She confided that she'd had a love letter — a love note — from a man in her Bible group and she would keep it forever. D? he asked. She was surprised — yes, D, how did he know? Short for devil, short for disaster? Short for David, she said. He raised his glass of beer. Well then here's to David. Helen raised her cup of tea. And here's to Eleanor, poor Eleanor, and to being loved.

The fatty flames snapped, wafting bad news and smells of vinegar into the room.

Yes, they toasted in unison.

Here's to being loved.