The Wilderness

2

Driving to work, he falls into the illusion for a moment that he is still in that Mini; the car shrinks to oblige the mistake. He misjudges the position of the gear stick in the thought that it is far closer to his leg, and his head and shoulders are stooped as they always used to be under the Mini's low roof. What frightens him is this — the way objects rush and trip over themselves to support his confusion. He looks around his car and tries to remember what make it is; he cannot. He opens the window to feel what month it is. It isn't a month. There aren't months. There are just happenings, a lack of signposts. Why this e? Why this missing e? He laughs at himself. The brain stores billions of memories and some are obvious, of course — it is obvious that he will remember his honeymoon and his suitcases and his pilgrimage (this is how he thinks of it now), his pilgrimage back home. And Henry. Granted, some of the details are imagined or inflated or borrowed from other times, but the essence, as part of the story of himself, is undeniably right. But the missing e? It is with a struggle that he remembers what he did this morning, or how long ago it was that Helen died, and yet he recalls her saying those words: The e is missing. It needs painting back on, somebody should do that.

He pulls up at the side of the road, lifts his glasses, and rubs his eyes. He has been doing this journey to and from work every day for thirty-five years. He pores over the map.

One day he arrived home from work, it was a Tuesday or a Wednesday, or a Monday. Helen was in the kitchen carving through salmon fillets while oblongs of sunlight fell in on her hands.

“They're old.” She put the knife down and spread her fingers. “Are they really my hands?”

He stood by her side, picked up the knife, and folded her fingers around the handle. He kissed her neck, a neutral and warm contact but nothing more, and she tucked her hair behind her ear.

In response to these worries that she was getting old there was nothing more to say; he had said it all. You're beautiful, he had previously ventured (and meant it, she was more beautiful now, in the details, in the stories of the lines, than before). She had shaken her head and simply disagreed. We all get old, he had tried: to no avail. Me faster than most, she had replied. He had shaken his head, she had shaken hers back. Once or twice he had offered, Helen, you're not getting old, and they had ended up smiling ruefully at the whiteness of the lie.

“It's like being injured,” she said, and rested the knife blade on the salmon. “Suddenly I feel injured by the years, like I've been in a car crash.”

“What is this, Helen? You have to stop. You're fifty-three, it's not old.”

“I had a dream that you were leaning over a very beautiful Bible, here at the table. What does this mean, Jake?” She cut through the flesh once and then again. “That you're going to find God?” She laughed. “At last, you're going to find God! And why would you do that?”

The expression she turned to him was unbearably sweet. Disarmed, he shrugged at it.

“I doubt I will, I'm not looking for him. The dream means something else, or nothing. It means you want me to find God. It means I need to, it means anything, nothing.”

She merely shook her head at him.

“I think it means, Jake, that I am not going to be here for very long. You'll be alone — you see, God finds those who are alone and in need.”

“And where are you going?” he asked, feeling querulous. He turned to take a plum from the fruit bowl on the kitchen table and Helen stole it from his hand as he was about to bite it. She sliced the plum in half and scooped out the stone, then passed half back to him.

“Look at this,” she said with a sudden childlike smile, and laid the salmon and the plum side by side. “One is fruit, one is fish, but the flesh is so similar. This is where I see God, in these — in these consistencies between things.”

Discarding his half of fruit on the table he took the knife from her and held it close to her face. He had not wanted half a plum, he had wanted a whole one; he had not wanted it cut neatly, de-stoned. Certainly he had not wanted to hear her prophesise her own death, and moreover he had not, at the point where he saw her prophesy play before his mind in a stilted and sickening delivery of images, wanted to talk about the artistry of God in lieu, yet again, of a real topic of conversation.

“What is this, Helen? Didn't you once used to ask me about my day, and I yours?”

Her eyes, either side of the blade, blinked rather calmly. “Yes, and you used to say, Do we have to talk about our days, Helen? It's so superficial, talking about days. Can we not just have a coffee and make love instead?”

The asymmetry of her face, divided as it was by the steel blade, captivated him. He had always thought of her as perfectly ordered, prettily symmetrical, delicate and unsurprising. She was, at this moment at least, not. Not delicate — her fearlessness made her formidable. Not pretty — too formidable to be pretty. No symmetry — one ear, he now observed, was higher than the other, one eye slightly wider, one cheekbone more threaded with fine blood vessels.

“Can we make love now?” he asked. He wanted to withdraw the knife, knowing the absurdity of it, but he did not want to restore her to the plainness of perfection quite so soon. He felt an urgent love for her; he thought, he had to admit, of Joy.

“No, not now.” She blinked again and backed away the few inches to the sideboard, and finally he placed the knife down. “Besides,” she said, “you didn't meet me to go shopping today.”

“Pardon?”

“I said you didn't meet me to go shopping today.”

He will never forget the way she brought her hands to her hips so as to challenge him not to lie. He did not lie.

“I'm sorry, I completely forgot. Are you punishing me?”

“No, of course not.” She sat at the table and leaned forward on her elbows, her hair crowding behind her ears and her eyebrows arched. “You forgot last week, you put the coffee in the oven instead of the fridge, you sometimes forget my name.”

“What is this?” he demanded to know. He was angered now by the slipping of the conversation from plums to death to God to this, this, whatever this was. An accusation perhaps, though of what he was unsure.

“Can you say anything, Jake, except what is this?”

“If you could start making sense, yes, then I could stop asking you to clarify.”

She stood and took a bowl from the table. “I'm going to pick some cherries.”

Then she walked barefooted to the French doors, and slipped outside.

After her death he stared into the dark and demanded a ghost. He had read bereavement leaflets that warned gently of the appearance of the deceased, at the foot of the bed, out of the corner of the eye, a smoky presence you might put your fingers through. If such a thing came he was not to be alarmed— no, far from it, he was to be comforted. And so he waited.

Each night he sat in his study and looked through an album of photographs Henry had put together for her memorial. There is one of her on that same day of her death, after she went out into the garden barefooted, and she is up the ladder in the branches of the cherry tree in her pinafore and shoes and socks that made her look like Alice in Wonderland. The more he sat in his study looking at those photographs, the more he became convinced that if she came back to life and he could ask her just one question, it would be this: When did you put your shoes and socks on?

The question plagued him out of all proportion. Maybe he was wrong about the bare feet. But he was not wrong about the bare feet. He remembered it. He would make himself a mint julep and swill it with the troubled concentration of a detective.

After closing the album he always sat back in his seat and replayed this scene: Helen barefooted in the kitchen on her last day alive, slicing salmon and plums, making mention of his forgetfulness for the first time as if she had been saving this conversation — as if, before dying, she wanted him to know she knew that it was not just a bit of absentminded aging but dementia, an illness; that her knowledge of this would go some way to protecting him after she was gone.

This is where I see God, in these — in these consistencies between things, she had said. Did she really say this, or is it just the kind of thing she might have said? Were her feet really bare, or was going barefooted just the kind of thing she would have done? And in perfecting that scene in the kitchen, has he simply perfected his version of it? And isn't it true to say that the more perfect the memory the less accurate it is likely to be? Like a Nativity scene on a Christmas card, rendered so many times it now no longer represents anything of the real birth of Christ.

Dogged by these uncertainties, willing her ghost to come, he rid the house of milk, knowing Helen's near phobia of it. For months he settled for black coffee and found himself remembering those days, so far back — before Alice's birth— when she did drink it, when she loved it, when her freckled skin itself was like cream dusted with cinnamon, when she would tell him his eyes were washed with milk, and when she loved the cherry blossom that curdled on the branches. But it was not to stay that way, and by the time she died her aversion to it was stronger than any aversion she had to anything; just the smell of it, she would say. Just the smell of it. So, in trying to lure back her ghost, he poured the remains of a bottle of milk down the sink and bought no more. She still didn't come. One day it suddenly dawned on him that he was being absurd and he bought a pint, put it in the fridge. Nothing whatsoever changed. The empty drudgery of the days went on regardless.

At night, occasionally, he would go through the photograph album once again and then try to feel the ghost or the delusion. He lay with his teeth gritted as his night vision, still sharp, interrogated each pixel of darkness in the bedroom. Each pixel gathered with others in a crouch of wardrobe or flow of jacket or a heft of beam; the handbasin and the chrome arm of the record player caught a splinter of moonlight. In there, between there, from there, he calculated, Helen will appear.

There is a story his mother once told him about the murderer Luigi Lucheni. In 1898 Lucheni stabbed the Austrian empress in the heart with a shoemaker's file and killed her. When he went to prison he began raving and went mad, and he spent twelve years this way, in euphoric insanity, until he finally killed himself. In this time his only comfort was the regular visitations, manifestations, of the ghost of the beautiful empress. She came wrapped in fur, crouching at his side at dog level; she gave him dog vision. You can call me Elisabeth, she offered generously. She gave him access to the brilliance of sights, smells, and sounds that humans perpetually overlook; she stroked him, he her. In whispers she explained how she had come back to the source of the sin that killed her in order to forgive it, to forgive him, and she told him that this close encounter with one's demise was the only way to heal the pain of being dead. The hole in her heart — a concise puncture that barely blemished the white skin of her breast — had begun to glow a little, and cool breezes passed through it. For the first time, she was happy. And he was happy, at last, he was happy.

(As an aside to this story, Sara also mentioned that Lucheni indirectly started the First World War by setting a precedent for the assassination of Austrian royals, which is what spawned the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand sixteen years later, which is what flared the conflict between the empire and the Serbian assassins, which is when Russia stepped up to defend their Serbian allies, which is when Austria mobilised its army, and Germany theirs in support, and France theirs in opposition, and Britain theirs in support of France's opposition, and so: a war. Sara dipped a wedge of cold potato in her milky coffee and said, Hey presto—a phrase she had just learned—hey presto, Jacob, Elisabeth had a lot to forgive. And she remained impassive, inexpressive, as if the war had no personal dimension for her.)

He believed, then, that if Lucheni — who had been ugly and craven by all accounts — got Elisabeth, a ghost of Helen would not be unreasonable in the least. One bereavement leaflet seemed to feel so certain of apparitions that it listed them, as a compensatory effort, against the other possible symptoms of grief: physical pain (in the chest, as if one's heart is cleaved), a sense of injustice, a broiling anger, notions of hopelessness, an intermittent or abnormal appetite, sporadic loss of function in the limbs, extreme fear of, or else longing for, one's own death. And in return, one may see or get the distinct feeling that the loved one is there, at the foot of the bed, or in the bed, or at one's shoulder, a smoky presence. One may put their fingers through it and feel the soul of the deceased, like moist remnants of dawn in the morning air.

Apart from that short-lived banishment of milk, he has never been a superstitious man; he awaited the presence as anyone would await the next step in a process. The chest pain came, the abnormal appetite, some anger promptly controlled. Confusion. In fact, it was more than this — it was clotting of thoughts, disorientation. A presence was the least a man in his position should now expect; it was not his privilege after all, it was his right.

He bartered with his solitude. The ghost did not have to be an apparition, nor strictly ephemeral, it did not have to bring lasting peace and hope, it could be real and logical, obvious almost, the outcome of a simple sum. It didn't have to creep in the dark, it could be felt in the day if Helen, who was not a night creature, so preferred.

He was open to possibility. After more than thirty years of marriage to a woman whose beliefs fired her every breath he had at least learned, for the sake of good-natured compromise, to be anything but agnostic, agreeing to believe anything in principle. And the more he lived by this compromise the more he found it served his natural attitudes. He would always favour something over nothing. He would always hedge his religious bets, preserving this something as just that, some thing, not this specific thing nor that particular thing. Helen would draw him into religious debate and he would, he always felt, evade it deftly by saying, “Helen, take it up with somebody else — in principle, I don't disagree with you. Maybe there is a god, in principle you're absolutely right, anything is possible.” He meant it, and the integrity was part of what made the argument deft, that for once he was not trying to quell her constant musing by outwitting her but was doing so by being simple and honest.

Being so busy waiting for ghosts, he failed to notice then that the confusion, clotting of thoughts, disorientation were burrowing deeper than the grief.

He lived by the leaflets. The leaflets said there was the chance of a presence, and on balance and in view of all he had been and was, he felt it was his due. But it did not come.

Entropy: this is the word his brain has been trying to hunt down for days, and suddenly it has arrived in a little whoosh of eureka.

Entropy is singularly the most interesting theory that exists, he mumbles to himself, propped in front of his drawing board at the angle, he thinks, of somebody who is always about to do something significant, but never quite does. The office is silent except for a rustling of papers in the other room, and is lit by a spill of light coming from there and outside, and a few desk lights people must have left on before they went home; the darkness stacked into the other areas is surprisingly deep and quiet.

Entropy — the theory that says everything loses, rather than gains, order. A cup of coffee will, with enough time, get cold, but no amount of time will cause it to get hot again. A house can become a mere pile of bricks of its own accord, but a mere pile of bricks will never become a house of its own accord. Everywhere nature's fingers unpick as if trying to leave things as they would be if humans never existed.

He stares at the drawing; it is not his, it was done by one of the junior architects and he has been asked to check it. Thorn-ley Library, front elevation. A simple two-storey building whose only design hurdle is, as ever, the budget; but even so he has been gazing at it all afternoon, his pencil in hand, a stream of coffees getting cold as he tries to remember what it is one is supposed to do. Should he change the lines somehow (but how?)? Should he put a tick in the corner? Now it is well into the evening and everybody — save for that mystery rustler in the next room — has gone, and he aches with inactivity.

Something makes him look up, and he sees a girl in the doorway to his left.

“Jake, would you like another drink?”

She is tall and familiar, brown cropped hair and a simple, kind face.

“A coffee, please.”

“Are you going to be here all night?”

“I have to deal with this.” He taps the drawing with his pencil.

“Well, I'm going in a few minutes, so you'll be left in peace.” She purses her lips into a smile and puts her hands in the pockets of her trousers.

“I won't be alone, there's somebody in the other room,” he says.

“What? This room?” She gestures behind her with a nod.

“Yes, I heard papers shuffling.”

With a tilt of the head she whispers, “That was me.”

“Oh, really?”

Confusion passes across him, across his skin. He can feel it these days as a bodily sensation not unlike a rash. He wants to itch at it.

“So, coffee,” she says lightly, and turns.

He leans closer into the drawing board and hovers the pencil. Entropy. A house can become a pile of bricks of its own accord, but a pile of bricks will never become a house. Entropy. The arrow of time, time can only move one way. He taps, taps the pencil on the paper.

When the girl comes back with the coffee he shoves the pencil into his pocket with the accomplished efficiency of a man who is used to having something to hide.

“Here.” She pushes papers aside and puts the mug on his desk. “What are you working on? Is there a deadline coming up?”

“Yes, yes. It's—” he sweeps the drawing with the palm of his hand and smiles. “It's not interesting.”

“I'm interested.” She buries her hands in her pockets again as if she too is hiding something. “I'm an interested secretary. Is that rare?”

“Is it very busy, being a secretary?”

“At times.” She shrugs gently and leaves the subject there.

“And what are you going to do, when you, when you're older?”

She laughs. “I am older.”

“Of course, I'm sorry.”

“I always wanted to be a vet, actually.” She sits on the edge of the desk. “When I was a child I thought I'd be a vet in a monkey rescue centre, because I always had a fascination with monkeys, and I kept sticker books of them to help me learn the different types: chimps, orangutans, gorillas, baboons, macaques, spider monkeys.” She tucks her hair behind her ear in a way that reminds him of Helen. “There are more than a hundred different types. I used to know them all.”

The words peal against the silence of the office, exotic, forgotten; he thinks momentarily of the time in America when the old word monkey came strangely into the new brown car. And he grasps the last of her list: macaques, spider monkeys. He feels himself stash them away as if they belong to a world he does not want to lose, and to things which were once important and will be important again.

The girl passes his coffee from the desk. “But I'm not sure what happened to that plan.”

“Maybe it wasn't ever a real plan, maybe it was just a fancy, an illusion.”

She nods. “I think you're probably right.”

In the comfortable silence that falls between them he looks back at the drawing and, on an impulse, reaches for a pen on the desk and places a large, firm tick in the bottom right.

The girl glances at her watch and stands. “Nearly nine o'clock. I'm going to get home. Don't stay too much longer, Jake.”

“In fact I'm going to stop now,” he says.

While he gathers things into his bag (takes them out again, puts them back in, wondering what stays and what goes), the girl turns the lights out around the office. A faint orange glow comes through the windows from the street.

“I'm sorry if I offended you just then,” he says. They leave the office and she locks the door, then they proceed down the corridor. In front of him her narrow shoulders, long back, green bag, stand slightly proud of the darkness, slightly vulnerable, and maybe it is this that makes him feel he has done her an injustice of some kind.

“Offended me in what way?”

“For—” He doesn't know what for. “For the things I said.”

“About when I'm older?”

He nods hurriedly and makes a sound of assent; maybe this; he has no memory of it, but maybe.

She laughs again as they take the door out to the car park. Security lights come on and he sees a toothy smile, the bag now grass green, her hair behind her ears. “I forgive you.”

“Thank you. I'm always — saying the wrong thing.”

Is he? He has never thought of himself that way before, but now he says it a sentiment rises to meet the statement and he feels clumsy, unlucky, very slightly sorry for himself.

She pauses and frowns a little in thought. “I read an article recently about a man who set his girlfriend on fire. And then, in prison, the man decided he wouldn't eat anything except muesli, and it had to be a certain type. So his girlfriend visited every week and brought it to him in Tupperware boxes.” She looks keenly at him. “He set her on fire and she brought him muesli.”

As she takes keys from her bag she smiles as if they are sharing a joke.

“So I think you shouldn't worry about anything. People can be very forgiving.”

Touching his elbow, she says good night and goes to her car. He goes to his — the only one left thankfully, or else he may have struggled to know which to choose. Can people be very forgiving, he wonders. Or did she say women?. Women can be very forgiving. A man wouldn't have done that, with the muesli. A man would have walked away and not come back.

Later he wakes up hungry and goes downstairs in darkness, the word entropy loud in his head. There were times — there are still — when he would face the darkness of three a.m. and be terrified by the idea of entropy: nature dismantling every human object, and eventually every human being, until there was just an unfettered, cold chaos. Other people had God to protect them from such an outcome, but he had nothing— nothing except himself.

The kitchen is littered with aide memoirs: Keys on hook behind door. Turn oven on at wall first. Tea bags in teapot, not kettle! In his tiredness he imagines his son weak and safe in his prison cell, wrapped in furs. He looks in the fridge for something to eat and takes out a box of eggs. He finds a saucepan.

If nature was so insistent on making a house a pile of bricks, he had once decided, he would become insistent on making a pile of bricks a house. One must always fight back, not in the hope of winning but just to delay the moment of losing.

If it was bricks-to-houses that he wanted to achieve, it would have been much more honest to become a builder. But there was something frightening in the vision of it — one solitary man battling against the tidal wave of a mammoth physical process, like that man and Goliath, like Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill just to have it roll back down. (Always he has this image of Sisyphus, and the older he gets the easier it is to relate to that particular kind of penance: the acceptance of the pointless.) No, to become an architect and fight the process behind a drawing board in an office seemed less doomed than the builder's thankless task, more strategic and long term.

So he went to London to university and then to work. He converted bombed ruins into high-rises, scrapyards into precincts, thistle-choked fields into schools; he met his wife in the ruins of a blitzed Victorian terrace and proceeded to carve an orderly life with her. She was young, sleek, and suburban. All around them London was powerful with human endeavour. Entropy seemed to be a lame old process after all; it seemed never to encroach.

Now, when he looks back, he wonders: has he succeeded in holding back the tide? The prison is his creation; its codes and systems, its sequenced, numbered rooms, all of which act as a dam against the mess of the world. That in itself was a victory against chaos. He breaks eggs into the pan and throws the shells away. He then takes the shells from the bin and stands with them in his hand with the idea that he needs them for the omelet — he can't remember if shells are like packets that you throw away or apple skins that you eat. Packet or skin, skin or packet? Or box? Or wrapper, or case? There are so many words, and so many actions that depend on the words, that it becomes impossible, when one begins to think it through, to ever know what to do.

He puts the eggshells in the bread bin instead. Think about it later, he resolves, mumbling to himself.

That evening — that Tuesday or Monday or Friday — he had watched Helen out on the ladder in the pinafore she always wore, and the socks and shoes; she looks like Alice in Wonderland, he had thought, and he took a picture. She was picking cherries from the tree with the familiar ineluctable energy that seemed never to leave her. So many times in the past she had come down from that tree, her fingers stained red, beaming— absolutely beaming at the bounty of it all.

He had told her, many years before when they first moved to the coach house, about the Jewish laws of kashrut that dictated how the fruit of a tree could not be harvested until the third year — that before its cycles can be interfered with the tree must know about ripeness and withering, until it becomes so adamant in its growth and so voluptuous with fruit that no amount of picking will disturb it. And for the harvester's part, the virtue of patience must be learned. The virtue of waiting for one's pleasure until the waiting itself doubles or triples the joy.

“Joy,” she had said smiling, “is something I enjoy.” She had put the bowl of cherries on the grass and taken Henry from his arms. “And waiting is my favourite pastime. Waiting for my little boy to grow up, hmm, waiting for him to climb the ladder with me and pick the cherries, what do you say, Hen, what do you say?”

She began to shower Henry's head with kisses, then sat at the bench beneath the tree and unbuttoned her shirt down the front. “Are you hungry, Henry, are you a hungry boy?” It had begun to rain, large plump raindrops landing in discreet crystals on the leaves, but she had stayed there nevertheless and laid bare her right breast in the same way she laid bare packets of fish or cheese, with the same tender efficiency.

Whether she did, in fact, breast-feed there and then, whether this was, in fact, the exact occasion on which he had told her about kashrut, whether the rain had belonged to that occasion or to another, or many others, or none (for a thing that never happened can be remembered exquisitely, he knows) is beside the point. Kashrut and cherries were beside the point. As he watched her that evening in the pinafore, a much older woman, up the ladder, panic welled behind his eyes and he had what he now regards as his first true blankness. For a moment he forgot everything he had ever known, not just facts but the art of how to get facts. The utter blankness amounted to one solitary, stammering thought: What is it I'm supposed to do now?

It was a moment, that was all, of extreme disorientation, but though it passed it did not, he felt, pass fully. He reached under the bed for the human-skin Bible and, kneeling over it on the bedroom floor, opened it at Psalms; perhaps he did not open it at Psalms at all, perhaps he scanned through page after page looking for something that might speak to him. He has remembered this evening so often that he has muddied it with his mind — but there it was in any case and however it came to be. There in Psalms it said, Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? And thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?

One cannot be expected to remember everything, and in fact remembering everything is a hindrance to living; if an event comes as a thousand details the brain needs to forget nine hundred of them in order derive any meaning from that event. So a woman with dyed red hair, coarse skin, and a pen in her hand has explained. But, she has also explained, too much forgetting is bad. He had wanted to take her to task over this: Define too much, define bad, who do you think you are, do you think I am a child?

I'm going to say three words and I'd like you to repeat them after me: house, shoelace, picture. He does not remember what answer he gave, only that he wished for the woman to look away as he strove to meet her ludicrous demands; and he knows that he must, despite an effort, have failed to please her.

“Please draw a clock face on this piece of paper for me,” she had said.

“Analogue or digital?” he asked, looking her acutely in the eye.

“Analogue.”

He had drawn carefully; despite this the outcome had been unusual. He could see that what he had drawn was not a good clock face and that there was something wrong, but he could not see what, nor why. One day, he supposes, he will not even remember that he does not know or remember, and the ageless face of that woman taking his drawing and saying, “Right, Mr. Jameson, thank you,” will constitute for him neither hope nor fear, it will just be an unknown face.

Once he asked the woman with the fox hair what was meant by the missing e. It was just that he kept remembering it, and she seemed to have all the answers. She told him if he remembered something and he couldn't think why, he should let it go; it didn't matter. He was edgy and restless. He did not want to let it go. Then there is the cherry tree, he told her: they had once had a cherry tree in their garden, come to think of it they still might. And there was the human-skin Bible. There was 1960. The year his father died, also the year Henry was born. She just nodded and offered a sympathetic smile, and rubbed her hand across her belly. He remembers that now, wonders if she had a stomachache, or if she wanted to go home.

What if he did not remember that? He feels desperately unreliable. The bed creaks as he shifts his weight towards the centre, and instinctively he folds his arms around the body lying there. He decides not to be afraid. When he looks in the mirror he does not see an old man, nor does he see a brain that lacks logic. He sees himself, greatly changed, but undeniably himself, and he is grateful to this self for persisting this long. For years he saw in others what he thought was anger or hostility and he wondered why, then, mankind should be so incalculably reclusive, so intent on making life worse than it need be. Now he sees that this is not anger but rather a simple refusal to be worn down or away. The old man who looks in the mirror and sees an old man beholds also a man who has given up. This is not him. There are vast tracts of his life which he believes unassailable by disease, and strings of days in which he is no less coherent and lucid than he was as a twenty-or thirty-year-old. He is amazed, thus far, at the banality of this land of forgetfulness.

It is dark and late, although he is unsure how late. He moves his arm from under the other body's weight and puts his hand on her hip. Eleanor, he mumbles, as if expecting her to wake up and make things right. Still uncomfortable he rolls to his other side so that he can see some night sky through the French windows. Out of sight are the branches of the cherry tree, perhaps heavy with cherries, or perhaps bare — he cannot think precisely, with his arm numbed like this and his brain half asleep, where in the year they are. The last clear recollection he has of today was looking at the map in the car, and even this, even this might have happened a different day.

That evening Helen had stood so firmly at the blade of the knife, her hands on her hips, that he had been sure she would not be physically capable of dying. She had thought she was getting old, and yet her hands were oddly young and childish. He had asked this anxious question — What is it I'm supposed to do now? — as if she might step down from the ladder and guide him neatly back to himself. It was not meant to be the last time he would see her alive. On the contrary, it was the sight of her so solid and gallant on the ladder, her pinafore blowing in a new wind, cherries falling into her bowl, that propelled him into blankness, timidity, and confusion. For the first time he did not find himself the better of the two, and for the first time he realised he might need her. He saw the wind pick up. He stood for a long time in a reverie, his hands to his chin, thinking he might go out and help her.