The Wilderness

4

Over his mint julep he consults this Bible, the skin soft under his fingers. It says very clearly that adultery is a sin. They have committed adultery, and blood is in their hands … and have also caused their sons, whom they bare unto me, to pass for them through the fire, to devour them.

Without fully comprehending the meaning of the words on the page before him he knows that they speak of unrightable wrongs. He bends forward at the kitchen table, turning slowly.

The letters are in a stack, a veritable brick, in plush cream and pastel envelopes. He cannot be sure exactly when they started coming or how long he has been biting his nails over them in this state of overwrought indecision, but there has been an increased urgency to their arrival so that now they arrive two or three times weekly and the handwriting becomes more hasty and desperate. Whatever Henry might say, it is a man's handwriting, constricted and reticent, and it leans the wrong way which suggests the man is left-handed like himself. This only adds ammunition to the theory of the affair, since Helen liked his own left-handedness. She liked it that his ring finger belonged to his more active and capable hand, as if that might mean that he would be an active and capable husband. She decided that left-handedness denoted sensitivity and that her active and capable husband would still, beneath all that physical brawn, have the soft innards of a clam.

Who is this man? What does he want with Helen? Were they intimate? If so, how? Why? When? When faced with the unknown, or with particular troubling outcomes, it is, to use one of Helen's favourite words, healthy to be moderately afraid. Well, as he sits here now he is petrified by the letters; he bites his nails, becomes irritated with himself, and drinks the mint julep in anxious instalments as if it is a thought he is chewing on. The fear is not concerned with what the outcome of the letters might be but rather with the notion that, whatever the outcome, he will deal with it wrongly.

If Helen were having an affair will he be obliged to forgive her? After all she is passed away, gone to the other side, departed. Here are yet more choices of expression, and he could go on. Pushing up the daisies, kicked the bucket, met her maker. Such a spread of options before him only heightens the fact that, looking up at the utensils that hang along the kitchen wall, he cannot name them all. Masher, knife with teeth — sawing knife? Perhaps no, but then what? — peeler, whisker. He looks out to the garden and the thing that the washing hangs on. Windmill. Wind thing. Wind washing thing.

Helen has had her innings. She has given up the ghost.

If she was not having an affair and was only up to something of the utmost purity (if this shaky left-handed man is the grown-up and grateful orphan she had secretly been supporting all her life, or if he is her priest), then is he, he wonders, supposed to be angry with Helen nevertheless for concealing something from him? Is he supposed to write to the man and tell him the news? Are they supposed to become friends?

The trouble with right and wrong, he thinks, is that one is usually disguised as the other. He finishes his mint julep and thinks of a myth he knows about two travellers who knock on the door of an elderly couple and ask for shelter. The elderly couple welcome them in, scour a dining board with mint, and prepare the travellers a simple meal. The travellers turn out to be gods in disguise and, so impressed by the hospitality of their hosts, give them a temple in exchange for their ratty-tatty house.

He can only assume this is a lesson in being good and doing the right thing, but the right thing in one situation is the wrong thing in the next. If the travellers had turned out to be murderers, letting them in would have been the wrong thing. Besides, it seems terribly unfair that one should be judged in secret, that gods should sleuth around searching out their unsuspecting victims. He, perhaps, is being judged second by second by his formless wife — an exacting, unrevealed ghost, and a kind of god herself.

He had always told Helen this myth when she said he was drinking too many mint juleps; he would point out how mint is a symbol of home and humble goodness. And then he would wonder, if humble domesticity is so prized a virtue, did that elderly couple even want a temple? What is right, what is good? What use is truth? What constitutes a happy ending?

Eleanor picks up a plastic container of red fruit and rattles it.

“Do you like raspberries?”

“I love them.”

“So we'll get some then. Did Helen use to do anything special with raspberries? Jam? Could try to make a tart.”

He digs his hands into his pockets. “I don't think we had them. They weren't her thing.”

“Shame,” Eleanor says. She drops them into the basket.

It is true, Helen did dislike them. He recalls her once tasting one and taking it out of her mouth. Hairs, she frowned, texture, not right. She had given him the chewed remains of the fruit and smiled; he had eaten it from his palm. But he doesn't in fact remember if he likes raspberries.

As they round the small shop he examines the food and realises that this is true for most things, and that his likes and dislikes have become peripheral trivia. A shoulder of beef behind glass. Some — what are they? He reads the label: clementines. He looks back at the beef, remembers a precise time he had it in a sandwich with the hot white sauce, what he was wearing (blue nylon trousers, hair thick around his ears), where he stood (by the piano), who with (Helen, playing Ir ving Berlin, Alice on her lap); the memory of the food is more real than the present, and in this memory he loves it — the taste and warmth of the meat, the fondness of the moment. But that slab of pink meat behind the glass, a lining of blood around its edge, makes him feel sick now. Vertigo overcomes him. He glances across to Eleanor to tell her but decides against it.

She loads the basket with dirty vegetables and he can't help but think how like her it is to have dirty vegetables. Always digging, her hands always a little sullied, her clothes, too. She unloads the basket at the counter and pays while he stands and watches. When the supermarkets came Helen was glad to be out of these awkward little shops. Into the clean and bright! You could get everything you wanted in one go. Eleanor struggles with bags, holds one out to him.

“Any chance you might help?”

He takes one, and then insists on taking them both. They get into the car, he into the driver's seat. The air feels thick and congested. Caught in it is the thought of himself as a young man, he is tall with dark hair and a leather coat, dark-blue nylon trousers, he is composed, beautiful some say, his skin tans the moment it sees the sun. He attracts stories, he wears them, and they are what make him alive. As he drives away, Eleanor chatting to herself, he wishes he could be more sure about the point of the missing e. So strong and sharp is the memory of it, and of the minutiae: the leaf that looked like a ladybird, the key chain, the deep orange of his mother's carpet, leaves elsewhere, a stain in the shape of a leaf, leaf banisters, woods. But what of it? What was its point? So sharp, and he has made a story around it, but now that he thinks about the story it resolves nothing. Nor is the tale necessarily true. He has begun to worry about the truth, and to become protective over it. That young man is nothing if he has no true stories. Just an empty and ongoing present.

Driving, though, he feels at ease. Today there is something he has to do. In these new restless, workless days there is something he has to do. He must remember a list of words beginning with d. The drive home passes in anticipation of it — finding the list, constructing patterns to order the words in the mind, applying some discipline and logic. Then sitting down to the test, a thing he has always enjoyed doing. There is a hope, more than a hope, that he will pass it. Impossible that he will fail.

At home he helps Eleanor unpack the shopping and then takes up a circular route around the house, beginning in the kitchen, coming through to the hall, ascending the staircase (letting his fingers bounce lightly against the leaf shapes wrought into the banisters, relaxing), following the landing to Henry's bedroom (leaving his footprints on the chocolate carpet), ducking through the secret door, crossing his own bedroom (past Joy's letters, which he eyes suspiciously, not sure why they are lying there on the floor), picking step by step down the pine treads of the second staircase into the study (cold draughts caught behind the books), shoving his weight into the jammed door that opens to the living room, coming back to the hall, and standing.

All the while he repeats: discard, devolution, demolish, dish, decrepit, drone, dynasty, diamond, drastic, day, develop, drip. As a method for remembrance, the circular route works. It sets his brain into a loop, and, if he concentrates on the nothingness of the loop, the turgid pointlessness of it, he finds that forgetfulness, having wilder gardens to explore, does not bother with him.

The more he is able to remember, the more the exercise brings him peace. There is a satisfactory quality about gathering the words into his mind, filling him like stones filling his pockets. He has seen a programme, at some point, in which a man gathers dark-grey stones from the shore and his children count the stones into the deep pockets of his coat. They are learning about the relationship between size and weight. If one pocket has small stones and the other large, he leans. At one point the balance is so uneven that he lies on his left side and his children have to grapple underneath him to remove the excess stones from his left pocket until he is standing. They comb the beach for stones that can form pairs. They become obsessed with the task of making him as straight as a plumb line, as if he is suspended from the sky. One shoulder is tilted; they remove a stone and replace it with a pebble. They add a shell and he is almost there; they add a few grains of sand and he squares himself, miraculously balanced, perpendicular to the horizon.

Demolish, drastic, drip. Each word a stone, one in this pocket, one in that. Day and demolish here, drip and develop there. Each word, he imagines, straightens him. He begins to feel their weight sincerely. There are moments when the sheer challenge of his illness feels blessed; he rises to it and the elevation brings new air to breathe, and memories come sharp as shards from nowhere, like this man and the beach. He thinks now, as he often thinks, that perhaps he is not ill at all, or if he is it is very mild, or his case is quirky and reversible; it is, after all, not like him to get old and unwell. He was always going to be assassinated in public like the empress Elisabeth. He was going to haunt his murderer as Elisabeth haunted Lucheni. There was simply no option concerned with fading away in cautious, anxious increments; it is not like him to forget who he is.

He can see Eleanor through the kitchen window, in the garden heaving up weeds; he thought she had gone out, or that she was not here today at all. He can't remember waking up with her this morning and her putting on that pearl-coloured suit jacket and trousers she is wearing now, tight over her broad figure. Her hair is illogical and her shoulders rounded against the effort of gardening.

The letters are still there on the kitchen table, forgotten about. Each time he comes back to them he has to begin the whole logical process again, fumbling with them, feeling unease fold itself up into fear, calculating the outcomes, then, in response to it all, wandering away in a state of pure distraction, his moral vigilance gone.

He makes coffee, pouring the grinds in, releasing the handle, hearing the water shoot through. Then he crushes ice, thinking that by now it must be late enough in the day for his first mint julep, and he assembles the drink with a careful adoring rigour. He sits. It is his greatest pleasure to have a mint julep in the afternoon followed by coffee and to see the evening in slightly intoxicated, his brain responding to the chemicals in his blood and the sense of life being to hand, and something waiting around the corner.

The water trickles through the coffee machine. He fidgets against the need to urinate. Eleanor comes in from the garden and washes her hands, commenting on the smell of the coffee. It occurs to him that there is little or no smell, not of coffee, nor of the delightful sugar, mint, and bourbon of the julep, nor the generic smell of the house, nor, he discovers, his own skin. There are smells perhaps, but they are ghosts. He puts his mug down on the table and breathes in deeply, closing his eyes.

“The cherries are coming,” Eleanor says with a forced brightness.

He is relieved by her brightness and forces his own, smiling and pushing his breath out through his nose. She runs her hand over his head and down his arm, holding his hand, then she comes behind him and presses her chest against his head, stroking him.

“Have you learned your words?” she asks. “We'll have to go soon.”

He brings his hands to a prayer position. “Dynasty, develop, drip”—he pauses—“demolish, diamond, depend, desecrate, dilapidate.”

Eleanor walks to the tap and pours herself some water, spilling it down her as she drinks.

Poor Eleanor, he thinks; it makes him feel better to think it. He repeats it to himself as he watches her sponge up the water with tissues. Poor Eleanor, poor Eleanor, and feels the coffee wake him to a sense of himself as a tall man, a good tall man, a free man who can get up any time he wants and walk away.

Eleanor waits outside as she always does. He has been here before, he knows the room, and he knows the chair he has to sit in. As he takes a seat opposite the young woman the anticipation of before is replaced with a sudden fear and boredom. She is a woman, also a doctor or some such person. He wants to please her, he will not please her. The letters spring to his mind then sink back into a grey confusion. The woman's hair is as red as fox fur and she looks like, out of that uniform, she would not want be here at all asking this deranged old man what day it is. Her green eyes offer no solace. He coughs.

In the fifteen minutes that follow she takes the role of a ringmaster. He jumps, as obligingly as possible, through her hoops. She holds up objects: What is this? And this? What is this called? She makes notes and instructs him to fold a piece of paper in half, in four, into a triangle.

A triangle?

With the paper in quarters he looks to her for encouragement. He knows what a triangle is, it has three sides. How to make it from this? She tells him not to worry and asks him to count back from one hundred in multiples of seven; he does so until he reaches seventy-two and then is overcome with a weary anger, like that of the tiger who burns his paw going through a ring of fire and reflects long enough to wonder why on God's earth it must do this useless thing.

“Why am I here?” he asks suddenly. She looks at him long, a little pitifully, as if she is unsure what level the question is functioning on.

“We have to keep track of where you are,” she puts her fingers lightly to her temple, “so we can make sure you have the right medication and the right care.”

He nods.

“And where am I?”

“Where we would expect,” she says, leafing through papers in his file. “It's rather routine.” She lets her pen swing loosely between her fingers like a pendulum as she thinks. “You had a list of words, Jake, beginning with d. Can you tell me some of them? Any of them.”

She sits back in her chair, combing her fox hair with her fingers. How old is she? Young. Youngish. He contents himself that she is middle-aged, feeling that many people are middle-aged, the middle age being that which one sinks into on this great mattress of life. She looks beached, he thinks grimly. Cast like a horse. He no longer likes her. She would once have been pretty but now she is just irritating, and he is not going to pass this test. He can't even recall what it is she wants him to do.

“I'm sorry, could you just repeat that?” he says.

She nods in a businesslike fashion, but she looks unravelled. “You had a list of words beginning with d. Can you tell me some of them?”

He feels like an old tiger winding its jaded flanks around the ring, spying the scarlet-lipped woman from the corner of its eye, and seeing its weariness in her own.

“D,” he says, tapping his fingers. He closes his eyes to recall his loop of the house, the leaf banister, the draughty books. He wreathes like smoke up and down the two staircases. “Day,” he ventures. “Dip.” He is standing at the shore filling his pockets with stones; there are no children, only an ocean hushing out his logic with its expansive to-fro. He feels becalmed. “Dog,” he says.

After a long pause the woman leans forward. “Any more?”

“Yes, yes, there are a lot.” Sitting up straight, he joins his palms and strokes the bristle on his chin, giving his whole body to his mind. “Do,” he offers tentatively. She puts down her pencil. “That's fine,” she says.

He still has each of Joy's letters, a vast number by now. Letters from America, American stamps, their prices going up with the years. Here under the bed they are shored up in an almost violent darkness, sheathed in a leather satchel displaying the letters J.J. Instinctively, like an animal checking its territory, he smells the envelopes, particularly the small patches of semi-transparence where Joy (also like an animal, leaving her mark) had used to drop scented oil. The paper, once so ripely perfumed, gives little or no smell now.

What a gruesome mess. Secret letters from Joy to him. Secret letters from a man to Helen. Joy is a secret from Eleanor, Eleanor from Joy. Helen had a secret engagement; he kept it a secret that he ever knew about the engagement. The fox-haired woman — he is keeping the badness of it all a secret from her. Is this a normal life? All these deceptions; he will not be able to maintain them when the brain goes. Maybe it is the deceit that has rotted the brain. Already he is unsure whether Eleanor knows about the letters to Helen, or whether he has spoken to her about them. He feels the insufficiency of himself, the completely unsatisfactory way he has lived his life.

Yet when he opens Joy's letters at random and immerses himself in the words — not the meaning of them as such, just the words alone and their shapes — they do not feel deceitful, but rather the most honest thing in his life. Maybe they are pathetic, maybe they are, but they make him happy. The early letters, being the ones he has read the most, are thoroughly compressed in his mind, their contents rich and resinous. In those letters he and Joy were still able to draw on their physical memory of each other, and he could reference the fading of a bruise she had seen, and she could reference the fading of the hair dye that had been so new and red on their night together.

For a time it was always about fading. There was nothing they could say about their relationship — which had not even lasted twenty-four hours — except to express the loss of it. These are not the letters he wishes to find; he has lingered enough over the stench of loss — for it is a stench, no matter how sweetly packaged — and he has grown too old, surely, to spend time being unintelligent with love. He wants to read the letters as they evolved into something more reasoned — those letters in which he was most himself.

After some weeks of writing back and forth across the Atlantic, he and Joy began to play letter chess, the games continuing for weeks or months and Joy habitually destroying him; he had never been good at having too much thinking time, the more he thought the less bold he became and the more he would venture off into fool's errands with his pawns. While he went about defending his king she rampaged across the board with her knight and wiped him out.

Around these games the letters became more confident, more neutral, more pragmatic. Joy told him what clothes to buy to make himself modern. (He had so wanted to be modern, and she, with her startling red hair and rimmed eyes, and her androgyny that dismissed all notions of bellies and hips he had once held dear, was modernity in human form.) When he could, he took her advice. Helen liked the clothes Joy recommended; he came to believe that the three-way arrangement brought about a harmony that two people alone could never accomplish.

What pleased him in Joy was that she showed herself to be a factual, practical person; she was fed up with women who skewed all they saw with the wide curves of sentiment and empathy, as if their thoughts could not come straight but had to be filtered through their bodies first. She said she was homesick, so had bought herself an American dictionary and a book on Californian history to indoctrinate herself against England. These tactics having not worked well, he informed her that America was a huge grid. Each township was originally six miles square, that is, how many? How many square miles, he now wonders? He can remember the letter perfectly, and the stolid exhilaration he felt when he wrote it, and yet the sum disintegrates in his brain. Fifty? A hundred? A thousand? It is so painfully frustrating to not know; but he is tired, increasingly tired and agitated, and he has never been able to think clearly when tired and agitated. All the same, six miles square. A huge grid, a huge pattern like an immense chessboard. To counter her longing for home she had to stop seeing America as something that was never quite England, and start seeing it as a game she needed to learn to play.

Then came the confessionals — the lighthearted list of everybody he had slept with prior to Helen. It wasn't a great number, but enough, he was thirty-two after all. (He could not make that list now — names all gone, a few faces remain as a sort of puppetry but they could belong to anybody.) Joy had no such list. At twenty, he was her first.

Amongst the letters here is a little package wrapped around with elastic bands which, when opened, contains leaflets and pages of text entitled AIPAC: American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Joy's husband was Jewish. He doesn't even know if the man is still alive; in any case he belonged to AIPAC in order to lobby for Israel's rights — he knows this because he reads the leaflets in front of him. At the time these leaflets, and Joy, and her husband, had unwittingly granted him permission to honour his past, not by running backwards to find it but by standing up for its future.

He remembers that Joy would send him the latest news from the committee, and indulged him where others would not in this path towards himself he so wanted to follow, and through it they became allies in a joint cause. There seemed to be so little difference between allies and lovers — or at least one seemed a condition for the other — and they are still allies now, he thinks. Joy is always on his side, always fighting his war; heaven knows, Joy has been the only person in his life who has even recognised there is a war to fight.

It was two years or more before Joy sent any photographs of herself; he had kept asking, trying to stave off her demise into ghostliness. The photographs, of course, he still has. Joy in the bright bleached Californian garden, Joy on a sun lounger in the garden, Joy eating lobster on a sun lounger in the garden, her hair no longer red but (interpreting loosely from the black-and-white) a far more civilised earth brown, flooding to her elbows. Joy's overlong over-tanned body clung to by a pair of shorts and a cotton shawl and a man — her husband. He struggles for the name briefly and then decides to let it go. Joy's body adorned by a ball gown and hunks of ruby and a man, her husband. Joy's body wrapped in a faux-fur throw that does not become her and is bought, and owned, as she is herself, by a man, her husband. Joy's body, wrapped in nothing, clung to by nothing except some shadows and light. Joy's naked body in front of a photographer's tripod in a series of modest poses that use cushions and armchairs and silk screens and Indian fabrics, all of which are chosen specifically to strike against her skin in the most flattering and tastefully sexual way. Joy's naked body in a series of immodest poses that use the same cushions, armchairs, screens, and fabrics as nothing other than gratuitous props for one inevitable sexual overture that he found amazing, and amazingly unbearable.

She sent pictures of her husband, too, as if she expected him to show them to his children or pin them on the cork-board in the kitchen. He inspected the man — his slick and charming demeanour and leaking intimacy. He was a man with undeniable charm; he had not thought this was Joy's taste, and then realised that he had no idea what Joy's tastes were, or even who she was. He might have fallen out of love with her there and then had it not been for one photograph of her standing in a car park, just standing, looking blankly away from the camera clearly unaware she was under the lens. She looks thin, a little haughty, a little fuck you. To him, this was Joy — the woman who in her most unguarded moments was guarded, and in her most inelegant moments was elegant. And into that aloof, black, white, and grey metallic tarmac scene he could, with confidence, inject some colour. That dress she was wearing was yellow, he knew it, he knew that dress. He, in the spirit of the pioneer, in the spirit of the man who illuminates through his knowledge, could put colour where it was not. Joy in her yellow dress.

In a letter written a few months after the photographs came, she said that it was no good, she did not belong. America had her but did not want her, it just tolerated her presence. Had he seen the photographs? Did he see the costumes she wore just to entertain this gruelling, demanding America? She was playing the game at full tilt with all her faculties attuned, dressing up, playing up, learning the accent, learning to spend dollars without converting. But it was a game. Perhaps she would come home, she didn't after all think much of — the man, her husband — anyway; perhaps she would come home and live in Rook's eccentric house or find some of her family in Italy.

He drafted a reply. He told her that because America was divided into square grids, every so often there had to be an extra bit of land that wasn't a mile square, to account for the earth's curvature, just as there is an extra day in the year every so often to account for time's curvature (and this day, he added incidentally, is Henry's birthday). He suggested the bit of land she lived on must be one of those extra bits that did not quite fit, which was why she could never make America feel like home.

She wrote back jubilantly. Of course, she would move. The problem would be solved. They had already started looking.

He was equally jubilant at her happiness. He told her that since money was no object she should move to somewhere with a great deal of glass and a view of the ocean. She could stand there on a shag-pile rug and sip martinis.

No, no, she wrote. Not martinis — the rage these days, the thing you drink if you want to be modern, is mint juleps. At the bottom of the page she wrote out the ingredients and a few quick instructions. Mint, ice, sugar, bourbon. The smell, she wrote. The smell — heavenly! Once you've smelt the sugar and mint, you will never, dear Jake, go back to martinis.

These branches and leaves look like chaos, but they are not. There is a pattern. Each leaf has a pattern, and each bit of bark, and each pattern in the leaf has a smaller pattern. And the patterns are repeated, and the patterns of the patterns are repeated.

He walks the wide path looking above him at the tree canopy. The branches lattice in mad arrangements across the sky. The sky is pristine with light, it is true sky-blue, and he is warm under it, hot even. Sara insisted that there were patterns here, and that the madness had methods finer than the eyes could comprehend. Mathematics held it together. Clasps of numbers cohered what the eyes saw as separate. Of course he agreed; he went so far as to say that the logic going through the leaves must proceed infinitely through all things, at which she called him reckless for his choice of expression. She did not believe in words like infinite; it was that very optimistic carelessness in Helen that she balked at. One does not see infinity, one cannot put a value to it, nor measure it in stones.

He enjoys looking up. Upwards, being on the vertical plane, is not connected to time. He is troubled by the recollection of Eleanor talking to the fox-haired woman, nodding, her arms crossed, and that look of sympathy softening the wrinkles around her mouth. Apparently he is struggling with numbers and shapes, but his words are good — his ability to label things is still very good. He cannot accept this; he realises that he has no real wish to label things. If he can no longer call a tree a tree, it is sad, pathetic, but the tree will go on. But if he can no longer calculate or piece together through numbers then the invisible sense, the sense behind the apparently chaotic stray of branches and leaves, is gone. Order will be a dream he once had that has melted like glass, slowly and quite imperceptibly.

He sees himself sitting in the chair trying, failing, to make a paper triangle. Rook would ridicule him now for this dysfunction — Rook who was so canny with those fingers that could fold infinite objects into being. And now Sara would chide: Infinite, there you go again, Jake!

He wishes, more than anything, to not be drawn down by his situation. They say that on balance he is where they would expect him to be, that is, his demise is reassuringly predictable. The simple enormity of it grips him and rids him momentarily of feeling, and when he surfaces again it is to a vista spread before him of arable land and beyond that the black strip of the moors. The path ahead is strewn with felled trees. The woods are gone.

How dizzying it is, to come here to Quail Woods only to find that it has no wood. How dizzying for something to turn to nothing. What day is it, how long since he saw the fox-haired woman, or Henry? He recalls, from his childhood perhaps, a view of woods from the air and the trees being felled, their trunks stacking up on the ground like matches. But it cannot have been Quail Woods; Quail Woods has been here quite recently; he remembers walking here with Sara on the day his father died, and drinking coffee between these now recumbent trees. It is not a memory, at least not his memory. Maybe, like the man on the shore, it was a programme, or maybe, he thinks, disappointed with himself, he made it up.

Wondering what he has done with Eleanor, and why he wore a jumper on this increasingly hot evening, he turns around and makes his way back to the lay-by where the Land Rover is parked.

That night he chaperones Eleanor to the bed and allows her to help him remove their clothes. As they make love he watches her face, the V of creases at her eyes, the pores of skin on her flaccid cheeks, the stubborn mouth. Is this really her? He struggles to relate this woman to the memory of an old friend.

Under the bed Joy's letters ghost into the darkness, and downstairs the unopened letters to Helen listen to the creak of the bed. My life is a slow-motion mistake, he thinks. Then he buries his face in Eleanor's; her skin has the neutered centuries-old scent of the human-skin Bible, some musty religion packed inside. He goes after that, the musty religion. Astonishing how a pensioner's body can still seek and find a god in this curious old act, and still believe in that god's promises, even when they have been made and broken a thousand times before.

In the morning he has an idea, or at least recognises an idea that has been distilling. He goes to the telephone book, wracks his memory for a name, and makes a call. Wrong number. And again, not this one. Eventually he has some success. The vet tells him that to the best of his knowledge the dog brought in two months ago is well, recovering from an operation to its leg. No owner could be traced and nobody came forward, so she was taken to a dogs' home. He calls the home. She is still there, is he interested in taking her? Maybe, he will come and have a look.

When he arrives they show him her enclosure and, to his surprise, he recognises her at once; she is standing, a white bandage round her black leg, as if she has been waiting for him. A swell of possession arises in him. She is flesh and blood, as black as wet tar; when he puts his hand out to her nose she nudges his palm with bold curiosity. They tell him she is called Lucky. He grimaces. All rescue dogs are called Lucky. When they call the name, a hundred lopsided, empty creatures must come running all at once.

STORY OF THE WOMAN CLOTHED WITH THE SUN

Helen scrubbed the sign down and painted it. She painted a naked woman whose skin glowed with sunlight, her arms held aloft and the sun a furious ball of yellow in her hands. She had stars above her head, and stood in front of a black landscape, the steelworks in the far distance, with the graphite smoke emitting from the chimneys. The words in black across the woman's legs, with the missing e painted in: THE SUN RISES.

“And there appeared a great wonder in heaven. A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.”

With this declaration she scratched her cheek and stood back to assess her work.

He observed the painting, it was sweet, a little childish. Not skilful at all but the brushstrokes were so plain they were utterly irreproachable. He could not fault her anything, ever. Could not ever question her goodness. He sat on the grass by her side in the afternoon heat and smoked.

The Sun Rises was in an odd place, thrown into the middle of the moors without boundaries, except for the arbitrary knee-high wall somebody had put around the back garden. In fact the land that The Sun Rises, and therefore Eleanor, owned had always been in dispute, and perhaps it had no right to any land at all, but gradually it took it anyway, edging the forty or so yards to the road at the front, and spilling out of its low walls at the back. From where he and Helen sat on the small strip of grass at the front, and with the pub's back and front doors open, he could see right through the building to the rear garden.

Already that morning he had washed down the pub walls inside and out, nailed chairs back together that had been left broken in the cellar for years, glossed the doors and skirting boards, scrubbed the stone floors, secured window latches, fixed the cisterns, put locks on the toilet doors, oiled the bar hatch; Eleanor cleaned the windows and sills, the glasses, the spirit bottles, the pumps, polished the last pieces of brass that remained, and she watered the beds at the front. They fit a till to replace the shoe box stuffed with crumpled cash.

The day before, they had spent the entire day hoisting the waist-high weeds from the small back garden and flattening the ground. Then at seven that morning, lucky enough to have a hot dry day, two men had come and poured concrete onto the layer of hardcore and sand that covered the soil. By now it was beginning to dry and its whiteness shone against the peat.

He looked for Eleanor but she must have been indoors. He turned to his wife and pointed out to the steelworks with his cigarette.

“The Sun Rises is so called because the sun rises over there. And we used to be able to see it, before the smoke from the chimneys botched the sky. So we decided, together, to call this The Sun Rises, as an affirmation. That the sun does still rise.”

Helen returned his smile. “That's nice,” she said. “Who's we?”

“Me, Eleanor, Sara, Rook, Eleanor's parents, when they were still alive.”

“And what happened to them? How did they die?”

“Her mother died before the war of — pneumonia, or something like that, and her father wasn't around much, he didn't cope with the loss and wouldn't come home for days at a time — then he got conscripted when the war came and was killed in, I don't know, '42, '43. Her uncle — her father's brother — came to look after her but he never wanted to be here. Then he left, too.” He shrugged and inhaled. “Eleanor says that every man in her life is useless and always will be.”

Helen shielded her eyes from the sun and squinted at her painting. She added some colour to the stars above the woman's head.

“So she believes she'll never find the man she wants?”

He shrugged again, not knowing how Eleanor viewed her love life, and not interested, either.

“She will find him.” Helen put her tongue out in concentration. “She will.”

He leaned over and kissed her shoulder.

“The concrete looks good, don't you think?”

“I think it looks strange. I preferred the grass.”

The weeds, he wanted to correct. Helen had a habit of lumping different things together under the same word, as though the act of being specific pained her: in this case all things green and growing were grass. But to him they were weeds and it mattered, suddenly greatly, that the garden had choked and shrunk underneath them.

“When I was a teenager, a few years before I went to London, I used to dream about doing this place up. I remember seeing all the factory workers come here on their bikes and sit at the bar, or out in the weeds at the back, trying to get a bit of fresh air, talking about blast furnaces, torpedoes, rolling mills, crucibles—”

Helen pouted a little. “Those words mean nothing to me,” she said. But she had stopped painting and started listening avidly as she always did when he talked about the past.

“And I always thought how bad it was that after twelve hours sweating in a factory there was nowhere outside for them to sit, I mean properly sit with space and air around them. Just weeds.”

He stubbed his cigarette out. Helen took the butt and tidied it away in her pocket.

“I thought they looked quite pretty.”

“Before the war it used to be grass and we sat out there in the summer — Sara used to play the violin and Rook the harmonica and we would sing—”

“I didn't know Sara played the violin,” Helen said.

“She did. She used to do a lot of things. We would sing — I still remember it—Komm doch, mein Mädel, komm her geschwind.” His singing voice was dry and dusty, and he couldn't remember when he had last thought of this song. “Dreh dich im Tanze mit mir, mein Kind! Hör, wie die Geigen locken zum Reigen, komm doch, mein Mäde! zum Tanz geschwind!”

He grinned at Helen and she returned it, reaching over to touch his knee.

“It was a Hungarian dance — you had to sort of twirl round and round until you were dizzy and fell over. And I remember — I was always allowed to stay up late. There were money spiders — that's what I remember most about it now. Money spiders, everywhere. In our hair, on our arms and legs. Sara always said they were lucky.”

From the corner of his eye he saw Eleanor coming out of the pub towards them. She was carrying a bottle of something and some large glasses.

Helen glanced at her and then away. “My mother said that, too.”

“But maybe not so lucky after all. The war came. No more of it. The grass turned to weeds and the spiders went.”

Helen watched and waited for him to say more, but now Eleanor was here he didn't want to. He felt, as he always felt, that a past was too intimate a thing to share with Eleanor, that her drab misfortune was infectious, and a meanness in his character detested the thought that their two lives might seem bound. She had of course been there, too, in those days. Money spiders had climbed up her arms. She had stayed up late with him. They had sometimes slept top to toe in the same bed. He would sleep facing away from her feet.

Eleanor stood behind them and spread her arms, bottle sloshing and flashing in the sunlight.

“It's the wilderness! It's the bloody wilderness!”

She flapped her arms about, her feet rooted in their Wellingtons to the peat. “Christ,” she said. “I'd do anything to get away from here, and you come here by choice. Left London for this.”

Helen laughed. “This,” she said, stretching her own arms. “Look at it, it's heaven today.”

And it was. He took in the scene: enormous blue sky, wild-flowers, sun silvering the water in the dykes, the distant gas flame of the steelworks almost invisible against the light, and the three of them equally dwarfed by mile upon mile of sun-blurred horizon.

He recalled his conversation with Helen in the zoo cafeteria: we'll come to the edge of the wilderness and we'll make it ours. He dug his heel into the earth.

Helen went back to painting, still smiling. Her arms were dusted with colour. It was mid-afternoon and hot. As he watched her, she struck him as a different and more purposeful woman without a baby in her arms. Her body, always mummified by blue blankets and clinging limbs wrapped in terry towelling, reappeared solo in a definite, young shape, and her legs were revealed thin by the jeans which she had rolled up her shins.

Eleanor sat close to Helen, removed a jar of mussels she had stashed inside one of the glasses, and poured three drinks. Gin. Without taking her eyes from the painting Helen took the glass offered her, knocked the drink back, and put the glass down.

“This is the woman clothed with the sun,” she told Eleanor, who had leaned in over her shoulder. “In the Bible the woman clothed with the sun is the People of God. And with her in heaven is a red dragon with seven heads who is waiting to devour her unborn child. The dragon represents the nonbeliev-ers, the people who think they're not of God.”

He realised then that he had closed his eyes, and that he always closed his eyes when she began talking about the Bible. Now he opened them again to see her smooth her hair apologetically at the bad news.

“The unborn child is Jesus,” she said, “and the seventh head of the dragon is the Rome of the future, the Rome that is going to kill him. The Roman — Pilate, of course.”

Eleanor squinted her face into scepticism.

“Is that supposed to be true?” she asked.

“Yes, Eleanor, all of the Bible is supposed to be true in its own way.”

He rested himself back onto his elbows and witnessed himself in Eleanor, the churlishness and refusal to be bought with words. In its own way. This was such a lazy answer, he thought, and yet Helen obviously thought not. To her it explained everything, and so fully and satisfactorily.

“But after the woman gave birth to Jesus,” Helen smiled, “she entrusted him to the kingdom of Heaven, and she escaped to the wilderness.”

As she looked around her at the moors her smile persisted, but it was a not a delicate smile, not incidental as he had always thought, but serious and persuaded. Her peace was a tangible weight.

“During the war we built a bomb shelter in the garden.” She scooped a mussel from the jar and was pensive suddenly. “I used to play in it. When the bombing got bad we — me, my mum, my daddy, my brother — lived in the shelter for a week. I remember it as one of the very best weeks of my life because we were all together, absolutely for one another. We never argued, you see, because we didn't know when a bomb might drop and whether our shelter was any good. Mother prayed.”

She drew her legs up to her body and fixed her slightly excited look on the yellow woman she had painted.

“Bombs missed us. We began to assume that the prayers were making us immune. Then one night a bomb blew the door off our shelter and took off one of Daddy's feet. Mum lost her religion for five years, until her congregation convinced her again, or bullied her, I don't know which. I watched my daddy for weeks, struggling without his foot, going to work and getting on with it. He was a doctor, he had to keep working.”

She turned her head up towards the sun, warm and rich as it eased past midday.

“Unlike my mum, I wasn't in any doubt. I suddenly knew God existed because he'd saved my father. And that man with only one foot was still my daddy. If he'd had no feet, no hands, no legs, he'd still be my daddy. So we can't be our bodies alone. And if we are not our bodies we must be something else.”

“Our brains,” he said.

“More than that, Jake.”

“Why more than that?”

“His soul shone out through his eyes. I saw his soul.”

“In your own way.”

She held her gaze on him for several seconds too long, not with anger or irritation, just as though he were a formation of light she was suddenly interested in, or as if she were waiting for him to finish his sentence. He hadn't known about her father's foot; he wondered what else she didn't tell him. Footless father, secret fiancé. They had married so fast. Perhaps he didn't know her at all.

Eleanor crossed her legs uncomfortably and tapped her bare knees.

“Honestly, I don't have your strength to believe.”

Helen leaned over and put her hand on Eleanor's knee. “You have all the strength in the world. You especially, of all people. It's plain to see.”

She stood and picked up the sign. Then she climbed the ladder and hooked it back in place, wavering, humming. He was afraid she would fall and he thought he should go and help her.

“With this sign, I call the woman clothed with the sun to The Sun Rises,” she grinned as she descended. “I call the People of God to the wilderness.”

“I hope the People of God drink a lot,” Eleanor answered.

“The People of God do everything, they are everyone.”

He stared up at the sign; it looked good in situ, and the woman seemed to be staring straight back at him, precisely at him and nowhere else. He winked at her.

Then later, Eleanor straightened her legs into the quiet strip of sunlight and smoked. Rook was there and Helen was not. They sat on the low wall around the bright rectangle of concrete as the sun set.

“Cannabis,” Eleanor said, passing it on. “I have it for the aches in my back. It's not just for coloured people anymore.”

He straightened his legs along the wall too, sun-filled, dusty, and tired after the day of work. He held the cigarette between his fingers; of course, it was not a cigarette, but he was so ignorant about drugs that he had no proper word for it. This had all just been beginning in London when he left, he had started to see it, people smoking in parks here and there, a sort of immature excitement gathering that had not been present before.

“Thanks,” he murmured.

He smoked, loosening instantly, and passed it to Rook, who was folding minute paper birds from cigarette papers — elegant long-necked cranes with wings bent and poised for flight.

Rook refused. “Too old. You shouldn't smoke that, you bad children.”

Fuck off, Rook, he thought happily. With a hazy concentration he inspected the long tight roll of tobacco. So much more interest in an object you have no word for. He inhaled more before passing it to Eleanor.

His mind was milky and he wasn't sure how he came to be here, where Helen had gone, where Rook had come from. Having worked his way through much of Eleanor's bottle of gin, and having eaten only mussels all day, he was drunk and hungry; he was optimistic, too. He had the sudden feeling that all his decisions had been right, coming here, marrying Helen, that a potential chaos was being fought back, and that Helen was instrumental in this — no, necessary to it. That peace he had seen in her earlier, it was a peace missing in himself. Somehow it seemed she had a wisdom that could presage and protect them, a wisdom he should not mock.

“We did good work today,” he said. “We made a difference.”

He looked up at the rear wall of The Sun Rises and then across the silken concrete and out over the moors. He loved the way this low, random wall marked man from nature, how there was so little separation. So little, but enough. Under the concrete the few remaining weeds were dying. The peat glowed in the sunset as if on fire.

“There's so much we can do,” Eleanor said. She sat upright for a moment to clear a path for inspiration. “We can start doing food. Why don't we get some tables and those chequered tablecloths?”

Rook flew one of his paper cranes across the garden where it landed and nestled the tip of its wing in the wet concrete. “We can bring back the debating groups.”

“You know, the red-and-white ones, and candles in bottles. Sara can do the cooking.”

“We can have snail races.”

“We can have book clubs, Nescafé, we can have dances—”

“We can start an Assassination Club.” Rook swilled whiskey around his glass. “We can jointly and democratically decide who to kill, and then we can fashion weapons from unlikely objects and go forth and murder. Being humble folk it may be messy at first but practice will improve us.”

“We can begin,” he cut in on Rook, tired of this nonsense, “an action group. A pro-Israel lobby group.”

Rook laughed. “This is Lincolnshire. You might not find many supporters.”

“On the contrary, areas without any strong leanings this way or that are good fertile ground for this sort of thing.”

“Why would you want to?” Eleanor asked, slumping her body weight onto her knees and gazing, as though longingly, at the creamy concrete beneath her. She looked tired.

“Listen, it isn't enough just to give a people a block of land and then deny them their history. They're surrounded by countries who deny there was ever a holocaust. What the hell are they doing there, then, if there wasn't a holocaust? Why didn't they just stay in their nice European apartments? Has it ever occurred to you that they might not want to live in Israel any more than you and I do? Maybe they'd like to go back to Vienna or Berlin — the places they were born. And now everybody says the Jews are a — what was the word I heard? — an unscrupulous race. A naturally unscrupulous race. Why? Because they won't settle for being trampled? Because now that they've been given a piece of land and have to live with the hatred of their neighbours they would like something more?”

It was the first time he had ever really voiced these views. Anger — albeit an anger that was blunted with smoke and drink — surfaced, ebbed, and surfaced. He was angry, not because he cared about a distant race but because he wanted to defend his mother, and his mother, if she were here now, wouldn't want him to do so. She would shake her head and say, Asch, Jacob, you would be better not worrying about it, you would be better starting up a wine-tasting club.

“We don't want to become too — political.” Eleanor frowned.

“Take this place,” he argued, “your uncle left it to you, a building, some land, a business. It's all very well, but do you want it? Is it enough, without any love, or—”

He gave up on the thought. The word love had slipped out with the smoke and he wished it might disperse with the smoke.

“No.” Eleanor pursed her lips tightly around the sound. “But I'd be stupid to think it's not enough when it's all I've got.”

He felt slightly ashamed by the question, but then kicked the shame away. By Eleanor's argument nothing would ever improve or progress, it was a terrible, overly humble, defeatist thing to believe.

Rook slung his legs over onto the moors side of the low wall and stood, cracking his knuckles. “For pity's sake don't start up some ridiculous Jewish group, Jake. You'll upset your mother.”

“She might want to come along.”

“She will not want to come along.”

They eyed each other for a few moments and then he stood too and picked the butts off the wall. It was time to go home to Helen, he thought, and get some sleep. It had been a long day.

“We could have a vegetable-growing club. A poetry club!” Eleanor, laid out along the wall, clapped her hands in fantasy. “We could be the hub of the community. We could have coffee mornings with custard, apple cake, apple strudel, ice cream, chocolate sponge—”

In that moment he suddenly missed his father. He looked at Rook and was angry with him for his flippancy. For all that was disappointing, violent, and rigid in him, his father would not have joked childishly about assassination clubs, and he would have spoken up against the triviality of poetry and ice cream; his father was a man of strong political ideals. Circumstance meant that he could only live them through the impotence of nostalgia, but he defended them viciously in that domain, locked in his mind, locked in his colonial anecdotes. Ice cream would never have been on his agenda.

These thoughts closed down. It was the only real stab of grief he'd had for his father and even then it didn't quite reach its object. The poor rotting man underground, the man who once took him to see the Blue Diamonds flying overhead in formation. He struggled and failed to find love in the grief. He just wanted an ally.

It was almost dark now, and the pub looked a little forlorn without any customers. Tomorrow, when the paint was dry and Eleanor opened as normal for lunch, it would be a new dawn perhaps. He felt for her, without love as he had put it. If they could make a success of The Sun Rises it might change things for her. As he offered her a hand she sat upright, frowned deeply, and looked up at him as a child might.

“Is that a storm coming?”

On the horizon a barrel of black cloud was rolling in, a wind beginning to blow up.

He nodded. She held on to his hand but did not move.

“Can you hear the sound of the sign swinging?”

“Just,” he said.

She shivered. “Sounds like someone's hanging.”

“Rich and nasty imagination you have, Ellie.” Rook put his leg over the wall and tested the concrete with his toe.

“I often think I can hear people hanging,” she went on. “Then I wonder what it was they did, who they murdered, and why. Then I can't sleep.”

“Nasty, nasty. You should think about pleasanter things, my dear.”

“But it isn't actually unpleasant. It's quite comforting, to think about a crime being punished, do you know? Every person hanging is one less that can kill you — I like it, it makes me feel safe.”

He and Rook looked at her in dismayed sympathy. He helped her to her feet; she was dozy and loose with smoking, and she wrapped her arms around him. Like a small child, he thought. Like he had grown up and she had not. The wind picked its way across the moors and seemed to shove itself suddenly through the tunnel between the open front and back doors of the pub, and gusted into the garden.

Then, as though dealt up by the wind, a figure appeared. Rook turned and was taken aback. There was silence. All three foggy faces turned to behold it: a tall woman in a yellow dress. She was separated from them by the pool of concrete. The yellow of her dress was outrageous against the angered light. His first thought was her resemblance to the woman Helen had painted, and his second thought was, at closer scrutiny, her lack of resemblance to anybody he had ever seen. He took time to absorb the amber eyes and long face, the ears that protruded from her hair, the wide mouth that reminded him of Rook's, and the orange scarf around her head.

“Darling,” Rook said with tender surprise.

“Granddad.”

She winked. That state of her face, on the brink of ugliness and beauty, was the most interesting of all states. He saw it sometimes — rarely — in a woman's face, and had even seen it in a man's. It was sometimes there in thin cats. One day soon, he vowed, he would build himself a house that was in that suspended state. Glass — gleaming and unforgiving.

“This is Joy,” Rook said.

They nodded in her direction. After a hungry pause Rook cocked his head. “What do you think of hanging, darling?”

She tilted her head slightly to one side. She managed to look deeply interested and at the same time deeply aloof, and intelligent at the same time as vacant. Her chin rested on her hand in consideration.

“I don't like it,” she reflected at length.

“Is there a reason?”

She fixed them all with a firm gaze. “It breaks your neck.”

A gunshot sounded out on the moors. Poor Eleanor breathed the word Jake—an involuntary betraying sound that fled from her mouth before she could stop it — and jumped into good posture at his side. He could have sworn she whispered a do-or-die I love you in his ear beneath the crack of the released bullet. In this spot where there were no trees, a leaf blew in across the white concrete, drifted to the pair of feet closest to the back door — a pair of yellow silk slippers at the end of eternal legs — and stuck.