The Wilderness (7 page)

She had bowed her head towards the book she was holding and had resumed reading. “I'll try,” she said, and patted his hand when he leaned in to kiss her.

If nothing else, she knew when a game was lost. He had already had a job interview, and been offered the position, and accepted it, almost within the same breath. A day trip there and back, dropping in on Sara for long enough to visit the grave and then turn on his heel before dark descended. It had been hopelessly easy. Architects were rarely prepared to move to rural northern areas, not with the great London rebuild happening. In his interview he had been effortlessly impressive; he faced three men in their fifties, and talked at length about concrete. With a piece of paper he made a small, impromptu presentation of the possibilities.

“Concrete is a gift for the architect,” he'd said, curving the paper into a series of flowing shapes. “By pouring it into moulds it becomes a very graceful material, you see, it has a freedom about it that other hard-wearing materials don't.” He formed it into waves, domes, folded it into triangles.

The men nodded—this was hardly breaking news but they agreed, wholeheartedly—and they asked him for a portfolio of work which he produced: suburban developments mainly, and six tower blocks in south London. He showed them series of shots of a Victorian street damaged by time and war. There it was in the first few photographs, a slum almost, with blackening brickwork and rows of drab doors and smashed windows.
There, in the next photograph, in precisely etched detail, was the same scene flattened into red rubble. And there in the next set of pictures was the same location again but this time a silky-flat square of poured concrete with low, light, regular buildings around it bearing shop fronts and library signs, cafés, launderettes, bookmakers, Odeon signs.

The three men had nodded and run their hands over their chins; they said they would call him in for a second interview, and the next day a letter came that dispensed with the interview and suggested he start at his earliest convenience.

Walking through the zoo they saw animals churned from their enclosures while someone in overalls scrubbed their excrement from the ground. The tigers, having ripped up their meat with long, delicate teeth and claws, stood perfectly still and watched the few visitors passing; he scrunched his nose and stared flagrantly at them until their returned stare made him uncomfortable. An overbearing urge came to him to put his hand through the bars and beckon them, then to stroke their long spines and see if the orange hair felt different to the black. He resisted of course, but only because he thought, if he beckoned, they wouldn't come. Their stares were dignified and rejectful; he checked his clothes and posture and wandered on.

When they reached the aviary he passed the child to Helen and stood with his hands in his pockets. The aviary was newly built; he remembered having read about it, and about its architect Cedric Price. He had seen Price once, walking down the street near the Festival Hall—not that he would have known it was Cedric Price if his colleague hadn't pointed him out. He had always been rather ignorant about these things, a
little parochial, clueless, and wayward. Nor did he pretend to know what he didn't, in fact the older he got the more he valued ignorance as a kind of kudos in itself—that one didn't
need
to pad their existence with trivia, or simply couldn't be bothered to direct their attention into such small corners.

The aviary was a vast structure of glass held aloft by tension cables and aluminium castings. He had never before seen so much glass in a building; the sheer rise of it, the complexity of its frames, the very overengineering of something made for creatures as blasé as birds. The very overengineering of something that was supposed to emulate a simple sky.

“Look, Henry, look,” Helen was muttering. “Look at that, look at those birds! What sound do birds make? Do you know? Do they go cheep? Cheepcheep?”

Henry looked startled, but apparently not by the birds or the tower of glass, more, perhaps, by the general rigour of being newly alive.

He seemed to remember then that Price had been an imposing man, black-haired, a sincere intelligence—not a tenth as imposing as his creation, admittedly, but then that creation now seemed to lend its grandeur back to its maker, as if its only function were to add to that which had given it life. In retrospect, through the convex lens of memory, Price became a sudden god of sorts.

Cedric Price, architect of the birds. Jake Jameson, architect of the high-rise tenant. Architect of Harold Macmillan and his winds of change. What did the birds know, what did the tenants know, of philosophy or politics or the aspirations of one man, and what did they care? The real function of the building, he thought in that moment, was to please and bolster the
architect, nobody and nothing else. He stood for a long time simply taking in the angles of glass, enjoying the mathematics that held it there and the humdrum screwing of metal into metal by way of sums scrawled on paper. The way it decided what sort of life the birds should lead, and the way it half led that life for them.

“Do you think it's big enough for the birds?” Helen worried.

“Yes,” he said. “It was built precisely for birds.”

“Do you think they know that's the sky out there?”

“Yes.”

“So they must miss it.”

“But they don't have a memory.”

“Why would they need a memory?” she frowned. “You don't need a memory to know you're trapped.”

“They're not trapped, Helen—there's sky outside and sky inside, and a pane of glass between, which is just a collection of atoms like air itself, or like rain. Glass is liquid, just liquid. The birds live happily as the glass tells them to, like they live as the rain tells them to, like they fly at certain altitudes because the air tells them to.”

“But—”

“You must understand.”

He went to put an arm around her waist but she gave him the baby and walked towards the glass until her nose was against it. There were one or two people ambling some distance from them, but otherwise the zoo was struck with early-morning silence. Against the brightness of the glass his wife was part silhouette, her smallness, slenderness tucked neatly inside a brown dress—a sparrow, he thought, or a thrush,
something very English, and something lovely not in its entirety but in its detail. The way she tended to consume minor moments by tapping her toes or scratching a very particular area on her right cheek.

He turned from his wife then to see that approaching the aviary was a man with a large cage of birds, not parrots, too small, but audacious and colourful nonetheless, and the man put the cage down heavily while he opened a glass door, and went inside.

Helen marvelled: “Where did the door come from? I didn't see a door—”

True, neither had he. It had appeared and then swiftly disappeared in a trick of glass and metal. Once in, the man began releasing the disoriented creatures, tipping them out of the cage so that they stuttered on the air and then flew any which way in an outpouring of colour. Both Helen and Henry were staring openly at the man as he ushered the birds out with his small white hands, Henry reaching his own hands out in exploratory swipes at the space around him.

At that another three men came, carrying containers. They, too, stepped in through the invisible door and began laying down trays of seed and fruit salad, flinging tubs of cockroaches and mealworms up onto platforms above their heads. The birds came from their perches and boxes, slapping their astonishing wings, singing, squawking, diving, rising in trails of prime, high-pitched plumage.

Helen was rapt and childlike. She gawped as children do when they've no idea of social mores, and he in turn stared at her pointedly while Henry blinked at a glint of sunlight that the glass had thrown him, and one of the men glanced up
from feeding the birds and waved to them, holding Helen in his sight for a moment longer than necessary. The whole zoo had become a busy junction of scrutiny, a hall of mirrors, even the sun had rid itself of cloud to observe and be observed. It all had the unruddered perspective of a dream. Was this how his wife dreamt? Was it the sort of thing she dreamt about? Was he giving her what she wanted? Would he ever? What was it that she thought while she stood there gawping? What did she see?

He kissed her unexpectedly—kissed the back of her neck, kissed the baby's forehead. He pulled the collar of her dress down a few millimetres and kissed the top bone of her spine; he wanted to tell her, all of a sudden, that he loved her. As he lifted his head he saw birds rising to the top of the aviary and watching everything at once with rapid, cocked vision.

“We should get breakfast,” Helen said, turning to him with a resolute look. “Is there a café here? Coffee and toast. I want a cigarette too, do you have yours?”

“Yes,” he said, surprised. He had only seen her smoke once or twice before.

Two cups of Nescafé, six pieces of toast, orange marmalade in plastic pots, two cigarettes, and a piece of Battenberg cake which they split into two squares each. Helen liked the yellow sponge, he did not. They disputed it—do you save the best 'til last or plunge straight in for what you like. He said the best should always come last; she laughed, shook her head, and breast-fed while she ate and smoked, dropping cake crumbs on Henry's forehead.

“When we go,” she said, tapping her cigarette into the ashtray, “I want to live in an old house in the country. I want us to
find our favourite place there, somewhere in the house, and whenever I stand in that place I want you to notice me.” She stirred her coffee without looking away from him. “When you stand there I'll notice you. I'll say, ‘There's Jake, my husband, my Jake.' When we stand there together we'll make sure we look each other in the eye. The first time we find that place we'll make love there. We'll leave a stain. No one will know it's there, just us.”

He smiled and held her gaze. “I thought you didn't want to go.”

“I don't. I'm watching that cherry tree there.” With her cigarette she gestured out of the window behind him. “It's very early in bloom. It made me think—I don't know.” She shrugged and looked beyond him, but not at the tree. “It just made me think, what's the point? What's the point in holding on.”

“We can come back.”

“No, we can't think of it that way. When we go, we go. We find our place in the house and we act as if it was ours all along.”

Having just inhaled a ball of smoke he let it out quickly in anticipation, almost excitement. “That's how I feel, Helen. We go. We stay. We make it home. To Henry it will always be home.”

She rested her cigarette in the ashtray, finished her cake, and took Henry from her breast, smoothing down her blouse.

“And they took their journey from Succoth, and encamped in Etham, in the edge of the wilderness,”
he said, leaning back, waiting for her response. “It's from Exodus, Helen. From the Bible.”

She raised her brows. “You think I don't know that?” she teased. “I don't like the sound of
the edge of the wilderness
very much. Couldn't you have remembered a different quote?”

“We'll leave this great sprawling city of Succoth behind, and on the edge of the wilderness we'll find a cherry tree—”

“And it won't be a wilderness anymore.”

“It will be ours.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.” She picked up the cigarette, and looking at it distrustfully, took one last drag and put it out.

Instead of taking the Underground they took the bus back through the city so that they could see it one last time. He wanted to look hard at the new world of tower blocks, eructations of concrete, structures escaping the sky.

“Did you see how those monkeys looked at us?” Helen said as they moved along. “Did you see how perceptive they are? They see everything, they see us truly.”

He nodded. “Yes, they're uncanny.” He formed rings around his eyes with his fingers. “Their eyes are like this, can you imagine human eyes being like this? Terrifying.”

“The first monkey has just come back from space alive, did you know that?” Helen said. “And there are some images of the earth taken on that space mission. If nothing else,” she tucked her hair behind her ear, “mankind's existence is utterly justified by this gift it will give to earth, the gift of sight, a sort of consciousness.”

Eventually he rested his head back and let the motion of the bus carry a Buddy Holly tune through his mind, eroding the words and thoughts: thoughts of Helen and how she had excited him just then in the café by the mere fact that they had
agreed
on something vital. It was such a powerful state, to be in
agreement, like two streams meeting to form a river. Thoughts also of how strange it was, getting to know her. They had married so fast and unthinkingly, not so much through passion but through mutual and unspoken logic. What was the point in two people being alone? He desperately did not want to be alone. And now he would have to justify their marriage, both to himself and to her. Today was the beginning of that.

Thoughts of the baby, the baby that meant more to him than he could justify or quantify, and for whom he felt an almost painfully dense love; so dense, so graceless, that he sometimes wondered if it could count as love at all. Thoughts of his mother and dead father. Thoughts about the aviary, which culminated in an effortless knowledge about the permanence, the coercive and perfecting permanence of a building, the permanence of a home, of going home, and of being home.