The Wilderness Read Online Free PDF Page A

drunk—he was underage, nobody on earth cared. Sara had decorated the toilets with paintings of mermaids and slogans in German: MAN IST WAS MAN ISST. You are what you eat. It was one of the few German phrases he knew. Rook had sat at the bar with a rope of sunlight falling around his neck, eating mussels, too drunk to speak, eyeing Sara with an unreadable expression. Love, possibly. Lust, or pity, or just drunkenness. Sara had lost all her relatives, her parents included, in the war. She was unsure of herself, wondering how to cook all the potatoes they had—as Jewish latkes or as English mash. Deciding who to be, where her allegiance lay. The Sun Rises had been a small pocket of belonging and energy in a sluggish time. How could he have cast it so easily from his mind? How strange, then, was memory—that a whole interval of one's life could be blotted out like the sun behind the moon, and then emerge again so intact!
    In front of the pub he saw a woman. He knew immediately that it was Eleanor. She wore a turquoise dress patterned with blue flowers that fit her little better than a curtain; she wore a pair of Wellington boots. She seemed, as far as he could see, tobe watering the bedding plants at the front of the pub although it had rained the previous night.
    He sounded the horn and waved. For a time she looked up bemused, then waved back, then made gestures of annoyance that he had not stopped. There'll be plenty of time, he thought. He said it aloud to his wife. “There'll be plenty of time to meet Eleanor.”
    “The
e
is missing,” Helen said, pointing back at the sign that swung above the door. It read, on the background of a faded hilly landscape, THE SUN RIS S. “It needs painting back on, somebody should do that.”
    He smiled, watching Eleanor shrink in the rearview mirror. They struck their way across the moors, past field upon field of beetroot and potatoes, and at last reached the new tarmac corridor of the M1, his foot pressed onto the accelerator, and Helen fast asleep. They got home late, went to bed, got up, he went to work. When he left Helen was reading her Bible at the kitchen table, her head dipped deeply, turning her wedding ring round and round her finger. That afternoon he handed in his notice. A month later they were packing their three cases and trying them out this way and that until they fit in the back of the Mini.

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 ofit 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