Free The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey

was his homeland and she wanted to get to know it through the eyes of his childhood. He drives on and his stomach tightens. It strikes him as strange and sad that whenever he maps out his own history it converges on pain. He has known so much more than pain—and yet recently everything pivots on the tragedies and wrong turnings.
    He doesn't know if Eleanor has truly sunk into oblivion over the past or whether she is just pretending. Either way, itobviously isn't important enough to her. But to him it is. While she inspects her hairline he entertains horror. This is the precise route he took that night, from the coach house to The Sun Rises, 1967, the week after the Six-Day War had ended; it was hot. War, you see, and bombed airfields and Egypt's planes blown to nothing by Israel, and Helen angry for an entire week as if they would divorce over this: this war. As if it were his fault.
    How full of rage and horror he was when he drove out here and decided to make a play for Eleanor, knowing Eleanor would never refuse. All he could think about was Alice. To salve the blame he had loaded on himself he decided to run to Eleanor's bed, and there she was, of course. Of course she let him in. And then he left.
    He cannot decide now how long it was before he and Eleanor spoke again. He was embarrassed. He spent months disgusted with himself, and when he checks now to confirm when that disgust eased he is not sure that it ever did. He is embarrassed, that decades later Eleanor is what remains. Their past seems so dull and grubby, and their present so—inexpli cable. He wonders if he should have brought her along tonight.
    They pull up at a junction and wait. In the mirror her eyes become ringed with dark brown and expand in size. She emerges and changes under the nib of the eye pencil as Helen had used to do. In the late sixties Helen had worn her eyes large and black; her once-brown legs had turned ravishing white from the bad northern weather and her knees had seemed to be exposed bone. They are so uncannily different, Helen and Eleanor. Eleanor is plump and her makeup is a mask; he prefers her without it. He wants to tell somebodythere has been a mistake. He searches his pockets for a cigarette, finds the accelerator and pulls off.
    Eleanor dabs her cheeks in the failing light. “Are you excited?”
    Dear Eleanor, to think that somebody could be
excited
about their own retirement dinner.
    “Nervous,” he replies. “It's a bit like going to your own wake.”
    She sniffs and puts the mirror on the dashboard. “I don't think I'll ever retire. Don't think I'll ever be able to afford to. I'll be digging my own grave to save money.”
    She grins; the smell of her perfume edges into his senses as if through a wall of sponge, just some of the smell permeating and the rest lost. What does she even
do
for a living?
    “Everyone retires. I tried not to—but there comes a point when it's necessary for you to be eased out. It's a system.”
    He worries suddenly that he has forgotten the car keys, quizzing himself to think where he might have left them, before realising they are in the ignition. Eleanor clears a blemish from the windscreen with the cuff of her blouse. She turns to him.
    “I'll look after you,” she says.
    “Sara used to call retirement the Sabbath Days,” he says, ignoring her. He does not want to talk about being looked after or to look across and catch her eye as if they are sealing a joint fate. “The Sabbath Days, the days of rest. No gathering manna, no ploughing or reaping or pressing—” He frowns out of the window at the moors and the cooling towers in the distance, ejecting broad plumes of cloud into an otherwise clear evening. With his thumb and forefinger he makes a small circle. “No pressing those things, not plums. The other things.”
    “Grapes?” Eleanor ventures.
    “Yes. Grapes.” Embarrassed still, he forges on with his point. “No ploughing or reaping. No cooking. She called them the days of