Free The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey Page B

sure, is still sure, that if they read the letters they would find infidelity in them. Only a secret lover would keep writing to his beloved after her death, not knowing that she was dead. The thought is painful to him, so much so that he sometimes feels pity for this poor man, who must by now be worried, mustn't he? The lack of replies must be eating at him.
    Henry was not interested in the theory and put the letters aside, yawned, and rambled about prison life. They saved their fruit rations, he said, and fermented them with marmite andsugar to make wine; he asked if he could be sent some mar-mite, they had stopped selling it at the prison shop.
    There was an argument about who knew Helen better. He remembers he had tried to pull the chair towards the table to impose his view, but the chair was rooted to the floor. In the effort he had done something, spilt his tea or knocked the letters to the floor, it is unclear now, but one of the women had looked around at him as if apologetic, and he had felt, again, something like unworthiness or failure in the slow tired blink she gave before she turned back to her husband.
    The argument—the argument had been so familiar. He can't with any honesty say they definitely had it this time, more that it is just an argument that is always there for the having, regurgitated so many times it could be scripted. He sometimes wonders if it is the only conversation he and Henry have really had since Helen died. It is an argument over who knows her best, who is more like her, who loved her most. The debate tires and upsets him; how can he even approach these questions? Helen was his
wife.
Compacted in that word is a whole planet of intimacy, not to mention the fact of choice: that he and Helen chose each other in a way that Helen and Henry never did. Slept together, too. Made Henry. Henry is secondary to Jake-and-Helen, a by-product.
    Henry gathered the letters then, from the floor or the table, and patted them tenderly into order. He began to talk about a German poet in his block who had a wife at home with long blond hair and eyes like planets. The poet wrote his wife a hundred poems a day. People write when they're lonely, Henry said, and it would be no good just writing to yourself, what you say has to be said
to
someone. Days when the poet couldn't gethis post sorted in time to go out he went mad. Henry smiled as if at a fond memory. He said that maybe those mysterious letters were just from somebody lonely exploiting Helen's charity.
    He must have been looking away from Henry during that speech, because he remembers now seeing him suddenly as a stranger: restless, warring, and vulnerable in his—what is the word—jail costume? It occurred to him that, given a choice of who he should be, his son had been launched into a dilemma he had not yet solved. The baby was in him, and the boy, and the man, the old man, the wise, the embittered, the arrogant. His hair had not grown back from whatever it was that had made it come out, either the drugs or the prison razor. There they both sat, more hairless than ever. He had no idea how to relate to his son. They could not pull their chairs closer, and there was no way of bridging the gap. The table and chairs were all of a piece, arranged so as to never be rearranged.
    He put the letters in his pocket before he left. Henry whispered something:
There,
he said,
see that man, he's the one who set his girlfriend on fire.
    As he listened to Henry whisper he looked at the clock and saw its fast hand trip forward, and it started near the four and, by the time Henry stopped speaking, it was near the eleven. In that time Henry had told him about how the man would eat nothing that had been in contact with meat; he would eat only muesli which his girlfriend brought in plastic boxes. Yes, that was where he had encountered that man, in prison. He is relieved; he remembers sharp words with Eleanor when he came out into the car park where she was waiting, because