The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey Page B

gradually over decades the peat would begin to dry, it would be smothered and heated by sediment that would crush out its water and slowly, another century later, it would become brittle coal, then the coal would harden until it was a tough, glassy graphite. A polished glass house embedded in polished ground. And at last the land would have adapted itself to the structure. This manmade coercion of the landscape is what is rightly called architecture and the rest is called only art at best—at worst, modelling.
    When he has finished speaking he assesses the three or four faces looking at him, sees interest, and so he goes on; he tells them that the building that inspired him the most is the bird place at London Zoo, a great iceberg of glass. While he gestures its size and angles with his arms, some quizzical and troubled stares meet his, the words
Cedric Price
are muttered; Lewis asks,
Is it made of glass? Surely not? Surely the birds would die, isn't it made of some kind of mesh—some kind of
—and Fergus interrupts with the assertion that it is a mighty piece of architecture, yes, who could fail to be inspired?
    From their enthusiastic nodding he can only assume everything has gone well; he stands. “May I make a parting speech?” he says.
    A choral yes passes up and down the table. He meets Eleanor's eye and sees her apprehension. She is sitting up straight, twitchy and almost—very uncharacteristically— birdlike.
    “I would like to say only this,” he states. “You do not create a building in keeping with its environment. You create a building that gives the environment something to aspire to. Beauty is not the point. It just happens to slowly become the point. Is this not like life? I am going to spend my retirement seeking beauty. That's all, thank you.”
    He does not exactly mean this, or rather, does not know if he means it or not. Seeking beauty? As if it can be found in the cupboard under the sink, or in one's sock drawer. But there is something very marvellous in being blindly profound, and everybody agrees it seems, raising their glasses and toasting him. Now when he looks at Eleanor she is relaxed and heavy once again in that cloak of needy devotion.
    He has little idea what he just said; but that, he thinks, is because he is drunk. Nothing more.
    Before they leave he decides to go out into the garden, and is confused to find it changed: where once had been a neatly, cleanly filled rectangle of poured concrete, surrounded by a low wall and open view of the moors, there is now a—what is its name?—the glass shed, the glass part, and it is cluttered with tables and large sweating plants. People are eating at the tables and look up at him as he wanders in. Unsure of how to get out again he panics and stares at their hot, flushed faces.
    Then he sees on the floor, by his own feet, some footprints embedded in the surface, dried fossils of prints that are making their way out and over the wall that is no longer there. One set is large, the other smaller. He smiles before he has had time to guard himself from the tender swipe of the past, and then Eleanor comes up behind him, not seeming to notice the footprints at all, and guides him back to the others.

    In his memories he is often travelling, riding uninhibited down motorways at night, down the brand-new M1 hushing and empty, along an American highway in a brown car with his wife. Flying.
    When he is driving in those memories the roads are always like this: black and quiet. The car swishes; everything feels soft, overly soft. His eyes are always closed even when he is at the wheel. There is certainly no danger, only a secured sense of going home, though home is not necessarily the bricks andmortar of the coach house or the fluorescence of a motel or even the flat open landscape of his childhood. It is an eternally imminent concept of home whose proximity brings fantastic comfort until he begins to realise that it will only ever be proximate and will