The Monkey Puzzle Tree (12 page)

The other girls looked at Gillian expectantly.

“Nothing.” Wiping her eyes, Gillian looked over at Fiona’s empty bed. “Nothing at all. It’s just a story.”

W

Tom rolled up,
a fresh pint in his hand, just as the waiter arrived with their orders.

“Hadn’t you better take it easy?” Gillian raised an eyebrow. “You’ve got to drive to Langland after this.”

“You’re right. This is my last. But Mum upsets me. Nothing pleases her, however hard I try. There’s no doing anything with her!” He took a long swallow and set his tankard down. “But the thing is, Gill,” he looked hard at her, “I don’t want her to die without sort of giving me her blessing, if you know what I mean.”

Gillian sat back, tears in her eyes. “I do know what you mean, Tom! That’s what I want too. I thought I came because I wanted to tell her about Angus, and so I do, but this goes even deeper.” She leaned forward. “But why should we be asking for her blessing, Tom? Isn’t it she who should blessing beg of us?”

“Where’s that from?”

“King Lear.”

“Ha! Well let’s not exaggerate, but I think you’re right.”

“In the play it goes both ways: Lear and Cordelia open their hearts completely to each other before they meet their deaths.”

“Well, this is small potatoes compared to that I suppose, but still …” He picked up his knife and fork and set about his steak and chips.

At the bungalow Tweetie-Pie lumbered to meet them, tail erect.

“How’s my big boy?’ Tom swept him up to ride on his shoulder. As they entered the sunlit living room, Sylvester let loose a trill of joy, or, for all Gillian knew, anger.

“What will become of these two if …?”

“Oh, I’ll take them myself. I promised her that when I gave them to her. You know, I think I’ll have a bit of a nap, Gill, if that’s okay. And then maybe we’ll have a cup of tea and go for a walk on the beach.”

He and Tweetie-Pie ambled off to the spare room, while Gillian settled into the cushioned rocking chair from the old home in Tregwyr, to look out over the calm sea until she too fell asleep.

Two hours later, they were walking along hard, damp sand, dotted with shells, pebbles, clumps of seaweed, pieces of driftwood, and stranded starfish; a cracked Frisbee here, a small red spade there, the dried remains of a seagull scrunched under a log a few steps ahead. Gillian picked up a piece of bladderwort and popped its bubbles, getting slime on her fingers. Squinting into the sun, she pulled a strand of hair off her salty lower lip. “I bumped into Robbie, the butcher’s boy, this morning. Did you know he married Gladys?”

“Yes, of course I knew. She married him straight after our divorce. Bit of luck for me, that. Almost as good as her flying off, literally, ha, ha, with that fellow who owned an airplane!”

“Bit of luck for her, too. Robbie seems devoted to her, God knows why.”

Tom slouched along beside her, shoulders hunched, hands in his jeans pockets. He stopped and faced her. “Have you seen Vanna?”

Gillian nodded.

“Did she say anything about me?”

“Actually, she did. She asked after you quite particularly. She seems to be pretty up-to-date on your affairs, so to speak. Have you been seeing her at all?”

“Oh, now and then, off and on, you know.” He looked out over the sea. “But I don’t think she’ll ever return my feelings. Nobody ever has, really, come to think of it.” He turned to her. “What’s the matter with me, Gill? I mean, I’m not bad-looking. I’m not poor, or weird, or anything. All I want is to settle down happily with someone, but it never works out.”

Gillian put her arm in his. “Well, I love you.”

He hugged her arm into his side. “I know. You’re a rock.” He picked up a stick and threw it for a Jack Russell terrier which had appeared out of nowhere. “That was a bad business about that creep, Stan. Remember? I think Vanna always saw me as a bumbling fool after that.”

“I don’t think she knew you told Gladys where he could find her, Tom. How could she? I think she might have suspected me, though. She turned cold towards me again for years after that, until just before I went away.”

They walked along in silence for a while, Tom obliging the fanatical dog, and Gillian thinking about the uncomfortable events of that summer holiday more than fifty years ago.

W

Home for the summer
holidays, alone for once, since their father was giving Tom his Saturday morning tennis lesson, and their mother was meeting friends for coffee, Gillian sat on the couch in the sunlit living room. In her hand were her General Certificate results, just received in the post, all of them even better than she had hoped. So it was on to A levels in English, French, and Latin, and in two years’ time, university; a lifetime of freedom and reading opening up for her.

Two more years before she got out of prison! School had become more bearable as the years had passed, but she had never been one of those girls, and there were surprisingly many of them, who loved being at boarding school, and probably
would
say in their old age, that those really had been the happiest days of their lives. She herself was just getting through it as best she could, doing her work, and waiting for her happy life, broken off at six years old, to begin again somehow, when she got out into the world.

Fortunately, the housemistress had stopped writing comments like “Gillian should participate more enthusiastically,” and “Gillian gives the impression of living in a cage,” which had caused a bit of an uproar, with her parents insisting that she stop embarrassing them and start joining clubs and trying out for teams.

That bit about living in a cage had been true though, in more senses than one. In the first months she had struggled, first to adjust to that new, regimented life, and then to deal with the death of Fiona. Things became even worse when her periods started. Even though she had vaguely known in theory what would happen, she had turned in on herself, shocked at her body’s gross betrayal. Profoundly embarrassed by the whole thing, she would withdraw into a book whenever the talk in the dorm turned, as it did more and more often, to the excruciating subject of boys, and making babies and what went where and how.

“I’ve seen my brother with nothing on,” she heard Chris say, “and it beats me how that little floppy thing can get into anything, let alone in
there?”

“Oh, I think something happens to it,” Anita said, and blushed.

“What d’you mean? What happens to it?” Diana and Chris stared at her, fascinated.

Silent and appalled, Gillian tried to suppress the images that arose unbidden: the winking eye of that thing, stiff as a policeman’s truncheon; Angus’s demands on its behalf; and the eventual milky fountain, like a whale spouting. Floppiness would not be a problem, she thought, though size certainly would be. Angus had said he was going to get it right in her next time, and she had been terrified at the thought of what would happen to her if he finally succeeded. Thank God Grandma and Grandpa had sent for them when they did!

Even more excruciating than the dorm discussions had been the time when the biology teacher had given the Upper Fourth a lesson on the mechanics of human reproduction, using unspeakable words like
engorgement
and
ejaculation.
As Miss Sinclair, glaring over her shoulder, wrote and even drew on the board Gillian had wished she could be anywhere but there, or that she could—perhaps not die, because that would attract too much attention—but just cease to exist, right there in the smell of formaldehyde, amongst the test tubes and Bunsen burners and stained sinks.

In time however, she had roused herself and managed some success at taking part in school life. She had begun by joining the knitting circle, where she made Tom a pair of too-small socks, and had gone on to help Miss Lamb with the organization of a junior poetry competition. To the delight of her father she had been selected for the junior tennis team, but it turned out that while she could be a competent player if merely enjoying the game or bringing up the score, whenever a game reached a critical point, in an interschool match for instance, she could never hit a winner. This, no doubt, was why she had never made it to the senior team.

She was on the senior hockey team, though, playing defense; always and only defense, but nevertheless definitely participating. When school started again, she would be in the sixth form and had agreed to work behind the scenes on the senior school production of
Twelfth Night.
What was more, she would be a junior prefect, and had been asked to join the editorial board of the school newspaper. She was playing her part as well as she knew how. What more could they ask?

The side door slammed and Tom burst into the room, dropping his tennis racket with a clatter on the parquet floor, and throwing himself sideways into an armchair. High colour burned on his cheeks as he fixed the blue blaze of his eyes on her. “You’ll never guess who I saw in Woolworth’s earlier this morning, Gill! Go on. Guess!”

She sighed. “Just tell me, Tom.”

“I saw Vanna! Vanna Farrell!”

Gillian sat up. “Vanna? You saw her here in town?”

“Yes. And she’s absolutely gorgeous, Gill! She’s the most beautiful girl I ever saw in my whole life!” He grabbed the quiff of dark hair on top of his head in both fists.

“I see. And is she still covered with freckles?”

“Yes, but her freckles are gorgeous too! And you should see her hair! She’s cut off her plaits, and it’s all long and loose and curly. She’s absolutely stunning!”

Remembering her first sight of Vanna’s mother, Gillian knew what he meant. “Did you talk to her?”

“No, she was busy serving someone. She didn’t see me.”

“Serving someone?”

“Yes, she was behind the counter in the women’s bit; jewelry ’n stuff.”

Gillian put the letter from school down on a side table, her self-satisfaction draining away. Instead of being behind the counter in Woolworth’s, Vanna too, should have been getting excellent G.C. results at this point, with a good chance of being able to go to university in a couple of years on a scholarship.

“Could you go and see her, Gill?” Tom fixed pleading eyes on her. “Maybe get her to meet you after work? And then, maybe I …”

“Don’t be daft, Tom. Vanna’s two years older than you, and if she’s as gorgeous as you say, she probably has a boyfriend already.”

Tom pouted and kicked at the coffee table with a hefty tennis shoe. He was awfully big for fourteen, she thought; strong enough to have beaten their father at tennis the day before, and with the makings of a mustache showing on his upper lip.

“You could go and see her anyway,” he suggested, leaning forward. She could tell Vanna that he, Tom, wanted news of Francis.

“Why don’t you ask her yourself?”

He flung himself back. “Oh I couldn’t! I’d be terrified to go up and talk to her just like that. Please, Gill, go to see her. Just to say hello?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Tom. It’s sort of awkward.” Gillian was remembering her last face-to-face encounter with Vanna after the Eleven Plus exam.

“Listen.” Elbows on knees, chin in hands, he fixed his eyes on her. “I’ll tell you something. For years now, ever since we left Tregwyr, I’ve had this dream about Vanna. Don’t laugh, Gill. We’re at Grandma’s having tea, and Vanna eats a whole sponge cake.”

Gillian laughed. “And are you angry in the dream? You certainly wouldn’t like it in real life.”

“No. I’m giving it to her, slice after slice.”

Gillian studied his flushed face. “Crikey, Tom, I’d no idea it was as bad as that.”

“Neither had I, not really, not ’til I saw her today. Well, some idea, of course. I always thought she was fabulous, but this, today … It was like a bolt from the blue!” He propped an ankle across a tanned knee, the hairs on his leg much more noticeable than she remembered. “You know, maybe I’m not too young, Gill. Old Glad Eyes doesn’t seem to mind.”

“What? What do you mean? Are you saying
Gladys
fancies you?”

“Yeah, well. Me and whoever.”

Gillian and Tom saw Gladys from time to time during school holidays when she came in to collect her mother. Dark-haired and fine-boned, she had cultivated the Audrey Hepburn look with more success than many, despite her lack of height. She would tease Tom, flirting with him shamelessly, and to Gillian’s disgust, act towards her as if they had always been the best of friends.

Earlier in the holiday, she had casually let drop that she sometimes visited her mother’s cousin, Auntie Blodwen, in Croesffordd. “I seen Angus there one time.” She smiled up at Gillian, batting her long eyelashes. “He’ve got ever such a posh girlfriend now. All tall and blonde she is, and la-di-dah English.”

Gillian could not have cared less about the girlfriend, but the mention of Angus had sent her into a flat spin for days, and she had avoided Gladys ever since. Why couldn’t he just stay in the deep, dark cellar she had assigned him to? Why did he keep popping up when she had forgotten all about him, like some monstrous Jack-in-the-box?

“What about it, Gill? Will you go? Please!” Tom often got his way through sheer persistence.

“I’ll think about it.” She was distracted by her unwelcome memories, the multiple shock of the Vanna sighting, and the glimpse into the secret lives of Tom and Gladys.

Two days later, she entered
Woolworth’s. Vanna was leaning over the jewelry counter, sorting cardboard boxes of earrings. Even taller than Gillian, she not only looked like her mother, but moved as gracefully. Holding back their glittering contents with a long, white finger, she was turning over the boxes to check the price sticker underneath. Absorbed in her task, she did not look up until Gillian stood across the counter from her.

“Can I help you?” She raised her head, a mechanical smile on her rose-tinted lips. At the sight of Gillian, she dropped the box she was holding, her face flooding with the deep colour Gillian remembered. “What do
you
want? Buying Woolworth’s earrings are you? You must’ve come down in the world!”