The Monkey Puzzle Tree (15 page)

She was probably right. Gillian had never thought of associating with the
Plaid Cymru
, and even though she did not think of herself as English in any way, she had not been brought up speaking Welsh, and had been educated outside Wales. Moreover, she disapproved of stuffing bombs into postboxes. Despite that, she could not get him out of her head. She kept seeing his even skin, light hair, and clear, pale eyes. He flitted in and out of her dreams. Every morning she woke up wondering if she would see him that day. Instead of studying at home for the end-of-term exams, she made a daily trip to the university, ostensibly to work in the library, in fact to check the refectory board for a notice of a
Plaid Cymru
meeting. Finally she saw one posted, to be held in three days’ time.

As she had hoped, the members of the
Plaid
, including the man of many names, who was chatting to a dark-haired, black-eyed girl with a bosom rightly belonging to someone twice her size, came into the refectory after the meeting, probably to continue their scheming. She sat at the worn wooden table, sipping the pallid coffee and pretending to read, while glancing over her book at their nearby table.

He was wearing a finely cabled wool pullover that looked hand-knitted and was the exact colour of his eyes. Its pushed-up sleeves showed muscular forearms, covered with a fine pelt of fawn hair. She had not thought he had noticed her, but at the break-up of the group, he came over to her table.

“I think you’re a friend of our Eleri,” he said. Like hers, his accent was barely perceptible. “I’ve seen you in here with her. May I join you, or are you just off?”

Gillian gestured to the chair opposite. He sat down staring at her hair, which she had let loose that day, and which surrounded her head and neck in a cloud. His pale irises, she saw when his eyes met and held hers, were finely ringed with dark blue.

“Gillian Davies, isn’t it? Doctor Roy Davies’s daughter? I’m Llewellyn Parry-Jones, Eleri’s cousin. What’s that you were reading?”

She indicated the volume of poetry beside her.

“Ah, Matthew Arnold! A favourite of mine.” He smiled, showing teeth as purely white as the whites of his eyes, a slight chip off the inside corner of a centre one. “I’ve always identified with the Scholar Gypsy. Like him, I’m ‘waiting for the spark from heaven to fall’.”

“Isn’t the
Plaid Cymru
your spark from heaven?” Gillian asked, her breathing becoming regular again.

He smiled. “Oh I’ve had a shower of little sparks in my time, but I’m waiting for the big one.”

“And what will that be, do you think?”

“I don’t know. Just as long as it isn’t The Call!” He laughed and looked at her, and his face went still. “Your eyes are sea-green,” he said. “‘The cold strange eyes of a little mermaiden.’”

He put out a hand and touched her hair, and as easily as that, she was lost. Cold strange eyes or not, she was totally in love. When he suggested they walk part of the way home together, she feared her legs would not hold her, she had such an urge to lie down.

“It’s a fire of straw.” Eleri pulled a long face. “It won’t last. Never does with him.” But it did, for over two years. Her parents did not know what to think. On the one hand they seemed to be quite impressed with Llewellyn; first-class degrees from Swansea and from Cambridge went a long way with them, as with almost everyone else in town. On the other hand, he was a Welsh Nationalist, a preacher, and apparently, by some accounts, not altogether respectable; not good enough, they said, for their now strangely beautiful daughter.

Llewellyn was a busy man. He drove his MG sports car around South Wales, interviewing and researching for the BBC. He translated material for the Plaid Cymru. He cultivated political connections, and dealt in mysterious secret matters, some political, some not, Gillian gathered.

He also seemed to be in demand as a preacher. At first she wanted to go to meetings with him despite her lack of Welsh, or, better still, to hear him preach, but apparently he preferred to keep his complicated life compartmentalized. As long as she had sole occupation of the girlfriend compartment, she decided, she could live with that.

He would make time for them to go on their own outings, however; just the two of them, usually to the remoter beaches of the Gower coast, where alone together, they would walk hand in hand across the hard, damp sands, or curl into the soft secrecy of the dunes, or lie, stretched out like lizards on the warmth of sun-baked rocks.

At first, although fascinated by him, she had been repelled and frightened by the slightest suggestion of sexual intimacy. Llewellyn, however, who enjoyed a challenge, had been patient. She had been brainwashed, he said, into an excess of purity and needed to be deprogrammed, and he was the man to do it.

Despite this misreading of the situation, his tactics and tech-
nique, along with her intense attraction to him, eventually brought success. Everything was new and thrilling to her: his crisp hair; his voice, especially when speaking Welsh; the unexpected softness and salty taste of his skin; its smell, like fresh-baked bread.

He, on the other hand, having overcome that particular hurdle, forever seemed to be seeking new sensations and further adventure. At his urging they made love on the crumbling battlements of a ruined castle, loose stones rattling down beneath them; over the prone effigies of a knight and his lady in an ancient church, tourists approaching in the near distance, cameras at the ready; and, at the back of a narrow cave, with the tide coming in fast, reaching their climax just as a huge breaker rushed through the narrow opening and dragged them out in its undertow.

“We could’ve drowned!” Gillian gasped, laughing after the cold wave flung them up on the hard sand.

Llewellyn, spread-eagled on his back, turned his head, “I’ve always dreamed of doing that!”

“You have? You mean you knew what would happen?”

“I did.” He rolled over and kissed her. “That was the best fuck of my life!”

One early summer afternoon, they sat in a sheep-bitten hollow at the very end of the Worm’s Head promontory. Buffeted by the wind off the sea, and deafened by the screaming of gulls and the roar of breakers channeling through the hollow rocks below, they exchanged cold salty kisses and cuddled together, looking out over the green, white-crested ocean.

“Next stop, America!” Llewellyn shouted over the wind.

“Canada, actually, as the bird flies.” Gillian had often studied Canada in her school atlas, having thrilled as a child to tales of the Frozen North in Tom’s
Chums
annuals:
“Back, you brutes! Back!” cried the trapper, snatching up the last burning brand, as the gleaming circle of green eyes drew ever nearer
…

Diana, who had been in Vancouver for a year, had written of spectacular winters and gorgeous summers and opportunities for work of all kinds. She should come, Diana had written. It was a whole different life.

“Time to go home now.” Llewellyn spoke through the last piece of his mother’s excellent fruitcake. “I’m covering a meeting in the Town Hall tonight about the future of the docks. And your mummy’ll be worrying about you.”

When she turned twenty-one, and had graduated, and was studying for her teaching certificate, Gillian thought she would be allowed more freedom, to be at least as free as Tom was when he came home on leave from the army, but as long as she lived in her parents’ house, they said, she lived by their rules. There could be no question, for example, of her going away with Llewellyn, a restriction that caused considerable tension between the two of them until eventually, he forced the issue by asking her to come with him on a trip in May, to Bangor in North Wales, to cover a conference on a proposed new reservoir. They would be away for two nights and three days, he said. It would be wonderful.

Her mother’s subsequent tirade, no doubt exacerbated by Gillian’s indifference to the eligible youngish surgeon her parents had recently invited to dinner, culminated in the declaration, made with flashing eyes and wagging forefinger, “You’re making yourself cheap, my girl!”

Frustration and anger made Gillian bold: “Oh, really? How much do you think I should charge?”

Her mother clapped both hands to her cheeks. “Oh! To speak to me like that! You should be ashamed of yourself!” She shook her finger at Gillian. “After all your father and I have done for you! After all the money we’ve spent on your education! All the sacrifices we’ve made for you! And now you want to disgrace
us like this!” She cast her eyes up to the ceiling. “What have I done to deserve such an unkind, thankless daughter?” She turned her head as she swept out of the room. “You’ve turned out to be a great disappointment to your father and I, Gillian.”

“Me.”

“What?”

“It’s ‘Your father and
me.
’”

Her mother slammed the door.

“Come anyway,” Llewellyn said as they drove back from a Gower pub that evening. “They’ll get over it. We’ll just sort of elope.”

Gillian turned to face his profile. “But don’t you have to be getting married to elope?” There had been no previous suggestion of any such development.

He glanced at her for a moment. “We could get married, you know.” He grinned. “I know how to fix it. There’s just enough time. I could set it up, and we could get married in Bangor.” His eyes were glinting with mischief. She knew he was thinking how they would be putting one over on her mother and father, and causing a stir amongst their friends, not to mention upsetting his own perfectly nice parents.

“No, Lew, we can’t do it that way.”

He stopped the car and turned on her. “What d’you mean? Are you saying you don’t want to marry me?” His eyes were like ice-picks. “The idea does not appeal to you, perhaps?” He seemed to be working himself up into a temper.

“I didn’t say that, Lew. I’d love to marry you, although I don’t actually remember you asking me. It just doesn’t feel right to do it like this. It’s … it’s sort of perverse.”

“
Perverse
is it? You think I’m
perverse
?” He shook out a cigarette while still looking at her. Rare spots of colour appeared on his cheeks. “I’ll tell you what, Gillian. That’s the trouble with you. You never do things spontaneously. You’re so
cool
-
hearted
, always watching, always thinking. You never just throw yourself into something; there’s always part of you holding back. You never give your all.” He turned away to stare out of the side window.

I never give my all?
Gillian began to shake. She could hardly breathe for the tightness in her throat. “How can you say that, Lew? Do you really think that?”

“Yes I do. And you can forget about coming to Bangor. I’ll go by myself. Or maybe,” he kept his head turned away, “I know someone else who’d like to go.”

Gillian closed her eyes. She knew at once who that would be. Angharad, the girl she had seen him with that first day in the refectory; she, whose very name meant ‘beloved’; a friend of Eleri’s, and a staunch member of the Plaid Cymru. That rosy, dark-eyed girl, with her lustrous black curls, wide red mouth, and loud free laugh, the very antithesis of herself; the reserved, no-fun, pusillanimous one, thin and pale, with ash-coloured hair, and cold strange eyes. Angharad would have no trouble giving her all, whatever that was, Gillian thought. Probably gave it all the time.

She got out of the car on trembling legs, saying she wanted to walk home.

“That’s it?” He was standing on his side of the low car. “You’re not even going to discuss it?”

“What’s the point?” Gillian managed not to give way to tears. “Now that I know how you feel. You’ll do what you want to sooner or later anyway.”

She succeeded in getting into the house without anyone seeing her, but before she could flee upstairs to her bedroom, she heard her mother’s voice. She turned quickly into the cloakroom, full of winter coats, and pulled the door shut. In the mothball-smelling darkness, half-covered by her father’s heavy, tobacco-scented, Melton overcoat, she succumbed. “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!” she sobbed into her mother’s perfumed fox-fur cape. After a while she looked up, her eyes searching the darkness. Was it really all over? Was it already too late? Or should she try to make up the quarrel and win him back? A voice rose up from her childhood:
You can fight if you like, but you can’t win.
She hid her face again in the wet fur.

Two months later, in high summer
,
she went to a party at a senior English professor’s cottage on the north coast of the Gower peninsula. Her father, much more indulgent since a recent heart scare, had lent her the car so that she could leave early if she wanted, as likely she would.

James was there of course, not being the man to miss a well-heeled party. He had been on leave the previous semester, working on a book about Dylan Thomas, recently dead of “a massive insult to the brain” after a drinking binge in New York. James was onto a good thing there, she thought, considering the market for anything related to the dead poet.

She was pleased to see Gordon, still a good friend, at the party. Eleri was there too, not unexpectedly since she was an enthusiastic partygoer and knew the hosts. Less welcome was the sight of Angharad, resplendent in a red silk blouse and demonstrating considerable vivacity. According to Eleri, she had come to have some fun since Llewelyn was away, covering a trade conference in Cardiff.

Gillian and James had crossed paths several times during the previous two years, mostly at parties or in pubs, where he would fetch her drinks, smile at her offbeat comments, and make cracks about Welsh nationalists. He registered her presence with a long, meaningful look across the smoke-filled room, and a lift of his glass.

The noise and smoke, along with unremitting peals of laughter from Angharad, drove Gillian to leave the room and retreat down the rocky path behind the cottage. Seated on the low, whitewashed stone wall overlooking the water, she took from her pocket the brochure of the Canadian Rocky Mountains she had received that morning from Diana. For a moment her heart lifted at their splendour, until she sank back into brooding, as so often those days, over what Llewelyn had said. Had he really meant it? Was she, in some way she couldn’t grasp, essentially cold? Was she all that different from other women? What did they have to give that she did not? She shivered and looked again at the brochure.