The Monkey Puzzle Tree (19 page)

“Imagine my astonishment,” Diana had written, “when I answered the door and found myself face-to-face with Doug Clegg! He was a bit grizzled and wrinkled, of course, but there was no mistaking that face. He didn’t recognize me at first because I’m pretty grey now, alas, and getting a tad stout, but when he heard my voice, he went all quiet and thoughtful.

“‘Are you who I think you are?’ he says, ‘Diana, the Abductor?’

“‘That’s me,’ says I, ‘And what can I do for Doug, the Dog-
freezer?’

“Apparently he’d come to inquire about buying a couple of dogs to guard his place! Hah! As if! I learned later, that his and his brother’s ‘place’ is a highly successful grow op in the forest behind Comox!

“My God, Gill! What a scene that was, all those years ago! And what a trip back to the city!”

Before finally drifting off to sleep,
Gillian reflected on what a lucky escape she had been granted, and how fortunate she had been in the way things had worked out for her in Ottawa. To begin with, at any rate.

W

Two days after Diana’s
Sunday-night departure from Ottawa, Gillian was hanging curtains and rearranging furniture in the apartment they had found. Small, but bright and high-
ceilinged, with a bay window overlooking a narrow little valley of a park, it had immediately felt like home. She would have, for the first time in her life, a place of her own, and despite all that had happened she felt good. She placed a hooked rug, a Salvation Army find, in front of the fireplace, watered the white gardenia that had been Diana’s house-warming gift, filled the shiny whistling kettle, and turned on the little Canadian Tire radio, Perry Como’s “Catch a Falling Star” inspiring her to sing along and execute a sort of tap dance, such as she and Vanna used to practice years ago. Raucous barking rose up immediately from downstairs, quickly followed by a knock on her door.

Mrs. Armstrong, her landlady, who lived on the ground floor and was the owner of the old, brick three-storey house, stood smiling in the doorway, a plate of freshly made oatmeal cookies in her arthritic-looking hands. In a blue-grey cashmere twin set and coordinated tweed skirt, she looked exactly the sort of woman Gillian knew her mother would approve of.

“I want to apologize for Jack’s barking,” Mrs. Armstrong held out the plate, “and to give a proper welcome to my new neighbour.” The chunky West Highland terrier at her feet twirled around, his claws clicking on the hardwood floor, his black nose pointing steadily up at the cookies.

Over Irish Breakfast tea in Gillian’s new blue and white striped mugs, Mrs. Armstrong put her into the context of Rosedale Villa. The tall, bespectacled man in a sheepskin coat, whom Gillian had met the day before as he was leaving the house, was her son, Russ, who came to see her three times a week, “like clockwork.” He was a scientist, she said, and worked at the National Research Council. The nervous-looking, middle-aged man who had doffed his beret at meeting Gillian on the stairs was Monsieur Laliberté, a flautist, who lived on the top floor, and played in the Ottawa Philharmonic Orchestra. When the weather got warmer, Mrs. Armstrong said, and the windows were open, they would have the pleasure of hearing him practice. Gillian sipped her tea and imagined sitting on the window-seat in the sunshine as haunting notes drifted down to the blossoming crab-apple trees below.

Luck had also been with her in the matter of finding work. A not-so-lucky, about-to-retire English teacher at one of the downtown high schools had slipped on the ice and broken her hip, and would not be finishing the school year. English teachers were hard to come by, according to Peter Fearnley, Gillian’s previous principal, who said he could not offer her full-time teaching at his school but would be happy to recommend her for the position at Sir Charles Roberts High School.

She had found a comfortable place to live and a good job, both within a week.

That evening she put up her feet on an exotic little leather pouf she had found in a junk shop on Bank Street, and looked back over the past eight months. It could all have been a dream: the forgetting of all other ties; the living only in the present; the total absorption in each other, or rather in Doug, she now saw, since everything had always and only been about him.

Every time she thought of Doug, her heart jumped in panic. She knew Diana had been right when she said in the car that he was a dangerous man. She had gone further than that, using alarming psychological terminology, with which, looking back, it was hard to argue. Gillian tried to drown out that insistent voice in her head and be objective, but could not get past the image of Nigel freezing to death on the doorstep. Nor should she try to, she decided, blowing her nose. Diana was right. That was what Doug was.

She had not done well with men, she thought, settling herself deeper into the chair, or they by her. First there was Llewellyn, and, of course, James; and then Doug; jerks all three as it turned out. Perhaps, to be fair, they had thought they loved her. They had said they did, except for James, and even he had seemed to be holding out some sort of promise, but looking back, she was pretty sure there had been no real heart in any of it.

Gordon, on the other hand, had loved her, she felt certain, but the sad truth was that his devotion had irritated her; the way he hovered, ever alert, to be of service: to write her
philosophy essay, carry her book-bag, pick up her dropped handkerchief; he was just asking for it. It had been the same with Eric, a colleague at her first Ottawa school, who was forever coincidentally bumping into her, asking if she needed help settling in, and finding excuses to talk, even going so far as to offer help with her marking. She had gone out with him a couple of times, but had retreated in fright at the prospect of being invited to dinner with his family, a flight that had resulted in a little poem, written in copper-plate on azure vellum:

You picked up my life like a paper bag;

looked into it,

found it empty,

crumpled it up,

and threw it away.

Appalled, she had crumpled it up and thrown it away, cutting off the poet completely.

It was true, though: like Groucho Marx scorning any club which would have him as a member, she trashed any true lovers, while the men she was attracted to just used her. She sank down further in
her chair, brooding. Maybe she could write a poem too; one about the hopelessness of ever finding real love. She picked up a pad and the mottled-blue Waterman fountain pen her father had given her as a going-away-to-school gift, and stared for a long while at the blank piece of paper before beginning to scribble. Finally she wrote out the fair copy of her efforts:

Sleepless I lie within your arms.

You stir and sigh; the night grows cold.

The sphinx of thought stares down those charms

That sang of happiness, then told

That one is one; and love, the sense

Of loneliness grown more intense.

She threw down her pen, which rolled off the table. ‘Arms’ and ‘charms’! ‘Cold’ and ‘told’ indeed! And so derivative! She was as hopeless at poetry as she was at love.

After a restorative cup of tea and one of Mrs. Armstrong’s cookies, she returned to the subject of men. Wondering if a viable compromise might be possible perhaps
at some time in the future, she retrieved her pen and printed two headings:
Users
and
Losers
. Llewellyn, James, and Doug, she put under the one; Gordon and Eric under the other. She had a feeling, looking at the
Users
list, that she had forgotten someone, but could not remember who it might be.

After mulling over the other men in her life, she added a third column for those who were neither users nor losers. She put her father in that column, and, of course, her grandfather, along with Mr. Fearnley and a few others. She would have included Tom, but remembered that unfortunately, as far as love was concerned at least, he belonged in the
Loser
column. In his letter at Christmas he had written about the awful business with Gladys. He would have to marry her, he wrote, because if the child was his, which it well might be, he wanted to look after it, and make sure it had a better childhood than his had been. No child of his was going to be neglected by anyone.

Despite the way things turned out, he must have been hurt and surprised to have had no reply. So must her grandmother; and Vanna, who had actually written, after more than a year of silence, exulting over her success in landing a place as an actress with the Swansea Repertory Company. Mrs. Farrell was another whom she had cut off in this way. She resolved to write to them all, apologizing for her neglect, and filling them in on what was happening in her life.

Only then did she remember that Tom’s address in Germany, along with all the other letters, was still at the farmhouse. So were her photographs, her passport, her few good pieces of jewelry, her books, records, clothes, and a framed Picasso print she had always liked, called
Resting on Imperfection,
in which a woman sits with her hands around her knees, staring sphinx-like into the distance or the future
.

She was to start teaching the following Monday at Sir Charles Roberts School, a short bus ride away from the apartment. She would be teaching senior grades only: two grade thirteen classes, two grade twelves, and an enriched grade eleven; a heavy load entailing five large classes of over forty students and three different sets of lesson preparations. Her predecessor, Mrs. Kay Entwistle, apparently an indefatigable worker, had set written homework every week for each class besides assigning quizzes, exercises, and tests, and had sent Gillian the schedules and tests for all classes, along with sets of corrected essays. She would be a hard act to follow, Gillian knew, but she would take it one day at a time. She gathered her books together on the table and settled down to prepare for Monday.

At the start of her first class, Thirteen C, the students seemed so quiet and well-behaved that Gillian wondered why her predecessor had written, “Watch this lot!” above the class list. After introducing herself, she checked names and attendance, described what was ahead for the last weeks of the semester, and passed around mimeographed copies of Mrs. Entwistle’s quiz on
Hamlet.

“So far, so good,” she thought, as she collected their answers before writing on the board the questions on Act Four, Scene Two. While they scribbled, heads bent, she looked over the quiz sheets.

The top paper, the last to have been handed in, offered in answer to the first question:
What is the gist of Laertes’ advice to Ophelia?
the terse injunction,
Stay away from Macbeth!
The second question:
What is ‘that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns’?
had for answer, not
Death
, but
Poland,
heavily crossed out and replaced by
England.

Keeping her head down and pressing her lips hard together, she glanced at the five rows of students, all seemingly bent over their work. She had better take a closer look at what they were doing.

In the first aisle she confiscated a knitting pattern for baby boots, a math textbook, and a
Mad
comic. She collected a Harlequin romance and Coles notes on
Hamlet
in the second aisle and nothing at all in the fully alerted third. Holding her scruffy spoils, she stood in front of the class.

“Why are you here?”

They glanced at her and at each other, muttering and sniggering.

“Write an honest, one-sentence answer to that query, with your name on it, please, and hand it in as you leave, together with your answers to Mrs. Entwistle’s questions.”

When the bell had rung, and they were jostling their way out, a thick-set youth, heavy black stubble on his chin, loomed over her desk. “I want my math book back,” he said. “I’ve got an important test tomorrow.” The other students nudged each other as they passed.

She looked at the name inside the cover. “I’m sorry Bruce White, but you must pay attention in my class.”

“You’ll be the sorry one if you don’t give it me.” He stared down at her and held out his hand for the book.

She gathered up the last of her papers. “You’ll have it back next class, the same as everyone else.”

“Is that so?” He raised his eyebrows and stared at her. “We’ll see about that!” He lurched out of the room, his backpack slamming against the door frame.

Marking the quizzes in the staff room at lunchtime and incidentally confirming her suspicion that Bruce White was the author of
Stay away from Macbeth!,
she became aware of an intensification of tobacco fumes as a pair of bony hands and wrists, protruding from threadbare tweed cuffs, appeared on the table in front of her.

A thin, grey-haired man leaned over the table, his prognathic face a few inches from hers.

“Be a good girl and give the lad his book back!” he said in one of those voices that can be heard clearly throughout any assembly hall. “He’s going in for engineering. He doesn’t need
Hamlet,
for Christ’s sake, but he sure as hell needs all the math he can get!” He straightened up. “Besides, we’ve got a match against Ashburn tonight, and he, my dear, is our goalie. We don’t want him off his form, do we?” He winked and held out his right hand, palm upwards, jiggling it at her. “Just give us the book, sweetheart, and I’ll get it to him.”

“As I understand it,” Gillian rose to eye level with him, “he needs to pass Grade Thirteen English to go in for anything at all at the post-secondary level, and by the looks of it, if he doesn’t give it his full attention and effort, he may very well
not
pass. Besides, he won’t be studying anything much tonight if he has a match. He can have the book back tomorrow, as I told him.”