The Monkey Puzzle Tree (2 page)

The room was dark, and very high and bare, the only furnishings being the huge four-poster bed, covered with a slippery-looking, pale purple eiderdown, a black, mothball- smelling wardrobe, big enough for the two of them to live in, and a matching chest of drawers, also empty.

Tommy was sniffling worryingly, so Gillian helped him up onto the bed, where they tried some half-hearted bouncing before he gave up and started to cry in earnest. Afraid that Mrs. Macpherson would come back, she ran to pull up a window blind, hoping to distract him with a sunny field or maybe even some animals. The blind stuck at first, but then rose slowly onto a
maze of dense, prickly branches.

Peering through gathering tears into the dark heart of the monkey puzzle tree, she wondered what would actually happen to a monkey caught in those branches. Would it be able to get out? Was that the puzzle?

Life was strange at Maenordy. They had to stay out of the house all day except for meals. In the house they had to be quiet and never do anything to annoy Mrs. Macpherson. If by some accident they did, she would spank them, pulling down their underpants and hitting them hard on their bottoms, making Tommy wet himself, which made her even angrier. They only saw Dr. Macpherson at meals. He had rusty grey hair and a dark, mottled nose, and never said anything.

Angus, their son, who was eighteen, was away at boarding school.

Gillian had hopes of the village school, but everything was in Welsh, and she hardly knew any. Even worse, Gladys had been evacuated to the village too, to one of the stone cottages in the whitewashed row down by the crossroads, where loud-voiced, cheery women in flowered pinnies hung out their washing in gardens full of cabbages and chickens. Still jealous of Gillian being at the big house, she would whisper to the other girls in Welsh, making them stare and giggle.

“You’s only there ’cos you dad’s a doctor, like ’im up by there,” she said to Gillian one day in the schoolyard. “They
’ad
to take somebody, and they asked for you two special. They din’t want us
common
kids. That’s what my mam said.” After that the other girls turned their backs on Gillian and wouldn’t let her join in their hopscotch and skipping games.

Things were better after school and at weekends since Gillian and Tommy could go wherever they liked outside, and could play in the barn if it rained. At first it was warm and sunny most of the time, and it was exciting to be free to wander in the woods and fields. In one field there was a white calf which would let Gillian climb on her back. In another there was an old cart-horse who did not seem to mind sharing his space with them. On the hill behind Maenordy they found an abandoned cottage which at first they joyfully imagined making into their own house, but the dried-up dead crows and stained, ripped mattress in the bedroom gave them such a bad feeling that they never went back.

Another time they heard screaming, thin and high, and searched the field until they found the rabbit, its leg caught in a trap. They managed to lever the trap open with sticks and watched the poor little thing limp trembling away, after which they dropped stones on all the traps they could find to spring them until the farmer complained to Mrs. Macpherson, who said he would shoot them if he caught them at it again.

There was a fox’s den, too, in the woods, with a stink that made Gillian want to blow out hard through her nose. Once they saw the fox himself, so fine and delicate, with his gleaming eyes and pointed snout, twenty times better than Red Riding Hood’s wolf. They watched and waited for him for weeks, but they never saw him again until the day they found him hanged. A trap had been laid for him too, and he swung from a tree by the neck, stiff and snarling.

“Why was the fox hanged?” Gillian and Tommy stood hand-in-hand in front of Mrs. Macpherson.

She squinched her eyes at them. “For a warning,” she said.

They stared back at her. Tommy turned to Gillian, his mouth wobbling. “What’d we do?”

“Nothing.” She held his hand tight. “It wasn’t us. It was a warning to the fox.”

He gaped at her before running off with his chin in the air and his arms flung out behind, being not a goose but a Spitfire, the low sun shining red through his sticking-out ears.

The good weather came to an end in October, and there were many days of wind and rain when they played after school in the almost empty barn. In a dark corner of that shadowy, sweet-smelling place where the odd ray of sunlight lit up the dancing dust, they built, out of leftover bales of straw and metal milk crates, a little golden room. Straw-covered boards made a roof, two bales served as seats, and an upside-down crate became a table on which Gillian put a jam jar full of Michaelmas daisies. An old calendar with a picture of baby rabbits on it made it even more home-like.

Sitting on the prickly bales along with Tommy, Glory Anna, her doll, and Tommy’s teddy bear, Rupie, she would teach Tommy his alphabet with a slate and chalk, rewarding him with miniature Dolly Mixture sweets doled out one by one while Dinah, the Macphersons’ brown and white spaniel, who was going to have puppies, drooled in expectation of her share. Gillian would make up stories there about The Little People who lived right beneath them in The Kingdom Under the Earth, or she would read to Tommy from her big red book,
The Children’s Golden Treasury.
Sometimes they would sing:
London Bridge is Falling Down, A Bicycle Made for Two,
or, still one of Tommy’s favorites,
Incy, Wincy Spider.
They would study Dinah, too, wondering about the puppies.

They decided to call this secret den Cartref, ‘Home’, like their grandparents’ house, and for months, from autumn until the Christmas holidays, they were safe and free and happy enough there.

There was excitement at Maenordy.
Angus was coming home from boarding school for the Christmas holidays. Mrs. Macpherson bustled around, getting ready for his arrival, polishing and baking, and, astonishingly, bursting into a carol once in a while. She even put up a Christmas tree, rather dingily decorated in Gillian’s opinion, and gathered holly and ivy to stick around the newel post and drape along the mantelpiece.

The children first met the great, grown-up boy in the lamp-lit, wood-panelled dining room that smelled of the rabbit pie Mrs. Macpherson was cooking for dinner.

“Well, hello! What have we here?” He was smiling a funny sideways smile and rubbing his big hands together like Jack-in-the-Beanstalk’s giant as the children stood, hand in hand, on the patterned carpet looking up at him. Gillian saw that he was tall and thin, with thick, red-brown hair and a long nose.

“Are they good?” he said to his mother. “They
look
good. Matter of fact, they look good enough to eat.” He laughed and fished in his pocket to give them each a black toffee.

To their surprise, Angus spent a lot of time with them. He would take them for walks through the bare, silent woods and fields, talking and even sometimes listening to them. One afternoon he scared Gillian by taking a gun with him and pointing it all over the place, but to her relief all the birds and animals hid from him. It was hard to keep up as he strode along in his tall, shining boots, especially for Tommy, but when Angus suggested one day that only Gillian should go for a walk with him, Tommy set up such a racket that the subject was quickly dropped. Bicycle rides, though, were for Gillian only, since Tommy was obviously too little for that.

“Just you and me, eh?” Angus would say, as they hurtled down the hill to the sweet shop on the corner, Gillian perched on the crossbar. “You like that, don’t you?” She did too, especially when they bought a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut, or a triangular packet of sherbet with a liquorice straw.

Angus was kind to them all right, and they enjoyed the sweets he bought, but they were never by themselves anymore, and could not get to their den
for nearly a week. Finally, however, the day came when he had to go to Brecon with his mother to do some Christmas shopping, and they were free at last to go to Cartref.

In the gloom of the barn, Gillian saw that their den had stopped shining. She looked at the dusty, straw-scattered boards and the dried-up Michaelmas daisies. The place definitely needed cheering up. “I know what, Tommy!” She clapped her hands. “Let’s decorate Cartref for Christmas!”

He gawped at her. “But what’ll we do for decorations?”

“Just you see!”

Using an old pair of clippers they found in the barn, they gathered armfuls of holly and ivy from the woods, Gillian even managing to wrench a bunch of mistletoe off the low, twisty apple tree which Angus had shown her how to climb. They stuck the stems into crates and between bales and planks until Cartref glowed with shiny, dark green leaves, red and white berries, and golden straw. When they finished, they stared at it in awe. It was as beautiful as Aladdin’s cave in the pantomime.

Tommy wiped squashed mistletoe berries off his hands onto the front of his new coat. His nose was running, but his cheeks were bright red and his blue eyes were blazing. “Gilly!” he whispered, “Let’s show it
to Angus!”

“But it’s our secret, stupid.”

“Oh, please, Gilly! He’s our friend. He won’t tell. And we can have a party! Pop n’ sweets n’ things! It’d be fun!”

Gillian looked around at their gleaming creation. She wanted to keep it safe and secret forever, but in a way she wanted to share it too. She wanted it to be admired. And it was true, Angus was their friend. “If you like,” she said. “It’ll probably be all right.”

“I say! Just the thing, eh?
”
Angus was impressed. He crouched in Cartref and looked around with his twisted smile. “You mean to say, you clever little monkeys, you’ve had this smashing place all to yourselves all along, and you never told anyone?”

They declared proudly that no one had any idea of their secret, and they all settled down comfortably, bulgy Dinah included, to share a bottle of fizzy
Tizer
and the striped humbugs Angus had brought, and to examine the disc of ice, clear as glass, which had come off Dinah’s drinking bowl.

As they sucked the sweets, Angus did a strange thing. He slid his hand under Gillian’s jersey and stroked her back, moving his hand around, over and over, as if learning the shape of her bones off by heart. She squirmed away from him, but he kept on stroking.

“Tell us about the puppies,” Tommy said, dribbling. “How’d they get in there?”

Angus stopped his stroking. He looked at Dinah, and then at Gillian.

“Tell you what, old chap,” he grinned at Tommy. “Be a sport and go look in my bike basket for some more sweeties.”

Tommy scrambled off, and Angus turned back to Gillian, getting his hand under her skirt that time. “Come on, Gilly! Why won’t you let me do that? I won’t hurt you. Now this doesn’t hurt at all, does it?”

She shot to her feet. “Angus, that’s rude! Don’t be so … so
common!”
She was shocked. He should have stopped all that sort of thing when he was little, as she had. “Grown-ups don’t do things like that.”

“Is that so?” He seemed to think that was funny, but then grabbed her arm, his face suddenly serious. “Listen. Come here tonight, after he’s asleep.”

What was he talking about? “No, I can’t. Let go! You’re hurting me, Angus!”

He looked down at her, frowning. “You must. If you don’t, I’ll have to tell my mother about this place. You’ll get a royal beating for being so sly, and you’ll never be allowed to come here again. I bet she’d tell on you to your mother too.”

Gillian thought about it. The beating she could stand perhaps. She had already survived some of those. But to make her mother disappointed in her? That would be awful. And what about Cartref? Mrs. Macpherson was so mean, she’d surely put an end to it. But how could they live without their den? Where would they go? What would they do?

“Come on. What’s it going to be? Make up your mind.” He let go of her arm and stroked it gently, smiling at her, nice again. He lifted her chin with his finger. “I won’t hurt you, you know. I’m your friend. I won’t even touch you, I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

That was a real promise. No one would say that if they didn’t mean it.

“All right,” she said, as Tommy stumbled in, proudly waving a Fry’s peppermint sandwich bar. “I’ll come.”

They were in bed by six o’clock, as usual, and it was not quite dark. It was cold in their bedroom, and Tommy had trouble getting to sleep. “Don’t go,” he whispered. “Stay here with me.”

“I must go. I said I would. If I don’t, he’ll tell on us. I’ll only stay for a bit, though. I won’t be gone long.”

As soon as they had warmed up under the heavy blankets and lumpy eiderdown, and Tommy had finally fallen asleep, Gillian slithered from the high bed onto the icy floorboards and put on her sheepskin slippers and the red wool dressing gown her grandmother had made her. She tucked Glory Anna under her arm and crossed the shadowy room to the door. From there she looked back at Tommy, deep in his hot sleep, with Rupie beside him. He looked like a baby, not like a big boy of four at all, his cheeks red and his dark hair stuck to his forehead.

She managed the stairs, avoiding the creaky bits, tiptoed past the sitting room where she could hear people on the wireless, laughing, and crept along the dark hallway to the back door. Slowly and carefully she lifted the latch and slipped out into the cold night.

By the upward-leaping shadows from a hurricane lamp on the floor, she saw that Angus was in Cartref
already. He was sitting on one of the bales, white and strange-looking, as though he too were scared. The hands he held out to her trembled as he pulled her to him between his knees, and she could feel his heart thudding. A smell of mothballs came from the rough blanket he had brought. He reached up under her nightdress and put his hands right around her waist and shook her.

“Why did you come?” His voice was shaky, and his breath smelt funny, like his father’s.