The Monkey Puzzle Tree (21 page)

She checked the exit route. “That’s nice.”

“I’d be honoured … er, that is, I was wondering, Gillian, if you’d consider—what is it they call it?” he put his head on one side—“
going steady
with me? He placed his large, pale hands on the table, the nails irreproachable as always, unlike Doug’s hands, with their scars from metalwork, and their hard-bitten, dirty nails, and Llewellyn’s; light brown, slim, and nimble-fingered.

She sat up straight and clasped her hands on the table in front of her. “Russ,” she said, “There’s something I have to tell you.”

After she had said what she had to say, he sat back, his face slack with astonishment. “I can’t believe it! You seemed so refined.”

“Well, even refined women get pregnant, you know.” She put her napkin on the table. “I’m sure your mother, for example, has always been very refined.”

“My mother …” he grimaced. “My mother’s going to be so shocked!”

“Mine too. She’s obviously not as refined as yours, since she’s had
two
children, but she’s not going to like this. But she’s in another country. Maybe I won’t tell her, and just present her one day with a
fait accompli
.”

“With a what?”

“A
fait accompli
. It’s what comes after a fate worse than death.”

“That isn’t funny, Gillian.”

People were always telling her that things were not funny.

“But what are you going to do?” He frowned. “How, er, pregnant are you actually?”

“Don’t even think of it.”

They sat in silence for a minute.

“So, there will be a baby.” He looked into the distance. “If I may ask, does the father know about this?”

“No he doesn’t, and he’s not going to. Look, Russ, I think I’d better go home. I can get a taxi.”

“Certainly not!” He beckoned to the waiter for the bill. “I’ll drive you home, of course. It’s the least I can do.”

He was a nice man, she thought, sitting beside him in his Chevrolet. Maybe it really was a pity that she could not take this any further. To her surprise, as they said goodnight at the foot of the stairs, he put his arms around her and kissed her cheek, his lips soft, and his embrace, unlike those of Llewellyn or Doug, holding no hint of underlying danger. In his arms she felt safe. Suppressing a strong impulse to respond, she said goodnight, and went up to her apartment. Before she had closed her own, she heard him tap on his mother’s door.

In bed, disarmed by that glimpse of security, she gave herself up, first to panic, and then to an overwhelming sense of loss. She grieved for Doug, alone again with his demons, and for poor faithful Nigel, waiting in vain on the doorstep for her to return. Sinking deeper than those heartaches, even deeper than the anguish of Llewellyn’s desertion, she found herself sobbing like a little child for her mother:
“Don’t go! Don’t go! Don’t leave me!”

W

“I told you I’d turned
the corner! I’m a tough old bird!” Their mother was sitting up, smiling, as Gillian and Tom came to St. Anne’s the next morning. She did indeed look better: her colour had improved, and her breathing was still easy. There was even a whiff of
Je Reviens
in the air as she beckoned them closer. “What have you two been up to?”

Gillian shot an amused look at Tom who had not come back to the bungalow until morning. “Oh, nothing, just an early night,” she said. “By the way, Mum, did you know that Tweetie-Pie snores?”

“Actually, Mum, I went out to dinner last night. With Vanna!” Tom sat down, beaming at her. “We had a wonderful time!”

She stared at him, eyebrows raised. “Vanna? That Irish girl? Really
,
Tom!” She looked out of the window with a sniff. “Typical!”

“What the devil d’you mean by that?” Tom jumped to his feet, his face red. “Vanna is a brilliant and successful woman. She’s made far more of her life than
you
ever did, with your—your coffee mornings and your cocktail parties and your fancy hats. Where would you have been if it hadn’t been for Dad, eh?
Eh
?”

She glared furiously at him. “I would have been in Australia. Happy! Now please go away. And don’t come back.”

“Jesus Christ! No wonder Dad said you were a hell of a woman!” He slammed out of the room.

Telling herself it was not funny, Gillian caught up with him on the landing. “Don’t listen to her, Tom! She’s old, and sick, and not making any sense.”

“She’s never made any sense! I’m sick and tired of kowtowing to her. And I’m not having Vanna insulted like that.” He was huffing and puffing, a thick vein standing out on his temple.

“Calm down. It’s only Mum. Isn’t it time we stopped stressing about her? She’s probably not going to be with us much longer anyway.”

“I know, but I’m not tiptoeing around her, walking on
eggshells anymore.”

“Well that’s a good thing. Why should you, after all?”

He shrugged his shoulders, but he was less flushed. He grinned. “‘I would have been in Australia’ indeed! What the hell was that about?”

“Who knows?” She watched him go heavily down the stairs, his hand on the rail, something slipping again across the back of her mind.

Her mother was drying her eyes with a handkerchief. “That’s right. Stick together. Never mind me. You were always thick as thieves, you two.”

The memory slithered by once more, and this time Gillian caught it by the tail: her grandmother, looking sadly at a faded sepia photograph of two radiant young people who had also been thick as thieves. The laughing young man had gone to Australia, her grandmother had said, and had died there five years later.

Gillian sat down thoughtfully beside the bed. “Mum, you started telling me yesterday about the man who gave me the Koala bear. Who was he?”

Her mother looked down, carefully smoothing the satin ribbons of her bed jacket. “Oh, just an old friend. A distant relative, actually.” She flicked a look at Gillian. “Why do you ask?”

“It seemed important to you, and I …” Gillian broke off as the door opened wide.

“Your mum’s really perked up after that procedure, hasn’t she?” Sunita came in, her arms full. She put down her load, filled a stainless-steel bowl with hot water from the wash basin, and wrung out the face cloth. “You’re looking rested too, Gillian. I won’t be long here, but I’m going to freshen Iris up and change the sheets as well as see to her medications. Give us about half an hour.”

Gillian walked to the Uplands shopping centre. After watching her mother and some of the other patients in the nursing home, she was appreciating the fact that she could walk, and briskly at that. Climbing the hill and enjoying the warmth of the sun on her face, she wondered about the man who had given her the bear. Could he be the young man in that photograph?

She was in the bookstore, searching unsuccessfully for any Canadian content, when a raised voice jolted her to attention. A middle-aged man was haranguing the young female cashier about an order that had not yet come in. She heard him say, “Do I make myself clear?” and saw a balding, grey-tonsured head thrust forward as the sallow-faced man turned and pushed past her, his pale eyes fixed on a distant goal.

It was the self-important swing of his shoulders as he left the shop that gave him away.

She had grieved all her life over
that?
She had wilted under the judgment of a future annoying old fart? She would have married him, and spent her whole life with him, would she? Hugging her elbows, she stood at the door and watched Llewellyn get into a Mercedes-Benz, the revelation further enhanced by the sight of a stout, equally angry-looking, black-haired woman in a red straw hat sitting at the wheel.

She bought up all the freesias in the grocer’s shop for her mother and set off for St. Anne’s, her arms full of the white yellow and purple blossoms. Despite their heady fragrance, her euphoria faded as she walked back in the noonday heat.

If only I had known!
She thought of all the years she had spent held back by guilt, bruised by rejection, afraid to carve for herself, and unable to see her way; the waste of shame through which she had struggled all her life. To be fair, Llewellyn had not been the first cause of all that; he had been more of a symptom, she realized, as had Doug, and, after Doug, the dim purgatory of her marriage to Russ. She shook her head recalling the ten, trancelike years of their marriage, and the surreal awakening that had brought them to an end.

W

Watching
Zorba the Greek
one summer night at Ottawa’s Mayfair Cinema, Gillian saw that during those years of marriage to Russ, she had somehow mislaid her life. She was a ghost, drifting through the motions of domesticity while the living souls, clapping fervently, if stupidly, beside her in the cinema, for example, were surely caught up in the joys and pains of existence. They felt free to throw back their heads and belt out arias, or pop songs, or hymns. They jived to the pulse of disco lights and drums. Their teeth clenched on thorny roses, they swirled and swooped in sultry tangos. Cuddled on the sofa, they watched Wayne and Schuster, wiping tears of laughter from their eyes. They threw cast-iron pots at each other, and then, if they survived, made passionate love on the kitchen floor. They rejoiced and suffered with a blessed intensity, in heaven or in hell, while she, prim and pampered, languished in limbo in a genteel, white-frame house in Manor Park.

She walked to the car behind a middle-aged couple, at least ten years older than she was. The woman put her head on the man’s shoulder as they walked in step, her arm tucked tightly under his. They were laughing in delight over the film, and Gillian knew that when they got home they would make love.

In her gleaming kitchen
the next morning, she lifted the damp mass of hair off the back of her neck with a sigh and stirred lemon slices into a jug of iced tea. She drew out the long-handled spoon, pulling a face at her upside-down reflection in its back, and watched the drops of condensation trickle down the tall sides of the glass jug onto the shining, tomato-red countertop. An image of a stream tumbling down a cliff-face between wind-blown poppies was disrupted by the drone of the Hoover, as Mrs. Knight, her cleaning woman, apparently unfazed by the heat, began briskly vacuuming the upstairs hall.

Gillian blew down the front of her blouse. When she had immigrated she had thought the main problem with living in Ottawa would be the cold, but at that moment, even though it was still only June, she might as well be living in one of those hothouses, complete with banana trees, they used to have in the Educational Gardens in Swansea. Nine-year-old Bryn had found it hard to do his homework and to get to sleep the night before and had trailed off to school that morning, pale and bruise-eyed. She would ask Russ again about getting an air conditioner. He had given her the new Hoover as a present for her thirty-fifth birthday in April, so perhaps the air
conditioner could be an advance Christmas gift. She would tell him that several other households in the neighbourhood had already acquired one.

With a pang she remembered the couple walking from the cinema the previous night. Ten years before, Russ had been so insistent that he loved her, and that he would think of her unborn child as his own that, believing she had found a man who was neither user nor loser, she had gladly agreed to marry him. To be fair, she reflected, he had been honest when he made those promises. He loved her as much as he could, she believed, and probably would have regarded a biological son just as numbly as he did Bryn.

She remembered an incident in Windsor Park when Bryn was about seven months old. Needing to tie her shoelace, she had handed the baby to Russ who, as usual, held out the wriggling bundle at some distance from his body as if afraid it might explode. At a warning shout, she looked up from her shoe to see a football, arcing end over end through the air, heading directly for Russ.

“Russ! Look out!” she yelled, and watched, appalled, as Russ, taking in the danger of being hit on the head by a large flying object, raised his arms and fended off the ball with the baby.

Still in shock, and giddy with relief since the ball had bounced off Bryn’s well-diapered behind with no ill effect, apart from his ear-splitting objections, she had laughed off the incident, and for years, despite the recurring image of the flying ball and the baby in the air, had firmly told herself that she had been lucky to marry a decent, steady man who loved her.

He had certainly told her he loved her when he proposed marriage but apparently had felt no need to repeat himself, and lovemaking, if you could call it that, had long since become a thing of the past. He seemed satisfied with the routine of their life: a silent, hurried breakfast, packed lunches
to take to the National Research Centre, and dinners of the sort that could be adjusted to his timetable. There was never a meal out, or a holiday trip. Restaurant meals were overpriced he said, and travel didn’t appeal to him.

Isobel had come every Sunday until her final illness, four years before, to spend the day with them, bringing Jack with her, to Bryn’s delight. Russ had agreed they would take over the care of Jack when Isobel became too ill to look after him, but when the old dog died, soon after Isobel, he said there would be no more dogs. Jack’s barking had disturbed his rest, he said, and affected his ability to concentrate. Moreover, the animal was smelly, scruffy, and towards the end, incontinent. His mother’s previous dog had died too, he remembered, after a similar deterioration. What was the point? He was, he said, allergic to cats.

He seemed to have no sense of family life; understandable perhaps, since before his marriage there had only been he and his mother, his father having died when he was a baby. When Tom had come to Ottawa that one time on BMW business, Gillian had hoped that the two practical-minded men might find something in common to talk about: engines, fuel consumption, metal fatigue … But for the whole three days that Tom had stayed with them, the conversation had been minimal and awkward and he had left looking sad and subdued.