The Monkey Puzzle Tree (23 page)

You are so cool-hearted.
She shook her head and drove faster, despite the continuing downpour. Forgetting that the car radio had been turned up to full volume the day before for Bryn’s benefit, she switched it on. Vibrations shook the car, bass notes thumping her in the solar plexus.

The words, the melody, and the deep, trembling voice of the famous singer, young and beautiful then, with everything before him, swept her back to her arrival in Ottawa, twenty-two years old, homesick and lonely, but full of hope. She dashed the tears from her eyes with the backs of her hands as the wipers flailed ineffectively against sheets of rain. Where was her hope now? Who loved her tender? What dreams had been fulfilled? She slowed down. Her life was a shadowy sham, and she was sick of it. She stopped the car in her driveway, dried her eyes, and sat up straight.

Bryn was sitting on his school bag at the back door, dark hair plastered to his head, eyelashes starry-wet, white shirt clinging transparently to his chest. He beamed and waved as she got out and, with a leap of love, she wondered, as often before, how she and Doug between them had managed to produce such a sweetheart.

“Hi, Mom! How was the funeral?” His smile disappeared as he saw traces of tears. “Did it make you very sad?”

For once, she controlled her everything’s-just-fine reflex. “Yes,” she said, “It was very sad. I’ll tell you about it one day.” She bent to stroke the dripping hair off his wide, white forehead with its scattering of pin-point freckles. “I’m so sorry, darling, that you had to wait in the rain like this. Dad must have forgotten.”

“Big surprise, eh?” He grinned. “But I didn’t mind. I never got this wet before with my clothes on! And it’s not cold. Anyway, I knew you’d be home soon.”

She looked at her son, soaked and smiling on the doorstep, trying to keep his homework dry by sitting on it, and swept him up into a big hug. “Come on, Sunshine
.
We can do better than this! Let’s get you dry, and then we’ll go to McDonald’s for supper. Just the two of us.”

W

Gillian placed the freesias
beside her on the bench in the front garden of Saint Anne’s, and gave in to the temptation to rest a while before going in to see her mother. Reluctant to move, her bones aching a little, she sat in the shade, remembering the long, lonely years after she had left Russ, and the way Simon had come into her life.

W

On her way home
from the school where she had taught for the last twenty years, Gillian picked her way along an Ottawa side street, still slushy and salt-strewn in March. Stopping in front of a shop window crowded with old
volumes, she studied a display of thirty or so travel books:
Exploring Quebec City;
Old
Edinburgh; Istanbul;
Jan Morris’s
Oxford.
About to move on, she spotted a little book at the back of the display, its title half-obscured by a pile of Fodors, possibly an early edition of George Borrow’s 1872 travelogue,
Wild Wales
.

I
t was one of those dim, musty, tunnel-like shops, going way back. Bookshelves, crammed floor-to-ceiling, lined each side of two narrow aisles and most of the back wall. Strips of threadbare carpet of indistinguishable pattern and colour covered the uneven floor between the aisles. Bare bulbs provided just enough light for her to browse the shelves and see that she was alone with the books in peace and silence.

Remember me!
She nearly dropped the book she was holding. From somewhere at the back of the shop, the rich soprano voice rose up in the aria of the abandoned queen in Purcell’s
Dido and Aeneas
.
Remember me!
the diva sang again
, But, ah! forget my fate!
With a click, the music was turned off.

Replacing the book,
Gillian drifted distractedly along the aisles before stopping at the novels. Still unsettled, she pulled a pristine edition of
Dance of the Happy Shades
off the shelf in the Canadian section and tucked it under her arm before checking for the presence of other favourites. Among the American authors, she leafed through an Edith Wharton novel before moving on to the British section, where complete sets of classics weighed down the shelves. Feeling something brush against her leg, she looked down into the golden eyes of a long-haired, grey tabby, the size of a schnauzer, with lynx-like tufts on its ears.

“That is my cat, Jeffrey.” A stocky man, of about her height, curly black hairs mixed with gray sprouting over the top of his white T-shirt, came down the passageway from the back. “I didn’t realize there was anyone here. I trust you’re not allergic?”

She shook her head and bent to stroke the cat, which rose on its hind legs to receive the caress. Looking up, she asked if that was indeed a copy of
Wild Wales
that she had seen in
the window.

His eyes were very dark, the whites clear under short spiked eyelashes. He smiled, showing equally white teeth. “I thought twice about putting that in the window, but it rounded out the display and I didn’t think anyone would notice. It’s pretty special.”

“I know.” Now she had to have it.

“You from Wales?” He glanced at her as she nodded. “I thought I could hear something in your voice. Hang on while I get it.”

While he was gone, she moved on to the religion section, less dusty and better organized than the rest, and surprisingly extensive, she thought, even by second-hand bookstore standards. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism were all richly represented, together with an especially large collection of books on Hinduism.

After taking the little green and gold book from his hand and scrutinizing the first page, she looked up. “Is religion a special interest of yours?”

“It is. All religions.” He ran his hand over some thin, yellow paperbacks, hesitated, and then turned to look at her. “But I’m most interested in the school of Indian thought called Advaita Vedanta.”

“Oh? What attracts you so much to that?”

A blaring of horns from outside was followed by a bang.

“Oh, you know …
‘
That thou art’.”

Angry shouts rose up in the street.

“I’m sorry? What does that mean?”

After a pause he said, against the wail of an approaching siren, “It means that what you seek is what you are. You don’t need to go searching, because what you’re looking for is already inside you. In your soul, if you want to put it that way.”

What you seek is what you are.
“What’s the best book to read about that?”

He took down one of the paperbacks. “This’ll expand on the idea, but in the end it all comes down to those three words.” His eyes held hers for a moment. “That thou art.”

At the counter he gave her change out of an ornate antique till and placed the three books in a brown paper bag. “I hope you enjoy them.” He handed her the bag with another quick glance. “And I hope you’ll come back.”

“I will.” She hugged the books to her breast as she left the shop.

That first exchange had been
followed by a further visit a week later and by others after that, until she developed the habit of dropping in at the bookstore for a browse and a bookish chat on her way home from school.

She was trolling through the Enid Blyton titles in the
children’s literature section one afternoon in early April when Simon approached her down an aisle. He had recently had his hair cut very short, and instead of his usual T-shirt, was wearing a white shirt, brand new, judging by its brilliance and evenly spaced creases. He looked younger, she thought, and vulnerable.

He cleared his throat. “Um, I thought I’d make some coffee, and I, er, I wondered if you’d like a cup?”

She took a seat on one of the two battered chairs in a little room at the back of the shop while he attended to plugging in the kettle and checking the insides of two thick mugs. He opened a jar of Nescafé and sniffed the milk carton he took from the otherwise empty mini-refrigerator. “Would you rather have tea? I’ve got Red Rose tea bags.”

“No. Coffee’d be lovely.” She looked around the room. Besides the chairs, a small, rickety table, and Jeffrey, there was an electric fire, one bar turned on, and a battered filing cabinet. On top of the cabinet, next to a little radio, stood a framed black and white photograph of a couple, arm-in-arm.

“That’s my wife, Rachel, with me,” Simon said.

She got up to see it better and to hide her sudden, shocked dismay. She saw a younger, slimmer Simon smiling down at a small dark fine-featured woman who, although she was facing the photographer, somehow gave the impression of having no eyes. They were there physically, of course, and could have been beautiful, had they not been somehow blank, like the eyes of a Greek statue.

“That photo was taken a few years ago,” Simon said, “as you can probably see; before Rachel became too ill to stay here. She’s now in a nursing home for Alzheimer’s patients.” He handed her a mug. “Sugar?”

She shook her head, still looking at the photograph.

He took it from her and replaced it on the cabinet before sitting down. “We lived here, above the shop, for years—I still do—and I looked after her as long as I could, but I had to give up.” He stirred his black coffee vigorously before taking a gulp. “She’d wander about down here in the night, looking for a particular book, crying and pulling shelves apart, desperate to find it, but she could never remember what it was. She said she’d know it when she saw it.” Coffee splashed as he put down his mug. “She started saying I’d hidden it, screaming at me to tell her where I’d put it.” He stopped with a grimace. “But I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be telling you all this.”

“Please go on. I want to hear.”

His eyes on the photograph, he described how he had come down in the early hours of one morning to find her rummaging around in the filing cabinet, her nightgown and shawl trailing and the fire turned on full. That, he said, was the moment he knew they could not go on like that. “But really, I don’t know why I’m unburdening myself to you like this, Gillian. I never talk about it to anyone. It was just that … well, the way you looked at the photograph caught me off guard.”

She lowered her eyes. “So what did you decide to do?”

He meshed his fingers, pulling them against each other. “I would have sold up and looked after her twenty-four-seven, but she … she turned against me. It got so that just the sight of me upset her to the point where she’d physically attack me.”

He stood up, collected the mugs, and restarted the kettle. Over his shoulder he said, “I visit her every day after I’ve closed the store, but most of the time now, she hasn’t a clue who I am. Only,” he paused, a mug in one hand, the milk carton in the other, “once in a while she asks me where have I been all these years. ‘Where did you go Simon? Why did you leave me?’
That sort of thing.” He turned around. “I loved her, you know, and still do. But sometimes I wonder now what it is that I love. Is it just memories?” He shook his head. “I don’t know any more.”

He put the refilled mugs on the table and sat down.

“Do you have children, Simon?”

“Rachel has a daughter from a previous marriage, but Sarah’s stopped visiting her mother, and I can’t say I blame her.”

“I’m sorry. It must be hard for you to bear.”

He shrugged. “I read, I meditate, and I look after my shop. I try to live in the moment, although after the way I’ve been talking, you’ll probably find that hard to believe.” He lowered his head and spread his hands on the table. “For the most part, I accept the way things are, and I’m not unhappy.”

His hands were broad and strong, with fine black hairs across the back. His wedding ring gleamed dully. Holding her breath, Gillian reached out to put her hand on his, touching him for the first time, feeling the spring of hairs and the warmth of his skin. “You know what Edith Wharton says? ‘If you make up your mind not to be happy …’
”

He looked up with a quick grin and they finished the quotation together: “‘there is no reason why you should not have a fairly good time’.”
Laughing, they finished their coffee.

Taking the mugs to the sink, Gillian noticed a sheet of notepaper under the photograph, a few lines centred on it. She picked it up and read aloud,

Eyes stretched wide, straining

to catch a memory’s tail;

another one

gone.

“Simon …”

He stood up and held out his arms. His sleeves were rolled up and his collar open. A coffee stain on his shirt, shocking against its whiteness, made her want to weep.

While the little refrigerator hummed and Jeffrey rubbed against their legs, Simon took her hands and pressed them against his heart to feel how it beat. They stood, foreheads touching, eyes closed, barely breathing until Gillian said, “Take off that shirt, Simon, so that I can wash away the stain before it sets.”

W

“Gillian?”

She opened her eyes with a start to see a little woman of about her own age, built like a hen, standing before her in the front garden of Saint Anne’s. The artificial poppies nodding in a straw hat perched on the dry black curls matched those on her dress, their scarlet shade picked up by fingernails and by the toenails peeking out of patent-leather high-heeled sandals.

“It
is
Gillian, isn’t it? Gillian Davies? Remember me?”

Jolted back from her other world, Gillian looked into the bright, black eyes in front of her, and blinked.

“Gladys? Is that
you
?”

Placing the freesias on the grass, Gladys sat next to her. “My Robbie said he saw you sitting here, and I thought I’d have a look-see. How are you then, Gillian? And how’s you mam? I been thinking about her. And about you too.”

She shifted her stout little body around to face Gillian and pursed her lips. “Now that I’m getting on a bit, see, Gillian, and looking back, like, there’s things I want to say.” She smoothed the dress on her short broad lap. “We ’ad somethin’ in common, you know, Gillian. More’n people would think. Know what I mean?” She flashed Gillian a look. “Din’t do us no good, neither of us, all that with Angus, did it?”