The Juniper Tree

by Barbara Comyns

  I have few happy memories of my mother. She seemed to blame me for my father’s disappearance. After he left us he used to take me out sometimes. There were jaunts on the river to a great palace, most likely Hampton Court, cinemas and ice-cream far better than any I have eaten since. We went to the sea for the day and a lovely woman came too. She came from another land, but spoke English and afterwards I thought she might have been an American. Then much later I heard that she was a Canadian and that she had died before my father was free to marry her. I always remember that outing, particularly because I never saw my father again. After a day with him mother always asked so many questions. If she didn’t like my answers, she would slap my hands until I cried – not that she hurt me physically, the hurt was mental.

  My mother was the games mistress at a local school which I attended. At first the girls teased me and called me ‘teacher’s pet’, but when they saw how she treated me the teasing ceased. As soon as I was able to cross the busy main road on my own, my mother and I travelled to school separately. It was as if we didn’t want to spend a moment more together than necessary. Strangely enough, she was remarkably generous towards me in some ways. Although her income was small I was well dressed and fed. At Christmas and on my birthday I was given handsome presents as if they were punishments. I remember a new bicycle once and on my tenth birthday there was a real leather attaché case with my initials stamped on it. No one else at school had such a case. They carried their books in bulging satchels on their backs and looked almost humped-backed as they walked.

  I seldom asked school friends to my home. It was a small, impersonal, Kilburn house with stained glass let into the front door and clinkers in the garden. It was furnished with shabby hire-purchase furniture, fully paid for and now almost worn out. The sofa was made of imitation brown leather and when it was hot it stuck to our bottoms, and the dining-room chairs were the same. The general colour scheme was brown, dark green and browny-gold. The only thing that appealed to me in the house was a French gilt clock which had belonged to my mother’s French grandfather. It gently ticked away the hours on the ugly sitting-room mantelshelf. Sometimes it stopped at eight o’clock, but not often or mother would have thrown it out. There was Robinson Crusoe sitting under a palm tree and Man Friday ministering to him and there may have been a sunshade although it seems unlikely. I think it was this clock that started my interest in antiques. As I grew older I’d spend Saturday mornings searching for antique shops. Although Kilburn was not a good place for them, there were plenty not too far away and there was the Portobello Road street market, which seemed like a strange fairyland to me. I had very little money but occasionally bought Victorian children’s books and headless Staffordshire figures and, on one occasion, a plate to commemorate the birth of King Edward of which I was very proud. My mother suffered the china but later on banned books in case they had ‘bugs in their spines’.

  I left school at sixteen with a few O-levels, few ambitions and few friends. Mother immediately sent me to a business college. I loathed it at the time, but the knowledge I gained there has come in very useful. My first job was in a coal office with bowls of coal displayed in the dusty window. It was called ‘Crimony, the Coal People’ and I typed letters to customers reminding them to order coal before the summer ended and the price went up. There were also invoices and the telephone to answer. The women I worked with were kind but elderly and talked about their knitting machines and their retirement. Should they leave their little flats and move to the coast, Bognor perhaps, or would life in a small private hotel be more convenient? No housework, but what would they do with their time? I listened to their plans but knew it was unlikely they would ever leave their safe little homes, at least as long as their health lasted. They were fond of spring-cleaning and gave a day-to-day account of the cleaning as they did it – how the carpet was sent to the cleaners and the curtains washed, the condensation in the pantry and the surprising amount of dirt they found under the cooker and, horror of horrors, the lavatory pan had a crack Mr Crimony wasn’t difficult to work for although he did sometimes follow me into the basement cupboard where the old files were kept. He’d come very close so that I could hear him breathe and perhaps a dark, hairy hand would come on my shoulder, but that was all. I trained myself to be very quick at finding files, though.

  I stayed with coal for six months, then to my mother’s dismay went to work in a second-hand furniture shop in Chalk Farm. It was a junk shop really, but occasionally something good appeared, so hopeful dealers came from time to time and I gradually became involved with the antique world.

  In the meantime, there was my mother still at the school. Her severe black hair was slightly grey and the slang words she liked to use were a little out of date now and the girls smiled and called her old Winterbottom behind her back. Sometimes she’d have drinks in a popular pub with her fellow teachers, but they never came to the house. I don’t think anyone did.

  We spoke little to each other, my mother and I. She would make remarks like, ‘Really, Bella, you look a perfect guy in those trousers. Your bottom is too fat, so are your hips.’

  I’d say, ‘Good, that’s how I like them,’ but I didn’t. I worried a lot about my heavy hips and legs. The top part of me was almost beautiful and still is except for one disfigurement. My black hair is still thick and glossy and falls into lovely shapes whether it is cut short or left to grow long. My eyes are very dark with a kind of glitter, at least they glitter when I see them in the mirror. My skin is fine and white, a healthy white, and my lips are red even without lipstick. I have good teeth too and a good figure now, but in those days, when I was still in my teens, I was heavy below the waist with a largish bottom, rather thick thighs which bulged a bit when I sat down and plump legs that fortunately did taper at my ankles before they reached my small feet.

  If I have boasted about my appearance – and I must admit that I used to be rather vain as a girl – I’ve been punished for my vanity and given a disfiguring scar on my left cheek. It used to be nearly three inches long, and lifted one eye in a horrible leer, but now, after treatment, the eye hardly notices and the scar is shorter and no longer purple-red. The stitch marks have almost gone too. At first it was as if I had a fearful centipede running up my face and I covered it with my hand when I spoke to people. I still turn the left side of my face away.

  My father called me Bella. The name was an embarrassment at that time.

  Chapter Two

  I had been living in Twickenham for just over a month when the shop bell rang and I hurried from the kitchen with a cup of tea in my hand. Standing with her back to the window was a very tall woman dressed in cream-coloured clothes almost like robes. For a moment I didn’t recognize her, but when I switched on the lights, which should have already been on, I saw it was the beautiful woman from Richmond, the one who had cut her hand, the blood dripping on the snow. Her gloves were lying on the counter and as I glanced at her hand she recognized me, smiled and said, ‘It is completely healed. There is nothing to see,’ and we stood there smiling as if we were old friends.

  She told me she was searching for etchings and good prints and paintings if she could find any up to her husband’s standard. She said she had often noticed ‘Mary Meadows’ but this was the first time she had stopped to look in the window. She chose some large and ugly engravings for their bird’s eye maple frames and a small print of dogs being clipped under an arch. (The dogs, mostly poodles were tied to a shabby cart. It must have been one of the first dogs’ beauty parlours. I think there is mention of one in David Copperfield.) She also bought a little chair made of elm, with a heart cut out of the back, definitely a child’s chair and much loved by Tommy.

  Her car was parked beside the Green and we carried out her purchases and put them in the boot wrapped in dark army blankets to protect the glass. The little chair was placed beside her on the front seat. ‘I don’t want it to be shut away in the dark,’ she said as if it were a living thing. As she drov
e away in her expensive-looking car I realized I did not know her name. I hoped she would return. It was as if she were already part of my life.

  In the evening, when I cleared the till, there was her cheque amongst the paper money, clean against the soiled notes. It was signed Gertrude Forbes and the Richmond address was on the other side. ‘Gertrude,’ I said out loud, ‘Gertrude,’ and the second time I said it, I liked it better.

  A few days later Gertrude Forbes telephoned and said her husband was pleased with the frames and that she was delighted with the child’s chair and thought we might be able to do quite a lot of business together. Then she asked me to lunch to meet her husband the following Sunday. She didn’t even know my name and called me Miss Meadows as if I were the owner of the shop. I explained my position and that I was the mother of a child who would have to come with me and she said it was no problem, she and her husband both adored children, ‘particularly now’. I said, ‘Yes, of course,’ although I didn’t know what she was referring to, perhaps something to do with the Year of the Child. What would they think of my dark-skinned daughter? I wondered.

  Marline was the child of a man I didn’t know. I met him at a party given in Bayswater by people I didn’t know. I drifted there with a flat-mate, a wild Australian girl. The man I’d been living with for over two years and I had parted, in fact he practically turned me out of the flat we shared and I was living in a wreck of a house in Cleveland Square. I shared a basement flat with three untidy girls, mice and some very small but penetrating cockroaches. At the time I was too miserable to care where I lived if Stephen wasn’t there. In my heart I knew it was a good thing that we had parted, if I’d had more pride I would have left months ago. Looking back on our relationship, I don’t think he had ever felt deeply for me, except perhaps for a short time after the accident. I was the one who loved and he alternately petted or teased me and was sometimes really spiteful, as if to see how much I could take. He complained about my dresses mingling with his suits in the wardrobe, the books I was reading lying about the flat. He said my belongings made him feel hemmed in, ‘trapped’, yet it was he who persuaded me to leave home and move in. We shared the expenses, too, so I cost him very little, the occasional meal or drink out, petrol for the car, the odd taxi, that sort of thing. At times there were painful quarrels over the weekend shopping and it often ended in me paying far more than my share. Meanness over money was a kind of game with him and sometimes he could be unexpectedly generous. It was money that finally broke our relationship, money and the scar that disfigured the left side of my face. Although Stephen was driving at the time, he blamed me for the accident and the loss of his licence for a year for careless driving. He said I distracted him, although I was asleep when the accident occurred. I awoke to find myself lying on the road-side with blood pouring from my nose and face, the blood such a deep brown colour and salty on my lips. Someone was attending to me in the kindest way and I said, ‘My blood, it’s not red any more’, and they said something about the street lighting and not to worry. Then I was in hospital surrounded by strangers humped up in bed, some crying out in pain and others as if dead. I wondered why my face was so bound up because the only pain I felt was in my forehead; the other pain came later. Stephen, in a petulant mood, came to see me with his arm in a sling. I was glad his handsome face wasn’t damaged.

  When I’d been in the hospital for a few days and was clearer in my head, my mother came to visit me. I was surprised to see her bitter face again because we had hardly seen each other since I left home. She produced a large cake I’d never be able to eat, but I could see she had gone to some trouble making it, all iced as it was. Before she left she showed me my face in a small mirror from her handbag and all I saw was a lot of bandages and one black eye. She said in her old spiteful way, ‘What would your father think if he could see you now? Bella, indeed!’ But father was thousands of miles away in Canada and unlikely to see my damaged face. The worst time in the hospital, and perhaps in my whole life, was when they took the bandages away and I first saw the purple seam decorated with stitch marks, the half sneering mouth and leering eye. I’d had no idea that under the bandages my face was like that. When Stephen saw me slinking round the ward with this leering face marked with a purple scar like a centipede he sat on my bed and cried in a stranger’s voice, ‘Oh, my God! I’ve done this to you,’ and tears were running down his face. I think he really did love me then. He took me back to the flat and loved me for at least a month. Even my mother was touched by his devotion. It was almost worth having the disfigurement to be so loved. He bought me beautiful scarves that I could drape over the left side of my face. One was made of black muslin with little gold stars on it and another orange and gold, and there were silk squares like the Sloane Rangers wear. I still have some of them stored away.

  I dreaded returning to the antique shop where I was working although I’d been happy there. Instead, I became a telephone girl and worked on a switchboard, where no one except my fellow workers could see me – and they soon became used to my ruin of a face. Sometimes I heard them talking about me: ‘She must have been beautiful before the accident, lovely skin she has,’ or, ‘It’s a pity about the mouth, her mouth is sort of lop-sided.’

  When I’d had two operations, the sneer was hardly noticeable and the eye gradually improved. Then the scar shrank and became quite white, but to me it was a fearful disfigurement, particularly on days when I was feeling depressed, and it was then I developed the habit of turning my face away when I spoke, so that people found it difficult to hear what I was saying except when I was on the phone.

  I worked with telephones on and off for nearly two years, and after Stephen and I parted I went home at night to dirty flats in dirty houses. Most of them were in the Bayswater district and were overflowing with South Americans and Filipinos, many of them illegal immigrants who worked in hotels. The houses were large and the streets wide and many passers-by appeared to be Arabs. On warm afternoons they sat on carpets in their front gardens, sipping coffee. Sometimes the garden railings were hung with glowing carpets until rain or darkness fell. I never saw the carpets being hung or taken down, they just came and went at appropriate times. They could have been magic carpets.

  I moved around the district, Leinster Gardens, then Ladbroke Grove, then back to Bayswater – to Cleveland Square, which I became rather fond of. I think I had three different flats there – if you could call them flats. They were really large bedsitting-rooms with kitchenette and use of bathroom and sometimes a small balcony looking on to the square. I had one with a balcony soon after Marline was born and she lay there in the sun, if there was any, when the weekends came and we were at home together. During the week she spent her days in a nursery, rather far from the square but near the telephone exchange where I worked. I suppose it wasn’t a very good life for a baby but she thrived. Just before we left the flat an albino mouse appeared and he became quite tame and we fed him from dolls’ plates. We wanted to take him to Twickenham with us but I felt he wouldn’t be popular in an antique shop because he used to gnaw wood at night,

  The cottage in Twickenham was the first real home we had had and life seemed perfect, and although it was winter, every day was lovely. With no rent to pay I was quite well off. My largest expense was the day nursery, but my child was well looked after there and I got a discount because we were a one-parentfamily. There was a child allowance too, so we were really quite comfortably off and for the first time for over two years I was able to buy new clothes and have my hair cut and shaped by a good hairdresser. I also had five thousand pounds in a building society, which brought in a small income.

  For a time this money seemed a curse to me, yet I wouldn’t share it with Stephen. It was the insurance money paid for my damaged face. We thought it would be six thousand pounds, but eventually, when my claim was settled, it was only five. For some reason Stephen thought we should share it, although he was responsible for the damage. I asked him, would he have wanted to
share it with me if it had been the other way round and he was the one all scarred? We quarrelled bitterly over this money. I didn’t receive it until my daughter was born and we had parted, but it couldn’t have come at a better time and I was glad I hadn’t got to hand half of it to Stephen. Even after we parted he visited me in my first Bayswater lodging and continued the fight. When I told him I was pregnant he suggested an abortion, but eventually went away rumbling like an exhausted thunderstorm. Then I changed my job and address and we didn’t see each other any more. He could have traced me if he had wanted to but the prospect of a baby must have scared him. It would be worse than my dresses mingling with his suits. Actually he wasn’t the father of my baby but I didn’t know that at the time.

  I’d almost forgotten my unknown lover. I led a lonely life and had no real friends, just the people I worked with and the illegal immigrants who came and went and seldom opened their doors to strangers, but accepted me. They did things to my meters so that they didn’t consume so many coins and they gave me expensive tins and packets of food which I felt hadn’t been paid for. A girl from the Canaries unbuttoned her blouse and gave me one of the steaks that were plastered there and I couldn’t refuse to take it when they were so kind to me. They were always offering to baby-sit, only I had nowhere to go while they sat.