by Patrick Gale
‘Charlie, it’s Lawrence. How are you?’
‘Lawrence? I’m fine. Are you okay? You sound a bit …’
‘I’m fine. Fine.’ Lawrence slurred the words in his effort not to. ‘Charlie, I know this sounds stupid but is … Are Bonnie and Lucy with you?’
‘No. I was just going to ask how they are. I rang earlier. Bonnie hasn’t called me in weeks.’
‘Oh. Well. I just wondered … Thanks, Charlie.’
‘Lawrence? What’s up?’ Charlie’s tone hardened.
‘Nothing. We … We had a bit of a fight, that’s all. I … I hurt her.’
Lawrence hung up rapidly, fumbling with the receiver and feeling slightly sick. Seconds later the telephone rang. He picked it up, heard Charlie shouting and hung up. It rang again. This time he let the answering machine take the call. Charlie ranted about what he would like to do to the man cowardly enough to hit his daughter, which portions of his anatomy he would like to sever, how he would then force-feed them to said coward before kicking his face to a pulp and breaking both his arms. He sounded unhinged. Channelled through the machine’s tiny speaker in the darkened hall, his fury had nothing to feed off, however, and soon began to subside.
‘Lawrence?’ he called out. ‘Lawrence, pick up the telephone.’
Lawrence obeyed.
‘She’s left me,’ he said immediately. ‘She took Lucy. I don’t know where she’s gone. I thought she might have come to you.’
‘You’re drunk.’
Of course I’m drunk.’
‘You’re pathetic.’
‘I know.’
‘How could you, man?’
‘I … I don’t think that’s why she left. She must have planned it. She went so fast. I spent the night out in the truck on Wumpett. I came back early this morning and they’d gone.’
‘So why hasn’t she rung me?’
‘Well I dunno. Maybe she– ’
‘If Bonnie was in trouble, the first thing she’d do would be to ring me.’
‘She’s probably– ’
Lawrence hung up as his father-in-law started to rant again. He lurched into the hall and tugged the answering machine cable from its socket. After a few seconds, the telephone by the bed began to ring. It rang so incessantly that Lawrence had to take refuge outside in the cab of the pick-up. He turned on the radio, curled himself in the rug and slowly passed out while a hushed stream of tearful ballads and dedications for the late-night lovelorn drained the truck’s battery.
CHAPTER TWO
An uneducated, self-made man, ruler of a small, unhappy empire, Charlie Knights had always viewed his daughter with a dangerous lack of objectivity. She was his pearl without price, his princess. Swiftly eclipsed in his eyes by the child she had produced, her mother had died of cervical cancer when Bonnie was still an infant. The only woman in her father’s life, at least officially, no suitor Bonnie chose could ever have pleased him, not a duke, not a film star, not a tycoon and certainly not a tree surgeon.
Bonnie was away at school when Lawrence first called on her father. There had been a gale the month before and Charlie had summoned him to see to an old oak. Perhaps a century earlier, the tree’s trunk had been allowed to branch out in two directions far too early on. As a result the equivalent of two large trees now forked out, perilously flexible, from a point barely five feet from the ground. The wind had brought neither half down but had clearly weakened some central point in the great plant’s structure for an ominous creaking now sounded at the slightest breath of wind.
Charlie had only bought the house a few years before. A four-square, Victorian structure, less handsome than it was imposing, the place had no family associations for him. Like many a rootless person whose money was as yet too fresh to have brought much faith in permanence, however, Charlie was obsessed with the preservation of every bush, brick and boot-scraper in his new domain. For safety’s sake the oak should have been felled. It would free up a new area for planting, Lawrence pointed out, and provide valuable timber. Charlie was adamant, however, that he wanted the tree saved. Accordingly Lawrence shored up the weak fork with a steel rod, bolted at either end. A few feet higher, he braced one half of the tree to the other, using two more bolted rods held together by a short length of galvanized cable. One half now supported the other, much as though the tree had been properly trained with a single central trunk.
Charlie lacked a son, Lawrence a father, and the two men formed a watchful bond. Lawrence’s interest fed Charlie’s territorial pride, and Charlie asked Lawrence to tell him about the trees he owned. The previous owners had been collectors so there were some interesting exotics among the standared native varieties; a pagoda tree from Korea, a Wellingtonia already towering above the house, a smoky blue spruce, a Persian ironwood and, sheltered by the meeting of two old walls, a lovely, pure white Magnolia campbellii. Ever competitive, Charlie read up on the subject and, having run out of pruning for Lawrence to do, announced that he wanted to plant an arboretum. His daughter had lost interest in riding and her pony had been sold. The paddock below the house was therefore redundant space. Ordinary gardening did not interest him. He spent too much time away from home to maintain herbaceous borders. Trees appealed to him, representing, like a well-chosen unit trust, steady growth, a faith in the future and stability. A collection of trees would also shield the house from view.
Lawrence’s work since he set up business after graduating from agriculture college had consisted largely of mundane pruning and felling. Like every forestry student, however, he had long nurtured a mental list of favourite trees. Charlie was the perfect client in that, having set his mind to do something, he would countenance no half-measures. No expense was too great, no specimen tree too rare. They drove to famous tree collections around the country, they pored over books and catalogues, they argued over plans. They spent hours together. When they were away on tree hunting trips, they ate together and spent occasional nights in hotels. This was all at Charlie’s expense. He also insisted that Lawrence continue to send him fortnightly invoices, charging him for his consultation and time by the hour. This began to feel awkward since they were almost friends, but when Lawrence demurred, Charlie grew quite angry and harangued him on the subject of ‘good business practice’. He preferred the formal arrangement of client and consultant to the shapeless ambivalence of mere friendship. He preferred tabulated covenant to simple trust.
By the time Bonnie returned from her last term at school, the paddock was unrecognizable. Turf had been lifted and rolled up, and a large mass of earth had been moved to change the existing slope to the Bross into three distinct shelves of land, secured with stones from a collapsed dry-stone wall and the pony’s demolished stable. Charlie hated to see his daughter idle and thought the other bored rich of the area a potential bad influence on her so he encouraged her to assist Lawrence. Used to obeying him, she donned old clothes and fell to with a spade, helping Lawrence dig holes, lugging buckets of water from the river, holding each sapling steady while he fastened it by straps to the double stakes he had malleted into the ground on either side.
The immediate impression Lawrence gained of her was one of good health and an intimidating cheerfulness. Still confident of being liked by all who met her, she seemed younger than her eighteen years. She wore her blonde hair long, straight down her back. When it threatened to bother her, she tied it tightly back into a ponytail, which made her seem younger still. She talked incessantly, asking him a stream of impertinent, intrusive questions about himself, his family, his boyhood. Did he have a girlfriend, she asked. Well why not? Was there something wrong with him? Never having had a sister, he did not know to win her respect by teasing her. Her being a valued client’s daughter complicated their relationship further, so that he came to treat her as the master’s irritating but precious spaniel that must be humoured however much one longed to kick it. She talked on regardless, even when his mind was clearly intent on his work. She talked, with the unabashed egotism o
f the very young, of herself, her friends, her enemies, her ambitions, all in peculiarly tedious detail, evidently impervious to the lengths of time in which he said nothing to break her flow. Her mind was so much faster than his, her tongue so much readier, that the verbal assault battered him into a numb submission and when Charlie asked, in her absence, if she was proving a pain in the arse, he heard himself say no, not at all, quite the contrary.
He was planting the final tree, a catalpa, already several years old so cruelly expensive. Digging down, he had found a mass of old stones, flags perhaps of some long forgotten building. Removing them to make a clear root run, he unearthed a layer of foundations. When Bonnie came back from watering the other saplings, she found him up to his ears in a moist pit, struggling to loosen the last stone. She jumped eagerly in to help him. They scrabbled until their fingers were sore and eventually rocked the piece of limestone free from the greedy clay. They heaved the lump clear of the pit mouth then slumped, laughing with exhaustion like a pair of sodden gravediggers. Then she kissed him, impulsively, grinding the back of his head into the earth. Giggling breathlessly at his astonished efforts to brush her off, she pulled his belt open and began tugging on his flies. It was nearly a year since he had last had sex and she was determined; inquisitive as a Brownie, insistent as a nurse. They made brisk, unpolished love on the floor of the pit. Her determination overpowered his nervousness about her father and he was shocked when she cried out and he saw, too late, that she had been a virgin. She hastily pulled her dungarees back on, kissed him once more, laughing in her throat as she smeared a muddy streak across his ear and cheek, then she used him as a ladder to clamber up out of the hole, and was gone as suddenly as she had arrived.
Labouring on in a daze, he managed to plant the catalpa on his own then washed his face and hands in the icy stream. He knocked at the back door, hoping to tell Charlie that the work was finished and to come to some arrangement about returning to make occasional inspections of the trees’ growth rate and fastenings. There was no reply however and although dusk had fallen, the house was all in darkness. The next day, his telephone calls were rebuffed by an answering machine. The day after that he received a cheque and curt payment slip.
In full and final settlement, Charlie’s secretary had typed. Mr Knights thanks you for your services, which will no longer be required.
In the five years that followed, Lawrence neither saw nor heard anything of the Knightses beyond his mother saying that the hairdresser in Barrowcester had told her that Charlie had almost lost his left hand in a nasty car crash, poor man, and that Bonnie had gone away to university in the south somewhere.
Helped, undoubtedly, by the contacts he had formed during his spell as Charlie’s personal tree surgeon, Lawrence’s business thrived and he went into partnership with John at the suggestion of their mutual accountant. He had a half-hearted affair with a girl called Lindy, who drank to excess, but neither was prepared to take responsibility for their lack of commitment. Over two sad years he returned fewer and fewer of her calls, and she was later and later for their every rendezvous until one day she failed to turn up altogether. He made enough money to buy a small cottage on an estate that was being broken up and sold off.
On returning from a short holiday he found that, in his absence, John had taken a call from Bonnie Knights and booked him in for some consultancy work with her. She had set up as a landscape gardener, apparently, and needed his expertise on a local project. Had he, not John, taken the call, he would have found some excuse to duck out of the booking or send John in his place. She was adamant that she wanted him, however, so he swallowed his embarrassment and drove over to the site, determined to do his job with concise professionalism then leave. After all, he told himself, she had as much cause for discomfort as he did, possibly more.
She had transformed herself from the gauche thing he remembered. She had cut her hair short and permed it into loose ringlets so that her face now looked as soft as her name. She had cast aside the jeans and dungarees of her teens for skirts, so that she appeared miraculously to have acquired hips and ankles. She pecked him on the cheek, which was unexpected, and introduced him to the client, one of the sons of the idle rich whose bad influence her father had feared and with whom she was, plainly, romantically involved. There was a good month’s work. The old trees which lined the house’s deceptive, winding approach had received no attention in decades and Bonnie wanted to reinstate an earlier coach drive whose avenue had been felled to provide floor timbers after a devastating fire. No mention was made of her father and she was either too well mannered or bashful to allude to the muddy encounter in their past. Relieved, Lawrence accepted the commission and set to work with ropes, harness and saws.
It became swiftly apparent that she believed she was reshaping the gardens of her future home. It also became cruelly plain that the rich and idle client took a less romantic view and, if his numerous trips to London without her were any proof, was using her landscaping commission as a heartless means of easing her out of his little black book. Whenever the client was away, which was more often than not, she would press Lawrence into joining her at the local pub for lunch. She was loquacious as ever, still hedging him round with words, but his slower perception had caught what her fleeter one had missed, so as she chatted of we this and we that, he sorrowed for her. Pity warmed to interest and he found himself slowly falling in love with her in a way he would never have done had she been paying him any more direct attention than using him as a sounding board.
When Lawrence was halfway through planting the new avenue, the client dropped her in the nastiest way possible, driving a new girlfriend down to stay with him and introducing Bonnie to her as though she were some quaint hired help.
‘Well I’m not going back if you’re not,’ Lawrence told her over lunch.
‘I can’t afford to keep paying you if he doesn’t pay me,’ she warned.
‘So? Buy you another drink?’
By the time her second, vengeful pint had been downed, Bonnie seemed actually to notice him for the first time since their reunion. Whereas before he had balked at her questioning, giving the shortest answers possible, now he found himself eager to tell her everything, about his mother, the dead father he had never known, his failure to shine at school and the revelation that he liked and could understand trees. He babbled about the tree he used to climb in Wumpett Woods, he explained bark to her and tried to convey the thrill of working high under the whispering canopy of an ancient beech or horse chestnut, with only a rope between exhilaration and a back-breaking fall. With hindsight, he guessed that she kissed him in the pub, where she and the client had been regulars, as an act of aggressive retribution, wanting to be seen and reported on. At the time, he believed his words had moved her and this lent him the courage to drive her back to the cottage where she spent the next three days.
Charlie Knights raged and blustered but there was nothing he could do short of disinheriting his only child and he doted on her too much for that. He tried to lure her away with an offer of work in Australia but she laughed at him. He tried to buy Lawrence off but Lawrence tore the cheque in two and hung it, framed, on his workshop wall. If Charlie had done nothing but indulge them, the affair might have run its short and shallow course. It was a liaison based on nothing stronger than sex on Lawrence’s side and anger and frustrated ambition on Bonnie’s and, unfuelled, would have devoured itself in time. Charlie’s strenuous efforts to abort it, however, caused the lovers to entrench. In particular, his rejection of Lawrence caused Bonnie defiantly to seek out every ounce of her lover’s worth. Defending him, she came to love him, believing that his unsophisticated devotion was a finer thing than the temporary shelter for which she had first commandeered it.
Once she became pregnant, Charlie abandoned all faith in severing them and set out instead on a pragmatic accommodation with his disappointed hopes and unsatisfactory son-in-law. Broking a grumbling peace, he discovered he had underestimated Lawr
ence’s background. Lawrence’s uncle was a wealthy if effete businessman and his mother a still glamorous widow of some means with all the brittle poise of a frustrated actress. Charlie was charmed by her and slightly awed. He made a pass at her on their third meeting, which she graciously overlooked. She had already welcomed Bonnie with open arms and, as the marriage approached, shamed Charlie into an approximation of the same for her cherished only son.
What neither parent knew was that the pregnancy was not a crude cause of obligation. When Bonnie first announced it to Lawrence, his initial, secret reaction was panic. Their defiant idyll, already losing its charm, seemed suddenly a disguised trap. His reaction was less than ecstatic and, when this prompted her to say that of course she ‘would not go through with it’, his heart leaped with a sense of reprieve and he guiltily agreed. He would break with her, he decided, as soon as a decent interval had passed; one month, six weeks at the most. She was the enthusiastic type. She loved easily. She would mend and live to love again and more appropriately. He would escape.
That night, however, he woke to find her crying in the dark and she confessed that it would be the second child of his she had aborted. Their very first encounter had left her pregnant and her father had insisted on an abortion.
‘It’s like– It’s like a second chance,’ she stammered. Despairing, he proposed marriage several times in the course of the night, growing bolder with her every, tearfully heroic, refusal. Astonished at how easy it was going to be to play a noble role and still duck his responsibilities with something approaching honour, he proposed once too often however. Just when he thought she had sighed herself to tearful sleep, she accepted. Dawn was colouring the room about them and Bonnie wept as he made horrified love to her.
As a boy he had no intimate acquaintance with married life. His mother was a widow, his uncle, Darius, an apparently loveless bachelor. He was aware that Darius could fill the public aspects, at least, of the fatherly and husbandly roles. When the two of them hosted a birthday party for him or attended, with world-weary picnic or too-elegant clothes, a sports day or a school play, he was aware that they were play-acting. Marriage, it seemed, was a light thing one could assume with soft mockery and discard at will, a simple matter of form and observance. His mother had been married – was still married in a sense, in that the mere word widow would instantly summon up the dead husband, as if she carried him, reduced, about her person like a discreet piece of jewellery or a love token. And yet beyond this, the condition seemed to have left her unmarked by grief or regret. Her marriage was a memory of which Lawrence was the sole significance. Both mother and uncle unconsciously spoke of couples with a tone of teasing patronage, as of children. She regularly entertained married men without their wives and his social life tended to revolve around married women without their husbands. It was not surprising, therefore, if Lawrence approached marriage with little respect for the institution, or real understanding of the burden of commitment he was about to shoulder. Marriage, he felt, was less an activity than something which merely happened to one, like the automatically happy ending of a fairy tale.