Tree Surgery for Beginners

by Patrick Gale

  Indeed, in the weeks after he proposed to Bonnie, it did seem to be something that had happened to him, as external as a birthday celebration or a burst water pipe. He had merely asked the question and received the answer and was suddenly, irreversibly, on the other side of an invisible barrier. It was as if he had been thrust through a looking-glass; his life looked much the same but everything in it had changed, its values, its purpose, its future. He could no longer drift, no longer do only as he liked. For the first time since leaving home, he was subject to the padded rule of domestic democracy. He sold the cottage and together they purchased a larger farmhouse.

  Everyone, even Charlie Knights, once Lawrence’s mother had corrected his initial reaction, conspired to celebrate the young couple’s love.

  ‘You must be so happy,’ people told Lawrence. ‘She’s quite a catch.’

  Even worse, they would stand back to talk about him in the third person.

  ‘Ah, you can tell he’s walking in the clouds. Just look at him!’

  And he would realize with a sudden dread that his impending nuptials had people talking of him in the same infantilizing fashion his uncle and mother reserved for married couples.

  Of course, to announce that he was not happy was impossible. To declare to the fatuously smiling faces that he did not love Bonnie, that now that he was to be bound to her by law and public recognition, the mere proximity of her would cause a kind of panic in him, would be an outrage to the cult of love, still more to propriety. Borne with him to visit her relatives and college friends, her favourite shops for baby clothes and kitchenware, his secret felt as reprehensible as murder. Always so cool in matters of the heart, so pragmatic when discussing other people’s domestic arrangements, his mother could have saved him with a few sharp questions, but she swiftly became chief celebrant of the match, designer of floral tributes, chooser of bridesmaids. She welcomed her daughter-in-law and sloughed off her son in a single complex psychological manoeuvre which left him feeling betrayed, as if all the years of tender motherhood had been a mere show or, worse, a kind of warm-up act for the star turn played by the first candidate to meet with her voracious approval.

  Only his Uncle Darius appeared not to be fooled. At least, only Darius voiced his doubts. Sadly he left this far too late. Sensing Lawrence’s horror of stag nights, he spirited him up to London for one last evening à deux two nights before the wedding. He bought Lawrence a set of six botanical engravings to hang on his dining room walls.

  ‘These are not a wedding present,’ he said. ‘You know I abhor the practice of confounding the individual within the mere domestic unit. These are a present for you.’

  He took him to the theatre, to see a cruel French farce, then on to dinner. Cracking the claw of a steaming half-lobster, he fixed Lawrence with his most searching stare and said,

  ‘You do know nothing in life is fixed. No arrangement short of disability or death, need be final. Marriage is an economic convenience and a shelter for children, nothing more. If you’re only doing this because she’s pregnant, think again. I can see that the child is provided for. Everyone would understand, even your mother.’

  Lawrence felt his cheeks burn so hot that tears of intimidation welled in the corners of his eyes.

  ‘No,’ he stammered, and tried to laugh. ‘I … I do understand. And thanks, Darius. But I love her. I really love her.’

  Darius searched his face once more then apologized briskly and plunged a skewer into the lobster claw. By rights, a cockerel should have crowed but there was merely a gasp and a small rush of flame at a nearby table where someone had ordered a nostalgic steak Diane. For a few pitiful seconds, Lawrence felt a child’s naive assumption that his pain could be divined and cured without his saying a thing. Then he perceived that Darius had retreated from him, twitching spiritual skirts clear of such palpable cowardice as he left him to his fate.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lawrence woke in the small hours, bitterly cold, and returned to his bed for the rest of the night. In the morning he was surprisingly clear-headed. Appalled at having lost a day, he dressed, snatched breakfast, fed the ravenous bantams and set them loose in the garden, jump-started the pick-up and drove into work. John’s understandable indignation was swiftly stifled.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry I messed you around, but Bonnie left me yesterday and she took Lucy and I was in a bit of a state.’

  At once John was all concern. Where had she gone? Had she telephoned? Had he got enough to eat? Did he want to move out to his place for a few nights? This was just what Lawrence needed because it enabled him to sweep aside all enquiries and re-establish his authority. There was work to be done and he would do it. Work had sustained him before he had met her, it would bear him up now that she had gone.

  He rang his mother on the mobile telephone during his lunch break.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Her father told me. He rang to ask if I was hiding her. Darling, are you alright? Well of course you’re not but– Oh. Oh darling how could you be so stupid!’ She started to cry then so he hung up. She did not call back but his Uncle Darius rang an hour later. Lawrence was halfway up a cedar of Lebanon when he took the call.

  ‘I won’t say I’m sorry,’ Darius said, ‘because that’s pointless. I just thought you should know, Charlie Knights has been ringing all sorts of people. I think he’s trying to stir up trouble. I thought you should know, that’s all. Call me if I can do anything.’

  Working helped. Lawrence had always found reassurance in the application of specific knowledge. When he drove the pick-up home in late afternoon, his limbs were pleasantly weary from the juddering of the chain saw and shredder, his hands sore from scraping on bark, his cheeks tight from cold air. His thick hair was peppered with wood chips. The cab and his work clothes were permeated with the resinous tang of sawdust, a scent Bonnie had once claimed to find intensely arousing. They would often make love when each had just returned from work, when their hair smelled of outdoors, their nails were grimy and their bodies exhausted before they began.

  There was a car in the yard. As he drew near, its doors opened and a stocky woman and a younger man emerged, scattering the scavenging bantams. She was not in uniform and did not flash her police identity card until he came closer, but her confident, world-weary bearing betrayed her.

  ‘Mr Lawrence Frost?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Detective Inspector Faithe.’

  Confused, he offered her his dusty hand. Hers was cold, ringless and dry, its grasp assertively firm. Standing back, her colleague stared at him in silent impudence.

  ‘Could we come in for a minute?’

  ‘Er. Of course.’

  ‘It won’t take long. Just something we wanted cleared up.’

  She was not local. Her accent was Cockney. Although she could not have been more than forty-something, her face was craggy with tension lines. He wondered if she had transferred to a rural division because of stress. He led them into the kitchen and saw her glance at the neglected washing-up, the vase of wilting roses, the empty wine bottles, the savaged, rapidly staling, loaf of bread. As they sat down at the table and he reached to pull out a chair as well, he found that his hands were shaking. Authority figures, even nurses and traffic wardens, always made him nervous; he had often been in trouble as a boy.

  ‘Mind if I smoke?’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  Faithe produced a cigarette which her colleague hastily lit for her. Lawrence noticed that she had a scar on one cheek, puckered from where a wound had been too tightly stitched. She dragged deep on the cigarette and exhaled slowly then reached into her pocket for a small portable ashtray whose black enamelled lid she flipped open with casual expertise. Lawrence warmed to her. He liked people who relished their pleasures.

  ‘We had a visit from your father-in-law this morning,’ she said. ‘He was in quite a state. He wanted us to register your wife and daughter as missing persons. Nothing wrong with that, only it’s rather strange to h
ear from the father and not the husband. When did you last see her?’

  ‘The night before last.’

  The colleague took notes while Faithe tapped her cigarette on the ashtray brim.

  ‘Did she announce any intention of going away?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you know where she is?’

  ‘No. We …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We had an argument. A bad argument. And I left her here, with Lucy – that’s our daughter. I was angry and thought I should make myself scarce. I drove for a bit and spent the night in my truck.’

  ‘Where?’ she asked, apparently without interest.

  ‘In Wumpett Woods. I often take Lucy there for walks at weekends. There’s a car park. I spent the night in the car park.’

  Faithe minutely raised an eyebrow. She stubbed out her cigarette half-smoked.

  ‘Trying to give up and failing miserably,’ she muttered then suddenly turned her candid grey eyes on him.

  ‘How bad an argument was it?’

  ‘Bad. I … accused her of having an affair. With a client of hers. She’s a landscape gardener.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘She denied it. She was very angry.’

  ‘Was Lucy with you?’

  ‘No. She was in bed.’

  ‘Did you hit your wife, Mr Frost?’

  ‘No.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Did you hit her, Mr Frost?’ Faithe asked again. ‘Mr Knights seemed to think you had, but maybe he’s prone to exaggeration.’

  ‘Yes,’ he sighed, avoiding her stare. ‘Well, I pushed her. Just once. I sort of shoved her and she fell back against the sink. Then I was frightened of what I might do. I was still angry. It scared me. That was why I left.’

  ‘And presumably why she did …?’

  ‘Yes. I came back the next morning at about seven. She had gone and taken Lucy with her. Her car was gone and some clothes and things. She didn’t leave a note.’

  ‘I see. And you’ve no idea where she might have gone?’

  Lawrence paused.

  ‘She’d hate me for saying this … I mean, it’s why we had the fight …'

  ‘Why you hit her, you mean.’

  ‘Yes … Can I get you a drink?’ Lawrence was gasping for a glass of wine. He could see the unopened bottles in their box beside the fridge.

  ‘Not when we’re on duty, thanks. You were saying where you thought she’d gone.’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’ He wished he had never begun to tell them. He knew now that Bonnie had been entirely innocent. The policeman paused in his scribbling and looked up from his pad accusingly. ‘She has a client, an American architect. He designed a hall of residence for the university and hired her to do the garden. He’s been staying off and on at the Gladstone.’

  ‘And she’s having an affair with him?’

  ‘No. Christ. Maybe. It’s what I thought.’

  ‘But she may be with him in any case?’

  ‘She might. She might just have gone to ground somewhere. She might be with old friends. Isn’t it a bit early to go putting her on a missing persons list?’

  ‘Mr Knights seemed to think there was a special urgency. Don’t you want to know where she is?’

  ‘Well of course I do!’ he shouted so that Detective Inspector Faithe jumped slightly. ‘Sorry,’ he said. Of course I want to know, but I don’t think I’m likely to hear from her for some time. A week. Maybe longer.’

  ‘Has she walked out on you before, then?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘So how do you know?’

  ‘She’s my wife. I know how she is.’

  ‘This architect– ’

  ‘McBugger.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘He’s called McBride. Craig McBride.’

  ‘You got his number?’

  ‘No but you can ask at the Gladstone. He’s the kind of man who leaves contact numbers with everyone he meets. He assumes the world and his wife are just aching to call him.’

  Hearing the anger that was boiling up unbidden, Faithe rose and her partner followed suit.

  ‘Yes, well, that’s all for now. Thanks for your time, Mr Frost. You going to be around, then, for a few days?’

  ‘Sure.’ Lawrence nodded, puzzled, watching them go. ‘I’m going nowhere.’

  As they drove off, he opened a bottle of claret.

  Craig McBride. Drinking, Lawrence pictured the man, his mature poise, his easy plausibility. He looked like a film star, too old to play romantic leads yet strong enough a presence to carry a Western on his own rugged merits. He walked with his feet slightly turned out and his thighs splayed, as though a horse had just spent some hours between them.

  ‘He’s ridiculously good-looking,’ Bonnie had exclaimed after their first meeting. ‘He looks as if he’s carved from granite. That chin!’

  The chin did indeed have a Kirk Douglas cleft in it, not a feature one often saw in England luckily. The bugger, the McBugger, had contacted her through a former client. She returned from meeting him full of enthusiasm, not just because the commission meant good money and probably some magazine coverage, but because, Lawrence guessed, she had begun to feel herself mired in a provincial rut and this new client represented contact with a wider, more exciting sphere.

  He strove to be happy for her. He was happy. Things had been almost good between them recently. He had learned that he was threatened by her assertiveness and her ambition and the knowledge was protecting him. He was able to see the absurd posturing his fear represented. In turn she had learned to move at his slower pace sometimes, not to badger him with slippery speeches.

  Lucy too had lived up to her name, illuminating their relationship by her mere presence and changing them both irreversibly. When she was a baby he had felt helpless with her, unable to satisfy her, maddened by her crying jags. As soon as she began to stagger about the house, however, as soon as she began to laugh, he was captivated by her. She had a bewilderingly developed character for so immature a creature. At times she was less child than goblin. She would mimic him and laugh. She imitated her mother, her grandmother, the telephone. Her round face, with her mother’s piercing blue eyes, was remarkably flexible. Meeting a dog, a cat, a pony, a cow, she stood in heavy breathing silence then worked up a passable imitation of their expression before startling them away with her mischievous laugh. The first time she fell asleep on his lap and he felt the trusting weightiness of her as she subsided against him, he knew himself her abject slave and arrived at a fresh sympathy with his similarly besotted father-in-law. He had only heard how infants deprived husbands of their wives, not how gratitude for the joy of them could rekindle a husband’s waning affection.

  McBugger took the two of them out to dinner in Barrowcester to ‘welcome Bonnie on board’ as he put it. He was, indeed, charm itself, with such hackneyed good-guy looks that it would have been perverse not to trust him on sight. Lawrence was used to clients of Bonnie’s dismissing him as just a tree surgeon, a mere technician, with no creative spirit. If McBride neglected anyone that evening, however, it was Bonnie. He wanted to know all about Lawrence. Why, given every opportunity, had he chosen this particular field? He wanted to know about trees, why they were shaped the way they were, why they lived so long, where they had come from, and whether they had evolved much over the millennia. Lawrence found himself digging up knowledge he had not needed since his last bout of exams. He was uncomfortable at having to talk so much and grateful when Bonnie at last swung the conversation back to herself and her plans for the university project. Resuming his usual bystander’s role, he watched her enthusiasm and was able to see that McBride heralded a new stage in their relationship. She would travel further afield for work. She might rely on him increasingly to care for Lucy. It was likely that she would use him professionally less and less. He saw all this and astonished himself by accepting it with equanimity. As her eyes shone with wine and chatter, he found he could be glad for her success. He did
not need to control her, to bring her down. He could even be grateful to McBride, not for taking her off his hands exactly, but for taking up the slack in his own attentions to her.

  As the weeks passed however, and she spent hours hunched over the telephone and plant lists at her drawing board, his trust curdled. Her every other word was Craig. Craig says this. Craig says that. Craig thinks. Craig believes.

  ‘Be calm,’ he told himself, taking Lucy for a long walk around Wumpett Woods. ‘He’s old enough to be her father. He’s clever in a way her father isn’t. He’s a match for Charlie. This is a necessary stage. This is good for her. And the downgrading of the father-in-law can only be good for the husband.’

  But then McBride began to come to their house – which of course he admired but began immediately to replan – for suppers, lunches, long afternoons while Lawrence was out at work, long weekends at which he was all too present. He wooed Lucy with presents and his big, rangy charm. During one of the weekends when McBride had invaded the spare room and taken over the bathroom with his razor, his contact lens paraphernalia, his alien smells, his high design clutter, Charlie invited them all to his house for Sunday lunch. Inevitably this led to a stroll around the maturing arboretum. Walking behind with Lucy, who insisted on keeping slow company with Megan, Charlie’s old, scent-obsessed Doberman, he watched the other three striding on ahead, pointing and talking, always talking. Charlie slapped McBride on the back to emphasize some point he was making, Bonnie smiled and Lawrence saw that this was the man she should have married, the man who could match her father and wrest her fairly from him.