Tree Surgery for Beginners

by Patrick Gale

Dora took her friend firmly by the shoulders. For all the lost weight, Bonnie’s body felt young still, resilient. Dora was briefly inhibited by Charlie standing beside them like a halted sleepwalker.

  ‘You’re to get away,’ she said at last. ‘Right away. You have to leave him.’ She sensed she was referring as much to the father as the husband.

  ‘But you’re his mother.’

  ‘So I know. You have to leave him.’

  ‘I still love him, Dora. It’s so stupid.’

  ‘You’re not listening to me.’

  ‘I am. I am. Oh. Oh what about Lucy? She adores him. She keeps saying where is he, and why can’t Daddy come too and when are we going to see him. She cried for hours last night. I very nearly hit her,’ she added, grimly humorous. ‘God I need to pee. It’s all the excitement and this cold wind. Hang on. I won’t be a sec.’

  She ran along the hall and through a door beneath the stairs. Dora watched her go, amazed, horrified even, at the bizarre inappropriateness of her young friend’s mood.

  ‘She’s in shock,’ she told Charlie, masking incomprehension with certainty. ‘She’s not herself.’ His bizarre lack of reaction was no easier to comprehend. All those tears, all that need and yet now, far from shouting with surprise and relief and running out to see his granddaughter again, he had merely slumped onto a hall chair and was staring down the corridor after Bonnie. Dora thought a moment then hurried out to the drive and the waiting car. As she drew near, the driver’s door opened and a man got out. He had crinkled, greying hair and wore a wedding ring. He held out his hand. As she took it, Dora wanted to laugh because he was so good-looking.

  ‘Isn’t it a heavenly day?’ she blurted like a fool. ‘Sorry.’ She coughed. ‘You must think Bonnie awfully rude leaving you outside.’

  He merely smiled, crinkling blue eyes and revealing reassuringly un-American teeth.

  ‘You must be the famous Dora,’ he said. ‘I’m Craig. Craig McBride.’

  She took back her hand, needing to regain control, reminding herself she had long since ceased to be the age she could feel. She cast a glance back to the house, to Bonnie.

  ‘Can you take her away?’ she asked quickly. Lucy had clambered into the driver’s seat and was playing with the steering wheel. ‘She mustn’t stay here.’

  ‘You read my mind,’ he said. ‘It’s like she’s taken this big step into the unknown and now she hasn’t the faintest idea which way to turn. I was thinking that if I help her put some distance between her and Lawrence it might help her see things more clearly. I mean,’ he added hastily, ‘it’s not that I– Well. I wouldn’t want you to think that I– ’

  ‘Take her away,’ Dora assured him. ‘You must. Whatever she says, it’s her only hope. She’s still in love with him and it’s hopeless. It’s not fair to either of them. This is the only chance they’ve got. Please?’

  He touched her elbow and indicated that Bonnie and her father were drawing near. She turned. Bonnie laughed. She took Charlie’s hand but dropped it again swiftly as though she had found it cold.

  ‘Dora don’t look so worried, darling,’ she called out. ‘Everything’s been vile but it’s all going to be just fine now. We’ll drive straight into Barrowcester to the police station and I’ll swear I’m Mrs Lawrence Frost and still alive and show them my driving licence and passport or whatever and Lucy and they’ll let him out and everything’ll be fine.’ She kissed Dora’s cheek. ‘I do love you when you worry. Don’t look like that. Honestly. We’ll all be laughing about this in a few months’ time.’

  ‘Bye darling,’ Dora said to her. She wanted to hug her so much but was afraid of betraying any emotions that might seem suspiciously final. She shook the American’s huge hand.

  ‘Lovely to have met you,’ she said.

  ‘Sure,’ he replied and nodded. ‘We’ll sort something out,’ he added quietly. He looked like a man who could dig ditches and build walls. Dora trusted him.

  ‘Take care of them,’ she thought and waved to Lucy who was waving through the back window and continued to wave as the car pulled out with a small spurt of gravel.

  Watching them go, she knew a part of herself was being torn out forever. She felt breathless. She resisted the urge to cry.

  ‘I must go,’ she said to Charlie. ‘Lawrence will need me now. They’ll be sending him home. Are you– Are you going to be okay?’

  He said nothing for a few seconds then seemed to click back into his old, ebullient self as abruptly and unconvincingly as an automaton.

  ‘Oh fine. Fine. Thanks so much for coming over,’ he added, apparently forgetting that she had come to rage not to comfort.

  ‘Yes,’ she said clumsily. ‘I’m sure she’ll be back in an hour or so. She’ll sort things out with the police then she’ll want to come back and talk things over with her Dad and … I’ll be off then.’

  He had slipped away and only his body was standing there. Sensing his master was not as reliable as he had been, the younger of the dogs, Rex, jumped into her car when she opened the door and showed a disloyal reluctance to be left behind. As she drove away, he ran alongside making unnerving, darting movements towards its tyres. She was torn between watching out for the dog and looking at Charlie’s immobile figure, shrinking in the rear-view mirror. Halfway home she was overcome with sick dizziness as though she were about to faint and had to pull over into the entrance to a field, open the door and sit hunched forward with her head between her knees.

  CHAPTER SIX

  During a long, tense wait in the Channel Tunnel, Craig, who prided himself on being good with children, had made the error of teaching Lucy to sing Ay Yi Yippee. Excited at returning to familiar ground and doubtless picking up on her mother’s tension, the child had been singing the song over and over in the back of the hired car ever since Craig had pointed to a motorway sign with some relief and said,

  ‘Look, Lucy. Barrowcester forty-five miles.’

  Now, as they left her father’s house and pulled up to the ancient city, the mindless repetition was threatening to make Bonnie lash out.

  ‘Lucy?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Could you maybe sing something else? Maybe?’

  ‘Why? She’ll be wearing pink pyjamas when she– ’

  ‘Look, Lucy. There’s the cathedral! See the two towers?’

  ‘Oh yes. Are we going to see Daddy now?’

  ‘Maybe. Soon. Maybe.’

  Craig parked across the road from the police station.

  ‘Is that it?’ he asked gently. ‘Do I drop you both here?’

  ‘Are you mad? Oh. God. Sorry. I dunno.’

  ‘Do you want me to come in with you?’ he asked, patiently smiling.

  ‘No!’ she gasped. ‘You saw those papers. The place is probably crawling with journalists.’

  ‘I’ll stay with the munchkin.’

  ‘Yes. Teach her a new song.’

  On the night when he tried to celebrate, with so characteristically warped sensitivity, the anniversary of their first, abortion-haunted sex, Lawrence picked a fight with her. His name-calling and jealous accusations incensed her to the point where she felt the urge to lash out at him. The last thing she remembered was his hand flying up and her losing her balance. She came to with a sick headache worse than any hangover. Her cheek was pressed against the icy floor in a small pool of congealing blood, which had matted her hair on one side. Staring at the floor, she became aware of Lucy’s weeping. Then her tongue sought the hole where one of her teeth had been and a white bolt of pain startled her into complete awareness. Checking the damage in the looking-glass in the downstairs loo, she found the broken tooth digging into the cut it had made inside her cheek and spat it out.

  When Lucy asked where her father was, she realized they had the house to themselves and told Lucy he had gone away for a while. For fun.

  ‘What happened? Why were you bleeding?’

  ‘I fell over.’

  ‘Silly Mummy.’

  ‘Yes. Very
silly Mummy. Shall we go away too? Would that be fun? Just you and me?’

  Breathlessly enthusing, she hurried Lucy upstairs as fast as her throbbing head would let her, downed a handful of painkillers, packed, seized money, passport and the painting that was her only possession of value then dressed her daughter and drove south as fast as she dared.

  Addicted to romance and to animals as a child, she had always, in her fantasies, cast herself in the role of the plucky but helpless princess and her father in that of the dragon. Her relationship with the dragon was ambivalent. It was now her pet and guardian, now her tormentor and worst fate. The man who could vanquish the dragon, killing what she loved, would win her as a matter of course. Looking with some envy from her friends’ mothers to her widowed father, she entertained too the possibility of a stepmother, wicked, quite possibly, but usefully worldly too and infinitely glamorous. When she was sent away to school, the fairy tales gave way to more adult fantasies, often less well written, but her father remained the dragon in her dreams, her bed the rich treasure at the heart of a forest of briars.

  She fell in unquestioning love with Lawrence the moment she saw him, with his thick, unruly hair, sinewy limbs and brown eyes. With his lack of fine speeches and his array of axes and saws, he was short on traditional princely charm but he had the stuff of heroism about him. A giant-killer perhaps, or an unexpectedly victorious third son. She could hardly believe her luck when her father told her to work with him on the arboretum or how nervous and gabbling this labourer made her. He seemed impervious to her teenage charm, however much she sought to impress him, and she marked out the hopelessness of her case in trees, calculating the days until the end of his commission. At last, when she saw there were no saplings left to plant but the catalpa, desperation and a complete lack of self-consciousness lent her strength. She seduced him as if by natural magic.

  The moment it was done however it was she who was disenchanted. She was still of an age when to kiss someone with one’s tongue was to embark on a steady relationship and to go all the way was to entertain serious thoughts of marriage. With the rude loss of her virginity, all the judicious snobbery her education had inculcated in her came to the fore. She was a princess. He was her father’s tree surgeon. She could never marry him. She had to leave home still. She had to make a life elsewhere. She had to leave her mark. She discovered later that Lawrence assumed her father knew what had happened and, furious, cut him off for that reason. In fact her father knew nothing, but she had engineered the breach by complaining that the tree surgeon had made passes at her.

  She realized she was pregnant a fortnight later and dealt with it herself with some money from her newly matured trust fund, tearfully drunk on cheap vodka and pineapple juice. It was unpleasant and shameful but she was young enough for regrets to pass easily. Nothing was to interfere with her ideals. She left home and went to university as planned. No princes materialized, only frauds, and she found herself working and independent and beginning to enjoy it. She avoided Barrowcester until, amused at the coincidence of their shared birthplace, she became involved with Alexander, the debonair heir to a local estate and the next Lord Barrow. When he repeatedly invited her home, declared he loved her to distraction and set her to redesign his garden, it seemed more than likely she would become his wife. Blind to his veiled sneers at her father’s background, she was triumphantly happy and hired Lawrence to work for her partly to lay an old ghost but also from a mischievous desire to compare the man she might have settled for with the one that was control’s reward.

  She should never have done it. Looking back with fatalism, she saw that malicious impulse as her downfall. Lawrence seemed no more interested in her than before but, regarding him with wiser, adult eyes, she found that, compared with Alexander, he won hands down. Alexander was conventionally handsome, rich and better educated but Lawrence was more grounded. He had the calm, untrumpeting self-assurance of an expert. He had no need of human props to justify his importance. He looked even better in jeans than she remembered. In a way that disarmed her utterly, he also seemed good. She thought, with a pang, of their lost child and knew him for a kind and responsible father. Too late she saw herself trapped in a gilded compromise and the bitter tears she shed when Alexander revealed his perfidy drew as deeply on relief as on humiliation. Even if Lawrence had not taken her hand in the crowded snug of the Tracer’s Arms and let her kiss him, he would still have proved her unconscious rescuer.

  For all that she was spoiled, for all her fantasies and childish, worldly ambition, Bonnie was not a fool. She saw he did not love her as she loved him. If she had not become pregnant a second time, she might have let him go. She could not face a second abortion, however. She felt sure her love was strong enough for two and she was wise enough to have observed that some of the firmest marriages were founded on imperfect grounds and inequality of feeling. She was not, however, experienced and had no mother to advise her that any problems writ small in courtship loomed large in matrimony.

  At first her faith seemed justified. He was a good father and she felt the adoration he shone on Lucy spill over onto her as loving gratitude. His lack of ambition began to madden her, however, and his inarticulacy and, more than either of these, the way his emotions, which fatherhood and domestic intimacy should have released, seemed as inaccessible to him as ever. As time passed and, ironically, as she found a dear friend in his mother, she came to be indignant that she should ever have been grateful for whatever love he could offer. She came instead to see his love or rather the demonstration of his love and of his gratitude, as her contractual right. She was not the kind of woman who flirts to recapture her husband’s interest but when Craig entered her professional life and began to spend time with the two of them, she did hope that an element of jealousy might prick Lawrence’s conscience. Craig, who was so naturally courteous, so overtly warm, might lead him to cherish her by example. Nothing could have prepared her for the demonic reaction she unleashed. They had argued before, like any couple. They had said hateful things. But they had always spoken, she believed, out of simple frustration or anger, never from actual hatred.

  She had maintained a front for Craig, as she had for Dora, but the work on the new university site was so time-consuming and threw her into his company for so long, that it was perhaps a foregone conclusion that the handsome American should come to perceive the truth about her marriage.

  From the moment she unburdened herself, his sympathy was persuasive. In spite of Lawrence’s shortcomings, she persisted in reaffirming her love for him. For she did love him. Deeply. When she secretly read a marital self-help book, it was with small shocks of guilty self-recognition. And yet something in her love must have died or at least lost its potency or she would have taken the simple solution of handing over her designs to Craig and asking, with apologies, that he find someone else to oversee the work. She did not desire Craig. Handsome or no, he was not at all what she thought of as her type. Yet it was surely more than professional assiduity that made her stick by his side even as her marriage spiralled down in flames. Had her only confidante not been Dora, with whom she could never be entirely honest for obvious reasons, she might have been brought to admit that Craig was proving the chiselled, upstanding means to a matrimonial end.

  Had she had him in mind for a lover, she would have fled directly to his side. Instead, woozy from painkillers, envious of Lucy’s sound backseat slumbers, she drove to London. She headed towards Parson’s Green, the haunt of her student days, where several girlfriends still lived, then realized abruptly that she was no longer close enough to any of them to materialize on their doorstep so late with two suitcases, a sleeping child and a face like a prize-fighter’s. Hating herself for sounding tearful and pathetic, she rang Craig’s Barrowcester hotel from a kiosk. He asked no questions and was with her in less than two hours, tapping on the window to wake her. He made her leave her car in a side street – from where it was later stolen – then gave her his dark glasses and swe
pt her and Lucy in a taxi to Waterloo International. Unprepared, cashless, anxious not to be traced, she accepted his protection, his tickets to Paris, his payment of a dentistry bill, but when she locked herself in her bathroom at the Bristol for a silent weep, it was for the physical loss of Lawrence. Her hotel bed felt empty without him and, for all Craig’s chaste chivalry and her staunch independence, she felt ridiculously vulnerable and alone without her husband beside her.

  Bonnie entered Barrowcester police station alone and unrecognized. When she had made herself known to a stunned duty officer and he asked if she wanted to wait to see her husband, she panicked.

  ‘Er. No,’ she told him foolishly. ‘I can’t. The car’s on a double yellow line and my little girl’s in it. Tell him. Oh. God. Er. Tell him anything. Tell him I’ve been found, that’s all.’

  He protested, but she hurried out and made Craig drive her swiftly to the farmhouse. Lucy was overjoyed, of course, thinking she was coming home at last and about to see her father. Leaving her with capable Craig, Bonnie walked distractedly around the house, packing another case with a jumble of things she had forgotten before. Packing in broad daylight felt more real than on her first, bloodstained flit. She became suddenly, painfully tearful at the sense that she was leaving the house she loved. She lay on their bed for a few perilously seductive minutes and even began to write Lawrence a letter, then she thought better of it, imagined the ugly scene if he returned any minute to find Craig playing with his daughter, and she hurried out.

  Lucy began to play up when she found they were on the move again, producing a repetitive whine like a wounded animal.

  ‘Where now?’ Craig asked over the noise.

  ‘Back to Dad’s, I thought. There’s plenty of room.’

  ‘Won’t he come after you there?’

  ‘Dad would probably shoot him,’ she laughed, desperately unhappy. Lucy’s misery was infectious, brain-scraping.

  ‘I think you need to get right away,’ Craig said, driving back to the main road.