Tree Surgery for Beginners

by Patrick Gale

  ‘Sorry,’ she stammered. ‘You wanted to talk, didn’t you?’

  ‘Did I?’

  He kissed her again with a hunger that was, he felt sure, as impersonal for her as it was for him. Judging from her narrative, she had slept with no one since her romantic disappointment with the rugger master. She smelled of soap and tasted of lamb cutlet and red wine. Strictly speaking, this was adultery, yet he felt no guilt, only an overmastering, automatic desire. But suddenly she was fighting him off.

  ‘No. Lawrence? Er. No. I’m … I’m so sorry,’ she stammered.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘I’m … It’s nothing to do with you. Nothing wrong, I mean. It’s just that I’m not ready for …’

  ‘I rushed you.’

  ‘No. I rushed. I shouldn’t have. Too much wine on top of seasick pills. Or something. Sorry.’

  Flustered, she smiled, and kissed his cheek, which he took as his dismissal. He backed away, grateful at least that he did not have to fumble after lost socks or tangled underwear.

  ‘Night, then,’ he muttered and watched her slip away and disappear through a door.

  A party of laughing Italians emerged in her wake. Lawrence fled up the stairs all the way to the sun deck. There he stood on the Astroturf and leaned against a railing to look up at the vapour cloud that billowed from a towering smokestack, until he grew dizzy at the way the great silhouette pitched up and down against the pattern of stars beyond. Turning to stare back at where the boat’s myriad portholes cast a ghostly glow across its churning wake, he thought nothing of his uncle, of the woman he had just lunged at, of how he was to get through the three purgatorial weeks ahead. He felt only a profound, calming sense of detachment and thought, if it were possible with the wind flapping his clothes and the sea boiling all about him, of nothing at all.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Only with the following morning did the folly of what he had done dawn on Lawrence. This was no casual encounter in a pub or ordinary holiday fling. He had crudely pounced on a perfectly nice, actually rather sweet woman, possibly the only remotely sweet woman on the entire boat, and now she would avoid him, mortified, and they were trapped in this floating purgatory for another three weeks under five hundred pairs of watchful eyes.

  Darius had already formed some kind of alliance with her brother – doubtless based on smug supremacy at the card table. The two men were heartily breakfasting together when he shuffled out onto the aft restaurant deck in search of toast and coffee. Reuben was got up in a jaunty, faintly nautical outfit. Darius had relaxed sufficiently to wear one of his more overtly woolly weekend suits. Lawrence decided to play innocent in the hope of their ignorance.

  ‘Ah. Three down, one to go,’ Darius said as he joined them. ‘Sleep well? It got pretty rough in the small hours.’

  ‘Yes thanks,’ said Lawrence, although he had spent half the night clinging to his mattress for fear of rolling off his bed and the other half suffering cramps as a result. ‘Your sister’s not up yet, then?’ he asked Reuben.

  ‘Amazingly not. She’s normally up for hours before anyone else, reading and writing letters and taking walks and generally putting everyone else to shame. A lie-in’s a very good sign. She needed a holiday so badly.’

  ‘Unless she’s sick, of course,’ put in Darius.

  ‘Oh she’s definitely not sick,’ Reuben went on. ‘I heard her singing to herself in the bath as I was leaving my cabin.’

  ‘Sea air must agree with her.’

  ‘She so deserves a good break. I expect she told you, Lawrence, she’s had a run of bad luck. Shitty men. She’s always had hopeless taste in men. I mean it was hideous to have him drop dead like that but Tony was a pimple of a husband really. Then there was the bloody rugger bugger– ’

  ‘Well good morning!’ Darius stood with a pointed smile, to indicate that Bee was approaching beyond Reuben’s sight line. Lawrence, like Reuben, remained firmly in his chair. She waved, passed on to the buffet table and returned with a bowl of lurid fruit salad and a pot of natural yoghurt. Even with dark glasses on, she had a certain glow.

  ‘Morning,’ Lawrence said, his voice emerging strangled. He fell to buttering his toast, which had dried out and so shattered disloyally under pressure. He caught her eye, smiled and saw just a terribly sweet woman who did nothing for him. Whatever had possessed him? Judging from her satisfied feline smile, she was not remotely put out by the memory of the night before; she was prepared, indeed, for some vengeful teasing.

  ‘You both missed the midnight buffet last night,’ said Darius.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked. ‘Leftovers from dinner?’

  ‘No,’ Reuben enthused, ‘a whole new meal. These people live to eat, I tell you. Their ticket price includes food so nothing is to pass them by. There’s a different theme every night. Mexican. Italian. Tutti Frutti.’

  ‘What was last night’s?’

  ‘Scapa Flow, I think. There was a lot of soused herring.’

  ‘I’ll see you all later.’ Lawrence could bear it no longer, so jumped up, taking his coffee with him.

  ‘Vegetable Sculpture at eleven,’ Reuben called after him. ‘Be there or be square.’

  ‘Bridge Basics at twelve,’ Darius added.

  Lawrence drank his coffee on a wrought-iron bench outside an ersatz French patisserie where all cakes were free. It lay at one end of what had once been a promenade open to the elements. He tried to imagine rows of passengers tucked up beneath liveried blankets on steamer chairs; sour older women with wide-eyed daughters, honeymooners too exhausted by passion to do more than clutch hands and gaze out at the passing desert of grey-blue wave, long-married couples united by a tacit agreement to read away a morning in silence. The passengers who strolled here now, however, in their acid-toned tracksuits and unwise shorts, were a far cry from the elegant ghosts they trampled. The bracing spaces in the former promenade had been filled with windows that did not open and the resultant long corridor was left largely chairless, the better to encourage passengers to shop in a string of pointless boutiques. Lawrence frowned at his ‘orientation map’ and saw that he was sitting on the Champs Elysées and could cross to a corresponding deckside ‘street’ no less confidently dubbed Fifth Avenue, which he did in a spirit of depressed curiosity. These were the shops advertised whenever he had turned on his cabin television. They sold cultured pearls and ugly overpriced ‘fashion wear’ with stitched-on motifs, glittery beads and sequins. There was a chemist, a barbershop called Herr Kutz, a beauty parlour called Cheeky Miss, a thinly stocked bookshop-cum-newsagent and rack upon dispiriting rack of souvenirs which bore no discernible relation to any of their Caribbean destinations.

  He caught sight of Bee at the other end of Fifth Avenue. She smiled and seemed to want to speak so he held her at bay with a quick wave and ducked into a stairwell. He began to pace, furiously retracing the tour he had taken with Darius the afternoon before. The sun deck was unpleasantly windy, since they were still mid-Atlantic, and short on sun. Undeterred, a gang of children was already larking around in the outdoor pools, shrieking at the way the dipping and rolling of the ship caused the pool water to slap up over the sides and knock them about. A Paulina childminder, evidently forced to accompany them, was trying to interest them in an inflated plastic beach ball. Her arms were grey and goose-bumped with cold. In the bingo lounge he stumbled on the crowd already assembling for the chef’s vegetable carving demonstration and hurried out again. He passed the ballroom, where another crowd was solemnly learning to chachacha and, realizing he was hungry, ordered more coffee and a chocolate muffin in an area perkily defined as Polly Pretzel’s Milk Bar. He gained no thrill from being served without money changing hands.

  A tall, thin, white-haired man in a check shirt pulled out the other stool at his table.

  ‘Mind if I join you?’

  Lawrence tried not to frown. His mouth was full so he merely shrugged. The man, who was American, sat parallel to Lawrence, also watching the passing
groups of passengers. He stirred some Sweet ‘n’ Low into his coffee, sipped it and sighed.

  ‘So what are you doing in this hell hole?’

  ‘My uncle had a free ticket.’

  ‘You too, huh? Martha won ours in some magazine competition she filled in at the dentist’s. They flew us to London for a week first. I already feel as if we’ve been away for months. Crazy. You don’t look like a bridge player.’

  ‘I’m not. My mother is. He wanted to bring her but she sent me instead. I’m starting to see why.’

  ‘We could always jump ship in Miami.’

  ‘Do we get to go ashore there?’

  ‘We get a whole day. They need to restock the kitchens and take on more gimcrackety crap to sell in these stores, I guess. They’ll be bussing us all out to some remote shopping mall they’ve done some deal with. It’s not exactly An Affair to Remember.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What? Oh. It’s just a film. A very old film.’

  The American drained his coffee and made a face at it.

  ‘Poodle’s piss,’ he muttered. ‘The name’s George.’

  ‘Lawrence.’

  They shook hands and Lawrence noticed he was as tanned and weather-beaten as a cowboy.

  ‘So what do you do, Lawrence?’

  ‘I’m a kind of tree surgeon.’

  ‘Well either you are or you ain’t.’

  ‘I am. I’m a tree surgeon.’ Lawrence felt himself smile. George nodded slowly, watching him.

  ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘It’s good to work outside. Too much indoors drives a man mad. So why’s that?’

  ‘I dunno.’ Lawrence shrugged. ‘I like trees. I like the feel of them. I spent a lot of time climbing them as a boy. I could have been a carpenter, I suppose. I liked the smell of cut timber.’

  ‘And trees don’t yabber all the time, right?’

  ‘Something like that.’ Lawrence smiled again. ‘How about you?’

  ‘I used to farm. Now I’m retired and we’ve moved to the coast. Martha’s a potter. She’s got her kiln and a workshop. Takes it quite seriously now. People have started buying her stuff. Say, if you like trees you should get your hands round one of our sequoias. Now that’s a tree.’

  ‘There you are!’

  A middle-aged woman was approaching them. She might have been George’s twin but for the fact that she was nearly two feet shorter; same tan, same checked shirt, same short white hair. George reached out to take her hand briefly as she pulled up another stool.

  ‘Found another refugee,’ he murmured. ‘Missing his trees.’

  ‘Oh. I hope he hasn’t been depressing you too much, young man.’

  ‘This is Lawrence.’

  ‘I’m Martha. George and Martha. We’ve heard all the jokes and we hate Virginia Woolf.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Seeing Lawrence’s confusion, she patted his arm.

  ‘Oh, nothing. Just an old play. So you miss trees? I just want some grass, tired old cow that I am. Do you play bridge, then, Lawrence?’

  ‘We’ve been through all that. He’s a refugee like us.’

  ‘Oh but I want to learn. There’s a Bridge Basics class at twelve with Darius Blake who’s a real expert so I thought we should– ’

  ‘That’s my uncle.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘He brought me along on this.’

  ‘Well then we must go. George? Just the once? We might love it and we’d get to meet folks.’

  ‘Just what I was afraid of.’

  ‘Oh baloney.’ Martha laughed, showing wonderfully white teeth and smacked her husband playfully on the chest with the back of her hand. ‘I told him when we won this that we didn’t have to come, it wasn’t costing us any, but he was keen as mustard. Deep down,’ she confided to Lawrence, lowering her voice, ‘very deep down, I think he’s sort of enjoying himself. We lead such a quiet life since we sold the farm. Is your wife with you, Lawrence?’ she asked suddenly, having glanced at his battered wedding ring.

  ‘My– er. We’re not together any more.’

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry to hear that,’ she sighed. ‘Any kids?’

  ‘Just the one. A little girl.’

  ‘What’s she called?’

  ‘Lucy.’

  ‘Well that’s the strangest thing. That’s our girl’s name too. She’s long grown up and left us of course. Lives in Seattle now in a converted meat fridge – the darnedest weird place. But her lady friend’s from round there. Rosanna. I’m sorry. Does that shock you?’

  ‘What? Oh. Not really.’

  ‘Quit yabbering, woman.’

  ‘Am I yabbering? I’m sorry. I’ve had women showing me photos of their grandchildren all morning and I reckon it’s got to my brain somehow.’

  She smiled mischievously and Lawrence could not help smiling back, so that she patted the back of his hand.

  ‘Larry here’s a tree surgeon,’ George said gruffly.

  ‘Well isn’t that great. I could tell you worked with your hands on account of the state of them, poor things. You should see the trees up by our place. Hundreds of years old and wider than my Chevy.’

  ‘I was just telling him that when you came along.’

  Lawrence felt almost happy. There was something soothing about the way this couple talked, their bickering speech rhythms mirroring each other like the question and answer calls of two foraging birds. He was disarmed too by their natural admiration of what he did for a living. He had been too long exposed to Bonnie’s friends who plainly viewed the fact that he was not a doctor or a solicitor as a social stile to be scaled with the maximum show of gracious condescension.

  ‘Hello.’ Suddenly Bee was amongst them, wanly smiling, in jeans and a crisp white shirt. She had caught him. She kissed him slyly on the cheek and pulled over a stool so that she was between him and Martha. ‘You vanished so suddenly at breakfast. I missed you,’ she said.

  Oh. Well. I’ve been walking around. Er. This is Martha. This is George. This is Bee.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello, dear.’

  He could see Martha brightly assessing the new arrival. Woman who broke up marriage? Not the type. So she must be Girl he turned to when Wicked Wife left him, poor boy.

  ‘Bee’s a teacher,’ he said. ‘Martha’s a potter.’

  ‘So are you two engaged?’ Martha asked, eyes twinkling as George studiously ignored them all to read an ice cream menu. Bee gasped.

  ‘Well, no,’ she said. ‘Hardly. We’ve barely met.’

  Lawrence pushed back his chair.

  ‘Time for Bridge Basics,’ he mumbled. ‘Darius will kill me if I don’t show willing.’

  ‘Oh but we’re coming with you,’ Martha said.

  ‘Me too,’ added Bee, rising with him. ‘My bidding’s got so rusty.’

  ‘Well I’ll see you down there. I just need to get something. Erm. Bye, George.’

  Face hot with confusion and anger, he hurried away before they could gather themselves to follow. He headed towards his cabin, then realized they could find him there; he had no intention of being dragged off to Bridge Basics for further humiliation after last night’s display.

  How could she? She had seemed so sweet. He had been feeling bad for making a vulgar pass at someone so vulnerable and open. He need not have bothered. He remembered the way she had coyly insinuated herself between him and the old woman, shyly pecking him on the cheek, coming on like a lovebird. He had never been able to take teasing as a child, as a man he found it intolerable. She was going to be merciless, secure in the knowledge that she was unanswerable.

  He angrily punched the button to summon a lift. As he waited, however, he heard Darius’s distinctively fruity tones approaching up the stairwell so he turned aside, hurried back onto the Champs Elysées and dived in at the first open door.

  It was a chapel. Panting, Lawrence barely had time to take in the abstract stained glass, electrically lit from behind, the soft organ music piped from below a ga
udy flower arrangement, the stripped pine pews, the flickering sanctuary lamp, before a man dressed like a Mormon with a buzz cut like a marine’s, had sprung out of the shadows to trap him in a sunny smile and outstretched, seemingly elastic arms. He could have been any age between a sun-wrinkled forty and a sinisterly apple-cheeked sixty-five.

  ‘Welcome welcome. I’m Father Xavier or just Xavier if you prefer, or indeed Father.’ He laughed. It was as though Lawrence had tripped an invisible switch that flung him into motion like some sophisticated puppet. There was a cluster of emblematic badges on his lapel – a crucifix, a star of David, a red ribbon, a pink triangle, a shamrock leaf, a CND symbol and an Islamic moon. ‘Have I left anything out?’ he asked, following Lawrence’s gaze. ‘I am the boat’s all-purpose faith resource and holy person and I tell you the strain can be bewildering sometimes. Come in, come in. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Well actually I was just hiding from somebody.’

  ‘Quite understandable. And so many of them to hide from now.’ He guffawed. His accent was either Welsh, Irish or American and had perhaps started as one, travelled towards the other and become mired between all three in mid-Atlantic. ‘Sit down do. The seats are hard you’ll find but the reception’s soft and non-judgmental. Ha ha. Only my little joke. Come. Sit.’

  Warily, coerced by goodwill, Lawrence sat in the best lit pew. Father Xavier twitched a remote control gadget from his breast pocket and fired it at the flower arrangement. The organ music retreated slightly but the lights, Lawrence was happy to see, dimmed no further.

  ‘Do you have many people seeking you out?’ he asked defensively.

  ‘Not too many. I find if I keep the lights dim and sit with my back to the door, they don’t realise I’m here. Only joking. It’s weddings mainly. You’d be amazed how many people meet on board and want to get married. Of course, I can only bless their union when we’re out at sea but there’s always quite a rush for the full works when we put into a port.’ He sighed. ‘There’s the occasional death, of course. Usually too much alcohol and midnight buffet on top of the wrong medication. Either that or they’ve just blown their life savings and an overwhelming sense of anticlimax carries them off. But you’re not dead and I can see you’re married already, lucky man, so you must be a lost soul.’