Tree Surgery for Beginners

by Patrick Gale

  They reached the car. Bee took the wheel since it was booked in her name and he began his escape.

  ‘Shit,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I forgot something. Er. Hang on. I won’t be a sec– ’

  He began to open the door but she accelerated.

  ‘No you don’t,’ she said.

  ‘But I– ’

  ‘It’s only lunch. It’ll be fun.’

  ‘Stop the car. I’ve got to– Bee, bloody stop the car!’

  ‘No!’ she laughed.

  She swerved to avoid a bollard and he reached instinctively for his seat belt. Strapped in, powerless, he felt a spasm of black rage pass through him. In the last twenty-four hours he had been thinking of Lucy so much, it was as though his daughter were waiting for him, sunnily alone and accessible at the quayside and did not still have to be tracked the country’s vast length. Teasing, oblivious Bee was driving him away from her, for something as transitory as a laugh. Then Bee turned briefly, saw his expression and, shocked, indicated right and pulled over near the entrance to the docks.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m being childish. You really don’t want to go, do you? I’ll drive us back.’ She was quite unafraid of him, as she had said the day before. She was only stopping because she saw he was upset and she respected his feelings.

  ‘No,’ he said, looking at the empty benches on the quayside and telling himself it was all one whether he set off for Chicago and Lucy now or in a few hours’ time. And he was, perhaps, just a little curious to see if Lala would be diminished when encountered beyond the unnatural confines of a liner. ‘I was the one being childish. Drive on.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Honest.’ He looked at the map. ‘It’s only lunch. What can she do? Eat me?’

  She drove on, and smiled to herself.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘Is it left or right when we hit the main road?’

  It was, indeed, the house of a star, one of several waterside mansions with high fences, densely planted gardens and security cameras. It was older than the Art Deco concoctions they had passed along South Beach; a fanciful, almost Moorish structure with a bell tower and arched colonnades like an old Spanish mission. Lawrence climbed out and was evidently seen on a camera because the gates began to swing open by remote control before he even reached out a hand to the bellpull. As they rolled onto the drive and the gates swung shut behind them, Bee threw him a mischievous glance.

  ‘Beauty arrives at Beast Castle,’ she said. ‘Nervous?’

  ‘Shut up and drive.’

  ‘God! The size of those palms!’

  Lala greeted them on the steps, for all the world as if she lived there and had not left the ship a mere hour before them. Like Bee, she had dressed for a wedding, only in French navy and without the hat.

  ‘What a pretty hat,’ she said kissing Bee’s cheek. ‘So glad you could come. Oh and you brought young Larry. Good. Come on in. I’ll show you around. It’s the loveliest place. For a rock singer, she’s a clever shopper.’

  She did not ignore Lawrence exactly, but she treated him like the sweet but slightly dull spouse of a cherished friend. All her attention, all her seductive attention, was devoted to Bee. As she showed them around the ground floor of the mansion – which had, in fact, been a home to Spanish missionary nuns and still retained a cloister planted with citrus trees – she gently took Bee’s arm in hers and patted it from time to time with an unringed hand. She made no allusion to the attentions she had paid Lawrence on the boat, to the flowers, the champagne, the gardenias now wilting in the fierce sun on his cabin balcony. Occasionally she drew him in with a casual ‘Don’t you find that, Larry?’ or ‘What do you think, Larry?’ only to proceed with her wooing of his companion before he could muster much of an answer.

  There was a manicured garden at the rear of the house which descended in graceful stages to a balcony overlooking a kind of lagoon and a landing stage. There was an inviting swimming pool, lined with midnight-blue tiles and the occasional flash of gold, which made it seem far deeper than it probably was. Unseen hands – surely not Lala’s – had laid lunch out on a table beside it in the relative cool of a vast cotton shade. White cloth, white plates, white napkins, gaudy food.

  ‘Fruit punch? You must both be thirsty after the drive and it’s my own recipe.’

  She filled three tall glasses with an orangey pink liquid and handed them round. It tasted of strawberry, mango, banana and something indefinable but alcoholic.

  ‘Nectar,’ Bee exclaimed. ‘I must be careful if I’m to drive back.’

  ‘Oh there’s hardly a thing in it,’ Lala assured her. ‘Nearly all fruit. Now I want you here on my right and perhaps Larry could sit on the other side. You don’t mind if I call you Larry? Now Bee, tell me all about your work. Children, isn’t it?’

  ‘Little boys, God help me.’

  ‘Delightful.’

  The three of them ate. Cold fried chicken. Chargrilled peppers. Rice salad. Baby artichokes in tomato vinaigrette. They ate and the women talked. Seas of talk, about children and childhood, marriage, death, chance, twins, astrology. Lawrence lost all track of the conversation, consumed as he was by the glimpses he was gaining of Lala’s body. She had discarded her jacket to reveal a sleeveless dress. When she raised her glass to her lips, or reached out a hand for a dish, he could see a braless breast. When she stooped to retrieve Bee’s tumbled napkin, she afforded him a generous view of her cleavage. It was ironic that the conversation should have begun with a discussion of little boys for he could not remember having his thoughts so jangled by the suggestiveness of a clothed female form since he fell in love with his French teacher at ten and began to receive even poorer marks than usual because he was too busy watching for flashes of her chaste, white bra strap to concentrate on what she was saying. When Lala stood to offer him coffee, she had to ask twice because he was too intently wondering if she were wearing any underwear at all.

  ‘Isn’t it heaven?’ Bee asked happily, pouring herself yet another glass of punch. ‘Aren’t you glad you came after all? Better than trudging round some dreary house.’ She moved to a reclining chair, sat in it rather heavily, sipped her drink, pushed her sunglasses higher on her nose and kicked off her shoes. ‘Bliss,’ she confirmed.

  Lala returned from the house with a silver coffee pot and two white cups. As if in sympathy, she too had removed her shoes but Lawrence noticed that she continued to walk on tiptoe, as though on the ghosts of heels. She said nothing but threw him a strange, direct glance as she filled his cup. She held out a cup to Bee.

  ‘Bee, darling?’ Bee did not stir. She had fallen fast sleep. ‘Looks like the sort that burns,’ Lala murmured and softly trundled the shade into place over Bee’s head and shoulders, leaving her thin legs to toast. Lawrence had risen, ostensibly to walk about the pool. The sun was now full overhead and catching on the small gold tiles so that they shot darts of cold fire about the unstirred water. ‘Here.’ Lala took his cup from him. ‘Come and see.’

  He followed her into the house, where the sudden shadow blinded him at first, and up a wide, wooden staircase. The blue dress, which had seemed so respectable at first glance, was actually far sexier than the blatant outfits she wore to perform. As she climbed the stairs in front of him, it revealed the alternate squeezing motions of her buttocks and laid bare the muscular length of her legs. He had thought she was wearing no scent but now that they were indoors and he was walking close in her wake, he breathed it again and felt a pit in his guts and a constriction in his chest. He itched to lay hands on her. When she led him to a huge, white, shaded room where thin drapes drifted in the breeze about a great boat of a bed and, with one neat movement, unzipped her dress and let it fall so that she stood naked before him, he had never been so grateful for a lack of wordy preliminaries.

  She let him kiss her lips, her breasts, her belly, her bush, while she stood, still on tip toe, swaying under his grasps and mouthings, then she stepped asid
e to part the bed drapes.

  ‘Medusa’s raft,’ she said.

  He clambered up past her, pulled her beside him and continued to rifle through her like a hungry burglar. She helped him undress, produced a condom from somewhere and, with a small purr, somehow slid it onto him with her mouth.

  ‘What about Bee?’ he muttered.

  ‘How many drinks did she get down her?’

  ‘Three or four.’

  ‘We’ve got hours, then.’

  ‘Did you put something in them? We all drank from the same jug.’

  ‘Oldest trick in the world; I spiked her ice. Just a little something I get on prescription for long flights. She’ll be having fabulous dreams down there. Dear girl. Now. Go back to where you were at. I liked that.’

  Making love with Bonnie, Lawrence had felt constrained, both by his fear lest she detect any slackening of his desire for her and by a sense that it was not enough to be merely himself. Even when they were making up after a quarrel, sex between them tended to occur within a vacuum. It always felt as though she were striving to lose herself in bed and play some role and there was a corresponding onus on him to do the same. While she became someone else, non-wife, non-mother, a kind of temporary, amateur whore, so he must become some ideal stud rather than mere husband. He closed himself in for her, became impregnable, invulnerable, tireless. The result was that those times when they should have felt most intimately open to one another were the times of least communication. It was easier to maintain a show of appetite if he made himself a stranger to her for the duration. For the seconds when he raged at her in jealousy, she became an it to him, a thing. For the long minutes when he strove to satisfy her, he objectified himself in turn. He was often tempted to rise early before she woke and tire himself out with work so that he nodded off in an armchair after dinner and had to be gently woken and sent to bed wrapped in an invalid’s chastity. But once there he would worry about McBugger and the comparisons between them, and rouse himself to the challenge.

  Perhaps it was merely a condition of it being their first encounter or perhaps it was an effect of making love in such broad daylight in a space which belonged to neither of them, but with Lala he felt doubly naked, unable to be other than himself. Her gaze was a magnifying glass, her touch an entomologist’s pin. Just as the filtered sunlight exposed the slight crepiness of her upper arms and his incipient belly, so he felt she knew him for what he was and, in each case, the exposure was at once unnerving and a relief.

  Her hair was clearly her own – she winced when he pulled it slightly and tugged his own in retaliation. So were her breasts, great soft globes which weighed heavily in his hands as he cupped them from behind. She was unscarred, unhairy. Everyone had lied about her. She was very tall, that was all, and long-limbed. And yet, as she twined strong legs about him, as she pushed his face hard against the bank of pillows, as she pinned his hands above his head and trailed a nipple across his straining lips like a questing fingertip, he could not rid his mind of the ambiguity the slander had sown there or deny the covert excitement it was causing him. She came like a man too, letting him work her to a single climax in which she flexed herself and ground spasmodically against him as though to wring out the last drop of strength he had to offer. He fell asleep afterwards. In that respect, the experience was not unusual.

  When he came to, the light in the room had softened considerably and Lala was standing at the foot of the bed, dressed again, sipping a glass of water and watching him.

  ‘You should be getting back to the boat,’ she said.

  ‘Who needs to go anywhere?’ he murmured, his head full of sleep. After nearly a week of his monastic cabin, the bed was too comfortable to leave, the heavy sheets too cool.

  ‘Mrs Anthony Martin does for one.’

  ‘I forgot all about her.’

  She muttered something in a foreign language. It sounded ironic and she released one of her distant, crooked smiles.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing. She’s still asleep. Concepcion’s made some fresh coffee. I must go. The launch is waiting for me.’

  And she was gone. He heard a boat revving away on the water. Not a kiss. Not a farewell. Not a word to acknowledge what had passed between them.

  He slept again. He woke. He dozed. He forced himself to shake the drowsiness from him, took a moment to find his bearings then lurched off the bed in search of clothes. Now that she had left, he felt like an intruder in the house. Fastening his belt as he bounded down the stairs again, he wondered if this was indeed her friend’s house or whether Lala had not merely forced an entry by way of setting him up for some elaborate punishment. Cooling coffee was indeed waiting at the poolside but there was not a sign of the maid she had mentioned.

  ‘Bee? Bee, wake up. It’s– shit! It’s late. We’ve got to hurry. Here. Coffee. Drink!’ Bee rubbed bleary eyes, groaned and reached for the tepid cup automatically, as a baby would a bottle. He imagined wailing sirens, flashing blue lights, a sudden swarm of heavily armed police over the wall and up from the landing stage. ‘Bee, hurry. Come on. You’ve been asleep for hours.’

  ‘When– God!’

  She lurched to her feet then sank drunkenly back, clutching her head.

  ‘Come on. I’ll hold you. We’re going to be late. Where are the keys?’

  ‘Er … I dunno.’ She found the keys and dropped them inches from the pool’s brim. He lunged for them as she sank back into the chair.

  Somehow he half-walked, half-dragged her to the car, leaped in on the driver’s side and negotiated his way back through Miami, snatching perilous glances at the map fluttering on his knees. He caught sight of clocks as he drove by shops or offices. He still had time to get Bee back through customs and on to the ship and, if he ran, snatch up his luggage and leave. It was madness to contemplate the alternative.

  Immigration was a nightmare, however, as Bee was barely capable of standing unassisted, still less of answering for herself. He apologized profusely, said she had drunk too much at lunch without realizing it would react badly with the medication she was on. Medication was a foolish word to use. Increasingly suspicious, the officials wanted to know what drugs she was taking and, when he could not say and when it emerged that he was neither her lover nor blood relative, were all for performing a blood test for narcotics on both of them. Luckily, Father Xavier appeared behind them, breathless from some lone foray on the mainland, and insisted he could vouch for the young people’s probity. He even had them procure Bee a wheelchair.

  ‘Touch of Florida sunstroke, I’ve no doubt,’ he said as they parted company. ‘She’s naturally pale. Just like me. Celtic skin. We burn in a flash. Peace of the Lord.’

  The next obstacle was settling Bee into her cabin. All the fuss had apparently caused her dopiness to wear off and replaced it with a mounting, drug-enhanced panic attack.

  ‘Don’t leave me!’ she cried. ‘Where are you going? What happened to me? Why am I in a wheelchair?’

  Hating himself for his irresponsibility, he poured her a stiff brandy from her mini-fridge ‘for medicinal purposes’ and sat with her till she passed out afresh.

  He ran so hard to his cabin that he thought his lungs would burst, flung open the door and let out a groan of frustration. A new chambermaid, freshly embarked, had seen his cases and, assuming them to belong to a passenger joining the cruise from Miami onwards, had kindly unpacked them and hung or folded everything back into the cupboards. She had even slipped some crumpled chinos into the trouser press. He threw everything back in the cases pell-mell, crushing fabric, snagging buttons, and broke a tooth glass in his rush to retrieve the wash things so conscientiously rearranged on the bathroom shelf. Matters were not made easier by the chambermaid returning, realizing her awful blunder, trying to make amends by refolding clothes and, when he shouted at her to get out of the bloody way, melting into loud Cuban lamentations.

  ‘Lucy,’ he thought, as he ran down seven flights of stairs rather than wa
it for a crowded lift. ‘Hold the doors. Make them hold the doors, Lucy.’ All his efforts were in vain, however. The doors were closing, the last gangplank about to be withdrawn. He tried to explain himself, got caught up in a confrontation with the purser, who misunderstood and thought he wanted to leave because the cruise was not up to standard in some way, and was then sneered at when it emerged that he was travelling in a luxury cabin free of charge and merely wanted to leave to pursue some mother and child to a Midwestern address for which he had neither telephone number nor zip code.

  Defeated, Lawrence returned to his cabin and placated and tipped the chambermaid who was near prostration at the thought of how foolish and obstructive her helpfulness had proved. As the Paulina throbbed into motion once more, he unpacked his cases a third time then mournfully chose clothes for dinner. He had already learned that there was nothing so shaming as a child disappointed by assurances given then broken. As he set about watering the parched gardenias he suffered a shame so profound he felt it should be displayed livid on his face for all to see.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Leaving Miami as the sun was setting, the Paulina sailed out past Cuba and down into the Caribbean. There were to be three nights at sea before its arrival on the Dutch side of St Martin. The atmosphere on board underwent subtle changes, emphasized by the departure of some passengers and the intake of new ones. The temperature rose dramatically, some parts of the ship becoming as stickily humid as a palm house. Passengers wore less and began to colonize the broad outdoor spaces, where the waiting staff were kept busy as consumption of sickly faux-Caribbean cocktails soared. Where the Atlantic crossing had been marked by a near frantic struggle against boredom as passengers rushed from activity to class to social gathering, the leisured passage into calmer, warmer waters saw them neglecting bridge clinic and dance class to spend hour on sweltering hour basking on serried rows of plastic couches. The lifts and bars were sweet with sun tan lotion, the faces at dinner browner, more relaxed. More used to heat, perhaps, the American passengers maintained a more energetic front, bouncing around the jogging track and assembling noisy games of basketball. The British showed a tendency to bewail delightedly how lazy the warmth was making them.