Tree Surgery for Beginners

by Patrick Gale

Darius looked about them and shaded his eyes to stare out to sea.

  ‘But the sky’s so blue,’ he said, faintly outraged. ‘There can’t be a storm.’

  As she drove them back to the ship by a different, coastal route, Bee was full of chat. Jerome’s house, apparently, was simple but charming. He was some sort of building contractor as well as a driver for his sister’s firm in high season. He was unmarried. He had never been to England but he had a Scottish grandmother who had come to the island to study birdlife and never left. He was also an excellent cook. Darius tapped Lawrence’s knee and discreetly pointed to where a fluttering label betrayed the fact that her tee shirt was now inside out.

  ‘And did you swim?’ he asked insouciantly.

  ‘Oh no,’ she murmured. ‘Although his place is right on a tiny beach. We were far too busy talking. I’m so glad we came.’ She laughed. ‘I’m so glad no other cars were free.’

  ‘Stop driving so fast,’ Reuben told her.

  ‘Am I? Sorry.’ She slowed a little then gradually speeded up again.

  ‘It’s no use,’ she said. ‘I’m too happy. I can’t pretend. He’s asked me to jump ship and come to stay and I’m going to.’

  Darius’s eyes widened. ‘You can’t!’ Reuben insisted.

  ‘I can and I shall,’ she said. ‘I’ve got enough on my credit card to get home and school doesn’t go back for weeks. Who knows, I might like it so much I might hand in my notice.’

  ‘Bee!’

  ‘Oh Reuben, I’m sorry. It was sweet of you to bring me and I’ve enjoyed the cruise enormously but– Oh God. Are you very cross?’

  ‘I’m worried. That’s all. This is so sudden.’

  ‘But very romantic,’ Darius added and Lawrence noted his private smile.

  ‘Very,’ she enthused. ‘Oh Darius, you understand, don’t you?’ She swerved to avoid a clutch of chickens.

  Opportunity visits one less and less,’ Darius pronounced. ‘And regret is a harsh and unyielding companion.’

  ‘But what about bridge?’ Reuben asked, crestfallen.

  ‘Bridge is going to be the consolation of my old age,’ she said. ‘But it’s not a life substitute.’

  The original plan had been to explore St Martin’s French side a little further and even go to some of the better French shops but, with the careless selfishness of the supremely happy, Bee drove them directly to the Paulina with two hours still to spare. While Darius went to make enquiries on the bridge concerning the approaching storm, Reuben and Lawrence lolled drunkenly on her bed watching her pack and followed her to the purser’s office where she paid her onboard bill with the credit card that was to be her lifeline. She signed a document to confirm that she was leaving the cruise of her own volition and would not hold the company responsible for her return to England. Then she kissed and hugged them both and left hurried verbal messages for Darius, George and Martha before hurrying down to catch a boat back to shore where Jerome had arranged to meet her in a waterfront café.

  Her euphoria was palpable as sunlight. It was unassailable and self-sufficient and reminded Lawrence, with a pang, of Bonnie on their wedding day. She had faced her friends and family with a kind of brave triumph and made it seem that this was a rite of passage in which the joy or displeasure of the groom was immaterial, provided he was there, on time, dressed correctly and prepared to take her away somewhere special once it was all over. Watching Bee stirred up in him inevitable feelings of regret, so that he was left wondering if perhaps he should have pursued her after all. If nothing else, she had been his companion, an unobtrusive source of social support, a kind of ideal sister. Who would he talk to now? Who would help him through the remaining ordeal? Returning from seeing her off, he and Reuben passed a landing where a florist was arranging a vase of calla lilies beside a poster announcing Lala’s fourth and final onboard concert.

  ‘We’re going,’ Reuben sighed. ‘No buts. Darius has a hangover. You can be my date for the evening.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Craig McBride’s single-storey house was beautiful and strange. It was entirely his. He had designed everything down to the chopping board and shoe rack. In a city of architectural treasures, it was hard to resist comparisons, although Bonnie kept them to herself. It was as though Frank Lloyd Wright had collaborated with a Japanese craftsman. Presenting a blank, almost fortified air to the outside-although the outside was nothing more threatening than leafily suburban Oak Park-symmetrical yew hedge, concrete wall and shoji-screened windows concealed a series of serene interlocking rooms arranged in a perfect square about a sunny courtyard garden that held more stone and wood than unruly living matter. There was a deep, square pond in the centre, where white lilies and zandestechia flowered and ghostly koi rose to feed from one’s fingers. There was a magnificently phallic menhir balanced by a more feminine cluster of smooth rocks which glistened and revealed colours when it rained. Inside, the walls and floors were made of wood but Craig had varied the wall panels so that each room’s colour was dictated by its tree of origin. There was oak, of course, white pine, cork and beech but smaller areas had drawn on more luxurious timbers like walnut and maple. He had ordered successively sliced sheets of wood so that each wall contained an evolving pattern like a perverse wallpaper. The master bedroom was lined with incense cedar so that it smelled like a cigar box. Even the bath was wooden, made to a Japanese design with the aid of a bemused firm of Midwestern coopers. Bonnie’s beloved John Minton was the only painting in the entire place. She had not dared to request a picture hook, so it still rested at one end of a bookcase.

  Blatantly charm the daughter though he might, if Craig had wooed the mother, he had done so with such stealthy sensitivity she was quite unaware of it.

  ‘Come for three weeks,’ he said at first. ‘Then see. Relax. Take stock. I can find you some work if you want it. We’re surrounded by gardens in need of you.’

  He had clients to talk to and sites to check on but he took time off to show her and Lucy the city. They rode the lifts up the Sears Tower, went to a concert by the symphony orchestra, visited the Art Institute and paid homage at the altars of Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies Van de Rohe and Louis Sullivan. They took picnics to the beach. He found Lucy a cheerful dumpling of a baby-sitter some friends used and took Bonnie with him to a few parties. At first he merely walked her round easy, work-related receptions where there was no pressure on her. Then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, he took her to a few dinner parties where she met his oldest friends and his sister, who Bonnie liked immediately. They then called on his widowed mother, who baked raisin bran cookies for Lucy and gently scrutinized her son’s new, gardening friend under cover of asking her to identify some label-less plants she had picked up at a charity fair.

  Little by little she was introduced, purely as a friend, but she was introduced. Little by little she picked up scraps and traces of Craig’s ex-wife, Vi, who had left him suddenly for a man she met at the opera and who now lived in Boston. Little acrimony was held against Vi. Craig certainly dismissed it as a precipitous marriage of two people barely old enough to cook a meal, much less pay for it. Everyone spoke of her with a hint of laughter in their voices. She was plainly held to be a fool but they were all relieved at her folly for she was a fool who would surely have matured into a monster.

  ‘Craig’s a catch,’ their tone conveyed to Bonnie. ‘Don’t make the same mistake Vi made …’

  She felt some of them assume he was her lover but could hardly correct them when nothing was overtly declared. Adrift as she was in an emotional limbo, numbly recuperating, she found herself unable to speak firmly of the future or of her return to England in a way that would immediately clear up any misinterpretations of her state.

  The end of the second week came and then of the third.

  ‘Do you mind if I stay a bit?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll mind if you go,’ he answered her.

  He found her a near neighbour who wanted an English rose garde
n planning. He suggested she take the job on ‘just for fun’. Just for fun, Lucy was introduced on a temporary basis at the lively neighbourhood nursery school, which she loved. The child was learning to swear allegiance to the flag of her new country and developed a taste for peanut butter and ‘jelly’ sandwiches and now she was having an all-American birthday when she would normally have had a few friends over for cake and party games and been spoiled by Dora.

  Bonnie and Lucy were sitting at the kitchen breakfast bar. At the sound of a car engine and the garage doors purring into action, Bonnie looked up from the bulb catalogue she had been poring over. Lucy looked up simultaneously from the drawing pad that had been one of her birthday presents. The birthday girl had been sulking slightly since being thwarted in her desire to visit a neighbourhood ice cream parlour. In these last days, Bonnie had noticed, she tended to sulk only for her mother’s benefit, setting her jaw, narrowing her mouth and becoming a small, watchful piece of Lawrence. Usually this look and the sullen behaviour that went with it vanished in Craig’s presence, for the child was already a mistress of the manipulation of males. Just occasionally, when he was driving them somewhere, Bonnie would glance over her shoulder or peer in the rear-view mirror and see Lucy hunched on her booster cushion on the back seat, staring scornfully at Craig with her father’s dark eyes. Bonnie could not fathom whether Lucy hated him and was hypocritically sweet to his face or loved him and merely mimed hating him behind his back to punish her mother.

  ‘Is that Craig?’ the child asked now.

  Bonnie nodded and grinned.

  ‘That’s right. Which means it’s time for someone’s birthday treat.’

  ‘What are we doing?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask him.’

  ‘No but what? The zoo? Ice skating? What?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Bonnie laughed. ‘He organized it all. It’s his treat for you.’

  Lucy hesitated a moment then, hearing the door that linked house to garage open, she flung down her felt tip and raced to meet him.

  Hearing his laughter and her shouts, Bonnie could almost imagine her calling him Daddy. Lucy still missed her father, although the intervals when she forgot to mention him were already growing heartlessly longer. Once she asked, in a particularly irritating whine, whether he was ill or maybe lost.

  ‘We can’t see him for a while. Mummy and Daddy need to be apart for a bit. We– We make each other cross, remember?’

  ‘But I want to see him. I want to see him today,’ the child retorted.

  Bonnie saw Lawrence in her petulant face and lost her temper.

  ‘Don’t you remember? You were there! You found me on the bloody kitchen floor!’

  All child again, Lucy turned pale and wept so copiously that Bonnie worried she might have traumatized her. When Lucy mentioned him again, a few hours later, it was with almost comic caution as ‘him’.

  ‘Who?’ Bonnie asked.

  ‘Him. You know. Lawrence.’

  Daddy had apparently become too conflict-ridden a concept to grasp. As mere Lawrence, he was demoted to the safer level of Black Bun or the characters in Sesame Street – to be invoked with the sheepish awareness that he was not entirely real. Today, however, Craig had anticipated she might begin to pine afresh when Lawrence failed to appear on her birthday so he had laid on a spectacular birthday treat: a trip to a theme park, then to a new Walt Disney film and then to a pizzeria.

  She wondered anew if he were perhaps seducing her through her daughter, manoeuvring Lucy into playing Cupid like some Old Hollywood moppet matchmaker:

  Oh please say you love him, Mummy. Pretty please? He’s said he’ll buy me a pony and a kitten and a new pink party dress with seed pearls. Oh please Mummy!’

  Tidying away the new felt tip set and sketch pad, Bonnie snorted at the very idea. She glanced at the pictures with a twinge of guilty anxiety, looking for codified images of sadness and loss amid the giant bumblebees, foursquare houses, triangle-skirted stick women and smiling flowers. Craig strode into view, bouncing Lucy on broad shoulders.

  ‘Hi, honey. I’m home,’ he said with a grin and she sniffed for truth beneath the satire.

  She had always marvelled at how handsome he was – film star handsome, chiselled. His eyes were so true a blue she had heard him accused of wearing coloured contact lenses. His prematurely silver hair was thick and fell naturally into loose waves like the hair on a statue. With eyes only for Lawrence, she had been disconcerted when she first met Craig to discuss the university landscaping. His looks seemed so remarkable as to demand some acknowledgement. Then she had easily dismissed them. He was decorative, certainly, she told herself, but not specifically sexy like Lawrence. He was slightly too good-looking. He was no temptation. Thereafter she had unconsciously used humour as a Craig-vaccine, commenting satirically on his good looks in front of him to show that yes, she admired them but no, they stirred no dark unspoken longings.

  In the pizzeria this evening, however, he looked at her and she changed her mind. Worn out by pleasure and so much stimulus, Lucy fell heavily asleep against him on the banquette across from Bonnie. He tucked an arm about the child to stop her sliding off, like a dad to the manner born, and reached for his coffee with his free, left hand. Raising the cup to his lips, his eyes met Bonnie’s with such warm directness that she froze for a moment then had to look away. She felt that her chest, not her cheeks, was blushing. She thought of Mia Farrow as a star-struck waitress whose idol suddenly turns out of his celluloid setting to make public advances to her. This was an unscripted moment. She realized that, precisely because of his looks, she had not treated him as a flesh-and-blood male and had made no allowances for any emotional life, any vulnerable desire that might be uncoiling beneath that Hollywood exterior.

  ‘So,’ he said after a moment. ‘You wrote to him.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, snapping pieces of Lucy’s half-munched bread stick. ‘I wrote to Dora and I wrote to him.’

  ‘No reply?’

  ‘I didn’t tell them where we are. But I doubt he’d write anyway. He’s not a letter writer. Words unsettle him.’

  Craig sighed.

  ‘How did you two ever come together?’

  ‘Girlhood crush. He was the hired help. I seduced him.’

  ‘You’re kidding me.’ She nodded ruefully.

  ‘Then, a bit later, he came to my rescue when a scumbag gave me a hard time.’

  ‘Just like me.’ He gave her that look again.

  ‘He’s not a scumbag,’ she said quickly and waved to a waiter for the bill.

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Let’s just …’ She thought a moment. ‘Let’s just not discuss him, okay? There’s nothing to agree on. It doesn’t solve a thing.’

  He drove them home solicitously, like a good cab driver, with them on the backseat, Lucy fast asleep with her head in Bonnie’s lap. Neither spoke. She stared out at the still unfamiliar streets, the great, louring Loop, rich window displays, glittering, black-faced towers. While they were waiting at some lights, Lucy broke the silence by snoring softly and the adults laughed, catching each other’s glance in the rear-view mirror, then Craig slid some quiet jazz cassette into the player. Thelonius Monk. It was one of the only two tapes in the car so, if only by virtue of enforced repetition, was fast becoming the theme tune of the trip, holiday, escape, whatever this was. Their tune.

  Unlike Lawrence, whose silent presence was impossible to ignore, Craig had a way of melting away for hours at a stretch, suddenly absorbed like a thoughtful boy, at his drawing board or over a magazine. He vanished that night when they returned home. Bonnie swept a grouchily waking daughter off to bath and bed as soon as they were out of the garage. Sliding Lucy’s door softly closed, she anticipated a mellow, companionate hour of sitting around with a bourbon and some music and was disappointed to find the living area and library in darkness. She took a delicious soak in the wooden tub instead, leaning back against its steep, warm side.

  When sh
e climbed into bed, she glanced across the courtyard as had become her habit. Lucy’s window was dark, naturally, but she could see Craig in bed, tortoiseshell glasses sliding down his nose as he read the long novel he claimed to have been battling with for the last year and a half. She watched him for perhaps five minutes before he looked up and noticed her. He smiled and adjusted his glasses. She held his gaze until his smile melted then she pointedly flicked back the bedding on the other half of her bed and looked up at him again. Grinning now, he did the same.

  Leaving her light on, she walked to the window, slid it back a couple of feet, then stole, naked and shivering, across the courtyard, treading the path of light from her bed to his. The brief, significant passage from one room to the other felt risky, yes, and transgressive, but, perhaps because of the light at her back, not irrevocable. There was a remote control panel at his bedside however and once he had taken her in his arms and kissed her, steering her through the giant cigar box to his bed, he used it to dim his own lights and plunge her distant room into darkness. As far as he was concerned, it seemed, her vote was cast.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  From the moment he knocked on her cabin door Lawrence was lost. In so far as there was a battle, he had ceded her the victory. She had already abased herself quite enough, apparently, and now it was his turn. At first she was all charmed, torturing surprise, as though he were some helpless fan in her dressing room and she had no idea, none whatsoever, why he should have come. She forced him to ask politely, worse, to beg, to spell out what he wanted.

  ‘You,’ he stammered. ‘I want you. I can’t stop thinking about you. No one need know. Please. Even if it’s just once more. Please.’

  He had never felt so humiliated. Even when he pleaded, she tortured him. She waited. She smiled. She crossed her legs and ate a grape.

  ‘You took your time,’ she said at last, still watching him.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know what you wanted. I thought perhaps …’