Tree Surgery for Beginners

by Patrick Gale

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  ‘I suppose I was spoilt,’ Bonnie sighed. She was talking on automatic pilot, her attention taken up by the view. Dr Marcus lived near the top of a high-rise block on the Outer Drive facing Lake Michigan and back across Chicago. The extreme altitude rendered the lake and cityscape a crawling map. On grey days, Dr Marcus’s apartment was often inside a bank of cloud. On windy days, Bonnie fancied she could feel the whole place sway like a ship. The sense of removal from the earth made it easier to talk, as though one had absentmindedly died, nothing mattered any more and Dr Marcus’s apartment, with its elegant blond parquet and contemporary Italian furniture was a sparse but fashionably decorated staging post on the way to whatever came next.

  ‘Yes?’ Dr Marcus prompted. She rarely spoke. When she did, her voice was warm but studiedly neutral, interested but never prurient.

  ‘My mother dying so young – I mean when I was so young – meant that I was his daughter and sort of wife too. I mean he didn’t molest me or anything. But I had him all to myself. Every young girl’s dream.’ Bonnie broke off again, turning her head slightly as she lay back on the deep purple sofa to watch a seagull from the lake wheel and hover, riding the uprush of wind caused by the building. When Craig first brought them here, Lucy had insisted on calling the lake the sea, because it had beaches, boats and appropriate birdlife.

  ‘You never mention your mother. Why do you think that is?’ Dr Marcus asked.

  ‘I never knew her. She meant nothing to me.’

  ‘Are you sad about that?’

  ‘Why should I be? I had no mother. Like I say, every young girl’s dream.’

  Silence floated down between them like a piece of gauze. Dr Marcus liked to use the silence, Bonnie realized. Silence was her thumbscrew. She looked at her watch. There were five minutes to go. It was always in these last minutes that she began to feel the need to talk properly, deeply, and time ran out on her and the next session always began back at a superficial first square. Bonnie watched the second hand on the watch. The silence oppressed her.

  ‘I never realized this would involve me doing so much talking. You send me home hoarse,’ she said. Dr Marcus said nothing. ‘And no, I’m not twitchy because I’m used to being controlled and led. I’m not the bloodless English wimp you think I am,’ she laughed bitterly. ‘Just because I sit here and cry for a whole hour sometimes. I have a life. I stand on my own two feet. I’m not some victim, you know. I left him, remember. I got out. I’m rebuilding my life. I know Craig thinks I blame myself for what happened but he’s wrong. I don’t, any more than I think I blame myself for letting things get to the stage they did. It only happened once. I’m not a battered wife. I’ve read the books. I know there are meant to be these weird women who sort of attract violent men and connive in it all and manipulate themselves into a position where they need to be beaten. But I think that’s a stupid, dangerous lie and anyway, as I say, I’m not one of them. The violence between us was a one-off, an accident. It happened to him as much as to me. Now I’m outside it, and it set me free. I can see that. And I can see he loved me. In a way. I think …’ She tailed off. The minute hand had reached the vertical.

  ‘And Craig?’ Dr Marcus prompted.

  ‘It’s time to go.’

  ‘That’s alright. There’s no one after you. What about Craig?’

  ‘Craig.’ Bonnie sat up. She let her feet slide to the floor and slip into her shoes, then she relaxed. She felt his arms about her, his sleeping breath on the back of her neck. ‘Craig really loves me. It took me so by surprise. I think it surprised him too. First he was just helping me, holding open a door so I could run away and then I found he was the one I was running to. It’s just that …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Sometimes I think my sorrow, my confusion over Dad, whatever, I think it offends him.’

  Dr Marcus raised her plucked eyebrows minutely, requesting more.

  ‘Maybe if Craig had had children himself before Vi left him, he’d understand better. But he’s an architect,’ Bonnie explained. ‘He requires perfection. He’s not a monster, not some psycho who lines up all the towels just so, he doesn’t want me to be perfect but. But I think that, well, Lucy and everything, since then, it’s become a sort of blemish he wants taken away. You know he pays for these sessions?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He insisted. I don’t mind. No reflection on you, but I don’t think they’re helping much. But it reassures him to feel he’s doing something. He has faith in specialists. If some stone cracks, he gets a mason. If a plaster pigment comes out in blotches, he calls in a colourist. When his bereaved girlfriend’s father turns out to be a murderer and she sits opposite him in expensive restaurants and cries on the foie gras, he calls in a soul doctor.’

  Bonnie smiled wryly and stood up. ‘Living up here,’ she began. ‘Don’t you ever want a garden? Trees and things?’

  Dr Marcus merely shrugged. She walked Bonnie to the door. She was all in grey as usual, right down to little grey suede ankle boots, which were a mistake. Bonnie imagined her wardrobes, shelves of thunder-cloud cashmere, silver silk, elephant moiré, pigeon-wing cotton, a whole rack of elegant non-commitment.

  ‘I’ll see you on Wednesday, Bonnie,’ she said.

  Bonnie took the glass lift rather than the internal one. Re-entering the world from this height was like suicide in slow motion.

  On the way home through Oak Park, she stopped off to check on the rose garden she had completed for a client two months previously. She had several pieces of work on her drawing board now. Only one of them was for Craig, which was as it should be. The rose garden was the simplest project to date but, of its nature, the hardest to maintain. Because she liked to be able to send potential clients to view her previous work whenever possible, she needed to be sure the Balmains’ gardener was doing his work correctly. The Balmains were away at their Cape Cod hideaway which was a relief because she found their attention oppressive. A childless couple, they were all too keen to treat her like a daughter, which she found faintly sinister.

  She let herself in at the high gate in their unusual copper beech hedge and slipped around the side of the house to the lawn. The rose garden was settling in well. It was of a suitably unadventurous design; a perfect square divided into four equilateral triangles. Herringbone paths of slate and red brick ran from corner to corner, crossing through a central gazebo with a circular seat. Lavender bushes marked the entrances to each path and clipped box hedges delineated the four beds. The gazebo was to be grown over with jasmine for shade and scent.

  Bonnie walked along one of the paths, noting that, as she had requested, the roses were not being too tightly trained yet. She frowned, seeing that one of the jasmine plants had died and tugged it up, making a mental note to complain to the nursery that the stock they sold her had not been sufficiently hardened off for bedding out.

  ‘Bonnie, darling!’

  ‘Hell.’ Bonnie straightened up and turned to see Cindy Balmain, broad, tanned and predatory, crossing the lawn to greet her.

  ‘Welcome back,’ she said aloud. ‘We weren’t expecting you for a week yet. Sorry. This jasmine’s withered. I’ll get you another from the nursery.’

  ‘Really? Oh. Never mind that. How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  Cindy circled her shoulders in a beefy arm and steered her towards the house.

  ‘Really? We’ve been so worried about you. It’s the most horrible thing. I know it’s months ago now but I just can’t get over it. Dick kept saying the way I carry on people would think it was one of my own. But I can’t help it.’ She sniffed. ‘But enough about me. You must come in and have a drink and tell me everything. How’re you doing and dear, sweet Craig and that nice Doreen?’

  ‘Dora. Her name’s Dora.’ Bonnie thought of Dora with a pang. Cindy Balmain’s emotional blowziness always made her pine for Dora’s elegant, citric restraint. ‘Cindy, I’d love to but I’m late as it is and I promis
ed Craig …’

  ‘Now don’t you let him control you like he did Vi.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. But thanks and I’ll sort the jasmine out tomorrow.’

  Bonnie ran for the car.

  Returning to Craig’s house, she walked round the building’s entire square, opening all the doors, enjoying the sense that its quiet symmetry restored her equilibrium. Craig’s cleaner amused herself by sliding the doors shut as she worked her way around the place, which left the house feeling clean but airless as an Egyptian tomb. Walking from door to door, Bonnie could not help recalling how Lucy, fractious after the long journey from Barrowcester – effectively from Paris – had immediately cheered up on arrival and run from room to room, laughing as though the building were one delightful puzzle, which in a dry, architectural sense, it was. Because most of the rooms were infinitely adaptable and the futons easy to move and reassemble, Craig let Lucy have a choice of five. Bonnie had expected her to choose the one nearest her and took it as a good sign that she selected one on the opposite side of the square, lined in creamy ash. The child had already realized that, though the housebound route was long, she could reach her mother quickly enough by sliding open the window onto the courtyard. At night, too, they were able to wave to one another from their beds, which Lucy thought funny. Craig’s room, the cedar-lined one, was on yet another side of the square, so Bonnie could see him too.

  She slid back another door, stepped forward then faltered and came to a staring standstill. She had arrived in the ash room before she could check herself. She had managed to avoid it for months until now, taking circuitous routes or crossing the courtyard and re-entering via their shared workroom. But now here she was. The cleaner had long since stripped and washed the bedding, but Craig had not thought to move the futon again and the drawers beneath it were still full of Lucy’s clothes. A favourite bedtime book of hers, Noisy Noises, still lay on the bedside table along with a clutch of the plastic ‘jewellery’ she treasured, her toy rabbit, Black Bun and her inhaler and drugs. In a house where clutter was usually anathematized, neglect and queasy indecision had created a shrine. Surprised, unable to pass on now, Bonnie sank to the bed, kicked off her shoes and drew up her feet. She hugged the book. She reached for the rabbit. It began to rain. Streaks of sympathetic water turned the rocks from uniform grey to shades of pink and blue while the koi rose to kiss the lily pads in search of food.

  Looking across the courtyard to one side, she gazed at the cedar room, now their bedroom. After her first night in there, she had slipped back to her own bed before dawn.

  ‘I don’t want Lucy waking and wondering where I am,’ she explained. ‘Or still worse, seeing. Not yet. Not till she’s ready.’

  By the fourth day, Craig was growing impatient. ‘I love the kid,’ he said. ‘I think she’s starting to like me.’

  ‘She adores you.’

  ‘So tell her. Make her glad.’

  Okay. I’ll tell her tomorrow.’

  On the fifth day, a Saturday, Bonnie had woken to the sound of the coffee grinder. She lay in the big bed for a while, planning a shopping trip. Lucy was intensely materialistic, to the point of actually enjoying watching adults spend money on themselves as well as her. The promise of a shopping trip and a department store lunch would make her instantly receptive and amenable. Bonnie had pulled on one of Craig’s thick kimonos and gone to Lucy’s room all ready to sit calmly on the futon beside her, Black Bun between them for security, to tell her that Mummy was in love with Craig now and Craig was in love with Mummy and they both wanted to make Lucy happy and give her a new home here in Chicago for ever and ever.

  She found Lucy still in bed but not asleep. Her bedding was on the floor and she lolled forward in a sitting position, as though she had sat up and fallen asleep there. She was a strange, pale colour. Her mouth was open in a frozen gasp.

  ‘Darling? Lucy? Lucy!’

  Bonnie fell forward onto the heap of quilt and blanket, clutching her daughter, patting her cheek, violently seizing her wrists, her chest. Lucy was cooler than the wood around her. She must have suffered an asthma attack hours ago, around midnight or earlier. They had all been in bed by eleven. Bonnie’s first reaction was to snatch at the nebuliser and check it was working. It was fine and there was a supply of drugs.

  It was only when Craig came running, white-faced, across the courtyard that Bonnie realized she was screaming.

  When she had rung Dora to break the news, Bonnie heard that Lawrence was incongruously on a cruise and was not due back to Miami for a week. At Dora’s advising, Bonnie held out against Craig’s suggestion that they have a cable sent to him on the boat in case he wanted to get back in time for the funeral. Bonnie should meet the boat, Dora said. She should take him on one side as he came through customs and tell him face to face, lead him to a private room perhaps, if this was permitted.

  Dora flew out with Bonnie’s father on the first available flight. The funeral was held three days later. Her father was now Bonnie’s sole blood relative, Dora, the nearest thing to a mother she possessed, and yet, under her belljar of grief, she would gladly have spurned them both to find Lawrence beside her. Only he could understand what she was feeling because only he was suffering as she was. Rather, he would be, once she scalded his ears with the news. His absence, his grotesque, holiday inaccessibility, wounded and enraged her more than his words had ever done. In the first, hot-eyed hours of shock, her need for him was as impatient as any frustrated lover’s. Craig dealt with the doctor, who passed neatly from signing the death certificate to filling out a prescription for sedatives, and handled an odiously tremulous woman from the funeral parlour. Dora made and fielded countless phone calls. When the moment came to get the coffin from hearse to grave side, Bonnie’s father broke from her side to intercept the undertakers and carry the wooden casket in his arms. When any of them came near her, Bonnie clung to them like an unsupported vine. She took her pills, tried to eat, did her dazed best to behave in a way that would not attract attention. Left alone, however, she watched them in a kind of mute, listless anger, resenting their ability to function as much as she resented their usurpation of Lawrence’s role.

  The time came, the ticket to Miami was bought, but her nerve failed her. Suddenly she turned anew to Craig, needing his strength, unable to face the battery of Lawrence’s emotions.

  ‘I’ll go,’ Dora said quietly. ‘Perhaps it’s for the best that way. I’ll ring to warn you if he’s coming to Chicago. He may– He may want to see the grave.’

  But Lawrence had not come or, if he had, he had visited Lucy’s grave in secret, without contacting his wife. This, she had come to perceive from the Olympian heights of Dr Marcus’s consulting room, was entirely his right. His absence and silence also spared her some pain in the fresh ordeal that followed.

  When her father was arrested, he rang her, reversing the charges from Barrowcester police station, and she judged him as he feared. She could not face him, would not return for the trial, happily acquiesced in the sale of his property and wanted no part of the tainted proceeds. His guilt, like Lucy’s death and Lawrence’s continued silence severed yet another rope that had tethered her to her old life.

  A whole year had passed. It would be thirteen months to the day tomorrow. She had grown used to laying flowers before a tiny headstone, to telling other young women,

  ‘I had a daughter but she died. An asthma attack. Yes. Terrible,’ and to hearing them apologize as though their innocent enquiry made them somehow culpable. She could not, however, tell people what her father, her dad, had done. Strangely, unlike death, violent crime in the family was not something that slipped naturally into conversations. And she was deeply, however irrationally, ashamed. She had tried several churches. She had tried a support group. She had called helplines. She had even called a live radio phone-in. Now, because Craig worried that her grieving process, entwined with her shame about her father, was becoming irrationally morbid, she was in thrice-weekly consulta
tion with Dr Ida Marcus of the American Psychiatric Association. Still, however, she froze over when Craig made even tentative reference to divorce and remarriage. She knew from Dora’s monthly letters that Lawrence had gone to earth somewhere, had declined to return to England with her and Darius. She fantasized in secret about him coming to Chicago. Her old confused desire for him had been cauterized by Craig’s touch and evident love. A powerful sense of guilt was prolonging her grief, however, holding it about her like an unnatural tide, and she felt, but dared not confess, that only the father of her child could cause it to ebb. She wondered whether Lucy would still be alive if she had not left England, and felt this to be her fault one moment, Lawrence’s the next. A second, darker cause for guilt, however, was less easily dispelled by common sense. There was unfinished business between them, business that no psychiatrist could exorcise or divorce lawyer could begin to broke on her behalf.

  She heard the electric garage door mechanism hum and thump into motion, heard his big car drive in. She continued to sit quite still on the futon, clutching book and rabbit, her face awash with tears. She would wait to let him find her. Sometimes he was distracted or had work to finish. He might head straight to his workroom and not find her for an hour or more. He saw her at once, however. There he was striding across the courtyard. He dropped his case on a chair and hurried over, falling onto the futon beside her and drawing her into his arms, knees, rabbit, book and all. He said nothing, kissed her hair, her ear, her neck, squeezed her tight as though the pain could be wrung from her like sour water from a flannel. He pulled out one of the coloured bandanas he used as handkerchiefs, gently wiped her face and eyes and encouraged her to blow her nose.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said at last. ‘The sessions are helping. They really are. It’s just that I came in here when I got back and it sort of took me by surprise.’ She blew her nose again, taking the soaked cotton from him and clenching it in her fist till her nails gouged her palm painfully. ‘We should clear all this out,’ she muttered. ‘We really should. Make it a spare room again. Have some friends to stay.’