Tree Surgery for Beginners

by Patrick Gale

  ‘When does he get back?’ he murmured over her shoulder, adenoidal with swallowed tears.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said.

  ‘Do you want to marry him?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Anyway, you don’t want me back,’ she said. ‘You just want me to forgive you.’

  ‘I … Do I?’

  ‘I think we could both use a little absolution.’ She pulled back, smiled sadly and pushed her fingers through his hair. ‘For what it’s worth, I think I do. Forgive you I mean. I think I have to. If only for my own sake. So I can push off from the shore.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She yawned delicately. ‘Just thinking of a conversation I had with an extraordinary woman earlier.’

  She suddenly felt exhausted. She crossed the room and slipped decisively into bed effectively declaring the dialogue at an end. There was nothing childish about her but, spreading a blanket over her quilt to keep out the chill and sitting on the edge of her mattress, he could not help remembering the countless times he had similarly seen Lucy off to sleep. He turned out the lights so the room was once more lit only by the flames of the dying fire.

  ‘Shall I give you our address in Chicago?’ she asked.

  ‘Do you want to?’ he replied.

  She thought a moment.

  ‘Do you mind if I don’t? I think maybe …’

  He squeezed her hand to reassure her.

  ‘As for the other thing,’ he muttered. ‘I mean if … If he wants to marry you and you– I mean. Well. Tell your lawyers there’s no problem.’

  She nodded. He took her sad smile as thanks. They did not kiss.

  Outside, bemused in the darkness, he wandered up and down for a while, trying to discern which might actually be Lala’s room. There were no tell-tale baby’s cries however, and the occasional, still-lit window gave nothing away.

  Back in the staff village, he saw that a light still burned in Laurie’s cabin. He knocked. After a moment or two she glanced out of the window clutching a torch, then opened the door a little. She was in striped man’s pyjamas. He noticed she had done the jacket up wrongly so the buttons were out of step with the holes. She smelled of toothpaste.

  ‘Oh. Hi,’ she said, scowling sleepily. ‘No dice then?’

  ‘I told you. It was just a drink. We sat and talked.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Laurie, I– I meant to ask you.’

  ‘Evidently.’

  ‘Sorry. Were you asleep?’

  ‘Not quite. What?’

  ‘Well.’ He leaned on her porch rail. ‘Tell me to bugger off if you want but I wondered if, on your next free night– ’

  ‘My every night is free here.’

  ‘Well, whatever. I wondered if you’d like to drive somewhere with me. Go out for a meal for once. Maybe to a cinema. Find some meat to eat.’

  ‘You’re asking me on a date,’ she said, half as flat statement, half tentative enquiry.

  ‘No no. Nothing like that. Just asking you out. As a friend.’

  ‘Brother and sister sort of thing?’

  He nodded.

  ‘If you like.’

  She stared at him speculatively for a few seconds.

  ‘I like to sit really near the front,’ she said, ‘so the picture’s really big and you have to move your head like at a tennis match.’

  ‘That’s alright.’

  ‘And you have to let me drive.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘And choose the film.’

  ‘Fine too.’

  ‘Well I guess that’s fine then. Only not tomorrow. I have to stay in and wash my hair. Only kidding.’

  Striding over to his table just as he was finishing breakfast the next morning, Laurie threw herself into a chair in a foul mood. She had argued with Jules about her pay. Lawrence was astonished. Money was something they never discussed, yet it transpired she had been dissatisfied with her income for months and wanted a raise. Jules would not allow it and now she had impulsively handed in her notice and would be moving on in a couple of weeks.

  ‘Where?’ he asked, stunned.

  ‘I dunno.’ She shrugged, dipping a piece of bread roll in the honey and butter which remained on his plate. ‘East? Somewhere they have a Fall? Come too. We could sign up with a car courier firm, drive someone’s car across country for them. Go to New York or Boston. Or Vermont. Lots of trees in Vermont.’

  Going about his work, he found that her restlessness had transformed his pure idyll into an ambivalently enchanted limbo. Should he go? Could he go? He was mowing the grass along the main drive, thinking of his mother and Darius and Barrowcester and Wumpett Woods, daring for the first time in a year to entertain the possibility of returning to them, when a car pulled up beside him and he saw Lala at the wheel. Serena, rather. Whoever she was.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, and wrinkled her nose in mock apology. ‘About last night … Do I apologize?’

  He cut the mower’s engine and walked over to lean on the car roof, unable to resist glancing past her at Humphrey Junior in the strap-on baby seat. Humphrey dutifully stared back.

  ‘It was a shock,’ he said. ‘And she almost brained me with a poker.’

  Lala whistled softly.

  ‘But thank you,’ he went on. ‘It helped. Are you– ?’

  ‘We’re off. We’ve got a long drive.’

  ‘To Wherever.’

  ‘Uh-huh.'

  He could not read her expression through her dark glasses.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked. ‘You seem, well, down.’

  ‘I’m fine. I was just thinking. Laurie – the masseuse you met yesterday.’

  ‘She looks like you.’

  ‘Yeah. Well anyway, she’s handed in her notice. She’s moving on. So, well …’ He shrugged. ‘I’m just thinking.’

  ‘But you’re happy here, right? You’re peaceful. You like the work.’

  ‘Of course. Yes.’ He nodded. Swallowed. ‘I love it. I’d better get on.’

  ‘Sure you had. Well. Bye, Lawrence. Stay well, soldier.’

  ‘You too.’

  She pressed a button that sent the window purring up, raised a hand in a mock salute and slid off down the drive. He stood watching her go then turned wearily back to the lawnmower. He thought of Bonnie waking alone and restored in her room, enjoying breakfast on her balcony over the Pacific and waiting eagerly for Craig’s reliable return. He thought of Laurie pummelling someone’s back and allowing her anger to be dispelled by tentative excitement at the thought of pastures new. He thought of himself and pictured a desolate blank.

  He had started the lawnmower’s engine again when he heard the moan of a car in recklessly fast reverse, glanced up and saw Lala speeding back up the drive towards him, window winding down as she came.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  It was high summer. The wisteria’s heavy, blue-grey tassels of blossom swayed from the foliage that framed the open windows, and filled Dora’s bedroom with their nostalgic scent. As she rose from touching up her lipstick and tidying her hair, she could see Darius and Reuben sitting in deck chairs by the pond. They were talking. It amazed her that they never ran out of things to discuss just as it amazed her, still, that her brother had at last acquired such a loving partner in debate.

  Watched by the dogs, she scrutinized her appearance in the full-length looking-glass with a little pout. Dark blue suit, highish black heels, hemline on the knee. It was what Tennessee Williams called a ‘neat, tailored outfit’. She tried it with the hat. Tried looking at it sideways on.

  ‘I look like the bride’s mother,’ she thought.

  She discarded the hat, replaced the pearls with Charlie’s garnets and undid a button on her blouse. She sprayed a puff of scent into the air and walked through it in the way her grandmother had taught her. Megan sneezed and Dora laughed at her.

  Until very recently, it had seemed that her days were full of yawning voids. She missed Lawrence more keenly than she dared admit, especia
lly now that Darius was otherwise engaged. She felt the lack of Bonnie almost as a twin bereavement to the lack of Lucy. Bonnie had written ecstatically to announce that she was pregnant again. Happy for her, Dora was hurt that she should have written rather than telephoned and thereby risked a motherly inquisition. She was shocked too at the rapidity with which Bonnie was adjusting. Less than two years on, the advent of the new child could only seem the first block in a new wall between them. The new child, Craig’s child, had none of Dora’s blood in it and could never claim her as Lucy had. Most disturbingly, Bonnie went on to admit that Lucy was not the first baby she could have had with Lawrence. There was another apparently, aborted by her in secret when she felt she was too young to cope or commit. Of course, if she had not aborted it, Dora would still have a grandchild, Lawrence a family.

  Inspired by this evidently therapeutic truth-telling and by a joint encounter on a trip they had made to an Eve Arnold exhibition, with a sequence of photographs of a birth in progress, she had confessed to a startled Hecate that Lawrence was not her only child.

  ‘I had twins,’ she admitted. ‘There was a boy and a girl. My mother made me give one up for adoption. I had to choose. I never forgave her. I hope it haunted her dreams and speeded her to a painful death.’

  Lucy’s death was thus bound up in her mind in a complex of thorny loss with the effectual death of her own daughter and what now seemed the casual, profligate discarding of Lucy’s unknown sibling. There was no social structure to support the bereavement of grandmothers. She felt the bleak absence as a spiritual wound, as deep as if the child had been her own, and yet nobody wrote her notes of condolence or sent her flowers or thought to ring her on hearing the news, to ask how she was coping. Certainly no one thought to remember the black anniversary. Even Darius, usually so adept in anticipating her reactions, underestimated her suffering, perhaps because he was rendered insensitive by new love, perhaps because he had barely known Lucy and therefore registered her death so little himself. Charlie, of course, had mourned alongside her for the few weeks before his arrest, but he was squeamish, unable to discuss his pain or hers. Hecate sent flowers and a note then rang or called around every day for a fortnight, and so unwittingly raised herself in Dora’s esteem above any of her acquaintance. Hecate had remembered the anniversary and organized the Eve Arnold excursion as a kind diversion. Theirs was a friendship forged in death.

  Sad in a useless way which apparently had no issue because it had no progression, Dora could not help feeling demoralized as Lawrence, Bonnie and Darius started new lives and left her marooned in her old one. Then she received the letter.

  Dora,

  My Dora. I’m sorry but I’m too used to calling you that to go back to Mrs Frost. First I want to thank you for what you did. Obviously we couldn’t talk in court so I’m thanking you now. I was desperate after what I did but somehow I couldn’t just give myself up and coming to love you and share all we had ahead of us made it even harder. I know you didn’t know it was me you were helping to incriminate but you probably saved my life. I know you will have helped Bonnie by organizing the house sale, so thank you for that too. I gather the dogs are with you now. That’s good. I was really glad to hear about the new baby on the way. She doesn’t write but Craig sent me a letter which was kind of him. Poor Lucy. I still dream about her you know. Maybe that’s how people live on. In our dreams, Dora, I know you may not want to. I’ll understand, honestly. But would you visit me? Just the once. I’d refund your travelling expenses. It would mean a lot. They’re not a bad bunch here. My cell-mate used to be a merchant seaman so he has many stories to tell but I have no one to talk to. Not properly. Still yours. Charlie.

  He had been placed in Barrowcester Prison during and immediately after his trial but had now been moved to a place on the bleak outskirts of a town nearer Birmingham. When Dora rashly showed her the letter, Hecate needed barely a minute’s contemplation before she decided,

  ‘Of course you must go to see him.’

  ‘But I wasn’t that keen on him even before.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He …’ Dora wondered just how much Hecate understood. She continued to improvise wildly. ‘He was always trying to get me to go out with him, as if we were two lonely, widowed people, made for one another.’

  ‘He’s not very handsome, it’s true.’

  ‘That has nothing to do with it,’ she snapped, instinctively touching the garnets in the opening of her blouse. ‘Keep your eyes on the road.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Anyway, what does it matter what I thought then? Now I know he would have seen Lawrence in prison for … He’s a bloody murderer, for God’s sake!’

  ‘You visit other murderers.’

  ‘Not ones I know socially.’

  ‘Jesus was crucified with malefactors. He made one his first friend in Paradise.’

  ‘Leave your pal Jesus out of this.’

  ‘I think you should see him if only to tell him how angry you feel. Go for your sake, not for his. We could pray if you like, for guidance.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not? It helps.’

  ‘I’ll go. I’ll go! Just keep your hands on the wheel.’

  So she wrote back to him, as dryly as she could, throwing away several drafts that she judged too confused or emotional. She agreed to come and see him at his convenience.

  At the first visit, he asked for her forgiveness and she raged at him, lips tight with anger, fingers clutching at the desk between them. How could he? How could he have watched what Lawrence had to go through? Granted the boy was no angel, granted he had hurt Bonnie, they all knew that, but did he deserve that? Wasn’t the death of his marriage punishment enough? And what about Carla Rushton? Everyone knew about her, she sneered, they had known for ages. About his little tart he wouldn’t marry for the sake of his precious reputation and the honour of his dead wife. So she died to no purpose.

  The venom of her words astonished Charlie but he took it all equably without a murmur in his own defence. When she had done, he merely asked if she would come again and to her surprise she said yes, of course and how about next Tuesday. She told Darius nothing of the letter nor of her visit and, having not told him at first, it grew harder and harder to tell him as the year went on. The secret compensated her, in a petty way, for his having found Reuben.

  On her second visit, they began to speak of all the things they had not discussed during their affair, preoccupied as they had been with lovemaking, tongue-tied by mature desire. Charlie said he was sorry that Lawrence’s arrest had exposed the fact of her never having married. He knew how hard she must have taken that. She suspected he was mocking her and parried the thrust by asking him about his wife.

  ‘I was so young, I hardly knew what love was, much less marriage. I had to marry her if I wanted her to sleep with me. We hardly knew each other.’ He laughed at the memory, tapping his cigarette on the tin foil ashtray. ‘I had to get engaged just to be left alone with her.’

  ‘Did she look like Bonnie?’

  He smiled sadly.

  ‘Yes. I suppose she did.’

  Dora liked him better like this – without house, or money, or position. He had – how did Hecate put it – nothing to ‘put over’ her. She also found she desired him more fiercely. Biting the inside of her lip, she made him tell her about Carla Rushton.

  ‘I was involved with her longer than I was with my wife,’ he said. ‘We met in a pub.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘The Tracer’s Arms. She was on the game, then. Very discreetly. But I still put a stop to it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I took out a lease on a flat for her, gave her housekeeping, paid her bills.’

  ‘Was she so special? Did you love her?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But by Christ I wanted her. I wanted her all the time. I’d be looking round some site or talking to my accountant and I’d remember her and feel all, well, you know the sort of thing. I kept a
pair of– Sorry. You don’t want to hear this.’

  ‘Yes I do.’

  He looked down at his big hands on the desk and manoeuvred his wedding ring.

  ‘Panties,’ he said gruffly. ‘I kept a pair in my trouser pocket. Just to feel. You know. During the day.’

  ‘Why didn’t you marry her?’

  ‘I wanted to but– ’

  ‘I thought she did– ’

  ‘That was later. She thought it would make her a laughing stock at first. You know what a tight little place Barrowcester is. No. She preferred it the way it was.’

  ‘I suppose she had most of the things women marry for.’

  ‘She thought she did. Then she started talking to her friends. She learned about wills and alimony and next of kin. She worried about the lease. She wanted more security.’

  ‘But by then you had all the things men marry for.’

  ‘Not quite.’ He grinned fleetingly. ‘But most, I grant you.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you killed her. People kill for love or money and you– ’

  ‘I didn’t mean to. I … I only hit her the once, with my fist, but she moved and I got her on the side of the neck. It must have done something to her windpipe or a blood vessel. She just collapsed like a sack of potatoes. She was a big woman. There was a fireplace with a little brass fender. You know the sort of thing? She hit her head.’

  ‘Then you panicked.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He nodded, tears in his eyes now.

  ‘I tried resuscitating her. Mouth to mouth. Everything. I should have called an ambulance but her heart had stopped for so long and I thought by the time they came

  Dora watched him cry, watched the blinded, clumsy way he reached for a handkerchief to mop his eyes, watched the action of his profound shame and was disconcerted to perceive that it would not be out of the question to forgive him. Forgiveness after all would be like their love affair; a private matter. It required no public declarations or speeches of defence. When he had controlled himself again, she laid a hand on his.

  ‘Charlie,’ she said, quietly.

  ‘It’s good of you to come, Dora. I never thought you would.’