Turning briskly on her heel, she stalked out of the kitchen and out through the still open front door. And began to run full-pelt, not along the road, as earlier, but down the rocky, tussocky cliff-face – dangerously, precipitately, not caring if she tripped and broke her neck. Everything was already broken, and she was weeping for that brokenness, and for her own rigidity and folly and sickening self-destructiveness, weeping, above all, for her unknown, uncaring father, her lost, aborted childhood.
Yew
‘You ought to celebrate, Sarah, not beat yourself up about it. If you want my honest opinion, you’re well rid of him, in any case.’
No, she didn’t want Pat’s opinion; nor was it ‘honest’, since Pat had taken a strong, irrational dislike to Daniel, the very instant the two had met. She held her peace, however, and took out her annoyance on her espresso, savagely stirring in an overdose of sugar, until spurts of hot black liquid overflowed the cup.
‘You’re right, Pat,’ Avril chipped in. ‘When an ex gets remarried, the best thing to do is show you don’t give a monkey’s. When Simon tied the knot again, I took myself on a day-trip to Paris, got sozzled on champagne and revelled in my freedom.’
‘Yes, one of the girls at work did much the same,’ Pat remarked, between mouthfuls of her cheesecake, ‘except she went all the way to California on the day of her ex’s wedding, hired an open-top sports car and drove along Highway 120, singing at the top of her voice. She refused to feel sorry for herself, or envy the new wife.’
Meaning I do both, Sarah didn’t say, taking a gulp of her scalding coffee. At least the pain of a burned mouth helped control her irritation. Didn’t these so-called friends realize she still loved Daniel, body, heart and soul, and thus detested his new bride-to-be? The very thought of their wedding made her sick with grief and jealousy, and the fact of Clare and Chloe being bridesmaids only complicated things still more. She wouldn’t dream of spoiling her daughters’ excitement, prompted largely by their flamboyant bridesmaids’ dresses and the thrill of their first flight. The only grain of comfort in the whole galling affair was that, thanks to Amanda, she didn’t have to accompany them to Italy. Amanda, ten years older than Daniel, was completely different in temperament from her exuberant, extravagant, mercurial, moody brother – a boon on this occasion, since the calm and capable woman had offered to chaperone the girls and act as stand-in mother.
‘Seriously, love,’ Avril said, putting a hand on Sarah’s arm, ‘the last thing you should do is mope around at home. I’m free that particular Saturday, so why don’t you and I book ourselves in for a Pamper Day at the spa – have the whole works: massage, facial, manicure...?’
‘It’s sweet of you, Avril, but I’d actually prefer just to spend the day in the garden, clearing up the fallen leaves and having a good old bonfire. That’ll be as therapeutic as anything.’
‘Sounds thrilling!’ Pat said, sardonically. ‘But look, if you change your mind, or don’t fancy Avril’s spa-day, give me a ring, OK? I can’t promise Highway 120, but I’ll certainly lay on some sort of diversion to keep your mind off Daniel.’
‘Thanks, both of you. I appreciate it.’ It was a physical and mental impossibility to keep her mind off Daniel. He had been her life, her lodestar and – so she’d thought until fifteen months ago – her future. It was different for Pat and Avril; both long-divorced and childless and seeming positively to relish being free to do exactly what they chose and embark on wild affairs. As a newly single parent, her life was more constrained, nor could she even contemplate sleeping with any man but Daniel.
‘Well, I’d better make a move,’ she said, extracting a note from her purse, to pay for her two coffees. ‘The girls are with their grandma and she hates me to be late.’ Granny Taylor, although not, in fact, particularly fierce, was as good an excuse as any. She could hardly admit her urge to escape this crowded, claustrophobic café and especially the din from the adjoining table, where a group of women kept breaking into peals of raucous laughter. Since the divorce, laughing seemed unwarranted – indeed, very nearly blasphemous.
Pat and Avril were clearly in no hurry to leave and, once they had waved her off, she glanced back over her shoulder to see them already deep in conversation – discussing her, maybe: how ridiculously fixated she was on her shit of an ex-husband and totally blind to his deficiencies. Not true. It was simply that his deficiencies were outweighed by his good points: his vivacity and ebullience, his thirst for knowledge of every kind, and sheer enthusiasm for life – infectious qualities, which, from the age of eighteen, when he’d first erupted into her life, had kept her buoyant and inspired, if sometimes reeling. Without him, she was flat champagne, tepid coffee, stale cake, soggy toast.
Clare and Chloe had, at last, stopped calling out for drinks of water, or yet more bedtime stories, or a continuation of their discussion over supper as to whether witches and wizards actually existed. After a final pause outside their bedroom door, she trailed downstairs and poured herself a glass of wine. The sofa still felt achingly empty without Daniel’s bulk and solidity pressing against her side – a big man, in every sense. The sofa bore his traces: a cigarette-burn on one chintzy arm; a star-shaped beer-stain on the seat and, along the back, a faint grease-mark from his mane of irrepressible black hair. Stains and holes and grease marks had become as precious in her mind as his cache of love-letters and the romantic inscription on her wedding ring – a ring she refused to remove, whatever her present status as discarded, superseded wife. She even missed his habit of purloining most of the duvet, leaving her chilly and uncovered, or of wolfing the whole huge chunk of cheese she had bought to last a week. They were simply part of his endearing greed; the way he regarded life as a tuckbox or a treasure-chest to be raided and plundered at need. Tragically, that treasure chest now included Gabriella: impossibly young, exotically blonde and, from the moment she had first encountered Daniel, set relentlessly on being the next Mrs Langham, whatever the impediments in her path.
She banged her glass down on the coffee-table, imagining she was punching Gabriella’s gorgeous face. Yet, as the mother of two daughters, she had to retain her dignity; not warp their young minds by exposing them to ugly scenes. It was imperative to prise her thoughts from the nuptials, as they approached nearer every day. Not easy, when the wedding photographs seemed already to have been taken and were now displayed in full colour in her mind: the radiant bride clamped mouth-to-mouth with the besotted groom; the spiteful Sienese sun daring to shine all day, and the two enchanting bridesmaids becoming increasingly sparky and kittenish at all the extra attention from their new Italian relations… .
‘Enough!’ she said, out loud, striding to the window and staring out at the murky darkness of the garden. No, she couldn’t spend the wedding day placidly incinerating dead brown autumn leaves, whilst longing to fling her rival on the bonfire and burn her to a satisfying crisp. Vindictiveness was foul and self-defeating. Better far to work out a survival plan and stick to it religiously – not massages and manicures, or extravagant trips to Paris, but some activity or project that would allow her to lay claim to part of Daniel’s vital essence, and to solemnize a past memory that couldn’t be erased, or shared with the new upstart.
As she stood pondering the matter, the silhouettes of trees began to take blurry shape against the sombre, starless sky and, all at once, an idea sprang to mind. It wouldn’t cost much in terms of cash or effort, nor would it involve Avril, Pat, or any of her other friends, who might insist that she be positive and impossibly upbeat. Instead, it would be solitary, peaceful and allow her to grieve rather than to celebrate, yet still, she hoped, be ultimately consoling.
Two thousand years old, he’d told her, ninety-foot tall, and with a trunk-girth thirteen feet in diameter. She had halved all the figures, allowing for his habitual exaggeration, but now, looking at the tree again, it did seem exceptionally large for a yew and, with its thin, peeling bark and distorted, sagging branches, awesomely old and venerable. All thos
e years ago, he had called their visit here a ‘pilgrimage’, in which they would make a mystical connection to ages long past, and honour the yew’s endurance and resilience. They had been married then a mere eleven months, yet she had already grown used to his all-consuming passions – whether for chess, cheeses, Damien Hirst, performance poetry, Wittgenstein or, in this particular case, spiritual transformation. Whatever the rapidity with which one craze succeeded another, she never mocked his whims or wearied of his interests. Why should she, when, as his zealous pupil and eager disciple, she was continually learning and growing under his tutelage?
And the yew-tree pilgrimage had remained in her mind as a magical turning-point, because only then had she stopped mourning her miscarriage two months earlier. Daniel had devised a touching ceremony in honour of the lost and much-lamented baby and, as they’d stood within the sheltering tent of branches, he had declaimed an ancient Celtic prayer, in which death was regarded not as final, but more as a kind of transformation. Each end could be a new beginning, the prayer insisted, and she had, in fact, felt renewed and healed, standing in the empty churchyard with no witness but the circling rooks and the sacred yew itself. And, as if to prove Daniel right, she had conceived again, that very weekend and, nine months later, given birth to Chloe.
Remembering both the death and the birth, she gazed up at the dark reaches of the tree, its branches a-flurry with greedy birds gorging on the glistening berries. She hadn’t known until he told her that only the female yews had berries, nor how the birds discarded the highly poisonous seeds, before feeding on the harmless scarlet flesh. Poisonous females recalled her to Gabriella, even at this moment walking down the aisle, with innocently traitorous Chloe and Clare holding up her magnificent white train. And, yes, having checked the forecast for Siena, she knew the sun would be shining; the temperature a smug twenty-five degrees. Indeed, even here in England, the weather had surpassed itself, despite it being mid-October. The sun was not just shining, it was veritably gloating, enamelling all the autumn colours, glinting on the cotton-wool clouds in the postcard-perfect blue sky, as if to taunt her with a snapshot of the splendiferously radiant wedding day in Gabriella’s home town. Yet, if nature had any pity, Siena, far from basking in sultry heat, should be ravaged by a storm: thunderclaps drowning out the wedding march, vindictive hail-showers stinging and slashing the bride’s young, flawless face.
She turned on her heel, stalked away from the yew and began stomping round the churchyard, kicking out at the disrespectful weeds choking many of the gravestones. All too easy to deny death, when corpses clogged the ground here – mouldering flesh, whitening bones, loving couples separated: one deceased, one flourishing. It seemed bitterly appropriate that male and female yews were separate; only the male trees producing pollen, only the females bearing berries. Weren’t males and females always separate, whatever the sentimental tosh about twin souls, or lifelong unions, or flesh of one flesh? Daniel had taught her the word ‘dioecious’ – one she’d never heard and couldn’t spell, but which came from the Greek and meant, literally, ‘two households’. Neither of them had dreamed that, one day, there would be two households, separate and apart; their daughters forced to switch between them, with two homes in two different countries, even two mothers.
No, she thought, with a new lightning-flash of fury, Gabriella would never be a mother to the girls – except how could anyone prevent them, young and impressionable as they were, being tempted and seduced by presents, treats and frequent plane trips to Siena? That huge extended Italian family – a whole tribe of clucking aunties, grannies, cousins – were bound to indulge the pair in extravagant, unusual ways she had no chance of rivalling.
Her anger and the sunshine were making her uncomfortably hot, so she followed the path back to the church, pushed the heavy oak door and slipped inside, to be immediately enveloped by the cool breath of ancient stone. As she inhaled the faint, curdled smells of lilies, must and candlewax, a sense of peace and timelessness began gradually to calm her vituperative mood. Colours from the stained-glass windows were reflected on the flagstone floor like stone embroidery, and the highly polished brass altar-rails gleamed against the dull wood of the pews. Instinctively, she closed her eyes, longing, all at once, to have the comfort of a deity, some kindly Father-God who could kiss her better and make everything all right. She remembered visiting a church in Rome, on honeymoon with Daniel, and seeing hundreds of petitions left by trusting pilgrims beside a statue of the Virgin Mary, begging for babies, cures, interventions, miracles. Even then, she had envied those with faith, the resources they could call on, the supernatural powers to reverse sterility or terminal disease or the break-up of a marriage.
People even left petitions tied to yew trees, so Daniel had informed her, when, just the following year, they made their pilgrimage to this very spot. She had dismissed the notion as empty superstition, appropriate for credulous Celts, or ardent early Christians, but not for twenty-first century agnostics with a rigorous cast of mind. Now, however, some irrational, intuitive part of her yearned to believe in Somebody or Something that could offer help from some mysterious realm – help that would far surpass the Positive Thinking pep-talks supplied by her crass friends.
On a sudden impulse, she rummaged in her bag, withdrew her Filofax and tore out a clean white page. Then, frowning in concentration, she tried to compose an appropriate petition. No use begging for Daniel’s return, or for her broken marriage to be magically repaired. Whatever the yew tree’s powers, it could hardly work outright miracles, so wouldn’t it be better to beg simply for the courage to endure? She owed it to Chloe and Clare not to be bitter and resentful, even to welcome a new addition to the family, should Gabriella produce her own child. Such an outcome would call for strength and resilience way beyond her normal reserves, yet the yew, as the most resilient of trees, surely provided the perfect exemplar. It had stood firm throughout the ages, even if completely hollow inside – as she was, too, since the divorce had hollowed out her vital inner sap – yet still able to survive centuries of storms.
Leaning back against the pew, she continued her attempt to find some apposite words, whilst also struggling to silence the doubting, derisory voices in her head. If Daniel were here, he would urge her to respect the wisdom of past peoples and religions, rather than mock them for their naïveté. So, when she finally decided on her petition – one for fortitude, forbearance, perseverance, patience – she wrote it out in her neatest and most careful script, as if to signify the importance of the exercise.
Then, page in hand, she ventured out into the still swanking sunshine, dazzled for a moment by the contrast with the cool gloom of the church. Relieved to see the churchyard totally deserted, she made her way back to the yew, moving close in to the trunk this time and allowing the thick foliage to serve as a protection against the glare of the noon daylight and the gimlet-sharpness of her grief. The bark felt scaly and rough-edged beneath her hand, yet, according to Daniel, yew-wood was prized for its toughness and durability, and had been since primitive times. Admittedly, the tree was not a beauty, with its unkempt foliage, asymmetrical shape and air of being worn down by the years, but it was that very weight of years that gave it majesty and nobility, as one of the longest-living plants in the whole world. Her own brief life had impinged on it for a mere fraction of its span. Established here long before her, it would continue aeons afterwards; witnessing in its time great swathes of human history. Didn’t all that make it worthy of respect?
Deliberately, she leaned against the trunk, in an effort to absorb some of the tree’s own tenacity and stoicism, then folded her frail piece of paper and pushed it deep into a hole in one of the lower branches, trying to mark this important moment with some prayer or invocation.
Embarrassed all at once, she peered behind her, as if Pat and Avril might have somehow tracked her down and, contemptuous of her ‘mystic’ ritual, were now endeavouring to drag her off to some spa, or spree, or trip on Eurostar. But no
one was there at all, no human sound or footstep, only the flutter of birds in the branches, the hoarse squawk of a crow, and a melancholy salvo as the church clock chimed the quarter. She was only imagining the derision and could, if she desired, commit herself, heart and soul, to this otherworldly experience. Indeed, she was already beginning to feel more deeply rooted, less impervious to gales and storms, as if the yew tree’s ineffable powers were slowly working a transformation.
She remembered Daniel saying that the earliest yews had survived the great climatic changes of the planet, even thriving in the Ice Age, somehow finding ways to adapt, whatever the adversities. So wasn’t that a lesson for her? Her husband had left, their once deathless marriage expired, but those were irreversible facts, so it was time she stopped indulging in vain and futile regret. Of course it was a searing loss, and no way could she shrug it off or – God forbid – celebrate it, as her more superficial friends advised. But, having mourned the loss so long, she did now have the option of simply picking up the pieces and quietly moving on.
A squirrel suddenly darted up to the tree but, sensing her presence, sped instantly away with a frantic scurrying of feet. Only then did she notice that the ground beneath the yew was completely bare of vegetation. Clearly, nothing could grow in the shade of this dense tree: no blade of grass, no smallest, slightest plant. As she continued to gaze at the empty, barren patch of brown, she was struck by an analogy with Daniel. He had always been so dominant, no one and nothing could flourish in his shadow. Throughout the years of their marriage, she had been dimmed by his brilliance and dwarfed by his achievements. Forced into the pupil role – even the parasite role on occasion –– she had lived only through his nourishment and obedient to his whim. Yet extraordinary as it seemed, she had never really realized till this moment, let alone resented it. It was as if the yew itself was showing her a revelatory truth: that, if she freed herself from her ex-husband’s stifling shade, she might find light and space to be herself.
Bad Mothers Brilliant Lovers Page 14