The Monkey Puzzle Tree

by Sonia Tilson

  In September 1944, at the beginning of their last year at that school, Miss Thomas spoke seriously to the top class. “In May of this year,” she looked slowly around the room, “you will all be sitting the new examination. You’ll be tested to see if you should go on to the grammar school, and then possibly to university, or if you’d be better suited to a secondary modern or technical school.”

  The children shifted in their seats and looked around at each other.

  “You must start working hard now,” Miss Thomas went on. “You may think eight months is a long time, and that you needn’t worry yet about preparing for the exam. But I promise you, my dears, the time will pass, and one day, if you’re spared, each of you will be sitting here, in this very room, with the test paper on your desk.” Gillian and Vanna smiled smugly at each other. They were not worried. They had everything under control.

  As the months went by, Gillian missed her talks with Mrs. Farrell now that there was another baby taking up all her time. When she told her grandparents that Mrs. Farrell had given herself a black eye bumping into the newel post, they had puzzled her by exchanging a meaningful glance and rolling their eyes. To Gillian’s relief, however, her grandmother had softened towards Vanna, even allowing her in the house at times. Gratified by her reaction to the story of Little Jim, and disarmed by her sobs on hearing I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen, she had said, “That poor little girl! You can bring her here more often, Gillian. Perhaps she can learn something from spending time in our house.”

  Gillian chose not to think about what her grandmother was up to, happy that she and Vanna could spend time together in the parlour in the evenings and on weekends. Whenever Vanna’s mother could spare her, they would settle down there together, among the antimacassars and china dogs, to do homework, read, and talk.

  In time, however, Gillian became increasingly annoyed by Tommy who would barge in to sit, cross-legged and open-mouthed, staring at Vanna, apparently mesmerized by her hair, her freckles and her accent. Vanna did not seem to mind; she was used to worse things, Gillian knew, but it drove Gillian crazy. It seemed as though she was never free of him. He followed them everywhere, listening to them talking, telling tales if she went out of bounds or was mean to him. It did not help, either, that he had palled up with Francis. Next thing, she supposed, Francis too would be in the parlour with them of an evening. Her grandmother was already talking about his beautiful eyelashes.

  As the class sat at their desks, back straight, feet crossed, pens and blotting paper at the ready, waiting for the first part of the Eleven Plus exam, the Composition question, to be given out, Gillian remembered with a start Miss Thomas’s words, way back in September, about time passing. She had understood, of course, in theory, about the passage of time, but had applied the principle in a day-to-day way only, not to large chunks of time. To have everything happen exactly as it had been foreseen months before came as a shock. Miss Thomas had spoken true: the time had passed, all eight months of it, and here they were, sitting at their desks, just as she had said, waiting for the test papers to be handed out. Gillian nodded her head, registering the momentous fact, and lifted her eyes to their teacher standing at the front of the room, her white blouse stiff with starch, the line of her parting straight as a ruler, the test papers in her hand.

  In the next desk Vanna, freckles standing out on her sharp white face, sat with her hands tucked under her arms. She was not wearing any socks, and there was a purple bruise on her arm. She would be all right, though, Gillian thought; she nearly always had full marks for composition.

  Gillian checked that there was plenty of ink in her inkwell and put a new nib in her wooden pen as Miss Thomas moved around the room, placing the papers face-down on the desks. Three-quarters of an hour later, after checking her composition for spelling or punctuation mistakes, and reading it through one more time, she put down her pen with a satisfied sigh. She had written about “My Favourite Place,” the Ilston Valley, with its successive waves of snowdrops, primroses and violets, and bluebells.

  Feeling as if she had just woken up, she looked over to see how Vanna was getting on, and saw, to her dismay, that she had written only a few smudged lines. She was looking dopily into the distance, the shadows under her eyes matching the ink stains on her paper.

  “I couldn’t think,” she said as they fetched their milk in the playground. “My bloody pen nib had a bloody hair in it, and I couldn’t get it out, and I didn’t have another bloody nib.” She downed her milk in one go and slammed the bottle back in the crate. “Ouch!”

  “Why didn’t you tell Miss Thomas?”

  “She said no disturbances, remember, stupid?”

  Worried, Gillian slurped the last of her milk with a straw. “Maybe you’ll ace the other tests.”

  “I’m not doing them. There’s no point.” Vanna stumbled out of the playground in an awkward, knock-kneed run, the laces of her canvas shoes trailing.

  After the tests were over, Gillian went to Vanna’s house. She knocked their special knock on the back door, but no one answered until Bridie opened the door a crack. “Vanna doesn’t want to see you,” she hissed. “She says to go away.” She banged the door shut.

  Gillian stood there, biting her lip. Why was Vanna angry with her? It was not her fault that Vanna’s nib had a hair in it. Why hadn’t she brought a spare nib anyway, or asked Miss Thomas for one before the test started? She knocked on the door again, jumping back as Vanna pulled it open and stood blazing before her.

  “Why don’t you leave me alone?” White-faced, her red-rimmed eyes glaring, and her unloosed hair springing out around her head, she looked like that Medusa in their book of myths who could kill at a glance. “I expect you’ve come to gloat because you know you passed.” She stamped her foot. “I’m sick of you! And I’m sick of your grandma telling me about Jesus being her personal saviour and giving me cabbages to take home as if we were a charity case. And I’m sick of Tommy always mooning around after me. I hate the lot of you!”

  “I thought we were friends.” Gillian swallowed miserably.

  “How can we be friends? You’ve got so much more than me, and now I’ve got no chance to catch up. Ever! It’s just not fair! It’s not fair! Fuck off!” She burst into tears and slammed the door in Gillian’s face.

  Shocked, Gillian walked slowly back to her grandparents’ house. She had never heard anyone she knew say that word out loud, not even Mr. Farrell. It was true, though. It was not fair. Why should she herself have a nice, comfortable place to call home, enough to eat, a good chance of getting into the grammar school, and everyone in the village being nice to her, when all Vanna had was the whole village looking down their noses at her and her family, which was from the wrong place and had the wrong religion. She had to live in that dark, cramped house too; full of little ones she had to mind, with not nearly enough food to go round, and a mean father to boot. She did have a lovely mother, though, Gillian told herself, but at the thought of Mrs. Farrell, her beautiful hair going grey and a yellow-green bruise around her eye, surrounded by hungry, crying children and the books Mr. Farrell said he was going to burn to save money on coal, she began to cry herself.

  “Don’t tell me you spoilt your chances at that old exam?” Her grandmother put her arm around her and gave her a rock cake. “Never you mind, cariad! Your daddy will see you right, whatever.”

  Gillian told her it was not that, and told her about the hair in the nib, and Vanna running away from the playground, and, omitting the ‘fuck-off’ bit of course, about her saying she hated Gillian, and slamming the door on her.

  “Those Irish!” Her grandmother slapped invisible specks of dust off the Welsh dresser with a dishcloth. “Feckless, that’s what they are. There’s no helping some people. Why couldn’t they have sent the poor child to school properly prepared like you? I don’t suppose she even had a good breakfast.”

  “But, Grandma, they
’re so poor! And there are so many of them!”

  “Well that’s their own fault, isn’t it?”

  Gillian looked at her in surprise. “What, being poor? Or having so many children?”

  “Both. They should work harder and look after their money better. And they should control themselves. We managed. Why can’t they?”

  Asking herself how Mrs. Farrell could manage better, and what good controlling herself would be, and finding no answers, Gillian took her rock cake out to the garden, planning to sit in the elderberry tree, now in full flower, and try to calm down. About to perch on the usual branch, she saw that the bark where she wanted to sit had come loose, and tugged at it with her free hand. She leapt back with a yelp, dropping the rock-cake. Woodlice, each about a third of an inch long, swarmed over the exposed limb, crawling away into crevices on their multiple hair-like legs, or curling into serrated grey balls and dropping off the tree into the dirt. Shuddering, she ran back into the house. She would retreat to her bedroom and read something, anything, as long as it was not about insects or exams, or people being mean to each other. Shutting the bedroom door, she took Five Run Away Together off her bookshelf in the vain hope of putting Vanna’s strange behaviour out of her mind. “Why did she fail?” she kept asking herself, “Why didn’t she even try?”

  W

  “You never told me what went wrong with that exam.” Gillian waved away the plate of chocolate digestive biscuits Vanna was offering. “I remember I could see there was something the matter, because you hadn’t any socks on, and your arm was all bruised. I know we sort of made it up some years later, Vanna, but we never went into what happened, and there was always that tension between us. And of course, I’ve been away for most of our lives. But I wish I could finally understand what went on.”

  Vanna stood up to light a cigarette, nearly dropping the heavy silver table-lighter onto the coffee table before stalking over to the window. “The night before the exam,” she said, “My da came home even drunker than usual. He’d lost his job and couldn’t face what that meant, I suppose. He saw all the things my mother’d bought for me—pencils, pen, box of nibs, ruler and so on—and my best blouse and skirt and white socks airing over the back of a chair by the fire she’d lit specially.

  “And what’s all this fancy bloody gear for?” he says. “Who paid for this, then?” And when my mother, God rest her soul, tells him it’s for my big day tomorrow, and that she knows he’ll be wanting me to do well, he says, “You know bugger all!” and throws the whole lot into the fire.

  “That’s how I burned my fingers, trying to get stuff out, and why I couldn’t hardly hold my pen the next day.” She took a quick drag on her cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke. “Anyway, the little ones were all screaming, while himself was waving the poker and shouting about throwing away good money, as if he’d never in his whole bloody life done any such thing at all. Then he said I’d turn out to be a useless, head-in-the-air, bluestocking like my mother, and he wasn’t having that. And don’t ask me why I said that about the hair in the nib, and why I didn’t tell Miss Thomas all about it. I had my pride, if nothing else.” She ground out her cigarette savagely in the cut-glass ashtray.

  Gillian smoothed the burled walnut surface of the coffee table with her finger. “I remember your father died not long after that, didn’t he?”

  Vanna lit another cigarette. “He did so. He was coming home from the pub, legless as usual, and got run over by another drunk. And wasn’t that the best thing that ever happened to our family at all?” She squinted narrowly at Gillian through the smoke.

  Gillian felt she could hardly argue with that, especially after Vanna went on to say that her mother’s father, after he heard Michael Farrell was dead, had regularly sent them enough money to live on comfortably, until he himself died, leaving her mother a fair sum. She had died happy, Vanna said, knowing that all six children were provided for.

  “You never know what’s round the corner, right?” She raised a sculpted eyebrow at Gillian. “As my Da must have said when he saw Dai Jones’s van coming at him. God rest his poor soul, after all!”

  After a light supper, they sat in Vanna’s soft, grey-blue velvet armchairs while the mist came up from the sea and the foghorns moaned in the bay, until it was time for Gillian to return to Langland for the night.

  In the still-misty morning, Gillian walked from the bus-stop to Saint Anne’s, and smelled the salty, fishy, seaweedy tang borne on the wind from the sea. I’m home, she thought. This is the smell of home. She stopped and inhaled deeply. But what was home now, in fact? A set of lawyers’ offices? An old wall? An unfamiliar bungalow on the outskirts of town? A few people who remembered her but could live perfectly well without her? With a shake of her head she walked on.

  Home was Canada now. Ottawa was where she belonged, as much as she could belong anywhere. If she came back to live here now, she would be homesick for Canada. Home was her little house near the park and the river; her son and his wife, and her granddaughter, Alice; her partner Simon, and her other friends, and her spaniel, Dora. All those, along with the snow and the wide horizons had become her home.

  Passing the wall of her old house, she noticed a small stout man in cap and raincoat walking briskly up the hill. Drawing level with her, he touched his cap and smiled politely, then stopped to take a second look, smiling even more broadly.

  “Excuse me, lady, but does I know you?” He chuckled. “You looks very familiar. Does you come from round here, then?”

  “Well, yes, I do, actually. Very much so.” She pointed. “I used to live in this house.”

  As he peered at her, she saw something familiar about his broad, red face and bright blue eyes.

  “It’s never Gillian?” He burst into a high, wheezy laugh. “Well, well, well! It’s Gillian Davies! There’s a surprise, isn’t it! I’m Robbie Bevan, Gillian. Don’t you remember me? I used to bring the meat!” He seemed to find that hilarious.

  She remembered him then: Robbie, the butcher’s boy, in his navy and white striped apron, turning up on his ancient bicycle with shiny brown-paper packages in the front basket. A cheery, red-cheeked boy, always whistling.

  “Gladys’ll be amazed when I tells her!” He chuckled. “Who’d of thought it? Gillian Davies! Well I never!”

  “Gladys?”

  “Yes, Gladys Jones, as was.” He grinned and jerked his head at the house. “Her mother worked for your mother, remember? It was after you went to Canada, I think, that we got married. Didn’t you mother tell you? I always fancied Gladys, and in the end she come ’round to me, and we been very happy. Got grandchildren now, we have. Five of them!” He evidently found this side-splitting, but suddenly straightened his face. “Is you mam still alive? Last I heard she was living in Langland.”

  Gillian told him where her mother was presently, and learned that he and Gladys lived just down the hill from Saint Anne’s, in Number 84. Gladys would be popping in to see Mrs. Davies, he said, now that she knew where she was. He raised his cap and twinkled off, with an invitation to come and see them any time.

  Curious, although not at all sure she wanted to see Gladys, or that her mother would, after what happened with Tom, Gillian made her way to Saint Anne’s.

  Sunita met her on the stairs, carrying a tray of untouched breakfast: scrambled egg, toast, marmalade and tea. “Your mother’s not eating well, Mrs. Armstrong,” she said. “She didn’t touch the beef jelly you brought her yesterday, and she had no dinner to speak of. I think she should go onto meal supplements just to keep her strength up until she feels better.”

  “Certainly. Whatever you think best, Sunita.” Gillian felt a stirring of the panic she had felt on the plane. “D’you think the new antibiotic is working?

  “Not yet, but it’s too early to tell. We should know by tomorrow.” Sunita smiled, perfect teeth in a dusky-rose face, and passed on softly down the carpeted st
airs.

  Her mother was sitting up, coughing. She waved her hand impatiently as if signaling Gillian to go away, but then beckoned her back. “This’ll pass.” She held up a finger. “Don’t go. Don’t leave me.” She coughed again and spat a chunk of thick khaki-coloured phlegm into the stainless steel dish Gillian held for her. “That’s good! I’ll be all right now. I’m getting the better of this. I’ll be out of here in no time.”

  Gillian studied her. She looked even thinner, but alert, bright almost, a faint mauve flush beneath the apricot rouge on her cheeks.

  “How’s my Tweetie-Pie? Did you give him a good brush as I asked you to? He needs to be brushed every day. I hope you remembered that.”

  Gillian forbore from showing her the scratches she had received as soon as she had laid brush on the cat. “He’s fine, Mum. I did everything you asked.” If she were to get anywhere with her, she would have to be patient and ignore her needling.

  To soften her up she had brought along photographs of Bryn, the grandson her mother had never seen; his attractive blonde wife, Carol, the pharmacist; and Alice, Gillian’s darling five-year-old granddaughter, with her joie-de-vivre and funny, loud laugh. Her mother would be bound to exclaim over Alice’s physical resemblance to Gillian at that age: the same hair, eyes, and build, a similarity that Gillian hoped might provide a lead-in to the subject of her own evacuation at around that age and then, with luck, to the crucial disclosure.

  “Oh, how unfortunate!” Her mother dropped the photograph of Alice face-down on the bedspread. She put her face in her hands for a moment and gave a little shudder, before looking up with a forced smile. “I see she has your hair.” She gave a little laugh. “Although I must say, Gillian, in your case it seems to have worn well. You can hardly tell if you’ve gone grey or not!” She snatched up another photo. “Now this must be Bryn! He’s a handsome young man, certainly. He has a look of me I think. See the eyebrows? And there’s something about the mouth, don’t you agree?”