The Monkey Puzzle Tree

by Sonia Tilson

  Gladys flushed, clutching the handbag to her chest. “’Oo d’you think you are, asking me questions like that? Mind you own bloody business!” About to flounce out, she turned around, suddenly crestfallen. “Oh, I nearly forgot. You never told us who that girl is. Stan’s ever so keen on signin’ her up. What’s her name then, Gillian? Go on, be a sport. You can tell me.”

  “Why don’t you mind your own bloody business, Gladys?”

  Gladys hung onto the door knob like a frightened elf. “Oh come on, Gillian. Give us a clue. Stan asked me particular to ask you. Tell us her name, or at least where she do live. Go on! Please!”

  “Go away!” Gillian said. “And stay away!”

  “Stuck-up bloody cow!” Gladys slammed the door behind her.

  “What was that all about?” Gillian’s mother came into the kitchen, “Did I hear you quarrelling with Gladys?”

  Gillian had never exactly wished Gladys well, but the suspicion she had formed was too serious to be ignored. Against her usual instincts, she told her mother about the man.

  Her mother’s eyes grew round as she listened. She put on her Chairman of the Board face. “I’m going to drive over to Mrs. Jones’s right now,” she said. “I think Gladys is in danger. She’s barely seventeen, and her mother should know about this man. You did right to tell me, Gillian.”

  It felt good to have actually managed to do something right for once. She almost relayed this achievement to Tom, who came in soon after, looking excited as usual and going on about how the butcher’s boy had tried to run him over with his bicycle, but decided he was too young to understand the implications of the situation.

  She would hardly have recognized the Farrells’ house. The front door and window frames had been painted grey-blue. The hall had been repapered and painted, as had the rest of the house. Rugs lay on the polished floorboards, an embroidered cushion adorned a green brocade armchair, and every available bit of wall space in the living room was taken up with well-filled bookshelves. There was a fresh smell of baking in the air. In the middle of the table sat a sponge layer-cake, oozing jam and cream and surrounded by sandwiches, scones, and homemade biscuits.

  Mrs. Farrell welcomed them in off the three-o’clock bus, kissing them both and exclaiming how wonderful they both looked. She looked very good herself, Gillian thought, elegant actually, in a cream silk blouse and charcoal skirt. Francis and Tom grinned awkwardly at each other while Bridie, Patrick, Kathleen and red-headed Devlin, the youngest, shyly examined the visitors. Tom, who had been brimming over with excitement on the bus, and pestering Gillian for suitable conversational openings, kept looking around while he talked to Francis, until she realized that Vanna was not there.

  “Vanna says she’s sorry not to be here to meet you.” Mrs. Farrell looked at the brass carriage clock on the mantelpiece. “She should be here any minute now though, off the next bus. It’s quite exciting, Gillian! She had an interview yesterday with a representative from a modeling agency and had to go back for trial photographs today. Strange on a Sunday, wouldn’t you think? But those people are different I suppose.”

  It had to be him! Remembering Stan’s eyes, Gillian felt her stomach clench. Should she tell Mrs. Farrell what she knew, and what her mother had said? Or should she wait to find out more? If Vanna was not on the bus, she decided, she would have to say something.

  The front door burst open and slammed shut as Vanna stormed into the room. “Sweet Mother of Christ!” She hurled her handbag onto a chair. “You wouldn’t believe, Mama, what that man wanted me to do! I’m not stupid. I could see right away what he was after, and I told him to go to hell, and walked out.”

  “Praise be to God! That’s my fighting girl!”

  “What did he look like?” Thankful that Vanna had her mother’s brains and some of her father’s temper, Gillian waited, fearing the answer, while Vanna slung her coat on a hook.

  “Sleazy. He had black hair, little dark eyes, and a nasty thin moustache.”

  Gillian winced. “How did he find you?”

  “He walked into the shop on Thursday morning and said he’d been told a real knockout was serving behind the jewelry counter in Woolworth’s.” She glanced at Gillian. “I wonder who told him that.”

  Tom made a noise in his throat and closed his eyes.

  Gladys! That little bitch! She must have nobbled him the other day as she was leaving the kitchen after their quarrel and he was coming in.

  They sat around the table, drinking tea and handing around sandwiches and scones, Tom passing wanly on every plate, until the time came for the sponge-cake. After she and Mrs. Farrell had been served, Gillian saw Vanna cut a large slice and offer it to Tom with a smile. His lips pressed tight, he swallowed and blinked hard. “No, I couldn’t, thank you, Vanna.”

  “Here’s someone who wants it I think.” Gillian diverted attention to little Devlin who was holding out his plate, and the chatter rose again.

  Before returning home, they made a quick visit to their grandparents’ house. Since their grandfather was at a chapel meeting, Tom went outside, hands in pockets, kicking a stone down the garden path while Gillian told their fascinated grandmother about the improvements at the Farrell’s house.

  Her grandmother had a cold and dabbed at her nose. “Run up and fetch me a clean hanky, would you, Gillian, there’s a good girl? They’re in my dressing table, top drawer.”

  Lifting the delicately embroidered handkerchief sachet, Gillian found a small brown photograph album with “Porthcawl, May, 1932. Bethesda Outing” written on the cover. Inside were tissue-covered sepia snapshots, first of the whole group of merrymaking chapel-goers enjoying them-selves at the seaside, and then of just her grandparents: Grandpa in a silly hat, although still wearing his dark suit; Grandma, in a flowered dress and button shoes, smiling as she sat on a donkey. At the back of the book she found a photograph of her mother, arm in arm with a barefoot young man in an open-necked shirt and rolled-up trousers. They were laughing into the camera.

  She examined her young mother’s face. Except for the long hair and radiantly happy expression, she could have been looking at Tom; the same wide-winged eyebrows, high cheek-bones, and full mouth. The young man was tall and thin, his light hair cut very short, a faint squiggle discernable on his forehead. He looked familiar but she could not place him.

  Handkerchief and album in hand, she went downstairs to ask her grandmother who he was.

  The smile faded from her grandmother’s face. “Oh that’s Ieuan, my second cousin Dewi’s son, same age as your mother. Thick as thieves they were, those two, since they were little.” She pressed her lips together. “And then your mam met your father, and that was the end of that. He came to see her though; Ieuan did, the night before the wedding, to … But I shouldn’t be going into all that with you. Here, let me put that away.”

  “What happened to him?” Gillian looked with even more interest at the laughing young man.

  Her grandmother took the book from her hands. “He died.” She pulled opened a drawer in the Welsh dresser to put the book under a set of napkins. “In Australia. Twenty-five years old he was.” She slammed the drawer shut.

  Died? That laughing face? That joie de vivre? “How did he die, Grandma?”

  Her grandmother looked out of the window. “That’s all water under the bridge now. Here comes the rain, and you’re going to miss the bus, you two, if you don’t hurry. Come along now. Call Tom, and off you go!”

  Rain slashed the windows of the bus as they traveled home, each lost in their own thoughts. Gillian saw again the euphoric face of the young man, and longed to know more. She could not, she felt, ask her mother about him. Tom had hardly said a word since Vanna’s question at the Farrells’ table. He had turned in on himself, his eyes burning with anguish.

  W

  The dog shook itself over Gillian’s legs and feet as she turned to face To
m. “Vanna doesn’t think you’re a bumbling fool, Tom. I can tell she’s fond of you from the way she asked after you. And she does see you from time to time, doesn’t she? She wouldn’t bother if she didn’t like you. She’s always had plenty of men to choose from after all.”

  “Tell me about it!”

  “Why don’t you go and see her while you’re here? You don’t have to spend all your time with Mum and me.”

  “Perhaps I will. But I want to see as much of you as I can. We haven’t spent much of our lives together, have we?”

  “When this is over, you’ve got to come to visit me again in Ottawa. You only came that once, about twenty-five years ago. You could get time off from work, couldn’t you?”

  “I bet I could. I’d love to come.” He threw the stick into the sea for the indefatigable dog. “I will. I promise. I’ll do it as soon as I can.”

  “Drop me off here, Tom,” Gillian said the next morning, as they neared the university entrance in their drive along the coast road into Swansea. “I’ll walk over to Saint Anne’s in an hour or so. I just want to look around at all the changes in the campus and walk through the park.”

  The university was indeed greatly changed. In her time it had been a jarring juxtaposition of prefabricated lecture rooms and the venerable stone buildings that had once comprised the home of the Vivian family. The old buildings were still there she saw, as she walked through the campus to the park, but the university had grown enormously. Multiple impressive structures had more than replaced the prefabs. After walking around, wondering at the changes, she passed through the old stone entrance building and into the great park which had once been the Vivian family estate.

  The park had not changed much. Smooth lawns still stretched away into the distance, shaded by chestnut trees, beeches, and oaks. She walked through the glossy foliage and lush blooms of the rhododendron garden. Averting her eyes from a monkey puzzle tree, new since her time, she passed the familiar fountain, surrounded by trellised wisteria, and the grotto where as a child she used to play at being a little cave-girl. The Swiss chalet was still there, she noticed, and the boundary wall at the far end of the park was still covered with shining, dark-berried ivy.

  It was hard to believe that thirty-seven years had passed since she first walked through that park as a university student, about to meet Gordon, James, and Llewellyn, and the rest of them.

  W

  “And what have you been reading this summer?” At the end of the assessment interview, Professor James Falconer leaned back in the swivel chair in his book-lined office, swept his fingers through his bronze waves, and looked sternly at Gillian over non-existent glasses.

  “Well, I read Middlemarch,” she glanced shyly at him, “and the poetry of William Blake.”

  “Really?” He raised his eyebrows. “Why?”

  She twisted her fingers in her lap. “Shouldn’t I have?”

  “Certainly not! Where’s the fun in that? But never mind.” He stood up and shook her hand. “Welcome to the English department.”

  As she reached the door, he looked her up and down. “And remember, er, Gillian, any time you have a problem, anything at all, you must come and see me.”

  In her gauzy white sundress she walked away from his office, past the drifts of honey-scented alyssum that softened the hard edges of the new classrooms, and back to the coolness of the old stone building that housed the main entrance.

  On their last night at school, she and her friends had discussed what sort of men they would marry. Anita would marry her farmer boyfriend and have lots of babies; Chris would marry a saxophonist; and Diana, when she had quite finished exploring the world, might consider finding herself a filthy-rich businessman, preferably not long for this world. Gillian had declared that she would marry an English professor. The two of them would discuss literature all the time, and read poetry to each other before going to sleep. She left the university grounds deciding for about the fifth time that day that she had a great deal to learn.

  Three weeks later, she entered The Uplands Pub, her first act of defiance against her parents’ ban on such places. With her newly-acquired boyfriend, Gordon, a lanky, bespectacled, third-year philosophy student, she joined a group of his friends sitting around a table with Professor Falconer who was entertaining them by reciting lines from Under Milk Wood, by Swansea’s own poet, Dylan Thomas, born just around the corner from where they sat. “Call me Dolores, like they do in the stories,” he whined girlishly in a stage Welsh accent, to appreciative guffaws.

  He quirked an eyebrow and raised his pint to Gillian as she and Gordon seated themselves. Oppressed by the noise and smoke, and uneasy at the hilarity, she sipped her warm, sticky gin and orange and tried to ignore the glances he kept flicking her way.

  A week or so later he stopped to talk to her after an afternoon class, casually observing that as they lived in the same direction from the university, they might as well walk home together through the park. Alarmed by his reputation as a hard-drinking ladies’ man, she scurried along beside him, clutching her books to her chest and replying to his conversational overtures as minimally as possible. His questions about how she was getting along in her classes seemed harmless enough, however, as did his explanations about the point of learning Anglo-Saxon and about the subtleties of a Shakespearian sonnet, and she gradually relaxed her guard somewhat. After several such walks and talks, much insistence on his part, and many lapses on hers, she was finally prevailed upon to call him James.

  One November afternoon, he suggested a detour past the rhododendron gardens to a path that ran along under the wall enclosing the park. They were alone on the path when he stopped and leaned against the wall. A loose spray of ivy detached itself from the mass of leaves and dark berries that surrounded him and draped itself over his shoulder. The bruised foliage gave off a dull bitter smell.

  “Do you like me, Gillian?” He took hold of the spray and twisted it this way and that, as if to break it off.

  “Er, yes. Yes I do.” She wished he would leave the ivy alone and get back to explaining Donne’s image comparing two

  lovers to a mathematical compass.

  “Why do you like me?” He abandoned the spray and looked into her eyes. “Tell me, what it is about me that you find most attractive?”

  There was no getting out of it, even though she had never actually said, or felt for that matter, that she was attracted to him. She analyzed his appearance. He was rather old, at least twelve years older than she was, but not bad-looking she supposed: tall and rangy, his rich-coloured, poetically long waves framing a round face in which the features, while regular enough, were somewhat crowded into the middle, like those of the sun in ancient pictures. His blue eyes twinkled encouragingly at her from under heavy lids and arched eyebrows that seemed permanently raised. His wide, thin-lipped mouth was winsomely pursed. She rummaged around for an honest answer. She could not fool him she knew, nor did she want to.

  “I’m not sure,” she said finally, “but I think it’s that you’re cleverer than I am.”

  The brightness fell from his eyes, and the shoulders of his green corduroy jacket drooped as he detached himself from the wall and turned away. What did he expect her to say? That it was his animal magnetism? To her surprise, she had experienced that phenomenon recently and knew that, as far as she was concerned anyway, neither he nor Gordon had it.

  “Seriously though,” he said, as they neared the iron gates of the park. “Have you never thought of setting your sights on, um, somewhat older men instead of those callow youths that surround you?” He stopped and looked at her with his head on one side. “You’re wasted on them, you know. You could get yourself something really worthwhile.”

  “But wouldn’t that cause a great deal of trouble?” Gillian cast her mind over the older men she knew, all of them married, and failed to come up with a catch. “It probably wouldn’t be worth all
the fuss.” It struck her that the professor pursed his lips rather disagreeably as he nodded goodbye and struck off in a different direction.

  The possessor of animal magnetism had appeared in the refectory about a week before that conversation. He had been sitting on a table, swinging his feet and waving his hands, and talking in rapid-fire Welsh to a group of five or six nationalists. She asked her friend Eleri, a fringe member of the Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party, who he was.

  “Oh, that’s Aneurin Llewellyn Caradoc Parry-Jones,” Eleri said. “Lew or Llewellyn to his family; Aneurin when he preaches; Caradoc in the Plaid; and in BBC Wales, where he works, they call him Dewi, don’t ask me why. Dunno what his associates in the Taffia call him.”

  “What’s the Taffia?”

  “You know, the Welsh Mafia. He’s got many fingers in many pies, does our Lew.”

  “Is he related to you then, Eleri?”

  “He’s the son of my mother’s cousin, my Aunty Dilys. The apple of her eye!”

  “What did you mean, ‘when he preaches’? Is he a minister?”

  “He’s a lay-preacher in the chapels. Preaches up a storm he does.”

  Eleri seemed to have a bit of an edge on her, Gillian thought, as she went back to studying the young man. What Eleri had told her was interesting, but it was his appearance that fascinated Gillian. She thought it was extraordinary, the way his short, curly hair and his skin were exactly the same colour, a light golden fawn. His eyes were an unusually pale blue-grey, and his features were clear-cut and regular, everything just so. He was well made, and moved fluidly she saw as he went to the drinks counter. Like Chaucer’s squire, neither short nor tall, nor thin nor fat, “of his stature he was of evene lengthe.” She kept sneaking glances over her coffee mug at this wonderfully indeterminate-looking man until Eleri said sharply, “He’s definitely not your sort, Gill. Don’t even think of it.”