The Monkey Puzzle Tree

by Sonia Tilson

  “It is Gillian, isn’t it? Gillian Davies? Remember me?”

  Jolted back from her other world, Gillian looked into the bright, black eyes in front of her, and blinked.

  “Gladys? Is that you?”

  Placing the freesias on the grass, Gladys sat next to her. “My Robbie said he saw you sitting here, and I thought I’d have a look-see. How are you then, Gillian? And how’s you mam? I been thinking about her. And about you too.”

  She shifted her stout little body around to face Gillian and pursed her lips. “Now that I’m getting on a bit, see, Gillian, and looking back, like, there’s things I want to say.” She smoothed the dress on her short broad lap. “We ’ad somethin’ in common, you know, Gillian. More’n people would think. Know what I mean?” She flashed Gillian a look. “Din’t do us no good, neither of us, all that with Angus, did it?”

  All that with Angus?

  “What did you say?” Prickling with shock, Gillian stared at her. “You mean …? Oh my God, Gladys! It was you too? Both of us? Oh, I’m so sorry!”

  Sparrows chirped and flitted about in the tree above them as they looked at each other. Gillian took Gladys’s small, work-worn hand in hers. “We were handed to him on a plate, weren’t we?”

  Together they slowly shook their heads. “But how did you know about me, Gladys? What did he tell you?”

  “He took me to the barn, and I seen you doll there. He told me you really liked all that, and that I would too.”

  Gillian shuddered. “Gladys,” she said after a pause, “Can I ask you this? Don’t answer if you don’t want to, but did he … did he go further than just … molesting you?”

  Gladys straightened her hat. “’e got around to it in the end. Yes. How ’bout you?”

  “Jesus, Gladys! He actually raped you? Dear God! I don’t know what to say!” Gillian turned her head away, closing her eyes and swallowing hard, an icy tingle running down her back. “But as for me …” She shook her head and turned back to Gladys. “No, he didn’t rape me, just everything but. I knew he fully intended to. I was very, very lucky to be able to leave when I did.” She looked into the round, dark eyes. “I am so terribly sorry, Gladys!”

  “Well likewise, indeed, Gillian.” Gladys gave her shoulders a shake and grinned suddenly, an aging imp. “Hey! Mebbe we could bring a court case? Sock it to him! Rub his nose in it! Wouldn’t I just like that!” She wrinkled her nose. “Bit late now, though, I suppose, innit?” She stood up, straightening her dress. “Anyhow, I just wanted to tell you that I never told nobody about all that. And I’m very happy to have had this little chat with you finally.”

  “Me too, Gladys! Thank you for coming to find me.” Gillian hugged her. “I’m glad everything worked out so well for you in the end.”

  “And for you, too, by the looks of you. We survived anyhow!” Gladys grinned. “Tell you mam I was asking after her. God bless!”

  Gillian watched her bustle away on little pointed feet. Many things about her old bête noir made sense now. Seeing her in this new light as a small, defenseless child, and remembering Gladys’s reckless teenaged self, Gillian was seized by a murderous rage.

  Turning back to the nursing home, she pulled herself together in preparation for what she might find inside. Pressing a Kleenex over her hot face, she scraped her hair back, tying it firmly before picking up the wilting flowers.

  She could hear the cry as she approached the stairs: her mother’s voice, shouting one word, or perhaps uttering a cry of pain, over and over: “Yey-ya! Yey-ya!” Reaching the landing at a run, she met Sunita, who put a steadying hand on her arm.

  “I’m afraid your mum’s not doing well at all.” Her eyes were wary and sympathetic. “Dr. Gabriel says it’s pneumonia. I’ve given her the sedative he said she should have, so she’ll probably sleep soon. I’ll just be in the hall office if you need me.” She took the freesias. “Let me put those in water for you.”

  Her mother, flushed and dishevelled, was calling out the same word repeatedly in a hoarse and shockingly loud voice. She seemed to see someone in front of her, and to be struggling to reach him. “Yey-ya!” She held out her arms. “Yey-ya! Don’t go! Wait for me! Don’t leave me!”

  Don’t leave me?

  “I’m here, Mum. I won’t leave you.” Gillian put her arms around her mother’s shoulders and managed to get her lying back and covered with the sheet. She wiped the burning forehead with a cool, damp cloth and moistened the dry lips with slivers of ice, until her mother, struggling feebly to sit up, cried out again. “Yey-ya!”

  Gillian repeated the syllables aloud to herself, “Yey-ya.”

  She jumped up, clasping her hands over her mouth.

  Ieuan! The laughing young man with his arm around her mother in her grandmother’s album.

  Ieuan, who had come back when she was four, and who had died so young in Australia.

  She turned to her mother, desperate to ask about him, but her mother was in a different place and time, and could not hear or answer. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she kept saying, her head turning from side to side on the pillow as she plucked incessantly at the sheet. “I’m so sorry, Ieuan.” As Gillian leaned over to smooth the hair off her mother’s forehead, the dazed eyes focused on Gillian’s face. They stilled and opened wide in amazement. A shaking hand reached up to cradle Gillian’s cheek. “Oh Ieuan, cariad!” her mother whispered. “So old!”

  Gillian fell back, holding her burning cheek.

  So that was it! That was the mystery behind the coldness and unhappiness, the tension and resentment; the discomfort about her appearance, and now about Alice’s. Here, at her mother’s deathbed, well into middle age herself, Gillian looked back over their largely separate lives as mother and daughter and saw how they had circled and avoided each other, hugging their own poisonous secrets. Looking down at her mother, quiet now, her ravaged face relaxing into a suggestion of its former beauty, she grieved for the waste of life, and of love; for her mother and father, for Ieuan, for Tom, and herself; their lives all damaged by that choice the young Iris had made.

  Her mother had fallen into a restless, drugged slumber, the fever clearly worse and her breathing rougher as pneumonia tightened its grip. As the hours went by, Sunita, who had extended her shift, came in several times during the evening and night to check on her and help Gillian make her more comfortable. Not sure what difference it made, Gillian continued wiping her mother’s face, and moistening her lips, until at last the old woman fell into what seemed a deeper sleep. Finally, after releasing her hair and loosening her waistband, Gillian managed to sleep also, in the armchair she had pulled up to the bedside.

  In the morning, she saw a further change. The fever seemed to have subsided, but her mother’s cheeks and mouth were even more fallen-in, her breathing a soft rattle, her restless fingers still. As Gillian stirred, her mother’s eyes opened and dwelt on her.

  “Gillian,” she said, her blue lips barely moving. “Gillian …”

  There was a soft tap at the door. Tom came quietly into the room and Gillian embraced him. As they stood at each side of their mother’s bed, looking down at her, Gillian took her hand, surprised and moved to feel an answering pressure.

  “Mum,” Tom took her other hand. “It’s Tom.”

  Her lips opened, but not her eyes. “No time now.”

  Gillian and Tom looked at each other.

  “I’m sorry,” he said awkwardly. “I don’t want to be a nuisance.”

  Faint but unmistakable, the words were heard, “Always a nuisance.”

  Turning a grimace into a crooked smile, Tom retreated to the window to stand with his back to the room. Drawing her hand out of her mother’s, Gillian went to his side and put her arm around him.

  When she returned to the bedside, the coldness of her mother’s hand chilled her. The closed eyes had sunk further back in their sockets, the na
ils were blue. The bedclothes barely moved over a form that seemed to have shrunk to little more than that of a child under the sheets.

  “Tom,” Gillian said. “Come here with me.” They stood together, hand in hand, Tom weeping, Gillian dry-eyed, watching the marble features lose their strain as the rattling breaths grew ever shallower and further apart, until, after one last sigh, they stopped.

  As they prepared to leave the room after fetching a tearful Sunita, Tom picked a silver-framed photograph off the chest of drawers, a black and white portrait of their mother in film-star pose, beautiful as they first remembered her.

  “Could I have this?”

  “Of course you can, Tom. Take anything you want.”

  They stood heads together, in front of the dressing-table mirror, regarding the photograph.

  “She certainly knew she was beautiful,” Tom said.

  Looking up, they caught each other’s eyes in the mirror and smiled ruefully. There was none of the youthful radiance of that old photograph in their reflected images, Gillian saw, but their mother’s winged eyebrows and high cheekbones were still to be seen in Tom’s countenance, as were Ieuan’s curly hair, thin features, and wide eyes in her own. As she looked, she saw those green eyes fill with tears.

  “Well, Gill, we neither of us got what we wanted.” After the funeral, Tom sat beside Vanna on the sofa in her living room. “But, you know, I find I don’t really care all that much anymore.” He took Vanna’s hand and raised it to his lips.

  Gillian looked from one to the other in disbelief. Not since childhood had she seen Vanna smile so happily and openly, without a trace of irony or mockery. “Is this for real?”

  “As real as it gets.” Vanna held Tom’s hand in both of hers. “This is it now. No more running, no more searching. What I wanted was right in front of me, and I couldn’t see it until now.”

  It was not quite, ‘That thou art’, Gillian thought, but close enough. “Well that’s wonderful! I’m thrilled for you both! Promise me you’ll come and visit me in Ottawa as soon as you can.”

  “We’re planning on it.” Tom topped up her wine glass as Vanna went to check on the sausage rolls, their choice of comfort food. “How about you, Gill?” He was serious again. “Are you all right?”

  “I am. I never did have that talk with Mum, but that can’t be helped now, and like you, I don’t seem to mind so much.” She turned to face him. “I’ve learned something else, though, Tom, which you should know.”

  After she told him about Ieuan, he came over to sit on the wide arm of her chair, his hand around her shoulders. “Good Lord, Gill! I don’t know what to say.” He looked into her eyes. “But how do you feel about it?”

  “It was so long ago, and we’re getting so much older, that, to tell you the truth, Tom, all I feel, now that I’m over the shock, is a sense of waste, and pity. Pity for everyone involved, including and especially poor Dad.”

  “Right. Poor Dad.” Tom blew his nose. “I remember now you telling me about that photograph, after we visited Grandma that day. Did Grandma know d’you think?” He wiped his eyes. “Did Dad?”

  They heard a clunk from the oven door, and a savoury smell wafted in from the kitchen as they looked at each other.

  “So that was the mystery man she’d have been so happy with in Australia.” He got up, smiling sadly. “Poor Mum! Perhaps she would.” He set off for the kitchen but stopped and turned back. “So you think that this Ieuan came back to see her when you were four, and tried to persuade her to leave Dad, and take us back to Australia with him, but she refused?” His eyes widened. “Because of me, do you think? I must have complicated the issue, mustn’t I, nuisance that I was.”

  “I think she was too scared, Tom. Imagine leaving your home and everyone you know, to set off across the world into the Great Unknown with two small children. And then she might’ve had to live in relative poverty with Ieuan. After all, remember, she left him in the first place to marry Dad, who must’ve already been pretty well off by then.”

  “I say!” Tom grinned. “Do you wish she’d gone with him, Gill? Think about it! We could’ve been little Australian

  children, larking about in the sunshine with our pet kangaroo! No evacuation, no boarding school ….”

  “… and a happy mother.” Gillian twisted her hair. “But then, a different father, Tom. And no Bryn and Carol, or Alice. Or Simon.”

  “Or Vanna!” A smile spread over Tom’s face as he shrugged his broad shoulders. “Well, it’s all water under the bridge now, isn’t it? Let’s drink to that, eh? Where are you, Vanna? Come and join us!” He opened another bottle of wine and filled their glasses rather too generously, necessitating some hasty mopping-up. They clinked glasses.

  “To water under the bridge.”

  After her return to Ottawa, Gillian to her surprise brooded constantly, going back over her life and picking retroactive fights. She turned on herself for being a self-

  centred loser, while her anger against her mother grew rather than abated. Curdled with unrequited love and under-

  acknowledged grief, it seethed in a tightly lidded cauldron, the toxic mixture thickened with fury against Angus for what he did to Gladys. At times the focus of this rage shifted completely onto him and onto his mother. Had that woman really not seen what went on? Forgotten details came back to Gillian: how his mother would let him come into the bathroom while she sponged down the children; how she had tucked the Shirley Temple doll into his bed, giggling in a way that had struck Gillian even then as inappropriate. But it was Angus’s crime against Gladys that burned Gillian the most as she pictured Gladys suffering in ways far worse than she herself had known.

  She was at odds in her relationship with Simon, too. Although he had still kept the apartment over the bookstore, he had spent more and more time at her house during the last months, and she had been happy with that until she went back to Wales. After her return, however, she told him she was upset over her mother’s death and needed more space.

  “You must suit yourself, of course,” he replied stiffly, and returned to his apartment over the shop, leaving her more or less alone after that. She understood and felt the magnitude of her loss, but could not summon up the will to turn things around. “So what?” she argued with herself. He was a lovely man: kind and sensitive and cultured, and she had thought she loved him, but she was no good at relationships; they always failed in the end, so what was the point of hanging on where there was no longer any joy or peace?

  She became increasingly aggravated also by Carol’s determined cheerfulness and by Bryn’s anxious solicitude. She was all right, she told them irritably; she just wanted to be left alone. In the end they stopped inviting her to join them in the evenings and at weekends. Worse still, the company of Alice, once her delight, now made her uneasy to the point where she avoided the child, in whose eyes she now fancied she saw a cold, strange look. She saw, too, how cherished the little girl was, and how protected; how she was the focus of her parents’ concerns, her welfare always their first priority. Everything in that house revolved about Alice. If they were not careful, she thought, they would find she ruled the roost. Without a doubt, the child would become horribly spoiled and self-important.

  Christmas was the worst time. She managed to bah-humbug her way through the season until the unavoidable mid-day Christmas dinner at Bryn and Carol’s home when the foolish hilarity, the grossly extravagant feast, and the threat of Christmas crackers and games drove her to leave early.

  She walked Dora by the river in Windsor Park. Under a darkening sky, the ice-bound willows creaking in the north wind, and the hard snow groaning under her boots, she strode on until the dog stopped, holding up an ice-packed paw, mutely imploring that they return home.

  Her work was in trouble too: her colleagues boring and her students insufferable. That last semester, arguing with a student about the meaning of a word, she had co
me close to a serious misdemeanour. The girl had objected loudly in class to Gillian’s correction of the word emphasize in the sentence, “I can emphasize with my friends’ problems.” Gillian had explained her reason, writing all the forms of the words empathy and emphasis, in columns on the board, and doing a sort of riff to demonstrate their distinct uses, only to hear the girl say, “Whatever. That’s still what it means to me.” Others in the class declared that that was what it meant to them too, so what was the big deal? When Gillian suggested, tight-lipped, that they look it up in the dictionary, the girl said, against a background of nodding heads, that she didn’t care what it said in the dictionary, that it was what emphasize meant to her, so that was what it meant. Period.

  That was when Gillian said, “Do you want a smack?”

  There was a communal intake of breath, all eyes fixed on her. Switching quickly into damage-control mode, she added “… is what I’d have been able to get away with saying at one time, but now I think I have to say, ‘You have a right to your opinion’.”

  “You still saying I’m wrong, or what?” The girl was a scrapper.

  “What I’m saying,” Gillian stated, “is that I’m emphasizing with your point of view.”

  She got away with it, but only just, and the incident showed her she was in danger of losing her balance, at the very least. For the rest of the winter she would focus on her work and on avoiding aggravation.

  April arrived with its threats and promises, bringing with it Alice’s sixth birthday. Gillian tried to take an interest in the party preparations, but as at Christmas, the whole thing seemed absurdly overblown. Once more, the expenditure of time and effort offended her: the extravagant gifts, so carefully chosen, wrapped in irrationally expensive paper, the loot bags, the junk food, the balloons and paper-chains, and the inane tape of Alice’s favourite songs playing non-stop.

  Seeing her irritation at the music, Bryn changed the tape to one of a Mozart symphony that sounded to her like a bluebottle trapped on a windowpane.