The Juniper Tree (11 page)

Not knowing what had happened I waited all day for Gertrude to telephone and by the time it was evening I was convinced that the baby was born dead. Several times I held the receiver in my hand but was unable to bring myself to dial the Forbeses’ number. I couldn’t face any bad news that was waiting for me. Perhaps the longed-for baby was deformed or very sickly or the labour pains were false ones. It never crossed my mind that Gertrude might have died.

The following morning when I went to open the shop Bernard was standing by his car. As he crossed the road he hardly noticed the on-coming traffic and horns were honking at him and the lollipop man was jumping up and down with frustration but he didn’t notice: his eyes were like black holes and his face dark and unshaven. He told me not to open the shop, but to return with him to Richmond, so I shut the door behind me and went with him just as I was. We sat silent in the car for a few heavy minutes, then he said: ‘I suppose you know that Gertrude is dead. She died suddenly yesterday morning of a haemorrhage amongst other things. She was proudly holding the child and the happiness on her face . . . It was as if she’d died of happiness.’ He said no more and we drove away. It was so fearful there was nothing to say, we were like two sleep-drivers.

When we reached the house Bernard immediately took me upstairs and, as we stood outside the bedroom door, he said, ‘You would like to see her, wouldn’t you? There’s nothing to be afraid of, she looks beautiful, just as she always was.’ We went in and he put a hand on my shoulder, as if for support, and we gazed at Gertrude, lying like a statue and looking very much as she had the first time I saw her in the snowy courtyard. There was no baby in her arms, so perhaps it was still alive. ‘The baby,’ I asked. ‘What has happened to the baby?’

‘Oh, the baby,’ he said vaguely. ‘I suppose it’s with Marie.’

As we spoke there came the bleating cry of a new-born child from the next room, the nursery that Gertrude had prepared months ago. Bernard still stood looking down at his wife, so I took his cold hand and walked towards the door, looking back once for a last glance at Gertrude’s pale profile. Then we went into the other room.

The nurse, Marie, was feeding the child from a small bottle and I could see by her inflamed eyes that she had been crying. She told me that the baby was a boy and weighed nearly nine pounds and he certainly was a fine child, with an exceptionally white skin and rose-red cheeks, looking much older than his two days. When he had finished his bottle she put him in my arms. I felt a strange revulsion to him. It was partly because he was the cause of Gertrude’s death, but it wasn’t only that, it was his colouring. The contrast of the snow-white skin and the rose-red cheeks was so unusual in a new-born baby. I tried to pass him on to Bernard, but he backed away saying, ‘No, no, not yet.’ He stroked the baby’s soft bright hair for a moment and then quickly left the room.

He was waiting on the landing for me and jerked out, ‘His name is John, you know.’

I corrected him: ‘John Bernard, isn’t it?’

He agreed: ‘Yes, John Bernard, poor little fellow. At the moment I can’t really feel for him. He doesn’t seem real to me somehow and I expect him to vanish. I can’t bear to hear him cry. Charlotte will drive you home. It’s all arranged,’ and he stumbled away from me, his unshaven face all wet with tears. I’d never been close to death before and it was far worse than I’d imagined, particularly sudden death.

Gertrude was cremated, as she would have wished to be, although Charlotte and Bernard would have preferred a grave where they could plant her favourite flowers. I went to the funeral but slipped away before it ended because I didn’t want to be there when she was burnt and reduced to tiny ashes and smoke came out of a narrow chimney, as I’d heard. I went home and opened the shop as if nothing had happened and because I didn’t care one way or another I sold a Victorian sofa that had been filling the shop for months. In the evening Mary came to see me and we went to the nearest pub together, leaving Tommy alone in the house, a thing I’d never done before. I’d have got drunk if it would have helped, but after two Guinnesses I felt worse than I did before. Being so black, Guinness is a suitable drink for funerals, but I couldn’t imagine Bernard serving it.

It was over three weeks before I saw Bernard again and I was beginning to think he had dropped me. After all, I was really Gertrude’s friend and he had only been interested in improving my mind and as someone to keep Gertrude amused. Then, one Saturday evening as I was re-arranging the shop window, Tommy suddenly cried, ‘Bernard’s coming.’ She always seemed to know when he was coming before he appeared. We were standing together, looking hopefully through the window, when his car drew up beside the Green and, seeing our eager faces, he smiled at us in a normal way. I’d been imagining him as I’d last seen him, broken and unshaven, his upper lip drawing back from his teeth every now and then.

We went into the back room together and he sat in his usual chair which I’d never liked to sell because we called it Bernard’s chair and Tommy curled up on his knee like a contented kitten and we sat there in the dusk, drinking rather inferior sherry and talking in low tones. He told me that Charlotte had given up her teaching for the time being so that she could look after the baby and run the house after Marie left. It was a noble thing to do because she enjoyed her work and independence and was giving it up for the restricted life of a mother-housekeeper. ‘Thank God we still have old Mrs Hicks coming in to do the cleaning, but for how long, we don’t know. She adored Gertrude and it isn’t so easy for her to work for Charlotte; the sisters have such different temperaments, or rather, had. Poor Charlotte, she tries so hard not to quarrel with me. I almost miss our battles.’

He wasn’t with us for long but it was arranged that Tommy and I would stay in Richmond the following weekend. ‘You’ll have to face it sometime, my dear. I know the house is just a shell of a place without her, but you want to see Johnny, don’t you? We call him Johnny now, but I don’t know if Gertrude would have approved. Better than Otto, I suppose, but anything she liked to call him would seem perfect to me.’

I had seen little of Stephen since Brit returned to the States. He’d telephoned a few times and called once when I was out and once when I was at home; but he had been in a restless mood and didn’t stay long. Somehow, not through me, he heard about Gertrude’s death and came to see me immediately. He’d never met her but knew how much the friendship meant to me and, although he teased me about the ‘pompous Bernard’, he never joked about Gertrude. I think they would have got on very well because people were always at their best with her and Stephen at his best could be very charming. He was at his best that evening and did all he could to comfort me. Brit wasn’t mentioned once the entire evening and he bought me flowers and Chinese food, which we nibbled sitting on the floor in front of the gas fire. That night we went to bed together, more as friends than lovers. It was a thing that occasionally happened between us at times of stress, a way of comforting each other that was in no way a commitment.

Bernard came to fetch us the following Saturday as we had arranged and there was Tommy jumping around us and talking about Gertrude and the swim in the bath she was looking forward to, the swing and the toys waiting in her bedroom, the dog and the carved bear guarding the house in the courtyard. She hadn’t been to the Forbeses’ house for weeks and had missed it sorely, poor child, but I was so on edge I could have hit her. Instead I covered my scar with my hand, a thing I hadn’t done for months. Bernard gently removed my hand and slipped it into my pocket, saying in the kindest way: ‘Relax, you silly girl. It won’t be as terrible as you imagine. There’s Johnny, for one thing, and we have been so looking forward to you coming.’

I smiled at the thought of Charlotte looking forward to my visit. Usually she hardly noticed me and I couldn’t remember a single conversation between us, just ‘Hallo’, ‘Goodbye’, ‘It’s very warm’, ‘It’s very cold’, and surprisingly ‘What a dear little girl you have. Is she adopted?’ Yet, there she was, standing on the doorstep with a welcoming smile on her fine face and a kiss on both cheeks for me and a hug for Tommy-Marline, who ran into the house looking for Gertrude although I’d already explained to her that she was away. ‘Has she gone to the shops?’ she asked and all I could think of saying was that she had gone very far away where there were no shops and she had taken Petra the dog with her. Petra had died in her sleep a few days after Gertrude. Mrs Hicks had found her lying under the kitchen table, but as she often lay there, hadn’t realized she was dead until there was no response to a bowl of her favourite food. Then, being a quiet woman who disliked scenes, she had knocked on Bernard’s door and said, ‘Please, sir, the dog appears to have died. It’s making no movement.’

Marie was putting Johnny to bed when we all trouped in to see him. There he was, sitting on her knee and looking at us with Gertrude’s beautiful eyes. He was very large and handsome and exactly the sort of baby she had wished for, but, as Marie put him in my arms, again I had the slight revulsion to him although his very white skin and rose-red cheeks appeared more natural now. His Aunt Charlotte had very much the same colouring. Bernard obviously doted on the child and his eyes never left him, but he did not hold him in his arms – perhaps he was too shy in the presence of three eager women and a transfixed little girl. From the moment Marline saw the beautiful child she adored him as if he had been her own baby brother, which indeed she thought he was, and she never showed the slightest trace of jealousy.

On the surface we got through the weekend without too much suffering; but there were some painful moments. Once, when Bernard and I were walking together in the garden, we came across Gertrude’s half-tame magpies chattering on a low bough of the juniper tree and they looked at us with clever eyes as if they knew that she was dead. We were both aware of something almost sinister and I, who was often afraid to touch people, clutched Bernard’s arm and buried my face in his shoulder so that I couldn’t see their knowing eyes. We were both shaking.

On Sunday evening we couldn’t bring ourselves to play Gertrude’s records, or any records for that matter, so we settled for Scrabble. I wondered where the Scrabble had come from, Charlotte perhaps. The Forbeses didn’t play games, with the exception of chess. I was quite enjoying the game when Bernard, who was winning, suddenly jumped up, scattering the letters, muttered something about ‘Damn fool game’ and left the room.

On Monday, when he was driving us back to Twickenham, he stopped the car near Marble Hill and apologized for the Scrabble incident. ‘It’s Charlotte trying to be a ray of sunshine that gets me down, although I know she means it for the best. The other day she suggested brightly that I went for a nice walk in the park with the dog; she’d forgotten that she had been dead for three weeks or more – poor creature, nothing to live for, like me. I sometimes feel that I’m harnessed to remorse, misery and loneliness for the rest of my life. I can’t see how it can ever get better. There’s Johnny, of course, but it will be years until I can really talk to him. I watch him, though, and he’s changing all the time. He has Gertrude’s eyes, have you noticed? And Marie says he’s very advanced for his age. My poor Gertrude, how she would have loved him.’

Tommy was becoming restless in her little seat in the back of the car so we drove on and, just as we were half way down Heath Road and were held up in the traffic, I suddenly remembered a beautiful August day when Gertrude and I were in the flowery thicket and she had made me promise to look after her baby if anything happened to her. I’d forgotten all about it; but now, in this ugly, traffic-filled road, it came back to me with great clarity and it was as if we were still in the Burning Bush Restaurant, under the juniper tree with the magpies moving about in the branches above, and I was making this serious promise.

I turned to Bernard, who was frowning at the almost stationary traffic, and cried, ‘Oh, Bernard, I’ve just remembered I promised Gertrude I’d look after her child if anything happened to her. How could I have forgotten?’

Bernard’s frowning face relaxed as he turned towards me: ‘Of course I know you will do anything humanly possible for Gertrude’s child, whether you have made promises or not. You are absolutely trustworthy, Bella, dear.’

Then the traffic cleared and we drove on. Now I felt doubly committed to little John Bernard.

Chapter Fifteen

I
hadn’t seen Miss Murray for several months. Then she turned up at the shop like a fairy godmother with her usual large basket filled with damaged china. She had heard about Gertrude’s death and thought going through the china would cheer me up. She knew the Forbeses fairly well and called Gertrude a headstrong woman because she had insisted on having her baby at home. ‘She would have been pushing her baby through the streets like any other woman if she had gone into hospital. Having a baby at home was so foolhardy at her age, don’t you agree?’ Then, relenting, ‘I might have done the same, though.’

‘It’s a very fine child,’ I said listlessly as I picked over her rejects. Then, with more interest, ‘I like these Italian cups with the cupids. They seem perfect to me.’

She examined them for a moment. ‘Well, they’re on the heavy side, don’t you think? And there are only three of them. No one wants three cups, it’s six or perhaps four or even two. I know, sell them as a pair and keep the odd one yourself.’

I smiled and said I’d keep one for my early morning cup of tea, and I drank from it for many mornings.

It is strange how that Italian cup comforted me and helped me back on the right track again. I’ve noticed that after a crisis in one’s life or a bad illness quite a small thing can be the turning point towards recovery. I can remember having pneumonia as a child. It must have been when my father was still with us because he seemed to be sitting there night and day and trying to get me to eat a kind of meat jelly called Brand’s Essence; but I turned my face away and demanded celery. I had a craving for it and the doctor eventually allowed me to chew – but not swallow – beautiful, crisp celery, and from that moment I recovered rapidly. The Italian cup acted in the same way and I began to take an interest in the shop again. I bought a new winter overcoat and made an appointment with an expensive hairdresser to have my dark hair re-styled. I even went to a Sunday morning party given by one of Stephen’s friends and I quite enjoyed it.