The Monkey Puzzle Tree (16 page)

A rattle of stones announced the arrival of James. In a new corduroy jacket the same colour as his hair and accessorized by a paisley cravat, he was making his unsteady way down the path. Managing, after a few tries, to find a safe place on the uneven surface of the wall for his whisky glass and to light a cigarette, he went straight to the point. Now that now she’d been knocked about a bit, so to speak, might she not be kinder to a faithful admirer? “How about it, Gillian?” He cocked his head at her, blowing out smoke. “It could be just what we both need.”

“I don’t think so.” Gillian looked out across the sands, wet from the retreating tide. “After you get what you want, you don’t want it.”

“Nonsense! You don’t know what you’re missing.” He sat down beside her on the wall and took her hand. “But I think you do know that we’re two of a kind in a way, you and I. We could be great together; I with my superior brain, ha, ha, and you with your not altogether disagreeable looks. Come on, what d’you say?” He held out his arms. “Be a sport.”

Be a sport?
She shook her head. “I’m sorry, James, but I’m not much of a one for the sporting life.”
Llewellyn would certainly agree with that.

He sighed gustily and crushed his cigarette out on the wall, flipping the stub onto the bushes below. “You’ll be sorry one day, my girl.” He got up, raising his eyebrows admonishingly at her. “Chances like this are hard to come by.” She watched him stumble back up the path.

Wouldn’t it be funny if it were true!
Despite his crassness just now, probably due to the whisky, he was the only person she had ever met who always recognized her allusions, capped her quotations, and laughed at her jokes. He made her laugh in turn, never bored her, and seemed to find her attractive. Maybe he was right: perhaps he could help lessen this hollow ache, this ghost-like feeling.

She sat for a while, thinking about what he had said and watching the black and white oyster-catchers running along the sands below, digging after their prey with long, curved, orange beaks. Although it was mid-July, she shivered when a cloud covered the sun.

Back at the cottage, she looked around. The party, which had spilled out-of-doors, looked far from festive. The mostly middle-aged guests, many of whom she did not know, seemed both staid and drunk at the same time. The cottage was smaller and shabbier than she had thought, while the formerly gleaming beach had become a mud-flat. There was no sign of James. Still shivering, she went in to collect her cardigan from the little bedroom where she had left it.

In the living room, Gordon was putting on a ’78 record. “Just a
minute, Gill!” he said sharply as she went towards the bedroom.

“Be with you in a sec.” Pushing open the door she heard scuffle and a throaty giggle and saw in the half-light from the small, ivy-shaded window, tousled dark hair and a rosy face half-hidden by a corduroy shoulder. Angharad, her mouth loose as an overblown peony, and her crimson blouse rumpled and unbuttoned, was looking up at James, clearly willing to give her all, if she had not already. Turning his head and seeing Gillian, James grimaced like a man experiencing severe acid-reflux.

Keeping her eyes down, Gillian snatched her cardigan from the back of a chair and retreated into the living room, shutting the door smartly behind her. Gordon grinned and jerking his head at the bedroom, rolled his eyes. Looking from the gramophone to her, he held up a long forefinger.

The music filled the gloomy, black-beamed room.

Love, oh love, oh careless love!
the voice sang with full heart, bittersweet and dark.

Overwhelmed, Gillian held her breath, until, seeing Gordon’s face, she burst out laughing.

“You go to my head like wi-ine,”
they sang along
,

“You ruined the life of many a poor girl,

And you ver’ near ruined this life of mine.”

Gordon danced around
the scruffy room, waving his wine glass, his dark hair flopping on his forehead.

Dear Gordon. Why couldn’t it have been you?
Giving him a quick goodbye kiss, and asking him to thank the hosts for her, Gillian stuffed Diana’s brochure into her handbag, stepped over a recumbent junior lecturer by the front door, and left the cottage to follow the winding stony path to the car.

W

As she sat by her sleeping
mother later that morning, Gillian thought how those events during that long-ago summer had all pointed in the same direction: away from Llewellyn, and away from her mother. Canada would offer a fresh start, new possibilities. And so it had, even if it had not created a new Gillian.

The room was quiet, apart from the rasp of laboured breathing. Her mother’s dentures grinned from a glass of water on the bedside table. Stripped of her feistiness and make-up, she was fearfully diminished. Taking in the pallor of the sunken cheeks, the hollowness of the eye sockets, and the collapse of the half-open mouth, Gillian saw ‘the skull beneath the skin’. The eyes opened to drift unseeingly around the room until they lit on her, stilled, widened for a long moment, and then with a wince closed tight, her mother seeming to shrink even further.

“What’s wrong, Mum?” Gillian leaned over to stroke the hot, dry forehead.

“Nothing. Why d’you ask?” With an obvious effort, her mother roused herself. “Give me my glasses, would you, and my dentures. I wasn’t expecting you today.”

“But I said I’d be coming. I come to see you every day.”

“Yes,
now
you do.” She strained to sit forward as Gillian placed an extra pillow behind her back, and supplied the missing items. Settling back against the pillows, she added, “After over thirty years.” With her teeth in, and her glasses on, she was back in the world of the living.

Gillian straightened the bed, pulling the sheet tight and refastening it with ‘hospital corners’ as she had been taught long ago at school. She shook out the cotton blanket with a snap. “Has Tom been in?”

“Yes he has, but he was so noisy and made so much fuss, I told him to go away.”

Gillian threw the blanket down on the bed. “Tom loves you, Mum, and he tries hard to please you. Why are you so harsh?” In her anger on her brother’s behalf she pushed the question further, surprising herself. “Why have you always been so cold and hard towards both of us, all our lives, even when we were little children?”

Her mother’s fingers flew to the base of her throat, her rheumy eyes wide. “
Me
? Cold and hard towards
you
? Oh, Gillian! If you only knew what a sacrifice I made for you both, so that you could have every advantage and never go without.” She closed her eyes. “What happiness I gave up for your sakes.”

Gillian stepped back, colliding with the chair, “What? What are you talking about? What sacrifice? What happiness?”

Her mother kept her eyes closed and waved a hand. “Water under the bridge, Gillian! Water under the bridge!”

“‘
Water under the bridge’ my foot! Bloody great dam more likely! What’s this all about, Mum?” She gripped the frail shoulder, close to giving it a shake. “Tell me!”

“Don’t you bully me, my girl! It’s none of your business.”

“It damn well is my business, if it has anything to do with what came between us.” Gillian sat down, trying to breathe slowly. After a moment she took her mother’s hand. “I’m sorry I was cross, Mum, but what you said about sacrifices and lost happiness shook me. Will you tell me what you meant?”

Her mother looked away, coughing. “I was very hurt to hear you say I was cold to you,” she wheezed, “I did my best, you know.”

A straight answer would be nice
. “I know you loved me when I was very little.” With a sigh, Gillian stroked the translucent skin on the back of her mother’s hand. “I remember going through scraps of cloth in your rag bag, feeling the textures while you told me the words for them:
crepe de Chine, taffeta, bombazine
; and the names of colours I didn’t know:
heliotrope, crimson, Nile green
… you said that was the colour of my eyes. There was tenderness and closeness between us then, I’m sure of it. But something changed.” She looked up. “What happened, Mum?”

“I’ve always loved you, Gillian, despite your difficult nature, but
…
things got complicated.” She glanced at Gillian out of the corner of her eye, pleating the sheet between her fingers and clearing her throat. “Do you, by any chance, remember a man coming to visit us when you were four years old? A tall man, very tanned? He brought you a stuffed toy—a Koala bear.”

“I remember the bear, Ozzie. Tommy threw him into the duck pond in Brynmill Park.” She looked sharply at her mother. “Why? What about him? That man?”

“Well he …” Her mother took a deep breath, setting off a fit of coughing that left her ashen and gasping. “He was …” Another paroxysm gripped her. “I’m sorry, Gillian,” she gasped, “I can’t talk now.” She lay back, deathly pale, her chest crackling and her eyes closed.

Hardly able to breathe herself, Gillian watched her mother struggle for breath as something rolled, clanking, down the hallway. Hoping to find Sunita, she went to the door, but found the passage silent and empty.

A
minute later her mother looked up with a start and seized Gillian’s wrist.

“That time …” she whispered hoarsely, “… that time when you were at Croesffordd.” She pulled on the wrist. “Was it all right, Gillian? With that boy, Angus, I mean?”

Gillian stared at her, the blood pounding in her head.

Is this it? Now?

Her mother tugged again, nodding encouragingly. “Tell me it was all right!” The wheezing grew louder. “I’ve always been a bit worried …” She fell back, seized by another fit of coughing.

Gillian pulled her hand away. At the window she laid her forehead against the cool glass.

She knew!

Outside, gulls screamed and wheeled in the wind.

She has always been “a bit” worried?
Gillian clenched her teeth, her eyes squeezed shut.

And
now,
when she’s
at death’s door, and I can’t tell her, she needs to know it was “all right”?

After a long pause, filled with the thump of her own heartbeat, her mother’s wheezing, and the shrieks of gulls, she opened her eyes and said, still facing the window,
“Yes, it was all right.”

“You’re sure?”

For a moment she wavered, but made herself turn back to the bed. “It was all right, Mum.”

Her mother put her head back, closing her eyes. Gillian let out a long breath and tidied up the bedside table.

With a clatter at the door, Sunita came in, carrying a loaded, stainless-steel tray. “It’s time for your Lasix injection, Iris, and for your sponge bath, and your pills.” She turned to Gillian. “Mrs. Davies asked me to call her Iris. She said it made her feel more at home.”

“It’d make me feel the same, Sunita, if you’d call me Gillian.”

Sunita smiled and turned back to her patient, her face becoming serious. “How are you feeling, Iris?” She looked at the water glass. “Oh dear, you haven’t drunk any of your water! Remember Dr. Gabriel said it was very important for you to drink plenty of fluids.” She felt her patient’s pulse. “Is there anything you’d like to drink? Does something tempt you in particular?”

Gillian’s mother made a big effort. “That stuff you found for me the other day, Gillian, what was that called now? I liked that.”

“Lucozade. I’ll get you some more right now, Mum. What about a bottle of Ribena too? I know where I can get that.”

“Thank you, darling. That would be lovely.”

So that was that. It had been close, but there would be no revelation, no heart-to-heart reconciliation, and no closure. Holding onto that ‘darling’, Gillian left her mother to Sunita’s care.

Walking up to the shops, she searched for memories of Ozzie, and fetched up an image of the little bear with the funny face being held out to her in the thin, brown hands of a tall stranger smiling down at her. Something stirred in the back of her mind, but slipped away as Tom’s BMW, a perk from his years at the Croyden dealership, drew alongside with a gentle toot.

They bought Lucozade and Ribena at the chemist’s, and located a box of Meltis New Berry Fruits, their mother’s favourite candy, in case she could be tempted.

“Sunita’s going to be a while with Mum.” Gillian looked at her watch. “Let’s just drop off the Lucozade for her, and then drive over and look at the ducks in Brynmill Park. Like when we were little.”

The pond was still there, complete with panhandling ducks, beady eyes fixed sideways on them. Holding ice cream cones from the park kiosk, they sat on what could have been the same iron bench as that used by their mother or Olwen fifty years ago, while Gillian described to Tom how ill their mother seemed.

“She’s probably dehydrated,” he said, “It’s surprising what that can do to you.”

He took a bite of his ice cream. “Do you remember the rude monkey that used to be in the cage behind this bench?”

Gillian smiled. “We were never allowed to watch him, were we? There was a fox here too, in a pen behind the bushes on the other side of the pond. Remember? Sometimes you could smell it.”

“What was the point of that? We couldn’t look at the monkey, and no one could see the fox.”

“Who knows?” Gillian licked her cone and looked at him sideways. “You threw my Koala bear, Ozzie, into this pond, Tom, and Mum wouldn’t get him out because he’d be filthy. I was pretty upset.”

“Sorry!” Tom sighed. “I seem to have spent my life saying ‘sorry’.”

He broke off a piece of cone and threw it to the ducks which squabbled as if it were their only source of nourishment for the day. “Do you remember Gill, when you didn’t write for almost a year; that second year you were in Canada? What happened there? You’ve never told me.”