The Wild Cherry Tree Read online

  It was inevitable too that he should ask about her husband. What kind of a man was it, he asked, who could treat a woman like her as if – as if – half in anger, half in astonished disgust, he found himself at a loss for words.

  ‘It all died long ago.’

  When he sought to probe more deeply behind that withered sentence she told him, at first with hesitancy and then with even more belated responses, of the evening, long ago, when she had wanted to go to a party, a wedding anniversary or something of that sort, and she had bought for it, out of almost the first of the money she made for herself, a new dress. It was a dress of vivid emerald, in taffeta, flared at the skirt, and loose, round and low at the neck. It was in fact the first of her many purchases that were brilliant to look at, sensuous to touch, exciting to wear.

  ‘He practically tore it from my back. Said the green was unlucky, swore it made me look like a cheap, tarty bitch. I went straight upstairs and we never went to the party.’

  That too, though she never told him so, was the first of her many withdrawals into the secret make-believe of dressing up. For years after that, though she didn’t tell him that either, she sought solely to build for herself a life of sensuous elegance, impossibly useless beauty, that she could enjoy alone.

  ‘The man must be a blind raving idiot. You dress with such taste. Somehow you always get everything absolutely right.’

  ‘He isn’t worth talking about.’

  ‘Blind, puerile, raving idiot –’

  ‘I don’t come and meet you to talk about him. I don’t need to talk about anything, in fact – I just come –’

  Slowly, from behind yet another of her long-delayed responses, she at last confessed that what she really came for, above all, was tenderness. She had never known such tenderness. It enveloped her as sensuously and softly as the silk of her dresses. Emotionally and physically it clothed her like a second skin.

  The spring, protracted, neither too warm nor too cold, seemed to hold itself back from emergence into full summer, so that the sea of bluebells in the darkening wood was still brilliant at the end of May. Nor had the primroses and drifts of white anemones and white sprays of cherry bloom fully faded either when he held her face between his two hands one evening and said:

  ‘Got something to tell you. Miserable bit of news, I’m afraid.’

  She prepared herself to make light of it. ‘You don’t love me any more.’

  ‘For ever and ever. Absolutely for ever and ever. From here to eternity. For a thousand springs.’

  ‘You’re teasing me.’

  ‘Never. No. It’s this.’ He purposely let his voice fall to a flat whisper. ‘They may be sending me back to the Gulf.’

  ‘May?’

  ‘It isn’t certain yet. The only thing that is certain is that I’ll have to go back to town for a few days until they decide.’

  ‘And if they do decide? Will it be for long?’

  ‘Don’t talk about it. There’s nothing I can do anyway.’

  Yes indeed there was, she said.

  ‘And what is it?’

  ‘You could love me.’

  In the deep corner of the wood, lying between two big rugs he had brought from the car, she was overcome by an increasingly haunting impression that they were together, and that she was being loved, for the last time. An exhausting wave of passion in turn overwhelmed the impression briefly and she was then left in the oppressive grip of something infinitely worse: an ache of the most barren loneliness.

  Much later she was to know it as something as permanently part of her as her own heart beat but that first evening the experience left her with a feeling of being completely arid, a dead sapless branch rotted to dry touchwood at the core.

  She tried to make light of that too.

  ‘In a couple of weeks you’ll forget me. Off with the old and on with the new. Out of sight, out of mind.’

  ‘Now you’re being cruel to me.’

  ‘No, no. I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘It hurts just as much to go as it does for you to be left.’

  She turned with a restless impulse and pressed her naked body against him under the rug and kissed him, more in utter gratitude than anything like love or passion.

  ‘I’m glad you said that. If you never say another word to me I’ll always remember that.’

  It was almost dark in the wood. A great scent of bluebells, elusive but rich, filled the twilight air. As she breathed it in she gave a long, aching, involuntary sigh.

  ‘I’ll be back in two days anyway,’ he said. ‘What’s today? Tuesday. I’ll be back Thursday. Same time, same place.’

  ‘Same time, same place.’

  Holding her breasts in his two hands he suddenly asked a final favour.

  ‘What is it?’ she said.

  He drew a deep breath of his own.

  ‘Wear that apricot dress.’

  She promised she would. He began to walk down the hill to where he had parked his car. She stood watching him for a moment or two and then with one of those sudden delayed responses of hers she ran after him and impetuously threw her arms round his neck.

  Impetuously too she found herself on the verge of blurting out a confession. A second or two later that too was delayed. She suppressed every word of it except the first fractured syllable and then simply stood there dumbly, caught in the trap of her own making, of her two identities, the self she was and the self she wasn’t.

  ‘What was it?’ he said. ‘You were going to say something.’

  No, she said, she wasn’t going to say anything. Not now. It was silly anyway. It wasn’t important.

  ‘You ran after me as if you were scared stiff.’

  Perhaps she was, she told herself. But the impossibility of attempting to tell him that she was really two persons was again too much for her and again she stood there without a word.

  He said at last that he ought to go and she said, feeling not only desperate but impossibly stupid.

  ‘Supposing you can’t get down for a day or two? Would there be some way of letting me know?’

  ‘I could telephone.’

  ‘We haven’t got a telephone.’

  ‘But I will come. Cross my heart and all that, if it’s the last thing I do.’

  ‘I know you will. It’s just that I can’t bear the thought of something that might –’

  She let him go at last. It was already late. In the spring darkness she watched the headlights of the car flash full on, swing away and illuminate for a few seconds the white branches of the cherry tree, the pig-sties, the pig-yards and the shabby corrugated roof of the house before disappearing altogether.

  Then she walked down the road. She walked stiffly and slowly, head up, eyes staring directly ahead, like a child walking on a tight-rope, frozen with the terror of falling.

  Nearly a month went by. The last of the bluebells faded completely in the wood. The blossom from the cherry tree thinned and faded too from the black branches.

  Soon the many greens of the May landscape merged gradually into one single green, a great leaf blanket, so that even as early as eight o’clock it was almost dark in the wood as she stood there, always in the apricot dress, and waited for the sound of a car coming up the hill.

  During this time she again went about feeling not really ill but suspended between a brittle nausea and actual sickness. By day she slopped about the pig-yards, carrying swill, shovelling dung, suckling some weakling of a piglet too feeble to fend for itself, her identity lost under the sack apron, the mud-caked boots, the floppy ancient hat.

  On a day towards the end of June she was backing out the old Ford truck, preparing to load into it half a dozen pigs, when she saw the green Cortina driving up the hill. As the car went past the gate of the farm-yard she caught her first glimpse of Jack Gilbert for nearly a month. He was wearing a light-weight biscuit-coloured suit and a yellow and green club tie. The neat freshness of his appearance at once caused her to break out in a cold sweat, so that sh
e stood again as if on the edge of a cliff, in the grip of a cold white vertigo.

  The car stopped two hundred yards up the hill. She stood in the road and watched Gilbert get out, light a cigarette and then stand smoking it, quickly, in nervous, impatient snatches. Then suddenly he threw the half-smoked cigarette down, crushed it with the heel of his pale brown suède shoe and began to walk up the hill.

  Even as he started walking he lit another cigarette and began to smoke that too in quick nervous gasps. Some twenty yards further on he abruptly stopped, turned, seemed about to change his mind over something and then as abruptly went on. If at that moment she was within his line of vision he failed utterly to notice it. She might have been a tree stump, a gate post, even another pig standing there on the roadside.

  A wild impulse to rush into the house, change into a dress of some sort and run up the hillside after him flared and died in her in a matter of seconds, leaving her ashen. She endured for some few minutes longer the torment of the old dilemma she had created for herself, the fraudulent trap of being two people, and then she started to drag herself slowly up the hill.

  Rather less than ten minutes later she met him coming back down the road. He was still smoking in short violent snatches. As they passed each other he took the cigarette from his mouth, muttered a half-audible good morning and then threw the cigarette away.

  In that moment a second and even wilder impulse brought her to the very edge of snatching off her scarf and hat. It failed completely simply because every atom of strength ebbed from her arms and hands. She found herself in a state of sudden bloodless paralysis, unable to take even another step up the road.

  Without even a second glance at her he went on down the hill. It seemed like an hour rather than only a minute or so before she gathered strength enough to turn and look after him. When she finally did so he had reached the car.

  Before getting into it he stood for some moments beside it and lit yet another cigarette. As his lighter flared it had the effect on her of an electric switch being sharply pressed and in that moment she snatched off her scarf and hat, ruffled both hands through her dark brown hair and then stood there completely motionless, bare headed.

  With almost a final glance of indifference in her direction he killed the flame in his lighter, thrust it into his pocket and put his hand on the handle of the car door. A moment later he seemed to be struck by an infinitely brief flash of interest in her. For a few seconds it seemed remotely possible that he might have recognized her. Then he suddenly threw the last of his many cigarettes on the road, crushed it underfoot, got into the car and drove away. In that same moment she lifted her hand, half as if to wave, and then let it fall dead at her side.

  It was the last of her delayed responses. Not even seeing it, he drove on, down the hill, towards the motorway and the metallic beetles, and at last out of sight.

  Some Other Spring

  It was going to be rather something, he told himself, for the tenth time or so, to see the children again after nearly two years. They might well have changed out of all recognition; they might well be strangers.

  It was partly for that reason he had left his car in the village and decided to walk the rest of the way, a quarter of a mile or so, across the fields. He would go in – no, sort of saunter in, quite casually, as if in fact the house were still his own – through the garden, by the back way. It seemed altogether too formal to use the front door. You couldn’t very well knock and say ‘Hullo, good afternoon, excuse me, I’ve come to pay my visit to the children. I’m allowed to see them once a month, if you remember. You know, the court order, Yes, I know I haven’t – yes, it’s been some time – I hope you got my letter. I did write to confirm.’

  The old Saunders place next door looked well, he thought, across the fields. The black and white front stood out in the August sun like a piece of iced cake against the black background of pines. He always envied the Saunders place, so marvellously well kept, so permanent, so immemorial somehow, so secure: all due, of course, to Elspeth, who looked after her father as efficiently as she looked after the garden, the house, the accounts, the cooking and everything else. She would have made someone an awfully good wife, Elspeth, he always thought: nice looks, charming, pleasant, affectionate, good taste, good clothes, good manners, good cook, good everything. He simply couldn’t think why she had never made it. He supposed she might well have given up the thought of it now. But then, in a way, perhaps it was no loss: you had to have women like Elspeth, who ran their fathers’ houses with efficiency, remembered birthdays, became miraculous godmothers and were always faultless friends. After all they couldn’t all be wives.

  The surrounding countryside looked pretty immemorial too, he thought. It was so long since he had seen it that he had forgotten how perfectly the low fold of meadows gave way to strips of cornland, the barley almost as white as the chalk on which it grew, and the glowing beauty of the dark beechwoods above and beyond.

  If these old familiar things seemed to surprise him pleasantly the sight of his own house – it wasn’t his own any more, but for some reason he couldn’t get out of the habit of thinking it was – grated on him, it always had, with irritation. You could see even from a distance that it fairly sprouted shabbiness. Even the curtains of the window in the east gable hadn’t been pulled back: that old, old bone of contention. Why on earth couldn’t Carrie remember?

  Naturally, of course, because she was Carrie. She was made like that. He could look at it dispassionately now. Untidiness, shabbiness, slopping about, come-easy, go-easy, dust and cobwebs: she loved it all; to her it was all, in a sense, romantic. A house in the country was merely a glorious ramshackle plaything for messing about with, whereas he himself had just as naturally wanted it to be ordered, civilized, a pattern.

  For instance, the garden. He had been most passionately keen on the garden. He had gone to great expense in making, among other things, a rock-garden, with specially imported stone, and a lily pond. In no time the lily pond was full of rusty toys, old bricks, ice-cream cartons, ghastly little tricycles. The children dug sand castles among the rocks. They played absolute hell with his beautifully nurtured gentians.

  Carrie thought this natural, even funny. They must be allowed, she fiercely maintained, to be themselves, to give expression to this and that, to run free.

  ‘But God, the wretched pool looks like a bomb-site. Look at the mess – look at the tin-cans –’

  ‘Then let it look like a bomb-site. To them –’

  ‘But damn it, hell, it isn’t a bomb-site. It’s a pool. A lily pool. I paid good hard-earned money to have the thing made and now look what the little horrors –’

  ‘And how are they to know that? They don’t know. They can’t differentiate between a lily pool and a bomb-site. To them it’s merely a place. They can’t differentiate –’

  ‘Oh! don’t keep using words like differentiate.’

  ‘Oh! and why not?’

  ‘Oh! it’s sort of councilese – sort of – well, why don’t you just say “tell the difference”? – I don’t know, it’s sort of suburban –’

  ‘Sort of, sort of, sort of – My God, it’s no more suburban than that!’

  By now he had reached the back boundary of the garden. He paused by the privet hedge. He seemed to see them still, the little perishers. He saw Nigel, the boy, actually riding a filthy tricycle through the lily pond, crushing lilies as they floated in full bloom, with Gilian, the girl, towed on behind in what seemed to be some sort of wretched fish-box on wheels. They were laughing uproariously, almost idiotically, and Carrie was laughing with them. No wonder he had hated and loved them; no wonder the end had come.

  ‘You’ve got a sort of bead-frame mind, you have. Everything’s got to be neat and in rows. Proper colours and added up. All nice and tidy and mathematical.’

  He was almost, at that moment, on the verge of turning back. It seemed the height of stupidity, suddenly, to rake it all up again. Could children change? He
doubted it. Once there, the character could only manifest itself accordingly; like a plant, it was fixed: poisonous or not, fragrant or otherwise.

  All of a sudden he was bothered by something about the hedge. It was somehow different. That end of the garden had always been a rampant wilderness, deep in nettles, a maze of bryony and elderberry everywhere. It was where the tin cans came from.

  Now he was aware not merely of an air of change, but even of order. To his infinite astonishment the hedge had been smoothly clipped. The elderberry bushes that he remembered as being like untidy purple autumnal umbrellas had been laid low. The wicket gate, half way along it, had actually been painted, the slats alternatively green and white.

  With his hand on the latch of the gate he was halted by an oppressive thought. Had Carrie married again and not told him? Or had she now a boy-friend, for whom the new-painted garden gate was as essential a part of her attraction as the lipstick on her face? He suddenly felt, in any case, a dreadful stranger, an intruder, cold and out of it.

  He supposed, now, that that was why she had invited him to tea: family gathering and so on. It would ease the situation: everyone on best behaviour. This, at least, was a relief. In such a situation he wouldn’t have to play games, make pet mice out of handkerchiefs or pretend, as he jogged the children on his knee, that he was a raspberry jam factory.

  He pushed open the gate and went into the garden that surprised him, like the hedge, with its air of orderliness. Gone were not only the elderberry bushes, but the tin cans. Shrubs, with an underplanting of silver foliage in many shapes, had supplanted them. The old brick wall that ran behind and beyond had been cleaned up and planted with a yellow Mermaid rose, still in full bloom, and a clematis that erupted over the crest of it in thick purple pennants, warm velvet in the August sun.

  ‘And Good God, an Abutilon megopotanicum. Incredible. What on earth’s that doing here?’ He stood staring at a shrub hung with many red and black and yellow bells, in shape not unlike a fuchsia, and felt a sharp strange pang of envy. Some new influence had been at work all right. How otherwise had she ever managed to plant that? It wasn’t even hardy.