The Monkey Puzzle Tree (20 page)

“I see.” He narrowed his eyes and gave her a penetrating look. “This does not end here.” He turned on his heel and walked out of the room, the fingertips of his left hand clutching the cuff of his jacket. Interested eyes followed him and then swung back to her.

“Good for you!” Danielle, a French teacher, appeared beside her. “That’s Phil Scott, the senior math master. He’s probably off to tell on you to his pal, the principal. Come on, let’s go to the cafeteria. It’s lasagna day.”

She was around Gillian’s age, slim and dark, with a wide, humorous mouth and a husky voice. As they walked along the hallway between the battered lockers, Gillian told her about the quiz answers, eliciting a loud, throaty laugh.

At the end of the school day, Harold Brown, the principal, sent for her. A small, bald man with a hooked nose, he strutted around the large desk to his chair.

“You are young, Miss Davies,” he said, thick glasses magnifying his round black eyes as he sat, tilting the chair back and balancing his hands on the rise of his pot-belly, “and have much to learn about how a school works. As this is your first day here, I will not make too much of this.” He sat forward, raising his eyebrows at her. “But you must understand, my dear, that you need to understand the need for flexibility. All sides of the question need to be equally considered you know, not just your own side. Bruce White is a valued member of our school community and has made a valuable contribution to our athletic standing. So if you’d be so good, kindly hand over the book in question.”

She felt in her bag and, without taking her eyes off him, silently handed over the dog-eared book. His glasses flashed as he looked away. “Thank you. Please close the door after you.”

Weighed down by her heavy bag, she walked home through the slush rather than share the bus with students. She had no stomach for their lethal backpacks, their shrieks and shouts and foul language. She kicked a grey, disintegrating lump of ice out of her way. Why hadn’t she said, “Would you like the Harlequin romance, the knitting pattern, the comic, and the Coles notes as well, so that all the other students involved can be equally considered?” Why was she challenged by students, called “sweetheart” by the likes of Phil Scott, and mutely, if mulishly, obedient to the orders of such a man as Harold Brown, the Human Budgie? Why, for that matter, she asked herself as she sloshed along, had she let herself be dismissed by Llewellyn without putting up any sort of a fight? And why had she been so blind about Doug? Why couldn’t she be like Jane Austen’s Emma, always confident of receiving the best treatment, because she ‘would never put up with any other’? She was distracted from going further along that line of thought by a shower of slush thrown up on her by a car speeding around the corner at the crossroads.

That evening, after wearily finishing her preparation for the next day, she looked to see how the students in Thirteen C. accounted for their presence there. “Because i have no choice,” she read; “There’s nothing else to do”; “To hang out with my friends”; “So as I can get a really good job and make alot of money.” Out of the few who claimed to enjoy learning for its own sake, one stood out: Joel Waterman had written, “I am here to read as much as I can before I have to go into my father’s meat business. All I want to do is study literature; English is an
oasis
in my day!” Admiring the semicolon, along with the sentiment, she experienced a leap of the hope that springs eternal in the English teacher’s breast.

Putting the papers away, she noticed the knitting pattern in her bag and took it out. As she smiled at the picture of the tiny booties, a worm of worry stirred in the back of her mind. So much had happened that last week that she had not thought about it until then, but wasn’t she
late
? She looked in her diary. She was, in fact, five days late. Not that that was so very unusual; she was not always completely regular. When she had broken up with Llewellyn, the same thing had happened; she had been a week late then. These were similar circumstances. Probably the same cause: just stress. That made sense.

She turned her mind to the problem of getting her belongings back from the farmhouse, but at the thought of facing Doug her new-found sense of being somewhat in control of her life further evaporated. Doubts and worries sneaked, and circled, and sank their teeth into her. What if she could not get anything back, not even her passport? What if she lost her job, as perhaps she might after that cheeky stare in the principal’s office? What if she could not get another? And then that most frightening of all possibilities reared up again. What if
…? She ran her fingers through her hair and shook her head. It was too soon yet to worry about that. Probably was not going to happen anyway. She should forget it for now, and start writing those letters.

As she put pen to paper, the doorbell rang.

“I’m not going to stay. I’m just passing,” Danielle brought a wave of cold fresh air in with her. “I missed you after school, and I want to know how things turned out. I remembered you said you lived here.” She swept off her silver-fox hat and shook out her long, dark hair.

“I’ve only had my job for a day, and I think I could’ve lost it already.” Gillian described her encounter with the principal.

“Don’t worry about it. They need you. That was just a staff-room spat. We have them all the time at Sir Charles and they always blow over. You did fine, actually. The bully boys will leave you alone now, and you’ll get some respect from the kids.” After regaling Gillian with a snippet of gossip concerning Phil Scott and the female phys. ed. teacher, she put on her coat. “You okay for tomorrow? You look
un peu
…”

“I’m fine,” Gillian said quickly as she saw her out. “Thanks for coming round.” But she was exhausted. She had struggled all day to keep alert, and had slept for two hours as soon as she got home. Naturally she was worn out, though. A day like that would do anyone in.

The following day brought no reprieve from her fears, nor did the next, nor the day after. A week passed, and then another. By the end of the week after that, she had run out of hope. Brooding, she considered her options. Looking to Doug for help was out of the question. Imagining him with a child sent her, to her surprise, into mother-tiger mode. The same reaction arose to another equally improbable option; no one, especially not her, was going to harm her baby. She remembered what Tom had said, and now completely understood how he had felt about his putative child.

She began to worry about money. The baby would be born in October, so there could be no chance, obviously, of going back to work in September. On the positive side, thanks to her father’s annuity plus some savings, she would probably be able to stay on in her apartment for a while anyway. Then what? Go home to Mother with a baby?
Absolutely not
! She would just have to wait and see.

She was putting up a cork
notice board in the kitchen the following Saturday when she heard a tap at the door. In a turtleneck sweater and cords, Russ Armstrong looked younger, and less of a stuffed shirt than she had thought.

“I heard you hammering, and wondered if perhaps you could do with a hand?”

There would be no harm in asking him in, she decided. Actually she could do with some help in putting up an awkwardly large mirror.

“I want to thank you for helping my mother bring in her shopping the other day, and for walking Jack the night of the freezing rain.” He straightened the corkboard. “She gets very tired these days, and I worry about her.” He stood back to check on his work. “I wish she’d come and live with me in Manor Park. There’s plenty of room in my house, but I suppose she likes her independence.”

Gillian put on the kettle. “Do you have a family?” She assumed that at his age, in his mid-thirties at least, and with a house of his own, that was likely.

“No, unfortunately, I don’t.” He took off his glasses and polished them with a spotlessly laundered handkerchief. “I’ve always been too busy studying, and then working, to have had any time for a personal life.”

This was the first time she had met anyone like that, even at university. She asked what his work was, and learned that he worked in the field of helicopter icing.

“It’s a serious problem,” he said, “especially, of course, in northern countries. We’ve made great strides recently.” He went on to describe in detail the huge rig they had constructed, with one hundred and sixty-one nozzles, to help provide icing protection. It seemed they were leading the field in that work. Over a mug of Maxwell House instant coffee, he told her more about the icing problem. She could not understand much of his explanations, but could see that his mother was right: he lived for his work.

After putting up the mirror, he looked around the apartment. “It’s nice in here. You’ve made it very home-like. My place just looks like a hotel.”

Having seen him to the door, she poured her coffee down the sink as usual those days. He just might be interesting, she thought as she washed and dried the mugs, as long as he stayed off the subject of ice-rigs. He was not bad-looking at all, and definitely not the demon-lover sort; neither user nor loser perhaps. If things were different, she might even encourage his possible overtures in the hope of finding that viable compromise she had been thinking about, although that was obviously out of the question now.

As it turned out, Russ would not have needed any encouraging. When his mother invited Gillian down for an afternoon cup of tea the next Saturday, it was he who opened the door, looking casually smart in a sports jacket and cavalry twill trousers such as her father liked to wear. A bit behind the times, but a tidy man, she thought; not like Doug.

They sat at the round, rosewood table, laid with gold-rimmed Royal Albert china of a dark blue, white, and orange pattern, dabbing their lips with hand-embroidered napkins, and passing around homemade scones and carrot cake.

When they returned to the fireside, Jack laid his red rubber ball at Gillian’s feet, giving a bark of excitement when she rolled it over to Russ, who, after a moment’s thought, bent down and rolled it back. Isobel, as she had asked to be called, watched the stout little dog scamper between them. “Poor Jack! He’s not getting nearly enough exercise these days. My arthritis is really acting up.”

“I could walk him.” Gillian looked up. “I’d love to. I’m not getting enough exercise either.”

Russ observed that there was a park nearby where dogs were safe to run free. It was a lovely day, he said. Perhaps the two of them could both take Jack there for half an hour or so before the sun went down? Isobel looked, smiling, from one to the other. Gillian thought of saying she had too much marking to do that day, but did not want to seem ungracious. Isobel had been very kind, it was indeed a lovely day, and a short walk would, in fact, do her good.

That was how it had started. Without any encouragement from her, one small thing had led to another on an almost daily basis until it became disconcertingly clear that, if not head over heels in love with her, Russ had intentions that she could not imagine were anything but honourable. She had tried to say that she was busy or had other engagements, but he was persistent, and in the circumstances it was difficult to snub or avoid him. She understood that short of moving across town, she could not run away from this. She had better tell him.

“You’re looking very lovely tonight.” Russ regarded her solemnly over the brilliant white tablecloth at the fashionable Italian restaurant he had chosen. He was not looking so bad himself, she thought, in his well-tailored grey suit, white shirt, and discreetly patterned, red silk tie.
Clean-cut
was the word that came to mind. Her mother would be impressed. If, on the other hand, he grew his hair, got rid of those round gold-rimmed glasses, and changed his suit for casual pants and shirt, she might even fancy him herself; if circumstances were different, of course.

She had been glad to find that she had no trouble fitting into her dress, retrieved from the farmhouse along with her other possessions the previous weekend when Danielle and her boyfriend, Pierre, had driven her out there. To her relief, Doug had not been around, having left everything on the steps, stuffed into two large garbage bags.

The dress, black georgette with a flared skirt and soft neckline, was one which her mother had taken upon herself to find for her, unasked, at Mrs. Rosenberg’s little shop. “You should have at least one stylish thing to wear,” she had said. “I don’t suppose you’ll find anything smart where you’re going.”

Gillian had never worn it, convinced it was strictly for funerals and would make her look at least forty; but when she tried it on that evening, adding the string of pearls her parents had given her for her twenty-first birthday, she was surprised to see that her mother had been right: the effect was far from frumpy, and the pearls were perfect. “Knowing that you’re wearing good pearls always gives one confidence,” her mother had said, an idea Gillian had scoffed at, but now found herself wishing could be true.

She began to worry that Russ would get the wrong impression: that he might think she had made a special effort to look good for him; that she fancied him even. He was looking rather nervous, tapping his fingers and loosening his tie. Was he planning to make some sort of move that evening? What would she say? Pulling herself together, she got down to the less daunting business of the menu, choosing a clear soup and a salad.

After he had finished off his veal marsala and spooned down his sabayon, Russ patted his mouth with the extra-large napkin and sat back, clearing his throat. “You know, I’ve never met anyone like you, Gillian. I mean before I met you.” He looked at her over the little posy of red and white carnations as the candle flickered in its glass bowl. “You’re the most, um, elegant girl I’ve ever met. And, and you’re reserved. I really like that in a girl.”

“Well, thank you.” Gillian looked around for a washroom sign.

“You remind me of my mother.” He smiled shyly, lifting his wineglass.