A Sea-Grape Tree

by Rosamond Lehmann

  One day, passing her in the corridor, he stops, takes her hand in his, which is icy, claw-like. He stands in silence, his impenetrably dark spectacles fastened on her face, then murmurs tenderly: ‘Tell me your name … Her soft, meandering, Spanish name.’ But another time he stops her to remark quite nastily: ‘Daily repenting, never amending’; followed by an eldritch cackle. Why? What can he mean? Take no notice, take no notice. I am Mrs Cunningham’s pet protégée; Miss Stay’s little ray of sunshine. What else besides? Victim of Princess’s relentless exploitation in the matter of cosmetics (even emery boards and nail scissors have disappeared). What else besides? Playmate of Kit and Trevor … She falls upon her bed at intervals, exhausted, lets go of the last shreds of this counterfeit multiple identity; then after a blessed lapse into unconsciousness, slowly, painstakingly starts cobbling it up again, beginning with thoughts of Kit and Trevor.

  These are innocuous, even soothing thoughts. Made free, she is now, of their well-appointed bungalow, their books, photographs and records, their experiments in batik work for shirts and scarves; taken in their motor boat for picnics to other idyllic bays, to swim, to collect more shells and coral branches, to watch the pelicans plunge, plunge again for fish, to drink sweet-sour fermenting milk from the green coconuts that Trevor shakes down and opens with his knife, to be photographed by Kit a dozen times. Attractive, creative, sunny-natured pair, with scarcely a grain of malice. Kit’s fairly ample means, Trevor’s domestic talents, the mixture they share of sophistication and unworldliness combine to make a marriage unshakeably fidéle (so they confide) since first they were acquaint. One day perhaps they will go back to England for a good long visit; but here is home now—delicious climate, out of the rat race, busy from morn till night, sufficient unto one another. Family ties, if sparse, are strong. Every other year their widowed mothers, getting on in years but faculties unimpaired and best of friends, come out to spend a happy month or so. Themselves approaching middle age, preserving with care their boyish hips and torsos, they have left youthful ambitions—Kit’s to excel as a ballet dancer, Trevor’s as a theatrical designer—more or less painlessly behind. They recall the success figures with whom they started out rather as they recall Sibyl Anstey: with nostalgia and regret, but of a special kind: that kind made up of reverence, romance, humility, particular to those whose destiny it is to stoop for and pick up the fallen forever cherished eagle’s feather. Oh, Sibyl Anstey, what a personality!—magnetic; what a brilliant conversationalist; above all what a beauty! Something about her larger than life size, a touch of the monstre sacré—of for instance Sara Bernhardt—glorious vanishing species. What a dramatic life she must have led, one sensed it … No, they had never heard the name Jardine mentioned: always Anstey, Sibyl Anstey—Madame Anstée the natives called her. Yes, they had both worked hard on the house of shells, under her supervision. Well yes, they had done most of the actual work but it had been such fun and such a privilege; the general design was hers. It was just a rough bathing hut when she arrived. She had it enlarged, made habitable; and then the idea came to her to decorate it, make it a work of art. Basically, of course, it was designed to be her gift to Johnny: she knew that swimming helped him most, both physically and from the point of view of his morale. And then of course he could be alone there, or alone with her. She adored him, no doubt of that. A great Prince in prison lies, they heard her once say of him: a quotation, they supposed? And another time she referred to him as her spiritual son. But it didn’t quite seem to them like a mother and son relationship. How did Johnny respond? Impossible to tell. He kept one at a distance, dreading pity no doubt, poor sweet. Sometimes they thought he was really a very simple person; sometimes that he was immensely devious, complicated, a smouldering volcano, potentially dangerous. Then, might the volcano become active? Who could say nowadays what might rouse him? He had cultivated unnatural detachment in order to survive. Think what he must have looked—like in his uniform!—the girls falling like ninepins—the boys as well—I know I would have, says Trevor with an abashed giggle. Difficult to imagine Johnny’s real background—home, family, all that, before the war. He never spoke of it, he had cut himself clean off. They rather thought he had one sister, married, and that his parents were both dead. And Jackie?—what did Jackie make of spiritual sons and mothers? Again, impossible to tell. She’d been much more in evidence when Sibyl first came out—trotting after her, one of her ladies-in-waiting, so to speak. Although presumably it had never been a proper marriage, it had seemed possible, in those first days, before Sibyl Anstey’s advent, to consider them in some sense a going concern, an affectionate couple. He was much more helpless then than now; she was energetic, equable, organised his life but didn’t fuss him: at least they had never seen him irritated. Had she been in love with him? Probably not—at least, one hoped not. Obviously Johnny couldn’t be everybody’s cup of tea—some girls would have other fish to fry: maybe Jackie was one of these. As time went on, what with Sibyl’s take-over and Louis’s dedicated service day and night, Jackie lost her job, started to fade out, go her own way. Tony de Pas and that lot much more up her street. Rum taste, but chacun à son goût. Johnny didn’t object? No one would ever know or guess, much less dare ask what Johnny’s feelings were. His reticence was formidable. Perhaps, she suggested, he was rather heartless?—an undeveloped heart? Well, but imagine the adjustments, the disciplines he had been obliged, poor sweet, to practise.

  They remembered that Johnny and Maisie had hit it off together. Maisie? Yes, Sibyl’s granddaughter, who had come out to be with the old lady, had luckily remained until her death. Kit hunts among his myriad prints and negatives: there must be some of Maisie. Any of Sibyl? No, alas! she never permitted him to photograph her: a thousand pities considering the ageless perfection of the bone structure. But here is Maisie.

  Incredible! Authentic Maisie, unmistakable. There she stands, very little changed, perhaps even stockier than of yore, planted knee deep in the sea, in a black regulation swim suit, around her neck a lei of various flowers, her rough mane blowing in the breeze. And holding up in her arms, of all things, a plump white naked female infant in a cotton sun bonnet. The wreath is looped around its neck as well as Maisie’s, thereby linking them together; and Maisie, all her remembered splendid teeth displayed, is laughing into its face. It is not laughing back. Its spine is stiffened; it wears the maniacal expression of a being helplessly, ferociously at odds with circumstance.

  ‘What about the child?’

  Kit looks and laughs. ‘Oh yes, poor tot, about to have her swimming lesson.’

  ‘She doesn’t look more than eighteen months.’

  ‘About that. Maisie’s idea was that if she was dropped in she’d paddle off like a puppy, crowing with delight. She didn’t see it that way. Crikey, what a little tigress! But she never created when Sibyl was around. She’d roll and splash in the shallows like a water baby. Needless to say that caused ructions.’ Some private recollection caused Kit to throw back his head and chuckle. He added: ‘How the old lady doted on that child. Her last joy, she said.’

  ‘She adored children. But who is she? Whose child?’

  ‘Maisie’s of course.’

  ‘Maisie’s …? It can’t be! How extraordinary. She used to say she’d never marry. Whom did she marry?’

  But they had never heard mention of a husband. Adopted? That would seem in character. Oh no, it was her own all right. They are fairly sure that Dr Maisie Thomson is an unmarried mother, though none of their business to enquire. Besides, look at the likeness!—not to Mum but Granny. Promise of exceptional beauty.

  She seizes the snapshot again and scans it for clues, for likenesses. The bonnet askew over one eye somehow increases the effect of passionate indignation, of imperious will. One fat leg is hooked like a clamp around Maisie’s solid waist: not lovingly but in repudiation. In spite of all obscuring factors, there is a suggestion of a familiar cast of countenance.

 
; ‘What did you say her name is?’

  Tanya, they thought, but always called Tarni to rhyme with Barney, and spelt with an ‘r’ to avoid mispronunciation.

  Complex images and sounds arise: Christmas Eve, Mrs Jardine’s huge hot kitchen; the voice of Maisie going on and on, conjuring a French river, thick with weeds and water lilies, and someone jumping into them, and someone leaping from the bank to rescue someone tangled in them; and Mrs Jardine advancing with a reverberating remark upon her lips. Gil, a sculptor, killed in action; a shadowy girl he married whose name was Tanya.

  ‘Yes, I see. I remember why Maisie might have called her Tanya.’ She goes on staring, amazed. She can all but hear Mrs Jardine remarking at her driest: ‘Maisie and her child do not pull well together.’ Can it really be that Maisie presented Mrs Jardine with her last joy?—with a true flesh and blood descendant?

  ‘And they were here when she died?’

  ‘Yes, very fortunately.’ They rather thought Sibyl had sent for her only living relative. She had grown so frail, almost transparent, but still indomitable in spirit. Maisie was a great support to her. The end was perfectly peaceful: simply, her heart stopped beating one morning in the early hours.

  The girls—Carlotta, Princess, Adelina, all of them went far and wide gathering armfuls of lilies, orchids, jasmine, hibiscus, frangipani and wove her a whole sweet-scented coverlet. Next day they made another; last the most magnificent of all. Her face had become smooth, fine, like a carving in ivory. Louis and one of his sons, both men of giant strength, carried her coffin all the way to the cemetery on top of the hill, and the whole village followed, singing hymns and howling, and rigged out in unimaginable Sunday best confections including hats and torturing high heels, to show mourning and respect.

  ‘How she would have enjoyed that! An apotheosis.’

  Yes, you could call it that. A unique occasion. Bizarre but moving. No, Johnny didn’t go. He took the last blanket of flowers from Maisie, and that evening, with Louis rowing, carried it out to sea and let it float away. Rummaging again through his photographs, Kit picks out one to show her Mrs Jardine’s grave. Plain headstone engraved with two words only: SIBYL ANSTEY; no dates, according to her particular instructions. The slab of local stone under which she lies is ringed round with ferns and blossoming shrubs which he and Trevor planted; which they have made it their responsibility to tend. She might like to visit it before she leaves?—and take a photograph to Maisie? Perhaps. She is assailed by a sharp pluck of longing to search out Maisie. Might not something hopeful come from the renewal of that girlhood friendship? Although, imagine admitting to Maisie, that successfully established professional woman, one’s own muddles and defeats.

  She imagines it. Dr Thomson’s consulting room.

  ‘I wonder if you remember me? Rebecca Landon.’

  ‘Can’t say I do. Or do I? Yes, good God!—Jess and Rebecca, good little girls put into pinafores for rough games, not allowed to tear their stockings. It all comes back to me.’

  ‘Do you remember one Christmas Eve—when we came to dinner? Jess danced all the evening with—with your brother Malcolm, but we stayed in the kitchen and talked for hours.’

  ‘You don’t say! I talked, I wouldn’t wonder, you listened. I wouldn’t wonder if your jaw dropped—it often did. Yes, I do remember that evening now you mention it, but we don’t dwell on it. They’re all dead, every one of them. Jess still alive? Delighted to hear it. Your mother?’

  ‘Oh yes, very much so.’

  ‘Splendid. She was very kind to me. Very just. Justice was my passion. What on earth brings you here? What can I do for you?’

  ‘Maisie, I’d like your advice. I’m at a—sort of crossroads and I wondered … I’ve always wanted to be—well, like you, a doctor.’

  ‘Well, I’m damned. What’s bitten you? Aren’t you married?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’ll go into that another time. No children I presume?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘We’ll go into that another time. Living alone?’

  ‘Not always. Sometimes.’

  ‘A man in your life then. Satisfactory?’

  ‘It was—anyway I thought so. But now it’s all over—at least I think so, I’m not sure. I want to change my life.’

  ‘Ever had a job?’

  ‘Several. I’ve worked in a book shop and a decorating shop—’

  ‘You don’t say!’

  And I read now and then for a publisher.’

  Maisie is silent, a frown drawing her thick brows together. Then she says: ‘You’re in no state to make decisions, that’s for sure. What makes you think you’d make a go of medicine?’

  ‘It interests me so much. I’m not stupid, I’d work hard. I’m not too old, am I?’

  ‘My good girl, let’s face it, you’re not cut out for it. The training’s long and bloody tough, bloody in every sense. You’d never stand it.’

  ‘Psychiatry actually is what I’d like … I’d like to specialise in.’

  Maisie’s silence is magisterial, daunting.

  ‘I know it means years of training—of analysis.’

  ‘And a cracking bore you’d be by the end of it. Sorry to be so blunt, if you do want my advice steer clear of Freud and all those jokers. There are more constructive ways of getting to know yourself.’

  ‘Do you know yourself?’

  ‘Yes I do—after a long hard haul. But it’s you we’re talking about. Why don’t you marry whoever it is?’

  Out it would all come, the sorry tale, with stammering and attempts at flippancy, and at impartial judgment; and probably final abject sobs. Then Maisie says:

  ‘What induced you to pick such a louse? OK he isn’t, but you always were a sucker. Don’t blub … well, blub away. But blow your nose in a minute or two, there’s a love. Chuck it all overboard, it’s rubbish anyway, and start again. I’ll help if I can, of course I will. I’m very glad to see you. I was very fond of you in the dear dead days—beyond recall, thank God. Remember my grandmother, Sibyl?’

  ‘As if I could forget her.’

  ‘Hmm … She made her mark, I will say. Now, are you feeling up to a surprise?’

  ‘A surprise? What sort?’

  ‘In a hundred years you’d never guess.’

  Tarni appears—(no surprise)—planted on sturdy legs, exact replica of that old old faded photograph found in a drawer: the child Sibyl in a tartan frock, bows on adorable bare shoulders; angelic face framed in long white-blonde hair, eyes pale, enormous, piercing, full, serious mouth, promising such beauty.

  What will Tarni do? Frown? Stiffen herself? Roar? No. After the briefest stare, she runs to me, not Maisie, who says:

  ‘Well, I’m damned! They’ve clicked’; and proceeds as in former days to tell her story: the story of how Tarni came to be. Says finally: ‘You’d better stay for a bit, Rebecca.’ A happy time ensues, working in some capacity with Maisie, taken under her wing; the blue-veined child with crystal eyes hovering between them.

  The scene cuts off there, brusquely, as always when the images begin to build innocuous self-indulgent fantasies. She dreads to see the face of Anon appear as if through a trap door, watching her with an expression of cold curiosity, as who should say: ‘Is she finished off? If not, why not?’ Or with that thrust-out lip, flared nostril, crooked smirk of triumph she did glimpse once, for a second. It springs at any moment—perhaps while she is listening to Kit’s gramophone records, or watching Trevor’s enterprising experiments in batik; or when, as she appears on the Cunningham verandah, Miss Stay calls out with a wave of her clinking glass: ‘Here comes our dreamer! Day-dreaming Dinah! Where can her thoughts be?’ She comes to a halt, shocked by the frightful notion that Miss Stay is maliciously exercising her paranormal faculties; then advances smiling, shaking her head, as if to suggest the secret romantic nature of her thought
s. Only the wincing man, the Captain looks uncomfortable. His leg twitches, his fierce eye rakes her with what looks like desperation: as if the sight of her threatened him with unacceptable memories of pain. They frighten one another: this will never do. She decides to make a fuss of him. His wife observes this with approval: it is just what he needs, someone well-informed and a good listener; for he is a brainy man and enjoys an exchange of interesting views.

  So, by lamplight, with great moths tap-tapping on the shutters, and beneath Joey’s watchful presence, he becomes expansive on the subject of military history, flings rum punches helter skelter down his throat, addresses Bobby tenderly, compassionately, produces photographic records of life in Malaya, expatiates on them with a wealth of detail; even, one night, instructs her patiently in the mysteries of bridge. During that lesson his wife put down her sewing and wandered a little way towards the shore. At the turn of the path she was discernible, standing at gaze like Dido, wafting her soul towards the hut. When she returned he threw her sharp teasing words and glances, and she bridled.

  Oh, he is a lovable gallant sozzled wreck of an old boy: she would like to hug him. As Miss Stay declares, he is a thorough gentleman, chivalry itself, a heart of gold. He would knock down any cad behaving with conduct unbecoming. Mrs Cunningham’s Mummy chose well for her darling daughter.

  As the days go on, staring into the dim mirror, as she does obsessively, she begins to see an unfamiliar face: it has become heart-shaped, with cheekbones prominent over attractive hollows, eyes dilated, brilliant. Can she be going into a decline, like a jilted Victorian damsel? She can scarcely eat, she has a constant pain under a lower rib, as if something had got caught up on a hook. If she goes on like this, what with her ethereal pallor, her caved-in stomach, slender limbs, her hair grown long and bleached from letting it float behind her as she swims, she will have become physically unrecognisable. What a shock for him when he appears: for, since he has neither telegraphed nor written, appear he surely must: any day, any moment now. He will alight from a specially chartered biplane … No no, of course not, he loathes flying … One of the little steamers that ply between the islands will land him one morning or one evening. She will stand still while he walks towards her slowly with a white set face. He will catch his breath and murmur: ‘I had to come. I’ve missed you day and night. Is it really you? You’ve changed.’