The Wild Cherry Tree

by H. E. Bates

  He started to finger the shrub’s slender leaves, jealous now not only of the shrub but of Carrie. In a way it wasn’t quite fair. He had always wanted to grow that particular abutilon but had never really dared to risk it. The three-coloured bells were so beautiful. They were like little pagodas. He fingered the leaves again. One might, he supposed, have a shot with cuttings?

  ‘Are you trying to pinch bits from the garden?’

  ‘Oh! no, I really wasn’t doing that. Oh! no, I was just admiring.’

  He turned and saw his daughter, Gilian, standing on the edge of the path. He supposed she was seven now, or thereabouts. He couldn’t accurately remember. She seemed awfully tall, anyway, he thought, and was wearing tartan trews, a red shirt-blouse and her blonde hair in a horse-tail.

  ‘No, you really mustn’t think I was stealing. Just admiring, that’s all.’

  ‘That’s what all the people said at the garden party. Oh! no, nobody was putting bits in their handkerchiefs. Just admiring, that’s all. Did you want Mummy?’

  ‘I’m your father.’

  For a moment he fully expected her to say something like ‘I might have known’, but then, as the cold notion of being a stranger suddenly enveloped him again, he heard the familiar voice of Carrie, rather high-pitched as usual, saying as she came across the lawn:

  ‘Ah! there you are. No wonder we couldn’t see you – creeping in by the back way, eh?’

  He refrained from commenting, although strongly and briefly tempted, on the word creeping, and merely said:

  ‘Afraid I was caught in the act. Hullo.’

  ‘Well, after all, there is a front door bell.’

  He stood facing Carrie, not knowing what to say. He hadn’t seen her, either, for nearly two years. She was very brown and rather leaner in the face, he thought. Her very light blonde hair was done in that chewed-off fashion that seemed to be so popular at the moment. He didn’t like it. His daughter stood apart.

  He felt he ought to refer, somehow, to the incident of the abutilon. He said he supposed that Gilian hadn’t recognized him.

  ‘Oh! nonsense. Of course she knew you. She’s been hopping about expecting you all day.’

  ‘Yes? I must say the abutilon took me by surprise.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The abutilon. The thing growing up the wall. I must say you’ve done wonders with the wall.’

  ‘Oh! that. That’s not me, I’m afraid. That’s Charles. He’s responsible for all that.’

  Well, damn it, he thought. He felt she might have told him. He supposed, really, that he hadn’t any real right to know of – well, any new set-up, liaison or whatever it was – but he was after all the father of the children.

  Who was this Charles? Another gardener, it seemed. That struck him as pretty rich. He and Carrie had practically arrived at dagger point because of what she called his bead-frame mind, his meticulous passion for the straight line, proper colours and everything added up, and now there was this Charles and the garden as neat and ordered as a park.

  He noticed that the children weren’t dashing about it everywhere on those damned tricycles either. He looked hastily at Gilian, who in return gave him, shyly, a side-long glance and a smile. She too, like the garden, was incredibly tidy, so utterly different from the sloppy, muddy little horror who had trailed about his lily pool that again he felt a stranger, cold, out of it all.

  Then he remembered that, of course, he was a stranger. He didn’t belong here. He heard Carrie ask if he wouldn’t like to see the rest of the garden before tea and as they began to walk across the lawn, itself as smooth and even as a sheet of green baize, his eye caught in the middle distance a great orange crowd of tiger lilies, curled turbanned heads flaming against some artemesia-like cloud of grey.

  He was at once stricken by a pang of jealousy. At the same time he had to admire the rightness of the combination, of the contrast between gold flower and grey leaf, fire and smoke. It was all most effective, if anything too damned effective.

  ‘Oh! that’s Charles again. Anything you see out of the ordinary, that’s Charles.’

  He now supposed that Charles would, of course, be at tea. Conversation would have to be made with Charles: he would have to be polite. In irritation he wished he had never come. It was all a bit deceitful, not quite fair, not playing the game.

  ‘I think you’re awfully like your photograph.’

  He discovered that Gilian was walking very close to him. Her airy light horse-tail was almost transparent in the sun. He was aware of a presence very feminine and slightly strange too, not at all daughterly. Her sharp blue eyes, though shy, never left him.

  ‘Oh! I take awful photographs. Which photograph was that?’

  ‘The one where you’re gathering wild strawberries. Up on the hills.’

  ‘Oh! yes.’

  ‘You’ve got your handkerchief knotted over your head because it was so hot. Don’t you remember?’

  Children had awful memories, he thought. They remembered the most ridiculous, impossible details.

  ‘Oh! you remember that,’ Carrie said. ‘Even I remember that day.’

  ‘We gathered five pounds and afterwards we made jam and it didn’t set very well.’ Gilian kept him in a sharp, prolonged side-long glance, now partly in recollection, part in scrutiny. ‘You can’t go up there now. They’ve ploughed it all up.’

  ‘Oh! yes I remember now.’ He didn’t remember at all – or just, perhaps, very vaguely.

  Glad to change the subject, he noted a new blaze of fire across the garden: a burning vermilion cluster of horns with small white honeycombs of dahlias below. Again the contrast was very striking, very right. He supposed it was a salvia of some sort?

  ‘Oh! you must ask Charles. He knows all about names. I’m hopeless. You know, I think you and old Charles might have a great deal in common.’

  Old Charles, he noted with irritation and then saw that she was smiling at him. He noticed the particular quality of the smile with surprise. Formerly it too might have been an irritant. It was an old habit of hers to smile when acid, even bitter. Now there was no trace of acrimony.

  ‘You must come and see my garden. I’ve got a piece all to myself.’

  ‘Oh! yes, you must see Gilian’s garden. She’s mad about her garden.’

  ‘When, now?’

  ‘Oh! when she’s ready. You’re very honoured. Even I don’t get asked.’

  ‘After tea, will you come?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Speaking of tea, Carrie said, she thought they might go into the house now. Where was Nigel? Would Gilian run and find him? He found himself recoiling coldly at the name Nigel. He had always hated that name. It had been a great source of conflict, that name, a great breeder of rows, but in the end he had given in.

  ‘Oh! he’ll come, won’t he?’ Gilian stood very close to him again, still holding him with that sharp, shy, sidelong glance. ‘He never comes if you go and fetch him.’

  ‘Oh! Here’s Elspeth anyway. Oh! there you are, Elspeth – nice and early, good.’

  Charles, he noted now to himself, didn’t have all the monopoly of taste and the rightness of doing things. As Elspeth came across the lawn in a light cream linen suit piped at the edges with what seemed to be thinnest stalks of bright green reed she also seemed to have the quality of some well-placed flower. Her deep natural brown hair was burning and sombre in the sun.

  ‘We all know about your dreadful memory, but don’t go and say you don’t remember Elspeth.’

  ‘Of course I remember Elspeth. Vividly. Is that the right thing to say, Elspeth?’

  ‘Of course. Only there was a time when you used to kiss me too.’

  Elspeth held up her face to be kissed. He duly kissed it, on both cheeks, with polite affection. At the same time he remembered that he had kissed neither Carrie nor his daughter. It was perhaps remiss. On the other hand there was Charles.

  ‘Oh! that’s more like it.’ The eyes of Elspeth were like
moist, gold-brown shells. ‘How are you? Let’s have a look at you.’ She stood back to appraise him. Her smile, like the cheeks he had just kissed so lightly, was smooth and warm. ‘Pass with honours.’

  ‘Putting on a little weight, I thought,’ Carrie said.

  ‘Oh! Carrie, nonsense. Not a gramme.’

  ‘Have you put on weight? You have.’

  ‘Oh! why is everyone so obsessed with weight?’ he said. ‘If you must know I’ve lost three ounces since yesterday. I’ve had my hair cut.’

  Elspeth laughed brightly at this, with rich amusement. Carrie seemed, however, not to think it funny and looked at him with what, in the past, he had sometimes called that old spoon look of hers. It was tarnished and unreflective.

  ‘Well and what do you think of the garden? Don’t you think we’ve livenened it up?’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Oh! it’s Charles and Elspeth who’ve done it all. You know how mad keen Elspeth always was. Charles and she talk the language. Just like you do.’

  The voice of Carrie was again an irritant. They were all walking across the lawn now, Gilian still close to him, still watching. The old white French rose, Madame Alfred Carrière, was flowering beautifully, for the second time, on the house wall, and for some reason he again thought of the abutilon.

  ‘Oh! yes that was from a cutting of mine,’ Elspeth said.

  ‘Everything’s from Elspeth’s cuttings. Elspeth brings them and Charles bungs them in.’

  He had no idea, for a few moments, what to say, and walked on in silence. Then something made him remember Gilian. Her eyes were still fixed on him and he said:

  ‘What about your garden? Does Charles help in your garden too?’

  ‘Oh! no. My garden’s my own.’

  They would have tea, Carrie said, on the lawn, under the big cherry tree. She would put the kettle on; everything was ready on a tray.

  It was close beyond the cherry tree where the lily pond had been. He looked for it now in vain. A bed of heathers, with dwarf conifers and clumps of blue-grey grass and a pocket or two of miniature scarlet roses had taken its place.

  ‘Oh! yes I’m afraid the pool’s gone for a Burton. That was an early casualty. The aquatic things grew like mad and smothered the water-lilies and then the cherry leaves came down and in the end there just wasn’t any water. It was an awful mess. Charles couldn’t have that. He filled it in.’

  Silently he mourned the pool. It had been rather a pet of his, the pool. Perhaps it was badly sited there, too near the tree, but all the same—

  ‘Will you be long, Carrie? Can I help? If not, I’d rather like to show Roger that thing I snaffled from the old Abbey garden. The red thing. The one nobody’s been able to name.’

  ‘As long as you don’t drag it out too long. India or China?’

  ‘China, I think. I know Roger likes China. He always did.’

  The eyes of Gilian watched him like those of a dog waiting to be tempted with a morsel of food, for the snap of a leash, for a run across the fields.

  ‘I do want you to see this thing. Nobody has a notion what it is. I suppose you could send it to Kew and they’d know. How does the garden strike you?’

  ‘It seems larger somehow.’

  ‘Oh! that’s Charles. He’s done a lot of clever cutting down, Charles. Opening up vistas and that sort of thing.’

  He suddenly felt the compulsive pull of two forces: a growing impatience with Charles and a submission to the deep brown warmth of Elspeth’s voice, urging him to look now at a long serpentine valley of azaleas where once, he knew, nothing had ever grown but gooseberries. Of course the azaleas were over now, but in the spring – it had been marvellous in the spring.

  ‘Did I hear a rumour that you were going to be married again?’

  He knew it was a try-on; he knew there was no such rumour. He merely said:

  ‘No, no. And you? What about you?’

  ‘Oh! I still keep house for Father.’

  ‘Still? It isn’t good for you.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  She caught his arm, guiding him away from the azaleas. The new plan of the garden was all unfamiliar to him. It wasn’t his any longer and he felt more than ever a stranger to it all, a cold intruder.

  ‘Well, there it is. What do you make of it? I just snaffled a couple of cuttings and in no time Charles had it going.’

  He was coming to the point where, he thought, he could cheerfully have strangled Charles. The shrub he now saw before him, four or five feet high, flowering with a curious blood-red tassel, slightly flamboyant, was very beautiful. It was totally unfamiliar too but he said:

  ‘It’s that Obedient Plant thing, isn’t it? You push the flowers round and they stay where you put them.’

  ‘Oh! I never thought of that.’

  ‘Try pushing the flowers round. Swivel them. They ought to stay where you put them. Like the hands of a clock.’

  He watched her fingers on the blood-red flowers. He saw her touch and twist and turn them, this way and that, and then saw that they were not like the hands of a clock. They didn’t obey; they didn’t stay where you put them.

  ‘So it isn’t that, after all.’

  ‘No, it can’t be that. To me it always looks like a sub-tropical snapdragon. But of course it’s not. No other thoughts?’

  No, he said, he was afraid he had no other thoughts. It was something of a mystery. Of course she could, he suggested, always go back to the garden she had pinched it from and ask there.

  She laughed, throwing her head back, and the sound was as warm and tawny as the tiger lilies he had seen, not long since, burning across the garden.

  ‘Supposing I took a flower and looked it up and dropped you a line?’

  Oh! no, she said, she thought that would rather spoil it now. It would be better to let it stay as it was, something of a mystery. It might probably turn out to be some awfully ordinary thing, a rampant weed from Kenya or somewhere. One day you’d meet someone who would laugh in your face and say ‘What, that thing? We could never get rid of it.’

  Her alternate laughing and talking suddenly stopped. The garden, shut off at some distance from the house, became very quiet. A profound silence sang all about them. The warm brown eyes encompassed him and she said:

  ‘Shouldn’t ask this, I suppose. But why the long time coming back? Oh! it’s difficult, I suppose.’

  ‘I wasn’t exactly encouraged.’

  ‘Well, you’re encouraged now.’

  She put her face to his, giving him no more than the shadow of a kiss on the side of it.

  ‘Well, now tea I suppose.’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose –’

  She started to walk away. For a moment or two he felt left in air. Then he felt a powerful urge to take her by the shoulders and turn her back. After all he was free. There was nothing, not a thing, to hold him now.

  ‘Well, come on. You heard what Carrie said. Don’t drag it out too long.’

  He joined her without a word and together they went up through the new azalea walk, crimson here and there with a burning leaf or two, and so to the lawn and across to the house.

  He became aware, half way across the lawn, of a waiting figure.

  ‘Gilian’s on the watch for you.’

  ‘So I see.’

  From the house Carrie appeared, carrying a silver teapot and plate of cream-cheese sandwiches. She smiled and said Oh! there they were and how perfectly they had timed it and her voice was dry.

  ‘Milk or lemon, Roger?’

  ‘Oh! lemon,’ Elspeth said. ‘He always did.’

  ‘I’ll have lemon today too,’ Gilian said.

  Set half in sun, half in shade, the table with its shining cups and china gave a twisted sort of sparkle.

  ‘Well, did you solve the great mystery?’

  No, he said, he was afraid he’d made a wrong guess.

  ‘Obedient Plant, he thought,’ Elspeth said. ‘But it turned out not. It didn’t obey.’

&
nbsp; Well, Carrie said, if it beat Charles it would beat anybody.

  ‘What is an Obedient Plant?’ Gilian said.

  He started to explain about the Obedient Plant. A certain feeling of futility about the explanation suddenly made him impatient and he was on the point of stopping the whole thing when he saw the eyes of his daughter, large and transfixed, holding him as if mesmerized. Hastily he renewed the explantion, saying how the flowers could be turned this way and that, wherever you liked, and would stop where you left them.

  ‘How clever. How did you find out about a thing like that?’

  Oh! he supposed he’d swotted it up at some time, heard of it somehow.

  ‘I think it’s marvellous.’

  ‘I can’t imagine,’ Carrie said, ‘where Nigel’s got to. Gilian, go and look for him again.’

  ‘I looked. He said he wouldn’t come. He’s playing with water outside the dog-kennel.’

  ‘He’s been truculent, that boy, all day. Apologies for your son – he’s sometimes a bit like that.’

  Without a word he picked up his spoon and jabbed at the lemon in his China tea. Apologies: as if the truculence, the refusal to come to table, were all his fault. He was relieved, however, rather than offended. One of the things he had dreaded more than anything was to meet the boy. It imposed on him an obligation only equalled by the necessity, sooner or later, of meeting Charles.

  ‘Oh! by the way,’ Elspeth said, ‘I brought a few seedlings of the other abutilon over. The mauve one, vitifolium. I put them in the greenhouse. You know it, Roger, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s lovely.’

  ‘I really prefer it to the megapotanicum.’

  ‘I think I do too.’

  ‘We had it once before but the last bad winter killed it. Now the new one has set seed.’

  ‘We had it here too and something killed it. Some truculent axe, I think.’

  At once the tea-table seemed to flame. An interval of what seemed the better part of a minute, but in reality only a few seconds, ignited and seared the air. He waited for yet a further whip of it to reach him from Carrie’s tongue but she merely poured more hot water into the tea-pot and Elspeth said: