The Weeping Tree

by Audrey Reimann

  In fact the real-life adventure had ended there, in Trafalgar Square, where, emerging from Lyon's Corner House, he'd walked straight into two policemen and been driven back to school to be punished by the Barbarian.

  He was floating up, up out of the dream. A cool breeze was stirring the starched curtain at the sick-room window. There was a smell of iodine and he saw beside his bed the inhalator bowl that the nurse always spiced with friar's balsam. He must have had a severe attack of asthma -so severe he couldn't remember a thing about it. His eyes began to focus. There was a new doctor, stethoscope dangling, standing over him and there, behind the doctor, the nurse. Beside the nurse was the headmaster - and wonderfully, there beside the Barbarian, was Nanny.

  He blinked and checked. He was awake and Nanny was talking in her most severe voice to the Barbarian. 'What do you mean -you do not allow a pupil to be examined by his own doctor?'

  The Barbarian answered testily: 'He has been seen by the school doctor.'

  'And?' said Nanny.

  The Barbarian replied, 'There is nothing wrong with him. It was an attack of asthma. He has had treatment and a sedative.'

  Nanny said, 'I am here as Sir Gordon Campbell's representative. I demand a second opinion.' She nodded to the doctor. 'Go ahead, please.'

  The Barbarian could do nothing to stop him. Robert was being stripped of his clothes; he flinched and winced as the doctor, with Nanny's help, peeled the bloodied vest and underpants away from his skin. The doctor drew in breath sharply when he saw the bruising, the weals and open wounds. Then Robert felt the cold metal of the stethoscope on his chest and back, while Nanny turned and held him with gentle hands.

  Finally the doctor looked towards the headmaster and said, 'You realise that if I were dealing with a poor boy at a state school I should be duty-bound to report this to the Schools Inspectorate?'

  'We are the seedbed for Eton and the best public schools in England. We inculcate qualities of leadership, bravery and endeavour,' the Barbarian blustered.

  'I am going to remove him to hospital,' the doctor said. 'He is underweight and unclean. Not even basic health care has been given to this boy.' With one index finger he lifted Robert's chin to reveal the grime on his neck. Helpfully, Robert tipped his head back. The doctor evidently could see what nobody else had noticed. The school regime was squalid; the facilities minimal. They were allowed only two tepid, shallow baths in a communal bathroom every week, with no adult supervision and the mob in attendance.

  'He has been severely beaten,' the doctor said. 'Beaten to the point of collapse. I must have an explanation.'

  Robert began to enjoy himself. The Barbarian would not admit to having inflicted the injuries and Robert himself would not dare to tell who had administered the beating or it would be the worse for him, but it was gratifying to lie there listening to the Barbarian's excuses. Maybe he'd spend a couple of days in the sick room or hospital. It would be a welcome respite.

  Nanny spoke. 'Robert will not be taken to hospital. Nor will he remain here. I am taking him home.'

  Robert opened his eyes and smiled at her. She was standing beside the bed, pulling the sheet over his exposed behind. He adored Nanny. She was old; in fact, she was ancient. She had been Nanny to Father and Father was over fifty. But she was a powerful presence and theirs was a mutual affection. she said, 'Can you stand, Robert?'

  He swung his legs off the bed. He was in pain but he would not give the Barbarian the satisfaction of seeing his agony. 'Yes,' he said.

  'Pack your case. Bring only personal things. The school will send the rest.'

  Gingerly he pulled on his flannels and left the room while Nanny made clear her own feelings to the assembled officialdom.

  His small case was found for him by the groundsman who kept the box-room keys, and when this was done Robert made for the dorm. Whitmore was there, alone. He was seldom alone and never brave without his mob around him. But he looked down his nose at Robert and said, 'In a funk now, are we? Sent for Nanny?'

  Robert knew he'd not be coming back. He had seen it in Nanny's face. He would never again have the opportunity to stand up to Whitmore, man to man. It was going to be his first serious fight. He'd scrapped before to save himself but had never started a fight. He could not know that from now on he would never wait until his enemies struck first. He simply knew it was now or never.

  He was small for twelve, but wiry and angry and hungry all the things Whitmore was not. He dropped his case and squared up to the bigger boy. 'Say that again, Whitmore,' he snarled.

  Whitmore, to buy time and save face, ignored him. Robert went in close. 'Say it again!'

  'Don't be a fool, wee Scot.' Whitmore sneered, but he did not finish the sentence. Robert hadn't known his own strength or fury or whatever it was that drove his right fist into Whitmore's face as his left caught him in the chest.

  Whitmore put up his own fists, but far too slowly. Robert hit him under the jaw and saw his eyes bulge with fear. Whitmore's arms flailed wildly. He staggered back with Robert going after him like a terrier, landing every blow to his enemy's body, to his face, his head. Whitmore fell to the floor as the door opened and Cutler and the mob came in.

  Robert turned on them. 'Who's next?' he demanded in a voice that had suddenly decided to stick at the lower register it had been dropping to over the last months. 'You, Cutler?'

  Whitmore got to his feet, his hands to his head, tears streaming down his face, mingling with the blood from his nose. He went backwards, to his bed, saying nothing. Robert ignored him and went for Cutler. But one crack was all Cutler needed to turn tail and fly for the door, slightly ahead of the mob, who scrambled to get out before him.

  Robert stood tall. 'That felt good!' he said. Then, to himself, because he never spoke aloud these days about the imaginary friend - the other half who had never gone from his imagination - he murmured, 'What about that, Sandy? How am I doing?' Sandy had always been the dauntless one.

  1957

  'Sandy. Are you ready?' Uncle John strode down through the clearing to the jetty on the lake, where Alexander was stowing the outboard motor on the boat.

  Alexander, Sandy now to Uncle John, waved, uncurled his six-foot-two scrawny, strong frame and hopped on to the jetty. He tied the boat fast to the ring and called, 'I'm coming. We have four trucks to unload today. Can you spare a couple of hands from the sawmill?'

  Alexander loved it all, especially the weekends and holidays spent here at the cottage on Lake Paudash. Paudash was eight miles long and one mile wide and, the locals boasted, had a hundred miles of shoreline, counting all the bays and inlets. Thousands of lakes joined one another in a lacework of rivers and lakes and forest and grassland that stretched from almost the Arctic Circle to the Great Lakes, which separated what Alexander thought of as his homeland from the Rocky Mountains and America.

  Alexander spent Monday to Fridays at school, living in the house at Bancroft with Aunt Dorothy and Uncle John. Aunt Dorothy still ran the Bird's Creek store and the house at Bancroft while Mom, treated as a partner in the business as well as the daughter of the family, helped Uncle John run the sawmill from her cottage here on Lake Paudash.

  'Cottage' was a misleading name for the sprawling timber lodge set in fifty acres of forest on a raised site overlooking the lake. The house had four bedrooms, three living rooms, kitchen, bathroom and basement. Uncle John had built it for Mom - had given it to her in appreciation of all the work Mom did for them.

  Lake Paudash had been popular since the twenties with people who could afford to work in the towns and along the York River and buy a weekend place where in summer they sailed, swam and fished and in winter, when the lakes froze solid for four months, skated, tobagganed and skied.

  Alexander stood as Uncle John reached the jetty and called out, 'The Polanski brothers will unload.' The mill employed thirty Poles who had stayed on after the war. Many of them had Canadian wives.

  'Good,' Alexander said. The Poles were hard workers.


  'Were you hoping to go out in the boat?' John asked as they went towards the Dodge and the fifteen-mile journey to the sawmill at Bird's Creek. 'I haven't messed up your day, have I? Your Aunt Dorothy will have a meal ready for us all at midday at the store if the work takes longer than a morning.' The mill workers' week finished at twelve o'clock on Sundays.

  'OK.' Alexander grinned. 'I'm just checking the engine for Peter.' Peter Murray, Uncle John's son, a paediatrician at Toronto General Hospital, was staying with them at the cottage for the weekend.

  'He arrived?' Uncle John put the Dodge into first gear and drove slowly and carefully over the rough forest tracks towards the main road. 'A whole weekend! He's not usually here for more than a day.'

  'Well, it's not every weekend you call a family conference,' Alex replied. 'Goona tell me what it's about?'

  Uncle John ignored his question and started to sing to himself. At this point Alexander switched off. He was too much of a musician to be able to concentrate on anything while listening to Uncle John singing out of tune, out of time and the wrong words. He looked at his uncle, at the shock of curly white hair, the ruddy face, strong hands on the wheel and wished as he did every day of his life that Uncle John had been his real father instead of simply the man who had taken him and his Mom in and whom both of them loved and honoured for the decent good man he was. He said, 'Does Peter know what it's all about?'

  Uncle John grinned and sang louder. Alexander smiled, but it was difficult to look convincing. Alexander's latest love was the guitar, though he could play every musical instrument he'd ever tried. He didn't boast: he was simply a musician.

  'Have you made up your mind?' Uncle John broke off from singing.

  'About university? Yes. I'm not going.' Mom had some bee in her bonnet about his not falling behind, as if he were in some unspecified competition with a contemporary. 'I'll tell Mom soon.'

  'Sure it’s the right decision to go into the sawmill?'

  'I am sure.' Alexander loved everything about the life Uncle John led: the pace, the independence of knowing you stood or fell by your own efforts. Even if he were to find what he had always sought, the perfect partner for music, singing and playing, becoming stars of the music scene, he'd always need the touchstone, the security of home. He said, 'Mom, too. She's never been happier than she is now with her own place. It was real generous of you.'

  ‘Nonsense. Your Mom was an angel sent from Heaven to us. She’s the daughter we never had.’Besides,’ he said,’your Mom does the books, the buying and selling, the wages and the hiring and firing. The sawmill did only half as much before she took charge.'

  So the family conference was not about the sawmill. Uncle John began to sing again. He loved to keep things from them keep them guessing, as he put it.

  Alexander hated secrets. He couldn't say so to Uncle John but it drove him crazy at times when he got to wondering and asking, pestering Mom for answers. He'd say, 'Who was my dad?' for he thought Mom was lying when she said that she and his dad had married under a weeping tree, exchanging vows which they both swore were for ever, and telling him that Alexander must not think he was illegitimate, because in Scotland your word was your bond.

  'I don't care about illegitimacy,' he said. 'It happens all the time in Canada. Men in the outback couldn't get away from their farms or logging limits for a religious ceremony. They wanted brides to sew and keep house and they chose them or had them chosen by the guardians at the orphanages. They would marry them when they had the time. No, it's not that. But how do you know my father died at sea? You won't even tell me his name. Did he desert us, Mom?' If his father had deserted him and Mom then he would find out who and where this man was and make him sorry. That he would. Make no mistake.

  Uncle John stopped singing as he swung the Dodge into the yard where men were working, adding to the great stacks of cut timber that half filled the place. He said, 'Don't worry about a thing, Sandy. I'll put in a word for you tonight with your mom. You don't have to go to university if that's what you've decided.'

  Flora came up the forest track from her swim in the lake, her wet hair like bronze ropes hanging down over her lightly tanned shoulders almost to the waist of her navy-blue swimsuit. There was something about the air here, or the sunlight that came filtering, green and honey-soft, through the trees, turning her skin a pale sandy colour with none of the freckles that had plagued her childhood.

  She saw Peter, tall and fair and ridiculously boyish in appearance, though he was thirty-seven, standing on the deck, leaning over, watching her.

  She waved and called to him: 'Lazybones. I thought you wanted to swim.' She reached the cottage and stood looking up at him before climbing the steps to the side entrance, for the house was built on two levels on the hillside. Peter was barefoot, wearing shorts and a sloppy joe. The fair hairs on his arms shone golden in the morning sunshine.

  He said, 'I've made coffee. Want some?'

  'Yes.' She ran up the steps, slipped into the bathrobe she kept in the bathroom by the door and went into the kitchen. Peter had made a big breakfast of fruit, scrambled eggs on toast and waffles with maple syrup. He'd set a place for her and she sat, sipping piping-hot coffee while he served her. 'This is a treat,' she said. 'You know what? It might be a good idea to marry you after all.'

  He laughed. 'Well, I don't know what this conference is all about, but I'll bet a dollar to a piece of toast that Dad and Mother will suggest it.'

  'As if the idea had only just occurred to them!' Flora laughed too.

  This urging of them to marry had been going on year after year. They liked one another a lot but neither of them thought that liking was strong enough to base marriage upon.

  Peter became serious. 'Flora, you still love the man you left behind in Scotland. I've never fallen wildly in love in my life. But we are both single and getting on in years. I'm thirty seven. You're thirty-three. We have to take the plunge some time, you know.'

  Peter went to the boat while Flora cleared the dishes then went to the bathroom to shower and change into her jeans and Tshirt. She thought about marriage to the serious, workcentred Peter and she knew she would have to tell Peter everything if she were to marry him. Flora could not tell anyone, ever, about Robert.

  Alexander was the living image of his father, though not yet as broad and strong. She never need wonder what Robert looked like, she reflected, though she was starved of news of her son. Nanny had never been able to send photos of him for obvious reasons, and for the last few years had written little about him, except to say that they had ambitions for him that included Fettes College and university.

  Much later, after supper, they all sat around the pine tables on the deck, watching the boats bobbing on the water by the jetty, while around them tiny moths fluttered about the lanterns on the deck's rail. Tied up for their use was Peter's canoe, the little sailing dinghy and the Dispro, the motor boat with a disappearing propeller that Flora used to cross the lake for gas and kerosene and boat supplies.

  They knew something serious was afoot when Uncle John brought from the trunk of the Dodge sherry for the ladies, a bottle of Glenfiddich whisky for himself and Peter and soda water to dilute the whisky for Alexander.

  'Now then, you guys,' Uncle John began. Peter and Flora exchanged smiles. Uncle John poured, then sat, then stood, and finally, leaning against the rail of the veranda, with fireflies dancing about his shock of white hair, said, 'I'm sixty-seven. It's time to retire. Dorothy and I want to see a few places before we die. While we are fit. Now, any suggestions?'

  'You mean -where will you travel?' Flora asked.

  'No. We'll travel in America for six months. Then Dot's old country.' Aunt Dorothy had been born in Edinburgh. Flora felt her face go pale.

  Suppose they turned up to see Nanny at Ingersley when Robert was there? It would be a terrible shock for them. She must write to Nanny and tell her to visit them here, in Canada. If she did, then there would be no need for Aunt Dorothy and Uncle John to go to Inger
sley.

  'We can't carryon doing this work for ever.’ Aunt Dorothy said while she handed round marzipan fruits. 'And we couldn’t have dreamed of it but for Flora. She's the backbone of the family.' She added nervously, while giving a wistful look towards Flora, 'If Flora and Peter were married…'

  Peter grinned and Flora gave him a quick wink and smiled.

  Alexander said, 'Well, I am ready to leave school. Any time.'

  'No!' said Flora. 'I want you to go to university.'

  'I've made up my mind, Mom. There's nothing I want to do that I'll need a degree for.' Alexander looked at Uncle John for support. 'Mom and I could run the store and the sawmill.'

  Flora said, 'We've talked round the subject for months. Alexander should have an education. What do you all think?'

  Uncle John said, 'There was no choice in my day. It was work or starve.’ He took a sip of whisky and looked sidelong at Alexander as if to confirm that he was indeed being helpful, 'I remember when the logs for Bancroft Hydro came out of Bruton Swamp in Haliburton County. At Sandy's age I was navigating the chain of lakes above Baptiste, overseeing our logs being bagged in huge chained-together boomsticks and towed to the High Falls dam. At Baptiste's foot they were channelled down a man-made chute ... ' He took a quick sip of whisky and before anyone could stop him went on fast: 'Past Crooked Rapids and Flat Rapids it was smooth sailing on the York until we reached the hydro mill just north of Bancroft ...

  ‘Yes, Dad!' Peter said finally. 'But this is now. And you made sure that Jake and I had an education.'

  'I don't want it!' Alexander got to his feet and went to stand beside his hero. 'I want to work. I want to work in the lumber business, like Uncle John.'