The Juniper Tree (6 page)

One afternoon when I was rearranging the shop window I noticed a nasty little dark blue car drawn up opposite the shop and there was Mr Crimony slamming a grey felt hat on his head and helping mother out of the car. He carefully locked the doors and crossed the road holding her arm in a possessive manner. By this time I had reached the shop door and turned the notice that said ‘Open’ to ‘Closed’ and stood waiting for them to enter.

‘Well, here we are,’ mother said nervously. ‘I must say it is a pretty little shop. Better than I expected, but very small. Do people really buy this kind of junk?’

Mr Crimony took off his wide-brimmed grey felt hat. It was greasy, with a black band, and strangely repellent. He placed it on a plaster bust of Beethoven, slightly tilted it and said, ‘Of course they do. Antiques, that’s what they are. My auntie had this kind of thing in her old cottage but we threw it out after she died. Rubbish it seemed to us, but it was worth a small fortune, we heard afterwards. A brass bed, I remember, and a slippery horsehair sofa, and things under glass domes, china and that. There was a square piano that looked for all the world like a coffin on tressels and some stuffed fish her Dad had caught years ago.’

Mr Crimony was waving his large arm about in a dangerous way so I hustled them into the back room and mother’s mouth went down when she saw that I cooked, ate and sat in the same room. ‘Is this all you have, then?’ she asked as I lit the gas under the kettle.

‘No, there are two perfectly good rooms upstairs but it is more convenient to stay near the shop. Anyway, I like this room.’

Mr Crimony, who was trying hard to be pleasant, looked round and said, ‘That’s a fine dresser you have there, Bella, and those plates are very handsome. Annie, have you noticed the dresser?’

Mother brightened: ‘Yes, some very nice things mixed in with the rubbish, but of course it’s her trade.’ Then to me, ‘I must say it’s very cosy in here,’ and she looked comfortable and at home sitting there in a Victorian buttoned chair waiting for her long-lost daughter to give her a cup of tea.

I didn’t want to shatter the peace, there had so seldom been any between us, but I felt the time had come when I must tell her about Tommy Marline. I would have to fetch her from nursery school soon. Mother put down her tea cup and said in a relaxed way, ‘Pretty, isn’t it? Hand-painted, I suppose.’ Then, looking at the twisted staircase that led upstairs, added, ‘I’d rather like to see the rest of the place while I’m here. If it’s convenient, of course.’

So I led her upstairs and first we went into the room that I used as a bedsitting-room. It had a good view of the Green with its chestnut trees and the scarlet buses flashing past half hidden by the bright young leaves. The room was really quite pretty now I’d redecorated it. The divan and recess where I hung my clothes were covered by Indian material, red and white with a design of peacocks, and there was a fine old writing table in the window where I did the shop’s accounts, and a built-in bookcase and shelves for china, mostly Staffordshire. It was the most individual room I’d ever had and I asked brightly, ‘Do you like it, mother?’

She lifted the curtain covering my clothes: ‘So you’ve only got this place to hang your clothes. Why don’t you get a wardrobe or something. You had a beautiful built-in one at home, remember? Mr Crimony fits all his suits into it and with room to spare. I’m not saying it isn’t a pretty room. You have made it very nice, considering, but I should do something about the wardrobe if I were you.’

We went on to the little landing and I opened the door of the back room. It was filled with afternoon sun streaming on the little bed, the toys, the animals from the Noah’s ark lying scattered on the floor and Big Teddy sitting in the now discarded high chair. The sun illuminated my baby’s nursery as if it were a stage set.

My mother literally reeled. I’ve heard of people reeling from shock but never seen anyone do it before. She was tottering back on her heels and if I hadn’t caught her, she would have fallen down the stairs. She pushed my supporting arms away and cried, ‘Charlie, come up here.’

Charlie came stumbling up the narrow, twisting stairs, stumbling because his feet were too long to fit the treads. We retreated from the landing and he followed us into the sun-filled room. ‘Well, what’s the matter?’ he snapped. ‘Looks all right to me.’

Mother clawed at him like a demented cat. ‘You fool, can’t you see that this is a child’s room? She’s got a baby hidden away somewhere.’ She looked round wildly and made to pull the cot cover back.

Trying to control myself, I said in what I hoped was a calming voice: ‘Don’t bother, your grand-daughter is in a nursery across the Green. Actually it is just about time to fetch her now. How about coming with me? It will only take a few minutes.

I held out my hand to her, hoping she would take it, but she slapped it and then my face and shouted, ‘You fool, at least you could have had an abortion! No wonder you have been in hiding all this time. Charlie, take me home.’

She tottered down the stairs with poor Charlie stumbling after her. From an upstairs window I watched them scramble into their ugly little car and drive away, then I fetched Tommy home. Her hands were filled with paper butterflies they had been making in the nursery.

Chapter Seven

I
didn’t see the Forbeses that weekend. I didn’t see anyone except the customers who came to the shop – oh, and Miss Murray, but I couldn’t really talk to her. She was quite pleasant the few times she had seen Tommy but she obviously didn’t want to be involved with her in any way. She appeared to be afraid of being roped in for babysitting and that kind of thing, although she was the last person one could ask. She would have had a fit if a child upset a mug of milk on the carpet, or worse, if it did not make it clear that it needed to use its pot. Miss Murray was far kinder than she appeared to be but you couldn’t confide in her or tell her the things your mother said and did.

Then Mr Crimony came again and as usual without warning. I saw him from the window getting out of his horrible little car but he didn’t open the door to mother because she wasn’t there. He tapped on the shop window with something metal, a nail file I thought, but it turned out to be his car keys. I’d already locked the door and turned the cardboard notice to ‘Closed’, but he went on tapping and eventually it so got on my nerves I let him in.

‘Shall we go into the back room?’ he said in a funereal voice. ‘I see you are closed,’ and I realized that to him the sign was very important, like ‘Keep off the Grass’ or something. It was nothing to me because I often changed the notice and there was one that said ‘Back in Ten Minutes’ that I used quite a lot.

We entered the back room which was dark that day although it was almost summer; the handsome plates on the dresser hardly noticed. Mr Crimony went to sit on the buttoned Victorian chair, then changed it for an uncomfortable Gothic one already sold and waiting to be collected. He laid his hat, a bowler this time, and soiled driving gloves on the table and said heavily, ‘Bella, you may be wondering why I’m here. I can understand that you don’t want to see me after the way your poor mother went on. But it was a shock, a fearful shock to us both, particularly to your mother, to hear that you had a child that no one knew about. A little girl, did you say it was? And what about her father? You’re not married, are you?’ I shook my head and he added, ‘No, we didn’t think so.’

He went on asking impertinent questions which I occasionally answered with a movement of my head. He was behaving as if he were a relation or someone in authority and after about ten minutes of this questioning I told him so and added, ‘If mother wants to know anything about my child, she can ask me herself.’

He turned down his bottom lip and said darkly, ‘That’s one thing she won’t do. You don’t know your own history, girl. I’ve known your mother for nearly forty years. Our parents were friends, particularly our fathers. Did you know that your grandfather was a coal merchant at one time, the same as my father was? Then he changed and became a timber merchant, in Pimlico of all places, and we didn’t see so much of him. We still went for holidays together and I remember your mother, Annie, scrambling up the rocks and climbing cliffs, quite fearless she was and she swam well too. She was seven years younger than me and made me feel so ashamed. Then she could speak French. She’d picked it up from her mother, who was half French as you know, and because I was jealous I teased her quite a lot. So we quarrelled. She had a very quick temper, even in those days.’

He stopped talking and lit a cigarette although he wasn’t a smoking man and hadn’t even a match in his pocket. I had silently handed him the box from the cooker. I couldn’t speak because I was quietly praying over and over again, ‘Please God, don’t let Crimony be my father.’

He went rambling on. ‘After your grandfather died and left your family very badly off (we always said he’d have done better to stick to coal – wood wasn’t his line), well they drifted back to Kilburn and managed somehow. Your uncle Ted got quite a nice little job in insurance and your mother became a pupil-teacher at the school where she stayed all those years. Games and French were her subjects and I think at first she quite enjoyed herself there. She was very keen on tennis in those days and used to play on some courts at Swiss Cottage. Sometimes I used to join her there on a Saturday afternoon but I wasn’t in her class. The man who owned the courts used to coach her quite a bit and didn’t charge a penny. Thought he’d make her a champion, no less.’

I stopped praying for a moment and said, ‘It’s strange she never let me play, I wanted to at school and it might have got my weight down a bit.’

Mr Crimony fixed his pale blue eyes on me in such a way that we were staring each other out: ‘It’s not surprising that she didn’t want you to take up tennis, because you were the reason she had to give it up. Annie was very bitter about that, very bitter.’

I said, ‘Now I come to think about it, tennis champions don’t seem to go in for babies much, not like actresses. If she felt like that about it, why did she get married?’

Crimony’s pale eyes held mine even more intently and I thought, ‘Now it’s coming.’

He hunched his shoulders and growled like a bad-tempered old dog. ‘This is going to be a shock to you. You were conceived out of wedlock. Your mother, who I’d hoped to marry, had behaved like any slut of the streets and had had intercourse with a man she hardly knew, a man she met playing tennis. It took her four months to persuade him to marry her, four months of purgatory. Her brother Ted knocked him to the ground, but that didn’t help much. You see, his family were against it, didn’t think Annie good enough. They gave in eventually and there was a quiet wedding, in a registry office I believe. I didn’t go, of course. I didn’t see Annie again for at least six years and I was married by then myself.’

I was saying under my breath, ‘Thank you, God, thank you that I’m not Crimony’s child,’ and when I finished thanking God I started to laugh, I couldn’t stop. It wasn’t a happy laugh, but I felt better for it, and looking at Mr Crimony sitting in his Gothic chair I could see he was shaking with a kind of laughter – or perhaps tears. I was longing to get him out of the house so that I could think about my parents, so many things were becoming clear. I opened my mouth to say, ‘You had better go now, Mr Crimony,’ but instead I said, ‘Perhaps you’d like a drink before you go, Mr Crimony. There’s some sherry on the dresser,’ and I fetched two glasses from the shop.

Chapter Eight

O
n the first Monday of May Gertrude telephoned and asked me to close ‘the silly old shop’ and spend the day with her, gardening. ‘You haven’t been here the last two weekends and you can’t imagine what is happening out there in the garden. The flowers seem to be completely taking over, every root, bulb or seed I have planted has taken root and the place is like a jungle.’

‘But what about the gardener I sometimes see mowing the lawns?’ I asked.

‘Well, that’s just it. He only does the mowing, pruning and general tidying up, but has no contact with the flowers, that’s my job. I love it normally.’

I remembered her condition and agreed to come although there were several things I’d planned to do in the shop. It was a perfect early summer day, ideal for gardening, and after what I’d been through with Crimony I needed a change. So I hung ‘Closed’ on the door and set off for Richmond by bus because Bernard wouldn’t allow Gertrude to drive now she was five months pregnant and the baby had started to flutter about. He seemed to think a moving baby was more vulnerable.

Gertrude was waiting for me in the courtyard at the front of the house. She was examining a passion flower cutting that she had recently planted hoping it would climb up the walls of the house. It had been about three feet high when I’d last seen it but now it was careering up the wall and had already reached a bedroom window. I laughed and said she was like Jack and the beanstalk. She pointed out a patch of wild violets. ‘You remember the violet I dug up from the roadside – look how it has multiplied. Even the carved bear has canary-creeper growing over his back. I don’t know where it came from, but I haven’t the heart to pull it up. Soon it will be a golden lion.’

We walked through the cool house into the garden, blazing with sun and colour, a jumble of tulips mixed with forget-me-nots and groups of heavy-smelling hyacinths, borders of polyanthus and the luxuriant leaves of peonies springing up and hiding struggling small plants. Against a crumbling stone wall there was a patch of blood-red wallflowers. I have never cared for wallflowers much except for their scent; to me they seem rather shaggy and shapeless, but these were perfect, like an illustration in a gardening book. We went to the little potting-shed/conservatory where Gertrude started her seeds in boxes and pots. It must have been five weeks ago that I had helped her plant the annuals intended to fill the summer beds and the stone urns she was so fond of. The glass had been removed and green leaves were pouring out of the boxes, the petunias and dahlias already in bud and demanding to be transplanted.