The Monkey Puzzle Tree by Sonia Tilson

Author:Sonia Tilson [Tilson, Sonia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Family & Relationships, Abuse, Child Abuse, Death; Grief; Bereavement, Fiction, Historical, Literary, Contemporary Women
ISBN: 9781927428122
Google: a-25MgEACAAJ
Amazon: B00B6UACLK
Barnesnoble: B00B6UACLK
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2013-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

Three weeks later, she entered The Uplands Pub, her first act of defiance against her parents’ ban on such places. With her newly-acquired boyfriend, Gordon, a lanky, bespectacled, third-year philosophy student, she joined a group of his friends sitting around a table with Professor Falconer who was entertaining them by reciting lines from Under Milk Wood, by Swansea’s own poet, Dylan Thomas, born just around the corner from where they sat. “Call me Dolores, like they do in the stories,” he whined girlishly in a stage Welsh accent, to appreciative guffaws.

He quirked an eyebrow and raised his pint to Gillian as she and Gordon seated themselves. Oppressed by the noise and smoke, and uneasy at the hilarity, she sipped her warm, sticky gin and orange and tried to ignore the glances he kept flicking her way.

A week or so later he stopped to talk to her after an afternoon class, casually observing that as they lived in the same direction from the university, they might as well walk home together through the park. Alarmed by his reputation as a hard-drinking ladies’ man, she scurried along beside him, clutching her books to her chest and replying to his conversational overtures as minimally as possible. His questions about how she was getting along in her classes seemed harmless enough, however, as did his explanations about the point of learning Anglo-Saxon and about the subtleties of a Shakespearian sonnet, and she gradually relaxed her guard somewhat. After several such walks and talks, much insistence on his part, and many lapses on hers, she was finally prevailed upon to call him James.

One November afternoon, he suggested a detour past the rhododendron gardens to a path that ran along under the wall enclosing the park. They were alone on the path when he stopped and leaned against the wall. A loose spray of ivy detached itself from the mass of leaves and dark berries that surrounded him and draped itself over his shoulder. The bruised foliage gave off a dull bitter smell.

“Do you like me, Gillian?” He took hold of the spray and twisted it this way and that, as if to break it off.

“Er, yes. Yes I do.” She wished he would leave the ivy alone and get back to explaining Donne’s image comparing two

lovers to a mathematical compass.

“Why do you like me?” He abandoned the spray and looked into her eyes. “Tell me, what it is about me that you find most attractive?”

There was no getting out of it, even though she had never actually said, or felt for that matter, that she was attracted to him. She analyzed his appearance. He was rather old, at least twelve years older than she was, but not bad-looking she supposed: tall and rangy, his rich-coloured, poetically long waves framing a round face in which the features, while regular enough, were somewhat crowded into the middle, like those of the sun in ancient pictures. His blue eyes twinkled encouragingly at her from under heavy lids and arched eyebrows that seemed permanently raised.

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