THE LITTLE OLIVE TREE
Robert wanted floodlighting for the olive trees.
He said he liked the way it turned nature into modern art, the lit-up branches making statements against the black sky. Mary wondered whether nature made statements like that. What statements would they be, exactly? Robert hadn’t answered, he wasn’t wearing his hearing aid. Not wearing his hearing aid was probably a statement too.
She had loved the darkness which slowly melted the garden away and worried that the harsh light would hurt the trees. Surely they needed to sleep? What about the birds and all the little creatures that rustled in the dark Greek nights?
But the lights made her look at the two olive trees more closely. She saw how huge the darker one had become, the beams showing up its monstrous growth. They had planted them as saplings in the garden of their new holiday villa, forty years ago. Now they lived here all year round, she realised they had been planted too close to each other. Robert liked the way they looked, he said they’d become one over time, a fusion of opposing worlds, an organic synthesis of light and dark. He often spoke in those kind of sentences, like the ones he’d used when he wrote for the arts review pages before retirement.
Mary thought it was more complicated. The bigger tree had flourished at the expense of the smaller one, twisting it out of shape and holding it so tightly it had become stunted. The pale branches, locked inside the darker ones, were like hands trying to claw their way out. Of course she didn’t say this to Robert. He would have laughed if he’d heard, but once she’d seen the trees engaged in unequal battle, it was hard to see them any other way.
When the cocks crowed from the farm over the hill, Mary would get up and tiptoe into the garden and put her hand on the little tree. The light wood was smooth and beaded with damp like the skin of someone who was frightened.
Every day at six p.m. Robert turned on the floodlights. Mary didn’t understand why, he never looked at the trees. He watched television as the evening light outside changed from pink to blue then mauve. He had his meals in front of the television now and ate more than he used to. He took up extra room in bed, he felt heavier. At those times, Mary held tight to the edge of the mattress, thoughts rustling in her head, shifting and swaying like branches in the wind. She was getting thinner. At night, knitting blankets for the refugees in Athens, her fingers looked as bumpy as twigs.
One day in late October, the great storm came. It had been brewing at sea for days. The young woman in the market spoke with relish of damage to come as she wrapped up their bunches of sweet green grapes. The wind got stronger all day. Metal shop signs blew along the street, a child’s plastic swing cartwheeled into the road.
Robert closed the shutters early and went to bed. Sometime after midnight the trees fell, crushing the garden wall. When the commotion began, Robert got up to look.
‘Modern art auto-destructs!’ He sounded excited.
Mary stayed in bed. She felt the sound in her bones, thrilling and frightening at the same time. it was hard to believe the world could hold so much noise but the silence afterwards was even bigger.
The next morning the trees had disappeared and the garden was submerged in torn branches and splintered wood. All the wood looked dark. She searched in vain for lighter fragments but the little tree had vanished.
Men came with chain saws which whined for two days, they left a neat pile of logs behind. Builders mended the wall. Now there was just an empty space outside instead of trees. Robert looked up types of decking for the following summer. He sent for samples of paving and tried to interest her in his choices. She pointed out there would be no shade, so the unbroken sunshine would scald their faces. Hot light would glare up from the paving. He didn’t reply. These days she was too tired for much conversation anyway; she knitted instead and went to bed early every night.
Just before Christmas, her pile of woollen blankets was collected by a volunteer driver called Declan. He worked as a plumber and had come to Corfu from Ireland years ago.
‘Shame about the trees but nice to see a bit of sky.’ A dimple appeared in his grey stubble. He spoke with a lilt that was comforting. After he’d gone, Mary looked up, up instead of down, up into the pale blue sky which reminded her of a tablecloth she had held with her sister at some long ago summer picnic. The wind had caught it and blown it into a dome between their clutching fingers. How they’d laughed! Her sister died years back but the blue of the sky looked just like that day had felt: hopeful.
By the first day of spring, the house was packed up, it had been sold to an American family . All Robert’s belongings had gone with him two weeks before. He left the logs untouched, he had gas effect in the flat in Crouch End.
The cabin Mary had bought in the forest outside Kassiopi had plenty of logs already, but she thought she might take some along. She planned to sit on top of them each pine- fresh morning and watch the sun rise over the blue, blue sea.
Everything fitted easily into Declan’s truck. He waited while she had a last look in the garden, where the stumps of the trees used to be, before Robert grubbed them out to prepare for paving. There, in a small circle, were a dozen bendy stems of light-coloured wood, their green tips reaching up to the sun.
