Under the Almond Tree

By Annie Munro

Abandoned children. Wicked mothers. Deadly secrets. Sometimes life's a real fairytale.

 

When Sophie Baker starts searching for answers about her birth and identity, the journey takes her from New Zealand to England, India and Germany, each place drawing her further back into her family's carefully buried past. What she discovers will derail her sheltered life and change her future. But unearthing the truth will also dramatically impact those who came before. Separated across times and continents yet bound by blood and by a single, hateful act, four women, four generations, finally converge in the place it all started, and a horrifying history looks set to repeat itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Annie Munro
• Release date: Aug 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201325862

Annie Munro

I was picked out of a baby line-up by a young couple who’d travelled all the way from Scotland to New Zealand to find the child of their dreams. Well, that’s how I always pictured it. What is true is that my parents were Glaswegian, and they adopted me and both my brothers in New Zealand, later whisking us off to their bonnie homeland to live for four years. We didn’t last two. After eighteen months Mum and Dad fled with us back to the land of sunny beaches and long warm summers, conceding that they had lost their Hardy Scots status for good. This short overseas experience instilled in me a love for travel and a fascination for cultures, stories and languages not my own. So I went on to study French and German literature, fell for a guy with the oddest and loveliest accent I’d ever heard, and have spent much of my married life bouncing about the globe with him, following hearts and jobs to settle in countries as varied as Germany and Pakistan, France and India, Vietnam and England. And while I've enjoyed my years of university teaching and academic editing, it’s fiction writing that I’ve found to be the most challenging and absorbing job of all.

Book preview

Then the almond tree began to wave to and fro, and the boughs drew together and then parted, just like a clapping of hands for joy; then a cloud rose from the tree, and in the midst of the cloud there burned a fire, and out of the fire a beautiful bird arose, and, singing most sweetly, soared high into the air; and when he had flown away, the almond tree remained as it was before, but the handkerchief full of bones was gone.

From Lucy Crane’s ‘The Almond Tree’, 1882

A desiccated ancient at death’s door

He was striding across the square, although those who turned to watch him would likely have described it as a languorous lope. Sophie wasn’t fooled by the loose-hipped gait and smiling face. He was rushing. Which was at least something.

‘I even left you a reminder,’ she said loudly, partly out of exasperation and partly because he was still several metres away.

‘How’d it go?’ he called cheerfully.

She crossed her arms and waited for him to reach her, aware of the buzzing huddles of beaming families crowded about them outside the Auckland Town Hall.

‘On the fridge. Impossible to miss.’

‘I stand as an unworthy maggot before you,’ he said, head bowed, arms wide, in a gesture that looked more like a courtly greeting than a supplication for mercy.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Come on. Don’t condemn me to a lifetime of guilt for missing your big day.’

‘Again.’

‘It was this interminable meeting and then the traffic...’

‘Dinner. Your shout.’

‘Definitely some sort of catastrophic accident.’

‘And drinks.’

‘Long as you ditch the goofy cap.’

‘Done.’

‘And the hideous gown.’

A few hours later, they were relaxing into their second drink in Tony’s on Wellesley, a favourite haunt of Jack’s due to the sublimity of their steaks.

‘Are you going to accept?’

‘Guess so.’

‘Love the enthusiasm, Soph. Warms my cockles.’

‘Well, you know, necessary means to an end and all that.’

‘Come off it. You’ll love it and you know it,’ said Jack, tipping his head back to slug the remains of his glass. ‘You were born to be a mad old academic,’ he swept his hand over an imaginary scene, ‘with walls of books. Velvet-collared dressing gown. Fat-bowl pipe. One of those squashed-faced cats, you know, with the contemptuous golden eyes, squatting dribbling all over your...’

‘It’s a lot of years.’

‘But the alternative is what? School teaching? It’d drive you nuts.’

‘You seem to cope.’

Jack sighed, leaning back into his chair and stretching his legs. ‘Yes, but you see I...’

He stopped and looked up at the young waitress who had materialised at their table. He smiled, and Sophie watched the girl’s eyes flicker.

‘Can I get you anything else?’

‘Sophiecles?’

She shook her head.

He ordered another double brandy and the waitress drifted off, looking back over her shoulder as she took orders from the next table.

‘Drowning your sorrows?’

‘I’m celebrating my brilliant daughter’s...’

‘Fine,’ Sophie said, holding up her hands. ‘I’ll move onto more serious issues. Like the waitress.’

‘Look, at the very least, a doctorate will keep your options open. You can always enter the educational realm of the insane at a later stage, if you so desire.’

‘You must have noticed that.’

‘What?’

‘The waitress.’

‘What, that little girl just now?’

‘Yes that little girl just now. She couldn’t take her eyes off you.’

‘What on earth would she see in a sinewy old man,’ said Jack laughing. ‘She was just being attentive.’

‘Fair point. You are a desiccated ancient at death’s door.’

Jack said ‘oh very ha ha’ and clasped his hands behind his head, sucking in air through his teeth to stifle a yawn.

By the time he was on his fourth drink, they had started talking about The Women, a topic they settled into with the ease and comfort of returning to an old armchair, moulded to fit after years of use. It was the waitress who started them off.

‘Don’t you think she looks a bit like Meg?’

‘Meg? Mm, maybe. Yes,’ said Jack.

‘A younger version, but still.’

‘A daughter!’ said Jack with a gasp and a fist to his teeth.

‘To know for sure, we’d have to get her to cook something.’

‘Oh my Good Lord. I can still actually, you know, physically feel the thud of those meatloaves landing on the table,’ said Jack. ‘To this day, my heart sinks for a second, every time a student drops a book on the floor.’

‘Well you shouldn’t have told her it was delicious the first time.’

‘She looked so pleased with herself.’

‘And that you prefer it without salt or spices or in fact any...’

‘She spent hours...’

‘Because, you know, you can actually taste the meat.’

‘Quite a talent really, creating such a good building material from mince.’

Suesa of the fabulous afro came next, thanks to her unsuccessful but determined attempts to bring some spiritual enlightenment to the Baker household. After her departure, the yoga instruction manuals and cassette tapes of twangy sitars and plinky bells were pushed to the back of a cupboard in the garage, although the smell of incense lingered for weeks.

‘Okay okay. Who’s this...? Oh Jaaack, your eyes are deeviiine,’ squeaked Sophie, smoothing her hair with a delicate sweep from the temple.

‘Never once heard Maree say that.’

‘Must’ve been just me and the neighbourhood dogs then.’

‘I really think they missed her when she left.’

‘Was she the one who got you into that salmony... apricoty...’

‘Ah, those wild, heady days of my one foray into the world of haute couture.’

‘You looked like an emaciated pumpkin.’

‘Yeah, who was that? Not Maree...’

‘That nurse?’

‘It was... Wait. No. Air hostess. I want to say... Helen?’

‘Elaine! But, but, it’s so meaningful, you know, I mean, it’s just an insurance ad, but still, you know, that father and his little girl...’ said Sophie, hand pressed to heart, eyes wide and watering.

‘Wow, nailed it!’

‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’

Yet even as she and her father laughed, Sophie never felt that they were being unkind. Jack was still friends with most of them. Even the highly emotional Elaine, whom Sophie bumped into at a chemist a few months after the break-up. The teary-eyed woman had clasped Sophie’s hands and gazed intensely into her eyes as she asked, ‘And how are you both, I mean really?’ Jack and Sophie remembered each one with affection. They were memories of a caring motherly presence in their home. Memories that held no sting in the tail.

When they finally got up from the table, the waitress approached and Jack leaned forward to look at the name-tag pinned to her chest.

‘Well, Evelyn, this really has been the most wonderful pleasure,’ he said, lifting her hand to his lips.

‘Oh for goodness’ sake,’ burst out Sophie.

She grabbed her father’s arm and they walked giggling out of the restaurant, leaving the blushing girl standing among the tables.

Inside the taxi, Jack lit a cigarette and sighed.

‘Thought you were giving up.’

‘Yes, decided against it on the grounds that I didn’t want to. Plus Doc Stewart recommends moderate usage. For relaxation and mental calm.’

‘Cause you’re so highly strung.’

‘Behind this smooth and cool exterior...’

‘In case you hadn’t noticed, this is the seventies, and blood-letting, head-drilling and smoking are no longer touted as the medical panacea they once were.’

‘I know, I know. It’s just a celebratory treat.’

‘Well, give us a puff then.’

‘I’m not sure I want to be held responsible for leading your virginal lungs astray.’

‘That ship well and truly sailed, Dad.’

‘When?’

‘I told you about it. Years ago. In The Long Grass. Mandy Patterson and Susan and that lot. I said it was like drinking nice warm water? You laughed at me?’

‘I hate to think what other seedy and shameful things you all got up to in there.’

Sophie tapped the side of her nose and took the cigarette from Jack. Putting it to her lips, she pictured The Long Grass, a huge fenced area that horseshoed their cul-de-sac and consisted of a few dilapidated sheds, some shrubs, trees, a creek and the eponymous greenery. Access to it was possible just beyond the Bakers’ back garden, through a small gap in the fencing where two sheets of the corrugated steel had popped apart at the bottom. Every child had, at one time or another, fallen victim to the Jaws of Death and Hell, which would regularly jam and then suddenly spring open to bite chunks of skin from knuckles or shins.

It was in The Long Grass with Mandy that Sophie found out what happens to slugs when you put salt on them. She dreamed of fat wet frothing writhing grubs for weeks after the distressing experiment. And it was behind one of the sheds that she and Danny pulled down their pants and pressed their bare bottoms together. They leapt away, squealing with horror at the sensation of smooth, bouncy skin against skin, but repeated the strangely exciting experience on a number of occasions. But the touch-bums with Danny actually turned out to be less absorbing than climbing trees, making mud pies or trying to catch frogs together, with pants on.

Unlike Sophie’s mother, Sophie’s father was not fussy about muddy footprints in the hall, sticky fingers on doors, sand-filled pockets that left trails across the bathroom floor or buckets full of warm water and dead tadpoles on the kitchen bench, as long as everything got sponged up, wiped up, swept up, or poured down the toilet by the end of the day.

‘Here,’ she said, holding out the cigarette.

Jack didn’t answer. Sophie turned to look at him. In his sleep, he looked older.

The way they were

T

he bed tilted, rose, tipped back, fell, listed again. Sophie pictured the ship being lifted high on the backs of liquid mountains. Tomorrow, after nearly six weeks, she’d be on firm ground, beneath her not miles of water teeming with gilled, scaled, gulping, gaping life but thick layers of earth, rock, clay, ash. She glanced over to the dressing table. The strip of corridor light sneaking under the door made a silhouette of the only object sitting on it, a small wooden box. It should have been placed in the bottom of the cupboard for safety. She’d put it in there when she first moved into the cabin, but soon took it out again. It was impossible to say which place was preferable. To have it there, in the open, in the space she shared with it, was a comfort. But when her eyes were inevitably drawn to the object itself, its presence was almost too much to bear.

She closed her eyes to feel the bed lift and dip under her and the tears trace cool rivulets down her temples and into her hair.

When she’d decided to travel by ship rather than plane, she had thought the journey would give her time, before the interment and the start of her research, to rest in the emptiness and silence of the open sea, in the comfortable anonymity among strangers. Such a romanticised notion was bound to disappoint.

The first night, the conversation swirled around her designated dining table, names and occupations being shared, cautious friendships begun. She tried to blend in with the happy excitement, and was, she thought, doing tolerably well, until her neighbour turned to her and said, ‘Oh honey, I just love your blouse.’

Sophie thanked her, and after a few minutes smiled at the table and quietly excused herself.

It was that accent. She could hear her, clear as a bell. Dorothy, the American drama teacher. Oh honey, he looked peaceful. Like he was ready. We just loved him, Sophie. We all loved him.

When she saw the scene in her mind, it was always in slow motion, as if to convince herself that it did, indeed, have some poetry. Some meaning. Jack in front of the zip boiler in the staff room, advising the other Social Studies teacher, Kenneth, new to the school and struggling with student discipline. Jack’s face going slate-coloured as he puts his coffee cup down, and as the whistle starts soaring, he’s falling, the sound going up, the man going down, as if they’re connected somehow, and when he hits the floor the zip is screaming, and nobody thinks to turn it off because they’re all running to help him and yelling for a telephone.

The service was held in a chapel sort of building attached to the funeral place. I don’t remember choosing lilies, she’d thought as she watched the clean-faced, smooth-haired minister. She didn’t catch a lot of what he said. What she did hear came to her as a string of single, unconnected words. Life. Rejoice. Mourn. Comfort. Grief. Everlasting.

They made no sense at all.

When the ship finally sailed into Southampton, she stood on the front deck. The Bloody English Weather her father had always spoken of with a hint of proud familiarity dutifully fulfilled the stereotype, engulfing the ship in a wet fog. Other smaller vessels took hazy form and then slipped back into mist. The buildings at the water’s edge appeared as if in a colourless Turner oil.

In a hotel room in London that afternoon, she contemplated going out, taking in a museum or a park, going to the theatre in the evening, walking through Covent Gardens or Trafalgar Square. The day wore on. She ordered room service, watched something forgettable on the TV and went to sleep early.

As her bus pulled into Gloucester Green the next day, a portly man in suit and tie jumped up from his bench and waved. Reverend Claude Chalmers had scarcely aged over the past two decades, still bald and firm as a just-ripe plum, his skin the colour of vanilla milk jelly. He must have been sent a recent photo of her by her father – she certainly bore little resemblance to the seven-year-old child who had kissed Uncle Claude goodbye from this same bus station years before. Her father’s large hand had clasped her small one as they’d boarded the bus, and he hadn’t let it go until Heathrow. 

Claude hurried over to help Sophie down in a gesture of carefully executed chivalry. His grey eyes shone as he reached up to his full five-foot-six to kiss her on the cheek. His cool hands pressed hers, and he said ‘Ah, dear girl’ in a way that made her feel sad and comforted at the same time.

‘Right, let’s get you home to Kitty.’

Auntie Catherine. Cheerful and chatty, with white hair scraped back and twisted into an elaborate plaited coil covering the back of her head. Always in a floral apron. With lace-edged pockets.

They drove through the gentle landscape, all soft light, soothing lines and muted colours, with the occasional outburst of brilliant yellow. In his few moments of nostalgia, her father had voiced a longing for the undulating patchwork that was rural England, comparing it with the dark, damp tangle of New Zealand bush, stuffed with ponga, mamaku and passion vine, which he never grew to appreciate.

As they approached Wantage, Sophie asked Claude about his retirement a few years previously, then about his new-found love of gardening, his and Catherine’s on-going involvement in their church, how often they went to Oxford nowadays, and whether they continued to do the South Downs every year. Claude chatted freely, happily expanding on the installation of raised veggie beds, the stress and ultimate satisfaction of preaching the odd sermon when asked to fill in, the best places to eat in Oxford.

‘Resting on their laurels, I think. Such a shame. The museum is so very good. But, no, my advice would be, explore the Ashmolean, then eschew the cafe and flee down to The Bear. Excellent fare. Hearty too. And not far. Just south of the Covered Market.’

He went on to describe in comic detail the worst Bed and Breakfast they’d ever experienced in the Downs when they went the year before.

Thus they talked and laughed their way through Wantage, passing without comment the road that led to Sophie’s primary school, as if they didn’t remember. But of course they did. Although Claude didn’t know all of it. Nobody did.

That she’d sat on top of her desk, feet swinging, lingering after most of the other children had left the classroom. That she’d decided this would be the day she’d show them. There would be no rushing off to meet Mummy today.

Donnalee Thorpe and Fiona Tibbet, sniggering at the back of the classroom with Billy and Tony, the Wells twins, seemed unimpressed by her nonchalance and disinclined to leave. Sophie pulled a book out of her bag and pretended to read. The giggling and whispering gained momentum, slowly formed into words.

‘Must have been a blind hairdresser.’

‘Nah, it’s perfect. For a sooky-baba.’

‘Or her mum. Bet mummy did it.’

‘Oh look, the baby’s going all red.’

‘Stuck a bowl on her head.’

‘It’s going to cry.’

‘And used hedge clippers.’

‘No, it’s going to fart.’

‘Or poo.’

‘No, dog clippers.’

‘Big stinking pile of poo’s going to come out. Betcha.’

‘Ewww, it’s dribbling.’

‘How disgusting.’

Sophie wiped her nose on her sleeve and slid off the desk. Followed by the Tibbet gang, she dawdled towards the school gate, frantically trying to work out how to warn off her mother, how to pre-empt the inevitable: the soaring ‘cooee, darling!’ called from afar as if her daughter would be the only one to hear; the inviting arms flung open in wide abandonment; the shining smile that beamed so brightly it hurt to look at it full on.

And she prayed that just this once her mother wouldn’t be there.

Claude knew the rest. Sophie being stopped by Miss Grantham. Sophie pushing past the young French teacher and running to the gate. Mr Brothers surrounded by children on the footpath. Cars at a standstill all over the road. People shouting, hurrying towards the children.

Sophie heard Miss Grantham’s panicked voice behind her, calling, ‘Greg! Greg!’ Mr Brothers looked up and yelled, ‘Sophie, no!’ She stopped. As he pushed his way towards her, she saw on the ground behind him an edge of red fabric appliquéd with little green fruit. Sophie’s stomach lurched, rose to her throat, and as the vomit hit the pavement, her vision blurred and darkened and she felt Mr Brothers’ hands lifting her up, away from the sick and the crowd and her mother’s strawberry skirt.

Ten minutes beyond Wantage, the car went through an arboreal tunnel of oak and elm to emerge in the ridiculously pretty village of Childrey. Passing thatched cottages, the little store and the willow-fringed pond, they arrived at a house with heavy arched thatching over the top two windows. Jack had always dubbed it Groucho. It was only now, standing in front of it, that Sophie understood the reference for the first time. She told Claude, and they were still