Polly Samson: Haunted by “The Apple Tree”

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Polly Samson links the stories in Perfect Lives, her second collection, by overlapping characters in the same community—the family featured in one story will be the last clients of the piano tuner in the next story; his first client will be a friend to the unnamed woman whose first-person account of her marriage and family life is revisited several times. (This narrator also has an intense love of photography, drawing upon Samson’s personal passions). Some of her characters are just millimeters away from a breakdown, others are already behaving quite erratically, but a few have managed to carve out moments of comfort and passion; they all, however, tend to be at best tangentially aware of the dramas being played out around them. Samson has written the introduction to a collection of some of Daphne du Maurier’s earliest work, The Doll and Other Stories, so it makes sense that she would invoke du Maurier for this “Selling Shorts” essay—and the nervous energy in so many of her characters makes the choice even more apt.

As a child in London, I suffered so badly from nightmares that my mother took me to the doctor. I remember clearly the doctor in half moon glasses solemnly writing out a prescription for warm milk at bedtime, and yet I remember very little about the nightmares themselves: just a feeling of darkness, and trying to run, of gnarled roots and branches closing in around my head.

I stopped having bad dreams when we moved to Cornwall when I was eight. My suddenly peaceful sleep was odd, considering that we now lived in an old granite vicarage said to be haunted by a murderess and which was situated beside an ancient graveyard from which our terrier would bring the occasional femur. It wasn’t far from Fowey, where Corwall’s greatest novelist—Daphne du Maurier—lived and work, and this was real du Maurier country: open moors, windswept, sparsely populated… As I headed into my teens, I found I shared du Maurier’s passion for this wild landscape over which my own imagination had been freed to roam. I lost myself in her novels and slept peacefully at night.

I don’t know why I didn’t read her short stories until much later. I don’t think I ever came across them at the time; perhaps they weren’t even in print. I remember being surprised that two films that had truly terrified me—each causing a resurgence of nightmares—Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now were, in fact, based on du Maurier short stories.

As terrifying as I found the movies, I found that The Birds and Don’t Look Now wound the tension even tighter on the page than on the screen; du Maurier can do atmosphere and menace like no one else, and her short stories make my pulse race faster than her novels. In the smaller space, she hasn’t had to think too much about pace or form, so the stories seem more instinctive. In the more concentrated form, she is able to tap into fears that are so deeply subconscious you don’t even know that they are yours.

I like so many of her stories but “The Apple Tree” has haunted me the longest. It is the story of a man who believes that his recently departed wife, Midge, has come back, as part of her eternal reproach, in the form of an apple tree. He dwells on their long marriage, including the years of dejection and silent resentment after Midge caught him kissing a rosy-cheeked land girl in the infancy of their newlywed days. Midge remained tight-lipped but punished him until the end of her life with slavish devotion. Even when dying of pneumonia, she thoughtfully took herself off to a nursing home so that he wouldn’t be bothered. Her passive-aggression sentenced him to a lifetime of shame, even after her death.

One of the things I like most about this story is that even though it is nerve-strummingly suspenseful—the scene where the husband finally hacks down the tree is so like a gruesome and violent murder that it turns my stomach—it also manages to be acutely funny in its observations of the unfortunate Midge. There is a moment where the husband imagines her waiting her turn at the gates of Heaven,” rather far back, as was always her fate in queues.” An image of her staring reproachfully at him from the turnstile into Paradise “remained with him for about a week, fading a little day by day. Then he forgot her.”

The brevity of his mourning is deliciously spiteful and his recollections of his wife unrelentingly cruel. The tree is always seen as “humped” and “stooping” and in the filthy description of its buds: “so small and brown that it seemed to him they scarcely deserved the name, they were more like blemishes upon the twig, dusty and dry…He felt a queer distaste to touch them,” you see how repulsed he had become by her bodily presence.

Gradually, the tree starts to taint his life. A branch falls in the night and when he attempts to burn the logs they fill the house with a sickly green stench that lingers everywhere. His housekeeper serves him jam made with the apples from the tree that makes him sick. The story becomes quietly ever more nightmarish as the husband tries to rid himself of the tree. Perhaps it is only his own guilt that he is trying to escape; you can never be certain, due to the intensity of his misogyny and hatred. Is the husband delusional? Or is the tree a real manifestation of an avenging spirit? For the husband, the apple tree becomes ever more sinister until there is no escape as the roots bind him tight.

And somewhere in there, when I first read it, I felt again the constriction of my own nightmares.

20 May 2011 | selling shorts |