The Memory of Trees by F. G. Cottam

and the mother of his child was much more successful. She was one of the busiest and best paid make-up artists in the world. Her working life comprised fashion shoots and movie junkets and seriously well-paid advertising campaigns. Her exclusive contract with the cosmetics company she promoted alone brought in sixty grand a year.
    They had met at art school. They had both been on the painting course. Baxter had invented a pretext for visiting Charlotte’s school and had seen her illustrations on her classroom wall and so knew that she had inherited the talent to draw from one or both of her parents.
    There was no man in Sarah Bourne’s life. She balanced work and motherhood successfully. She drove a nice car and wore fashionable clothes. She exercised at the gym a lot and generally took care of her appearance. Baxter had concluded that this was more to do with image than vanity. She had no choice but to be an advert for what she did. People would judge her skills on her appearance. It was a prejudice that went with the territory. She seemed comfortable enough with it.
    Curtis struck him as more enigmatic. He clearly doted on the daughter he was not currently permitted to see. He took work that was nomadic by its nature. He gave guest lectures and ran courses like the one that had facilitated his disastrous liaison with Isobel Jenks. But his engagement with the world seemed a bit half-hearted. There was something remote about him, as though he was almost a figure out of his time.
    That was a fanciful way of looking at it. But Baxter trusted his ability to read character and had been unable to pull Tom Curtis, despite this, into the clear sort of focus in which people could be properly scrutinized. It was a puzzle. He was a puzzle.
    Probably it was just his profession. Forests were still and silent places – weren’t they? – built by nature for seclusion. There was a sense in which they harboured shade and secrecy. Even a copse of trees was cover, a place of concealment. There was little older or more steadfast in nature than a tree.
    The way people went about their work gave you clues as to their characters. Some men were aggressive deal makers. Some were methodical. Some were showy and spectacular in their office dress and accoutrements or habitually fast at the wheel of their company cars.
    The physical nature of what Tom Curtis did had endowed him with an enviable physique. Otherwise his work offered few clues about him. But then planting trees seemed less like a job to Baxter than some sort of ancient, arduous ritual.
    In the bed next to him, Isobel said something he only half-heard.
    ‘What?’
    ‘I said he should have been more grateful.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘The first time we went to bed? He didn’t exactly seduce me over a candlelit dinner.’
    ‘Go on.’
    She sat up, squirming free of the duvet, her breasts pertly revealed, her skin sallow and her shoulders slight. He could see the dark roots in the smoke-bleared light showing against the scalp under her bleached crop.
    ‘I couldn’t sleep, one night. I went for a walk in the woods. It wasn’t dangerous. It never goes fully dark in the Scottish highlands in summer. You might come across a fox or an owl, but there’s nothing there that preys on humans.
    ‘I came across Curtis, naked, seated cross-legged in a clearing on the forest floor. His eyes were open but he must have been dreaming, must have sleep-walked his way there. He was listening intently. Had that attitude, anyway – kept nodding his head. Except that nothing was being said to him because there was no one there to say it.’
    ‘What did you do?’
    ‘I sort of hauled him to his feet and guided him back. He came to, kind of, on the route back to the huts we were staying in.’
    ‘Why did you think he should be grateful?’
    ‘It was high summer, like I said. But it was so bloody cold at the spot where I found him I could see my breath. There was hoar frost on the ground. He wasn’t wearing