The Strawberry Tree: Part One

Petra Summers is an attractive middle-aged woman with a past, and the past has started making appointments. The trouble began on the island of Majorca, where a young Petra spent a summer being traumatised by the disappearance of her beloved older brother Piers and his cousin Rosario, the girl he was about to marry. The two of them vanished, and Petra has carried the wound ever since. Now, decades later, she still finds it hard to get over the situation, and the episode is built on that stubborn, unhealed ache.

The story threads the old loss through the present. When Petra's elder brother Piers falls in love with their Spanish cousin Rosario, the consequences are far-reaching, and the shadow of that long-ago Majorca summer starts pulling at the edges of her settled life. The episode is less concerned with who disappeared than with how disappearing changes the people left behind, and Lisa Harrow's Petra wears the change in every careful gesture.

The cast is a fine one: Simon Ward's Will Harvey, David Collings' Michael Sunderton, Karen Archer's Alice Sunderton, Eleanor Bron as the adult Rosario with Cordelia Bugeja as the young Rosario, Tom Chadbon's Piers, Morgan Deare's Ronald Harvey, Emma Dewhurst's estate agent and Terrence Hardiman's solicitor. George Baker wrote it, and Herbert Wise directed. It is one of the series' standalone stories, with no Wexford in the cast at all, so Baker's writing credit carries a neat irony for regular viewers. The hour was first broadcast on 21 April 1995.

The hour ends with Petra's past still unresolved and her present quietly unravelling, the memories of Majorca less like a distant holiday and more like an active force. Some past moments are never closed off, the episode suggests, only waiting for the right combination of people and circumstances to reappear. The strawberry tree of the title is still bearing its strange fruit, and the second part will have to pick it.