by S. T. Haymon
The praise, sweet to my ears, brought a lump to my throat.
‘Do they really?’
‘Miss Malahide always says, the way you play us out, though our feet are obliged to march for the sake of decorum, our spirits go to our classrooms dancing.’
Miss Malahide was the art mistress, whiskered, leathery, and demonstrably barmy. Reduced to life size, I followed Miss Gosse down the hall almost to the end of it.
‘We shall have to take you on a conducted tour.’ She smiled as she opened yet another shut door. ‘In the mean time, this is the dining-room.’
I went through the door and exclaimed, ‘How pretty!’
Miss Gosse looked pleased. I could see she thought I meant the room, and I knew better than to put her right. In fact, the room was nothing much: dull beige paper almost hidden under framed photographs of rocky places, bleak and treeless and without people; a round dining-table covered with a brown cloth, an old-fashioned sideboard holding toast racks and cruets and a bottle of HP sauce, and a piano of which I knew instantly to expect the worst, since its front was made of a kind of fretwork with faded mauve satin showing through the holes. Somebody had placed my music case at the side of it. It leaned against the yellowish wood nonchalantly enough, but I transmitted a silent apology to the music books within, or rather to their progenitors, to Mozart and Beethoven, to Ivor Novello and (my taste in music being as eclectic and indiscriminating as my taste in literature) to whoever it was who wrote ‘The Birth of the Blues’.
‘Go on,’ Miss Gosse urged. ‘Try it out, just to see what you think of the tone.’
I raised the lid from the yellowed keys and, without sitting down on the stool covered in worn burgundy velvet, pounded out the first few chords of ‘Three-Fours’ by Coleridge-Taylor, my show-off piece, which I loved because it sounded so difficult when in fact it was almost as easy as ‘Chopsticks’.
Miss Gosse exclaimed, ‘There! I knew you’d like it!’ I did not say that, on the contrary, I thought it sounded like a string of old tin cans. One thing was certain: I was never going to sound like Moisevitch on that. But then, who was I kidding? I was never going to sound like Moisevitch on anything, not even the Steinway in St Andrew’s Hall; which was why, without having discussed it with my mother, I had told Miss Barker, my music teacher, that I would be discontinuing my lessons once I had moved. Though I had said it was too far to come all the way to Earlham Road twice a week, I would have come ten times the distance if there had been a dog’s chance that I would sound like Moisevitch at the end of the journey. Miss Barker had been quite put out – not only, I am pretty sure, because of losing the money from my fees. I had passed several Royal Academy of Music examinations and had won the medal at the Norwich Music Festival for piano solo under twelve, playing one of Bach’s French Suites, so she had expectations of me. There was even the possibility – she had dangled the dream in front of me as one proffering a golden apple of the Hesperides – that I might one day become a music teacher like herself if I went on practising.
That was before my father took me to hear Moisevitch, which he did not long before he died. It was meant to be a treat, which it was, and an incentive, which it definitely was not, because I, who had previously – even if, out of superstitious dread, the actual words remained unspoken – thought myself capable of everything, almost, learned with the opening arpeggios that not only would I never be a concert pianist but that to be a music teacher was an unacceptable alternative. This last, to be truthful, did not exactly make me feel sad. On the contrary. So many roads through life beckoned delightfully, it was almost a relief to find one blocked, one choice less.
I stopped showing off with Coleridge-Taylor, closed the piano lid carefully, ashamed of Miss Gosse’s undeserved praise and at the same time glad of it.
‘Miss Locke will be pleased!’
When I had exclaimed ‘How pretty!’ what I had meant was the garden. The single good thing about the Chandos House dining-room was its french window which gave on to a lawn with lovely old untidy fruit trees growing out of it as if they had just that moment risen from deep down in the earth and were stretching their gnarled limbs in an ecstasy of light and air. Behind the trees were flowerbeds and shrubberies and vegetables, with a glimpse of fields beyond. Unlike the rest of the house that I had seen so far, the dining-room was bright with sun, so light that at eight o’clock in the evening there was still no need for gaslight to drink our Horlicks/ Bovril by. The garden was permeated with the golden warmth of evening. A blackbird sang in an apple tree. A shimmering veil of midges hovered above the grass.
Miss Gosse said, ‘We often eat here with the window open in the summer. Would you like to have it open now?’
I said that I should like it very much. Just at that moment Mrs Benyon came in with a tray with two mugs on it. She put the tray down on the dining table. My heart twanged with sorrow as I saw that there weren’t any cream crackers.
Miss Gosse said: ‘Would you mind opening the french window, Mrs Benyon?’ And, to me, in explanation: ‘I’m afraid the bolt’s a bit high up for me.’
Mrs Benyon looked out at the garden as if she couldn’t abide the sight of it. She said: ‘Mosquitoes,’ in her heavy, flat voice and went out of the room without doing anything about the bolt.
‘She’s quite right, of course,’ Miss Gosse said brightly. ‘Mrs Benyon, as you’ll discover, is the practical one of our little household. Are you practical, Sylvia?’
Not too sure, but anxious to make the reply which would do me the most good: ‘I – I think so.’
‘Capital!’ exclaimed Miss Gosse. ‘That makes two of you!’
I went upstairs again carrying hot water for my bedtime ablutions. Upon Miss Gosse’s instructions I had gone through another door, this time the one at the end of the hall, the door into the kitchen, a large, red-tiled expanse with the same aspect and consequently – though the window was much smaller and obstructed by some pot plants that were mottled rather like Mrs Benyon – some of the same light which had transformed the dining-room. I could hear the blackbird still singing.
‘If you don’t see Mrs Benyon, knock on the door next to the dresser. That’s the door to her bedroom. She will have your hot water ready.’
Relieved in some way I could not have explained that the housekeeper and I were to sleep on different levels, I went into the kitchen and found her on the point of emerging from her bedroom door, one she made haste to shut as soon as she saw the intruder into her domain. Hungry and emotionally stressed as I was, her hostility confused me. So far in my life, so far as I could tell at any rate, most people seemed to like me – at least they acted as if they did. As a result, I had not yet encountered enough of the other kind to have evolved the right technique for dealing with them. That was why I always found myself struck dumb in the presence of Mrs Crail, for instance, and it was exactly the same with Mrs Benyon. She floored me with her utter lack of love, not a speck of it showing through the thick crust of her withering indifference. I wondered fleetingly whether the housekeeper, as the headmistress was reputed to be, was another of those courtesy missuses, and if a certain prickliness might not be a common factor among women who pretended to be married when they weren’t. I also wondered if Mrs Benyon might be thinking that she ought by rights to be paid extra now that she had one extra to housekeep for, and Miss Gosse had made no offer in that direction.
This latter thought made me feel more sympathetic towards her, and I might have ventured something in my sweetly winsome vein about doing my best not to be any extra trouble; only, as I watched her filling the shining copper hot-water can from the outsize kettle which stood steaming on the range, I saw that she filled it to the very brim, deliberately, dangerously full, and gave up all hope of a truce. Rightly or wrongly, I felt convinced that she intended me to spill some of the scalding water on the hall lino or the stairs, if not on to myself, so that then she could complain to Miss Gosse: ‘See what you’ve lumbered me with!’
Disguising my mistrust with elaborate gratitude, I took the can and with slow, careful steps made my way out of the kitchen and along the hall to the foot of the stairs. Before I ever set foot on the first tread, my hands felt trembly. I knew I would never make it.
I had to make it.
After a quick glance back to make sure both the kitchen and the dining-room doors were shut, I set the can down, opened the front door as quietly as I was able, picked up the water again and emptied a good half-canful on to the roots of the tree that quivered outside my window. Steam rose from the soil which didn’t matter as there was nobody to see it, and if it killed the tree, too bad, the noisy thing. I was back indoors in a trice, making my demure way upstairs, full of a glee which momentarily overlaid what might have been a sudden, agonizing pang of homesickness, but could just as easily have been a renewed, a raging, apprehension of my empty stomach.
After all that, I didn’t even wash. I didn’t seem to have the strength, let alone the inclination. I put the plug in the bathroom basin, poured in the water, added some cold, and waited a little before letting it out: in a strange place you never knew what bathroom noises might resound through the house, and who might be listening out for them. Miss Gosse had told me to leave my sponge bag hanging from the mahogany towel-stand where I would find the towels set aside for my use – skimpy things, a small hand towel and another slightly larger, each stiff as a board. Before I hung the sponge bag up I carefully dampened my sponge and wetted the bristles of my toothbrush in case anyone thought to check up on me. I also unfolded the larger towel and mucked it about a bit so that it looked used.
Back in my bedroom it had become really dark and a little scary. Nobody had shown me how to light the gas mantle and I was afraid to try uninstructed. I didn’t fancy lighting the candle either. Instead, I switched on the torch and undressed by the light of that. The leaves outside the window were noisier than ever. Either the hot water had been a stimulus or the wind had got up and was jigging them about even more than they ordinarily bestirred themselves. I turned the torch on them and watched them for a little. They quivered like those people in the Middle Ages who were always coming down with the ague. I flashed the torch on, then off, then on again, thinking that to anyone outside in the road – a passing radio operator, say, on shore leave from his ship – it could have looked like Morse code. Calling on my limited knowledge, I sent three shorts, three longs, three shorts, beaming into the darkness – SOS – wondering whose help, if anybody’s, I was calling for.
I got into bed and slid instantly, cosily, down to the middle. It could have been a sailor’s hammock, slung from beam to beam. There and then I fell in love with that bed, the feel of my book box nudging my buttocks through the thin mattress, the thought of the books I was brooding like a hen on a clutch of eggs. Would I awaken to find that a new Zane Grey had hatched out during the night, or perhaps a hitherto unknown play by one W. Shakespeare? I realized that, despite everything, I was still happy, the stream still forging ahead strongly.
Could the dead people in heaven see in the dark? I hoped not, but you never knew. I certainly did not want my father to lose any sleep on my account. He had always said he needed his eight hours. But just in case there was anybody up there hoping for news, I pulled the covers over my head and said out loud: ‘Don’t worry! I’m all right!’
I wasn’t, you know. All right. Not for long, anyway, though longer than I had thought, waking up, as it seemed to me, no more than five minutes later: until I looked at my clock numbers, shining green in the blackness, and discovered it was ten minutes past eleven.
Hunger was what had awakened me, together with the certainty that without food, instanter, I should not last out the night. Hunger and a revelation. I had been dreaming, sort of, of Miss Barker and Ludwig and Amadeus and Ivor, and of straining in vain to remember the names, one on each side of the printed music, of ‘The Birth of the Blues’. Though I didn’t manage to recall either, I did remember something else.
I remembered that inside my music case, along with the great composers, there was a whipped cream walnut, purchased on my way home from my last music lesson and then – difficult as it was to believe – overlooked in all the hoo-ha of moving. Fully awake now, I pictured it in the case as clearly as if I could have reached out and taken it in my hand, its chocolate smell by now tempered with a soupçon of cowhide, but none the worse for that; its taste, conceivably, made even more ambrosial by a week spent sandwiched between ‘Rondo alla Turca’ and ‘An die ferne Geliebte’. Fears of waking up the household, of having to explain to Miss Gosse and, much worse, to Mrs Benyon, faded in comparison with the prospect of biting off the gleaming walnut which crowned that mini-pyramid, of nibbling the swirled chocolate to get at the delicious goo within. Alive with anticipation, I scrambled up the slope that led out of bed, felt for my torch, and gingerly opened the bedroom door.
The landing light was out which was a relief, the darkness encouraging me to feel myself invisible. And I was lucky. Either the floorboards of Chandos House did not squeak like those of St Giles, or, in years of practice circumventing Maud when about my private business, my feet had acquired a sensitivity to making choices which enabled me to get down to the ground floor with hardly a sound. As I neared the dining-room, a noise from the direction of the kitchen first froze me to the spot with horror before making me, albeit silently, giggle with relief. It was Mrs Benyon, snoring.
Noiselessly I turned the white china knob on the dining-room door, noiselessly entered and crossed to the piano. Although the out of doors at the back of the house was presumably as dark as the out of doors in front, it did not seem so. My awareness of the french window, of its wide expanse of glass deluded me into the conviction that I could see grass and fruit trees and a gentle sky.
I opened the music case and tenderly removed the whipped cream walnut, so filled with exultation as to forget completely to take, as I had intended, a quick peep at ‘The Birth of the Blues’ so as to satisfy myself once and for all who in fact had been responsible for that masterpiece of jazz. I had already decided that I would bite off the walnut at once, to fortify me for the return journey, the nut and no more. The rest would have to wait until I regained the haven of my hammock-bed.
The walnut was so glorious I could have exclaimed aloud, praising God for nuts. And would have, probably, if somebody standing in the open doorway, had not got in first, in a voice veined with a familiar undertone of mockery: ‘Well, I must say! What a little pig!’
Miss Locke taught history. This was particularly apt since she was the only person I had ever seen whose forehead and nose, in profile, were precisely in line, the way they were in gods and goddesses from Ancient Greek temples. Presumably the Ancient Greeks thought such a profile a sign of beauty. In my judgement, for what it was worth, whilst it may have been OK on gods and goddesses fresh from Mount Olympus, it was pretty off-putting in a human being, especially one in authority. It made Miss Locke look censorious, which I didn’t think she was, particularly. The thing, however, that made her face a difficult one to come to a decision about was that the two halves, upper and lower, did not really belong together. They reminded you of the faces in those jokey books which have their pages divided horizontally, making it possible to combine brows and chins you would never ordinarily dream of putting together.
The Ancient Greeks, I am pretty sure, would not have been best pleased with a classical brow and nose that modulated, as the history mistress’s did, via a small round mouth filled with small teeth, to a chin that pointed forward and upward, a little like Punch.
Just the same, met by night in the dining-room of Chandos House, slim-armed in her sleeveless shift of greeny-blue, she was undeniably beautiful, holding a candlestick with a lighted candle in it and the light thrown up on to her face. It made her eyes deep-set and mysterious and contrived to etch a honey-coloured aureole round the edges of her short brown hair. Unusually for schoolmistresses of that time, Miss Locke wore her hair cut like
a man’s. Not exactly an Eton crop, which was beginning to go out of fashion anyway, it looked so ugly from the back, but more like something you might expect to see on a faun or a satyr, or a poet of the Romantic period. The hair, curly, with a natural spring to it, fitted the shape of her head like a cap, one that stuck to the edges of her face as if carved there. Her exposed ears were unusually small, the kind Ethel M. Dell and Peg’s Paper, I shouldn’t be surprised, meant by shell-like, not meaning a crab or even a whelk, I felt sure, but something dainty and delicate not to be picked up on Cromer beach. Had I thought about it, or been a bit older, I might have guessed that Miss Locke must be a history teacher with exceptionally good qualifications for Mrs Crail to put up with a hair-do like that.
I knew that I was much too old to cry, but cut off from my walnut in mid-bite, I had no alternative. I howled: burst out that I hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast and not much even then: that I wasn’t a pig, whatever she said, just dying of hunger, that was all.
‘Be quiet, you little fool!’ Miss Locke ordered. ‘You’ll wake up Mrs Benyon.’
She had only to command once. Then, with a finger to her lip, she led the way into the kitchen where, whilst I watched incredulously, half-certain it was all a dream, she opened the larder door, took a loaf out of an earthenware crock set on the floor, and brought it to the scrubbed deal table where a bread board and bread knife waited as if against just such an emergency. The housekeeper’s snores continued with unabated gusto as Miss Locke cut two slices, real doorsteps. Putting back the loaf, taking care to replace the lid of the crock without noise, she returned to the table with a jar of strawberry jam, which she spread generously over the bread.
‘Won’t Mrs Benyon notice?’ I whispered.
‘Her?’ Contemptuously, barely keeping her voice down: ‘She’ll think she ate it in her sleep. Let me see now –’ Miss Locke pondered, more to herself than to me. ‘We’d better not take a plate –’ Then: ‘I know!’
