The Quivering Tree

by S. T. Haymon

  I had something of everything – even, at Miss Malahide’s insistence – the wine. ‘She has to start some time,’ she countered when Miss Gosse looked anxious. Miss Gosse steadfastly refused to drink any wine herself, her father, as she explained, having signed the pledge on her behalf when she was seven years old.

  ‘That’s a pa for you,’ was Miss Malahide’s comment. ‘Mine never let me have a drop either, but that was only so there’d be more for him, the old sot!’

  When, with a certain hauteur, I announced that I had already tasted wine; that at home on special occasions I was often given a little port and some sponge fingers to dip into it, the art mistress snorted: ‘What way is that to develop a palate!’

  Miss Malahide’s wine was not sweet at all, and although I pretended it was lovely, actually I did not care for it one bit, although I drank a glass and a half because I was thirsty. After the strawberries and cream I fell fast asleep until Miss Locke woke me up saying it was time to start for home. I discovered to my surprise that I had been sleeping with my head in her lap.

  I was also surprised to find that I had been asleep at all, something that had never happened to me in the daytime since I was a baby. Miss Locke said: ‘It must have been the cream. It was definitely off,’ at which everybody laughed, including Miss Gosse who was looking a little peaky, as if she had had too much sun.

  Chapter Fourteen

  That night I woke up angry, which puzzled me because, all in all, it had been a lovely day – more importantly, a lively one: I had lived. I awoke to find the bedroom bright with the risen moon. Instead of silhouetting themselves against its shining, as you might have expected, the quivering leaves had become semi-transparent, their veins a delicate tracery on a background of gauze.

  I awoke in no mood to appreciate the artistry of silvery greenery. Discomfort, not moonshine, was what had brought me awake. My hair was full of sand. I put my hand in the hollow of the pillow where my head had rested and, with a shudder of repulsion, touched a little deposit of grit diversified with some sharp-edged fragments which – having turned my torch on them – I was able to identify as bits of cockleshell.

  I absolutely couldn’t stand it! I hated Miss Locke for having pushed me over on the dunes, for filling my hair with the sea’s rubbish. All week, even without her silly tricks, my hair had been becoming a problem, one of those things to which, when I came to live at Chandos House, nobody whose business it was to think about such things had given a thought. How was I to get my hair washed? At home, Maud had washed it twice a week, to the invariable accompaniment of my non-stop threnody that the water was too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry; that the lather was in my eyes, my ears, my nose, my socks – a thoroughly enjoyable performance made the more explicit by the loveliness of clean, light-floating hair which was the end product. But who was to wash my hair at Chandos House? Mrs Benyon? My scalp crawled at the very thought of those masterful fingers kneading my poor little skull. I could not possibly ask the mistresses; and Mr Johnson, the hairdresser in Dove Street who, so long as I lived in St Giles, had cut my hair once a month, charged one-and-sixpence for a shampoo – I had seen it on his list of prices. I had, in fact, toyed with the idea of doing it myself; had even, once, for a pregnant moment, stood poised on the brink in the bathroom with my cake of soap in one hand and my daily can of hot water in the other, only to be deterred by the certainty that one can wasn’t nearly enough to get all the soap out, especially making due allowance for what I should undoubtedly slosh on to the bathroom floor.

  I ran my hand through my hair and found sand deposited between my fingers. Outside the window the moon and the leaves quivered with the utter awfulness of it. I picked up my torch and my matches and crept along the landing, past the closed doors, to the bathroom. It had to be done. I was going to wash my hair in the Chandos House bath.

  What made this a desperate and illicit undertaking was that I still had not been initiated into the mysteries of lighting the bathroom geyser, and had been in no hurry to press for enlightenment. Even when Mrs Benyon lit the thing on my behalf there was always a lancing of flame and a gurgling bang that sent me cowering against the woodwork. Now I encouraged myself with the thought that the housekeeper probably made the geyser act that way on purpose, to pay me out for having made her climb the stairs. I wasn’t a child. In the chemistry lab I used a Bunsen burner to heat up dangerous substances without turning a hair. If I couldn’t light a simple thing like a geyser, I didn’t know who could.

  Having brought my torch with me, I decided not to light the gas mantle, though that at least was a manoeuvre in which I had become well practised. The geyser was another thing. Brooding and metallic, it even had a look of Mrs Benyon. I found it perfectly possible to envisage that the housekeeper too, inside her, carried hidden fire and would go off with a bang if you knew which tap to turn. I took a deep breath, did – as I thought – all the things Mrs Benyon did when lighting the contraption, and gingerly, as one proffering a bone to a doubtfully friendly dog, applied a lighted match.

  There was a gentle plop! and then the match went out.

  I struck another and tried again. Again the plop!, this time sounding distinctly apologetic as if the apparatus truly regretted having to disoblige, before the match was once more extinguished. Five matches on, the geyser still not doing its stuff, I began to feel puzzled, not to say woozy. It came to me without any particular feeling of alarm that the bathroom was full of gas and here was I, so good at chemistry, cheerfully striking match after match in the miasma, not the cleverest thing in the world to do.

  I bent over the geyser to turn it off. I could not do it. Any bits that moved, I turned them to the left, I turned them to the right. It made no difference. The gas continued to flow into the room.

  Vaguely aware that something needed to be done fast, I went towards the window. I never made it. Half-way there, I fell over Miss Gosse’s mahogany and brass towel rail which, in turn, fell over Miss Locke’s weighing machine. As for myself, having once fallen it seemed altogether too much of a fag to get to my feet again: but the resultant noise must have been sufficient to penetrate those closed doors on the landing because the next thing I remember was my head, the terminal of my stomach, stuck out of the bathroom window being sick on to the marigolds down below. All that lovely picnic!

  I heard Miss Gosse’s voice: ‘I’ve damped a towel. Let me wipe her face.’ How kind she sounded, and how unkind Miss Locke when she exclaimed: ‘The little fool, she must have been completely blotto! What did she think she was doing? She could have blown us all up.’

  ‘My hair’s full of sand!’ I shouted, called rudely back to the cares of the world. Tears ran down my face at such a rate that, for a moment, I thought Miss Gosse must have soaked her towel instead of wringing it out, as she had said. Adding, to myself only, of course: ‘And I’m only sorry I didn’t!’

  Miss Locke washed my hair. Washed it with some shampoo that smelled of lemons. Her long, strong fingers whipped up such a lather I felt like a lemon meringue pie. Heavenly. Miss Gosse stood fussing somewhere in the background wondering whether she ought not to get dressed and go and wake up the doctor down the road despite the lateness of the hour. ‘After all, we are responsible for the child –’

  ‘Nonsense!’ was the robust rejoinder. ‘The child’s old enough to be responsible for herself – and if she isn’t, it’s her funeral. If you want to be of help, bring me water for the rinsing.’

  Whilst Miss Locke rinsed the shampoo out of my hair and Miss Gosse trotted obediently to and from a geyser now acting docile as a lamb, I could not help feeling important, having two mistresses dancing attendance on me as if they were mere serving wenches and I a princess. It was a pity there was nobody I could tell about it. I knew, in some obscure way, that it wasn’t something to talk about in school, however avidly the girls of IIIa would have gobbled up such juicy gossip. If I wrote to my mother, all she would do was get herself in a state about the gas. People she had known
in the Great War had got themselves gassed and never been the same again, so she said, though probably not from a bathroom geyser.

  ‘Clean as a whistle!’ Miss Locke pronounced at last. She told Miss Gosse to turn off the geyser and go to bed. She herself took a towel and rubbed my head until I felt my head coming off, but it was lovely just the same. Miss Gosse observed in a plaintive voice that it was very late, whereupon Miss Locke announced her intention of seeing me safely into bed – ‘and then we can all get some sleep, thank heaven!’

  In my bedroom Miss Locke sat me down on the bed and, kneeling beside me, combed my hair for me, parting it in the middle with a good deal more regard for accuracy than I ever bothered with myself, and teasing out the tangles with unexpected gentleness. Probably because there were still some vestigial whiffs of gas floating about inside me looking for the way out, I felt floppy and foolish, close to sleep and yet not close. I could see the aspen leaves goggling in at the window as if wondering what on earth was up, and I mouthed silently, so that Miss Locke shouldn’t hear, ‘I’ll tell you all about it in the morning.’

  When my hair was done, Miss Locke pulled back the covers and helped me into bed, which I didn’t need, but there! It was pure luxury. I had a feeling she might easily have curtseyed before withdrawing if Miss Gosse had not called out from the landing just then to repeat that it was really very late indeed.

  ‘Just finished getting our invalid to beddy-byes!’ Miss Locke called back. ‘Just coming!’ Having tucked me in, she bent over and asked, in a different kind of voice, ‘How would you like me to wash your hair for you every week?’

  A picture of Mr Johnson’s price list with IS 6d on it for a shampoo flashing instantly through my mind, I would surely have answered an eager ‘Yes please!’ if her face hadn’t been so close. It made me feel uncomfortable, her face so close; so instead of saying anything I shut my eyes and pretended I had just that moment fallen asleep. One-and-six or no one-and-six, it was something that needed thinking over.

  Miss Locke kissed me, whispered ‘Good-night!’ and went out of the room, shutting the door softly behind her. I could hear her voice and Miss Gosse’s retreating down the landing: the sound, not what was said. I settled down to sleep clean-haired and cosy, not thinking of anything much except that Miss Locke ought to know better than to kiss people full on the lips the way she had kissed me. It not only made you feel uncomfortable. That way you could catch germs.

  But not thinking much about that either.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I came down to breakfast next morning to discover that I was not to go to school that day. Since my mirror, a bare minute earlier, had given back the reflection of a face tanned by sun and sea and looking healthier than it had for months, I took the decision as a schoolteacher’s weird idea of punishment for my contretemps with the geyser. What could be worse, ho, ho, than a day deprived of lovely school?

  I did Miss Gosse an injustice. Her little pug face creased with earnestness, she told me that, her conscience troubling her, early in the day as it was she had already been down to the telephone box at the crossroads to let Dr Parfitt – whose number my mother had left with her against emergencies – into the details of what she delicately termed my little mishap. Did he think he ought to pay a call if only to satisfy all concerned that no permanent damage had been done?

  Had I known beforehand what she intended I could have saved my landlady the trouble. Knowing Dr Parfitt for the lazy old booby he was, and greedy with it, I could have told her in advance what his reply would be to the suggestion that he get himself all the way from St Giles to the Wroxham Road solely to examine one uneconomic child, sole remnant of a family which, one way and another, had removed itself from his sheltering wings, never to be billed by him again. So far from harm, the good doctor had asserted, the gas, so long as it had stopped short of actually killing me, could have done nothing but good. ‘Flushes out the tubes,’ were his words apparently, followed by a request to be told the make of the geyser. Dear Dr Parfitt, just the same! As was his wont he had concluded the consultation with the suggestion that I be kept at home for the day just in case. Perhaps he was not such a booby after all, a day away from school curing many infant disorders.

  Miss Gosse said consolingly: ‘You’ll be able to catch up with the work you weren’t able to do yesterday.’

  ‘So long as you don’t get under my feet,’ warned Mrs Benyon, after the two schoolmistresses had departed. ‘Monday’s my cleaning day. I’ve got my work to do.’

  I replied that I was going to go for a little walk to get a breath of fresh air, after which I would happily settle down to my studies in whatever part of the house best suited her convenience.

  The housekeeper looked at me with somewhat more interest than usual.

  ‘Nearly did for yourself last night, from what I hear.’

  I said that it wasn’t nearly as bad as all that.

  ‘Hubby of a friend of mine,’ Mrs Benyon said, in the nearest we had ever come to conversation, ‘put his head in the gas oven, and it was a funny thing. Never been much to look at, pasty-faced, constipation was his trouble, but in his coffin, blow me if he wasn’t rosy as an apple. Could’ve gone on the stage looking like that. His lips were that red!’ Scanning my face with one of her marble stares, in a vain search for some sign of rose-tipped beauty: ‘Tha’s what gas does to you. First turns you blue an’ then rosy.’

  ‘I don’t think I even got to the blue stage,’ I said apologetically.

  ‘Doesn’t look like it.’ Mrs Benyon stumped off to the kitchen with the breakfast things, leaving me unsurprised to learn that the hubbies of her friends put their heads into gas ovens. It was only to be expected.

  I went upstairs to my room to get my loaf of bread and the buns out from under the bed, covering them up with my blazer, draped with careful negligence over one arm. What with the heat and not being eaten after all because of the picnic, they had turned out to be an unwise purchase. Even with the window open I could smell a fermented smell hanging about the room, not unpleasant exactly but one that would be bound to lead Mrs Benyon to the book box like a bloodhound to blood.

  So as to be sure of not running into her whilst thus burdened, I went the long way round to the field at the rear of the house; out of the front door, down to the crossroads, turn right into the Catton Road until I came to the back path. To my surprise, the rusty old white van was again parked in the opening, but this time sufficiently to one side for there to be plenty of room to squeeze by. Of the driver there was no sign, except that I could hear something going on at the back of the van. I edged through the space and there he was, smiling like last time, even more unshaven, but with all his teeth in place! Knowing I possessed an exceptionally good memory, this last so took me aback that I said – rudely, I’m afraid – ‘What happened to your teeth? You had two missing last time.’

  Fortunately the man took no offence; smiled even wider. ‘That were on account of I didn’t know I was goin’ to run into a little lady, did I? Today I weren’t taking no chances.’ Having said which, he put some fingers into his mouth and prised out two false teeth, which he held out on the palm of his hand for my inspection. ‘Beauties, aren’t they?’

  Little prig that I was, I observed severely: ‘I suppose you ate too many sweets as a child.’

  ‘No such luck,’ returned the man, still taking no offence, thank goodness. He seemed really nice. He put his teeth back again and wiped his slimy fingers on the front of the khaki shirt he was wearing. ‘Bit of an argy-bargy arter closing time, tha’s all it were.’

  When I said that I was sorry to hear it, he assured me that I had no reason to be: the new teeth were in every way an improvement upon the old. We parted with mutual goodwill, he finishing off the job he had been doing when I arrived, which was to tie up the back doors of the van with string, there being no handles; I continuing on my way to Bagshaw, seeing no reason for letting on that I had seen what was inside.

  Bagshaw w
as not in a good mood. (I had begun to wonder if he ever was.) He ate the buns and the bread more with the air of one doing a favour than being done one. He seemed particularly out of sorts. I didn’t blame him. It must be hard, I felt, on a gorgeous summer day to find yourself a donkey mooching about a field when the world outside was overflowing with so many more interesting things to do and to be.

  I decided not to try the gate into the garden, but returned to Chandos House by the way I had come. The white van had gone. In the front hall Mrs Benyon, folded in half like an airing mattress, was poking a long-handled brush about under the hallstand. It was always a surprise to find that she could bend at all. You would never have guessed from the look of her.

  She straightened up and told me to take my books into the drawing-room because that was the only room in the house which was ‘done’, something I was glad to do as I had not seen the drawing-room until then. When I went inside I saw that it was not only ‘done’ but done for. Dark despite the bright day, it was more like a mortuary chapel than a salon for polite conversation, the brown walls, the mantelpiece and every available ledge covered with paintings and photographs of a man who had to be Miss Gosse’s father. In some of the pictures he was a young man, with moustaches which had been twiddled at the ends: in others he was white-haired with a beard that looked like a dishcloth, one it was time to throw away and get a new one. Only the eyes told you that the young man and the old man were the same person – boot-button eyes like Miss Gosse’s, but whereas Miss Gosse’s eyes were limpid and trustful, her father’s looked like boot buttons and nothing beside. There were no pictures of anybody else, nor of Mr Gosse with anybody, not even with a funny little girl with short legs who would have been Miss Gosse when she was a child. No woman who might have been Miss Gosse’s mother.