The Quivering Tree

by S. T. Haymon

  Tea was one of Mrs Benyon’s specials – tissue-thin sandwiches, scones with home-made jam and clotted cream, three kinds of cake as well as raspberries I myself had picked earlier in the day, moving from cane to cane with a certain reluctance which came from wondering how much profit I was doing Mr Betts out of by so doing. The conversation was less scintillating. Miss Gosse had installed Mrs Crail in the one chair in the dining-room which had arms, and there she sat like the Holy Roman Emperor, flanked by underlings who knew better than to speak before they were spoken to.

  Miss Barton, a sad-featured woman reputed to have an invalid mother given to wailing like a banshee, seemed the only one untroubled by any sense of constraint. As the senior maths mistress, with an impressive record of getting her pupils into university, often with scholarships or bursaries to boot, she may have felt her position unassailable; unless living with a wailing banshee had taught her the value of good teas and dullness.

  ‘A dainty meal is such a joy,’ she said, reaching for her umpteenth scone.

  Miss Barton would not be teaching me until I got into the Vth, the form where you took the Cambridge Senior, that dire exam which for matriculation demanded, even if you were a genius at everything else, passes in English and Mathematics if you were not to be cast into the outer darkness of shorthand and typing, an academic reject. Would a year be enough for Miss Barton to teach me the arithmetic which Miss Gosse had so signally failed to do? There were times when I felt that not even God Himself could teach me arithmetic, though I wished He would at least have a try. Pending divine intervention, I was always as nice as I could possibly be to Miss Barton.

  For something to say, I suppose, Miss Malahide looked at me and announced that ‘Noreen says you are very intelligent,’ at which Mrs Crail laughed prettily and asked the girl, ‘Did you really say that?’

  Noreen fluttered her eyelashes and murmured, ‘I really did,’ at which the two of them laughed prettily together, as at some secret joke too exquisite to be shared with the lesser orders below the salt.

  ‘Aren’t you glad, Sylvia –’ recovering her composure, and daring me to say different, Mrs Crail wanted to know – ‘that I arranged for you to stay here at Chandos House?’

  Naturally I answered that I was very glad. Miss Locke who, as the youngest teacher present, perhaps, or the one with the least seniority, had been unusually subdued all afternoon, put in: ‘We’re delighted to have her, aren’t we, Lydia?’ To which Miss Gosse, looking a little wan, I thought, added: ‘We can hardly remember what it was like without her.’

  ‘I hope,’ the headmistress went on, re-addressing herself to me, ‘that you are taking full advantage of your opportunities here – and that you are doing all you can to show your appreciation of Miss Gosse’s kindness in taking you?’ You would never have thought, from the way she went on, that my mother was paying 30s a week for the privilege of having me ‘taken’. Miss Gosse, obviously suspecting a trap, fell over herself to assure the monster that neither she nor Miss Locke had given me so much as a minute’s extra coaching, and had no intention of ever doing so. ‘It wouldn’t be fair.’

  ‘Very proper,’ Mrs Crail commented, inclining her head on its short neck and beaming all over her piggy face.

  Whilst the others were drinking their positively final cups of tea, eating their final slices of cake – I shouldn’t have minded another slice myself but nobody asked me – I was commanded to play something on the piano. I chose one of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances, the one everybody knows: da di-da – di-da – diddy-da, and so on; played it with a wholly synthetic verve and a lot of pedalling which I vainly hoped would blur the many mistakes. It was a deeply depressing experience. Not even my losing struggle with arithmetic had dispelled the illusion that life was something you became progressively better at, instead of, as it now appeared, an accumulating inventory of wrong notes.

  When I had finished, Mrs Crail tapped her beringed fingers together, very, very softly. No half-crowns were going to be forthcoming from that quarter, that much was certain. Not so much as a threepenny bit.

  After tea was cleared, Mrs Crail slumped in her armchair like a beached whale and Noreen swept me off for a walk in the garden.

  ‘Sylvia is determined to teach me the names of all the flowers,’ she apologized to the others in her old-fashioned way, gently making it appear that the idea for our desertion of them was mine, not hers, which it wasn’t, yet speaking with such an air of regret as almost to convince even me that such was indeed the case. Once we had got as far as the shrubbery, however, well out of sight and sound of the house, ‘Whew!’ she exclaimed, stretching her arms outwards and backwards, bringing her shoulder-blades together and her usually diffident breasts into unwonted prominence beneath the pale yellow crêpe de Chine of her dress. ‘What a lot they are!’

  ‘Do you or don’t you want to know about the flowers?’ I demanded with childish crossness. Mr Betts had taught me all the names and since she was the one who had brought up the subject I was quite keen to show off my erudition.

  ‘All I know about flowers,’ was the reply, ‘all I want to know, is that nettles sting and dandelions make you wet the bed.’ Looking at me with a hard critical eye that did not exactly go with the rest of her get-up: ‘What a baby you are! Geoffrey was quite taken with you.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought so.’

  ‘He was,’ the girl insisted. ‘When I said we were coming here this afternoon he said to be sure and give you his love.’

  After what had happened the day before with Robert Kett I couldn’t help feeling pleased. Being completely absentee, I thought, Geoffrey would make the ideal boyfriend. He certainly wasn’t one to come hanging about Chandos House on any pretext, whereas at school it wouldn’t do me the slightest harm to be able to boast the ownership of a boyfriend who was actually grown up.

  Just the same, and as usual pleased with the dream but rejecting the substance, I said crudely, ‘Don’t give him my love back.’

  I began to reel off the names of the flowers even though Noreen appeared not even to be listening. When we came to the soft fruit she went along the rows of canes helping herself to more of what I had come to think of as Mr Betts’s raspberries.

  To make her stop, as much as anything, I asked her if she was intending to marry Graham.

  ‘Marry him! You must be mad! Do you know what he does for a living? He works in the post office in Davey Place, handing out stamps and things over the counter.’

  ‘One day he may be the Postmaster-General.’

  ‘And me the Queen of Sheba!’ Noreen laughed her tinkling ladylike laugh. ‘You don’t happen to know any rich old men, I suppose? They’re the kind to marry, just you make a note of it. The richer and the older the better.’

  When I mentioned Mr Denver she seemed quite interested, especially when I said about the Rolls and the uniformed chauffeur.

  ‘Except that he belongs to Miss Gosse,’ I finished.

  Noreen laughed again and hooked her arm through mine.

  ‘One day you’ll grow up,’ she said. ‘Now, tell me the names of these stinking flowers.’

  I don’t think, really, she cared a brass farthing about them. I had hardly pointed out the lupins and the delphiniums, the peonies and the aquilegia, before she was off again, talking of this and that so pleasantly and as to an equal that I began to feel a bit above myself. I inquired if, as Miss Malahide had asserted, she had really said that about my being intelligent.

  ‘I really did,’ was the reply. ‘And I do think it. That’s why I got you out here – to say thanks for not giving the show away.’

  I put on a suitably shocked look and said of course I would never do that.

  ‘I should have known.’ Adding blithely: ‘But then, as I’m not to be trusted myself I tend to tar everybody else with the same brush. At first, let me tell you, when I came downstairs and discovered you’d done a bunk I was livid. What would that old bag of a housekeeper say when you came ringing to be le
t in last thing at night? She’d be bound to say something to Miss Gosse and then the fat would be in the fire. There’d be no way to stop it getting back to Auntie. You ask Graham – I was in a right old tizz. I only calmed down after I found that you’d left your cardigan behind, obviously for Auntie’s benefit. And then I thought, she’s not a fool, she’ll find some way not to blow the gaff. And I was right, wasn’t I? Though I have to admit I had a bad day or two after they came back from Ipswich, waiting for the axe to fall.’

  Basking in Noreen’s praise, however undeserved, I served up a shamelessly inflated version of how I had in fact passed the rest of that fateful night. Nothing about Mrs Benyon’s drunken stupor which had made it impossible for me to get back into the house anyway: only horrific hours of darkness spent in the bothy fending off rats as big as fox terriers – well, as chihuahuas, anyway – an ordeal unflinchingly undertaken rather than risk betraying a friend.

  Noreen, less impressed with my heroism than I could have wished, laughed and said, ‘What a lark!’ and that she was glad it had all turned out so well. She said Miss Malahide was not such a bad old thing if only she wasn’t such a randy old dyke. Not liking to ask what a randy old dyke might be, I made a mental note to ask Mr Betts.

  When, comfortably gossiping, we got round to Mrs Crail, I said that I thought she was very ugly.

  ‘She doesn’t think so, that’s all that matters. She thinks she’s the cat’s whiskers. She’s headmistress. She’s made it.’ Noreen continued: ‘She’ll do anything to make mischief. Did you see how she made a beeline for me?’

  ‘You encouraged her.’

  ‘Mustn’t let Auntie take me for granted.’ Noreen looked demure. ‘And why d’ you suppose Her Imperial Majesty wanted you to board here at Chandos House in the first place?’

  I explained – haltingly: it was still a matter for recurrent regret – that it was because, for some reason, she hadn’t thought Mrs Curwen suitable.

  ‘Don’t you believe it! She did it to make trouble between Gossy and Cocky Locky.’

  Now I was completely at sea. ‘How could my coming here to stay do that?’

  ‘God give me strength!’ Noreen exclaimed, casting her eyes skyward. We walked about for a little in silence, each of us baffled in our differing ways, until Noreen began again, her manner carefully casual: ‘Of course you know Miss Locke is soft on you. You can’t be that daft. Handle it right and you can have her eating out of your hand.’

  ‘Soft!’ I exclaimed. It was my turn to laugh, albeit with some bitterness. On the contrary, I pointed out, Miss Locke was hard on me, very hard, always jeering and poking fun. As clinching proof I nearly told Noreen about the unspeakable kiss and the tongue pushed wetly into my mouth, only that was what it was, unspeakable. I could hardly bear to think about it, let alone put it into words. As it was, Noreen merely repeated that, no matter what I said, Miss Locke was soft on me, it was plain as the nose on your face, and if I played my cards right I could do all right for myself.

  ‘Be nice to her,’ she urged, as one friend to another. ‘At least she’s the only one of the bunch that hasn’t got one foot in the grave. Play with her, why don’t you? You must know what I mean. Let her do things –’

  ‘I do play with her!’ I countered heatedly. ‘And I do let her do things. She’s always hiking those boring old duets out of the piano stool and making me play secondo all the time, which isn’t fair, but I never say anything –’

  After that, somehow, talk petered out and I went back, a little distractedly, to naming the flowers. I couldn’t remember achillea for the life of me, and I probably got centaurea wrong as well. Ignorant I might be, like most of my contemporaries in IIIa, but I was not a complete fool. My body, if not my brain, alerted me to the fact that in some way I didn’t understand my conversation with Noreen had consisted of more than the words actually spoken.

  ‘Trollius,’ I instructed, pointing to something yellow. It was almost certainly not trollius at all, but I didn’t suppose Noreen would notice. Her mind seemed to be on other things.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  After they had gone, Mrs Crail in her hired car, Miss Malahide and Noreen resolutely driving off in the direction of Wroxham and, in all likelihood, looking for the first place where there was room to turn round once they were safely out of sight, Miss Barton – who had not been offered a lift by the headmistress – stepping out with sturdy resignation for the tram terminus, I sat alone in the front room doing my homework. I had been at Chandos House long enough now for the photographs of Mr Gosse which covered its walls no longer to trouble me. I was not even conscious that they were there. The room, the whole house, seemed blessedly tranquil and at ease after all the socializing.

  I had an essay to write for Mrs Crail – ‘Family Pets’. She went in for soppy subjects like that, probably in order to provide herself with the opportunity to tell us off for writing soppy essays. So far as pets were concerned, St Giles did not have a happy history. Apart from the puppy who had been run over, there was only Pillow the toad, whose violent end still haunted my dreams1 Otherwise there had only been a couple of cats who had disdainfully accepted our proffered board and lodging on the understanding (or rather, our misunderstanding) that in return they would keep down the mice. Anyone calling that pair pets to their faces would, I am pretty sure, have felt the unsheathed edge of their claws. The truth was that, at St Giles, the family pet had been me, so much the youngest of the family, the spoilt darling.

  As I had no confidence that this reading of her title would be acceptable to Mrs Crail, I invented a mynah bird named Joey, formerly the property of a sea captain in the China trade, and consequently arriving in our home with a vocabulary calculated to make spinster ladies go into shock. Fortunately for his avian soul, the Salvation Army hall was situated a few doors further up St Giles. Thanks to their band which, every Sunday morning, passed the house in full flood, to say nothing of the prayer meetings held in the street outside, Joey became a reformed character, his rendition of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ in a clear and pure soprano enough to bring any sinner to the mercy seat. By the time I had finished with Joey – two sides were the minimum and I managed to cover four – I believed in him implicitly, even if Mrs Crail, as was all too likely, wielding her blue pencil (all the other teachers used red) and smiling her abominable crescent smile, made it clear that she did not believe a word of it.

  The exhilaration engendered by the completion of this literary exercise did not last long. My other homework was arithmetic.

  Arithmetic! The very word was like a knell. Geometry was fine, algebra an endlessly entrancing game. At both subjects I was the best in IIIa – but arithmetic! I simply could not understand how the three came to be lumped together under the heading of mathematics. If a train travels 30 miles at an average speed of 65 miles per hour and a further 25 miles at an average speed of 70 miles per hour, how many eggs at a shilling a dozen will fit into the guards van? – or words to that effect. Every time I sat down to do my arithmetic homework I was confronted with the unpalatable proof that whilst diagrams and codes might be right up my alley, at trains and eggs and miles per hour – at real life, in fact – I was a washout.

  My trouble was not that I couldn’t get the correct answer to arithmetical problems, but that I arrived at them by a forbidden route – interdit! verboten! – by algebra which, for some reason (the sacred Syllabus, I suppose, or the examining board at Cambridge having its bit of fun), was worse than getting the wrong answer altogether so long as you went wrong using the correct arithmetical method. Arithmetic homework was done on paper specially ruled with a wide margin on the right-hand side where you had to show your working, so that your maths mistress could check that you weren’t committing the sin against the Holy Ghost – in other words, cheating by using algebra.

  Yet what was wrong with that lovely science, if that was what it was: poetry would be a better word for it – with its dear little numbers that signified squares and cub
es hovering over the x’s and the y’s like honey bees, as if about to rob them of their nectar: its plus signs that changed miraculously to minus when you transferred them to the other side of the equation; its brackets that opened out like gates into a magic garden?

  I once looked up the word algebra in the dictionary and discovered that it came from the Arabic. Just imagine! If only I had had the luck to be born in Saudi Arabia or Morocco I might have lived out my life in those perpetually sunny climes with never the hateful shadow of arithmetic – that which must be passed – darkening my days. Let x equal the number of camels, of date palms, of belly-dancers. Allah was great! The Arabs, the lucky things, had x’s everywhere, with no one to hiss the imprecation ‘Arithmetic!’ With x at my bidding, I felt reasonably sure, I could unravel the secret of the universe.