The Quivering Tree

by S. T. Haymon

  Miss Gosse came away from the hallstand to meet her.

  ‘I’m taking Sylvia to the doctor’s. She’s had an accident.’

  ‘Dear me!’ Miss Locke observed coolly. Without so much as looking at me she passed along the passage, towards the dining room. Miss Gosse looked after her in momentary perplexity before her little puppy-dog face cleared as she explained for my benefit: ‘I don’t think she even took it in, poor girl. Those exam papers! She’s working herself to a frazzle.’

  I need not have been afraid. Dr Becket, crisply clean-shaven, no soup stains on his white jacket, and hands that knew their business as he put two stitches into the gash on my cheek, proved as different as could be from Dr Parfitt. No iodine either, but something cold that stung hardly at all, followed by a powdering that was wonderfully soothing. He sponged away the dried blood that was making my face feel stiff with a gentleness that, judging from his severe appearance, I would not have guessed him capable of.

  In fact, he looked amazingly like Miss Locke, except that his nose was not quite as straight as hers: it looked as if it might have been damaged in school boxing. Amid the large apprehensions and the small pains of the consultation I wondered vaguely whether he was married. If not, he and Miss Locke would make a well-matched pair, to say nothing of the advantage to a doctor, surely, of having a wife who could be relied on to bring in business whenever she took it into her head to hit people so that they needed stitches. Only four houses away from Chandos House, why hadn’t Miss Gosse thought to introduce them?

  Dr Becket pondered aloud whether he ought or ought not to give me an anti-tetanus injection, just, as he said, to be on the safe side. This upset me, because I couldn’t remember whether it was for tetanus or rabies that they stuck needles into your stomach, too agonizing for words – or so I seemed to have read somewhere. His questioning – had I fallen on to bare earth? had I been in contact with any metal? – caused me further anxiety. Since I had not regained sufficient energy to concoct a credible story to account for my injury, I took the easy way out and began to cry. Somewhat to my surprise, considering the man’s stern demeanour, it worked. He discontinued the cross-examination and produced a yellow pill which I was to go to bed and take as soon as I returned home. I would wake up in the morning, he said, feeling my old self (whatever that was, I added mentally). No more was said about anti-tetanus, that was something.

  Back at Chandos House, on tiptoe at my awkwardly placed looking-glass, I at last had the opportunity of surveying the physical damage Miss Locke had done to me. Whilst I must have looked much better than I had before receiving Dr Becket’s ministrations I still looked ghastly, the cheek swollen so that my right eye had the appearance of a sun about to set behind a hill which would shortly obliterate it altogether.

  It occurred to me to wonder if I was scarred for life. No one would want to marry me looking like that, and I would live and die an old maid, probably a schoolmistress like Miss Locke, like Miss Gosse. My attempt to work up a good head of self-pity got nowhere. I simply could not be fagged. I swallowed the yellow pill.

  One other thing the mirror had shown me. Red on red did show. The new dress was scarlet, my blood crimson. It was obvious that we were not, after all, made for each other. Untidy threads of blood showed all the way down the right side of the bodice from neck to waistline. Dr Becket hadn’t done it any good either. Splashings of water darkened and patches of his therapeutic powder whitened a substantial area of the front. On the way to the doctor’s, Miss Gosse had ventured nervously, as if afraid what the answer might be, ‘I don’t think I’ve seen you wearing that frock before, Sylvia.’

  ‘Haven’t you?’ I said: and that was the sum of our conversation on the subject.

  I pulled the dress over my head, not bothering to check that I had undone all the buttons, two of which promptly popped off and disappeared who cared where. The buttons were shaped like tiny acorns, covered with the same material as the dress. I could almost hear Mrs Benyon complaining that the dratted things had put paid to her carpet sweeper.

  I bundled the dress up and thrust it into the drawstring bag which I used for soiled linen, lay down on the bed in my underwear. My mother was right in one thing, I told the leaves trembling at the window. Red was not a suitable colour for children.

  Next day, though the swelling was worse and my cheek had turned a threatening shade of purple, I felt much better. Thanks to the yellow pill, I suppose, I had slept long and dreamlessly, awaking only when Mrs Benyon arrived at the door with my breakfast.

  Breakfast in bed! And Mrs Benyon actually smiling! I could almost have fancied myself still dreaming and back in St Giles again.

  I was not in St Giles. As the memory of where I was, of what had happened the day before took hold, my eyes filled with tears.

  In a voice I scarcely recognized, so human was it, the housekeeper said: ‘I didn’t work my fingers to the bone making a slap-up breakfast for a cry-baby.’

  Slap-up was the only word for it. I could never have imagined that Chandos House even harboured the makings of such a banquet – scrambled eggs, sausages and mushrooms with fluffy little potato cakes on the side, oodles of toast and marmalade; two silver pots, one with coffee, one with hot milk, all disposed prettily on a pale blue tray with little legs that came down so that you didn’t have to balance it on your knees.

  The housekeeper, having plumped up my pillow and settled me comfortably (with no insistence that I get up first and go and wash), produced a silver bell which she placed among the dishes.

  ‘Anything more you want, just ring.’

  When, as she was leaving, I told her shyly that she was an angel, she turned in the doorway, her face arranged in that marble stare of hers I ordinarily detested.

  ‘Make the most of it while it lasts, if I was you.’

  ‘I will!’ I promised, whereupon we both laughed. We actually laughed together!

  The laughter seemed to have prompted second thoughts. Mrs Benyon came back into the room and informed me that the schoolmistresses had long ago gone off to school, Miss Gosse leaving instructions that I was to stay at home for the day and take things easy. Seating herself on the end of the bed, which made the bed tray teeter dangerously until mattress and spring had made the necessary adjustments, she inquired, with the ease of one settling down to a comfortable chat, ‘So what really happened, then?’

  Kicking myself mentally for still not having my story ready, and using a mouth full of toast and marmalade as an alibi, I mumbled something about falling over and hitting my face against something.

  As an explanation it was pathetic, but it seemed to satisfy – or did it?

  ‘Pity Miss Locke had only just that minute come indoors. She stayed out a bit longer, she might have caught you as you fell.’

  ‘I suppose she might,’ I agreed faintly.

  ‘Funny thing is –’ the housekeeper went on relentlessly – ‘she must’ve had a bit of a fall herself. There’s a coincidence! When she came in through the french window I went into the dining-room to ask should I bring in the tea, and she was white as a sheet. And what do you think?’ The old devil regarded me with an expression of the utmost innocence. ‘There was blood on her hand.’

  Mrs Benyon got up, the bed responding with a whinny of relief. She stood looking down at me.

  ‘Don’t you go letting those sausages get cold, now. And next time she tries to lay a hand on you, the filthy cow, take my advice an’ give her back as good as you get, either on the conk or the backside, whichever is most convenient.’

  To my surprise, when I went down the garden at the time I guessed Mr Betts would be taking his elevenses, I found him sitting on the bench eating a whipped cream walnut. How could that be, when only yesterday I had watched with my own eyes as he scoffed the last one?

  The gardener put the chocolate down on his folded paper and got up as soon as he heard my approach. The concern that showed on his knobby face pleased me. It was all screwed up with the force of h
is feelings as he drew me down by both hands to sit beside him.

  ‘Well, well! You have been in the wars!’

  I was grateful that here was one, at least, who did not press me for details.

  But then, as I quickly discovered, he had no need to. With a little help, he must have worked it out for himself.

  ‘That young man o’ yours, bin here first thing. In a dreadful hurry to get off to school, but he brought you the biscuits and the whipped cream walnuts you wanted, an’ said I was to tell you there’s fourpence change in the bag.’ Over the last of his whipped cream walnut Mr Betts looked at me in a worried way. ‘Like me t’ fetch one out fer you?’

  Full of my bang-up breakfast, I answered that I did not fancy one at the moment, thank you; wondering why the man still looked upset.

  ‘It looks worse than it is,’ I assured him. ‘The doctor put two stitches in and once the swelling’s gone down he says it’ll soon dry up and I’ll hardly be able to tell even where it was.’

  ‘Tha’s good! Wouldn’t want yer chances ruined of ending up a star of the silver screen.’

  But I could see that something was still bothering him.

  ‘That young “wha’s-his-name” –’ he came out with it at last. ‘He left a message for you.’

  ‘About the fourpence, you mean? You said.’

  ‘Not just that. He said –’ There was a long pause. ‘He said I were to tell you he knew he said he wouldn’t tell anybody, like you made him promise, but somehow, arter he got home, he told his ma. He said it just come out like, not intending it. And his ma –’ an even longer interval – ‘his ma says it’s better if he doesn’t come again, not for a while, at any rate.’ When I made no immediate comment, the gardener added, his voice gentle: ‘Don’t take on, gal.’

  I said, more or less truthfully, that I had no intention of taking on. That it was Bagshaw I was thinking about and how Mrs Kett made Victoria sponges which weren’t any good, only Bagshaw was crazy about them. I wasn’t being brave, though I could see Mr Betts thought I was. Mingled with the sour taste of rejection was a sense of relief. At least I wouldn’t have to rack my brains any more to remember what Robert Kett looked like. As a matter of fact, his image was already fading rapidly.

  Mr Betts looked at me in admiration. He was a great patriot and I could see he thought I was keeping a stiff upper lip in the traditional English fashion, when I wasn’t at all, only a stiff upper cheek, courtesy of Miss Grecian-conk Locke. So that when he went on, his rosy face rosier than ever with earnestness: ‘Pretty gal like you, there’s plenty more fish in the sea,’ I was able to reply with sufficient honesty that, taking one thing with another, I was not dissatisfied with the way things had turned out. Boys, on the whole, were an awful bother and I had exams to think of.

  For some reason, my answer only seemed cause for further disquiet. Having once been one himself, I suppose, Mr Betts insisted that boys were a good thing and I wasn’t on any account to go thinking different. Living with ‘them two old desiccated coconuts’, which I took to mean my landlady and my co-lodger, might have given me the wrong idea.

  I said it had nothing to do with the schoolmistresses. And anyway, Miss Locke wasn’t old.

  ‘They’re the worst kind,’ he replied darkly.

  His break over, he heaved himself up on to his ex-stable boy’s bowed legs and started off towards the greenhouse.

  ‘Got to love yer and leave yer.’

  I went slowly back up the garden, past all the lovely growing things. How lucky they were to have only greenfly and cuckoo-spit to worry about! I was half-way back to the house when Mr Betts overtook me.

  ‘Head like a sieve, that’s me,’ he said cheerfully. ‘There were one other thing. The young ’ un asked me special to say as how he hopes the dress is OK.’

  Feeling a bit low, I went indoors, got ‘Pale Hands I Loved’ out of the piano stool and played it loudly, hoping Mrs Benyon would hear, wherever in the house she happened to be, and come and join in. She must have been busy in the kitchen, getting the lunch ready or something. However, across the distance separating us her strange, extra-terrestrial voice sounded almost as loud as if she were in the room, her heavy hands on my shoulders, her heavy-scented breath wafting past my ear.

  ‘Pale hands, pink-tipped, like lotus-buds that float

  On those cool waters where we used to dwell,

  I would have rather felt you round my throat

  Crushing out life than waving me farewell.’

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Unfortunately, back at school, my fluorescent cheek and stitched wound did not attract the attention I had anticipated, but that was because it was the first day of exams, the prospect of which several of the girls in IIIa used as a pretext for histrionic displays of panic and palpitation that stole my thunder. For myself, arithmetic apart, I relished exams. They were a game that made me feel excited, stretched beyond my natural capacities. I loved the hushed ritual of coming into the classroom to find creamy ruled paper, of much better quality than our everyday stuff, laid out ready on desks which, for all their carved initials and other familiar disfigurements, had taken on a sacramental quality befitting the occasion; the inkwells fresh-filled by some unknown hand; and, face down, the examination paper, a mystery not to be divulged until the big hand on the classroom clock moved to the witching hour and the invigilator, in a voice never heard at other times, intoned, with the inevitability of fate: ‘Now!’

  When at last it was permissible to turn the paper over and read the questions cyclostyled on the other side, the blood pounded triumphantly through my veins at the recognition that, thanks to my good memory, none of them was beyond my powers. The delicious uncertainty of deciding which combination would best display my genius – five questions to be answered out of a total of eight – was even better than being offered a box of chocolates from which you were only allowed to select one.

  My sole difficulty so far as exams were concerned was in the matter of timing. However much I began with an iron resolve to divide the time available by five and stick to it, go on to the next question once the allotted time was up, even if it meant stopping in the middle of a sentence, middle of a word even, things seldom worked out that way. There was so much I wanted to say! Invariably, for all my resolutions, the last question certainly and often the penultimate as well were scamped, to my teachers’ oft-voiced despair. They constantly pointed out that since an agreed number of marks attached to any one answer, gilding the lily in the earlier part of the paper could never compensate for doing poorly in the second half.

  ‘You’ll never get Matric unless you mend your ways!’ they admonished me.

  The exams settled down to a lovely rhythm that left one disorientated when it stopped, buoyed up only by the thought of results. Become accustomed to my damaged cheek and the necessity of taking extra care whenever I pulled any article of clothing over my head, I almost forgot about the injury and its cause. Almost.

  At break on my first day back Miss Malahide accosted me in the north quad outside the Art Room.

  ‘What on earth have you done to yourself, child?’

  By then I was already tired of being asked that question and fudging the reply, and because it was Miss Malahide, her hairy face alight with compassion, I answered that I hadn’t done anything. Somebody had done it to me. ‘If you promise not to tell,’ I had added, marvelling at my own audacity, ‘I’ll tell you who it was.’

  The art mistress had looked, not angry, but alarmed. ‘I think I would rather not know,’ she said, and hurried away, flinging an end of her black cloak over her shoulder.

  All this time, whether in school or at Chandos House, Miss Locke never so much as spoke to me. At breakfast Miss Gosse, whose doggy features had come to wear a look of permanent bewilderment, would say things like: ‘I think Sylvia’s face is looking a little better this morning, don’t you, Helen?’ or ‘I’m sure the swelling’s gone down. What do you think?’ To which Miss Locke would ma
ke rejoinders such as ‘I really couldn’t say,’ and go on to other matters.

  For the history exam, to IIIa’s surprise, she acted as invigilator, it being an unwritten law that, to avoid any suspicion of bias, mistresses did not officiate in their own subjects. Waiting for the off, I studied her straight-browed, straight-nosed profile, knowing it was quite safe to do so since she would never turn her face towards me. I came to the conclusion that, whatever writers of romantic novels might maintain, small, shell-like ears were not beautiful. They were mean, unfriendly, signifying people who did not want to listen or did not know how to. I decided, admittedly on insecure grounds, that a trumpeting elephant, charging towards you with trunk upraised, was less frightening by reason of its large ears flapping than a history mistress with her teeny-weeny shells.

  And what kind of shells were like ears, when you came down to it? I could not remember a single author ever specifying. Cockles, winkles, mussels, whelks? I still hadn’t decided which species they could possibly have had in mind when the big hand of the clock clicked into place and Miss Locke called out: ‘Now!’

  Exams over, several days of delicious lethargy followed. The mistresses were all busy marking papers and we were left more or less to our own devices. We were allowed to bring our own books to school and read them sitting outside on the grass under the trees which screened the school buildings from the roads on either side. I had brought Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley which I had got out of the library because I had read somewhere that he was a subtle and witty writer.

  At twelve years old, the subtlety passed me by and I found precious little to laugh at; which did not entirely displease me as I was most of all in the mood to lie flat on my back, looking up through the canopy of the trees to the sky beyond, thinking of nothing special.

  ‘Showing off as usual, Sylvia!’ said Mrs Crail, smiling her crescent smile.

  I scrambled to my feet, blushing and confused as I always was in her presence. The headmistress delicately put the toe of her shoe to Antic Hay where it lay open at my place, down-facing on the grass. ‘I’m sure the librarian will be most interested to hear what care you take of the city’s books.’