The Quivering Tree

by S. T. Haymon

  I wanted to shout out, ‘You’re doing more harm with that great fat toe of yours than I ever did leaving it open like that!’ But of course I didn’t say anything, and after she had opened a nasty little crack in the book’s spine she sailed majestically on.

  That afternoon I went down to the back gate at Chandos House for the first time in ages. Exams had been my excuse, but the unacknowledged truth was that I hadn’t wanted to risk running into Robert Kett. I hoped he hadn’t given up going to see Bagshaw just because he had given up coming to see me. I hoped his mother hadn’t found a recipe for making Victoria sponges that rose.

  I also began to feel guilty. Poor old Bagshaw! It wasn’t his fault Robert Kett and I were not friends any longer.

  Mrs Benyon gave me some stale bread and I went down the garden and out of the gate, both relieved and disappointed to find there was nobody there except the donkey. He was standing at the barbed wire, not looking in the least pleased to see me or my bread which as usual he swallowed as if doing me a favour. The reason was not far to seek. Lying in the middle of the path was a good-sized wedge of failed Victoria sponge, too far from the wire for even Bagshaw’s scrawny stretch. Robert Kett must have chucked the cake down and run, frightened I might choose that moment to put in an appearance. A wasp was crawling about the jam filling, having a whale of a time. The sight of it on the ground out of reach must have turned Bagshaw into a raving loony. The look he gave me, and the accompanying snort! ‘About time!’ was definitely what he said.

  Because of the wasp I didn’t care actually to pick up the piece of sponge, so I found a stick in the hedge and poked at it until it was in a position for the donkey to get at unaided. He snuffled it up at a gulp, wasp and all, and still looked so plainly dissatisfied that I said I wouldn’t be long, went back through the gate and up the garden as far as the bothy, where I went to the drawer which housed the custard creams. It was the first time I had been in the bothy since – I did not care to specify even to myself since when – and it made me feel peculiar. To keep my mind off the when I reminded myself that Bagshaw, a donkey of small patience, was waiting; pulled open the drawer in which I knew Mr Betts would have put the biscuits, only permitting myself tangentially to admire the workmanship of the inlay and the mitred corners, and took four custard creams out of the paper bag within. I had reemerged into the light of day when second thoughts sent me back into the gloom again to get the whole bag, every last one. I could not see myself eating a custard cream for a long time to come, probably never.

  You would have thought that, with half a pound of biscuits inside him, a donkey, not an unintelligent animal whatever people might say, would have given some little intimation of gratitude – a nod, a genteel hee-haw – but not Bagshaw. He saw off the lot, one, two, three, and looked about for more. A creature mean and tricky, totally lacking in grace.

  At least he didn’t have small, shell-like ears like Miss Locke.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  It was really weird how, in IIIa, once they were over, the memory of the examinations which a few days previously had filled our every waking moment, to say nothing of our dreams, faded into insignificance. Perhaps it was because we were still a couple of years away from the dreaded Matric; perhaps because, the term almost at its end, our minds were already on the holidays. Perhaps, most of all, it was because it was ripe and roistering summer, the blackberries already beginning to plump in the hedgerows. Whichever it was, we gave hardly a thought to results.

  Consequently, when Miss Gosse came home, very happy, took both my hands into her plump little paws and began to talk about exams, it took me a moment or two to adjust to what she was on about.

  ‘This is in strictest confidence,’ she burbled. ‘You’re not supposed to know until marks are given out, but I simply have to tell you, if only to make that poor old cheek of yours feel better. Well! –’ A pause for effect: ‘You’ve got 62% for arithmetic. 62%!’ Awaiting my reaction, eyes shining: ‘What do you say to that?’

  I said: ‘It ought to be your mark by rights. It was all your doing.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ Miss Gosse broke into laughter in a way I hadn’t heard her laugh for some time. Miss Locke seemed to have put a damper on everything and everybody. ‘As the maths mistress, I ought to get 100%, surely?’

  We laughed together, which actually did make my cheek feel better, I don’t know why. Miss Gosse told me that as a matter of fact she herself had given me 60%, only she had asked Miss Copley, who also taught maths, to go over my paper after her, to nip in the bud any suggestion of favouritism, and Miss Copley had added another 2%. Since the marks for arithmetic, geometry and algebra were always aggregated and then divided by three to obtain the final figure which appeared under the heading of mathematics in our reports, being rotten at arithmetic had always pulled me down in the final placings. With 62% – assuming, that is, my other papers were up to scratch, which I felt pretty sure they were – I must be in the running for the Progress Prize, if not the Form Prize, which was books to the value of 7s 6d as against the Progress Prize’s 5s. Not that I had any real hopes of the Form Prize which was practically certain to go to Dorothy Hopper who was not only cleverer than me but never had marks taken off for untidiness, as I always did.

  Still, it was amazing how far 5s could be made to go in Jarrold’s bookshop, provided you chose something Mrs Crail approved of. If she didn’t, being her she never said a word, never suggested you go back to Jarrold’s for a second look around. Only, when prize-giving arrived and you were all agog with the lovely anticipation of actually taking possession of the books you had chosen, you could find yourself lumbered with A Christian Thought for Every Day of the Year, or something equally dire.

  Miss Gosse was frisking around me like Tirri the puppy who had been run over by the tram. I thought, if only I had some dog-biscuits in the nest of drawers in the bothy I could have run quickly down the garden and fetched some back for her, to say thank you for your help. I would have held one up high and told her to sit up and beg.

  As it was, I said: ‘It was awfully good of you to give me extra lessons when you had so much other work to do.’

  Draining away most of the pleasure, Miss Gosse demurred: ‘The one you really ought to thank is Miss Locke.’

  It was on the last afternoon of that lovely, lazy post-examinations week that Miss Reade, the school secretary, came into the cloakroom as I was changing out of my house shoes and told me I was to go to Mrs Crail’s study immediately.

  From the way she spoke, with a little tremor in her voice, I could tell there was trouble ahead: so, having a little difficulty with the buttons, I changed back into my house shoes. I did not want to risk aggravating the offence, whatever it was, by walking about the school in my outdoor ones. Miss Reade quavered, ‘At once!’ Not young, she always wore a narrow ribbon of black velvet fastened tightly round her throat, which made her neck, full of stalky veins, look like a bundle of asparagus which would fall apart without a binding. An old girl herself from the year dot, she was, I think, as frightened of Mrs Crail as the rest of us – more probably, since her job depended on her keeping on the right side of the old battleaxe.

  Heart pounding, I followed her tall, stooping figure out of the cloakroom, along the corridor to the headmistress’s room, where she knocked at the door so timidly as scarcely to be heard, I would have thought, through its thick mahogany. However – perhaps Mrs Crail had been keeping an ear out in expectation – a loud ‘Come!’ sounded from the other side. Miss Reade opened the door just wide enough for me to insert myself before she scuttled back to her office next door.

  Everyone else I knew called out ‘Come in!’ when they wanted you to enter a room, and that peremptory ‘Come!’ froze my blood before I was well inside, where, it appeared, three persons were waiting to receive me: Mrs Crail herself, important in her important-looking chair; Miss Barton, my house-mistress, perched uneasily on the small, uncomfortable chair the headmistress normally reserved for visiting
parents, and Miss Locke, who sat looking at me directly for the first time since she had hit me in the bothy. Her usually pale face was as rosy as her shell-like ears and her pale eyes were almost as bright as Miss Gosse’s. The corners of her mouth were turned down in familiar, triumphant derision.

  Mrs Crail lifted up her piggy snout as if to sample which way the wind was blowing and said: ‘Unfortunately, Sylvia, we have had to become used to your arrogance, your chronic untidiness, and your reckless disregard for school discipline. Even so, despite all these things, we did not, until today, expect a situation to arise which would bring into question your continued attendance at this school. We did not expect to have to add cheating to the list.’

  Cheating! My heart gave a leap that almost made me lose consciousness. My injured cheek sent stabs of pain up through the roof of my mouth to the top of my head. I must have swayed on my feet because Miss Barton, looking suddenly alarmed, sprang from her chair and took a step in my direction.

  ‘Sit down, Miss Barton, if you please! I am sure Sylvia is perfectly able to answer our questions without assistance. I have never known her at a loss for words before.’

  Miss Barton resumed her seat, looking upset. The wrench of producing sound scraping the soft parts of my vocal system as with a pot-scourer, I managed to croak that I hadn’t cheated, I hadn’t.

  ‘Indeed?’ Mrs Crail smiled her crescent smile, as if I had answered exactly as she had hoped I would. ‘In that case, what are we to make of this?’

  With fingers where her gold wedding-ring nestled among the ample flesh, she lifted up from her desk what I now recognized as my history examination paper, several pages stapled together in the school-approved way. She pushed them towards me, folded back so that the last but one question I had answered was uppermost.

  ‘Take your time,’ she said with dreadful kindness as I scanned the page wildly, recognizing words in my own handwriting but not taking in their sense. ‘Then read it aloud. Miss Locke, Miss Barton and I are in no hurry.’ She settled back, spread over her green-upholstered armchair like a basking slug. ‘When you are ready.’

  Miss Barton smiled at me in wan encouragement. Miss Locke I did not dare to look at, but I felt her presence: an enemy. Somehow I managed:

  ‘Charles I was an upright, well-meaning man, a loving husband and an affectionate father. Unfortunately, he was also very obstinate and unable to compromise, so that, whilst he patronized literature and the arts, he sternly repressed all political and religious opposition, believing monarchy to be a divine right, a responsibility entrusted to him by the Almighty, to Whom alone he was required to render an account. In 1640, when he was forced to summon Parliament because of the rebellion in Scotland –’

  ‘That will do,’ Mrs Crail interrupted. She sounded so gentle that I knew myself to be in deadly peril. Yet where was the cheating in what I had read? What had I done wrong?

  ‘Now then –’ Mrs Crail sounded quite jolly. She reached back into some bookshelves behind her and brought out a copy of our current IIIa history textbook, already marked in two places with paper cut into narrow strips. ‘Page 39 first, I think.’

  I took the book with trembling hands, opened it to page 39 and read with mounting horror: ‘Charles I was an upright, well-meaning man, a loving husband and an affectionate father. Unfortunately, he was also very obstinate and unable to compromise, so that –’ my voice petered out.

  The crescent smile stretching far up her cheeks, Mrs Crail ordered: ‘Now the next one. Page 126.’

  Page 126 dealt with the Restoration, the subject of the last question on my history paper. It also dealt with it in precisely the same terms as I had used in my answer. Surprisingly, the sight of those printed paragraphs at one fell swoop took all my nervousness away. I had long known that I possessed a good memory. I had just that moment discovered that I had a remarkable one.

  Mrs Crail observed sweetly: ‘Either you are not as clever as we took you for, Sylvia, or you were paying Miss Locke no compliment. You must have thought her very foolish not to have spotted what you were at.’

  I protested that I had not been at anything; that I had simply fallen behind time and so, without thinking, I must have –

  ‘Cheated?’

  ‘No!’ Reckless now of the consequences, and exhilarated by the justice of my cause, I let my voice rise. ‘If you want to know, I didn’t even know I was doing it! I just did. I know all my textbooks by heart and so –’

  ‘All?’

  ‘Yes, I do! As far as we’ve got in class, anyway. I don’t sit down to learn them. It isn’t my fault if they stick in my mind of their own accord.’

  ‘That is remarkable!’ Miss Barton put in, leaning forward in her seat and looking relieved and suddenly happy. ‘I’m sure we wish we could all have memories like that,’ she said to me.

  ‘All,’ Mrs Crail said again. This time she rose ponderously to look through her bookshelves, located the book she wanted and came back with it to her chair. I saw from the cover that it was Henry V which was our Shakespeare play for English that term.

  The headmistress took her time selecting the bit out of the play she was going to test me with. Confident I was equal to whatever passage she might choose, I was beginning, in a creepy kind of way, to enjoy myself. I thought, I bet she’s thinking hard cheese, it’s a pity I can’t make this beastly girl walk over red-hot coals to prove her innocence, the way they made them in the Middle Ages. I guessed she was turning over the pages looking for a bit that did not have any of the great set pieces in it like ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends,’ which I might be expected to know anyway and wouldn’t prove anything one way or the other.

  At last she was ready. She didn’t even tell me the scene or the act, the old devil, but never mind.

  ‘Pistol says, “Captain, I thee beseech to do me favours.” Go on from there.’

  I braced my shoulders, screwed up my eyes in the way I knew I had when I wanted to concentrate on something, and wanted consequently to empty my mind of everything else. My luck, my God, my father, whichever it was, did not desert me. ‘Act III, Scene 5,’ some inner prompt instructed me, and sliding into that inner vision of which, until then, I had scarcely been aware, I saw the relevant page in my own copy of the play, even down to the two blots on the right-hand side near the bottom which looked amazingly like Corsica and Sardinia, only the other way round, with Sardinia on top of Corsica instead of vice versa. I did not, however, think to mention this interesting geographical reversal to Mrs Crail, suspecting – rightly, I felt sure – that she would not be interested.

  ‘Pistol –’ I bent to the task in hand – ‘goes on to say: “The Duke of Exeter doth love thee well.” Then Fluellen says, “Aye, I praise God; and I have merited some love at his hands. Pist. (Yes, I actually said, not Pistol, but Pist., just as it was printed in the book) Bardolph, a soldier, firm and sound of heart,

  Of buxom valour, hath, by cruel fate,

  And giddy Fortune’s furious fickle wheel –

  That goddess blind,

  That stands upon the rolling, restless stone –

  Flue. By your patience, Ancient Pistol. Fortune is

  painted plind, with a muffler afore her eyes, to

  signify to you that Fortune is plind, and she is

  painted also with a wheel, to signify to you,

  which is the moral of it, that she is turning and

  inconstant, and mutability, and variation: and her

  foot, look you, is fixed upon a spherical stone,

  which rolls, and rolls, and rolls. In good truth,

  the poet makes a most excellent description of it.

  Fortune is an excellent moral.

  Pist. Fortune is Bardolph’s foe and frowns on him –”’

  Thank goodness, it did not frown on me. Mrs Crail let me go on to the very end of the scene – to ‘And on tomorrow bid them march away’ – without my memory once letting me down. Even then, she did not say stop. I hesitated, gathe
ring my forces and wondering if I was meant to proceed to Scene 6, when Miss Barton stood up.

  ‘I don’t think we need to prolong this further, do we?’ she said to the headmistress, with what seemed to me astonishing courage.

  ‘Probably not.’ Mrs Crail seemed to have lost all her former good humour. If I had been so crazy as to expect an apology – which I wasn’t – none was forthcoming. Quite the contrary, in fact.

  ‘An interesting trick.’ Mrs Crail’s verdict was delivered in her sourest tone. ‘However, whilst I am relieved to find that you did not, after all, cheat in the literal sense, I feel bound to say that, put into a wider context, cheating is what it undoubtedly was, and Miss Locke was quite right to bring it to our attention. The fact that, through no expenditure of time or effort, you possess a certain facility must not be taken to mean that you have any special dispensation to benefit from it above other girls who may have studied hard and long in the pursuit of knowledge. Miss Locke, I am sure, will take this into consideration in awarding her marks – or in not awarding them, as the case may be.’

  As I rode home, exultant but confused, half proud of my memory, half ashamed of it as something that singled me out as being different when what I wanted above all was to be the same as everyone else; wholly uncertain as to what, if anything, I ought to do about Miss Locke, the history mistress overtook me.

  ‘Sylvia!’ she said. ‘My dear child!’

  That was rich, that was, coming from her. I would have ridden on if she hadn’t put her hand down on the middle of my handlebars, forcing me to dismount.

  ‘I was angry. I don’t know what came over me.’ Thrusting her head closer to mine than I cared for, she pleaded: ‘Do you forgive me?’