The Quivering Tree

by S. T. Haymon

  It was quite a disappointment that, despite all the pictures, Miss Gosse’s father did not look anything special. His clothes, dark and heavy, were more interesting than the face which peeped out from the top of his stiff white collar for all the world like one of those big Easter eggs on which, for no extra money, confectioners write in white icing the name of your choice. I pulled up one of the horsehair-covered dining-chairs to the big mahogany table and spread out my work in a businesslike way, but it was hard to concentrate with those Easter eggs popping up all over the place. They reminded me that, as usual, I was hungry, so I ran upstairs and fished one of my two whipped cream walnuts out of my book box. I wrapped it in a handkerchief because the heat had melted it a little and also because I did not want to risk running into Mrs Benyon on the way down.

  On second thoughts, I fished out the second whipped cream walnut as well, and went out into the garden to give it to Mr Betts.

  Mr Betts was picking peas. His knobby face crinkled in a smile at the sight of me, even though his first words were: ‘That there Grecian Vase of yours, gal, it must have had a crack in it. Last heard of, she were still running.’

  All the same, and despite my renewed protestations that I really did not think I possessed any particular gift as a tipster, he stopped picking and led me over to the seat, where I could see the pink sports paper sticking out of his jacket pocket. I presented him with the whipped cream walnut, which he sat comfortably licking, as if it had been an ice-cream, whilst at his behest I ran my eye over the lists of runners. I had never seen anybody eat a whipped cream walnut like that before, and I found it difficult to keep my mind on my task. It had, I could see, the advantage of making the whipped cream walnut last twice as long as usual, assuming one had the patience or the self-control to restrain one’s greed, the unbridled loosing of which was itself part of the pleasure. But how on earth was one expected to deal with the cream filling once the restraining chocolate walls had dissolved into gooey oblivion?

  Mr Betts, who was making a right mess of himself, urged: ‘Get on with it! I haven’t got all day!’

  In the end I chose a horse called Clair de Lune, the mere sight of whose name in print was enough to set up resonances in my fingertips, but did not affect Mr Betts in the same way. He wiped his hands on his trousers and took the paper back from me, frowning.

  ‘Debussy,’ I explained helpfully.

  ‘Never heard o’ him. Who else he train? Thought you didn’t know nothing about horses.’

  ‘I don’t. Debussy’s a composer. “Clair de Lune” is a piece of music.’

  ‘What you on about?’ The gardener studied the list again before commenting disparagingly, ‘Frenchies.’

  As I still had not decided what I was going to do about Mr Betts – only that, in the mean time, I wanted to keep him in a good mood – I said again that I did not really think I was any good about horses. That, to be truthful, I didn’t even care for them.

  ‘Couldn’t think worse than I do meself!’ was the surprising rejoinder. ‘Four legs an’ a bag of wind! Nothing in their bleeding heads but to run the wrong way an’ nip you in the crotch when you aren’t looking!’ Thrusting his legs forward for my inspection: ‘Where you reckon I got that lot; then?’

  Mr Betts was certainly very bow-legged, a condition he seemed less inclined to assign to heredity than to the circumstances of his former employment. It appeared that, before becoming a gardener, he had been – grudgingly, because he couldn’t abide horses – a stable lad at Newmarket, like his ma’s pa and grandpa before him. The day after his grandpa, who had lived with them, kicked the bucket, so he declared, he had bunged his old ma into an old-age home and caught the next bus to Norwich, shaking the dust of his native town from his feet for ever.

  ‘Couldn’t you have stayed and become a gardener in Newmarket?’ I asked, shaken by the thought of his bunged old ma. But Mr Betts dismissed the suggestion out of hand.

  ‘Newmarket!’ he echoed. ‘The village idiot could be a gardener in Newmarket!’

  The town, I gathered, thanks to all those bloody horses, laboured under the dire handicap of too much muck. It was drowning in it: you could smell it down the road ten miles off. For a gardener worthy of the name there was no challenge: anything grew there, from begonias to banyan trees. ‘One o’ them four-legged shitters let fly, you go for a brush an’ pan to sweep it up, an’ by the time you get back blow me if there in’t a dozen half-hardy annuals growing out of it, ready for transplanting.’

  Having subtler ends in view, I offered, since it was a French horse, to forgo my commission if Clair de Lune won, but Mr Betts said absolutely no. Business was business, he warned me, and don’t you ever go forgetting it. Living as I did with two schoolteachers, ladies of education, I could be expected to pick up a lot in the way of learning, one way and another, but – he would lay a fiver on it – nothing so helpful to me in later life as those three words.

  He hoped I had taken notice.

  ‘Business is business,’ I repeated happily, my conscience appeased. I could have hugged him.

  On Tuesday afternoon I wheeled my bicycle out of the school drive to find my brother Alfred waiting by the gate. It seemed a long time since I had seen him last, longer than it actually was, and I think he must have felt the same because we embraced with the mixture of pleasure and embarrassment common to people who have not set eyes on each other for ages and think they ought to have. He even looked different – but no: it was the perspective which had altered. From being central to my existence he had moved to the periphery where outlines tended to merge with the surrounding scenery. He said that he had decided to come on the spur of the moment, leaving the telephone ringing and his work undone, out of a sudden need to see with his own eyes that I was all right. I was very touched even as, unbidden, there flickered through my subconscious the hope that he wouldn’t stay too long. I wanted my tea.

  Alfred had driven to the school in the tub of a car which belonged to his future father-in-law. The Morris Oxford, I was told, was sold – gone to a good home, I was assured. But as to the sports car which was to have replaced it – the frown mark between my brother’s blue eyes deepened. He began to speak, rapidly, like one who has a lot to say and little time to say it in. As he spoke, the distance between us began to diminish, my heart to throb with the old affection, augmented with a new pride in my own worth. My father was dead, the rest of the family in London. In all Norwich there was no one else to talk to, really talk to: and so my grown-up brother had come to confide in me.

  He had bought a plot of land in Cecil Road on the edge of the city and the builders were going to build on it the house he and Phyllis would live in when they were married. It was, he didn’t mind telling me, going to cost a packet. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll see much change out of £1,000,’ my brother said, as much appalled as exhilarated by the prospect. Unlike me, who had been living for more than a week at Chandos House, it was the first time he had had to think seriously about money. I knew exactly how he felt. It was, after all, only a case of Mr Johnson and his IS 6d shampoos writ large.

  ‘What do you think, Sylvia? Do you think I’m biting off more than I can chew?’

  The metaphor was unfortunate. Reminded of the yawning abyss inside me, I longed to be home at Chandos House chewing my bread and butter. Today might just be one of those glorious days when Mrs Benyon unaccountably lost count and piled the serving dish with more slices than it could comfortably hold. If I hadn’t been so hungry I might possibly, looking all the time as if butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth, have convinced Alfred that as between a wife and a thousand-pound house on the one hand and a snazzy sports car on the other, the car was infinitely the better buy. But no: I had outgrown such childish jealousies.

  Instead, I overflowed with enthusiasm; asked all about the house, how many bedrooms would it have, would there be a garage, what kind of flowers would they grow in the garden, until the frown between my brother’s eyes erased itself. Being good at d
rawing, he found an old envelope in his jacket pocket on which to sketch the front elevation and the back; a sundial and a lily pool and a summerhouse with a roof like a pagoda –

  ‘And a steeple and weathercock!’ I added.

  How we laughed! Just like the old days.

  ‘How are you off for money?’ Alfred wanted to know. I observed with a truly maternal satisfaction that he was feeling much better for our conversation, his old generous self once more.

  ‘Fine!’ I answered nevertheless. How could I possibly ask someone committed to the outlay of £1,000 for the where-withal to buy shampoos and whipped cream walnuts? ‘I’ve got plenty!’

  We parted fondly, our intimacy not only re-established, but deepened; and I cycled home famished but full of beans, confirmed in the absolute rightness of my plan to blackmail Mr Betts.

  When, on Wednesday, straight after tea and before I weakened, I went down the garden, red-faced, heart beating faster than was comfortable, to let Mr Betts know that, going by the back way to feed Bagshaw, I had caught sight of lettuces and strawberries and goodness only knew what else in the back of the white van, and that as a consequence I was very sorry but I was going to have to blackmail him, his answer was not what I had expected.

  ‘Crikey!’ he exclaimed. ‘Not the two of you!’ And when I stood stupid, not understanding: ‘The Bunion – the Lady of Shallotts, who else? The Greta Garbo of the servants’ hall. First her, now you!’

  ‘I didn’t know she –’

  ‘Nothing goes on in this house she don’t know about and takes her cut out of. You ought to know that by now! If I got ter pay all me profit out in hush-money, I might as well turn it in, call it a day. Not worth the blooming candle!’ Despite the emphasis with which he spoke, Mr Betts did not sound really angry. He looked at me with a humorous disbelief. ‘Too shy to speak up fer a second helping, but not too shy to put the screws on me like a ruddy pro! An’ looking such a little lady, too!’

  That put my back up.

  ‘And you don’t look like a thief, but you are!’

  ‘Name callin’s never goin’ to get us nowhere.’ The gardener, who had been tying up some lupins which had flopped over, stopped doing it; went over to the bench where his jacket was lying, fished his pipe out of the pocket and sat sucking it, empty and unlit, like a baby. He remarked mildly, as if we were in the middle of a perfectly ordinary conversation: ‘That French horse you picked came in second. Didn’t back her both ways, but tha’s my funeral. You’re still entitled to yer commission.’

  I burst out that I didn’t want his commission; that I didn’t want to go on picking out horses when I knew nothing whatever about them and couldn’t be sure if they’d win or if they’d lose. What I wanted, if I wasn’t to die of starvation and get nits in my hair into the bargain, was a regular source of income I could rely on.

  Mr Betts thereupon offered to lend me some money, but I replied that I would be grown up before I could pay it back, if then, and besides, my father had taught me that I must never on any account allow myself to get into debt. The gardener sucked at his pipe, then gave it as his opinion that it was a mistake to let dead people go on telling you what to do. Enough was enough. They had had their turn and now ought to lie quietly in their graves, letting people get on with things in their own way.

  This upset me, because he seemed to be getting at my father, who wasn’t, properly speaking, in his grave at all, but in heaven. It made me cruel.

  ‘You’re an old man,’ I pointed out. ‘If I borrow some money from you, by the time I can pay it back you’ll be dead yourself.’

  ‘More fool me, then,’ said Mr Betts.

  The conversation was not going at all according to the scenario I had rehearsed so often beforehand. Planning it in my mind, everything falling out the way I intended it to fall, I had been entranced to discover how easy crime was. No wonder so many people went in for it.

  ‘The trouble wi’ you is –’ Mr Betts took his pipe out of his mouth and waggled it at me – ‘you don’t think things through. As I understand it – right? – if I don’t pay up on demand you’ll up an’ tell Miss Gosse I bin on the fiddle?’

  ‘Right!’ I agreed between clenched teeth, feeling terrible to hear my threat put into words.

  ‘But where’ll that get you? How’ll you be better off? I’ll get the push sure enough, but you won’t be any nearer a steady income. New bloke gets taken on, stands to reason Miss G.’ll be watching him like a hawk arter what’s happened. Ten to one she’ll decide it’s time to ferget how the garden was in her pa’s day and have the whole vegetable plot put down to grass. Get herself a goat, maybe, to keep it down. An’ that’ll make two of ’em on the premises!’

  Aggrieved by the insult, I stopped having qualms. The gardener was simply not playing the part I had allotted to him in the drama. It had never occurred to me that a blackmailer’s victim might refuse to be blackmailed. It did not seem fair.

  I played the trump card Mr Betts himself had put into my hand.

  ‘You said yourself you’re paying Mrs Benyon not to say anything. Why her and not me?’

  ‘Because she scares the living daylights out of me,’ Mr Betts explained. ‘And you’re such a dear little gal, I don’t think.’

  ‘Oh!’

  I knew that I wasn’t a dear little gal. I knew that I wasn’t a child and I wasn’t a grown-up either, something between the two that there wasn’t a word for. I knew I was too old to cry like a child, but like a child I did, wailing that I couldn’t possibly manage on a shilling a week with biscuits alone costing sixpence for half a pound and that was only the plain sorts, goodness only knew how much you had to pay for Bourbons or Milk ’n Honey. It wasn’t good for growing girls to go hungry. It stunted their growth. Perhaps that was why Miss Gosse had legs like she had, and I would grow up with them too if I didn’t get enough to eat. I couldn’t ask my mother to send me more pocket money. Since my father died she didn’t have nearly as much money as she had had when he was alive, and it cost a lot more to live in London than it had in St Giles. What on earth was I to do? My brother was building a house from which he didn’t expect to get any change out of a thousand pounds and Mr Johnson in Dove Street charged IS 6d for a shampoo: IS 6d! – it was unbelievable. When I had tried to wash my hair myself the geyser had refused to light and I could easily have blown Chandos House to smithereens, to say nothing of myself. My ululation petered out with the information that whilst it was true Miss Locke had volunteered to wash my hair for me once a week for nothing, somehow I didn’t think much of the idea –

  Mr Betts waited for me to finish. Then: ‘You look a picture, I must say!’ When I had achieved a semblance of equanimity he inquired, in a tone of mild interest: ‘How much were you figuring on touching me for?’

  Having done my sums over and over in preparation for just such a question, I was ready with the answer. I told him that, taking my own shilling pocket money into account, I reckoned I could just about get by on 4s 6d – that was to say, 3s 6d weekly was what I had looked forward to receiving from him as the price of silence.

  The gardener regarded me with disgust.

  ‘That all? All that tarradiddle over 3s 6d?’ Shaking his head: ‘You got t’ learn to set yer sights higher ’n that, gal, if you want to get anywhere in the world! You should’ve asked five bob at the lowest.’

  I pointed out forlornly that since he had refused to let me blackmail him at all, the size of my demand was now of academic interest only.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Mr Betts said. He got up from the bench and told me to follow him, rolling along with his bowlegged gait to a small building which stood against the garden wall a little distance from the greenhouse and was called the bothy. It was built of bricks, with a high-pitched roof, the whole covered with Virginia creeper so that it looked quite romantic, but inside the dim interior there was nothing but an old pot-bellied stove at the further end, some stored deckchairs, and Mr Betts’s garden tools and horticultural
supplies. There was also a queer old-fashioned nest of drawers on a stand which was where Mr Betts kept his packets of seeds, and it was towards this that he now led me. Selecting one of the drawers in the lowest tier, he levered it out, emptied it of the few seed packets that happened to be there and turned it upside down to get rid of some shrivelled-up bits and pieces that clung to its sides. A spider fell out on to my shoe and scampered away, its eight legs pumping indignantly.

  Mr Betts replaced the drawer, leaving it open a mere inch or so. He dug into his trouser pocket and produced a handful of change from which he selected a two-shilling piece, a shilling, and four sixpences which he dropped through the slit; shut the drawer smartly. He informed me that so long as he was at Chandos House or I was – whichever way it turned out – there would be five bob in the drawer, at my service. I could rely on it. ‘If I see it’s gone, I’ll fill it up again, and tha’s how we’ll go on.’ He must have seen the expression on my face for he added sharply: ‘An’ don’t let me hear no more about blackmail, nor about borrowing neither. You’re a little lady an’ one o’ the things I reckon a lady’s got t’ learn is how to accept a present from a pal in the spirit it’s given, no strings attached an’ no thanks necessary. An’ no more water-works neither –’ he ordered, as my chin began to quiver uncontrollably – ‘or Mrs Benyon the Bunion’ll be chargin’ down here wanting to know what I done to you. An’ then the fur’ll fly!’

  Chapter Sixteen

  One Saturday morning, when we were having breakfast, Miss Locke leaned across the table and said to me: ‘Don’t make any arrangements to be out today, Sylvia, unless you want to miss Miss Gosse’s sweetheart. He’s coming to lunch.’