The Quivering Tree

by S. T. Haymon

  With arithmetic, so far from unravelling anything, every so-called explanation left me ever more entangled. Since I was obviously not constituted to understand what it was all about, I concentrated on acquiring not the why of it, but the how, which I figured ought to be enough for exam purposes at our humble level. Miss Gosse, having chalked some indecipherable mishmash up on the blackboard, was always pleading with me in class, her boot-button eyes bright with earnestness: ‘You do see why we do this, Sylvia, don’t you?’ To which the honest answer, if I had only had the gumption to be honest, would have been, ‘Yes, Miss Gosse. To get through matric.’

  The front room, shaded by the trunk of my quivering tree, was always the first in the house to grow dark. Still I delayed lighting the gas, wallowing in the outward reflection of my inward gloom; yet, once lit, it only made more explicit the footling matters to which I was commanded to bend all my intellectual powers: the train travelling at an average speed of who cared; Farmers Smith and Brown and Jones who, each owning 75 head of cattle, had elected to share grazing land, the silly fools. Anyone but the crackpots who wrote arithmetic books would have known an arrangement like that was bound to cause trouble –

  Half an hour’s homework – ha! Time passed interminably, the soft summer evening giving way to night. From the bottom of the front garden, along the Wroxham Road, waxing and waning car headlights advertised people pursuing all kinds of pleasure whilst I sat on a prickly chair, slowly but surely sinking in a bog of arithmetic as into the Slough of Despond. Upstairs, either Miss Gosse or Miss Locke was having a bath. I coud hear the water bubbling in the geyser. Otherwise, not a sound … Nobody had thought to remark, Oh dear! Sylvia hasn’t come for her Bovril. I hope nothing is wrong. Nobody cared whether I was alive or dead.

  Not even my father.

  Admittedly, of late, I had been thinking about him rather less than when I had first come to Chandos House; but he should have been glad about that. The last thing he would want was for me to go about moping all my life. Life had to go on, as people had kept saying to my mother after the funeral. I could not believe that my father could be so petty-minded as to feel resentment that I had been too occupied in recent days to give him all that much attention. Yet how, unless he was displeased with me, could he look down from heaven, see the state I was in, and do nothing about it? Not that he was all that good at arithmetic himself, which, when you came down to it, was probably why I wasn’t either. A quick word to Galileo, say, or Sir Isaac Newton was all that was needed.

  ‘Sylvia, what in the world – ?’ Miss Locke stood in the doorway in her red-and-white striped pyjamas; barefoot, no dressing-gown, her curls damp about her beautifully shaped little ears. She came into the room and demanded: ‘Do you know what time it is? I saw the light shining on the grass. I thought you must have forgotten to turn it off. I never dreamed you’d still be here –’

  As if only awaiting the appearance of an audience, I burst into noisy crying, something I was conscious of doing altogether too much since coming to Chandos House. It was getting to be a habit. I felt that my relationship with the human race had reached an all-time low. I needed help, love, sympathy, and what had I got? Miss Locke!

  Still, I had to give her credit, she knew the right form of words.

  ‘My dear child,’ she exclaimed, ‘whatever is troubling you?’ She came over to where I was sitting and put her thin, whippy arms round my shoulders. For a moment fear redoubled my sobs. I thought she might be positioning herself for another of those horrible kisses. But all she did was ask, in the tenderest of tones: ‘Tell me, love. Whatever is the matter?’

  Incapable of speech, I gestured at the open textbook and the sheets with the ruled margins for your working, still blank after goodness knew how many hours. I seemed to have been sitting on that beastly chair for centuries.

  ‘Arithmetic!’ Miss Locke pronounced the word with a distaste I could not but find endearing. ‘I might have guessed. Leave it now, why don’t you, and have another go before breakfast.’

  I wailed that I wouldn’t be able to do it before breakfast, before dinner or tea, before ever. Miss Locke gave my shoulders an affectionate squeeze and said that I should have asked her.

  ‘But you’re a history mistress!’

  ‘I could have had a word with Miss Gosse, if you’d only asked.’

  I whimpered that, as she knew, Miss Gosse didn’t think it fair to give me extra coaching, and Mrs Crail wouldn’t be pleased either. Miss Locke repeated smilingly that, just the same, had I asked her, she might have been able to persuade Miss Gosse to change her mind. ‘Why didn’t you ask, you silly little goose?’

  Too miserable to be other than frank, I admitted that I was afraid of her, too afraid to ask her anything.

  ‘Afraid!’ Miss Locke repeated, as if genuinely surprised. With her straight nose and straight forehead, her short hair very curly after her bath, she would have looked beautiful if only her mouth, even smiling, had not been so small. From the look of it, you would never have guessed what a large wet tongue lurked inside. Miss Locke said: ‘When are you going to wake up to the fact that nobody in the world loves you more than I do?’

  Without waiting for an answer she straightened up and went swiftly out of the door and up the stairs, leaving me more than a little disbelieving. Miss Locke love me? All I could say was, she had a funny way of showing it.

  Still, I wasn’t sorry that the gaslight shining on the grass had given me away. Not that her discovery of me had solved anything – the ruled pages remained as blank as ever – but the crying had done me a power of good. Besides, I thought maliciously, with that residual resentment all children harbour against the adult world, let them know something of the misery they inflicted with their presumption and their power. What grown-ups ever had to do arithmetic when they didn’t want to?

  At that moment Miss Locke came back into the room, the arithmetic mistress dragging unwillingly behind her. Miss Gosse had her dressing-gown on over her nightdress, disguising her short legs. Her hair was in its overnight plait and her face was shiny with cold cream, this last surprising me as I had not thought her one who went in for such vanities. She was a kind woman, and I believe the thought of my seeing her in that condition was the prime reason she had responded with such obvious reluctance to Miss Locke’s demand that she come to my aid. I could understand how she felt, and I looked away, as embarrassed as she herself was. Whilst I was ready to concede that the history mistress meant well, I wished she hadn’t bothered.

  And anyway, what for? It was speedily apparent that more than face cream was at issue. Swivelling her button eyes from Miss Locke to me and back again, Miss Gosse maintained stoutly that it would not be fair for me to take advantage of my uniquely privileged position to obtain the private coaching denied to all the other denizens of IIIa.

  ‘Rubbish!’ was Miss Locke’s unsympathetic response. ‘The others have got their mothers and fathers to help them. I’ve never heard you going on about unfairness on that score.’

  Looking increasingly unhappy, Miss Gosse denied that this was an accurate statement of the matter. She appealed to me for confirmation that in class she was constantly exhorting girls to hand in their own unaided work. It wasn’t her fault that there seemed to be no way of stopping parents from helping their children with their homework, whether the children wanted it or not. Whereas, so far as Sylvia was concerned –

  ‘So far as Sylvia is concerned, you leave her to sit up all hours without a soul to turn to! It won’t do, Lydia – it really won’t do!’

  It was awful, but also, in its awful way, magnificent. It was the first time in my life that I had been witness to a full-blown, stand-up-and-knock-down row, and I would have been a block of wood not to have derived enjoyment from the spectacle, not to have been myself vitalized by the rush of energy released into the adjacent air. St Giles had known its minor differences but generally speaking, even irked, we had remained courteous to one another; never anything to approach w
ords that were like daggers, laughter that was sharper than a bacon slicer; noise that rose high as Everest and dropped to a silence deep in the earth’s core. Appalled and fascinated, I made myself as small as possible, kept out of the way whenever the two contestants, as happened from time to time, swayed in my direction. But inside I was not in the least small. I was tall with the excitement of being important.

  Because amazingly, in some way I was unable to account for, the fighting was all about me. Not about whether Miss Gosse should or should not show me how to do my arithmetic prep: that had been only the trigger. Now they were flinging love and hate at each other like cowpats, and it was all due to a girl called Sylvia, a girl who could only be me.

  ‘Corruption of a minor!’ Miss Gosse screeched, and burst into tears, just as if she was twelve years old like me. Confused as I was by this unexpected reversal of roles, the phrase lodged in my butterfly brain, something to hang on to gratefully. Miss Locke’s pyjama jacket had come undone and gaped wide. Her breasts, actually seen, looked smaller and much less bumpy than they did under her clothes, but more than large enough to make me go crimson and concentrate like mad on thinking about something else. So – ‘minor’ as in a minor scale, I pondered, or ‘miner’ as in a coal mine? Unless it was Joey the mynah as in ‘Family Pets’?

  It was certainly no moment to ask; and anyway, thank goodness, during my interval of semantic excogitation Miss Gosse and Miss Locke seemed to have resolved their differences. The storm had subsided with the same suddenness as it had blown up. The two women were standing plastered together, and Miss Locke, her face blazing with triumph, was murmuring into Miss Gosse’s hair: ‘There – there. It’s all right, girlie. All right –’

  Miss Locke went into the kitchen to make us all a nice hot cup of tea whilst Miss Gosse gave me an arithmetic lesson. A train travels 25 miles at an average speed of 65 miles per hour and a further 30 miles at 70 miles per hour. What is the average speed for the complete journey?

  I was never to know. Miss Gosse began to read out the problem in a shaky voice. She had barely got as far as the first ‘average speed’ when she broke down, put her hands up to her face and burst into tears all over again. Her crying made me cry too, I don’t know why, except that, as I say, it was getting to be a habit; besides which, Miss Gosse did remind me so strongly of the puppy who had got run over, and thinking about him always made me feel sad. The only bad thing about that puppy had been the way it had of trying to lick you all over – ugh! As it happened, just as I was remembering that, Miss Gosse leaned across the table and kissed me, a perfectly acceptable kiss, luckily on the cheek and quite dry.

  Miss Locke came back from the kitchen in high spirits, with cups of tea on a tray and also, wonder of wonders – a midnight feast, she called it – a plate piled high with custard creams.

  ‘You two old miseries!’ she hooted at the sight of our tear-stained faces. ‘If that’s what arithmetic does to you, I can quite understand why Sylvia can’t stand it.’

  Miss Gosse looked at Miss Locke with a smile that, without my being able to say why, made me want to cry some more. She said: ‘I’ve decided to excuse her from this weekend’s prep, Helen. I think we’ve all been a little under the weather.’

  ‘Speak for yourself!’ Miss Locke took one of the custard creams and lobbed it in my direction. ‘Catch!’

  I reached up and caught the biscuit perfectly, which made it taste twice as good. As a matter of fact, in the end I ate the whole plateful because, for some reason, neither Miss Gosse nor Miss Locke fancied any.

  See Opposite the Cross Keys

  Back to Text

  Chapter Twenty-three

  We had a quiet time after that. We acted as if nothing had happened. Exams were coming up and the school took on an anxious, delicate air, as if sickening for something; the swots steering clear of the lazy, the feckless and the thick who sought out their company as never before, in the hope, it might be, of absorbing knowledge by hanging about in its vicinity. At Chandos House Miss Gosse and Miss Locke were busy setting examination papers and I was busy with revision, which was no problem as I had a good memory. Every evening I had a coaching session with Miss Gosse, and though I grew no fonder of arithmetic I did at least learn how to fill up those loathsome margins with some semblance of working, so that I got some marks for trying even if I more often got the answer wrong than right.

  The two mistresses needed the large table in the drawing-room for their papers, so I did my revision in the dining-room. From the kitchen came the intoxicating savours of strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries cooking as Mrs Benyon made more pots of jam, I felt sure, than the inhabitants of Chandos House could eat in a lifetime. Knowing her, it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that she was running a jam-making factory on the side. Once – one Sunday when I had been invited to have supper with my brother Alfred’s future in-laws – I went into the kitchen in the morning and asked if I could buy a jar of raspberry jam to take along as a present, and the housekeeper snapped: ‘Elevenpence the pound size; two pounds, one and seven-pence ha’penny,’ just like that, without having to stop to think, just like the grocer.

  It wouldn’t have surprised me, either, to discover that she and Mr Betts were in the jam-making business together, except that I doubted it because the gardener was always complaining about all the fruit the Bunion’s jammy demands were cheating him out of. On the other hand, I knew by then that Mr Betts, though in the nicest possible way, was a crafty man, who could have been covering up his tracks.

  One afternoon I found him sitting on his bench by the bothy eating a whipped cream walnut. I wished he hadn’t eaten that particular one, since I knew it was my last. What with one thing and another I hadn’t been into the city for ages and my stocks were just about exhausted. I wouldn’t have said no if he had offered me the bottom bit of chocolate, which he hadn’t yet got to, but it didn’t seem to occur to him. He scoffed the lot, the greedy so-and-so, and then took out his horrid pipe by way of dessert.

  Feeling deprived – so far as tea was concerned, it had been one of Mrs Benyon’s less generous days – I sat down beside him, contriving nevertheless to preserve a veneer of amiability. Mr Betts’s friendship had become important to me.

  In a conversational way I asked if he could please tell me what a randy old dyke was. The gardener took his pipe out of his mouth, regarded it for a little in silence, and then put it back again.

  ‘You know what a dyke is. Can’t be born in Norfolk and not know what a dyke is.’

  ‘Not that kind!’ I brushed the answer aside impatiently. ‘The kind of dyke I mean is a person. What kind of person, though – that’s the question. Do you know what kind of person it is?’

  Mr Betts replied austerely that one thing he did know, which was that dyke meaning a person was not a word that ought to pass a young lady’s lips. It was as bad a word as swearing and, if he might take the liberty, whoever I had picked it up from was not a fit person for a young lady to associate herself with.

  I laughed and said that as a matter of fact it was a young lady I had picked it up from; to which Mr Betts returned a sardonic ‘Oh ah? Some lady!’

  ‘What about randy, then?’ I persisted. ‘Is that a bad word too?’

  Mr Betts nodded and got up to go home. He seemed to consider the subject closed, which was intolerable.

  ‘But what do they mean?’ I cried. ‘I promise not to use them. I just want to know.’

  ‘Wha’s the point o’ bunging yer brains up wi’ that garbage? Stuff enough of it in, it turns all the rest rotten.’

  To this I responded by pointing out that although he, Mr Betts, evidently knew what both dyke and randy meant, his brains were still in working order. I walked with him a little way towards the back gate, piling on the winsomeness for all it was worth, and at last, when we were nearly there, I got my reward – distinctly disappointing when you came down to it. I couldn’t understand what all the fuss had been about.

  ‘A dy
ke,’ Mr Betts explained, ‘is a mannish woman’ – which, all said and done, was only a factual description of Miss Malahide with her whiskers – ‘and randy means –’ the gardener searched about for an equivalent before coming up with ‘vigorous’.

  ‘On’y mind what I say,’ he finished. ‘Don’t you go speakin’ either of them to anybody – not even to the scrubber who spoke them to you.’

  I would have gone on to ask him what a scrubber was, only by then he was through the gate. However, he came back to say: ‘There’s a pal o’ yours outside in the lane, if you’re interested. Don’t look, though, as if he came to see you. He’s feeding that blasted donkey.’

  Robert Kett was feeding Bagshaw a Victoria sponge that looked as though someone had sat on it. He said that all his mother’s Victoria sponges, so long as he could remember, came out like that, but that she never gave up trying. She had been about to throw her latest disaster into the dustbin when he had said that he knew a donkey who would be glad of it.

  ‘A donkey!’ she had exclaimed, but then she had burst out laughing and said it was something at least to know that all those eggs and the flour and sugar wouldn’t be wasted.

  I liked the sound of Robert Kett’s mother. She sounded a nice woman. Bagshaw, judging by the way he went for the sponge cake, especially the jammy bits, had fallen for her in a big way, just as he had for her son. Whilst the two were busy smiling at each other I sneaked a small piece for myself and it wasn’t all that bad, at any rate not on one of Mrs Benyon’s meagre days: but I didn’t try to get any more, both because I didn’t want to deprive Bagshaw, and because I had developed a kind of loyalty, not so much to Miss Gosse and Miss Locke and Mrs Benyon – certainly not to her! – as to Chandos House itself, its gaslight, the mauve lining in the piano front, my little room and the quivering tree outside my window. I didn’t want to admit to an outsider that it was only too easy to be hungry there.