The Quivering Tree (19 page)

From the living room came the sound of my favourite ‘Birth of the Blues' and a voice singing:

‘They heard the breeze
In the trees
Singing weird melodies
And they made that
The start of the blues –'

I waited until Geoffrey had hung the damp dish towels tidily on the string stretched above the gas stove and then suggested, shyly, that we too might join the dance. As if something more than dish towels had been hung up, I watched the animation die out of his face.

‘If you want,' he said.

Noreen and Graham were not exactly dancing. They stood swaying in front of the fireplace under the painting of Noreen with no clothes on, their arms round each other's necks. Grim-faced, in sharp contrast, Geoffrey and I took the floor, only to find, to our mutual astonishment and satisfaction, that the other could dance well; that despite the difference in our heights, our steps meshed perfectly. When the record ended Geoffrey asked: ‘Where did you learn to dance like that?' and when I replied that when I lived in St Giles I had gone to Mrs Barwell's, he inquired further, ‘And who's Mrs Barwell when she's at home?' Which, all over again, made him seem a stranger – more, a visitor from an alien planet – because everybody who was anybody in Norwich knew that Mrs Barwell was positively the best dancing teacher in the city.

Next, Noreen put on ‘Jealousy', and she and Graham began to dance the tango, trying to look fierce and Hispanic as they swooped up and down the room and only, to my way of thinking, making themselves ridiculous. I loved the grave, ritualistic movements of the dance and their melodramatic exaggerations offended my sense of rightness. Geoffrey said that he didn't know how to do the tango, and, when I offered to teach him, relapsed into surliness and refused, maintaining it was a dance for lounge lizards. Half-way through their travesty Noreen and Graham stopped dancing and announced that they were going upstairs for a bit. There was something they needed to talk over in private. Their footsteps sounded up the narrow stairs and then in the room overhead, but only for a little.

When ‘Jealousy' came to an end, neither Geoffrey nor I put on another record. We sat in glum silence until the lure of Chandos House, that distant oasis where
Scaramouche
and
Black Bartlemy
wandered among the whipped cream walnut trees overwhelmed me with a desire too intense to be denied. I got up and said, ‘Excuse me,' coyly, as if I needed to go to the lav. Instead I went out into the little hall, picked up my attaché case which I had left there, opened the front door softly and went outside, shutting it after me with equal care. The night was warm, which was just as well since I had, on arrival, handed my cardigan to Noreen and what she had done with it I had no idea. Anyway, I thought, she would be pleased to have it as proof of my presence overnight in case Miss Malahide got suspicious.

I had turned on my bicycle lamp and was strapping the attaché case back on to the carrier when the front door opened softly and Geoffrey came out, making no noise. At first he seemed taken aback to see me, but then he actually laughed, something I had never heard him do so far, and probably never would again.

‘I'm off to the pub,' he announced. ‘If you want, I could fetch you a shandy outside.'

I declined the offer gracefully and we parted good friends, Geoffrey even going so far as to declare that one day, maybe, he would get me and Mrs What's-her-name to teach him the tango. As I mounted my bicycle and drew away from the kerb he waved me on my way with a gesture, I felt, worthy of Rafael Sabatini at his swashbuckling best. Almost, for a fleeting instant, I wished I had been littler.

By the time I got home it was dark, Chandos House shining silver under a star-salted sky. They were the only lights in evidence. As I wheeled my bike up the front path I could see no sign of life. For the first time it occurred to me that Mrs Benyon might well have turned in for the night. As I tugged at the bell pull and heard the resultant carillon distantly clanging, I began to rehearse phrases of explanation and apology.

I might as well have saved myself the trouble. No answer came to my summons, neither there nor round at the back where, having put away my bicycle, I tried my luck at the scullery door, banging on it with the handle of a mop which I found propped outside. Desperate, I took the mop round to the side of the house, to Mrs Benyon's bedroom window, and swished it against the glass, at first diffidently, then with a reckless abandon that took no heed of the consequences.

Nothing. Doubly opaque with net curtains and drawn blind, the window stayed blank, no frame for an enraged housekeeper awakened from her beauty sleep. The thought struck me: could it be that Noreen was not the only mouse to be out playing that night whilst the cat was away? – that Mrs Benyon had deserted her post, was living it up in town until the small hours, even, it was conceivable, not planning to return until morning?

I went round the house again, hopelessly seeking an open window. All that offered was a ventilator over the sink in the scullery, too narrow for me to squeeze through at the best of times, let alone after having supped on savoury pasties, trifle and chocolate cake. Tiredness possessed me. Taking my bicycle lamp by the way of better illumination than was offered by Perseus, Andromeda
et al
., up there in the sky, I went down the garden to the bothy, reflecting that Noreen, at least, would be pleased: no chance of Mrs Benyon finding out the true state of things and giving the game away.

I could have done with my cardigan. It was chilly and damp inside the little house, not even the thought of my money in the nest of drawers sufficient to warm me. The squeaks and scuffles which I had heard coming up the path ceased abruptly as I crossed the threshold, carrying my lamp. The mice knew when they were not wanted.

I set up one of the folded deckchairs, found two spider-webbed sacks with which to cover myself. I left the lamp on to keep the mice away, only to find besotted moths blundering in from outside, and an amazingly varied proliferation of creeping things moving across the floor to the light source like pilgrims processing to a shrine. I knew that in such horrifying conditions I would not be able to sleep a wink, an error persisted in until the moment a familiar voice awoke me with the waggish inquiry: ‘Chucked you out at last, then, have they?'

Mr Betts lost no time in restoring me to the interior of Chandos House. Having, the two of us, rung bells and banged on doors to no purpose, the gardener went back down the garden to the bothy, returning with a step-ladder and a tattered umbrella that might well have been lying there since old Mr Gosse's day. He placed the steps under the scullery ventilator, climbed up and inserted the umbrella, crook handle down, jiggling it about until, more by good luck that judgement, it engaged with the catch on the window beneath. A jerk and the casement was open, as simple as that.

‘You're younger ' n I am,' announced Mr Betts. ‘You hop in an' get the door open.' Which, excited with the adventure of it all, I did, sliding on my bottom down the draining-board before jumping down to the red-tiled floor. I looked a mess, I knew, spiders' webs in my hair and my linen dress a honeycomb of creases, but I felt gloriously swashbuckling just for that moment when I stood in Chandos House scullery on my own, guilty of breaking and entering.

I withdrew the bolts on the back door and let Mr Betts in. For a moment we stood smiling at each other, congratulating ourselves on our joint cleverness. Only then did we become conscious of the noise.

It was not so much a snore as a bubbling, like the sound Saracens in films about the Crusades made smoking hookahs, or the kind of noise you get when, seeking out the site of a puncture, you slowly rotate an inner tube in a basin of water.
Bubba-lubble
it goes, once you have found the hole.

‘Hold on!' Mr Betts ordered.

He pushed open the door into Mrs Benyon's bedroom, myself at his heels. Whatever he said, it was no time to be holding on. The room was too dark for anything much to be seen, but the
bubba-lubble
went on unremittingly. The gardener made his way to the window and tugged the cord at the bottom of the blind. Full of energy and as if waiting for that moment, the blind sprang up, wound itself round its roller and only then desisted, the acorn bobble at the end of the cord swinging against the window pane and away again until it finally calmed down. The room was suddenly full of light and a bad smell and the massy landscape of Mrs Benyon on her back on the bed, legs apart, nightgown rucked up to her armpits, her mottled stomach rising and falling in time with the
bubba-lubbling
.

I cried out: ‘Fetch the doctor! She's dying!'

‘She's dead,' Mr Betts corrected calmly. ‘Dead drunk.'

I don't know what I would have done without Mr Betts. Assaulted by the smell of vomit in Mrs Benyon's bedroom, it was all I could do, after the rich fare of the night before, not to throw up myself. In the nick of time the gardener opened the window as far as it would go, and the lovely fresh air poured in, saving me from humiliation. As for attending to the housekeeper's personal needs, as one woman to another in her predicament, that was something which, sick or well, I simply wasn't up to.

I never knew whether Mr Betts had a wife or not, drunken or sober, but either way he evidently knew all about what went on a woman between being naked and being properly dressed, because when he eventually emerged with Mrs Benyon into the kitchen – she leaning heavily on his arm – she was in her usual get-up of flowered overall over a grey skirt, her stockings unwrinkled, which must have meant that she had on her corset and suspenders as well. The only thing that was out of place was her hair, which was sopping wet, with her perm turned into wiggly corkscrews which reminded me of the serpents on Miss Malahide's brass knocker; the gardener's first step in her rehabilitation having been to drag her to the sink and force her head under the tap.

I had been told to put on the kettle and make some good strong coffee. With Mrs Benyon screaming like a stuck pig as the cold water cascaded over her head and down the front of her nightgown it did not seem the best moment to inquire how many spoons. I had never made coffee before and had no idea how much to put in the pot. In the event, I found a pound packet in the larder and put in half – the gardener, after all, had stipulated strong. Later, as the three of us sat drinking at the table, Mr Betts said it was the first cup of coffee for which he could have done with a knife and fork; but he was ready to admit that it did wonders for Mrs Benyon. After three cups of it she looked almost normal – normal for her, that is; which was to say, as awful as usual.

She turned on me that familiar glazed look of hers as if, in the course of her cooking, she had set her eyes in aspic.

‘What've you been up to? You look as if you'd been dragged through a hedge backward.'

You're a fine one to talk!
I thought angrily, but I didn't say anything. To have told about sleeping in the bothy would have meant giving Noreen away, and I had promised.

Her ill temper with the gardener was more specific. No gratitude for his services rendered: quite the contrary. He had, she alleged, been the root cause of what she called her little accident. She had suspected it at the time and now she knew for a certainty. That last bottle he had brought her had been definitely ‘off'.

‘Any more like that,' she finished balefully, ‘and you know what.'

Mr Betts's habitual expression of knobby good humour did not waver. ‘An' what,' he asked, with the air of one launching a paper dart into the wind for the sheer interest of seeing how far it would go, ‘if, when she gets back, I give the missus a blow by blow account of how I found you this morning?'

‘Tell her what you like,' the housekeeper returned with a shrug. ‘I got too much on her. She'll never give me the push, no matter what.' And to me: ‘And that goes for you too, little Miss Know-all.'

Never had my room seemed such a haven. I sat down on the bed with my head in a whirl. I knew now that Mr Betts paid his blackmail to Mrs Benyon in gin, which I had been brought up to believe a very bad thing, making people go blind, or worse. I knew it was gin apart from what had been said because there had been several empty bottles labelled ‘Gin' lying about her bedroom. But what was it that the housekeeper had on Miss Gosse?

Part of the whirligig in my head was due to pleasant excitement that so much was happening to me. Not all, though. After an unsuccessful attempt to block off all thought of it, I gave in and thought about the horribleness of Mrs Benyon's body, the mountainous stomach, the triangle of grizzled hair that looked like a fur the moths had had the best part of.

I needed to change anyway, so I took off all my clothes, stood on my chair to get a good look, and, for the first time in my life, consciously examined my own body in the looking-glass. It seemed OK, if a bit on the skinny side. I could see my ribs. I felt better for seeing them because it came to me that even if, by a stroke of ill fortune, I grew up to have a horrible body like Mrs Benyon's, once I had been dead long enough I would end up a skeleton as elegant as any film star or mannequin. Dead, we would all be elegant together.

The quivering leaves at the window seemed especially agitated. It may have been that they had never before seen me standing naked on a chair and it bothered them. Or perhaps they had been worried to discover that my bed had not been slept in.

‘Where were you?' they seemed to be saying, pressing against the pane in their anxiety. ‘Are you all right?'

I got down from the chair, went over to the window, put my face against the glass, cool, calming. Whispered, reassuring the leaves and myself: ‘I'm all right. All right!'

In the afternoon, Alfred called by to ask if I would like to come with him to see how the house was getting along. I answered that I would have loved to, only I had homework to do, which was both true and untrue, as I think we both understood. I came out with him to the car and we parted very lovingly, waving to each other across the unbridgeable abyss which had again opened up between us and was getting wider by the minute.