The Quivering Tree (24 page)

‘You encouraged her.'

‘Mustn't let Auntie take me for granted.' Noreen looked demure. ‘And why d' you suppose Her Imperial Majesty wanted you to board here at Chandos House in the first place?'

I explained – haltingly: it was still a matter for recurrent regret – that it was because, for some reason, she hadn't thought Mrs Curwen suitable.

‘Don't you believe it! She did it to make trouble between Gossy and Cocky Locky.'

Now I was completely at sea. ‘How could my coming here to stay do that?'

‘God give me strength!' Noreen exclaimed, casting her eyes skyward. We walked about for a little in silence, each of us baffled in our differing ways, until Noreen began again, her manner carefully casual: ‘Of course you know Miss Locke is soft on you. You can't be that daft. Handle it right and you can have her eating out of your hand.'

‘Soft!' I exclaimed. It was my turn to laugh, albeit with some bitterness. On the contrary, I pointed out, Miss Locke was hard on me, very hard, always jeering and poking fun. As clinching proof I nearly told Noreen about the unspeakable kiss and the tongue pushed wetly into my mouth, only that was what it was, unspeakable. I could hardly bear to think about it, let alone put it into words. As it was, Noreen merely repeated that, no matter what I said, Miss Locke
was
soft on me, it was plain as the nose on your face, and if I played my cards right I could do all right for myself.

‘Be nice to her,' she urged, as one friend to another. ‘At least she's the only one of the bunch that hasn't got one foot in the grave. Play with her, why don't you? You must know what I mean. Let her do things –'

‘I
do
play with her!' I countered heatedly. ‘And I do let her do things. She's always hiking those boring old duets out of the piano stool
and
making me play
secondo
all the time, which isn't fair, but I never say anything –'

After that, somehow, talk petered out and I went back, a little distractedly, to naming the flowers. I couldn't remember achillea for the life of me, and I probably got centaurea wrong as well. Ignorant I might be, like most of my contemporaries in IIIa, but I was not a complete fool. My body, if not my brain, alerted me to the fact that in some way I didn't understand my conversation with Noreen had consisted of more than the words actually spoken.

‘Trollius,' I instructed, pointing to something yellow. It was almost certainly not trollius at all, but I didn't suppose Noreen would notice. Her mind seemed to be on other things.

After they had gone, Mrs Crail in her hired car, Miss Malahide and Noreen resolutely driving off in the direction of Wroxham and, in all likelihood, looking for the first place where there was room to turn round once they were safely out of sight, Miss Barton – who had not been offered a lift by the headmistress – stepping out with sturdy resignation for the tram terminus, I sat alone in the front room doing my homework. I had been at Chandos House long enough now for the photographs of Mr Gosse which covered its walls no longer to trouble me. I was not even conscious that they were there. The room, the whole house, seemed blessedly tranquil and at ease after all the socializing.

I had an essay to write for Mrs Crail – ‘Family Pets'. She went in for soppy subjects like that, probably in order to provide herself with the opportunity to tell us off for writing soppy essays. So far as pets were concerned, St Giles did not have a happy history. Apart from the puppy who had been run over, there was only Pillow the toad, whose violent end still haunted my dreams
¹
Otherwise there had only been a couple of cats who had disdainfully accepted our proffered board and lodging on the understanding (or rather, our misunderstanding) that in return they would keep down the mice. Anyone calling that pair pets to their faces would, I am pretty sure, have felt the unsheathed edge of their claws. The truth was that, at St Giles, the family pet had been me, so much the youngest of the family, the spoilt darling.

As I had no confidence that this reading of her title would be acceptable to Mrs Crail, I invented a mynah bird named Joey, formerly the property of a sea captain in the China trade, and consequently arriving in our home with a vocabulary calculated to make spinster ladies go into shock. Fortunately for his avian soul, the Salvation Army hall was situated a few doors further up St Giles. Thanks to their band which, every Sunday morning, passed the house in full flood, to say nothing of the prayer meetings held in the street outside, Joey became a reformed character, his rendition of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers' in a clear and pure soprano enough to bring any sinner to the mercy seat. By the time I had finished with Joey – two sides were the minimum and I managed to cover four – I believed in him implicitly, even if Mrs Crail, as was all too likely, wielding her blue pencil (all the other teachers used red) and smiling her abominable crescent smile, made it clear that she did not believe a word of it.

The exhilaration engendered by the completion of this literary exercise did not last long. My other homework was arithmetic.

Arithmetic! The very word was like a knell. Geometry was fine, algebra an endlessly entrancing game. At both subjects I was the best in IIIa – but arithmetic! I simply could not understand how the three came to be lumped together under the heading of mathematics.
If a train travels 30 miles at an average speed of 65 miles per hour and a further 25 miles at an average speed of 70 miles per hour, how many eggs at a shilling a dozen will fit into the guards van?
– or words to that effect. Every time I sat down to do my arithmetic homework I was confronted with the unpalatable proof that whilst diagrams and codes might be right up my alley, at trains and eggs and miles per hour – at real life, in fact – I was a washout.

My trouble was not that I couldn't get the correct answer to arithmetical problems, but that I arrived at them by a forbidden route –
interdit! verboten!
– by algebra which, for some reason (the sacred Syllabus, I suppose, or the examining board at Cambridge having its bit of fun), was worse than getting the wrong answer altogether so long as you went wrong using the correct arithmetical method. Arithmetic homework was done on paper specially ruled with a wide margin on the right-hand side where you had to show your working, so that your maths mistress could check that you weren't committing the sin against the Holy Ghost – in other words, cheating by using algebra.

Yet what was wrong with that lovely science, if that was what it was: poetry would be a better word for it – with its dear little numbers that signified squares and cubes hovering over the x's and the y's like honey bees, as if about to rob them of their nectar: its plus signs that changed miraculously to minus when you transferred them to the other side of the equation; its brackets that opened out like gates into a magic garden?

I once looked up the word
algebra
in the dictionary and discovered that it came from the Arabic. Just imagine! If only I had had the luck to be born in Saudi Arabia or Morocco I might have lived out my life in those perpetually sunny climes with never the hateful shadow of arithmetic – that which must be passed – darkening my days. Let x equal the number of camels, of date palms, of belly-dancers. Allah was great! The Arabs, the lucky things, had x's everywhere, with no one to hiss the imprecation ‘Arithmetic!' With x at my bidding, I felt reasonably sure, I could unravel the secret of the universe.

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.