The Quivering Tree (29 page)

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, gathering 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?'

Since there was no prospect of getting away without some demeaning pushing, I said, as nastily as I knew how, ‘As I've forgiven you for having to have two stitches in my cheek I suppose I may as well forgive you for calling me a cheat as well. Please can I go now?'

She took her hand away, saying sadly: ‘If only you loved me as much as I love you, you would understand.'

‘In that case,' I snapped back, ‘I'm very glad I don't!' and rode away, pleased with myself.

She was a much faster cyclist than myself, especially on the long pull-up of the Sprowston Road, so she must have stayed behind deliberately. I said aloud, triumphantly: ‘
That's
put you in your place!'

When I got back to Chandos House I ran straight up to my room and would have stayed there, going without tea altogether rather than risk having it with Miss Locke, if I hadn't felt so absolutely ravenous. Getting the better of Mrs Crail for once in my life had made me feel even hungrier than normal. In the end, I couldn't stand it any longer; went down to the dining-room only to find it blessedly empty and one of Mrs Benyon's bumper teas on the table. She came in with the teapot as I was tucking in and I said what a gorgeous tea it was.

She said: ‘That's to celebrate another few days and I won't be having to put up with you again till summer's over.'

The tone in which she said it brought home to me how far we had come since I had first arrived at Chandos House, only a half-term ago but light-years by another reckoning. Feeling powerful and successful, I smiled up at her over my buttered scone and returned: ‘You're just saying that. You know you'll miss me like anything.'

‘There's a good miss and bad miss.' But she smiled back, making it not such a dusty day after all.

Next day being Saturday, I decided to cycle to Earlham Hall, where I hadn't been since I had gone there with my sister Maisie after my father died. First, though, I went to the post office and cashed the postal order my mother had sent me to cover my fare home, and then I went to Thorpe Station to buy my ticket. For some reason my mother had sent 28s 4d, having obviously forgotten that I was still a child, entitled to half-fare. She must have forgotten about me quite a bit to do a thing like that; but I didn't hold it against her because, to be honest, I had forgotten quite a bit about
her
, so we were quits. Actually, my mother would be getting back even more change and not only because she had made a mistake and sent the full fare. When it came to telling the man in the booking office what I wanted, I asked not for a return, but for a half single. It put off the necessity of having to make decisions.

The rockery at Earlham Hall had none of the beauty it had possessed on my previous visit. It looked drab and grey, a fit place for Quakers. Understandable, I suppose. Coming from mountainous regions where winter must often have seemed to go on for ever, what else could alpine plants do but explode into colour with the English spring, seizing the darling moment with nothing left over for afters? Who knew what summer might bring, how put any trust in it?

Who and how indeed.

To pretend to myself that my journey to the Hall had a defined purpose, I quartered the rockery paths where I had earlier clambered pierced with delight, among foliage that stuck out in sullen clumps from dustings of gravel. I shut my eyes tight in a vain attempt to resurrect remembered joy, reopening them to the even bleaker possibility that perhaps there had never been any to be resurrected in the first place: I had made it all up, peacock and all.

‘Careful he doesn't peck at you!' my sister had called out, so the bird at least must have been real, those feather tips moving in the breeze. At that moment, as if my longing had conjured it out of the past, a peacock came slouching over the big stones to where I was standing – but oh dear! not the blue and the emerald and the gold nonpareil of my imagination, but a miserable moulting fowl, as out of temper with the world and its condition as I was with myself. We stared at each other and went our separate ways.

The truth was, I shouldn't have come. I wasn't feeling at all well. Not the satisfactory unwellness of being properly ill when one could, in good conscience, throw oneself upon the world's sympathy, confident of a tender response; but a niggly, drizzly sense of something being wrong in a way you could not even specify. I had intended to treat myself to one of the pêche Melba sundaes they sold in the tea-room on the ground floor of the Hall, but now the very word ‘sundae' made my stomach turn over. I also jettisoned my plan of stopping on my way back through the city to replenish my stock of whipped cream walnuts at Sullivan's sweetshop in St Giles. The thought of whipped cream walnuts was making me feel sick too.