The Quivering Tree (5 page)

I wondered what had happened to Miss Locke.

Miss Gosse took the suitcase from me and set it down at the side of the hallstand, next to my school case and my shoebag. As if she had read my thought she said: ‘Helen – Miss Locke – has gone to the concert at St Andrew's Hall. She won't be back till late. You'll see her in the morning.' On the way down the hall towards the back of the house, she added: ‘When I saw your music case I thought,
oh good!
You and Miss Locke will be able to play duets together.'

‘I hope I'll be good enough.'

‘Much better than me, that's certain! I'm afraid there are times when Helen – Miss Locke – quite loses patience with my clumsy fingers. I hope this won't make your head swell, Sylvia, but the staff all agree that nobody plays for prayers better than you do.'

The praise, sweet to my ears, brought a lump to my throat.

‘Do they really?'

‘Miss Malahide always says, the way you play us out, though our feet are obliged to march for the sake of decorum, our spirits go to our classrooms dancing.'

Miss Malahide was the art mistress, whiskered, leathery, and demonstrably barmy. Reduced to life size, I followed Miss Gosse down the hall almost to the end of it.

‘We shall have to take you on a conducted tour.' She smiled as she opened yet another shut door. ‘In the mean time, this is the dining-room.'

I went through the door and exclaimed, ‘How pretty!'

Miss Gosse looked pleased. I could see she thought I meant the room, and I knew better than to put her right. In fact, the room was nothing much: dull beige paper almost hidden under framed photographs of rocky places, bleak and treeless and without people; a round dining-table covered with a brown cloth, an old-fashioned sideboard holding toast racks and cruets and a bottle of HP sauce, and a piano of which I knew instantly to expect the worst, since its front was made of a kind of fretwork with faded mauve satin showing through the holes. Somebody had placed my music case at the side of it. It leaned against the yellowish wood nonchalantly enough, but I transmitted a silent apology to the music books within, or rather to their progenitors, to Mozart and Beethoven, to Ivor Novello and (my taste in music being as eclectic and indiscriminating as my taste in literature) to whoever it was who wrote ‘The Birth of the Blues'.

‘Go on,' Miss Gosse urged. ‘Try it out, just to see what you think of the tone.'

I raised the lid from the yellowed keys and, without sitting down on the stool covered in worn burgundy velvet, pounded out the first few chords of ‘Three-Fours' by Coleridge-Taylor, my show-off piece, which I loved because it sounded so difficult when in fact it was almost as easy as ‘Chopsticks'.

Miss Gosse exclaimed, ‘There! I knew you'd like it!' I did not say that, on the contrary, I thought it sounded like a string of old tin cans. One thing was certain: I was never going to sound like Moisevitch on that. But then, who was I kidding? I was never going to sound like Moisevitch on anything, not even the Steinway in St Andrew's Hall; which was why, without having discussed it with my mother, I had told Miss Barker, my music teacher, that I would be discontinuing my lessons once I had moved. Though I had said it was too far to come all the way to Earlham Road twice a week, I would have come ten times the distance if there had been a dog's chance that I would sound like Moisevitch at the end of the journey. Miss Barker had been quite put out – not only, I am pretty sure, because of losing the money from my fees. I had passed several Royal Academy of Music examinations and had won the medal at the Norwich Music Festival for piano solo under twelve, playing one of Bach's French Suites, so she had expectations of me. There was even the possibility – she had dangled the dream in front of me as one proffering a golden apple of the Hesperides – that I might one day become a music teacher like herself if I went on practising.

That was before my father took me to hear Moisevitch, which he did not long before he died. It was meant to be a treat, which it was, and an incentive, which it definitely was not, because I, who had previously – even if, out of superstitious dread, the actual words remained unspoken – thought myself capable of everything, almost, learned with the opening arpeggios that not only would I never be a concert pianist but that to be a music teacher was an unacceptable alternative. This last, to be truthful, did not exactly make me feel sad. On the contrary. So many roads through life beckoned delightfully, it was almost a relief to find one blocked, one choice less.

I stopped showing off with Coleridge-Taylor, closed the piano lid carefully, ashamed of Miss Gosse's undeserved praise and at the same time glad of it.

‘Miss Locke
will
be pleased!'

When I had exclaimed ‘How pretty!' what I had meant was the garden. The single good thing about the Chandos House dining-room was its french window which gave on to a lawn with lovely old untidy fruit trees growing out of it as if they had just that moment risen from deep down in the earth and were stretching their gnarled limbs in an ecstasy of light and air. Behind the trees were flowerbeds and shrubberies and vegetables, with a glimpse of fields beyond. Unlike the rest of the house that I had seen so far, the dining-room was bright with sun, so light that at eight o'clock in the evening there was still no need for gaslight to drink our Horlicks/ Bovril by. The garden was permeated with the golden warmth of evening. A blackbird sang in an apple tree. A shimmering veil of midges hovered above the grass.

Miss Gosse said, ‘We often eat here with the window open in the summer. Would you like to have it open now?'

I said that I should like it very much. Just at that moment Mrs Benyon came in with a tray with two mugs on it. She put the tray down on the dining table. My heart twanged with sorrow as I saw that there weren't any cream crackers.

Miss Gosse said: ‘Would you mind opening the french window, Mrs Benyon?' And, to me, in explanation: ‘I'm afraid the bolt's a bit high up for me.'

Mrs Benyon looked out at the garden as if she couldn't abide the sight of it. She said: ‘Mosquitoes,' in her heavy, flat voice and went out of the room without doing anything about the bolt.

‘She's quite right, of course,' Miss Gosse said brightly. ‘Mrs Benyon, as you'll discover, is the practical one of our little household. Are
you
practical, Sylvia?'

Not too sure, but anxious to make the reply which would do me the most good: ‘I – I think so.'

‘Capital!' exclaimed Miss Gosse. ‘That makes two of you!'

I went upstairs again carrying hot water for my bedtime ablutions. Upon Miss Gosse's instructions I had gone through another door, this time the one at the end of the hall, the door into the kitchen, a large, red-tiled expanse with the same aspect and consequently – though the window was much smaller and obstructed by some pot plants that were mottled rather like Mrs Benyon – some of the same light which had transformed the dining-room. I could hear the blackbird still singing.

‘If you don't see Mrs Benyon, knock on the door next to the dresser. That's the door to her bedroom. She will have your hot water ready.'

Relieved in some way I could not have explained that the housekeeper and I were to sleep on different levels, I went into the kitchen and found her on the point of emerging from her bedroom door, one she made haste to shut as soon as she saw the intruder into her domain. Hungry and emotionally stressed as I was, her hostility confused me. So far in my life, so far as I could tell at any rate, most people seemed to like me – at least they acted as if they did. As a result, I had not yet encountered enough of the other kind to have evolved the right technique for dealing with them. That was why I always found myself struck dumb in the presence of Mrs Crail, for instance, and it was exactly the same with Mrs Benyon. She floored me with her utter lack of love, not a speck of it showing through the thick crust of her withering indifference. I wondered fleetingly whether the housekeeper, as the headmistress was reputed to be, was another of those courtesy missuses, and if a certain prickliness might not be a common factor among women who pretended to be married when they weren't. I also wondered if Mrs Benyon might be thinking that she ought by rights to be paid extra now that she had one extra to housekeep for, and Miss Gosse had made no offer in that direction.

This latter thought made me feel more sympathetic towards her, and I might have ventured something in my sweetly winsome vein about doing my best not to be any extra trouble; only, as I watched her filling the shining copper hot-water can from the outsize kettle which stood steaming on the range, I saw that she filled it to the very brim, deliberately, dangerously full, and gave up all hope of a truce. Rightly or wrongly, I felt convinced that she intended me to spill some of the scalding water on the hall lino or the stairs, if not on to myself, so that then she could complain to Miss Gosse: ‘See what you've lumbered me with!'

Disguising my mistrust with elaborate gratitude, I took the can and with slow, careful steps made my way out of the kitchen and along the hall to the foot of the stairs. Before I ever set foot on the first tread, my hands felt trembly. I knew I would never make it.

I had to make it.

After a quick glance back to make sure both the kitchen and the dining-room doors were shut, I set the can down, opened the front door as quietly as I was able, picked up the water again and emptied a good half-canful on to the roots of the tree that quivered outside my window. Steam rose from the soil which didn't matter as there was nobody to see it, and if it killed the tree, too bad, the noisy thing. I was back indoors in a trice, making my demure way upstairs, full of a glee which momentarily overlaid what might have been a sudden, agonizing pang of homesickness, but could just as easily have been a renewed, a raging, apprehension of my empty stomach.

After all that, I didn't even wash. I didn't seem to have the strength, let alone the inclination. I put the plug in the bathroom basin, poured in the water, added some cold, and waited a little before letting it out: in a strange place you never knew what bathroom noises might resound through the house, and who might be listening out for them. Miss Gosse had told me to leave my sponge bag hanging from the mahogany towel-stand where I would find the towels set aside for my use – skimpy things, a small hand towel and another slightly larger, each stiff as a board. Before I hung the sponge bag up I carefully dampened my sponge and wetted the bristles of my toothbrush in case anyone thought to check up on me. I also unfolded the larger towel and mucked it about a bit so that it looked used.

Back in my bedroom it had become really dark and a little scary. Nobody had shown me how to light the gas mantle and I was afraid to try uninstructed. I didn't fancy lighting the candle either. Instead, I switched on the torch and undressed by the light of that. The leaves outside the window were noisier than ever. Either the hot water had been a stimulus or the wind had got up and was jigging them about even more than they ordinarily bestirred themselves. I turned the torch on them and watched them for a little. They quivered like those people in the Middle Ages who were always coming down with the ague. I flashed the torch on, then off, then on again, thinking that to anyone outside in the road – a passing radio operator, say, on shore leave from his ship – it could have looked like Morse code. Calling on my limited knowledge, I sent three shorts, three longs, three shorts, beaming into the darkness – SOS – wondering whose help, if anybody's, I was calling for.

I got into bed and slid instantly, cosily, down to the middle. It could have been a sailor's hammock, slung from beam to beam. There and then I fell in love with that bed, the feel of my book box nudging my buttocks through the thin mattress, the thought of the books I was brooding like a hen on a clutch of eggs. Would I awaken to find that a new Zane Grey had hatched out during the night, or perhaps a hitherto unknown play by one W. Shakespeare? I realized that, despite everything, I was still happy, the stream still forging ahead strongly.

Could the dead people in heaven see in the dark? I hoped not, but you never knew. I certainly did not want my father to lose any sleep on my account. He had always said he needed his eight hours. But just in case there was anybody up there hoping for news, I pulled the covers over my head and said out loud: ‘Don't worry! I'm all right!'

I wasn't, you know. All right. Not for long, anyway, though longer than I had thought, waking up, as it seemed to me, no more than five minutes later: until I looked at my clock numbers, shining green in the blackness, and discovered it was ten minutes past eleven.

Hunger was what had awakened me, together with the certainty that without food, instanter, I should not last out the night. Hunger and a revelation. I had been dreaming, sort of, of Miss Barker and Ludwig and Amadeus and Ivor, and of straining in vain to remember the names, one on each side of the printed music, of ‘The Birth of the Blues'. Though I didn't manage to recall either, I did remember something else.

I remembered that inside my music case, along with the great composers, there was a whipped cream walnut, purchased on my way home from my last music lesson and then – difficult as it was to believe – overlooked in all the hoo-ha of moving. Fully awake now, I pictured it in the case as clearly as if I could have reached out and taken it in my hand, its chocolate smell by now tempered with a
soupçon
of cowhide, but none the worse for that; its taste, conceivably, made even more ambrosial by a week spent sandwiched between ‘Rondo alla Turca' and ‘An die ferne Geliebte'. Fears of waking up the household, of having to explain to Miss Gosse and, much worse, to Mrs Benyon, faded in comparison with the prospect of biting off the gleaming walnut which crowned that mini-pyramid, of nibbling the swirled chocolate to get at the delicious goo within. Alive with anticipation, I scrambled up the slope that led out of bed, felt for my torch, and gingerly opened the bedroom door.