The Quivering Tree (6 page)

The landing light was out which was a relief, the darkness encouraging me to feel myself invisible. And I was lucky. Either the floorboards of Chandos House did not squeak like those of St Giles, or, in years of practice circumventing Maud when about my private business, my feet had acquired a sensitivity to making choices which enabled me to get down to the ground floor with hardly a sound. As I neared the dining-room, a noise from the direction of the kitchen first froze me to the spot with horror before making me, albeit silently, giggle with relief. It was Mrs Benyon, snoring.

Noiselessly I turned the white china knob on the dining-room door, noiselessly entered and crossed to the piano. Although the out of doors at the back of the house was presumably as dark as the out of doors in front, it did not seem so. My awareness of the french window, of its wide expanse of glass deluded me into the conviction that I could see grass and fruit trees and a gentle sky.

I opened the music case and tenderly removed the whipped cream walnut, so filled with exultation as to forget completely to take, as I had intended, a quick peep at ‘The Birth of the Blues' so as to satisfy myself once and for all who in fact had been responsible for that masterpiece of jazz. I had already decided that I would bite off the walnut at once, to fortify me for the return journey, the nut and no more. The rest would have to wait until I regained the haven of my hammock-bed.

The walnut was so glorious I could have exclaimed aloud, praising God for nuts. And would have, probably, if somebody standing in the open doorway, had not got in first, in a voice veined with a familiar undertone of mockery: ‘Well, I must say! What a little pig!'

Miss Locke taught history. This was particularly apt since she was the only person I had ever seen whose forehead and nose, in profile, were precisely in line, the way they were in gods and goddesses from Ancient Greek temples. Presumably the Ancient Greeks thought such a profile a sign of beauty. In my judgement, for what it was worth, whilst it may have been OK on gods and goddesses fresh from Mount Olympus, it was pretty off-putting in a human being, especially one in authority. It made Miss Locke look censorious, which I didn't think she was, particularly. The thing, however, that made her face a difficult one to come to a decision about was that the two halves, upper and lower, did not really belong together. They reminded you of the faces in those jokey books which have their pages divided horizontally, making it possible to combine brows and chins you would never ordinarily dream of putting together.

The Ancient Greeks, I am pretty sure, would not have been best pleased with a classical brow and nose that modulated, as the history mistress's did, via a small round mouth filled with small teeth, to a chin that pointed forward and upward, a little like Punch.

Just the same, met by night in the dining-room of Chandos House, slim-armed in her sleeveless shift of greeny-blue, she was undeniably beautiful, holding a candlestick with a lighted candle in it and the light thrown up on to her face. It made her eyes deep-set and mysterious and contrived to etch a honey-coloured aureole round the edges of her short brown hair. Unusually for schoolmistresses of that time, Miss Locke wore her hair cut like a man's. Not exactly an Eton crop, which was beginning to go out of fashion anyway, it looked so ugly from the back, but more like something you might expect to see on a faun or a satyr, or a poet of the Romantic period. The hair, curly, with a natural spring to it, fitted the shape of her head like a cap, one that stuck to the edges of her face as if carved there. Her exposed ears were unusually small, the kind Ethel M. Dell and
Peg's Paper
, I shouldn't be surprised, meant by shell-like, not meaning a crab or even a whelk, I felt sure, but something dainty and delicate not to be picked up on Cromer beach. Had I thought about it, or been a bit older, I might have guessed that Miss Locke must be a history teacher with exceptionally good qualifications for Mrs Crail to put up with a hair-do like that.

I knew that I was much too old to cry, but cut off from my walnut in mid-bite, I had no alternative. I howled: burst out that I hadn't had anything to eat since breakfast and not much even then: that I wasn't a pig, whatever she said, just dying of hunger, that was all.

‘Be quiet, you little fool!' Miss Locke ordered. ‘You'll wake up Mrs Benyon.'

She had only to command once. Then, with a finger to her lip, she led the way into the kitchen where, whilst I watched incredulously, half-certain it was all a dream, she opened the larder door, took a loaf out of an earthenware crock set on the floor, and brought it to the scrubbed deal table where a bread board and bread knife waited as if against just such an emergency. The housekeeper's snores continued with unabated gusto as Miss Locke cut two slices, real doorsteps. Putting back the loaf, taking care to replace the lid of the crock without noise, she returned to the table with a jar of strawberry jam, which she spread generously over the bread.

‘Won't Mrs Benyon notice?' I whispered.

‘Her?' Contemptuously, barely keeping her voice down: ‘She'll think she ate it in her sleep. Let me see now –' Miss Locke pondered, more to herself than to me. ‘We'd better not take a plate –' Then: ‘I know!'

She took a handkerchief out of her pocket, a sensible-sized one, not the lacy kind my mother went in for, not a bit of use for wrapping hunks of bread and jam in.

‘No crumbs, mind!' Miss Locke scooped every last crumb off the bread board into her cupped hand before popping her little haul into her little mouth. She aligned board and knife exactly as they had been before, and returned the pot of jam to its shelf. She handed me the handkerchief-wrapped booty, which I received too overwhelmed even to say thank you. ‘That at least should make sure we don't find a corpse in the morning. Up you go now – quietly!'

If I nearly disobeyed this injunction, she had only herself to blame for it. Half-way up to the landing, going slowly and carefully so as not to create crumbs whicn might give us both away, I became aware of Miss Locke's footsteps on the stairs behind me, going faster than I. The next moment, she pinched my bottom.

‘Hurry up, slowcoach!' she hissed in my ear, edging past.

On the landing she waited until I had completed my own ascent, gone to my room and shut the door. A little later, standing on the thin chenille rug that lay between my bed and the chest of drawers, the bread and jam, wrapped and untasted, still in my hand – the whipped cream walnut, set down on the bed for a moment, had slid down into the dip in the middle – I heard a door opening and guessed that Miss Gosse had been awakened by the sound of Miss Locke's footsteps on her way to her own bedroom, and had got out of bed to speak to her. I heard only the sound of voices, not what was said. I heard Miss Locke laugh – at least I think it was her – and say something or other, and then I heard a door shut.

I sat on my bed in the dark to consider that nobody had ever pinched my bottom before. I did not consider it at all nice.

A schoolmistress!

I unwrapped the bread and jam and ate it all up in indignant bites that must have interfered with my digestion, for I could feel the bread stuck somewhere at the back of my breastbone. Then I went to bed. Only when the alarm went off at 6.45 did I remember the whipped cream walnut in the dip, and for a dreadful moment thought that I had gone to sleep on top of it. Visions of melted chocolate and goo stuck to the sheet made me wish never to wake up again. When, albeit reluctantly, my eyes insisted on opening on their own account, I saw that in fact the whipped cream walnut had fallen on to the floor and was still edible. My spirits rose, readying for what the new day might hold, not only by way of breakfast but by way of everything.

Just to be on the safe side, though, I polished off the whipped cream walnut before I went down to the dining room. Which, considering that breakfast turned out to consist of a mingy bowl of cornflakes and one triangle of toast – only one! – was just as well.

The Sprowston Road sloped gently but unremittingly down to the city, a fearsome freewheeling joy as my Hudson gathered momentum with a fine disregard for a child's hands desperately squeezing its unresponsive brakes. The bicycle, which had belonged to my sister Maisie before she had grown up and gone to work in London, weighed a ton, or something not far short of it. Knowing nothing of bicycles, my parents had purchased the vehicle – it seemed a kind of
lèse majesté
to call it anything less – following their general principle that what was solid and heavy must, for that very reason, be superior to what was hollow and light. Downhill, it gave gravity a new meaning. Uphill it equalled a hellish ache in the calves; and even as, in a shocked way and suppressing an impulse to scream, I enjoyed the first part of my first ride from Chandos House to school, my legs were already anticipating the anguish of the ride back.

A journey which had to be undertaken four times a day, what was more. After breakfast, to my consternation, there had been no packet of sandwiches proffered for putting into my school case before it was strapped to the bike carrier. Was it possible that my frugal hostesses dispensed with lunch altogether?

‘We prefer to have our main meal at midday,' Miss Gosse had mercifully explained. ‘So much healthier, and as we have an hour and a half there really is ample time so long as we (I could tell she meant “you”) don't hang about chatting.'

Shooting the slope not quite out of control, I heard a bicycle bell behind ringing like mad. It was Miss Locke trying to catch up with me.

‘Next on the right!' she shouted.

I could have done with more notice. As it was, I shot across the bows of a United bus which luckily had better brakes than mine, up a turning which, with the illogic of geography, rose from the gentle planes of the Sprowston Road like the motte of Norwich castle. Momentum carried me up the first few feet of this precipice, after which the same gravity that an instant earlier had lent wings to my flight grabbed me by the rear wheel so fiercely that I had, more or less, to fall off and push – just at the moment, too, when Miss Locke and Miss Gosse sailed past, Miss Locke making nothing at all of the gradient and Miss Gosse's stumpy legs pumping away merrily nineteen to the dozen.

Pushing the Hudson up the hill was almost as hard as actually riding it. I wanted to call out to the pair disappearing in the distance that I was a convalescent, it wasn't my fault; but they had vanished round the curve of the motte, on to the plateau which ended at the school gates. By the time I myself had arrived at the latter, it was to find their two bicycles parked smugly side by side in the reserved racks, and they themselves, no doubt, at their leisurely robing in the Staff Room. For my especial benefit the gong was well into the unctuous ululation which meant time was running out and prepare to meet thy Maker – or rather, Mrs Crail, which was infinitely worse.

I dashed to the cloakroom, hung up my shoebag, tore off my panama and blazer, changed my shoes even though there wasn't time for such fussiness, except that to put a foot still clad in an outdoor shoe to a school floor was a capital offence. I ran to deliver the letter which alone would readmit me to the sacred portals – Dr Parfitt's letter which certified that I was fit to return to my studies provided that, for the remainder of the term, I was excused gym, games, and, by implication, any other dangerous physical pursuit such as racing to get into the Assembly Hall for prayers ahead of the headmistress.

Miss Reade, the school secretary, had her office next door to the headmistress's room. As I knocked, waiting to be told to enter, Mrs Crail emerged from next door in all her glory, Bible in hand, gown filled with some celestial thermal that was bearing her along, if not aloft, everything in place but the halo.

‘Back at last, Sylvia!' At sight of me her little eyes disappeared in one of her crinkled smiles. The voice was like a dose of salts. I knew better than to expect any expression of gratification at my restoration to health. ‘Let us hope in more conciliatory mood. No more threats of revolution, I trust, to make us all tremble in our boots.'

She really was an old devil the way she nourished herself on the remembrance of ancient grudges. English was her subject and donkeys' years ago, working through some exercise in
Marriott's English
, we had been instructed to come up one at a time to the blackboard and inscribe thereon any one word whose sound – sound, mark you – we thought among the most beautiful in the language. Despite this emphasis on purely aural values, most of the first girls to go up to the board under Mrs Crail's sneering, smiling gaze, wrote words like
Mother
or
Baby
, or
Jesus
which, to my way of thinking, was not only soppy in the extreme but directly contradictory to what was being demanded of us. The textbook specifically enjoined us to ignore meaning. The sound was all.

Pondering in the time available what should be my own contribution, I hit on the word
Evolution
. Mouthing it silently, I relished the way it rolled over the tongue, like chocolate fudge sauce. By the time it came to my turn to perform, I had made a slight alteration to my first draft. Not
Evolution
but
Revolution. Revolution really
rolled. One little ‘r' made all the difference.

When I had written the word on the blackboard in my best print, I stood back and regarded my handiwork with a certain modest satisfaction. Even in chalk
Revolution sounded
good. Mrs Crail who, making her own rules, had commended the
Mothers
and the
Babies
and the
Jesuses
, looked at
Revolution
and smiled and smiled; following upon which she told me what she thought of the company I kept, obviously consisting of anarchists, Bolsheviks, and the descendants of those abominable Frenchmen who had cut off the heads of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. A ritual erasing of the infamy, she took hold of the dampened felt pad we used for cleaning the blackboard and rubbed the offending word out. This pad, never damp enough, was by mid-morning always full of powdered chalk. You had to know how to use it, gingerly, and even then you were lucky not to get chalk dust in your hair and your mouth among other places. Since Mrs Crail always appointed blackboard monitors on whom the duty – and the powdered chalk – customarily fell, it could not be said that she was unaware of the drawbacks of the blackboard eraser. In the warmth of the moment she had just forgotten.