The Quivering Tree (8 page)

At lunch Miss Gosse inquired: ‘Well, Sylvia? Were you glad to be back?'

‘Very.'

I must have been getting used to the bike ride because I arrived back at Chandos House only a minute or two after Miss Locke and Miss Gosse. Admittedly, my knees trembled and my calves felt like jelly, but I managed it; to be rewarded with the most delicious smell of roasting meat rolling down the hall and quite overlaying the ground base of polish and imperfectly suppressed mildew which seemed normally resident there.

‘Run up and wash your hands, dear,' Miss Gosse called over her shoulder, already on her way to the dining-room. ‘We're ready to start.'

Run I could not, even after having been called ‘dear', but I hoisted my aching bones up the stairs as fast as I was able. Half-way to the landing I heard Miss Locke's brisk step behind me. Forewarned by what had happened upon our last encounter there, I shrank back against the dado, my rear protected, and let her pass. As she did so, she reached out with her long thin fingers and tweaked my nose.

‘There!' she laughed, continuing on her way to her bedroom without pausing for an answer. ‘Is that better?'

Well, it was and it wasn't. Speaking for myself, I felt confused by teachers who tweaked you
anywhere
.

Lunch – or dinner, as Miss Gosse insisted on calling it – was lovely. Not just the food. Breakfast had been too hurried a meal for anything but its scantiness to have made much impression on me; but at lunch I noted and enjoyed the happy atmosphere, the way Miss Gosse and Miss Locke were obviously content with each other's company. It wasn't anything particular that they said, just something you felt, something that even Mrs Benyon's dour presence going to and fro from the kitchen could not dampen. When Miss Gosse carved Miss Locke's meat she carefully – you might almost say lovingly – cut out the fat because, I suppose, she knew that Miss Locke didn't care for it. And when Miss Locke got up from the table to get the mint sauce which Mrs Benyon had left on the sideboard, she gave Miss Gosse a little pat on the head as she passed her chair, just the kind of pat you might give a King Charles spaniel.

Sitting opposite Miss Locke as we ate our meal, I saw her, really saw her for the first time. At school, in converse with any of the teachers it was unthinkable to look them directly in the face. One might as well have ventured to engage eyeball to eyeball with Medusa. Instead, one directed one's gaze a little to the right or a little to the left, or, better still, down at one's feet, so that at best one garnered a general impression only, which might or might not be accurate.

Now, with only the table between us, I realized for the first time that Miss Locke was not nearly so young as I had thought her. That boyish figure, that Peter Pan cap of hair, had misled me. Was she young at all, in fact?

Whilst it was true that I was at an age when all grown-ups, to my pitiless eye, were bogged down in varying degrees of senility, I could at least see quite well that Miss Locke was not young in the way Phyllis, my brother's fiancée, or any other of my brother's girl-friends, was young. Her complexion had a used look as if – in good condition, mind you, donated by one careful owner – it had been picked up secondhand at a good-class jumble sale; and her face, whilst free of wrinkles, had something written there which, although I could not decipher it, I knew was not to be found on the face of the genuinely young.

It could, of course, have been simply that Miss Locke was clever, a history teacher with a degree – I had lived long enough to be aware that knowledge, delicious as it was to possess it, was, like all self-indulgences, ageing – whilst my brother's female acquaintance, including my future sister-in-law, were one and all, in the arrogant judgement of childhood, brainless ninnies with nothing on what they hopefully called their minds but boys. All the same, looking at Miss Locke across the table – surreptitious, darting glances of which, in all probability, she was perfectly aware – I couldn't help thinking that a little brainlessness, a touch of boy-mania, would have improved that Ancient Greek profile, that narrow nose whose nostrils looked scarcely wide enough to accommodate a good blow.

I watched a little anxiously as Miss Gosse carved my portion, hoping she hadn't any ideas about cutting out my fat the way she had Miss Locke's, because there was little enough to the solitary slice as it was, fat and lean combined. In fact, the food on all three plates, taken together, scarcely equalled what in St Giles would have been considered adequate for one. By now, though – and that was something – I was pretty sure that Miss Gosse was not stingy by nature, simply that Chandos House had its own standards of what constituted enough to eat. Had we, in St Giles, been, all unaware, a family of guzzlers? I did not think so but it was hard to decide. In a single day my past life,
cuisine
and all, had, along with dinosaurs and the Battle of Waterloo, receded into a shadowy past where nothing was truly real except the
pastness
of it.

The lamb tasted as good as it smelled, the peas and new potatoes from the garden sheer poetry – but oh! the insufficiency! Though I did my best to make my food last as long as Miss Gosse and Miss Locke did theirs, it was gone in a trice. So far from assuaging my hunger it merely whetted my appetite. I began to doubt that, during my stay at Chandos House, I should ever have time to think of anything else besides eating.

Yet why, just the same, when Miss Locke, looking up from her plate and observing mine already empty, said: ‘I shouldn't be surprised, Lydia, this child would like a second helping,' and Miss Gosse, astonished but willing, had picked up the carving knife and fork again, did I stammer, red in the face: ‘Oh no, really, thank you, I've had loads'?

At teatime, on the other hand, I could hardly believe my eyes. I had already been told by Miss Gosse that during the school week I should, as a general rule, take my tea on my own, since both she and Miss Locke preferred to do their marking of homework at school rather than have to ferry piles of exercise books to and fro. As, on that particular afternoon, there was to be a staff meeting in addition, I arrived back at Chandos House, ravenous as usual but, give or take Mrs Benyon, looking forward to a quiet time that would, as it were, enable me to take my bearings uninterrupted before I settled down to my own homework: read a book, play the piano perhaps, explore the garden; do the small, nosy things that, hopefully sooner rather than later, would convert lodgings into a home.

I went upstairs and prised
Beau Geste
out of the box under the bed. Legionnaires cut off in the desert, not an oasis for hundreds of kilometres,
mon colonel
, not so much as a mouldy date to stave off the pangs: altogether an apt choice for making me count my blessings as I munched the single slice of bread and butter and the solitary bun which, on the basis of past performance, were the sum of my expectations.

Instead, on the dining-room table, my unbelieving eyes were dazzled by the sight of a large dish loaded with triangles of bread and butter sliced with a delicacy to bring tears to the eyes, plus half a currant cake already cut into pieces, which must mean it was expected all to be eaten. A glass bowl filled with a home-made strawberry jam full of the bumps of whole fruit, none of your shop mush, completed a tea that dreams were made of.

Only, how much was my share? Obviously, tea had been laid out for the three of us. I tried to count the pieces of bread and butter, in order to ascertain how much I might take with a clear conscience, but the dish was so full that, for fear of breaking tender slices which might not be mine, I was forced to desist.

Drooling at the chops, I waited a little in the hope that the housekeeper would come into the dining-room and issue me with my instructions. Nothing happened, and at last I could bear it no longer; went timidly into the kitchen where I found her adding a teapot to a tray already set with a slop basin, sugar bowl, milk and hot-water jug.

Not so much as looking at me, Mrs Benyon said in the flat, glazed voice which went so well with her glazed eyes, her mottled-marble complexion: ‘Can't be kept waiting a minute, can you? Regular little madam. Let me tell you, miss, whatever it may have been like where you come from, here we won't all jump to your tune.'

I countered, stammering the first excuse I could think of: ‘I – I thought I could save you the bother of bringing in the tray –'

‘Very kind of you.' The tone conveyed no kind of thanks. ‘But as it happens, I don't encourage interlopers in my kitchen any more than I do black beetles.' Saying which, she picked up the tray and, with a heavy tread that positively cried out for the Dead March in
Saul
as an accompaniment, bore it out of the room, abandoning me so definitively that, starving as I was, I could have wished I had the willpower to go upstairs to my bedroom and stay there and keep your rotten old tea.

Not being made of the stuff of which martyrs and masochists were made, I followed the woman meekly back to the dining-room, stifled my impatience until she had set down the tray at the side of the incomparable feast. ‘Please,' I whispered then, unable to stay quiet a moment longer, ‘could you please tell me how much is for me?'

Mrs Benyon turned on me her frozen glance and observed icily: ‘It's your stomach, not mine.'

‘I mean –' hunger emboldening me – ‘I don't want to eat Miss Gosse's or Miss Locke's by mistake.'

‘I should hope Miss Gosse and Miss Locke get their bread and butter and cake fresh cut.' The housekeeper spoke as if I had insulted her. Yet, as her tidings of great joy sank in at last, I could, almost, have embraced her.

‘You mean, it's
all
for me? How kind you are!'

‘Not kind at all,' declared Mrs Benyon, still aggrieved. ‘So don't you go thinking any such things. If there's one thing I can't stand it's false pretences. And if there's another thing I can't stand and never have, it's kids.'

I protested, with that winsomeness of which I was half-proud, half-ashamed: ‘I won't stay one for ever, you know.'

The housekeeper turned away from the table; gave me a coldly appraising once-over. ‘Two years an' a bit, Miss Gosse said. You'll still be a kid when you get out of here. Either that, or –' She broke off.

‘Or what?'

‘You go on like that at home?' Mrs Benyon demanded without much interest. ‘No wonder they wanted to get rid of you.'

‘They didn't want anything of the sort!' I cried, beyond either politeness or policy. ‘It's what I chose to do! That is, I wanted to go and stay with Mrs Curwen, only Mrs Crail –'

‘So she's the one waved her magic wand! I might've guessed!' The housekeeper's lower jaw moved a fraction from right to left and back again, from left to right, at the same time that her glazed eyes snapped open and shut three times, for all the world like a china doll bent forwards and backwards again to make her eyelids work. I felt surprised not to hear their dull clunk as they fell into place. It took a little while to realize that Mrs Benyon was laughing.

‘Well, I never!' she declared. ‘The artful old so-and-so!'

I ate up all the tea, except for the last piece of the cake, which I wrapped up in my handkerchief; ran upstairs and hid under my pillow for later. It was the first time since arriving at Chandos House that I felt able to address myself to anything without having my thoughts or actions subverted by a supervening preoccupation with food. I was able to take stock of my situation and to decide that, taking one thing with another, I was still happy.

School that afternoon had been a double period of art, which I always enjoyed as much for the room in which it took place as for Miss Malahide the art mistress's instruction. The Art Room was situated at the northern end of the north quad, a lofty room with no open-air nonsense, but with tall, north-facing windows which – to my way of thinking, at any rate – admitted a light unlike any other. Even on the greyest day the light drew an outline of surpassing delicacy round everybody and everything within its four walls, making them separate in a way nothing else in the world was separate, inviolate even when they appeared, superficially, to be touching. Just to be there, to know that even though you yourself were not properly placed to reach a judgement, your own body must be a similar masterpiece inscribed on the Art Room air, was a life-enhancing experience even if you couldn't draw for toffee.

If, on the other hand, you weren't into life-enhancing, there was always Miss Malahide.

Miss Malahide had pepper-and-salt hair cut in a square bob and whiskers to match. She had a way of throwing her head back, tossing her mane as you might say, her whiskery muzzle protruding, which made her look very like a lion, fierce but not frightening; just as the crazy way she talked sometimes astonished you with a sanity that was as reassuring as it was strange. Perhaps because she was an artist, perhaps because she didn't rate a gown like the other mistresses, she wore, summer and winter, a voluminous black cloak which she was given to flinging over her shoulder with theatrical gestures that used to make us put our hands up to our faces to cover our giggles. Not that we need have bothered, probably. She wasn't the kind to take offence. In fact, for all her eccentricities, she was, I think, of all the women teaching at the school, the single one that we recognized as a complete human being, someone to be believed in as we believed in ourselves.

It was funny. The girls of Form IIIa treated what happened in the outside world as real – which of course was what it was. That was why, since my return, they had quite understandably gone off me for bringing things like illness and death into the cosy, make-believe sanctuary of school where getting your sums right or winning your netball colours was what counted. With the mistresses it was exactly the reverse. School was the one reality; whatever happened outside was a fantasy it didn't do to take too seriously. That was why, with one exception, they treated my return to the fold with the utmost insouciance, concerned only with the logistics of how I was to make up work missed during my absence. Beyond a cheerfully perfunctory inquiry, the reason for my temporary dropping-out of the community was not their business.