The Quivering Tree (15 page)

Miss Gosse said consolingly: ‘You'll be able to catch up with the work you weren't able to do yesterday.'

‘So long as you don't get under my feet,' warned Mrs Benyon, after the two schoolmistresses had departed. ‘Monday's my cleaning day. I've got my work to do.'

I replied that I was going to go for a little walk to get a breath of fresh air, after which I would happily settle down to my studies in whatever part of the house best suited her convenience.

The housekeeper looked at me with somewhat more interest than usual.

‘Nearly did for yourself last night, from what I hear.'

I said that it wasn't nearly as bad as all that.

‘Hubby of a friend of mine,' Mrs Benyon said, in the nearest we had ever come to conversation, ‘put his head in the gas oven, and it was a funny thing. Never been much to look at, pasty-faced, constipation was his trouble, but in his coffin, blow me if he wasn't rosy as an apple. Could've gone on the stage looking like that. His lips were that red!' Scanning my face with one of her marble stares, in a vain search for some sign of rose-tipped beauty: ‘Tha's what gas does to you. First turns you blue an' then rosy.'

‘I don't think I even got to the blue stage,' I said apologetically.

‘Doesn't look like it.' Mrs Benyon stumped off to the kitchen with the breakfast things, leaving me unsurprised to learn that the hubbies of her friends put their heads into gas ovens. It was only to be expected.

I went upstairs to my room to get my loaf of bread and the buns out from under the bed, covering them up with my blazer, draped with careful negligence over one arm. What with the heat and not being eaten after all because of the picnic, they had turned out to be an unwise purchase. Even with the window open I could smell a fermented smell hanging about the room, not unpleasant exactly but one that would be bound to lead Mrs Benyon to the book box like a bloodhound to blood.

So as to be sure of not running into her whilst thus burdened, I went the long way round to the field at the rear of the house; out of the front door, down to the crossroads, turn right into the Catton Road until I came to the back path. To my surprise, the rusty old white van was again parked in the opening, but this time sufficiently to one side for there to be plenty of room to squeeze by. Of the driver there was no sign, except that I could hear something going on at the back of the van. I edged through the space and there he was, smiling like last time, even more unshaven, but with all his teeth in place! Knowing I possessed an exceptionally good memory, this last so took me aback that I said – rudely, I'm afraid – ‘What happened to your teeth? You had two missing last time.'

Fortunately the man took no offence; smiled even wider. ‘That were on account of I didn't know I was goin' to run into a little lady, did I? Today I weren't taking no chances.' Having said which, he put some fingers into his mouth and prised out two false teeth, which he held out on the palm of his hand for my inspection. ‘Beauties, aren't they?'

Little prig that I was, I observed severely: ‘I suppose you ate too many sweets as a child.'

‘No such luck,' returned the man, still taking no offence, thank goodness. He seemed really nice. He put his teeth back again and wiped his slimy fingers on the front of the khaki shirt he was wearing. ‘Bit of an argy-bargy arter closing time, tha's all it were.'

When I said that I was sorry to hear it, he assured me that I had no reason to be: the new teeth were in every way an improvement upon the old. We parted with mutual goodwill, he finishing off the job he had been doing when I arrived, which was to tie up the back doors of the van with string, there being no handles; I continuing on my way to Bagshaw, seeing no reason for letting on that I had seen what was inside.

Bagshaw was not in a good mood. (I had begun to wonder if he ever was.) He ate the buns and the bread more with the air of one doing a favour than being done one. He seemed particularly out of sorts. I didn't blame him. It must be hard, I felt, on a gorgeous summer day to find yourself a donkey mooching about a field when the world outside was overflowing with so many more interesting things to do and to be.

I decided not to try the gate into the garden, but returned to Chandos House by the way I had come. The white van had gone. In the front hall Mrs Benyon, folded in half like an airing mattress, was poking a long-handled brush about under the hallstand. It was always a surprise to find that she could bend at all. You would never have guessed from the look of her.

She straightened up and told me to take my books into the drawing-room because that was the only room in the house which was ‘done', something I was glad to do as I had not seen the drawing-room until then. When I went inside I saw that it was not only ‘done' but done for. Dark despite the bright day, it was more like a mortuary chapel than a salon for polite conversation, the brown walls, the mantelpiece and every available ledge covered with paintings and photographs of a man who had to be Miss Gosse's father. In some of the pictures he was a young man, with moustaches which had been twiddled at the ends: in others he was white-haired with a beard that looked like a dishcloth, one it was time to throw away and get a new one. Only the eyes told you that the young man and the old man were the same person – boot-button eyes like Miss Gosse's, but whereas Miss Gosse's eyes were limpid and trustful, her father's looked like boot buttons and nothing beside. There were no pictures of anybody else, nor of Mr Gosse with anybody, not even with a funny little girl with short legs who would have been Miss Gosse when she was a child. No woman who might have been Miss Gosse's mother.

It was quite a disappointment that, despite all the pictures, Miss Gosse's father did not look anything special. His clothes, dark and heavy, were more interesting than the face which peeped out from the top of his stiff white collar for all the world like one of those big Easter eggs on which, for no extra money, confectioners write in white icing the name of your choice. I pulled up one of the horsehair-covered dining-chairs to the big mahogany table and spread out my work in a businesslike way, but it was hard to concentrate with those Easter eggs popping up all over the place. They reminded me that, as usual, I was hungry, so I ran upstairs and fished one of my two whipped cream walnuts out of my book box. I wrapped it in a handkerchief because the heat had melted it a little and also because I did not want to risk running into Mrs Benyon on the way down.

On second thoughts, I fished out the second whipped cream walnut as well, and went out into the garden to give it to Mr Betts.

Mr Betts was picking peas. His knobby face crinkled in a smile at the sight of me, even though his first words were: ‘That there Grecian Vase of yours, gal, it must have had a crack in it. Last heard of, she were still running.'

All the same, and despite my renewed protestations that I really did not think I possessed any particular gift as a tipster, he stopped picking and led me over to the seat, where I could see the pink sports paper sticking out of his jacket pocket. I presented him with the whipped cream walnut, which he sat comfortably licking, as if it had been an ice-cream, whilst at his behest I ran my eye over the lists of runners. I had never seen anybody eat a whipped cream walnut like that before, and I found it difficult to keep my mind on my task. It had, I could see, the advantage of making the whipped cream walnut last twice as long as usual, assuming one had the patience or the self-control to restrain one's greed, the unbridled loosing of which was itself part of the pleasure. But how on earth was one expected to deal with the cream filling once the restraining chocolate walls had dissolved into gooey oblivion?

Mr Betts, who was making a right mess of himself, urged: ‘Get on with it! I haven't got all day!'

In the end I chose a horse called Clair de Lune, the mere sight of whose name in print was enough to set up resonances in my fingertips, but did not affect Mr Betts in the same way. He wiped his hands on his trousers and took the paper back from me, frowning.

‘Debussy,' I explained helpfully.

‘Never heard o' him. Who else he train? Thought you didn't know nothing about horses.'

‘I don't. Debussy's a composer. “Clair de Lune” is a piece of music.'

‘What you on about?' The gardener studied the list again before commenting disparagingly, ‘Frenchies.'

As I still had not decided what I was going to do about Mr Betts – only that, in the mean time, I wanted to keep him in a good mood – I said again that I did not really think I was any good about horses. That, to be truthful, I didn't even care for them.

‘Couldn't think worse than I do meself!' was the surprising rejoinder. ‘Four legs an' a bag of wind! Nothing in their bleeding heads but to run the wrong way an' nip you in the crotch when you aren't looking!' Thrusting his legs forward for my inspection: ‘Where you reckon I got that lot; then?'

Mr Betts was certainly very bow-legged, a condition he seemed less inclined to assign to heredity than to the circumstances of his former employment. It appeared that, before becoming a gardener, he had been – grudgingly, because he couldn't abide horses – a stable lad at Newmarket, like his ma's pa and grandpa before him. The day after his grandpa, who had lived with them, kicked the bucket, so he declared, he had bunged his old ma into an old-age home and caught the next bus to Norwich, shaking the dust of his native town from his feet for ever.

‘Couldn't you have stayed and become a gardener in Newmarket?' I asked, shaken by the thought of his bunged old ma. But Mr Betts dismissed the suggestion out of hand.

‘Newmarket!' he echoed. ‘The village idiot could be a gardener in Newmarket!'

The town, I gathered, thanks to all those bloody horses, laboured under the dire handicap of too much muck. It was drowning in it: you could smell it down the road ten miles off. For a gardener worthy of the name there was no challenge: anything grew there, from begonias to banyan trees. ‘One o' them four-legged shitters let fly, you go for a brush an' pan to sweep it up, an' by the time you get back blow me if there in't a dozen half-hardy annuals growing out of it, ready for transplanting.'

Having subtler ends in view, I offered, since it was a French horse, to forgo my commission if Clair de Lune won, but Mr Betts said absolutely no. Business was business, he warned me, and don't you ever go forgetting it. Living as I did with two schoolteachers, ladies of education, I could be expected to pick up a lot in the way of learning, one way and another, but – he would lay a fiver on it – nothing so helpful to me in later life as those three words.

He hoped I had taken notice.

‘Business is business,' I repeated happily, my conscience appeased. I could have hugged him.

On Tuesday afternoon I wheeled my bicycle out of the school drive to find my brother Alfred waiting by the gate. It seemed a long time since I had seen him last, longer than it actually was, and I think he must have felt the same because we embraced with the mixture of pleasure and embarrassment common to people who have not set eyes on each other for ages and think they ought to have. He even looked different – but no: it was the perspective which had altered. From being central to my existence he had moved to the periphery where outlines tended to merge with the surrounding scenery. He said that he had decided to come on the spur of the moment, leaving the telephone ringing and his work undone, out of a sudden need to see with his own eyes that I was all right. I was very touched even as, unbidden, there flickered through my subconscious the hope that he wouldn't stay too long. I wanted my tea.

Alfred had driven to the school in the tub of a car which belonged to his future father-in-law. The Morris Oxford, I was told, was sold – gone to a good home, I was assured. But as to the sports car which was to have replaced it – the frown mark between my brother's blue eyes deepened. He began to speak, rapidly, like one who has a lot to say and little time to say it in. As he spoke, the distance between us began to diminish, my heart to throb with the old affection, augmented with a new pride in my own worth. My father was dead, the rest of the family in London. In all Norwich there was no one else to talk to, really talk to: and so my grown-up brother had come to confide in me.

He had bought a plot of land in Cecil Road on the edge of the city and the builders were going to build on it the house he and Phyllis would live in when they were married. It was, he didn't mind telling me, going to cost a packet. ‘I don't suppose I'll see much change out of £1,000,' my brother said, as much appalled as exhilarated by the prospect. Unlike me, who had been living for more than a week at Chandos House, it was the first time he had had to think seriously about money. I knew exactly how he felt. It was, after all, only a case of Mr Johnson and his IS 6d shampoos writ large.

‘What do you think, Sylvia? Do you think I'm biting off more than I can chew?'

The metaphor was unfortunate. Reminded of the yawning abyss inside me, I longed to be home at Chandos House chewing my bread and butter. Today might just be one of those glorious days when Mrs Benyon unaccountably lost count and piled the serving dish with more slices than it could comfortably hold. If I hadn't been so hungry I might possibly, looking all the time as if butter wouldn't melt in my mouth, have convinced Alfred that as between a wife and a thousand-pound house on the one hand and a snazzy sports car on the other, the car was infinitely the better buy. But no: I had outgrown such childish jealousies.

Instead, I overflowed with enthusiasm; asked all about the house, how many bedrooms would it have, would there be a garage, what kind of flowers would they grow in the garden, until the frown between my brother's eyes erased itself. Being good at drawing, he found an old envelope in his jacket pocket on which to sketch the front elevation and the back; a sundial and a lily pool and a summerhouse with a roof like a pagoda –