The Quivering Tree (20 page)

Oddly enough, once her secret was out, Mrs Benyon became, if not exactly friendly, at least a good deal less overtly hostile to my presence in Chandos House. It was almost as if she took it for granted that by the very act of uncovering a weakness in herself, I had laid bare a corresponding one in me. By staying quiet about her alcoholism – and what else could I have done, anyway? – I had assumed my own burden of guilt – one, in my case, not to be lightened by a tumbler of mother's ruin. For one thing, tea became a much less unpredictable meal than hitherto. Often, without being asked, she provided me with stale bread for Bagshaw.

On one occasion she gave me the best part of a loaf which seemed quite fresh, and I hurried off with it down the garden to the back gate in case she changed her mind. Bagshaw and I shared the windfall together, the donkey staring dourly when he finished up his allotment long before I had come to the end of mine. I got back to the house to find Mrs Benyon in a state. She must have taken more drink that day than she had thought, because what in fact she had done was give me all the bread in stock, and Miss Gosse and Miss Locke had not yet come in for their tea, to say nothing of breakfast next morning.

Armed with fourpence three-farthings, the price of a large white, I sprang gallantly to the rescue, whizzing down the Sprowston Road on my bike as if the Red Indians were after me; down to the baker's, only to find, as at that time of day I should have anticipated, that the shelves were bare except for a lopsided cottage loaf that nobody, for good reason, had wanted. In fact, the baker knocked a penny off the price which I purloined without shame. Whatever else it had achieved, living at Chandos House had not improved my moral tone.

The housekeeper, as I should also have anticipated, was not best pleased with my acquisition. I guessed that, awaiting my return, fearful that the schoolmistresses might arrive first, she had fortified herself with additional potions of Mr Betts's blackmail. I was unable to convince her that I had purchased the loaf
faute de mieux
and that I had not – repeat, had not – lopsided it on the way home.

‘You'll get me sacked,' she growled, snatching up the bread knife as if she would be at least as pleased to use it on me as the bread. Privately, I thought her remark quite amusing in the circumstances, but of course I said nothing to show what I was thinking.

One afternoon, as she was clearing away my tea, she asked, out of the blue: ‘How would you like to have a little chat with your pa?'

My face went red, my heart pounded against my ribs. My father still had not been long enough dead for me to be able to talk about him or to hear him referred to by others without those tiresome physical reactions being instantly in evidence. And anyway, what did the woman mean?

The woman explained that what she meant was that a good friend of hers, whom she said was called Madame Sadie, possessed a wonderful gift for getting in touch with people who had, as she put it, passed over. Twice a month people who had been bereaved gathered at her home, where she was able to be a great comfort to them, passing on messages from their loved ones. Since I was looking peaky, the thought had occurred to Mrs Benyon that a visit to Madame Sadie might cheer me up something wonderful.

In St Giles we had taken several newspapers so that I knew quite a bit about séances, which were always fakes or they would never have got into the papers in the first place. Whilst recognizing that mine might be a prejudiced view, nevertheless, so soon as the pounding stopped and the red ebbed out of my cheeks, my first impulse was to say no thank you, restraining myself with difficulty from adding that if I were indeed looking peaky, which I took leave to doubt, it was more likely because I didn't get enough to eat than because of anything to do with my father. My second impulse also was to say no, for a different reason. Over the weeks the two of us, my father up in heaven and I down below in Chandos House, had, slowly and painfully, come to an accommodation, evolved a relationship I felt it dangerous to disturb. Might I not, if I unilaterally changed the terms of engagement, risk losing him altogether? Apart from anything else, what would he be likely to think of a Madame Sadie getting in on the act? She didn't sound my father's type at all.

Moreover, it transpired that Mrs Benyon's words about my having a chat with him were overstating the case. The dead people (the housekeeper called them ‘the people on the other side') did not actually converse with their grieving relatives. Perhaps they were too far off to make themselves heard without shouting. Instead, they spoke via Madame Sadie, who had this amazing ability to hear across the endless reaches of eternity.

What if you wished to say something back, I wanted to know. Mrs Benyon brushed the question aside: no problem. Madame Sadie would convey the gist of it, if it was something that needed to be said, which she doubted.
They
already knew all there was to know about
us
.

Obstinately, because I was reluctant to reach the point where I would have to make a final decision one way or the other, to go or not to go, I persisted: ‘Suppose you couldn't find the key to a certain cupboard and only the dead person knew where it was?'

‘Get in a locksmith!' snapped the housekeeper. She was clearly coming to the end of her patience, always on a short leash. ‘Do you want to go or don't you? I thought I was doing you a favour.'

Mrs Benyon said that naturally people paid Madame Sadie for her services. She had to pay the butcher's bills like everyone else. She didn't normally take children, but she would make an exception of me as a favour to a friend. Her charge was half a guinea a sitting which – cutting across my expression of horrified surprise – could easily be met by deducting it from the fifteen shillings still outstanding between us, leaving a mere 4s 6d to close the account. Evidently prepared for my compliance, Mrs Benyon took two florins and a sixpenny piece out of her overall pocket, plunked them down on the table in front of me and declared, ‘Now we're quits!'

One didn't need to be clever to know one was being had. I wouldn't have minded betting that no half-guinea would change hands as the price of my admittance to Madame Sadie's next get-together. She would be bound to let me in for nothing to oblige an old acquaintance. But it was no good. Deep down, from the moment that the possibility of going to the séance had been broached I had recognized that there was no alternative.

‘OK,' I said. ‘I'll go.'

The séance took place the following Saturday afternoon. Mrs Benyon and I travelled into town on the bus, the housekeeper being unreceptive of my suggestion that we walk down to the tram terminus so that I could use one of my Scholars' Tickets and save myself the bus fare. I did not protest too much at this, as I saw it, unnecessary expense as we were rather loaded down with packages. Mrs Benyon carried one bag and I another. My bag, when she handed it to me, felt strangely warm, and once we were on the bus I dared to open it a little, not enough actually to see inside, which Mrs Benyon would have been sure to have spotted, but enough to be able to identify an unmistakable aroma of the casserole we had had for lunch. At last I had the answer to something which had puzzled me from my first days at Chandos House – the reason why though, thanks to Miss Gosse's frugal carving, the joint was customarily removed from the table barely dented, it never reappeared cold or in any other guise. Now I knew where it went – into the mouths of Mrs Benyon's cronies. The housekeeper had already informed me that after the séance I would have to make my own way home: she herself would be staying behind for a meal with Madame Sadie and her husband Bert. Surely, over the years, Miss Gosse must have noticed the unaccountable disappearance of the ribs of beef or the legs of lamb. Why had she never said anything?

The smell from the casserole was somewhat overlaid by the strange sweet smell that came from Mrs Benyon. Another small mystery was resolved when she opened her handbag and took out a pretty little tin, small as a snuffbox, with a design on it, so far as I could see, of an Eastern maiden complete with a veil, baggy trousers and shoes that turned up at the toes. The printing on the box said Shem-el-Nessim, whatever that was. The housekeeper prised the lid off the tin and offered me one of the minuscule greyish tablets with which it was filled. ‘Don't swallow it, don't chew,' she admonished. ‘Let it melt slowly.'

I put the tablet on my tongue out of curiosity, but was immediately aware that if I followed instructions I would soon smell like Mrs Benyon, something which did not appeal; so I swallowed it despite having been warned, trusting that my father – whose fault it was after all, in a way, that I found myself in such a situation in the first place – would fix it with God so that the awful pong I had just generated inside me did not turn my liver forever against my lights or vice versa. Mrs Benyon settled back on the bus seat and informed me that there also existed other tablets called Phul-Nana which were equally available in reputable sweetshops for the convenience of people who had been smoking or eating onions or garlic – (or drinking, I added mentally, when she didn't) – but for her money there was nothing like Shem-el-Nessims for sweetening the breath.

In Madame Sadie's home in Trinity Street, Arabian Nights influences were also evident – no veiled houris, but bead curtains, a good deal of beaten brasswork and a hookah perched among the family photographs on the mantelpiece. Three other customers – clients, petitioners – were already present, sitting round the table which took up most of the room. Two of them were obviously husband and wife, young and pale and looking terribly bereaved. From the look of their clothes, they couldn't have found it easy to come up with the Ios 6d admission money. Out of sheer nervousness, because I did not want to think about why I was there myself, I worked myself into one of my familiar worries wondering if Madame Sadie allowed them both in for the same half-guinea, or did they have to pay Ios 6d each? At the very least, she should, in justice, have made a reduction for quantity, the way they did with oranges on the Market Place.

The third seeker after comfort looked as if she had already found it – materially, anyhow. She had on a fashionable coat-frock, a powdered face, and, although it was much too warm for furs, a narrow scarf made up of two stone martens, the two tails dangling down the middle of her back, and in front, two little animal heads glaring bad-temperedly at each other across a short length of silver chain. Her black hat had a red rose on it.

Madame Sadie would have looked very Arabian Nights herself in her long loose gown of some shimmering green stuff sewn with diamanté and at least six bangles on each wrist, if the body underneath and the face above had not been so comfortably Norfolk, padded out, at a guess, with a good few years of Norfolk dumplings. She appeared a friendly soul, dispensing tea and strips of toast smeared with Salancho with a generous hand, solicitous of the young couple who were looking as if they were sorry they had come. Madame Sadie was nice to me too, in her way, saying that she hoped I would go away comforted. I wanted to say that I didn't need comforting; that comforting was not what you needed when you lost a father. What you needed was – but as I could not possibly have put into words what it was you needed, I said nothing.

Being me, I would probably have said nothing anyway.

Once the tea things were cleared away, Madame Sadie drew dark-blue curtains over the bay window. The daylight was not entirely cut off because the curtains, though heavy, were unlined; but the room took on a mysterious, underwater aspect. Here and there a muted reflection from a brass tray or vase hinted at pirate treasure wrecked on the floor of some shallow sea.

Madame Sadie ordered us all to join hands round the table. ‘Gloves off!' she commanded sharply to the customer with the fur scarf. She warned us that the completion of the circle would set up an area of force sufficiently powerful to wrench our dear ones out of the celestial orbit they now inhabited and bring them back to the world they had left behind. Only one thing could make them feel that their journey was worthwhile, and that was our love; so that we must concentrate all our thoughts on the dear departed, willing them to sense how much we missed them, how much we grieved that they had passed over to the other side: how much, just the same, we unselfishly hoped that they were happy in their new existence beyond the stars.

‘Don't go upsetting them just because you're upset yourself,' Madame Sadie instructed severely. ‘Making them discontented won't do anybody any good.'

Madame Sadie went on to explain that it was not actually herself who would be making contact with the dear departed, but her spirit guide, a wonderful person called Zalbaran who in the flesh, long ago, had been a Red Indian, but one who had never scalped a paleface in his whole life. If the day were propitious – and here Madame Sadie made it plain that she could promise nothing: though nothing specific was said on the subject it was made clear that in the event of the spirit guide drawing a blank no half-guineas would be refunded under any circumstances – the dear departed would speak to Zalbaran and Zalbaran in turn would speak to her, so that she could then pass their words on in language the listeners could understand.

‘They still speak English, don't they?' Fur Scarf wanted to know. ‘Why can't we hear ourselves what they have to say?'

The answer was that we could not – the dear departed, as was only to be expected once we thought about it, having left their vocal apparatus in the grave along with all their other physical bits and pieces. They had become all spirit, which was why they could now only communicate with others of their kind.

‘So, now – all join hands. Hold tightly and, whatever you do, don't let go till I say so, not even to blow your nose.' Madame Sadie did not say what would happen to us if we broke the circle, but we could tell by the expression on her face that it would be something serious.