The Quivering Tree (22 page)

Catching sight of me, the history mistress called out: ‘Sylvia, you naughty thing, you've been holding out on us! So Miss Gosse isn't the only one at Chandos House to own a sweetheart! Yours is outside waiting, face like a mashed potato, his broken heart bleeding all over his bicycle.'

‘Helen!' Miss Gosse's face was as red as my own. ‘Just a boy, Sylvia, wanting to know if this was where you lived.' She added, kind as ever: ‘Not like a mashed potato at all.'

‘Quite right!' Miss Locke conceded. ‘More like soggy chips.' She looked at me critically, at Mr Johnson's latest trim, which I had ordered extra short for economy's sake. ‘You'll have to let it grow,' she pronounced. Then you'll be able to let it down from your window like Rapunzel, for the young lover to clamber up to your bower. But oh dear!' – the corners of her mouth turning down in familiar derision – ‘Do you think he'll wait that long?'

Miss Gosse said that she had invited him in but he had said no thank you. ‘A nice, mannerly boy, I thought, whatever Miss Locke says.'

I went into the kitchen, collected Bagshaw's bread, and came back into the hall carrying it.

‘How romantic!' Miss Locke trilled. ‘They're going on a picnic!'

I muttered something about feeding the donkey, and went out of the front door, hating her.

Underneath it all, I was not displeased. Thanks to the egregious Sybil, Robert Kett's cousin, I had definitely benefited from the myth that I had a boyfriend. Whatever was the case at Chandos House, in Form IIIa a boyfriend gave you status. We recognized the importance of boys without in the least knowing why. Like the weather, they were there and had to be taken into account. Close to, on the whole, we did not even like them, their smell, their dreary clothes, their lumpish inability to carry on anything approaching a civilized conversation. Even the ‘common' clique that went in for hanging about street corners conceded that there was nothing to beat girls when it came to having a good time together: yet unaware, unquestioning, we played out our evolutionary role. If you couldn't boast a boyfriend by the time you were twelve, the outlook was bleak. You could easily end up like that gaggle of old maids, our mistresses.

Seen down the tunnel of time, our innocence seems incredible. Even the street-corner brigade partook of it, every last one of them convinced that it was kissing – so long as you were married, that was – which produced babies. A classroom symposium on the subject of beds one morning when it was too wet to go out to play had produced a consensus to the effect that though (heaven only knew why) married people were expected to share the same one, this need not necessarily be an insuperable obstacle to marriage. One could probably get used to it.

‘Even if it was Stanley Osborne in there with you?' someone objected, naming a drip of some local fame. Or Brian Willis? Or Ivor Perse? The names came thick and fast. There were any number of boys IIIa did not fancy getting into the same bed with.

Would you do it for £10, was the next question. For £100? £1,000? After an animated discussion, the sum of £50 was agreed as the minimum making it worthwhile to get into the same bed as a boy you couldn't stand. Always assuming, that is, that it was a good wide one where there was plenty of room for two to lie without touching, in which case you could hug the edge and more or less pretend there was nobody else there at all.

I was grateful that, so far at least, nobody had classed Robert Kett as a drip, which would have lost me public esteem, though that was what I myself thought him. The only thing about him, apart from his name, which was in any way memorable, was his utter lack of memorability. Every time I saw him approaching there was always a second of doubt as to whether it was Robert Kett or somebody else with mousy hair and a minus personality. It would have been so embarrassing to make a mistake.

Robert Kett was hanging about a little way down the road from Chandos House, pretending to be doing something to his bike. If I had not recognized him I would have recognized his bicycle anywhere, a birthday present from parents whose perception of their son clearly differed from my own. It was blue and white with turned-down handlebars and the lines of a cheetah poised to spring upon an unsuspecting gazelle. Not that I had ever seen – nor ever expected to see – Robert Kett riding it with the panache it deserved. He seemed happiest quietly pushing it along, himself padding alongside in a submissive way that did not make entirely clear which of the two was in charge.

We said hello to each other and were, as usual, immediately at a loss for words. I think I said something about liking his pullover, which was a dazzling new white, hand-knitted in cable stitch. Going bright red – when it came to blushing there was not much to choose between us – he told me his Auntie Mabel had knitted it for him. To break the painful silence which followed this intelligence I mentioned that I was on my way to feed a donkey. I was not conscious of framing this information in the form of an invitation, but so he took it, and I did not contradict, such a relief it was to discover a purpose for our being together. Bagshaw might have something to say: that was up to him. I decided privately that the boy was even drippier than I had thought: also that I would have to be very hard up indeed for whipped cream walnuts to contemplate getting into the same bed with him for £100, let alone £50, even with the bicycle plumped down the middle between us.

We walked in a depressive quiet down to the crossroads, turned into the road to Catton, and so to the back path. I had long ago resigned myself to the sad recognition that – in the circles I frequented, at any rate – people did not converse with either the wit or the high seriousness they invariably exhibited in books. Even so, with nothing but Auntie Mabel's pullover between us and silence, I could not help feeling that we had touched rock bottom.

Once we got into the back path things got even worse. Robert Kett grew fussy and I could never abide fussiness. With the exception of the Chandos House boundary which Mr Betts kept trimmed to a boring neatness, nobody, it seemed – neither the other householders on the one side nor the owner of Bagshaw's field on the other – cared a fig for the state of the hedges which flanked the path. With spring passing into summer, the wild roses had grown prodigiously, the brambles arching over what might laughingly be termed the carriageway or snaking thornily along the ground with the express aim, surely, of tripping up the unsuspecting or myopic passer-by. Even Mr Betts's partner in crime must be thinking twice about backing his mouldy old van off the road into such a jungle.

As a place for picking up scratches on the beautiful blue and white enamel of a brand-new bike, it took a lot of beating. Much as I hated fuss, I felt sufficient sympathy for my companion in his obvious distress to suggest that he and his bicycle change their minds about accompanying me further and retreat to the safety of metalled roads. Robert Kett's refusal to withdraw might have demonstrated a gratifying desire for my company despite all danger, if only he had not said: ‘It's ages since I saw a donkey.'

Robert Kett and Bagshaw liked each other instantly. It was love at first sight. His bicycle parked against the back gate at Chandos House, his worries for its wellbeing assuaged, my titular boyfriend took to the donkey in a way I had never seen him take to me. Undaunted by the large yellow teeth that made me prefer to throw the bread down on the ground rather than risk my fingers in a friendlier proffering of largesse, Robert Kett – showing, possibly, for the first time in our acquaintance, the heroic stock from which he was descended – fearlessly held out lumps of bread for the animal to snuffle up with its slobbery lips. He patted Bagshaw on the muzzle like an old friend, shooed the flies away from his eyes; even snagged his new pullover on the barbed wire and didn't seem to care.

If I was, to be honest, a little put out by this access of a vivacity never triggered off by my presence, it was as nothing to my annoyance at Bagshaw's response. Here was I who had been feeding the wretched beast day after day without receiving so much as a hee-haw of thanks in return, and here was a complete stranger – a drip of the deepest water – moving in effortlessly to take over the heart which should, if there were any justice in the world, belong to me. Bagshaw purred, Bagshaw simpered, Bagshaw fluttered his long eyelashes at Robert Kett in a way that was quite disgusting. I might as well not have been there at all.
It takes one donkey to recognize another
, I thought ferociously, but remained uncomforted. I suddenly felt lonelier than I had ever felt since coming to Chandos House; and when my faithless lover turned to me and demanded (though the answer must have been plain to see – where, for heaven's sake, did he think I kept extra bread? Up my knickers?), ‘Is that all there is?' I burst into tears.

I don't know which of the three of us was most embarrassed – me, Robert Kett or Bagshaw; but only the donkey had the sense to do something about it. Pushing his head even further than usual between the strands of barbed wire, he first rubbed his nose affectionately against Robert Kett's new pullover, then, opening his mouth wide, clamped his teeth with an audible
clack!
down on to Auntie Mabel's handiwork and bit a large piece out of it.

It was masterly done. The shock of it dried my tears instanter, the destruction so utter as to preclude pettifogging worries about whether or not the damage could be repaired. Even as the boy stood staring down unbelievingly at the vacancy spread over his front, the nothingness enlarged itself. It seemed that breathing was enough to send more stitches dropping into oblivion, more wool unravelling, more cables untwisting themselves. It was a sight to see.

Bagshaw stood with the piece of pullover in his mouth, moving his head from side to side and looking insufferably pleased with his own cleverness. He seemed uncertain, however, as to what to do with his trophy now that he had it, and finally settled for swallowing it, all except a few strands which caught in his teeth, after which he did not look quite so pleased. It was probably giving him indigestion.

Robert Kett went pale, his freckles standing out dark on his milky skin. Even his hands went pale, making me think of pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar, except that I doubted whether those particular hands had freckles on them the way Robert Kett's had. The reason that I noticed his hands was because I was afraid to look directly in his face in case I burst out laughing, something I was aching to do, and then where would be my boyfriend, my burgeoning love affair? Gone like the wind. When Robert Kett demanded in a high-pitched voice, ‘What am I going to tell Auntie? What's she going to say?' I took charge, the way, it seemed to me, girls often had to when faced with boys' inability to cope.

‘Tell her you lost it. Tell her you took if off because it was so hot and you strapped it on your bike carrier only it must have fallen off without your knowing. She'll knit you another. Women always buy more wool than they need. She'll be glad of a reason to use it up.' Red with the effort of stifling my laughter I helped Robert Kett divest himself of the mangled remains of the pullover – not easy because some of the loose bits of wool had wound themselves round the buttons of the sports shirt he wore underneath.

‘Hang on a jiff.' Pressed close against his chest I worked at getting the buttons free. If our faces touched, I have no recollection of it. Only of a dull thump as the blue-and-white bicycle propped against the gate heeled over on to its handlebars, the gate opening, and Miss Locke's voice inquiring icily: ‘What on earth is going on?'

Obeying orders, I walked with Miss Locke up the garden towards the house. Well, not exactly with. As befitted a mere child, a lesser mortal, and one out of favour what was more, I walked a little behind, projecting my spleen against the slender back where the shoulder-blades could be seen sticking out under the white blouse. What business was it of hers to come spying on us?

It would have been too much to expect that Robert Kett would stand up to the woman, show himself worthy of his ancestors. Instead, acting true to form, he had blushed and mumbled, picked up his bike and stumbled away down the track without venturing a word in his own defence – or in mine: though why we should, either of us, be called upon to defend ourselves was beyond understanding. Not that I blamed him. He was only a child like myself in a world where, it seemed, for some grown-ups at least, it was always open season for humiliating children under the guise of doing what was good for them. It wasn't fair, I shouted silently at the shoulder-blades. It jolly well wasn't fair!

When we came to the open space by the greenhouse and the bench and the bothy, Miss Locke stopped and waited for me to catch up with her, which I did reluctantly, knowing what was in store, knowing what was always in store when grown-ups felt the urge to show off their power. She was going to tell me off.

She was going to do nothing of the kind. What she did, before I could make any movement to fend off the attack, was grab hold of me, pinion me against the bothy wall, among the dusty trails of Virginia creeper. Her cropped head with its small ears was between me and the sun, so that I could not distinguish the expression on her face, nor even the features, save for the small mouth grown suddenly large which she clamped over mine like a sink plunger over a recalcitrant plug hole.

Unpleasant as it was, worse was to come. Something forced itself between my lips, something thick and wet and exploratory. Slugs, lampreys, giant worms were the images which flashed through my mind before I realized that, incredible as it seemed, the something was Miss Locke's tongue.

My mouth was anchored, but my stomach was free, despatching the taste of bile and the remains of my breakfast to coat my throat. I was quite sure that I was about to die when Miss Locke took her tongue back, stepped away a little and stood contemplating my crimson face with her familiar expression of amused derision. Only the fact that she was breathing more heavily than usual advertised that anything out of the ordinary had occurred.