The Quivering Tree (23 page)

‘You and your silly little pecks!' declared Miss Locke. With a deep sigh of what I suppose was satisfaction: ‘
That's
how you kiss when you love somebody.'

Confused and tired to death, I protested: ‘I wasn't kissing anybody. I don't know what you're talking about!'

‘Oh, you little fool!'

That Sunday, Mrs Crail came to tea. As soon as I heard, earlier in the week, that there was to be a tea-party, I went down to the telephone box at the crossroads and telephoned Alfred to ask if I could spend the day with him. From the way he stammered before saying, ‘Yes, of course. That would be lovely,' I knew he must have made prior arrangements for himself and Phyllis, only he didn't want to hurt my feelings. Providentially, I suddenly remembered that I had got the wrong Sunday, that the one I had really meant was the Sunday after. That, for this Sunday, I already had an unbreakable commitment to play tennis. The court was booked and you know how difficult it was to get a court on Sundays. And even for the Sunday after, now that I came to think about it, there were plans brewing –

We exchanged words of unaffected affection before I rang off. Walking back to Chandos House, I steeled myself to further lying. I would say that, much as I should have loved to be present I could not be in to tea on Sunday because I had a long-standing engagement to meet my brother and his fiancée. By the time I came up the front path I had tried out various forms of words only, as I reached the front door, to abandon them all as impractical. Even in rehearsal, my reddening face – I could tell by the way it felt hot and then hotter – gave me away.

‘It's quite an honour!' said Miss Gosse, her button eyes shining. ‘Mrs Crail is in such demand at weekends.'

Mrs Crail in demand! I wanted to ask by whom – a couple of prize saddlebacks? But of course I did no such thing. More likely, I decided uncharitably, the headmistress spent her weekends lying low. Weekdays, in term time at least, she had her billowing gown to protect her: anyone could see that she was a person of some authority. But outside working hours it was quite easy to imagine how Mr Martin the butcher, having left his glasses at home, might mistake her for a pig with ideas above its station, and there she would be, too late to do anything about it, hanging by her trotters in his shop in St Benedict's, only the snout, the piggy eyes and the balefully smiling curve of the lips still recognizable to those in the know as belonging to the Scourge of the Secondary; and they wouldn't say a word, not if they had the sense they were born with.

There were other guests – Miss Barton, my house-mistress, and Miss Malahide and Noreen, the latter looking sweet and compliant and so much a one for the Syllabus that I was sure Mrs Crail would take to her on the spot – that was, if they hadn't met already. Swagged in draperies, the headmistress was the last to arrive, by hired car. When she saw Miss Malahide she said, dripping honeyed poison, that had she known the art mistress was to be among the company she would have begged a lift in the Austin Seven. In reply Miss Malahide could not, of course, point out that Mrs Crail was much too fat to fit into an Austin Seven, so she shook her whiskery head sadly and said if only she had known. Miss Gosse's little doggy face wrinkled in distress since the breakdown in communication was obviously due to her own poor organization, but Miss Malahide did not seem bothered. It was possible that being an artist had armoured her against the Crails of this world. Unfortunately, she now went on, deciding I suppose to get the matter settled at the outset, the Austin Seven would not be available for the headmistress's homeward conveyance either. When the party broke up, she and Noreen were engaged to drive post-haste to Wroxham in order to spend time with a sick friend whose supper they had promised to prepare and serve, and goodness only knew at what hour they would be free to return to the city. To Mrs Crail, I think, as to everybody else, it sounded altogether too much of an excuse – as with her oil paintings, Miss Malahide had a tendency to lay the colours on too thick. At any rate, the headmistress didn't say anything more to Miss Malahide all afternoon but devoted herself to being absolutely charming to Noreen, who fluttered her eyelashes and was absolutely charming back.

Tea was one of Mrs Benyon's specials – tissue-thin sandwiches, scones with home-made jam and clotted cream, three kinds of cake as well as raspberries I myself had picked earlier in the day, moving from cane to cane with a certain reluctance which came from wondering how much profit I was doing Mr Betts out of by so doing. The conversation was less scintillating. Miss Gosse had installed Mrs Crail in the one chair in the dining-room which had arms, and there she sat like the Holy Roman Emperor, flanked by underlings who knew better than to speak before they were spoken to.

Miss Barton, a sad-featured woman reputed to have an invalid mother given to wailing like a banshee, seemed the only one untroubled by any sense of constraint. As the senior maths mistress, with an impressive record of getting her pupils into university, often with scholarships or bursaries to boot, she may have felt her position unassailable; unless living with a wailing banshee had taught her the value of good teas and dullness.

‘A dainty meal is such a joy,' she said, reaching for her umpteenth scone.

Miss Barton would not be teaching me until I got into the Vth, the form where you took the Cambridge Senior, that dire exam which for matriculation demanded, even if you were a genius at everything else, passes in English and Mathematics if you were not to be cast into the outer darkness of shorthand and typing, an academic reject. Would a year be enough for Miss Barton to teach me the arithmetic which Miss Gosse had so signally failed to do? There were times when I felt that not even God Himself could teach me arithmetic, though I wished He would at least have a try. Pending divine intervention, I was always as nice as I could possibly be to Miss Barton.

For something to say, I suppose, Miss Malahide looked at me and announced that ‘Noreen says you are very intelligent,' at which Mrs Crail laughed prettily and asked the girl, ‘Did you really say that?'

Noreen fluttered her eyelashes and murmured, ‘I really did,' at which the two of them laughed prettily together, as at some secret joke too exquisite to be shared with the lesser orders below the salt.

‘Aren't you glad, Sylvia –' recovering her composure, and daring me to say different, Mrs Crail wanted to know – ‘that I arranged for you to stay here at Chandos House?'

Naturally I answered that I was very glad. Miss Locke who, as the youngest teacher present, perhaps, or the one with the least seniority, had been unusually subdued all afternoon, put in: ‘We're delighted to have her, aren't we, Lydia?' To which Miss Gosse, looking a little wan, I thought, added: ‘We can hardly remember what it was like without her.'

‘I hope,' the headmistress went on, re-addressing herself to me, ‘that you are taking full advantage of your opportunities here – and that you are doing all you can to show your appreciation of Miss Gosse's kindness in taking you?' You would never have thought, from the way she went on, that my mother was paying 30s a week for the privilege of having me ‘taken'. Miss Gosse, obviously suspecting a trap, fell over herself to assure the monster that neither she nor Miss Locke had given me so much as a minute's extra coaching, and had no intention of ever doing so. ‘It wouldn't be fair.'

‘Very proper,' Mrs Crail commented, inclining her head on its short neck and beaming all over her piggy face.

Whilst the others were drinking their positively final cups of tea, eating their final slices of cake – I shouldn't have minded another slice myself but nobody asked me – I was commanded to play something on the piano. I chose one of Brahms' Hungarian Dances, the one everybody knows:
da
di-
da
– di-
da
– diddy-
da
, and so on; played it with a wholly synthetic verve and a lot of pedalling which I vainly hoped would blur the many mistakes. It was a deeply depressing experience. Not even my losing struggle with arithmetic had dispelled the illusion that life was something you became progressively better at, instead of, as it now appeared, an accumulating inventory of wrong notes.

When I had finished, Mrs Crail tapped her beringed fingers together, very, very softly. No half-crowns were going to be forthcoming from that quarter, that much was certain. Not so much as a threepenny bit.

After tea was cleared, Mrs Crail slumped in her armchair like a beached whale and Noreen swept me off for a walk in the garden.

‘Sylvia is determined to teach me the names of all the flowers,' she apologized to the others in her old-fashioned way, gently making it appear that the idea for our desertion of them was mine, not hers, which it wasn't, yet speaking with such an air of regret as almost to convince even me that such was indeed the case. Once we had got as far as the shrubbery, however, well out of sight and sound of the house, ‘Whew!' she exclaimed, stretching her arms outwards and backwards, bringing her shoulder-blades together and her usually diffident breasts into unwonted prominence beneath the pale yellow crêpe de Chine of her dress. ‘What a lot they are!'

‘Do you or don't you want to know about the flowers?' I demanded with childish crossness. Mr Betts had taught me all the names and since she was the one who had brought up the subject I was quite keen to show off my erudition.

‘All I know about flowers,' was the reply, ‘all I want to know, is that nettles sting and dandelions make you wet the bed.' Looking at me with a hard critical eye that did not exactly go with the rest of her get-up: ‘What a baby you are! Geoffrey was quite taken with you.'

‘I shouldn't have thought so.'

‘He was,' the girl insisted. ‘When I said we were coming here this afternoon he said to be sure and give you his love.'

After what had happened the day before with Robert Kett I couldn't help feeling pleased. Being completely absentee, I thought, Geoffrey would make the ideal boyfriend. He certainly wasn't one to come hanging about Chandos House on any pretext, whereas at school it wouldn't do me the slightest harm to be able to boast the ownership of a boyfriend who was actually grown up.

Just the same, and as usual pleased with the dream but rejecting the substance, I said crudely, ‘Don't give him my love back.'

I began to reel off the names of the flowers even though Noreen appeared not even to be listening. When we came to the soft fruit she went along the rows of canes helping herself to more of what I had come to think of as Mr Betts's raspberries.

To make her stop, as much as anything, I asked her if she was intending to marry Graham.

‘Marry him! You must be mad! Do you know what he does for a living? He works in the post office in Davey Place, handing out stamps and things over the counter.'

‘One day he may be the Postmaster-General.'

‘And me the Queen of Sheba!' Noreen laughed her tinkling ladylike laugh. ‘You don't happen to know any rich old men, I suppose? They're the kind to marry, just you make a note of it. The richer and the older the better.'

When I mentioned Mr Denver she seemed quite interested, especially when I said about the Rolls and the uniformed chauffeur.

‘Except that he belongs to Miss Gosse,' I finished.

Noreen laughed again and hooked her arm through mine.

‘One day you'll grow up,' she said. ‘Now, tell me the names of these stinking flowers.'

I don't think, really, she cared a brass farthing about them. I had hardly pointed out the lupins and the delphiniums, the peonies and the aquilegia, before she was off again, talking of this and that so pleasantly and as to an equal that I began to feel a bit above myself. I inquired if, as Miss Malahide had asserted, she had really said that about my being intelligent.

‘I really did,' was the reply. ‘And I do think it. That's why I got you out here – to say thanks for not giving the show away.'

I put on a suitably shocked look and said of course I would never do that.

‘I should have known.' Adding blithely: ‘But then, as I'm not to be trusted myself I tend to tar everybody else with the same brush. At first, let me tell you, when I came downstairs and discovered you'd done a bunk I was livid. What would that old bag of a housekeeper say when you came ringing to be let in last thing at night? She'd be bound to say something to Miss Gosse and then the fat would be in the fire. There'd be no way to stop it getting back to Auntie. You ask Graham – I was in a right old tizz. I only calmed down after I found that you'd left your cardigan behind, obviously for Auntie's benefit. And then I thought, she's not a fool, she'll find some way not to blow the gaff. And I was right, wasn't I? Though I have to admit I had a bad day or two after they came back from Ipswich, waiting for the axe to fall.'

Basking in Noreen's praise, however undeserved, I served up a shamelessly inflated version of how I had in fact passed the rest of that fateful night. Nothing about Mrs Benyon's drunken stupor which had made it impossible for me to get back into the house anyway: only horrific hours of darkness spent in the bothy fending off rats as big as fox terriers – well, as chihuahuas, anyway – an ordeal unflinchingly undertaken rather than risk betraying a friend.

Noreen, less impressed with my heroism than I could have wished, laughed and said, ‘What a lark!' and that she was glad it had all turned out so well. She said Miss Malahide was not such a bad old thing if only she wasn't such a randy old dyke. Not liking to ask what a randy old dyke might be, I made a mental note to ask Mr Betts.

When, comfortably gossiping, we got round to Mrs Crail, I said that I thought she was very ugly.

‘
She
doesn't think so, that's all that matters. She thinks she's the cat's whiskers. She's headmistress. She's made it.' Noreen continued: ‘She'll do anything to make mischief. Did you see how she made a beeline for me?'