The Quivering Tree (12 page)

I wandered over to the Haymarket cinema to look at the pictures of coming attractions. If it had been open so early in the day I would gladly have spent ninepence out of my remaining money to go inside just to sit in the friendly dark, even though the film that was on looked nothing much. Next week's attraction was
The Broadway Melody
; the glazed cases stuck to the cinema walls were filled with chorus girls kicking up their long legs, in between pictures of men's and women's faces kissing each other or looking as if they were just about to do so.

My parents had taken me to the cinema from a very early age. No one, so far as I could tell, had ever censored what I saw, and so I knew a lot about kissing in films, which I did not need to be told was altogether different from other kinds of kissing, especially kissing at children's parties which, at that time, was the kind I knew most about. Postman's Knock, for instance, where you got called outside the door and found a boy on the other side knowing he had to kiss you and you to kiss him before he could get away, back into the room with the others. Well, kiss in a manner of speaking. What you actually did, both of you, was position your cheeks vaguely in the vicinity of the other's; purse your lips and then unpurse them with a little sucking noise, after which it was OK to draw apart, glad that was over. The great thing was not the so-called kiss, which was distinctly icky, but to be called out, to be chosen out of all the multitude. It showed you were in demand.

Young as I was, I was not too young to understand that the way the big faces on the cinema screen came together, their edges melting so that you could scarcely tell where one face ended and the other began, was not just, nor even principally, about kissing. It was about Love, Love with a capital L, one of the things that lay in store for me when I was grown up, along with lots of other things like high heels and understanding Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Whilst I often wished I could understand Einstein's Theory without having to wait that long, so far as the high heels etc. were concerned I was in no hurry. On the contrary. I thought high heels silly, and boys much the same: each an alien species going its separate wobbly way, one I felt – as yet, anyway – under no urgent compulsion to follow.

Feeling as I did, it was a source of some annoyance to me that, during the past few months, on the few occasions when I had come into actual contact with a boy, I had found myself willy-nilly blushing and sounding silly, unless, indeed, I found nothing to say at all, which was even worse. Now, outside the Haymarket, as if, activated by the long legs and the big faces on the walls, my unwelcome thought had conjured up one of the disturbing species out of the air, at my side Robert Kett asked: ‘You going to see it?'

‘Shouldn't think so.'

After a long pause, as if a good deal of effort was involved in the saying of it: ‘If you want to, I'll pay.'

Me, ungraciously: ‘No thanks.'

Why were we both so ridiculously red? I could feel the heat of my own redness; see Robert Kett's, which, I was pretty sure, looked marginally worse than mine on account of all the freckles which dotted its surface. It was small comfort.

Robert Kett was a boy who had a cousin in IIIa. She was called Sybil, not a particular friend, just someone to whom, in my unthinking enthusiasm for history and with no ulterior motive, I happened once to say that it must be thrilling to have a name like Robert Kett, the name of the great Norfolk hero and rebel who had been hanged from the battlements of Norwich castle in 1549, ‘like a ham hung up for winter store', as one of the bystanders had put it pithily, dreadfully. The authorities of the time had never taken the body down, leaving it to the crows and as a reminder to the citizens of the city of the price of rebellion. It was fifty years, so the story went, before the last poor remnants fell to the ground for the dogs to scavenge, which would have made it the reign of James I. The very thought of the end of Robert Kett was enough to bring a lump to my throat. Even in the reign of King George V, four centuries on, I could still, when the light was right, glancing up at the Norman keep, brutish on its hill, fancy I saw the pitiful skeleton still dangling there, and feel sad and proud to be alive in Norwich, part of Robert Kett's story.

A lot of Norfolk people called Kett must have been proud of their lineage because there were several Robert Ketts about in Norwich. In the great man's home town of Wymondham his namesakes, for all I knew, could be numbered by the dozen. Sybil who, like Henry Ford, thought history was bunk and didn't give a fig for the great rebel even though he might have been her very own ancestor, told her cousin that I was crazy about his name, a statement which, so far as I could guess, slid easily into the assertion that I was crazy about its bearer. A week later, with all the self-importance of a pander, she brought me a letter.

Dear Sylvia,

This is to let you know I am crazy about you too.

I would like you to be my girl friend. We could go for walks and all that. I think you are pretty.

Yours sinserely,

Robert Kett, Sybil's cousin, I saw you at Dorothy Bell's party, remember?

It was my first love letter, in one way tremendously reassuring as evidence that one day real people, not wet, freckled boys, would fall in love with me. In the mean time, however, the very suggestion that I could be crazy about somebody who – no matter how illustrious his lineage – looked so little like Ronald Colman, my current favourite, was deeply offensive. Although afterwards, off and on, I was sorry for it – there was, after all, status in possessing a boyfriend, whatever he looked like – I gave Sybil my reply to deliver to the lovesick swain:

Don't talk rot and there is only one S in sincerely.

Robert Kett and I parted amicably, the embarrassment level markedly reduced on both sides. I am sure he was relieved I had said no to going to see
The Broadway Melody
, and not just because he had saved himself ninepence. Like Tamino in
The Magic Flute
he seemed to believe he had undergone some ordeal and emerged with a good pass. I think it crossed both our minds that we could be really good friends so long as we did not have to see each other.

On Sunday morning, whilst I was still getting dressed, I glanced out of my bedroom window and, in the spaces between the quivering leaves, saw Mrs Benyon going down the front path on her way to her day off. Despite the fact that the sun was already blazing out of a cloudless sky, the housekeeper wore a coat and a hat with a wintry look to them, perhaps to advertise that there was nothing in the universe she did not view with deep distrust, not even the sun. She carried, besides her black handbag and an umbrella, a large straw bag whose braided handles she could barely hold together, so crammed was it with – what? Gifts for the friends with whom she proposed to spend the day? What kind of people could possibly be friends with a woman like Mrs Benyon?

It was a mystery, one I lightheartedly engaged myself to solve, so soon as I could get round to it; just as, sooner or later, no hurry, I would solve all the mysteries of Chandos House. It had taken yesterday – my trip into town and my return for the first time to a completely empty house, mine to come to terms with without interruption – to bring home to me how content I was to be Miss Gosse's lodger, even if I didn't get enough to eat. On tiptoe at the mirror I put my tongue out at Mrs Crail, who had intended me to be miserable.

From the moment yesterday when, fagged with the uphill drag from the tram terminus, I had, as instructed, up-ended the flower pot hidden behind the trunk of the quivering tree to get at the front-door key concealed there, I had sensed a heightened awareness on the part of both of us – the house, that is to say, and me. The others out of the way, now we could really get to know each other.

Not that, once inside, and with all its closed doors vulnerable to my curiosity, I rushed to take advantage of my opportunity. The ambivalence of Chandos House was its most powerful attraction, one that I was in no hurry to construe. In St Giles – until, that is, my father, for once keeping himself outrageously to himself, had upped and died – there had been no secrets of any kind; an agreeable existence but, as I was now coming to see, bland: a criminal waste of the excitement with which the world was filled, only waiting for me to key into it.

Miss Gosse and Miss Locke were already having breakfast when I got downstairs. At the dining-room door I almost collided with Miss Locke as she emerged from the kitchen with the tray bearing the teapot, milk jug and hot-water jug.

‘Make way for the skivvy!' she cried merrily.

She was wearing a skimpy vest and shorts, and I could tell, by the shine in her eyes and the way the straight line from her forehead to the tip of her nose looked less forbidding than usual, that she was pleased with her appearance – which, to tell the truth, I did not think all that much of. Her legs were too thin, for one thing, too all of a piece, not at all like the legs of the chorus girls in
The Broadway Melody
photographs. There weren't enough curves and, at the top, they were narrow where they should have broadened out, so that it was quite a relief when your eyes got to the shorts, which were made of red-and-white checked gingham, and there wasn't any more leg for you to have to see.

Miss Gosse, for once, was also showing more than I could wish to have revealed for my embarrassed inspection. She was wearing a sleeveless frock that showed the tops of her arms which were veined and lumpy in a peculiar way as if somebody had secreted little pouches of fat here and there underneath the skin. Her left arm was pocked with absolutely enormous vaccination marks, which were no help to her beauty either. The white cotton material of her dress, though, was pretty, with a pattern of green leaves.

I blushed the way I always tended to when confronted with something in any degree troubling. Miss Locke, who had put the tray down on the table for Miss Gosse to do the pouring out, exclaimed delightedly: ‘I've shocked her, Lydia! Our little puritan is shocked! Perhaps she thinks schoolmistresses should wear their gowns even for a day at the sea.'

Miss Gosse smiled happily, first at Miss Locke, then at me.

‘You know what a tease Miss Locke is,' she observed indulgently, using her favourite phrase. Handing me my tea: ‘Especially on holiday. Then there's no holding her!'

She informed me that Miss Malahide and her niece would be calling for them shortly, any minute now, in their Austin Seven. They were all going to drive down to Ormesby for a picnic on the beach, and weren't they lucky to have such a glorious day? ‘Do get yourself into the garden for a time,' the kind woman finished, her pleasant, puggy face bright with concern. ‘Don't spend the whole day poring over your books.'

Miss Gosse was in the middle of telling me that I would find my midday meal inside the meat safe in the larder when a honking from the road, loud enough for a Rolls let alone an Austin Seven, signalled the arrival of their transport. Immediately Miss Gosse and Miss Locke both got very busy and excited, running about collecting towels and bathing costumes and a canvas windbreak; a basket of strawberries from the kitchen, spoons and fruit bowls and a crock of cream which, as an old hand at picnics from St Giles days, I offered to swathe in several sheets of newspaper so that it wouldn't go sour in the heat.

At last, the honking going non-stop, the two were away down the garden path, trailing towels and full of admonitions, one to the other, about not tilting the strawberries and not spilling the cream. I stood at the front door waving goodbye, feeling like a mother seeing off her children to a party or a scout jamboree. The honking ceased and I shut the door intending – with the same maternal relief, I fancy – a retreat to the dining-room for a second cup of tea to be savoured in blessed peace. Sliced bread being still uninvented, I decided first to run up to my room for the loaf I had hidden in my book box; to bring it down to the kitchen for slicing with Mrs Benyon's bread knife. I would never have a better chance.

I might even, greatly daring, light the grill on the gas stove and make myself an extra slice of toast.

I was coming down the stairs with my loaf cradled tenderly in my arms when the front door opened and Miss Locke came into the hall.

‘What on earth are you doing with that?' she asked, looking up at me; and then, as if my answer were of no consequence, commanded, ‘Put it down, anyway. I came back for the sugar sifter. And you.'

I followed Miss Locke down the path to the front gate unwillingly, my bathing costume under one arm and not knowing what to think – or, rather, concentrating all my strength on not thinking at all for dread of the possibilities thought might suggest to me. The moment we came out into the road I could tell by the faces of the three people waiting in the Austin Seven that I had been right to have qualms. Miss Locke had lied when she told me, as she had, that they had one and all decided that I simply must come too, they wouldn't take no for an answer. They had expected her to come back with the sugar sifter and nothing beside. Apart from anything else, the Austin Seven, open to the elements, was more like an outsize baby carriage than a real car. There was barely room for the four of them, let alone anybody extra, especially the way it was cluttered up with all the things they were taking with them.

I would have run back, cheeks burning, to the sanctuary of Chandos House, only Miss Locke put her arm round my waist, squeezed me so tightly I couldn't possibly have got away without making an exhibition of myself.

‘There she was,' Miss Locke announced. ‘A waif. Pathetic. I couldn't, in Christian charity, see how we could possibly enjoy our own day, knowing we had left her behind, all alone.'

Miss Malahide, who was at the driving-wheel and wore a straw sunbonnet out of which she peered like a whiskery milkmaid, nodded warmly. ‘Quite right, Helen! Poor little thing. Pa kicked the bucket – did she tell you?' Twisting round in her seat: ‘Move over, Noreen love – make room! You're only a little one!'