The Quivering Tree (13 page)

Miss Malahide's niece, who was a small young person with a neat face and body and a neat way of wearing her clothes that made other people (well, me) feel untidy just to look at her, moved over as far as she was able, which was not far. Her face showed neither pleasure nor annoyance, just neatness. In the front passenger's seat Miss Gosse, holding the crock of cream carefully between her knees, looked, not angry, as I had feared, either with Miss Locke or with me, but fussed, as if finding it difficult to rearrange her vision of the day ahead into one that could include me. I wanted to say to her that it wasn't my fault, that I understood perfectly how schoolmistresses, who had to put up with schoolgirls all week long, wouldn't want them tagging along in the weekend. But of course I just stood there looking down at my plimsolls like a half-wit, waiting to be disposed of.

Miss Malahide had a strange way of driving. Like a falcon or a hawk that hovers until it has pinpointed its prey, then drops down upon it in one deadly swoop, she targeted each successive bend in the road: a momentary pause before pressing down the accelerator in a mad rush to round it before any other predator got there first. For the better part of our journey to the coast I had the sensation that whilst the major portion of my anatomy might be a passenger in the Austin Seven, my stomach certainly was not; was far back down the road, struggling in a forlorn attempt to keep up with the rest of me.

Silently, intensely, I prayed to my father to put in a word with God
at once
, to interrupt Him no matter what He was doing, to stop me being sick. In the same moment, so muddled was my reaction to the way the day was turning out, a nasty little demon tucked away in some obscure corner of my being contemplated with glee the havoc I had it in my power to wreak on people who bossed one about so that one didn't know where one was, if anywhere at all. With a perverse pleasure it conjured up visions of green bile and yellow vomit descending impartially on strawberries, towels, Miss Malahide's picnic hamper, neat Noreen's neat frock and most of all, most of all, Miss Locke's bare legs and gingham shorts. If my stomach, despairing, had not by then been left abandoned by the roadside a good mile back, I could easily have made it happen out of my own imagining.

Fortunately, apart from Miss Malahide's occasional shouts at some passing motorist and Miss Gosse's involuntary gasps when, as happened every now and again, disaster threatened to overwhelm us, there was no conversation. One was not, thank God, in addition to everything else, expected to shine. The wind we created with our passing filled the little vehicle, possessed it, and us along with it. Fields and farmhouses swished past, yielding place to marshes and windmills, all equally unreal. As we neared the coast the wind blew even stronger and louder, joining airs already waiting there. The trees alongside the roadside verges no longer spread their shade impartially. They all leaned one way, away from the east wind.

Miss Malahide screamed, ‘I smell salt!' and slammed her foot down on the accelerator to celebrate it. We all – even Noreen What's-her-name – smiled at each other and took deep breaths as if we had accomplished something. Miss Locke who, throughout the journey, had kept her right arm extended behind my neck along the folded car hood, squeezed my shoulder, heaven knew why. Miss Gosse exclaimed with heartfelt gratitude: ‘The sea!'

We came to the sea by a narrow lane which ended at a cliff edge topped with a few wooden huts which could have done with a lick of paint. Three or four brick cottages on the other side of the lane, a way down to the beach that was more a ladder than a stair, and that was it: not a soul to be seen on the wide expanse of sand, only a mongrel dog barking at the waves. When Miss Locke, stretching her long legs thankfully, came up to me as I stood looking down at the view and asked, ‘Well? Wasn't it clever of me? Aren't you glad you came?' I hardly knew what to say.

The truth was that I didn't like the sea at all, as such. Hated it, in fact. It was a desert, worse than the Sahara which at least had oases: no flowers, no trees, only a killing wetness hammering at the shore with a manic persistence that must one day achieve its object – and then goodbye, lovely land! On the other hand, I adored what went with the sea – any sea, even the sea at Yarmouth edged with piers and cockle-stalls and weighing machines: an access of surprise and freedom, of certainty that beyond the seeming finality of the horizon there was another one waiting, and another, and so on ad infinitum.

‘Yes,' I answered her at last. ‘Very glad.'

I approved of the way Miss Locke helped Miss Gosse down the ladder, going ahead and, with hands on the ankles, guiding the stunted legs towards the next hold. Miss Gosse went down backwards, her body to the cliff face, so that I couldn't see her expression, if she was enjoying it or not; only the top of her black hair which, seen from an unusual perspective, had more white in it than I had realized. Miss Malahide, also watching, remarked to her niece, ‘Let that be a lesson to you, dearie!' but immediately, disdaining assistance, lowering herself with ponderous assurance from rung to rung. Pausing in her progress, she tilted her head back to shout: ‘You two young 'uns can bring the stuff down – and make it snappy, will you? I want a swim before we eat and I'm famished!'

Noreen and I quite enjoyed getting everything out of the Austin Seven and down to the beach – at least I did, and I believe she did too, because she began to giggle, which I had never heard her do up to that moment; to act younger, to be the girl she looked under all the neatness. She stopped looking down her nose at me. We almost became friends.

Partly, I'm afraid that our pleasure in our task was not very nice, based as it was on a kind of showing-off, a celebration of our youth for those old fuddy-duddies down below to eye and envy. How easy it was for
us
, we demonstrated, to run up and down like the angels of God on Jacob's ladder ascending and descending, and
they
hadn't had to carry picnic hampers and crocks of cream into the bargain.

Down on the sands Miss Gosse said that she would stay and guard our possessions.

‘Who were you expecting?' boomed Miss Malahide, looking meaningfully to right and left along the deserted beach. ‘Man Friday?'

‘We don't want that dog nosing round our food.' But I thought that perhaps the real reason was that, with her legs, Miss Gosse did not want me to see her in a bathing costume. At Chandos House, even in a dressing-gown, she always took care, going to or from the bathroom, that we did not meet on the landing. Out of the corner of my eye I would see her door opening a fraction as she waited for me to pass.

When Noreen announced that she wasn't going swimming either; in fact, couldn't – ‘You know –' she said, casting down her eyes – nobody made any comment, and I decided it must be because she did not want to risk messing up her hair which waved and curled in a fancy way I did not think could possibly be natural. Miss Malahide removed her sunbonnet and the long loose garment she was dressed in. Underneath she already had on her bathing costume which was grey with a full skirt and a string round the neck which she hauled on like a fisherman pulling in his nets and knotted, winching her large breasts into a solid mass without any division showing in the middle. Miss Locke's bathing costume was scarlet, very chic, with a diving girl embroidered on one corner of its half-skirt. She laid it out on the sand whilst she undid the button at the waistband of her shorts.

‘Helen!' cried Miss Gosse. But it was too late. Miss Locke slipped off her shorts and panties and stood there with absolutely nothing on down below, before nonchalantly, without haste, poking her feet through the leg holes of the bathing costume and pulling it up as far as her belly button, where she desisted for as long as it took her to take off her vest. Her breasts were so small they hardly seemed to belong to a grown woman. It was difficult to believe they belonged to the same category of anatomy as the big bump on the front of Miss Malahide.

With your eyes screwed up against the strong light Miss Locke looked very beautiful – slender body, curly cropped head, the small ears showing; one of those dancing figures made of some kind of silvery bronze that you sometimes saw in the windows of posh jewellers. Only if you made the effort, kept your eyes open sun or no sun, could you see that it wasn't true, an optical illusion. Whatever she might have been in the past, she wasn't young, she wasn't beautiful any more.

I didn't know where to look when she stood there, naked from the waist down. It wasn't behaviour I was used to. Except that of course I did look and was amazed. Miss Locke's hair – the hair on her head, that is to say – was light brown, the colour that hair which has been blond when you were a child often turns when you grow up: but the hair between her legs was black, and besides, there was so much of it! My face must have been at least as red as her red bathing costume.

‘Look at Sylvia!' Miss Locke pointed mockingly. ‘I've shocked her again. Have you ever known anyone shock so easily?'

The sea was very calm except at the edges where it had worked itself up into its usual pointless lather. Past the froth but still safely in my depth, I swam sedately to and fro doing the breast stroke, the only stroke I knew: not very far in each direction either, for I was not a good swimmer. I was quite unable to understand the ecstasy with which some swimmers launched themselves into the briny, as if suddenly they had found everything in life they had been looking for.

Miss Locke was one of those. What is more, she could do the crawl, which in those days not a lot of females knew how to do. She positively burrowed through the water, her flashing arms and legs diminishing in the distance. She made for the open sea as if she meant never to come back.

Miss Malahide remarked calmly, ‘Hope she's got enough petrol for the return journey.' The art mistress herself did no swimming at all; stood in water up to her chest and dipped herself in and out of it, submerging completely, head and all. As she rose from each immersion, the sea cascading off her grey costume, her grey hair and her grey-whiskery face, she looked very like one of the seals which, at Blakeney Point, further up the coast, often bobbed up out of curiosity to look at the people in the boats going out to the bird sanctuary.

Having proved to my own satisfaction, as well as to that of anybody who might be watching, that I knew how to swim – (every time I went into the water after an interval I found myself assailed by a little demon of doubt asking,
had I remembered since last time how it was done?
) – I rearranged myself and floated on my back, the only thing about bathing I actually enjoyed. Floating on a sunny day, the water warm, the light intense, always made me feel sleepy, made me wonder whether, if I let myself fall asleep, would I go on floating until I woke up again, or would the sea, taking advantage of my innocent trust in its good intentions, pour itself into my mouth and up my nose and drown me dreaming, in which case, would the dream go on for ever?

I was pondering the possibilities when I found myself suddenly lifted from the water, almost completely out of it, by sinewy arms and thin fingers that dug hard into my skinny flesh before setting me down on my feet.

‘Call that swimming?' Miss Locke inquired laughingly.

With none of the splashy bravura of her departure, she had come back from the far reaches of the ocean to play a silly trick on me and disturb, as so often, my composure. ‘Lydia's waving like mad,' she said. ‘She's terrified the cream will go off.'

I was too taken aback to reply, and followed silently out of the water. Miss Malahide was already trudging up the beach to the picnic.

At the water's edge Miss Locke cried: ‘Race you to the dunes!' and set off as she spoke, her long legs going like pistons.

It was so beastly unfair, so cheating not even to have said ‘One – two – three –
off
!' so that we could at least have started on equal terms that, powered by my burning sense of injustice, I actually overtook her, even holding my lead above the high-tide mark where the lovely firm wet sand gave way to powdery stuff that dragged you down and took away your strength. As I reached the nearest dune, the undisputed victor exulting in her victory, Miss Locke at my heels reached forward, grabbed at my bathing suit; sent me sprawling, herself landing on top of me.

The spiky marram grass that grew on the dunes scratching my chest, her panting body enveloping me – I was mortified! I could feel the sand plastering my wet bathing suit and the front of my legs and sifting through my hair. I had felt so peaceful out there floating in the sea, and so clean. The Chandos House geyser was so chugging and threatening that I had never enjoyed what one could call a proper bath since going there – only a frenzied soaping and rinsing before flinging myself out again, thankful to have escaped once more from the jaws of death. And now this ghastly woman – what a weight she was, a ton of bricks pressing down on me – had messed me up all over again.

‘Get off me!' I shouted, before realizing the enormity of what I had said, and modulating to a tone more nearly proper when addressing one of your schoolmistresses. ‘Please get off, Miss Locke. You're hurting.'

She sent me back to the sea to wash off the sand, which I did, more or less. I hadn't the courage to do as I had seen Miss Malahide do – put my head completely under water. Although the sun was shining with undiminished ardour the sea seemed to have become colder. I came out of it shivering, glad to outpace the last salt dribble that pursued me up the beach before returning sulkily to the rest of its kind. As I trailed back up the sands to rejoin my companions – not the right word: how could
teachers
ever be companions? – I wished that Miss Locke had given me time, back at Chandos House, to collect a towel before setting out. Thanks to her, I would have to sit in my school bathing suit, baggy old cotton with an edging of faded yellow – the colour of my house, Sewell – round the neck and armholes, until I was dry enough to put on my clothes again. True, I was only a child and it didn't matter that I hadn't a lovely red costume with an embroidered diving girl on it. It didn't matter how I looked.