The Quivering Tree (9 page)

The exception was Miss Malahide.

‘Pa died, did he?' At my reluctant nod – every time I assented to the proposition of my father's death it seemed that I killed him anew – ‘Loved him, did you?' A further small nod. I was aware of the girls' sardonic glances. ‘Pity, that. Take your seats, girls – not like a herd of bison,
if
you please, but quietly, prayerfully, as befits one's demeanour in a temple of the arts. As I was saying –' continuing the conversation in a smooth, unbroken line like those she was apt to sweep across our drawing paper with a BB pencil to show us how something ought to be done, and then blame us for taking ten minutes to rub the soft smear out – ‘a pity you loved him. Now my pa, bless him, was a complete monster. Couldn't say so at the time, of course, but we were all so delighted to see him go, I can't tell you. After the funeral we went for a bang-up tea at Gunter's and then on to the panto:
Dick Whittington
. Glorious! My ma was a new woman. Married again as soon as the year was out – but would you believe it? Blow me if the second wasn't as bad as the first, if not worse! A good woman, but not a penn'orth of judgement. Tell your ma from me, don't be in too much of a hurry.'

The possibility of my mother remarrying was so patently ridiculous that I laughed out loud.

‘That's right,' said Miss Malahide approvingly. ‘Cheer up – you can't cheer down!'

Because I had been away for so long she let me choose what we should do that day, and I said ‘Models', although it brought, as I knew it would, groans from the rest of the form. Models wasn't drawing from life, as one might have expected, but drawing arrangements of large cylinders, pyramids and cubes which, with their smooth white surfaces and cool, unambiguous shadows, were like music by Bach or God. At the end of the lesson Miss Malahide marked mine G for Good, which I hoped wasn't just her being kind, though I was afraid it probably was.

The garden was another country – lovely, but not at all what I had meant by staying on in Norwich. Even as I gazed about me in admiration, I yearned for the Market Place, the castle, the cathedral, the vibrating pulse of that centre which, for all of my life up till then, had enfolded and defended me the way its ancient walls had once enfolded and defended the entire city.

Nothing was left of the walls except for some lumps of masonry sticking up through the pavement like dragons' teeth looking for a very clever dentist. Thanks to the good offices of Mrs Crail, nothing was left of me either, marooned as I was on the shirt tails of the city, in neither town or country, a nothing place for nothing people.

Luxuriating in the complacent discontent that goes particularly well with a good tea, I wandered beneath the fruit trees, sloshing my shoes through the fallen blossom; past herbaceous borders where lupins and peonies and bearded iris took precedence. I skirted a netted enclosure of currant and gooseberry bushes, and came to the vegetable garden.

The vegetable garden was enormous, taking up by far the largest part of the land available: not so much a garden as a regimental parade-ground, ranks of this and that and the other in the vegetable line standing to attention into the far distance. How could Miss Gosse and Miss Locke with their birdlike appetites – even with Mrs Benyon added to the equation – put away such tonnage of food? Even assuming Mrs Benyon spent her days pickling, bottling and preserving, what did they do with it all?

On a sanded space outside a greenhouse filled with tomato plants a man was sitting on a wooden bench in the sun, reading a newspaper. All about his feet the ground was covered with punnets and punnets of strawberries, neatly fitted into crates of slatted wood. The man, who was small and knobbly, not young, with bow legs whose curvature, in their corduroy breeches, was noticeable even when he was sitting down, looked up from his paper and announced, not asked: ‘You'll be the gal, then, what her ladyship's taken in.'

Not pleased at all with the way he put it, I admitted repressively that I was indeed boarding with Miss Gosse.

‘Tha's what I said.' The man tilted back the peak of his cloth cap which had been pulled down against the strong light. He inquired matily: ‘How the ol' goats treating you, then?'

Dropping the repressive bit since, to tell the truth, I was delighted to have come upon someone, anyone, to talk to, I replied that they were treating me very well, thank you.

‘S'long as you don't let ' em start taking liberties,' the man admonished. ‘Best advice I can give you. Start as you mean to go on.' I should have liked to ask what particular liberties he had in mind, but, as usual, was shy about asking. Picking up his paper again, the man looked at me in a peculiar way, pale-blue eyes narrowed, before inquiring: ‘You pure, gal?'

At this surprising question the red flooded into my cheeks, I couldn't think why, except that ‘pure' was one of
those
words, whatever
those
words might be. I had reached the point in life where, although I was as completely ignorant of matters sexual as on the day I was born – more ignorant, probably, for how could one possibly undergo that particular transmogrification without picking up a few hints along the way? (knowledge unfortunately mislaid in all the stress of learning to be a baby) – I was at least grown up enough to recognize my ignorance. There was, in IIIa, a small raffish group of girls that the rest of us knew, somehow, were not ignorant. We also knew, somehow, that this knowledge which they alone of their classmates possessed was in some way connected with boys. In the evenings, when they should have been indoors doing their homework, they hung about on street corners, not exactly talking to boys but with boys circling them under the street-lamps like moths about a flame, except marginally more cautious, not getting close enough to get burned. These girls turned up their noses at me because I was a swot and because I came from a private school talking posh, and I turned up my nose at them because they completely failed to understand how exciting it was to learn things – the kind of things you learned at school, that is, not out in the streets under the street-lamps.

The fact that I, normally so inquisitive, not to say nosy, made absolutely no effort to inform myself of what it was that they knew – indeed, went out of my way to avoid inadvertent enlightenment – I can only put down to a deliberate if subconscious suppression, a reluctance to hear something which would take me into areas where I was not yet ready to venture.

The man insisted: ‘Well – are you?'

‘I – I think so,' I stammered.

He gave me another of his looks; then, apparently satisfied, handed me the paper he had been holding.

‘Get an eyeful o' that, then –' indicating with a dirt-encrusted fingernail where I should look – ‘an' tell me what you fancy.'

It wasn't like any newspaper I had ever seen at St Giles: a kind of sporting sheet, printed on pink paper, with races listed according to venue and starting times, and the names of the horses entered for them.

I cast my eyes down the lists without really seeing them; wondering, though once more too shy to ask, what on earth being pure could possibly have to do with horse races.

As if reading my thoughts, the man explained: ‘It's what you might call a scientific experiment. Somethin' I heard. Bloke on the Cattle Market – gipsy, he were – tol' me the best way to be sure of a winner is to get a young gal what's a virgin – (another of
those
words! My face flamed afresh) – to pick it out fer you.' He finished kindly: ‘Not that I'll be casting 'spersions on yer morals, gal, if it don't work. You know what them gippoes are.'

I returned to the racing sheet confusedly: relieved when a familiar name stood out, my brother's.

‘King Alfred,' I pronounced, with sudden confidence.

‘King Alfred?' The man repeated the name unbelievingly. ‘Get away! That refugee from the cat's meat man!' He took back his paper and frowned at the relevant line. ‘Thirty-three to one! You aren't having me on, by any chance?'

‘King Alfred!' I repeated, pleased with the regal sound of it.

The reward for my racing tip was a punnet of strawberries which I didn't want to accept because – though I did not say so – I wasn't sure they were in the man's gift to bestow. Full up as I was with my gorgeous tea, the sacrifice was not all that great.

‘Go on!' the man insisted. He thrust the fruit at me so that I had no choice between taking it or getting strawberry stains on my school uniform. ‘Stick it up yer bloomers if yer think
they're
going to say anything – which they won't, take it from me. I'm the one in charge of this here garden. Without me, as they know very well, it'd be a wilderness you could wander about in fer forty years an' no Promised Land at the end of it, either.'

‘It
is
an awfully big vegetable garden for so few people –'

‘Tha's on account of old Mr Gosse. Never knew him myself, before my time. Foreigner. Gossi his name was, afore it was Gosse. Bet you never knew that! Frog or Eytie, something like that. Always thought another war were just round the corner, so they tell me, an' wanted to be sure he wouldn't starve when the Jerries come marching up London Street into the Market Place.'

‘Really?' I was glad to learn something of Miss Gosse's family history. It made me feel less a stranger at Chandos House. It also made me understand how Miss Gosse came to look the way she did with her dark skin and hair, her black boot-button eyes. ‘Does Miss Gosse think the same about the war, then, that she keeps on growing so much?'

‘Never heard her say, one way or the other. Only she'll never change nothing her daddy did, I know that.' The man folded away his paper, put it in his jacket pocket and got up from the bench in a way that indicated the audience was over. Sorry to be constrained to break off the only social intercourse that had come my way, I offered to help him carry the strawberries up to the house, only he said no; so I announced my intention of going down to the bottom of the garden in order to complete my tour of inspection.

From where we stood, I could make out a gate at the far end. Where did it lead?

‘Jest a track along the back o' the houses, an' a field the other side, got a donkey in it. If you go down there, mind out. It's a right ole devil.'

I couldn't understand how a donkey could be dangerous, but I said I'd be careful. With my best private-school manners I told the man how glad I was to have made his acquaintance, and that I hoped to see him again soon.

‘Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, my days here.' The man looked at me. ‘Bugger as burnt the cakes, weren't he?'

‘What? Oh – you mean King Alfred. Yes he did, though it's probably only a legend.' Even as I spoke I recognized the schoolroom prissiness that probably drove my class-mates barmy.

‘Like thirty-three to one, eh? In case you want to know,' the man added, as I took my first steps away from him, ‘the donkey's name is Bagshaw.'

‘Is it? Why is it called that?'

‘Because that's its name, what you think? Which reminds me – you never asked me mine.'

‘I didn't like to –'

‘Pah!' he spat in disgust. ‘Some people'd shit theirselves if a mouse farted.'

I made the effort and inquired haltingly, ‘What is your name, please?'

‘Joey Betts,' he answered, enormously pleased with himself. ‘What else?'

The track at the back of the garden was a delicious place, secret and spicily aromatic with the hawthorn, honeysuckle, sweetbriar and bramble that made up the untidy hedge on either side. There wasn't a proper gate into the field opposite, which was grass mostly and some spiky weeds: only a few strands of barbed wire. I could not see any donkey.

I stood there with my strawberries, but only for a moment. Through a gap between the wires a dove-coloured head with enormous teeth whipped out of the shelter of the hedgerow and attached itself to the punnet. For a second or so we struggled for possession, a good many of the strawberries jolting out on to the ground in the process: but my adversary had the advantages of strength and surprise. The teeth withdrew, taking the punnet with them.

The donkey ate the fruit first, and then the punnet, which it seemed marginally to prefer; then gave me a hard look which signalled plainly: ‘That all?' I picked up some berries that had fallen on the path beyond reach of his questing head and threw them – it didn't seem very polite but his teeth were
very
large – into the field behind him.

The donkey did not deign to go after them; merely shrugged his head – a head that was disproportionately large in relation to his body – in a way that amply conveyed he did not think much of me. It was a head you almost expected him to take off presently and there underneath would be a couple of pantomime men coming up for a breath of air.

The animal, however, did not take off his head; only leaned his neck on the barbed wire in a way that frightened me. I expected to see blood spurting from his jugular any minute, but it was only strawberry juice, followed by saliva. When it was clear that no more strawberries or punnets were on offer, Bagshaw spat at me.

‘That bloody critter in't one to waste his spit where it ain't appreciated. Sure sign he likes you,' Joey Betts said consolingly when I came back into the garden feeling sticky and rejected. ‘We got a tap here, you want to use it.'

He turned on a stopcock at the side of the greenhouse and provided me with a bar of orange soap and a towel, both proffered with a kindness which made tears come into my eyes. Rightly or wrongly, I felt that I had found a friend.

‘Put a sock in it,' he said in a friendly way whilst I washed and dried my face, sniffing between times. ‘If I was to turn on the waterworks for every time that Bagshaw spewed me in the kisser, I'd've drowned in me tears twice over by now. If you don't mind me saying so, you take things too personal. Bagshaw's got problems, poor ole bugger. All day long, no one to talk to, no one to care a brass farthing if he's dead or alive. Wonder is he don't go clean off his rocker, let alone a little harmless spit what don't hurt nobody.' Taking back his toilet articles, the gardener draped the towel over the back of the bench, and gave me a sudden sharp look. ‘Reckon you could do with a bit o' love yerself, gal.'