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  Contents

  S T Haymon

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  S. T. Haymon

  The Quivering Tree

  S T Haymon

  Sylvia Theresa Haymon was born in Norwich, and is best known for her eight crime fiction novels featuring the character Inspector Ben Jurnet. Haymon also wrote two non-fiction books for children, as well as two memoirs of her childhood in East Anglia.

  The Ben Jurnet series enjoyed success in both the UK and the US during Haymon’s lifetime: Ritual Murder (1982) won the prestigious CWA Silver Dagger Award from the Crime Writers’ Association. Stately Homicide (1984), a skilful variation on the country house mystery, was praised by the New York Times as a ‘brilliantly crafted novel of detection … stylish serious fiction’, and favourably compared to the work of Dorothy L. Sayers.

  Chapter One

  ‘Don’t ring,’ my brother Alfred admonished me. ‘Wait till I’ve brought in the rest of the stuff.’

  He went back down the narrow path to the gate and out to the car. The house was built a long way back from the road, and the sound of the traffic, already distant and dreamlike, was further masked by a rustling noise which came from a large untidy tree at the side of the porch. There was no wind, and it was hard to decide what the leaves were making such a fuss about.

  Alfred need not have worried about my ringing the doorbell betimes. Now that I had actually arrived at Chandos House I was in no hurry to gain entrance. On the contrary. The longer it was put off the better. I propped my school attaché case, my shoe-bag, my music case and my bundled-up tennis racquet, hockey stick and lacrosse stick against the suitcase Alfred had already deposited on the front step and moved back on to the path, to get a better look at the exterior. I didn’t take a very good look in case somebody looking out of a window saw me and came to the door whilst I was unsupported by Alfred’s presence.

  The house was Edwardian, of less importance than, unseen, its name might have suggested, but not without a certain consequence: solid, the nearest dwellings on either side an affluent distance away. Unfortunately, my dead father had taught me, young as I was, to be an architectural snob and before darting back into the protective shadow of the porch, itself a foolish irrelevance of pseudo-Tudor held up by outsize skittles painted a turgid green, I curled up my lip at the narrow bays, the bricks no number of centuries would ever mellow, the general mean-spiritedness of the place that, incredibly, for the next two years, was to be my home. Though tears came into my eyes at the prospect, another part of me was not displeased.

  How unreal my possessions looked, parked on that alien doorstep! My music case had the St Giles address tooled into the leather. My mother and I had watched it being done with red-hot dies, an advertisement of my place in the world, never to be removed. ‘Last you a lifetime,’ the man who did it had promised, and my mother and I had nodded approvingly, for who could ever imagine living anywhere else? But now – St Giles? Where was that? It might as well have been on the moon. The tennis racquet, the hockey stick and the lacrosse stick had the air of ritual objects belonging to an alien cult into which I had yet to prove myself worthy of initiation. The suitcase wasn’t mine, not mine particularly, that is. It was a family object, like most of the things that, up to that moment, had surrounded me, cushioning and confirming my existence. But where was the family now, apart from my father, trapped in the cemetery and deprived for ever of his armchair, his newspapers, Caruso records and all the other things that made life worth living?

  Alfred came crunching up the path with my box of books, and plunked it down next to the suitcase. He wasn’t looking too happy himself, but whether it was sadness at our imminent parting or because the coarse pebbles of which the path was made were scratching his beautiful brogues I couldn’t tell, and he went back to unstrap my bike from the running-board of the Morris Oxford before I had time to ask. The thought of the Morris Oxford made the tears well up in earnest. After all, it wasn’t as if I were parting from my brother for good. I would be seeing him from time to time, even though our relationship would be completely changed (but then, everything was changed, wasn’t it – not only that), but the car, never again. Alfred had announced that he was going to turn it in for a sports model, an Alvis or a Riley or an MG, something that went better with his plus-fours and his ukelele and the girls with red lips, long cigarette-holders and bobbed hair streaming in the wind he often took along as passengers. The fact that his fiancée, Phyllis, didn’t smoke and that whenever she came out in the Morris Oxford with us Alfred had to pull up every few miles so that she could get out to be sick, made me privately wonder whether I would ever be called upon to be bridesmaid at that particular wedding.

  I waited on the porch, tremulously reflecting that by rights there ought to be a place where motor-cars which had served their masters well could be turned out to grass like old horses, instead of being sold down the river like so many Uncle Toms. How could the new owners, whoever they might be, be expected to learn our Morris Oxford’s little ways and tolerate them, as we had, as endearing expressions of personality? How, for example, appreciate that, though the set of celluloid windscreens looked identical, in fact only a particular one fitted a particular door, and you could go blue in the face to no purpose trying to fit the ratchets of one into holes where it did not choose to go? We had always been meaning to mark the windscreens in some unmistakable way, but somehow had never got round to it, and now, as with everything else, it was too late. Anyway, with time it hadn’t proved necessary, because we had come, little by little, to recognize certain intimate marks of identity, such as the stain on the one that belonged on the front passenger side where Phyllis had been sick on the black belting that surrounded the celluloid before Alfred had come to a place where it was safe to stop.

  If only I were older, I thought, I could have kept the Morris Oxford myself and gone driving all over Norfolk in it, the way we had before my father died. Only, children couldn’t get driving licences and though, to my way of thinking, at twelve I wasn’t a child any longer (particularly as the experience of losing a parent was a very ageing thing) I wasn’t a grown-up either. I wasn’t anything. This doleful reflection cheered me up wonderfully, and when
Alfred came back with the bicycle I was able to greet him with an encouraging smile.

  ‘You can always use that Cherry Blossom polish with the dye in it. I bet it’ll cover up the scratches so you’d never even know they were there.’

  ‘What?’ Alfred stared. He propped the bicycle against the privet hedge that, on one side, edged the path from the house to the road. ‘We’ll have to ask where this goes.’ He came back to the porch and put an arm round my shoulder. ‘Know what?’ he said. ‘I’m going to miss my little sister.’

  The bell was still clanging somewhere deep in the house when Miss Gosse opened her front door, which was rather unnerving, both because I wasn’t used to doorbells which kept on ringing when the need for their services was patently past, and because Miss Gosse herself was such a surprise.

  I knew her, of course. I’d have been pretty thick not to, considering that she had been teaching me mathematics, or trying to, for more than a year. I even prized her funny, olive-skinned face with its shiny, boot-button eyes and its snub nose as one of the alleviations of the school day; the black hair parted in the middle and drawn tightly back from her forehead into an intricately plaited knot which was more like one of those fancy bread rolls than a bun, except there weren’t any poppy seeds, naturally.

  My new landlady’s head, then, presented no problem: it was the rest of her. In school, like all the other mistresses, Miss Gosse wore her black college gown, such a soaring symbol of authority as it billowed along the corridors that one scarcely noticed the body beneath, unless it was as big as a barge like the body of Mrs Crail, the headmistress. I knew Miss Gosse was short – not much taller than myself, I now discovered, so greatly had I sprung up in the half-term I had been away from school – but until the moment I entered Chandos House for the first time and saw her in a blouse and skirt, no gown, no dignity, I had never noticed that her sturdy little legs were much too short for her sturdy little body, almost dwarfish.

  As one who, not out of vanity and without giving a lot of thought to it, had always taken it for granted that I would grow up beautiful, because beautiful was the best thing to be and only the best was going to happen to me, I felt a stab of fear to see Miss Gosse the way she was. Not that I was afraid short legs were catching, nothing silly like that; only that they proved you could never be sure. For all I knew, Miss Gosse had never wanted to be a maths mistress at all, but a chorus girl with lovely long legs that went far up her thighs, and look what she had been landed with instead.

  At school we – that is, the other girls in my form and I – often filled in dull moments with arguing as to whether Miss Gosse looked more like a Pekinese than she did a King Charles spaniel, or vice versa. Sometimes, just to stir things up, I would maintain that it was a pug of whom she was the spitting image. In my heart, however, I was a King Charles man through and through. At St Giles we had briefly had a King Charles spaniel puppy whom I had loved passionately in the short time before it had dashed out into the street and been run over by a tram. There were times, during maths, as I sat trying to take in parallelograms or quadratic equations or whatever was the flavour of the day, when Miss Gosse, standing in front of the blackboard with a stump of chalk in her hand, would turn her head in a certain way, and instantly grief for the lost puppy would overwhelm me, so close was the resemblance between her and my darling Tirri.

  Occasionally, Miss Gosse would notice my distress and misinterpreting its cause, tell me kindly that, if only I concentrated, all – parallelograms, quadratic equations, the secrets of the universe – would be revealed. She was a great one for concentrating. Standing wedged with my luggage in the narrow hall of Chandos House, a knobbly hallstand nudging my back in an unfriendly way, I found myself willing her to concentrate on tea. Now that I had recovered from my illness, my appetite had recovered tenfold, and I was ravenous. Breakfast at St Giles that day had been of the sketchiest, and lunch non-existent with the moving men hovering, itching to whisk everything in the house away to London, the last remnants of food in the larder included. Disgorged at last by an empty house which would already have seemed a total stranger were it not for the discoloured rectangles left on the wallpaper that showed where our pictures had hung, we – the three of us, my mother, Alfred and I – had driven to the station with ages to spare before the train left for London: plenty of time to go and get something to eat if only the two grown-ups had given a thought to it, which they hadn’t, and I didn’t like to bring up the subject, it seemed so crass when my mother was in such a state.

  It was funny. For as long as I could remember, my mother had mourned the cruel necessity which had made Norwich our home. London, I was instructed, was not only bigger, it was better in every possible way, a place where life was lived to the full as against the mere vegetable existence which was all that went on in the benighted provinces, or at any rate in the benighted province of East Anglia. She was forever, as she put it, ‘popping up to town’ to spend a few days with one or other of her four sisters resident in the capital, either as a temporary escape to the full life, or even just to buy a new hat because London hats were, by definition, infinitely superior to those on sale in Norwich, even in posh shops like Bunting’s or Chamberlains. When I asked her once why she had ever married my father and come to live in Norwich in the first place, if she disliked the city so much, she had opened her beautiful brown eyes wide and replied that everyone made sacrifices for love, an answer I found unsatisfactory in the extreme, since it in no way corresponded to my juvenile fantasies as to the nature of that mysterious quality.

  But now that the moment of parting had come – almost come, rather, for a notice at the platfrom barrier announced a forty-minute delay – she paced to and fro, from the bookstall to the booking office and back again, tormenting herself over and over with the despairing question: was she doing the right thing?

  Her indecision confused me beyond what had already become the normal confusion of those months following my father’s death. How could it not be the right thing to go and live in London since that was what she wanted to do, and there was nothing now to stop her? After all, two of her children – my sister and the younger of my two brothers – were already living and working there; and Alfred, also a grown man, was going to be married as soon as, in the light of our bereavement, it was considered decent to do so. As for myself, I was taken care of, wasn’t I, so why the eleventh-hour agony? It couldn’t be because of my father that she thought she ought to stay where she was, because he was no more in Norwich than he was anywhere else except heaven, where he was bound to be, having been a sweet and lovely man.

  All the same, I couldn’t help wondering if my mother’s last-minute second thoughts might not be on account of my father after all; if it didn’t make her uncomfortable to think of him up there close to the throne of God, looking down all the time to see what she was up to, and thinking that she couldn’t wait to be off the minute the coast was clear. I know his new address made me feel awful. Alive, my father had been exquisitely scrupulous about according his children their own private living space, mental and physical – but dead! The last thing I wanted was for him to burn in Hell, but oh! it was intolerable, knowing him in heaven and privy to absolutely everything that went on – everything! When, intending comfort, people told me not to grieve, that night and day he was watching over me, I wanted to shout, ‘He isn’t! He isn’t!’ Whenever I went to the lavatory, I would whisper fiercely as I pulled down my knickers: ‘Don’t look! Don’t look!’

  Even Alfred, my unfailingly kind brother, looked and sounded a little frayed after a half-hour of repeated assurances that yes, my mother was doing the right thing. I could tell by the way he scanned the railway lines converging in the distance that, like me, he was willing them to produce a train moving slowly over the points into Norwich Thorpe station. I’m not sure that, even as he reminded her that her sisters – our aunts – would be there in force at Liverpool Street to meet her, he did not send up a little prayer to the god of the Lond
on and North-Eastern Railway: ‘Hurry up, for Christ’s sake!’

  Maud, our maid1 was already ensconced in the new house, ready to let in the movers and tell them where the furniture and everything and everyone else was to go. In the meantime, George, Aunty Kay’s chauffeur (she was the rich one), resplendent in his grey uniform and peaked cap, would drive the reunited sisters in the Seabrook to Aunty Kay’s house where she would be able to relax, have a meal, put her feet up, until word came that the house was ready for her reception, down to the last hairpin.

  The reference to a meal really did for me. Up till then I had been playing a private game to make time pass and divert my mind from my mother’s and my own sufferings. Every time we approached the bookstall I strained to see how much I could read of the front pages of the newspapers displayed there, how many story titles on the covers of the magazines, the Strand, the London, Argosy, Happy Mag, before my mother turned on her louis heels and it was time to trail back to the booking office once more. Now, my hunger smote me with such force that if I hadn’t seen with my own eyes that the larder there was bare I would have cut across Alfred’s optimistic affirmations that of course she was doing the right thing with: ‘No, you’re not! Let’s go back to St Giles and never leave it again, ever!’

  For more about Maud, see Opposite the Cross Keys (Constable, 1988)

  Back to Text

  Chapter Two

  Driving away from the station, out of town by the Sprowston Road, a long pull-up past dingy houses which seemed to have nothing to do with the beautiful city centre where I had lived and had my being, I had felt too battered by my mother’s emotions to feel any of my own, conscious only of the great void which throbbed inside me, expanding and contracting, glug, glug, like one of those volcanic mudholes they went in for in New Zealand.