The Quivering Tree Read online

  ‘Was the train late?’ Miss Gosse now inquired. ‘We’d expected you earlier. What a pity you’ve missed tea!’

  It was my introduction to the life of a lodger, a life where meals materialized only at pre-stated hours, and if you were late, hard cheese. No offer to make a fresh pot, no bringing back to the table of what was left of the bread and butter: between whiles, no hot snacks on tap in the kitchen, no larder overflowing with little somethings to keep you going until it was time once more to sit down to a proper meal. I had missed tea. How I missed it!

  Alfred looked at me worriedly. After all, I was only just well again. Dr Parfitt had emphasized that I had to be careful, whatever that might mean. Afraid he might say something, I tugged surreptitiously at his jacket. Making demands, I knew instinctively, even if he didn’t, was no way to get my new lodging life off to a good start.

  A large square woman came into the hall through a door at the far end. As she reached the slash of light which came through the glass panels in the front door, I could see that she wore a long-sleeved overall with a design of purple and white shrubbery which echoed in a truly remarkable way the marbled pattern of her skin. Marbled not only described her complexion but also the extraordinary immobility of her features. When she spoke it was snap! Her lips moved the way a lizard moved, almost too fast to be seen before they froze again. Only a slight quiver of the heavy jowls, a tremor that never let up completely, gave the game away that she hadn’t just that moment arrived on the boat with the Elgin marbles.

  ‘This is Mrs Benyon, our housekeeper,’ said Miss Gosse, smiling. And, turning to the woman in question: ‘And this is Sylvia, our little guest.’

  Guest! I thought bitterly, not taken in for a moment. A fine guest who didn’t even qualify for a cup of tea!

  Mrs Benyon looked at me without noticeable warmth and demanded, in a tone that was more London than Norfolk: ‘Horlicks or Bovril?’

  The question took me aback, both because it was unexpected and because I hated both drinks equally.

  ‘We all have a mug of either Horlicks or Bovril at eight o’clock,’ Miss Gosse explained with a touch of coyness, as if confessing to something a little on the naughty side. ‘Mrs Benyon needs to know which you prefer.’

  I knew better than to say neither, thank you just the same. I said Bovril, not becase I liked the one any better than the other, but because the few times I had had to drink the stuff it had at least arrived with a couple of cream crackers in the saucer.

  The housekeeper pointed to my sports equipment which, for want of anywhere else to put it, Alfred had propped against the hallstand.

  ‘That,’ she pronounced, ‘will have to go under the stairs. The rest –’ and she looked at my brother meaningly – ‘will need to be carried up.’

  Alfred sprang forward with offers of assistance, but I could see the woman had made him nervous. So handsome, so good-humoured, he was used to people smiling at him. Disapproval threw him out of his stride. He grabbed at the bundle. As he did so the lacrosse stick twisted in the same unpredictable way it often twisted on the playing-field; banged against a brass tray which stood on the bit of hallstand which jutted out in front of the central mirror, and knocked it to the floor. Some letters ready for the post which had been placed on the tray slid across the linoleum.

  As Alfred and I, stammering apologies, scrabbled red-faced to pick them up, I lifted my head to see the housekeeper looking across at Miss Gosse with a glaze of satisfaction on her marbled face. As loud as words, the look proclaimed: ‘What did I tell you?’

  ‘Accidents will happen.’ Miss Gosse smiled, but she sounded a bit nervous herself. In the few moments I had lived in Chandos House I had learned that Mrs Benyon was a very powerful person.

  My room at Chandos House was so small that Alfred, going ahead with the suitcase, made the mistake of assuming it was some kind of anteroom, with the proper bedroom somewhere beyond. It was, in fact, built over the hall and was of comparable proportions, only slightly smaller, part of its space having been snaffled by the first floor landing. Once he had realized that was it, my brother was forced to put the suitcase on the bed, which I could tell immediately Mrs Benyon, wheezing up the stairs behind us to keep an eye on what we were up to, didn’t like one little bit, only there was nowhere else to put it, if we were to be able to move about the room at all. As it was, the box of books had to go under the bed, which wasn’t such a bad idea considering how the latter dipped in the middle.

  The only other furniture was a straw-seated chair on which were a box of matches and a green metal candlestick fitted with a white candle, plus, in front of the window, a tall, narrow chest of drawers with a mirror perched on top, too high to see into, except on tiptoe. A shallow niche, fixed up with a rail and curtained off in the same faded chintz as hung on either side of the window, served as a wardrobe. I could tell just by looking at him that Alfred – not out loud: he wasn’t going to risk offending Mrs Benyon, whose important position in the household he had noted, just as I had – thought it was a poky little room, but I loved it on sight, taking its smallness as a positive virtue. I saw myself curled up inside it as in a chrysalis, snug as a bug in a rug until the moment came – as come it must – for me to fly free towards the sun, a butterfly on iridescent wing.

  In the meantime, it was dark, though: darker than I cared for, owing to a branch of the untidy tree outside spreading its bulk clear across the window. Its leaves, pressed against the glass like nosy urchins, were almost completely round, with shallow, rounded teeth that did not look at all aggressive. The leaf stalks were ones you could be sorry for, they looked so weak and defenceless. No wonder the leaves shivered and quivered, afraid of dropping off altogether.

  It was so dark that Alfred looked round for the electric light switch. The housekeeper, divining his intention, actually chuckled, the marble, though only momentarily, turning into rubber before resuming its accustomed rigidity. ‘You’ll look a long time for one o’ them in this house. We only got gas here.’

  ‘Gas!’

  We both of us looked up at the light dangling in front of the window, and sure enough, there it was – a gas mantle with a beaded frill and two little pulleys with rings at the ends for regulating the flame, or so I supposed; also a further box of matches on top of the chest of drawers. We were astonished. No doubt in 1930 there were in Norwich homes besides this one where electricity had not yet penetrated, but only the cottages of the poor, surely: not houses like Chandos House.

  ‘Old Mr Gosse didn’t hold with it,’ Mrs Benyon condescended to explain. ‘Said it wasn’t natural, all those wires going every which way. One day we’d be struck by lightning, sure as eggs are eggs.’

  ‘I’m surprised he thought gas any safer. Does Mr Gosse still live here?’ Alfred wanted to know.

  ‘Passed over eleven years come November. But Miss Gosse wouldn’t go and do something he wouldn’t want her to. She knows what respect is.’

  ‘Quite!’ Alfred agreed hastily, but I could see that my big brother was worried about me, about lighted matches, escaping gas and all that. Since my father’s death he had increasingly taken on the paternal role. ‘Think you can manage to light it, Sylvia, and turn it off properly?’

  ‘Of course I can.’ I added, at my most winsome: ‘If I can’t, I’m sure Mrs Benyon will show me how.’

  Mrs Benyon didn’t say she would, she didn’t say she wouldn’t. She paced heavily out of the room, throwing over her shoulder as she went: ‘When you got that case empty, bring it down so’s it can go in the shed.’

  ‘Shed reminds me,’ Alfred said after she had gone, her footsteps deliberate on the lino of landing and stairs, seeming not to fade away in the distance the way footsteps could normally be relied on to do, ‘I’ve got to find out where your bike goes.’ Instead of going, however, he stood eyeing the gas fitting with undiminished distrust. ‘I don’t like it. Suppose you have to go the lav during the night?’ During my illness I had been obliged to go only too o
ften.

  ‘There’s always the candlestick. That’s what it’s for, I suppose.’

  ‘I still don’t like it.’ But my brother’s face brightened. ‘I know what! You can have the torch out of the car. I put new batteries in only last week. I’ll go and fetch it.’ After another worried pause: ‘What I ought to do is drive back into town and rustle you up something to eat. The shops’ll be shut, but I’m sure Mrs Coe wouldn’t mind fixing you up with a few sandwiches if I ask her.’

  ‘It would take far too long.’ The Coes, the friends with whom Alfred had arranged to stay, lived almost as far across the city as it was possible to be and still be in Norwich. Besides, whatever could I say if they found crumbs? It would look awful. ‘I’m all right, really I am. But the torch is a lovely idea.’

  ‘If you’re sure.’ Before he went downstairs Alfred bent over and kissed me. ‘I’ll see to the bike at the same time.’ Whilst he was away I sat on the bed in my little room, enjoying the loveliness of it. When my brother came back he looked marginally happier.

  ‘Bike’s round at the back. There’s an enormous garden – fruit trees, vegetables, everything, and fields back of that. It’s really the country. You’d never know from the road. You’ll get fresh air, fresh garden produce, soon put the roses back in your cheeks.’

  He handed over the torch, pressing the catch as he did so. In the light the room looked even better, so that I was sorry when he switched it off again, so as not to waste the batteries. He had also brought two squares of chocolate which he had found in the little cupboard in the car’s dashboard. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’

  The chocolate was plain Bournville, which I didn’t care for normally, and fuzzy with a pelt of car fluff. Just the same I wolfed it, fluff and all, and felt even hungrier to be reminded of what food was like.

  ‘Another thing you won’t believe,’ Alfred went on. ‘I asked Miss Gosse for the number so I’d know where to get you, and she said they weren’t on the phone! Papa and the wires again – can you credit it? She says there’s a very nice call-box at the crossroads, wherever they are, so it’s no inconvenience to be without one. Quite the contrary. “Privacy is a great boon, don’t you think?” Boon! That’s what she actually said!’

  I wanted to tell Alfred to stop worrying. Because I was so much younger than the rest of them, my family were always worrying about me, quite unnecessarily. As it was, he went on, insisting: ‘Promise you’ll ring me every Saturday morning without fail – and any other time if you need anything. You’ve got the office number, and the Coes’.’

  ‘You know I have. You made me write them down in my diary.’

  ‘Well, then. Always make sure you’ve got pennies with you for putting in the box.’ A sudden thought: ‘How much money have you got, anyway?’

  I felt in my blazer pocket, took out my money and counted it in his presence, even though I knew beforehand exactly how much there was.

  ‘Ninepence. A threepenny bit and six pennies. It’s all arranged for Miss Gosse to give me a shilling pocket money every Saturday.’ I was, and sounded, quite pleased about this because up to that time I had only been getting sixpence; but Alfred did not appear to share my satisfaction in my enhanced financial status. Taking out his wallet, he extracted a pound note which he put down on the bed beside me. ‘Put that away somewhere safe. You have to have something in hand. When you’ve used it up, let me know and I’ll give you another.’

  ‘A pound! Thanks!’

  Alfred and I looked at each other with a mixture of love and exasperation on both sides. For myself, I was very glad to have such a lovely man for my brother, but suddenly I couldn’t wait for him to go so that I could get on with the rest of my life.

  ‘I suppose I ought to start unpacking,’ I suggested diplomatically.

  Chapter Three

  This is how I came to be living at Chandos House in the first place.

  A few days after my father’s death I fell ill. I had diarrhoea, I couldn’t keep a thing down. I suppose I must have picked up a germ somewhere: any other time that would certainly have been the verdict. Happening when it did, Dr Parfitt, our GP and a foolish old man, said it was grieving. I think he said it primarily because he was terrified of germs himself and grasped at any excuse for not making a proper examination in case he caught something. He grew his yellowish-white moustache down nearly to his chin on the grounds that it trapped germs before they had a chance to get into his mouth and make him ill the way they had made his patients. I used to wonder how he ever managed to eat his meals through such an obstruction, until my mother, one morning, sent me round to his surgery early, after she had been up all night with one of her throats. Then I found out. I was to pick up a bottle of his pink medicine, the kind he prescribed for everything above the waist. The medicine for everything lower down was a greyish blue.

  Dr Parfitt came to the front door himself, his napkin still tucked between two buttons of his waistcoat, and his moustache neatly parted in the middle, the swags of hair held in place on either side with two of his wife’s hairpins. Even so, he had got a little of the yellow of his egg on the left side. His lips, seen for the first time, were moist and very red. I never saw them again.

  Whilst diarrhoea and vomiting seemed pretty unromantic ways to register grief, not to be compared to the broken hearts I enjoyed reading about in Maud’s copies of Peg’s Paper and in the novels of Ruby M. Ayres, it was a diagnosis I did not dare to question, lest people should think I was not particularly upset my father was dead, which I was. Dr Parfitt treated me, not with the sympathy one might have expected in the circumstances, but with an irascibility which, looking back, I can understand. Manifesting as I did symptoms both above and below the waist I was a problem. Was the pink medicine indicated, or the blue? I am surprised he did not consider prescribing a cocktail of the two, but this, apparently, was contrary to all good medical practice – his, at any rate. In the event, he opted for neither. Instead, I was instructed to drink milk, milk and more milk – ugh! – in all probability the very stuff which, in its then unpasteurized state, had been the cause of the trouble in the first place.

  I lost weight, I had to stay away from school, I hardly dared put a foot out of doors for fear I might suddenly need to go to the lav in a hurry. The fact that my mother’s sisters were already actively house-hunting in London on our behalf did not make me feel any better.

  My family was almost too understanding, treating me, to my way of thinking, altogether too much as if I were one of those delicate children one was always coming upon in books intended to make you feel religious. Unlike those little horrors, I was – even with a father already in residence – nowhere near ready for heaven. Anyone who wanted it was welcome to my place in the queue.

  When I began to be a little better, my sister Maisie took a holiday from her job in London and came down to Norwich to keep me company and cheer me up; to take short walks with me, and then longer ones as my bowels gradually moderated their antisocial behaviour. One sunny day we took the tram that went to the Earlham Road terminus, opposite the cemetery, and then walked the rest of the way to Earlham Hall, a house which had once been the home of the Gurneys and now belonged to the Council. In the garden behind the house was a rock garden which, in spring at any rate, was one of the wonders of the world, a honeycomb of paths and mini-canyons where you could walk, if you were a child with small, careful feet, drenched in scents and spices, half-drowned in waves of colour, with insects on gossamer wings for company and bees zigzagging from flower to flower too busy even to notice you were there.

  The Gurneys, so I’d been told, were Quakers, people who were expected to go about in drab clothes and live in a very plain and boring way. Gardens not being a sin, seeing that God himself had planted the first garden of all, the Garden of Eden, I could only think that they had planted their garden at Earlham Hall to make up for the dreariness they had to put up with in every other department. There were peacocks in the garden too, but whether they had
been put there by the Gurneys or the Council, I couldn’t say.

  On the day that I went to Earlham Hall with my sister, she sat on a bench with a book in her hand, supposedly reading, but actually keeping an anxious eye on me as I clambered about the rockery. I wished people wouldn’t fuss so. I went up some roughly hewn stone steps between clumps of pinks and catmint to a little gravelly plateau where, as I knew from earlier visits, I could be monarch of all the flowery kingdom. As it happened, just as I reached this eminence, a peacock, stepping daintily, came up the further side and we met in the middle, neither of us minded to give way and the bird snaking its head from side to side as if it wasn’t at all glad to see me.

  My sister called out, ‘Careful he doesn’t peck at you!’ as if I could have done anything to prevent it, had it had a mind to, except beat an ignominious retreat, which, for some reason I could not put into words, was unthinkable. Anyway, she need not have worried. With a slatty noise like someone letting down a Venetian blind, the peacock opened its fan and stood there unmoving, the delicate fronds at the tip of each Argus-eyed quill swaying gently in the soft breeze.

  What happened next wasn’t a mystical experience, an epiphany or anything high-flown like that. It was probably due to the sun and the buzz of insects combined with the hallucinating effect of the light slanting off all that peacock-blue threaded through with emerald and gold. Suddenly I felt drunk – not on the horrid milk that had been forced down my rebellious gullet week after week, but intoxicated by the glorious surprises, the amazing possibilities, that went with being alive. My father was dead, my lovely family life had fragmented like the pieces inside a kaleidoscope, never to fall again into the same pattern, yet just the same – not to mince words – I was happy! I could feel the world turning, myself with it, and not just round and round either, but up and down at the same time like the horses on the roundabout at the Whitsun Fair, the steam organ blaring until, with nostrils flaring and a triumphant whinny, my painted charger wrenched itself free of the revolving carousel and with one mighty leap flung itself into the sky, heading for the stars.