The Quivering Tree (14 page)

But it did.

Miss Malahide, I could see as I neared the little party, was already back in her long sack or whatever it was, the grey bathing suit spread out on a towel nearby. Had she got nothing on underneath? I don't know why the thought of Miss Malahide knickerless should have bothered me, but it did. I hoped, for her sake as much as mine, that she had brought spare knickers with her even though, as anyone could see, she had not thought to bring along a brassiere to keep her big bosom where it belonged. I was surprised that Noreen, so neat, had not packed extra undies for her aunt. She could have put them in the picnic hamper where they could have helped to keep the crockery from rattling.

At my approach Miss Gosse pulled out from underneath her the towel she had been sitting on. It was still warm from her bottom as she handed it to me with a very nice smile. ‘We don't want you coming down with a cold,' she said.

I took the towel, feeling rather weepy: not just, or even mainly, on account of her kindness, but because I had caught sight of the picnic. Noreen, I guessed it was, from the neat way it was done, had set out the food and the plates and cutlery on a pretty cloth patterned with daisies which had napkins to match. After a week of Chandos House fare, the sheer generosity of the spread on offer made me feel emotional.

There were thick slices of roast beef, any single one of which would have made three good Chandos House portions; bowls of assorted salads, rolls with poppy seeds on top, hunks of cheese, a bottle of wine wrapped round with a white cloth. Even Miss Gosse and Miss Locke, their normal appetites presumably augmented by the sea air, put away as much as anyone. I ate and ate and wished passionately that Mrs Crail had thought to suggest that I lodge with Miss Malahide instead of with Miss Gosse and Miss Locke. The art mistress watched benevolently, heaped second and third helpings on to my plate. Said to the others: ‘Don't you love to see youngsters enjoying their grub?'

I had something of everything – even, at Miss Malahide's insistence – the wine. ‘She has to start some time,' she countered when Miss Gosse looked anxious. Miss Gosse steadfastly refused to drink any wine herself, her father, as she explained, having signed the pledge on her behalf when she was seven years old.

‘That's a pa for you,' was Miss Malahide's comment. ‘Mine never let me have a drop either, but that was only so there'd be more for him, the old sot!'

When, with a certain hauteur, I announced that I had already tasted wine; that at home on special occasions I was often given a little port and some sponge fingers to dip into it, the art mistress snorted: ‘What way is that to develop a palate!'

Miss Malahide's wine was not sweet at all, and although I pretended it was lovely, actually I did not care for it one bit, although I drank a glass and a half because I was thirsty. After the strawberries and cream I fell fast asleep until Miss Locke woke me up saying it was time to start for home. I discovered to my surprise that I had been sleeping with my head in her lap.

I was also surprised to find that I had been asleep at all, something that had never happened to me in the daytime since I was a baby. Miss Locke said: ‘It must have been the cream. It was definitely off,' at which everybody laughed, including Miss Gosse who was looking a little peaky, as if she had had too much sun.

That night I woke up angry, which puzzled me because, all in all, it had been a lovely day – more importantly, a lively one:
I had lived
. I awoke to find the bedroom bright with the risen moon. Instead of silhouetting themselves against its shining, as you might have expected, the quivering leaves had become semi-transparent, their veins a delicate tracery on a background of gauze.

I awoke in no mood to appreciate the artistry of silvery greenery. Discomfort, not moonshine, was what had brought me awake. My hair was full of sand. I put my hand in the hollow of the pillow where my head had rested and, with a shudder of repulsion, touched a little deposit of grit diversified with some sharp-edged fragments which – having turned my torch on them – I was able to identify as bits of cockleshell.

I absolutely couldn't stand it! I hated Miss Locke for having pushed me over on the dunes, for filling my hair with the sea's rubbish. All week, even without her silly tricks, my hair had been becoming a problem, one of those things to which, when I came to live at Chandos House, nobody whose business it was to think about such things had given a thought. How was I to get my hair washed? At home, Maud had washed it twice a week, to the invariable accompaniment of my non-stop threnody that the water was too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry; that the lather was in my eyes, my ears, my nose, my socks – a thoroughly enjoyable performance made the more explicit by the loveliness of clean, light-floating hair which was the end product. But who was to wash my hair at Chandos House? Mrs Benyon? My scalp crawled at the very thought of those masterful fingers kneading my poor little skull. I could not possibly ask the mistresses; and Mr Johnson, the hairdresser in Dove Street who, so long as I lived in St Giles, had cut my hair once a month, charged one-and-sixpence for a shampoo – I had seen it on his list of prices. I had, in fact, toyed with the idea of doing it myself; had even, once, for a pregnant moment, stood poised on the brink in the bathroom with my cake of soap in one hand and my daily can of hot water in the other, only to be deterred by the certainty that one can wasn't nearly enough to get all the soap out, especially making due allowance for what I should undoubtedly slosh on to the bathroom floor.

I ran my hand through my hair and found sand deposited between my fingers. Outside the window the moon and the leaves quivered with the utter awfulness of it. I picked up my torch and my matches and crept along the landing, past the closed doors, to the bathroom. It had to be done. I was going to wash my hair in the Chandos House bath.

What made this a desperate and illicit undertaking was that I still had not been initiated into the mysteries of lighting the bathroom geyser, and had been in no hurry to press for enlightenment. Even when Mrs Benyon lit the thing on my behalf there was always a lancing of flame and a gurgling bang that sent me cowering against the woodwork. Now I encouraged myself with the thought that the housekeeper probably made the geyser act that way on purpose, to pay me out for having made her climb the stairs. I wasn't a child. In the chemistry lab I used a Bunsen burner to heat up dangerous substances without turning a hair. If I couldn't light a simple thing like a geyser, I didn't know who could.

Having brought my torch with me, I decided not to light the gas mantle, though that at least was a manoeuvre in which I had become well practised. The geyser was another thing. Brooding and metallic, it even had a look of Mrs Benyon. I found it perfectly possible to envisage that the housekeeper too, inside her, carried hidden fire and would go off with a bang if you knew which tap to turn. I took a deep breath, did – as I thought – all the things Mrs Benyon did when lighting the contraption, and gingerly, as one proffering a bone to a doubtfully friendly dog, applied a lighted match.

There was a gentle
plop!
and then the match went out.

I struck another and tried again. Again the
plop!
, this time sounding distinctly apologetic as if the apparatus truly regretted having to disoblige, before the match was once more extinguished. Five matches on, the geyser still not doing its stuff, I began to feel puzzled, not to say woozy. It came to me without any particular feeling of alarm that the bathroom was full of gas and here was I, so good at chemistry, cheerfully striking match after match in the miasma, not the cleverest thing in the world to do.

I bent over the geyser to turn it off. I could not do it. Any bits that moved, I turned them to the left, I turned them to the right. It made no difference. The gas continued to flow into the room.

Vaguely aware that something needed to be done fast, I went towards the window. I never made it. Half-way there, I fell over Miss Gosse's mahogany and brass towel rail which, in turn, fell over Miss Locke's weighing machine. As for myself, having once fallen it seemed altogether too much of a fag to get to my feet again: but the resultant noise must have been sufficient to penetrate those closed doors on the landing because the next thing I remember was my head, the terminal of my stomach, stuck out of the bathroom window being sick on to the marigolds down below. All that lovely picnic!

I heard Miss Gosse's voice: ‘I've damped a towel. Let me wipe her face.' How kind she sounded, and how unkind Miss Locke when she exclaimed: ‘The little fool, she must have been completely blotto! What did she think she was doing? She could have blown us all up.'

‘My hair's full of sand!' I shouted, called rudely back to the cares of the world. Tears ran down my face at such a rate that, for a moment, I thought Miss Gosse must have soaked her towel instead of wringing it out, as she had said. Adding, to myself only, of course: ‘And I'm only sorry I didn't!'

Miss Locke washed my hair. Washed it with some shampoo that smelled of lemons. Her long, strong fingers whipped up such a lather I felt like a lemon meringue pie. Heavenly. Miss Gosse stood fussing somewhere in the background wondering whether she ought not to get dressed and go and wake up the doctor down the road despite the lateness of the hour. ‘After all, we are responsible for the child –'

‘Nonsense!' was the robust rejoinder. ‘The child's old enough to be responsible for herself – and if she isn't, it's her funeral. If you want to be of help, bring me water for the rinsing.'

Whilst Miss Locke rinsed the shampoo out of my hair and Miss Gosse trotted obediently to and from a geyser now acting docile as a lamb, I could not help feeling important, having two mistresses dancing attendance on me as if they were mere serving wenches and I a princess. It was a pity there was nobody I could tell about it. I knew, in some obscure way, that it wasn't something to talk about in school, however avidly the girls of IIIa would have gobbled up such juicy gossip. If I wrote to my mother, all she would do was get herself in a state about the gas. People she had known in the Great War had got themselves gassed and never been the same again, so she said, though probably not from a bathroom geyser.

‘Clean as a whistle!' Miss Locke pronounced at last. She told Miss Gosse to turn off the geyser and go to bed. She herself took a towel and rubbed my head until I felt my head coming off, but it was lovely just the same. Miss Gosse observed in a plaintive voice that it was very late, whereupon Miss Locke announced her intention of seeing me safely into bed – ‘and then we can all get some sleep, thank heaven!'

In my bedroom Miss Locke sat me down on the bed and, kneeling beside me, combed my hair for me, parting it in the middle with a good deal more regard for accuracy than I ever bothered with myself, and teasing out the tangles with unexpected gentleness. Probably because there were still some vestigial whiffs of gas floating about inside me looking for the way out, I felt floppy and foolish, close to sleep and yet not close. I could see the aspen leaves goggling in at the window as if wondering what on earth was up, and I mouthed silently, so that Miss Locke shouldn't hear, ‘I'll tell you all about it in the morning.'

When my hair was done, Miss Locke pulled back the covers and helped me into bed, which I didn't need, but there! It was pure luxury. I had a feeling she might easily have curtseyed before withdrawing if Miss Gosse had not called out from the landing just then to repeat that it was really very late indeed.

‘Just finished getting our invalid to beddy-byes!' Miss Locke called back. ‘Just coming!' Having tucked me in, she bent over and asked, in a different kind of voice, ‘How would you like me to wash your hair for you every week?'

A picture of Mr Johnson's price list with IS 6d on it for a shampoo flashing instantly through my mind, I would surely have answered an eager ‘Yes please!' if her face hadn't been so close. It made me feel uncomfortable, her face so close; so instead of saying anything I shut my eyes and pretended I had just that moment fallen asleep. One-and-six or no one-and-six, it was something that needed thinking over.

Miss Locke kissed me, whispered ‘Good-night!' and went out of the room, shutting the door softly behind her. I could hear her voice and Miss Gosse's retreating down the landing: the sound, not what was said. I settled down to sleep clean-haired and cosy, not thinking of anything much except that Miss Locke ought to know better than to kiss people full on the lips the way she had kissed me. It not only made you feel uncomfortable. That way you could catch germs.

But not thinking much about that either.

I came down to breakfast next morning to discover that I was not to go to school that day. Since my mirror, a bare minute earlier, had given back the reflection of a face tanned by sun and sea and looking healthier than it had for months, I took the decision as a schoolteacher's weird idea of punishment for my
contretemps
with the geyser. What could be worse, ho, ho, than a day deprived of lovely school?

I did Miss Gosse an injustice. Her little pug face creased with earnestness, she told me that, her conscience troubling her, early in the day as it was she had already been down to the telephone box at the crossroads to let Dr Parfitt – whose number my mother had left with her against emergencies – into the details of what she delicately termed my little mishap. Did he think he ought to pay a call if only to satisfy all concerned that no permanent damage had been done?

Had I known beforehand what she intended I could have saved my landlady the trouble. Knowing Dr Parfitt for the lazy old booby he was, and greedy with it, I could have told her in advance what his reply would be to the suggestion that he get himself all the way from St Giles to the Wroxham Road solely to examine one uneconomic child, sole remnant of a family which, one way and another, had removed itself from his sheltering wings, never to be billed by him again. So far from harm, the good doctor had asserted, the gas, so long as it had stopped short of actually killing me, could have done nothing but good. ‘Flushes out the tubes,' were his words apparently, followed by a request to be told the make of the geyser. Dear Dr Parfitt, just the same! As was his wont he had concluded the consultation with the suggestion that I be kept at home for the day just in case. Perhaps he was not such a booby after all, a day away from school curing many infant disorders.