The Quivering Tree (31 page)

As I passed the dining-room door, Miss Gosse came out and drew me inside, holding me by both hands. For the first time I realized that I had grown since coming to Chandos House, shot up so that I was just about as tall as the maths mistress on her stumpy legs. We looked at each other eye to eye. It couldn't have been the Chandos House food. It must have been all those whipped cream walnuts.

Miss Gosse did not look well. She was too dark-skinned ever to look pale, but she looked yellow, except where the flesh round her eyes had acquired a tinge of purple. She said that she had heard from Mrs Benyon that I had brought my book box out from under the bed and moved it over to my bedroom door.

‘You surely aren't thinking of dragging it all the way up to London and back, just for the holidays?'

I replied, carefully not specifying what it was exactly that I still had to make up my mind about, that I hadn't decided.

A look of alarm nevertheless came over Miss Gosse's face.

‘You surely aren't thinking of staying in London for good?'

Again I answered – guilt, for which I could assign no reason, making me mumble – that I hadn't made up my mind.

Speaking in a level tone which could not disguise a despair which sat oddly on her doggy features, Miss Gosse said: ‘Miss Locke says, if you are going to leave Chandos House, so will she. She says she will go up to London too and try and find a position there.'

It was intolerable! Intolerable to be saddled with other people's pain, as if one didn't have enough of one's own to put up with. Two old women! What was I to them or they to me? It wasn't fair.

‘Life isn't fair,'
I could hear Mr Spencer saying.

I could also hear Miss Gosse. ‘Sylvia, I beg of you. Please don't go.'

She was looking at me in exactly the way Tirri used to look at me when he wanted something. After the tram had hit him I had run out into St Giles to find, not my puppy at all, but a sack emptied of meaning, litter for the street cleaner to take away in his little cart. I looked at Miss Gosse and thought that, so far as she was concerned, the tram was still out of sight, down by the Guildhall, at the beginning of the hill. There was still time for her to get back on the pavement, out of its way. I saw that I held her happiness in my hand like a dog biscuit. If I held it high and commanded, ‘Up, doggie!' she would jump for it, squealing.

Down below I could feel that I was bleeding again, my new kind of blood, but I had a sanitary towel now, I didn't need to worry. I was young and didn't need to worry about anything.

I thought. I thought about my father up there in heaven, too busy, or more likely too shy, to warn me about menstruation but still safely up there, straight up from Norwich, not forced to peer down anxiously in a vain attempt to locate me through the layers of London smoke and London people. I thought of my brother Alfred and his fiancée Phyllis and the house they were building to live in after they were married. I thought of the rest of my family, leading their busy lives in a city I should never feel at home in, not if I lived there for a hundred years. I thought of Miss Gosse and Miss Locke, to whom I was important: who loved each other and loved me, even if they had their funny ways of showing it. Of ginny Mrs Benyon and knobby Mr Betts. Of Robert Kett and Bagshaw the donkey.

At the thought of Mrs Kett and her culinary disasters my spirits lightened. Nobody was going to keep
me
down like a flat sponge. I was going to rise and rise. Never mind the bleeding, the Boots the Chemist parcels at IS 3d a time. The way time was flying, if I didn't get on with life I'd be fifty and finished with them before I'd got properly started.

‘Please go on staying with us,' Miss Gosse pleaded. ‘Please come back after the holidays.'

I thought of my room, my darling room with my book box under the bed and the quivering tree outside the window. I handed Miss Gosse the biscuit without, after all, making a production of it.

‘All right,' I said.

First published in 1990 by Constable

This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

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Copyright © S T Haymon, 1990

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