The Quivering Tree (11 page)

Either way I would have to go. Go to ghastly London, to that ghastly house – I had never seen it, but I knew exactly how it must be. And only a matter of minutes before I had called Chandos House home.

It was! It was!

I dug deep into my blazer pocket to finger the ninepence that was there untouched, and my shilling pocket money. I picked up my last and definitive shopping list from the top of the chest of drawers, crumpled it up and threw it into the wastepaper basket. I wondered fleetingly if, when I telephoned Alfred as promised, I shouldn't tell him what had happened, and decided that I couldn't possibly. For a second or two I thought about my dead father, just long enough to hope he had something interesting on in heaven that morning and so wouldn't be looking down and getting upset about what had happened to me. In case, however, he
was
looking, I put on the best face I could contrive to show how well I was coping with the disaster. Not even crying – at least, not so that you'd notice.

I went down the road to the call-box at the crossroads and got through to my brother at his office. We spoke for a very short time, not because he was not glad to hear from me – the warm concern in his voice almost broke down my defences – but because Saturday morning was his busiest time of the week. I could hear a blur of noises in the background, phones ringing, typewriters tapping, a richness of living that made me long to be grown up and out in the mainstream instead of timorously on the bank, barely dipping a toe in the water. Alfred took down the number of the box so that he could phone me back and it wouldn't cost me another tuppence, which, in the circumstances, was something to be grateful for. He said he needed to make arrangements as to the best time for picking me up next day, taking me over to the house of Phyllis's parents. There were plans to take a boat out on the Broads – would I like that? Or was there something else I would rather do? When I announced my intention of staying indoors at Chandos House to do schoolwork he sounded quite proud of my conscientiousness but upset that my weekend would contain no fun. The high regard my brother placed on fun was one of the things I loved him for, even if, sometimes, it made me feel that I was the grown-up and he the child.

I promised to telephone at the same time next week.

‘Are you sure you've got everything you want?'

‘Everything,' I answered, fingering the coins in my pocket; and we said goodbye even before the first tuppence ran out.

I had already decided that one-and-seven was not worth going into Norwich for. Nineteen penny bars of chocolate or, alternatively, nine whipped cream walnuts and a penny change over sounded a glorious abundance when you said it, just like that; but spread over the gut-crimping hunger of a week or more, it was nothing. I had often read in stories of high adventure that when there was only very little to eat over a prolonged period you could get used to it if you persevered, the way heroes in adventure books invariably did, because your stomach shrank. By the time I figured that I could, with a fair degree of credibility, apply to Alfred for a further subvention, my stomach could very likely have shrunk so much I wouldn't need any more money for food after all.

Not noticeably cheered by these consolatory musings, I set off back to Chandos House, though not by the way I had come. I didn't want to risk running into Miss Gosse and Miss Locke and having to explain that I had changed my mind about going into town. I couldn't feel certain of being able to preserve the necessary smiling exterior without cracks, of not letting the cat out of the bag about Mrs Benyon in a sudden irrepressible caterwaul that I had been robbed. Instead, I turned into the Catton Road and walked down it looking for the opening to the path that led along the backs of the Wroxham Road houses. Other things apart, it was something to do on a day that now stretched arid and undernourished till bedtime. I would go and commune with Bagshaw. We could at least be miserable together.

In the event, I almost overshot my objective. Head-on to the road, a van was parked in the entrance to the track, taking up practically its full width and masking its very existence: a white van with plenty of rust showing and one headlamp hanging out on a cable like an eye from its socket. As I drew abreast a man came round from the back, scarcely able to squeeze into the driving seat through the meagre slit that was the utmost he could get the door open. A wild rose in the hedgerow reached down and playfully scratched a thorny signature across the raddled coachwork.

The man, who was young, had two front teeth missing and could have done with a shave, saw me and grinned cheerfully through the open window.

‘Lucky I didn't bring the Rolls.'

Once I had signified that I wished to turn into the track he said: ‘Jest goin', lovey. On' y came in fer a leak'; started the engine and nosed the van out into the road. From behind, the vehicle, if that were possible, looked even more disreputable than from the front, the double doors tied together with string and looking ready to burst open at any moment. I watched it trundle up to the crossroads and turn right for the city.

The track all my own, I trailed along slowly, feeling frail and not in a hurry to get anywhere. The brief human encounter had made me feel better than I had felt before, but the path put me down. Under a sun already hot and promising hotter, amid a buzz of insects whizzing about like ballet dancers and a frenzy of blossom, of fruit and seed, it had no time for me. Left out, affronted, I found a stick and took out my spleen on some nettles that edged the path, only to have one of them get its own back by stinging my knee badly.

I saw a few strawberries which I must have overlooked the day before, lying on the rutted ground looking fresh and undamaged. Restraining the impulse to guzzle them myself, I picked them up to give to Bagshaw. The donkey, who was standing, head down, at the further end of the field, looked up morosely when I called his name, thought about it, and finally came shambling over. When he neared the barbed wire I steeled myself to thrust my hand through the gap unflinchingly, holding out the berries, only to have them butted out of my palm as if by a billy-goat, in what I could only interpret as an access of indigestion. Perhaps Bagshaw had found out the hard way that strawberries and donkeys did not mix, unless it was the punnet that was the trouble. I did not know; only that neither of us was in any mood to comfort the other.

It would have been too much, in the mood I was in, to have given prior thought as to how I was to get back to Chandos House through the bolted door at the bottom of the garden. Examining it now, the difficulties did not seem insuperable. There were battens to afford footholds, and the spikes at the top, whilst nobody could have called them inviting, were not so unchallengeable that, cautiously and taking care not to get your knickers caught on the points, you couldn't expect to lift your legs over, one after the other, in safety;

Conscious of the donkey watching me with the pleased, anticipatory expression of a bystander hoping for an accident to happen, I began the ascent, not so much climbing the door as scrambling up it. As nobody was about and my mother had made a particular point of my taking care of my clothes, I took off my blazer and dress and left them neatly folded for recovery later; tackled the door with teeth gritted in a determination which, after several abortive tries, took me to the top.

I was concentrating on the delicate business of negotiating the spikes when the voice of Mr Betts inquired from below: ‘Gettin' into training for Everest, are yer?'

The surprise and, even more, the embarrassment of being discovered
en déshabille
made me nearly lose my balance.

‘But you said you only came in on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays!'

‘Then I said wrong, didn' I? Come to give the lettuces a water, if you must know.' The man squinted up at me, shading his eyes against the sun. ‘You can do yerself an injury up there, won't please your ma nohow. Get yourself down, do, an' come in through the gate like a Christian.'

Decently back into my clothes, I came up the garden to find the lettuces watered and Mr Betts sitting on the wooden bench near the greenhouse with a copy of his sporting paper open by his side.

‘Bin hopin' to run into you, as it happens,' he greeted my arrival, dipping his hand into his trousers pocket and bringing out assorted change. ‘Mustn' ferget to pay me debts, must I?'

‘But you don't –' I began, only to be brought up short, mesmerized by the miracle of what was happening. The gardener, having selected two half-crowns, returned the rest of the money whence it had come; took hold of my hand and placed the beautiful silver coins in the middle of my palm before folding my fingers over them.

‘Commission,' he said, by way of explanation; and when I continued to stand there, staring down at the money and bemused by the wonder of it: ‘Commission on King Alfred, dummy! That gippo knew what he was on about.' Mr Betts looked at me curiously. ‘No need to carry on like you never seen dough before.'

I managed ‘Thank you! oh, thank you!' when what I wanted to do was fling my arms round the bow-legged little fellow in gratitude and glee: tell him what infamy Mrs Benyon had perpetrated on me and how, thanks to him and that lovely racehorse, I could now go flying down to Norwich and buy food, five shillings' lovely worth of it. I shouldn't die of starvation after all.

Only of course I said nothing. I didn't dare. Not that I thought for a moment that Mr Betts would give me away by saying something to the housekeeper if I put him on his honour not to. Simply that the mere act of launching the tell-tale syllables on to the air was fraught with peril. I could see them drifting across the garden like thistledown, drifting through the open kitchen window to reconstitute themselves in silken whispers of ‘Thief!' and ‘Burglar!' that would bring Mrs Benyon out into the garden with marble, implacable tread to exact some revenge too awful even to conjure up in imagination.

Mr Betts picked up his paper and thrust it at me.

‘What do you fancy fer today, then?'

I dropped the two half-crowns into my blazer pocket and looked where he directed. None of the horses' names rang any particular bell the way King Alfred had. In the end I picked out a horse called Grecian Vase because the Grecian bit reminded me of Miss Locke's forehead and nose, in one straight line. Seized by a sudden misgiving, I asked Mr Betts timorously whether I would be required to pay
him
commission if the horse failed to win.

‘'Course you will, gal, what you think?' Then, eyes twinkling. ‘Take my advice. Get yerself into Norwich double quick an' blow every bleedin' penny while you got it to spend. Then, when I come asking for it back – well, I'll have to go on askin', won't I?'

Everything was going right, not just the five shillings. Leaving by the back way I found yet another strawberry lying on the path, one that I could eat with a clear conscience now that I knew they didn't agree with donkeys. Next, aware of something pouching out the breast pocket of my blazer (it couldn't be breasts since I possessed none worth speaking of), I discovered half a packet of mauve-coloured Scholars' Tickets which cost a shilling for twelve and could be used by children of school age for a ride on the trams, any distance for a penny. As a result of this lucky find I willingly walked the mile or so down to the tram terminus and caught the tram which swayed along dreary Magdalen Road before bustling past the cheap shops in Magdalen Street, until it came to Fye Bridge and the river. Suddenly we were in
my
city, the city I knew and loved: the cathedral, the Agricultural Hall where every year at the Ideal Home Exhibition there was always a yellow and blue parrot on the Sharp's Creamy Toffee stand; the black angel on the top of the memorial in the Cattle Market to soldiers killed in the Boer War – black, I assumed, because there were so many black men in Africa: the Castle, the gunsmith's on Orford Hill with a full-size stag perched high up on the outside: the hairdresser's shop in the Royal Arcade called Madame Pfob: the pith and core of my universe, complete. At Orford Place, where all the tram routes met briefly before taking their separate serpentine ways round the houses, I scrambled down the stairs from the top deck, impatient to submerge myself afresh, to be part of it all over again.

No.

After the first ecstatic moments spent deciding in which direction to go, wanting to go in every direction at once, the truth dawned. Living in the suburbs changed you, turned you into somebody else. I no longer belonged: foreign country. I seemed to be moving among hordes of people I used to know but who now were separated from me by a sheet of glass, invisible but shatter-proof, through which the living clamour of the city arrived flat and muted. Several people greeted me, cordially but with a certain awkwardness, as if, given the choice, they would have preferred not to have run into me. They seemed uncertain as to whether or not it was time to stop being commiserating and time to start being jolly. All in all, I was a problem, and they soon moved on thankfully to less complicated encounters.

I bought biscuits and fruit drops, whipped cream walnuts and a Lyons Swiss Roll, but my heart wasn't in it. At Palmer's, in Davey Place, I bought a loaf of bread and six currant buns, and was suddenly so transported by the gorgeous yeasty smell of the place that I came outside and stood by the shop window until I had devoured three of them, too quickly either for comfort or manners. Those were not days when persons of breeding ate in the street. Two girls I used to know at Eldon House School passed by with their noses in the air. You could tell, by the way, whilst pretending not to have seen me, their eyes slid sideways in delighted outrage at my uncouth behaviour, how much they thought I had come down in the world in every possible way since going to a municipal secondary school after having gone to a private one.

I went back into the shop and bought three more buns to replace the ones I had just wolfed. The woman behind the counter had a kind face. Perhaps, through the window, she had seen the mini-drama enacted outside. Anyway, she gave me, for nothing, a paper carrier-bag with string handles, usual price tuppence, to put my purchases in.