The Quivering Tree (26 page)

‘Well, go on! Open it,' she had ordered, tossing it on to the bed. ‘Then come into my room to try it on. I've got a long glass you'll be able to see yourself in properly.'

Inside the box were sheets and sheets of tissue paper layered there with unthinking luxury, and, nestling amongst it, was a dress. But such a dress! The word is inadequate to describe its beauty and its mysteriousness. To begin with, it was red, and I had never possessed a red dress before, my mother believing clothes of that colour unsuitable for those of tender years; and then again, it was made of chiffon, a material equally out of my childish star, but one that moved about one's body as if propelled by built-in zephyrs over a lining of scarlet silk that whispered secrets when you so much as breathed.

Patterned with nebulous traceries of pale blue and pale yellow that made you think of lighted candles flickering in a draught, the dress was like a flame. Trying it on in front of Miss Locke's long mirror, embarrassed by being in her room for the first time and by her intent gaze watching as I stripped to my vest and knickers, I nevertheless felt myself transformed, made beautiful by its beauty. ‘Something special for somebody special,' I heard Miss Locke say, from somewhere a long way off. The skirt, longer than any I had ever possessed, swirled like the skirts of a dancing dervish as I twisted and turned, trying to survey every aspect of the ravishing creature I had suddenly turned into. At the neck there was a kind of scarf thing which I flung over one shoulder with gipsy abandon. The sleeves, caught in tight to the wrist, were pleated and very full. I could feel the air trapped inside them.

‘For heaven's sake, take off those stockings,' Miss Locke commanded, and I obediently stripped off my black school stockings and stood barefoot on the balls of my feet, heels off the floor, scarcely knowing what kept me anchored there and not rising to the ceiling and through it to the roof and beyond, up into the summer sky.

Miss Locke declared with a satisfied air: ‘As soon as I set eyes on it, I knew it was made for you.' Then: ‘Don't I get a kiss for thank you?'

Aflame in my flame-coloured dress, not even that could dowse my pleasure. I kissed her lightly on the cheek, and whirled away before she could make something yukky out of it. How I wished Alfred, Maud, my mother, were there to see how gorgeous I looked. How I wished my father could see me, until I remembered that he could, unless God had kept him busy with some special job, which wasn't likely with all those angels standing about waiting for orders.

I heard the front door open and shut and Miss Gosse's brisk little pitter-pat on the hall lino. Not knowing how I knew, I knew without question that she was not to be told about the dress. Miss Locke looked on in silent amusement as I hastily gathered up my clothes and ran across the landing, back to my room, where I showed off my dress to the leaves clustered against the window. They positively shook with joy and astonishment.

I wanted people to see me in my new dress. I craved to be admired.

I confided to Robert Kett: ‘It's very unusual.' Seized by the sudden realization that here was an audience ready-made: ‘Would you like me to go and put it on, so you can see it?'

The boy looked bemused, positively thick.

‘If you want to.'

I did want to.
Just you wait
, I thought to myself.
That'll take the silly look off your face!
I went through the gate into the garden, ran its length and round to the front of the house so as to be sure of not running into Mrs Benyon. A glance into the bicycle shed in passing reassured me that neither Miss Locke nor Miss Gosse had come home.

In my room I undressed quickly, remembering to take off my black stockings as well. The new dress slid over my head as smoothly as cream, the silk lining whispering a greeting. I put on my sandals and ran downstairs and out into the air again.

Robert Kett turned from feeding Bagshaw the last of the Victoria sponge and stared at me as I stood in front of him, panting a little from my run but otherwise quite still, the dress billowing gently in the soft breeze. Then he said: ‘I'm going to buy you a red ribbon for your hair.'

‘I was forced to stay still for fear the dress might catch on a protruding bramble or branch of wild rose, otherwise I would have executed a twirl of triumph then and there. In my exalted state I instructed the boy: ‘See it's the right kind of red, then. Scarlet, not crimson.' And, with a sudden brain-wave: ‘If you're going shopping, there's one or two things you can get for me at the same time.' No asking please, you notice. In my red dress I had only to command.

I told him that I needed half a pound of custard creams plus a dozen whipped cream walnuts, explaining away the size of the order by saying it was principally for Mr Betts the gardener, who was mad about them. I told him how I kept my money and my private store in a special place in the bothy, implying, without actually saying so, that I was conferring a great favour by entrusting him with my secret.

‘Come in and I'll get you the money.'

He wanted to wait whilst I went and fetched it myself. Afraid of running into Miss Locke, of course. Invulnerable in my red dress, I made no attempt to hide my disdain: shamed him into following me through the gate before I said negligently, over my shoulder, the scarf ends floating wide: ‘It's all right. Neither of them's in.'

It was the red dress he followed, not me. He followed it up the garden as far as the bothy, out of the sunlight into the fusty gloom within. At the sight of the nest of drawers he brightened up no end. Apparently, at school, woodwork was his favourite subject. It was, he asserted, a crying shame to keep a nest of drawers like that, so beautifully made, an antique, he shouldn't be surprised, in a shed open to the damp and with nobody to care what happened to it. He stroked the wood and said it was lovely. Miss What's-her-name must be barmy, leaving a nest of drawers like that out in the garden to go to the dogs.

Piqued that Robert Kett seemed to have quite forgotten me in my new red dress, I opened my money drawer wide, ostensibly to take out enough to pay for the biscuits and the whipped cream walnuts, but really to let him see how much silver still remained, that I was a woman of substance. All he did was push the drawer back in, a look of alarm on his face.

‘Don't do that! You're putting too much strain on it.'

Robert Kett looked at the nest of drawers with a sigh of longing. ‘I had a piece of furniture like that, I'd make it really look something.'

‘Would you really?' I studied the nest of drawers in my turn, noting for the first time the neatness of its mitred corners, the elegant inlay, thin as string, which outlined each individual drawer. ‘If you like, I'll ask Miss Gosse to let you come here and work on it in your spare time.'

For a moment the boy looked tempted, but then he shook his head. I guessed he was thinking about Miss Locke, though what he said was: ‘Then she'll move it indoors and you won't have anywhere any more to hide your money in.'

‘Or my biscuits,' I agreed. ‘Or my whipped cream walnuts. And Mr Betts won't have anywhere to put his seeds.' I was content to leave it at that. He really was a nice boy. I was truly grateful to him for having taught me to see the nest of drawers with new eyes.

With exaggerated care I opened and shut the drawers where I kept my stores and, no more than an inch or two, some of the drawers full of packets of seeds, whilst Robert Kett marvelled aloud at the smoothness with which they slid along their runners. With that sudden transition from gravity to tomfoolery characteristic of our place in space and time – the narrow crack between childhood and puberty – we began to open and shut drawers at random, getting noisier as we went along.

‘Here's where you keep your doughnuts,' Robert Kett sang out.

‘And here's where I keep my glacier mints,' I countered.

‘Here's where you keep your chocolate éclairs!'

‘And here's where I keep my jam tarts!'

‘Here's where you keep your rhubarb and custard!'

‘And here's where I keep my summer pudding!'

‘Here's where you keep your cornflakes – your poached eggs on toast – your liquorice shoe laces –'

We opened and shut the dear little drawers shrieking with laughter, forgetting what, as children, we should have remembered, that laughter was dangerous. But then, children never learn, they only grow up. We became so weak with laughing that we had to lean against each other for support. Gasping for breath, we never noticed that the gloom inside the funny little house had deepened, that a shadow blocked the door, until a stinging sensation of heat cut across my right cheek and a voice, as cold as the pain was hot, lanced across the bothy.

‘You dirty little slut!'

Miss Locke had a ring which she wore occasionally on the third finger of her right hand; wore it sometimes during the week though I don't think mistresses were supposed to wear jewellery at school, except for Mrs Curwen who wore her wedding ring and Mrs Crail who wore hers whether she was entitled to it or not, as well as a heavy gold chain and medallion that looked as if it might have belonged to a Lord Mayor. Miss Locke's ring – so she had once told me – had been made for her specially by a dear friend who wasn't alive any longer. She had gone out swimming one morning before breakfast and never come back.

I must say it seemed a fitting death because the ring, which was made of silver and a greenish enamel with bits of lapis lazuli stuck on here and there, was in the form of silver reeds bent, as it might be, under water. In the middle of them was the tiny figure of a girl with long waving hair who might have been asleep or a water nymph but who looked drowned to me in the brief time I was given to make up my mind about her. Miss Locke had taken the ring off her finger to let me have a better look at it, but then she had whipped it back brusquely, as if it was my fault she had ever let it out of her possession, even for a second.

It was a wide, bumpy kind of ring that could not have been very comfortable to wear, which was probably why Miss Locke did not wear it all that often. Unfortunately for me, she was wearing it that afternoon in the bothy when she struck me on the cheek and the bumpy bits opened up a jagged cut over my right cheekbone. There was a lot of blood which, in my state of appalled astonishment, I barely noticed. I had been hit! I, who had never known anything but loving-kindness and soft words all the years of my life, had been hit. Violence! I could not take it in.

Robert Kett was shouting – something about the blood dripping on my new dress, which, in my confusion, did not seem all that important. Red on red, it wouldn't show. He was also shouting something about going for the police and the Society for Cruelty to Children. I saw, as from a distance, that it was Miss Locke he was shouting at – shouting as if he had never been the least bit afraid of her. It was very brave, but too noisy. The noise gave me a headache. I was relieved when he stopped shouting and brought out a rather grubby handkerchief with which he tried to staunch the bleeding.

With her back to the light, Miss Locke's expression was indecipherable. Her voice was brisk and precise, the tone she used towards the end of lessons on a day when she thought IIIa had been particularly thick.

‘Go to the police by all means, young man. Let me tell you, when I tell them what I saw, they will send you to a reformatory.'

‘You never saw – we never did anything!'

‘A liar into the bargain.' Miss Locke swivelled her body in my direction. Silhouetted as she was, I could not see, but I felt the unforgivingness of her.

Robert Kett was shouting again. I wished he would go home so that I could get some quiet. I put out my hand and tugged at his blazer sleeve, which made him turn and look at me. I was still bleeding.

‘Haven't you got any iodine?' he demanded of Miss Locke, still shouting.

When the history mistress didn't answer; turned on her heel and went out of the bothy leaving us there, Robert Kett urged me not to stay at Chandos House a second longer. Never mind my luggage, never mind anything. He would take me home to his mother who would know how to stop the bleeding, and look after me. I would like his mother.

‘Perhaps she's gone for the iodine,' I said, meaning Miss Locke; though I didn't think so for a moment.

The mention of iodine had brought me fully back to my senses. I hated the stuff, the way it stung, the crude yellow stain of it. Robert Kett's mother, I felt sure, kindly and with the best of intentions, would slosh on iodine by the bucketful, however much I protested that I would rather have the germs.

The important thing was to make the boy promise not to go either to the police or the Society for Cruelty to Children: nor to tell anybody about what had happened.

Reluctantly, he promised. I could have wished he had not added, on a note of disbelief: ‘You aren't going to go on living here?'

How tired I was! Too tired even to think about decisions, let alone actually make them. I said that exams started the day after tomorrow and that was all I could think about at the moment; and he had better go, because I still had some revising to do.

I think Robert Kett must have been feeling tired himself after all the shouting, because he didn't make any more fuss. He gave me his handkerchief and told me to keep it pressed against my cheek and then the bleeding would stop. There was no need to give it back, he added, kind boy that he was.

We came out of the bothy together, the sunlight making us both screw our eyes up after the dark within. The two of us didn't look in the least alike ordinarily, but for some reason I was strongly aware that, just at that moment, despite the blood on my face and the freckles on his, we were as alike as two peas in a pod, two children screwing up their eyes against the sun and everything.

He said: ‘I hope you haven't messed up your pretty dress.'