Read Online The Quivering Tree by S. T. Haymon - Free Book Online Page B

friends, best enemies, I was less sure. I was after all, as I was humbly ready to acknowledge, guilty of three unforgivable crimes. I had been ill, I had been associated with a death, and now, as if those two were not enough, I was living with some of Them – the Them on the other side of the great divide which separates the teachers from the taught. Not one of the girls asked if I were feeling better, or said she was sorry about my father, but then I had never been so barmy as to have expected them to. Alice Boulter, the dope, wanted to know if Miss Locke wore pyjamas or a nightie in bed at night. Both, I answered: one on top of the other. This reply raised a titter and warmed the atmosphere a little, not much.
    As it happened, my personal position in Form IIIa had always been on the equivocal side. Through no fault of my own, and no particular cleverness either, I had gone straight from the First to the Third Form, which meant that, separated from my contemporaries, the children with whom I had entered the school, I found myself among others who were a full year older and had already established their own pecking order.
    French had been my downfall. I was the only girl in my year to come from a private school, and French – a subject at that time not taught at all in State primary schools – was one of the few things Eldon House had taught me – taught me by the medium of a genuine Frenchwoman, what was more, so that it not only was French, it actually sounded like it. Madame Bradley was married to an Englishman and powdered her face dead white like a Pierrot’s, with black outlines round her eyes. She had worn gauzy, wide-brimmed hats in class as well as tight-fitting dresses that fastened all the way down her back from nape to hem with little buttons covered with matching fabric. It was a marvel to us how day after day she could sit on all those buttons and never once move a buttock. It had given us a high opinion of the French, a race which otherwise, I am practically sure, we would have regarded with suspicion and contempt. We felt privileged to have her for our teacher, an admiration which carried over into our work. Thanks to those buttons, we had felt she was somebody worth trying for.
    When Miss Parsons, my French teacher at the Secondary School, found out how much French I knew, she set in motion a personal campaign for my advancement – one that, given Mrs Crail’s prejudice against excellence of any kind, would have got nowhere if the object of her endeavour had been anybody but me. By then, however, the battle lines of my relationship with the headmistress had already been drawn up; and, aware of how much I hated the proposal – I never, in all my time at the school, learned the art of dissembling in that piggy presence – Mrs Crail smiled and smiled and said what a good idea.
    Peggy Coates’s glasses, instead of the usual metal, were framed in mock tortoiseshell, which made her look like Harold Lloyd. They were the latest thing and she was besotted with them, to say nothing of being as pleased as Punch to have my seat in the front row. Just the same, her glance of triumph slid off me uneasily as if, my father being dead, I too was putrescent, beyond the grave, which was odd because suddenly I had never found myself so confident, so aware of life, as I was at that particular moment. The realization came to me that it was a legacy from my father – all the life he no longer had need of.
    Because a gift like that wasn’t something to be frittered away on trifles, I went up to Peggy and said: ‘I don’t see why you needed to take my desk.’
    â€˜My eyes, dummy!’
    â€˜Your eyes,’ I pointed out – quite amiably, I like to think – ‘have got glasses on them, making them as good as new, if not better. If not, you’d better go back to your optician and complain. If you didn’t have glasses I wouldn’t say a word. But as you