The Quivering Tree by S. T. Haymon Page A

Penny for penny, did monkey nuts fill you up better than shortbreads? Were doughnuts to be preferred to sticky buns, and which of the two went stale first? Was chocolate, however delicious, a better buy than almond brittle which, given an iron determination, you could suck practically from one week to the next before the last sliver dissolved on the tongue? How long before apples went soggy and Cornish pasties grew mould? Would Dutch cheese, when Mrs Benyon came into my room to dust, give itself away by the smell?
    My choice of cache being strictly limited, I had nominated the book box under the bed as my hiding-place. If I hid the food under a good thick layer of books, the housekeeper would never know.
    Or would she? I decided, quite calmly, without any crass upsurge of anger, that if she did, I would kill her.
    Tremulous with anticipation, I took my seat at the breakfast table; smiled into the smiling faces of Miss Locke and Miss Gosse. Miss Gosse was dressed in a green Aertex shirt and a white skirt, Miss Locke actually wore trousers. There was a different, a weekend, atmosphere – no school gong, as it were, lurking over the horizon, ready to sound off with its horrible, triumphant sound. Instead, leisure, pleasure, food. Food! It was going to be a lovely day.
    Miss Gosse handed me my shilling pocket money, happy to do so, I could see, even though it wasn’t her own money she was giving away. Money seemed to make her less shy; the way, I had often noticed, it did with a lot of people. She informed me that Saturday, beginning at noon, was Mrs Benyon’s time off – that she had every Saturday afternoon, as well as alternate Sundays, when she had the whole day. It did not necessarily mean that on such days she left the house, the choice was hers: simply that, at such times, in or out, her services were unavailable under any circumstances. On Saturdays, cold collations would be left out for whoever wanted them, to be taken or not as desired. On Mrs Benyon’s Sundays, of which, incidentally, tomorrow was one – Miss Gosse paused in her exposition of Chandos House ways to remark comfortably: ‘But then, you’ll be spending your Sundays with your brother, won’t you?’
    I blushed scarlet. What had my mother, a woman incurably addicted to saying whatever she thought her listeners would be best pleased to hear, led my landlady to believe? That I should never be hanging about the premises to trouble the schoolmistresses’ sabbath peace?
    For some reason I found it impossible to say outright that actually I had no plans to spend my Sundays with Alfred: in fact, quite the contrary. I hoped he wouldn’t think I was sulking, that I was jealous of Phyllis, which I wasn’t, not in the least. I loved my brother, I wanted him to be happy. I was a great believer in happiness. I simply had not the words to explain to him or to anybody else that the death of my father had made me realize, as perhaps my brother himself did not, that, in the natural way of things, the time had come for us go to our separate ways, each waving lovingly to the other across an ever-widening distance. Freedom came into the equation somewhere, though I was not sure how: my father free of life, myself at last free to live, nobody’s daughter or dear little sister, but the irreducible me. Sometimes they seemed bleak alternatives rather than choices. At others, I wanted to jump up to the sky with the excitement of what was in store for me.
    As it was, I managed to get out that I needed to go into the city that morning to make some small purchases; and finally, hot with effort, let it be known that, shopping apart, I had no plans to go anywhere, Saturday or Sunday. It was my intention to stay home catching up on as much as I could of the school work I had missed during my absence. Amid my stumbling and stammering, it was with surprise and some elation that I heard myself calling Chandos House home.
    Miss Gosse