Free The Quivering Tree by S. T. Haymon

have –’
    Leaving the girl appalled at my cheek I went up to Miss Adams and asked if I could please have my desk back. After all, Peggy Coates had glasses, whereas I had to make do with my two unaided eyes, such as they were. Our form-mistress, who was a gentle soul, looked flustered. She obviously had not viewed the matter in the light I indicated; but my calm sense of justice carried the day and Peggy Coates, near to tears and spilling her books and papers as she pushed angrily between the ranks of desks, was returned to the second row from the back whence she came.
    At lunch Miss Gosse inquired: ‘Well, Sylvia? Were you glad to be back?’
    â€˜Very.’

Chapter Eight
    I must have been getting used to the bike ride because I arrived back at Chandos House only a minute or two after Miss Locke and Miss Gosse. Admittedly, my knees trembled and my calves felt like jelly, but I managed it; to be rewarded with the most delicious smell of roasting meat rolling down the hall and quite overlaying the ground base of polish and imperfectly suppressed mildew which seemed normally resident there.
    â€˜Run up and wash your hands, dear,’ Miss Gosse called over her shoulder, already on her way to the dining-room. ‘We’re ready to start.’
    Run I could not, even after having been called ‘dear’, but I hoisted my aching bones up the stairs as fast as I was able. Half-way to the landing I heard Miss Locke’s brisk step behind me. Forewarned by what had happened upon our last encounter there, I shrank back against the dado, my rear protected, and let her pass. As she did so, she reached out with her long thin fingers and tweaked my nose.
    â€˜There!’ she laughed, continuing on her way to her bedroom without pausing for an answer. ‘Is that better?’
    Well, it was and it wasn’t. Speaking for myself, I felt confused by teachers who tweaked you anywhere .
    Lunch – or dinner, as Miss Gosse insisted on calling it – was lovely. Not just the food. Breakfast had been too hurried a meal for anything but its scantiness to have made much impression on me; but at lunch I noted and enjoyed the happy atmosphere, the way Miss Gosse and Miss Locke were obviously content with each other’s company. It wasn’t anything particular that they said, just something you felt, something that even Mrs Benyon’s dour presence going to and fro from the kitchen could not dampen. When Miss Gosse carved Miss Locke’s meat she carefully – you might almost say lovingly – cut out the fat because, I suppose, she knew that Miss Locke didn’t care for it. And when Miss Locke got up from the table to get the mint sauce which Mrs Benyon had left on the sideboard, she gave Miss Gosse a little pat on the head as she passed her chair, just the kind of pat you might give a King Charles spaniel.
    Sitting opposite Miss Locke as we ate our meal, I saw her, really saw her for the first time. At school, in converse with any of the teachers it was unthinkable to look them directly in the face. One might as well have ventured to engage eyeball to eyeball with Medusa. Instead, one directed one’s gaze a little to the right or a little to the left, or, better still, down at one’s feet, so that at best one garnered a general impression only, which might or might not be accurate.
    Now, with only the table between us, I realized for the first time that Miss Locke was not nearly so young as I had thought her. That boyish figure, that Peter Pan cap of hair, had misled me. Was she young at all, in fact?
    Whilst it was true that I was at an age when all grown-ups, to my pitiless eye, were bogged down in varying degrees of senility, I could at least see quite well that Miss Locke was not young in the way Phyllis, my brother’s fiancée, or any other of my brother’s girl-friends, was young. Her complexion had a used look as if – in good condition, mind you, donated