Free The Quivering Tree by S. T. Haymon Page A

by one careful owner – it had been picked up secondhand at a good-class jumble sale; and her face, whilst free of wrinkles, had something written there which, although I could not decipher it, I knew was not to be found on the face of the genuinely young.
    It could, of course, have been simply that Miss Locke was clever, a history teacher with a degree – I had lived long enough to be aware that knowledge, delicious as it was to possess it, was, like all self-indulgences, ageing – whilst my brother’s female acquaintance, including my future sister-in-law, were one and all, in the arrogant judgement of childhood, brainless ninnies with nothing on what they hopefully called their minds but boys. All the same, looking at Miss Locke across the table – surreptitious, darting glances of which, in all probability, she was perfectly aware – I couldn’t help thinking that a little brainlessness, a touch of boy-mania, would have improved that Ancient Greek profile, that narrow nose whose nostrils looked scarcely wide enough to accommodate a good blow.
    I watched a little anxiously as Miss Gosse carved my portion, hoping she hadn’t any ideas about cutting out my fat the way she had Miss Locke’s, because there was little enough to the solitary slice as it was, fat and lean combined. In fact, the food on all three plates, taken together, scarcely equalled what in St Giles would have been considered adequate for one. By now, though – and that was something – I was pretty sure that Miss Gosse was not stingy by nature, simply that Chandos House had its own standards of what constituted enough to eat. Had we, in St Giles, been, all unaware, a family of guzzlers? I did not think so but it was hard to decide. In a single day my past life, cuisine and all, had, along with dinosaurs and the Battle of Waterloo, receded into a shadowy past where nothing was truly real except the pastness of it.
    The lamb tasted as good as it smelled, the peas and new potatoes from the garden sheer poetry – but oh! the insufficiency! Though I did my best to make my food last as long as Miss Gosse and Miss Locke did theirs, it was gone in a trice. So far from assuaging my hunger it merely whetted my appetite. I began to doubt that, during my stay at Chandos House, I should ever have time to think of anything else besides eating.
    Yet why, just the same, when Miss Locke, looking up from her plate and observing mine already empty, said: ‘I shouldn’t be surprised, Lydia, this child would like a second helping,’ and Miss Gosse, astonished but willing, had picked up the carving knife and fork again, did I stammer, red in the face: ‘Oh no, really, thank you, I’ve had loads’?
    At teatime, on the other hand, I could hardly believe my eyes. I had already been told by Miss Gosse that during the school week I should, as a general rule, take my tea on my own, since both she and Miss Locke preferred to do their marking of homework at school rather than have to ferry piles of exercise books to and fro. As, on that particular afternoon, there was to be a staff meeting in addition, I arrived back at Chandos House, ravenous as usual but, give or take Mrs Benyon, looking forward to a quiet time that would, as it were, enable me to take my bearings uninterrupted before I settled down to my own homework: read a book, play the piano perhaps, explore the garden; do the small, nosy things that, hopefully sooner rather than later, would convert lodgings into a home.
    I went upstairs and prised Beau Geste out of the box under the bed. Legionnaires cut off in the desert, not an oasis for hundreds of kilometres, mon colonel , not so much as a mouldy date to stave off the pangs: altogether an apt choice for making me count my blessings as I munched the single slice of bread and butter and the solitary bun which, on the basis of past performance, were the sum of my expectations.
    Instead, on the dining-room