The Quivering Tree by S. T. Haymon

Author:S. T. Haymon [Haymon, S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Chapter Sixteen

One Saturday morning, when we were having breakfast, Miss Locke leaned across the table and said to me: ‘Don’t make any arrangements to be out today, Sylvia, unless you want to miss Miss Gosse’s sweetheart. He’s coming to lunch.’

‘Helen!’ Miss Gosse cried, and then, to me, with that mixture of dismay and indulgent affection which I had come to recognize as her usual reaction to one of Miss Locke’s enormities: ‘Pay no attention, Sylvia. Mr Denver’s an old friend of my father’s. He lives in a hotel at Cromer and he’s coming to see us. It’s only Miss Locke’s idea of a joke.’

‘No joking matter.’ Miss Locke shook her head and her short curls jumped about engagingly. She always looked her best in the morning, tending to grow progressively more severe and Ancient Greek as the day wore on. This particular morning she looked particularly good, having herself visited Mr Johnson in Dove Street after school the day before to have her hair cut.

It was a relief to me that he had done it so well. There could not be many customers in Norwich who wanted their hair cut in Miss Locke’s style, and I had been anxious lest he make a botch of it and I be held responsible. ‘Since he washes your hair so superbly that you turn down all my offers to do it for you for nothing,’ Miss Locke had said in her mocking way, ‘he must be the best hairdresser in town.’

Thank heaven, he had cut it beautifully. Thank heaven and my father, that is, whom I had asked to put in a private word with God to endow Mr Johnson with the special skills needed to do a good job; Miss Locke, as I was only too well aware, having that disconcerting tendency to put people off their stride. She looked young and mischievous, as if having her hair cut had somehow, at the same time, improved her complexion, which was what usually made her look not exactly secondhand but a bit shopsoiled.

‘His name is Mr Maurice Denver,’ she announced. ‘He is handsome, clever, immensely rich, and he has been dying to lay his fortune at Miss Gosse’s feet ever since she was a child, as young as you, if not younger. But always – can you credit it? – the foolish woman has spurned his honourable advances, can you possible think why?’

‘Helen!’ Red-faced, Miss Gosse cried out again, her boot-button eyes shining. I was blushing as well, it was something Miss Locke was always making me do, but not out of embarrassment this time, not really: more out of pleasure at being invited in on a family joke. Well fed at last, thanks to Mr Betts’s darling generosity, I had settled down at Chandos House. I had got used to Miss Gosse’s and Miss Locke’s little ways, as I hoped they had got used to mine. After the strains and stresses of school, the prick of ambition, the minefield of play-ground friendships,

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