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

of those courtesy missuses, and if a certain prickliness might not be a common factor among women who pretended to be married when they weren’t. I also wondered if Mrs Benyon might be thinking that she ought by rights to be paid extra now that she had one extra to housekeep for, and Miss Gosse had made no offer in that direction.
    This latter thought made me feel more sympathetic towards her, and I might have ventured something in my sweetly winsome vein about doing my best not to be any extra trouble; only, as I watched her filling the shining copper hot-water can from the outsize kettle which stood steaming on the range, I saw that she filled it to the very brim, deliberately, dangerously full, and gave up all hope of a truce. Rightly or wrongly, I felt convinced that she intended me to spill some of the scalding water on the hall lino or the stairs, if not on to myself, so that then she could complain to Miss Gosse: ‘See what you’ve lumbered me with!’
    Disguising my mistrust with elaborate gratitude, I took the can and with slow, careful steps made my way out of the kitchen and along the hall to the foot of the stairs. Before I ever set foot on the first tread, my hands felt trembly. I knew I would never make it.
    I had to make it.
    After a quick glance back to make sure both the kitchen and the dining-room doors were shut, I set the can down, opened the front door as quietly as I was able, picked up the water again and emptied a good half-canful on to the roots of the tree that quivered outside my window. Steam rose from the soil which didn’t matter as there was nobody to see it, and if it killed the tree, too bad, the noisy thing. I was back indoors in a trice, making my demure way upstairs, full of a glee which momentarily overlaid what might have been a sudden, agonizing pang of homesickness, but could just as easily have been a renewed, a raging, apprehension of my empty stomach.
    After all that, I didn’t even wash. I didn’t seem to have the strength, let alone the inclination. I put the plug in the bathroom basin, poured in the water, added some cold, and waited a little before letting it out: in a strange place you never knew what bathroom noises might resound through the house, and who might be listening out for them. Miss Gosse had told me to leave my sponge bag hanging from the mahogany towel-stand where I would find the towels set aside for my use – skimpy things, a small hand towel and another slightly larger, each stiff as a board. Before I hung the sponge bag up I carefully dampened my sponge and wetted the bristles of my toothbrush in case anyone thought to check up on me. I also unfolded the larger towel and mucked it about a bit so that it looked used.
    Back in my bedroom it had become really dark and a little scary. Nobody had shown me how to light the gas mantle and I was afraid to try uninstructed. I didn’t fancy lighting the candle either. Instead, I switched on the torch and undressed by the light of that. The leaves outside the window were noisier than ever. Either the hot water had been a stimulus or the wind had got up and was jigging them about even more than they ordinarily bestirred themselves. I turned the torch on them and watched them for a little. They quivered like those people in the Middle Ages who were always coming down with the ague. I flashed the torch on, then off, then on again, thinking that to anyone outside in the road – a passing radio operator, say, on shore leave from his ship – it could have looked like Morse code. Calling on my limited knowledge, I sent three shorts, three longs, three shorts, beaming into the darkness – SOS – wondering whose help, if anybody’s, I was calling for.
    I got into bed and slid instantly, cosily, down to the middle. It could have been a sailor’s hammock, slung from beam to beam. There and then I fell in love with that bed, the feel of my book box nudging my buttocks through