The Queen of the Tambourine (11 page)

Folders and clipboards taken out of hiding. “Chocolate cake?” somebody asked Pixie, who opened her eyes and began to eat hungrily with a cake-fork. “I'm afraid this is all going to seem very amateur to
you
,” the apple-green girl said, and Pixie licked her fingers. She was seated rather close to me. Too close to me. I looked at the nice brown brogues again and was troubled once more for I found that it was Henry and not my Girl-Guide Captain they reminded me of. Henry's shoes. His dear shoes. His always lovely shoes. The ones that I had waited for, looking out of the bowed windows of St. James's Street, at an old-fashioned confident world with big clean handsome men going by.

Here I was, in this strange clique, listening to a story about a family of centipedes. It was a perfectly acceptable story—but behold all these educated women listening to it like the word of God! Centipedes, I thought, and gave a yell, for there was something crawling across the back of my neck. It was Pixie Leak's hand.

“Have to go,” I cried. “Forgot something.” And, like Lancaster, I fled.

 

Outside was a bus-stop and a bus coming. I flung myself aboard. At that time of the afternoon there was scarcely anyone on it and I climbed upstairs so that I could ride between the branches of the sycamores along the Common's edge. There was only one other passenger, sitting in the front seat, too, across the gangway from me.

He was a boy, about ten years old and his chin was on his chest. He had silky hair and the back of his neck under his red and black striped school cap had a heart-breakingly beautiful cleft in it. I wanted all at once to kiss it, then thought that perhaps nowadays that would be called child-abuse. He might report me. Well, so he should. We hadn't been introduced. He'd sock me one.

The boy was reading steadily, page after page of a comic, and as he read, his feet in red and grey woollen socks kicked and swung, kicked and swung. When children stop swinging their legs they're grown up. He stopped and looked at me, then went on reading.

After a while he began again, swing and kick, kick and swing. The pages of the comic were lovingly turned and turned. When he gathered up all his things to get off the bus, he looked at me again and gravely raised his cap to me.

Oh, all the different kinds of love—

 

April 12th

 

Dear Joan,

 

You see the date. A month of silence.

I left you in March with the words “the different kinds of love” and I have nothing better to offer now. I write from habit only.

Nothing has happened. Nothing but long grey days. I stand in the window a great deal. Nothing has happened since the razzledazzle of Oxford, the interesting anthropological behaviour of the Creative Writing Class, except rain. Rain and rain. Soft and soaking. Deeply seeping. Whispering night and day, all our lawns of Surrey green as Ireland and we in Rathbone Road as grey as ghosts. I stand watching the rain and contemplating the silence of God.

What to tell you?

So many kinds of love.

Rain.

Yesterday, my dearest Joan, I stood looking out at the road and saw two people standing on the pavement gazing up at the house next to mine, the house where the glamorous pair have touched down, she of the hair made of golden snakes and the figure for the catwalk. She is the martyr of the Road, goddess of the watery smile, of the perpetual headache, who pushes her two small children maniacally about from morning till night, spending her life with them at every sort of class and play-group, too busy for one word of chat, one breath of friendship. Her face is pinched and fretful and she has the air of the true template for the one-parent family.

Not so. A husband, a fleeting figure, is to be seen daily, leaping down the steps and into the Porsche and away. They smile at me sometimes, these people, but they do not know my name.

That house has never been a lucky house and, though it is the same pretty 1860s architecture as the rest of the Road, nobody stays there long. It is a giant sentry-box, well-proportioned, with handsome front door of royal blue. Bronze and purple glass lamps from some Sicilian palace or Parisian bordello are hung on either side of it. The glamorous couple have added a new wing to the far side of the house, with half-sunken garage that opens its mouth in welcome to the leaping Adonis each evening when his car turns the corner of the street. A statue of Ceres stands on a plinth to one side of the door, a sheaf of the earth's fruits showering from her shoulder. At Ceres' feet the babies' toys lie in a scatter down the steps and often stay there for days, the golden serpent girl being too tired to pick them up and the husband holding his head too high to notice them. The babies are dressed in designer clothes of soft leather and hand-stitched lawn, always marvellously laundered or pressed, or perhaps always just new.

Although the babies cry rather a lot and there is some slamming of doors, I never hear through their walls any sounds of adult activity. There seems to be no domestic help, no socialising, no entertaining. The evenings are unnaturally quiet. These birds of paradise are dropped down among us obviously very temporarily, destined any day for the apartment in Dockland and the big weekend country house outside Salisbury. One day perhaps they will talk about the quaint cottage of their early years—if the marriage lasts long enough for any of its years to have been early.

For there's some tension. The other night for instance a window at the back of the house was thrown open while I was with the dogs in the garden and a nasty black thing was flung out, very solid, about the size of a dark pork-pie or a small rugger-ball. I thought, this is a grenade. I was frightened by it and there was something about the shadow-figures in the window that frightened me more. Some hatred, some distress. I saw the Adonis crash down the window-sash and jerk the curtains together. There was no explosion.

In the road outside the front of the house, now, this small man and woman stared up at the purple lamps and the statue. They were smartly dressed, the man in a long black coat that looked as if it came out for funerals, the woman in fur-lined suede and carrying a square Italian shopping-bag of quilted leather, stuffed with parcels. No umbrellas. The rain soaked down and down but they did not seem to mind. They stood nodding like marionettes.

The man saw me. He touched the woman's arm and together they made for my front door. “Mr. Deecie,” he said as I opened it, “pronounced as in Washington.” “Washington, Mrs. Deecie. Mr. and Mrs. Deecie,” said she. “We've just come down to see Deborah.” “Deborah,” said he, “Deborah is our daughter. Next door. Pleased to meet you. Peabody? Now that's a good Northern name.” “Northern name,” said Mrs. Deecie. “We're from Leicester which is not exactly North, not what
we
call North being from West Yorkshire in the first place, but it's getting on the way. It's in the right direction.” “Direction,” said her husband.

They took off their coats and we all trooped into the kitchen and I hung the coats round the Aga to dry.

“Now that is kind,” said Mrs. Deecie. “It was a sunny day in Leicester.”

“Sunny as anything. Well, we stepped on the coach. Unpremeditated.”

“. . . itated,” said Mrs. Deecie. “They're very comfortable and they give you an unspecified number of paper cups of tea and the usual facilities. Rather cleaner than any we've encountered on the trains. We've just got an hour or so before the return journey begins, but it looks as if she's out.”

“I'm afraid that Mrs. Deecie is right there,” said Mr. Deecie.

“Just to see the grandchildren. Well, we don't get so many chances, being so far away. A sudden whim, or you might call it a fancy. Deborah always so busy with her career in the film and modelling world and Ivan flying about everywhere—Australia all the time. Australia, Mrs. Peabody, is absolutely nothing to Ivan. For Ivan it is like Runcorn or Port Sunlight. All the film-work on location. Do you think I might ask if I could use your toilet?”

“You'll know Deborah of course,” said Mr. Deecie. “Lovely girl. Just while Mrs. Deecie's out of the room I'd like to say that Deborah means a very great deal to her mother and that's the sole reason we've come. For me, I'm happy with my garden and I'm not saying the marriage wasn't a bit of a relief. I sit here in this chair today entirely to please Mrs. Deecie.”

“I'm afraid Deborah may be in London today,” I say.

He looks mystified. “But I'd call this London. Isn't it? We speak of her as living in London, though I must say it took long enough from Victoria for it to be somewhere else. No, we haven't been to the house before. They've not been here that long. Mind, we've heard about it. Lovely house. Nice position. Though I'd not imagined it being only terrace property, I have to say. I'd been fancying something in its own grounds and maybe a pool.”

“But we think we have very big gardens here.”

“Oh well, not by Leicester standards I have to say. Mrs. Deecie and I have opportunities for brussels, runner-beans and particularly nice onions, apart from the patio and the fish and a small but by no means shameful herbaceous. I can see, mind, that this is all very well set-up and a good neighbourhood and the statue's a bit above Leicester. It's the children she misses, Mrs. Peabody, I'll just say this if I may before Mrs. Deecie comes down. Mrs. Deecie would like to see a lot more of the grandchildren. She knits them little things of course all the time but it's not the same as fitting them to the child, and you never get much of a letter. Deborah rings birthdays and Christmas and she lets them speak on the phone to their Granny. But, look at it this way, Mrs. Peabody, if a child can't put a face to a voice . . . Do you know, if Ivan was to pass me and Mrs. Deecie in the street I don't suppose he'd recognise us. Not his own mother-in-law. It's the film-world. It breaks family ties.

“Well, yes. She did bring him once to Leicester before they were married. I imagine it was at about the time they were beginning to think about an engagement because they dropped in at Leicester on the way down from Scotland where they'd been holidaying together just the two of them in the modern way—not that I'm saying there was anything wrong in it, Deborah being so well brought-up. She's always been used to temptations too, being so—well you know her, Mrs. Peabody. You see what she is. A true beauty.

“Always was. No two ways. A beauty from the start. It was a sore trouble to her and to us too as a matter of fact. She didn't ever know how to handle it, the looks. Her mother's a beauty of course, but more in the Elizabeth Taylor style. I'd say, well I've always said, Deborah is more after the Jane Fonda. When she was a teenager it was different again, mind. She was the Marilyn Monroe then, slow and weepy and she could have run to fat.

“We had it all, Mrs. Peabody. All the troubles—the anorexia and the over-eating. We never had the drugs, though. Maybe that was because we never had the boyfriend trouble either. She was too beautiful for boyfriends of her own age, it always seemed to me. Frightened them off. And she was no talker—nothing like her mother and me; that isn't our failing. But her mother was very proud of her always, and not at all averse to this Ivan for being an older man. Mrs. Deecie has always liked to regard Deborah as her friend as well as her daughter. That's how she's regarded her. And Mrs. Deecie always loving babies, this has been the extra blow. Not seeing them.”

He steamed gently like a steady kettle above his coffee-cup, and when Mrs. Deecie came into the kitchen, dry and tidy and her face newly painted, he rose to his feet and didn't sit down again until she did. “We've been talking about Deborah, Vera.”

“Oh, she's a lovely girl. You'll know her well, Mrs. Peabody?”

“I'm afraid I don't. We've hardly spoken. We smile of course.”

“That's the London way,” said Mrs. Deecie. “You'd think it would have taken Deborah a bit of getting used to but she was never a chatterbox even in Leicester. Very shy.”

“I sometimes wonder how she ever had children she was so shy,” said Mr. Deecie.

“Now Frank.”

“She had those babies all by herself, Mrs. Peabody, without her mother anywhere near her. There's character there. She's not just a pretty face.”

“That is true, Mrs. Peabody. She never asked for me or needed me near at all. I was disappointed, I'll not deny it. What mother wouldn't be? But after all those teenage troubles it should be looked on as brave, not wanting me.”

“Now she never said she didn't want you, Vera. You mustn't put words into Deborah's mouth.”

“She never said anything,” said Mrs. Deecie. “Nothing. Well, between ourselves, and I wouldn't say it in Leicester, she never even told me she was expecting either time—even the first one, born prematurely after the wedding. I expect she knew I'd be nervous for her. I used to get very nervous in her bad years around seventeen. And before that. And for quite a time after when you come to think about it.”

“But it was never drugs, I've been telling Mrs. Peabody, Vera. We never had that dreadful problem.”

“She just couldn't get up. Lay in bed with her eyes shut and her hands over her ears.”

“It's so usual,” I said. “Or I hear it is.”

“Just seemed so strange really to Frank and me—I mean, with those looks and such a nice girl. Well, we had to send her to a nerve-home for a bit. It's where she met this theatre person who took her off to London.”

She stopped and laughed and stirred her coffee.

“We mustn't bother, Mrs. Peabody, Vera. We mustn't tell tales out of school. What I want to know is what the nanny's like.

“What we naturally feel is that if only Mrs. Deecie was nearer, Deborah would have no need of nannies. Mrs. Deecie would be ‘Nanny.' That's what is said for ‘Gran' in Leicester. Mrs. Deecie is the natural ‘Nan,' yet the children don't even know her face. It's hard on Mrs. Deecie.”

“Never mind Frank. So long as they're happy. It's just you remember your own, and those days—all those years. I expect you'll know what I'm talking about if you've had your own. The way they used to love you. We'll have to go now, Franko. We call him Franko, Mrs. Peabody, on account of his Spanish appearance. I have it too, though we're not. We're English. In my view Deborah going blonde is a big mistake and wrong for her Latin complexion. When she was young she was after the old Audrey Hepburn style. The chickenpox changed her. It took away from the skin.”

“It was a very terrible chickenpox, Mrs. Peabody,” said Mr. Deecie. “I don't mind telling you that I prayed on my knees for her, though out of the bedroom of course. She was hot enough for brain-damage. Mrs. Deecie cried—not of course so Deborah could see her—she kept bright before Deborah. Mrs. Deecie is a wonderful woman—no, I shall say it, Vera, you are a wonderful woman. We sat up four nights together with Deborah's chickenpox and she was so bad the doctor gave her a little touch of opium. Deborah looked at us with such love then—I'll never forget—and when she was better she said she'd never felt as wonderful as she did with the opium. We didn't let on locally about it, our doctor not being universally liked. Rather after the
avant-garde
style and being very dusky. I must say that it was after the chickenpox, after the opium—what? Yes. We ought to be getting along, you're quite right, Vera.”

I said, “Oh do wait. I'm sure they won't be long. At four everyone is usually home from nursery school.”

There was a silence and Mr. and Mrs. Deecie sat with bright smiles.

“Fancy. School already,” said Mrs. Deecie. “They'll be professors at this rate. I wonder what schooling they can have and scarcely out of nappies? Well, still in them, last time I saw them, on account of this famous child-care book they all read now, written by one of these one-parent families. Whatever do they want a nanny for if they're at school all day?”

“It'll be for the picking-up and the school-run,” said Mr. Deecie, “because of Ivan's position. A nanny will be expected in the film-world. It's the
de rigeur
.”

“Oh, couldn't you stay on for the night? You could stay here if there's no room . . .”