The Queen of the Tambourine (12 page)

“Oh no, she has all these dinner parties and social functions and we wouldn't impose. And—Franko, you go off upstairs and then we'll be off, we mustn't miss the coach.”

She got up, crossed to the kitchen door and closed it after Frank. “Just so I can say one thing in private, Mrs. Peabody, and I don't want to tell tales, like I said. It's very bitter for Frank. Very bitter. I'd never say it to his face or let him know I knew, but the wedding was very bitter. Well maybe you were there?”

“No. I really don't know Deborah.”

“Well, just between the two of us I think it was probably more Ivan than her and because of his friends being so important, but we were told, Franko and I, that it was just a registry office and no reception Ivan having been married before and there was no need for us to come. It would be just a few minutes and they'd rather see us in Leicester later and take us out for a meal. But I'm afraid that wouldn't do for Frank, and I must say I was very disappointed, too. Frank said right out, “Deborah, I'm coming to the marriage of my only child however small it is and quiet.” So after a bit she said all right and told us how to get there—right across in West London. We changed ready for it in Leicester and came down on the fast train with reserved seats and then in a taxi, over six pounds. We were far too early and we had to stand for hours, a cold raw day and blowy with grit, the other weddings all coming and going. Mrs. Peabody, you could write a book! Those weddings! Some dressed to the nines and champagne corks popping in the street and professional photographers, and some just slinking in and sliding out. One poor little bride, she even got left behind as the bridegroom and his friends walked away—laughing and nudging at each other and this little one trotting behind him by herself with a funny smile—a poor little face all pancake and eye-shadow and not even a pretty frock. She didn't look unhappy though, even with her husband in front being slapped by these ones in leathers, off in the direction of the pub.

“Well, at last here's Ivan and Deborah and their party. It turned out to be, well I have to say it, an enormous crowd. It had been gathering up all this time all down the street, we'd been seeing it. People all dressed very unusually, the girls in wide Ascot-style hats and little leather skirts up to their thigh-tops. And the men! So ill and awful they looked, hair all greasy and balding and a very bad indoor colour to them all, like pewter. It was the Media. That was the first time it really came home to us she was marrying into the Media-world. She and he arrived together in the white Porsche and he was in a white suit and she was in almost the same white suit and her hair up in a knot on the top of her head like she had it for dancing-class age of seven, but not so tidy and not of course in the elastic band but a draggly white ribbon like a boot-lace. And she appeared to us, Mrs. Peabody, like a haunted skeleton, but the crowd said, ‘God, what a looker,' and other common things that made us aware that in that world she's considered at the top. And Mrs. Peabody, they were both smoking as they got out of the Porsche and she had a smile that her father labelled as ‘relentless'—he has a turn of phrase.

“She saw us as she passed. Her father was smiling as he does, and Deborah said, ‘Hullo Mum, hullo Dad.' Well, she couldn't miss us, being properly dressed. Mr. Deecie is always properly dressed and he'll tell you that in twenty-five years he hasn't seen me without my earrings except in bed, if you'll pardon me. I had matching hat, coat, bag, gloves and shoes taking a tip from the Royals. In tangerine. Franko was dark suit, very white shirt, new, and a tangerine tie, to tone with me. It was just as she'd said, a very fast ceremony, just a few minutes, and afterwards—we'd not actually managed to get in the room for the ceremony but stood out in the passage—afterwards she gave us both a kiss. She said, ‘See you next week then, Dad. Mother.' Ivan didn't say anything till she pulled his sleeve and then he said, ‘Good of you to come.'

“We couldn't get a taxi away from the registry office so we walked down the street to a main road and the traffic was at a standstill there, too, and every taxi taken. I said, ‘Frank, we should get something to eat round here, there's lots of little places,' but he said no. ‘No,' he said. ‘I'm not taking you just anywhere. I'm taking you to the Cumberland Hotel.' The Cumberland being the place we'd stayed the first night of our honeymoon. ‘It's the Cumberland or nothing,' he said, ‘And we're going by taxi.'

“But there was no taxi. Five minutes, ten minutes—no taxi. Frank said we'd start to walk, so we walked—me in my high heels after all the standing—and we crossed over a terrible corner for traffic and nearly got ourselves run over. We found we were walking towards Kensington Gardens and we passed the road-end where Princess Margaret and all of them live, and then, just nearby, was this wonderful hotel and all kinds of very good cars driving up and people hurrying in and laughing and I said to Frank, ‘Look there's that girl in the cartwheel hat,' and Frank said, ‘And there's that man with the make-up on his face and the earrings.'

“Then I said, ‘I thought I saw Ivan.' Then we both saw there was confetti galore and a flick of white that was Deborah. I saw Mr. Deecie's face then, Mrs. Peabody. I said, Well, it doesn't matter. We'd not have fitted in.'

“I said, ‘Come on now, Franko, we'll go to the Cumberland and have a wine and steak lunch, the two of us,' but he'd lost heart and we didn't. We had a salad at the station.

“On the way home in the train he said, ‘It's the finish this, Vera. I'm not a hard man but it's the finish.'

“I couldn't think of a word to say. I kept trying to take his mind off by pointing things out to him from the train window. He never spoke. And he never spoke when we got home. He just sat looking at his tea. I said, ‘Have a whisky, Frank, it'll make it better,' but he didn't. He lay in bed that night and whenever I woke I said, ‘Are you awake?' and he said, ‘Yes, I'm all right.' But he wasn't. We don't ever mention it—never since.”

“But he's come to see her today?”

“Oh, it's true what he said. He's not a hard man.”

Frank asked if they could step into my back garden—he'd been looking out on it from upstairs—to take a look at the back of Deborah's house, and I helped him put his head through the weak place in the fence. He didn't mention to Vera all he saw next door—the climbing-frames and swings left out all winter and all the mud and weeds. “Very nice swings and slides here, Vera, and there's that doll you sent, sitting up in a window.” When Vera went tiptoeing ahead back to my kitchen door I saw that Frank's face looked sharper, rather sick. He said, “Mrs. Peabody there's a dead tortoise in that garden. Horrible. Birds or something have been trying to pull it out of the shell. Like stretched black liquorice. It's all torn and crawling. They sometimes don't winter over. A warm day they'll come up too soon and then—weak—the birds . . . I don't care that the children should see it. If I could only get to it with a spade.”

He said at the gate, “Thank you Mrs. Peabody. If ever you're in Leicester.”

“Leicester,” said she. “No thank you. I'll take the presents back in my bag—Ivan gave me this bag from one of his trips in foreign parts. I hope what we've said today can be private between us? I don't know what came over us. I feel very grateful and pleased we came. With such a person as a neighbour, she'll not come to harm.”

They had hardly turned the corner, heads near together under my umbrella (it came back to me by return of post) when Deborah came swooping up the hill in her Peugeot 105 from the other direction, and bundled everyone out and towards the house. She smiled crookedly at me. She looked tired.

So.

Nothing has happened Joan.

 

With love,

Eliza

 

May 1st

 

Let me describe to you The Hospice, m.d.J., for I don't believe you ever saw it. It's a longish, lowish sort of house that stands at the end of a wooded track in the deep part of the Common. It was once called Caesar's Farm because it's supposed to have been built on the site of a Roman encampment. A fairly romantic notion, but who knows. The nuns thought very little of it, and changed the name to The Hospice of St. Julian. Julian for Julius, and there St. Julian hangs in the hall above Mother Ambrosine's desk, the holy lad with the golden eyes. St. Julian the Hospitaler, St. Julian the patron saint of watermen and minstrels, the saint of the passing show, of the Fair. The saint who put a leper in his own bed and was told by an angel to cheer up and be happy in married love. Oh, he's the man for me.

Barry thinks he looks a sulky sort of cove. “Like a sullen cream bun,” he says. But I gasp at his beauty. Piero della Francesca. The great eyes don't follow you about the room. They never look at you, but out of the window, over the Common and away. Away to the waters of the Common and the Fair, the Fair, the Fair.

Well of course the Common's why we all came to live here, isn't it? Our Common love, ha ha. From the big roads that slash it on the London side you wouldn't think anything of it—just a round field with some grand houses standing looking at it, and a pond in the middle where we all skate in winter and fly kites and sail boats the rest of the year. Vigorous men in shorts bounce up and down on Sunday afternoons before galloping off on long-distance runs, and there's usually a horse or two with well-mannered people on board, touching their old fashioned black riding-hats with their crops. There are always dozens of dog walkers, mostly women on their own, calling out, “Artnoon,” to each other. There's the little antique shop where you can pass the time of day, and there's a row' of wisteria-strangled pastel cottages, fine furniture showing through double-locked windows, burglar alarms set at the ready.

There's the seventeenth-century farmhouse that's supposed to be stuffed with Rembrandts and there's the pair of thirty-foot wrought iron gates a coach and horses rattles through each night at eight o'clock, though I've never seen it. The gates lead to a new close of houses with pink and peppermint courtyard tiles. The coach stops on the tiles before a house that hasn't been there for two hundred years. Ha.

But duckie-doo, dear Joanio, beyond the pond and the patios and the golfers in their yellow jerseys, like wandering bananas, the wild part of the Common begins. Remember the sweep of bracken—nearly half a mile of it? Did you know that a French duchess used to produce plays in a glade in the middle of it? Pastoral parties for the French émigrés. Marie Antoinette shepherdesses wandered down the rabbit-paths in silken pinnies, carrying ivory crooks, down to the green scythed stage. The leathery fish-bone bracken nearly met over their heads. Tinkling laughter, lemonade, sugared cakes, footmen in wigs. French farce. Deep, sleepy country then, silent as Shropshire.

Now, even louder than when you left, Joan, you can hear the traffic. You can hear it anywhere on the Common now, tearing east and west across the London counties, comforting as ships' engines, thundering along. We pay more for living near the Common now and the nuns have to pay more still to let us have the privilege of dying on it. But we still love the place for itself. It's not just the city-dweller's snob gold card, the chance he has of pretending to live in the country.

I met Old Bernard once on the Common, cursing and swearing under his breath, cracking his broken fingers, the Auschwitz number tattoo hidden beneath his shirt cuff. “You all play at being country gentlemen,” he shouts on bad days, “and, by Christ, it's over.” But he walks on the Common almost every day and cycles slowly about on it early in the mornings.

The Common has a presence and a spirit of its own.

Beyond the pond and the coloured cottages, Joan, remember how the woods begin. Remember how the ground drops down and the trees rise and thicken. Through the trees, paths straggle, turn and dip under hanging branches, and bring you out to grassy places with butterflies and brambles and streams with bits of logs slung across for bridges. You can walk for hours seeing nobody but the odd flasher. Or you can walk through the woods, a mile or so, and out of them again into long avenues of park-like trees. You probably never went this far, always being so busy. If, like me, you had lived here for a long time, you could have watched the trees grow and change their nature—flourish, age, droop, recover, fall. They fell some of them in what looks like their prime.

I knew a tree, Joan, a birch. It stood beyond the spring. It never grew tall. It flickered and swayed. When it was young it tossed its hair. I used to wander about on the Common then almost every day watching the women with the children and the lonely, unappetising-looking men. For the likes of me they had put a seat near the trees. On the seat was a very expensive brass plate saying
In memory of James and John, the sons of thunder, two Sealyhams who for many years were happy on these Commons
. Classy that, the plural. Classy the brass. It got nicked like they nicked all the brass lettering off the War Memorial. Old Bernard walks by the seat cracking and crackling his tortured hands. We are used to him.

“These Commons.” Where's the other one, the other one—the Common of the golden boy, the passing Fair? Hush. Wait. I think we'll get there in the end.

Now, that lovely tree grew more and more beautiful. Its bark thickened and turned to gold and pewter flakes. The leaves turned first to green and then to white confetti—from silver coins like the sun on summer water to October sovereigns shaking against the autumn sky. The gold discs were scattered around in the frailest twigs on the metal branches. Then one day, it was gone.

I stood by the seat. Gone Joan, gone. The tree had gone. There was turf over the hole, neat as needlework. If you scuffed your feet about you could just make out a few white chippings in the long grass. The tree had had its knock on the door at three o'clock in the morning. Everything tidied away. Miss Ingham came by, all cardigans and wraps and her pockets bulging with the roots she pinched. She said, “How very upsetting.”

Someone had seen the signs of mortality in the tree and spared it a lingering death.

There are still badgers on the Common, Joan, and foxes. Do you ever think of them, among the tigers and the crocs? There are better flowers than there used to be, now that we have all become such a nice bright Green, and the cold spring still rises and flows down through the trees to feed the mere—the best water in Surrey, says Marjorie Gargery, passing paper cups of it around among her children. There's always someone standing in the pine trees where the spring rises, always some old tramp with purple lips. Often that queer little jogger dressed in black. You often see him about in that slinky track suit. He never looks at me but he knows that I am there. I sometimes think he might murder me. It would happen in fiction. The Roman soldiers at the spring would have made short work of him. I think of them, dipping their feet in the water, and their Naafi mugs. I think of them shivering and wishing for Umbria and the land of Piero della Francesca, except he hadn't then been born.

Well now, this pure and ancient trickle, Joan, flows not so far away from a metalled narrow road marked “Private” that leads to The Hospice. One mile and a half, and down it one day I come a-Maying and find Mother Ambrosine at her books.

“Good afternoon, Eliza. You are looking very wild.”

“I walked. Maybe I took a bus part of the way. Then I walked. From the other side.”

“Through the woods? You walked all the way through the woods? My dear, you've walked miles. Miles.”

“I'm not an old woman, Mother Ambrosine.”

“But, my lamb, it is pouring with rain. It is raining like the Monsoon.”

Mother Ambrosine is solid and sure. Her face is smooth and brown. Her eyes are brown and bright and clear. She looks completed. It is a face familiar to me but never usual. It is a face with which you do not compete. There are lines about the eyes, across the brow one thread. More lines about the mouth. But no bags. No pouches. She travels without luggage. Her ears have never been pierced and her hair has never seen an electric drier or a scented shampoo. It's short and springy beneath a little cap that is the residual fin of what for centuries in her Order was a huge and yacht-like veil.

Stout shoes beneath the desk, support-tights, knees well apart beneath the dark serge skirt, and she is scratching under the residual fin with a leaky biro. Or was. She has stopped. As I approach the desk the biro is brought point down and begins to rap the blotting pad.

“. . . to the skin,” she is saying. “At once to the Laundry. Take off those clothes.”

“I can't run naked through The Hospice.”

“We'll find you something. What shall we do with her, Nick?”

I see, for the first time, that the Curate is sitting in her office, Nick Fish the committee man, my high-Protestant priest. He and Mother A. have been sitting talking together, sitting quiet together, Anglican and Roman, talking and thinking. St. Julian above their heads stares on and I examine my fingernails. They have begun to look unfamiliar lately.

I fear Mother A. and Nick Fish. This silence between them.

This stillness holds within it the awaited grief. I have seen Mother A. of course many times at a death but a Hospice (Joan) is not what they sometimes make out—a brave, hearty place; though it's no bleak house of corpses either. It was to try to find out something about death that I came here in the first place, as I dare say by now you will have guessed. Only domestic work it may be, but there are few secrets in a kitchen. We've all wept in The Hospice, Joan. We're not always jealously thinking of heaven. Death, they tell you at funerals—which are hellish things, Joan, and I can't stand the people who pretend they're not—death is ‘just like stepping into another room.' Yeah, who says? Who's been there? And which room Joan? How are we going to shape up to turning the door-handle to find out? I have seen Mother Ambrosine, the warrior Queen for God, distressed and shaken by death, and if it were not so there would be no strength.

And now, here's Fish-the-Committee in his scruffy cassock and woolly hat and gloves, working away at a rosary and making sure not to look at me. So my Lord and my God I am right and it is Barry. He is gone.

“Barry's been asking for you,” says Mother A., “Quickly get dry and go and see him.”

“How is he?”

“Back in bed. Weak. Not so bad. Barry,” she says to Nick Fish, “is still here. He is in love with Eliza.”

I say to Nick, “He is twenty-two years old.”

Fish absorbs this information unsmiling, and twitches. He can't stand me. Upper-class-rich-bitch-never-done-a-day'swork-in-her-life. But I watch him putting holy charity together as he lets go the rosary and gets to his feet. I see the dirty trainers and boyish draggly shoe-lace. I see the inside of his head—
no
NO.
Please God, no. Don't let this happen. I will my soul, or whatever it is that forces on me these visitations, I will my eyes not to see the jelly within the bone and the bone's soft marrow and the cells that make our juices, cells so temporal that they flow away like the foam on the quay that was all that was left of the little mermaid in the tale. She faded downwards from the head. Off with her head. Blink. Swallow. Better.

Nick's taut face is back, and I see the expression on its surface and the effort he is making as a Christian priest dealing with poor dotty Eliza. But how can he ever give comfort if he can't conceal the clock-work, the cuckoo clockwork going on within his head?

Yet it's hard to trust a mask, and if you arouse hostile feelings maybe it's better to know it, even if they're in a priest. Cock-asnook back, maybe? Cockasnook. His brain is saying (
no don't look
;
look away
): Eliza Peabody, oh my God, not her again. The mad woman. Needs a shrink. What's Mother Am doing, letting her in here?

“Hullo, Eliza. Nice to see you. Sorry I had to go the last time we met. We must have that talk some time.”

 

Joan, The Hospice laundry! It ought to be the subject of a preservation order. It lies in the cellars above unexamined remnants of the centurions, and it looks as if the nuns moved their equipment into a wash-house ready made: a temple of steam and heat with runnels in it laid down by Roman fingers. The washing-machines whir, the driers thump, and there are nuns working with electric irons and starch, sleeves rolled up and faces shining. Above their heads, rows of sheets hang like heavy flags.

“Eliza!” Sister Mildred is smoothing a shroud. “Will you get those clothes off while we dry them and I find something warm—not this—to wrap you in.” She hands me a hot hairy blanket.

I sit beside the washing-machines and watch the clothes slosh and pause. Pause and slosh. Gather momentum. Faster and faster they go, and away into an ecstasy of Dervish whirling, out of control. I'm always reading novels where the behaviour of a washing-machine is considered similar to an orgasm. A contemporary image. It will date. But I try to remember—Is it? Was it? Watching the whizzing bed-sheets I decide I never knew.

“So, what's the matter?” asks Sister Josephine. “Depths of gloom, dear?”

“We'd better hear the worst,” says Sister Anna.

“I was watching the water go round.”

“Well now, and that's interesting.”

“And thinking of sex.”

“Sure and we think of nothing else, and champagne every day for breakfast. Now then—have you had anything to eat this morning?”

When my clothes were dry I dressed again (“Love her, the earrings'll be getting the jumper in a twist.” “Don't tell her to take them off for goodness sake. Aren't they Barry's pride and joy?”) and went up to the kitchen for coffee. I didn't remember having eaten anything for some time and I felt better for a slice of fried bread and a couple of sausages. Then I remembered the dogs. My walk in the rain had taken hours. I must feed them. I must take them out. But first I must see Barry.