The Queen of the Tambourine (13 page)

He was asleep, lying straight, the sheets as fresh and shiny as when they were new, or still in the folds of the bath-house.

“Barry. Me. Eliza.”

No reply. Oh, the skin. The raw cracks.

“It's the Queen of the Tambourine.”

Not a flicker.

I sit by him and hold his hand. I examine each clean blue nail. The clock ticks. Outside the window it looks to be the saddest weather now.

 

Nick Fish stands by his car and appears to be waiting for me. “
Oh-
kay,” he says, going round to the passenger side, opening its door, coming back to arm me in. That's one of the new things people have started trying to do—to arm me about. “Lift?” he says. “I'll take you home, Eliza.” That's something else. “Eliza.” Nick Fish always called me Eliza of course, but now it's the butcher, the baker, and the dry-cleaner. Madness is a great leveller.

“Home?” he asks.

“Yes, please, I have to feed the dogs.”

“Nice dog of yours. I wish we had a dog, we have almost everything else. It's the expense. I see yours on the Common. Often by himself, I may say.”

“It's in his breed. He's a natural wanderer. I can't keep him in. He's like an eel. I do try.”

“Oh
-kay
. Don't take off,” he says. “I'm not blaming you, sweetie.”

“Sweetie” is new. Sweets to the sweet and barmy.

“He's been better since he had company. Since we had the other dog wished on us. We have two.”

“Two?”

“One's Joan's.”

“Who's Joan?”

“Well, for heaven's sake Nick,
Joan
. You remember Joan. You've been here five years.”

“Eliza, I do not remember Joan.”

“Oh well—I suppose you can't remember everyone. She lives—she lived—opposite me in Rathbone Road. Number thirty-four. Very good-looking. Carefree. You
must
remember her. Everybody knew her. Over a year ago she took herself off all of a sudden—left the children and the husband. Shocked the Wives' Fellowship.

“Look, Nick, you must remember Joan. People like Joan don't just get forgotten.”

“It's a big parish, you know. I'm only one priest in it. I'm not even the Vicar. If she was such a free spirit and so carefree I probably never heard of her. Church-goer was she?”

“Oh heavens, no. No more than I am, now.”

“Really? I'm sorry, Eliza, about that—we really ought to talk. But you can see why I've not heard of your Joan. I can't get round the lot.”

“It's a pity you couldn't. Still—she's all right now. She learned how to look after herself. She threw out all her fears and miseries they were there under the cheerfulness, that's why she got a peculiar leg—and she began to make her own decisions. I admire her enormously. She was a ruthless and decided woman.”

I went on for a while and all at once he swung the car off Caesar's Lane, stopped the engine and put his face in his hands. All in one go.

“Nick—heavens, Nick, what is it?”

“Could you shut up? I need a moment.”

“Are you not feeling well? It does hit you suddenly sometimes, doesn't it? It does me. I was sick the other week just after I'd shown a visitor the garden of the house next door. Quite suddenly. I don't even know who he was really, just someone who had come to see them next door and they were out. I was just suddenly sick. What is it? Is it The Hospice? Something at The Hospice?”

“No. Never The Hospice.”

“What then? What is it, dear Nick?”

“If you could just stop
talking
.”

After some time he said, “Well, it's Vanessa.”

Long silence. It was warm in the car. I rolled down my window and bird-chirrups came in and the swish of the fir trees tossing. A little shower scattered down on the bonnet from the wet branches.

“My wife. Vanessa.”

“Vanessa is . . .”

“Look, Eliza, don't start again.
Vanessa
. A very decisive woman. Et cetera.”

Silence. I looked at him in his woolly hat and he took off his glasses and wiped his eyes with his duffle sleeve. I took the glasses from him and dried them on my handkerchief. I gave him back the glasses and he put them on and sniffed, so then I handed him the handkerchief. He sat staring out at the rainy lane and I put an arm along the back of the seat behind him and stroked his neck above the clerical collar. I like necks. He put the handkerchief in his pocket and said, “Have to get on,” and started the car.

On the road over the Common he said—snappish again “D'you mind? I just ought to look in at home before I take you back to Rathbone Road. Vanessa will be worrying.”

So we turned up at the clergy house forecourt, more puddles than gravel, and he left the car and leaned in through his front door and I heard him shout, “—in a few minutes. Taking poor Eliza home.”

There was a flurry from within and Vanessa came bounding past him with a face of wrath, leapt in her car which was poised ready for her, and roared away.

“Oh hell,” said Nick Fish. “She's furious. She's got some meeting in London. Lord, I'd no idea it was so late.”

A child appeared. A baby, just beginning to stagger and wearing a nappy and a vest. Another child, a girl with a very direct look, appeared beside it. She seemed about seven or eight—I'm hazy about Nick's children. We've all helped out when Vanessa's been away but mostly by sending food. I had not actually met them. The girl took the baby's arms from round Nick's cassocked knees and it squealed and thumped her. “Au pair's day off,” said Nick.

“It's all right. Goodness me, Nick, it's perfectly all right. I can walk home. It's no distance at all, l've been walking all day.”

“It's not so much
you
,” said Nick. “It's not so much
that
. I have the Youth Group. There's nobody to leave the children with. Vanessa must have forgotten.”

“She didn't,” said the girl. “She's furious. You promised. She'll stay late now. She always does when you forget. It's a matter of principle.”

“That'll do. Have you all had supper?”

“Yep. I got it.”

“Well,” said I, “I'll go now. Forget me. I'm the least of your troubles. Thanks, Nick, for the lift. Half-way.”

“I wonder,” he said looking me over. “Eliza—could I leave you here with them for a few seconds? I'll just nip round to the Youth Group and explain. They can carry on alone for once. I'll have to nip round to St. Cyprian's too and take them some stuff for tomorrow and if I cut over the Common again I might get Mike to take over at 7.30. I could be back by eight—say 8.10.”

“I'll stay as long as you like. Of course,” I said or heard myself say, and, Let's see if he'll risk it, I thought. A mad nanny. Well most of them always were, they say now, one way or another.

“Could you really? Would you, Eliza? Do that?”

“We don't need anyone,” said the girl, seizing the baby and glaring. “We can manage on our own.”

“But I'd rather like it,” I said, and Nick held the door for me. It had a huge paper face stuck to the glass looking out. A balloon from the mouth said, “Hi!”

“I'm here,” I said to the girl who had a flounce like her departed mother.

“There's tea,” said her father, “or something. I'll promise not to be long.”

“Stay for the Youth Group,” I said. “Stay the whole time.”

“Dad-dad-dad,” wailed the baby with outstretched arms. Nick paid no attention. “This is very kind of you, Eliza.”

And he was gone—a car screeching and grinding in the thin gravel once again—and I walked towards the sitting room followed by the huffy girl and the baby yelling full-tilt. The house had a rich and earthy smell that reminded me of long ago farmyards. I passed a cage full of rustling straw, a large bubbling fish-tank full of what looked like spinach and another cage, very fruity, with mice. I walked through an open door into what seemed to be the main room where seated at the corner of a table stacked with parish papers and crumby plates was the boy I had seen on the bus. He was pushing along an old-fashioned fountain pen but rose at once, at once recognised me and (my goodness) held out his hand. He might be eleven, I thought, but not more than twelve. I'm not much good at the ages of children, but I'd not think he was twelve. He said, “I'm Lucien, hullo. Sorry about Timmy. He'll shut up.” The girl was bouncing the baby up and down on her arm, or trying to, for he was wriggling and pressing his face at her, open-mouthed, to bite her chin. Between the bites he was engaged upon a purple roar. “I'm Eliza,” I said, “
ELIZA PEABODY
,” and the boy did not laugh at Henry's awful name.

“I saw you on that bus.”

“Yes.”

The girl screamed as one of the baby's fingers went in her eye and she began to cry, too. She flung the baby on the sofa, still roaring, and I lunged out and fielded it before it hit the ground. His mouth was still a cave but for the moment it had reached a silence, gathering up for the next bellow. I stood up. The warm little child was surprisingly heavy. It was also very sticky. The bellow did not come.

“That's a terrible noise. Terrible,” I said in what I hoped was the voice you use. “I don't know when I've heard anything like it.” (There was something very like it going on on the sofa.) The baby, pop-eyed, slowly unarched its back and lay limp in my arms. It stared so hard at me I wondered if it was about to have a fit. Babies once were prone to fits. They might yet be. And this other one on the sofa—it was perfectly possible, it seemed to me, that her eye had been put out. There arose squeals of agony.

“Shut up can't you?” said the boy. “For heaven's sake, Amanda, how old are you? Eliza's terrified.”

The girl's toes drummed with fury at the floor. Face-down she continued to scream though on a lower note.

“Take no notice,” he said. “She does this to all the au pairs.”

“I'm not an au pair,” I said, flattered. I liked the “Eliza”—he wasn't the butcher who'd changed to it when I started posting the liver instead of the letters in the post-box outside his shop—“but, I'd better tell you, I know nothing about looking after children. I shouldn't really have offered. You'll have to help me.”

“No problem. None of them do. They get caught. And they're all hopeless.”

“We get awful Church ladies mostly,” said Amanda, turning and staring at me with two tearless and undamaged eyes. She considered me. “Look at Timmy.”

The baby, its mouth still hanging open though growing smaller, had reached out a round hand and stretched it to my face. I said, “Timmy?” He squirmed and levered himself about in my arms until he sat upright, then he leaned forward, reached for an earring and patted it. He pushed the earring until it swung and all the bells began to tinkle like a Tibetan hillside. He gave a crow. A most delightful happy crow. He smiled at the earring with merry eyes.

“Now you're for it,” said Lucien.

“He's found your earrings,” said Amanda. “He's crazy for earrings. He eats them. He's eaten dozens of Vanessa's.”

“Do you call your mother Vanessa?” I asked and thought, What a question. You don't have to get beyond the face on the front door to know they'll call their mother Vanessa.

“She does. I don't,” said Lucien. “A bit sixties.”

“What do you call your father?”

“I call him Father, she calls him Daddy.”

“I call her Vanessa because she likes it,” said Amanda. “She ought to have what she likes. She works hard and gets no thanks for it like Nick—like Daddy—does. Nobody drools over Mum, Vanessa. She hasn't got any smelly old ladies.”

“That will do,” said Lucien and I together and regarded each other with approbation. I noticed that the baby was cramming its mouth with bells.

“Oh heavens, Amanda, help!”

“It's all right,” she said. “I'll scoop them. They've not gone right down his throat,” and she fished with a finger while the baby roared. “There's two here. I think I've got them all out. How many's missing?”

“I can't see. They're on me. Is there a mirror?”

Amanda and the baby, who was still taking distant hopeless swipes towards my ears, were struggling together now side by side on the table where Lucien had put down his pen with a sigh.

“I'll count. Amanda, get him
off
her. One, two, three— seven on the right and—oh Lord, only three on the left. Two we've found, so two have gone down.”

“Oh no!” Amanda looked stricken. “They're awfully sharp.

They're as sharp as Vanessa's tin mobiles were. I'd better ring the doctor. No, 999's quicker, the doctor's hopeless. He doesn't believe us anymore.”

“Don't!” thundered Lucien, and baby and sister were silenced.

“Amanda—look first, and I'll look. Get on the floor. Look under the jumble. Eliza, look down your front.”

Amanda flung jumble about and said, “Well, here's one,” and I looked down the front of my shirt where a bell rested on the ridge of my bra.

“Panic over,” said Lucien. “Now Eliza, while Amanda shows you where things are I'd better get on.”

“Where things are?”

“To bath him. He should have been bathed hours ago.”

“I couldn't help it. I had the supper to get. And find Vanessa's notes. I'll bathe him. Come here.”

“I shouldn't,” Lucien warned as I gladly handed Timmy over.

“She'll drop him. Accidentally on purpose. She does. It's attention-seeking.”

“I don't.”

“You do.”

“I don't. And she can't, anyway. You can see she can't. She doesn't have a clue.”

“
Thank
you, Amanda.” I grabbed the baby back and made for the stairs.