The Queen of the Tambourine (17 page)

May 30th

 

Humpty-Dumpty piddle and pie,

Soon after you arrived to live in Rathbone Road, dear Joan, I spent a day with Old Bernard that I have not forgotten. It revealed much to me. First, it revealed to me the duplicity of the sainted Miss Ingham. A note from her had come through my door. She was then—as now—a woman I saw only occasionally to smile at. We had scarcely spoken. She wondered if I would do her a favour. Every year, she said, she attended the Chelsea Flower Show with Old Bernard, as his guest, his poor wife Lola being unable to go about much. This year she, Miss Ingham, was beginning to feel that she too was unable to stand about. Would I very kindly go with him instead?

The Chelsea Flower Show, Miss Ingham said, was the big day in the year for O.B., the only time he now ventured into central London. He certainly could not go alone—too old—and, as I knew, he had few friends, being so outspoken. She had her Fellows' Tickets which meant that we could go on the least crowded day and afterwards Old B. always took her to lunch at Peter Jones. He would be delighted to do the same for me. What a kindness I would be doing, she said. The C.F.S. was the last spark in the old man of his lost Bavarian childhood.

I rang and said I wasn't sure if O.B. liked me much. He seemed to regard me only as the one who had knocked him flying with my car door. Miss I, speaking faintly and with pauses, as if simultaneously doing something else—prodding at seed-trays, examining her whiskers—said that everyone had knocked Old Bernard off his bike at one time or another. She had suggested the outing to him and he had seemed very happy.

We went padding down the hill, then, the two of us, Old Bernard and I, to the station where O.B. made a great performance of buying the Underground tickets.

“D'you have a card? It's only one pound fifteen if you have a card.”

“A student card? Goodness, no.”

“No. A pensioner's card. Have you a
pensioner
's card yet?”

“I'm not sixty, Bernard.”

“No,” he said dismally, “maybe not.”

We sat side by side, joggling along the District Line, Old Bern cracking his knuckles. I said that I hadn't realised he was a gardener.

“I'm not a gardener.”

“But you go to the Show every year?”

“Miss Ingham is a forceful woman.”

I could see it was going to be a long day. “Perhaps,” I suggested, “we should split up?” We had reached the Chelsea Embankment and had joined the hurrying happy feet, “I could look at the flowers and you might . . .”

“I shall be among the furniture. The garden seats.”

“We could meet here again at say, twelve-thirty.”

“That's too late. They'd have given us up and we'd have lost our table. Peter Jones is a considerable walk.”

“I don't really mind missing Peter Jones.” To tell you the truth, Joan, I couldn't imagine Old B. in any kind of restaurant and certainly not among the pastel tints. “Couldn't we just have a snack, here at the café?”

“I don't eat out of doors. The flies here are diseased.”

“Diseased?”

“From the spraying. The sprays they use on the flowers. This place is a death-trap. We breathe poison into the lungs. That's why I never go near the flower tents. The roses are all spray. The gladioli pure ethylene.”

He sat down on a cruelly bright, tobacco-coloured garden seat and stared at some polystyrene urns and a statue of Pandora letting all the troubles of the world out of a polystyrene box at her feet. She had a join all down her sides and over her head like an Easter egg that would fall apart if you tapped it. I went round the flower tents trying not to breathe. “But they smell absolutely wonderful,” I said when I found him again, looking at gold-fish and lotuses in a pool loud with a hose-pipe-engendered waterfall. “They smell only of heavenly flowers.”

But he was abstracted.

We made our way up Lower Sloane Street where I met, among the afternoon Flower-Show-tramping-feet, Duffy and Dilly Fancy-Baker from Wallis and Critch before they were bought up by Klein and Woo, who shrieked and embraced me in the usual way (a light-year-and-a-half away, dat ole Eliza-girl) and asked if Henry and I were going to Glyndebourne. Old Bernard stood bleakly with his long cuffs hanging, looking at the road.

In the crowded Peter Jones lift he revived and seemed at home, gaining confidence and a little cheerfulness when people began to whisper and fumble about, prodding buttons for the right floor. He called loudly, “Fifth floor. Fifth floor. We want the fifth” (it turned out to be the fourth), in a resonant voice, and marched me towards a window table.

“Have what you like,” he said. “She pays.”

“Miss Ingham pays?”

“Yes. Don't ask me why. It pleasures her.”

“I thought Miss Ingham said . . . You mean she gives you money? Like a boy?”

“Oh yes.
I'm
not taking you out.” He laughed long and loud, a harsh laugh that made heads turn. After it, he sat smiling, the smile I get from him when he stops and speaks on the Common and talks about the Lamb of God.

Now all this happened, Joan, when I still felt God to be on my side as well as at my side, and I was hand in hand with Him. I said, “Bernard, I expect that it is very difficult for you to like us in Rathbone Road even though there are quite a number of Jews there. It must be very difficult for you, very annoying, and you would have been a lot happier in Hampstead. We have all had very much more constricted lives than you, but we cannot help it.”

“You can all help it. Hampstead is neither here nor there. To the middle-class English the Holocaust might never have happened—look at them all, eating their lunch.”

“We can't help not being Jewish.”

“You can help your self-absorption. Introspection.”

“You don't tell me Jews aren't introspective?”

“I'm not talking about Jews. Jews are irrelevant to this conversation. Let's forget the Jews.”

A woman came up and asked if the spare seat at our table was free and I thankfully removed my handbag from it and she sat down. Old B. turned to the window and gazed at the sky.

“How beautiful it is,” said the woman, “this part of London.”

We all three looked down at the tops of the trees moving gently in the square.

“Like Paris. The last romantic bit of London to look like Paris. D'you know the little bit where the bus goes round to Passy?”

She wore a black hat from another age—Leghorn straw, its veil pulled over her face and tied tight round her neck with a narrow, black-velvet ribbon. Pale brown splodges on the skin. She wore the oldest black coat I had ever seen, most beautifully made, but cheap black net gloves. Under the gloves the fingers were heavy with diamonds and the veins on the back of the hands were pumped full of purple ink. They stood up in blebs and knobs under white make-up. Her head nid-nodded as she undid the veil. She said to Bernard, “I'm afraid I heard what you said. I don't think you ought to speak of the Jews like that.”

Bernard munched.

“You remind me of one of my late husbands who made Jewish jokes. One of them ran as follows. One man says to another, ‘My new house is all right but it looks out over the Jewish cemetery.' The second man says, ‘You're very lucky, where I live they're still all walking about.' This is the sort of joke that only a Jew may make, just as only the blackamoors are permitted to say ‘niggers.' Don't you think? I'm very clear about this. I have a friend close to the Queen Mother who says Her Majesty feels exactly the same. We—you and I—have to be so careful.”

Old Bernard began to eat his lemon sole.

“Fish,” said the woman, “fish. Now that is something the Jews understand. Nobody cooks fish like a Jew. I always think of that in Church when we have the Feeding of the Five Thousand. I don't think, by the way, that there is a Jewish chef here, do you? There's something in it you know—it has been scientifically proved—this talk of fish making brains. The Jews have plenty of brains. One quite grants them that, even though it does seem odd how many managed to get caught. Excuse me, my dear, but are you one of the Terry family?”

“Terry?” I asked.

“No—not the chocolate people. The
Ellen
Terry family. You have something of the same hair. Of course red hair in a woman is often Jewish, though I'm sure Ellen wasn't. She would be Church of England.”

Bernard munched.

The woman ordered and ate a little omelette and got up to go.

“I eat a little omelette here every day. There is nearly always someone to talk to. I hope we may meet again,” she said to me, casting a glance of disapproval at anti-Semitic Bernard. “I live in a very nice bed-sitting room in Royal Avenue. Once I lived in the whole house and many members of the Terry family came to see me frequently in the old days. And several very Jewish people too.” (Another flash at Bernard.) “Excuse me, but you have smudged your arm, your wrist. How dirty London has become. I need fresh gloves every day.”

Bernard unbuttoned his cuff and laid his arm along the table and we all three read the number inside the wrist.

“That reminds me of something, too,” she said, “but I can't remember what. Something very nice. I know it well but my memory is failing. Could you tell me what it is?”

Old Bernard and I said nothing. I felt it was not for me to say and Bernard was chewing his apple tart.

“The world grows more and not less mysterious as we grow older,” she said. “I look back on simple, happy years, not least the wonderful days of the Edwardian London stage. All the Terrys—Gielguds, Trees. Such
Hamlets
—Geilgud a non-pareil.
The Merchant
. Alas—not an easy part but—I must go now. I do hope you didn't mind me taking you up about the Jews. You see, I can remember Mosley. Such an attractive man. Not unlike a member of the Terry family. But so dangerous.”

She turned, took her bearings and set off over the wide floor of the restaurant, feeling precisely with her stick. After a few steps she turned and said, “Oh, I have remembered. Your numbers on your wrist remind me of my grandchildren. We all once went for a Continental summer holiday on a lake shore. There was a little club for the children. To show they'd paid their entrance money their little wrists were stamped with a number. Then they were allowed the swings and slides of the fair. They so loved the stamp coming down. 1939—that wonderful sunny summer. We all so loved the old Germany. It made us feel close to our own Royal Family. I always thought, if only someone had adopted Hitler as a little boy and sent him to a good English public school like some of those fine African leaders who were loyal to us for years. But the idea is impossible, isn't it?”

 

Bernard stood strap-hanging home on the crowded tube. He hung by the other wrist. Across the carriage, through the forest of gardening pamphlets everyone was carrying, I could see the old white arm clutching up at the rail. Tramping back up the hill home he said, “Ach—the inconsequence. The studied eccentricity. The inability to reason. The irrationality. The shortness of memory. The pride in new poverty. The lack of the once transparent smear of imagination. The unshakeable security. The remains of the Churchillian myth of the British bulldog, a most detestable animal. It is a terrible ignorance. The great fact of this age is The Holocaust. Only The Holocaust. It can never be forgiven or forgotten. I am not talking about race. I am talking about evil. Nothing else matters—yet what do you any of you care or know?” He raised his arms up and outwards to the road, “Stagnant, unawakened, calm, criminally comfortable, fifty years on.”

I said, “‘Never
understood
' not ‘never forgotten.' It's not that we forget. And we can't help not being Jews.”

“It must
never
be forgiven.”

“No, I suppose not. Nobody not Jewish dares to forgive, Bernard, I know. Well, I suppose.”

“‘Suppose?' ‘Suppose?' All this good-mannered caution. Understatement. Morning mist and cricket. And flower-shows.”

“Oh, Bernard, you're antique. She was antique too. She was a coelacanth. That sort of thing has gone. She was History.”

“But I am History. I am antique. I am the ancient of days—a wanderer. And by God, I am still here.”

“Come on—you've been forty years in Rathbone Road.”

“My mind is far away,” he said. “So much as is left of it.”

“Give my—remember me to Lola,” I said at the gate. “I hope she does—is better.”

“You should come and see her. In my country everyone would be calling on her daily.”

He crackled his knuckles as he stood waiting for Lola to unlock the door and I went on and walked on the Common for fresh air. On the way home I made a detour to the old parish church and sat in it for a time looking at the hanging crucifix above the rood-screen. I wondered if I could manage forgiveness if I were Old Bernard since I could not manage forgiveness even in Rathbone Road, and how Jesus would have got on, watching the children being sorted for the ovens.

Two talkative women came in and started cleaning. They ran a cloth over the Red Cross knight who lay on his marble tomb, legs crossed to show he'd sliced some Saracens; member of the local great family, long defunct. God looked down on the lot of us and for perhaps the first time I saw the suffering of His silence. The smallness of our prayers.

 

“Well,” said Dulcie, breezy and restored, for there had been a long muted discussion with Dr. Seneca in the hall—some women get almost sexy in their conversations with departing doctors—“Well, I gather there's no reason at all why you shouldn't get up, so I'll leave your lunch ready on a tray. After lunch you might rest in the drawing room on your long chair. Then at three-thirty Henry should be here.”

“Henry?”