The Queen of the Tambourine (18 page)

“Richard and I spoke to him this morning. He has appointments and then a luncheon but will come out here to see you straight afterwards.”

“Whatever for? I'm not in any state to talk about a divorce today. I feel wrung out.”

“We told him he ought to see you. Also, Eliza, we wonder have you no relations? Is there anyone—?”

“Relations? I've only a cousin. Whatever—?”

“Just an idea of Richard's. He thinks that you ought to be in touch with a close relative if possible. If you have one.”

“Annie Cartwright? Whatever for. She lives in Canada or America or somewhere.”

“Canada or America,” said Dulcie, “have you her address? Is there any way of finding it through Directory Enquiries? Only of course with your permission.”

“She's married. She's called Annie Grucock. I suppose that might make it easier. Why on earth—we haven't met in fifteen or twenty years. Oh, except once for an hour at a party in Washington. We don't get on. We're nothing to each other.”

“But she's your next-of-kin.”

“Henry's my . . .” But then, Joan, I understood. If the divorce goes through, Henry will no longer be my next-of-kin. And if, between them all, they are to deposit me in a mental hospital it will have to be Annie Grucock who signs on the dotted line, a task she will be ready, nay eager, nay utterly unsurprised, to be asked to perform.

“Don't you ever bring Annie Grucock here,” I said and flung off the bedclothes, rousted for my slippers. “That's all, Dulcie. Thank you very much for being so kind to me, getting the doctor and the breakfast and lunch and the tea last night with the sleeping tablets in it and even for ringing Henry, though I hope he doesn't come and don't expect him—but just keep clear of Annie Grucock.”

“I'm afraid,” she said, “that Henry may already have rung her. We had to mention it to him. I may say he became very vague and silent.”

“If she turns up I'll send her across to you. And to Anne Robin. To Gant and the Gargerys and Nick Fish—no, not to Nick Fish, he has good children.”

“I don't believe she can be so . . .”

“She is. I was at school with her. She was The Harrogate Rose.”

“Oh, my dear—school. You'll like each other now. I find I get on frightfully well with girls I didn't care for at school.”

“I wouldn't risk it. Not Annie Cartwright-Grucock. I was brought up with her. I'm going for a bath. Have you fed the dogs? Go on, Dulcie, take the old Mock and go home. Finish all you have to do. Because if Annie Cartwright's coming there'll be nothing done in Rathbone Road until you've put her in her first-class carriage home again. With bouquets, champagne, hot-water-bottles and several people's husbands.”

“You are I suppose recovering,” said Dulcie, “if recovery means you are becoming unrecognisable. You sound—well, you sound rather common.” And she flung off.

I opened the window and watched her cross the road, talking with some dignity to Lady Gant. I leaned out and threw a swear word at them and Gant looked up at me as if she'd swallowed a scorpion. I listened to the cadence of the oath upon the noon-day air. I sang;

 

“In't it a pity

She's only one titty

To feed the baby on?

 

“The other old dangle

Got caught in the mangle

And now there's only one.”

 

Gant wears a hat. It's because of the tumour on her head. It sticks up. George Orwell had one, too. People noticed it when he raised his hat. It stood up tall. Lady Gant, a Trojan of a woman I much admire, keeps her hat on. Poor Orwell, stuck with the etiquette of his times.

 

“Poor little bugger,” I sang,

“He'll never play rugger

And grow up big and—”

 

Dulcie turned, after urging Gant in through her front door, on the top of the steps. The steps are flanked by twin lions, for Richard's family is heraldic. She called kindly, “Leave the dog, Eliza, I'll see to him. Rest.”

“Is there enough food in for them?”

“There is enough for
him
.”

I said, “I'm not giving Henry dog-food. He's going to a luncheon.”

 

Later

 

Joan oh Joan

 

I scribble in the bed and the white sheets float about the floor and the biros keep running out.

Bath. After Dulcie had gone, the great white virgin, I lay in the almond oil suds and watched my face swell and contract in the Victorian taps. I looked along my skinny body, half a century old: the purple ridge, the appendix scar, the blotches of the old-fashioned vaccination marks on my thigh, but all still serviceable enough. A body not much noticed since the womb. Unused.

What might it have looked like? If I had married a man who thought sharing a bed important? Fat and flaccid? Covered in stretch-marks and Appalachian ranges? I've never seen a stretch-mark and don't know what it looks like. I have never seen a contraceptive pill. I have never seen pot or hash or heroin. I've never actually examined a condom, and still feel they are rather secret, nasty things.

Bosoms. Scarcely there. They might, I suppose, by now be hanging like old leather bottles? The children saying, “Mother's letting herself go. Such a shame.”

But I'd have looked used.

I thought of the saints, the ones whose bodies were discovered at death, and centuries after death, sweet-smelling, unlined, supple as lads and girls, wafting with daphne and the scent of pomegranates. Pristine, like St. Julian for God. Annie Cartwright, no saint, will smell all her life of double strength
Ma Griffe
, so long as it is expensive enough.

When my parents died, Joan, I was taken in by my mother's sister who was married to a mill-owner in the green soft boggy country outside Bolton, Lancashire. I had been staying with them when it happened. I was six. Annie was their ewe-lamb and she was eight. The four of us had been very quiet. My uncle had already been able to retire from his profession and the mill clattered peacefully away down the dale, looked after by managers. My parents, a tear-away pair, had been on their first holiday together since their War-time honeymoon. My father had been in Changi gaol since the fall of Singapore. They were killed in France in their hired car. A lorry smashed into them from a side turning. It was my aunt who broke the news to me and she was stern about it.

My uncle went out of the room. When he came back my aunt went upstairs to her bedroom. My uncle sat in his leather chair before the big, brass fender. Do you think of a pot-belly, Joan? A plebeian head on a knitted antimacassar? Of homely Lancashire vowels? The Southerner's image of the North? Wrong. He was a gentle, thin and thoughtful man not unlike the figure of the Red Cross knight on our parish church tomb. He spoke gently. I knew that he suffered for his sister and that he suffered for me. I knew that Annie, their daughter, sitting on the fireside stool with her rosy lips pouted out suffered for me not at all. I knew that she was jealous of her father's pity. She sat on her hands and looked down at her polished shoes and taut socks that came three-quarters of the way up her firm calves. She asked if she could do her sewing.

“No, not now.” My uncle lifted a hand from the arm of his chair and stroked my head.

“Then I'll go and ask Mother.”

Soon she was down again and sitting with a little bit of canvas. She stitched white petals with pink French-knotted tips.

 

We went to the same school for a time in Harrogate, Annie and I, but then she went on to another school with a fetching uniform—straw hat with pink and grey ribbon, pale grey dress, white gloves, shell-pink lawn blouse. It was not that she had had to leave the first school but that she was artistic, my aunt said, and couldn't concentrate on what didn't interest her. She rebelled against learning by rote.

Before I went up to Oxford, Annie was about to leave yet another school—her finishing school in Switzerland. She had set out there the previous year, in fur: a creamy fur coat with darker, toffee-coloured fur collar and cuffs, and a fur hat. She had a stolid presence with bulging, treacly eyes but an innate self-confidence and poise that nothing could shake. Soft, wet lips. And she had the advantage of having no shoulders and the consequent air of frailty. The neck sloped down to soft Botticellian arms, pale little hands, all at variance with the strong jaw. Her self-confidence was based on her knowledge that men on seeing her wanted to wrap her shoulderlessness in their arms and at the same time felt comforted by her obvious possession and understanding of a good deal of money. It was an assurance that showed her a match for her fortunes, that the cheque-book inside the crocodile handbag (she would go to Italy now and then solely for the handbags) could conquer the world—or the parts of the world she was aware of. She could see no parts of mine.

She seemed complete, Annie Cartwright, at twenty. There were a great many men after her—young men being watched cannily by parents galore at the functions of the local Conservative Associations of Lancashire and West Yorkshire. It seemed to me unnecessary that she should go away anywhere. She seemed in the golden lap of the world for keeps.

“Won't you miss her?” I asked my aunt.

“She has to go. All her friends go. I like a finishing school. I was finished myself.”

“She seems finished already.”

My aunt looked to see if I were being nasty, decided not (wrong) and said, “A finishing school teaches a girl how to sit in a chair.”

Annie and her husband Basil Grucock came to see me once at Oxford and she sat beautifully in her chair in my lodgings—a knockabout tail house where we were left much to ourselves. Basil seemed less comfortable and kept getting up and pacing about, looking at his Philippe Patek watch which had been her wedding present to him. I should say
tried
to pace about for it was the time when I had released myself into squalor. Old tights and bras and half-eaten Welsh-rarebits lay everywhere on the floor. My bed, with grey sheets, was not so much unmade as unmakeable. This was my second year—my first year of tweed skirts and polished shoes and college hall-of-residence was done. In the middle of this, my most beloved room, the big gesture of my life so soon to be denied, there was a table, and on the table jam-pots, wine bottles, a pair of the man of the moment's trousers I was mending and a space cleared for papers, text-books, notes, pens and an unopened packet of condoms. They were for show. They never were opened. Somebody took them away.

Annie's long silk legs, her French silk suit, her complex curls, her drooping, glossy mouth, her vacancy, her little cigarette case with an “A” on it in diamonds, dumbfounded all my acquaintances as they put their heads at intervals round my door. “Oh—I'm sorry.” Open mouths.

“How do you do?” Basil walked forward heartily to each of them.

“My cousin Annie. Her husband Basil,” I said to their hastily backing-off nods. Her slow smile.

As they were about to leave, Henry arrived. He was not the man of the moment. We had just met. I remember that I covered the condoms with Sweet's
Anglo-Saxon Reader
.

Seeing someone in a clean shirt, Annie came to life. Unwinding herself, getting up most beautifully from her chair, she approached him, paw held out like a present. She gave him a long, long stare. Oh, Henry's wonderful twenty-two-year-old looks! And, when she had gone, his amazed eyes.

“Who on earth was
that
?”

“My cousin.”

“
Your
cousin!”

And we both laughed and laughed. To my surprise Henry went over to the door and locked it. I put the alien trousers hastily out of sight. He came over to me and said, “You are full of surprises.”

“She's the only relative I have.”

“You must be glad. Wherever has she been?”

“Being finished.”

“It can't have taken long.”

Now, in the bath-taps, I see the Oxford twilight. I close my eyes and get a breath for just an instant of the Oxford spring. I feel Henry's grave chin on the top of my head and my amazement when his hands began to move about my bare back.

That, however, was where they stayed, for he left before long in a hurry and that night dropped through my door a terrible note. “I think we must be careful. We have only just met. We must not do what we might regret.” I felt humiliated. I tore it to bits.

But the next morning he was standing outside the gates of St. Hilda's as I came from a supervision, and a warm April wind was blowing his hair about and he asked me to marry him. Knowing, knowing, knowing that this was the right thing to do, I said yes at once.

Annie didn't come to the wedding. I didn't tell her. We asked only about ten friends. I sent her a postcard on our honeymoon in France, and we laughed about her now and then. We sent Christmas cards for years but then stopped.

And now one of the hands that had moved over my back and done no more—nor for a long time after marriage come to that, for he was as hopeless at love as I was then—one of those hands was about to sign the document that would put me away, unless of course it had already signed the one that said he had no further responsibility for me, nor for anything of mine; in which case the hand that condemns me will be the little pink paw of Annie. I see the pink shells of her nails as she slowly writes her name. After which, the clean quiet room, the pills, the dutiful visits of Rathbone Road for a while, the couch. The separation of body, soul and spirit from my dear world. Still my dear world.

“Hang on to God,” says Mother Ambrosine, so I hang on to the towel-rail—I can approach no nearer. I try to pray.

“Courage,” I tell the toothpaste. I do my teeth, I brush my hair, I look in the glass. I look, as usual, most wonderfully well. The mad seldom seem to catch things. You don't see mad people with tiresome colds. They don't seem to get the flu. The skin goes, and there are headaches, yet not even these afflictions have visited me. Oh Barry, Barry, sanest of men. Sores about the mouth, sores between the fingers, pus around the eyes, bones a cage wherein the bees could make their honey. Out of the weak shall come forth sweetness even mingled with the smell of decay. Thin, thin hair. Oh Barry, my love, my child.

And here am I, lean and lithe with health, shining with un-physical fever. For there is something burning in me, flowing hot through the map of my veins, rapids clattering along and searching for the sea. I'm an old central-heating system that never conks out.

Why am I permitted no release into sickness?

Faster, faster, says the Red Queen. Roll up to the Fair. Oh, roll on the Fair.

As I cross from the bathroom to the bedroom I see from the landing that Tom Hopkin is talking to dear Simon in the hall below. Tom needs his trousers mending. I must hurry and dress.

But they have both disappeared when I am ready to go downstairs. I look for them everywhere. Then I get out the silver tray and the rose-bud tea-service—inherited from Bolton, Annie's late wedding present, now I come to think of it. Remembering the quiet stone house in the green valley I add sugar-tongs, silver milk-jug, sugar-lumps and a lacey plate of those very nice biscuits that are getting to be rare—the ones with coffee, lemon and chocolate stripes which Henry and I both like. I see that my newly bathed fingernails have tiny flowers growing out of them, ten little arcs, fresh and blue, like miniature speedwell.

The dogs are still. The house is very still, too. Through the back windows of the drawing room I see that there are still lacquer-red shoots on the dog-wood. I walk the length of the room and observe the Road from the other end. In your front garden—oh Joan!—oh, if you could see the lilac blossom and the fat cream tulips. If you could see the dark red cherry tree toss and shake and feel the wind catch up the petals and throw them like a wedding at old Isobel Ingham drifting home.

I open the front door on it all. The warm wind blows all the papers off the hall table. (No note there from Simon or Tom.) Standing on my top step there's the aching smell of the sap of spring and the nectar welling. Colour is coming into the soil. There's a rose or two in bud, frilly pansies with astonished expressions at their early call. You'd wonder at yourself today, Joan, for ever wanting to leave us.