The Queen of the Tambourine (20 page)

“You mean George and the mistress in Hong Kong, and creeping about after the Philippinos, and everyone knowing except Anne?”

“Of course Anne knows. She's not the fool she makes herself out to be.”

“You mean, we all know each other's secrets? Unconsciously? That's not true.”

“No. But there is a tribal knowledge. In any small community.”

“I got it into my head once,” I said, “that my husband was deranged, and once that he was homosexual.”

“Most women believe both at one time or another and usually rightly. But you were wrong on both counts about Henry. You were frightened to look in the right place.”

“However can you know? Sitting here behind that door in the wall.”

“Oh, I see him. Or I used to see him. And I see you.”

“You know,” I tried to say in my old brisk way and then felt it fizzle out. “You know, a year and a half ago I used to talk like that—behave like you. The wise woman of the tribe. It was a complete failure. I have learned not to make oracular pronouncements anymore. They did me and other people no good.”

She looked disdainfully over the Surrey plain. “You were ahead of yourself,” she said. “Too young. But there's time yet. The old women of the tribe have almost always been the wiser. If they keep their marbles long enough. Old men forget—or tend to reminisce, and reminisce falsely and sententiously as a rule. We are often very silly in our middle years but we tend to improve—as our marriages often do. Women who survive, survive better than men. It's because our lives—our physical lives—are more dramatic.”

“Is it because Anne won't face George's—well—randiness that she writes books for children?”

Miss Ingham sat up quickly in the basket chair and turned reddish round the mouth and nostrils. “Don't you dare patronise Anne! In her work she knows exactly what she's doing. It's in her life she is hopeless. She doesn't like to look further than her books, but that is no short journey. Her books may be ahead of her—ahead of most of us. They're a good deal more commendable than her husband.”

“Yet I do like George,” said I, “and I can see his point. She is dull.”

“Can you? Can you indeed? And who says so? I think Anne suspects that she can see George's point, too, in looking about him. She's full of her own limitations. She's a bag of false modesty and misplaced guilt and she attracts humiliation by people who ought to be honoured to know her. But don't tell me that she needs a romance. Anne is not equipped for the torrid zone.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't say—”

“Anymore than you are, but with you it is your great misfortune.”

I was silent.

“Do you feel better?” she said. “On your way home you might drop this little hybrid lilium altromerium in on Anne and save my arthritis. She could do with seeing a new face sometimes. Would you like to see to yours before you go?”

I was not ready to go, Joan. I wanted to stay. In the 1930s white-tiled loo, with its frieze of little black triangles and mirror tapping from a long cord, I looked at the chaotic map of my life, my eyes nearly sunk away, my mouth a poor hair-pin. The earrings hung like dead birds. I wasn't looking well.

“You look low,” she said as I came back to the verandah, “and that is good, for you have been looking dangerously high for some time.” She wrapped another old cardigan around herself and came with me to the gate, passing me the plastic bag.

“Thank you for . . .”

“Not at all. I'll send someone with a ladder.”

“They all think I'm mad now, of course.”

“I know. You are not mad. You are frightened.”

“
Never!
I'm never frightened. Don't even take that away from me, Miss Ingham. I've been fairly brave and I've tried to be self-sufficient. I have survived alone perfectly.”

She leaned forward and touched my arm and smiled, and the girl of twenty, happy about the coming baby, looked out at me for a moment. “Face what you know,” she said. “Grow up.”

I thought, Once this was my function, handing on advice. Making people of people. I looked steadily at her and said, “You sound like me, advising Joan. But I suppose you never knew Joan either. Nobody else did.”

“Of course I knew Joan,” said Miss Ingham. “I was very fond of her.”

 

“But here comes one,” she went on at her garden door, “much too young to have known her: still damp from his cocoon,” and she turned to where the laundering husband could be seen bouncing towards us up the hill, in either hand a plastic bag of supermarket groceries, a briefcase hooked over a stray finger.

He smiled when he saw Miss Archer, called out “Hi, Isobel,” and lifted the one-bag paw.

“So young,” she said. “He will always look young. He has such a little nose. Now then—” as he went prancing by on the other side of the road, calling good-evening to me, but skirting me, not quite looking, the letters on his forehead glowing “—now then,” she said, “Dickie—stop at once.” He sprang on for a couple of steps, turned a tight circle, came over to us and stood marking time.

“Mustn't stop. Ratatouille. Gabriella's having her check-up at the hospital. May not be back yet—blood-pressure. It's a bit of a bore. Had to take Mick with her—supper” (wagging bag) “when they get home.”

“It can't be long now?”

“Any day. I packed up work tonight—paternity leave. Shan't be back for a month. Bought plenty of food for a week.”

“Could you help Eliza? She's locked herself out. Have you a ladder?”

“Gabriella'd know. Find out. Pronto—she's probably home,” and he passed on his way, not once having looked at me.

Joan, now and then I have my doubts about
The Ancient Mariner
. Now every wedding guest plods by and no mad eye glitters bright enough. The mad have become sadder, and however important the tale they have to tell, they soon cease trying. The tail and the tale get curled within them like an embryo. Locked within us. It gets more difficult to call out, “Excuse me, could you spare a key?” Oh, I dare say my eyes give off a bit of glitter, but it's only what I was born with. Fortuitous, like Dickie, the-man-who-has-everything's youth-giving nose.

“In case he forgets,” said Miss Ingham, “or in case Gabriella's time is come, you could ask across the road for a ladder when you drop this in on Anne. My Croupier may not have time before he has to leave for his casino.”

 

“It's a lily, I think,” I say to George who is standing on the terrace, looking raffish and sun-burnt from months of oriental solaria, and stirring his thick gravel with the tip of a gardening shoe. George wears the right clothes for every occasion, not of course that he gardens himself, he employs; but he counts it good manners to the flowers to appear before them in clothes they may respect. George, one feels, might walk the Common in a smock, visit The Hospice in a toga. Oh dear—I do like George. Peel off the clothes and I dare say there's not much sinew, just a smooth stuffed tailor's dummy of oatmeal canvas and little black tin-tack heads, and here and there a prickle of horse-hair with only a whiff of the wild: but I should rather like to stroke the odd hair on George. It's what he wants and seldom gets, I suspect, from his Philippinos, who all look very high-minded, or from silly old Anne, mourning flown children and taken up with
The Baby's Opera
.

George has a long, lank head and an expression of sensual desolation. His sweet, weak mouth is nipped in at the corners. Something in his looks always revives in me the distant tingle. They do not recreate it but they stir a frail string. His eyes greet every woman with appeal. He hasn't spotted yet that his appeal excites few western women now. He spends far too much time in the Orient.

“Oh, hullo Eliza, whatever's this?”

“A plant from Miss Ingham for Anne.” Once I would have said, “
George
! How very nice! You're home again—how lovely. I didn't
know
! Anne
must
be pleased. And how was Indonesia?”

Farewell that woman, that doddle-taffy woman. There she blows.

I stand. I stick. Like a plug in a hole.

“Do go on up. Anne's working. Well, she's in her room, I won't say working. There's some sort of crisis.”

“It's all right.” I put the plant down on the dwarf wall near the clusters of Provençal jars filled ready for the Robins' annual celebration of the giant pelargonium.

“How are you, Eliza? I'm just back. Six bloody months. Lovey you look tired. Where are the glittering eyes? Hey—”

He comes across and puts an arm around me. “Tears? Not Eliza! Tears? Here,” and he brings out a gardener's handkerchief thick, lineny, the colour of grass-clippings, beautifully folded. “Whatever's Henry been doing to you? Neglecting you? Come in and have a drink.”

“I've locked myself out.”

“Then I'll send someone with a ladder. Don't be an idiot, sweetie—hey, aren't you thin? Go and see Anne while I do something about the ladder. She's having a rather bad time—well, we both are. New Philippino.
Very
critical of us she is,” and he gleams at me with a mixture of collusion, apprehension and lubricity.

“And something too terrible to describe has happened to Anne on the recent Grand Book Tour. Daren't ask for details but maybe you'll hear. Now then—ladder.”

I roam round their house which is standing open to both road and garden, but no Anne. Her supremo of a study is empty and the vase of Sissinghurst pinks droops on the desk.

“Anne?” I call. “Anne? Hullo?” I start to wander the garden. “Anne? Anne?”

Down near the asparagus bed stands a meaningful-looking shed and I look through its window where at a potting-bench which is draped in cloth-like cobwebs Anne sits glaring at a hose-pipe hanging on the back of the door. A virgin notebook lies on the bench, with several biros beside it and some trays of seed compost. I tap on the glass and she turns a bleak face to me. No glitter there—but no true grief either. Take heart, Eliza, you can cope with this. Such albatrosses as she knows are chicks.

A look of disappointment changes Anne's blank face for the moment, and for the worse, but I am glad to see that it is Eliza she is looking at, not mad Eliza. No letters on that brow. She stares at me, then looks away.

The door is locked. I begin to try and make myself heard through the glass. After a time she leans forward and struggles with the window-catch. The top of the shed window tilts outwards with a painful cracking and several spiders come tearing out, falling over each other in haste to reach salt-free air.

“George said I was to look for you, Anne. Sorry.” (Why was I sorry?) “Is it the new au pair?”

Anne looks sharp for a second, then resigned. I am a loony—no point talking. She turns her face away. But I feel light suddenly, for I'd asked an objective question and George had not been simply pitying when he had dabbed my tears. “Anne, can't you tell me? Remember all you told me that day you came round and we talked in the kitchen. The day I went to your Literary Tea. All you told me about your career?”

“Career,” she cried. “Career,” and crashed her face in the seed-trays.

“You've been to America, Miss Ingham says. I'm sure you were a huge success.”

“What does Miss Ingham know. Oh, marriage!”

“But George wasn't with you in America.”

“I'm talking about marriage and my literary career. I'm talking about loneliness. I could never tell him . . . Or the children.
Never
.”

“Well, I'm afraid I can't know about children, but . . .”

“I had a terrible time, Eliza, terrible. No—not the Children's Book Tour, that was super. There were tens of thousands in the audiences and our photographs all blown up much bigger than life-size round the Carnegie Hall. Even my ear was about two feet long, and we went to Boston where there's a college where all they do is children's books. They take degrees in them. Well wonderful. Well, if you want to know . . .”

“I can't hear you, Anne. Your face is in the soil.”

“I don't care what my face is like. I don't care about my looks. Eleanor Farjeon was a very plain woman and so was Beatrix Potter.”

“But what
happened
?”

After an age she lifts her head, swivels sideways, drops her face in her hands and sits like a tired Catholic priest who has heard one confession too many. Outside among the asparagus fern I sink to my knees in the penitential position and lean my ear towards the refugee spiders. Role reversal.

She is still.

I wonder after a very long time if she has fallen into a fit. I even wonder if she is on some drug or other that someone has recommended in America, though drugs didn't really sound part of the Children's Book World—you never know, of course. Pixie Leak had seemed a little strange. A little tranced.

“It was New York,” Anne suddenly shrieks. “I should never have gone to New York. I only went because they said it would be useful. Useful to me as an Adult Writer. To meet an Adult Publisher. I've sold an Adult Novel, you see, to America. It was sold actually ages ago and it's been out for months and not a single review. So they said, here in London—my editor, Bessie Bilbury—she said I ought to make myself known to the Adult World, and I did, and they asked me to lunch.”

“But that was nice.”

“They told me the restaurant and the day and the time, and I spent hours and hours getting ready so that I wouldn't look like a children's writer. I put on a big shawl like Margaret Drabble and a simple aertex shirt like Susan Hill and some thigh-length boots, and took a taxi and got there ten minutes early. I thought early looks efficient so I went in and it was gorgeous—in Fifth Avenue shadowy and pale and only seven tables in creamy marble and expensive flowers and waiters more like Claridges than America well, I don't have to tell you, Eliza. You've been everywhere with Henry. It's all humdrum to you, but it isn't to me. The head-waiter came up and looked for a long time in a black book—a programme thing of the reservations—and furrowed his brow.”