The Queen of the Tambourine (21 page)

“He furrowed his brow?”

“Then he said, ‘Come this way,' and put me at the best table in the restaurant, right in the middle of the window-tables, and gave me a cool little smile. There was only one other person in the restaurant, it was so early. He was at the next table and he said, ‘Hi—you look happy,' and he was so friendly I said, ‘Yes, I am. I'm here to have lunch with my American publisher. I'm English,' and he said, ‘You don't say.' He honestly did—spoke the words, ‘You don't say.' Then he said, ‘Is this your first book, then?' So of course I told him that I'd been all over America touring and reading my works. He said, ‘Have you written many books?' so I told him the truth, ninety-four—I didn't say they were for children, well, why should I? He asked my name then and then he asked, ‘And what name do you write under?' We're all used to that from the philistine masses so I gave him the look they all get when they ask it and said with the unspoken words very clear in the air, poor fish, you're not exactly in the know are you? Aloud I said, ‘My own.'

“So the time passed and his friends arrived and I could hear they were all talking about publishing. All the other tables filled up except mine, and I sat and sat. And the
maître d'hôtel
came up and asked if I'd like to order and I said I'd wait a bit longer, but it was now three-quarters of an hour since I'd arrived and I asked, ‘Do you by any chance know Miss Gobbet's telephone number?' and he said, ‘I do. She comes here three times a week.' I said, ‘Do you think that I might telephone?' and he said, looking away, ‘Yes, you could do that.' And I sat.

“And the friendly man leaned over and said, ‘Could we four tempt you to a glass of Bordeaux?' and they were all looking sorry for me, and so kind that I could bear no more. I mean—oh,
confused
. I mean, America's meant to be so tough and ruthless and these men behaving like the most terrific
gents
. And American publishers all meant to be so efficient, never missing a trick, never muddling anything. That's supposed to be us. I looked at the letter in my bag and I hadn't got the date or the place wrong—oh Eliza!
Eliza
! Not bothering to turn up!

“So I went to the telephone which was by the
maître d'hôtel
's desk and there was a dim gold lamp and a vase of lilies and the
maître d
' stood looking at me. And everyone in the restaurant could hear.

“I phoned Miss Gobbet—I mean it was
Grizelda Gobbet
. She's a legend. Oh, and Eliza! The girl on the publisher's switchboard said, ‘Speak louder can't you?' and I had to shout, and silence fell all over the restaurant. And then—oh—then Grizelda Gobbet answered and you could hear her eating. She was smacking her lips and crackling papers and she said, ‘Chrissake—I clean forgot. Can we make it tomorrow?'

“So I ran out. Right out. And there was a taxi and I stood for oh, Eliza!—for a fraction of a second and the driver said, ‘Look at it this way, are you getting in or aren't you? Just
get inside
.'

“So I didn't. I walked all the way back to the hotel, about seven miles, between those canyon walls, and there were lunatics everywhere, some of them on roller-skates playing Russian roulette with the traffic, and there were other people fighting and looking like the Marx Brothers or Woody Allen—everybody
acting
, Eliza. Continental-looking people working themselves into a sweat being comedians on street-corners, sweet-talking, behaving like an opera and I reached the hotel and oh . . .

“I couldn't go in. I just couldn't go in. Not at three o'clock in the afternoon. What could I do there? It's failure to be back in a hotel at three in the afternoon. They look at you at the reception, pretending not to see. So I just went on walking. I walked right past and on and on until I came to a sign saying that I was near the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And I thought, well, at least I'll be able to say I went there. Pathetic—oh, pathetic, Eliza! I began to go over speeches to everyone at home. ‘Yes I did. I got to the Met. of Art. Yes—I only had forty-eight hours in New York and of course these American publishers work you very hard, but I was absolutely determined to get there and . . . Waah!

“I went up the steps of the Museum and the glass wall of doors was locked and there was a notice saying ‘No strollers.' All I wanted to do was stroll—I mean, what sort of a museum—? I wanted to stroll and gaze and forget Miss Gobbet and the restaurant and look at the Renoirs and think of peasant France. So I tried to shout through the glass at the attendant, who carried a gun, ‘Could I just be allowed in this once, to stroll?' and he stared at me and turned his back. Just turned his great fat back. And then a black person sitting by the fountains, though they weren't working, I mean playing, dressed in a silver wet-suit and his hair in ropes, he said, ‘They're not open today, Ma'am. It's Tuesday,' so I walked away. I walked all the way back to the hotel and didn't go anywhere else that day or in the evening. I had room-service and lay on the bed.”

“But didn't you—? I think this is awful.”

“Oh yes. Oh,
yes
! The next morning, Eliza, I woke up remembering who I was, and George and the children and how I am not dependent on the United States of America in any possible way. I thought about England and the Road and everything and how lousy the Americans were to us after the War when they stopped lease-lend and we were all eating whale-meat. And how they think they won the War and took over all our air-bases and then went and made that amateur mess in Vietnam and all the army went on drugs, they were so scared. So I rang her again. I put on an ice-cold voice and Gobbet said, quite easy and pleasant,

“‘Hi, sorry 'bout yesterday. Glad to be seeing you today.' I said, ‘I'm sorry, Miss Gobbet, but I will not go back to that restaurant. I was humiliated,' and she said, ‘Oh fine. Fine. Why don't you come round here and see the office?'

“So I went—dressed in my Jean Muir coat and pearls—and it was utterly empty. I got there a bit late on purpose, but there wasn't a sign of life in all the acres of little cardboard booths they work in—all out eating. Miss Gobbet's desk had nothing on it but her nail-varnish and a collection of cartons of health-foods. There were no books anywhere. She started looking about, not saying what she was doing, opening and shutting drawers, and after a time she found a copy of my book in the back of one of them, very shiny and as if it hadn't been opened. She said, ‘There you are. Isn't it great? I had a hand in the jacket myself. Don't you think it looks great?'

“I said—why am I so
polite
, Eliza?—I hoped she had liked the book as well as the jacket, since she is
my editor
. I was so sorry, I said, that it didn't seem to be selling very well.

“She said, ‘Oh it's just great. No, I guess it isn't selling very well.'

“We went to a restaurant then, where you queued up with a tray and all there was to eat was salad and great chunks of pulped-over meat that wasn't meat and glasses of thin foamy milk and we sat at a little table where I kept getting knocked. Grizelda Gobbet
lay
in her chair, Eliza, lay back in it and sort of half-smiled and messed with her salad and started smoking.

“And she said, ‘So. How you enjoying New York?'

“I tried to talk to her. I did try. I tried to talk about the book—it's what I was told I should do, but whenever I did she just looked up at her cigarette smoke and the ceiling. I noticed how her hands shook all the time, just like my editor's at home, which reminded me of the masturbation scene that I'd found so difficult. So I asked her if she approved of the masturbation scene, and she looked absolutely shattered.

“‘I'm sorry to have to say this,' she said, ‘but the book isn't going too well. You know, the trouble with us Americans is that we're just not egg-heads.'

“I said, ‘But it's only about love. You liked the book. You bought the book.'

“‘Well,' she said, ‘
I
didn't exactly buy it, someone else did, and she's left. She was the house drunk. Matter of fact I haven't exactly read it yet. Say—', she said, ‘—do you have a cat? I'm a cat-lover. Do you ever think of writing a book about a cat? I live with my cat and—do you know what—I don't seem able to feel for anything like I feel for my cat. Not even for Central American politics, which is my area.'

“Someone kicked the back of my chair then, it was so crowded with people walking about with their trays, and I was tipped forward and nearly crashed into her face with my own, and when I saw her close, Eliza, she was so old. An old sad woman, not at all unpleasant under the mask of paint. Her eyes were quite vacant.

“She said, ‘Well, I guess you'll be wanting to go shopping now'—it wasn't quite two o'clock—‘don't let me keep you.' And that night, Eliza, I flew home to England.”

I said through the grille, “That is one of the most horrible stories I have ever heard. My dearest, dearest Anne,” and she let out a wail, crashed from the shed and made for the house.

“Awful,” I said on the drive to George who was coming in through the gates, “George—awful. What happened to Anne was awful. Don't ask. She'll recover. And never let the children know that it wasn't all wonderful for her.”

“Yes. I gather. She hasn't said much. I don't know why she cares about the Americans, though, do you?”

“Yes I do. We were brought up to think that they liked us. It's taking time to realise they don't give a fuck.”

“Eliza—
what
did you say. My goodness!”

“Also, Anne is young and good, and she can't help having beautiful manners, and she suffers.”

“Who doesn't, sweetheart?” he said with more interest than usual. “Oh, I love you when your hair sings.”

“
Sings
, George?”

“With electric currents. And your Eliza-eyes are black-currants again now. They are black-magic currants. I wish you'd come with me to Hong Kong.”

I side-stepped him and also Mrs. Cori Aquino who was coming along behind him through the gates with a steely smile.

“Are you the woman who has locked herself out?” she asked.

And Joan—do you know, for a moment or two I hadn't the faintest idea what she was talking about. I was shaking with
fury
for Anne. For something that was of course nothing, that in the end Anne will be quite able to bear, to tell the world, make into a party joke and in the end all but forget—such
fury
for Anne, Joan, that my own locked sorrow, my broken soul were quite forgotten.

I walked to number forty-three and saw a house bristling with ladders. Windows stood open on every floor. A man of Slavic appearance was heaving himself over the garden door. Half-way up the principal ladder to my bedroom, as if it might have been some great, untrammelled gorilla, there hung by one hand an imminently pregnant girl. Her small-nosed husband, unafraid as he held in his arms his one-year-old baby, was calling instructions. Spotting me, Dulcie Baxter began to remove herself hastily back to her own house. Some Gargery children were talking about the fire-brigade.

The pregnant girl eased herself competently, carefully down, on the inner side of the ladder, hand over hand, tight-lipped, and fell in a heap into somebody's waiting arms. Nobody said much. It was all very orderly. There was an unspoken team-spirit. She was sensibly dusted down.

I loved England then, Joan. I had loved it in the morning and I loved it now towards evening, after tea.

 

E.

?

 

Dear Joan,

 

It seems to me that to feel the goodness of someone is a rare occurrence. Experiencing the corporate goodness of the tribe is rarer still. In Rathbone Road all our security and worldly success is usually brought about by hard, slogging work, careful and conventional and un-eccentric endeavour suitable to the class in which we are all stuck, and the troubled knowledge that comes with the years is that we are most of us little more than holes in the air.

And yet, I think that most of us try to be good a lot of the time. We have ample opportunities to do good, and most of us take them. We give liberally to charities.

But we most of us only really know people of our own sort. We leave our five-bedroomed houses of an evening some of us twice a week to man—or usually woman—the food-stalls for the homeless under Waterloo Bridge, and we do our little bits of part-time good work. But is there one of us here, Joan, ready for total immersion? Is there one of us ready to forget his or her self-righteousness? Anything less than total love, universal love, Joan, achieves nothing. We are not angels. I don't think I know any totally committed human being—totally committed to anything. I know no St. Julian.

Yet all those ladders, all those people springing about on account of one tiresome member of the tribe—it was so kind.

I found the dogs subdued. They were exhausted with barking and badly frightened by all the aliens tramping through the house.

And there was no message from Henry, no sign of him. The front door must have blown shut behind me and the dogs safe indoors all the time. My rosy tea-service still stood on its silver tray.

The phone was ringing. It was Dulcie, gulping with rage.

“
Wherever
did you get to, Eliza? Henry's been ringing and ringing you. In the end he had to ring me. I said I had left you much better, bathing before beginning to get tea ready for him. He said there had been no reply from your house for hours.”

“I thought the dogs had got out. I went on the Common looking for them. I left the door open but the door slammed. When did he arrive?”

“Oh, he didn't arrive. I'm glad to say he hadn't that nuisance. He found that he had to have a very important conference this afternoon—a crisis of Government. He was very put about. Something arose over the luncheon and had to be pursued through the afternoon.”

“The dogs had to be pursued through . . .”

“Eliza! He was put about. He asked me to tell you that he was
put about
, not being able to keep the appointment with you.”

“Oh, well.”

“He asked how you were and I said, calmer.”

“Yes. That's true.”

“You know, you and Henry will have to meet, Eliza. Soon. You can't just sit there at number forty-three all your life spending his money and with not a blind thing to do—just there all day and half the night in that sitting-room window.”

“I have a lot of blind things to do.”

“If we had nothing to do, no work, life in this Road would be quite unjustifiable. I mean, what about all our degrees and qualifications? I know that they were some time ago but—it would be living death. My work utterly exhausts me, I'm glad to say. I don't have to do it. We're perfectly comfortably off. But it makes the Road have
meaning
. After all, nothing happens here—nothing.
Nothing
goes on except the tiny events of every day, and you're not old enough for that yet. You're not Isobel Ingham. You can't just
be
.”

“Yes, I suppose so. No, I suppose not.”

“And you don't play Bridge.”

“I never liked it much.”

“You go to no classes. There are excellent courses of lectures.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Courses of
good
lectures. With very distinguished lecturers.”

“Yes, I know.”

 

Classes. I have attended classes, Joan, not always in this country, and have found them very valuable. Some taught me that simply being alive can seem very adequate. Some taught me that working is a lot easier than living. We all attend classes.

Some time ago, before your time here, Joan, or Dulcie's, or Gant's, there were the Penumbras. You know the house. Indeed you do. Stand for a moment at your old front gate. Across the road, head on to you, is my house. On your right is Deborah's. On your left, next door to me and on my right, stands the pastry-coloured house with the white blinds and great empty barn of a basement kitchen you can see right through to the back and out the other side, all chrome and copper and “butcher's blocks” and old circulars tossed about the floor in the clean white dust. The house we all explain when anyone asks as “belonging to film-people, I think, but they're hardly ever there.”

Ten years ago this house was dirty and unkempt and knocked about, unrecovered since the War. Its windows were covered by thick and grimy crocheted curtains, never washed. Blue hydrangeas bulged about in front of it, blocking off the view from the basement, straggling across the windows of the first floor, stalks black, leaves brittle through the winter turning to mulch beneath them, paddled into the path. Newspapers blew about and two tipsy dustbins, seedy comedians, rusted at the side door. There was an unassailability about the place. It seemed impervious to us and to all our standards. It had the curious effect of making us behave as if it were not there.

“They're blacks,” said Angela. “They've been in a while. Nobody's seen them. Name like Conundrum.”

Henry said that Conundrum sounded rather Indian. Angela said, “Well something like Conundrum. It's from those parts. Pakistani-blacks, they usually are. And fancy! In this Road!”

We settled for Penumbra. The Family Penumbra, shadows of shadows, though we only ever seemed to see one member of it, “the man,” who left the house each day at eight and returned long after night-fall. He was a tall full man with a passive, greenish face and a solid plastering of close-knit hair gone prematurely grey. He walked away down the hill to the station with bold strides, gazing high above our heads. If greeted, he looked through us.

Little movements of the curtains occurred within the house sometimes. Occasionally we heard muted music, but we saw no one. Behind the house the garden was high with grass and roses, unpruned for years, flopped about in it on old posts. No one went into the garden. No one called at the front door. No milk was delivered. An old large tinny car behind the broken doors of the garage was never taken out.

Then, one day, I was in my garden at the back of the house and heard children in the Penumbra garden alongside, and felt eyes watching me through a knot-hole in the fence. Later, from the turning on my staircase I saw two women there, veiled and in black, giving sweets to a fat boy. I told Henry that they were Arabs, the Penumbras, not Pakistanis at all.

A day or so later, a ball flew over the fence and landed at my feet. There was screaming and lamentation, then silence. I threw the ball back and the silence deepened. In a moment I heard a whispered chattering and fussing as the children were bundled back indoors.

This was about the beginning of the time when I took to the distribution of little notes. I wrote one, addressing the envelope only with the words “By hand,” saying that I wished to be a good neighbour and would be honoured if they would like to come and have some coffee with me.

Silence entire.

About a month later, however, the offerings began. Henry and I returned one night from the theatre to find our top step strewn with flowers and sugar biscuits and Henry said, “Aha—Penumbra.” For we had met this before. Once, in Syria, waiting for our official residence to be ready, we had silent and almost invisible neighbours who left us gifts, gifts that increased in volume and value until they became an embarrassment and then a burden. Every evening there they were. No message. No one to thank.

“Tell them to stop, Henry.”

“My dear Eliza, it's the custom.”

The offerings in Syria had arrived in waves that seemed to have no rhyme or reason. They seemed unconnected to any religious festivals, political events, phases of the moon, or with anything at all that we were doing, though it was remarkable that whenever we went away, even unexpectedly, the offerings ceased. We asked our servants, who smiled and said that it was friendship. I did just wonder once, after a particularly lavish display which had included a large game-bird, whether our neighbours had seen us watching them one night as they dug a hole in their garden and buried a big lead casket. But there seemed little reason for them to mind. I brooded on it in my courtyard among the sweet doping lilies, my orange trees almost ready for marmalade, the water from our fountain glittering and splashing into the cistern. I never discovered the answer.

“I wish I had,” I said to Henry. “I should have discovered the answer then. Perhaps I should call now next door, and ask outright.” But in the end I wrote a note saying, “Thank you so much, particularly for the last present of the marigolds and the Sainsbury duckling, but I feel that we can accept no more presents.”

“In this country,” I wrote, “we do not accept presents from people to whom we have not been introduced.” I said I was sure that the unmarried mothers at The Shires, run by our Church, would be pleased to receive the presents, especially the duck, but that they must be the last.

When I told Henry, he said, “Oh, my God.” I said, “Well why didn't you deal with it?” He said, “It's making so much of it. Did you have to mention the Church?”

“Why shouldn't I?”

“It's a bit provocative, isn't it?”

The offerings stopped. The dirty house relapsed into blackness and trance and only the daily progress of Mr. Penumbra down the hill to the train to London, sure as the passage of the seasons or the noonday gun of yore, proved that its heart still beat. Each day he strode away, staring over our heads at the Epsom skyline.

One day, hearing some little noises through the fence while I was in my garden, I called out a greeting in Aramaic. Then in Farsee. But there was no response. That evening we saw Mr. Penumbra in his garden walking thoughtfully up and down. He must have been able to hear us talking, but he made no move. “Funny cove,” Henry said in bed. “Rather rough-looking. Very shabby. Those English cardigans. Looks as if he's used to wearing something better, somehow, but he doesn't really care. I can't place him. He's a gent, though.”

 

But when in October Henry attended a dinner at his old college, he found Mr. Penumbra there, and very firmly placed indeed, on the high table and next to the Dean.

“My neighbour,” said Mr. Penumbra to the Dean. “Whose wife speaks Farsee.”

After dinner at the dessert, Henry met Mr. Penumbra eye-ball to eye-ball across a silver bowl of fruit. Mr. Penumbra was wearing a dinner jacket as green as his face and of very ancient design and, delicately peeling a Conference pear, he said, “Good evening,” in a slow, low, academic and slightly American-Oxford voice, “Rather,” said Henry, “like T. S. Eliot's.”

“May I give you a lift home, Peabody?” asked Mr. Penumbra.

Henry was very annoyed to be staying in the college overnight and unable to accept.

About a week later, on my doorstep stood Mrs. Penumbra, with no sign of an offering. She appeared to think that I knew her quite well. She was very small with pretty hands and large eyes. She was sharp about the cheek-bones, wore lipstick and was smiling. She smelled of my Syrian courtyard orange-trees, or maybe my lilies, and I felt a pang for them and for the water falling into the cistern: the slow, hot days.

“Mrs. Peabody?”

“But how very nice. Do come in.” Angela was prowling and peering. “May I get you some coffee?”

Mrs. Penumbra sat daintily on the edge of her chair and sipped. Her dress was silk and short but very old and rather tight. She wore high-heeled shoes and fine stockings. On her head was a silk scarf, like the Royal Family.

“Won't you take off—?”

“Oh, no. I don't remove it. It is a dispensation from the veil only while we are in England. It is an honour, you see.” Then she loosened the scarf, loosened its knot, pushed her fingers under the scarf into her hair—her hair wasn't particularly clean as a matter of fact—and then she took her fingers out, smoothed the sides of the scarf and tightened the knot again. She watched me all the time. It was something I'd never seen done.

“I've lived in the Middle East,” I said. “In Syria—Iraq. Iran.”

“In the time of the Devil?”

“Yes, I was there in the time of the Shah. But afterwards, too. We moved about.”

“A terrible regime. An evil man. We are now restored to our faith.” Again she played with the knot of her scarf. She moved her head about restlessly inside it. “We give thanks to God for all His mercies.”

I thought of a Sheraton Hotel where Henry and I had stayed as the Shah's reign ended. The night before we flew home. The hotel was next to the prison. All through the night, precisely on the hour and the half hour, we heard the firing-squad. We counted through the hours. Five, six, seven, eight times. A rip, whiplash, crackle of shots. Quite short. Nine, ten, eleven. We lay in the dark holding hands. Gant, Dulcie, Gargery, even Old Bernard, hearken. Sometimes there is nothing to be done.

I said to her, “Of course we're quite out of touch now. But I loved the Middle East. I'm sick at all I hear.”

“What do you hear?”

“We still have friends there. And we read the papers. And—for instance the other day, outside Marks and Spencer there was a group of girls with a book of photographs. Some were veiled, some weren't. They carried a collecting box and showed the photographs to people coming out of the store. The photographs were of young men—well, teenaged boys, being hanged from scaffolds in the streets. Sometimes a whole row of them—and people in the market going about their business, or watching. In some of the photographs the boys were hanging dead. There were other photographs, with the boys still standing waiting. There were some girls, too. They were children some of them—not much older than your own.”