The Queen of the Tambourine (4 page)

“A parson? I'm the British Council. I meant the supper. Could we have our supper on our knees?”

I waved the glass dish about.

“Supper,” he said. “Here—out of the way—I'll finish it. Go and put a dress on. A nice one. Take a glass of wine with you,” and he topped up the vase.

So I went upstairs and changed into the gold dress and gulped down the wine and stood looking at myself. I burrowed around for lipstick and after I had put some on I took it off again. Lipstick is ageing. I poured scent on myself. Then I put up my hair.

Then I took it down.

Two trays of turkey. A new bottle open by the fire. Your friend observed me through Henry's eye-glass. “She sent some earrings to go with that,” he said. “Catch.”

I opened the earring parcel, Joan, and said, “But they must weigh ten tons.” Then I screwed them in and found that they weighed feathers. I said, “They're like the Fair on the Common. They're like tambourines. They tickle my shoulders,” and found that silence had fallen in the room and Henry's monocle shone with a steady gleam. “Lucky earrings,” said he. “Pouilly-fuissé? What shall we play on the tape-deck?”

“Most of them are
Requiems
. I don't think I want any music.”

“I certainly don't want
Requiems
. Are you quite comfortable?”

“Oh yes, very.”

“And I see that you were hungry.”

I looked down and saw that I'd eaten all my turkey, cold roast potatoes, bread-sauce, two kinds of stuffing and a green salad, my glass was empty and there didn't seem to be much pouilly-fuissé left in the bottle. I thought: Eliza take care, why was he asking if you were comfortable? And I tried to gather myself together to say something safe and hostess-like, such as: “Well, I
am
glad you—decided to telephone and how
is
Joan?” But all that came out was a sigh, and I lay back and wished.

“Why,” he asked, “has that picture got its face to the wall?” He turned it round and said, “Oh well, yes.”

“It's one of Henry's ancestors.”

“Poor fellow.”

“Henry is my husband.”

“Oh, I know about Henry.”

“Henry is—. Has Joan said much?”

“No. Not much. But one divines.”

“She never writes. At least, not to me. I write often.”

“Why do you write? Are you a relation?”

“Goodness, you are old-fashioned. It must be living with Indians. You must have been away a long time. Families here aren't important enough for letters any more. Not even friends write to each other much now.”

“Joan was your close friend then?”

“Well, she was hardly a friend at all. But she left a list of addresses—box-numbers.”

“Then why do you write? Sit there while I go for the plum-pudding.”

I heard a great conversation going on in the kitchen and, when he returned with silver dishes and the bottle of Courvoisier that is kept in the drinks cupboard, its key, I swear, under the saucer in the study (your friends do drink a lot, Joan), both dogs trotted meekly at his heels.

“Very well,” he was saying to them, “we shall see. It depends entirely on your behaviour the next half hour,” and he handed me plum-pudding and flourished a great white dinner napkin about. Then he sat down to his own plateful at the other side of the fire. The dogs gazed upon him. First one and then the other flopped down, arranged its front paws, laid its chin upon them and continued to gaze. My dog sighed.

“Much better,” said Tom Hopkin. “Yes?”

“Yes, much better.”

“I like to see someone lick a spoon,” he said. “I meant, have you found the answer yet to why you write so compulsively to Joan?”

I thought, Oh Lord, he thinks I'm a lesbian. He expects the usual throbbing steamy stuff. If I say no, he'll think I'm just not facing the new so-called natural world. Oh shitto, as Sarah would say.

“Looking at you and the blushing and so on I see that your interest in Joan is quite holy. Sex with you would not be paramount.”

I felt wretched.

“I haven't much interest in Joan in any way really, except for some reason I feel that I know her very well.” (I thought: What is it? He makes me tell the truth.) “I told you—we were not even friends. If anything we were opposites. She reminds me of someone or something—I don't know. I think that I write because I feel a little responsible for her disappearance. I wrote her a letter telling her she was a hypochondriac and she should pull herself together.

“I prayed about it first. God often tells me what to do. Or He did.”

“Do you often advise people who are not your friends?”

I told him about working at The Hospice.

“You thought that you could help her in a medical capacity? Are you trained?”

I hung my head and said that it was mostly washing-up but that I do believe myself sometimes called to fling myself at a pen and sound off to people.

“Well, why are you so ashamed of it?”

He lay back in his chair. The fire sparked and crackled with a new log. The Courvoisier caught the light as it tipped here and there in his glass. His hair shone silky and young. I thought: this is the man I have looked for all my life.

“You are obviously an excellent woman,” he said, and I burst into tears.

“I am nothing of the sort. But I try.”

“What—try to be an excellent woman?”

“No. Of course not. You're cruel. Who could want that? Oh well—yes, I suppose so. I can't help it. I try to be good. It's the way I was brought up. I was too early for the self-fulfilment stuff, the ‘love thyself,' the Germaine Greer feminism—too busy then, keeping Henry going. I know they all say I'm humourless and conceited and I talk too much and I'm self-righteous, but not even Lady Gant can say I don't try. To be good.”

“
Is
there someone called Lady Gant?” He smiled contentedly. “And you try to
do
good?”

“Well, of course. Why not? I can't help it. It's what I was taught.”

“Well,
why ever
not. Another Courvoisier? Are you averse to getting sloshed? Tell me about Henry.” (A sharp glance at the portrait.) “You said he'd left you.”

“I didn't. Did I say that? Nobody knows that. He only did it at lunchtime.”

“Today? At Christmas dinner? Well, big things do happen on Christmas Day—there are quite a lot of suicides. Did he do any washing-up?”

“
Henry
? Well, there wasn't much to wash-up. We none of us ate anything really. I knew something was brewing when he and Charles came in from Church. All of a sudden they just rose up and left. Before the pudding.”

“That does seem an inhuman act.”

I sipped the Courvoisier and wanted to weep again; but, as I sat, I began to think, and having thought—the wine and brandy had not befuddled me, Joan, at all—as I thought, I realised that there were many things that might be said on Henry's behalf.

“There wasn't much for him to leave. It wasn't exactly a convivial Christmas. I never managed a child for him. Neither of us has parents. Scarcely a relation between us and all our friends make their own plans. Charles sat like a dead fish, his wife in Bangladesh and not even a Christmas card from her. I have really nothing to say to Henry now. I haven't had for years, although I do try always to keep a conversation going. I think that that may have been part of the trouble. I should have been enigmatic and silent. He is a very senior Civil Servant. My tongue tends to run away when we go to parties together and I haven't been seen about with him for ages. He is exactly the same seniority as Charles and they have become close friends. They are both interested only in their work and their religion.”

“What about love?”

“Love?”

“Do you and Henry love each other?”

“Love each other? Well. I don't—I don't think about it. I'm very interested in religion, too.”

“Go on.”

“Well, I suppose at our age, Henry's and mine, we should be trying to love God.”

“What, in the night?”

“Well, all the time. It's a Christian principle. I don't see why we shouldn't make that clear, like the Muslims do. And anyway, our beds are at opposite ends of the room. Henry says they look made-to-measure there.”

“And you think about God when you're in bed?”

“Yes. Sometimes.”

“And Henry minds? This is why you say there was little for him to leave behind?”

“Oh, Henry isn't in the bedroom at all now. He sleeps down in the study with a small stove.”

Tom Hopkin closed then opened his eyes. He looked at me.

“Eliza, Joan sent some sweets. Shall we open them?”

He sat near me on the sofa and we ate the sweets. Actually, Joan, they weren't very nice. They were so sweet they set my skin shuddering. I went cold-turkey. They wobbled all over and looked like pale, powdered flesh. “Eastern delicacies,” Tom Hopkin said and I said, “There are some chocolates. Barry gave them to me,” and we ate Barry's chocolates which were wonderful and two layers.

“Who's Barry?” he said on the third fondant whirl—he'd been down in the bottom layer for it. I thought seriously for an instant whether he was one I could tell. But no.

He put his arms round me then, and I felt the one along the back of my shoulders, resting along the sofa, begin to strain further off into the distance as he pushed me sideways and down. I thought: I wish I could feel less analytical about this.

He heaved himself then with a cumbersome, lateral movement on top of me and I thought: What will be will be. Please God, I've never done it with anyone but Henry and I'm half a century old.

I waited.

“Got it,” he said and tweaked a book out of the bookcase beside the fireplace, brought it round the front of my neck and held it in both his hands before my face. He brought his cheek close to mine. “Dryden,” he said, “I'll read to you.”

After he'd finished the
whole
of
The Ode on St. Cecilia's Day
, Joan, I didn't know where I was. I was upright, taut, fraught, watchful, frightened. And longing. Longing for the last verse. Longing for Hopkin. The book was so near our faces and he was whispering so musically in my right ear, his arms tight round me.

I thought, I am sitting alone in the house with a total stranger who has his arms very close to my jugular and is dressed in my husband's best clothes. He has drunk a bottle and a half of my husband's wine and three brandies. He is a madman. He is reading a most inappropriate poem. Soon I shall be raped.

“Wonderful,” he said and closed the book. He let his face drop down into my collar-bone. The eye-glass made a clatter against your earrings. The tambourines shivered. He let the eye-glass drop.

When they find my body, I said to myself, some may be sorry; but I kissed Tom Hopkin first with my eyes open and then with my eyes closed. Then we rearranged ourselves and I kissed him again. Then I about-faced the eighteenth-century goat and slid backwards into Tom H's arms, then both of us rolled on to the floor. As he touched the ground he cried, “Basket,” and both dogs obediently trotted to the kitchen. He left me, and went across to close the door, returned and joined me on the hearth-rug.

“Eliza?”

“Yes?”

“Is it possible to get a taxi?”

“A
taxi
?”

“I ought to get back to the flat.”

“What flat?”

“I have a flat in Warwick Gardens.”

“Warwick Gardens? But you were in tropical clothes. You'd just arrived.”

“No. I had dropped into the flat on the way from the airport. I'm rather absentminded.”

I thought of all you hear and read and see about women taking the initiative now. There is a statutory phrase. “You don't
have
to go.”

I tried it. He looked thoughtful—I must have got it wrong. It still is the man who has to say it. I thought things had improved. I thought all women did the decision-making now—Anne Robin, Marjorie Gargery, Lady Gant. I saw them all, acting according to the new fiction, the television serial, the cleansing rejuvenating feminist handout, each with her illicit man behind the fat, interlined curtains of each pleasant house, burglar-alarmed and window-locked and the chain up.

What
men? What on earth do I know about it—about how any of them go on? I began to conjure up the men, Joan, who might bring a frisson to the lives of Robin, Gargery and Gant. The milkman for Robin, she is the soul of conventionality; the window-cleaner for Gargery, with his long sweeping arms to whisk her away. For Gant? What? Ha—a doctor. A young and terrified National Health doctor, flattened beneath the field of the cloth of gold. Rocking my head with joy, or hysteria, at her good fortune, I laughed and I laughed beneath the bony, delicious anatomy of this man who had come in from the cold and got himself into Henry's velvet jacket.

“Oh don't cry,” he said. “Please don't cry. I've behaved very badly. I think it's probably jet-lag.” He sat up, wound away the eye-glass and put his glasses on. “I was mad to go anywhere tonight. For me it's about four in the morning. My wife is much more sensible. She went to bed. I needed a bit of exercise so I brought round the parcels.” I sat on the rug and he padded away, to come back shortly in his own clothes.

“I've put Henry's things back. It's been very pleasant. Do thank him when he comes home—I'm sure he'll be back soon. I feel rather—well, rather bad you know. Good evening, dogs.”

I didn't see him out and it was nearly an hour after he left that I heaved myself up and put the chain on the front door. The dogs would have to do without a trip round the block tonight.

In the bathroom he'd left the most astonishing mess—soap on the floor, towels everywhere, puddles on the carpet. All Henry's clothes were flung about. I thought: Why does Joan send such terrible men? Are they to show me that there are some worse than my own? Is she telling me not to bother to follow her to freedom? Joan, I think it would be a good idea for you to write and tell me what you're up to. Quickly. If I am to come and join you I have to sell the ancestor while Barry is still able to arrange it. A month already since Christmas.