The Queen of the Tambourine (5 page)

I fell on my bed that Christmas night, Joan, in your dress and earrings and the bed began to spin. It spun me up and up and out of the window, and away and away. I looked down on the Road with its scuffed snow, its lighted tree in every window, its sleek motor cars turning calmly back into it again at intervals, families teeming out of them, carrying presents, calling to each other.

Babies, parcels, bottles, toys, dogs, rugs, everyone home and dry. The highly successful, never hungry, Western-European family of man. The prize-winners.

Up and up I spun and over the horizon, then outward and outward and out of the world.

Towards heaven? There is nobody now to whom I can talk about heaven. Tonight I had thought that I might have found one. He had the voice for
St. Cecilia's Day
. A heavenly voice. And heavenly hands. Well, perhaps it's because I am so caught up with heaven and suchlike that I am such a failure in this world. I should concentrate on one world at a time. But I wonder what God was about, putting me in this lonely situation?

I believe that I could suffer, Joan, I believe that I could even endure great misfortune, terrible grief in the hope of a glorious resurrection. But who can walk hand in hand with God when He seems to require of His servant Christmas night alone in Rathbone Road?

I am nevertheless your sincere, subdued neighbour, Eliza.

 

Happy New Year.

 

 

 

Jan 22nd?

 

I slept on Boxing Day until lunchtime, Joan, and the dogs were frantic. I pushed them into the garden, then pulled on some clothes and took them for a walk on the Common. The sun had come out and so had the whole community, all wearing their Christmas clothes, the children with their bright new toys. The pond was frozen and people skated. The sky was coppery and gleaming above the snow. I walked into the woods for several miles, round the mere, in and out of the golf bunkers, round and sometimes over the snowy greens; up to the windmill, back down the grit track where horses galloped and people called to one another with plumes of breath coming from their mouths. I saw little clumps of folk I knew, but it is easy to avoid people on the Common. I waved sometimes as I veered away, once stood looking earnestly in the window of the antique-shop beside the riding-stables. The people passing—perhaps it was the low, orange sunshine that spread their shadows before them—looked much larger than they used to do when we first came to live here years ago; and so much better-dressed, so much louder, more self-confident, the children glossier, everyone rich. The dogs all shone with top-quality pet-food, leather leads and collars studded with silver like mediaeval bracelets. Only I unchanging in my immemorial grey mohair and my old black boots. I went off home again to number forty-three, and slept again till morning.

Then I went to the bank and drew out all the money. We had twelve thousand pounds in the current account. Far too much, but Henry is hopeless with money and usually so am I. There was about thirty thousand on deposit, but they said I'd have to wait a day or two for that. The counter clerk was sleepy from Christmas, her neck all covered with love-bites and her bosoms sticking out of her white sweater. She pointed them here and there like a terrorist with a machine-gun as she whisked about spelling out my account on the screen, as if they and she had had a good time. A vulgar notion.

“Could I have it all out? In notes?”

She'd been yawning but stopped with a click. “I'll have to get advice on that. I think you'll have to wait.” She slid round and down off the stool and whispered with a young man who looked up quickly from under his brows. He said, “Oh, Mrs. Peabody. That's all right,” and after a time the girl came back with a package. I signed for it and put it in a Sainsbury bag. I wondered if they would offer me an escort, but they didn't. Money isn't what it was. I left the bank and entered the Building Society next door to put the pack of money there in my own name. All the time I felt this was a mean and shabby thing that I was doing.

The man behind the counter said, “Just a minute,” and went away to do some quiet talking and somebody else gave me a quick look, bobbing his head up from behind a partition. Could they, asked the first man, have some form of identification? I showed them my membership card for the Liberal Party, very old and grubby, almost collectable as an antique; a card for the University Women's Club—older and grubbier; one for the London Library saying “valid until 1966,” and a signed receipt from Harrods hairdressing which made them blanch though it was five years old. They nevertheless signed in the money and smiled pleasantly.

Then I went home and found Charles standing at the gate holding a bunch of Underground chrysanthemums, that's to say London Underground Railway chrysanthemums done up in a plastic cornet. They were a very crude pink and overblown. I asked if he had mislaid his key—he has had one for months—and I also looked nervously around his feet to see if his zip-bag was with him. It's his dirty-shirt bag. He and Henry have one each. He had not—and his shirt was not very white. He was looking, even for Charles, particularly grave.

“Might we have a short talk, Eliza?”

We went together to the sitting room where your dog—his dog—went for him, and I went off to make the coffee as he rolled up his trouser-leg to look at the damage. In the sitting room were the remains of the turkey and plum-pudding, the Stilton cheese and a complex still-life of empty glasses. The ancestor stood on the floor among cushions. The hearth-rug was in a twist and the fire was out. The curtains were drawn across and the room was lit only by the sun shining through the cracks, the saddest scenario. I hate drawn curtains. One of the long endurances of my marriage has been Henry's curtain-fetish. It came upon him slowly—at Oxford we'd lie together looking up at the moon, but these past three or four years he has reached the stage where he goes round each window every night as it grows dark, and sometimes rather before, smoothing and smoothing to eliminate chinks. In the bedroom he has insisted on a blind as well. In his dressing room he never draws up the blind until he is completely dressed, summer or winter. Since I have had my bedroom to myself I have taken all the curtains down. I mentioned them to The Hospice. “Interlined Colefax and Fowler,” I said. All they said was, “Eliza, dear, first spades, then curtains. We have plenty of blinds here.”

However, after my adventures, Joan, with your friend on Christmas night, I had not touched the room in which we had spent such a glorious time. I had closed the door gently on it, as it might have been upon a shrine. Charles seemed uncomfortable there.

“Could you put a light on? I'm falling over things.
Hell
!” There was a crunching, flopping sound as the ancestor fell on its face. I heard him dragging back the curtains, and, as I arrived with the tray, he was holding his foot and looking with horror at the erstwhile Peabody.

“What's the portrait doing off the wall? Did it fall?”

“No. I'm thinking of selling it.”

“Eliza, it is Henry's? He's only been gone two days.”

“Everything's in our joint name.”

“But it's a family portrait. It's unmistakably a Peabody.”

“Yes. How is Henry?”

“Very troubled. Very unhappy I think, Eliza. If we might just sit down. I'd like to talk to you. It is going to be so difficult but I have promised Henry that I will try. You have been very good to me since Joan left. I don't believe there is another woman who would have taken on the shirts. I am doing this for you as much as for Henry.”

“Well, it wasn't so much the shirts. It's more the dog.”

“Oh, the dog. You know, I miss the dog.” (Joy broke over me like the sun over the winter Common.) “I only wish that they allowed dogs at Dolphin Square.” (The sun went down.)

“Are you both at Dolphin Square?”

“Yes. We've borrowed old Felix's flat. It's a very popular place you know.”

“Yes.”

“For people like ourselves. I miss the dear old Road of course. A secret society, isn't it—the closeness and kindness of English suburban life? Not the conventional press image at all. And Church of course. I miss St. Saviour's. It's wonderful that you're able to keep an eye on the house—looking right across at it. You are so good, Eliza. Oh dear, Eliza, who would have predicted this last Christmas? Joan so jolly and all of us singing carols for the NSPCC.”

“Yes. Her leg hadn't started then.”

“It began last New Year's Eve—or thereabouts.”

He hung his bald head, your poor old husband, Joan, and I waited to see whether a tear might run down the great nose, but it didn't. “I must stick to the point,” he said, and I looked at the nose again, concentrating on the tip. He began to stroke it and I thought of Gogol, Joan. I started to feel weak, laughter building up as it had on Christmas night when I had the visions of Anne and Gargery and Gant and co., rolling in their sitting rooms with the men of their choice.

I saw Charles look at me sharply.

“Laughing, Eliza?”

“I'm so sorry.”

“Henry has asked me to come and see if you'll give him a divorce. He says you have both been deeply unhappy for some years. He'll see that you are properly kept, of course. He can allow ten thousand a year, after the house is sold.”

“And,” I asked, “are you and he going to continue together?”

Charles looked wary. “We are very much at one,” he said, “Though there are aspects . . . Two men living together these days is still quite criminally suspect. It wouldn't be good for either of us professionally.”

“Does Henry say why he wants a divorce?”

“Well—oh, this is dreadful.” He clasped and unclasped his hands. “Dreadful.”

We both examined the ashes in the grate.

“Can I get you a drink, Charles. Whisky?”

He sipped the whisky, then set it down on the gold and glass table and looked at it. Through the glass, on the floor, lay one of the joyous earrings of Christmas with its hook squashed in. I felt tears coming.

“Please be absolutely truthful, Charles. I've always tried to be truthful.”

“He says . . . He's afraid . . . He thinks that you are changed.”

“How?”

“Well, you have become strange.”

“Why?”

“Well, your obsessions.”

“Obsessions?”

“With everything. The Hospice. The Road. Joan, of course. The dog.”

“The
dog
? I'm obsessive about the
dog
?”

“And religion. And the way you're always analysing and observing—and lecturing. Talking of things outside your sphere. Politics, for instance. And talking so
much
.”

“
Politics
? But that's
him
.”

“At dinner parties. When people so much better-informed are present. You don't listen, you tell them. It is embarrassing for a man in Henry's position. The endless talking—do forgive me.”

“But I've always spoken out.”

“It's—I'm sorry, Eliza—it's the way you make a fool of yourself now. He says that you have crumbled. Nobody now would dream you had been to a university. Your prudence did not develop. Say what you like about equality of mind,
prudence
is usually a male attribute, especially in the Civil Service where of course there are still very few women, as we know. Making judgments is a female failing, justified by the dangerous word ‘instinct.' Making judgments, Henry feels, has grown in you with time.”

“I have been married to Henry for thirty years. It's odd that he has just noticed all this. He has never hinted to me that I am imprudent and judgmental and a fool. How odd. It sounds very much as if he's scratting about for reasons.”

“Oh, he is a
kind
man, Eliza.”

“He has never been a kind man. You don't marry kindness, at least not at twenty.”

“That was a very long time ago.”

I said to him then: “I understand Joan now to the ends of her fingernails, to the end of each hair, and I weep for her. Hurrah for her escape.” Looking at my own fingernails at this point, I noticed a strangeness in them.

“Joan?” he said. “Joan?”

“What you are trying to tell me,” I said, “is that Henry has found another woman.”

Charles looked amazed. “No, no. Of course not.”

“Why not?”

“He's far too busy. And he's a religious man, Eliza.”

“Oh yes. I had forgotten that.”

 

After Charles had gone, I made a stab at clearing up the house. I fed the dogs and walked them, ate the leg of some bird, picked up the ancestor and put him in the car. I drove to The Hospice.

Just before I started, though, I went back indoors and found the earrings, unsquashed the one under the table entangled in the rug, and fixed them both in. They swung about. They should have been one more reminder of the humiliations of my visitation by your British Council friend, but they were not. They are any old Eastern things you probably picked up in some bazaar, dear Joan, so why do they have talismanic properties? But they do. They lift my heart and free me—free me from Henry, Charles and the pronouncements I'm soon about to face from Rathbone Road. I tossed my head at Mother Ambrosine as I marched in to The Hospice carrying the baleful goat.

“Holy Mother of God, if it isn't Gypsy Rose Lee,” she said. “And what's the picture? Is it for Barry? There's no room for a great thing like that.”

“How is he?”

“Remarkable. Remarkable. He's a lot better. It's a respite only, dear, of course, but so much better. I dare say because he's seen nothing of you the past few days. Wherever have you been, deserting us over Christmas?”

“There's been a lot going on.”

“There's been a lot going on here, too, especially a lot of washing-up. The washing-up has missed you—and we have missed you, child.”

“I've missed you, too,” I said, realising it was so. There is peace and strength in The Hospice. You catch it on the doorstep. It smells of flowers, good food and polish. There's joy there as you walk in. And it was good to be called child.

Barry was sitting up in bed looking at the telly and didn't turn it off as I lumbered in. He raised a warning hand, then pointed a finger at my chair. I clumped down the picture, then myself and for a little while we both watched racing-cars go snarling round a track, now and then spinning off course and crashing into things. Once or twice black pyres of smoke rose up. Once or twice there was a flourish of fire-engines and people ran in rivulets like ants towards a juicy beetle and there was a surge and roar of excited applause and distress. The whine and scream of the race filled Barry's room and flowed into us both. He looked at me at last, pressed the button on his pillows and the whole jamboree vanished. “Eliza, whatever's this?”

“It's a picture I brought for you to value.”

“No. This. You. The dangles. The Queen of the Tambourine.”

“They're a Christmas present.”

“They look more than that to me.”

“Why? Aren't they nice? I like them . . .” I wagged my head and the bells began to ring. “They're imprudent, tawdry, foolish and out of character. Fun. Fun is hazy territory.”