The Queen of the Tambourine (6 page)

“They're fun all right. They're the beginning of the day-break. They're the light at the end of the tunnel. You don't look like a Senior Civil Servant's wife. At last.”

“What does a Senior Civil Servant's wife look like?”

“Watchful. Neglected.”

“Henry's left me,” I said before he started to try to laugh. He is bones and bones, with bright eyes. His scant hair stands upright. Astonishingly today he was sitting upright, too, though propped. Now there was almost space between him and his pillows, which I have never seen.

“Because of the earrings?”

“No. It seems that all these years he has thought me a fool.”

“Well, you are a fool, Eliza. D'you want a sweet?”

“Barry, hold my hand.”

“We're not allowed sex with the Staff.”

But he held it. His own felt a little warmer. The nails were less blue. He looked at mine. “So pretty,” he said.

“How was Christmas? I'm sorry I couldn't get here.”

He was looking out of the window. It was snowing again, “Get on the Common, did you? With the dogs? Loads of jolly?”

“Well only once. I had to. You can't be cruel to dogs.”

“Can't you?”

“You know I don't want them. I want to be here.”

“Then ditch them. And him. The time has come. Has he left you? Are you fantasising again? Eliza? I hope you're not changing into an ordinary woman. Eliza I want. Not just anybody. Don't start telling yourself stories and going daft.”

“That's what it seems I am. ‘Becoming strange,' Henry says. And he says I make a fool of myself when I talk Politics.”

“Never met anyone who didn't, Cock. Has he left you?”

“He's gone to live with Charles in Dolphin Square.”

“Well! What think ye of Christ?”

“Barry, he wants a divorce.”

We both watched the snow. “I'm sorry,” he said, “I'm sorry, Cock. Unbelievable.”

“Why?”

“I don't see how anybody could possibly ever leave you.”

I said nothing in case I began to cry.

“I don't see why not,” I said in the end. “All Charles said about me is true. I
am
a fool. I'm erratic. It seems I am unstable. I behave unpredictably, bossily, shallowly and my mind has no abiding place. I have insufficient to do after all the busy years, and an urge to do nothing. I look a freak—no interest in getting up in the morning. I haven't bought any clothes for years. I look like a voluntary worker, an agnostic, a Good Works freak, a municipal counsellor, a sick-visitor unpaid, and I do not care.”

“That's his fault.”

“It's not. I've plenty of money.”

“He doesn't see you.”

“How do you know?”

“I can always spot an invisible wife.”

“I've grown to like it—being invisible. You can see without being seen.”

“No. That is not true. You don't. You like to behave like an avenging angel. Rushing with flaming swords, telling people truths—about their legs and that. You get burnt, but you get over it. That's you, Eliza. Be it. For God's sake,
be
it. What you really need, if you'll just be quiet, is love.”

“Who doesn't? And I
am
a fool.”

“Yes. Like I said. But a surface fool. Only on the surface. You insist on it, Cocky.”

After a bit I said, “I rolled on the hearth-rug on Christmas night with a marvellous man.”

“There you are, see. Things are looking up.”

“No. He asked me if I would call him a taxi.”

Mother Ambrosine put her head round the door and said, “If you could release her hand now, Barry dear, she has the dishwashers to stack.”

“Look at the picture,” I said. “Tell me what it's worth. I'll look in for it when I go.”

 

But when I went back, the picture had been moved with its face to the wall, and I left it there. Barry had been laid down flat and seemed asleep.

“See you tomorrow,” I said.

In his sleep he sang, “
For she's the Queen of the Tambourine
.”

“Goodnight, Barry.”

“
The Cymbals and the Bones
.”

 

Well, I'd better get on with the rest of my thank-you letters now. Sarah and Simon sent me talcum-powder and soap. Charles gave me a card which contained another card inside it telling me that for a year I am a Friend of Redundant Churches. This means that I am authorised now to visit any decaying church in the United Kingdom, taking a friend with me free of charge. Henry gave me a pot plant—a transparent cyclamen, its flowers limp with thirst, its rubber-tube stalks bent down. When I watered it it gave up the ghost.

It is still quite snowy here and we had a white Christmas. I forget if I told you that. It seems a long time ago. I forget when I wrote last but think it must have been when your dress came.

 

Yrs, E.

 

4 February 1990

 

Dear Joan,

 

I have written you a great number of letters. I expect that they have been a burden—that is to say, if you have bothered to read them, for it is now about a year since you went off and I have had not one reply. As a matter of fact I have written many more letters than I have posted. I am cautious now.

I gather that you are now staying in Dacca more or less permanently and I shall continue to write there. I have given up expecting answers and that, in a way, has made me freer. Many of the letters that weren't posted were not apposite. They would have told you nothing of interest or of use to you in your own situation, only mine: and since you do not seem to be able to take the slightest interest in that—well, why should you?—I use you now as diary only, as mirror image. I see you with bare feet on a shadowy verandah sipping lime-juice, skimming through my letters, thinking gratefully of all you have escaped. They can give you, I fear, little else. They are facts. They give neither of us even the solace of fiction.

Always, always you interest me, however, and still I can't see why. What is it about your flight that seems so inevitable, familiar, yet unfathomably mysterious? There is something pertinent to me about it, just out of sight. In shadow. What is the shadow? It is something much more serious than envy of you. It is certainly not a subterranean desire to be like you or become you, i.e. to be Charles's wife, oh my God, no! That nose alongside one on the pillow. Drooping over the cornflakes. Reared up before the shaving-mirror.

Sorry, Joan. I know I shouldn't laugh at someone else's husband even after she's left him. I couldn't laugh at all once, you know. Before you packed off, I don't think I ever laughed. I don't suppose I'd laughed for—maybe ten years.

If, after all, that is what you have done—packed off. Nearly a year and nobody knows. Nobody knows a thing. Or perhaps some of them do and don't tell me. I get no news of you now, with Simon and Sarah flown and Charles submerged in Dolphin Square (I'm told they both swim up and down in that long green swimming bath every morning) and your friend Tom Hopkin quite disappeared. He is a short dream-memory, TH, and but for the earrings and the lymph-gland sweets I'd think him an hallucination.

I love the earrings still and so do Barry and the nuns. Barry says because of the earrings he wants to stick around and see what happens. He sings a song.

You know, I can't remember if I've told you all this before,

 

Eliza

 

Feb 12th

 

Dear Joan,

 

I'm sorry but this is one letter that has to be posted and which by some means or other you are to be forced to read and to answer. I shall put URGENT stickers on the envelope and I shall also telephone the Bangladesh Consulate to tell them that you are to be contacted at once. It is about Sarah.

It's all right. She is perfectly well, as I'll describe in a minute. No accident or sickness. Safe home from the skiing. You'd have heard if it had been something like that. The horrors always get through. This is a crisis of another kind. Here it is.

Yesterday Sarah rang me and asked if I would send her some things. Would I go across the road and collect them at once? Some shirts and sweaters. I went to number thirty-four and heard my feet clattering about. I climbed the sad staircase and up to Sarah's room and was just thinking that I should wash some of the clothes before I posted them, because they smelled of must, when the telephone rang. Not disconnected. You see how vague Charles has become. It was Sarah again and she asked if I was alone.

“Only ghosts.”

“I thought you mightn't be alone in your house. That's why I asked you to go to ours. It doesn't matter about the sweaters.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Oh no! Not a thing. Not the least thing.” Her voice, Joan, has changed. You know how she used to talk Birmingham/ American—well, I suppose you know. Now it is a sort of clear, high, socially-OK voice of yesteryear, and much much older than her years. It's rather like the Queen's. “Oh, not a
bit
, Eliza. Just I'm rather . . .” Then the image shivered. The voice cracked. “I just wondered if you might be coming to Oxford sometime.”

“I'd love to come to Oxford, Sarah. Thank you. I'd love to. I'll take you out to lunch.”

“No, not lunch. Could you come to where I'm living? To my room?”

“Well of course. I'll bring the lunch if you like.”

“No, no. That's all right. I'd just like to talk to you. I can't say more now. There's someone wanting the phone. Just behind me.”

“When shall I come? Next weekend?”

“I wondered” (careful cadences) “if you could come today? This afternoon? There's a two-ish train.”

“I can't come today, Sarah, I have to be at The Hospice.”

“It's terribly important. Could you change it?”

“Well, I
could.
Sarah. Couldn't your father . . . ?”

“Are you joking?” she said in Birmingham, then “Oh, Eliza” (Her Maj.) “please come!”

“Could you meet me at the station?”

“Well, I'm not actually able to leave my room at present. Could you get a taxi? You know Oxford. I'll give you my address.”

So I rang Mother Ambrosine who said that she could cope and Barry was beginning a tapestry and had the football. I arrived in Oxford in the early afternoon and went bowling through the streets looking at all the orderly and competent young, clean and tidy, and all the girls with washed hair—full circle again to the time when I was one of them, though I never looked so fierce and sure. And, in my second year, of course I left them.

Sarah's lodgings seemed to be some sort of religious house, presumably found for her by Charles. Did you know this? I hadn't realised that Sarah is devout. From all the BVMs in the vestibile niches I thought it must be Catholic, but when at last I opened the door—nobody paying any attention to the bell—there were photographs of Greek- or Russian-Orthodox priests all the way up the stairs glaring from inside their beards. Two or three godly-looking, willowy people—small-headed men with fluting voices and bony women with good profiles and woollen stockings—were standing together in the hall. They looked through me but stopped talking. One man blew his nose. There was a hint of incense. On a board there were lists of Divine Service in the Chapel, a very great many. It looked like a religion that knew what it was up to.

I smiled but nobody spoke. I went up to the top floor and knocked on Sarah's door.

“
Hullo
!” said the Queen. She looks beautiful, Joan; bronzed from the skiing, and Charles must be giving her a very good allowance to judge from her pink silk suit. Her face is like an advertisement, lipstick shining, and the
exact
pink; hair well-cut, fingernails that never saw a sink.

“
Darling
Eliza!”

Her eyelashes are all turned up, two semi-circles dyed black. They reminded me of my long-forgotten terrible cousin in Harrogate the day she left school in 1954. Her hands were covered in enormous rings. There was a crucifix on the wall and various pictures of saints. Otherwise it was almost bare. A plastic bucket stood about, “For the leak in the roof,” said Sarah. “This top floor is pretty scruffy. Excuse me one sec,” and she left the room. I wandered about.

“Coffee?” she said, coming back with some.

“Oh, yes please.”

“Excuse me.” Out she went again. This time she came back carrying a milk-jug, but it was empty. “Isn't it a lovely day?” she said. “So glad you could come.”

We drank our coffee or at least I drank mine and she looked hard at hers and put it down. She said, “Half a sec,” and carried hers from the room, returning without it. We sat for a while looking at a picture of St. Ursula surrounded by her eleven thousand virgins.

“You said it was urgent, Sarah?”

“Yes,” she said. “I'm going to have a baby.”

I'm sorry, Joan. I'm telling it exactly as it happened. Without doubt you'll get a formal notification from Charles in the end, but this I want you to hear precisely as it unwound. That is as it should be.

I said, “Sarah! It's only your second term.”

She said, “I know. I'm silly.”

“You are more than silly. You are utterly irresponsible and wrong. All your music! All those years!”

“Oh, the music's still there.”

“Yes, but
you
can't be. You can't stay at Oxford. Oh—you lunatic child.”

“I'm not. It isn't going to make any difference.”

“Sarah, are you by any chance thinking I'll organise . . . ?”

“No, of course not.”

“I expect everyone will advise it. They will be advising it now.”

“Nobody knows yet.”

“They will. And I'm sorry. I can have nothing to do with abortions.”

“Good Lord, neither can I,” she said and we both sat looking at the eleven thousand virgins standing in clumps like a herbaceous border, all singing. Singing flowers. Eleven thousand mouths held open in neat ovals, effortlessly on top C. Easy lives.

“Oh Sarah. Why did you send for me? I know nothing about this. I never had a child. I've never looked after one.”

“I know, but you should have done, Eliza. You'd have loved it. You'd have loved a child.”

“What are you saying?”

“Well, I—we—we were just wondering if by any chance you felt that you could look after it for us? You and Henry. Just at first, for a year or two.”

“Are you mad? Do you think you'd be allowed to hand over a baby to a—to an acquaintance of your mother living in south London and you in Oxford—a woman who wouldn't have the first idea what to do with it?”

“You would. I know you would. You could do anything. You are so successful, always. Look how the dog settled in, and Daddy.”

“Sarah!”

“Well, it was the first thing I thought of. I know that it would be all right. I thought of you at once. Instinctively.”

“Sarah, apart from anything else, Henry isn't living with me anymore.”

“Where's he gone now?”

“He—well, he's living with your father as a matter of fact, In Dolphin Square. He's left me.”

“What—for Daddy?”

“No. Nothing like that.”

“We must thank God,” she said, looking at St. Ursula's ecstatic face, “for small mercies. Or maybe not. Might have been the very thing.”

“Eliza,” she said. We had been sitting silent. All we could hear was the January wind battering the dormer window and a holy sound drifting up from some other virginal choir in the chapel below. “Eliza—excuse me.”

When she came back she said, “It's bad at present. I looked it up in a book in Blackwell's and it says it will be better after the third month.”

“Sarah, the child's father . . .”

“Yes. We're going to tea with him. That is, if you don't mind. I said you'd come.”

“But it's an intimate matter. It's a thing for your parents. Your own father . . .”

“Look Eliza,
be
sensible.” (Brum again.) “And Ma's in Bangladesh having experiences.”

“She must come home.” (Yes, Joan.)

“I think she won't. She's ill you know. Gone potty. Flipped. We can't get near her. It's a year now.”

I should like to be able to tell you now, Joan, that at this point Sarah began to cry. She did not. She crossed her silky legs, took an old-world powder compact out of her pocket and looked this way and that, searching her face for signs of weakness. Again she reminded me of my dreadful cousin, Annie Cartwright, thirty years ago and I cannot say why, but thinking this, the room became suddenly cold. I found that I was shaking. It was a relief when Sarah did something equally unsophisticated but true to her own self. She took a small white handkerchief from her pocket and began to suck the end of it.

“Oh, all right, Sarah. All right. Of course I'll come. When are we to go?”

“Half-past three. We're late. Tea is three forty-five until four-thirty.”

“I suppose it's a college. We never had tea when I was an undergraduate, except a bun or a tray we pushed along. Won't it be very public?”

“No, it's a college but it's very quiet. We'll be in the Fellows' drawing room. He's a Professor.”

“Sarah—he must be ninety!”

“You're out of date, Eliza,” said the Queen, collecting a handbag and, great heaven, gloves. “There are some
frightfully
young ones now. Reg is barely fifty.”

“Reg?” I said. Somehow Reg did not sound like a Professor. Had she been duped, I wondered? Had I misheard? Was it the college janitor? Porter? Approaching the porter through the great gates of a college, announcing ourselves to him through the glass of his little office, it seemed unlikely. A delightful man. He smiled with avuncular pleasure on seeing Sarah, who seemed to be familiar to him. He said that Professor Hookaneye was expecting us and that he would ring through.

“Hookaneye?”

“Yes,” said the Queen. “They come from Tewkesbury.”

“I honestly don't see that where the Hookaneyes come from . . .”

“Oh golly,” she said, and disappeared behind a golden buttress.

Beyond her, over the greensward, I beheld a very slender man as tall as Henry, six foot four at least. He towered above us, suspended in the air as on a magician's string. His long head looked like a Leicestershire sheep.

Well, Joan, first I suppose I should reassure you in one department. He is perfectly respectable. He is I think probably the most respectable man I've ever met. He was wearing a pale grey double-breasted suit, dark blue tie and highly polished shoes. He walked carefully, his head a little dipped. He had thick grey hair like a helmet. Every possible bit of him was covered up. I never saw a man who showed so little skin—unless perhaps a member of the IRA or Ku Klux Klan and I've never actually seen either of these. The idea of Professor Hookaneye's nakedness was awesome. A holy mystery.

“I'm sorry to say,” said he, “that we must go first to my rooms. The other member of our tea-party is late.”

“Other member?”

“Yes. We're only allowed one guest per Fellow, so I have had to call in a colleague for the godmother.”

I looked round for the godmother and then glared at Sarah.

“I'd be quite happy to miss tea,” I said, “and talk here.”

We had arranged ourselves on his Grecian sofa. I wondered if this was where the seduction had taken place and looked intently at the Professor who had put his fingertips together as though in prayer. This seemed hopeful. We sat. The gold buildings shone in through the window. The room was a miracle of order. A tome stood upon a lectern. It appeared to be written in Sanskrit. I thought the Professor's eyes had taken on a peculiar look when I said, “talk.”

I said, “I should like to talk to you
at length
. The sooner this is over the better.”

He said vaguely, rather cross I thought, “But I think you would like to have the experience of seeing us all at tea?” He gave me a nervous—and I have to say it—sweet though bewildered smile. “Don't you think your godmother would like that, Sarah? Sarah has often visited me here by herself, Mrs. Peabody. Haven't you, Sarah?”

“Yes, I'm
quite sure she has
,” I said, looking at him very straight.

“Of course I should be honoured to go down to tea, but
would it be private enough
? I think that there will be much to say. With Sarah's mother in Bangladesh and Charles not readily available. Charles is her father . . .”

“Oh, I know Joan and Charles,” he said with ease.

“I am then even more surprised.” My blackest stare I could see was giving him pause. He seemed in deep thought now, watching me carefully. I examined my fingernails and found them interesting. They had a hazy green line beneath each rim, pale, marine and eerie.

Then he swung himself off his wing chair and said, “Oh, you know, Sarah—shall we risk it, hey? Go down to tea without the other chaperon?” and led us off through many a twist and turn along pattering marble passages and into a chamber where figures sat about in the shadows like uneasy thoughts, either alone or in well-behaved little groups, eating and sipping and now and then glinting at each other. There was a very cruel silence as Professor Hookaneye paced by with the two of us. I almost felt sorry for him, and tried to make myself invisible so that Sarah could look like the sole, permitted guest, but as I was wearing my old green trousers, zip-jacket and the earrings—I had had no time to change if I was to catch the train that Sarah had commanded—this was not easy. Sarah was certainly not invisible in her sharp pink silk and fifties Harrogate jewellery (wherever had she found it?) and gleaming legs. She was like a flamingo in a poultry house.