The Queen of the Tambourine (8 page)

March 10th

 

Well—here I am again.

I thought, Joan, the next morning that I might clean the house, beginning with the kitchen. You remember that I told you—that is, if it was a posted letter—that Angela long since left you, left number thirty-four? Well, she has now decided to leave me at number forty-three. After twenty years, Joan. She was with me long, long before you came upon the scene. We have been through great events together, Angela and I, and I have told myself for years how truly loyal she is. Never a word when Henry began to live in the study. She never even commented when she had to clear up all the spilt soup and tins and bits of bacon round the Baby Belling. She didn't object when we had to take in your dog. Very oddly, she used to say, “What dog? I don't see another dog,” even though your dog hated her from the first and let her know it.

Angela's never been a talker, of course, and by no means is she cheery. Slap, bang, crash, and you know she has arrived. Sniff, slam, sigh, and the monologue about the rareness of buses from Fulham gathers momentum for the morning. We both, if you remember, were upset when she suddenly yelled at us that we were paying a bus-fare two years out of date (though she's way over sixty and travels on them free) and there was always the business of the manner in which she received presents: the stiff and brief nod and then the stories of the good fortune of her friends who have employers so very grateful for almost no work at all.

I can't say I've ever really
liked
Angela. She is one of those who by her presence makes a claim for gratitude. “So good of you to come on such a wet day, Angela. Of course I'll run you home.” Making conversation in the traffic-jam on Putney High Street while she sits with a safety-pin mouth.

I suppose, Joan, Angela really couldn't stand us, when you come to think about it. And from our point of view it is a great strain to have someone in the house three mornings a week whose pleasure is to register dislike, even though you call it her eccentricity. But I did love the once-beautiful bloom on the bath, the cleanliness of the kitchen floor and the dazzle of the doorknocker. One day I came home and she had shampooed the dog. She had hosed down his basket in the garden and laundered all his rugs. Toby lay under the table, quivering. I said, “How kind of you, Angela. What a washing-line of rugs! I'm surprised you didn't hang the dog up too,” and she said, “Hang it I'd like.”

Henry and I always thought her brusque but true. Underneath the venom, a gold heart that loved us.

A month—oh maybe more, maybe several months ago—I came down one morning and she was clashing and bashing as usual at the sink and I was yawning. I said, “Ah, Angela, hullo, let's have some coffee,” and she spun round with the mop in her hand and her eyes alight with hate. She screamed, “No. I've had enough. It's the end of the line. It's the end of my time.”

“Oh, but Angela, what—?”

“Four buses passed me. Up at five to clean seven offices and staircases. Grandchildren measles and here's filth, and you in bed and that fag hanging out of you. And them earrings.”

“Angela!”

“And him gone poor soul. Driven to that Belling. Then driven even away from that Belling. Gone I'm not told where nor yet explained to. It's him I've worked for all these years if you want to know, God help him in his high position and nobody to look after him and him so polite and serious-minded, never various. I'd work for him yet, but you no more. I'm finished here.”

“Did you say all this across the Road when you left them? Is this a repeat performance of thirty-four when that family split up?”

“You're talking your rubbish again. I'm leaving.”

“Oh Angela—twenty years.”

“You was a different woman twenty years ago.”

“Would you like Henry's address? I'm sure he'd like some help at Dolphin Square though it's rather far from Fulham. They both would.”

“
Both
,” she said. “So that's the way it is. I can't say I'm surprised,” and the door exploded on her for the last time.

And so, Joan, today, after a poor night's sleep, I come down to my unloved kitchen—fag and earrings—sit at the table, behold the dogs and think, Shampoo today would not be amiss, but sit on.

Make coffee, long-armed. Behold dresser covered in marigold plates from my mother's country childhood. Behold grime on plates. Sit on.

Look at Aga cooker, reflect on nativity of trickles down its front, the grease and gravy on the once-so-shining domes. Sit on.

Again, long-armed, open kitchen door for dogs to go out. Dogs stretch and walk stiff-legged to smell the day. Watch dogs scratch, roll, rub down their ears, sigh, pee hugely, and return to their basket.

Think of Oxford. Think of Sarah, now presumably addressing herself to her work.

Think of the eleven thousand virgins.

Think of love.

Think of Henry stepping towards me over Magdalen Bridge. Think of me at twenty blushing as he approaches. Tongue-tied with longing, but such chaste kisses.

Think of wedding in Merton Chapel, Henry morning-dress, very sage for his few years, and me in a cream silk suit—raw silk, not at all shiny. Henry with First Class Honours in Natural Sciences and a small motor-car with a lid and little windows of what looked like horn, as in a mediaeval castle. And the two of us belting across France—Henry going quite fast!—looking at real mediaeval castles en route. Staying at cheap inns. A stone stair overhung with creeper leading to an upper barn-like room with stone walls and old beams and a bed like a galleon.

Through the shutters in the morning, dazzling slits of sunlight. Cock-crow. People calling in the fields. The
petit déjeuner
. Coffee in bowls. Sitting to drink it on the window-seat, the sun already hot. Outside the rolling vineyards going to the horizon, rows of charcoal stumps, red earth, promise. Henry's beautiful hands, Joan.

The front door bell rang and after a while I answered and it was Anne Robin. I lit another cigarette.

Could she come in?

“Gosh, Eliza,” she said. “I say. I haven't been here for ages. How lovely.” (Surveying chaos.)

“Milk? I'm afraid it's only instant.”

“Is it de-caff? Oh gosh, sorry, but it's this silly health thing.”

I found the de-caff. “Sugar?”

“Oh, crikey, no. Eliza—oh, hullo Toby. We don't see you about much in the Road now, do we? Eliza, how are
you
? We don't see you either.”

She has the most polished cheeks. Do you remember? Clear eyes. The whites are blue as a baby's. And clean, clean finger-nails. And toenails I'm sure. Broad white edges filed into broad half-moons. I droop. Standing. Over my coffee cup. Her hair looks just washed, beautifully cut and each particular hair doth stand like a golden wire. With the solicitor husband and his international practice, the five healthy children all now at boarding-school and scarcely needing her, with her own effulgent bounce and so much money she doesn't know what to do with it, she now writes fiction. Her little study is all done out in William Morris wall-paper, sixty pounds a roll. Her wordprocessor stands on her George III writing-desk near a vase of flowers à la Vita Sackville-West. She is always being interviewed on television as the fully mature woman with the perfect life. She is asked her views on Margaret Drabble and Proust, at least she was until she confused the two. Then she came whizzing down the ladder somewhat and was nearly out of the game for good. She never speaks of that!

Beside the word-processor and the flowers is a photograph of husband George when young without the gin-hammocks. I remember now that it was you who said—the only unkind thing I remember of you: why does everybody dislike George?—that it must be some sort of trick photography, one of those things done on the pier by sticking your face through a hole in a cardboard figure. Anyway, there's George in gold and white braid, like
Lives of a Bengal Lancer
. Before he took the old yo-ho.

“How's George?”

“Oh goodness,
George
. He's
fine
. I suppose. Of course I hardly see him. When he's home I'm away on one of my promotional tours, and vice versa. He's in Hong Kong at present. Isn't it sad the way none of us sees much of our husbands now? In the Road I mean. We've all done so well. Got so rich. And my dear, the next generation will be richer still, they work even harder. It's the penalty, isn't it? It's a hard one.”

“It's good that you have your work,” I said, not jumping.

“Oh—my
salvation
! My children's books. Well, that's what people call them.”

“Oh, but I'm sure they're not.”

“I'm not a bit ashamed of it you know if they
are
.” Her cheeks had begun to glow.

“Of course not. I didn't mean that at all?”

“Mean what? After all, there's Mrs. Molesworth.”

We looked into our de-caffs and thought of Mrs. Molesworth and I found that tears were trembling in my eyes and were about to splash out, tears of longing. Longing for a white-stockinged, pig-tailed world. Bat and bail. Lemonade. Days ages and ages long, and people laughing. Anne was examining my filthy kitchen.

“I've just heard,” she said, “that you've lost Angela.”

“Yes. Long ago. She first left Joan, then me.”

Anne Robin looked serious. “D'you want someone else? I'm sure mine would give you an hour or two.”

“Oh, no thanks. There's nothing to do now, really, since Henry left. I might as well clean up after myself.”

“
About
that . . .”

“Yes?”

“Oh well, nothing. I just wondered if there's anything one could do?”

“About Henry? No, I shouldn't think so. He's gone off with Charles, you know. He wants a divorce.”

“So it is true? Nobody quite knows.”

“Well, I don't quite know myself.”

“I mean, we wondered if you'd like to talk about it? In the Road? You've always been so good whenever anything went wrong. The nice notes you used to send. And the advice you used to give. ‘Counselling' it's called now. So natural and unprofessional . . .”

“I wrote a note too many. I wrote a note to Joan.”

“Ah,” she said. “Now
Joan
.” She looked at me nervously.

“Do you ever feel you have written a word too many, Anne?”

“Too many? Well, mine are just tiny books you know. Not didactic in any way. Just
fun
books. No, I don't think I've written too many. Nothing like as many as Enid Blyton did. I have the same difficulty as she did you know, they just
flow
out of me. I just use the same plot again and again and nobody notices. I wish I got more reviews though. I say, you won't tell anyone all this, will you, Eliza?”

“I'm sure that children are very pleased you write so much. I expect they love you.”

“Yes. Well, no. Well I'm not sure. You know the awful thing is, Eliza, I'm not sure that children read my books at all. I'm just known in the Children's Book World and creative writing classes. But—you won't tell a soul this, will you Eliza?—it seems so conceited for someone like me to push in among the wonderful people like Salman Rushdie and Beckett and Lancaster Forbes and so on, but actually I've had an adult novel accepted. Under an assumed name.”

“I'm so glad.”

“You see, I always thought of myself as an adult writer even when I was a child. I mean, no child would ever want to be only a
children
's writer, would it? And look at Blake. There's nothing more childish than Blake, is there? I don't see much difference myself between adults and children, do you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Oh. Really? I didn't know you ever thought about such things, Eliza, I mean not having had any children.”

I watched the dark face of the de-caff.

“My trouble is that I had so many children and kept them around for so long. None of them went away to school till they were ten you know. When they were at home I think I began to think like a child. They seemed older than me. I
am
a bit childish.” (Oh my dear Anne, you have been listening at doors.) “And I've rather had to grit my teeth in the adult novel to do the—you know, the sexual bits. The girl who advised me on it—you know, my Editor, she's very young and utterly contemporary and hungry-looking, d'you know her hands shook all the time with nerves, a nice girl—well, she asked me to put in a masturbation scene.”

“Whatever for?”

“She said that these days it's expected.”

Mrs. Molesworth hastily left the room and, “I'm sorry, Anne,” said I, “I'm hopeless at this sort of conversation. I don't read that sort of thing.”

“
Don't
you? But, you know, we mustn't be prudish. We ought to reflect the real world.”

“But masturbation isn't the real world, Anne. It's just fantasising.”

“It can be quite nice in itself,” said Anne, and then turned puce.

“What I do like about you,” I said, very quick, sharp, fast before she fainted with shame, “is the way you tell stories. That tale you told about Joan buying the tent and the gun in the Army and Navy Stores.”

“That wasn't Joan,” she said, “I'd never call anyone
Joan
. There's no one called Joan under the age of fifty. There's absolutely
no one
called Joan in my books.”

“Not a book,” I said. “It was Joan—our Joan. You were telling me about Joan. At number thirty-four.”

She leaned forward and looked carefully in my ashtray and at my heap of stubs. Then at her chalky half-moons. “Eliza. . .”

“Yes?”

“We're so worried. In the Road. We've been talking. We've been having meetings about you.”