The Queen of the Tambourine (9 page)

I looked at her.

“Eliza, I suggested and they—well, some of them—agreed that you must get a job. Get something to do.”

I said, “Ah.”

 

For, you see, it happens, Joan, that Anne and her friends do not know that before any of them came to live here, soon after I had stopped travelling abroad with Henry, I did have a job, of a kind, for a short time. I took it out of shame for my idleness and with reluctance, for I was marched into it by Lady Gant.

In those days Lady Gant sat on many committees about the town, having in attendance an unpaid shadowy creature called Bella. Bella Bentley. She was always smiling. You can still see Bella about, still in her sixties mini-skirts and bouffant hair, though she's all of fifty. Sometimes she wears little suits with brooches. She lived in those days somewhere down by the railway in a bed-sit and did a clerking job in London, though I think it must have been part-time because almost every afternoon she could be found at Gant's standing in the hall smiling at mountains of old clothes for jumble sales, or in the sitting room wading through toppling piles of papers and accounts, or in the kitchen making passes with her hands above elderly sandwiches and heavy jam—sponges awaiting transport to fêtes. Gant floated about giving orders. It was before she got this tumour on her head—did I mention that?

One day Gant asked if she could come and see me. “For luncheon,” she said. “Nothing elaborate,” and in she swept with Bella behind her, Bella smiling, the legs beneath the mini-skirt grown rather stringy. Gant wore her usual look of outrage, the face of a portentous mushroom. As they took off their coats Gant passed a finger over the hall table and examined it for dust. She was not aware of doing it, any more than she knew that when she picked up her fork for the cheese soufflé (packet; still learning to cook after diplomatic immunity—still am) she polished it with her napkin. Bella not only noticed but noticed me noticing and out of loyalty picked up her own fork and dabbed at it; whereupon Gant cried out, “Whatever are you doing, Bella?”

“Now, what we are here for, Bella and I,” she said, “is to see if we can persuade you to work at The Shires. I know you've recently been out of sorts. The best thing in the world for you would be to get really busy. We don't ask much of the Secretaryship of The Shires. Minutes, accounts, liaison with the State sector now and then, that sort of thing. It's a friendly little committee. What I call a listening committee. And of course there is the rota of drivers to be drawn up. The drivers who take the babies into London for adoption. You would be called upon to do some of this. Most rewarding.”

I said that there was nobody in the whole country who could be less qualified to do this work than I. It was impossible.

“That attitude, Eliza, has often proved the foundation of a useful, dedicated life. Bella, don't keep all the butter to yourself. After all—what on earth are you doing with yourself now that you are back in England? Cleaning this great house all day?”

I said that I lived a private life and did not care about team work of any kind.

“You know The Shires of course?”

I did. I did.

The Shires, dear Joan, is gone now but not long gone—just before you arrived here. It was a home for unmarried mothers that stood for nearly a century in the middle of the Common. It was founded by three mysterious sisters in Derbyshire, called Shire, who had most startlingly for Derbyshire left all their wealth to unmarried pregnant girls unpopular with their families. It was a fine solid house with encouraging views and healthy air. There was a kitchen of scrubbed tables and a dormitory of reliable iron bedsteads, a hall and stairs uncarpeted and vast. There was opportunity therefore for exercise, for the girls did the housework at the early stage of pregnancy and helped with the cooking towards the end. When their time came they were driven to the local maternity hospital where they stayed for up to two weeks and were then driven back to the home with the baby who was usually all set up with an adopting family longing to have him or her, but there was no compulsion to give the child up other than a briefing once or twice a week during the period in residence explaining the enormous advantages the girls were withholding from the child if they did not. There were only two rules at The Shires. These were that no mother was allowed to breast-feed and no mother who fell a second time was allowed to come back.

The girls were well prepared before and after the birth of the child for the day when they were to give it up. They were encouraged to dress themselves and the baby in their best clothes. It was obligatory that every mother should hand the child over herself. It was, they were told, vital. The baby would be taken into the arms of a motherly official dressed convincingly in blue and starch, at an address in Belgravia. This woman would whisk the child kindly away into an adjacent room where its new family would be waiting. Usually two or three mothers would be done together, for company afterwards. After the hand-over they were driven by one of us on the committee to the nearest local transport, their luggage of the last months lifted out and with a hand-out of money, depending on their circumstances, they were waved off. “Most of them,” said Gant, “are very grateful. Many of them are quite well-educated with an Anglican background. The sort who want to spare their parents' reputation. They go home as if it has been a long holiday—oh, it's as old as time. A few send Christmas cards to us for a year or so but on the whole we hope to lose track of them. We respect their privacy.”

“It sounds rather exclusive.”

“Not at all. We take all classes. There's a small means-test, but anyone can apply. Of course we try to encourage attendance at the eleven o'clock service.”

They did indeed. For over half a century there had been two rows of balloon-like women seated at the back of St. Saviour's. What the first ones had been like one can only imagine, but the present-day ones were extremely talkative and ate a lot of sweets in noisy wrappings. Once or twice there was a crisis—even once the clanging of an ambulance bell. The girls now were in no way shy of the congregation, met their kind nods and smiles with interested looks. The congregation for its part held mixed views on the girls, and some of the sidesmen were nervous of those with swollen ankles who had to be helped up the altar steps to Communion. Sometimes there was a suspicion of threat and truculence in the air. But the girls liked St. Saviour's on the whole, and at coffee after the service sat at their ease in the parish room, stroking their domed fronts. Almost everyone except Lady Gant thought that the girls should be allowed to sit scattered about the Church, not confined to the Magdalene pews, and at coffee time they often said so. The girls seemed to have no opinion on this matter and Lady Gant never wavered in her conviction that it was all much safer near the door. “In a body,” she said, “with Matron and Bella in charge, and if possible the Chaplain.”

Now the Chaplain to The Shires, oh Johanna, was a man called Father Garsington and he lived above the girls in a private apartment at the top of the house. From the beginning, and for obvious reasons, it had been stipulated that the Chaplain should be a married man.

Father Garsington had been appointed so long ago, however, that his wife, who did not go about, had been forgotten. Those who tried to recall her remembered only a refined sort of woman in very old silk dresses—she had been in touch with that very good dress-agency, run by that Duchess, for clergy wives. There had been a perpetual string of seed-pearls round her neck and above them the shiny, unlined face of a girl. Her eyes were innocent, her hair in slides as it had been since school. She had met Father Garsington at Cambridge and Cambridge had been and still was her golden time. Nothing had happened to her since. Father Garsington had come back from the War very dickie—“Oh, very dickie indeed,” Gant said. Both Garsingtons kept to The Shires and to each other.

As the years passed, the fallen girls had grown noisier and the Chaplain's flat quieter and towards the end of the establishment's life, when the girls were getting hard to find and rebellious about carrying up the Garsingtons' trays of lunch and supper, the Chaplain and his wife became like two old owls living almost invisibly in the rafters. Father Garsington, a gentle man, carried up the food-trays uncomplainingly, prayed often, walked each afternoon on the Common, but was seldom otherwise seen. On a board in the hall was a time-scarred notice saying that the Chaplain was available for counselling, but few girls availed themselves of this opportunity.

Once, a Jamaican beauty, six feet high with teeth like a Bechstein, who could have eaten six Father Garsingtons every day for snacks, gave him a bottle of rum for Christmas. “And a kiss,” she said, and put her arms around him, her cheek against his, and rocked him in his chair. She laughed and laughed and danced and clapped and he said, brick red, “Now then, now then Rosie.”

“Rosie has given us some rum,” he told his wife, “and a new scarf for you.” Mrs. Garsington took the scarf and smoothed it on the counterpane, saying that it was rather bright. The rum, she said, would do him no good whatsoever, with his breathing, and would come in nicely for the bottle-stall at the next fête. Father Garsington, however, put the bottle in one of his Wellington boots in The Shires' coal shed and had a good tot every night when he was seeing to the cat.

When Rosie left The Shires with her curly-headed prune—who had his mother's eyes of liquid black light—Father Garsington stood about at the gates. Rosie was not going off to Belgravia in a car. She was keeping her baby and had gone striding off with him, breast-feeding as she went, to the bus-stop on Common Side.

When she'd disappeared, the Chaplain didn't hurry in but watched the trees on the Common—a rainy day with the wind blowing cold drops at him. Mrs. Garsington stood in her high window, looking down. One of the girls told me this, when I was waiting to give Gant a lift home. The girl thought I was a new inmate. I felt so proud.

My turn to drive the Belgravia trail—I took the job of course; did I say that? no need: you remember Gant—my turn did not come for several months. I attended the monthly Progress Meetings, tried to do the Home's accounts, and attacked the secretarial work without the least knowledge of it. There was a Government Social Worker co-opted on to the committee now, “by Law, unfortunately,” said Gant. She was an Englishwoman called Mrs. Djinn. “One of the Old School,” said Gant, “nothing feminist or aggressive. We insisted. We've managed perfectly well for nearly a century without interference by the State.”

Mrs. Djinn was indeed no feminist. She was old and tired and cynical and on the point of retirement. She wore hand-knitted mustard-coloured cardigans with sleeves made huge by handkerchieves as she was subject to a perpetual cold. Her eyes had seen everything and expected nothing and the reports she wrote on the girls drained them of all life. The act that had brought them to her notice held for her neither mystery nor the slightest interest. The sex-act for Mrs. Djinn was after the nature of a viral infection that might result in nasty flu, something not yet eradicated from the human species. The urges of the body were but fallow, stony fields for Mrs. Djinn, and her face was that of a desolate wooden idol. Yet, one day after one of the Monthly Meetings, there called for her at Gant's house a lean brown dreamy-eyed Indian son.

And another surprise—I hope you're enjoying this little perambulation, Joanissima carissima—another surprise. One night, during the five months when I was working for The Shires, I walked miles and miles from home. Henry was abroad. He was in Washington, now I come to think of it. It was a damp evening, rainy and blowy, and I walked fast down the hill, over the railway and into the little streets. I passed the black stump of the paper-works, the tin block of the motor-tyre company, the greyhound track walls like the sides of a ship-white light and a sea roaring within. I got to Mitcham—miles and miles from home. It is our horizon, up in the Road. I walked the deadly Mitcham pavements in the rain thinking of the miles of lavender fields that would once have been under my feet. When The Shires was built the Chaplain's wife in the top windows would have been able to see the blue fields far away.

I turned in at the fish and chip shop and stood waiting for the fryer to finish the next shoal of cod. I leaned my arms on the warm silver counter and saw, between the sauce bottles and the Box for the Blind and the old jumbo glass-and-chrome pepper pots, Bella, unsmiling, talking earnestly over a table to Father Garsington. She held his hand across the table. They each had a couple of rock fish in front of them and a mountainous heap of chips. Father Garsington's plate was splattered in blood-red ketchup and he had taken off his mittens.

So—is the picture in place, Joan?

Five months or so after my initiation to the inner workings of The Shires, the call came to Belgravia. Two babies. Mrs. Djinn arrived on her worn soles at my door and together we picked up Bella when she stepped off her bus from beyond the tracks. At The Shires Mrs. Djinn got out of the car in a business-like way and disappeared inside the house and Bella got out hesitantly and hung about at the gates, smiling. There was a long pause.

Father Garsington appeared. “Hullo, my dear, hullo, hullo,” very hearty to Bella. He strode past her. “Good day, good day, good day,” to me. He stamped with cold feet, puffed white mist like a dragon. Pink fingertips thrust out of his mittens grew as purple as his mouth. “Just the first touch. The first touch of autumn. Ha.”

Two children came quickly down the path, each carrying a soft white bundle, and Matron followed behind to arrange them all in the back of the car. Mrs. Djinn came down the path next, almost languid with good sense. She carried a file and some brown envelopes and got in beside me. Bella went round to sit in the back of the car but one of the girls was fat and it was clear that someone must be left behind. “There's no room for Bella,” said Mrs. Djinn.