The Queen of the Tambourine Read online

  “But he’s come to see her today?”

  “Oh, it’s true what he said. He’s not a hard man.”

  Frank asked if they could step into my back garden—he’d been looking out on it from upstairs—to take a look at the back of Deborah’s house, and I helped him put his head through the weak place in the fence. He didn’t mention to Vera all he saw next door—the climbing-frames and swings left out all winter and all the mud and weeds. “Very nice swings and slides here, Vera, and there’s that doll you sent, sitting up in a window.” When Vera went tiptoeing ahead back to my kitchen door I saw that Frank’s face looked sharper, rather sick. He said, “Mrs. Peabody there’s a dead tortoise in that garden. Horrible. Birds or something have been trying to pull it out of the shell. Like stretched black liquorice. It’s all torn and crawling. They sometimes don’t winter over. A warm day they’ll come up too soon and then—weak—the birds . . . I don’t care that the children should see it. If I could only get to it with a spade.”

  He said at the gate, “Thank you Mrs. Peabody. If ever you’re in Leicester.”

  “Leicester,” said she. “No thank you. I’ll take the presents back in my bag—Ivan gave me this bag from one of his trips in foreign parts. I hope what we’ve said today can be private between us? I don’t know what came over us. I feel very grateful and pleased we came. With such a person as a neighbour, she’ll not come to harm.”

  They had hardly turned the corner, heads near together under my umbrella (it came back to me by return of post) when Deborah came swooping up the hill in her Peugeot 105 from the other direction, and bundled everyone out and towards the house. She smiled crookedly at me. She looked tired.

  So.

  Nothing has happened Joan.

  With love,

  Eliza

  May 1st

  Let me describe to you The Hospice, m.d.J., for I don’t believe you ever saw it. It’s a longish, lowish sort of house that stands at the end of a wooded track in the deep part of the Common. It was once called Caesar’s Farm because it’s supposed to have been built on the site of a Roman encampment. A fairly romantic notion, but who knows. The nuns thought very little of it, and changed the name to The Hospice of St. Julian. Julian for Julius, and there St. Julian hangs in the hall above Mother Ambrosine’s desk, the holy lad with the golden eyes. St. Julian the Hospitaler, St. Julian the patron saint of watermen and minstrels, the saint of the passing show, of the Fair. The saint who put a leper in his own bed and was told by an angel to cheer up and be happy in married love. Oh, he’s the man for me.

  Barry thinks he looks a sulky sort of cove. “Like a sullen cream bun,” he says. But I gasp at his beauty. Piero della Francesca. The great eyes don’t follow you about the room. They never look at you, but out of the window, over the Common and away. Away to the waters of the Common and the Fair, the Fair, the Fair.

  Well of course the Common’s why we all came to live here, isn’t it? Our Common love, ha ha. From the big roads that slash it on the London side you wouldn’t think anything of it—just a round field with some grand houses standing looking at it, and a pond in the middle where we all skate in winter and fly kites and sail boats the rest of the year. Vigorous men in shorts bounce up and down on Sunday afternoons before galloping off on long-distance runs, and there’s usually a horse or two with well-mannered people on board, touching their old fashioned black riding-hats with their crops. There are always dozens of dog walkers, mostly women on their own, calling out, “Artnoon,” to each other. There’s the little antique shop where you can pass the time of day, and there’s a row’ of wisteria-strangled pastel cottages, fine furniture showing through double-locked windows, burglar alarms set at the ready.

  There’s the seventeenth-century farmhouse that’s supposed to be stuffed with Rembrandts and there’s the pair of thirty-foot wrought iron gates a coach and horses rattles through each night at eight o’clock, though I’ve never seen it. The gates lead to a new close of houses with pink and peppermint courtyard tiles. The coach stops on the tiles before a house that hasn’t been there for two hundred years. Ha.

  But duckie-doo, dear Joanio, beyond the pond and the patios and the golfers in their yellow jerseys, like wandering bananas, the wild part of the Common begins. Remember the sweep of bracken—nearly half a mile of it? Did you know that a French duchess used to produce plays in a glade in the middle of it? Pastoral parties for the French émigrés. Marie Antoinette shepherdesses wandered down the rabbit-paths in silken pinnies, carrying ivory crooks, down to the green scythed stage. The leathery fish-bone bracken nearly met over their heads. Tinkling laughter, lemonade, sugared cakes, footmen in wigs. French farce. Deep, sleepy country then, silent as Shropshire.

  Now, even louder than when you left, Joan, you can hear the traffic. You can hear it anywhere on the Common now, tearing east and west across the London counties, comforting as ships’ engines, thundering along. We pay more for living near the Common now and the nuns have to pay more still to let us have the privilege of dying on it. But we still love the place for itself. It’s not just the city-dweller’s snob gold card, the chance he has of pretending to live in the country.

  I met Old Bernard once on the Common, cursing and swearing under his breath, cracking his broken fingers, the Auschwitz number tattoo hidden beneath his shirt cuff. “You all play at being country gentlemen,” he shouts on bad days, “and, by Christ, it’s over.” But he walks on the Common almost every day and cycles slowly about on it early in the mornings.

  The Common has a presence and a spirit of its own.

  Beyond the pond and the coloured cottages, Joan, remember how the woods begin. Remember how the ground drops down and the trees rise and thicken. Through the trees, paths straggle, turn and dip under hanging branches, and bring you out to grassy places with butterflies and brambles and streams with bits of logs slung across for bridges. You can walk for hours seeing nobody but the odd flasher. Or you can walk through the woods, a mile or so, and out of them again into long avenues of park-like trees. You probably never went this far, always being so busy. If, like me, you had lived here for a long time, you could have watched the trees grow and change their nature—flourish, age, droop, recover, fall. They fell some of them in what looks like their prime.

  I knew a tree, Joan, a birch. It stood beyond the spring. It never grew tall. It flickered and swayed. When it was young it tossed its hair. I used to wander about on the Common then almost every day watching the women with the children and the lonely, unappetising-looking men. For the likes of me they had put a seat near the trees. On the seat was a very expensive brass plate saying In memory of James and John, the sons of thunder, two Sealyhams who for many years were happy on these Commons. Classy that, the plural. Classy the brass. It got nicked like they nicked all the brass lettering off the War Memorial. Old Bernard walks by the seat cracking and crackling his tortured hands. We are used to him.

  “These Commons.” Where’s the other one, the other one—the Common of the golden boy, the passing Fair? Hush. Wait. I think we’ll get there in the end.

  Now, that lovely tree grew more and more beautiful. Its bark thickened and turned to gold and pewter flakes. The leaves turned first to green and then to white confetti—from silver coins like the sun on summer water to October sovereigns shaking against the autumn sky. The gold discs were scattered around in the frailest twigs on the metal branches. Then one day, it was gone.

  I stood by the seat. Gone Joan, gone. The tree had gone. There was turf over the hole, neat as needlework. If you scuffed your feet about you could just make out a few white chippings in the long grass. The tree had had its knock on the door at three o’clock in the morning. Everything tidied away. Miss Ingham came by, all cardigans and wraps and her pockets bulging with the roots she pinched. She said, “How very upsetting.”

  Someone had seen the signs of mortality in the tree and spared it a lingering death.

  There are still badgers on the Common, Joan, and foxes.
Do you ever think of them, among the tigers and the crocs? There are better flowers than there used to be, now that we have all become such a nice bright Green, and the cold spring still rises and flows down through the trees to feed the mere—the best water in Surrey, says Marjorie Gargery, passing paper cups of it around among her children. There’s always someone standing in the pine trees where the spring rises, always some old tramp with purple lips. Often that queer little jogger dressed in black. You often see him about in that slinky track suit. He never looks at me but he knows that I am there. I sometimes think he might murder me. It would happen in fiction. The Roman soldiers at the spring would have made short work of him. I think of them, dipping their feet in the water, and their Naafi mugs. I think of them shivering and wishing for Umbria and the land of Piero della Francesca, except he hadn’t then been born.

  Well now, this pure and ancient trickle, Joan, flows not so far away from a metalled narrow road marked “Private” that leads to The Hospice. One mile and a half, and down it one day I come a-Maying and find Mother Ambrosine at her books.

  “Good afternoon, Eliza. You are looking very wild.”

  “I walked. Maybe I took a bus part of the way. Then I walked. From the other side.”

  “Through the woods? You walked all the way through the woods? My dear, you’ve walked miles. Miles.”

  “I’m not an old woman, Mother Ambrosine.”

  “But, my lamb, it is pouring with rain. It is raining like the Monsoon.”

  Mother Ambrosine is solid and sure. Her face is smooth and brown. Her eyes are brown and bright and clear. She looks completed. It is a face familiar to me but never usual. It is a face with which you do not compete. There are lines about the eyes, across the brow one thread. More lines about the mouth. But no bags. No pouches. She travels without luggage. Her ears have never been pierced and her hair has never seen an electric drier or a scented shampoo. It’s short and springy beneath a little cap that is the residual fin of what for centuries in her Order was a huge and yacht-like veil.

  Stout shoes beneath the desk, support-tights, knees well apart beneath the dark serge skirt, and she is scratching under the residual fin with a leaky biro. Or was. She has stopped. As I approach the desk the biro is brought point down and begins to rap the blotting pad.

  “. . . to the skin,” she is saying. “At once to the Laundry. Take off those clothes.”

  “I can’t run naked through The Hospice.”

  “We’ll find you something. What shall we do with her, Nick?”

  I see, for the first time, that the Curate is sitting in her office, Nick Fish the committee man, my high-Protestant priest. He and Mother A. have been sitting talking together, sitting quiet together, Anglican and Roman, talking and thinking. St. Julian above their heads stares on and I examine my fingernails. They have begun to look unfamiliar lately.

  I fear Mother A. and Nick Fish. This silence between them.

  This stillness holds within it the awaited grief. I have seen Mother A. of course many times at a death but a Hospice (Joan) is not what they sometimes make out—a brave, hearty place; though it’s no bleak house of corpses either. It was to try to find out something about death that I came here in the first place, as I dare say by now you will have guessed. Only domestic work it may be, but there are few secrets in a kitchen. We’ve all wept in The Hospice, Joan. We’re not always jealously thinking of heaven. Death, they tell you at funerals—which are hellish things, Joan, and I can’t stand the people who pretend they’re not—death is ‘just like stepping into another room.’ Yeah, who says? Who’s been there? And which room Joan? How are we going to shape up to turning the door-handle to find out? I have seen Mother Ambrosine, the warrior Queen for God, distressed and shaken by death, and if it were not so there would be no strength.

  And now, here’s Fish-the-Committee in his scruffy cassock and woolly hat and gloves, working away at a rosary and making sure not to look at me. So my Lord and my God I am right and it is Barry. He is gone.

  “Barry’s been asking for you,” says Mother A., “Quickly get dry and go and see him.”

  “How is he?”

  “Back in bed. Weak. Not so bad. Barry,” she says to Nick Fish, “is still here. He is in love with Eliza.”

  I say to Nick, “He is twenty-two years old.”

  Fish absorbs this information unsmiling, and twitches. He can’t stand me. Upper-class-rich-bitch-never-done-a-day’swork-in-her-life. But I watch him putting holy charity together as he lets go the rosary and gets to his feet. I see the dirty trainers and boyish draggly shoe-lace. I see the inside of his head—no NO. Please God, no. Don’t let this happen. I will my soul, or whatever it is that forces on me these visitations, I will my eyes not to see the jelly within the bone and the bone’s soft marrow and the cells that make our juices, cells so temporal that they flow away like the foam on the quay that was all that was left of the little mermaid in the tale. She faded downwards from the head. Off with her head. Blink. Swallow. Better.

  Nick’s taut face is back, and I see the expression on its surface and the effort he is making as a Christian priest dealing with poor dotty Eliza. But how can he ever give comfort if he can’t conceal the clock-work, the cuckoo clockwork going on within his head?

  Yet it’s hard to trust a mask, and if you arouse hostile feelings maybe it’s better to know it, even if they’re in a priest. Cock-asnook back, maybe? Cockasnook. His brain is saying (no don’t look; look away): Eliza Peabody, oh my God, not her again. The mad woman. Needs a shrink. What’s Mother Am doing, letting her in here?

  “Hullo, Eliza. Nice to see you. Sorry I had to go the last time we met. We must have that talk some time.”

  Joan, The Hospice laundry! It ought to be the subject of a preservation order. It lies in the cellars above unexamined remnants of the centurions, and it looks as if the nuns moved their equipment into a wash-house ready made: a temple of steam and heat with runnels in it laid down by Roman fingers. The washing-machines whir, the driers thump, and there are nuns working with electric irons and starch, sleeves rolled up and faces shining. Above their heads, rows of sheets hang like heavy flags.

  “Eliza!” Sister Mildred is smoothing a shroud. “Will you get those clothes off while we dry them and I find something warm—not this—to wrap you in.” She hands me a hot hairy blanket.

  I sit beside the washing-machines and watch the clothes slosh and pause. Pause and slosh. Gather momentum. Faster and faster they go, and away into an ecstasy of Dervish whirling, out of control. I’m always reading novels where the behaviour of a washing-machine is considered similar to an orgasm. A contemporary image. It will date. But I try to remember—Is it? Was it? Watching the whizzing bed-sheets I decide I never knew.

  “So, what’s the matter?” asks Sister Josephine. “Depths of gloom, dear?”

  “We’d better hear the worst,” says Sister Anna.

  “I was watching the water go round.”

  “Well now, and that’s interesting.”

  “And thinking of sex.”

  “Sure and we think of nothing else, and champagne every day for breakfast. Now then—have you had anything to eat this morning?”

  When my clothes were dry I dressed again (“Love her, the earrings’ll be getting the jumper in a twist.” “Don’t tell her to take them off for goodness sake. Aren’t they Barry’s pride and joy?”) and went up to the kitchen for coffee. I didn’t remember having eaten anything for some time and I felt better for a slice of fried bread and a couple of sausages. Then I remembered the dogs. My walk in the rain had taken hours. I must feed them. I must take them out. But first I must see Barry.

  He was asleep, lying straight, the sheets as fresh and shiny as when they were new, or still in the folds of the bath-house.

  “Barry. Me. Eliza.”

  No reply. Oh, the skin. The raw cracks.

  “It’s the Queen of the Tambourine.”

  Not a flicker.

  I sit by him and hold his
hand. I examine each clean blue nail. The clock ticks. Outside the window it looks to be the saddest weather now.

  Nick Fish stands by his car and appears to be waiting for me. “Oh-kay,” he says, going round to the passenger side, opening its door, coming back to arm me in. That’s one of the new things people have started trying to do—to arm me about. “Lift?” he says. “I’ll take you home, Eliza.” That’s something else. “Eliza.” Nick Fish always called me Eliza of course, but now it’s the butcher, the baker, and the dry-cleaner. Madness is a great leveller.

  “Home?” he asks.

  “Yes, please, I have to feed the dogs.”

  “Nice dog of yours. I wish we had a dog, we have almost everything else. It’s the expense. I see yours on the Common. Often by himself, I may say.”

  “It’s in his breed. He’s a natural wanderer. I can’t keep him in. He’s like an eel. I do try.”

  “Oh-kay. Don’t take off,” he says. “I’m not blaming you, sweetie.”

  “Sweetie” is new. Sweets to the sweet and barmy.

  “He’s been better since he had company. Since we had the other dog wished on us. We have two.”

  “Two?”

  “One’s Joan’s.”

  “Who’s Joan?”

  “Well, for heaven’s sake Nick, Joan. You remember Joan. You’ve been here five years.”

  “Eliza, I do not remember Joan.”

  “Oh well—I suppose you can’t remember everyone. She lives—she lived—opposite me in Rathbone Road. Number thirty-four. Very good-looking. Carefree. You must remember her. Everybody knew her. Over a year ago she took herself off all of a sudden—left the children and the husband. Shocked the Wives’ Fellowship.

  “Look, Nick, you must remember Joan. People like Joan don’t just get forgotten.”

  “It’s a big parish, you know. I’m only one priest in it. I’m not even the Vicar. If she was such a free spirit and so carefree I probably never heard of her. Church-goer was she?”