The Queen of the Tambourine Read online

  “Oh heavens, no. No more than I am, now.”

  “Really? I’m sorry, Eliza, about that—we really ought to talk. But you can see why I’ve not heard of your Joan. I can’t get round the lot.”

  “It’s a pity you couldn’t. Still—she’s all right now. She learned how to look after herself. She threw out all her fears and miseries they were there under the cheerfulness, that’s why she got a peculiar leg—and she began to make her own decisions. I admire her enormously. She was a ruthless and decided woman.”

  I went on for a while and all at once he swung the car off Caesar’s Lane, stopped the engine and put his face in his hands. All in one go.

  “Nick—heavens, Nick, what is it?”

  “Could you shut up? I need a moment.”

  “Are you not feeling well? It does hit you suddenly sometimes, doesn’t it? It does me. I was sick the other week just after I’d shown a visitor the garden of the house next door. Quite suddenly. I don’t even know who he was really, just someone who had come to see them next door and they were out. I was just suddenly sick. What is it? Is it The Hospice? Something at The Hospice?”

  “No. Never The Hospice.”

  “What then? What is it, dear Nick?”

  “If you could just stop talking.”

  After some time he said, “Well, it’s Vanessa.”

  Long silence. It was warm in the car. I rolled down my window and bird-chirrups came in and the swish of the fir trees tossing. A little shower scattered down on the bonnet from the wet branches.

  “My wife. Vanessa.”

  “Vanessa is . . .”

  “Look, Eliza, don’t start again. Vanessa. A very decisive woman. Et cetera.”

  Silence. I looked at him in his woolly hat and he took off his glasses and wiped his eyes with his duffle sleeve. I took the glasses from him and dried them on my handkerchief. I gave him back the glasses and he put them on and sniffed, so then I handed him the handkerchief. He sat staring out at the rainy lane and I put an arm along the back of the seat behind him and stroked his neck above the clerical collar. I like necks. He put the handkerchief in his pocket and said, “Have to get on,” and started the car.

  On the road over the Common he said—snappish again “D’you mind? I just ought to look in at home before I take you back to Rathbone Road. Vanessa will be worrying.”

  So we turned up at the clergy house forecourt, more puddles than gravel, and he left the car and leaned in through his front door and I heard him shout, “—in a few minutes. Taking poor Eliza home.”

  There was a flurry from within and Vanessa came bounding past him with a face of wrath, leapt in her car which was poised ready for her, and roared away.

  “Oh hell,” said Nick Fish. “She’s furious. She’s got some meeting in London. Lord, I’d no idea it was so late.”

  A child appeared. A baby, just beginning to stagger and wearing a nappy and a vest. Another child, a girl with a very direct look, appeared beside it. She seemed about seven or eight—I’m hazy about Nick’s children. We’ve all helped out when Vanessa’s been away but mostly by sending food. I had not actually met them. The girl took the baby’s arms from round Nick’s cassocked knees and it squealed and thumped her. “Au pair’s day off,” said Nick.

  “It’s all right. Goodness me, Nick, it’s perfectly all right. I can walk home. It’s no distance at all, l’ve been walking all day.”

  “It’s not so much you,” said Nick. “It’s not so much that. I have the Youth Group. There’s nobody to leave the children with. Vanessa must have forgotten.”

  “She didn’t,” said the girl. “She’s furious. You promised. She’ll stay late now. She always does when you forget. It’s a matter of principle.”

  “That’ll do. Have you all had supper?”

  “Yep. I got it.”

  “Well,” said I, “I’ll go now. Forget me. I’m the least of your troubles. Thanks, Nick, for the lift. Half-way.”

  “I wonder,” he said looking me over. “Eliza—could I leave you here with them for a few seconds? I’ll just nip round to the Youth Group and explain. They can carry on alone for once. I’ll have to nip round to St. Cyprian’s too and take them some stuff for tomorrow and if I cut over the Common again I might get Mike to take over at 7.30. I could be back by eight—say 8.10.”

  “I’ll stay as long as you like. Of course,” I said or heard myself say, and, Let’s see if he’ll risk it, I thought. A mad nanny. Well most of them always were, they say now, one way or another.

  “Could you really? Would you, Eliza? Do that?”

  “We don’t need anyone,” said the girl, seizing the baby and glaring. “We can manage on our own.”

  “But I’d rather like it,” I said, and Nick held the door for me. It had a huge paper face stuck to the glass looking out. A balloon from the mouth said, “Hi!”

  “I’m here,” I said to the girl who had a flounce like her departed mother.

  “There’s tea,” said her father, “or something. I’ll promise not to be long.”

  “Stay for the Youth Group,” I said. “Stay the whole time.”

  “Dad-dad-dad,” wailed the baby with outstretched arms. Nick paid no attention. “This is very kind of you, Eliza.”

  And he was gone—a car screeching and grinding in the thin gravel once again—and I walked towards the sitting room followed by the huffy girl and the baby yelling full-tilt. The house had a rich and earthy smell that reminded me of long ago farmyards. I passed a cage full of rustling straw, a large bubbling fish-tank full of what looked like spinach and another cage, very fruity, with mice. I walked through an open door into what seemed to be the main room where seated at the corner of a table stacked with parish papers and crumby plates was the boy I had seen on the bus. He was pushing along an old-fashioned fountain pen but rose at once, at once recognised me and (my goodness) held out his hand. He might be eleven, I thought, but not more than twelve. I’m not much good at the ages of children, but I’d not think he was twelve. He said, “I’m Lucien, hullo. Sorry about Timmy. He’ll shut up.” The girl was bouncing the baby up and down on her arm, or trying to, for he was wriggling and pressing his face at her, open-mouthed, to bite her chin. Between the bites he was engaged upon a purple roar. “I’m Eliza,” I said, “ELIZA PEABODY,” and the boy did not laugh at Henry’s awful name.

  “I saw you on that bus.”

  “Yes.”

  The girl screamed as one of the baby’s fingers went in her eye and she began to cry, too. She flung the baby on the sofa, still roaring, and I lunged out and fielded it before it hit the ground. His mouth was still a cave but for the moment it had reached a silence, gathering up for the next bellow. I stood up. The warm little child was surprisingly heavy. It was also very sticky. The bellow did not come.

  “That’s a terrible noise. Terrible,” I said in what I hoped was the voice you use. “I don’t know when I’ve heard anything like it.” (There was something very like it going on on the sofa.) The baby, pop-eyed, slowly unarched its back and lay limp in my arms. It stared so hard at me I wondered if it was about to have a fit. Babies once were prone to fits. They might yet be. And this other one on the sofa—it was perfectly possible, it seemed to me, that her eye had been put out. There arose squeals of agony.

  “Shut up can’t you?” said the boy. “For heaven’s sake, Amanda, how old are you? Eliza’s terrified.”

  The girl’s toes drummed with fury at the floor. Face-down she continued to scream though on a lower note.

  “Take no notice,” he said. “She does this to all the au pairs.”

  “I’m not an au pair,” I said, flattered. I liked the “Eliza”—he wasn’t the butcher who’d changed to it when I started posting the liver instead of the letters in the post-box outside his shop—“but, I’d better tell you, I know nothing about looking after children. I shouldn’t really have offered. You’ll have to help me.”

  “No problem. None of them do. They get caught. And they’r
e all hopeless.”

  “We get awful Church ladies mostly,” said Amanda, turning and staring at me with two tearless and undamaged eyes. She considered me. “Look at Timmy.”

  The baby, its mouth still hanging open though growing smaller, had reached out a round hand and stretched it to my face. I said, “Timmy?” He squirmed and levered himself about in my arms until he sat upright, then he leaned forward, reached for an earring and patted it. He pushed the earring until it swung and all the bells began to tinkle like a Tibetan hillside. He gave a crow. A most delightful happy crow. He smiled at the earring with merry eyes.

  “Now you’re for it,” said Lucien.

  “He’s found your earrings,” said Amanda. “He’s crazy for earrings. He eats them. He’s eaten dozens of Vanessa’s.”

  “Do you call your mother Vanessa?” I asked and thought, What a question. You don’t have to get beyond the face on the front door to know they’ll call their mother Vanessa.

  “She does. I don’t,” said Lucien. “A bit sixties.”

  “What do you call your father?”

  “I call him Father, she calls him Daddy.”

  “I call her Vanessa because she likes it,” said Amanda. “She ought to have what she likes. She works hard and gets no thanks for it like Nick—like Daddy—does. Nobody drools over Mum, Vanessa. She hasn’t got any smelly old ladies.”

  “That will do,” said Lucien and I together and regarded each other with approbation. I noticed that the baby was cramming its mouth with bells.

  “Oh heavens, Amanda, help!”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll scoop them. They’ve not gone right down his throat,” and she fished with a finger while the baby roared. “There’s two here. I think I’ve got them all out. How many’s missing?”

  “I can’t see. They’re on me. Is there a mirror?”

  Amanda and the baby, who was still taking distant hopeless swipes towards my ears, were struggling together now side by side on the table where Lucien had put down his pen with a sigh.

  “I’ll count. Amanda, get him off her. One, two, three— seven on the right and—oh Lord, only three on the left. Two we’ve found, so two have gone down.”

  “Oh no!” Amanda looked stricken. “They’re awfully sharp.

  They’re as sharp as Vanessa’s tin mobiles were. I’d better ring the doctor. No, 999’s quicker, the doctor’s hopeless. He doesn’t believe us anymore.”

  “Don’t!” thundered Lucien, and baby and sister were silenced.

  “Amanda—look first, and I’ll look. Get on the floor. Look under the jumble. Eliza, look down your front.”

  Amanda flung jumble about and said, “Well, here’s one,” and I looked down the front of my shirt where a bell rested on the ridge of my bra.

  “Panic over,” said Lucien. “Now Eliza, while Amanda shows you where things are I’d better get on.”

  “Where things are?”

  “To bath him. He should have been bathed hours ago.”

  “I couldn’t help it. I had the supper to get. And find Vanessa’s notes. I’ll bathe him. Come here.”

  “I shouldn’t,” Lucien warned as I gladly handed Timmy over.

  “She’ll drop him. Accidentally on purpose. She does. It’s attention-seeking.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You do.”

  “I don’t. And she can’t, anyway. You can see she can’t. She doesn’t have a clue.”

  “Thank you, Amanda.” I grabbed the baby back and made for the stairs.

  I blanched a little at a tank of terrible newts at a turn of the landing. This made Amanda laugh. “Look in there,” she said with malice, opening a door on a wall of cages full of little velvety things scuttling about. “They’re chinchillas—going to make us a fortune.”

  Apart from the cages there were other walls of books, and tables spilling with papers and on the floor more books and papers in tottering piles. “It’s my grandmother’s stuff,” said Amanda. “She’s a widow in India. She says the books would get eaten where she is, so we have them.” In the bathroom there seemed no room for anybody, so tight was the space between bath, basin and WC, and again books everywhere. “All Gran’s,” said Amanda. On the walls of the passage between its bedrooms, wherever there were no books, there were posters, and beside the bathroom door a big crucifix at which the baby took a swipe.

  “Does your grandmother come here sometimes? I mean come and help?”

  “No. She doesn’t get on with Vanessa and Vanessa can’t stand her.”

  “That’s a shame. I don’t think you should have told me that you know. It’s rather a private thing.”

  “No it isn’t. Everyone knows. Mum-essa says it’s better to have these things in the open.”

  “I’m not at all sure of that.”

  “Aren’t you?” She looked at me as if, after all, I might hold some interest. “You ought to bathe Timmy now.”

  “Bath,” I said to the baby who now lay still across my knees. He gave me a lingering, personal smile, “Oh! he smiled at me.”

  Amanda leaned against the bathroom doorpost, swinging a foot.

  “Oh Amanda, he’s beautiful!”

  She came in, put the plug in and ran the taps.

  “Oh—isn’t that a bit deep? It looks a long way down.”

  “No. It’s fine. Just drop him in.”

  “What now? Like this?”

  “Well, take his vest and breeks off. Go on. Don’t be silly.”

  I slowly lowered the watchful child who opened out in the water like a flower. “Oh, he’s floating! Amanda—can I let go?”

  “Of course you can. Of course you can. He won’t drown, not even him. He’s nearly a year old. He’s been sitting up for ages. He can pretty well walk.”

  The baby began to beat the water with open palms and sop everything near and far including my nun-dried skirt. He gave a crow like whooping-cough. “Oh,” I said, “Look, look, Amanda. He’s laughing at us,” and Amanda shoved herself off the doorpost, came in and leaned heavily against my side all of a sudden. She began to manoeuvre her finger like a knitting-needle through a piece of my hair.

  “Are you African? You’ve got lovely hair. Like little orange bed-springs.”

  “I think the baby must be very forward,” I said as Timmy squeezed the soap in the direction of a rubber duck and killed it dead. “Isn’t that rather advanced?”

  “He’s got terrific co-ordination,” she said. “Yes. Actually he’s very advanced. He’s a bit marvellous. He’s more advanced than any baby we know.”

  “I think you are all three rather advanced.”

  She ran to the top of the stairs and called, “Lucien—she didn’t know you could let him float.”

  “Well, don’t go away, that’s all,” he shouted back.

  “Help,” I shrieked. “Amanda, he’s eating it. The soap. Is it allowed? Oh heavens, is it poison? Oh God he’s drowning,” for the baby had taken a slithery sideways glide, clutched wildly about him, grabbed at some garments hanging above the bath to dry and sunk beneath the wave.

  “Drowning,” I screamed, and Amanda fished him out tangled in what looked like some of his father’s Y-fronts and a vest, wrapped him deftly in a towel and laid him again across my knees. “Rock him and shush him,” she said. She put both her arms round my neck. “You are so funny,” she said. “You’re the funniest we’ve had.”

  We put him in a pod-like outer covering of woolly stuff over a macintosh parcel stuck down at the edges, very plump and neat. I had never seen a baby’s private parts and was rather embarrassed by them because they looked so huge. I wondered if there might be something abnormal about Timmy.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Amanda. “Haven’t you seen that before?”

  “Well, no. Aren’t they a bit out of proportion?”

  “No. Pretty average. They’re a bit like kidneys, aren’t they?”

  “Amanda!”

  “Well they are. You don’t know an awf
ul lot do you? Yet you’re so pretty.”

  She lifted him up and then down over the cot side and between us we arranged him for the night, pink, clean and peaceful. No pillow. No covers.

  “Can he sleep like that?”

  “Of course he can.”

  “No blankets?”

  “Of course not. Mum-Vanessa doesn’t like things covered up. It’s for health. He needs his sucky thing though,” and she produced from some evil corner a rag covered in congealed food which the baby grabbed like an old drunk in a bar spying his whisky. He thrust a corner of it in his mouth with one hand and let the other wave slowly about above him, as if giving Benediction.

  “He’ll be a bishop.”

  “Vanessa says she’ll shoot him first.”

  “Doesn’t she like bishops?” I knew of course that Vanessa was a conventional clergy wife who wanted no part in her husband’s work.

  “No, Vanessa’s an atheist.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “It’s hard on Daddy. In a sense,” she said, stroking Timmy’s face as she hung over the cot side.

  “Well, I’m sure you . . . What about Lucien?”

  “He’s agnostic.”

  “I suppose Timmy’s a Communist?”

  “You are funny. How could Timmy be a Communist yet? Anyway, Communism’s over.” She called down, “Lucien, she thinks Timmy’s a Communist!”

  “And what about you, Amanda?”

  “Oh, I’m Christian. I’m going to be a Woman Priest. Vanessa’s really pleased. And if you don’t mind,” she added, “I actually ought to be going to bed now.”

  “She ought,” called Lucien. “She’s not nine yet and it’s past eight o’clock.”

  “Do I—? Shall I—? Help you to bed?”

  “No thanks, I’m too old.”

  “Would you like a story?”

  “Oh yes. I’ll call when I’m ready. I’m sleeping here in Timmy’s room, by the way. Granny’s stuff’s filled up mine.”

  While I waited to be called I went downstairs to the kitchen and began to clear up a bit. I did this and that. A little more. A little more. There was an ancient, salty smell rather like Venice and I wondered if it would be taken amiss if I started a good clear-out. The dish-washer was nearly full up with dirty dishes. There was a big saucepan beside the cooker I wondered if I could squeeze into the dish-washer with the rest. “Shall I start the dish-washer?” I called to Lucien.