The Queen of the Tambourine Read online

  She turned, took her bearings and set off over the wide floor of the restaurant, feeling precisely with her stick. After a few steps she turned and said, “Oh, I have remembered. Your numbers on your wrist remind me of my grandchildren. We all once went for a Continental summer holiday on a lake shore. There was a little club for the children. To show they’d paid their entrance money their little wrists were stamped with a number. Then they were allowed the swings and slides of the fair. They so loved the stamp coming down. 1939—that wonderful sunny summer. We all so loved the old Germany. It made us feel close to our own Royal Family. I always thought, if only someone had adopted Hitler as a little boy and sent him to a good English public school like some of those fine African leaders who were loyal to us for years. But the idea is impossible, isn’t it?”

  Bernard stood strap-hanging home on the crowded tube. He hung by the other wrist. Across the carriage, through the forest of gardening pamphlets everyone was carrying, I could see the old white arm clutching up at the rail. Tramping back up the hill home he said, “Ach—the inconsequence. The studied eccentricity. The inability to reason. The irrationality. The shortness of memory. The pride in new poverty. The lack of the once transparent smear of imagination. The unshakeable security. The remains of the Churchillian myth of the British bulldog, a most detestable animal. It is a terrible ignorance. The great fact of this age is The Holocaust. Only The Holocaust. It can never be forgiven or forgotten. I am not talking about race. I am talking about evil. Nothing else matters—yet what do you any of you care or know?” He raised his arms up and outwards to the road, “Stagnant, unawakened, calm, criminally comfortable, fifty years on.”

  I said, “‘Never understood’ not ‘never forgotten.’ It’s not that we forget. And we can’t help not being Jews.”

  “It must never be forgiven.”

  “No, I suppose not. Nobody not Jewish dares to forgive, Bernard, I know. Well, I suppose.”

  “‘Suppose?’ ‘Suppose?’ All this good-mannered caution. Understatement. Morning mist and cricket. And flower-shows.”

  “Oh, Bernard, you’re antique. She was antique too. She was a coelacanth. That sort of thing has gone. She was History.”

  “But I am History. I am antique. I am the ancient of days—a wanderer. And by God, I am still here.”

  “Come on—you’ve been forty years in Rathbone Road.”

  “My mind is far away,” he said. “So much as is left of it.”

  “Give my—remember me to Lola,” I said at the gate. “I hope she does—is better.”

  “You should come and see her. In my country everyone would be calling on her daily.”

  He crackled his knuckles as he stood waiting for Lola to unlock the door and I went on and walked on the Common for fresh air. On the way home I made a detour to the old parish church and sat in it for a time looking at the hanging crucifix above the rood-screen. I wondered if I could manage forgiveness if I were Old Bernard since I could not manage forgiveness even in Rathbone Road, and how Jesus would have got on, watching the children being sorted for the ovens.

  Two talkative women came in and started cleaning. They ran a cloth over the Red Cross knight who lay on his marble tomb, legs crossed to show he’d sliced some Saracens; member of the local great family, long defunct. God looked down on the lot of us and for perhaps the first time I saw the suffering of His silence. The smallness of our prayers.

  “Well,” said Dulcie, breezy and restored, for there had been a long muted discussion with Dr. Seneca in the hall—some women get almost sexy in their conversations with departing doctors—“Well, I gather there’s no reason at all why you shouldn’t get up, so I’ll leave your lunch ready on a tray. After lunch you might rest in the drawing room on your long chair. Then at three-thirty Henry should be here.”

  “Henry?”

  “Richard and I spoke to him this morning. He has appointments and then a luncheon but will come out here to see you straight afterwards.”

  “Whatever for? I’m not in any state to talk about a divorce today. I feel wrung out.”

  “We told him he ought to see you. Also, Eliza, we wonder have you no relations? Is there anyone—?”

  “Relations? I’ve only a cousin. Whatever—?”

  “Just an idea of Richard’s. He thinks that you ought to be in touch with a close relative if possible. If you have one.”

  “Annie Cartwright? Whatever for. She lives in Canada or America or somewhere.”

  “Canada or America,” said Dulcie, “have you her address? Is there any way of finding it through Directory Enquiries? Only of course with your permission.”

  “She’s married. She’s called Annie Grucock. I suppose that might make it easier. Why on earth—we haven’t met in fifteen or twenty years. Oh, except once for an hour at a party in Washington. We don’t get on. We’re nothing to each other.”

  “But she’s your next-of-kin.”

  “Henry’s my . . .” But then, Joan, I understood. If the divorce goes through, Henry will no longer be my next-of-kin. And if, between them all, they are to deposit me in a mental hospital it will have to be Annie Grucock who signs on the dotted line, a task she will be ready, nay eager, nay utterly unsurprised, to be asked to perform.

  “Don’t you ever bring Annie Grucock here,” I said and flung off the bedclothes, rousted for my slippers. “That’s all, Dulcie. Thank you very much for being so kind to me, getting the doctor and the breakfast and lunch and the tea last night with the sleeping tablets in it and even for ringing Henry, though I hope he doesn’t come and don’t expect him—but just keep clear of Annie Grucock.”

  “I’m afraid,” she said, “that Henry may already have rung her. We had to mention it to him. I may say he became very vague and silent.”

  “If she turns up I’ll send her across to you. And to Anne Robin. To Gant and the Gargerys and Nick Fish—no, not to Nick Fish, he has good children.”

  “I don’t believe she can be so . . .”

  “She is. I was at school with her. She was The Harrogate Rose.”

  “Oh, my dear—school. You’ll like each other now. I find I get on frightfully well with girls I didn’t care for at school.”

  “I wouldn’t risk it. Not Annie Cartwright-Grucock. I was brought up with her. I’m going for a bath. Have you fed the dogs? Go on, Dulcie, take the old Mock and go home. Finish all you have to do. Because if Annie Cartwright’s coming there’ll be nothing done in Rathbone Road until you’ve put her in her first-class carriage home again. With bouquets, champagne, hot-water-bottles and several people’s husbands.”

  “You are I suppose recovering,” said Dulcie, “if recovery means you are becoming unrecognisable. You sound—well, you sound rather common.” And she flung off.

  I opened the window and watched her cross the road, talking with some dignity to Lady Gant. I leaned out and threw a swear word at them and Gant looked up at me as if she’d swallowed a scorpion. I listened to the cadence of the oath upon the noon-day air. I sang;

  “In’t it a pity

  She’s only one titty

  To feed the baby on?

  “The other old dangle

  Got caught in the mangle

  And now there’s only one.”

  Gant wears a hat. It’s because of the tumour on her head. It sticks up. George Orwell had one, too. People noticed it when he raised his hat. It stood up tall. Lady Gant, a Trojan of a woman I much admire, keeps her hat on. Poor Orwell, stuck with the etiquette of his times.

  “Poor little bugger,” I sang,

  “He’ll never play rugger

  And grow up big and—”

  Dulcie turned, after urging Gant in through her front door, on the top of the steps. The steps are flanked by twin lions, for Richard’s family is heraldic. She called kindly, “Leave the dog, Eliza, I’ll see to him. Rest.”

  “Is there enough food in for them?”

  “There is enough for him.”

  I said, “I’m not givin
g Henry dog-food. He’s going to a luncheon.”

  Later

  Joan oh Joan

  I scribble in the bed and the white sheets float about the floor and the biros keep running out.

  Bath. After Dulcie had gone, the great white virgin, I lay in the almond oil suds and watched my face swell and contract in the Victorian taps. I looked along my skinny body, half a century old: the purple ridge, the appendix scar, the blotches of the old-fashioned vaccination marks on my thigh, but all still serviceable enough. A body not much noticed since the womb. Unused.

  What might it have looked like? If I had married a man who thought sharing a bed important? Fat and flaccid? Covered in stretch-marks and Appalachian ranges? I’ve never seen a stretch-mark and don’t know what it looks like. I have never seen a contraceptive pill. I have never seen pot or hash or heroin. I’ve never actually examined a condom, and still feel they are rather secret, nasty things.

  Bosoms. Scarcely there. They might, I suppose, by now be hanging like old leather bottles? The children saying, “Mother’s letting herself go. Such a shame.”

  But I’d have looked used.

  I thought of the saints, the ones whose bodies were discovered at death, and centuries after death, sweet-smelling, unlined, supple as lads and girls, wafting with daphne and the scent of pomegranates. Pristine, like St. Julian for God. Annie Cartwright, no saint, will smell all her life of double strength Ma Griffe, so long as it is expensive enough.

  When my parents died, Joan, I was taken in by my mother’s sister who was married to a mill-owner in the green soft boggy country outside Bolton, Lancashire. I had been staying with them when it happened. I was six. Annie was their ewe-lamb and she was eight. The four of us had been very quiet. My uncle had already been able to retire from his profession and the mill clattered peacefully away down the dale, looked after by managers. My parents, a tear-away pair, had been on their first holiday together since their War-time honeymoon. My father had been in Changi gaol since the fall of Singapore. They were killed in France in their hired car. A lorry smashed into them from a side turning. It was my aunt who broke the news to me and she was stern about it.

  My uncle went out of the room. When he came back my aunt went upstairs to her bedroom. My uncle sat in his leather chair before the big, brass fender. Do you think of a pot-belly, Joan? A plebeian head on a knitted antimacassar? Of homely Lancashire vowels? The Southerner’s image of the North? Wrong. He was a gentle, thin and thoughtful man not unlike the figure of the Red Cross knight on our parish church tomb. He spoke gently. I knew that he suffered for his sister and that he suffered for me. I knew that Annie, their daughter, sitting on the fireside stool with her rosy lips pouted out suffered for me not at all. I knew that she was jealous of her father’s pity. She sat on her hands and looked down at her polished shoes and taut socks that came three-quarters of the way up her firm calves. She asked if she could do her sewing.

  “No, not now.” My uncle lifted a hand from the arm of his chair and stroked my head.

  “Then I’ll go and ask Mother.”

  Soon she was down again and sitting with a little bit of canvas. She stitched white petals with pink French-knotted tips.

  We went to the same school for a time in Harrogate, Annie and I, but then she went on to another school with a fetching uniform—straw hat with pink and grey ribbon, pale grey dress, white gloves, shell-pink lawn blouse. It was not that she had had to leave the first school but that she was artistic, my aunt said, and couldn’t concentrate on what didn’t interest her. She rebelled against learning by rote.

  Before I went up to Oxford, Annie was about to leave yet another school—her finishing school in Switzerland. She had set out there the previous year, in fur: a creamy fur coat with darker, toffee-coloured fur collar and cuffs, and a fur hat. She had a stolid presence with bulging, treacly eyes but an innate self-confidence and poise that nothing could shake. Soft, wet lips. And she had the advantage of having no shoulders and the consequent air of frailty. The neck sloped down to soft Botticellian arms, pale little hands, all at variance with the strong jaw. Her self-confidence was based on her knowledge that men on seeing her wanted to wrap her shoulderlessness in their arms and at the same time felt comforted by her obvious possession and understanding of a good deal of money. It was an assurance that showed her a match for her fortunes, that the cheque-book inside the crocodile handbag (she would go to Italy now and then solely for the handbags) could conquer the world—or the parts of the world she was aware of. She could see no parts of mine.

  She seemed complete, Annie Cartwright, at twenty. There were a great many men after her—young men being watched cannily by parents galore at the functions of the local Conservative Associations of Lancashire and West Yorkshire. It seemed to me unnecessary that she should go away anywhere. She seemed in the golden lap of the world for keeps.

  “Won’t you miss her?” I asked my aunt.

  “She has to go. All her friends go. I like a finishing school. I was finished myself.”

  “She seems finished already.”

  My aunt looked to see if I were being nasty, decided not (wrong) and said, “A finishing school teaches a girl how to sit in a chair.”

  Annie and her husband Basil Grucock came to see me once at Oxford and she sat beautifully in her chair in my lodgings—a knockabout tail house where we were left much to ourselves. Basil seemed less comfortable and kept getting up and pacing about, looking at his Philippe Patek watch which had been her wedding present to him. I should say tried to pace about for it was the time when I had released myself into squalor. Old tights and bras and half-eaten Welsh-rarebits lay everywhere on the floor. My bed, with grey sheets, was not so much unmade as unmakeable. This was my second year—my first year of tweed skirts and polished shoes and college hall-of-residence was done. In the middle of this, my most beloved room, the big gesture of my life so soon to be denied, there was a table, and on the table jam-pots, wine bottles, a pair of the man of the moment’s trousers I was mending and a space cleared for papers, text-books, notes, pens and an unopened packet of condoms. They were for show. They never were opened. Somebody took them away.

  Annie’s long silk legs, her French silk suit, her complex curls, her drooping, glossy mouth, her vacancy, her little cigarette case with an “A” on it in diamonds, dumbfounded all my acquaintances as they put their heads at intervals round my door. “Oh—I’m sorry.” Open mouths.

  “How do you do?” Basil walked forward heartily to each of them.

  “My cousin Annie. Her husband Basil,” I said to their hastily backing-off nods. Her slow smile.

  As they were about to leave, Henry arrived. He was not the man of the moment. We had just met. I remember that I covered the condoms with Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader.

  Seeing someone in a clean shirt, Annie came to life. Unwinding herself, getting up most beautifully from her chair, she approached him, paw held out like a present. She gave him a long, long stare. Oh, Henry’s wonderful twenty-two-year-old looks! And, when she had gone, his amazed eyes.

  “Who on earth was that?”

  “My cousin.”

  “Your cousin!”

  And we both laughed and laughed. To my surprise Henry went over to the door and locked it. I put the alien trousers hastily out of sight. He came over to me and said, “You are full of surprises.”

  “She’s the only relative I have.”

  “You must be glad. Wherever has she been?”

  “Being finished.”

  “It can’t have taken long.”

  Now, in the bath-taps, I see the Oxford twilight. I close my eyes and get a breath for just an instant of the Oxford spring. I feel Henry’s grave chin on the top of my head and my amazement when his hands began to move about my bare back.

  That, however, was where they stayed, for he left before long in a hurry and that night dropped through my door a terrible note. “I think we must be careful. We have only just met. We must not do what we migh
t regret.” I felt humiliated. I tore it to bits.

  But the next morning he was standing outside the gates of St. Hilda’s as I came from a supervision, and a warm April wind was blowing his hair about and he asked me to marry him. Knowing, knowing, knowing that this was the right thing to do, I said yes at once.

  Annie didn’t come to the wedding. I didn’t tell her. We asked only about ten friends. I sent her a postcard on our honeymoon in France, and we laughed about her now and then. We sent Christmas cards for years but then stopped.

  And now one of the hands that had moved over my back and done no more—nor for a long time after marriage come to that, for he was as hopeless at love as I was then—one of those hands was about to sign the document that would put me away, unless of course it had already signed the one that said he had no further responsibility for me, nor for anything of mine; in which case the hand that condemns me will be the little pink paw of Annie. I see the pink shells of her nails as she slowly writes her name. After which, the clean quiet room, the pills, the dutiful visits of Rathbone Road for a while, the couch. The separation of body, soul and spirit from my dear world. Still my dear world.

  “Hang on to God,” says Mother Ambrosine, so I hang on to the towel-rail—I can approach no nearer. I try to pray.

  “Courage,” I tell the toothpaste. I do my teeth, I brush my hair, I look in the glass. I look, as usual, most wonderfully well. The mad seldom seem to catch things. You don’t see mad people with tiresome colds. They don’t seem to get the flu. The skin goes, and there are headaches, yet not even these afflictions have visited me. Oh Barry, Barry, sanest of men. Sores about the mouth, sores between the fingers, pus around the eyes, bones a cage wherein the bees could make their honey. Out of the weak shall come forth sweetness even mingled with the smell of decay. Thin, thin hair. Oh Barry, my love, my child.