The Queen of the Tambourine Read online

  And here am I, lean and lithe with health, shining with un-physical fever. For there is something burning in me, flowing hot through the map of my veins, rapids clattering along and searching for the sea. I’m an old central-heating system that never conks out.

  Why am I permitted no release into sickness?

  Faster, faster, says the Red Queen. Roll up to the Fair. Oh, roll on the Fair.

  As I cross from the bathroom to the bedroom I see from the landing that Tom Hopkin is talking to dear Simon in the hall below. Tom needs his trousers mending. I must hurry and dress.

  But they have both disappeared when I am ready to go downstairs. I look for them everywhere. Then I get out the silver tray and the rose-bud tea-service—inherited from Bolton, Annie’s late wedding present, now I come to think of it. Remembering the quiet stone house in the green valley I add sugar-tongs, silver milk-jug, sugar-lumps and a lacey plate of those very nice biscuits that are getting to be rare—the ones with coffee, lemon and chocolate stripes which Henry and I both like. I see that my newly bathed fingernails have tiny flowers growing out of them, ten little arcs, fresh and blue, like miniature speedwell.

  The dogs are still. The house is very still, too. Through the back windows of the drawing room I see that there are still lacquer-red shoots on the dog-wood. I walk the length of the room and observe the Road from the other end. In your front garden—oh Joan!—oh, if you could see the lilac blossom and the fat cream tulips. If you could see the dark red cherry tree toss and shake and feel the wind catch up the petals and throw them like a wedding at old Isobel Ingham drifting home.

  I open the front door on it all. The warm wind blows all the papers off the hall table. (No note there from Simon or Tom.) Standing on my top step there’s the aching smell of the sap of spring and the nectar welling. Colour is coming into the soil. There’s a rose or two in bud, frilly pansies with astonished expressions at their early call. You’d wonder at yourself today, Joan, for ever wanting to leave us.

  Concerning June 2nd

  But oh my dear, dear Joan,

  It had not been only the wind getting under the hall rug that I had been hearing with my door wide to the daffodil pollen, it had been the dogs. They rushed and scuttered about. I went and sat on my chaise-longue beside the tea-cups and thought of Bolton, my six-year-old self handing round the little sandwiches. But tip, tip, tap of claws. Snuffle, snuffle—very tactful, out in the hall. One of the dogs—my Toby—at last comes in and stands in the drawing-room doorway and looks at me, head askew.

  “Walk?” asks he.

  “Yes. Later. After tea. He won’t be staying long.”

  “Oh well, O.K.,” says Toby, dubiously, going out. I hear him take a run or two down the hall stopping short with a skid at the door-mat, waiting to be told to come back. The silence, the cunning silence of a dog ready to slide out of your reach and go off on the march. I ponder the difficulties of women with afternoon lovers who have a dog in the house. It is a predicament not touched upon in (for example) the television drama. Why worry about the wretched dog? He’s never been run over yet when he’s been out on his own. The police know him—always very friendly about him. “Genius of an animal, Mrs. Peabody. Safer than a human being. I’ve seen him look to left and right.”

  Nevertheless.

  And I’m not sure of your truculent beast, Joan, slinking and scowling about the High Street, “O.K., kill me then. Don’t bother to brake. Why should I care? It’s a dog’s life. Oh dear— near thing! Almost through the windscreen. Better be off.”

  I might be prosecuted. One of these animals could cause death. Think if they should cause the death of a child.

  And I see frenetic Vanessa screaming behind the wheel, foot hard down on the brake-pad, eyes closed, “A dog—a bloody dog!” and all three little Fishes scattered like rain-drops in the road with the number 9 bus bearing down. Amanda screaming—“Mum—Vanessa—Timmy’s dead.”

  So, off I go, carrying leads to look for them both. I leave the front door wide for Henry, who should be here in a minute, and Dulcie is watching. If a burglar comes instead of or as well as Henry she’ll be there, though her head does not look up as I pass now, quickly along under her window. The open door will reflect my genuine readiness to see Henry again and also show that I don’t mean to be long. I’ll no doubt catch up with the wretched pair at the top of the road.

  But I don’t. I cross over the main road and search round the dust-bins of the Little Greek. No dogs. At the edge of the Common I scan the terrain, but I can see no loose dogs at all today—all trot to heel, politely sniffing each others’ hind-quarters. Nothing roves. I drift for perhaps half an hour, then home again.

  Now the front door is shut. Dulcie is not to be seen at her desk. Out of the sitting-room window of my house the faces of the dogs regard me over the sill. They become wild with emotion, spring about in hysterical attitudes, disappear, reappear, bark like fiends at the wrong side of the front door. “Henry,” I call through the letter-box. “Hullo. Eliza here. Just had to go out for . . .”

  But Henry’s coffee-cream BMW, I now see, is not in the road. Through the letter-box I see no sign of him—hall table still bare of notes. Oh well. I had better go in. Why ever not?

  Because I can’t. I haven’t a key. I didn’t take one.

  So I walk casually round to the side door and the dogs are magnetised around the inside of the house in the same direction, kicking up Hades. At the side of the house all is bolted and barred. I try the door at the end of the path that leads to the back garden, and find it bolted, too.

  Now this door is never locked, so possibly a burglar has passed this way, despite Dulcie. He has made off through the back garden sealing himself off from his pursuers or, oh dear yes, perhaps Henry did call, and in a fury he has secured his abandoned house on all sides and has left again. Even the ladders are round at the back and I can’t get to them. It is becoming rather cold out here without a coat and the nectar and the scents of spring are not so balmy.

  I stroll.

  Gently, carefully, not looking anywhere in particular and certainly not anywhere near Dulcie’s bowed head, I stroll. What do I seek? A strong, large man. A strong large man with the introduction to a ladder and who is on my side. Oh, how this Road still seems to be peopled with women, Joan, who live in their houses from dawn until dark.

  Old Bernard appears upon his doorstep. He lifts a hand in salute, arranges his bicycle-clips and goes weaving away. Lola will be in. She never leaves the house. Lola and Bernard had a daughter. I knew the daughter and used to talk to her, but she was rather remote. In those days Lola used to stand at the gate to wave the daughter off to her violin classes, and would talk. Not for ages now. They say she sits in the corner of the room always facing a door like the famous picture of Beckett—the playwright not the archbishop.

  Her french-louvred blinds are heavy with dust. I look through the letter-box and the photographs of orchestras and soloists cover the walls. They are curling at the edges now, most of them. I remember little Hannah (later called Felicia) so clearly now that I feel she may come round the corner of the dark hall to answer the door. Up and down the road she used to go, agonised and silent, her violin in a black leather case much too big for her.

  Lola came to the door instead and, as ever, it is she who looks made for the concert platform. Tall, long neck, giant eyes, black oiled hair screwed back tight in a knob. It looks painted on like Olive Oyle in Popeye. She is unageing.

  The house is in semi-darkness. She has no ladder for me. There might, she thinks, be one in the shed but neither she nor Bernard has been in the shed for years. Would I like to come in and see the latest photos of Felicia from Haiti? Oh yes—touring, always touring. The photograph is far from new and surely Felicia must be much older than this by now?

  “How young she looks.”

  “Oh, it’s the life. So healthy. The wonderful audiences—and the travelling. She’s so lucky.”

  Lola settles herself i
n a corner, looking left and right. The garden taps on the window, half-way up the window. I see how unsettling the Chelsea Flower Show must have been for Bernard.

  “Lola, how you must miss her.”

  “No. I accepted it before she was seven. It’s the price she and I both pay for her genius.”

  There is dust everywhere, heaps of old clothes, empty coffee cups. Through the window I look at the little meadow blowing in the breeze. I say, “Well, it’s good that you understand. I suppose, having been a musician yourself . . .”

  “Oh, I was never a musician. I was never allowed lessons. I was never anything. But I knew, the minute I saw her as a baby in the hospital, when I touched her little hands. I have been the vehicle for Felicia, that is all. Bernard has suffered, I’m afraid. Men seldom understand.”

  We sit staring at a Victorian screen covered with yellowing concert programmes.

  “Upstairs,” she said, “I have every violin she’s ever played on, from the very first.”

  Out on her doorstep again, and the door is shut behind me. I hear bolts drawn.

  I walk on, cross the road, and as I pass the high door in her garden wall there appears Miss Ingham. She holds a small plastic bag of earth with a green sprout sticking up. We confront each other.

  Now I am aware that Miss Ingham has never thought much of me. Long ago, in the days when I wrote notes to people, she thought me an idiot, though I didn’t much care, being (I thought) directed by God. Miss Ingham is also way past ladders. Nevertheless, she is one of those in the road who does not now have letters an inch high emblazoned across her forehead saying, “Here comes Eliza, the poor thing.”

  I wonder at what point those letters began to appear? Lately they have become a virus, an epidemic.

  Miss Ingham clutches her cardigan about her and says, “I was about to take this to Anne.”

  “I could do it. I was looking for a ladder.”

  “I can find you a ladder. Are you painting something?”

  “I’m locked out.”

  “Ah,” she says, “when my lodgers come in they could help you. Or you could call the police. If you like you may use my telephone.”

  “I sent for the police last night. I’d better not.”

  “So you did,” she said, “so you did. You had better come in.”

  We sit on her covered verandah in basket chairs among the lemon-scented geraniums and she says, “I expect you’d like tea.”

  “I was expecting Henry for tea. It’s all ready on a tray. It’s a shame I can’t get in. It was a nice cake. And biscuits with stripes.”

  I saw her think, She’s playing the child.

  “Would you like some salami?” she said. “I usually eat a plate of salami at about this time of day. It’s having had Polish lodgers for so many years. Polish, Latvian, that sort of thing. Very good for me.”

  “I never see your lodgers.”

  They sleep a lot.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  They tend to work at night. One of them is a Croupier. A fascinating life, though prurient and most unhealthy. I send him jogging but he never looks really well. He has that yellow look. But then all Croupiers do.”

  She disappears into a some remote kitchen and I stare out from the verandah at the huge view to the Epsom Downs, southward where the race-horses prance and life is lush. It seems quite lush here for Miss Ingham, too—the broad sunshiny terrace without, the warm secure covered verandah within, both teeming with great pots of vegetation bursting into life. A jasmine like a feather-boa floats about the glass above my head. In an Ali Baba jar there is an orange tree with glossy leaves and five living breathing fruits. It stands beside a writing desk where there is an open accounts ledger, an ink-well, a silver pen-tray, a bottle of whisky and the photograph of a beautiful woman.

  “I was twenty,” says Isobel Ingham, moving slowly back across the verandah with the salami plate in one hand and a couple of tumblers in the other. “I have lived here for fifty years.”

  “We’ve only been here for twenty-two. Everyone else came long after us and they’re always moving. It’s strange that you and I have never really met.”

  “Well, it’s my fault as much as yours,” she said. “I don’t go about much.”

  I imagine the dazzling twenty-year-old arriving in Rathbone Road. No man. Living with parents? No marriage. Odd.

  “It’s strange how close some of us are in the Road, and some don’t know each other’s names,” I say.

  “It’s the same in all villages. All over the world.”

  “I suppose, when you came here to live, it was all very different. Very formal. Everybody keeping to themselves. Only the servants in these houses would really know each other.”

  “It wasn’t that long ago. It wasn’t crinolines, you know. I was a petty-officer in the Navy. At the beginning of the War. Have another whisky. I was put here.”

  “Put here?”

  “A far suburb. My father was a member of Parliament. I chose to keep the child and not marry the father. My own father bought me this house and washed his hands of me. Better than some cultures. In the Middle East I’d have been stoned.”

  “And,” I say, taking the ribbon off the salami disc, “and the little baby?”

  “Ah. In the end it never was. No—that I will not say. I lost it after three months of pregnancy. He was perfectly formed at three months—little arms and legs and hands and a round, opaque head like a grub. I had him here, alone. It was the maid’s day off. Nobody had told me that a spontaneous abortion—miscarriage they call it now, to make it sound neater—is exactly like a birth. One goes into labour, you know. But there is no joy.”

  “None.”

  “They counted mine a child you know. He is in the records at the Town Hall. I’m glad of that. My father wanted me to go home afterwards.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You just lived on here? No other—well, life?”

  “I paint a little—not very well. I know something about flowers and I run a lodging-house. But if you mean no other lover—then no. Oh, sometimes the lodgers, especially those from the Baltic States—so attractive. And Poles—I first met Poles in the War. Very inflammatory. But no—no love. Dear me, no. That did not happen again. I took sex where I needed it—which, if I may say so, it is sad you cannot do. It stands out a mile that you are in great bodily need. But it would not be your solution.”

  “You know nothing about me.”

  “I know about sexual needs.”

  I said, “Miss Ingham, had you married the man you loved you might have changed for one another. Lovers do. I have experience that you have not. It may be no more than changes in bodily chemistry, but then it may be more profound. You have lived in a state of romantic memory. Had you married your man, you don’t know what might have happened. Marriage can be very terrible and surprising.”

  Whereupon, Joan, most unexpectedly I began to weep. I wept and wept. I could not stop. Miss Ingham kept picking up slices of salami and examining each one before peeling it and placing it delicately in her mouth.

  “I’m not at all sure,” she said, not (Joan) even raising her voice above my sobs and yet I heard each word, “I am not at all sure of all this light talk of change. I think it can be simpler, less mystical. I think it possible that after many years some great event can come between a man and a woman that cannot be shared. A silence forms and begins to fester. Handkerchief?”

  “You can’t know. You didn’t have time for secrets to form. It was all glamour and passion and renunciation. Just the top-soil.”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “We had no time at all.”

  “You sound smug, Miss Ingham.”

  “And you sound dictatorial, Mrs. Peabody. But I have watched a lot of secrets form and fester and destroy—or come near to destroying—in the most unlikely places. Poor Anne, for example.”

  “You mean George and the mistress in Hong Kong, and creeping about after the Phi
lippinos, and everyone knowing except Anne?”

  “Of course Anne knows. She’s not the fool she makes herself out to be.”

  “You mean, we all know each other’s secrets? Unconsciously? That’s not true.”

  “No. But there is a tribal knowledge. In any small community.”

  “I got it into my head once,” I said, “that my husband was deranged, and once that he was homosexual.”

  “Most women believe both at one time or another and usually rightly. But you were wrong on both counts about Henry. You were frightened to look in the right place.”

  “However can you know? Sitting here behind that door in the wall.”

  “Oh, I see him. Or I used to see him. And I see you.”

  “You know,” I tried to say in my old brisk way and then felt it fizzle out. “You know, a year and a half ago I used to talk like that—behave like you. The wise woman of the tribe. It was a complete failure. I have learned not to make oracular pronouncements anymore. They did me and other people no good.”

  She looked disdainfully over the Surrey plain. “You were ahead of yourself,” she said. “Too young. But there’s time yet. The old women of the tribe have almost always been the wiser. If they keep their marbles long enough. Old men forget—or tend to reminisce, and reminisce falsely and sententiously as a rule. We are often very silly in our middle years but we tend to improve—as our marriages often do. Women who survive, survive better than men. It’s because our lives—our physical lives—are more dramatic.”

  “Is it because Anne won’t face George’s—well—randiness that she writes books for children?”

  Miss Ingham sat up quickly in the basket chair and turned reddish round the mouth and nostrils. “Don’t you dare patronise Anne! In her work she knows exactly what she’s doing. It’s in her life she is hopeless. She doesn’t like to look further than her books, but that is no short journey. Her books may be ahead of her—ahead of most of us. They’re a good deal more commendable than her husband.”

  “Yet I do like George,” said I, “and I can see his point. She is dull.”