The Queen of the Tambourine Read online

  “Can you? Can you indeed? And who says so? I think Anne suspects that she can see George’s point, too, in looking about him. She’s full of her own limitations. She’s a bag of false modesty and misplaced guilt and she attracts humiliation by people who ought to be honoured to know her. But don’t tell me that she needs a romance. Anne is not equipped for the torrid zone.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t say—”

  “Anymore than you are, but with you it is your great misfortune.”

  I was silent.

  “Do you feel better?” she said. “On your way home you might drop this little hybrid lilium altromerium in on Anne and save my arthritis. She could do with seeing a new face sometimes. Would you like to see to yours before you go?”

  I was not ready to go, Joan. I wanted to stay. In the 1930s white-tiled loo, with its frieze of little black triangles and mirror tapping from a long cord, I looked at the chaotic map of my life, my eyes nearly sunk away, my mouth a poor hair-pin. The earrings hung like dead birds. I wasn’t looking well.

  “You look low,” she said as I came back to the verandah, “and that is good, for you have been looking dangerously high for some time.” She wrapped another old cardigan around herself and came with me to the gate, passing me the plastic bag.

  “Thank you for . . .”

  “Not at all. I’ll send someone with a ladder.”

  “They all think I’m mad now, of course.”

  “I know. You are not mad. You are frightened.”

  “Never! I’m never frightened. Don’t even take that away from me, Miss Ingham. I’ve been fairly brave and I’ve tried to be self-sufficient. I have survived alone perfectly.”

  She leaned forward and touched my arm and smiled, and the girl of twenty, happy about the coming baby, looked out at me for a moment. “Face what you know,” she said. “Grow up.”

  I thought, Once this was my function, handing on advice. Making people of people. I looked steadily at her and said, “You sound like me, advising Joan. But I suppose you never knew Joan either. Nobody else did.”

  “Of course I knew Joan,” said Miss Ingham. “I was very fond of her.”

  “But here comes one,” she went on at her garden door, “much too young to have known her: still damp from his cocoon,” and she turned to where the laundering husband could be seen bouncing towards us up the hill, in either hand a plastic bag of supermarket groceries, a briefcase hooked over a stray finger.

  He smiled when he saw Miss Archer, called out “Hi, Isobel,” and lifted the one-bag paw.

  “So young,” she said. “He will always look young. He has such a little nose. Now then—” as he went prancing by on the other side of the road, calling good-evening to me, but skirting me, not quite looking, the letters on his forehead glowing “—now then,” she said, “Dickie—stop at once.” He sprang on for a couple of steps, turned a tight circle, came over to us and stood marking time.

  “Mustn’t stop. Ratatouille. Gabriella’s having her check-up at the hospital. May not be back yet—blood-pressure. It’s a bit of a bore. Had to take Mick with her—supper” (wagging bag) “when they get home.”

  “It can’t be long now?”

  “Any day. I packed up work tonight—paternity leave. Shan’t be back for a month. Bought plenty of food for a week.”

  “Could you help Eliza? She’s locked herself out. Have you a ladder?”

  “Gabriella’d know. Find out. Pronto—she’s probably home,” and he passed on his way, not once having looked at me.

  Joan, now and then I have my doubts about The Ancient Mariner. Now every wedding guest plods by and no mad eye glitters bright enough. The mad have become sadder, and however important the tale they have to tell, they soon cease trying. The tail and the tale get curled within them like an embryo. Locked within us. It gets more difficult to call out, “Excuse me, could you spare a key?” Oh, I dare say my eyes give off a bit of glitter, but it’s only what I was born with. Fortuitous, like Dickie, the-man-who-has-everything’s youth-giving nose.

  “In case he forgets,” said Miss Ingham, “or in case Gabriella’s time is come, you could ask across the road for a ladder when you drop this in on Anne. My Croupier may not have time before he has to leave for his casino.”

  “It’s a lily, I think,” I say to George who is standing on the terrace, looking raffish and sun-burnt from months of oriental solaria, and stirring his thick gravel with the tip of a gardening shoe. George wears the right clothes for every occasion, not of course that he gardens himself, he employs; but he counts it good manners to the flowers to appear before them in clothes they may respect. George, one feels, might walk the Common in a smock, visit The Hospice in a toga. Oh dear—I do like George. Peel off the clothes and I dare say there’s not much sinew, just a smooth stuffed tailor’s dummy of oatmeal canvas and little black tin-tack heads, and here and there a prickle of horse-hair with only a whiff of the wild: but I should rather like to stroke the odd hair on George. It’s what he wants and seldom gets, I suspect, from his Philippinos, who all look very high-minded, or from silly old Anne, mourning flown children and taken up with The Baby’s Opera.

  George has a long, lank head and an expression of sensual desolation. His sweet, weak mouth is nipped in at the corners. Something in his looks always revives in me the distant tingle. They do not recreate it but they stir a frail string. His eyes greet every woman with appeal. He hasn’t spotted yet that his appeal excites few western women now. He spends far too much time in the Orient.

  “Oh, hullo Eliza, whatever’s this?”

  “A plant from Miss Ingham for Anne.” Once I would have said, “George! How very nice! You’re home again—how lovely. I didn’t know! Anne must be pleased. And how was Indonesia?”

  Farewell that woman, that doddle-taffy woman. There she blows.

  I stand. I stick. Like a plug in a hole.

  “Do go on up. Anne’s working. Well, she’s in her room, I won’t say working. There’s some sort of crisis.”

  “It’s all right.” I put the plant down on the dwarf wall near the clusters of Provençal jars filled ready for the Robins’ annual celebration of the giant pelargonium.

  “How are you, Eliza? I’m just back. Six bloody months. Lovey you look tired. Where are the glittering eyes? Hey—”

  He comes across and puts an arm around me. “Tears? Not Eliza! Tears? Here,” and he brings out a gardener’s handkerchief thick, lineny, the colour of grass-clippings, beautifully folded. “Whatever’s Henry been doing to you? Neglecting you? Come in and have a drink.”

  “I’ve locked myself out.”

  “Then I’ll send someone with a ladder. Don’t be an idiot, sweetie—hey, aren’t you thin? Go and see Anne while I do something about the ladder. She’s having a rather bad time—well, we both are. New Philippino. Very critical of us she is,” and he gleams at me with a mixture of collusion, apprehension and lubricity.

  “And something too terrible to describe has happened to Anne on the recent Grand Book Tour. Daren’t ask for details but maybe you’ll hear. Now then—ladder.”

  I roam round their house which is standing open to both road and garden, but no Anne. Her supremo of a study is empty and the vase of Sissinghurst pinks droops on the desk.

  “Anne?” I call. “Anne? Hullo?” I start to wander the garden. “Anne? Anne?”

  Down near the asparagus bed stands a meaningful-looking shed and I look through its window where at a potting-bench which is draped in cloth-like cobwebs Anne sits glaring at a hose-pipe hanging on the back of the door. A virgin notebook lies on the bench, with several biros beside it and some trays of seed compost. I tap on the glass and she turns a bleak face to me. No glitter there—but no true grief either. Take heart, Eliza, you can cope with this. Such albatrosses as she knows are chicks.

  A look of disappointment changes Anne’s blank face for the moment, and for the worse, but I am glad to see that it is Eliza she is looking at, not mad Eliza. No letters on that br
ow. She stares at me, then looks away.

  The door is locked. I begin to try and make myself heard through the glass. After a time she leans forward and struggles with the window-catch. The top of the shed window tilts outwards with a painful cracking and several spiders come tearing out, falling over each other in haste to reach salt-free air.

  “George said I was to look for you, Anne. Sorry.” (Why was I sorry?) “Is it the new au pair?”

  Anne looks sharp for a second, then resigned. I am a loony—no point talking. She turns her face away. But I feel light suddenly, for I’d asked an objective question and George had not been simply pitying when he had dabbed my tears. “Anne, can’t you tell me? Remember all you told me that day you came round and we talked in the kitchen. The day I went to your Literary Tea. All you told me about your career?”

  “Career,” she cried. “Career,” and crashed her face in the seed-trays.

  “You’ve been to America, Miss Ingham says. I’m sure you were a huge success.”

  “What does Miss Ingham know. Oh, marriage!”

  “But George wasn’t with you in America.”

  “I’m talking about marriage and my literary career. I’m talking about loneliness. I could never tell him . . . Or the children. Never.”

  “Well, I’m afraid I can’t know about children, but . . .”

  “I had a terrible time, Eliza, terrible. No—not the Children’s Book Tour, that was super. There were tens of thousands in the audiences and our photographs all blown up much bigger than life-size round the Carnegie Hall. Even my ear was about two feet long, and we went to Boston where there’s a college where all they do is children’s books. They take degrees in them. Well wonderful. Well, if you want to know . . .”

  “I can’t hear you, Anne. Your face is in the soil.”

  “I don’t care what my face is like. I don’t care about my looks. Eleanor Farjeon was a very plain woman and so was Beatrix Potter.”

  “But what happened?”

  After an age she lifts her head, swivels sideways, drops her face in her hands and sits like a tired Catholic priest who has heard one confession too many. Outside among the asparagus fern I sink to my knees in the penitential position and lean my ear towards the refugee spiders. Role reversal.

  She is still.

  I wonder after a very long time if she has fallen into a fit. I even wonder if she is on some drug or other that someone has recommended in America, though drugs didn’t really sound part of the Children’s Book World—you never know, of course. Pixie Leak had seemed a little strange. A little tranced.

  “It was New York,” Anne suddenly shrieks. “I should never have gone to New York. I only went because they said it would be useful. Useful to me as an Adult Writer. To meet an Adult Publisher. I’ve sold an Adult Novel, you see, to America. It was sold actually ages ago and it’s been out for months and not a single review. So they said, here in London—my editor, Bessie Bilbury—she said I ought to make myself known to the Adult World, and I did, and they asked me to lunch.”

  “But that was nice.”

  “They told me the restaurant and the day and the time, and I spent hours and hours getting ready so that I wouldn’t look like a children’s writer. I put on a big shawl like Margaret Drabble and a simple aertex shirt like Susan Hill and some thigh-length boots, and took a taxi and got there ten minutes early. I thought early looks efficient so I went in and it was gorgeous—in Fifth Avenue shadowy and pale and only seven tables in creamy marble and expensive flowers and waiters more like Claridges than America well, I don’t have to tell you, Eliza. You’ve been everywhere with Henry. It’s all humdrum to you, but it isn’t to me. The head-waiter came up and looked for a long time in a black book—a programme thing of the reservations—and furrowed his brow.”

  “He furrowed his brow?”

  “Then he said, ‘Come this way,’ and put me at the best table in the restaurant, right in the middle of the window-tables, and gave me a cool little smile. There was only one other person in the restaurant, it was so early. He was at the next table and he said, ‘Hi—you look happy,’ and he was so friendly I said, ‘Yes, I am. I’m here to have lunch with my American publisher. I’m English,’ and he said, ‘You don’t say.’ He honestly did—spoke the words, ‘You don’t say.’ Then he said, ‘Is this your first book, then?’ So of course I told him that I’d been all over America touring and reading my works. He said, ‘Have you written many books?’ so I told him the truth, ninety-four—I didn’t say they were for children, well, why should I? He asked my name then and then he asked, ‘And what name do you write under?’ We’re all used to that from the philistine masses so I gave him the look they all get when they ask it and said with the unspoken words very clear in the air, poor fish, you’re not exactly in the know are you? Aloud I said, ‘My own.’

  “So the time passed and his friends arrived and I could hear they were all talking about publishing. All the other tables filled up except mine, and I sat and sat. And the maître d’hôtel came up and asked if I’d like to order and I said I’d wait a bit longer, but it was now three-quarters of an hour since I’d arrived and I asked, ‘Do you by any chance know Miss Gobbet’s telephone number?’ and he said, ‘I do. She comes here three times a week.’ I said, ‘Do you think that I might telephone?’ and he said, looking away, ‘Yes, you could do that.’ And I sat.

  “And the friendly man leaned over and said, ‘Could we four tempt you to a glass of Bordeaux?’ and they were all looking sorry for me, and so kind that I could bear no more. I mean—oh, confused. I mean, America’s meant to be so tough and ruthless and these men behaving like the most terrific gents. And American publishers all meant to be so efficient, never missing a trick, never muddling anything. That’s supposed to be us. I looked at the letter in my bag and I hadn’t got the date or the place wrong—oh Eliza! Eliza! Not bothering to turn up!

  “So I went to the telephone which was by the maître d’hôtel’s desk and there was a dim gold lamp and a vase of lilies and the maître d’ stood looking at me. And everyone in the restaurant could hear.

  “I phoned Miss Gobbet—I mean it was Grizelda Gobbet. She’s a legend. Oh, and Eliza! The girl on the publisher’s switchboard said, ‘Speak louder can’t you?’ and I had to shout, and silence fell all over the restaurant. And then—oh—then Grizelda Gobbet answered and you could hear her eating. She was smacking her lips and crackling papers and she said, ‘Chrissake—I clean forgot. Can we make it tomorrow?’

  “So I ran out. Right out. And there was a taxi and I stood for oh, Eliza!—for a fraction of a second and the driver said, ‘Look at it this way, are you getting in or aren’t you? Just get inside.’

  “So I didn’t. I walked all the way back to the hotel, about seven miles, between those canyon walls, and there were lunatics everywhere, some of them on roller-skates playing Russian roulette with the traffic, and there were other people fighting and looking like the Marx Brothers or Woody Allen—everybody acting, Eliza. Continental-looking people working themselves into a sweat being comedians on street-corners, sweet-talking, behaving like an opera and I reached the hotel and oh . . .

  “I couldn’t go in. I just couldn’t go in. Not at three o’clock in the afternoon. What could I do there? It’s failure to be back in a hotel at three in the afternoon. They look at you at the reception, pretending not to see. So I just went on walking. I walked right past and on and on until I came to a sign saying that I was near the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And I thought, well, at least I’ll be able to say I went there. Pathetic—oh, pathetic, Eliza! I began to go over speeches to everyone at home. ‘Yes I did. I got to the Met. of Art. Yes—I only had forty-eight hours in New York and of course these American publishers work you very hard, but I was absolutely determined to get there and . . . Waah!

  “I went up the steps of the Museum and the glass wall of doors was locked and there was a notice saying ‘No strollers.’ All I wanted to do was stroll—I mean, what sort of a
museum—? I wanted to stroll and gaze and forget Miss Gobbet and the restaurant and look at the Renoirs and think of peasant France. So I tried to shout through the glass at the attendant, who carried a gun, ‘Could I just be allowed in this once, to stroll?’ and he stared at me and turned his back. Just turned his great fat back. And then a black person sitting by the fountains, though they weren’t working, I mean playing, dressed in a silver wet-suit and his hair in ropes, he said, ‘They’re not open today, Ma’am. It’s Tuesday,’ so I walked away. I walked all the way back to the hotel and didn’t go anywhere else that day or in the evening. I had room-service and lay on the bed.”

  “But didn’t you—? I think this is awful.”

  “Oh yes. Oh, yes! The next morning, Eliza, I woke up remembering who I was, and George and the children and how I am not dependent on the United States of America in any possible way. I thought about England and the Road and everything and how lousy the Americans were to us after the War when they stopped lease-lend and we were all eating whale-meat. And how they think they won the War and took over all our air-bases and then went and made that amateur mess in Vietnam and all the army went on drugs, they were so scared. So I rang her again. I put on an ice-cold voice and Gobbet said, quite easy and pleasant,

  “‘Hi, sorry ’bout yesterday. Glad to be seeing you today.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, Miss Gobbet, but I will not go back to that restaurant. I was humiliated,’ and she said, ‘Oh fine. Fine. Why don’t you come round here and see the office?’

  “So I went—dressed in my Jean Muir coat and pearls—and it was utterly empty. I got there a bit late on purpose, but there wasn’t a sign of life in all the acres of little cardboard booths they work in—all out eating. Miss Gobbet’s desk had nothing on it but her nail-varnish and a collection of cartons of health-foods. There were no books anywhere. She started looking about, not saying what she was doing, opening and shutting drawers, and after a time she found a copy of my book in the back of one of them, very shiny and as if it hadn’t been opened. She said, ‘There you are. Isn’t it great? I had a hand in the jacket myself. Don’t you think it looks great?’