The Queen of the Tambourine Read online

  They went off down the street with the Kurd in the direction of the tube and I suppose London nightlife, making a great deal of noise. After dinner we watched the News and I said, “Charles, how can you be so calm after all that’s happened?” Henry said, “Charles is a calm man.” Then I said—I dare say it was the liquid from the flask—“But how can you be calm, Charles, with your wife en route for Himalayan territory in your Volvo, and this extraordinary man here to collect her jewellery?”

  Charles looked very down, Joan, when I said this and he and Henry went across to the Church. After a while your friend—friend, Joan, your lover, I wasn’t born yesterday—returned alone and behaved in a very obvious way, trying to push me upstairs towards a bedroom. Fortunately Henry and Charles reappeared about then and made him go to bed on the drawing-room sofa. In the morning he was still there, and immobile, with half the bottles from the drinks cupboard lying about him. We packed him off, still half-tight, at about three o’clock this afternoon, i.e. a few minutes ago, and he is head in hands on the front doorstep as I finish this letter. Then he is leaving.

  I said, “Charles, you can’t, you can’t let him take her jewels. She is bleeding you dry—your car and so on.” Charles then said, “She’s chucked the car and bought a jeep”—just like that. So he must have been in touch with you and I think I might have been told before.

  Anyway, I am feeling very miserable and shall end this letter,

  Sincerely,

  Eliza

  November 10th

  Dear Joan,

  Three months have passed and I am writing to Thailand in the hope that this is your next port of call. I dare say that you will have stayed some time in Kurdistan to await your jewellery. I was too sick for some time—sick at heart—to write about the end of that bizarre episode.

  But perhaps now.

  After finishing a letter to you, which I wonder if you will ever see, I walked out on to the doorstep to hand over the packet to the Kurd. Charles had brought over from across the road the little Victorian lacquer box from your bedroom mantelpiece, leaving, no doubt, a sad little gap among the pot-pourri bowls, the enamel-faced clock, the patch-box that says “My love I’ll treat with kisses sweet.” Oh, DO YOU NOT REMEMBER THESE, Joan? Poor old Charles!

  I poured the jewels out into a sacking coffee-bag from Harrods, with a drawstring, and, as I did so, Charles and Henry as one man rose and left. They did not speak to the Kurd as they stepped over him, holding out their briefcases before them as they went, talking nonchalantly together. I said to the Kurd, who seems to have no name, “I don’t know how you intend to get these through the Customs I’m sure,” and he proved that he knew some English because he opened the emerald green dress he was wearing above his breeches to reveal his chest and hung the bag in among the hair. Then he kissed my hand and went away. Richard Baxter opposite put a shielding arm round Dulcie as they both came home from shopping.

  Joan.

  Joan—I’m not really, altogether, the fool I make myself out to be.

  I ham myself up, don’t I?

  Joan, I’m frightened. I don’t know why.

  Joan, don’t you think you should at least ring Charles from somewhere? He’s such a good man.

  Love, Eliza

  Nov 20th?—I don’t know

  Dear Joan,

  It is three in the morning and I am alone in the house because Henry and Charles have gone away on a Diocesan Weekend Theology Course. The lights are out at thirty-four.

  Joan, I have to tell you something. I am in love with Charles.

  Please, please come back. I didn’t want this to happen. I have nobody to consult, only the nuns and the Dying.

  I don’t want to be a husband-stealer.

  Eliza

  Nov?, Saturday

  Dear, dear Joan,

  I am absolutely overcome by the wonderful present that has just arrived from Cambodia. I cannot imagine how you reached Angkor Wat and hope you are being careful. The situation there has never been stable in twenty or more years. I never got there. I always longed.

  I have never in my life possessed anything so beautiful as this glorious golden robe. I sit clutching it and stroking it. No word except “from Joan”—I do wish you had written a letter. I do so want to hear about the Kurd and if you got the earrings and pearls safely. I expect you sold them if you can buy such glamorous presents. Charles never mentions how he thinks you can be managing for money. Simon, when I once asked, said, “No problem, she nicked the cutlery,” but I will not believe that.

  Oh Joan, what a dress! I simply don’t know when I shall wear it. I suggested to Henry that we might get tickets for Glyndehourne next year, just the three of us, but he and Charles stood staring at me as if I was mad. They are both growing more ascetic day by day. When they left for work this morning, I went across the road to find Sarah who is home for a few days, and there she was, all alone far down in the garden by the summer house, out on the sittingplace playing her flute among the dahlias and late, late roses, all the bees still humming, winter forgotten to arrive.

  The flute stopped in the middle of a bar. She said, “Eliza!”

  I said, “Oh do go on, Sarah, it was lovely,” and she said, “Not until I’m over the shock.” She walked all round me and said, “She sent me one, too, but yours is better. Lucky old you. Where’s Henry taking you to in that—the Churchmen’s Society Ball?”

  So I had to laugh that off.

  Thank you very, very much, Joan, most sincerely and affectionately,

  Eliza

  December 25th

  Dear Joan,

  It is Christmas afternoon and I am writing at the far end of the drawing room looking out at the garden all covered in snow. The road is very quiet, most people being away with their families elsewhere, or walking off their Christmas dinner on the Common. I spent Christmas Eve with the Dying. They always make a big effort on Christmas Eve—the nuns, I mean. It’s quite jolly. On Friday was the Wives’ Fellowship Christmas Party and I wore your dress. Unfortunately Henry couldn’t take me as there was a party at work. Charles was attending a similar one, so I went alone as a “help” and served at the Buffet. Lots of people complimented me on the dress and some—but not all—I told where it had come from. I did not tell the ones I feel will still be very upset by what you have done.

  I came home alone and rather late, after the clearing up, and as the car wouldn’t start I had to walk. Have I told you about my new car? It is one that Henry bought me on Charles’s advice. Charles is not exactly a mechanically minded man, is he? Or rather, he has something of a mechanical mind but does not apply it to mechanical things. Also, he isn’t a very talkative man, is he? Not that I’m used to talkative men. Henry over the years has grown more and more silent and, as this is going to he a very momentous letter, Joan, I shall be as outspoken as I was in the fatal note I sent you in the spring.

  I think that the time has come to tell you that Henry is not really fitted out for marriage. This is not the reason why we have no children. That was an academic decision taken years ago. All the mechanical equipment is still there, perfectly normal, as far as I can tell of course. I haven’t seen it for years and the only other I have seen, at least looked squarely in the face, so to speak, is on Michelangelo’s David in Florence, which is of course marble and upsettingly larger than life. What I have come to face has nothing to do with all that sort of thing. Henry does not see women as of any particular interest. He is without curiosity. I said to him once, “Women are governed by the moon,” and his face became taut with distaste. He said, “I am afraid, Eliza, that you want the moon,” and I said, “Well, in love, yes I do,” and he vigorously shook out The Times.

  Soon after our honeymoon he stopped seeing me as something good to touch, Joan, even though in those days people turned in the street to look as I went by. When men sometimes sent me flowers—well, it was usually just duty, after an invitation to dinner—he would open the door on them and say, “Eliza—flowers
. Have you seen the dog’s lead?”

  After the first few months lying down together was very like being upon a Church tomb, knight and lady, hand in hand perhaps, but legs crossed, noses skyward. At some moment in any marriage surely, surely, one thinks of the other as a person apart? A woman should be her very self to her husband, interesting to him always even if only as the woman he once loved, chose, negotiated for, was scooped up by or at the very least considered to be adequate. Not Henry. I remember the two of us in our first house in St. John’s Wood in the early sixties. It was scarcely lived in, we were on our travels so much, but I remember our being very happy then because of a delightful feeling of security and promise. It was working. It had not been just an Oxford romance, ending in the usual mess. It was a good time. But already I was no longer special.

  Last year we had new beds. You remember—I know you do for it was when I first became interested in you. I saw you standing watching as they were being delivered. Then you quickly jumped in your car.

  It is a solemn moment, Joan, when the first marriage bed is carried away. Farewell that battlefield, farewell those hills and dales. “Farewell green fields and happy groves where nymphs have ta’en delight.” Henry was not precisely a nymph. I still feel—no felt—I could be.

  Henry arranged the new beds at opposite ends of the room and said, “Doesn’t that look better? They might have been made to measure. Perfect fit.” And they did. And they were. But I cannot help feeling, Joan, that there was something blinkered in that statement.

  I spoke to Henry about this. I told him, at about the same time I wrote you a silly letter saying that I was in love with Charles which I hope you never received. Not that it matters because I can imagine what you thought when/if you read it: “Let’s just wait.”

  You are right. I now know so much more about what you must have been through these past years with Charles.

  Well, after the beds, Henry started going to thousands of prayer-meetings all over London and the suburbs, even to North London. I noticed that he had gone off eggs. It was a joke between us. They were his schoolboy passion. His mother used to say, “Lucky girl, you won’t have to cook a thing, you can always feed him eggs.” This I thought a vaguely disgusting remark, but she was a vaguely disgusting woman. Well, may God forgive me, for she’s dead. Anyway, he went off them.

  Then I perceived that he seemed to have gone off food altogether. He picked about. But he drank. How he drank. And how he kept on drinking. For a while. Then first the late-night whiskies went and then the wine. For some weeks he sat downstairs, drinking and then not drinking, after I had gone to bed, listening to his tapes. There was a particular Requiem—I can’t remember which, but it wasn’t Lloyd Webber. It surged through the house, a baleful and eternal sorrow. From number thirty-four came the jangled chords of Simon’s and Sarah’s cacophonous equivalents. The notes merged. They rose and sank, and the people of Rathbone Road listened. Sometimes Charles left number thirty-four and sat with Henry in the study, listening to the Requiems, too.

  Then, after a while, it must have been about September, Henry stopped drinking. Altogether. For a long time he had been absentminded about sex. It had always been very much now and then. A hit and miss, half-hearted business. One felt the strains of the Requiem sifting through his being. He flopped out like a flag on a windless day and after a while sex stopped altogether. I didn’t like to say anything. I did once say on a sharp blue morning as I got out of bed, “Remember Gascony?” but all he said, grey-faced, was, “Eliza, we are old people now.”

  At The Hospice the patients noticed that I was looking low. My favourite, Barry, said, “You look as if you need a cuddle. You should be in here with me,” and lifted the sheet. He laughed because I blushed. He got it out of me—what was wrong. Well, not really. I didn’t tell him all. He just said, “Gone off the boil, has he, the Elder Statesman? Maybe,” he said, “you have stopped liking him.”

  Oh, Joan, that set me thinking. It set me weeping. Barry kept on handing me tissues from a box. I said, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” and he said, “I do, old cock. You haven’t started yet.”

  “Just not started,” he said, and shut his eyes. “Life,” he said. “Think it out. Don’t ask so many questions and, Eliza, don’t talk so much. Just get started living before I stop.”

  Well, after going off sex, Henry went off me. Completely. That’s the only way to describe it. He winced and looked away when I blew my nose. Shut his eyes in pain when I spoke on the telephone to my friends. Each evening I’d hear the click of the front door and from the kitchen or the top of the stairs I’d see him come padding into the house like a cat, put down his briefcase and look in the hall mirror. Very drearily, Joan. “Ahem, ahem,” he would say.

  At first he would grunt in my direction before sitting down in his study with the door shut behind him. One evening he came home carrying an electric kettle and an electric fire. No word. Soon there was a little stove. A “Baby Belling.” He began to sleep in the study after that.

  I walked over to thirty-four, oh, three months ago, to talk to Charles about it. I rang the bell. No reply, so I walked round to the garden, looking through the windows. Everywhere shut up, Joan. Joan—if you could see your drawing room. Not that it is messy; or—with Simon and Sarah both away most of the time there is no one to make a mess. Charles’s life is passed in a crusade against mess. “Pyjamas are put in the drawer marked pyjamas,” etc. Pressing my forehead to the kitchen window I saw that there are labels and memos everywhere, saying “Dustbin Bags.” “More Weed-killer.” And “Dahlias in by Friday.”

  But the house is dead. Dead. All tidy and silent and dead. Thick with dust because Angela went months ago. She said it gave her the creeps and she kept seeing you about, pre- the leg-iron, laughing and calling as you ran down the stairs, longlegged out of the front door to the car. “Ghosts,” she said. “I’d say she’s in the house somewhere, buried in the cellar,” but I made her apologise for that. I walked sadly back to your front door and humbly rang the bell again, and quite quickly this time Charles answered. At the open door he stood, solemn. He did not invite me in. I told him just a little about Henry, and he was no use at all. I said, “I’m sorry to bring you my problems when you have so many of your own.”

  “My own?”

  “Joan.”

  “Bugger Joan,” he said.

  I was sick, sick Joan, sick with the shock.

  “Bugger Joan,” he said and shut the door in my face.

  Well, the upshot is that, this Christmas afternoon, Henry has gone off to live with Charles.

  They told me after Christmas dinner. Charles did the telling while Henry was upstairs getting his belongings together and when Henry came down Charles said, “I’ve told her, Henry,” and Henry looked down at his shoes. Russell and Bromley. I’d not long ago gone all the way to Piccadilly to the repairer with them and back a month later to collect them. An hour’s journey each way. He said, “I’m sorry, Eliza. I’ll write. Are you—you are all right, aren’t you?”

  “The less said at this stage the better,” said Charles, easing him forward. “I’ll bring him back in the New Year to talk about arrangements.” And they went.

  I watched them from the window—the front window on to the road, not this back window where I sit writing, looking out at the snowy garden, the branches of the tall trees ridged with snow and the birds’ footmarks making pricky patterns on the lawn. Outside the front window all the snow is messed about and brown, where people—Gillespies and Hardwicks and Gargerys and Oatses and Baxters and Robins—had gone off after breakfast for their Christmas dinners, most of them loading their cars with children. I thought how glad I was that Simon and Sarah had gone off skiing. With luck, all this will be over by the time they come back.

  I mean—Joan! It’s madness. I mean they’re neither of them, you know, pansies. Homos. “Gays” we have to say now. I never knew human beings less gay than Charles and Henry, in any way. Though of c
ourse one can never be sure. It’s all a matter of genetic soup. But I mean, they’re both so cerebral. What will the Treasury and H’s people think? Perhaps it’s just an old-fashioned thing like Holmes and Watson. They’re both pretty Victorian after all. Why shouldn’t two men live together? Two women can’t live together now without everyone assuming they roll about in one bed. If Charles or Henry were widowed they are exactly the sort who would love to live in Albany. But side by side. There are men who sit dreaming of this as they watch their wives iron their shirts, plan their menus, answer their letters, never wondering “and who would do all this then?” How do I know all this? I, impossible Eliza, Queen of the Suburban Realm? I know it.

  I mean, Joan. Think of them side by side in a bed together. Or more than that!

  They are cast in the mould of their fathers, Joan. Men of some power believing that somewhere there is a privileged, exclusive male world with butlers and old money, shooting parties you don’t have to pay to attend, High Tables at which you sit for hours over the port and never need to speak of or to the working class. D’you know something, Joanio? They’re right. There is.

  It is a world where you only know a very few people and they so like yourself there is no need of words, only the communication of familiar noises. That’s why this sort of Englishman is still there, and so happy, still blinking in his London club, because whenever he sets eyes on the other blinking figures in their deep chairs he is looking in the glass. The size of those temples in Pall Mall, Joan! Kremlins. The women allowed in the servants’ quarters of some of them have to eat apart, from a separate kitchen so dirty that the plate comes up with the table-mat when the waiter comes to take it away. Somewhere in these male clubs, beyond the political negotiations, the mumbling at the national News, there are ghosts—long-dead cricketers each with his great gold beard. And, somewhere in the heads of ruminative members is an adoring idle woman who means “WOMAN,” the help-meet, the set-piece, the accoutrement, looking like their mothers. They would all deny this, but it is true, and I only realised it today.