The Queen of the Tambourine Page 21

  I said to her, “Of course we’re quite out of touch now. But I loved the Middle East. I’m sick at all I hear.”

  “What do you hear?”

  “We still have friends there. And we read the papers. And—for instance the other day, outside Marks and Spencer there was a group of girls with a book of photographs. Some were veiled, some weren’t. They carried a collecting box and showed the photographs to people coming out of the store. The photographs were of young men—well, teenaged boys, being hanged from scaffolds in the streets. Sometimes a whole row of them—and people in the market going about their business, or watching. In some of the photographs the boys were hanging dead. There were other photographs, with the boys still standing waiting. There were some girls, too. They were children some of them—not much older than your own.”

  “The photographs were fakes. Did you give them money?”

  “I gave them twenty pounds, but that was nothing. I should have given them everything I had. No regime can be good that hangs children.”

  “They were only beggars, those people outside Marks and Spencer. They were English people. The photographs were fakes.”

  Mrs. Penumbra was suddenly gone. I came to my senses and thought, I must never tell Henry. The wife of Henry talking politics, breaking the first spider-web thread of understanding! I went to find Angela, who was lurking in the hall, to see if I had dreamed Mrs. Penumbra, she was gone so fast—this was in the days when I had little trouble in this direction. I had few waking dreams.

  “Angela—was she real?”

  “Real she was,” said Angela, “but I never saw anybody gone so white.”

  I didn’t tell Henry of the visit. I tried not to think of it. I was ashamed. I felt guilt and fright and couldn’t say why. I knew that there was something worrying about the visit from Mrs. Penumbra so soon after her husband had mentioned to mine that I spoke Farsee.

  One evening in spring, Henry and I came home from a walk on the Common to find Mr. and Mrs. Penumbra, the fat boy and two small girls all standing at our door, Mrs. Penumbra holding a great dish of caviar standing in an even bigger dish of ice.

  The girls carried trays with toast and forks and napkins and lemons. The whole family swept into our house with us in a troupe and arranged everything on the gold and glass table, and Henry said—we blinked at the superb quality of the caviar—“I shall find some champagne.”

  Then he said, “Oh dear, I do beg your pardon. That was worthy of Eliza. I forgot.” He turned to the children and said, “We are not Muslim you see. We do drink alcohol and with caviar we drink champagne because we think it is the most perfect wine with the most perfect food. They go together.”

  “Like fish and chips,” said the boy.

  “He likes fish and chips,” said one of the girls.

  “He likes McDonalds,” said the other and both Penumbra parents for a moment looked furious. Mr. Penumbra recovered very fast, though, and laughed. He said, “Perhaps just tonight I might drink champagne. I dare say not my wife. Not quite.”

  “No,” she said, “I celebrate with champagne of my mind. Champagne of the heart only. It is enough for me.”

  They rose to go, taking their trays, and we went with them to the gate when Mr. Penumbra without warning grabbed at, clutched, then clung to Henry’s hand and held it against his own chest. We saw that both Mr. and Mrs. Penumbra were weeping.

  “We learned today,” said Mr. Penumbra, “that our son has been released from the death-cell. He has been there for fourteen months. I have worked for him and worked for him. Writing, writing. Working for our country. He is now only under house arrest. A teacher, as I am. As I was. He is twenty-one years old.”

  “It has been fourteen months,” said Mrs. Penumbra. “Fourteen.”

  On their top step, as they looked for their keys and the children pushed each other about and larked with the trays, Mrs. Penumbra turned and eased the knot beneath her chin. She said, “Thank you for your kindness.”

  We saw none of them ever again. Mr. Penumbra was killed shortly afterwards in the car that had stood so long unused. The wheels were unsafe, which was not surprising. The police called on us—which is how we knew; the accident had been far from home—to ask about Mr. Penumbra, and if we knew of his having enemies of any kind, for the wheels looked as if all the nuts on the hub caps had been systematically loosened.

  We heard nothing at all of Mrs. Penumbra and the children except that they had not been with Mr. Penumbra in the car. They disappeared like water down a sluice.

  The house was put up for sale, was sold, sanitised, gentrified, deadened and became invisible to us in another way. To me it is like a darkness over my right eye as I stand in the window, a cataract creeping. The shadow of a shadow in this eventless street.

  “Eliza—you are not listening to me,” said Dulcie. “Look, do buck up a bit. Shall I come across and see you? Hullo?”

  I looked round the room—the sugar basin on the tray on the gold and glass table, the sugar-tongs. I felt some old sad occasion stirring, not the Penumbras only, but dozens and dozens of times, all gone. And slow, slow nineteenth-century summers. “I don’t like it in here this afternoon,” I said, “there are ghosts about. Can I come and see you?”

  “I’m adding up marks and we’re off to the theatre soon. I can’t give you long. Oh well—yes of course.”

  “Have a drink,” said old Richard, opening the front door wide on me and his lions. “She’s just a bit busy with the final stages. Won’t be long.”

  We sat with the clearest, driest sherry poured into the clearest smallest glasses, and Richard sipped. I tried to remember what Barry calls fino sherry. Hen’s piss.

  “I beg your pardon,” said Richard, “what did you say?”

  “Just this—I’m sorry to butt into your evening. I expect you’re just as busy as Dulcie.”

  “Oh no, I clear the decks for Dulcie when she’s marking papers. Clear the metaphorical decks. I never feel retired, you know, at her examination times—but no, nothing like so busy as she is. It’s all pleasure for me. We discuss the questions. It’s good for me,” he sipped. “Just at present I’m giving a lot of attention to Christabel.”

  I said, “Have you met the new Philippino at the Robins’? She looks very fierce. By the way, George is home.”

  He looked long and soberly at me.

  “You have a grasshopper mind, Eliza.” I saw him deliberate whether to say, “I must ask you to concentrate please on the matter put to you,” in the voice he must have used for forty years in court, or whether, because I am not a reliable witness, to lure me carefully back to the subject so that I shall not be embarrassed to find that I have strayed. He took a millilitre of sherry. I wondered if Christabel was the cat.

  “I didn’t know you had another cat.”

  “We haven’t.”

  “Oh I’m sorry.”

  “There’s no need to be sorry that we haven’t a cat. No need at all. I am far from sorry. Hairs everywhere.”

  “D’you know what Anne Robin was asked by her American publisher? If she’d write a book about a cat.”

  “Really? I don’t call that particularly interesting, Eliza. I thought she wrote about all kinds of small creatures. There aren’t any hairs on your chair are there?”

  “No. I’m sure there aren’t. It’s leather.”

  “I’m sorry if there are still signs of the old cat. I really do hope not. It’s what we had a long battle about. We both became very upset about it. It was dreadful to have the old animal about the place knowing that very shortly it would all be over for him. I saw to it in the end. Dulcie isn’t domestic, you know. More sherry?”

  “Well, yes please.”

  “This is a very rare sherry.” He poured a third of an inch into each of our glasses and looking through the side of his own glass, holding it high, said again, “Not a bit domestic. Hopeless cook. At Girton it was part of her charm.”

  “Girton isn’t a very domestic place.”


  “Ah, but you could have seen, wherever we had met, that she would never be domestic. She had a fine mind. Sharp as a scimitar. Enchanting. Far ahead of her time.”

  “You were ahead of yours too, Richard. Not to mind,” I tried not to look at the layer of dust that coated everything like soft grey plush. “How’s Dulcie’s hay-fever?” I asked and again saw him think, Her mind is all over the place.

  “I am basically rather domestic,” I said. “It comes and goes. I don’t mind mess. Clean mess. I don’t like smells though,” and I thought, This is the most pointless conversation I have ever had in my life even in Washington. I shouldn’t have come. Just because I was frightened of the tea-tray.

  I began to try and analyse my feelings about the tea-tray.

  “Smells?” he said. “I do hope there are no smells here? One thing I can’t stand is the smell of cat. Especially when it has been dead for some time.”

  “But, didn’t you take it to the vet?”

  “I mean” (he seemed to be thinking nostalgically of the death-penalty for his wife’s friends) “I mean the smell of a cat that hangs about when the cat is—oh good gracious me, Eliza, you know what I mean.”

  “I’m quite sure, Richard, that Christabel never smelled.”

  “Christabel? Christabel’s not a cat. It’s a poem. By Coleridge.”

  But he got up all the same and started padding about, sniffing.

  “Oh for goodness sake, Richard,” said Dulcie, pouncing in, “I’m sure Eliza knows her Coleridge.”

  “I don’t, you know, Dulcie. How strange though—I was thinking about The Ancient Mariner today. I don’t know much about Coleridge though, not really.” For some reason I then added, “Not reelly.” To round things off I then said, “Cock.” They looked non-plussed.

  I said, “Why isn’t non-plussed minussed? Or just nought?”

  “Minussed? Nought?”

  “You both look minussed.”

  Pouring Dulcie an enormous brandy and soda, Richard took the decision to soldier on as if I were my old self—or even Henry. More likely Henry, he used to like a disputation with Henry. “We’ve been having something of a stinger in this year’s Mock,” he said. (“Ha—much better,” said Dulcie. “Needed that.”) “To do with the difference between the fancy and the imagination. Coleridge of course has the reputation for self-indulgence. Opium and suchlike. Yet in his poetry he resolutely, resolutely suppresses the fancy. He destroyed all verse that even touched the periphery of the fancy, delicate, delicious though it might be, in order to let in the full flow of the deep, true, creative imagination. He was his own harshest scourge, you know. There is nothing to fear from the power of the imagination, Eliza,” and he looked at the darkening evening through the sherry glass. “But the fancy, oh the fancy—it is a false star.”

  “It must be tiring being a poet,” I said. “Like being a religious. I’m very fond of The Ancient Mariner but I’m glad I don’t have to try and work out how he did it anymore.”

  “And,” said Richard, turning to me his pursy face, his careful lips, “fancy to the non-poet, after childhood, has to be cast out like seven devils. Hallucinations are not always produced by drugs you know, or by brain-disease. They are often wilfully conjured. They are very dangerous and frightening to all. They used to cause belief in witches. They are destructive. They can destroy the personality. Cut us off from our fellows and the real world.”

  “I don’t think of Coleridge as being cut off. Wasn’t he a great talker? Didn’t most people adore him? And when there was nobody congenial about—and even when there was, didn’t he just go on talking on paper? I mean letters. How nice—I do remember something about him after all.”

  “Coleridge,” said Dulcie, “was Coleridge. I’ve been aware of that all day. I’m sick of him—poet or no poet. There was real lack of moral fibre there. I’m a Wordsworthian.”

  I thought, Oh how I want you, Barry-boy! You and the racing track. I hate culture. I want the Fair.

  “Yes?” asked Richard. “Yes?”

  “Yes what?” I must have missed a bit. I said, “But why are you so angry, Richard? So judgmental? Judge—mental? Judges are mental.”

  Dulcie said, “Oh, don’t you understand, Eliza? I know you understand. We’re all so worried about you. Hallucinations.”

  “What hallucinations?”

  “Well—for example all this about your dogs.”

  “Is that the time? I must go. You’ve reminded me. They have to go out. Joan’s dog is such a menace.”

  “Think very carefully,” Richard said at the door, holding the wheel of the Yale, making me wait and look in his face, his other kind hand under my elbow. “Just think, Eliza. Think. Quietly. Don’t feel. Now then—dogs?”

  I said, “But you were imagining cats,” and I saw them turn to one another as I ran down the steps.

  Finding my front-door key at the top of my own steps I think, Dogs, cats—what an afternoon! Dogs, cats, American publishers, spontaneous abortions and violinists; yet Dulcie says that I must widen my horizons. I don’t think I can bear anything more today.

  Whatever is this?

  For the garage of my neighbour has suddenly opened its clattering mouth and Deborah’s car appears. It does not get gobbled up between the iron jaws but stops outside in the Road. Ivan emerges from the back seat and together he and Deborah almost lift from the seat beside the driver’s little Mr. Deecie, hunched like a wounded man inside his long dark coat. Ivan pauses to lock the car but Deborah yells, “Don’t do that now, you fool. You can do it later. Come here and help,” and Ivan jumps to it.

  Each takes an arm of Mr. Deecie and lifts him up the steps. He looks boneless, like a Guy Fawkes, and they look tall and tense at either side of him. It is a fraught, strange little pieta. Or it’s a man being taken kindly but desperately towards his execution. It is one more snapshot of the day.

  And Richard is here on the steps beside me once again. He is saying, “Trouble with the key?”

  He has hurried over the Road to me. I had thought that I had silenced him, forgetting that one can never silence a judge. “Eliza,” he says, “there is something else. Dulcie and I both spoke to Henry this afternoon and she told him very forcibly how worried we are about your health, my dear. Your loneliness. We said again that there must be someone, some near relative and that we should like to be put in touch with your Yorkshire cousin.”

  “Lancashire cousin.”

  “Lancashire cousin.”

  “And he said?”

  “My dear, he’s as bad as you are. He said nothing at all as only the Diplomatic Services know how. At first he said he thought we must be exaggerating and then he said he saw no reason to contact Annie Cartwright—in fact implied it wouldn’t be possible.”

  “He’s right. I haven’t seen her for years, or even heard of her. For all I know she’s dead. I think she went to America.”

  “Well, we got him to say that he’d speak to you about it. He said there’d been some trouble . . . in your childhood . . .?”

  “My troubles are to do with here and now, Richard. About my bewilderment.” (I saw him think—ah! At last. Talking.) “About Joan going away.” (A look of strong disapproval now.) “About Henry going away. Richard, Richard—how I envy them all—all away. For thirty years I have been the one who can’t go away alone. I have held the fort. I’ve always been the one who worries about the others. Since I stopped going abroad with him, I’ve been the one spending her life at the window looking out for someone’s—well Henry’s—return.”

  There was an almost ingratiating delight on Richard’s face now. (At last! She’s never said so much.)

  “Then the time’s come for you to go away, Eliza. Do something of your own. You’re scarcely fifty—you’re a child still. What you need is a job.”

  “I had a job. For thirty years I had Henry. I saw him through. He was hopeless when we married—so diffident, afraid of trying, said he was no good at languages. When we married
it was made quite clear to me that Henry’s job in the Foreign Service was shared between us. Diplomatic wives were not allowed any other work then. It’s different now. Then it was full-time social punishment and doing the intellectual and diplomatic polite. We were Oxbridge-trained geisha girls and I was a very good one. And I was worth something better.

  “And why do you say I should ‘go away’? Why should something black in my heart vanish because I am standing on another piece of the globe? If I’d thought that, it would have been I who went off—not Joan. I wouldn’t have been the one writing the letters.”

  “You write letters to Joan? Eliza—you know you really ought to see someone. I believe that Henry truly will turn up tomorrow. You must promise me you’ll talk to him. Tell him all this. He is going to ring you again tonight.”

  And he does.

  Such an unfamiliar voice. Is it really Henry or a Coleridgian fantasy? A new, nervous voice and the sentences punctured by little frightened coughs. Heck, heck, heck. He has turned into an Edwardian bishop. What on earth’s the matter with him?

  “Henry—what’s the matter?”

  “Ahem, ahem, Eliza—I’m so sorry about this afternoon, ahem. Heck.”

  “Not at all. I had an interesting afternoon.”

  “Good. Ahem. Heck, heck.”

  “There’s absolutely no need for you to come here, Henry. I’m sorry the Baxters have been on to you. I’m perfectly well. Don’t listen to Dulcie, she’s hardly seen me for months until this week they most of them just discuss me, they don’t come and talk. Anyway, she’s much too busy for everyday life—and you know what she’s like about common sense. If you haven’t a full pint pot of it she looks you up and down. She’s been giving Coleridge hell.”

  “You sound—Eliza—ahem—”

  “Different?”

  “Like you once were—quite funny.”

  “And nicer I suppose—less bossy?”

  “Well, actually, no. Rather catty.”