The Queen of the Tambourine Page 22

  We both laugh and stop. We have surprised ourselves.

  “Ahem Eliza, I ought to see you. About the future.”

  “How’s Charles?”

  “Be quiet. Listen.” (No coughs.) “About our future.”

  “Oh, the divorce.”

  A long, long silence. Then a little string of coughs.

  “You need some linctus. Henry, whatever’s all this about Annie Grucock?”

  “I’ll be there tomorrow. I promise.”

  “Well, what time?”

  “I just don’t know. But you’re not busy are you? Does it matter?”

  “How d’you know I’m not busy?”

  “Well—evening then. Seven o’clock. Shall I tell Dulcie? We might go on to the Little Greek.”

  “With Dulcie? D’you think I need a minder? Why ever tell Dulcie? Anyway, they’re off on holiday tomorrow to get over the Mock.”

  “I thought you might like someone else there. In case you got upset.”

  I put down the phone.

  I thought, And what was all that about? Something. Something. He’s very frightened. Does he think I’ll have a carving knife ready down the chaise-longue? He is terrified of something, whatever it may be.

  Concerning June 3—This day of days

  AND, my dear J.,

  The next day was still and beautiful. I sat in the morning early at the window, watching the Road. All had fallen so quiet that as I looked at your alternate crimson and white standard roses I watched a velvet petal fall to the ground and almost listened to hear it touch. Such roses—all the better really for having been left unpruned this year. Charles always slew them. They had to struggle out of the bare wood to catch up with the year and never looked anything before August when the whole Road except for us and you were on holiday.

  “Gone away.”

  How many years since Henry and I have gone away? In the first years we travelled so much. Now we scarcely leave the Road. Since Henry in his distinguished middle-age has been London based, his only trips have been flips to Washington and Brussels, and, for nearly twenty years now, always alone, the rule about the back-up of the camp-following wife being gone. Rathbone Road is the place where Henry has wanted his holidays. Like a boy back from boarding-school he wanted no bucket-and-spade country, but his own bed and garden.

  Oh, all our travels. I thought of the busy, happy woman I used to be, laughing, talking, organising, setting up our official residencies. There was the one with no floors. There was the one with no furniture, no glasses, cups, saucers, the great reception hall empty except for filth and crates and empty bottles. I left Henry then, flew back to England, placed a huge order for everything down to salt-spoons, wrote furious notes to the Foreign Secretary. Henry sent a cable saying, “Has he resigned?” I threatened to contact the Queen. “I shall BEARD THE QUEEN,” I wrote to Henry from London, and he sent back a little drawing. I slaved over that old shabby, shadowy house in a Syrian street. I started the garden there. My lilies are still flowering in that garden, I dare say, somewhere in the rubble and the gun-fire. Oh Henry.

  Martinis round the pool in Cairo. Did I ever? Did I ever, truly, sip martini round a pool? Talk drivel? Do I really remember, in Jokjakarta, sitting for hours on the floor with the women of the harem in the dark cool rooms, listening to them talk at first slowly, then, as they forgot me, merry and careless. “Daft,” we’d have called it at school. “Being daft.” Then Bangkok. I tried as I stood watching your Alice Through the Looking-Glass roses, Joan, each on its dark and snappable stalk, to smell the East, the hot spicy blast that hits you as you step from the plane. The queer dry smell. Sweetish like dung and sun and sex.

  Then I tried to be in New England again. Oh my, how I worked for Henry there—well, for myself, too. I wanted to be a success. All the huge parties, all the hard smiles. The wafts of French scent, the punishing barbecues, the idiotic dressing-up of all the surroundings as well as myself. I sent to Italy once for fireworks and to Malta for powder to scatter on the fire in winter for houseparties, that made the flames flicker in pretty colours. The superb English cook I found who had them all wild about Lancashire hot-pot and steak-and-mushroom pie and treacle pudding.

  Untouched. I am left untouched by it all. Or maybe touched. It has all left me, as completely as my old, sensual life, for I can remember no more of the excitements of sex than I can remember my mother’s arms, my mother’s voice. All gone.

  I ought to remember something of my mother. Six is not so young. They say she was so loving. In dreams sometimes there’s something, but I can’t remember it when I wake. Can’t remember what she looked like—just now and then I catch a sort of breath of her. A lightness of heart. A running figure—long legs. A laugh somewhere down a passage. I remember my father better—Army moustache, cheek-bones, trilby hat—yet he had been away for three years.

  Another petal falls on the grass. Only just June, yet that rose is almost over. Must stick the petals on again. Sleepy. Write a letter to the Red Queen. The window is open before me and I sit. The wonderful English hot June morning. Heavy. Everyone must be in a trance somewhere. Everybody has gone out today. The whole Road. I am in a trance, too, I am falling asleep.

  And the door opposite, Joan, is flung wide and out rushes the laundering husband, the man who has everything, with his first child Mick, named for Mikhail Gorbachev, under his arm. He looks a bright little boy.

  The father rushes down his steps and up the steps of the house on your left, Dulcie and Richard’s house. He beats upon their door. Mick wags his legs about from beneath his father’s arm.

  The father runs down Dulcie’s steps again and into the road and up the steps of the house next door to me, of Deborah of the watery smile. There is no reply.

  The father looks wildly about him, down towards Miss Ingham on the crest of the hill, then at Anne’s mansion opposite. He deliberates, looks desperately over his shoulder at his open front door, then comes tearing up my steps. He bangs, he beats, he rings. “Can you take him? Half an hour? It’s come,” he cries and pushes the child in my arms. “Hospital. Ambulance.”

  “Come? The new baby’s come?”

  “She’s having it now. On the floor. It was the ladder. Now.”

  His short and fashionably bristly head of hair, his little round nose, his Jermyn Street T-shirt, his cheeks like cherries. His utterly terrified eyes.

  “You’re good with kids. They all say so. Back as soon as . . .”

  The ambulance arrives. From my top step, Master Gorbachev wriggling, I watch the dashing and the rushing and the pandemonium—and a stretcher with a mountain of blankets come jogging out, husband running behind. All is shovelled in the back, and away. The laundering husband’s door has been left wide and the Road again falls silent.

  The baby regards me, weighs me up, points across the road to his front door and begins to scream. I thoroughly agree with him.

  I cross the road and go in. There is a push-chair thing, the seat a nest of straps and buckles and I sit him in it. He screws himself out of it. I put him back. He thunders and lightnings at me as I tie him down. I take the door keys, wheel him out, close the door behind us. In the street he roars like a lion but attracts no attention. I think that this is all a dream.

  And I am full of rare delight—for I have said, “This must be all a dream,” knowing that it is not. It is happening. This is true. I am perfectly sane.

  “We’ll just go over to my house, Mick,” I say. “I’ll feed the dogs and then . . .” I think. What does one do all day with babies? Go for walks. Yes. I won’t take the dogs though—too much. Not safe. Must give the child my whole attention.

  He roars on. So loud is his roar that the dogs wince. “D’you like cake?” I ask him. “Cake?” and he stops, mid-roar. I cut a large slice of Henry’s chocolate cake on the kitchen table. I had been too dispirited last night to put it away. “More?”

  More indeed. A second slice.

  I look about for a cloth to remove crum
bs from M. Gorbachev’s chops. I don’t like the idea of using the dish-cloth and so I look about for the rag-bag that hangs, as it has for many years, on the back of the wash-room door. It is a cherry-coloured bag and it still has my name-tape on it, for it was my school sewing-bag. Annie Cartwright’s initials are on it, too—it is from the time when we were both at the same school. They are sewn upon it, very large, hardly faded, in beautifully even chain stitch. Very neat. “A.C.” intertwined. I had wanted a sewing-bag of my own but Annie, now eight, was moving up from Sewing and my aunt said that it would be silly to buy a new one. “You can unpick the chain-stitch if you like, Elizabeth, but I really shouldn’t bother. The ‘A.C.’ will show through. It will always be there. Just stitch on your own name-tape.”

  I tip the rags out of the bag, mop up the baby with the softest one, and I have a great assurance now about what has to be done.

  Locking up the house, I go off with the baby and the empty rag-bag up the High Street. The bag swings, light on the handles. When we reach the Building Society I carefully manoeuvre the push-chair inside, not expertly. The push-chair kicks at someone’s heels. They are the heels of Dr. Sepsis, looking grave. I think he swears but realise what he says is, “Buggy.” Then he looks a little interested. “Mrs. er?” he says. “Getting about?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Excellent. Grandchild?”

  Two days ago I entrusted to him the story—part of the story—of my barrenness. I have entrusted it to no-one else. “Great-grandchild,” I say, and he looks rather puzzled, but not seriously. He becomes entangled again in the chair as he leaves, remembers the soap and gives me a glare. “Awkward things those,” says the counter-clerk. “They call them strollers in America. It’s quite the day for a stroll.”

  I ask if I may take all the money out of my account. Almost all of it is left. I have separate quiet money of my own that my uncle left me. Money’s never been a trouble to me, l’ve always managed. It’s the Lancashire cotton genes. The clerk goes away and returns with the manager and there is a repeat performance of the day after Boxing Day.

  “Shall you want it all, Mrs. Peabody?”

  “Every penny. In coin if possible.”

  “We could manage only a percentage in coin.”

  “Heavy coin please. Could you put it all in here?” And I hold out Annie’s bag.

  I am in the High Street again and we set off for the Common only stopping once at the patisserie, for éclairs. I buy seven. Bella Benson is in the patisserie. We do not acknowledge each other. She watches me, her cake-fork poised.

  Over the Common we go. Big vans, enormous lorries, queer pantechnicons are standing about near the pond. There are caravans, shuttered and still. The Fair is coming.

  The baby squawks, and at every new squawk I hand down an éclair. Soon he is asleep and I stride off in the direction of Caesar’s Farm.

  Such a balmy and beautiful walk, Joan. My feet go pat, pat on the earth along the road side. So windless. Even the very tips of the delicate fir trees are still. If I stop for a moment I can hear the crackle of pine needles, as if they’re on a griddle—or maybe it’s the gorse-bushes beyond. There’s the odd squeak of a bird. No more.

  At The Hospice nobody is sitting behind the desk which is not usual. I hang about looking at St. Julian. At last a nun walks by and says, “Well now, and what are you doing here today? It’s not your day is it? What a lovely boy. Now then, what are you up to, Eliza?”

  “D’you think I might show him to Barry?”

  “Oh no dear. Not now. It’s a bad day.”

  “Just for one moment. Oh, please.”

  “But the child is fast asleep, and Barry’s eyes are shut too, Eliza darling.” The nun takes my hand and looks clearly at my eyes. “It is a very bad day. You do understand, don’t you? You do know?”

  “Just for one minute.”

  “Leave the push-chair out here then.”

  “Oh, but I must take the baby. I’m in sole charge of him. I mustn’t leave him for an instant.”

  Mick is lifted from the push-chair and I carry him sleeping to Barry’s room. A nun is with him.

  “Could I stay one minute with him alone?”

  “One minute, Eliza, one minute.”

  I sit by Barry and look at the poor face covered now with bandaged sores, the bones seem nearly through the skin. The head is bandaged too. The gummy lids are closed. Barry is dying. I hold on to the child very carefully but manage to stroke—and fearlessly and no doubt unwisely—one of the oozing, bandaged hands. One of Barry’s eyes opens a slit.

  “Had a baby?”

  I can hardly hear him through the blistered lips.

  “Barry. I want to say something.”

  “Not mine. Deny all knowledge.”

  He floats away from me. Only the joke is alive in the room. Only the joke is left in the automatically comical heart.

  “I want to say—oh my child and lover—that I love you.”

  “Love you back, Elizabeth.”

  “Queen of the Tambourine,” he says.

  The babe and I go marching on. Down the lane again we go, over the Common. The babe sleeps. My tears run down my face and fall on my hands. They trickle over the hands and down the handles of the push-chair. Some fall on the child. I take a cut through the Roman woods and we get on to rough land and then into bracken. We push on through this, leaving a rippling track. We come out among the little paths and the flowering blackberries.

  Nobody about.

  Rabbits, birds, badgers, foxes—all somewhere near. I want the baby to wake up so that I can tell him about them, but he sleeps on. We get to the woods above the far mere; and the strollercoaster, the baby and the bag and I go bowling and rollicking into the trees, swinging and bumping. Down we go. We reach the mere. Still nobody about.

  The mere is a strange place with black water and very bright green weed. The trees, very tall and close together, slope down all round it. It’s in a hole. In the middle of the mere there’s a post sticking up saying: DANGER THIS LAKE IS UNSAFE FOR BATHING.

  I wonder why?

  Once it wasn’t. Once people came all the way out from central London to swim in this mere. Only fifteen years ago it was a place for naughty nude bathing, men only, before 9 A.M.—an extraordinary idea it seems now. A hundred years before that it was not a mere at all but a soggy stretch of ground in the woods where famous duels were fought.

  But the mere is deep now. A young dead girl was found here one winter’s morning a few years ago, stuck in the ice. Her hair was rayed out in icicles. Dead and frozen. A frozen water-lily. Oh, Ophelia.

  Today, in the warm sunshine, there is a boat, and I take the baby from the stroller. I take Annie’s sewing-bag off the handlebars and drop it in the bottom of the boat. Then I place the baby in the bottom of the boat—so beautiful. Like us all, he will become cruel. In mid-mere, rowing slowly, just a few strokes then a few more, I lift the oars out of the water and let them drip. I bring them in close, rest them along the sides of the boat. They stream with water and green weed. I have put a big stone in Annie’s bag, just for certainty, and I lift the bag and throw it in the mere. It disappears at once. Gone. The boat rocks a little as I lean to look. Nothing left of Annie’s chains or Henry’s money.

  The baby, all chocolate éclair, stirs. His eyes fly wide and he watches the water streaming from the oars above him. I pick him up and hold him out over the water and he begins to wriggle and yell. So I drop him in the water and he disappears like the bag.

  I watch. Up he comes. His back is rounded over and I can’t see his face. He comes up for the second time. I can only see his bottom now in its bunchy covers. I watch him a moment.

  Quite soon, the third time, before he sinks back, I catch hold of him, nearly upsetting the boat. I lift him high.

  I stand in the boat. I lift him high.

  Water and weed stream from the child as they streamed from the oars, and there is silence like the first or the last moment of the tu
rning world.

  Then the voice of the child is loud in the heavens. He yells. He roars. He rampages. My hands support his armpits. His head is flung back. The boat rocks. His voice cracks the firmament. His legs and arms flail, hard, strong as roots.

  The boat has sidled up to the bank. It shimmies over the water to the shore. Flop-slap goes the water against the sides of the mere and some loutish, truanting boys come running and shouting out of the trees and appear beside the water, quite near to us. They seem brought up short. They stand still.

  They are silenced.

  “It’s fallen in,” says one.

  “She’s let it fall in.”

  I gather the baby, light in my arms, still screaming, and push the stroller one-handed, past them. They seem uneasy.

  “Eh—miss? Missus? Did it fall in?”

  “Yes. He’s all right.”

  I push on through the woods, up the steep wooded slope, the baby crying, and take him on to the sunny plain of grasses up above. I think I see Bella walking by herself somewhere in the distance, determinedly smiling.

  I stop, I lay down the baby and peel off his outer skin, take off my jacket and jersey and wrap him in them. Some golfers go by.

  I sing to the baby. I point out this and that to him. At last his sobs begin to grow farther apart. “Look,” I say. “A daisy. Look, a butterfly.” At last there is the true long shuddering pause between sobs that means the worst is past. He takes a blade of grass from my fingers. Gravely he hands it back again to me. I give him the seventh éclair, but it is some time before he begins to eat it, watching me.

  Then I play a tickling game, rubbing him hard all over, my hands and my clothes drying him, warming him. Secure in the pushchair, he laughs once on the way home. His drying hair curls sweetly over his head, in rings. I look down on his hair and sometimes, now and then, as we proceed, I stroke it.

  And back in his own home I give him a bath, remembering perfectly all I was taught by Amanda Fish. I wash his clothes and put them in the drier. I find others and dress him. Then I play with him in the sunny garden, but he’s tired. He seems to need no more food. He is such a very good child. Soon now he sleeps in his cot, eyes heavy. His afternoon rest.