The Queen of the Tambourine Read online

  “Why,” he asked, “has that picture got its face to the wall?” He turned it round and said, “Oh well, yes.”

  “It’s one of Henry’s ancestors.”

  “Poor fellow.”

  “Henry is my husband.”

  “Oh, I know about Henry.”

  “Henry is—. Has Joan said much?”

  “No. Not much. But one divines.”

  “She never writes. At least, not to me. I write often.”

  “Why do you write? Are you a relation?”

  “Goodness, you are old-fashioned. It must be living with Indians. You must have been away a long time. Families here aren’t important enough for letters any more. Not even friends write to each other much now.”

  “Joan was your close friend then?”

  “Well, she was hardly a friend at all. But she left a list of addresses—box-numbers.”

  “Then why do you write? Sit there while I go for the plum-pudding.”

  I heard a great conversation going on in the kitchen and, when he returned with silver dishes and the bottle of Courvoisier that is kept in the drinks cupboard, its key, I swear, under the saucer in the study (your friends do drink a lot, Joan), both dogs trotted meekly at his heels.

  “Very well,” he was saying to them, “we shall see. It depends entirely on your behaviour the next half hour,” and he handed me plum-pudding and flourished a great white dinner napkin about. Then he sat down to his own plateful at the other side of the fire. The dogs gazed upon him. First one and then the other flopped down, arranged its front paws, laid its chin upon them and continued to gaze. My dog sighed.

  “Much better,” said Tom Hopkin. “Yes?”

  “Yes, much better.”

  “I like to see someone lick a spoon,” he said. “I meant, have you found the answer yet to why you write so compulsively to Joan?”

  I thought, Oh Lord, he thinks I’m a lesbian. He expects the usual throbbing steamy stuff. If I say no, he’ll think I’m just not facing the new so-called natural world. Oh shitto, as Sarah would say.

  “Looking at you and the blushing and so on I see that your interest in Joan is quite holy. Sex with you would not be paramount.”

  I felt wretched.

  “I haven’t much interest in Joan in any way really, except for some reason I feel that I know her very well.” (I thought: What is it? He makes me tell the truth.) “I told you—we were not even friends. If anything we were opposites. She reminds me of someone or something—I don’t know. I think that I write because I feel a little responsible for her disappearance. I wrote her a letter telling her she was a hypochondriac and she should pull herself together.

  “I prayed about it first. God often tells me what to do. Or He did.”

  “Do you often advise people who are not your friends?”

  I told him about working at The Hospice.

  “You thought that you could help her in a medical capacity? Are you trained?”

  I hung my head and said that it was mostly washing-up but that I do believe myself sometimes called to fling myself at a pen and sound off to people.

  “Well, why are you so ashamed of it?”

  He lay back in his chair. The fire sparked and crackled with a new log. The Courvoisier caught the light as it tipped here and there in his glass. His hair shone silky and young. I thought: this is the man I have looked for all my life.

  “You are obviously an excellent woman,” he said, and I burst into tears.

  “I am nothing of the sort. But I try.”

  “What—try to be an excellent woman?”

  “No. Of course not. You’re cruel. Who could want that? Oh well—yes, I suppose so. I can’t help it. I try to be good. It’s the way I was brought up. I was too early for the self-fulfilment stuff, the ‘love thyself,’ the Germaine Greer feminism—too busy then, keeping Henry going. I know they all say I’m humourless and conceited and I talk too much and I’m self-righteous, but not even Lady Gant can say I don’t try. To be good.”

  “Is there someone called Lady Gant?” He smiled contentedly. “And you try to do good?”

  “Well, of course. Why not? I can’t help it. It’s what I was taught.”

  “Well, why ever not. Another Courvoisier? Are you averse to getting sloshed? Tell me about Henry.” (A sharp glance at the portrait.) “You said he’d left you.”

  “I didn’t. Did I say that? Nobody knows that. He only did it at lunchtime.”

  “Today? At Christmas dinner? Well, big things do happen on Christmas Day—there are quite a lot of suicides. Did he do any washing-up?”

  “Henry? Well, there wasn’t much to wash-up. We none of us ate anything really. I knew something was brewing when he and Charles came in from Church. All of a sudden they just rose up and left. Before the pudding.”

  “That does seem an inhuman act.”

  I sipped the Courvoisier and wanted to weep again; but, as I sat, I began to think, and having thought—the wine and brandy had not befuddled me, Joan, at all—as I thought, I realised that there were many things that might be said on Henry’s behalf.

  “There wasn’t much for him to leave. It wasn’t exactly a convivial Christmas. I never managed a child for him. Neither of us has parents. Scarcely a relation between us and all our friends make their own plans. Charles sat like a dead fish, his wife in Bangladesh and not even a Christmas card from her. I have really nothing to say to Henry now. I haven’t had for years, although I do try always to keep a conversation going. I think that that may have been part of the trouble. I should have been enigmatic and silent. He is a very senior Civil Servant. My tongue tends to run away when we go to parties together and I haven’t been seen about with him for ages. He is exactly the same seniority as Charles and they have become close friends. They are both interested only in their work and their religion.”

  “What about love?”

  “Love?”

  “Do you and Henry love each other?”

  “Love each other? Well. I don’t—I don’t think about it. I’m very interested in religion, too.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, I suppose at our age, Henry’s and mine, we should be trying to love God.”

  “What, in the night?”

  “Well, all the time. It’s a Christian principle. I don’t see why we shouldn’t make that clear, like the Muslims do. And anyway, our beds are at opposite ends of the room. Henry says they look made-to-measure there.”

  “And you think about God when you’re in bed?”

  “Yes. Sometimes.”

  “And Henry minds? This is why you say there was little for him to leave behind?”

  “Oh, Henry isn’t in the bedroom at all now. He sleeps down in the study with a small stove.”

  Tom Hopkin closed then opened his eyes. He looked at me.

  “Eliza, Joan sent some sweets. Shall we open them?”

  He sat near me on the sofa and we ate the sweets. Actually, Joan, they weren’t very nice. They were so sweet they set my skin shuddering. I went cold-turkey. They wobbled all over and looked like pale, powdered flesh. “Eastern delicacies,” Tom Hopkin said and I said, “There are some chocolates. Barry gave them to me,” and we ate Barry’s chocolates which were wonderful and two layers.

  “Who’s Barry?” he said on the third fondant whirl—he’d been down in the bottom layer for it. I thought seriously for an instant whether he was one I could tell. But no.

  He put his arms round me then, and I felt the one along the back of my shoulders, resting along the sofa, begin to strain further off into the distance as he pushed me sideways and down. I thought: I wish I could feel less analytical about this.

  He heaved himself then with a cumbersome, lateral movement on top of me and I thought: What will be will be. Please God, I’ve never done it with anyone but Henry and I’m half a century old.

  I waited.

  “Got it,” he said and tweaked a book out of the bookcase beside the fireplace, brought it round the front of
my neck and held it in both his hands before my face. He brought his cheek close to mine. “Dryden,” he said, “I’ll read to you.”

  After he’d finished the whole of The Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day, Joan, I didn’t know where I was. I was upright, taut, fraught, watchful, frightened. And longing. Longing for the last verse. Longing for Hopkin. The book was so near our faces and he was whispering so musically in my right ear, his arms tight round me.

  I thought, I am sitting alone in the house with a total stranger who has his arms very close to my jugular and is dressed in my husband’s best clothes. He has drunk a bottle and a half of my husband’s wine and three brandies. He is a madman. He is reading a most inappropriate poem. Soon I shall be raped.

  “Wonderful,” he said and closed the book. He let his face drop down into my collar-bone. The eye-glass made a clatter against your earrings. The tambourines shivered. He let the eye-glass drop.

  When they find my body, I said to myself, some may be sorry; but I kissed Tom Hopkin first with my eyes open and then with my eyes closed. Then we rearranged ourselves and I kissed him again. Then I about-faced the eighteenth-century goat and slid backwards into Tom H’s arms, then both of us rolled on to the floor. As he touched the ground he cried, “Basket,” and both dogs obediently trotted to the kitchen. He left me, and went across to close the door, returned and joined me on the hearth-rug.

  “Eliza?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is it possible to get a taxi?”

  “A taxi?”

  “I ought to get back to the flat.”

  “What flat?”

  “I have a flat in Warwick Gardens.”

  “Warwick Gardens? But you were in tropical clothes. You’d just arrived.”

  “No. I had dropped into the flat on the way from the airport. I’m rather absentminded.”

  I thought of all you hear and read and see about women taking the initiative now. There is a statutory phrase. “You don’t have to go.”

  I tried it. He looked thoughtful—I must have got it wrong. It still is the man who has to say it. I thought things had improved. I thought all women did the decision-making now—Anne Robin, Marjorie Gargery, Lady Gant. I saw them all, acting according to the new fiction, the television serial, the cleansing rejuvenating feminist handout, each with her illicit man behind the fat, interlined curtains of each pleasant house, burglar-alarmed and window-locked and the chain up.

  What men? What on earth do I know about it—about how any of them go on? I began to conjure up the men, Joan, who might bring a frisson to the lives of Robin, Gargery and Gant. The milkman for Robin, she is the soul of conventionality; the window-cleaner for Gargery, with his long sweeping arms to whisk her away. For Gant? What? Ha—a doctor. A young and terrified National Health doctor, flattened beneath the field of the cloth of gold. Rocking my head with joy, or hysteria, at her good fortune, I laughed and I laughed beneath the bony, delicious anatomy of this man who had come in from the cold and got himself into Henry’s velvet jacket.

  “Oh don’t cry,” he said. “Please don’t cry. I’ve behaved very badly. I think it’s probably jet-lag.” He sat up, wound away the eye-glass and put his glasses on. “I was mad to go anywhere tonight. For me it’s about four in the morning. My wife is much more sensible. She went to bed. I needed a bit of exercise so I brought round the parcels.” I sat on the rug and he padded away, to come back shortly in his own clothes.

  “I’ve put Henry’s things back. It’s been very pleasant. Do thank him when he comes home—I’m sure he’ll be back soon. I feel rather—well, rather bad you know. Good evening, dogs.”

  I didn’t see him out and it was nearly an hour after he left that I heaved myself up and put the chain on the front door. The dogs would have to do without a trip round the block tonight.

  In the bathroom he’d left the most astonishing mess—soap on the floor, towels everywhere, puddles on the carpet. All Henry’s clothes were flung about. I thought: Why does Joan send such terrible men? Are they to show me that there are some worse than my own? Is she telling me not to bother to follow her to freedom? Joan, I think it would be a good idea for you to write and tell me what you’re up to. Quickly. If I am to come and join you I have to sell the ancestor while Barry is still able to arrange it. A month already since Christmas.

  I fell on my bed that Christmas night, Joan, in your dress and earrings and the bed began to spin. It spun me up and up and out of the window, and away and away. I looked down on the Road with its scuffed snow, its lighted tree in every window, its sleek motor cars turning calmly back into it again at intervals, families teeming out of them, carrying presents, calling to each other.

  Babies, parcels, bottles, toys, dogs, rugs, everyone home and dry. The highly successful, never hungry, Western-European family of man. The prize-winners.

  Up and up I spun and over the horizon, then outward and outward and out of the world.

  Towards heaven? There is nobody now to whom I can talk about heaven. Tonight I had thought that I might have found one. He had the voice for St. Cecilia’s Day. A heavenly voice. And heavenly hands. Well, perhaps it’s because I am so caught up with heaven and suchlike that I am such a failure in this world. I should concentrate on one world at a time. But I wonder what God was about, putting me in this lonely situation?

  I believe that I could suffer, Joan, I believe that I could even endure great misfortune, terrible grief in the hope of a glorious resurrection. But who can walk hand in hand with God when He seems to require of His servant Christmas night alone in Rathbone Road?

  I am nevertheless your sincere, subdued neighbour, Eliza.

  Happy New Year.

  Jan 22nd?

  I slept on Boxing Day until lunchtime, Joan, and the dogs were frantic. I pushed them into the garden, then pulled on some clothes and took them for a walk on the Common. The sun had come out and so had the whole community, all wearing their Christmas clothes, the children with their bright new toys. The pond was frozen and people skated. The sky was coppery and gleaming above the snow. I walked into the woods for several miles, round the mere, in and out of the golf bunkers, round and sometimes over the snowy greens; up to the windmill, back down the grit track where horses galloped and people called to one another with plumes of breath coming from their mouths. I saw little clumps of folk I knew, but it is easy to avoid people on the Common. I waved sometimes as I veered away, once stood looking earnestly in the window of the antique-shop beside the riding-stables. The people passing—perhaps it was the low, orange sunshine that spread their shadows before them—looked much larger than they used to do when we first came to live here years ago; and so much better-dressed, so much louder, more self-confident, the children glossier, everyone rich. The dogs all shone with top-quality pet-food, leather leads and collars studded with silver like mediaeval bracelets. Only I unchanging in my immemorial grey mohair and my old black boots. I went off home again to number forty-three, and slept again till morning.

  Then I went to the bank and drew out all the money. We had twelve thousand pounds in the current account. Far too much, but Henry is hopeless with money and usually so am I. There was about thirty thousand on deposit, but they said I’d have to wait a day or two for that. The counter clerk was sleepy from Christmas, her neck all covered with love-bites and her bosoms sticking out of her white sweater. She pointed them here and there like a terrorist with a machine-gun as she whisked about spelling out my account on the screen, as if they and she had had a good time. A vulgar notion.

  “Could I have it all out? In notes?”

  She’d been yawning but stopped with a click. “I’ll have to get advice on that. I think you’ll have to wait.” She slid round and down off the stool and whispered with a young man who looked up quickly from under his brows. He said, “Oh, Mrs. Peabody. That’s all right,” and after a time the girl came back with a package. I signed for it and put it in a Sainsbury bag. I wondered if they would offer me an escort, but they didn’t. Money
isn’t what it was. I left the bank and entered the Building Society next door to put the pack of money there in my own name. All the time I felt this was a mean and shabby thing that I was doing.

  The man behind the counter said, “Just a minute,” and went away to do some quiet talking and somebody else gave me a quick look, bobbing his head up from behind a partition. Could they, asked the first man, have some form of identification? I showed them my membership card for the Liberal Party, very old and grubby, almost collectable as an antique; a card for the University Women’s Club—older and grubbier; one for the London Library saying “valid until 1966,” and a signed receipt from Harrods hairdressing which made them blanch though it was five years old. They nevertheless signed in the money and smiled pleasantly.

  Then I went home and found Charles standing at the gate holding a bunch of Underground chrysanthemums, that’s to say London Underground Railway chrysanthemums done up in a plastic cornet. They were a very crude pink and overblown. I asked if he had mislaid his key—he has had one for months—and I also looked nervously around his feet to see if his zip-bag was with him. It’s his dirty-shirt bag. He and Henry have one each. He had not—and his shirt was not very white. He was looking, even for Charles, particularly grave.

  “Might we have a short talk, Eliza?”

  We went together to the sitting room where your dog—his dog—went for him, and I went off to make the coffee as he rolled up his trouser-leg to look at the damage. In the sitting room were the remains of the turkey and plum-pudding, the Stilton cheese and a complex still-life of empty glasses. The ancestor stood on the floor among cushions. The hearth-rug was in a twist and the fire was out. The curtains were drawn across and the room was lit only by the sun shining through the cracks, the saddest scenario. I hate drawn curtains. One of the long endurances of my marriage has been Henry’s curtain-fetish. It came upon him slowly—at Oxford we’d lie together looking up at the moon, but these past three or four years he has reached the stage where he goes round each window every night as it grows dark, and sometimes rather before, smoothing and smoothing to eliminate chinks. In the bedroom he has insisted on a blind as well. In his dressing room he never draws up the blind until he is completely dressed, summer or winter. Since I have had my bedroom to myself I have taken all the curtains down. I mentioned them to The Hospice. “Interlined Colefax and Fowler,” I said. All they said was, “Eliza, dear, first spades, then curtains. We have plenty of blinds here.”