The Queen of the Tambourine Read online

  However, after my adventures, Joan, with your friend on Christmas night, I had not touched the room in which we had spent such a glorious time. I had closed the door gently on it, as it might have been upon a shrine. Charles seemed uncomfortable there.

  “Could you put a light on? I’m falling over things. Hell!” There was a crunching, flopping sound as the ancestor fell on its face. I heard him dragging back the curtains, and, as I arrived with the tray, he was holding his foot and looking with horror at the erstwhile Peabody.

  “What’s the portrait doing off the wall? Did it fall?”

  “No. I’m thinking of selling it.”

  “Eliza, it is Henry’s? He’s only been gone two days.”

  “Everything’s in our joint name.”

  “But it’s a family portrait. It’s unmistakably a Peabody.”

  “Yes. How is Henry?”

  “Very troubled. Very unhappy I think, Eliza. If we might just sit down. I’d like to talk to you. It is going to be so difficult but I have promised Henry that I will try. You have been very good to me since Joan left. I don’t believe there is another woman who would have taken on the shirts. I am doing this for you as much as for Henry.”

  “Well, it wasn’t so much the shirts. It’s more the dog.”

  “Oh, the dog. You know, I miss the dog.” (Joy broke over me like the sun over the winter Common.) “I only wish that they allowed dogs at Dolphin Square.” (The sun went down.)

  “Are you both at Dolphin Square?”

  “Yes. We’ve borrowed old Felix’s flat. It’s a very popular place you know.”

  “Yes.”

  “For people like ourselves. I miss the dear old Road of course. A secret society, isn’t it—the closeness and kindness of English suburban life? Not the conventional press image at all. And Church of course. I miss St. Saviour’s. It’s wonderful that you’re able to keep an eye on the house—looking right across at it. You are so good, Eliza. Oh dear, Eliza, who would have predicted this last Christmas? Joan so jolly and all of us singing carols for the NSPCC.”

  “Yes. Her leg hadn’t started then.”

  “It began last New Year’s Eve—or thereabouts.”

  He hung his bald head, your poor old husband, Joan, and I waited to see whether a tear might run down the great nose, but it didn’t. “I must stick to the point,” he said, and I looked at the nose again, concentrating on the tip. He began to stroke it and I thought of Gogol, Joan. I started to feel weak, laughter building up as it had on Christmas night when I had the visions of Anne and Gargery and Gant and co., rolling in their sitting rooms with the men of their choice.

  I saw Charles look at me sharply.

  “Laughing, Eliza?”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Henry has asked me to come and see if you’ll give him a divorce. He says you have both been deeply unhappy for some years. He’ll see that you are properly kept, of course. He can allow ten thousand a year, after the house is sold.”

  “And,” I asked, “are you and he going to continue together?”

  Charles looked wary. “We are very much at one,” he said, “Though there are aspects . . . Two men living together these days is still quite criminally suspect. It wouldn’t be good for either of us professionally.”

  “Does Henry say why he wants a divorce?”

  “Well—oh, this is dreadful.” He clasped and unclasped his hands. “Dreadful.”

  We both examined the ashes in the grate.

  “Can I get you a drink, Charles. Whisky?”

  He sipped the whisky, then set it down on the gold and glass table and looked at it. Through the glass, on the floor, lay one of the joyous earrings of Christmas with its hook squashed in. I felt tears coming.

  “Please be absolutely truthful, Charles. I’ve always tried to be truthful.”

  “He says . . . He’s afraid . . . He thinks that you are changed.”

  “How?”

  “Well, you have become strange.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, your obsessions.”

  “Obsessions?”

  “With everything. The Hospice. The Road. Joan, of course. The dog.”

  “The dog? I’m obsessive about the dog?”

  “And religion. And the way you’re always analysing and observing—and lecturing. Talking of things outside your sphere. Politics, for instance. And talking so much.”

  “Politics? But that’s him.”

  “At dinner parties. When people so much better-informed are present. You don’t listen, you tell them. It is embarrassing for a man in Henry’s position. The endless talking—do forgive me.”

  “But I’ve always spoken out.”

  “It’s—I’m sorry, Eliza—it’s the way you make a fool of yourself now. He says that you have crumbled. Nobody now would dream you had been to a university. Your prudence did not develop. Say what you like about equality of mind, prudence is usually a male attribute, especially in the Civil Service where of course there are still very few women, as we know. Making judgments is a female failing, justified by the dangerous word ‘instinct.’ Making judgments, Henry feels, has grown in you with time.”

  “I have been married to Henry for thirty years. It’s odd that he has just noticed all this. He has never hinted to me that I am imprudent and judgmental and a fool. How odd. It sounds very much as if he’s scratting about for reasons.”

  “Oh, he is a kind man, Eliza.”

  “He has never been a kind man. You don’t marry kindness, at least not at twenty.”

  “That was a very long time ago.”

  I said to him then: “I understand Joan now to the ends of her fingernails, to the end of each hair, and I weep for her. Hurrah for her escape.” Looking at my own fingernails at this point, I noticed a strangeness in them.

  “Joan?” he said. “Joan?”

  “What you are trying to tell me,” I said, “is that Henry has found another woman.”

  Charles looked amazed. “No, no. Of course not.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s far too busy. And he’s a religious man, Eliza.”

  “Oh yes. I had forgotten that.”

  After Charles had gone, I made a stab at clearing up the house. I fed the dogs and walked them, ate the leg of some bird, picked up the ancestor and put him in the car. I drove to The Hospice.

  Just before I started, though, I went back indoors and found the earrings, unsquashed the one under the table entangled in the rug, and fixed them both in. They swung about. They should have been one more reminder of the humiliations of my visitation by your British Council friend, but they were not. They are any old Eastern things you probably picked up in some bazaar, dear Joan, so why do they have talismanic properties? But they do. They lift my heart and free me—free me from Henry, Charles and the pronouncements I’m soon about to face from Rathbone Road. I tossed my head at Mother Ambrosine as I marched in to The Hospice carrying the baleful goat.

  “Holy Mother of God, if it isn’t Gypsy Rose Lee,” she said. “And what’s the picture? Is it for Barry? There’s no room for a great thing like that.”

  “How is he?”

  “Remarkable. Remarkable. He’s a lot better. It’s a respite only, dear, of course, but so much better. I dare say because he’s seen nothing of you the past few days. Wherever have you been, deserting us over Christmas?”

  “There’s been a lot going on.”

  “There’s been a lot going on here, too, especially a lot of washing-up. The washing-up has missed you—and we have missed you, child.”

  “I’ve missed you, too,” I said, realising it was so. There is peace and strength in The Hospice. You catch it on the doorstep. It smells of flowers, good food and polish. There’s joy there as you walk in. And it was good to be called child.

  Barry was sitting up in bed looking at the telly and didn’t turn it off as I lumbered in. He raised a warning hand, then pointed a finger at my chair. I clumped down the picture, then myself
and for a little while we both watched racing-cars go snarling round a track, now and then spinning off course and crashing into things. Once or twice black pyres of smoke rose up. Once or twice there was a flourish of fire-engines and people ran in rivulets like ants towards a juicy beetle and there was a surge and roar of excited applause and distress. The whine and scream of the race filled Barry’s room and flowed into us both. He looked at me at last, pressed the button on his pillows and the whole jamboree vanished. “Eliza, whatever’s this?”

  “It’s a picture I brought for you to value.”

  “No. This. You. The dangles. The Queen of the Tambourine.”

  “They’re a Christmas present.”

  “They look more than that to me.”

  “Why? Aren’t they nice? I like them . . .” I wagged my head and the bells began to ring. “They’re imprudent, tawdry, foolish and out of character. Fun. Fun is hazy territory.”

  “They’re fun all right. They’re the beginning of the day-break. They’re the light at the end of the tunnel. You don’t look like a Senior Civil Servant’s wife. At last.”

  “What does a Senior Civil Servant’s wife look like?”

  “Watchful. Neglected.”

  “Henry’s left me,” I said before he started to try to laugh. He is bones and bones, with bright eyes. His scant hair stands upright. Astonishingly today he was sitting upright, too, though propped. Now there was almost space between him and his pillows, which I have never seen.

  “Because of the earrings?”

  “No. It seems that all these years he has thought me a fool.”

  “Well, you are a fool, Eliza. D’you want a sweet?”

  “Barry, hold my hand.”

  “We’re not allowed sex with the Staff.”

  But he held it. His own felt a little warmer. The nails were less blue. He looked at mine. “So pretty,” he said.

  “How was Christmas? I’m sorry I couldn’t get here.”

  He was looking out of the window. It was snowing again, “Get on the Common, did you? With the dogs? Loads of jolly?”

  “Well only once. I had to. You can’t be cruel to dogs.”

  “Can’t you?”

  “You know I don’t want them. I want to be here.”

  “Then ditch them. And him. The time has come. Has he left you? Are you fantasising again? Eliza? I hope you’re not changing into an ordinary woman. Eliza I want. Not just anybody. Don’t start telling yourself stories and going daft.”

  “That’s what it seems I am. ‘Becoming strange,’ Henry says. And he says I make a fool of myself when I talk Politics.”

  “Never met anyone who didn’t, Cock. Has he left you?”

  “He’s gone to live with Charles in Dolphin Square.”

  “Well! What think ye of Christ?”

  “Barry, he wants a divorce.”

  We both watched the snow. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry, Cock. Unbelievable.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t see how anybody could possibly ever leave you.”

  I said nothing in case I began to cry.

  “I don’t see why not,” I said in the end. “All Charles said about me is true. I am a fool. I’m erratic. It seems I am unstable. I behave unpredictably, bossily, shallowly and my mind has no abiding place. I have insufficient to do after all the busy years, and an urge to do nothing. I look a freak—no interest in getting up in the morning. I haven’t bought any clothes for years. I look like a voluntary worker, an agnostic, a Good Works freak, a municipal counsellor, a sick-visitor unpaid, and I do not care.”

  “That’s his fault.”

  “It’s not. I’ve plenty of money.”

  “He doesn’t see you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can always spot an invisible wife.”

  “I’ve grown to like it—being invisible. You can see without being seen.”

  “No. That is not true. You don’t. You like to behave like an avenging angel. Rushing with flaming swords, telling people truths—about their legs and that. You get burnt, but you get over it. That’s you, Eliza. Be it. For God’s sake, be it. What you really need, if you’ll just be quiet, is love.”

  “Who doesn’t? And I am a fool.”

  “Yes. Like I said. But a surface fool. Only on the surface. You insist on it, Cocky.”

  After a bit I said, “I rolled on the hearth-rug on Christmas night with a marvellous man.”

  “There you are, see. Things are looking up.”

  “No. He asked me if I would call him a taxi.”

  Mother Ambrosine put her head round the door and said, “If you could release her hand now, Barry dear, she has the dishwashers to stack.”

  “Look at the picture,” I said. “Tell me what it’s worth. I’ll look in for it when I go.”

  But when I went back, the picture had been moved with its face to the wall, and I left it there. Barry had been laid down flat and seemed asleep.

  “See you tomorrow,” I said.

  In his sleep he sang, “For she’s the Queen of the Tambourine.”

  “Goodnight, Barry.”

  “The Cymbals and the Bones.”

  Well, I’d better get on with the rest of my thank-you letters now. Sarah and Simon sent me talcum-powder and soap. Charles gave me a card which contained another card inside it telling me that for a year I am a Friend of Redundant Churches. This means that I am authorised now to visit any decaying church in the United Kingdom, taking a friend with me free of charge. Henry gave me a pot plant—a transparent cyclamen, its flowers limp with thirst, its rubber-tube stalks bent down. When I watered it it gave up the ghost.

  It is still quite snowy here and we had a white Christmas. I forget if I told you that. It seems a long time ago. I forget when I wrote last but think it must have been when your dress came.

  Yrs, E.

  4 February 1990

  Dear Joan,

  I have written you a great number of letters. I expect that they have been a burden—that is to say, if you have bothered to read them, for it is now about a year since you went off and I have had not one reply. As a matter of fact I have written many more letters than I have posted. I am cautious now.

  I gather that you are now staying in Dacca more or less permanently and I shall continue to write there. I have given up expecting answers and that, in a way, has made me freer. Many of the letters that weren’t posted were not apposite. They would have told you nothing of interest or of use to you in your own situation, only mine: and since you do not seem to be able to take the slightest interest in that—well, why should you?—I use you now as diary only, as mirror image. I see you with bare feet on a shadowy verandah sipping lime-juice, skimming through my letters, thinking gratefully of all you have escaped. They can give you, I fear, little else. They are facts. They give neither of us even the solace of fiction.

  Always, always you interest me, however, and still I can’t see why. What is it about your flight that seems so inevitable, familiar, yet unfathomably mysterious? There is something pertinent to me about it, just out of sight. In shadow. What is the shadow? It is something much more serious than envy of you. It is certainly not a subterranean desire to be like you or become you, i.e. to be Charles’s wife, oh my God, no! That nose alongside one on the pillow. Drooping over the cornflakes. Reared up before the shaving-mirror.

  Sorry, Joan. I know I shouldn’t laugh at someone else’s husband even after she’s left him. I couldn’t laugh at all once, you know. Before you packed off, I don’t think I ever laughed. I don’t suppose I’d laughed for—maybe ten years.

  If, after all, that is what you have done—packed off. Nearly a year and nobody knows. Nobody knows a thing. Or perhaps some of them do and don’t tell me. I get no news of you now, with Simon and Sarah flown and Charles submerged in Dolphin Square (I’m told they both swim up and down in that long green swimming bath every morning) and your friend Tom Hopkin quite disappeared. He is a short dream-memory, TH, an
d but for the earrings and the lymph-gland sweets I’d think him an hallucination.

  I love the earrings still and so do Barry and the nuns. Barry says because of the earrings he wants to stick around and see what happens. He sings a song.

  You know, I can’t remember if I’ve told you all this before,

  Eliza

  Feb 12th

  Dear Joan,

  I’m sorry but this is one letter that has to be posted and which by some means or other you are to be forced to read and to answer. I shall put URGENT stickers on the envelope and I shall also telephone the Bangladesh Consulate to tell them that you are to be contacted at once. It is about Sarah.

  It’s all right. She is perfectly well, as I’ll describe in a minute. No accident or sickness. Safe home from the skiing. You’d have heard if it had been something like that. The horrors always get through. This is a crisis of another kind. Here it is.

  Yesterday Sarah rang me and asked if I would send her some things. Would I go across the road and collect them at once? Some shirts and sweaters. I went to number thirty-four and heard my feet clattering about. I climbed the sad staircase and up to Sarah’s room and was just thinking that I should wash some of the clothes before I posted them, because they smelled of must, when the telephone rang. Not disconnected. You see how vague Charles has become. It was Sarah again and she asked if I was alone.

  “Only ghosts.”

  “I thought you mightn’t be alone in your house. That’s why I asked you to go to ours. It doesn’t matter about the sweaters.”