The Queen of the Tambourine

by Jane Gardam

  “Oh, but Angela, what—?”

  “Four buses passed me. Up at five to clean seven offices and staircases. Grandchildren measles and here’s filth, and you in bed and that fag hanging out of you. And them earrings.”

  “Angela!”

  “And him gone poor soul. Driven to that Belling. Then driven even away from that Belling. Gone I’m not told where nor yet explained to. It’s him I’ve worked for all these years if you want to know, God help him in his high position and nobody to look after him and him so polite and serious-minded, never various. I’d work for him yet, but you no more. I’m finished here.”

  “Did you say all this across the Road when you left them? Is this a repeat performance of thirty-four when that family split up?”

  “You’re talking your rubbish again. I’m leaving.”

  “Oh Angela—twenty years.”

  “You was a different woman twenty years ago.”

  “Would you like Henry’s address? I’m sure he’d like some help at Dolphin Square though it’s rather far from Fulham. They both would.”

  “Both,” she said. “So that’s the way it is. I can’t say I’m surprised,” and the door exploded on her for the last time.

  And so, Joan, today, after a poor night’s sleep, I come down to my unloved kitchen—fag and earrings—sit at the table, behold the dogs and think, Shampoo today would not be amiss, but sit on.

  Make coffee, long-armed. Behold dresser covered in marigold plates from my mother’s country childhood. Behold grime on plates. Sit on.

  Look at Aga cooker, reflect on nativity of trickles down its front, the grease and gravy on the once-so-shining domes. Sit on.

  Again, long-armed, open kitchen door for dogs to go out. Dogs stretch and walk stiff-legged to smell the day. Watch dogs scratch, roll, rub down their ears, sigh, pee hugely, and return to their basket.

  Think of Oxford. Think of Sarah, now presumably addressing herself to her work.

  Think of the eleven thousand virgins.

  Think of love.

  Think of Henry stepping towards me over Magdalen Bridge. Think of me at twenty blushing as he approaches. Tongue-tied with longing, but such chaste kisses.

  Think of wedding in Merton Chapel, Henry morning-dress, very sage for his few years, and me in a cream silk suit—raw silk, not at all shiny. Henry with First Class Honours in Natural Sciences and a small motor-car with a lid and little windows of what looked like horn, as in a mediaeval castle. And the two of us belting across France—Henry going quite fast!—looking at real mediaeval castles en route. Staying at cheap inns. A stone stair overhung with creeper leading to an upper barn-like room with stone walls and old beams and a bed like a galleon.

  Through the shutters in the morning, dazzling slits of sunlight. Cock-crow. People calling in the fields. The petit déjeuner. Coffee in bowls. Sitting to drink it on the window-seat, the sun already hot. Outside the rolling vineyards going to the horizon, rows of charcoal stumps, red earth, promise. Henry’s beautiful hands, Joan.

  The front door bell rang and after a while I answered and it was Anne Robin. I lit another cigarette.

  Could she come in?

  “Gosh, Eliza,” she said. “I say. I haven’t been here for ages. How lovely.” (Surveying chaos.)

  “Milk? I’m afraid it’s only instant.”

  “Is it de-caff? Oh gosh, sorry, but it’s this silly health thing.”

  I found the de-caff. “Sugar?”

  “Oh, crikey, no. Eliza—oh, hullo Toby. We don’t see you about much in the Road now, do we? Eliza, how are you? We don’t see you either.”

  She has the most polished cheeks. Do you remember? Clear eyes. The whites are blue as a baby’s. And clean, clean finger-nails. And toenails I’m sure. Broad white edges filed into broad half-moons. I droop. Standing. Over my coffee cup. Her hair looks just washed, beautifully cut and each particular hair doth stand like a golden wire. With the solicitor husband and his international practice, the five healthy children all now at boarding-school and scarcely needing her, with her own effulgent bounce and so much money she doesn’t know what to do with it, she now writes fiction. Her little study is all done out in William Morris wall-paper, sixty pounds a roll. Her wordprocessor stands on her George III writing-desk near a vase of flowers à la Vita Sackville-West. She is always being interviewed on television as the fully mature woman with the perfect life. She is asked her views on Margaret Drabble and Proust, at least she was until she confused the two. Then she came whizzing down the ladder somewhat and was nearly out of the game for good. She never speaks of that!

  Beside the word-processor and the flowers is a photograph of husband George when young without the gin-hammocks. I remember now that it was you who said—the only unkind thing I remember of you: why does everybody dislike George?—that it must be some sort of trick photography, one of those things done on the pier by sticking your face through a hole in a cardboard figure. Anyway, there’s George in gold and white braid, like Lives of a Bengal Lancer. Before he took the old yo-ho.

  “How’s George?”

  “Oh goodness, George. He’s fine. I suppose. Of course I hardly see him. When he’s home I’m away on one of my promotional tours, and vice versa. He’s in Hong Kong at present. Isn’t it sad the way none of us sees much of our husbands now? In the Road I mean. We’ve all done so well. Got so rich. And my dear, the next generation will be richer still, they work even harder. It’s the penalty, isn’t it? It’s a hard one.”

  “It’s good that you have your work,” I said, not jumping.

  “Oh—my salvation! My children’s books. Well, that’s what people call them.”

  “Oh, but I’m sure they’re not.”

  “I’m not a bit ashamed of it you know if they are.” Her cheeks had begun to glow.

  “Of course not. I didn’t mean that at all?”

  “Mean what? After all, there’s Mrs. Molesworth.”

  We looked into our de-caffs and thought of Mrs. Molesworth and I found that tears were trembling in my eyes and were about to splash out, tears of longing. Longing for a white-stockinged, pig-tailed world. Bat and bail. Lemonade. Days ages and ages long, and people laughing. Anne was examining my filthy kitchen.

  “I’ve just heard,” she said, “that you’ve lost Angela.”

  “Yes. Long ago. She first left Joan, then me.”

  Anne Robin looked serious. “D’you want someone else? I’m sure mine would give you an hour or two.”

  “Oh, no thanks. There’s nothing to do now, really, since Henry left. I might as well clean up after myself.”

  “About that . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Oh well, nothing. I just wondered if there’s anything one could do?”

  “About Henry? No, I shouldn’t think so. He’s gone off with Charles, you know. He wants a divorce.”

  “So it is true? Nobody quite knows.”

  “Well, I don’t quite know myself.”

  “I mean, we wondered if you’d like to talk about it? In the Road? You’ve always been so good whenever anything went wrong. The nice notes you used to send. And the advice you used to give. ‘Counselling’ it’s called now. So natural and unprofessional . . .”

  “I wrote a note too many. I wrote a note to Joan.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Now Joan.” She looked at me nervously.

  “Do you ever feel you have written a word too many, Anne?”

  “Too many? Well, mine are just tiny books you know. Not didactic in any way. Just fun books. No, I don’t think I’ve written too many. Nothing like as many as Enid Blyton did. I have the same difficulty as she did you know, they just flow out of me. I just use the same plot again and again and nobody notices. I wish I got more reviews though. I say, you won’t tell anyone all this, will you, Eliza?”

  “I’m sure that children are very pleased you write so much. I expect they love you.”

  “Yes. Well, no. Well I’m not sure. You know the awful thing is, Eliza,
I’m not sure that children read my books at all. I’m just known in the Children’s Book World and creative writing classes. But—you won’t tell a soul this, will you Eliza?—it seems so conceited for someone like me to push in among the wonderful people like Salman Rushdie and Beckett and Lancaster Forbes and so on, but actually I’ve had an adult novel accepted. Under an assumed name.”

  “I’m so glad.”

  “You see, I always thought of myself as an adult writer even when I was a child. I mean, no child would ever want to be only a children’s writer, would it? And look at Blake. There’s nothing more childish than Blake, is there? I don’t see much difference myself between adults and children, do you?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Oh. Really? I didn’t know you ever thought about such things, Eliza, I mean not having had any children.”

  I watched the dark face of the de-caff.

  “My trouble is that I had so many children and kept them around for so long. None of them went away to school till they were ten you know. When they were at home I think I began to think like a child. They seemed older than me. I am a bit childish.” (Oh my dear Anne, you have been listening at doors.) “And I’ve rather had to grit my teeth in the adult novel to do the—you know, the sexual bits. The girl who advised me on it—you know, my Editor, she’s very young and utterly contemporary and hungry-looking, d’you know her hands shook all the time with nerves, a nice girl—well, she asked me to put in a masturbation scene.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “She said that these days it’s expected.”

  Mrs. Molesworth hastily left the room and, “I’m sorry, Anne,” said I, “I’m hopeless at this sort of conversation. I don’t read that sort of thing.”

  “Don’t you? But, you know, we mustn’t be prudish. We ought to reflect the real world.”

  “But masturbation isn’t the real world, Anne. It’s just fantasising.”

  “It can be quite nice in itself,” said Anne, and then turned puce.

  “What I do like about you,” I said, very quick, sharp, fast before she fainted with shame, “is the way you tell stories. That tale you told about Joan buying the tent and the gun in the Army and Navy Stores.”

  “That wasn’t Joan,” she said, “I’d never call anyone Joan. There’s no one called Joan under the age of fifty. There’s absolutely no one called Joan in my books.”

  “Not a book,” I said. “It was Joan—our Joan. You were telling me about Joan. At number thirty-four.”

  She leaned forward and looked carefully in my ashtray and at my heap of stubs. Then at her chalky half-moons. “Eliza. . .”

  “Yes?”

  “We’re so worried. In the Road. We’ve been talking. We’ve been having meetings about you.”

  I looked at her.

  “Eliza, I suggested and they—well, some of them—agreed that you must get a job. Get something to do.”

  I said, “Ah.”

  For, you see, it happens, Joan, that Anne and her friends do not know that before any of them came to live here, soon after I had stopped travelling abroad with Henry, I did have a job, of a kind, for a short time. I took it out of shame for my idleness and with reluctance, for I was marched into it by Lady Gant.

  In those days Lady Gant sat on many committees about the town, having in attendance an unpaid shadowy creature called Bella. Bella Bentley. She was always smiling. You can still see Bella about, still in her sixties mini-skirts and bouffant hair, though she’s all of fifty. Sometimes she wears little suits with brooches. She lived in those days somewhere down by the railway in a bed-sit and did a clerking job in London, though I think it must have been part-time because almost every afternoon she could be found at Gant’s standing in the hall smiling at mountains of old clothes for jumble sales, or in the sitting room wading through toppling piles of papers and accounts, or in the kitchen making passes with her hands above elderly sandwiches and heavy jam—sponges awaiting transport to fêtes. Gant floated about giving orders. It was before she got this tumour on her head—did I mention that?

  One day Gant asked if she could come and see me. “For luncheon,” she said. “Nothing elaborate,” and in she swept with Bella behind her, Bella smiling, the legs beneath the mini-skirt grown rather stringy. Gant wore her usual look of outrage, the face of a portentous mushroom. As they took off their coats Gant passed a finger over the hall table and examined it for dust. She was not aware of doing it, any more than she knew that when she picked up her fork for the cheese soufflé (packet; still learning to cook after diplomatic immunity—still am) she polished it with her napkin. Bella not only noticed but noticed me noticing and out of loyalty picked up her own fork and dabbed at it; whereupon Gant cried out, “Whatever are you doing, Bella?”

  “Now, what we are here for, Bella and I,” she said, “is to see if we can persuade you to work at The Shires. I know you’ve recently been out of sorts. The best thing in the world for you would be to get really busy. We don’t ask much of the Secretaryship of The Shires. Minutes, accounts, liaison with the State sector now and then, that sort of thing. It’s a friendly little committee. What I call a listening committee. And of course there is the rota of drivers to be drawn up. The drivers who take the babies into London for adoption. You would be called upon to do some of this. Most rewarding.”

  I said that there was nobody in the whole country who could be less qualified to do this work than I. It was impossible.

  “That attitude, Eliza, has often proved the foundation of a useful, dedicated life. Bella, don’t keep all the butter to yourself. After all—what on earth are you doing with yourself now that you are back in England? Cleaning this great house all day?”

  I said that I lived a private life and did not care about team work of any kind.

  “You know The Shires of course?”

  I did. I did.

  The Shires, dear Joan, is gone now but not long gone—just before you arrived here. It was a home for unmarried mothers that stood for nearly a century in the middle of the Common. It was founded by three mysterious sisters in Derbyshire, called Shire, who had most startlingly for Derbyshire left all their wealth to unmarried pregnant girls unpopular with their families. It was a fine solid house with encouraging views and healthy air. There was a kitchen of scrubbed tables and a dormitory of reliable iron bedsteads, a hall and stairs uncarpeted and vast. There was opportunity therefore for exercise, for the girls did the housework at the early stage of pregnancy and helped with the cooking towards the end. When their time came they were driven to the local maternity hospital where they stayed for up to two weeks and were then driven back to the home with the baby who was usually all set up with an adopting family longing to have him or her, but there was no compulsion to give the child up other than a briefing once or twice a week during the period in residence explaining the enormous advantages the girls were withholding from the child if they did not. There were only two rules at The Shires. These were that no mother was allowed to breast-feed and no mother who fell a second time was allowed to come back.

  The girls were well prepared before and after the birth of the child for the day when they were to give it up. They were encouraged to dress themselves and the baby in their best clothes. It was obligatory that every mother should hand the child over herself. It was, they were told, vital. The baby would be taken into the arms of a motherly official dressed convincingly in blue and starch, at an address in Belgravia. This woman would whisk the child kindly away into an adjacent room where its new family would be waiting. Usually two or three mothers would be done together, for company afterwards. After the hand-over they were driven by one of us on the committee to the nearest local transport, their luggage of the last months lifted out and with a hand-out of money, depending on their circumstances, they were waved off. “Most of them,” said Gant, “are very grateful. Many of them are quite well-educated with an Anglican background. The sort who want to spare their parents’ reputation. They go home as if it
has been a long holiday—oh, it’s as old as time. A few send Christmas cards to us for a year or so but on the whole we hope to lose track of them. We respect their privacy.”

  “It sounds rather exclusive.”

  “Not at all. We take all classes. There’s a small means-test, but anyone can apply. Of course we try to encourage attendance at the eleven o’clock service.”

  They did indeed. For over half a century there had been two rows of balloon-like women seated at the back of St. Saviour’s. What the first ones had been like one can only imagine, but the present-day ones were extremely talkative and ate a lot of sweets in noisy wrappings. Once or twice there was a crisis—even once the clanging of an ambulance bell. The girls now were in no way shy of the congregation, met their kind nods and smiles with interested looks. The congregation for its part held mixed views on the girls, and some of the sidesmen were nervous of those with swollen ankles who had to be helped up the altar steps to Communion. Sometimes there was a suspicion of threat and truculence in the air. But the girls liked St. Saviour’s on the whole, and at coffee after the service sat at their ease in the parish room, stroking their domed fronts. Almost everyone except Lady Gant thought that the girls should be allowed to sit scattered about the Church, not confined to the Magdalene pews, and at coffee time they often said so. The girls seemed to have no opinion on this matter and Lady Gant never wavered in her conviction that it was all much safer near the door. “In a body,” she said, “with Matron and Bella in charge, and if possible the Chaplain.”

  Now the Chaplain to The Shires, oh Johanna, was a man called Father Garsington and he lived above the girls in a private apartment at the top of the house. From the beginning, and for obvious reasons, it had been stipulated that the Chaplain should be a married man.

  Father Garsington had been appointed so long ago, however, that his wife, who did not go about, had been forgotten. Those who tried to recall her remembered only a refined sort of woman in very old silk dresses—she had been in touch with that very good dress-agency, run by that Duchess, for clergy wives. There had been a perpetual string of seed-pearls round her neck and above them the shiny, unlined face of a girl. Her eyes were innocent, her hair in slides as it had been since school. She had met Father Garsington at Cambridge and Cambridge had been and still was her golden time. Nothing had happened to her since. Father Garsington had come back from the War very dickie—“Oh, very dickie indeed,” Gant said. Both Garsingtons kept to The Shires and to each other.