The Queen of the Tambourine (16 page)

Inside the Church I felt about round the door for the lightswitch to light me to the vestry, but couldn't find it, so I felt my way down the dark side-aisle. In the vestry I found the lighting-panel for the whole Church and switched on the one marked
Chancel
.

The organ when I reached the chancel was locked, its hood pulled down, and I walked over and felt the cushion which did not seem to be at all warm. I looked up at the silent silver pipes with their swallows' nest slits. It was unbelievable that the glory I had heard not half an hour ago had sprung from this cool plumbing. I had dreamed.

No music now.

But there was a fumbling, a sudden clatter far away down the unlighted nave. Someone was moving about. I called out, “Oh! Hullo? Is someone there? Hullo?”

Silence.

I had to get down through the nave to leave the Church. If I switched off the lights from the vestry I'd have to walk down the nave in complete darkness. I looked hard at the shadows. Utter silence. Blackness.

“Hullo?”

Silence still.

I went to the vestry and turned out the lights and began the walk down the side aisle, my hands feeling out in front and only the slightly lighter panels of the drained windows to help me. I went at first slowly and bravely, then faster and faster, looking defiantly into the dark.

I felt very weak when I reached the south door again and I turned and shouted into the nave, “You can't fool me. There isn't anybody there.”

There was silence, and then the whole Church began to ring out with laughter and I ran stumbling away. I heard it, high, triumphant and mocking like an idiot child. The door banged behind me and I ran across the road, down the alley and into the sleepy street.

 

I lay in bed.

It was one in the morning.

I slept a little but kept waking, first with echoes of the music, then with echoes of the laughter. Then I slept and dreamed.

I dreamed of a child with outstretched arms and the confident girl, Amanda, and the dignified boy. The boy stood at a table of books and addressed me on stern matters. Beneath the severity he seemed just, though not particularly kind, I knew that he spoke for my own good but I could not hear the words. His lips moved but it was a faulty track. “Tell me, tell me,” I begged and I was calling it out as I woke again. There was a light in my bedroom. It went out.

I have moved my bed, Joan, oh long ago, trying to deny, to negate this business of beds at opposite ends of the room. I had first piled Henry's bed with things and covered everything with dust-sheets. Then I had sent all the things to the jumble and Henry's bed to Age Concern. My own bed now stands alone, in the middle of the floor. I have removed the carpet and of course, long ago, the curtains. I lie now each night as a corpse with no need of bedside light or night-table. I lie afloat now, all Danae to the stars. The centre, ceiling light is a bulb, shadeless.

The window frame grows against the moonless night. I hear the wind in your tall trees across the road, Joan, and in my own tall trees behind me, in the back garden. Otherwise, all so quiet. Dogs asleep in the kitchen. I begin to drift.

Then the beam of light springs across the room again. Up, round, down, gone. A torch.

There is someone in the room, Joan, and I am standing, before I realise it, in the window, and my heart is an organ-pump. Thump, thump, thump—I feel for a curtain to cling to and there is none. Thump, thump. I clutch the window-frame.

The light comes again and it is not a torch-beam in my own house, Joan, but one in yours. The light is coming from across the road. Up, down it goes, switching about in an upstairs window. For a moment it lights the plasterwork doily in your bedroom ceiling and the chandelier of painted lemons from Sicily via Peter Jones I was never brave enough to copy—and all cobwebs now. I see flashes of your house, flashes of you, still brilliant with colour and life—your royal blue stair-carpets, your marble urns with the undying ivy plants, your eighteenth-century, broken, French torchères upon the wall. Your enviable snook at the road's good taste.

All black again.

There is a burglar moving from room to room in number thirty-four, Joan, and so at once I ring the police.

And then, dear Joan, away I go again, across the road in my dressing-gown and slippers—and a tweed hat for it is not warm now. I walk swiftly, quietly through your garden gate, round the side of the house past the ballroom and the piles of frail gold chairs, to the back. Standing on the terrace, I watch.

Nothing to be seen inside the black windows at first but then, from the hall, the torch-beam again. It gets nearer. A flash, long, dizzy, urgent around the drawing-room walls. I move close to the windows and stand among the weeds and the faithful, untended chrysanthemums and dahlias. I look in.

On goes the torch again, and I see Simon. He has propped the torch upon the hearth and it shines in his face as he busies himself with paper and sticks and a box of matches. The flame on the lit corner of a firelighter takes hold of the sticks and he begins to arrange with the tips of his beautiful fingers little pieces of coal. “Oh, Simon!”

I knock on the window expecting him to jump out of his skin but he continues calmly making the yellow fire before slowly turning his gentle Galahad face to me. He smiles, gets up and crosses to the French doors where I stand, and I see his lips are saying, “Eliza.” Then I see that the lips are not Simon's after all, nor yet is the face, nor would Simon ever wear this slippery black track-suit, as a hand like a brick lands on my shoulder, and the police are here.

Not only here, but at your front door on the street side of the house, Joan, and at your side door by your coal sheds and beside the gardener's loo. A police car has crept quietly into Rathbone Road packed full of stalwart disagreeables. Silently but not secretly, for, from all around in the Road, there move other figures in assorted attire. Here are Gargerys and Philippinos and frantic-eyed Dulcie Baxter with ink in her hair. Do I see Isobel Ingham wrapped in a shawl? And the pregnant girl with the laundering husband? Only Deborah's house is dark, its blue door shut. The statue of Ceres isn't giving a toss.

“Eliza, oh Eliza!”

The inhabitants of Rathbone Road move towards me as a policeman marches me forward towards them. “Oh, Eliza, whatever are you doing
now
?”

They are so persuasive, the inhabitants of Rathbone Road, so articulate, confident, authoritative, highly educated, resourceful, strong, commanding and rich. They polish off the police presence before I have even begun to try to explain myself to it, even to see its face. The police car is gone. Marjorie Gargery is running with a cup of tea and somebody else with an extra coat. Isobel Ingham goes off without a word and doesn't look back as she passes through the high door in her wall. Everyone else—not the pregnant couple who stand apart, a little embarrassed—but everybody else urges me over to my own front door. And oh, good heavens, here are the Baxters coming out of their house with hot-water-bottles, and it seems they are to spend the night with me.

“I'm perfectly all right. I have Simon. Simon will stay at number forty-three tonight. It was only Simon. I can't think why he didn't simply ask for a bed over here in the first place.”

But they have got me into bed (the buggers) and Dulcie seems to be hauling mattresses about so that she may sleep on my floor. “Now Eliza, you can't be alone.”

“Look,” I say, sitting upright, swilling tea, crunching biscuits, supremely wide-awake. (I don't feel tired. I have not felt tired for months.) “Lincoln biscuits, very nice, Dulcie—I'm sorry. I was woken up by a light shining in on me. I went over and found that it had only been Simon breaking into his own old home.”

The Baxters were both there, side by side at the foot of my bed.

“Simon?”

“Joan's Simon. He must have been down in London from Cambridge and missed the last train. A concert I expect. I heard him playing in the Church earlier. You know—like he used to. He was wonderful. I sat in the porch listening.”

Now they are seated side by side on the end of my bed, the two Baxters, shifting their thin bottoms about.

“I must be mad—I knew he had a Church key. I didn't connect. When the torch-beams began to play all over me, I didn't connect. I rang the police before I went across and found it was only Simon. But, before I had time to come back here and ring again to say it was all a mistake . . .”

“Eliza,” said sombre Richard Baxter of the prudent, judicial lips, hair on end in scant but tidy tufts. (How wise of him to become a judge. It's a head already half a wig.) “Eliza, let me ask you one question. Where do you think Simon is now?”

“Well I hope, I very much hope that someone is looking after him. That house must be freezing. Nobody's been near it for months. I never see Charles there now. Or at all. Sarah's in Oxford . . .”

The Baxters sit in thought and I start to climb out of bed to go and look for Simon, hungry and alone. Four Baxter hands are raised to press me back again.

“Dulcie, Richard, could you find out about Simon?”

Two kind Baxter nods.

“There's my spare room. Poor boy, messing with firelighters. He needs looking after. He needs his mother.” I had a flash of fear though. I remembered the natty, cruel little face that was no more Simon than it was Tom Hopkin.

“Yes,” they say, watching me. “Yes, Eliza.”

Now all at once my eyes are heavy. There must have been something in the tea and I'd like to fight it. I haven't needed sleep for months. I haven't really slept since drunken Christmas night.

 

May 29th

 

D.J.,

 

And I wake to hear a telephone conversation going on in the hall. At first I can't think who is in my house. “Very,” the voice is saying. “Very. Yes. Called the police. I think it is essential. Yes.” Then I drift again and wake again. Dulcie Baxter with a most slipshod tray of breakfast is lurching about the room, looking for somewhere to put it down. She blinks through her specs. The ink is still in her hair. I am overcome as I remember the goodness of Dulcie and the events of the night. I spring up in bed and cry, “Oh, Dulcie—you look so tired.”

“It's the end of the Mock,” she says, “it is the worst time.”

“But you
never
make fun.”

“The Mock. Mock, mock, mock. ‘A Levels.' Marking. This is the worst year we have ever had in the history of the school. The worst papers I've ever seen. Of course it's twentieth-century stuff they set now, most of it.”

“Really?”

“Well, enough. They all choose the recent authors.”

“Don't you like recent authors?”

“I'm afraid not much. It's all stuff we could all of us write if we could be bothered, the modern novel. And modern poetry in particular.”

“You're very good still to be taking it on.”

“Oh, they're very short of people. Young examiners won't put the hours in. For the pay. It has to be someone with plenty of time.”

I think of my time in its plenty, and nothing done. She plonks the tray across my knees and the marmalade pot slides and slips and spills. She walks about the floor trampling vigorously my shed garments. I am troubled by them. They ought to be over a chair. My dog arrives and lies on my knickers. Dulcie shoos him off. Dog growls and she looks as if she's going to give him extra homework. She looks about my bare room for something to do, needing curtains to draw back.

She stands at the window, facing the road.

“I've telephoned Henry,” she says. “I'm afraid you won't be pleased, but Richard and I decided last night that Henry ought to know about you.”

“Know what?”

“That you are frightening us all. That you are clearly very unhappy.”

“Did you get through?”

“Yes, he was just about to leave for work.”

“But did you get
through
to him? You'll be the first for a long time.”

“He's coming to see you. He'll be here this afternoon.”

“Well, I'd better get up.”

“No, no Eliza. We want you to stay quietly where you are today. I've brought the Mock across and I shall work in your drawing room and bring you your lunch to bed. You need a rest.”

“What is there for me to rest from?”

“Eliza, oh Eliza.”

“I know, Dulcie. You've sent for the doctor.”

She blinked. Her eyes through the hard-worked tri-focals turned to fried eggs.

“So you heard the phone?”

“Not really. I didn't know who it was. But it's what you would do. Perhaps you're right. Who's coming? I've never had a doctor visit the house. Even after the hysterectomy.”

“I've sent for Richard's doctor. Dr. Sepsis. He's an old doctor, Eliza. Very experienced. He doesn't do much nowadays, but Richard has the highest respect . . . He was awfully good when Richard's mother died.
And
his father. And his cousin, come to that, in Merton Park. And he was marvellous when Sybil Etheridge died and poor—you know, the man from down the hill with the Airedale. When he went.”

“Do his patients ever get better?”

“What? He's properly qualified—very highly qualified indeed before the War. His father used to live in Anne's house, or it may have been Isobel Ingham's. It was a doctor's family before the Great War.”

“Can he get up the stairs?”

(Oh Barry, Barry—just wait!)

“Oh, he's very spry. I'm not sending you some young psychiatric type, Eliza. No—we'll see what Dr. Septimus has to say.”

“Septimus?”

“
St.
Thomas
, Eliza.”

“What, where he was or what he is?”

“Eliza, just let me get a bowl of water and a flannel and then you can have another sleep.”

I examine the bowl and flannel for soporific elements and watch my rose-geranium soap grow soft and pale round the edges as the water cools about it. I loathe pink. I loathe
pink
.

In the end I take it out of the water. A Christmas present. I'd never have bought pink for myself. One pound thirty they cost. The green ones—mint—are lovely. I sit squashing it in my fingers, feeling rather sick.

What's Dulcie up to? There are dreadful noises going on below—snarls, woofs and smashing crockery. As I slip into sleep again I feel the soap slip, too, out of my hand. In the mists I hear a bell and Dulcie's voice.

In further mists I hear a second ring and two voices coming nearer up the stairs, one Dulcie's the other a sort of wheeze with pauses. At length Dulcie comes sailing in carrying the earthenware pot I keep for old lettuce-leaves for the compost-heap. It is stuffed with yellow roses. “Look what's come for you. What a bouquet!”

Beloved Simon.

“And here is Dr. Sepulchre.”

(You know it's funny, Joan, I can't get the hang of the way Dulcie Baxter speaks, I'm glad I'm not one of her pupils. She's got something of Sarah about her, making godfather sound like father.)

“Here's the patient, Doctor, and I shall leave you alone.”

And he looks quite a nice old thing. He has the usual half-smile they fix on with the stethoscope. Sometimes you see it at The Hospice though not often, Mother Ambrosine choosing her doctors as carefully as her helpers and, if I dare say so, her patients.

“Ha,” he says. “Hullo there.” (Well, what can they say?) “Not well in the night I hear?”

“It was not a—not a very usual night.”

“Not a usual night, eh?” He is feeling about in my neck glands.

“Open wide.” Gleaming a light down my throat, he seizes one of my hands and inspects the nails then, seeming unsurprised at them, he flings back my bedclothes, whips out a hammer and hits me on the knee. My foot hits him obediently back. “Excellent,” he says. “Excellent. Sorry my hands are cold,” and he begins to press me in the stomach. He continues with things of this nature and then sits with bowed head for a considerable time. I wonder what it is that he has found.

“There's a big bar of soap on the floor,” he says.

I can think of no reply.

“Ah,” he says at last, and very sadly. “And how old are you, Mrs. Peabody?”

“I'm fifty-one.”

“Ah fifty-one. Menopause going all right? Everything drying up nicely?”

“I had a hysterectomy at thirty-one. That's the scar.”

“Ah, the scar.” We both look at the huge purple zip-fastener across my lower regions and my tired stomach, once so taut and golden above it. The skin above the scar hangs poised like the overhang before an avalanche. You'd have thought he might have noticed.

“I believe I knew your father,” I said.

“Really?”

“Long ago.”

“Ah, long gone, long gone. Now I do congratulate you. Well done, well done.”

“For knowing your father?”

“For getting rid of the good old nursery-furniture, my dear. Best removed when no longer needed.”

“What a perfectly horrible thing to say. What a foul phrase.”

“What? Ha?”

“I was thirty-one.” Then I added, “Fuck you.”

“
Now
then,” he said. “Tell me. How many children have you, Mrs. Peabody?”

“None.”

“Ah, I see. Some trouble? Was there malignancy?”

“No, we were very fond of each other then.”

“I mean—er—my dear—did you
want
children?”

“No. Not by then. It was not possible after . . . But we were both fertile.” (Why the hell tell him?) “It was a sort of unspoken postponement.”

“Husband happy?”

“Oh, I expect so. He's living in Dolphin Square. He left me.”

“Ah, now then, I
had
heard something? Why was this d'you think?”

“I think . . .” And then Joan I did indeed endeavour to think. I looked straight at the old creature's eyes. How mysterious that I should feel suddenly impelled to tell the truth to the Son of Dreariness, who no more than his father cared in the least about it. I think perhaps because he had looked with distaste at the rose-geranium soap.

“I think he left me because I had become impossible. He thought that I was going mad and he probably saw it before anybody else did. It is hard to bear—someone else's rift in the soul.”

“Leaving you was not a sympathetic move.”

“No. But I think, you know, that he was frightened. My soul's rift had caused another—a chasm that opened between us. The chasm only opened a few years ago, the rift years maybe ten years before that. I believe. I believe that deep down somewhere he found something that was too difficult for him. It was probably in me but it might, I suppose, have been in himself too. So he went off with a friend.”

“Ah, and the friend a younger woman.”

“No. He'd
never
do that. He's not at all romantic. He went off with a Senior Member of the Civil Service, a man. From the house across the road. The house you can see. Number thirtyfour. The man's wife was my friend. Well, my acquaintance. She left her husband a year and a half ago. You can see how sad that lovely house looks. No, Henry went off on Christmas Day with a perfectly friendly congenial excellent sort of man, in a very dignified way.”

Doctor Access stood looking out at where your lost house stands lamenting you, Joan. He said, “We lived in this road once you know. Over on that side of the road. Splendid old houses with such beautiful long gardens. I expect this side is more practical. Lot of bomb-damage over there. Of course I was away at the War. I must have a talk with your husband, Mrs. Peabody. I think he must be made to come and talk to me about you before we decide on the next step. A consultation or two. Nothing very urgent.”

“How like your dear father.”

“What? Now there's a place I could recommend. Rather expensive but excellent for complete rest.”

“But I don't need a rest. I'm never tired. What I want is a revelation.”

“Now, alas, that is not in my power. Who doesn't? Who doesn't?”

“I need to understand the nature of sanity.”

“Mrs. Peabody, this is a little outside my sphere but I believe that if you comprehend a notion of sanity . . .”

“But I'm not sure I do.”

“If you think yourself mad, then, to be blunt you are most unlikely to be so. That's what my textbooks used to say anyway. Of course, I'm old-fashioned.” He sighed deeply and his face hung like a crag. “Just my opinion of course.”

“You look, doctor, as if you don't find life very rewarding either.”

“Rewarding? Now, we're not here to talk about me, are we? One does one's best. That is the only reward. I think you know we all ask too much. I remember my Indian servants before the War. Poor as dogs. Life expectancy thirty-two. Happy all day long.”

“Really?” I saw the flies on the boy with dying eyes, who was head and torso only, in the mud of the bank of the Brahmaputra outside our house near Dacca.

“And such good health available for us
all
now. When my old father was first a doctor here he used to go round in a horse and trap, or on his feet, walking between patients, and all he had to offer when he got to them was a kind face and a bottle of coloured water most of the time. People died or recovered, as they do today. But all so much happier now.”

“Penicillin?”

“I prescribe it rarely. Even without it—so much splendid health. Yet all these nervous breakdowns and everybody depressed.”

“I work at The Hospice at Caesar's Farm.”

He looked up with a totally different face. “I didn't know you worked. You're medical then? Dulcie should have told me.”

“Oh, only the washing-up.”

“I see.” He looked relieved. “Well, my dear, I shall be in touch with your husband and my secretary will be writing to you. And don't worry. You seem very fit to me. This confusion is a wretched business. It's the age, you know, the age. Even though all the little bits and pieces were nipped out long ago . . . We must think of all the starving people in Ethiopia, mustn't we? And of Buchenwald and Belsen? Of the atomic bomb and of terrible cancers?”

“I don't think that that would make me happier.”

Not hearing me presumably, he took a quick, worried look across the road again at your house and said, “And above all, we must keep jogging along.” He patted my hand, slid on the soap about six feet across the room and fell flat on his face.

“Jesus laughed,” I informed Dulcie who came bouncing in with a glare as if it was all my fault. She gathered him up, ushered him out and they went off downstairs. I nipped out of bed and watched from the window as he loped down the path like an old turtle, his head waving about in front of him feeling in front with his creepy claws. He slid slowly away in his car, past Old Bernard who today, as every day, was zig-zagging up the road on his heavy bicycle. Two grim-faced men, one who used concentration camps as moral fodder, the other who had known one.