The Queen of the Tambourine

by Jane Gardam

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Oh no! Not a thing. Not the least thing.” Her voice, Joan, has changed. You know how she used to talk Birmingham/ American—well, I suppose you know. Now it is a sort of clear, high, socially-OK voice of yesteryear, and much much older than her years. It’s rather like the Queen’s. “Oh, not a bit, Eliza. Just I’m rather . . .” Then the image shivered. The voice cracked. “I just wondered if you might be coming to Oxford sometime.”

  “I’d love to come to Oxford, Sarah. Thank you. I’d love to. I’ll take you out to lunch.”

  “No, not lunch. Could you come to where I’m living? To my room?”

  “Well of course. I’ll bring the lunch if you like.”

  “No, no. That’s all right. I’d just like to talk to you. I can’t say more now. There’s someone wanting the phone. Just behind me.”

  “When shall I come? Next weekend?”

  “I wondered” (careful cadences) “if you could come today? This afternoon? There’s a two-ish train.”

  “I can’t come today, Sarah, I have to be at The Hospice.”

  “It’s terribly important. Could you change it?”

  “Well, I could. Sarah. Couldn’t your father . . . ?”

  “Are you joking?” she said in Birmingham, then “Oh, Eliza” (Her Maj.) “please come!”

  “Could you meet me at the station?”

  “Well, I’m not actually able to leave my room at present. Could you get a taxi? You know Oxford. I’ll give you my address.”

  So I rang Mother Ambrosine who said that she could cope and Barry was beginning a tapestry and had the football. I arrived in Oxford in the early afternoon and went bowling through the streets looking at all the orderly and competent young, clean and tidy, and all the girls with washed hair—full circle again to the time when I was one of them, though I never looked so fierce and sure. And, in my second year, of course I left them.

  Sarah’s lodgings seemed to be some sort of religious house, presumably found for her by Charles. Did you know this? I hadn’t realised that Sarah is devout. From all the BVMs in the vestibile niches I thought it must be Catholic, but when at last I opened the door—nobody paying any attention to the bell—there were photographs of Greek- or Russian-Orthodox priests all the way up the stairs glaring from inside their beards. Two or three godly-looking, willowy people—small-headed men with fluting voices and bony women with good profiles and woollen stockings—were standing together in the hall. They looked through me but stopped talking. One man blew his nose. There was a hint of incense. On a board there were lists of Divine Service in the Chapel, a very great many. It looked like a religion that knew what it was up to.

  I smiled but nobody spoke. I went up to the top floor and knocked on Sarah’s door.

  “Hullo!” said the Queen. She looks beautiful, Joan; bronzed from the skiing, and Charles must be giving her a very good allowance to judge from her pink silk suit. Her face is like an advertisement, lipstick shining, and the exact pink; hair well-cut, fingernails that never saw a sink.

  “Darling Eliza!”

  Her eyelashes are all turned up, two semi-circles dyed black. They reminded me of my long-forgotten terrible cousin in Harrogate the day she left school in 1954. Her hands were covered in enormous rings. There was a crucifix on the wall and various pictures of saints. Otherwise it was almost bare. A plastic bucket stood about, “For the leak in the roof,” said Sarah. “This top floor is pretty scruffy. Excuse me one sec,” and she left the room. I wandered about.

  “Coffee?” she said, coming back with some.

  “Oh, yes please.”

  “Excuse me.” Out she went again. This time she came back carrying a milk-jug, but it was empty. “Isn’t it a lovely day?” she said. “So glad you could come.”

  We drank our coffee or at least I drank mine and she looked hard at hers and put it down. She said, “Half a sec,” and carried hers from the room, returning without it. We sat for a while looking at a picture of St. Ursula surrounded by her eleven thousand virgins.

  “You said it was urgent, Sarah?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m going to have a baby.”

  I’m sorry, Joan. I’m telling it exactly as it happened. Without doubt you’ll get a formal notification from Charles in the end, but this I want you to hear precisely as it unwound. That is as it should be.

  I said, “Sarah! It’s only your second term.”

  She said, “I know. I’m silly.”

  “You are more than silly. You are utterly irresponsible and wrong. All your music! All those years!”

  “Oh, the music’s still there.”

  “Yes, but you can’t be. You can’t stay at Oxford. Oh—you lunatic child.”

  “I’m not. It isn’t going to make any difference.”

  “Sarah, are you by any chance thinking I’ll organise . . . ?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “I expect everyone will advise it. They will be advising it now.”

  “Nobody knows yet.”

  “They will. And I’m sorry. I can have nothing to do with abortions.”

  “Good Lord, neither can I,” she said and we both sat looking at the eleven thousand virgins standing in clumps like a herbaceous border, all singing. Singing flowers. Eleven thousand mouths held open in neat ovals, effortlessly on top C. Easy lives.

  “Oh Sarah. Why did you send for me? I know nothing about this. I never had a child. I’ve never looked after one.”

  “I know, but you should have done, Eliza. You’d have loved it. You’d have loved a child.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Well, I—we—we were just wondering if by any chance you felt that you could look after it for us? You and Henry. Just at first, for a year or two.”

  “Are you mad? Do you think you’d be allowed to hand over a baby to a—to an acquaintance of your mother living in south London and you in Oxford—a woman who wouldn’t have the first idea what to do with it?”

  “You would. I know you would. You could do anything. You are so successful, always. Look how the dog settled in, and Daddy.”

  “Sarah!”

  “Well, it was the first thing I thought of. I know that it would be all right. I thought of you at once. Instinctively.”

  “Sarah, apart from anything else, Henry isn’t living with me anymore.”

  “Where’s he gone now?”

  “He—well, he’s living with your father as a matter of fact, In Dolphin Square. He’s left me.”

  “What—for Daddy?”

  “No. Nothing like that.”

  “We must thank God,” she said, looking at St. Ursula’s ecstatic face, “for small mercies. Or maybe not. Might have been the very thing.”

  “Eliza,” she said. We had been sitting silent. All we could hear was the January wind battering the dormer window and a holy sound drifting up from some other virginal choir in the chapel below. “Eliza—excuse me.”

  When she came back she said, “It’s bad at present. I looked it up in a book in Blackwell’s and it says it will be better after the third month.”

  “Sarah, the child’s father . . .”

  “Yes. We’re going to tea with him. That is, if you don’t mind. I said you’d come.”

  “But it’s an intimate matter. It’s a thing for your parents. Your own father . . .”

  “Look Eliza, be sensible.” (Brum again.) “And Ma’s in Bangladesh having experiences.”

  “She must come home.” (Yes, Joan.)

  “I think she won’t. She’s ill you know. Gone potty. Flipped. We can’t get near her. It’s a year now.”

  I should like to be able to tell you now, Joan, that at this point Sarah began to cry. She did not. She crossed her silky legs, took an old-world powder compact out of her pocket and looked this way and that, searching her face for signs of weakness. Again she reminded me of my dreadful cousin, Annie Cartwright, thirty years ago and I cannot say why, but thinking this, the room b
ecame suddenly cold. I found that I was shaking. It was a relief when Sarah did something equally unsophisticated but true to her own self. She took a small white handkerchief from her pocket and began to suck the end of it.

  “Oh, all right, Sarah. All right. Of course I’ll come. When are we to go?”

  “Half-past three. We’re late. Tea is three forty-five until four-thirty.”

  “I suppose it’s a college. We never had tea when I was an undergraduate, except a bun or a tray we pushed along. Won’t it be very public?”

  “No, it’s a college but it’s very quiet. We’ll be in the Fellows’ drawing room. He’s a Professor.”

  “Sarah—he must be ninety!”

  “You’re out of date, Eliza,” said the Queen, collecting a handbag and, great heaven, gloves. “There are some frightfully young ones now. Reg is barely fifty.”

  “Reg?” I said. Somehow Reg did not sound like a Professor. Had she been duped, I wondered? Had I misheard? Was it the college janitor? Porter? Approaching the porter through the great gates of a college, announcing ourselves to him through the glass of his little office, it seemed unlikely. A delightful man. He smiled with avuncular pleasure on seeing Sarah, who seemed to be familiar to him. He said that Professor Hookaneye was expecting us and that he would ring through.

  “Hookaneye?”

  “Yes,” said the Queen. “They come from Tewkesbury.”

  “I honestly don’t see that where the Hookaneyes come from . . .”

  “Oh golly,” she said, and disappeared behind a golden buttress.

  Beyond her, over the greensward, I beheld a very slender man as tall as Henry, six foot four at least. He towered above us, suspended in the air as on a magician’s string. His long head looked like a Leicestershire sheep.

  Well, Joan, first I suppose I should reassure you in one department. He is perfectly respectable. He is I think probably the most respectable man I’ve ever met. He was wearing a pale grey double-breasted suit, dark blue tie and highly polished shoes. He walked carefully, his head a little dipped. He had thick grey hair like a helmet. Every possible bit of him was covered up. I never saw a man who showed so little skin—unless perhaps a member of the IRA or Ku Klux Klan and I’ve never actually seen either of these. The idea of Professor Hookaneye’s nakedness was awesome. A holy mystery.

  “I’m sorry to say,” said he, “that we must go first to my rooms. The other member of our tea-party is late.”

  “Other member?”

  “Yes. We’re only allowed one guest per Fellow, so I have had to call in a colleague for the godmother.”

  I looked round for the godmother and then glared at Sarah.

  “I’d be quite happy to miss tea,” I said, “and talk here.”

  We had arranged ourselves on his Grecian sofa. I wondered if this was where the seduction had taken place and looked intently at the Professor who had put his fingertips together as though in prayer. This seemed hopeful. We sat. The gold buildings shone in through the window. The room was a miracle of order. A tome stood upon a lectern. It appeared to be written in Sanskrit. I thought the Professor’s eyes had taken on a peculiar look when I said, “talk.”

  I said, “I should like to talk to you at length. The sooner this is over the better.”

  He said vaguely, rather cross I thought, “But I think you would like to have the experience of seeing us all at tea?” He gave me a nervous—and I have to say it—sweet though bewildered smile. “Don’t you think your godmother would like that, Sarah? Sarah has often visited me here by herself, Mrs. Peabody. Haven’t you, Sarah?”

  “Yes, I’m quite sure she has,” I said, looking at him very straight.

  “Of course I should be honoured to go down to tea, but would it be private enough? I think that there will be much to say. With Sarah’s mother in Bangladesh and Charles not readily available. Charles is her father . . .”

  “Oh, I know Joan and Charles,” he said with ease.

  “I am then even more surprised.” My blackest stare I could see was giving him pause. He seemed in deep thought now, watching me carefully. I examined my fingernails and found them interesting. They had a hazy green line beneath each rim, pale, marine and eerie.

  Then he swung himself off his wing chair and said, “Oh, you know, Sarah—shall we risk it, hey? Go down to tea without the other chaperon?” and led us off through many a twist and turn along pattering marble passages and into a chamber where figures sat about in the shadows like uneasy thoughts, either alone or in well-behaved little groups, eating and sipping and now and then glinting at each other. There was a very cruel silence as Professor Hookaneye paced by with the two of us. I almost felt sorry for him, and tried to make myself invisible so that Sarah could look like the sole, permitted guest, but as I was wearing my old green trousers, zip-jacket and the earrings—I had had no time to change if I was to catch the train that Sarah had commanded—this was not easy. Sarah was certainly not invisible in her sharp pink silk and fifties Harrogate jewellery (wherever had she found it?) and gleaming legs. She was like a flamingo in a poultry house.

  There was a vast round mahogany table with plates of thin bread and butter, slab cake, Marmite and honey. We had to help ourselves. Reg brought us cups of faint tea and led us to a far corner so that, he said, we might observe.

  I observed. All those skulls full of brains. Some of the finest brains in the world. I could almost see the brains. The heads seemed lit from within so that each white spongey mass shone in the semi-darkness like a miner’s lamp or a gigantic glow-worm. An internal halo.

  Halo, by God, I thought, examining Professor Hookaneye who was lying back stirring his tea with benignity. What if I were now to say loud and clear, “Professor Hookaneye, what do you propose to do about Sarah? Were you really serious in suggesting that I should adopt your child?” I thought of what had happened to Sarah in his ascetic den, her young life spoiled, her future in sad collapse, all her carefree flute-playing in the roses done. I debated whether to pick up my slice of bread and honey and slap it on his face.

  But he talked quietly and precisely on, giving us a friendly and delightful rundown on the great men before us. “I thought you might like to see the Chapel and our dining room,” he said to me (“Go with him,” mouthed the Queen) and we processed from the room followed by glances that said, Two guests! Two guests!

  And poor Sarah at the entrance to the dining room fled again. Reg Hookaneye said, “She doesn’t seem quite the thing. Overworking”—and I was speechless. But he and I wandered on until we came to a room where after dinner each evening dessert is taken. We stood looking at silver candlesticks and a fruit bowl like a Van der Meer and a great flagon of port set ready. So beautiful.

  “It is a privilege to be part of it,” he said—what a dear humble man he sounds. I said, “Since we are alone, Professor Hookaneye, I should like to sit down for a while and have this business out with you.”

  “Oh, we can’t sit here,” he said, “I can’t possibly let you sit down here.”

  “Nevertheless we have to talk some time about Sarah’s baby.”

  “Sarah’s what?”

  Then he turned so white that the colour seemed to drain even out of his suit. He seized the back of a throne, pulled it away from the table and collapsed on it. He stared at me.

  “But you knew why I had come?”

  “You . . . She said only that she wanted to bring her godmother to tea.”

  “Professor Hookaneye—do you mean you didn’t know? About your own child?”

  He stared on and on. Then he laid his head down beside the grapes. I heard voices outside, one Sarah’s and the other a pleasant voice that seemed familiar. “Sorry I was late for tea, Reg. Unforgivable. I was in the Codrington. Good heavens—Eliza Peabody!” It was Tom Hopkin, very bright, his glasses flashing with good-nature.

  “I think,” he said, “Good Lord, Dr. Hookaneye has fainted. Here, I’ll take his head. Somebody get hold of his feet.”

  �
�I will,” said Sarah, tottering up.

  “No, no, I will,” I said, “Sarah mustn’t lift anything heavy.” And then I thought, Well perhaps she should.

  In the end she and I took a long thin leg each and Tom the narrow shoulders and we carried Dr. Hookaneye out of the room and on to the quadrangle to lie him down on the pale stones near a drain. No one was about. We paused.

  And then Joan, a very horrible and extraordinary thing happened. Hookaneye disintegrated. The lanky, beautifully finished, excellently dressed body of Dr. Hookaneye shimmered and vibrated and melted and liquified and began to twirl itself down into the mediaeval drainage so that in no time at all only the toe of a shoe showed there—polished black, like the top of a little lost cricket ball. Dr. Hookaneye, Joan, was gone.

  I raised my eyes to the others and beheld Tom Hopkin leading Sarah away. She appeared to be weeping. Her head was near his shoulder and his arm was round her. I looked back at the drain and blop, blop, bleep, gurgle, now the toe juddered, shuddered, reverberated and all in one movement was gone. The drain was full of Reg. Pray that the college tonight is not troubled by cloud-burst. I ran to Sarah.

  “I’ll see to her,” said Tom.

  “I must find her Tutor.”

  “I shall find her Tutor. You must go. Go home, Mrs. Peabody. Have a long rest. You don’t seem yourself.”

  “You called me Mrs. Peabody!”

  “Do go, Eliza, I’ll ring.”

  “I shall have to tell Joan. I shall tell her everything.”

  They stood staring. Tom then stepped across from Sarah and kissed me on the cheek. He lifted a finger to my face, traced a line affectionately along the edge of it. “Eliza, Eliza,” he said.

  “You’ll miss your train,” said Sarah. She looked rosy, invigorated. She was not being sick.

  “I’ll find you a taxi,” said Tom.

  “You are obsessed by taxis.”

  “I must take Sarah home.”

  “Will you report . . . ?” I looked back at the drain.

  “What?”

  “Well, the disappearance of Dr. Hookaneye.”

  “Oh, he’s always doing it,” said Tom. “Don’t worry. He’ll be right as rain in the morning.”