The Queen of the Tambourine

by Jane Gardam

  Round the edge of the world something looked at me. A very distant, scarce-remembered relation—happiness. Like frightened, struggling Anne, happiness had slipped my mind since I had been persuaded that the world is composed entirely of super-women now, like you, Joan, in your brave defection. More anon, anon, anon—

  Your admiring, searching, separate friend, E. P.

  March marches on

  Dear old J.,

  Continuum, continuum.

  I dressed carefully for the Creative Writing Class and stood in the window, waiting. When Anne’s car drew up I could see the bulk of another person beside her and Anne’s head turned towards it, nodding up and down in earnest conversation. She began to leave the car with firm tread but then put her head back in the car again and continued to talk, one arm conducting music in the air. She turned and looked up at the house like a general squaring up to a hard campaign.

  “Just ready.” I was all smiles and she looked relieved, I suppose because I was in a dress and not the usual dressing-gown or zip jacket. “Eliza, lovely! I keep meaning to say—what amazing earrings. This is Pixie, Pixie Leak.”

  The substantial form in the passenger seat—I’d sat myself in the back—did not show by a tremor any awareness of me, but stared ahead. “Pixie—Eliza Peabody.” Maybe there was a sound, though it might have been only the creaking of clothes. I could not see her face at all, nor yet her hair for it was covered by a yachting cap. Shoulders were encased in army-surplus, painted with camouflage, and a leather jerkin. We proceeded down Common Side and turned in at a beautifully painted Victorian house facing the Common and otherwise surrounded by vast gardens. Steel mesh covered all the windows and the eaves held the usual alarms. A bell beside the oaken door was held steady by a vertical bar of barley-sugar wrought-iron fit for the entrance to some castle keep.

  It reminded me of the sinister Chinese houses in Penang where everyone’s afraid of the chop. “Are they Chinese?” I asked and was rewarded by blankness.

  “She’s married to a very successful QC,” said Anne. “He could have done very well if he hadn’t gone into Building Contracts.”

  “He doesn’t seem to have done too badly.”

  “I mean,” said Anne, “he will never be exactly the crème de la. It rather shows in the light fittings. I mean, he makes a frightful lot of money but they know none of the right people. He’s very musical and she’s a bit highbrow. But awfully nice.”

  A wisp of Philippino answered the bell’s clang and the three of us trooped into a drawing room which could easily have doubled for a ballroom or the site of a mid-term investiture at Buckingham Palace. Twenty or so very well-dressed women were sitting easily about in cheerful communion. Rather apart, behind a coffee table sat a small, despondent man. It was exactly like a meeting of the ‘Wives’ Fell. in which another Eliza once had ta’en delight.

  “But I thought it was going to be something to do with a college?”

  “Oh no,” said Anne, “I never said that. It’s pretty high-powered all the same. The seated man is Lancaster.”

  “It sounds like one of Shakespeare’s Histories.”

  “Hush Eliza. He’s very shy—and terribly sensitive as a result of being abused as a child.”

  “How awful. But can he bear to talk about it?”

  “Talking about it and writing about it have saved his sanity. He feels he has a mission to prepare people for the Thatcher World.”

  “I’d have thought most people here subscribe to the Thatcher World.”

  “Oh, not when it comes to child-abuse, Eliza. Nobody here could countenance child-abuse. Please give us that.”

  “But does Mrs. Thatcher? I shouldn’t think she’d ever have had the time. Aren’t her children rather loyal and well set-up?”

  “Of course Mrs. Thatcher didn’t practise child—really, Eliza. You know exactly what I mean. But child-abuse must be brought right into the open. All over the world. Children must learn where danger is likely to strike and in the present political climate where could they learn better than in children’s books.”

  This seemed to me a mystifying statement and made Pixie Leak produce a sudden and enormous clearing of the throat. I felt her eyes on me. I said, “Yes. Well. I suppose Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs . . .”

  “Well exactly. Precisely. You have hit it. The Attachment Dynamic and the Concept of Ego Strength. It is all a question of perceiving and recognising reality and dealing with unpleasure. The child must become aware of the sin of others.”

  “Snow White was C. S. Lewis’s favourite film,” I said, rather to fill a silence. “He and his brother used to go on Saturday afternoons.”

  “Well, exactly.”

  “Yes, but they were both about fifty.”

  “Eliza,” said Anne, “do be careful. There are some very bright people here.”

  “C. S. Lewis was very bright.”

  “Be quiet at once, Eliza.”

  Pixie Leak was being whisperingly introduced now to the women nearest her in the semi-circle of comfortable chairs. They all nodded and smiled widely as she glowered about for something with a straighter back, then climbed out of her jerkin and the army-surplus to reveal a gigantic T-shirt with “Hard Rock Café” inscribed across the front. Her face above, as she settled with forward-thrusting brows, was grim. Below the T-shirt were knickerbockers, yellow socks and bright brown brogues. I was amazed to find that the brogues sent through me a pang of pure love and I found myself thinking of my beloved Girl-Guide Captain long ago. I said, “Anne—do you think—have you ever thought I might be queer?”

  “Oh Eliza—please.”

  Cups of tea were being passed round (Royal Worcester, Lapsang Souchong) and the little table was moved nearer to the waiting speaker who then placed his notebook more centrally upon it. Then he picked the book up again and, foolishly, the tea-cup and saucer, too. He found that if he held the notebook in the same hand as the saucer he could drink from the cup. We watched with respect, while all kinds of bits of paper began to fall out of the notebook and a number of women began to crawl about the floor picking them up. A retarded child who had been sitting quietly on the floor near her mother suddenly burst out laughing and blew some raspberries at everyone and Lady Gant, sitting behind me, said, “She ought to leave that child at home. It’s very upsetting for everybody to have to see it.” Pixie Leak gave a sigh and the woman whose house it seemed to be, whose husband didn’t know the right people, and who was dressed in rich brown silk jersey for which you should really be very thin indeed, went and stood beside Lancaster Forbes and smiled, brilliant-eyed, for silence. For silence at once.

  Oh Joan. What good women. So concerned about children. So experienced. How efficient they all are, every one of their children at this moment safely at school or with its nanny, beautifully managed, secure. Each child in a little while will be gathered up from school, taken home to a prosperous shining house, tea ready on the table, supper in the mike. Oh, all these women with their well-washed hair, hand-made sweaters, sun-tans from second homes in Corfu or Unknown Tuscany. And good, you know. Not decadent, jealous, spiteful, cruel; few of them drunks, hopped up on amphetamines, or damped down by tranquillisers. All of them obediently divorced from nicotine, all keeping their appointments for cancer scans, dental check-ups, cholesterol counts and their diaries in sensible order for Ascot, Hurlingham, Covent Garden, tickets for Glyndebourne and the Tennis. Rich they are, rich fawn and dull, like marrons glacés. But good. Serious about Bridge, a bit heavy on the gin—but otherwise blameless, blameless. How odd that, when the story goes that women now are dragged down often to suicide by full-time marriage and parenthood, here are these survivors sitting well-groomed, good-looking, confident, articulate (how well brown-silk-jersey is talking) and having the time of their lives. They are the organisers of complex social lives, several houses and maybe a central-London apartment belonging to the company; blind-eyed when necessary to the other woman who may use it, too; and linchpins of their
husbands’ careers, as their children get themselves about the world to foreign friends in Mexico and Peru at an age when their grandparents were still being taken for short walks in the park.

  I looked at the women, at the speaker designate, at Pixie. Leak pulsating from her throne and thought, It’s no good, this is not my tribe. My trouble is that I never knew my tribe. I’ve always been on the edge, just hanging about. Nowhere. And I’ve never faced it.

  I could not understand one word of the talk that now followed. Lancaster Forbes spoke in a weary little voice as if at any moment he might burst into tears and in a vocabulary that was new to me; but this may have been because I found it hard to concentrate after the first few moments when he dropped his half-full tea-cup on the floor and brown-jersey crept forward on hands and knees with a damp cloth, rubbing vigorously first the carpet and then the speaker’s feet, then the legs of his little table and now and again, at her whim, making dabs at his trouser-legs and even lap. When she had crept back, the retarded child crept forward and flung her arms round Mr. Forbes’s knees and made some high-pitched hooting noises. Everybody smiled affectionately at this except for Lady Gant, who made a noise like a demented horse, and Mr. Lancaster who gave the child a nasty shove and made her cry. Most of the audience however were polite and very disciplined, and as the talk drew to a close and Mr. Forbes took out a handkerchief and scrubbed at his face and hands—the room boiled with central-heating—there was a flutter of clapping and exclamations of pleasure.

  Anne Robin then moved the vote of thanks. She had not introduced the speaker, she said, because everybody in the room knew him (the retarded child cried “Whoops”) and respected him so well (Pixie Leak cleared her throat again at this and flung the knee of one knickerbocker over the other) and there could be no family in the land that did not know and love him, too. There were many autograph-albums in the room, she knew, waiting to be presented to testify to this, and a number of paperbacks everyone hoped that he would sign. She knew that Mr. Forbes would not mind (he gave a skimmed-milk smile) and now it was her pleasure to thank him for his very interesting talk, assure him that we would all now be brushing up our ideas on the ego and the id, sibling politics and psychological proximity, and to say that he had kindly agreed to answer questions. There was the customary, English, thoughtful silence then, and Pixie did another fling of the legs.

  “Our speaker will of course understand,” said Anne, stoutly, “that this talk has been a very rare treat, for we seldom, as full-time wives and mothers, hear much about the theory of children’s literature.” She looked rather desperately round at Pixie who closed her eyes. “Usually children’s writers—and I’m afraid I am one of them—start writing without giving thought to the theory. I myself came late to this group which was formed by those so interested in child-psychology that they had decided to write books themselves. We are a group who meet largely to discuss the work that has emerged from our findings—little stories that support our views—and also of course just to talk about whatever comes into our heads, which is when the nitty-gritty really takes place.

  “But,” she went doggedly on, “there is someone here today we are glad to say well-qualified to take up some of the speaker’s points and even perhaps” (she looked glaringly and commandingly in P. Leak’s direction) “query some of them?”

  But P. Leak was smoking a very loose-looking cigarette with tobacco hanging out of it like hairs from a nose. Her head was thrown back, her eyes closed. At the mention of her, Lancaster Bumblebee had sunk down into himself in order to consider his teaspoon.

  “I was wondering,” I said, and everybody jumped. Some of them looked round and several whispered together and nodded and smiled encouragingly. “I have been wondering why it is that we are really here.”

  Lancaster looked quickly up, then down.

  “I mean, is there a theory of children’s literature? I thought it was just books children liked.” My voice faded before their stares. These women after all lived (Joan) with children every day. “I’ve always thought that children do the teaching really. That’s why I’m a bit scared of them.”

  “You’ll see what we mean in a minute, Eliza,” somebody called, kindly. “We’re going to have a chance to stretch our minds. Soon we are going to perform.”

  “Let’s see,” said Anne. “Yes, four of us I think. We are going to read aloud from our works and then Mr. Forbes and Pixie Leak whom I am proud to say we have inveigled here today” (glare) “are to comment. Pixie, as most of us know, is the winner of the Elfin Goblet, the Cow and Calf Ewer and the Queen Mab Shield and in her private capacity is a dear friend of many of us and lives in East Molesey. Pixie.”

  Then Lancaster Forbes stood up knocked over his table for the last time, muttered that he was sorry but he had to go and catch his bus and made for the door in leaps, with brown-jersey rushing after him, flapping a cheque.

  There was understanding, kindly laughter.

  “Terribly shy,” someone was saying. “We were so lucky to get him. He’s so busy. You know he thinks every morning, writes every afternoon and in the evening thinks again. It’s the basis of his canon.”

  “I wonder who does his shirts?” I asked, but nobody listened.

  “And only ten pounds and expenses. And so frightfully good. You’d never think anyone so small could have written The Video-Nasty Man and The Sex Machine.”

  “Grizel adores The Sex Machine,” said a limpid girl in apple green. “It’s cathartic, isn’t it? The girl’s initiation in the ceremonial killing of the mother of the tribe. Pre-Communist. Well, pretty well pre-everything.”

  They all began to speak at once about politics and the inevitability of the oligarch but I kept my mouth shut because of what Charles had once said. A Philippino with sad eyes came in with a tea-trolley stacked with wonderful lemon and orange shortcakes and home-made chocolate brownies. Fresh hot tea.

  Folders and clipboards taken out of hiding. “Chocolate cake?” somebody asked Pixie, who opened her eyes and began to eat hungrily with a cake-fork. “I’m afraid this is all going to seem very amateur to you,” the apple-green girl said, and Pixie licked her fingers. She was seated rather close to me. Too close to me. I looked at the nice brown brogues again and was troubled once more for I found that it was Henry and not my Girl-Guide Captain they reminded me of. Henry’s shoes. His dear shoes. His always lovely shoes. The ones that I had waited for, looking out of the bowed windows of St. James’s Street, at an old-fashioned confident world with big clean handsome men going by.

  Here I was, in this strange clique, listening to a story about a family of centipedes. It was a perfectly acceptable story—but behold all these educated women listening to it like the word of God! Centipedes, I thought, and gave a yell, for there was something crawling across the back of my neck. It was Pixie Leak’s hand.

  “Have to go,” I cried. “Forgot something.” And, like Lancaster, I fled.

  Outside was a bus-stop and a bus coming. I flung myself aboard. At that time of the afternoon there was scarcely anyone on it and I climbed upstairs so that I could ride between the branches of the sycamores along the Common’s edge. There was only one other passenger, sitting in the front seat, too, across the gangway from me.

  He was a boy, about ten years old and his chin was on his chest. He had silky hair and the back of his neck under his red and black striped school cap had a heart-breakingly beautiful cleft in it. I wanted all at once to kiss it, then thought that perhaps nowadays that would be called child-abuse. He might report me. Well, so he should. We hadn’t been introduced. He’d sock me one.

  The boy was reading steadily, page after page of a comic, and as he read, his feet in red and grey woollen socks kicked and swung, kicked and swung. When children stop swinging their legs they’re grown up. He stopped and looked at me, then went on reading.

  After a while he began again, swing and kick, kick and swing. The pages of the comic were lovingly turned and turned. When he gathered up all his th
ings to get off the bus, he looked at me again and gravely raised his cap to me.

  Oh, all the different kinds of love—

  April 12th

  Dear Joan,

  You see the date. A month of silence.

  I left you in March with the words “the different kinds of love” and I have nothing better to offer now. I write from habit only.

  Nothing has happened. Nothing but long grey days. I stand in the window a great deal. Nothing has happened since the razzledazzle of Oxford, the interesting anthropological behaviour of the Creative Writing Class, except rain. Rain and rain. Soft and soaking. Deeply seeping. Whispering night and day, all our lawns of Surrey green as Ireland and we in Rathbone Road as grey as ghosts. I stand watching the rain and contemplating the silence of God.

  What to tell you?

  So many kinds of love.

  Rain.

  Yesterday, my dearest Joan, I stood looking out at the road and saw two people standing on the pavement gazing up at the house next to mine, the house where the glamorous pair have touched down, she of the hair made of golden snakes and the figure for the catwalk. She is the martyr of the Road, goddess of the watery smile, of the perpetual headache, who pushes her two small children maniacally about from morning till night, spending her life with them at every sort of class and play-group, too busy for one word of chat, one breath of friendship. Her face is pinched and fretful and she has the air of the true template for the one-parent family.

  Not so. A husband, a fleeting figure, is to be seen daily, leaping down the steps and into the Porsche and away. They smile at me sometimes, these people, but they do not know my name.

  That house has never been a lucky house and, though it is the same pretty 1860s architecture as the rest of the Road, nobody stays there long. It is a giant sentry-box, well-proportioned, with handsome front door of royal blue. Bronze and purple glass lamps from some Sicilian palace or Parisian bordello are hung on either side of it. The glamorous couple have added a new wing to the far side of the house, with half-sunken garage that opens its mouth in welcome to the leaping Adonis each evening when his car turns the corner of the street. A statue of Ceres stands on a plinth to one side of the door, a sheaf of the earth’s fruits showering from her shoulder. At Ceres’ feet the babies’ toys lie in a scatter down the steps and often stay there for days, the golden serpent girl being too tired to pick them up and the husband holding his head too high to notice them. The babies are dressed in designer clothes of soft leather and hand-stitched lawn, always marvellously laundered or pressed, or perhaps always just new.