The Queen of the Tambourine

by Jane Gardam

  Although the babies cry rather a lot and there is some slamming of doors, I never hear through their walls any sounds of adult activity. There seems to be no domestic help, no socialising, no entertaining. The evenings are unnaturally quiet. These birds of paradise are dropped down among us obviously very temporarily, destined any day for the apartment in Dockland and the big weekend country house outside Salisbury. One day perhaps they will talk about the quaint cottage of their early years—if the marriage lasts long enough for any of its years to have been early.

  For there’s some tension. The other night for instance a window at the back of the house was thrown open while I was with the dogs in the garden and a nasty black thing was flung out, very solid, about the size of a dark pork-pie or a small rugger-ball. I thought, this is a grenade. I was frightened by it and there was something about the shadow-figures in the window that frightened me more. Some hatred, some distress. I saw the Adonis crash down the window-sash and jerk the curtains together. There was no explosion.

  In the road outside the front of the house, now, this small man and woman stared up at the purple lamps and the statue. They were smartly dressed, the man in a long black coat that looked as if it came out for funerals, the woman in fur-lined suede and carrying a square Italian shopping-bag of quilted leather, stuffed with parcels. No umbrellas. The rain soaked down and down but they did not seem to mind. They stood nodding like marionettes.

  The man saw me. He touched the woman’s arm and together they made for my front door. “Mr. Deecie,” he said as I opened it, “pronounced as in Washington.” “Washington, Mrs. Deecie. Mr. and Mrs. Deecie,” said she. “We’ve just come down to see Deborah.” “Deborah,” said he, “Deborah is our daughter. Next door. Pleased to meet you. Peabody? Now that’s a good Northern name.” “Northern name,” said Mrs. Deecie. “We’re from Leicester which is not exactly North, not what we call North being from West Yorkshire in the first place, but it’s getting on the way. It’s in the right direction.” “Direction,” said her husband.

  They took off their coats and we all trooped into the kitchen and I hung the coats round the Aga to dry.

  “Now that is kind,” said Mrs. Deecie. “It was a sunny day in Leicester.”

  “Sunny as anything. Well, we stepped on the coach. Unpremeditated.”

  “. . . itated,” said Mrs. Deecie. “They’re very comfortable and they give you an unspecified number of paper cups of tea and the usual facilities. Rather cleaner than any we’ve encountered on the trains. We’ve just got an hour or so before the return journey begins, but it looks as if she’s out.”

  “I’m afraid that Mrs. Deecie is right there,” said Mr. Deecie.

  “Just to see the grandchildren. Well, we don’t get so many chances, being so far away. A sudden whim, or you might call it a fancy. Deborah always so busy with her career in the film and modelling world and Ivan flying about everywhere—Australia all the time. Australia, Mrs. Peabody, is absolutely nothing to Ivan. For Ivan it is like Runcorn or Port Sunlight. All the film-work on location. Do you think I might ask if I could use your toilet?”

  “You’ll know Deborah of course,” said Mr. Deecie. “Lovely girl. Just while Mrs. Deecie’s out of the room I’d like to say that Deborah means a very great deal to her mother and that’s the sole reason we’ve come. For me, I’m happy with my garden and I’m not saying the marriage wasn’t a bit of a relief. I sit here in this chair today entirely to please Mrs. Deecie.”

  “I’m afraid Deborah may be in London today,” I say.

  He looks mystified. “But I’d call this London. Isn’t it? We speak of her as living in London, though I must say it took long enough from Victoria for it to be somewhere else. No, we haven’t been to the house before. They’ve not been here that long. Mind, we’ve heard about it. Lovely house. Nice position. Though I’d not imagined it being only terrace property, I have to say. I’d been fancying something in its own grounds and maybe a pool.”

  “But we think we have very big gardens here.”

  “Oh well, not by Leicester standards I have to say. Mrs. Deecie and I have opportunities for brussels, runner-beans and particularly nice onions, apart from the patio and the fish and a small but by no means shameful herbaceous. I can see, mind, that this is all very well set-up and a good neighbourhood and the statue’s a bit above Leicester. It’s the children she misses, Mrs. Peabody, I’ll just say this if I may before Mrs. Deecie comes down. Mrs. Deecie would like to see a lot more of the grandchildren. She knits them little things of course all the time but it’s not the same as fitting them to the child, and you never get much of a letter. Deborah rings birthdays and Christmas and she lets them speak on the phone to their Granny. But, look at it this way, Mrs. Peabody, if a child can’t put a face to a voice . . . Do you know, if Ivan was to pass me and Mrs. Deecie in the street I don’t suppose he’d recognise us. Not his own mother-in-law. It’s the film-world. It breaks family ties.

  “Well, yes. She did bring him once to Leicester before they were married. I imagine it was at about the time they were beginning to think about an engagement because they dropped in at Leicester on the way down from Scotland where they’d been holidaying together just the two of them in the modern way—not that I’m saying there was anything wrong in it, Deborah being so well brought-up. She’s always been used to temptations too, being so—well you know her, Mrs. Peabody. You see what she is. A true beauty.

  “Always was. No two ways. A beauty from the start. It was a sore trouble to her and to us too as a matter of fact. She didn’t ever know how to handle it, the looks. Her mother’s a beauty of course, but more in the Elizabeth Taylor style. I’d say, well I’ve always said, Deborah is more after the Jane Fonda. When she was a teenager it was different again, mind. She was the Marilyn Monroe then, slow and weepy and she could have run to fat.

  “We had it all, Mrs. Peabody. All the troubles—the anorexia and the over-eating. We never had the drugs, though. Maybe that was because we never had the boyfriend trouble either. She was too beautiful for boyfriends of her own age, it always seemed to me. Frightened them off. And she was no talker—nothing like her mother and me; that isn’t our failing. But her mother was very proud of her always, and not at all averse to this Ivan for being an older man. Mrs. Deecie has always liked to regard Deborah as her friend as well as her daughter. That’s how she’s regarded her. And Mrs. Deecie always loving babies, this has been the extra blow. Not seeing them.”

  He steamed gently like a steady kettle above his coffee-cup, and when Mrs. Deecie came into the kitchen, dry and tidy and her face newly painted, he rose to his feet and didn’t sit down again until she did. “We’ve been talking about Deborah, Vera.”

  “Oh, she’s a lovely girl. You’ll know her well, Mrs. Peabody?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t. We’ve hardly spoken. We smile of course.”

  “That’s the London way,” said Mrs. Deecie. “You’d think it would have taken Deborah a bit of getting used to but she was never a chatterbox even in Leicester. Very shy.”

  “I sometimes wonder how she ever had children she was so shy,” said Mr. Deecie.

  “Now Frank.”

  “She had those babies all by herself, Mrs. Peabody, without her mother anywhere near her. There’s character there. She’s not just a pretty face.”

  “That is true, Mrs. Peabody. She never asked for me or needed me near at all. I was disappointed, I’ll not deny it. What mother wouldn’t be? But after all those teenage troubles it should be looked on as brave, not wanting me.”

  “Now she never said she didn’t want you, Vera. You mustn’t put words into Deborah’s mouth.”

  “She never said anything,” said Mrs. Deecie. “Nothing. Well, between ourselves, and I wouldn’t say it in Leicester, she never even told me she was expecting either time—even the first one, born prematurely after the wedding. I expect she knew I’d be nervous for her. I used to get very nervous in her bad years around seventeen. And before that. And
for quite a time after when you come to think about it.”

  “But it was never drugs, I’ve been telling Mrs. Peabody, Vera. We never had that dreadful problem.”

  “She just couldn’t get up. Lay in bed with her eyes shut and her hands over her ears.”

  “It’s so usual,” I said. “Or I hear it is.”

  “Just seemed so strange really to Frank and me—I mean, with those looks and such a nice girl. Well, we had to send her to a nerve-home for a bit. It’s where she met this theatre person who took her off to London.”

  She stopped and laughed and stirred her coffee.

  “We mustn’t bother, Mrs. Peabody, Vera. We mustn’t tell tales out of school. What I want to know is what the nanny’s like.

  “What we naturally feel is that if only Mrs. Deecie was nearer, Deborah would have no need of nannies. Mrs. Deecie would be ‘Nanny.’ That’s what is said for ‘Gran’ in Leicester. Mrs. Deecie is the natural ‘Nan,’ yet the children don’t even know her face. It’s hard on Mrs. Deecie.”

  “Never mind Frank. So long as they’re happy. It’s just you remember your own, and those days—all those years. I expect you’ll know what I’m talking about if you’ve had your own. The way they used to love you. We’ll have to go now, Franko. We call him Franko, Mrs. Peabody, on account of his Spanish appearance. I have it too, though we’re not. We’re English. In my view Deborah going blonde is a big mistake and wrong for her Latin complexion. When she was young she was after the old Audrey Hepburn style. The chickenpox changed her. It took away from the skin.”

  “It was a very terrible chickenpox, Mrs. Peabody,” said Mr. Deecie. “I don’t mind telling you that I prayed on my knees for her, though out of the bedroom of course. She was hot enough for brain-damage. Mrs. Deecie cried—not of course so Deborah could see her—she kept bright before Deborah. Mrs. Deecie is a wonderful woman—no, I shall say it, Vera, you are a wonderful woman. We sat up four nights together with Deborah’s chickenpox and she was so bad the doctor gave her a little touch of opium. Deborah looked at us with such love then—I’ll never forget—and when she was better she said she’d never felt as wonderful as she did with the opium. We didn’t let on locally about it, our doctor not being universally liked. Rather after the avant-garde style and being very dusky. I must say that it was after the chickenpox, after the opium—what? Yes. We ought to be getting along, you’re quite right, Vera.”

  I said, “Oh do wait. I’m sure they won’t be long. At four everyone is usually home from nursery school.”

  There was a silence and Mr. and Mrs. Deecie sat with bright smiles.

  “Fancy. School already,” said Mrs. Deecie. “They’ll be professors at this rate. I wonder what schooling they can have and scarcely out of nappies? Well, still in them, last time I saw them, on account of this famous child-care book they all read now, written by one of these one-parent families. Whatever do they want a nanny for if they’re at school all day?”

  “It’ll be for the picking-up and the school-run,” said Mr. Deecie, “because of Ivan’s position. A nanny will be expected in the film-world. It’s the de rigeur.”

  “Oh, couldn’t you stay on for the night? You could stay here if there’s no room . . .”

  “Oh no, she has all these dinner parties and social functions and we wouldn’t impose. And—Franko, you go off upstairs and then we’ll be off, we mustn’t miss the coach.”

  She got up, crossed to the kitchen door and closed it after Frank. “Just so I can say one thing in private, Mrs. Peabody, and I don’t want to tell tales, like I said. It’s very bitter for Frank. Very bitter. I’d never say it to his face or let him know I knew, but the wedding was very bitter. Well maybe you were there?”

  “No. I really don’t know Deborah.”

  “Well, just between the two of us I think it was probably more Ivan than her and because of his friends being so important, but we were told, Franko and I, that it was just a registry office and no reception Ivan having been married before and there was no need for us to come. It would be just a few minutes and they’d rather see us in Leicester later and take us out for a meal. But I’m afraid that wouldn’t do for Frank, and I must say I was very disappointed, too. Frank said right out, “Deborah, I’m coming to the marriage of my only child however small it is and quiet.” So after a bit she said all right and told us how to get there—right across in West London. We changed ready for it in Leicester and came down on the fast train with reserved seats and then in a taxi, over six pounds. We were far too early and we had to stand for hours, a cold raw day and blowy with grit, the other weddings all coming and going. Mrs. Peabody, you could write a book! Those weddings! Some dressed to the nines and champagne corks popping in the street and professional photographers, and some just slinking in and sliding out. One poor little bride, she even got left behind as the bridegroom and his friends walked away—laughing and nudging at each other and this little one trotting behind him by herself with a funny smile—a poor little face all pancake and eye-shadow and not even a pretty frock. She didn’t look unhappy though, even with her husband in front being slapped by these ones in leathers, off in the direction of the pub.

  “Well, at last here’s Ivan and Deborah and their party. It turned out to be, well I have to say it, an enormous crowd. It had been gathering up all this time all down the street, we’d been seeing it. People all dressed very unusually, the girls in wide Ascot-style hats and little leather skirts up to their thigh-tops. And the men! So ill and awful they looked, hair all greasy and balding and a very bad indoor colour to them all, like pewter. It was the Media. That was the first time it really came home to us she was marrying into the Media-world. She and he arrived together in the white Porsche and he was in a white suit and she was in almost the same white suit and her hair up in a knot on the top of her head like she had it for dancing-class age of seven, but not so tidy and not of course in the elastic band but a draggly white ribbon like a boot-lace. And she appeared to us, Mrs. Peabody, like a haunted skeleton, but the crowd said, ‘God, what a looker,’ and other common things that made us aware that in that world she’s considered at the top. And Mrs. Peabody, they were both smoking as they got out of the Porsche and she had a smile that her father labelled as ‘relentless’—he has a turn of phrase.

  “She saw us as she passed. Her father was smiling as he does, and Deborah said, ‘Hullo Mum, hullo Dad.’ Well, she couldn’t miss us, being properly dressed. Mr. Deecie is always properly dressed and he’ll tell you that in twenty-five years he hasn’t seen me without my earrings except in bed, if you’ll pardon me. I had matching hat, coat, bag, gloves and shoes taking a tip from the Royals. In tangerine. Franko was dark suit, very white shirt, new, and a tangerine tie, to tone with me. It was just as she’d said, a very fast ceremony, just a few minutes, and afterwards—we’d not actually managed to get in the room for the ceremony but stood out in the passage—afterwards she gave us both a kiss. She said, ‘See you next week then, Dad. Mother.’ Ivan didn’t say anything till she pulled his sleeve and then he said, ‘Good of you to come.’

  “We couldn’t get a taxi away from the registry office so we walked down the street to a main road and the traffic was at a standstill there, too, and every taxi taken. I said, ‘Frank, we should get something to eat round here, there’s lots of little places,’ but he said no. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not taking you just anywhere. I’m taking you to the Cumberland Hotel.’ The Cumberland being the place we’d stayed the first night of our honeymoon. ‘It’s the Cumberland or nothing,’ he said, ‘And we’re going by taxi.’

  “But there was no taxi. Five minutes, ten minutes—no taxi. Frank said we’d start to walk, so we walked—me in my high heels after all the standing—and we crossed over a terrible corner for traffic and nearly got ourselves run over. We found we were walking towards Kensington Gardens and we passed the road-end where Princess Margaret and all of them live, and then, just nearby, was this wonderful hotel and all kinds of very good ca
rs driving up and people hurrying in and laughing and I said to Frank, ‘Look there’s that girl in the cartwheel hat,’ and Frank said, ‘And there’s that man with the make-up on his face and the earrings.’

  “Then I said, ‘I thought I saw Ivan.’ Then we both saw there was confetti galore and a flick of white that was Deborah. I saw Mr. Deecie’s face then, Mrs. Peabody. I said, Well, it doesn’t matter. We’d not have fitted in.’

  “I said, ‘Come on now, Franko, we’ll go to the Cumberland and have a wine and steak lunch, the two of us,’ but he’d lost heart and we didn’t. We had a salad at the station.

  “On the way home in the train he said, ‘It’s the finish this, Vera. I’m not a hard man but it’s the finish.’

  “I couldn’t think of a word to say. I kept trying to take his mind off by pointing things out to him from the train window. He never spoke. And he never spoke when we got home. He just sat looking at his tea. I said, ‘Have a whisky, Frank, it’ll make it better,’ but he didn’t. He lay in bed that night and whenever I woke I said, ‘Are you awake?’ and he said, ‘Yes, I’m all right.’ But he wasn’t. We don’t ever mention it—never since.”