The Queen of the Tambourine

by Jane Gardam

  St. Saviour’s is one hundred-and-fifty years old, built as a chapel of ease for the parish church which had proved to be too small for the intensity of Christianity at the time of the Oxford Movement. It represents one of the dying breaths of the Pre-Raphaelites when the Brotherhood was grown rash like Picasso in old age running about with pink toilet rolls and making them into sugar-pink doves. Our windows are mostly coloured splashes of glass so garish that through the thirties there were petitions to have them taken out. War came and the windows survived. The raspberry-red robes, the purple camels, the orange palm trees scarcely rattled when the land-mine hit Rathbone Road. Here they still shine.

  And tonight, this dark night, Joan, they shone indeed. They blazed their kaleidoscope of tall slabs, basted with lead like the wrong side of an embroidery, across the black streets. As I drew near, I heard the sound of the Church organ.

  I stepped inside the porch and stood. Joan—I never heard such organ playing in my life. The fabric of the building vibrated. The camels and the cacti and the rainbow saints shuddered with awe and joy. Boom, boom the music surged and rolled, ever louder, ever more tremendous, more fearful and more solemn. The dogs began to whimper and whine. They dragged on their leads. I stood there shaking and exalted with an almost sexual shuddering. Winding the two leads over my hands, I dragged the dogs towards the Church door and tried to turn the handle, but it was locked.

  The music now rose higher and higher as I shook the door and I sank on my knees with my forehead on the big iron ring of the handle and I felt the Church inside fill with music as the sea is filled with tides, as a glass filled convex to the brim. The music passed through the door until I was filled up with it, too. It flooded me. I took the dogs home and ate another piece of cake, and a small pie.

  Then, Joan, I knew I must go back. It’s all very well to receive a religious experience but one must relate it afterwards to the world of every day. I had to know exactly what had been happening inside the Church. It was my duty as a sidewoman. I had not done any pew-dusting for weeks—no one had noticed—so there was every reason for me to be there and nowhere, I think, is it written down that we shouldn’t do our Church-work at midnight. Off I set again, alone, and found St. Saviour’s now in darkness and quite silent. I took the key from its place inside the south door, above the noticeboard, behind the loose stone, and I wondered why I had not remembered it was there before. Had whoever it was who had been playing, used it? Locked himself in with it? Only just put it back?

  The key did not feel just put back. It felt cold, as if it had been in its little damp grave a long time, yet the only other key, except for the Vicar’s, is always in the clergy-house. A third was once with Henry. Perhaps it is now with whoever his proxy is—I’ve never asked. Perhaps it lies on Henry’s still no doubt meticulous, fastidious desk-top in Dolphin Square? Your Simon had a key once you may remember, Joan, when he was doing his first organ exams, but that was several years ago. I remember that Simon used to practise at night. There were complaints about it.

  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 h
e 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 poo
r—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!”