The Queen of the Tambourine

by Jane Gardam

  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 t
urtle, 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.

  May 30th

  Humpty-Dumpty piddle and pie,

  Soon after you arrived to live in Rathbone Road, dear Joan, I spent a day with Old Bernard that I have not forgotten. It revealed much to me. First, it revealed to me the duplicity of the sainted Miss Ingham. A note from her had come through my door. She was then—as now—a woman I saw only occasionally to smile at. We had scarcely spoken. She wondered if I would do her a favour. Every year, she said, she attended the Chelsea Flower Show with Old Bernard, as his guest, his poor wife Lola being unable to go about much. This year she, Miss Ingham, was beginning to feel that she too was unable to stand about. Would I very kindly go with him instead?

  The Chelsea Flower Show, Miss Ingham said, was the big day in the year for O.B., the only time he now ventured into central London. He certainly could not go alone—too old—and, as I knew, he had few friends, being so outspoken. She had her Fellows’ Tickets which meant that we could go on the least crowded day and afterwards Old B. always took her to lunch at Peter Jones. He would be delighted to do the same for me. What a kindness I would be doing, she said. The C.F.S. was the last spark in the old man of his lost Bavarian childhood.

  I rang and said I wasn’t sure if O.B. liked me much. He seemed to regard me only as the one who had knocked him flying with my car door. Miss I, speaking faintly and with pauses, as if simultaneously doing something else—prodding at seed-trays, examining her whiskers—said that everyone had knocked Old Bernard off his bike at one time or another. She had suggested the outing to him and he had seemed very happy.

  We went padding down the hill, then, the two of us, Old Bernard and I, to the station where O.B. made a great performance of buying the Underground tickets.

  “D’you have a card? It’s only one pound fifteen if you have a card.”

  “A student card? Goodness, no.”

  “No. A pensioner’s card. Have you a pensioner’s card yet?”

  “I’m not sixty, Bernard.”

  “No,” he said dismally, “maybe not.”

  We sat side by side, joggling along the District Line, Old Bern cracking his knuckles. I said that I hadn’t realised he was a gardener.

  “I’m not a gardener.”

  “But you go to the Show every year?”

  “Miss Ingham is a forceful woman.”

  I could see it was going to be a long day. “Perhaps,” I suggested, “we should split up?” We had reached the Chelsea Embankment and had joined the hurrying happy feet, “I could look at the flowers and you might . . .”

  “I shall be among the furniture. The garden seats.”

  “We could meet here again at say, twelve-thirty.”

  “That’s too late. They’d have given us up and we’d have lost our table. Peter Jones is a considerable walk.”

  “I don’t really mind missing Peter Jones.” To tell you the truth, Joan, I couldn’t imagine Old B. in any kind of restaurant and certainly not among the pastel tints. “Couldn’t we just have a snack, here at the café?”

  “I don’t eat out of doors. The flies here are diseased.”

  “Diseased?”

  “From the spraying. The sprays they use on the flowers. This place is a death-trap. We breathe poison into the lungs. That’s why I never go near the flower tents. The roses are all spray. The gladioli pure ethylene.”

  He sat down on a cruelly bright, tobacco-coloured garden seat and stared at some polystyrene urns and a statue of Pandora letting all the troubles of the world out of a polystyrene box at her feet. She had a join all down her sides and over her head like an Easter egg that would fall apart if you tapped it. I went round the flower tents trying not to breathe. “But they smell absolutely wonderful,” I said when I found him again, looking at gold-fish and lotuses in a pool loud with a hose-pipe-engendered waterfall. “They smell only of heavenly flowers.”

  But he was abstracted.

  We made our way up Lower Sloane Street where I met, among the afternoon Flower-Show-tramping-feet, Duffy and Dilly Fancy-Baker from Wallis and Critch before they were bought up by Klein and Woo, who shrieked and embraced me in the usual way (a light-year-and-a-half away, dat ole Eliza-girl) and asked if Henry and I were going to Glyndebourne. Old Bernard stood bleakly with his long cuffs hanging, looking at the road.

  In the crowded Peter Jones lift he revived and seemed at home, gaining confidence and a little cheerfulness when people began to whisper and fumble about, prodding buttons for the right floor. He called loudly, “Fifth floor. Fifth floor. We want the fifth” (it turned out to be the fourth), in a resonant voice, and marched me towards a window table.

  “Have what you like,” he said. “She pays.”

  “Miss Ingham pays?”

  “Yes. Don’t ask me why. It pleasures her.”

  “I thought Miss Ingham said . . . You mean she gives you money? Like a boy?”

  “Oh yes. I’m not taking you out.” He laughed long and loud, a harsh laugh that made heads turn. After it, he sat smiling, the smile I get from him when he stops and speaks on the Common and talks about the Lamb of God.

  Now all this happened, Joan, when I still felt God to be on my side as well as at my side, and I was hand in hand with Him. I said, “Bernard, I expect that it is very difficult for you to like us in Rathbone Road even though there are quite a number of Jews there. It must be very difficult for you, very annoying, and you would have been a lot happier in Hampstead. We have all had very much more constricted lives than you, but we cannot help it.”

  “You can all help it. Hampstead is neither here nor there. To the middle-class English the Holocaust might never have happened—look at them all, eating their lunch.”

  “We can’t help not being Jewish.”

  “You can help your self-absorption. Introspection.”

  “You don’t tell me Jews aren’t introspective?”

  “I’m not talking about Jews. Jews are irrelevant to this conversation. Let’s forget the Jews.”

  A woman came up and asked if the spare seat at our table was free and I thankfully removed my handbag from it and she sat down. Old B. turned to the window and gazed at the sky.

  “How beautiful it is,” said the woman, “this part of London.”

  We all three looked down at the tops of the trees moving gently in the square.

  “Like Paris. The last romantic bit of London to look like Paris. D’you know the little bit where the bus goes round to Passy?”

  She wore a black hat from another age—Leghorn straw, its veil pulled over her face and tied tight round her neck with a narrow, black-velvet ribbon. Pale brown splodges on the skin. She wore the oldest black coat I had ever seen, most beautifully made, but cheap black net gloves. Under the gloves the fingers were heavy with diamonds and the veins on the back of the hands were pumped full of purple ink. They stood up in blebs and knobs under white make-up. Her head nid-nodded as she undid the veil. She said to Bernard, “I’m afraid I heard what you said. I don’t think you ought to speak of the Jews like that.”

  Bernard munched.

  “You remind me of one of my late husbands who made Jewish jokes. One of them ran as follows. One man says to another, ‘My new house is all right but it looks out over the Jewish cemetery.’ The second man says, ‘You’re very lucky, where I live they’re still all walking about.’ This is the sort of joke that only a Jew may make, just as only the blackamoors are permitted to say ‘niggers.’ Don’t you think? I’m very clear about this. I have a friend close to the Queen Mother who says Her Majesty feels exactly the same. We—you and I—have to be so careful.”

  Old Bernard began to eat his lemon sole.

  “Fish,” said the woman, “fish. Now that is something the Jews understand. N
obody cooks fish like a Jew. I always think of that in Church when we have the Feeding of the Five Thousand. I don’t think, by the way, that there is a Jewish chef here, do you? There’s something in it you know—it has been scientifically proved—this talk of fish making brains. The Jews have plenty of brains. One quite grants them that, even though it does seem odd how many managed to get caught. Excuse me, my dear, but are you one of the Terry family?”

  “Terry?” I asked.

  “No—not the chocolate people. The Ellen Terry family. You have something of the same hair. Of course red hair in a woman is often Jewish, though I’m sure Ellen wasn’t. She would be Church of England.”

  Bernard munched.

  The woman ordered and ate a little omelette and got up to go.

  “I eat a little omelette here every day. There is nearly always someone to talk to. I hope we may meet again,” she said to me, casting a glance of disapproval at anti-Semitic Bernard. “I live in a very nice bed-sitting room in Royal Avenue. Once I lived in the whole house and many members of the Terry family came to see me frequently in the old days. And several very Jewish people too.” (Another flash at Bernard.) “Excuse me, but you have smudged your arm, your wrist. How dirty London has become. I need fresh gloves every day.”

  Bernard unbuttoned his cuff and laid his arm along the table and we all three read the number inside the wrist.

  “That reminds me of something, too,” she said, “but I can’t remember what. Something very nice. I know it well but my memory is failing. Could you tell me what it is?”

  Old Bernard and I said nothing. I felt it was not for me to say and Bernard was chewing his apple tart.

  “The world grows more and not less mysterious as we grow older,” she said. “I look back on simple, happy years, not least the wonderful days of the Edwardian London stage. All the Terrys—Gielguds, Trees. Such Hamlets—Geilgud a non-pareil. The Merchant. Alas—not an easy part but—I must go now. I do hope you didn’t mind me taking you up about the Jews. You see, I can remember Mosley. Such an attractive man. Not unlike a member of the Terry family. But so dangerous.”