Read Online The Queen of the Tambourine by Jane Gardam - Free Book Online
Authors: Jane Gardam
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here and we had a white Christmas. I forget if I told you that. It seems a long time ago. I forget when I wrote last but think it must have been when your dress came.
Â
Yrs, E.
Â
 Â
4 February 1990
Â
Dear Joan,
Â
I have written you a great number of letters. I expect that they have been a burdenâthat is to say, if you have bothered to read them, for it is now about a year since you went off and I have had not one reply. As a matter of fact I have written many more letters than I have posted. I am cautious now.
I gather that you are now staying in Dacca more or less permanently and I shall continue to write there. I have given up expecting answers and that, in a way, has made me freer. Many of the letters that werenât posted were not apposite. They would have told you nothing of interest or of use to you in your own situation, only mine: and since you do not seem to be able to take the slightest interest in thatâwell, why should you?âI use you now as diary only, as mirror image. I see you with bare feet on a shadowy verandah sipping lime-juice, skimming through my letters, thinking gratefully of all you have escaped. They can give you, I fear, little else. They are facts. They give neither of us even the solace of fiction.
Always, always you interest me, however, and still I canât see why. What is it about your flight that seems so inevitable, familiar, yet unfathomably mysterious? There is something pertinent to me about it, just out of sight. In shadow. What is the shadow? It is something much more serious than envy of you. It is certainly not a subterranean desire to be like you or become you, i.e. to be Charlesâs wife, oh my God, no! That nose alongside one on the pillow. Drooping over the cornflakes. Reared up before the shaving-mirror.
Sorry, Joan. I know I shouldnât laugh at someone elseâs husband even after sheâs left him. I couldnât laugh at all once, you know. Before you packed off, I donât think I ever laughed. I donât suppose Iâd laughed forâmaybe ten years.
If, after all, that is what you have doneâpacked off. Nearly a year and nobody knows. Nobody knows a thing. Or perhaps some of them do and donât tell me. I get no news of you now, with Simon and Sarah flown and Charles submerged in Dolphin Square (Iâm told they both swim up and down in that long green swimming bath every morning) and your friend Tom Hopkin quite disappeared. He is a short dream-memory, TH, and but for the earrings and the lymph-gland sweets Iâd think him an hallucination.
I love the earrings still and so do Barry and the nuns. Barry says because of the earrings he wants to stick around and see what happens. He sings a song.
You know, I canât remember if Iâve told you all this before,
Â
Eliza
Â
 Â
Feb 12th
Â
Dear Joan,
Â
Iâm sorry but this is one letter that has to be posted and which by some means or other you are to be forced to read and to answer. I shall put URGENT stickers on the envelope and I shall also telephone the Bangladesh Consulate to tell them that you are to be contacted at once. It is about Sarah.
Itâs all right. She is perfectly well, as Iâll describe in a minute. No accident or sickness. Safe home from the skiing. Youâd have heard if it had been something like that. The horrors always get through. This is a crisis of another kind. Here it is.
Yesterday Sarah rang me and asked if I would send her some things. Would I go across the road and collect them at once? Some shirts and sweaters. I went to number thirty-four and heard my feet clattering about. I climbed the sad staircase and up to Sarahâs room and was just thinking that I should wash some of the clothes before I posted them, because they smelled of must, when the telephone rang. Not disconnected. You see how vague Charles has become. It was Sarah again and she asked if I was
Â
Yrs, E.
Â
 Â
4 February 1990
Â
Dear Joan,
Â
I have written you a great number of letters. I expect that they have been a burdenâthat is to say, if you have bothered to read them, for it is now about a year since you went off and I have had not one reply. As a matter of fact I have written many more letters than I have posted. I am cautious now.
I gather that you are now staying in Dacca more or less permanently and I shall continue to write there. I have given up expecting answers and that, in a way, has made me freer. Many of the letters that werenât posted were not apposite. They would have told you nothing of interest or of use to you in your own situation, only mine: and since you do not seem to be able to take the slightest interest in thatâwell, why should you?âI use you now as diary only, as mirror image. I see you with bare feet on a shadowy verandah sipping lime-juice, skimming through my letters, thinking gratefully of all you have escaped. They can give you, I fear, little else. They are facts. They give neither of us even the solace of fiction.
Always, always you interest me, however, and still I canât see why. What is it about your flight that seems so inevitable, familiar, yet unfathomably mysterious? There is something pertinent to me about it, just out of sight. In shadow. What is the shadow? It is something much more serious than envy of you. It is certainly not a subterranean desire to be like you or become you, i.e. to be Charlesâs wife, oh my God, no! That nose alongside one on the pillow. Drooping over the cornflakes. Reared up before the shaving-mirror.
Sorry, Joan. I know I shouldnât laugh at someone elseâs husband even after sheâs left him. I couldnât laugh at all once, you know. Before you packed off, I donât think I ever laughed. I donât suppose Iâd laughed forâmaybe ten years.
If, after all, that is what you have doneâpacked off. Nearly a year and nobody knows. Nobody knows a thing. Or perhaps some of them do and donât tell me. I get no news of you now, with Simon and Sarah flown and Charles submerged in Dolphin Square (Iâm told they both swim up and down in that long green swimming bath every morning) and your friend Tom Hopkin quite disappeared. He is a short dream-memory, TH, and but for the earrings and the lymph-gland sweets Iâd think him an hallucination.
I love the earrings still and so do Barry and the nuns. Barry says because of the earrings he wants to stick around and see what happens. He sings a song.
You know, I canât remember if Iâve told you all this before,
Â
Eliza
Â
 Â
Feb 12th
Â
Dear Joan,
Â
Iâm sorry but this is one letter that has to be posted and which by some means or other you are to be forced to read and to answer. I shall put URGENT stickers on the envelope and I shall also telephone the Bangladesh Consulate to tell them that you are to be contacted at once. It is about Sarah.
Itâs all right. She is perfectly well, as Iâll describe in a minute. No accident or sickness. Safe home from the skiing. Youâd have heard if it had been something like that. The horrors always get through. This is a crisis of another kind. Here it is.
Yesterday Sarah rang me and asked if I would send her some things. Would I go across the road and collect them at once? Some shirts and sweaters. I went to number thirty-four and heard my feet clattering about. I climbed the sad staircase and up to Sarahâs room and was just thinking that I should wash some of the clothes before I posted them, because they smelled of must, when the telephone rang. Not disconnected. You see how vague Charles has become. It was Sarah again and she asked if I was
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