Read Online The Queen of the Tambourine by Jane Gardam - Free Book Online Page A

alone.
    â€œOnly ghosts.”
    â€œI thought you mightn’t be alone in your house. That’s why I asked you to go to ours. It doesn’t matter about the sweaters.”
    â€œIs something wrong?”
    â€œOh no! Not a thing. Not the least thing.” Her voice, Joan, has changed. You know how she used to talk Birmingham/ American—well, I suppose you know. Now it is a sort of clear, high, socially-OK voice of yesteryear, and much much older than her years. It’s rather like the Queen’s. “Oh, not a bit , Eliza. Just I’m rather . . .” Then the image shivered. The voice cracked. “I just wondered if you might be coming to Oxford sometime.”
    â€œI’d love to come to Oxford, Sarah. Thank you. I’d love to. I’ll take you out to lunch.”
    â€œNo, not lunch. Could you come to where I’m living? To my room?”
    â€œWell of course. I’ll bring the lunch if you like.”
    â€œNo, no. That’s all right. I’d just like to talk to you. I can’t say more now. There’s someone wanting the phone. Just behind me.”
    â€œWhen shall I come? Next weekend?”
    â€œI wondered” (careful cadences) “if you could come today? This afternoon? There’s a two-ish train.”
    â€œI can’t come today, Sarah, I have to be at The Hospice.”
    â€œIt’s terribly important. Could you change it?”
    â€œWell, I could. Sarah. Couldn’t your father . . . ?”
    â€œAre you joking?” she said in Birmingham, then “Oh, Eliza” (Her Maj.) “please come!”
    â€œCould you meet me at the station?”
    â€œWell, I’m not actually able to leave my room at present. Could you get a taxi? You know Oxford. I’ll give you my address.”
    So I rang Mother Ambrosine who said that she could cope and Barry was beginning a tapestry and had the football. I arrived in Oxford in the early afternoon and went bowling through the streets looking at all the orderly and competent young, clean and tidy, and all the girls with washed hair—full circle again to the time when I was one of them, though I never looked so fierce and sure. And, in my second year, of course I left them.
    Sarah’s lodgings seemed to be some sort of religious house, presumably found for her by Charles. Did you know this? I hadn’t realised that Sarah is devout. From all the BVMs in the vestibile niches I thought it must be Catholic, but when at last I opened the door—nobody paying any attention to the bell—there were photographs of Greek- or Russian-Orthodox priests all the way up the stairs glaring from inside their beards. Two or three godly-looking, willowy people—small-headed men with fluting voices and bony women with good profiles and woollen stockings—were standing together in the hall. They looked through me but stopped talking. One man blew his nose. There was a hint of incense. On a board there were lists of Divine Service in the Chapel, a very great many. It looked like a religion that knew what it was up to.
    I smiled but nobody spoke. I went up to the top floor and knocked on Sarah’s door.
    â€œ Hullo !” said the Queen. She looks beautiful, Joan; bronzed from the skiing, and Charles must be giving her a very good allowance to judge from her pink silk suit. Her face is like an advertisement, lipstick shining, and the exact pink; hair well-cut, fingernails that never saw a sink.
    â€œ Darling Eliza!”
    Her eyelashes are all turned up, two semi-circles dyed black. They reminded me of my long-forgotten terrible cousin in Harrogate the day she left school in 1954. Her hands were covered in enormous rings. There was a crucifix on the wall and various pictures of saints. Otherwise it was almost bare. A plastic bucket stood about, “For the leak in the roof,” said Sarah. “This top floor is pretty scruffy. Excuse me one sec,” and she left the room.