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

I wandered about.
    â€œCoffee?” she said, coming back with some.
    â€œOh, yes please.”
    â€œExcuse me.” Out she went again. This time she came back carrying a milk-jug, but it was empty. “Isn’t it a lovely day?” she said. “So glad you could come.”
    We drank our coffee or at least I drank mine and she looked hard at hers and put it down. She said, “Half a sec,” and carried hers from the room, returning without it. We sat for a while looking at a picture of St. Ursula surrounded by her eleven thousand virgins.
    â€œYou said it was urgent, Sarah?”
    â€œYes,” she said. “I’m going to have a baby.”
    I’m sorry, Joan. I’m telling it exactly as it happened. Without doubt you’ll get a formal notification from Charles in the end, but this I want you to hear precisely as it unwound. That is as it should be.
    I said, “Sarah! It’s only your second term.”
    She said, “I know. I’m silly.”
    â€œYou are more than silly. You are utterly irresponsible and wrong. All your music! All those years!”
    â€œOh, the music’s still there.”
    â€œYes, but you can’t be. You can’t stay at Oxford. Oh—you lunatic child.”
    â€œI’m not. It isn’t going to make any difference.”
    â€œSarah, are you by any chance thinking I’ll organise . . . ?”
    â€œNo, of course not.”
    â€œI expect everyone will advise it. They will be advising it now.”
    â€œNobody knows yet.”
    â€œThey will. And I’m sorry. I can have nothing to do with abortions.”
    â€œGood Lord, neither can I,” she said and we both sat looking at the eleven thousand virgins standing in clumps like a herbaceous border, all singing. Singing flowers. Eleven thousand mouths held open in neat ovals, effortlessly on top C. Easy lives.
    â€œOh Sarah. Why did you send for me? I know nothing about this. I never had a child. I’ve never looked after one.”
    â€œI know, but you should have done, Eliza. You’d have loved it. You’d have loved a child.”
    â€œWhat are you saying?”
    â€œWell, I—we—we were just wondering if by any chance you felt that you could look after it for us? You and Henry. Just at first, for a year or two.”
    â€œAre you mad? Do you think you’d be allowed to hand over a baby to a—to an acquaintance of your mother living in south London and you in Oxford—a woman who wouldn’t have the first idea what to do with it?”
    â€œYou would. I know you would. You could do anything. You are so successful, always. Look how the dog settled in, and Daddy.”
    â€œSarah!”
    â€œWell, it was the first thing I thought of. I know that it would be all right. I thought of you at once. Instinctively.”
    â€œSarah, apart from anything else, Henry isn’t living with me anymore.”
    â€œWhere’s he gone now?”
    â€œHe—well, he’s living with your father as a matter of fact, In Dolphin Square. He’s left me.”
    â€œWhat—for Daddy?”
    â€œNo. Nothing like that.”
    â€œWe must thank God,” she said, looking at St. Ursula’s ecstatic face, “for small mercies. Or maybe not. Might have been the very thing.”
    â€œEliza,” she said. We had been sitting silent. All we could hear was the January wind battering the dormer window and a holy sound drifting up from some other virginal choir in the chapel below. “Eliza—excuse me.”
    When she came back she said, “It’s bad at present. I looked it up in a book in Blackwell’s and it says it will be better after the third month.”
    â€œSarah, the child’s father . . .”
    â€œYes. We’re going to tea with him. That is, if you don’t mind. I said you’d come.”
    â€œBut it’s an intimate matter. It’s a thing for your parents.