The Queen of the Tambourine Read Free Page B

year we had new beds. You remember—I know you do for it was when I first became interested in you. I saw you standing watching as they were being delivered. Then you quickly jumped in your car.
    It is a solemn moment, Joan, when the first marriage bed is carried away. Farewell that battlefield, farewell those hills and dales. “Farewell green fields and happy groves where nymphs have ta’en delight.” Henry was not precisely a nymph. I still feel—no felt—I could be.
    Henry arranged the new beds at opposite ends of the room and said, “Doesn’t that look better? They might have been made to measure. Perfect fit.” And they did. And they were. But I cannot help feeling, Joan, that there was something blinkered in that statement.
    I spoke to Henry about this. I told him, at about the same time I wrote you a silly letter saying that I was in love with Charles which I hope you never received. Not that it matters because I can imagine what you thought when/if you read it: “Let’s just wait.”
    You are right. I now know so much more about what you must have been through these past years with Charles.
    Well, after the beds, Henry started going to thousands of prayer-meetings all over London and the suburbs, even to North London. I noticed that he had gone off eggs. It was a joke between us. They were his schoolboy passion. His mother used to say, “Lucky girl, you won’t have to cook a thing, you can always feed him eggs.” This I thought a vaguely disgusting remark, but she was a vaguely disgusting woman. Well, may God forgive me, for she’s dead. Anyway, he went off them.
    Then I perceived that he seemed to have gone off food altogether. He picked about. But he drank. How he drank. And how he kept on drinking. For a while. Then first the late-night whiskies went and then the wine. For some weeks he sat downstairs, drinking and then not drinking, after I had gone to bed, listening to his tapes. There was a particular Requiem —I can’t remember which, but it wasn’t Lloyd Webber. It surged through the house, a baleful and eternal sorrow. From number thirty-four came the jangled chords of Simon’s and Sarah’s cacophonous equivalents. The notes merged. They rose and sank, and the people of Rathbone Road listened. Sometimes Charles left number thirty-four and sat with Henry in the study, listening to the Requiems , too.
    Then, after a while, it must have been about September, Henry stopped drinking. Altogether. For a long time he had been absentminded about sex. It had always been very much now and then. A hit and miss, half-hearted business. One felt the strains of the Requiem sifting through his being. He flopped out like a flag on a windless day and after a while sex stopped altogether. I didn’t like to say anything. I did once say on a sharp blue morning as I got out of bed, “Remember Gascony?” but all he said, grey-faced, was, “Eliza, we are old people now.”
    At The Hospice the patients noticed that I was looking low. My favourite, Barry, said, “You look as if you need a cuddle. You should be in here with me,” and lifted the sheet. He laughed because I blushed. He got it out of me—what was wrong. Well, not really. I didn’t tell him all. He just said, “Gone off the boil, has he, the Elder Statesman? Maybe,” he said, “you have stopped liking him.”
    Oh, Joan, that set me thinking. It set me weeping. Barry kept on handing me tissues from a box. I said, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” and he said, “I do, old cock. You haven’t started yet.”
    â€œJust not started,” he said, and shut his eyes. “Life,” he said. “Think it out. Don’t ask so many questions and, Eliza, don’t talk so much. Just get started living before I stop.”
    Well, after going off sex, Henry went off me. Completely. That’s the only way to