Letters to abroad
Anita Brookner
THE QUEEN OF THE TAMBOURINE by Jane Gardam Sinclair-Stevenson, f13.95, pp.227 Jane Gardam, like A.L. Barker, whom she closely resembles, is a writer for an appreciative minority, quiet, wry, unobtru- sively anarchic, and a world removed from fashionable literary goings-on. In her nov- els, and in her more celebrated short sto- ries, eccentrics parade their obsessions before her always interested gaze. Nothing fazes her: even when peaceful suburban streets begin to pullulate with fantasies, she manages — just — to avoid their almost overwhelming attractions, even if she her- self takes a few steps in their direction. Stories which threaten to slide off into the realm of the impossible are brought to heel, and to a conclusion, by her sharp good sense. She is subversive, but her mind is agreeably open: the wicked are never punished, the hopeless never ridiculed. Although women take centre stage, men are never written off as impossible, and out of unpromising material a happy ending is slyly negotiated.
All is sedate in Rathbone Road, where the large houses are occupied by well-off, sensible people. In this civilised context Eliza Peabody is something of an oddity. She is far too enthusiastic, for one thing, and her kindly advice, distributed without mercy, is not always well received. We first meet her through the medium of her letters to her neigbour Joan — the whole book is constructed in the form of letters to Joan — whom she urges to throw away her leg- iron and join up with the Senior Wives or the Hospice for the Dying, where Eliza herself does such stirling work. One is not surprised when no letters arrive in return, for Eliza is so all-encompassing that any reciprocal information would be irrelevant.
A further letter evinces some disappoint- ment that Joan has in fact thrown away her leg-iron, but only in order to leave her hus- band, Charles, and to light out for the Far East, where she is apparently quite happy to stay, merely sending a Kurd to Rathbone Road in order to collect her jew- ellery. More frantic letters follow. Does Joan realise that her abandoned husband, Charles, has set up house with Eliza's own husband, Henry, and that they have gone to live together in Dolphin Square? Or that the nice man from the British Council in Bangladesh called on Christmas Day and ate Eliza's Christmas dinner, after which he read her Dryden's 'Ode to Saint Cecilia' in a rather compromising position? Should she not come home and sort out her daughter's phantom pregnancy? Or at least reclaim her dog ?
One believes in the existence of Joan, whom one sees tightlipped with annoyance in Dacca or Bangkok. One believes even more in Eliza, but one's belief is shaken when Eliza reveals rather more of herself than is apparent in that first masterly letter about the leg-iron. For Eliza is not what she seems. To the neighbours, who are beginning to worry about her, she was always a nuisance, but now she appears to be going downhill. She is really one of Barbara Pym's excellent women, with a religious faith which seems entirely sincere and a deep commitment to her Hospice work, where she befriends a young man dying of Aids. But she wanders out of her house a little too often, leaving the door open, and sometimes answers at cross pur- poses, so much so that the neighbours call in doctors and try to wrest from her the name of her next-of-kin. This raises the problem of whom to contact while Henry is still in Dolphin Square. Through all this, the letters to Joan continue, but now Eliza is the suppliant. She writes to Joan as she might write a diary, and through the sum- mer peacefulness in the large gardens in Rathbone Road the hints of madness appear, making their first entrance with one or two off-the-wall surnames, attached to characters who abruptly materialise.
One is tempted to read this as comedy, but Jane Gardam is quietly pulling the rug out from under us. Her skill as a short- story writer is apparent in the way each neighbour's life story is turned into an entertaining episode, yet Eliza, wandering in and out of the houses, gives us one or two scares. Does she have a religious expe- rience in the church? Does she mean to drown the baby whom she fishes from the lake at the last moment? Curiously, she is good with children, although she has none of her own, and seems to strengthen her grasp on reality when the curate of St Saviour's asks her to baby-sit, as does her neighbour, Dickie the Yuppie. Yet would a sane woman feed a baby no less than seven chocolate eclairs?
Common sense, or something like it, eventually prevails. Joan certainly exists, although Eliza has never met her. Joan is the curate's mother, and she is indeed in the Far East. She has never, as far as we know, had a bad leg, nor have Henry and Charles ever set up house together: they could hardly have done so, since Eliza cre- ated Charles, as she created Joan's house, and Joan's children. A ruined garden, where she once crawled to miscarry her own baby 20 years previously, is the only reality in the fantasy she has constructed about the house which once stood there and the family she created to fill it. Her husband is real, and he has a real daughter of his own, but she belongs to another plot, one which emerges belatedly and gradually overcomes the element in which the baffled and intrigued reader is very nearly sub- merged. Sanity wins, but for a time it was a close-run thing.
This is excellently done. The tone is uni- fied throughout; manic delusions were never so persuasive. And it is very moving, when it is not being exceedingly funny. This novel seems to me to be the most ambi- tious Jane Gardam has written: I should not be surprised if it features on the Booker shortlist. But a word to the wise: topical allusions wear out very quickly. One of the babies is called Perestroika. How long ago it seems!
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