The Queen of the Tambourine by Jane Gardam Page A

like Salman Rushdie and Beckett and Lancaster Forbes and so on, but actually I’ve had an adult novel accepted. Under an assumed name.”
    â€œI’m so glad.”
    â€œYou see, I always thought of myself as an adult writer even when I was a child. I mean, no child would ever want to be only a children ’s writer, would it? And look at Blake. There’s nothing more childish than Blake, is there? I don’t see much difference myself between adults and children, do you?”
    â€œYes, I do.”
    â€œOh. Really? I didn’t know you ever thought about such things, Eliza, I mean not having had any children.”
    I watched the dark face of the de-caff.
    â€œMy trouble is that I had so many children and kept them around for so long. None of them went away to school till they were ten you know. When they were at home I think I began to think like a child. They seemed older than me. I am a bit childish.” (Oh my dear Anne, you have been listening at doors.) “And I’ve rather had to grit my teeth in the adult novel to do the—you know, the sexual bits. The girl who advised me on it—you know, my Editor, she’s very young and utterly contemporary and hungry-looking, d’you know her hands shook all the time with nerves, a nice girl—well, she asked me to put in a masturbation scene.”
    â€œWhatever for?”
    â€œShe said that these days it’s expected.”
    Mrs. Molesworth hastily left the room and, “I’m sorry, Anne,” said I, “I’m hopeless at this sort of conversation. I don’t read that sort of thing.”
    â€œ Don’t you? But, you know, we mustn’t be prudish. We ought to reflect the real world.”
    â€œBut masturbation isn’t the real world, Anne. It’s just fantasising.”
    â€œIt can be quite nice in itself,” said Anne, and then turned puce.
    â€œWhat I do like about you,” I said, very quick, sharp, fast before she fainted with shame, “is the way you tell stories. That tale you told about Joan buying the tent and the gun in the Army and Navy Stores.”
    â€œThat wasn’t Joan,” she said, “I’d never call anyone Joan . There’s no one called Joan under the age of fifty. There’s absolutely no one called Joan in my books.”
    â€œNot a book,” I said. “It was Joan—our Joan. You were telling me about Joan. At number thirty-four.”
    She leaned forward and looked carefully in my ashtray and at my heap of stubs. Then at her chalky half-moons. “Eliza. . .”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œWe’re so worried. In the Road. We’ve been talking. We’ve been having meetings about you.”
    I looked at her.
    â€œEliza, I suggested and they—well, some of them—agreed that you must get a job. Get something to do.”
    I said, “Ah.”
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    For, you see, it happens, Joan, that Anne and her friends do not know that before any of them came to live here, soon after I had stopped travelling abroad with Henry, I did have a job, of a kind, for a short time. I took it out of shame for my idleness and with reluctance, for I was marched into it by Lady Gant.
    In those days Lady Gant sat on many committees about the town, having in attendance an unpaid shadowy creature called Bella. Bella Bentley. She was always smiling. You can still see Bella about, still in her sixties mini-skirts and bouffant hair, though she’s all of fifty. Sometimes she wears little suits with brooches. She lived in those days somewhere down by the railway in a bed-sit and did a clerking job in London, though I think it must have been part-time because almost every afternoon she could be found at Gant’s standing in the hall smiling at mountains of old clothes for jumble sales, or in the sitting room wading through toppling piles of papers and accounts, or in the kitchen making passes with her hands above elderly sandwiches and