Old Filth

by Jane Gardam

  “I’ve not seen mine for years, either,” she said. “He’s still bashing away in India. And I know you, you’re Teddy Feathers.”

  The eyes became at once the ten-year-old eyes of his cousin Babs—eyes that he had last seen pouring out tears by the fuchsia bushes in Ma Didds’s garden. The long, tapping finger over the ashtray became little Babs’s fierce claw which could pick out any tune without thought on the chapel harmonium. Just out of sight somewhere was the watchful pink and gold of their six-year-old cousin, Claire.

  “Babs?”

  “Teddy.”

  Eddie ordered them both some milky bottled coffee and a Marie biscuit and Babs lit another cigarette.

  “So. You live in Oxford? I’d no idea, Babs.”

  “No. I’m up. At Somerville. I’m packing it in, though. It’s no time to be here. I’m volunteering for the Navy. I’ll be gone by next week.”

  “Where’s Claire?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. She’s married. Straight from school. Didn’t you hear? She’s in East Anglia somewhere among all the airfields. As far away from us as possible. Well, she would be, wouldn’t she?”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “She was very passive always. And they made sure we were never to meet up again—or they tried to. Wanted us to drop each other dead. So—what’s been happening to you, old Teddy-bear?”

  “Did they? Try to stop us?”

  “Well, you had some sort of crack-up, so I heard. Began to chatter like a monkey. A Welsh monkey.”

  “I never cracked up. Do I stammer now?”

  “No. You talk proper. You’ll do for Christ Church.” When she smiled, she dazzled. There were smoker’s lines already etched on her face but sunlight was still behind them.

  “I’ve got myself into one hell of a bigger mess now,” Eddie said. “I’ve nobody to tell me the answers. I find I don’t know how to—proceed.”

  “Proceed,” she said, and leaning forward stroked his wrist. “I always loved your words. I suppose it was books. Your father sent you so many books at Didds’s.”

  “Did he? Nobody told me. What? Were the books from him?”

  “You weren’t wanting to hear anything good about your father then. Proceed,” she said. “Maybe you’ll be a lawyer? A Barrister, but it’d be a pity to cover that hair. Proceed—look, you proceed by yourself now. You don’t need Claire or me or Auntie May. Get on with life! You can take decisions,” she said, “if anyone can.”

  They both looked down at the insides of their coffee cups.

  “You were bloody wonderful,” she said, “that day. Braver than any of us and eight years old.”

  “I’ve not made a decision since,” he said. “That must have been my one decisive moment.”

  “Where did you go in the holidays all these years? You can’t have been alone?” she asked him.

  “School friend. Sort of second family to me.”

  “Can’t they help now? And what about your pa’s sensible sisters?”

  “They are psychologically deaf,” said he.

  “They’re just reacting against your pa,” she said. “Don’t forget they were all Raj Orphans themselves. They say it suits some. They come out fizzing and yelling, ‘I didn’t need parents,’ and waving the red, white and blue. Snooty for life. But we’re all touched, one way or another.”

  “I don’t think it suited my father,” said Eddie. “He’s gone entirely barmy.”

  “Yep. I heard. You know, my lot and Claire’s are still in India, and I never give them a thought. Not after ten years.”

  Eddie realised that since the Ma Didds’ horror he had never given a thought to either Babs or Claire. Not a thought.

  “Have you a girlfriend, Eddie?”

  “I never meet any girls. I just work. And play games. And read.”

  “Come home with me now,” said Babs. “To my digs. There’s no one there.” She put out her cigarette. “We’ll go to bed. We have before.”

  Eddie, scarlet, was aware of a drop in the background conversation at the nearby tables. Babs’s voice was beautiful and old-fashioned, a penetrating voice like Royalty, clear and high and unconcerned, and he stumbled out of his chair, withdrawing his hand from beneath hers. “Sorry. Can’t. Getting a train. Might miss it.”

  And she leaned back, laughing, and called across the steamy shop—the still-immobile cake-queue—“We’ll never forget each other, Teddy-bear. Never.” He fumbled at the door. “You and I and Claire. And Cumberledge. Whatever happens to us. Never.”

  He was on the train, sopped through with Oxford’s rain. He watched the tangled hedges threaded with the dead spirals of last year’s weeds. This was an empty, slow, uncertain train that trundled insolently through anonymous stations, their names painted out with coarse black brush-strokes to confuse the Germans when they eventually arrived. Station waiting-rooms stood barred; cigarette- and chocolate-machines stood empty with their metal drawers hanging out. It was not until he had changed trains in Manchester (I could still be in her bed) that he remembered that he had left Babs to pay for the coffee.

  He was sitting now in another railway carriage looking, above the man sitting opposite, at a pre-War watercolour reproduction of a happy artless English family on a sunny English beach. The other picture frames below the rack held patriotic slogans and he wondered if the sand-castle country scene had been deliberately preserved. The clean-cut daddy; the Marcel-waved mummy; the innocent little one; the happy dog, Towser. Presumably in some people’s memory? He closed his eyes to keep them from tears. He dozed and found himself in a richer place, a sleep-laden, dripping dell with drops on every great leaf, the clattering of banana leaves, black children dancing in foetid puddles on the earth—earth beaten hard as concrete with dancing feet but which could become in moments under the warm rain a living mud. Laughter. The smell of sweet hot skin. He was being tossed up high in someone’s arms and he was looking down again upon a brown face, white teeth, gloriously loving eyes. The eyes of the man across the carriage were staring at him as Eddie woke.

  “You all right, lad?”

  “Yes. Sorry. Was I snoring?”

  “No. You were moaning. Want to see a paper?”

  “No, no. I was . . . I think I must talk in my sleep.”

  “Here. I’m reading the Deaths,” said the man, “and I’ve discovered something quite important. See what you think. Just see what you think—no prejudice. Just look down the list of places and you can tell which deaths are from enemy action. You can tell from the Times exactly where the raids were, dates given. Nobody’s thought of it here, I’ll bet. I’m writing to the authorities. I’ll bet the enemy has noticed.”

  Eddie, scrambling from the tropical dream, said, “Careless talk costs lives.”

  “D’you want to see, though? Just you see what I mean. It’s a bloody check-list for the enemy,” and he passed across the outer pages of the Times. Eddie arranged them as a barrier between himself and the man and began, automatically, as his eyes refocused, to read in alphabetical order. He immediately read: Ingoldby, Patrick, aged eighteen years, RAF, a date of one week before, and For King and Country.

  THE TIME OF FRENZY

  When Betty died suddenly, planting the tulips the day after their day in London attempting to sign their Wills, Filth’s astonishment lifted his soul outside his body and he stood looking down not only at the slumped body but at his own, gazing and emptied of all its meaning now.

  “It has happened,” “It has occurred,” “Keep your head,” said the spirit to the body. Stiffly he knelt beside her, watching himself kneel, take her hand, kiss her hand and put it to his face. There was no doubt in either soul or body that she was dead. Dead. Gone. Happened. Lost. Over.

  Throughout the funeral service he silently repeated the words: Dead. Lost. Happened. Gone. A small funeral, for neither of them had much in the way of relations and Babs and Claire did not take—or so he assumed—the Telegraph or the Times. Filth, the ever-meticulous, had lapsed. H
e forgot (or pretended to forget) that you should telephone people. His old friends were all in Hong Kong or with their Maker. A small funeral.

  Touchingly, some members of his former Chambers turned up and his magnificent old Clerk, once the Junior Clerk who had been a schoolboy with pimples, was there in the church, magisterial now in a long Harrods overcoat.

  “So sorry, sir.”

  “How very good of you to come, Charlie. Very kind.”

  “Mr. Wemyss is here, and Sir Andrew Bysshe.”

  “Very kind. Very long way for you all to come.”

  The dark, serious, pallid London figures in the second pew. The rest of the mourners were locals, mostly church ladies, for Betty had been on the flower rota. She had been very forceful with the flowers, banging their stalks down hard in the bottom of the green bucket, commandeering the Frobisher Window from the moment of her arrival, a position not usually offered until you’d been in the parish for several years.

  Betty stood no nonsense from flowers. In Hong Kong she had once done the cathedral, and the Hong Kong iris, the Cuban bast flower, the American worm seed and the Maud’s Michellia had all known their place there. She harangued flowers. She wanted of all things, she often said, to have a flower named after her. “The Elizabeth Feathers. Long-leaved Greenbriar?” Filth had thought sometimes of organising such a thing for her; he’d heard that it was not really expensive. It was a birthday present always forgotten. Filth was not taken with flowers. He found them unresponsive, sometimes even hostile. It was tulips, he thought, that had got her in the end.

  As he stood beside the grave and thought of his long life with Betty and his achievement in presenting to the world the full man, the completed and successful being, his hands in their lined kid gloves folded over the top of his walking stick, he was aware of something, somewhere. He looked up at the sky. Nothing, yet he was being informed, no doubt about it, that there was something in him unresolved. He was inadequate and weak. If they knew, they would all find him unlikable. Despicable. Face it.

  Yet he felt nothing. Nothing at all.

  They had put on a do for Betty afterwards in the church hall. Tea and anchovy sandwiches and fruit cake and the ubiquitous pale green Anglican crockery, known from the Donheads to Hong Kong to Jamaica. He took nothing, but moved among the guests magnificently, like a knight of old. He talked of the weather. Of their kind journeys to the Donheads. A nice woman, when they had all gone, offered him whiskey and he must have drunk it for he found himself looking down into an empty glass when she suggested seeing him safely home.

  “Are you going to be alone here tonight, Edward?”

  “Oh, I shall be perfectly all right. Perfectly.”

  Outside, the tulip bed had been tactfully raked over and Filth and the woman (Chloe) stood looking carefully beyond it from the sun-lounge and over the hills. The woman smelled nostalgically of some old scent—not Betty’s, he thought. It was the scent, he supposed, but suddenly (and the nice woman had long lost her waistline and her hair was grey) Filth experienced an astonishment as great as the sight of Betty dead—her untenanted body, her empty face. Filth experienced a huge, full-blown, adolescent lust.

  At once, he walked away from the woman, and sat down in the sitting-room alone.

  “I could sit with you for a while.”

  “No thank you, Chloe, I think as a matter of fact I’d like to be by myself now.”

  When she had gone he sat for a time. (Lost. Over. Gone. Finished. Happened.) She was not here. She was dead. Not here. But, he felt, elsewhere. They had both detested the macabre Chinese funeral rites and the Oriental notions of an afterlife. They were (of course) Anglicans and liked the idea of Heaven, but whether the spirit survived the ridiculous body they had never discussed. They certainly had never considered the idea that they might meet again in another world. The notion is rubbish, now thought Filth.

  “Don’t you think?” he asked Betty directly for the first time, speaking to a point above the curtain rail.

  There was no reply.

  Yet he slept well. The lust had retreated and the next morning early, properly dressed with a purplish tie, he telephoned his two cousins.

  From the first, Claire in Essex somewhere, there was no reply, not even from an answerphone. It rang on and on. The second was Babs, who lived now for no known reason somewhere on Teesside called Herringfleet. She was alone in the world and, Betty had thought, a little odd now. Babs had known Betty at school (everyone, he thought, seems to have known Betty at school). Betty and Babs had been at St. Paul’s Girls School and had the Paulina voice.

  So that it was Betty who answered the phone. “Hello?” she said, “Yes? Teddy?”

  (Betty must be staying up there with Babs, he thought, caught his breath and plunged into hell.)

  “It is Babs?”

  “Yes. I suppose so. Barbara.”

  “Edward. Betty’s husband.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m afraid I have bad news.”

  “I know. I saw it in the paper. Poor old thing.”

  “Well, I’m not exactly—”

  “I mean Betty. Poor old thing.”

  It was Betty talking. He longed for more.

  “I thought you would want to know . . .”

  “Yes, what?”

  “The funeral’s over, Babs. I thought you’d be glad to know that she died instantly. She can’t have known a thing about it. Wonderful for her, really.”

  “Yes. That’s what they say.”

  Silence.

  “Babs?”

  Now a long silence. Then a crashing waterfall of musical notes on a piano. Filth remembered that Babs had something to do with music. Even in Herringfleet presumably. “Babs, is that a piano?”

  The scales ceased. Then Schubert began. On and on.

  “Babs?”

  Eventually, he put down the telephone and tried the other cousin again. Again, no answer. He thought of Chloe yesterday and then there was a shadow of someone watching him somewhere from a wood.

  Again, the astounding lust. Lust. He put his face in his hands and tried to be calm. What is all this? He found himself praying as he had never prayed at all during the funeral. And very seldom during Betty’s life.

  “Oh Lord, we beseech thee . . . direct our hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God.”

  He had not shared a bed with Betty for over thirty years. Double beds were for the bourgeoisie. Sex had never been a great success. They had never discussed it. They had disliked visiting friends who had not two spare bedrooms. Betty had joked for years that the marriage would never have survived had Filth not had his own dressing-room. She had meant bedroom.

  Had he ever desired Betty? Well, yes. He had. He remembered. He had desired everything about her. Her past, her present, her future with him. Her sweet, alert, intelligent face, her famously alive eyes. He had wanted to possess every part of her for she had fitted so perfectly into his life’s plan. She had made him safe and confident. She had eased old childhood nightmares.

  But—this. Not ever this. Where did this lust come from? Were she alive, could he have told her about it? She who had never done a passionate act. She would have sent him to a doctor.

  But yet—so very close they had been. Sometimes at night in Hong Kong, hot and restless in the swirling mists of the Peak, the case of the previous day, or worse, a judgement lingering, he had gone to her room and lain beside her and she had stretched out a hand.

  “What’s this?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Bad day?”

  “I condemned a man to death.”

  Silence.

  She would never have taken him in her arms from pity. Never presented her body to him as a distraction. Never indicated: Here is balm. Take me. Forget it. Your job. You knew there would be this to face here. You could have stayed in England.

  Instead . . .

  “Was he guilty?”

  “As hell.”

  They lay quiet, listening
to the night sounds on the Peak.

  “Crime passionel,” he said.

  “Then probably he will be glad to die.”

  He said, “You still shock me. If you had been the judge . . .”

  “. . . I would have done as you did. There is not an alternative. But I would have suffered less.”

  (But I would have wanted you to suffer more. I want you to make me resign because I disgust myself. I feel, truly, filth.)

  “I should have stayed in Chambers at home in the Temple. Famous Feathers of the Construction Industry. Sewers and drains.”

  But Betty had already fallen asleep again, peacefully against his shoulder, unconcerned, proud of him, a very nice woman. An excellent wife for a judge. And two miles off, in a sink across the spangled city, the condemned man, like a small grey bird, his mean little head on its scant Oriental neck soon to be crushed bone, lay alone.

  I got out just in time, he thought when they retired and came home to the Donheads. Couldn’t take much more emotion alongside the drudgery. Still can’t manage emotion. All under control. I am a professional. But why this lust? This longing?

  “Babs?”

  It was the following morning and he was telephoning her again, “Babs, I want to come and see you.”

  Betty’s voice answered—he remembered that it had been Veneering he’d once overheard saying that Betty’s voice was like Desdemona’s.

  “Babs?”

  “Just a minute.”

  A full tempest of Wagner was stilled somewhere. “Yes? Teddy again? What?”

  “Babs—may I come and see you?”

  “Yes. I suppose so. All right. When?”

  “Any time. This week? Next week?”

  “Yes. All right.”

  He heard a sob, which surprised him.

  “Babs, don’t cry. She died so easily. A ful-ful-ful-filled, a splendid life.”

  “I’m not crying for Betty,” she said, “or for you, you old fool,” and she crashed down the phone.

  He didn’t telephone again; he wrote. He would visit her the following Friday and perhaps stay the night?