Old Filth

by Jane Gardam

  He dreamed for a little, drifted, read the Sermon on the Mount, remembered hearing that no child nowadays has heard of the Sermon on the Mount and most guess it is a book or a film. He thought benevolently how he should like to be upon another Bench listening to Christ going for the defence in a Case to do with, say, a land-reclamation.

  A fist grabbed him in the chest and pain shot through him. He could not breathe. He stretched for the bell and kept his right hand on it as the pain sank down, then surged up again. It’s the Hand of God, he thought. And nobody but God knows where the hell I am.

  Garbutt’s house was empty when the phone began to ring the next morning. He had gone to Privilege Road to help the tedious Chloe with her asparagus bed and they were both down in the garden when her phone began to ring, too.

  “I’ll leave it,” she said. “It won’t be anything.”

  But it rang on.

  She caught it as the other end was about to put it down.

  “I’m very sorry to hear it,” she said. “Yes. He’s a neighbour but not a close friend. No—I don’t think there are any relations. Well, he’s over eighty. He’s never had anything wrong with him in his life. The time comes. He’s not very popular here in the village, I’m afraid. He treats his servants badly. Very difficult for you. I think there are some cousins in Essex. Oh, I see, you’ve tried them. Well, I can’t help you. Goodbye.”

  “Sir Edward’s had a heart attack,” she said, returning to the asparagus bed. “I said last week it was blood-pressure, the way he was behaving.”

  “What? Where?” said Garbutt.

  “Well, around his heart.”

  “Where was the call from?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  Garbutt blundered her out of the way, ran through her French doors and across her pastel Chinese carpet, dialled 1471, then pressed three.

  “He’s in hospital,” said the hotel. “The ambulance came very quickly. We were surprised. He’d been so much better. He’d been out in the afternoon and eaten an excellent dinner.”

  “Had he been ill already, then?”

  “Yes, he arrived with a sprained ankle. Do you want the name of the hospital? I hope you will excuse us asking but will there be funds to pay his account?”

  “Funds have never been a trouble to him.”

  “Thank you. We were beginning to grow very fond of him.”

  “People do,” said Garbutt, and phoned Kate, and then his wife.

  Garbutt found Filth, looped up to drips and scans, trying to shut out the quack of the television sets and the clatter of the public ward where male and female lay alongside each other in various stages of ill health. Like Pompeii.

  It was an old hospital. The windows were too high to see anything except the wires and concrete of unexciting buildings and the sky. The light was not the pearly light of yesterday in the meadows of Badminton, which Filth was trying to remember and decide when and where it had been and whom he had been with. Memory, he thought. Memory. My memory has always been so reliable. Perhaps too reliable. It has never spared me. Memory and desire, he thought. Who said that? Without memory and desire life is pointless? I long ago lost any sort of desire. Now memory.

  Suddenly he knew that this was what had been the matter with him for years. He had lost desire. Not sexual desire, that had been a poor part of his nature always. He had been furtive about the poverty of his sexual past. Dear Betty—she had been very undemanding. He had never told her about the buttermilk business and had skimmed over Isobel Ingoldby. Whatever would the young make of him today? It seemed they were all like rabbits and started haphazardly as soon as they reached double figures. He found them repellent.

  And homosexuals repellent, if he were honest. And divorce repellent. Blacks—here he was disturbed by a cluster of different coloured people surrounding his bed. These are not the black people of the Empire, he thought, and then realised that that was exactly what most of them were. “Any of you chaps Malays?” he asked. “Malaya’s my country. Malaysia now, of course. And Ceylon’s Sri Lanka, Lanka’s what my friend Loss called it, and he should know. It was full of his uncles. That’s what he said before he went down the trough. Bombed by the bloody Japanese, I expect. Oh, sorry.” The lead figure in the performance around his bed was Japanese. “Didn’t realise. It’s your West Country accent.”

  “OK, grandpa,” said the Japanese. “Take it easy.”

  Filth’s days passed. Various bits of equipment were detached from him. Once he thought that Garbutt was sitting at the end of the bed and gave a feeble wave. “Very sorry about this. How’s Mrs.-er? Very sorry to have upset Mrs.-er. Feeling better. I’d like to see a priest, though.” Then he slept, and woke in the night trying to ring a bell for a priest.

  “It’s not Sunday,” said a nurse. “Or are you a Catholic? You’re getting better. Talk to them in the morning. Go to sleep, old gramps. Think positive.”

  Times have been worse than this, he thought. Much worse.

  It’s just there’s no chance of many more of them, of times of any sort, now. That’s absolutely rationally true, a serious, even beautiful equation. Life ends. You’re tired of it anyway. No memory. No desire. Yet you don’t want it to be over. Not quite yet.

  Bloody memory.

  “I was very happy round here, you know, in the War,” he said to a passing Sikh. “I was a friend of Queen Mary. She remembered my birthday. She sent me chocolate.”

  “Who’s Queen Mary?” asked the Sikh in an Estuary accent. “The Queen Mum?”

  “While I lived here in Gloucestershire,” said drowsing Filth, “I rather buried my head.”

  “Bury it now,” said the Sikh, “and get to sleep.”

  “Before I go,” said Filth, “I really do want to see a priest.”

  But when they found him a priest next day, he was feeling much better, was loosed from his bonds, was sent to a terrible place to wash, was given cornflakes and a type of meat which smelled of onions and was laced with a fluid called “brown sauce,” and was told that he would later on be going home.

  Moreover, the priest, when he arrived, was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and Filth did not believe in him. He would have preferred a female to this one, and that was saying something. His confession would have to be postponed. He sat and read the Daily Telegraph in a small, contained cubicle, his carrier bag at his feet. He sat there all morning, and at some point dozed off, thinking of other occasions in his life of total reversion, of failure.

  After six months he had been posted away from Badminton. The War had changed. We were now on the winning side and there was a new jauntiness. Queen Mary’s staff unpacked her three suitcases in the attics and he was sent to the War Office on the mistaken premise that he was a linguist and well-connected. He experienced the Mall on VE Day and was released to Oxford much more quickly than his War record deserved. He took a First in Law after only two years and was called to the Bar and set about the much harder matter of finding a seat in somebody’s Chambers.

  It was the winter still talked of, half a century on: 1947.

  Memory and desire, he thought.

  CHAMBERS

  The January rain of 1947 slopped down upon dilapidated Lincoln’s Inn Fields, puckering the stagnant surfaces of the static-water tanks implanted in its grass. Eddie Feathers observed it from the passage in a small set of undistinguished Chambers in New Square. He kept the door open between the passage and the Senior Barrister’s empty room on the front of the building, otherwise he had no view except the dustbins at the back. On days like this and on days of smog which were getting more frequent though coal was rationed to a bag a week, he could look through the door to what he might look forward to if the old fellow stopped coming in altogether. A good old room with magnificent carved Elizabethan fireplace and a large portrait of the Silk’s unhappy-looking wife: the sort of wartime bridal face that wished it had waited.

  In an adjoining, equally historic, equally dusty room but lacking an uxorial photograph sat the on
ly other member of Chambers, usually asleep. These rooms had been built as legal Chambers hundreds of years ago and had housed a multitude of lawyers from before the Commonwealth. Wigs in these rooms had been worn naturally, like hats. Then even hats around Chambers had gone—bowler hats had also just about disappeared by 1947, though Eddie Feathers had bought one for five excessive pounds, and it hung, laughably, on a hook inside the Chambers’ street door.

  The passage was bitterly cold. There were no carpets, no curtaining, a small spluttering heater. He sat before a splintered table where transcripts of a dispute stood two feet high, almost indecipherable blueprints concerning the installation of new water-closets throughout a bombed government building, his annotation of which went down at about a sixteenth of an inch per hour. Sir, his school, his college, Queen Mary, all pointed stern fingers at Eddie. Habit dictated. There had been black hours before. Diligence gets you through. Keep going. Oh God why?

  Gloucestershire and Oxford kept breaking in on him. Christ Church meadow, the bells stumbling and tumbling, calling down the High. The wallflowers—the smell of the velvet wallflowers outside his set of rooms. The emptiness of his Quad, returning home at night. Hardly a soul about. Music from the open windows. And the spring there, and the politics and the friends. Too much work. Too much work to go to parties, even to attend the Union, meet any girls, too many men just up from school drinking themselves silly, schoolchildren who had missed the War. Leaving Oxford had surprised him by its finality.

  The rain fell. In the far room with the door shut he heard the comatose, under-employed Head of Chambers fart and yawn. The fart was an elderly fart—lengthy, unmusical and resigned.

  Eddie found that he was crying, and mopped his face. He thought he might as well go home for the day.

  But, no. Better not. Another quarter-inch of notes. No point in going out in the rain. It was a longish walk to the Aldwych tube station and he had no macintosh. There were a couple of changes on his tube (everyone wheezing and smelling of no soap) to get back to his bed-sit in sleazy Notting Hill. Then out again for something to eat at an ABC café: sausage and mash, stewed apple and custard, keep within a shilling. There was still no sign of his inheritance. He’d been told it might take years to prove the death, let alone the Will. He was still unable to put his mind to the imagining of his father’s end. No friend of his father, no official notification from the Foreign Office. Eddie pushed down the guilt that he had made no enquiries. There had been no communication from the aunts. “I shall learn one day,” was all he allowed himself.

  He must get a bike. Save the fares. He was earning a hundred pounds a year devilling for the absent Silk with the difficult wife. Three hundred a year in all, with the very odd Brief. He had one good suit, kept his shoes soled and heeled, washed his new-fangled nylon shirt every evening and hung it round the geyser in the communal bathroom at his lodgings, to dry for the morning. To keep up appearances before solicitors and clients. Not that there were any clients. Not for him. Not for years yet. Maybe never. Nobody knew him. Along the passage the old Silk farted again.

  It had been nearly a year ago that Eddie, walking round the once-beautiful London squares one evening—without money there was nothing else to do, he was putting the hours in until bedtime—had thought of the building and engineering aspect of the Law. The War was over. One day—look at Germany—rebuilding of the ruins must surely occur in this country. Building disputes, he thought. There’ll be hundreds of them. Enquiring about, he had found a set of engineering Chambers that had been bombed and moved into this backwater of Lincoln’s Inn.

  There was not even space for a Clerk’s room. This had had to be rented across a yard. The Senior Clerk, who looked like an unsuccessful butler and spent much time in rumination, left early after lunch for South Wimbledon. The clever Junior Clerk, Tom, hideously unemployed, worked like mad around the pubs at lunchtime among the Clerks of other Chambers, trying to get leads on coming Cases and plotting where he would move to next. He liked Eddie and was sorry for him. “I should pack it in, sir,” he said one day. “You’re worth better than this—First from Oxford. I can’t sell you here. Go to New Zealand.”

  I might, thought Eddie today, looking through the door to the grander room and then beyond it out of the old, absent Silk’s window to the rain falling. Between the building and the Inn garden where stood a great tree which had survived other wars, a white Rolls-Royce was parked. He could see the chauffeur inside it in a green uniform. Not usual. Eddie sighed, and lifted the next pages of transcript off the pile.

  The street door of the Chambers now banged open against the wall and feet came running towards Eddie’s alley. The Junior Clerk, macintosh flapping—he’d been waiting to go home—flung open his door and shouted, “Come on, sir. Quick. Quick, sir! Get up. Leave those papers. Get into that front room. Behind the desk. You’ve got a client.”

  “Client?”

  “New solicitor. Get the dust off those sets of papers. Smarten your clothing. Where’s that classy clothes-brush of yours? Here. I’ll put his wife’s photo out of sight. Wrong image. You’re young and free to travel. I think you’re on the move.”

  “Move?”

  “I’ve got you a Brief. It’s a big one. Four hundred on the Brief and forty a day. Likely to last two weeks.”

  “Whoever—?”

  “Don’t ask me. It’s Hong Kong. It’s a Chinese dwarf.”

  “You’ve gone insane, Tom. It’s a hoax.”

  “Turned up in that Rolls. I’ve had him sitting in the Clerk’s room twenty minutes. I’ll bring him over.”

  “wait!”

  “Wait? Wait? Look, it’s a pipeline failure in Hong Kong. You’re on your way.”

  “A Chinese dwarf?”

  “Come back. Where you going, sir? I bring him over here to you, you don’t go running after him.”

  “Where is he now?” Eddie shouted from the courtyard.

  “He’s still in the Clerks’ room. I told him I was coming to see if you were free. I bring him to you. Gravitas, sir.”

  But Eddie was gone, over the courtyard, under the lime tree, running in the rain. The chauffeur in the Rolls turned to look, raising an eyebrow.

  Eddie ran into the Clerks’ room, where Albert Loss was seated on the sagging purple sofa playing Patience.

  “Coleridge!”

  “Spot the lady. Kill the ace of spades.”

  “Coleridge! God in heaven, Coleridge. But you’re dead. The Japanese killed you.”

  “Colombo didn’t fall. You are an amnesiac. There were initial raids. And then they left us alone. You should have stayed. I found my uncle. Several of them. All attorneys. And so I became one too.”

  “This is the most wonderful . . . How ever did you find me?”

  “Law Lists, my dear old chum. Top of the Law Lists. Thanks to me. I directed you, you will remember, towards the Law. And now I am Briefing you. My practice is largely in Hong Kong. I hope you have no serious family ties?”

  “Not a tie. Not a thread. Not a cobweb—Coleridge!”

  “Good. Then you can fly to Hong Kong next week? First class, of course. We must not lose face before the clients. We’ll put you up in the Peninsular.”

  “I’ll have to read the papers.”

  “Nonsense, Fevvers. You’ll do it all in your head. On the plane. Open-and-shut Case, and I taught you Poker. You can think. I’m flying back myself tomorrow.”

  “This is a dream. You’re exactly the same. You haven’t aged. By the way, what happened to my watch?”

  “Ah, that had to be sacrificed in the avuncular search. But you have aged, Fevvers. You have been aged by your Wartime experiences, no doubt?”

  “You could say that. Coleridge, come on! Let’s go out. Where are you staying?”

  “The Dorchester, of course. But there is no time for social punishment. I fly tomorrow and I must see my builders. I’m buying a house in the Nash Terraces of Regent’s Park. All in ruins. Practically free at present. If you
want it to rent, after the pipeline, it’s yours. By the way, were you met?”

  “Met?”

  “At Liverpool? Off the old Portuguese tub?”

  “Yes. Yes, I was—”

  “I was forced to borrow your address book. I’m afraid it has fallen by the way. My uncles were very close to the Corps of Signals. And of course I have a phenomenal memory.”

  “You should be a spy.”

  “Thank you, but I am in gainful employment. It’s very good to see you, Feathers. Very nice clothes-brush. Do you want it?”

  “Yes. Coleridge!”

  “And by the way,” Albert Loss said at the car, the chauffeur towering above him, holding a brolly, “while I’m away in Hong Kong, do make use of the Royce.”

  LAST RITES

  Indigestion,” said the hotel to Claire over the telephone. “A very bad case of indigestion.”

  “He said on the postcard a sprained ankle.”

  “The indigestion followed. It was the prawns. Looked identical to a heart attack. He’s been in hospital. He’s back here again now recovering from the hospital. Can we get him for you? He’s out in the sun, well wrapped up. Who shall we say?”

  “Will you say Claire? And that I had his postcard.”

  “We were very glad of those postcards.”

  “Hello,” said Filth, tottering in. “I was wondering if someone could find me a priest.”

  The bar listened. The nice girl came and sat him in a chair. Dialling the number for him, handing him the phone, she said, “Sir Edward, the priest business was last week.”

  “What? Hello? Claire? There are things I want to get off my chest. This episode was rather alarming. Some unfinished business. You know what I’m talking about.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You and I and Babs.”

  “What about us?”

  “And Cumberledge?”

  There was silence.

  “Oh, long, long ago,” she said.