The Stories of Jane Gardam

by Jane Gardam

  ‘But it’s always been empty,’ fusses a sheep. ‘Always quite left to ourselves. Except for the angels. They arrive on the half-hour in the sky above. That’s when we go into Latin.’

  The three tigers stand apart, looking across the graveyard at the church with their terrible eyes. They lie down among the tombs.

  One or two people are arriving—not many. They are walking up the path to the porch, passing under a bunch of mistletoe reminiscent of other times.

  A woman with a small, muffled-up boy pauses beneath the mistletoe as she straightens him out; Terry Hogbin, thought to be retarded. He looks out over the graveyard and waves at a lynx. His mother pulls him into church.

  ‘So we just wait here, then, do we?’ asks a nervous bongo, most beautiful, most fleet of all antelopes, most aristocratic of hoofstock.

  ‘I don’t know. This isn’t in the poem,’ says a common sort of nilgai. ‘Ask the bloody tamarins.’

  The tamarins confer manically together. They can’t say, they can’t say. Stay or go?

  The gorilla, Wallace, decides it. He sighs, raises his vast grey bottom and lopes on fingers and toes into church, where he sits in one of the empty pews at the back, a space before him and an aisle to his side. The rest, except for the tigers, follow without demur. The old lion Theodore snuffs about and settles by the shelves at the door, flat out, his chin in the hymn books.

  The tigers sit out in the graveyard. Their sleek, ringed tails twitch once. Twice. Then first Hilda, followed by Enid, and at last Ackroyd get up and slide seamlessly in.

  Melting snow from the pelts of the animals forms pools on the medieval flagstones. A smell arises, like fierce incense.

  A parishioner sneezes.

  The organ strikes up the first and most glorious Christmas hymn.

  ‘Mum,’ says Terry Hogbin, ‘look at all them animals.’ She says shut up and turn round.

  But neither she nor Terry, nor any of them there, ever forgot the music of that night.

  The parishioners said it was like a tape. There was a new vicar, a woman. They hadn’t got to know her yet and she must have set something up. It was as good as the Bach Choir, they said, or the Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College Chapel. It was like angels.

  And they talked of how the candlelight had shone in a most peculiar way. The crib with its holy family, surrounded by cardboard animals, had been bathed in a midnight sunshine. The baby in the hay had stretched out His arms towards a glorious world nobody there had ever suspected. It was a pity that Terry Hogbin had upset his mother by tugging at her sleeve and talking about giraffes.

  And there was that stranger, an old hunchback, who came up after the Blessing to look in the crib. And made off. And the doll they had used for the Christ child had disappeared with him.

  And, come to that, so had the woman priest. She’d stood out at the church door in the snow after the service saying happy Christmas to everyone, and good night, and nobody ever saw her again. Margaret Bean, her name was. A name with a ring to it, like it might be a martyr’s.

  And Ackroyd had gone missing, too, the tiger who had eaten his keeper. His tracks had not been among the others making their way home; tracks that were to amaze many people the next morning. Ackroyd wasn’t caught until the day after Boxing Day, and in a very confused state. He remained confused, even desolate, ever afterwards. All his life. But tigers are funny.

  As for old Wallace, he took the doll from the crib up to his private lodging in the cage top, and would sit staring at it, quite still, for hours. When the silly spider monkeys tried to get hold of it and snatch it about, he would show his might. He would rise up in his terrible strength and beat upon his black, rock-hard breast, though (it has to be said) he hadn’t much of a notion why.

  OLD FILTH

  Old Filth had been a delightful man. The occasional kink, but a delightful man. A self-mocking man. The name had been his own invention, a joke against himself: a well-worn joke now but he had been the one to think of it first. ‘Failed In London Try Hong Kong.’ Good old legal joke.

  He was Old Filth, QC, useful and dependable advocate, who would never have made judge in England. Never have made judge anywhere, come to that, for it was not what he had ever wanted. ‘Failed’ was his joke, for he had had exactly the career he had planned, to practise at the English Bar yet live as close to the Orient as possible.

  He’d been born in Malaya more than eighty years ago, into a diplomatic British family, his muse a girl with loving, rounded arms. He had played in the village with the village children. They had filled him with love and superstitions and the tangled forests of the fiery folktales he had loved. Old Filth still spoke Malay and when he did you heard an unsuspected voice. All his life he had kept a regard for eastern values, the courtesy, the hospitality, the respect for money, the decorum, the importance of food, the discretion, the cleverness. He had married a Scotswoman born in Peking. She was dumpy and tweedy, with broad shoulders, but she too spoke some Mandarin and liked oriental ways. She had a Chinese passion for jewellery. Her strong, Scottish fingers rattled the trays of jade in the market, stirring the stones about like pebbles on a beach. ‘When you do that,’ Old Filth would say, ‘your eyes are almond-shaped.’ ‘Poor old Betty,’ he often thought now. She had died after their retirement to Dorset.

  And why ever Dorset? Nobody knew. Some tradition, perhaps. But if any pair of human beings had been born to be Hong Kong expats, members of the Cricket Club, the Jockey Club, stalwarts of the English lending library, props of St Andrew’s Church, they were Filth and Betty. People, you’d say, who’d always be able to keep some servants, ever be happy hosts to any friend of a friend who was visiting the Colony. When you thought of Betty, you saw her at her round rosewood dining-table, looking about her to see if plates were empty, tinkling her little bell to summon the smiling girls in their household livery of identical cheongsams. Such perfectly international people, Old Filth and Betty. Ornaments to every one of the memorial services in St John’s Cathedral that in the last years had been falling on them thick and fast.

  Was it the thought of having to survive in Hong Kong on a pension, then? But the part of Dorset they had chosen was far from cheap, and surely Old Filth must have stashed away a packet? (Another of the reasons, he had always said so jollily, for not becoming a judge.) And they had no children. No responsibilities. No one to come home for.

  Or was it—the most likely thing—1997? Was it the unbearableness of being left behind to bow to the barbarians? The unknown Chinese who would not be feeding them sweets and telling them fairy tales? Neither of them was keen on the unknown. Already, some years before they left, English was not being spoken in shops and hotels so often or so well. Many faces had disappeared to London and Seattle and Toronto and rich people’s children had vanished to English boarding schools. Big houses on The Peak were in darkness behind steel grilles. At Betty’s favourite jeweller, the little girls threading beads, who still appeared to be sixteen though she had known them twenty years, looked up more slowly now when she walked in. They still kept their fixed smiles, but found fewer good stones for her. Chinese women she knew had not the same difficulty.

  So, suddenly, Old Filth and Betty were gone, gone for ever from the sky-high curtain-drops of glittering lights, gold and soft green and rose, from the busy waters of the harbour and the perpetual drama of every sort of boat—the junks and oil tankers and private yachts, and the ancient and comforting dark-green Star-ferries that chugged back and forth to Kowloon all day and most of the night. ‘This deck accommodates 319 passengers.’ Filth had loved the certainty of the ‘19’.

  They were gone, moved far from any friend, to a house deep in the Donheads on the Wiltshire–Dorset border, an old low stone house that could not be seen from its gate. A rough drive climbed past it and out of sight. The house sat on a small plateau looking down over forests of every sort and colour of English tree. Far
away, the horizon was a long scalpel line of milky chalk down, dappled with shadows drawn across it by the clouds above.

  No place in the world could be less like Hong Kong. Yet it was not so remote that a doctor might start suggesting in a few years’ time that it would be kind to the Social Services if they were to move nearer civilisation. There was a village half a mile up the main road that passed their gate; and half a mile in the other direction, also up a hill, for their drive ran down into a dip, was a church and a shop. There were other more modern, if invisible, houses in the trees. There was even a house next door, its outer gate alongside theirs, its drive curving upwards in the same way and disappearing, as did their own, out of sight. So they were secluded but not cut off.

  And it worked. They made it work. Well, they were people who would see to it that the end of their lives worked. They changed. They discarded much. They went out and about very little. But they put their hearts into becoming content, safe behind the lock on their old-fashioned farmhouse door that could never be left accidentally on the latch. Old Filth gardened and read thrillers and biographies and worked now and then in his tool shed. He kept his QC’s wig in its black-and-gold oval box on the hearth like a grey cat in a basket; then, as nobody but Betty was there to be amused, he moved it after a time to his wardrobe to lie with his black silk stockings and buckled shoes. Betty spent time sewing and looking out of the window at the trees. They went to the supermarket most weeks in their modest car and a woman came in four times a week to clean and cook and do the laundry. Betty said the legacy Hong Kong had left them was the inability to do their own washing. After Betty died, Old Filth took everything from her jewel box and distributed it. He was leaving all his money to the Barristers’ Benevolent Association, he said, because nobody felt much benevolence towards barristers. It was sad, really, that there was no one to appreciate the little joke. Nice man. Always had been.

  It was the cleaning lady who destroyed it all.

  One morning, letting herself in with her door key, talking even before she was over the threshold, ‘Well,’ she said, ‘what about this, then? You never hear anything in this place. Next door must have moved. There’s removal vans all up and down the drive and loads of new stuff getting carried in. They say it’s another lawyer from Singapore, like you.’

  ‘Hong Kong,’ said Old Filth, automatically and as usual.

  ‘Hong Kong, then. They’ll be wanting help but they’re out of luck. I’m well-suited here, you’re not to worry. I’ll find them someone. I’ve enough to do.’

  A few days later Old Filth enquired if she’d heard anything more and was told, courtesy of the village shop, the new neighbour’s name. It was indeed the name of another Hong Kong lawyer and it was the name of the only man in either his professional or private life that Old Filth had ever detested. The extraordinary effect this man had had upon him over thirty years ago and for many years after—and it had been much noticed and the usually cautious Filth had not cared—was like the venom that sprayed out from the mouths of the dragons in his old nanny’s stories.

  And the same had gone for Terry Veneering’s opinion of Old Filth.

  Nobody knew why. It was almost a chemical, a physical thing. In Hong Kong, Old Filth, kind Old Filth, and swashbuckling Veneering did not ‘have words’, they spat poisons. They did not cross swords, they set about each other with scimitars. Old Filth believed that jumped-up Terry Veneering was all that was wrong with the English masters of the Colony—arrogant, blustering, loud, cynical, narrow and far too athletic. Without such as him, who knows? Veneering treated the Chinese as if they were invisible, flung himself into pompous rites of Empire, strutted at ceremonies, cringed before the Governor, drank too much. In court he was known for treating his opponent to spates of personal abuse. Once, in an interminable case against Old Filth, about a housing estate in the New Territories that had been built over a Chinese graveyard and had mysteriously refused to prosper, Veneering spent days sneering at primitive beliefs. Or so Old Filth said. What Veneering said about Old Filth he never enquired but there was a mutual, cold and seething dislike.

  And somehow or other Veneering got away with everything. He bestrode the Colony like a colossus, booming on at parties about his excellence. During a state visit of royalty he was rumoured to have boasted about his boy at Eton. Later it was ‘my boy at Cambridge’, then ‘my lad in the Guards’.

  Betty loathed him, and Old Filth’s first thought when he heard that Veneering had become his new neighbour was: ‘Thank God Betty’s gone.’ His second thought was: ‘I shall have to move.’

  However, the next-door house was as invisible as Old Filth’s; and its garden quite secret, behind a long stand of firs that grew broader and taller all the time. Even when leaves of other trees fell, there was no sight or sound of him. ‘He’s a widower living alone,’ said the cleaning lady. ‘His wife was a Chinese.’ Old Filth remembered then that Veneering had married a Chinese woman. Strange to have forgotten. Why did the idea stir up such hatred again? He remembered the wife now, her downcast eyes and the curious chandelier earrings she wore. He remembered her at a racecourse in a bright-yellow silk dress, Veneering alongside—great, coarse, golden fellow, six foot two, with his strangled voice trying to sound public school.

  Old Filth dozed off then with this picture before him, wondering at the clarity of an image thirty years old when what happened yesterday had receded into utter darkness. He was eighty-three now. Veneering must be almost eighty. Well, they could each keep their own corner. They need never meet.

  Nor did they. The year went by, and the next one. A friend from Hong Kong called on Old Filth and said, ‘I believe Terry Veneering lives somewhere down here, too. Do you ever come across him?’

  ‘He’s next door. No. Never.’

  ‘Next door? My dear fellow—!’

  ‘I’d like to have moved away.’

  ‘But you mean you’ve never—?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And he’s made no . ⁠. ⁠. gesture?’

  ‘Christopher, your memory is short.’

  ‘Well, I knew you were— You were both irrational in that direction, but—’

  Old Filth walked his friend to the gate. Beside it stood Veneering’s gate, overhung with ragged yews. A short length of drainpipe, to take a morning newspaper, was attached to Veneering’s gate. It was identical to the one that had been attached to Old Filth’s gate for many years. ‘He copied my drainpipe,’ said Old Filth. ‘He never had an original notion.’

  ‘I have half a mind to call.’

  ‘Well, you needn’t come and see me again if you do,’ said courteous Old Filth.

  Seated in his car the friend considered the mystery of the fixations that survive dotage and how wise he had been to stay in Hong Kong.

  ‘You don’t feel like a visit?’ he asked out of the window. ‘Why not come back for Christmas? It’s not so much changed that there’ll ever be anywhere else like it.’

  But Old Filth said that he didn’t stir at Christmas. Just a taxi to the White Hart at Salisbury for luncheon. Good place. Not too many paper hats and streamers.

  ‘Hong Kong is still all streamers,’ said the friend. ‘I remember Betty with streamers tangled up in her gold chains.’

  But Old Filth just thanked him and waved him off.

  He thought of him again on Christmas morning, waiting for the taxi to the White Hart, watching from a window whose panes were almost blocked with snow, snow that had been falling when he’d opened his bedroom curtains five hours ago at seven o’clock. Big, fast, determined flakes. They fell and fell. They danced. They mesmerised. After a few minutes you couldn’t tell if they were going up or down. Thinking of the road at the end of the drive, the deep hollow there, he wondered if the taxi would make it. At twelve-fifteen he thought he might ring and ask, but waited until twelve-thirty as it seemed tetchy to fuss. He discovered that the telephone
was not working.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘ha.’

  There were mince pies and a ham shank. A good bottle somewhere. He’d be all right. A pity, though. Break with tradition.

  He stood staring at the Christmas cards. Fewer again this year. As for presents, nothing except one from his cousin at Hainault. Always two handkerchiefs. Well, more than he ever sent her. He must remember to send some flowers or something. He picked up a large, glossy card and read: ‘A Merry Christmas from The Ideal Tailor, Century Arcade, Star Building, to our esteemed client.’ Every year. Never failed. Still had his suits. Twenty years old. Snowflakes danced around a Chinese house on stilts. Red Chinese characters and a rosy Father Christmas in the corner.

  Suddenly he missed Betty. Longed for Betty. Felt that if he turned round quickly, there she would be.

  But she was not.

  Outside there was a strange sound, a long sliding noise and a thump. A heavy thump. It might well be the taxi skidding on the drive and hitting the house. Filth opened the front door and saw nothing but snow. He stepped quickly out on to his doorstep for a moment, to look down the drive, and the front door swung to behind him, fastening with a solid, pre-war click.

  He was in bedroom slippers. Otherwise he was wearing trousers, a singlet—which he always wore, being a gentleman, thank God—shirt and tie and a thin cashmere cardigan Betty had bought him years ago. It was already sopped through.

  Filth walked delicately round the outside of the house, bent forward, screwing up his eyes against the snow, to see if by any chance . ⁠. ⁠. but he knew that the back door was locked and all the windows. He turned off towards the toolshed, over the invisible slippery grass. Locked. He thought of the car in the garage. He hadn’t driven it for some time. Mrs. Thing did the shopping now. It was scarcely used. But maybe the garage?