Old Filth (23 page)

“Don't laugh at me.”

“I am in love with you, Eddie.”

“I have a bad reputation already. With my Colonel. And I am in charge of Queen Mary. Oh God—there's my shoe!” He was in his jacket, in his British warm, had found his cap as she wrapped herself around him.

“Eddie, Eddie. You look still the boy in the trees at High House.”

“What time is it? Oh God. I've fifteen minutes. There won't be a taxi.”

 

But there was a taxi. God has sent me a taxi, he thought. It was standing outside the door. “Paddington,” he said. “In ten minutes. I'll give you ten pounds.” He did not look back to see whether she was watching.

“Ten pounds, sir.”

“Thank you. Thank you very much.” (It's only what I'd have spent at the Savoy. God but I'm hungry.)

“Yes. Platform one. Where's the bit of carpet? Is it gone?”

It was there. And word had gone round. Somehow a crowd had gathered beside the Royal coach and the top of the toque with its doves' feathers could be seen passing between the clapping avenue of loyal subjects. The lady-in-waiting was invisible, a small woman to begin with, and no doubt weighted down now with more wool. The bodyguards were already on the train. Eddie gave a brief nod to the guard and jumped into his private cabin, slammed the door and fell on the banquette. I'll go along in a minute. Just get my breath.

The train began to steam slowly, powerfully, inexorably away from London.

Go along in a minute, he thought and fell asleep.

 

He woke to a crash and shriek of brakes. The whole train jolted, shuddered and stopped. Outside it was now dark and he jumped from his long blue velvet couch and made for the corridor, to meet one of the bodyguards coming to find him.

“Emergency, sir. Probably unexploded bomb on the line. Queen Mary's sent for you.”

The lady-in-waiting was trembling. From outside came a series of shouts. The train began to shunt backwards, squealing and complaining.

“It's the Invasion,” said the lady-in-waiting.

“Don't be ridiculous, Margaret,” said the Queen. “Eddie, take her along to your compartment and find her an aspirin. She needs a rest. Then come back again and we can talk. I want to hear every single thing you've done today.”

 

“So
tiresome
,” she said an hour later. “The carriage so dark. These blue spot-lights are very clever but they're just not bright enough to read by.” She fell silent. “But it's nice to look out at the moonlight.”

“Yes, Ma'am.” (And he realised she was afraid. He'd heard that though she never showed it by a tremor she was terrified of kidnap.)

“And you did no more than that, Captain Feathers?” (Captain Feathers? What's this?) “No more than go about in taxis? You didn't even go to the Savoy for luncheon as you'd so wished?”

“I'm afraid not. I found London—overwhelming. Kensington seemed quite like an unknown vil-vill-vill-village.”

“A
village
? How very odd. I was born there. In Kensington Palace. I never felt it a village.”

“I—couldn't find Kensington Palace.”

“Oh dear,” she said.

The train at last jerked forward, stopped, jerked again and then began to steam sweetly along towards the West.

“That is a pity,” said Her Majesty. “By the way” (looking out at the moonlight) “whatever has become of your tie?”

 

On the way home from their walk about the meadows around Badminton House, Old Filth asked the girl and her grandmother if they would stop the wheelchair at the post office for him to buy postcards. “No, no,” he said. “Let me get out and walk. Do me good,” and he hopped into the shop and back again, carrying three postcards of the village, all ready and stamped. He was able to hop around the car, and hold open the door for the grandmother as the girl put the folding chair back in the boot.

“So extremely kind of you,” he said. “A splendid afternoon.” Sitting by the reception desk he thought he would write the postcards at once though it was too late for the post, for a cloud no bigger than a man's hand had gathered around the recollection of his departure from home. He would write to Mrs.-er—to
Kate
—and to Garbutt. Perhaps he would write to lacy Chloe, too, and make her day.

Then he found that he had never had Mrs.-er's (Kate's) address. It was somewhere in the next village. It would be offensive to send it c/o Garbutt, for she had preceded Garbutt in his employment by years. He addressed one card to Garbutt at the house down the hill from his own, well known to him. Peep o'Day. Easy to remember. So was Chloe's: The Manor House, Privilege Lane. On Garbutt's card he wrote, “Please say I'm sorry to Kate.”

He had one card left over now and wrote it to Claire, mentioning that he had sprained something but was otherwise having a very good holiday by himself in Gloucestershire at this beautiful hotel. He was exalted. His optimistic self, he felt, was just around the corner.

But in the early hours of the next morning he woke with a chilling certainty that all was not well. He switched on his bedside lamp, hopped from the bed, opened a window upon the night. He shivered, and then flushed and sweated. He went for a pee, then drank a glass of water, hopped back, hot and cold by turns, clambered between the sheets. He knew that he was ill.

He knew that he was very ill. He had no idea what it was, but he knew that he was not in control. He lay and waited.

He stretched his hand out to the bedside table drawer and felt about for the never-failing
Gideon's Bible
that had seen him through many a sleepless hotel night during his legal life. In skyscrapers in Hong Kong, in the Shangri-la in Singapore, the dear old Intercon in Dacca. Lonely places, until he'd been married and able to take Betty along with him. He thought he needed a
Gospel
tonight, and turned up one of Christ's dingdongs with the lawyers.

He wondered, the pages shaking as he turned them, why Christ had so hated lawyers when He'd have been such a brilliant one Himself. Christ, when you considered it, was simply putting a Case. He may well have been enjoying the lawyers' examinations of him. Pilate's was his most respectable interrogation. Pilate had not been a lawyer, but another excellent lawyer manqué. Pilate and Christ had understood each other.

“We still use a little Roman Law, here,” he told Christ tonight. “The Law can always do with a going-over as you pointed out then. Execution should be entirely out. Execution leads only to victory for the corpse. You proved that,” he informed the Holy Ghost.

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.