Old Filth (24 page)

Memory and desire
, he thought.

 

T
he 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 only 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.”

 

I
ndigestion,” 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.

“But I need to tell someone, even so. What happened to your priest? The one in the church with all the marble babies?”

“Do you mean Father Tansy? I thought he was anathema to you.”

“Well, yes. He was. But I keep remembering him. Can you find him for me?”

“But you're in Gloucestershire. And I hear you can't walk and have had a suspected heart attack.”

“False alarm. Got over-excited reading the Gospels.”

“Say goodbye to her now, Sir Edward. We'll bring you your lunch in the lounge. You still have to take care.”

“Goodbye, Claire. Thank you for ringing. I'll ring again.”

 

The day wore on. He sat in remote reveries. They brought him tea.

Bloody good of them to have me back here, he thought. All thanks to Loss I can pay for it. Set me on my path. But I've worked for it myself, too. I've worked for my millions. Survived them too. Loss didn't.

He began to doze and was woken by the nice girl and her grandmother with a bunch of asters. “You should keep off prawns,” said the grandmother. “After seventy you should keep off prawns. You never saw Queen Mary even look at a prawn.”

“It may have been the banana split,” said her granddaughter.

“I don't eat bananas,” said Filth.

 

Next day came a letter from Claire in her trailing bright blue handwriting.

 

Dear Teddy,

It so happens that Father Tansy is coming to your part of the world to visit his Boys' Club in Falmouth. Babs will be with him. It all seems prophetic. I have told them where you are.

As to the matter of our rotten childhood, old cousin, you should forget it. I have never let what we did trouble me, even in dreams. I had no difficulty with it at the time and I've never felt the need to speak about it since. Oliver, for instance, does not know, and neither did my late-lamented husband. What would now be called “The Authorities” spirited us all away so fast after the death that it didn't get much into the papers. Now, it would have dominated the telly for a month.

D'you know that I met Cumberledge again? It was only a few years ago. As a matter of fact, it was the day you were staying with us, when Oliver took me to Cambridge for tea with some grandee from his old college, a Dean who's still in residence. Someone who was kind to Oliver when he was up. Well, all the time we were in the old boy's rooms I felt puzzled, as if I knew him. He seemed quite unaware of me. My surname has changed and it was three-quarters of a century on and Oliver had never mentioned that I'd been a Raj Orphan. Oliver told me his name on the way home and after you'd all gone I sat down here in High Light and wrote him a letter, hoping I wasn't stirring up something best forgotten. We struck up a thoroughly boring correspondence.

I'm not sure whether I'm pleased or not that he never referred to the murder. Well yes, of course I'm sure. I was not pleased. I should have liked to hear what he thought we'd all been at. I often think, when I'm reading in the papers about a murder, that the murderer is the last person to be aware of the crime. Sometimes he is not aware of it for years, I'd guess. Well, you'll know all about that. Murderers are the possessed.

I'm not saying there's no such thing as guilt. And wickedness.

I'm saying there is confusion and derangement in the mature murderer. What is so interesting about our murder is that there was neither. No confusion. No derangement. We three—not Cumberledge—were absorbed in the process of handing over responsibility to the powers of darkness whom we had met as children, and who had met us. We were thoroughly engaged, us three. Still untamed. We were of the jungle.

Poor Babs—she's probably the best of us—went mad. She's maddish most of the time. But she's still Babs. Ma Didds was cruellest of all to her. Stopped her singing. Gagged her mouth. Babs became castrated. Ugly in mind, body and estate. Grows uglier now. And yet I remember her dazzling for a while when she was in the War.

You, dear Teddy, Ma Didds feared because of your height and strength and prodigious good looks. Oh, how unfair are our looks! Didds knew she could never make you ugly. She worked on your stammer. She was afraid of your silences. You were not like a child then. You are more of a child now. Betty came and stripped the years away from you in what looked like the perfect marriage. She never asked for more than you could give. Others gave her passion. You were a saint about Veneering. You were a wall of alabaster. You saved each other. You and Betty. I'd guess, neither of you ever spoke of it.

But nobody ever loved you like I did, Teddy.

Yet I was the coldest of us. I was the harshest. I was the actress. I was the little pretty one who never did wrong. I was the one who suggested the murder.

Cumberledge never made a decision in his quiet life (I don't know how he got so high up in the Army before he was wafted into Cambridge). He was utterly passive—all his weeping and screaming as she approached him with the whip (I am writing down what I have never before even been able to think about). But something deep in him remained untouched by her. I bet he became amiable and soppy. A man always falling in love.

You, Teddy, were horribly touched by her. You became no good at love. I don't think you ever had many friends at school. I'm the same, if I'm honest. I can't love. I'm all charm. Babs needs love. Needs it as her daily bread. Will try for it anywhere. But she repels, the poor old thing. Doesn't wash now—that's a bad sign. It won't help her with Father Tansy. She says she once had an
affaire
with Cumberledge. All fantasy.

D'you know, the one who needed love most was Ma Didds. All the hatred was love gone wrong. What did she ever get from old Pa Didds and all that chapel?

Not that as children we could have been expected to know, but I had an inkling when she took me on her smelly old lap and crooned over me and gave me buttered bread. I knew already where my bread was buttered. I'd been sent away younger than any of you, and my parents were faceless; but I was, and am, the toughest. I'm very glad I thought of the murder. I thoroughly enjoyed it. So don't fret. It was you who struck the blow, dear Teddy, but they can't hang you now. Love from Claire

 

He tore the letter up.

I am old at last, he thought. I should be cold too. But I am casting off the coldness of youth and putting on the maudlin armour of dotage. I am not a religious man. Claire does not shock me, as she would most people.
Why
do I want a priest? Rites? Ceremonies? I despise myself. It's all superstition. Yet I know that I must tell someone that when I was eight years old I killed a woman in cold blood.

The West wind of the equinox bashed suddenly against the conservatory glass of the hotel lounge where Filth sat, now alone. Then the wind stopped and he slept. In his sleep he heard the steady beating of a drum, and started awake, thinking that it was his heart. They helped him back to his bedroom where the grandmother's asters shone on the window-sill.

“I am so undeservedly lucky,” he said to the chambermaid later, beginning the repair of his damaged image. (Claire's terrifying letter.) He smiled his lovely smile.

“Lucky in material things anyway,” he said when he was alone again, curtains closed, lying in the sweet dark. “Their kindness is only because they've found out that I'm rich. There'll be no trouble with the bill.” Considering other people's pragmatism, he found that Claire's beastly letter receded.

But, dropping into sleep, a great face flooded across his dream landscape, filled the screen of his sleeping consciousness, loomed at him—disappeared. “Go away, Veneering,” Filth shouted after it. “I'm not ready to talk. Not yet.”

 

A few days later, Father Tansy turned up at the delectable hotel, with a woman in a wavy nylon skirt and grey nun's headgear who turned out to be Babs.

Filth was in bed again. He had been advised to stay there for a day or two and not trouble himself with visitors, and his curtains were pulled across the daylight when the manager of the hotel knocked and eventually put his head around his door, and switched on the light, and Babs and the priest beheld the catafalque figure of Filth under the sheet, his ivory nose pointed upwards, the nose of a very old man.

“Perhaps not long?” said the manager. “Don't stay too long.” Babs said she would go out now and take her dog for a walk.

Then Father Tansy shut the door behind him, opened the curtains and switched off the light. He picked up the bedside phone and ordered room-service luncheon in an hour's time. Then he ran round the bedroom removing drooping asters and opening all the windows. He found Filth's dressing-gown and manoeuvred him into it, heaved the old bones off the bed, slid the ivory fans of Filth's feet into his Harrods leather bedroomslippers, sat Filth on an upright chair and set a table in front of him.

“Have I shaved?” asked Filth. “Oh dear, I do hope so.”

“Never mind that,” said Tansy. “Wake up. You have sent for me at last. I have been waiting patiently.”

“You have a great idea of your own importance,” said Filth. “I remember you, awash in that great marble church.”

“Not my own importance,” said Tansy. “I follow Another's importance. I try to follow the personality of Christ, and am directed by it.”

“I don't believe in all that,” said Filth. “But there's something, somewhere, that's urging me to talk to a—well, I suppose, to a priest. You are the only priest I know. How you got here, I don't know. What I'm doing here, I don't know. I've been dreaming lately. About Queen Mary.”

“Queen Mary?”

“Yes. And my father. And a—murder. And other loose ends.”

Father Tansy waited with bright eyes, like a squirrel. “Carry on.”

“I suppose it's going to be a confession,” said Filth. “I'm glad you're not hidden in one of those boxes. I'm not up to that.”

“I know.”

“I can't start until Babs comes back. She's part of it. And I've been seriously ill.”

“Sir Edward, you can begin by telling me what's the matter with you. And I don't want to hear about prawns and strained ligaments.”

After a time Filth said, “All my life, Tansy, from my early childhood, I have been left, or dumped, or separated by death, from everyone I loved or who cared for me. I want to know why.”

“You are a hero in your profession, Sir Edward.”

“That's an utterly different matter. And in fact I don't believe you. Nobody remembers me now at the Bar. My work is quite forgotten. I was once famous for some Pollution Law. All out-of-date now. I want to tell you something. When my Chambers were moved to a newly built office block, like a government department, costing millions which by then we could all afford—there were thirty-six members of Chambers when I decided to go permanently to Hong Kong—the old Clerk, who was retiring, took me down into the basement under the Elizabethan building where I began, and there was a sea of Briefs there, three feet deep, bundled up with pink tape. ‘We don't know what to do with it,' he said. ‘We've decided to get a firm in to throw it on a dump.' That was years of my life. Years and years.”

“It's not often,” said the priest, “made as clear to us as that. I see it in my empty pews.”

“It has all been void. I am old, forgotten and dying alone. My last friend, Veneering, has died. I miss him but I never quite trusted him. My most valuable friend was a card-sharp and my wife hated him though he made our fortunes at the Far Eastern Bar. He was killed on 9/11. A passenger in one of the planes. Still playing cards, I imagine. Hadn't heard from him for years.”

Babs came back in and made the dog lie down. It immediately climbed on Filth's bed and lay looking across at him as if he'd seen him somewhere before.

“The point is,” said Filth, seated at his table, recovering a little of his former authority when addressing the Court, “the point is, I have begun to wonder whether my life of loneliness—always basically I have felt quite alone—is because of what I did when I was eight years old, living with Babs and Claire in Wales, fostered by a woman called Mrs. Didds.”

Babs scratched her leg in its thick grey stocking and looked out of the window. “Go on then, Teddy,” she said. “Spit it out.”

Father Tansy, no trace now of the prancing comic of his parish church, his Office completely dominating him, sat still, and nodded once.

When Filth was obviously unable to begin, Babs said, “Oh, I'll do it, then.”

There was a silence.

“She hurt us,” Babs said. “She had that sort of smiling face, plump and round, that when you look closer is cruel. Nobody had noticed. Probably, when she first fostered children she was different. Pa Didds was a nice old man but he just sat about. Then he died. They'd had no children of their own. By the time the three of us arrived, she'd begun to hate children, but she had to keep on fostering because there was nothing else. They went on sending her children. From all over the Empire. When the children complained . . . Most never did, they thought she was normal. Anyway the children couldn't complain until they'd got away, somewhere else. And there wasn't anywhere else. We were all sent to her for four or five years. You know, longer than we'd been
alive
. The complaining ones were thought to be cowards. We had to copy the Spartans in those days. You should have seen the illustrations in children's books of the Raj then. Pictures of children beating
each other
with canes at school. The prefectorial system. Now it would be thought porn. It was Cumberledge, of course, she hated most.”