The Man in the Wooden Hat (23 page)

Kill him if he happens to be under it, thought Veneering. But I shouldn’t think he is. He’ll be at some ghastly party with “all the trimmings.” He thought of Betty long, long ago sitting up very straight and perky with the paper streamers tangled up in her necklaces. Maybe sometimes his pearls . . . He was making for his bed again when the front-door bell rang.

Veneering pulled on some trousers and another fleece over the first and something in the way of shoes and the bell rang again. Who the hell . . . ?

Looking out of his sitting-room window he saw Filth standing in his porch in a cashmere cardigan and slippers, and soaked to the skin. Very doleful face, too. Well, well. This’ll kill him. Ha! The old fool’s locked himself out. Went out to investigate the bang. Ha!

He answered the next peal on the bell and they confronted each other. Filth’s magnificent face dropped open at the jaw like a cartoon and Veneering remembered that he hadn’t shaved. Not yesterday either. Feathers, expecting Achilles, saw a little old man with a couple of strands of yellow-grey hair across his pate, bent over with arthritis. Veneering, expecting the glory of Agamemnon, saw a lanky skeleton that might just have been dragged dripping from the sea full fathom five and those were certainly not pearls that were his eyes.

“Oh, good morning, Filth,” said Veneering.

“Just called to say Happy Christmas,” said Edward Feathers, crossing Veneering’s un-hollied threshold.

“Good of you to call,” said Veneering. “I’ll get you a towel. Better take off the pullover. I’ve a duffel here. And maybe the slippers? There’s a fire in here.”

Together they entered Veneering’s bleak sitting room where he switched on a brown electric heater where soon a wire-worm of an element began to glow into life. “We can put the second bar on if you wish,” said Veneering. He did so. They looked at it. “
O, come let us be merry
,” said Veneering, “Don’t want to get mean, like Fiscal-Smith.”

A faint smile hovered round Filth’s blue lips.

“Whisky?” said Veneering.

They each drank a gigantic, neat whisky. On a table lay an immense jigsaw only half finished. They regarded it, sipping. “Too much damn sky,” said Veneering. “Sit down.”

In a glass case on legs Filth saw a pair of chandelier earrings. He remembered them. On the mantelpiece was a photograph of an enchanting young Guards officer. The fire, the whisky, the earrings, the steady falling snow, made Filth want to weep.

“Another?” asked Veneering.

“I should really be going.”

“I was sorry to hear about Betty,” said Veneering, looking away.

“I was sorry to hear about Elsie,” said Filth, remembering her name, her beauty, her yellow silk dress at the Hong Kong Jockey Club. Her unhappiness. “Tell me, what news of your son?”

“Dead,” said Veneering. “Killed. Soldier.”

“I am so terribly sorry. So most dreadfully sorry. I hear nothing. Oh, I am so very sorry.”

“I sometimes think we all hear too much. It is too hard—the suffering for each other. I think we had too many Hearings all those years.”

“I must go home.”

Filth was looking troubled and Veneering thought: In a minute he’ll have to tell me that he’s locked himself out. Let’s see how he’ll get round that.

“It was good of you to come, Filth.”

Filth said nothing for a while. Then, “I really came to ask you if I could use your phone. Mine’s out of order. Expecting a taxi.”

(Well done, thought Veneering. Good opening move.)

“Mine will be out of order if yours is, I expect. But by all means try.”

The phone was dead.

(And the village is three miles away and the only spare key will be with his cleaner and it’s Christmas and she won’t be back until the New Year. And I’ve got him.)

“As a matter of fact,” Veneering said, “I’ve meant to come and see you several times.”

Filth looked into his whisky glass. He felt ashamed. He himself had never dreamed of doing any such thing.

“Only trouble was I couldn’t think of an excuse. Bloody hot-tempered type I was, once upon a time.”

“Bloody good judge, though,” said Filth, remembering that this was true.

“You were a bloody good Advocate. Come on. One more.

“The only excuse I could think of,” Veneering said in a minute, “was that there’s an old key of yours hanging up here in an outhouse. Has your address on it. Must have been here for years. Probably the last people here had been given one for emergencies. Maybe you have one of mine?”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Filth.

“Shall I get it? Or some other time?”

“I may as well take it now.”

On Veneering’s doorstep, the snow now thinning, wearing Veneering’s unpleasant overcoat, he heard himself say, “I have a ham shank at home. Tin of crabmeat. A good bottle. If you care to come over for Boxing Day?”

“Delighted,” said Veneering.

Down the slippery slope went Filth, holding very tightly to Veneering’s yews. He put the old Dexter key in the lock. Would it turn?

It did.

T
hat spring Veneering began to play chess at Dexters once a week. Then twice a week, on Thursdays and Sundays. Each time, before he arrived, Filth moved Betty’s pink umbrella from the umbrella stand in the hall to the cupboard under the stairs. Later he would bring it out again. He also moved, right out of sight, the rather magisterial photograph on the chimney piece of Betty holding up the OBE for her good works and replaced it with one of himself and Betty laughing together in Bhutan on their honeymoon. Veneering appeared to notice nothing in the Feathers’ house except the chessboard.

As the year warmed they began to meet occasionally to walk in the lanes, and Veneering grew less yellow and arthritic. He tended to stop for every passer-by for conversation and cross-examination. His charm revived and he began again to take pleasure in everybody he met, especially if they were female. Females were always “girls.” He used the old upper-class lingo, thought Filth. Must have learned it at embassy parties. Certainly not in Middlesbrough where he was born. Filth’s snobbery was now appalling.

The “girl” Veneering liked best was pretty Dulcie, and on meeting they would stand bobbing about in the lane together while Filth inspected the sky or sometimes pretended his walking stick was a golf club and tried out a couple of swings. They sniff round each other like dogs, he thought. Come on, Veneering, you’ll catch cold.

“I begin,” said Filth to Betty’s shadow, “to wish I’d left the bloody key where it was. I’m stuck with him now.”

But he was not. On one chess Thursday, Veneering said, as he took Filth’s queen, “Oh, by the way, I’m going on a cruise.”

Filth took his time. He rather interestingly shifted a knight and took Veneering’s bishop. “Oh, well done!” said Veneering. “Yes, I’m off to the Mediterranean. Sailing to Malta. Getting some warmth into my joints.”

“I’m told it can be bitterly cold in Malta in March.”

“Oh, I’m hoping to stay with the Governor. I’ve met him once or twice. Nice wife.”

“You sound like Fiscal-Smith. You’re not going on a cruise with him, are you?”

“Good God, no. I’m striking out.”

Filth waited to see if he’d suggest that Filth himself might accompany him. He did not.

“Betty and I found that the few expats left on Malta were pretty ropy. She called them ‘the riff-raff of Europe.’”

“Did she? Oh, well, we’re all riff-raff now. I wouldn’t suggest Malta was the best place for you, Edward. Sea can be unpleasant and you’re too old to fly. Insurance would be tricky.”

“I know the sea, and you are hardly younger than I am. What about
your
insurance?”

“Not bothering. I’ve pots of money if I catch the Maltese flu and have to go to hospital. I dare say the Governor would see me right anyway.”

Filth thought that using a phrase like “see me right” was what he had always detested about Veneering.

The evening before he left for his cruise Veneering called on Filth with a supermarket bag full of leftovers of food that he thought Filth might like to make use of, and details of his cruise line. Filth took the leftovers into the kitchen and put them in the rubbish bin. He returned and said, “Why?”

“Well, then someone could let me know if there was a crisis.”

“You mean you’d want to know if I should kick the bucket?”

“Well, yes, of course.”

“In order to return for my funeral?”

“Certainly not. I’d probably send the odd flower. I’d come later for your memorial service. It wouldn’t be for several months, so I would be able to finish my philanderings. But yes, I’d want to know.”

Then he realised what he’d said. “Not, of course, that I’ve ever been a philanderer. Never. I was always serious, which was why my life has always been so exhausting—whatever it looked like. I do know how to love a woman.”

But he was getting in deeper.

Filth sat mute. This time Veneering had gone too far. His restored health had also restored his outrageous conceit. He was still the same—
bounder
—as before.

“I’ll walk home with you.”

“Oh.” Veneering hadn’t planned to leave just yet. He could smell Filth’s supper cooking.

“Must get my walk in before dusk,” said Filth. “Come on,” and he took his stick from the umbrella stand where (damn) he had forgotten to remove Betty’s pink umbrella. And (double damn) as, holding open the door for Veneering, he saw Veneering look at it, Bloody Hell—
touch
it!

Filth gave his queer roar. He led the way out, not to the lane end, but down his garden, past the tulip beds, the still-leafless orchard, past Betty’s still-wonderful kitchen garden, her pond, her spinney, and somehow they were back at the house again but now facing the steep track that led up a bank from an alley behind a shed.

“That’s the old earth closet,” said Filth. “Come on, I’ll show you a quick way home,” and he began to spring up the slippery bank like a boy.

Veneering followed on all fours.

“Good God, where are we going?”

“To the road,” said Filth. “You’d better take my hand. When we were just a cottage there used to be an opening on the lane up here. You had to climb through—ah, come on.”

Veneering hesitated, but eventually they stood together on the upper road in the coming dark.

“I found Betty standing here once,” said Filth. “Long ago. She’d been very ill. Somehow she found this place. To convalesce. The station taxi brought her to this opening on the road and she stayed here all by herself. I forget for how long. It seemed very long to me. I couldn’t phone. She didn’t answer my letters. I was in the middle of the Reservoir Case. You’ll remember it.”

“Well, you couldn’t just abandon it.”

“No? Well—I wonder . . . She disappeared. Was she with you, Veneering? Not down here at all?”

“I swear to you, no. I was on the Reservoir Case, too, remember?”

“What do I remember? Didn’t you leave your junior? One fantasises. I came looking for her. Found her in the end, standing here in the road in a browny-gold silk thing, soaked to the skin, her suitcase beside her. I’d been round and round, through all the bloody Donheads. Thought I’d never see her again. When I did find her, her wet face became—well, delirious with happiness. As if she saw me for the first time. And I knew I need never worry about you ever again.”

Veneering said, “I’ll get back to my packing.”

“
But
,” said Edward Feathers QC (Learned in the Law) “—and I’ll walk up with you—
but
she never knew the truth about me. For two nights after Betty and I became engaged to be married in Hong Kong I was with the girl who’d fascinated and obsessed me ever since I was sixteen. She happened to be passing through Hong Kong. I didn’t know she knew Betty. I didn’t connect her with the girl Betty was just then travelling with. I didn’t even know that she and Amy and Betty were at the same school. Not until after Betty died. Then I found out that Betty and Isobel had been together at Bletchley Park, too. Betty had always called her Lizzie.

“But when I found Isobel again, there in Hong Kong, just after I’d made Betty promise never to leave me, I forgot Betty completely. For two nights I was with Isobel in my room at the Peninsular Hotel. There can’t be anything more disgusting, more perfidious than that. Veneering? The only equally disgusting thing would be if some other man had that night been with Betty. Would it not?”

“It happens. This sort of thing, Filth.”

“Oh, it
happens
—but only if you are an absolute swine. Don’t you think? Wouldn’t you say? If you examine your meagre self? Veneering?”

“Look—it’s over half a century ago. We were young men.”

“Yes. But I did something worse to Betty. I knew she wanted children. Ten, she’d said. I suspected that I was infertile. Something to do with—perhaps mumps at school. Apparently I talked to Ross—when I had fever in Africa. I can’t remember any of it. Nobody knew any of it, except perhaps Isobel.

“So you see I’m not a saint, Veneering. She was worth ten of me. Yet, from the moment I found her standing here in the road I knew she would never leave me now. You were nowhere. Goodbye, old man.” And Filth walked back down the slope.

Below, beside the earth closet, Filth shouted up, “Look, Veneering, it doesn’t matter which of us was father of the child.”

“
Child
!”

“The child she lost. Before she had the hysterectomy. Yours or mine, it was not to be. What matters is to face something quite different. Betty didn’t love either of us very much. The one she loved was your son. Harry.”

“Yes,” he said, his pale old face peering down. “Yes. I believe she did love Harry.”

“Why else would she have given him ten thousand pounds?”

“That is a lie! It is a
lie
! She told me herself that Harry never asked her for money.”

Filth, despite himself, softened. “I don’t expect he did. Betty was always ready to give, whether any of us asked or not.”