Jane Gardam - The Man in the Wooden Hat

Below the waist, hidden now by the table in the airport’s first-class lounge at which he was playing a game of Patience, Ross’s sturdy torso dwindled down into poor little legs and block feet in Dr Scholl’s orthopaedic sandals. The legs suggested an unfortunate birth and a rickety childhood. No one ever found out if this was true.

Like a king or a prince he wore no watch. Eddie Feathers had, in wartime, as bombs were falling about them on a quayside in Ceylon and Ross had decided to make a run for it, presented Ross with a watch, his most precious possession. It had been Eddie’s father’s. The watch, of course, had long disappeared, bartered probably for food, but it was not forgotten and never replaced.

On Ross’s head today and every day was a size 10 brown trilby hat, also from St. James’s Street. Around the feet of the two men stood two leather briefcases stamped in gold with Eddie Feathers’s initials. It was the class of luggage that would grow old along with the owner as he became Queen’s Counsel, Judge, High Court Judge, perhaps Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, even Queen’s Remembrancer, and possibly God.

Feathers would deserve his success. He was a thoroughly good, nice man, diligent and clever. He had grown up lonely, loved only by servants in Malaya. He had become an orphan of the Raj, fostered (disastrously) in Wales. He had been moved to a boarding school, had lost friends in the Battle of Britain, one of whom meant more to him than any family and whom he never spoke about. Sent back to the East as an evacuee, he had met Ross on board a leaky boat and lost him again. Eddie returned to England penniless and sick and, after a dismal time learning Law at Oxford, had been sitting underemployed in a back corridor of ice-cold Dickensian Chambers in Lincoln’s Inn (the Temple having been bombed to rubble) when he was suddenly swept to glory by the reappearance of Ross, now a solicitor carrying with him oriental briefs galore, a sack of faery gold.

Directed by Ross, Eddie began to specialise in Bomb Damage Claims, then in General Building Disputes. Almost at once Ross had him in good suits flying about the world on the way to becoming Czar (as the saying is now) of the Construction Industry. In the Far East, there began the skyscraper boom.

And now, during the lean Attlee years post-war, Eddie was being discussed over Dinners in the Inns of Court by his peers munching their whale-meat steaks. Most of them had little else to occupy them. Litigation in the early 1950s was as rare as wartime suicide.

But there was no great jealousy. The Construction Industry is not glamorous like Slander and Libel or Crime. It is supposed to be easy, unlike Shipping or Chancery. Indeed, it comes dangerously close to Engineering, ever despised in England. It is often referred to as Sewers and Drains. Hence Filth? No — not hence Filth. Filth was an entirely affectionate pseudonym. Eddie, or Filth, who always looked as if he’d stepped out of a five-star-hotel shower, was immaculate in body and soul. Well, almost. People got on with him, always at a distance, of course, in the English way. Having no jealousy he inspired none. Women. .

Ah, women. Well, women were intrigued by him. There was nothing effete about him. He was not unattractive sexually. His eye could gleam. But no one made any headway. He had no present entanglements, and there was no one to hear him talk in his sleep in the passionate Malay of his childhood.

His memory was as mysterious and private as anybody’s. He knew only that his competence and his happiness were at their greatest in Far Eastern sunlight and the crash and rattle of monsoon rain, the suck and grind and roar of hot seas on white shores. It was in the East that he won most of his cases.

His only threat was another English lawyer, slightly younger and utterly different: a man who spoke no language other than English, had a degree in Engineering and some sort of diploma in Law from a Middlesbrough technical college often called a “night school,” and was bold, ugly and unstoppable, irrepressibly merry in a way a great many women and many men found irresistible. His name was Terry Veneering.

Terry Veneering was to be on the other side in the Case Edward Feathers was about to fight in Hong Kong. He was, however, on a different plane, or perhaps staying in Hong Kong already, for he had a Chinese wife. Eddie was becoming expert in forgetting about his detested rival, and was concentrating now in the airport lounge on his solicitor, Ross, who was splattering a pack of playing cards from hand to hand, cutting, dealing, now and then flinging them into the air in an arc and catching them sweetly on their way down. Ross was raising a breeze.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” said Filth. “People are becoming irritated.”

“It’s because hardly any of them are able to,” said Ross. “It is a gift.”

“You were messing with cards the first time I met you. Why can’t you take up knitting?”

“No call for woollens in Hong Kong. Find the Lady.”

“I don’t want to find the bloody Lady. Where’s this bloody plane? Has something gone wrong with it? They tell you nothing.”

“It shouldn’t. It’s the latest thing. Big square windows.”

“Excellent. Except it doesn’t seem to work. The old ones were better last year. Trundling along. Screws loose. Men with oilcans taking up the carpets. And we always got there.”

“We’re being called,” said Ross. He snapped the cards into a wad, the wad into a pouch, and with some Gypsy sleight of hand picked up both briefcases and thumped off towards the lifts. From above he looked like a walking hat.

Filth strode behind carrying his walking stick and the Daily Telegraph . At the steps up to the plane Ross, as was proper, stood back for his Counsel to pass him and Filth was bowed aboard and automatically directed to turn left to the first class. Ross, hobbling behind in the Dr Scholl’s, was asked to set down the hand luggage and show his seat number.

But it was Ross who saw the cases safely stowed, changed their seats for ones that could accommodate Filth’s long legs, the plane being as usual half empty, and Ross who commanded Filth’s jacket to be put on a hanger in a cupboard, declined to take off his hat and who demanded an immediate refill of the complimentary champagne.

They both sat back and watched England gallop backwards, then the delicious lurch upwards through the grey sky to the sunlit blue above.

“This champagne is second-rate,” said Ross. “I’ve had better in Puerto Rico.”

“There’ll be a good dinner,” said Filth. “And excellent wine. What about your hat?”

Ross removed it with both hands and laid it on his table.

A steward hovered. “Shall I take that from you, sir?”

“No. I keep it with me.” After a time he put it at his feet.

The dinner trolley, with its glistening saddle of lamb, was being wheeled to the centre of the cabin. Silver cutlery — real silver, Ross noted, turning the forks to confirm the hallmark — was laid on starched tray cloths. A carving knife flashed amidships. Côtes du Rhône appeared.

“Remember the Breath o’Dunoon , Albatross?” said Filth. “Remember the duff you made full of black beetles for currants?”

Ross brooded. “I remember the first mate. He said he’d kill me at Crib. He wanted to kill me. I beat him.”

“It’s a wonder we weren’t torpedoed.”

“I thought we were torpedoed. But then, I have been so often torpedoed—”

“Thank you, thank you,” roared out Filth in the direction of the roast lamb. He was apt to roar when emotionally disturbed: it was the last vestige of the terrible stammer of his Welsh childhood. “Don’t start about torpedoes.”