Jane Gardam - The Man in the Wooden Hat

At last she said, “Well, I’d better go to Edward.”

“You had. But I’ll miss you,” said Delilah. “Next time you’re here you’ll be laughing again. I promise. And we’ll go to the music hall together and see Late Joys .”

Without saying goodbye to anyone she picked up a note Delilah had put through her letter box, looked across at the drawn curtains of the electrician who was getting up later and later now, and stepped into the taxi for the airport. She left no message for her new Jamaican cleaner, who had saved her life, because she could not face her. Even to think of her made her cry.

It had been the cleaner’s morning.

Elisabeth had, from the start, given her her own key. Singing, the young woman had come tramping up the stairs, flung open Elisabeth’s bedroom door, flung in the vacuum cleaner. Then stopped. Betty in bed. Eyes black pools. Sheets to chin.

“I’m losing the baby.”

“God a mercy! Where gone the doctor?”

“He came but he went. We’ve been expecting this. Things began to go wrong two weeks ago. He’s coming back. He didn’t think it’d happen yet. Well — I suppose he’s coming back.”

“And sir? Does sir know?”

“I phoned.”

“When you phone, ma’am?”

“An hour ago. He’s busy. He’s finishing a set of papers.”

The woman plunged at the bedside telephone. Then she was yelling from the window on the street. Then she was calling from the back window on the gardens where Delilah was regarding her flowers. Then she was boiling water. Then she was propping open the street door with the bicycle so that the ambulance men could run straight through. She had found a chamber pot with roses painted round it and set it by the bed, soothing Betty and telling her it would soon be over now.

“It’s coming in waves,” said Betty. “It’s like labour. Like they told us in the classes. Maybe I’m full-term? Maybe I’m just having a baby?”

“No, ma’am,” said the cleaner.

“Hold my hand,” said Betty.

“Give me this Chambers number. Right. Now then. Mr. Feathers, this is your cleaner speakin‘. You get you skinny arse home. Here. Now.”

A scuffle of people at the street door. The cleaner shouting down the stairs. A scream from the bed.

“Don’t look, don’t look,” Betty shouted to the cleaner. “It’s all over. It’s in the. .” and she screamed again. “Get the dog out! The bloody dog.” It was Delilah’s dog. A daily visitor. It sniffed the air. Then fled.

“It’s the dog of the rat!” And she fainted. As she fainted she saw the little sliver of life slopped wet in the chamber pot. It had beautiful miniature hands.

Edward was too late to see. And too late to see her, for she had been taken off on a stretcher. Neighbours stood about the open door watching the arrival of the doctor, and the cleaner roaring at him. Edward had walked from the tube station, bringing with him his heavy briefcase to finish his work at home.

At the hospital they wouldn’t let him see her.

A decade or so on, in their golden house in the row of judges’ houses on the Peak, protected from the world which he was paid to judge and in which Elisabeth worked all the time with her charity work, certain friends would occasionally touch on the Feathers’ childlessness. Betty, so fond of children — what a shame — etc. Betty had grown expert in her replies.

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think either of us was very child-minded. We knew nothing of children. We’d never had brothers or sisters ourselves. Poor Filth was a Raj orphan, you know. My parents died very young, too. We were ignorant.”

“You’ve had a wonderful marriage.”

“It’s not over yet, thank you.”

(Ha, ha, ha.)

“You must have been a child yourself, Betty, when you married. So young.”

“Yes,” Elisabeth always said, “I was.”

Hong Kong had embraced her again, wrapping her in its dazzle and warmth and noise: the smells of her childhood, the food of her childhood, the lack of false sentiment of her childhood. They took a furnished apartment on the Mid-levels and women friends came round for drinks and chat at lunchtime, and they went shopping with her in the blinding light of the big stores. She bought embroidered pillowcases and guest towels. She grew languid and lazy, and drifted away from Amy. Someone said that she should take up Bridge.

“Take her out of herself,” said a Scottish banker’s wife to the wife of an English judge. “Who hasn’t had a mis?”

The other woman said that she had to drive up into the New Territories and Betty could come too.

“I’m looking for a rocking horse,” she said.

“A rock ing horse?”

“The grandchildren want one. We’ll get it shipped home. They’re twenty-five pounds in Harrods and these are just as good. There’s an old chap up there somewhere who makes them. They look a bit oriental but that’s part of the fun. He sells them unpainted but then we could stipulate.”

“You mean stipple them? I don’t think. .”

“No, no — we could tell him what we want. A bay or a grey. That sort of thing. I’ll ask the grandchildren in Richmond Gate what they’d like.”

“Is it tactful? Children’s toys? If we’re taking Betty?”

“Oh, come on. She’s got to get over this and have another.”

So they set off into the New Territories in a smart little car, Betty smoking Piccadilly cigarettes. The city did not disappear so much as change and become a canyon between concrete cliffs of new housing for city workers. “Further than this?” said the judge’s wife looking at the map. “I’ve never been as far as this. Oh yes, here’s that little temple. In those trees. Shall we go in? Have a breather?”

It was midday and very hot. The courtyard of the temple was silent, its surrounding trees unmoving. There was no chatter of birds. On the temple steps a dead-looking dog lay like dried-out leather, one lip lifted as if in disdain. In the courtyard in front of the steps sat two old men at a table. They wore traditional black tunics and trousers, and one had a pigtail and a wisp of beard. They were playing chess under the trees and all was black and white except for the bold red lacquer of the soaring temple. Occasionally a grey leaf detached itself from the trees and fell about the chess players like pale rain.

“Well! You’d have thought they might have stood up,” said the banker’s wife, “as we went past. And I don’t like the look of that dog. It’s ill.”

“It’s hot,” said Elisabeth. “It’s having its siesta like the whole of Hong Kong. Except us. And the chess players.”

“Well, don’t go near it. A bite could kill. Oh, look here! This is monstrous!”

The temple steps were cracked and littered with papers and Coca-Cola cans, and the portico broken. The figures of the Buddha inside, arms raised, more than life-sized, were thick with dust. At a desk to one side, presumably selling things, a heavy girl lay sprawled asleep, head on arms. Her desk was thick with dust and dust seemed to emanate from the walls and ledges high above, resting on all the carvings like snow. The girl opened her eyes and made a half-hearted move to get up.

“Look here,” said the judge’s wife. “This won’t do. What sort of impression does this make on the tourists?”

“Well, it’s very Chinese, Audrey.”

“Not New Territories Chinese. It’s all very well sending people to prison for graffiti on the new tower blocks where nobody goes except the workforce, but what about our own image here? This temple is in the guidebooks. Everyone comes.”

“There don’t seem to have been many recently,” said Elisabeth.