Jane Gardam - The Man in the Wooden Hat

Elisabeth looked up the road and down it, and wondered how far it was to the village. Below her the cottage was all securely locked up. Maybe she should stumble down the slippery path again and shelter in the earth closet.

No. Ridiculous. The taxi was taking her to catch a particular train. At Waterloo Station a cab had been ordered by Edward’s Chambers to take her back to the flat in the Temple. All arranged. Foolproof.

But no taxi.

I’ll go and see if there is a house up there, she thought, and shuddered. She was frightened of houses in woods.

No. She would walk into Salisbury, carrying her suitcase. Her scar still hurt and still bled a little but she didn’t care. She tightened the silk cloth about her, picked up her suitcase and heard the sound of an approaching car. Thank God! Oh, thank God!

She stood holding the suitcase as the car spun into sight and it was not a taxi, but an ordinary private car going by. It was travelling very fast and splashed past her and down the hill, and vanished round the bend in the road and was gone.

So much, she thought, for answers to prayer.

She gripped the handle of her suitcase tighter, turned to face what she hoped would be Salisbury, soaked now to the skin, and heard the same car roaring back again up the hill, so fast that she had to jump into the side of the hedge.

The car stopped, the driver’s door flew open and Edward stood in the middle of the road.

Wet to the skin, enclosed in his long arms, Elisabeth began to cry and Edward to set up the curious roaring noises that had overtaken him since his stammering childhood but now only when he was on the point of tears.

She said, “Oh, Eddie! Oh, Filth!” her wet face against his clean, warm shirt.

She thought: I love him.

He said, “I thought you’d left me!”

Scene Hong Kong.

Crackle and swish of limousine bringing the Judge home from court at exactly the appointed hour (insert clock: 7 P.M. ).

Interior. Elisabeth waiting for him in living room of Judges’ Lodgings, a row of mansions behind a wall and steel gates, guarded. She has an open library book face-down upon her knee. Outside, Edward Feathers’s driver rings the front-door bell.

Elisabeth counts silently. A full minute. Longer. Two minutes.

Slip-slop feet of Lily Woo from kitchen across polished hall.

Lily Woo: Good evening, sir.

Slip-slop she goes back .

Edward (Filth) takes off shoes in hall. Clonk, then clonk. Puts on house shoes left him there by Lily. We hear him go to wash in cloakroom. He opens living-room door and sees Elisabeth as ever waiting. (Pretty dress, neat hair, gold chains, perfect fingernails. She is changed.)

Filth: Gin? All well?

Elisabeth: Yes, please. And no. Not all well. Today I’ve had a revelation. I am now officially old.

Filth: Ice? Old?

Elisabeth: Yes, and yes. Today I heard myself telling someone on the Children’s Aid committee that we’d been living in Hong Kong for over twenty years and that it seems no more than about six; and where did all the years go? Saying that, I’m old.

Filth: God knows where they’ve gone. Into the mist.

Bell rings outside in hall. Tinkle, tinkle. It is a small brass honeymoon bell from India. Slip-slop of girl’s feet again as she returns to kitchen. Filth looks into his gin and vermouth and gulps it down.

Elisabeth: You’re drinking too fast. Again.

Filth: I need it. Various things. What’s this, being old?

Elisabeth: I feel it. Suddenly. I’m melancholy at things changing. So, I’m old.

Filth: They need to change. It’s a place of changes. Annexing Hong Kong set the scene for change at the start. It will never settle down. Never be contented. But what did we bring but good? Work. Medicine. The English language. The Christian faith. And the Law. With all its shortcomings they don’t want to change the Law.

Goes over to the drinks tray .

Elisabeth: That was the dressing bell. Dinner in twenty minutes.

Filth: Or three-quarters of an hour. She’s sloppy.

Elisabeth: Yes. Go on. Go up. Have a shower and change your shirt. You can have a whisky after dinner.

Scene Dining Room.

A quiet dinner. The silver and glasses are reflected in the rosewood dining table. Lamb chops, peas, new potatoes. (Lily Woo has learned to cook them very well and sometimes it is a pleasant change from chopsticks.) English vicarage tonight .

Filth: It would be good to finish off with cheese now.

Elisabeth: It would be astonishing to finish off with cheese. There’s not a speck of it in the Colony. Your mind is going!

After dinner Filth stares at tomorrow’s Court papers. He goes to bed early, without the whisky. In the middle of the night Elisabeth wakes to find him in her bed, his head on her breast. She takes him in her arms .

Filth: I condemned a man to death today.

Elisabeth: I know. I saw the evening paper. Was he guilty?

Filth: Guilty as hell. It was a crime passionel .

Elisabeth: Then he is probably glad to die.

They lie awake for a long time. The hanging will be at eight o’clock. Elisabeth has set the bedside clock half an hour fast and seen that Lily Woo has done the same to the grandfather striking clock downstairs. They lie awake together.

Filth: Capital punishment must go.

Elisabeth: They’ll take years.

Filth: They’ll have their own Judiciary by then. Someone spat at the car today when I left Court. They are changing. Lily Woo took five minutes to answer the bell tonight.

Elisabeth: No, only two. But I know what you mean. Respect is fading. Well, I don’t know if it was ever there. In the jewellers’, the girls hardly bother to lift their heads when I go in. They just go on threading the jade. They used to get me the best stones. They still get them for Nellie Wee.

Filth: Oh, well. She’s famous.

Elisabeth: Well, I’m quite famous. I do my best. I try to be like Amy used to be. I have got the OBE. And half my girlfriends are Chinese.

Filth: I used to say that when you were sifting through the jade in the market your eyes changed to slits and you became an Oriental.

Elisabeth: Slits, with English eyelashes. Filth, we do need to live out here, don’t we? We’re lifetime expats. Aren’t we?

Filth ( after a long, long pause ): I don’t know.

They took a holiday in a tin bus and bowled along on the Chinese mainland through Canton. For miles the road was lined with rusty factories all dropping to bits. “These were sold to us by the Russians,” said their guide. “We were conned.” In the shadows of the rusted chimneys lay wide stretches of murky water sometimes with lotuses. White ducks floated among the lotuses on the foul olive-green water. The road was terrible, full of gritty holes, narrow and mean. Tall factories trailed hundred-foot stripes of mould down their sides, like dark green seaweed. All the small windows were boarded up.

The bus stopped for photographs and most people got out and stood in a row looking down on men scratching the surface of fields. The cameras clicked. The men were so thin you could see their bones under their belted cotton blouses. Their hats were the immemorial lampshades, colourless and beautiful. “Make sure you get the hats in,” shouted the photographers. The fieldworkers continued to drag their sticks along the soil and never once looked up.

“Do they dream of Hong Kong?” said Elisabeth.

“We don’t know what they dream of.”

The bus lurched on and the guide beseeched them to look to the right, at the distant and very modern restaurant where they would be stopping for lunch. “On no account look left . Do not look left .”