Jane Gardam - The Man in the Wooden Hat

Once, when a much younger Hong Kong lawyer called on Filth and Filth walked him back to his car at the end of the lane, the lawyer said, “Didn’t Terry Veneering retire down this way?” before remembering the myth of the clash of the Titans. But surely over now?

“Lives next door,” said Filth.

“Next door! Then you are friends.”

“Friends?” said Filth. “Never seen him. Certainly don’t want to. That’s his personal bit of drainpipe he’s put up. He copied mine. He never had an original idea.”

“Good God! I’ve a mind to go and see him myself. He went through it, you know. This is ridiculous.”

“Go if you like,” said Filth, “but you needn’t bother to come and see me again if you do.”

Filth walked that day further than usual and returned home after dark. It was getting towards Christmas, and Kate and the gardener had hung fairy lights around his length of lead piping. There was a holly wreath on his door and a spangle of coloured lights shone from his windows. He could see the light of his coal fire in the sitting room, a table light on in the hall showing Christmas cards standing about. As ever, the right-hand bend of the lane and the house above were in total darkness.

Don’t expect he’s there, thought Filth. Playboy! Probably lives half the time in his London club. Or with a whore. Or with several whores. Or in Las Vegas or somewhere vulgar for Christmas. Disneyland.

After the hellish years without Betty, Filth was, however, beginning to learn how to live again. The remorse. The loss of the sense of comfort she brought, her integration with the seasons of the year, her surety about a life of the spirit — never actually discussed. Often, when he was alone in the house and she seemed to be just at his shoulder, he would say aloud to her shadow, “I left you too often. My work was too important to me.” He did not address the first days of their engagement though. Never. Never.

Christmases alone he liked. Positively liked. With Betty unavailable there was nobody he wanted to be with. He and Betty had gone in the last years to the hotel in Salisbury together for Christmas lunch. No fuss. No paper hats. No streamers to get caught up in all her necklaces. Now he went alone to the same hotel, the same table. Taken there and returned by taxi. Then a good read, a whisky or two before bed. This year, his fourth without her, was to be exactly as usual.

Except that it was snowing. And it had been snowing very hard since he got up. The snowflakes fell so fast and thick he could not say whether they were going up or down. He could not even see the barrier of trees that shielded him from his neighbour.

And this year — no sign of the taxi. It was already half an hour late. Filth decided to ring it up but found that his phone was dead. Ha!

He padded about — getting very late indeed now — and was relieved to hear a loud bang and slither outside in the drive. But nothing further.

Taxi’s crashed against the wall in the snow, he thought, and went out of the front door one step only and still in his slippers and without his coat. But there was no taxi, only a great heap of snow that had slid from his roof into the drive. And the snow was falling faster than ever.

And behind him he heard his front door click shut on its fine Chubb lock.

And at the same moment, up behind the trees, Veneering was humped in bed, wearing a much-used fleece and his pyjamas, and thick woollen socks, under two duvets. He had examined Christmas Day with one eye, then the bedside clock with the other, groaned as he flexed his wrists and ankles, seen that his bedroom, with the old drugget on the floor and the navy-blue cotton curtains he had inherited from the farming family, was damp and dreary as usual but that round the black edges of the curtains was a suffusing, imperial dazzle. Hobbling from the bed, pulling back a curtain, he saw the snow.

The sky must be somewhere out there, too, the treetops below him, Whin Green. But all he saw was dancing snow so thick he couldn’t tell if it was going up or coming down. Coming up , he thought, afraid. Was he still drunk from last night? Or am I standing on my head ? He concentrated and, looking down, made out a patch of shadow, a certain darkness around — what? Yes. It must be old Filth’s chimney stack, the flashing round its base on the roof. Yes. The chimney was there and a great sloppy patch of snow had melted round it and — wha-hey! As Veneering watched he saw the shadow moving and the whole slope of wetter warmer snow (he’d have his central heating on full tilt of course) slipped away to the ground and he heard the thunderous slap as it landed.

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.”