Jane Gardam - The Man in the Wooden Hat

“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.”

So that’s fixed him, thought Filth. I’ve won. That night he went slowly up his stairs to bed, pausing a little breathlessly on the landing. “Checkmate,” he said.

But then, later, lying in bed, every button done up on his striped pyjamas, clean handkerchief in his pyjama pocket, he wondered why he did not feel triumphant. There was no relish. No relish.

Well, he thought. That’s the last I’ll hear from him.

Veneering did not return from Malta. He broke one of his arthritic ankles on a stony slope where there was a deep slash in the rock masked by the night-scented stocks that grow wild all over the island and make it such heaven in the spring. A thrombosis followed and then Veneering died.

When the news was broken to Sir Edward Feathers he said, “Ah, well. He was a great age. He hadn’t looked after himself very well. I shall miss the chess.”

About two weeks later, the Maltese postal service being so slow, a picture postcard arrived for Filth at Donhead St. Ague. It said,

We are bathed in glorious sunlight here [Oh, so he got to heaven then, did he?] and I’m having a wonderfully revitalising holiday. A pity that it would have been too much for you. Today I’m going to see the one fresh-water spring on the island (life like an ever-rolling stream, etc.) with a man who says he once met you and you offered him a job as your clerk. Seems very unlikely. But memory tells all of us lies. Looking forward to our next encounter. Kind regards. T.H.V.

Filth did not attend Veneering’s memorial service. He thought it would be theatrical to do so. The Great Rapprochement. Dulcie would tell him all about it. Kate the cleaner was a bit tight-lipped with him, saying that he could have shared a car with someone, but he said, “I have things to see to. I am planning a journey of my own.”

“Well, I hope it’s not a cruise.”

“No, no. Not a cruise. I’m thinking of going back to my birthplace for a last look round. Malaya — they call it Malaysia now, like a headache. I shall be going by air.”

She gasped and shrieked and ran to tell the gardener and Filth saw the pair of them deep in conversation as he plodded on with Hudson in his study. He was negotiating about who would continue with Hudson when he was dead. Veneering would have been the obvious choice. Ah well.

He was beginning to miss Veneering more than he would admit. When the For Sale notice went up again so vulgarly in the lane it gave him a jolt. When lights of the ugly house again appeared through the trees, he was drowsing with his curtains undrawn and he woke with a start of pleasure that turned to pain as he remembered that Veneering would not be there.

“You can have anything you want of mine if I don’t come back,” he had said.

Filth had said, “Oh, nothing, thanks. Maybe the chessmen.”

One afternoon during a St. Martin’s summer, his bony knees under a tartan rug, Filth was snoozing in the garden when he became aware of a movement in one of the fruit trees and a new next-door child dropped out of it eating an apple. The child began to wander nonchalantly over the lawn as if he owned it. Filth had been reading minutes of the latest Bench Table of his Inn. He felt like throwing the child back over the hedge.

“Sorry,” the child said.

“I suppose you’re wanting a ball back.”

“I haven’t got a ball.”

“Well, what’s that in your hand? And I don’t mean my apple.”

“Just some old beads I found in that flower bed.” And he vanished.

They’re so bloody self-confident, thought Filth. My prep-school Headmaster would have settled him. Then: What am I saying? Sir’d have set about teaching him something about apples.

“Keep the beads,” he called. “They’re yours.”

The night before he was to leave for his voyage home to Malaya, Filth felt such a surge of longing for Betty that he had to sit down and close his eyes. The longing had included guilt. Why guilt? Because he was beginning to forget her. Forget his long desire. “Memory and desire,” he said aloud, “I must keep track of them or the game’s up.” Then he thought: Or maybe let them go?

There was a ring at his doorbell and a family stood grimly on his doorstep, father, mother, son and daughter.

“Might we come in? We are from next door,” said the father (a gent, though long-haired). “We need to speak to you on a serious matter.”