Jane Gardam - Old Filth

“My friend Billy

Had a ten-foot. .”

“Stop it!”

“He showed it to the boy next door.

Who thought it was a snake

And hit it with a rake

And now it’s only. .”

And they rolled about, fighting as they had done for years, stopping the clocks for a minute longer.

But there was a change somewhere. He and Pat were moving on. Glaciers would soon come grinding them apart, memories would be forgotten or adapted or faked.

Eddie followed Pat heavily into the house that evening and even Pat looked thoughtful. In the drawing-room the Ingoldbys were talking their pointless evening birdsong. No sound of Isobel anywhere.

As Eddie lay in his adored High House bed the rain began to patter down again outside and he jumped out to shut the window where the moon soon disappeared behind the rain clouds. He climbed back into bed.

All the following years, the memory or dream of what happened next never quite left him. His bedroom door opened and closed again, and the goddess — lioness — girl was at the end of his bed. Standing and watching, brooding on his inability to take his eyes off her.

She then walked to the window and looked out. He knew that something was expected of him but had no idea what it was. Not long ago, he would have shouted out, “Help! Burglars!” In time, in only a few years, he supposed, from books he’d read in the back of bookshops near Sir’s, he and the girl would have merged their flesh together in some sort of way in the bed. But he didn’t know what happened next. And didn’t want to know.

She’s old and she’s evil and she only wants to hurt, he thought.

“Eddie?” the shadow whispered from the window. “I wonder what you think of me?”

She walked back across the room and he found that he could sit up straight under the blankets and confront her, brave as brave as— Cumberledge . There! He’d said the word. Cumberledge. Wherever he was now. Silent Cumberledge whose spirit had never been completely broken.

Eddie would finish her, as once already in his life he had finished a woman. “I think you’re bad. A bad woman,” he said. “Get out.”

And she was gone.

The weird dream (or whatever it was) was never quite obliterated. He had not so much kept it to himself as denied it. In a way he never understood, it both shamed and saddened him.

Why ever? Nothing had happened. He had won. He had silenced the sirens. If there had been sailors on board, they would not have had to tie this Ulysses to the mast. So sucks to sexy Isobel, the cradle-snatcher.

Yet, all his life — regret.

Isobel and Mrs. Ingoldby were gone first thing next morning. And when Eddie next met Isobel it was in another world and a great many people were dead.

And so it was Isobel. The green letter was from Isobel. A letter of condolence for the loss of his wife.

Dear Teddy (if I still may, Sir Edward), I have just seen in the

New York Times

here in Paris the very sad news of Betty’s death and I am writing to say how very much I feel for you, and for all of us, come to that, who knew her and will miss her.

( Miss her? Knew her?)

I wonder just how much you remember? I wonder how much you remember of anything before you met Betty and became the icon of the jolly old Hong Kong Bar? Before you

really

met me? We never mentioned High House, did we? Again?

It hardly outlasted the War, you know. You and Pat were so very much together there. You and Pat were the spirit of the place, and I was a hole in the air. Did you ever know, I wonder, after you met Betty, that she and I were at school together? I went to High House after the Higher School Certificate disaster. She left St. Paul’s Girls in triumph. But they had me later in the War at Bletchley Park and there we met again. Bletchley Park was full of innocent, nice girls (not me) who had a very particular aptitude (crosswords) for solving cyphers and things, as you will be hearing in a year or two when

all is told

(the fifty-year revelation). That is how we won the War. How we stopped the U-Boats. So we were told. We were schoolgirls, Teddy. I was still a schoolgirl when you met me. Do you remember my teenage sulks? I was a schoolgirl five years on — no. Not five years on. Not in Peel Street. Oh, my beloved Teddy.

I was so pleased when you married Betty. I would have destroyed you, my sweet, beloved Teddy. But because of — well, I expect you have forgotten — but because of the day your great big feet came left, right, stamp, stamp down Peel Street and I was waiting for you and then—. Well, because of this I think I am allowed to write to you now. Oh, look — forget Peel Street. Kensington. Peripheral. I loved you from the moment you came walking (embarrassingly!) up to the trees at High House. I loved you and I love you.

Betty and I always exchanged Christmas cards. I expect you didn’t know. You probably never noticed mine. Betty was a very untouchable woman. Nobody knew her — though I always suspected that there was a great well—

comprehension

— with someone, somewhere. She wasn’t very pretty. She always sent me a Christmas card.

I was so very sorry to see in the

NY Times—

my word, she was a surpriser! You and I, Teddy, won’t make the

NYT

— I was so very sorry to see in the obituary that there were “no children of the marriage.” It is — in every language — a bleak little phrase. It means that you and B had a sadness, for when I last saw Betty forty years ago, she told me how much she longed for a child. We were in a park at the Hague. You were at the Court of International justice, against Veneering. Betty and Veneering — what a saint you were, Eddie!

I have no children either, come to that. And no partner (Christ! Christ!—“

partner

”). I can no longer bear a partner, but I most desperately regret not having had a child. You guessed, Eddie. I think. There wasn’t the word “gay” then and it was something you didn’t care to think about. But I believe you guessed.

I hope you still have friends about you in the south of England (NOT your place, I’d have thought?). Dear Teddy, everyone always loved you in your extraordinary never-revealed or unravelled private world. I am one of those who know that you were not really cold.

Sincerely yours,

Isobel

.

Filth picked up this letter and then its envelope and dropped both in the waste-paper basket. His face had taken upon it the iron ridges of a stage or television version of a prosecuting Counsel before he rises to the attack.

He found air-mail stationery of antique design. He addressed the envelope and attached three expensive stamps to be sure of covering the French postage. He drew the old-fashioned flimsy paper towards him, pushed aside the cheap Biros and took up his Collins gold pen (a retirement present from the lawyers of his Inn). He filled the pen from the ink bottle. Quink. Black. He wrote:

Sir Edward Feathers thanks Miss Isobel

Ingoldby for her kind letter of condolence.

He dated it, muffled himself into a coat, tweed hat and woollen gloves, took his walking stick and the letter, and set off down the drive and up the village hill to the post office.

He dropped the letter into the red box that still said, V.R. and strode inexorably home again. One or two people on the hill noticed him, and stopped what they were doing as he passed, glad to see that the old boy was going out again, ready to speak to him if he noticed them.

But he went by, the lanky, old-fashioned figure of long ago, walking painfully between the over-hanging trees of his drive. He passed Garbutt without a glance.