Jane Gardam - Old Filth

Isobel Ingoldby.

He sat again to his desk and wrote three more letters, replying to the formal, kind messages of condolence. Several times the telephone rang and he heard the drone and click of the answerphone and paid no attention. Lunchtime came and went. He wrote more replies to letters including one (good heavens!!) from Cumberledge in Cambridge. Billy Cumberledge. What is this? What’s this? I need Betty.

Mid-afternoon, and he walked into the kitchen and looked hard and long at the fridge and did not open it. He boiled up water but, when the kettle clicked off, did nothing about it. He stood at the kitchen window idly swirling water from the hot tap around in the little green teapot to warm its inside, standing until the steam began to scald his fingers. Then he poured himself a glass of milk and walked to the study where the newspaper lay ready for him by his armchair. He sat, and regarded his rows of law books, his grand old wig-box now laid out again upon the hearth. Eventually he dozed and awoke with the sun gone down behind the hills, and the room cold.

He wondered wherever the glass of milk had come from. He had not drunk milk since Ma Didds in Wales. She must be here. He heard the hated voice. “You don’t leave this cupboard until you’ve drunk this glass of good milk and you’d better not stir your feet because there’s a hole in there beside you deep as a well and you’d never be heard of more.” The long day, and not let out till bedtime, and six years old.

He walked over to the wastepaper basket and re-read the letter. It existed. It had not been a dream. She had waited over forty years. The letter of a cruel spirit. “Loves me”—how abhorrent. She is a lesbian. “Not cold”—enough! Betty wanting a child. . How dare she! This Ingoldby, the last traitor of all the traitorous Ingoldbys.

Oh, I am too old for any of this.

He took the milk back to the kitchen and poured it down the sink, opened a cake-tin and cut himself a slice of Betty’s birthday cake and ate it rather guiltily because it wasn’t yet stale. Then he poured himself a whiskey and soda, walked into the sun-lounge and held the letter up towards the tulip-bed.

“Betty?”

Emptiness. Silence. And silence within the house, too. Outside a most unnatural silence. Not a car in the lane, or a plane in the sky, not a human voice calling a dog. Not the church clock on the quarters, not a breath of wind, not a bird on a bough. All darkness as usual from the empty invisible house next door. Then a fox walked tiptoe over the December grass, its brush trailing but its ears pricked. At the steps that led up to the sun-lounge it turned its head towards Filth and smiled.

He remembered the Ingoldbys’ delinquent cat angrily shaking its paws at the time of the breaking of nations. 1939. The roar of the Colonel that had shattered the family’s self-deception and serenity. Then that earlier shadow, three years before, of the girl. Her shadow detaching itself from the blacker shadow of the yews. The term before he went to Public school.

Eddie found himself very much the junior to Pat at Chilham School when he followed him there in 1936. At first they were in different Houses. Eddie, after Sir’s Outfit, was able to cope easily with the new place’s idiosyncrasies. He was good at getting up in the morning and untroubled by Morning Prep at 6.30 A.M. The work was easy. He was good at games. He liked the slabs of bread and jam halfway through the morning. Whenever he caught sight of Pat he sent him a salute and Pat, untroubled that he was senior to Eddie, saluted back or did his Herr Hitler imitation. They naturally continued to keep together whenever possible. After matches — they were both in good teams — they would walk unselfconsciously round and round the playing fields, talking. They were soon a famous oddity, and were spoken to about it.

“It is not as if you were brothers,” said the Headmaster when the case was at length referred to him, the highest court.

“We’ve been brought up as brothers,” said Pat. “Sir.”

“But even brothers here do not go about together all the time.”

“What do you say, Feathers?”

“I can’t think of anything, Sir.”

“Do you, we wonder” (this was a trap) “wish you were in Ingoldby’s House?”

“No, not specially. I’ve never thought about it. I’m with the Ingoldbys all the holidays.”

“How very unusual.”

“My father knew his father in the Great War,” said Pat, astonishing Eddie who hadn’t known of it. “We’re a sort of subfamily.”

It was a mystery.

“There seems no physicality about it,” said the Headmaster to their Housemasters. “They’re both very bright. And very unusual, but then all boys are unusual. Put Feathers in Ingoldby’s House might be the best thing. Treat them like other brothers here.”

Pat, most ridiculously young, went up to Cambridge for several days for the university entrance exam. The phoney war was over and the Battle of Britain had begun. The journey would not be unexciting. Pat made much of taking his gas mask.

Without him that week the school felt dull and empty and for the first time Eddie realised that he had made no friends. He felt an outsider as he lay in his bed in the dormitory.

“Is Ingoldby some relation?” came a shout in the dark.

“Not of mine,” said Eddie.

“You don’t look like him,” came another shout. “Not like his brother Jack did.”

“I’m not his brother. How d’you know what his brother Jack looks like?”

“In the team-photographs. Holding cups and shields. Head boy in a gown . Hamlet in Hamlet . Just a taller Ingoldby. Good looking, not carroty.”

“I come from Malaya.”

“Do they all have red hair there?”

“Yes. Every one of them.”

“Doesn’t Ingoldby’s brother mind?” someone shouted far down the row of beds, made brave by the black-out curtains.

“Mind what? I’m his brother’s friend, too.”

“Mind your being so important to him?”

A searchlight began to scale the walls, to pierce the black windows. It was joined by another and they danced together for a while, searching for German bombers on the way to Liverpool.

“Why ever should he? Jack’s in the Air Force. He’s got more important things to think about. I dare say,” Eddie added, like Sir.

“What do Ingoldby’s parents think?”

“I’ve never asked them. They’ve always wanted me there.” (And, he thought, they’re mine. Blood of my blood and bone of my bone.)

“Where’s your own family then, Feathers?” shouted an up-and-coming man. “Where’s your own family?” (They were braver with Ingoldby away.)

“My father’s in Malaya.”

“Was he in the Great War? Smashed up?”

“Yes.”

“Why doesn’t he come and see you?”

Pat returned from Cambridge with an assured place to read physics, having decided that history was all out of date — oh joke!

“After this War,” they had said, “you have your foot in the door by being accepted by the college now. You can be deferred if you wish. Volunteer and wait to be called. They’ll give you the first year. Excellent papers.”

But on the way home from Cambridge, overnight at High House, he had managed to volunteer for the RAF at the end of the summer term.

“If I’m spared,” he said to Eddie, in a Methusaleh voice. “Bloody raids, here every night. Why didn’t they evacuate us? We’re going to be clobbered.”

“They think slowly here,” said Eddie. “Sir moved his Outfit the minute Chamberlain wagged the white paper.”

“Chamberlain saved us,” said Pat. “Gave us a year to make more broomsticks to look like rifles. Even the carpet factory’s making tents now. I don’t know where they’ll be using them. Africa?”