Jane Gardam - Old Filth

However, no go. So would you very kindly read the following points that will state briefly my reasons for not wanting to come and live with you in Malaya or Java or S’pore or wherever?

(1) I should at Christmas be going to Oxford for an interview at Christ Church for a place after the War.

(2) I want, after that, to volunteer for the Army.

(3) For me to be “evacuated” out of danger now, at my age, is absolutely unheard of in England at the moment. I should have to travel with children aged between seven and twelve. Whatever would the ship’s company think of me?

(4) I would lose my English friends for life. It would be a continuing stigma. I am six-foot-two and look older than my years. I am

very fit

.

and (5) and sorry to sound gung-ho, but I believe that I should be fighting for my country. I

can’t

run away. You haven’t heard Churchill. Even people like you, the bitter ones of ’14/18, listen to him. I have lived in this country since you sent me here as almost a baby. Had there been [the pen was beginning to race and Eddie’s face wasp red with a rage he had had no knowledge of] any friendship, any contact, between us, if you had

once

written to me not just handed me that pin-box, it might be different.

I shall argue these points with my aunts — though they seem to be very indifferent listeners. I’ve tried to argue with the school. All they say is that until I am eighteen you can do more or less what you like with me.

Do you

want

me with you on these autocratic and loveless terms?

Sincerely, E. J. Feathers

He read the letter through, and by the end of it was seeing not the god-like young soldier of the photograph but the father who had turned up at Sir’s Outfit soon after the Ma Didds’ affair, the affair that was — and still was — his closed, locked box. He saw a lank and trembling figure sitting in Sir’s study, the mountain trees of the Lake District tossing blackly about in the wind through the window behind him. The figure had sat cracking his finger joints.

Sir had kindly left the two of them together (“just out here if you need me, Feathers’s”) and father and son, neither clear which of them Sir was referring to, had stared long and hard at the pattern on the carpet.

Eddie remembered the hands. How his father had clasped and unclasped them. How the knuckles had cracked like pistols. He remembered the thin shanks of his father’s legs in the old-fashioned European suit; the bald head; the lashless eyes that looked almost blind. How the man shifted in his chair, said nothing, looked at a wristwatch far too big for the wrist. The watch that must have come through the Great War with him. The watch in the photo. Maybe it had been an amulet?

Eddie had been far too frightened to speak and reveal his stammer, especially after he heard a long staccato rattle begin in his father’s throat and realised — who better? — that his father stammered, too. He became inexorably mute. His father was asking a question. If he tried to answer it, his father might think his son was mocking him.

Tears came. Eddie did not look again at his father’s face. The patterns on Sir’s carpet swelled and ran together into chaos and oblivion.

When Sir returned, father and son both jumped up and Sir said to Eddie, “Away you go then,” and Eddie fled back to the classroom, to Pat Ingoldby and the lead soldiers under the desklid, and nobody ever mentioned this interview with his father again.

Once, only once, had Eddie met the aunts. Yet he knew that these aunts no longer talked about their brother. Not a breath in them confessed to the twitching, half-mad widower with the yellow face and strange eyes. (Once at Ma Didds’s one of his cousins, probably Babs, had said, “Your pa has malaria,” and the other had said, “No, he doesn’t. My mother says it’s opium.”) Nor did these Bolton aunts, out on the numbing golf course, any longer ever say a word about the young, quizzical, handsome, alert spirit that had been their brother and with whom they had grown up.

Eddie went through the address book on the desk until he found his father’s name. After Kotakinakulu, there were many crossings out. The current address seemed to be Singapore. It did not sound very grand. A back-street address. An instinct, some gentle gene in Eddie, made him write a P.S. before he licked the air-mail envelope:

P.S: I should like to say, though, Father, you’ve been very generous to someone you clearly found it impossible to like. Now that I’ve really thought about it, your wanting me to come to you in order to survive the War seems [he was going to write “very civil”] a miracle of unexpected kindness.

Eddie

And so, he thought, I spoil my case.

He did not go to the golf-course lunch, but found his way below stairs to a kitchen where a diminutive old woman was folding paper spills for the grate. She looked depressed and paid him no attention, so then he lay on his bed in a room with eiderdowns and heavy flowered curtains and huge lampshades and wondered if this was all.

He stayed on, apparently invisible, for a week. And then for several weeks, while he waited to hear from school about the Oxford interview. There was no reply to his letter to his father and, though he often wondered if today there might be a cable, none came. He spent the days mugging up for the possible Oxford interview — there was a good public library in the town — and thinking unhopefully about life. From his bedroom window, steamed with delicious heat from a Victorian iron radiator, his dreams merged into other bedroom windows. One, that mystified him on the edge of sleep, was an unglazed slit with the black knives of banana plants against a black sapphire sky. This dream always woke him.

His Bolton bedroom now was rich in Lancashire splendour, the carpet pure olive-green wool overflung with white roses. The heavy curtains, interlined for the black-out, were damask within and without. The eiderdown was of fat rose-pink blisters and beside the bed was a lamp with pink silk and bead fringes. The wallpaper could have stood by itself, thickly embossed with gold, and the blankets were snowy wool, and satin-bound. “You are in the best spare,” said Muriel. “The wardrobe may be a Gillow.” “Now put the fire on if you need it,” said Hilda. “Both bars. We have to go out now.”

Going out was their refrain. Eddie’s life was beyond their interest. They dwelt like Siamese twins in each other’s concerns and in the present moment. Every morning they came down to the breakfast-room talking before they saw you but telling you their plans. Their eyes were always blanks. They were always in one of a number of uniforms but always the same as each other. There was the Red Cross officer with stripes and a cockade; the WVS plum and dark green; a scarlet and grey ensemble reminiscent of the North-West Frontier; and a white and navy serge with wings on the head indicative of some variety of military nurse. They left the house every day by eight-thirty and were never home till supper. On Sundays they were up betimes for the eight o’clock Communion, and later sat knitting gloves and listening to Forces Favourites . There was a nice medium sherry before a heavy supper each evening. The midget maid crept about doing wonders with the chores and a muscular woman came in for the rough and a man for swilling down the yard. Each day Eddie ate his lunch alone at one end of the mahogany dining table, also a suspected Gillow, laid up with lace mats and shining silver. He received no mail and the phone never rang for him.

“Now, don’t you overwork,” they shouted. “You’ll get in. It’s your father’s old college. There’s a nice flick on at the Odeon,” and they clashed shut the vestibule door not interested in his answer.