Jane Gardam - Old Filth

But yet there was a sort of warmth there in the fug and Eddie edged further in to the shop where there were tables and chairs. They were all smoking and reading newspapers or warming their hands on their coffee cups. He sat down at a table where a girl was leaning back in her chair, smoking through a cigarette holder and watching him. Her legs were crossed and one high-heeled shoe was swinging up and down from her big toe.

“Is it all right to sit here?”

He sat, and looked around him to see what was on offer in the way of breakfast.

“I’ve not had breakfast,” he said. “I’m up here for my entrance exams. I suddenly wanted to go home, so I skipped breakfast. Now I’m hungry.”

“Which college?”

“Christ Church.”

“You’d have been given a good free breakfast there. Even in the vacation. Quails’ eggs and flagons of porter I shouldn’t wonder. Small talk about the Christ Church Beagles. It won’t survive the War, you know, Christ Church. Thank God. You don’t look exactly Christ Church. I’ll say that for you.”

“I don’t know a thing about it. I was told to apply. It could have been St. Karl Marx’s College for all I know about it.”

“I’ll bet your father was there.”

“Yes, he was. Actually. I can’t help that.”

She leaned forward to the ashtray, looking at him carefully, and he looked back into bright hazel eyes which were somehow familiar. He remembered the giant who had also been familiar.

I’m over-tired, he thought. Over-excited. “I’ve not seen my father in ten years,” he told the girl. “He’s a very hard-working civil servant. Out East.”

“I’ve not seen mine for years, either,” she said. “He’s still bashing away in India. And I know you, you’re Teddy Feathers.”

The eyes became at once the ten-year-old eyes of his cousin Babs — eyes that he had last seen pouring out tears by the fuchsia bushes in Ma Didds’s garden. The long, tapping finger over the ashtray became little Babs’s fierce claw which could pick out any tune without thought on the chapel harmonium. Just out of sight somewhere was the watchful pink and gold of their six-year-old cousin, Claire.

“Babs?”

“Teddy.”

Eddie ordered them both some milky bottled coffee and a Marie biscuit and Babs lit another cigarette.

“So. You live in Oxford? I’d no idea, Babs.”

“No. I’m up. At Somerville. I’m packing it in, though. It’s no time to be here. I’m volunteering for the Navy. I’ll be gone by next week.”

“Where’s Claire?”

“Oh, I don’t know. She’s married. Straight from school. Didn’t you hear? She’s in East Anglia somewhere among all the airfields. As far away from us as possible. Well, she would be, wouldn’t she?”

“I don’t see why.”

“She was very passive always. And they made sure we were never to meet up again — or they tried to. Wanted us to drop each other dead. So — what’s been happening to you, old Teddy-bear?”

“ Did they? Try to stop us?”

“Well, you had some sort of crack-up, so I heard. Began to chatter like a monkey. A Welsh monkey.”

“I never cracked up. Do I stammer now?”

“No. You talk proper. You’ll do for Christ Church.” When she smiled, she dazzled. There were smoker’s lines already etched on her face but sunlight was still behind them.

“I’ve got myself into one hell of a bigger mess now,” Eddie said. “I’ve nobody to tell me the answers. I find I don’t know how to — proceed.”

“ Proceed ,” she said, and leaning forward stroked his wrist. “I always loved your words. I suppose it was books. Your father sent you so many books at Didds’s.”

“Did he? Nobody told me. What? Were the books from him?”

“You weren’t wanting to hear anything good about your father then. Proceed ,” she said. “Maybe you’ll be a lawyer? A Barrister, but it’d be a pity to cover that hair. Proceed —look, you proceed by yourself now. You don’t need Claire or me or Auntie May. Get on with life! You can take decisions,” she said, “if anyone can.”

They both looked down at the insides of their coffee cups.

“You were bloody wonderful,” she said, “that day. Braver than any of us and eight years old.”

“I’ve not made a decision since,” he said. “That must have been my one decisive moment.”

“Where did you go in the holidays all these years? You can’t have been alone?” she asked him.

“School friend. Sort of second family to me.”

“Can’t they help now? And what about your pa’s sensible sisters?”

“They are psychologically deaf,” said he.

“They’re just reacting against your pa,” she said. “Don’t forget they were all Raj Orphans themselves. They say it suits some. They come out fizzing and yelling, ‘I didn’t need parents,’ and waving the red, white and blue. Snooty for life. But we’re all touched, one way or another.”

“I don’t think it suited my father,” said Eddie. “He’s gone entirely barmy.”

“Yep. I heard. You know, my lot and Claire’s are still in India, and I never give them a thought. Not after ten years.”

Eddie realised that since the Ma Didds’ horror he had never given a thought to either Babs or Claire. Not a thought.

“Have you a girlfriend, Eddie?”

“I never meet any girls. I just work. And play games. And read.”

“Come home with me now,” said Babs. “To my digs. There’s no one there.” She put out her cigarette. “We’ll go to bed. We have before.”

Eddie, scarlet, was aware of a drop in the background conversation at the nearby tables. Babs’s voice was beautiful and old-fashioned, a penetrating voice like Royalty, clear and high and unconcerned, and he stumbled out of his chair, withdrawing his hand from beneath hers. “Sorry. Can’t. Getting a train. Might miss it.”

And she leaned back, laughing, and called across the steamy shop — the still-immobile cake-queue—“We’ll never forget each other, Teddy-bear. Never.” He fumbled at the door. “You and I and Claire. And Cumberledge. Whatever happens to us. Never.”

He was on the train, sopped through with Oxford’s rain. He watched the tangled hedges threaded with the dead spirals of last year’s weeds. This was an empty, slow, uncertain train that trundled insolently through anonymous stations, their names painted out with coarse black brush-strokes to confuse the Germans when they eventually arrived. Station waiting-rooms stood barred; cigarette- and chocolate-machines stood empty with their metal drawers hanging out. It was not until he had changed trains in Manchester (I could still be in her bed) that he remembered that he had left Babs to pay for the coffee.

He was sitting now in another railway carriage looking, above the man sitting opposite, at a pre-War watercolour reproduction of a happy artless English family on a sunny English beach. The other picture frames below the rack held patriotic slogans and he wondered if the sand-castle country scene had been deliberately preserved. The clean-cut daddy; the Marcel-waved mummy; the innocent little one; the happy dog, Towser. Presumably in some people’s memory? He closed his eyes to keep them from tears. He dozed and found himself in a richer place, a sleep-laden, dripping dell with drops on every great leaf, the clattering of banana leaves, black children dancing in foetid puddles on the earth — earth beaten hard as concrete with dancing feet but which could become in moments under the warm rain a living mud. Laughter. The smell of sweet hot skin. He was being tossed up high in someone’s arms and he was looking down again upon a brown face, white teeth, gloriously loving eyes. The eyes of the man across the carriage were staring at him as Eddie woke.