Jane Gardam - Old Filth

“You all right, lad?”

“Yes. Sorry. Was I snoring?”

“No. You were moaning. Want to see a paper?”

“No, no. I was. . I think I must talk in my sleep.”

“Here. I’m reading the Deaths ,” said the man, “and I’ve discovered something quite important. See what you think. Just see what you think — no prejudice. Just look down the list of places and you can tell which deaths are from enemy action. You can tell from the Times exactly where the raids were, dates given. Nobody’s thought of it here, I’ll bet. I’m writing to the authorities. I’ll bet the enemy has noticed.”

Eddie, scrambling from the tropical dream, said, “Careless talk costs lives.”

“D’you want to see, though? Just you see what I mean. It’s a bloody check-list for the enemy,” and he passed across the outer pages of the Times . Eddie arranged them as a barrier between himself and the man and began, automatically, as his eyes refocused, to read in alphabetical order. He immediately read: Ingoldby, Patrick, aged eighteen years, RAF , a date of one week before, and For King and Country .

When Betty died suddenly, planting the tulips the day after their day in London attempting to sign their Wills, Filth’s astonishment lifted his soul outside his body and he stood looking down not only at the slumped body but at his own, gazing and emptied of all its meaning now.

“It has happened,” “It has occurred,” “Keep your head,” said the spirit to the body. Stiffly he knelt beside her, watching himself kneel, take her hand, kiss her hand and put it to his face. There was no doubt in either soul or body that she was dead. Dead. Gone. Happened. Lost. Over.

Throughout the funeral service he silently repeated the words: Dead. Lost. Happened. Gone. A small funeral, for neither of them had much in the way of relations and Babs and Claire did not take — or so he assumed — the Telegraph or the Times . Filth, the ever-meticulous, had lapsed. He forgot (or pretended to forget) that you should telephone people. His old friends were all in Hong Kong or with their Maker. A small funeral.

Touchingly, some members of his former Chambers turned up and his magnificent old Clerk, once the Junior Clerk who had been a schoolboy with pimples, was there in the church, magisterial now in a long Harrods overcoat.

“So sorry, sir.”

“How very good of you to come, Charlie. Very kind.”

“Mr. Wemyss is here, and Sir Andrew Bysshe.”

“Very kind. Very long way for you all to come.”

The dark, serious, pallid London figures in the second pew. The rest of the mourners were locals, mostly church ladies, for Betty had been on the flower rota. She had been very forceful with the flowers, banging their stalks down hard in the bottom of the green bucket, commandeering the Frobisher Window from the moment of her arrival, a position not usually offered until you’d been in the parish for several years.

Betty stood no nonsense from flowers. In Hong Kong she had once done the cathedral, and the Hong Kong iris, the Cuban bast flower, the American worm seed and the Maud’s Michellia had all known their place there. She harangued flowers. She wanted of all things, she often said, to have a flower named after her. “The Elizabeth Feathers. Long-leaved Greenbriar?” Filth had thought sometimes of organising such a thing for her; he’d heard that it was not really expensive. It was a birthday present always forgotten. Filth was not taken with flowers. He found them unresponsive, sometimes even hostile. It was tulips, he thought, that had got her in the end.

As he stood beside the grave and thought of his long life with Betty and his achievement in presenting to the world the full man, the completed and successful being, his hands in their lined kid gloves folded over the top of his walking stick, he was aware of something, somewhere. He looked up at the sky. Nothing, yet he was being informed, no doubt about it, that there was something in him unresolved. He was inadequate and weak. If they knew, they would all find him unlikable. Despicable. Face it.

Yet he felt nothing. Nothing at all.

They had put on a do for Betty afterwards in the church hall. Tea and anchovy sandwiches and fruit cake and the ubiquitous pale green Anglican crockery, known from the Donheads to Hong Kong to Jamaica. He took nothing, but moved among the guests magnificently, like a knight of old. He talked of the weather. Of their kind journeys to the Donheads. A nice woman, when they had all gone, offered him whiskey and he must have drunk it for he found himself looking down into an empty glass when she suggested seeing him safely home.

“Are you going to be alone here tonight, Edward?”

“Oh, I shall be perfectly all right. Perfectly.”

Outside, the tulip bed had been tactfully raked over and Filth and the woman (Chloe) stood looking carefully beyond it from the sun-lounge and over the hills. The woman smelled nostalgically of some old scent — not Betty’s, he thought. It was the scent, he supposed, but suddenly (and the nice woman had long lost her waistline and her hair was grey) Filth experienced an astonishment as great as the sight of Betty dead — her untenanted body, her empty face. Filth experienced a huge, full-blown, adolescent lust.

At once, he walked away from the woman, and sat down in the sitting-room alone.

“I could sit with you for a while.”

“No thank you, Chloe, I think as a matter of fact I’d like to be by myself now.”

When she had gone he sat for a time. (Lost. Over. Gone. Finished. Happened.) She was not here. She was dead. Not here. But, he felt, elsewhere. They had both detested the macabre Chinese funeral rites and the Oriental notions of an afterlife. They were (of course) Anglicans and liked the idea of Heaven, but whether the spirit survived the ridiculous body they had never discussed. They certainly had never considered the idea that they might meet again in another world. The notion is rubbish, now thought Filth.

“Don’t you think?” he asked Betty directly for the first time, speaking to a point above the curtain rail.

There was no reply.

Yet he slept well. The lust had retreated and the next morning early, properly dressed with a purplish tie, he telephoned his two cousins.

From the first, Claire in Essex somewhere, there was no reply, not even from an answerphone. It rang on and on. The second was Babs, who lived now for no known reason somewhere on Teesside called Herringfleet. She was alone in the world and, Betty had thought, a little odd now. Babs had known Betty at school (everyone, he thought, seems to have known Betty at school). Betty and Babs had been at St. Paul’s Girls School and had the Paulina voice.

So that it was Betty who answered the phone. “Hello?” she said, “Yes? Teddy?”

(Betty must be staying up there with Babs, he thought, caught his breath and plunged into hell.)

“It is Babs?”

“Yes. I suppose so. Barbara.”

“Edward. Betty’s husband.”

“I know.”

“I’m afraid I have bad news.”

“I know. I saw it in the paper. Poor old thing.”

“Well, I’m not exactly—”

“I mean Betty. Poor old thing.”

It was Betty talking. He longed for more.

“I thought you would want to know. .”

“Yes, what?”

“The funeral’s over, Babs. I thought you’d be glad to know that she died instantly. She can’t have known a thing about it. Wonderful for her, really.”

“Yes. That’s what they say.”

Silence.

“Babs?”

Now a long silence. Then a crashing waterfall of musical notes on a piano. Filth remembered that Babs had something to do with music. Even in Herringfleet presumably. “Babs, is that a piano?”