Jane Gardam - Old Filth

The scales ceased. Then Schubert began. On and on.

“Babs?”

Eventually, he put down the telephone and tried the other cousin again. Again, no answer. He thought of Chloe yesterday and then there was a shadow of someone watching him somewhere from a wood.

Again, the astounding lust. Lust. He put his face in his hands and tried to be calm. What is all this? He found himself praying as he had never prayed at all during the funeral. And very seldom during Betty’s life.

“Oh Lord, we beseech thee. . direct our hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God.”

He had not shared a bed with Betty for over thirty years. Double beds were for the bourgeoisie. Sex had never been a great success. They had never discussed it. They had disliked visiting friends who had not two spare bedrooms. Betty had joked for years that the marriage would never have survived had Filth not had his own dressing-room. She had meant bedroom.

Had he ever desired Betty? Well, yes. He had. He remembered. He had desired everything about her. Her past, her present, her future with him. Her sweet, alert, intelligent face, her famously alive eyes. He had wanted to possess every part of her for she had fitted so perfectly into his life’s plan. She had made him safe and confident. She had eased old childhood nightmares.

But — this. Not ever this. Where did this lust come from? Were she alive, could he have told her about it? She who had never done a passionate act. She would have sent him to a doctor.

But yet — so very close they had been. Sometimes at night in Hong Kong, hot and restless in the swirling mists of the Peak, the case of the previous day, or worse, a judgement lingering, he had gone to her room and lain beside her and she had stretched out a hand.

“What’s this?”

“Nothing.”

“Bad day?”

“I condemned a man to death.”

Silence.

She would never have taken him in her arms from pity. Never presented her body to him as a distraction. Never indicated: Here is balm. Take me. Forget it. Your job. You knew there would be this to face here. You could have stayed in England.

Instead. .

“Was he guilty?”

“As hell.”

They lay quiet, listening to the night sounds on the Peak.

“ Crime passionel ,” he said.

“Then probably he will be glad to die.”

He said, “You still shock me. If you had been the judge. .”

“. . I would have done as you did. There is not an alternative. But I would have suffered less.”

(But I would have wanted you to suffer more. I want you to make me resign because I disgust myself. I feel, truly, filth.)

“I should have stayed in Chambers at home in the Temple. Famous Feathers of the Construction Industry. Sewers and drains.”

But Betty had already fallen asleep again, peacefully against his shoulder, unconcerned, proud of him, a very nice woman. An excellent wife for a judge. And two miles off, in a sink across the spangled city, the condemned man, like a small grey bird, his mean little head on its scant Oriental neck soon to be crushed bone, lay alone.

I got out just in time, he thought when they retired and came home to the Donheads. Couldn’t take much more emotion alongside the drudgery. Still can’t manage emotion. All under control. I am a professional. But why this lust? This longing?

“Babs?”

It was the following morning and he was telephoning her again, “Babs, I want to come and see you.”

Betty’s voice answered — he remembered that it had been Veneering he’d once overheard saying that Betty’s voice was like Desdemona’s.

“Babs?”

“Just a minute.”

A full tempest of Wagner was stilled somewhere. “Yes? Teddy again? What?”

“Babs — may I come and see you?”

“Yes. I suppose so. All right. When?”

“Any time. This week? Next week?”

“Yes. All right.”

He heard a sob, which surprised him.

“Babs, don’t cry. She died so easily. A ful-ful-ful-filled, a splendid life.”

“I’m not crying for Betty,” she said, “or for you, you old fool,” and she crashed down the phone.

He didn’t telephone again; he wrote. He would visit her the following Friday and perhaps stay the night?

There was no reply.

However, in the new, footloose and irrational way that his body was behaving, Filth made his preparations, taking the car to be checked over in Salisbury, looking out for something good of Betty’s as a present for Babs.

He would have liked it so much more if he had been going to Claire. He wished she would answer the phone. He searched for the address to write to in Hainault where her Christmas cards came from, but the only card he could find was very old and blurred with no postcode. Nevertheless he wrote to say that he might perhaps be passing near her next Saturday. He told her about Betty.

No reply.

As Mrs.-er set down his morning cup of coffee on his desk, Filth gave the mighty roaring garrumph that had often preceded his pleadings in Court. (There was a rumour that it was the remains of some speech impediment though this seemed unlikely in such an articulate man.)

“Ah-argh. Aha! Mrs.-er, I meant to tell you I’m going away. Taking a short trip. Leaving on Friday. Doing a round of the family. What?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Travelling by car,” he said.

“Then I will say something. You’re out of your mind, Sir Edward. Wherever do you think you’re going?”

“Oh, it’s up in the north somewhere.”

“You haven’t driven further than Tisbury station in years. That car’s welded to the garage.”

“Not at all. I’ve had it checked over.”

“Sir Edward, it’s the motorways. You’ve never driven on a motorway.”

“It’s an excellent car. And it’s a chance for you to have a break, too. You’ve been very — very good these past days. Take a holiday.”

“If you insist on going, I’ll not take a holiday. I’ll steep them grey nets in your bathroom window.”

“You could, actually,” he said, not looking at her, “perhaps do something about Lady Feathers’s room. Get rid of her — er — the c-c-c-clothes. I believe it’s usual.”

“Sir Edward.” She came round the table and leaned against the window ledge looking at him, arms folded. “I’ve something to say.”

“Oh. Sorry. Yes, Mrs.-er. Mrs. T.”

“Look, it’s too soon. You’re doing it all too soon. You started in on the letters before the funeral. You ought to let them settle. I know, because of Mother. And it’s too soon to go round handing out presents, you’ll muddle them. I’m sorry, but you’re not yourself.”

“Mrs.-er, if you don’t want to do Lady Feathers’s room I’m sure that Chloe — the one from the church — would do it.”

“I’m sure she would, too. Let’s forget all that though, I’m only interested in stopping you driving. Now then.”

His face, with the light from behind her full on it, she saw must have been wonderful once. Appealing, as he gazed at her.

She carried a mug of coffee out to Garbutt who was waiting near the house wall that stood raw and naked without its ivy.

“He’s off in the car. Visiting.”

“On his own?”

“Yes. On the motorways. I’ve told him he’s not rational yet. She’d have never let him. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s answering every letter return of post and ticking them off on a list, every one hand-done and different and she’s scarcely cold. There was a green one—”

“Green what?”

“Letter. From Paris. He threw it in the bin. It upset him. He wrote out an answer and they say he was up the street with it in his hand before the postman was hardly gone.”