Jane Gardam - Old Filth

“You wouldn’t think so if we were in Malaysia.”

“Don’t be silly, Filth.”

“Or the dialects. Malay lacks consonants.”

“ Yarm seems to lack everything.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Rather a fine-looking town. Splendidly wide main street. Shows up the Cotswolds.”

“Well, don’t stop, Filth. Not now, for goodness sake. You’ve only half an hour to go. Get there.”

Just outside Yarm he saw a signpost which amazingly, for he had not been here before, he recognised. Standing back on a grim champaign behind the swishing traffic stood the Old Judges’ Lodging, now a hotel. Once the Circuit judges would have lived there throughout the Quarter Sessions. No wives allowed. Too much port. Boring each other silly. Comforting each others’ isolation with talk. Every evening, like cricket commentators between matches, discussing their profession. Finished. Gone. Dead. Hotel now, eh?

“Ha?”

Sign for Herringfleet.

Babs.

What a dire town. And not small. How to find 25 The Lindens? Here was the sea. A cemented edge of promenade. A line of glimmer that must be white sandy beach. Long, long waves curving round a great bay, and behind their swirling frills, spread into the total dark, was the heaving black skin and muscle of the ocean. Sea. How they had hated the sea in Wales. The cruel dividing sea. How could Babs ever choose this?

He had stopped the car on the promenade where, looking blank-eyed at the sea, were tall once-elegant lodging houses now near-slums, bed-and-breakfast places for the Nationally Assisted, i.e., the poor. No lights. The rain fell.

“The Lindens? What?” shouted a man on an old bike. He got off and came across and stuck his head through the window. The smell was chip fat and beer and no work. “The Lindens, mate? (Grand car.) Just over to your right there. You’ll not miss it, pal.”

It was a terrace of genteel and secretive houses on either side of a short street bordered by trees. The trees were bulging with round gangliae from which next year new sprouts would shoot like hairs from a mole. Revolting treatment. What would Sir say? Number 25.

At the top of steep stone steps there was a dim light above a front room and another light in a window beside it. A gate hung on one hinge. There was a sense of retreat and defeat. He remembered laughing, streetwise, positive Babs in the Oxford tea-shop. We’ll go to bed. We have before . Laughing, wagging her cracked high-heeled shoe from her toe.

It was so quiet that Filth could hear the beat of the sea two roads away, rhythmic, unstoppable. “Too soon,” it said. “They were right. This is histrionic nonsense. You’ve arrived too soon. You’re in shock. You’ll make a fool of yourself. There’s nothing here.”

Suddenly, at the top of the steps, the front door was wrenched open and a boy ran out. He came tearing down, missing several steps, belted along the path towards Filth at the gate. One hand held a music-case and with the other he pushed Filth hard in the stomach so that he fell back into the hedge. The boy, who was wearing old-fashioned school uniform, vanished towards the sea.

Badly winded, Filth struggled out of the hedge, dusted down his clothes, picked up the fallen parcel of presents, looked right and left and gave his furious roar. The quiet of the road then re-asserted itself. The child might never have been.

But the front door stood wide and he walked uneasily up the steps and into the passage beyond, where, as if he had stood on a switch, a torrent of Chopin was let loose in the room to his right.

“Hello?”

He stood outside its open door.

“Hello there? Babs?”

He knocked on the door, peered round it. “It’s Teddy.”

The music stopped. The room appeared to be empty.

Then he saw her by the back window, staring into the dark. She was wearing some sort of shawl and her hair was long and white. She seemed to be pressing something — a handkerchief? — into her face. Without turning towards him further, her voice came out from behind her hands, clear and controlled. And Betty’s.

In one of her very occasional cynical or bitter moods which Filth had never understood, and which usually ended in her going to London for a few days (or over to Macao from Hong Kong), Betty had said, “Look, leave me alone, Filth. I’m in the dark. Just need a break.”

“I’m in the dark, Teddy-bear,” now said Betty’s voice inside this crazed old creature. “You shouldn’t have come. I should have stopped you. I couldn’t find the number.”

“Oh, dear me, Babs. You’re ill.”

“Ill. Do you mean sick? I’m sick all right. D’you want tea? I make it on my gas-ring. There’s some milk somewhere. In a cupboard. But we don’t take milk, do we? Not from our classy background. I’m finished, Teddy. Broken-hearted. Like Betty. You’d better go.”

(Like Betty? What rubbish — never.)

“I can’t stay more than a few minutes,” said Filth, realising that this was absolutely so, for the room was not only ice-cold and dark, but there was an aroma about. Setting down his parcels on a chair piled with newspapers, he touched something unspeakable on a plate.

“Babs, I had no idea. .”

“You thought I was well-off, did you? Sky television and modems? Well, I am well-off, but because I am still a teacher of music. I live alone. Betty always warned me against living alone. Said I’d get funny. But I prefer to live alone. Ever since well, you know. Wales. I had mother of course until last year. Upstairs. I still hear her stick thumping on the floor for the commode. Sometimes I start heating up her milk. But I’m glad she’s gone. In a way.”

“Then,” said Filth, prickling all over with disgust, making stabs at various shadows to find perhaps somewhere to lean against or sit. “Then it can’t all have been bad.” He had begun to lower himself into what might have been a chair when something in it rustled and streaked for the door.

“Ah,” he said, easing his shirt-collar. “And you have a dog.”

“What dog? I have no dog.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not sorry. Even with a dog I would be utterly alone. And I am going mad.”

“ Well ”—he had sprung up from the chair and was standing to attention—“Well” (half-heartedly). “Well, I’m here now, Babs. We must sort something out. Get something going. Betty wouldn’t want. .”

Babs had left the window and was fumbling about. A light came on and an electric jug was revealed. A half-empty milk bottle was withdrawn from an antique gramophone. Cups and saucers were wrested from their natural home upon the hearth.

“You see, I’m quite independent. No trouble to anyone. Sugar? No, that’s not us , either, Teddy, is it?”

“Babs, let me take you out somewhere for a meal.”

She flung her long hair about. “I never go out. I watch and wait. First Flush? Do you remember?”

For a dreadful moment Filth thought that Babs was referring to the menopause, though that, surely, must be now in the past?

“First Flush?”

(Or maybe it was something to do with Bridge? Or the domestic plumbing?)

“ Tea , Teddy. First Flush is tea . From Darjeeling.” (She pronounced it correctly. Datcherling.) “Don’t you remember?” She seemed to be holding up a very tattered packet marked Fortnum and Mason, Piccadilly . “He gave it to me always for years. Every Christmas. In memory of our childhood. You, me, him, Claire, Betty.”

“But we weren’t in India, Betty and I. I hadn’t met Betty. You and I and Claire were in — Wales.”

She looked frightened.

“But he sent me tea from India. They took him back there after. . Year after year from India he sent me tea.”