Jane Gardam - Old Filth

The church appeared to be very well-kept. He pushed open an inner red-baize door. The church within echoed with insistent silence. There was the smell of incense and very highlyvarnished pews. A strange church. The sense of many centuries with a brash, almost aggressive overlay. You’d be kept on your toes here. Never had much idea of these things, thought Filth. Lists pinned up everywhere. All kinds of services. Meditations. The lamp is lit over the Blessed Sacrament . Vigils. Quiet is requested . An enormous Cross with an agonised Christ. That always upset Filth.

This terrible silence.

He sat in the south aisle and closed his eyes and when he opened them saw that winter sunshine had lit up a marble memorial to some great local family. It was immense, a giant wedding cake in black and pink and sepia. Like an old photograph. Like a sad cry.

Filth got up and peered closer. He touched some of the figures. They were babies. Dozens of babies. Well, cherubs, he supposed, carved among garlands of buds and flowers, nuts, leaves, insects, fat fruits. More marble babies caught at more garlands at the foot of the pyramid, all naked, and male of course. They were weeping. One piped its eye, whatever piping was. Their fat lips pouted with sorrow. They stood, however, on very sturdy legs with creases across the backs of their knees, and their bottoms shone. There was a notice saying that the memorial had three stars and was thought to have been designed by Gibbons.

Well, I don’t know about that, thought Filth. What would Gibbons be doing here? And he gave one of the bottoms a slap.

The air of the church came alive for a moment as the baize door opened and shut, and a curly boy came springing down the aisle. He wore a clerical collar and jeans. “Good afternoon,” he cried. “So sorry I’m rather late. You’re wanting me to hear your confession.”

“Confession?”

“Saturday afternoons. Confessions. St. Trebizond’s. Half a mo while I put my cassock on.”

He ran past the weeping pile and disappeared into a vestry, emerging at once struggling into a cassock. He hurried into something like a varnished sedan chair which stood beside the rood screen, and clicked shut its door. The silence resumed.

Filth at once turned and made to walk out of the church, clearing his throat with the judicial roar.

He looked back. The sedan chair watched him. There was a grille of little holes at waist level and he imagined the boy priest resting his head near it on the inside.

It would be rather discourteous just to leave the church.

Filth might go over and say, “Very low-church, I’m afraid. Not used to this particular practice though my wife was interested. .”

He walked back to the sedan chair, leaned down and said, “Hullo? Vicar?”

A crackling noise. Like eating potato crisps.

“Vicar? I beg your pardon?”

No reply. All was hermetically sealed within except for the grille. Really quite dangerous.

He creaked down to his knees to a hassock and put his face to the grille. Nothing happened. The boy must have fallen asleep.

“Excuse me, Vicar. I’m afraid I don’t go in for this. I have nothing to confess.”

“A very rash statement,” snarled a horrendous voice — there must be some amplifier.

Filth jumped as if he’d put his ear to an electric fence.

“How long, my son, since your last confession?”

“I’ve—” (his son!) “—I’ve never made a confession in my life. I’ve heard plenty. I’m a Q.C.”

There was a snuffling sound.

“But you are in some trouble?”

Filth bowed his head.

“Begin. Go on. ‘Father I have sinned.’ Don’t be afraid.”

Filth’s ragged old logical mind was not used to commands.

“I’m afraid I don’t at the moment feel sinful at all. I am more sinned against than sinning. I am able to think only of my dear dead wife. She was in the Telegraph this morning. Her obituary.” Then he thought: I am not telling the truth. “And I am unable to understand the strange games my loss of her play with my behaviour.”

Why tell this baby? Can’t be much over thirty. Well, same age as Christ, I suppose. If Christ were inside this box. . A great and astounding longing fell upon Filth, the longing of a poet, the deep perfect adoring longing of a lover of Christ. How did he come on to this? This medieval, well of course, very primitive, love of Christ you read about? Not my sort of thing at all.

“My son, were there any children of the marriage?”

“No. We didn’t seem to need any.”

“That’s never the full answer. I have to say that I saw you touching the anatomy of the cherubs on the Tytchley tomb.”

“You what ?”

“Reveal all to me, my son. I can understand and help you.”

“Young man,” roared Filth through the grille. “Go home. Look to your calling. I am one of Her Majesty’s Counsellors and was once a Judge.”

“There is only one judge in the end,” said the voice, but Filth was in the car again and belting on past Saffron Walden.

He drove very fast indeed now, as the roads grew less equipped for him. I am a coelacanth. Yes. I dare say. I have lived too long. Certainly, I cannot cope — cope with a mind such as I have. The bloody little twerp. Wouldn’t have him in my Chambers. I can drive, though. That’s one thing I can do. My reactions are perfect, and here is a motorway again.

And hullo — what’s this? Lights? Sirens? Police? “Good afternoon. Yes?”

“You have been behaving oddly on the road, sir. It has been reported.”

“I have been stopping sometimes. Resting. Once in a church. In my view, essential. No, no need for a breath test. Oh well, very well.”

“You see. Perfectly clear,” said Filth.

“Could we help you in any way?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Your licence is in order?”

“Yes, of course. I am a lawyer.”

“It doesn’t follow, sir. I see that you are eighty-one?”

“With no convictions,” said Filth.

“No, sir. Well, goodbye, sir.”

“There is one thing,” said Filth, strapping himself back in his seat with some languor. “I do seem to be rather lost.”

“Ah.”

“I don’t suppose you know this address. Hainault?”

“We do, sir. But it’s not Hainault. That is in Essex. It’s High Light. Not High Note. A house called High Light . And we know who it belongs to. We know her. It’s five miles away. Shall we go ahead of you?”

“She is my cousin. She can never have had any Christmas cards. Thank you. And thank you for your courtesy and proper behaviour. A great surprise.”

“You oughtn’t to believe the television, sir.”

“Who the hell was he?” one policeman asked the other. “He’s like out of some Channel Four play.”

Claire in her house all alone sat in her shadowless kitchen and down came her beautiful little hands slap-bang across the Daily Telegraph . She closed her eyes and sat for a full minute, “No,” she said. “Of course it’s not Betty. Someone would have told me.”

She opened her eyes, removed her hands and stared down at Betty Feathers’ eyes which looked back at her with sharp but pleasant intelligence. “Well,” she said, “an obituary for Betty.” She smoothed the paper, read Elizabeth Feathers, MBE, and then the whole thing.

The phone rang. She folded the paper and turned it on its back. She walked to the phone.

“Hullo?”

“Beware. The Ice Man Cometh.”

Claire sat down quickly. The quiet life she had diligently followed over years was the rent she paid to a weak heart. Her control, balance, yoga, good sense, none of it natural to her, had been necessary if she was to see her husband out. She had told the doctor that it was essential she outlive him, and the doctor had thought her wonderful and her husband a weak old bore. Now, as a widow, Claire found that creeping about and being careful was a habit she could not drop. She would have liked a lover, but the heart battering about inside her made the practice impossible. Today, it was beating like an angry butterfly under a jam jar.