Jane Gardam - Old Filth

“Claire? Claire? Are you there? It’s Babs.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Babs. Yes, of course. You always did sound like Betty.”

“Can’t help it. I suppose you were at the funeral. In at the kill.”

“I’ve just this minute seen the Telegraph . An utter shock.”

“Well, it would be the hush-hush Bletchley Park thing. She wasn’t there for long. I never thought she was very clever. She’s had a pretty good life with him. You might have told me about the funeral. She had some wonderful rocks.”

“Rocks?”

“Jewellery.”

“Oh. Had she? I didn’t know she was dead until now.”

Claire had been wild about Filth since she was four, but as inscrutable then as now she sat prettily in her pink dressinggown with her hand firmly against the butterfly.

“He turned up here yesterday. He only stayed ten minutes. He brought me some recipe books but I can’t find them. He’ll be en-route to you now. At a guess.”

“He would have telephoned. Though I suppose I do tend to switch it off.”

“He’s not himself, I warn you. He never told me when he was arriving. Then ten minutes later he was gone. Actually I wasn’t very well. I’m not a very well woman.”

“But why did he come? We haven’t seen either of them in years. All that way! Dorset! She can’t have died more than. .” She glanced at the folded paper. She would look properly later.

“Just over a fortnight. He was bringing us keepsakes. I’d rather hoped she’d made a Will. I think he thought better of giving me the recipe books. I expect he’ll offer them to you.”

“But I’m diabetic.”

“Yes, well, I don’t suppose he remembers that. Just at the moment.”

“No,” said Claire.

“He was very strange. He fled the house. I seemed to horrify him. I can’t think why. My ways are not everybody’s ways, of course, but knowing what we three have been through together. .”

“Your ways were not everybody’s ways then.”

“Neither were yours.”

“Why not?”

“All that perfection , Claire. Nauseating perfection. From the start.”

Silence.

“Claire?”

“Yes?”

“Sorry. I only meant that it’s a bit chilling.”

“It seems,” said Claire, “that Betty’s death removes barriers. It’s bringing corpses to the surface. I can honestly say I never had anything to hide.”

“Oh, no?”

Claire was watching through the huge window an immaculate Mercedes nosing about in the lane. It paused, considered, started off again and cruised out of sight.

“You’d better ring me if he turns up,” said Babs. “He looked to me as if he was in need of special care, like they used to say of drawn-thread work on laundry lists. Get him to see someone.”

Elgar’s Enigma Variations began to boom in Babs’s background.

“Laundry lists? Hello? I can’t hear you.”

Claire put down the phone.

The car must have turned somewhere down the road, for here it was nosing slowly back again. “He won’t come here,” she said aloud. “He doesn’t need me. He never did and we won’t be able to look each other in the eye. ‘It was Betty who made him,’ Isobel Ingoldby used to say. I never believed her. He’s made himself. Made his impeccable, astringent self.”

The phone rang again.

“Well, all I can say, Claire, he was shaking all over and grey in the face and terrified of my poor animals under his feet. Gob- smacked , outraged by my little lover with his little musiccase.”

“What are you talking about, Babs? I wish you wouldn’t say ‘gob-smacked.’ It doesn’t become you. You’re not a teenager.”

“Yes, I am. At heart I am fourteen.”

The car had now stopped at Claire’s gate and Filth’s stony face, with the Plantagenet cheek-bones and thick ungreying curly hair, could be observed, peering out.

“When old women say that,” said Claire, “‘I’m just a girl inside,’ I. .” The butterfly was hammering now on iron wings. Filth’s long right leg, like the leg of a flamingo but in Harris tweed, was feeling for the pavement. “I,” said Claire, “cease to find them interesting.”

“I may not be interesting, but it was me he turned to at Ma Didds, when you went running down the village.”

Claire let her fingers stray about over the glass table-top, feeling for her butterfly-subduing pills. And here came the old flamingo, the old crane, lean as a cowboy still. What? Six-foot-three, and still melting my heart.

Well, he seemed to be carrying the parcel of recipe books.

“I must go now, Babs. The laundry man’s here. And Babs, you’re drinking too much. Goodbye.”

“Have you any luggage? I hope you’ll be staying the night?” she asked at once.

Filth jack-knifed himself into a small, gold-sprayed Lloyd-loom chair and his knees were nearly up to his chin. Light fell upon him like a greeting as in fact it always did upon everybody inside the rambling bungalow which Claire had moved into a few years ago for that very reason, and because it was sensible for someone with A Heart. The building followed an easy circuit. Sitting-room led into kitchen, kitchen led into bathroom, bathroom led into Claire’s bedroom and out to the hallway again. Off the hall was a second bedroom and bathroom, the bedroom narrower and full of hat boxes and tissue paper and old letters and Christmas lists spread permanently over the bed. In each room she kept a supply of pills and on the bathroom mirror she had stuck a list, written in her beautiful calligraphy, of all the pills she took, and when. “You make poetry of every word you write,” the Vicar had said, but Claire had passed the compliment by.

“I have a spare room, Teddy.”

“I could take you out to dinner,” he said, without enthusiasm.

“I don’t go out for meals. I hardly go out at all. I watch the Boy Scouts doing my gardening outside my windows. That is my fresh air.”

“You have a beautiful complexion, nevertheless,” he said. “And you have the figure of a — of an angel.”

He saw Betty’s jolly old rump above the tulip bed. Her weather-beaten face. “A hundred in and a hundred more to go,” she had called. “I don’t want a gin. Could we miss lunch?” Then over she fell.

He looked now long and piercingly — but unseeingly — at Claire’s open and beautiful face. She’d been a sunlit, lovely child who’d grown plain (or so Betty had told him). A stodgy bride in horn-rims. Then pretty again, and now beautiful. He remembered being told that she had ruled her children by a mysterious silence, her adoration of them never expressed. Betty said the children had felt guilty about it, knowing they could never deserve her; they had become conventional, monosyllabic members of society. Her nice husband, Betty said, had taken to drink. Claire (Betty said) believed that marriage and motherhood meant pain. Betty had agreed with her about children, and thought that Claire lived for the moment when they fled the nest and she was peacefully widowed. And here she sat now, gentle, shoulderless as a courtesan on her linen-covered sofa, smiling. (Filth turned to Betty on his interior telephone to ask what she thought about it, but Betty had left the phone off the hook.)

“Of course!” he said. “I remember. You have diabetes. You can’t come out to dinner. Let me. .” he had never gone shopping in his life. “Let me go and forage for us.”

“So you will stay?”

“I’d be — delighted.”

“Teddy, there’s no need to forage. The girl gets me what I want. There’s a freezer. And there’s whiskey.”

“Whiskey?”

“Oh, just for anyone who drifts in. The police — very nice people, out of hours. They come here when I fall over. The Vicar. The woman down the road with one eye. The window-cleaner. I’m fond of the window-cleaner. I have him once a week, though ‘have’ alas is not any longer the word. I ‘have’ a weak heart.”