Jane Gardam - Old Filth

“I ring you every three weeks.”

“Yes.”

“Last time I couldn’t get through. You were engaged.”

“Yes. We do occasionally have another phone-call.”

“And what about this ?” Vanessa said now, marching into the hall as Oliver picked up his sports bag en-route for a work-out. “They’re not going to be there.”

“What? Your parents?”

“My consistent and saintly parents say they’d no idea I was coming down this weekend. They’re going to a Fortieth Wedding Anniversary on the Isle of Wight. They said they told me. They’re going senile. Parents of some of my primary-school friends I’ve not seen for twenty years. They said why don’t I go, too, for goodness sake!”

“Well, why don’t you?” Oliver saw, and his spirits fell, the way things would now develop. “Better come with me and visit my Ma,” he said, not looking at her.

“Half-way to Scotland? On a Saturday morning? And there’s only a single bed. No thanks.”

“We could go to a hotel. Stay in Cambridge if you like.”

She wavered while he kept his balance. He loved her. They would have a nice time. It was just that alone, with his mother, he could slop about with his shoes and socks off. Read the tabloids. Pick his nose.

“And what do I do there to pass the time?”

“In Cambridge?”

“No, fool. In your mother’s house looking out at nothing and nothing looking in. All that silence as she sits and smiles.”

“At least she never asks when we’re getting married.”

“Well, neither does mine.”

“Your father does.”

“Oh — does he? I’m surprised.”

“Because he doesn’t like me? You’re right. He asks in order to smirk when I say not yet. You’re too close to your aged P, dear, it’s unhealthy.”

She frowned and began to bustle about. He thought her tiny waist and neck miraculously beautiful. He’d have liked her in a silk kimono and little silk shoes. They’d been together six years and she was thirty-two and as rich as he was. She could stop work tomorrow and. .

“Come on,” she said. “We’re at it again. I’m sorry. It’s just the bloody Isle of Wight . They could have said: I’ll come with you.”

“And it’s all right,” she said, “I’ll behave. I won’t sulk. I won’t go and lie down with a headache. I won’t say ‘Thanks, I’m fine’ when she offers me another fish finger.”

“I’ll ring and tell her,” said Oliver. “And I’ll book a hotel for tomorrow night. Or you could go in the spare bed and I could have the sofa? OK, OK, I didn’t mean it.”

“Fine,” he said ten minutes later. “I’ve booked the George at Stamford and I’ve told Ma. Turns out we couldn’t have stayed with her anyway. She’s got an old chum there.”

“Oh no! She’s going the same way as mine.”

“No, he’s all right. Sort of cousin. She fancies him. Family solicitor or something down in the West Country. Nice.”

“Solicitor? Oh well then, we can’t go. He’ll be all over me. Oliver, let’s get the Eurostar to Paris.”

But he had had enough. “If you don’t want to come, stay here. That’s it. I shan’t come back here if you won’t come with me now.”

She looked hard at him, thinking things over. He was big. And good. He was clever. He was loyal. He could be as ruthless as his mother. I don’t like his mother, but I do like him.

“Coming then?” he asked on Saturday morning — he had slept on the sofa bed in the study. “Coming for a spin to see the Mater in the motor?”

“OK,” she said. “Agreed. Can’t wait to meet the family solicitor.”

Filth lay in the light, pale bedroom after a very long night’s sleep, and opened his eyes upon the hat-boxes stacked now on top of a 1930s wardrobe with varnished panels of marquetry fruit and flowers and an Arts and Crafts iron latch. One hat-box, labelled Marshal and Snelgrove , and another, Peter Robinson , engaged him. He had known them somewhere else. A child’s voice inside him cried out for someone to come and help him in some way. To come and love him. Explain some fear. Only she could help.

The name would not come. He tried to scream, but the scream wouldn’t come. Terror took hold. He could not move. They were the wrong hat-boxes. The right hat-boxes had been battered and mouldy. He could hear the sea, the vile sea. He could hear Ma Didds coming. After breakfast she would beat him because he’d wet the bed. They all wet their beds.

There was a gentle tapping at the dqor and Filth felt about himself and he was dry. Oh, salvation, thank you God. Wonderful relief. Let her come. Let her come and look. She’d get him for something else today, but not for that. As she got Cumberledge almost every morning. Boiling the sheets in the copper, putting them on the line for all to see.

“Eight years old,” she’d say.

“She’s a bit afraid of me though,” said eight-year-old Teddy Feathers. “Because I can pierce her with my gimlet eyes. One day I shall blind her,” and he practised the look on the bedroom door. Claire came through it in her rose-pink dressing-gown.

She was carrying a huge cup and saucer painted with brown flowers and a primrose-coloured inside. In the other hand she carried a tipping silver sugar-basin with some silver sugar tongs sticking out.

“I can’t do trays,” she said. “And I can’t remember about sugar. I do remember no milk.”

She put the cup down on the bedside table. “Are you awake, Teddy? You look glazed.” She moved some old dress-boxes from a chair and sat down. “I’m glad I insisted on a house with decent-sized bedrooms.”

“A danger, I’d have thought,” he said, relaxing, drinking the hot tea. “Open invitation. People arriving and demanding beds. Thinking you’re a boarding-house. We keep — I keep — our spare bedrooms quiet.”

“Oh? Why? I like company. I like open doors.”

“Well, watch out for the window-cleaner.” He was pleased to find yesterday’s conversation totally in place, like yesterday’s Court-hearing used to be.

“And the Vicar,” he added.

“Oh, the Vicar is perfectly safe. He’s slightly charismatic, or working at it, but he’s sound on the Gospels . And I love women priests, too, don’t you?”

“Not altogether,” said Filth, “but there they are.”

“No. I keep the spare bedroom at the ready, dear Teddy, not for the window-cleaner, despite his lovely hairy chest, nor for the fifty-thousand to one chance that the beloved of my childhood should turn up after twenty years in need of a bit of peace. No — I keep it for Oliver. And of course I have to have somewhere to do up my Christmas presents.”

“Oliver?”

“Not that I send many now. Only about three apart from your handkerchiefs. But I like to be able to spread the wrapping paper out. And then there is the ironing. .”

“Who is Oliver?”

She paused to regard with pity someone who did not know Oliver. When it comes to people’s children, she thought, Teddy looks at emptiness.

“Oliver is my younger son. Your second cousin twice removed, or something of the sort. He has your eyes, and your height but he’s beginning to run to fat. He’s almost as clever and as handsome as you were.” (And I hope you’ve left him some money, she thought.)

“Oh,” said Filth, unconvincingly. “Yes, yes. Of course. A nice little chap. I remember.”

“You haven’t ever met him. He’s nearly forty.”

“Oh. Yes. I see. Betty and I were hopeless at all that.”

“All what?”

“Genealogy.”

“Yes. You were ahead of your time. Genealogy’s over. It’s a wise child now all right that knows its own father. You know, Teddy, the withering of the family tree is one of the saddest things ever. Who else can you turn to when you’re old and sick without having to feel grateful?”