Jane Gardam - Old Filth

“Then I made a mistake,” he said, still not looking at her. “Maybe it’s your hair. It is so thin. I’m sorry.”

“My hair is a Sassoon cut and it cost one hundred pounds.” She flung about with the cups and tea-tray and made to go off into the house.

“I have my career,” she said. “I know it’s what all women say, but it’s true. It matters to me and to Oliver and to the economy of the country. I make a lot of money. I can have a child when I’m fifty.”

“See if you do,” he said. “I hope you don’t. Children are cruel. They are wreckers of the soul. I hate children. I am a paedophobe. Betty knew we must not have a child because of the child I was myself. I would have damaged a child. I don’t mean physically, of course.”

(The old thing’s deranged, she thought in the brightness of Claire’s kitchen, washing up the lunch and the tea-cups. Whoever is he? Some sort of hypnotist? Thinks he’s the Oracle. Why is he attractive? He scares me. And I damn well will have some children. When it suits me. And with Oliver. Or someone.)

She wrung out the dishcloth (no washing-up machine) and hung up the tea-towel. God, I’m behaving like a daughter-in-law. Oh Lord, here’s Oliver and his Ma and Claire will say, Thank you dear, you shouldn’t.

“Thank you dear, you shouldn’t,” said Claire thinking how fierce and snappish Vanessa looked. She’s like a little black fox, she thought. What has Eddie been saying to her?

“Has it been very dull?” she asked.

“Not at all. I think he’s asleep.”

“Now we must think about supper. We have eight beautiful eggs.”

Oliver saw Vanessa’s face.

“No, Ma. Thanks a lot but Vanessa and I have booked a table at the George. You’ve enough on your hands with Eddie and, anyway, I want to put some flowers on Dad’s grave on the way. OK? We’ll be back after breakfast. I’ll bring us all some lunch.”

“Are you sure?” (Relief!)

“It’s been quite a day for you.”

“I suppose it has.”

“OK, then. Off, Vanessa. Say goodbye to the Great Man for us, Ma, and don’t let him keep you up half the night with sophistry.”

“All he does is sleep,” said Claire. “And I’m glad. It means he feels he knows us well. He just turned up,” she told Vanessa. “After hundreds of years. His wife was a friend from way back. She died less than three weeks ago.”

“Oh, no ! Not three weeks!”

“Such a shock. She seemed set to live for ever.”

“Oh, Oliver!”

“What?”

“You should have told me. I’ve been chatting on about— about marriage and how interminable it must seem!”

At the churchyard she was still angry. They walked up the path together, Oliver carrying flowers, Vanessa her laptop.

“Makes me look so gauche ,” she said. “So insensitive . You are the strangest family. You tell people nothing . No, I’m not helping to put flowers on your father’s grave, I never met him.”

“Go on into the church then. There’s the famous marble Gibbons.”

“The what? I hate Culture.”

“Three stars in all the guide-books. Known locally as The Four Brass Monkeys.”

“What is it?”

“Memorial to some great family, can’t remember who. Nobody can. Sort of marble pyramid of fruits and flowers and cherubs weeping. Mum knew it when she was a child, too.”

“How ghastly. Why monkeys?”

“Gibbons, sweetie. Surname of Grinling. They think he did the drawings for it. Worth seeing. You can’t help stroking it. Bite the peaches. Pat the bottoms. It’s never been vandalised. It was our job to wash it when we were kids. Get in the cracks. Took hours. Saturday mornings.”

“You had a sensational childhood.”

She pranced into the church through the self-sealing door and Oliver fished about for a green tin vase with a spike that his subconscious remembered would be behind the dead-flower bin near the tap. He pushed the spike into the grass above his father’s head, arranged the flowers, stood up and leaned against the headstone and took note of his father’s name and the space left for Claire’s. He thought how much he’d like to have a talk with his father. On the other hand he knew every word of it.

“How d’you think your mother’s looking?”

“Very well, Pa. You mustn’t worry.”

“Can’t say I think she’s looking well. I led her a dance, you know.”

“I know.”

“Not coming home till dawn. She was always out looking for me. As far as Stamford. Found me once hiding behind some dustbins. I thought she was the police. Old Contemptibles’ Dinner, or something. Not the behaviour for a bank-manager. Marvellous woman.”

“I’ll bet she never cross-questioned?”

“No. Never.”

“Mine grumbles. Cross-questions. Very cross questions!”

“What, this new one?”

“Well — we’ve been together six years. She’s not new.”

“Grumbles all the time, does she?”

“Well, criticises mostly. It’s her job. Analysis of motives, then development and execution.”

“Sounds like Eddie, dry old stick.”

“Yes. A lawyer. And a ‘new woman.’”

“Ah, your mother couldn’t be labelled. Result of that childhood.”

“Ma’s pretty much all right,” he said. “You can bury your childhood. Not that I want to.”

God, but I miss him, he thought, and watched Vanessa marching forward from the church, hopping the graves, laptop tightly clutched.

“There’s a boy in there dressed up as a Vicar and he came up and asked if I wanted him to hear my confession. And I swear — I swear — he looked me over to see if I was pregnant.”

At the George they went straight in to dinner, Vanessa first twirling off her shirt to reveal a black silk camisole beneath, the size of a handkerchief. Her sloping white shoulders and tiny white neck against the panelling turned heads. Claret. Roast beef carved from the silver dome. Vanessa shone and talked, oblivious. The waiters admired. She nattered on about the Vicar and the marble babies crying and holding shields against their private parts. It hadn’t seemed a Christian monument to her, three stars or not.

“Did you say so?”

“Yes, I did. And I told him I had nothing to confess and he said, “My child, then you are in a bad way.” I nearly socked him. What are these people doing in the church now, Oliver?”

“He sounds a bit of a throw back to me. You don’t see them now in the church at all. It’s a rare sighting, a clergyman in a church, out of hours.”

“I think he hides in there all day, and then he pounces. He sees guilt all the time. He’s a monster.”

“He’s a friend of Ma. She likes him.”

“Oh no! Then that’s it.”

“That’s what?”

“She’ll want him to marry us.”

“What did you say?” They were in their grand bedroom after the coffee and the crème brûlée, both of them happy with wine. “Marry us?”

But she was somewhere else now. “Oliver, what room is this? It’s the bridal suite. Look at the hangings, and the drapes. It’s obscene. And whatever is it costing us?”

“A hundred and fifty pounds — so what? It was all they had left.”

“But we could have gone to a B&B. We’re supposed to be going to Thailand.”

“We can afford it.”

“Well, you might have asked me first. Oh, well. Never mind,” and she took off her handkerchief top and cast off the rest of her clothes. She lifted her legs high in the air. “Haven’t I wonderful feet?” she said.

(God, Oliver remembered, I forgot to bring any condoms.)

“OK,” she said. “Pass my purse.”

“Why?”

“I’ll give you my half of the hundred and fifty pounds.”