Jane Gardam - Old Filth

“If it’s hotels, be careful. There’ll be steps and stairs you don’t know. Remember poor Judge Veneering.”

“It is not a ship. I’ll leave my address.”

“I’ll pack for you.”

“Thank you, I’m sure I can manage. And I’ll be hiring a car.”

Two minutes later he saw her outside, furiously conferring with Garbutt, the mauve woman having disappeared. Their excitement maddened him.

The next day, she came in to tell him that if it was a hotel he ought to have new pyjamas.

He said, “Oh, and Mrs.-er, when I come back I intend to manage here alone.”

“ Alone ?”

“I think I am becoming too dependent on you all. I’m going to employ the Social Services. The Meals on Wheels. I’m sorry, Mrs.-er.”

“After all these years you still don’t know my name,” she said. “That’s it, then. I’ll go now. Get yourself to Malmesbury.”

He saw her clacking at Garbutt on the lawn and marching away, and felt gleefully cruel. He opened the glass doors and waited till Garbutt went by.

“I know what you’re going to say,” said Garbutt. “I’ll just see the fire’s out, then I’m off. You know where to find me if you change your mind. Her name’s Katey, by the way. You’ve gutted her.”

In the hotel at Malmesbury, journey safely accomplished, splendid room looking across at the Abbey, smell of a good dinner floating up, his unrepentant euphoria remained. Their blank faces, ha! Their disbelief. They’d see he was his own master yet. And here in Malmesbury not a soul knew him. He stumbled on the stairs and limped into the dining-room, rather wishing he’d brought his walking-stick for his explorations tomorrow.

The ankle next morning was the size of a small balloon and he telephoned the Desk for assistance. They suggested bringing him breakfast in bed which outraged him. Staggering down a steep flight of stairs between two waiters, he somehow made the breakfast-room. Outside it was pouring with rain and people went by behind umbrellas at a forty-five degree angle against the wind. Unable to walk from the table, he enquired whether there was a doctor who could come and see him and was told the way to a surgery. It was not far, they said, but Old Filth couldn’t even reach the hotel’s front door and sank upon an oak bench. People passed by. A whole coachload of tourists streamed past, chattering about the disappointing weather. He asked if the Desk would ring for a doctor to call to examine him.

“You’d have to go to the hospital for that. For an X-ray.”

“I only need a GP’s opinion.”

The Desk stared. “You’d have to go round to the surgery. They don’t do home visits now unless it’s serious.”

He asked the Desk to call a taxi.

The paving stones between the taxi and surgery door shone slippery and menacing. He hesitated. The umbrellas continued to go by. At last he was helped in, and found a room crowded and silent like a church and one girl at a screen with her back to the audience.

“I need to see a doctor.”

“Yes.” She handed him a disc saying “21.”

“Do I wait here?”

She looked surprised. “Where else?”

“This means that there are twenty people ahead of me?”

“Yes.”

“What sort of wait will that be?”

“A long one.”

“An hour?”

“Oh, nearer two.”

He rang the Desk and asked for his luggage to be collected and brought down to the hotel foyer. And would they kindly ring the car-hire company to come and take him from the surgery, then back to the hotel and then home to the Donheads.

“It wasn’t even Malmesbury I really wanted to go to, it was Badminton. Just down the road,” he told this driver.

“It is. Just as it ever was. Down the road and down the hill.”

“I was there in the War. Wanted to have another look. I was in the Army.” (His ankle was hell.)

“There’s a good hotel near there where you could keep your foot up. They might get you a doctor. Were you there with the Royals? They’ll be pleased to see you if you were. Still the same sort of place.”

(Anything better than creeping home to shame and emptiness.)

“I might give it a try. Thank you.”

They swooped from the hill to the plain. Through the rain he saw the great house again, the broad quiet streets of the village, the stretch of woodland, the wide fields.

“Terrible weather for sight-seeing,” said the taxi man. “I’ll take you right home when the time comes, if you like. I’ll just look in here and see if there’s a room. It’ll cost you, mind.”

Exhausted, he sat in the foyer of the new hotel which was calm and gracious. Someone brought him a stool for his foot. Someone else said they were going to get a doctor. The rain eased and Filth was brought lunch on a tray alone in the lounge. He was tired, humiliated and — something else — what? Good God! frightened. I have been frightened! He sank into himself, dozed, was helped to a big ground-floor bedroom with a view across the parkland, and very cautiously, a snip at a time, allowed himself the past.

“Would you very kindly put my name and address in your address book, young man?” said the ragged skeleton beside him on the boat-deck as they left Cadiz. “I fully intend to reach Home, but, if not, I would like to be sure that Vera knows what happened to me. That’s to say, of course, if she gets Home herself, which I doubt. She was always rather feeble without me to get her anywhere. I am Miss Robertson. Miss Meg. She is Miss Vera. We’re daughters of the late Colonel Robertson. Teachers. This is our only address in England now. It belongs to some old chums from school who’ve always paid us a little rent. I hope we’ll get on together now that I shall have to live with them. Well, school’s a long time ago, you know.”

Her skin was pale and glazed with fever and her eyes far too bright. Her wooden crutches lay beside her and she tried all the time to clutch their handles. “Have you a pen, young man? Turn to ‘R’ in your address book.” Eddie lay immobile. Someone crept up to Miss Robertson and wiped her face with a cloth. Other people muttered together that she should have been detained at Cadiz. She had been formidably against it, even in fever. She had to get Home.

“If any of us gets Home,” she had said. “I hear that there’s one ship a day being sunk just now in the Channel.”

As it grew dark, one night, he heard Miss Robertson whisper, “Look in my little bag. There’s some trinkets. Take them, young man, and give them to your sweetheart.” The little bag lay pushed up under the life-boat blocks and the crutches near it. There was a cold clean breeze. When daylight came, where Miss Robertson had been there was a stain.

The smell beneath the life-boat where she had lain had gone too.

She had been complaining of the rotting smell on the ship. Eddie had not cared about it, hardly noticed. “Gangrene,” he heard someone say. “The stink was from herself. The boy don’t look much better. He’s filth all through.”

A crewman went away for a bucket of water and scrubbing brush, and Eddie, eyes closed, stretched to touch Miss Robertson’s walking aids and found his hand on the bag. He took it and pushed it beneath him, later found a corner for it in his own suitcase with his father’s photograph and Pat Ingoldby’s clothes-brush. Through his headache and fever, and through the now endless vomiting, he found himself thinking that he was becoming like Loss. A scavenger. Survival. Take anything. Old lady. Couldn’t see her own doom. Her isolation. Talking about address books.

The ship sailed on like some faery invisible barge. The sea shone, still and blue. No planes. No U-Boats. Other craft nowhere near. Way out, towards the West, fishing boats. A wonderful calmness.