Jane Gardam - Old Filth

A kind of whisper went round at last among the humped and now many fewer passengers; a sibilant, urgent word. “Yes. Yes, it is. It’s land. Yes. Yes. It is.”

And cold now. Eddie was unwrapped first from his life-jacket then put inside a tarpaulin. Someone washed his face as he vomited. Cleaned him when he shat his clothes. “Here’s another going, if you ask me.”

Now he was left alone.

The odd thing, said the speck of the rational in Eddie within him — he guarded it like his life — the odd thing is that I did once have an address book. Alice gave it to me. In the kitchen. Leather. Small. Red. Someone had given it to her, but, she said, “I don’t need it. I never had any addresses to write to.” One day, at the billet in Londonderry, Eddie had written in it, for comfort, all the addresses he knew. School. Oxford, the Ingoldbys (hopelessly), Sir, Auntie May, one or two schoolfriends even though he’d never write to them. Not Les Girls. Not the buttermilk girl. As his temperature soared now he began to wonder if he’d ever again find the addresses of his cousins. If the old address in Kotakinakulu would ever find his father. He had had no address for Loss. By now there was probably no Loss to write to.

Then he remembered that he had not seen his address book for a very long time. He felt about in his bag and it was not there and he knew, without any question, that Loss had stolen it. God knows why, except he was a natural crook. A delinquent. The bastard. Vanished, and with my watch. And no Loss. No loss. But such a monstrous act! Cutting Eddie off from every hope of contact.

Loss’s defection was the metaphor for Eddie’s life. It was Eddie’s fate always to be left. Always to be left and forgotten. Everyone gone, now. Out of his reach. For the first time, Eddie was utterly on his own.

He had his passport — yes, he felt that in the bag. He had Pat’s brush. He had Miss Robertson’s pouch. He felt fat beads inside it and pulled them out. A great string of pearls. Thank goodness Loss wasn’t there. They’d be gone in five minutes. Lightness almost mirth filled Eddie as the ship, charmed, blessed, unhindered, sailed slowly, slowly, up the Irish Sea and such as could gathered at the rail and gazed unbelieving at the peaceful green Welsh hills. Over the Styx, thought Eddie. Crossing the bar.

Aeons passed and Eddie, wrapped in blankets, shaking with fever but ice-cold, a structure of bones, was dumped on a stretcher and carried through customs unhindered, and ashore. At the ambulance station in his fever he looked for a car like a bread-bin but found instead a man playing with a yo-yo. He was familiar. He was old Oils, his Housemaster. Standing alongside him was Isobel Ingoldby.

Diagonally falling drops alighting on the windowpanes of Gloucestershire, and Old Filth awoke in the new, ever-silent hotel to see a girl smiling down at him, holding a tray of tea. He thought: Oh God — the buttermilk girl! Then, seeing the sweet open smile, thought: No.

And I am an old man, he thought.

“I am an old man,” he said.

“I’ve brought you a cup of tea. Is it true you were a soldier here, sir?”

It took him some time to remember where he was. Near Badminton.

“I was stationed at Badminton,” he said. “In the War.”

“My gran was at Badminton then. In the War. Queen Mary was here but we all kept it quiet. They said nobody would want to kidnap her but my gran said — she was parlour maid at the house — that she had three bags ready packed to take her to America. In the attics.”

“That was probably true. Though she might not have gone herself.”

“One was full of jewels.”

“Oh, I’m sure that was true. That would have gone into safety.”

“Did you know her, sir?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Is it true she was always cutting down trees?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Especially ivy. She hated ivy. She had half a platoon chopping down ivy. They say the first year she didn’t realise it would grow back again.

“I expect it was the way she’d been brought up,” said the girl. “My gran says she was kept in a band-box as a girl. Never opened her mouth — well, her mother never stopped talking — and what a bottom! Her mother’s, that is. Lovely woman. Real old England, her mother. Queen Mary was brought up in Teck, which is German, and she didn’t like Germans. My gran said she’d been brought up to gravel paths and never seen a field of hay. And my gran says it was all psychological, the ivy.”

“Your gran sounds a very perceptive woman.”

“She is. My mother sang for Queen Mary, you know.”

“Sang?”

“In the village school. Queen Mary used to turn up there unexpected and sit at the back. She had a turned-up nose.”

“Oh. I never noticed that.”

“Yes. Look at the stamps. She was embarrassed by it, my gran thinks. She had never been thought a beauty. But she was a beauty, my gran says. And all that about being a kleptomaniac was wicked lies. And she never forgot a birthday.”

“That’s true.”

“And she fancied some of the subalterns. She liked them with a stammer, did you know that? My uncle had a stammer. He was one of her four motorbike bodyguards and she chose him for his stammer. She said, ‘I have a son like you.’ She meant the King.”

“D’you know, I never knew that,” said Filth. “I didn’t make the connection.”

“Won’t you go out now and sit in the sun? I’ll help you. My gran has a terrible leg. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was gangrene. What’s the matter? Have I upset you? Now then, you know the doctor said yours is but a bad sprain. You’ll be fit in a week. Shall I ask my gran to come up here? She’d love a talk.”

“Do you want to talk with my gran?” the girl asked the next day, bringing him a breakfast tray and no refusals. “It’d be a breath of life to her. Maybe she’d remember you.”

“I hardly remember myself.”

“She said there was one always reading. Law books. She got them for him, Queen Mary. And chocolate. He used to hold her wool for her. He’d been through it, she said. Very good-looking. Oh yes, and he had a stammer, She found him — now what was it? — very personable . That’s what we heard her tell her lady-in-waiting. ‘The Captain’s very personable, isn’t he?’ She took up very close to him after her son got killed, the Duke of Kent. He was nearest to her, that one, they said. She never cried though. She and this soldier — he was a junior Platoon Commander — I asked gran when I got home last night — this soldier used to sit with her by the hour. She even used to pass through the library when he was reading in there, not looking up. Deep in his books. He was invited to stay in the house you know. Dine with them all. The Duke and Duchess — and my, there were some sparks flying there — them being kicked upstairs in their own home and all the best rooms taken over by Queen Mary and her fifty servants.”

“This all sounds very credible.”

“He refused though, the young Captain. He said he had to be with his men in the billets in the stables and Queen Mary couldn’t but say he was right. I believe now and then she was poking about the stables too, searching out ivy. And maybe—” she had his tie straight now and his socks on and his polished shoes ready for him. “He was very good-looking, my gran said.” She thoughtfully looked Filth over. “And very young and nice.”

“I was young but far from nice,” said Filth. “I don’t think I’d better meet your gran.”

“I’d like a look round the stables, though,” he said, the next day. “When I’m walking again.”

“I can get you a wheelchair.”

“No. No thanks.”

“Queen Mary used to go round in a horse and cart to save petrol. No side to her. They used to put a couple of basket chairs in the cart and hoist her and the lady’s maid up into it and one of the bike boys shouted up, ‘You look as if you’re in a tumbril, Ma’am,’ and she said, ‘Well, it might come to that.’ So she can’t have been altogether no fun.”