Jane Gardam - Old Filth

“You are like a jungle creature,” he said. “In an undiscovered country.”

“Eddie,” she said at last, winding herself into the sheets, “I have something very important to say. How much time have we got? When’s your train?”

“Five-fifteen.”

“It’s nearly five o’clock already.”

He fled the bed, he ran for the stairs, he limped and hopped into scattered garments, he yelled with terror.

She laughed and laughed.

He found one shoe, but the other was gone.

“This will finish me,” he said. “This will be the end of the Army for me.”

She howled with laughter from the bedroom; came laughing down the stairs wrapped in the sheet, lighting a new cigarette.

“Don’t laugh at me.”

“I am in love with you, Eddie.”

“I have a bad reputation already. With my Colonel. And I am in charge of Queen Mary. Oh God — there’s my shoe!” He was in his jacket, in his British warm, had found his cap as she wrapped herself around him.

“Eddie, Eddie. You look still the boy in the trees at High House.”

“What time is it? Oh God. I’ve fifteen minutes. There won’t be a taxi.”

But there was a taxi. God has sent me a taxi, he thought. It was standing outside the door. “Paddington,” he said. “In ten minutes. I’ll give you ten pounds.” He did not look back to see whether she was watching.

“Ten pounds, sir.”

“Thank you. Thank you very much.” (It’s only what I’d have spent at the Savoy. God but I’m hungry.)

“Yes. Platform one. Where’s the bit of carpet? Is it gone?”

It was there. And word had gone round. Somehow a crowd had gathered beside the Royal coach and the top of the toque with its doves’ feathers could be seen passing between the clapping avenue of loyal subjects. The lady-in-waiting was invisible, a small woman to begin with, and no doubt weighted down now with more wool. The bodyguards were already on the train. Eddie gave a brief nod to the guard and jumped into his private cabin, slammed the door and fell on the banquette. I’ll go along in a minute. Just get my breath.

The train began to steam slowly, powerfully, inexorably away from London.

Go along in a minute, he thought and fell asleep.

He woke to a crash and shriek of brakes. The whole train jolted, shuddered and stopped. Outside it was now dark and he jumped from his long blue velvet couch and made for the corridor, to meet one of the bodyguards coming to find him.

“Emergency, sir. Probably unexploded bomb on the line. Queen Mary’s sent for you.”

The lady-in-waiting was trembling. From outside came a series of shouts. The train began to shunt backwards, squealing and complaining.

“It’s the Invasion,” said the lady-in-waiting.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Margaret,” said the Queen. “Eddie, take her along to your compartment and find her an aspirin. She needs a rest. Then come back again and we can talk. I want to hear every single thing you’ve done today.”

“So tiresome ,” she said an hour later. “The carriage so dark. These blue spot-lights are very clever but they’re just not bright enough to read by.” She fell silent. “But it’s nice to look out at the moonlight.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” (And he realised she was afraid. He’d heard that though she never showed it by a tremor she was terrified of kidnap.)

“And you did no more than that, Captain Feathers?” (Captain Feathers? What’s this?) “No more than go about in taxis? You didn’t even go to the Savoy for luncheon as you’d so wished?”

“I’m afraid not. I found London — overwhelming. Kensington seemed quite like an unknown vil-vill-vill-village.”

“A village ? How very odd. I was born there. In Kensington Palace. I never felt it a village.”

“I — couldn’t find Kensington Palace.”

“Oh dear,” she said.

The train at last jerked forward, stopped, jerked again and then began to steam sweetly along towards the West.

“That is a pity,” said Her Majesty. “By the way” (looking out at the moonlight) “whatever has become of your tie?”

On the way home from their walk about the meadows around Badminton House, Old Filth asked the girl and her grandmother if they would stop the wheelchair at the post office for him to buy postcards. “No, no,” he said. “Let me get out and walk. Do me good,” and he hopped into the shop and back again, carrying three postcards of the village, all ready and stamped. He was able to hop around the car, and hold open the door for the grandmother as the girl put the folding chair back in the boot.

“So extremely kind of you,” he said. “A splendid afternoon.” Sitting by the reception desk he thought he would write the postcards at once though it was too late for the post, for a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand had gathered around the recollection of his departure from home. He would write to Mrs.-er — to Kate —and to Garbutt. Perhaps he would write to lacy Chloe, too, and make her day.

Then he found that he had never had Mrs.-er’s (Kate’s) address. It was somewhere in the next village. It would be offensive to send it c/o Garbutt, for she had preceded Garbutt in his employment by years. He addressed one card to Garbutt at the house down the hill from his own, well known to him. Peep o’Day. Easy to remember. So was Chloe’s: The Manor House, Privilege Lane. On Garbutt’s card he wrote, “Please say I’m sorry to Kate.”

He had one card left over now and wrote it to Claire, mentioning that he had sprained something but was otherwise having a very good holiday by himself in Gloucestershire at this beautiful hotel. He was exalted. His optimistic self, he felt, was just around the corner.

But in the early hours of the next morning he woke with a chilling certainty that all was not well. He switched on his bedside lamp, hopped from the bed, opened a window upon the night. He shivered, and then flushed and sweated. He went for a pee, then drank a glass of water, hopped back, hot and cold by turns, clambered between the sheets. He knew that he was ill.

He knew that he was very ill. He had no idea what it was, but he knew that he was not in control. He lay and waited.

He stretched his hand out to the bedside table drawer and felt about for the never-failing Gideon’s Bible that had seen him through many a sleepless hotel night during his legal life. In skyscrapers in Hong Kong, in the Shangri-la in Singapore, the dear old Intercon in Dacca. Lonely places, until he’d been married and able to take Betty along with him. He thought he needed a Gospel tonight, and turned up one of Christ’s dingdongs with the lawyers.

He wondered, the pages shaking as he turned them, why Christ had so hated lawyers when He’d have been such a brilliant one Himself. Christ, when you considered it, was simply putting a Case. He may well have been enjoying the lawyers’ examinations of him. Pilate’s was his most respectable interrogation. Pilate had not been a lawyer, but another excellent lawyer manqué. Pilate and Christ had understood each other.

“We still use a little Roman Law, here,” he told Christ tonight. “The Law can always do with a going-over as you pointed out then. Execution should be entirely out. Execution leads only to victory for the corpse. You proved that,” he informed the Holy Ghost.

He dreamed for a little, drifted, read the Sermon on the Mount, remembered hearing that no child nowadays has heard of the Sermon on the Mount and most guess it is a book or a film. He thought benevolently how he should like to be upon another Bench listening to Christ going for the defence in a Case to do with, say, a land-reclamation.

A fist grabbed him in the chest and pain shot through him. He could not breathe. He stretched for the bell and kept his right hand on it as the pain sank down, then surged up again. It’s the Hand of God, he thought. And nobody but God knows where the hell I am.