Jane Gardam - Old Filth

Garbutt’s house was empty when the phone began to ring the next morning. He had gone to Privilege Road to help the tedious Chloe with her asparagus bed and they were both down in the garden when her phone began to ring, too.

“I’ll leave it,” she said. “It won’t be anything.”

But it rang on.

She caught it as the other end was about to put it down.

“I’m very sorry to hear it,” she said. “Yes. He’s a neighbour but not a close friend. No — I don’t think there are any relations. Well, he’s over eighty. He’s never had anything wrong with him in his life. The time comes. He’s not very popular here in the village, I’m afraid. He treats his servants badly. Very difficult for you. I think there are some cousins in Essex. Oh, I see, you’ve tried them. Well, I can’t help you. Goodbye.”

“Sir Edward’s had a heart attack,” she said, returning to the asparagus bed. “I said last week it was blood-pressure, the way he was behaving.”

“What? Where?” said Garbutt.

“Well, around his heart.”

“Where was the call from?”

“I didn’t ask.”

Garbutt blundered her out of the way, ran through her French doors and across her pastel Chinese carpet, dialled 1471, then pressed three.

“He’s in hospital,” said the hotel. “The ambulance came very quickly. We were surprised. He’d been so much better. He’d been out in the afternoon and eaten an excellent dinner.”

“Had he been ill already, then?”

“Yes, he arrived with a sprained ankle. Do you want the name of the hospital? I hope you will excuse us asking but will there be funds to pay his account?”

“Funds have never been a trouble to him.”

“Thank you. We were beginning to grow very fond of him.”

“People do,” said Garbutt, and phoned Kate, and then his wife.

Garbutt found Filth, looped up to drips and scans, trying to shut out the quack of the television sets and the clatter of the public ward where male and female lay alongside each other in various stages of ill health. Like Pompeii.

It was an old hospital. The windows were too high to see anything except the wires and concrete of unexciting buildings and the sky. The light was not the pearly light of yesterday in the meadows of Badminton, which Filth was trying to remember and decide when and where it had been and whom he had been with. Memory, he thought. Memory. My memory has always been so reliable. Perhaps too reliable. It has never spared me. Memory and desire , he thought. Who said that? Without memory and desire life is pointless ? I long ago lost any sort of desire. Now memory.

Suddenly he knew that this was what had been the matter with him for years. He had lost desire. Not sexual desire, that had been a poor part of his nature always. He had been furtive about the poverty of his sexual past. Dear Betty — she had been very undemanding. He had never told her about the buttermilk business and had skimmed over Isobel Ingoldby. Whatever would the young make of him today? It seemed they were all like rabbits and started haphazardly as soon as they reached double figures. He found them repellent.

And homosexuals repellent, if he were honest. And divorce repellent. Blacks — here he was disturbed by a cluster of different coloured people surrounding his bed. These are not the black people of the Empire, he thought, and then realised that that was exactly what most of them were. “Any of you chaps Malays?” he asked. “Malaya’s my country. Malaysia now, of course. And Ceylon’s Sri Lanka, Lanka’s what my friend Loss called it, and he should know. It was full of his uncles. That’s what he said before he went down the trough. Bombed by the bloody Japanese, I expect. Oh, sorry.” The lead figure in the performance around his bed was Japanese. “Didn’t realise. It’s your West Country accent.”

“OK, grandpa,” said the Japanese. “Take it easy.”

Filth’s days passed. Various bits of equipment were detached from him. Once he thought that Garbutt was sitting at the end of the bed and gave a feeble wave. “Very sorry about this. How’s Mrs.-er? Very sorry to have upset Mrs.-er. Feeling better. I’d like to see a priest, though.” Then he slept, and woke in the night trying to ring a bell for a priest.

“It’s not Sunday,” said a nurse. “Or are you a Catholic? You’re getting better. Talk to them in the morning. Go to sleep, old gramps. Think positive.”

Times have been worse than this, he thought. Much worse.

It’s just there’s no chance of many more of them, of times of any sort, now. That’s absolutely rationally true, a serious, even beautiful equation. Life ends. You’re tired of it anyway. No memory. No desire. Yet you don’t want it to be over. Not quite yet.

Bloody memory.

“I was very happy round here, you know, in the War,” he said to a passing Sikh. “I was a friend of Queen Mary. She remembered my birthday. She sent me chocolate.”

“Who’s Queen Mary?” asked the Sikh in an Estuary accent. “The Queen Mum?”

“While I lived here in Gloucestershire,” said drowsing Filth, “I rather buried my head.”

“Bury it now,” said the Sikh, “and get to sleep.”

“Before I go,” said Filth, “I really do want to see a priest.”

But when they found him a priest next day, he was feeling much better, was loosed from his bonds, was sent to a terrible place to wash, was given cornflakes and a type of meat which smelled of onions and was laced with a fluid called “brown sauce,” and was told that he would later on be going home.

Moreover, the priest, when he arrived, was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and Filth did not believe in him. He would have preferred a female to this one, and that was saying something. His confession would have to be postponed. He sat and read the Daily Telegraph in a small, contained cubicle, his carrier bag at his feet. He sat there all morning, and at some point dozed off, thinking of other occasions in his life of total reversion, of failure.

After six months he had been posted away from Badminton. The War had changed. We were now on the winning side and there was a new jauntiness. Queen Mary’s staff unpacked her three suitcases in the attics and he was sent to the War Office on the mistaken premise that he was a linguist and well-connected. He experienced the Mall on VE Day and was released to Oxford much more quickly than his War record deserved. He took a First in Law after only two years and was called to the Bar and set about the much harder matter of finding a seat in somebody’s Chambers.

It was the winter still talked of, half a century on: 1947.

Memory and desire , he thought.

The January rain of 1947 slopped down upon dilapidated Lincoln’s Inn Fields, puckering the stagnant surfaces of the static-water tanks implanted in its grass. Eddie Feathers observed it from the passage in a small set of undistinguished Chambers in New Square. He kept the door open between the passage and the Senior Barrister’s empty room on the front of the building, otherwise he had no view except the dustbins at the back. On days like this and on days of smog which were getting more frequent though coal was rationed to a bag a week, he could look through the door to what he might look forward to if the old fellow stopped coming in altogether. A good old room with magnificent carved Elizabethan fireplace and a large portrait of the Silk’s unhappy-looking wife: the sort of wartime bridal face that wished it had waited.

In an adjoining, equally historic, equally dusty room but lacking an uxorial photograph sat the only other member of Chambers, usually asleep. These rooms had been built as legal Chambers hundreds of years ago and had housed a multitude of lawyers from before the Commonwealth. Wigs in these rooms had been worn naturally, like hats. Then even hats around Chambers had gone — bowler hats had also just about disappeared by 1947, though Eddie Feathers had bought one for five excessive pounds, and it hung, laughably, on a hook inside the Chambers’ street door.