Jane Gardam - Old Filth

The passage was bitterly cold. There were no carpets, no curtaining, a small spluttering heater. He sat before a splintered table where transcripts of a dispute stood two feet high, almost indecipherable blueprints concerning the installation of new water-closets throughout a bombed government building, his annotation of which went down at about a sixteenth of an inch per hour. Sir, his school, his college, Queen Mary, all pointed stern fingers at Eddie. Habit dictated. There had been black hours before. Diligence gets you through. Keep going. Oh God why?

Gloucestershire and Oxford kept breaking in on him. Christ Church meadow, the bells stumbling and tumbling, calling down the High. The wallflowers — the smell of the velvet wallflowers outside his set of rooms. The emptiness of his Quad, returning home at night. Hardly a soul about. Music from the open windows. And the spring there, and the politics and the friends. Too much work. Too much work to go to parties, even to attend the Union, meet any girls, too many men just up from school drinking themselves silly, schoolchildren who had missed the War. Leaving Oxford had surprised him by its finality.

The rain fell. In the far room with the door shut he heard the comatose, under-employed Head of Chambers fart and yawn. The fart was an elderly fart — lengthy, unmusical and resigned.

Eddie found that he was crying, and mopped his face. He thought he might as well go home for the day.

But, no. Better not. Another quarter-inch of notes. No point in going out in the rain. It was a longish walk to the Aldwych tube station and he had no macintosh. There were a couple of changes on his tube (everyone wheezing and smelling of no soap) to get back to his bed-sit in sleazy Notting Hill. Then out again for something to eat at an ABC café: sausage and mash, stewed apple and custard, keep within a shilling. There was still no sign of his inheritance. He’d been told it might take years to prove the death, let alone the Will. He was still unable to put his mind to the imagining of his father’s end. No friend of his father, no official notification from the Foreign Office. Eddie pushed down the guilt that he had made no enquiries. There had been no communication from the aunts. “I shall learn one day,” was all he allowed himself.

He must get a bike. Save the fares. He was earning a hundred pounds a year devilling for the absent Silk with the difficult wife. Three hundred a year in all, with the very odd Brief. He had one good suit, kept his shoes soled and heeled, washed his new-fangled nylon shirt every evening and hung it round the geyser in the communal bathroom at his lodgings, to dry for the morning. To keep up appearances before solicitors and clients. Not that there were any clients. Not for him. Not for years yet. Maybe never. Nobody knew him. Along the passage the old Silk farted again.

It had been nearly a year ago that Eddie, walking round the once-beautiful London squares one evening — without money there was nothing else to do, he was putting the hours in until bedtime — had thought of the building and engineering aspect of the Law. The War was over. One day — look at Germany — rebuilding of the ruins must surely occur in this country. Building disputes, he thought. There’ll be hundreds of them. Enquiring about, he had found a set of engineering Chambers that had been bombed and moved into this backwater of Lincoln’s Inn.

There was not even space for a Clerk’s room. This had had to be rented across a yard. The Senior Clerk, who looked like an unsuccessful butler and spent much time in rumination, left early after lunch for South Wimbledon. The clever Junior Clerk, Tom, hideously unemployed, worked like mad around the pubs at lunchtime among the Clerks of other Chambers, trying to get leads on coming Cases and plotting where he would move to next. He liked Eddie and was sorry for him. “I should pack it in, sir,” he said one day. “You’re worth better than this — First from Oxford. I can’t sell you here. Go to New Zealand.”

I might, thought Eddie today, looking through the door to the grander room and then beyond it out of the old, absent Silk’s window to the rain falling. Between the building and the Inn garden where stood a great tree which had survived other wars, a white Rolls-Royce was parked. He could see the chauffeur inside it in a green uniform. Not usual. Eddie sighed, and lifted the next pages of transcript off the pile.

The street door of the Chambers now banged open against the wall and feet came running towards Eddie’s alley. The Junior Clerk, macintosh flapping — he’d been waiting to go home — flung open his door and shouted, “Come on, sir. Quick. Quick, sir! Get up. Leave those papers. Get into that front room. Behind the desk. You’ve got a client.”

“Client?”

“New solicitor. Get the dust off those sets of papers. Smarten your clothing. Where’s that classy clothes-brush of yours? Here. I’ll put his wife’s photo out of sight. Wrong image. You’re young and free to travel. I think you’re on the move.”

“Move?”

“I’ve got you a Brief. It’s a big one. Four hundred on the Brief and forty a day. Likely to last two weeks.”

“Whoever—?”

“Don’t ask me. It’s Hong Kong. It’s a Chinese dwarf.”

“You’ve gone insane, Tom. It’s a hoax.”

“Turned up in that Rolls. I’ve had him sitting in the Clerk’s room twenty minutes. I’ll bring him over.”

“wait!”

“Wait? Wait? Look, it’s a pipeline failure in Hong Kong. You’re on your way.”

“A Chinese dwarf ?”

“Come back. Where you going, sir? I bring him over here to you, you don’t go running after him.”

“Where is he now?” Eddie shouted from the courtyard.

“He’s still in the Clerks’ room. I told him I was coming to see if you were free. I bring him to you. Gravitas, sir .”

But Eddie was gone, over the courtyard, under the lime tree, running in the rain. The chauffeur in the Rolls turned to look, raising an eyebrow.

Eddie ran into the Clerks’ room, where Albert Loss was seated on the sagging purple sofa playing Patience.

“ Coleridge !”

“Spot the lady. Kill the ace of spades.”

“ Coleridge ! God in heaven, Coleridge. But you’re dead. The Japanese killed you.”

“Colombo didn’t fall. You are an amnesiac. There were initial raids. And then they left us alone. You should have stayed. I found my uncle. Several of them. All attorneys. And so I became one too.”

“This is the most wonderful. . How ever did you find me?”

“Law Lists, my dear old chum. Top of the Law Lists. Thanks to me. I directed you, you will remember, towards the Law. And now I am Briefing you. My practice is largely in Hong Kong. I hope you have no serious family ties?”

“Not a tie. Not a thread. Not a cobweb— Coleridge !”

“Good. Then you can fly to Hong Kong next week? First class, of course. We must not lose face before the clients. We’ll put you up in the Peninsular.”

“I’ll have to read the papers.”

“Nonsense, Fevvers. You’ll do it all in your head. On the plane. Open-and-shut Case, and I taught you Poker. You can think. I’m flying back myself tomorrow.”

“This is a dream. You’re exactly the same. You haven’t aged. By the way, what happened to my watch?”

“Ah, that had to be sacrificed in the avuncular search. But you have aged, Fevvers. You have been aged by your Wartime experiences, no doubt?”

“You could say that. Coleridge, come on! Let’s go out. Where are you staying?”

“The Dorchester, of course. But there is no time for social punishment. I fly tomorrow and I must see my builders. I’m buying a house in the Nash Terraces of Regent’s Park. All in ruins. Practically free at present. If you want it to rent, after the pipeline, it’s yours. By the way, were you met?”