Jane Gardam - Old Filth

He tore the letter up.

I am old at last, he thought. I should be cold too. But I am casting off the coldness of youth and putting on the maudlin armour of dotage. I am not a religious man. Claire does not shock me, as she would most people. Why do I want a priest? Rites? Ceremonies? I despise myself. It’s all superstition. Yet I know that I must tell someone that when I was eight years old I killed a woman in cold blood.

The West wind of the equinox bashed suddenly against the conservatory glass of the hotel lounge where Filth sat, now alone. Then the wind stopped and he slept. In his sleep he heard the steady beating of a drum, and started awake, thinking that it was his heart. They helped him back to his bedroom where the grandmother’s asters shone on the window-sill.

“I am so undeservedly lucky,” he said to the chambermaid later, beginning the repair of his damaged image. (Claire’s terrifying letter.) He smiled his lovely smile.

“Lucky in material things anyway,” he said when he was alone again, curtains closed, lying in the sweet dark. “Their kindness is only because they’ve found out that I’m rich. There’ll be no trouble with the bill.” Considering other people’s pragmatism, he found that Claire’s beastly letter receded.

But, dropping into sleep, a great face flooded across his dream landscape, filled the screen of his sleeping consciousness, loomed at him — disappeared. “Go away, Veneering,” Filth shouted after it. “I’m not ready to talk. Not yet.”

A few days later, Father Tansy turned up at the delectable hotel, with a woman in a wavy nylon skirt and grey nun’s headgear who turned out to be Babs.

Filth was in bed again. He had been advised to stay there for a day or two and not trouble himself with visitors, and his curtains were pulled across the daylight when the manager of the hotel knocked and eventually put his head around his door, and switched on the light, and Babs and the priest beheld the catafalque figure of Filth under the sheet, his ivory nose pointed upwards, the nose of a very old man.

“Perhaps not long?” said the manager. “Don’t stay too long.” Babs said she would go out now and take her dog for a walk.

Then Father Tansy shut the door behind him, opened the curtains and switched off the light. He picked up the bedside phone and ordered room-service luncheon in an hour’s time. Then he ran round the bedroom removing drooping asters and opening all the windows. He found Filth’s dressing-gown and manoeuvred him into it, heaved the old bones off the bed, slid the ivory fans of Filth’s feet into his Harrods leather bedroomslippers, sat Filth on an upright chair and set a table in front of him.

“Have I shaved?” asked Filth. “Oh dear, I do hope so.”

“Never mind that,” said Tansy. “Wake up. You have sent for me at last. I have been waiting patiently.”

“You have a great idea of your own importance,” said Filth. “I remember you, awash in that great marble church.”

“Not my own importance,” said Tansy. “I follow Another’s importance. I try to follow the personality of Christ, and am directed by it.”

“I don’t believe in all that,” said Filth. “But there’s something, somewhere, that’s urging me to talk to a — well, I suppose, to a priest. You are the only priest I know. How you got here, I don’t know. What I’m doing here, I don’t know. I’ve been dreaming lately. About Queen Mary.”

“Queen Mary?”

“Yes. And my father. And a — murder. And other loose ends.”

Father Tansy waited with bright eyes, like a squirrel. “Carry on.”

“I suppose it’s going to be a confession,” said Filth. “I’m glad you’re not hidden in one of those boxes. I’m not up to that.”

“I know.”

“I can’t start until Babs comes back. She’s part of it. And I’ve been seriously ill.”

“Sir Edward, you can begin by telling me what’s the matter with you. And I don’t want to hear about prawns and strained ligaments.”

After a time Filth said, “All my life, Tansy, from my early childhood, I have been left, or dumped, or separated by death, from everyone I loved or who cared for me. I want to know why.”

“You are a hero in your profession, Sir Edward.”

“That’s an utterly different matter. And in fact I don’t believe you. Nobody remembers me now at the Bar. My work is quite forgotten. I was once famous for some Pollution Law. All out-of-date now. I want to tell you something. When my Chambers were moved to a newly built office block, like a government department, costing millions which by then we could all afford — there were thirty-six members of Chambers when I decided to go permanently to Hong Kong — the old Clerk, who was retiring, took me down into the basement under the Elizabethan building where I began, and there was a sea of Briefs there, three feet deep, bundled up with pink tape. ‘We don’t know what to do with it,’ he said. ‘We’ve decided to get a firm in to throw it on a dump.’ That was years of my life. Years and years.”

“It’s not often,” said the priest, “made as clear to us as that. I see it in my empty pews.”

“It has all been void. I am old, forgotten and dying alone. My last friend, Veneering, has died. I miss him but I never quite trusted him. My most valuable friend was a card-sharp and my wife hated him though he made our fortunes at the Far Eastern Bar. He was killed on 9/11. A passenger in one of the planes. Still playing cards, I imagine. Hadn’t heard from him for years.”

Babs came back in and made the dog lie down. It immediately climbed on Filth’s bed and lay looking across at him as if he’d seen him somewhere before.

“The point is,” said Filth, seated at his table, recovering a little of his former authority when addressing the Court, “the point is, I have begun to wonder whether my life of loneliness — always basically I have felt quite alone — is because of what I did when I was eight years old, living with Babs and Claire in Wales, fostered by a woman called Mrs. Didds.”

Babs scratched her leg in its thick grey stocking and looked out of the window. “Go on then, Teddy,” she said. “Spit it out.”

Father Tansy, no trace now of the prancing comic of his parish church, his Office completely dominating him, sat still, and nodded once.

When Filth was obviously unable to begin, Babs said, “Oh, I’ll do it, then.”

There was a silence.

“She hurt us,” Babs said. “She had that sort of smiling face, plump and round, that when you look closer is cruel. Nobody had noticed. Probably, when she first fostered children she was different. Pa Didds was a nice old man but he just sat about. Then he died. They’d had no children of their own. By the time the three of us arrived, she’d begun to hate children, but she had to keep on fostering because there was nothing else. They went on sending her children. From all over the Empire. When the children complained. . Most never did, they thought she was normal. Anyway the children couldn’t complain until they’d got away, somewhere else. And there wasn’t anywhere else. We were all sent to her for four or five years. You know, longer than we’d been alive . The complaining ones were thought to be cowards. We had to copy the Spartans in those days. You should have seen the illustrations in children’s books of the Raj then. Pictures of children beating each other with canes at school. The prefectorial system. Now it would be thought porn. It was Cumberledge, of course, she hated most.”

“He was there when we arrived,” said Filth. “In bed. Not speaking. He was pale and fat and sobbing and he didn’t come down to tea. ‘What’s the matter with the other boy?’ Babs asked. ‘He’s wet his bed again,’ Ma Didds said, and she laid one of her long whips over the table. ‘And he’ll have to wash his own sheets.’”