Jane Gardam - Old Filth

“I shared a room with him,” said Filth, eventually. “He smelled and I hated him. He slept on the floor to save the sheets, but then he’d wet his pyjamas. He used to take them off and lie on the boards, but then she’d beat him a second time for removing his pyjamas. We had to watch.”

“How long did it last?”

“Years,” said Babs. “They merged, the years. It seemed our whole lives. We forgot there had been anything different. Anything before.”

“Not altogether,” said Filth. “Claire — by the way, she never hurt Claire — Claire was younger and very pretty and she used to sit her on her knee and comb her hair. Before Pa Didds went off into hospital and died, he used to be nice to me and Babs. There were several good moments.”

“He liked you,” said Babs. “Took you for walks. He never took me for walks. I used to sing hymns very, very loud. She hated my singing. She bandaged my mouth.”

“And the end of the story?” asked the priest.

“Claire decided on the end of the story one day while we were gathering the hens’ eggs in the hen-house. It was our job. We liked it — all the fluster and the commotion and the rooster crowing. It was a day when Cumberledge had been flogged and flung back to his bed and was crying again. It was almost as if Ma Didds loved Cumberledge in some horrible cruel way, especially after Pa Didds died. As if she hated herself. She used to sit rocking herself and holding her stomach after we’d all gone to bed. We peeped over the stairs and saw her. As if she had a baby inside her.”

“She shut me in cupboards,” said Filth. “I began to stammer even worse than I did already. Then she would shout at me to answer her politely, and when I couldn’t get any words out she’d bang my face against the wall or box my ears, and shout at me again to answer her.”

“She fed us well,” said Babs. “Great plates of food. Big stews and home-made bread. ‘You should see the food they eat,’ she told them at the chapel. ‘Fat as pigs.’ She stuffed us. Except for Claire. Claire left half of hers and smiled at Ma Didds like an angel. She never punished Claire.”

“Claire is the cleverest of us,” said Babs.

“And so—?” said Tansy.

“And so, this evening in the hen-house, Cumberledge indoors, inarticulate as ever, Claire, she was only six, said, ‘I think we should kill her.’”

“We all three knew how to do it. We’d had ayahs. And Eddie had his amah.”

“I used to watch her and the whole village in the compound,” said Filth. “They would kill a cockerel as a sacrifice and then they’d beat a drum. The incantations went on for hours. They burnt things that belonged to the one they wanted dead. Hair. A button. And feathers from the cockerel. Then the person died.”

“You believed it?”

“Oh yes. It was true. It happened. Always.”

“I knew how to kill a cockerel,” said Filth. “Ada could do it. I used to watch. But when I tried to catch Ma Didds’s rooster, it was too strong for me, so I caught a hen and killed it instead. It’s very easy. Ada used to tie the legs together and then break the neck by twirling it hard, upside down, round and round, in the dry mud. I did it on the floor of the hen-house. Ma Didds was at chapel. We were always alone on Sunday nights. I cut off its head with the bread knife and took it inside. Claire had taken some of Ma Didds’s hair out of her comb. We took the matches and lit the hair and the hen’s head in the hearth, and Babs sang.”

“I sang There’s a friend for little children ,” said Babs, “ Above the bright blue sky , and Eddie banged saucepan lids together. We hadn’t expected the hen’s head to smell so bad or to be so difficult to burn. Then we heard her coming and we all ran upstairs.”

“We’d forgotten to shut the hen-house door,” said Filth, “and that was the first thing she saw, and one or two hens roosting on the roof. She came thundering in and took up a cane and then she smelt the feathers. She shouted, ‘Cumberledge!’ and started up the stairs. When she went upstairs, she always had to hold her stomach up. It hung down. It was repulsive. So she came up the stairs holding her stomach in one hand, and her other arm raised holding the cane. ‘This time I’ll break you, Cumberledge!’

“But at the top,” said Babs, when Filth could not continue, “Eddie stepped forward from the room he shared with Cumberledge. Claire and I had come out of our room and were standing near. Cumberledge did not move from under his bed. He didn’t see it. But we saw. We saw Eddie catch hold of her wrist, the wrist holding the cane high. He was above her on the stairs and taller than her already. And he just stood there, holding her wrist above her head. And she said, ‘Let go my wrist. I am going to see to Cumberledge.’ And she had to clutch her stomach with her other hand.”

“And so,” said Filth, “I let go of her very suddenly so that she fell backwards down the stairs. And lay still at the bottom of them. Before she lay still, there was a — crack. Like a snapped tree.”

“I ran to clear up the burnt head,” said Babs, “and Eddie went to look after Cumberledge. Claire put on her coat and went down to the village to get help. But she was a very long time because it was a dark night and she got lost. She’s always hated the dark. So Teddy and I got into bed together to be close. We couldn’t make Cumberledge get in with us. In the end Teddy and I went to sleep and we only woke up when they were clearing Ma Didds away. She wasn’t dead, as it turned out, but she died the next day. They had to do an emergency operation on her for cancer of the stomach. That’s what she died of, they said. She’d have died in a few days, anyway.”

“ What ?” said Filth. “Nobody ever told me that.”

“And the other boy? Cumberledge?”

“Cumberledge’s so-called guardians took him away at once. There was a scandal about his condition and he vanished from us. We were kept down in the village until Auntie May could come, and Eddie’s Sir.”

“Were questions asked?”

“So far as I know, none. There had been rumours for a long time. But Welsh villages stick together against foreigners, and we were all very foreign children there. Wales was more secretive in those days and the language defeated us. But nobody suggested anything criminal about us.”

“Nobody,” said Babs. “Claire even got some presents. Everyone always loves Claire.”

In this expensive and benign hotel in the English late autumn light, they sat, all three, in silence.

“You have come to me asking for absolution?” asked Father Tansy. “You repent?”

Eddie Feathers, Old Filth, the judge, Fevvers, a Master of the Inner Temple, Teddy — pillar of justice, arbitrator of truth said nothing.

“No,” he said at last. “I don’t. I can’t.”

“No, I don’t either,” said Babs. “And I know Claire doesn’t.”

“Did Cumberledge survive? Is he sane?”

“Very much so,” said Filth. “I next met him in the dark in Oxford. During the War when I was lost in the snow. I didn’t realise who it was. Between eight and eighteen we all change utterly. Yet years later I somehow realised. He was coming out of a blacked-out church. He had a calmness and a kindness. He was Army. He wrote when Betty died. His essence was unharmed.”

“He became a grandee,” said Babs. “He’s retired to Cambridge. A grandee.”

“There are those who are given Grace,” said Tansy. “But you yourself wanted to make some sort of confession, Sir Edward?”

“I wanted to express my pity,” said Filth. “My pity for her. For Ma Didds. I’ve tried hundreds of Cases, many more wicked than anything here. Some I still cannot bear to think about. I don’t mean I cannot bear to think about my judgements — you have to be thick-skinned about that — I cannot bear to think about the cruelty at the core of this foul world. Or the vengeance dormant even in children. All there, ready, waiting for use. Without love. Cumberledge was given Grace. That’s all I can say. We were not.”