Jane Gardam - Old Filth

They still sat on.

The dog stretched on the bed and yawned and jumped down, bent over and rested its head on Babs’s knobbly knee.

“We’ll say the General Confession,” said Tansy. “Together.”

They did, Filth remembering it being hammered into him by Sir.

Tansy then said, “Let us pray. Remember these Thy children, oh merciful Lord. Heal them and keep them in Thine everlasting arms.”

His house was clean and polished, his garden neat. A note on the kitchen table said, Butter, cheese, milk in fridge. Eggs. Bread in crock. Bacon, etc. Welcome home. Kate . Through the windows, looking towards the Downs, he saw movement in his apple tree and a next-door child dropped out of it, eating fruit, and wandered nonchalantly over the lawn as if he owned it. The hedge must have a hole in it, he thought. It might as well stay. His mail had been neatly stacked on his desk, the fire laid ready to light. She’d stuck some shop flowers in a vase.

It had been a good drive home. Most enjoyable. Christmas coming.

Very pleasant seeing poor Babs again. And the parson chap. Holiday full of events. And tomorrow he must see the doctor.

His ankle was very much better, and he had no trace of trouble with his heart — or digestion. All that was the matter with him now was the onset of winter aches and pains. His arthritis was remarkably mild for his age, they always said, especially considering the age of his damp old house.

“I am about to make another journey,” he said the next day after his visit to the surgery in Shaftesbury. “Good morning, Mrs. Kate. How very good to see you. Thank you for the provisions. The house looks very well. I’ve brought you a keepsake from Gloucester. Where’s Garbutt?”

“Garbutt,” he said. “Good morning. Did I imagine it? Yes, of course I did. You didn’t by any chance visit me in wherever it was I’ve been? I had some sort of dream. There were some very odd doctors. They thought I’d had a heart attack. Perfect nonsense.”

“Thanks for the postcard,” said Garbutt.

“Now then, you haven’t got rid of me yet, either of you. I’ve made a decision. I’m flying to the East for the New Year.”

“You’d never get the Insurance,” said Kate.

“You’ve not flown in years. It’s knees on your nose now,” said Garbutt.

“I shall be flying First. I always did. I always shall. I can afford it. Judge Veneering left me his set of Law Reports and I shall sell them for six thousand pounds.”

“You won’t get Insurance.”

“You can’t go alone.”

The two of them were closing on him like assassins.

“I have never felt so well. My little holiday has set me right. The doctor says that there is no need for the more lethal injections against diseases now. And I have the right clothes already in my wardrobe. No shopping.”

They muttered off, to confer.

“Flying’s not safe any more,” said Kate. “Not since the Twin Towers. New Year’s just the time for the next attack. And you’ll be flying to a Muslim country, like as not.”

He paid no attention but asked Garbutt if he would go up in the roof and look for the suitcase he and Lady Feathers had brought back from Bangladesh on their last trip.

Kate said, “Madeira’s nice. Why not settle for nearer?”

“No. Bangladesh. I must see Bangladesh — or maybe Lanka again. And I might just continue. On into Malaysia, then up to Borneo. Kotakinakulu. Where I was born.”

“Then I despair,” said Garbutt.

“Bangladesh is where the brasses come from.”

He had given Kate the beaten copper bowls of his heyday, after Betty died, to stop her from cleaning them twice a week at his expense.

She said, “If I understand the nine-o’clock news, Bangladesh is the place half the time under water and no good for arthritis. I’m sorry, but that doctor’s notorious. He’s never been beyond the golf course. He’s never even been to Grand Canary where we go — nice and near and no chance of Economy-class thrombosis.”

“He’s told you. He’s not going Economy-class,” said Garbutt. “He says it’s full of children joining their families out East for the school holidays. Makes him angry. Says in his day it took six weeks and you went once in five years. Says they’re all spoilt now, and playing music in their ears.”

“It’s the luggage that really bothers me,” said Garbutt.

The suitcase was immense. He got it out of the roof like a difficult birth. Its label called it a Revelation.

“Revelation was once the very best luggage,” said Filth. “They were ‘revelations’ because they expanded.”

“They were them heavy things that went out with porters,” said Kate. “Can’t we get you one borrowed? From that Chloe?”

“Absolutely not,” said Filth.

“No way,” said Garbutt.

“Get something on wheels with a handle, then,” she said; and “What’s this, there’s something written on it in brass studs?”

“Islam,” Filth said.

“Well that settles it. You can’t carry that. You’ll be thought a terrorist.”

“Islam was the name of a distinguished lawyer in Brunei. A friend. He gave me the suitcase to bring back our presents. We bought a great many — they have so little there. It was the least we could do. Buy and buy.”

“Let’s get it open then,” said Garbutt.

Inside were lurid hessian table mats, cross-stitched sacking table cloths, wilting saris and some indestructible straw matting. There was also a heavy little bundle of amethysts. He had sometimes suspected Betty of light-hearted smuggling. He sent all the other stuff to a church sale and asked Garbutt to scrub the case and polish it. It came up a treat.

“You can tell Class, I’ll say that,” said Kate. “But I wish you’d reconsider, Sir Edward. We’re hardly over your last.”

He stared her out.

And so into the Revelation went Filth’s impeccable underwear; his singlets and what he still called his knickers; his yellow cotton socks from Harrods, twenty years old; some silk pyjamas; two light-weight suits and a dinner jacket (because one can never be quite sure where one will be invited). He added two sponge (antique phrase) bags, one for shaving things and bars of coal-tar soap, the other for his pills. Separate pills for use on the journey would go into his passport case. There was ample room in the Revelation for more.

“You could get all your things in here, too,” he called out to Betty over his shoulder — then felt a pang in the upper chest. He was doing it again. Talking to her. And as if she would ever have dreamed of sharing his suitcase! So strange that, since his extraordinary peregrination to the West Country, Betty was back in his life again. Brief pains, real pains of longing for her now. Guilty pains. He had been neglecting her memory. Memory and desire —I must keep track of them. Mustn’t lose hold.

On Christmas Day he attended church at ten. He preferred the eight o’clock in a silent church, heady with greenery and winter-scented flowers, but eight was getting early for him now. The ten o’clock was restless with children and everyone shaking hands with each other and the Vicar was called Lucy. Never mind. He prayed for Father Tansy, and for Babs and Claire. He prayed for the souls of Ma Didds and Sir and Oils and Miss Robertson and Auntie May. This set up other candidates. He prayed for Loss, of course, as he often did, and for Jack and for Pat Ingoldby as he did every day, and for poor old Isobel who’d turned out to be a lesbian all the time. So stupid of him. And most unpleasant. He should have guessed he could never be everything to her.

He prayed— what, will the line ne’er be done ? — for the nice girl and her grandmother, and for the aunts’ little maid Alice, and for Garbutt and Kate. He prayed for the souls of his father and mother. And then he prayed for Ada, the shadow who leaned to him over water which he now was not sure was a memory or the memory of a memory. He prayed for podgy Cumberledge who had come out strong as a lion. How unaccountable it all is. How various and wonderful. He kept on and on praying through the rest of the service. For Veneering, for that unattractive Barrister girl who’d had a baby she’d called after him, for. . He struggled hard against praying for Chloe and the souls of his aunts — but in the end, he managed it. He didn’t pray for Betty. He knew she didn’t need it.