Old Filth

by Jane Gardam

  “I suppose it has to be, for washing the carpets,” said Eddie. “But what about all the dyes?”

  “Oh, I’ve simply no idea.”

  “Teddy” they called him, or “My dear chap” (the Colonel). Pat called him “Fevvers,” as at school, but otherwise often ignored him. He was different at home and went off on his own. He sometimes sulked.

  “He has these wretched black moods,” said Mrs. Ingoldby, shelling peas under a beech tree. “Does it happen at school?”

  “Yes. Sometimes. It does, actually.”

  “D’you know what causes them? He was such a sunny little boy. Of course he is so clever, it’s such a pity. The rest of us are nothing much. I keep thinking it’s my fault. One’s mother becomes disappointing in puberty, don’t you think? I suppose he’ll just have to bear it.”

  Eddie wondered what puberty was.

  “I suppose it’s just this tiresome sex business coming on. Not, thank goodness, homo-sex for either of you.”

  “No,” said Eddie. “We get too much about it from Sir.”

  “Ah, Sir. And poor Mr. Smith.”

  “Yes,” said Eddie. “And the Mr. Smiths are always changing and Sir broken-hearted and we have to take him up Striding Edge and get his spirits re-started.” Eddie had come some distance since the motor ride from North Wales.

  “Your mother must feel so far from you, across the world.”

  “Oh no, she’s dead. She died having me. I never knew her.”

  “And your poor father, all alone still?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I’m sure he loves you.”

  Eddie said nothing. The idea was novel. Bumble bees drowsed in the lavender bushes.

  “My parents didn’t love me at all,” said Mrs. Ingoldby. “They were Indian Army. My mother couldn’t wait to get rid of me to England. She’d lost several of us. Such pitiful rows of little graves in the Punjab and rows of mothers, too. But she really wanted just to ship me off. I’m very grateful. I went to a marvellous woman and there was a group of us. We completely forgot our parents. My mother ran off with someone—they did, you know. Or took to drink. Not enough to do. They used to give orders to the Indian servants like soldiers—very unbecoming. Utterly loyal to England of course. Then my father lost all his money. He was rather pathetic, I suppose.”

  “D-d-did he come to see you? In England?”

  “Oh, I suppose so. Yes. I went to live with his sister, my Aunt Rose, when I grew up. It was very dull but I had nice clothes and she was very rich. I was never allowed to be ill. She was what is known as a Christian Scientist. Influenza in 1919 was tiresome. Everyone was dying. When my father turned up one day, a footman answered the morning-room door if you please (Aunt Rose had never opened a door in her life), and she just said, ‘Oh, there you are, Gaspard. You must be tired. Here is your little girl.’ D’you know, he burst into tears and fled. I can’t think why. Oh, how lucky I was to meet the Colonel.”

  Walking across the fields with Pat, Eddie made about the only comment on anyone’s life he had ever made.

  “Your mother seems to feel the same about everybody. Why is she always happy?”

  “God—I don’t know.”

  “She’s not bitter at all. Nobody liked her. Her parents sound awful if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “You’ve had Aunt Rose and the footman? They were all barmy, if you ask me. Raj loonies.”

  “She seems to feel—well, to like everybody, though.”

  “Oh, no, she doesn’t. They were brought up like that. Most of them learned never to like anyone, ever, their whole lives. But they didn’t moan because they had this safety net. The Empire. Wherever you went you wore the Crown, and wherever you went you could find your own kind. A club. There are still thousands round the world thinking they own it. It’s vaguely mixed up with Christian duty. Even now. Even here, at Home. Every house of our sort you go into, Liverpool to the Isle of Wight—there’s big game on the wall and tiger skins on the floor and tables made of Benares brass trays and a photograph of the Great Durbar. Nowadays you can even fake it, with plenty of servants. It wasn’t like that in my grandfather’s generation. They were better people. Better educated, Bible-readers, not showy. Got on with the job. There was a job for everyone and they did it and often died in it.”

  “I think my father will die in his. He thinks of nothing else. Sweats and slogs. Sick with malaria. And lost his family.”

  Pat, who was unconcerned about individuals, slashed at the flower-heads. “I’ll be an historian. That’s what I’m going to do. It’s the only hope—learning how we got to be what we are. Primates, I mean. Surges of aggression. Today’ll be history tomorrow. The empire is on the wane. Draining away. There will be chaos when it’s gone and we’ll be none the better people. When empires end, there’s often a dazzling finale—then—? Germany’s looming again, Goths versus Visigoths.”

  “But you’d fight for the Empire, wouldn’t you? I mean you’d fight for all this?” Eddie nodded over the green land.

  “For the carpet factory? Yes, I would. I will.”

  “You will. Fight then?”

  “Yes.”

  “So will I,” said Eddie.

  Wandering about that last peacetime summer with the Ingoldbys, Pat now seventeen, Eddie sixteen, the days were like weeks, endless as summers in childhood. They walked for miles—and at the end of each day of sun and smouldering cloud and shining Lancashire rain—stopped at the avenue. In the soft valley, more certain than sunset, the factory workers set off for home after the five o’clock hooter, moving in strings up The Goit and through the woods on paved paths worn into saucers and polished by generations of clogs. Sometimes on the high avenue, with the wind right, you could hear the horse-shoe metal of the clogs on the sandstone clinking like castanets.

  Wandering on, the two of them would watch the Colonel in a black veil puffing smoke from a funnel stuffed with hay, and swearing at his bees. “If he’d only be quieter with them,” said Pat. “Want any help, Pa?”

  “No. Get away, you’ll be killed. They’re on the rampage.”

  “Oh—tea,” said Mrs. Ingoldby. “You’re just in time. I’ll get them to make you some more of the little tongue sandwiches. Did you have a good walk?”

  “Wonderful, thanks. Any news?”

  “Yes. Hitler’s invaded Poland. Don’t tell your father yet, Pat. He can do nothing about it and there’s his favourite supper. Oxtail stew.”

  “It’s not all an act, you know,” said Pat, the thought-reader, Mrs. Ingoldby having gone up to change for dinner. “It’s a modus vivendi. Old-fashioned manners.”

  “I like it.”

  “Not upsetting the guests, yes. But she keeps anything horrid inside, for her own safety. My mother’s not the fool she makes herself out to be. She’s frightened. Any minute now, and farewell the carpet factory and security. It’s going to be turned over to munitions. Ploughshares into swords. It’s been our safe and respected source of income for two generations. This house’ll go. Jack’s going into the Air Force, and I intend to.”

  “You?”

  “Yes. I suppose so. After I’ve got in to Cambridge. If they’ll have me. Get my foot in for later.”

  He didn’t ask about Eddie’s plans.

  “As I’ve been through the OTC,” said Eddie. “I suppose I’ll go for a soldier. My father was in something called the Royal Gloucesters—I don’t know why. He might get me in there.”

  “By the way,” said Pat, like his mother avoiding rocks in the river. “All that about footmen and Ma—it’s balls, you know. Too many Georgette Heyers.”

  “But your mother’s so—” (he was going to say innocent but it didn’t seem polite) “—truthful.”

  “She’s self-protective,” said Pat. “Can you wonder? She was through the Great War, too.”

  That evening after dinner they listened to the wireless with the long windows open on to the lawn. A larch swung down black arms to touch the grass. A cat
came out from under the arms and limped across the garden and out of sight. It was shaking its paws crossly.

  The news was dire. After the Colonel had switched it off, you could hear the clipped BBC tones continuing through the open windows of the servants’ sitting-room. Shadows had suddenly swallowed the drawing-room, and it was cold.

  Mrs. Ingoldby draped a rug about her knees and said, “Pat, we need the light on.” The heart-breaking smell of the stocks in the nearest flower bed engulfed the room like a sweet gas.

  Pat lit up a cigarette and the cat walked back over the grass, a shadow now. Two green lamps of eyes blinked briefly. Pat put the light on.

  “Whatever’s the matter with the cat?”

  “Don’t talk to me about the cat,” said the Colonel. “I threw it out of the bedroom window.”

  “Pa!”

  “It had done a wee on my eiderdown. I threw the eiderdown after it. I’d have shot it if the gun had been handy. I’m keeping it loaded now for the Invasion. That cat knows exactly what it’s doing.”

  “Do be careful, dear. It’s not a Nazi.”

  “Cats and bees and the world, all gone mad. I tell you, there’ll be no honey this year. Everything’s a failure. I’m thinking of buying a cow.”

  “A cow, dear?”

  “There’ll be no butter by Christmas. Powdered milk. No cream.”

  “Why ever not?”

  “It’ll be rationed. Forces first. Are you a fool?”

  At bedtime Eddie leaned out of his bedroom window—the bedroom now seemed altogether his own—and looked at the dark and light rows of the vegetable garden, the Colonel’s obedient regiment standing to attention under a paring of moon. Silence until six o’clock tomorrow, and the factory hooter. Then the chorus of clicking feet trudging down The Goit as if nothing could ever change. Along the landing he heard the trumpet-call of the Colonel, “Rosie—do not shut the window. And don’t bring in that eiderdown. It stays there all night. I dare say it will rain. Let it rain.”

  Eddie could make out the square shape of desecrated satin lying up against the house like a forlorn white flag.

  TULIPS

  The morning after the ghastly day in London—the solicitor had muddled her diary or had had to stay at home with sick children or her mobile phone was out of order or a mixture of the three, which had meant their trip to Bantry Street had been for nothing—Filth was seated in the sun-lounge, very fierce and composing a Letter of Wishes to add to his Will. He wondered if he was quite well. A wet square of eiderdown kept floating into sight. Tiredness. He was half-dreaming. Wouldn’t say anything to Betty.

  The November sun blazed. It was almost warm enough to sit out of doors but Filth liked a desk before him when he was thinking. He liked a pen, or at least one of the expensive type of Biro—several because they gave out—and a block of A5 of the kind on which he had written his careful Opinions. Diligent, accurate, lucid, no jargon, all thanks to Sir, his Opinions used to be shown to juniors as models of the form. Then they had left him for the Clerk’s rooms, where they were typed. First by a single typist—Mrs. Jones, who in between whiles did her knitting, often in her sealskin fur coat for there was no central heating. Later there were five typists, later still twenty. Over the years Filth had scarcely noticed the changes, from the clatter of the old black Remingtons and all the girls chain-smoking, to the hum and click of electronics, to the glare of a screen in every Barrister’s room, the first fax machines, the e-mails and the mysterious Web. He was relieved not to have had to cope with all this as a junior or a Silk, and that by the time he made judge and lived in Hong Kong he had stepped into a world so advanced in electronics that he could hand everything over to machines but keep his pen too. His handwriting—thanks again to Sir—was much admired. He had been in Commercial Chambers. The construction industry. Bridges and dams.

  And what a great stack of money I made at the Bar, he thought. It was a noble act becoming a judge on a salary. Letters of Wishes . . . Bequests to Friends . . . I’ve left it too long. The best friends are all dead.

  And no children to leave it to. He looked across from the sun-lounge to Betty planting the tulips. She seldom spoke of children. Never to children when there were any around. She seemed—had always seemed—to have no views on their barrenness.

  As it happened, had he known it, she was thinking of children now. She was wondering about yesterday, when she and Filth had made an abortive attempt to give what they had by dying. The death of Terry’s child. The solicitor forgetting her job because of her children’s measles. This dazzle of a morning, thirty years beyond her child-bearing years. The trees across Wiltshire were bright orange, yellow, an occasional vermilion maple—what a slow leaf fall—spreading away from the hillside garden, the sun rich and strong, the house behind her benign and English and safe, as well-loved now as her apartments and houses in the East. There would have been grandchildren by now, she thought and heard their voices. Would we have been any good with them? She could not see Filth looking at a grandchild with love.

  She had never been sure about Filth and love. Something blocked him. Oh, faithful—oh, yes. Unswerving unto death. “Never been anyone for Filth but Betty.” And so on.

  All this time in the tulip bed, she had been on her knees and she tried now to get up. It is becoming ridiculous, this getting up. Ungainly. Not that I was ever gainly, but I wasn’t lumberous. She lay down on her side, grinning, on the wet grass. And saw that her pearls had come off and lay in the tulip bed. They were yesterday’s pearls, and for the first time in her life she had not taken them off at bedtime nor when she bathed in the morning. “I am becoming a slut,” she told them. Her face was close against them. She said to them, “You are not my famous pearls, though he never notices. You are my guilty pearls. What shall I do with you? Who shall have you when I am gone?”

  “No one,” she said, and let them slither out of sight into one of the holes made ready for the tulips. With her fingers, she filled the hole with earth and smoothed it over.

  Then she brought her firm old legs round in front of her so that they lay across the flower-beds. She noticed that each hole had a sprinkle of sharp sand in the bottom, and hoped the sand would not hurt the pearls.

  Still not out of the wood, she thought. Hope Filth doesn’t look up, he’d worry.

  She rested, then twisted herself, heaved and crawled. The legs obeyed her at last and came round back again and she was on all fours. She leaned on her elbows, her hands huge in green and yellow gloves, and slowly brought her bottom into the air, swayed, and creakily, gleefully stood up. “Well, I was never John Travolta,” she said. “And it is November. Almost first frost.”

  Amazed, as she never ceased to be, about how such a multi- tude of ideas and images exist alongside one another and how the brain can cope with them, layered like filo pastry in the mind, invisible as data behind the screen, Betty was again in Orange Tree Road, standing with Mrs. Cleary and Mrs. Hong and old friends in the warm rain, and all around the leaves falling like painted raindrops. The smell of the earth round the building-works of the new blocks of flats, the jacarandas, the polish on the banana leaves, children laughing, swimming in the private pools. The sense of being part of elastic life, unhurried, timeless, controlled. And in love. The poor little girl selling parking tickets in her white mittens against the sun. Betty’s eyes filled with tears, misting her glasses. Time gone. Terry’s boy gone.

  Trowel in hand, a bit tottery, she turned to look up the garden at Filth.

  Since yesterday he had been impossible. All night catafalque-rigid, sipping water, at breakfast senatorial and remote. The Judge’s dais. He had frowned about him for toast. When she had made more toast and set the toast-rack (silver) before him he had examined it and said, “The toast-rack needs cleaning.”

  “So do the salt-cellars,” she’d said. “I’ll get you the Silvo. You’ve nothing else to do today.”

  He had glared at her, and she wondered whether his mind, too, was layered wit
h images. Breakfast on The Peak for eleven years at seven o’clock, misty, damp and grey, she in her silk dressing-gown making lists for the day, Filth—oh so clean, clean Filth—in his light-weight dark suit and shirt so white it seemed almost blue, his Christ Church tie, his crocodile briefcase. Outside the silently-sliding Merc, with driver waiting in dark-green uniform, the guard on the gate ready to press the button on the steel doors that would rise without creak or hesitation. And the warm, warm heavy air.

  “Bye, dear.”

  “Bye, Filth. Home sixish?”

  “Home sixish.”

  Every minute pleasantly filled. Work, play and no chores.

  And the sunset always on the dot, like Filth’s homecoming. The dark falling over the harbour that was never dark, the lights in their multitude, every sky-scraper with a thousand eyes. The sky-high curtains of unwinking lights, red, yellow, white, pale green, coloured rain falling through the dark. The huge noise of Hong Kong rising, the little ferries plying, the sense of a place to be proud of. We made it. We saw how to do it. A place to have been responsible for. British.

  “I’ll do the silver later,” said Filth. “I shall be busy this morning with my Letter of Wishes. I shall see to my own Will.”

  “I suppose I should do a Letter too,” she said. “I’d thought the Will would be enough. But after yesterday—”

  “The less said about yesterday the better. London solicitors!” and he rose from the toast-rack, still a fascinatingly tall and taking man, she thought. If it wasn’t for the neck and the moles he’d look no more than sixty. People still look up and wonder who he is. Always a tie. And his shoes like glass.