Old Filth

by Jane Gardam

  “I’m going to plant tulips.”

  “I’ll clear up the breakfast.”

  “Do you mind? It’s not Mrs. T’s day.”

  “I want to get on with the Will whilst I’m still in ferment.”

  “Ferment?”

  “About that woman. Solicitor. You know exactly. Lack of seriousness. Duty. Messy. The distance we travelled! Messy diary. I expect her diary’s on a screen.”

  “Watch your blood-pressure, Filth. You’ve gone purple.”

  He flung about the house looking for the right pen.

  “You could do it on the computer. You can make changes much quicker.”

  (They both played the game that they could work the computer if they tried.)

  “I shan’t be making many changes.”

  “The point is,” she said, “be quick. Get everything witnessed. Locally—why not? So much cheaper. We might die at any time.”

  “So you said all the way home in the train. Solicitors!”

  “So you have often said.”

  He glared at her, then softened as he watched her healthy, outdoor face and her eyes that had never caught her out.

  “I hate making Wills,” she said. “I’ve made dozens,” and looked away, not wanting to touch on inheritances since there was nobody to inherit. She didn’t want to see that Filth didn’t mind.

  “I think,” said Filth, astonishingly, “one day I’ll write you a Letter of my Wishes. My personal wishes.”

  “Have you so many left then?”

  “Not many. Peace at the last, perhaps.”

  And that you will never leave me, he thought.

  And now, standing with the trowel, head racing a bit with the effort of being John Travolta, she closed her eyes against dizziness. She opened them again, shaded them with her hand and saw him seated above her in the sun-lounge. He had some sort of wrap over his bony, parted knees. The drape of it and the long narrow face staring into the sun made him look like a Christ in Majesty over a cathedral gate. All that was needed was the raised hand in blessing. His eyes were closed. How long is he going to last? she thought. How he hates death. However, Christ in Majesty opened his eyes and raised a hand not in blessing but holding an enormous gin.

  “Gin,” he called down. “Felt like gin.”

  I won’t get any nearer to him now, she thought, turning to pick up the bulb-basket, taking off her gloves. Too late now. The holes look good, but I’ll do the planting tomorrow. There might be a frost. I won’t risk them out all night on the grass.

  THE FERMENT

  After her funeral, Filth, now old as time, was at his desk again. Garbutt, the odd job man, trundled a wheelbarrow stacked up with ivy between the sun-lounge and the tulip bed. Garbutt’s jaw was thrust forward. He was lusting after a bonfire. The woman, Mrs. Thing, arrived at Filth’s shoulder with a cup of coffee, then with a Ewbank sweeper.

  “Lift your feet a minute and let me get under them and then I’ll leave you in peace,” she said. “Here’s more letters. Shall I come back with your ironing tonight? I could make you a salad. The way he goes at that ivy!”

  “Thank you, no. Perfectly capable,” said Filth. “I must keep at desk.”

  “I liked the ivy,” she said. “Not that my opinion . . .”

  “It’s done now,” said Filth.

  “I’m sorry. Well, there’s plenty in the fridge and you’ve only to phone up . . .”

  “Letters,” he said. “Letters. Many, many letters,” and he picked one up and waved it about to get rid of her. There were no black-bordered ones now, thank God. They had disappeared with the Empire. This one was in a pale green envelope and came from Paris. As the woman, Mrs.-er, slammed the front door and Garbutt stamped past again with the empty barrow, Filth had the sensation of a command not to open this letter and looking across the garden saw Betty standing on the lawn watching him with an expression of deep annoyance.

  “Ha!” he said, and stared her out. “Leave me be,” he shouted. He picked up the ivory paper knife to slit the envelope and saw the name: Ingoldby. He stared, looked back at the now empty lawn, looked down again.

  Not the Colonel or Mrs. Ingoldby, long ago gone. Not Jack or Pat. No issue there. I. Ingoldby, it said on the envelope and so it must be Isobel. Ye gods.

  Well, I’d better face it.

  The year that Eddie left Sir’s Outfit for his Public school, he was to spend the summer as usual at High House. Pat Ingoldby, a year older, had left Sir the year before but had written a weekly letter from the new school to Eddie and Eddie had written back. Other boys did the same with absent brothers. Sir had insisted from the start on weekly letters to parents and, although Eddie had had none back from his father, the habit had continued until Pat moved on. Then Eddie had struck, and asked to write to Mrs. Ingoldby instead of his father and, as Eddie’s stammer was threatening again after Pat’s departure, Sir agreed, and Mrs. Ingoldby did write back occasionally, in a hand like a very small spider meandering across the thick writing paper and passing out and dying off in the faintest of signatures. Years later, in a different life, Eddie found that his father had kept all his letters from Sir’s Outfit, numbered carefully and filed in a steel safe against the termites. Eddie’s letters to Mrs. Ingoldby and to Pat did not survive.

  Sir had also insisted on letters being written to Auntie May, who occasionally sent a postcard; Uncle Albert, her missionary husband, once sent the school a coconut for Christmas.

  Pat’s short, succinct, witty letters from the new school were a great pleasure to Eddie. He absorbed everything offered for his information: accommodation, lessons, boys, games (which were more important than church), menus, lack of humour among staff. Both boys missed each other but never referred to the fact, nor to the fact that the fraternal arrangements of the holidays would of course continue. Eddie wrote to his aunts, one of about three letters in his five years with Sir, asking if he could have some of the money his father had put aside for him, to give Sir a present, and Aunt Muriel sent a ten shilling note.

  “I don’t accept presents,” said Sir, looking briefly at Three Men in a Boat. “This is a clean school. No nonsense. But yes, I’ll have this one. Send your sons here when you’ve got some. Present us with a silver cup for something when you’re a filthy rich lawyer, I dare say? Yes. You’ll be a lawyer. Magnificent memory. Sense of logic, no imagination and no brains. My favourite chap, Teddy Feathers, as a matter of fact. I dare say.”

  “Thank you, Sir. I’ll always keep in touch.”

  “Don’t go near Wales. And keep off girls for a while. Soon as girls arrive exam results go down. Passion leads to a Lower Second. Goodbye, old Feathers. On with the dance.”

  High House—it was now 1936—where Eddie now brought all his (few) possessions, was reassuringly the same and here was Pat on the railway platform, taller and spotty, with a deep voice but still talking. Talking and talking. There was to be a girl staying, he said, but not to worry as almost at once she was going off on holiday to the Lake District with his mother.

  “She’s here already. She’s a cousin. Pa’s niece. She’s causing trouble.”

  But up at the House there was no sign of this cousin and nobody mentioned her and she didn’t show up all day.

  The next day at breakfast Eddie asked the Colonel about her.

  “How’s your niece, Sir?”

  “Done very badly in her Higher School Certificate. And she’s too old to try again. I tell her nobody will ever ask her what she did and she’ll forget it herself in six months. She’ll find a husband. Poor fellow.”

  “One can’t be sure,” said Mrs. Ingoldby. “She’s rather secretive. I’ve a feeling that a husband isn’t on the cards. And very stubborn, I’m afraid. I’ve sent her breakfast up as she has a headache. And she’s upset.”

  The next day there was a sighting of Isobel Ingoldby pacing about the garden, up and down, up and down in the rain with a haversack on her back.

  “Is she going somewhere?” asked Pat.


  “She talks of Spain. She has an urge to help the rebels. I thought I might telegraph her parents.”

  “Let her be,” said Pat. “She’ll be in for dinner.”

  “But did she have breakfast?”

  “Well, it was all laid up for her on the sideboard.”

  “I wouldn’t want her going home and saying we’d given her nothing to eat. And oh dear, look! Maybe she didn’t have breakfast.”

  Isobel could be seen writhing about in her haversack and then disembowelling it on the grass. She took from it a hunk of bread, stood up, tilted back her head and began to devour it. Her eyes seemed closed. Praying perhaps.

  “I think she may be a little peculiar,” said Colonel Ingoldby. “There is some of that in the Ingoldbys. Not Pat, of course, dear, and certainly not Jack.”

  Elder brother Jack, the beloved, now passed through High House only very occasionally. Sir and the family’s traditional public school had seen him to Cambridge and he was there or abroad most of the time, swooping through his old home, once or twice a summer, bringing rare and various companions, playing wonderful tennis, clean and groomed, at one with his parents’ world. Mrs. Ingoldby, like a dog which awaits its master, seemed to know by instinct when he was on the way. “Just a mo. Isn’t that Jack?” They would listen, then continue life, and a few minutes later would come the splutter and roar of Jack’s car, its silver body tied up with a classy leather strap.

  Eddie had an instinct about Jack, too; that Isobel was being kept away from him and that was why she and Mrs. Ingoldby were off to the Lake District. That was why Isobel was peculiar. Seeing Isobel in the garden he could tell that the Lake District and her godmother would not be sufficient for her.

  “Oh, do bring her in,” said Mrs. Ingoldby, “or at any rate someone go and talk to her . . . You, Eddie. Would you go? You’ll be new to her—she finds us boring. You could talk to her about the Spanish Civil War. I don’t want any stories about our neglecting her going back to Gerard’s Cross.”

  So Eddie had walked rather awkwardly across the lawn and into the trees, on his fourteen-year-old lengthening legs and oval knees. His curly hair; his hands in his pockets like some of the more blasé of the Mr. Smiths’ had been. His feet in scruffy sand-shoes very huge; his height endearing. His voice, breaking, was surprising him all the time by sudden booms and squeaks. Yet there was grace about him. He hadn’t taken in a thing about the Spanish Civil War.

  The girl was standing with her back to him. The rain had stopped and it was becoming a warm and honeyed July morning and in the hills below stood the factory chimneys rising brown and mighty like Hindu temples.

  “Oh, hullo,” he said.

  The girl stopped munching and turned. She stared.

  “I’m Edward Feathers. Pat’s friend. I’ve been told to ask if you—well, if you might be coming in for lunch?”

  The girl was gigantic; bony, golden and vast; as tall as Eddie and certainly pretty old. She could be twenty. Her face was like a lioness’s—flat nose, narrow brow, wide cheekbones, long green eyes. Supreme self-command. Wow!

  Her legs were bare and very long, like his own, and her sandals had little leather thongs separating the toes.

  Eddie felt something happening to his anatomy and though he had no idea what it was he began to blush.

  She looked him up and down and began to laugh.

  “I don’t go in for eating round a polished table,” she said. “I need to be out of doors. They know that.”

  “They didn’t seem to. Oh, well, OK, then. I’ll tell them.” And he fled.

  “She says she doesn’t like eating round a polished table.”

  “Oh, God,” said Pat.

  “That’s her mother,” said the Colonel.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have a difficult time with her in the Wastwater Hotel,” said Mrs. Ingoldby.

  “Maybe the table won’t be polished,” said Pat. “Anyway, why take her? Jack’s abroad.”

  His mother gave him what in any other woman would have been a searching look. “I am her godmother,” she said, “and her mother has gone off with a Moroccan drummer.”

  “I don’t blame her,” said Pat. “Fevvers’ mother went off, and he doesn’t go eating in the trees.”

  “Oh, Teddy! I didn’t know! I thought your mother only died.”

  “She did only die,” said Eddie. “She died when I was two days old.”

  “She must have caught sight of you,” said Pat.

  “That will do,” said his mother, and “Damn bad luck,” said his father, “don’t suppose there were many Moroccans in Malaya.”

  “There were a lot of drummers,” said Eddie and began to squeal and cackle. The Colonel and his wife looked baffled and embarrassed.

  Pat had given Eddie some sort of sudden freedom. Eddie’s ideal mother, whom he had always thought of as an Auntie May sort of person, became a houri, off to bed and that with a Moroccan drummer! Pat had given him confidence. Right from the very start. And crikey, he needed it, now, after that thing that had happened to him in the trees. He wondered whether to mention it to Pat; then knew that it was the first thing ever that he couldn’t discuss with him.

  Pat was watching him.

  “Shall we go out on bikes?”

  “Yes, great. Yes, please.”

  “OK, Ma?”

  “Yes. But what are we to do about Isobel?”

  “It’s out of our hands to do anything about Isobel.”

  And the leopardish girl went prowling past the windows, haversack in place and reading a map.

  “She’s a fine looker, I’ll say that,” said the Colonel.

  “Jack thinks so, too,” said Pat.

  The two of them trudged up a hill, pushing their bikes, wishing for modern three-speeds and not these childhood toys with baskets. “And you—hein?”

  Eddie said nothing.

  At supper Isobel appeared and sat down at the Colonel’s right hand. She leaned back in her chair and glittered her eyes. “What a pretty dress,” said her godmother. “Were you thinking of taking it to Spain? I’m sure it has to be dry-cleaned. It will be difficult at the frontier.”

  Isobel messed with her food.

  “Oh, dear. I’m afraid you’ve stopped liking fish-pie. You used to love . . .”

  “It’s fine,” said Isobel, scraping it about with the tips of the prongs of her fork. She had picked out all the prawns and now leaned her sun-burnt shoulders towards Eddie and began to pick prawns off his plate.

  “Yummie,” she said, and Eddie found himself in trouble again beneath the tablecloth. He blushed purple and Pat exploded in his glass of water.

  “I think she’s after you,” Pat said after dinner, playing tennis with Eddie in the dark. “Go easy. She’s a cannibal. It’s going to rain. We’ll have to go in. Get the net down. She’ll be out there somewhere, gleaming in the bushes. Aren’t you going to laugh?”

  But Eddie, busy catching up tennis balls, winding up the net, said nothing. On the way back to the house he slashed at vegetation for all he was worth.

  “Sorry I spoke,” said Pat. “Only joking.”

  “Oh, shut up,” said Eddie. “I can’t stand your cousin. OK? Sorry.”

  But they stopped at the bench for the view from the hill. “Can’t see much, but we could maybe hear the nightingale. Then we could send a card to Sir,” said Pat.

  “It’s too late for the nightingale. And too far north.”

  “D’you want a weed?” Pat lit up a cigarette.

  “No fear.”

  “It turns on the girls. Not that you seem to feel the need.”

  “It’s disgusting. It’s all disgusting,” Eddie yelled out and pushed Pat off the seat and sat on him. Pat flailed about and then began to sing:

  “My friend Billy

  Had a ten-foot. . .”

  “Stop it!”

  “He showed it to the boy next door.

  Who thought it was a snake

  And hit it with a rake

/>   And now it’s only . . .”

  And they rolled about, fighting as they had done for years, stopping the clocks for a minute longer.

  But there was a change somewhere. He and Pat were moving on. Glaciers would soon come grinding them apart, memories would be forgotten or adapted or faked.

  Eddie followed Pat heavily into the house that evening and even Pat looked thoughtful. In the drawing-room the Ingoldbys were talking their pointless evening birdsong. No sound of Isobel anywhere.

  As Eddie lay in his adored High House bed the rain began to patter down again outside and he jumped out to shut the window where the moon soon disappeared behind the rain clouds. He climbed back into bed.

  All the following years, the memory or dream of what happened next never quite left him. His bedroom door opened and closed again, and the goddess—lioness—girl was at the end of his bed. Standing and watching, brooding on his inability to take his eyes off her.

  She then walked to the window and looked out. He knew that something was expected of him but had no idea what it was. Not long ago, he would have shouted out, “Help! Burglars!” In time, in only a few years, he supposed, from books he’d read in the back of bookshops near Sir’s, he and the girl would have merged their flesh together in some sort of way in the bed. But he didn’t know what happened next. And didn’t want to know.

  She’s old and she’s evil and she only wants to hurt, he thought.

  “Eddie?” the shadow whispered from the window. “I wonder what you think of me?”

  She walked back across the room and he found that he could sit up straight under the blankets and confront her, brave as brave as—Cumberledge. There! He’d said the word. Cumberledge. Wherever he was now. Silent Cumberledge whose spirit had never been completely broken.