Old Filth

by Jane Gardam

  Well, I don’t know about that, thought Filth. What would Gibbons be doing here? And he gave one of the bottoms a slap.

  The air of the church came alive for a moment as the baize door opened and shut, and a curly boy came springing down the aisle. He wore a clerical collar and jeans. “Good afternoon,” he cried. “So sorry I’m rather late. You’re wanting me to hear your confession.”

  “Confession?”

  “Saturday afternoons. Confessions. St. Trebizond’s. Half a mo while I put my cassock on.”

  He ran past the weeping pile and disappeared into a vestry, emerging at once struggling into a cassock. He hurried into something like a varnished sedan chair which stood beside the rood screen, and clicked shut its door. The silence resumed.

  Filth at once turned and made to walk out of the church, clearing his throat with the judicial roar.

  He looked back. The sedan chair watched him. There was a grille of little holes at waist level and he imagined the boy priest resting his head near it on the inside.

  It would be rather discourteous just to leave the church.

  Filth might go over and say, “Very low-church, I’m afraid. Not used to this particular practice though my wife was interested . . .”

  He walked back to the sedan chair, leaned down and said, “Hullo? Vicar?”

  A crackling noise. Like eating potato crisps.

  “Vicar? I beg your pardon?”

  No reply. All was hermetically sealed within except for the grille. Really quite dangerous.

  He creaked down to his knees to a hassock and put his face to the grille. Nothing happened. The boy must have fallen asleep.

  “Excuse me, Vicar. I’m afraid I don’t go in for this. I have nothing to confess.”

  “A very rash statement,” snarled a horrendous voice—there must be some amplifier.

  Filth jumped as if he’d put his ear to an electric fence.

  “How long, my son, since your last confession?”

  “I’ve—” (his son!) “—I’ve never made a confession in my life. I’ve heard plenty. I’m a Q.C.”

  There was a snuffling sound.

  “But you are in some trouble?”

  Filth bowed his head.

  “Begin. Go on. ‘Father I have sinned.’ Don’t be afraid.”

  Filth’s ragged old logical mind was not used to commands.

  “I’m afraid I don’t at the moment feel sinful at all. I am more sinned against than sinning. I am able to think only of my dear dead wife. She was in the Telegraph this morning. Her obituary.” Then he thought: I am not telling the truth. “And I am unable to understand the strange games my loss of her play with my behaviour.”

  Why tell this baby? Can’t be much over thirty. Well, same age as Christ, I suppose. If Christ were inside this box . . . A great and astounding longing fell upon Filth, the longing of a poet, the deep perfect adoring longing of a lover of Christ. How did he come on to this? This medieval, well of course, very primitive, love of Christ you read about? Not my sort of thing at all.

  “My son, were there any children of the marriage?”

  “No. We didn’t seem to need any.”

  “That’s never the full answer. I have to say that I saw you touching the anatomy of the cherubs on the Tytchley tomb.”

  “You what?”

  “Reveal all to me, my son. I can understand and help you.”

  “Young man,” roared Filth through the grille. “Go home. Look to your calling. I am one of Her Majesty’s Counsellors and was once a Judge.”

  “There is only one judge in the end,” said the voice, but Filth was in the car again and belting on past Saffron Walden.

  He drove very fast indeed now, as the roads grew less equipped for him. I am a coelacanth. Yes. I dare say. I have lived too long. Certainly, I cannot cope—cope with a mind such as I have. The bloody little twerp. Wouldn’t have him in my Chambers. I can drive, though. That’s one thing I can do. My reactions are perfect, and here is a motorway again.

  And hullo—what’s this? Lights? Sirens? Police? “Good afternoon. Yes?”

  “You have been behaving oddly on the road, sir. It has been reported.”

  “I have been stopping sometimes. Resting. Once in a church. In my view, essential. No, no need for a breath test. Oh well, very well.”

  “You see. Perfectly clear,” said Filth.

  “Could we help you in any way?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Your licence is in order?”

  “Yes, of course. I am a lawyer.”

  “It doesn’t follow, sir. I see that you are eighty-one?”

  “With no convictions,” said Filth.

  “No, sir. Well, goodbye, sir.”

  “There is one thing,” said Filth, strapping himself back in his seat with some languor. “I do seem to be rather lost.”

  “Ah.”

  “I don’t suppose you know this address. Hainault?”

  “We do, sir. But it’s not Hainault. That is in Essex. It’s High Light. Not High Note. A house called High Light. And we know who it belongs to. We know her. It’s five miles away. Shall we go ahead of you?”

  “She is my cousin. She can never have had any Christmas cards. Thank you. And thank you for your courtesy and proper behaviour. A great surprise.”

  “You oughtn’t to believe the television, sir.”

  “Who the hell was he?” one policeman asked the other. “He’s like out of some Channel Four play.”

  A LIGHT HOUSE

  Claire in her house all alone sat in her shadowless kitchen and down came her beautiful little hands slap-bang across the Daily Telegraph. She closed her eyes and sat for a full minute, “No,” she said. “Of course it’s not Betty. Someone would have told me.”

  She opened her eyes, removed her hands and stared down at Betty Feathers’ eyes which looked back at her with sharp but pleasant intelligence. “Well,” she said, “an obituary for Betty.” She smoothed the paper, read Elizabeth Feathers, MBE, and then the whole thing.

  The phone rang. She folded the paper and turned it on its back. She walked to the phone.

  “Hullo?”

  “Beware. The Ice Man Cometh.”

  Claire sat down quickly. The quiet life she had diligently followed over years was the rent she paid to a weak heart. Her control, balance, yoga, good sense, none of it natural to her, had been necessary if she was to see her husband out. She had told the doctor that it was essential she outlive him, and the doctor had thought her wonderful and her husband a weak old bore. Now, as a widow, Claire found that creeping about and being careful was a habit she could not drop. She would have liked a lover, but the heart battering about inside her made the practice impossible. Today, it was beating like an angry butterfly under a jam jar.

  “Claire? Claire? Are you there? It’s Babs.”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Babs. Yes, of course. You always did sound like Betty.”

  “Can’t help it. I suppose you were at the funeral. In at the kill.”

  “I’ve just this minute seen the Telegraph. An utter shock.”

  “Well, it would be the hush-hush Bletchley Park thing. She wasn’t there for long. I never thought she was very clever. She’s had a pretty good life with him. You might have told me about the funeral. She had some wonderful rocks.”

  “Rocks?”

  “Jewellery.”

  “Oh. Had she? I didn’t know she was dead until now.”

  Claire had been wild about Filth since she was four, but as inscrutable then as now she sat prettily in her pink dressinggown with her hand firmly against the butterfly.

  “He turned up here yesterday. He only stayed ten minutes. He brought me some recipe books but I can’t find them. He’ll be en-route to you now. At a guess.”

  “He would have telephoned. Though I suppose I do tend to switch it off.”

  “He’s not himself, I warn you. He never told me when he was arriving. Then ten minutes later he was gone. Actu
ally I wasn’t very well. I’m not a very well woman.”

  “But why did he come? We haven’t seen either of them in years. All that way! Dorset! She can’t have died more than . . .” She glanced at the folded paper. She would look properly later.

  “Just over a fortnight. He was bringing us keepsakes. I’d rather hoped she’d made a Will. I think he thought better of giving me the recipe books. I expect he’ll offer them to you.”

  “But I’m diabetic.”

  “Yes, well, I don’t suppose he remembers that. Just at the moment.”

  “No,” said Claire.

  “He was very strange. He fled the house. I seemed to horrify him. I can’t think why. My ways are not everybody’s ways, of course, but knowing what we three have been through together . . .”

  “Your ways were not everybody’s ways then.”

  “Neither were yours.”

  “Why not?”

  “All that perfection, Claire. Nauseating perfection. From the start.”

  Silence.

  “Claire?”

  “Yes?”

  “Sorry. I only meant that it’s a bit chilling.”

  “It seems,” said Claire, “that Betty’s death removes barriers. It’s bringing corpses to the surface. I can honestly say I never had anything to hide.”

  “Oh, no?”

  Claire was watching through the huge window an immaculate Mercedes nosing about in the lane. It paused, considered, started off again and cruised out of sight.

  “You’d better ring me if he turns up,” said Babs. “He looked to me as if he was in need of special care, like they used to say of drawn-thread work on laundry lists. Get him to see someone.”

  Elgar’s Enigma Variations began to boom in Babs’s background.

  “Laundry lists? Hello? I can’t hear you.”

  Claire put down the phone.

  The car must have turned somewhere down the road, for here it was nosing slowly back again. “He won’t come here,” she said aloud. “He doesn’t need me. He never did and we won’t be able to look each other in the eye. ‘It was Betty who made him,’ Isobel Ingoldby used to say. I never believed her. He’s made himself. Made his impeccable, astringent self.”

  The phone rang again.

  “Well, all I can say, Claire, he was shaking all over and grey in the face and terrified of my poor animals under his feet. Gob-smacked, outraged by my little lover with his little musiccase.”

  “What are you talking about, Babs? I wish you wouldn’t say ‘gob-smacked.’ It doesn’t become you. You’re not a teenager.”

  “Yes, I am. At heart I am fourteen.”

  The car had now stopped at Claire’s gate and Filth’s stony face, with the Plantagenet cheek-bones and thick ungreying curly hair, could be observed, peering out.

  “When old women say that,” said Claire, “‘I’m just a girl inside,’ I . . .” The butterfly was hammering now on iron wings. Filth’s long right leg, like the leg of a flamingo but in Harris tweed, was feeling for the pavement. “I,” said Claire, “cease to find them interesting.”

  “I may not be interesting, but it was me he turned to at Ma Didds, when you went running down the village.”

  Claire let her fingers stray about over the glass table-top, feeling for her butterfly-subduing pills. And here came the old flamingo, the old crane, lean as a cowboy still. What? Six-foot-three, and still melting my heart.

  Well, he seemed to be carrying the parcel of recipe books.

  “I must go now, Babs. The laundry man’s here. And Babs, you’re drinking too much. Goodbye.”

  “Have you any luggage? I hope you’ll be staying the night?” she asked at once.

  Filth jack-knifed himself into a small, gold-sprayed Lloyd-loom chair and his knees were nearly up to his chin. Light fell upon him like a greeting as in fact it always did upon everybody inside the rambling bungalow which Claire had moved into a few years ago for that very reason, and because it was sensible for someone with A Heart. The building followed an easy circuit. Sitting-room led into kitchen, kitchen led into bathroom, bathroom led into Claire’s bedroom and out to the hallway again. Off the hall was a second bedroom and bathroom, the bedroom narrower and full of hat boxes and tissue paper and old letters and Christmas lists spread permanently over the bed. In each room she kept a supply of pills and on the bathroom mirror she had stuck a list, written in her beautiful calligraphy, of all the pills she took, and when. “You make poetry of every word you write,” the Vicar had said, but Claire had passed the compliment by.

  “I have a spare room, Teddy.”

  “I could take you out to dinner,” he said, without enthusiasm.

  “I don’t go out for meals. I hardly go out at all. I watch the Boy Scouts doing my gardening outside my windows. That is my fresh air.”

  “You have a beautiful complexion, nevertheless,” he said. “And you have the figure of a—of an angel.”

  He saw Betty’s jolly old rump above the tulip bed. Her weather-beaten face. “A hundred in and a hundred more to go,” she had called. “I don’t want a gin. Could we miss lunch?” Then over she fell.

  He looked now long and piercingly—but unseeingly—at Claire’s open and beautiful face. She’d been a sunlit, lovely child who’d grown plain (or so Betty had told him). A stodgy bride in horn-rims. Then pretty again, and now beautiful. He remembered being told that she had ruled her children by a mysterious silence, her adoration of them never expressed. Betty said the children had felt guilty about it, knowing they could never deserve her; they had become conventional, monosyllabic members of society. Her nice husband, Betty said, had taken to drink. Claire (Betty said) believed that marriage and motherhood meant pain. Betty had agreed with her about children, and thought that Claire lived for the moment when they fled the nest and she was peacefully widowed. And here she sat now, gentle, shoulderless as a courtesan on her linen-covered sofa, smiling. (Filth turned to Betty on his interior telephone to ask what she thought about it, but Betty had left the phone off the hook.)

  “Of course!” he said. “I remember. You have diabetes. You can’t come out to dinner. Let me . . .” he had never gone shopping in his life. “Let me go and forage for us.”

  “So you will stay?”

  “I’d be—delighted.”

  “Teddy, there’s no need to forage. The girl gets me what I want. There’s a freezer. And there’s whiskey.”

  “Whiskey?”

  “Oh, just for anyone who drifts in. The police—very nice people, out of hours. They come here when I fall over. The Vicar. The woman down the road with one eye. The window-cleaner. I’m fond of the window-cleaner. I have him once a week, though ‘have’ alas is not any longer the word. I ‘have’ a weak heart.”

  Filth’s eyes were startled as a dog’s. This silvery, powdery woman.

  “Oh, Teddy,” she said. “So easily shocked.”

  “Well, Claire, really. We are way over . . . seventy.”

  “Yes. And I have a weak heart.”

  She poured him an immense whiskey and sat on, smiling beyond him out through the gleaming clean window.

  Soon Filth eased himself down in the chair, tilted his head back on the curved rim and looked up at the ceiling which was studded with dozens of trendy spotlights, like an office. He took another deep swig of whiskey and sighed.

  “Our mutual cousin, or whatever she is, Babs, exists in perpetual darkness and you in perpetual light.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s odd. I can’t get enough of it. Maybe my eyesight’s going. I’d love a cataract operation, wouldn’t you?”

  “I’m lucky there,” said Filth. “I brought you a present, by the way. Betty wanted you to have them.”

  “Oh, yes?” She looked canny. She examined his face for lies.

  “Nothing much. Family stuff mostly. Some from way back. She wanted you to have them. She was insistent. If she departed first—only you.”

  “What about Babs?”

  “She’d put s
omething else aside for Babs. As a matter of fact we were in the m-m-m-middle of our, what’s called ‘Letters of Wishes.’”

  “I see. She had other friends?”

  “Yes. Don’t know how well she kept them, though. Not exactly friends. At the funeral . . .”

  “Ah yes. The funeral.”

  “Didn’t bother you with the funeral. Sorry now. Thought I’d spare you. Never get this sort of thing right. And a big journey. Our time of life, it’s a funeral a week in the winter. They don’t do anyone any good.”

  “I hope mine will be private. On the Ganges on a pyre.”

  “I never read obituaries. No idea Betty was getting one.”

  “Did nobody turn up at the funeral, Teddy?”

  “No idea.”

  “Teddy—?”

  “Didn’t look around. Eyes front. Usual hymns. Discipline and all that.”

  “Of course,” said Claire. (Oh, where was the boy, the blazing young friend in Wales?) “Of course. You were with the Glorious Gloucesters in the War.”

  He gave her a look.

  “I believe there was a pack of church ladies,” he said. “From the flower committee. Coffee rota. One of them walked me home and made herself rather too friendly. I’m told you have to watch this.”

  “Was there a wake?”

  “Bun-fight in the church hall.”

  “Nobody from Chambers?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes. My Clerk. Retired now. Very civil of him.”

  “Well, you made him a packet.”

  Again the look.

  “And there were a few from the Inn. Hardly knew them. Can’t think why they came, trains being what they are.”

  “But, Teddy, they may have wanted to come. They were fond of Betty. Maybe it helped them to wear a dark suit, make an effort on your behalf. Respecting you. Helping you.”

  “Helping me?” He looked at his glass. “Nonsense, Claire. Whenever did I need help?” He seemed outraged. “We all come to an end.”