Old Filth

by Jane Gardam

  “But I need to tell someone, even so. What happened to your priest? The one in the church with all the marble babies?”

  “Do you mean Father Tansy? I thought he was anathema to you.”

  “Well, yes. He was. But I keep remembering him. Can you find him for me?”

  “But you’re in Gloucestershire. And I hear you can’t walk and have had a suspected heart attack.”

  “False alarm. Got over-excited reading the Gospels.”

  “Say goodbye to her now, Sir Edward. We’ll bring you your lunch in the lounge. You still have to take care.”

  “Goodbye, Claire. Thank you for ringing. I’ll ring again.”

  The day wore on. He sat in remote reveries. They brought him tea.

  Bloody good of them to have me back here, he thought. All thanks to Loss I can pay for it. Set me on my path. But I’ve worked for it myself, too. I’ve worked for my millions. Survived them too. Loss didn’t.

  He began to doze and was woken by the nice girl and her grandmother with a bunch of asters. “You should keep off prawns,” said the grandmother. “After seventy you should keep off prawns. You never saw Queen Mary even look at a prawn.”

  “It may have been the banana split,” said her granddaughter.

  “I don’t eat bananas,” said Filth.

  Next day came a letter from Claire in her trailing bright blue handwriting.

  Dear Teddy,

  It so happens that Father Tansy is coming to your part of the world to visit his Boys’ Club in Falmouth. Babs will be with him. It all seems prophetic. I have told them where you are.

  As to the matter of our rotten childhood, old cousin, you should forget it. I have never let what we did trouble me, even in dreams. I had no difficulty with it at the time and I’ve never felt the need to speak about it since. Oliver, for instance, does not know, and neither did my late-lamented husband. What would now be called “The Authorities” spirited us all away so fast after the death that it didn’t get much into the papers. Now, it would have dominated the telly for a month.

  D’you know that I met Cumberledge again? It was only a few years ago. As a matter of fact, it was the day you were staying with us, when Oliver took me to Cambridge for tea with some grandee from his old college, a Dean who’s still in residence. Someone who was kind to Oliver when he was up. Well, all the time we were in the old boy’s rooms I felt puzzled, as if I knew him. He seemed quite unaware of me. My surname has changed and it was three-quarters of a century on and Oliver had never mentioned that I’d been a Raj Orphan. Oliver told me his name on the way home and after you’d all gone I sat down here in High Light and wrote him a letter, hoping I wasn’t stirring up something best forgotten. We struck up a thoroughly boring correspondence.

  I’m not sure whether I’m pleased or not that he never referred to the murder. Well yes, of course I’m sure. I was not pleased. I should have liked to hear what he thought we’d all been at. I often think, when I’m reading in the papers about a murder, that the murderer is the last person to be aware of the crime. Sometimes he is not aware of it for years, I’d guess. Well, you’ll know all about that. Murderers are the possessed.

  I’m not saying there’s no such thing as guilt. And wickedness.

  I’m saying there is confusion and derangement in the mature murderer. What is so interesting about our murder is that there was neither. No confusion. No derangement. We three—not Cumberledge—were absorbed in the process of handing over responsibility to the powers of darkness whom we had met as children, and who had met us. We were thoroughly engaged, us three. Still untamed. We were of the jungle.

  Poor Babs—she’s probably the best of us—went mad. She’s maddish most of the time. But she’s still Babs. Ma Didds was cruellest of all to her. Stopped her singing. Gagged her mouth. Babs became castrated. Ugly in mind, body and estate. Grows uglier now. And yet I remember her dazzling for a while when she was in the War.

  You, dear Teddy, Ma Didds feared because of your height and strength and prodigious good looks. Oh, how unfair are our looks! Didds knew she could never make you ugly. She worked on your stammer. She was afraid of your silences. You were not like a child then. You are more of a child now. Betty came and stripped the years away from you in what looked like the perfect marriage. She never asked for more than you could give. Others gave her passion. You were a saint about Veneering. You were a wall of alabaster. You saved each other. You and Betty. I’d guess, neither of you ever spoke of it.

  But nobody ever loved you like I did, Teddy.

  Yet I was the coldest of us. I was the harshest. I was the actress. I was the little pretty one who never did wrong. I was the one who suggested the murder.

  Cumberledge never made a decision in his quiet life (I don’t know how he got so high up in the Army before he was wafted into Cambridge). He was utterly passive—all his weeping and screaming as she approached him with the whip (I am writing down what I have never before even been able to think about). But something deep in him remained untouched by her. I bet he became amiable and soppy. A man always falling in love.

  You, Teddy, were horribly touched by her. You became no good at love. I don’t think you ever had many friends at school. I’m the same, if I’m honest. I can’t love. I’m all charm. Babs needs love. Needs it as her daily bread. Will try for it anywhere. But she repels, the poor old thing. Doesn’t wash now—that’s a bad sign. It won’t help her with Father Tansy. She says she once had an affaire with Cumberledge. All fantasy.

  D’you know, the one who needed love most was Ma Didds. All the hatred was love gone wrong. What did she ever get from old Pa Didds and all that chapel?

  Not that as children we could have been expected to know, but I had an inkling when she took me on her smelly old lap and crooned over me and gave me buttered bread. I knew already where my bread was buttered. I’d been sent away younger than any of you, and my parents were faceless; but I was, and am, the toughest. I’m very glad I thought of the murder. I thoroughly enjoyed it. So don’t fret. It was you who struck the blow, dear Teddy, but they can’t hang you now. Love from Claire

  He tore the letter up.

  I am old at last, he thought. I should be cold too. But I am casting off the coldness of youth and putting on the maudlin armour of dotage. I am not a religious man. Claire does not shock me, as she would most people. Why do I want a priest? Rites? Ceremonies? I despise myself. It’s all superstition. Yet I know that I must tell someone that when I was eight years old I killed a woman in cold blood.

  The West wind of the equinox bashed suddenly against the conservatory glass of the hotel lounge where Filth sat, now alone. Then the wind stopped and he slept. In his sleep he heard the steady beating of a drum, and started awake, thinking that it was his heart. They helped him back to his bedroom where the grandmother’s asters shone on the window-sill.

  “I am so undeservedly lucky,” he said to the chambermaid later, beginning the repair of his damaged image. (Claire’s terrifying letter.) He smiled his lovely smile.

  “Lucky in material things anyway,” he said when he was alone again, curtains closed, lying in the sweet dark. “Their kindness is only because they’ve found out that I’m rich. There’ll be no trouble with the bill.” Considering other people’s pragmatism, he found that Claire’s beastly letter receded.

  But, dropping into sleep, a great face flooded across his dream landscape, filled the screen of his sleeping consciousness, loomed at him—disappeared. “Go away, Veneering,” Filth shouted after it. “I’m not ready to talk. Not yet.”

  A few days later, Father Tansy turned up at the delectable hotel, with a woman in a wavy nylon skirt and grey nun’s headgear who turned out to be Babs.

  Filth was in bed again. He had been advised to stay there for a day or two and not trouble himself with visitors, and his curtains were pulled across the daylight when the manager of the hotel knocked and eventually put his head around his door, and switched on the light, and Babs and the priest beheld
the catafalque figure of Filth under the sheet, his ivory nose pointed upwards, the nose of a very old man.

  “Perhaps not long?” said the manager. “Don’t stay too long.” Babs said she would go out now and take her dog for a walk.

  Then Father Tansy shut the door behind him, opened the curtains and switched off the light. He picked up the bedside phone and ordered room-service luncheon in an hour’s time. Then he ran round the bedroom removing drooping asters and opening all the windows. He found Filth’s dressing-gown and manoeuvred him into it, heaved the old bones off the bed, slid the ivory fans of Filth’s feet into his Harrods leather bedroomslippers, sat Filth on an upright chair and set a table in front of him.

  “Have I shaved?” asked Filth. “Oh dear, I do hope so.”

  “Never mind that,” said Tansy. “Wake up. You have sent for me at last. I have been waiting patiently.”

  “You have a great idea of your own importance,” said Filth. “I remember you, awash in that great marble church.”

  “Not my own importance,” said Tansy. “I follow Another’s importance. I try to follow the personality of Christ, and am directed by it.”

  “I don’t believe in all that,” said Filth. “But there’s something, somewhere, that’s urging me to talk to a—well, I suppose, to a priest. You are the only priest I know. How you got here, I don’t know. What I’m doing here, I don’t know. I’ve been dreaming lately. About Queen Mary.”

  “Queen Mary?”

  “Yes. And my father. And a—murder. And other loose ends.”

  Father Tansy waited with bright eyes, like a squirrel. “Carry on.”

  “I suppose it’s going to be a confession,” said Filth. “I’m glad you’re not hidden in one of those boxes. I’m not up to that.”

  “I know.”

  “I can’t start until Babs comes back. She’s part of it. And I’ve been seriously ill.”

  “Sir Edward, you can begin by telling me what’s the matter with you. And I don’t want to hear about prawns and strained ligaments.”

  After a time Filth said, “All my life, Tansy, from my early childhood, I have been left, or dumped, or separated by death, from everyone I loved or who cared for me. I want to know why.”

  “You are a hero in your profession, Sir Edward.”

  “That’s an utterly different matter. And in fact I don’t believe you. Nobody remembers me now at the Bar. My work is quite forgotten. I was once famous for some Pollution Law. All out-of-date now. I want to tell you something. When my Chambers were moved to a newly built office block, like a government department, costing millions which by then we could all afford—there were thirty-six members of Chambers when I decided to go permanently to Hong Kong—the old Clerk, who was retiring, took me down into the basement under the Elizabethan building where I began, and there was a sea of Briefs there, three feet deep, bundled up with pink tape. ‘We don’t know what to do with it,’ he said. ‘We’ve decided to get a firm in to throw it on a dump.’ That was years of my life. Years and years.”

  “It’s not often,” said the priest, “made as clear to us as that. I see it in my empty pews.”

  “It has all been void. I am old, forgotten and dying alone. My last friend, Veneering, has died. I miss him but I never quite trusted him. My most valuable friend was a card-sharp and my wife hated him though he made our fortunes at the Far Eastern Bar. He was killed on 9/11. A passenger in one of the planes. Still playing cards, I imagine. Hadn’t heard from him for years.”

  Babs came back in and made the dog lie down. It immediately climbed on Filth’s bed and lay looking across at him as if he’d seen him somewhere before.

  “The point is,” said Filth, seated at his table, recovering a little of his former authority when addressing the Court, “the point is, I have begun to wonder whether my life of loneliness—always basically I have felt quite alone—is because of what I did when I was eight years old, living with Babs and Claire in Wales, fostered by a woman called Mrs. Didds.”

  Babs scratched her leg in its thick grey stocking and looked out of the window. “Go on then, Teddy,” she said. “Spit it out.”

  Father Tansy, no trace now of the prancing comic of his parish church, his Office completely dominating him, sat still, and nodded once.

  When Filth was obviously unable to begin, Babs said, “Oh, I’ll do it, then.”

  There was a silence.

  “She hurt us,” Babs said. “She had that sort of smiling face, plump and round, that when you look closer is cruel. Nobody had noticed. Probably, when she first fostered children she was different. Pa Didds was a nice old man but he just sat about. Then he died. They’d had no children of their own. By the time the three of us arrived, she’d begun to hate children, but she had to keep on fostering because there was nothing else. They went on sending her children. From all over the Empire. When the children complained . . . Most never did, they thought she was normal. Anyway the children couldn’t complain until they’d got away, somewhere else. And there wasn’t anywhere else. We were all sent to her for four or five years. You know, longer than we’d been alive. The complaining ones were thought to be cowards. We had to copy the Spartans in those days. You should have seen the illustrations in children’s books of the Raj then. Pictures of children beating each other with canes at school. The prefectorial system. Now it would be thought porn. It was Cumberledge, of course, she hated most.”

  “He was there when we arrived,” said Filth. “In bed. Not speaking. He was pale and fat and sobbing and he didn’t come down to tea. ‘What’s the matter with the other boy?’ Babs asked. ‘He’s wet his bed again,’ Ma Didds said, and she laid one of her long whips over the table. ‘And he’ll have to wash his own sheets.’”

  “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 ev
er, 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.”