Last Friends (Old Filth Trilogy)

by Gardam, Jane

  (She’s taking her time to come up.)

  ‘Susan? Susan? Is that you? Are you back?’

  ‘You know it’s me, I’m getting your lunch. Here. Sit up. Soup and cheese. I seem to have been bringing people food all day. Oh, don’t snivel, Ma. I suppose you’ve forgotten that I’m going home tomorrow?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. Is Herman going too?’

  ‘Where else d’you think he’ll live?’

  ‘And I’m not snivelling. It’s a cold. I must have caught it in the church.’

  ‘The less said about that the better. Ma—tell me something. Did Fiscal-Smith have some sort of a thing about Veneering? I always thought it was Old Filth he was mad about.’

  ‘Thing?’

  ‘Is he gay?’

  ‘Oh my dear! Good heavens, no. He’s 80 plus.’

  ‘He’s not related to Veneering, is he? Told me at the station he’d known him since they were eight.’

  ‘Well, they’re both from the North somewhere. Nobody knows. The North is big I suppose. I must say they’ve both dealt pretty well with the accent. They’re both Roman Catholics. Expensive schools and Oxford.’

  ‘How weird. It’s just that Fiscal-Smith, poor little scrap, flipped a bit as the train came in. Made a speech at me about Veneering. At me. Eyes glittering. Very odd. He kept pressing that lighted button on the carriage door and all the doors kept opening and closing.’

  ‘Once,’ said Dulcie, looking away, ‘you were fined twenty-five pounds for that. Pulling the cord for fun. We did it once at school and then we all jumped out and ran across the fields and my foster family nearly killed me. I wrote to my father in Shanghai to come and rescue me and he wrote back saying he would never write to me again and nor would my mother until I’d written letters of shame to everyone, including the railway company. It was the dear old LMS.’

  ‘Whatever that was. Here, Ma. Eat your rhubarb.’

  ‘I hate the way people call it rhubarb now. It should be rhu-BUB. Only the Queen and I pronounce it properly.’

  ‘When did you discuss rhubarb with the Queen? The last thing—when the doors did close—Fiscal-Smith was saying was that Veneering once had a different name and he was some sort of a hero. Very brave. Huge admiration. Did you know?’

  ‘Perhaps he was Veneering’s best-man, too.’

  ‘Oh now! Veneering was married frightfully young. When he was doing his national service in the Navy after the War. His ship was showing the flag around the Far East. He met and married Elsie ten years before he met the rest of us. Before he met Betty.’

  ‘Yes. We know all that. Everyone knew his wife drank. People always do.’

  ‘Elsie was Chinese of course. Never saw anyone so beautiful. But she drank.’

  ‘We knew all that, too.’

  ‘She was rather after the style of that pink-coat woman at the funeral, Isobel.’

  ‘Isobel does not drink!’

  ‘That will do, Susan! Do you know Isobel?’

  ‘O.K.—keep your hair on. I did once. It can’t be the same one.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Dulcie, spooning rhubarb, ‘there was some link between little Fred Fiscal-Smith and Edward. Something awful. Orphans, of some sort. Well, you don’t ask, do you? Not done.’

  ‘I was a Raj Orphan,’ said Susan.

  ‘Yes. You made a great fuss. I can’t think why. It is such a character-forming thing to be separated from one’s parents. I never saw mine for years. I didn’t miss them at all. Couldn’t remember what they looked like after about a week. But then, I’ve never been very interesting and I’m sure they weren’t.’

  ‘I missed mine,’ said Susan.

  ‘Your father, I suppose.’

  ‘No. I missed you. Dreadfully.’

  ‘Susan! How lovely! I had no idea! How kind of you to tell me. I did write you thousands of letters—. But—. I think I’ll get up now and write to Fiscal-Smith. I think I was a little hard on him for bringing that overnight-case. He’ll be nearly home by now. I hope there was a dining car on the train. He remembers—and so do I—when railway cups and saucers—.’

  ‘“Had rosebuds on them”. Yes, we know. And for godsake, Ma, don’t get up until I’ve done down-stairs. The kitchen’s full of damp church vestments.’

  ‘And after this,’ she said in the kitchen, ‘thank God, we must start packing for America.’

  Dulcie, not waiting to dress got out of bed, found some writing paper and sat at her dressing table.

  My dear Fiscal-Smith,

  I am sorry that we did not say a proper goodbye after our little adventure this morning. I had not expected you to leave immediately and I am very sorry if we seemed to be hurrying you away, Sincerely, your oldest friend, Dulcie.

  PS: I don’t seem to be able to get not Old Filth—Eddie—out of my mind, but Veneering. Am I right in thinking that you knew him better than anyone else did? That there are things you never told us? Just a hazy thought. I’ve so often wondered how he got where he did. So flashy and brash (if I dare say so) so brilliant in court, so good at languages, so passionate and so—whatever they say about him with women—so common. But oh so honourable! Don’t forget, I knew Betty very well. But I am saying too much—too much unless it is to a dear last friend which I know it is.

  DW.

  * * *

  And now I am completely restored, she thought the next day, waving Susan and her grandson off in the hired car for the airport, back to Boston, Mass.

  Susan had kissed her goodbye. Even Herman had hugged her, if inexpertly. This visit had been a success! Susan talked of returning soon. Even of sending Herman to boarding school here with the boy his own age over in Veneering’s old house, the poet’s son. Well, well! I wish she’d say what’s happened to her husband. An electric fence around her there.

  * * *

  Today and probably for the next few days Dulcie decided she would do nothing. It was time for her to be quiet and reflect. So idiotic at my age, but I must reflect upon the future. ‘Reflect’, perhaps the wrong word. It has a valedictory connotation. But I am not too old to consider matters of moral behaviour. There is Janice coming to clean on Wednesday and Susan’s already done the sheets. I will not go over to Veneering’s house to see that new family. I mustn’t get dependent on them. I mustn’t become a bore. I shall—. Well I shall read. Go through old letters. Plenty to do. Prayers. Wait for Fiscal-Smith’s reply.

  But when this had not arrived by Friday Dulcie began to think again how much he irritated her. She knew she had hurt him by sending him home, but, after all, she had not invited him. It was that supply of clean shirts she’d seen in the case that she couldn’t forget. The image brought others: his ease the night before with her drinks cupboard, his arrogance in the church. How he had criticised the vicar. He knew that the Church of England had to regard their priests as wandering planets now, the current one arrived on a scooter dressed as a hoodie and vanished after the service without a word to anybody; but Fiscal-Smith need not have looked so RC and smug. And disdainful of St. Ague’s.

  Of course she knew the village was dead. Dorset was dead. It was gone. Submerged beneath the rich week-enders, who never passed the time of day. Came looking for The Woodlanders of Thomas Hardy and then cut down the trees. The only life-timer in The Donheads was the ancient man in the lanes with the scythe. Willy used to call him the grim reaper. Lived somewhere in a ditch—never talked. Some said he was still here.

  There was no-one to talk to. The village Shop, as Fiscal-Smith had said, was dying on its feet. He didn’t have to tell her. She scrapped another letter to him, written this time on an expensive quatre-folded writing paper, thick and creamy, from Smythson’s of Bond Street—which Fiscal-Smith would never have heard of—and set out on foot to the village shop herself.

  It was pure patriotism and she hoped that there were some faces behind th
e beautiful polished windows and luxury blinds of the weekenders in the lanes to see her. She didn’t need anything. Susan had stocked up for her as if for a siege, in the Shaftesbury Co-op. She bought at the little shop a tin of baked beans and listened to Chloe discussing whether Scotts Oats were better than Quaker when making flap-jack. There rose up a vision of golden heaps of sea-wrack, squid, banana fritters, marigolds and the smell of every kind of spice. A tired, dreamy Chinese chef spinning pasta from a lump of dough for the tourists; a stall piled high with cat-fish. Mangoes. Loquats.

  On the way home she decided to get eggs from the farm. There was a wooden box hung on a field-gate. It had been there fifty years. You took out the eggs and left the money. Beautiful brown eggs covered in hen-shit to show how fresh they were. Today she opened the flap of the box and there were no eggs and no money but a dirty-looking note saying, ‘Ever Been Had?’

  She was all at once desolate. The whole world was corrupt. She was friendless and alone. Like Fiscal-Smith she had outstayed her welcome in the place she felt was home. There was absolutely nothing for her to do now but walk back to empty Privilege Hall.

  No she would not! There must be someone. Yes. She would go and call on the two old twins up the lane. The people in the shop had said that there was a new Carer there. Well, there nearly always was a new Carer there. (Oh! When was the last time there was anybody happy? It’s not that I’m really already missing Susan. I wonder if I’d have loved Susan more if she’d been a boy? With a nice wife who would sit and talk and play Bridge?)

  She tottered up to the cottage of the two old high-powered (Civil Service) twins and was greeted by a dry young woman with a grey face, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I am a friend—.’

  ‘They’re having their rest.’

  ‘But it’s lunch-time.’

  ‘They rest early.’

  ‘I am a very old friend. May I please come in?’

  She walked through the nice cottage that seemed to be awash with rubbish awaiting the bin men, and saw Olga and Faery playing a slowish card-game at a table. They raised their eyes sadly.

  ‘Thank you.’ Dulcie turned to the Carer. ‘That will be all for now. You may take a break. I’m sure you need one. Please take your cigarette into your car.’

  The twins looked frightened. ‘She’s from a very expensive agency. They said she did smoke but not in the house. But she does.’

  ‘It’s so strange that we mind,’ said Faery. ‘We all smoked once.’

  ‘And I suppose we are a horrible job,’ said Olga. ‘Even though she gets double. She goes on and on about how wonderful her last job was. “Lovely people”. She calls them by their first names, Elizabeth and Philip. Do you think it was with the Royal Family?’

  ‘I don’t. And if it was, Down with the Royal Family.’

  ‘Oh, don’t start, Dulcie. We’re wiser now.’

  ‘I want to kill her. Oh, for some men.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Dulcie, we’re all over eighty and we’re feminists.’

  They sat. The room was cold with no sign of a fire. Faery’s legs were wrapped in loose bandages.

  ‘Marriage must be a help in old age,’ said Olga, ‘but since the husband usually goes first it doesn’t rate much now. No penniless spinster daughters at home to look after us either. Must say, I’d like one.’

  ‘Well, my Susan would be hopeless as a Daughter at Home.’

  ‘But she comes and takes charge often,’ said Faery. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are Dulcie. You never did.’

  ‘But she makes me feel such a fool all the time. She’s married and clever and well-off and has a son and yet she’s never happy. Never was.’

  ‘She has her girl-friends,’ said Olga and there was a long pause. The Carer was hard at work across the front hall, complaining on her phone at high speed in an unknown tongue.

  ‘Did you know? Well of course you’ll know.’

  Faery said, ‘Hugely rich, we hear. And no girl. Woman almost your age.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course,’ said Dulcie.

  The Carer returned and said that she must start to get the girls to bed. Dulcie saw her lighting up another cigarette as she held open the front door.

  In the sitting room the two women stared at their playing-cards and listened to the Carer texting messages (plink, plink) in the kitchen.

  ‘My special subject at Oxford was Tolstoy,’ said Faery.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ said Olga.

  ‘Perhaps fiction was a mistake, it has rather fizzled out.’ said Faery. ‘We should have pioneered Women’s Rights.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Olga. ‘It was the wrong moment. Fiction got us through. Fiction and surviving the ship-wreck at 15 years old.’

  ‘Yes. And just look at us now.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with us being born women that we’re wearing nappies and in the charge of a drug-addict,’ said Olga. ‘Men get just the same. No family backing, that’s the trouble. Poor old Dulcie’s an example. Hardly went to school you know. Married in the cradle. Daft as a brush. Like a schoolgirl. Silly women haven’t a brain to lose.’

  ‘Yes. I wouldn’t have wanted to share a cradle with Pastry Willy! He never liked us, you know.’

  ‘No. I suppose we shouldn’t have told her about Susan and her old girl? Nasty of us. Poor Dulcie.’

  ‘Lesbians are always looking for their mothers.’

  ‘It must be hard for them.’

  The two old trolls sat over their cards thinking occasionally of Tolstoy.

  * * *

  Dulcie, having left the aged twins, began to walk home through the lanes, past the infertile egg-box, the village shop. When Janice, her cleaning lady, drove by in her new Volvo Dulcie stared at her as at a stranger.

  Susan loving someone who is a woman and not her mother! Such an insult to me. I suppose it’s been going on for ages and I am the last to know. It was that boarding-school at eight, in England, when we were in Shanghai or somewhere—I forget. I’ve done everything wrong. I wrote her hundreds of letters at school. I did try. She hardly answered them.

  But she was so happy here in England. All her friends were here, everyone’s parents over-seas. All seemed so jolly. Everyone did it. I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it. Lesbian! I wonder if they all were? I’m sure I didn’t know the meaning of the word. Well, anyway, we’d never have talked about it. Men get turned on by divine discontent, and challenged when a woman’s mind is always somewhere else, dreaming. I wonder if Betty—no. I heard once that there had been something between Old Filth and that Isobel, but of course I won’t believe that. Edward would have had an apocalyptic fit if he’d thought that Betty had ever embraced a woman. Whatever would my mother have thought? Well—I suppose there was Miss Cleaves—.

  I’m not sure that the word is apocalyptic?

  I wonder who’s got Filth’s house? And fortune! A woman—that pale pink woman? Isobel. The femme fatale. No not Isobel. No—there was only ever Betty for Filth. Nobody else. Not ever. Surely? Do you know, Willy (Willy, where are you?) I think I’ve been left behind.

  Oh, is nobody ever virtuous any more—as our mothers were? Well, I think mine was. I didn’t see her very often—Pastry—please tell me. Whatever would you make of this?

  I suppose Pastry, you never—? No. No. Had a—?

  You would say, my faithful man (though I was never happy about that old Vera) you would say, ‘Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’ Pastry? Listen to me.

  The point is that, as a lonely widow in a big empty house and few friends left (I’ve forgotten a handkerchief) there is nobody to discuss anything with any more. That is the sharpness of loss. The feelings don’t go, even when the brain has begun to wither and stray. I know some very nice widowed people who manage so well. Ther
e’s poor Patsy, laying up dinner-places for all her dead relations. Seems perfectly happy. She’s got that funny middle-aged son who goes round clearing everything away again. Those with latter-day brains are the lucky ones.

  I can hardly discuss anything with Olga and Faery. You would have told me to keep clear of them. They smell of decay. They can never forget that they went to the university and think I am beneath them. They’re senile, though. Serves them right for being so patronising at school. And they only got upper-seconds someone said, or was it actually lower-seconds? I bet they both remember that. And I will not leave them comfortless even if they are church-going atheists. I will always be their old friend. I suppose. For what I’m worth. Oh. Oh, dear. I must not crack up.

  In the drive of Privilege House stood her rickety car and finding the key in the lock Dulcie climbed in and drove away. She reversed, ground the tyres into the cattle-grid, and swept down the hill and up the un-metalled driveway jointly shared by Old Filth’s ghost and Veneering’s ghost, dividing, one down, one up, and leading nowhere now, she thought. Even those awful rooks don’t seem to be there anymore.

  She accelerated noisily towards Veneering’s yews and here, head-on towards her, came a huge crucifix with a pretty woman marching behind it and smiling. Anna.

  * * *

  Anna saw Dulcie’s cigarette-lined, little monkey face peeping behind the wheel and her expression of panic and she flung the crucifix aside (it was a home-made sign-post), pounced on Dulcie’s car and opened its doors.

  ‘I’m just fixing up a bigger B and B sign, Dulcie. Whatever’s the matter!’

  ‘Nothing. The car looked as if it needed a little run. We used to say “a spin”. So I’m spinning.’

  ‘You’re crying! Come on. I’m getting in with you. Can you drive on up? I’ll get you something to eat with us.’

  ‘Oh, but I must get back.’

  ‘Nonsense. Go on. Re-start the engine. Don’t look down Filth’s ridiculous precipice. Stupid place to build that lovely house, down in a hole. I’ll bet he had a bad chest.’