Old Filth (25 page)

“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 ever, 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.”

“And so,” said Filth, “I let go of her very suddenly so that she fell backwards down the stairs. And lay still at the bottom of them. Before she lay still, there was a—crack. Like a snapped tree.”

“I ran to clear up the burnt head,” said Babs, “and Eddie went to look after Cumberledge. Claire put on her coat and went down to the village to get help. But she was a very long time because it was a dark night and she got lost. She's always hated the dark. So Teddy and I got into bed together to be close. We couldn't make Cumberledge get in with us. In the end Teddy and I went to sleep and we only woke up when they were clearing Ma Didds away. She wasn't dead, as it turned out, but she died the next day. They had to do an emergency operation on her for cancer of the stomach. That's what she died of, they said. She'd have died in a few days, anyway.”

“
What
?” said Filth. “Nobody ever told me that.”

 

“And the other boy? Cumberledge?”

“Cumberledge's so-called guardians took him away at once. There was a scandal about his condition and he vanished from us. We were kept down in the village until Auntie May could come, and Eddie's Sir.”

“Were questions asked?”

“So far as I know, none. There had been rumours for a long time. But Welsh villages stick together against foreigners, and we were all very foreign children there. Wales was more secretive in those days and the language defeated us. But nobody suggested anything criminal about us.”

“Nobody,” said Babs. “Claire even got some presents. Everyone always loves Claire.”

 

In this expensive and benign hotel in the English late autumn light, they sat, all three, in silence.

“You have come to me asking for absolution?” asked Father Tansy. “You repent?”

Eddie Feathers, Old Filth, the judge, Fevvers, a Master of the Inner Temple, Teddy—pillar of justice, arbitrator of truth said nothing.

“No,” he said at last. “I don't. I can't.”

“No, I don't either,” said Babs. “And I know Claire doesn't.”

“Did Cumberledge survive? Is he sane?”

“Very much so,” said Filth. “I next met him in the dark in Oxford. During the War when I was lost in the snow. I didn't realise who it was. Between eight and eighteen we all change utterly. Yet years later I somehow realised. He was coming out of a blacked-out church. He had a calmness and a kindness. He was Army. He wrote when Betty died. His essence was unharmed.”

“He became a grandee,” said Babs. “He's retired to Cambridge. A grandee.”

“There are those who are given Grace,” said Tansy. “But you yourself wanted to make some sort of confession, Sir Edward?”

“I wanted to express my pity,” said Filth. “My pity for her. For Ma Didds. I've tried hundreds of Cases, many more wicked than anything here. Some I still cannot bear to think about. I don't mean I cannot bear to think about my judgements—you have to be thick-skinned about that—I cannot bear to think about the cruelty at the core of this foul world. Or the vengeance dormant even in children. All there, ready, waiting for use. Without love. Cumberledge was given Grace. That's all I can say. We were not.”

They still sat on.

The dog stretched on the bed and yawned and jumped down, bent over and rested its head on Babs's knobbly knee.

“We'll say the General Confession,” said Tansy. “Together.”

They did, Filth remembering it being hammered into him by Sir.

Tansy then said, “Let us pray. Remember these Thy children, oh merciful Lord. Heal them and keep them in Thine everlasting arms.”

 

H
is house was clean and polished, his garden neat. A note on the kitchen table said,
Butter, cheese, milk in fridge. Eggs. Bread in crock. Bacon, etc. Welcome home. Kate
. Through the windows, looking towards the Downs, he saw movement in his apple tree and a next-door child dropped out of it, eating fruit, and wandered nonchalantly over the lawn as if he owned it. The hedge must have a hole in it, he thought. It might as well stay. His mail had been neatly stacked on his desk, the fire laid ready to light. She'd stuck some shop flowers in a vase.

It had been a good drive home. Most enjoyable. Christmas coming.

Very pleasant seeing poor Babs again. And the parson chap. Holiday full of events. And tomorrow he must see the doctor.

His ankle was very much better, and he had no trace of trouble with his heart—or digestion. All that was the matter with him now was the onset of winter aches and pains. His arthritis was remarkably mild for his age, they always said, especially considering the age of his damp old house.

 

“I am about to make another journey,” he said the next day after his visit to the surgery in Shaftesbury. “Good morning, Mrs. Kate. How very good to see you. Thank you for the provisions. The house looks very well. I've brought you a keepsake from Gloucester. Where's Garbutt?”

 

“Garbutt,” he said. “Good morning. Did I imagine it? Yes, of course I did. You didn't by any chance visit me in wherever it was I've been? I had some sort of dream. There were some very odd doctors. They thought I'd had a heart attack. Perfect nonsense.”

“Thanks for the postcard,” said Garbutt.

“Now then, you haven't got rid of me yet, either of you. I've made a decision. I'm flying to the East for the New Year.”

“You'd never get the Insurance,” said Kate.

“You've not flown in years. It's knees on your nose now,” said Garbutt.

“I shall be flying First. I always did. I always shall. I can afford it. Judge Veneering left me his set of Law Reports and I shall sell them for six thousand pounds.”

“You won't get Insurance.”

“You can't go alone.”

The two of them were closing on him like assassins.

“I have never felt so well. My little holiday has set me right. The doctor says that there is no need for the more lethal injections against diseases now. And I have the right clothes already in my wardrobe. No shopping.”

They muttered off, to confer.

“Flying's not safe any more,” said Kate. “Not since the Twin Towers. New Year's just the time for the next attack. And you'll be flying to a Muslim country, like as not.”

He paid no attention but asked Garbutt if he would go up in the roof and look for the suitcase he and Lady Feathers had brought back from Bangladesh on their last trip.

Kate said, “Madeira's nice. Why not settle for nearer?”

“No. Bangladesh. I must see Bangladesh—or maybe Lanka again. And I might just continue. On into Malaysia, then up to Borneo. Kotakinakulu. Where I was born.”

“Then I despair,” said Garbutt.

“Bangladesh is where the brasses come from.”

He had given Kate the beaten copper bowls of his heyday, after Betty died, to stop her from cleaning them twice a week at his expense.

She said, “If I understand the nine-o'clock news, Bangladesh is the place half the time under water and no good for arthritis. I'm sorry, but that doctor's notorious. He's never been beyond the golf course. He's never even been to Grand Canary where we go—nice and near and no chance of Economy-class thrombosis.”

“He's told you. He's not going Economy-class,” said Garbutt. “He says it's full of children joining their families out East for the school holidays. Makes him angry. Says in his day it took six weeks and you went once in five years. Says they're all spoilt now, and playing music in their ears.”

 

“It's the luggage that really bothers me,” said Garbutt.

The suitcase was immense. He got it out of the roof like a difficult birth. Its label called it a Revelation.

“Revelation was once the very best luggage,” said Filth. “They were ‘revelations' because they expanded.”

“They were them heavy things that went out with porters,” said Kate. “Can't we get you one borrowed? From that Chloe?”

“Absolutely not,” said Filth.

“No way,” said Garbutt.

“Get something on wheels with a handle, then,” she said; and “What's this, there's something written on it in brass studs?”

“Islam,” Filth said.

“Well that settles it. You can't carry that. You'll be thought a terrorist.”

“Islam was the name of a distinguished lawyer in Brunei. A friend. He gave me the suitcase to bring back our presents. We bought a great many—they have so little there. It was the least we could do. Buy and buy.”

“Let's get it open then,” said Garbutt.

Inside were lurid hessian table mats, cross-stitched sacking table cloths, wilting saris and some indestructible straw matting. There was also a heavy little bundle of amethysts. He had sometimes suspected Betty of light-hearted smuggling. He sent all the other stuff to a church sale and asked Garbutt to scrub the case and polish it. It came up a treat.

“You can tell Class, I'll say that,” said Kate. “But I wish you'd reconsider, Sir Edward. We're hardly over your last.”

He stared her out.

And so into the Revelation went Filth's impeccable underwear; his singlets and what he still called his knickers; his yellow cotton socks from Harrods, twenty years old; some silk pyjamas; two light-weight suits and a dinner jacket (because one can never be quite sure where one will be invited). He added two sponge (antique phrase) bags, one for shaving things and bars of coal-tar soap, the other for his pills. Separate pills for use on the journey would go into his passport case. There was ample room in the Revelation for more.

“You could get all your things in here, too,” he called out to Betty over his shoulder—then felt a pang in the upper chest. He was doing it again. Talking to her. And as if she would ever have dreamed of sharing his suitcase! So strange that, since his extraordinary peregrination to the West Country, Betty was back in his life again. Brief pains, real pains of longing for her now. Guilty pains. He had been neglecting her memory.
Memory and desire
—I must keep track of them. Mustn't lose hold.

 

On Christmas Day he attended church at ten. He preferred the eight o'clock in a silent church, heady with greenery and winter-scented flowers, but eight was getting early for him now. The ten o'clock was restless with children and everyone shaking hands with each other and the Vicar was called Lucy. Never mind. He prayed for Father Tansy, and for Babs and Claire. He prayed for the souls of Ma Didds and Sir and Oils and Miss Robertson and Auntie May. This set up other candidates. He prayed for Loss, of course, as he often did, and for Jack and for Pat Ingoldby as he did every day, and for poor old Isobel who'd turned out to be a lesbian all the time. So stupid of him. And most unpleasant. He should have guessed he could never be everything to her.

He prayed—
what, will the line ne'er be done
?—for the nice girl and her grandmother, and for the aunts' little maid Alice, and for Garbutt and Kate. He prayed for the souls of his father and mother. And then he prayed for Ada, the shadow who leaned to him over water which he now was not sure was a memory or the memory of a memory. He prayed for podgy Cumberledge who had come out strong as a lion. How unaccountable it all is. How various and wonderful. He kept on and on praying through the rest of the service. For Veneering, for that unattractive Barrister girl who'd had a baby she'd called after him, for . . . He struggled hard against praying for Chloe and the souls of his aunts—but in the end, he managed it. He didn't pray for Betty. He knew she didn't need it.

He had his usual Christmas dinner at the White Hart in Salisbury and over the next few days put his desk in order, adding a codicil to his Will that left Mrs.-er—Kate (her name was Toms, Katherine Toms) the amethysts. He left Garbutt a cheque, then tore it up and left him a much larger one. He topped up his bequests to the National Trust and the Barristers' Benevolent. And so the last dead days of December passed.

On the thirty-first, he was waiting for the car in the hall, seated upon Betty's rose-and-gold throne, alone, since Kate had her family to think about at New Year, and the car drove him without incident in pouring rain the hundred miles to Heathrow.

The airport was almost empty. There had been “an alert.” How ridiculous, he thought. We are letting these people win. Security was meticulous. He was made to step three times under the scaffold before anyone realised that the alarm signal he gave off came from his old-world eyeglass. The suitcase with its emblazoned studs and Muslim appearance was passed through without a glance. Islam. There was a little hesitation about the X-ray picture of Pat Ingoldby's clothes-brush which looked like a gun.

And, then, the plane.

How stewardesses do smile these days, thought Filth. How cold their eyes.

He wondered what it would be like to be hi-jacked? He wondered once again, an hour or so later, when the plane plunged like a stone for a thousand feet over the Alps.

“Just a bit of turbulence.” The pilot came strolling through, presumably to give confidence, and Filth was pleased with himself for continuing to drink his soup.

“Are you comfortable, sir?”

He was pleased that the fellow was English. Pilots nowadays tended not to be.

“What route are we taking, Captain? Round the edges?”

“Oh, sure. Well to the South. Not a missile in sight. It'll be dark over Afghanistan. Singapore for a cup of tea and then up to Dacca.”

Filth said, “When I first used to come out here, it was Vietnam we had to avoid. Had to refuel twice then. The Gulf. Then Bombay. Bombay's called something else now, I gather. There used to be half a marble staircase on Bombay airport. Gold and cream. Lovely thing. It stopped in mid-air. Symbolic.”

“Time marches on.”

“Not so sure it marches anywhere in particular though.”

He slept. Once, jerking awake from a dream, he yelled out, thinking he was being put into a body-bag. An air stewardess with tendril arms was tucking a blanket around him.

The black night shuddered all around the plane. When he next woke there was a pencilled line of gold drawn round each oval blind.

Dawn already.

“We are in tomorrow,” said the girl. “It's the sunrise. A happy New Year.”

(You'd think I'd never flown before.)

He watched the dawn.

Later he looked down upon a fat carpet of clouds and saw something he had never seen in his life before. Two suns stood side by side in the sky. A parhelion. A formidable and ancient omen of something or other, he forgot what. He looked about the cabin, but the other two or three First-class passengers were asleep under their blankets and the stewards out of sight.

The whiteness outside the plane became terrible. The plane was a glass splinter, a pin. It was being flipped into eternity, into dissolution. They were beyond speed now, and in infinity—travelling towards what he understood astronomers call “The Singularity.”

But they were bringing the orange juice and hot cloths.

And soon it was evening again.

 

At Singapore a wheelchair had been provided for him. (Very old gentleman with limp.) It stood waiting at the mouth of the wrinkled tube that joined the aeroplane to the earth (and that certainly had not been there in the seventies; they had had to climb down steep stepladders). He disregarded the chair and walked stiffly along the bouncing tunnel and into the air-cooled glitter of the shops, and eventually to the shadowy First-class lounge. Two hours, and a long sleep, later—and he walked easily all the way back.

The seat next to his was now occupied by a young man in an open-necked collarless white shirt and jeans who was already at work upon a laptop. Filth read across a white laminated folder “Instructions to Counsel.”

Filth felt garrulous.

“You a lawyer? So was I. I used to work on the flight out, too. All the way out, all the way back. Don't know how I did it now. Straight into Chambers from the airport. We all got used to working through the night, even in London. Mind you, I never went straight from a plane into Court. Never did that. Too dangerous.”

“We do now,” said the boy. “No time to hang about.”

“Dangerous for the client. Dangerous for Counsel. Going into Court not feeling tip-top.”

“I always feel tip-top. I say—you're not by any chance . . .?

“Yes. Old Filth. Long forgotten.”

“Well, you're still remembered out here.”

“Yes. Well, I dare say. I hope so. Ha. Did you ever come across a chap called Loss?”

“No. I don't think so.”

“Or Islam?”

“They're all called Islam.”

“He's probably dead. Certainly retired. I've got one of his suitcases. Called a Revelation.”

A new stewardess, a Malay, browner, silkier, gentler, with more rounded arms and in a sari, came along with potted prawns. “Shall we pull down the blinds for you, sir?”

“No thanks,” said the young Silk. “Less than two hours left. Let's watch the stars.”

“You married?” asked Filth after a long rumination looking at but not eating the prawns.

“Sure.”

“I used to take mine along,” said Filth. “Always.”

“Mine's in banking. And I don't think she actually would describe herself as ‘mine.' We're landing. Good. And we weren't hi-jacked.”

 

As he made to leave the plane, a black misery suddenly came upon Filth like the eye bandage slapped around the face before it is presented to a firing squad. Then he wondered if, in fact, on this journey, he had really hoped only for death . . . Had wanted the knife slipped out of the shoe. The gun in the sleeve. The “Nobody move!” The spatter of bullets and blood. One blessed, releasing explosion. Lived long enough. Get the thing over.