Old Filth (26 page)

He had been waiting.

For what was there left for him in the Donheads?

Stuck in that wet woodland place with Garbutt and Mrs.-er, and lacy Chloe?

Well, there was still hope for obliteration on the return journey. Might achieve it.

And if I don't—what? I'll move. I'll take a flat in The Temple. Don't know anyone now. Ghastly lot of new Judges. Still, they are one's own.

Bleak, uncertain, nodding thanks to the pretty girl, Filth made gingerly for the door.

 

From the top of the gangway, the East hit him full in the face. The thick, glorious heat washed on to him and around him, lapped his swollen old hands and his tired feet, bathed his old skull and sinewy neck, soaked into his every pore and fibre. Life stirred. The resting plane was vibrating with heat, the air around it vibrating, the airport vibrating and dancing in the soft dark. High glares and electrics together shone along the low parapet where people were waiting to meet the plane, clustered like dark flies, like frenzied butterflies.

The tremendous chatter of talk, the excitement. The toots and hoots and wails and the drumming. The prayers and the prostrated prayers and the prayer mats. The old, old beloved smell.

Betty seemed to be beside him, grinning away, waving back at all the people. Just at his shoulder.

“Watch it, sir. Let me help you. Is something wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong,” said Filth. The kind arms stretched. “Nothing at all is wrong.”

For he was Home.

 

S
cene: The Inner Temple Garden.

Two judges standing beside the monument that is inscribed,
Lawyers, I suppose, were children once
. The bell of the Temple Church is tolling on and on, as it does, once for every year of a dead Bencher's life.

 

The Queen's Remembrancer: That'll be for Filth.

A Lord of Appeal: There'll be ninety of them then.

QR: Not quite. Nearly. Did you read the obituaries?

L of A: Yes. Short. So difficult to say exactly what he'd done. When it came to it. Not a
great
lawyer. Never changed anything. Very old-fashioned delivery. Laughable, I expect, now. Good judge, of course.

QR: He'd just got off a plane. Did you know? Going back to his roots.

L of A: Game of him. About the most imaginative thing he ever did, I suspect. In his long and uneventful life. Was he travelling alone, d'you know?

QR: Oh, yes. Travelling alone. Quite alone.

 

As will be obvious, I am very much indebted to Rudyard Kipling's Autobiography and to his story “Baa Baa Black Sheep.” Also to Christopher Hudson's fine novel, “Colombo Heat,” about the last days of the Raj in Ceylon (Sri Lanka); I have even taken the liberty of borrowing one of his characters and giving her a walk-on part with a crutch. Sir was suggested by Geoffrey Grigson's autobiography, The Crest on the Silver.

I am also very grateful to friends, dead and alive, who were once Raj Orphans, and to Peter Leyland, K. S. Chung and my husband, David Gardam, all of whom set off in Wartime convoys to the East and two of whom returned.

I am very grateful to the late Michael Underhill, QC, who was for a few months junior Platoon Commander in the Royal Gloucestershire regiment which guarded Queen Mary at Badminton House. He talked to me about it, as did his wife, Rosalie Beaumont, who showed me a charming, innocent correspondence between her husband and Queen Mary. Thanks also to Mrs. Nettles, one-time housekeeper at Badminton, and her sister. I drew on Queen Mary by James Pope-Hennessy (1959) and HRH Princess Adelaide, Duchess of Teck (1900), a mighty work by C. Kinloch Cooke, Barrister-at-Law. John Saumarez Smith of the Heywood Hill bookshop in Curzon Street kindly introduced me to Osbert Sitwell's hilarious Queen Mary and Others (1974).

To the Benchers of the Inner Temple, the Clerks and members of Atkin Chambers I am particularly grateful for many things over fifty years; especially to Stewart Goldsmith who often got me to foreign parts and home again.

Those who believe that they recognise any of my characters are mistaken, for they are all from my imagination except for Queen Mary; her lady-in-waiting; the Duchess of Beaufort; the stationmaster of Badminton (who, it appears, really did wear white gloves and call the platforms “lawns”); and my husband who in only one instance resembles Filth: he ate thirty-seven bananas on Freetown beach. (There were no ill effects.) His friend at Oundle School, “the best I ever had,” was called Pat Ingoldby; he was lost at sea in 1942 and I have made use of his name in his memory.

Any historical mistakes are my own.
 

Jane Gardam,

Sandwich,

Kent

2004

 

 

Jane Gardam's first book,
Black Faces, White Faces
(1975), a collection of short stories, won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. Subsequent collections of short stories include
The Pangs of Love and Other Stories
, winner of the Katherine Mansfield Award, and
Going into a Dark House
, which was awarded the PEN Macmillan Silver Pen Award in 1995. Gardam's first novel,
God on the Rocks
was adapted for television in 1992. It won the Prix Baudelaire (France) in 1989 and was short-listed for the Booker Prize. She is the only author to have twice been awarded the Whitbread Prize for the Best Novel of the Year (for the
Queen of the Tambourine
, in 1991, and for
The Hollow Land
, 1981). She is also the author of
The Flight of the Maiden
, which was adapted for BBC Radio's Woman's Hour. In 1999, Jane Gardam was awarded the Heywood Hill Literary Prize in recognition of a distinguished literary career. She lives with her husband in England.