Old Filth (8 page)

“But I've his sisters. My guardians. What do they say?”

“We have written to the Misses Feathers and they replied in a very—sanguine—manner. Busy women. War work, one supposes.”

“I don't know. I've hardly seen them. Am I to leave school after
Christmas
?”

“And here is tea. Let us hope for crumpets though it will be only marge.”

“May I go now? I want to think.”

“If you feel it wise. One can of course think too much. Your father tended to think too much.”

As Eddie opened the door of the study, there came padding towards it an old lady in slippers pushing a tea-trolley. The teapot was muffled in a knitted crinoline of rose and orange frills and had an art-nouveau lady's head on top, a black painted curl against each porcelain cheek. Whenever afterwards Filth beheld such an object—at a church fête, perhaps, at the end of his life and long after the precise reason for it had been lost—he found himself near tears.

The old woman handed Eddie a silver dish full of crumpets and indicated a brass crumpet-stand on the hearth.

“Oh, good. Jam,” said the Headmaster. “This is Ingoldby's friend, Mrs. P.”

“Ingoldby's a nice boy,” said the housekeeper, “and so was his brother, God rest him.” She left the room.

“What's this?” cried Eddie.

“Sit down a minute, Feathers. I was coming to it. I'm sorry. But tomorrow I shall have to give the news out in prayers. I'm glad you came over. Jack Ingoldby's plane has been reported missing over the Channel. His brother doesn't know. We're waiting until he is better. He is being taken home tomorrow. Keep it to yourself.”

 

Eddie ran from the penumbrous house to the nearest public phone box, on the corner of the playing fields, and dialled Trunks for a long-distance call. He asked for the High House number and was told by the operator to expect a long wait. “Will you be ready when a line comes free? Maybe twenty or thirty minutes, dear, and you must have the right money. One shilling and a sixpence and two pennies.”

“I haven't got thirty minutes.”

“Try later, dear. And it's cheaper.” She cut him off.

He ran back to his House and began a letter to Mrs. Ingoldby, but the words were senseless. I can't write formalities, I can't. I'm the family. She'll want to hear my voice. She'll be expecting to hear it. They'll have been trying to get me and nobody's told me. He sat, thinking, then wrote:

 

Dear Mrs. Ingoldby,

I am thinking of you all the time,

your loving Eddie.

 

Have I the right to be their loving Eddie?

The voids of his ignorance opened before him. I'm still the foreigner. To them. And to myself, here. I've no background. I've been peeled off my background. I've been attached to another background like a cut-out. I'm only someone they've been kind to for eight years because Pat was a loner till I came along. I'm socially a bit dubious, because they know my father went barmy. And because of living in the heart of darkness and something funny going on in Wales. And the stammer.

 

He signed himself

 

Sincerely yours, E. J. Feathers

 

He stuck a penny-ha'penny stamp on the letter and took it to the postbox as the evening Prep bell rang. It was his night to invigilate the little boys in the House but he doubled back to the San.

The windy restless afternoon was done and clouds covered the moon. It was damp but not viciously raining now. At the top of the San's staircase he looked into Matron's room where her coal fire blazed and the ghastly scarf lay abandoned. There was the smell of her meaty supper and a clink from her kitchen. Coals crashed, then blazed up in the grate. He walked on along the corridor expecting the San to be rows of beds, blanket-rolls, empty lockers with open doors, the smell of Detto! But there was Pat in a small lone room with a blanket over his head.

“Hey—Pat?”

Pat sat up. His head rose out of the blanket, its folds draped around his shoulders.

“Where are you, Fevvers? Put the light on.”

“How are you? They wouldn't let me in.”

“Fine. I'm going home tomorrow. I'm ravenous. But, listen—”

Noises as of torn cats on a roof top issued from Pat's chest.

“Good God!”

“It's the Banshee. They're giving me some new weird drug. It's going to cost Pa something. I can make it sound like distant machine guns, listen.”

“They'll fix it,” said Eddie, considerably frightened. “I've just written to your mother.”

“Well, keep it cool. There's a scare on. Jack's missing.”

“I—don't know anything—”

“Yes, you do. If I've heard in here, you'll have heard it out there. If he's. . .”

Silence.

“. . . if he's gone, well then, he's gone. It's what he believed in.”

A poker was being rattled about in the grate next door.

“You'd better go, Fevvers. She'll have an orgasm if she finds you. ‘This is a CLEAN school.'” He began wheezing.

I'll . . . Shouldn't I ring High House?”

Pat's black eyes became blacker. A certain hauteur. “Nope. Leave them alone. I'll be home tomorrow. There's nothing you can do. It's family stuff.”

Eddie turned for the door, amazed at how cold he felt.

“Oh, and hey—Ed?”

“Yes?”

“Don't join the RAF. You couldn't handle it. And don't join the Navy—you've done the sea.”

“I can't see myself in the Army, not any more. I couldn't kill someone I was looking at. I mean, at his face. The point is, you can't join the RAF. Not now. I mean, God—for your parents' sake.”

“Oh yes I can,” said Ingoldby. “They'll survive even if I don't. My parents. I've told you—they don't really feel much. Bye—see you sometime, Fevvers.”

 

A couple of days later and after no luck with the High House telephone though Eddie tried several times, a letter came to him from Pat in dithering writing.

 

Dear Ed,

I'm fine now but staying home.

I'll not be coming back, lad,

When all the trees are green,

I have to join the pack, lad,

And drink my Ovaltine.

 

Take the lead soldiers we had at Sir's. Melt them down for plough-shares or a sixth bullet, whatever. Will you gather up my stuff?—Pa forgot it and so did Matron-La-Booze. Hang on to it till—when? The clothes-brush you always fancied, my godfather's, it's from Bond Street (he used eau-de-cologne and had a mistress in Clarges Street) you can have but it will cost you a penny.

                         Regards PI

 

A few days after the news that Jack Ingoldby was missing came the news that he was certainly killed. It was the sort of notice the Head was giving out repeatedly at assembly that term. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people in East Kent saw the planes from the dogfights of the Battle of Britain come spinning and flickering down to sizzle in the Channel or burst into flames in the orchards. Parachutes blossoming out would raise a cheer; but most pilots were invisible and people went on with what they were doing, like harvesters in medieval France during the Hundred Years War. Nevertheless, a certain and recorded and undeniable filmed death was a shock.

 

There was no further card from Pat nor response to a second letter from Eddie to High House. Half-term was coming but there was no sign that he would go as usual to the Ingoldbys. He was, it seemed, to go at last to his guardians, for a jokey invitation had been received by the Headmaster from the Bolton aunts. But still he hung about the school until the very last minute in case a call should come from Pat.

As the cab to take him to the train for Bolton was arriving, he tried once more with a thumping heart to telephone High House.

“Hullo?”

“Who's that?”

“Is that—the Ingoldbys?”

“It's Isobel.”

“Oh. Hullo. It's Eddie. Teddy Feathers.”

“Oh, hullo.”

“I just rang to see . . . To hear . . .”

“Yes?”

“It's half-term. Should I come over?”

“Oh no. I shouldn't do that. Pat's not here. He's gone off somewhere to volunteer again.”

“How is—Mrs. Ingoldby?”

“Oh, she's fine. Very patriotic, you know.”

“I'd love to see her.”

“I'll tell her.”

“Actually, would you tell her that I won't be in England much longer?”

“Joining up?”

“Not exactly. I'm too young. My father's sent for me.”

“Whatever for?”

“Could you tell them? The Ingoldbys?”

“What?”

“Well, say goodbye. And s-s-so many many thanks. I'll be on the other side of the world.”

“So will a lot of people.”

“Say I'll write. I'll
always
write. Thank them for . . .”

“OK. Bye.”

“I'd love to hear . . . .”

But she was gone.

 

So Eddie picked up Pat's belongings and shook hands with Oils, and stepped into the taxi for Bolton where, even with Pat's extras, there was not enough luggage to justify a taxi from the station, so he walked to the house, surprised that he remembered how to get there after a single visit long ago; the half-term holiday after the Didds' business in Wales. His father had come to England for the first and only time and had taken the eight-year-old Eddie to see his sisters.

It was a sleek, boastful, purple-brick house like a giant plum standing back from the road behind a semi-circle of lawn with shaven edges and Victorian (purple) edging tiles. In a round bed stood the winter sticks of roses.

Aunt Hilda appeared, flinging wide an inner vestibule door of rich cream paint and crimson and blue glass panes, and cried out, “Muriel! He's here. It's the boy. Come in, come in. We should have written. You've arrived—well done! We've sorted everything out. Your passport should be here by Christmas. Excellent.
Muriel
.”

They were in the hall now and Aunt Muriel was coming down the stairs in tweeds and a hat. “Dear old chap—how like Alistair.”

“There's a pretty important golf today,” said Hilda, “and we're just off. Not a tournament nowadays of course, the links are so restricted. But still quite a highspot. So we'll go on ahead. You settle in, then you can join us for lunch or tea? No distance. Take the bike from the garage. We must fly. Duties on the course—so few men now. The lunch won't be at all bad. You're very thin.”

They departed, their car's rear window nearly covered by patriotic slogans.
Careless talk costs lives
, he read. He wandered through the house.

There were brass urns full of ferns and an ironwood table topped with a brass disc engraved with dancing Orientals. In a sitting-room were crowds of family photographs. Odd, he thought. He was family but they had shown no interest in him since he was eight. He wondered if photographs were substitutes for hospitality. Looking around, he saw no photographs at all of children. And nobody who could possibly have been his mother. He had no idea what she had looked like. Most of the photographs were of people a generation older than his aunts, bearded or braided, sepia, stern and sad. Beside them, were other photographs and more fern in brass containers. On a table by themselves were golfing trophies and a silver cup engraved
Hole in One, Hilda Feathers
. There was a magnificent fireplace of wood and tiles, with a shiny clock with icicle pointers let into the chimneypiece. Instead of coals there was a pleated fan of paper, and in the hearth a miracle of barbola work covered in thonged parchment and filled with newspaper spills to save matches.

Then he saw, on the mantelpiece, a photograph of a dazzling young man in open-necked khaki shirt and shorts, arms crossed and a cigarette burning nonchalantly in one hand, and, on the other wrist, a big, beautiful, seductive gold watch. On his head, an army beret without a badge, like a Frenchman, and eyes dark, wise, amused and most beautiful. On the silver frame was engraved Alistair, 1914, and there was a little jug of flowers arranged beside it, as if the photograph was of a dead man, or like a funeral bunch upon a grave. Flowers for the dead. But this was his father. No doubt of it. Eddie knew.

And his father was alive enough to have sent for him, to get him out of another set-piece of butchery like the one that had all but extinguished him and his country in 1914.

Eddie picked up the photograph and felt pride. He wanted it. He'd nick it. It was his. He wished Pat could see it, or the vile Isobel. Had Colonel Ingoldby really known his father? Why hadn't he ever said anything about him? His father's wonderful face, a poet's face, he thought, and with an exciting hint in it of his own. It occurred to him that he must write again, after years, to his father.

And now. Write now.

He turned to the writing desk—brasses galore (
The Snake and His Boy
, a row of ugly monkeys)—and searched around for writing paper, found his own fountain pen, stared at the laurels outside the window, the bald lawn, the grey street. The gate flung open.
No Hawkers or Circulars
nailed to it on a plaque.

 

Dear Father

I am at Aunt Muriel's having left school this morning for half-term or, for all I know, for good. I only heard this week that I'm to leave school and come out to you. I
wish
you could have written to
me
about it. The Head says they've been discussing it with you for some time, and Aunt Hilda says my passport will be ready by Christmas. I'm seventeen and shall soon be eighteen. It is ten years since you saw me and I've had nothing from you of any kind except I suppose all my expenses have been paid and I'm told there is a bank-book for me sometime soon. So thank you for that.