When Betty died suddenly, planting the tulips the day after their day in London attempting to sign their Wills, Filth’s astonishment lifted his soul outside his body and he stood looking down not only at the slumped body but at his own, gazing and emptied of all its meaning now.
“It has happened,” “It has occurred,” “Keep your head,” said the spirit to the body. Stiffly he knelt beside her, watching himself kneel, take her hand, kiss her hand and put it to his face. There was no doubt in either soul or body that she was dead. Dead. Gone. Happened. Lost. Over.
Throughout the funeral service he silently repeated the words: Dead. Lost. Happened. Gone. A small funeral, for neither of them had much in the way of relations and Babs and Claire did not take—or so he assumed—the Telegraph or the Times. Filth, the ever-meticulous, had lapsed. He forgot (or pretended to forget) that you should telephone people. His old friends were all in Hong Kong or with their Maker. A small funeral.
Touchingly, some members of his former Chambers turned up and his magnificent old Clerk, once the Junior Clerk who had been a schoolboy with pimples, was there in the church, magisterial now in a long Harrods overcoat.
“So sorry, sir.”
“How very good of you to come, Charlie. Very kind.”
“Mr. Wemyss is here, and Sir Andrew Bysshe.”
“Very kind. Very long way for you all to come.”
The dark, serious, pallid London figures in the second pew. The rest of the mourners were locals, mostly church ladies, for Betty had been on the flower rota. She had been very forceful with the flowers, banging their stalks down hard in the bottom of the green bucket, commandeering the Frobisher Window from the moment of her arrival, a position not usually offered until you’d been in the parish for several years.
Betty stood no nonsense from flowers. In Hong Kong she had once done the cathedral, and the Hong Kong iris, the Cuban bast flower, the American worm seed and the Maud’s Michellia had all known their place there. She harangued flowers. She wanted of all things, she often said, to have a flower named after her. “The Elizabeth Feathers. Long-leaved Greenbriar?” Filth had thought sometimes of organising such a thing for her; he’d heard that it was not really expensive. It was a birthday present always forgotten. Filth was not taken with flowers. He found them unresponsive, sometimes even hostile. It was tulips, he thought, that had got her in the end.
As he stood beside the grave and thought of his long life with Betty and his achievement in presenting to the world the full man, the completed and successful being, his hands in their lined kid gloves folded over the top of his walking stick, he was aware of something, somewhere. He looked up at the sky. Nothing, yet he was being informed, no doubt about it, that there was something in him unresolved. He was inadequate and weak. If they knew, they would all find him unlikable. Despicable. Face it.
Yet he felt nothing. Nothing at all.
They had put on a do for Betty afterwards in the church hall. Tea and anchovy sandwiches and fruit cake and the ubiquitous pale green Anglican crockery, known from the Donheads to Hong Kong to Jamaica. He took nothing, but moved among the guests magnificently, like a knight of old. He talked of the weather. Of their kind journeys to the Donheads. A nice woman, when they had all gone, offered him whiskey and he must have drunk it for he found himself looking down into an empty glass when she suggested seeing him safely home.
“Are you going to be alone here tonight, Edward?”
“Oh, I shall be perfectly all right. Perfectly.”
Outside, the tulip bed had been tactfully raked over and Filth and the woman (Chloe) stood looking carefully beyond it from the sun-lounge and over the hills. The woman smelled nostalgically of some old scent—not Betty’s, he thought. It was the scent, he supposed, but suddenly (and the nice woman had long lost her waistline and her hair was grey) Filth experienced an astonishment as great as the sight of Betty dead—her untenanted body, her empty face. Filth experienced a huge, full-blown, adolescent lust.
At once, he walked away from the woman, and sat down in the sitting-room alone.
“I could sit with you for a while.”
“No thank you, Chloe, I think as a matter of fact I’d like to be by myself now.”
When she had gone he sat for a time. (Lost. Over. Gone. Finished. Happened.) She was not here. She was dead. Not here. But, he felt, elsewhere. They had both detested the macabre Chinese funeral rites and the Oriental notions of an afterlife. They were (of course) Anglicans and liked the idea of Heaven, but whether the spirit survived the ridiculous body they had never discussed. They certainly had never considered the idea that they might meet again in another world. The notion is rubbish, now thought Filth.
“Don’t you think?” he asked Betty directly for the first time, speaking to a point above the curtain rail.
There was no reply.
Yet he slept well. The lust had retreated and the next morning early, properly dressed with a purplish tie, he telephoned his two cousins.
From the first, Claire in Essex somewhere, there was no reply, not even from an answerphone. It rang on and on. The second was Babs, who lived now for no known reason somewhere on Teesside called Herringfleet. She was alone in the world and, Betty had thought, a little odd now. Babs had known Betty at school (everyone, he thought, seems to have known Betty at school). Betty and Babs had been at St. Paul’s Girls School and had the Paulina voice.
So that it was Betty who answered the phone. “Hello?” she said, “Yes? Teddy?”
(Betty must be staying up there with Babs, he thought, caught his breath and plunged into hell.)
“It is Babs?”
“Yes. I suppose so. Barbara.”
“Edward. Betty’s husband.”
“I know.”
“I’m afraid I have bad news.”
“I know. I saw it in the paper. Poor old thing.”
“Well, I’m not exactly—”
“I mean Betty. Poor old thing.”
It was Betty talking. He longed for more.
“I thought you would want to know . . .”
“Yes, what?”
“The funeral’s over, Babs. I thought you’d be glad to know that she died instantly. She can’t have known a thing about it. Wonderful for her, really.”
“Yes. That’s what they say.”
Silence.
“Babs?”
Now a long silence. Then a crashing waterfall of musical notes on a piano. Filth remembered that Babs had something to do with music. Even in Herringfleet presumably. “Babs, is that a piano?”
The scales ceased. Then Schubert began. On and on.
“Babs?”
Eventually, he put down the telephone and tried the other cousin again. Again, no answer. He thought of Chloe yesterday and then there was a shadow of someone watching him somewhere from a wood.
Again, the astounding lust. Lust. He put his face in his hands and tried to be calm. What is all this? He found himself praying as he had never prayed at all during the funeral. And very seldom during Betty’s life.
“Oh Lord, we beseech thee . . . direct our hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God.”
He had not shared a bed with Betty for over thirty years. Double beds were for the bourgeoisie. Sex had never been a great success. They had never discussed it. They had disliked visiting friends who had not two spare bedrooms. Betty had joked for years that the marriage would never have survived had Filth not had his own dressing-room. She had meant bedroom.
Had he ever desired Betty? Well, yes. He had. He remembered. He had desired everything about her. Her past, her present, her future with him. Her sweet, alert, intelligent face, her famously alive eyes. He had wanted to possess every part of her for she had fitted so perfectly into his life’s plan. She had made him safe and confident. She had eased old childhood nightmares.
But—this. Not ever this. Where did this lust come from? Were she alive, could he have told her about it? She who had never done a passionate act. She would have sent him to a doctor.
But yet—so very close they had been. Sometimes at night in Hong Kong, hot and restless in the swirling mists of the Peak, the case of the previous day, or worse, a judgement lingering, he had gone to her room and lain beside her and she had stretched out a hand.
“What’s this?”
“Nothing.”
“Bad day?”
“I condemned a man to death.”
Silence.
She would never have taken him in her arms from pity. Never presented her body to him as a distraction. Never indicated: Here is balm. Take me. Forget it. Your job. You knew there would be this to face here. You could have stayed in England.
Instead . . .
“Was he guilty?”
“As hell.”
They lay quiet, listening to the night sounds on the Peak.
“Crime passionel,” he said.
“Then probably he will be glad to die.”
He said, “You still shock me. If you had been the judge . . .”
“. . . I would have done as you did. There is not an alternative. But I would have suffered less.”
(But I would have wanted you to suffer more. I want you to make me resign because I disgust myself. I feel, truly, filth.)
“I should have stayed in Chambers at home in the Temple. Famous Feathers of the Construction Industry. Sewers and drains.”
But Betty had already fallen asleep again, peacefully against his shoulder, unconcerned, proud of him, a very nice woman. An excellent wife for a judge. And two miles off, in a sink across the spangled city, the condemned man, like a small grey bird, his mean little head on its scant Oriental neck soon to be crushed bone, lay alone.
I got out just in time, he thought when they retired and came home to the Donheads. Couldn’t take much more emotion alongside the drudgery. Still can’t manage emotion. All under control. I am a professional. But why this lust? This longing?
“Babs?”
It was the following morning and he was telephoning her again, “Babs, I want to come and see you.”
Betty’s voice answered—he remembered that it had been Veneering he’d once overheard saying that Betty’s voice was like Desdemona’s.
“Babs?”
“Just a minute.”
A full tempest of Wagner was stilled somewhere. “Yes? Teddy again? What?”
“Babs—may I come and see you?”
“Yes. I suppose so. All right. When?”
“Any time. This week? Next week?”
“Yes. All right.”
He heard a sob, which surprised him.
“Babs, don’t cry. She died so easily. A ful-ful-ful-filled, a splendid life.”
“I’m not crying for Betty,” she said, “or for you, you old fool,” and she crashed down the phone.
He didn’t telephone again; he wrote. He would visit her the following Friday and perhaps stay the night?
There was no reply.
However, in the new, footloose and irrational way that his body was behaving, Filth made his preparations, taking the car to be checked over in Salisbury, looking out for something good of Betty’s as a present for Babs.
He would have liked it so much more if he had been going to Claire. He wished she would answer the phone. He searched for the address to write to in Hainault where her Christmas cards came from, but the only card he could find was very old and blurred with no postcode. Nevertheless he wrote to say that he might perhaps be passing near her next Saturday. He told her about Betty.
No reply.
As Mrs.-er set down his morning cup of coffee on his desk, Filth gave the mighty roaring garrumph that had often preceded his pleadings in Court. (There was a rumour that it was the remains of some speech impediment though this seemed unlikely in such an articulate man.)
“Ah-argh. Aha! Mrs.-er, I meant to tell you I’m going away. Taking a short trip. Leaving on Friday. Doing a round of the family. What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Travelling by car,” he said.
“Then I will say something. You’re out of your mind, Sir Edward. Wherever do you think you’re going?”
“Oh, it’s up in the north somewhere.”
“You haven’t driven further than Tisbury station in years. That car’s welded to the garage.”
“Not at all. I’ve had it checked over.”
“Sir Edward, it’s the motorways. You’ve never driven on a motorway.”
“It’s an excellent car. And it’s a chance for you to have a break, too. You’ve been very—very good these past days. Take a holiday.”
“If you insist on going, I’ll not take a holiday. I’ll steep them grey nets in your bathroom window.”
“You could, actually,” he said, not looking at her, “perhaps do something about Lady Feathers’s room. Get rid of her—er—the c-c-c-clothes. I believe it’s usual.”
“Sir Edward.” She came round the table and leaned against the window ledge looking at him, arms folded. “I’ve something to say.”
“Oh. Sorry. Yes, Mrs.-er. Mrs. T.”
“Look, it’s too soon. You’re doing it all too soon. You started in on the letters before the funeral. You ought to let them settle. I know, because of Mother. And it’s too soon to go round handing out presents, you’ll muddle them. I’m sorry, but you’re not yourself.”
“Mrs.-er, if you don’t want to do Lady Feathers’s room I’m sure that Chloe—the one from the church—would do it.”
“I’m sure she would, too. Let’s forget all that though, I’m only interested in stopping you driving. Now then.”
His face, with the light from behind her full on it, she saw must have been wonderful once. Appealing, as he gazed at her.
She carried a mug of coffee out to Garbutt who was waiting near the house wall that stood raw and naked without its ivy.
“He’s off in the car. Visiting.”
“On his own?”
“Yes. On the motorways. I’ve told him he’s not rational yet. She’d have never let him. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s answering every letter return of post and ticking them off on a list, every one hand-done and different and she’s scarcely cold. There was a green one—”
“Green what?”
“Letter. From Paris. He threw it in the bin. It upset him. He wrote out an answer and they say he was up the street with it in his hand before the postman was hardly gone.”
They both regarded the wall.
Garbutt knew she had read the letter in the waste-paper basket. He would not have read it.
“You know, he’s never once called me by my name. She did, of course.”
Garbutt finished his coffee, upturned the mug and shook the dregs out on the grass. “Well, I can’t see we can do much about it. He’s the Law. The law unto himself.”
“I tell you, we’ll both be out of a job by Monday and who else is he going to kill on the road? That’s what I care about.”
“He might make it,” he said, handing her back the mug. “There’s quite a bit to him yet.”
Nevertheless, on the Thursday afternoon Filth found the gardener hanging about the garage doors.
“I’ve had her looked at,” said Filth, “I seem to be having to tell everybody. She’s a Mercedes. I’m a good driver. Why have you removed all the ivy?”
“It was her instructions. Not a fortnight since. Sir Edward, you’re barmy. It’s too soon. You’re pushing eighty. She’d say it was too soon. You haven’t a notion of that A1.”
“Is it the A1 now? I must look at the map. Good God, I’ve known the Great North Road for years. I was at school up there.”
“Well, you’ll not know it now. That’s all I’ll say. Goodbye then, sir.”
Filth looked up the seaside town of Herringfleet where Babs hung out and was surprised. He’d thought it might be somewhere around Lincolnshire, but it was nearer to Scotland. Odd, he thought, how I could still find my way round the back streets of Hong Kong and the New Territories with my eyes shut and England now is a blur.
Whatever was Babs doing up there? Where would he stay if she couldn’t put him up? There seemed to be no hostelry in Herringfleet that the travel guides felt very happy about.
But he went on with his plans, polishing his shoes, looking out shirts. He loved packing. He packed his ivory hair brushes, his Queen Mary cufflinks from the War and, rather surprising himself, Betty’s Book of Common Prayer. Maybe he’d give it to Babs. Or Claire, if he ever found her. He folded two of Betty’s lovely Jacqumar scarves, packaged up some recipe books and then, in a sudden fit of panache, swept a great swag of her jewellery from the dressing-table drawer and poured it into a jiffy bag. He put the scarves and recipe books into another jiffy bag and sealed both of them up.
On Friday morning early, Mrs.-er standing on the front doorstep with a face of doom and Garbutt up his ladder at work on ivy roots and not even turning his head, he made off down the drive and headed for the future.
His eyesight was good. He had spent time on the map. The day was fair and he felt very well. He had decided that he would proceed across England from left to right, and somewhere around Birmingham take a route from South-West to North-East. Very little trouble. His visual memory of the map was excellent and he plunged out into the mêlée of Spaghetti Junction without a tremor, scarcely registering the walls of traffic that wailed and shrieked and overtook him. He admitted to a sense of tension whenever he swerved into the fast lane, but enjoyed the stimulation. Several very large vehicles passed him with a dying scream, one or two even overtaking him on the driver’s side although he was in the fast lane. One of these seemed to bounce a little against the central reservation.
Filth was intrigued by the central reservation. It was a phenomenon new to him. He wondered who had thought of it. Was it the same man who had invented cat’s-eyes and made millions and hadn’t known what to do with them? He remembered that man. He had had three television sets all quacking on together. Poor wretched fellow. Death by cat’s-eye. Well, that must be some time ago.
Lorries in strings, like moving blocks of flats, were now hurtling along. Sometimes his old Mercedes seemed to hang between them, hardly touching the road. Seemed to be a great many foreign buggers driving the lorries, steering-wheels lefthand side where they couldn’t see a thing. Matter of time no doubt when they’d be in the majority. Then everyone would be driving on the right. Vile government. Probably got all the plans drawn up already. Drive on the right, vote on the left. The so-called left, said Filth. Not Mr. Attlee’s left. Not Aneurin Bevan’s left. All of them in suits now. Singapore still drives on the left, though they’ve never heard of left. Singapore’s over, like Hong Kong. Empire now like Rome. Not even in the history books. Lost. Over. Finished. Dead. Happened.
Two dragons, Machiavellis, each carrying a dozen or so motor-cars on its back, like obscene, louse-laden animals, hemmed him in on either side of the middle lane. Surely the one in the fast lane was breaking the law? Both seemed impatient with him, though he was doing a steady sixty-five, quite within limits.
He could feel their hatred. One slip and I’m gone, he thought with again the stir of excitement, almost of sexual excitement, “One toot and yer oot,” as the bishop said to the old girl with the ear-trumpet. Wherever did that come from? Too much litter in old brains.
Ah! Suddenly he was free. The lorries were gone. He had turned expertly eastwards—with some style, I may say—and into Nottinghamshire.
He found himself now on narrower two-way roads broken by enormous, complicated country roundabouts. Signs declared unlikely names. Fields began, the colour of ox-blood. (Why is ox-blood darker than cow’s-blood?) Clumps of black-green trees’ stood on the tops of low hills. Streaming towards him, opening out before him, passing him by, were old mining towns all forlorn. Then a medieval castle on a knoll. Then came an artificial hill with a pipe sticking out of its side like a patient with nasty things within. Black stuff trickled. The last coal mine.
Black stuff wavered in the wind. Never been down a coal mine, thought Filth. There’s always something new. (But no. Over. Finished. Gone. Dead.) Better stop soon. Seeing double. Need to pee. Done well. One of these cafés.
But now there were no cafés. They had all disappeared. “Worksop,” said Filth. “Now, there’s a nasty name. Betty would be furious—Worksop!” She hated the North except for Harrogate. “Why ever go to ghastly Babs? You’re mad. She’s mad. I met her after you did.” (Oh, finish, finish, finish.)
He came upon pale and graceful stone gates leading to some lost great estate with the National Trust’s acorn on a road sign. He turned in and drove two miles down an avenue of limes. Families shrieked about. He found a Gents and then returned stiffly to the Mercedes in the car-park. People ran about taking plants from a garden shop to their cars to plant on their patios. If I had ever loved England, he thought, I would now weep for her. Sherwood Forest watched him from every side, dense and black.
On again, and into the ruthless thunder of the traffic on the A1; but he was in charge again. Bloody good car, strong as a tank, fine as a good horse. Always liked driving. Aha! Help! Spotting a café he turned across the path of a conveyor of metal pipes from the Ruhr.
A near thing. The driver’s face was purple and his mouth held wide in a black roar.
Shaken a little, Filth ate toasted tea-cake at a plastic table and drank a large potful of tea. The waitress looked at his suit and tie with dislike. The man at the next table was wearing denim trousers, with his knees protruding, and a vest. Brassy rings were clipped into all visible orifices. Filth went back to the car for a quick nap but the rhythmic blast of the passing traffic caused the Mercedes to rock at three-second intervals.
“On, on,” said Filth. “Be dark soon.”
And, two hours later, it was indeed pretty dark and he must have reached Teesside. There was no indication, however, of any towns. Only roads. Roads and roads. The traffic went swimming over them, presumably knowing where it was going. Endless, head-on, blazing head-lights. It is only an airport now, he thought. My spacious lovely North. We are living on a transporter. Up and down we go. We shall chase you up and down. That swine Veneering liked Midsummer Night’s Dream. Silly stuff, but you can’t help quoting it. Forest of Arden. Forest of Sherwood. Gone, gone. Finished. Dead. Like Garbutt’s ivy. Betty would have been in a fury. “You could have been in Madeira by now, in a nice, elderly hotel. And you go to Babs on Teesside. And here’s a place called Yarm. What a name! Yarm.”
“You wouldn’t think so if we were in Malaysia.”
“Don’t be silly, Filth.”
“Or the dialects. Malay lacks consonants.”
“Yarm seems to lack everything.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Rather a fine-looking town. Splendidly wide main street. Shows up the Cotswolds.”
“Well, don’t stop, Filth. Not now, for goodness sake. You’ve only half an hour to go. Get there.”
Just outside Yarm he saw a signpost which amazingly, for he had not been here before, he recognised. Standing back on a grim champaign behind the swishing traffic stood the Old Judges’ Lodging, now a hotel. Once the Circuit judges would have lived there throughout the Quarter Sessions. No wives allowed. Too much port. Boring each other silly. Comforting each others’ isolation with talk. Every evening, like cricket commentators between matches, discussing their profession. Finished. Gone. Dead. Hotel now, eh?
“Ha?”
Sign for Herringfleet.
Babs.
What a dire town. And not small. How to find 25 The Lindens? Here was the sea. A cemented edge of promenade. A line of glimmer that must be white sandy beach. Long, long waves curving round a great bay, and behind their swirling frills, spread into the total dark, was the heaving black skin and muscle of the ocean. Sea. How they had hated the sea in Wales. The cruel dividing sea. How could Babs ever choose this?
He had stopped the car on the promenade where, looking blank-eyed at the sea, were tall once-elegant lodging houses now near-slums, bed-and-breakfast places for the Nationally Assisted, i.e., the poor. No lights. The rain fell.
“The Lindens? What?” shouted a man on an old bike. He got off and came across and stuck his head through the window. The smell was chip fat and beer and no work. “The Lindens, mate? (Grand car.) Just over to your right there. You’ll not miss it, pal.”
It was a terrace of genteel and secretive houses on either side of a short street bordered by trees. The trees were bulging with round gangliae from which next year new sprouts would shoot like hairs from a mole. Revolting treatment. What would Sir say? Number 25.
At the top of steep stone steps there was a dim light above a front room and another light in a window beside it. A gate hung on one hinge. There was a sense of retreat and defeat. He remembered laughing, streetwise, positive Babs in the Oxford tea-shop. We’ll go to bed. We have before. Laughing, wagging her cracked high-heeled shoe from her toe.
It was so quiet that Filth could hear the beat of the sea two roads away, rhythmic, unstoppable. “Too soon,” it said. “They were right. This is histrionic nonsense. You’ve arrived too soon. You’re in shock. You’ll make a fool of yourself. There’s nothing here.”
Suddenly, at the top of the steps, the front door was wrenched open and a boy ran out. He came tearing down, missing several steps, belted along the path towards Filth at the gate. One hand held a music-case and with the other he pushed Filth hard in the stomach so that he fell back into the hedge. The boy, who was wearing old-fashioned school uniform, vanished towards the sea.
Badly winded, Filth struggled out of the hedge, dusted down his clothes, picked up the fallen parcel of presents, looked right and left and gave his furious roar. The quiet of the road then re-asserted itself. The child might never have been.
But the front door stood wide and he walked uneasily up the steps and into the passage beyond, where, as if he had stood on a switch, a torrent of Chopin was let loose in the room to his right.
“Hello?”
He stood outside its open door.
“Hello there? Babs?”
He knocked on the door, peered round it. “It’s Teddy.”
The music stopped. The room appeared to be empty.
Then he saw her by the back window, staring into the dark. She was wearing some sort of shawl and her hair was long and white. She seemed to be pressing something—a handkerchief?—into her face. Without turning towards him further, her voice came out from behind her hands, clear and controlled. And Betty’s.
In one of her very occasional cynical or bitter moods which Filth had never understood, and which usually ended in her going to London for a few days (or over to Macao from Hong Kong), Betty had said, “Look, leave me alone, Filth. I’m in the dark. Just need a break.”
“I’m in the dark, Teddy-bear,” now said Betty’s voice inside this crazed old creature. “You shouldn’t have come. I should have stopped you. I couldn’t find the number.”
“Oh, dear me, Babs. You’re ill.”
“Ill. Do you mean sick? I’m sick all right. D’you want tea? I make it on my gas-ring. There’s some milk somewhere. In a cupboard. But we don’t take milk, do we? Not from our classy background. I’m finished, Teddy. Broken-hearted. Like Betty. You’d better go.”
(Like Betty? What rubbish—never.)
“I can’t stay more than a few minutes,” said Filth, realising that this was absolutely so, for the room was not only ice-cold and dark, but there was an aroma about. Setting down his parcels on a chair piled with newspapers, he touched something unspeakable on a plate.
“Babs, I had no idea . . .”
“You thought I was well-off, did you? Sky television and modems? Well, I am well-off, but because I am still a teacher of music. I live alone. Betty always warned me against living alone. Said I’d get funny. But I prefer to live alone. Ever since well, you know. Wales. I had mother of course until last year. Upstairs. I still hear her stick thumping on the floor for the commode. Sometimes I start heating up her milk. But I’m glad she’s gone. In a way.”
“Then,” said Filth, prickling all over with disgust, making stabs at various shadows to find perhaps somewhere to lean against or sit. “Then it can’t all have been bad.” He had begun to lower himself into what might have been a chair when something in it rustled and streaked for the door.
“Ah,” he said, easing his shirt-collar. “And you have a dog.”
“What dog? I have no dog.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not sorry. Even with a dog I would be utterly alone. And I am going mad.”
“Well”—he had sprung up from the chair and was standing to attention—“Well” (half-heartedly). “Well, I’m here now, Babs. We must sort something out. Get something going. Betty wouldn’t want . . .”
Babs had left the window and was fumbling about. A light came on and an electric jug was revealed. A half-empty milk bottle was withdrawn from an antique gramophone. Cups and saucers were wrested from their natural home upon the hearth.
“You see, I’m quite independent. No trouble to anyone. Sugar? No, that’s not us, either, Teddy, is it?”
“Babs, let me take you out somewhere for a meal.”
She flung her long hair about. “I never go out. I watch and wait. First Flush? Do you remember?”
For a dreadful moment Filth thought that Babs was referring to the menopause, though that, surely, must be now in the past?
“First Flush?”
(Or maybe it was something to do with Bridge? Or the domestic plumbing?)
“Tea, Teddy. First Flush is tea. From Darjeeling.” (She pronounced it correctly. Datcherling.) “Don’t you remember?” She seemed to be holding up a very tattered packet marked Fortnum and Mason, Piccadilly. “He gave it to me always for years. Every Christmas. In memory of our childhood. You, me, him, Claire, Betty.”
“But we weren’t in India, Betty and I. I hadn’t met Betty. You and I and Claire were in—Wales.”
She looked frightened.
“But he sent me tea from India. They took him back there after . . . Year after year from India he sent me tea.”
“Who?”
“Billy Cumberledge.”
“Babs?”
“My lover.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry, Babs. And he died, too?”
“I’m not sure. I used to see him in Oxford. He was a lovely man. She could never touch his soul, never break him utterly. He and I—no, you and I, Teddy. We got into one bed that night to be near together while Claire went to get help.”
“I’d forgotten.” (A wave of relief. So that’s what she’d meant in the tea-shop.)
“Yes, he was my lover. But not my last lover. My present lover you may have seen just now as he went scampering down the steps.”
“But that was a schoolboy . . .”
“Yes, but a genius. I don’t do examination work now, except for this one. He is a genius.”
“Yes. I see.”
They drank the First Flush which was not noticeably refreshing.
“This is of course a First Flush of some time ago.”
“Yes,” he said. “Some time ago.”
The lights in the street came on and revealed a Broadwood piano by the front window and a piano stool lying on its side. He remembered the terrified boy.
“Edward,” she said, abandoning the tea to the grate, “oh, Edward, we were so close. I have to tell someone. I am in love again.”
“Oh—Oh dear—”
“He is fourteen. You know how old I am. Way over seventy. It makes no difference.”
Something out in the passage fell with a crash to the floor and there was the sound of running water.
“It’s that dog,” she said, weeping. “Everyone’s against me. I need God, not a dog.”
All that Filth, now deeply shaken, could say was, “But you haven’t got a dog.”
“Haven’t I? Of course I have. I need some protection, don’t I?” (And, sharply, in Betty’s voice.) “Come on now, Filth. Work it out.”
A cat ran down the hall as Filth stepped out into it, and water was still dripping from a vase of amazingly perfect lupins.
“Let me help.” Filth stood, unbending.
“It’s all right. They’re artificial. I always put them in water though, it seems kinder. I arrange them for him. The boy. My boy. I don’t somehow think he’ll be coming back.”
“He won’t?”
“No.” She clutched the shawl around her and bent forward as if butting at a storm.
“You see—I showed my hand.”
“Your hand?” (Again, he thought hysterically of Bridge.)
“I showed my hand. I showed my heart. I showed my . . . Oh, Eddie! I fell to my knees. I told my love.”
Filth was now on the top step. Very fast, he was on the bottom step. “So sorry, Babs. Time to go. Sorry to leave you so . . .”
“Don’t worry about the flowers,” she said. “It wasn’t your fault.”
She was now on her knees crawling about in the water.
“So sorry, Babs. Not much help. Terribly sorry. God, I wish Betty . . . I’ll try and think what’s to be done.”
He could not remember getting back into the car nor the road he took next, but in time found that he was hurtling back in the dark and then into the blinding lights of traffic coming towards Yarm. The Judges’ Hotel was before him, agreeably behind its lawns like a flower in a gravel pit. He drove through its gateway with care for he was beginning to shake, and at its great studded doors he stopped. A cheerful young man, in a livery that would not have disgraced Claridges, but eating a sandwich, bounded forward and opened the driver’s door.
“Good evening, sir, staying the night? Out you get, leave the key, I’ll park it. Any luggage? Nasty weather!”
Filth stepped in to a black-and-white marble hall with a grand staircase and portraits of judges in dubious bright oils hanging all the way down it. How very odd to be here. Yes, there was one room left. Yes, there was dinner. Yes, there was a bar.
Filth removed his coat in the bedroom and regarded the two single beds, both populous with teddy bears. A foot-massager of green plastic lay by the bedside and a globe of goldfish with instructions for feeding them (“Guests are asked to confine themselves to one pinch”—was it hemp?). There were no towels in the bathroom but a great many plastic ducks. The noble height of the room that had in the past seen scores of judicial heads on the pillow seemed another frightening joke. I suppose I don’t know much about hotels now, he thought and had a flashback of the black towels and white telephones and linen sheets of Hong Kong.
For the first time in many years he did not change his shirt for dinner but stepped quickly back into the hall where the eyes of the old buggers on the staircase, in their wigs and scarlet, gave him a sense of his secure past. Glad I got out of the country though. No Circuits in Hong Kong. No getting stuck in luxury here for weeks on end with the likes of Fiscal-Smith. He wondered where the name had come from. Hadn’t thought of the dear old bore for years.
Good heavens.
Fiscal-Smith was still here. He was sitting in the bar in a vast leather armchair and as usual he was without a glass in his hand, waiting for someone to buy him a drink.
“Evening, Filth,” said Fiscal-Smith. (Ye gods, thought Filth, there’s something funny going on here.) “No idea you’d be here. Thought you’d retire in Hong Kong. How’s Betty?”
“We retired and came Home years ago,” said Filth, sitting down carefully in a second leather throne.
“Oh, so did I, so did I,” said Fiscal-Smith. “I retired up here though.”
“Really.”
“Got myself a little estate. Nobody wants them now—it’s the fumes. It was very cheap.”
“I see.”
“Or they assume there are fumes. Actually I am out on the moors. Shooting rights. Everything.”
“How is . . . ?” Filth could not remember whether Fiscal-Smith had ever had a wife. It seemed unlikely. “ . . . the Bar up here these days?”
Fiscal-Smith was looking meaningfully over at the Claridges lad, who was hovering about and responded with a matey wave.
“Have a drink,” said Filth, giving in, signalling to the boy and ordering whiskeys.
“Don’t be too long, sir,” said the boy. “Dining-room closes in half an hour.”
“Yes. Yes. I must have dinner. Long drive today.” He was beginning to feel better though. Warmth, whiskey, familiar jargon. “Are you staying the night here?” he asked Fiscal-Smith.
“I don’t usually. I go home. Always a chance that someone might turn up from the old days. Very good of you. Thank you. I’d enjoy dinner.”
They munched. Conversation waned
“Fancy sort of food nowadays,” said the ancient judge. “Seem to paint the sauces on the plates with a brush.”
The waitress patted his shoulder and shouted with laughter. “You’re meant to lick ’em up. Shall I keep you some tiramisu?”
“What on earth is that?”
“No idea,” said Filth, his eyelids drooping.
“Trifle,” said the waitress. “You’re nothing now, if you haven’t tried tiramisu.”
“Is this usual?” asked Filth, reviving a little with coffee.
“What—trifle? Yes, it’s on all the time.”
“No. I mean the—familiarity. They’re very matey. I never worked the Northern Circuit.”
“It’s not mateyness.”
“Well, it’s not exactly respect.” Filth’s mind presented him with Betty ringing for the invisible and silent maids. He suddenly yearned for that sycophantic time in his life, like a boy thinking of his birthday parties. “They’re very insensitive. And I can’t understand the teddy bears. I always detested teddy bears.”
“What teddy bears?”
“The beds are covered with them. Is it a local custom?”
“I’m afraid you are ahead of me, somewhere. But of course, yes, it’s different up here. Very nice people.”
“But you’re not local, Fiscal-Smith. Is there anybody to talk to? On your estate?”
Fiscal-Smith took a second huge slice of cheese. “No. Not really. Sit there alone. I like it here though.” (Old Filth’s grown stuffy. Home Counties. How does Betty put up with him?) “They’re rude to your face but they boast about knowing you. House of Lords, and all that. It’s a compliment, but you have to understand it. Good friends at The Judges to an old bachelor.”
All but one of the lights were now switched off in the dining-room, where they were the only diners left. The waitress looked out from a peephole.
“Yes, we’ve finished, Dolly. I think I’ll stay the night. Too much wine for driving. ‘Ex-Judge drunk at wheel.’ Wouldn’t do.”
“Yes. Keep it within closed doors,” said Dolly. “But I don’t think there’s a room ready. The housekeeper’s gone off.”
“Twin beds in your room, Filth?”
“Well, I’m afraid . . .
“Room One?” said the waitress. “Yes. Twin beds.”
“No,” said Filth in the final and first, utterly immovable decision of the day. “No. Sorry. I—snore.”
“Oh, then, we’ll find you somewhere, Lord Fiscal-Smith. Come along. The trouble will be bath-towels. I think she hides them.”
“Shan’t have a bath.” He tottered away on her arm. “Borrow your razor in the morning, Filth.”
“We can do a razor,” she said. “Did you say he was called Filth?”
She handed Fiscal-Smith over to the Claridges boy who was drinking a glass of milk in the hall.
When Filth lay down on one of his beds the room rocked gently round and round. “Pushing myself,” he said. “Heart attack. I dare say. Sir? Good. Hope it’s the finish. And I’m certainly not lending him my razor.”
Then, it was morning.
The goldfish were looking at his face on the pillow with inquisitive distaste. On the floor a heap of bears gave the impression of decadence. The bedside clock glared out 9.30 a.m. which filled him with shame, and he reached breakfast just in time.
“So sorry,” he said.
“That’s all right, dear. You need your sleep at your age.”
Far across the bright conservatory, where breakfast was served, bacon and eggs were being carried to Fiscal-Smith whose back was turned firmly away from all comers as he perused the Daily Telegraph. Filth changed his chair so that his back was also turned away from Fiscal-Smith. Outside, across the grey Teesside grass, stood magnificent oaks and, above them, a deep blue autumn sky and a hint of moorland, air and light. The Telegraph was beside Filth’s plate. He must have ordered it. Couldn’t read it. Not yet. Rice-Krispies.
“Oh dear no, thank you. Nothing cooked.”
“Oh, come on. Do you good.”
She brought bacon and eggs.
Why should I? thought Filth, petulant, and clattered down his knife and fork.
“I’m disappointed,” said the waitress, bringing coffee.
He drank it and looked at the oak trees and the light beyond.
Must get out of this wasteland. Not my sort of place at all. What was Babs doing here? What was I doing, coming to visit her? Rather frightening, what grief can uncover in you.
Don’t you think so, Betty? Just as well I wasn’t in the middle of a case when you went. But you’d have dealt with it. Got me through.
Remembering, then, that the cause of the grief was that she could no longer get him through anything, he gulped, shuddered, watched the oaks, as his eyes at last filled up with tears.
A hand came down on his shoulder but he did not turn. The hand was removed.
“So very sorry, old chap. So very sorry,” and Fiscal-Smith was gone.
It was some time later—breakfast still uneaten, Filth’s back the only sign of anyone in the room, silence from the kitchen—that the oaks began to return to their natural steadiness. Filth, his face wet, blew his nose, mopped with his napkin, took up the newspaper, opened it, shook it about. He found himself looking straight into Betty’s face.
Obituary.
Good gracious. Betty. No idea there’d be an obituary. And half a column. Second on the page. Good God: Red Cross; Barristers’ Benevolent Association; Bletchley Park. Dominant personality. Wife of—yes, it was Betty, all right. Fiscal-Smith must have been reading it. Good God—Betty! They’ll never give me half a column. I’ve never done anything but work. Great traveller. Ambassadress. Chinese-speaking. Married and the dates. No children of the marriage.
He sat on. On and on. They cleared the table. They did not hurry him. On and on he sat. They changed the cloth. They said not a word.
At some point he began properly to weep. He wept silently behind his hands, sitting in this unknown place, uncared about, ignorant, bewildered, past it.
Much later they brought him, unasked, a tray of tea. When at last he had packed his case and paid his bill at the desk in the marble hall and was standing bleakly on the porch as the boy brought his car, he remembered that he had invited Fiscal-Smith to join him for last night’s dinner, and that this had not been on the bill.
“Don’t you worry, sir,” said the receptionist. “He’s paid it himself.”
She said no more, but both understood that this was a first. And that it was touching. It lifted Filth’s desolate heart.
He drove for an hour before addressing Betty again. “You never know where help’s coming from, do you? Yes. You’re right. I’m ten years older than yesterday and I look it.” (“Fool,” he yelled at a nervous little Volkswagen. “Do you want to be killed, woman?”) No more gadding about for a while.
“But stop worrying. I’ll get home. I’m a bloody good driver.” The car gave a wobble.
He thought of the hotel which loomed now much larger in his consciousness than the Babs business (Babs had always been potty) and he understood the goldfish, the bears, the box of Scrabble in the wardrobe, the tape deck and the vast television set in the room. They were an attempt to dispel the sombre judicial atmosphere of the place’s past. The seams of the Judges’ Lodging had exuded crime, wickedness, evil, folly and pain. All had been tossed about in conversation each night over far too much port. Jocose, over-confident judges.
Well, they have to be. Judges live with shadows behind them.
There are very good men among them. Mind you, I’d never have put Fiscal-Smith among those, the horrible old hangerand-flogger.
“Seems we were wrong, Betty,” he said, turning the car unthinkingly Eastward in the direction of the Humber bridge.
And on it sped for three hours, when he had to stop for petrol and saw signs for Cambridge.
Cambridge?
Why Cambridge? He was making for the Midlands and home in the South-West. He must have missed his turning. He seemed to be on the way to London. This road was called the M11 and it was taking its pitiless way between the wide green fields of—where? Huntingdonshire? Rutland?—don’t know anything about any of them. Claire lives somewhere about down here. Hainault. Never been. Must have the address somewhere. Hadn’t intended to come. Hadn’t consciously intended to come. Had quite enough. Saffron Walden? Nice name. Why are you going to see Claire? You haven’t seen her since—well, since Ma Didds.
Betty knew her. Betty saw her. Why must I? Wasn’t Babs enough?
He drew out in front of a Hungarian demon. Its hoot died slowly away, as at length it passed him, spitting wrath as he swayed into the slow lane. Mile after mile. Mile after mile. Fear no bigger than a child’s hand squeezed at his ribcage. “If it’s a heart attack, get on with it,” commanded Filth.
But he drew off the motorway and dawdled into a lane. There were old red-brick walls and silent mansions and a church. A by-passed village, like a by-passed heart. Not a café. Not a shop. He’d perhaps go and sit in the church for a while. Here it stood.
The church appeared to be very well-kept. He pushed open an inner red-baize door. The church within echoed with insistent silence. There was the smell of incense and very highlyvarnished pews. A strange church. The sense of many centuries with a brash, almost aggressive overlay. You’d be kept on your toes here. Never had much idea of these things, thought Filth. Lists pinned up everywhere. All kinds of services. Meditations. The lamp is lit over the Blessed Sacrament. Vigils. Quiet is requested. An enormous Cross with an agonised Christ. That always upset Filth.
This terrible silence.
He sat in the south aisle and closed his eyes and when he opened them saw that winter sunshine had lit up a marble memorial to some great local family. It was immense, a giant wedding cake in black and pink and sepia. Like an old photograph. Like a sad cry.
Filth got up and peered closer. He touched some of the figures. They were babies. Dozens of babies. Well, cherubs, he supposed, carved among garlands of buds and flowers, nuts, leaves, insects, fat fruits. More marble babies caught at more garlands at the foot of the pyramid, all naked, and male of course. They were weeping. One piped its eye, whatever piping was. Their fat lips pouted with sorrow. They stood, however, on very sturdy legs with creases across the backs of their knees, and their bottoms shone. There was a notice saying that the memorial had three stars and was thought to have been designed by Gibbons.
Well, I don’t know about that, thought Filth. What would Gibbons be doing here? And he gave one of the bottoms a slap.
The air of the church came alive for a moment as the baize door opened and shut, and a curly boy came springing down the aisle. He wore a clerical collar and jeans. “Good afternoon,” he cried. “So sorry I’m rather late. You’re wanting me to hear your confession.”
“Confession?”
“Saturday afternoons. Confessions. St. Trebizond’s. Half a mo while I put my cassock on.”
He ran past the weeping pile and disappeared into a vestry, emerging at once struggling into a cassock. He hurried into something like a varnished sedan chair which stood beside the rood screen, and clicked shut its door. The silence resumed.
Filth at once turned and made to walk out of the church, clearing his throat with the judicial roar.
He looked back. The sedan chair watched him. There was a grille of little holes at waist level and he imagined the boy priest resting his head near it on the inside.
It would be rather discourteous just to leave the church.
Filth might go over and say, “Very low-church, I’m afraid. Not used to this particular practice though my wife was interested . . .”
He walked back to the sedan chair, leaned down and said, “Hullo? Vicar?”
A crackling noise. Like eating potato crisps.
“Vicar? I beg your pardon?”
No reply. All was hermetically sealed within except for the grille. Really quite dangerous.
He creaked down to his knees to a hassock and put his face to the grille. Nothing happened. The boy must have fallen asleep.
“Excuse me, Vicar. I’m afraid I don’t go in for this. I have nothing to confess.”
“A very rash statement,” snarled a horrendous voice—there must be some amplifier.
Filth jumped as if he’d put his ear to an electric fence.
“How long, my son, since your last confession?”
“I’ve—” (his son!) “—I’ve never made a confession in my life. I’ve heard plenty. I’m a Q.C.”
There was a snuffling sound.
“But you are in some trouble?”
Filth bowed his head.
“Begin. Go on. ‘Father I have sinned.’ Don’t be afraid.”
Filth’s ragged old logical mind was not used to commands.
“I’m afraid I don’t at the moment feel sinful at all. I am more sinned against than sinning. I am able to think only of my dear dead wife. She was in the Telegraph this morning. Her obituary.” Then he thought: I am not telling the truth. “And I am unable to understand the strange games my loss of her play with my behaviour.”
Why tell this baby? Can’t be much over thirty. Well, same age as Christ, I suppose. If Christ were inside this box . . . A great and astounding longing fell upon Filth, the longing of a poet, the deep perfect adoring longing of a lover of Christ. How did he come on to this? This medieval, well of course, very primitive, love of Christ you read about? Not my sort of thing at all.
“My son, were there any children of the marriage?”
“No. We didn’t seem to need any.”
“That’s never the full answer. I have to say that I saw you touching the anatomy of the cherubs on the Tytchley tomb.”
“You what?”
“Reveal all to me, my son. I can understand and help you.”
“Young man,” roared Filth through the grille. “Go home. Look to your calling. I am one of Her Majesty’s Counsellors and was once a Judge.”
“There is only one judge in the end,” said the voice, but Filth was in the car again and belting on past Saffron Walden.
He drove very fast indeed now, as the roads grew less equipped for him. I am a coelacanth. Yes. I dare say. I have lived too long. Certainly, I cannot cope—cope with a mind such as I have. The bloody little twerp. Wouldn’t have him in my Chambers. I can drive, though. That’s one thing I can do. My reactions are perfect, and here is a motorway again.
And hullo—what’s this? Lights? Sirens? Police? “Good afternoon. Yes?”
“You have been behaving oddly on the road, sir. It has been reported.”
“I have been stopping sometimes. Resting. Once in a church. In my view, essential. No, no need for a breath test. Oh well, very well.”
“You see. Perfectly clear,” said Filth.
“Could we help you in any way?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Your licence is in order?”
“Yes, of course. I am a lawyer.”
“It doesn’t follow, sir. I see that you are eighty-one?”
“With no convictions,” said Filth.
“No, sir. Well, goodbye, sir.”
“There is one thing,” said Filth, strapping himself back in his seat with some languor. “I do seem to be rather lost.”
“Ah.”
“I don’t suppose you know this address. Hainault?”
“We do, sir. But it’s not Hainault. That is in Essex. It’s High Light. Not High Note. A house called High Light. And we know who it belongs to. We know her. It’s five miles away. Shall we go ahead of you?”
“She is my cousin. She can never have had any Christmas cards. Thank you. And thank you for your courtesy and proper behaviour. A great surprise.”
“You oughtn’t to believe the television, sir.”
“Who the hell was he?” one policeman asked the other. “He’s like out of some Channel Four play.”