He was spectacularly clean. You might say ostentatiously clean. His ancient fingernails were rimmed with purest white. The few still-gold hairs below his knuckles looked always freshly shampooed, as did his curly still-bronze hair. His shoes shone like conkers. His clothes were always freshly pressed. He had the elegance of the 1920s, for his garments, whatever they looked like off, always became him. Always a Victorian silk handkerchief in the breast pocket. Always yellow cotton or silk socks from Harrods; and some still perfect from his old days in the East. His skin was clear and, in a poor light, young.
His colleagues at the Bar called him Filth, but not out of irony. It was because he was considered to be the source of the old joke, Failed In London Try Hong Kong. It was said that he had fled the London Bar, very young, very poor, on a sudden whim just after the War, and had done magnificently well in Hong Kong from the start. Being a modest man, they said, he had called himself a parvenu, a fraud, a carefree spirit.
Filth in fact was no great maker of jokes, was not at all modest about his work and seldom, except in great extremity, went in for whims. He was loved, however, admired, laughed at kindly and still much discussed many years after retirement.
Now, nearing eighty, he lived alone in Dorset. His wife Betty was dead but he often prattled on to her around the house. Astonishingly in one so old, his curly hair was not yet grey. His eyes and mind alert, he was a delightful man. He had always been thought so. A man whose distinguished life had run steadily and happily. There was no smell of old age about his house. He was rich and took for granted that it (and he) would be kept clean, fed and laundered by servants as it had always been. He knew how to treat servants and they stayed for years.
Betty had been successful with servants, too. Both she and Old Filth had been born in what Americans called the Orient and the British Raj had called the Far East. They knew who they were, but they were unselfconscious and popular.
After Betty’s death the self-mockery dwindled in Old Filth. His life exploded. He became more ponderous. He began, at first slowly, to flick open shutters on the past that he had, as a sensible man with sensible and learned friends (he was a QC and had been a judge), kept clamped down.
His success as an advocate in Hong Kong had been phenomenal for he had had ease, grasp, diligence and flair. His career had taken off the minute he had begun to be briefed by the Straits-Chinese. It was not just that scraps of eastern languages began to re-emerge from his childhood in Malaya, but a feeling of nearness to the Oriental mind. When Old Filth spoke Malay or (less ably) Mandarin, you heard an unsuspected voice. Chinese, Malay and Bengali lawyers—though often trained at Oxford and the Inns of Court—were thought to be not straightforward but Filth, now Old Filth and after his retirement often Dear Old Filth, had found them perfectly straightforward, and to his taste.
All his life he kept a regard for Chinese values: the courtesy, the sudden thrust, the holiness of hospitality, the pleasure in money, the decorum, the importance of food, the discretion, the cleverness. He had married a Scotswoman but she had been born in Peking. She was dumpy and tweedy with broad Lanarkshire shoulders and square hands, but she spoke Mandarin perfectly and was much more at home with Chinese ways and idiom than she ever felt on her very rare visits to Scotland. Her passion for jewellery was Chinese and her strong Scottish fingers rattled the trays of jade in the street markets of Kowloon, stirring the stones like pebbles on a beach. “When you do that,” Old Filth would say—when they were young and he was still aware of her all the time—“your eyes are almond-shaped.” “Poor Old Betty,” he would say to her ghost across in another armchair in the house in Dorset to which they had retired and in which she had died.
And why ever Dorset? Nobody knew. Some family tradition somewhere perhaps. Filth said it was because he disliked everywhere else in England, Betty because she felt the cold in Scotland. They both had a dismissive attitude towards Wales.
But if any old pair had been born to become retired ex-pats in Hong Kong, members of the Cricket Club, the Jockey Club, stalwarts of the English Lending Library, props of St. Andrew’s Church and St. John’s Cathedral, they were Filth and Betty. People who would always be able to keep servants (Filth was very rich), who would live in a house on The Peak, be forever welcoming hosts to every friend of a friend’s friend visiting the Colony. When you thought of Betty, you saw her at her round rosewood dining table, looking quickly about her to see if plates were empty, tinkling her little bell to summon the snakey smiling girls in their household livery of identical cheongsams. Old Filth and Betty were perfectly international people, beloved ornaments at every one of the Memorial Services to old friends, English or Chinese, in the Cathedral. In the last years these deaths had been falling thick and fast upon them.
Was it perhaps “The Pound” that drew them to Dorset? The thought of having to survive one day in Hong Kong on a pension? But the part of Dorset they had chosen was far from cheap. Betty was known to “have her own money” and Filth had always said merrily that he had put off making judge for as long as possible so that he hadn’t to live on a salary.
And they had no children. No responsibilities. No one to come back to England for.
Or was it—the most likely thing—the end of Empire? The drawing-near of 1997? Was it the unbearableness of the thought of the arrival of the barbarians? The now unknown, but certainly changed, Mainland-Chinese whose grandparents had fed the baby Miss Betty on soft, cloudy jellies and told her frightening fairy tales?
Neither Filth nor Betty cared for the unknown and already, five years before they left, English was not being heard so much in Hong Kong shops and hotels and, when it was heard, it was being spoken less well. Many familiar English and Chinese had disappeared to London or Seattle or Toronto, and many children had vanished to foreign boarding schools. The finest of the big houses on The Peak were in darkness behind steel grilles, and at Betty’s favourite jeweller the little girls behind the counter, who sat all day threading beads and who still seemed to look under sixteen although she had known them twenty years, glanced up more slowly now when she rang the bell on the armour-plated door. They kept their fixed smiles but somehow found fewer good stones for her. Chinese women she knew had not the same difficulty.
So suddenly Filth and Betty were gone, gone for ever from the sky-high curtains of glittering lights, unflickering gold, soft-green and rose, from the busy waters of the finest harbour in the world and the perpetual drama of every sort of boat: the junks and oil tankers and the private yachts like swans, and the comforting, bottle-green bulk of the little Star Ferries that chugged back and forth to Kowloon all day and most of the night. This deck accommodates 319 passengers. Filth had loved the certainty of the 19.
So they were gone, far from friends and over seventy, to a house deep in the Donheads on the Dorset-Wiltshire border, an old low stone house that could not be seen from its gate. A rough, narrow drive climbed up to it, curving towards it and out of sight. The house sat on a small plateau looking down over forests of every sort and colour of English tree, and far across the horizon was a long scalpel line of milky, chalky downland, dappled with shadows drawn across it by the clouds. No place in the world is less like Hong Kong or the Far East.
Yet it was not so remote that a doctor might start suggesting in a few years’ time that it might be kinder to the Social Services if they were to move nearer to civilisation. There was a village half a mile up the hilly road that passed their gate, and half a mile in the other direction, also up a hill for their drive ran down into a dip, were a church and a shop. There were other houses among the trees. There was even a house next door, its gateway alongside theirs, its drive curving upwards as did their own, though branching away. It disappeared, as did their own. So they were secluded but not cut off.
And it worked. They made it work. Betty was the sort of woman who had plotted that the end of her life would work, and Filth, having Betty, had no fears of failure. They changed of course. They discarded much. They went out and about very little. Betty wrote a great many letters. They put their hearts into becoming content, safe in their successful lives. Filth had always said—of his Cases—“I am trained to forget.” “Otherwise,” he said, “how could I function?” Facts, memories, the pain of life—of lives in chaos—have to be forgotten. Filth had condemned men to death. Had seen innocent men convicted. As a Silk he reckoned that fifty per cent of his Cases had gone wrong. In Hong Kong the judges lived in an enclave of palaces but behind steel gates guarded night and day.
In The Donheads they felt safe behind the lock of their old- fashioned farmhouse door that could never accidentally be left on the latch. Betty gardened, Filth read thrillers and biographies, worked now and then in his tool shed. He kept his judge’s wig in its oval black-and-gold tin box on the hearth, like a grey cat in a basket. Then in time, as there was nobody but Betty to be amused, he moved it to his wardrobe to lie with his black silk stockings and buckled shoes. He had not brought the Black Cap home.
Betty sat sewing. She often stared for hours at the trees. They went to the supermarket in Shaftesbury once a week in their modest car. A gardener came to do the heavy digging and a woman from a nearby village came in four times a week to clean, cook and do the laundry. Betty said that Hong Kong’s legacy was to make foreigners unable to do their own washing. After Betty died, the gardener and the woman continued to work for Filth. Filth’s lifetime of disciplined charm survived well.
Or so it seemed. Looking back, Filth knew that beneath his apparent serenity the years after Betty’s departure had been a time of mental breakdown and that mental breakdown in someone conditioned to an actor’s life (which is the Bar) can be invisible both to the sufferer and everyone else.
And this—the event he came to see as the beginning of enlightenment—occurred one Christmas, two years on. The cleaning lady started it.
Letting herself in with her door-key, talking as usual before she was over the threshold, “Well,” she said. “What about this then, Sir Edward? You never hear a thing down this way till it’s happened. Next door must have moved. Your next door. There’s removal vans all up and down the drive and loads of new stuff being carried in. They say it’s another lawyer from Singapore like you.”
“Hong Kong,” corrected Filth, as he always did.
“Hong Kong then. They’ll be wanting a domestic I dare say, but they’re out of luck. I’m well-suited here, you’re not to worry. I’ll find them someone if they ask. I’ve enough to do.”
A few days later Filth was told, courtesy of the village shop, the new neighbour’s name. It was, as the cleaning lady had said, indeed that of another Hong Kong lawyer and it was the name of the only man in his professional life, or come to that his private life, that Old Filth had ever detested. The extraordinary effect this man had had upon him over many years, and it had been much remarked upon and the usually buttoned-up Filth had not cared, was like venom sprayed from the mouths of Chinese dragons.
And the same had gone for Terry Veneering’s opinion of Old Filth.
Betty had never spoken of it. Kept herself apart. Became silent, remote. Filth’s Clerk, other lawyers, found the enmity almost a chemical, physical thing. In Hong Kong, the Bar watched. Old Filth, delightful wise Old Filth and swashbuckling Veneering, did not “have words” in Court, they spat poisons. They did not cross swords, they set about each other with scimitars. Old Filth believed that Terry Veneering was all that was wrong with the British masters of this divine Colony—jumped-up, arrogant, blustering, loud, cynical and common. And far too good at games. Without such as Veneering—who knows? Veneering treated the Chinese as if they were invisible, flung himself into pompous rites of Empire, strutted at ceremonies in his black and gold, cringed with sycophancy before the Governor, drank too much. In Court he treated his opponent to personal abuse. Once, when they were both still Counsel in an interminable case about a housing estate built over a Chinese graveyard (the housing estate mysteriously refused to prosper), Veneering spent days sneering at primitive beliefs. Or so Old Filth said in, and out of, Court. What Veneering said about Old Filth he never enquired but there was a mutual, seething dislike. Betty became haggard with the subject.
For Veneering got away with everything, snarled Filth. He bestrode the Colony on his thick legs like a colossus, booming on at parties about his own excellence. During a state visit by royalty he boasted about his boy at Eton. Later it was all “my boy at Cambridge,” then “my boy in the Guards.” “Insufferable,” cried Filth. Betty said, “Oh, hush, hush.”
Filth’s first thought—now—was: Well, thank God Betty’s gone. His second thought was that he would have to move.
However, the next-door house was as invisible as Filth’s, its garden secret behind the long band of firs that curved between their joint drives. These trees grew broader, taller, all the time, and even when the leaves of other trees fell and it became winter, there was neither sight nor sound of the new neighbour.
“He’s a widower, living alone,” said the cleaning lady. “His wife used to be a Chinese.”
Old Filth remembered then that Veneering had married a Chinese woman. Strange to have forgotten. Why did it stir up in him such a mixture of hatred and smugness—almost of relief? He remembered the wife now, her downward-looking eyes, the curious chandelier earrings she wore. He remembered her at the racecourse in a bright yellow silk dress, Veneering alongside—great coarse golden fellow, six foot two; his strangled voice trying to sound English public school.
Old Filth dozed off then with this picture before him, wondering at the clarity of an image thirty years old when what happened yesterday had receded into darkness. He was nearly eighty now. Veneering was a bit younger. Well, they could each keep their own corner. They need never meet.
Nor did they. The year went by and the next one. A friend from Hong Kong—young chap of sixty—called and said, “I believe old Terry Veneering lives somewhere down here, too. Do you ever come across him?”
“He’s next door. No. Never.”
“Next door? My dear fellow—!”
“I’d have been wise to move away.”
“But you mean you’ve never—?”
“No.”
“And he’s made no . . . gesture?”
“Christopher, your memory is short.”
“Well, I knew of course you were . . . You were both irrational in that direction, but . . .”
Old Filth walked his friend down to the gate. Beside it stood Veneering’s gate, overhung by ragged yews. A short length of drainpipe, to take a morning newspaper, was attached to Veneering’s gate. It was identical to the one that had lain by Old Filth’s gate for many years. “He copied my drainpipe,” said Old Filth. “He never had an original notion.”
“I’ve half a mind to call,” said Christopher.
“Well, you needn’t come and see me again if you do,” said courteous Old Filth.
Seated in his car in the road the friend considered the mystery of what convictions survive into dotage and how wise he had been to stay on in Hong Kong.
“You don’t feel like a visit, Eddie?” he asked out of the car window. “Why not come out for Christmas? It’s not so much changed that there’ll ever be anywhere in the world like it.”
But Filth said he never stirred at Christmas. Just a taxi to the White Hart at Salisbury, for luncheon. Good place. No paper hats. No streamers.
“I remember Betty with streamers tangled up in her hair and her pearls and gold chains. In Hong Kong.”
But Filth thanked him and declined and waved him off.
On Christmas morning, Filth thought again of Christopher, as he was waiting for the taxi to the White Hart, watching from a window whose panes were almost blocked with snow, snow that had been falling when he’d opened his bedroom curtains five hours ago at seven o’clock. Big, fast, determined flakes. They fell and fell. They danced. They mesmerised. After a few moments you couldn’t tell if they were going up or down. Thinking of the road at the end of his drive, the deep hollow there, he wondered if the taxi would make it. At twelve-fifteen he thought he might ring and ask, but waited until twelve-thirty as it seemed tetchy to fuss. He discovered the telephone was dead.
“Ah,” he said. “Ha.”
There were mince pies and a ham shank. A good bottle somewhere. He’d be all right. A pity though. Break with tradition.
He stood staring at the Christmas cards. Fewer again this year. As for presents, nothing except one from his cousin Claire. Always the same. Two handkerchiefs. More than he ever sent her, but she had had the pearls. He must send her some flowers. He picked up one large glossy card and read A Merry Christmas from The Ideal Tailor, Century Arcade, Star Building, Hong Kong to an old and esteemed client. Every year. Never failed. Still had his suits. Twenty years old. He wore them sometimes in summer. Snowflakes danced around a Chinese house on stilts. Red Chinese characters. A rosy Father Christmas waving from a corner. Stilts. Houses on stilts.
Suddenly he missed Betty. Longed for her. Felt that if he turned round now, quickly, there she would be.
But she was not.
Outside there was a strange sound, a long, sliding noise and a thump. A heavy thump. It might well be the taxi skidding on the drive and hitting the side of the house. Filth opened the front door but saw nothing but snow. He stepped quickly out upon his doorstep to look down the drive, and behind him the front door swung to, fastening with a solid, pre-War click.
He was in his bedroom slippers. Otherwise he was dressed in trousers, a singlet—which he always wore, being a gentleman, thank God—shirt and tie and the thin cashmere cardigan Betty had bought him years ago. Already it was sopped through.
Filth walked delicately along the side of the house in his slippers, bent forward, screwing his old eyes against the snow, to see if by any chance . . . but he knew that the back door was locked, and the French windows. He turned off towards the tool shed over the invisible slippery grass. Locked. He thought of the car in the garage. He hadn’t driven now for some time, not since the days of terror. Mrs. Thing did the shopping now. It was scarcely used. But perhaps the garage—?
The garage was locked.
Nothing for it but to get down the drive somehow and wait for the taxi under Veneering’s yews.
In his tiptoe way he passed the heap of snow that had fallen off the roof and had sounded like a slithering car. “I’m a bloody old fool,” he said.
From the gate he looked out upon the road. It was a gleaming sheet of snow in both directions. Nothing had disturbed it for many hours. All was silent, as death. Filth turned and looked up Veneering’s drive.
That too was pristine silk, unmarked by birds, unpocked by fallen berries. Snow and snow. Falling and falling. Thick, wet, ice cold. His thinning hair ice cold. Snow had gathered inside his collar, his cardigan, his slippers. All ice cold. His knobbly hands were freezing as he grasped first one yew branch and then the next. Hand over hand he made his way up Veneering’s drive.
He’ll be with the son, thought Old Filth. That or there’ll be some ghastly house party going on. Golfers. Old cobwebs from the Temple. Smart solicitors. Gin.
But the house when it came in view was dark and seemed empty. Abandoned for years.
Old Filth rang the bell and stood on the porch. The bell tinkled somewhere far away inside, like Betty’s at the rosewood dining-table in the Mid Levels.
And what the hell do I do now? He’s probably gone to that oaf Christopher and they are carousing in the Peninsular Hotel. It’ll be—what? Late night now. They’ll have reached the brandy and cigars—the cigars presented in a huge shallow box, the maître d’ bowing like a priest before the sacrament. The vulgarity. Probably kill the pair of them. Hullo?
A light had been switched on inside the house and a face peered from behind a curtain in a side window. Then the front door was opened slightly by a bent old man with a strand or two of blond hair.
“Filth? Come in.”
“Thank you.”
“No coat?”
“I just stepped across. I was looking out for my taxi. For the White Hart. Christmas luncheon. Just hanging about. I thought I’d call and . . .”
“Merry Christmas. Good of you.”
They stood in the drear, unhollied hall.
“I’ll get you a towel. Better take off your cardigan. I’ll find you another. Whiskey?”
In the brown and freezing sitting-room a jigsaw puzzle only one-eighth completed was laid out over a huge table. Table and jigsaw were both white with dust. The venture looked hopeless.
“Too much damned sky,” said Veneering as they stood contemplating it. “I’ll put another bar on. I don’t often sit in here. You must be cold. Maybe we’ll hear your car from here, but I doubt it. I’d guess it won’t get through.”
“I wonder if I might use your phone? Mine seemed to be defunct.”
“Mine too, I’d guess, if yours is,” said Veneering. “By all means try.”
The phone was dead.
They sat before two small, red wire-worms stretched across the front of an electric fire. Some sort of antique, thought Filth. Haven’t seen one like that in sixty years. Chambers in the years of the Great Fog.
In a display case on the chimney-piece he saw a pair of exotic chandelier earrings. The fire, the earrings, the whiskey, the jigsaw, the silence, the eerily-falling snow made him all at once want to weep.
“I was sorry to hear about Betty,” said Veneering.
“I was sorry about Elsie,” said Filth, remembering her name and her still and beautiful—and unhappy—Chinese face. “Your son—?”
“Dead,” said Veneering. “Killed. Army.”
“I am most terribly sorry. So dreadfully sorry. I hadn’t heard.”
“We don’t hear much these days,” said Veneering. “Maybe we don’t want to. We had too many Hearings.”
Filth watched the arthritic stooped old figure shamble across the room to the decanter.
“Not good for the bones, this climate,” said Veneering, shambling back.
“Did you think of staying on?”
“Good God, no.”
“It suited you so well.” Then Filth said something very odd. “Better than us, I always thought. Better than me, anyway. And Betty never talked about it. She was very Scotch, you know.”
“Plenty of Scots in Hong Kong,” said Veneering. “You two seemed absolutely welded, melded, into the place. Betty and her Chinese jewellery.”
“Oh, she tried,” said Filth sadly. “She was very faithful.”
“Another?”
“I should be getting home.”
It dawned on Old Filth that he would have to ask a favour of Veneering. He had already lost a good point to him by calling round wet to the skin. Veneering was still no fool. He’d spotted the telephone business. It would be difficult to regain his position. Maybe make something out of being the first to break the silence? Maturity. Magnanimity. Water under the bridge. Christmas Day. Hint at a larger spirit?
He wouldn’t mention locking himself out.
But how was he to get home? Mrs. Thing’s key was three miles off and she wasn’t coming in again until New Year’s Day. He could hardly stay here—Good God! With Veneering!
“I’ve thought of coming to see you,” said Veneering. “Several times as a matter of fact, this past year. Getting on, both of us.”
Old Filth was silent. He himself had not thought of doing anything of the sort, and could not pretend.
“Couldn’t think of a good excuse,” said Veneering. “Bit afraid of the reception. Bloody hot-tempered type, I used to be. We weren’t exactly similar.”
“I’ve forgotten what type I was,” said Filth, again surprising himself. “Not much of anything, I expect.”
“Bloody good advocate,” said Veneering.
“You made a damn good judge,” said Filth, remembering that this was true. “Better than I was.”
“Only excuse I could think of was a feeble one,” said Veneering. “There’s a key of yours here hanging in my pantry. Front door. Chubb. Your address is on the label. Must have been here for years. Neighbours being neighbourly long ago, I expect. Maybe you have one of mine?”
“No,” said Filth. “No, I’ve not seen one.”
“Could have let myself in, any time,” said Veneering. “Murdered you in your bed.” There was a flash of the old black mischief. “Must you go? I don’t think there’s going to be a taxi. It would never make the hill. I’ll get that key—unless you want me to hold on to it. For an emergency?” (Another hard look.)
“No,” said Filth with Court decorum. “No, I’ll take it and see if it works.”
On Veneering’s porch, wearing Veneering’s (ghastly) over-coat, Filth paused. The snow was easing. He heard himself say, “Boxing Day tomorrow. If you’re on your own, I’ve a ham shank and some decent claret.”
“Pleasure,” said Veneering.
On his own doorstep Filth thought: Will it turn?
It did.
The house was beautifully warm but he made up the fire. The water would be hot, thank God. Get out of these clothes. Hello? What?
He thought he heard something in the kitchen. Hello? Yes?
He went through and found it empty. The snow had stopped at last and the windows were squares of black light. He thought, peering forward into the gloaming: Someone is looking in. But he could see no signs of footprints anywhere, and drew the curtains. He peeped into cupboards to make sure of things for tomorrow. Didn’t want to look a fool. There was a can of shark’s fin soup. Tin of crab-meat. Good rice. Package of parmesan. Avocado. Fine. Fine.
Behind him in the hall he heard something like a chuckle.
“Who the hell is that? Hello?” (Had the fellow had two keys? Murdered you in your bed.)
“Edward, Edward, stop these fantasies! You are too old. You are no longer seven.” A man’s voice. Good God, I’m going senile. “Yes, Sir,” he said. “Kettle. Hot water bottle. Bath. I’m old.”
The phone rang.
“You back safely?” asked Veneering’s voice. “I thought I’d try the phone. We’re in touch again.”
“Oh. Thanks, Veneering. One o’clock tomorrow?”
“Yes. Would you like me to bring my chessmen?”
“Got some. Maybe next time.”
“Next time.”
So it wasn’t Veneering, he ruminated in the bath, idly watching his old greying pubic hair floating like fern on the delicious hot water. Steam filled the bathroom. He almost slept.
Better get out. Somehow. Or it’ll be all over.
He turned his lanky frame so that he was on all fours, facing the porcelain floor of the bath, balanced on his spread hands and his sharp knees (one of them none too excellent), and slithered his feet about to get some sort of purchase near the taps. Slowly the long length of him arose, feet squeaking a little. He pulled the plug out and watched the soapy water begin to drain, bubbling round his now rosy feet. He thought of another river. Black and brown babies splashing. A girl all warmth and laughter, his head against her thighs. The water gurgled away.
Getting more difficult. Must get a shower. Won’t have one of those bloody mats with suction pads, though. Won’t have what they call the Social Services. Veneering doesn’t, you can see. Mind, Veneering doesn’t look as if he has baths at all. Poor old bugger.
Wrapped in a white bath towel he padded about. Slippers, bath robe. Perfectly well. Take a little something to bed? No— eat it over the telly? Anchovy toast. Tea—enough whiskey. Ha!—blaze up, fire. Mustn’t drop off.
“Don’t drop off,” said a woman’s voice. “Don’t drop off the perch! Not yet.”
“Hey, hello, what? Betty?”
But again, nobody there.
Hope I’m not feverish.
“And I’m not being a fool,” he shouted to the door of Betty’s old bedroom and shut his own bedroom door behind him.
Perfectly in charge.
The bed was warm, and his own. Extraordinary really, the idea of sharing a bed. Bourgeois. Something Betty and I never talked about.
“This is not the time of frenzy,” he heard himself say out loud as the images of the day merged into dreams. He was clinging to someone on a boat-deck and the sea a silver skin. There was screaming but it was somewhere else and hardly woke him. “We dealt with all that,” he said, “in what they call my long, untroubled and uneventful life.”
“Sleep, Filth,” said a voice. “Nobody knew you like I did.”
Which of them said that? he wondered.