The Man in the Wooden Hat Page 15

  They drove on, up to York which was impersonal and then up to the Roman Wall where they had Hong Kong friends whose bodies and minds had shrivelled against the climate. Approaching the Border country they surveyed Scotland across the lapping grey waters of the Solway. “If our genes are here,” said Filth, “we ought at least to give Scotland a try.”

  So they stayed at a grand hotel on Loch Lomond and visited another retired lawyer from the Far Eastern circuit, Glasgow-born and seeming ashamed of ever having been away. He was full of a Case to do with some local mountains that had been stacked with warheads in the seventies. They were all there, oh yes. He himself was not for Aldermaston. Always good to have defences. Bugger the Russians. They wondered if his mind had been touched, perhaps by radiation.

  They stepped back from Scotland like people on the brink of a freezing plunge without towels, and turned south-east towards the Lake District and Grasmere because Betty had liked Wordsworth at school. Pilgrims queued outside Dove Cottage and the lakeside was thick with Japanese. They felt foreigners.

  “There must be something wrong with us,” she said. “We are jaundiced has-beens,” and they stopped off at a roadside pub as pretty as a calendar to think about it. The pub was just outside the delectable little town of Appleby. It was 1.30 P.M. and they asked for lunch. “This time of day?” said the proprietor. “Dinner here’s at twelve o’clock! Sandwiches? You can’t ask him to make sandwiches after one o’clock. He needs his rest.”

  So back south. They agreed, unspokenly, not to look at Wales where Filth had suffered as a child, nor Lancashire and west Cumberland where at his prep school—though they never talked about it—they both knew he had been unbelievably, almost unbearably, happy. A time sacred and unrepeatable.

  Down the M6 they drove, and the air warmed. They spent a night in Oxford but did not look anybody up. (Too cliquey. Too long ago.) They drifted south towards Pastry Willy. And, for Betty, a dream garden that had probably never existed. She didn’t explain this. She wore new armour now.

  And then the hen in the tree and a man with an axe.

  Before they left Privilege Hill Betty said, “I’ve remembered, the place I stayed when I was convalescing was called Dexters. At least the people were called Dexter. D’you remember them? From Ebury Street? They were actors.” But Dulcie and Willy, waving from the wrought-iron gate, said there was nobody they’d heard of called Dexter in the Donheads.

  “Goodbye,” they all called out to each other. “Thank you. Oh! How we’ll miss you,” and Willy took Elisabeth’s bright sweet face between his hands and kissed it.

  Susan went back to Boston the following week and, leaving, said, “Those Feathers—I can’t stand them. Never could. So bloody smug. And politically ignorant. And culturally dead! And childless. And selfish. And so bloody, bloody rich.”

  “Elisabeth,” said Dulcie, “wanted ten children.”

  “Oh, they all say that. Posh brides with no brains.”

  “Elisabeth has brains,” said Willy. “She was at Bletchley Park in the war, decoding ciphers, and Filth passed out top in the Bar Finals. And they’re neither of them posh!”

  “Dry as sticks,” said Susan.

  “No,” said Willy.

  “Wasn’t there some sort of scandal about her?” Susan’s eyes gleamed.

  “No,” said Willy.

  “Oh, well,” said Susan. “Her memory’s not much. There’s a house called Dexters here in the village. I passed it out riding. It’s down that lane that divides. One up one down. You can’t see it from the road.”

  “Oh, nonsense, we’d know it.”

  “The Dexter place, all you can see is down its chimney unless you go round to the front entrance, down the hill, towards Donhead St. Anthony. It’s been a ruin for years. I asked because it’s being all done up.”

  “Darling, why didn’t you tell them?”

  “Why should they live here? I can’t.”

  So the Feathers settled down for a London winter in the Temple, Filth working on his Pollution Bill, excellent Sunday lunches in the Inner Temple Hall after church, theatres, old friends and an occasional weekend in Surrey. They grew dull. Filth went back to Hong Kong for a while, but Betty stayed behind.

  Old Willy died in the New Year and Betty asked Dulcie to stay with her in the flat, which was close to the Temple church where the memorial service would be held. Betty had gone to the funeral of course, in the Donheads, and seen Willy lowered into the Dorset soil in his local churchyard. Susan had not come from America but she would be at the memorial service. Betty invited her to stay with her in the Temple, too, but this was left uncertain. Which is to say that Susan did not reply.

  Oh, well, thought Elisabeth.

  It was a splashy, showery day and the congregation arrived shaking umbrellas and stamping their wet shoes in the porch of the Temple church. Willy had been so contentedly old, they were all telling each other, that this was a celebration of his life, not a lament. There were a few old lawyers from Singapore and Hong Kong and some Benchers from all the Inns of Court who faced each other sanguinely across the chancel, occasionally raising a hand in greeting.

  Betty sat wanting Filth there. She felt very sad. Dulcie next to her was perfectly dressed in Harrods black with a glint of Chanel, eyes streaming, and sulky Susan was gulping and snuffling into a big handkerchief. Betty hadn’t bothered much with what to wear or whom to greet. She sat thinking of Willy and old Shanghai and nursery rhymes a thousand years ago. I do know love when I see it, she thought. He loved me and I loved him. Nobody much left. And she tried to ignore the hatchet face, directly across from her, of Fiscal-Smith in a black suit worn slippery with funerals.

  There was a scuffle and commotion and, across the church, Fiscal-Smith made room ungraciously for a stumbling latecomer who was nodding left and right in apology. The Master of the Temple was already climbing to the pulpit to read from the Holy Bible. The latecomer looked at Betty across the chancel, directly head-on to him, and gave a delighted wave. It was Harry Veneering.

  “Come on out to tea,” he said afterwards.

  They were all gathering outside the church or crammed into the porch and some had begun to walk over the courtyard to the wake in Parliament Chamber. It was not quite raining but damp, and many of them were old. The senior Benchers were filing away from the church through their private door under umbrellas, and Dulcie and Susan were being cared for by the Master of the Temple.

  “Come on, don’t go that way,” said Harry Veneering to Betty. “Come with me round here past these gents on the floor,” and he took her elbow and led her away among the circle of Knights Templar on their tombs, swords in place. Chins high.

  “Promising juniors who didn’t quite make it,” said Harry. “I’d have been the same if I’d gone to the Bar. The Army was for me. Mind, the Army didn’t seem to do them a lot of good, proud bastards pretending to be like Jesus. Killing everybody. Taxi!”

  “Where are we going?”

  “The Savoy.”

  “But it’s only a two-minute walk.”

  “We’re not walking. I’m an Officer in the Brigade of Guards.”

  “And,” she said, “we haven’t booked.”

  “Oh, they’ll find me a table.”

  He gave the saluting doorman a wave, and took her through the foyer laughing and smiling around. Yes, of course, sir, a table. No, of course not, sir. Not too near the piano. They sat in an alcove where lamplight and warmth denied the soggy day.

  “Yes,” he said, “full afternoon tea and, yes, the glass of champagne. Naturally. And—” he looked at her and took her hand.

  “Harry, stop this at once. They’ll think you’re my—what is it called?—toy boy!”

  “Oh, but I am,” he said. “Mrs. Waterproof and galoshes!—Hey—look at my right thigh!” He stuck out his leg just in front of the approaching waitress, and there were shrieks and laughter.

  “Harry—will you sit down. You’re no better than when you were nine.”


  “I wish they served lobsters,” he said.

  Shriek.

  “And I wish I was under the table again, missing my plane back to school. I wish—I wish I’d never grown up.”

  “Harry, how dare you! How can you? All we did!”

  “Sorry. Yes. Look at my thigh. It’s twice the width of my left one, twice as strong. Whenever I have X-rays it makes them faint. Wonderful operation. Did you read in the papers? I climbed the Eiger.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Not that I’m the first.”

  “No, you’re not. And how did it get in the papers?”

  “I attract attention. Like my father.”

  Pouring pale-gold tea she said, “And where is your father? And your mother? I thought they’d be here at the service.”

  “Pa’s in Fiji doing an Arbitration. I suppose Ma’s at home in HK. I don’t hear much from her.”

  “You hear from your father?”

  “Oh, yes. But I’m in his black books at the moment.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t go into it. Extravagance. I think he rather likes to boast about it really. Makes me seem a toff.”

  “He’s been very good to you.”

  “So have you, Miss Raincoat. You are my true and only love. Someone told me you were with me all night long before I nearly had my leg chopped off.”

  A waiter came with the champagne.

  “It’s true,” Harry said to him. “She was with me all night long. Out on the Russian steppes. She stopped them amputating my leg. Then things got out of hand and we were attacked by wolves . . .”

  “Will that be all, sir?”

  “Oh, no!” said Harry. “Lots more to come.”

  “Harry,” she said. “I must go back to the wake and look after Dulcie. She’s staying with me.”

  “Where’s Hyperion?” he asked. “Can’t he look after her?—Filth, I mean. Sir Edward?”

  “He’s abroad. He’s arbitrating, too. He’s retiring soon and then we’re going to live in Dorset, near Dulcie.”

  But he was staring at the clock across the room. “Good God in heaven,” he said. “Good God!—The time! I have to go,” and he began to pat his pockets. “I’m dreadfully late. I—my wallet!”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I’m taking you out to tea. Next time you can give me dinner. At the Ritz.”

  “I will! I’d love to. Mrs. Burberry, my angel of light,” and he was gone, flitting through the room and out of the foyer through the glass doors into the Strand.

  She followed after paying the huge bill and walked back into the Temple and into the sombre celebration for her dear old friend. As she came into the room she seemed to see him somewhere in the crowd watching her and lovingly shaking his head.

  “I haven’t a son,” she told the ghost. (“Oh, hello, Tony! Hello, Desmond!”) “I haven’t a child. I’ve no one else to be unwise with. I so love him.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Dexters was an immediate success. There was very little of the old cowman’s cottage left. All had been enlarged and the garden opened widely to the view. The entrance was no longer the breakneck business of Elisabeth’s first haunted visit and there was electricity, an Aga, a telephone, a splendid kitchen, two bathrooms, a dining room for the rosewood table and a hall wide enough for the red chair. And a terrace, facing the sunset for gin on summer evenings. The great stone chimney remained. Dexters was private and quiet but not so isolated that the two of them would one day become a threat to the social services when they became seriously old. There was a shop half a mile away, the paper and the groceries were delivered, as of yore, and the church stood up unchanging near Dulcie on Privilege Hill. There was a room for Filth to work in surrounded by his shelves of Law Reports, and a hidden garage for one modest car. The almost virgin—if there is such a thing—garden beckoned, and deliveries began of Betty’s plants. A gardener was found and a cleaner who also did laundry. There was the smell of leaves and dew when you opened the windows and the smell of the new wood floors within, and the wood-burning stove. Betty gathered lavender and scattered it in chests of drawers.

  And so they settled. The curtains of lights and fireworks and the clamour and glamour and luxury and squalor of Hong Kong were over for them. The sun rose and set less hectically, less noticeably, but more birds sang. The rookery was still there, the nests, now huge and askew, weighing heavily in the branches, the birds—probably, said Filth, the same ones—still disputing and objecting and arbitrating and condemning, passing judgement and gathering further and better particulars. Filth said that so long as they were there he’d never miss his profession.

  Memory changed for both Edward and Elisabeth. There were fewer people now to keep it alive. Christmas cards dwindled. Instead, Betty began in October to write letters to the best of those left. Not many. Amy and Isobel and a couple of dotty cousins of Edward. Just as she had rearranged herself into a copy of her dead mother on her marriage, now she began to work on being the wife of a distinguished old man. She took over the church—the vicar was nowhere—and set up committees. She joined a Book Club and found DVDs of glorious old films of their youth. She took up French again and had her finger- and toenails done in Salisbury, her hair quite often in London where she became a member of the University Women’s Club. She knew she still looked sexy. She still had disturbing erotic dreams.

  She quite enjoyed the new role, and bought very expensive county clothes, and she wore Veneering’s pearls (Edward’s were in a safe) more and more boldly and with less and less guilt.

  As ever, she kept Veneering’s diamond clasp round the back of her neck in the daytime and only risked it round the front at dinner parties where sometimes it was exclaimed over. Filth never seemed to notice.

  One day Filth said, “Do you remember that I once took part in an Arbitration at The Hague?”

  “The International Court of Justice? Of course I do. I didn’t see you for months. You said it was dreary.”

  “That fellow was on the other side.”

  “Veneering,” she said. “Yes.”

  “We kept our distance. You didn’t come out.”

  “I did, actually. Just for a night or two. I met a school-friend in a park. I don’t remember much. It was after we—we married.”

  “Well,” he said, looking through his glass of red wine and tipping it about. “I’ve been asked there again.”

  “What! It’s been years . . .”

  “It’s an engineering dispute about a dam in Syria. I’ve done a few dams in my time. The two sides have been rabbiting on, squandering millions. They want to bring in a couple of new arbitrators to sit above the present ones.”

  “Could you? Do you want to? Aren’t you rusty?”

  “I could. I’d like to. I don’t think so. Come too. The Hague’s a lovely place and there’s so much around it. There’s Delft and Leyden and Amsterdam and Bruges. Wonderful museums. Paintings. Oh, and good, clean food. Good, clean people. Good for you!”

  “I’ll think. But you should do it.”

  “Yes. I think so. I think so.”

  “The International Court of Justice! At your age.”

  “Yes.”

  “But,” he said a week later, “it’s out of the question. Guess whom they want as the third replacement arbitrator?”

  She licked her fingers. She was making marmalade.

  “Easy,” she said. “Sir Terence Veneering QC, Learned in the Law.”

  “Yes.”

  “Does it matter? Isn’t it about time . . . ?”

  “Well, I suppose so!” said Filth. “And he’s the only other one who knows as much as I do about dams. It would be a fair fight. I needn’t speak to him out of Court.”

  “Is he ‘Dams’?”

  “Yes. He got the Aswan Dam once. I’d have liked that one. However, I got the dam in Iran. D’you remember? It wouldn’t fill up. Very interesting. They’d moved half the population of the country out and drowned all their vill
ages. I won that. I had death threats there, you know.”

  “You always thought so. Will this dam be interesting?”

  “All dams are interesting,” he said, shocked.

  Later, eating the new marmalade at breakfast, she said, “But I don’t think I’ll come with you, Filth, my darling. If you don’t mind.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, well. It’s Easter. I’m needed at church. And so on.”

  “Dulcie could do all that.”

  “Well. No, I’m happy here, Eddie. I’m used to you being away, for goodness sake. It’s not like in East Pakistan with only three telephone lines.”

  “Well, I’ll go. Actually”—he gave his crazy embarrassed roar—“I have actually accepted the job so I’ll go and I’ll come back at weekends. I can be back here every Friday night you know, until the Sunday night. And—you never know—you might change your mind and come out to me for a weekend? We could stay somewhere outside The Hague.”

  So she was alone in the Donheads through the early spring. It was a bitter Lent, cold and lonely. When Eddie’s car dropped him off at Dexters each Friday night and she had dinner ready for him and news of village matters, he seemed far away and unconcerned.

  “Are you enjoying the International Court of Justice?”

  “Well, ‘enjoying?’ The creature is still poisonous. Still hates me. But I’m glad to be there. Betty, come out and join me. We can stay away from The Hague and all that. It’s such a chance for you. Buy bulbs.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “You can order a million tulips there,” he said.

  “Tulips,” she said.

  “Well, think about it.”

  “I love you, Filth. Oh, yes, well, yes. I’ll come!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT