Old Filth Read online

  Six months later the two of them took ship to England alone.

  There was no sign of the District Officer, no sign of Ada, and they travelled steerage—Alistair had been vague to Auntie May about how much more money he had to spare, and she was nervous lest the child became over-excited by uniforms and orchestras. There was also the question of table manners for someone who had not sat at tables until six months ago at the Port. At first Edward had tried to eat beneath the table. The Mission had done better with his English than with his social graces. All that Auntie May had heard from Captain Feathers since they parted was a letter saying that all financial arrangements had been made for the boy and that he would come into his own money in time. His father’s sisters had been written to and had the address of the Public school where he would go when he was fourteen. Money had been sent to the foster parents in Wales.

  Auntie May wrote back, making sure the father had the boy’s Welsh address correctly, and told him that a letter would be written by Edward every week as soon as he could write. She made clear that Edward was not himself at present. That, at the Port, while he had absorbed English easily—he would be a linguist she was sure—he had become passive and listless and glum and when he talked now it seemed to be with some difficulty, as if he had a constriction in the throat like an old clock trying to gear itself up to strike. “A-a-a-a-a-ack.” You longed to say the word for him. You sometimes almost wanted to shake him for he seemed to be doing it on purpose. When the words were eventually freed from the clockwork in the gullet, or the mind, out they poured far too fast, and when he paused for breath it was “ack-ack-ack, ek-ek-ek” again. At the Mission, other children had called him “the monkey” and he had in fact become rather like one of the bony, pale-orange baboons with their hot red eyes.

  He never asked for Ada again.

  At Colombo the ship took on more passengers and Auntie May suspected that two of the many white children with their ayahs and mothers might be Edward’s cousins travelling (of course) first-class. There had been rumours of this but she had made no enquiries. The two cousins were girls, one a little older than Edward, the other even younger. They would be spending the next four years together, all three, in Wales, with the Didds family. Edward might be taunted for his father’s apparent poverty if these cousins knew he was on the lower deck. There might be jealousy.

  In this Auntie May was wrong. Whatever web the children were to make between themselves, it would always be too tight-knit for jealousy or taunts. But Auntie May kept her counsel, did her best with the stammering Edward as they crossed the molten-silver disc of the Indian Ocean beneath a beating sky. It was very hot in steerage but both were used to heat. From the upper deck in the first-class, dance music floated down to them.

  INNER TEMPLE

  Stately Old Filth—Eddie Feathers—was nodding after lunch for a moment in the smoking-room of the Inner Temple before taking a taxi to his family solicitor to make his Will.

  It was autumn but very hot. The flowers in the Inner Temple garden blazed. The River Thames glittered, and, coming out of his post-prandial nap he was a gawky boy, crossing the equator again, watching mad capers by the grown-ups. Neptune in a green wig. Auntie May had been lying down and so he had wandered towards the upper deck and seen faces and elegance he’d never known. He stood and gawped. People were drinking coloured liquid out of vases on stalks, puffing smoke from their lips. Ladies with hard, sad eyes wore long tight glitter and laughed a lot. A man in black and white held a woman in gold, their bodies fused as they moved languidly about to the wailing, meaningless music. A wave of great desolation had swept across Eddie. He was never, ever after, to understand it. He knew that before long he’d be back on this ocean, maybe for eternity. He had no words for all this then, and not even now in the armchair in the Inner Temple, coffee cup alongside.

  As he came round from the day-dream he heard two of his peers—old judges he’d known for years—coming along the passage to the smoking-room talking about him. He had been sitting next to them at luncheon.

  “Remarkably well preserved.”

  “Well, he’s from Commercial Chambers. Rich as Croesus. But he’s a great man.”

  “Pretty easy life. Nothing ever seems to have happened to him.”

  Nothing.

  WALES

  The whitewashed stone farmhouse stood high, with fields all around it and a view of rick-rack stone walls laid out towards cliffs above the sea. In front of the house was a farmyard of beaten earth and a midden with a headless chicken lying on it and a cockerel crowing near. The door of the farmhouse stood open. On the yard in front of it, spaced out well away from each other, were three children, Eddie the only boy and the tallest.

  He was eight now, looked ten, and startlingly white, though this may have been the pallor of a red-head. He was standing almost to attention, as if awaiting execution or about to declaim a speech. The other two figures were also looking theatrical, set in their positions on stage. Waiting for something. Babs and Claire. Claire sat on the corner of the wall. Babs leaned darkly against an outhouse. Chickens ran about. The children were not speaking to each other.

  Inside the house was Auntie May again, packing up. She was softer now, less bristly, about to marry another missionary and off to the Belgian Congo very soon. But first she was finishing her job with Edward Feathers. “I never desert,” said Auntie May. “Especially after such a tragedy as this.”

  The tragedy was apparent, she thought, as soon as she’d seen Edward’s closed face, his frightening dignity. He had stood there in shorts long-grown-out-of—could they have been those she’d found for him three-and-a-half years ago?—his hair cropped to near-baldness, his white face empty. “Auntie May,” she’d said, “You remember Auntie May?” He seemed not to know her. She looked at the two girls, whom she was to take away and look after until their parents—or some relatives somewhere—would come to claim them.

  The children had been excused the funeral. People in the village had taken them in.

  Babs, dark and unsmiling, stood picking at her fingernails, stage left. Pink little Claire sat on the wall, wagging her feet, down stage right. When Auntie May had arrived and said, “I am Auntie May,” Claire had smiled and raised her arms to her for an embrace.

  Babs had jerked away from Auntie May, as if expecting a blow.

  Edward, whom Auntie May had cared for, did not go near her. He had looked at her once, then walked away through the gate in the stone wall, off-stage right, and now stood alone, gazing at the sea.

  You would expect them to draw together, Auntie May thought.

  “I’ll see if all’s ready,” she had said. “I’ll lock up the house.”

  After Auntie May had gone into the house the children did not stir but began to observe a small motor car working its way towards them from the cliff road. It turned into the maze of stone walls. A car was rare. This car was fat and business-like with a cloth roof and rounded, tinny back and a high, rubber running-board down each side. Mudguards flowed like breaking waves over the solid wheels and the windows were made of orange celluloid, rather cracked. A short man jumped out and came jollily to the foot of the garden steps. He was talking.

  “—I dare say,” he said. “Eddie Feathers, I dare say? Excellent to meet you. I am your new Headmaster and my name is Sir. Always Sir. Understood? The school is small. There are only twenty boys. They call each other by their surnames. I have one assistant, Mr. Smith. He is always called Mr. Smith, my assistant, whatever his real name. Different ones come and go. This Mr. Smith is something of a trial but very good at cricket, which I am not. And so, good morning, Eddie, and these are your sisters, I dare say?”

  “C-cou-cousins,” came out of Edward’s mouth. He liked this man.

  “I know nothing of girls,” said Sir. “I know everything about boys. I am a very good teacher, Feathers, as your father may remember. By the time you leave my Outfit there is not a bird, butterfly or flower, not a fish or insect of the British I
sles you will not recognise. You will also read Latin like a Roman and understand Euclid like a Greek.”

  “Will he still have to do Welsh?” asked blonde Claire.

  “Welsh! I should hope not.”

  “What if you get a stupid boy?” asked Babs from the shadows (and thought: I do not like this man; he’ll change Eddie).

  “Eddie isn’t stupid,” said Claire and, suddenly aware—for here came Auntie May with luggage—that Eddie was going away, she jumped from her plinth and hugged him as she had never done in all the terrible years since they met at Liverpool Docks. She began to cry.

  “Sh-shut up, Claire.” Eddie turned to the man accusingly and said, “Claire never cries.” He looked down at Claire’s top-knot, felt her arms round him, did not know what to do about it and carefully removed himself.

  “Auntie May,” said Auntie May to Sir. “I am Auntie May.”

  “Ah, the redoubtable Auntie May. You are seeing to the girls, I hear? This would be quite outside my territory. I teach only boys. My establishment is very expensive and very well-known. I am unmarried, as is Mr. Smith, but let me say, for all things good should be noised abroad, that there is absolutely nothing unpleasant going on in my school. We are perfectly clean. There is nothing like that.”

  “Well, that will be a change for him,” said Auntie May. “There’s been nothing pleasant here.”

  “So I understand. Or rather I do not understand for such events are beyond comprehension in a well-run Outfit. There is no corporal punishment in my school. And there is no emotional hysteria. One can only suppose that these things are the result of the mixture of the sexes. I never teach girls.”

  “What happened here was not to do with a school. These children went to the village school.”

  “Which accounts for the pink child’s regional accent. Come, boy, say your goodbyes. At my school nobody leaves with an accent.”

  “Goodbye,” said Eddie, looking only at Sir’s face. He remembered to shake hands with Auntie May and say, “Th-th-tha-thank you.” Ignoring the girls, for the three of them would all their lives be beyond formalities, he picked up some of his belongings, Auntie May some more and Sir none at all and they processed to the car, where Sir unfastened broad leather straps and the back was lifted, like the lid of a bread-bin.

  “It’s marvellous. Your car.”

  “Marvellous, Sir.”

  “Marvellous, Sir.”

  Sir stood back and watched the luggage being put inside the bread-bin. Then he nodded at Auntie May, pointed to the dickie seat and watched Eddie climb in, Babs and Claire looking on nonchalantly from above.

  “You have the address?” said Sir to Auntie May. “And Feathers has yours? Not too many letters, please; we have work to do. He should write regularly to his father only. No letters from the girls or from this village. I think that was the understanding? Why does the boy stammer?”

  “It began years ago.”

  “Nothing in the least to worry about now,” said Sir, cranking an iron handle in front of the bonnet, then flinging it over the car into the dickie, just missing Eddie’s head, and leaping behind the wheel to keep the engine alive. Without a toot or a wave or a word of farewell he reversed on the springy grass and flung the car back into the stony lane and went bounding between the low walls and out of sight; leaving a considerable silence.

  It was Babs who burst into tears.

  “Now then, this stammer,” said Sir, an hour or so later, “I suppose it’s never mentioned. That’s the current policy.”

  “It—it—it was. At the sch-school.”

  “Ah, well they were Welsh. The Welsh have an easy flow and cadence. They can’t understand those of us who haven’t. I, for example, am not musical. Are you?”

  “I d-don’t know.”

  “Chapel? Chapel?”

  “I d-didn’t sing. If I did they all turned and l-l-looked. Babs sang. B-b-b can sing.”

  “The dark one?”

  “She sang clear and sh-sh-sharp. Not at all sweet. Not Welsh singing. They d-didn’t like it. So she went on.”

  “A prima donna. Girls are very difficult. Hush. Stop a minute. I see swifts.”

  He stopped the car in the middle of a leafy lane with trees. Swooping about in high pleasure were some dart-shaped birds cutting the air high and low and gathering invisible flies. “Listen!” said Sir. “Hear that?”

  “It’s rather like b-bells.”

  “Good, good. You will never forget swifts now. There are birds, you know, who actually do sound like bells. They’re bell birds and they call to each other across the rainforests of Eastern Australia. Don’t let them tell you there are no rainforests in Australia. I have been there. Is that understood? I dare say?”

  “Y-yes, Sir.”

  “Good. And it is writhing with dragons.”

  “D-d-, Sir?”

  “They are a form of armadillo, enlarged wood-lice. (The common prawn is related to the wood-louse.) Fat low beasts and over-confident. Rather disgustingly beautiful.”

  “Like the lizards in Kotakinakulu?” said Eddie, amazing himself by the memory of the platinum lizards with crocodiles’ merciless eyes, steel slit of a long mouth, not seen since . . .

  “Seen some, have you? Interested Darwin. You’ll have to tell the others, stammer or no stammer. Claudius had a stammer. Have you come across Claudius?”

  “Claudius who?”

  “Who, Sir. Claudius the Emperor of Rome. Splendid fellow. The Prince of Wales has a stammer. He’s having lessons for it.”

  “Did he get it in Wales?”

  “I shouldn’t wonder. Pity they didn’t send him to me.”

  On sped the car. When they reached main roads conversation ceased. Sir’s long scarf kept flapping behind him into Eddie’s face. A precarious mirror hooked to the car at the height of Sir’s ear but in front of him showed Sir with concentrated gravity clenching his teeth on a curly pipe, unlit. Now and then he squeezed a grey rubber bulb attached to a small trumpet and a high bleat sounded off.

  The rubber thing reminded Eddie of something vile. Old Mr. Didds’s constipation. Eddie’s face disappeared from Sir’s mirror, and Sir drew to the side of the road and stopped. “Just letting her cool down somewhat. Where are you? On the floor, I dare say?”

  Eddie was squashed down on the floor of the dickie, knees to chin and pale green.

  “Feeling sick? Not unnatural. Breathe slowly. It may be the car. Others have felt the same.”

  After a while Eddie scrambled up.

  “You could come and sit beside me but I never allow it. You are in my care. Do you know much about cars?”

  “It’s the f-f-first—”

  “First time in a car? Excellent. You can write the experience down. Did they teach you to write?”

  “Yes. In a w-ay.”

  “You mean they struck you with rulers? Beat you about the head?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “This does not happen in my Outfit. If you do not work—do not try—then Mr. Smith takes you for a run. All weathers. Along the shores of the lake.”

  “D-do we wear labels?”

  “Labels?”

  “We carried labels on our backs.”

  “Did this happen to you?”

  “To all of us, it d-did. Babs had UGLY. I had MONKEY.”

  “And the pink girl?”

  “Oh, she never got c-caught. Well, they l-liked her.”

  “Nothing can be further from my Outfit,” said Sir, closing his eyes for a moment. “What do you think of my mirror?”

  “M-m-m?”

  “On the car. It is very much the fashionable touch, invented I am surprised to say by a lady. The first driving mirrors were adapted from the powder-case in a lady’s handbag. They were hand-held. So that you could see if anything was coming along behind. One day, they’ll be compulsory for both sexes I dare say. I see you are unaware of powder-cases? Perhaps you know no ladies? Have you a mother?”

  “She died when I was b-b-b—�
��

  “Several boys in my Outfit have suffered similarly. We are almost all of the Raj. I try not to see any of the mothers.”

  The car was re-cranked and off they went again. In the dickie it grew very cold about the ears. Eddie crouched down a bit but was afraid to take himself out of range of the mysterious powder-case mirror. Sir stopped in a wooded valley and passed Eddie a bottle of lemonade, taking a swig himself from a flask with a silver top and wrapped in basket work. Eddie smelled something powerful and sweet. It reminded him of the silver box which his father had given him and which he had given to Ada.

  “Not long, now,” said Sir. “We are on the borders of what is known as the English Lake District. It is the Old Kingdom of Cumbria and where I chose to set up my Outfit. I dare say you have not heard of our purple mountains and silver rivers?”

  “I c-can’t remember. Sir.”

  “Never fell to the Romans. Home of the poet Wordsworth who had a happy education.”

  “Y-yes, Sir.”

  “You know all this, I dare say?”

  “I did—didn’t—”

  “Can you read, Feathers?” Sir asked casually.

  “N-n-not yet m-much.”

  “Never mind. Won’t take two ticks. Great times ahead. Now, here we are.”