Old Filth Read online

A high and very ugly brown stone castle towered out of a mountain forest beside a black lake, and as they turned and began to climb up a drive edged with blue hydrangeas a bell rang ahead of them and various boys began to emerge from the undergrowth looking eager and wild. Sir gave a salvo on the bulb and the boys began to jog up the drive, beside the car, some of them cheering.

  “Supper time,” said Sir. “Sausages, with any luck. We’ve a good cook. You like sausages, I dare say?”

  An elfin child burst out of the front door and flung himself in front of the car, arms spread.

  “One day I’ll turn you into a single dimension. A pancake. A pulp for a pie,” said Sir.

  “Can I put the car in the garage for you, Sir?” said the alert-looking boy.

  “Of course, of course. Rub it down, will you, and give it a drink?”

  The boy took the driver’s seat and, though his head was not far above the instruments panel, steered slowly and carefully into the garage where it fitted like a toy in a box.

  “Very accurate boy,” said Sir. “Name of Ingoldby. He’s in charge of you for your first half-term. Very well done, Ingoldby. A garage to contend with.”

  “It’s not so much a garage,” said Ingoldby, “as a kennel for a medium-sized dog. Hullo.”

  “Ingoldby—Feathers,” introduced Sir, shaping the future.

  THE DONHEADS

  Seventy years on in Dorset, an extraordinarily warm November, Teddy Feathers, Sir Edward, Old Filth was fussing about which tie to wear for a trip to London. He and Betty were going to the solicitors to make their Wills.

  Downstairs in the hall Betty, perfectly ready, sat waiting on a sort of throne of gilded wood and faded, shredding silk which had been scarlet when they bought it in Bangladesh. She had found it in a cavernous incense-smelling shop in the backstreets of Dacca’s Old Town. Stroking the pale rose satin now with her fingertips, she tried to remember what it was that had made her buy this chair. A bit of showing off, she thought. Well, some people brought back stuffed animals. She had asked if she might try sitting in it. It had been right at the back of the shop and she had looked out from it down the blackness to the dazzle of the doorway and the passing show of the street, the tangle of the rickshaws, the dignified old gentlemen in turbans, the women like briskly floating butterflies, the clusters of black heads in all the high windows. A procession of princelings had gone by, each carrying a silver dish piled with steaming plum pudding. Well of course she knew that it was only tin-foil and cow dung. But they were jolly and grave at the same time, like the Magi.

  “Yes, I’ll take it. I’ll take the chair.”

  And here it was now, standing on the Dorset parquet beside the teak chest, and her fingernails, rosy as the silk, were stroking it.

  On the teak chest were net bags full of tulip bulbs waiting to be planted. Today would have been the perfect day for it. Tomorrow might be cold or wet and she would be feeling a bit done-in after this jaunt today. Why Filth still had to have a London solicitor she did not know. Twice the price and half the efficiency, in her experience. The very thought of London made her dizzy. No point in telling Filth. No arguing with Filth.

  And the bulbs should have been in two weeks ago for she wasn’t the walking talking calendar she used to be. She didn’t like dropping to her knees very much, at any time. She’d even stopped in church, though it felt louche, just squatting. The Queen Mother still knelt in church. Well, probably. Filth said that Queen Mary had knelt until the very end.

  Filth still kept to a timetable. He’d booked this appointment weeks ago. 3.30 p.m. Bantry Street, W.C.1. The Wills would now be ready for signing. He’d been urgent about it lately and she wondered if he’d been having the dizzies again. His slight heart attack was several years ago. She stroked the satin.

  Then her fingers strayed to the bulbs in their bags and she touched them—like a priestess giving a blessing. The fat globes inside the nets made her think of the crops of shot game-birds laid out on a slab—somewhere in her childhood’s China, maybe? And, as a matter of fact, thought Betty, stroking, these fat potential globes under their skins were very like a man’s balls, when you came to think about it.

  Not that I have, for years.

  She heard Filth above stairs drop a shoe and swear.

  But if I seriously think about it, as an artist might, or a doctor, or a lover dreaming . . .

  She closed her eyes and under the pile of bulb bags the telephone began to ring. She felt about until she reached the receiver, pulled it free and said, “Yes? Betty.” She said again, “Yes? Hello? Betty,” knowing that it would be someone from her reading group, which was meeting in the village that afternoon, and which she had notified yesterday that she would be away. The writer they were studying (studying!) was driving all the way from Islington to interpret her novel for them. Betty thought that she ought to have better things to do. It must be like discussing your marriage with strangers. “Hello? Is that you, Chloe?”

  “Betty?” (A man.)

  “Yes?”

  “I’m in Orange Tree Road. Where are you?”

  “Well, here.”

  “Exactly where?”

  “Sitting in the hall. By the phone. On the satin throne.”

  “What are you wearing?”

  “Wearing?”

  “I need to see you.”

  “But you’re in Hong Kong.”

  “I need to see you. To see your face. I’ve lost it. I have to be able to see you in the chair.”

  “Well, I’m—we’re about to go up to London. Filth’s putting his shoes on upstairs. He’ll be down in a minute. I’m dressed for London.”

  “Are you wearing the amethysts?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s nine o’clock in the morning.”

  “Pearls.”

  “Oh, well, yes.”

  “Touch them. Are they warm? Are they mine? Or his? Would he know?”

  “Yours. No, he wouldn’t notice. Are you drunk? It must be after dinner.”

  “No. Well, yes. Maybe.”

  “Is—are you alone?”

  “Elsie’s lying down. Betty, Harry’s dead. My boy.”

  The line died as Filth came bounding down the stairs in a London suit and black shoes. He swirled himself into his overcoat and looked about for the bowler hat which he had resurrected. It lay among the tulips. He reflected upon it and then let it lie. Mustn’t be antique. The taxi was here.

  “Phone-call?”

  “Nothing—cut off.”

  They travelled first-class, though unintentionally as they both thought first-class was vulgar and only for expense-account people.

  The ticket-collector, weighing up their age and clothes, had thought differently, seeing Teddy’s rolled umbrella and Betty’s glorious pearls and the rubbish on the floor around their polished shoes.

  “You can upgrade, sir, if you like.” (The wife looks very pale.) “Just the next compartment and four pounds extra if you’re seniors.”

  “Perfectly well here, thank you,” said Filth, but Betty smiled at the man’s black Tamil face, gathered up her bag and gloves and set off on her jaunty heels down the coach, tottering through the swaying connecting doors towards the firsts, away from what she still called “the thirds.”

  They paddled through the water spilling out from under the doors of the W.C.s and settled in a blue velvet six-seater compartment. Four of the seats were slashed down the back with the stuffing coming out. Graffiti covered the ceiling but the floor was cleaner. Filth thought of the train to Kuala Lumpur, the mahogany and the hot food handed in, and sat facing his wife in the two unslashed seats on the window side. The fields, woods, hedges, uplands of Wiltshire, white chalk shining through the grass, flickered by.

  Betty suddenly saw a hoopoe in a hedge. She looked at Filth to see if he had noticed it, but he was abstracted. The lines between his nose and mouth were sharp today, cruel as the slashes down the seats. Whatever had he to be bitter about?

  His boy is dead. His
boy, Harry.

  The Tamil drew the door open.

  “Better, sir?”

  “Very nice,” said Betty.

  “Four pounds? Is that each?” asked Filth.

  “Don’t bother with it, sir. When you look at the seats . . . But it’s cleaner. Take my advice and get straight into first-class on the way home. You’ll be Day Returns?”

  “Oh, yes. We don’t stay in London longer than we can help.” The man wondered why the lady’s eyes were so bright. Like it was tears. Real old. Could be his grandma. And yet—she was smiling at him.

  “We’re going to London to sign our Wills.”

  “Ma’am, I’m sure there’s plenty of time.”

  Filth blew his nose on a starched handkerchief and drew down his eyebrows as if in Court. “In your profession, I wouldn’t count on that.”

  “Too right,” said the man. “Takes our lives in our hands, we do on the railways. Safer flying. But that’s how I like it. When you gotta go, you gotta go? Right?”

  “Right,” said Betty.

  “Quite right,” said Filth. He was noticing Betty, her face tired through the make-up. He looked at her again as the train swayed insolently through Clapham junction. She must get her eyes seen to. They looked moist and strange. Old, he thought. She’s never looked old before.

  “Lunch?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Where are you having lunch? Shall we go somewhere together? Simpson’s?”

  “But you’re going to the Inner Temple.”

  “I can change it. Nobody’s expecting me. Don’t know a soul there now.”

  She was silent.

  “Then we could get a taxi to the place—the solicitor together. Not arrive separately. Hanging about on pavements.” “No,” she said. “I’ve made arrangements at the Club.”

  “You don’t have to go. There’s never anybody else there.”

  “That’s why I go. To keep it going. I’m meeting somebody this time.”

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  She thought: You didn’t ask.

  At Waterloo she stood with him for his taxi, the driver coming round to help him in. The door was slammed and he tapped his window and called “Betty—where did you say you were going?” but she was gone. He saw her as he was taken down the slope, fast as a girl on her still not uninteresting legs, nipping through the traffic towards the National Theatre side. Must be walking all the way to the Club, he thought with pride. Crossing the bridge, down the Strand, Trafalgar Square, the Mall, St. James’s, Dover Street. Remarkable woman for over seventy. She loved walking. Strange the hold that University Women’s Club had over her. Never been there himself. Betty, of course, had never been to a university. She’d vanished now.

  He had not seen her take a right down the steps towards the Film Theatre and the Queen Elizabeth Hall. In the National Theatre she took a tray and shoved it along in the queue of the audience for the matinee for Elektra.

  She had no idea what she ate. She took the lift to the high level of the theatre and sat outside alone in the cold air. She was meeting nobody. There were buskers everywhere: acrobats, musicians, living statues, contortionists and a sudden deluge of sound from a Pavarotti in a loin cloth. The waves of the canned music made the pigeons fly. Two people sat down on the seat beside her, the girl with her hair in two wings of crinkled gold. Heavy, sullen, resentful, the boy slumped beside her, his mouth slack. The music and the voice blazed away.

  His boy Harry is dead.

  The girl lit a cigarette, her fingers and thumbs chunky with rings.

  Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes—and goodness knows where else, thought Betty. She shall have music wherever she goes. Oh, I do hope so.

  The girl was staring at her.

  “I like your hair,” said Betty.

  The girl turned away, haughtily. “Nothing lasts long,” said Betty, and the boy said, “We could go for a Chinese.”

  They thought about it.

  Then the two of them turned to each other on the seat and in one fluid movement entwined themselves in each other’s arms.

  His boy is dead, thought Betty and got up.

  She wandered away down steep, spiral stairs and at the riverbank watched the water streaming by, the crowds, the silver wheel high in the air dotted with silver bullets. Beautiful. It jerked awake. Jerk, stop, fly. Round and round.

  Terry’s boy is dead.

  And I’m not, she thought. Filth and I are going to live for ever. Pointlessly. Keeping the old flag flying for a country I no longer recognise or love.

  When she saw the state of the traffic down the Strand she wondered if Filth would make it to the solicitor’s in time. He liked ten minutes zizz after lunch in the smoking-room of the Inn. Hopeless without it. She thought of him, tense and angry, traffic-blocked in his taxi. A few years ago he’d have sprung out and walked. He had been a familiar sight, gown and papers flapping, prancing to the Law Courts. “Look, isn’t it Old Filth?”

  When he’d been very young and not a penny, not a Brief, before she knew him, he’d always, he said, had a bowler hat for going home. “Why?” she had asked.

  “To have something to raise to a judge.”

  You never knew when Filth was being sardonic or serious.

  He was not being sardonic today. With the help of the rolled umbrella he was signalling to taxis outside his Inn on the Embankment. He moved his feet rather cautiously and looked ancient, but still handsome, beautifully dressed, alert after his ten-minute nap, someone you’d notice. But the traffic streamed by him. Nothing stopped. He’d never get there. Too old for this now. He’d be late for Court. He began to be frightened as he used to be. His throat felt tight.

  I’ll walk to Bantry Street, thought Betty; his taxi might overtake me. And she struck out into the crowd. In her Agatha-Christie country clothes and pearls and polished shoes, she strode among an elbowing, slovenly riff-raff who looked at her as if she was someone out of a play. Pain and dislike, bewilderment and fear, she thought, in every face. Nobody at peace except the corpses in the doorways, the bundles with rags and bottles; and you can’t call that peace. She dropped money into hats and boxes as she would never have done in Dacca or Shanghai, and would have been prosecuted for doing in Singapore. Beggars again in the streets of London, she thought. My world’s over. Like Terry’s.

  Her heart was beating much too fast and she slowed down at Bantry Street and felt in her handbag for a pill. But all was well. Here was Filth, grave and tall, being helped out of a taxi.

  “Well, good timing,” he called. “Excellent. Nice lunch? Anybody there?”

  “No one I knew.”

  “Same here. Only old has-beens.”

  THE OUTFIT

  Ingoldby—Feathers,” Sir had said outside the Prep school in the Lake District mountains. Ingoldby that day became not only Eddie Feathers’s first friend but a part of him. They sat down that evening side by side for the sausage supper. From the next morning they shared one of the ten double desks, with tip-up seats and a single inkwell. Listening to Pat Ingoldby’s endless talk, Eddie, at first painfully and hesitantly, began to talk, too. Ingoldby waited patiently when the clock had trouble ticking, never breaking in. Over four years the stammer healed.

  Despite Sir’s strictness about no best friends and daily cold showers, nothing could be done about the oneness of Ingoldby and Feathers. They read the same tattered books from the library—Henty, Ballantyne and Kipling; picked each other for teams. They discussed the same heroes. Ingoldby was dark and slight, Eddie Feathers four inches taller and chestnut-haired, but they began to walk with the same gait. A funny pair. And they made a funny pair in the school skiff on the lake but almost always won. Ingoldby’s wit and logic expunged the nightmares of Eddie’s past. They were balm and blessing to Eddie who had met none previously. He never once mentioned the years before he arrived at Sir’s Outfit and Pat never enquired about them or volunteered information about himself. The past, unless very pleasan
t, is not much discussed among children.

  On Sports Day, Colonel Ingoldby arrived and Feathers was introduced to him and soon Feathers was visiting the Ingoldbys in the school holidays. Sir wrote to Malaya describing the excellence of the Ingoldbys and saying that they would like to have Eddie with them for every holiday. A handsome cheque came from Kotakinakulu to Mrs. Ingoldby and was graciously received (though there had been no accompanying letter).

  At fourteen both boys were to move on to the same Public school in the Midlands and Mrs. Ingoldby asked Eddie how he felt about continuing the arrangements. Would his aunts— whom he had only once seen—be jealous? Insulted? “We’ve become so used to you, Eddie. Jack is so much older than Pat. They’re too far apart to be close as brothers. I think Pat is lonely, to tell you the truth. Would you be very bored to become part of the family? Now, do say so if you would.”

  “Of course I’d love to be.”

  “I’ll write to your father.”

  From Malaya, there was silence, except for another cheque. Nor was anything heard from the aunts. Mrs. Ingoldby said nothing about the money except, “How very kind and how quite unnecessary,” and Eddie was absorbed into the Ingoldbys’ life in their large house on a Lancashire hilltop where the Colonel kept bees and Mrs. Ingoldby wandered vaguely and happily about, smiling at people. When Pat won an award to their next school, Colonel Ingoldby opened a bottle of Valpolicella which he remembered having drunk (“Did we dear?”) on their honeymoon in Italy before the Great War. The following year Eddie won one, too, and there was the same ritual.

  Mrs. Ingoldby was Eddie’s first English love. He had not known such an uncomplicated woman could exist. Calm and dreamy, often carrying somebody a cup of tea for no reason but love; entirely at the whim of a choleric husband, of whom she made no complaints. She was unfailingly delighted by the surprise of each new day.

  The house was High House and stood at the end of a straight steep drive with an avenue of trees. Old and spare metal fences separated the avenue from the fields which in the Easter holidays of the wet Lancashire spring were the same dizzy green as the rice-paddies of South-East Asia. Far below the avenue to the West you could look down the chimneys of the family business which was a factory set in a deli. It was famous for making a particular kind of carpet, and was called The Goit, and through it, among the buildings of the purring carpet factory, ran a wide stream full of washed stones and little transparent fishes. “I am told our water is particularly pure,” said Mrs. Ingoldby to Eddie Feathers (“Such an interesting name”).