The Man in the Wooden Hat Read online

  First, beloved Amy, thank you from all parts of me for all you did for me and the speed at which you did it. I hope you liked Edward? He is monosyllabic in a crowd. He very much liked you and Nick and was full of admiration for you controlling and producing a family among the poor and needy and weak in the head. He never mentioned your children, which is a bit frightening. He doesn’t know I want ten—plus a nanny and several nursemaids and a nursery floor at the top of a grand house in Chelsea on the river. I can’t help it. I read too many Victorian children’s books of Ma’s in China. And I miss my Ma. But don’t worry. I’ll probably be marching against the Bomb, unwashed and hugely pregnant like the rest.

  Eddie couldn’t believe you have always been my best friend ever. He thought you’d be pony club and debutanting and hot stuff on the marriage market. “She was,” I said. Do you find that much-travelled men are the most insular? Like Robinson Crusoe? If he hadn’t got stuck on that island, Robinson Crusoe’d have got stuck on another. Of his own making.

  I’m writing myself into a mood to say real things to you and maybe I should now quickly write myself out of it. Do you remember that book about marriage (Bowen?) that talks about the glass screen that comes down between a newly wed couple and all their former friends? I’m not going to let this happen but I can see, after that terrifying 1662 marriage service, that it can eat into one. Well, it was you made me go through with it. Said I was at last being practical. I wasn’t sure that you still thought so when you met Eddie and I wish he hadn’t stared so steadily and so high above your head.

  Loyalty. And so I’ll only say that we had a ghastly first night in Delhi, propped up in basket chairs because harlots had been using our beds. Then we went in a solid car (called “An Ambassador’) up the Himalayas to Darjeeling where we were greeted by old English types and cold mutton and rice pudding and porridge, and our own room looking directly at dawn over the Katmanjunga. The occasional English flag. There was early-morning tea and everything perfect between white, white linen sheets. In the middle of the night Eddie said, “I can’t apologise enough,” which I thought weird after his spectacular performances. “About the Delhi hotel,” he said.

  There was some ghastly hang-up in his childhood. I don’t want to know about it. I’d guess half the men with his background are the same. Well, he was so happy in the mountains.

  Then after Bhutan we came on here to Dacca.

  I’ve seen a chair in a dark shop. It is rose-and-gold, a patterned throne from some old rajah’s palace, but all tattered. I longed. I yearned. Eddie said, “But we haven’t a home yet.” This had not occurred to me. “We could send it to Amy at first.” He looked at me and said, “She wouldn’t thank you.” You and I aren’t very good at domiciliary arrangements, Amy. You leave yours to God and I’m still imprisoned by the past, and expect it to come again. It won’t, any more than sherbet fountains. It’s to be “Utility furniture” now for ever. I said, “Sorry.” And he said, “Hold on,” and he went into the back of the dark shop and came out saying, “I’ve bought it. It can go to Chambers.”

  And this, not the great rope of pearls he gave me, and not the ring and that, not the moment he saw me in the Baxter butterflies, was the moment. Well, I suppose when I knew I loved him.

  I’ll write to the Baxter next and explain about leaving the veil behind. In twenty years I’ll come to your little girls’ weddings. During the twenty years I’ll have been endlessly breastfeeding in the rose-red chair, and anywhere else I choose. Times will have changed. Maybe we’ll be having babies on bottles? Or in bottles? Maybe men will be extinct too.

  But women will always have each other. You gave me such a wedding.

  Love to Nick and the babes—by the way has the new one come? Don’t let Baxter tears fall on its sweet head but give it a X from

  Betty

  Three: A picture postcard from the bride to Mrs. Hildegarde Maisie Annie Baxter of Mimosa Cottage, Kai Tak, Hong Kong.

  Dear Mrs. Baxter,

  This is only a note until I get home when I’ll write to thank you properly for the veil. I have left it for the time being with Amy but I think you should see it back in its box. I fear for it among the hordes in Sunset Buildings. It made the wedding.

  I am sure we’ll meet again and I’m so glad you could come to the restaurant though I’m sorry about the bouillabaisse.

  With love from Betty Feathers

  (Card discovered unposted fifty years on in the Donheads down the cushions of a great red chair.)

  Four: A letter from the bride to Judge Sir William Pastry of Hong Kong, posted in Valetta, Malta.

  Valetta, Malta

  Dear Uncle Willy,

  We are up at “Mabel’s Place” and I don’t think I have to explain that it’s the medieval palace of the great Mabel Strickland on the hilltop and the blue sea all around. The walls must be six feet thick and inside there are miles of tall and shadowy stone passages, slit windows for arrers, no furniture except the occasional dusty carpet woven when Penelope was a girl, massy candelabra standing on massy oak chests. Our bed could be rented out in London as a dwelling: four posts, painted heraldry, old plumes drooping thick with dust, thick bedlinen like altar cloths. Wow!

  But I expect you’ve been here lots of times. One day you’ll make a wonderful governor of Malta and they’d love you as much as they love Mabel in her darned stockings and tweed skirts. If you won’t do it then I’d push Edward for governor instead. We’d bring up our ten children here and become passionate about the Maltese, and have picnics on the beach (the Maltese perched on chairs and making lace) and watch the British flag going up and down with the sun. Until it’s folded up and put away.

  But you won’t even think of it. Are you still wanting Thomas Hardy and Dorset? I can’t think why. Dorset sounds stuffy—full of people like us—and Malta is cheerful, flashing with the light of the sea. And they still like us here and we like them. That will become rare. Quite soon, Edward thinks.

  But at present Grand Harbour is alive with British ships hooting and tooting, and the streets are alive with British tars and all the girls roll their black eyes at them on their way to Mass which seems to take place every half-hour. Their mothers, believe it or not, still stride the corkscrew streets in flowing black, their heads draped in black veiling arranged over tea trays. Oh—and flowers everywhere, Uncle W! Such flowers!

  It’s been terribly bombed, of course, and it’s pretty filthy. Sliema Creek is covered by a heavy carpet of scum. The Royal Navy swims in it though the locals tell them not to. It’s the main sewer. They wag their heads. There’s a rumour of bubonic plague and yesterday a big black rat ran across Mabel’s roses not looking at all well.

  Of course the food is terrible, as ever it was. It was we who taught them Mrs. Beeton’s mashed potato! There is not much in the way of wine. But the wonderful broken architecture from before the Flood stretches everywhere: hundreds of scattered broken villages—Africa-ish—the occasional rose-pink palace decorated like a birthday cake. There are about a hundred thousand churches, bells clanking all day long and half the night. Dust inside them hangs as if in water, incense burns and the roofs (because of the war) are mostly open to the sky.

  There is a passion for building here and they’re all at it with ropes and pulleys. Restoring and starting anew. It would be wonderful for Eddie’s practice: plenty of materials. Malta is one big rock of ages cleft for us. It is full of cracks and overnight the cracks fill with dew and flowers. The smell of the night-scented stocks floats far out to sea.

  (Scene: Hong Kong

  Willy’s Dulcie: You aren’t still reading Betty’s letter!

  Willy: She grows verbose. Don’t like the sound of it.)

  It will remain a mystery that the island never fell to the enemy. It was dive-bombed night and day, the people hiding deep in caves and (I gather) quarrelling incessantly and threatening each other’s authority most of the time. There was almost a revolution. Then, in limped the battered British convoys with
flour and meat and oil and sugar, and the pipes all playing and the cliffs black with cheering crowds.

  (Willy: Now it’s military history. She’s holding back.

  Dulcie: She’s going to be a British blimp in middle age if she’s not careful. What about the honey moon?

  Willy: I think she’s coming to that.)

  We arrived here by sea from Rome. We flew to Rome from East Pakistan and we arrived in East Pakistan from Bhutan! I think we were the only tourists. The king of Bhutan is pretty insular but he let us in because he was at Christ Church with Eddie. Not that they met. Then or then. He’s an insular king—like you and Thomas Hardy. And maybe George VI.

  London tomorrow. We’ll be in Eddie’s old London pad until we can find somewhere else. The Temple’s bombed to bits still. I think—but don’t spread it—that Eddie wants to come back to live in Hong Kong and so do I, especially if you and Dulcie stay. Don’t be lured back to the dreary Donheads.

  I’m sorry. I run on with no means of stopping—Oh, God—History!

  (Willy: I think she’s stopping.

  Dulcie: You’ll be late for Court.)

  I have so much to tell you, my dear godfather I’ve known since Old Shanghai. This was to have been a simple letter of thanks. Thanks for being such a prop and stay at the wedding, for giving me away, for being so diplomatic at Le Trou Normand about Amy breastfeeding (tell Dulcie sorry about that, I didn’t know it would upset her) and especially when Mrs. Baxter was sick. You were wonderful. I’m afraid my Edward kept a seat near the back! He was silent for a long time but as we passed through Sikkim en route for Darjeeling and we saw slender ladies plucking tea leaves with the very tips of their fingers—their saris like poppies in the green, their little heads bound round with colours and I was transported with joy—he said, “I am not enough for you.”

  Oh dear—I have been carried far away. Please, dear Uncle W, don’t show Dulcie this. Well, I expect you will.

  In Dacca Eddie bought me a red chair. The old, old man who sold it lived far down the back of his shop in the dark, his eyes gleaming like a Maltese plague rat. The chair is to be sent to the Inns of Court, The Temple, London EC4!

  Oh—I don’t seem to be able to concentrate on thanking you. If only Ma and Pa were here. “You are my mother and my father,” as the Old Raj promised India, or rather they said, “I am.”

  Isn’t it odd how Hong Kong holds us still? Isn’t it odd how the “Far East” has somehow faded away with the Bomb? Do you understand? Now the British live out there by grace. I shall call my first daughter Grace.

  I promise, dear Uncle Willy, to grow more sage: more worthy of your affection. I shall grow tweedy and stout and hairy, with moles on my chin, and I shall be a magistrate and open bazaars in support of the Barristers’ Benevolent Society. You won’t be ashamed of me.

  Thanks for liking Eddie, with much, much love from

  Betty x

  (Letter left in Judge Pastry’s Will to Her Majesty’s Judge Sir Edward Feathers QC, residing in the Donheads, carefully dated and inscribed and packed in a cellophane envelope, and bequeathed to Edward Feathers’s Chambers where it may still be mouldering.)

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  You are grinning all over your face, Mrs. Feathers.”

  “I’m happy, Mr. Feathers. I’m writing to Pastry Willy.”

  “About a hundred pages, at a guess. Come on. It’s a picnic.”

  “Picnic?”

  “On the cliffs, Elisabeth. With the local talent. Well, the local English talent. Quick. No ‘PS xx.’ Envelope, stamp and off. Silver salver at the portcullis. Take your suncream and I’ve got your hat.”

  “I love you, Edward Feathers. Why are we going off on a picnic with all these terrible people? We could be eating tinned pilchards with Mabel.”

  “It’ll be tinned pilchard sandwiches on the cliffs. Come on, there’s a great swarm going. Planned for years. Since the end of the war. It’s all expats with no money, no education and big ideas. All drunk with sunlight. They drifted to Malta. They can’t go home. Nothing to do.”

  “Is it the British Council?”

  “Certainly not. It’s the riff-raff of Europe. The Sixpenny Settlers. We have to go. It’s polite. There’s to be wine.”

  They arrived at the picnic where everyone was lolling about in the sun on what seemed to be an inland clifftop, though you could hear the sea far below. There was a long fissure on the plateau, stuffed full of flowers. There was a trickling sound of running water.

  “I thought there were no streams on Malta,” she said.

  “There is one. Only one,” said a languid man lying about nearby with a bottle of wine.

  “We found it a year ago. Nobody knew of it. Yet it’s no distance from Valetta,” said somebody else.

  “Ah,”—the languid man—. “We find that the island gets bigger and bigger.”

  Some daughters, English schoolgirls in bathing dresses, neat round the thighs, were laughing and jumping over the rift in the rock. And then a shriek.

  “What’s happening? What’s happening, Eddie?”

  “I think they’re jumping the crack.”

  Elisabeth ran across and lay on her stomach and looked down into the slit rock and its channel of flowers. It was less then a yard wide. The spot of emerald ocean below seemed distant as the sky above. “Oh, if they slip! If they slip!” Betty yelled out.

  But the girls’ mothers were sitting smoking and examining their nails, and one of them called, “They won’t. Don’t worry.”

  Then one girl did. A leg went down and she had to be hauled out fast. Everyone laughed, except Elisabeth, who again lay face-down. There was the notion that there was no time, nor ever had been, nor ever would be. She said, “Eddie, there’s a little beach down there. I can see breakers. I’m going down by the path.”

  “If there is a path.”

  “I’ll find one. I’ll go alone. Don’t follow me.”

  They had not been apart since the wedding.

  The languid man lying near with his wine bottle called out, “I say, you’re the barrister chap, aren’t you? I want to ask you something.”

  “I’m off. I’ll see you down there, Edward. Come for me in one of the cars. Don’t hurry.”

  “You’ll miss the picnic.”

  “Good. Don’t drink too much. The road down will be screwy. Might be safer to dive through the crack.”

  Edward turned grey. He strode over and grabbed her arm above the elbow.

  “Let go! Stop it! You’re like a tourniquet! Edward!”

  His eyes were looking at someone she had never met.

  Then he let go of her arm, sat down on the stony cliff and put his hands over his face. “Sorry.”

  “I should think so.”

  “I went back somewhere. I was about eight.”

  “Eight?”

  “I killed someone—”

  “Oh, Eddie, shut up. I’m going . . . No, all right, then. All right. I won’t. Go and talk to that awful man. I’ll sit here by myself.”

  “Something wrong?” the man called. “Honeymoon over? Something I said?”

  “No,” said Edward.

  “The war,” said the man. “POW, were you?”

  “No. Were you?”

  “God, no. Navy. Shore job. Ulcer. Left me low. Wife left too, thank God. Look.” He heaved himself up and came over to Edward. “Can you get me a job? In the Law line? Something like barristers’ clerk. No exams. Something easy.”

  “Barristers’ clerks don’t have easy lives.”

  “I’d really like just to stay here. On Malta. Do nothing. Just stay with our own sort.”

  “I can’t stand this,” said Elisabeth. “Eddie, come with me down the cliff.” She stepped over the man and said, “Oh, drop dead, whoever you are.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The streets around Victoria Station were dark and the taxi crawled along in a fog so dense that kerb-stones were invisible and even double-decker buses were upon you befor
e you knew it. The cab driver stopped and started, and they sat silent until he said at last, “Ebury Street. Yes? Ten pounds.” He had brought them all the way from the airport, their luggage piled around them and under a strap on the front and on top on a frame. “Thanks, sir. Good luck, sir.”

  She had never seen Edward’s part of London. She had never seen him in a house at all. Always it had been hotels and restaurants. She had no idea what his maisonette in Pimlico would be like, and still less now they had drawn up outside it in thick fog. She had always been with him in sunlight.

  “I should carry you over my doorstep,” he said, “but it’s going to be a bit cluttered,” and he unlocked the front door upon an unpainted, uncarpeted stairwell with the yellow gloaming of the fog seeping in through a back window. There was an untrampled mess of mail about the floorboards and the smell of cats and an old-fashioned bicycle. Uncarpeted stairs went up and round a corner into more shadow.

  “Home,” said Edward.

  “Whose is the bike?”

  “Mine.”

  “Yours? Can you? I mean I can’t see you riding a bike.”

  “I ride it every Sunday morning. Piccadilly. Oxford Circus. Not a thing on the road. I’ll get you one.”