Old Filth (14 page)

“He saw I had a visitor,” said Claire, and went to the kitchen to look in the freezer. Fish fingers. Oven chips, but she kept these for Oliver so she and Teddy mustn't eat them all. A square of mild cheddar in plastic. Flora margarine and frozen peas. Splendid. Though Teddy never noticed what he ate.

“Or anything else,” she said, sadly, and mistakenly.

P
arents' weekend, thought Claire's younger son, Oliver, in Wandsworth on Friday, flinging a few crumpled things into a sports bag. Wonder if I need petrol. Trip to the bank machine. No need for condoms, anyway, all by myself. Might step out and buy some real flowers for Ma, not petrol-station ones. Saturday morning.

He was happy to be going to see his mother and trying not to face the fact that he was happier because he was going alone. Vanessa, at present snarling and snapping incisively into the sitting-room phone, was off in a moment to her own parents in Bournemouth. They arranged these filial visits every other month, Oliver ringing his mother every week to check up on her diabetes, Vanessa ringing hers, who was hale and hearty, every three. When Vanessa was not about, Oliver sometimes rang Claire in between times from station platforms, airports, or the forecourt of the Wandsworth supermarket. He had premonitions about his vague and undemonstrative mother and found it hard to look at the advertisements in the papers showing resigned old women with bells round their necks like Swiss cattle lying waiting for rescue, or for the end. He knew that, should his mother fall over, she would never ring for help, but would lie there, thinking. Thus she would be avenged for his believing her immortal. Another part of him said that his mother was a cynic, even a torturer. Then he thought: And I am a swine, and don't believe in selflessness. He adored her.

Vanessa was brisker. The three-weekly call to Bournemouth was always made at 6
p.m
. sharp on a Friday, and she set aside half an hour. She was a Barrister in Shipping Chambers, a prestigious area and rare for a woman. She had had to swim enjoyably hard to keep up with the tide. She was respected in the Chambers and held in awe in Bournemouth where her parents knew nothing of the Bar except what they saw on television. She regaled them, third Fridays, with accounts of her daily round—from the 7
a.m.
orange juice in the super-nova kitchen, to her reading Briefs last thing at night. (“A case you'll be seeing in the papers.”) Her Opinions were not usually complete before midnight.

“Well, I'm sure I don't know how you fit it all in,” her mother said. “How do you do your housework and shopping and cooking? And laundry?” (And where are the children?)

Vanessa ignored her. Work first. No philosophising.

“Whenever do you see your
friends
?” asked her mother. (Or us?)

“Oliver and I have it all under control. We eat out. Friends at weekends. We probably see more friends than you do.”

“I miss your friends, Vanessa,” said her mother. “Every weekend we saw your friends, all through school and Cambridge, they used to come. I miss your friends.” (And I miss you, too. I don't know this sharp-faced, black-suited, almost bald-headed, lap-top sprite.)

“I ring you every three weeks.”

“Yes.”

“Last time I couldn't get through. You were engaged.”

“Yes. We do occasionally have another phone-call.”

 

“And what about
this
?” Vanessa said now, marching into the hall as Oliver picked up his sports bag en-route for a work-out. “They're not going to be there.”

“What? Your parents?”

“My consistent and saintly parents say they'd no idea I was coming down this weekend. They're going to a Fortieth Wedding Anniversary on the Isle of Wight. They said they told me. They're going senile. Parents of some of my
primary-school
friends I've not seen for twenty years. They said why don't I go, too, for goodness sake!”

“Well, why don't you?” Oliver saw, and his spirits fell, the way things would now develop. “Better come with me and visit my Ma,” he said, not looking at her.

“Half-way to Scotland? On a Saturday morning? And there's only a single bed. No thanks.”

“We could go to a hotel. Stay in Cambridge if you like.”

She wavered while he kept his balance. He loved her. They would have a nice time. It was just that alone, with his mother, he could slop about with his shoes and socks off. Read the tabloids. Pick his nose.

“And what do I do there to pass the time?”

“In Cambridge?”

“No, fool. In your mother's house looking out at nothing and nothing looking in. All that silence as she sits and smiles.”

“At least she never asks when we're getting married.”

“Well, neither does mine.”

“Your father does.”

“Oh—does he? I'm surprised.”

“Because he doesn't like me? You're right. He asks in order to smirk when I say not yet. You're too close to your aged P, dear, it's unhealthy.”

She frowned and began to bustle about. He thought her tiny waist and neck miraculously beautiful. He'd have liked her in a silk kimono and little silk shoes. They'd been together six years and she was thirty-two and as rich as he was. She could stop work tomorrow and . . .

“Come on,” she said. “We're at it again. I'm sorry. It's just the bloody
Isle of Wight
. They could have said: I'll come with you.”

“And it's all right,” she said, “I'll behave. I won't sulk. I won't go and lie down with a headache. I won't say ‘Thanks, I'm fine' when she offers me another fish finger.”

“I'll ring and tell her,” said Oliver. “And I'll book a hotel for tomorrow night. Or you could go in the spare bed and I could have the sofa? OK, OK, I didn't mean it.”

“Fine,” he said ten minutes later. “I've booked the George at Stamford and I've told Ma. Turns out we couldn't have stayed with her anyway. She's got an old chum there.”

“Oh no! She's going the same way as mine.”

“No, he's all right. Sort of cousin. She fancies him. Family solicitor or something down in the West Country. Nice.”

“Solicitor? Oh well then, we can't go. He'll be all over me. Oliver, let's get the Eurostar to Paris.”

But he had had enough. “If you don't want to come, stay here. That's it. I shan't come back here if you won't come with me now.”

She looked hard at him, thinking things over. He was big. And good. He was clever. He was loyal. He could be as ruthless as his mother. I don't like his mother, but I do like him.

 

“Coming then?” he asked on Saturday morning—he had slept on the sofa bed in the study. “Coming for a spin to see the Mater in the motor?”

“OK,” she said. “Agreed. Can't wait to meet the family solicitor.”

 

F
ilth lay in the light, pale bedroom after a very long night's sleep, and opened his eyes upon the hat-boxes stacked now on top of a 1930s wardrobe with varnished panels of marquetry fruit and flowers and an Arts and Crafts iron latch. One hat-box, labelled
Marshal and Snelgrove
, and another,
Peter Robinson
, engaged him. He had known them somewhere else. A child's voice inside him cried out for someone to come and help him in some way. To come and love him. Explain some fear. Only she could help.

The name would not come. He tried to scream, but the scream wouldn't come. Terror took hold. He could not move. They were the wrong hat-boxes. The right hat-boxes had been battered and mouldy. He could hear the sea, the vile sea. He could hear Ma Didds coming. After breakfast she would beat him because he'd wet the bed. They all wet their beds.

There was a gentle tapping at the dqor and Filth felt about himself and he was dry. Oh, salvation, thank you God. Wonderful relief. Let her come. Let her come and look. She'd get him for something else today, but not for that. As she got Cumberledge almost every morning. Boiling the sheets in the copper, putting them on the line for all to see.

“Eight years old,” she'd say.

“She's a bit afraid of me though,” said eight-year-old Teddy Feathers. “Because I can pierce her with my gimlet eyes. One day I shall blind her,” and he practised the look on the bedroom door. Claire came through it in her rose-pink dressing-gown.

She was carrying a huge cup and saucer painted with brown flowers and a primrose-coloured inside. In the other hand she carried a tipping silver sugar-basin with some silver sugar tongs sticking out.

“I can't do trays,” she said. “And I can't remember about sugar. I do remember no milk.”

She put the cup down on the bedside table. “Are you awake, Teddy? You look glazed.” She moved some old dress-boxes from a chair and sat down. “I'm glad I insisted on a house with decent-sized bedrooms.”

“A danger, I'd have thought,” he said, relaxing, drinking the hot tea. “Open invitation. People arriving and demanding beds. Thinking you're a boarding-house. We keep—I keep—our spare bedrooms quiet.”

“Oh? Why? I like company. I like open doors.”

“Well, watch out for the window-cleaner.” He was pleased to find yesterday's conversation totally in place, like yesterday's Court-hearing used to be.

“And the Vicar,” he added.

“Oh, the Vicar is perfectly safe. He's slightly charismatic, or working at it, but he's sound on the
Gospels
. And I love women priests, too, don't you?”

“Not altogether,” said Filth, “but there they are.”

“No. I keep the spare bedroom at the ready, dear Teddy, not for the window-cleaner, despite his lovely hairy chest, nor for the fifty-thousand to one chance that the beloved of my childhood should turn up after twenty years in need of a bit of peace. No—I keep it for Oliver. And of course I have to have somewhere to do up my Christmas presents.”

“Oliver?”

“Not that I send many now. Only about three apart from your handkerchiefs. But I like to be able to spread the wrapping paper out. And then there is the ironing . . .”

“Who is Oliver?”

She paused to regard with pity someone who did not know Oliver. When it comes to people's children, she thought, Teddy looks at emptiness.

“Oliver is my younger son. Your second cousin twice removed, or something of the sort. He has your eyes, and your height but he's beginning to run to fat. He's almost as clever and as handsome as you were.” (And I hope you've left him some money, she thought.)

“Oh,” said Filth, unconvincingly. “Yes, yes. Of course. A nice little chap. I remember.”

“You haven't ever met him. He's nearly forty.”

“Oh. Yes. I see. Betty and I were hopeless at all that.”

“All what?”

“Genealogy.”

“Yes. You were ahead of your time. Genealogy's over. It's a wise child now all right that knows its own father. You know, Teddy, the withering of the family tree is one of the saddest things ever. Who else can you turn to when you're old and sick without having to feel grateful?”

Filth, lying like a knight on a slab, holding his cup to his chest, swivelled his eyes at her.

“They don't marry any more,” she said. “Surely you've noticed? It's over. Their children are unbaptised so there'll be no baptismal record. Our times will become dark as Romano-Britain.”

“Genes not genealogy?”

“Exactly. I know you don't care for children . . .”

He drank the tea and waved the empty cup for her to take, sat up in bed and looked uneasily at the hat-boxes.

“The hat-boxes were your mother's,” said Claire. “I've no idea how they got here.”

“Anyway,” she then said. “You will have to meet a thirty-six-year-old child today. Oliver's coming for the weekend with Vanessa.”

“Vanessa?” (Which one was this?)

“Yes, Vanessa. She's his partner. She's at the Bar.”

“Is Oliver at the Bar?”

“No, he's an accountant.
Vanessa
's at the Bar. His partner.”

Filth was about to say that at the Bar there are no partners, but lost confidence.

“They live together, Eddie dear. They ‘co-habit.' They have ‘co-habited' in Wandsworth for six years.”

“In Wandsworth! They're not doing too well, then?”

“Wandsworth, dear Eddie, is now the crème-de-la of the Euro-chics.”

“Rubbish. It's where all the taxi-drivers live.”

“Not now. It's full of rich thirty-year-olds who owe thousands on their credit cards and go to Tuscany for their holidays but have never heard of Raphael.”

“They sound particularly unattractive.”

“Yes, they are. But they seem to have a very good time.”

“And two of them are coming here? Look here, Claire, I'll be off. Can't have your boy arriving with nowhere to sleep.”

“He's staying with Vanessa at the George at Stamford, so don't fuss. I've told them you will be here. They'd be mortified if they thought they'd pushed you out.”

“I very much wonder if they would?”

“Don't wonder, Teddy,
learn
. You'll like Vanessa. You'll have so much to talk about. She's Inner Temple, like you. And nobody—” she said, taking the empty cup towards the door, looking kindly back at him, speaking of the only area in which she had been blinded for life, “—nobody, if I dare say so, could possibly dislike Oliver.

“And what they do all have nowadays—this isn't the sixties (I must give all these old things in the dress-boxes to Vanessa)—what they do have now, Eddie, when they come here, is perfect manners.”

And so they bloody should, thought Eddie.

 

And it was afternoon and Filth was drinking tea again and Vanessa sat near his hammock on the wide, shaven lawn in front of the house, adding more hot water to the teapot from a silver thermos jug. There were small sandwiches. It was a warm late November and Claire's dahlias glowed and dripped with sunlight. The exposed garden, on a corner—High Light was an end-of-terrace site on a rise, like a Roman villa built over a hill fort—looked down and across at a shiny shallow lake where boats were moving about and children shouted. Beyond, straggled the town and, beyond that, droned the invisible motorway like bees in the warm afternoon.

Oliver had taken his mother out in his car for tea in Saffron Walden, a suggestion she had greeted with the luminous silence which was always followed by refusal.

“I've not been into the town for—”

“Oh, come on. You'll be fine.”

(The black butterfly opened its wings.)

“It's no distance and we'll have the top down. It's a lovely day.”

“
Not
on the motorway, Oliver.”

“Of course not.”

“I can't take the motorway. Not until I'm dead.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The crem is on the motorway. I really don't care for it.”

“Ma, would I take you to the crem?”

“Though I dare say you can get a cup of tea there,” she said. “Darling, what if the doctor saw me as we pass the surgery?”

“We won't pass the surgery.”

“I think we have to.”

“Then we'll disguise ourselves.”

“Oh, Oliver—what as?”

“Barristers. We'll borrow Vanessa's and old funny-face's wigs.”

“I don't think they travel with their wigs.”

“Well, get a big hat out of the spare room, and some dark glasses.”

 

“I haven't enjoyed anything like this for years.”

“Hold on to your hat.”

“I will. I wore it at poor Babs's wedding. It must be thirty years old.”

“Is Babs still alive?”

“What? Can't hear. Are you
sure
this isn't the motorway?
Oliver
! How dare you! This is Cambridge. It
was
the motorway.”

They sat by the Cam and the low sun shone through the straps of the willows. Students called to each other and splashed about, or glided along. King's College Chapel reared up like a white cruise-liner on a grassy sea. “I've organised tea for us,” he said. “Come on. It's not far.”

She walked lightly beside him on the tow-path and over a bridge. Fat common people in tight clothes licked ice creams and ate oozing buns and shouted. Some, despite the season, had bare midriffs. Some looked at Claire's hat. She was enchanted.

“It's a shame so many young people are bald now,” she said. “I wonder why? Is it Aids or this awful chemotherapy? I'm sure we never had either.”

“It's the fashion, Ma.”

“Oh, it can't be. That's dreadlocks.”

“No, they're out. Or at any rate localised.”

“Do they go over their pates every day like their chins? Will you be doing it, Oliver?”

“Ma, I'm nearly forty and I'm a chartered accountant.”

“Yes, and you have lovely hair, Oliver. What is Vanessa's hair like—I mean, when she lets it grow?”

But they had reached Oliver's old, undistinguished college; a door and a staircase of someone of distinction; a huge, gentle old man. Claire did not catch his name. He was expecting Oliver and was pleased to see them and he nodded at Claire and looked affectionately at her hat. They sat in a room with a tall window that seemed to let in little light and where mountains of books and furniture were deep in dust. They ate cinnamon scones. Other crumby plates lay about the room among the books and balled-up garments that suggested socks and what Claire thought of as woollies. What a peaceful quiet place. What a nice man. How nice for him to know Oliver.

“We thought we'd make for Evensong at King's,” said Oliver. “Have we missed it, d'you think?”

“Oh, no. Still the same programme,” and the old man began to talk about politics. “I am very fond of Oliver,” he said as he stumbled along with them to the door of the chapel. They all said goodbye.

“Tired?” asked Oliver as they sat down in the choir stalls.

“Not in the least. Did he put on that performance just for us? I didn't know there were any left.”

“Any what?”

“Eccentrics. Had you told him we were coming?”

“Yes, I rang him up. At the petrol station.”

“From a call box?”

“From my handset.”

“You keep his number?”

“No. I dialled directory enquiries.”

“You are wonderful, Oliver.”

“I am.”

“The world is full of miracles,” she said, “but I think you set it all up. There were computers and internets and e-mails hidden in all those books, and he was an actor who does E. M. Forster parts. I really loved him. Who was he?”

“Who's E. M. Forster? Anyway, he liked your hat. He was the Dean.” Delighted with the day, the music, the chapel, he said, “You're a cynic, Ma. Go on—he fancied you. Have him over.”

They stood for the
Nunc Dimittis
, and Oliver wondered what havoc Vanessa was wreaking on poor old Uncle Eddie.

 

“Have you always practised in Dorset?” asked Vanessa from her canvas chair.

“No, no. I returned there. Travelled a lot.”

“That was rather good luck.”

“Very good luck.”

“You found some ex-pat clients? Over the years?”

“Not exactly ex-pats,” he said. “The locals.”

“I often think,” she said (Vanessa was magnanimous to people who were no threat), “that to be a family solicitor, in any country, is to be the most useful person in the world. You have to be so subtle. And cleverer than any Barrister. Anyone can be a Barrister. The Bar finals are a joke, you know. Solicitors' finals,” she said, “are a marathon by comparison.”

“I believe so. So they always said. But it is so long ago.”

She thought: He is quite unaware of me. He is Methuselah. Why do I care? He is so mysterious. I hadn't expected to be drawn to someone as old as this. Sad silence. He's so old he's almost gone, yet he's sharp—sharper than Oliver. I like his eyes. I wish he'd open them again.

The striped canvas hammock had come from Harrods—a present from Oliver to his mother, last birthday, like the huge, navy-blue sun-umbrella worked by rope pulleys, as for a yacht, supposed to be supported by a dollop of concrete that the window-cleaner and the gardener and the Vicar together had not been able to budge from where the van-man had dropped it by the gate. Claire had begun to grow trailing plants over this base and the umbrella, unwrapped but in cobwebs, was still propped in a corner of the car-less garage. Today Oliver had made an effort and had fixed up the hammock, just before lunch. It hung inside an outer wooden cradle, rather like a horse-jump at a gymkhana. There were no trees in Claire's garden and the hammock stood out in high display. Passers by along the avenue looked curiously at the old long person stretched out in it, fine nose pointed at the winter sky.