Old Filth (7 page)

 

But there was a change somewhere. He and Pat were moving on. Glaciers would soon come grinding them apart, memories would be forgotten or adapted or faked.

Eddie followed Pat heavily into the house that evening and even Pat looked thoughtful. In the drawing-room the Ingoldbys were talking their pointless evening birdsong. No sound of Isobel anywhere.

As Eddie lay in his adored High House bed the rain began to patter down again outside and he jumped out to shut the window where the moon soon disappeared behind the rain clouds. He climbed back into bed.

All the following years, the memory or dream of what happened next never quite left him. His bedroom door opened and closed again, and the goddess—lioness—girl was at the end of his bed. Standing and watching, brooding on his inability to take his eyes off her.

She then walked to the window and looked out. He knew that something was expected of him but had no idea what it was. Not long ago, he would have shouted out, “Help! Burglars!” In time, in only a few years, he supposed, from books he'd read in the back of bookshops near Sir's, he and the girl would have merged their flesh together in some sort of way in the bed. But he didn't know what happened next. And didn't want to know.

She's old and she's evil and she only wants to hurt, he thought.

“Eddie?” the shadow whispered from the window. “I wonder what you think of me?”

She walked back across the room and he found that he could sit up straight under the blankets and confront her, brave as brave as—
Cumberledge
. There! He'd said the word. Cumberledge. Wherever he was now. Silent Cumberledge whose spirit had never been completely broken.

Eddie would finish her, as once already in his life he had finished a woman. “I think you're bad. A bad woman,” he said. “Get out.”

And she was gone.

 

The weird dream (or whatever it was) was never quite obliterated. He had not so much kept it to himself as denied it. In a way he never understood, it both shamed and saddened him.

Why ever? Nothing had happened. He had won. He had silenced the sirens. If there had been sailors on board, they would not have had to tie this Ulysses to the mast. So sucks to sexy Isobel, the cradle-snatcher.

Yet, all his life—regret.

 

Isobel and Mrs. Ingoldby were gone first thing next morning. And when Eddie next met Isobel it was in another world and a great many people were dead.

A
nd so it was Isobel. The green letter was from Isobel. A letter of condolence for the loss of his wife.

 

Dear Teddy (if I still may, Sir Edward), I have just seen in the
New York Times
here in Paris the very sad news of Betty's death and I am writing to say how very much I feel for you, and for all of us, come to that, who knew her and will miss her.

 

(
Miss
her?
Knew
her?)

 

I wonder just how much you remember? I wonder how much you remember of anything before you met Betty and became the icon of the jolly old Hong Kong Bar? Before you
really
met me? We never mentioned High House, did we? Again?

It hardly outlasted the War, you know. You and Pat were so very much together there. You and Pat were the spirit of the place, and I was a hole in the air. Did you ever know, I wonder, after you met Betty, that she and I were at school together? I went to High House after the Higher School Certificate disaster. She left St. Paul's Girls in triumph. But they had me later in the War at Bletchley Park and there we met again. Bletchley Park was full of innocent, nice girls (not me) who had a very particular aptitude (crosswords) for solving cyphers and things, as you will be hearing in a year or two when
all is told
(the fifty-year revelation). That is how we won the War. How we stopped the U-Boats. So we were told. We were schoolgirls, Teddy. I was still a schoolgirl when you met me. Do you remember my teenage sulks? I was a schoolgirl five years on—no. Not five years on. Not in Peel Street. Oh, my beloved Teddy.

I was so pleased when you married Betty. I would have destroyed you, my sweet, beloved Teddy. But because of—well, I expect you have forgotten—but because of the day your great big feet came left, right, stamp, stamp down Peel Street and I was waiting for you and then—. Well, because of this I think I am allowed to write to you now. Oh, look—forget Peel Street. Kensington. Peripheral. I loved you from the moment you came walking (embarrassingly!) up to the trees at High House. I loved you and I love you.

Betty and I always exchanged Christmas cards. I expect you didn't know. You probably never noticed mine. Betty was a very untouchable woman. Nobody knew her—though I always suspected that there was a great well—
comprehension
—with someone, somewhere. She wasn't very pretty. She always sent me a Christmas card.

I was so very sorry to see in the
NY Times—
my word, she was a surpriser! You and I, Teddy, won't make the
NYT
—I was so very sorry to see in the obituary that there were “no children of the marriage.” It is—in every language—a bleak little phrase. It means that you and B had a sadness, for when I last saw Betty forty years ago, she told me how much she longed for a child. We were in a park at the Hague. You were at the Court of International justice, against Veneering. Betty and Veneering—what a saint you were, Eddie!

I have no children either, come to that. And no partner (Christ! Christ!—“
partner
”). I can no longer bear a partner, but I most desperately regret not having had a child. You guessed, Eddie. I think. There wasn't the word “gay” then and it was something you didn't care to think about. But I believe you guessed.

I hope you still have friends about you in the south of England (NOT your place, I'd have thought?). Dear Teddy, everyone always loved you in your extraordinary never-revealed or unravelled private world. I am one of those who know that you were not really cold.

                    Sincerely yours,
Isobel
.

 

Filth picked up this letter and then its envelope and dropped both in the waste-paper basket. His face had taken upon it the iron ridges of a stage or television version of a prosecuting Counsel before he rises to the attack.

He found air-mail stationery of antique design. He addressed the envelope and attached three expensive stamps to be sure of covering the French postage. He drew the old-fashioned flimsy paper towards him, pushed aside the cheap Biros and took up his Collins gold pen (a retirement present from the lawyers of his Inn). He filled the pen from the ink bottle. Quink. Black. He wrote:

Sir Edward Feathers thanks Miss Isobel

Ingoldby for her kind letter of condolence.

 

He dated it, muffled himself into a coat, tweed hat and woollen gloves, took his walking stick and the letter, and set off down the drive and up the village hill to the post office.

He dropped the letter into the red box that still said,
V.R.
and strode inexorably home again. One or two people on the hill noticed him, and stopped what they were doing as he passed, glad to see that the old boy was going out again, ready to speak to him if he noticed them.

But he went by, the lanky, old-fashioned figure of long ago, walking painfully between the over-hanging trees of his drive. He passed Garbutt without a glance.

 

Isobel Ingoldby.

 

He sat again to his desk and wrote three more letters, replying to the formal, kind messages of condolence. Several times the telephone rang and he heard the drone and click of the answerphone and paid no attention. Lunchtime came and went. He wrote more replies to letters including one (good heavens!!) from Cumberledge in Cambridge. Billy Cumberledge. What is this? What's this? I need Betty.

Mid-afternoon, and he walked into the kitchen and looked hard and long at the fridge and did not open it. He boiled up water but, when the kettle clicked off, did nothing about it. He stood at the kitchen window idly swirling water from the hot tap around in the little green teapot to warm its inside, standing until the steam began to scald his fingers. Then he poured himself a glass of milk and walked to the study where the newspaper lay ready for him by his armchair. He sat, and regarded his rows of law books, his grand old wig-box now laid out again upon the hearth. Eventually he dozed and awoke with the sun gone down behind the hills, and the room cold.

He wondered wherever the glass of milk had come from. He had not drunk milk since Ma Didds in Wales. She must be here. He heard the hated voice. “You don't leave this cupboard until you've drunk this glass of good milk and you'd better not stir your feet because there's a hole in there beside you deep as a well and you'd never be heard of more.” The long day, and not let out till bedtime, and six years old.

He walked over to the wastepaper basket and re-read the letter. It existed. It had not been a dream. She had waited over forty years. The letter of a cruel spirit. “Loves me”—how abhorrent. She is a lesbian. “Not cold”—enough! Betty wanting a child . . . How dare she! This Ingoldby, the last traitor of all the traitorous Ingoldbys.

Oh, I am too old for any of this.

 

He took the milk back to the kitchen and poured it down the sink, opened a cake-tin and cut himself a slice of Betty's birthday cake and ate it rather guiltily because it wasn't yet stale. Then he poured himself a whiskey and soda, walked into the sun-lounge and held the letter up towards the tulip-bed.

“Betty?”

Emptiness. Silence. And silence within the house, too. Outside a most unnatural silence. Not a car in the lane, or a plane in the sky, not a human voice calling a dog. Not the church clock on the quarters, not a breath of wind, not a bird on a bough. All darkness as usual from the empty invisible house next door. Then a fox walked tiptoe over the December grass, its brush trailing but its ears pricked. At the steps that led up to the sun-lounge it turned its head towards Filth and smiled.

He remembered the Ingoldbys' delinquent cat angrily shaking its paws at the time of the breaking of nations. 1939. The roar of the Colonel that had shattered the family's self-deception and serenity. Then that earlier shadow, three years before, of the girl. Her shadow detaching itself from the blacker shadow of the yews. The term before he went to Public school.

E
ddie found himself very much the junior to Pat at Chilham School when he followed him there in 1936. At first they were in different Houses. Eddie, after Sir's Outfit, was able to cope easily with the new place's idiosyncrasies. He was good at getting up in the morning and untroubled by Morning Prep at 6.30 A.M. The work was easy. He was good at games. He liked the slabs of bread and jam halfway through the morning. Whenever he caught sight of Pat he sent him a salute and Pat, untroubled that he was senior to Eddie, saluted back or did his Herr Hitler imitation. They naturally continued to keep together whenever possible. After matches—they were both in good teams—they would walk unselfconsciously round and round the playing fields, talking. They were soon a famous oddity, and were spoken to about it.

“It is not as if you were brothers,” said the Headmaster when the case was at length referred to him, the highest court.

“We've been brought up as brothers,” said Pat. “Sir.”

“But even brothers here do not go about together all the time.”

“What do you say, Feathers?”

“I can't think of anything, Sir.”

“Do you, we wonder” (this was a trap) “wish you were in Ingoldby's House?”

“No, not specially. I've never thought about it. I'm with the Ingoldbys all the holidays.”

“How very unusual.”

“My father knew his father in the Great War,” said Pat, astonishing Eddie who hadn't known of it. “We're a sort of subfamily.”

It was a mystery.

“There seems no
physicality
about it,” said the Headmaster to their Housemasters. “They're both very bright. And very unusual, but then all boys are unusual. Put Feathers in Ingoldby's House might be the best thing. Treat them like other brothers here.”

 

Pat, most ridiculously young, went up to Cambridge for several days for the university entrance exam. The phoney war was over and the Battle of Britain had begun. The journey would not be unexciting. Pat made much of taking his gas mask.

Without him that week the school felt dull and empty and for the first time Eddie realised that he had made no friends. He felt an outsider as he lay in his bed in the dormitory.

“Is Ingoldby some relation?” came a shout in the dark.

“Not of mine,” said Eddie.

“You don't look like him,” came another shout. “Not like his brother Jack did.”

“I'm not his brother. How d'you know what his brother Jack looks like?”

“In the team-photographs. Holding cups and shields. Head boy in a
gown
. Hamlet in
Hamlet
. Just a taller Ingoldby. Good looking, not carroty.”

“I come from Malaya.”

“Do they all have red hair there?”

“Yes. Every one of them.”

“Doesn't Ingoldby's brother mind?” someone shouted far down the row of beds, made brave by the black-out curtains.

“Mind what? I'm his brother's friend, too.”

“Mind your being so important to him?”

A searchlight began to scale the walls, to pierce the black windows. It was joined by another and they danced together for a while, searching for German bombers on the way to Liverpool.

“Why ever should he? Jack's in the Air Force. He's got more important things to think about. I dare say,” Eddie added, like Sir.

“What do Ingoldby's parents think?”

“I've never asked them. They've always wanted me there.” (And, he thought, they're mine. Blood of my blood and bone of my bone.)

“Where's your own family then, Feathers?” shouted an up-and-coming man. “Where's your own family?” (They were braver with Ingoldby away.)

“My father's in Malaya.”

“Was he in the Great War? Smashed up?”

“Yes.”

“Why doesn't he come and see you?”

 

Pat returned from Cambridge with an assured place to read physics, having decided that history was all out of date—oh joke!

“After this War,” they had said, “you have your foot in the door by being accepted by the college now. You can be deferred if you wish. Volunteer and wait to be called. They'll give you the first year. Excellent papers.”

But on the way home from Cambridge, overnight at High House, he had managed to volunteer for the RAF at the end of the summer term.

“If I'm spared,” he said to Eddie, in a Methusaleh voice. “Bloody raids, here every night. Why didn't they evacuate us? We're going to be clobbered.”

“They think slowly here,” said Eddie. “Sir moved his Outfit the minute Chamberlain wagged the white paper.”

“Chamberlain saved us,” said Pat. “Gave us a year to make more broomsticks to look like rifles. Even the carpet factory's making tents now. I don't know where they'll be using them. Africa?”

“Sir's gone to America.”

This made them unhappy.

They were lying between damp grey blankets, among rows of other boys in the school's underground shelters, water running in rills down the walls. Far away a never-ending thunder meant that somewhere was being flattened again. York? Liverpool? Even as far away as Coventry.

 

The same week, on a night when there had been no air-raid siren, a drenching cold and moonless night and the boys asleep in their dormitories, every alarm bell in the school had begun to ring, followed by hooters, whistles and military cries. The dormitory doors were flung open and every boy ordered to dress immediately and gather by his House front door.

“And uniform, please, if you are in the Corps.”

“What—puttees, sir?”

“Puttees, Ingoldby.”

“They take a good five minutes, sir.”

“Then die, Ingoldby. Or get moving.”

Out from all the seven Houses of the school streamed boys of several ages in various attire. Each one was handed a rifle, Officers' Training Corps or not, and five rounds of ammunition.

“Invasion. Get on there. It's the Invasion. Go!” and five hundred boys, some trailing khaki bandages on their legs, some in their pyjamas and without their dressing-gowns (“
dressing
-gowns”), were quickly lost in the midnight fields and ditches of the North Midlands. Somebody cried “Hark!” and some of them heard the death knell: the cry of the bells from all the muffled steeples. This was later denied.

“Oh,” said Pat, still purring from the Cambridge grown-up claret, “invasion. Five rounds. Bang, bang, bang, bang, finish. Farewell the red, white and blue.”

Those who knew how, loaded their rifles. Those who didn't, dropped their cartridges in the mud. There was occasional unfortunate friendly fire (though the phrase had not then been invented and the one used was balls-up) and a few disagreeable misfortunes with bayonets. There was the occasional, but not serious, scream.

Then, the silence. Darkness and rain settled over the North's infant infantry who did not trouble the landscape or the night, which passed with very few prayers and still fewer orgasms or unexpected desire. Little poetry was engendered. After several hours some word of command must have been passed and the great old school found itself staggering from the ditches, crossing the sodden ugly fields, falling into bed again at 4
a.m.

But at 6.15 A.M. it was pre-breakfast Prep, as usual.

It had been a false alarm.

 

“We're going to lose this war,” said Eddie. “Am I right, Pat?”

“Can't speak,” said Ingoldby. His hair looked like black lacquer which someone had painted on his head. His face was carmine. Under the bedclothes in the dormitory he was wearing last night's Army uniform sopped through and caked with mud. At the end of his bed, purple feet stuck out. Above them, his semi-putteed legs.

“You know the whole bloody issue was nothing?” someone was saying. “A barrage-balloon come loose over the Vale of York, for God's sake. Trailed its cable over the electric pylon and blacked out the North. Invasion, my foot!”

“Invasion, my feet,” shuddered Ingoldby, looking with interest down his body under the blankets at them. “Sometimes there are two of them, s-s-sometimes—oh God! S-s-sometimes four.”

 

He was found to have pneumonia and put in the school San. There, he was scooped from all friends, and therefore of course from Eddie, and absorbed into the antiseptic of the nutcracker-faced Matron in charge. Days passed.

On one of them, in a free-period, Eddie on his ostrich legs went walking to the San and found this woman seated just inside the door knitting an immense scarf in khaki wool that curled inwards down the sides like a tube.

“May I go and see Ingoldby, Matron?”

“Certainly not. You know the rules.”

“How is he?”

“That's my business.”

“Would you give him a message?”

“You know that's not allowed, neither.”

“I'll ask Oils, then.”

“Ask away.”

Eddie knocked on Mr. Oilseed's door and found Oils, his Housemaster, late of Ypres, France, sitting one-eyed and holding a little glass weight at the end of a silver chain, swinging the chain gently over a desk covered with mountains of unmarked essays.

“Matron says I can ask to visit Ingoldby, sir.”

“Now—where is Ingoldby? I forget.”

“He's in the San, sir. As a result of The Fiasco. The other night.”

“Fiasco? Oh, I don't think we should assume that. It was a valuable exercise.”

“It's said that Ingoldby has pneumonia.”

“‘It is said,'” said Oils, “is not a phrase I ever recommend. It does not commend itself. Ingoldby's parents are coming later today.”

“But, sir . . . I'm pretty well part of that family, you know. Since I was eight.”

Oils let the fine chain ripple and fall into a heap upon the green baize of the desk. (What
was
he doing? Sexing a child?) He continued to stare at it.

“Feathers,” he said, “the times are moving on, but very slowly.”

“Yes, sir?”

“There is something today that is a wonder in the school. This
Victorian
and bourgeois school. This is that the unnatural closeness between you and Ingoldby has not been terminated. There are certain explanatory circumstances but, as we who were in the trenches know, emotions have to be contained. This, like your Prep school, is a school in which we endure.”

“I loved our Prep school, sir.”

“I suggest that you go back to your study and read Kipling.”

“Kipling's childhood was very like mine and he
was
queer. I should like to appeal.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I have the right of appeal here.”

“To whom, may I ask?”

“To the Headmaster first, sir. Then to the Board of Governors. Finally in the correspondence columns of the
Times
.”

“On what grounds?”

“Slander, sir. And antediluvianism.”

He left Oils' study and made for the Headmaster's House where no foot trod unbidden except those of the old spider himself and his paddly housekeeper. Eddie stood outside, and turned the great iron ring on the tall gate. The flagstones were slimy, the windows glimpsed through tangled plants.

“Come round the side,” said a threadbare voice from behind a pane. “Kitchen.”

“Ah, yes,” said the Head after blinking at the daylight Eddie brought in with him, “Tussock, isn't it?”

“
Tussock
, sir? I'm Feathers.”

“Ah, Feathers, Feathers. ‘The life of man is plumed with death.' It's part of a plea of mercy by a seaman to Queen Elizabeth the First.”

“I know, sir.”

“Do you? We aren't told whether it was successful. I knew your father, Feathers. He was a boy here when I was. How is he?”

“I never see him. He's in South-East Asia. I think he's gone to Singapore now.”

“Yes. Of course. And that's what we must talk about. I've been pondering the matter all week, Tussock. But first—what?”

“I want to visit my friend, Ingoldby, in the San, sir. I am told by Mr. Oilseed that it is an unholy desire.”

“Yes, yes. You would be.”

“It's obscene of him, sir, to say a thing like that.”

“Yes. But it's an old obscenity. Very primitive. Age gives these flabby ideas weight. Oh yes—and
parents
. No, the reason for isolation of patients in the San is the possibility of infection.”

“But, it's pneumonia. Caught in the performance—”

“—ah, yes. The invasion by barrage-balloon. I slept through it.”

“All I want is to wish him well. Put my head round the door. You'd allow me if he were my brother. Wouldn't you, Headmaster?”

“Yes. Yes, I would. And you are a prefect. And, I understand, fairly sane. Yes.” The Head had shrunk in his chair. “Particularly today, I would.” He pointed to a second armchair across the fireplace. “Stick another log on the fire as you go by, would you? Will you have a cup of tea? We ought to be talking about your future. We have a bit of a worry with you—oh, nothing to do with this David and Jonathan business. We all grow out of every loyalty in the end.”

“It's called friendship, sir.”

“Yes. Yes. And you won't be seeing much more of Ingoldby. Your father has written to us to say that he wants you to leave school after Christmas. He wants you to go to Malaysia. Or Singapore. We have been giving it a lot of thought.”

“He—what?”

“He thinks you should be evacuated from England. To get away from the bombing. Place of safety. He was—I needn't tell you—through the last one. And he's been out of touch with British politics. We're trying to persuade him to let you take the Oxford entrance exam first.”

“But it's children who are evacuated. And women. I'm going on eighteen.”

“Until you are eighteen, your father has the say.”