Old Filth - Jane Gardam [100]
“Perhaps not long?” said the manager. “Don’t stay too long.” Babs said she would go out now and take her dog for a walk.
Then Father Tansy shut the door behind him, opened the curtains and switched off the light. He picked up the bedside phone and ordered room-service luncheon in an hour’s time. Then he ran round the bedroom removing drooping asters and opening all the windows. He found Filth’s dressing-gown and manoeuvred him into it, heaved the old bones off the bed, slid the ivory fans of Filth’s feet into his Harrods leather bedroomslippers, sat Filth on an upright chair and set a table in front of him.
“Have I shaved?” asked Filth. “Oh dear, I do hope so.”
“Never mind that,” said Tansy. “Wake up. You have sent for me at last. I have been waiting patiently.”
“You have a great idea of your own importance,” said Filth. “I remember you, awash in that great marble church.”
“Not my own importance,” said Tansy. “I follow Another’s importance. I try to follow the personality of Christ, and am directed by it.”
“I don’t believe in all that,” said Filth. “But there’s something, somewhere, that’s urging me to talk to a—well, I suppose, to a priest. You are the only priest I know. How you got here, I don’t know. What I’m doing here, I don’t know. I’ve been dreaming lately. About Queen Mary.”
“Queen Mary?”
“Yes. And my father. And a—murder. And other loose ends.”
Father Tansy waited with bright eyes, like a squirrel. “Carry on.”
“I suppose it’s going to be a confession,” said Filth. “I’m glad you’re not hidden in one of those boxes. I’m not up to that.”
“I know.”
“I can’t start until Babs comes back. She’s part of it. And I’ve been seriously ill.”
“Sir Edward, you can begin by telling me what’s the matter with you. And I don’t want to hear about prawns and strained ligaments.”
After a time Filth said, “All my life, Tansy, from my early childhood, I have been left, or dumped, or separated by death, from everyone I loved or who cared for me. I want to know why.”
“You are a hero in your profession, Sir Edward.”
“That’s an utterly different matter. And in fact I don’t believe you. Nobody remembers me now at the Bar. My work is quite forgotten. I was once famous for some Pollution Law. All out-of-date now. I want to tell you something. When my Chambers were moved to a newly built office block, like a government department, costing millions which by then we could all afford—there were thirty-six members of Chambers when I decided to go permanently to Hong Kong—the old Clerk, who was retiring, took me down into the basement under the Elizabethan building where I began, and there was a sea of Briefs there, three feet deep, bundled up with pink tape. ‘We don’t know what to do with it,’ he said. ‘We’ve decided to get a firm in to throw it on a dump.’ That was years of my life. Years and years.”
“It’s not often,” said the priest, “made as clear to us as that. I see it in my empty pews.”
“It has all been void. I am old, forgotten and dying alone. My last friend, Veneering, has died. I miss him but I never quite trusted him. My most valuable friend was a card-sharp and my wife hated him though he made our fortunes at the Far Eastern Bar. He was killed on 9/11. A passenger in one of the planes. Still playing cards, I imagine. Hadn’t heard from him for years.”
Babs came back in and made the dog lie down. It immediately climbed on Filth’s bed and lay looking across at him as if he’d seen him somewhere before.
“The point is,” said Filth, seated at his table, recovering a little of his former authority when addressing the Court, “the point is, I have begun to wonder whether my life of loneliness—always basically I have felt quite alone—is because of what I did when I was eight years old,