Old Filth - Jane Gardam [24]
“Don’t talk to me about the cat,” said the Colonel. “I threw it out of the bedroom window.”
“Pa!”
“It had done a wee on my eiderdown. I threw the eiderdown after it. I’d have shot it if the gun had been handy. I’m keeping it loaded now for the Invasion. That cat knows exactly what it’s doing.”
“Do be careful, dear. It’s not a Nazi.”
“Cats and bees and the world, all gone mad. I tell you, there’ll be no honey this year. Everything’s a failure. I’m thinking of buying a cow.”
“A cow, dear?”
“There’ll be no butter by Christmas. Powdered milk. No cream.”
“Why ever not?”
“It’ll be rationed. Forces first. Are you a fool?”
At bedtime Eddie leaned out of his bedroom window—the bedroom now seemed altogether his own—and looked at the dark and light rows of the vegetable garden, the Colonel’s obedient regiment standing to attention under a paring of moon. Silence until six o’clock tomorrow, and the factory hooter. Then the chorus of clicking feet trudging down The Goit as if nothing could ever change. Along the landing he heard the trumpet-call of the Colonel, “Rosie—do not shut the window. And don’t bring in that eiderdown. It stays there all night. I dare say it will rain. Let it rain.”
Eddie could make out the square shape of desecrated satin lying up against the house like a forlorn white flag.
TULIPS
The morning after the ghastly day in London—the solicitor had muddled her diary or had had to stay at home with sick children or her mobile phone was out of order or a mixture of the three, which had meant their trip to Bantry Street had been for nothing—Filth was seated in the sun-lounge, very fierce and composing a Letter of Wishes to add to his Will. He wondered if he was quite well. A wet square of eiderdown kept floating into sight. Tiredness. He was half-dreaming. Wouldn’t say anything to Betty.
The November sun blazed. It was almost warm enough to sit out of doors but Filth liked a desk before him when he was thinking. He liked a pen, or at least one of the expensive type of Biro—several because they gave out—and a block of A5 of the kind on which he had written his careful Opinions. Diligent, accurate, lucid, no jargon, all thanks to Sir, his Opinions used to be shown to juniors as models of the form. Then they had left him for the Clerk’s rooms, where they were typed. First by a single typist—Mrs. Jones, who in between whiles did her knitting, often in her sealskin fur coat for there was no central heating. Later there were five typists, later still twenty. Over the years Filth had scarcely noticed the changes, from the clatter of the old black Remingtons and all the girls chain-smoking, to the hum and click of electronics, to the glare of a screen in every Barrister’s room, the first fax machines, the e-mails and the mysterious Web. He was relieved not to have had to cope with all this as a junior or a Silk, and that by the time he made judge and lived in Hong Kong he had stepped into a world so advanced in electronics that he could hand everything over to machines but keep his pen too. His handwriting—thanks again to Sir—was much admired. He had been in Commercial Chambers. The construction industry. Bridges and dams.
And what a great stack of money I made at the Bar, he thought. It was a noble act becoming a judge on a salary. Letters of Wishes . . . Bequests to Friends . . . I’ve left it too long. The best friends are all dead.
And no children to leave it to. He looked across from the sun-lounge to Betty planting the tulips. She seldom spoke of children. Never to children when there were any around. She seemed—had always seemed—to have no views on their barrenness.
As it happened, had he known it, she was thinking of children now. She was wondering about yesterday, when she and Filth had made an abortive attempt to give what they had by dying. The death of Terry’s child. The solicitor forgetting her job because of her children’s measles. This dazzle of a morning, thirty years beyond her child-bearing years. The trees across Wiltshire were bright orange, yellow, an occasional vermilion maple