Old Filth - Jane Gardam [27]
“Letters,” he said. “Letters. Many, many letters,” and he picked one up and waved it about to get rid of her. There were no black-bordered ones now, thank God. They had disappeared with the Empire. This one was in a pale green envelope and came from Paris. As the woman, Mrs.-er, slammed the front door and Garbutt stamped past again with the empty barrow, Filth had the sensation of a command not to open this letter and looking across the garden saw Betty standing on the lawn watching him with an expression of deep annoyance.
“Ha!” he said, and stared her out. “Leave me be,” he shouted. He picked up the ivory paper knife to slit the envelope and saw the name: Ingoldby. He stared, looked back at the now empty lawn, looked down again.
Not the Colonel or Mrs. Ingoldby, long ago gone. Not Jack or Pat. No issue there. I. Ingoldby, it said on the envelope and so it must be Isobel. Ye gods.
Well, I’d better face it.
The year that Eddie left Sir’s Outfit for his Public school, he was to spend the summer as usual at High House. Pat Ingoldby, a year older, had left Sir the year before but had written a weekly letter from the new school to Eddie and Eddie had written back. Other boys did the same with absent brothers. Sir had insisted from the start on weekly letters to parents and, although Eddie had had none back from his father, the habit had continued until Pat moved on. Then Eddie had struck, and asked to write to Mrs. Ingoldby instead of his father and, as Eddie’s stammer was threatening again after Pat’s departure, Sir agreed, and Mrs. Ingoldby did write back occasionally, in a hand like a very small spider meandering across the thick writing paper and passing out and dying off in the faintest of signatures. Years later, in a different life, Eddie found that his father had kept all his letters from Sir’s Outfit, numbered carefully and filed in a steel safe against the termites. Eddie’s letters to Mrs. Ingoldby and to Pat did not survive.
Sir had also insisted on letters being written to Auntie May, who occasionally sent a postcard; Uncle Albert, her missionary husband, once sent the school a coconut for Christmas.
Pat’s short, succinct, witty letters from the new school were a great pleasure to Eddie. He absorbed everything offered for his information: accommodation, lessons, boys, games (which were more important than church), menus, lack of humour among staff. Both boys missed each other but never referred to the fact, nor to the fact that the fraternal arrangements of the holidays would of course continue. Eddie wrote to his aunts, one of about three letters in his five years with Sir, asking if he could have some of the money his father had put aside for him, to give Sir a present, and Aunt Muriel sent a ten shilling note.
“I don’t accept presents,” said Sir, looking briefly at Three Men in a Boat. “This is a clean school. No nonsense. But yes, I’ll have this one. Send your sons here when you’ve got some. Present us with a silver cup for something when you’re a filthy rich lawyer, I dare say? Yes. You’ll be a lawyer. Magnificent memory. Sense of logic, no imagination and no brains. My favourite chap, Teddy Feathers, as a matter of fact. I dare say.”
“Thank you, Sir. I’ll always keep in touch.”
“Don’t go near Wales. And keep off girls for a while. Soon as girls arrive exam results go down. Passion leads to a Lower Second. Goodbye, old Feathers. On with the dance.”
High House—it was now 1936—where Eddie now brought all his (few) possessions, was reassuringly the same and here was Pat on the railway platform, taller and spotty, with a deep voice but still talking. Talking and talking. There was to be a girl staying, he said, but not to worry as almost at once she was going off on holiday to the Lake District with his mother.
“She’s here already. She’s a cousin. Pa’s niece. She’s causing trouble.”
But up at the House there was no sign of this cousin and nobody mentioned her and she didn’t show up all day.
The next day at breakfast Eddie asked the Colonel