Old Filth - Jane Gardam [31]
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