Old Filth - Jane Gardam [32]
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.
SCHOOL
Eddie 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.