Old Filth - Jane Gardam [39]
However, no go. So would you very kindly read the following points that will state briefly my reasons for not wanting to come and live with you in Malaya or Java or S’pore or wherever?
(1) I should at Christmas be going to Oxford for an interview at Christ Church for a place after the War.
(2) I want, after that, to volunteer for the Army.
(3) For me to be “evacuated” out of danger now, at my age, is absolutely unheard of in England at the moment. I should have to travel with children aged between seven and twelve. Whatever would the ship’s company think of me?
(4) I would lose my English friends for life. It would be a continuing stigma. I am six-foot-two and look older than my years. I am very fit.
and (5) and sorry to sound gung-ho, but I believe that I should be fighting for my country. I can’t run away. You haven’t heard Churchill. Even people like you, the bitter ones of ’14/18, listen to him. I have lived in this country since you sent me here as almost a baby. Had there been [the pen was beginning to race and Eddie’s face wasp red with a rage he had had no knowledge of] any friendship, any contact, between us, if you had once written to me not just handed me that pin-box, it might be different.
I shall argue these points with my aunts—though they seem to be very indifferent listeners. I’ve tried to argue with the school. All they say is that until I am eighteen you can do more or less what you like with me.
Do you want me with you on these autocratic and loveless terms?
Sincerely, E. J. Feathers
He read the letter through, and by the end of it was seeing not the god-like young soldier of the photograph but the father who had turned up at Sir’s Outfit soon after the Ma Didds’ affair, the affair that was—and still was—his closed, locked box. He saw a lank and trembling figure sitting in Sir’s study, the mountain trees of the Lake District tossing blackly about in the wind through the window behind him. The figure had sat cracking his finger joints.
Sir had kindly left the two of them together (“just out here if you need me, Feathers’s”) and father and son, neither clear which of them Sir was referring to, had stared long and hard at the pattern on the carpet.
Eddie remembered the hands. How his father had clasped and unclasped them. How the knuckles had cracked like pistols. He remembered the thin shanks of his father’s legs in the old-fashioned European suit; the bald head; the lashless eyes that looked almost blind. How the man shifted in his chair, said nothing, looked at a wristwatch far too big for the wrist. The watch that must have come through the Great War with him. The watch in the photo. Maybe it had been an amulet?
Eddie had been far too frightened to speak and reveal his stammer, especially after he heard a long staccato rattle begin in his father’s throat and realised—who better?—that his father stammered, too. He became inexorably mute. His father was asking a question. If he tried to answer it, his father might think his son was mocking him.
Tears came. Eddie did not look again at his father’s face. The patterns on Sir’s carpet swelled and ran together into chaos and oblivion.
When Sir returned, father and son both jumped up and Sir said to Eddie, “Away you go then,” and Eddie fled back to the classroom, to Pat Ingoldby and the lead soldiers under the desklid, and nobody ever mentioned this interview with his father again.
Once, only once, had Eddie met the aunts. Yet he knew that these aunts no longer talked about their brother. Not a breath in them confessed to the twitching, half-mad widower with the yellow face and strange eyes. (Once at Ma Didds’s one of his cousins, probably Babs, had said, “Your pa has malaria,” and the other had said, “No, he doesn’t. My mother says it’s opium.”) Nor did these Bolton aunts, out on the numbing golf course, any longer ever say a word about the young, quizzical, handsome, alert spirit that had been their