Old Filth - Jane Gardam [40]
Eddie went through the address book on the desk until he found his father’s name. After Kotakinakulu, there were many crossings out. The current address seemed to be Singapore. It did not sound very grand. A back-street address. An instinct, some gentle gene in Eddie, made him write a P.S. before he licked the air-mail envelope:
P.S: I should like to say, though, Father, you’ve been very generous to someone you clearly found it impossible to like. Now that I’ve really thought about it, your wanting me to come to you in order to survive the War seems [he was going to write “very civil”] a miracle of unexpected kindness.
Eddie
And so, he thought, I spoil my case.
He did not go to the golf-course lunch, but found his way below stairs to a kitchen where a diminutive old woman was folding paper spills for the grate. She looked depressed and paid him no attention, so then he lay on his bed in a room with eiderdowns and heavy flowered curtains and huge lampshades and wondered if this was all.
He stayed on, apparently invisible, for a week. And then for several weeks, while he waited to hear from school about the Oxford interview. There was no reply to his letter to his father and, though he often wondered if today there might be a cable, none came. He spent the days mugging up for the possible Oxford interview—there was a good public library in the town—and thinking unhopefully about life. From his bedroom window, steamed with delicious heat from a Victorian iron radiator, his dreams merged into other bedroom windows. One, that mystified him on the edge of sleep, was an unglazed slit with the black knives of banana plants against a black sapphire sky. This dream always woke him.
His Bolton bedroom now was rich in Lancashire splendour, the carpet pure olive-green wool overflung with white roses. The heavy curtains, interlined for the black-out, were damask within and without. The eiderdown was of fat rose-pink blisters and beside the bed was a lamp with pink silk and bead fringes. The wallpaper could have stood by itself, thickly embossed with gold, and the blankets were snowy wool, and satin-bound. “You are in the best spare,” said Muriel. “The wardrobe may be a Gillow.” “Now put the fire on if you need it,” said Hilda. “Both bars. We have to go out now.”
Going out was their refrain. Eddie’s life was beyond their interest. They dwelt like Siamese twins in each other’s concerns and in the present moment. Every morning they came down to the breakfast-room talking before they saw you but telling you their plans. Their eyes were always blanks. They were always in one of a number of uniforms but always the same as each other. There was the Red Cross officer with stripes and a cockade; the WVS plum and dark green; a scarlet and grey ensemble reminiscent of the North-West Frontier; and a white and navy serge with wings on the head indicative of some variety of military nurse. They left the house every day by eight-thirty and were never home till supper. On Sundays they were up betimes for the eight o’clock Communion, and later sat knitting gloves and listening to Forces Favourites. There was a nice medium sherry before a heavy supper each evening. The midget maid crept about doing wonders with the chores and a muscular woman came in for the rough and a man for swilling down the yard. Each day Eddie ate his lunch alone at one end of the mahogany dining table, also a suspected Gillow, laid up with lace mats and shining silver. He received no mail and the phone never rang for him.
“Now, don’t you overwork,” they shouted. “You’ll get in. It’s your father’s old college. There’s a nice flick on at the Odeon,” and they clashed shut the vestibule door not interested in his answer.
The winter gathered. Once or twice he grew desperate to telephone the Ingoldbys but dared not because of Pat’s bombshell: It’s family stuff.
The air-raids in the North-West had for the moment stopped but the dogfights went on in the South-East and Eddie wondered whether Pat had his pilot’s wings yet. “They