Old Filth - Jane Gardam [44]
“They are psychologically deaf,” said he.
“They’re just reacting against your pa,” she said. “Don’t forget they were all Raj Orphans themselves. They say it suits some. They come out fizzing and yelling, ‘I didn’t need parents,’ and waving the red, white and blue. Snooty for life. But we’re all touched, one way or another.”
“I don’t think it suited my father,” said Eddie. “He’s gone entirely barmy.”
“Yep. I heard. You know, my lot and Claire’s are still in India, and I never give them a thought. Not after ten years.”
Eddie realised that since the Ma Didds’ horror he had never given a thought to either Babs or Claire. Not a thought.
“Have you a girlfriend, Eddie?”
“I never meet any girls. I just work. And play games. And read.”
“Come home with me now,” said Babs. “To my digs. There’s no one there.” She put out her cigarette. “We’ll go to bed. We have before.”
Eddie, scarlet, was aware of a drop in the background conversation at the nearby tables. Babs’s voice was beautiful and old-fashioned, a penetrating voice like Royalty, clear and high and unconcerned, and he stumbled out of his chair, withdrawing his hand from beneath hers. “Sorry. Can’t. Getting a train. Might miss it.”
And she leaned back, laughing, and called across the steamy shop—the still-immobile cake-queue—“We’ll never forget each other, Teddy-bear. Never.” He fumbled at the door. “You and I and Claire. And Cumberledge. Whatever happens to us. Never.”
He was on the train, sopped through with Oxford’s rain. He watched the tangled hedges threaded with the dead spirals of last year’s weeds. This was an empty, slow, uncertain train that trundled insolently through anonymous stations, their names painted out with coarse black brush-strokes to confuse the Germans when they eventually arrived. Station waiting-rooms stood barred; cigarette- and chocolate-machines stood empty with their metal drawers hanging out. It was not until he had changed trains in Manchester (I could still be in her bed) that he remembered that he had left Babs to pay for the coffee.
He was sitting now in another railway carriage looking, above the man sitting opposite, at a pre-War watercolour reproduction of a happy artless English family on a sunny English beach. The other picture frames below the rack held patriotic slogans and he wondered if the sand-castle country scene had been deliberately preserved. The clean-cut daddy; the Marcel-waved mummy; the innocent little one; the happy dog, Towser. Presumably in some people’s memory? He closed his eyes to keep them from tears. He dozed and found himself in a richer place, a sleep-laden, dripping dell with drops on every great leaf, the clattering of banana leaves, black children dancing in foetid puddles on the earth—earth beaten hard as concrete with dancing feet but which could become in moments under the warm rain a living mud. Laughter. The smell of sweet hot skin. He was being tossed up high in someone’s arms and he was looking down again upon a brown face, white teeth, gloriously loving eyes. The eyes of the man across the carriage were staring at him as Eddie woke.
“You all right, lad?”
“Yes. Sorry. Was I snoring?”
“No. You were moaning. Want to see a paper?”
“No, no. I was . . . I think I must talk in my sleep.”
“Here. I’m reading the Deaths,” said the man, “and I’ve discovered something quite important. See what you think. Just see what you think—no prejudice. Just look down the list of places and you can tell which deaths are from enemy action. You can tell from the Times exactly where the raids were, dates given. Nobody’s thought of it here, I’ll bet. I’m writing to the authorities. I’ll bet the enemy has noticed.”
Eddie, scrambling from the tropical dream, said, “Careless talk costs lives.”
“D’you want to see, though? Just you see what I mean. It’s a bloody check-list for the enemy,” and he passed across the outer pages of the Times. Eddie arranged them as a barrier between himself and the man and began, automatically, as his eyes refocused, to read in alphabetical