Old Filth - Jane Gardam [46]
At once, he walked away from the woman, and sat down in the sitting-room alone.
“I could sit with you for a while.”
“No thank you, Chloe, I think as a matter of fact I’d like to be by myself now.”
When she had gone he sat for a time. (Lost. Over. Gone. Finished. Happened.) She was not here. She was dead. Not here. But, he felt, elsewhere. They had both detested the macabre Chinese funeral rites and the Oriental notions of an afterlife. They were (of course) Anglicans and liked the idea of Heaven, but whether the spirit survived the ridiculous body they had never discussed. They certainly had never considered the idea that they might meet again in another world. The notion is rubbish, now thought Filth.
“Don’t you think?” he asked Betty directly for the first time, speaking to a point above the curtain rail.
There was no reply.
Yet he slept well. The lust had retreated and the next morning early, properly dressed with a purplish tie, he telephoned his two cousins.
From the first, Claire in Essex somewhere, there was no reply, not even from an answerphone. It rang on and on. The second was Babs, who lived now for no known reason somewhere on Teesside called Herringfleet. She was alone in the world and, Betty had thought, a little odd now. Babs had known Betty at school (everyone, he thought, seems to have known Betty at school). Betty and Babs had been at St. Paul’s Girls School and had the Paulina voice.
So that it was Betty who answered the phone. “Hello?” she said, “Yes? Teddy?”
(Betty must be staying up there with Babs, he thought, caught his breath and plunged into hell.)
“It is Babs?”
“Yes. I suppose so. Barbara.”
“Edward. Betty’s husband.”
“I know.”
“I’m afraid I have bad news.”
“I know. I saw it in the paper. Poor old thing.”
“Well, I’m not exactly—”
“I mean Betty. Poor old thing.”
It was Betty talking. He longed for more.
“I thought you would want to know . . .”
“Yes, what?”
“The funeral’s over, Babs. I thought you’d be glad to know that she died instantly. She can’t have known a thing about it. Wonderful for her, really.”
“Yes. That’s what they say.”
Silence.
“Babs?”
Now a long silence. Then a crashing waterfall of musical notes on a piano. Filth remembered that Babs had something to do with music. Even in Herringfleet presumably. “Babs, is that a piano?”
The scales ceased. Then Schubert began. On and on.
“Babs?”
Eventually, he put down the telephone and tried the other cousin again. Again, no answer. He thought of Chloe yesterday and then there was a shadow of someone watching him somewhere from a wood.
Again, the astounding lust. Lust. He put his face in his hands and tried to be calm. What is all this? He found himself praying as he had never prayed at all during the funeral. And very seldom during Betty’s life.
“Oh Lord, we beseech thee . . . direct our hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God.”
He had not shared a bed with Betty for over thirty years. Double beds were for the bourgeoisie. Sex had never been a great success. They had never discussed it. They had disliked visiting friends who had not two spare bedrooms. Betty had joked for years that the marriage would never have survived had Filth not had his own dressing-room. She had meant bedroom.
Had he ever desired Betty? Well, yes. He had. He remembered. He had desired everything about her. Her past, her present, her future with him. Her sweet, alert, intelligent face, her famously alive eyes. He had wanted to possess every part of her for she had fitted so perfectly into his life’s plan. She had made him safe and confident. She had eased old childhood nightmares.
But—this. Not ever this. Where did this lust come from? Were she alive, could he have told her about it? She who had never done a passionate act. She would have sent him to a doctor.
But yet—so very close they had been. Sometimes at night in Hong Kong,