Old Filth - Jane Gardam [47]
“What’s this?”
“Nothing.”
“Bad day?”
“I condemned a man to death.”
Silence.
She would never have taken him in her arms from pity. Never presented her body to him as a distraction. Never indicated: Here is balm. Take me. Forget it. Your job. You knew there would be this to face here. You could have stayed in England.
Instead . . .
“Was he guilty?”
“As hell.”
They lay quiet, listening to the night sounds on the Peak.
“Crime passionel,” he said.
“Then probably he will be glad to die.”
He said, “You still shock me. If you had been the judge . . .”
“. . . I would have done as you did. There is not an alternative. But I would have suffered less.”
(But I would have wanted you to suffer more. I want you to make me resign because I disgust myself. I feel, truly, filth.)
“I should have stayed in Chambers at home in the Temple. Famous Feathers of the Construction Industry. Sewers and drains.”
But Betty had already fallen asleep again, peacefully against his shoulder, unconcerned, proud of him, a very nice woman. An excellent wife for a judge. And two miles off, in a sink across the spangled city, the condemned man, like a small grey bird, his mean little head on its scant Oriental neck soon to be crushed bone, lay alone.
I got out just in time, he thought when they retired and came home to the Donheads. Couldn’t take much more emotion alongside the drudgery. Still can’t manage emotion. All under control. I am a professional. But why this lust? This longing?
“Babs?”
It was the following morning and he was telephoning her again, “Babs, I want to come and see you.”
Betty’s voice answered—he remembered that it had been Veneering he’d once overheard saying that Betty’s voice was like Desdemona’s.
“Babs?”
“Just a minute.”
A full tempest of Wagner was stilled somewhere. “Yes? Teddy again? What?”
“Babs—may I come and see you?”
“Yes. I suppose so. All right. When?”
“Any time. This week? Next week?”
“Yes. All right.”
He heard a sob, which surprised him.
“Babs, don’t cry. She died so easily. A ful-ful-ful-filled, a splendid life.”
“I’m not crying for Betty,” she said, “or for you, you old fool,” and she crashed down the phone.
He didn’t telephone again; he wrote. He would visit her the following Friday and perhaps stay the night?
There was no reply.
However, in the new, footloose and irrational way that his body was behaving, Filth made his preparations, taking the car to be checked over in Salisbury, looking out for something good of Betty’s as a present for Babs.
He would have liked it so much more if he had been going to Claire. He wished she would answer the phone. He searched for the address to write to in Hainault where her Christmas cards came from, but the only card he could find was very old and blurred with no postcode. Nevertheless he wrote to say that he might perhaps be passing near her next Saturday. He told her about Betty.
No reply.
As Mrs.-er set down his morning cup of coffee on his desk, Filth gave the mighty roaring garrumph that had often preceded his pleadings in Court. (There was a rumour that it was the remains of some speech impediment though this seemed unlikely in such an articulate man.)
“Ah-argh. Aha! Mrs.-er, I meant to tell you I’m going away. Taking a short trip. Leaving on Friday. Doing a round of the family. What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Travelling by car,” he said.
“Then I will say something. You’re out of your mind, Sir Edward. Wherever do you think you’re going?”
“Oh, it’s up in the north somewhere.”
“You haven’t driven further than Tisbury station in years. That car’s welded to the garage.”
“Not at all. I’ve had it checked over.”
“Sir Edward, it’s the motorways. You’ve never driven on a motorway.”
“It’s an excellent car. And it’s a chance for you to have a break, too. You’ve been very—very good these past days. Take a holiday.”
“If you insist on going, I’ll not take