Old Filth - Jane Gardam [5]
But she was not.
Outside there was a strange sound, a long, sliding noise and a thump. A heavy thump. It might well be the taxi skidding on the drive and hitting the side of the house. Filth opened the front door but saw nothing but snow. He stepped quickly out upon his doorstep to look down the drive, and behind him the front door swung to, fastening with a solid, pre-War click.
He was in his bedroom slippers. Otherwise he was dressed in trousers, a singlet—which he always wore, being a gentleman, thank God—shirt and tie and the thin cashmere cardigan Betty had bought him years ago. Already it was sopped through.
Filth walked delicately along the side of the house in his slippers, bent forward, screwing his old eyes against the snow, to see if by any chance . . . but he knew that the back door was locked, and the French windows. He turned off towards the tool shed over the invisible slippery grass. Locked. He thought of the car in the garage. He hadn’t driven now for some time, not since the days of terror. Mrs. Thing did the shopping now. It was scarcely used. But perhaps the garage—?
The garage was locked.
Nothing for it but to get down the drive somehow and wait for the taxi under Veneering’s yews.
In his tiptoe way he passed the heap of snow that had fallen off the roof and had sounded like a slithering car. “I’m a bloody old fool,” he said.
From the gate he looked out upon the road. It was a gleaming sheet of snow in both directions. Nothing had disturbed it for many hours. All was silent, as death. Filth turned and looked up Veneering’s drive.
That too was pristine silk, unmarked by birds, unpocked by fallen berries. Snow and snow. Falling and falling. Thick, wet, ice cold. His thinning hair ice cold. Snow had gathered inside his collar, his cardigan, his slippers. All ice cold. His knobbly hands were freezing as he grasped first one yew branch and then the next. Hand over hand he made his way up Veneering’s drive.
He’ll be with the son, thought Old Filth. That or there’ll be some ghastly house party going on. Golfers. Old cobwebs from the Temple. Smart solicitors. Gin.
But the house when it came in view was dark and seemed empty. Abandoned for years.
Old Filth rang the bell and stood on the porch. The bell tinkled somewhere far away inside, like Betty’s at the rosewood dining-table in the Mid Levels.
And what the hell do I do now? He’s probably gone to that oaf Christopher and they are carousing in the Peninsular Hotel. It’ll be—what? Late night now. They’ll have reached the brandy and cigars—the cigars presented in a huge shallow box, the maître d’ bowing like a priest before the sacrament. The vulgarity. Probably kill the pair of them. Hullo?
A light had been switched on inside the house and a face peered from behind a curtain in a side window. Then the front door was opened slightly by a bent old man with a strand or two of blond hair.
“Filth? Come in.”
“Thank you.”
“No coat?”
“I just stepped across. I was looking out for my taxi. For the White Hart. Christmas luncheon. Just hanging about. I thought I’d call and . . .”
“Merry Christmas. Good of you.”
They stood in the drear, unhollied hall.
“I’ll get you a towel. Better take off your cardigan. I’ll find you another. Whiskey?”
In the brown and freezing sitting-room a jigsaw puzzle only one-eighth completed was laid out over a huge table. Table and jigsaw were both white with dust. The venture looked hopeless.
“Too much damned sky,” said Veneering as they stood contemplating it. “I’ll put another bar on. I don’t often sit in here. You must be cold. Maybe we’ll hear your car from here, but I doubt it. I’d guess it won’t get through.”
“I wonder if I might use your phone? Mine seemed to be defunct.”
“Mine too, I’d guess, if yours is,” said Veneering. “By all means try.”
The phone was dead.
They sat before two small, red wire-worms stretched across the front of an electric fire. Some sort of antique, thought Filth. Haven’t seen one like that in sixty years. Chambers in the years of the Great Fog.
In