Old Filth - Jane Gardam [58]
“He would have telephoned. Though I suppose I do tend to switch it off.”
“He’s not himself, I warn you. He never told me when he was arriving. Then ten minutes later he was gone. Actually I wasn’t very well. I’m not a very well woman.”
“But why did he come? We haven’t seen either of them in years. All that way! Dorset! She can’t have died more than . . .” She glanced at the folded paper. She would look properly later.
“Just over a fortnight. He was bringing us keepsakes. I’d rather hoped she’d made a Will. I think he thought better of giving me the recipe books. I expect he’ll offer them to you.”
“But I’m diabetic.”
“Yes, well, I don’t suppose he remembers that. Just at the moment.”
“No,” said Claire.
“He was very strange. He fled the house. I seemed to horrify him. I can’t think why. My ways are not everybody’s ways, of course, but knowing what we three have been through together . . .”
“Your ways were not everybody’s ways then.”
“Neither were yours.”
“Why not?”
“All that perfection, Claire. Nauseating perfection. From the start.”
Silence.
“Claire?”
“Yes?”
“Sorry. I only meant that it’s a bit chilling.”
“It seems,” said Claire, “that Betty’s death removes barriers. It’s bringing corpses to the surface. I can honestly say I never had anything to hide.”
“Oh, no?”
Claire was watching through the huge window an immaculate Mercedes nosing about in the lane. It paused, considered, started off again and cruised out of sight.
“You’d better ring me if he turns up,” said Babs. “He looked to me as if he was in need of special care, like they used to say of drawn-thread work on laundry lists. Get him to see someone.”
Elgar’s Enigma Variations began to boom in Babs’s background.
“Laundry lists? Hello? I can’t hear you.”
Claire put down the phone.
The car must have turned somewhere down the road, for here it was nosing slowly back again. “He won’t come here,” she said aloud. “He doesn’t need me. He never did and we won’t be able to look each other in the eye. ‘It was Betty who made him,’ Isobel Ingoldby used to say. I never believed her. He’s made himself. Made his impeccable, astringent self.”
The phone rang again.
“Well, all I can say, Claire, he was shaking all over and grey in the face and terrified of my poor animals under his feet. Gob-smacked, outraged by my little lover with his little musiccase.”
“What are you talking about, Babs? I wish you wouldn’t say ‘gob-smacked.’ It doesn’t become you. You’re not a teenager.”
“Yes, I am. At heart I am fourteen.”
The car had now stopped at Claire’s gate and Filth’s stony face, with the Plantagenet cheek-bones and thick ungreying curly hair, could be observed, peering out.
“When old women say that,” said Claire, “‘I’m just a girl inside,’ I . . .” The butterfly was hammering now on iron wings. Filth’s long right leg, like the leg of a flamingo but in Harris tweed, was feeling for the pavement. “I,” said Claire, “cease to find them interesting.”
“I may not be interesting, but it was me he turned to at Ma Didds, when you went running down the village.”
Claire let her fingers stray about over the glass table-top, feeling for her butterfly-subduing pills. And here came the old flamingo, the old crane, lean as a cowboy still. What? Six-foot-three, and still melting my heart.
Well, he seemed to be carrying the parcel of recipe books.
“I must go now, Babs. The laundry man’s here. And Babs, you’re drinking too much. Goodbye.”
“Have you any luggage? I hope you’ll be staying the night?” she asked at once.
Filth jack-knifed himself into a small, gold-sprayed Lloyd-loom chair and his knees were nearly up to his chin. Light fell upon him like a greeting as in fact it always did upon everybody inside the rambling bungalow which Claire had moved into a few years ago for that very reason, and because it was sensible for someone with A Heart. The building followed an easy circuit. Sitting-room led into kitchen, kitchen led into bathroom, bathroom led