Old Filth - Jane Gardam [59]
“I have a spare room, Teddy.”
“I could take you out to dinner,” he said, without enthusiasm.
“I don’t go out for meals. I hardly go out at all. I watch the Boy Scouts doing my gardening outside my windows. That is my fresh air.”
“You have a beautiful complexion, nevertheless,” he said. “And you have the figure of a—of an angel.”
He saw Betty’s jolly old rump above the tulip bed. Her weather-beaten face. “A hundred in and a hundred more to go,” she had called. “I don’t want a gin. Could we miss lunch?” Then over she fell.
He looked now long and piercingly—but unseeingly—at Claire’s open and beautiful face. She’d been a sunlit, lovely child who’d grown plain (or so Betty had told him). A stodgy bride in horn-rims. Then pretty again, and now beautiful. He remembered being told that she had ruled her children by a mysterious silence, her adoration of them never expressed. Betty said the children had felt guilty about it, knowing they could never deserve her; they had become conventional, monosyllabic members of society. Her nice husband, Betty said, had taken to drink. Claire (Betty said) believed that marriage and motherhood meant pain. Betty had agreed with her about children, and thought that Claire lived for the moment when they fled the nest and she was peacefully widowed. And here she sat now, gentle, shoulderless as a courtesan on her linen-covered sofa, smiling. (Filth turned to Betty on his interior telephone to ask what she thought about it, but Betty had left the phone off the hook.)
“Of course!” he said. “I remember. You have diabetes. You can’t come out to dinner. Let me . . .” he had never gone shopping in his life. “Let me go and forage for us.”
“So you will stay?”
“I’d be—delighted.”
“Teddy, there’s no need to forage. The girl gets me what I want. There’s a freezer. And there’s whiskey.”
“Whiskey?”
“Oh, just for anyone who drifts in. The police—very nice people, out of hours. They come here when I fall over. The Vicar. The woman down the road with one eye. The window-cleaner. I’m fond of the window-cleaner. I have him once a week, though ‘have’ alas is not any longer the word. I ‘have’ a weak heart.”
Filth’s eyes were startled as a dog’s. This silvery, powdery woman.
“Oh, Teddy,” she said. “So easily shocked.”
“Well, Claire, really. We are way over . . . seventy.”
“Yes. And I have a weak heart.”
She poured him an immense whiskey and sat on, smiling beyond him out through the gleaming clean window.
Soon Filth eased himself down in the chair, tilted his head back on the curved rim and looked up at the ceiling which was studded with dozens of trendy spotlights, like an office. He took another deep swig of whiskey and sighed.
“Our mutual cousin, or whatever she is, Babs, exists in perpetual darkness and you in perpetual light.”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s odd. I can’t get enough of it. Maybe my eyesight’s going. I’d love a cataract operation, wouldn’t you?”
“I’m lucky there,” said Filth. “I brought you a present, by the way. Betty wanted you to have them.”
“Oh, yes?” She looked canny. She examined his face for lies.
“Nothing much. Family stuff mostly. Some from way back. She wanted you to have them. She was insistent. If she departed first—only you.”
“What about Babs?”
“She’d put something else aside for Babs. As a matter of fact we were in the m-m-m-middle of our, what’s called ‘Letters of Wishes.’”
“I see. She had other friends?”
“Yes. Don’t know how well she kept them, though. Not exactly friends. At the funeral . . .”
“Ah yes. The funeral.”
“Didn’t bother you with the funeral. Sorry now. Thought I