Old Filth - Jane Gardam [65]
They stood for the Nunc Dimittis, and Oliver wondered what havoc Vanessa was wreaking on poor old Uncle Eddie.
“Have you always practised in Dorset?” asked Vanessa from her canvas chair.
“No, no. I returned there. Travelled a lot.”
“That was rather good luck.”
“Very good luck.”
“You found some ex-pat clients? Over the years?”
“Not exactly ex-pats,” he said. “The locals.”
“I often think,” she said (Vanessa was magnanimous to people who were no threat), “that to be a family solicitor, in any country, is to be the most useful person in the world. You have to be so subtle. And cleverer than any Barrister. Anyone can be a Barrister. The Bar finals are a joke, you know. Solicitors’ finals,” she said, “are a marathon by comparison.”
“I believe so. So they always said. But it is so long ago.”
She thought: He is quite unaware of me. He is Methuselah. Why do I care? He is so mysterious. I hadn’t expected to be drawn to someone as old as this. Sad silence. He’s so old he’s almost gone, yet he’s sharp—sharper than Oliver. I like his eyes. I wish he’d open them again.
The striped canvas hammock had come from Harrods—a present from Oliver to his mother, last birthday, like the huge, navy-blue sun-umbrella worked by rope pulleys, as for a yacht, supposed to be supported by a dollop of concrete that the window-cleaner and the gardener and the Vicar together had not been able to budge from where the van-man had dropped it by the gate. Claire had begun to grow trailing plants over this base and the umbrella, unwrapped but in cobwebs, was still propped in a corner of the car-less garage. Today Oliver had made an effort and had fixed up the hammock, just before lunch. It hung inside an outer wooden cradle, rather like a horse-jump at a gymkhana. There were no trees in Claire’s garden and the hammock stood out in high display. Passers by along the avenue looked curiously at the old long person stretched out in it, fine nose pointed at the winter sky.
A rope hung beside the hammock ending in a baroque blue tassel.
“I could swing you if you like,” Vanessa suggested, wondering at herself. She had refused Filth’s offer of the hammock for herself as firmly as she always refused a seat from a man on the Underground. She often offered her own seat on the Underground to an older woman. Sometimes these older women refused, too, not feeling older. Great games are played on the Underground, she thought, the premier sport being that everyone avoids everyone else’s eyes. Oh, how happy I am to have enough to think about. Work to do. How pleased I am to have mastered the pleasure—never acknowledged—when scanned, leaned against, breathed upon in the Underground by a man. I’ve got rid of that.
“Do you mind being stuck up here in the hammock in full view of Saffron Walden, Eddie?”
They had called him Eddie. And sometimes Teddy. They had not properly introduced him. They behaved as if she must know him. “Shall I give you a swing with the rope?”
“You sound like Mr. Pierrepoint,” he said, without opening his eyes. “I don’t feel exposed. No, not at all, thank you. No, I don’t need to be rocked.”
“Who is Mr. Pierrepoint?”
“I’m glad you can’t remember. He was the hangman. His last hanging was of a woman, Ruth Ellis, who shot her unfaithful lover a few weeks after losing his baby and whilst her mind was disturbed.”
“Oh yes, well, of course, I know about that. They buried her in quick-lime at Wormwood Scrubs prison, didn’t they?”
“They did. Before you were born, but not long before, I think.”
“I think,” she said, pouring tea through Claire’s Edwardian tea-strainer, “we have to forgive history a very great deal.”
“I think,” he said, “that we should forgive history almost nothing.
“I met the government hangman of Hong Kong,” he said soon, a breeze over the dahlias, a breeze over the lake, the hammock gently moving. Hot, hot November. “Had a long talk with him. An Englishman. Not a bad man. Not at all sadistic. Just unimaginative and conformist. Common, ugly English man.