Old Filth - Jane Gardam [7]
Behind him in the hall he heard something like a chuckle.
“Who the hell is that? Hello?” (Had the fellow had two keys? Murdered you in your bed.)
“Edward, Edward, stop these fantasies! You are too old. You are no longer seven.” A man’s voice. Good God, I’m going senile. “Yes, Sir,” he said. “Kettle. Hot water bottle. Bath. I’m old.”
The phone rang.
“You back safely?” asked Veneering’s voice. “I thought I’d try the phone. We’re in touch again.”
“Oh. Thanks, Veneering. One o’clock tomorrow?”
“Yes. Would you like me to bring my chessmen?”
“Got some. Maybe next time.”
“Next time.”
So it wasn’t Veneering, he ruminated in the bath, idly watching his old greying pubic hair floating like fern on the delicious hot water. Steam filled the bathroom. He almost slept.
Better get out. Somehow. Or it’ll be all over.
He turned his lanky frame so that he was on all fours, facing the porcelain floor of the bath, balanced on his spread hands and his sharp knees (one of them none too excellent), and slithered his feet about to get some sort of purchase near the taps. Slowly the long length of him arose, feet squeaking a little. He pulled the plug out and watched the soapy water begin to drain, bubbling round his now rosy feet. He thought of another river. Black and brown babies splashing. A girl all warmth and laughter, his head against her thighs. The water gurgled away.
Getting more difficult. Must get a shower. Won’t have one of those bloody mats with suction pads, though. Won’t have what they call the Social Services. Veneering doesn’t, you can see. Mind, Veneering doesn’t look as if he has baths at all. Poor old bugger.
Wrapped in a white bath towel he padded about. Slippers, bath robe. Perfectly well. Take a little something to bed? No— eat it over the telly? Anchovy toast. Tea—enough whiskey. Ha!—blaze up, fire. Mustn’t drop off.
“Don’t drop off,” said a woman’s voice. “Don’t drop off the perch! Not yet.”
“Hey, hello, what? Betty?”
But again, nobody there.
Hope I’m not feverish.
“And I’m not being a fool,” he shouted to the door of Betty’s old bedroom and shut his own bedroom door behind him.
Perfectly in charge.
The bed was warm, and his own. Extraordinary really, the idea of sharing a bed. Bourgeois. Something Betty and I never talked about.
“This is not the time of frenzy,” he heard himself say out loud as the images of the day merged into dreams. He was clinging to someone on a boat-deck and the sea a silver skin. There was screaming but it was somewhere else and hardly woke him. “We dealt with all that,” he said, “in what they call my long, untroubled and uneventful life.”
“Sleep, Filth,” said a voice. “Nobody knew you like I did.”
Which of them said that? he wondered.
KOTAKINAKULU
Yes, yes, yes,” said Auntie May of the Baptist Mission, striding up the gangplank. “Now then, here we are. Excellent.”
The motor launch, now and then trying its engine to see whether it would be safe to let it die, stirred the black water around it, rocked and snorted. All across the wide river, small waves slapped and tipped. Heat seemed to drip from the trees like oil. It was summer, the monsoon coming, and when it did the river traffic would die. This was why they were getting the baby home at only one week old. Otherwise he would have been stranded in the Port where he had gone to be born. Here they were, safely home, but it had been a near thing. A two-day journey and Auntie May, after she had seen him safely to his father’s house, would have to make it back again herself, alone and at once.
On the journey out to the Port not much more than a week ago the baby not yet born had travelled the river in a native boat with his mother and the Malay woman who was now climbing the grass ladder to the landing stage, sorrowful and frightened, behind Auntie May. She had carried her own baby for she was the wet nurse who had been taken to Mrs. Feathers’s confinement in case of an emergency should Mrs. Feathers have been unable to feed the child herself.
Nobody had expected Mrs. Feathers