Old Filth - Jane Gardam [70]
The Queen’s Remembrancer: He must have gone.
The Purveyor of Seals and Ordinances: To get his hair cut?
QR: Possibly. Very great surprise to see him again.
PS&O: Looks well. Amazing physique still. Nothing ever been wrong with him.
QR: Nothing ever did go wrong for him.
PS&O: Nothing much ever happened to him. Except success.
QR: There’s talk of a rather mysterious War, you know. Didn’t fight.
PS&O: A conchie?
QR: Good God, no. Some crack-up. He had a stammer.
PS&O: Pretty brave to go on to the Bar then.
QR: Remarkable. He joined a good regiment. It’s in Who’s Who. The Gloucesters. He had something to do with the Royal family.
PS&O: Had he indeed!
QR: And there was something else. Someone gave him a push upstairs somewhere. Or out East. There’s always something a bit dicey about that circuit. A lot of people you can’t really know socially but you have to pretend to.
PS&O: Betty was very O.K. though. Don’t you think? Don’t you think? There was of course Veneering. Veneering and Betty. Aha!
QR: What do the likes of us know, creeping round the Woolsack at Home and round the Inns of Court?
PS&O: “What should they know of England
Who only England know.”
QR: Kipling. You know Kipling had a start like Filth? Torn from his family at five. Raj Orphan.
PS&O: Kipling didn’t do too badly either.
QR: Kipling had a crack-up.
PS&O: Did he stammer?
QR: He went blind. Half blind at seven. Hated the Empire, you know. Psychological blindness.
PS&O: Are you having coffee?
QR: No. I just came in looking for Filth. Just missed him.
PS&O: Did we imagine him?
QR: I expect he was having his last look round.
Exeunt. Room apparently empty.
Filth rises from the chair and takes a long last look at Mr. Attlee.
Filth: Have I the courage to write my Memoirs?
Attlee: Churchill had. But on the whole, better not. Keep your secrets.
THE WATCH
In that train of 1941, after the Oxford interview, Eddie had pushed the Times back into the hands of the man opposite, left the compartment and walked down the corridor where he stood holding tight the brass rail along the middle of the window. The train stopped very often, filled up. The corridor became crammed with people mostly silently enduring, shoulder to shoulder. Even so it was cold. Water from somewhere trickled about his feet. Troops started to climb in—maybe around Birmingham. These troops were morose and quiet. Still and silent. Everyone squashed up tighter. It grew dark. Only the blue pin-lights on all the death-mask faces.
And Eddie stood on.
At some point he left the train and waited for another one that would take him to the nearest station to High House, and there he jumped down upon an empty, late-night platform. After an unknown space of time he found that he was travelling in a newspaper-van that must have stopped to give him a lift. It dropped him outside the gates of the avenue which were closed and guarded by two sentries with rifles. He walked off down the lane, then doubled back through a hedge, then across in the darkness to the graceful iron railings of what he felt to be his home.
The house stood there with lightless, blindless windows and the dark glass flashed black. The place was empty. But there were army vehicles everywhere in the drive and a complex of army huts where the land began to drop away above the chimneys of the old carpet factory. Eddie walked round the resting, deserted house and met nobody. He began to try the familiar door handles: the side door from the passage into the garden with its dimpled brass knob; the door to the stables; the kitchens. All were locked. He grew bolder and stood beneath a bedroom window and called, “Mrs. Ingoldby? Is anyone there? It’s Eddie.” He rattled the door of the bothy where the gardener had lived. Nothing. No dog barked. In the garage, there was no old car, the car in which you had to put up an umbrella in the back seat when it rained.