Old Filth - Jane Gardam [82]
(Anything better than creeping home to shame and emptiness.)
“I might give it a try. Thank you.”
They swooped from the hill to the plain. Through the rain he saw the great house again, the broad quiet streets of the village, the stretch of woodland, the wide fields.
“Terrible weather for sight-seeing,” said the taxi man. “I’ll take you right home when the time comes, if you like. I’ll just look in here and see if there’s a room. It’ll cost you, mind.”
Exhausted, he sat in the foyer of the new hotel which was calm and gracious. Someone brought him a stool for his foot. Someone else said they were going to get a doctor. The rain eased and Filth was brought lunch on a tray alone in the lounge. He was tired, humiliated and—something else—what? Good God! frightened. I have been frightened! He sank into himself, dozed, was helped to a big ground-floor bedroom with a view across the parkland, and very cautiously, a snip at a time, allowed himself the past.
“Would you very kindly put my name and address in your address book, young man?” said the ragged skeleton beside him on the boat-deck as they left Cadiz. “I fully intend to reach Home, but, if not, I would like to be sure that Vera knows what happened to me. That’s to say, of course, if she gets Home herself, which I doubt. She was always rather feeble without me to get her anywhere. I am Miss Robertson. Miss Meg. She is Miss Vera. We’re daughters of the late Colonel Robertson. Teachers. This is our only address in England now. It belongs to some old chums from school who’ve always paid us a little rent. I hope we’ll get on together now that I shall have to live with them. Well, school’s a long time ago, you know.”
Her skin was pale and glazed with fever and her eyes far too bright. Her wooden crutches lay beside her and she tried all the time to clutch their handles. “Have you a pen, young man? Turn to ‘R’ in your address book.” Eddie lay immobile. Someone crept up to Miss Robertson and wiped her face with a cloth. Other people muttered together that she should have been detained at Cadiz. She had been formidably against it, even in fever. She had to get Home.
“If any of us gets Home,” she had said. “I hear that there’s one ship a day being sunk just now in the Channel.”
As it grew dark, one night, he heard Miss Robertson whisper, “Look in my little bag. There’s some trinkets. Take them, young man, and give them to your sweetheart.” The little bag lay pushed up under the life-boat blocks and the crutches near it. There was a cold clean breeze. When daylight came, where Miss Robertson had been there was a stain.
The smell beneath the life-boat where she had lain had gone too.
She had been complaining of the rotting smell on the ship. Eddie had not cared about it, hardly noticed. “Gangrene,” he heard someone say. “The stink was from herself. The boy don’t look much better. He’s filth all through.”
A crewman went away for a bucket of water and scrubbing brush, and Eddie, eyes closed, stretched to touch Miss Robertson’s walking aids and found his hand on the bag. He took it and pushed it beneath him, later found a corner for it in his own suitcase with his father’s photograph and Pat Ingoldby’s clothes-brush. Through his headache and fever, and through the now endless vomiting, he found himself thinking that he was becoming like Loss. A scavenger. Survival. Take anything. Old lady. Couldn’t see her own doom. Her isolation. Talking about address books.
The ship sailed on like some faery invisible barge. The sea shone, still and blue. No planes. No U-Boats. Other craft nowhere near. Way out, towards the West, fishing boats. A wonderful calmness.
A kind of whisper went round at last among the humped and now many fewer passengers; a sibilant, urgent word. “Yes. Yes, it is. It’s land. Yes. Yes. It is.”
And cold now. Eddie was unwrapped first from his life-jacket then put inside a tarpaulin. Someone washed his face as he vomited. Cleaned