Old Filth - Jane Gardam [83]
Now he was left alone.
The odd thing, said the speck of the rational in Eddie within him—he guarded it like his life—the odd thing is that I did once have an address book. Alice gave it to me. In the kitchen. Leather. Small. Red. Someone had given it to her, but, she said, “I don’t need it. I never had any addresses to write to.” One day, at the billet in Londonderry, Eddie had written in it, for comfort, all the addresses he knew. School. Oxford, the Ingoldbys (hopelessly), Sir, Auntie May, one or two schoolfriends even though he’d never write to them. Not Les Girls. Not the buttermilk girl. As his temperature soared now he began to wonder if he’d ever again find the addresses of his cousins. If the old address in Kotakinakulu would ever find his father. He had had no address for Loss. By now there was probably no Loss to write to.
Then he remembered that he had not seen his address book for a very long time. He felt about in his bag and it was not there and he knew, without any question, that Loss had stolen it. God knows why, except he was a natural crook. A delinquent. The bastard. Vanished, and with my watch. And no Loss. No loss. But such a monstrous act! Cutting Eddie off from every hope of contact.
Loss’s defection was the metaphor for Eddie’s life. It was Eddie’s fate always to be left. Always to be left and forgotten. Everyone gone, now. Out of his reach. For the first time, Eddie was utterly on his own.
He had his passport—yes, he felt that in the bag. He had Pat’s brush. He had Miss Robertson’s pouch. He felt fat beads inside it and pulled them out. A great string of pearls. Thank goodness Loss wasn’t there. They’d be gone in five minutes. Lightness almost mirth filled Eddie as the ship, charmed, blessed, unhindered, sailed slowly, slowly, up the Irish Sea and such as could gathered at the rail and gazed unbelieving at the peaceful green Welsh hills. Over the Styx, thought Eddie. Crossing the bar.
Aeons passed and Eddie, wrapped in blankets, shaking with fever but ice-cold, a structure of bones, was dumped on a stretcher and carried through customs unhindered, and ashore. At the ambulance station in his fever he looked for a car like a bread-bin but found instead a man playing with a yo-yo. He was familiar. He was old Oils, his Housemaster. Standing alongside him was Isobel Ingoldby.
Diagonally falling drops alighting on the windowpanes of Gloucestershire, and Old Filth awoke in the new, ever-silent hotel to see a girl smiling down at him, holding a tray of tea. He thought: Oh God—the buttermilk girl! Then, seeing the sweet open smile, thought: No.
And I am an old man, he thought.
“I am an old man,” he said.
“I’ve brought you a cup of tea. Is it true you were a soldier here, sir?”
It took him some time to remember where he was. Near Badminton.
“I was stationed at Badminton,” he said. “In the War.”
“My gran was at Badminton then. In the War. Queen Mary was here but we all kept it quiet. They said nobody would want to kidnap her but my gran said—she was parlour maid at the house—that she had three bags ready packed to take her to America. In the attics.”
“That was probably true. Though she might not have gone herself.”
“One was full of jewels.”
“Oh, I’m sure that was true. That would have gone into safety.”
“Did you know her, sir?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Is it true she was always cutting down trees?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Especially ivy. She hated ivy. She had half a platoon chopping down ivy. They say the first year she didn’t realise it would grow back again.
“I expect it was the way she’d been brought up,” said the girl. “My gran says she was kept in a band-box as a girl. Never opened her mouth—well, her mother never stopped talking—and what a bottom! Her mother’s, that is. Lovely woman. Real old England, her mother. Queen Mary was brought up in Teck, which is German, and she didn’t like Germans. My gran said she’d been brought up to gravel paths and never seen a field of hay. And my gran says it was all psychological, the ivy.”