Old Filth - Jane Gardam [94]
“Sir Edward’s had a heart attack,” she said, returning to the asparagus bed. “I said last week it was blood-pressure, the way he was behaving.”
“What? Where?” said Garbutt.
“Well, around his heart.”
“Where was the call from?”
“I didn’t ask.”
Garbutt blundered her out of the way, ran through her French doors and across her pastel Chinese carpet, dialled 1471, then pressed three.
“He’s in hospital,” said the hotel. “The ambulance came very quickly. We were surprised. He’d been so much better. He’d been out in the afternoon and eaten an excellent dinner.”
“Had he been ill already, then?”
“Yes, he arrived with a sprained ankle. Do you want the name of the hospital? I hope you will excuse us asking but will there be funds to pay his account?”
“Funds have never been a trouble to him.”
“Thank you. We were beginning to grow very fond of him.”
“People do,” said Garbutt, and phoned Kate, and then his wife.
Garbutt found Filth, looped up to drips and scans, trying to shut out the quack of the television sets and the clatter of the public ward where male and female lay alongside each other in various stages of ill health. Like Pompeii.
It was an old hospital. The windows were too high to see anything except the wires and concrete of unexciting buildings and the sky. The light was not the pearly light of yesterday in the meadows of Badminton, which Filth was trying to remember and decide when and where it had been and whom he had been with. Memory, he thought. Memory. My memory has always been so reliable. Perhaps too reliable. It has never spared me. Memory and desire, he thought. Who said that? Without memory and desire life is pointless? I long ago lost any sort of desire. Now memory.
Suddenly he knew that this was what had been the matter with him for years. He had lost desire. Not sexual desire, that had been a poor part of his nature always. He had been furtive about the poverty of his sexual past. Dear Betty—she had been very undemanding. He had never told her about the buttermilk business and had skimmed over Isobel Ingoldby. Whatever would the young make of him today? It seemed they were all like rabbits and started haphazardly as soon as they reached double figures. He found them repellent.
And homosexuals repellent, if he were honest. And divorce repellent. Blacks—here he was disturbed by a cluster of different coloured people surrounding his bed. These are not the black people of the Empire, he thought, and then realised that that was exactly what most of them were. “Any of you chaps Malays?” he asked. “Malaya’s my country. Malaysia now, of course. And Ceylon’s Sri Lanka, Lanka’s what my friend Loss called it, and he should know. It was full of his uncles. That’s what he said before he went down the trough. Bombed by the bloody Japanese, I expect. Oh, sorry.” The lead figure in the performance around his bed was Japanese. “Didn’t realise. It’s your West Country accent.”
“OK, grandpa,” said the Japanese. “Take it easy.”
Filth’s days passed. Various bits of equipment were detached from him. Once he thought that Garbutt was sitting at the end of the bed and gave a feeble wave. “Very sorry about this. How’s Mrs.-er? Very sorry to have upset Mrs.-er. Feeling better. I’d like to see a priest, though.” Then he slept, and woke in the night trying to ring a bell for a priest.
“It’s not Sunday,” said a nurse. “Or are you a Catholic? You’re getting better. Talk to them in the morning. Go to sleep, old gramps. Think positive.”
Times have been worse than this, he thought. Much worse.
It’s just there’s no chance of many more of them, of times of any sort, now. That’s absolutely rationally true, a serious, even beautiful equation. Life ends. You’re tired of it anyway. No memory. No desire. Yet you don’t want it to be over. Not