Old Filth - Jane Gardam [95]
Bloody memory.
“I was very happy round here, you know, in the War,” he said to a passing Sikh. “I was a friend of Queen Mary. She remembered my birthday. She sent me chocolate.”
“Who’s Queen Mary?” asked the Sikh in an Estuary accent. “The Queen Mum?”
“While I lived here in Gloucestershire,” said drowsing Filth, “I rather buried my head.”
“Bury it now,” said the Sikh, “and get to sleep.”
“Before I go,” said Filth, “I really do want to see a priest.”
But when they found him a priest next day, he was feeling much better, was loosed from his bonds, was sent to a terrible place to wash, was given cornflakes and a type of meat which smelled of onions and was laced with a fluid called “brown sauce,” and was told that he would later on be going home.
Moreover, the priest, when he arrived, was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and Filth did not believe in him. He would have preferred a female to this one, and that was saying something. His confession would have to be postponed. He sat and read the Daily Telegraph in a small, contained cubicle, his carrier bag at his feet. He sat there all morning, and at some point dozed off, thinking of other occasions in his life of total reversion, of failure.
After six months he had been posted away from Badminton. The War had changed. We were now on the winning side and there was a new jauntiness. Queen Mary’s staff unpacked her three suitcases in the attics and he was sent to the War Office on the mistaken premise that he was a linguist and well-connected. He experienced the Mall on VE Day and was released to Oxford much more quickly than his War record deserved. He took a First in Law after only two years and was called to the Bar and set about the much harder matter of finding a seat in somebody’s Chambers.
It was the winter still talked of, half a century on: 1947.
Memory and desire, he thought.
CHAMBERS
The January rain of 1947 slopped down upon dilapidated Lincoln’s Inn Fields, puckering the stagnant surfaces of the static-water tanks implanted in its grass. Eddie Feathers observed it from the passage in a small set of undistinguished Chambers in New Square. He kept the door open between the passage and the Senior Barrister’s empty room on the front of the building, otherwise he had no view except the dustbins at the back. On days like this and on days of smog which were getting more frequent though coal was rationed to a bag a week, he could look through the door to what he might look forward to if the old fellow stopped coming in altogether. A good old room with magnificent carved Elizabethan fireplace and a large portrait of the Silk’s unhappy-looking wife: the sort of wartime bridal face that wished it had waited.
In an adjoining, equally historic, equally dusty room but lacking an uxorial photograph sat the only other member of Chambers, usually asleep. These rooms had been built as legal Chambers hundreds of years ago and had housed a multitude of lawyers from before the Commonwealth. Wigs in these rooms had been worn naturally, like hats. Then even hats around Chambers had gone—bowler hats had also just about disappeared by 1947, though Eddie Feathers had bought one for five excessive pounds, and it hung, laughably, on a hook inside the Chambers’ street door.
The passage was bitterly cold. There were no carpets, no curtaining, a small spluttering heater. He sat before a splintered table where transcripts of a dispute stood two feet high, almost indecipherable blueprints concerning the installation of new water-closets throughout a bombed government building, his annotation of which went down at about a sixteenth of an inch per hour. Sir, his school, his college, Queen Mary, all pointed stern fingers at Eddie. Habit dictated. There had been black hours before. Diligence gets you through. Keep going. Oh God why?
Gloucestershire and Oxford kept breaking in on him. Christ Church meadow, the bells stumbling and tumbling, calling down the High. The wallflowers—the smell of the velvet wallflowers outside his set of rooms. The emptiness of his Quad, returning