Old Filth - Jane Gardam [98]
“I have no idea.”
“You and I and Babs.”
“What about us?”
“And Cumberledge?”
There was silence.
“Oh, long, long ago,” she said.
“But I need to tell someone, even so. What happened to your priest? The one in the church with all the marble babies?”
“Do you mean Father Tansy? I thought he was anathema to you.”
“Well, yes. He was. But I keep remembering him. Can you find him for me?”
“But you’re in Gloucestershire. And I hear you can’t walk and have had a suspected heart attack.”
“False alarm. Got over-excited reading the Gospels.”
“Say goodbye to her now, Sir Edward. We’ll bring you your lunch in the lounge. You still have to take care.”
“Goodbye, Claire. Thank you for ringing. I’ll ring again.”
The day wore on. He sat in remote reveries. They brought him tea.
Bloody good of them to have me back here, he thought. All thanks to Loss I can pay for it. Set me on my path. But I’ve worked for it myself, too. I’ve worked for my millions. Survived them too. Loss didn’t.
He began to doze and was woken by the nice girl and her grandmother with a bunch of asters. “You should keep off prawns,” said the grandmother. “After seventy you should keep off prawns. You never saw Queen Mary even look at a prawn.”
“It may have been the banana split,” said her granddaughter.
“I don’t eat bananas,” said Filth.
Next day came a letter from Claire in her trailing bright blue handwriting.
Dear Teddy,
It so happens that Father Tansy is coming to your part of the world to visit his Boys’ Club in Falmouth. Babs will be with him. It all seems prophetic. I have told them where you are.
As to the matter of our rotten childhood, old cousin, you should forget it. I have never let what we did trouble me, even in dreams. I had no difficulty with it at the time and I’ve never felt the need to speak about it since. Oliver, for instance, does not know, and neither did my late-lamented husband. What would now be called “The Authorities” spirited us all away so fast after the death that it didn’t get much into the papers. Now, it would have dominated the telly for a month.
D’you know that I met Cumberledge again? It was only a few years ago. As a matter of fact, it was the day you were staying with us, when Oliver took me to Cambridge for tea with some grandee from his old college, a Dean who’s still in residence. Someone who was kind to Oliver when he was up. Well, all the time we were in the old boy’s rooms I felt puzzled, as if I knew him. He seemed quite unaware of me. My surname has changed and it was three-quarters of a century on and Oliver had never mentioned that I’d been a Raj Orphan. Oliver told me his name on the way home and after you’d all gone I sat down here in High Light and wrote him a letter, hoping I wasn’t stirring up something best forgotten. We struck up a thoroughly boring correspondence.
I’m not sure whether I’m pleased or not that he never referred to the murder. Well yes, of course I’m sure. I was not pleased. I should have liked to hear what he thought we’d all been at. I often think, when I’m reading in the papers about a murder, that the murderer is the last person to be aware of the crime. Sometimes he is not aware of it for years, I’d guess. Well, you’ll know all about that. Murderers are the possessed.
I’m not saying there’s no such thing as guilt. And wickedness.
I’m saying there is confusion and derangement in the mature murderer. What is so interesting about our murder is that there was neither. No confusion. No derangement. We three—not Cumberledge—were absorbed in the process of handing over responsibility to the powers of darkness whom we had met as children, and who had met us. We were thoroughly engaged, us three. Still untamed. We were of the jungle.
Poor Babs—she’s probably the best of us—went mad. She’s maddish most of the time. But she’s still Babs. Ma Didds was cruellest of all to her. Stopped her singing. Gagged her mouth. Babs became castrated. Ugly in mind,