Old Filth - Jane Gardam [99]
You, dear Teddy, Ma Didds feared because of your height and strength and prodigious good looks. Oh, how unfair are our looks! Didds knew she could never make you ugly. She worked on your stammer. She was afraid of your silences. You were not like a child then. You are more of a child now. Betty came and stripped the years away from you in what looked like the perfect marriage. She never asked for more than you could give. Others gave her passion. You were a saint about Veneering. You were a wall of alabaster. You saved each other. You and Betty. I’d guess, neither of you ever spoke of it.
But nobody ever loved you like I did, Teddy.
Yet I was the coldest of us. I was the harshest. I was the actress. I was the little pretty one who never did wrong. I was the one who suggested the murder.
Cumberledge never made a decision in his quiet life (I don’t know how he got so high up in the Army before he was wafted into Cambridge). He was utterly passive—all his weeping and screaming as she approached him with the whip (I am writing down what I have never before even been able to think about). But something deep in him remained untouched by her. I bet he became amiable and soppy. A man always falling in love.
You, Teddy, were horribly touched by her. You became no good at love. I don’t think you ever had many friends at school. I’m the same, if I’m honest. I can’t love. I’m all charm. Babs needs love. Needs it as her daily bread. Will try for it anywhere. But she repels, the poor old thing. Doesn’t wash now—that’s a bad sign. It won’t help her with Father Tansy. She says she once had an affaire with Cumberledge. All fantasy.
D’you know, the one who needed love most was Ma Didds. All the hatred was love gone wrong. What did she ever get from old Pa Didds and all that chapel?
Not that as children we could have been expected to know, but I had an inkling when she took me on her smelly old lap and crooned over me and gave me buttered bread. I knew already where my bread was buttered. I’d been sent away younger than any of you, and my parents were faceless; but I was, and am, the toughest. I’m very glad I thought of the murder. I thoroughly enjoyed it. So don’t fret. It was you who struck the blow, dear Teddy, but they can’t hang you now. Love from Claire
He tore the letter up.
I am old at last, he thought. I should be cold too. But I am casting off the coldness of youth and putting on the maudlin armour of dotage. I am not a religious man. Claire does not shock me, as she would most people. Why do I want a priest? Rites? Ceremonies? I despise myself. It’s all superstition. Yet I know that I must tell someone that when I was eight years old I killed a woman in cold blood.
The West wind of the equinox bashed suddenly against the conservatory glass of the hotel lounge where Filth sat, now alone. Then the wind stopped and he slept. In his sleep he heard the steady beating of a drum, and started awake, thinking that it was his heart. They helped him back to his bedroom where the grandmother’s asters shone on the window-sill.
“I am so undeservedly lucky,” he said to the chambermaid later, beginning the repair of his damaged image. (Claire’s terrifying letter.) He smiled his lovely smile.
“Lucky in material things anyway,” he said when he was alone again, curtains closed, lying in the sweet dark. “Their kindness is only because they’ve found out that I’m rich. There’ll be no trouble with the bill.” Considering other people’s pragmatism, he found that Claire’s beastly letter receded.
But, dropping into sleep, a great face flooded across his dream landscape, filled the screen of his sleeping consciousness, loomed at him—disappeared. “Go away, Veneering,” Filth shouted after it. “I’m not ready to talk. Not yet.”
A few days later, Father Tansy turned up at the delectable hotel, with a woman in a wavy nylon skirt and grey nun’s headgear who turned out to be Babs.
Filth was in bed again. He had been advised to stay there for a