Last Friends

CHAPTER 1

The Titans were gone. They had clashed their last. Sir Edward Feathers, affectionately known as Old Filth (Failed in London, Try Hong Kong) and Sir Terence Veneering, the two greatest exponents of English and International Law in the engineering and construction industry and the current experts upon the Ethics of Pollution, were dead. Their well-worn armour had fallen from them with barely a clatter and the quiet Dorset village to which they had retired within a very few years of each other (accidentally, for they had hated each other for over fifty years) mourned their passing and wondered who would be distinguished enough to buy their houses.

How they had hated! For over half a century they had been fetching up all over the world eye-ball to eye-ball, Hector and Achilles, usually on battlefields far from home, championing or rubbishing, depending on the client, great broken bridges, mouldering reservoirs, wild crumbling new roads across mountain ranges, sewage-works, wind farms, ocean barrages and the leaking swimming pools of moguls. That they had in old age finished up by buying houses next door to each other in a village where there was absolutely nothing to do must have been the result of something the lolling gods had set up one drab day on Olympus to give the legal world a laugh.

And the laugh had been uneasy because it had been said for years — well, everyone knew — that Edward Feathers’ dead wife, Betty, had been the lover of Sir Terry. Or maybe not exactly the lover. But something. There had been something between them. Well, there had been love.

Elizabeth — Betty — Feathers had died some years before the arrival of Sir Terry next-door.

Her husband, Old Filth, Sir Edward, the great crag of a man seated above her on the patio pretending to shoot rooks with his walking-stick, a gin and tonic at his elbow, had, quite simply, broken his heart.

Birds and beasts were important to Old Filth. Donkeys’ years ago his prep-school headmaster had taught him about birds. It was birds and the language of the natural world and the headmaster whose name was briefly ‘Sir’, who had cured him of his awful child-hood stammer and enabled him to become an advocate.

His house, Dexters, lay in a long narrow dell off the village hill, bird-haunted and surrounded by trees. Beyond his gate, up the same turn-off and out of sight, Veneering’s house stood at the top of the view. His taller, darker trees hung over the lane but the rooks ignored them. ‘Rooks,’ thought Old Filth, ‘choose their friends. They will only abandon a friend if they have fore-knowledge of disaster.’ Each night before sleep and each morning Filth lay in his bed straight as a sentry, striped Chilprufe pyjamas neatly buttoned, handkerchief in breast pocket carefully folded, and listened to the vigorous clamour of the rooks and was comforted. So long as he could hear their passionate disputations he would never miss his life at the Commercial Bar.

He did rather wish they had been cleaner birds. Their nests were old and huge. Ramshackle and filthy. Filth himself was ostentatiously clean. His finger nails and toe nails were pearly (chiropodist to the house every sixth week: twenty-five pounds a time) his hair still not grey but curly, autumnal bronze. His complexion shone and was scarcely lined. He smelled of Wrights coal-tar soap — rather excitingly — a commodity beginning to be rare in many parts of the country. ‘He must have had something to hide,’ said young barristers. ‘Something nasty in his wood-shed.’ ‘What, Old Filth!’ they cried, ‘Impossible!’ They were of course wrong. Eddie Feathers Q.C. had as much to hide as everybody else.

But whatever it was it would have nothing to do with money. He never mentioned the stuff. He was a gentleman to the end. There must have been buckets of it somewhere. Bucket upon bucket upon bucket, thanks to the long, long international practice. And he spent nothing, or nothing much. Maybe a bit more than the mysterious Veneering next door. He was not a vain man. He strode about the lanes in expensive tweeds, but they were very old. Not much fun, but never pompous. If he ever brooded upon his well-organised millions, managed by impeccable brokers, he didn’t think about them much. He joked about them occasionally. ‘Oh yes, I have “held the gorgeous East in fee,”’ he would say, ‘Ha-ha,’ and quoting Sir, his headmaster. He himself never went to the theatre or read poetry, for he wept too easily.

After a time a lethargy had fallen upon Feathers. He lost the energy even to think about moving house. And maybe the old enemy up the slope had begun to feel the same. They never met. If occasionally they found themselves passing one another at a distance during an afternoon walk in the lanes, each looked away.

Then, after a year or so, something must have happened. It was never discussed even in the village shop but there were some astonishing sightings, sounds of old-English accents, staccato in the blue-bell woods. It happened over a snow-bound Christmas. Before long it was reported that the two old buffers were playing chess together on Thursdays. And when Terry Veneering died during a ridiculous jaunt — foot in a hole on a cliff-top on the island of Malta and then thrombosis — Edward Feathers said, ‘Silly old fool. Far too old for that sort of thing. I told him so,’ but was surprised how much he missed him.

Yet he refused to attend Veneering’s memorial service at Temple Church in London. There would have been comment and Betty’s name bandied about. For all his Olympian manner Old Filth was not histrionic. Never. He stayed alone at home that day making notes on the new edition of Hudson on Building Contracts that he had been (flatteringly considering his age) asked to re-edit some years before. He had a whisky and a slice of ham for his supper and listened to the News. When he heard the returning cars of the village mourners passing the end of his lane from Tisbury station he sensed disapproval at his absence like a wet cloth across his face; and turned a page.

Nobody came to see him that evening, not even sexy old Chloe who was never off his doorstep with shepherd’s pies: not his gardener or his cleaning lady who had travelled to the memorial service to London and back together in the gardener’s pick-up. Not Dulcie who lived nearby on Privilege Hill and was just about his oldest friend, the widow of an endearing old Hong Kong judge dead years ago and much lamented. Dulcie was a tiny, rather stupid woman, and grande dame of the village. ‘Let them think what they like,’ said Old Filth into his double malt. ‘I am past all these frivolities.’

But the next frivolity was to be his own, for the following Christmas he took himself off alone to the place of his birth, which he still called The Malay States, and died as he stepped off the plane.

CHAPTER 2

And so, on a cold morning in March the Dorset village of St. Ague was off to its second memorial service within a few months, first for Veneering, second for Filth, off to Temple Church again, waiting for the London train on Tisbury station. In prime positions were a group of three and a group of four all sombrely and correctly dressed but standing at different ends of the platform because although they were neighbours they were not yet exactly friends.

The group of four had recently bought Veneering’s house, invisible from the road but known for its brashness and flamboyance and ugliness like its old owner and, like its old owner, keeping out of sight. They were father, mother, son and daughter, most ordinary people it was said, though it was vaguely thought that the father was some sort of intellectual.

Waiting at the front end of the train was the elder of the village: Old Dulcie the widow, with her daughter Susan and her twelve year old grandson Herman, an American child, serious and very free with his opinions. Dulcie was half his size, a tiny woman in grey moleskin and a hat made of what could have been the feathers of the village rooks. It was a hat bought forty years ago in Bond Street for the Queen’s birthday in Dar-es-Salaam where Dulcie’s husband had been an easy-going and contented judge even at a hanging.

Susan, Dulcie’s stocky daughter, was a glum person, married to an invisible husband who seldom stirred from Boston, Massachusetts. Granny, mother and son were about to travel first-class in reserved seats.

The group of four, who had never reserved a seat for anything in their lives, were stamping noisily about waiting to fight their way into the last carriage, quite ready to stand all the way to Waterloo among the people who’d been down to Weymouth for the bank holiday and would be drunk or drugged or singing and drinking smoothies, some of the tattooed young men wearing dresses. These old Dulcie would somehow be spared. She had a heart-murmur.

The group of three settled themselves in first-class. Susan began to demolish the Daily Telegraph crossword, flung it from her completed within minutes and said ‘I don’t know why we’re going. We’re hardly over Veneering’s.’

‘Oh, I am,’ said Dulcie, ‘I quite enjoyed it.’

‘It’s not good for you, Ma. All this death. At your age.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Dulcie, ‘It keeps people in touch.’

‘I’m not keen on touching people.’

‘I know dear,’ said Dulcie looking at her grandson and wondering how ever he had come into the world.

‘I don’t suppose there’ll be anyone there we’ll even remember, you know. Filth was much older than you. You married from the school-room.’

‘Did I? Good gracious,’ said Dulcie.

‘Ma,’ said Susan and amazingly touched her mother’s hand, ‘You mustn’t be upset if there’s nobody much there. At his age. Veneering was younger.’

* * *

But surprisingly the church was full. There were young people there — whoever were they? — and people who didn’t look at all like lawyers. Groups seemed to be arranging themselves in tribes, nodding and smiling at each other. Some stared with polite surprise — some with distaste. There was a dwarf. Well — of course. He’d been Filth’s instructing solicitor for decades — but surely he was dead? Here he was, legs stuck out in front of him, face creased like an old nut, vast brown felt hat on his knee and sitting in one of the lateral seats reserved for Benches only: and refusing to move. The intellectual family man whispered to his wife that the dwarf was a celebrity, to tell the children to look at him. ‘Must be a hundred. They will tell their grandchildren. Said to have been dead ten times over. Had some sort of power over Filth.’ The two children looked unimpressed and the little girl asked if the Queen would be coming.

There was a pew full of generations of a family with the queer pigmentation of expats. Britons — a pale cheese-colour, like Wensleydale. There was a row of Straits Chinese and some Japanese who were being reprimanded about their mobile phones. There was a huge sad man rambling about at the back of the church near the medieval knights who lay with broken swords and noses. ‘Barristers?’ asked the children but the intellectual man wasn’t sure. The old man was silently refusing to be moved to a more distinguished seat, it having been discovered that he’d once been a Vice Chancellor.

There was Old Filth’s gardener and cleaning lady, who had parked the pick-up in the Temple this time round and had just finished a slap-up lunch at the Cheshire Cheese in The Strand. And there was a very, very old, tall woman, just arriving, sliding in among the Orientals, in a long silk coat — pale rose-pink — as the choir and organ set-to on the opening hymn.

‘I’ll bet that was his mistress,’ said the intellectual.

‘More likely it’s a ghost,’ said his wife.

And then they all began to sing, ‘I vow to thee my country’ which, for Old Filth, born on the Black River in the jungles of Malaysia, wrapped in the arms of a childish ayah, rocked by the night sounds of water and trees and invisible creatures and watched over by different gods, had never been England anyway.

CHAPTER 3

After the service old Dulcie found that she didn’t want to stay long at the gathering in the Parliament Chamber across Temple yard. Talk had broken into chorus as they all streamed out. Conversation swelled. The dwarf was being waved off in a splendid car, tossing his hat to the crowd like a hero. Streams of guests were passing up the steps of Inner Temple hall and towards the champagne. Dulcie clutched Susan’s arm, then, inside the Chamber, watched people looking uncertainly at each other before plunging. She watched them watching each other furtively from a distance. She examined — and recognised — the degrees of enthusiasm as they asked a name. She saw all the things that had made her worried lately. So much going on that she seemed to be seeing for the first time, or analysing for the first time though she knew that it was everyday, as habitual as looking at the clock or holding out a hand. Yet whatever did it mean?

She was sure that she knew any number of the looming, talkative, exclaiming faces if she could only brush away the threads and lines that now veiled them. And the curious papery, dried-out skin! ‘I’m afraid it was all the cigarettes,’ she said to someone passing by in pale pink silk. The woman immediately melted off-stage. Over in a corner rowdy people seemed to be passing around the dwarf’s hat and a cheer went up. ‘It is like a saloon,’ she said. She moved towards the lovely long windows, hearing everywhere half-familiar voices. And names of old friends lamented for being long-gone.

But they were not long gone to her. Oh, never! Since school-days, and just like her mother, Dulcie had kept all her address books and birthday books and a tattered pre-war autograph book. Some of the names, of course, were hazy on the page. Some were firmly crossed out by Susan. (‘But there were always Vansittarts at Wingfield. Susan, do not cross that out. I’ll be sending a Christmas card.’) I must learn this e-mail, she thought, tomorrow. ‘Susan — could we go home?’

Susan fetched her mother’s coat. Naturally Dulcie had kept her hat on. It made for a pleasant, feathery shadow but she had a wish that she were of this generation who would have left a hat in the cloakroom and shown that she wasn’t going thin on top like most of them; but she didn’t quite dare. Her fur coat was expensive and light as wool and smelled of evening-in-Paris, setting the odd old nostril quivering, as she passed.

A taxi had been called for Waterloo Station and the train home and Herman was being hunted down. Large and grave, the boy stood looking towards the Thames across the Temple gardens, ‘Where,’ he told his grandmother, ‘as I guess you know they organised the Wars of the Roses.’

‘Such lovely lime-juice,’ said Dulcie, ‘and how we missed it in the War.’

Herman glowered, saying that clearly only Americans were historians now.

‘They have so little of it to learn,’ said Dulcie.

‘Romantic vista?’ asked the ex-Vice Chancellor, plodding by. ‘Hullo Dulcie. I am Cumberledge. Eddie and I were lads together in Wales.’

‘Magnificent,’ said Dulcie. ‘They call it Cumbria now. So affected. Herman darling, I do think it’s time to go.’

‘The Thames once stank so much they had to move out of The House of Commons,’ said Herman.

‘Quite a stink there sometimes now,’ said a new Queen’s Counsel going by with tipping wine glass.

‘I think you should qualify that,’ said Herman, but the Silk had faded away. ‘Granny, nobody’s talking to me.’

‘Why should they?’

‘And there’s no music.’

‘Well, I don’t think Old Filth was — big — on music, darling.’

‘Veneering was. I liked Mr. Veneering better anyway.’

‘So you always say,’ said his mother. ‘I don’t know how you knew anything about him. And he was Sir Terence. Terry Veneering.’

‘Gran, I was nine. He was at your house. His hair was like threads and queer yellow. He played The Blues on your piano. Gran, you must remember. There was an awful man there, too, called Winston Smith or something. Like 1984. I hope the Winston Smith one’s dead like most of these here. Why’s Mr. Veneering dead? He noticed me. I’ll bet he was an American. They never forget you, Americans. Mr. Feathers’ (‘Sir Edward,’ said Dulcie) ‘never had a clue who I was.’

‘Taxi now, Herman. Stop talking.’

A little old man seemed to be accompanying them as they left the party.

They had seen him in the church with a second-class railway ticket sticking up from his breast pocket.

When they climbed in to their waiting taxi he climbed in with them. ‘Dulcie,’ he said, ‘I am Fiscal-Smith.’

The name, the face had been at the rim of Dulcie’s perception all day, like the faint trail of light from a dead planet. Fiscal-Smith!

‘But,’ she said. ‘You told me you were never coming to London again after Veneering’s party. I mean Memorial. Don’t you live somewhere quite north?’

‘Good early train. Darlington,’ he said. ‘My ghillie drove me down from The Hall. Two hours King’s Cross. Excellent.’

‘What’s a ghillie?’ asked Herman.

‘You know, Dulcie, that I never miss a memorial service. I wouldn’t come down for anything else. Well, perhaps for an Investiture—. And you’ll remember, I think, that I was Old Filth’s best man. In Hong Kong. You were there. With Willie.’

‘Yes,’ said Dulcie — in time — her eyes glazing, remembering with terrible clarity that Veneering of course was not present. Not in the flesh.

Fiscal-Smith was never exactly one of us, she thought. No-one knows a thing about him now. Jumped up from nowhere. Like Veneering. On the make all his life. In a minute he’s going to ask to come back to Dorset with us for a free bed-and-breakfast. He’ll be asking me to marry him next.

‘I’m nearly eighty-three,’ she said, confusing him.

He took his cheap-day second-class rail ticket from his pocket and read it through. ‘I was just thinking,’ he said, ‘I might come back with you to Dorset? Stay a few nights? Old Times? Talk about Willy? Maybe a week? Or two? Possiblity?’

In the train he sat down at once in Herman’s reserved seat. ‘That,’ said Herman, ‘is not legal.’

‘Justice,’ said Fiscal-Smith, ‘has nothing to do with Law.’

‘Well you’ll have to help me to get Mother out,’ said Susan. ‘Tisbury has a big drop.’

‘I wouldn’t mind a big drop now,’ said Fiscal-Smith, ‘or even a small one. Will there be a trolley?’

* * *

There was not. The journey was slow. Fiscal-Smith had trouble with the ticket inspector, who was slow to admit that you have a right to a first-class seat with only the return half of a Basic, Fun-day Special to another part of the country. Fiscal-Smith won the case, as he had been known to do before, through relentless wearing down of the defence, who went shakily off through the rattletrap doors. ‘Ridiculous man. Quite untrained,’ said Fiscal-Smith.

The train stopped at last at Tisbury, waiting in the wings for the down-line train to hurtle by. ‘Excellent management,’ said Fiscal-Smith as they drew up on the platform and the usual Titanic-style evacuation took place from its eccentric height, passengers leaping into the air and hoping to be caught. ‘Very dangerous,’ said Fiscal-Smith. ‘Very well-known hazard this line. “Every man for himself”,’ and then completely disappeared.

Dulcie and Susan were rescued by the intellectual family man who came running up the platform to take Dulcie in his arms and lift her down.

‘How well you can run,’ she said to him. ‘Your legs are as long as dear Edward’s. An English gentleman could always be identified by his long legs you know, once. Though in old age they all became rather floppy in the shanks.’ Seeing suddenly Old Filth’s rotting remains in the English cemetery in Dacca and nobody to put flowers on them, her pale eyes filled with tears. Everyone gone now, she thought. Nobody left.

‘Come on back with us,’ said the family man, ‘It’s a foul night. I’ll drop you at home. We have a car rug,’ but she said, ‘No, we’d better stay together. But you can have Fiscal-Smith,’ she added, which he seemed not to hear. Fiscal-Smith had already found Susan’s old Morris Traveller in the car park and was fussing round it.

‘Well, keep our lights in view,’ called the family man, who was at once invisible through the murk and lashing rain.

As Susan drove carefully along behind, they all fell silent as they passed Old Filth’s empty house, in its hollow. Dulcie didn’t peer down at it, thinking of all his happy years, his steady friendship and noble soul. What Fiscal-Smith was thinking it was hard to say. The car swished through lakes of rain in the road, the deluge and the dark. All looked straight ahead.

* * *

They began to speak again only as they reached Privilege House where in minutes lights blazed, central heating and hot water were turned up higher, soup, bread and cheese appeared and the telly was switched on for the News. The smell of fat, navy-blue hyacinths in bowls set heads spinning and the polished blackness of the windows before the curtains were drawn across showed that the wet and starless world had passed into infinite space. Dulcie thought again about the last scene of the last act.

‘Why were all the lights on in his house?’ asked Herman.

‘Whose house? Filth’s?’ said Susan. ‘They weren’t. ‘It’s been locked up since Christmas. Chains on the gates.’

‘Didn’t notice the gates,’ said Herman, ‘but the lights were on all over it. In every room. Shining like always. But there seemed to be more than usual. Every window blazing.’

‘I expect it has caught fire,’ said Fiscal-Smith, searching out Dulcie’s drinks cupboard, as old friends are permitted to do.

CHAPTER 4

The next morning Dulcie awoke in her comfortable foam-lined bed with a sense of unrest. Her window was open in the English tradition, two inches at the top for the circulation of refreshing night air (how they had dreamed of it in all their years in Hong Kong) long before the European central-heating. In their native English bedrooms Dulcie and Willy had always eschewed central-heating as working-class.

Outside was country silence except for the clatter of an occasional wooden-looking leaf from the Magnolia Grandiflora hitting the stone terrace. Her watch said 5 A.M. Excellent! She was in time for Prayer for the Day on faithful BBC four, which she still called the Home Service.

Where was she? Was it today they had to go to London to dear Eddie’s thing? No, no. They’d done that. Flames, she thought, Flames. Ashes to ashes—, and drifted off to sleep again.

* * *

Quite soon she woke once more, the flames retreating. She trotted downstairs in slippers and her old dressing-gown of lilac silk, feeling a sort of twitch in a back molar. Oh dear. Time for a check-up. So expensive. Own teeth every one of them. Thanks to Nannie. A full five minutes brushing morning and night. More than the teeth at yesterday’s party—. Oh, the awful rictus grins! And the bridges! You could see them. Queen Elizabeth the first who never smiled. The old Queen Mother who never stopped, and should have done. Early-morning tea.

Willy had always made the early-morning tea. Not in Hong Kong, of course. There had always been a slender maid with a tray, smiling. They thought, the Chinese and the Americans, that it was disgusting. Called it ‘bed-tea’. Oh Willy! She tried not to think of Willy in case once again she found that she had forgotten what he had looked like. Ah — all well. Here he came on the stairs, his fastidious feet, balancing tea-cups and deeply thinking. ‘Oh, Willy! So many years! I haven’t really forgotten what you looked like. “Pastry Willy”—but you grew quite weather beaten after we came home. It’s just, sometimes lately that you’ve grown hazy. Doesn’t matter. Changes nothing. I wish we could have a good talk Willy, about money. There doesn’t seem to be much of it. I always put the Bank letters in your desk. Very silly of me. I don’t open many of them.’

He was watching her up by the kitchen ceiling, very kindly, but noncommittally. No need ever to discuss the big things. He knew she was — well — superficial. Hopeless at school. Men love that, Nannie had said. But shrewd, she thought. Oh, yes. I’m shrewd. An unshakable belief in the Church of England and God’s mercy, and Duty and ‘routine’. Early tea. Clocks all over the house (fewer now I’ve sold the carriage clocks) wound up each Sunday evening after Evensong. Jesus had probably never seen a clock. Were there any? She tried to imagine the Son of Man with a wrist watch, all the time putting from her hazy early-morning mind the fact that she couldn’t remember Willy at all. ‘I can’t see your face,’ she called.

Come on. Hospitality, said his voice from behind the kitchen curtains. Tags and watch-words, she thought. That’s what all the love and passion comes down to. We never really talked.

And imagine, sex! Extraordinary! I suppose we did it? Susan was a lovely baby.

She made tea from the loose Darjeeling in the black and gold tin and carried up a pretty tray with sugar basin and milk jug—. What am I doing all this for, Willy? It’s no wonder Susan just thumps down a mug. Our bloody parents. Highest standards. But what of, Willy? Standards of what? Oh! He had vanished again.

Good. He couldn’t answer her.

‘Now then, Fiscal-Smith. Rockingham china for Fiscal-Smith. I bet he lives off pots and shards in Yorkshire. Mugs there, certainly. And I’m still trying to show him the rules.’ She tottered up to the guest room and found it empty.

‘Hullo?’

‘Fiscal-Smith,’ she called. (What is his first name? Nobody ever knew.)

‘Hullo?’

(That must be sad for him. Nobody ever asking.)

‘Hullo?’

Silence. The bed in his room was tidily turned back — his pale pink and white winceyette pyjamas folded on the pillow, his dressing-gown and slippers side by side by an upright chair. (So he’d brought his night-things. He’d intended to stay from the start. The old chancer!)

Except that he was absent.

She sat down on his bed and thought, he says he comes in honour of Filth and yet all he wants is to be looked after here. That’s all he’s after. Being looked after. You were so different, Willy. And now all I want is someone to deal with those letters (My slippers. Time for new slippers) and peace and quiet. And — absolute silence.

There was a most unholy crash from below stairs.

As she shrieked, she remembered that she was not alone. There were others in the house. Left over from yesterday. She couldn’t actually remember the end of yesterday. Any yesterday. The evening before had usually slipped away now by morning. King Lear, poor man—.

But last night hadn’t there been something rather sensational? Rather terrible? Oh dear, yes. Poor Old Filth’s empty house had burned to the ground. Or something of the sort.

She looked at her feet. Yes, it was time for new slippers. Then through the window she saw Fiscal-Smith tramping up the hill towards her, from the direction of Filth’s house, still in yesterday’s funeral suit and he was looking jaunty. Eighty plus. And plus. 5.30 A.M. Beginning to rain. He saw her and called out, ‘All well. It’s still there.’

‘What?’

‘Filth’s nice old place. The boy was wrong. No sign of fire. I’ve a feeling that boy is a stirrer. He was a stirrer years ago at that lunch you gave. A little monkey!’

‘Do you never forget anything, Fiscal-Smith? What lunch? A life-time of lunches. And with’—for a wobbly second she forgot her grandson’s name. ‘When? Where?’

‘Two fat sisters. And a priest. And Veneering, of course. Oh, I forget nothing. Mind never falters. It is rather a burden to me, Dulcie.’

‘You are arrogant, Fiscal-Smith.’

‘I simply put my case,’ he said.

He was with her in the kitchen now. She said, ‘Your case is in your bedroom. Do you want help with packing?’—and shocked herself.

There fell a silence as he stepped out upon the terrace with his cup of tea.

* * *

At the same moment, down in Old Filth’s house in the dell, Isobel Ingoldby, wrapped now in his Harrods dressing gown instead of her own pink silk coat, was turning off the lights which she had left burning all night. Foolish, she was saying, I’m the one paying for the electricity now. Until I sell. Why did I light the whole place up through the dark? Some primitive thing about the spirit finding its way home? But he won’t be searching. His spirit is free. It’s back in his birth-place. It maybe never quite left it.

She boiled a kettle for tea but forgot to make any. She wandered about. Betty’s favourite chair stood packed up in the hall. His present for Fiscal-Smith. Nobody gave Fiscal-Smith presents.

This house — the house she had inherited — watched her as she went about. So tidy. So austere. So dead. Betty’s photograph on a mantelpiece, fallen over sideways.

Isobel had slept in his bed last night. Someone had removed the sheets and she had lain on the bare mattress with rugs over her. She thought of the first time she’d seen him in bed. He was about fourteen years old. He was terrified. We both knew then. I was only his school-friend’s older cousin, but we recognised each other. All our lives.

* * *

Fiscal-Smith still stood on Dulcie’s terrace half an hour later, still examined the view over the Roman road towards Salisbury, the wintery sun trying to enliven the grey fields through the rain.

Dulcie came walking past him towards the wrought-iron gates, fully dressed now in tweed skirt and cardigan, remarkably high heels and some sort of casual coat, not warm, from the cupboard under the stairs. She carried a prayer-book. Fiscal-Smith shouted, ‘Where are you going? Filth’s house is perfectly all right.’

‘I am going to church.’

‘Dulcie, it’s six o’clock in the morning. It is clouding over. It’s beginning to rain. That coat you had in Hong Kong. And it isn’t Sunday.’ He came up close to her.

‘I need to say my prayers.’

‘It will be locked.’

‘I doubt it. The great Chloe is supposed to open it but she usually forgets to shut and lock it the night before.’

‘The mad woman who runs about with cakes?’

‘Yes. Well-meaning, but the mind’s going. Sometimes she locks in the morning and un-locks at night. We shall have to tell the church-warden soon. Actually I think she may be the church-warden. There’s nothing much going on in the church. Not even anybody sleeping rough. It’s too damp—.’

He was padding along behind her.

‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Unlocked. Unlocked all night.’

* * *

Inside, the church scowled at them and blew a blast of damp breath. Hassocks looked ready to sprout moss and there was the hymn-book smell. Notices curled on green baize gone ragged, and the stained-glass windows appeared to bulge inwards from the flanking walls. Two sinister ropes dangled in the belfry tower. It was bitterly cold.

‘Stay there,’ Dulcie ordered him, making for a chancel prayer desk up near the organ. ‘I can’t pray with anyone watching.’

‘The Muslims can,’ he said, trying to bring the blood back to his knobbed hands. ‘This is a refrigerator, not a church.’

‘Muslims,’ she said, ‘can crowd together on mats and swing about and keep their circulation going and you don’t see what the women do but I don’t think they pray with men, in a huddle. Anyway, I need what I know,’ and she vanished, eastwards.

‘Five minutes,’ he shouted after her as her high heels tapped out of sight. ‘Utter madness,’ he said to the stained glass windows. ‘Hopeless woman. Hopeless village.’ His voice echoed hopelessly around the rood-screen and its sad saints. Rows of regimental flags hung drooping down the side-aisle like shredding dish cloths, still as sleeping bats. ‘They’re all off their heads here,’ he called out. There was the sound of a heavy key being turned in the lock of the south door, just behind him. The one by which they had entered.

He sprang towards it, flung himself first through the wire, then the baize door, the south door they had just pushed heavily through. He tugged and shouted.

But the door was now firmly and determinedly locked from the outside. Chloe, on her bike, had been thinking that it was evening again.

* * *

Up in the chancel there was no sign of Dulcie but at length he saw the top of her head and her praying hands. She was like a — what was it called? A little Dutch thing. Little painting on wood. ‘Praying hands,’ he thought. ‘They have them on Christmas cards. Dürer. The Germans were perfectly all right then.’ Her head was bowed (‘She still has thick, curly hair’). ‘Five minutes,’ he called, like a tout, or an invigilator.

* * *

Soon he began to hum a tune from his seat in front of the choir-stall and after a minute she opened angry eyes.

‘We are locked in,’ he said.

‘Nonsense,’ she said.

‘I heard the key thrust in and turned. It was Chloe.’

Dulcie went pattering back down the central aisle, tried the oak door first with one hand, then the other, then both hands together. She regarded the broad and ancient lock. ‘You heard her? Chloe?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t you shout?’

‘I think I did. Now, leave all this to me, Dulcie, I banged and rattled and yelled. I will do it again.’

‘Yes. She is getting deaf.’

They stood in icy shadow and he called again, ‘Hullo?’

‘It’s no good shouting, Fiscal-Smith. Nobody in the village is up yet except Chloe.’ But he roared out, ‘Hullo there?’ ‘There may be someone walking a dog?’

‘Nobody walks a dog as early as this in winter. We are all old here.’

‘I’m tired of this “old”,’ said Fiscal-Smith. ‘We don’t have it in the north. Won’t Susan be coming by on the horse? And where’s that boy?’

‘Sleeping. And Susan won’t be out for at least two hours. She may notice we are missing, but I don’t think so.’

‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘you don’t carry such a thing as a mobile telephone?’

‘Good heavens, no. Do you?’

‘Never.’

‘We could try shouting louder.’

And so they did for a time — treble and bass — but there was no response.

‘Of course, there are the bells,’ said Dulcie. She was shaking now with cold. ‘It might warm us up.’

Fiscal-Smith released the tufted, woolly bell-ropes from their loops in the tower and handed one to her, icy to the touch. She closed her eyes and dragged at it with childish fists. It did not stir.

‘I’ll have a go,’ he said, and after a time, sulkily, on the edge of outrage, the damp and matted bell-pull began to move stiffly up and down: but Fiscal-Smith looked exhausted.

‘Go on, go on,’ cried Dulcie. ‘You got it up I think,’ and thought, I believe I said something rather risqué just then, and giggled.

‘This is quite serious, Dulcie. Don’t laugh. Go over there and pull the blue one.’

And so they toiled, and after what seemed to be hours they both heard the sad boom of a bell.

‘I think it was only the church clock striking seven,’ she said.

‘We must go on trying.’

But she couldn’t and made for the chancel again and possible candles on the altar for heat. He followed, but the candles looked like greasy ice and all the little night-lights people light for memorials to the dead were brownish and dry and there were no matches. Dulcie’s lips were turning blue now. ‘This,’ she said, not crossly, ‘will be the death of me. We have no warm clothing and between us we are nearly two hundred years old. My mother stayed in bed all the time after eighty. There was nothing wrong with her but everyone cherished her.’

Through a door they found a vestry and a wall full of modern pine cupboards, ‘Bequeathed,’ said a plaque, ‘by Elizabeth Feathers’. ‘I wish she’d bequeathed an electric fire,’ said Dulcie.

Inside, the cupboards were crammed full of choirboys’ black woollen cassocks, and Fiscal-Smith and Dulcie somehow scrambled into one each. Dulcie said they were damp. But then, over in the priests’ vestry nearby, there was treasure. Albs, cottas, chasubles and a great golden embroidered cope beneath a linen cover.

‘Wrap it round you,’ ordered Fiscal-Smith.

‘It’s reserved for Easter only,’ said Dulcie. ‘It’s for the Bishop and it’s too big. It could go round us both.’

So they both stood inside it, their faces looking out from it side-by-side. ‘My neck is still very cold,’ said Dulcie. ‘Look, there is the ceremonial mitre and the St. Ague stoll. This church! This church you know was once High. And very well-endowed.’

‘I can’t remember what High is. I’m a Roman Catholic,’ said Fiscal-Smith, ‘but I’m in favour if High turns up the heat. Remember Hong Kong. No copes there. Too hot. This is very curious head-gear, Dulcie. We are becoming ridiculous.’

‘I wish this was a monastery,’ she said. ‘There’d be a supply of hoods.’

‘That was because of the tonsures.’

‘I’m not surprised. I had terrible tonsils as a girl. Before penicillin and I wasn’t a monk. Wonderful penicillin.’

‘I’m lost,’ said Fiscal-Smith.

‘It was God’s reward for us winning the war, penicillin.’ (‘She’s bats.’) ‘Willy used to say that every nation that has ever achieved a great empire blazes up for a moment in its dying fire. Penicillin. I wouldn’t have missed our Finest Hour, would you, Fiscal-Smith?’

‘I bloody would,’ he said. Then after a silence, ‘Look here, Dulcie. Where do they keep the Communion wine?’

* * *

It was later that there came a loud knocking on the vestry door into the churchyard. ‘Are you in there? An answer please. Are you there? Who are you?’

‘Yes, we are locked into the church. Accidentally. Dulcie is not well. It is very cold. This is Sir Frederick Fiscal-Smith speaking.’

‘Have you tried to open the door?’

‘Of course we’ve tried the bloody door.’

‘I mean this door. The vestry door. It is beside you. There is an inside bolt.’

Fiscal-Smith leaned from his princely garment, considered the unobtrusive little modern door, slid open a silken brass bolt and revealed the misty morning. There, in running shorts among the graves, stood the family man.

Out through the doorway, laced across with trails of young ivy, a door which, like Christ’s in Holman-Hunt’s Light of the World in St. Paul’s Cathedral, only opened from within, stepped a pair of ancient Siamese twins in cloth of gold, one of them wearing a papal headdress and both of them blue to the gills.

Away down past the churchyard at the foot of the steep stepped path sped old Chloe on her bicycle bearing on the handlebars a jam sponge and in her other hand the ancient church key. She called a greeting and waved.

‘Just wondered if I’d remembered to unlock. So glad I had,’ and pressed on.

In the village shop, she said, ‘There’s something going on in the church. I think it’s a pageant.’

CHAPTER 5

Dulcie had been put to bed by Susan. Fiscal-Smith, with his overnight case beside him on the terrace, was awaiting transport.

‘You might call me a taxi.’

Susan said, ‘There are no taxis. I’ll drive you to the station. Do you want to say goodbye to Dulcie?’

‘Oh, no thank you.’

‘She will not be pleased.’

‘Whatever I say or do makes not the least difference to her. I make no difference to anyone.’

‘Oh, I’m sure—.’

‘All the years we have all known each other, do you know, Susan, I’ve never actually been invited anywhere. And I was present when Betty saw Veneering for the first time. Party. Filth was like Hyperion. Betty looked like the captain of the school hockey team. Gorgeous Betjeman girl. Stalwart but not joyful.’

‘You don’t have to tell me this—.’

‘As she came in to the party she saw Veneering across the room. Hell-raising, blond-yellow hair falling over his face, already half drunk (and with a case starting against Eddie next morning) and I saw him get hold of a pillar. White and gold. Fluted. His face became very still and serious. Yes. I saw the beginning of it. The disgraceful love affair.’

‘We have five minutes to get to the station. You may catch it but you know, you’re very welcome—.’

‘No I am not.’

* * *

In the train he stood inside the doors on the high step and looked down on Susan. ‘No. I am not welcome. But thank you for the lift. Edward and Betty never invited me to stay either. At that lunch at Dulcie’s I had to walk in from Salisbury. Seven miles.’

‘Oh, Fiscal-Smith,’ she said, ‘until yesterday you were one of the last friends. Her last and best.’

‘I wonder if she remembers,’ he said. ‘That I was Edward’s best man?’

The doors clashed together, clapping their hands a couple of times. There were some fizzing and knocking sounds and then a long sigh. Then the train clattered off, and Susan stood staring at its disappearing rump, wondering why the ridiculous man cared so much about these people who were dead and hadn’t liked him anyway. He’d said in the car that Veneering was the best of them. That Veneering could have invited him down here. That he’d known him from boyhood.

‘But couldn’t you have invited them to you anyway? To stay with you up in the North?’

‘Not possible,’ he had said. ‘Anyway, I am the only one who knows Veneering’s secrets.’

‘Did you never have a wife, Fiscal-Smith?’

‘Certainly not,’ he had said.

God, thought Susan, these old fruits are boring.

CHAPTER 6

Anna, the young wife of the poet from the house that had been Veneering’s, had been at the village shop that morning at the same time as Chloe, buying bread and milk for breakfast, and she had heard the words ‘pageant’ and ‘church’.

She was interested in the church, and the unlikely Saint Ague, and had been allowed to do something about the vestry. She loved robes and the clergy. She came from a vicarage family and wasn’t usual. She was the reason why the brass plates in memory of Betty Feathers shone so bright. What a homely name! Some old villager! Then someone else corrected her and told her about wonderful dead Betty, very distinguished woman, and she thought, Oh Lord, another old dear. And it was Anna now, the family woman who put the Cope in clean sacking and starched the choir boys’ surplices so that they looked like preening swans. Sadly there were only three choir boys now and seldom visible. Or audible.

Soon, the old guard predicted this woman (Anna) would be in Charge of Altar Frontals, then Communion Silver and Candle-sticks (already rumoured to be in her attic). Not, of course, Flowers. Only Betty Feathers had dared take Flowers unasked. Betty Feathers had not had much to do with churches except in Hong Kong but she was unbeatable on flowers. During her mature years at St. Ague with her perfect husband Sir Edward (Filth) Feathers, vicars of the parish had been grateful for such a conventional and pleasant woman and nothing churchy about her. You would never guess she might take over. And here most exceptionally, for most of St. Ague was fashionably atheist now, was another. This Anna. ‘Labourers,’ said the village elders, ‘do still seem to keep the vineyard going even late in the day. And for no pay.’ Anna had been a god-send at the last harvest festival and for the first time in years there had been more than tins of baked beans round the lectern.

There had been a bit of a fuss about Anna surrounding the Easter pulpit with bramble bushes. Not only had she taken them up by the roots (she put them back down her drive-way, where they thrived) but they had damaged several small children who had come with chocolate eggs and rabbits.

Mothers — one or two — enquired if she was interested in the cleaning rota and she said, ‘I don’t want to push in but if you like we’ve got a power hose and we could cover the Saxon frieze of The Wounds of St. Ague in bubble-wrap.’ ‘Or Elastoplast,’ said her husband, the poet, the family man.

In the end they let Anna fix up only the vestry. Just for the present.

‘I do not care for “fixing up”,’ said one of the ex-flower committee, now confined, like her twin sister, to a wheel chair. They lived with a Carer up the lane and went to church on separate weeks, as the Carer could take only one at a time.

The Vicar tearing past to the next of his string of churches each Sunday, gave thanks for Anna (whoever she was), prayed for new hassocks and fungicides and matches.

‘It will take a hundred grand to deal with the vestry. Half a million to save the church,’ said Anna. ‘We’ll have a go with the power hose.’

St. Ague’s became Anna’s secret passion, her plan for life to supersede (or kill) Chloe. Her heart had gone cold with dread when Chloe, that morning, had said the word ‘pageant’.

* * *

‘Oh yes,’ Chloe had said. ‘Scarlet and gold. Robes. Pushing out through that little narrow door. Very queer. Something double-headed. Like black magic. We’re wondering if it was art? Your husband seemed to be in charge, Anna. Is he a film director?’

‘In charge!’ she cried. ‘I left him in bed.’

‘Well he was in running shorts. And he was either on his mobile or directing, like in a play. His arms going up and down.’

Anna said that she had better get home, but instead launched off her car with the breakfast in it towards Privilege House which seemed to be empty except for Herman who was standing in the kitchen eating fish-fingers on his own. He was staring out at the now heavily falling rain. ‘Can I come round to you, Anna? To play? I mean music. We’re going back to America tomorrow.’

‘Where’s your grandmother?’

Anna turned to ice when she saw the gold and crimson vestments gleaming around the Aga, a mitre contracting on one hot plate, and Dulcie’s yesterday’s funeral hat on the other.

‘They put her back in bed I think.’

‘And you didn’t even go up to see,’ said Anna. ‘You are rubbish, Herman.’

* * *

Dulcie was sitting up in bed, her hair fallen into extraordinary Napoleonic cork-screws, her eyes immense, and downing a double Famous Grouse. ‘He’s gone,’ she said. ‘He didn’t say goodbye.’ She wept.

‘Who?’ Anna took her in her arms and rocked her.

‘No need for that,’ said Dulcie. ‘Fiscal-Smith of course. I’ve known him over 60 years. My oldest living friend. I can’t believe it. I am mortified.’

‘But Dulcie, you didn’t want him. You didn’t invite him. He drives you mad. And to be truthful you deserve better. Dulcie?’

‘Yes. Well, no. You see, he’s never been known to leave anywhere early unless, of course, he’s been kicked out. I’m afraid that does happen. He was never exactly one of us. Not important to us. We didn’t know much about him. Though I believe that somehow Veneering did. Somewhere long ago, I was never close to him, he was so boring. But you see, this morning I was locked in the church with him. We had to wrap ourselves up together in the golden Cope.’

‘Oh, Dulcie! He’ll get over it. He’s used to being ignored.’

‘Oh, the vestments!’

‘Dulcie, I’ll see to them. Now get up, I’ll find you some clothes and you can come over to us. I’ve sent Herman over already. I’ll make the kids cook the lunch. Where’s your daughter?’

‘Susan’s driving him to the station.’ Dulcie began to cry. ‘He’s so ashamed. He was always frightened of being shamed. It is the Yorkshire accent. And — he never said goodbye.’

‘Come on. Get this jersey on.’

‘He won’t come back. He’s a terrible bore. I don’t like him, but Willy said he was a very good lawyer. Incorruptible.’

‘Like Veneering then?’

‘No,’ she said, her mind at last at work. ‘No. Not like Veneering. Simpler than Veneering. But he’s the last link. The last friend.’

‘Coat,’ said Anna, ‘Gloves. Head-scarf, it’s still raining. Put your feet in these boots.’

As Anna’s car, Dulcie in the head-scarf beside her, hardly up to her shoulder, passed Old Filth’s house in the dell Anna looked down at its front door and saw a window slightly open. The five-barred gate was padlocked but something very queer and large had appeared behind it wrapped in a tarpaulin. There came a sudden insolent puff of smoke from Old Filth’s medieval chimney.

Better say nothing, thought Anna. Enough for one day. And it’s only nine in the morning.

CHAPTER 7

Susan, clamp-jawed, had not looked towards Old Filth’s house as she took Fiscal-Smith to the station, nor did she alone, on the way back. She was taken up with thoughts about her mother, who was obviously going down-hill fast.

Not fit to be left alone. These new people are a god-send, but you can’t expect—. And Herman and I go back to America tomorrow. I wonder when I ought to tell her that I’m not married anymore? Herman hasn’t told her. Well I can’t tell her. It would be all over the village.

And as to what she’s done now! Not so much this senile episode in the church. It’s what she’s done to poor little Fiscal-Smith. She’s bloody hurt him. She can hurt. She does. She used to hurt poor old Dad but she doesn’t remember. He had to find new books to read all the time and work for the Thomas Hardy Society, which got him only as far as Dorchester. He asked me to look after her but she’s so silly. He knew she was silly. I don’t think he ever spotted that she’s also rather nasty. Got me off from Hong Kong soon as I was out of the pram to a boarding school in England — her old school of course. I hated Hong Kong. I hate all that last lot who came home, with their permed hair, thinking they’re like the Last Debutantes curtseying in the court of heaven. Hate, hate, hate—.

‘My mother,’ she told the passing trees along the lanes towards St. Ague, ‘let everyone call me Sulky Sue from the beginning. I guess she was the one who invented it. She’s hard, my mother. She’s not altogether the fool she makes herself out to be: the fool who is very sweet. She’s neither foolish nor sweet, really. She’s manipulative, cunning and works at seeming thick as a brick. And nasty.’

Through tears, on Privilege Hill Susan braked as a woman passed in front of the car. It was the tall old woman who was at the do in London yesterday. In pink. Silk. Long coat. She’s still in it! It’s Isobel. She’s got Betty Feathers’ pink umbrella. Lovely-looking person. Wish she was my mother.

At least there’s plenty of money. She’s not a burden to me. But we must think about death-duties one day soon. She won’t like it, but we must.

And Fiscal-Smith. Ancient little Fiscal-Smith. Ma’s really hurt him this time. Deep — twisted in the knife. Whatever has she said to him? Oh God — I wish I had a mother I could love. I wonder if she’s beginning to like him, or something.

I must go and see these new people to say goodbye.