Old Filth

SCENE: INNER TEMPLE

The smoking-room of the Inner Temple, almost deserted. It is much re-furbished: easy chairs stand about. Portraits of distinguished former Benchers on the walls, the one of Mr. Attlee gaunt and glazed — seeming to be wringing his hands. One wing chair has its back to the rest and Mr. Attlee seems to be looking down at it. Filth is in the chair half-asleep. Post-prandial. No one can see him. Enter the Queen’s Remembrancer and the Purveyor of Seals and Ordinances.

The Queen’s Remembrancer: He must have gone.

The Purveyor of Seals and Ordinances: To get his hair cut?

QR: Possibly. Very great surprise to see him again.

PS&O: Looks well. Amazing physique still. Nothing ever been wrong with him.

QR: Nothing ever did go wrong for him.

PS&O: Nothing much ever happened to him. Except success.

QR: There’s talk of a rather mysterious War, you know. Didn’t fight.

PS&O: A conchie?

QR: Good God, no. Some crack-up. He had a stammer.

PS&O: Pretty brave to go on to the Bar then.

QR: Remarkable. He joined a good regiment. It’s in Who’s Who. The Gloucesters. He had something to do with the Royal family.

PS&O: Had he indeed!

QR: And there was something else. Someone gave him a push upstairs somewhere. Or out East. There’s always something a bit dicey about that circuit. A lot of people you can’t really know socially but you have to pretend to.

PS&O: Betty was very O.K. though. Don’t you think? Don’t you think? There was of course Veneering. Veneering and Betty. Aha!

QR: What do the likes of us know, creeping round the Woolsack at Home and round the Inns of Court?

PS&O: “What should they know of England

Who only England know.”

QR: Kipling. You know Kipling had a start like Filth? Torn from his family at five. Raj Orphan.

PS&O: Kipling didn’t do too badly either.

QR: Kipling had a crack-up.

PS&O: Did he stammer?

QR: He went blind. Half blind at seven. Hated the Empire, you know. Psychological blindness.

PS&O: Are you having coffee?

QR: No. I just came in looking for Filth. Just missed him.

PS&O: Did we imagine him?

QR: I expect he was having his last look round.

Exeunt. Room apparently empty.

Filth rises from the chair and takes a long last look at Mr. Attlee.

Filth: Have I the courage to write my Memoirs?

Attlee: Churchill had. But on the whole, better not. Keep your secrets.

THE WATCH

In that train of 1941, after the Oxford interview, Eddie had pushed the Times back into the hands of the man opposite, left the compartment and walked down the corridor where he stood holding tight the brass rail along the middle of the window. The train stopped very often, filled up. The corridor became crammed with people mostly silently enduring, shoulder to shoulder. Even so it was cold. Water from somewhere trickled about his feet. Troops started to climb in — maybe around Birmingham. These troops were morose and quiet. Still and silent. Everyone squashed up tighter. It grew dark. Only the blue pin-lights on all the death-mask faces.

And Eddie stood on.

At some point he left the train and waited for another one that would take him to the nearest station to High House, and there he jumped down upon an empty, late-night platform. After an unknown space of time he found that he was travelling in a newspaper-van that must have stopped to give him a lift. It dropped him outside the gates of the avenue which were closed and guarded by two sentries with rifles. He walked off down the lane, then doubled back through a hedge, then across in the darkness to the graceful iron railings of what he felt to be his home.

The house stood there with lightless, blindless windows and the dark glass flashed black. The place was empty. But there were army vehicles everywhere in the drive and a complex of army huts where the land began to drop away above the chimneys of the old carpet factory. Eddie walked round the resting, deserted house and met nobody. He began to try the familiar door handles: the side door from the passage into the garden with its dimpled brass knob; the door to the stables; the kitchens. All were locked. He grew bolder and stood beneath a bedroom window and called, “Mrs. Ingoldby? Is anyone there? It’s Eddie.” He rattled the door of the bothy where the gardener had lived. Nothing. No dog barked. In the garage, there was no old car, the car in which you had to put up an umbrella in the back seat when it rained. The Colonel’s vegetables stood scant and scruffy, Brussels sprouts like Passchendaele. The beehives had disappeared.

He set off on foot back to the railway station; slept the rest of the night on a bench along the wall of the waiting room with its empty grate; reached his aunts’ warm house by the following lunchtime.

There was no car outside it and so “Les Girls,” as they liked to be known, were not at home, but Eddie had his key and planted his bag and his icy feet on the rug in the hall. He stood.

He heard Alice, the midget maid, creeping up from the kitchen. She gave a chirp of surprise, touching her fingers to her lips, and Eddie remembered he’d slept in his clothes, wet through since Oxford, and was unshaven. He found — with the old terror — that he couldn’t speak.

“Mr. Eddie. Come, come, come,” she said and led him down to her kitchen and gave him tea and porridge which he could not eat. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” she said. “Have you failed your exams?” She had been sitting beneath her calendar of the King and Queen and the photograph of Mr. Churchill in his siren-suit, making more paper spills for the upstairs fireplace. Vegetables were prepared on the draining-board, the kitchen clean, alive and shining. “Oh dear, oh dear. I expect you have heard the news.”

“Yes. I read it in the paper.”

She seemed puzzled, and he remembered that nobody in this house cared a fig about the Ingoldbys.

“I’m meaning their news, Mr. Eddie. Miss Hilda’s and Miss Muriel’s. I don’t know what’s to become of us all now. Or this house. Or you and me, Mr. Eddie. Mind, I’d seen it coming. There’s been talk for years. They think I’m deaf. They never told me a thing, never warned me. I’ve been here nearly twenty years. It was little to expect.”

“They’ve never sacked you, Alice?”

“In a sense, yes, Mr. Eddie.”

The slam of the front door above. The clash of the vestibule glass. The shriek of Hilda spotting the bag in the hail. “He’s back. See? Now for it — Eddie? Where are you?”

“Yes. I’m back.” His head rose up from Alice’s cellar rabbit- hole, and he saw that the eyes of the girls were particularly wild. He thought: They must have won a cup. “Have you been on the course?” Then he saw they were wearing Air Force blue with several stripes. Not golf.

“We have some news for you,” said Muriel. “Better get it over and tell you right off. We’re getting married.”

For a dizzy moment Eddie thought they were marrying each other.

“You’ll easily guess who,” said Hilda, and mentioned two names from among the red faces at the golf club.

“Married!”

He thought: Whatever for? Old women. Over forty. And this great house full of their stuff. And Alice.

“Go and wash, Eddie dear. Then come and have some champagne. It’s been on the cards for years but of course we couldn’t split up and leave you until we’d got you off our hands.”

He looked at their untouchable hands.

“But you mean you’ll be living apart now?”

“Oh, quite near each other. And near Royal St. Andrews. In Scotland. All four of us.”

“Does my father know?”

“We’ve written. He’s known for several years that we — well, we put off our plans. For you. That’s why he’s been so generous to us while you’ve been living here all these years.”

“Living here?”

“Yes. Ever since you were a tiny.”

When he came downstairs again Alice was anxiously laying up the dining-table. The silver and glasses shone. When she saw him she scuttled out of sight.

“What about Alice?”

“Oh, she’s much too old to move in with either of us. Someone else will probably take her. She’s got her Girls’ Friendly Society. And she’s over seventy and pretty well” (Hilda whispered like a whistle) “past it. She ought to retire. So it all fits in.”

“Fits in?”

“Alice retiring. You going out to Alistair as an evacuee. And this tragedy of the Ingoldbys.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know. I saw it in the Times. I’m surprised you did. Or that you even remembered — their name.” (Tears, tears, stop. And, bugger it, my voice is going.)

“Of course we remembered. They used to have you over there. Very kind to help us out. Anyway, someone rang up.”

“Someone? Who? Please, who?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t ask. It was a girl. Quite a young voice. Yes, Isobel. Isobel Ingoldby. That would be a sister? Rather snooty we thought. La-di-da.”

“Did she leave a number?”

“No, no. Very quick she was. Now dear, no brooding. Let’s talk about you. And Singapore.”

“It’s Singapore you’re going to,” said Hilda. “Alistair’ll meet you there. Safest place in the world.”

“Did you pass your exams?” asked Muriel.

“Yes.”

“Jolly good. Something to look forward to after the War. Your tickets are all fixed up and you leave next week.”

“And bottoms up,” said Muriel, with the champagne. “Here’s to all of us.”

“And we have a present for you,” said Hilda. “He said you were to have it when you left school. We’ve kept it for you. It’s your father’s watch.”

TO COLOMBO

After a torrid and joyless Christmas with the brides- and grooms-to-be — gravy and turkey from somewhere and gin galore — Eddie was ready for the voyage to his father. He’d given ten pounds to Alice and promised her a postcard. He would have given wedding presents to Les Girls, but would have had to ask them for the money. He had only the money for the journey to Londonderry to pick up his ship; that and his Post Office Book with fifteen shillings in it and a new cheque book he didn’t know how to use.

The day dawned. The vestibule door slammed behind him and his luggage was in the car, the watch on his wrist.

Both brides had genuinely (they said) intended to see him off from Liverpool — the journey from Bolton was short — and had dressed for it in excellent pre-War mufti of tweed and diamond-pin brooches, uniforms set aside; but at the last minute Hilda was called away by her beau to discuss some marital arrangement, and Muriel drove Eddie to the dock alone. There they got out of the car, she landed him a smacking kiss, said how she envied him a wonderful voyage into the sunshine and out of the War—

“Aunt Muriel—?”

— and how they would miss him, and how she was looking forward to seeing him in Oxford after the War—

“Aunt Muriel, I’m sorry—”

“Yes?”

“It’s just that I have no money.”

“Dear boy, you’re going to have plenty of money. You’ll have all that we are having to give up, now that you’re gone. Your allowance.”

“Yes. But I mean for now. I’ve only about a pound.”

“You won’t need money on board ship.”

“Something might go wrong. We might be stuck half-way.”

“Oh, Eddie — what a fusspot. Alistair’s meeting you.”

“I’m not sure how long—”

“Well, I don’t know. I don’t know that I’ve much with me. Would five pounds—?”

“I think I shall need perhaps a bit more.”

She scratched in her purse and came up with seven pounds, twelve shillings and sixpence.

“There,” she said, “you’ve cleaned me out.”

Then she was gone, dropping from his life unlamented and unloved. He felt shaken and depressed, as if another boy, a sunny, golfing chap, would have done better.

She tooted her horn at the harbour barrier. The clashing and hooting, the crowd at the ferry. He saw her big amiable face as she turned the corner.

The ferry was no trouble. The sea, hatefully grey, was thank God calm. He stood at the rail watching the submarines of the English Navy busy in the Irish Sea practising the sinking of U-Boats. The West coast of England dwindled behind him.

There were tickets in code on his suitcase, and someone beside him watching the U-Boat exercises said, “You’ll find plenty of them things if you’s away over the water. Stiff with U-Boats.”

On the train towards Londonderry — blank scenery — the idea occurred to him that he should have roused himself to take an interest in what lay ahead. He did not even know the length of the journey. Then it all slid away. He wondered languidly if he’d even find his ship.

But somehow here he was at the dock of a huge bay and some sort of official had his name on a list.

“Travelling alone? No group? Don’t think we’ll tie a label on you” (Eddie towered over him). “All plain sailing up to now?”

“Yes thanks.”

“But no more plain sailing for a while. The convoy’s not ready. She’ll be in harbour at least three weeks.”

“Three weeks?”

“Yes. Here’s your billet address. Don’t worry, we won’t forget you. Can you get there by yourself or do you want a school bus?”

“I’ll find it. I’ve left school.”

The man looked at him curiously as he turned away.

“What’s the bus fare?” he called, but the man was gone.

He found the bus, and the journey was not very expensive and he got out in green mild country to the West of the city and saw that he was to be on a farm where a maidservant greeted him and brought him a glass of buttermilk. He was at present the only lodger.

“Evacuees comes and goes,” she said. “Poor little souls, crying and that, and hung with tickets. See me letting a bairn go where there’s none it knows. Who’s sending yous off, then? You’s old for an evacuee. Or is yous home abroad then? Or is yous not for fighting?”

He hated her.

He walked in the fields, helped on the farm. The empty days followed each other. Time stood still. When the servant girl — she smelled of earth and corn and her eyes were aching and knowing — passed behind his chair at dinner with the tatey stew and the heavy suet puddings she leaned very close over him. Sometimes she ran her warm hands through his hair. One night she came to his room and tried to get into his bed, but he was terrified and threw her out.

Then, after a week and still no ship, he found himself looking for her and when she came over the fields with the buttermilk his heart began to beat so loud he blushed.

“Is there no letters you should be writing? Is there nobody should know?”

He felt her kindness and that night wrote, on scented paper she gave him from her bedroom drawer, to his school. He told them about Oxford and that his aunts had despatched him to Singapore. He thanked old Oils who’d taught him history and asked him to tell Oxford how he’d been powerless to stay and would be back as soon as ever he could. He could not write to Oxford himself. He was too wretched. He felt weak, guilty, a schoolboy, a pathetic child again. And he couldn’t tell Oxford where to reply.

Then he wrote to Sir, but could find nothing to say that mattered. In neither of his letters did he mention Pat Ingoldby. His weakness and self-loathing numbed him. He began to stammer again, and so stopped talking. When he woke one night in his white clean bed, the room full of moonlight, the old closet, the bare floor, the ewer and wash-basin and soap dish on the marble washstand, the pure whiteness of his towel for morning, he turned to the girl and let her do what she wanted.

Which he found was what he wanted. And she made it easy. The next night he was waiting for her and took control. “You’s wonderful,” she said and he said, “Well, I’m good at games,” and she laughed into the pillow. He had a feeling that the farmer and his wife knew. The next night she didn’t come. He was desolate. Desperate. “Where were you?” he said next day, but she stared and went out to do the dairy. She was in his room that night again but he did not enjoy it. As she washed in the soft soapy water in his bowl she said, “How much money is yous going to give me?” and when he said he only had a few pounds she didn’t believe him. “All right then — you can give us yous watch.”

He said, “Never. It was my father’s.”

At breakfast there was a message brought by a farm boy that his ship was near to sailing. He packed and was at the bus stop without breakfast, leaving a shilling on his bedroom mantelpiece. The leaving of the shilling pleased him. A man who knows the rules. A Christ Church man. A man of the world. The buttermilk girl had disappeared.

And when he reached the dock this time, he felt jaunty and no longer worried that he’d be herded into a group of small children and weeping parents. He presented his papers to an office on the quay. A whole fleet now lay at anchor. A mammoth fish tank of troop-ships, battle-cruisers, destroyers, freighters, cargo boats, awaiting release.

An old-time tar spat over the rail of his own ship.

“Is this the Breath o’Dunoon?”

“It is, so. Step aboard.”

“Am I the only one? — the only evacuee?”

“Not at all, there’s one other. He’s below.”

Eddie clambered with his case down three metal ladders into smelly darkness and walked along a narrow passage that dipped towards the middle. It was way below the water line. Les Girls had not been interested in classes of cabin on the Breath o’Dunoon.

Nobody was to be seen. The sound of the sea slopped about. There was a dry, clicking noise coming from behind a cabin door.

He opened the door and found two bunks at right angles to each other, so narrow that they looked like shelves, each covered with a grey blanket. On the better bunk, seated cross-legged, was a boy, busy with a pack of cards. One of his very small hands he held high in the air above his head, the other cupped in his lap, and between the two, arrested in mid-air, hung an arc of coloured playing cards, held beautifully in space. As Eddie watched, the arc collapsed with lovely precision and became a solid pack again in the cupped hand.

“OK, how’s that?” said the boy. “Find the lady.”

He was an Oriental and appeared to be about ten-years old. His body, however, seemed to have been borrowed to fit the cabin and was that of a child of six. The crossed legs looked very short, the feet dainty. The features, when you looked carefully, were interesting for they were not Chinese though the eyes were narrow and tilted. He was not Indian and certainly not Malay. After thirteen years, Eddie still knew a Malay. The boy’s skin was not ivory or the so-called “yellow” but robust and ruddy red.

“OK then,” said the boy, “don’t find the lady. Just pick a card. Any card. OK?”

“I have to settle in.”

“You’ll have months for that. We’re in this rat hole for twelve weeks.”

“What! I hope not. I’m only going to Singapore.”

“Me too. Via Sierra Leone. Didn’t you know? We change ship at Freetown, if one turns up. Choose a card.”

Eddie sat on the other end of the bunk.

“Go on. Pick a card. No, don’t show me. Very good. Nine of diamonds. Right?”

It was the nine of diamonds.

“Are you some sort of professional?”

“Professional what?”

“Card-sharp.”

“Yes,” said the boy. “You could look at it that way. I’m Albert Loss. I’d be Albert Ross — I have Scottish blood — but I can’t say my Rs, being also Hakka Chinese. Right?”

“Why can’t other people call you Albert Ross?”

“You can, if you want. They did at school. And they called me Coleridge. ‘Albat Ross.’ Right? Ancient Mariner. They like having me on board ships, sailors. Albatrosses bring them luck.”

“Are you a professional sailor, too?”

“I’ve been around,” said Loss. “D’you play Crib?”

“No.”

“I’ll teach you Crib.”

“Are there going to be some more of us on the ship?”

“More what?”

“Well—” (with shame) “—evacuees.”

“No idea. I think it’s just the pair of us. OK? Pick another card.”

“I’m going back on deck,” said Eddie.

“OK. I’ll come with you. Watch them loading. It’s corned beef. We unload at Freetown and she’ll sail full of bananas.”

“Bananas? To the Far East?”

“Don’t be stupid. We change ship at Freetown, hang about. The bananas get taken Home by the Breath o’Dunoon for the Black Market and the Commandos.”

“I’ve not seen any bananas in three years.”

“Well, you’re not in the know. You can eat plenty in Freetown. Flat on your back. Nothing moves in Freetown. There’s RAF there, and they’ve all gone mad. Talking to monkeys. Mating with monkeys.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Common knowledge. I’ve done this trip before. Often.”

“How old are you?”

The boy looked outraged. Eddie saw the long eyes go cold. Then soft and sad. “That’s a question I don’t often answer, but I’ll tell you. I’m fourteen,” and he took from his pocket a black cigarette with a gold tip, and lit it.

Thirty-six hours later there were signs that the huge herd of ships might be thinking of sailing. Eddie asked again if they were the only passengers.

“Four months. Just you and I.”

“I suppose so.” Loss spat black shag at the seagulls. “Shag to shags,” he said. “I am also rather witty. I’m a master of languages as well. I could teach you Malay.”

“I speak Malay,” said Eddie. “I was born there.”

“Mandarin, then? Hindi. All one. Nice watch.”

“It was my father’s.”

Days, it seemed, later they saw the last of Ireland sink into the sea. The prow of the ship seemed to be seeking the sunset, such as it was, rainy and pale. Great grey sea-coloured ships like lead pencils stood about the ocean and smaller brisker ships nosed about them. The Breath o’Dunoon looked like a tramp at a ball. The Atlantic lay still beneath its skin.

“We’re in a convoy.”

“Well, of course, we’re in a convoy,” said Loss. “We can’t go sailing off to Africa alone. We’re not a fishing boat. It’s a widespread War.

“Mind you,” he added, “we’d probably get there faster if we were a fishing boat. The convoy always goes the speed of the slowest ship. And we’re headed out to the West for days on end, to get clear of the U-Boats. Nearly to America, zig-zagging all the way.

“Am I right?” he condescendingly enquired of the Captain at whose none too clean table they were dining. The Captain ignored him and spooned up treacle pudding.

“Is that all we’re going to do all the time? I’ve brought no books. I thought it would be just a few days.”

“You can do the cooking if you like,” said the Engineer Officer. “You couldn’t do worse than this duff. It’s made of lead shot. Can you cook, Mr. Feathers?”

“No, not at all.”

“I can cook,” said Loss, “but only French cuisine.”

“You can both peel spuds,” said the Captain, “but remember to take that watch off, Feathers.”

“And keep it away from him,” said the Engineer Officer, pointing at Loss. “Ask me, he’s escaped from a reformatory school for delinquents.”

“It was Eton,” said Loss. “I was about to go to Eton. Do you play Crib?”

“Not now,” said the Sparks, “but I’ll thrash you when I do.”

They left the rickety Breath o’Dunoon at Freetown for a blazing beach where the air throbbed like petrol fumes. The jungle hung black. Black people were immobile under palm trees. Nobody seemed to know what should happen next. After a shabby attempt at examination by the customs, where interest was taken in the watch, the two of them stood about, waiting for instructions. There were none. The crew of the Breath o’Dunoon were taking their ease before the unloading of the cans of meat, and the Captain had disappeared. There was a suggestion that they should give up their passports which they ignored.

Heat such as Eddie had never known blasted land and sea. The smell of Africa was like chloroform. Inland from the port were dancing-hot tin sheds, one with a red cross on it, asphalt, some apologies for shops, and RAF personnel in vests and shorts. More black people stood about in the shadows beneath the trees.

Beyond the white strip of beach the mango forests began and Albert Loss sat down neatly under a palm tree and ate one, first peeling off the skin with a little knife from his pocket, then sucking. He took out a notebook and began to make calculations. Eddie ate bananas and thought about the buttermilk girl, with some satisfaction.

He watched the rollers of the Atlantic. “I think I’ll bathe,” he said. “Get rid of the banana juice.” He licked his fingers and ran down to the sea and was immediately flung back on the beach. He tried again and was again spat out. He lay with a ricked back and a badly grazed knee as the waves slopped over him with contempt.

“The sun’s dangerous,” Loss announced from the edge of the jungle.

But Eddie, exalted to be free, warm, deflowered and full of bananas, lay on in the sand. The dangerous part of the journey was over. They had seen no U-Boats, and there would be none on the next ship for they were out of range now. They were taking the Long Route down Africa to the Cape, and out to Colombo to refuel. Then Singapore and safety. And the next ship might be better. Even comfortable. A Sunderland flying boat suddenly roared from beyond the mangoes and came towards him along the sea, bouncing like a loose parcel chucked from hand to hand. It blundered to an uncertain lopsided stop some way out. Bloody planes, thought Eddie. I want to sleep. He was sated, different — happy.

“How many bananas have you eaten?” asked Loss.

“Thirty-six.”

“You are intemperate. I wouldn’t have thought it.”

“They’re miniature bananas. They’re nothing.”

“They’re very over-ripe. Where did you get them?”

“Off a heap. Under a tree. Any objection?”

Loss watched him.

“No. I am glad you have some powers of enjoyment. D’you want a game of Patience?”

“It’s about a hundred and five degrees. I want a beer.”

Eddie stumbled up the beach, to a stall under the trees where a massive lady in orange appeared to be in a trance but took his English money into her pink palm.

“You’ve left your watch lying on the sand,” called Loss.

“Look after it,” Eddie shouted. “D’you want a beer?”

“Certainly not. Not that stuff. And don’t touch the bottled water. I’ve been here before.”

Eddie lay back in the sand and went to sleep.

Waking he felt about him, sat up and began to swig from a dark bottle. His head began to swim deliciously. He lifted his legs in the air. Loss observed him.

“You are behaving quite out of character,” he said. “I have known you six weeks, but I know this to be out of character.”

“I like this character.”

“I am amazed. You have a rational mind.”

“I’ve slept with a woman,” said Eddie. “Yippee.”

Loss chose not to comment.

After a pause for thought Eddie said, “Have you been here before?”

“Somewhere like it. Down the coast.”

“Oh, I’ve been somewhere like it. Plenty of this. Worse.”

“When?”

“When I was five. When I came over to England with a missionary. Auntie May, she was called. To live in England on my own.”

“On your own?”

“No. With a woman called Ma Didds. Professional foster mother. Me and two vague cousins I’d never heard of. It wasn’t safe for Raj brats to stay in Malaya. We died off after five. And before five in hundreds. I felt pretty well in the East but I hadn’t a say in the matter. ‘Terrible for the parents,’ everyone says but I hadn’t a mother and my father lived in a world of his own. Anyway, all Raj Orphans forgot their parents. Some of them attached themselves to the foster parents for life.”

“Not you?”

“No.”

“Where did you go?”

“Wales. It was Wales or Norfolk. Wales was cheaper.”

Suddenly he knew that it must have been his aunts who had chosen it. “What about you, Loss?”

“Something of a mystery, my parents. They didn’t send me to England until I was ten. And they didn’t call it ‘Home.’ They weren’t Raj.”

“What did you do in the holidays?”

“Oh, I always went to Singapore.”

“You couldn’t have done. There wasn’t time.”

Loss continued to play Patience with a cloth over his head.

“Well,” he said vaguely. “I got humped about. I am a natural traveller. We are of Hakkar stock.”

“So you keep telling me. Were there many Hakkars going to Eton?”

“I beseech you, Feathers. You may have found your tongue at last and it is all very interesting, but do not drink any more of the beer. And leave off the bananas.”

“Why?”

“I shall have to look after you. I can see the fruit moving. It will be a humiliation.”

“For me or for you?” shouted Eddie, tight as a tick, flat on his back, feet in the air, peeling a thirty-seventh banana.

“Both of us,” said Loss. “Here. Cover yourself. Here is your shirt. You are calling attention to us.”

“Not true,” yelled Eddie. “They’re all drunk here. Look at the beer cans everywhere. Or they’re drugged — look at them all just standing staring. All des-o-late. All the best ones dead. We’re going to lose this War so we may as well drink and die.”

Another flying boat split the air with sound. “Bundle of spare parts,” shouted Eddie. “Won’t make it back. Torpedo boats bang bang — down. England won’t last six months against Germany. Churchill’s a buffoon. Ham actor. Country’s finished. Europe’s finished. Thank God I’m going away.”

Someone from the Red Cross hut came down the beach and took him off, Loss walking thoughtfully behind.

Eddie, put to bed, raved for three days. Loss moved into the Missions to Seamen and watched a scorpion hanging from a rafter, ate mangoes and played cards with anyone who would give him a game.

The Missions to Seamen medical man was troubled by Eddie. “How old is he?” he asked Loss. “Your friend. The other evacuee — a schoolfriend?”

“I am not an evacuee,” said Loss. “I am travelling home to pursue my life. Feathers is a young friend of mine, no; for I only met him on the Breath o’Dunoon. He is an unwilling evacuee. His father sent for him to return to Malaya. He wanted to stay and Do His Bit.”

“Did he? Well, now he’s yelling and ranting about dead pilots and the Battle of Britain.”

“That’s over,” said Loss. “I expect he’s lost best friends. There are those with best friends. I avoid such. He’ll be OK. He needed to blow up.”

The doctor looked dubious.

But by the time the Portuguese freighter arrived a fortnight later to carry them on, a gaunt, monosyllabic (but not stammering) Feathers was allowed to continue his journey.

“He’s strong,” said the Purser. “There’s those get malaria soon as they get to Freetown. He’s not had that. There’s blackwater fever if you so much as look at the swamp. He’s not had that. Just the guts. The guts and the brains. He’ll recover.”

“He drank palm-beer from a bad bottle,” said Loss, tightlipped as a Methodist.

“Maybe, lad, it saved his life.” The Purser was the only Englishman on the new ship, and spoke Portuguese. He had avoided the call-up, he said, because of flat feet. “I dare say the bugger’ll live,” he said. “He’s walking.”

But as they sailed — their neutral flag flying or rather hanging limp on the mast — down the bulge of Africa and at last out upon the hot-plate of the Indian Ocean, day after day, day after day, Eddie lay prone in the sick bay, hardly eating, drinking only lime juice, not talking but muttering and yelling in his sleep. Loss, three flights down in the noisome, sweaty bilges, sat on his bunk and wrote up his log book. He also sat with Eddie several hours a day thinking his Hakkar thoughts. In the night he went on deck and sat about learning Portuguese from the crew. He watched each morning the raising of the neutral flag to ensure that the sea and the sky and the sea-birds (there were few now) and the enemy submarines (there were none) knew that this was a craft on peaceful business.

In time, Eddie got up and began to wander on deck, sit against the davits, lean over the rails. He felt so alien and remote from anything that had happened to him before that tears of weakness filled his eyes and reflected the tremendous starlight. He was hollow, a shell on a beach — but safe at last. I could be OK now, he thought, if I could stay here for my life on the circle of the sea.

Loss watched him and considered the ranting he’d heard in the sick bay and risked saying, once, when they were sitting on the creaking deck under the moon, “Tell me about Ma Didds. Go on. You’ll have to tell somebody, some day.”

But Eddie froze to stone.

Breezily on another occasion, the crew eating fish stew, Eddie crumbling bread, Loss said, “I suppose you know that there are those who believe that endurance of cruelty as a child can feed genius?”

“I have no genius,” said Eddie, “and never would have had.”

“Bad luck,” said Loss. “It is perhaps a pity that I wasn’t sent to Ma Didds.”

“She would have broken even you.”

But this conversation was a turning point, and Eddie seemed to relax. As the heat grew ever stronger, the sea a shimmering disc wherever you looked, and the two boys shrunk into any patch of shadow under the life-boats; and as the engines chuntered on, and the wake behind them curdled the water, and the sea beneath held its mysteries, and as time ceased, Eddie began to sleep again at night and exist, and often sleep peacefully again in the day. Once or twice his old self broke through. He wondered about his father and whatever the two of them would do in Kotakinakulu — or Singapore or Penang, or wherever his father was now — but soon he dismissed all thoughts of the future and the past, and lazily watched Loss dealing out the cards.

“Do you smell something?” asked Loss. “Do you smell land?” Eddie sniffed.

“We’re still too far out.”

“Lanka,” said Loss, “was said by the poet to be the Scented Isle, the Aromatic Eden, the last outpost of civilisation. We’ve half a day’s sailing ahead. We should be sensing it now.”

“What — flowers? Wafted over the sea?”

“Yes. You can always smell them. It gives a lift to the heart.”

After a time Eddie said, “I do smell something. Not flowers. Something rather vile. I was wondering if there was engine trouble.”

“I have noted it, too,” said Loss, and went to the rail and stared hard into the Eastern dazzle on the sea.

“It’s smeary,” said Eddie, joining him. “The sky’s smeary.”

In half an hour the smears had turned to clouds black as oil and soot, lying all along and high above the curved horizon. The ship’s engines were slowing down.

Then they stopped and fell silent, the wake hushed, and the crew called to each other, gathered along the rail to stare.

Then a torrent of excited Portuguese splattered out from the tannoy on the bridge.

“I’ll find the Purser,” said Loss. “But I know what it is.” He listened. “There’s been a signal. There has been a signal from Colombo. Singapore has fallen to the Japanese!”

“The Japanese? What have they to do with us?”

“We have seen no newspapers. We have heard no news since Christmas. We have been nearly four months aboard.”

“Singapore is impregnable.”

“It seems not.”

After dark, very slowly, the ship began to move on towards Colombo, though whether, said the Purser, they would get their refuelling slot was uncertain. Black smoke covered all the hills. The rubber plantations were all on fire. The dawn seemed never to come as they sailed nearer and nearer the murk.

And they were all at once one of a great fleet of battered craft, most of them limping towards harbour, a macabre regatta, their decks packed with the bandaged and the lame.

“They’re wearing red flowers in their hats,” said Eddie. “Most of them.”

“It’s blood,” said Loss.

Some of the bandaged waved weakly and uncertainly put up their thumbs and, as the boats reached harbour, there came feeble cheering and scraps of patriotic songs. “They’re singing,” said Eddie. But There’ll always be an England trailed away when the refugees on board were near enough to see the whole port of Colombo crammed with other English trying to get away.

“They look numb,” said Loss.

“They look withered,” said Eddie. “Like they’ve been days in water. Shrivelled. Hey — you don’t think Singapore can really have gone?”

Loss said nothing.

Then, “Look ashore,” he said, and pointed at the thousand fluttering Japanese flags that were flaming on every harbourside roof and window.

“I don’t think that they will be any safer here,” said Eddie.

“Nor will any of us,” said Loss.

All at once, high above the Fragrant Isle and to the South, there was a startling scatter of light. Several groups of tiny daylight stars, triangles of silver and scarlet that the sun caught for a moment before they were lost in the smoke. Aeroplanes.

“Like pen nibs,” said Eddie. “Dipped in red ink.”

“Japs,” said Loss.

The British Army was everywhere on the quays, top brass striding, the Governor with his little cane, the refugees being welcomed but too dazed to understand. A procession of stretchers. Eddie saw one old woman on a crutch asking courteously if anyone had seen her sister, Vera; then collapsing. Crowds hung over the rails of the Customs and Excise who were unhurriedly examining credentials even of the stretcher cases.

“What will happen to us?” said Eddie. “We’ll vanish in all that. The bombing here will start any time.”

“We’re to refuel and turn round,” said Loss — he had found the Chief Engineer. “It’ll be quite a time before we’re refuelled though, and we’ll be taking on refugees.”

“Turn back?” said Eddie. “To Sierra Leone again?”

“No. Back to England. All the way. Probably via Cadiz.”

“I must get a message to my father.”

“If you send a message, it will have to be in Japanese.”

The ship somehow sidled into the madhouse harbour, the engines shuddered loudly, then stopped, and they were tied up and the first gangplank let down. Loss and Eddie stood above it, side by side, like lamp-post and bollard. Loss, now that Eddie looked down, had with him his suitcase and haversack.

“Feathers, I’m staying.”

“You’re what?”

“I’m staying here. D’you want to come with me?”

“You can’t stay. You’ve no money. You’ll be on your own.”

“I’ve a bit of money and I won’t be alone. I’ve a couple of uncles. Attorneys. Everyone’s an attorney in Colombo. I shall be an attorney one day. So will you, I can tell. I’ll be safe from the Japanese. I’m not British. Not white. Come with me. My relatives are resourceful.”

“What about the customs?”

“Oh, I am adept at slithering through.”

“Loss, you’ll disappear. The Japs’ll be here in a week. After they’ve bombed Colombo into the sea. If you don’t get killed by a bomb, they’ll dispose of you and no one will know.”

“I tell you, Feathers, I am lucky. I am The Albat Ross. I’ll give you my pack of cards. An Albat Ross feather. A feather to Feathers. Here you are. Oh, could you give me your watch? For emergencies?”

“It’s my father’s.”

“I may need it.”

The masked face. The humourless, cunning, dwarf’s eyes. .

“Yes, of course.” Eddie took it off and put it in Loss’s outstretched hand.

“See,” said Loss. “You’ll be safe. Just look—,” and he pointed up behind Eddie at the mast-head “—an albatross. You don’t often get them this far South.”

Eddie looked and saw nothing. He turned back and Loss had gone.

THE DONHEADS

Cracks like shots and a roar followed by heavy black smoke emerged from the region of the bonfire, just off-stage from Filth’s sun-lounge, and Garbutt, looking older now, went rebelliously by with yet another load of leaves.

I don’t know what’s the matter with the man. He knows how I feel. It’s too soon to burn. The stuff hasn’t died down. He’s not normal.

Garbutt came back, past him again, a fork over the barrow for the next load. Each time he passed his jaw was thrust out further, his eyes more determinedly set full ahead.

He’s a pyro — pyro. Pyro-technic? Pyrocanthus? Pyrowhatever (words keep leaving me). He’s destructive as old Queen Mary. Pyro — pyro? How can I get on here?

And to whom could he complain now old Veneering was gone?

He was amazed at his regret for Veneering. It was genuine grief. Veneering the arch-enemy had become the familiar and close friend. The twice-a-week chess had become the comforting note in an empty diary. There had been visits to the White Hart for lunch, once even for dinner, in Salisbury. Once they had taken a car to Wilton to look at the Vari Dycks. Veneering turned out to be keen on painting and music and Old Filth, trying to hide his total ignorance of both, had accompanied him. Veneering read books. Filth had not been a reader. Veneering had introduced him to various writers. “Only of the higher journalism,” he’d said. “We won’t tax our addled brains. Patrick O’Brian. You were a sea-faring man, Filth, weren’t you? In the War?”

“I hate the sea,” said Filth, putting down O’Brian.

“I’d quite like a cruise,” said Veneering, but saw Filth look aghast. “I’d not have even thought of a cruise once,” said Veneering. “I was beyond cruising before you came round that Christmas Day.”

“Yes,” said Filth with some pride. “You were in dry dock.”

Muffled up, the two of them walked sometimes round the lanes, Filth instructing Veneering in ornithology.

“You are full of surprises,” said Veneering.

“My prep school Headmaster,” said Filth. “He went off to America in the War and I suppose he died there. He didn’t keep up with any of us. He’d done his duty by us.”

“Very wise.”

“I tried to find him when I came back from my abortive attempt at being an evacuee. We had to turn for Home, you know. Took three months. Four months, going out. Singapore fell before we got there. My father was there. He died in Changi.”

“I’d heard something of the sort.”

“I used to make a joke of it. Dinner parties. All the way to Singapore, and about turn, back again.”

“It can’t have been a great joke.”

“No. The journey home was worse than going out. We were stacked with casualties. They kept dying. There was none of the Prayer Book and committal to the deep and Abide with Me and so forth. They were just shovelled over. I hung on. I kept imagining Sir — my Headmaster — would be waiting for me at Cadiz. Or my Auntie May.”

“I had not thought you the type for an Auntie May.”

“Missionary. Wonderful woman. There was another missionary on the boat. A Miss Robertson. She died of gangrene and they shovelled her off, too.”

“Have you written about all this?”

“Certainly not. Old Barrister’s memoirs are all deadly. Don’t you think?”

“Yes. But maybe you’d have surprised us.”

“I’ve grown my image, Veneering. Took some doing. I’m not going to upset it now.”

“You mean upset yourself?”

“Yes. Probably. Have some more hock.”

But Veneering gone — ridiculous to have taken a cruise at his age — Filth’s loneliness for the old enemy was extraordinary, his mourning for him entirely different and sharper than his mourning for Betty. He’d told Veneering more than he’d ever told Betty — though never about Ma Didds. He’d even told Veneering about the buttermilk girl. Veneering had cackled. He’d told him about Loss. “Did you tell me about that before?” asked Veneering. “It rings a bell. Did I know him?”

“You’re wandering,” said Filth. They were playing chess.

“Not far,” said Veneering, taking his queen.

I suppose Memoirs might be in the order of things, he thought, with Veneering dead and his house next door torn apart, windows flung wide, a family with children shouting, crying, laughing, breaking through his hedge; the parents growing vegetables and offering him lettuces. Once a child from Veneering’s house had landed at his feet like a football as he sat in the garden reading the Minutes of a new Temple Benchtable. He wanted to throw the child back over the hedge. “Sorry,” the child said.

“I suppose you want your ball back.”

“I haven’t got a ball.”

“Well, what’s that in your hand?”

“Just some old beads.”

Giggles from the bushes.

“I found them in that flower-bed.”

He vanished.

Bloody self-confident, thought Filth. I don’t understand children now. Sir would have flayed him. Then: What am I talking about? Acting the Blimp. Sir wouldn’t have flayed him. He’d have lectured him on birds.

But, too late for that, he thought.

He sat to his desk and attempted a Memoir, but found it impossible. Opinions, judgements had made him famous, but how to write without opinion or judgement? Statement of facts — easy. But how to decide which were the facts? He shrank from the tremendous, essential burden of seeing himself through other people’s eyes. Only God could do it. It seemed blasphemous even to try. Such a multitude of impressions, such a magnitude of emotion. Where was truth to be found?

“Why did you become an advocate, Filth?” Veneering used to ask. “Don’t tell me you wanted to promote the truth.”

“Justice. It interested me.”

“And we know that justice is not the truth.”

“Certainly not.”

“But it’s some sort of step towards it?”

“Not even that. Do you agree?”

“I agree,” Veneering had said, busy with his ghastly jigsaw. “The Law is nevertheless an instinct. A good instinct. A framework for behaviour. And a safeguard (good — bit of the church roof) in time of trouble. Parlement of Foules — Chaucer.”

“Rooks have a parliament,” said Filth, keeping his end up.

But though his Memoirs went on endlessly, and rather impressively as he thought them through in the small hours of the night, sometimes to the accompaniment of his beating heart and too much whiskey, when it came to getting them upon paper they would not come. They made him feel so foolish. He felt Betty looking over his shoulder and saying kindly, “jolly good.” He sat in the sun-lounge each morning, defeated, and Garbutt went tramping by. Oh, how could one concentrate? And, oh great heaven! Here came that Chloe in lacy mauve and a perm, round the back of the house and waving a cake. To think he had once. .

He deliberately arose, holding his tartan blanket round him and shuffled to the other side of the table to sit with his back to her, facing the door to the sitting-room which immediately opened and in came the cleaning lady, Mrs.-er, with a cup of tea.

Decisions came fast to Filth, all decisions except what to include in his Memoirs. Mrs.-er put down the cup and saucer, talking the while, saying that that Chloe from the church was wanting to give him another sponge.

“Mrs.-er,” he said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you. I am going away.”

“Away? Oh, yes?”

“Yes. I am going to Malmesbury.”

“Malmesbury? Down Gloucester?”

“Yes. I was there in the Army during the War. Just for a look round.”

“If it’s hotels, be careful. There’ll be steps and stairs you don’t know. Remember poor Judge Veneering.”

“It is not a ship. I’ll leave my address.”

“I’ll pack for you.”

“Thank you, I’m sure I can manage. And I’ll be hiring a car.”

Two minutes later he saw her outside, furiously conferring with Garbutt, the mauve woman having disappeared. Their excitement maddened him.

The next day, she came in to tell him that if it was a hotel he ought to have new pyjamas.

He said, “Oh, and Mrs.-er, when I come back I intend to manage here alone.”

“Alone?”

“I think I am becoming too dependent on you all. I’m going to employ the Social Services. The Meals on Wheels. I’m sorry, Mrs.-er.”

“After all these years you still don’t know my name,” she said. “That’s it, then. I’ll go now. Get yourself to Malmesbury.”

He saw her clacking at Garbutt on the lawn and marching away, and felt gleefully cruel. He opened the glass doors and waited till Garbutt went by.

“I know what you’re going to say,” said Garbutt. “I’ll just see the fire’s out, then I’m off. You know where to find me if you change your mind. Her name’s Katey, by the way. You’ve gutted her.”

In the hotel at Malmesbury, journey safely accomplished, splendid room looking across at the Abbey, smell of a good dinner floating up, his unrepentant euphoria remained. Their blank faces, ha! Their disbelief. They’d see he was his own master yet. And here in Malmesbury not a soul knew him. He stumbled on the stairs and limped into the dining-room, rather wishing he’d brought his walking-stick for his explorations tomorrow.

The ankle next morning was the size of a small balloon and he telephoned the Desk for assistance. They suggested bringing him breakfast in bed which outraged him. Staggering down a steep flight of stairs between two waiters, he somehow made the breakfast-room. Outside it was pouring with rain and people went by behind umbrellas at a forty-five degree angle against the wind. Unable to walk from the table, he enquired whether there was a doctor who could come and see him and was told the way to a surgery. It was not far, they said, but Old Filth couldn’t even reach the hotel’s front door and sank upon an oak bench. People passed by. A whole coachload of tourists streamed past, chattering about the disappointing weather. He asked if the Desk would ring for a doctor to call to examine him.

“You’d have to go to the hospital for that. For an X-ray.”

“I only need a GP’s opinion.”

The Desk stared. “You’d have to go round to the surgery. They don’t do home visits now unless it’s serious.”

He asked the Desk to call a taxi.

The paving stones between the taxi and surgery door shone slippery and menacing. He hesitated. The umbrellas continued to go by. At last he was helped in, and found a room crowded and silent like a church and one girl at a screen with her back to the audience.

“I need to see a doctor.”

“Yes.” She handed him a disc saying “21.”

“Do I wait here?”

She looked surprised. “Where else?”

“This means that there are twenty people ahead of me?”

“Yes.”

“What sort of wait will that be?”

“A long one.”

“An hour?”

“Oh, nearer two.”

He rang the Desk and asked for his luggage to be collected and brought down to the hotel foyer. And would they kindly ring the car-hire company to come and take him from the surgery, then back to the hotel and then home to the Donheads.

“It wasn’t even Malmesbury I really wanted to go to, it was Badminton. Just down the road,” he told this driver.

“It is. Just as it ever was. Down the road and down the hill.”

“I was there in the War. Wanted to have another look. I was in the Army.” (His ankle was hell.)

“There’s a good hotel near there where you could keep your foot up. They might get you a doctor. Were you there with the Royals? They’ll be pleased to see you if you were. Still the same sort of place.”

(Anything better than creeping home to shame and emptiness.)

“I might give it a try. Thank you.”

They swooped from the hill to the plain. Through the rain he saw the great house again, the broad quiet streets of the village, the stretch of woodland, the wide fields.

“Terrible weather for sight-seeing,” said the taxi man. “I’ll take you right home when the time comes, if you like. I’ll just look in here and see if there’s a room. It’ll cost you, mind.”

Exhausted, he sat in the foyer of the new hotel which was calm and gracious. Someone brought him a stool for his foot. Someone else said they were going to get a doctor. The rain eased and Filth was brought lunch on a tray alone in the lounge. He was tired, humiliated and — something else — what? Good God! frightened. I have been frightened! He sank into himself, dozed, was helped to a big ground-floor bedroom with a view across the parkland, and very cautiously, a snip at a time, allowed himself the past.

“Would you very kindly put my name and address in your address book, young man?” said the ragged skeleton beside him on the boat-deck as they left Cadiz. “I fully intend to reach Home, but, if not, I would like to be sure that Vera knows what happened to me. That’s to say, of course, if she gets Home herself, which I doubt. She was always rather feeble without me to get her anywhere. I am Miss Robertson. Miss Meg. She is Miss Vera. We’re daughters of the late Colonel Robertson. Teachers. This is our only address in England now. It belongs to some old chums from school who’ve always paid us a little rent. I hope we’ll get on together now that I shall have to live with them. Well, school’s a long time ago, you know.”

Her skin was pale and glazed with fever and her eyes far too bright. Her wooden crutches lay beside her and she tried all the time to clutch their handles. “Have you a pen, young man? Turn to ‘R’ in your address book.” Eddie lay immobile. Someone crept up to Miss Robertson and wiped her face with a cloth. Other people muttered together that she should have been detained at Cadiz. She had been formidably against it, even in fever. She had to get Home.

“If any of us gets Home,” she had said. “I hear that there’s one ship a day being sunk just now in the Channel.”

As it grew dark, one night, he heard Miss Robertson whisper, “Look in my little bag. There’s some trinkets. Take them, young man, and give them to your sweetheart.” The little bag lay pushed up under the life-boat blocks and the crutches near it. There was a cold clean breeze. When daylight came, where Miss Robertson had been there was a stain.

The smell beneath the life-boat where she had lain had gone too.

She had been complaining of the rotting smell on the ship. Eddie had not cared about it, hardly noticed. “Gangrene,” he heard someone say. “The stink was from herself. The boy don’t look much better. He’s filth all through.”

A crewman went away for a bucket of water and scrubbing brush, and Eddie, eyes closed, stretched to touch Miss Robertson’s walking aids and found his hand on the bag. He took it and pushed it beneath him, later found a corner for it in his own suitcase with his father’s photograph and Pat Ingoldby’s clothes-brush. Through his headache and fever, and through the now endless vomiting, he found himself thinking that he was becoming like Loss. A scavenger. Survival. Take anything. Old lady. Couldn’t see her own doom. Her isolation. Talking about address books.

The ship sailed on like some faery invisible barge. The sea shone, still and blue. No planes. No U-Boats. Other craft nowhere near. Way out, towards the West, fishing boats. A wonderful calmness.

A kind of whisper went round at last among the humped and now many fewer passengers; a sibilant, urgent word. “Yes. Yes, it is. It’s land. Yes. Yes. It is.”

And cold now. Eddie was unwrapped first from his life-jacket then put inside a tarpaulin. Someone washed his face as he vomited. Cleaned him when he shat his clothes. “Here’s another going, if you ask me.”

Now he was left alone.

The odd thing, said the speck of the rational in Eddie within him — he guarded it like his life — the odd thing is that I did once have an address book. Alice gave it to me. In the kitchen. Leather. Small. Red. Someone had given it to her, but, she said, “I don’t need it. I never had any addresses to write to.” One day, at the billet in Londonderry, Eddie had written in it, for comfort, all the addresses he knew. School. Oxford, the Ingoldbys (hopelessly), Sir, Auntie May, one or two schoolfriends even though he’d never write to them. Not Les Girls. Not the buttermilk girl. As his temperature soared now he began to wonder if he’d ever again find the addresses of his cousins. If the old address in Kotakinakulu would ever find his father. He had had no address for Loss. By now there was probably no Loss to write to.

Then he remembered that he had not seen his address book for a very long time. He felt about in his bag and it was not there and he knew, without any question, that Loss had stolen it. God knows why, except he was a natural crook. A delinquent. The bastard. Vanished, and with my watch. And no Loss. No loss. But such a monstrous act! Cutting Eddie off from every hope of contact.

Loss’s defection was the metaphor for Eddie’s life. It was Eddie’s fate always to be left. Always to be left and forgotten. Everyone gone, now. Out of his reach. For the first time, Eddie was utterly on his own.

He had his passport — yes, he felt that in the bag. He had Pat’s brush. He had Miss Robertson’s pouch. He felt fat beads inside it and pulled them out. A great string of pearls. Thank goodness Loss wasn’t there. They’d be gone in five minutes. Lightness almost mirth filled Eddie as the ship, charmed, blessed, unhindered, sailed slowly, slowly, up the Irish Sea and such as could gathered at the rail and gazed unbelieving at the peaceful green Welsh hills. Over the Styx, thought Eddie. Crossing the bar.

Aeons passed and Eddie, wrapped in blankets, shaking with fever but ice-cold, a structure of bones, was dumped on a stretcher and carried through customs unhindered, and ashore. At the ambulance station in his fever he looked for a car like a bread-bin but found instead a man playing with a yo-yo. He was familiar. He was old Oils, his Housemaster. Standing alongside him was Isobel Ingoldby.

Diagonally falling drops alighting on the windowpanes of Gloucestershire, and Old Filth awoke in the new, ever-silent hotel to see a girl smiling down at him, holding a tray of tea. He thought: Oh God — the buttermilk girl! Then, seeing the sweet open smile, thought: No.

And I am an old man, he thought.

“I am an old man,” he said.

“I’ve brought you a cup of tea. Is it true you were a soldier here, sir?”

It took him some time to remember where he was. Near Badminton.

“I was stationed at Badminton,” he said. “In the War.”

“My gran was at Badminton then. In the War. Queen Mary was here but we all kept it quiet. They said nobody would want to kidnap her but my gran said — she was parlour maid at the house — that she had three bags ready packed to take her to America. In the attics.”

“That was probably true. Though she might not have gone herself.”

“One was full of jewels.”

“Oh, I’m sure that was true. That would have gone into safety.”

“Did you know her, sir?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Is it true she was always cutting down trees?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Especially ivy. She hated ivy. She had half a platoon chopping down ivy. They say the first year she didn’t realise it would grow back again.

“I expect it was the way she’d been brought up,” said the girl. “My gran says she was kept in a band-box as a girl. Never opened her mouth — well, her mother never stopped talking — and what a bottom! Her mother’s, that is. Lovely woman. Real old England, her mother. Queen Mary was brought up in Teck, which is German, and she didn’t like Germans. My gran said she’d been brought up to gravel paths and never seen a field of hay. And my gran says it was all psychological, the ivy.”

“Your gran sounds a very perceptive woman.”

“She is. My mother sang for Queen Mary, you know.”

“Sang?”

“In the village school. Queen Mary used to turn up there unexpected and sit at the back. She had a turned-up nose.”

“Oh. I never noticed that.”

“Yes. Look at the stamps. She was embarrassed by it, my gran thinks. She had never been thought a beauty. But she was a beauty, my gran says. And all that about being a kleptomaniac was wicked lies. And she never forgot a birthday.”

“That’s true.”

“And she fancied some of the subalterns. She liked them with a stammer, did you know that? My uncle had a stammer. He was one of her four motorbike bodyguards and she chose him for his stammer. She said, ‘I have a son like you.’ She meant the King.”

“D’you know, I never knew that,” said Filth. “I didn’t make the connection.”

“Won’t you go out now and sit in the sun? I’ll help you. My gran has a terrible leg. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was gangrene. What’s the matter? Have I upset you? Now then, you know the doctor said yours is but a bad sprain. You’ll be fit in a week. Shall I ask my gran to come up here? She’d love a talk.”

“Do you want to talk with my gran?” the girl asked the next day, bringing him a breakfast tray and no refusals. “It’d be a breath of life to her. Maybe she’d remember you.”

“I hardly remember myself.”

“She said there was one always reading. Law books. She got them for him, Queen Mary. And chocolate. He used to hold her wool for her. He’d been through it, she said. Very good-looking. Oh yes, and he had a stammer, She found him — now what was it? — very personable. That’s what we heard her tell her lady-in-waiting. ‘The Captain’s very personable, isn’t he?’ She took up very close to him after her son got killed, the Duke of Kent. He was nearest to her, that one, they said. She never cried though. She and this soldier — he was a junior Platoon Commander — I asked gran when I got home last night — this soldier used to sit with her by the hour. She even used to pass through the library when he was reading in there, not looking up. Deep in his books. He was invited to stay in the house you know. Dine with them all. The Duke and Duchess — and my, there were some sparks flying there — them being kicked upstairs in their own home and all the best rooms taken over by Queen Mary and her fifty servants.”

“This all sounds very credible.”

“He refused though, the young Captain. He said he had to be with his men in the billets in the stables and Queen Mary couldn’t but say he was right. I believe now and then she was poking about the stables too, searching out ivy. And maybe—” she had his tie straight now and his socks on and his polished shoes ready for him. “He was very good-looking, my gran said.” She thoughtfully looked Filth over. “And very young and nice.”

“I was young but far from nice,” said Filth. “I don’t think I’d better meet your gran.”

“I’d like a look round the stables, though,” he said, the next day. “When I’m walking again.”

“I can get you a wheelchair.”

“No. No thanks.”

“Queen Mary used to go round in a horse and cart to save petrol. No side to her. They used to put a couple of basket chairs in the cart and hoist her and the lady’s maid up into it and one of the bike boys shouted up, ‘You look as if you’re in a tumbril, Ma’am,’ and she said, ‘Well, it might come to that.’ So she can’t have been altogether no fun.”

“I think she wasn’t much fun. She hadn’t had much fun,” said Filth.

“Oh that terrible King!” said the girl. “All those pheasants. All he ever thought about, my gran said. Where the children came from, we’ll never know, my gran said.”

“Yes, that’s often a puzzle,” said Filth.

He was in a private room. It might be a cabin of some sort. Outside the window there were trees but trees do not grow in the sea and the sea still moved beneath him, up and down, up and down, lift and drop. Seven months at sea. But the clouds above the window sailed along without the elf-light from the sea beneath them. And these tree tops? A woman ran by him and her hat was a plume of white starch. Her dress was navy blue but she, too, had nothing to do with ships. She had a face of wrath and across her broad front hung a watch and chain. She did not speak. He floated away.

Later he opened his eyes on a member of the Ku Klux Klan seated at the end of his bed playing cat’s cradle with some bedtape.

“Hello?” Eddie said and the dreadful figure looked up with surprise. It was Oils again.

“Hello, sir.”

“Hello, Feathers. Well done. Awake?”

“What for, sir? Why well done?”

“Getting home.”

“Not in my hands, sir.”

Adrift again. He was remembering the image at the end of the bed when it was suddenly present again.

“Hello, sir. Why are you in those clothes?”

“They’re antiseptic, Feathers. You’re infectious.”

“What have I got?”

“A variety of things.”

“Will I recover?”

“Yes. Of course. In time. Then you can come back to school until it’s time to go to Oxford.”

Away he floated. Nurses came and went and put needles in different parts of him, and tubes. Did unspeakable things to him. They wore masks. An unpleasant one told him he’d no right to be there. “You should be in the Hospital for Tropical Diseases,” she said, “but it’s too far off. They’re doing tests on you there. We’re not equipped here. We’ve had to ask for volunteers.”

“What for?”

“To nurse you.”

“Thanks.”

Here was the Ku Klux Klan again, now back with the yo-yo. “The Headmaster sends his good wishes. He says you must convalesce at school.”

“Thanks. You mean in the San?”

“I suppose so, Feathers, but we’ve not planned anything yet.”

“I won’t go in the San.”

“The Headmaster has offered you a room in his house.”

Remembering the tea-cosy, Eddie flinched.

“My aunts have gone to Scotland somewhere,” he said. “I don’t know where. If you find out, don’t tell them. But I’d like to know about my father. If you can find out somehow.”

“I have to go now,” said Oils. “Ten minutes at a time.”

A nurse came in one day with mail which lay by the bed for several days.

“Shall I read it?” asked another nurse. “Well, this is nice, it’s from your aunts. It says: ‘Bad luck, Eddie dear, what a hoot.’”

“The police found them,” said Oils on his next visit, embarrassed. “Your aunts.”

“Can they be lost again?”

“I’d think so,” said Oils.

“This visiting card’s been stuck to your locker since the first day you came in here,” said the Red Cross hospital librarian, pushing round her trolley. She always stopped by his bed though he read nothing. Masks had been abandoned now. “You’re not ready to read yet, are you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I don’t blame you. These are all awful old trashy paperbacks. They have to be burnt in case they get into the general library and spread infection. They can’t get librarians for this ward. I wipe all the books in Dettol — not a nice job. Shall I read you this visiting card, it says Isobel Ingoldby, that will be the girl that brought you in, her and the schoolmaster — he’s a funny one.”

“Has she been back?”

“Yes. Several times. When you were not with us.”

“Where does she live?”

“The card has her address. It’s in London.”

“However did she find me here?”

“How did you find me, Mr. Oilseed? I’m glad you’re out of your overalls, sir.”

“You’re not infectious any more. You’re to sit up at the window tomorrow.”

“But how did you know I’d be on that particular ship?”

“There were signals sent of some sort. From Colombo. To me and to Ingoldby’s sister and maybe to others but we haven’t heard. The Admiralty tracked the ship. Ingoldby’s sister has some underground job there somewhere. Something to do with the Admiralty.”

“Underground in the Admiralty? Was it signed? What was it — a telegram?”

“It was a cable. Unsigned. I gather it came by way of a place called Bletchley Park. Where Isobel Ingoldby was.”

“Could it have been from my father?”

“No,” said Oils. “No. Sorry. I don’t think so. Singapore isn’t in touch. Some prisoners have got letters out, somehow. . but no. .”

“D’you think someone in Colombo got a message to him?”

“I’d not think so. Not unless someone knew every single one of our addresses.”

They moved him by ambulance to the South of England and Oils said goodbye, with some relief, Eddie thought. “By the way, we’ve informed Christ Church. You are not forgotten. As soon as you’re released.”

“Thanks. Thank the Headmaster for me, sir.”

“Yes. Of course. And well done again. You’re fit now.”

“But I’m going to another isolation ward. The Plymouth Naval Hospital. Whatever for?”

“The ways of medical men are very strange.”

“Sir — thanks for being so brave.”

“Nothing brave about me,” said Oils. “Matter of fact you’ve cheered me up. Glad you’re better.”

In Plymouth, in the isolation wing, he kept apart from the rest who were thoroughly dispirited, most of them gnarled old salts who swore considerably and talked of past delights. One of them had been at Gallipoli, and he talked on through the night of the horrors of the deep. “There was one sailor,” he said, “looked ninety. Homeless. Living miracle. He was so riddled with corruption — look, one day on deck he coughed up something with legs and a backbone.

“A backbone,” he said. “I’ve never forgotten it. What’s the matter with the lad? Squeamish?”

Slowly they let Eddie walk about outside along the old stone terraces. It was autumn. The air was sweet.

Then one afternoon came Isobel, striding along.

“They wouldn’t let me in before,” she said. “They didn’t tell me what you’d caught, either. Whatever have you been doing? You never left the ship, did you?”

“I a-a-ate bananas in Freetown.”

“Your stammer’s come back.”

“Only i-i-in-intermittently.”

“You’re keeping something to yourself.”

“I suppose so but I don’t quite know what.”

She leant towards him and stroked his arm. “You look like a grub,” she said. “One of those things you can see through.”

He was in tears. “Sorry. I’ll be OK in a minute. Don’t go.”

“I have to get the train back. I’ve come two hundred miles.”

“Isobel.”

“You’ve got my card and number.”

“Come next leave.”

“My next leave maybe I’ll go to Scotland to flay your aunts.”

“Don’t,” he said. “I’m nothing to do with them now. Just get me near to you. Somehow. For ever.”

“Child,” she said, and was gone.

And — six full months later—“You are passed and fit, Feathers,” said the Surgeon Commander, RN, with a facial tic and a foghorn voice who ran the hospital like a cruiser, each patient to attention each at the end of his bed. “I suppose you will now depart to Oxford?”

“No, sir. I’ve decided not.”

“Yes?”

“I’m going to join up, sir.”

“We’ve just got you shipshape. You may prove we’ve been wasting our time. A very expensive case. Expensive and unsavoury. But good show.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“You will want to join the Navy, I suppose? Return to the source of the trouble?”

“No, sir. The Army. My father was in the Army. I’d like to join his old regiment.”

“No accounting for taste,” said the Commander. “Foolish of you. The sea is pretty well ours now. The going is easier. The Army’s just about to move to the thick of the last long shove. It will be slow and bloody, and you don’t look like a soldier.”

“I think I might be, sir. Given the chance.”

He felt naked on the hospital forecourt. He travelled to Gloucestershire alone. It was as terrifying as the journey to a first school, as horrible as his first walk with Babs and Claire to the Welsh baby school when he was five. He’d been feeling ill with the Welsh winter then. There had been a pain in his chest — but every time he had turned to look back at the farmhouse, Ma Didds, as usual clutching her stomach, holding her little stick, had waved him furiously on.

He missed the safety of the hospital.

Now it was a ride in a train again into a different world, the West Country, Eastward from Plymolith, across a beautiful river, soil the red of sunset, a change of trains; and into Gloucestershire. Someone had given him a bed-and-breakfast address and a warm soft-voiced old couple saw that he had a hot water bottle. There was a boiled egg for breakfast. An egg! “Joining up?” they said. “Make the most of the egg, now.” He borrowed a bike and turned up at the recruiting office, in Gloucester; where he was expected.

There were three of them behind the desk and they looked at him with considerable interest. They spoke of his health. He had been cleared one-hundred-per-cent fit and he was brown from the air and sea off Plymouth and he looked every bit of his nearly nineteen years. His hair was curly again and auburn. His weight was now normal. His eyes were alive.

“Your father’s regiment?” they said. “The Gloucesters?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I know your father.”

“I’m afraid I hardly do, sir. I was on my way—”

“So we understand. There is, I suppose, no news from Changi?”

“No, sir.”

“I hope very much that we’ll hear something and that he will hear of you. Well do what we can.”

The middle one nodded at the other two who got up and went out.

“We have a proposal to make to you, Feathers. You were a member of your school’s OTC, I understand, and have done some basic training — can march and so forth?”

“Well, I could, sir.”

“It doesn’t leave you. We have decided to send you to the platoon that is guarding Queen Mary.”

Eddie stared. “But she’s well guarded, sir. And she’s in the Pacific Ocean or somewhere.”

“Not the ship. The Queen. The mother of our Monarch. She is down here in the West Country. We have one hundred and fifty men in her defence and four particular bodyguards. What’s the matter?”

“It is not s-s-soldiering, sir.”

Instead of darkening with rage, the Colonel’s blue eyes shut and opened again quickly.

“Only a run-in, Feathers. Not for the rest of the War. It is to finish your restoration. I notice you have a stammer and I have heard that it can be chronic. You would find it hard to give orders. The stammer must be removed.”

“It is only i-in-int-int-ermittent, sir. It re-t-urns when it is comm-comm-ented on.”

“You will report to Badminton barracks tomorrow at fourteen hundred hours. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But there is one more thing. Your health.”

“I’m a hundred per cent, sir.”

“I wonder if you know what has been the matter with you, Feathers?”

“Fever, sir. A bug from Sierra Leone. Pretty lethal, I suppose. They never told me.”

“You have been infected, Feathers, with three different types of parasitic worm. And certainly from Sierra Leone.”

“Sir?”

“But that has not troubled us. The worms are gone. We know how to treat these things. But the other thing was more serious. You have been suffering from a venereal disease.”

“What is that, sir?”

The Colonel looked at him warily.

“You have been in close contact with a woman.”

“She died of gangrene, sir, on the ship after Cadiz. I only did what I could. Miss Robertson. She was over seventy—”

“I doubt that she was the source of the infection. What I am saying, Feathers, is that you have acquired sexual knowledge through a most unpalatable source. Isn’t this true?”

A long and thoughtful silence.

“It was dark, sir. I never really looked at her. I never thought of her as palatable or unpalatable. She just climbed in. I’d no idea how to do it, and she had. She gave me buttermilk, sir. It was in Northern Ireland, sir.”

The Colonel paced hurriedly across to the window and stood looking out intently.

“Were you taught nothing at school, Feathers?”

“I have won a scholarship to Oxford, sir.”

A sort of sob from the window. A pause for recovery.

“Feathers, I have decided that this disreputable episode should not be passed on to Badminton. Primarily because of Queen Mary. I hope I am not being unwise.”

“Thank you. Yes, sir. I can’t think that Queen Mary would be in any danger from me.”

“Go! Enough!” roared the Colonel. “You’re dismissed, Feathers. Go.”

Afterwards the Colonel wondered if he’d been made fun of. Beaten in argument. Run rings round.

Feathers wasn’t certain, either.

And so, this October, Filth was in a wheelchair being pushed round the Badminton meadows around Badminton House by the nice girl and her grandmother, their feet crunching on the crystalline grass. They stood at a distance from the great house.

“The cedar’s gone,” said Filth. “Well, well.”

“Oh, the cedar’s gone,” said the grandmother. “Not so very long after Queen Mary. The sixties. She’d be pleased. It was what might be called a running sore, that tree. ‘Have it down,’ she told the Duchess (and her hardly moved in!). ‘It’s in the wrong place. It blocks the light.’ ‘Lord Raglan used to climb in it,’ says her Grace. ‘It’s not to be touched.’ ‘Over my dead body,’ the Duchess said. I heard the very words.”

“The tree was still the issue when I arrived,” said Filth.

He had not seen Queen Mary his first month at Badminton, after a three-week OCTU course in another camp. Once he saw a silvery pillar above him on a terrace. Once again he seemed to see something moving slowly inside a long glass gallery. Then one day, reading in the vegetable garden — he had begun to order Law books from London — there she was, watching him from over the hedge. It was a hot day but she was dressed in full rig — a long coat and skirt, pearls and brooches, and a rucked hat like a turban with a sweep to it. He stood up at once and she gave a strange half-bow and turned away. There was an attendant nearby who was knitting on four-peg needles. Knitting steadily, she turned about and followed the Queen. The next week he was invited to the house to tea.

It was served in the large salon where new acquaintances were tried out. If they made the grade there would be a future invitation to Her Majesty’s private sitting-room upstairs. Big test. The Queen sat doing needlework, her lady-in-waiting sat picking over some scraps of cloth, and a fat noisy woman was shouting.

“Over my dead body,” she was saying, “will you cut down my tree. Cut down my spinneys, my ivy, my woodlands, my bramble bushes. Cut down my house, but not the tree.”

Queen Mary continued with her blanket stitch. The lady-in- waiting looked exhausted and the fat woman came up alongside Eddie Feathers as the twelve-foot high doors to the salon were being held open by footmen in scarlet.

“She’s impossible. I’m the Duchess of Beaufort. I know I look like somebody’s cook, but that’s who I am, and this is my house. She’s only an evacuee,” she spat as she blew past, the doors being silently closed behind her.

Queen Mary looked across at Eddie and smiled.

After the tray had been put down (margarine on the bread, pineapple jam but really made from turnips, a terrible seed cake and some oatcakes) Queen Mary passed him an almost transparent cup half-full of pale water.

“Cream?” she asked.

“No, thank you.”

She nodded. There was no cream, anyway, and the milk looked blue.

The lady-in-waiting brought out a box of pills and dropped one in the Queen’s cup and one in her own. “Saccharine?” she said.

“Oh, no, thank you.”

“It is quite true. What my niece says is perfectly true. I am only an evacuee. A very unwilling evacuee.”

Eddie wondered what to say. “I was once an evacuee,” he said. “And very unwilling. And far too old.”

“I am far too old,” said the Queen. “How old were you?”

“Eighteen.”

“Good gracious. How humiliating for you.”

“Yes. It was. My father sent for me to Malaya, to escape the War.”

“How disgraceful of him.”

“He had had a very bad time in 1914.”

“Yes. I see. But you escaped? To tell you the truth I don’t altogether feel ashamed to have escaped. It was the Govern- ment’s decision I should come here. They told me I would be much more trouble in London. In case of kidnap. Personally I think that a plane might come and bundle me off more easily from here. That of course is why you’re all here. A hundred and fifty of you. Quite ridiculous.”

“Yes, your Maj—”

“Call me Ma’am.”

“You must miss being at the heart of things — Ma’am?”

“I don’t, now. I’ll tell you more another time.”

She looked pointedly at the lady-in-waiting who gathered up a skein of mud-coloured wool and passed it to Eddie who was having trouble with the turnip jam. “Hold Her Majesty’s wool, please.”

Eddie held out his hands and the wool was arranged upon them in a figure of eight. The lady-in-waiting began to roll it up into a ball. He felt a ninny.

“Do you think you will enjoy soldiering?” asked the Queen, looking hard at him.

He blushed and began to stammer.

“Ah yes. I see. You’ll get over it. I know a boy like you.”

He walked in the park with her through the next hard winter. The ground was black, the trees sticks of opaline ice.

“We shall just walk up and down,” said Queen Mary. “For an hour or so. We must get exercise at all costs. D’you see how the wretched ivy is coming back?”

“Did you walk like this, Ma’am, before you came here?”

“I’ve always tried to walk a great deal. You see my family runs to fat. They eat too much. My dear mother would eat half a bird and then a great sirloin for dinner, and she loved cream. And the Duchess — I used to walk in Teck but only round and round the box-beds. Sandringham was the place to walk, but somehow one didn’t. One went about in little carts to watch them shooting. And one didn’t walk in London of course. I luckily have magnificent Guelph health.”

“I have never been to London.”

She stood still with amazement. “You have never been to London? Everybody has been to London.”

“Most of Badminton village has never been to London.”

“Oh, I don’t mean the village. I mean that a gentleman, surely, has always been to London?”

“No, Ma’am. I’ve been in Wales and in the North—”

“You haven’t seen the galleries? The museums? The theatre?”

“No, Ma’am.”

“That is a personable young man,” she said that evening, hard at work arranging family photographs in an album before getting down to the red despatch boxes the King sent her daily. She read them in private, and nobody was quite sure how many, but probably all.

“Very good-looking indeed,” said Mary Beaufort. “He’ll be useful at dinner parties.”

“We don’t give dinner parties,” said the Queen. “It would be out of kilter with the War effort. But we could ask a few of the Subalterns.”

“We could.”

“In fact it seems quite ridiculous that a boy like that should be billeted down in the stables. Why can’t he come and live in the house, Mary? Do you know, he has never been to London?”

Eddie refused to live in Badminton House. He said he must stay with his platoon. He began to find the tea parties rather trying. The mud-coloured wool had been overtaken by a cloud of unravelled powder-blue which clung to his uniform in tufts. He let it be known that he had to work hard, and he settled to his Law in the stables.

But the tall shadow would fall across his book and he would have to find a garden chair and she would sit with him among the dying dahlias in the remains of the cutting garden — every foot of land, she had instructed, to be used for vegetables. The Duchess fumed, and one day came thumping down to look for Eddie and complain.

“She brought fifty-five servants,” she said. “She’s stopped them wearing livery because of the War and Churchill in that awful siren-suit. Six of them are leaving. They’ve worn scarlet since they were under-footmen and they’re old and say they can’t change. Can you do nothing with her?”

“What — me? No, your Grace. Couldn’t; c-c-couldn’t.”

“Well, you’ll have to think of something. Distract her.”

“I’ve stopped the tree. Well, I hope s-s-so.”

“Oh, good boy. But listen, she’s determined to take you to London. Her chauffeur, old Humphries, is half-blind and not safe. Once he lost Her Majesty for over an hour in Ashdown Forest. She won’t sack him. And she makes him stop and pick up any member of the forces walking on the road. Once she picked up a couple who were walking the other way and once it was an onion seller. She’ll be murdered, and then we’ll all be blamed.”

“Eddie,” said the Queen, a little later. “I am determined to get you to London. When I first came here I went back every week, you know, on the train. Then it became painful because of the bombing. The Guildhall. The City churches. All gone. And of course the antique shops are all closed or gone to Bath (you and I might perhaps go to Bath one day). But I have a great desire to see London again. It might not be patriotic to insist that the Royal coach be put back on the train, but I have plenty of my petrol ration untouched, and you could do the driving, on the main roads, Eddie, if it is too much for Humphries. We shall of course need two outriders.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t drive, Ma’am.”

The expedition was put off until Eddie had learned to drive, instruction being given in a tank on the estate.

“I can only drive a tank, Ma’am,” he said when a London visit was again suggested.

“The principle must be the same,” said the Queen.

“We must clear it with Security.”

She looked imperious. The ex-Empress of India. “Well, we’ll go out wooding, Eddie. Get my bodyguards and my axe. No, I’ll keep my hat on. I’m determined to take you to London.”

It was fixed at last that Queen Mary should make the journey to London by the train, the Royal coach still being rested in a siding near Gloucester. Some of the Badminton staff were sent to wash it down and the stationmaster of Badminton railway station had to look out for the white gloves he had worn to haul the Queen aboard the 6.15 a.m. in 1939 at the beginning of her evacuee life.

“Good luck, Ma’am.”

The lady-in-waiting followed her in, and Eddie and a couple of Other Ranks with rifles took up their posts.

“Hope you don’t meet Jerry, Ma’am,” said the stationmaster. “Everyone stand back from the lawns.”

“Oh, the bombing is totally over,” said Queen Mary. “I shall go to the Palace and have a look at the ruins of Marlborough House. And there is a little shopping—”

He blew the whistle and waved the flag. The Queen’s progress had cheered him up. She’d be back on the 5.15 from Paddington. She wasn’t dead yet.

“She’s got some spirit,” he told the empty platform. Even at Badminton there were no porters. “We’re better off than Poland. Or Stalingrad.”

Just before Paddington, Eddie in a different side-carriage alone, the Queen sent for him and handed him a slip of paper.

“Here are the things you ought to see. I haven’t given you too many. It is not only a first visit but you will find it confusing without signposts, and all the bomb-damage. You ought to have time for the Abbey and take a glance at St. James’s Park and No.10. And Big Ben. Here we are. It’s a pity you don’t know anyone who could show you about. Have a splendid time. Now, lunch — I really don’t know what to suggest.”

“I’ll miss lunch, Ma’am. It’s going to be a tight schedule.”

She stepped from the train. There was a bit of rather old red carpet down for her and she stood in silver grey with doves’ feathers in her toque, grey kid gloves, ebony stick. A whisper began—“It’s Queen Mary. Hey look — Queen Mary”—and a crowd gathered up like blown leaves. There were feeble hurrahs and some clapping, growing stronger, and the little crowd closed round Her Majesty and the lady-in-waiting. The two bodyguards melted away.

Eddie, all alone, made at once for the taxi-rank and the bedsit in Kensington of Isobel Ingoldby.

“I’m not sure how far it is,” he told the taxi-driver, after waiting in a long queue, tapping his leg with his military stick. His uniform helped him not at all for everyone seemed to be in uniform. “It’s Kensington. Off Church Street.”

“Twenty minutes,” he said, “unless we’re unlucky.”

“You mean an air raid?” Eddie was looking round the Paddington streets disappointedly. This was London: sandbags, shuffling people, greyness, walls hanging in space.

“Nah — air raids ain’t a trouble now. We’ve licked all that. We have him on the run, unless he starts with his secret weapon, he talks about. Not that we believe he’s got one.”

(They really do talk like the films, Eddie thought.)

“You’re here. D’you want to borrer a tin ’at?”

He was set down at the end of a narrow curving street of shabby cottages with gardens. There was no paint anywhere and grime everywhere. Nobody much about, and most windows boarded up. Isobel Ingoldby’s number must almost certainly be a mistake for it had Walt Disney lattice windows, and a shaggy evergreen plant trailing over it which would have sent Queen Mary into action before she’d even knocked at the front door. There was a squirrel made of plaster on the doorstep and a tin case full of empty milk bottles with a note saying None today. Do not ring.

It’s somebody’s who’s out. This couldn’t be hers, he thought, at the gate, as the door opened and she was standing there.

His first thought was a blankness.

She was ordinary.

She was big and ordinary and bored.

She had a cigarette in her hand and leaned back against the door saying, “Come on in then,” as if he had come to read a gas meter.

Her hair was untidy and too long. Her feet were bare and she wore a shapeless sort of dressing-gown.

“Ciao,” she said, closing the door behind him. He saw how tired she was, and sad.

And maybe disillusioned? Was she disillusioned about him, too? She’d last seen him in hospital, pale and almost dying, the centre of attention. But she had made no effort of any kind though she’d known he’d be coming. He’d written a fortnight ago. She looked as if she’d just turned out of bed. She was even yawning.

“You’re tired?” he said.

“No. Well, yes. I’m always tired. Ghastly job.”

“I thought you were some sort of egghead hush-hush type?”

“I am. Of a cryptic variety.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Secret. D’you want—?”

She vaguely gestured towards the kitchen.

“Tea or something? A wee?”

“No. I thought of taking you out to lunch. To the Savoy, or somewhere?” He’d heard of the Savoy. He looked anxiously at her night clothes.

“I was there yesterday.”

“Isobel — what is it?”

“What’s what?”

“What have I done? Have I changed or something? You said to come.”

She put out the cigarette on the hall table ashtray, caught sight of herself in the mirror and said, “Oh my God! I forgot to comb my hair.” She turned to him and grinned and it was as if the sun had come out. The sloped cat’s eyes were alive again. Her long arms went up behind her head to gather up her hair into a bundle and she pinned it there. A piece of it fell down, a lion-coloured tress. Slowly, she pinned it back again, her fingers long, and lovely, and her fingernails painted the most unflinching vermilion. The dressing-gown fell open when she dropped her hands and stretched them out to him.

“Oh Eddie. You are golden brown like a field of corn.”

Her fingertips were at his collar. When he took off his British warm, then his officer’s jacket, he saw that she had loosened and then removed his tie. She draped it over a wall-light and then was in his arms.

On the kitchen floor, naked, he thought the taxi must still be outside. He had got out of it only a minute ago. Then he forgot all that; where he had come from, where in the world he had landed, which was upon a kitchen floor, the filthy lino torn and stuck up with some sort of thick paper tape. There was an old fridge on tall legs. It was gas. Lying on the floor beside her, then above her, he could see the fridge’s blue flame. It must be the oldest fridge in the world — oh, my God, Isobel. Isobel.

Later, oh much, much later, they rolled apart.

“I don’t like this lino,” he said. “It’s disgusting.”

“You’re spoiled. Living in palaces.”

“I was not living in palaces when you last saw me.”

“You were hardly living at all.”

They had moved on to a tiny sitting-room which was in darkness. It smelled of booze and dust. They felt their way to a divan that stank of nicotine.

“Why is there no light?”

“Do we need it?”

“Oh, Isobel.”

“It’s blacked-out. Permanently. Convenient. We’ve never taken down the shutters since the Blitz.”

“We?”

“The other girl and I.”

“Is she likely to come in?” His head was on her stomach. His tongue licked her skin. She was warm and alive and smelled of sweat and spice and he went mad for her again.

Later, “Who is she?”

“No one you know. She’s Bletchley Park. Like me.”

“It’s a man, isn’t it?”

“No. No, certainly not. Shall we go upstairs?”

The bedroom was lighter. It had a sloping ceiling and the windows looked country as if there had once been fields outside. It had the feel of a country place; a cottage. So here’s London.

“It is a cottage,” she said. “London’s full of cottages. And of villages. This bed is a country bed. We found it here.”

The bed was high and made of loops of metal. Its springs creaked and groaned beneath them.

“Please never get rid of it. Keep it forever.”

The hours passed. Wrapped, coiled, melded together they slept. They woke. Eddie laughed, stretched out to her again.

“You are like a jungle creature,” he said. “In an undiscovered country.”

“Eddie,” she said at last, winding herself into the sheets, “I have something very important to say. How much time have we got? When’s your train?”

“Five-fifteen.”

“It’s nearly five o’clock already.”

He fled the bed, he ran for the stairs, he limped and hopped into scattered garments, he yelled with terror.

She laughed and laughed.

He found one shoe, but the other was gone.

“This will finish me,” he said. “This will be the end of the Army for me.”

She howled with laughter from the bedroom; came laughing down the stairs wrapped in the sheet, lighting a new cigarette.

“Don’t laugh at me.”

“I am in love with you, Eddie.”

“I have a bad reputation already. With my Colonel. And I am in charge of Queen Mary. Oh God — there’s my shoe!” He was in his jacket, in his British warm, had found his cap as she wrapped herself around him.

“Eddie, Eddie. You look still the boy in the trees at High House.”

“What time is it? Oh God. I’ve fifteen minutes. There won’t be a taxi.”

But there was a taxi. God has sent me a taxi, he thought. It was standing outside the door. “Paddington,” he said. “In ten minutes. I’ll give you ten pounds.” He did not look back to see whether she was watching.

“Ten pounds, sir.”

“Thank you. Thank you very much.” (It’s only what I’d have spent at the Savoy. God but I’m hungry.)

“Yes. Platform one. Where’s the bit of carpet? Is it gone?”

It was there. And word had gone round. Somehow a crowd had gathered beside the Royal coach and the top of the toque with its doves’ feathers could be seen passing between the clapping avenue of loyal subjects. The lady-in-waiting was invisible, a small woman to begin with, and no doubt weighted down now with more wool. The bodyguards were already on the train. Eddie gave a brief nod to the guard and jumped into his private cabin, slammed the door and fell on the banquette. I’ll go along in a minute. Just get my breath.

The train began to steam slowly, powerfully, inexorably away from London.

Go along in a minute, he thought and fell asleep.

He woke to a crash and shriek of brakes. The whole train jolted, shuddered and stopped. Outside it was now dark and he jumped from his long blue velvet couch and made for the corridor, to meet one of the bodyguards coming to find him.

“Emergency, sir. Probably unexploded bomb on the line. Queen Mary’s sent for you.”

The lady-in-waiting was trembling. From outside came a series of shouts. The train began to shunt backwards, squealing and complaining.

“It’s the Invasion,” said the lady-in-waiting.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Margaret,” said the Queen. “Eddie, take her along to your compartment and find her an aspirin. She needs a rest. Then come back again and we can talk. I want to hear every single thing you’ve done today.”

“So tiresome,” she said an hour later. “The carriage so dark. These blue spot-lights are very clever but they’re just not bright enough to read by.” She fell silent. “But it’s nice to look out at the moonlight.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” (And he realised she was afraid. He’d heard that though she never showed it by a tremor she was terrified of kidnap.)

“And you did no more than that, Captain Feathers?” (Captain Feathers? What’s this?) “No more than go about in taxis? You didn’t even go to the Savoy for luncheon as you’d so wished?”

“I’m afraid not. I found London — overwhelming. Kensington seemed quite like an unknown vil-vill-vill-village.”

“A village? How very odd. I was born there. In Kensington Palace. I never felt it a village.”

“I — couldn’t find Kensington Palace.”

“Oh dear,” she said.

The train at last jerked forward, stopped, jerked again and then began to steam sweetly along towards the West.

“That is a pity,” said Her Majesty. “By the way” (looking out at the moonlight) “whatever has become of your tie?”

On the way home from their walk about the meadows around Badminton House, Old Filth asked the girl and her grandmother if they would stop the wheelchair at the post office for him to buy postcards. “No, no,” he said. “Let me get out and walk. Do me good,” and he hopped into the shop and back again, carrying three postcards of the village, all ready and stamped. He was able to hop around the car, and hold open the door for the grandmother as the girl put the folding chair back in the boot.

“So extremely kind of you,” he said. “A splendid afternoon.” Sitting by the reception desk he thought he would write the postcards at once though it was too late for the post, for a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand had gathered around the recollection of his departure from home. He would write to Mrs.-er — to Kate—and to Garbutt. Perhaps he would write to lacy Chloe, too, and make her day.

Then he found that he had never had Mrs.-er’s (Kate’s) address. It was somewhere in the next village. It would be offensive to send it c/o Garbutt, for she had preceded Garbutt in his employment by years. He addressed one card to Garbutt at the house down the hill from his own, well known to him. Peep o’Day. Easy to remember. So was Chloe’s: The Manor House, Privilege Lane. On Garbutt’s card he wrote, “Please say I’m sorry to Kate.”

He had one card left over now and wrote it to Claire, mentioning that he had sprained something but was otherwise having a very good holiday by himself in Gloucestershire at this beautiful hotel. He was exalted. His optimistic self, he felt, was just around the corner.

But in the early hours of the next morning he woke with a chilling certainty that all was not well. He switched on his bedside lamp, hopped from the bed, opened a window upon the night. He shivered, and then flushed and sweated. He went for a pee, then drank a glass of water, hopped back, hot and cold by turns, clambered between the sheets. He knew that he was ill.

He knew that he was very ill. He had no idea what it was, but he knew that he was not in control. He lay and waited.

He stretched his hand out to the bedside table drawer and felt about for the never-failing Gideon’s Bible that had seen him through many a sleepless hotel night during his legal life. In skyscrapers in Hong Kong, in the Shangri-la in Singapore, the dear old Intercon in Dacca. Lonely places, until he’d been married and able to take Betty along with him. He thought he needed a Gospel tonight, and turned up one of Christ’s dingdongs with the lawyers.

He wondered, the pages shaking as he turned them, why Christ had so hated lawyers when He’d have been such a brilliant one Himself. Christ, when you considered it, was simply putting a Case. He may well have been enjoying the lawyers’ examinations of him. Pilate’s was his most respectable interrogation. Pilate had not been a lawyer, but another excellent lawyer manqué. Pilate and Christ had understood each other.

“We still use a little Roman Law, here,” he told Christ tonight. “The Law can always do with a going-over as you pointed out then. Execution should be entirely out. Execution leads only to victory for the corpse. You proved that,” he informed the Holy Ghost.

He dreamed for a little, drifted, read the Sermon on the Mount, remembered hearing that no child nowadays has heard of the Sermon on the Mount and most guess it is a book or a film. He thought benevolently how he should like to be upon another Bench listening to Christ going for the defence in a Case to do with, say, a land-reclamation.

A fist grabbed him in the chest and pain shot through him. He could not breathe. He stretched for the bell and kept his right hand on it as the pain sank down, then surged up again. It’s the Hand of God, he thought. And nobody but God knows where the hell I am.

Garbutt’s house was empty when the phone began to ring the next morning. He had gone to Privilege Road to help the tedious Chloe with her asparagus bed and they were both down in the garden when her phone began to ring, too.

“I’ll leave it,” she said. “It won’t be anything.”

But it rang on.

She caught it as the other end was about to put it down.

“I’m very sorry to hear it,” she said. “Yes. He’s a neighbour but not a close friend. No — I don’t think there are any relations. Well, he’s over eighty. He’s never had anything wrong with him in his life. The time comes. He’s not very popular here in the village, I’m afraid. He treats his servants badly. Very difficult for you. I think there are some cousins in Essex. Oh, I see, you’ve tried them. Well, I can’t help you. Goodbye.”

“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 quite yet.

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 home at night. Hardly a soul about. Music from the open windows. And the spring there, and the politics and the friends. Too much work. Too much work to go to parties, even to attend the Union, meet any girls, too many men just up from school drinking themselves silly, schoolchildren who had missed the War. Leaving Oxford had surprised him by its finality.

The rain fell. In the far room with the door shut he heard the comatose, under-employed Head of Chambers fart and yawn. The fart was an elderly fart — lengthy, unmusical and resigned.

Eddie found that he was crying, and mopped his face. He thought he might as well go home for the day.

But, no. Better not. Another quarter-inch of notes. No point in going out in the rain. It was a longish walk to the Aldwych tube station and he had no macintosh. There were a couple of changes on his tube (everyone wheezing and smelling of no soap) to get back to his bed-sit in sleazy Notting Hill. Then out again for something to eat at an ABC café: sausage and mash, stewed apple and custard, keep within a shilling. There was still no sign of his inheritance. He’d been told it might take years to prove the death, let alone the Will. He was still unable to put his mind to the imagining of his father’s end. No friend of his father, no official notification from the Foreign Office. Eddie pushed down the guilt that he had made no enquiries. There had been no communication from the aunts. “I shall learn one day,” was all he allowed himself.

He must get a bike. Save the fares. He was earning a hundred pounds a year devilling for the absent Silk with the difficult wife. Three hundred a year in all, with the very odd Brief. He had one good suit, kept his shoes soled and heeled, washed his new-fangled nylon shirt every evening and hung it round the geyser in the communal bathroom at his lodgings, to dry for the morning. To keep up appearances before solicitors and clients. Not that there were any clients. Not for him. Not for years yet. Maybe never. Nobody knew him. Along the passage the old Silk farted again.

It had been nearly a year ago that Eddie, walking round the once-beautiful London squares one evening — without money there was nothing else to do, he was putting the hours in until bedtime — had thought of the building and engineering aspect of the Law. The War was over. One day — look at Germany — rebuilding of the ruins must surely occur in this country. Building disputes, he thought. There’ll be hundreds of them. Enquiring about, he had found a set of engineering Chambers that had been bombed and moved into this backwater of Lincoln’s Inn.

There was not even space for a Clerk’s room. This had had to be rented across a yard. The Senior Clerk, who looked like an unsuccessful butler and spent much time in rumination, left early after lunch for South Wimbledon. The clever Junior Clerk, Tom, hideously unemployed, worked like mad around the pubs at lunchtime among the Clerks of other Chambers, trying to get leads on coming Cases and plotting where he would move to next. He liked Eddie and was sorry for him. “I should pack it in, sir,” he said one day. “You’re worth better than this — First from Oxford. I can’t sell you here. Go to New Zealand.”

I might, thought Eddie today, looking through the door to the grander room and then beyond it out of the old, absent Silk’s window to the rain falling. Between the building and the Inn garden where stood a great tree which had survived other wars, a white Rolls-Royce was parked. He could see the chauffeur inside it in a green uniform. Not usual. Eddie sighed, and lifted the next pages of transcript off the pile.

The street door of the Chambers now banged open against the wall and feet came running towards Eddie’s alley. The Junior Clerk, macintosh flapping — he’d been waiting to go home — flung open his door and shouted, “Come on, sir. Quick. Quick, sir! Get up. Leave those papers. Get into that front room. Behind the desk. You’ve got a client.”

“Client?”

“New solicitor. Get the dust off those sets of papers. Smarten your clothing. Where’s that classy clothes-brush of yours? Here. I’ll put his wife’s photo out of sight. Wrong image. You’re young and free to travel. I think you’re on the move.”

“Move?”

“I’ve got you a Brief. It’s a big one. Four hundred on the Brief and forty a day. Likely to last two weeks.”

“Whoever—?”

“Don’t ask me. It’s Hong Kong. It’s a Chinese dwarf.”

“You’ve gone insane, Tom. It’s a hoax.”

“Turned up in that Rolls. I’ve had him sitting in the Clerk’s room twenty minutes. I’ll bring him over.”

“wait!”

“Wait? Wait? Look, it’s a pipeline failure in Hong Kong. You’re on your way.”

“A Chinese dwarf?”

“Come back. Where you going, sir? I bring him over here to you, you don’t go running after him.”

“Where is he now?” Eddie shouted from the courtyard.

“He’s still in the Clerks’ room. I told him I was coming to see if you were free. I bring him to you. Gravitas, sir.”

But Eddie was gone, over the courtyard, under the lime tree, running in the rain. The chauffeur in the Rolls turned to look, raising an eyebrow.

Eddie ran into the Clerks’ room, where Albert Loss was seated on the sagging purple sofa playing Patience.

“Coleridge!”

“Spot the lady. Kill the ace of spades.”

“Coleridge! God in heaven, Coleridge. But you’re dead. The Japanese killed you.”

“Colombo didn’t fall. You are an amnesiac. There were initial raids. And then they left us alone. You should have stayed. I found my uncle. Several of them. All attorneys. And so I became one too.”

“This is the most wonderful. . How ever did you find me?”

“Law Lists, my dear old chum. Top of the Law Lists. Thanks to me. I directed you, you will remember, towards the Law. And now I am Briefing you. My practice is largely in Hong Kong. I hope you have no serious family ties?”

“Not a tie. Not a thread. Not a cobweb—Coleridge!”

“Good. Then you can fly to Hong Kong next week? First class, of course. We must not lose face before the clients. We’ll put you up in the Peninsular.”

“I’ll have to read the papers.”

“Nonsense, Fevvers. You’ll do it all in your head. On the plane. Open-and-shut Case, and I taught you Poker. You can think. I’m flying back myself tomorrow.”

“This is a dream. You’re exactly the same. You haven’t aged. By the way, what happened to my watch?”

“Ah, that had to be sacrificed in the avuncular search. But you have aged, Fevvers. You have been aged by your Wartime experiences, no doubt?”

“You could say that. Coleridge, come on! Let’s go out. Where are you staying?”

“The Dorchester, of course. But there is no time for social punishment. I fly tomorrow and I must see my builders. I’m buying a house in the Nash Terraces of Regent’s Park. All in ruins. Practically free at present. If you want it to rent, after the pipeline, it’s yours. By the way, were you met?”

“Met?”

“At Liverpool? Off the old Portuguese tub?”

“Yes. Yes, I was—”

“I was forced to borrow your address book. I’m afraid it has fallen by the way. My uncles were very close to the Corps of Signals. And of course I have a phenomenal memory.”

“You should be a spy.”

“Thank you, but I am in gainful employment. It’s very good to see you, Feathers. Very nice clothes-brush. Do you want it?”

“Yes. Coleridge!”

“And by the way,” Albert Loss said at the car, the chauffeur towering above him, holding a brolly, “while I’m away in Hong Kong, do make use of the Royce.”

LAST RITES

Indigestion,” said the hotel to Claire over the telephone. “A very bad case of indigestion.”

“He said on the postcard a sprained ankle.”

“The indigestion followed. It was the prawns. Looked identical to a heart attack. He’s been in hospital. He’s back here again now recovering from the hospital. Can we get him for you? He’s out in the sun, well wrapped up. Who shall we say?”

“Will you say Claire? And that I had his postcard.”

“We were very glad of those postcards.”

“Hello,” said Filth, tottering in. “I was wondering if someone could find me a priest.”

The bar listened. The nice girl came and sat him in a chair. Dialling the number for him, handing him the phone, she said, “Sir Edward, the priest business was last week.”

“What? Hello? Claire? There are things I want to get off my chest. This episode was rather alarming. Some unfinished business. You know what I’m talking about.”

“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, body and estate. Grows uglier now. And yet I remember her dazzling for a while when she was in the War.

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 day or two and not trouble himself with visitors, and his curtains were pulled across the daylight when the manager of the hotel knocked and eventually put his head around his door, and switched on the light, and Babs and the priest beheld the catafalque figure of Filth under the sheet, his ivory nose pointed upwards, the nose of a very old man.

“Perhaps not long?” said the manager. “Don’t stay too long.” Babs said she would go out now and take her dog for a walk.

Then Father Tansy shut the door behind him, opened the curtains and switched off the light. He picked up the bedside phone and ordered room-service luncheon in an hour’s time. Then he ran round the bedroom removing drooping asters and opening all the windows. He found Filth’s dressing-gown and manoeuvred him into it, heaved the old bones off the bed, slid the ivory fans of Filth’s feet into his Harrods leather bedroomslippers, sat Filth on an upright chair and set a table in front of him.

“Have I shaved?” asked Filth. “Oh dear, I do hope so.”

“Never mind that,” said Tansy. “Wake up. You have sent for me at last. I have been waiting patiently.”

“You have a great idea of your own importance,” said Filth. “I remember you, awash in that great marble church.”

“Not my own importance,” said Tansy. “I follow Another’s importance. I try to follow the personality of Christ, and am directed by it.”

“I don’t believe in all that,” said Filth. “But there’s something, somewhere, that’s urging me to talk to a — well, I suppose, to a priest. You are the only priest I know. How you got here, I don’t know. What I’m doing here, I don’t know. I’ve been dreaming lately. About Queen Mary.”

“Queen Mary?”

“Yes. And my father. And a — murder. And other loose ends.”

Father Tansy waited with bright eyes, like a squirrel. “Carry on.”

“I suppose it’s going to be a confession,” said Filth. “I’m glad you’re not hidden in one of those boxes. I’m not up to that.”

“I know.”

“I can’t start until Babs comes back. She’s part of it. And I’ve been seriously ill.”

“Sir Edward, you can begin by telling me what’s the matter with you. And I don’t want to hear about prawns and strained ligaments.”

After a time Filth said, “All my life, Tansy, from my early childhood, I have been left, or dumped, or separated by death, from everyone I loved or who cared for me. I want to know why.”

“You are a hero in your profession, Sir Edward.”

“That’s an utterly different matter. And in fact I don’t believe you. Nobody remembers me now at the Bar. My work is quite forgotten. I was once famous for some Pollution Law. All out-of-date now. I want to tell you something. When my Chambers were moved to a newly built office block, like a government department, costing millions which by then we could all afford — there were thirty-six members of Chambers when I decided to go permanently to Hong Kong — the old Clerk, who was retiring, took me down into the basement under the Elizabethan building where I began, and there was a sea of Briefs there, three feet deep, bundled up with pink tape. ‘We don’t know what to do with it,’ he said. ‘We’ve decided to get a firm in to throw it on a dump.’ That was years of my life. Years and years.”

“It’s not often,” said the priest, “made as clear to us as that. I see it in my empty pews.”

“It has all been void. I am old, forgotten and dying alone. My last friend, Veneering, has died. I miss him but I never quite trusted him. My most valuable friend was a card-sharp and my wife hated him though he made our fortunes at the Far Eastern Bar. He was killed on 9/11. A passenger in one of the planes. Still playing cards, I imagine. Hadn’t heard from him for years.”

Babs came back in and made the dog lie down. It immediately climbed on Filth’s bed and lay looking across at him as if he’d seen him somewhere before.

“The point is,” said Filth, seated at his table, recovering a little of his former authority when addressing the Court, “the point is, I have begun to wonder whether my life of loneliness — always basically I have felt quite alone — is because of what I did when I was eight years old, living with Babs and Claire in Wales, fostered by a woman called Mrs. Didds.”

Babs scratched her leg in its thick grey stocking and looked out of the window. “Go on then, Teddy,” she said. “Spit it out.”

Father Tansy, no trace now of the prancing comic of his parish church, his Office completely dominating him, sat still, and nodded once.

When Filth was obviously unable to begin, Babs said, “Oh, I’ll do it, then.”

There was a silence.

“She hurt us,” Babs said. “She had that sort of smiling face, plump and round, that when you look closer is cruel. Nobody had noticed. Probably, when she first fostered children she was different. Pa Didds was a nice old man but he just sat about. Then he died. They’d had no children of their own. By the time the three of us arrived, she’d begun to hate children, but she had to keep on fostering because there was nothing else. They went on sending her children. From all over the Empire. When the children complained. . Most never did, they thought she was normal. Anyway the children couldn’t complain until they’d got away, somewhere else. And there wasn’t anywhere else. We were all sent to her for four or five years. You know, longer than we’d been alive. The complaining ones were thought to be cowards. We had to copy the Spartans in those days. You should have seen the illustrations in children’s books of the Raj then. Pictures of children beating each other with canes at school. The prefectorial system. Now it would be thought porn. It was Cumberledge, of course, she hated most.”

“He was there when we arrived,” said Filth. “In bed. Not speaking. He was pale and fat and sobbing and he didn’t come down to tea. ‘What’s the matter with the other boy?’ Babs asked. ‘He’s wet his bed again,’ Ma Didds said, and she laid one of her long whips over the table. ‘And he’ll have to wash his own sheets.’”

“I shared a room with him,” said Filth, eventually. “He smelled and I hated him. He slept on the floor to save the sheets, but then he’d wet his pyjamas. He used to take them off and lie on the boards, but then she’d beat him a second time for removing his pyjamas. We had to watch.”

“How long did it last?”

“Years,” said Babs. “They merged, the years. It seemed our whole lives. We forgot there had been anything different. Anything before.”

“Not altogether,” said Filth. “Claire — by the way, she never hurt Claire — Claire was younger and very pretty and she used to sit her on her knee and comb her hair. Before Pa Didds went off into hospital and died, he used to be nice to me and Babs. There were several good moments.”

“He liked you,” said Babs. “Took you for walks. He never took me for walks. I used to sing hymns very, very loud. She hated my singing. She bandaged my mouth.”

“And the end of the story?” asked the priest.

“Claire decided on the end of the story one day while we were gathering the hens’ eggs in the hen-house. It was our job. We liked it — all the fluster and the commotion and the rooster crowing. It was a day when Cumberledge had been flogged and flung back to his bed and was crying again. It was almost as if Ma Didds loved Cumberledge in some horrible cruel way, especially after Pa Didds died. As if she hated herself. She used to sit rocking herself and holding her stomach after we’d all gone to bed. We peeped over the stairs and saw her. As if she had a baby inside her.”

“She shut me in cupboards,” said Filth. “I began to stammer even worse than I did already. Then she would shout at me to answer her politely, and when I couldn’t get any words out she’d bang my face against the wall or box my ears, and shout at me again to answer her.”

“She fed us well,” said Babs. “Great plates of food. Big stews and home-made bread. ‘You should see the food they eat,’ she told them at the chapel. ‘Fat as pigs.’ She stuffed us. Except for Claire. Claire left half of hers and smiled at Ma Didds like an angel. She never punished Claire.”

“Claire is the cleverest of us,” said Babs.

“And so—?” said Tansy.

“And so, this evening in the hen-house, Cumberledge indoors, inarticulate as ever, Claire, she was only six, said, ‘I think we should kill her.’”

“We all three knew how to do it. We’d had ayahs. And Eddie had his amah.”

“I used to watch her and the whole village in the compound,” said Filth. “They would kill a cockerel as a sacrifice and then they’d beat a drum. The incantations went on for hours. They burnt things that belonged to the one they wanted dead. Hair. A button. And feathers from the cockerel. Then the person died.”

“You believed it?”

“Oh yes. It was true. It happened. Always.”

“I knew how to kill a cockerel,” said Filth. “Ada could do it. I used to watch. But when I tried to catch Ma Didds’s rooster, it was too strong for me, so I caught a hen and killed it instead. It’s very easy. Ada used to tie the legs together and then break the neck by twirling it hard, upside down, round and round, in the dry mud. I did it on the floor of the hen-house. Ma Didds was at chapel. We were always alone on Sunday nights. I cut off its head with the bread knife and took it inside. Claire had taken some of Ma Didds’s hair out of her comb. We took the matches and lit the hair and the hen’s head in the hearth, and Babs sang.”

“I sang There’s a friend for little children,” said Babs, “Above the bright blue sky, and Eddie banged saucepan lids together. We hadn’t expected the hen’s head to smell so bad or to be so difficult to burn. Then we heard her coming and we all ran upstairs.”

“We’d forgotten to shut the hen-house door,” said Filth, “and that was the first thing she saw, and one or two hens roosting on the roof. She came thundering in and took up a cane and then she smelt the feathers. She shouted, ‘Cumberledge!’ and started up the stairs. When she went upstairs, she always had to hold her stomach up. It hung down. It was repulsive. So she came up the stairs holding her stomach in one hand, and her other arm raised holding the cane. ‘This time I’ll break you, Cumberledge!’

“But at the top,” said Babs, when Filth could not continue, “Eddie stepped forward from the room he shared with Cumberledge. Claire and I had come out of our room and were standing near. Cumberledge did not move from under his bed. He didn’t see it. But we saw. We saw Eddie catch hold of her wrist, the wrist holding the cane high. He was above her on the stairs and taller than her already. And he just stood there, holding her wrist above her head. And she said, ‘Let go my wrist. I am going to see to Cumberledge.’ And she had to clutch her stomach with her other hand.”

“And so,” said Filth, “I let go of her very suddenly so that she fell backwards down the stairs. And lay still at the bottom of them. Before she lay still, there was a — crack. Like a snapped tree.”

“I ran to clear up the burnt head,” said Babs, “and Eddie went to look after Cumberledge. Claire put on her coat and went down to the village to get help. But she was a very long time because it was a dark night and she got lost. She’s always hated the dark. So Teddy and I got into bed together to be close. We couldn’t make Cumberledge get in with us. In the end Teddy and I went to sleep and we only woke up when they were clearing Ma Didds away. She wasn’t dead, as it turned out, but she died the next day. They had to do an emergency operation on her for cancer of the stomach. That’s what she died of, they said. She’d have died in a few days, anyway.”

“What?” said Filth. “Nobody ever told me that.”

“And the other boy? Cumberledge?”

“Cumberledge’s so-called guardians took him away at once. There was a scandal about his condition and he vanished from us. We were kept down in the village until Auntie May could come, and Eddie’s Sir.”

“Were questions asked?”

“So far as I know, none. There had been rumours for a long time. But Welsh villages stick together against foreigners, and we were all very foreign children there. Wales was more secretive in those days and the language defeated us. But nobody suggested anything criminal about us.”

“Nobody,” said Babs. “Claire even got some presents. Everyone always loves Claire.”

In this expensive and benign hotel in the English late autumn light, they sat, all three, in silence.

“You have come to me asking for absolution?” asked Father Tansy. “You repent?”

Eddie Feathers, Old Filth, the judge, Fevvers, a Master of the Inner Temple, Teddy — pillar of justice, arbitrator of truth said nothing.

“No,” he said at last. “I don’t. I can’t.”

“No, I don’t either,” said Babs. “And I know Claire doesn’t.”

“Did Cumberledge survive? Is he sane?”

“Very much so,” said Filth. “I next met him in the dark in Oxford. During the War when I was lost in the snow. I didn’t realise who it was. Between eight and eighteen we all change utterly. Yet years later I somehow realised. He was coming out of a blacked-out church. He had a calmness and a kindness. He was Army. He wrote when Betty died. His essence was unharmed.”

“He became a grandee,” said Babs. “He’s retired to Cambridge. A grandee.”

“There are those who are given Grace,” said Tansy. “But you yourself wanted to make some sort of confession, Sir Edward?”

“I wanted to express my pity,” said Filth. “My pity for her. For Ma Didds. I’ve tried hundreds of Cases, many more wicked than anything here. Some I still cannot bear to think about. I don’t mean I cannot bear to think about my judgements — you have to be thick-skinned about that — I cannot bear to think about the cruelty at the core of this foul world. Or the vengeance dormant even in children. All there, ready, waiting for use. Without love. Cumberledge was given Grace. That’s all I can say. We were not.”

They still sat on.

The dog stretched on the bed and yawned and jumped down, bent over and rested its head on Babs’s knobbly knee.

“We’ll say the General Confession,” said Tansy. “Together.”

They did, Filth remembering it being hammered into him by Sir.

Tansy then said, “Let us pray. Remember these Thy children, oh merciful Lord. Heal them and keep them in Thine everlasting arms.”

THE REVELATION

His house was clean and polished, his garden neat. A note on the kitchen table said, Butter, cheese, milk in fridge. Eggs. Bread in crock. Bacon, etc. Welcome home. Kate. Through the windows, looking towards the Downs, he saw movement in his apple tree and a next-door child dropped out of it, eating fruit, and wandered nonchalantly over the lawn as if he owned it. The hedge must have a hole in it, he thought. It might as well stay. His mail had been neatly stacked on his desk, the fire laid ready to light. She’d stuck some shop flowers in a vase.

It had been a good drive home. Most enjoyable. Christmas coming.

Very pleasant seeing poor Babs again. And the parson chap. Holiday full of events. And tomorrow he must see the doctor.

His ankle was very much better, and he had no trace of trouble with his heart — or digestion. All that was the matter with him now was the onset of winter aches and pains. His arthritis was remarkably mild for his age, they always said, especially considering the age of his damp old house.

“I am about to make another journey,” he said the next day after his visit to the surgery in Shaftesbury. “Good morning, Mrs. Kate. How very good to see you. Thank you for the provisions. The house looks very well. I’ve brought you a keepsake from Gloucester. Where’s Garbutt?”

“Garbutt,” he said. “Good morning. Did I imagine it? Yes, of course I did. You didn’t by any chance visit me in wherever it was I’ve been? I had some sort of dream. There were some very odd doctors. They thought I’d had a heart attack. Perfect nonsense.”

“Thanks for the postcard,” said Garbutt.

“Now then, you haven’t got rid of me yet, either of you. I’ve made a decision. I’m flying to the East for the New Year.”

“You’d never get the Insurance,” said Kate.

“You’ve not flown in years. It’s knees on your nose now,” said Garbutt.

“I shall be flying First. I always did. I always shall. I can afford it. Judge Veneering left me his set of Law Reports and I shall sell them for six thousand pounds.”

“You won’t get Insurance.”

“You can’t go alone.”

The two of them were closing on him like assassins.

“I have never felt so well. My little holiday has set me right. The doctor says that there is no need for the more lethal injections against diseases now. And I have the right clothes already in my wardrobe. No shopping.”

They muttered off, to confer.

“Flying’s not safe any more,” said Kate. “Not since the Twin Towers. New Year’s just the time for the next attack. And you’ll be flying to a Muslim country, like as not.”

He paid no attention but asked Garbutt if he would go up in the roof and look for the suitcase he and Lady Feathers had brought back from Bangladesh on their last trip.

Kate said, “Madeira’s nice. Why not settle for nearer?”

“No. Bangladesh. I must see Bangladesh — or maybe Lanka again. And I might just continue. On into Malaysia, then up to Borneo. Kotakinakulu. Where I was born.”

“Then I despair,” said Garbutt.

“Bangladesh is where the brasses come from.”

He had given Kate the beaten copper bowls of his heyday, after Betty died, to stop her from cleaning them twice a week at his expense.

She said, “If I understand the nine-o’clock news, Bangladesh is the place half the time under water and no good for arthritis. I’m sorry, but that doctor’s notorious. He’s never been beyond the golf course. He’s never even been to Grand Canary where we go — nice and near and no chance of Economy-class thrombosis.”

“He’s told you. He’s not going Economy-class,” said Garbutt. “He says it’s full of children joining their families out East for the school holidays. Makes him angry. Says in his day it took six weeks and you went once in five years. Says they’re all spoilt now, and playing music in their ears.”

“It’s the luggage that really bothers me,” said Garbutt.

The suitcase was immense. He got it out of the roof like a difficult birth. Its label called it a Revelation.

“Revelation was once the very best luggage,” said Filth. “They were ‘revelations’ because they expanded.”

“They were them heavy things that went out with porters,” said Kate. “Can’t we get you one borrowed? From that Chloe?”

“Absolutely not,” said Filth.

“No way,” said Garbutt.

“Get something on wheels with a handle, then,” she said; and “What’s this, there’s something written on it in brass studs?”

“Islam,” Filth said.

“Well that settles it. You can’t carry that. You’ll be thought a terrorist.”

“Islam was the name of a distinguished lawyer in Brunei. A friend. He gave me the suitcase to bring back our presents. We bought a great many — they have so little there. It was the least we could do. Buy and buy.”

“Let’s get it open then,” said Garbutt.

Inside were lurid hessian table mats, cross-stitched sacking table cloths, wilting saris and some indestructible straw matting. There was also a heavy little bundle of amethysts. He had sometimes suspected Betty of light-hearted smuggling. He sent all the other stuff to a church sale and asked Garbutt to scrub the case and polish it. It came up a treat.

“You can tell Class, I’ll say that,” said Kate. “But I wish you’d reconsider, Sir Edward. We’re hardly over your last.”

He stared her out.

And so into the Revelation went Filth’s impeccable underwear; his singlets and what he still called his knickers; his yellow cotton socks from Harrods, twenty years old; some silk pyjamas; two light-weight suits and a dinner jacket (because one can never be quite sure where one will be invited). He added two sponge (antique phrase) bags, one for shaving things and bars of coal-tar soap, the other for his pills. Separate pills for use on the journey would go into his passport case. There was ample room in the Revelation for more.

“You could get all your things in here, too,” he called out to Betty over his shoulder — then felt a pang in the upper chest. He was doing it again. Talking to her. And as if she would ever have dreamed of sharing his suitcase! So strange that, since his extraordinary peregrination to the West Country, Betty was back in his life again. Brief pains, real pains of longing for her now. Guilty pains. He had been neglecting her memory. Memory and desire—I must keep track of them. Mustn’t lose hold.

On Christmas Day he attended church at ten. He preferred the eight o’clock in a silent church, heady with greenery and winter-scented flowers, but eight was getting early for him now. The ten o’clock was restless with children and everyone shaking hands with each other and the Vicar was called Lucy. Never mind. He prayed for Father Tansy, and for Babs and Claire. He prayed for the souls of Ma Didds and Sir and Oils and Miss Robertson and Auntie May. This set up other candidates. He prayed for Loss, of course, as he often did, and for Jack and for Pat Ingoldby as he did every day, and for poor old Isobel who’d turned out to be a lesbian all the time. So stupid of him. And most unpleasant. He should have guessed he could never be everything to her.

He prayed—what, will the line ne’er be done? — for the nice girl and her grandmother, and for the aunts’ little maid Alice, and for Garbutt and Kate. He prayed for the souls of his father and mother. And then he prayed for Ada, the shadow who leaned to him over water which he now was not sure was a memory or the memory of a memory. He prayed for podgy Cumberledge who had come out strong as a lion. How unaccountable it all is. How various and wonderful. He kept on and on praying through the rest of the service. For Veneering, for that unattractive Barrister girl who’d had a baby she’d called after him, for. . He struggled hard against praying for Chloe and the souls of his aunts — but in the end, he managed it. He didn’t pray for Betty. He knew she didn’t need it.

He had his usual Christmas dinner at the White Hart in Salisbury and over the next few days put his desk in order, adding a codicil to his Will that left Mrs.-er — Kate (her name was Toms, Katherine Toms) the amethysts. He left Garbutt a cheque, then tore it up and left him a much larger one. He topped up his bequests to the National Trust and the Barristers’ Benevolent. And so the last dead days of December passed.

On the thirty-first, he was waiting for the car in the hall, seated upon Betty’s rose-and-gold throne, alone, since Kate had her family to think about at New Year, and the car drove him without incident in pouring rain the hundred miles to Heathrow.

The airport was almost empty. There had been “an alert.” How ridiculous, he thought. We are letting these people win. Security was meticulous. He was made to step three times under the scaffold before anyone realised that the alarm signal he gave off came from his old-world eyeglass. The suitcase with its emblazoned studs and Muslim appearance was passed through without a glance. Islam. There was a little hesitation about the X-ray picture of Pat Ingoldby’s clothes-brush which looked like a gun.

And, then, the plane.

How stewardesses do smile these days, thought Filth. How cold their eyes.

He wondered what it would be like to be hi-jacked? He wondered once again, an hour or so later, when the plane plunged like a stone for a thousand feet over the Alps.

“Just a bit of turbulence.” The pilot came strolling through, presumably to give confidence, and Filth was pleased with himself for continuing to drink his soup.

“Are you comfortable, sir?”

He was pleased that the fellow was English. Pilots nowadays tended not to be.

“What route are we taking, Captain? Round the edges?”

“Oh, sure. Well to the South. Not a missile in sight. It’ll be dark over Afghanistan. Singapore for a cup of tea and then up to Dacca.”

Filth said, “When I first used to come out here, it was Vietnam we had to avoid. Had to refuel twice then. The Gulf. Then Bombay. Bombay’s called something else now, I gather. There used to be half a marble staircase on Bombay airport. Gold and cream. Lovely thing. It stopped in mid-air. Symbolic.”

“Time marches on.”

“Not so sure it marches anywhere in particular though.”

He slept. Once, jerking awake from a dream, he yelled out, thinking he was being put into a body-bag. An air stewardess with tendril arms was tucking a blanket around him.

The black night shuddered all around the plane. When he next woke there was a pencilled line of gold drawn round each oval blind.

Dawn already.

“We are in tomorrow,” said the girl. “It’s the sunrise. A happy New Year.”

(You’d think I’d never flown before.)

He watched the dawn.

Later he looked down upon a fat carpet of clouds and saw something he had never seen in his life before. Two suns stood side by side in the sky. A parhelion. A formidable and ancient omen of something or other, he forgot what. He looked about the cabin, but the other two or three First-class passengers were asleep under their blankets and the stewards out of sight.

The whiteness outside the plane became terrible. The plane was a glass splinter, a pin. It was being flipped into eternity, into dissolution. They were beyond speed now, and in infinity — travelling towards what he understood astronomers call “The Singularity.”

But they were bringing the orange juice and hot cloths.

And soon it was evening again.

At Singapore a wheelchair had been provided for him. (Very old gentleman with limp.) It stood waiting at the mouth of the wrinkled tube that joined the aeroplane to the earth (and that certainly had not been there in the seventies; they had had to climb down steep stepladders). He disregarded the chair and walked stiffly along the bouncing tunnel and into the air-cooled glitter of the shops, and eventually to the shadowy First-class lounge. Two hours, and a long sleep, later — and he walked easily all the way back.

The seat next to his was now occupied by a young man in an open-necked collarless white shirt and jeans who was already at work upon a laptop. Filth read across a white laminated folder “Instructions to Counsel.”

Filth felt garrulous.

“You a lawyer? So was I. I used to work on the flight out, too. All the way out, all the way back. Don’t know how I did it now. Straight into Chambers from the airport. We all got used to working through the night, even in London. Mind you, I never went straight from a plane into Court. Never did that. Too dangerous.”

“We do now,” said the boy. “No time to hang about.”

“Dangerous for the client. Dangerous for Counsel. Going into Court not feeling tip-top.”

“I always feel tip-top. I say — you’re not by any chance. .?

“Yes. Old Filth. Long forgotten.”

“Well, you’re still remembered out here.”

“Yes. Well, I dare say. I hope so. Ha. Did you ever come across a chap called Loss?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Or Islam?”

“They’re all called Islam.”

“He’s probably dead. Certainly retired. I’ve got one of his suitcases. Called a Revelation.”

A new stewardess, a Malay, browner, silkier, gentler, with more rounded arms and in a sari, came along with potted prawns. “Shall we pull down the blinds for you, sir?”

“No thanks,” said the young Silk. “Less than two hours left. Let’s watch the stars.”

“You married?” asked Filth after a long rumination looking at but not eating the prawns.

“Sure.”

“I used to take mine along,” said Filth. “Always.”

“Mine’s in banking. And I don’t think she actually would describe herself as ‘mine.’ We’re landing. Good. And we weren’t hi-jacked.”

As he made to leave the plane, a black misery suddenly came upon Filth like the eye bandage slapped around the face before it is presented to a firing squad. Then he wondered if, in fact, on this journey, he had really hoped only for death. . Had wanted the knife slipped out of the shoe. The gun in the sleeve. The “Nobody move!” The spatter of bullets and blood. One blessed, releasing explosion. Lived long enough. Get the thing over.

He had been waiting.

For what was there left for him in the Donheads?

Stuck in that wet woodland place with Garbutt and Mrs.-er, and lacy Chloe?

Well, there was still hope for obliteration on the return journey. Might achieve it.

And if I don’t — what? I’ll move. I’ll take a flat in The Temple. Don’t know anyone now. Ghastly lot of new Judges. Still, they are one’s own.

Bleak, uncertain, nodding thanks to the pretty girl, Filth made gingerly for the door.

From the top of the gangway, the East hit him full in the face. The thick, glorious heat washed on to him and around him, lapped his swollen old hands and his tired feet, bathed his old skull and sinewy neck, soaked into his every pore and fibre. Life stirred. The resting plane was vibrating with heat, the air around it vibrating, the airport vibrating and dancing in the soft dark. High glares and electrics together shone along the low parapet where people were waiting to meet the plane, clustered like dark flies, like frenzied butterflies.

The tremendous chatter of talk, the excitement. The toots and hoots and wails and the drumming. The prayers and the prostrated prayers and the prayer mats. The old, old beloved smell.

Betty seemed to be beside him, grinning away, waving back at all the people. Just at his shoulder.

“Watch it, sir. Let me help you. Is something wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong,” said Filth. The kind arms stretched. “Nothing at all is wrong.”

For he was Home.

SCENE: THE INNER TEMPLE GARDEN

Scene: The Inner Temple Garden.

Two judges standing beside the monument that is inscribed, Lawyers, I suppose, were children once. The bell of the Temple Church is tolling on and on, as it does, once for every year of a dead Bencher’s life.

The Queen’s Remembrancer: That’ll be for Filth.

A Lord of Appeal: There’ll be ninety of them then.

QR: Not quite. Nearly. Did you read the obituaries?

L of A: Yes. Short. So difficult to say exactly what he’d done. When it came to it. Not a great lawyer. Never changed anything. Very old-fashioned delivery. Laughable, I expect, now. Good judge, of course.

QR: He’d just got off a plane. Did you know? Going back to his roots.

L of A: Game of him. About the most imaginative thing he ever did, I suspect. In his long and uneventful life. Was he travelling alone, d’you know?

QR: Oh, yes. Travelling alone. Quite alone.