The Man in the Wooden Hat

CHAPTER ELEVEN

When he was very old and had retired to the Dorset countryside in England, and Betty dead, Old Filth, as he was always called now, reverentially and kindly, would walk most afternoons about the lanes carrying his walking stick with the Airedale’s head, pausing at intervals to examine the blossom or the bluebell woods or the berries or the holly bushes according to the season. The pauses were in part rests, but to a passer-by they looked like a man lost in wonder or meditation. A dear, ram-rod straight man of elegiac appearance. As he grew really old, the English countryside was sometimes on these walks shot through for an instant by a random, almost metallic flash of unsought revelation.

One November day of black trees, brown streams blocked with sludge and dead leaves, skies grey as ashes, he found himself in his room at the Peninsular Hotel again, and it was his wedding day.

It was early and he was looking down at the old harbour-front YMCA building, everything ablaze with white sunlight. The flash of memory, like an early picture show, was all in black and white. The carpet of his hotel room was black, like velvet, the curtains white silk, the armchairs white, the telephones white. In the bathroom the walls and ceiling were painted black, the towels and flowers were white. There lay on a black glass table near the door of the suite a white gardenia and he, Edward Feathers himself only just taken silk (QC), at all of eight a.m., ready dressed in European “morning dress” and a shirt so white that it mocked its surroundings by looking blue.

All these years later, he saw himself. He had been standing gravely at the window wondering whether or not to telephone her.

Breakfast?

He had not ordered a cooked breakfast. It would seem hearty. Others no doubt would be sitting down in their suites to bacon and eggs on the round black glass table, napkin startlingly white. But for Edward — well. Perhaps a cup of coffee?

Should he ring his wife-to-be? Amy’s number? His — his Elisabeth? But then the telephone shouted all over his room.

“Hello?”

“It’s me,” said Elisabeth.

“I was going to telephone you.”

“It’s supposed to be bad luck,” she said.

“No, it’s bad luck for me to see you before the church. I was thinking of — er — saying, well — well, how to get there — well, don’t get the time wrong. Will those missionaries get you there? Willy could fetch you.”

“I’ll be there, Edward.”

“All set, then?”

“All set, Edward. Edward, are you O.K.? Are you happy?”

“Don’t forget your passport. Tell them to throw your suitcase in the back. Oh, and don’t forget. .”

“What?”

A long silence and he watched the seabirds leaning this way and that over the harbour.

“Don’t forget. . Elisabeth. Dear Betty. Even now — are you sure?”

There was the longest pause perhaps in the whole of Edward Feathers’s professional life.

And then he heard her voice in mid-sentence, saying, “It could be cold in the evenings. Have you packed a jersey?”

“My breakfast hasn’t arrived yet. Then I have to pay the bill here. Are you dressed? I mean in all your finery?”

“No. I’ve a baby on my knee and Amy and everyone are shouting. But, Eddie, if you like we can still forget it.”

“I’ll be there,” he said. Silence again for an aeon. “I love you, Betty. Don’t leave me.”

“Well, mind you turn up,” she said briskly. Too brightly. And put down the phone.

He had no recollection in the Donhead lanes after Betty’s death of any of this except his own immaculate figure standing at the window.

“I am not going,” said Bets, hand still on the phone. “It’s off.”

Amy planted a glass of brandy beside the bride’s cornflakes. “Come on. Get dressed. I’ve done the children. What’s the matter?”

“What in hell am I doing?”

“The best thing you ever did in your life. Looking ahead at last. Here, I’ll do your hair.”

Edward’s luggage had already gone ahead to the airport. He paid his bill at the desk, the management far from effusive, since they’d expected him there for another two months. But they knew he would be back, and he tipped everyone correctly and shook hands all round. They walked with him to the glass doors and bowed and smiled, nobody saying a thing about his stiff collar and tailcoat so early in the morning. “You don’t need a car, sir? For the airport?” “No, no. I’m going across to church first.” “Ah — church. Ah.” The gardenia in his buttonhole could have been laminated plastic.

He set out to his wedding alone.

Briefly he thought of Albert Ross. Ross had vanished. Eddie had no best man.

Oh, well, you can marry without a best man. No one else he’d want. It was a glorious morning. He remembered his prep-school headmaster, Sir, reading Dickens aloud, and the effete Lord Verisoft walking sadly to his death in a duel on Wimbledon Common with all the birds singing and the sunlight in the trees.

“I am alone, too,” he said in his mind to Sir. “I haven’t even a Second to chat to on the way.”

He thought of the old friends missing. War. Distance. Amnesia. Family demands. “I have married a wife and therefore I cannot come.” Oxford friends. Army friends. Pupils in his Chambers. Not one. Not one. Oh my God!

Walking towards the exquisite figure of Edward Feathers — well, not so much walking as shambling — was Fiscal-Smith.

From Paper Buildings, London EC4!

They both stopped walking.

Then Fiscal-Smith came rambling up, talking while still out of earshot. “Good heavens! Old Filth! This hour in the morning! Gardenia! Haven’t you been to bed? I’m just off the plane. Great Scot — what a surprise! Where are you going?”

“Just going to church.”

“Case settled, I hear. Bad luck. I’m here for the Reclamation North-east Mining Co. It hasn’t a hope. Oh, well, excellent! Thought you’d be on the way Home.”

“No, not — not just at once.”

“Church you said? I’d no idea it was Sunday. Jet lag. I’ll walk there with you.”

“No, that’s all right, Fiscal-Smith.”

“Glad to. Nothing to do. Need to walk after the plane. Should really have shaved and changed. I always travel now in these new T-shirt things. Feathers, you do look particularly smart.”

“Oh, I don’t know. .”

“Ah. Oh, yes. Of course. You’ve just got Silk. All-night party. Well done. You look pretty spry, though.”

“Thank you.”

“Well, very spry. Good God, Feathers, you look like The Importance of Being Earnest. Nine o’clock in the morning. What’s going on?”

Eddie stopped and turned his back on St. James’s church. At that moment, from the belfry a merry bell began to ring. “Private matter,” he said and held out his hand. “Goodbye, old chap. See you again.”

“There’s a clergyman waving at you,” said Fiscal-Smith. “Several people in bright dresses are round the church door. Smart hats. The padré—he’s coming over. He looks anxious—”

“Goodbye, Fiscal-Smith.”

“Hello!” cried out the parson. “We were getting worried. Organist’s on “Sheep May Safely” third time. You are looking very fine, my dear fellow, if I may say so. Now then — best man? Delighted. At the risk of sounding less than original I have to ask if you have the ring?”

“Ring?”

“Wedding ring? Let me see it. Best man — by the way my name is Yo. Yo Kong. I am to officiate. And you are?”

“Well, I’m called Fiscal-Smith. I’ve just arrived.”

“Well done, well done. Right on time. The ring.”

Fiscal-Smith stood in unaccustomed reverence, and Feathers gave one of his nervous roars and took a small box from his pocket.

“Very good. Splendid. Very good indeed. Now if you will accompany me, both of you, to the front pew on the right. The bride should be here in five minutes.”

“Bride?” said Fiscal-Smith out of a tight mouth.

“Yes,” said Eddie, staring up at the east window.

“Who the hell is she?”

“Betty Macintosh.”

“Who?”

“Decided to get on with it. Case settled. No time to contact a friend.”

“Friend?”

“Best man. Quite in order to go it alone.”

“Oh, I don’t mind. If you’d told me I’d have shaved. And I dare say you’ll be giving me a present. Usual thing.”

“Of course. And you won’t mind giving presents to the bridesmaids?”

“What?”

“I take it they all want the same. A string of pearls,” and Eddie was suddenly transported with boyish joy and began to boom with laughter, just as the organ left off safely grazing sheep and thundered out “The Wedding March.”

The two men were hustled to their feet and arranged alongside the front pew. Fiscal-Smith was handed the ring box and dropped it, and began to crawl about looking down gratings. Edward’s old headmaster, Sir, used to say, “You don’t find many things funny, Feathers. The sense of humour in some boys needs nourishment.” But this, on the wedding day that he had greeted as if going to his death, Eddie suddenly saw as deliriously dotty. He guffawed.

A rustle and a flurry and a gasp, and the bride stood alongside the groom who looked down with a cheerful face maybe to wink at good old Betty and say, “Hello — so you’re here.” Instead his face froze in wonder. A girl he had never seen stood beside him in a cloud of lace and smelling of orchids. She carried lilies. She did not turn to look at him. The face, invisible under the veil, was in shadow.

He could sense the delight of the small congregation — must be Amy and her husband, and Mrs. Baxter and some children and, oh yes, of course, Judge Pastry Willy and his wife Dulcie. Willy was “giving Betty away.” How they were all singing! Singing their heads off: From Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand. (A paean to the Empire, he had always thought. Whoever had chosen it?)

Someone had put hymn books into the hands of the bride and groom and the best man in his coloured T-shirt, who was singing louder than anyone with the book upside down. (You wouldn’t have expected Fiscal-Smith to know any hymns by heart.) The bride was trilling away, too, reading the hymn book through the veil.

I don’t know this girl, Eddie thought. I suppose it’s Betty. It could be anyone. She’s singing in tune rather well. I didn’t know that Betty could sing. I don’t really know anything about her. I wonder if some other men — other man — does? I don’t know her tastes. I only know that terrible green dress. I don’t know the colour of her eyes. Oh!

The bride had been told to lift her veil to make the promises and there to his relief was Betty in his pearls, and her eyes were bright hazel. And she was standing with her right foot on his left foot, and quite hurting him. They made the tremendous promises to each other, like automata, and he was told that he might now kiss her.

Tears in his eyes, he leaned towards Betty who leaned towards his ear after the small, obligatory kiss. “Who on earth is the best man?” just as Fiscal-Smith dropped the now empty ring box for the second time and turned to check how many un-necklaced bridesmaids there were. And, for the first time that day, Fiscal-Smith smiled, on finding that there were none.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Honeymoon Letters

Letter one: A letter from the bride to her friend Isobel Ingoldby, of no fixed address.

Dear Lizzie,

I’m writing with no real idea yet of where to send it. Perhaps to the Old Col, in case you left a forwarding address. Are you east or west? Back in Oz, forward to Notting Hill, or in pursuit of some passion in the Everglades or one of the Poles?

I’ve done it. Wore ancient veil belonging to old bird. A Missionary Bird once in Dacca all butterflies and flowers to cover my homely face and a new dress that was a present from her too, and shoes from Amy and flowers from Uncle Pastry who walked me down the aisle and handed me over. Antique idea but rather amazing. Eddie gave a sort of hiccup as I drew up alongside. I gleamed at him through the lace and I could see that he was worried that I might be someone else. He likes all evidence to be in the open. When I came to lift the veil — as does God at death — he looked startled, then breathed out thankfully. I’d made an effort with the face and had my hair cut where the grandee expats used to go, one of them looking down at me from a benign photograph on the wall. Must be long dead, but somehow I know her. Could have been part of my childhood. Friend of Ma, I guess. Red nails, shiny lips like a geisha girl with kind eyes. She’s going to be my icon. I shall grow old like her, commanding people and being a perfick lady, opening bazaars. I’ll live in the past and try to improve it. You’ll know me by my hat and gloves, and hymn book too, like the mission-ary who got eaten by the cassa-wary in Tim-buk-tu. . something something hymn book too.

Well, I suppose I got eaten in HK at the church but I’m not unhappy, being digested, just a little shaken. I don’t know if Eddie’s happy — who does know about him? — but I’d say he isn’t shaken at all. The only thing that worried him apart from my heavy disguise under the antique tablecloth was his best man. You’d think Eddie would have been ashamed of Fiscal-Smith but he’s loyal to friends. And he has some funny friends, like the Dwarf — who was nowhere to be seen — and now this battered scarecrow. He thinks my friends are funny too, citing the excellent Mrs. Baxter who does nothing but cry.

And if he knew I know you, what then! Don’t worry, ducky. I’m not jealous of his memories or that you were in flagrante delicto (more jargon) once upon a time. “Let it be our secret that I know you,” as your lesbian pals undoubtedly bleat.

I don’t think you and Eddie’d have much to say to each other now, Lizzie, whatever you both got up to in the school hols before the war.

And I find I have everything to say to him morning, noon and night. Old Filth, as he is so charmingly called — I can’t care for it — is full of surprises. And I do enjoy the way people defer to him. I am but a hole in the air but they run after him, bowing. And why I like this so much, Lizzie, is that he doesn’t notice it. And he doesn’t think it odd to have friends like Fiscal-Smith and the seven dwarfs. Well, only one dwarf to date but you never know who will turn up next.

And he trusts me utterly, Lizzie. Never suspected a thing about you-know-what. And I’ve put it out of my mind. It was some sort of hypnosis. Terrifying! No, I never think about it. Of course, Eddie’s a bit of an enigma himself and it makes me pleased with our Enigma years at Bletchley Park. You and I know about silence. Not one of us spilled a bean, did we? And the fact that I’ll never really crack Eddie in a way gives me a freedom, Lizzie. Oh, not to misbehave again, oh dear me, no, but to have an unassailable privacy within my own life equal to his. This must be how to make marriage work. I have been married three full days. I know.

We’re in Shangri-La, Lizzie. It’s called Bhutan, and way round the back of Everest. He organised it all between the Case settling and marrying me. That’s what he was doing the two days he vanished in Hong Kong. First he fixed a plane to Delhi — no, first the wedding breakfast at the Restaurant Le Trou Normand where Amy tried to breastfeed at the table and Eddie and Fiscal-Smith looked up at the ceiling that was all hung with fishing nets with fake starfish trapped in them, like Brittany, and the manager removed her to an annexe.

“Off to Delhi now,” says groom to bride and “Delhi? We’re not going to Delhi. Not Agra? Not the Taj Mahal with all the tours?” says bride to groom: “I’ve not seen the Taj Mahal, as it happens,” he says, “but no, it’s a stopover. I couldn’t get much of a hotel, though.”

Nor was it. The tarts paraded the corridors and used our room when we were down at dinner (British Restaurant wartime standard) and Edward inspected the bedcovers and roared, and we slept in chairs and next day he refused to pay and confetti fell out of my pockets and the manager smirked. Bad start.

But then I experienced the superhuman power of the Great Man’s fury. Heathcliff stand back. Result: somehow comes along an Embassy car and chauffeur to take us to the airport, no Taj Mahal but a silent journey with Eddie like Jove on his cloud. And the cloud gave way to mountains and the mountains were the Himalayas and then the mountains started to change and soften and a pale-green, misty valley country began. Its architecture of wood and stone and bright paint is like a pure and unworldly Vienna. Tall, huge blocks of apartments like palaces. Cotton prayer flags blow in clusters from every hilltop and street corner and everyone — children and grandpas and cripples and monks — give each prayer wheel a little shove as they pass.

And now we have reached a rest-house high above a valley where a green river thunders, foaming along between forests standing in the sky and luminous terraces of rice. At a meeting of waters stands a stupa. Even from up here its whiteness and purity hurt the eyes. High up here we listen to the thunderous waters and then, high above us again, are monasteries hidden in the peaks, and eagles.

We arrived yesterday on a country bus and we passed this stupa far below at the meeting of the rivers. It is like the huge snow-white breast of a giantess lying prone with a tower on top, like a tall white nipple. Reclining by the roadside on a wooden bridge was a human-sized creature examining its fingernails like a courtesan, not interested in us. Bus stops still. Driver cries, “Look, look! It is a langur, the rare animal you see on our postage stamps!” and the langur langur-ously yawns, putting a paw over its mouth — I swear — and vanishes.

I’d like to be a langur

Sitting by a stupa

Eating chips and bang-ur

Wouldn’t it be supa?

Now, in this Bhutanese rest-house, I am completely happy and I hope Eddie is. He spends hours sweeping the view with his binoculars and peace on his face. The walls of the rest-house are made of crimson felt hung inside heavy skins. The red felt flaps and groans in the wind. It is damp to the touch. Monks and monkish people shuffle about. The appearance of the management puts the Savoy Hotel to shame. They wear deep-blue woollen coats, the Scottish kilt, long woollen socks knitted in diamond patterns like the Highland Games and dazzle-white cuffs turned back over blue sleeves. The cuffs are a foot deep. There’s a whiff of Bluecoat Boys and of Oliver Cromwell. Puritan? No. There must be a lot of sex about, for the villages team with children and (wait for it) all the government offices are painted with murals several storeys high, with giant phalluses (or phalli?) on which Eddie sometimes lets his binoculars rest and even faintly smiles.

So, it’s all O.K., Lizzie-Izz.

Love you. Love you for not being at the wedding. If Eddie knew I knew you and was writing he’d send his love, but I’d rather he didn’t. I must keep hold of his love all to myself at least at first, until I understand it.

Dinner is served. Looks like langur fritters.

Your old school chum

Bets

(Letter stamped by Old Colonial Hotel, Hong Kong “To await arrival” and eventually thrown away.)

Two: A letter from the bride to her friend Amy of Kai Tak.

Amy, my duck, I’m writing from Dacca in East Pakistan but when I write to The Baxter (next one) I’ll call it Bengal and I have to say that Bengal suits it better, even sans Lancers. The climate remains the same. Every other change political and historical is on the surface. I can’t remember if you and Nick worked here? Actually you can’t see much surface for most of it is water. It is hardly “a land” but part of the globe where the sea is shallow and the sinuous silky people are almost fish but with great white smiling teeth. The “lone and level land” stretches far away and the crowds blacken it like dust drifting. Nowhere in the world more different than the last place, i.e. the first call in our Honeymoon Progress which is becoming global and all arranged in secret and string-pulling by Eddie.

First, Bhutan. We were dizzy there, not with releasing passions, but with altitude sickness. We were level with the eagles. There was also a bit of food poisoning. I managed not to buy the goat’s cheese they sell on the mountainside like dollops of soft cream snowballs set on leaves. “You would last one hour,” says my lord. In the rest houses the food came before us on silver dishes and looked ceremoniously beautiful: mounds of rice with little coloured bits of meat and fish and vegetables in it, warmish and wet, and only after a terrible day and night did we realise that anything left over is mixed in with the new stuff next day. Tourists are few. Probably mostly dead. The king hates tourists and you usually have to wait a year. Eddie was at Oxford with him after the war and I was all for dropping in our cards in the hope of getting some Oxford marmalade and Christ Church claret. Eddie said no. Eddie is. . but later.

First, beloved Amy, thank you from all parts of me for all you did for me and the speed at which you did it. I hope you liked Edward? He is monosyllabic in a crowd. He very much liked you and Nick and was full of admiration for you controlling and producing a family among the poor and needy and weak in the head. He never mentioned your children, which is a bit frightening. He doesn’t know I want ten — plus a nanny and several nursemaids and a nursery floor at the top of a grand house in Chelsea on the river. I can’t help it. I read too many Victorian children’s books of Ma’s in China. And I miss my Ma. But don’t worry. I’ll probably be marching against the Bomb, unwashed and hugely pregnant like the rest.

Eddie couldn’t believe you have always been my best friend ever. He thought you’d be pony club and debutanting and hot stuff on the marriage market. “She was,” I said. Do you find that much-travelled men are the most insular? Like Robinson Crusoe? If he hadn’t got stuck on that island, Robinson Crusoe’d have got stuck on another. Of his own making.

I’m writing myself into a mood to say real things to you and maybe I should now quickly write myself out of it. Do you remember that book about marriage (Bowen?) that talks about the glass screen that comes down between a newly wed couple and all their former friends? I’m not going to let this happen but I can see, after that terrifying 1662 marriage service, that it can eat into one. Well, it was you made me go through with it. Said I was at last being practical. I wasn’t sure that you still thought so when you met Eddie and I wish he hadn’t stared so steadily and so high above your head.

Loyalty. And so I’ll only say that we had a ghastly first night in Delhi, propped up in basket chairs because harlots had been using our beds. Then we went in a solid car (called “An Ambassador’) up the Himalayas to Darjeeling where we were greeted by old English types and cold mutton and rice pudding and porridge, and our own room looking directly at dawn over the Katmanjunga. The occasional English flag. There was early-morning tea and everything perfect between white, white linen sheets. In the middle of the night Eddie said, “I can’t apologise enough,” which I thought weird after his spectacular performances. “About the Delhi hotel,” he said.

There was some ghastly hang-up in his childhood. I don’t want to know about it. I’d guess half the men with his background are the same. Well, he was so happy in the mountains.

Then after Bhutan we came on here to Dacca.

I’ve seen a chair in a dark shop. It is rose-and-gold, a patterned throne from some old rajah’s palace, but all tattered. I longed. I yearned. Eddie said, “But we haven’t a home yet.” This had not occurred to me. “We could send it to Amy at first.” He looked at me and said, “She wouldn’t thank you.” You and I aren’t very good at domiciliary arrangements, Amy. You leave yours to God and I’m still imprisoned by the past, and expect it to come again. It won’t, any more than sherbet fountains. It’s to be “Utility furniture” now for ever. I said, “Sorry.” And he said, “Hold on,” and he went into the back of the dark shop and came out saying, “I’ve bought it. It can go to Chambers.”

And this, not the great rope of pearls he gave me, and not the ring and that, not the moment he saw me in the Baxter butterflies, was the moment. Well, I suppose when I knew I loved him.

I’ll write to the Baxter next and explain about leaving the veil behind. In twenty years I’ll come to your little girls’ weddings. During the twenty years I’ll have been endlessly breastfeeding in the rose-red chair, and anywhere else I choose. Times will have changed. Maybe we’ll be having babies on bottles? Or in bottles? Maybe men will be extinct too.

But women will always have each other. You gave me such a wedding.

Love to Nick and the babes — by the way has the new one come? Don’t let Baxter tears fall on its sweet head but give it a X from

Betty

Three: A picture postcard from the bride to Mrs. Hildegarde Maisie Annie Baxter of Mimosa Cottage, Kai Tak, Hong Kong.

Dear Mrs. Baxter,

This is only a note until I get home when I’ll write to thank you properly for the veil. I have left it for the time being with Amy but I think you should see it back in its box. I fear for it among the hordes in Sunset Buildings. It made the wedding.

I am sure we’ll meet again and I’m so glad you could come to the restaurant though I’m sorry about the bouillabaisse.

With love from Betty Feathers

(Card discovered unposted fifty years on in the Donheads down the cushions of a great red chair.)

Four: A letter from the bride to Judge Sir William Pastry of Hong Kong, posted in Valetta, Malta.

Valetta, Malta

Dear Uncle Willy,

We are up at “Mabel’s Place” and I don’t think I have to explain that it’s the medieval palace of the great Mabel Strickland on the hilltop and the blue sea all around. The walls must be six feet thick and inside there are miles of tall and shadowy stone passages, slit windows for arrers, no furniture except the occasional dusty carpet woven when Penelope was a girl, massy candelabra standing on massy oak chests. Our bed could be rented out in London as a dwelling: four posts, painted heraldry, old plumes drooping thick with dust, thick bedlinen like altar cloths. Wow!

But I expect you’ve been here lots of times. One day you’ll make a wonderful governor of Malta and they’d love you as much as they love Mabel in her darned stockings and tweed skirts. If you won’t do it then I’d push Edward for governor instead. We’d bring up our ten children here and become passionate about the Maltese, and have picnics on the beach (the Maltese perched on chairs and making lace) and watch the British flag going up and down with the sun. Until it’s folded up and put away.

But you won’t even think of it. Are you still wanting Thomas Hardy and Dorset? I can’t think why. Dorset sounds stuffy — full of people like us — and Malta is cheerful, flashing with the light of the sea. And they still like us here and we like them. That will become rare. Quite soon, Edward thinks.

But at present Grand Harbour is alive with British ships hooting and tooting, and the streets are alive with British tars and all the girls roll their black eyes at them on their way to Mass which seems to take place every half-hour. Their mothers, believe it or not, still stride the corkscrew streets in flowing black, their heads draped in black veiling arranged over tea trays. Oh — and flowers everywhere, Uncle W! Such flowers!

It’s been terribly bombed, of course, and it’s pretty filthy. Sliema Creek is covered by a heavy carpet of scum. The Royal Navy swims in it though the locals tell them not to. It’s the main sewer. They wag their heads. There’s a rumour of bubonic plague and yesterday a big black rat ran across Mabel’s roses not looking at all well.

Of course the food is terrible, as ever it was. It was we who taught them Mrs. Beeton’s mashed potato! There is not much in the way of wine. But the wonderful broken architecture from before the Flood stretches everywhere: hundreds of scattered broken villages — Africa-ish — the occasional rose-pink palace decorated like a birthday cake. There are about a hundred thousand churches, bells clanking all day long and half the night. Dust inside them hangs as if in water, incense burns and the roofs (because of the war) are mostly open to the sky.

There is a passion for building here and they’re all at it with ropes and pulleys. Restoring and starting anew. It would be wonderful for Eddie’s practice: plenty of materials. Malta is one big rock of ages cleft for us. It is full of cracks and overnight the cracks fill with dew and flowers. The smell of the night-scented stocks floats far out to sea.

(Scene: Hong Kong

Willy’s Dulcie: You aren’t still reading Betty’s letter!

Willy: She grows verbose. Don’t like the sound of it.)

It will remain a mystery that the island never fell to the enemy. It was dive-bombed night and day, the people hiding deep in caves and (I gather) quarrelling incessantly and threatening each other’s authority most of the time. There was almost a revolution. Then, in limped the battered British convoys with flour and meat and oil and sugar, and the pipes all playing and the cliffs black with cheering crowds.

(Willy: Now it’s military history. She’s holding back.

Dulcie: She’s going to be a British blimp in middle age if she’s not careful. What about the honey moon?

Willy: I think she’s coming to that.)

We arrived here by sea from Rome. We flew to Rome from East Pakistan and we arrived in East Pakistan from Bhutan! I think we were the only tourists. The king of Bhutan is pretty insular but he let us in because he was at Christ Church with Eddie. Not that they met. Then or then. He’s an insular king — like you and Thomas Hardy. And maybe George VI.

London tomorrow. We’ll be in Eddie’s old London pad until we can find somewhere else. The Temple’s bombed to bits still. I think — but don’t spread it — that Eddie wants to come back to live in Hong Kong and so do I, especially if you and Dulcie stay. Don’t be lured back to the dreary Donheads.

I’m sorry. I run on with no means of stopping — Oh, God — History!

(Willy: I think she’s stopping.

Dulcie: You’ll be late for Court.)

I have so much to tell you, my dear godfather I’ve known since Old Shanghai. This was to have been a simple letter of thanks. Thanks for being such a prop and stay at the wedding, for giving me away, for being so diplomatic at Le Trou Normand about Amy breastfeeding (tell Dulcie sorry about that, I didn’t know it would upset her) and especially when Mrs. Baxter was sick. You were wonderful. I’m afraid my Edward kept a seat near the back! He was silent for a long time but as we passed through Sikkim en route for Darjeeling and we saw slender ladies plucking tea leaves with the very tips of their fingers — their saris like poppies in the green, their little heads bound round with colours and I was transported with joy — he said, “I am not enough for you.”

Oh dear — I have been carried far away. Please, dear Uncle W, don’t show Dulcie this. Well, I expect you will.

In Dacca Eddie bought me a red chair. The old, old man who sold it lived far down the back of his shop in the dark, his eyes gleaming like a Maltese plague rat. The chair is to be sent to the Inns of Court, The Temple, London EC4!

Oh — I don’t seem to be able to concentrate on thanking you. If only Ma and Pa were here. “You are my mother and my father,” as the Old Raj promised India, or rather they said, “I am.”

Isn’t it odd how Hong Kong holds us still? Isn’t it odd how the “Far East” has somehow faded away with the Bomb? Do you understand? Now the British live out there by grace. I shall call my first daughter Grace.

I promise, dear Uncle Willy, to grow more sage: more worthy of your affection. I shall grow tweedy and stout and hairy, with moles on my chin, and I shall be a magistrate and open bazaars in support of the Barristers’ Benevolent Society. You won’t be ashamed of me.

Thanks for liking Eddie, with much, much love from

Betty x

(Letter left in Judge Pastry’s Will to Her Majesty’s Judge Sir Edward Feathers QC, residing in the Donheads, carefully dated and inscribed and packed in a cellophane envelope, and bequeathed to Edward Feathers’s Chambers where it may still be mouldering.)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

You are grinning all over your face, Mrs. Feathers.”

“I’m happy, Mr. Feathers. I’m writing to Pastry Willy.”

“About a hundred pages, at a guess. Come on. It’s a picnic.”

“Picnic?”

“On the cliffs, Elisabeth. With the local talent. Well, the local English talent. Quick. No ‘PS xx.’ Envelope, stamp and off. Silver salver at the portcullis. Take your suncream and I’ve got your hat.”

“I love you, Edward Feathers. Why are we going off on a picnic with all these terrible people? We could be eating tinned pilchards with Mabel.”

“It’ll be tinned pilchard sandwiches on the cliffs. Come on, there’s a great swarm going. Planned for years. Since the end of the war. It’s all expats with no money, no education and big ideas. All drunk with sunlight. They drifted to Malta. They can’t go home. Nothing to do.”

“Is it the British Council?”

“Certainly not. It’s the riff-raff of Europe. The Sixpenny Settlers. We have to go. It’s polite. There’s to be wine.”

They arrived at the picnic where everyone was lolling about in the sun on what seemed to be an inland clifftop, though you could hear the sea far below. There was a long fissure on the plateau, stuffed full of flowers. There was a trickling sound of running water.

“I thought there were no streams on Malta,” she said.

“There is one. Only one,” said a languid man lying about nearby with a bottle of wine.

“We found it a year ago. Nobody knew of it. Yet it’s no distance from Valetta,” said somebody else.

“Ah,”—the languid man—. “We find that the island gets bigger and bigger.”

Some daughters, English schoolgirls in bathing dresses, neat round the thighs, were laughing and jumping over the rift in the rock. And then a shriek.

“What’s happening? What’s happening, Eddie?”

“I think they’re jumping the crack.”

Elisabeth ran across and lay on her stomach and looked down into the slit rock and its channel of flowers. It was less then a yard wide. The spot of emerald ocean below seemed distant as the sky above. “Oh, if they slip! If they slip!” Betty yelled out.

But the girls’ mothers were sitting smoking and examining their nails, and one of them called, “They won’t. Don’t worry.”

Then one girl did. A leg went down and she had to be hauled out fast. Everyone laughed, except Elisabeth, who again lay face-down. There was the notion that there was no time, nor ever had been, nor ever would be. She said, “Eddie, there’s a little beach down there. I can see breakers. I’m going down by the path.”

“If there is a path.”

“I’ll find one. I’ll go alone. Don’t follow me.”

They had not been apart since the wedding.

The languid man lying near with his wine bottle called out, “I say, you’re the barrister chap, aren’t you? I want to ask you something.”

“I’m off. I’ll see you down there, Edward. Come for me in one of the cars. Don’t hurry.”

“You’ll miss the picnic.”

“Good. Don’t drink too much. The road down will be screwy. Might be safer to dive through the crack.”

Edward turned grey. He strode over and grabbed her arm above the elbow.

“Let go! Stop it! You’re like a tourniquet! Edward!”

His eyes were looking at someone she had never met.

Then he let go of her arm, sat down on the stony cliff and put his hands over his face. “Sorry.”

“I should think so.”

“I went back somewhere. I was about eight.”

“Eight?”

“I killed someone—”

“Oh, Eddie, shut up. I’m going. . No, all right, then. All right. I won’t. Go and talk to that awful man. I’ll sit here by myself.”

“Something wrong?” the man called. “Honeymoon over? Something I said?”

“No,” said Edward.

“The war,” said the man. “POW, were you?”

“No. Were you?”

“God, no. Navy. Shore job. Ulcer. Left me low. Wife left too, thank God. Look.” He heaved himself up and came over to Edward. “Can you get me a job? In the Law line? Something like barristers’ clerk. No exams. Something easy.”

“Barristers’ clerks don’t have easy lives.”

“I’d really like just to stay here. On Malta. Do nothing. Just stay with our own sort.”

“I can’t stand this,” said Elisabeth. “Eddie, come with me down the cliff.” She stepped over the man and said, “Oh, drop dead, whoever you are.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The streets around Victoria Station were dark and the taxi crawled along in a fog so dense that kerb-stones were invisible and even double-decker buses were upon you before you knew it. The cab driver stopped and started, and they sat silent until he said at last, “Ebury Street. Yes? Ten pounds.” He had brought them all the way from the airport, their luggage piled around them and under a strap on the front and on top on a frame. “Thanks, sir. Good luck, sir.”

She had never seen Edward’s part of London. She had never seen him in a house at all. Always it had been hotels and restaurants. She had no idea what his maisonette in Pimlico would be like, and still less now they had drawn up outside it in thick fog. She had always been with him in sunlight.

“I should carry you over my doorstep,” he said, “but it’s going to be a bit cluttered,” and he unlocked the front door upon an unpainted, uncarpeted stairwell with the yellow gloaming of the fog seeping in through a back window. There was an untrampled mess of mail about the floorboards and the smell of cats and an old-fashioned bicycle. Uncarpeted stairs went up and round a corner into more shadow.

“Home,” said Edward.

“Whose is the bike?”

“Mine.”

“Yours? Can you? I mean I can’t see you riding a bike.”

“I ride it every Sunday morning. Piccadilly. Oxford Circus. Not a thing on the road. I’ll get you one.”

Upstairs there was a kitchen that housed one chipped enamel-topped table and a chair. Under the table were old copies of the Financial Times and the Daily Telegraph so densely packed that the table legs were rising from the floor. A rusty geyser hung crooked over a Belfast stone sink. Cupboard doors hung open against a wall. On the table, green fish-paste stood in an open glass jar and a teacup from some unspecified time. It had a mahogany-coloured tidemark inside it.

Edward smiled about him. “I have a cleaner but it doesn’t look as if she’s been in. I’ve never actually met her. I leave the money by the sink and it disappears — yes, it’s gone, so I suppose she’s been. I hope the bed’s made up. I’m not good at all this. I’m hardly ever here. There’s a laundry round the corner and an ABC for bread.”

“You live here! All the time? Alone? But Eddie, it’s so unlike you.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve never been fussy.”

There was a Victorian clothes airer attached to the ceiling on a pulley with ropes that brought it up and down. Sitting on one of the rails of the airer was a rat.

Over the years this homecoming became one of Elisabeth’s famous stories, as she sat in Hong Kong at her rosewood dining table with its orchids and silver and transparent china bowls of soup. Contemporaries discussing post-war London. Elisabeth became glib, inspiring like memories among guests who were all of a certain age. They joked proudly of the drabness of that fifties — even sixties — London; the insanity of the National Health Service (“free elastoplast!”), the puritanical government. Elisabeth, always pleasant, never joined in about politics. She revered the British Health Service, and turned the conversation to the London she came to as a bride, to Edward’s unworldliness in seedy Pimlico, his hard work, his long hours in Chambers. But when she told the homecoming story, which became more colourful with the years, she could not decide why she somehow could never include the rat.

She had screamed, run from the kitchen, down the stairs and out into the fog, and stood shaking on the pavement, Edward following her and shouting, “Betty — for God’s sake, there were rats on Malta. Plague rats. And Hong Kong. And what about Bhutan and the snakes coming up the bath pipes?”

“We never saw one.”

“What about the Camp in Shanghai?”

“That was different. And we kept the place clean. We’ve got to leave, Eddie. Now.”

“You don’t know how hard it is to find anywhere. Even one room. Everywhere is flattened. And Ebury Street is SW1. It’s a good address on writing paper.”

“That rat wasn’t there to write letters!”

Forty or so years on, in Dorset in her Lavendo-polished house and weedless garden, driving her car weekly to the car wash, refusing to keep a dog because of mud on its paws, a blast of memory sometimes overcame her. There sat the rat on the airer. It was her falling point. It was the rat eternal. It had been the sign that she must now take charge.

“Isn’t there a hotel? Isn’t the Grosvenor around here? At Victoria Station? We’ll get the luggage back on the pavement and go there in a cab.”

“We’d never get another taxi in this fog,” he said, and at once a taxi swam out of the night, its headlamps as comforting as Florence Nightingale.

“I’m not sure if I’ve any English money left,” he said.

“I have,” she said. “I bought some at the airport. Slam the front door behind you.”

She climbed in, and after a moment he followed.

And at Grosvenor Place they were out, they were in the foyer and the cabman paid off while Edward still stood frowning on the pavement in his linen suit. “This hotel smells. It smells of beer and tobacco and fry. It’s probably full up.” But she secured a room.

In bed he said, “I always rather liked rats.”

That night in the Grosvenor in an unheated bedroom, shunting steam trains clamouring below, yellow fingers of fog painting the window and a mat from the floor on top of the skimpy eiderdown, Edward began to laugh. “I am the rat,” he said, grabbing her. “I came with you in the taxi.”

Scene in HK. Rosewood dining table. In middle age.

Fin de Siècle.

Edward (to guests): End of my freedom, you know. Minute we reached London, she took me over. She and the clerk and, of course, Albert Ross. Needn’t have existed outside work.

All: Well, you did work, Filth! How you worked!

Edward: Yes. Work at last began to come in. Remember, Betty?

Elisabeth: I do.

Edward: Don’t know what you did with yourself in the evenings, poor child. You looked about sixteen. All alone.

Elisabeth: Not exactly.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

By the morning the fog had lifted and Edward was off to Chambers with his laundry and papers by nine o’clock. Across the table of the gloomy breakfast room at the Grosvenor Hotel, he handed Elisabeth the keys of the maisonette.

As soon as he’d gone she picked up the keys, asked for the luggage to be brought down and taken round to the station left-luggage office. She paid the bill and set off on foot, bravely, to Edward’s horrible domain.

As she reached the corner of Ebury Street the fog rolled away and she saw that Edward’s side of the street was beautiful in morning light. The façade was faded and gentle and seemed like paper, an unfinished film set, almost bending in the wind. The eighteenth-century windows that had withstood the bomb blasts all around were unwashed, yet clear, set in narrow panes. Little shops on to the pavement ran all along, and doors to the houses above had rounded fanlights. Each house had three storeys. There were two tall first-floor windows side by side with pretty iron balconies. The shop at street level beside Edward’s front door seemed to be a greengrocer’s with boxes and sacks spread about the pavement and a very fat short man in a buff overall was standing, hands in pockets, on the step. “Morning,” he said, blowing air out of his cheeks and looking at the sky.

“Are you open yet? Have you — anything?”

“Anything? I’d not say anything. We have potatoes. Carrots. Celery, if required.”

“Have you — apples?”

He looked at her intently and said, “We might have an orange or two.”

“Oh! Could I have two pounds?”

“Where you been then, miss? I’ll sell you one orange.”

She followed him inside the shop where a doom-laden woman was perched high on a stool behind a desk.

“Look at my ankles,” she said, sticking one out. It bulged purple over the rim of a man’s carpet slipper, unstockinged. “D’you want a guess at the size of it?”

“It looks horribly swollen,” said Elisabeth.

“It’s sixteen inches round. Sixteen! And all water. That’s your National Health Service for you.”

“But you must go to the doctor at once.”

“And who does the accounts here? You reached home, then?”

“Home?”

“Next door. “Mr. Feathers is home,” they said, the electrician’s across the road. Mozart Electrics.”

“We’re — we’re just passing through. I’m Mrs. Feathers.”

“Well!” She rolled her eyes at her impassive husband, who was again on the step cornering the market. “Married!”

“You can have two,” he called over his shoulder. “But don’t ask for lemons.”

“Sack that cleaner,” said his wife. “She stays ten minutes. You’ll have to get scrubbing.”

“Oh, well. I don’t think we’re staying. We want to get something nearer the City.”

“You’ll be lucky,” said the woman. “But you are lucky, I can see that. There’d be a thousand after next door the minute you handed in the keys.”

“I saw a rat. Last night. We left.”

“Oh, rats. They’re all over the place, rats. Mr. Feathers used to complain sometimes, though he’s a perfect gentleman. ‘Have you by any chance got a dog, Mrs. — er?’ (He calls everyone Mrs. — er.) ‘Does your dog like rats?’ We said we didn’t know but we took it round and it stands there looking at this rat”—a huge wheezing and shaking soon taken up by the greengrocer on the step, the rolls of fat beneath the buff vibrating—“and it turns and walks out. The dog walks out. It was a big rat.”

“Well, I can’t live here,” said Elisabeth.

“I’ll get you the Corporation,” said the wife. “You’ll be clean and sweet there soon, you’ll see. D’you want some kippers?”

Elisabeth turned the key in Edward’s lock and then stood back for a while on the pavement, watching the electrical shop across the road opening up. A very arthritic old person stood watching her.

“Go on in,” he called. “You’ll be all right. ’Ere, I’ll come in with you,” and like one risen painfully from the dead he slowly crossed the road, cars stopping for him. “Takes me over an hour now to get up in the morning,” he said. “Now watch that bike. The stairs is steep but if I take it slow. . I’se easing. Now then. .”

In the kitchen the airer was unoccupied and through a beautiful window, its glazing bars as fine as spars, lay a long, green, tangled garden full of flowers. Upstairs and upstairs again were bedrooms with tipping floors and simple marble fireplaces. Edward’s narrow bed stood like a monk’s pallet in the middle of one room, on a mat. One fine old wardrobe. One upright chair. A decent bathroom led off, and now the higher view showed a row of other gardens on either side. On the other side from the green grass was a small lawn and forest trees blocking out Victoria Station’s engine sheds.

“Don’t you get too far in with her next door that side,” said the electrician. “I don’t mean Florrie with the ankles. I mean t’other side. You all a’right now?”

“Yes. Well. I shan’t be staying. We saw — well — rats.”

“From the river,” he said. “They have to go somewhere. There’s worse than rats. Now, this is a good house and so it should be. We hear it’s two pound a week rent. Mind, it’s all coming down for development soon. Miracle is that not a bomb touched it. All the big stuff came down — Eaton Square and so on — not a window broken here. Artisans’ dwellings, we are. But panelling original pine. I’ll leave you for the moment.”

“Thank you,” she called down after him. “Very much. Could you tell me why you’re called Mozart Electrics?”

“Well, he was here as a boy,” said the arthritic, amazed that the whole world did not know. “One day there’ll be a statue.”

She found her way to the garden and there were fruit bushes and a cucumber frame, and over the fence to the right an old woman with a florid face was watching her.

“Good morning,” she said. “I am Da-lilah Dexter. You may have heard of me. I am an actress but equally concerned with gardening. And I hear that you have just married Edward.”

“How ever—?”

“News flies through eighteenth-century walls. We heard you arrive last night but then you were gone. I suppose he’s off to his Chambers?”

“Yes. We’re just back—”

“From a long honeymoon. It will be hard to adjust. I suggest you come in for hot cocoa and to meet Dexter.”

“I don’t think. .”

“I will put on the cocoa and leave open the front door.”

“This,” Delilah said, pointing, “is Dexter.”

The house was like the green room of a small theatre, the sitting room apparently immense since the wall opposite the windows (hung with roped-back velvet like proscenium arches) was covered by a gold-framed mirror that reflected an older, softer light than was real. The mirror had a golden flambeau at either side of the frame where fat wax candles had burned to the last inch. The looking-glass reflected a collapsed man in a black suit, his legs stretched out before him on a red velvet chaise longue that lacked a leg. His face was ivory. He waved an exhausted greeting.

“Dexter,” announced his wife, “is also an actor. A fine actor, but in his later years he only plays butlers.”

“How interesting. .”

“Butlers have been our support for years. Unfortunately the new drama is uninterested in butlers. It is all tramps and working-class women doing the ironing. But still, here and there, Dexter finds a part, or rather directors find a part for him. He’s the ultimate butler. He very much favours the Playhouse where they still tend towards the country-house comedy, and long runs. At present he is in a play where his part ends with Act Two and so he gets home for supper. They let him off the final curtain.”

“I hope always to be let off the final curtain,” said Dexter. “And as I always wear black I need spend no time in the dressing room. I can leave this house and be on stage in nine minutes.”

“But if you fell over in the street?”

Both actors looked at Elisabeth with disdain.

“We are professionals,” said Delilah. “We can dance on a broken leg. If Dexter should get late, he could borrow Edward’s bicycle. I’ll top up your cocoa with a little green chartreuse.”

When Elisabeth had opened every window in the house and propped open the front door with the bicycle, she followed Edward’s telephone wire under a cushion and phoned the Westminster Council about the rat. Then she got busy with the labour exchange and went across to Mozart Electrics about a cleaning agency. At the National Provincial Bank on the corner she opened an account and she attacked the gas showrooms to dare them not to replace the geyser. “They’ll not show up for a month,” said Delilah Dexter, but someone came round in an hour and stayed until hot water crept forth. Elisabeth found a saucepan, cleaned out spiders and ate kippers.

“They were very good,” she told the greengrocer’s wife.

“Yes, They’re from Lowestoft. These are Lowestoft kippers — we’ve gone there two weeks’ holiday for twenty-seven years, even in the war. You’ll be all right, they keep. We’ll be back there in a few months and I’ll get you some more. We don’t like change. We’re here.”

Edward, returning uneasily — and late — that evening to the Grosvenor, found no sign of his wife or his luggage. He walked back dispiritedly to Ebury Street to find every light in the house ablaze, every window open and a smell of kippers noticeable as far away as Victoria Station. His wife on his doorstep, arms akimbo in a borrowed overall, was deep in conversation with the fruit shop, and Mr. Dexter was making his way solemnly down the street dressed as a butler.

“The end of Act Two,” said Dexter, raising his bowler hat.