The Man in the Wooden Hat

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Three years later — the years Edward Feathers saw as his torture and suffering and the village called his fortitude — came the extraordinary news that the house next door to Dexters, the monstrous hidden house above him, had been sold.

One winter’s day, a single van arrived and was quickly away again. Who had bought the upper house nobody knew. After a time Edward Feathers, on his morning constitutional to the lane end to collect his Daily Telegraph from the length of drainpipe attached to the rough handrail at the foot of the slope, saw that a second bit of drainpipe had been fastened to the handrail of his new neighbour across the lane. The paper was not the Daily Telegraph. It was thicker and stubbier and from what he could see it was the Guardian.

How insolent! To copy his invention for a rainproof newspaper without his permission! He marched off on his emu legs, chin forward, plunging his walking stick into the road. He met his neighbour Dulcie, bright and smiling as usual. When he had slashed his way by she said to her dog, “So — what’s the matter with him today?”

She did not know what was to come.

About a month after the newcomer’s arrival a new telephone was installed (the Donheads move slowly) and the newcomer used it to telephone the village shop in a more distant Donhead. He thanked them for the delivery of his daily paper and would the shop kindly put up a postcard in their window advertising for daily help? What was the going rate? Excellent. Double it. And stipulate laundry. The newcomer had lived in the Far East and was ashamed to say that he was totally incapable of looking after himself.

“Oh, dear me,” they said. “And no wife, sir?”

“My wife is dead. She was Chinese. I’m afraid she had no idea how to do laundry either. We had servants.”

“We’ll do our best,” said the shop. “You sound just like your neighbour. He was from Singapore-way. He’s a lawyer.”

“Oh.”

“What name shall I put on the card, sir? Perhaps you are a lawyer, too?”

“Yes, I am, as it happens.”

“Well, fancy that. You may be friends.”

“My name is Veneering.”

“Your neighbour is Sir Edward Feathers.”

There was a terrible silence. The telephone was put down. “Funny one we’ve got now,” said the shop to Eddie Feathers’s daily who was in buying marmalade for him. “Not a bundle of fun.”

“Makes two of them,” said Kate, and half an hour later, letting herself into the Feathers domain, “What about this, then? Next door it’s another lawyer and he’s from Singapore-way, too. His name’s Veneering. That’s a queer name if ever. Is it Jewish? He’s wanting a domestic, and don’t you worry, I’ve said I’m not available. There’s enough to do here. I’ll find him someone but — Sir Edward, what’s wrong? You’ve turned greenish. Sit down and I’ll get you your cup of tea.”

Feathers sat silent, stunned out of thought. At last he said, “Thank God that Betty is dead.”

Over the way Veneering sat on by the telephone for a long while and said at last, “I must move. Thank God that Betty is dead.”

After a time looking at his fire, burning brightly in the great chimney, Feathers also said, “I must move.”

A bombshell coincidence?

Yet it was really not so very unlikely that Veneering had lighted on this particular house. The Donheads are thick with retired international lawyers, and house agents’ blurbs do not always mention English county boundaries. Dorset is large and, anyway, Veneering had no idea of the Featherses’ address. He was not the detective his son had been. No, the only really curious thing was that after their mutual discovery they never met. Filth, far too proud to change the route of his afternoon walk, kept to the same paths as before, went to church as before, drove to the same small supermarket as before, kept the same friends. It was Veneering who kept himself out of sight. He was, quite simply, never about. Cases of wine were delivered at quite frequent intervals and the village shop would drop off meagre groceries on his porch up the hill. His cleaner came when she felt like it and reported that he was obviously someone “in reduced circumstances” and his garden was left to go wild. Sometimes a hired car would come out from the station to take him to the London train and drop him at home again after dark. Later, it was reported that the circumstances could not have been that much reduced for the hired car began to transport him all the way. When people called at the house with envelopes for Save the Children or Breast Cancer, they were ignored. The postman said he delivered very little up there. There was seldom a light.

Once, when a much younger Hong Kong lawyer called on Filth and Filth walked him back to his car at the end of the lane, the lawyer said, “Didn’t Terry Veneering retire down this way?” before remembering the myth of the clash of the Titans. But surely over now?

“Lives next door,” said Filth.

“Next door! Then you are friends.”

“Friends?” said Filth. “Never seen him. Certainly don’t want to. That’s his personal bit of drainpipe he’s put up. He copied mine. He never had an original idea.”

“Good God! I’ve a mind to go and see him myself. He went through it, you know. This is ridiculous.”

“Go if you like,” said Filth, “but you needn’t bother to come and see me again if you do.”

Filth walked that day further than usual and returned home after dark. It was getting towards Christmas, and Kate and the gardener had hung fairy lights around his length of lead piping. There was a holly wreath on his door and a spangle of coloured lights shone from his windows. He could see the light of his coal fire in the sitting room, a table light on in the hall showing Christmas cards standing about. As ever, the right-hand bend of the lane and the house above were in total darkness.

Don’t expect he’s there, thought Filth. Playboy! Probably lives half the time in his London club. Or with a whore. Or with several whores. Or in Las Vegas or somewhere vulgar for Christmas. Disneyland.

After the hellish years without Betty, Filth was, however, beginning to learn how to live again. The remorse. The loss of the sense of comfort she brought, her integration with the seasons of the year, her surety about a life of the spirit — never actually discussed. Often, when he was alone in the house and she seemed to be just at his shoulder, he would say aloud to her shadow, “I left you too often. My work was too important to me.” He did not address the first days of their engagement though. Never. Never.

Christmases alone he liked. Positively liked. With Betty unavailable there was nobody he wanted to be with. He and Betty had gone in the last years to the hotel in Salisbury together for Christmas lunch. No fuss. No paper hats. No streamers to get caught up in all her necklaces. Now he went alone to the same hotel, the same table. Taken there and returned by taxi. Then a good read, a whisky or two before bed. This year, his fourth without her, was to be exactly as usual.

Except that it was snowing. And it had been snowing very hard since he got up. The snowflakes fell so fast and thick he could not say whether they were going up or down. He could not even see the barrier of trees that shielded him from his neighbour.

And this year — no sign of the taxi. It was already half an hour late. Filth decided to ring it up but found that his phone was dead. Ha!

He padded about — getting very late indeed now — and was relieved to hear a loud bang and slither outside in the drive. But nothing further.

Taxi’s crashed against the wall in the snow, he thought, and went out of the front door one step only and still in his slippers and without his coat. But there was no taxi, only a great heap of snow that had slid from his roof into the drive. And the snow was falling faster than ever.

And behind him he heard his front door click shut on its fine Chubb lock.

And at the same moment, up behind the trees, Veneering was humped in bed, wearing a much-used fleece and his pyjamas, and thick woollen socks, under two duvets. He had examined Christmas Day with one eye, then the bedside clock with the other, groaned as he flexed his wrists and ankles, seen that his bedroom, with the old drugget on the floor and the navy-blue cotton curtains he had inherited from the farming family, was damp and dreary as usual but that round the black edges of the curtains was a suffusing, imperial dazzle. Hobbling from the bed, pulling back a curtain, he saw the snow.

The sky must be somewhere out there, too, the treetops below him, Whin Green. But all he saw was dancing snow so thick he couldn’t tell if it was going up or coming down. Coming up, he thought, afraid. Was he still drunk from last night? Or am I standing on my head? He concentrated and, looking down, made out a patch of shadow, a certain darkness around — what? Yes. It must be old Filth’s chimney stack, the flashing round its base on the roof. Yes. The chimney was there and a great sloppy patch of snow had melted round it and — wha-hey! As Veneering watched he saw the shadow moving and the whole slope of wetter warmer snow (he’d have his central heating on full tilt of course) slipped away to the ground and he heard the thunderous slap as it landed.

Kill him if he happens to be under it, thought Veneering. But I shouldn’t think he is. He’ll be at some ghastly party with “all the trimmings.” He thought of Betty long, long ago sitting up very straight and perky with the paper streamers tangled up in her necklaces. Maybe sometimes his pearls. . He was making for his bed again when the front-door bell rang.

Veneering pulled on some trousers and another fleece over the first and something in the way of shoes and the bell rang again. Who the hell. .?

Looking out of his sitting-room window he saw Filth standing in his porch in a cashmere cardigan and slippers, and soaked to the skin. Very doleful face, too. Well, well. This’ll kill him. Ha! The old fool’s locked himself out. Went out to investigate the bang. Ha!

He answered the next peal on the bell and they confronted each other. Filth’s magnificent face dropped open at the jaw like a cartoon and Veneering remembered that he hadn’t shaved. Not yesterday either. Feathers, expecting Achilles, saw a little old man with a couple of strands of yellow-grey hair across his pate, bent over with arthritis. Veneering, expecting the glory of Agamemnon, saw a lanky skeleton that might just have been dragged dripping from the sea full fathom five and those were certainly not pearls that were his eyes.

“Oh, good morning, Filth,” said Veneering.

“Just called to say Happy Christmas,” said Edward Feathers, crossing Veneering’s un-hollied threshold.

“Good of you to call,” said Veneering. “I’ll get you a towel. Better take off the pullover. I’ve a duffel here. And maybe the slippers? There’s a fire in here.”

Together they entered Veneering’s bleak sitting room where he switched on a brown electric heater where soon a wire-worm of an element began to glow into life. “We can put the second bar on if you wish,” said Veneering. He did so. They looked at it. “O, come let us be merry,” said Veneering, “Don’t want to get mean, like Fiscal-Smith.”

A faint smile hovered round Filth’s blue lips.

“Whisky?” said Veneering.

They each drank a gigantic, neat whisky. On a table lay an immense jigsaw only half finished. They regarded it, sipping. “Too much damn sky,” said Veneering. “Sit down.”

In a glass case on legs Filth saw a pair of chandelier earrings. He remembered them. On the mantelpiece was a photograph of an enchanting young Guards officer. The fire, the whisky, the earrings, the steady falling snow, made Filth want to weep.

“Another?” asked Veneering.

“I should really be going.”

“I was sorry to hear about Betty,” said Veneering, looking away.

“I was sorry to hear about Elsie,” said Filth, remembering her name, her beauty, her yellow silk dress at the Hong Kong Jockey Club. Her unhappiness. “Tell me, what news of your son?”

“Dead,” said Veneering. “Killed. Soldier.”

“I am so terribly sorry. So most dreadfully sorry. I hear nothing. Oh, I am so very sorry.”

“I sometimes think we all hear too much. It is too hard — the suffering for each other. I think we had too many Hearings all those years.”

“I must go home.”

Filth was looking troubled and Veneering thought: In a minute he’ll have to tell me that he’s locked himself out. Let’s see how he’ll get round that.

“It was good of you to come, Filth.”

Filth said nothing for a while. Then, “I really came to ask you if I could use your phone. Mine’s out of order. Expecting a taxi.”

(Well done, thought Veneering. Good opening move.)

“Mine will be out of order if yours is, I expect. But by all means try.”

The phone was dead.

(And the village is three miles away and the only spare key will be with his cleaner and it’s Christmas and she won’t be back until the New Year. And I’ve got him.)

“As a matter of fact,” Veneering said, “I’ve meant to come and see you several times.”

Filth looked into his whisky glass. He felt ashamed. He himself had never dreamed of doing any such thing.

“Only trouble was I couldn’t think of an excuse. Bloody hot-tempered type I was, once upon a time.”

“Bloody good judge, though,” said Filth, remembering that this was true.

“You were a bloody good Advocate. Come on. One more.

“The only excuse I could think of,” Veneering said in a minute, “was that there’s an old key of yours hanging up here in an outhouse. Has your address on it. Must have been here for years. Probably the last people here had been given one for emergencies. Maybe you have one of mine?”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Filth.

“Shall I get it? Or some other time?”

“I may as well take it now.”

On Veneering’s doorstep, the snow now thinning, wearing Veneering’s unpleasant overcoat, he heard himself say, “I have a ham shank at home. Tin of crabmeat. A good bottle. If you care to come over for Boxing Day?”

“Delighted,” said Veneering.

Down the slippery slope went Filth, holding very tightly to Veneering’s yews. He put the old Dexter key in the lock. Would it turn?

It did.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

That spring Veneering began to play chess at Dexters once a week. Then twice a week, on Thursdays and Sundays. Each time, before he arrived, Filth moved Betty’s pink umbrella from the umbrella stand in the hall to the cupboard under the stairs. Later he would bring it out again. He also moved, right out of sight, the rather magisterial photograph on the chimney piece of Betty holding up the OBE for her good works and replaced it with one of himself and Betty laughing together in Bhutan on their honeymoon. Veneering appeared to notice nothing in the Feathers’ house except the chessboard.

As the year warmed they began to meet occasionally to walk in the lanes, and Veneering grew less yellow and arthritic. He tended to stop for every passer-by for conversation and cross-examination. His charm revived and he began again to take pleasure in everybody he met, especially if they were female. Females were always “girls.” He used the old upper-class lingo, thought Filth. Must have learned it at embassy parties. Certainly not in Middlesbrough where he was born. Filth’s snobbery was now appalling.

The “girl” Veneering liked best was pretty Dulcie, and on meeting they would stand bobbing about in the lane together while Filth inspected the sky or sometimes pretended his walking stick was a golf club and tried out a couple of swings. They sniff round each other like dogs, he thought. Come on, Veneering, you’ll catch cold.

“I begin,” said Filth to Betty’s shadow, “to wish I’d left the bloody key where it was. I’m stuck with him now.”

But he was not. On one chess Thursday, Veneering said, as he took Filth’s queen, “Oh, by the way, I’m going on a cruise.”

Filth took his time. He rather interestingly shifted a knight and took Veneering’s bishop. “Oh, well done!” said Veneering. “Yes, I’m off to the Mediterranean. Sailing to Malta. Getting some warmth into my joints.”

“I’m told it can be bitterly cold in Malta in March.”

“Oh, I’m hoping to stay with the Governor. I’ve met him once or twice. Nice wife.”

“You sound like Fiscal-Smith. You’re not going on a cruise with him, are you?”

“Good God, no. I’m striking out.”

Filth waited to see if he’d suggest that Filth himself might accompany him. He did not.

“Betty and I found that the few expats left on Malta were pretty ropy. She called them ‘the riff-raff of Europe.’”

“Did she? Oh, well, we’re all riff-raff now. I wouldn’t suggest Malta was the best place for you, Edward. Sea can be unpleasant and you’re too old to fly. Insurance would be tricky.”

“I know the sea, and you are hardly younger than I am. What about your insurance?”

“Not bothering. I’ve pots of money if I catch the Maltese flu and have to go to hospital. I dare say the Governor would see me right anyway.”

Filth thought that using a phrase like “see me right” was what he had always detested about Veneering.

The evening before he left for his cruise Veneering called on Filth with a supermarket bag full of leftovers of food that he thought Filth might like to make use of, and details of his cruise line. Filth took the leftovers into the kitchen and put them in the rubbish bin. He returned and said, “Why?”

“Well, then someone could let me know if there was a crisis.”

“You mean you’d want to know if I should kick the bucket?”

“Well, yes, of course.”

“In order to return for my funeral?”

“Certainly not. I’d probably send the odd flower. I’d come later for your memorial service. It wouldn’t be for several months, so I would be able to finish my philanderings. But yes, I’d want to know.”

Then he realised what he’d said. “Not, of course, that I’ve ever been a philanderer. Never. I was always serious, which was why my life has always been so exhausting — whatever it looked like. I do know how to love a woman.”

But he was getting in deeper.

Filth sat mute. This time Veneering had gone too far. His restored health had also restored his outrageous conceit. He was still the same—bounder—as before.

“I’ll walk home with you.”

“Oh.” Veneering hadn’t planned to leave just yet. He could smell Filth’s supper cooking.

“Must get my walk in before dusk,” said Filth. “Come on,” and he took his stick from the umbrella stand where (damn) he had forgotten to remove Betty’s pink umbrella. And (double damn) as, holding open the door for Veneering, he saw Veneering look at it, Bloody Hell—touch it!

Filth gave his queer roar. He led the way out, not to the lane end, but down his garden, past the tulip beds, the still-leafless orchard, past Betty’s still-wonderful kitchen garden, her pond, her spinney, and somehow they were back at the house again but now facing the steep track that led up a bank from an alley behind a shed.

“That’s the old earth closet,” said Filth. “Come on, I’ll show you a quick way home,” and he began to spring up the slippery bank like a boy.

Veneering followed on all fours.

“Good God, where are we going?”

“To the road,” said Filth. “You’d better take my hand. When we were just a cottage there used to be an opening on the lane up here. You had to climb through — ah, come on.”

Veneering hesitated, but eventually they stood together on the upper road in the coming dark.

“I found Betty standing here once,” said Filth. “Long ago. She’d been very ill. Somehow she found this place. To convalesce. The station taxi brought her to this opening on the road and she stayed here all by herself. I forget for how long. It seemed very long to me. I couldn’t phone. She didn’t answer my letters. I was in the middle of the Reservoir Case. You’ll remember it.”

“Well, you couldn’t just abandon it.”

“No? Well — I wonder. . She disappeared. Was she with you, Veneering? Not down here at all?”

“I swear to you, no. I was on the Reservoir Case, too, remember?”

“What do I remember? Didn’t you leave your junior? One fantasises. I came looking for her. Found her in the end, standing here in the road in a browny-gold silk thing, soaked to the skin, her suitcase beside her. I’d been round and round, through all the bloody Donheads. Thought I’d never see her again. When I did find her, her wet face became — well, delirious with happiness. As if she saw me for the first time. And I knew I need never worry about you ever again.”

Veneering said, “I’ll get back to my packing.”

“But,” said Edward Feathers QC (Learned in the Law) “—and I’ll walk up with you—but she never knew the truth about me. For two nights after Betty and I became engaged to be married in Hong Kong I was with the girl who’d fascinated and obsessed me ever since I was sixteen. She happened to be passing through Hong Kong. I didn’t know she knew Betty. I didn’t connect her with the girl Betty was just then travelling with. I didn’t even know that she and Amy and Betty were at the same school. Not until after Betty died. Then I found out that Betty and Isobel had been together at Bletchley Park, too. Betty had always called her Lizzie.

“But when I found Isobel again, there in Hong Kong, just after I’d made Betty promise never to leave me, I forgot Betty completely. For two nights I was with Isobel in my room at the Peninsular Hotel. There can’t be anything more disgusting, more perfidious than that. Veneering? The only equally disgusting thing would be if some other man had that night been with Betty. Would it not?”

“It happens. This sort of thing, Filth.”

“Oh, it happens—but only if you are an absolute swine. Don’t you think? Wouldn’t you say? If you examine your meagre self? Veneering?”

“Look — it’s over half a century ago. We were young men.”

“Yes. But I did something worse to Betty. I knew she wanted children. Ten, she’d said. I suspected that I was infertile. Something to do with — perhaps mumps at school. Apparently I talked to Ross — when I had fever in Africa. I can’t remember any of it. Nobody knew any of it, except perhaps Isobel.

“So you see I’m not a saint, Veneering. She was worth ten of me. Yet, from the moment I found her standing here in the road I knew she would never leave me now. You were nowhere. Goodbye, old man.” And Filth walked back down the slope.

Below, beside the earth closet, Filth shouted up, “Look, Veneering, it doesn’t matter which of us was father of the child.”

“Child!”

“The child she lost. Before she had the hysterectomy. Yours or mine, it was not to be. What matters is to face something quite different. Betty didn’t love either of us very much. The one she loved was your son. Harry.”

“Yes,” he said, his pale old face peering down. “Yes. I believe she did love Harry.”

“Why else would she have given him ten thousand pounds?”

“That is a lie! It is a lie! She told me herself that Harry never asked her for money.”

Filth, despite himself, softened. “I don’t expect he did. Betty was always ready to give, whether any of us asked or not.”

So that’s fixed him, thought Filth. I’ve won. That night he went slowly up his stairs to bed, pausing a little breathlessly on the landing. “Checkmate,” he said.

But then, later, lying in bed, every button done up on his striped pyjamas, clean handkerchief in his pyjama pocket, he wondered why he did not feel triumphant. There was no relish. No relish.

Well, he thought. That’s the last I’ll hear from him.

Veneering did not return from Malta. He broke one of his arthritic ankles on a stony slope where there was a deep slash in the rock masked by the night-scented stocks that grow wild all over the island and make it such heaven in the spring. A thrombosis followed and then Veneering died.

When the news was broken to Sir Edward Feathers he said, “Ah, well. He was a great age. He hadn’t looked after himself very well. I shall miss the chess.”

About two weeks later, the Maltese postal service being so slow, a picture postcard arrived for Filth at Donhead St. Ague. It said,

We are bathed in glorious sunlight here [Oh, so he got to heaven then, did he?] and I’m having a wonderfully revitalising holiday. A pity that it would have been too much for you. Today I’m going to see the one fresh-water spring on the island (life like an ever-rolling stream, etc.) with a man who says he once met you and you offered him a job as your clerk. Seems very unlikely. But memory tells all of us lies. Looking forward to our next encounter. Kind regards. T.H.V.

Filth did not attend Veneering’s memorial service. He thought it would be theatrical to do so. The Great Rapprochement. Dulcie would tell him all about it. Kate the cleaner was a bit tight-lipped with him, saying that he could have shared a car with someone, but he said, “I have things to see to. I am planning a journey of my own.”

“Well, I hope it’s not a cruise.”

“No, no. Not a cruise. I’m thinking of going back to my birthplace for a last look round. Malaya — they call it Malaysia now, like a headache. I shall be going by air.”

She gasped and shrieked and ran to tell the gardener and Filth saw the pair of them deep in conversation as he plodded on with Hudson in his study. He was negotiating about who would continue with Hudson when he was dead. Veneering would have been the obvious choice. Ah well.

He was beginning to miss Veneering more than he would admit. When the For Sale notice went up again so vulgarly in the lane it gave him a jolt. When lights of the ugly house again appeared through the trees, he was drowsing with his curtains undrawn and he woke with a start of pleasure that turned to pain as he remembered that Veneering would not be there.

“You can have anything you want of mine if I don’t come back,” he had said.

Filth had said, “Oh, nothing, thanks. Maybe the chessmen.”

One afternoon during a St. Martin’s summer, his bony knees under a tartan rug, Filth was snoozing in the garden when he became aware of a movement in one of the fruit trees and a new next-door child dropped out of it eating an apple. The child began to wander nonchalantly over the lawn as if he owned it. Filth had been reading minutes of the latest Bench Table of his Inn. He felt like throwing the child back over the hedge.

“Sorry,” the child said.

“I suppose you’re wanting a ball back.”

“I haven’t got a ball.”

“Well, what’s that in your hand? And I don’t mean my apple.”

“Just some old beads I found in that flower bed.” And he vanished.

They’re so bloody self-confident, thought Filth. My prep-school Headmaster would have settled him. Then: What am I saying? Sir’d have set about teaching him something about apples.

“Keep the beads,” he called. “They’re yours.”

The night before he was to leave for his voyage home to Malaya, Filth felt such a surge of longing for Betty that he had to sit down and close his eyes. The longing had included guilt. Why guilt? Because he was beginning to forget her. Forget his long desire. “Memory and desire,” he said aloud, “I must keep track of them or the game’s up.” Then he thought: Or maybe let them go?

There was a ring at his doorbell and a family stood grimly on his doorstep, father, mother, son and daughter.

“Might we come in? We are from next door,” said the father (a gent, though long-haired). “We need to speak to you on a serious matter.”

“Come in.”

They filed into the hall. “Sebastian,” said the father and the boy held out Betty’s pearl necklace.

“He says you gave it him. We want to know the truth. He says he found it in a flower bed.”

“Yes. I did. He did. Perfectly right.” (The look in the parents’ eyes. Think I’m a paedophile?)

“You see — sir,” said the father. “We believe these pearls to be valuable.”

“Yes. I expect they are. They were my wife’s. Given her by some old boyfriend. She threw them away. Silly woman. She had much better ones from me. Mine have been inherited by some cousin, I think. These — well, I’ll be glad to see the last of them. Her “guilty pearls”, I called them.”

“Well, really — we couldn’t. .”

“I’m just off on a trip. Look, if you want to repay me could you just keep an eye on the house while I’m away? I have a spare key here. For emergencies.” He handed them the key that knew its way about their house. “I hear that you are what is called ‘Green.’ And aren’t you intellectuals?”

“I’m not,” said the little girl.

“Dad is,” said the boy. “He’s a poet.”

“Good, good—”

“And I’m going to do bed and breakfast,” said the wife. “I hope you don’t mind if I put up a sign on our lane?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

When he stepped off the still-vibrating plane and smelled the East again, the hot airport, the hot jungle, the heavy scents of spices and humans and tropical trees and tropical food, Filth forgot everything else and knew that memory was now unnecessary and all desire fulfilled. Betty at his shoulder, he fell into the everlasting arms. The mystery and darkness and warmth of the womb returned him to the beginning of everything and to the end of all need.

His memorial service, several months later at the other side of the world, was distinguished but rather small. It was so very long since Sir Edward Feathers had been in practice. His years alone with Hudson had been solitary and long, and his age was so great that few lawyers could remember him as a person.

Nevertheless quite a good scattering turned up. In the Benchers’ pews the Lord Chief Justice sat, for Feathers had been a great name in his time — when the Lord Chief was probably still at school. The Master of the Temple preached on Feathers’ integrity and advocacy (“in a style no doubt we would now find a little dated!”), his bravery in World War Two, his long, quiet, happy marriage. His charm. He had kept clear of politics, given himself entirely to the importance of the tenets of English Law. We shall not see his like again. . etc.

“Who’s that creature?” asked one of Amy’s children. Amy’s grandchildren and children made quite a mob in the public pews. “Just below the pulpit. He looks like a pickled walnut.”

Albert Ross had, in fact, been asked by an usher to move from the seats reserved permanently for Masters of the Temple but had taken no notice. Across from him in an equally regal seat in the Middle Temple Benchers’ pews, a legitimate lawyer who looked preserved in aspic was glaring across at him. It was Fiscal-Smith accompanying dear old Dulcie. He had a cheap-day return railway ticket sticking out of his pocket.

In the body of the church, across from Amy’s family but a modest pew or so behind them, sat the family of Sir Edward Feathers’s neighbours, the mother wearing a double string of remarkable pearls. Several pews around had filled up quite nicely with members of the Bar of the Construction Industry, particularly those from the Chambers that Sir Edward and the pickled walnut had founded. There was a clutch of clerks, one of whom had been in his pram when Sir Edward was sitting disconsolate in a draughty corridor without any work one winter’s afternoon.

Then a tall and beautiful and very old woman came in and slid in beside Amy, looking at nobody. She wore a pale silk coat and her face was an enigma.

“Who’s that? She’s like the collarbone of a hare,” said the poet. “I bet it was his mistress.”

They sang the usual hymns, “I vow to thee my country” being the most inappropriate. Filth’s country had never been England.

Outside afterwards, they all gathered to hear the bell toll once for every year of Filth’s life and it seemed as if it would go on for ever. It was autumn and gold dry leaves scratched under their feet.

The dwarf, the pickled walnut, was being helped into his Rolls-Royce. He handed his large felt hat to the Chief Clerk. “I’ve done with it,” he said. “Keep it in the Chambers. It is your foundation stone.”

“Aren’t you coming in to the wake, Mr. Ross?”

“No. Plane to catch. I am en route to Kabul. Goodbye.” Waving a hero’s wave he was spirited away.

“Is it all a pantomime?” asked one of the children and the poet said, “Something of the sort.”

Inside the Parliament Chamber of the Inner Temple Hall the wine was flowing now and the famous hat went from hand to hand. Someone said, “He’s supposed to have kept his playing cards in that hat.”

“Well, there’s a zip across the inside of it.”

So they unzipped it and found the playing cards fastened in a pouch.

“What’s that other thing in there?” asked the next-door boy.

It was a small oilskin packet tied with very old string, and inside it was a watch.