Black stuff wavered in the wind. Never been down a coal mine, thought Filth. There’s always something new. (But no. Over. Finished. Gone. Dead.) Better stop soon. Seeing double. Need to pee. Done well. One of these cafés.
But now there were no cafés. They had all disappeared. “Worksop,” said Filth. “Now, there’s a nasty name. Betty would be furious—Worksop!” She hated the North except for Harrogate. “Why ever go to ghastly Babs? You’re mad. She’s mad. I met her after you did.” (Oh, finish, finish, finish.)
He came upon pale and graceful stone gates leading to some lost great estate with the National Trust’s acorn on a road sign. He turned in and drove two miles down an avenue of limes. Families shrieked about. He found a Gents and then returned stiffly to the Mercedes in the car-park. People ran about taking plants from a garden shop to their cars to plant on their patios. If I had ever loved England, he thought, I would now weep for her. Sherwood Forest watched him from every side, dense and black.
On again, and into the ruthless thunder of the traffic on the A1; but he was in charge again. Bloody good car, strong as a tank, fine as a good horse. Always liked driving. Aha! Help! Spotting a café he turned across the path of a conveyor of metal pipes from the Ruhr.
A near thing. The driver’s face was purple and his mouth held wide in a black roar.
Shaken a little, Filth ate toasted tea-cake at a plastic table and drank a large potful of tea. The waitress looked at his suit and tie with dislike. The man at the next table was wearing denim trousers, with his knees protruding, and a vest. Brassy rings were clipped into all visible orifices. Filth went back to the car for a quick nap but the rhythmic blast of the passing traffic caused the Mercedes to rock at three-second intervals.
“On, on,” said Filth. “Be dark soon.”
And, two hours later, it was indeed pretty dark and he must have reached Teesside. There was no indication, however, of any towns. Only roads. Roads and roads. The traffic went swimming over them, presumably knowing where it was going. Endless, head-on, blazing head-lights. It is only an airport now, he thought. My spacious lovely North. We are living on a transporter. Up and down we go. We shall chase you up and down. That swine Veneering liked Midsummer Night’s Dream. Silly stuff, but you can’t help quoting it. Forest of Arden. Forest of Sherwood. Gone, gone. Finished. Dead. Like Garbutt’s ivy. Betty would have been in a fury. “You could have been in Madeira by now, in a nice, elderly hotel. And you go to Babs on Teesside. And here’s a place called Yarm. What a name! Yarm.”
“You wouldn’t think so if we were in Malaysia.”
“Don’t be silly, Filth.”
“Or the dialects. Malay lacks consonants.”
“Yarm seems to lack everything.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Rather a fine-looking town. Splendidly wide main street. Shows up the Cotswolds.”
“Well, don’t stop, Filth. Not now, for goodness sake. You’ve only half an hour to go. Get there.”
Just outside Yarm he saw a signpost which amazingly, for he had not been here before, he recognised. Standing back on a grim champaign behind the swishing traffic stood the Old Judges’ Lodging, now a hotel. Once the Circuit judges would have lived there throughout the Quarter Sessions. No wives allowed. Too much port. Boring each other silly. Comforting each others’ isolation with talk. Every evening, like cricket commentators between matches, discussing their profession. Finished. Gone. Dead. Hotel now, eh?
“Ha?”
Sign for Herringfleet.
Babs.
What a dire town. And not small. How to find 25 The Lindens? Here was the sea. A cemented edge of promenade. A line of glimmer that must be white sandy beach. Long, long waves curving round a great bay, and behind their swirling frills, spread into the total dark, was the heaving black skin and muscle of the ocean. Sea. How they had hated the sea in Wales. The cruel dividing sea. How could Babs ever choose this?
He had stopped the car on the promenade where, looking blank-eyed at the sea, were tall once-elegant lodging houses now near-slums, bed-and-breakfast places for the Nationally Assisted, i.e., the poor. No lights. The rain fell.
“The Lindens? What?” shouted a man on an old bike. He got off and came across and stuck his head through the window. The smell was chip fat and beer and no work. “The Lindens, mate? (Grand car.) Just over to your right there. You’ll not miss it, pal.”
It was a terrace of genteel and secretive houses on either side of a short street bordered by trees. The trees were bulging with round gangliae from which next year new sprouts would shoot like hairs from a mole. Revolting treatment. What would Sir say? Number 25.
At the top of steep stone steps there was a dim light above a front room and another light in a window beside it. A gate hung on one hinge. There was a sense of retreat and defeat. He remembered laughing, streetwise, positive Babs in the Oxford tea-shop. We’ll go to bed. We have before. Laughing, wagging her cracked high-heeled shoe from her toe.
It was so quiet that Filth could hear the beat of the sea two roads away, rhythmic, unstoppable. “Too soon,” it said. “They were right. This is histrionic nonsense. You’ve arrived too soon. You’re in shock. You’ll make a fool of yourself. There’s nothing here.”
Suddenly, at the top of the steps, the front door was wrenched open and a boy ran out. He came tearing down, missing several steps, belted along the path towards Filth at the gate. One hand held a music-case and with the other he pushed Filth hard in the stomach so that he fell back into the hedge. The boy, who was wearing old-fashioned school uniform, vanished towards the sea.
Badly winded, Filth struggled out of the hedge, dusted down his clothes, picked up the fallen parcel of presents, looked right and left and gave his furious roar. The quiet of the road then re-asserted itself. The child might never have been.
But the front door stood wide and he walked uneasily up the steps and into the passage beyond, where, as if he had stood on a switch, a torrent of Chopin was let loose in the room to his right.
“Hello?”
He stood outside its open door.
“Hello there? Babs?”
He knocked on the door, peered round it. “It’s Teddy.”
The music stopped. The room appeared to be empty.
Then he saw her by the back window, staring into the dark. She was wearing some sort of shawl and her hair was long and white. She seemed to be pressing something — a handkerchief? — into her face. Without turning towards him further, her voice came out from behind her hands, clear and controlled. And Betty’s.
In one of her very occasional cynical or bitter moods which Filth had never understood, and which usually ended in her going to London for a few days (or over to Macao from Hong Kong), Betty had said, “Look, leave me alone, Filth. I’m in the dark. Just need a break.”
“I’m in the dark, Teddy-bear,” now said Betty’s voice inside this crazed old creature. “You shouldn’t have come. I should have stopped you. I couldn’t find the number.”
“Oh, dear me, Babs. You’re ill.”
“Ill. Do you mean sick? I’m sick all right. D’you want tea? I make it on my gas-ring. There’s some milk somewhere. In a cupboard. But we don’t take milk, do we? Not from our classy background. I’m finished, Teddy. Broken-hearted. Like Betty. You’d better go.”
(Like Betty? What rubbish — never.)
“I can’t stay more than a few minutes,” said Filth, realising that this was absolutely so, for the room was not only ice-cold and dark, but there was an aroma about. Setting down his parcels on a chair piled with newspapers, he touched something unspeakable on a plate.