“Young man,” roared Filth through the grille. “Go home. Look to your calling. I am one of Her Majesty’s Counsellors and was once a Judge.”
“There is only one judge in the end,” said the voice, but Filth was in the car again and belting on past Saffron Walden.
He drove very fast indeed now, as the roads grew less equipped for him. I am a coelacanth. Yes. I dare say. I have lived too long. Certainly, I cannot cope — cope with a mind such as I have. The bloody little twerp. Wouldn’t have him in my Chambers. I can drive, though. That’s one thing I can do. My reactions are perfect, and here is a motorway again.
And hullo — what’s this? Lights? Sirens? Police? “Good afternoon. Yes?”
“You have been behaving oddly on the road, sir. It has been reported.”
“I have been stopping sometimes. Resting. Once in a church. In my view, essential. No, no need for a breath test. Oh well, very well.”
“You see. Perfectly clear,” said Filth.
“Could we help you in any way?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Your licence is in order?”
“Yes, of course. I am a lawyer.”
“It doesn’t follow, sir. I see that you are eighty-one?”
“With no convictions,” said Filth.
“No, sir. Well, goodbye, sir.”
“There is one thing,” said Filth, strapping himself back in his seat with some languor. “I do seem to be rather lost.”
“Ah.”
“I don’t suppose you know this address. Hainault?”
“We do, sir. But it’s not Hainault. That is in Essex. It’s High Light. Not High Note. A house called High Light. And we know who it belongs to. We know her. It’s five miles away. Shall we go ahead of you?”
“She is my cousin. She can never have had any Christmas cards. Thank you. And thank you for your courtesy and proper behaviour. A great surprise.”
“You oughtn’t to believe the television, sir.”
“Who the hell was he?” one policeman asked the other. “He’s like out of some Channel Four play.”
A LIGHT HOUSE
Claire in her house all alone sat in her shadowless kitchen and down came her beautiful little hands slap-bang across the Daily Telegraph. She closed her eyes and sat for a full minute, “No,” she said. “Of course it’s not Betty. Someone would have told me.”
She opened her eyes, removed her hands and stared down at Betty Feathers’ eyes which looked back at her with sharp but pleasant intelligence. “Well,” she said, “an obituary for Betty.” She smoothed the paper, read Elizabeth Feathers, MBE, and then the whole thing.
The phone rang. She folded the paper and turned it on its back. She walked to the phone.
“Hullo?”
“Beware. The Ice Man Cometh.”
Claire sat down quickly. The quiet life she had diligently followed over years was the rent she paid to a weak heart. Her control, balance, yoga, good sense, none of it natural to her, had been necessary if she was to see her husband out. She had told the doctor that it was essential she outlive him, and the doctor had thought her wonderful and her husband a weak old bore. Now, as a widow, Claire found that creeping about and being careful was a habit she could not drop. She would have liked a lover, but the heart battering about inside her made the practice impossible. Today, it was beating like an angry butterfly under a jam jar.
“Claire? Claire? Are you there? It’s Babs.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Babs. Yes, of course. You always did sound like Betty.”
“Can’t help it. I suppose you were at the funeral. In at the kill.”
“I’ve just this minute seen the Telegraph. An utter shock.”
“Well, it would be the hush-hush Bletchley Park thing. She wasn’t there for long. I never thought she was very clever. She’s had a pretty good life with him. You might have told me about the funeral. She had some wonderful rocks.”
“Rocks?”
“Jewellery.”
“Oh. Had she? I didn’t know she was dead until now.”
Claire had been wild about Filth since she was four, but as inscrutable then as now she sat prettily in her pink dressinggown with her hand firmly against the butterfly.
“He turned up here yesterday. He only stayed ten minutes. He brought me some recipe books but I can’t find them. He’ll be en-route to you now. At a guess.”
“He would have telephoned. Though I suppose I do tend to switch it off.”
“He’s not himself, I warn you. He never told me when he was arriving. Then ten minutes later he was gone. Actually I wasn’t very well. I’m not a very well woman.”
“But why did he come? We haven’t seen either of them in years. All that way! Dorset! She can’t have died more than. .” She glanced at the folded paper. She would look properly later.
“Just over a fortnight. He was bringing us keepsakes. I’d rather hoped she’d made a Will. I think he thought better of giving me the recipe books. I expect he’ll offer them to you.”
“But I’m diabetic.”
“Yes, well, I don’t suppose he remembers that. Just at the moment.”
“No,” said Claire.
“He was very strange. He fled the house. I seemed to horrify him. I can’t think why. My ways are not everybody’s ways, of course, but knowing what we three have been through together. .”
“Your ways were not everybody’s ways then.”
“Neither were yours.”
“Why not?”
“All that perfection, Claire. Nauseating perfection. From the start.”
Silence.
“Claire?”
“Yes?”
“Sorry. I only meant that it’s a bit chilling.”
“It seems,” said Claire, “that Betty’s death removes barriers. It’s bringing corpses to the surface. I can honestly say I never had anything to hide.”
“Oh, no?”
Claire was watching through the huge window an immaculate Mercedes nosing about in the lane. It paused, considered, started off again and cruised out of sight.
“You’d better ring me if he turns up,” said Babs. “He looked to me as if he was in need of special care, like they used to say of drawn-thread work on laundry lists. Get him to see someone.”
Elgar’s Enigma Variations began to boom in Babs’s background.
“Laundry lists? Hello? I can’t hear you.”
Claire put down the phone.
The car must have turned somewhere down the road, for here it was nosing slowly back again. “He won’t come here,” she said aloud. “He doesn’t need me. He never did and we won’t be able to look each other in the eye. ‘It was Betty who made him,’ Isobel Ingoldby used to say. I never believed her. He’s made himself. Made his impeccable, astringent self.”
The phone rang again.
“Well, all I can say, Claire, he was shaking all over and grey in the face and terrified of my poor animals under his feet. Gob-smacked, outraged by my little lover with his little musiccase.”
“What are you talking about, Babs? I wish you wouldn’t say ‘gob-smacked.’ It doesn’t become you. You’re not a teenager.”
“Yes, I am. At heart I am fourteen.”
The car had now stopped at Claire’s gate and Filth’s stony face, with the Plantagenet cheek-bones and thick ungreying curly hair, could be observed, peering out.
“When old women say that,” said Claire, “‘I’m just a girl inside,’ I. .” The butterfly was hammering now on iron wings. Filth’s long right leg, like the leg of a flamingo but in Harris tweed, was feeling for the pavement. “I,” said Claire, “cease to find them interesting.”