“I may not be interesting, but it was me he turned to at Ma Didds, when you went running down the village.”
Claire let her fingers stray about over the glass table-top, feeling for her butterfly-subduing pills. And here came the old flamingo, the old crane, lean as a cowboy still. What? Six-foot-three, and still melting my heart.
Well, he seemed to be carrying the parcel of recipe books.
“I must go now, Babs. The laundry man’s here. And Babs, you’re drinking too much. Goodbye.”
“Have you any luggage? I hope you’ll be staying the night?” she asked at once.
Filth jack-knifed himself into a small, gold-sprayed Lloyd-loom chair and his knees were nearly up to his chin. Light fell upon him like a greeting as in fact it always did upon everybody inside the rambling bungalow which Claire had moved into a few years ago for that very reason, and because it was sensible for someone with A Heart. The building followed an easy circuit. Sitting-room led into kitchen, kitchen led into bathroom, bathroom led into Claire’s bedroom and out to the hallway again. Off the hall was a second bedroom and bathroom, the bedroom narrower and full of hat boxes and tissue paper and old letters and Christmas lists spread permanently over the bed. In each room she kept a supply of pills and on the bathroom mirror she had stuck a list, written in her beautiful calligraphy, of all the pills she took, and when. “You make poetry of every word you write,” the Vicar had said, but Claire had passed the compliment by.
“I have a spare room, Teddy.”
“I could take you out to dinner,” he said, without enthusiasm.
“I don’t go out for meals. I hardly go out at all. I watch the Boy Scouts doing my gardening outside my windows. That is my fresh air.”
“You have a beautiful complexion, nevertheless,” he said. “And you have the figure of a — of an angel.”
He saw Betty’s jolly old rump above the tulip bed. Her weather-beaten face. “A hundred in and a hundred more to go,” she had called. “I don’t want a gin. Could we miss lunch?” Then over she fell.
He looked now long and piercingly — but unseeingly — at Claire’s open and beautiful face. She’d been a sunlit, lovely child who’d grown plain (or so Betty had told him). A stodgy bride in horn-rims. Then pretty again, and now beautiful. He remembered being told that she had ruled her children by a mysterious silence, her adoration of them never expressed. Betty said the children had felt guilty about it, knowing they could never deserve her; they had become conventional, monosyllabic members of society. Her nice husband, Betty said, had taken to drink. Claire (Betty said) believed that marriage and motherhood meant pain. Betty had agreed with her about children, and thought that Claire lived for the moment when they fled the nest and she was peacefully widowed. And here she sat now, gentle, shoulderless as a courtesan on her linen-covered sofa, smiling. (Filth turned to Betty on his interior telephone to ask what she thought about it, but Betty had left the phone off the hook.)
“Of course!” he said. “I remember. You have diabetes. You can’t come out to dinner. Let me. .” he had never gone shopping in his life. “Let me go and forage for us.”
“So you will stay?”
“I’d be — delighted.”
“Teddy, there’s no need to forage. The girl gets me what I want. There’s a freezer. And there’s whiskey.”
“Whiskey?”
“Oh, just for anyone who drifts in. The police — very nice people, out of hours. They come here when I fall over. The Vicar. The woman down the road with one eye. The window-cleaner. I’m fond of the window-cleaner. I have him once a week, though ‘have’ alas is not any longer the word. I ‘have’ a weak heart.”
Filth’s eyes were startled as a dog’s. This silvery, powdery woman.
“Oh, Teddy,” she said. “So easily shocked.”
“Well, Claire, really. We are way over. . seventy.”
“Yes. And I have a weak heart.”
She poured him an immense whiskey and sat on, smiling beyond him out through the gleaming clean window.
Soon Filth eased himself down in the chair, tilted his head back on the curved rim and looked up at the ceiling which was studded with dozens of trendy spotlights, like an office. He took another deep swig of whiskey and sighed.
“Our mutual cousin, or whatever she is, Babs, exists in perpetual darkness and you in perpetual light.”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s odd. I can’t get enough of it. Maybe my eyesight’s going. I’d love a cataract operation, wouldn’t you?”
“I’m lucky there,” said Filth. “I brought you a present, by the way. Betty wanted you to have them.”
“Oh, yes?” She looked canny. She examined his face for lies.
“Nothing much. Family stuff mostly. Some from way back. She wanted you to have them. She was insistent. If she departed first — only you.”
“What about Babs?”
“She’d put something else aside for Babs. As a matter of fact we were in the m-m-m-middle of our, what’s called ‘Letters of Wishes.’”
“I see. She had other friends?”
“Yes. Don’t know how well she kept them, though. Not exactly friends. At the funeral. .”
“Ah yes. The funeral.”
“Didn’t bother you with the funeral. Sorry now. Thought I’d spare you. Never get this sort of thing right. And a big journey. Our time of life, it’s a funeral a week in the winter. They don’t do anyone any good.”
“I hope mine will be private. On the Ganges on a pyre.”
“I never read obituaries. No idea Betty was getting one.”
“Did nobody turn up at the funeral, Teddy?”
“No idea.”
“Teddy—?”
“Didn’t look around. Eyes front. Usual hymns. Discipline and all that.”
“Of course,” said Claire. (Oh, where was the boy, the blazing young friend in Wales?) “Of course. You were with the Glorious Gloucesters in the War.”
He gave her a look.
“I believe there was a pack of church ladies,” he said. “From the flower committee. Coffee rota. One of them walked me home and made herself rather too friendly. I’m told you have to watch this.”
“Was there a wake?”
“Bun-fight in the church hall.”
“Nobody from Chambers?”
“Oh, yes. Yes. My Clerk. Retired now. Very civil of him.”
“Well, you made him a packet.”
Again the look.
“And there were a few from the Inn. Hardly knew them. Can’t think why they came, trains being what they are.”
“But, Teddy, they may have wanted to come. They were fond of Betty. Maybe it helped them to wear a dark suit, make an effort on your behalf. Respecting you. Helping you.”
“Helping me?” He looked at his glass. “Nonsense, Claire. Whenever did I need help?” He seemed outraged. “We all come to an end.”
“Teddy, you must grieve for her. You will soon. It hasn’t hit you yet, but listen, there may be a very bad time coming. You were married nearly half a century and you never — I’d guess strayed?”
“Strayed?”
“You were never unfaithful to Betty with another woman?”
“Good God, no.”
Yet his eyes were dazzling, hungry eyes. Claire thought how Betty had underestimated him. And fooled him.
“Then, Teddy, you are in trouble. You are in shock.” (“She should have seen you on the motorway,” said Betty to Filth on her mobile.) “Why else would you have come charging round the country after Babs and me?”
“How did you know about Babs?”
“She rang.”
“Was she drunk? She was drunk yesterday. On tea from Fortnum’s, or worse. Very squalid.”
“You can be a cruel man, Teddy. More whiskey? Hello, who’s this?”