The name would not come. He tried to scream, but the scream wouldn’t come. Terror took hold. He could not move. They were the wrong hat-boxes. The right hat-boxes had been battered and mouldy. He could hear the sea, the vile sea. He could hear Ma Didds coming. After breakfast she would beat him because he’d wet the bed. They all wet their beds.
There was a gentle tapping at the dqor and Filth felt about himself and he was dry. Oh, salvation, thank you God. Wonderful relief. Let her come. Let her come and look. She’d get him for something else today, but not for that. As she got Cumberledge almost every morning. Boiling the sheets in the copper, putting them on the line for all to see.
“Eight years old,” she’d say.
“She’s a bit afraid of me though,” said eight-year-old Teddy Feathers. “Because I can pierce her with my gimlet eyes. One day I shall blind her,” and he practised the look on the bedroom door. Claire came through it in her rose-pink dressing-gown.
She was carrying a huge cup and saucer painted with brown flowers and a primrose-coloured inside. In the other hand she carried a tipping silver sugar-basin with some silver sugar tongs sticking out.
“I can’t do trays,” she said. “And I can’t remember about sugar. I do remember no milk.”
She put the cup down on the bedside table. “Are you awake, Teddy? You look glazed.” She moved some old dress-boxes from a chair and sat down. “I’m glad I insisted on a house with decent-sized bedrooms.”
“A danger, I’d have thought,” he said, relaxing, drinking the hot tea. “Open invitation. People arriving and demanding beds. Thinking you’re a boarding-house. We keep — I keep — our spare bedrooms quiet.”
“Oh? Why? I like company. I like open doors.”
“Well, watch out for the window-cleaner.” He was pleased to find yesterday’s conversation totally in place, like yesterday’s Court-hearing used to be.
“And the Vicar,” he added.
“Oh, the Vicar is perfectly safe. He’s slightly charismatic, or working at it, but he’s sound on the Gospels. And I love women priests, too, don’t you?”
“Not altogether,” said Filth, “but there they are.”
“No. I keep the spare bedroom at the ready, dear Teddy, not for the window-cleaner, despite his lovely hairy chest, nor for the fifty-thousand to one chance that the beloved of my childhood should turn up after twenty years in need of a bit of peace. No — I keep it for Oliver. And of course I have to have somewhere to do up my Christmas presents.”
“Oliver?”
“Not that I send many now. Only about three apart from your handkerchiefs. But I like to be able to spread the wrapping paper out. And then there is the ironing. .”
“Who is Oliver?”
She paused to regard with pity someone who did not know Oliver. When it comes to people’s children, she thought, Teddy looks at emptiness.
“Oliver is my younger son. Your second cousin twice removed, or something of the sort. He has your eyes, and your height but he’s beginning to run to fat. He’s almost as clever and as handsome as you were.” (And I hope you’ve left him some money, she thought.)
“Oh,” said Filth, unconvincingly. “Yes, yes. Of course. A nice little chap. I remember.”
“You haven’t ever met him. He’s nearly forty.”
“Oh. Yes. I see. Betty and I were hopeless at all that.”
“All what?”
“Genealogy.”
“Yes. You were ahead of your time. Genealogy’s over. It’s a wise child now all right that knows its own father. You know, Teddy, the withering of the family tree is one of the saddest things ever. Who else can you turn to when you’re old and sick without having to feel grateful?”
Filth, lying like a knight on a slab, holding his cup to his chest, swivelled his eyes at her.
“They don’t marry any more,” she said. “Surely you’ve noticed? It’s over. Their children are unbaptised so there’ll be no baptismal record. Our times will become dark as Romano-Britain.”
“Genes not genealogy?”
“Exactly. I know you don’t care for children. .”
He drank the tea and waved the empty cup for her to take, sat up in bed and looked uneasily at the hat-boxes.
“The hat-boxes were your mother’s,” said Claire. “I’ve no idea how they got here.”
“Anyway,” she then said. “You will have to meet a thirty-six-year-old child today. Oliver’s coming for the weekend with Vanessa.”
“Vanessa?” (Which one was this?)
“Yes, Vanessa. She’s his partner. She’s at the Bar.”
“Is Oliver at the Bar?”
“No, he’s an accountant. Vanessa’s at the Bar. His partner.”
Filth was about to say that at the Bar there are no partners, but lost confidence.
“They live together, Eddie dear. They ‘co-habit.’ They have ‘co-habited’ in Wandsworth for six years.”
“In Wandsworth! They’re not doing too well, then?”
“Wandsworth, dear Eddie, is now the crème-de-la of the Euro-chics.”
“Rubbish. It’s where all the taxi-drivers live.”
“Not now. It’s full of rich thirty-year-olds who owe thousands on their credit cards and go to Tuscany for their holidays but have never heard of Raphael.”
“They sound particularly unattractive.”
“Yes, they are. But they seem to have a very good time.”
“And two of them are coming here? Look here, Claire, I’ll be off. Can’t have your boy arriving with nowhere to sleep.”
“He’s staying with Vanessa at the George at Stamford, so don’t fuss. I’ve told them you will be here. They’d be mortified if they thought they’d pushed you out.”
“I very much wonder if they would?”
“Don’t wonder, Teddy, learn. You’ll like Vanessa. You’ll have so much to talk about. She’s Inner Temple, like you. And nobody—” she said, taking the empty cup towards the door, looking kindly back at him, speaking of the only area in which she had been blinded for life, “—nobody, if I dare say so, could possibly dislike Oliver.
“And what they do all have nowadays — this isn’t the sixties (I must give all these old things in the dress-boxes to Vanessa) — what they do have now, Eddie, when they come here, is perfect manners.”
And so they bloody should, thought Eddie.
And it was afternoon and Filth was drinking tea again and Vanessa sat near his hammock on the wide, shaven lawn in front of the house, adding more hot water to the teapot from a silver thermos jug. There were small sandwiches. It was a warm late November and Claire’s dahlias glowed and dripped with sunlight. The exposed garden, on a corner — High Light was an end-of-terrace site on a rise, like a Roman villa built over a hill fort — looked down and across at a shiny shallow lake where boats were moving about and children shouted. Beyond, straggled the town and, beyond that, droned the invisible motorway like bees in the warm afternoon.
Oliver had taken his mother out in his car for tea in Saffron Walden, a suggestion she had greeted with the luminous silence which was always followed by refusal.
“I’ve not been into the town for—”
“Oh, come on. You’ll be fine.”
(The black butterfly opened its wings.)
“It’s no distance and we’ll have the top down. It’s a lovely day.”
“Not on the motorway, Oliver.”