“Did she say singular or plural ‘you’?”
“Shall I ask her?”
“Not yet. Let me think. No — I don’t have to think. I won’t have them. They’ll think that’s why I married you.”
“Come on,” he said. “It’s not going to be in the papers. Nobody’s to know we’ve got them but me.”
“I never wear jewellery.” She stroked the gold adoringly, the jade ring.
“You could change.”
“I never change. Was that old Eddie out in the East a lot, Ollie? Oh — Ollie!” She had seen the signature on the note and the letter-heading, for frugal Filth was still using up his old Chambers writing paper. “It says here, Sir Edward Feathers.”
“Yes. That’s him. Cousin Ed. Ridiculous name.”
“But Oliver, Edward Feathers is Old Filth.”
“I hope not.”
“Oliver, Old Filth is a legend. At the Bar. I thought he’d died years ago. He was a wonderful advocate. He had a stammer.”
“A stammer? Yes, well, Eddie does sometimes make odd noises.”
“Oliver — it was Old Filth. Of Hong Kong. And he became a wonderful judge,” and she began to moan.
“What’s so dreadful?”
“I told him all about the Bar. And how easy it was to pass the Bar exams. And I asked him if he’d always practised in Dorset. Oh, Oliver!”
“Vannie, I have never seen you so discomposed.”
“I want to die.”
“Will you marry me?”
“Yes, of course. But, oh, Oliver!”
Filth was invited to the wedding six months later but could not remember Vanessa and could not think whom he knew in Bournemouth. The groom’s name rang no bell. Some relative? Was he Claire’s? But he refused the invitation. Claire, true to form (and because she had not been told of Betty’s funeral), did not get in touch. She attended the wedding, the Vicar driving her. He did not officiate but enjoyed the fun and talked about sin to Vanessa’s mother. Babs turned up with her hair short and blood-red. She and the Vicar got on famously and danced the night away.
And Claire waved the pair off to Thailand, hoping the baby wouldn’t be born there, though they can do wonders with premature babies now.
Vanessa gave Claire the rope of pearls she’d worn to the altar to look after until she returned.
Claire took care of her heart to be sure of seeing the grandchild.
She wrote to tell Filth of the birth three months later. Edward, they were calling him. Edward George.
Thus is the world peopled.
PART TWO
SCENE: INNER TEMPLE
The smoking-room of the Inner Temple, almost deserted. It is much re-furbished: easy chairs stand about. Portraits of distinguished former Benchers on the walls, the one of Mr. Attlee gaunt and glazed — seeming to be wringing his hands. One wing chair has its back to the rest and Mr. Attlee seems to be looking down at it. Filth is in the chair half-asleep. Post-prandial. No one can see him. Enter the Queen’s Remembrancer and the Purveyor of Seals and Ordinances.
The Queen’s Remembrancer: He must have gone.
The Purveyor of Seals and Ordinances: To get his hair cut?
QR: Possibly. Very great surprise to see him again.
PS&O: Looks well. Amazing physique still. Nothing ever been wrong with him.
QR: Nothing ever did go wrong for him.
PS&O: Nothing much ever happened to him. Except success.
QR: There’s talk of a rather mysterious War, you know. Didn’t fight.
PS&O: A conchie?
QR: Good God, no. Some crack-up. He had a stammer.
PS&O: Pretty brave to go on to the Bar then.
QR: Remarkable. He joined a good regiment. It’s in Who’s Who. The Gloucesters. He had something to do with the Royal family.
PS&O: Had he indeed!
QR: And there was something else. Someone gave him a push upstairs somewhere. Or out East. There’s always something a bit dicey about that circuit. A lot of people you can’t really know socially but you have to pretend to.
PS&O: Betty was very O.K. though. Don’t you think? Don’t you think? There was of course Veneering. Veneering and Betty. Aha!
QR: What do the likes of us know, creeping round the Woolsack at Home and round the Inns of Court?
PS&O: “What should they know of England
Who only England know.”
QR: Kipling. You know Kipling had a start like Filth? Torn from his family at five. Raj Orphan.
PS&O: Kipling didn’t do too badly either.
QR: Kipling had a crack-up.
PS&O: Did he stammer?
QR: He went blind. Half blind at seven. Hated the Empire, you know. Psychological blindness.
PS&O: Are you having coffee?
QR: No. I just came in looking for Filth. Just missed him.
PS&O: Did we imagine him?
QR: I expect he was having his last look round.
Exeunt. Room apparently empty.
Filth rises from the chair and takes a long last look at Mr. Attlee.
Filth: Have I the courage to write my Memoirs?
Attlee: Churchill had. But on the whole, better not. Keep your secrets.
THE WATCH
In that train of 1941, after the Oxford interview, Eddie had pushed the Times back into the hands of the man opposite, left the compartment and walked down the corridor where he stood holding tight the brass rail along the middle of the window. The train stopped very often, filled up. The corridor became crammed with people mostly silently enduring, shoulder to shoulder. Even so it was cold. Water from somewhere trickled about his feet. Troops started to climb in — maybe around Birmingham. These troops were morose and quiet. Still and silent. Everyone squashed up tighter. It grew dark. Only the blue pin-lights on all the death-mask faces.
And Eddie stood on.
At some point he left the train and waited for another one that would take him to the nearest station to High House, and there he jumped down upon an empty, late-night platform. After an unknown space of time he found that he was travelling in a newspaper-van that must have stopped to give him a lift. It dropped him outside the gates of the avenue which were closed and guarded by two sentries with rifles. He walked off down the lane, then doubled back through a hedge, then across in the darkness to the graceful iron railings of what he felt to be his home.
The house stood there with lightless, blindless windows and the dark glass flashed black. The place was empty. But there were army vehicles everywhere in the drive and a complex of army huts where the land began to drop away above the chimneys of the old carpet factory. Eddie walked round the resting, deserted house and met nobody. He began to try the familiar door handles: the side door from the passage into the garden with its dimpled brass knob; the door to the stables; the kitchens. All were locked. He grew bolder and stood beneath a bedroom window and called, “Mrs. Ingoldby? Is anyone there? It’s Eddie.” He rattled the door of the bothy where the gardener had lived. Nothing. No dog barked. In the garage, there was no old car, the car in which you had to put up an umbrella in the back seat when it rained. The Colonel’s vegetables stood scant and scruffy, Brussels sprouts like Passchendaele. The beehives had disappeared.
He set off on foot back to the railway station; slept the rest of the night on a bench along the wall of the waiting room with its empty grate; reached his aunts’ warm house by the following lunchtime.