The paving stones between the taxi and surgery door shone slippery and menacing. He hesitated. The umbrellas continued to go by. At last he was helped in, and found a room crowded and silent like a church and one girl at a screen with her back to the audience.
“I need to see a doctor.”
“Yes.” She handed him a disc saying “21.”
“Do I wait here?”
She looked surprised. “Where else?”
“This means that there are twenty people ahead of me?”
“Yes.”
“What sort of wait will that be?”
“A long one.”
“An hour?”
“Oh, nearer two.”
He rang the Desk and asked for his luggage to be collected and brought down to the hotel foyer. And would they kindly ring the car-hire company to come and take him from the surgery, then back to the hotel and then home to the Donheads.
“It wasn’t even Malmesbury I really wanted to go to, it was Badminton. Just down the road,” he told this driver.
“It is. Just as it ever was. Down the road and down the hill.”
“I was there in the War. Wanted to have another look. I was in the Army.” (His ankle was hell.)
“There’s a good hotel near there where you could keep your foot up. They might get you a doctor. Were you there with the Royals? They’ll be pleased to see you if you were. Still the same sort of place.”
(Anything better than creeping home to shame and emptiness.)
“I might give it a try. Thank you.”
They swooped from the hill to the plain. Through the rain he saw the great house again, the broad quiet streets of the village, the stretch of woodland, the wide fields.
“Terrible weather for sight-seeing,” said the taxi man. “I’ll take you right home when the time comes, if you like. I’ll just look in here and see if there’s a room. It’ll cost you, mind.”
Exhausted, he sat in the foyer of the new hotel which was calm and gracious. Someone brought him a stool for his foot. Someone else said they were going to get a doctor. The rain eased and Filth was brought lunch on a tray alone in the lounge. He was tired, humiliated and — something else — what? Good God! frightened. I have been frightened! He sank into himself, dozed, was helped to a big ground-floor bedroom with a view across the parkland, and very cautiously, a snip at a time, allowed himself the past.
“Would you very kindly put my name and address in your address book, young man?” said the ragged skeleton beside him on the boat-deck as they left Cadiz. “I fully intend to reach Home, but, if not, I would like to be sure that Vera knows what happened to me. That’s to say, of course, if she gets Home herself, which I doubt. She was always rather feeble without me to get her anywhere. I am Miss Robertson. Miss Meg. She is Miss Vera. We’re daughters of the late Colonel Robertson. Teachers. This is our only address in England now. It belongs to some old chums from school who’ve always paid us a little rent. I hope we’ll get on together now that I shall have to live with them. Well, school’s a long time ago, you know.”
Her skin was pale and glazed with fever and her eyes far too bright. Her wooden crutches lay beside her and she tried all the time to clutch their handles. “Have you a pen, young man? Turn to ‘R’ in your address book.” Eddie lay immobile. Someone crept up to Miss Robertson and wiped her face with a cloth. Other people muttered together that she should have been detained at Cadiz. She had been formidably against it, even in fever. She had to get Home.
“If any of us gets Home,” she had said. “I hear that there’s one ship a day being sunk just now in the Channel.”
As it grew dark, one night, he heard Miss Robertson whisper, “Look in my little bag. There’s some trinkets. Take them, young man, and give them to your sweetheart.” The little bag lay pushed up under the life-boat blocks and the crutches near it. There was a cold clean breeze. When daylight came, where Miss Robertson had been there was a stain.
The smell beneath the life-boat where she had lain had gone too.
She had been complaining of the rotting smell on the ship. Eddie had not cared about it, hardly noticed. “Gangrene,” he heard someone say. “The stink was from herself. The boy don’t look much better. He’s filth all through.”
A crewman went away for a bucket of water and scrubbing brush, and Eddie, eyes closed, stretched to touch Miss Robertson’s walking aids and found his hand on the bag. He took it and pushed it beneath him, later found a corner for it in his own suitcase with his father’s photograph and Pat Ingoldby’s clothes-brush. Through his headache and fever, and through the now endless vomiting, he found himself thinking that he was becoming like Loss. A scavenger. Survival. Take anything. Old lady. Couldn’t see her own doom. Her isolation. Talking about address books.
The ship sailed on like some faery invisible barge. The sea shone, still and blue. No planes. No U-Boats. Other craft nowhere near. Way out, towards the West, fishing boats. A wonderful calmness.
A kind of whisper went round at last among the humped and now many fewer passengers; a sibilant, urgent word. “Yes. Yes, it is. It’s land. Yes. Yes. It is.”
And cold now. Eddie was unwrapped first from his life-jacket then put inside a tarpaulin. Someone washed his face as he vomited. Cleaned him when he shat his clothes. “Here’s another going, if you ask me.”
Now he was left alone.
The odd thing, said the speck of the rational in Eddie within him — he guarded it like his life — the odd thing is that I did once have an address book. Alice gave it to me. In the kitchen. Leather. Small. Red. Someone had given it to her, but, she said, “I don’t need it. I never had any addresses to write to.” One day, at the billet in Londonderry, Eddie had written in it, for comfort, all the addresses he knew. School. Oxford, the Ingoldbys (hopelessly), Sir, Auntie May, one or two schoolfriends even though he’d never write to them. Not Les Girls. Not the buttermilk girl. As his temperature soared now he began to wonder if he’d ever again find the addresses of his cousins. If the old address in Kotakinakulu would ever find his father. He had had no address for Loss. By now there was probably no Loss to write to.
Then he remembered that he had not seen his address book for a very long time. He felt about in his bag and it was not there and he knew, without any question, that Loss had stolen it. God knows why, except he was a natural crook. A delinquent. The bastard. Vanished, and with my watch. And no Loss. No loss. But such a monstrous act! Cutting Eddie off from every hope of contact.
Loss’s defection was the metaphor for Eddie’s life. It was Eddie’s fate always to be left. Always to be left and forgotten. Everyone gone, now. Out of his reach. For the first time, Eddie was utterly on his own.
He had his passport — yes, he felt that in the bag. He had Pat’s brush. He had Miss Robertson’s pouch. He felt fat beads inside it and pulled them out. A great string of pearls. Thank goodness Loss wasn’t there. They’d be gone in five minutes. Lightness almost mirth filled Eddie as the ship, charmed, blessed, unhindered, sailed slowly, slowly, up the Irish Sea and such as could gathered at the rail and gazed unbelieving at the peaceful green Welsh hills. Over the Styx, thought Eddie. Crossing the bar.
Aeons passed and Eddie, wrapped in blankets, shaking with fever but ice-cold, a structure of bones, was dumped on a stretcher and carried through customs unhindered, and ashore. At the ambulance station in his fever he looked for a car like a bread-bin but found instead a man playing with a yo-yo. He was familiar. He was old Oils, his Housemaster. Standing alongside him was Isobel Ingoldby.
Diagonally falling drops alighting on the windowpanes of Gloucestershire, and Old Filth awoke in the new, ever-silent hotel to see a girl smiling down at him, holding a tray of tea. He thought: Oh God — the buttermilk girl! Then, seeing the sweet open smile, thought: No.