It was an old hospital. The windows were too high to see anything except the wires and concrete of unexciting buildings and the sky. The light was not the pearly light of yesterday in the meadows of Badminton, which Filth was trying to remember and decide when and where it had been and whom he had been with. Memory, he thought. Memory. My memory has always been so reliable. Perhaps too reliable. It has never spared me. Memory and desire, he thought. Who said that? Without memory and desire life is pointless? I long ago lost any sort of desire. Now memory.
Suddenly he knew that this was what had been the matter with him for years. He had lost desire. Not sexual desire, that had been a poor part of his nature always. He had been furtive about the poverty of his sexual past. Dear Betty — she had been very undemanding. He had never told her about the buttermilk business and had skimmed over Isobel Ingoldby. Whatever would the young make of him today? It seemed they were all like rabbits and started haphazardly as soon as they reached double figures. He found them repellent.
And homosexuals repellent, if he were honest. And divorce repellent. Blacks — here he was disturbed by a cluster of different coloured people surrounding his bed. These are not the black people of the Empire, he thought, and then realised that that was exactly what most of them were. “Any of you chaps Malays?” he asked. “Malaya’s my country. Malaysia now, of course. And Ceylon’s Sri Lanka, Lanka’s what my friend Loss called it, and he should know. It was full of his uncles. That’s what he said before he went down the trough. Bombed by the bloody Japanese, I expect. Oh, sorry.” The lead figure in the performance around his bed was Japanese. “Didn’t realise. It’s your West Country accent.”
“OK, grandpa,” said the Japanese. “Take it easy.”
Filth’s days passed. Various bits of equipment were detached from him. Once he thought that Garbutt was sitting at the end of the bed and gave a feeble wave. “Very sorry about this. How’s Mrs.-er? Very sorry to have upset Mrs.-er. Feeling better. I’d like to see a priest, though.” Then he slept, and woke in the night trying to ring a bell for a priest.
“It’s not Sunday,” said a nurse. “Or are you a Catholic? You’re getting better. Talk to them in the morning. Go to sleep, old gramps. Think positive.”
Times have been worse than this, he thought. Much worse.
It’s just there’s no chance of many more of them, of times of any sort, now. That’s absolutely rationally true, a serious, even beautiful equation. Life ends. You’re tired of it anyway. No memory. No desire. Yet you don’t want it to be over. Not quite yet.
Bloody memory.
“I was very happy round here, you know, in the War,” he said to a passing Sikh. “I was a friend of Queen Mary. She remembered my birthday. She sent me chocolate.”
“Who’s Queen Mary?” asked the Sikh in an Estuary accent. “The Queen Mum?”
“While I lived here in Gloucestershire,” said drowsing Filth, “I rather buried my head.”
“Bury it now,” said the Sikh, “and get to sleep.”
“Before I go,” said Filth, “I really do want to see a priest.”
But when they found him a priest next day, he was feeling much better, was loosed from his bonds, was sent to a terrible place to wash, was given cornflakes and a type of meat which smelled of onions and was laced with a fluid called “brown sauce,” and was told that he would later on be going home.
Moreover, the priest, when he arrived, was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and Filth did not believe in him. He would have preferred a female to this one, and that was saying something. His confession would have to be postponed. He sat and read the Daily Telegraph in a small, contained cubicle, his carrier bag at his feet. He sat there all morning, and at some point dozed off, thinking of other occasions in his life of total reversion, of failure.
After six months he had been posted away from Badminton. The War had changed. We were now on the winning side and there was a new jauntiness. Queen Mary’s staff unpacked her three suitcases in the attics and he was sent to the War Office on the mistaken premise that he was a linguist and well-connected. He experienced the Mall on VE Day and was released to Oxford much more quickly than his War record deserved. He took a First in Law after only two years and was called to the Bar and set about the much harder matter of finding a seat in somebody’s Chambers.
It was the winter still talked of, half a century on: 1947.
Memory and desire, he thought.
CHAMBERS
The January rain of 1947 slopped down upon dilapidated Lincoln’s Inn Fields, puckering the stagnant surfaces of the static-water tanks implanted in its grass. Eddie Feathers observed it from the passage in a small set of undistinguished Chambers in New Square. He kept the door open between the passage and the Senior Barrister’s empty room on the front of the building, otherwise he had no view except the dustbins at the back. On days like this and on days of smog which were getting more frequent though coal was rationed to a bag a week, he could look through the door to what he might look forward to if the old fellow stopped coming in altogether. A good old room with magnificent carved Elizabethan fireplace and a large portrait of the Silk’s unhappy-looking wife: the sort of wartime bridal face that wished it had waited.
In an adjoining, equally historic, equally dusty room but lacking an uxorial photograph sat the only other member of Chambers, usually asleep. These rooms had been built as legal Chambers hundreds of years ago and had housed a multitude of lawyers from before the Commonwealth. Wigs in these rooms had been worn naturally, like hats. Then even hats around Chambers had gone — bowler hats had also just about disappeared by 1947, though Eddie Feathers had bought one for five excessive pounds, and it hung, laughably, on a hook inside the Chambers’ street door.
The passage was bitterly cold. There were no carpets, no curtaining, a small spluttering heater. He sat before a splintered table where transcripts of a dispute stood two feet high, almost indecipherable blueprints concerning the installation of new water-closets throughout a bombed government building, his annotation of which went down at about a sixteenth of an inch per hour. Sir, his school, his college, Queen Mary, all pointed stern fingers at Eddie. Habit dictated. There had been black hours before. Diligence gets you through. Keep going. Oh God why?
Gloucestershire and Oxford kept breaking in on him. Christ Church meadow, the bells stumbling and tumbling, calling down the High. The wallflowers — the smell of the velvet wallflowers outside his set of rooms. The emptiness of his Quad, returning home at night. Hardly a soul about. Music from the open windows. And the spring there, and the politics and the friends. Too much work. Too much work to go to parties, even to attend the Union, meet any girls, too many men just up from school drinking themselves silly, schoolchildren who had missed the War. Leaving Oxford had surprised him by its finality.
The rain fell. In the far room with the door shut he heard the comatose, under-employed Head of Chambers fart and yawn. The fart was an elderly fart — lengthy, unmusical and resigned.
Eddie found that he was crying, and mopped his face. He thought he might as well go home for the day.
But, no. Better not. Another quarter-inch of notes. No point in going out in the rain. It was a longish walk to the Aldwych tube station and he had no macintosh. There were a couple of changes on his tube (everyone wheezing and smelling of no soap) to get back to his bed-sit in sleazy Notting Hill. Then out again for something to eat at an ABC café: sausage and mash, stewed apple and custard, keep within a shilling. There was still no sign of his inheritance. He’d been told it might take years to prove the death, let alone the Will. He was still unable to put his mind to the imagining of his father’s end. No friend of his father, no official notification from the Foreign Office. Eddie pushed down the guilt that he had made no enquiries. There had been no communication from the aunts. “I shall learn one day,” was all he allowed himself.