Last Friends (Old Filth Trilogy) (13 page)

It was pure patriotism and she hoped that there were some faces behind the beautiful polished windows and luxury blinds of the weekenders in the lanes to see her. She didn’t need anything. Susan had stocked up for her as if for a siege, in the Shaftesbury Co-op. She bought at the little shop a tin of baked beans and listened to Chloe discussing whether Scotts Oats were better than Quaker when making flap-jack. There rose up a vision of golden heaps of sea-wrack, squid, banana fritters, marigolds and the smell of every kind of spice. A tired, dreamy Chinese chef spinning pasta from a lump of dough for the tourists; a stall piled high with cat-fish. Mangoes. Loquats.

On the way home she decided to get eggs from the farm. There was a wooden box hung on a field-gate. It had been there fifty years. You took out the eggs and left the money. Beautiful brown eggs covered in hen-shit to show how fresh they were. Today she opened the flap of the box and there were no eggs and no money but a dirty-looking note saying, ‘Ever Been Had?’

She was all at once desolate. The whole world was corrupt. She was friendless and alone. Like Fiscal-Smith she had outstayed her welcome in the place she felt was home. There was absolutely nothing for her to do now but walk back to empty Privilege Hall.

No she would not! There must be someone. Yes. She would go and call on the two old twins up the lane. The people in the shop had said that there was a new Carer there. Well, there nearly always was a new Carer there. (Oh! When was the last time there was anybody happy? It’s not that I’m really already missing Susan. I wonder if I’d have loved Susan more if she’d been a boy? With a nice wife who would sit and talk and play Bridge?)

She tottered up to the cottage of the two old high-powered (Civil Service) twins and was greeted by a dry young woman with a grey face, smoking a cigarette.

‘Yes?’

‘I am a friend—.’

‘They’re having their rest.’

‘But it’s lunch-time.’

‘They rest early.’

‘I am a very
old
friend. May I please come in?’

She walked through the nice cottage that seemed to be awash with rubbish awaiting the bin men, and saw Olga and Faery playing a slowish card-game at a table. They raised their eyes sadly.

‘Thank you.’ Dulcie turned to the Carer. ‘That will be all for now. You may take a break. I’m sure you need one. Please take your cigarette into your car.’

The twins looked frightened. ‘She’s from a very expensive agency. They said she
did
smoke but not in the house. But she does.’

‘It’s so strange that we mind,’ said Faery. ‘We all smoked once.’

‘And I suppose we are a horrible job,’ said Olga. ‘Even though she gets double. She goes on and on about how wonderful her last job was. “Lovely people”. She calls them by their first names, Elizabeth and Philip. Do you think it was with the Royal Family?’

‘I don’t. And if it was, Down with the Royal Family.’

‘Oh, don’t start, Dulcie. We’re wiser now.’

‘I want to kill her. Oh, for some
men
.’

‘Don’t be a fool, Dulcie, we’re all over eighty and we’re feminists.’

They sat. The room was cold with no sign of a fire. Faery’s legs were wrapped in loose bandages.

‘Marriage must be a help in old age,’ said Olga, ‘but since the husband usually goes first it doesn’t rate much now. No penniless spinster daughters at home to look after us either. Must say, I’d like one.’

‘Well, my Susan would be hopeless as a Daughter at Home.’

‘But she comes and takes charge often,’ said Faery. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are Dulcie. You never did.’

‘But she makes me feel such a fool all the time. She’s married and clever and well-off and has a son and yet she’s never happy. Never was.’

‘She has her girl-friends,’ said Olga and there was a long pause. The Carer was hard at work across the front hall, complaining on her phone at high speed in an unknown tongue.

‘Did you know? Well of course you’ll know.’

Faery said, ‘Hugely rich, we hear. And no girl. Woman almost your age.’

‘Oh yes, of course,’ said Dulcie.

The Carer returned and said that she must start to get the girls to bed. Dulcie saw her lighting up another cigarette as she held open the front door.

In the sitting room the two women stared at their playing-cards and listened to the Carer texting messages (plink, plink) in the kitchen.

‘My special subject at Oxford was Tolstoy,’ said Faery.

‘You don’t have to tell me,’ said Olga.

‘Perhaps fiction was a mistake, it has rather fizzled out.’ said Faery. ‘We should have pioneered Women’s Rights.’

‘Rubbish,’ said Olga. ‘It was the wrong moment. Fiction got us through. Fiction and surviving the ship-wreck at 15 years old.’

‘Yes. And just look at us now.’

‘It’s nothing to do with us being born women that we’re wearing nappies and in the charge of a drug-addict,’ said Olga. ‘Men get just the same. No family backing, that’s the trouble. Poor old Dulcie’s an example. Hardly went to school you know. Married in the cradle. Daft as a brush. Like a schoolgirl. Silly women haven’t a brain to lose.’

‘Yes. I wouldn’t have wanted to share a cradle with Pastry Willy! He never liked us, you know.’

‘No. I suppose we shouldn’t have told her about Susan and her old girl? Nasty of us. Poor Dulcie.’

‘Lesbians are always looking for their mothers.’

‘It must be hard for them.’

The two old trolls sat over their cards thinking occasionally of Tolstoy.

* * *

Dulcie, having left the aged twins, began to walk home through the lanes, past the infertile egg-box, the village shop. When Janice, her cleaning lady, drove by in her new Volvo Dulcie stared at her as at a stranger.

Susan loving someone who is a woman and not her mother! Such an insult to me. I suppose it’s been going on for ages and I am the last to know. It was that boarding-school at eight, in England, when we were in Shanghai or somewhere—I forget. I’ve done everything wrong. I wrote her
hundreds
of letters at school. I did try. She hardly answered them.

But she was so
happy
here in England. All her friends were here, everyone’s parents over-seas. All seemed so
jolly
. Everyone did it. I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it.
Lesbian
! I wonder if they all were? I’m sure I didn’t know the meaning of the word. Well, anyway, we’d never have talked about it. Men get turned on by divine discontent, and challenged when a woman’s mind is always somewhere else, dreaming. I wonder if Betty—no. I heard once that there had been something between Old Filth and that Isobel, but of course I won’t believe
that
. Edward would have had an apocalyptic fit if he’d thought that Betty had ever embraced a woman. Whatever would my mother have thought? Well—I suppose there was Miss Cleaves—.

I’m not sure that the word is apocalyptic?

I wonder who’s got Filth’s house? And fortune! A woman—that pale pink woman? Isobel. The femme fatale. No not Isobel. No—there was only ever Betty for Filth. Nobody else. Not ever. Surely? Do you know, Willy (Willy, where are you?) I think I’ve been left behind.

Oh, is nobody ever virtuous any more—as our mothers were? Well, I
think
mine was. I didn’t see her very often—Pastry—please tell me.
Whatever
would you make of this?

I suppose Pastry, you never—? No. No. Had a—?

You would say, my faithful man (though I was never happy about that old Vera) you would say, ‘Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’ Pastry? Listen to me.

The point is that, as a lonely widow in a big empty house and few friends left (I’ve forgotten a handkerchief) there is nobody to discuss anything with any more. That is the sharpness of loss. The feelings don’t go, even when the brain has begun to wither and stray. I know some very nice widowed people who manage so well. There’s poor Patsy, laying up dinner-places for all her dead relations. Seems perfectly happy. She’s got that funny middle-aged son who goes round clearing everything away again. Those with latter-day brains are the lucky ones.

I can hardly discuss anything with Olga and Faery. You would have told me to keep clear of them. They smell of decay. They can never forget that they went to the university and think I am beneath them. They’re senile, though. Serves them right for being so patronising at school. And
they
only got upper-seconds someone said, or was it actually
lower
-seconds? I bet they both remember that. And I will not leave them comfortless even if they are church-going atheists. I will always be their old friend. I suppose. For what I’m worth. Oh. Oh, dear. I must not crack up.

In the drive of Privilege House stood her rickety car and finding the key in the lock Dulcie climbed in and drove away. She reversed, ground the tyres into the cattle-grid, and swept down the hill and up the un-metalled driveway jointly shared by Old Filth’s ghost and Veneering’s ghost, dividing, one down, one up, and leading nowhere now, she thought. Even those awful rooks don’t seem to be there anymore.

She accelerated noisily towards Veneering’s yews and here, head-on towards her, came a huge crucifix with a pretty woman marching behind it and smiling. Anna.

* * *

Anna saw Dulcie’s cigarette-lined, little monkey face peeping behind the wheel and her expression of panic and she flung the crucifix aside (it was a home-made sign-post), pounced on Dulcie’s car and opened its doors.

‘I’m just fixing up a bigger B and B sign, Dulcie.
Whatever’s
the matter!’

‘Nothing. The car looked as if it needed a little run. We used to say “a spin”. So I’m spinning.’

‘You’re crying! Come on. I’m getting in with you. Can you drive on up? I’ll get you something to eat with us.’

‘Oh, but I must get back.’

‘Nonsense. Go on. Re-start the engine. Don’t look down Filth’s ridiculous precipice. Stupid place to build that lovely house, down in a hole. I’ll bet he had a bad chest.’

* * *

She bundled Dulcie into the chaos of her own—once Veneering’s—abode above, where children’s clothes, toys, a thousand books and a thousand attic relics were scattered about the hall and her husband, Henry, was painting the walls bright yellow.

‘Hi, Dulcie,’ said he. ‘Did you know van Gogh called yellow “God’s colour”? Everything here was the colour of mud. Bitter chocolate. Well, they were farmers before Veneering. Fifty years. Well, you must have known them? Wanted the colour of the good earth inside as well as out. Hate farmers. Holes in the floor, no heating except a few rusty radiators that gurgled all night, electric fires just one red glow, worn light-fittings that blow up. And that’s
after
the farmers left. That was Veneering’s taste too, and he’d come direct from a sky-scraper in Hong Kong. Wasn’t a SOP—Spoiled Old Colonial—anyway, whatever he was. What was he, Dulcie? They say he was an ugly little old man bent over. With dyed hair. Dulcie, kiss me!’

‘He was my greatest friend,’ lied Dulcie, stern and angry. ‘To the end’ (another lie!) ‘he was one of the finest-looking men in the Colony’ (true). ‘Amazing white-gold, floppy hair’ (Henry’s was looking like mattress-stuffing tied back with string). ‘It wasn’t dyed. He could have been a Norwegian or one of those eastern-European people. Odessans? Slavs? He was a glorious man once. He was said to have had a mysterious father. But not
dour
—you know. No, no, never. He was noisy and funny and sweet to women, and he could read your thoughts.
Could read your thoughts
! And a constant friend. And—do you know—we none of us had a notion of how he got to England. Or about his past.’

‘Herman says he could play the drums. And the Blues. Wonderfully. We’re finding revelations in the attics. What do you think—
five
rocking horses! Come and see. Take anything Dulcie.’

‘And take a glass of sherry with you?’ said Anna. ‘There’s dozens of photographs up there. A lovely boy at Eton and The Guards. Film-star looks. Very fetching. A somewhat over-the-top boy I’d say.’

Dulcie said, ‘That was the son, Harry. Killed in Northern Ireland. Doing something very mad and brave. It broke—.’ (But why tell them? All this is mine. And Betty’s.) ‘It broke his father’s heart.’

‘Yes, I thought there was something. This is a broken-hearted house,’ said the husband. ‘We’ll change it. No fears. I wish you would tell us what to do with all his jig-saws.’

‘Nobody could really get near Terry Veneering,’ said Dulcie. ‘Nobody but Betty—Elizabeth—Old Filth’s wife.’

‘Yes. We have heard about that,’ they said. ‘Just a little.’

* * *

After lunch Dulcie was put back in her car on the drive and, looking up at the house behind her, she saw that already it was losing Veneering. There was the same hideousness of shiny scarlet brick-work, the same chrome-yellow gravel and the view at the top of the drive over the miles of meadow was the same shimmering water-colour dream. But Veneering’s house was coming to life. Filth’s great stern, phallic chimney still broke the dream apart but from the inside of Veneering’s house—doors wide—now came the sound of hearty singing and the family man (Henry) with his pig-tail, exploded across the doorstep in overalls covered with paint and kicking the cat.

‘Get out!’

The cat vanished into a thicket.

‘Goodbye Dulcie. Come back soon. Come for B and B. We’re going to make our fortunes when I’ve finished painting this place. Cat in the paint tins. Paws no doubt permanently damaged. Colour “Forsythia” like the bush. Horrible colour. Like urine, I always think, but the staircase seems happy with it. We are all going to be, like it tells us in the prayer Book, “in perpetual light”. I’m never sure about wanting that, are you? Tiring. “Perpetual light”.’

‘Goodbye,’ said Dulcie. (They are very self-confident, these people, for new-comers to the village.) ‘And thank you very much.’ (But you can discuss things with them and they’re not senile.) ‘By the way, I may not see you for a while. I am thinking of going on a cruise.’ (What? Am I?)