Last Friends (Old Filth Trilogy) (17 page)

‘Whatever,’ said Veneering, slamming the door, stamping up his stone spiral stair and surveying himself in his fur-lined waistcoat, pink open-neck shirt, tight black trousers, brown boots, long platinum new-look hair. He stared at the mirror for some minutes.

The boy had disappeared when he eventually emerged into Lincoln’s Inn and its water tanks. Ah well. Got the message.
New Statesman
first priority. The literary Editor there a woman. Sounded daunting. Not young. Apparently somebody. Chat her up. Who’s afraid? Not I who knew Mrs. Veronica Fondle—and I drowned her. This one had said on the phone that she promised nothing except a sandwich together in Lincoln’s Inn Fields sitting on the grass to talk about his future. ‘You sound so very young, Mr. Veneering. Did you not think of staying at Oxford—life as an academic?’ (She ain’t seen me yet!)

No, Mrs. Beetle-Bags, I did not. I don’t want to interpret the world, I want to put it straight. To spread the globe out flat like pastry on a slab like Ma made. Pick it up, slap it down, turn it over like a Tarte Tatin in Le Trou Normand in Hong Kong. Oh hell, that was wonderful! I don’t want a careful bloody life. Why am I turning to the right? This place in St. Yves Court—St. Yves, the Breton lawyer. And saint. (Might write a book on him?) Augustus’s chambers—

Where there is nothing but a gaping door and windows and a heap of rubble on the pavement with a rope round it and a red lamp you light with a match. And it’s eight years on. 1953—Christ! However did we win the War? No-one will ever know. I’ll tell my grandchildren.

Or will I? Will I reminisce? Will they give a fuck for historic Britain? Little ragged-edged, off-shore island and not my country anyway. Go to Russia soon, let’s hope. Everywhere fighting their neighbours to the death. Death doesn’t bring life—ever.

He saw his house-master at his Roman Catholic school saying, ‘Sharpen up, Veneering. The Resurrection?’ Oh, fuck.

He took his eyes off the heap of rubble and looked up steps to a tall row of early-Victorian houses where doors and window frames gaped empty. In front of each house was a heap of rubble similar to that at his feet: beams and floorboards and shelving and corner-cupboards and lead fire-backs. Nearby there was a little marble chimney-piece. It had a small deep-carved circle at the top of each pillar. Around 1740, he thought. He lusted after it. A man was loading all the rubble into a lorry.

‘Can I have that?’

‘What—that broke fireplace?’

‘Yes, how much?’

‘Take it for free. How you goin’ to get it home?’

‘I will. Leave it aside.’

He stood looking at the silken marble skin under the grime. Smooth as jade. He saw the translucence and perfection of the surface under the dirt of the war. He thought there must always have been people who stared at such things. He imagined his wife’s terrifying family at her birth, fastening the tiny jade rings around her baby wrists. Her shackles. He thought of his mother, pushing tripe about in the black frying pan on the coal fire. Her worn hands. He thought of all that his mother had had no knowledge of. Her tiny world where she, among all her family and friends, had alone pondered and sought helplessly for explanations.

Augustus was standing on the top steps of one of the un-restored houses. At the bottom of the steps near him, a girl’s bike was propped on one pedal, its basket on the handlebars full of flowers. A girl pushed past Augustus and came running down the steps towards the bike. She passed Veneering by like a whip-lash, but he had the impression of happiness, good temper, laughter, excitement. She leapt on the bike, balanced, kicked the pedal and hurtled away out of sight. She was bare-legged, sandaled, in a crazy new-look skirt that did not suit her (legs a bit short—though good). She had not seen him.

Augustus called from above, ‘Please come in, Mr. Veneering. I
hope
you are in time.’ A dreadful look was cast upon the fur-lined sleeveless jacket.

‘Mr. Willy can see you now. I hope.’

But there seemed to be nobody there.

The room was large but far from ready. The windows were newly glazed but still with builders’ finger-marks. There was no carpet. Bookshelves were not yet filled. There was a big plain desk with little on it except an enormous concoction of cellophane-wrapping with a bunch of spring flowers in the midst, and a book.

A voice said, ‘My god-daughter left them. The girl you were watching getting on to her bicycle.’

The man was small with a pasty face and sitting rather out of the light in an alcove beside a roundabout book-case. He had a sweet smile.

‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you.’ Veneering found that he was tugging down the waist-coat. Pushing back his hair.

‘Veneering?’

‘Yes, er—you sent for me.’

Mr. William Willy said, ‘I have been asked to establish a new set of Chambers for specialising in engineering and construction Law. There is to be a great deal of building work—‘sky-scrapers,’ bridges, roads—which we hope will continue to be in the hands of British lawyers. English engineers are still very much the best, except for the Italians, and in Hong Kong and Singapore for instance, there are some huge contracts brewing for what we call “The Far East” and the Americans call “The Orient”, which shows a certain romanticism in them I suppose. I am Shanghai-born, Mr. Veneering. I am not a romantic. I understand you speak Mandarin? And you are a travelling man?’

‘Well, only post-war Navy. Round the China Sea. Showing the flag. Yes, I do speak Mandarin. I find languages easy.’

‘So you will travel?’

‘Yes. I have few allegiances.’

‘But you have a wife and small son in Hong Kong, Mr. Veneering.’

After a thoughtful space Veneering said, ‘This isn’t generally known. But yes.’

‘Would you stoop to practice in the Construction Industry? They often call it “Sewers and Drains”. High fees, international experience but you would be doomed to personal obscurity. No honours.’

‘I haven’t really thought . . . ’

‘About whether or not you care about obscurity?’

The pale-faced man walked to the window behind his desk and turned his back on Veneering and looked across London.

‘You haven’t really started thinking yet. You and Feathers.’

‘If you are inviting Feathers,’ said Veneering, ‘then I’m not interested.’

‘And nor, I’d guess, is he. He has connections of his own. You of course could become an academic. Or you would make a very good journalist. Maybe at
The New Statesman
? I expect you are left wing? But you—I have made enquiries—like big money. And power. The power in the East of your father-in-law’s family?’

‘This is like the night I arrived at Ampleforth and the monks grilled me,’ said Veneering.

‘Ah, yes. That was the night
The City of Benares
went down. You were very lucky to escape. Have you second-sight, Mr. Veneering? That is always useful. You might be very useful all round.’

‘I don’t talk about it. No—I jumped ship because—I wanted to go home. But I thought nobody had been told about that business.’

Augustus came in and took the god-daughter’s flowers away to put them in water, leaving the book.

‘Your name is not really Veneering, is it?’

‘However do you know that . . . ?’

‘Because I know my Dickens. You can’t use a good name twice. It is a joke. Veneering was a
nasty
man . . . ’

‘I haven’t actually read . . . ’

‘But you are
not
a nasty man. I knew your father. His name was Venitsky. Was it not?’

Silence.

‘Your father, whatever his name, was I think from Odessa? A blond Odessan—very unusual. He had been a hero. He was left totally alone for years, at great risk, abandoned, crippled, fearless to the end. They got him of course. Not that I am suggesting that the whole purpose of the German air-raids in the north-east was to eliminate one defunct—shall we say specialist er—thinker? Political activist? Your father was a great man.’

Veneering said, ‘Are you telling me my father was a spy?’

‘I’m telling you, my dear fellow, to work for me in . . . the Construction Industry.’

* * *

‘And have this.’ He handed the book that the god-daughter had brought across the desk. ‘I have any number of copies.
Life’s Little Ironies
. Thomas Hardy was a builder and architect by trade you know. In the construction industry.’

Out on the street—a very thin Brief in his jacket—Veneering flagged down a taxi and persuaded the driver to heave in the fireplace. Then he opened the book and read on the fly-leaf, ‘To my darling god-father Uncle Willy from Elizabeth Macintosh’.

During that last year in The Donheads, Feathers and Veneering, as we have said, drew slowly together step by hesitant step as they had walked the lanes around their village. First they had pointedly ignored each other from a distance. Later they had nodded and looked away. Then came the famous Christmas meeting when Feathers had shut himself out of his house as, cut off from the rest of the world by a snowfall and the Dorset earth beneath his feet beginning to freeze, feeling death clutch at his wheezy throat, seep into his ancient bones, at last, hand over hand, up Veneering’s drive he went, from one branch of Veneering’s dreary over-hanging yew trees to the next, until he had dragged himself, ancient, decrepit orphan of many storms, to Veneering’s peeling front door.

Nobody locally—nor anywhere else—ever discovered what went on during the rest of that Christmas day, but afterwards the two old men met regularly in Feathers’ (much warmer) sitting room in his house down their joint driveway, for chess. Chess and a drink. Or two. But never more (though we don’t know what Veneering did back home up the slope, later in his lonely night).

Feathers never offered food. Nor did Terry Veneering ever suggest a return visit up the slope.

Their chess improved, their concentration deepened. The photograph of old Feathers’ dead wife Elizabeth (Betty), with whom Veneering had been in love since he first set eyes on her on a bike outside Pastry Willy’s office—and beyond her death, for he was still in love with her—surveyed the two old men from the mantel-piece.

It was a flattering photograph taken on a picnic on Malta where she and Feathers were completing their honeymoon half a century ago.

That day for the young couple (he had bought her a fat crimson and gold chair in a back street in Dacca during the honeymoon) had been a day of blue and gold on the cliff tips, the sea, far, far below—St. Paul’s Bay, where he slew the serpent—running bright green.

There has always been on Malta the belief that there is a crack in the cliff top where a fresh-water stream runs silver. It trickles down the slope, falls, sprays out into the dark below. Far, far below a spout of spittle shining like light above the ocean. Betty, the bride had said, ‘There! You see! There is a fresh-water spring dropping down to the shore.’

And the girl had stretched herself out and looked down through the crack, her legs out behind her. Her legs were not her best feature. They were Penelope’s legs, not Calypso’s—but they were brown and sleek and strong and her pretty Calypso feet kicked up and down and she lay, watching the clear water turn to mist. She shifted slightly and the water shifted slightly like a net. It revealed a very small glimpse of the creeping emerald tide below.

Sixty years on, comfortable in his winter sitting room, fire blazing, whisky coming along any minute and—(ha-ha!)—he’d taken Veneering’s queen—a sweet peace fell upon Edward Feathers and for the first time since he’d acknowledged his wife’s infidelity with this jumped-up good-looking cad he knew that his jealousy was over and that he could now look back over his life—and at his beloved wife with pleasure and pride.

Well, perhaps not. Perhaps love shall always be divorced from time.

What a delicious, young and merry face looked at him from the mantel-piece. The trophy of his successful life.

And only a photograph.

She was not necessary to him anymore.

She had never been a siren. There had been one or two of those, and he smiled kindly at his young self—oh almost possessed by that other one. Isobel. She must be gone by now. She never told her love. They say she only loved women. Rubbish. Did I re-write my will? I expect she’s gone by now. All shadows.

But potent shadows. We strengthened ourselves, Betty and I. Isobel weakened me.

Sometimes I mix them all up.

On the whole, he said, addressing an audience of some great court, I managed well. Better than Veneering and his idiot adolescent marriage. How lonely that shrill Elsie must have been. She left him of course and the boy didn’t love her. If we are honest, it was Madame Butterfly who left Pinkerton (I say, that’s rather an original thought) and Veneering knew his weakness. He knew from the beginning he was not the man he might have been.

‘Veneering,’ he said. ‘Check-mate, I think? Yes? Whisky now—you ready?’

Silence. Then Veneering saying, ‘Yes. Good idea’ and continuing to stare at the board.

‘Tell me,’ said Filth, ‘that’s to say if you have no objection—how did you get yourself entangled with Elsie?’

There was such a long silence that Filth looked down into his glass, then up at the ceiling, then winked at Betty’s photograph and wondered if he had gone too far.

Or maybe Veneering—God he was ugly now, too—was becoming deaf. He had rather wondered. Didn’t appear to be listening. He looked keenly now at Veneering’s ears to see if there were any of those disgusting pink lumps stuck in them like half-masticated chewing gum. Thank God no need of that himself.

No sign. What’s the matter with the man? Sulking? Thinks I’m prying. Not answering.

‘Sorry, Veneering. Shouldn’t have asked. Never even asked you about that ship-wreck incident you were in.
City of Benares
? They tell me you were in a life boat for twelve days and only a child. Amazingly brave.’

Still silence. A coal dropped in the grate. Then Veneering moved a pawn with a smart crack as he put it down. ‘Check-mate to me, I think?’ He picked up his glass and drained it at a gulp.