Last Friends (Old Filth Trilogy) (2 page)

‘I’ll bet that was his mistress,’ said the intellectual.

‘More likely it’s a ghost,’ said his wife.

And then they all began to sing, ‘I vow to thee my country’ which, for Old Filth, born on the Black River in the jungles of Malaysia, wrapped in the arms of a childish ayah, rocked by the night sounds of water and trees and invisible creatures and watched over by different gods, had never been England anyway.

After the service old Dulcie found that she didn’t want to stay long at the gathering in the Parliament Chamber across Temple yard. Talk had broken into chorus as they all streamed out. Conversation swelled. The dwarf was being waved off in a splendid car, tossing his hat to the crowd like a hero. Streams of guests were passing up the steps of Inner Temple hall and towards the champagne. Dulcie clutched Susan’s arm, then, inside the Chamber, watched people looking uncertainly at each other before plunging. She watched them watching each other furtively from a distance. She examined—and recognised—the degrees of enthusiasm as they asked a name. She saw all the things that had made her worried lately. So much going on that she seemed to be seeing for the first time, or analysing for the first time though she knew that it was everyday, as habitual as looking at the clock or holding out a hand. Yet whatever did it mean?

She was sure that she knew any number of the looming, talkative, exclaiming faces if she could only brush away the threads and lines that now veiled them. And the curious papery, dried-out skin! ‘I’m afraid it was all the
cigarettes
,’ she said to someone passing by in pale pink silk. The woman immediately melted off-stage. Over in a corner rowdy people seemed to be passing around the dwarf’s hat and a cheer went up. ‘It is like a saloon,’ she said. She moved towards the lovely long windows, hearing everywhere half-familiar voices. And names of old friends lamented for being long-gone.

But they were not long gone to her. Oh, never! Since school-days, and just like her mother, Dulcie had kept all her address books and birthday books and a tattered pre-war autograph book. Some of the names, of course, were hazy on the page. Some were firmly crossed out by Susan. (‘But there were
always
Vansittarts at Wingfield. Susan, do
not
cross that out. I’ll be sending a Christmas card.’)
I must learn this e-mail
, she thought,
tomorrow
. ‘Susan—could we go home?’

Susan fetched her mother’s coat. Naturally Dulcie had kept her hat on. It made for a pleasant, feathery shadow but she had a wish that she were of this generation who would have left a hat in the cloakroom and shown that she wasn’t going thin on top like most of them; but she didn’t quite dare. Her fur coat was expensive and light as wool and smelled of evening-in-Paris, setting the odd old nostril quivering, as she passed.

A taxi had been called for Waterloo Station and the train home and Herman was being hunted down. Large and grave, the boy stood looking towards the Thames across the Temple gardens, ‘Where,’ he told his grandmother, ‘as I guess you know they organised the Wars of the Roses.’

‘Such lovely lime-juice,’ said Dulcie, ‘and
how
we missed it in the War.’

Herman glowered, saying that clearly only Americans were historians now.

‘They have so little of it to learn,’ said Dulcie.

‘Romantic vista?’ asked the ex-Vice Chancellor, plodding by. ‘Hullo Dulcie. I am Cumberledge. Eddie and I were lads together in Wales.’

‘Magnificent,’ said Dulcie. ‘They call it Cumbria now. So affected. Herman darling, I do think it’s time to go.’

‘The Thames once stank so much they had to move out of The House of Commons,’ said Herman.

‘Quite a stink there sometimes now,’ said a new Queen’s Counsel going by with tipping wine glass.

‘I think you should qualify that,’ said Herman, but the Silk had faded away. ‘Granny, nobody’s talking to me.’

‘Why should they?’

‘And there’s no music.’

‘Well, I don’t think Old Filth was—big—on music, darling.’

‘Veneering was. I liked Mr. Veneering better anyway.’

‘So you always say,’ said his mother. ‘I don’t know how you knew anything about him. And he was Sir Terence. Terry Veneering.’

‘Gran, I was nine. He was at your house. His hair was like threads and queer yellow. He played The Blues on your piano. Gran, you
must
remember. There was an awful man there, too, called Winston Smith or something. Like
1984
. I hope the Winston Smith one’s dead like most of these here. Why’s Mr. Veneering dead? He noticed me. I’ll bet he was an American. They never forget you, Americans. Mr. Feathers’ (‘Sir Edward,’ said Dulcie) ‘never had a clue who I was.’

‘Taxi now, Herman. Stop talking.’

A little old man seemed to be accompanying them as they left the party.

They had seen him in the church with a second-class railway ticket sticking up from his breast pocket.

When they climbed in to their waiting taxi he climbed in with them. ‘Dulcie,’ he said, ‘I am Fiscal-Smith.’

The name, the face had been at the rim of Dulcie’s perception all day, like the faint trail of light from a dead planet. Fiscal-Smith!

‘But,’ she said. ‘You told me you were never coming to London again after Veneering’s party. I mean Memorial. Don’t you live somewhere quite north?’

‘Good early train. Darlington,’ he said. ‘My ghillie drove me down from The Hall. Two hours King’s Cross. Excellent.’

‘What’s a ghillie?’ asked Herman.

‘You know, Dulcie, that I never miss a memorial service. I wouldn’t come down for anything else. Well, perhaps for an Investiture—. And you’ll remember, I think, that I
was
Old Filth’s best man. In Hong Kong. You were there. With Willie.’

‘Yes,’ said Dulcie—in time—her eyes glazing, remembering with terrible clarity that Veneering of course was not present. Not in the flesh.

Fiscal-Smith was never exactly one of us, she thought. No-one knows a thing about him now. Jumped up from nowhere. Like Veneering. On the make all his life. In a minute he’s going to ask to come back to Dorset with us for a free bed-and-breakfast. He’ll be asking me to marry him next.

‘I’m nearly eighty-three,’ she said, confusing him.

He took his cheap-day second-class rail ticket from his pocket and read it through. ‘I was just thinking,’ he said, ‘I might come back with you to Dorset? Stay a few nights? Old Times? Talk about Willy? Maybe a week? Or two? Possiblity?’

In the train he sat down at once in Herman’s reserved seat. ‘That,’ said Herman, ‘is not legal.’

‘Justice,’ said Fiscal-Smith, ‘has nothing to do with Law.’

‘Well you’ll have to help me to get Mother out,’ said Susan. ‘Tisbury has a big drop.’

‘I wouldn’t mind a big drop now,’ said Fiscal-Smith, ‘or even a small one. Will there be a trolley?’

* * *

There was not. The journey was slow. Fiscal-Smith had trouble with the ticket inspector, who was slow to admit that you have a right to a first-class seat with only the return half of a Basic, Fun-day Special to another part of the country. Fiscal-Smith won the case, as he had been known to do before, through relentless wearing down of the defence, who went shakily off through the rattletrap doors. ‘Ridiculous man. Quite untrained,’ said Fiscal-Smith.

The train stopped at last at Tisbury, waiting in the wings for the down-line train to hurtle by. ‘Excellent management,’ said Fiscal-Smith as they drew up on the platform and the usual Titanic-style evacuation took place from its eccentric height, passengers leaping into the air and hoping to be caught. ‘Very dangerous,’ said Fiscal-Smith. ‘Very well-known hazard this line. “Every man for himself”,’ and then completely disappeared.

Dulcie and Susan were rescued by the intellectual family man who came running up the platform to take Dulcie in his arms and lift her down.

‘How well you can run,’ she said to him. ‘Your legs are as long as dear Edward’s. An English gentleman could always be identified by his long legs you know, once. Though in old age they all became rather floppy in the shanks.’ Seeing suddenly Old Filth’s rotting remains in the English cemetery in Dacca and nobody to put flowers on them, her pale eyes filled with tears. Everyone gone now, she thought. Nobody left.

‘Come on back with us,’ said the family man, ‘It’s a foul night. I’ll drop you at home. We have a car rug,’ but she said, ‘No, we’d better stay together. But you can have Fiscal-Smith,’ she added, which he seemed not to hear. Fiscal-Smith had already found Susan’s old Morris Traveller in the car park and was fussing round it.

‘Well, keep our lights in view,’ called the family man, who was at once invisible through the murk and lashing rain.

As Susan drove carefully along behind, they all fell silent as they passed Old Filth’s empty house, in its hollow. Dulcie didn’t peer down at it, thinking of all his happy years, his steady friendship and noble soul. What Fiscal-Smith was thinking it was hard to say. The car swished through lakes of rain in the road, the deluge and the dark. All looked straight ahead.

* * *

They began to speak again only as they reached Privilege House where in minutes lights blazed, central heating and hot water were turned up higher, soup, bread and cheese appeared and the telly was switched on for the News. The smell of fat, navy-blue hyacinths in bowls set heads spinning and the polished blackness of the windows before the curtains were drawn across showed that the wet and starless world had passed into infinite space. Dulcie thought again about the last scene of the last act.

‘Why were all the lights on in his house?’ asked Herman.

‘Whose house? Filth’s?’ said Susan. ‘They weren’t. ‘It’s been locked up since Christmas. Chains on the gates.’

‘Didn’t notice the gates,’ said Herman, ‘but the lights were on all over it. In every room. Shining like always. But there seemed to be more than usual. Every window blazing.’

‘I expect it has caught fire,’ said Fiscal-Smith, searching out Dulcie’s drinks cupboard, as old friends are permitted to do.

The next morning Dulcie awoke in her comfortable foam-lined bed with a sense of unrest. Her window was open in the English tradition, two inches at the top for the circulation of refreshing night air (how they had dreamed of it in all their years in Hong Kong) long before the European central-heating. In their native English bedrooms Dulcie and Willy had always eschewed central-heating as working-class.

Outside was country silence except for the clatter of an occasional wooden-looking leaf from the Magnolia Grandiflora hitting the stone terrace. Her watch said 5
A.M.
Excellent! She was in time for Prayer for the Day on faithful BBC four, which she still called the Home Service.

Where was she? Was it today they had to go to London to dear Eddie’s thing? No, no. They’d done that.
Flames
, she thought,
Flames.
Ashes to ashes
—, and drifted off to sleep again.

* * *

Quite soon she woke once more, the flames retreating. She trotted downstairs in slippers and her old dressing-gown of lilac silk, feeling a sort of twitch in a back molar. Oh dear. Time for a check-up. So expensive. Own teeth every one of them. Thanks to Nannie. A full five minutes brushing morning and night. More than the teeth at yesterday’s party—. Oh, the awful rictus grins! And the
bridges
! You could
see
them. Queen Elizabeth the first who never smiled. The old Queen Mother who never stopped, and should have done. Early-morning tea.

Willy had always made the early-morning tea. Not in Hong Kong, of course. There had always been a slender maid with a tray, smiling. They thought, the Chinese and the Americans, that it was disgusting. Called it ‘bed-tea’. Oh Willy! She tried not to think of Willy in case once again she found that she had forgotten what he had looked like. Ah—all well. Here he came on the stairs, his fastidious feet, balancing tea-cups and deeply thinking. ‘Oh,
Willy
! So many years! I haven’t really forgotten what you looked like. “Pastry Willy”—but you grew quite weather beaten after we came home. It’s just, sometimes lately that you’ve grown hazy. Doesn’t matter. Changes nothing. I wish we could have a good
talk
Willy, about money. There doesn’t seem to be much of it. I always put the Bank letters in your desk. Very silly of me. I don’t open many of them.’

He was watching her up by the kitchen ceiling, very kindly, but noncommittally. No need ever to discuss the big things. He knew she was—well—superficial. Hopeless at school. Men love that, Nannie had said. But shrewd, she thought.
Oh
, yes. I’m shrewd. An unshakable belief in the Church of England and God’s mercy, and
Duty
and ‘routine’. Early tea. Clocks all over the house (fewer now I’ve sold the carriage clocks) wound up each Sunday evening after Evensong. Jesus had probably never seen a clock.
Were
there any? She tried to imagine the Son of Man with a wrist watch, all the time putting from her hazy early-morning mind the fact that she couldn’t remember Willy at all. ‘I can’t see your
face
,’ she called.

Come on. Hospitality, said his voice from behind the kitchen curtains. Tags and watch-words, she thought. That’s what all the love and passion comes down to. We never really talked.

And imagine, sex! Extraordinary! I suppose we did it? Susan was a lovely baby.

She made tea from the loose Darjeeling in the black and gold tin and carried up a pretty tray with sugar basin and milk jug—. What am I doing all this
for
, Willy? It’s no wonder Susan just thumps down a mug. Our bloody parents. Highest standards. But what of, Willy? Standards of what? Oh! He had vanished again.

Good. He couldn’t answer her.

‘Now then, Fiscal-Smith. Rockingham china for Fiscal-Smith. I bet he lives off pots and shards in Yorkshire. Mugs there, certainly. And I’m still trying to show him the rules.’ She tottered up to the guest room and found it empty.