Last Friends (Old Filth Trilogy) (3 page)

‘Hullo?’

‘Fiscal-Smith,’ she called. (What
is
his first name? Nobody ever knew.)

‘Hullo?’

(That must be sad for him. Nobody ever asking.)

‘Hullo?’

Silence. The bed in his room was tidily turned back—his pale pink and white winceyette pyjamas folded on the pillow, his dressing-gown and slippers side by side by an upright chair. (So he’d brought his night-things. He’d intended to stay from the start. The old chancer!)

Except that he was absent.

She sat down on his bed and thought, he says he comes in honour of Filth and yet all he wants is to be looked after here. That’s all he’s after. Being
looked
after. You were so different, Willy. And now all I want is someone to deal with those letters (My slippers. Time for new slippers) and peace and quiet. And—absolute silence.

There was a most unholy crash from below stairs.

As she shrieked, she remembered that she was not alone. There were others in the house. Left over from yesterday. She couldn’t actually remember the end of yesterday. Any yesterday. The evening before had usually slipped away now by morning. King Lear, poor man—.

But last night hadn’t there been something rather sensational? Rather terrible? Oh dear, yes. Poor Old Filth’s empty house had burned to the ground. Or something of the sort.

She looked at her feet. Yes, it was time for new slippers. Then through the window she saw Fiscal-Smith tramping up the hill towards her, from the direction of Filth’s house, still in yesterday’s funeral suit and he was looking jaunty. Eighty plus. And plus. 5.30
A.M.
Beginning to rain. He saw her and called out, ‘All well. It’s still there.’

‘What?’

‘Filth’s nice old place. The boy was wrong. No sign of fire. I’ve a feeling that boy is a
stirrer
. He was a stirrer years ago at that lunch you gave. A little monkey!’

‘Do you never forget anything, Fiscal-Smith? What lunch? A life-time of lunches. And with’—for a wobbly second she forgot her grandson’s name. ‘When? Where?’

‘Two fat sisters. And a priest. And Veneering, of course. Oh, I forget nothing. Mind never falters. It is rather a burden to me, Dulcie.’

‘You
are
arrogant, Fiscal-Smith.’

‘I simply put my case,’ he said.

He was with her in the kitchen now. She said, ‘Your case is in your bedroom. Do you want help with packing?’—and shocked herself.

There fell a silence as he stepped out upon the terrace with his cup of tea.

* * *

At the same moment, down in Old Filth’s house in the dell, Isobel Ingoldby, wrapped now in his Harrods dressing gown instead of her own pink silk coat, was turning off the lights which she had left burning all night. Foolish, she was saying, I’m the one paying for the electricity now. Until I sell. Why did I light the whole place up through the dark? Some primitive thing about the spirit finding its way home? But he won’t be searching. His spirit is free. It’s back in his birth-place. It maybe never quite left it.

She boiled a kettle for tea but forgot to make any. She wandered about. Betty’s favourite chair stood packed up in the hall. His present for Fiscal-Smith. Nobody gave Fiscal-Smith presents.

This house—the house she had inherited—watched her as she went about. So tidy. So austere. So dead. Betty’s photograph on a mantelpiece, fallen over sideways.

Isobel had slept in his bed last night. Someone had removed the sheets and she had lain on the bare mattress with rugs over her. She thought of the first time she’d seen him in bed. He was about fourteen years old. He was terrified. We both knew then. I was only his school-friend’s older cousin, but we recognised each other. All our lives.

* * *

Fiscal-Smith still stood on Dulcie’s terrace half an hour later, still examined the view over the Roman road towards Salisbury, the wintery sun trying to enliven the grey fields through the rain.

Dulcie came walking past him towards the wrought-iron gates, fully dressed now in tweed skirt and cardigan, remarkably high heels and some sort of casual coat, not warm, from the cupboard under the stairs. She carried a prayer-book. Fiscal-Smith shouted, ‘Where are you going? Filth’s house is perfectly all right.’

‘I am going to church.’

‘Dulcie, it’s six o’clock in the morning. It is clouding over. It’s beginning to rain. That coat you had in Hong Kong. And it isn’t Sunday.’ He came up close to her.

‘I need to say my prayers.’

‘It will be locked.’

‘I doubt it. The great Chloe is supposed to open it but she usually forgets to shut and lock it the night before.’

‘The mad woman who runs about with cakes?’

‘Yes. Well-meaning, but the mind’s going. Sometimes she locks in the morning and un-locks at night. We shall have to tell the church-warden soon. Actually I think she may
be
the church-warden. There’s nothing much going on in the church. Not even anybody sleeping rough. It’s too damp—.’

He was padding along behind her.

‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Unlocked. Unlocked all night.’

* * *

Inside, the church scowled at them and blew a blast of damp breath. Hassocks looked ready to sprout moss and there was the hymn-book smell. Notices curled on green baize gone ragged, and the stained-glass windows appeared to bulge inwards from the flanking walls. Two sinister ropes dangled in the belfry tower. It was bitterly cold.

‘Stay there,’ Dulcie ordered him, making for a chancel prayer desk up near the organ. ‘I can’t pray with anyone watching.’

‘The Muslims can,’ he said, trying to bring the blood back to his knobbed hands. ‘This is a refrigerator, not a church.’

‘
Muslims
,’ she said, ‘can crowd together on mats and swing about and keep their circulation going and you don’t see what the women do but I don’t think they pray with men, in a huddle. Anyway, I need what I know,’ and she vanished, eastwards.

‘Five minutes,’ he shouted after her as her high heels tapped out of sight. ‘Utter madness,’ he said to the stained glass windows. ‘Hopeless woman. Hopeless village.’ His voice echoed hopelessly around the rood-screen and its sad saints. Rows of regimental flags hung drooping down the side-aisle like shredding dish cloths, still as sleeping bats. ‘They’re all off their heads here,’ he called out. There was the sound of a heavy key being turned in the lock of the south door, just behind him. The one by which they had entered.

He sprang towards it, flung himself first through the wire, then the baize door, the south door they had just pushed heavily through. He tugged and shouted.

But the door was now firmly and determinedly locked from the outside. Chloe, on her bike, had been thinking that it was evening again.

* * *

Up in the chancel there was no sign of Dulcie but at length he saw the top of her head and her praying hands. She was like a—what was it called? A little Dutch thing. Little painting on wood. ‘Praying hands,’ he thought. ‘They have them on Christmas cards. Dürer. The Germans were perfectly all right then.’ Her head was bowed (‘She still has thick, curly hair’). ‘Five minutes,’ he called, like a tout, or an invigilator.

* * *

Soon he began to hum a tune from his seat in front of the choir-stall and after a minute she opened angry eyes.

‘We are locked in,’ he said.

‘Nonsense,’ she said.

‘I heard the key thrust in and turned. It was Chloe.’

Dulcie went pattering back down the central aisle, tried the oak door first with one hand, then the other, then both hands together. She regarded the broad and ancient lock. ‘You heard her? Chloe?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t you shout?’

‘I think I did. Now, leave all this to me, Dulcie, I banged and rattled and yelled. I will do it again.’

‘Yes. She
is
getting deaf.’

They stood in icy shadow and he called again, ‘Hullo?’

‘It’s no good shouting, Fiscal-Smith. Nobody in the village is up yet except Chloe.’ But he roared out, ‘
Hullo
there?’ ‘There may be someone walking a dog?’

‘Nobody walks a dog as early as this in winter. We are all old here.’

‘I’m tired of this “old”,’ said Fiscal-Smith. ‘We don’t have it in the north. Won’t Susan be coming by on the horse? And where’s that boy?’

‘Sleeping. And Susan won’t be out for at least two hours. She may notice we are missing, but I don’t think so.’

‘I
suppose
,’ he said, ‘you don’t carry such a thing as a mobile telephone?’

‘Good heavens, no. Do you?’

‘Never.’

‘We could try shouting louder.’

And so they did for a time—treble and bass—but there was no response.

‘Of course, there are the bells,’ said Dulcie. She was shaking now with cold. ‘It might warm us up.’

Fiscal-Smith released the tufted, woolly bell-ropes from their loops in the tower and handed one to her, icy to the touch. She closed her eyes and dragged at it with childish fists. It did not stir.

‘I’ll have a go,’ he said, and after a time, sulkily, on the edge of outrage, the damp and matted bell-pull began to move stiffly up and down: but Fiscal-Smith looked exhausted.

‘Go on, go on,’ cried Dulcie. ‘You got it up I think,’ and thought, I believe I said something rather risqué just then, and giggled.

‘This is quite serious, Dulcie. Don’t laugh. Go over there and pull the blue one.’

And so they toiled, and after what seemed to be hours they both heard the sad boom of a bell.

‘I think it was only the church clock striking seven,’ she said.

‘We must go on trying.’

But she couldn’t and made for the chancel again and possible candles on the altar for heat. He followed, but the candles looked like greasy ice and all the little night-lights people light for memorials to the dead were brownish and dry and there were no matches. Dulcie’s lips were turning blue now. ‘This,’ she said, not crossly, ‘will be the death of me. We have no warm clothing and between us we are nearly two hundred years old. My mother stayed in bed all the time after eighty. There was nothing wrong with her but everyone cherished her.’

Through a door they found a vestry and a wall full of modern pine cupboards, ‘Bequeathed,’ said a plaque, ‘by Elizabeth Feathers’. ‘I wish she’d bequeathed an electric fire,’ said Dulcie.

Inside, the cupboards were crammed full of choirboys’ black woollen cassocks, and Fiscal-Smith and Dulcie somehow scrambled into one each. Dulcie said they were damp. But then, over in the priests’ vestry nearby, there was treasure. Albs, cottas, chasubles and a great golden embroidered cope beneath a linen cover.

‘Wrap it round you,’ ordered Fiscal-Smith.

‘It’s reserved for Easter only,’ said Dulcie. ‘It’s for the Bishop and it’s too big. It could go round us both.’

So they both stood inside it, their faces looking out from it side-by-side. ‘My neck is still very cold,’ said Dulcie. ‘Look, there is the ceremonial mitre and the St. Ague stoll. This church! This church you know was once High. And very well-endowed.’

‘I can’t remember what High is. I’m a Roman Catholic,’ said Fiscal-Smith, ‘but I’m in favour if High turns up the heat. Remember Hong Kong. No copes there. Too hot. This is very curious head-gear, Dulcie. We are becoming ridiculous.’

‘I wish this was a monastery,’ she said. ‘There’d be a supply of hoods.’

‘That was because of the tonsures.’

‘I’m not surprised. I had terrible tonsils as a girl. Before penicillin and I wasn’t a monk. Wonderful penicillin.’

‘I’m lost,’ said Fiscal-Smith.

‘It was God’s reward for us winning the war, penicillin.’ (‘She’s bats.’) ‘Willy used to say that every nation that has ever achieved a great empire blazes up for a moment in its dying fire. Penicillin. I wouldn’t have missed our Finest Hour, would you, Fiscal-Smith?’

‘I bloody would,’ he said. Then after a silence, ‘Look here, Dulcie. Where do they keep the Communion wine?’

* * *

It was later that there came a loud knocking on the vestry door into the churchyard. ‘Are you in there? An answer please. Are you there? Who are you?’

‘Yes, we are locked into the church. Accidentally. Dulcie is not well. It is very cold. This is Sir Frederick Fiscal-Smith speaking.’

‘Have you tried to open the door?’

‘Of course we’ve tried the bloody door.’

‘I mean this door. The vestry door. It is beside you. There is an inside bolt.’

Fiscal-Smith leaned from his princely garment, considered the unobtrusive little modern door, slid open a silken brass bolt and revealed the misty morning. There, in running shorts among the graves, stood the family man.

Out through the doorway, laced across with trails of young ivy, a door which, like Christ’s in Holman-Hunt’s
Light of the World
in St. Paul’s Cathedral, only opened from within, stepped a pair of ancient Siamese twins in cloth of gold, one of them wearing a papal headdress and both of them blue to the gills.

Away down past the churchyard at the foot of the steep stepped path sped old Chloe on her bicycle bearing on the handlebars a jam sponge and in her other hand the ancient church key. She called a greeting and waved.

‘Just wondered if I’d remembered to unlock. So glad I had,’ and pressed on.

In the village shop, she said, ‘There’s something going on in the church. I think it’s a pageant.’

Dulcie had been put to bed by Susan. Fiscal-Smith, with his overnight case beside him on the terrace, was awaiting transport.

‘You might call me a taxi.’

Susan said, ‘There are no taxis. I’ll drive you to the station. Do you want to say goodbye to Dulcie?’

‘Oh, no thank you.’

‘She will not be pleased.’

‘Whatever I say or do makes not the least difference to her. I make no difference to anyone.’

‘Oh, I’m sure—.’

‘All the years we have all known each other, do you know, Susan, I’ve never actually been invited anywhere. And I was present when Betty saw Veneering for the first time. Party. Filth was like Hyperion. Betty looked like the captain of the school hockey team. Gorgeous Betjeman girl. Stalwart but not joyful.’