Last Friends (Old Filth Trilogy) (8 page)

‘
Marvellous
,’ cried a large woman, wearing a musquash coat, square shouldered, bearing down on them in the porch. ‘You found your way then Mrs. Van—Van Erskine?
Splendid
. We are short of
boys
.’

Behind the woman a door stood open upon a glittering dining room, a gleam of white cloth and shiny glasses. Silver cake-stands. Three-tiered, laden plates.

Then Florrie was out again on the steps alone.

* * *

She wondered if she was meant to sit there until it was eight o’ clock. Three hours. It was getting quite dark already. And cold.

She wasn’t going home, though.
Oh
, no! Nurse Watkins must never know. But there was nobody she knew round here to call in on. Especially dressed like this. There was the refreshment room over the station but the sandwiches were all curled up under glass and anyway she’d no money. And it might be closed. Father Griesepert? His church down by the beach would be locked up. It was a creepy place anyway. In the Presbytery he’d be drowsing now all by himself, alone with his whisky and his thoughts about purity. She’d never gone to him—nor he to her—even when her parents were dying.

The mist was thickening outside the ironwork porch of The Towers and she longed suddenly for her parents. Her father had once been a powerful, forceful, political man. Oh, she wanted a man. A man who stood straight and strong, who’d have brought the child here instead of her and looked round to see if the place was good enough. She folded herself down on the top step and began to disentangle the veil from the vixen’s teeth.

She wondered what Terry was doing.

If he needed the you-know-what, would he ask?

He still had to be helped with buttons. He’d not long finished with the chamber-pot. She often went with him down the privy in the yard especially in the dark. All those other children! Shouting and dancing about with the flaming wires. They were all so much older. Why ever had Terry been invited?

He wouldn’t be crying though. Terry never cried.

But, well, he might just be. He might be crying now. Would they notice him? Would they, any of them have the gump to think he might never before have been out in the dark? Would they look after him around the bonfire? Would he scream when he saw the man burning? Would they care?

That daft Bessie. No help there. Fourpence in the shilling. And she’d seen other people. All their proud horse-faced nannies in that hall. Eyebrows raised. She’d known Anton was wrong about the kids all being in uniform. Maybe in his country. Not here. Except if it was a sailor-suit and where would she get a sailor-suit? He’s not Princess Margaret Rose in London.

They might be being unkind and laughing at him. At this moment he might be screaming with fear. She’d seen his face as they grabbed him and carried him away. They all said he was advanced. Very, very, very clever—. But she’d seen his solemn face—.

He thinks I have left him and he won’t see me again. Fear blazed to inferno and she scrambled from the step through a laurel border and round to the back of the house to its rows of lighted windows and doors and the waiting bonfire. She stepped into a flower-bed and looked into a long room full of children sitting round a banquet.

It was a Christmas card of pink and gold and scattered with glitter. There were cart-wheels of cakes, pyramids of sweets and fruit. Nannies in dark blue dresses stood behind almost every child’s chair talking to each other out of the sides of their mouths but never taking their eyes off their charges. Iron-masters’ children. The other side of the tracks. She couldn’t see Terry.

One Nannie was pressing a rather torpid child into a high chair facing Florence. All the children were being firmly controlled. They’ll not forget the rules, these ones, she thought. There’ll be no fight left in them. She knew that this stuff wasn’t for Terry. Where was he?

She sensed an event. A few children were being restrained from banging spoons on the table-cloth and a tall iced cake was being carried in by a heavy smiling man who gripped a pipe between his teeth. Mr. HAROLD FONDLE, OXON! A maid came and began to cut the cake. Where, where was Terry?

Then she saw him. He was so close to her that she could have stretched to touch him but for the glass in the long window. He had his back to her. With his newly cut hair he looked like a tiny man. In both hands he held a glass of orange juice.

He was drinking from it. He was lifting it up in the air. He was bending backwards. Then he slid off his chair and turned towards the window and she stepped back. And, oh, he was beginning to cry!

And there was blood on his face and there was a jagged arc in the glass and on his hand and he was spitting out blood. He had swallowed glass!

She began to beat her fists against the window as first one person and then another noticed that there was a crisis. Shouting and consternation surged among the nannies. One gave Terry a savage shake and glass shot across the room. Terry stopped crying and grinned and Mrs. Veronica Fondle came swanning up like a barge at sunset.

Through the window Florrie heard her pea-hen cry that the child was probably only used to mugs, All well. All well.

But Florrie was by now at the front door again hanging on the bell chain, dragging it up and down and when Bessie answered she was across the hall and into the dining room to see Terry composedly eating porridge which some plumed assistant was spooning in to him. Mrs. Fondle in her furs stood nearby, en route to the garden where the bonfire was being lit. Smoke and one crackling flame. ‘Oh! Aha! Oh—Mrs.
Verminsky
!’ (She was laughing) ‘He took a
bite
from a
glass
! But
please
don’t worry. Nannie has counted all the bits and we have most of them. Boys tend to do this more than girls. We give them
porridge
just in case. Wonderful in the intestines—.’

Florrie seized the child in her arms as his mouth opened for more porridge. He looked at his mother and began to cry again.

‘There are worse things we have to face than glass.’ Mr. Harold Fondle strode by, his arms spiky with rockets, towards the bonfire.

‘Well, he’s coming home with me now,’ said Florrie. ‘I’ve had enough.’

* * *

‘But however did she
know
?’ Veronica Fondle called across to her husband that night in their avant-garde twin-bedded room. Outside, the bonfire was dowsed and ashy, the straw man a few fragments of rags and dust. ‘She must have been watching through the window. Crept into the garden. Peeping in at us!’

‘Perhaps we should have invited her in to the party,’ said Fondle. ‘He’s very young.’

‘Oh, I think not. There are limits.’

‘I have my reasons you know for keeping an eye on that boy. He could become one of my stars.’

‘So you say. Look, he’s perfectly all right. He’d eaten an enormous tea before that orange juice. He wasn’t worried when his mother came barging in.’

‘Well, his mother was. Very worried.’

They laughed as they turned off their individual bedside lights, like people in a dance routine. Click, then click.

‘Oh, and darling,’ she said in the dark. ‘The
hat
!’

‘Do you know,’ he said from the other bed, ‘I thought the hat was rather fine.’

When Fiscal-Smith’s train reached Waterloo after the dreadful morning in Dorset he found himself reluctant for some reason to continue his journey to King’s Cross and then on to the North.

He was, for one thing, not exactly expected at home. He had intimated that he had been invited to stay for some time with old friends. And, also, he was now feeling distinctly unwell.

Already it had been a long morning for a man of his advanced years: up at 5
A.M.
in the Dorset rain to examine a building half a mile away, said to be burnt out and which had turned out to be in perfect condition. Then that idiocy with Dulcie, locked alone with her inside the parish church and having to ring the bells for rescue. And so on.

And then Dulcie herself. Distinctly unwelcoming. And the awful daughter. And the glaring grandson. Sometimes, he thought, one should take a long, hard look at old friends. Like old clothes in a cupboard, there comes the moment to examine for moth. Perhaps throw them out and forget them. Yes.

But he had been able to make his mark with the delightful, new village family who had bought Veneering’s pile, his frightful Gormenghast on the hill. Fiscal-Smith would rather like to keep his oar in there. He would be pleased to have an open invitation to sleep in Veneering’s old house, tell these new people about their predecessor. Though maybe not everything about him.

Not that Veneering himself had ever once invited him there. Not even after that ridiculous lunch of Dulcie’s years ago, where all the guests were senile except himself and that boy and that desolate Carer. Like lunch in a care-home. Turned out in the rain. Had had to walk to the station on that occasion. Walk! Couldn’t do it now. Taxi would have cost three pounds even then. God knows how much now.

But there wouldn’t be much chance of making his mark with the new people either. Very casual manners these days. And Dulcie had taken against him. She’d always been a funny fish. Probably never see her again. Probably never see any of them again. Oh, well. End of it all.

At Waterloo he burrowed for his old man’s bus-pass and stood for a bus that crossed the bridge and turned towards the Temple. Taxi fares prohibitive and the drivers not pleasant any more. Mostly Polish immigrants. Very haughty. One had told him lately how the Poles had saved us in the War and then added, ‘Now we’re saving you for the second time. We
work
.’ He had not replied. For the second day running Fiscal-Smith made for the Strand and the Inns of Court.

Only twenty-four hours since the bell was tolling for Old Filth.

Different scene now. Earlier in the day.

Streams of black gowns pouring about, papers flapping, lap-tops gleaming, wigs on rakish, neck-bands flopping in the breeze. Home, he thought, I am home and young again. Bugger Dorset and the living dead.

And it was lunch time. I’ll go to lunch at the Inn. They’ll remember me. It can’t be more than ten years. Say fifteen. And it’s free. I am a life member, A Bencher—of this Inn.

Inner Temple Hall was roaring as he used his old key to let himself in (watch-chain). Then up the stairs. He pushed at the swing doors to the Hall. Hundreds of them inside, hundreds! Yelling! How much bigger they all are than we were. No rationing now. What a size some of them—. Sitting down to plates of what looks like excellent hot food. Stacks of it. Fiscal-Smith had not been offered breakfast. Only that watery tea.

Fiscal-Smith set down his substantial over-night valise and went to pee. No gentleman now, he thought, ever makes use of the facilities on British Rail. So sad. There were once towels even in third class. The W.Cs. now look like oil-drums. They can trap you inside them. Enough of that for one day.

Fiscal-Smith tidied himself up and made for the dining-hall, and was stopped on the threshold. ‘Yes, sir? May we help?’

‘Fiscal-Smith.’

‘Are you a member of this Inn, sir?’

He tried a withering look.

‘Bencher. For more than half a century. I am from the North. I am seldom here.’

‘We may have to ask you to pay, sir.’

As he turned the colour of damson jam someone called to him from the High Table where senior Silks and judges were leaning about like a da Vinci frieze. Sharks, whales, porpoises above the ocean floor. Scarcely registering the shoals of minnows in the waters below but not near them.

‘Fiscal-Smith! Good God! Over here, over here. Excellent!’ and he felt at once much better.

‘Been staying with old Pastry Willy’s widow in Dorset. Invited me back after Filth’s do yesterday. Very old friends of course.’

Nobody seemed to have heard of Pastry Willy.

‘Good do, I thought,’ said the oldest of the great fish. Touching. Very well-attended, considering his age. Weren’t you a particular friend?’

Fiscal-Smith sat down, comforted. Roast pork, vegetables with nuts in, gravy and apple sauce were put before him and he was asked if he would like a glass of wine.

‘Extraordinary,’ he told a childish-looking Silk beside him. ‘When I was starting out and we came to lunch here it was bread and cheese and soup and beer. And free. We were thinner, too. And more awake perhaps in the court in the afternoons.’

‘During the War?’

‘Afterwards. Just after. Place here all dust you know. Direct hit. First made me think there might be a future in Building Contracts. Early in the War I don’t think there was any lunch at all. But I was still at school then.’

‘Really? Were you? Where were you?’

‘Oh, in the north. I’m Catholic you know. Roman Catholic.’

‘Not much in the way of work in those days, I hear?’

‘No. Not for years after the War,’ said Fiscal-Smith. ‘Fighting was passé. We’d lost the taste for it. So poor we washed our shirts and bands ourselves. Fourpence at the laundry. We bought this new stuff—detergent. ‘Dreft’ it was called. And a Dolly Blue. Starched them too. Too poor for wives. Tramped the streets in our de-mob suits looking for Chambers.’

‘It’s said that even Filth and Veneering couldn’t get Chambers. Did they hate each other from the start? Did you know them then?’

‘I knew Veneering from being eight years old.’

‘Yet nobody ever
really
knew him—we understand?’

Fiscal-Smith kept a conceited silence.

At length he said, ‘I was Veneering’s oldest friend on earth.’

Then he added, seeing a suggestion of Veneering’s sour old man’s face somewhere up in the repaired rafters of the Great Hall, ‘He was much cleverer than I was of course. So was Old Feathers—they called him Old Filth. Both wonderful brains.’

‘So,’ someone eating apple-crumble and custard, called from down the table, ‘So we understand. One wonders why they stuck so long with the Construction Law. Charismatic, well-educated, intellectuals. Double Firsts. A life-time writing building contracts and a twilight of editing Hudson. No politics. No crime. No international high-lights.