"Old Filth"

[fiefoe]

Like the previous one, this novel is very much about reckoning that comes with old age. I must have missed many clever little phrases by Jane Gardam, because the audiobook narrator is rather too good at doing accents, including less intelligible ones. What's left is mostly morose, though there were some arch moments. Emotionally distant characters are hard to be made engaging, even prodigiously good-looking ones with glamorous careers.

• All his life he kept a regard for Chinese values: the courtesy, the sudden thrust, the holiness of hospitality, the pleasure in money, the decorum, the importance of food, the discretion, the cleverness.
• Or was it—the most likely thing—the end of Empire? The drawing-near of 1997? Was it the unbearableness of the thought of the arrival of the barbarians? The now unknown, but certainly changed, Mainland-Chinese whose grandparents had fed the baby Miss Betty on soft, cloudy jellies and told her frightening fairy tales?
• “Well, you needn’t come and see me again if you do,” said courteous Old Filth.
  Seated in his car in the road the friend considered the mystery of what convictions survive into dotage.
• A cupfull of drink appeared from a bottle in Auntie May’s bag. (Auntie May had negotiated these hateful kidnappings before.) The drink was dark and sweet and he gulped it in the middle of a last shuddering sob. She passed the empty cup to the boatman and rocked the child, allowing herself the pleasure of a child in her arms, knowing that this stringy, red-headed boy would never tempt her into lullabies or spoiling comforts. But he was warm against her broad chest, and now he slept. She seethed against the father, the system, the Empire which she had begun to think was not God’s ordinance after all, and how had she ever thought it could be?
• The writer they were studying (studying!) was driving all the way from Islington to interpret her novel for them. Betty thought that she ought to have better things to do. It must be like discussing your marriage with strangers.
• They were brought up like that. Most of them learned never to like anyone, ever, their whole lives. But they didn’t moan because they had this safety net. The Empire. Wherever you went you wore the Crown, and wherever you went you could find your own kind. A club. There are still thousands round the world thinking they own it. It’s vaguely mixed up with Christian duty.
• “By the way,” said Pat, like his mother avoiding rocks in the river. “All that about footmen and Ma—it’s balls, you know. Too many Georgette Heyers.”
  “But your mother’s so—” (he was going to say innocent but it didn’t seem polite) “—truthful.”
  “She’s self-protective,” said Pat. “Can you wonder? She was through the Great War, too.”
• But there was a change somewhere. He and Pat were moving on. Glaciers would soon come grinding them apart, memories would be forgotten or adapted or faked.
• But they had me later in the War at Bletchley Park and there we met again. Bletchley Park was full of innocent, nice girls (not me) who had a very particular aptitude (crosswords) for solving cyphers and things, as you will be hearing in a year or two when all is told (the fifty-year revelation). That is how we won the War. How we stopped the U-Boats. So we were told.
• We have a bit of a worry with you—oh, nothing to do with this David and Jonathan business. We all grow out of every loyalty in the end.”
  “It’s called friendship, sir.”
  “Yes. Yes. And you won’t be seeing much more of Ingoldby.
• On his head, an army beret without a badge, like a Frenchman, and eyes dark, wise, amused and most beautiful. On the silver frame was engraved Alistair, 1914, and there was a little jug of flowers arranged beside it, as if the photograph was of a dead man, or like a funeral bunch upon a grave. Flowers for the dead. But this was his father. No doubt of it. Eddie knew.
  And his father was alive enough to have sent for him, to get him out of another set-piece of butchery like the one that had all but extinguished him and his country in 1914.
• He watched the tangled hedges threaded with the dead spirals of last year’s weeds. This was an empty, slow, uncertain train that trundled insolently through anonymous stations, their names painted out with coarse black brush-strokes to confuse the Germans when they eventually arrived. Station waiting-rooms stood barred; cigarette- and chocolate-machines stood empty with their metal drawers hanging out. It was not until he had changed trains in Manchester (I could still be in her bed) that he remembered that he had left Babs to pay for the coffee.
  He was sitting now in another railway carriage looking, above the man sitting opposite, at a pre-War watercolour reproduction of a happy artless English family on a sunny English beach.
• “Look, it’s too soon. You’re doing it all too soon. You started in on the letters before the funeral. You ought to let them settle. I know, because of Mother. And it’s too soon to go round handing out presents, you’ll muddle them. I’m sorry, but you’re not yourself.”
• He thought of the hotel which loomed now much larger in his consciousness than the Babs business (Babs had always been potty) and he understood the goldfish, the bears, the box of Scrabble in the wardrobe, the tape deck and the vast television set in the room. They were an attempt to dispel the sombre judicial atmosphere of the place’s past. The seams of the Judges’ Lodging had exuded crime, wickedness, evil, folly and pain. All had been tossed about in conversation each night over far too much port. Jocose, over-confident judges.
  Well, they have to be. Judges live with shadows behind them.
• “I’m sorry you’ve lost your wife. Was it long ago? I’d have enjoyed meeting her,” said Vanessa kindly to the imagined Betty: the marmalade-maker, Bridge-player, no doubt churchflower arranger, and the grandchildren in the holidays.


• 'You can inflict pain through ignorance. I was not loved after the age of four and a half. Think of being a parent like that.'
  'Yes. I suppose.'
  'A parent like you, for instance, young woman. What child would want a parent like you?'
  She was furious. “I was loved,” she said. “I’m still loved by my parents, thank you very much. And I love them. We have difficulties, but it’s normal family life.”
  “Then I made a mistake,” he said, still not looking at her. “Maybe it’s your hair. It is so thin. I’m sorry.”
• QR: Kipling. You know Kipling had a start like Filth? Torn from his family at five. Raj Orphan.
  PS&O: Kipling didn’t do too badly either.
  QR: Kipling had a crack-up.
  PS&O: Did he stammer?
  QR: He went blind. Half blind at seven. Hated the Empire, you know. Psychological blindness.
• All at once, high above the Fragrant Isle and to the South, there was a startling scatter of light. Several groups of tiny daylight stars, triangles of silver and scarlet that the sun caught for a moment before they were lost in the smoke. Aeroplanes.
  “Like pen nibs,” said Eddie. “Dipped in red ink.”
• The odd thing, said the speck of the rational in Eddie within him—he guarded it like his life—the odd thing is that I did once have an address book. Alice gave it to me. In the kitchen. Leather. Small. Red. .. One day, at the billet in Londonderry, Eddie had written in it, for comfort, all the addresses he knew. School. Oxford, the Ingoldbys (hopelessly), Sir, Auntie May, one or two schoolfriends even though he’d never write to them. Not Les Girls. Not the buttermilk girl.
• “You have been in close contact with a woman.”
  “She died of gangrene, sir, on the ship after Cadiz. I only did what I could. Miss Robertson. She was over seventy—”
  “I doubt that she was the source of the infection. What I am saying, Feathers, is that you have acquired sexual knowledge through a most unpalatable source. Isn’t this true?”
  A long and thoughtful silence.
  “It was dark, sir. I never really looked at her. I never thought of her as palatable or unpalatable. She just climbed in. I’d no idea how to do it, and she had. She gave me buttermilk, sir. It was in Northern Ireland, sir.”
  The Colonel paced hurriedly across to the window and stood looking out intently.
  “Were you taught nothing at school, Feathers?”
  “I have won a scholarship to Oxford, sir.”
  A sort of sob from the window. A pause for recovery.
  “Feathers, I have decided that this disreputable episode should not be passed on to Badminton. Primarily because of Queen Mary. I hope I am not being unwise.”
  “Thank you. Yes, sir. I can’t think that Queen Mary would be in any danger from me.”
  “Go! Enough!” roared the Colonel. “You’re dismissed, Feathers. Go.”
  Afterwards the Colonel wondered if he’d been made fun of. Beaten in argument. Run rings round.
  Feathers wasn’t certain, either.
• “She’s impossible. I’m the Duchess of Beaufort. I know I look like somebody’s cook, but that’s who I am, and this is my house. She’s only an evacuee,” she spat as she blew past, the doors being silently closed behind her.
• “Oh, good boy. But listen, she’s determined to take you to London. Her chauffeur, old Humphries, is half-blind and not safe. Once he lost Her Majesty for over an hour in Ashdown Forest. She won’t sack him. And she makes him stop and pick up any member of the forces walking on the road. Once she picked up a couple who were walking the other way and once it was an onion seller. She’ll be murdered, and then we’ll all be blamed.”
• The expedition was put off until Eddie had learned to drive, instruction being given in a tank on the estate.
• Garbutt found Filth, looped up to drips and scans, trying to shut out the quack of the television sets and the clatter of the public ward where male and female lay alongside each other in various stages of ill health. Like Pompeii.
• My memory has always been so reliable. Perhaps too reliable. It has never spared me. Memory and desire, he thought. Who said that? Without memory and desire life is pointless? I long ago lost any sort of desire. Now memory.
• “Any of you chaps Malays?” he asked. “Malaya’s my country. Malaysia now, of course. And Ceylon’s Sri Lanka, Lanka’s what my friend Loss called it, and he should know. It was full of his uncles. That’s what he said before he went down the trough. Bombed by the bloody Japanese, I expect. Oh, sorry.” The lead figure in the performance around his bed was Japanese. “Didn’t realise. It’s your West Country accent.”
  “OK, grandpa,” said the Japanese. “Take it easy.”
• A good old room with magnificent carved Elizabethan fireplace and a large portrait of the Silk’s unhappy-looking wife: the sort of wartime bridal face that wished it had waited.
• I’m not saying there’s no such thing as guilt. And wickedness.
  I’m saying there is confusion and derangement in the mature murderer. What is so interesting about our murder is that there was neither. No confusion. No derangement. We three—not Cumberledge—were absorbed in the process of handing over responsibility to the powers of darkness whom we had met as children, and who had met us. We were thoroughly engaged, us three. Still untamed. We were of the jungle.


• Betty came and stripped the years away from you in what looked like the perfect marriage. She never asked for more than you could give. Others gave her passion. You were a saint about Veneering. You were a wall of alabaster. You saved each other. You and Betty. I’d guess, neither of you ever spoke of it.
• He wrote when Betty died. His essence was unharmed.”
  “He became a grandee,” said Babs. “He’s retired to Cambridge. A grandee.”
  “There are those who are given Grace,” said Tansy. “But you yourself wanted to make some sort of confession, Sir Edward?”
  “I wanted to express my pity,” said Filth. “My pity for her. For Ma Didds. I’ve tried hundreds of Cases, many more wicked than anything here. Some I still cannot bear to think about. I don’t mean I cannot bear to think about my judgements—you have to be thick-skinned about that—I cannot bear to think about the cruelty at the core of this foul world. Or the vengeance dormant even in children. All there, ready, waiting for use. Without love. Cumberledge was given Grace. That’s all I can say. We were not.”