Last Friends (Old Filth Trilogy) (21 page)

Dulcie sat alone in the car. The long, long street of red houses was by no means derelict or poor but it was lifeless. Re-built since the war, dozen after dozen, all alike. Well-kept, anonymous, identical. Curtains were pasted against the windows. No-one to be seen. Concrete and weeds in the long, long vista of tiny front gardens. Silence. No people. Then a boy with small eyes came up beside the car and spat at it.

After a while a shuffling old man with a dog appeared, stopping and looking, looking and stopping. He put his face near hers at the passenger window and said through the glass, ‘Is it Lilian?’

‘No, I’m Dulcie.’

‘I’m looking out for our Lilian. She’s seldom coming by.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’d say the Germans have her.’

‘That was a
very
long time ago.’

‘Behind that Iron Curtain.’

‘That was a long time ago, too.’

‘No, it were yesterday. Not even the blacks come here, you know. Too dismal for ’em. Our Lilian was a grand girl.’

Michael came down his aunt’s concrete path, ignored the old man and said Dulcie was to come in. ‘And you get on with your walk,’ he said to the man.

‘Michael, this old man is crying. For his sister.’

‘Oh aye. Lilian. Half a century on. Killed in Middlesbrough. Shut up now, George. There was worse going on than Lilian. What about the Concentration Camps?’

‘It’s all stood still,’ said the old man.

‘Aye, and that’s the trouble,’ said Michael.

As Dulcie pulled on her little mohair gloves as she walked up the path the old man shouted, ‘It was wireless won us t’war. If it had been only bloody television we’d have lost it and mebbe got some soul back in us. It went out, did soul, with Churchill. We was all listening to him when the Dorniers come that night.’

A woman was watching them from the door-step.

‘Are you comin’ in then?’

* * *

She didn’t look a hundred, she looked fifty and very alert.

‘Friends o’ Terry’s? Terry Vanetski? Cup o’ tea?’

‘I’m afraid Terry is gone,’ said Dulcie, drawing off her gloves, Bessie watching, stretching over and taking one and stroking it. ‘I went to his memorial service. He died in Malta.’

‘What in heck was he doing there? He was that restless. Is’t true he married a Chinese?’

‘Yes. Elsie. I hardly knew her . . . ’

‘Now then tell us. One thing we can still do here is talk. I wonder if she was like his mother, Florrie. Now she was a fine woman, like a man. With a back-to-front man’s cap. Here’s your tea and a fancy. It’s only shop.’

‘They—didn’t exactly get on. Terry and Elsie.’

‘Then there’d be someone else. Terry was born to love women. Serviette? You can’t see where he lived. Nowt left. Nowt much left of Florrie neither nor the Russian. Eighty-seven killed that night. Terry was out of it you know because they’d put him on some getaway-train that afternoon. He left without a tear. I helped get his mother home where she’d been waving at the train from the fence. Oh, she was a fine woman. She never knew if he’d seen her waving.’

‘And you’ve never moved away?’

‘Well, bus-trips with Michael, in a club, to foreign parts but I can’t recommend them. Up here’s better, even with the drugs and the knives—even in
Turner
Street! Turner Street where the doctors used to live and the manager of the Co-op. Even now it’s better than the Costa del Sol where you can’t understand a word they say. All those fat English women, they’re a disgrace. I was maid at a posh school here once you know. That was a nasty place, but interesting and you never saw anything like that Mrs. Fondle in her purples and satins. She fancied young Terry. Yes she did. Just as well she got drowned. There was tensions all right, what with Mrs. Fondle and circus performers and spies and coal-carts—bit of Dundee? I mek me own Dundee.’

‘It must have been a very—vivid—time,’ said Dulcie. ‘I was in Shanghai about then. It was really my country. I don’t know why we were all so mad on this one we’d never seen.’

‘I’d not think Shanghai would have been all water-lilies and flowers-behind-the-ear neither. But, like wherever you go, there’s great compensations. Great people.’

‘Oh—yes.’

‘Like Mr. Parable in Herringfleet. Now
he
was mad. He was what’s called a religious maniac but he was one of the nicest men you could hope to meet. I wonder where his money went?’

‘And then,’ she said, ‘there was that Mr. Smith. He had a son, too. Tight-up little chap. Never very taking. Father took no note of him but they say he did well, mebbe better than Terry. But yet, with little Fred, nobody ever seemed to take to him.’

‘Yes. I see. It’s another world to me you know. You make me feel very
narrow
Mrs.—’

‘Miss,’ she said. ‘Thank God.’

There was a silence, Dulcie thinking of all the countries she had lived in where nobody now cared for her one jot, Bessie thinking of the children of this grey place who had shone here once. ‘Did you say our Terry’s
gone
?’ she asked and Dulcie said again she had been to his memorial service. ‘We don’t go in for that round here,’ said Bessie, ‘whoever you are. It’s York Minster if you’re someone, but otherwise it’s Mr. Davison at Herringfleet church digging a hole. And we don’t go for these basket-work caskets neither. Remind you of the old laundry down Cargo Fleet. I suppose little Fred’s gone too.’

* * *

‘Thank you,’ Dulcie said to the milk-drinking Michael on the way back from the sea to the Cleveland Hills.

‘Pretty great, in’t she?’

‘What a memory.’

‘Aye, but Dulcie—what a terrible life.’

‘Michael, I don’t think so. Oh good! Look,’ for here was the Donhead car in the forecourt of the hotel. ‘Oh thank God! She’s back from the hospital. Now we can go home.’

But the next morning they were both still at the hotel. Henry was being kept in hospital for another day and arrangements had to be made for an ambulance.

‘We’ll drive in convoy,’ said Anna, ‘you and I in the car. It’ll be rather slow. But more restful than the journey up. Today, I’ll go to the hospital and see the surgeon and arrange about physio. But what will you do?’

‘I’ll go to Lone Hall again.’

‘But you said it was grim.’

‘Yes. But I can’t stop thinking about him all alone in it.’

‘I hope you’re not thinking of joining him in it?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous Anna. I shouldn’t tell you this, but I can’t really afford Privilege House anymore and it’s in very good condition. This one needs a million pounds spending on it. Dear Anna—it’s idle curiosity that’s all. Could they get me a lift up there and back d’you think? The hotel?’

They could. She did. The ghillie was on his way up there now. He was meeting a possible buyer.

‘But would he let me in?’ she said. ‘I want to go round it alone.’

‘Dulcie?’

‘I tell you, Fiscal-Smith’s not there. He’s gone to Hong Kong.’

‘Look—it has nothing to do with you where Fiscal-Smith lives. He’s only there because he can’t shake off his childhood. That’s why he’s such a
bore
, Dulcie. You deserve better. Or just memories of Willy. Fiscal-Smith clings to his miserable past like a limpet to a rock.’

‘I don’t think anyone has ever loved him,’ she said.

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘Anna, you are being unpleasant. Fiscal-Smith is pathetic because he doesn’t know how to love. But there’s a For Sale notice up and this time—he never tells you anything—something must have happened. I believe, Anna, that he’s a virgin.’

‘I hope you’re not thinking of doing something about that.’

‘That will do, Anna. We don’t talk like that. And I’d be glad if you tell
nobody
that I’m short of money.’

‘Oh—ah! Well, well—Fiscal-Smith’s worth millions, just like the other two. Now I understand.’

‘I hope we are not about to quarrel, Anna.’

* * *

The ghillie dropped her off and she was allowed to go alone into the gaunt, wind-blown house on the moor. ‘I’m glad you trust me,’ she said as he handed her a key the size of a rolling pin. ‘I can tell a good woman,’ he said. ‘Ye’ll not pilfer. And it suits me because I have to wait outside for the estate agents. They’re bringing in a possible buyer. Some lunatic. I’ll look him over. Off ye go now and mind ye take care on the boards.’

‘Is it clean?’ she said.

‘Och, aye, it’s clean.’

Inside Fiscal-Smith’s Lone Hall, the smell of wood fires and heather. No carpets, no curtains and very little furniture. A kitchen range like a James Watt steam engine, rusted and ice-cold, a midget micro-wave beside it, an electric toaster, almost antique. Taps high above a yellow stone sink, and an empty larder. An empty bread-crock, a calendar of years ago marked with crosses indicating absences abroad. All colourless, clean, scrubbed. Eighteenth-centry windows, light flowing in from moor and sky.

Where did he sleep? Where did he eat? Where did he read—whatever did he
do here
? Room after room: empty. Not a painting, not a clock, not a photograph.

On her way out she opened a door on the ground floor behind a shabby baize curtain. The room within was cold—another tall window, unshuttered, the walls covered with shelves and upon them row upon row of boxes all neatly labelled. There was a man’s bike with a flowing leather saddle and a round silver bell. It stood upside down. A very old basket was strapped to the handlebars. On a hook nearby hung a dingy white riding-mackintosh with brass eyelet holes under the arms. It hung stiff as wood. There was a black, tinny filing-cabinet labelled ‘Examination Papers’. There was no sign anywhere of a woman’s presence, or touch.

There was a complete set of the English Law Reports in leather, worth several thousands of pounds—Dulcie knew this because she had recently had to sell Willy’s. There was an iron bed, like the campaign bed of the Duke of Wellington. Beside the bed, a missal, its pages loose with wear. Then she saw, on the wall behind her, a photograph of familiar faces: Willy waving. Herself in a rose-scattered hat—my! Wasn’t I gorgeous! Those tiresome missionaries in Iran. Eddie Feathers, magnificent in full-bottomed wig, Veneering cracking up with laughter, holding golf-clubs, hair flying. Drunk. Row after row of them and no girl-friends, no children, no-one who could have been Fred’s invisible, ailing mother. In the dead centre of the collage was a wedding group outside St. James’s church, Hong Kong. Eddie Feathers, so young and almost ridiculously good-looking in his old-fashioned morning suit and bridegroom’s camellia; the bride Elizabeth—darling Betty—in frothy lace, with a face looking out like a baby at its christening.

And there, beside her, astonishingly in a tee-shirt and what must have been the first pair of jeans in the Colony, was Fiscal-Smith the super-careful conformist, never wrongly-dressed. Asked to be best-man at the last minute, his face was shining like the Holy Ghost. The best day of his life.

No sign of Veneering in this photograph. No sign at all. Nor of Isobel Ingoldby, the femme fatale.

Willy was there. Oh, look at us, look at us! Still damp from our cocoons!

* * *

But it was the huge floor of the room in Lone Hall that held Dulcie now. It was slung from end to end with swathes of tiny metal ‘Hornby’ rolling-stock: points, buffers, level-crossings, signals, water-pumps, platforms, sheds, long seats, lacy wooden canopies, slot-machines; luggage trolleys like floats with unbending metal handles long as cart-shafts. Portmanteaux, trunks, Gladstone bags, sacks red and grey and all set up for midgets. And calm, good midgets stood in dark-blue uniforms blowing pin-head whistles, punching pin-holes in tiny tickets. Branch-lines swung far and wide, under the Duke of Wellington’s bed, and were criss-crossed by bridges, paralleled by streams where tiny men in floppy hats sat fishing. And the station platforms, up and down the room, were decorated with tiny tubs of geraniums. Time had stopped.

In the green-painted fields around lived happy sheep and lambs and cardboard figures carrying ladders over their shoulders and pots of paint. They went smiling to their daily bread. And the engines! And the goods-wagons! And the carriages up-holstered in blue and red and green velvets. And the happy pin-sized families untouched by care, all loving each other.

There was someone else in the house. The ghillie was at the door. He was furious. ‘This room is not on view. You are here without permission,’ and he locked the door behind her as she scurried out.

Another car, a Mercedes, was on the drive now, with the estate agent kow-towing and she heard someone say ‘Very sad. Hong Kong business-man. Made his pile. No, no—a local. Not in residence at present but lived here for years. Matter of fact we’ve just heard he has recently died—back in Hong Kong.’

‘Good afternoon,’ said Dulcie as she passed.

‘So sorry about your wasted journey,’ called the man with the shooting-stick. ‘I’ve bought it already. Fixtures and fittings. Splendid shooting lodge. I’d better not tell you how cheap it was.’

And he stood aside, laughing, and watched her climb into the ghillie’s car.

* * *

The next day she was driving south with Anna to The Donheads, the ambulance somewhere behind them, cautiously bouncing and now and then sounding its siren.

‘They wanted to keep him in longer, Dulcie, oh, I wish they had! He’s going to be hell downstairs at home. Physios coming in three times a day—on the good old NHS of course—and, pray God, they’re pretty. Oh—and he’ll be surrounded by the yellow staircase! Oh help me Dulcie.’

‘I suppose—did you hear anything about the lecture?’

‘Brilliant, of course. The wilder the preliminaries the better he always seems to be.’

‘It’s not like that in law-suits.’

In time:

‘Dulcie? You’re very quiet. You did want to come back home I hope?’

‘Yes. I did. I do. All is settled now.’

‘I’m so sorry. We messed it all up for you. It was meant to be a treat. We’re so dis-organised.’