Free Last Friends (Old Filth Trilogy) by Jane Gardam Page B

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