Free Old Filth by Jane Gardam Page B

and lay in the tulip bed. They were yesterday’s pearls, and for the first time in her life she had not taken them off at bedtime nor when she bathed in the morning. “I am becoming a slut,” she told them. Her face was close against them. She said to them, “You are not my famous pearls, though he never notices. You are my guilty pearls. What shall I do with you? Who shall have you when I am gone?”
    â€œNo one,” she said, and let them slither out of sight into one of the holes made ready for the tulips. With her fingers, she filled the hole with earth and smoothed it over.
    Then she brought her firm old legs round in front of her so that they lay across the flower-beds. She noticed that each hole had a sprinkle of sharp sand in the bottom, and hoped the sand would not hurt the pearls.
    Still not out of the wood, she thought. Hope Filth doesn’t look up, he’d worry.
    She rested, then twisted herself, heaved and crawled. The legs obeyed her at last and came round back again and she was on all fours. She leaned on her elbows, her hands huge in green and yellow gloves, and slowly brought her bottom into the air, swayed, and creakily, gleefully stood up. “Well, I was never John Travolta,” she said. “And it is November. Almost first frost.”
    Amazed, as she never ceased to be, about how such a multi- tude of ideas and images exist alongside one another and how the brain can cope with them, layered like filo pastry in the mind, invisible as data behind the screen, Betty was again in Orange Tree Road, standing with Mrs. Cleary and Mrs. Hong and old friends in the warm rain, and all around the leaves falling like painted raindrops. The smell of the earth round the building-works of the new blocks of flats, the jacarandas, the polish on the banana leaves, children laughing, swimming in the private pools. The sense of being part of elastic life, unhurried, timeless, controlled. And in love. The poor little girl selling parking tickets in her white mittens against the sun. Betty’s eyes filled with tears, misting her glasses. Time gone. Terry’s boy gone.
    Trowel in hand, a bit tottery, she turned to look up the garden at Filth.
    Since yesterday he had been impossible. All night catafalque-rigid, sipping water, at breakfast senatorial and remote. The Judge’s dais. He had frowned about him for toast. When she had made more toast and set the toast-rack (silver) before him he had examined it and said, “The toast-rack needs cleaning.”
    â€œSo do the salt-cellars,” she’d said. “I’ll get you the Silvo. You’ve nothing else to do today.”
    He had glared at her, and she wondered whether his mind, too, was layered with images. Breakfast on The Peak for eleven years at seven o’clock, misty, damp and grey, she in her silk dressing-gown making lists for the day, Filth—oh so clean, clean Filth—in his light-weight dark suit and shirt so white it seemed almost blue, his Christ Church tie, his crocodile briefcase. Outside the silently-sliding Merc, with driver waiting in dark-green uniform, the guard on the gate ready to press the button on the steel doors that would rise without creak or hesitation. And the warm, warm heavy air.
    â€œBye, dear.”
    â€œBye, Filth. Home sixish?”
    â€œHome sixish.”
    Every minute pleasantly filled. Work, play and no chores.
    And the sunset always on the dot, like Filth’s homecoming. The dark falling over the harbour that was never dark, the lights in their multitude, every sky-scraper with a thousand eyes. The sky-high curtains of unwinking lights, red, yellow, white, pale green, coloured rain falling through the dark. The huge noise of Hong Kong rising, the little ferries plying, the sense of a place to be proud of. We made it. We saw how to do it. A place to have been responsible for. British.
    â€œI’ll do the silver later,” said Filth. “I shall be busy this