The Man in the Wooden Hat (17 page)

She carried her tea with her towards a door—the cottage was shadowy—which she pushed open to reveal the stretch of meadow-lawn cleared from the forest. The trees around were wildly tossing and the grass was wet with dew. A fox stood still in the middle of the space, staring at her with black eyes, interested in an alteration of the scene. A dead bird hung down heavy and soft on either side of the fox’s mouth. It turned tiptoe on its black feet and was gone. Then the wind dropped and lemon-coloured light soaked over the garden and the river spread wide to the horizon where above the far trees a triangle of hilltop was crowned with a knot of trees like a garland.

It was warmer now. She sat outside on the shabby wooden balcony and drank the tea. She thought of her new London home that commanded a view of a thousand nameless lives. Here she was alone of her kind. She felt perfectly happy, no more lonely than the fox, or the rabbits she began to see in the bracken, or the strutting pheasant which appeared now at her feet. No telephone would ring, no car stop on the road above, she would hear no human voice.

Amy, in her Kai Tak slum, would say, “Betty, this will not do. You need a cause.” Elisabeth thought of the hollow-cheeked crowds in the stinking streets. The old man who sat with no legs, his crutches splayed across his patch of the street, breaking open crustaceans, chanting the prices, cracking the shells. Urine in the pools. “We must forget
ourselves
, Bets. Our Englishness.” Amy had not been in the Camps.

She sat on, looking towards the topknot garland of the next-door village and saw to one side of her, higher up than the Dexter trees, a flicker. There must be a building up there, and her heart plunged. No—too dense. An illusion. She looked back down her vista of meadow, and two children were walking hand in hand. They paid her no attention and slipped back into the tall grass. Later, a young man crossed from one side of the garden to the other but further away. He was lean, unkempt, dark-skinned, alert and self-contained. Some sort of Gypsy. He was swinging something like an axe and did not look towards the house. She heard the distant sound of the car bringing her groceries on the road above. The rooks began their civic racket. I must decide what to do with the day, she thought. But not yet.

On the balcony was a long wooden chair with a footrest and padded cushions, and she thought: That will be damp, but lay down and found it warm and sweet-smelling, and she fell asleep again.

All week she stayed alone in the house and garden, collecting groceries from the top of the steep slope, leaving money and details of supplies for the next day. A can of soup, a piece of cheese, three apples. She worried at first about water. Someone had left out two jugs on the slab in the pantry, otherwise there was only a stream. She washed in the stream, boiled some of it, eventually drank it unboiled, catching it in a tin mug as it rushed by. She liked the earth closet. Seated there, the door wide to the view, she commanded territory crossed by Roman cohorts on the march to Salisbury.

On the third day she began to notice things to do in the garden and spent a morning getting out weeds, shouldering them in armloads to what seemed to be a compost heap. She amazed herself. She did not know where her knowledge came from. She marvelled at the rich soil—remembering the scratching in the earth by the skin-and-bone labourers in the lampshade hats of her Chinese childhood. She imagined a continuing supply of vegetables and along an old red wall a sea of European tulips. Then she remembered that this was Delilah’s garden.

In the evenings, after a first attempt when black flakes flew to the ceiling and the wick roared like a petrol fire, she mastered the oil lamp and sat reading the books about old theatre productions and biographies of great actors. Sometimes, prising a book out of the damp shelves, she let loose a sheaf of theatre programmes. Some were signed flamboyantly with forgotten names, some smelled of long-dead violets. Once or twice a pressed flower fell out—a gardenia (gone brown) or a rose—and crumpled before her eyes when she tried to pick it up. Some of the books were inscribed,
To my darling Delilah, the ultimate Desdemona
, or,
To my own Mark Antony from his adoring wife
and the date of over half a century ago
.

Love, thought Elisabeth. Adoration. Was it all just theatre?

O
ne day she woke up and forced herself to think: When am I going home? In fact she knew the date. Somewhere it was written down, perhaps on her return railway ticket. A taxi was to pick her up that morning, to put her back on the London train. She remembered that.

But when was it? She had no way of knowing the date: no radio, no daily paper. Letters had come for her but she had not opened them and they would not have helped. She would ask the village shop to put tomorrow’s newspaper in with her baked beans. They would not keep the
Telegraph
or
The Times
or the
Manchester Guardian
. Perhaps they only had the weekly local paper. She thought she’d try for the
Daily Express
. When she collected it, she found that she had only one day left. This day. The taxi would be here to take her towards London before nine o’clock tomorrow morning.

She could hardly bear it.

Suppose she ran from the house tomorrow and hid in the woods? She could creep back again in the evening? Or on another evening? She could sleep in the woods.

But then, word would go round. The village shop (wherever it was) would come making enquiries. Friends in London—Chambers—even Edward in Hong Kong.

I’m still trapped, she thought. I’ll have to go.

She cleared the kitchen of the glorious squalor she had made in it. She dusted. She trimmed the lamp, thinking that there were very few people left in the world who could trim a lamp (and where had she learned? And when?). Fitting back its beautiful globe, she smashed it to pieces and was horrified. The lamplight had been the wonder of her evenings and the carrying up of the heavy lamp, one hand shading the light, to bed at night. Oh, Delilah! Oh, if there were a telephone . . .

Well, no. Thank God. And I don’t know the number. I shall leave you, Delilah, a huge sum of money to replace the lamp. I shall scout the London markets for a new one.

She scrubbed the whole house clean. That evening she walked down the garden and looked at the red wall in the fading light. The rooks grumbled their way to bed.

In the morning she gathered her things together around the door and ate some bread. There was a fumbling shadow outside the window and she saw the Gypsy person ambling about outside. He was trying to look in.

“Yes?” she called, not opening the door. “Yes?” He was trailing the thing like an axe. “Who are you?”

He mouthed words at her. She thought: The poor thing’s simple. But the axe made her hesitate. He was speaking of a key. He needed a key. The taxi would be coming.

“But the
axe
,” she said.

“It’s for the w-w-w-wood. Firewood.”

She brought him in. “I’m so sorry. I was afraid of you.”

Among the things she had been leaving for the Dexters were two bottles of village shop wine and she handed them now to the Gypsy. He looked bewildered so she gave him some money. He took the key and the money and went ahead of her with her case and, when she was through the front door, he locked it behind her and put the key in his pocket. He went ahead, up the steep bank through the slit in the wall, not helping her, and when she had climbed the perilous slope there was her suitcase beside the road, and he was gone.

She sat down then on a stone on the roadside, her back to the wall. It was not yet a quarter past eight. It was beginning to be cloudy. Cloudy and wettish. England in October, although it was only September. Nobody passed by.

I had to be here for the taxi, she thought, before nine. I hadn’t thought of rain. It’s only eight twenty.

Out of her bag she dragged the brown and gold pashmina and wrapped it round her. When the rain began she rearranged the coloured silk to cover her head. Bright against the dark bushes she sat on in the rain and when the village shop van passed she waved, but she had paid her bill yesterday and the car went by.

Nobody came. The rain became heavier. It was after half past eight now and the wind blew the rain in surges and began to sound angry and bitter. The rain lashed back.

Elisabeth looked up the road and down it, and wondered how far it was to the village. Below her the cottage was all securely locked up. Maybe she should stumble down the slippery path again and shelter in the earth closet.

No. Ridiculous. The taxi was taking her to catch a particular train. At Waterloo Station a cab had been ordered by Edward’s Chambers to take her back to the flat in the Temple. All arranged. Foolproof.

But no taxi.

I’ll go and see if there
is
a house up there, she thought, and shuddered. She was frightened of houses in woods.

No. She would walk into Salisbury, carrying her suitcase. Her scar still hurt and still bled a little but she didn’t care. She tightened the silk cloth about her, picked up her suitcase and heard the sound of an approaching car. Thank God! Oh, thank God!

She stood holding the suitcase as the car spun into sight and it was not a taxi, but an ordinary private car going by. It was travelling very fast and splashed past her and down the hill, and vanished round the bend in the road and was gone.

So much, she thought, for answers to prayer.

She gripped the handle of her suitcase tighter, turned to face what she hoped would be Salisbury, soaked now to the skin, and heard the same car roaring back again up the hill, so fast that she had to jump into the side of the hedge.

The car stopped, the driver’s door flew open and Edward stood in the middle of the road.

Wet to the skin, enclosed in his long arms, Elisabeth began to cry and Edward to set up the curious roaring noises that had overtaken him since his stammering childhood but now only when he was on the point of tears.

She said, “Oh, Eddie! Oh, Filth!” her wet face against his clean, warm shirt.

She thought: I love him.

He said, “I thought you’d left me!”

S
cene Hong Kong.

Crackle and swish of limousine bringing the Judge home from court at exactly the appointed hour (insert clock: 7
P.M.
).

Interior. Elisabeth waiting for him in living room of Judges’ Lodgings, a row of mansions behind a wall and steel gates, guarded. She has an open library book face-down upon her knee. Outside, Edward Feathers’s driver rings the front-door bell.

Elisabeth counts silently. A full minute. Longer. Two minutes.

Slip-slop feet of Lily Woo from kitchen across polished hall.

Lily Woo: Good evening, sir.

Slip-slop she goes back
.

Edward (Filth) takes off shoes in hall. Clonk, then clonk. Puts on house shoes left him there by Lily. We hear him go to wash in cloakroom. He opens living-room door and sees Elisabeth as ever waiting. (Pretty dress, neat hair, gold chains, perfect fingernails. She is changed.)

Filth: Gin? All well?

Elisabeth: Yes, please. And no. Not all well. Today I’ve had a revelation. I am now officially old.

Filth: Ice? Old?

Elisabeth: Yes, and yes. Today I heard myself telling someone on the Children’s Aid committee that we’d been living in Hong Kong for over twenty years and that it seems no more than about six; and where did all the years go? Saying that, I’m old.

Filth: God knows where they’ve gone. Into the mist.

Bell rings outside in hall. Tinkle, tinkle. It is a small brass honeymoon bell from India. Slip-slop of girl’s feet again as she returns to kitchen. Filth looks into his gin and vermouth and gulps it down.

Elisabeth: You’re drinking too fast. Again.

Filth: I need it. Various things. What’s this, being old?

Elisabeth: I feel it. Suddenly. I’m melancholy at things changing. So, I’m old.

Filth: They need to change. It’s a place of changes. Annexing Hong Kong set the scene for change at the start. It will never settle down. Never be contented. But what did we bring but good? Work. Medicine. The English language. The Christian faith. And the Law. With all its shortcomings they don’t want to change the Law.

Goes over to the drinks tray
.

Elisabeth: That was the dressing bell. Dinner in twenty minutes.

Filth: Or three-quarters of an hour. She’s sloppy.

Elisabeth: Yes. Go on. Go up. Have a shower and change your shirt. You can have a whisky after dinner.

Scene Dining Room.

A quiet dinner. The silver and glasses are reflected in the rosewood dining table. Lamb chops, peas, new potatoes. (Lily Woo has learned to cook them very well and sometimes it is a pleasant change from chopsticks.) English vicarage tonight
.

Filth: It would be good to finish off with cheese now.

Elisabeth: It would be astonishing to finish off with cheese. There’s not a speck of it in the Colony. Your mind is going!

After dinner Filth stares at tomorrow’s Court papers. He goes to bed early, without the whisky. In the middle of the night Elisabeth wakes to find him in her bed, his head on her breast. She takes him in her arms
.

Filth: I condemned a man to death today.

Elisabeth: I know. I saw the evening paper. Was he guilty?

Filth: Guilty as hell. It was a
crime passionel
.