by William Boyd
“Lucky old you. But that shirt won’t be popular, I can promise you.”
Felix took out his cigarette case. “Want one?” he offered.
“No thanks, old chap, not while I’m driving.”
Felix lit his and blew smoke at the passing countryside. The bulging hedgerows were bright with flowers, but the leaves on the trees and bushes looked tired and dull. So far, the summer of 1914 had been a good one. The cornfields were bleached and ready for harvest; some fields already contained their line of reapers, scythes swishing rhythmically as they made their slow but steady advance into the ranks of corn.
They turned off the main road and the hedges rose to overshadow the lane. Driving through shade after the sun made Felix shiver.
“It’s all so predictable, isn’t it?” he said.
“What?”
“Summer. You know: hot sun, corn, birds singing. All that rot.”
Gabriel looked at him, smiling. “Honestly, Felix, sometimes I just can’t make you out at all.”
Felix shrugged. “Never mind.” He paused. “Looking forward to tomorrow?”
Gabriel stiffened slightly, then relaxed. “Of course, you idiot. After all, it was me who asked her to get married, not anyone else. She—that is, Charis—is looking forward to meeting you.” He smiled again. “Can’t think why. I’ve told her all about you. Right clever Dick, my little brother is, I said. Hey!”
Felix punched Gabriel lightly in the shoulder causing the car to swerve.
“Watch out, Gabe,” Felix said mock-seriously. “‘Bride-groom and best man in automobile accident.’”
“Talking about best man,” Gabriel said, “remind me to have a word later on today.”
“Words of advice from big brother?”
“Something like that.”
They drove on another mile before they reached a gate set in a long stone wall. They drove through it and up an avenue of elms towards the medium-sized country house which was Stackpole Manor.
“Home sweet home,” Felix said.
The elms gave way to high rhododendrons. In front of the house was a gravelled square and a lawn on which two little girls in pale pink lacy dresses scampered, being chased by a small yapping terrier. Three cars were parked in front of the main door.
“Good Lord!” said Felix. “Don’t tell me Mother’s started a taxi service.”
“Just the family,” Gabriel said. “Gathering of the clans. Nearly everyone’s here.”
“Oh no,” Felix groaned, then, as the two little girls ran up: “Let me guess, these are Albertine’s. What are their names, Gabriel? I can’t remember.”
“My God, Felix, you can certainly spout rubbish.”
“Hello, Felix,” said one of the little girls shyly.
“Uncle Felix, please, Dora. But hello anyway, Dora. And hello to you, Harriet,” he said in deep, suitably avuncular tones. “If that’s your beastly dog will you please stop it barking like that.”
Felix stood on the gravel and looked up at the manor house. It was a strange building. The front of the house, which faced to the north, was a classical three-storey Georgian brick facade with a neat pillared portico around the front door and regular rows of sash windows precisely descending in size as they moved higher. However, Felix’s uncle Gerald, the previous occupant, had added what was in effect an entirely new and larger building to the back, obliterating the austere southern facade with an edifice of modern design. This forced Siamese pairing was, to Felix’s eyes, an act of desecration. Now the landscaped south lawns were confronted by a cluttered and inelegant jumble of styles. On the ground floor were three reception rooms sharing a long stone terrace. The ground floor walls were of red brick but the two above them were faced with hanging tiles, reminiscent of grossly enlarged fish scales. The large bay window of the downstairs drawing room was carried up through the next two floors to form a squat turret. Other bay windows rising from the new dining room and library were half-timbered, the windows filled with leaded lights. Felix’s father, Major Cobb, had made his mark on the unhappy building by enlarging the servants’ wing to the east—new kitchen, scullery and pantry, wash house and coal cellar. And at the western extremity Mrs Cobb, not to be outdone, had appended a neo-gothic conservatory and loggia.
Gabriel stood at the door with Felix’s bags watching him with amused tolerance.
“Come on, Felix,” he said. “You’ve only been up to London for ten days. It’s scarcely the return of the prodigal.”
“Well that’s what it feels like,” Felix said. “Even when I’ve only been away for a night. What possesses them to live in the place?”
He didn’t need an answer; he knew why. Stackpole Manor had been bought by his late uncle, Gerald Cobb, who had astutely invested the meagre Cobb inheritance in the electro-plating industry. With the money he’d made he had bought Stackpole Manor, built on his new half, and had settled down with his wife, Mary, to raise a family. No offspring had been forthcoming, however, and the deficiency or whoever was responsible for it had never come to light. In 1896 Gerald Cobb drowned in a sailing accident. His widow left the Manor and took her childless grief and increasingly unbalanced mental state to another house the family owned some ten miles away. The Manor, the home farm and the electro-plating works in Wolverhampton passed to Gerald’s younger brother, Hamish, a major in the Duke of Connaught’s Own West Kent regiment. Major Cobb resigned his commission and established himself in the Manor forthwith. And as if to taunt brother Gerald’s shade, the major and his wife promptly conceived and produced a child, Felix, some ten years after they had assumed their large family to be complete. Felix had been born and brought up in Stackpole Manor, yet he, of all the Cobb children (there were four others, girls, apart from Gabriel and himself) was the least attracted to the place, the most reluctant to call it home.
They went into the hall. It was unnaturally dark after the glare outside, and deliciously cool. The hall was tiled in black and white marble. A wooden staircase swept up from the middle and divided itself in two against the wall, beneath what had once been a large window. This, however, had been bricked in as a result of Uncle Gerald’s extensions, and now the only light came from two small casement windows on either side of the front door. Double doors led off to reception rooms to the right and left and other doors had been knocked through the back wall to gain access to the new apartments. From one of these ushered Felix’s mother with plaintive cries of, “Felix, darling, darling, you’re home.”
Felix allowed himself to be enveloped in his mother’s plump, odorous arms. She was a large soft pink woman, dressed, as ever, in the latest fashions. Today she wore a heliotrope satin tea-gown, fastened at the side with a large hook.
As he had grown older Felix had come to realize that his mother was a redoubtably silly and sentimental woman. But, equally, as this awareness had established itself so had a steadily growing respect for the certain innate qualities of shrewdness and intractability she exhibited. He saw that she treated her marriage to his father as a relentless challenge, an unending struggle under appallingly adverse conditions to get her own way. At first this manifested itself only in the naming of her children, but lately, as she had come to know her enemy, or as he had grown more senile and eccentric, evidence of her own long suppressed personality came increasingly to the fore. She dressed in the most unsuitable clothes, followed interests that, in the earlier years of her marriage, would have been banned forthwith, and, for this was her greatest weakness, surreptitiously indulged in her taste for the modern. She had installed refrigeration in the kitchen, electrified the house, bought motor cars and, her current campaign, was trying to move from coal fires to hot water heating.
Felix was, he now accepted, a living proof of this silent life-long insurrection. As her youngest son, and through lack of interest on his ageing father’s part, he had been indulged and brought up in a way quite different from that of his brother and sisters. Felix also realized that this triumph of his mother had prompted
the animosity that existed between him and his sisters and the mutual near-contempt that he and his father held for each other. From his mother’s point of view, the kind of person he now was—independent, self-assured, above all, different— stood as a monument, living testimony to her own spirit and pluck. But it brought with it its own share of problems.
However, Felix thought, as he allowed his mother’s love to wash unobstructed over him, he was glad she had persevered. And besides, he reflected, there was no telling that he might have turned out as he had anyway. Gabriel had been the focus of his father’s ambitions and attention all his life and yet he had barely been corrupted by militarism. The two were as close as brothers could be. Parents, he decided, had only a superficial impact on their offspring. As Holland said: you either had the right soul or you hadn’t.
He turned his attention back to his mother, who was pushing the lock of hair off his forehead and being sceptical about his health.
“Are you well, Felix? Darling, I do like your shirt and tie. Don’t you think he looks tired, Gabriel? Do you want to lie down, my dear?”
“No thank you, Mother. I’m fine.”
“Did you have a pleasant time with the Hollands? You didn’t do too much I hope.”
“Rest assured on that point, Mother. Holland and I do as little as possible. Am I in my own room?”
“Of course. Nearly everyone’s here. Yseult and Henry, and little Charles. Oh, he’s in your dressing room. I hope you don’t mind. We’re so crowded. And Albertine and Greville. Did you see the girls outside? We’re just waiting for Eustacia and Nigel…” She paused. “Do you want to see your father, dear? He’s upstairs, in his study.”
“Not really,” Felix said breezily. “I’ll see him at dinner, shan’t I?”
After lunch—a veal mould, cold meat and pickles—Felix and Gabriel went for a walk in the garden. From the back of the house a long lawn sloped gently down about fifty yards to three large ornamental fishponds, planted round with bushes and stocked with fat, slow carp. On the right was an ornamental rose garden separated from the lawn by a neat briar hedge. Carefully aligned screens carried a riotous freight of ramblers. A path avenued with pleached lime trees led through the screens and flower beds to a dark yew bower, decorated with spanking new classical busts. Neglected for a few years, everything now evidenced the most careful cultivation. Ornamental gardens, Mrs Cobb intuited, would be back in favour soon. On the left of the lawn was an orchard with wooden beehives scattered about it. Beyond the orchard a beech and oak wood grew.
“Heavens,” Felix said. “What a heat!” He took off his jacket and slung it over his shoulder. It was one of those flabby, corpulent midsummer days.
“Fancy a swim?” Gabriel suggested.
“Good idea, that man,” Felix said. “Just let me change. I’ll get some towels.”
Ten minutes later Gabriel and Felix—now dressed in white flannels, open necked shirt and rope-soled tennis shoes—climbed over the eve-gate at the foot of the orchard, walked across the small bridge that spanned the stream feeding the fishponds and set out along a mud path that led through the wood. About a quarter of a mile from the Manor they stopped at the garden gate of a small stone cottage. The lawn had been freshly mown and the flower beds newly hoed and replanted. Even what Felix could see of the driveway on the other side looked re-gravelled.
“What do you think?” Gabriel asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Like it? It’s where Charis and I are going to live. Father and Mother’s wedding present.”
“Oh. Very nice. But didn’t Cyril live here?” Felix referred to the Manor’s young gardener and odd-job man.
“Yes. He’s been moved to the village. We had to do a lot of work on the place. Cyril and co. lived in a fair old squalor.” Gabriel paused, looking over his new home with pride. “Charis hasn’t seen it yet.”
“Where is she by the way?” Felix asked. “She is around somewhere, I take it.”
“Yes, you great oaf. She’s staying over at Melton with Aunt Mary.”
“Aunt Mary? God help the poor girl. Whose idea was that?”
“Not much alternative, I’m afraid. Bride and groom have got to be kept apart. Her papa can’t come over from India…Aunt Mary’s not that bad.”
“She has her days.”
“Anyway I saw Charis yesterday. She’s fine.”
Felix tested the garden gate, noting the new latch. “I bet Cyril wasn’t too pleased about being turfed out.”
“Who?”
“Cyril.” Sometimes Gabriel was so slow. “Whose house this was.” Felix laughed. “Lord the air must have been blue.” But Gabriel had already walked ahead.
“Come on,” Gabriel shouted. “Cut along, Cobb, cut along.”
Felix caught up with him as they tramped over the dry crumbling furrows at the edge of a silently restless com field.
“Haven’t had a dip in the pond for years, have we, Felix?” Gabriel said. “D’you remember that day we pushed Eustacia in?”
“Useless Eustace,” Felix said. “Father leathered us though.” He picked up a stick and swished it at clumps of dusty nettles and delicate cow-parsley heads.
“Is that how you decapitate Pathans or fuzzy-wuzzies or whatever you call them, Gabriel?” He brutally hacked down a stand of ragwort in illustration.
“I wish it were,” Gabriel said. “I’m afraid I’ve wielded nothing more lethal against my fellow man than a polo mallet.”
“That’s good,” Felix cried. He always liked to celebrate Gabriel’s rare sallies of wit.
“I’ve stuck a few wild pigs, though,” Gabriel said.
“Disgusting habit. Did they squeal terribly? Do stuck pigs squeal?”
“I should say they do. I would squeal if somebody stuck me.” Gabriel looked serious for a moment. “I may soon be doing worse than that. We all may.”
“What? Worse than sticking pigs?”
“No. Raising arms against our fellow man.”
“What are you talking about, Gabriel?”
“The Anglo-German war. It’s coming, Felix. I’m sure of it.”
“Do they only take the Daily Mail in your mess?” Felix scoffed. “I’ve never heard such rot. There’s not going to be any war.” He ran ahead, leaping and bounding in a theatrical imitation of euphoria. “Holland says everyone is having far too good a time to go to war. Don’t you think this is the most wonderful time to be alive, Gabriel?”
Gabriel smiled. “Well I suppose I do. But then I’ve got my own special reasons.”
“So have I,” Felix said, “I think I’d rather be living now than at any other time. Don’t you think so? There’s so much in the air.” They climbed over a gate.
“Besides,” Felix went on, “they can’t have a war. I’m going to Oxford.”
“Oh well then, of course not. I’m sure the Kaiser will wait until you’ve got your B.A.”
They had reached the river. It ran turbidly between wheat fields, before some subterranean impediment caused it to take an unusually sharp bend. At this point five mature weeping willows grew over the large pool formed by the swerve in the river’s progress. The gentle current eddied and swirled, slowly cutting into the facing bank. On one side of the pool was a mud and pebble beach. On the other the overhanging bank shadowed a wide channel some six to eight feet deep. It was possible to climb the willow trees and drop into the cool green waters from a considerable height.
“Looks inviting,” Gabriel said, unbuttoning his shirt. “It seems to get bigger every year.” He slipped off his clothes until he stood naked.
“I hope there’s no country maiden passing by,” he said and climbed easily up the accommodating boughs of the willow trees, before launching himself with a whoop into the pool. He swam splashily across to the far side and sloshed out of the water on to the beach.
“Superb,” he called. “Come on, slowcoach. It’s not a bit cold.”
Felix stared for a moment at his brother’s powerf
ul naked body, dappled with the knife-like shadows of the willow leaves. He had a broad slab of a chest covered in a sprinkling of fine blond hairs. His abdomen was flat and muscled and the line of his pelvis was clearly marked. His ruddy, pink cock and balls, tensed from the cold water, were compact in their nest of gingery brown hairs that spread across his groin over his heavy thighs. Water runnelled off his chest and stomach and dripped in a stream from his stubby cock. His scrotum, big as a fist, was wrinkled and firm.
Felix felt himself blushing. He folded his trousers and shirt with undue care and laid them at the foot of the willow. He was conscious of his white half-formed body, his thin chest, his little tuft of pubic hair. Gabriel seemed so solid in comparison, his body tapering from broad shoulders. Felix felt feeble and soft. He undid the cord on his drawers and let them fall to his ankles. He climbed the tree and almost immediately felt dizzy and insecure. He looked down at the swirling shifting mass of the water, the frolicking prisms of light, some twelve feet below. It seemed like a hundred and twenty. He hung on to a branch, gathering his courage. Gabriel stood waiting on the mud beach, arms akimbo.
“Jump, Felix. Leap in. It won’t hurt.”
Felix let go of his reassuring bough and fell.
Felix dried his hair with the towel and ran it one last time over his naked body. A beam of afternoon sun broke through the willow leaves and warmed his left hip and thigh. Holding the towel in front of him he covertly ran his hand over his cock and balls, feeling the sensations swarm and jostle. If Gabriel hadn’t been present, he thought, he would have frigged there and then, in the open air.
Gabriel pulled on his shirt and tucked it into his flannels. He held out his arms and breathed deeply.
“Ah, splendid,” he said. “I used to dream about this sort of afternoon when I was in India.” He ran both his hands through his damp hair. “Got a comb?” he asked smiling.
Felix was silenced for an instant with a sudden tingling surge of inarticulate love for his brother. He felt numb and weightless with its power. He swallowed. “No,” he said. “Silly. I should have brought one.”