Fruit on the Bough: A heartfelt family saga about a brother and sister

by Ursula Bloom

  Little Great-Granny, amazingly care-free and open-minded, knew nothing of all this. In those days women were singularly unenlightened. She had understood the embracings of Great-Grandpa and had accepted them with resignation rather than with reciprocation. She believed that all men required consummation. Although in other respects unprejudiced, her stereotyped 1840 sex mentality convinced her that whereas it was perfectly proper (in fact desirable) with your husband, it was extremely improper and undesirable with anyone else. She had been shocked when George the elder had eloped with his old love. She had always tried to take a charitable aspect of the affair, to convince herself that there had been nothing wrong in it. After all they had perhaps only cared for each other as brother and sister. Sex she acknowledged, but sex instincts and, that most pernicious of all, hereditary sex instincts, she did not understand.

  It was significant of that epoch that their misunderstanding should foster unworthiness in the new generation. Twit and Jill were to pay for the 1840 prudism.

  Twit and Jill have at least had the advantage of witnessing two Englands, the pre-war comfortably misunderstanding, and the post-war, which perhaps understands too much.

  The upbringing of George the younger had been a helter-skelter affair. It was unobservant of instincts, it was ignorant of Freudian theories. George in his young manhood did more than merely discuss these all-engrossing matters with Amy. And having had his eyes opened, they were not opened to Amy alone. Whereas hitherto he had only offered forget-me-nots and roses in faithful imitation of Victorian aunts, now he offered his body. There was no man in the house to realise what was happening. An irate farmer, discovering George caressing his only daughter on a hay-rick, hauled him down and set about him with his belt. Unfortunately George merely reviewed this in the light of a martyrdom for love. The martyred cause flourishes valiantly in the youthful breast. He believed himself to be an idealist, and the idealism of the ’eighties was not too scintillating. George drenched himself in Oscar Wilde and William Morris and asceticism. He draped a red sash round his waist and stuck a jay’s wing in his hat. George cultivated a soul which was in reality stark body, but he did not realise it as such.

  He became a tutor.

  He had brains, and a certain flashing brilliance, but all along he was handicapped by being Emily’s son.

  V

  In the next few years it is impossible to follow George with any detail. He underwent all manner of changes, all manner of phases. He became engaged and disengaged with an alarming rapidity. Great-Granny and his aunts shook their heads. George was a sentimentalist, he had a convincing manner, and he swept women off their feet. He was a house master in a boys’ school. In deference to his asceticism his study was hung with a jaundiced art muslin. He wore his hair very long indeed, and he learnt the language of flowers. He was then engaged to a Miss Nellie Browne, with whom he sang duets from ‘Patience.’

  But George’s language of lilies was not so pure a matter as the title would imply. He visited his old home less and less. He began to criticise his grandmother and to laugh at his aunts. They were, he stated, narrow-minded, prudish, too ‘utterly utter.’ Certain it is that Great-Granny was no partisan of George’s affairs of the heart. Aunt Mabel rebuked him solemnly. George was never above feigning a penitence and pleading financial embarrassment. He accepted the occasional pound which Aunt Mabel and Great-Granny scraped together to send to him, and he excused himself by saying, ‘They like to do little things for me.’

  George never even heard of his mother. Little Henry, the second son, who had appeared so mysteriously, had been dragged round the London boarding-houses by Emily. He, also, had had no education. The middle child had chosen the better part and had conveniently died.

  ‘God took her back again,’ said Emily to one of her admiring gentleman friends in Highgate. But really it was a somewhat debatable point as to whether God had ever sent her!

  Suddenly, in the spring of 1888, George wrote home to his grandmother and told her that he was about to be married. He assured her that it was the real thing this time. The lady’s name was Isobel Brookes.

  VI

  We now approach the other side of the family tree, merging in with the Grimshaw bough, on which Twit and Jill sprang as fruit.

  As Isobel was their mother, it is only right that there should be recorded definitely the traits that lay within her. In reality Twit and Jill inherited little enough from the Brookes family.

  Isobel was the youngest of three children. Papa had been a worsted merchant in the North. He was a mild man, with a beautiful moustache, who, like most mild men, had made the mistake of marrying a termagant. Mamma had been a proud and ambitious woman, who believed respectability to be the sole passport to the next world. She had a Landseer, chenille curtain, and marble bust complex. Mamma had married Papa for his money, and had found later that he had not got as much as she had been led to believe, which was aggravating. She bore him three children: Charles, Blanche and Isobel. Charles was a devil-may-care youth who does not concern us. He went out into the world at an early age, with an unfortunate gift for imitative handwriting. Encouraging this gift, he went out of his sisters’ lives for ever. Blanche was entirely engrossed in what was ladylike. She believed it interesting to be ill. She posed as a delicate and fragile girl, who was invariably a martyr. The desire of her life was to ‘go into a decline.’ Unfortunately she had been endowed with robust health, a pale skin and an abundant obstinacy. The obstinacy made the most of the pale skin, which triumphed over the robust health. Isobel had been born with a male mentality.

  Mamma was widowed young. Poor Papa was the victim of a carriage accident, and although Mamma had never cared for him much in life, she doted upon him in death. A small, virile woman, with a fierce temper, she deliberately bit her way through life. Mamma believed in education. She could not bring herself to part with Charles, but she insisted that Blanche and Isobel should be finished abroad.

  In those days education was not so important as it is to-day, and a finishing abroad was considered to be almost eccentric. Blanche hated school. She howled herself sick, and set herself systematically to learn nothing at all. In the next generation Twit, in faithful imitation of his maternal aunt, did much the same thing. Isobel loved reading. She was born with some of her mother’s ambition, and she studied hard. In 1880 these two girls returned from a strenuous life in Lausanne and Florence, educated far beyond their position, to a middle-class house in the North, and to Mamma.

  Mamma was a dissatisfied and embittered woman. Blanche hated her. She even went so far as to think out suitable little methods of aggravating Mamma, which were usually most successful. Blanche had a positive genius for being annoying. Isobel merely prayed for peace. She did her best to maintain that peace, and in consequence Mamma disliked her. Mamma loved a good quarrel. She liked making people cry. She was a shrew of a woman, and her house was a little hell; but that was, in her eyes, all that it should be.

  Mamma believed that Blanche would marry. She wanted Blanche to marry, because she was her favourite daughter; therefore it was a tremendous blow to her pride when Isobel became engaged to George Grimshaw.

  Isobel, born in 1860, arrived in this world fifty years before her time. Had she lived to-day she would have gone far. Her observance was acute, her education had been wide, but she was badly hampered by middle-class respectabilities. The middle-class respectabilities of the ’eighties and ’nineties were binding. They might not have included wax flowers, but they were shrouded in Madras muslin. Bamboo was intriguing people. Customs were influenced by furniture.

  Isobel married George because she was sick of Mamma’s quarrelling with Blanche. She was tired out with Blanche’s imaginary illnesses, and she believed that marriage offered her a wider scope. The depths of Isobel’s mind were cluttered with wicker-work and cosy corners; it was a remote possibility that she would ever escape from them. She was aware that she was more in love with the emotion than with the man, but she was will
ing to run the risk. What she did not know was that George was a sensualist.

  Isobel was entirely ignorant of sex. It is amazing that the Victorians ever had children at all, considering how they glossed over such matters. Their ignorance was undoubtedly the parent of our perversion. Isobel married George one blissful September morning. She wore a green watered silk dress with one of those smart new bustles, and a white chip bonnet. She carried a bunch of mauve asters. They went to Lowestoft for their honeymoon because they believed it to be a genteel place. During the honeymoon Isobel suffered the tortures of disillusionment. Her maidenly attitude towards love was suddenly revolutionised. Her memories of Lowestoft were allied with a text-hung bedroom, from whose tiny windows you could view a pale line of sea between rising chimney-stacks. In this room all her feelings about love, and more especially about George, underwent a change. You cannot handle a woman’s latent sex being with brutality without it reflecting on her inner self. They returned to the small house which they had taken in the North, and from that day there began a stiff fight. Money was short. They lived on a hundred and twenty a year, and the person who retrenched was not George. From 1888 until 1892 they drifted along. George declared that Isobel was cold to him and that he had married a woman with a heart of ice. He was entirely misunderstood, he said. He never looked into himself for the possible explanation.

  In the spring of 1892 they were established in Kenloch, a remote Northern village, and George, having grown a little tired of school life, was coaching older men for Sandhurst. He had been fortunate in obtaining a resident pupil, Alan Hayne.

  Alan Hayne was the son of a baronet. He may have been a wild young man, but he happened to be the idealist that George was not. He had not steeped himself in asceticism; he was sincere. It is highly probable that he and George, closely confined in the same house, would have clashed badly had it not been that Alan kept himself reined in. He had fallen in love with Isobel. She was his senior by some years, for at that time Isobel was nearly thirty-two, and he was in his early twenties. Many a young man has suffered an exquisite passion for an older woman. Alan felt it burning deliciously within him. I have no records of what passed between these two. It seemed an innocent enough friendship.

  During the winter of 1891 and 1892, George had had a flirtatious episode with a woman who had a face like a mouse. Isobel was hurt by it. She was hurt because of public opinion, which bruised her susceptibilities. Isobel, with four years of marriage behind her and each spelling disillusion, was ashamed that she should despise her husband. She had until now been unable to confide in anyone. Mamma was unapproachable. Blanche would have been annoying about it. She had thought of little Great-Granny, but it is always difficult to confide in the other side of the house. Alan, being with her, saw what was afoot. She could not keep up the pretence. She was no longer reticent. He deliberately tore down the curtain with which she struggled to shroud that tragedy that was her marriage. She was a proud woman and she was afraid lest anyone should see the bitter remorse that, in her solitude, she suffered.

  How much, or how little, Alan Hayne saw, we do not know.

  It is all too long ago now; there is only her tear-sodden diary left. Anyway, it is not too vital to the story.

  VII

  In the late spring of 1892 Isobel found that she was pregnant. For some time George had bewailed their lack of children, and had declared that he was undoubtedly a family man. He had employed his childlessness as a convenient peg on which to hang the cloak of his martyrdom. Yet, perversely enough, when he discovered the imminence of Jill, he was irritated. He declared that they could not afford a child. Isobel listened imperturbably. When he had finished she began to state her case with quiet persistence. She hated the North. She was sick to death of slag-heaps and steel filings. She had never appreciated the grey atmosphere and the improvidence of the mining community, and she wanted to get away from them now. She wanted to move before the child was born, and she suggested that George should seek employment elsewhere.

  They quarrelled at the time, but Isobel, being insistent, won the day. George read an advertisement for a schoolmaster somewhere in Kent, and applied for it. By mere chance he acquired the position.

  In Kent, Jill was born.

  Between Jill and Twit there were exactly two years. The years were indicative of change. George, having passed through probationary periods, had the good fortune to be offered a coach’s position. Jill was born in a small house with one maid-of-all-work and only Isobel to tend her infant wants. Twit came into the world in a country house at Greenley. There were a couple of maids and a most excellent nurse, for the Grimshaws had gone up in the world.

  Little Great-Granny passed on to another land. I think of her as having died with a chuckle on her sweet old lips. She had always sought the amusing in life. Mamma had re-married, and was bitterly regretting it. She had married for position, and the military gentleman who had supplied this had married for financial gain. There had been no love on either side, and they told each other of it daily. Blanche was still being ladylike.

  Through the infancy of the two children little happened. George had his good and bad moments, his ideals and his delusions. Isobel faced the situation bravely. They lived in the large country house capable of accommodating four pupils. Mercifully she was an able housekeeper, and by her thrift and intelligence George lived. He was eternally dominated by sex questions, and praying that he might meet the great romance of his life. Isobel was worn with it. She knew that she was not the great romance, because he had told her so often, but she went on bravely. I have often wondered what torturing doubts assailed Isobel as she gave the best years of her life to George in the desolate country house. It was an additional cruelty that she should have been educated above his standards. George might have been a brilliant man, but it was a superficial veneer. He had an amazing knack of gathering the froth from knowledge and convincing you that he had plumbed the depths. His standards and appreciations were allied to the ascetic decade. He still maintained a sneaking regard for lace curtains, and crotchet loops, Miss Proctor’s poems, and Sidney Smith’s music. George was cheap, whereas Isobel was sound.

  This was the heredity lying behind the two children. Jill, a sturdy, splendid little person, almost too pretty to be true, and Tristram, two years her junior.

  VIII

  Significant of their futures were their births. One Sunday afternoon in the shaggy December of 1892, Isobel and George attended service at the local church. They returned to tea alone. On Sundays the pupils invariably went out visiting. Isobel became aware that she was feeling ill, and wandered aimlessly about until she discovered that she was feeling very ill indeed. At half-past six Jill was tucked into her cot, where she slept a serene sleep, never troubling to take a second look into the new world. Jill habitually accepted facts with a cheerful complacency. She accepted the fact of being born in that wise. She did not make a fuss. A few weeks after her first birthday, she had a romp with a cat, the first that she had ever been allowed to handle. Isobel, noticing that the game had ceased abruptly, inquired the reason. Jill was not disturbed. She explained it solemnly.

  ‘Pussy got pins in her toes,’ said Jill.

  But Tristram was illogical.

  He was born one wet and windy March night at an inconvenient and unexpected moment, and he proceeded to scream till dawn. He contracted pneumonia, and, on recovering, sickened with gastritis. At six months old Twit was more like a bird than a boy. His great dark eyes had sunk into two pits, his thin little face was sagging and jaundiced. His nose had become acutely pointed. By the time that he was a year old he had contracted every unreasonable illness that he might not have been expected to contract. Physically he was a wreck.

  In staggering infancy he named himself Twit, and as that was the only word he was capable of uttering until he was three, it became familiar. Whether Twit wouldn’t or couldn’t talk, nobody discovered. It might have been sheer inability, or gross obstinacy. His parents excused it
as inability; Jill knew it to be obstinacy. He was going to do exactly what he wanted, and nothing would deter him.

  To this very day Twit is a mule. He started life by refusing to talk; he carried it on by refusing to learn. Even now nobody knows whether it is that he can’t or he won’t. He has never enlightened them.

  THE STORY

  PART ONE

  PRE-WAR ENGLAND

  (I) TWIT

  CHAPTER I

  Mahomet said: ‘They plotted, but God plotted, and of plotters God is the best.’

  BEGINNING.

  I

  In the May of 1914 Jill contemplated breaking off her engagement with Stanley. She was twenty-one, and they had been engaged since she was eighteen. Jill would have severed the tie before, but her obstinacy had been provoked. Her mother had taken up the wrong attitude towards it, for Isobel was vehemently against the whole affair. Her very vehemence ignited the pyre of Jill’s determination. There was also Twit.

  Jill, sitting alone in the country lane, was wondering how she felt about her brother. She was, she supposed, passionately attached to him, yet she had to admit that there were times when she literally hated him. What was even worse, she despised him. You can hate in a clean and friendly manner, but to despise is soiling.

  To-day Grandmother Grimshaw was being buried in Highgate Cemetery, which accounted for the new black frock that Jill had made herself. She expected that her father would be at Highgate, and Uncle Henry too. Since Isobel and George had separated when Jill was seventeen, the girl had not been interested in her father. But she was intrigued with Uncle Henry, about the manner of whose birth there was the enchanting element of uncertainty. It whetted your whistle for more.