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

by Ursula Bloom

  ‘Got you, my lad.’

  The remorseless hand and the irate voice belonged to the schoolmaster himself, who had been waiting for this opportunity. Not only did he deal with Twit, but he returned him in person to Mr. Andrews, who also dealt out justice.

  Twit had hoped that the school would consider him in the light of a hero for inadvertently pursuing the enemy into his own country ‒ it had been an accident, for he had believed the place to be empty, but the boys were not to know that. They might consider him brave. Unfortunately, when he returned to his companions he was not hailed in the light of a conqueror. They merely considered him to be a fool.

  ‘Whatcher want to go barging in like that for? You ought to have known the old man would be there. We’ll be gated now, and all through you.’

  ‘You never can play without getting somebody into a mess. What did you do it for, Combies?’

  ‘I thought I’d give him beans.’

  ‘Bet you got beans.’

  Instead of acquiring a wreath of bays he was despised more than ever. They sent him to Coventry.

  It was a wretched term, and it ended more wretchedly still. On the Monday before Good Friday, Twit, expressly against rules, went down to the long ditch meadow. He went down because he had seen bobbing caps under the hedge. He believed that sundry prefects were engaged in a stolen game of cricket there. They broke up on the Wednesday and you could not get into much trouble, because for the last few days the masters relaxed rules. Besides, who was there to see him? Mr. Andrews was doing exam papers, Nelly was tinkering with his motor bicycle. Yellow Fungus had gone down with a return of the jaundice earlier in the term. The Fox was examining the small fry in their knowledge of English.

  Twit, observing the prefects, and particularly an elegant boy whom he detested, and who was known as Growler, seized a golden opportunity cautiously. He crept closer. Under the gaunt willow tree of the long ditch lay a huddle of coats. They lay limply, like dead things among the springing grasses. If he could steal the coats and hold them up as hostage, what a success it would be!

  Twit peeped round the trunk of the tree.

  It was sheer misfortune that the cricket ball should come along at the same moment and knock him completely senseless.

  V

  Isobel had taken a small villa in a row of small villas which stood in a cheap road at St. Laurence’s. The poorness of the place was galling to an ambitious woman, and she wept anew as she watched her furniture carried into it. George was allowing her a hundred and twenty a year, and paying for Twit’s schooling, and there was but a small margin. St. Laurence’s was a small town close to London. She had come here because she believed that, should necessity compel her, she would be able to let a bedroom and make a little extra. She hoped that people would call on her. Jill had had a miserable girlhood and Isobel wanted her to marry. She was not match-making, but she did want some future for her daughter. Anyway, though the villa might be shoddy, and the place suburban, it was a beginning, and that was something.

  Before the villa was a small garden with a rowan tree, and several clumps of iris. There was also a small grating which should have lit the cellar below, but which was choked with weeds. Four steps led to the porch and the aggressively pretentious front door. Inside was a thin hall, with a varnished paper and cheap stairs rising too steeply before the door itself. There was a front room which was cramped, and a large comfortable back room which led into a small uncomfortable kitchen. The agent had advertised four bedrooms, but the fourth was somewhat hampered by the presence of the bath. This was a useless affair, as no water supply was connected with it. The house had stood empty for some time, and beyond the windows lay a square of choked and weedy garden, where here or there a frail daffodil peered incuriously upwards. They had hardly settled in before Twit arrived home with concussion of the brain and a broken eardrum. Twit’s condition roused Isobel’s suspicions, and for the first time she admitted the unsuitability of Whoreham. The villa and the meagre hundred and twenty a year were shocks, but Twit was a greater one. He had learnt nothing at all and had been badly hurt physically. In the one comfortable sitting-room, Jill faced her mother.

  ‘He wasn’t the sort of boy to go to school. I told you he couldn’t see after himself.’

  ‘Poor boy! He’s sensitive. Now what shall we do with him? He can’t possibly return there.’

  ‘The question is,’ said Jill, ‘what is he going to be?’ She was telling herself, ‘I doubt if he will ever be anything. He’s that sort of boy. What are we going to do with Twit ‒ what can we do with him?’

  Upstairs Twit lay in bed with an intolerable headache and an ear that cracked in waves of excruciating pain. He lay there counting the pink medallions of the wallpaper, and wondering what the future would bring forth. He did not like the villa, but he was glad to have got away from his father. He wished somebody would leave him some money, so that he could snap his fingers at everybody.

  Into the subsequent counsel of war George had to be summoned. He had installed Miss Smith as lady housekeeper at Greenley, and the proposition was an economical one. No longer did he issue weekly cheques to her. She was fed and housed inclusively in his own budget. There had been some unlooked-for hitch about the three hundred a year. At the moment it was not available, being left to her with some other person having a life interest in it. That was, of course, trying, but it had to be accepted. On the whole the present arrangement was not a bad one. George had disposed of a wife, who, if she were not weeping, was nagging, and vice versa. He had rid himself of a daughter who had managed to look superb contempt at him in a most embarrassing manner. He was quite comfortable at last, when Twit must needs go and upset matters. George believed that Twit possessed diabolical and secret powers of causing confusion. With a bad grace he went to St. Laurence’s. He did not like the locality and he did not like the villa. He liked his family still less. It was quite obvious that Twit could not return to Whoreham, and George was prepared to agree, seeing that by this arrangement he saved forty pounds a year, which was the price of Twit’s annual tuition.

  Isobel complained that she could not keep both children on the hundred and twenty, and that the allowance must be more elastic. George considered that such a proposition was mere impertinence.

  ‘You think of nothing but money,’ said George; ‘what about the poor boy’s health? Are neither of you going to consider that?’

  ‘We can’t starve.’

  ‘I am making you a handsome allowance. It is the uttermost farthing that I can pay. It is time Twit earned.’

  ‘He can’t.’

  ‘I had to when I was his age.’

  George’s eternal trump card brought out with an exaggerated triumph. After that he inevitably washed his hands of the whole affair. Isobel subsided into sobs. It was Jill who stood up to her father, but, determined as she might be, she did not gain her point.

  During the next few weeks Isobel lost touch with her relatives. She was too proud to admit defeat to her own family. Blanche wrote once or twice, but Isobel did not reply. She did not want pity. She did not want sneers. The Grimshaws she was afraid to correspond with, for the simple reason that she did not know what George might say. She wanted to be left to herself, and in this crisis she leant solely on Jill. She was ashamed that she should lean on anyone so young. Jill was capable. She shouldered the burden of responsibility with courage, but her capability went to her head. She made up her mind that Twit must go into a Bank, whether he liked it or not. It would be a probationary period while he was looking round to see what he wanted to be. He would also be earning. Once, when she was a child, she had met an eminent banker, and to him Jill wrote. The banker was a philanthropist and he sent a form strongly recommending Twit as a candidate. Isobel believed the boy’s fortune to be made, and blessed the fortuitous chance that had brought it about.

  On a Thursday morning, Twit sat for the very simple examination that was to pass him into the Bank, and returned that evening to his
excited family.

  ‘Well?’ they said. They had gone to the station to meet him, and were standing there all eager impatience. Jill took one arm and Isobel the other, marshalling him down the cheap little road. They were both talking at the same time.

  ‘Tell us all about it, Twit?’

  ‘I got something in my eye.’

  ‘Never mind that. The exam. Do you think you’ve passed?’

  ‘I don’t know. They asked silly questions. Nothing to do with a Bank.’

  ‘What did they ask?’ Jill shook his arm in her impatient excitement.

  ‘The Home Counties was one thing.’

  ‘You knew that, of course?’

  ‘Yes. I knew them, some of them, anyway. It didn’t matter much.’

  ‘Twit,’ said Isobel, ‘it did matter. It mattered very much indeed. What else?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno.’ He was indifferent.

  It was Jill who became sharp and decisive. ‘You must tell us, Twit. You must remember them all. What else?’

  ‘Rome. They asked me where Rome was.’

  ‘You knew?’

  ‘Of course. It’s on the Italian coast; there’s a volcano there.’

  Isobel felt her pulse suddenly quicken in fear. Jill, stung to exasperation, wheeled round and shook Twit by the shoulder. ‘You little fool! You know that’s Naples. What else?’

  ‘It’s no good getting mad with me. I’m not lucky in exams.’

  ‘But Twit …’

  ‘I expect I’ve failed. I don’t care much. I’m no good at anything …’

  They turned in at the ugly square gate, and the door wheezed to on them. In the weed-choked garden Jill turned on him. ‘Haven’t you any guts? Haven’t you any go at all? Here’s mother in this mess and yet you are being a martyr about it. It’s half of it your fault, because you won’t try and help.’ Twit broke into tears. He wept noisily against the spider-infested summer-house, and Jill, watching him, noticed that he had not put on a clean collar. His hands, too, were ingrained with dirt.

  (II) JILL

  CHAPTER I

  ‘Happiness is the only sanction of life: where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experience.’ ‒ Santayama.

  JEUNE FILLE.

  I

  Twit had failed in his examination. The influence of the eminent banker being great, he was vouchsafed a second chance. This time Jill stood over him while he dressed. As she had washed his things (a laundry was unthinkable, and her mother too frail to attempt the work), she knew that he started clean. He failed again, but owing to his recommendation he was allowed to pass into the Bank. Jill wept tears of gratitude, and Isobel assured the world in general that she had always predicted that Twit would turn up trumps in the end.

  The three months’ probationary period was eventful. Jill started well by superintending Twit’s toilet every day, but she could not keep it up. The housework and the laundry demanded much of her. The moment she relaxed her vigilant eye. Twit went back to shock-headed untidiness. After all, he argued, why should he bother?

  Jill did not notice because she happened to meet Stanley. The Stanley episode started romantically at the very moment when Jill was starved for a love adventure. She scraped together the necessary five shillings and a frock in pale pink wool-back satin and went to a dance. The dance took place at the Town Hall, and she was escorted by a girl friend. People had not called on Isobel in her villa residence. The few who knew of her arrival at St. Laurence’s whispered furtively that she had ‘left’ her husband. They sensed one of those nasty mysteries in which the woman, however innocent, is inevitably blamed. Jill had been unspeakably lonely until she met Effie Hancox over the small matter of new-laid eggs.

  Eggs were difficult to obtain. Almost immediately upon her arrival in the town, Jill, country-bred and unsuspecting, had been initiated into the strange etiquette of ‘breakfast eggs,’ ‘morning eggs,’ ‘fresh eggs,’ ‘cooking eggs,’ ‘new-laid eggs,’ and the simple but impossible specimens known as merely ‘eggs.’ Isobel, sick at heart over the metamorphosis of her chequered career, had lost interest in life. Unable to afford a doctor, and at her wits’ end, Jill relied on milk and eggs to bring her mother back to health. The milk was easy, but the eggs were difficult. In one of her walks she had seen a small and inconspicuous notice tacked up outside the Hancox’ house, stating that they had eggs for sale. She bought some and, finding them good, returned for more. In this manner she came to make the acquaintance of Effie, a fat, robust girl of twenty-two. Effie was not prepossessing; she was blowsy, and she did her hair over too large pads so that it distorted her head. Isobel did not approve of her at all. Isobel felt that Jill and Effie were not in the same position in life, and therefore they could not be friendly. Isobel suffered badly from the ‘class’ instincts which were part of her late Victorian heritage. She was an ambitious woman and she was anxious that Jill should do well for herself. She did not consider that the friendship with Effie was at all suitable, yet, because she understood how miserably lonely Jill was, she could not but suffer it. Jill in pink wool-back satin, and Effie in mauve dewdrop chiffon, escorted each other to the dance.

  Here it was that Jill met Stanley.

  II

  He was introduced to her by a smug M.C. in very shiny shoes and with a waxed moustache. Stanley advancing towards her took on the air of a Romeo, a Paris, an Adonis in one. Stanley tripped into her life just when she was bewildered with the effort of soothing Isobel’s heartache, and propelling the unwilling Twit in the way in which he should go. Stanley was not too tall, and was remarkably slight. He was fair, and his hair curled up in front like a little crest. His eyes reminded her of the sea, grey, with a greenish tinge, yet at the same time vividly blue as the scillas had been in the Greenley garden.

  They danced together, and somehow when Jill danced with Stanley she forgot the past. Stanley was gentle and solicitous; in him she sensed something that appealed to her. It was youth responding to youth, but the girl did not recognise it as that. Later, in a dark sitting-out room, they sat side by side on a low window-seat and he kissed her. The kiss was what Jill had wanted all through the last difficult months. It was the night flame of romance on the altar of her youth. She found herself longing to say, ‘Take care of me. Take me away. Prop me up.’ And she found that her eyes were moist.

  ‘We must meet again,’ urged Stanley.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  She told him. All the time from the dance-room came the oft purring of slippered feet against parquet, and the throb of Archibald Joyce’s band. It was the exquisite allure of ‘Vision of Salome’ that came faintly to them. To Jill it was romance, it was atmosphere, it was love. It was the sparkle of dew on virgin soil, starshine on an exquisite maiden night. It glittered into the youthful whitenesses of her unawakened soul.

  ‘I live with my people at number forty, Glendower Road,’ Stanley told her; ‘I expect you’ve heard of them?’

  ‘Yes,’ she lied. She believed that it would be rude to admit that she had never heard of him or any of them.

  He told her all about himself. He was a veterinary surgeon, who had just qualified and was starting in practice. His father was an engineer, and his brother was in the works. It seemed that Stanley had possessed himself of a scholarship and had been educated at a good school. He said that he loved being among the sick animals, and they were so good and so grateful. She replied chokingly that she was sure they were, and instantly she pictured him as a good Samaritan and a ministering angel in one. Her ignorance of life and her youthful innocence of fact placed a halo round his head. He gave her the address of his surgery and explained that it was near her home. His name was Buggins ‒ Stanley Buggins. He hoped that she would not laugh at it; most people did. But at the moment Jill had lost her sense of humour much as she had lost her sense of proportion. She could see nothing amusing in the name of Buggins, only a certain intense beauty. It was her very virginity that cloaked hi
m in loveliness. She was confronted with the first lush greenness of youth’s springtime, and she revelled in it.

  They arranged to meet on the Sunday afternoon and to go for a walk together. It struck her that it might be rather servantish, but he quickly dispelled her doubts. He had no other spare time. They would meet on the common outside the town, awaiting each other by the first patch of gorse bushes. Instantly the common took on a new glow. It became a bright Eden of assignation. He pressed her hand closely. What was it somebody had said about when the gorse was out of bloom kissing being out of favour? Milton or somebody. He laughed a little uncomfortably.

  Jill and Effie walked home carrying their shoes in dangling bags. It was a beautiful mild night with myriad eyes of stars staring through the purple arch of sky. Effie looked at Jill with admiration. ‘And didn’t you just get off?’ she asked.

  ‘Effie, he is so lovely!’ She had to tell somebody. Youth in love must perforce discuss it. It was a virginal, spontaneous emotion, and it painted the world in iridescence. It lit the stars with magic. It was strangely parthenogenetic, for on her side no sex thrill accompanied it.