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

by Ursula Bloom

  Late the next afternoon Twit got a postcard.

  I am staying here ‒ Jill.

  The address was: 7, Wurdlescote, Warwickshire.

  IV

  Twit assured himself that he always did the wrong thing. He knew now that he ought to have gone down to the drawing-room that night, and that at the present moment he ought to tackle Clive. Clive was a good deal bigger man than was Twit. Twit had no relish for a hand-to-hand fight. In India it had been different. That splendid time when he had hit the fellow in the face as he bent for a stone wherewith to brain Twit, that had been glorious fun. But here in England he was a separate identity. There he had been himself.

  If he went and tackled Clive, Clive would get the better of him. He knew that. Clive’s shrewd wit and acid humour would bite into him like a whip. He would not know what to say in reply, and Clive would be quick to take advantage of his slow-moving brain. The old coward in him shrank from it. When Jill came back, she would accuse him of having acted wrongly, and whatever he had done she would be angry. If he had done nothing she would be quick to see the cowardice which prompted the inaction. If he had seen Clive she would find fault with what he had said. As inaction was so much more to Twit’s liking, he pursued that course. He hoped that Jill was not going to have a baby, yet perhaps in that dilemma he might be able to endear himself to her.

  He launched a delightful dream, in which he got an excellent position, and swept in upon her remorse, a champion knight in her cause. Looking neither to right nor to left, he thrust aside her difficulties and doubts. He placed her in a nursing home, protected her, saw her through the trouble and helped her back on to her feet again.

  The bright bubble of the dream was pricked by the sudden realisation that employment was the primary necessity. He was no nearer employment. In fact, every day seemed to separate him more definitely from it. Dependent, Twit fawned, he had not the courage of his conviction, and achieved little. He tore her letter into shreds, and did not reply to it because he could think of no reply to make. ‘And,’ he told himself morbidly, ‘whatever I do will be wrong, so I may as well do nothing.’ He remained unresponsive. He met Clive that evening at Dora Hine’s. It was an awkward meeting, for Twit had called in to seek advice from Dora, and found Clive there trying to borrow a dress tie. The shops were shut and Clive had made the discovery that he had not a white tie to his name. Dora was in the bedroom that communicated with the sitting-room, turning out Dickie’s collar-box ‒ it seemed that he kept white ties there when he had them. At the moment he had none.

  ‘Hullo!’ said Clive, as Twit walked in, ‘where’s Jilly?’

  ‘She’s gone into the country.’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘Air, I suppose,’ said Twit, marking Clive’s surprise with a secret satisfaction, and then adding defiantly, ‘clean air.’

  Clive told himself, ‘He knows, and he hasn’t the spunk to tackle me’; and aloud he announced, ‘Pity about that. I’m going to a dance at Hindhead to meet a famous actress. I believe she is lovely as Helen, and beyond reproach as Caesar’s wife. Queer mixture that, actress, virgin, and inviolable.’

  ‘It oughtn’t to suit you.’

  ‘Perhaps not, but we’ll see. Lovely woman usually falls. Impregnability becomes susceptibility. I haven’t a white tie left, and Dora is routing me one out.’

  Dora emerged from the bedroom, dangling a creased black bow tie in one hand and a white cotton shoe-lace in the other.

  ‘All we’ve got, Clive. Sorry! I suppose you couldn’t manage with the shoe-lace?’

  ‘God, no!’ He turned to Twit. ‘You haven’t a white tie?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you had, perhaps it wouldn’t be white. Ah well, fortunes of war.’ He got up and stretched himself.

  ‘What’ll you do?’ asked Dora.

  ‘I’ll knock the shop up. I shan’t let a white tie stand between me and … well, attainment. She is really very lovely, I hear. Well, so long.’

  He strolled out.

  ‘I hate him,’ exclaimed Dora fiercely, and she stood leaning against the fireplace with the tie and the shoe-lace still in her hand; ‘he is a hateful man.’

  ‘I hate him too,’ agreed Twit.

  ‘Well, why don’t you show it? Why did you let him play the fool with Jill like that?’

  ‘I didn’t! Jill is obstinate; she will go her own way.’

  ‘But you ought to stop it.’

  He had meant to come for advice, but the advice seemed melting like April snow. He did not want it. He set his lip mulishly. Twit wanted sympathy, he wanted understanding, and he got neither. Only in his dreams was he really a great man. Only in his dreams was he ever understood.

  V

  Wurdlescote was situated high upon the hills. Below it stretched that greenly fertile valley of the Stour, a silver ribbon winding its way in and out of a fecund shore. The silver slashed in two the green meadows and red plough-lands and pale seas of corn still standing out uncut. Behind rose the hills, line upon line of them, rising to the ridge itself, where Illmington lifts its maypole, and Chipping Campden stands so proudly with the valley of the Avon ‒ Shakespeare’s river ‒ beyond. But half way between the Stour valley and that of the Avon lay the little clustering villages of Wurdlescote and the Felthams. The grandmother of the porter lived in Wurdlescote and sometimes she took in ladies who painted pictures. The porter knew that his grandmother’s rooms were untenanted when he sent Jill there. The grandmother lived in an old grey house, with black beams propping its lath walls, and the red patches of brick showing through in places where the plaster had peeled. The porch was slashed vividly with roses and creeper, whose green leaves were stained like wine in the September suns.

  The house had a sitting-room which was put at Jill’s disposal, and above it a raftered bedroom. It was simple, but the simplicity appealed to the girl, for here in this cottage there was nothing of Clive. There was nothing of sophistication, nothing that was not half a century old. Behind, the hyacinth blue of the Cotswolds rising in rounded hulk and sharpened apex. Below, the road which dipped through the miles of downland into the hazy valley itself. She was lucky in that she had come to Wurdlescote during one of those hot spells that September so graciously bestows. She could spend her time on the peaceful downs, undisturbed save by a blackberrier, or some poacher avidly eager to avoid her. Here she believed that she could reshape her ideals, reform her ideas and see the new future.

  She would either flounder under this strain, or she would rise as did the immortal phoenix. She told herself with set teeth and clenched hands that she must rise. She had got to mingle the old training and the new attitude, and bear fruit of both.

  The first evening Jill met Stephen Dare.

  Stephen Dare was a young Rector. In a sense he was a disappointed man. He had come to Wurdlescote full of good resolutions and enthusiasms, and Wurdlescote had been a sad blow to his ambitions.

  For the first year he had grappled splendidly with the situation. He had fought the loneliness and desolation and the dismal fact that his isolated Rectory stood three miles from the nearest village, Feltham. At Feltham there were four houses in which were people of education. The impassable road in winter, and the difficulties of locomotion, isolated him badly. Full of earnest endeavour, he made a titanic effort to visit his flock, and to stimulate their religious fervour. He was faced with a cow-like placidity. They believed that he meant well, but was a little touched in the head! Stephen was the son of a Ritualist. Ritualism had him in its grasp, and it had carried him through two probationary years to this Rectory. The patron of the living was a friend of the family. He was a hoary old squire who indulged too often in dissipations for which he hoped to atone by strong doses of Ritualism. A bad old man; he believed that the more showy side of religion would help him to angelic wings. Anyway, he assured his wife, it always made him feel good, and to feel good was half the battle.

  From time to time he had bestowed upon Wurdlescote Church
gifts which were ironically symbolical of some lapse from grace. The frescoes with which he had adorned the East end had appeared after the affair at Cowes. The redecorated altar and rails after a jaunt to Paris, which had enraged his lady wife and which had temporarily impoverished him. The lectern had been the result of a peccadillo in a flat in Dover Street, which had unfortunately got into the papers. This old gentleman had placed Stephen in the Rectory, believing that he was helping both the young man and the people. Stephen had come full of such bright intentions, such endeavour and such courage, and he had stepped into a slough of despond. All around him were similar priests, niched in little villages, alone with their flocks. Some had been there as many as twenty years. They stagnated. The hold of their good resolutions tarnished, endeavour mildewed. This was what would happen to Stephen, and he resented the prospect.

  Priests were isolated, time passed and they were forgotten. They flogged their souls out in unavailing labour. Preferment passed them by, opportunity took to itself wings and flitted far. The bright bauble of Fate which had delighted him in this preferment was merely a spun-glass affair. He knew that here he was shelved, it was a blind alley with no way out. These simple country people who came to church, what of them? He preached confession. His predecessor had been a drunken sot who had drowned his desolation and had preached no definite views. It was in fact doubtful if he had any distinct views by the time he had soaked himself into his grave. Stephen, out of a flock of a hundred and twenty, had but two who took advantage of confession. Whether they had ever fathomed the doctrine of the Real Presence, he had no idea. He had tried in the Sunday school, believing that here lay his great chance, in the untrained, pliable youth. He was bending supple boughs to his conception, and praying that they would stay bent. God would reward his effort with fruition. Then all manner of little pin-pricks had stabbed in on him, all manner of little disappointments had come to him. They might be caused by the ignorance of his congregation, but they hurt. The people’s minds were barren fields, and he found it difficult for his seeds of a ritualistic faith to bear harvest therein.

  A tall man with a wide head and a broad high forehead from which the hair had started to recede in his teens. At thirty he was almost bald. He had grey eyes. It was a face common in shape, banal, with its ordinary pug nose, loose mouth and fleshy cheeks and jaw. There was, in fact, little to differentiate him from dozens of his fellows. Yet sometimes ‒ in his indignation against the small village and its ignorance ‒ his mouth would set to a mulish line, and in his eyes there would shine the fire of his resolution. It was that undaunted courage that kept him doggedly persisting in his effort. He met Jill by the simple expedient of calling on her.

  Stephen took his flock seriously. He knew that many modern clergy did not visit, but he believed this to be an error. He would never give it up. How could a priest retain his hold upon his people’s affections if he did not share with them their doubts and difficulties?

  He called on Jill the very first day. He had a premonition that she was in some distress. Perhaps it was her limp attitude as she sat in the sitting-room with the crowded ornaments and shiny sofa as background. He made himself known to her.

  ‘It was good of you to come,’ she said. And again he became conscious of some secret oppressing her, by the very way she looked and her heavily-lidded eyes. He was lonely. He was aching to unburden himself of a hundred confidences, to talk again to a comprehending and educated person. Jill, weighed down with the remembrance of what was to her now a terrible sin, was also longing to talk to someone. The fact that Stephen was a stranger was only more helpful. They stared at each other across the little room, their loneliness the magnet. They were instantly drawn to each other. Presently Jill suggested tea.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘I am all alone, it would be a charity to share it with me?’

  ‘Oh, well’ ‒ he sat down again ‒ ‘you can’t imagine the treat that it is to talk to someone after the villagers.’ He halted, aware of the disloyalty, and yet keenly attracted by the girl. ‘It isn’t that they mean it. They are dear things really; it is just …’ He paused, helplessly at a loss for words.

  ‘I understand.’

  She poured out the tea, made strong and black by the porter’s grandmother, who believed that tea should vie with ink. Jill had already explained that she liked it weaker, but nothing deterred the porter’s grandmother.

  ‘I am afraid this is stewed,’ Jill said. ‘I did ask her to make it weaker, but she won’t.’

  ‘Drown it in milk. That takes the tang out of it.’

  She drowned it obligingly, but it still lay in dark pools in the thick cups. They talked pleasantly. She mentioned little happenings in her life ‒ Edward, Twit, Isobel, the old life. He told her of his difficulties in the parish.

  ‘These people don’t understand. They come to church because they believe it to be right, not because of its meaning.’

  ‘Can’t you explain?’

  ‘You see, ritual is a bit advanced. What views do you hold?’

  ‘I don’t think I hold any views,’ said Jill.

  ‘Church’ had not entered into her scheme of things. Isobel had gone to church as the village people, because she believed it to be the right thing to do. Isobel believed that the double services, Matins and Evensong on Sunday, were an insurance against unpleasant happenings at death. Jill had not been able to grasp how dual attendance at church could help you in any possible manner, and had turned her face from such teaching. She had, of course, been confirmed. She had gone to Communion, but the whole thing had been frightening. It had not done her any good, it had only reminded her that she was a very miserable sinner. Now, remembering that, she recollected how sinless she had really been, and how very sinful she was now. It was not a happy thought. Perhaps if she had not permitted double service on Sunday and monthly Communion to slip from her, she would have been less sinful. She explained that she had never contemplated the matter properly; she held no views. Stephen cut himself a large slice of dough cake.

  ‘I preach confession.’

  ‘Isn’t that Roman Catholic?’

  ‘Heavens, no! I think confession helps tremendously.’

  She lowered her lids, suddenly struck by the truth of that statement, and she said, ‘It must do.’

  ‘If only one keeps in touch through confession, one has such a hold. It is much easier to help your flock. You have a far greater understanding.’

  ‘But isn’t the confessional secret?’

  ‘Absolutely. It helps the penitent enormously. I have never been able to grasp the Evangelical trend. Beautiful surroundings must induce beautiful thought. I could never preach a whitewashed faith.’

  ‘It must be absorbing,’ she said slowly, for she was interested. Perhaps there was more in religion than one thought on the first glimpse.

  ‘It’s difficult. People do not understand. It is beyond their comprehension. They have been taught to believe in two sacraments and are merely mystified by seven.’

  ‘Naturally.’ She had no idea what he was talking about, but dare not admit her ignorance.

  ‘The Real Presence. You admit it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said weakly.

  The Real Presence she believed to be God. Naturally she admitted God as a far-away, nebulous deity. Time enough really to contemplate Him when it came to death itself.

  ‘You are coming to service on Sunday?’ he asked; ‘just for once in a while, I shall be able to preach as I long to preach. I shall know that you understand.’

  ‘I am not as clever as you think.’ She smiled wanly, and only wished that she could really understand.

  ‘It is a great treat to talk to you,’ he said and rose, pushing his chair back to its place against the gaudily-papered wall of the cottage. ‘I have a class to-night and it is getting late. To-morrow is Saturday. I am always at the church to hear confession, if it is required. I sit there for an hour.’

  Their eyes met across the overburdened table, and
there was meaning in his. He was loath to tear himself away, for he had enjoyed her company very much, and she attracted him in a whimsical fashion.

  ‘You know this part of the world?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It is lovely country. There is a view from the downs, where on a fine day you can see Wales. I’d show it you tomorrow, if you’d care to see it.’

  She assured him that she would be interested.

  ‘After tea?’ he suggested eagerly; ‘about this time?’

  The porter’s grandmother came forward with a number of brown eggs in a small basket.

  ‘If you would do me the honour of accepting them?’ she urged him quaveringly.

  Clergy always made her feel like that, poor, weakish, altogether rather contemptuous. They gave her an inferiority complex from which she could not escape. Stephen accepted the eggs with as many expressions of gratitude as he could muster. He made a very creditable speech, especially as he was a man who never ate eggs. He was troubled with a liver. Then he turned to Jill, and his eyes were bright.

  ‘I’ll call for you to-morrow,’ he said.

  VI

  They were sitting on the downs, where the hills dipped and divided far away, blue triangles in the hazy west which stood for Wales. The grass was dried to whiteness by the sun. The earth, finely powdered, no longer red and violet and loamy, but chalk and dun. They sat very still, and all around them was a bower of tangled bushes. The blackberries hung in clusters of ebony and crimson. They shone brightly, as though fairy fingers had burnished them. They lay against their deep five-pointed leaves, olively green, lined silver with here or there a stray one gloriously incarnadined. Under the may trees the grass grew white and thready. A clump of dark nettles edged a gorse bush, beyond lay the hills shoulder to shoulder, and the uplands green to one’s feet, fading away into the cerulean blue of distance. Round and angular hills side by side, with long tufted flanks of trees smudging their outlines. Here or there the nearer hills were checkboarded by irregular squares, significant of fields, shaded greens, with a patch of reddy Cupar marl in between. Ploughed loam lands, pale seas of uncut harvest, emerald of pasture, yet all tinged by a misty blueness in the exquisite blending of distance.