‘Where do you come from, Andy?’
‘Glesgy.’ The young man made a pause. ‘Sir,’ he added.
Toby had never heard of Glesgy, and wondered where it was. Certainly it was nowhere local. And, of course, the cricket field theory wouldn’t do, since Andy’s accent was far from local either. It was perhaps as he reflected on this that a first curious uneasiness invaded Toby Felton’s consciousness. His sense of having seen Andy before sharpened itself into a feeling that this previous acquaintance had been almost no time ago at all; that there was about it something of the déjà vu conundrum one ran into from time to time. So as he paused in his forking now to take yet another look at the young man it was with an odd apprehensiveness, which momentarily inhibited direct scrutiny. He found himself beginning, more or less, with Andy’s toes. Then he was looking at his naked tummy – flat, bronzed, and with a delicate spire of dark hair running up from the low-slung jeans to the navel. Toby himself carried precisely that around with him – but otherwise there was a very imperfect correspondence between what he saw and what would be visible were he to strip to his own waist. He was far from thinking of himself as unathletic, but his muscles didn’t ripple gently beneath taut skin to quite the effect achieved by Mr Hawkstone’s toil-tempered Andy. Toby fleetingly wondered whether Andy had a girl, since it seemed wasteful that he should not. Seeing the sweat now trickling down Andy’s chest, and smelling it too, he also wondered where the newcomer had found a lodging, and whether he could there command a shower or a tub at the end of the long chore wickedly imposed upon him.
But these were random and inconsequent thoughts, and Toby now became aware with a jerk that beneath them he was for some obscure reason threshing around in great confusion of mind. He had sorted this out only to the extent of realising that some enormous new fact confronted him when Andy, standing directly in his path, put up a hand and brushed his abundant hair back from where it had been tumbling over his eyes and forehead. Toby’s head swam. It swam precisely as certain actions performed by Elma Loftus could make it do.
‘I can edge past now, thanks.’ Toby heard himself call out this roughly, was aware of himself as wading almost knee-deep in prunus clippings back to his car, before Andy had time to do more than turn and stare at him. He wrenched open the door, leapt inside, banged the door to behind him, much as if he had behaved venturesomely in a wild-life park and had suddenly felt the hot breath of a tiger on his neck. But as he turned the ignition switch this mindless panic broke like a soap bubble, and something at least with the character of a decision took its place. Andy, a pitch-fork still in his hand – and so looking, if not like a tiger, at least like a demon – had come up to the car, and now Toby flung open the nearside door.
‘Come up to the house,’ he said.
‘What for should I do that?’ Toby’s perturbation had communicated itself to Hawkstone’s assistant, and he spoke on a frankly insubordinate note.
‘I tell you, I want you up at the house. Get in!’ This came from Toby with a curtness that he scarcely heard and wouldn’t have believed himself to command. Andy, who could be assumed to recognise an order when he received it, obeyed at once – but not without throwing himself back on the seat with a hint of defiance and to the diffusing of a further strong whiff of sweat. Then the Aston Martin hit them both in the back as it catapulted itself up the drive. The house was in view before either spoke.
‘Are you Mr Felton’s son?’ Andy asked – without turning his head, and glowering darkly through the windscreen.
‘Wait!’ Toby, confronting an undreamed-of possibility which had crashed down on him out of the blue, knew that for the moment little could usefully be said. He also knew that he never wanted his head to go swimming again as it had recently done. ‘I’ve got something to show you,’ he muttered, almost at random. ‘And here we are.’
He had swerved off the drive and round to the courtyard at the back of the house. It was the side on which his own quarters lay, and the most direct access to them was by a door and staircase close to the kitchens. He regularly took this route on arriving home, but the momentary notion came to him that perhaps it wasn’t quite right on the present occasion – or that it mightn’t look quite right to anybody who was around. But there was nobody in view. He bundled Andy out of the car – actually with a push on the bare shoulders – and through the doorway and upstairs. He flung open a door at the end of a corridor.
‘This is me,’ he said, and stood back to let Hawkstone’s kidnapped underling (for it came virtually to that) enter first, as a guest should do. It was a small undistinguished room, untidy in defiance of an elderly housemaid’s ministrations, in which Toby smoked his pipe and read his books and did a little fiddling with guns and fishing-rods. There was a revolting stuffed badger in a glass case, which he had been given in early life and become obstinately attached to. But now he glanced round this sanctum and was dissatisfied. ‘No good,’ he said impatiently and going over to an inner door. ‘Come in here. My bedroom.’ This time, he led the way.
Andy followed misdoubtingly – as was reasonable enough. This was a much larger room, and grander as well. The under-gardener glanced at the unnecessarily large bed, the dim ancient tapestry along one wall, the bits and pieces of furniture that had begun life very long ago. It must have been as strange to him as would have been the interior of Buckingham Palace, or Noah’s Ark. And the room’s owner must have been striking him as stranger still.
‘You know what you’re going to do now?’ Toby, who felt his wits in danger of clouding again, flung out this question almost wildly as he gazed fixedly at the man from Glesgy.
‘That I do not.’ But as Andy said this his frame tautened and his fists clenched, like one who suddenly sees that he may have to fight his way out of a trap.
‘You’re going to stand there.’ Toby’s hand had gone out and he was pointing – with an effect of drama he was quite unconscious of – to a spot midway between the room’s two high windows. ‘And damn well take a look at yourself.’
This was so extraordinary that Andy simply obeyed wonderingly. Between the windows hung a broad pier-glass set in a dull gilded frame.
‘If you weren’t so bloody thick,’ Toby said, this time aware with dismay of senseless and panicky rudeness, ‘you’d have seen it straight away. Now, look!’ Toby took a step forward as he reiterated this command, so that the two young men stood shoulder to shoulder before the glass: Toby in a rumpled but elegant linen suit and Andy still naked to the hips. And only now did it occur to Toby to whip off his sun-glasses. There was a long moment’s silence.
‘Aye, to be sure,’ Andy then said and the Doric syllables trembled, ‘I can see, a’ richt.’
There was another silence. And then, quite simultaneously, the two young men turned and confronted one another. Quite simultaneously, also, on the face of each that eyebrow – for it was like a single eyebrow, thought up for a Cyclops – lowered, contracted, darkened yet further over the bridge of the long nose. Perhaps because Toby’s period of complete confusion had exhausted him, it was again Andy who first spoke.
‘I was for asking you,’ he said, ‘if you’re this Mr Felton’s son.’
‘The proper short answer is yes.’ Toby had employed this formula before. ‘I’m legally that, for what the law’s worth in such a thing. Actually I’m an adoptive son.’
‘Adoptive?’ Andy had been listening intently, like a man requiring to make out something said in a foreign tongue. ‘Wad you be a foondling, Mr Felton—sir?’
‘My name’s Toby.’ It seemed necessary to say this at once. ‘Yes, foundling’s quite the name for it. Not found on a doorstep or under a gooseberry-bush, but at sea. Actually floating on the waters of the Atlantic, I’ve been told. Like in Shakespeare.’ This last and not very well-informed joke was one Toby was not in the habit of hurrying forward with. He was quite off-balance still.
‘Something aboot Hitler’s war?’
‘Yes, Andy, just that. Look – what
about you?’
This was the million-dollar question. An answer unequivocally clear, and the whole thing became no more than a meaningless freak of nature followed by a freak of chance: something the embarrassment of which decent wits and decent feeling would suffice to cope with.
‘They never tel’t me ower much.’
‘Who never told you – your parents?’
‘Aye – them. They were close.’
‘Then they’ll have to stop being close now.’
‘They’re deid, the twa o’ them. My faither a year syne, an’ my mither no more than weeks ago. It’s why I’ve come doon here to England.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Toby found that he was breathing with difficulty. ‘But they must have told you something.’
‘Aye – that I was a foondling. My father would ca’ me his wee mite o’ war-work. There was a bit paper about me yince, but I was never let see it. It’ll be lost by noo.’
‘I see.’ What Toby saw – and it was literally nothing but a sheerly visual experience yet – was a twin brother of whom he had never heard suddenly standing before him. The fact, although staggering, was beyond human doubt, and he wondered why, before speaking again, he had to take thought to what he’d say, and even more thought to the tone in which he’d say it. It seemed almost an occasion for an embrace, or at least for some expression of strong feeling. But for the moment, like a man numbed by a thunder-clap, he was capable of singularly little: nothing more, in fact, than a sense of irritation. He was shocked by this discovery, and even more by tracing it to what, in the circumstances, appeared an appallingly trivial source. It was simply Andy’s Scottish speech – doubtless his thoroughly plebeian Scottish speech. There ought to be nothing wrong with that. What he really sensed and resented – Toby told himself – was something defensive about it. Andy was laying on the Doric thicker than came naturally to him; it was as if he had hastily grabbed a shirt to slip over his naked body; he was saying that he remained a Glaswegian (for Toby now knew where Glesgy was) whether he had suddenly tripped up over a boss-class brother or not. If there was to be an embrace, in fact, it wouldn’t be Andy who’d initiate it.
‘Well,’ Toby said cheerfully, ‘It’s pretty clear, wouldn’t you say, Andy?’
‘Aye.’
‘Toby.’
‘Aye, Toby – unco clear.’
Toby Felton put out a hand, and very diffidently touched his brother’s arm.
‘Nearly six o’clock,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to take you downstairs and introduce you.’
This drew a blank from Andy, but Toby was quick enough to see it wasn’t now a hostile blank. Andy simply hadn’t caught on to the conception which had been proposed. It was another trivial matter: this time, of vocabulary.
‘But we’ll have a drink first,’ Toby said. ‘Fair enough, when it’s a bit of a jolt to both parties. There’s some sherry in the other room.’
‘I’ve niver been a short drinker. An’ after perspiring o’ sweit on yon hedge I’d be for beer – Toby.’
‘I expect there’s beer as well. But I suppose it should really be champagne.’
‘It should be salt water frae the Atlantic Ocean, mebby.’
Toby had no reply to this remark. So they left his bedroom – scene of so stiffly Aristotelian a transition from ignorance to knowledge – and sat for a time with glasses in their hands. Both young men were numb. It was all inescapably baffling, and the beer was without sacramental effect.
II
A few days after this surprising event, Howard Felton, young Tobias Felton’s father by adoption and the present proprietor of Felton House, drove the thirty miles into Oxford to lunch with his younger brother, Hugh Felton.
It was a family tradition that in every generation there was a ‘clever’ Felton, and that just occasionally there were two ‘clever’ Feltons or even three. This sort of Felton would become a bishop or judge or minister of the crown. It must have happened from time to time that it was to an eldest son that the extra measure of brains was meted out. But little record had been kept of anything of the sort, perhaps because the family as a whole would feel such a state of affairs to be anomalous and awkward. Howard Felton himself stood in no danger of being thus unfavourably regarded as an intellectual born to the wrong destiny. His vigour was more of the body than the mind, and he put in much time marching energetically around his estate without quite knowing whether it was in the interest of this project or that. His decisions when he came to them were sometimes surprising, but seldom other than benevolent in their intent.
His brother, although he had not become a prelate or a prime minister, was undoubtedly the ‘clever’ Felton of his day. Being attracted by academic life, Hugh had entered it as a historian, and had then very soon discarded what he came to regard as a lethargic discipline in favour of a more taxing career as a philosopher. In this he quickly won a high if perhaps still local reputation, with the odd result that his college – a small old-fashioned place – had judged him the right person to preside over its affairs. He was elected into the Wardenship in his forty-second year, and at once fell to performing his duties of governance conscientiously and well. Yet a number of his colleagues suspected him of being, intellectually, a little at a loose end. Those inclined to indulge a touch of malice – and no collegiate society is likely to be without a few men of the sort – would from time to time solicitously express some such hope as that he was ‘managing to keep going at the logical chopping-block like the rest of the old gang’. The Warden received pleasantries of this sort with perfect good humour. He knew that his lot was cast in agreeable places. And he was an uncomplaining man.
He had never been known, for instance, to complain even to an intimate of his elder brother’s having adopted an infant son and thus introduced a problematical factor into the succession to a considerable estate not entailed or settled in any way. It had certainly been an unusual thing to do. But it had been done – Hugh would say briefly, if he talked about the matter at all – in unusual times and upon a generous impulse in face of an appalling spectacle of the helpless wickedness of men. In his private mind, he may have reflected that a sporadic impulsiveness could be seen through several centuries as a constitutional liability in the family, and one which had occasionally produced calamitous results. Indeed, it might have been possible to argue that the cleverness of the ‘clever’ Feltons inhered chiefly in their being exceptional in this regard and disposed to think and not merely look before leaping.
But at least Howard had been lucky in the little pig that eventually emerged from that war-time poke. Toby, whether his unknown antecedents were gentle or simple, had developed as a very decent lad. Moreover Toby wasn’t going to be an anomaly within his adoptive family even if it did turn out that he were to inherit Felton and settle on the land. He was very far from being a fool, but he wouldn’t be wasting any large measure of genius upon its turnips and Charollais.
As frequently happened on those occasions, Hugh had to begin by apologising for the absence of his wife. This time Mercia was at Heathrow, putting her younger daughter on one plane and waiting to receive from another plane, by way of holiday exchange, the daughter of a professor of philosophy at Rennes. This means of furthering the comity of nations and the education of the young was one in which, it seemed to Howard, his brother’s household was almost unceasingly engaged. The juvenile guests were expected to put in much time listening to English conversation upon topics somewhat advanced for their years, and this under the hideous knowledge that they might at any moment be courteously invited to offer their own thoughts on the matter in hand. If in this strait they fell back upon their native tongue, Hugh would make a few kindly responses in French, German or Italian before, as it were, gently returning them to the front line.
Howard was relieved that nothing of this kind was in train at the moment. Silence obtained in the Warden’s Lodging – as indeed, at this time of year so deep in the Long Vacation, it did for the most part in the college�
�s three modest quadrangles as a whole. And the brothers, it transpired, were to lunch in solitude on cold ham, pickles, and what was still called audit ale.
‘I can’t think of the thing,’ Howard said as they sat down, ‘without being astounded.’ He had already written to Hugh with a brief account of what had happened at Felton.
‘The originating occasion, you mean? I rather agree. It’s disconcerting that rational beings should plan to drown one another either piecemeal or wholesale. It’s uncomfortable.’
‘Don’t be a fool, Hugh. What has just happened, of course. It’s an almost astronomical improbability.’
‘My dear chap, when we say that something is enormously improbable we commonly mean no more than that we have decided beforehand to be enormously surprised by it. Perhaps we ought to husband our surprise in order to loose it off when what happens is what we’ve been expecting to happen. Expectation was created by the treacherous gods for the fun of seeing us agape and at a loss when, yet once more, they bowl us out with the ball we weren’t thinking of.’
‘One can accept the identical twins separated at infancy.’ Howard had long since learnt to ignore routine academic badinage in Hugh as no more than a ritual prelude to serious discussion. ‘It’s like the start of some old folk-tale, no doubt. But it was a perfectly sober possibility in the circumstances under which the Cornucopia went down.’
‘I agree with that. Has it ever occurred to you what an uncommonly ironical name that old tub of a liner bore? Nearly everyone on board must have been more or less stripped – rich and poor alike – of almost everything they possessed.’
‘In a general way, yes. I suppose there may have been exceptions. It was the complete loss of all documentation that was the most staggering thing. You’ll remember how it was, Hugh. Almost in the hour that the torpedoes struck, the entire duplicate dossier went up in flames in London. But all that’s not the point. It’s this unbelievable coming together again, utterly by chance—’
Andrew and Tobias Page 2