‘Howard, are you quite sure it has really been a coming together again?’ The Warden was now entirely serious. ‘That there truly is, I mean, this relationship between the two young men? I doubt whether there can be any establishing the thing scientifically. Other than in a negative way, that is. It might be possible to say conclusively that they are not identical twins – “monozygotic” is the word, I think – but the alternative conclusion could only be that they may be or may not. One would be thrown back upon any other sort of evidence that there is. And isn’t the only assured evidence at the moment the fact that Toby and this Andrew are astonishingly like one another?’
‘No, not quite. You see, Hugh—’
‘Just pause a moment, Howard. You’d agree that as far as any conclusion based upon this extreme likeness goes, we are at least well within the area of what may be called mere innocent misconception and suggestibility?’
‘Whereas outside that area there is the possibility of fraud?’ There was dismay in Howard Felton’s voice. ‘I thought of fraud, Hugh, very early on. But it made me ashamed of myself – simply because it isn’t my sense of the thing. And that brings me to the other piece of evidence there is. I have to agree that it could be attacked. You see, it was like this; I’ve questioned Toby very closely, and he says it was like this. It was after Toby told this Andrew something of his own story that Andrew came out with the statement that he was the same sort of refugee war orphan himself. So if you suppose a cunning and quick-witted young man inventing a complete lie on the spot—’
‘I don’t think I do.’ The Warden had raised his carving-knife in air in order to halt the conversation while he replenished his brother’s plate. ‘In fact I’m quite certain I don’t. The sudden framing by such a lad, at a glimpse of this physical resemblance, of a complete plan of imposture bang out of the blue is wholly implausible. But has there been an element of milder deception, all the same? Did this Andrew . . . by the way, Andrew who?’
‘Andrew Auld. He calls himself Andy.’
‘Very well. Did this Andy Auld – whom we’ll regard for the moment as Toby’s authentic brother – really turn up as your under-gardener by sheer chance? I was talking rot about that, you know, and I apologise. It is uncommonly odd, although it would be extravagant to call it inconceivable. What I’m wondering is whether there was somewhere a thread of knowledge connecting the two adoptions, and whether this young man came by it when his parents died – I think you wrote they’d both died recently – and then set off to spy out the land.’ The Warden paused to pour ale from a large silver jug, and then for some moments brooded darkly. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That doesn’t make sense either. Getting a job in your gardens! All nonsense. Of course there are investigations that can be made – if it’s proper to make them.’
‘My dear Hugh, of course we must get to the bottom of the thing.’
‘I suppose so. Yes, I suppose it must be done. Enquiries wherever this young Auld was brought up.’
‘It seems that latterly he was living in Glasgow – because of some family misfortune or slight come-down in the world.’
‘Not a big come-down?’
‘He himself says quite definitely not. His adoptive parents were very simple people. But countryfolk all through his boyhood. Somewhere in Galloway, I think he said.’ Howard finished his ham. He was a hearty eater, with an appetite not to be blunted even by this perplexing affair upon which he had come to seek his clever brother’s advice. ‘But – you know, Hugh – there simply can’t have been any such thread of knowledge as you speak of. The entire circumstances of the Cornucopia disaster are against it. Among the score of survivors as many as a dozen children of whom nothing was known at all. Not a thing! Not a single fact of interrelationship established between any of them – and all back in England and, as you might say, on the market. Of course, a record was compiled of how they were all severally adopted or otherwise decently provided for. I went into that, as a matter of fact, and everything was as it should be. Scores of people, needless to say, had had the same idea as myself. Humble folk, some of them. It was an uncommonly moving thing.’
‘Certainly it was.’ Howard, the Warden thought, had these starts of sentiment, and there was something self-indulgent about them. Hence, indeed, the existence of Toby – and now, it seemed, of Toby’s ticklish twin. The Warden had long ago accepted Toby, but he wasn’t sure that he wanted to accept Andy, or that there was any imperative obligation upon anybody else to do so. But this was ground upon which it would be necessary to go carefully.
‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Just what is your impression, to date, of young Andy? I take it you’ve had a certain amount of talk with him – and not just about aphis on the roses?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Over the port, Howard?’
‘In effect, yes.’ Howard had received a serious – if flippantly framed – question seriously. ‘I have accepted the thing, you know. You and I have been discussing the issue as an open one over that excellent ham, but I must make it clear that I accept Andy as Toby’s brother. That being so, I can only treat him as an equal.’
‘As a gentleman? He isn’t one.’ The Warden picked up the silver jug again, and shook his head over what he failed to find in it. ‘You always expect one bloody awful speech from me, Howard my boy. So there it is.’
‘It’s well below your usual form, Hugh. Of course he’s not a gentleman. And you want me to say something high-minded about an honest cowman being anybody’s equal. I’d rather tell you that my first impression of Andy Auld was of a young man of aggressively demotic speech. It’s ordinary plebeian lowland Scots, of course. But it’s difficult to resist the feeling that he’s laying it on.’
‘It sounds better than trying to talk nice to his grand new acquaintances.’
‘You do quite right to laugh at me, Hugh. It’s a very petty reaction, indeed. And it’s small comfort to me that Toby admits to it, too.’
‘Ah! Now we come to the heart of the matter. Toby, having rashly dragged this strange relationship to the light—’
‘Don’t talk rubbish, Hugh. Toby may have been impulsive about the thing – and in a way that does him decent credit. But there could have been no question of keeping anything dark. All Felton would have been goggling at the two of them in just no time. Stand them side by side, and the thing’s quite comical. I can sometimes feel there’s nothing to do but laugh at it. They’re like Tenniel’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Alice.’
‘I could imagine the fissiparous effect to be disconcerting rather than ludicrous. But what I am asking is how Toby, having taken that bold initiative in acquiring a brother, now in his more reflective moments regards the matter. And how Andy regards it. Any action – if any be to be taken – must turn on what seems likely to establish itself between them. It’s their problem rather than yours, Howard. Attempt to move actively in the affair yourself and you may be astonished to have them both turn on you and tell you to mind your own business.’
‘That may well be so.’ Experience had taught Howard Felton to heed his brother when he came out with decided remarks like this. ‘And if there’s one thing I’m clear about it is that they are clear about nothing. They don’t know how they feel, or how they ought to be feeling, or even whether any particular feeling is called for.’
‘That sounds to me at a wholesome remove from premature commitment. Nature produced them at a birth, but nurture has set a formidable chasm between them. Are you publicising all this, by the way?’
‘Publicising it?’ Howard was horrified.
‘Divulging it, then, more than need be. I can see inordinate interest at two levels. It’s a marvellous story for the most vulgar public prints. But that would soon fade out. The interest of the learned would be more tenacious. The nature-and-nurture business again. There are beady-eyed biologists and geneticists, my dear Howard, who ransack the continents for identical twins parted at birth and reared in radically differing environments.’
&nb
sp; ‘Good heavens – that must certainly be so!’ Here was a view of the matter that had not occurred to the retiring proprietor of Felton House. ‘And what can I do about it?’
‘For a start, acknowledge the more obvious difficulties. Local interest is inevitable. Take your village and the other villages within gossiping range. They must contain a reasonable number of clear-headed people who are accurately informed about Toby’s origins. But there will be plenty who simply have a muzzy sense that he isn’t quite your son. And now another Toby – or say a replica of him – suddenly turns up. It provides marvellous material for scandal. You’re not likely to be affected much by that, Howard, but it might trouble the young men themselves. That’s one thing. And now, more immediately, there’s another. Does Andy regard himself as still in your employment?’
‘I think he does. He’s certainly not making any claim to a transformed status. I’d say he has a good deal of pride.’
‘I’d expect so. And, of course, he is a little more than moderately intelligent.’
‘Fair enough. Although I don’t know about the “of course”.’
‘Good Lord, Howard! If there is such a thing as innate intellectual ability, and any sense at all in the foggy talk about intelligence quotients, Andrew Auld will be in such regards precisely as Tobias Felton is.’
‘I suppose that must be true.’ Howard was perhaps not too gratified at hearing that Toby possessed a little more than moderate intelligence.
‘I’m afraid you won’t find many surprises in Andy, any way on. Were Toby homosexual, which of course he is not, Andy would almost certainly prove to be homosexual too. If Toby prefers a violin to a piano so, infallibly, does Andy. And if Toby – say at the age of sixty-three – develops a particular sort of pain in his tummy when working in New York, so simultaneously will Andy do while on holiday in Kamchatka. These are of course cheap exaggerations, such as an old college tutor has got in the habit of pitching at the sluggish noddles of his pupils. But the general proposition is valid. From either of these two it will be reasonably possible to predict the reaction of the other in any nearly identical situation.’
‘I doubt whether I shall have occasion to do anything of that sort.’ Howard said this mildly, although with a hint that his brother was proving a little slow in coming forward with practical counsel. ‘But aren’t you shoving the nurture side of the thing rather out of the picture?’
‘A valid point.’ The Warden exhibited mild pleasure – much as if Howard were a pupil whose noddle had indeed been successfully jolted into action. ‘And of course it’s here that what may be called the intellectual interest of the affair lies. It’s clear that your two young men would react a little differently in, for example, superficial social situations – such as confronting a battery of knives and forks. But when it comes—’
‘Confound your knives and forks, Hugh! I want your advice on how to regard this situation in its general bearings.’
‘I don’t know enough – not by a long way – to say much that can possibly be useful. I haven’t met your newcomer, and that leaves me particularly in the dark as to how the relationship between the two brothers is likely to develop.’
‘Which is the whole thing. I realise, Hugh, that I’m pretty well on the touchline so far as the main action is concerned.’
‘Not quite the whole thing. What about your womenfolk? How do they feel? Grace, for a start.’
Grace Warlow was another Felton. A little younger than either of her brothers, she had been married and divorced, and now kept house for Howard, a widower of several years’ standing. Grace’s husband had been a sculptor, economically not a promising occupation, and although variously talented he had proved without flair for married life. Grace was an artist too, specialising in portraits in water-colour or pastel. At Felton she had provided herself with a studio and persevered with her professional labours: partly because she liked them, and partly with the prudent aim of maintaining for herself an independent status both in her brother’s household and in the world at large. Howard, after all, was in no more than a robust middle age, and it was not unreasonable to suppose that he might marry again. His brother, indeed, had for years been expecting him to do so. A vigorous man doesn’t go on being celibate indefinitely just because by nature slow to make up his mind about anything.
‘Grace accepted Andy at a glance,’ Howard said. ‘As to the fact of kinship, I mean. And if I’d had doubts myself, I think I’d have felt her instant conclusion as carrying what you might call a technical authority. Because she puts in such a lot of time staring at people’s faces, you know.’
‘Ah, yes.’ The Warden accompanied this concurrence with an indulgent nod. It indicated that he didn’t very strongly feel the cogency of the consideration. ‘We’ll go and have coffee in the library, shall we? They’ll have put it there by now.’
The move involved a walk to the other end of the Lodging, and it was made in silence. The carpets, the furniture in the broad corridors, the portraits of former academic worthies on the walls, the seemingly ageless and always slightly dusty curtains and hangings: these invariably produced an uneasy feeling in Howard Felton. They had all been precisely as they now were when, as an undergraduate member of the college long ago, he had been accustomed to enjoy certain heavy and ritual hospitalities from a Warden now three Wardens back. At Felton, Feltons lived for generations amid the same daubs and sticks, and even the rugs looked good for another hundred years. That was as it should be. But here, where everything went with the job and successive Wardens moved in, you might say, on a suitcase, the effect must be almost of living in a hotel. And all round about you, too, people were perpetually moving in and out: the young men on their three-year or four-year conveyor belt; the dons always with half an eye to a better job across the road. Howard sometimes remembered how he had once attended a gaudy dinner at the college, and had heard in a witty speech about a professor who had come from a great continental university to work in Oxford and had so been baffled by the organisation of the place as to cry out finally in despair that it appeared to be no more than a collection of damned boarding-houses. The story had been thought very funny, but was true enough when you thought of it. Poor old Hugh ran a boarding house. There was a little more money in it, presumably, than there had been in all that holding forth in lecture-rooms about Existentialism and heaven knew what.
It would have much surprised the Warden to learn that his brother was sorry for him in this way, even felt guilty about the lengths to which the English took the principle of primogeniture, and was, in particular, at least intermittently troubled by the quandary in which he’d landed himself in such matters through action long ago. Hugh was only aware that his brother admired him as one who awesomely commanded the life of the mind. Or so Howard might have put it in an expansive moment. But intellectual eminence was really rather a vague conception with Howard, and what he really respected in Hugh was his unfailing power of confident decision.
‘We were speaking of Grace,’ Hugh said, when he had provided his brother with coffee and a cigar. ‘She accepts, you say. But does she approve?’
‘She agrees that we owe – that in particular I owe – some sort of duty to the lad.’
‘Agrees? You mean, Howard, that it is a view you have put to her, and that she concurs in?’
‘Well, yes.’ Howard paused on this. ‘But, yes – certainly,’ he reiterated with unusual firmness. ‘Not that she doesn’t see the inconveniences, as they may be called. She has put them to me pretty firmly.’
‘We are back with this Andy’s lack of breeding and education of any sort and so on?’
‘It can be expressed that way. I’d call it the lack of much to catch hold of.’
‘Why not just acknowledge him freely as a relation – as a relation of Toby’s, that is – in a humble walk of life, and leave it at that?’
‘Plus a hamper at Christmas?’ The sharpness of this question appeared to surprise Howard as he uttered it.
‘An alternative possibility would be a crash course. Linguistic at the start, I gather it would have to be. Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle.’ The Warden frowned. ‘But, yes,’ he said. ‘Let’s pause seriously on that. Steady support to establish him at something more promising than weeding paths and clipping hedges. Tuition of some sort, and then a polytechnic. Training for some decent trade, and always an opportunity for other things, if his ambition and abilities call him to them.’
‘My mind has been moving that way, I confess.’ Howard had brightened a little. ‘And, of course, the freedom of his kinsfolk’s house as well.’
‘I’d say there’s a question there, Howard.’ The Warden glanced at his brother a shade warily. ‘The whole plan would hang upon how the lad feels himself. And as for kin, it’s really only Toby who comes in there. One has to come back to that. You didn’t adopt Andy too, you know, and then mislay him for twenty years.’
‘If we treat him fully as Toby’s brother, as I think we ought to do since it’s what he is, it’s really a distinction without a difference, isn’t it?’
‘And so quite my sort of philosophical thing?’ The Warden was amused. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’
‘It would have to be made quite clear from the start that he could have no financial expectations except of the most modest sort.’ Howard Felton moved to this ground as if under the impulsion of much practical sagacity. ‘I don’t say we’ve no money. But we’ve the next thing to no money. Particularly after getting Toby into the City as we have. But with that once established, you know, I can’t see any mischief in—well—letting the thing develop.’
‘I suppose Andy is quite an attractive lad?’
‘Certainly he is.’
‘In some basic ways he’s bound to be – being Toby’s other self. Attractive, by the way, in spite of his proletarian cut – or partly on the strength of it?’
‘My dear Hugh, what an odd question!’
‘It is not an odd question.’ This came with that sudden air of intellectual authority which was always apt a little to intimidate Howard. But in a moment his brother was relaxed again. ‘You’ve told me what Grace thinks,’ he said. ‘But what about Ianthe?’
Andrew and Tobias Page 3