Ianthe was yet another Felton. She was more securely a Felton than Toby was. The orphan of the Cornucopia might never have seen Felton House had Howard Felton’s marriage not been a barren one for several years before that ship went down. But then the arrival of the baby within its walls had produced the consequence which frequently ensues with a childless couple who have thus provided themselves with an adopted infant. Within two years of Toby’s arrival, Felton’s wife gave birth to a daughter. Ianthe Felton then remained the only child of Howard Felton’s body. For years he hoped that a brother would be born to her. But it didn’t happen. And Toby, perhaps for the very reason that during this period of expectation he grew up a little in the shade, was then all the more cherished by his adoptive parents. The Feltons were unable to think of Toby and Ianthe as other than quite simply brother and sister. And the children themselves certainly had no other way of regarding one another.
‘Ianthe is visiting one of her Girton friends in Yorkshire,’ Howard said. ‘Good people, I gather, although I don’t recall their name at the moment. It would have been extravagant to call Ianthe home for a family council, don’t you think?’
‘I certainly do.’
‘Of course I’ve written and told her the facts of the case. No doubt she’ll be astounded like the rest of us. But I don’t know that she’ll be all that interested. Cambridge and fresh associations have been drawing Ianthe away from us a little. It’s probably no more than a temporary thing. But there it is, for the present. What I’ve most noticed is that she doesn’t even go around with Toby as much as she used to.’
‘I see.’ The Warden looked curiously at his brother, but made no further comment. ‘Toby himself is coming and going at Felton all through the summer?’
‘Yes. His office is giving him only three weeks’ holiday, it seems, and he doesn’t yet appear to know what to do with it.’
‘No young woman around?’
‘Absolutely not. He used occasionally to be stalking one girl or another – but notably ineffectively, it seemed to me.’ There was a tinge of disapproval in Howard’s voice, as if he took a surprisingly poor view of any lack of pertinacity in sexual enterprises among the young. ‘But he appears to have dropped even that for the present. We suppose that he finds his new work pretty absorbing.’
‘What – in that discount house?’
‘Acceptance house.’
‘Another distinction without a difference, I expect. Am I right in thinking you’re a shade disappointed, Howard, by Toby’s having taken to that bowler hat and those striped pants?’
‘I don’t think he wears anything like that. Yes – a little, perhaps. But it’s a real opening, and Toby has been thoroughly prudent to go after it. I went into the money quite carefully. Not a doubt of that.’
‘I’m delighted to hear it.’ The Warden watched his brother put down the butt of his cigar. ‘Must you be off? Well, I’ll be anxious to meet this young man. If he’s staying on for a time at Felton, that is. And Mercia will be most interested, too. You must have Grace ask us down as soon as may be. Nothing doing here in Oxford. The last of the Class Lists up a week ago, and this college as usual just avoiding the dusty rear. Tutors a damned sight too learned to deign to tute. I tell them I’d gladly sack the lot.’
With these more or less routine remarks, the Warden saw his brother to his car.
III
Toby’s summer holiday – the three weeks allowed him by those employers and destined partners whom Howard Felton called ‘your acceptance people’ – was beginning, and he had declared that he was going to spend the entire time at home. He let it be assumed that the coming of Andy – the coming of Andy viewed as a problem and a responsibility – was the reason for this decision. He couldn’t well explain that he wanted to be near Elma Loftus, who would be on holiday too; still less that he was coming to suspect Elma as having to be kept an eye on; and still less again that it was under cover of companionable walks with her on the downs that the most essential part of their relationship could least inconveniently be maintained.
He had to admit to himself that the mere motive of possessing his mistress with facility at need had something threadbare and even demeaning about it when faced up to. But he did want just that: to keep Elma in the picture without the expenditure, as it were, of more than defined physical energies. And this was because it was, in fact, true that Andy was now so much the centre of his thoughts as to diminish almost every other sort of energy that he possessed. But Elma still had her pull. When Howard tentatively suggested that the brothers might most easily and quickly get on terms with one another by going off together on a walking tour or a short trip abroad, Toby turned down the idea with few words. He was chiefly conscious of having a lot to work out, and of his having to do it on his own. Moreover, Andy was the big problem, and if Elma was becoming increasingly a problem too, it was something he felt to be happening at a middle distance and within a contracted perspective such as he wouldn’t have dreamed possible when she had appeared to fill to the brim any cup he was able to hold out to her.
From the first it had been necessary to take the initiative with Andy. Toby didn’t suppose that this proceeded from his possessing a stronger character than his brother, or any superior purposiveness in a general way. Having hastily provided himself with a certain amount of text-book learning on identical twinship, he accepted it as axiomatic that they would hang in poised scales when such matters were in question. It was simply that Andy was in the more pervasively bewildering situation of the two: the situation he himself would have been in had he wandered unwittingly to ‘Glesgy’ and there discovered unsuspected kin amid a social order of a totally alien sort – where it would be taken for granted (Toby reflected with a robust flight of fancy) that he would cool his tea by blowing on it in his saucer and move around the house unshaven and in carpet slippers. Andy, abruptly invited or almost ordered into an unknown scheme of things, was understandably kittle. He wasn’t nervous; he wasn’t, quite blessedly he wasn’t, uneasy on trivial accounts; but he had the air, although he didn’t grossly obtrude the fact, of suspending judgement on the whole situation. He wasn’t defensive any longer. If it is possible to be frank and open in a guarded way, Andy Auld was exactly that. But one had to admit that at any moment he might make up his mind it wouldn’t do, ask for his cards (from Hawkstone, presumably), and vanish for good from the Felton scene.
Toby knew that he would regard this as a great defeat. Of course it would be irrational, he thought, to imagine that at present he felt anything to be termed affection for Andy. Love could spring into being almost at a glance and was the more formidable on that account, but affection requires a long procession of days in which to build its house. So what he felt about Andy Auld – and he did feel something – was hard to define. If he fished about among the paperbacks on his bookshelves, or remembered that silly admiring of himself in the driving-mirror, or called up – rather hazily – the myth of Narcissus and his pool: if he did any of these things he could fancy a pathological self-love to be operative in him, and Andy absorbing only because Andy was in a dotty way himself over again. Yet he wasn’t greatly troubled by such notions, since he wasn’t at all a viewy young man. And what he had to do, he saw, was to bring to bear on the situation whatever power of practical and down-to-earth judgement he possessed.
The big immediate conundrum was clear enough. It could be called simply the class thing. (Like most public-school boys of his time, Toby had thought about the class thing a good deal.) He knew that if he and Andy went off on that suggested trip together they’d be deferring rather than solving this problem. Between themselves they’d ignore it, for the most part, without much difficulty, and even derive amusement, it might be, from the bewilderment of casually encountered persons before the spectacle of two young men so obviously brothers and so oddly disparate in speech and superficial comportment. That in itself would confirm something, would gain quite a lot. But Toby believed, whether rightly or not,
that he and Andy were well on that road already, and that what had to be worked out was a relationship which took account of everybody who lived, or even just visited, at Felton. This was because, if the revealed relationship was going to produce any shift in the material circumstances of the two parties principally concerned, that shift must consist in a modifying of Andy’s future rather than of Toby’s own. Such a conclusion seemed simply among the facts of life. Andy, to put it crudely, could be given a hand-up, whereas there would be no point in his brother being booted down. But what Andy felt about a hand-up was as yet unknown, although it was already evident – to scramble the metaphor – that his tongue wasn’t hanging out for anything of the kind. He might turn down flat the entire notion of any assimilation within Toby’s world. But until he did so, it was clear to Toby that something of the sort should be seen as the natural, indeed the minimally brotherly, thing. His father (from the first Toby had been taught to address Howard Felton as that) seemed to be of a similar mind about Andy, although he was characteristically hesitant over just how to begin. Toby was attempting a beginning in various concrete ways. But these all had to preserve a due regard for Andy’s evident disinclination to be made a spectacle of before Felton at large.
It was something that Andy could scarcely escape, all the same, and this he seemed to accept. Even if he bolted at once he would be more than a nine days’ wonder. That Mr Hawkstone’s new assistant was the split image of the young squire (which was how the better-affected of the tenantry and their labourers referred to Toby) had been widely evident at a glance. So there had been nothing for it but to face the situation full on. Howard Felton himself explained it to Hawkstone, the most closely-concerned of his employees. With what he felt to be considerable address – even guile – Howard had treated it as no more than a mildly surprising thing. Long-lost brothers, he seemed to be saying, were regularly turning up here and there, and quite often it was under odd and surprising circumstances. Hawkstone, a grim character who had grown fond of his employer during a long course of years, received the story with respect, and even refrained from intimating that, since the long-lost brother in question showed no disposition to cease being an under-gardener as well, he, Hawkstone, looked likely to be in a position of some difficulty. If young Auld had become Mr Andrew – which seemed to be the only proper way of regarding him – was Hawkstone to continue giving Mr Andrew orders, or was Mr Andrew entitled to give him orders by legitimate proxy, as was perfectly proper within bounds on the part of a son of the house? Hawkstone in fact uttered not a word of this, but every word of it was implicit in his mere glance. Howard, perhaps weakly, left him to work out an answer for himself. With the indoor servants it was easier. He no longer kept a butler – with whom, if of any seniority, a certain man-to-man communicativeness would have been requisite – and the women with whom his sister ran the place would scarcely expect to be formally addressed on what could be treated as a peripheral, if perplexing, change in the family circumstances.
It might have been different here had Andy at once moved into the house – a rash proposal which Toby had persuaded Howard to advance under the first shock of the affair’s unfolding. It had been rash as nearly precipitating a crisis, Andy having been less alarmed than indignant – indignant, indeed, to the extent of telling Toby he ‘mon ken he’d no be made a monkey o’ ‘. It was evident that Andy regarded the situation into which he had tumbled as sufficiently bizarre without the hanging out, as it were, of further wholly outlandish flags. Fortunately he was for the time being comfortably and respectably quartered – with those superannuated domestics, as it happened, before whose portal Toby and he had first encountered one another. The Misses Kinch (as they were always called) had never before been known to receive a boarder in their lodge, and one might indeed have judged them too decrepit to do so. They must both have been elderly women before the brothers were born. It was soon being asserted in the village – and in particular in the public bar of the Felton Arms – that these ancient persons were privy to some sensational hinterland to the late phenomenal appearance of an unknown Felton (as Andy was judged to be) at the big house. That twin brothers were in question was a view held only in very hazy focus at the Felton Arms, majority opinion being inclined to see a succession of obscure illegitimacies as accounting for what was self-evidently a pleasingly scandalous state of affairs.
It was Toby’s rational notion that he and Andy would most readily get to know one another better by doing things together. His first thought was that he’d teach his brother to drive the Aston Martin (which was almost the next best thing to offering to share Elma with him). But it turned out that Andy could already drive a car perfectly well, and that he saw no particular attraction in being promoted to the wheel of Toby’s vehicle. ‘For sure it’s no’ withoot class,’ he said. ‘But you mon mind it’s just that, Toby, that ye canna’ gie me alang wi’ a plate o’ porridge.’ This was the Doric coming over more than commonly thick, but it was accompanied, as Andy’s remarks now just occasionally were, by a quick smile that Toby once or twice found himself hoping he commanded himself.
‘What games do you play?’ Toby demanded.
‘Football.’ (It was as if Andy had simply forgotten to say ‘futba’’.) ‘There’s more sense in playing it badly than in bawling your heid off in a gomeril crowd o’ what they ca’ fans at a match.’
Toby agreed, but didn’t feel that football, thus regarded, offered much scope for what he had in mind. Had he and Andy come together at half their present age, they could have kicked a ball about the stable yard or a nearby paddock with entire satisfaction. But it would be widely supposed that a yet greater madness had descended upon Felton if they did that now.
‘What about tennis, Andy?’
‘I never played tennis, and no’ golf, either. Nothing with wee ba’s, Toby, not even billiards.’
‘All right! I’ll teach you tennis.’
‘I’ll learn you to use a sickle, Toby. And a scythe foreby – that’s harder by a lang way. Work first, then play.’
‘Agreed.’ Toby was encouraged by being thus relegated to a pupil’s role. He had been sustaining too much of the burden of jockeying things along. So he was emboldened to risk a question he hadn’t hitherto ventured on. ‘Andy,’ he asked, ‘do you think there’s something artificial in our trying to muck in together – I mean, in quite a close way? Strangers and brothers: it’s queer.’
‘It’s queer, all right.’ Andy was looking straight at Toby, and speaking almost in a new voice. ‘But there’s nothing artificial about being brothers, let alone twins.’ Andy’s quick smile came again, and along with it his accustomed dialect. ‘We monna jink it, Toby. Not if there’s the Deil to pay.’
So Andy wasn’t going to quit – or not yet, anyway. Toby comforted himself with this persuasion when, later that day, his muscles began first to ache and then (if muscles can crack) to crack under the unaccustomed use to which they were being put. For the hand-up to Andy was in abeyance, and he himself – at least in a symbolical way – was being booted down after all. He had become a gardener’s boy. He was so completely this that if Hawkstone in passing by had barked out a harsh order to him he’d scarcely have been surprised.
They’d begun, Andy and himself, not with sickle or scythe but with a couple of pairs of hand shears, on that still largely untrimmed hedge. They had two ladders and worked side by side. It was blazing hot, and this time Toby was even further stripped than Andy, since he had thought to show willing by turning out in nothing except old running shorts and a pair of gym-shoes. A prunus hedge in a dry August is an abominably dusty thing, particularly when close to a country road, and it was soon in muddy trickles that the sweat was running down Toby’s chest and back. Whenever a tough twig or two resisted the snap of his shears and jarred his wrists, he had recourse to one or another of the four most improper expletives he knew. Andy, more accustomed to the brute obstructiveness of material things, worked in silence and was amused by this. The Mis
ses Kinch, apprised of what was going on and of the company their lodger was keeping, came in an unheard-of way to their little parlour window and peered through its lace curtains.
In the course of the afternoon another spectator arrived in the person of Mrs Warlow. She came down the drive wearing a broad-brimmed hat with a fluttering green ribbon, and lightly burdened with a camp-stool and a sketching block. Toby got down from his ladder in order to help her dispose of these objects as she wished – an automatism which Andy, still clipping, marked with that hint of the sardonic occasionally to be detected in him. Mrs Warlow, when not, in her brother’s words, staring at people’s faces, was willing to put in time staring at the face of nature instead – transferring to paper small rural scenes judiciously animated by people’s figures here and there. It at once appeared that this was her object now. She was going to commemorate the not wholly unremarkable occasion of the two brothers labouring together.
‘That’s just right,’ she said briskly as she glanced from one to the other. ‘Both of you in shorts or both of you in trousers wouldn’t be nearly so good. But it would improve matters if the step-ladders were nearer together.’
‘They’re where they are,’ Andy said from his perch, ‘for a guid reason, the wark regairded.’
This was not a remark that Andy, if at all considered as Mr Hawkstone’s assistant merely, might have been expected to offer. Toby felt that it showed Andy as coming on. But Andy, who must find the idea of being made to serve as an artist’s model while he worked strange and disconcerting, was getting down from his ladder as he spoke, and seemed disposed to arrange matters in the way Mrs Warlow required. Toby found this absurd; he didn’t think that his Aunt Grace (as he was accustomed to speak of her) had been serious in proposing actually to squash them together in the service of art; it was simply one of the rather tiresome jokes she went in for. But now here was Andy picking up the idea of trivial polite attentions to a woman and actually shifting the ladder as he was told. Toby didn’t feel that Andy had taken any particular liking to Mrs Warlow. He couldn’t have seen much of her; and her conversation, although not more astringent when directed to him than to other people, must come to him as unfamiliar and off-putting. Yet Toby had once or twice been aware of his brother as turning upon Grace a certain intentness of regard, almost as if she were the most puzzling of all the puzzles – all the unknowns and unaccountabilities – to have gathered around him at Felton. And this was in turn a puzzle to Toby. He had never thought there was anything very special about Aunt Grace, unless it was her being rather challengingly ‘well-preserved’. She must be past forty (which spelt for Toby later middle age) but seemed not at all resigned to change and decay. Indeed, he had a notion – although it wasn’t really terribly nice – that Aunt Grace retained an interest in the sexual life, and was disposed to direct it upon Colonel Motley, a neighbouring widower even older than herself and with a similar tendency to defy the years. Toby knew perfectly well that if Aunt Grace were to marry Colonel Motley, it would be a commonplace and quite suitable match. But he did at the same time feel it embarrassing that persons a whole long generation older than himself should still be involved with the sex thing.
Andrew and Tobias Page 4