Work was resumed. The two young men clipped away industriously, and Mrs Warlow made various preliminary gestures with a pencil poised above her paper. Presently she began to draw, and for a time the snip-snap of the shears and the gentle swish of severed twigs falling to the ground were the only sounds heard. Then Mrs Warlow spoke.
‘I came down here partly,’ she said, ‘because I have news for you. But go on with the job.’
The young men had both turned to look at her as she spoke. It was to find her holding out a vertical pencil at arm’s length for the purpose of measuring her scene. Her own job was certainly going to continue.
‘My brother has had the answer to his enquiries,’ she said – and by this form of words indicated that she was chiefly addressing Andy. ‘It adds only a little to his own recollection. Three male infants were rescued from the Cornucopia. One was in a bad way and died before being brought to land. The second we know as Toby Felton. The third was adopted by a Mr and Mrs Auld of Newton Stewart in Galloway. So if the two of you have felt that your relationship was in need of any confirming you can now reach out from your perches and shake hands on it.’
Neither Toby nor Andy felt this symbolic act to be seemly or called for, and for some moments there was an uncertain pause. Then Toby spoke.
‘Well, that’s that,’ he said. ‘And we can go on with the job, as you say.’ He found himself resenting the fact of his aunt having taken it upon herself to give this information, even although it conveyed nothing momentous or new. It ought to have come from his father, and no doubt his father had meant to communicate it in the course of the afternoon. Toby was inclined to be sensitive about Mrs Warlow’s position in the household, and understood very well it was because she was a Felton and he was not. He also knew that she was an honest woman. She took no enchanted view of Andy – or so he believed – but had been absolutely straight in supporting her brother’s view that he was to be at once accepted as belonging to the family. This didn’t perhaps include the thought that he should join it. But it was the essential thing. And now Mrs Warlow addressed Andy directly, emphasising the fact by pointing her pencil at him as she spoke.
‘Toby declares that that’s that,’ she said. ‘What about you, Andy? Have you anything more expansive to say?’
There was a pause, presumably because ‘expansive’ was a word that Andy had to decode in some fashion.
‘Och, aye,’ he then said. ‘If I mon hae a brither – a thing I never thocht on – Toby will suit me fine.’
This definitely was expansive. In fact, it revealed in Andy, less uncertainly than had that dark remark about the Devil to pay, a drift of feeling so masked hitherto that Toby now found himself on the verge of being startled into tears. And perhaps it deserved better than the rejoinder it drew from Mrs Warlow.
‘And Felton,’ she asked, ‘does that suit you fine too?’
‘I canna’ say that. I dinna’ ken.’
‘So I’d suppose.’ Grace Warlow, who was at least a woman concerned to arrive at the truth of a situation, gave a briskly approbatory nod over her still-raised pencil. ‘But you’ll find it to be something you must make up your mind about.’
‘Ithers can do that – tell whether I’ve anything to gie or tak frae sic a place. It’s only simple folk that hae come my way afore.’
Mrs Warlow received this with a reflective pause, the result of which appeared to be the drawing of a single strong diagonal line on the paper before her. Over this she again indulged a considering impulse before speaking.
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she said. ‘Your shoulders are very nice, Toby, but much too pink. Quite horribly pink, even although I haven’t got my paint box. What’s more, you irritate the composition. Andy, very appropriately, makes a big St Andrew’s Cross on his ladder, and his shears make another little one. That’s quite enough. So would you mind going away? Get Hawkstone to find you your next job.’
Mrs Warlow’s sense of agreeable whimsy was frequently disconcerting. But Toby was used to it, and didn’t resent being thus dismissed by her in the way he did resent Elma’s recent permitting herself similar cavalier conduct. He simply jumped to the ground, achieved with his brother the satisfactory intimacy of an exchanged glance of amusement and alarm, tried to put his hands in his pockets only to find that he hadn’t any, and strolled off up the drive. Aunt Grace might annoy Andy in this tête à tête she had so badly brought about. But it wouldn’t be other than in a forthright way. And Toby was coming to feel that his brother, although (for the second time in his life) so very much cast upon wide waters, would prove a strong swimmer at need.
Mrs Warlow remained seated on her stool as Andy got down from his ladder, planted himself squarely before her, and lightly hitched up his jeans. He then remained with his knuckles resting on his hips. It would have been easier to say that the attitude hinted challenge than to identify the nature of the challenge involved.
‘It may still no’ be legal,’ Andy said.
Here again an observer could have felt in doubt. Andy Auld might have been attempting a canny probing of his situation with an eye to some dimly discerned advantage. Or he might, equally gropingly, be seeking what could crudely be called a way out. At least the remark occasioned in Mrs Warlow one of her considering moments. In these, an observer familiar with the family might have noted that she took on much the look of her Oxford brother.
‘My dear lad,’ she said, ‘I can hardly imagine circumstances in which the point would become material.’
‘Material?’
‘Important. Of practical significance in any way.’
‘I see. But ye canna’ tell.’ Being addressed by Mrs Warlow as ‘my dear lad’ had been not without effect on Andy. He had stiffened, and if he looked at her rather wonderingly as he had done once or twice before, he also for the first time – and very briefly – looked her up and down. ‘Would the doctors ken?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think so, Andy. And I don’t know what a lawyer would say. It’s my guess that, if a judge had to decide, he’d take a single look at the two of you and accept the presumptive evidence as overwhelming. But there’s a much simpler question. Do you want to be treated as what you are – as Toby’s brother?’
‘It’s still atween the twa o’ us, that, Mistress Warlow.’
If Andy had never been addressed by a handsome woman as ‘my dear lad’ before, neither had Grace Warlow ever been called ‘Mistress’ by a young man whose glance was at once combative and sexually appraising. It made her feel like an elderly female character in a novel by Walter Scott.
‘I do beg your pardon,’ she said, without coldness. ‘It is indeed entirely between the two of you. Only don’t be so reticent, Andy, as to make us feel you believe yourself to have any enemies at Felton. You have not.’
‘Yon Hawkstone’s an enemy. Times I’d like to gie him a clout on the heid, only he’s ower stricken in years for it. Hawkstone’s a regular auld Nickie Ben.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense, Andy.’ Mrs Warlow had in fact perceived that this odd speech was in no correspondence with anything Andy actually felt; it represented mere evasive action while he took the measure of what was going on.
‘A’ richt.’ Andy, who had remained standing with his weight poised evenly on either foot, now slightly flexed one knee and dropped the corresponding hip. This dehanchement, although his figure was such as to lend it quite as much elegance as Praxiteles and others have achieved with it, had chiefly the effect of enhancing the hint of challenge in him. ‘A’ the same, ye’d hae me gang awa’?’ This question had come a little swiftly for Mrs Warlow, and it seemed almost from a considerate wish to cover up her hesitation that Andy immediately added, ‘And perhaps hae a wee postal order sent me frae time to time?’
Despite the humorous intonation which Andy had lent this question, Mrs Warlow didn’t at all care for it. But she told herself that she was not entitled to be displeased, since Andy had expressed, if in a reductive fashion, a perfectly conceivable
way of dealing with the situation. Indeed, Howard had told her that their brother (over excellent cold ham) had suggested the feasibility of establishing Andy Auld as an honourable family pensioner at some remove.
‘Don’t be difficult, Andy. The thing is difficult enough in itself, without you turning pernickety about it as well.’
Andy looked thoughtful. He may merely have been wondering whether ‘pernickety’ had been used to make fun of him, or was a word in common use south of the Border. But his next action suggested that his mind was more seriously engaged. There was a wheelbarrow at the side of the drive; he went over to it, trundled it across to where Mrs Warlow sat, and deposited himself in it much as if he were a sack of potatoes, although at the same time with a practised ease such as a gentleman might display when sinking into an armchair in a club.
‘Then I’ll be listening,’ he said. ‘And you’ll run ower the difficulties.’
‘We’d better say the possibilities. But there are impossibilities as well, and they ought to be cleared out of the way. There’s the plain fact, for instance, that you can’t stay on at Felton as an under-gardener. I suppose you’ll agree to that.’
‘Mr Felton could gie Auld Clootie the sack, and hae me to be his heid gardener instead. I could dae it fine. And I’d tak’ on Toby to get the weeds oot.’
Mrs Warlow, assured by this last remark that Andy’s intention was still humorous and merely marked a continued disposition to bide his time, gave a few moments to the study of her interrupted sketch. She even took up her pencil and with a dozen strokes evoked a creditable impression of Mr Hawkstone’s assistant asleep in his wheelbarrow. She handed this to him, observed with satisfaction his eyes widen over such an accomplishment, and then tried again.
‘What I feel is this, Andy. Although it is indeed you and Toby who are alone closely involved, what you are going to work out isn’t going to be worked out in isolation. Other relationships will be affected.’
Andy made no response to this. What he did do was to put a hand to his mouth and bite his thumb. This startled Mrs Warlow. She went in for hands. And it wasn’t merely that Andy’s left hand was indistinguishable from Toby’s – and was a very nice hand as a consequence. It was also that the gesture was Toby’s as well. When some extra degree of concentration was required of him, Toby would bite his thumb and go on biting it. His nursery days lay sufficiently in a past age for thumb-sucking to have been regarded as a monstrous evil in them. But of this slightly less infantile habit neither nanny nor governess had ever been able to break Toby Felton. And now Mrs Warlow could tell that Andy had been reduced to thinking hard. Andy was almost certainly no less bright than his brother. But any generality, any proposition involving even a slight degree of abstraction, he’d take longer than Toby to absorb and cope with.
‘Weel,’ Andy said a little roughly, ‘I’ve got twa lugs, and am listening wi’ them. Sae have on with ye.’
‘Consider this. For a long time now Toby has been, quite simply, my brother’s son. And again never mind the law, Andy. It’s the accepted thing – what we all take for granted in this household. You understand that?’
‘I understand it fine. And I’d think poorly o’ any folk that thocht it otherwise.’
‘Very well. My brother is Toby’s father, and Toby is your brother, but you are not my brother’s son.’
‘It’s to talk like a conundrum out of a cracker, that.’
‘No, it isn’t – and you understand it perfectly well.’
‘Aren’t you meaning it’s going to be confusing? That’s what a conundrum’s for – to muddle ye.’
‘We just mustn’t get muddled.’ Mrs Warlow paused for longer than usual, since she found great difficulty in expressing herself at this point. ‘I’ve already suggested what I mean. Your arrival among us may bring about a shift in a good many relationships, and so it has to be considered with care. First this may slip, and then that. I know I’m putting it badly. But do you at all get what I mean?’
For a moment Andy was silent in his turn – perhaps aware that this confident lady’s sudden diffidence before her own power of expression had to be received with respect. But his colour had risen, all the same, as if in a moment he might flare up in a very unexpected way. And there was something of this in his next speech.
‘Is it a gowk in the nest you’d be taking me for, Mistress Warlow?’
‘Certainly not!’ It was with a new severity that Toby’s aunt made this reply, and as she did so she rose from her stool and faced the young man. Then she relaxed. ‘Anything less like a cuckoo than you, Andy Auld, I’d find it hard to imagine.’
‘Aye.’ Andy failed to respond to this more amiable note. ‘But, a’ the same, you’re for seeing me gang awa’, are ye no’? I can tell that fine.’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘Havers, woman! Ye say a’ this o’ slipping and slithering if I bide amang ye—’
‘I want you to stay at Felton.’
Andy stared at Grace Warlow – on the verge, it may have been, of some enormous misunderstanding. But an innate prudence saved him.
‘What for should you want sic’ a thing?’ he asked. ‘If trouble is all I can bring to this hoose.’
‘I think that a shake-up may do us good, Andy. We make all sorts of assumptions in a family like this, and some of them are no more than illusions, likely enough. I dislike illusions. I like to see this and that put to the test from time to time.’
‘You’re a wise yin, too,’ Andy said, still staring – and perhaps without much reflecting what the final word in this judgement betokened. ‘But just how I can bide here, kicking my heels like a keelie in a sweetie-shop, I canna’ tell.’ Andy picked up his shears as he arrived at this obscurely bizarre image. ‘But you’d better be sending Toby back to me. I’ll drive him so that we finish this side by tea.’
IV
Andy knew about tea, since it was the family occasion to which he had now been persuaded more or less regularly to turn up. At this time of year it happened outside a small incongruously-Gothic pavilion on the west terrace. You went into the pavilion itself for what you wanted – it was supposed to be impenetrable to flies – and then returned to the open air. Here you could be as sociable or unsociable as you pleased, since there was a scattering of chairs along the terrace and in the small Dutch garden on one side of the house. Andy found this informality reassuring, and on the whole, he was more conversable than not. Of Felton House itself, which although not opulent was rather splendid in various ways, he still fought shy. Toby had to exercise his imagination to estimate in advance how one or another of its strangenesses would strike his brother. It had never occurred to Andy, for instance, that one might find a billiard-room other than attached to a pub; and he had appeared worried rather than amused when it was explained to him that the gate halfway up the main staircase, which dated from the seventeenth century, was designed to prevent dogs from going up and not children from coming down. Toby’s own quarters, with their separate approach, alone became familiar ground to him.
The inner face of the hedge had been finished by four o’clock, and Toby managed what would have been a quick shower had it not required a surprising amount of soap and water to get the dust off him. He wondered, as he had done once before, about the ablutions available to his brother. The Misses Kinch, he decided, must certainly run to a bath. But Andy’s wardrobe was restricted, and Toby had not yet ventured to suggest that borrowing from his would be a reasonable fraternal arrangement. This bothered him now, since it suggested that in the mucking-in process there was still much to be achieved. He scrambled into an older Viyella shirt and pair of trousers than he might otherwise have chosen at this hour. When he got downstairs, and had made his way through what was called the new dining-room (which had been designed by Robert Mylne in 1770) into the open air, it was to find that Elma had come to tea. She had brought with her her younger brother, Vivian Loftus, whom Toby was no more than vaguely aware of as a sixth-former at some app
alling North of England public school.
‘Oh, hullo,’ Toby said to Elma. ‘Oh, hullo, Vivian.’ He felt these noises, even as he uttered them, to be particularly lame. That the Loftuses should drop in at Felton like this was of course entirely in order, but Toby sensed an awkwardness in it, all the same. He was also rather surprised. Elma made no secret of being fond of the house, and in fact, knew more of its history than Toby did. But lately she had seemed to be keeping away from it, in much the same way as she had been keeping him away from her own home. It was, he hoped, a matter of delicacy, and he was aware of something of the same sort in himself. He had ceased to see the secret he shared with Elma as conspiratorial fun, and had begun to tell himself that he was deceiving Howard – and for that matter Aunt Grace and Ianthe as well – to no good purpose at all. In fact, he ought to speed up the marriage thing straight away. Once he and Elma declared themselves as headed in that direction, Howard, he believed, would prove sufficiently aware of the present way of the world to take no exception to the fact that they were already going to bed together.
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