‘Hullo, Felton,’ Vivian Loftus said. Vivian was standing on the terrace with his legs straddled, his hands in his trouser-pockets, and his chin dropped on his chest. Toby judged him to be thoroughly oafish – and moreover didn’t care to be addressed by his surname, as if he were somebody in an old-fashioned school-story. ‘Where’s this brother?’ Vivian added.
‘He’ll be coming along,’ Toby said curtly. He hadn’t liked this either. ‘We’ve been doing rather a mucky job together.’
‘I’m so thrilled,’ Elma exclaimed – chiefly addressing Howard, who was handing her a tea-cup. ‘It’s such a wonderful thing to have happened.’
‘Yes, indeed.’ Whenever Howard Felton’s attention was particularly attracted by Elma, he conveyed an impression of being pleasantly surprised. As he had known her since infancy it was perhaps as a consequence of having regularly forgotten that she had grown up. ‘Andrew is a great accession,’ he added with some formality. ‘Do have one of these little sandwich affairs.’
Although Elma had of course heard about Andy from the first, they had not yet met – Toby having been for some reason prompted to defer the occasion. It was curiosity, he supposed, that had brought her to Felton today – and her brother too, for that matter. Toby felt faintly jealous about this – almost as if he and Andy might become rivals – and the feeling was not wholly abated by Elma’s disposition, as she drank her first cup of tea, to offer him from several yards’ distance what could only be called a speaking look. He had himself done the same thing in not wholly different situations. But he didn’t, somehow, at all care for speaking looks on his home ground.
Andy did now arrive, unconscious that by thus appearing last for tea he had occasioned a certain build-up of expectation. His route, moreover, chanced to lie through a vista of a peculiar character. First he rounded in the distance a lily pond where the formal garden began, and then advanced up a long path leading directly to the terrace. It was a path bisecting a series of parallel clipped hedges – very much older than the hedge at the bottom of the drive – the maintenance of which was Hawkstone’s particular pride. But as these hedges were successively higher as one moved between them towards the house, a small optical trick (borrowed, Howard would explain to guests, from Palladio) was played upon any watcher from the terrace. Andy, in fact, had the appearance of diminishing in stature as he advanced. Toby wondered whether this piece of nonsense had been explained to him. It was of course familiar to everybody else, and no more to be commented upon than that dog gate on the main staircase. But it did serve to concentrate the regard of the small company assembled on the terrace upon the young man who now – if in so odd and exiguous a fashion – belonged with them.
There had been a momentary check in Andy’s progress as he passed the last of the hedges on either hand. There were no more than two unfamiliar figures before him at this tea-taking affair, but it could be felt that even this was something he had to think about – even brace himself in the face of. Then he climbed some steps, and both Howard and Toby advanced a pace or two by way of judiciously casual welcome. But Andy was unnoticing – or at least appeared to be so – and walked straight up to Grace Warlow.
‘Would I be late for your tea?’ he asked. ‘Toby an’ me hae had a richt mucky time, as ye saw. But we tholed it, and the wark’s half done.’
Toby had also spoken of a mucky job, but not with quite the satisfaction carried by his brother’s tone. Andy was feeling that he had deserved his tea – a thought that wouldn’t have occurred to Toby. Andy might also have been feeling that Mrs Warlow’s personal regard had been earned by his exertions. Not that he had come up to her in the least, as it were, wagging his tail. Mrs Warlow herself, making some suitable rejoinder about the continued availability of tea, on this occasion directed upon Toby’s brother a brief intentness of regard such as her profession no doubt licensed her to exercise at will. There seemed nothing particularly new to observe in Andy – and certainly not in his clothes. His jeans were a replica of those he had worn at work, and he had added to them a faded blue cotton shirt, which had already appeared on several occasions. It would have been apparent to any woman that this last garment had been laundered and ironed by careful hands, and from this there might have been drawn the inference that its owner was now in good standing with the Misses Kinch.
‘Come and meet our guests,’ Mrs Warlow said, not without a touch of brisk command, and led Andy across the terrace. ‘Elma, this is Toby’s brother, Andrew. You will have heard that he comes from Scotland and has never been at Felton before.’ This reticent formula had probably been prepared for use on more frequented occasions than the present, but nevertheless Mrs Warlow was prompted to it now. ‘Andrew, this is Elma Loftus, a neighbour of ours, and her brother, Vivian.’
Elma, although she had learnt already that Toby’s twin resembled him virtually to the point of a freckle here and a pucker there, was wide-eyed as she now absorbed the fact at first hand. Vivian glanced rapidly from one brother to the other – they were separated by the breadth of the terrace – and was prompted to sharp laughter singularly graceless in effect.
‘Oh, I have been so glad!’ Elma said, and took Andy by the hand. It was a gesture rendered slightly awkward from Andy’s having momentarily misinterpreted it as signalling a desire to be provided with a slice of cake or a bun. Elma – Toby thought – was rapidly developing a social manner, but was still prone a little to lose her bearings on the job. There was really no reason why she should be quite so glad as she suggested, unless Toby had been murmuring in her ear in bed that he had found a long-lost brother who was proving to be a pearl beyond price. This he had certainly not done. Indeed, he hadn’t got around to saying a great deal to Elma about Andy – and to Andy he had said nothing about Elma at all. So here was something more to bother him – and another immediate spectacle to dislike. He didn’t care to see Andy even briefly confronted by a girl he wasn’t aware of as being his brother’s mistress, and he again felt that any relation of confidence established between Andy and himself couldn’t yet come to much if it had involved no exchange of information on sexual matters in general. But he quickly told himself that he was probably wrong about this; that he didn’t, after all, know the first thing about brothers; and that even between brothers who were pretty thick together, a certain reticence in this sphere might obtain. He wished he’d told Andy about Elma, all the same. It would be very horrid, somehow, if Elma straightway took Andy off into a corner of the garden and told him herself. It was at least probable that in the course of this small tea-party she would want to have his brother for a spell on her own. There really was a good deal of curiosity in Elma’s make-up, although it wasn’t exactly of the intellectual order that Toby’s Cambridge supervisor had been fond of commending to him.
These thoughts somehow lent urgency to Toby’s new sense that the sooner he got on with the marriage thing the better, and he decided to begin by rather obtrusively claiming Elma’s society for himself during the rest of her visit. He might even put an arm round her shoulders or – better still – give her coram populo an affectionate pat on the bottom. That would settle the matter in everybody’s mind at once. A chap was certainly going to marry a girl to whom he did that.
This plan was frustrated, however, by Elma’s brother – who had, it turned out, now left school, and who was anxious to impress the fact upon Toby, together with various other circumstances of interest and importance to himself. Vivian was ‘going up’ in October – a phrase which he supposed should be used without further particularisation by a university man. Toby asked, ‘Up what?’ and then, feeling penitent about this joke, resigned himself to listening to whatever else Vivian had to say. At least Vivian had quit being a prefect. Perhaps because his mind had been running on bottoms, it came into Toby’s head that Vivian’s was surely the school at which the biggest boys were awarded little dog whips as badges of office, and with these encouraged the smallest boys to develop their limbs and lungs on gargantuan mar
athons over the appalling moorland wastes in the midst of which the school was located. Toby wondered whether he might with adequate propriety seek confirmation of this piece of public-school mythology from the boring Vivian, but decided that the question might be a little offensive as coming from a host. In any case, Vivian was busy asking questions of his own.
‘Isn’t it a bit dull, this office place they’ve put you in?’ he demanded.
‘Yes, frightfully dull. No romance in it at all. And not even a pool of typists laid on. It’s a nice idea—don’t you think?—a typists’ pool. Down in a basement, I suppose. There they are, diving and swimming around in the most marvellous scraps of this and that.’
‘Jolly good.’ Vivian was in fact a little at sea before this. ‘I don’t want to do anything dull myself. I’m thinking of going into the army. It’s an adventurous life.’
‘So the adverts say.’
‘That’s right. I’ve been reading them, and it seems just the thing.’
‘But what about the exams?’
‘Oh, they don’t say much about exams. You just have to have those things they shove you through at school.’
‘The exams come later, Vivian. Once they’ve got you in. You have to keep on taking them until you’re about forty, and as soon as you fail one you’re out on your ear. The idea is that senior officers have to be rather intelligent.’
‘I never heard that. I wonder if you can be right?’ For a moment Elma’s brother was quite dashed. ‘What about this brother?’ he then asked. ‘What are you going to do with him?’
‘Do with him?’
‘Will he just live here and potter around?’
‘I’d hardly think so. There’s not all that much scope at Felton.’
‘Couldn’t you put him in the army?’ Vivian offered this as one stung by the splendour of a sudden thought. ‘Of course I don’t suppose they’d see him as officer material – not with that awful prole’s accent. But he seems a terribly nice chap.’ Vivian paused as if to emphasise the correctness of this ritual remark. ‘He’d probably end up as a rattling good NCO.’
‘By which time you’d be an ex-captain in the dole queue.’ Toby was instantly shocked at having produced an angry and discourteous remark, and at the same time reflected with dismay that this great sod was Elma’s brother. But Vivian Loftus had merely laughed loudly, which must be his standard treatment of anything he judged to be jolly good. Moreover his eye had strayed in the direction of his senior host, whom it was evident that he designed to favour with his conversation in turn.
So Toby slipped away. He slipped away and looked round for Elma, whom he had last glimpsed being nice to Mrs Warlow. But Elma had vanished, and Andy had vanished too.
Elma’s interest in Andy was no less lively than Toby had supposed, and she had secured that spell of sole companionship with him for a while by simply announcing that she was going to show him over the house. Andy may not have been particularly taken with the proposal, but his notion of who this pretty girl was had remained entirely vague, and he was quite without the sort of social sense that might have suggested to him anything odd in the proceeding. And he decidedly saw nothing unattractive in Elma as revealed by that quick up and down (and indeed round and about) glance which his own code of the fitness of things sanctioned. He contented himself with saying warily that Toby had shown him a guid bittock o’ the place and that it was gran’ eneuch. Toby, had he been present, would at once have said that Andy was laying it on. Andy, after all, was having to keep his end up in a long series of difficult situations, and a firm adherence to his native tongue had been proving a considerable moral support to him.
Leading him back through the new dining-room, Elma offered explanations which were not at all required. Her family, she said, although not of the immemorial antiquity of the Feltons, had lived in this part of the world for a good many generations, and there had even been some intermarriages a long time back. Since she was a quite small girl she had always been interested in Felton House and its history, and during her growing up Mr Felton’s daughter, Ianthe, had become her best friend. It was a joke among them all that if it ever became necessary to throw Felton ‘open to the public’ at five bob a head, it would certainly be she who would have to become chief cicerone to the enterprise. So she got into training by showing friends around from time to time. They must really begin in the hall, because Grinling Gibbons had been sent to Felton by John Evelyn in 1681, and had done a marvellous job with the new panelling which was installed during the following couple of years. But the best portraits, of course, were in the saloon.
Andy found this patter, and a good deal more that Elma said or implied, more confusing than anything that had yet come to him. He had a sense of this young woman as belonging to a world somehow more remote from him than the world of the Feltons themselves. Of course all sorts of things were odd about the Feltons: for example, that they should own a saloon – an amenity which he thought of together with billiard-tables as being a cut above the public bar. He wondered whether this girl’s greater strangeness meant that the Loftuses were really grander than the Feltons, and more remote-seeming on this account. Yet Andy was learning all the time – at very much the pace, it may be supposed, that Toby would have learnt in an answering situation. So he knew that this couldn’t be right. Elma Loftus, he saw, was an admirer of, rather than a full participant in, what in the Aulds’ world would have been known as high life. It was a situation that he didn’t want to find becoming his own.
They began in the hall. Andy, who had determined to meet all these people halfway (and Toby a good deal further, if need be) and give them a fair go, did his best to exercise his historical imagination. He started with great big dogs – dogs probably had to be very big when there were bears and dinosaurs around – and set them pawing and slavering at the dog gate on the staircase. The floor of the hall would be littered with straw instead of being carpeted; it would also be littered with the bones chucked away by lords and ladies after they had finished a good gnaw at them. Knives, perhaps; certainly no forks – but what about spoons? He might ask this girl about that. Mostly they ate peacocks and boar’s heads – so another doubtful point was what they did with the rest of the boars. They might be boiled up, he supposed, as broth or brose for the servants. There would be any number of servants – who would be just like himself. Some of them might be bastards of the laird—the lord—and as a consequence uncommonly like the son of the house.
‘. . . Reginald de Felton recovered his lands from the King and drove out the monks.’ This information from Elma came dimly to Andy as his unaccustomed effort of fancy faded out on him. If she detected him as inattentive she probably thought that he was engaged, as Toby might have been, in working out the exact lines of her figure beneath her light summer dress. It was not perhaps in Elma’s nature to be displeased by this speculation as she continued her talk. ‘But the barony was declared to be extinct, and the Feltons have remained commoners ever since. I suppose it must be said that they have chosen to remain commoners. They are in consequence among the very few commoners whose ancestors are known to have held land before the Conquest. They were allowed to retain it, of course, because of their Angevin connection.’
‘Aye.’ Andy had no idea what a commoner was, let alone an Angevin, and didn’t believe it would prove to be important if he found out. Moreover, although a good-natured young man, he resented being – as he felt it to be – shoved back into school. At the same time he did now clearly see that this girl possessed points that he didn’t recall in his schoolmistresses. So he signalised the realisation by giving Elma a new sort of look. It was perfectly inoffensive, quite brief, and with no urgency about it at all. It was a look, nevertheless, frankly inviting acknowledgement of one of the simpler facts of life. Elma, being by nature one who took that sort of thing in her stride, felt no impulse to be snubby, and contrived a nicely calculated modest glance in return. But Andy seemed merely to feel that something proper to be done
in regard to a girl like Elma had now been done, and he showed no disposition to advance further. ‘We’d better be getting alang round,’ he said. ‘You’ll be wanting to be for hame soon, Miss Loftus.’
‘You must please call me Elma,’ Elma said – and added as a quick afterthought, ‘Ianthe always does.’
‘Elma, then.’ Andy didn’t think much of Elma as a girl’s name; he felt it was a name you might give to a female elephant in a zoo. As for Ianthe – that struck him as a name outlandish beyond imagining.
‘And I may call you Andy? I heard Mr Felton call you Andrew once or twice. But Andy sounds friendlier.’
‘I’d say there’s no muckle in it.’
This was not particularly encouraging, and Elma led the way into the saloon. It was a very large room, elaborate beyond the general character of the house, and was almost unused except when a dance had to be got up for Ianthe. A couple of generations back somebody had injudiciously concentrated in it an excessive number of family portraits of very varying historical interest and artistic merit, and the general effect of these was costive rather than imposing.
‘Are all they folk Feltons?’ Andy asked. ‘Yin’s much like anither – but mebby that’s just how the painters had their way at it.’
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