Andrew and Tobias

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Saloon or public?’ Toby asked.

  Andy hesitated for a moment, which wasn’t a common thing with him. He may have been reflecting on that grand room with the portraits and feeling that a saloon was his brother’s customary home ground.

  ‘It’s a bawbee or twa less in the public,’ he said non-committally.

  So they went into the public bar. It didn’t look as if anybody was there because bawbees were scarce in their pockets. Among a large crowd of people a large amount of lavish drinking was going on. There was also a great deal of noise, a great deal of tobacco smoke, and a heavy alcoholic miasma permeating the whole area. Toby, although quite fond of a drink in a pub, didn’t much care for the place, but Andy seemed to respond to its atmosphere almost at once.

  ‘They’re back frae a match a’ richt,’ he said, ‘and this has no’ been their first pub. And a guid mony o’ your gentry hae come in here too.’

  Toby resented ‘your gentry’, supposing – probably wrongly – that his brother was intending to include him in that category. It was certainly true that a good many of the chaps with the big cars had come into the public bar. They were drinking in two or three small groups by themselves. Toby eyed them with disfavour, and was further irritated by the term Andy had just used. Having taken over – quite unconsciously with the years – a good many old-fashioned conceptions and perceptions from his foster-father, he was at once aware that there wasn’t a gentleman among them. But he was without those old-fashioned resources of vocabulary which Howard Felton could have called up at need, and had never in his life described anybody as a bounder or a cad.

  ‘Awful men,’ Toby said gloomily.

  ‘They think they own ony place they care to mak’ a big mouth in – an’ could own me an’ my kind tae, did they care aboot it.’ This was a surprisingly resentful speech from Andy. Toby, foreseeing some danger of these loud and opulent-seeming persons getting under his brother’s skin, steered him away from the nearest bunch of them. Together they squeezed up to the bar and got their pints, for which Andy managed to pay. Toby felt that the ‘supporters’ were some of them jostling a bit more than they had to, but when Andy got jostled by one of them to the extent of slopping some of his beer he seemed at once to regard the chap who had jostled him as a personal friend, and even exchanged several remarks with him in the loud tones required by the general clamour in the place. Then he turned back to his brother, glanced at him bright-eyed, raised his tankard in salutation, and took a handsome swig at it.

  ‘Their side lost, if you ask me,’ he said, ‘and they’re drooning their sorrows on the lang road hame.’

  ‘They look proper hooligans, some of them.’ Using this permitted term, Toby spoke injudiciously loudly himself. Aware that a couple of men were staring at him, he hastily got down quite a lot of his own beer.

  ‘Och, aye – but ye canna’ blame them if they put in a few hours in the week that way. Their wark’s awfu’ monotonous, mair like than not. So they like a bit o’ argie-bargie wi’ t’ither side o’ a Saturday. They’ll have left yin or twa o’ theirsel’s in the cells, I dinna’ doot.’

  Andy’s dialect was becoming harder to penetrate, and Andy himself somehow seemed to be drawing a little further off. He had finished his first pint already. So Toby finished his own, grabbed his brother’s tankard, and struggled back to the bar for fresh supplies. Andy shouted some cheerful instruction after him, and shouted again as soon as he had begun his return journey with the foaming stuff in either hand. Toby was aware that the two of them were now attracting a certain amount of attention from the company at large, and his mind went forward rather anxiously to the third pint. He was somehow sure that Andy would insist on that.

  ‘Safe back and awa’ through the hooligans,’ Andy said – again cheerfully and again loudly. ‘It’s true their crack wadna’ much please the meenister, an’ they’d cut a puir figure gin they had to tak’ tea with the Queen at Balmoral. But we’re a’Jock Tamson’s bairns. I was saying something to that wee dunty came to tea at Felton aboot Jock Tamson’s bairns.’

  Toby was puzzled by this, and he had no idea (fortunately, as it was to turn out) what a ‘dunty’ was. But he did suddenly realise that Andy had a light head for drink. He might have known as much, since he had a light head himself. Earlier in the evening, and perhaps influenced by literary sources, he had envisaged a short progress from pub to pub as advancing his relationship with his brother in an agreeable way. Now he was only anxious to bring the misconceived expedition to a close and to drive home in tolerable sobriety. It was vaguely in his head that recently the police had been permitted to lurk outside pubs and pick up heavy-drinking car-drivers at random. It would be quite shaming and beastly to have to appear before the beaks about a thing like that, and a calamity if he were denied the Aston Martin for a year as a result.

  Nevertheless they had their third pint. Something in Toby – a muzzy sense that he wasn’t going to be beaten – made him down his at one go – much as if he were an Oxford undergraduate being ‘sconced’ according to the disgusting usage still said to persist in that university. Andy, although without these academic associations, did the same, and then fetched the fourth pint. This time they drank more slowly, eyeing one another with a certain animosity. Toby wondered if it would improve matters if he made a dash for the gents and managed among other activities to vomit. But he and Andy were now mysteriously penned in. He didn’t quite know how this could be, but when he pulled himself together sufficiently to look round in a collected manner he saw a circle of curious hooligans – with here and there a patch of those loitering heirs of City directors. Probably they weren’t that at all. They were bloody car salesmen, which was even worse. A diffused belligerency invaded Toby. Why were all those people staring at him – and some of them even (for he felt sure of this) making jeering and taunting remarks? It suddenly came to him that Andy and he would never be able to be in a public place together without occasioning at least some slight curiosity and remark. When one saw grown up identical twins together – which was very rarely – they were usually for some reason female. Perhaps brothers so circumstanced had an impulse not to hang together but to keep clear of one another. He’d rather like to be clear of Andy now. For they might be getting by more or less unnoticed if only Andy wasn’t being so loud-mouthed and argumentative. He hadn’t a clue what Andy was hectoring him about, and he was astounded when he suddenly caught the sound of his own voice raised in the same way. The two of them, in fact, stood confronted in the most unaccountable fashion – and inside this circle of what could be detected as pleasurably expectant toughs. One little rat of a man, with his own pint pot in his hand, was grinning round as if inviting covert attention to his own cleverness. It was all most disagreeable and perplexing.

  Toby tried to reason it out. Andy, pitched into a totally alien environment, had been too much on his best behaviour for too long. He was now letting go a bit. Toby wasn’t sure he didn’t admire and envy this, but at the same time his feeling of animosity towards his brother grew. He realised – it was very horrid – that what Andy was loudly doing was boasting about girls. He said something about a dunty again. And then Toby heard Elma’s name.

  ‘And that’s my thocht aboot her!’ Andy said triumphantly.

  ‘What? What do you think about Elma?’ It was in amazement that Toby heard himself press this utterly injudicious question. But there was Andy, grinning in front of him, and with his pint pot circling hazily in air. And Andy seemed surprised that this particular lady should much arrest his brother’s attention.

  ‘Och,’ he said, ‘I could hae that yin for the speering. She’d dae fine for a quick touzle, or a bit o’ sprunting amang the stooks o’ a dark nicht.’

  There was no mistaking at least the general sense of this. Toby made a swift movement – he had no notion to what end – and in the same instant was blinded by the better part of a pint of beer dashed into his face. He hit out wildly, and his fist crashed against Andy’s j
aw. He heard a roar of laughter, and then Andy caught him just below the eye. They were taking breath for less random blows when, amid further raucous laughter, officious hands were laid upon them and they were hauled apart, panting. In this operation the revolting motor salesmen were prominent in an organising way – proving to themselves (Toby weirdly thought) that they were genuine executive types, accustomed to giving orders.

  ‘This is a respectable house,’ a voice said from behind the bar, ‘and you’ll both please leave it at once.’ But this wasn’t good enough for some of the hooligans, who had the pleasant sensation of an unexpected return to the terraces. Hands were laid on Toby and Andy anew, and for some further minutes there was a real rough-house. When this ended they found that they had been pitched out of the pub and into the semi-darkness of its car park.

  Moralists and novelists alike have been known to choose as the very type and acme of human ignominy being chucked out of a pub as a quarrelsome drunk. The simultaneous suffering of this disgrace – quite as scarifying as the gritty surface from which they had to pick themselves up – had at once the effect of rendering Andrew and Tobias a little less at odds with one another. The pub’s windows shed enough light for a brief mutual inspection – although each was more aware for the moment of a kind of sheepishness in himself than of any figure the other cut. Then they walked in silence to the Aston Martin, and in silence climbed into it. Toby switched on the headlights and started the engine. Andy spoke first.

  ‘I’m fair fashed,’ he said.

  ‘For Christ’s sake! Can’t you speak a word of English?’ There was fury in Toby’s voice, but he wasn’t at all clear whom he was furious with.

  ‘I’m vexed, and want tae beg your pardon. But did ye think it was me, Toby?’

  ‘That what was you?’ The car was on the high road again, and Toby already felt a little better.

  ‘That threw that beer, of course. It’s an auld trick enough, but maist times it’s done wi’ a kick up the doup.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean, Andy?’

  ‘Ye hae twa men, no weel-pleased yin wi’ anither, an’ at a right fliting-match. An’ when yin turns his back on t’ither, in nips a third jokie gomeril an’ lands him this kick on the backside. An’ if he then jinks awa’ quick enough, him that got the kick thinks the first loon gie’d it him. An’ see they fa’ to by the lugs. An’ it was no’ me, it was a wee weasel o’ a man wasted that guid beer on you.’

  ‘Then I’m very sorry.’ It seemed to Toby that adequate formal apologies had now been exchanged. ‘We were both pretty tight. It’s queer that we don’t seem to be now.’

  This was more or less true. There are shocks which do have, at least for a space, a sobering effect. And both young men were really very shocked indeed – much as Cain and Abel might have been had they both survived their disagreement. Behind them they had no common nursery in which every now and then they had cheerfully sought to maim one another. So it was going to be days before they quite recovered from this ludicrous incident.

  ‘Was it jist,’ Andy asked with some perceptiveness, ‘that your sort dinna’ like talking in publics aboot the lasses they’ve had?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean by people of my sort.’ Toby realised that this was a stupid and dishonest remark. ‘But, no—it wasn’t. It was what you said about Elma Loftus.’

  ‘Oh, her!’ There was simple surprise in Andy’s voice. ‘It was naethin but a bit stite an’ boasting, that. I expect she’s a decent lassie enough.’

  ‘We’re in love with one another, as it happens.’ Toby didn’t know why this sounded so awkward as he said it. ‘We’ve been making love.’

  It took Andy a moment to be certain of the meaning of this expression, which wouldn’t have been his for the activity indicated.

  ‘It wasna’ fair!’ he said with sudden vehemence. ‘Ye should hae tellt me, Toby.’

  ‘One doesn’t tell.’ Toby said this sulkily, knowing it to be another dishonesty, again with the class thing behind it. But then Andy’s boasting in the pub had been similarly prompted; to Andy those vulgarly confident business types had been the rich, the bosses; and they were jostling with the football crowd, who were Andy’s own people in a way, but clearly far from attractive to him. It was all this that had started the edginess.

  ‘Would you ca’ it serious?’ Andy asked. ‘This ganging wi’ Elma, I mean.’

  ‘I suppose we’ll be getting married.’ Toby had to resist putting his foot hard down on the accelerator. It seemed to him that he could say nothing just right. However, he continued to drive cautiously, and the headlights of the Aston Martin moved in an almost stately way down the empty, gently winding road before them. Although he felt so sober, a police surgeon might take a different view of him – if only because he must stink of beer, and would continue to do so until he had got out of his clothes and into a bath.

  ‘At least I got yon wee weasel cratur yin in the ba’s,’ Andy suddenly said with retrospective satisfaction. ‘But they were ower mony for us, Toby, and it canna’ be said we came off weel. We’ll hae sair ribs morie-morning, and nae look tae guid, either.’

  ‘We can go straight to bed tonight. And nobody need know if we feel a little stiff and bruised tomorrow.’

  ‘Aye, mebby.’

  Toby further slowed the car. He was by now familiar with this locution as an expression of sardonic scepticism on his brother’s part.

  ‘I do feel a bit uncomfortable,’ he said, ‘round about my right eye.’ He paused on this, for it was a new aspect of their situation that had come to him, and then took his gaze from the road for a moment to peer uncertainly at his brother’s face in the dark. ‘Shall we stop and take a proper look?’

  ‘Here’s yin o’ they park-places just aheid.’

  So Toby pulled in, switched off the headlights, switched on a spotlight angled on the windscreen, and swung it round so that his brother was garishly displayed to him.

  ‘Jesus!’ he said. ‘You’re a gory mess, Andy. I must have done you a cut lip.’ He spun the spotlight round. ‘What about me?’

  ‘It’ll be a richt black e’e the mornin’.’ Andy didn’t say this without a hint of the satisfaction that had attended his recalling having got the weasel where it would hurt him most. ‘We’ll just hae to say we got in a rough hoose in yon public.’

  ‘We can’t say that.’

  ‘And what for no’?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be true. Not about our bashed faces. That was us.’

  ‘Wee Geordie Washington! Faither, I canna’ tell a lee.’ Andy accompanied this outrageous taunt with honest laughter. ‘Toby, ye daft wean, can’t ye see it wadna’ do at a’? Mr Felton wad hae no onnerstanding o’ sic a thing as you an’ me belting the yin the ither. He’s a dacent man ye owe mickle to, and there’s nae cause tae perplex him. But if he thinks we did no’ badly when a bunch o’ keelies were jeering us, he’ll be as pleased as Punch on his wee platform.’

  ‘I don’t like it.’ Toby said this half-heartedly; he had been a good deal impressed by the acuteness of his brother’s perceptions.

  ‘Verra weel! I’ll tell him I lost my temper with ye ower naething at a’, an’ that then ye had to hit back at me.’

  ‘I like that even less.’ Toby let in the clutch again. ‘So you win. Let’s get on.’

  They drove for a time in silence. The car started a hare, which then behaved as hares in such circumstances do. Persuading it to abandon the fairway became for some minutes an absorbing pursuit, and the brothers were now as happy on their homeward journey as they had been on their outward one. Then Andy turned to a new theme.

  ‘But I dinna’ ken,’ he said, ‘that we’ll tak’ in Mrs Warlow. She’s a canny yin, your auntie.’

  ‘Aunt Grace is?’ It had never occurred to Andy to consider his foster-father’s housekeeping relative particularly in this light. ‘She’s very capable, I suppose. And outspoken at times.’

  ‘Sin when has she been a weedow?’

&nb
sp; ‘She isn’t one. She’s divorced. Or at least I suppose so. She’d tell you her marriage had been dissolved.’

  ‘I dinna’ see mysel’ asking her.’

  There was something so odd in Andy’s manner of saying this that Toby glanced at him curiously in the dull glow that came from the instruments on the dash-board.

  ‘You sound quite scared of her,’ he said. ‘Just as if she might take that strap to you.’ Andy had provided his brother with various reminiscences of his upbringing in the Auld household. ‘Of course she’s old enough to be your mother.’

  ‘Aye, that’s it! I never kenned the like, Toby. It’s a’most no’ in nature.’

  This was odder still, and Toby made very little of it. But he did see that Andy was for some reason disposed to accord Mrs Warlow a surprisingly prominent position in his Felton scene.

  ‘I sometimes wonder,’ he said, ‘how it’s going to be with Aunt Grace and Ianthe a little later on. They get on quite well at present, but there might come a time when it was natural for Aunt Grace to pack up and leave Ianthe to preside, as they say, over her father’s household.’