Andrew and Tobias

by J. I. M. Stewart

  Andy received this in a silence perhaps betokening incomprehension. No doubt he was unfamiliar with people to whom it would occur to ‘say’ anything of the sort. But after a minute or two he asked a question.

  ‘Will Ianthe be coming hame soon, do ye ken?’

  ‘In a few days’ time, I think. She’s been inclined to flit around a little lately. And after a first year at Cambridge Felton can seem a bit dull. I remember that myself.’

  ‘We’re doing our best, you and me, Toby. We hanna’ had a dull nicht o’ it the day.’

  ‘True enough.’ This amused Toby. ‘And Ianthe may find it more exciting with you on the scene.’

  ‘Aye, mebby.’ Andy was again silent, and his brother wondered whether his delicacy had somehow been offended by this joke. But when Andy did again speak it seemed to be in an equally light vein. ‘It’ll be a sair and awkward thing atween us twa,’ he said, ‘if there’s any like excitement stirring in your Elma. But our wee dander thegither roond Felton was no’ like that at a’. I could scarce get her to take a gowk at me, she was that fu’ o’ bits o’ history and a’ they pictures.’

  Toby had to suppose that this reassuring speech was designed to wipe out any ill impression occasioned by those unseemly words uttered in fatal ignorance in the pub. If they rather naively divulged the fact that getting a ‘gowk’ out of Elma had at least been in his brother’s mind there was no harm in that. Any normal chap would want to kindle at least some small spark in such a girl.

  PART TWO

  Ianthe

  VI

  Almost from its inception, Ianthe Felton had observed her foster-brother’s affair with Elma Loftus. Toby hadn’t told her of it, and it was because of this that she thought of it as an ‘affair’ and not as a courtship. (The word, in the sense in which she was using it, was a rather old-fashioned one out of books: less specific than ‘intrigue’, she felt, but meaning the same thing.) Ianthe was of an age at which engagements and weddings are beginning to happen among a girl’s contemporaries, and so to reveal themselves as in the order of nature. But nature runs to other arrangements as well, and Ianthe also numbered among her acquaintances, at least of the more casual sort, people who were ‘living together’, and others who hadn’t got around to that, but who made love as occasion offered.

  Ianthe soon understood that Toby and Elma were in this last category, although she couldn’t have told how she was convinced of the fact. It certainly wasn’t the result of operations of a detective character, nor were there any hints from a gratified Elma. She did somehow always know a lot about Toby: more than he (she knew) ever thought to know about her. So Toby’s present state of mind in the matter was far from closed to her. He had it in his head – although not perhaps with full conviction – that this was the common sort of run-up to marriage nowadays, and that sooner or later the ‘engagement’ would be shoved in The Times, with various normal consequences until the wedding bells were ringing. Ianthe wasn’t at all puzzled about Toby. But she was a little puzzled about Elma Loftus.

  It was true that she and Elma counted as old friends. They had been at school together, and in various areas of practical enterprise Elma had proved a satisfactory companion. Even in the middle of the dullest term she was never without some clear objective and the necessary ‘go’ to arrive at it. What she had arrived at now was Toby, and there was nothing surprising about that. What was perplexing was a sense that had come to Ianthe of the small commonplace drama as now somehow hanging fire. She had ended by becoming really uneasy about this – even to the extent of cutting down on messing around with Toby, and eventually taking herself off for a fairly long stay with friends in the West Riding. (It was still, in the later 1960s, called that.) She had in fact found it difficult to be much with Toby without betraying some wish that he should confide in her. As long as the ‘affair’ was running smoothly – towards either its legitimisation in Felton parish church or an uncomplicated and not too painful petering out – she felt Toby to be entitled to keep his own counsel. But if he was in real trouble with it, if there had emerged some aspect of the situation baffling to him, she would have expected to hear about it. Toby’s problems had regularly been made hers from an early age. It had happened that way partly because Ianthe was rather clever (she was almost one of the ‘clever’ Feltons) but rather more because she was so often ahead of Toby himself in knowing what was happening to Toby and what his problem demanded.

  Between them there had never seemed to be any problem at all – or none springing from the fact that they shared no common blood. Having been treated as brother and sister since long before any explanation of their parentage could be conveyed to them, they had grown as that. Toby said ‘my father’ when speaking about Howard Felton as naturally as Ianthe did. What might have come to stand between the two young people as they grew older was, very obviously, the Felton property. The time was far past at which Howard’s intentions here should have been made explicit to the whole family. As they hadn’t been, it had to be presumed that they were not yet formulated; that Howard, in fact, had quite failed to make up his mind. This didn’t come hard on Ianthe, since Ianthe’s mother, perhaps conscious of her husband’s infirmity of purpose, had left their daughter her own substantial, though scarcely magnificent, fortune. It did, however, come hard on Toby, much of whose pride was bound up with being as silent on the matter as the grave. The acceptance house had, of course, cost Howard a good deal of money, since Toby was in process of being bought into it (and the assurance of a fair income one day) in the discreet and devious manner in which such things are arranged in the City of London. But the very magnitude of the sum involved was felt by Toby (Ianthe knew) as sinister. He had to envisage the possibility of a time when, although he could hunt or shoot here or there if he wanted to, at Felton he would still be the guest of a Felton.

  During her stay in Yorkshire, all this had been much on Ianthe’s mind. She saw how, as soon as any serious thought of marriage confronted Toby, he was bound to be more sharply aware of what was anomalous in his position. He could offer Elma Loftus or any other girl the prospect of a comfortable sort of upper-middle-class life. (And young men still did ‘offer’ girls ‘lives’, archaic as the language seemed.) But Felton was another matter. And very much another matter to Elma Loftus.

  This last perception recurred to Ianthe when her Yorkshire visit had ended and she was on the train south. Elma wasn’t exactly mercenary. Under a modish, rather hard exterior there was something romantic in her – or soft-centred, if one preferred to put it that way. She was the doctor’s daughter – but firmly persuaded of the existence of previous Loftuses not constrained to peddle pills and potions. No doubt she wanted Toby in bed. Today and tomorrow she wanted Toby in bed – or, failing that, just between clumps of furze on the down. But what she wanted for keeps was Felton House. Ianthe contemplated this as she made her way through an unambitious meal purveyed by British Rail. So far as the bare fact went she didn’t blame Elma a bit. Tobias Felton with Felton House thrown in (but one could express it the other way round) would be a wholly rational object of desire on any young woman’s part. If, to begin with, one considered just Toby himself – but here Ianthe broke off with a request to a hurrying attendant for, after all, a glass of wine. It was Toby’s position, not Toby himself as eleven-and-a-half stone of vigorous young manhood, that constituted the problem.

  But now there was another problem as well. There was the astonishing news that had come to her in a letter from her father to the effect that Toby had discovered a brother. Her father had been – although without deliberation – rather vague about it all, but the brother appeared to have turned up, as in a fairy-tale, in the character of a cowherd, or at least a garden-boy, about the place. He was a twin brother, and of the identical sort. If Tobias and Andrew (her father had written) chose to dress themselves in identical clothing and comb their hair the same way, it would be impossible to distinguish between them. Until, that was to say, they opened their respect
ive mouths. Ianthe’s father appeared to have been, at the time of writing his letter, so possessed by the fantasy, the weird improbability, of such a thing that he had quite failed to go on to any useful assessment of the situation. But he was running over to Oxford, he had written, to discuss it with Ianthe’s Uncle Hugh.

  Ianthe tried to decide what, disregarding its mere oddity, was to be made of such a discovery. It was, for a start, something for Toby to cope with. So far, so good. Toby – she told herself dispassionately – had been as he grew up a little short of things to cope with. Apart from the Felton issue everything had come his way. He had been a success at school: the kind of boy who, with decent abilities, successfully conceals the slog he has had to put into things, and who is duly admired as a result. At Cambridge he hadn’t notably ‘developed’; he had simply continued the same highly agreeable existence he had enjoyed as a senior boy at school. At home he was variously admired. And then, after a few oafish episodes of which Ianthe wasn’t wholly unaware, he had fallen – if the image wasn’t too gross – neatly into Elma Loftus’s lap. Ianthe finished her wine while looking steadily at this last picture. One ought not to dodge things simply because there is something disturbing about them.

  Yes, Andrew was a problem for Toby to cope with. But might he not be a problem for her father to cope with too? In an immediate practical sense this was obvious, since something was clearly due to a brother of Toby’s discovered in a humble situation. But there might be more hazard to it than that. The sudden bobbing up of this young man – a second Toby with a background totally remote from Toby’s own – might well suggest to Howard Felton that there had been something a little arbitrary, socially regarded, in an action of his own more than twenty years ago.

  Aunt Grace was waiting for Ianthe at Didcot in Ianthe’s own car, a diminutive Fiat known to Toby as the sewing-machine.

  ‘I might have brought his nibs’s grand conveyance,’ Mrs Warlow said, ‘and got you home in style.’ This was a reference to the Aston Martin. ‘He suggested it, most magnanimously, himself. As it is, you’d better drive.’

  ‘He didn’t go to the length of suggesting that he’d fetch me himself?’

  ‘Toby is extremely busy, my dear. Clipping hedges and cleaning out ditches and ha-has, and heaven knows what. All in company, of course, with Andy. Don’t forget there are now traffic-lights up there at the top.’

  ‘Andy? Is that this Andrew – and is he still at Felton?’

  ‘Certainly he is. He may be described as in process of assimilation.’

  ‘You mean, Aunt Grace, becoming a member of the family?’

  ‘A compromise is adumbrated. Andy will work in the estate office, and eventually become agent. I am assuring your father that it is entirely suitable.’

  ‘It would only be suitable – in the long run – if Toby had Felton.’ Ianthe had said this like a flash, and in the instant of changing gear. ‘Don’t you agree?’

  ‘Certainly I agree, Ianthe. There are a good many things at Felton that are overdue for a tidy round.’

  ‘You think Andy might help? Tell me about him. Is he nice?’

  ‘He is Toby’s brother.’

  ‘But quite different in how he has been brought up – and that sort of thing?’

  ‘He cleans his nails and washes his hair, and smells only when he has been working like mad, which he does nearly all day, or drinking beer, which I gather to be his intermittent weakness. These things apart, he could scarcely be more uncouth than he is.’

  ‘Oh, dear!’ Ianthe appeared more amused than dismayed by this intelligence. ‘How does it show? By the way he blows his nose?’

  ‘I have remarked nothing peculiar about that. But he has been reared in the hyperborean unknown, and various mysteries surround him. The couple who adopted him are dead. But he has an auntie – a foster-auntie, if there be such a thing – whom he refers to respectfully as having been well-left. I rather gather that she owns a sweet-shop. But Andrew’s speech is virtually unintelligible. Or he insists on making it so. I suspect that he could talk like his schoolteachers if he chose to.’

  ‘And he and Toby are really getting on well as companions?’

  ‘They had what appears to have been a vicious set-to together three or four days ago.’ Mrs Warlow gave this information entirely composedly. ‘They came home one night, that is to say, decidedly the worse for wear, and the next morning Toby told your father a cock-and-bull story about how they had been assaulted by football fans in a pub, but had given as good as they got. Your father was rather pleased. It was quite comical, really, because Toby was so evidently telling fibs and hating it. Then Andy came to me privately, and said that in the first place it had really been a fight between them and entirely his fault. That was quite comical too: this simple lad, I mean, turning himself into the best type of English public-school boy for the nonce. It was a matter of my having made a conquest of Andy – I can’t think how.’

  Ianthe produced no direct response to this. Her aunt being very little given to silly ideas, or even to merely idle remarks, she noted the information as something to reflect on. If Andy had quickly become rather impressed by Mrs Warlow it suggested at least that he wasn’t thick. Of course Toby’s twin wouldn’t be that—wouldn’t be exactly that. But Toby’s inclination to take his aunt lightly had never struck Ianthe as one of his strong points, intellectually considered.

  ‘Has Andy’s arrival,’ she asked, ‘taken Toby’s mind a little off Elma Loftus?’

  As Ianthe asked this question she had the satisfaction of knowing that it had sprung a surprise on Aunt Grace. Aunt Grace must certainly believe that she alone had penetrated to the fact that Toby and the doctor’s daughter were in the enjoyment of a special relationship.

  ‘Ah, that!’ Mrs Warlow glanced sharply at her niece, whose conversation had never before touched at all freely upon matters of this sort. ‘They represent different fields of interest, wouldn’t you say, Andy and Elma? Of course Toby may be feeling he has less time for Elma now, and may therefore be employing it in a brisker and more immediately purposeful manner.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Ianthe was still young enough, was still sufficiently the nicely brought-up girl, to receive as promotion from the nursery this frankness of implication. ‘I suppose my father hasn’t noticed anything. Do you think he would approve if he did?’

  ‘He has, as a matter of fact, expressed a vague momentary alarm.’ There was frequently a note of indulgence in Grace Warlow’s references to her elder brother. ‘But it will probably have passed from his mind. As for his approving of Elma, I don’t at all know. He refers to her very pleasantly – but would certainly be disconcerted if she became engaged to Toby. I don’t think he quite sees the Loftuses as the Loftuses do.’

  ‘I suppose he is rather old-fashioned at heart.’ Ianthe had arrived at a crossroads, and drew to a halt with care. ‘I wonder whether he looks around, as they say, for Toby among eligible girls in general? It wouldn’t be very like him, really.’

  ‘He has never mentioned anything of the kind. Why is there so much traffic this afternoon? But now’s your chance – before the lorry.’

  Mrs Warlow was inclined to give this sort of assistance to any driver she happened to be sitting beside. Nevertheless she appeared to have felt that these interesting speculations had been carried far enough for the present, and Ianthe accordingly turned back to a previous topic.

  ‘Tell me one more thing about Andy,’ she said. ‘Is he now living in the house with us?’

  ‘No, he is not. He is lodging with the Misses Kinch at the bottom of the drive – which is where Hawkstone found him digs in the first place.’

  ‘It seems very odd, that. Doesn’t it illegitimatise him, in a sense?’ Ianthe paused as if to consider this seemingly outlandish question more carefully. ‘You know what I mean? It sounds like an eighteenth-century compromise over something that has happened on the wrong side of the blanket.’

  ‘My dear child!’ By thus affect
ing to be shocked, Mrs Warlow indicated that she was amused. ‘A by-blow – a term yet more picturesque – is one thing that we do not have to make do with.’

  ‘It is possible for twins to have different fathers, you know.’ Ianthe wasn’t quite sure if this was in fact true, but it pleased her to seem to command so recondite a subject.

  ‘Not our sort of twins, my dear. But the point about where Andy puts his head at night is certainly important. If your father’s plan comes off, it will of course be natural that in time he should have a place of his own. But for the present he must certainly live with us. Anything short of that would be impossibly awkward.’

  ‘But won’t it be impossibly awkward too if he starts blowing his nose on the tablecloth?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Ianthe.’ Very justly (as Ianthe felt it to be) Mrs Warlow was displeased. ‘The trouble is that Andy himself is not very keen on the idea. It is a feeling one must respect. He must see it as a point of positive commitment to a new way of life, and one which he is entitled to have misgivings about. There is no reason to suppose that the simpler classes feel unqualified admiration for the life of the lesser landed gentry.’

  ‘Are we “lesser”, Aunt Grace? It had never occurred to me.’

  ‘We shall be, if your father has to sell much more of the estate.’ This was a tart reference to certain financial exigencies which had presented themselves at the time of fixing up Toby in his acceptance house. (Toby had rather wanted to enter Lloyd’s, as one of his Cambridge friends had done, but hastily concealed the fact on discovering it would cost a good deal more.) ‘But the difficulty is that becoming, so to speak, a parlour-boarder, and moving in on us, is proving, for one reason or another, a sticking-point with Andy. Toby can’t get him past it.’

  ‘Was it what they had their fight about?’