‘I haven’t asked – but I think probably not. Toby is banking on you heavily.’
‘I don’t see why he should do that. It’s his business much more than mine.’
‘I suppose he sees his brother as one likely to be fondly overcome with female charm. The mirror-image effect again.’
Ianthe marked her disapproval of this haling-in of the poet Milton by silence and a slight quickening of the Fiat’s pace. She was full of curiosity about Andrew Auld. But it was with the last odd remark of her aunt’s that the strangeness of the situation came to her fully for the first time. There was nothing all that strange, she supposed, in a man’s discovering a long-lost – or even a never-suspected – brother. The strangeness was going to consist – at least for her – in what her father’s letter had made clear from the start: the visual near-identity of the two young men. She had grown up with Toby from infancy: a constantly changing Toby, transforming himself from boyhood to man. And all through this long process of development, a second Toby (for in imagination it could only be that) had been going through the same transformations in some distant strange place. And now there had been a coming together. It struck Ianthe that if her aunt could think of Milton she herself could think of Hardy; could think of that very rum poem in which while the Titanic is being wrought into being on the Clyde, the iceberg is similarly being wrought into being somewhere within the Arctic Circle.
The comparison that had come into Ianthe’s head was much lacking in imaginative propriety, and her Uncle Hugh would certainly have viewed it as indicating an imperfect literary cultivation. It was of her Uncle Hugh, as it happened, that Ianthe thought now.
‘When are Hugh and Mercia coming over?’ she asked. She and Toby always referred to the Oxford Feltons in this modern way, but for some reason called Mrs Warlow ‘Aunt Grace’. ‘Couldn’t Hugh cope with this domesticating of Andy? It must be part of his job to sort out young men.’
‘They will be coming some time next week – and no doubt with several extremely bored French children in tow. I doubt whether Hugh has much experience of sorting out Andrew Auld’s sort of young man.’Oxford colleges have a very broad intake nowadays, class-wise regarded. Or they do if they are at all like Cambridge ones.’
‘Both universities only run to Andys who have been processed by much prior education. You will find that the chief difficulty about being civilised with Andy is that it is so easy to take him out of his depth on all sorts of subjects. It seems lazy swimming in a quiet sea – chiefly because he is an easy person, rather in Toby’s manner. But it is as if there were treacherous currents around and you have been carried into some tactless assumption of knowledge he doesn’t have.’
‘I’d expect Toby to be rather good with him, without bothering terribly about tact.’
‘You’d be quite right.’ Mrs Warlow had an air of having expected the promptitude of her niece’s last comment. ‘But I rather fear Hugh may be another matter. We all know that the brains of the family are concentrated in Hugh – or at least that such is your father’s conviction—’
‘Hugh has always been very nice about Toby – very nice indeed.’
‘It is not the point to which I am addressing myself. I was going to say that Hugh’s reputation as an extremely clever man gives him at times a little too much confidence in the justness of his own perceptions.’
‘What a shocking thing to say!’ Ianthe wasn’t really at all shocked – but, for the second time during this drive, she felt that she was being promoted to a fully adult level of family talk. ‘Isn’t he going to be perceptive about Andy?’
‘We were speaking of tact. I am afraid Hugh may arrive with a little too much of it; that he will have laid in a supply before leaving Oxford, and even bought a brand-new extra large brush to lay it on with.’
‘I see.’ What Ianthe was, in fact, seeing was the existence of an area of sibling trouble between Hugh and Aunt Grace which she had never thought to remark before. ‘And aren’t you really thinking less of a paint-brush than of a broom? Don’t you mean that it will be Hugh’s impulse to sweep Andy deftly under the mat? That, surely, would be quite horrid.’
‘The image is certainly disagreeable. And if Andy makes up his mind to stick by Toby—’
‘It could be like that?’ For the first time, Ianthe was startled by her aunt’s vision of the new posture of things at Felton.
‘Say simply that if Andy decides very positively to be Toby’s brother, he might prove not at all sweepable under anything. But I don’t underestimate my brother Hugh’s abilities – and really in this matter there is common ground between us. We both see difficulties in the situation perhaps more clearly than your father does – or Toby, for that matter. But I have an additional feeling, which perhaps you have too. And as you’ve asked me so many questions I’ll now ask you one – and about just that. Would you say we are in rather a muddle at Felton?’
‘Not exactly. Or at least I don’t see us as all grouped round one big muddle.’ Ianthe paused on this, and with a sudden sense of the need for guarded utterance. She was glad, in fact, to see the grey roof of Felton House over the stubby bonnet of her car. ‘Perhaps a few private muddles here and there. But I don’t know that Andrew Auld much impinges on them.’
‘If he impinges on any,’ Mrs Warlow said, ‘he’ll impinge on the lot.’
VII
Although Howard Felton had made a pilgrimage to Oxford to consult the better wisdom of his brother on the curious situation confronting him, and although he had come home feeling the trip to have answered reasonably to expectation, he found that the prospect of Hugh’s return visit was something he looked forward to with misgiving. Mercia, his sister-in-law, would be coming too; she was a woman for whom he didn’t greatly care; and as they would almost certainly bring with them any guests staying in the Lodging, the effect would approximate to that of a commission of enquiry. Moreover he no longer judged that further light must succeed upon Hugh’s inspecting or vetting Andrew Auld. In what was really a very short space of time, this plebeian but by no means unpleasing Scot, had made considerable headway in Howard’s regard, and although Howard had not yet succeeded in coming to any firm conclusion about what action was required, he was indulging the sanguine expectation that he would quite soon do so. He almost regretted having made his visit to Hugh so much a matter of seeking advice rather than of imparting information. Hugh was extremely clever – but there was, after all, plenty of sound practical sense in his own household. Grace had already made judicious suggestions; Toby was clear that he wasn’t going to lose Andy if he could help it; best of all, Ianthe would pronounce like a shot on the rights or wrongs of any proposal as she saw them.
Of course, anything further that Hugh found to say would be extremely cogent. But even this fact made Howard uneasy. He was dimly aware in himself of areas of feeling upon which the arrival of Andrew Auld was at play in a manner at present eluding definition. But whatever the process was, and however vulnerable it might be to logical assault by his brother, it was at least part of himself, and for a time he ought to be left alone with it. But along with this right to independent judgement went the duty of doing his best to exercise it. Convinced of this, Howard took long striding walks – much as if he had an urgent letter to despatch which could be posted only in the next parish – and did his best to think things out.
He had made rather a stupid joke to Hugh to the effect that Tobias and Andrew were so much alike as to be comical, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Hugh hadn’t thought the indistinguishableness of the twins at all likely to be laughable, and had said something rather pedantic about a fissiparous phenomenon. It was certainly true that Howard, although believing himself deeply attached to Toby and becoming rather fond of Andy, took more pleasure in seeing either the one or the other of them solus than he did in seeing them standing side by side. This was puzzling, and indeed seemed quite wrong. Twins, unless deformed or otherwise visually disagreeable, constitute a spectacle commonly
regarded as pleasing in itself.
Perhaps what was troubling was not the similarity of the twins – which was a sheerly biological affair – but their dissimilarity, socially regarded. Or rather it was the clash of these two facts. Arriving at this during one of his walks, Howard quickened his pace on the footpath he was traversing. His mind, he felt, was now coming to grips with his problem. If Andrew Auld had turned up not as Hawkstone’s new assistant but as the adoptive son of a landowner in, say, Shropshire; if he had talked public-school and been public-school; if his assumptions and knowledgeableness as well as his nose, chin and eyebrows had been Toby’s; if he too was making his way among acceptance people or their like: if all these postulates had been true the situation would have been quite different. So the core of the problem lay in the disparity between Toby’s world and Andy’s, and in the perplexing system of claims and obligations which this seemed to set up. It came down to what was due to Andy on the straight count of kinship with Toby, and what was tactful and feasible in the light of Andy’s upbringing and outlook.
Howard, climbing towards the downs, realised that he had been over the problem in these terms before, and that his sister had placed squarely on the carpet a practicable plan for dealing with it. In fact, there wasn’t a problem – or not an intractable one – and he ought not therefore to be feeling in any confusion of mind. Being an elderly widower comfortably circumstanced and set in his ways, it was natural that he should sometimes simply wish that Andy had never turned up, even if at other times he was conscious of a positive affection for the lad as a sort of spill-over – he supposed – from his affection for Toby. The two didn’t just have the same features and complexion; they continued like one another – he felt sure – quite deep down. So if Andy was a complication whom one could in weak moments wish away, he was also, in a sense, an enrichment of the Felton scene. It was like opening the nursery door in a dream, Howard reflected, and discovering oneself to have been under a misapprehension about the number of one’s progeny – since there, playing on the carpet, are two little boys in place of one.
But individuals can fade into one another in a dream – or dispart in what Hugh would call a fissiparous way. And Howard was aware that, if he did have dreams about Toby and Andy (as hadn’t happened yet), the two young men would be likely to play hide-and-seek with one another. Awake, he did rather more thinking about Andy than Toby at present – which wasn’t unreasonable, Andy being the newcomer and unknown quantity that he was. Andy, in fact, was more interesting than Toby. Howard had to pause on this startling thought – and even to ask himself whether, for the moment, Andy didn’t make the running in terms of simple attractiveness as well. Something almost atavistic in Howard Felton responded to Andy, stripped and helping to thatch a rick, more readily than to Toby sitting in an office and shuffling papers among his acceptance people. But this was only a flicker of feeling. The real point was that the image of Toby which Howard had for long carried around unchallenged in the recesses of his mind was in some way being modified by Andy’s turning up. Something unsettling was happening. Howard didn’t quite know what. But the subliminal process, whatever it was, had a disturbing quality.
Howard now found that, absorbed in these thoughts, he had reached without knowing it the goal of one of his favourite walks. He was high up on the down, still on Felton land, and with Felton House just visible far below. Immediately before him was a monument of what appeared to be the most awesome antiquity: a circle of gigantic sarsen stones set within a grove of venerable oaks. It dated, however, only from the mid-eighteenth century and had been devised by a certain Torquil Felton, whose antiquarian interests had been stimulated when, as an undergraduate at Benet College, Cambridge, he had formed a friendship with William Stukeley. Stukeley, who was a very learned youth, was already mad about Druids; Torquil – who was already a landowner in his own right – was, correspondingly, becoming a keen arboriculturist. Megalithic circles, oak trees, and a Druid priesthood were closely associated in the thought of that time, and Torquil had decided to embellish his estate accordingly. The result, although named on Ordnance Survey maps as Felton Temple, was known in the family – most unfairly – as Stukeley’s Folly. It always amused Howard to enter this shameless fake and find that, despite his knowledge of its origin, a certain sense of the numinous assailed him. He was experiencing this now when he suddenly became aware that he was not alone.
Sunning himself in the middle of Stukeley’s Folly was Andrew Auld. He had taken his shirt off (as he was rather fond of doing) and was lying supine and spread-eagled on the turf, staring at a kestrel high above him.
For some moments Howard studied this unexpected appearance unobserved. Andy’s features – being also Toby’s features – were rather too strongly accentuated here and there to make for any regular sort of beauty. But when viewed chiefly as a torso lying on grass Andy was attractive enough, just as Toby would be. Howard took spontaneous pleasure in what he saw – a fact reflected in the cordiality of his tone when he now broke silence.
‘My dear Andy, what a surprise to find you up here!’
Andy, thus alerted, sat up. More precisely, with his arms still stretched above his head, he swung himself effortlessly upright from the hips. Howard found himself wondering whether Toby could do just that.
‘It’s the Bank Holiday,’ Andy said.
Howard was perplexed. For one thing, Bank Holidays didn’t much register with him (although they probably meant something in that acceptance place); and, for another, Andy’s tone had been swiftly defensive – almost as if he had heard a rebuke for not being down at Felton, working furiously and much to Mr Hawkstone’s annoyance as garden-boy still.
‘And I’m delighted to tumble in on you,’ Howard said hastily, and with equal promptness sat down on the grass. ‘What do you think of this odd affair?’ He made a gesture round Stukeley’s Folly. ‘At least there’s a splendid view. I suppose I particularly like it because it has all sorts of associations with my family.’
‘Wad it be what they ca’ Stonehenge?’ Andy asked. ‘I’ve heard tell o’ that.’
‘Stonehenge?’ For a moment Howard supposed that this was a joke. ‘Well, no. This place was put together by one of my ancestors, as a matter of fact.’
‘In the Stone Age?’ Not unnaturally, Andy asked this question with a certain awe – although awe touched, perhaps, with suspicion as well.
‘Not quite as far back as that. Not even in the Bronze Age, either.’ In an entirely genial way, Howard showed himself entertained by this misconception. ‘A good deal less than three hundred years ago.’
‘That’s a lang time, too.’
‘It was the period when people went in for that kind of thing: classical cow houses, you know, and Chinese gardens, and horses and so forth cut out of the chalk.’ Howard, not himself particularly strong in the scholarship of this subject, became conscious that Andy was, of course, even less so. Here, in fact, would be a main difficulty with Toby’s brother for a long time ahead; you never knew when he was going to be so at sea over matters of common knowledge that it became hard to talk on without talking down as well. It was notable, therefore, that conversation with him remained so pleasurable on the whole. If he had in a sense a discouragingly empty mind, it was in consequence an unusually open mind as well. ‘Ianthe can tell you a lot about such things,’ Howard went on. ‘She’s training, you know, to be an archaeologist.’
‘Has Miss Ianthe aye been your sole bairn?’ Andy always said ‘Toby’ but otherwise still remained uncertain about how to refer to other members of the family.
‘Yes. My wife never had another child.’
‘More ancestors than bairns,’ Andy said – and appeared to judge the fact worthy of meditation.
‘Why, yes. But that, you know, is true of everybody.’ Howard glanced whimsically at the young man, and saw with satisfaction that he was again supine and relaxed upon the turf. It looked as if this was going to be as good a time for serious discussion w
ith him as was likely to turn up in the near future. So Howard produced a pipe and a tobacco pouch by way of indicating a certain leisure ahead. As he manipulated these ritual objects Andy spoke again.
‘Will Miss Ianthe be hame soon?’
‘Andy, you must say just “Ianthe”, please. You can’t say what Toby doesn’t say.’ Howard felt that he had gained ground by venturing on this firm instruction. ‘Do you mind my mentioning things like that? It’s just a matter of small habits we happen to have.’
‘Aye. But it’s no’ a’ thegither a sma’ question.’ Andy glanced up at Toby’s adoptive father with a whimsical look of his own. ‘A’ richt,’ he then said. ‘So just when will Ianthe be back at Felton?’
‘By now, probably. My sister went to meet her train after luncheon.’
Andy made no immediate reply to this. But he rolled over on his side, plucked after due inspection a promising blade of grass, transferred this between his teeth apparently as an aid to thought, and then rolled yet further over and came to rest on his stomach. Howard thus found himself invited to converse with the nape of Andy’s neck, the gentle contours of Andy’s shoulder-blades, and the long furrow of Andy’s spine. This remained entirely agreeable. Supine or prone, female or male, the exposed human body always gave Howard pleasure when it came his way. Even his sister’s studies from the nude, although he suspected them of being artistically undistinguished, afforded him this mild satisfaction. So now for some minutes he puffed in silence, sometimes glancing at Andy, and sometimes at Felton and its surroundings, stretched out like an estate map in the vale below. Andy, who presumably saw nothing of interest in the decorously clad figure of his elderly companion, contented himself with the view, which he commanded by raising his head and cupping his prominent chin in his hands. When he spoke it was without stirring from this posture.
‘Will a’ yon be going to Ianthe?’
Andrew and Tobias Page 10