‘I beg your pardon?’ Howard took refuge in this phrase because he was extremely startled. ‘All what, Andy?’
‘Felton an’ a’ they acres. They’ll be hers, sin she’s your sole ain kin?’
‘It’s a very difficult question, I’m afraid.’ Howard told himself that Andrew Auld must not be considered as having wantonly perpetrated any impertinence. It would be very unfair to expect from a lad so simply bred an unfailing sense of his p’s and q’s. And his sudden question certainly had no background in expectations of his own, since nothing was clearer about him than his determination to decline anything approaching a pensioner’s status. Andy was thinking about Toby. There could be no doubt about that. But this didn’t make things any easier for Howard, thus suddenly confronted with so candid an onslaught. Not even his brother Hugh had ever tackled him in this direct way about his intentions with regard to the family property. Hugh probably guessed that he simply didn’t have intentions, and even that a kind of mental block mysteriously befell him when he tried to get the matter clear. But it wouldn’t do to let this young man glimpse so humiliating a fact. He must simply intimate to Andy at once that here was a subject not properly to be discussed between them.
But when it came to the point Howard found himself unable to do quite this. Somehow, he couldn’t bear the idea of snubbing or rebuking Andy, whose only assumption was that a relationship of candour had established itself between them. Fortunately there was something perfectly definite about Ianthe that he could pronounce upon at once.
‘Nowadays,’ he began, ‘the transmission of landed property can be a very ticklish business, Andy. With death duties as they are, a new proprietor may find himself burdened with more problems than he can cope with. I don’t think my daughter would be daunted by that, but the plain fact is that she is quite clear she doesn’t want to inherit Felton anyway. She has an independent fortune, as it happens, and she says it is as much as it is sensible for anyone to have. I’m not sure that there aren’t factors which she is leaving out of account – but I needn’t enter into that.’ Howard paused on this hint of quasi-dynastic sentiment, and felt that he had said enough, and could now without unkindness shut Andy up. ‘So much for that, then,’ he said, ‘and we won’t take it further now. But there is something else I want to discuss, Andy, and this seems a good opportunity. It’s the question of your own future – in which I am keenly interested, I need hardly say.’
The effect of this upon Andy was to make him do another roll, sit up, and clasp his knees within his arms – thereby assuming as formal and attentive a posture as the circumstances permitted.
‘Mr Felton,’ he said soberly, ‘ye monna’ think I feel there’s any ca’ on you that way. I’m Toby’s brither, but I hanna’ like him lived at Felton sin I was a wean.’
‘Well, you’re living there now.’ Howard produced this with a determined lightness of air. ‘And we can begin at just that point. I must ask you, my dear Andy, to stop being so determinedly a junior employee about the place.’
‘But I had my wages frae Mr Hawkstone but yesterday.’ Andy accompanied this information with his rare quick smile, as if himself humorously disposed. ‘And I signed a wee bit card for the insurance.’
Howard was about to say, ‘Confound your wages!’ when he reflected that Andy probably depended on them entirely both for paying the Misses Kinch and for defraying all the miscellaneous expenses of life. So here – in the area that might be called that of pocket-money – was one small vexatious problem rising up at once.
‘Hawkstone,’ he said, ‘is in a difficult position, and we mustn’t make fun of him. But, Andy, what you have to understand is that you are at present my guest. And as Toby’s brother you must allow me to treat you as something more than that as well. Small sums of money, for instance. I shall take it very hardly if you don’t allow me to provide you with anything of the sort that you may require. And we can forget about the insurance card.’
‘You’re verra kind.’
‘You can see what we are like. We’re not enormously wealthy’—Howard had recalled sagely assuring Hugh that he would make this point to Toby’s brother on an early occasion—’but we have no call to bother about moderate outlays of one sort or another.’
‘Like on Toby’s car.’
Howard was disconcerted for a moment, this appearing to him to be the first occasion upon which Andy had offered a stroke of sarcasm to the world. Then he realised that nothing of the sort had happened. Andy understood a weekly pay-packet; in money matters beyond that sphere his orders of magnitude were hazy. Howard could remember his own misgiving – and Grace’s decided disapproval – when the bill for the Aston Martin had to be met, and Andy would no doubt get this sort of thing right if he stopped to think about it. Now, he had just been expressing unreflecting pleasure in what could come his brother’s way as matter of course in such a family as the Feltons.
‘But it’s some longer-term plan we must get settled,’ Howard went on. ‘What I am going to say to you I have thought over very carefully. And I have discussed it with my sister. Indeed, I think it fair to say that she originated it.’
‘Mrs Warlow?’ So far, Andy’s attention might have been called respectful rather than intense, but now he straightened up further, and looked more sharply at Howard. ‘She’s been thinking o’ me?’
‘Indeed she has.’ Howard was conscious that this news was of importance to Andy, and he recalled an earlier impression that his sister had somehow come to occupy a prominent place in the young man’s regard. ‘But first I must give you some idea of how the estate is run. We have brought things together a good deal in recent years, and everything passes through the office of my agent, Mr Tarling. Perhaps you’ve heard of Mr Tarling?’
Andy hadn’t heard of Mr Tarling. But he asked a question that showed him to be not entirely at sea.
‘Mr Tarling would be your factor-like?’
‘Exactly! In Scotland Mr Tarling would be called a factor, I don’t doubt.’ Howard was about to add his sister’s observation that nowadays the job could be a gentleman’s, but checked himself from a feeling that this would be inapposite. Instead, he embarked upon Grace’s plan. Andy listened with a promising intentness, rather as a well-disposed schoolboy might do to a fairly stiff lesson in geometry. It was always necessary to remember – Howard told himself – that the lad must be totally unused to sustained exposition of any sort. Yet such difficulties as Andy had, both in this regard and in almost everything else at present surrounding him, had no effect of shattering a native self-confidence which could be felt to be his. He was as well-endowed here as Toby was. For some moments, indeed, Howard was led away by this consideration to ponder the mysteries of heredity. Of what sort of parents had these two boys come? Peasants from some steppe? Polish aristocrats? Hungarian intellectuals? So strangely assorted had been the Cornucopia’s freight that it was anybody’s guess. But one thing that they were almost certainly not was the progeny of an English landowner of ancient lineage. Children of the Felton kind had of course been hustled across the Atlantic and away from Hitler’s Europe. But not, it was almost assured, on that particular vessel.
‘Gie me time, an’ I could dae it,’ Andy said suddenly. ‘But would there be wark frae the start, as weel as learning?’
‘Oh, certainly! Plenty of work.’ Howard was astonished by the smoothness with which this seemed to be going. ‘A practical training, you know, with plenty of physical labour to face.’ Howard felt this to be deeply cunning. ‘But at the same time, you see, a position that any young man of our sort could properly be in. If you happened, say, to be my brother Hugh’s boy. Or my sister’s. Absolutely in order, I assure you.’
‘You might ca’ it an apprenticeship – but o’ the kind wi’ a bit wage frae the start.’ Andy remained firmly down-to-earth. ‘So what siller there was I’d be earning.’
‘Oh, most certainly.’
‘There’d be this Mr Tarling – but a’ the same it would be for
yoursel’ I’d be warking, Mr Felton?’
‘Yes, indeed, Andy.’ Howard felt things were now going forward quite famously. ‘It can be expressed precisely like that.’
‘So that yin day awa’ aheed I’d be Toby’s man?’ It was with simple amusement that Andy seemed to advance this. ‘I’d be Toby’s Mr Tarling, wad I no’?’
‘Just that.’ Having got in the way of confident affirmations, Howard Felton had said this before quite realising where it had taken him, or noticing the steadiness of gaze with which Toby’s brother had accompanied these last questions.
‘It’s to be thocht on,’ Andy said with decision, and reached for his shirt. In a second his head had disappeared into it and emerged again, and while thrusting its tails deftly with both hands inside his trousers he contrived simultaneously to rise to his feet as if his body incorporated some spring-like mechanism in the manner of a Jack-in-the-box. ‘An’ I can bide still wi’ the Miss Kinches?’ he said.
‘If you wish to, certainly. It’s entirely for you to say. But we’d all much prefer that, for the time being at least, you lived with us in the house. It’s what your brother would like, Andy. And I’d say he’s entitled to consider it the natural thing.’
‘I could be up there in that back wing wi’ him?’
‘That would be the best arrangement, and there’s plenty of space. Although I think the two of you would have to share a bathroom.’
‘I think that’s the daftest thing I’ve heard yet!’ Andy followed up this frank and not unjust remark with a shout of laughter which at first perplexed and then rather pleased Howard. But then he became serious again; became, indeed, almost grave. ‘But that’s to be thocht on, too,’ he said. ‘What does Mrs Warlow think o’ it?’
‘Of course she agrees. In fact, Andy, to be quite honest, I think she’d stand on it pretty stiffly.’
‘Insist, you mean?’
‘She wouldn’t treat you as other than your own master, my dear boy. But, yes – something like that.’
‘It’s the hairt o’ the matter, is it no’?’ For the first time in Howard’s experience of him, Andrew Auld was a deeply troubled youth. ‘An’ I dinna’ ken, Mr Felton – I just dinna’ ken!’
‘Do you mean that we’re asking too much, Andy?’ Also on his feet now, Howard laid for a moment on Toby’s brother’s shoulder an almost fatherly arm. This time, he was not at all at a loss as to what was going on in the young man’s mind.
‘Or gie’ing too much – I dinna’ ken!’
‘Then give it a trial, Andy. Think of yourself as an explorer, content to rub noses for a time with a strange tribe. At least we’re not cannibals, and shan’t eat you. And you needn’t pick up our songs and dances if you don’t want to.’
Howard Felton – standing in the middle of Felton Temple or Stukeley’s Folly, and with the Felton lands at his feet – rather surprised himself by his command of these bizarre images. But Andy at least didn’t take them amiss, nor did their sense elude him.
‘It wad be lang,’ he said, ‘afore I’d hear you speaking ither than a strange tongue an’ a’. So it mun be thocht on. Just let me bide on it a wee.’
VIII
Mrs warlow, having on her afternoon’s programme the necessary weekly patronising of the village shop in Felton Canonicorum, dropped Ianthe at the bottom of the drive and took the wheel. For her niece it meant a walk of well over half a mile, since the blessed seclusion of Felton House from a jarring world was one of its more notable features. Ianthe, who as a traveller had been sitting down for most of the day, welcomed this modicum of exercise. She also felt that she wanted time to arrange her thoughts.
It would scarcely have been easy to say why. Her aunt had given her a certain amount of fresh information about Toby’s miraculously recovered brother, but it wasn’t of a sort appearing to demand any particular initiative from herself. She saw that the strangeness of the event called for the exercise of a certain circumspection, and that it was probably necessary to bear Andrew Auld’s educational deficiencies constantly in mind while dissimulating the fact that one was doing so. These things were so obvious that they hardly needed thought, and there was nobody on the immediate Felton scene inadequately equipped for the job in point either of good manners or good will.
Why then did she feel that Andy’s arrival sounded for her an obscure alert? She asked herself this question as she paused for a moment to glance at the humbly snug dwelling of the Misses Kinch. Since she visited these ladies regularly for the purpose of enquiring about their health and augmenting their wardrobes or larder, she knew the inside of the lodge very well. She could quite clearly visualise the room that must have been let to Hawkstone’s new assistant, and by planting the figure of Toby in the middle of it call up almost precisely the spectacle enjoyed by one or another of the Misses Kinch when she stuck her ancient head through the doorway to call the young man to his tea. Possessing (like her Aunt Grace) a vigorous pictorial imagination, Ianthe went on to clothe this deutero-Toby in her mind’s eye in garments appropriate to horticultural activities, and thus completed an almost certainly accurate conjuration of Andrew Auld in his habit as he lived. But she found that this innocent and almost involuntary play of fancy somehow enhanced her sense of elusive crisis round the corner.
Ever since her two years’ juniority had ceased to count, and on through their later teens when her maturity had begun to outdistance his, Ianthe had been Toby’s sentinel and guard. There were other facets to their relationship, some of them perhaps not much available to the view of either, but this one was as important as any. It had perhaps come into being as early as those years during which Howard Felton and his wife (but chiefly Howard himself) had been hoping still for the birth of a boy; now it had achieved very conscious focus in Ianthe’s mind. Toby’s rights at Felton would be violated were he to be treated other than precisely as an only son. And something atavic, tribal, deep in her father (too deep, indeed, for Howard’s own ready comprehension) threatened the integrity of his purpose in this regard. Ianthe’s business – it was thus she saw it – was to see Toby established beyond equivocation as the acknowledged heir to Felton. For several years now she had been vigilant over this. She had developed, indeed, a kind of early warning system round the activities of her foster-brother. It was a fact of which Howard Felton himself was totally unconscious. His sister Grace was not.
There had been a certain hazard when the project of the acceptance house hove up. It had been prudent in Toby – himself not quite confident that matters would go as he expected and hoped – to enquire around concerning the sort of business opportunities, the avenues to unquestionable independence and financial ease, which his contemporaries at school and university were so many of them heading for. Howard had been brought round to applaud Toby’s sagacity, and indeed to claim a measure of it for himself. He had been disappointed, all the same. There wasn’t much spunk to finding oneself a niche in Lombard Street. Ianthe had been briefly furious. But for her father’s dilatory instinct the acceptance house wouldn’t have happened.
And now there was Elma Loftus – about whose relationship with (and designs upon) Toby Aunt Grace had admitted to being as well posted as Ianthe herself. Ianthe was less clear about this, feeling the possible emergence of something latent in the affair which eluded her. Despite her father’s seeming approval of Elma she found it hard to believe that he would much care for Toby’s liaison with her, let alone for any notion of a marriage. Dr Loftus kept a whacking great family tree in a wash-place, but the Loftuses weren’t Howard Felton’s sort of people, all the same. Her father – Ianthe told herself – although scarcely a complex character, did harbour a sufficient number of paradoxes to save him from insipidity. His adopting a male child of whose parentage nothing whatever was known had been the product of an impulse liberal in the most admirable sense, and it now looked as if Andrew Auld’s reception was exhibiting her father in the same light. At the same time there lurked in him prejudices (or loyalties, if one
cared to put it that way) that might have come straight out of Victorian fiction. In Trollope there was that duke (a variously admirable man) who was outraged that the hand of his daughter should be aspired to by a mere private gentleman. Howard Felton might be described as a mere private gentleman himself. But at least a tinge of that sort of feeling harboured in him.
And now in turn there was a possible hazard in Andy. It was very much her persuasion that Toby and Andy had taken to one another: even the mysterious fight reported by her aunt seemed somehow to support that view of the matter. Andy must be finding his situation bewildering and in many ways disagreeable. But there was no hint that he felt, as counterbalancing this, that there was, in the vulgar phrase, ‘something in it for him’. On the contrary, there was even a suggestion that he was fighting for his independence – or at least submitting only by cautious degrees to what Mrs Warlow had called a ‘process of assimilation’. Perhaps, despite its strangeness, he found the general spectacle of Felton attractive, but it looked as if it was decidedly just the discovering of a brother that pleased him in the main. Andy wasn’t, in other words, the sort of person by whom her father would be radically upset, with any consequent undesirable rubbing off of irritation upon Toby. He was a new and imponderable element in the family situation, all the same. She would know more about him when she had heard what Toby had to say.
By the time that Ianthe had developed her thinking thus far she was nearly halfway up the drive. The house was still invisible since the drive, in the interest of a level progress, here swept in a gentle curve round a coomb dropping steeply from the down. This added considerably to its length, and also to the effectiveness of the avenue of beech trees through which it moved as through a leafy rotunda. Some of the beeches had a yellow tinge which Ianthe knew to be causing her father anxiety as less likely to be autumnal than a sinister consequence of exceptional drought a couple of summers ago. Ianthe had paused to assess this phenomenon when she became aware that somebody had emerged from the coomb and was advancing towards her down the drive. Recognising the figure as Toby’s, she gave a wave. The wave was returned, but only after a moment’s perplexing hesitation. It was the hesitation, and not anything else visible to the eye, that told her this wasn’t Toby, after all. It was Andy. She moved forward with a quickened pace. And Andy did this too.
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