‘Are you Toby’s sister?’ Andy asked, coming to a halt squarely in the middle of the drive.
‘Yes, I am.’ Ianthe had been asked the right question, and her pleasure showed it. ‘And I don’t need to ask if you’re his brother.’
‘Aye, I’m Andy.’ As he said this Andy’s gaze was very steady – and not at all of the up and down order. ‘But there’s a difference.’
‘Between the two of you? I just don’t see it!’ This came from Ianthe lightly, and she managed to shake hands in a conventional way. But she had spoken what was for the moment at least the literal truth: that it was precisely as if it were Toby who was standing before her. Andy’s accent, indeed, was like the bit of ribbon one ties round one twin’s ankle at birth as a sole immediate means of preserving his identity when the second twin has arrived.
‘Aye, that too. But I was meaning there’s a difference between the way you’re like Toby’s sister and I’m his brother. There’s a kind of confusion in it.’
‘I suppose there is.’ Ianthe reflected on this – and also on the fact that, although the accent was there, Andy’s Doric could be more sparing than she had been led to believe. ‘And I’m the odd one out,’ she added.
‘I dinna’ think you odd,’ Andy said – with a sudden impulsive effect but with no hint of impudence. ‘And it’s Toby and me are odd men out thegither, wi’ a’ you Feltons gathered round us.’
‘Yes, in a way.’ Ianthe found herself acknowledging this reluctantly, although the defensibility of such a new view of the situation was instantly apparent to her. ‘But you speak as if the Feltons were visiting a zoo, and you and Toby were a couple of giant pandas.’ This sounded silly to Ianthe as she said it, but at least it was well received by Toby’s brother.
‘You don’t hae me a’ thegither behind bars yet,’ he said. ‘Although times I can a’most hear them clinking into place.’
Ianthe had been expecting Andy to be rather slow-witted. She believed that identical twins must enter the world with very little, if any, disparity in intellectual potential. But she had been assuming (which wasn’t itself too intelligent, she realised) that Toby’s education, his exposure since childhood to reasonably informed and alert conversation and so on, must result in his being rather cleverer than Andy. But now within minutes she was abandoning any such notion. Andy might be slower than Toby – at least in getting something by the tail in the field of verbal communication – but slower-witted he was not. Nor – almost certainly – quicker either. She had read somewhere of the possible coming of ‘clonal man’. That of course was something quite different from identical twins, and she was entirely vague about it. But when clonal man arrived in large numbers he would bring with him problems at least adumbrated in Tobias Felton and Andrew Auld.
‘My aunt and I have just driven home from Didcot.’ Ianthe said this because she was slightly at a loss about how to proceed with Andy. ‘You can guess we talked about you – or rather that I asked questions and Aunt Grace answered them. You won’t mind my being terribly curious about you, Andy? Toby’s finding a brother has been quite something. We’ve been pretty well brother and sister, you see, Toby and I. It couldn’t be otherwise, brought up together as we have been.’
‘Aye, mebby.’ Andy paused on this, perhaps as noticing that Ianthe appeared to find the form of his concurrence odd. ‘I’ll be hoping,’ he went on, ‘that Mrs Warlow spak’ no ill o’ me?’
‘Of course not.’ Ianthe thought Andy’s question had come with a sudden ingenuous anxiety which she mustn’t be amused by. ‘My aunt goes in for speaking the truth as she sees it – or turning the conversation, if truth won’t at all do.’ It was a sign that Ianthe was attending closely to Toby’s brother that she allowed a moment for his getting hold of this phrase. She was also recalling an odd thing that Aunt Grace had said about having made a conquest of this youth from the ‘hyperborean unknown’. ‘She said some things they won’t carve on your tombstone, Andy, but she certainly likes you. So I hope you like her.’
‘I never knew sic’ a one afore,’ Andy said with energy. ‘She has it twa ways at once. She’s auld enough to be my mither an’ gie me my bairn’s orders still. But at the same time I could—’ Andy checked himself as if conscious of having been about to utter something indecorous. ‘She’s that well-preserv’t!’ he went on wonderingly. ‘My ain mither was no older, but when she died she might hae been my grandmither. It’s like that, Ianthe, wi’ working men’s wives. They hae plenty o’ will still, but a’ o’ something else drain’t awa’ frae them wi’ the toil o’t.’ Andy’s accent had broadened momentarily. ‘But Mrs Warlow—’ Once more Andy didn’t know how to proceed.
‘ ... is a complete Cleopatra,’ Ianthe said – and at once knew that this was outside the rules when conversing with Andy Auld. Andy would have heard of Cleopatra – but not that, historically regarded, the charms known to Mark Antony must have been of a mature order. Perhaps, speaking to another man, Andy would have said ‘quite a dish’ – or something even more broadly spoken of the same sort. Ianthe saw that there was a good deal of propriety in Andy. He would be trustworthy in all sorts of minor ways. Probably he had been strictly brought up. She made a mental note to find out a lot about the upbringing of Toby’s brother, and even about the aunt with a sweet-shop.
This was a very sensible resolution, and of a piece with most of what had been said so far. But now something happened that oddly changed the temperature – it would have had to be called that – of the encounter. It was simply that Andy, who had still been standing before Ianthe on, as it were, an even keel, and with his fingers tucked lightly within the two little pockets at the front of his jeans, now tilted his hips so as to impose his weight much more on one foot than the other. This slight change of posture had the air of something habitual with him, and of having been made, at least on the present occasion, wholly without demonstrative intent. But its effect was to render Ianthe suddenly and vividly aware of Andrew Auld as a physical presence. Indeed, it was rather more than that. She had just made the amusing discovery that in some artless fashion Andy saw in her aunt what in another society might be thought of as the ideal of the maternal mistress. Now she was glimpsing Andy himself as conceivable in another prescriptive sexual role, that of the plebeian lover. There was nothing wholly out of the way about this. Like most chaste girls, Ianthe enjoyed the occasional experience of being fleetingly and secretly attracted by casually-encountered – or merely-observed – young men. She was aware of an additional charm or tug inhering in that element of the unknown carried by a personable male from an alien social context. It was entertaining sometimes to imagine how she would make do if she decided to marry the milkman, or one of Farmer Purbrick’s labourers of particularly masculine appeal. This being so, there was no reason why she should feel perturbed at momentarily viewing Hawkstone’s late assistant in terms of that kind of innocent fantasy.
But in fact Ianthe felt very perturbed indeed. For a moment she even had a strong impulse to brush past Andy and bolt up the drive – much as Toby had done not far from this spot in a not too distant past. Yet she hadn’t fallen into any total confusion, since there remained in her mind one vital area of complete clarity. When, not yet having glimpsed Andy, she had thought up that image of Toby dressed as an under-gardener in the rented room of the Misses Kinch, she had been fabricating a composite of a highly undesirable order. To muddle up Toby and Andy wouldn’t at all do. She would be in trouble if she did anything of the kind. And perhaps her father would be, too, were he to do so.
This was a clear but limited perception. Ianthe was striving to enlarge it – and becoming aware of indefinable impediments to doing so – when she recalled that she was still in colloquy with Toby’s brother, and that Toby’s brother was regarding her curiously through a brief but apparently awkward silence. He could be felt, indeed, as casting round for some conversational resource.
‘I’ve been awa’ up in they hills,’ he said, ‘to the great stanes some
ancestor of yours set in a circle there. Your faither came on me gauping at it a’, and I made a foo’ o’ mysel’, speering if they were Stonehenge.’ Andy glanced at Ianthe bright-eyed, aware that she had been somehow troubled, anxious to make her laugh – which, to her own relief, she did.
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘It’s the same general idea. You could call it a kind of mini Stonehenge, anyway – but a very late model.’
‘We had a bit o’ talk, Mr Felton and me. He’s a kind man, and it’s hard to say him no.’
‘What did he want you to say yes to, Andy?’
‘To moving into the big hoose. As his guest, he ca’d it.’
‘And what did you reply?’
‘That it’s to think on.’
‘So it is. But Toby won’t be pleased if you don’t agree.’
‘Toby an’ me – we’re a’ richt, Ianthe.’
This had been almost a snub – which was why, Ianthe realised, Andy had for the first time used her Christian name. He was very far from being an insensitive young man.
‘I can see the sort of decision it is, Andy. But please don’t go on thinking about it for too long. From the moment Toby discovered who you are, there was bound to be something rather artificial and awkward about your being down there in the lodge.’
‘There’ll be that wherever I bide.’
‘No – absolutely not!’ Ianthe said this with a passion that surprised her. ‘Not if we’re any good at all – any of us.’
‘Weel, at least I’ll be up to tea. They’ve got that far wi’ me.’ Andy’s smile came with this, and made him look particularly like his brother. ‘But now I must gang my gate, Ianthe.’
‘Are you sure you don’t use a good many of those Scotch words just to tease and puzzle us, Andy? They sometimes sound rather like that.’
‘I must be on my way.’ Hearing himself say this made Andy laugh as if he had achieved a considerable stroke of wit, and Ianthe laughed too. Her aunt had said that Andy was ‘easy’ just as Toby was ‘easy’ – meaning good-natured in a companionable fashion. Whether he consented to move into Felton House or not, it should not be hard – Ianthe now thought – to build up a brotherly and sisterly relationship between them. It seemed a good moment on which to part with Andy for a time.
‘See you don’t get run over by my aunt,’ she said. ‘She’ll be coming back from the village at any minute.’
Even as Ianthe said this, there came the sound of something giving notice of its approach on the drive. It wasn’t a car, however, but a bicycle – ridden by Elma Loftus, who was gaily ringing its bell with one hand, and waving to them with the other.
‘It’s that Elma,’ Andy said.
IX
‘i’ve managed to shake off my boring brother this time,’ Elma said when they had exchanged greetings. ‘He said he was going out shooting pigeons with the vicar. I don’t think a clergyman ought to shoot anything—do you, Ianthe?—except the rapids of religious faith and doubt.’
‘I’m sure Vivian is the better shot.’ Ianthe offered this oblique response a shade distantly. She disapproved of disparaging remarks about a brother made in his absence: much as one of Miss Austen’s heroines might have done, she judged it to be scarcely well-bred. She also disapproved of smart things clearly said for Andy’s benefit which Andy would merely be puzzled by.
‘But Vivian almost put off the slaughter in order to come over with me. He has formed a tremendous admiration for Toby, it seems, and has been getting advice from him about a career. I believe they have been talking about the army. Andy, has Toby been advising you about a career, too?’
‘I canna’ say that, Elma. But I’ve been having a crack aboot it wi’ Mr Felton.’ Andy paused, and Ianthe was disconcerted at seeing him direct upon Elma a considering glance of a sort she herself certainly hadn’t received from him. This was just as well, since it was not properly a friendly glance and not at all decorous either. Elma accepted it with an unoffended but neutral smile, rather as if she’d had it before. ‘There’s a thocht,’ Andy added surprisingly, ‘o’ estate-management or the like.’
‘Oh, that would be quite splendid!’ This excess of enthusiasm was quite in Elma’s line, but it rendered a little odder what she next said. ‘It’s a kind of office work, isn’t it? You and Toby will be able to compare notes about the height of your stools.’
They were now all three walking towards the house, with Elma wheeling her bicycle. Andy seemed unimpressed by Elma’s peculiar sally, which had conceivably not got across to him. But Ianthe, had she been given to demonstrations of the sort, would have opened her eyes wide at it. It was very much her hope that Elma hadn’t yet got Toby to commit himself on a permanent basis. Elma had gone boldly out on a limb in admitting him as a lover. But no doubt she had chosen her man well in this respect as in others. With any luck Toby was going to be a landowner and a person of consequence in the county; at the worst he would be a prosperous business man. But his main advantage, his strongest selling-point, was his decency. Elma was reckoning that, if the chips went down, Toby when called upon would make an honest woman of her.
Ianthe didn’t much like the spectacle of her own mind working in this crude way, inwardly articulating such phrases. But they fitted the situation. Elma hadn’t improved since her schooldays; on the contrary she had become a predatory female. It was unpleasant to feel this about an old companion, still entitled to one’s intimacy. Ianthe wished she hadn’t come to dislike Elma so much, and she wasn’t even entirely clear why she did so. She wondered whether, if Elma did now ditch Toby, she would at once dislike her less. It was conceivable that she would dislike her even more, as one who had followed up design with treachery. Had something of the sort actually begun to happen? Ianthe recalled her suspicion, active for some little time, that Toby’s affair with the doctor’s daughter was running into difficulties. Was it even possible to suppose that, just as Elma was becoming a little tired of Toby, Andy had usefully turned up? If Elma was after Andy now she wasn’t after somebody blind to her appeal. That single glance of Andy’s minutes ago (which Ianthe discovered had annoyed her considerably, although it was no business of hers) had made that plain enough.
But all this was most unlikely, and there was something squalid even in imagining it. Andy probably knew about Toby and Elma, and Ianthe didn’t believe he was the sort of person who would steal his brother’s girl. Moreover that gibe about office stools had been distributed equally between the brothers, and was no evidence of Elma’s switching interest from one to another. Perhaps Elma’s roving thought had moved quite elsewhere. Perhaps she had an eye on some young man who would turn her into Lady This or That. Elma would really think it much nicer to marry into the nobility than into mere landed gentry – especially when that awkward question-mark still hung over Toby’s succession to Felton. But this again seemed implausible. Ianthe doubted whether Elma had any great opportunity of frequenting the ultimate heights of upper-class society. And if her ambition was beginning to gratify itself in this way, why had she come cycling up the Felton drive, waving and ting-a-linging like mad?
Ianthe became aware that the bicycle was now being wheeled along by Andy, who appeared to have considered it proper that he should accompany the young women at least on part of their remaining way. She doubted whether his conception of squiring dames would have extended, however, to taking charge of Elma’s machine wholly unprompted, and she supposed that there had been some manoeuvring here which had escaped her during all these cogitations. In fact, Andy didn’t seem altogether pleased with the job, and Ianthe had the odd thought that he perhaps supposed it to have been imposed on him as a consequence of his servile – or late servile – condition. However much he wasn’t dull, such misconceptions were bound to be waiting for him from time to time round the corner of his consciousness, and they would always have to be reckoned with as part of the lurking awkwardness of the whole thing. But now Ianthe recalled the tone in which Andy had said ‘It’s that Elma’ when the cyc
list had appeared behind them on the drive. So perhaps what he wasn’t too pleased with was Elma herself. This, she reflected, would be by no means incompatible with that glance. She understood that most young men (in this surely differing from most young women) were regularly capable of amorous designs upon members of the opposite sex whom they had no disposition to admire in more general terms. Perhaps this was applicable, at least in some degree, even to Toby’s pursuit and conquest of Elma. She found herself rather hoping it had been like that.
‘And how’s the tennis conning on, Andy?’ This question from Elma was the first thing to recall Ianthe’s attention to the talk of her companions. But its tone told her at once that what she had missed had probably been several sallies of the same teasing sort on Elma’s part. Elma might have been asking a small boy about his cricket after his first summer term at a prep school. It occurred to Ianthe, also, that there was something a little surprising about the use of Christian names established between these two. It was true that she had herself very promptly required the same thing of Andy – but as she and Andy were virtually brother and sister (a way of looking at the thing, this, that hadn’t come to her before) that had been entirely natural. Elma Loftus was no more than a visitor. She must lately have been around, it seemed to Ianthe, quite a lot.
‘Och, the tennis!’ As he said this Andy, who was walking between the girls, turned his head towards Elma. ‘It doesna’, like some knacks, come by nature. But I’d say I’m getting haud o’ it, an’ yin day I’ll wear Toby doon. He’s already short-breathit after twa’ sets.’
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