Andrew and Tobias

by J. I. M. Stewart

  Ianthe believed, rightly or wrongly, that one of the knacks that come by nature had been invoked by a further look, this time not visible to her. She was about to tell herself, conscientiously, that Andrew Auld couldn’t be a very nice young man, after all, when she was reduced to complete astonishment by Elma’s rejoinder.

  ‘Whether you win or lose, it must be much better, I suppose, than hoeing turnips.’

  ‘I wadna’ say that. They’re twa’ different things, an’ it’s an idle thocht that yin’s better than tither.’ Andy said this so calmly that for a moment Ianthe supposed he must have been unaffected by Elma’s remark – a remark which the wretched girl had presumably thought of as belonging agreeably with the cut and thrust of what has been called the duel of sex. But it wasn’t so. ‘Here’s your bike, Miss Loftus,’ Ianthe heard Andy say – and saw that the machine had been steered firmly under Elma’s nose. ‘I’ll be going back to the lodge to get changed a bit now.’ Andy had turned to Ianthe, and she saw that his face was still faintly flushed. ‘But I’ll be up for my tea, Ianthe lass, at half-four.’

  ‘He’s really rather sweet, don’t you think?’ Elma asked, as the two young women walked on towards the house together. She seemed not to resent Andy’s somewhat abrupt departure, and spoke as if her slightly longer acquaintance with him made him more her property than Ianthe’s.

  ‘I think I shall like him very much. You oughtn’t to have said that about hoeing turnips, Elma. It was downright rude.’ Ianthe couldn’t recall ever having directly rebuked Elma Loftus before, and she felt better at once for having done so now. But again Elma wasn’t offended.

  ‘Oh, that!’ she said. ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean it, but he was turning just a little too oncoming – and not for the first time. You mayn’t have noticed it, but there it was. Young men do so easily get ideas in their heads, and it’s only kind to set them right as soon as may be. Otherwise a thing tends to run on, and eventually get out of hand. But perhaps it’s not something you’ve experienced, Ianthe.’ Elma paused on this, as if calculating whether a little to run on herself. ‘I’m rather worried about Toby, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Why ever should you be worried about Toby?’ As she asked this question Ianthe was almost prompted to halt and confront Elma squarely. But she thought better of this. It looked as if Elma were after a little drama, and it ought to be denied her. ‘Why,’ she amplified, ‘should you have Toby particularly in your head?’

  ‘Well, I suppose we all must in a way, with this thing having happened. It must be difficult for him.’ Elma herself came to a standstill on this, apparently to satisfy herself of the satisfactory state of her bicycle’s front tyre. ‘And, of course, particularly difficult for your father. Suddenly, I mean, having two young men on his hands instead of one.’

  ‘It’s not like that at all!’ Ianthe said this the more firmly and indignantly because she was aware that there might conceivably be some spark of truth in Elma’s last remark. ‘And you haven’t said what you mean by being worried about Toby.’

  ‘Well, you see, we’ve been seeing quite a lot of one another lately, and I’ve come to feel that just that may be getting a little out of hand. I’d hate Toby to begin imagining things.’

  Ianthe felt like saying, ‘For example, that you go to bed with him.’ But this would be wildly imprudent. And she realised – almost with a feeling of surprise – that she had in fact no real evidence that Elma was Toby’s mistress. It was simply a conviction that she still didn’t doubt for a moment. But this was again a position in which it wasn’t very nice to find herself. Ianthe, who valued having occasion for reasonable self-approval, felt that just at present she was experiencing bad luck in various ways.

  ‘Do you mean,’ she asked circumspectly, ‘that Toby may be coming to believe you care for him more than you do?’

  ‘It sounds horrid, Ianthe, baldly put like that. But yes, really. It has happened before – with other young men, that is.’

  ‘Oh, dear! You mean you carry the burden of being a kind of femme fatale. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I shan’t be able to think of you as a friend, Ianthe, if you say beastly things like that.’

  Ianthe had to acknowledge to herself the justness of this. She was surprised that so acrid a remark had been drawn from her. But her first reaction to what Elma was trying to establish was of indignation unmingled with any other feeling. It would be stupid to quarrel with Elma, all the same.

  ‘I don’t suppose that femmes fatales can entirely help being that,’ she said, a little disingenuously. ‘It would be much less friendly if I’d said you must have been leading Toby on.’

  ‘And then jilted him? That’s just what I don’t want anybody to think, and why I’m telling you this now. Toby has been a bit insistent about some things, as a matter of fact. But of course there’s been nothing wrong.’

  ‘Wrong?’

  ‘You know perfectly well what I mean. And it isn’t, of course, that I don’t like Toby very much. He’s your brother – or almost your brother – so I couldn’t not like him, could I?’ It was with the utmost assurance that Elma said this. ‘But I do simply know I don’t want to marry him – although I’ll be terribly upset if it makes him too dreadfully unhappy. You know, these things – or perhaps you don’t know yet – are so awfully physical in the last resort. And I just feel Toby and I wouldn’t be in harmony together that way.’

  The effect of all this on Ianthe – and particularly of that final outrage – cannot have been at all what Elma reckoned on. Ianthe was finally convinced that the relationship of Elma and Toby had indeed been as intimate as it could be, and for the moment at least she didn’t care a fig about that; it was as unimportant as would have been the discovery that Toby had been involved in some transitory sexual escapade in Paris or Vienna. What she was conscious of was enormous relief; indeed, in an obscure fashion it was of joy. The situation she had been entertaining as a hypothesis no time ago was now verifying itself as fact. Elma was ditching Toby. What she was hard at work on now – what, presumably, she had come tagging over to Felton for – was to lend some decent colouring to the thing. Probably she also wanted to ensure that her dismissed lover wouldn’t tell. And here, Ianthe saw, Elma was batting on a hopeful pitch. Toby, even if he had to accept its becoming public knowledge that he had been turned down by the doctor’s daughter, would be as secret as the grave about this having happened only after he had possessed her – for some time and quite a lot. He would tell nobody – except conceivably his brother Andy, who Ianthe had already guessed might be in the secret of the liaison. So Elma could go safely off and fix herself up with that young nobleman. Alternatively, and if the young nobleman hadn’t yet been brought quite under starter’s orders, she could fill in time with a brisk amour with Andy. Her recent brush with him, including that nasty crack about hoeing turnips, was perhaps a characteristic prelude to such episodes. And in the new state of affairs Andy mightn’t feel that he was being particularly disloyal to his brother.

  But about much of this Ianthe felt that she just wouldn’t know. She was lacking in experience about such things, apart from the experience – almost certainly unreliable – that one gains secondhand from books. (Elma had a considerable knack of bringing this home to her in casual asides.) But she glimpsed the strange possibility of her viewing Elma’s hypothetical subjugating of Andy with as much dismay as she was now realising, with satisfaction, that the Toby and Elma thing was all over – although it would no doubt have a final phase of miserable shuffling. She had come home full of curiosity about Andrew Auld. But she was finding that she had also come home to some unexpected perplexities as well.

  This afternoon’s tea-time occasion was much like that already described, except that Ianthe was back at Felton and that in place of the graceless Vivian Loftus, another and entirely polished neighbour had turned up in the person of Colonel Motley. In speaking to Ianthe Toby was accustomed to refer to Colonel Motley as ‘Aunt Grace’s beau’, and to re
iterate – to the effect of a rather tedious joke – a conviction that Colonel Motley wore stays. He had read one or two old-fashioned novels in which satirical play was made with this idea when middle-aged lovers were in question, and he was not put off by Ianthe’s either saying that he would not recognise a pair of stays if he saw them or pointing out that the colonel was by nature of so spare a figure that what he stood in need of was a little padding out. It was only metaphorically that one could call him strait-laced.

  Colonel Motley was certainly very correct. It was Mrs Warlow who attracted him to Felton, but although he talked to her quite a lot, he always talked just a little more to his host, with whom he was supposed to have in common various lively interests as a landowner, a magistrate, and a local grandee in a general way. He was talking to him now – but talking about Andy, whose acquaintance he had just been cultivating in an agreeably low-keyed and leisured manner.

  ‘Nice young chap,’ he said to Howard Felton as they strolled the length of the terrace. ‘Looks you straight in the eye. Clean-run effect. But what an astonishing thing.’

  ‘Yes, indeed, Motley. It has been quite a bolt from the blue.’ Howard paused to examine this expression, and saw that it wasn’t entirely right. ‘As a momentary shock, that is. But one knew in ten minutes that he was a decent lad. And Toby, in particular, had a sound instinct about him at once.’

  ‘And your sister, too, I gather.’ The colonel commonly referred to Grace Warlow in this way. He seemed to feel that he was entitled to go a little beyond ‘Mrs Warlow’, but that ‘Grace’ wouldn’t do since he and Howard Felton stuck conservatively to surnames. ‘The young man spoke of her very pleasantly. So I take it they get on.’

  ‘Excellently, I’m glad to say. Although at first Grace was a little doubtful about it all – as I suspect my brother over there in Oxford still is. But she has come round to feeling that we ought to adopt the boy.’ Howard paused for a moment, as if surprised to have heard himself using this expression. ‘Purely in a manner of speaking, that is.’

  ‘Quite so, quite so.’

  ‘Grace says that Andy – we call him Andy rather than Andrew, you know – may shake us up a bit. I don’t know what she can mean by that.’

  ‘One of her delightful jokes, Felton.’ For a moment Colonel Motley had appeared puzzled. Probably the idea of being shaken up had no great appeal for him. Ianthe declared that she had once heard him utter a private ‘amen’ when the vicar had reached that point in the prayer book in which it is desired that everything be ‘ordered and settled’ by the High Court of Parliament as briskly as possible. ‘Does the young man have any thought of a career?’

  ‘We have a notion of hitching him on to Tarling. Grace’s idea, again.’

  ‘And a capital one, without a doubt.’ The colonel was invariably enthusiastic about Mrs Warlow’s ideas. ‘Just the berth for him – and very handsome of you, my dear Felton, if it’s not impertinent to say so. But old chums, eh?’

  This was a great advance in intimacy on Colonel Motley’s part. ‘Old friends’ would have been colourless. ‘Old chums’ made it unaccountable that they were not Howard and Charles to one another, after all. (The colonel had probably decided on a declaration to Mrs Warlow on his next visit, although not on this one.)

  ‘It should be very nice for Toby,’ Howard said comfortably. ‘Having his brother as a companion when he’s down here at Felton. Teach him to take out a gun and flog a stream and so forth. I was remarking only the other day that Andy seems to be learning quite a lot from Toby already.’

  ‘Two-way process, perhaps.’ Colonel Motley seemed startled at having arrived at, let alone enunciated, this idea. ‘And very jolly for you having young people around,’ he added vaguely. ‘Look at them now.’

  The two men had turned and paused at the end of the terrace. At its other end the rest of the company was on view as a compact group. The brothers were perched side by side on a broad balustrade: Toby idly kicking his heels, and Andy cross-legged with his feet tucked under him. Sunlight and a faint breeze were at play in their fair hair. They were identically dressed – not by design, but in the classless pale bleached blue of their generation – so that they showed like a single figure freakishly duplicated by some optical device. Each was flanked by a plate recklessly piled with sandwiches and cake. Facing them stood the two girls, holding tea-cups and making casual talk. Mrs Warlow, having despatched her own tea, was sitting on a deck-chair some yards away with her embroidery, her scissors glinting in the light as she snipped a thread.

  ‘Women standing and men sitting down,’ Colonel Motley said, and gave an unexpected laugh. ‘All this modern informality carries a certain charm, wouldn’t you say? Kept within bounds, of course.’

  ‘Yes, indeed, Motley. We were a stuffy crowd – your generation and mine, I mean. Missed a lot.’

  ‘Too late to begin again now – at least as youngsters still.’ The colonel’s glance was on Mrs Warlow as he produced this sage reflection. ‘Not that one’s ever past it, they say: love, and that sort of thing.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ Howard Felton was too well-bred to have betrayed astonishment before his companion’s remarkable speech. It didn’t seem to him at all the drill. But he suddenly remembered a joke – it was surely a joke – that Ianthe and Toby had once or twice ventured on about Motley’s admiration for his sister. Could there be anything in it? It would be a most disturbing thing.

  ‘That girl Elma Loftus,’ Colonel Motley said – clearly with the intention of a little changing ground. ‘Might she be rather interested in your young man?’

  ‘In Toby? I think I recall Grace entertaining that notion. But there’s nothing in it at all. In fact, Toby won’t go after girls quite in the way I’d wish.’ Howard seemed not unconscious that he had said something rather out of turn himself. ‘Elma is a most delightful girl, but I fear her interest in Felton is largely in the house. Knows an amazing amount about it – through the centuries, and from an architectural and artistic point of view. We walked through the place together half an hour ago. There’s this business of redecorating the saloon, you know. It was the first thing she asked about when she arrived, so we went and had a look together. Those soft Italian pinks and blues on the ceiling can be renewed just as they were. But it’s a question about the gold-leaf. Expensive, of course, and too much of it isn’t in a modern taste. She’s on strong ground there, with a great deal of feeling for all that sort of thing.’

  ‘Is that so?’ The colonel’s tone was respectful – but sounded a hint of misgiving, all the same. ‘A wholesome-looking girl, and lively, don’t you think? Meet a fellow half-way. Artistic, no doubt – but not one of the wishy-washy aesthetic crowd.’ (Just so, a century before, might an honest English gentleman have said something like, ‘No question of the lungs being tainted’.) ‘Figure with a good broad base to it, too. No trouble when child-bearing comes along.’ These remarks – which again Howard Felton would scarcely have expected – appeared to lead Colonel Motley to a train of thought best accomplished in silence. So there was a substantial pause in the conversation before he spoke again. ‘By the way, Felton, how are those Camberley Hybrids of yours doing? They look well enough at the trough.’

  This transition, if scarcely elegant, was to a subject in which both gentlemen were interested. They talked pigs and pig-breeding for the rest of their walk along the terrace.

  X

  The four young people had been talking about nothing very much, and, in fact, the easy informality of their pose, so agreeable to Colonel Motley’s eye, belied a certain constraint alien to their years. The two promenading elders remained unaware of this as they came up, since the colonel immediately shifted his attention from porcine matters to Mrs Warlow, and his host had fallen into the abstraction of a man who has been given food for fresh thought. Mrs Warlow herself, although engaged upon the tip of a rose-leaf with care, had a clearer view of the situation. All four of these children – she told herself – were in one degree or ano
ther of a troubled mind. Ianthe was concerned – for some reason distinctly more concerned than she had been only a few hours earlier in the Fiat – about Toby’s relations with Elma. Elma herself exhibited a false vivacity, as if improvising an air of light amusement while inwardly calculating just when to do what. Toby was sufficiently aware of this to be uneasy in a way quite foreign to his character; in fact, he was being almost sulky and almost aggressive. Andy, who had normally to put in a good deal of time sorting out the mysteries surrounding him, had an enhanced appearance of wary regard and of what he would call ‘biding a wee’. Mrs Warlow found herself increasingly interested in Andy, and not merely because he was proving so disposed to sit at her feet. It seemed to her that the business of being identical could be overdone. What is stronger in determining action than the code of conduct to which one has been brought up? There was no reason to suppose that either brother had the advantage over the other here, morally regarded. The Aulds had also been God’s creatures. Indeed, the Aulds might be a better lot than the Feltons were. Or vice versa. She hadn’t the information on which to judge. But it was assured that Aulds and Feltons as they grew up gathered to themselves all sorts of standards and assumptions peculiar to themselves and their class, and this meant that Toby and Andy might react quite differently to the same given situation. Mrs Warlow found this thought encouraging. It would be rather dull if Andy were to prove to be just Toby over again – more and more just Toby as the business of spoons and forks and outlandish Scotticisms faded out.

  It followed from this that in the present situation Andy held a certain measure of advantage over his brother simply on account of the attractiveness of the lurkingly unpredictable. One knew what Toby would do: almost in detail one knew it, let alone that it would be honourable and tolerably decent. About Andy one knew intriguingly less.