The Elderbrook Brothers

by Gerald Bullet

  ‘Doesn’t know what I’m talking about?’ her father echoed.

  ‘No,’ said Emily, softly and quickly. ‘Nor do I, Joe. Are you having a joke with him?’

  ‘It’s plain enough,’ retorted Elderbrook. ‘You’ve all heard of Keyborough, haven’t ye? Well, that’s where the boy’s going. And where should a boy be going to at Keyborough but the grammar school, hey?’ he went on, his speech roughening as his excitement grew. ‘I’ve come to a settlement with the Reverend Williams, and he’ll take ‘un next term, he says.’

  ‘You’ve done what, Joe?’

  Emily’s eyebrows had risen high, and there was offended pride in the poise of her small neat person. For an instant all eyes were drawn to her. Elderbrook, giving her a glance, both admired and resented that indefinable touch of difference in her. Fine little filly: too blessed ladylike for a plain chap. These judgments came like echoes from twenty years ago. But, damn it all!—she was only Emily, for all her airs; the woman he’d bedded and boarded with for as many years as made no matter. With deliberate aggressiveness he stared her down, smiling still, but with a hint of anger in the smile.

  ‘Hard of hearing today, aint ye, Mother?’ He looked round on the company. ‘Am I talking too soft, or what is it?’

  Made aware, more by Emily’s behaviour than his, that an earth-shaking disaster was in the air, a quarrel between Father and Mother, the children avoided looking at either parent, and Joe’s idle, angry question went unanswered. Matthew, taking the line that it was no business of his anyhow, munched on at his doorstep of bread and dripping, with no sign of knowing that anything unusual was afoot; Felix, red to the ears, stared timidly at his plate, afraid even to swallow what was in his mouth, lest tears should take him unawares; Guy, with an uneasy polite smile, had chosen a particular square inch of the low ceiling to stare at; Faith could not take her eyes off Emily’s hands, which rested lightly and expressively on the table edge, as though their owner were on the point of rising; and the younger girl, Nancy, red-cheeked and plump as a robin, with bright eyes and a shock of black hair, sat with hands clasped as though holding herself together, and stared blankly ahead.

  ‘Here’s how it is,’ said their father, with a sidelong glance at Emily, whose eyes alone were still attentive to him. ‘He’s a very easy, how-d’yer-do, affable sort of man, is the grammar school master. A reverend too, with letters after his name, plenty of ‘em——’

  Emily timed her interruption with extraordinary precision.

  ‘Shall we talk about it afterwards, Joe?’

  Her apparent meekness did not deceive him. This was an Emily he seldom saw nowadays and had almost forgotten. He grunted acquiescence, cursing the weak scruple that prevented his boxing her ears as she deserved, the baggage! I’ll teach you to come the grand lady over me, my girl! And yet …

  Emily had risen from her seat.

  ‘You can go now, children. You’ve all finished but Matthew, and you can take yours along with you, Matt. Nancy’ll help Faith with the clearing, won’t you, dear? Father and I want to talk.’

  There was a scraping of chairs on the tiled floor. The two girls began dexterously collecting the crocks, and the boys shuffled to their feet. Their father, however, was the first to leave the table. With a half-sulky, half-satirical glance at Emily, then from Emily to the rest, then back again to Emily, with a sulky smirk and a shrug of his high square shoulders, he stamped his way to the outer door.

  They heard the scrape of his hobnails as, in the outer kitchen, he paused to shout back:

  ‘Come along, Matthew! House afire simmingly. Better get out before you’re burnt, boy!’

  This heavy, this homely piece of sarcasm, designed to annoy Emily, had the opposite effect: by its sheer simplicity it disarmed her indignation for the moment, making her soften towards Joe just when she wanted above all things to steel herself against him. But only for the moment. For his walking away was a pointed affront to her. She had a code: she would not quarrel in front of the children. But Joe, while not openly flouting the code, had contrived to snub her in their presence; and at the same time he was calculating, so she guessed, on her being unable to keep her grievance warm till bedtime, when at last, and perhaps not till then, they would be alone together and secure from interruption.

  Early to bed was a rule in the Elderbrook household, and soon after nine o’clock Emily sat in the conjugal bedroom waiting for Joe to appear. She was fully dressed; her hands rested in her lap; the light of one tall candle and its reflection in the dressing-table glass showed her softly illumined and mysteriously shadowed, giving her gentle face a gaunt and sculptured quality. She sat drooping slightly, a patient weary figure, utterly unaware of herself.

  When Joe came stamping into the room she said: ‘I’ve been waiting for you, Joe.’

  Joe answered, clumsily attempting conciliation: ‘Not undressed yet?’

  He at once began taking off his clothes.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ she repeated. ‘This talk about Felix going to Keyborough … what does it all mean?’

  ‘Just that, my girl. I’m sending him to the grammar school. Boys aren’t all alike. What suits some don’t suit others.’

  ‘I think you’re forgetting something,’ said Emily, after a pause.

  She spoke without emphasis or heat, but her tone compelled attention.

  ‘Huh?’ said he. ‘What’s that, pray?’

  ‘He’s my son,’ said Emily, ‘as well as yours.’

  ‘Tcha!’ said Joe angrily. ‘Stuff and nonsense, girl! What’s come to you? Don’t you want your son to grow up a gennelman?’

  Emily said simply, with no heightening of tone: ‘Fair’s fair, Joe. I ought to have a say, as well as you, about what’s to happen to Felix. He’s only a little boy, and I’m not sure I want him away from home. Besides, if Felix goes, why not Guy? I say nothing about Matthew, because you’ll tell me his schooling’s over and done with. But Guy has some years to go yet, and he’s as much right to a good education as Felix has.’

  In the act of stepping out of his trousers Joe paused to stare at her indignantly.

  ‘So that ‘s it! I’m to send Guy to grammar school as well, am I? Anything more for your ladyship? D’ ye think I’m made of money?’

  ‘We’ve got to be fair, Joe.’

  ‘What did I tell you just now?’ Joe demanded. ‘What suits some boys, I said, don’t suit others. Guy’s not a boy for book-learning. I want him on the farm with me, same as Matt. Us three’ll show ‘em what farming is—mark my words.’

  He flung his trousers on a chair. ‘Now Felix,’ he went on, ‘is—what?—ten, ainta? He’s not set in his ways yet, like Guy. He’ll take to it—grammar and such—like duck to water. You’ll see. And maybe he’ll turn into a clergyman and be a real credit to us. What d’ ye say to that?’

  Clothed in nothing but his shirt, his naked hairy legs striking a note oddly at variance with his grave square-cut sidewhiskered face, he stood eyeing her confidently, waiting for her answer. Having talked himself back into a good humour, he was prepared to be indulgent with a mother’s whims; but he felt, none the less, that Emily could hardly be less than grateful for the golden prospect he offered her.

  ‘You’re stubborn, I know that,’ said Emily, rising with a sigh, ‘and you’ll not listen to reason once you’ve set your mind on a thing: I know that too. But this I will tell you. He’ll feel it, the boy will.’ Turning her back on him, she began taking the pins out of her hair. ‘And it’ll rankle.’

  ‘Felix, d’ ye mean?’ Joe asked.

  ‘Oh!’ cried Emily, and suddenly her voice was sharp with impatience. ‘It’s waste of time talking. I mean Guy, of course. Guy.’

  § 4

  To reach Keyborough from Upmarden you took train at Lutterthorpe, travelled as far as Byford Junction, which is on the way to Mercester, and there changed, to be carried outwards, on another spoke of the wheel, to Keyborough itself. Because there would be a long wait at Byford it w
as necessary for Felix to leave home soon after a late breakfast, and to take some luncheon with him in a paper bag. The morning was cold and bright, and all the family, except Guy and Felix himself, had put on faces of extra cheerfulness. These two boys were thoughtful and silent, as if still puzzled by the unaccountable thing that was happening. They sat, all of them except Father, round the kitchen table, enjoying—or not enjoying— a breakfast that was for most of them a supplementary meal; for the elders of the household had been up and about for hours.

  Now that this odd exciting morning was here at last, so long looked for (it seemed) yet so suddenly come, Felix had lost all capacity for peering ahead. His imagination was numb, his mind unknowingly suspended between opposite poles of feeling. The world about him, the familiar world of family breakfast, was only vaguely present to his consciousness, except such parts of it as came within a narrow intense focus, and these—his plate, his porridge spoon, the ticking clock, the pattern of the tablecloth, and indeed anything his glance happened to rest upon— had a strange new character, and a clarity, an individual emphasis, that made him feel slightly, very slightly, sick. The voices of his family, heard distantly as through a dream, became loud and near the moment he noticed them.

  Nancy’s voice, however, was soft and confiding. Speaking close to his ear she said: ‘You’re having an egg to your breakfast this morning, Felix.’ Her copious black hair fell against his cheek.

  Porridge, bacon, and an egg—it was a sumptuous feast. The rest were having only porridge and bacon, but Felix, because he was ‘going a journey’, required something extra, both to sustain him and to mark the occasion. It was a high and a proud distinction, but there was discomfort in it too. It made him feel important. It made him feel lonely. It made him know, for just that second, that he was the centre of attention, and for a reason that made the fact less gratifying than it would normally have been. He saw that his mother was carefully not looking at him; he saw Faith smiling encouragement from the other side of the table; he became aware of Guy, who sat next to him, eating industriously and saying nothing, and of Matthew who had only a moment ago come in from the yard and made an enigmatic grimace at sight of the unwonted family assembly.

  Nancy’s remark, though softly spoken, was not lost on the company, as Faith’s quick smile showed. It was a smile faintly deprecating, as well as encouraging; for Nancy, unknowingly, had let the cat out of the bag, had directed attention to what her elders had been tacitly resolved to ignore. Their studied endeavour was to be busy and normal; whereas Nancy was normal without study, and had said, lightly and naturally, what happened to be in her mind. Felix did not in fact need their careful protection, nor suffer from Nancy’s breach of it. If for a moment he felt sorry for himself, that feeling was provoked not by his own conception of what was in store for him but by this mysterious hint of pain in the family atmosphere. He was not at this moment dismayed by the future, because his guardian angel, or whatever one may choose to call the mysterious regulator that resides in a child’s unconsciousness, had for a while cut him off from the future, as from the past. He was insulated in the present moment, was carried along in it, as in a bubble of light, looking neither before nor after.

  When breakfast was three parts over, Emily Elderbrook said, getting briskly from her seat: ‘Mind away now, boys—give me some space.’

  She gathered up all empty plates within reach and made a stack of them. The two girls joined her in the enterprise. Their training made it impossible for them to sit idle while their mother was on the move.

  ‘What’s to do, Mum?’ Nancy asked.

  ‘As if you didn’t know!’ said her mother with gentle scolding. Not pausing for an instant in her busyness, she was already spreading butter across the cut surface of the loaf.

  Nancy saw that Felix’s luncheon sandwiches were in the making.

  ‘What’s he going to have in them, Mummy?’

  ‘Ham and eggs and brussels sprouts,’ said Emily Elderbrook, with tart irony. ‘Don’t ask so many questions, girl. Run and fetch his things down for him. They’re all packed and ready. You’ll find the hold-all on the landing. Look sharp now.’

  This degree of briskness in Emily was unwonted: it told Faith, for one, that this was no ordinary morning for her mother. She did not need the telling, but it sharpened the edge of what she already knew.

  Nancy, darting across the red brick floor, nearly collided with her father.

  ‘Steady, mare, steady!’ His sharp eyes held her with a humorous stare. ‘Where’s the hurry, lass? Time enough! Time enough!’ Stamping his way towards the breakfast-table he took his stand opposite Felix. The pungent smell of the farmyard came in with him. ‘Well, boy!’ He looked across the table at Felix, giving him his characteristic half-fierce half-genial grin. ‘Glad you’re going to grammar school, hey?’

  Felix did his best to grin back. He was not aware of feeling unhappy, but he was painfully aware of feeling sick. There was a moment of agonized suspense. Then Faith was suddenly with him, her hands on his, helping him out of his chair.

  ‘Come along, ducky,’ she said. ‘We’ll go and see if the paint’s dry, shall we?’

  ‘Oo yes,’ answered Felix.

  It was almost the first sound he had uttered since breakfast began, and the smile he gave his sister was bright with a shy secret pleasure. For her words had conjured into memory not only the tin trunk with its famous lettering but all the other new excitements of this time: new boots, nightshirts, numerous articles of underwear, and two smart new toothbrushes—two, if you please. But it was the lettering that most delighted him: Faith’s lettering, in white enamel, of his name and new address on the black lid of his trunk: F. Eider brook. Junior School, St Swithins, Keyborough. She had taken great pains with the inscription, and it was a tremendous success. It would be easy, she had explained, to scrape off the first two letters of Junior, and paint in two others, when the glorious day of his elevation to the Senior School should arrive. That would not be for some little while yet, but it was a day to look forward to.

  While Faith and Felix went upstairs, to make sure, as she said, that the paint was dry—though she had no doubt of it —their mother continued to make sandwiches for Felix’s lunch, which, according to her instructions, he would eat during the last half-hour of his long wait at Byford Junction. The picture of him sitting alone in a bleak waiting-room, with his picnic lunch, his hand luggage (a porter would see to the trunk: she must remember to explain about the tipping), and the comic paper she intended to buy for him at Lutterthorpe if there was a chance, this picture tore her heart to tatters, or would have done had she given it a second glance. With a stubbornly unyielding face she finished her immediate task, then got quickly into outdoor clothes and made her way to the stable-yard, where Matthew, with Guy in attendance, was in process of backing the pony between the shafts of the trap.

  ‘That’s good boys,’ she said, ‘I’m taking him to the station, tell your father.’

  She joined them in harnessing pony to trap, and, when that was done, took the reins from Matthew’s gaunt fingers and climbed into the driving seat, the pony moving forward in the same instant.

  ‘I’ll bring her round to the front door,’ said Emily, over her shoulder. ‘Run and tell them, Matt.’

  § 5

  IN the eighteen-nineties, well before the coming of the motorcar, Keyborough had the kind of mellow dignity which a later generation, with envy of something lost or with an easygoing contempt for what it had never known, was to call ‘sleepy’. Until the triumphant industrialization of Mercester thirty or forty years earlier, Keyborough had been a place of some consequence; but to-day its cobbled square was the scene of nothing more exciting than a fortnightly market for butter and eggs and fruits in their season. This market square, the heart of Keyborough, could be approached by the Lower High Street from the south and by the Upper High Street running at right angles to it from the west: on the eastern side, roughly parallel to the High Street, lay th
e road going north to Mercester, twelve miles away, and south-west by many ramifications to the inconceivable remoteness of London, a place which Mercestershire children had read about in their school histories but had no expectation of visiting. Keyborough took itself and its excellence for granted, with a complacency so far from selfconscious that among its inhabitants, more especially of the younger generation, were there those who professed to think Mercester better worth living in; but in general you could find no town more contentedly insular than Keyborough, with its Early English church, its decent seventeenth- and eighteenth-century shops, its two or three large private houses with walled gardens into which an exuberant or ill-disposed child could throw a stone from the High Street, and, something less than a mile north-west of the clock-tower, the respectably aged grammar school.

  St Swithins was a smaller school than many of its kind, and lack of purchasable space prevented its enlargement except at the expense of the headmaster’s garden. This meant that so long as the Revd Dan Williams was in command no more than a hundred and fifty boys could be accommodated in the class-rooms of St Swithins, and far fewer in the dormitories. In his opinion these were plenty: at times he felt that the number might be profitably reduced by a hundred and forty-eight, leaving only his two sons, Tom and Stephen, whom he supposed their mother would insist on keeping, and to whose presence he himself had no objection, though the necessity of calling them Williams major and Williams minor in school, and of treating them with rather more than their share of severity, had made him almost forget he was their father. This kind of forgetfulness dated roughly from a moment in his early thirties, not ten years ago, when he first conceived the idea of writing a gigantic history of heresy. He suddenly saw it on his shelves, in seven, in ten, in twenty volumes, calf-bound: a work comparable with Gibbon. Every crank, fanatic, dreamer, misguided mystic, every mortal man who had ever strayed by so much as a yard from the narrow way of Christian orthodoxy, should have his chapter, his paragraph, or his footnote. Mr Williams’s eyes grew bright at the thought, and his pulse beat faster. He became in that moment an ardent heresy-hunter, but in a spirit very different from that of the inquisitors of old: he pursued not to condemn but to cherish, not to obliterate false doctrines from the mind of man, but to preserve them, beautiful specimens of human error, in the amber of his prose. But heresy implied an orthodoxy, and orthodoxy—was what? A fixed star or—blessed phrase!—a ‘progressive revelation’? The question led him into trouble, but it was the kind of trouble he enjoyed: a boy ankle-deep in the source of his own mud-pies was not happier than Dan Williams floundering amid the cross-currents of theology.