Fruit on the Bough: A heartfelt family saga about a brother and sister

by Ursula Bloom

  ‘Very well, only nobody must ever know.’

  ‘Why not? It isn’t dishonest.’

  ‘No, but it is dreadful. If your Aunt Mabel or your Aunt Blanche got to hear of it.’

  ‘I think it is fine of Jill earning for that lazy brother of hers,’ Stanley protested. ‘My word, but some people won’t see sense.’

  ‘Twit’s not lazy.’

  ‘It’s lethargy,’ Jill corroborated. ‘He’ll go far when he gets through this phase. He’ll repay us all right.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ sneered Stanley, and added, ‘I don’t think.’

  Jill was torn two ways. She could understand her mother’s rather natural reluctance over her earning. Isobel had been hallmarked late Victorian, and the late Victorians were full of prudish shames and false modesties. The idea of women working was beneath one’s dignity and stood prominently out among those prudisms. Isobel accepted it as a personal insult that a daughter of hers should have to work for a salary. Faithful to her own youth, she tried to persuade herself that it would not be quite so bad provided nobody knew about it. She tried to smear it over, believing that a necessity of that kind could be smeared over and made less undignified by secrecy.

  Jill, lying in bed beside a sleeping mother, thought wretchedly, ‘There’s something all wrong with us as a whole. We are ashamed of truth. Especially when it is an honest truth. There’s something rotten and artificial and petty eating into our hearts. Stanley says that there is nothing to be ashamed of, and I feel that there is nothing to be ashamed of, and yet Mother says there is.’

  She tried to harness her own honest personality, which would have risen like a passionate flame within her. She tried to quench it in the belief that Isobel, being mother, must assuredly know best. She wanted to be ashamed of the Hippodrome and of herself for earning, and she deliberately choked her pride in achievement. But she was not going to be able to strangle that personality for ever. The day would come when it would rise high above her and insist upon burning, a bright and splendid fire. It would adopt its own opinions and abide by its own strengths. She was a little alarmed as to how she would face that day, for as yet Jill, like most young people, had never found herself.

  Twit took on his job at the Plotherowe works. Jill bought him two sets of overalls, one in blue and the other in brown, out of her first earnings. Isobel satisfied her somewhat squeamish conscience by the theory that he was not a workman really, but that being articled made a difference. She even wrote to Blanche, and told her about it. Blanche wrote back one of her half-hearted, ardour-damping letters, and said that she only hoped the poor boy would enjoy it. Blanche had a friend called Monica who lived near by and who had children ‒ clever children! Blanche emphasized, as though reflecting on Twit and Jill, how these other children would go far, and do well. Isobel read the letter, wished that she had never written in the first place, and tore Blanche’s discomfiting epistle into tiny fragments. All the same, they were triangular and jagged fragments, and they seemed to prick into her soul.

  Jill worked at the Hippodrome.

  IX

  Jill made her entry into business life with no flourish of trumpets. She was distressed that Isobel should consider the position beneath her daughter. Jill had been a grand young lady in the village of Greenley, and she knew that behind her flowed an even tide of Granny Grimshaw, Great-Granny, and Great-Great-Granny. They bore a very fine coat-of-arms, but financial losses had undermined them. Finance is the axe that hacks for ever at the stout oak of the family tree. Against it no tree stands long. Jill, reviewing her pedigree, was dismayed, she had a certain Edwardian regret for past grandeur. She had perhaps inherited that much from Isobel.

  Mr. Cox greeted Jill on her arrival at the Hippodrome, and noted with approval that she seemed to be capable and understanding. She was also orderly. She arranged the change in suitable piles. He was glad to see it.

  There was a certain dryness about Jill’s throat, an excited pricking in her ears, when the first customer demanded a tally in return for his one-and-sixpence. By the third application she had regained her composure. She eyed the long queue with calm appreciation. She refused to be ruffled out of her serenity. Boots scraping impatiently against the pay-desk, chattering florins jingled against the brass counter through the ridiculous little pigeon-hole did not disturb her. She counted her change meticulously, aware of the fact that mathematics were not her strong point. She dared not risk making a mistake. The first house installed, she sat back with her crochet work. ‘A simple job,’ she told herself. ‘I could easily sell chocolates in between and earn two salaries. I wonder if I dare tell Mr. Cox that?’

  Then she remembered that she had not counted the money. She counted it laboriously, interrupted by a deaf old lady who crouched down to the pigeon-hole to ask her if a little boy in a green cap had gone inside. That meant starting again, adding up the coins and the number of tallies sold. Suddenly she found that the answers bore no relation to one another. In a panic she counted again, only to arrive at a different total. She tried to remain calm and to begin all over again, to find that she was out by four shillings. By that time she had given up the idea of selling chocolates as well. She saw only the two columns of figures on the paper before her. She longed for the black marble clock from the Greenley library to aid her. She pushed her hair from her eyes and found that her brow was wet. She moved her crochet and two florins disentangled themselves from the lace, and rolled cheerfully across her accounts. The situation was saved! She leant back thoughtfully, having learnt her lesson.

  ‘Phew,’ said Jill, ‘what a fool I am! If I’m honest, I’m honest, and the accounts must be right. I ought to have thought of that before.’

  It was long after the second house was safely inside and her accounts satisfactorily made up that she left. She found Stanley standing in the rain on the step where the commissionaire had put the three parched palms. That man was an optimist, he was always believing that the unhappy aliens would recover. They never did.

  Stanley slipped his hand in her arm. ‘Well, what was it like?’

  ‘I’m so tired.’

  ‘You’ll get used to it, eh? We’ve all of us got to work some time.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s a bit harder for me.’

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  ‘I’m not complaining, but when you’ve been brought up …’ She trailed off lamely. Linked together under the one umbrella they were trudging through the rain. How sweet it was, how coolly refreshing! She felt that she was dried up by the fetid air of the stuffy little pay-desk, and she held herself closer to him.

  ‘You’re starting to get like your mother,’ said Stanley, ‘all that grand business. I don’t hold with it. It makes my blood boil when she starts. As if birth made so much difference!’

  Two tears trickled down Jill’s nose, and dripped to her wrist just where she held her umbrella. Perhaps it would be all right. Stanley would think that it was the rain. She always felt ashamed of tears, and she hoped that he would not notice. He was not very observant. They came to the corner of the two roads where the villa stood. The rain dripped in melancholy fashion from the rowan tree. It fell with a hollow plopping sound to the grating that lit the cellar. It was like the solemn ticking of a clock.

  ‘I’d better not be coming in as it’s so late. She’s sure to kick up a fuss.’ He drew her wet face to his and kissed it in the passionless way that she liked best. The moon, struggling through a cliff of cloud, suddenly gleamed down and lit the triangle of whiteness with the dark rings under her eyes. She clung to him, suddenly ached for more, and could not understand the hunger and thirst parching her.

  ‘Stan, Stan, where should I be without you? I feel lonely, young, dreadful …’

  ‘Darling little thing,’ he said, and kissed her again.

  CHAPTER II

  ‘So, turning the key, I bade farewell to one of the May stars, and did one of the most adventurous things left to us ‒ I went to bed. For no one can lay a hand
on our dreams.’ ‒ E. V. Lucas.

  ADVENTURE.

  I

  Jill was wondering, as she sat in the country lane, if she should break off her engagement. It had wilted with the years. It was now July, that memorable July, and when the time came found she would have been engaged three years. She had made an honest effort to save on her salary from the Hippodrome. She ought to save for her trousseau and her house linen, and a nest egg. But there always seemed to be something cropping up, something that prevented putting aside. In the first year she had managed to retain her hold on five pounds. This was cautiously placed in the Post Office Savings Bank. It had been managed by severe squeezing. There was the constant and recurring trouble of the stuffy little pay-box. It made her feel so ill. Her brilliant colouring had faded to a magnolia, flower-petal creaminess. Her face had taken on a new outline, it became triangular where it had once been round. Strain was telling on her, not only the strain of earning and meting out her wages to support herself and Isobel, but the strain of her engagement to Stanley.

  Isobel was still hostile. For a few days her hostility would simmer, only to burst into sudden eruption. The eruption might be produced by a slip of speech from Stanley, or more often by a sly dig from Twit. Once it was because Blanche had written announcing that Monica’s girl had a baronet in tow. The worst eruption of all came about through the kitchen chimney requiring cleaning. Isobel was directed by an undiplomatic grocer to A. Buggins and Son. Stanley and Jill had managed to keep the Buggins family in the background, and for some strange reason Isobel believed that they lived several miles away. Jill, suffering severely from conscience, had consulted Effie Hancox as to what she should do, and Effie’s advice had been tactful. It was to the effect of letting sleeping dogs lie.

  Isobel had never known that on a Sunday afternoon when Jill was supposed to be out walking with Stanley, in reality she was visiting his home. Jill hated Stanley’s house with a fiercely passionate hatred, but she considered it to be her duty to visit there. She hated the smug complacency of the best room, which smelt of disuse. She disliked the higgledy-piggledy disorder of the furniture of all shapes and sizes, and of no definite period. She disliked the old father, who never wore a collar in the house and sometimes economised over his coat too. There was his mother, too, who was for ever toiling like a servant, and who had merely the servant’s mentality. Jill would have broken off her engagement, save for the one helpless feeling that she could not face life without Stanley. She could not endure it while her mother and Twit maintained their present attitude. She realised her cowardice, but did not dare to make the change. Isobel went down to A. Buggins and Son, and saw the lawn-mower and the chimney-sweeping notice with horror in her heart. Returning, she demanded that Jill should immediately break off her engagement. That was the spring of 1914.

  The works of the Buggins family were the petrol to the smouldering pyre of indignation. Isobel, at her wits’ end, approached Jill in a fury, when it was a situation necessitating a more sympathetic argument. In that stupendously crashing quarrel, Jill knew that, despite her diplomacy, she was bested. In her heart she did not want to keep her troth with Stanley. Lately the glittering romance had subsided into something that glittered no longer ‒ it was not even romance! It did not stir a lovely response within her, for it had taken on the drab outlook of everydayness. Stanley had tired of her, perhaps that was it, or was it that the Hippodrome wearied her, and that she could not be amusing to him? Sitting in the ditch that July afternoon, she was trying to ferret it out and to see what course she ought to pursue. She definitely wanted to marry. Jill had enough youth and enough of the pre-war lack of discrimination to believe that there was a stigma attached to old-maidism. The life of a spinster, she imagined, was necessarily wasted.

  She had no intention of going on for ever in the pay-desk of the Hippodrome. Yet she did not suffer from lack of interest in her job, in spite of its want of scope. She had worried Mr. Cox into allowing her to supervise the chocolate and cigarette sales. Jill’s businesslike instinct would not let her remain long in any rut. In her own mind she was debating the possibility of turning ice-cream vendor. There was a future in ice-cream. It had been a hot summer, and she had played with the idea of getting a Gamage’s ice bucket. She could make the custard at home, and turn it into ice-cream at the Hippodrome before the performance. She imagined most people would want ice-creams, and if it had not been for the eleven shillings necessary for the ice bucket, she would have launched herself into it before. But with Twit’s classes and his cobbler’s bill and his torn overalls it was difficult to save for an ice bucket. But be that as it might, the whole thing spun round in her brain back to the one point. The point was Stanley.

  She was used to him, and when you are used to a person it is difficult to put him out of your life. The day would come when she would have to do so. She knew that she would never marry him now. First of all the financial aspect was not a hopeful one. Secondly, Stanley did not really want to marry her. Perhaps he did not know it in his heart, but Jill had sensed it. He talked more about other girls, his little attentions were depreciating one by one. She thought to herself, ‘To-day they are burying Grandma, I suppose she suffered all the same pangs and partings, though it seems difficult to believe. I wonder who Uncle Henry’s father really was, and if he deserted her, or what …’ Then it was that she reviewed her shoes. Something would have to be done about those shoes soon. They had worn disgracefully badly. There was Stanley’s birthday present. No, she could not bring herself to break off the engagement, yet that definitely meant that she would have to buy a present for him, and men were so difficult and so expensive! Her mind spun round in circles.

  The funeral would be over now. Poor Emily would be lying in a thin box in Highgate Cemetery, all her troubles minimised by distance, all her doubts and her hopes and her silly baby talk drifting into the abyss of things forgotten. Surveying the past is always like looking down the wrong end of a microscope. Time makes trouble look small. Jill thought suddenly how she wished that she had Great-Granny to advise her. Somehow you could not associate gay little Great-Granny with such pettinesses as ‘class hatred,’ and quarrels. Great-Granny would have laughed in that queer tinkling way of hers, a merry laugh, rippling into space, but her advice would have been sound.

  Jill consulted the gun-metal watch that had been Emily’s before her. She rose, brushing the seeds and the loose dry earth from her skirt. How black dresses showed marks and stains. You would never have thought that crushed docks could have marked it so.

  She went homewards with the smell of honied clovers and fragrant dried hay and lucerne pods in her nostrils. She was still playing with the problem of a Gamage’s ice bucket.

  II

  It was the night of Twit’s class. He had almost forgotten that, so busy had he been with his rosy castle in Spain, dreaming what he would do if Emily had left him a fortune. Twit bicycled to his technical class, and usually got home late at night. Next February his articles would be through, and if he passed the exam, he would be fitted to start in a career. He supposed that there was something wrong with him, but the idea of a career did not appeal. He would have liked to invent something instead. He had the Edison flair, only he was saddled with this strange stupidity complex, this lethargy which mildewed his enthusiasm. It was verdigris on the tarnished silver of his youth. Jill and Isobel did not understand how he tried to fight it. Jill was so quick. She jumped at an idea and swung with it gladly and joyfully into space, buoyed by her enthusiasm. He was drenched in Jill’s quick wit and scintillation. He admired her intensely, he was proud of her, yet all the time he hated her. Odd how you could do both, loving a person fiercely and savagely, yet hating him with a sullen, smouldering hate under it all. You did not know which was uppermost, the love or the hate.

  He wheeled his bicycle in at the back gate and cast it aside into the convenient euonomy bush. Tea would be ready. Perhaps the telegram announcing his sudden wealth would have arrived. He dec
ided that he would take both Jill and his mother out, give them a meal with no limit to the expense, and a theatre afterwards. He strode across the kitchen. Jill was cutting bread and butter on the dining-room table. She looked up sharply.

  ‘Have you washed. Twit?’

  Not deigning a reply he returned back to the sink. At the Plotherowe works you got dirty again at once. Washing seemed to be superfluous, and Jill hyper-faddy. That cad Stanley made her like that. The cat purred and rubbed herself against his ankles as he washed. He thought again of Emily’s will as he insufficiently laved himself. Grouped round the table Jill and her mother were waiting.

  ‘Effie Hancox is coming,’ Jill explained.

  ‘What, that girl?’ Twit could not resist it. He knew by Isobel’s heightened colour that she was already annoyed.

  ‘Jill likes her.’

  ‘Jill likes anyone beneath her! Look at Stan.’

  Jill set the plate of bread and butter to one side and began to cut up pound cake spotted pinkly with cherries. ‘Oh, do shut up,’ she said, ‘and leave me alone.’

  ‘I’m hungry. I don’t see why I need wait for that common little beast Effie. If she’s late that’s her pidgin.’ He attacked the cake.

  ‘There’s an egg for you,’ said Isobel. ‘It’s still boiling, so that it shall be hard. I’ll fetch it.’

  He went on munching indifferently. ‘After all, I’m not playing cricket to-morrow, like I thought I was,’ he told his sister.