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

by Ursula Bloom

  Twit loved Marseilles, for its merry jostling streets, for its joyous cafe life, and its bonne camaraderie, whilst up above the city Notre Dame was etched against the sky, and the golden Virgin guarded the comings and goings of the port.

  At the end of the couple of months Twit sailed for India. He carried with him a handful of pleasant memories, a small rosary that a well-meaning M’lle had given him for luck, and a very superior mouth-organ which he had bought himself for a couple of francs in the Place d’Aubigne one Saturday night. He beguiled his comrades with solos on the mouth-organ the whole way to Bombay.

  It would take a whole volume to give in detail the exquisite story of Twit’s adventures. How he was submarined in the Gulf of Lyons and behaved with amazing courage, insisting on finishing the hand of Bridge in which he was engaged at the time. How Twit was rescued from a watery grave by an Italian boat, and, having lost his trousers, wore a blanket. Then, when it grew hot, how he devised himself a delightful affair out of two of the handkerchiefs that his Aunt Blanche had sent him at Christmas, airily terming it ‘my one-piece garment.’ The Neapolitans in the vicinity were merely amused. No one was shocked in those days, and in any days it takes much to shock an Italian. Twit liked them and they liked him.

  Ultimately he arrived in Bombay and spent the rest of the war in India, loving every moment of it. The merest details filtered through to England of Twit’s doings in the Punjab. He won a life-saving medal for rescuing two men from drowning in the Indus, and was recommended for the Military Medal for his gallant escort of an ambulance through hostile natives in Lahore. The Military Medal did not materialise owing to the chance luck of war. These decorations lie in the lap of Fortune. When all are gallant and splendid it is difficult to allot to the most gallant and splendid, and Twit was not popular with his officers.

  Unfortunately Isobel died before she heard of Twit’s efforts in defence of the terrified nurse in the ambulance at Lahore. She did learn of the life-saving medal, because Twit wrote in his usual casual manner, adding merely as a trivial postscript:

  I saved two men to-day who had got into difficulties in the Indus. Rather fun.

  And several weeks later in the form of another postscript:

  Oh, by the bye, I’ve got a medal. It’s rather like my snail prize at school. It’s for saving those two chaps in the Indus.

  The war proved Twit was one of those men whose efforts are severely clogged by home influences. At home he had leant on Jill, and away he stood on his own feet. His own feet were capable of bearing him up.

  In India he suffered from dysentery and all the hundred and one attendant horrors. Everybody had them. It wasn’t any good complaining; it happened everywhere and every time. He still had hopes of getting the Military Medal, but Fate was against him in her steadfast refusal to supply the opportunity. He lived a glorious life of freedom, of petty thieving, of playing at soldiers, and, in spite of the discomforts, he found it to be fun.

  The war trailed on and on. Parcels became rare from relations who had in the first few months been most attentive. Aunt Blanche had supplied him with one a month. Uncle Henry had remembered him with cigarettes, even George had occasionally sent along a few magazines. But now there was only Jill on whom he could depend, and all through those four dismal years of fighting she never failed him. In her letters she seldom mentioned Edward. Towards the end of the war, Twit, recovering from jaundice, was returned to his company and he received her note:

  Edward was killed yesterday (she wrote). I feel dreadfully alone, and young. It’s funny because I ought to feel very old.

  That was all! The idea of Jill left alone suddenly smote him with horror. For the first time in his life he saw her from a different angle. Here, at the other side of the world, what could he do? His hands were tied. He felt like a big brother trying to shield a frail little sister, which was exactly how he had always wanted to feel about Jill. It had been her capability that had prevented it. All through the night when he lay in a tent listening to the far-off cries of cheetahs and smelling the old fetid smell of hot leather and sweat and rotting vegetation, he was thinking of Jill.

  Jill, as a child, positive, self-assertive, a child who tossed her head and was a rebel against law and order. Jill, pumping the trough full and playing at seasides. Her fish business, her museum, her typewriting efforts. Jill, wrathfully defensive of Stanley. He considered that perhaps he had been a pig about Stanley. The war had brought women into Twit’s life in a new aspect, and he felt differently about love and marriage. He had grown more tolerant. Stanley had been just a common little man, and no more. The poor devil had been killed too! There had been so much butchery about the war, so much coarseness and filth, that Twit learnt to recall the days at St. Laurence’s with a new appreciation. He was shocked at Edward’s death. Something about Jill’s childish letter conveyed the fact to him that she was suffering acutely. She would have no one to whom she could turn. She would be longing for some kith or kin to comfort her, and would have only Aunt Blanche, who was an utter fool. Uncle Henry had recently married a stout and undoubtedly chaste wife; Jill would not turn to him. George had drifted out of both their lives; out of the strange women who had at one time been his mistresses, he had married one who had fought a similar competitor for the honour of George in lawful wedlock.

  In the aftermath of a sticky heat in the insect-infested Punjab Twit tried to write to his widowed sister. He was unable to concentrate and to convey what he felt. He made three separate attempts, and finally wrote simply:

  Dear Jill. You do have bad luck. It’s a sticky heat here, and everybody feels flagged …

  And he carried on in that strain. The letter conveyed nothing of his very real horror at the catastrophe, and secretly he was ashamed of it. Jill, receiving it some weeks later, sobbed her heart out for the sympathy that she had not received. She did not understand that her brother lacked a medium of expression. His soul was shuttered away behind locked doors and screened windows. His better self could not couch its meaning in words.

  Twit applied to headquarters that he might be sent home as soon as possible, but the great engine of war which had worked so speedily in 1914, worked more slowly in releasing the men in 1919. During those first few months of demobilisation Twit enjoyed himself very much. The war had normalised him. He had been given responsibility and it was the very blood of life itself to his type of temperament. Women looked upon him as a man at last. Jill and Isobel had always seemed to consider him a lout, and their attitude had made him loutish. Now women treated him as a sane being, and their treatment made him so.

  He came back as far as Malta, where he was shelved for three months, relieving another battalion. During those three months he was happier than at any other time in his life. Malta was warm and serene in its Springtime and as yet not too hot. It was pleasant after India. The clover was in bloom, a redder, riper clover than its English sister. It lay in long close fields for miles. The whole island was steeped in Tyrian purple, as if dyed by blood. It was castellated by square towers against the pale splash of a cloudless sky. The line of the clover fields was broken by the blue green of the abrupt cocoon-like cypresses, the rectangular huts of the Maltese, or the great dome of Musta lying like some Titan woman’s breast in the dip of the hills beyond Naxxar. His world became boundaried by the little island, with the long ridge of the Citta Vecchian hills on the north, and the wide sea stretching out in a clear blue spate towards Greece on the east.

  Twit loved Valetta, where he was stationed. A huddle of a city of stepped streets, of Mandraggio and Barracca, and every other building a church. He loved the Judas trees, not yet dusty with the grime of summer, but purple with thick blossoms, and rising like parasols thrust up out of the earth. It is an island of everlasting bells, their very discords struck a new concord in Twit’s strange heart. An island of exotic smells (some people were nauseated by them), mingled odour of pungent goat, garlic, unwashed, sweaty humanity, and fetid earth crumbling into acrid sa
nd. Yet a bright island of red and white flags, of turret and tenement, of clashing bells and chattering carozzin, of Judas trees and livid clover.

  Twit became a military policeman, and as a military policeman he automatically became part of the underworld of Valetta. The gay ladies in Strada Forni did not thrill him, but the fun that was to be had there did. Twit was not a misogynist, he had never found the appeal in sex, for all those instincts had been crushed at Whoreham. They had been brutalised by his ignorance. Eve no longer stood as Eve for him. He was virgin-proof against the beauty of a Helen. A Circe would not have seduced him. Yet there was a heady attraction about those bawdy houses in Strada Forni, and, although he never possessed himself of any of the women there, he found a certain crude charm about the suggestion of concupiscence.

  He took a childish delight in the games of hide and seek in which he chased Tommies through rooms that should have been unoccupied. He made the acquaintance of Rosella Shaw, a Serbian prostitute, in this way. Twit knew her for a keen hard woman of that trade. He cherished no false illusions about her, but somehow in his after life the memory of her stood fast within his soul.

  One night he stumbled across the body of a soldier lying doped in the gutter of Strada Forni. The man had been stripped of every farthing that he possessed, including a much-valued gold watch that had been his grandfather’s. Twit, seeing red, but realising the necessity for strategy, challenged Rosie Shaw. Rosie, in a scarlet kimono which was in reality less than nothing, resented his interference. She was brazen, badly painted, a cigarette between her crudely carmined lips, and a certain swaggering insolence about her demeanour. Twit knew her well enough to realise that if he was to recover his friend’s watch he must play her at her own game.

  ‘The fellow’s dead,’ he bluffed; ‘you’ll swing for this, my girl.’

  Rosie screamed. She screamed thinly, hurling forth a frantic jargon of a story. She knew nothing about it. God in Heaven might strike her dead if she did. Twit went nearer. He laid lithe fingers on the nude nobility of the shoulders from which the red kimono slipped audaciously.

  ‘It isn’t a pretty death,’ he reminded her; ‘women shriek a lot. They make a fuss about it.’

  He saw her blanch beneath the ugly enamel of her face. She began again. She and her partner Stebonia had doped the lad, and had dragged him out into the road by his heels. The place had been deserted, only a few goats, their udders trailing in the dust. One had approached and in desultory fashion had snuffled at the unconscious soldier. Stebonia, affronted that the lad had refused her unchaste embraces earlier in the day, had gone back. Rosella was not quite sure of Stebonia. There was Russian blood in her, and Rosie stoutly maintained that you could not trust the Russians. They were callous and cold, they carried things too far. She turned to Twit and clung. Twit was entirely unmoved by her caresses, he considered that she was fat, and she smelt of garlic beneath the tawdry, reeking patchouli in which she had soaked herself. She hoped to attract him by her charms and so entice him to abet her.

  ‘You help me?’ she besought; ‘at any time you come here and have what you will. No pay, always a welcome, see?’

  ‘You give me his things and I’ll say no more. If he is found stripped, they’ll know that it was your doing.’

  Rosie reached into her garter, which was ornate but soiled. There was attached to it, with grim irony, a religious medallion. She produced a fat wad of crinkled notes, and then brought the watch out of the too yellow bun of hair coiled on her neck. Twit took them and thrust them into his own case. Rosella clung to him.

  ‘You come back? At any time. I love you,’ proffered Rosie, for his coldness interested her.

  ‘Damn you, get out!’

  In the street he threw a bucket of ice-cold water over his friend. As this merely revived him to incoherence, and a total inaptitude for using his legs, Twit slung him round his neck in a bundle and marched for barracks.

  This was the new Twit. The Twit schooled by war.

  He was sorry to leave Valetta, growing hot and fly-infested with July. He was sorry to leave Strada Forni, where for the first time he had begun to fathom womanhood on more usual lines. In a sense he was sorry to be returning to England.

  The trooper chugged her way to Southampton. She wheezed like some asthmatical old woman, toiling up the hills of the waves, and falling again into their troughs with a shudder. Most of the men were sick. Twit sat forlornly on his haversack and viewed the disturbed waters with foreboding. He hoped that he was going to keep hold of his new self in the fresh life starting for the two of them. He hoped Jill would not by her sheer dominance unloosen his grasp. Turning round Tarifa Point the stark coldness smote him. All through the Bay and into the abrupt chill of the Channel he was conscious of a settling gloom. He knew that he was afraid of himself, the self he might not be able to keep. He was alarmed that this was his valediction to personality. In the new life he was terrified that custom would fetter him, that he might be caparisoned by habit. He remembered Rosella with reluctance. Rosella with her brassy yellow hair and her nude plump shoulders. He knew now that had he possessed himself of her he might have been a different man. He might have normalised his attitude towards sex; he might have vomited the poison of his unhappy youth.

  This was the Twit returning to Jill.

  PART II

  POST-WAR ENGLAND

  (I) JILL

  CHAPTER I

  ‘The fruit of my tree of knowledge is plucked. It is this. Adventures are to the adventurous.’ ‒ Disraeli.

  GLITTER.

  I

  Jill was poring over an enormous length of kitchen paper, on which she had inscribed in red ink the fiery letters ‘Welcome back to Blighty.’ The largest Union Jack that Morsegate could provide had waved its red, white and blue patriotism over the house since breakfast. A rickety triumphal arch had been devised by an unwilling gardener, and it wobbled proudly yet perilously over the gate. The official welcome was destined for the porch.

  She carried it out with joy. She believed this to be the valediction to loneliness and long-suffering. Edward had gone. Part of her he had crucified, and that part was cold and stiffening. It was her belief in love, her faith in a man’s embraces. Love, the fuller, riper quality of love, had ebbed out of her life for ever. She would lean on Twit. Her nerves were in a shocking state. She was aware of irritability and a grim tension; of a horror of some nameless attack; a hunted feeling, the aftermath of emotional crises. Twit would stand between her and this remorselessly stabbing world. She felt that the moment she had him back with her nothing else could matter. All the pain would be thrust away from her. She would be transfused with the knowledge of his support. No other man would ever come into her life, for she would not marry again. Love cheated. Life held love out in high bravery. Life eulogised, intoxicated itself in aphrodisiac, sang of the nectar-sweet and tricked itself into believing love beautiful. It was not beautiful, but sardonic. She accepted the ukase without demur and banished love from her existence. She and Twit. That was all she asked. The sea of fraternity should suffice.

  Jill arranged her legend over the porch, got into the cab, and drove to the station. She did not possess a car nowadays. Edward had developed a rather trying habit during his last year of life; consigning himself to the war attitude of living to-day for to-day, he had dipped into capital. Jill was no longer rich, she was merely comfortably off. She supposed that Twit would obtain some congenial employment, and together they would be very happy. Her idea was to devote her life whole-heartedly to him.

  He was not the marrying kind, either. They would cling together, these two; they would face everything, conquer everything, and find happiness by that route.

  They met outside the station, for the cab arrived late, the man having been delayed at another job. Jill saw Twit walking in soldierly fashion along the pavement. A khaki-clad figure, with a haversack slung across his shoulder. The first thing that struck her was that during the journey his face had come in contact w
ith a much-used Tommy’s cooker, and that he was dirty. Then a mist swam before her eyes and she despised herself for the unworthy thought. What did anything matter as long as it was Twit? He saw her and was appalled at her thinness, and the fragility of the face that had grown whimsically triangular. The war that had made him old had emphasised her youth. He knew that she had suffered by her eyes. He knew that he ought to say something comforting, but he could think of nothing. Gaucherie had him in its grip.

  ‘Twit dear, dear Twit.’ Her eyes were searching his face in anguish.

  ‘Oh Lord,’ he said, and then: ‘I had a rotten journey down, and I’ve broken my Tommy’s cooker. I’m fed up about that, because I have had it for years.’

  She seemed to shrink within herself, to recoil into the husk of herself. With some of her old sharpness she said, ‘Your face is dirty.’

  ‘Can’t help that. Faces don’t count when there’s a war on.’

  ‘But there isn’t a war on now.’

  They drove up to the gate with the wobbling arch and the proud flag waving above the roof. Twit did not seem to see them. As they crossed the veranda, she indicated the welcome above the porch and her lips twitched.