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

by Ursula Bloom

  The garage progressed. He worked hard in a servile, dogged manner. The men were too familiar with him. Twit liked their familiarity, because in the war these men had constituted his sole companions. He would not have shaped them differently. Jill repeatedly harped on the point that it was wrong for mechanics to call the manager ‘old chum’ and ‘mate.’ As it had started, Twit could not very well go back on it. Besides, Jill did not understand. Out there where men played with elementals, the savage, primitive facts of being, he had grown to know his fellows as ‘old chum’ and ‘mate.’ He liked them. He appreciated their blunt approval and disapproval far more than the fellowship of Jill’s friends, with their sharp wit which bit into life, with their acid eating into the silver of existence. They made him shrink up inside himself and he was frightened by them.

  Clive Meredith brought a Rudge-Multi motor-bicycle into the garage to exchange it in part payment for a sports model two-seater. The idea had evolved itself in his mind during breakfast and he was a man of speedy action. Clive was the only son of a prominent manufacturer in Morsegate, and Twit knew him by sight. He was tall, with deep brown eyes that held audacious twinkles. He had a spoon-shaped face with a firm round chin, the long line between that and his sensitive nostrils cut by a thinly cruel mouth. It was the sensualist’s mouth. It was avid for passion, but remorseless in that same passion. Clive, seeing a beautiful woman, felt the warm flow of possessive urge trickle through his being. He saw her eyes and imagined her kisses, saw her mouth and dreamt her caresses. She was not merely woman for him, but a live white body clasped in his own virile and passionate arms. He was twenty-seven. He had had too much money and had been sophisticated from the time when he had worn his first Eton collar. Twit, taking to him, summed him up at once. Fast, but cheery, the product of money on an unstable nature. He thought to himself, ‘If Jill would only marry a fellow like this and laugh through life with him, how much happier she’d be.’ It was then that Jill herself approached the garage, her arms full of deep blue cornflowers which she intended for the managerial office. Jill was more golden than ever with the black gauze floating about her, and the keen blue flowers pressed in her arms.

  Across the threshold her eyes, so pathetically young in years, so desperately old in tragedy, met the twinkling, audacious stare of Clive Meredith.

  CHAPTER II

  ‘That still, despite the distance and the dark,

  What was, again may be.’

  ‒ Robert Browning.

  ABANDON.

  I

  When I review the affair of Clive Meredith, I take it as something wholly apart in Jill’s life. It stands firmly as something that I cannot possibly fit in with the rest of her being, yet the experience was necessary to her development. It is difficult to write about it in its true light, to conceive the situation with fairness, for in this romance where Jill lost her soul she paradoxically found it. Clive was the very opposite of Edward Shane. He was virile in a way that Edward had never been. Until Clive glittered into her life, Jill had never felt the keenness of physical attraction for any man. She had not loved Stanley, though she had played at it and still honestly believed the emotion she had felt for him to have been love. The uncertainty of her position, and her desire to be married rather than remain an old maid, had pitchforked her into marriage. She had been in love with an emotion, but never with a man. She had been in love with the fetish of her own hearthside, the idea of a husband to protect her in the difficulties of life, of children and peace. Jill had become enamoured of sanctuary. She had been the natural daughter of Victorian shibboleth. She had at least been sincere enough to admit to both herself and to Edward the shallowness of her wavering feelings for him. Marriage had nauseated her. Widowhood left her predominantly thankful that the tie was ruptured. Now she knew that the capacity for love was shredded into a thousand fragments within her. She felt that she could never care again. In a certain marbled fashion she believed that she was incapable of appeal, unstirred by the rude winds of passion.

  ‘It’s no use,’ she told herself, ‘I’m not normal, not like other people. I’ve never felt that way and I never shall.’

  If Jill, beaten and bruised by a fatalistic time and tide, were ever to regain herself, were ever to find the real woman within her, she needed a Clive to bring it about. He was young. He had retained a very boyish artlessness and a youthful outlook that was enthusiastic about life. He was also extraordinarily old in his worldly sophistication. He espied Jill, and instantly told his friends that he was ‘struck all of a passion.’ Jill, little and willowy, with her blonde head and wide eyes. Jill, so black in her mourning, with her face rising like some palely tranquil flower, with the smooth gold loops of her hair on either side it. He felt the energising urge to possess her. Staring into her eyes he saw that in spite of her marriage it was a virgin youth that looked out upon the world. He had always desired just such a love, but had found the average girl too artless to amuse, too easy of conquest, too acquiescent to thrill him. But Jill had married. She was only virgin in the fact that the merely physical love had never penetrated her maiden soul.

  He asked her to dance with him. Until then Jill had only taken up dancing to pass the time. She had lost the best of her dancing by the fact that somewhere deep down within her being was a little nugget of ice. ‘I am like the schönste Jungfrau, who had a heart of ice,’ she told herself. ‘I can feel it all cold and freezing within me. Nobody will ever melt it.’

  Then she met Clive.

  II

  Jill had never meant to fall in love with him. She did not believe such a love to be possible. She thought that she had endured too bitter an experience to feel the scorching flame of love now. That it was something which contaminated you, or failed to contaminate you, in the teens. She placed it on the same plane as measles and mumps. She honestly believed that, because she had failed to meet it, she was proof against it now. Yet within the short span of two days she was hopelessly in love with Clive. She was surprised at the change within herself; so startled that she tried to pretend that it was not Clive but the youth that he epitomised. Youth is so pathetic in its excuses. She still considered passion to be something shameful, something you tried to hide, and finally squashed by your refusal to acknowledge it.

  That night at tea at Dora Hine’s flat, she voiced a little of her secret terror of this new physical trait within her. Dora’s unmarried maid had had a baby.

  ‘So inconvenient,’ said Dora, ‘but natural. It might have happened to any one of us.’

  ‘Not to any decent one of us,’ suggested Jill.

  ‘Why not? Passion doesn’t wait for petty details like marriage. Passion was here before marriage was invented. It is a far greater sin if a child is not the product of a physical attraction.’

  ‘You mean love?’

  It was Olive who glanced up. ‘Jill is so old-fashioned. She believes in love. She still cherishes the idea that a man may sin because he is a man, and a woman may not because she is a woman.’

  ‘Well, the consequences ‒’ objected Jill, and stopped short.

  ‘The consequences of the psychological effect upon either sex are the same,’ said Olive; ‘you should read Freud, my love.’

  ‘Mr. Cushaw says that Freud is improper.’

  ‘He would!’ Olive was no partisan of the rector. ‘Freud is truthful, and most of the old school cannot touch truth with a barge-pole.’

  Seen through their clear eyes it seemed that passion lost much of its shame. It was a natural product. Jill was standing at the cross roads between primitive urge and elemental training, and she did not know which to pursue.

  She was afraid, as is every woman who finds love running away with her, and herself powerless to stay its destructive course. This was what she discovered that second evening when after dinner she went to Clive’s house.

  Mrs. Meredith was in London. Mr. Meredith made a habit of taking the dogs for a stroll after dinner was done with. The whole place was bathed in the a
methyst and gentle grey of an August twilight. The limp leaves of lime and acacia hung inertly, not a breath ruffled the garden as she passed up the path to the front door. Clive had ordered coffee to be sent to them in the sunk rose-garden and was waiting for her there. He had planned the atmosphere, which was pregnant with romance. They sat side by side on a stone seat with the lovely tears of roses scattered gold and pink and deeply glowing crimson round them. Before her was a sundial, cut into a stone slab and laid horizontally on a stone plinth. The edges were sharply defined against the evening, and incised into the stone on top were the letters, with its silent gnomon pointing to the night sky. She leant forward, tracing the lettering of a verse with a shaky hand.

  ‘Gather ye roses while ye may.

  Old Time is still a-flying.’

  Her eyes misted, for somehow the verse seemed ominous. For all the world old Time is ever a-flying. She was twenty-seven. In three years she would be thirty, with the best of life lying behind her in a jumble of years. She had had so little that really mattered; even now she was having nothing that was vital. The grey pale cradle of the twilight through which the stars would soon prick their brilliant way brought the fact home to her. The stone gnomon, the roses weeping their gold and coral tears, the verse with its beauty and its warning, they were all part of it. She was resentful of the fact that she had gathered so few roses from the illusory garden of life. She felt severely childish in spite of the struggle for existence, her marriage and her subsequent widowhood. She was still a child. She had never sipped a reality from the chalice of the Fates. She had never opened Pandora’s box to take more than a superficial glance within. She had never tasted the golden apple of Atalanta, nor the ripely red apple of temptation of Mother Eve. Though she had suffered abysmally, she had never struck down to the full true meaning of life. She had been eddied in the trivial shallows, and the depths had remained unplumbed. She was conscious of the sudden desire for those depths. If she had borne a child perhaps it might have been different. That would have been a deep experience, yet something told her that was not the experience that she needed. It was the thrill of a lover’s arms drawing her down to his receiving breast. The crushing of his lips, the tender urgent demand of his eyes, the sweets of the great adventure.

  Clive watched her. Did she know how frailly lovely she looked? Her golden hair lay like smooth wings against her face, the darkness of the veil gave her the look of a Madonna. He took the coffee-tray from a servant, set it on the dial, jarring against the stone finger.

  ‘There,’ he said, ‘I’ve covered up that ridiculous verse. It shan’t make you sad.’

  ‘Life goes so quickly. Sunrise and sunset. There is very little in between. A day, a week, a month, a year, and then we are old. Dreadfully old.’

  ‘You are not old. You have yet to be young.’

  ‘I’ve had my youth,’ she said, and remembered it as a bitter-sweet youth that had left her still terribly young.

  ‘No. You’ve been cheated. You’ve never had it. You’re lucky in a sense, for you’ll have it now. You’re going to have it, you know.’

  Her eyes met his and she recognised the sharp gleam of challenge. Still her fingers lay upon the uncovered corner of the sundial. She could feel the cold chill penetrating the phalanx, it seemed to cramp her warmth, and she thought with a morbid abruptness how cold the grave must be. Edward was in his grave. He had looked magnificent in death. A new, rather awful majesty had enveloped him, so his colonel had written to tell her, and she wished now that she did not remember. Suddenly, before she was aware of the hateful disloyalty, she had whispered it. Clive craned forward to catch the faint words, heard but half, but put it together.

  ‘Jilly, why do you go on wearing black for him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Chuck it aside. Why are you trying to wear a conventional mourning for a man you cannot mourn?’

  ‘I never loved him properly in life,’ she admitted. ‘I suppose I have got superstitious and silly. I feel that if I mourn him like this long enough and strongly enough, I shall in some small way atone for it.’

  ‘You know that it is yourself you mourn, not him?’

  ‘Yes …’ she faltered, ‘I suppose I know.’

  Her fingers, working nervously, were outlining the stone incisions of letters which by reason of the approaching twilight she could not see. Old Time! She knew the rest. Old, urging, fatal Time, with the dice for ever loaded against the individual. Old Time with his ace of trumps and his silent, sinister and imperceptible method of moving about his destructive work. Clive’s voice had grown attractively husky. His hand closed over hers. She compared the deathly cold of the stone on which the fingers rested with the passionate warmth of his pressure atop hers.

  ‘I want you to live for me.’

  A rose dropped a single petal into her lap. The sharp whiteness of oncoming night blanched it. He went on:

  ‘We could mean so much to each other. You have only known brutality, and the horrible side of life, and there is another side. You have a right to know it. You always strike me as being like a corpse, like Snow White after she ate the apple and was laid in a glass coffin. She looked dead but she was really alive. You look dead.’

  ‘Perhaps I am dead,’ she suggested wanly.

  He poured out the coffee. ‘It’ll warm you,’ he said, ‘that is if cold coffee ever warmed anyone. Your darling little hands are icy. Slip them inside my coat, I’ve warmth enough for two.’

  There was something deliriously sweet about sitting there in the tranquil night among the roses. The ambient scent of them swam about the world. The perfume of nicotiana and syringa and rose reminded her of that other night, when she and Stanley had returned from the Hippodrome together when war was declared. But here there was no rowan tree to weep tears of blood upon them. Only the yellowing petals of roses, circumfused with their own richly warm pungency. He held her hands against his heart. She could feel it leaping and racing, speeding challengingly in its thunder. He leant closer.

  ‘Jilly, I do feel like that for you, and you feel a little like that for me, don’t you?’

  She could not answer. She watched his face and at that moment the lovely pale moon rose mistily and flung her first stream of thinly amber light upon them. There was magic in the moonshine. Magic in the scent of roses, in the dropping of petals, in the lovely threnody of the garden withering a little from the hot day. He drew her closer still.

  ‘I’m mad about you, Jilly. You do know, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted, for Jill could not coquette.

  He kissed her. In the awakening warmth of that kiss, the soul of Jill thawed. Stanley and Edward, the drudgery of the Hippodrome, the gnawing irksomeness of poverty, all retreated into far distance. It was the first kiss that she had ever received. Numbers do not count in kisses, only the man matters. Clive was the man! Across his shoulders she saw the star-pricked darkness and the ragged outline of blurred trees. She saw again the white discs of nicotiana as she had seen them that fateful fourth, but deliberately. They were full of a new emotional meaning. They were all part of the world’s beauty to add to the one vital beauty of the essential love. She saw his demanding eyes in which all the passionate elementals were fused. Urge and jealous ownership, and the surging covetousness of possession. She felt his lips cupping hers, and drawing her own sweetness from her very soul into his keeping.

  Then she knew that she was hopelessly in love.

  III

  They walked back through a town drenched in moonwash, sweet with the essence of syringa and the perfume of stocks and mignonette. Half way they met Grenville, who was leaning over his garden gate in solemn contemplation of the moon. He recognised them.

  ‘Hello, Troilus and Cressida! What are you doing?’

  ‘Jill has been round to our place,’ said Clive.

  ‘Really! Do not trust him, gentle maiden.’

  She laughed. She felt amazingly young again. She experienced a certain
girlish joy about Grenville’s teasing tone, and she knew that she was blushing. She went on ahead. It seemed to her that somewhere out of the darkly bewildered night that had been herself, a pale star had risen. It was the star of new conception, of transformed standards and appreciations. It was a star that should have lifted itself upon the horizon of her life in her teens. She was bemused by its palely ethereal light, by its pervading beauty, by the sheer brilliance of its luminosity. At her own gate Clive hesitated. He kissed her again under the syringa, strong-smelling, like bridal flowers. She felt that there was something ominous about the waxen cups of orange blossoms with the light yellow fringe of stamens in the centre. Suddenly she knew that in love she was very young. She went up the path, feeling guilty, but the very guilt was delicious.

  The front door was open. She caught a glimpse of a dull red-shaded lamp glimmering in a reflected pool of red on a mahogany table. Of turkey carpet on parquet. She passed inside. Somewhere in the kitchen one of the maids was singing. She sang untunefully, and so noisily that on an ordinary day Jill would have stopped her. But she could not stop her to-night. She could not interrupt anybody’s joy to-night. Not while that pale new star rose in its five-pointed majesty within her being.

  In the drawing-room Twit sprawled in his old flannel trousers and sports coat, his dusty boots resting on the arm of the brocade-covered sofa. Before she could stay herself, she exclaimed:

  ‘Oh Twit, your shoes!’

  He removed them hurriedly from the sofa end.

  ‘I never seem to do the right thing,’ he objected sullenly. There came a silence. It was a quiet that was heavy and struck in upon the inner consciousness.

  ‘Has anything happened?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing much! I’ve done with the garage.’

  ‘You’ve ‒ what?’

  ‘I’m not smart enough for them. They want somebody who can talk to customers, not a chap to do the work.’

  She clutched at the arms of her chair for support.