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

by Ursula Bloom

  ‘I knew that hobnobbing with those common men was a mistake! I told you so.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Twit.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t say “Oh” like that.’

  ‘What can I say? I’m not feeling happy about it. I don’t know what people do want.’

  ‘Twit, I did tell you. Grenville told you too. Olive said that you looked like a pen-wiper.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘There you go again.’ Could anything be more maddening? ‘What did that beast Bell say?’

  ‘Nothing much.’ Twit could not tell her when she became frantically expletive like this. He shifted his feet back to the sofa again, and then, seeing her warning eye, hurriedly moved them, once more adding lamely, ‘Nothing of any importance.’

  ‘Twit, don’t say you are going to start the old game again?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘You’re older now. Twit, please, dear, don’t disappoint me. It’s so dreadful to be disappointed. Please, Twit ‒’

  ‘You sound as if you thought it was my fault.’

  ‘I don’t, really I don’t.’ She stopped short, for she was thinking to herself, ‘But I do.’

  She stood there drinking the cup of coffee, her brain rotating within her in foolish dizzy circles. She stared at every detail of the room that she knew so well, yet seeing nothing of it. She had a horrid fear that this was no new Twit who had come back to her transformed by war. This was the same old Twit, expecting to be propped through life, shepherded along, mothered and guided. They were beginning again, the grim routine of finding jobs and losing them. If he had been worthless she could have flung him aside, but she knew that Twit was not worthless. He worked hard. He was too willing a servant to fulfil the requirements of the master. He was obstinate with the blindly stupid obduracy of all obstinate people, refusing to conform to new outlooks.

  She realised that they had got to pull together, these two, because she had the essential that he lacked ‒ money; also he gave her the one essential that she needed, companionship. She wondered vaguely if she really understood him? Was she not really the very worst sister that he could have had? She went up to bed ashamed of her attitude towards him, of having ever thought that mere bad fortune could be his fault. Then all her distrust of life faded. All else became subservient to that normal hour in the Merediths’ rose-garden. It seemed to be the only real occurrence in a hideously abnormal life. Clive and she, the kisses, the rose petals, the sudden realisation that she was not old at all, that the star of fair promise was rising within herself, a lamp to her feet, the light to her new self. She believed that it was a sinful urge that made Clive attract her in this new, strange and altogether intimate way. She longed to put her arms about his neck, and draw his protecting body over her own. Then, remembering that she was George’s daughter, and Emily’s grandchild, she knew that it was wrong. It was mere animalism. It was nauseating and repulsive, yet dreaming of Clive she could not be repulsed. The star of that illumination made her see things differently.

  She knew that Isobel would have condemned such feelings as disgusting. Because of her own pre-war principles she felt that they might be disgusting and, acting in accordance with Edwardian training, she tried to smother the disgusting by ignoring its existence. She would not feel for Clive in that way. She would not be covetous for those long sucking kisses and hot caresses. She would not let her evil mind go wandering and pursue such a wicked course. She would forget the soft prickings of those stubbly hairs on his neck against her fingers; she would forge the questions asked by his eyes, and the tender worship of his enshrining lips. She was so deeply ashamed of her attitude towards Clive that she tried to drench it in sane thought, unaware that sane thought never walks with love.

  She was conscious of a new being born within her, born under the auspices of an illuminating star, and the new being was a stranger.

  Jill was afraid of herself.

  IV

  Clive had been a spoilt boy. He was glamorous for the very fact that he was young and good to look upon, bright with that dangerous attractiveness of youth. He had all the daring of the modern’s viewpoint, and the necessary frankness of opinion. Morals had never disturbed him. A woman was a woman, and he never thought of her in any other terms. When he had seen Jill coming into the garage with those cruelly blue flowers against her breast, he had desired her only in that one way. He had been afraid of her position, which, he considered, probably carried with it a certain sophistication. He surmised that she might have an understanding of his art, which was the art of conquest. Later, he had been amazed how easy she was. Jill was the gentlest of souls, she was a mere child in love, clay in his moulding hands. He had tested her that evening in the rose-garden, and she had surrendered herself unquestioningly. He felt that she could never have been kissed before, and yet that could not be true, because she had been married, and engaged to someone before she had ever met Edward Shane. There was the element of mystery about Jilly, and mystery is for ever intriguing. His first qualms as to whether it was right to pursue so easy a course were instantly submerged in his desire to own her. There had been dozens of women in the last seven years of his life. Ma’m’selles in the estaminets in France where he had been fighting; war-sick women in London who had received his embraces in those hurried leaves. There had been barmaids attracted by his personal glamour, little actresses with peroxided heads and bright eyes. He had never paid for his concupiscence, because a mercenary basis would have detracted from the charm. He had accepted what these women had to give as a gift.

  Once there had been his friend’s wife. That was the one time when he had suffered remorse, and then only because the friend might return and discover what had happened. The right or wrong of such a course had never struck him. The youth of his generation had been pitchforked into carnage, and their one idea had been to derive a little joy from life before they were killed. The old conventions had been burst asunder, flung aside, they did not count any more. They never would count in quite the same way again. The older people had accepted marriage as the legitimate excuse for intimacy. The modern people believed that loveless marriage was more indecent than unhallowed passion. They believed that if you were born polygamous, well, you were polygamous, and nothing in this world would make you monogamous.

  Young Clive admitted his infamy in a bitterly bright way. He had, as he had expressed it, ‘got things going’ with Jill, and then for some unaccountable reason felt ashamed. She made him feel that he ought to offer her marriage as the excuse for his design. Yet he did not intend to marry. The hallowed tie held no appeal for him. One woman whom you knew by heart and who knew you by heart, could anything be duller? Nothing, he surmised. All the same, Jill made him feel that he ought to lay his hand and heart at her feet.

  He made some allusion to it two days later when he found her in the summer-house, crying over Twit. The summer-house had roses growing over it, and light variegated ivy and honeysuckle. It was strikingly dissimilar to the summer-house where Stanley had bade her farewell. This was clean, there was a rug on the floor, glass panes in the lattice windows. The sunlight caught the diamond points of the glass and sent rich prisms of light in full warm floods of colour into the interior. There was no ancient tuck-box, and no invention that might (or might not) make Twit an Edison one day. Clive found her weeping there, burst open the door and flung himself impulsively in on her woe.

  ‘Hell!’ he said, ‘what’s this?’

  ‘Twit has been sacked.’

  ‘You never expected anything else, did you? I am only surprised that it has lasted as long.’

  She stared at Clive doubtfully.

  ‘What is Twit going to do now?’

  ‘Live on you,’ announced Clive; ‘live on you, and if you are not careful he will spoil your life for you.’

  He sat down beside her on the locker that served also as a bench. He put an arm round her.

  ‘God, you do need a friend,’ he said.

  She cried then the
pathetically helpless tears of a young baby, and drawing her into his arms he told her of a project. What about the winter in Egypt together? Cairo was good fun.

  There were lots of dances and picnics and all that sort of thing. He knew that she would love it. They could be married quietly in London one morning, and come home and announce it over the fried eggs at breakfast. He drew an amusing picture of the occurrence. What would Twit say to that? She told him that Twit would only say ‘Oh,’ which would not be so amusing.

  ‘And of course,’ she added, ‘I could never leave Twit. I couldn’t marry, because if I did he would have no home.’

  Clive had only been dallying with the idea of marriage. He had been, as it were, having it out from the niche in his mind, on approval. He had been studying it with the full intention of setting it back there again and deciding against it. But, queer as is human nature, a certain pique possessed him, and he was annoyed that Jill should decide for him to put the idea of matrimony back into its niche.

  ‘Damn it all,’ he said, ‘you can’t spoil your life for the sake of an oaf who won’t work.’

  ‘It isn’t “won’t”. He works desperately hard; he never has much luck. Anyway,’ she added, ‘it isn’t fair to say that he won’t work just because he happens to have lost his job. His only job since the war.’

  ‘But, Jilly sweet,’ he asked, ‘who is going to employ Twit? He is so odd. He acts so strangely.’

  ‘Don’t!’

  ‘You’d love Egypt with me. Dawn over the pyramids, dusk on the Nile. I’m not a poetic sort of fellow, but, by Jove, Egypt gets you. And you need love. You’ve never had it, you know, not real love.’

  Her eyes met his. She was like water poured into a mould, that shapes itself fluidly to that mould. The star was rising high in the hemisphere of what had once been her misunderstanding mentality of confused night. She saw the new Jill, born out of the old self.

  The new Jill dared to snatch at the elusive passion of the passing hour; dared to take this wild, sweet, throbbing love and wear it on her breast. The new Jill did not dismiss the emotion as beastly, but wore it as a lovely spray of virgin blossom along the dark bough of past error. She had to admit it.

  ‘Yes, I do want love. I want it desperately.’

  She clung to him.

  In him she perceived the new beauty that she had suddenly found mirrored within herself, the new stipplings and shadings. There were mental and physical changes utterly alien to her previous outlook, and only to him could she confide them. He understood her. He received her into his caress, thrilled her with his warmth, his promise of future tenderness, his hints of undreamt mysteries, of the brave flood-tide of an absorbing passion. For his part he believed that he had been a fool ever to think of marriage. A most unnecessary fetter in which only the foolishly quixotic or madly moral indulged. Already she was nestling to him, already she was his for the asking. He had only to strike the right mood and the right atmosphere, and she was his entirely. Jill was anxious as to how she could reconcile her marriage to Clive with Twit’s future. It was also difficult to adapt yourself to everyday life while you were thrilling with the delicious passion for a lover. She believed that they were engaged. He had most certainly proposed to her, and mentioned going to Egypt for their honeymoon. The love she bore Clive was the one flashing jewel in her life of dull drabness. She believed it to be a rare and exotic emotion which would draw her forward into a glorious future.

  But all the while, strange as it might seem, the world went on. It throbbed around her in its trivial everydayness, unaware that she was absorbed by such an emotion. Only Olive seemed to be aware of it. She challenged Jill when she came to her bedroom one day to superintend a new hat. Jill’s bedroom was dimly blue, the colour that is love-in-a-mist and April skies, and some women’s eyes. On the silk-clad bed was a pile of dress boxes and Jill was delving into their depths, radiantly rosy. Olive saw the wisps of tissue paper about her, and the gleam of satin and crepe-de-chine, and the filminess of georgette in tender pastel shades.

  ‘Heavens!’ she drawled, ‘this is a change, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m tired of black.’

  Olive sank on to a small brocade sofa and tapped her cigarette out on her onyx case.

  ‘A man?’ she demanded between compressed lips ‒ ‘a lover?’

  ‘Why should you suppose that?’

  ‘It could only be an adventure. With most women the common adventure is a man.’

  Jill resented the likening of her sweet love to a common adventure. She declared:

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  Olive was impervious to untruth.

  ‘If it’s Clive,’ she said, ‘be careful. He is cruel; he wants only one thing and he usually gets it. Understand?’

  But Jill did not understand. She only suffered the fury of enraged helpless youth that sees its love attacked. She hated Olive for the truth. Later Olive told the whole town in strictest confidence that Jill was in love with Clive Meredith, and the town swelled with interest and watched tentatively.

  ‘I thought her wiser,’ added Olive.

  ‘She was wiser,’ said Grenville, ‘but he is devilish. He has some subtle charm, a woman is helpless with him.’

  ‘Excuses only accuse,’ said Olive complacently. And she set the jealous scythe of her scandalising tongue to the bright harvest of Jill’s honour.

  But Jill was debating on other topics.

  Supposing she settled so much a year on Twit? She sounded him on this project a few days later. Twit had come into the drawing-room triumphantly, for he had managed to arrange suitable employment for himself.

  ‘It’s Berners’ patent plugs,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘They are for cars. Rather good. I’m to travel in them.’

  Jill remembered Isobel’s horror of commerce. She said involuntarily:

  ‘Isn’t a commercial traveller rather infra dig.?’

  ‘I’m not uppish’; he sank into one of the Madeira chairs in the conservatory. ‘I don’t care what I do. I want work. I came here because of you.’

  And all the while he thought savagely of the burnished brilliance of his dreams, in which he cared so much as to what he did. He could never tell her of these. It was no good. She would not understand. This was a passing phase, subservient to those dreams. They were the flashing thread woven through the dark tapestry of his life, but he could never actually drag them out into the sunlight. He did not care how he worked, if only they would come true. Yet all the while the heart of him told him that he could not work in that way while he depended on Jill. He must free himself from her and assert his own independence. Whilst she overrode and mastered him he could not get himself free.

  ‘I don’t think you are cut out for a traveller,’ she said slowly.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well, I don’t,’

  ‘I don’t think you need throw cold water on it. Everything that I do is wrong.’

  ‘Not wrong, Twit. You are so unlucky.’

  ‘I’ll sell dozens of Berners’. I’m tremendously keen.’

  ‘I hope you do. Only I don’t think you are the right type of person. You don’t look the smartish usual type. You’ve got no back-chat. You’ll only say “Oh.” ’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t rub it in.’

  ‘All right.’

  Suddenly penitent, she went across the room and knelt beside him, putting her arms round his prone body.

  ‘Twit, dear, I’ll get you a season ticket; I’ll get everything you need, and I do wish you luck. I care for you, you know.’

  ‘Thanks awfully.’

  ‘If I went away and left you an allowance, would that simplify things?’

  ‘Are you going away?’ he demanded.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Travelling or marrying? Clive, I suppose?’

  ‘I do care for Clive.’

  She tried to say it without emotion, but was conscious that her voice was unsteady. Care for
him! Why, she loved him with the savagely swift passion of desire. She hoped that Twit would not notice.

  ‘I like him, too,’ said Twit; ‘he’s your sort, gay and careless and cheery. I’m not like that.’

  ‘Would you advise me to marry? I’m terribly alone, you know, and frightened; I want advice badly.’

  ‘I’m such a fool.’

  ‘No, Twit, not really.’

  ‘I feel a fool.’

  ‘You know me, you understand me a little?’

  He knew that he understood her not at all, but he said, ‘I think Clive’s all right.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound convincing.’

  She got up and stood by the fireside, her elbow resting on the mantelshelf, fingering her rings. It seemed that she was staring into the lone eye of the star that had risen in its pale tranquillity upon her disturbed horizon.

  ‘It’s difficult,’ she said at last.

  V

  During the first week with Berners’, Twit sold nothing at all. He said that he would do better when he knew the round and the people with whom the firm had dealings, which seemed to be logical. He walked miles in the earnest endeavour to interest people in the plug that he was employed to sell. He became more painfully aware of his gaucherie, of his isolation from his fellows, than before. The class division reared itself up and cut him off from other commercial travellers. Twit did not care how he looked. His ears were decorated with the old dirty dried soap which, day in, day out, he failed to remove. He did not cut his hair unless it inconvenienced him. Yet for all these habits in the democratic age, he did not get far. His fellows wore one hyper-smart suit, and one cut-away hat set at the wrong angle. The more progressive attempted side whiskers, bright tan shoes, and a way with shop girls and barmaids. Jostled in among this throng, Twit was at a loss. At the end of the first week, when the manager of the accounts department handed him his pay envelope and recorded glumly that he had not registered a single commission, he felt sickish. He felt worse when a second week proved equally unproductive. Twit had a very good idea what a third week would bring forth, and he was apprehensive of Jill’s face and her comments. A letter from the manager warned him that, unless he could bring about business, the end of the week would see his dismissal. They considered that he was not fitted for the job. Just what Jill had said. It was the old story of her habitual correctness. He worked desperately that week, leaving no stone unturned, and in the evenings, arriving back late and dog tired, he confided some of his trouble to Dora Hine. He preferred not to go home, in case Jill asked questions. As she was usually dancing with Clive, she did not query Twit’s absence. Fortune favoured him. He liked Dora. He could discuss matters candidly with her.