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

by Ursula Bloom

  ‘It might help you?’

  ‘I am sure it wouldn’t. It would drive me back to him,’ she said. Because she could imagine Clive laughing about it, and, heretic as she might be, she could laugh in a bitter, ironic derision herself. How could a cold prayer help her when she needed a warm fire?

  Then she felt the lump choking in her throat. She had been so wrong to suppose that he could understand, because he could not, of course he could not. Isobel would not have understood. Twit hadn’t. Why should a stranger grasp it? She knew by Stephen’s attitude that he considered her sin enormous. Yet, in spite of that, she knew that it was not enormous. It was phase. It was character-moulding. If she allowed it, the torrent would drown her better self, but she would not allow it. She would conquer it. She rose and moved to the font.

  ‘I know I’m difficult. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I’m sorry too,’ he said reluctantly.

  In truth he was terribly sorry. He thought to himself that she was such a nice girl to have gone to the bad. It was a pity. He watched her as she went down the asphalt path, the grey, dovelike frock fluttering against the grasses, her head erect. Such an exquisite girl, with a pathetic purity of thought in her eyes, with a bearing that had misled him. He stared after her.

  ‘Who would have thought it?’ he asked himself disappointedly.

  VIII

  On Sunday morning the Cotswolds no longer maintain their unbroken peace, for the bells break in upon the stillness. Feltham with its chimes, Illmington on the prow of the hill, Campden beyond, and down by the river those valley villages with their single bells calling to the responsive echoes. Light chimes and full-throated, resonant notes all clashing together, a glorious gushing of sound to the hills.

  All the morning Jill lay in the cottage room listening to the bells. Then when the hush came (for the hour of Matins had proclaimed itself) she got up. She had meant to go to church, but last night church had been disillusioning. The morning had decided her against it. Faith had been born within her, but not the faith that asked a code to steady it. She was half afraid of meeting Stephen again. It had not been what he had said. In truth, he had said little, too little for comfort. It had been the look in his eyes, the sudden realisation of shattered faith in her. She fell back into herself.

  She was searching in the recesses of her mind for comfort, and finding a certain budding faith, but not the orthodox faith of Stephen. It was a little faith struggling to climb to maturity, struggling to establish itself, a thin thready flame asking to break into a great fire.

  The porter’s grandmother, who was burnt up with curiosity, had done her best to provide distraction. She had bought a paper from the boy who came at midday on his bicycle. She had also cooked a chicken for dinner, and a queen pudding. But none of these attractions seemed to cheer the lone heart of Jill. The porter’s grandmother confided in her neighbour that she believed ‘her and th’ passon had had a row.’

  That afternoon there was an accident. A car came into the village. It was only on rare occasions that cars came, for the road merely led to Feltham, which was hardly a metropolis. Few people wanted to go to Feltham. Their business was usually at Ilmington, which stood bluely green on the hill, its poplars spearing the sky. There were three largish shops and several ‘publics’ at Ilmington, whereas Feltham had merely village inhabitants and an isolated Rectory and Mrs. Lucrece Dane. On this occasion Mrs. Lucrece Dane was entertaining. Mrs. Lucrece Dane was the grand Lady of the Manor, though she had erstwhile been cook in the same establishment before she had satisfactorily married the master. Her original name, Lucy, had been changed to the more aristocratic Lucrece. All her invitations were sent out as Mrs. Lucrece Dane, her husband having the unfortunate Christian name of Esau. She was giving a party, and had beguiled the Woods from Ilmington, promising that the Cliffes from Long Marston would be there, the Cliffes from Long Marston having been enticed by the notice that the Woods of Ilmington were attending. Coming quickly round the bend, the Woods’s car burst in suddenly upon the village street. A group of children playing in the centre of the road sprang up and scattered with the foolishness of fowls. There was a rasp and a grinding of brakes, a shrill voice, and little Susie Jenkins lay in the dust of the roadside. She was perhaps two years old. She lay there limply, with a white muslin pinafore fluttering upon a red serge frock, a pitiful, inert bundle. Jill and Mrs. Jenkins, who lived next door to the porter’s grandmother, were the first on the scene.

  It seemed to Jill that she had never met people more helpless than these poor folk. Their knowledge of medicine was the crudest, limited to castor oil and eucalyptus. It was Jill who stooped down into the dust of the road and gathered the child into her arms, trying not to sicken at the sight of a ghastly head wound. It was Jill who carried Susie into the Jenkins’s cottage and upstairs to the scrupulous bedroom.

  ‘Oh, my lamb,’ wailed the mother.

  ‘You must get a doctor,’ said Jill peremptorily.

  ‘The nearest one’s at Shipston.’

  ‘Then let them fetch him in their car.’

  ‘My lamb ‒’

  ‘Don’t!’ said Jill sharply. ‘If you want to save her life, be quick.’ She saw the gaping wound, red-stained and oozing in a thin reddy stream to the pillow, and she shuddered. ‘Bring me water ‒ lots of it.’

  She felt that she was doing something for somebody, something that mattered, and ghastly as it was it helped. The hysterical mother rushed down to the car again, and the neighbours crammed into the front garden to look up questioningly at the windows. Upstairs in the tiny room, with its ornaments and its cheap furniture, and the poor limp little figure in the lumpy bed, Jill did her best to staunch the bleeding. She heard the car spin away for the doctor. She shut out the too bright sunshine, for it painted the room garishly yellow; it was garish in its bold defiance of death. The mother was useless and she abandoned herself to hysterics. It was the porter’s grandmother who helped most, bringing warm water in a bowl, and linen rags. In the crisis Jill found something rather noble about the old woman whom she had hitherto adjudged to be stupid. Jill cleaned the wound systematically. It nauseated and yet fascinated her, this battle with death. She supposed that if she had been a religious person she would have prayed. But prayer had never been any part of her. She had never met death face to face before. Isobel had died in a nursing home, Edward Shane in France. Each time she had felt convinced that death was the end, the snuffing out of a candle, extinction, the grim finis to the poor little tragedy of life. Now, fighting it, she was not so sure. She saw it rather as a great beginning, opening a door to wider understanding. She believed it to be a necessary change, a promotion, but she was certain that it was not the end. She wondered if the little thing would live. Not an eyelid flickered. The disc of a face was tallow, the throat veined with a light tracery as of blue trees, the nose pinched. Jill believed that the bleeding was abating; gently she fixed a cold linen compress. As she did so she was conscious of a creaking on the stairs, of the door opening behind her and admitting someone. There was the voice of the porter’s grandmother.

  ‘Mr. Dare has come to say a prayer.’ Then the old woman wheezing down the stairs to the weeping mother, and silence.

  Jill fixed the compress and turned. Stephen was watching her. He was thinking, ‘What a girl! What a wife for any clergyman! If only she’d kept straight! If only she’d made it possible!’ He came closer, more attracted than ever, but believing the attraction to be in some way part of the sin of such a woman.

  ‘This is awful,’ he said.

  ‘Ghastly.’

  ‘The car must have been going much too fast.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He dropped to his knees beside the bed and gazed at the inert child lying there. ‘Will she live?’ he asked.

  ‘If the skull is fractured, I don’t suppose she will. It looks like a fracture.’

  ‘How clever you are! You ought to have been a nurse,’ he said before he could stay himself.


  ‘I am just interested in medicine, that’s all.’

  The silence made itself felt. It was like a gaol wall between them. Memories of that last night stabbed through him. He was now uncertain that confession was such a good thing. He felt that if only he had not known, he might … yet that would have been too dreadful. Supposing that he had actually married her and discovered the sin after? His mind went roaming ahead in a disturbingly jerky wandering. He told himself that of course she would lapse again ‒ bad women always did.

  ‘I hope the doctor won’t be long,’ he said with an effort.

  ‘I told the people to fetch the Shipston man.’

  The child gave a little movement, the first sign of life that she had shown. The mother, who had come up and was sitting in a three-legged wicker chair and weeping noisily, came closer to the bed. In the centre of its whiteness lay the child, like a small and desolate island. The face, which had until now been the colour of tallow, changed to a bluish shade. The eyes, half opening, showed slots of the white palely reddened by blood, and quivered. They flickered in an ugly fashion. The mouth turned black, and along the baby lips lay a light line of froth. The whole body was convulsed in a hideous fit. It seemed that it was caught in the torturing clutch of some foul inquisitor, racked on an invisible rack, writhing and twisting from lovely robust babyhood into a spectacle of revolting horror. The mother screamed. Jill, sickly afraid, turned and clung to Stephen. She hid her face in his shoulder. The baby was dying, and she knew that she did not want to see it die. She thought that people behaved like that when they were electrocuted: stiffened, twitched, danced a last ghastly dance of life that was mere mockery. Her hands clutched at Stephen’s as she turned her face away.

  As one far away she heard him praying. Then she heard the mother’s screams.

  ‘Oh, my baby … my own beautiful little baby … she’s dead, my lamb, she’s dead …’

  There was the noise of her steps as she ran to the stair-head, the lurching, rheumaticky tread of the porter’s grandmother hastening to receive her, the exclamations of neighbours. Jill was alone in the room with Stephen and a dead baby. Whilst the baby lived she had not been afraid of it, yet now, from reaction, she was dreadfully afraid. She hid her face. She was conscious of his voice, impelling through the mists of her own fear:

  ‘Please let go my hand.’

  It was a cold, calm, calculating voice, piercing in upon her quivering senses.

  ‘I’m frightened!’ she whimpered.

  He thought, ‘That’s how she got round that other fellow; she can’t be frightened really. She was quite all right a few moments ago. It’s all put on.’ Aloud he said again, ‘Let go my hand.’

  She raised her eyes, keeping them averted from the huddle in the bed. ‘Please, do help me?’

  ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

  ‘The poor baby.’ Her voice was choked with tears and her lips quivered from weakness. ‘Stephen, do be nice to me.’

  He was supremely shocked.

  ‘At such a time,’ he reproved her, ‘surely you ought not to behave like this? Remembering all you told me …’

  ‘I see,’ said Jill.

  She made a brave effort and walked out of the room with her knees sagging. Stephen, left alone in the little bedroom, thought of the woman who tempted man, and that he had been wise and understanding.

  He understood very little really.

  (II) TWIT

  CHAPTER I

  ‘Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.’ ‒ Emerson.

  ATMOSPHERE.

  I

  In nineteen twenty-five Twit met Ethel Stillmer. There had been a passage of years between then and nineteen twenty-one, and perhaps he and his sister had grown a little apart. Certainly he did not understand her any more, and she understood him less than ever. He had attempted different means of livelihood and had failed in most of them. Finally, Jill had settled his fortunes.

  It was a new Jill, a Jill who steered her course by a star. She looked neither to right nor to left, but she went her own way and abided by her own standards. She found help within herself. She had urged that it was necessary that Twit should train for something and start at the beginning. There had been so many beginnings in his life that Twit was loath to have any more, but Jill drove him on. He was a fluid that she poured into a mould. Ruthlessly she demanded his likes and dislikes, determined to make him do what he could. He wanted to tell her of his dreams, those radiant, iridescent bubbles, but somehow, when it came to words, he could not find them. He groped helplessly with self-expression and was entirely unable to cope with it.

  He still believed that perhaps some long-forgotten relative would one day leave him a fortune. It mattered not in the least that there were no long-forgotten relatives in his family. Aunt Blanche had died and had left seventy pounds, a Sealyham, and a small villa full of Victorian furniture. Uncle Henry had married an amazing woman and had two fat children, who were undoubtedly his heirs, if he had anything to leave, which was extremely doubtful. All the members of the Grimshaw family were nicely ticketed and docketed, and such a dream could not possibly materialise. The old myth of the uncle in Australia tickled Twit’s fancy, and he allowed it to be tickled. The uncle had always distinctly appealed to his lively imagination. But somehow he dared not bring up this Aladdin-like apparition before Jill.

  Jill enumerated the careers into which she could afford to put him, and they decided in favour of architecture. He had inclinations towards dentistry, but Jill could not afford the money for that. Twit left it to her to make the enquiries as to the best way of setting about architecture, for he had but little interest. Twit was martyrish. He supposed that she could not be expected to view matters from his angle, nor to admit that he had an angle. He wished now that he had never returned from India. He would have stayed where he was as a Bombardier. Or he thought covetously of springs in Malta, with the clover fields redly in bloom. There would have been evenings in Strada Forni with Stebonia and Rosie. He wished now that he had stayed there, that he had turned with the great war tide, a shifting sand upon the beach of circumstance. Twit would have sunk socially without a qualm, save that Jill acted as a lifebuoy in the sea of his irresolution.

  She persistently held him up. She would not let him go. Jill looked upon Twit as a son, and as that son she mothered and protected him, and wore herself out in the effort to make a man of him.

  She decided upon architecture, and Twit agreed. Jill paid a sum down to Mr. Josiah Stillmer, a widower, who lived in Dornington, which was the next town to Morsegate. She also paid for Twit to attend classes in London. And having drawn on her resources she found that her bank balance was alarmingly low. Jill suddenly realised that she would have to retrench, and that was when she moved into the cottage.

  ‘You’ll be happier there,’ said Twit. He felt guilty about it and hoped to shuffle out of the blame by ignoring it.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘One maid is easier to manage than three.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said again, and watched him furtively.

  ‘Anyway, when I’m earning, I’ll pay you back.’

  ‘I don’t want it, Twit. I promised Mother I’d see after you. I am seeing after you. It will be something to see you on your feet, won’t it?’

  ‘It will take five years.’

  ‘Time goes quickly.’

  ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘you’ll marry again?’

  She turned on him redly. ‘I promise. Twit, that if I do, one of the conditions will be that you have a home with me. You shall never be homeless.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Can’t you say something more than that?’

  It was that phlegmatic indifference of his that stung her. If only one could solicit some sympathy from him!

  ‘Well, dash it all,’ he said awkwardly, ‘it’s all in the future.’

  ‘Yes, but I mean it.’

  ‘Of course I shall never leave you,’ Twit p
romised bravely. Leave her? Of course not. A man did not desert a sister who had done so much for him, even though he realised deep down within himself that she clogged his efforts.

  ‘You might marry?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You might.’

  Somehow after that Twit found the marriage idea circling in his head. It formed into the most glorious multicoloured bubble of a dream. Supposing he married somebody very rich? What a surprise that would be to all the world! He could imagine people saying ‘Have you heard about Twit Grimshaw? He’s engaged to the heiress. It really is amazing; some people have all the luck.’ He preened himself in anticipation. He was a dreamer, while Jill was a doer, that was the stark difference between them.

  In the cottage there started a new Grimshaw epoch. All their career had been episodic. Greenley, St. Laurence’s, India, Morsegate. Now there was to be the episode of the cottage. It stood outside Morsegate in a cheap country lane. It was sun-splashed, with sunflowers and hollyhocks in the garden. There was one large living-room, a place of blue china and gleaming brass against cream walls; of soft Persian rugs on oak floors. Upstairs there were four small bedrooms. Into one of the windows there peeped the blue and green and silver of a birch tree. The birch tree rose from a smooth trunk, with two thick sockets like eyes in it. In summer the tender leaves brushed the window like feathers. In winter the stark branches clipped together like castanets. The light which filtered through the leaves was like rivers of amber and jade. Jill loved the blue and the green and the tender stippling of the tree that blew against her window. It was to her the dearest thing about the cottage.

  There was Hilda, the one maid-of-all-work. In the new ménage Jill worked hard. She lived hard too. Jill, overcoming her first post-war impulse, read widely and studied deeply and made an effort to shape her course to her star. She was lucky in the knowledge that Clive had gone away. They did not meet again until the friendship was dead as a November leaf flung between the sun and wind of March. The Clive episode worried Twit, and, although he never mentioned it to Jill, it lay heavily upon his heart. He was always hoping that some man would step into Jill’s life and make amends for the fiasco. But Jill was wary of men. Those who proposed to her were unprepared to accept Twit as part of the bargain, or, if they were prepared, Jill did not care for them. Her brother watched her through the various phases of her affairs. He was ashamed that perhaps he stood between her and her ultimate happiness. Yet he realised that if he removed himself then she would be dismally lonely. That could not be.