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

by Ursula Bloom

  They went on to Bournemouth.

  It was late when they got there, and a grey evening was creeping up from the sea and hiding the world in its grape-bloom. She was tired. Dinner was served in the small sitting-room that opened out of the bedroom of their suite. It was a square room, rose-du-Barri and grey, a room, fashioned after the French of some spurious period, that did not ring true and jarred upon her senses. All her life Jill had had a detestation of pink. It was discordant. She hated it.

  It was a small room, and should have been a pleasant room, with the leaping fire and the silver bowls of pale topaz-hued chrysanthemums and feathery fern. She changed into a white lace frock and she fastened a single camellia on the shoulder. A camellia with pearls close to its white loveliness. As she fastened it, her hands trembled, her eyes became suddenly moist. She had a horrid thrusting memory of the orchid, of Eden. Of Adam and Eve, and the serpent twisting itself between them. She tasted the acrid, choking taste of dust. No dream for a wedding night, this!

  There should be so much joy about a marriage night. There should be so much gladness. Angrily she dismissed the sinister thoughts that had come in upon her.

  She peeped into the sitting-room, through the chink of the open door. Jock sat before the fire. He was very big, this new and precious husband of hers, and very beautiful. She went across to him. Somehow in the imminence of his love Jill felt humbled. She experienced the strange need of the confessional that so many women have felt disastrously before her. The feminine desire to prostrate itself before the beloved and allow him to trample on its fragile body. For to the woman to love is to suffer. She delights in the exquisite refinement of pain. Nature has decreed that love shall bring her the torture of labour. It has equally ordered that to be wholly satisfying her love shall cede her a mental torture too.

  She believed now that she had deprived herself of a vividly realistic joy in allowing Twit to tell Jock of Clive. She ought to have told him herself. At this moment Clive possessed her. He was the phantom mocking at her heels, urging her on, a devil whipping her spirit forward. How good Jock was to have forgiven her, but how delicious it would have been to have heard him utter that forgiveness! She came to him and knelt at his feet, steadying herself against his knees.

  ‘Darling Jock.’

  ‘You sweet kid. I am so grateful to you for marrying me.’

  ‘I’m grateful to you.’

  He stroked her hair. ‘It is like silk,’ he told her, ‘and you are like an angel. I’m almost afraid to touch you.’

  ‘I’m not an angel,’ she said.

  ‘You are my angel. My own sweet, bright angel.’

  They kissed again, long, sucking, blissful kisses, with the firelight leaping up and down derisively and laughing at their shadows portrayed exaggeratedly on the rose-du-Barri wall. She clung closer.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ she admitted, ‘you ought to know how far from being an angel I am. There was Clive.’

  ‘That is done with. He behaved vilely.’

  She put her mouth to his ear, and she could feel the exquisite roughness of his cheek against her own softness. Sweet male roughness! She clung closer still.

  ‘I behaved vilely too. No man can sin like that without the woman’s willingness. You should not blame him too much.’ Her hands necklaced about his throat felt the stiffening and she drew back affrighted at the unexpected tension.

  ‘You were engaged?’ he demanded.

  She nodded, bright-eyed. ‘Yes, engaged,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Twit told you.’

  He was bewildered. A sinister doubt germinated in his heart, writhed and twisted within him torturingly. ‘Twit told me nothing,’ he said.

  ‘But he told you this had happened?’

  ‘He told me you were engaged.’

  Before she could stop herself she heard the little gasp of a moan tear itself from her throat. She had been right. She ought never to have trusted him, you couldn’t trust him.

  She began again and she could feel her eyes grown larger with wonder, and could hear the quaver in her voice. ‘I told him to tell you, because I couldn’t marry you unless you knew.’

  ‘I knew nothing.’

  ‘I’m telling you now,’ she said, and all the while the fire leapt and laughed and derided her against that flaunting pink wall.

  His eyes, staring into hers, were disillusioned. He said despairingly, as though praying for escape, ‘Jill, darling little Jilly, just once the brute managed to overcome you?’

  But Jill truthfully answered, ‘No, more than once. And I didn’t try to stop him.’

  Such a happening had never appeared possible to Jock. It happened to women, that sort of women, but not to the kind whom he met. He could see no excuse. He could only see the lovely woman whom he worshipped, as something toppled from her pedestal, besmirched, soiled. Sin was sin. It had no lights and shades. You could not qualify it. If you did, he held it in the light of excuse, and excuse could not be good. He looked into her eyes and realised suddenly that in some things they were in a different sphere. She was older than he was, his struggling, endeavouring mentality could not grasp the arguments of her soul. Man-like he was bruised by the knowledge. He stared at her bewildered.

  She felt the hands on her shoulders grow limp, saw the look on his face as though he could not believe the evidence that she laid before him.

  ‘But,’ he said, ‘I don’t understand. Happening the once I could understand, but like that … You had no moral strength. You let it go on.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Jill, I can’t believe it of you.’

  There was something pitifully simple about his disillusion. It struck her even more forcefully in its childish helplessness.

  ‘I’m telling you because it would be wrong of me if I didn’t,’ she said. ‘Jock, dear, I needn’t have told you.’

  But he could only adopt the masculine viewpoint. ‘You did not tell me until after we were married,’ he insisted.

  ‘That isn’t true. Twit should have told you. He must have lied.’

  ‘So it seems.’ He did not mean a sneer to have crept into his voice, but he could only see it from one angle, his angle. ‘It was a convenient lie. It sheltered you, didn’t it?’

  A vague yet persistent memory of Stephen thrust itself in upon her. He had looked like this. He also had misunderstood. Was it that man, ‘made in the likeness of God,’ was so incapable of tolerance?

  ‘I’m telling you the truth,’ she begged, and tried to stay the quaver in her voice.

  ‘It’s a terrible truth.’

  ‘It would have been easy for me to have told you nothing.’

  ‘It would have been kinder.’ The reproach stabbed her. He would prefer to have been deceived. That hurt her most of all.

  ‘Can’t you see that I could so easily have pretended that it was only once and that I was not responsible?’

  ‘I don’t know that I should have believed you.’

  She drew back from him. As she moved, the camellia, insecurely pinned, fell to the ground. In her anguish she did not see it, and knelt upon its frail beauty, crushing it. ‘It would have been so easy to deceive you,’ she urged.

  ‘You did deceive me.’

  ‘Twit did. I didn’t. You do believe me?’

  But he could not recover from the shock. It was so unexpected. The idea that she was old in carnal knowledge nauseated him. The once he could forgive; after all, that might have been an accident, but again … and to admit it! Man seldom sees the woman’s point, her love for him who has possessed her, her scruples once surmounted making her future acquiescence certain. Clive’s arguments having once prevailed were certain to do so again, seeing that the feminine for ever worships her master. Man himself seeks new quarry. It is woman who clings to the hunter. Where he is polygamous, she is monogamous, because Nature, instinctively protecting the future race, has willed it so. Jock could only see from the man’s standpoint. He was shocked. He was bitterly hurt.

  ‘I coul
d believe the Jill I knew,’ he said, ‘but you have been living with this man. Let’s get the thing right.’

  She made a wretched little nod of assent.

  ‘Dearest, you must listen. I was mad. I don’t know what made me do it, only that I was swept along. The awful part is that though at first I felt terrible about it, now I cannot feel terrible, any longer. It taught me so much. It taught me to understand. If there had been no Clive, there would not have been you. I was afraid of men; Edward had given me such a wrong idea, my upbringing was dulled by convention. Our generation has been so spoilt by shibboleth, so shackled.’

  ‘Oh, I dunno,’ he said. He respected shibboleth. He believed in fetish. He did not know that he had ever troubled to peer beneath the surface, because he had never had cause to do so.

  ‘Clive changed all that in me.’ The pink and grey of the room was garish background to the drama played in it. A cheap clock chimed on the shelf, and she went on. ‘You must not misunderstand. Although I did this dreadful thing, it taught me more than anything else in my life. It gave me you.’

  ‘But it was sin,’ he said dully. ‘If you could only see it properly, as sin, and not believe that it was a lesson!’

  ‘But it taught me,’ she persisted.

  ‘While you talk like that, it … it just shows …’ He made a little despairing gesture with his hands. Jill saw the star above her. It had been the greatest lesson in her life and she could not deny it. How could she deny truth and remain steadfast

  ‘I have to be true to myself,’ she said quietly, ‘to my ideals, to my soul.’

  ‘If you call that being true,’ he said wretchedly, ‘what is false? I suppose you are still half in love with this chap?’

  She thought of the day when they had parted, the limp mutilated mill crucified against the red sunset, and she shook her head. ‘Oh, no, my dear,’ she said, ‘not that.’

  It seemed to him that she was far away, something that he could not understand. He could not penetrate the mists that surrounded her, and see Jill, his Jill.

  ‘I want to think this over,’ he said.

  ‘But we’re married?’

  He nodded. ‘We have been through a ceremony,’ he agreed.

  She felt the colour ebbing from her lips, and a little pulse hammering in her brain. She got up and saw the camellia lying there, bruised, shapeless, its sweet sap crushed into the grey carpet. The mill had reminded her of herself that day; the camellia reminded her of herself now.

  ‘My dear,’ she said, ‘in this perhaps I am older, perhaps I am the one to do the thinking. I shan’t stay with you, Jock, because I should only influence you wrongly. I’m going home in the morning. I’m going somewhere else now.’

  She knew that the time was not ripe for their union. Jock had lumbered through life and had learnt none of the great lessons of love. He knew nothing of the pangs and the pain, of the sweet rare air of the heights, of the dragging humidity of the depths. He had only dabbled in the shallows of love’s seas. He needed to remould his theories, to find himself. This day in the little church there had been no wedding really. It had all been too simple. She thought bitterly, life does not let you off as easily as that, it demands toll, the highest toll of all. They were two flowers unfolding to each other, and she, with the keener woman’s perception, saw them as that and knew that as yet the time was not ripe.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said, and caught at her wrist. The physical desire for her fused his being. He could not let her go like that. Better to gloss over the lapse and forgive, if only to clasp her loveliness to him. ‘I’ll forget,’ he said passionately, ‘we’ll let it all go. Never speak of it again …’

  She shook her head. ‘No, Jock. I’m seeing things as they really are. We have got to find ourselves. You have got to find your soul. Because you want me like … like he wanted me is not enough.’

  ‘Darling, you’re mad.’

  ‘I’m wise,’ she said, and tenderly unlocked his fingers. She went back into the bedroom and crammed her things into her bag with the door locked between them. That was how she slept that night. Next morning when Jock had gone to his bath, she slipped quietly downstairs and took the first train for home.

  II

  She told Twit. She lay quivering and anguished on the slender bed. She wept with self-pity and every little while she demanded with painful reiteration:

  ‘Why didn’t you tell him, Twit, why didn’t you tell him?’

  He did not reply, because in point of fact he did not know why. He tried to insist that he had told Jock and that Jock must have misunderstood him, but after that he took refuge in a stony silence, cursing Jock for a fool. Jill cried herself out, and slept, and when she had recovered a little she came downstairs and sat by the fireside with him. He was all that she had. She felt the need for him, the clinging and the yearning. She must not be too harsh with him, for he had done his best. She tried to rein herself in.

  Before she came down she had seen Hilda, and Hilda, who felt that the injustice she had suffered by sleeping alone in the house was the most colossal one in the world, blurted out the happenings of the night. All sorts of things might have taken place, Hilda averred. She might have been murdered in her bed, or burgled, or worse, she added darkly. Jill was not feeling diplomatic, and she confronted Twit at once. She faced him haggard and worn.

  ‘Where have you been all night?’

  ‘I had a motor-bicycle accident.’

  ‘My dear,’ she was suddenly stirred out of her dismal lethargy, ‘you’re not hurt?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re telling me the truth?’ she demanded, because somehow she doubted him, she did not know why.

  He wished that she would not look at him like that. Her gaze seemed to penetrate into him, read down into his soul, and he felt guilty. He said, ‘Of course not,’ but she took no nay. Her misery seemed to have sharpened her perception.

  ‘You’ve been with that woman?’ she demanded.

  He felt that if he told her the truth, saying, ‘No, but I’ve been with another one,’ that would be letting them all in for a good deal more than they would care about. He was sincerely sorry about Jock, but he considered that Jill had behaved like a fool. She should have let the whole thing slide. This was what people got for honesty, ever a most exacting and fickle mistress. He did not feel that he was to blame, though Jill had frequently averred that he was. He had acted entirely for the best, so he supposed. It would have been for the best if Jill had only left it alone. It was her ridiculous feminism that had gone delving into the past. He believed that the whole thing would blow over. Jock would come to his senses, and Jill would melt towards him and drop the high ideal attitude. He felt that there had been far too many ideals in Jill’s life, and what had they done for her? Nothing much, anyway.

  ‘I certainly have seen Ethel,’ he said, ‘for she gave me breakfast.’

  ‘But where were you all night?’

  ‘On the road.’

  ‘That isn’t true.’

  He turned on her. Perhaps Harlequin’s sword flashed again, giving him an instant’s brittle courage. ‘I spent the night with a girl in Dornington. She let me down with a bad bump,’ he said, and added, ‘I proposed to Ethel.’

  ‘Of course she accepted you?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said bitterly.

  Now she knew. Now the cat was out of the bag all right, but she could do nothing because it was too late. He did not know why he had burst out with it, save that she had seemed to tear it out of his soul.

  ‘I’ll get you out of it,’ she said.

  ‘You’ll do nothing of the sort. I don’t want to be got out of it. I like Ethel. I’m to have a partnership in the business. The old man will die soon and I shall get everything.’

  It seemed to her that the world had suddenly become volcanic. The ground was riven under her feet. First Jock, now Twit. She was weak for want of sleep, for the long night had been insufferable. She felt as though all her sens
es were fuddled, and she was groping in the darkness of her tempest-torn soul to lay hold of them. She made a last effort to clear away the enveloping cloak of her bewilderment.

  ‘But you can’t be such a cad as to marry for things like that?’

  ‘It isn’t caddish.’

  She went to him, smothering her own tragedy in what she believed to be the even greater tragedy of Twit. If only her head did not feel so heavy, if only her eyes did not ache with unshed tears! If only the bright star had not hidden its one eye in the darkness of her night! ‘You have made a frightful mistake,’ she said, ‘but I’ll stand by you. I’ll help you, you know.’

  ‘I don’t want help.’

  ‘Twit, what was the ‒ the other one like?’

  Somehow she felt drawn to the other one. She felt that there was something human about the other one, something youthful, natural, perhaps rather lovely.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about her.’

  ‘Supposing I went to see her, do you think that I could possibly persuade her?’

  ‘She isn’t my sort.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what sort she is as long as she’d make you happy.’