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

by Ursula Bloom

  ‘I’d rather you kept out of it,’ he said with a bad grace.

  ‘I’m very willing, Twit,’ she said humbly.

  ‘You don’t understand. You will keep butting in on my affairs. She is a prostitute. It can’t be.’

  ‘You mustn’t marry Ethel for a worldly advantage.’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’ He shut his lips firmly, painfully, for in and out of the dream danced Harlequin again. He was remembering Mercedes as she had been last night, with those dark curls and demanding eyes. The warm peach glow of her. Those kisses that inflamed his being. Across the grey room flitted Harlequin. Impish, devilish ghost of Harlequin. He waved his sword and Twit forgot Ethel and dreamt those kisses. He dreamt again the voluptuous caresses of Mercedes, torch to the pyre of his weakness. He wanted to feel his hands bruising the soft pliant flesh of her throat, he wanted to hurt her, choke her, feel her fall back limp in his clutch. He would never feel like that about Ethel. But at any cost Jill must not interfere. He felt that he had been a fool to tell her, seeing that now she would work hard to interrupt the even tenor of their engagement.

  She went back to the side of the fire.

  ‘We both seem to be in the devil of a mess,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The only thing to do is to cling together.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We have each other.’

  Again he assented.

  Then she wept for the lack of comfort in his answers, for her loneliness and her longing for Jock. She ached for the smell of his tweed coat and the feel of his arms. Where with Clive she had longed with an accumulating passion, with Jock it was the simplicities that she coveted. She wept for all those little tendernesses, and for herself who had shattered his ideal and toppled it to lie broken at his feet.

  But Twit did not weep. He only remembered, and the remembering was a sword stabbing into his heart.

  III

  Jock came to see Jill, but she refused to see him. She had thought it over carefully and, mindful of her own weakness, knew that in their arguments she would surrender herself to him. He craved her now with a physical craving, he was covetous for her, and for that reason would forgive. But Jill demanded that he should love with understanding. She had had enough of physical emotions, too transient to last, too unsatisfactory to bring enduring good in their train. She wanted Jock when he returned in a few months’ time, with a wiser vision, having pondered on this thing, having learnt to love her for herself, or put her from him for ever.

  I have suffered so much in life, she wrote him, that I feel I cannot start this new love with you unless I am quite certain that it is my soul that you love, and not only my body. We must rest on this thing. We must ponder it. A little wise waiting now may save us months of misery later. Don’t let us hurry it.

  As she sealed it she thought: ‘He will think that it is because I do not want him, and he is wrong,’ and she wept again.

  On Twit fell the burden of the visit. Before he interviewed Jock, Twit had decided that he would make a gallant stand on behalf of his sister. He would tell his brother-in-law that he had made a mistake, explain how he had been acting for the best and offer this as the excuse for both of them. He would tell Jock that Jill had exaggerated matters, and how he was sure that the sin had only been repeated in her imagination. He would make a brave defence and settle matters. Dreaming of it beforehand, he saw Jill and Jock reunited and starting out on their second honeymoon, thanking Twit with tears in their eyes. He saw himself standing on the doorstep and waving them out of sight with his ‘Bless you, my children.’ He shone as the splendid benefactor of the whole romance, and the dream was altogether delicious.

  Yet when Jock came to see him, Twit sunk into tongue-tied gaucheries. Jock was a man with a grievance, and a man with a grievance is usually unable to see any save his own viewpoint. Until now Jock had never thought much about sin. Women in his own class did not break the conventions, or he thought they did not. It had been a shock to him, and he was still bemused by it. But he was more bewildered by the fact that Jill did not seem to understand how great had been her violation of the social laws. She even dared to believe that her lapse had taught her something. In his present state Jock failed to realise it as anything save a lapse. Either his standards were wrong or Jill’s were. You cannot in a few hours undo the teaching of a lifetime. Out in Ceylon he had had but little chance to learn of the new world, the world that had risen out of the ashes of carnage and despair. Jock had never even psychoanalysed his own needs. Either he had been left behind by the tide, or Jill had been carried too far ahead. The fault was someone’s. He believed it to be Jill’s. But he came to her bearing the olive branch. He would surrender. He would try to forget all about it, though it would be difficult. He still believed that this was a most magnanimous offer.

  Twit was tricked into admitting that he had been entrusted with the mission of confiding the truth in Jock, and he had not done so. Jock flared up. And when Jock flared up, Twit lapsed into doltishness. It wasn’t any use. He was no good in a row. It paralysed him and he could not think.

  Jock was sailing at once for Ceylon. When he discovered the fact that Jill was not prepared to accept his olive branch, he came to the wise conclusion that perhaps the few months’ consideration would not be such a bad thing. Both of them would have time. He would come and see Jill the moment that he returned at the end of February. Then they would arrive at some definite decision.

  Meanwhile, none of Twit’s dreams came true.

  Jock went off imagining that he was a badly-used person, and Jill kneeling by the window watched him through the soft silk curtain. She watched him through the network of the birch tree, through the thin dark twigs, and the few yellow leaves against the pale sky. She watched and she wept herself sick. Because she could not return to him unless he realised the truth. Her driving star would not allow it. At the moment he could see nothing because he was too close to it. Later, he would be able to use objective vision, and to view it rationally. Until then … she gave a little choking cry and clutched at the thin curtain for support.

  Sin! How queer it all was, she thought. Sin could be the greatest teacher, and yet this strange old shibboleth of damnation stuck to it. Under the guise of marriage men and women might be licensed to sin as they would. Edward Shane had bastardised the very name of love, but the world smiled on him because he had been through a ceremony that satisfied them. Clive had taught her sanity, tolerance, love itself, but the world shrieked its horror. Jock was appalled. He could not see it as anything but the most lustful sin. Later … She prayed for the future.

  Twit was feeling outraged. He was furious with Jock for his plain speaking, and indignant with Jill for having made such a fool of herself. The worst part of it all was that Ethel had scented a scandal and had done her best to wheedle it out of him. Ethel felt that Jill was not a nice person and that there was something mysterious behind all this, if not something really wicked. Ethel had announced her engagement to her incredulous friends. Her father had accepted Twit calmly. He was an old man. For some time he had disliked the thought of leaving Ethel to miserable spinsterhood when he died. He was not enthusiastic over her choice, but he was acquiescent and he agreed to the partnership. Arthur Simpson discovered the engagement by accident and greeted Twit with amusement when they met the next morning at the office.

  ‘Well, upon my Sam! I thought the old woman would have you, and she has. If you aren’t the priceless buffoon!’

  ‘You’ve found out?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t congratulate you. I suppose you’ve got to marry her. You are the father, eh?’

  Hurriedly Twit denied the inference.

  ‘Your family seems out to make a pretty good idiot of itself. What’s all this about your sister leaving this new husband of hers?’

  ‘I dunno.’ He was reserved over Jill. He resorted to his old subterfuge of repetition. It was the most effective barrage to further conversation.

&nbs
p; ‘You can’t come the “do bees sting?” over me. It’s all round the town. He’s gone to Ceylon.’

  ‘Yes, he’s gone to Ceylon.’

  ‘Can’t see the bridegroom for dust. Fancy that! Now you and old Ethel.’

  ‘Yes, me and old Ethel.’

  Arthur shot him a glance and drew a bow at a venture. ‘I suppose she knows about Mercedes?’

  Twit stuck to his guns. ‘Yes, I suppose she knows about Mercedes.’

  When he started that you could gain no ground with him. Arthur kicked a desk savagely, and would have gone on baiting Twit had not old Stillmer come into the office and prevented further argument.

  Twit bought Ethel an engagement ring. It took him a half day in Town to decide upon it, an old-fashioned half hoop and, arranged in the quaint heavy setting, a ruby, emerald, garnet, amethyst, ruby and diamond. The whole spelling ‘regard,’ as the second-hand shopkeeper assured Twit. Twit thought it extremely suitable and being a little out of the ordinary might enchant Ethel. He had discovered that Ethel was easily enchanted and that she had a tendency to care for things of this type. She liked butterfly-wing brooches, and in her bedroom there was a collection of Goss china. She would have to be broken of these strange habits, but not yet. He could do nothing at the moment but pray that Jill would not discover it.

  Ethel was delighted with the ring. She thought that it was unique and of course had no idea that it was second-hand. Unfortunately she talked about it and Arthur got to hear of it. He was merciless.

  ‘Excellent idea,’ he said, ‘ “regard” just hits it. You could not have said “dearest,” or “love,” or any of the fruitier things, could you? Not seeing that it is that old woman.’

  ‘She isn’t so old.’

  ‘Well, what is her age, then?’

  And there Twit was floored. He had no idea what Ethel’s age was, and he dare not ask her. He had groped furtively about the question and she seemed reserved on it. She must have been in the teens at the time of the Diamond Jubilee, but the exact teen he had not been able to discover. Ethel’s age did not matter very much, and certainly it was no concern of anybody else’s whatever they might choose to say about it. All the same, Twit felt that as the prospective bridegroom he would like to have known. Once she had referred lightly to the first Jubilee. It seemed that she recollected certain festivities then, donkey rides and sports at Morsegate, and a procession of decorated carts. More than that he had never been able to discover. Try as he would he could not ask her point blank.

  ‘But you mark my words, old boy,’ Arthur warned him darkly, ‘old Ethel was one of the exhibits at the 1851 Exhibition at the Crystal Palace’ ‒ which was not consoling.

  There came the painful moment when Ethel, wearing the ‘regard’ ring on her finger, came to tea with Jill. They met for the first time as future sisters. Ethel had dressed herself up for the occasion. She wore green, which was not becoming. She had also a gay buttonhole comprising more of her pom-pom work in tango and jade. The new sisters met stiffly. It was difficult for Jill to approve of Ethel, and although she went out to meet her with the best will in the world, she was dominatingly conscious of the effort. They sat round the fire having tea, Jill wide-eyed and pale, Ethel with her ridiculous buttonhole, and Twit perhaps the most uncomfortable of the three. Ethel purred about Twit. How clever he was, such excellent manners! What a strong man! What a dear! Of course he had been misunderstood, but all that was going to be put straight soon. She looked across at him with doting eyes. Jill thought to herself wearily, ‘I wonder if she has discovered that he doesn’t wash,’ but she listened to the eulogies politely. It was a great tide that rolled on and on, this tremendous adulation of Twit. Well, let it go on. Ethel would find out in time. She would never care for him with the same maternal, protective care of Jill, and ahead disillusion lay darkly across her path. Somehow Ethel had come between them, Jill felt that lately she and Twit had been growing apart, and in some intangible manner she had supposed that it was Jock who separated them. She believed that Twit was more than half ashamed of this engagement of his, of the ulterior motive that lay behind it. She herself was too sick with her own troubles to fight his battle for him. But he ought not to be allowed to marry Ethel. He ought to be rescued from the mess he was making of his life. She must brace herself up to encounter it, and fight Ethel for him. After all, he had been hers first. He was hers now and she loved him.

  Twit liked the long adulation of Ethel. He had never had it before. It was one of the joyous iridescent dreams materialising. For the moment he saw himself as the radiant, shining hero in bright armour. Adonis, Lancelot, Romeo, Mark Antony. He drank it all in. He felt that under this new influence he would emerge from the chrysalis state of his indifferent youth into the brilliant butterfly of his imagination. He had been starved of admiration, for Jill had had it all. Now he was starting anew. He was Icarus fastening the wings of adventure to his heels. He believed that he had only needed this placing on a pedestal and worshipping at the foot of the pedestal to force him to make the effort. Why, married to Ethel he would become great. He saw now that all along he had been badly handled. He was over sensitised. Jill had crushed him and his soul was pulp. Ethel would raise it from that pulp and with her he would succeed. He would be worthy of her praise. He would make Jill envious even yet.

  But down in his heart doubt squirmed as to what Jill was thinking of all this. Never before had she heard her brother so extolled, and it was a change for her. But Jill was hardly listening. She sat there sipping her tea and thinking of Jock. She wanted him dreadfully. She wanted him all the more because she was uncertain how to set about her rescue of Twit. She wondered dully what would happen in February when he returned to her, and would he help her stop this terrible engagement?

  ‘Lemon in your tea!’ said Ethel, ‘fancy that! I don’t think I’d like that.’

  ‘A lot depends on what you are used to.’

  ‘I daresay. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned. Lemon strikes me as being fast.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Jill, ‘that’s obviously the acid test.’

  Ethel cast her a sidelong look. She wasn’t quite sure about that remark and she did not know whether she liked it. ‘Twit doesn’t have lemon,’ she explained. ‘Twit is old-fashioned too. We shall just suit each other.’

  ‘So it seems.’

  ‘You know, I can’t believe that we are engaged, not even now.’ Ethel was seized with one of her fits of tittering girlishness. ‘It is all too wonderful. Such a romance.’

  ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ asked Jill, and again there was in her tone a hint of cynicism. Poor Twit! This was not the road to happiness, but what could she do about it? Twit caught her eye across the rim of his tea-cup. It was challenging.

  The tea was not a success. It had been doomed from its beginning. As they parted Jill exchanged a peckish kiss with Ethel and gave her some old snaps of Twit that she had cherished from his baby days. It was a real effort on Jill’s part and ill repaid. Twit in the garden at Greenley in smocks. Twit later in his first Etons, his unruly hair brushed flat by Isobel.

  ‘What a funny-looking child he was!’ said Ethel, eyeing the picture of the young gentleman in Etons. ‘I simply can’t bear to look at him.’

  Jill’s mouth set in a tenser line. She had loved him for his pathetic helplessness and had valued the yellowing photographs. She had stored them away in the bureau with her mother’s diary, her own first lesson books, and all the precious belongings that were milestones in her life. She had thought of giving Ethel the precious snail prize won in the bygone days at Whoreham, but now she laid it back again in its place, eternal memorial to the Twit who had been.

  After all she loved him. Why part so readily with all these sacred relics to a woman who did not grasp their value? She closed the drawer resolutely. Ethel and Twit passed out into the evening together. Jill watched them go.

  Something must be done to disentangle Twit from the fiasco he was trying to make of his life. But what? I
t needed delicate handling, and she was too absorbed with her own problem to be diplomatic. For the moment she must remain passive.

  IV

  ‘I do think I ought to know about her husband,’ said Ethel, as they walked home together; ‘there’s been some row. It is no good you trying to deceive me. As I’m marrying into the family I think I ought to be told.’

  Twit was not so sure.

  ‘There ought not to be secrets. Not where families are concerned.’

  ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘You are taking her part, Tristram, and that isn’t fair. You’re on my side now.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I feel I ought to know.’

  Ethel had been aching to know ever since the first delicious scandal had wafted itself across Morsegate. She was beset by an absorbing curiosity. She remarked upon this mystery to Twit several times and he foresaw that there would be no peace until it was settled. He did not know whether it would be wiser to invent a good story or to get Jill to tell her a little. He was not sure that he wanted to carry intrigue and deceit into his married life. He felt that now he would like to start on an entirely new basis if he could. He was jaded by beginnings, yet this would constitute another. Let it be an honest one anyway. This being so, he decided to broach the matter to Jill. He told her that as things stood it made it awkward for him. Ethel ought to know something. She was going to be one of the family and was entitled to some explanation.

  ‘It’s deplorable to think of Ethel being one of us,’ said Jill. ‘But there’s many a slip and I’m hoping.’

  ‘There isn’t going to be a slip here.’

  ‘That’s a tragedy.’

  ‘You want me to be happy, don’t you, Jill?’

  ‘Of course I do, but I don’t think that you can be happy with her. You haven’t been brought up on plush and bulrushes. She has.’

  ‘There’s more in her than you think,’ he averred.

  ‘That’s a joy, because I think there is nothing in her.’

  Twit wished that she would not be so brutal about matters, so uncommonly plain-spoken, and he started again: