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

by Ursula Bloom

  ‘It makes it most awkward for me, Jill, and I think it is your duty.’

  Duty had always appealed to Jill. It had been for ever the insistent urge rising within her. She turned it over in her own mind and she decided that if Twit felt like that she ought to do something about it. She did not see why she should launch herself into the confessional with Ethel as priestess, but she did believe that if Twit felt it necessary she ought to tell her future sister-in-law enough to satisfy her stupid curiosity. It wasn’t fair to keep back everything.

  She communed with herself for some time before she eventually decided. She lay in her room, watching the pink wintry dawn through the black tangle of the birch tree. It was like flesh under black lace. From the garden the birch tree seemed like a Spanish girl in a mantilla, but here through her window it was black lace drawn across the nude bosom of sky. She would read Jock’s weekly letter from Ceylon, trying to discover between the lines what his inner feelings might be. She would stare out at the tree and dream of when the buds were beginning to swell, when the first bright froth of green would tip its darknesses and her husband would return to her. Would he understand her better? Or would he still be pre-war, creature of shibboleth and convention?

  And Ethel? She thought of Ethel too. She was sure that Twit would not marry her, because something would happen to stop it. Something must happen. Gradually she would wean him from this old harridan of a love of his. But at the moment Ethel was entitled to some explanation. It was only fair to Twit.

  Jill stared out at the black lace fancifully veiling the elusive flesh. Perhaps in her life she had been too assertive, too tyrannical, too leading. Perhaps if she had given way more she would have got further. She told Twit that she would tell Ethel, and she abided by her promise.

  So Jill told Ethel one day when she had tea with the Stillmers. It was a November day, arrayed in wet fog outside, and drearier still in the hermetically sealed dining-room. The dinner-cloth was laid and the massive best silver and the sardines flanked by the meat paste. ‘There’s one thing about her tea,’ thought Jill, ‘there’s lots of it. Old Twit won’t starve.’ Ethel presided over the teapot in prim and proper fashion, executing her duties as though they were arduous and in no way pleasant. She was ill at ease with Jill because she knew that their teas were dissimilar. Jill had petits fours, and Ethel had conceived the idea that petits fours were flashy and dashing. She had homely digestive biscuits, and she rather thought that the kinds of biscuit aptly described the difference between herself and Jill. She resented it. Old Stillmer had got lumbago again, which was convenient. Twit had excused himself to give Jill the chance. Jill, faced with the china lion, the bulrushes and the equestrian gentlemen, launched herself into the campaign.

  V

  ‘Twit thought I ought to tell you,’ she said, ‘about Jock.’

  Ethel settled herself behind the massive silver teapot and the Britannia metal kettle, which she always hoped looked like real silver but which never did. This was going to be good hearing. She was prepared to be shocked, but she liked being shocked. It was always a thrilling experience.

  ‘Jock has gone to Ceylon,’ Jill said; ‘when he comes back in February we are going to see how we both feel.’

  ‘How you feel?’ echoed Ethel; ‘but you are married?’

  ‘Marriage does not interrupt feeling.’

  ‘I don’t believe in divorce,’ declared Ethel firmly. ‘I think it is wicked. A woman ought to forgive. You ought to forgive your husband.’

  It was Jill who was shocked that Ethel should have supposed that she had anything to forgive Jock. Jock who was so big-minded, and who would never have done anything of the sort. Jock who was, as he would have expressed it, ‘in the first honourable team.’

  ‘It is Jock who has to forgive me,’ she said gently. ‘I made rather a fool of myself before I married him.’ Loyalty forbade her dragging Twit into the miserable business. ‘I thought he knew. He didn’t.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Ethel, and wondered just what sort of a fool she had made of herself. She could hardly demand details, and already her fertile mind was racing back through what she knew of Jill’s past. She was trying to incriminate some man. She could think of no one. Surely it couldn’t be Arthur Simpson? He was the only man with whom she could recollect Jill having an acquaintance ‒ he and her father. It couldn’t be her father either.

  ‘But you are married now,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, in a ceremony.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A mere convention.’

  ‘But …’ Ethel struggled for words. She felt her throat going dry and her eyes stinging. ‘You went away for a honeymoon?’

  ‘One night.’

  Ethel haughtily surveyed the Britannia metal kettle. It was, she felt, a most passionate conversation. There were questions that she was thirsting to ask, but decency forbade. And as she could not ask and thus assuage her curiosity, she told herself that it was a very disgusting conversation and Jill had no right to thrust it on her. She said solemnly, ‘I think if I had been away for a night with a man, I should feel married to him.’

  ‘It is quite certain that if you went away for the night with a man, you would be married to him,’ said Jill drily.

  ‘You stayed together?’

  Jill grew a little impatient. ‘Of course we stayed together. We had a suite. I slept in my room and Jock on the sitting-room sofa.’

  ‘Oh, you had a sitting-room?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Ethel thought how exciting it must be to have a sitting-room in an hotel. It sounded so grand. It was the sort of thing that the nobility did in books, and Ethel envied them. Yet there was something a little lascivious about private suites, she thought. Something she associated with seducers and champagne and nude ladies. Also she was not sure that she would care for it herself. You missed all the fun of going down to the public rooms for meals and seeing other people and being seen in return. It might be select but it wasn’t so entertaining as being merely vulgar. She turned it over in her mind.

  ‘I think it is all very shocking,’ she said at last.

  ‘I rather thought you’d think that.’

  ‘People oughtn’t to talk about such things,’ said Ethel reprovingly.

  ‘Twit asked me to tell you.’

  ‘I’m sure Tristram would not ask anything so shocking.’

  ‘Well, he did.’

  ‘Tristram ‒’

  Jill interrupted abruptly. ‘Don’t keep calling him Tristram. He has always been Twit. He always will be Twit. He asked me to tell you.’

  ‘You’ve forced a most unpleasant conversation on me. I don’t know what my father will think.’

  Jill stared at her aghast.

  ‘But you could not repeat to anybody else a confidence like that? Surely your sense of honour ‒?’

  She got up and stared at Ethel as though she could not understand. Ethel was looking primly before her, an affronted virgin whose youthful innocence had been defiled.

  ‘You see, you knew you had no business to talk about it to me,’ she said. ‘I’m unmarried. I don’t know about such things. I haven’t lived your sort of life.’

  ‘You’ve lived a good deal longer than I have,’ flared Jill, which was unfortunately true.

  She felt a wild longing to hit Ethel. For a moment little Great-Granny waged war with the new Jill. ‘She hasn’t the intelligence of a fly, but a good shaking would teach her,’ urged the wraith of Great-Granny. It was with difficulty that the new Jill won. She gathered her things together and went to the door, leaving the outraged Ethel staring at the teapot.

  ‘I’ll let myself out,’ said Jill quietly.

  VI

  Ethel besought Twit to listen to the story as recounted by herself later.

  ‘You don’t know what things she said, and what she mentioned,’ said Ethel.

  ‘Jill’s terribly upset over Jock.’

  ‘But then to say that you asked her to tell me. You never did th
at, did you, Tristram?’

  For a moment his loyalty wavered. He remembered Jill demurring and how she had unwillingly been persuaded for his sake to appease Ethel’s curiosity. He seemed to see Jill again, flitting through the Greenley buttercups, a white and gold little person. Jill toiling at the Hippodrome, desperately attempting to prove the money before the second house. Jill standing at the doorway of the cheap villa in St. Laurence’s to wave him away to the war. His whole soul went out to her in that moment. He felt the cleaving, the strong call of blood against the weaker call of water. Yet as he thought he realised that to admit instructing Jill was to lose Ethel. Just when the partnership was being settled up, too; just when he was about to free himself. It seemed a pity.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Father says she cannot come here again. He was horrified.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Tristram, I don’t like to think of you being there with Jill. Couldn’t you come over to Dornington and live in rooms until we are married?’

  To give himself time, he said, ‘Perhaps I could.’

  ‘She will only get you away from me.’

  ‘Nothing will do that,’ he declared gallantly.

  ‘Couldn’t you come and live in rooms?’

  ‘I haven’t the money.’

  ‘I’ll get father to give you a decent salary.’

  At that his heart leapt. He had lived solely on a pittance and Jill’s charity, so that the sudden dazzling idea of financial freedom was unction to his soul. He flung his doubts and loyalties to the winds. For a moment the room blurred before his dancing vision. The dried pampas waved, the china lion smirked. He dared not show his delight. ‘Then I could,’ he agreed.

  They arranged it together tentatively, and he went home on air.

  In the cottage he was aware of the urgency for explanation to Jill, not the explanation that he was contemplating leaving her, but that Ethel was shocked. He veered round his point clumsily, missed it, and returned belatedly to it again and again.

  He tried to be diplomatic and was unsuccessful.

  ‘They’re fed up,’ he said at last; ‘goodness knows what you told Ethel.’

  ‘You asked me to tell her.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You explained that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then she can’t blame me.’

  ‘Well, she does.’

  ‘You mean that she has told her father? She has violated a confidence like that?’ There was the flashing hint of contempt in Jill’s voice and it galled Twit.

  He stared at her doltishly. He did not know what to say.

  ‘She has?’ Jill persisted.

  ‘Naturally she told him.’

  ‘But that was a dreadful thing to do. Monstrous! Don’t you see it, Twit, or has she got you into the no-honour routine too?’

  ‘I don’t think it was dreadful.’

  The old impetuous Jill suddenly leapt to the surface. ‘You always were a tell-tale yourself, weren’t you? That would appeal to you. All the same, it was filthy. Sneaking.’

  Again he maintained his grimly stubborn silence. He was wondering if he could break it to her that he intended to go away and live in rooms. Perhaps it would be wiser not to tell her now when they were arguing. He did not admit to himself that he dare not tell her. He was always weak in a row. Later it would come easier. He could devise some plan. He would think it out, discuss it with Ethel, and act upon their combined discretion. But here in the cottage room Jill was stating emphatically what she thought of Ethel. She was razor-sharp and cruel. She slashed brutally at the woman who had betrayed her confidence. She seemed to Twit’s imagination like some grim white executioner smiting with a scimitar, thin and gleaming and steel-cold. She hit to kill. She was merciless in the way in which she dissected this woman. Ethel, cold and passionless, with her sere virginity embittering her views. Ethel, curious enough to demand confidences and then callous enough to violate them. Twit tore himself away. He went up to his room in a blinding fury.

  But Jill was right, horribly right. The dream-castle was ashes. Across its grey threshold lay the body of his love. He saw bitterly that it was the gay and lovely body of Mercedes. If she had tenanted his castle so much might have been possible. She was lovely, languorous, sensual, but she stood for love. She who had given herself to him for a cheap bet with a cheap little clerk! And Mercedes was dead to him. The castle was crumbled. Out of its ashes rose Ethel, as some old scarecrow. Ethel, with the partnership and the key to liberty, and her eyes a little sunk and her mouth a little old. Ethel with the first frost of life’s autumn withering her like the birch tree without.

  He wept for himself.

  VII

  Next day he spent his lunch hour looking for rooms. He would not stop with Jill. She showed him himself by the white light of truth. Himself and his so-called love. He had to agree with her, to be persuaded by her, and he knew that he must leave. He had to get that partnership, he had to be free. Jill might sneer, but it meant everything to him.

  Ethel had found a Mrs. Isleworth and to Mrs. Isleworth’s Twit went. She was asking a very modest sum a week and seemed amiable, also the rooms were fairly comfortable. He did not look to see if they were clean. The sitting-room had an American organ in it which interested him. There was also an enlarged photograph of the departed Mr. Isleworth, and, hung thoughtfully beneath it, a neat little snapshot of Mr. Isleworth’s grave in Kensal Green cemetery. There was an abundance of bamboo and chenille table-cloth and the stagnant frowst of windows that did not open. The whole air was like a mantle over the place, it clung and clung close. But Twit liked the terms.

  ‘I don’t mind throwing in a cup o’ tea in the mornin’s,’ announced Mrs. Isleworth, who was tall and thin and acid, ‘but baths’ll be extra.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Twit.

  He would not be wanting baths.

  He felt to be something in the nature of a conspirator and it was not without thrill. He was making a desperate bid for his freedom and he knew that if he did not succeed in pulling it off he would never get another chance. Old Stillmer was paying him three pounds a week, and Mrs. Isleworth was content to ‘do’ for him for two. There was a little of the Croesus about this new venture and he felt the first clear thrill of glorious freedom. Three pounds a week, steering his own ship at last. But how would he get away? Jill would argue; worse, she would weep. If she wept he would have to give way. He knew that. She must be the last person to suspect the new venture if he were to succeed in it.

  Then he remembered ruefully that he had promised Jock not to leave Jill, and that he was making every possible attempt to desert her. He thought that Jock would probably consider him a cad for it, but he assumed that if you stopped to think what other people were considering you, you would never get very far. He argued with his conscience on those lines.

  It was most awkward that Jill and Ethel did not get on well together. He did not believe that it was entirely Ethel’s fault, for Jill had a habit of quarrelling with people. Ethel was placid, she had a cow-like mentality and she would not pick a quarrel with anyone. Yet these two had most certainly fallen foul of each other and would not meet. It made it singularly unpleasant for him in the capacity of a go-between. Ethel had discovered that he was afraid of Jill, and she was urging him to get away. Jill, believing herself to be in a safe position, had started her campaign against Ethel. She lost no opportunity to show her future sister-in-law in a bad light. Dora Hine was helping her. Grenville chimed in. It seemed that Jill had enlisted her friends’ aid and that the world was conniving against Twit. He must get away. But how? He felt that he would not have the strength to confront Jill and to go. She would thrust him through with the spear of sarcasm. Tyrannical, insistent Jill. He would have to creep away like a coward. He hated the idea, but it had to be. A dog with his tail between his legs, a creeping, crawling thing. He could conceive no wiser plan.

  He arranged to move into Mrs. Isleworth’s
on the Monday. As Jill spent the Saturday in London, he contrived to get his luggage across to Dornington. He took it in detachments on the back of his motor-bicycle. It was a long business and a complicated one. He met Grenville the first time, who stopped him and wanted to know if he were moving house.

  ‘Only some oddments for a friend,’ lied Twit hastily.

  ‘Some friend! What ghastly old traps! Drop them down the nearest drain. It would be charity.’

  Twit had other views. He met Dora too. She seemed to be amused at his luggage. Finally he saw Arthur Simpson, the last man in the world whom he wanted to meet, and who believed him to be eloping.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ said Arthur. ‘Your trousseau all packed. What’s the hurry? Don’t say there’s a just cause!’

  Twit accelerated and left him standing on the kerb.

  He went to meet Jill’s train happy in the knowledge that he had really managed to get his baggage out of the house without the row that he had anticipated. It had been so lucky that she had chosen this of all days to go to London.

  Then to his own surprise he broke it to her over the Sunday lunch table. He did not know why he did it, save that, the idea suddenly striking him, he acted on the impulse.

  ‘Old Stillmer wants me to live nearer. He has this lumbago and he wants me on the spot.’

  ‘We’re not three miles off.’

  ‘No, but I’ve decided to go nearer.’

  ‘Oh.’ She was only half listening because she was tired. There had been fog in London and the traffic had been difficult. She was hardly thinking about Twit but about yesterday.

  ‘I’ve taken rooms.’

  Suddenly she awoke from her apathy and stared at him aghast. ‘But what about me?’

  ‘When I’m married I’ll not be able to stay here.’ He had thought that out in bed last night and was rather pleased with it.

  ‘But you promised Jock?’

  ‘He’ll understand.’

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  ‘Old Stillmer wants me nearer. I’ve engaged rooms. I’m going to-morrow.’

  She turned white and he thought that she was going to faint as she leant forward against the oval dining-table. Jill, with a triangle of a face above the glitter of glass and silver. Her eyes were tragically large. He felt ashamed as he watched her.