‘But Ianthe’s no’ to hae word aboot it either?’ Andy was relaxed again.
‘No – because of what I’ve promised. But it’s not a thing one takes to a girl like Ianthe anyway.’
Andy was silent for a moment. The code underlying this was perhaps not sympathetic to him.
‘I must awa’ to my tea,’ he then said. ‘I’ll be unco late for it. They Miss Kinches will be fair fashed wi’ me.’
‘Damn your tea, and damn the Kinches.’ They were now outside Toby’s bedroom, and in the broad corridor. Toby crossed it and flung open a door. ‘This is to be your room,’ he said, ‘and the one at the end too. When the hell are you moving in?’
‘Morie-morning, Toby.’
‘Really?’ For the first time for some hours, Toby felt that something cheerful had happened. ‘Tomorrow?’
‘I’ve had my orders frae your auntie. So that’s it.’
‘But you said you wouldn’t be made a monkey of.’ Toby was much rejoiced that he could thus poke fun at his brother.
‘I was a wee bit to seek then, Toby. But I like your folk. I dinna care if I’m a monkey on a stick.’
‘I’ll liberate a bottle of champagne from the cellar in the morning. And we’ll drink it at midnight.’
‘An’ make wee cuts in our hauns, an’ mingle bluid, an’ be brithers twice over.’ Andy was presumably producing this fancy from juvenile reading of a popular character, conceivably connected with Red Indian braves. His next words, however, were soberly offered. ‘I’ll be in here the morrow, then, and drinking your faither’s champagne if you have a mind to it. But there’s yin promise I can make to you, Toby laddie. I’ll be out again if the day comes on which there’s a ca’ for it.’
‘Which will probably be when you marry the principal heiress in the county.’ Toby was so satisfied with this definitive stroke in acquiring a brother that he was prepared to talk any nonsense.
‘It’s yoursel’ had better be thinking o’ that, perhaps.’
Toby was again struck as by an echo of something he had already heard. But the impression was momentary. He had glanced at his watch and seen that he had time to accompany his brother for a little way down the drive. This happened for the most part in companionable silence. He found himself wondering what was meant by ‘tea’ at such an hour. It was a ‘high tea’ or a ‘hot tea’, he supposed, according to the region in which it was purveyed; and it meant sausages or kippers or even ‘baked beans’ on toast. His aunt’s cook, he felt comfortably, would do better for Andy than that.
But the trials of the day proved not quite over. Dinner at the big house, although remote from the humble repasts of the folk, was on this occasion a slightly uncomfortable affair. Satisfaction was expressed at Andy’s decision, but Toby wondered whether his father, at least, was quite easy about it. He had acted generously and impulsively – which was something he had done once before. He had decided that Andy must be regarded as in the same boat as his adopted son, which was fair enough since they had been quite literally that when a few weeks old. But if Andy was in the same boat as him the corresponding proposition was equally true: he was in the same boat as Andy. In fact Howard Felton’s original acquisition had perplexingly doubled itself. If – Toby thought – it was firmly decided that no line was to be drawn between Andy and himself, then that Gordian knot was in a sense cut. But society had already drawn a line by directing the two of them along divergent paths from infancy. And sentiment and long association had drawn another. It would be very odd if either Howard Felton or his daughter or even his sister straightaway fell to feeling about Andy as they had for long felt about him. But it might happen. In an unconscious and intermittent way something of the sort might have happened already.
Toby wondered whether such thoughts were going through the heads of the three people with whom he was at table. He didn’t like the notion of being part of a conundrum. Aunt Grace was being rather quiet, just as her brother was. But Aunt Grace had a lot to think about in a simple practical way. On her would fall the main burden – it might be put – of teaching Andy how to eat asparagus, or how to get up and open a door without fuss. It would have been Toby’s own impulse to take rather an airy view of such matters, and then – he acknowledged to himself – become cross and impatient when difficulties arose. Ianthe wasn’t saying much either. He realised – with mixed feelings – that he was much in Ianthe’s good books. Her steady gaze when she looked up at him across the table was somehow signalling approval and support. This must be because, having decided to like Andy, she liked his own fair success in coping with Andy so far. His mixed feelings arose from the fact that her attitude showed she didn’t even faintly suspect what had been going on between him and Elma. He was quite sure that of that Ianthe would take a very poor view. He was coming, with what he recognised as a rather shameful rapidity, to take a poor view of it himself. It had been the most awful humbug on his part to tell Andy that to the sort of girl that Ianthe was, one didn’t speak of a thing like that. The truth was that if the circumstances had been such that he had been obliged to tell her, he would simply have been unbearably ashamed. This was so even although in the past he had told her almost everything that had ever happened to him. There had been happenings (he believed in a slightly self-dramatising way) that he’d simply never have got through without her. Aunt Grace, a late arrival, he’d never much bothered his head about, although he acknowledged her to be a formidable woman. He had a proper affection for Howard Felton, but often felt subtly distanced from him: more rather than less aware, as the years passed, that currents undersea had picked his true father’s bones in whispers. But Ianthe was at the centre of things, as the truest of sisters might be.
Toby found that he had himself neglected to open a door. Mrs Warlow and her niece were leaving the dining-room, its owner having apparently indicated that this was to be so. Just occasionally Howard took it into his head that even on purely domestic evenings this antique convention was to be observed. The two males of the household (father and son) were to be tête à tête for a short space over their wine. So Howard now passed the port to Toby.
Toby disliked port, and never drank it. Edgy after the day’s disaster, he felt this forgetfulness on his father’s part to be a matter less of mere vagueness than of disregard. He supposed he ought to pour himself port, all the same. But there was also claret on the table – this, too, decanted – and it was what he had been drinking during the meal. He decided to stay with the claret, and made a long arm for the jug. Howard showed no awareness of the asserting of this small difference between them. When he spoke, it was about what obviously preoccupied him for the moment.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m very pleased about your brother. About his moving in, I mean. He will be much more comfortable here than with those old women. And it’s the proper thing, too, as your aunt insists.’
‘As I insist as well.’
‘Exactly, my dear boy.’ Howard seemed to find this quite in order. ‘And it’s particularly satisfactory that it should be tomorrow.’
This puzzled Toby for a moment, and he wondered whether his father believed that Tuesday was a lucky day in the week. Then he remembered what was going to happen on Friday. His aunt had told him that Mercia Felton had rung up that morning and arranged that Hugh and she, together with a couple of young guests, would come over and lunch at Felton on that day. Toby had also picked up the fact that this visit, although it had for some reason been much delayed, had its origin in the notion that Andy was in some sense to be inspected and passed upon by the Oxford Feltons. Toby had taken a dark view of this notion, and he now saw that his father really did so too. Howard Felton lived to some extent in awe of Hugh, and was known always to consult him on family matters. At the same time he was fidgety under this reliance upon the judgement of a younger brother, and concerned to assert his independence from time to time. This was what he was after now. When the Hugh Feltons did arrive, a big step in determining Andy’s standing with the fa
mily would already have been taken. This train of thought led of course to the conclusion that the Warden had already shown himself to be – at least tentatively – anti-Andy. But Toby had expected that, and wasn’t much perturbed by it. And he did have an intuitive sense that he might find Hugh Felton to be his own friend one day.
‘At least we have plenty of room,’ Howard went on amiably. ‘Although I have told Andy that he will have to share a bathroom with you.’
‘We’ve done that already.’ Toby had a momentary memory of his brother – comfortingly calm, bracingly sardonic – leaning against the tiles and grinning at him in his tub. ‘And Aunt Grace is fixing him up with a den of his own at the end of the wing. We shan’t be breathing down one another’s neck.’
‘Exactly. It will do splendidly for a time. But have you ever thought about the Mill House?’
‘Sir?’
It was very rarely indeed that Toby addressed his foster-father in this highly archaic fashion. But Howard himself, who had no doubt said ‘Sir’ to his own father several times in the day, was unaware that he had alerted his adoptive son in an uncommon degree.
‘It has just occurred to me that – later on, you know – it might suit the two of you very well. Again, of course, just for a time. Marriage, and so forth, would alter things a lot. Do finish the port.’
Toby finished the claret – and rather at a gulp. It was quite clear to him that the owner of Felton House (and of the Mill House too) was unconscious of having said anything very much. But then that was how Howard’s mind regularly worked. It was the mind of a man who quite frequently didn’t at all know where he was going. It had been like that, perhaps, when it reacted as it did to the Cornucopia disaster long ago.
‘Marriage?’ Toby said.
‘It might come very soon, I suppose. Men do seem to marry much earlier nowadays – which means it has to be with girls not much younger than themselves. It has its disadvantages, of course. What’s behind all those divorces one reads of is marrying in haste, likely enough. But I’m in favour of it, on the whole.’ Howard Felton was fond of declaring himself to be in favour of things. ‘So if you and Andy fixed yourselves up next week, I’d be entirely delighted. Still, as it’s not likely to happen quite like that, the Mill House is worth giving a thought to. Perhaps we’d better get back to the drawing-room.’
Toby got to his feet with very odd feelings – some of which he recognised as not much to his credit. In a sense which he found it difficult to identify, Andy was breathing down his neck. But at least it was something that Andy didn’t intend to do. Andy would never consent in the slightest degree to stepping into his shoes. But then nobody had a thought that way. Perhaps the situation would best be expressed by saying that Howard Felton’s mind was drifting towards the assumption that the brothers had one pair of shoes between them. And that it was a borrowed pair, at that.
Howard had paused with his hand on the knob of the dining- room door, and the air of a man into whose recollection some point of minor interest has come.
‘Talking of marriage,’ he said, ‘do you know that your aunt has had rather an odd idea in her head? It’s about Elma Loftus.’
‘About Elma?’ As he repeated the name, Toby saw how much it was going to be a danger signal for some time.
‘About Elma and yourself being interested in one another. Nothing in it, I suppose?’
‘I don’t think anything is going to happen between Elma and me.’ Toby saw, too, that as often as Elma was mentioned in the future it would be quite probable that he should have to choose an equivocal form of words in anything he said about her. When he had made her that promise of secrecy he had been thinking crudely in terms of a boastful communicativeness: something he could be quite sure he’d never be prompted to. But what about direct questions? What his father had just asked might well have been so phrased as to require a blank lie as answer. The thought of this made Toby very uncomfortable indeed.
‘Quite, quite – and I can’t think what has brought it back into my head again.’ Howard considered for a moment. ‘But—by Jove!—yes. This afternoon at tea. Do you remember that you gave her a pat on the rump? I thought it a little odd – I mean if there was no understanding between you. I’m sure she’s not the kind of girl for horseplay of any kind.’
‘I’m sorry. No doubt it was stupid – just bad manners.’ As Toby was obliged to say this about what, in the simplicity of his heart, he had regarded as preliminary to an announcement in The Times, he felt almost equally annoyed with his father and with himself.
‘It quite struck me at the time,’ Howard Felton said. As he spoke – and rather oddly – he took his hand off the knob, which he then twice patted before opening the door.
In the drawing-room Aunt Grace was working at her embroidery in her accustomed window-seat, and Ianthe was reading a fat book about the Minoans and scribbling notes. It might have been called a cultivated scene, and Toby wondered what his brother was going to make of it. It wasn’t this, however, that remained chiefly in his mind for the rest of the evening.
XI
‘And your niece?’ mercia felton asked. ‘Does Ianthe welcome the autodidact at the breakfast-table?’
It was Friday, and the Oxford Feltons, with two French girls duly in tow, had arrived and were awaiting luncheon. Mercia (who said clever things, as the wife of a clever Felton should do) was able to ask her question because Ianthe had taken Sophie and Arlette – who appeared to be sisters – on a tour of the house. Ianthe had decided at a glance that Sophie and Arlette were accustomed to houses quite as grand as Felton, and that now as on previous occasions Hugh and Mercia were putting their best foot forward in the display of territorial connections. In France professors were highly regarded – at least (as elsewhere) by others of their kind. But in Oxford these two young persons had probably been unimpressed by their hosts’ murkily commodious habitation in a corner of a large semi-conventual building abutting on a busy commercial thoroughfare, and at Felton were expressing the polite gratification of wanderers returned to some norm of human existence. Ianthe, who talked French very well, talked French; and this circumstance Sophie and Arlette clearly found agreeable. Heartened that there was only a quarter of an hour to fill in, Ianthe explained something of the ancientry of the Feltons in considerably less detail than Elma Loftus would have done.
‘Yes, indeed,’ Mrs Warlow said to Mercia. ‘I believe Ianthe likes Andrew Auld, as we are all coming to do. But he may not, I fear, be called an autodidact. What he knows has been taught him, I suspect, in a schoolroom, and since then there has been little burning of the midnight oil. After a day’s digging and delving, one presumably simply wants to go to sleep.’
‘So he must be described as quite uneducated?’
‘Oh, absolutely so. Of course there is what is called the school of life. I judge Andy not wholly uninstructed there.’
‘That may or may not be advantageous. Are his morals likely to be good? Agricultural labourers in Scotland would appear to be a mixed lot. Think of Burns.’
Mrs Warlow was silent, although not with the air of one who thinks of Burns. Her glance was upon Andy, who was undergoing viva voce examination by Hugh Felton in another corner of the Dutch garden. Mercia looked that way too.
‘Certainly,’ she said, ‘the young man is personable – and precisely as Toby is. The physique, that is to say, is good, and likely to be attractive to any young woman. The features are another matter. There is something peculiar about them, is there not? One wonders from what corner of central Europe they have sprung.’
‘It would not occur to me to describe them as central European.’ Mrs Warlow permitted herself an accent of some severity. She very much disliked Mercia’s dislike of Toby, which proceeded from her feeling that it was to Hugh that Felton ought to come. Perhaps, Mrs Warlow thought, it ought. But the question was an academic one – academic in the special sense that Hugh himself was so academic that he wouldn’t at all care to be landed with a large estate
, and still less to undergo the disgrace of promptly selling such an ancestral property. On this family issue Hugh appeared to bear a wholly disinterested mind. Perhaps it came of his being a philosopher.
‘The resemblance is quite fantastic,’ Mercia said. ‘It must be most confusing.’
‘Not in the least. One quickly comes to distinguish between them – except, perhaps, from a far or middle distance.’
‘That must be your professional eye, Grace. But I was thinking of confusion at a different level. I feel, for instance, that there is a sense in which poor Howard might muddle them up.’
‘Shall we go inside, Mercia? There should be time for a glass of sherry before Marian summons us.’ Mrs Warlow much disapproved of this intruder among the Feltons referring to her brother as ‘poor Howard’, nor did she wish at the moment to listen to any anatomy of that brother’s state of mind. And her suggestion was saved from appearing too abrupt by the fact that there was now a general movement indoors. It was not before Andy, however, had passed a fairly good examination with the Warden.
Andy, for a start, did not resent being catechised. (He didn’t even resent it being done with that superfluity of tact which Mrs Warlow had charged against her younger brother.) He had no air of having made himself a dependant of the Feltons and being uneasy about it. Indeed he reminded the Warden, curiously enough, of those among his former pupils who carried round with them a certain consciousness of privilege and security in the simplest economic sense, and whose general easiness of bearing was, although with a decent modesty, enhanced as a result. As Andy’s speech was so demotic or at least provincial, and as his mind was virgin of all science and all art, and in particular since he had turned up as the severe Hawkstone’s lowliest assistant, this was an impression hard to account for. Indeed nine men out of ten – Hugh, who had a good opinion of his own acumen, told himself – would have been totally unaware of it.
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