But although he was prepared to approve of Andy as a person, he was some way from approving of him in his particular place in the world at this moment. Here his opinion hadn’t changed much since he first heard of the whole business. Howard was a most injudicious fellow, prone to jump into awkward situations; and prone, later on, to find them untenable or unacceptable, with discomforting results for himself and sometimes for other people. There was, it seemed to Hugh, something viewy and unsound in the decision to treat Andrew Auld precisely as if he, like Toby, had been brought pretty well straight to Felton House from the Atlantic Ocean. It ignored too many factors, and was likely to bear hard upon Andrew Auld himself one day. The Warden was not unaware that he might be all wrong in this; indeed he told himself that he quite probably was. Nevertheless if his advice were asked again (only it clearly was not to be) he would still recommend that course of judicious patronage from a distance.
This line of thought, needless to say, caused Hugh Felton to be perfectly charming to Andy. And he hoped that Grace wouldn’t be fool enough to put the boy next to Mercia at luncheon. Mercia had acquired a good deal of skill with uncouth youths, since a fair number of such passed through the college. But Mercia wasn’t too fond of Toby – this for reasons which perhaps you had to be a philosopher to be immune from. And she might be a little tart with a second and proletarian Toby who had bobbed up at Felton.
This particular error in placement didn’t happen. Mrs Warlow, with an impossible four men and five women on her hands, had indulged herself in the amusement of seating Andy between the two French visitors. Andy betrayed no consciousness of seeing this as a bad joke; on the contrary, he seemed rather pleased. Ianthe having talked to them in the only language proper in civilisation, the two girls were disappointed that this odd member of the Felton family didn’t follow suit. He was more tiresomely obstinate even than monsieur le professeur at his own table in Oxford, who did at least condescend to be occasionally comprehensible. Their bewilderment grew when the young man appeared scarcely to talk English either. Perhaps he was a Dutch or Swedish cousin of these people? The girls (they were about seventeen, and, therefore, really women; and they were extremely good-looking as well) glanced at one another in mingled amusement and dismay across Andy’s long nose. But this didn’t last; it lasted hardly any time at all. By means not very easy to discover, Andy established rapport with them almost at once. They were soon hanging on his words – whether these were intelligible or not. They may have been telling themselves that he was like one of papa’s enchanting foresters or huntsmen.
Mercia Felton, watching this performance from her place next to Howard, may again have thought darkly of Robert Burns. Her sister-in-law was inclined to glance at Toby. For some days Toby had been in a bad temper, and Mrs Warlow thought she knew why. Now he was positively scowling at his brother. The spectacle of Andy getting away with these doubtless vapid but undeniably delectable little Frogs didn’t please him at all.
It was very comical. But it did at the same time afford occasion for thought. And Hugh, as might have been expected, found something to say about it. This happened when, over coffee in the open air again, the three senior Feltons proper distanced themselves for the purpose of short conference.
‘I’m glad everybody likes those girls,’ Hugh said. ‘They’re of good family and so forth, and quite oppressively educated, as all wretched French kids are. Oppressively good-mannered too, when elders are around. But probably the very Devil when only intimates of their own age-group are in question. Even under our ancient noses your new-found Andrew got on swimmingly with them. And did you notice Toby? Well, well!’
Howard hadn’t noticed Toby, and it had to be explained to him by his sister that Andy’s success with the French girls had made his brother rather cross.
‘Oh, I doubt that,’ Howard said easily. ‘But I rather wish you were right. There’s no reason why Toby shouldn’t be beginning to think of a wife – particularly with things going well in that acceptance place, as they seem to be doing. Indeed, I’ve been telling him so. But he’s a bit slow off the mark, if you ask me. Not really too interested in girls at all. It’s almost rather worrying.’
Mrs Warlow, who had heard this absurd persuasion advanced by her elder brother several times lately, said nothing – confining herself to slightly raised eyebrows directed in her younger brother’s direction.
‘What about Andrew, Howard?’ Hugh asked, plainly in a spirit of experiment.
‘I think Andrew may be different in some ways. You remember, Hugh, telling me how identical twins are bound to be the same pretty well all through. Of course there’s a lot in it, but it seems to be rather an old-fashioned view, if taken too far. I’ve been looking into it, you know. No longer ago than yesterday, as a matter of fact. Statistics, and so on. The weight of the genetic factors has to be considered. And it’s more an open question than you appear to have thought.’ Howard paused on this, perhaps a little daunted by thus openly challenging his brother’s superior mental competence. ‘So those two boys may, you see, differ in some quite important ways.’
Hugh, like his sister, was now silent for some moments. Howard, although not intellectually very well-endowed, seldom fell into quite this degree of incoherence, which was without the slightest significance except conceivably as hinting the movement of his inner mind.
‘I hardly know what we’re talking about,’ Hugh said. ‘And I doubt whether Grace does, either. Are you saying that your young Glasgow visitor is more likely than Toby is to go courting and get married and have children and all the rest of it?’
‘Well, yes – more or less.’ Howard’s confidence faltered. ‘Wouldn’t you agree?’
‘On the contrary, I’m bound to say I think you’re talking nonsense, Howard. If these two young men didn’t have decent principles – as I presume they have – you’d find that in no time at all they were rivals for the favour of half the village girls on the horizon. They’ve had a row already, I gather – and I wouldn’t mind betting a girl was at the bottom of it.’
If this impatient speech didn’t offend Howard – who wasn’t easily offended – it did discompose him, and he suddenly remembered that he had not yet been sufficiently attentive to his French guests. So the Warden and his sister were left together.
‘It is nonsense, isn’t it?’ Hugh demanded.
‘Complete nonsense. As a matter of fact, precisely what Toby has been doing lately is carrying on an affair with a village girl. Or a kind of village girl. The doctor’s daughter, Elma Loftus.’
‘Good Lord! You mean actually—’
‘Yes, of course. And guilelessly believing that it has been a deep secret from Ianthe and myself, when it was as obvious as if they’d been making love in the middle of the tennis court.’
‘My dear Grace!’ It seemed to be his sister’s manner of expressing the thing that shocked Hugh at this point.
‘But now it has run into some sort of snag – whether permanently or only for a time, I don’t yet know.’
‘Perhaps Andrew has cut in.’
‘I think not. He might, by agreement, take her over later. I’d say she’s that sort of girl. Only I doubt, come to think of it, whether Andy’s that sort of boy. He’d probably rather be off on his own.’
‘I must say I don’t much care for all this.’ Hugh was really perturbed. ‘I’ve got used enough, heaven knows, to the near-promiscuity of the young nowadays. But in a semi-professional way, you know, since they’ve been all around me for years. But when one meets it in a domestic situation—’
‘You exaggerate, Hugh. There’s nothing that could fairly be called promiscuity in sight. We have our problems at Felton. That’s all.’
‘Well, the turning up of this young man seems decidedly to have exacerbated them. I can’t understand why you’ve been on the side of his domestication at Felton. Has it occurred to you that it might even put Ianthe at risk?’ Hugh paused, and realised that this was too sinister a phrase. ‘Mightn’
t he fall in love with her? It would be an awkward thing, to say the least.’ Again Hugh paused. ‘Or—confound it!—she might fall in love with him.’
‘That would at least shift things a little.’
‘I don’t see any necessary virtue in that. Giving Felton a shake-up, and so forth, is something you rather harp on, as a matter of fact. It bobs up whenever we meet.’
‘Possibly so.’ Mrs Warlow didn’t greatly care for being thus taxed with a species of senile repetitiveness. ‘But at least we don’t meet very often.’
‘I’ll grant you that things are pretty static here. I’d get impatient with it myself. What’s at the bottom of it is Howard’s inactive and dilatory temperament. He has never really done anything all his life.’
‘He did adopt a war orphan, long ago. And now he may be said to be half-adopting another.’
‘Just at this moment, he looks as if he’d be very willing to adopt Mercia’s parlour-boarders as well.’
At this unexpected speech Mrs Warlow turned round, and immediately became aware of its occasion. Ianthe having already shown Sophie and Arlette over the house, Howard had apparently determined to accord them an equal courtesy in the gardens. They were now quite far off, but distinctly visible, in a small unwalled orchard of considerable antiquity. Against one large tree was perched a ladder, and on this ladder was perched Arlette. It was almost certainly too early in the season for apple picking, so mere amusement must be the occasion of this ascent. Even as Mrs Warlow looked, it proved hazardous. The ladder swayed; Arlette tumbled; she was saved from falling flat only by Howard’s ready hands. It had of course been very sudden, and Howard had not been able to effect his interposition with quite the delicacy he might have wished. But it was all matter for amusement. Howard put an arm for a moment round Arlette’s shoulder, as if concerned in a fatherly way to make sure she wasn’t hurt. Then all three moved on, apparently laughing, and disappeared among the trees.
‘Perhaps you’d call that a shake-up?’ Hugh asked.
‘It looked more like a shake-down.’ Mrs Warlow seemed unimpressed by the incident thus curiously observed from afar. ‘Howard is fond of the society of young people. And naturally we don’t get much of it now, except when Ianthe and Toby are at home.’
‘I don’t get much of it myself, except for all those confounded young men. But – whether in males or females – give me a little maturity of mind, every time. Howard ought to be looking for a woman five or ten years younger than himself, not thirty or forty.’
‘That, of course, depends.’ For a moment Mrs Warlow appeared disposed to enlarge upon this, but then thought better of it. ‘I have an idea,’ she said, ‘that Mercia would now like to collect your little flock and get back to Oxford.’
‘How did you like those Grens?’ Ianthe asked. (‘Grens’ was apparently short for grenouilles.)
‘I suppose they were all right.’ Toby didn’t sound enthusiastic. ‘Rather more posh, I thought, than Hugh’s usual crowd. They had a feeling they’d come among the peasantry – by which I don’t mean just Andy.’ Andy had hurried back to what he had taken to calling the ‘office’, meaning Mr Tarling’s house beyond the home farm, so Toby and Ianthe were alone. ‘I felt they were positively looking for the hay-seeds in my hair. And wondering how we’d all come honestly even by this modest shack.’
It wasn’t very possible to be amused by this travesty, but Ianthe did her best. She was aware of Toby as having a bad time, and aware that it wasn’t too easy to help, since he was remaining firmly mum about his catastrophe. She knew that young men react in various ways to being ditched. One of them consists of falling into an abyss of self-pity, or into the first cousin of that, when all control of the matter is taken out of your hands and your doctor feeds you pills, telling you that they sometimes slightly shorten the duration of a depressive illness. Ianthe had been instructed on this sort of thing by a Cambridge friend, who had an aunt devoted to preventing people committing suicide; and now she had a momentary vision of Toby constrained to take a condition of this kind to Dr Loftus. Fortunately this macabre idea hadn’t much probability attached to it. Toby’s reaction to the debacle over Elma, however that had precisely come about, was more a matter of humiliation than despair. Wounded vanity, although for a long time it might assail him in the middle of the night, would stop crippling his daylight hours quite soon. Moreover there must already be a rational corner in his head in which a radical reassessment of his late passion was beginning to form itself. Or so Ianthe hoped.
They had remained out of doors, and were now on the terrace again, sitting on Toby’s favourite balustrade. The stone was warm from the late-summer sunshine. But Toby, unbidden, had gone into the little Gothic pavilion and fetched a cushion for her greater ease. Ianthe was pleased, unusually pleased, by this, and rather surprised to find it reminding her of that proprietary smack on Elma’s bottom. But as soon as the deplorable episode had thus recurred to her she divined its significance. It hadn’t been a spontaneous act on Toby’s part, and it hadn’t been meant to pass undetected. It had been a bizarre way of intimating an engagement – an engagement either already contracted or that Toby believed to be on the verge of being so. So that was it; and she could see too what had happened later that afternoon. Toby – the callow brat – had been grandly announcing or re-announcing that it was going to be his pleasure to make Elma an honest woman, and she had responded to this expected event with a kind of saved-up and malicious rejection. It wasn’t a pretty picture, since it showed Elma as a bitch and Toby in a light which, at best, could be called ludicrous. But this last thought, and the phrase ‘callow brat’ lingering in her mind, only prompted in Ianthe a sudden flow of tenderness for her foster-brother of a sort not startling only because it had been known to her intermittently from nursery days. And now another thought came to her, which explained to her why Toby was dumb about his disaster. The wretched girl had exacted from him a promise of silence.
This almost clairvoyant faculty where Toby was concerned was not always comfortable to Ianthe. Fortunately – she thought – it had its limits. She had no notion, and no wish to have a notion, how the entanglement had begun. Toby’s sexual nature was, somehow, an aspect of him she had never let her mind dwell on; nor had she, for that matter, much considered it in other men. Perhaps Toby had put on a turn as – or perhaps he was actually capable of being – a ruthless seducer. If he had gone about ‘having’ Elma in that way there might be some excuse for Elma to husband an instinct for revenge. Ianthe just didn’t know. But she did know (she suddenly saw) that she would always love Toby, whatever flaw the chances of life turned up in him. A family (she told herself) had to be like that.
‘When do you go back to London, Toby?’ Because of the embargo on Elma and Elma’s perfidy (as she continued to judge it) Ianthe had difficulty in finding anything to talk about with the rejected lover. It didn’t matter very much, since in a way almost the most satisfactory moments between Toby and herself were silences. But this was a practical question of a neutral sort.
‘Oh, in a couple of days, worse luck.’
‘Is it frightfully boring?’
‘Well, not really. At least I expect it can become interesting in time. But it is just all about money, you know: other people’s and your own. I chose the job, and I’m not going to complain about it.’
‘I’d say you are, rather.’ Ianthe laughed softly, for she enjoyed her own candour. ‘And at least you’re never away for long.’
‘A bloody weekender, that’s me.’ Toby grinned wryly, and was himself silent for some moments. ‘Ianthe,’ he then said suddenly, ‘I do frightfully rely on you about Andy. You do like him, don’t you?’
‘I like him very much.’
‘As much as you like me? It looks, you know, as if equal shares is going to be the thing.’
‘No. I like you better, although I don’t suppose you are any worthier in the regard of heaven. But why do you rely on me?’
‘Well, I know I do
n’t just sparkle. But then neither does he. So we get on quite well together.’
‘When you don’t go pub-crawling.’
‘Oh, that! Well, yes. But what I mean is that – Felton all being a bit strange to him still – he may miss me at first during the week. Of course he obviously gets along well with Howard’—it was thus that Toby sometimes referred to his foster-father when speaking to Ianthe—’and he has quite a thing about Aunt Grace in an odd and awed sort of way. But you must be nice to him, too.’
‘You are a great oaf, Toby! Am I likely to be anything else? Turn on the haughty high-born lady, or something like that?’
‘I doubt whether you’re a high-born lady, my child.’ Toby occasionally addressed Ianthe in this patronising way. ‘Very well-born indeed. But for high-born your pop has to be a belted earl or something. Shakespeare and that crowd thought of the Feltons as persons of worship, not persons of honour. What was I saying?’
‘That I am to be nice to Andy. Well, I quite promise.’
‘Then that’s fine.’ Toby swung his legs idly for some moments – and for some further moments fell to biting a thumb. ‘By the way,’ he finally said, ‘I’ve something to tell you. I’ve been ditched.’
Ianthe was about to say, ‘Yes, I know – or at least I’ve guessed – about Elma.’ But something, again at an intuitive level, restrained her.
‘Tell me about it,’ she said quietly – and only then ventured to add, ‘Is it something about a girl?’
‘No, no.’ Toby seemed scarcely to have gathered the sense of the question. ‘It’s about Felton. I know now. It’s not coming to me. And I’m just glad it’s definite.’
‘Definite!’ All Ianthe’s dismay went into the word. ‘You mean that Daddy has actually said—’
‘No. In fact, of course not. He never does say, does he? It’s not the way his mind works. In a sense, perhaps, he doesn’t yet even know.’ Toby produced these brief sentences quite calmly. ‘It’s just that he’s planning an existence as a couple of dear old bachelors for Andy and myself in the Mill House.’
Andrew and Tobias Page 16
