Andrew and Tobias

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘I believed it at once. It’s the coming of Andy, you see, that has flicked the switch.’

  ‘Toby, that’s horrible. I don’t believe it either.’

  ‘Nothing horrible about it. Andy has shown him what he’s been hiding from himself for the sake of a quiet life full of benevolent feeling. Andy’s me and I’m Andy, to all intents and purposes; and we just don’t belong. We’re very nice, but we just don’t belong. It has to be a Felton at Felton, and one sees the point.’

  ‘But you are a Felton. Legally—’

  ‘Legally is all rot. This is a matter of feeling. But there’s one good thing: Hugh has no sons, and now he won’t have. So you and Hugh start level. And later on somebody from a female line, or whatever it’s called, will have to change his name by deed poll and assume the lordship of the manors and the lord knows what. It has its comic side.’

  ‘It has nothing of the sort.’ Ianthe had sprung to her feet. She was pale with passion. ‘Oh God, Toby – what a fool I was to say what I did!’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Quite a long time ago, Daddy talked to me about all this. It was in that indecisive and vacillating way he has – but what he said was that he thought it fair the place should come to me. I was furious. I felt about as unfilial as Goneril and Regan rolled into one. I told him that if Felton ever came to me I’d start conveying it to you – or whatever the word is – without fail on the following day. I ought to have held my tongue.’

  ‘I can’t see what good that would have done.’

  ‘We could have cheated him – as he would have deserved.’

  ‘Please, please, Ianthe, don’t be so upset. I had to tell you. But I don’t want the place all that, anyway.’

  ‘Yes, you do. Don’t be silly.’

  ‘I’ll become an opulent City gent, and buy a couple of Feltons off the hook.’ Toby grinned rather wanly. He was making a very big effort indeed. ‘But the important thing is Andy. You do see that?’

  ‘I don’t see what Andy has to do with it.’

  ‘It’s just that he must never, never know that his turning up had anything to do with things coming unstuck. It would be a dreadful thing between us. He’s rather a decent sort of brother, you know. He’d never forgive himself for coming south of the Border. Promise to keep it secret, Ianthe.’ Toby frowned, as if some irrelevant memory had brushed his consciousness. ‘Fortunately, of course, he knows nothing about all that sort of thing. Inheriting estates, and so on.’

  ‘I think he’ll wonder why there he is, sitting on one side of the kitchen fire in the Mill House – and gowking, as he’d say, at his long-lost brother on the other.’ Ianthe had put out her hand as she managed this joke, and seized Toby’s. ‘I’ll come and cook for you.’

  ‘You can come and just be a lady. We’ll have in the Misses Kinch, crutches and all, to do the rough and everything else. They’re rather fond of Andy already.’

  ‘Toby, you should get one thing clear. Of course it’s true that Andy isn’t all clued up on inheritances, and whose expectations should be what, and so on. But he’s very alert and sensitive. I think he may already have picked up a good deal more than you imagine.’

  ‘He hasn’t been told about this Mill House idea yet.’

  ‘Even if you are right about what that means – and I think you probably are – it has a quite harmless sound in itself: the two of you being lodged independently half a mile away. Andy mightn’t do all that wondering, after all. He might judge it quite a good idea.’

  ‘Not when he got hold of what it was really in aid of. And he’d do that in no time, if he’s as alert as you say. He’d ask questions and have to be told lies. I’m fed up with lies. It was pretty well lying like mad just not to—’

  Toby broke off abruptly and in confusion. It was natural to him to think of Ianthe as invariably in his confidence. He had been forgetting, she saw, the recent disaster-area in which this didn’t hold.

  ‘Toby, I don’t think we need assume that there’s a real crisis dead ahead. You know how wandering Daddy’s mind is. After all, Andy has been here no time at all, and any unsettlement of the sort you think you’ve detected may simply fade out. So we’d better do no more than keep our eyes open.’

  ‘I suppose that’s right.’ Toby didn’t sound altogether convinced. ‘It’s odd about Felton, isn’t it?’ he asked, after a moment and on what was almost a wistful note. ‘You don’t want it, and I don’t believe Hugh wants it – although I’m pretty sure Mercia would gobble it up if she could.’

  ‘Mercia doesn’t run Hugh, although you might think she does.’

  ‘Yes, I know. So I expect the estate will be sold to an insurance company and the house will become a home for delinquent girls. And those hippogriffs at the bottom of the drive will be replaced with white elephants.’

  Having said this, Toby cheered up a little. It always pleased him to have achieved anything he considered to be a stroke of wit. And Ianthe, as they walked back to the house together, was quite prepared to laugh. If Toby were really to lose Felton and to be relegated to a kind of weekending dowager’s condition in the Mill House she wouldn’t easily cease to be enraged about it. Yet it wouldn’t be wise to start feeling sorry for Toby. His limitations and vulnerabilities called forth from her feelings she was not very well able to define. But it would never do to begin commiserating with him on the score of misfortunes, whether real or imagined. He was, she told herself, a very largely privileged young man, and – short of social cataclysm – he would always remain so. His job in the City might be boring, but it would eventually bring him as many Aston Martins as he could desire. From Elma Loftus he had, so to speak, come down with a bump, but not before he must be presumed to have enjoyed a great deal of what she was qualified to give. There might have been times when Andrew Auld was uncertain about his next day’s dinner, and most of the dinners he’d ever eaten he’d had to do a hard day’s work for in a garden or on a cabbage patch. Not so with lucky Tobias Felton.

  The small spectacle of herself falling into this moralising vein entertained Ianthe, and some sign of her amusement was detected by Toby as they went together through Robert Mylne’s dining- room.

  ‘What’s funny?’ Toby asked, perhaps a little reproachfully.

  ‘I found myself being very wise about it all. Uncle Hugh’s chronic condition, don’t you think?’

  ‘Well, yes – but I do think Hugh’s all right, in a fashion. I even think he mightn’t approve of the way your father’s mind’s moving.’

  ‘That’s probably true.’ Ianthe was startled. She couldn’t remember when Toby had last said ‘your father’, just like that. When he sometimes said ‘Howard’ there was perhaps the germ of the same distancing idea. But more commonly he said ‘Daddy’ as spontaneously as she did. If he was going to be disinherited (for it came to that) he was going to lose more than spacious rooms and numerous acres. Under this perception Ianthe’s mood abruptly changed again. She saw that the moralising to which she had lightly admitted was facile and to be condemned. Her father had perhaps never given his word to Toby that Felton was going to come to him. Nevertheless the fulfilling of any other plan now would be deeply wrong. She had to face the fact that one day – even quite soon – she might have to speak up to that effect. And now she came to a halt in the middle of the room.

  ‘I’ll have to talk to Daddy,’ she said. ‘And I think you ought to talk to Andy.’

  ‘Talk to him? How do you mean?’

  ‘You do tell him things, don’t you – even things you mightn’t tell to me?’

  ‘Well, yes – I suppose so.’ Toby had been thrown into a consternation which was almost comical again by this last question. It shook his conviction that Ianthe couldn’t conceivably have an inkling of the Elma affair. In a way, he was now inclined to wish that she had; indeed, that she had somehow tumbled to it in all its horrid detail. For in that case his stupid promise of secrecy would become inoperat
ive, and he could be as honest about it as he wanted to be. ‘I don’t see,’ he said, ‘how Andy can really help.’

  ‘I just have an odd feeling that he may be the key to something.’ Ianthe frowned as she said this, as if conscious of an indefiniteness she didn’t much go in for. ‘In any case, I think he’s entitled to have the whole situation as you see it explained to him.’

  ‘Even that notion of mine that it’s his turning up that has flicked the switch – brought about the grand discovery that I’m not, any more than he himself is, descended from a chap who lined the family pocket from the revenues of Aquitaine?’ Toby became conscious of this question as bobbing up from a level of his mind that he didn’t greatly approve of. ‘Sorry! I didn’t mean to talk rot.’

  ‘It’s not exactly rot. And did I ever tell you, Toby? I’ve a theory that you’re descended – so Andy too, of course – from Charlemagne. You’re terribly like some of his portraits. And he was descended from King David, who was a kind of honorary ancestor of Jesus Christ. So you see—’

  ‘Do shut up, Ianthe.’

  ‘All right. Go back to Andy. If he happens to have – or has already had – much talk with Daddy he may arrive at something like that notion of yours off his own bat. But I’m not sure that he would be as upset by it as you imagine. I don’t really know him yet. He may conceivably feel that to be turfed out of Felton would be good for your soul.’

  ‘I suppose he might.’ Toby tried to hide his sense that any such feeling would be outrageous beyond belief.

  ‘Anyway, I think you should give him the lie of the land. He seems to me to be rather a loyal sort of person, and he ought to have the information that would give him the best chance of weighing in on your side.’

  ‘I think the idea of sides is pretty grim, Ianthe. But perhaps you’re right. I’ll think about it.’

  ‘That’s what Andy would say, in that lingo of his. I’ve forgotten the expression.’

  ‘Bide a wee.’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘At least we know where we are. We can’t be booked for surprises.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ Ianthe said.

  PART THREE

  Andy

  XII

  Autumn came suddenly to Felton. From the house its mists were more evident than its mellow fruitfulness. For days on end little was to be seen through the high windows except Andrew Auld’s successor, shrouded in vapour as he swept fallen leaves from lawns and paths while further leaves kept falling round him. He was a mere school-leaver, and disappointingly subject to discouragement as he thus struggled against nature’s plan. Hawkstone had little hope of the boy.

  Andy, on the other hand, was doing well in the higher sphere to which chance had promoted him. Mr Tarling, a tactful man, reported him to Howard Felton as being ‘just as capable as one would expect Toby’s brother to be’. Complete candour, indeed, would have constrained Mr Tarling to go a little further than that. Like most of the people who had any concern in the matter at all, he was disposed to be critical of Howard’s indecisive stance over the succession to the estate. Had it been made quite clear at the proper time that Toby was to be fully Howard’s heir, Toby would have got just that grip on the whole concern which his brother was showing himself very well equipped to do now. As it was, Toby had rather drifted away, and had in effect closed for a grand car and an office stool. Mr Tarling, although very much Toby’s man, and disposed to view the situation as produced by a large measure of weakness on his employer’s part, felt that there must have been a certain contributory weakness on Toby’s own part too. It was thoroughly unsatisfactory – and the more so because of the astonishing fact that (so far as Mr Tarling could see) there was nobody except Toby himself who particularly wanted Felton at all. The anomaly didn’t much affect Mr Tarling’s own position, since he was pretty well due to retire. But it irked him to see this capable Scottish lad being introduced into the picture in what he conceived as a thoroughly inept fashion. If things went on as they were, Howard Felton might drop dead at any time; the entire concern could simply come under the hammer; and as a consequence Toby’s meritorious new-found brother would probably find himself back on square one.

  Andy was still inclined to insist on what might be termed his intimate relationship with the soil. When he ought to be studying accounts he was apt to be out on the home farm with a fork-lift, stacking bales of belated hay. He had something of a head for accounts, all the same. On one occasion, when Mr Tarling had judged a word of commendation to be due in this regard, Andy had responded with a somewhat mysterious reference to an auntie who had been proving rather apt at that sort of thing. Of course Andy couldn’t thus be claiming that commercial acumen was in his blood. Perhaps he had simply learnt from this old person’s example.

  Toby had returned to his own account-books in Lombard Street, and to his normal weekending rhythm. Formerly this had seemed to suit him very well, but Ianthe had become aware that now he wasn’t liking it at all. Perhaps its satisfactoriness had consisted in his enjoyment of a kind of portable mistress, accessible in town and country alike. But that was over. Elma, indeed, had for some reason given up her job in Harley Street, and was simply living at home. She continued to turn up at Felton now and then – but it was sparingly, and never at week-ends. There seemed, Ianthe thought, to be a spark of decency in this. She was glad to think that Elma had thus departed into the wings. She had been slow to get out of her head the uncomfortable idea that Andy might prove to be Toby’s successor in the enjoyment of Elma’s favours. The idea was more than uncomfortable; it was rather horrid as well. She had probably been imagining things in a depraved (and doubtless inexpert) fashion when she had thought to detect something disconcertingly naked in glances passing fleetingly between these two. She had a dim sense that there was some masculine code in terms of which Andy would now be entitled to regard Elma as fair game. It was worrying that this worried her. What business was it of hers? But on the occasions upon which Elma did come over to Felton, with or without her rather graceless brother, and the four young people played some desultory tennis, Ianthe found herself quite unable to get this sort of thing out of her system. She was sure that Andy had a lot of what must be called sexual instinct. Even his marked and sober regard for Aunt Grace incongruously betrayed an element of something of the kind. He certainly had no sober regard for Elma Loftus. He didn’t even seem to be particularly aware of her. Yet in some mysterious way he compelled her (and it was a deliberate thing) to be distinctly aware of him.

  Fortunately, Ianthe thought, Andy seemed not inclined to anything of the sort with her. He was even rather more respectful, positively rather more wary, than their relationship (which was as good as a brotherly-and-sisterly one) at all called for. And this, too, she found herself disposed to worry over. With Toby away five nights out of seven, Andy was now her natural companion, and their intimacy must increase during the several weeks that still remained of the Cambridge Long Vacation. It would be right and proper, she was sure, that they should become open allies in Toby’s cause, and that they should somehow help him out of the disconsolate and let-down condition which the fiasco with Elma had detectably left behind it. She was sure that Andy knew about this; ought she to confide to him that she did too? But this wasn’t possible – or not if she was in the least right about there now being some current of feeling between Elma and Andy. So she didn’t talk about Toby at all.

  During Andy’s office hours – or what would have been office hours if he hadn’t been out in the fields showing sceptical labourers how hedging is done in Galloway – Ianthe worked hard at her vacation reading. But if she thus was a learner during most of the day she turned teacher as soon as Andy got back. For here, she discovered, was something she could do – and that Andy let her do. He would let Aunt Grace do it too. But although it was certainly Aunt Grace who dealt with what Ianthe thought of as the knives and forks (or as Toby liked to put it, with how to perform an introduction or enter a box at the Opera), Aunt Gr
ace appeared to feel that education as more largely conceived ought to be injected into Andrew Auld only in small doses if at all. Ianthe discovered that her aunt’s thinking here was quite wrong. It was a literary idea. Book learning had made Thomas Hardy’s obscure Jude Fawley a terrible bore, and Virginia Woolf had cast what might be just aspersions upon self-taught working men. But Andy had a lively mind which grew perceptibly livelier whenever you tipped something new into its vacancies. And the tipping didn’t even have to be done with the tact which Uncle Hugh (if constrained to the job) would have brought to it. Andy, so decidedly manly in an exterior regard (particularly when he fell into that unconscious dehanchement), and also emotionally so mature when compared with his brother, had at the same time a child’s pleasure in acquiring knowledge. Not that he was a respectful pupil. In fact, he made a great deal of fun of her. Or he did so until, quite suddenly, that mood of wariness, of prudent distancing, would come on him.

  Here was something over which Ianthe puzzled for some considerable time. Quite frequently she thought about it last thing before going to sleep at night. Then one morning, hard upon waking up, she hit upon what must be the explanation. Andy didn’t want to fall in love with her.

  This perception (as she was convinced it was) suddenly pitched Ianthe into an area of feeling in which for a time she seemed to wander bewildered and lost. She believed herself to remember that she had positively felt cheated when Andy had preferred the wretched Elma to herself as the recipient of brief and (as it were) routinely libidinous glances. How perfectly horrid! And why should Andy shy away from her – if that was what it came to? The answer was so silly that it was humiliating. From his brother’s Felton world he was determined to take away nothing for nothing. If he ate Felton’s porridge he was going to thatch Felton’s ricks. And he certainly wasn’t going to make passes at his benefactor’s only child. Ianthe told herself that although this was indeed silly, it was also a rather honourable kind of resolution as well. And of course what Toby called the class thing was involved too. Andy was very clear that the class you belong to doesn’t change simply because somebody nearly runs you over when you are clipping a hedge. Raids across that obstinate barrier are perhaps all right in a frivolous way. The butcher’s boy could have a quick affair with an Elma and no great harm need be done. But a marriage between them would prove a shambles more likely than not.