Andrew and Tobias

by J. I. M. Stewart

  Later he had of course come rather to enjoy this annual solemnity, which had now recurred half-a-dozen times. But this new invitation varied from the others in two regards. It was for some out-of-term affair to which former members of the college were bidden in a big way, so that it was likely to have the character of a regular jamboree. And Andy was invited as well. They were both bidden to stay the night in the Warden’s Lodging.

  Toby, although not given to fussing about such matters, consulted Mrs Warlow before seeking out Andy himself.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘Is this Hugh’s celebrated tact – or is it non-tact? I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘I see nothing remarkable about it.’

  ‘It’s not, I mean, exactly Andy’s thing.’

  ‘That, if true, can’t be helped. Now that Andy is with us, it would be invidious for your uncle to invite you without him. And he may judge that Andy will be a resource to you amid a great many middle-aged and boring people. By no means all of them will even hunt.’

  ‘Sarky, aren’t you, Aunt Grace?’

  ‘Or he may feel that your brother will keep you from drinking too much.’

  As drinking too much was no more Toby’s thing than formal academic refection was Andy’s, this was a harmless pleasantry. Mrs Warlow put something tart into it, all the same. Her inclination that way had increased of late, as if the general slight jumpiness at Felton were infecting her.

  ‘It says “white or black tie”. So I could put on my tails and Andy could have my dinner-jacket. Only I’d try to persuade him to do it the other way round. Do you know that I’m over an inch more round the tummy than he is? I’ll bet you’d regularly swoon, Aunt Grace, if you saw Andy in a white waistcoat.’

  ‘As the feast will be a depressingly all-male one, I fear your brother’s charms may be little regarded. Or yours either. But, since you ask my advice, it is that you take it for granted that Andy will accept. If he doesn’t want to go, he won’t be slow to say so.’

  ‘That’s true enough. And of course it wouldn’t come even into my thick head to sound doubtful about it. Andy’s worth a whole wagon-load of bloody dons.’

  ‘Say at least a barrowful. But, Toby, I think there is another point. You could quite easily drive home from Oxford after this dinner. Hugh’s asking you both to spend the night in college may mean that he wants to talk things over with you.’

  ‘Things?’

  ‘Precisely,’ Mrs Warlow said. ‘Things.’

  ‘Aunt Grace, have you been talking to Hugh?’

  ‘Not lately. Or not talking to him lately. We do correspond from time to time. I cannot pretend that I have the family trick of treating your uncle as an oracle. But I have a sense that he is your friend. And now, Toby, go away and stop fishing. Or fish, if it is a proper time of year for it. It will be a change from galloping round in the middle of all those blundering hounds.’

  ‘I never gallop around in the middle—’ Toby, momentarily outraged, checked himself and grinned. ‘OK, OK,’ he said. ‘And as for Hugh’s blessed dinner, no problem.’

  It turned out more or less like that. Andy’s response to the proposal was quite casual; he said he supposed it was all part of taking a look around – a judgement he might have appropriately passed on a suggestion that he and Toby should pay a visit to the Tower of London or the Zoo. Toby wasn’t sure that this attitude was entirely genuine. Andy had never been in Oxford, and it was probable that the existence of the place had scarcely ever entered his head. But Toby had once or twice treated him to accounts (no doubt satirically slanted) of Cambridge life, and as Andy did genuinely like looking around it might be supposed that on the present occasion he’d feel a lively curiosity about an unknown mode of life. Toby had become aware that his brother possessed much less in the way of social prejudices and assumptions than he himself did. Andy was definitely an uncommitted sort of chap. At times you could feel that he was this almost alarmingly. Reviewing what he vaguely thought of as the whole thing, Toby felt clear that Andy did very strongly approve of having a brother. Perhaps, too, other Felton loyalties were gathering around him: there was, for instance, the odd way he appeared struck on Aunt Grace. But you had to feel, all the same, that it was his instinct to keep his options open. And he had so miraged up out of nowhere that Toby was never quite free of the feeling that he might similarly vanish. It was why Toby particularly liked driving Andy round in the Aston Martin: this despite the unfortunate issue of their first considerable trip in it. There, for a time at least, Andy safely was. He couldn’t even jump for it. It was like that as they drove into Oxford.

  But there had been one near-hitch. The Felton men never now ‘changed for dinner’ in the full and old-fashioned way unless the giving of a dinner-party required it. Nothing of the sort had happened since Andy’s arrival. He had been buying some clothes, and wearing others of Toby’s, without any appearance of much bothering. But here suddenly was a sticking-point – rather like that which had presented itself over the business of his moving into Toby’s part of the house. He got himself into his brother’s dinner jacket, and didn’t like himself in it at all. He said it made him look and feel like a bloody waiter, and that if he went into this college place in it he couldn’t promise that he wouldn’t jump up and begin moving plates. Although this was a joke, Toby found himself almost frightened by it, and he hurried off and fetched Ianthe. Ianthe contrived to turn the situation to laughter. She got them both half-undressed again. She got Andy into Toby’s tails, just as Toby himself had proposed, but not without positively tugging at him here and there in the course of the operation. She performed for him the very difficult feat of tying another person’s bow tie. And then she combed his hair. Then, because Toby was professing himself exhausted, she started in on him too. These performances left her excited and triumphant, but decidedly confused. But the important thing was that Andy had been vanquished. He studied himself in that long pier-glass before which he and his new-found brother had once stood side by side – and this time it was in a kind of boyish awe.

  ‘I’m jest richt for the ba’!’ he said. ‘Ianthe, my dear, I’m dressed for the ball. So let the band strike up.’ Demonstrating himself as an advanced bilingual person had become a regular piece of fun with Andy. But it made things a little more confusing still. The brothers were nowhere more identical than in their simple view of the nature of wit.

  ‘How many students does your uncle have in this place we’re going to?’ Andy asked as they drove.

  ‘About three hundred and fifty, I think. I’m not sure.’

  ‘It’s a handfu’, that. How does he keep order amang them? They mon be fair tackets, some o’ them.’

  ‘Just go easy on that lingo again this evening, Andrew Auld. Otherwise you’ll frighten them.’

  ‘Message understood. Does he leather them?’

  ‘They’re supposed to be too old for that.’ It was clear that Andy had only an inexact notion of the difference between a public school and an Oxford or Cambridge college. ‘I expect he sometimes wishes he could.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about your uncle.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t go on saying “your uncle”. I don’t really think of him that way. I call Grace Warlow “Aunt Grace” because somehow it seems polite. But I no more imagine she’s really my aunt than I imagine the Queen is.’

  ‘Then what about Mr Felton?’

  ‘Well, yes – Howard’s my father. I mean I’ve always felt that he is, in a quite natural way.’ Toby hesitated for a moment. ‘Perhaps he’s more my father than – as it’s turning out – I’m his son.’

  ‘Mebby.’

  ‘But I think that, when you’ve simply been adopted like me, the sense of kinship doesn’t spread around. It’s hard to explain. But I know that I think of Hugh Felton just as that old chap in Oxford.’

  ‘Do you feel that Ianthe’s just that young girl at Felton?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Of course not.’ Toby hesitated again. ‘That’s absolu
tely different,’ he went on, rather brusquely. ‘We’ve been brought up together. Neither of us has a single memory that antedates our being kids in the same nursery. So in a kind of a way she’s even more my sister than you’re my brother.’

  ‘I’d ca’ that an unco queer kind o’ way.’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Andy. Your uncos are as tiresome as your uncles.’ Toby scowled over his steering-wheel, feeling this to have been a singularly silly quip. ‘But what do you mean, anyway, that you’ve been thinking about Hugh Felton?’

  ‘I’ve been wondering how it would be if this was long ago. Would there have been a time when, if your father had only an adopted son, this Hugh Felton would have to be the heir to things? I’m asking because your father seems to me to have a regard more than’s sensible to ancient ways of doing yin thing or another.’

  ‘I suppose he has. But about what you’re asking I haven’t a clue. I do know that if there were a title in the family – and there was, but it got lost in the wash – it would have to go to Hugh. If you’re a duke or something, you can’t just look round and adopt a brat and say he’s going to be a duke after you. But it has usually been different, I think, with a dozen farms and so on. I call this a stupid conversation. But we’re nearly there.’

  ‘What’s that building awa’ ahead? Is it the gas works?’

  ‘No. It’s something called the Radcliffe Camera.’

  ‘It must be a daft-like place that ca’s a thing like yon a camera.’

  ‘For pity’s sake, you great oaf!’ For some minutes Toby drove up the Abingdon road in silence. ‘I only hope,’ he then said gloomily, ‘we get some approach to a decent meal.’

  The dinner in fact proved not remarkable in any way. Andy, although the scene was as strange to him as would have been a cannibal feast in the jungle, enjoyed it very much. If he wasn’t exactly the riproarious success he had been with Sophie and Arlette, he did rather better than get by – and the more easily, no doubt, because the idea of getting by wasn’t urgent with him. Perhaps, dutifully respecting his brother’s injunction, he made only sparing use of his more mysterious vocabulary. There was a general feeling that he was a scientist. Some of the guests who conversed with him might have been observed quickly to assume the expression of slightly awed deference which is felt to be becoming in the presence of a young man understood to be brilliantly ahead in the field of atomic physics. But when directly questioned about his activities he promptly replied that he was an agronomist. Toby had found this word for him in a dictionary, and they had agreed that thus to describe a retired under-gardener was very funny indeed.

  They got back to the Lodging ahead of the Warden, who had to remain in common room until the end of the affair. This landed them with the task of a certain amount of polite conversation with Mercia Felton, who was exhibiting the slight grimness habitual in Oxford ladies whose husbands have been feasting while they themselves dine on a poached egg. Rather to Andy’s disappointment, no French parlour-boarders were in evidence. (‘Just when we felt like yin apiece,’ he muttered libidinously to his brother when this became apparent.) But the young men had drunk enough to cope with Mercia in an easy-going way, and Andy even scandalously amused himself by briefly according her his up-and-down-and-roundabout glance. After this she sent them to bed.

  ‘It was sweet of you both to come,’ she said as she dismissed them. ‘Hugh is particularly pleased. Of course he has been terribly busy tonight. But he is looking forward to a talk with you – with both of you – in the morning.’

  They shared a bedroom. Andy had got out of his tails – or out of Toby’s tails – before he spoke.

  ‘What would it mean,’ he asked, ‘about a talking to frae him you wonna hae for an uncle?’

  ‘Back with your double Dutch, aren’t you? I haven’t a clue.’

  ‘I dinna ken about you, Toby. But I can tell what he’s after wi’ me. He’s for offering me yin o’ the Fellowships they were claivering aboot. I feel it in my baines.’

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me a bit,’ Toby said handsomely – and added at once, ‘Plenty of moronic dons.’

  ‘Let’s hae a pillow-fight, Toby, like in the stories about your daft sort of school.’

  ‘It’s a bit old hat, that. But why not?’

  So for a minute or two they engaged in this ritual absurdity, banging one another on the head. Then they tumbled into their beds and went to sleep at once.

  They were awakened at what seemed an unearthly hour by the sound of briskly raised blinds and a rattle of crockery. There was a manservant in the room, equally concerned to pour tea and to announce that the Warden hoped the gentlemen would join him for breakfast at eight o’clock. Andy perhaps found this not out of the way. But Toby judged it an outrage, and insisted to his brother that at Cambridge such barbarous hours were unknown. But there was nothing for it but obedience, and they turned up downstairs as the clock struck.

  The Warden was already at table, and alone. Perhaps Mercia breakfasted in bed. The Hugh Felton daughters were away from home, presumably in France. The meal was an entirely help-yourself affair. If Hugh had something to propound, he could go straight ahead and do so. He began, needless to say, with polite enquiries: the young men’s enjoyment of the previous evening and the soundness of their slumbers thereafter.

  ‘But do you know,’ he asked, primarily of Toby, ‘that it has occurred to me it might be useful to have a talk? On the family situation, I mean.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better,’ Andy suggested, ‘to wait, sir, until I’m taking a dander round the town?’

  ‘I scarcely think so. It’s my sense of the matter that you and Toby are entirely in one another’s confidence. Toby, is that right?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘And I think, Andrew, that you have in a sense a fresh eye for things, having come among us so lately.’

  ‘I don’t spend all that time peering,’ Andy said – a shade belligerently.

  ‘Of course not. But now, Toby, I want to ask you something. Has it occurred to you that your father’—Hugh had paused on this, which he had clearly decided to prefer to ‘my brother’—’may marry again?’

  ‘Marry again!’ Toby seemed not merely astonished at this suggestion but scandalised as well.

  ‘Dr Johnson spoke of second marriage – or perhaps it was of a specific second marriage – as the triumph of hope over experience. In your father’s case, it would be the triumph of certain natural propensities over a somewhat dilatory and wavering temperament. He has been a widower for a long time. I can only say that, just lately, my observations have tended to my bringing the matter forward in my mind. Andrew, have you had any sense of this?’

  ‘Mebby.’

  ‘When we lunched with you at Felton lately, I was struck by the strong appeal which those French girls of ours appeared to exercise over him.’

  ‘I think that’s all rot,’ Toby said – and didn’t at all mind that this was not a courteous expression. ‘And if he did marry again it would be his own business, and it wouldn’t be fair to put it all down to weakness of character and being slow off the mark and all that.’

  ‘In part I agree with you. At least among his motives – and it might even be the most powerful of them – would be one which many people might judge entirely laudable. The desire for a son.’

  Not surprisingly, this produced a moment’s complete silence.

  ‘And why not?’ Toby said. He had gone very pale.

  ‘There’s a bloody big why not!’ Andy came out with this very robustly indeed.

  ‘I am in agreement with Andrew,’ Hugh said calmly. ‘I’d be far from happy to butt in. I hope I’m not butting in now. But I must record that I should wholly disapprove of my brother’s so belatedly altering the shape of things at Felton. It would be weakness of character, Toby. Howard might well be dead while his child and heir was still a boy, or an unformed lad. I see nothing to commend it except an unphilosophical – indeed, a fond and foolish – notion of lineage a
nd so forth. I’d try to prevent it.’

  ‘I don’t think you should say that, sir,’ Toby said. ‘And I expect Andy thinks it wrong too.’

  ‘Mebby.’

  Toby had been badly shaken, and he was shaken still more by his brother’s obvious disposition to accept the Warden’s point of view. The business of the Mill House had disturbed him, but he had somehow stopped short of seeing in it the particular portent which Hugh Felton believed to have been otherwise vouchsafed to him.

  ‘I shall be quite open with my brother,’ Hugh said, a shade coldly. ‘Just as I am now being quite open with both of you. It comes simply to this, Toby. The thing would be a mere vagary – and a discredit to my family, if one is minded to see things that way. I will not, if I can help it, see you displaced.’

  ‘A’ credit to you,’ Andy said with unabated vigour. ‘But can you help it? You’re no your brother’s keeper, Mr Felton – no more than I’m mine.’

  ‘In my view, Toby himself can help it. He can get married.’ This was certainly a surprising remark, but Toby received it as if it were a thunderbolt, perhaps because ‘marriage’ still meant for him nothing except what he had recently escaped from (or been denied) in the person of Elma. Andy, however, to whom it had been addressed, reacted in a judicial manner. ‘Mebby so,’ he said. ‘It should be thocht on.’

  ‘My brother has this strong instinct for continuities. And he sees his household, his family, coming to a stop. Or that’s how I view the matter. And, I believe, how my sister does too.’

  ‘Mrs Warlow?’ Andy asked quickly.