‘Yes, indeed. I believe that my brother has been a little disappointed – although he is scarcely, perhaps, conscious of the fact – that Toby, although still, if I may say so, so young, has had no thought of marriage as yet. Indeed – to look a little further – if another generation showed signs of coming along, he might shed all that superstition about lineage and ancestry and so forth with no great effort.’ The Warden paused warily – as a man is apt to do when feeling that he is being tactful in no common degree. ‘And of course in Toby’s case there is one specific possibility which it would be foolish to ignore.’
‘What do you mean – a specific possibility?’ Toby demanded. Toby was looking bewildered and rather scared – which was perhaps what brought Andy to his feet.
‘Mebby that it’s leap-year,’ he said, ‘and that some lass may be louping at Toby ower a hedge.’ As he produced this piece of nonsense Andy was looking at the Warden very hard indeed. ‘It’s a’ to be thocht o’, nae doot, but we monna be previous. And noo we must awa’. Toby, you’d better bring roond your car.’
The astonishing commandingness of this, let alone its full return to the accents of northern Britain, seemed momentarily to nonplus the Warden. As for Toby, he obeyed his brother to the extent of bolting from the room.
‘Sir,’ Andy said, ‘ye dinna ken how kittle this thing is. We know what we want – you and me and Mrs Warlow, although we’ve never talked about it thegither. But it canna be rushed. There’s a barrier to be got awa’.’
‘I suppose you’re right, young man.’ The Warden had stood up, and was looking at Toby’s brother with considerable respect. ‘There’s no legal barrier: I’ve made absolutely sure of that. The barrier to be broken down is what the anthropologists call the primitive fear of incest.’
‘I wouldn’t know to put any such words to it. I’d say it’s just how they’ve seen one another for a long time.’ Perhaps with the idea of clarity in what could be only a brief colloquy, Andy had abruptly come south of the Border. ‘Your sister has had the thought that I might help. At least that’s the way I see her thinking. That me being at Felton might help. The shoogle of it.’
‘The what?’
‘I’m sorry. The shake-up in it. Here’s me, suddenly. A kind of other Toby – but without all those brother-and-sister’—Andy paused, having to search for a word—’associations.’
‘Grace has really been thinking this way?’
‘She hasn’t ever said it, but I’m sure it’s in her mind. If Ianthe came to see me as just possibly a sweetheart, she might be jumped – it’s something like that, this idea – into seeing Toby as that too.’
‘And what is Toby going to see?’
‘He’ll see what he’s told.’ Andy said this with some appearance of humorous intent, but was clearly quite serious. ‘There’s but a thin curtain, you might say, between him and his knowing what Ianthe should be to him. But it’s all that kittle! I can’t get the English of that.’
‘Difficult. Delicately balanced.’
‘That’s it! I mustn’t be having Ianthe really fall in love with me.’
‘And you mustn’t fall in love with her?’
‘I hae to risk that, Mr Felton.’
‘I have an idea that you can trust yourself.’ The Warden said this with the deft briskness of one long accustomed to coping with young men. He was silent for a moment, and the sound of the Aston Martin’s engine made itself heard in the quad. ‘One other question, Andy. It’s about my notion of my brother’s thoughts on himself marrying. Have you anything more to say – in confidence between us – on that?’
‘Only that it might be delicate too.’ Andy paused on this. ‘Or perhaps’—he then added obscurely—’it might no’ be delicate at all. But there’s Toby waiting. And I enjoyed my grand dinner very much.’
XIV
Toby said little during the drive back to Felton, and nothing at all on the family situation as viewed from the Warden’s Lodging. If he felt that Hugh had been sympathetic and concerned to help, he also felt that some of his ideas had been distinctly odd. But there was something odd, too, in the way that Andy had rather quickly shut him up. Toby was conscious of not quite having got hold of that final turn in the talk. It was as if his mind had gone abruptly inattentive in an unusual way. Perhaps Hugh, with marriage buzzing like a bee in his bonnet, remembered something he’d been told or guessed about the Elma thing, and Andy had had the good sense to head him off. But then those two had been left together, and it was Andy who had contrived this by sending him to fetch round the car. So possibly Hugh knew nothing about Elma, and Andy had judged for some reason that he should be told. Toby remembered how Andy had refused to promise that in no circumstances would he betray the secret of the Elma affair. But what would be the point of telling Hugh about it? Andy couldn’t believe that, if Elma would only change her mind, her marrying him would restore him to Howard’s favour. This seemed nonsense, and Toby was very puzzled. But pride kept him from questioning Andy about those final exchanges with the Warden. In fact, it was to Ianthe, later that day and only in reply to questioning, that he first said a word about the Oxford trip.
‘How did it go?’ Ianthe asked. ‘Did Hugh have designs on you?’
‘I suppose he did, in a way. Benevolent designs. He was very decent to both of us. I think he’s coming to like Andy. I don’t expect Mercia does.’
‘Bother Mercia! What were the designs?’
‘Well, the first point is that he does take rather a gloomy view. About Felton and me, I mean. And I didn’t tell him about the Mill House ploy, so he wasn’t basing himself on that. Do you know? He has got the queerest idea in his head. He thinks your father is likely to marry again. That’s pretty absurd, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know that it can be called that.’ If Ianthe was surprised, it was by the fact that this possibility had apparently never entered Toby’s head.
‘And he has an odder idea still. He thinks it would help matters if I got married myself. That it would make Howard feel there was a kind of carrying-on effort in train at Felton. Carrying on seems not a bad word for it.’ Toby actually paused as if for appreciation of this entirely tasteless quip. ‘He stopped short of naming me a bride. Who on earth am I to marry? Perhaps the elder of the Misses Kinch would have me.’
‘Or you might marry Aunt Grace.’
‘The vicar wouldn’t do the job. A man can’t marry his aunt.’
‘She’s not your aunt. She’s absolutely unrelated to you. Ring up the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he’ll tell you that at once. But I suppose Hugh’s idea is that there should be little pattering feet in Felton once more. And Aunt Grace is probably beyond that. She’d better be left to Colonel Motley. So what about Elma Loftus?’
Ianthe’s lips hadn’t closed on this name before she saw that Toby had blushed scarlet. It was a thing she couldn’t remember ever happening before. She was horrified at having come out so unaccountably with so brutal a question – and the more so because nothing could immediately be done about it. She couldn’t even say she was sorry without transforming the blunder into a fuss, and without betraying a knowledge she was supposed never to have guessed at. All she could do was to pretend that her remark had been quite silly and pointless, and hurry on to something else.
As for Toby, when the blush faded it was replaced by the expression of perplexity which had been becoming intermittently evident in him. He had got to feeling that he never wanted to hear the name of Elma Loftus again. (On balance, this must be held rather ungrateful in Toby – Elma, even if a bitch, having initiated him into an important and pleasurable area of human activity.) He couldn’t decide whether Ianthe’s having mentioned her in this way now had been serious, or in fun, or in need of an explanation not adequately covered by either of these ideas. All along he’d had a bad conscience that he was letting Ianthe down in the Elma affair; that it had been a kind of lowering of his sights below her expectations of him. In this sense Elma had really come between I
anthe and himself, even although the affair had remained totally unknown to her. And now he couldn’t bear the thought of Ianthe thinking ill of him, still less the thought of in any degree losing her. This last feeling even prompted him for a moment to seize her in his arms and hold tight. But he refrained from such an unexampled act.
‘What did Andy think of Hugh’s ideas?’ Ianthe asked. This was the first fresh conversational resource that came into her head.
‘I haven’t asked him. Perhaps it should be Andy that marries Elma.’
Toby had now said something quite as strange and seemingly unprompted as Ianthe had achieved, and he was extremely disconcerted. Why on earth should he offer such a stupid and hostile remark about Andy, whom he had come to be very fond of, to Ianthe, whom he was very fond of too? The implication had almost been that the doctor’s daughter was good enough for the gardener’s boy. At best, Toby realised, it was about the feeblest joke he’d ever made – and that was saying a lot. The truth was that he was becoming envious of Andy.
This perception, although it was decidedly a foggy one, was of powerful effect as well. He told himself that the bloody acceptance house was to blame. There he was all week, hard at work turning useless things called bills into equally useless things called prime bills, while Ianthe and Andy were in the enjoyment of a proper sort of life, Felton life, together. It was true that Ianthe was a Cambridge undergraduate. But that need keep her from home for less than half the year, whereas the Lombard Street bastards judged that three weeks out of fifty-two was a good enough holiday for him.
‘Andy isn’t at all the sort of person who should marry Elma.’ Ianthe made this rejoinder with considerable fire. ‘Or even take her on.’
‘What do you mean – take her on?’ For the first time, Toby felt that Ianthe must really know.
‘Nothing much. And this is rather a silly conversation.’
‘So it is,’ Toby agreed quickly, and took Ianthe by the elbow – which was a perfectly customary thing. ‘Let’s have a knock-up. Just one set.’
So they played tennis for a time – on a court no longer in very good condition, and upon which Andy’s successor had swept up only in his deplorably half-hearted fashion. Toby played very badly. Whether silly or not, this conversation had left him both disturbed and puzzled. Why should there be something ungrateful to him in the thought of Ianthe and his brother enjoying one another’s company? The feeling was almost like jealousy. (Or at least so he supposed – for it was a novel sort of feeling, or one of which he couldn’t remember experiencing more than fleeting twinges, and those probably in his nursery.) Had he really become so fond of Andy that he resented sharing him with anyone? This seemed a shocking idea; it was Narcissus again, resenting a second face peering into that pool. Toby was walking back to the house, companionably enough with Ianthe, when this confused image a little clarified or at least modified itself. And this came about through another image, itself purely and sharply visual. He saw Ianthe and himself walking together. But although the one figure was certainly Ianthe, he was by no means certainly the other. For it was a kind of second self, after all, that he left behind him at Felton every Monday morning when, after an early breakfast, he climbed into the Aston Martin and set off for the City of London.
It will thus be apparent that Mrs Warlow’s theory of the shake-up (adopted by Andrew Auld as the theory of the shoogle) was by no means the figment of an over-ingenious mind. At least in its obscure workings it did accelerate things. And what would have happened at Felton had the young man from Glesgy never found employment there nobody is in a position to say.
XV
Ianthe went back to Cambridge, and life at Felton House settled down for the winter. Andy, in addition to appearing punctually for meals, spent a good deal of time with Mrs Warlow. She had felt it incumbent upon her to take on Ianthe’s role as the discreet purveyor of a liberal education. Andy now knew all about eating asparagus, and if he wasn’t yet quite sound on entering a box at the Opera this seemed unlikely to be of importance in any immediate future. Having thus modified her ideas about educating Toby’s brother, Mrs Warlow gave the subject a good deal of thought, eventually hitting upon the expedient of drawing lessons. Andy proved rather good at this, but not so absorbed in the activity as to fail of attention at the same time to his teacher’s fairly wide-ranging conversation. Mrs Warlow, who was not immune to the satisfactoriness of Andy’s so plainly regarding her as ‘well-preservit’, came to rely on his society a good deal. She could envisage developments at Felton which might well deprive her of this, or even result in Andrew Auld and herself going their several ways. And she had to acknowledge that she would miss him rather a lot. But their confidence in one another had grown marked, and she felt at least that Andy would spring no surprises on her.
Howard Felton in these late-autumn days was more peripatetic than ever, and at the same time given to considerable absence of mind. But as well as matters on the remoter parts of the estate the affairs of Felton House itself were now of much concern to him, and particularly the tiresome business of redecorating the saloon. His sister regarded this as tiresome partly because it was going to cost much more money than he seemed to be aware of, and partly because it brought Elma Loftus into the Felton picture again. Elma had thrown up her job in Harley Street, it seemed, because she had spotted a possible ‘opening’ with a fashionable firm of interior decorators. It looked as if landing them a commission at Felton was the test they were imposing on her, and she turned up at the house on several occasions with a director of the concern. He annoyed Mrs Warlow on the peculiar score that he was possessed of the manners of a gentleman. There was no reason why a house-decorator should not be graced in this way, but Mrs Warlow didn’t like it. Still less did she like a lavishness of aesthetic feeling in him which was only equalled by the lavishness of his proposed application of gold-leaf to what, even in its present faded state, was rather an ornate spectacle.
On these occasions Elma had, moreover, brought her brother Vivian along with her. It appeared that Vivian had overestimated the eagerness of the older universities to accept him into their society, and he was now being coached by the vicar with no very discernible goal in view. Vivian was sulky, but this was no doubt because he was unhappy, and Mrs Warlow judged it much to Andy’s credit that from time to time he gave Vivian a certain amount of his company. Whether he saw anything of Vivian’s sister other than on those occasions upon which she turned up with the man intent upon bedizening Felton House wasn’t clear. He seldom said anything about Elma, and for some time Mrs Warlow didn’t question him. She occasionally felt that, despite their absence of reserve towards one another, there was at least some aspect of Andy’s present feeling that was obscure to her. Being professionally expert in the field of human physiognomy, she once or twice thought to detect something rather grim lurking behind his generally cheerful air. And eventually she decided that cautious exploration was desirable.
‘Andy,’ she asked him one day when they were walking together in the garden, ‘did you have any sort of private conversation with my brother Hugh when you were in Oxford?’
‘Aye, did I. But it wouldn’t have been that private if I hadna’ hurried Toby frae the room. Your brother was for blurting out that Toby should marry Ianthe – and that way produce a kind of Felton heir for Felton, nae doot. And it’s perfectly true. I’m astray about yoursel if you don’t think that.’
‘Certainly I do.’
‘But you know what that learned man doesn’t: that Toby and Ianthe hae to mak their own way to seeing theirsels as something other than brother and sister.’
‘They do, indeed. And which will see it first? Ianthe, to my mind.’
‘I’d think that too. And then she’ll hae to wait, puir lass, for Toby to see it – or a’most see it – afore we get any further on that road. But will your brother Hugh never have told his idea to your brother Howard?’
‘Probably not. And I’m decidedly glad you didn’t let him sudden
ly confront Toby with it.’
‘But he did out wi’ another fact o’ the matter: that his brother may well marry and hae a son. We’ve all of us thought of that I dinna’ doot – or all except Toby.’
‘Of course we have. And what was my brother’s view of it?’
‘He was a’ agin it. He said he’d stop it if he could.’
‘That seems to me distinctly sweeping.’ Mrs Warlow looked seriously at her protégé. (She had come to feel that this was the proper light in which to regard Andy, if one aspect of his interest in her was to be prudently played down.) ‘I can imagine my brother Howard making what all reasonable people would regard as an entirely suitable second marriage. Its consequences might be hard on Toby – but to some extent that is a separate issue.’
‘Mr Felton – the Oxford yin – doesn’t see it quite that way.’ An anxious note had come into Andy’s voice, and he was looking almost warily at this admired woman. ‘An’ he’s a philosopher an’ a’ that.’
This sudden ingenuousness was endearing – or would have been so had not Mrs Warlow suspected that Toby’s brother was not without the power of rather subtly contrived effects.
‘And what,’ she asked, ‘does my brother Hugh dredge up from the depths of his philosophic mind?’
‘He’s a clear-thinking man, your brother Hugh, and if Mr Felton was aiming to marry a douce body of his own age he’d judge it fair enough. But it’s too late for a bairn in a cradle to be displacing Toby with ony kind o’ honesty at all. It’s that that your brother Hugh is saying, and I think he’s richt. Don’t you?’
For a moment Mrs Warlow made no reply. She was aware of Andy as looking at her with an intentness of regard that came rarely to him. She was aware that, for good or ill, Andy saw her as an arbiter. He was a young man of distinctly independent mind, but in that mind he had chosen to invest her with authority. With matters at Felton standing as they did, she was thus landed with a considerable responsibility. And it was no good shirking this.
Andrew and Tobias Page 20
