Andrew and Tobias

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘You can just see they sarsen stones still,’ Andy said. ‘Stukeley’s Folly, but put up by as daft a Felton as there can have been. Torquil Felton Esquire of Felton House, Felton.’

  ‘You’d be bound to be daft yourself if they’d called you Torquil. It’s no sort of name at all.’

  Toby and Andy had fallen into the habit of sometimes making fun of Feltons of the more antique sort; it was a kind of reminding one another that they were not Feltons, but belonged to some other gang altogether: notional ancestors to whom their major loyalty was due. They even invented absurd adventures for Feltons that had never been: a childish amusement at which the better-informed Toby had excelled at first, but at which Andy had rapidly caught him up. But it was something else that happened now.

  ‘I raither fancy yon wee place,’ Andy said, pointing a few yards ahead and abandoning received standard English. ‘It’s a guid hidey-hole.’

  ‘What do you mean – a hidey-hole?’ Toby wasn’t quite attending.

  ‘Snug room for twa, and a bit o’ threshing oot, foreby. An’ no chance for a peeping Tom for nigh a mile aroond. Only a cauld wind might tickle your doup a bit, gin your breeks were doon.’

  ‘Andy!’ Andy’s brother was staring in horror at the utterly recognisable hollow in the turf.

  ‘You might ca’ it a love-nest,’ Andy said composedly.

  ‘I don’t—’ But there was no sense in saying ‘I don’t understand’. Toby did understand. ‘She brought you here?’

  ‘Aye, did she.’

  ‘And—?’

  ‘Aye, for sure.’

  ‘Elma let you have her—here?’

  ‘Christ, Toby, the puir lass couldna’ help hersel. It’s how she’s like. The same place, and a’most the same man. A’most the same prick, yet yin she’d never had touch o’. She couldna’ resist – her nature being a wee bit depravit that way, the puir dunty.’ Andy paused for a moment. ‘Even,’ he added thoughtfully and with obscure satisfaction, ‘although it was a richt daft risk to take.’

  ‘It was only here?’ Toby asked, pointing at the love-nest (or lair) in his turn. What totally confused him was the deliberation with which Andy had confronted him with it.

  ‘Och, no. Ither places too.’

  ‘And you enjoyed it?’

  ‘Weel, she’s no bad. She’s no bad at a’.’

  ‘I think it’s disgusting.’

  ‘I’ll no say there wasna’ an element tae it o’ poking for poking’s sake – which is what you’d ended wi’ with Elma yoursel, Toby. But I thocht, you see, we’d better get her clear in our heids. And no’ being gentry – public hoose, ye ken, and no’ public school – I dinna mind kissing and telling. Or telling my ain brither, onyway.’

  ‘I don’t know how you could—’ Abruptly, Toby fell silent. It had come to him that he was on the brink of quite unforgivable dishonesty. For in his heart (as he had half-confessed to Andy) something had transformed itself, and as one consequence his brother having had his breeks down with Elma Loftus troubled him no more than he’d have minded his absentmindedly using his tooth-brush. ‘We’d better be getting home,’ he said. ‘And of course I don’t care where you misconduct yourself with wenches, randy Andy Auld.’

  ‘Then that’s fine.’

  So they retraced their path in a manner as companionable as before. But Toby remained puzzled. Andy must know that he was now as safe as houses from Elma, anyway. So why expose her?

  The pleasingly equivocal character of this expression caused him, much to Andy’s surprise, to give a sudden shout of laughter. And then he asked a serious question.

  ‘Andy, why have you told me this? You must have known already that I’m quite, quite finished with Elma.’

  ‘We should hae no secrets the yin frae the other.’ Andy paused on this explanation for a moment. ‘Although there may be an exception now and then.’

  With this Toby had to be content. It wasn’t difficult, since his thoughts were tending to be far away – absorbed in a wholly different matter.

  With the two young men out of the way for the afternoon Mrs Warlow had been attempting a cautious exploration of her brother’s mind. She found that her concern was less with the direction than with the pace of that mind’s moving. There was a good deal of obstinacy in Howard’s make-up, although it surfaced only on comparatively rare occasions. She had learnt to read the signs of his being in such a mood. Some of them were trivial and indeed almost ludicrous. He had, for example, acquired over the years a certain number of neck-ties and cravats and scarves so injudiciously chosen as to have attracted the explicit censure of both Ianthe and herself. There was also an ancient tweed jacket, admirably tailored and in a bold checked pattern perfectly proper for a country gentleman to wear, which was yet so mysteriously and absolutely wrong that Ianthe declared it made her father look like a decayed bookie. All these garments, although they had often been sternly denounced as fit only for the annual Church Sale, were cherished by Howard Felton, and donned from time to time as a perhaps unconscious symbol of an intransigent frame of mind. He was wearing one of the ties today.

  It annoyed Mrs Warlow to have to take account of so grotesquely small a portent of change. Of the change itself she no longer had any doubt. Howard was proposing to make Elma Loftus mistress of Felton House. He might even yet, of course, change his mind. He was given to changing his mind. Or again, he might simply put off so definitive a step in his familiar dilatory fashion – and follow this up by putting it off a second time and a third. But to bank on this was to fail to reckon with Elma, and also with Howard’s own countervailing sporadic impulse to precipitate action. The most immediate headache was here. Howard might rev up at any moment and shoot past the fatal point of no return. Mrs Warlow (who was in some danger of thinking rather wildly of the whole thing) even imagined a kind of elopement on her brother’s part. He would simply prove to have vanished one morning, leaving a note transfixed to a pin-cushion.

  Thus confronting the present horror of the time, Mrs Warlow reviewed various desperate expedients. She might tackle Howard herself and tell him he was an old fool. But, however she wrapped up the message, just that was what the message would be, and it was only too likely that the effort would be counter-productive. Even if her brother were not antagonised, he would start telling her (in his best vein of universal benevolence) that Elma was as charming as she was virtuous, terribly well up in the arts and so forth and in Felton history as well, and that her parents were decent and unassuming folk who would in no way make a nuisance of themselves.

  The decent and unassuming folk were Mrs Warlow’s next thought. She would call on Dr and Mrs Loftus and represent to them the extreme unsuitability and impropriety of the projected match. But this would be to behave like some haughty female patrician in an early-nineteenth century novel, and she doubted whether she could at all convincingly sustain the role. It wouldn’t be any good, anyway. A more prudent course appeared to be to seek the support of her younger brother. The Warden had revealed himself as very distinctly Toby’s man, and would be absolutely opposed to Howard’s marrying even a much more eligible bride than Elma; he would frown on the idea even were that bride securely past child-bearing age. Unfortunately Howard was much more given to seeking his clever Oxford brother’s advice than to accepting it. She couldn’t altogether blame him here, since Hugh had always annoyed her a good deal. Moreover, Mercia would butt in, and that would be intolerable.

  Thus hither and thither dividing the swift mind, Grace Warlow had seen the afternoon go by in vain. At half-past four she had presided over Howard’s cup of tea without making any headway in her problem. She sought to divine his intentions without prompting him to any explicit statement of them, since any such statement must be one more step on the road to absolute commitment. This proving a technical impossibility, she prudently withdrew to her customary window-seat and a particularly boring piece of embroidery dictated to her by a tasteless busybody who was organising the replacement of church
hassocks. Howard, much more contentedly, applied himself to the local weekly paper. This rag, which reported in terms of titanic struggle the current squabbles on the rural district council, and added to this a generous pictorial record of the weddings of plebeian persons, the activities of Boy Scouts, and an occasional extreme dotard waving a telegram from the Queen, Howard invariably read conscientiously from the first page to the last, since he believed that it was among his duties to keep in touch, as he expressed it, ‘with all that sort of thing’.

  Tiresomely circumstanced in this fashion, Mrs Warlow felt her tendency to irritability grow. She told herself that she was not in her true element at Felton, that Howard should be let do as he pleased, that Divine Providence had no duty to see to it that Tobias Felton became a landowner, that sub specie aeternitatis the succession to Felton was precisely as important as the exorbitant water-rates and disputed rights of way upon which Howard was instructing himself at the other end of the room. Then she glanced through the window and saw Toby and Andy returning up the drive. They were coming along at the double, each in turn kicking ahead of them an empty tin which they must have come upon by the roadside. Regardless of their doom – Mrs Warlow told herself – the little victims play! Only there wasn’t any doom – or, if there was, it lay inscrutably in the future, and had nothing to do with the elderly proprietor of Felton House kidding himself that he was discharging a duty to the line of the Feltons by treating himself to a chaste virgin (as he must conceive Elma to be) in bed.

  These thoughts didn’t at all affect Mrs Warlow’s sense that something must be done. She glanced again at the two young men now nearing the house, and considered them in turn as likely allies. Andy was already in a substantial sense her ally. The main crisis of the moment they hadn’t specifically discussed, but she now realised that it had been in Andy’s thought as well as her own. Something he had said – she couldn’t recall quite what – had hinted that the possibility of precisely the present disaster had been in his mind. And Andy Auld was the more effective of the brothers. Mrs Warlow had given up the notion that identical twins must be identical in the weight they pull. Andy, however much he was now on the verges of affluence on the strength of the sweetie-shop auntie, had hoed a harder row than Toby. He was harder. One could even imagine him exercising a ruthlessness that Toby would consider it not quite nice to command. But it was true, too, that Andy, despite his acceptance and domestication at Felton, enjoyed or suffered no such standing in the affair as did his brother.

  So what about Toby himself? Mrs Warlow saw that Toby couldn’t on his honour interpose in the matter. Were he to reveal that he had been where Howard proposed to be, denouncing Elma Loftus as a kind of demi-semi-fallen woman, unfit to be Felton’s chatelaine, he would thereby be acting directly in his own material interest. Mrs Warlow knew very well that there was simply no road that way. Toby’s lips would (as novelists say) be sealed. The outrageous thing would happen and he would keep honourably mum.

  ‘They’re back from their walk,’ Mrs Warlow called out to her brother across the room.

  ‘Toby and Andy? I expect they’ve had a very good tramp, and will want their tea.’ Howard said this with satisfaction but while scarcely looking up from his newspaper. A moment later however he added (obscurely, it might have been felt), ‘Oh, by the way, that reminds me, Grace. I wonder if you’d walk over to the Mill House one day? Tarling seems to think there will be difficulty in fitting in another bathroom. And we must have that – for Motley’s brother, you know, if he cares to have the place. He’ll want a guest or two from time to time, no doubt. And one can’t very well ask guests to share one’s bathroom, eh? Not as these things are nowadays.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ Howard – Mrs Warlow thought with sudden extreme impatience – was actually thinking to salve his conscience by awarding two brothers in their earliest twenties a bathroom apiece – as one might conceivably feel it incumbent upon one to do for a couple of maiden aunts known not to get on too well together.

  XVII

  The final crisis proved, very blessedly, to be an entirely private affair. This was a matter partly of luck and partly of Andy’s sagacity. Andy’s thinking was seldom—how could it have been?—of a very sophisticated sort. When he read a book it wasn’t one aspiring to the finer subtleties of psychological fiction; it was commonly about James Bond and people of that kind. His imagination therefore tended to frame things for him in terms of broad effects. When he realised, as he had now come to do, that at Felton the ball had been lobbed decidedly into his own court and that if he didn’t take a vigorous swipe at it nobody else was likely to do so until time ran out – when Andy realised this it was his natural instinct to envisage a grand confrontation scene as in the last few minutes of a movie. He was even disappointed that Ianthe wasn’t at home, so that she could applaud from the front row of the more expensive seats. And he might actually have moved in this disastrous direction if he hadn’t – quite by chance and later that Saturday evening – come upon Howard Felton carrying the champagne.

  It was a magnum bottle of champagne, an object which had never previously come under Andy’s close observation. So Andy stared at the bottle before he looked at its bearer – but when he did thus look this became a matter, if very briefly, of a stare too. It was clear that Howard had simply descended to the wine cellar (which was under the wing of the house in which Andy’s quarters lay) and there possessed himself of this inconsiderable if fairly costly portion of his own property. He bore, however, what could only be characterised as a detected appearance – much as might (although Andy didn’t think of this) a club servant who has been surprised by the secretary misappropriating what is proper only for the consumption of the members. Could Howard have taken to the vice of secret tippling? The magnitude of the magnum rendered this an improbable explanation of the perplexing spectacle. Moreover Howard in addition to being oddly nervous was curiously excited, which isn’t the same thing. Andy had remarked this earlier in the evening. While he and Toby were still having their belated tea Howard had withdrawn to his study, and a little later Andy, passing that way, had chanced just to hear the murmur of a telephone conversation. Since then the proprietor of Felton House had been wandering round in a perceptibly agitated manner. But, if agitated, he was damned pleased with himself as well. Andy was now reflecting – and to some purpose – on this when Howard spoke.

  ‘Oh, Toby,’ Howard said, ‘—Andy, I mean, I beg your pardon—have you seen The Times?’

  ‘Och, I dinna’ see The Times.’

  ‘I don’t mean that. Do you know where they’ve put today’s Times? I want their telephone number. They give it on the last page.’

  ‘I think your sister will have put it in the library.’ Christ, Andy said to himself, he’s fixed it up on the telephone with her and now he’s for getting it into the newspaper. And he’s going to make us drink that bloody stuff at dinner to celebrate. Aloud, however, Andy asked, ‘Shall I fetch it for you?’

  ‘No, no – I’ll go along there myself.’ Somewhat indecisively, Howard put the magnum down on a side-table in the corridor and hurried off. With no indecision whatever, Andy followed him. And at the library door he said politely, ‘May I have a word with you, sir?’ and followed Howard into the room.

  It now seemed to Andy that matters were, perhaps, falling out rather well. What wasn’t wanted, he was coming to see, was too many people coming to know too much. And this would inevitably happen if there was a row – or rather if there was a row extending beyond the walls of this gloomy book-filled room. That he had been rather hankering after such a show-down now struck him as extremely stupid. He had a bomb in his pocket, but an opportunity for quiet diplomacy seemed to be the first thing. And here it was.

  ‘Would I be right in thinking’—he asked, still very politely, and in what he called to Toby his best BBC—’that you and Miss Loftus have the thought of getting married?’

  ‘Yes, certainly. Certainly.’ Howard had swung round and was
staring at Andy in a way that Andy felt to call for analysis. Howard was startled, for one thing, and rather childishly vexed that his big moment of surprise, champagne and all, had been short-circuited in this way. And, for another thing, Howard continued as confident and pleased with himself as Punch. And for a third (and here Andy saw the point of crisis) he was extremely angry. Although he wasn’t perhaps going to say so, he considered Andy’s question as a monstrous impertinence. Here in fact was what Toby called the class thing, lashing its tail like mad. It became instantly clear to Andy that he wasn’t for a moment going to be allowed to reason with Howard Felton. Quiet diplomacy was out.

  ‘An’ do ye mind if I speer anither thing?’ Andy had abruptly dropped the BBC. ‘Just when wad this graund waddin’ be like tae come aboot?’

  There was a moment’s silence, during which Andy thought that he was going to be ordered out of the library. But its owner controlled himself.

  ‘Quite soon, if you must know. Perhaps in two or three months’ time.’

  ‘That’s fine. It wadna’ be sae guid if it were the morrow or the day after, Mr Felton. For then any man-chiel Elma bore tae be your heir wad be as like to be mine as yours, puir bairn. Mair like, mebby – your ain years considered, sir. But no’ Toby’s. Toby’s turn in Elma’s bed is lang syne ower.’