The Elderbrook Brothers

by Gerald Bullet

  The end, though momently expected, came with dramatic suddenness. At a shout from Pug the three men jumped away towards the house, and the tree went crashing down, the sawn butt pitching violently towards them.

  Pug, with a large red handkerchief, wiped the sweat from his beaming face.

  ‘That’s finished he off, Mr Matthew.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Matthew.

  He sighed. He felt dazed, like a man waking suddenly from a dream. He felt almost that he had taken part in a murder.

  ‘Come inside,’ he said, ‘and have a drop of cider.’

  § 9

  IT was almost the first thing Guy noticed, the absence of the beech. Weary of hinting and arguing with a husband whose trick of charming away disagreement and saying nothing to the point gave him an unfair advantage, Nora had at last taken the matter into her own hands, started a secret correspondence with her sister-in-law Ann, and arranged a family visit without even consulting him. It was an audacious step and she trembled as she took it, but she was resolved to be a mystery no longer, and to tolerate none. Precariously gay she confronted Guy with an ultimatum. She was going, she said, on a visit to Upmarden, and she was taking Joey with her. Guy could come or not, as he pleased. Guy laughed. To have done anything else would have made him look ridiculous, a medicine he had no taste for. But he realized, with creditable quickness, that he couldn’t laugh himself out of the fix she had put him in. If he gave way she would have won a plain victory and established an awkward precedent. But if he pompously refused his consent or churlishly denied her his company, what then? She would set off without either, he saw it in her eye, and he would be left to his lonely sulks and become a laughing-stock in the family. Moreover, though her impudence nettled him, he could not help admiring it. There was something stimulating, provocative, in finding that his doting little wife had so much devil in her. So, just in time, he had the presence of mind to laugh; and then, with an air of high good humour, he took possession of her plan, modified it, made it his own. They would run down in the car, he said, just he and she. Not Joey: on this point he was firm. Joey was too young for such escapades. Joey would be an unnecessary complication. And Mrs Macfarlane would like nothing better than to have Joey all to herself for a day or two.

  So he had ordained, and so it was. And almost the first change he noticed at Upmarden, after all these years, was the absence of the old beech at the back.

  ‘You’ve cut him down, Matthew! What was the idea?’

  ‘He was too near,’ said Matthew. ‘He cast a shadow.’

  ‘What! On the blind side of the house!’

  ‘Come, old boy, not quite! There’s one bedroom.’ He pointed. ‘Faith’s, if you remember.’

  ‘Yes, but who sleeps there? Only the servant.’

  ‘It darkened the whole place somehow,’ said Matthew. ‘It got on my nerves.’

  Guy, having returned to his old home in triumph, however belatedly, was inclined to be fretful over even the smallest change.

  ‘Place isn’t quite the same, you know, without it.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ said Matthew cheerfully. ‘That’s just the idea.’

  Guy could see that this elder brother of his had become very set in his ideas, which was only to be expected in a man stuck away here in the country, surrounded by cattle and clodhoppers, and with nothing of interest happening from one year’s end to another. Hardening of the mental arteries, he reflected sagaciously. But he liked old Matthew; good old sort; wasn’t his fault that he was a bit dull.

  ‘Anything for a change, eh, Matt? Well, I sympathize there. I daresay even you find this sort of life a bit slow sometimes.’

  ‘It can’t be too slow for me,’ said Matthew. ‘And there’s always something happening, you know.’

  Guy cocked a quizzical eye at him. ‘Such as?’

  ‘Seedtime and harvest,’ said Matthew, ‘and what comes between.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Guy. ‘The primal sanities. I’m all for them, you know. And the quiet!’ A note of unction crept into his voice. It became the voice of a man trying to sell something. ‘I can’t tell you what it means to me, after the rush and turmoil of one’s official life. Rural England. The England we fought for. But’—he smiled winningly—‘you must admit you don’t get much excitement down here.’

  ‘Excitement?’ said Matthew. He smiled. In his strange sad way he seemed almost amused. ‘Well, no. We don’t get excitement, it’s true.’ The smile died away: the irony was too gross. ‘This is the first taste of it we’ve had for years,’ he said coolly.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Your visit, and meeting your wife. We quite thought you’d forgotten our existence.’

  ‘Not a bit of it, old chap!’ Guy was not precisely plump, but his figure had filled out to prosperous, middle-aged dimensions, and his new semi-public manner, at once weighty and benevolent, had the effect of a certain portliness. ‘I often thought of you good people down here. There’s old Matthew, I thought, working away on the farm. Thank God he’s safe out of it all, I used to say. Doing dashed good work too, growing the food which we, as a nation at war, so sorely need. We each had our part to play in the struggle, Matt, and yours was one of the most vital of all contributions to victory: we at the Ministry never failed to recognize that, you know. I only hope they made it worth your while?’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ said Matthew. ‘The Government took a wonderful interest in our welfare when they wanted to make use of us. But it won’t last long. You’ll see. Half of them didn’t know there was such a thing as farming, before the war. They thought milk was made in bottles.’

  ‘Splendid!’ said Guy, who except in the way of business seldom listened to anyone below the rank of Cabinet Minister. ‘A square deal for all, and everyone pulling his weight: that was our motto. I suppose you heard they’d given me the O.B.E.?’

  ‘The what? Oh, did they? Why? … I mean,’ said Matthew hurriedly, ‘that’s jolly good, isn’t it?’

  Extraordinary, thought Guy, how Matthew had aged. Didn’t seem to be able to grasp what was said to him. Too much shut up in himself, poor old chap.

  But in spite of this and other little set-backs Guy enormously enjoyed this visit to Upmarden, and made it his business to see that others enjoyed it. His energy and enthusiasm were boundless, his benevolence all-embracing. With the single exception of the felled beech, which he continued to lament at intervals, he praised everything and everyone he saw, and on a flattering note of envy of those who had the good fortune, as he had not, to see them every day. He had much to say, too, about the grand new house he was building for himself, in a ‘good’ neighbourhood, at just the right distance from the metropolis: the work went all too slowly, and it was going to cost a pretty penny, but there it was, one had to be patient these days, he’d engaged the best architect in town (‘You must have seen his name in the papers, Matt!’), and when the place was finished he fancied it would be very suitable, very suitable indeed. ‘A man in my position,’ he said … and left it at that. The one small fly in his rich unadulterated ointment was Mrs Macfarlane, who could not be abandoned to the world and perhaps would hardly fit into the new picture so conveniently as into the old: he did not, however, publish this thought, nor give voice to his secret compensatory satisfaction in having during these past years been of use and comfort to Charlie’s mother.

  Next day Guy won all hearts, if any still resisted him, by insisting that he should run over in the car to Stanton, and fetch Felix back. It was a mere seventy-five miles each way: his little bus would do it in no time. Felix could allow himself only one night away from his parish, at most; and, Mr Mullion being in a tachety humour as usual, he doubted whether he ought to do even that; but Guy’s imperious gusto carried the day.

  It was the first time the three brothers had been under the same roof since the day of their father’s funeral. They were all warmly conscious of something which for years they had been too busy, too self-absorbed, too much distrac
ted by care or ambition to remember. Even Guy forgot his greatness. Even Matthew found himself roaring with laughter in the intoxication of finding himself a boy among boys again. Sundry chickens had been sacrificed on the altar of family reunion; the women, transformed by excitement into demons of energy, moved busily from kitchen to dining-room, from dining-room to kitchen, saying ‘Get out of my way, do!’; Guy and Felix, secretly, with the air of conspirators, unloaded bottles of wine from the back of the car, to return to the house with bulging pockets, looking transparently mysterious; and as daylight waned, and the curtains were drawn, and the time of feasting grew nearer, the glow of good fellowship, the sense of old times regained and continued, filled all hearts with its light and warmth.

  § 10

  WHEN the feast was at its height, and everyone merry, Felix with unwonted enterprise proposed a toast.

  ‘The children!’ he said, raising his glass.

  ‘What children, old chap?’ Guy asked.

  Felix stared back at him with mock sternness. ‘My nephew Joey for one, whom some day I’m hoping to be allowed to see.’

  ‘Splendid!’ cried Guy. ‘Terrific idea!’ The puzzle remained, however. ‘But he’s child, you know, not children. Where are the others? Of course I don’t know how many you’ve got, you sly dog.’

  ‘Well, let’s drink to them,’ Ann suggested, ‘however many there are.’

  Matthew said: ‘We’ll rise for this one.’

  They rose. They clinked glasses. They drank.

  ‘The children!’

  ‘The children!’

  ‘Born and unborn,’ said Matthew, glancing towards Felix.

  When the others sat down again Guy was found to be still standing.

  ‘Well, ladies and gentlemen, I don’t want to make a speech. That’s Felix’s job. But I’d like to say one thing. These children of ours (laughter) born and unborn,, as old Matthew so aptly puts it (renewed laughter) all joking apart though, the children of the new generation have every prospect of a better life than their fathers have had. Some of you may remember what my old chief, Lord Vogue, said on the first anniversary of Armistice Day, nearly a year ago.’

  ‘Frankly, old boy, we don’t.’ Matthew was unaccustomed to wine.

  ‘Well, I do,’ said Guy. ‘And not unnaturally, since I wrote it for him. We have fought the good fight, he said. We have’ finished the race. We have made the world safe for democracy. Difficulties may lie ahead’—Guy’s voice deepened to a solemn organ note: it was the voice of Lord Vogue himself, the voice of an England harassed by war and modest in victory—‘but they are difficulties which we in our new-found comradeship, of all kinds and classes, will face and solve together, shoulder to shoulder. We stand on the threshold of a new and glorious era, a world at peace, a world from which, please God, the grim spectre of war has been banished for ever. Our children and our children’s children will live their lives out under a clear sky, and their hands will build for themselves and for England a future worthy of her great past.’

  Guy sat down, entranced with his eloquence. He looked round to see how they were taking it. They were taking it well. Only Nora looked a little ill at ease. In Ann’s eyes there were tears. The men gazed thoughtfully at their platefuls of dismembered chicken. Felix, with Kate in mind, thanked God for the League of Nations. And the heart of Matthew, remembering Caleb, suddenly brimmed with joy. The date was November 1920. Caleb was five months old.

  THE END

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

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  Copyright © Gerald Bullett

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  ISBN: 9781448204014

  eISBN: 9781448203420

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