It was true that during these weeks Toby was taking an increasingly poor view of Lombard Street. He blamed this on Elma. He blamed it, just as crudely as he could, on his not having Elma to hop into bed with when he felt disposed. At the same time he knew himself to be enormously relieved that he wasn’t going to find himself married to Elma. That idea had been an awful muddle. And it belonged inside a whole area of muddle. He had dreams in which he found himself mysteriously in the wrong street (although it didn’t seem to be Lombard Street), and got himself in such a panic over his inability to find the right one that he woke up in the middle of a singularly useless sexual exercise. He was ashamed of this regressive condition, and he was also ashamed of his new feelings about his job. He disliked the people he worked beside – particularly the middling-senior ones, with their satisfied air of knowing how to ‘handle’ clients in brisk, confident, spuriously cordial telephone conversations. It was quite shocking (he told himself in a weirdly archaic way) that chaps with the air of gentlemen should have taken to scooping a living out of this money-grubbing jungle. He wished he’d gone into the army, even if it meant rubbing shoulders with brainless ticks like Elma’s brother. It was something that lots of Feltons had done for generations; that his own true ancestors – quite conceivably and whoever they were – had done too. There wouldn’t have been much of a living in it, but he knew very well that Howard – although he was revealing himself as of so inconstant a mind – wouldn’t dream of leaving him without a good many useful pennies in his pocket. For that matter, Howard had tipped a hefty dollop of them into Lombard Street. And it was this that now made his own regrets too late and in vain. He hadn’t a clue as to whether all or any of that money would be recoverable if he feebly chickened out of the dreary hole. In fact, he was bloody well trapped.
Things sometimes weren’t much better when he went home. What he was liable to collide with now was not Andy on top of a ladder but Andy in a Land Rover going about some sensible task. He believed himself to have come to hate the Aston Martin; to feel himself a proper Charley in it. Quite often in the City nowadays he found himself having a drink with a contemporary to whom an aunt had given something like a Rolls as a twenty-firster. All that sort of affluence was quite disgusting, Toby thought.
He took to envying Andy, to asking himself why the hell he hadn’t himself got into that Land Rover first. But equally he took to largely admiring Andy. There was something almost comical about it. Whether he was older or younger than Andy nobody would ever know. Twins were not, as he’d once dimly imagined, born simultaneously; at school he’d known a boy who was going to be an earl because he’d come into the world a few minutes before somebody else out of the same womb. But what he found himself occasionally feeling now was that he was Andy’s younger brother in a quite definite way. He didn’t resent this. In fact, it was perfectly clear to him that he was more bound to Andy than he’d ever been or would ever be to any other male person.
But this in turn didn’t prevent his being jealous of Andy as well. This was a very obscure feeling, but he did know that Ianthe was near the centre of it – and even that it would abate when Ianthe was back at Cambridge with her Mycenaeans or whoever they were. Toby, who was not devoid of a seriously inquiring mind, tried to think this out. He supposed that such jealousies generate themselves among siblings too frequently to be regarded as morbid or censurable. And Ianthe was unique. She was, that was to say, the one woman in the world who could occasion that sort of jealousy and no other between Andy and himself, since she was Andy’s sister precisely in the sense and degree that he was. Of course, he had himself been longer in the role. But this didn’t alter the basic fact.
Toby’s thought tended to break off here in what was not perhaps a particularly impressive fashion intellectually regarded. Nor did it clarify itself further when he was actually at home. Although there was now this indefinable awkwardness at Felton, its weekends held various agreeable distractions as well. Andy, far from hogging Ianthe, appeared a good deal disposed to masculine society and masculine rural pursuits. Surprisingly, it turned out that he could sit a horse, and he and Toby went riding on the downs. Then it proved that he could sit a horse rather better than Toby, and when cubbing started they pursued this mystery together on three successive Saturdays. To have a brother to go fox-hunting with seemed to Toby a very great happiness indeed, and at dinner he was inclined to make boring conversation about drawing this covert and that. Howard had never hunted, neither had Ianthe, and Mrs Warlow held absurd views about kindness to animals. Andy, who was coming to find amusement in polite behaviour, had to take on the job of introducing topics of more interest to the ladies. Howard Felton was rather silent during these weeks, whether at table or elsewhere; he went for his long tramps as usual, but seldom had anything much to report on returning from them. He had never said another word to anybody about the Mill House. But Andy reported Mr Tarling as having received instructions to effect various repairs there. It seemed that something called ‘Africanisation’ was bringing a brother of Colonel Motley’s home from an outpost of empire, and that there was a possibility he might like to rent the place.
Toby knew that Colonel Motley did have a brother in the Colonial Service, which during these years was certainly in process of packing up. But he found himself quite unable to believe that the chap was booking into Felton as suggested. His own scepticism here hurt Toby very much, and he became convinced that his first bizarre suspicion had been well in the target area. Things really had come unstuck at Felton as a result of Andy’s arrival. Despite the fact that Howard liked Andy – and there could be no doubt about that – he had been bumped into feeling that Felton ought not to be a Foundling Hospital. It was Feltons who ought to be at Felton; and that, in present circumstances, meant just his sister Grace and nobody else. Andy would be treated handsomely. Toby himself would be treated handsomely. But that was it.
This thought took Toby Felton so far down a devastating path that it was perhaps uncommonly odd it didn’t take him further. He was in a state of considerable gloom about it all when his uncle’s invitation arrived. It was an annual invitation, although it varied a little in date and character from year to year. The first occasion had been the worst. It had come during Toby’s earliest days in the sixth form of his public school, and before he had ever been inside an Oxford or Cambridge college even for an entrance examination. But the Warden’s summons had to be obeyed. Toby had been obliged to get into his dinner-jacket, take a bus to Oxford, and dine at a high table among about twenty dons, nearly all of whom felt they must have a word with Hugh’s nephew in the course of the evening. It had been the occasion upon which Toby had taken his dislike to port.
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 absolutely 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 and 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.
‘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.’