The Elderbrook Brothers (20 page)

At such reflections he felt the muscles of his face relax in the ghost of a smile; and once, looking up to see whether Faith were observing him, he saw that she too, for the moment, had allowed herself to forget the prevailing sadness. He rejoiced in the sight. It confirmed him in his own resolve to shake off despondency, and it told him, as clearly as any words, that she was anticipating the moment when she would see her children again. He did not ask whether she as correctly interpreted
his
smile, because the question had lost its point: in the excitement of contemplating these new bright prospects, opened up to him by his spiritual revolution, he had lost sight of any need for secrecy. Their common bereavement had drawn him closer to Faith, and had the idea occurred to him he would very likely have taken her some way into his confidence.

A few hours later, in the presence of another and a younger woman, the temptation to confide did indeed present itself: or, if not to confide, at least to drop hints and so make himself an interesting figure: or, yet another alternative, by some means short of confession to provoke talk about Ellen. For he had not been back half an hour in his sister's house before setting out again to visit at Mrs Meldreth's, and it was Kate, dear companionable Kate, who made him welcome. He resisted the small impulse: the occasion was not propitious. It was Kate's first sight of him since his mother's death. There was a moment's embarrassment: the event made a shyness between them. Kate did not speak of it, but she asked him with unusual seriousness how he was, and her dawning blush and downcast look betrayed some confusion.

‘Dear Kate!' he said, touched by her thought for him. ‘Don't worry about me. Tell me the news, every bit of it.'

He refrained, with perverse pleasure, from asking where Ellen was.

‘Well, let me see,' said Kate, brightening. ‘There's nothing
much, I'm afraid. Oh yes there is! Mother's had a lovely quarrel with the Vicar.'

Felix hid impatience under a smile. ‘I don't believe it.'

‘Yes, really, Felix! You don't know Mother when she's roused. “Kate,” she said, “I'm going to give that Vicar a piece of my mind.” And she did too.'

‘Very generous of her,' said Felix. ‘There's a large vacant space for him to put it in, poor old soul. But I can't believe she was really angry.'

‘Angry? They were at it an hour and a half, and she called him Mr Mullion all the time.'

‘Why not? Isn't that his name?'

‘Yes, but he hates to be called by it. He likes to be called Vicar.'

‘I begin to perceive, my dear Kate, that it was a very savage altercation indeed. Was it,' he added teasingly, ‘on a point of doctrine?'

‘It was hassocks, hymn-books, and pew-rents,' said Kate, ‘and the scandalous way the school's run. No, not your school, silly! The village school. Mummy's one of the governors——'

‘Shouldn't it be governess?' Felix interpolated.

‘—and so of course is he. But he's too lazy, she says, to take any interest in it. When she tells him privately what ought to be done he agrees with every word of it and soft-soaps her no end. But in public, at the governors' conference, he invariably rats.'

Felix laughed. ‘Did she tell him so. Did she say: “Mr Mullion, you invariably rat”? I wish I'd been there. Did she?'

‘She was more polite,' Kate admitted, ‘and more deadly.' Her eyes grew bright with reminiscence. ‘I called him Mr Mullion too,' she said joyously, ‘just as he was going.'

‘Oh Kate! What a brutal girl!' But Felix could keep back his question no longer. ‘By the way, how is your dear Aunt Ellen?' he said, in a tone of banter.

‘She's all right. We heard from her this morning. The usual bread-and-butter letter.'

‘You mean she's gone … back?'

‘Yes, the day before yesterday, in a great hurry. I forgot you didn't know.'

‘No. I didn't know,' said Felix bleakly. ‘Was there any special reason?'

‘I think Mr Whoever-it-is, the man she works for, got back from Stockholm sooner than she expected.'

The day before yesterday? That (he said to himself) would be the day my letter arrived, saying I was coming back.

‘Was there any …?' But he could not bring himself to ask if there was any message for him. He left the sentence unfinished.

‘Any what, Felix?'

‘Oh, nothing. Nevermind.' He sat for a while in stunned silence: then remarked, with an effort of cheerfulness: ‘Well, that
is
a piece of news, isn't it!' With these words he rose to his feet. ‘You'll miss her, I expect,' he said thoughtfully. And made his escape.

In the garden of Stanton House his little niece lay in wait for him.

‘Hullo, Mifanwy!'

The child was an entrancing sight, even for his disillusioned eyes.

‘Here's a letter for you,' said Mifanwy. ‘Would you like to see it?'

His sick heart gave a leap. ‘A letter? Where?'

Excitedly, from the folds of her small frock, Mifanwy fished out a piece of square folded paper and handed it to him with grave ceremony. He saw at once that it was one of her own works of art.

He forced himself to ask: ‘Did the postman bring it?'

‘I
am
the postman,' she said severely. ‘Can't you see?'

In form the missive resembled, not a letter, but the simpler kind of greetings card. On the front was inscribed, in block
capitals, with a brush dipped in colour: PLES LOOKIN SID. Obeying this injunction Felix read: NO WOSHING ALOUD INTHER DOLIZ BATHRUM. PLES WOSH INTHER CITCHIN.

So Ellen had sent no message. She had not even answered his letter. He stared miserably at the child's handiwork, a blankness in his mind.

But he became, just in time, aware of its author's eager, sparkling eyes: eyes in which expectancy was already beginning to diminish under the cloud of his unresponsiveness. To avert that catastrophe he smiled at her, man to man.

‘What a nice letter, isn't it?' he said. ‘I wonder who it's from.'

He bent down to let her whisper in his ear: ‘It's from me.' ‘What? From the postman?'

‘I'm not the postman any longer,' said Mifanwy. ‘I'm me now.'

Conversation proceeded on that basis.

ONE evening, a few days later, Dan Williams said: ‘Come and smoke a pipe in the study, Felix, if you're not busy.' The form of words differed only slightly from the one he had used six years ago. Felix had then been a schoolboy in his last term, and Mr Williams had thought to discuss with him the impending metamorphosis, headmaster into brother-in-law, which in the sequel, however, had not been so much as mentioned between them, though it was uppermost in both their minds. Felix, assenting, wondered what was in the wind now, but was past caring. Nothing that Dan had to say could affect his ingrowing misery. Ellen had still not answered his letter. Perhaps she considered her absence a sufficient answer.

‘Sit down, my boy,' said Dan Williams.

It was not what he meant to say. It did not strike the right note. It was, alas, rather what a headmaster might have said
to a member of the school, or to a young master. Felix had been the one and was now the other; but why, thought Dan fretfully, why must that for ever stand between us? Making a vague humming noise to cover his shyness he sat himself down in the leather armchair opposite Felix, on the other side of the empty hearth. It was a sombre room, too dark for Felix's taste, but comfortable and in some sense a refuge. Felix felt secure in it, but not at home. The world was shut out, desire an irrelevance, death a rumour. Blessed relief, this. You could think of the place, if you so chose, as a snug sanctuary in which old Dan lived like a mole, emerging only at intervals to visit his family or discourse on Thucydides to seniors of the school. But the books, while they attracted, also intimidated Felix. They were too many, too grim-looking, too severely methodical in their arrangement. The weight of their learning oppressed him. Laden with scent of upholstery, stale tobacco, and pot pourri, the air was heavy too with the thoughts of dead men: dusty, verbose, polysyllabic. Cunningly they had coffined themselves in these calf-bound volumes, from which, when you opened them, the reedy pompous voices could still be heard, garrulous even in the tomb.

‘Try some of this,' said Dan, throwing his tobacco pouch into Felix's lap.

Obediently, Felix pulled a pipe out of his pocket. He did not much want to smoke, and he did not want to smoke Dan's tobacco, which was too strong for him; but it was easier to acquiesce than to decline. He had a notion that his brother-in-law unconsciously attached some significance to this ritual of smoking together. His thoughts drifted to the days when Roaring Bull and Voice of Thunder, wearing feathered headdresses but looking otherwise remarkably like Felix and Guy Elderbrook, had smoked the pipe of peace after long and savage warfare.

Felix had got used to the headmaster's physical oddity: his short square figure, his blunt face, his ivory pate fringed with wiry curls, and the hairiness of his small brown vigorous hands.
In the thirteen years since that first sight of him he had grown no older in Felix's idea, whereas Felix from being a small boy had become a man. The distance between them grew less every day but would never be gone.

‘You're having a rough time,' Dan Williams remarked suddenly.

‘Oh, I don't know,' Felix said. ‘No worse than anyone else.'

‘Who else, for example?'

Felix answered quickly: ‘Well, Faith, for one.'

‘Faith's all right, I fancy,' said Faith's husband, not without complacency. ‘I don't mean it hasn't been a shock and a grief to her, your mother's death. It has. But Faith has her children to think about. And time will heal the grief, as it always does. Yes,' he continued resolutely, as if meeting a criticism, ‘I'm an old fogey by your standards, so you must allow me a platitude or two. Everything passes, even grief. It's a blessing, but one we're inclined to resent. We'd sooner go on suffering: suffering and agonizing till we die of it. To resign ourselves, to acquiesce, we feel there's something slavish about it, beneath our dignity.'

Felix nodded. ‘Yes.' He wondered how old Dan could know that.

‘And not only in bereavement. There's a finality about death which even the most stubborn of us must recognize. But these other disasters, where a man's vanity is involved, they go on hurting like the deuce, so long as one lets them.'

‘Vanity?' said Felix. ‘What's vanity got to do with it?'

‘Something,' said Dan. ‘Not everything, but something. There's always a bit of personal vanity in everything, if you happen to be my kind of peacock.'

‘We said some cheeky things about you at school, sir, but we never called you that.'

‘P'raps not. But I don't mind telling you, between ourselves my boy, I was quite put out when the governors accepted my resignation from St Swithins. “Gentlemen,” I said, “there
is a place in the world for shorthand and typewriting, but not, so long as I am headmaster, in our school curriculum.” The chairman said he didn't like my attitude, and I at once offered to resign.'

‘So that was it,' said Felix. ‘I've often wondered.'

‘We'd been at loggerheads for some time before that. And I was glad of the chance to get out. Nevertheless—and this is the disgraceful thing—it nettled me that they didn't ask me to stay.'

‘Disgraceful indeed,' said Felix with a grin. ‘It's nice,' he added after a pause, ‘to find you have some human weaknesses.'

‘Did you doubt it?' Dan laughed shortly. He did not pursue that line of thought, but picked up an earlier thread. ‘I'm sorry things aren't working out quite as you want them. If it were Tom now, I should rejoice. To be shaken up a bit would be good for that undeveloped soul of his, unless I'm much mistaken. But you're a different story altogether. You're younger and older, wiser and less knowing. Nothing's going to be very easy for you, Felix. And this business of falling in love, when it doesn't go right, well … that's not easy for anyone.'

After digesting his astonishment Felix said lamely: ‘You seem to know a good deal more than I imagined.'

‘One lives and learns,' said Dan. ‘I wasn't always fifty.'

‘I didn't mean knowledge in general,' Felix explained, unnecessarily. ‘After all, a headmaster is supposed to know a thing or two. But …' He fell silent, then tried again. ‘Has someone been talking about me? Has Faith?'

‘Not a word.'

‘Then how——?'

How, he would have asked, did a bat-eyed old scholar manage to see more of what was going on than younger and more active people with their eyes wide open?

‘Oh, one gets one's little impressions. But don't misunderstand me. I've asked no questions and I'm asking none now.'

‘I know,' said Felix.

He felt the inadequacy of his answer. That bleak statement had to do duty for the bewildering complex of emotions that agitated his grateful, lacerated heart. Yet it was not in truth so bleak, for in that moment a new knowledge had indeed come to him. The last piece, the key to a pattern, had fallen into place, making sense and meaning where there had been nothing but vagueness and confusion. He could not be said to have been seeking the pattern, to have been trying to understand his brother-in-law, his sister's marriage: except as a factor in Faith's happiness he had not concerned himself with the problem, being too much absorbed in himself. But now something had been revealed to him, something of Dan Williams which hitherto only Faith, perhaps, had had eyes for.

‘Not getting what one wants seems such a waste,' said Felix, groping for a thought that haunted and eluded him.

‘A waste, you mean, of mental and spiritual energy,' said Dan, helping him out.

‘Yes. I don't think much of the way the show is run, do you, Dan?'