The Elderbrook Brothers (3 page)

Nancy's voice, however, was soft and confiding. Speaking close to his ear she said: ‘You're having an egg to your breakfast this morning, Felix.' Her copious black hair fell against his cheek.

Porridge, bacon, and an egg—it was a sumptuous feast. The rest were having only porridge and bacon, but Felix, because he was ‘going a journey', required something extra, both to sustain him and to mark the occasion. It was a high and a proud distinction, but there was discomfort in it too. It made him feel important. It made him feel lonely. It made him know, for just that second, that he was the centre of attention, and for a reason that made the fact less gratifying than it would normally have been. He saw that his mother was carefully not looking at him; he saw Faith smiling encouragement from the other side of the table; he became aware of Guy, who sat next to him, eating industriously and saying nothing, and of Matthew who had only a moment ago come in from the yard and made an enigmatic grimace at sight of the unwonted family assembly.

Nancy's remark, though softly spoken, was not lost on the company, as Faith's quick smile showed. It was a smile faintly deprecating, as well as encouraging; for Nancy, unknowingly, had let the cat out of the bag, had directed attention to what her elders had been tacitly resolved to ignore. Their studied endeavour was to be busy and normal; whereas Nancy was normal without study, and had said, lightly and naturally, what happened to be in her mind. Felix did not in fact need their careful protection, nor suffer from Nancy's breach of it. If for a moment he felt sorry for himself, that feeling was provoked not by his own conception of what was in store for him but by this mysterious hint of pain in the family atmosphere. He was not at this moment dismayed by the future, because his guardian angel, or whatever one may choose to call the mysterious regulator that resides in a child's unconsciousness, had for a while cut him off from the future, as from the past. He was insulated in the present moment, was carried along in it, as in a bubble of light, looking neither before nor after.

When breakfast was three parts over, Emily Elderbrook said, getting briskly from her seat: ‘Mind away now, boys—give me some space.'

She gathered up all empty plates within reach and made a stack of them. The two girls joined her in the enterprise. Their training made it impossible for them to sit idle while their mother was on the move.

‘What's to do, Mum?' Nancy asked.

‘As if you didn't know!' said her mother with gentle scolding. Not pausing for an instant in her busyness, she was already spreading butter across the cut surface of the loaf.

Nancy saw that Felix's luncheon sandwiches were in the making.

‘What's he going to have
in
them, Mummy?'

‘Ham and eggs and brussels sprouts,' said Emily Elderbrook, with tart irony. ‘Don't ask so many questions, girl. Run and fetch his things down for him. They're all packed and ready. You'll find the hold-all on the landing. Look sharp now.'

This degree of briskness in Emily was unwonted: it told Faith, for one, that this was no ordinary morning for her mother. She did not need the telling, but it sharpened the edge of what she already knew.

Nancy, darting across the red brick floor, nearly collided with her father.

‘Steady, mare, steady!' His sharp eyes held her with a humorous stare. ‘Where's the hurry, lass? Time enough! Time enough!' Stamping his way towards the breakfast-table he took his stand opposite Felix. The pungent smell of the farmyard came in with him. ‘Well, boy!' He looked across the table at Felix, giving him his characteristic half-fierce half-genial grin. ‘Glad you're going to grammar school, hey?'

Felix did his best to grin back. He was not aware of feeling unhappy, but he was painfully aware of feeling sick. There was a moment of agonized suspense. Then Faith was suddenly
with him, her hands on his, helping him out of his chair.

‘Come along, ducky,' she said. ‘We'll go and see if the paint's dry, shall we?'

‘Oo yes,' answered Felix.

It was almost the first sound he had uttered since breakfast began, and the smile he gave his sister was bright with a shy secret pleasure. For her words had conjured into memory not only the tin trunk with its famous lettering but all the other new excitements of this time: new boots, nightshirts, numerous articles of underwear, and two smart new toothbrushes—two, if you please. But it was the lettering that most delighted him: Faith's lettering, in white enamel, of his name and new address on the black lid of his trunk:
F. Eider brook. Junior School, St Swithins, Keyborough
. She had taken great pains with the inscription, and it was a tremendous success. It would be easy, she had explained, to scrape off the first two letters of
Junior
, and paint in two others, when the glorious day of his elevation to the Senior School should arrive. That would not be for some little while yet, but it was a day to look forward to.

While Faith and Felix went upstairs, to make sure, as she said, that the paint was dry—though she had no doubt of it —their mother continued to make sandwiches for Felix's lunch, which, according to her instructions, he would eat during the last half-hour of his long wait at Byford Junction. The picture of him sitting alone in a bleak waiting-room, with his picnic lunch, his hand luggage (a porter would see to the trunk: she must remember to explain about the tipping), and the comic paper she intended to buy for him at Lutterthorpe if there was a chance, this picture tore her heart to tatters, or would have done had she given it a second glance. With a stubbornly unyielding face she finished her immediate task, then got quickly into outdoor clothes and made her way to the stable-yard, where Matthew, with Guy in attendance, was in process of backing the pony between the shafts of the trap.

‘That's good boys,' she said, ‘
I
'm taking him to the station, tell your father.'

She joined them in harnessing pony to trap, and, when that was done, took the reins from Matthew's gaunt fingers and climbed into the driving seat, the pony moving forward in the same instant.

‘I'll bring her round to the front door,' said Emily, over her shoulder. ‘Run and tell them, Matt.'

IN the eighteen-nineties, well before the coming of the motorcar, Keyborough had the kind of mellow dignity which a later generation, with envy of something lost or with an easygoing contempt for what it had never known, was to call ‘sleepy'. Until the triumphant industrialization of Mercester thirty or forty years earlier, Keyborough had been a place of some consequence; but to-day its cobbled square was the scene of nothing more exciting than a fortnightly market for butter and eggs and fruits in their season. This market square, the heart of Keyborough, could be approached by the Lower High Street from the south and by the Upper High Street running at right angles to it from the west: on the eastern side, roughly parallel to the High Street, lay the road going north to Mercester, twelve miles away, and south-west by many ramifications to the inconceivable remoteness of London, a place which Mercestershire children had read about in their school histories but had no expectation of visiting. Keyborough took itself and its excellence for granted, with a complacency so far from selfconscious that among its inhabitants, more especially of the younger generation, were there those who professed to think Mercester better worth living in; but in general you could find no town more contentedly insular than Keyborough, with its Early English church, its decent seventeenth- and eighteenth-century shops, its two or three large private houses with walled
gardens into which an exuberant or ill-disposed child could throw a stone from the High Street, and, something less than a mile north-west of the clock-tower, the respectably aged grammar school.

St Swithins was a smaller school than many of its kind, and lack of purchasable space prevented its enlargement except at the expense of the headmaster's garden. This meant that so long as the Revd Dan Williams was in command no more than a hundred and fifty boys could be accommodated in the class-rooms of St Swithins, and far fewer in the dormitories. In his opinion these were plenty: at times he felt that the number might be profitably reduced by a hundred and forty-eight, leaving only his two sons, Tom and Stephen, whom he supposed their mother would insist on keeping, and to whose presence he himself had no objection, though the necessity of calling them Williams major and Williams minor in school, and of treating them with rather more than their share of severity, had made him almost forget he was their father. This kind of forgetfulness dated roughly from a moment in his early thirties, not ten years ago, when he first conceived the idea of writing a gigantic history of heresy. He suddenly saw it on his shelves, in seven, in ten, in twenty volumes, calf-bound: a work comparable with Gibbon. Every crank, fanatic, dreamer, misguided mystic, every mortal man who had ever strayed by so much as a yard from the narrow way of Christian orthodoxy, should have his chapter, his paragraph, or his footnote. Mr Williams's eyes grew bright at the thought, and his pulse beat faster. He became in that moment an ardent heresy-hunter, but in a spirit very different from that of the inquisitors of old: he pursued not to condemn but to cherish, not to obliterate false doctrines from the mind of man, but to preserve them, beautiful specimens of human error, in the amber of his prose. But heresy implied an orthodoxy, and orthodoxy—was what? A fixed star or—blessed phrase!—a ‘progressive revelation'? The question led him into trouble, but it was the kind of trouble he enjoyed: a boy ankle-deep in the source of his own
mud-pies was not happier than Dan Williams floundering amid the cross-currents of theology.

Standing at gaze in his garden, he was reminded that his peace was at an end. From beyond the high south wall, upon which the peach and the pear were blossoming, came from time to time the clatter of an arriving cab and the noise of excited young gentlemen returning to captivity. What extraordinary animals, he thought: nothing can quell them! Cane them, detain them, lecture and entreat them: they will submit, gracefully or sullenly: they will listen, willingly or woodenly. But they will not change themselves by one iota. He sighed, for the gentle stubbornness of children sometimes maddened him. The school entrance and the playground were not visible from the garden, but the boys' voices reached him, loud and clear, across the distance that intervened, reminding him that he had other things to do than stare at his beloved salix babylonica, or weeping willow, ancient and benign umbrella of many a flattered senior class of boys. He must now go to his study and receive, one by one, any new boys who might be arriving this Easter term.

The study, situated on the top floor of the headmaster's private quarters, had for the school the effect of a tower-room, which the boys could approach only by way of an iron spiral stair running from the level of the playground up the outside wall of the house. It was an attractive ascent, with j ust enough suggestion of danger and desolation to tickle the fancy of an imaginative child: such as the slim, coltish, large-eared little boy who, under instructions from certain elders, came stamping his way up.

‘Come in,' said Mr Williams.

He sat at his desk, pen in hand, a number of open books spread out in front of him. The assault on the outer door was repeated. It was, he knew, a difficult door to open.

‘Come in, come in, come
in!'
he cried impatiently. ‘Ah!' he said, recovering his good humour; for someone had indeed come in. ‘A new boy, I think?'

‘Yes, sir,' said the new boy.

Already he had heard the headmaster described, by a candid schoolfellow, as a funny little monster, and was prepared to see him so. But, in this moment of introduction, awe prevailed. Mr Williams was the shortest man Felix had ever seen, but because of their relative positions the most awe-inspiring. Here was wisdom and authority, the pride of knowledge and the majesty of punishment. Vast powers were concentrated for Felix in this short square figure, those darkly scrutinizing and heavily browed eyes, the broad hirsute nose, the round brownish face so copiously and vigorously whiskered. He had time to notice the ivory baldness of the pate, the almost monkeylike growth of strong dark hairs on the hands, and the crisp curling hair about the broad temples. He had time to notice these alarming and fascinating aspects of the man whose word was now his law, and he winced under the first impact of that unageing energy, that controlled authoritative voice. But his main preoccupation was still, as it had been all day, the resolve on no account to let anybody see his feelings.

‘And what is your name, my boy?' said the Head kindly, yet speaking with what seemed to the child a quite enormous gravity.

‘Elderbrook, sir.'

‘Ah! Elderbrook!' said Mr Williams. ‘Of course. I remember.' Herein he lied, though with the best intentions. ‘Your father is, er, Mr Elderbrook, er, of …'

If Joe Elderbrook had lived and died a thousand years ago, and had entertained heretical notions about the nature of the Incarnation or the precise constitution of the Holy Trinity, Mr Williams would have known all about him. But as things were he had to wait for Felix to supply him with the name of Upmarden.

‘Upmarden, yes,' agreed the headmaster.

He did in fact now remember Joe Elderbrook, remembered being impressed by the curious force and vigour of the man. No such qualities were to be discerned in the child, who resembled his father only, if at all, in his rustic speech.

‘Well, Elderbrook, I hope you've made up your mind to do your best in everything you undertake here. We have a high tradition to maintain at St Swithins, and if you play the man, as I ‘m sure you want to do, we may yet be as proud of you as we are of some illustrious figures in our past. Keep that thought with you, my boy …'

But when he woke next morning, the first morning away from home in all his ten years, Felix found no such thought in his mind. For one astonished instant he wondered where he was, and before the details of yesterday came back to him, while he was still recalling his mother in the trap waiting to drive him to the station, his brothers and sisters watching with forced smiles from the gate, his father's noisy farewell and abrupt disappearance, his tin trunk being lifted into the trap and made room for, the sparkle of the morning, the warm comfortable smell of harness and pony, the white cloud of the pony's breath going before them, the clattering into the yard of Lutterthorpe station, the getting down, the saying goodbye, his mother's last kisses, waving from the carriage window, the friendliness of the guard who was to ‘keep an eye on him', the landscape flowing past (like time made visible)—while he was still piecing together these small treasures from his memory, the lordly languid voice of a young gentleman at the other end of the dormitory cut into his consciousness.