The Sons of Adam (5 page)

From that point on, events ran a hideously predictable course.

Sir Adam, unable to put Guy’s comments out of mind, decided to write in confidence to his London stockbroker, asking him – discreetly – to try to gauge whether there was any value in the Persian concession. Sir Adam told Guy that he had done as much. Guy let a few days pass, then told Tom.

Angrier than he’d ever been in his life, Tom flew to Sir Adam.

‘Uncle?’

‘Tommy! Hello there!’

‘What’s this about the concession?’

Sir Adam liked and admired Tom. The boy had pluck, doggedness, flair and passion. But, in moments of fury, he could also be rude, even violently rude. Sir Adam frowned.

‘What’s what?’ Sir Adam’s voice should have sent a warning, but Tom was unstoppable.

‘What are you doing with my concession?’

‘It’s not your concession, Tom. It’s in my name as your guardian.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘What makes you think I’m doing anything at all?’

‘Guy.’

Sir Adam answered slowly, trying to keep his calm. He nodded. ‘At Guy’s suggestion, which was a good one, I am taking steps to discover if the concession has marketable value. It may well do, seeing as D’Arcy seems on the verge of a major discovery in a region not so very far from our own patch.’

‘
My
patch.
My
concession.’

Then Sir Adam got angry. Tom’s impertinence was too much.

‘It is not your concession, Tom, nor is anything else for that matter, unless and until I damned well give it to you.’

‘You did give it. You said.’

‘I said it was a fine patch of land and I hoped you’d have fun dreaming about it. The idea that it
might
come to be yours – might
one day
come to be yours – arose when I believed the property in question to be without value.’

Tom almost staggered backwards. He crashed back against a mahogany sideboard.

‘You gave it to me because you thought it was worth nothing?’ Tom half laughed to himself. ‘And you’ve taken it back, at Guy’s suggestion?’ He blinked and looked down at the sideboard, where there stood a vase and, next to it, a framed photograph of the family: Sir Adam, Pamela, Guy, Tom, Alan. ‘Thank you, Uncle. I understand.’

He nodded once as though confirming something to himself, then swept his hand along the sideboard, knocking the photo to the floor. Almost by accident, he also caught the vase and toppled that too. The blue and white china shattered with a hollow boom and littered the floor with its wreckage.

Tom stared briefly and unemotionally at the mess, before walking quickly out of the room.

Alan paused at the door to the seed shed.

The building was invisible from the big house and the nearest gardeners were over the far side of the kitchen garden. Alan watched them go about their business, until he was sure that none of them was watching. Then he quickly slipped the catch and entered.

The wooden-built shed was about twenty-five feet long by only eight wide, with a line of windows running down the south side. Now, with winter ending, the workbenches were crammed with trays of compost, ready for the March sowing. The shed had a warm smell of earth and wood and growth and sunlight. A couple of mice scuttled away as Alan closed the door. Apart from the mice, there was total silence inside the shed. Once again, Alan checked he hadn’t been seen, then he raised his arms to one of the roof joists and swung himself up.

The roof space was narrow and only two and a half foot high at its highest. Boards lay loosely along the joists. Apart from some cobwebs and some rusty old garden tools, there was nothing up there. Nothing except Tom.

Alan squirmed forwards to join his twin.

‘Hello,’ said Tom.

Alan produced a paper packet containing bread, ham and cheese. ‘I’ve got apples in my pocket,’ he said.

Tom took the gift in silence. His eye asked a question of Alan and, without needing any further explanation, Alan answered it.

‘There’s an awful fuss,’ he said. ‘They’re looking for you everywhere. Everyone’s sure you’ve gone to your dad’s house. He’s saying not, of course, but I made them think so by pretending to try to get in there when I thought no one was watching. Only they were. I made sure.’

Tom nodded. Alan had done well. It hadn’t needed any secret signal to let Alan know his whereabouts. The two boys had maybe half a dozen favourite hiding places round the house and grounds. Alan had, by instinct, come first to the one where his twin lay hidden.

‘I won’t, you know,’ said Tom. ‘Not until …’

‘Yes, but he’s in an awful stew.’

The two boys’ conversation was always like this: all but incomprehensible to an outsider. Tom meant that he wouldn’t return to Whitcombe House until Sir Adam made the concession over to him properly and for good. Alan doubted that that would happen.

Tom looked at the other and grimaced. ‘I’ll be stuck here for ever then.’

They both laughed.

‘And what about the Donkey?’ Tom made a braying noise and pretended to jump on Alan. They laughed a second time, but Alan was uncomfortable as he answered.

‘Guy got a terrific dressing-down. Father said he’d been told in confidence. Guy said he thought you already knew. I don’t know if Father believed him.’

‘He always does.’

‘Probably.’

They slipped into silence for a while.

‘What’ll you do?’ asked Alan eventually.

‘Oh, I s’pose I’ll stay here for a day or two.’ Tom waved his hand airily round the tiny loft, as though it were an apartment he often rented for the summer.

‘Then what?’

‘It
is
my concession, you know.’ Tom rolled onto his elbow and looked directly at his twin.

Alan nodded.

‘But it
is
.’

‘I know. I said yes, didn’t I?’

‘No.’

‘I nodded. That’s the same.’

‘’Tisn’t.’

‘’Tis.’

‘Then say it. Go on then. Say it’s mine.’

‘Look, Father probably will give it in the end. It’s just Guy got him into a stew about it.’

‘There! See? You said he’ll give it in the end. He can’t do that, he’s already given it.’

‘Not with the legal bit as well,’ objected Alan. ‘I meant with the legal bit. I mean, I know it’s yours.’

Tom stared hard at the other, little spots of red appearing high on his cheeks. Then he rolled away, staring out of the tiny cobwebbed pane of glass that was his only window.

‘Then I s’pose I’ll have to go to Dad’s place. I’m old enough now.’

Tom didn’t spell out what he meant, but he didn’t have to. Alan understood. Tom meant that he’d go and live permanently with his father, away from Whitcombe House, away from Alan. The only thing that would stop him would be if Sir Adam backed down and made definite and permanent his gift of the concession.

Alan swallowed. He pretended to be calm, and began poking at the cobwebs with a bit of twig, while kicking his feet against the low roof just above. But he wasn’t calm. Tom was threatening to leave. Tom was implying that a quarrel over property was more important than the two boys’ friendship. He scooped up a bit of cobweb that had an insect caught in it: trapped and dying.

‘Look.’

‘So?’

Alan shrugged and scraped the insect off.

‘You know that vase?’

‘Yes.’

‘Apparently it was worth tons of money. About a thousand guineas, I should think. It didn’t help.’

‘So what? He shouldn’t have –’

‘You could say sorry.’

‘What!?’

‘Just to get him to calm down a bit. I only mean to make him calm down.’

‘You think I ought to say sorry?’

‘Look, he’s probably not going to sell the concession. He probably knows it’s yours really.’

‘
Probably?
D’you think you’re
probably
going to get your stupid farm or whatever? Do you think the Donkey is
probably
going to get everything else?’ Tom’s blood-spots had vanished now, leaving his face pale, and there was extraordinary intensity in his long-lashed blue eyes. As Tom looked at things, every time he challenged Alan to take sides, Alan tried to be nice but ended up taking his family’s cause. Even now, this late in the conversation, Alan hadn’t even said directly that the concession was Tom’s.

‘Anyway,’ cried Alan, ‘what does it matter? If I get the stupid old farm, then you can have half of it. You don’t think I wouldn’t share? Who cares about the stupid concession?’

It was a disastrous thing to say.

Tom stared for a full ten seconds at his twin, then looked away. He put the paper packet of food in his pocket, wriggled backwards to the gap in the boards, then swung the lower half of his body down. With his head still poking through into the roof space, he said, ‘I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to my dad’s now. I don’t care if they see me. They can’t stop me, can they? Bye.’

And he was gone.

Away from the seed shed, away from the big house, away from the family that had brought him up.

For twenty-four hours: stand-off.

In Tom’s eyes, Alan had said the worst thing he could have possibly said. ‘Who cares about the stupid concession?’ As far as Tom was concerned, Alan might as well have said, ‘Who cares if you’re a proper part of the Montague family or not?’

At the same time, as far as Alan was concerned, Tom had also committed the worst crime imaginable. As Alan saw it, Tom had placed a trivial argument about money and land over the best thing in the entire world: their friendship, their twinhood.

And so the quarrel persisted. Tom stayed at his father’s cottage. Alan stayed in the big house. For the first time since they’d been able to talk, they spent an entire day without speaking to each other. For the first time since they’d been able to walk, they spent an entire day without each other’s company.

On the evening of the following day, Alan slipped away early to bed.

To bed, but not to sleep. He opened his bedroom window, climbed quickly across the kitchen roofs, slid down a drainpipe and ran across the lawns and fields to Jack Creeley’s cottage. Once there, he tossed a pebble up at Tom’s window, saw it open, then scrambled quickly up the branching wisteria and tumbled in over the sill.

The room was lit by a single paraffin-wax candle. Tom was sitting on the bed with a boy’s magazine open in front of him. He nodded hello. Alan grinned back: the smile of a would-be peacemaker.

‘Well?’ said Tom.

Alan was momentarily confused. He didn’t know what Tom meant by his ‘Well?’ and he was taken aback by the loss of their normal invisible communication.

‘What do you mean?’ he said stupidly. ‘Well, what?’

‘You know. I mean I s’pose you’ve come to say sorry.’

‘What?!’

‘You heard.’

Alan was temporarily blank with astonishment. He knew perfectly well how remorseless his twin could be: remorseless and even cruel. But he’d never expected to feel the edge of it himself. Alan’s head jerked back.

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘As a matter of fact, I came to see if
you
were sorry yet. Obviously not.’

Alan was still sitting on the ledge of the window and he swung his legs out of it again onto the wisteria branch. But he didn’t drop away out of sight. He hung there, half in, half out of the room, waiting for Tom to say something that would let him come back in. But he was disappointed.

‘No,’ said Tom. ‘Obviously not.’

Alan shrugged. The shrug was meant to be a defiant, couldn’t-care-less affair, but the candle’s light was enough to show that his mouth and eyes obviously cared very much indeed.

‘Well then,’ said Alan, still hanging in the window.

‘Well then.’

The two boys stared at each other a few seconds longer. Eventually Tom looked away, back at his magazine. Alan found a lower hold for his feet, wriggled once, then dropped away out of sight.