The Elderbrook Brothers (7 page)

‘Here's Virgil,' said Mr. Cowlin. ‘Do you know about him? No, of course you don't: how could you?'

He began discoursing on Virgil, his life, and the sort of man he was; but broke off to go to the sideboard and mix himself a whisky and soda. Having swallowed one glassful quickly at the sideboard, he poured out another to bring back with him to the hearthrug, where he stood straddled in front of an empty grate, in the attitude of a man warming his hindquarters.

‘He wrote,' said Mr Cowlin, ‘a beautiful thing on farming. You'll like that, you a farmer's son.' Lodging his glass on the mantelpiece he began turning Virgil's pages: jerkily, with a kind of fury, as though he owed it an obscure grudge. ‘Here you are:
Haec super arvorum cultu pecorumque canebam et super arboribus
. Thus, or so, I sang of the cultivation, or care, of fields, of cattle, and of trees. That's what he says. And that's what he did. Tilling, planting, cattle-rearing, beekeeping. That was before the Christian era began, if you
please. Country life doesn't change much. Devilish long time ago: I was only a child at the time,' said Mr Cowlin, with a sudden laugh. ‘You stick to it, my boy. Get a good grounding. I'll see you do. I'll help you. Then you'll be able to read this for yourself, eh?'

Mr Cowlin was excited: by whisky, by the Georgics, by his own expanding benevolence. He felt suddenly that all things were possible; that he was being given a blessed, belated chance to justify his unnecessary existence. Gratitude to the unconscious author of his happiness beamed from his moist eye.

‘You see?' said Mr Cowlin lyrically.
‘Quid faciat laetas segetes, quo sidere terram vertere
… Nice stuff, my boy. Nice, practical, beautiful stuff.'

Guy said ‘Yes, sir!' and did his best to sound rapturous. He was seeing an entirely new Mr Cowlin, and though but dimly understanding this enthusiasm he saw that it was likely to prove very useful to himself. It
was
queer, too, to think of things going on much the same all those years ago; but he did not in the least want to read any old book for its own sake. The important thing was to learn Latin, to show them all that he could.

‘Get knowledge,' said Mr Cowlin solemnly, his utterance thickening a little. ‘Get it while you ‘re young, young Elderbrook. Knowledge, the old boy said, is power. Don't forget that. Don't f'get it. Knowledge idge power.'

Guy did not forget it. Knowledge was power. And power meant getting your own way and not playing second fiddle to anyone. Not Felix, not Matthew, not anyone.

The playground was transfigured. The yelling and the snowballing had been prodigious. Young Mr Surrey, the new master, said ‘It's the sparkle of the snow, old chap: you'll soon feel better.' But it wasn't the sparkle of the snow and
Felix didn't soon feel better. The sickness became a pain, and before morning school was over he was dizzy with it and had to be taken to Matron. Almost the next thing he knew, he was in bed, with three hot water bottles for company. The sparkle of the snow was in his mind still; the phrase itself ran among his thoughts; he wondered, now and again, what was going to happen to him, but did not trouble to ask. There were other boys in the long, green, unfamiliar dormitory. They seemed very far away. Felix did not want them and made no effort to communicate with them: he did not know what he wanted except his mother, or Faith, or someone from home: anyone from home would have been nice. Meanwhile there was this person called Sister, and presently there was the Doctor. Sister he knew, but only just. She was the one Matron sent you to when you had to have medicine. With her long nose and glazed complexion and severe manner she had seemed on those occasions a forbidding personage, but now she was different, friendly and comforting. She too said the pain would soon be better, and it was, a little, almost at once. Because he submitted without fuss to all her ministrations she said he was a good boy and a clever one. Her approval made him feel safe with her.

Dr Pearce he did not know at all. His small ailments hitherto had never carried him as far as the school doctor, who but for his neat black coat and starched linen would have looked more like a retired prizefighter. He had a bald round head and small pig-eyes. To the irreverent children he was known, in fact, as Piggy Pearce. The only hair on his face was a pair of ferocious black eyebrows which—so the absurd story ran—he affixed to himself every Monday morning with glue. Luckily he was a good doctor, or good enough. His odd appearance did not repel Felix: it only added another touch of strangeness to his already strange situation. After examining the patient, a process which involved much tapping and prodding and asking of questions, Dr Pearce said ‘M'yes … I see' in a tone of thoughtful satisfaction, picked up his little
black bag, and departed. At his next visit he was more communicative. Sister was in attendance as usual, smiling benignly. Their kindly conspiratorial air was designed to suggest that Felix was in for a great treat. The boy was not deceived, but he did not care and was not frightened. Thinking things over in the night he had decided that he was probably going to die, but the thought was a largely empty one, the words had no meaning, and he still wanted nothing except his mother and to be rid of pain: in his fancy the two things went together. And, as if they could read his thoughts, it was just that that Dr Pearce and Sister were now promising him.

‘See here,' said the Doctor, ‘I've got some scent on my handkerchief. If you're a good boy, Felix, I'll give you a sniff of it, see? And I'll tell you what: your mummy's coming to see you. This very day, if you're a good boy.'

Felix did not at all like the scent on Dr Pearce's handkerchief, but before he could say so the doctor had vanished and the sparkle of the snow changed to golden flowers in a green field. Felix was not at all surprised to find himself in this field, which nearly but not quite reminded him of something he had known in another life or another dream. He knew he was in a dream, but that knowledge did not in the least diminish its reality: he neither remembered what had happened before nor wondered what was to come, even though a kind of serene expectancy, a sense of looking for something or someone, kept him gently moving on. It seemed that only one thing was wanting to make this place the heaven it so nearly was; and in the moment of so thinking the want was fulfilled and forgotten, for now there was a stream winding its way through the meadow, and Felix, knee-deep in grass, was bending over the live, clear, magnifying water, enjoying the shapes and varying browns of the pebbles below, seeing without intrusion all the secrets of that lovely water-world. He felt, without handling them, the hard cool shining smoothness of those pebbles, enamelled in their everlasting wash; his ductile consciousness darted with silver fishes in and out of hidden crannies, to and from the
shadow of rocky shelters and floating weed; seeing a worm, embedded and at ease, he knew the luxury of mud. Above him spread the green boughs of a willow, filled with flirting fluttering life, and as soon as he remembered the birds they began singing. Then he became suddenly afraid, began saying to himself, with desperate self-reassurance, what a good job it was that Jerry Cockle wasn't with him; and at once, prompt to his cue, the destroyer appeared, Jerry Cockle himself. Big bland eyes, dark tousled head, lithe young body full of animal spirits, there he was, the other side of the stream, delighted to have found his friend Felix again. You couldn't help liking Jerry: that was just the trouble. Because you liked him, because there was a sort of love between you, you could do nothing but hate him when he did the things he did in his crazy, cruel moods. Felix could never decide whether there was something left out of Jerry's make-up or something devilish put into it. Birds, rabbits, squirrels, field-mice, he was insatiably curious about them, irresistibly attracted, but as a cat is curious, as a cat is attracted. And now, at a second glance, Felix saw him in his true shape: sleek, sinuous, furry, crouching to spring. To frighten the birds into safety, to warn the fishes, to put all the world of creatures on their guard, Felix flung up his arms and shouted ‘Shoo!' But his voice cracked, he was left impotently gasping and wheezing, and the cat, looming larger across the stream, seemed unperturbed. How he wished that the heavens would open and rain fire on this enemy! But the first drop, suddenly splashing on his open hand, proved to be not fire but blood; and now the sky was red with vengeance, and thunder came drumming from the ends of the earth and rose to a crackling climax. It sounded like the whistling of a train emerging from a tunnel, and when the train came into the station Felix knew that his mother was somewhere hidden in it, and he ran up the platform looking into every carriage, but he couldn't find her and the train began moving away faster and faster and he couldn't find her and he called out and the train wouldn't stop and he ran after the train into a wood full of shadows and
moonlight and the sparkle of the snow. All night he ran and all next day, no longer knowing what he was looking for. All day and all night till after many days he reached the very edge of the world. There he stopped dead, on the brink of infinite emptiness, but the edge of the world came to meet him, the ground under his feet was a moving disk that grew smaller and smaller till at last it was as small and smooth as a sixpenny piece, a spinning coin upon which, with a vast grey nothing around and above and below him, he struggled to keep his balance. A long agonized moment … and he pitched forward into the void.

But someone was holding him. ‘Had a nice sleep, darling?' His mother was with him. He was propped up in bed. It hurt: not the same, but badly.

‘No, don't try to move,' she said.

‘I want to lie down, Mummy. I'm so sleepy.'

‘Try to sleep like that, darling. We'll take care of you.'

‘I can't,' he murmured fretfully. And was asleep again.

The next time he woke they had a little conversation, with Sister in watchful benevolent attendance. He found, to his great surprise and satisfaction, that he had had an operation and was now a hero. He felt proud and important, as well as horribly sick. Being sick so often was itself a matter for some pride. He never cried, or hardly ever. He always tried not to let them see him crying, and with such success that he was voted the very best patient they had ever had. He was brave and docile and they treated him like a king.

He had Mummy for three days. Then she went back to look after poor Father, and Faith took her place at his bedside.

‘Where do you sleep, Faith?' he asked her. ‘Can't you sleep here, with me?'

‘What, in your bed?' she said, smiling.

‘I'd make room for you,' said Felix. ‘Do you live with Mr Williams?'

‘Mr and Mrs Williams, yes,' said Faith. ‘Isn't it kind of them?'

‘Bend down. I want to whisper…. Are they
really
nice?'

Faith assured him that they were really nice. ‘They couldn't be nicer if I belonged to them,' she said.

‘I've often wondered,' said Felix. ‘He's awfully
old
, but still …'

She laughed. ‘What nonsense!'

‘Dan, Dan, he's a funny old man.'

‘What
do
you mean, Felix?'

‘The Head of course. That's our song about him,' he said airily, with a shy grin.

She made a mock-severe face at him. ‘I can see you're getting well again, young man.'

Gradually, as he grew stronger, this illness resolved itself into a series of visits received. As soon as he was washed and smartened up, as soon as all traces of his decreasingly exiguous meals were removed, he would sit back and receive tribute from the outside world. He thought it was awfully decent of chaps to come and see him in their not very plentiful spare time, and shyly said so. Come they did, treating him as a person of consequence. Hollis and Abbott came together, and stayed ten minutes, saying little, sheepishly polite, so great was their awe of Sister and of the much-rumoured operation. They seemed surprised to find that Felix retained his full complement of limbs: surreptitious glances at the shape made by the bedclothes were eloquent of sensational conjectures on this point.

Jerry Cockle came too, and he too was uneasy, with more reason. Between Felix and Jerry there was a bond of affection, of time spent together, fun shared, secrets confided; but in their innermost hearts they were divided by a question which would never be answered because it would never be asked. The form of asking and answering had been duly gone through, but trust was wanting, belief faltered, an unspoken unspeakable doubt
remained. One day, meeting him unexpectedly in Long-barrow Wood, Jerry had fished out of his pocket, with triumphant glee, a bird's nest full of unfledged finches: there were seven of them, tight packed as though growing from one stem, their fixed-wide mouths looking like the flowering climax of some fantastic tropical plant. You had to look twice to realize that they were alive: alive, naked, mercifully witless, wanting only food. Jerry was proud of his capture, having risked his neck for it by climbing an impossible tree, and he first stared and then looked sulky when Felix expressed another point of view. ‘All right, soppy! Will you fight me for them?' In his present mood it was touch and go whether he would throw the birds on the ground and trample on them. Felix said: ‘If you like, but what's the good? Tell you what, Jerry: let's put them back. I expect their mother's still somewhere near. How long have you had them?' In the end, after some argument, Jerry said he would: he would put the nestlings back where he found them. But to save his face, or for some other private reason, he had to make a condition, and the condition was that Felix should give his word of honour to stay where he was till Jerry came back. Not only was he not to follow him: he was not even to try, Jerry said, to find the place. Nothing short of that would satisfy this curious boy, and Felix had to promise. What happened afterwards, except that Jerry rejoined him half an hour later, Felix would never know. He asked and was answered, and in the pause that followed he knew, and Jerry knew, that the worst had happened. He knew, and Jerry knew, that the answer told him nothing, and for the simplest of reasons. Where there is no trust there can be attraction but no friendship, even though the form of friendship remain. In demanding trust, if that had been the idea, Jerry had demanded more than Felix at that moment could give him. No word was said to the purpose; they talked volubly of other things; but beneath the talk a desolating silence persisted. The breach was invisible and absolute.