Arthur & George

proposals, as eminently sensible, and so for several Sunday afternoons he had gone off to the marshes and woodlands surrounding London. She thought he needed a hobby; he thought she needed him out of the house from time to time. He stuck at it dutifully for a few months, but in truth he had trouble following a bird in flight, and the ones at rest seemed to take pleasure in being camouflaged. Additionally and alternatively, many of the places from which it was deemed best to watch birds struck him as cold and damp. If you had spent three years in prison, you did not need any more cold and damp in your life until you were placed in your coffin and lowered into the coldest, dampest place of all. That had been George’s considered view of birdwatching.
    ‘I felt so sorry for you that day.’
    George looked up, the picture in his head of a twenty-one-year-old girl by the disappointing ruins of a Welsh castle replaced by a greying, middle-aged woman behind a teapot. She spotted some more dust on the binocular case and gave it another wipe. George gazed at his sister. Sometimes he could not tell which of them was taking care of the other.
    ‘It was a happy day,’ he said firmly, holding to the memory he had made into certainty by repetition. ‘The Belle Vue Hotel. The tramway. Roast chicken. Not going to pick up pebbles. The railway journey. It was a happy day.’
    ‘I was pretending for most of it.’
    George was not sure he wanted his memories disturbed. ‘I could never tell how much you knew,’ he said.
    ‘George, I was not a child. I might have been a child when it all began, but not then. What else did I have to do except work it out? You cannot keep things from someone of twenty-one who rarely leaves the house. You are only keeping things from yourself, pretending to yourself, and hoping she will go along with it.’
    George thought his way back from the Maud he knew now, and realized there must have been a lot more of this woman in that girl than he was aware of at the time. But he had no desire to pursue the complications of this. He had decided long ago what had happened; he knew his own story. He might be willing to accept a general correction of the kind just made; but the last thing he wanted was fresh detail.
    Maud sensed this. And if, back then, he had kept things from her, she had also kept things from him. She would never tell him of the morning Father had called her into his study and announced that he feared greatly for the mental stability of her brother. He said George had been under much strain and was refusing to take the slightest holiday; so he would propose over dinner that brother and sister take a day trip to Aberystwyth, and whether she wanted to or not she was to concur and insist that they must, absolutely must go. And this was what had happened. George had politely yet stubbornly refused his father, then yielded to the pleas of his sister.
    It had been a piece of scheming quite untypical of the Vicarage. But more shocking to Maud had been Father’s assessment of George’s condition. To her he had always been the reliable, conscientious brother; while Horace was the frivolous one, who lived life on a whim, who lacked stolidity. And as it turned out, she had been right and Father wrong. For how could George have survived his ordeal if he had not possessed much greater mental fortitude than Father ever attributed to him? But these were thoughts Maud would always keep to herself.
    ‘There was one matter on which Sir Arthur was profoundly wrong,’ George declared suddenly. ‘He opposed votes for women.’ Since her brother had always supported female suffrage during the time it had been an issue, this opinion came as no surprise to Maud. Rather, it was the fierceness in his voice that was unaccountable. George was now looking away from his sister in embarrassment. The trail of memory, and all that came with it, had set off in him the tenderest of emotions towards Maud, and a realization that these had been, and would continue to be, the strongest feelings of his life. But George was neither skilled nor easy at conveying such thoughts, and even this most indirect of confessions disturbed him. So he rose, folded the
Herald
unnecessarily, handed it back, and went downstairs to his office.
    There was work to be done, but instead he sat at his desk thinking about Sir Arthur. They had last met twenty-three years ago; still, the link between them had somehow never been broken. He had