'and now 'you're' letting me down too. I only wanted your advice.'
'Who has let you down?' said the Doctor sharply. 'Not the Headmaster...?' Irma dabbed her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief the size of a playing card.
'It's because I told him his neck was dirty, the dear, sweet lord...'
''Lord'!' cried Prunesquallor, 'you don't call him 'that', do you?'
'Of course not, Alfred... only to myself... after all he is my lord, isn't he?'
'If you say so,' said her brother, passing his hand across his brow. 'I suppose he could be anything.'
'O he is. He is. He's anything - or rather, Alfred, he's everything.'
'But you have shamed him, and he feels wounded - proud and wounded, is that it, Irma, my dear?'
'Yes, O yes. It is that exactly. But what can I 'do'? What can I 'do'?' The doctor placed the tips of his fingers together.
'You are experiencing already, my dear Irma,' he said, 'the stuff of marriage. And so is he. Be patient, sweet flower. Learn all you can. Use what tact God gave you, and remember your mistakes and what led up to them. Say nothing about his neck. You can only make things worse. His resentment will fade. His wound will heal in time. If you love him, then simply love him and never fuss about what's dead and gone. After all you love him in spite of all your 'faults', not 'his'. Other people's faults can be fascinating. One's own are dreary. Be quiet for a bit. Don't talk too much and can't you walk a little less like a buoy in a swell?'
Irma got up from her chair and moved to the door. 'Thank you, Alfred,' she said and disappeared.
Doctor Prunesquallor sank back on the couch by the window, and with an ease, quite astonishing, dismissed his sister's problem from his mind and was once more in the cogitative reverie from which she had interrupted him.
He had been thinking of Steerpike's accession to the key position that he now occupied. He had also been reflecting upon the way he had behaved as a patient. His fortitude had been matchless and his will to live quite savage. But for the most part, the Doctor was turning over in his mind something that was quite different. It was a phrase, which, at the height of Steerpike's delirium, had broken loose from the chaos of his ravings - ''And the Twins will make it five,'' the young man had shouted - ''and the Twins will make it five.''
FORTY-NINE
One dark winter morning, Titus and his sister sat together on the wide window-seat of one of Fuchsia's three rooms that overlooked the South Spinneys. Soon after Nannie Slagg had died Fuchsia had moved, not without much arguing and a sense of dire uprooting, to a more handsome district - and to a set of rooms which, in comparison with her old untidy bedroom of many memories, were full of light and space.
Outside the window the last of the snow lay in patches across the countryside. Fuchsia, with her chin on her hands and her elbows on the window sill, was watching the swaying motion of the thin stream of steel-grey water as it fell a hundred feet from the gutter of a nearby building - for a small, restless wind was blowing erratically and sometimes the stream of melted snow as it fell from the high gutter would descend in a straight and motionless line to a tank in the quadrangle below, and sometimes it would swing to the north and stay outstretched when a gust blew angrily, and sometimes the cascade would fan out in a spray of innumerable leaden drops and fall like rain. And then the wind would drop again and the steady tubular overflow would fall once more vertically, like a stretched cable, and the water would spurt and thud within the tank.
Titus, who had been turning over the pages of a book, got to his feet.
'I'm glad there's no school today, Few,' he said - it was a name he had started giving her - 'it would have been Perch-Prism with his foul chemistry and Cutflower this afternoon.'
'What's the holiday 'for'?' said Fuchsia with her eyes still on the water which was now swaying to and fro across the tank.
'I'm not sure,' said Titus. 'Something to do with Mother, I think. Birthday or something.'
'Oh,' said Fuchsia and then after a pause, 'it's funny how one has to be told everything. I don't remember her having birthdays before. It's all so inhuman.'
'I don't know what you mean,' said Titus.
'No,' said Fuchsia. 'You wouldn't, I suppose. It's not your fault and you're lucky in a way. But I've read quite a lot and I know that most children see a good deal of their parents - more than we do anyway.'
'Well, I don't remember father at all,' said Titus.
'I do,' said Fuchsia. 'But he was difficult too. I hardly ever spoke to him. I think he wanted me to be a boy.'
'Did he?'
'Yes.'
'Oh... I wonder why.'
'To be the next Earl of course.'
'Oh... but 'I' am... so it's all right, I suppose.'
'But he didn't know you were going to be born, when I was a child, did he? He couldn't have. I was about fourteen when you were born.'
'Were you really...'
'Of course I was. And for all that time he wished I was you, I suppose.'
'That's funny, isn't it?' said Titus.
'It wasn't funny at all - and it isn't funny now - is it? Not that it's your fault...'
