Free The Elderbrook Brothers by Gerald Bullet Page A

mock-severe face at him. ‘I can see you’re getting well again, young man.’
§ 12
    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 doubtremained. 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.
    He came to the infirmary, winningly eager to be friends, butbringing that silence with him. ‘Did it hurt much?’ he said. And: ‘When are you coming back, do you know?’ He had a new story about Mr Lamble, who twelve months earlier had been Felix’s form-master, and he gave an excited, exclamatory, giggling account of a recent hockey-match at which Mr Lamble had acted as referee. The two stories were inextricably mixed together in Jerry’s narrative, though they seemed to have no connection except Mr