What's Bred in the Bone

by Robertson Davies

  “You understand I’ve got to stick around,” said the man. “This isn’t your ordinary call. You might get carried away, and not in control of yourself. I’ve got to stick around, for both your sakes.”

  The woman was undressing, with rapid professional skill.

  “No need for that,” said Francis.

  “Oh, I think she’d better,” said the man. “In fact, I’d say she’d rather, seeing as you’re paying. Professional, you understand. Her birthday suit is her working clothes, isn’t it?”

  “Okay. Ready when you are,” said the woman, now naked and bracing herself on stout legs. She had, Francis saw with an embalmer’s eye, an appendicitis scar of the old-fashioned kind that looks rather like a beetle with outspread legs.

  Francis raised his fist, and to summon anger he thought hard of Ismay at her most defiant, her most derisive, her most sluttish. But it would not come. It was the Looner who dominated his feeling, not as an image, but as an influence, and he could not strike. He sat down suddenly on the bed, and to his deep shame burst into sobs.

  “Oh, the poor love,” said the woman. “Can’t you, darling?” She pushed a box of tissue handkerchiefs toward him. “Don’t feel it so. There’s lots that can’t, the other way, you know. They’ve very good reasons, too.”

  “He needs a drink,” said the man.

  “No, I think he needs a cup of tea,” said the woman. “Just put on the electric, will you, Jimsie? There, there, now. You tell me about it.” She sat beside Francis and drew his head down on her large scented breast. “What did she do to you, eh? She must have done something. What was it? Come on, tell me.”

  So Francis found himself sitting on the bed with the woman, who had pulled a silk peignoir trimmed with rather worn marabou about her, and her ponce, or her bully, or whatever the term might be for Jimsie, sipping hot, strong tea, giving a shortened, edited version of what Ismay had done. The woman made comforting noises, but it was Jimsie who spoke.

  “Don’t take me up wrong,” he said, “but it certainly looks as if she done the dirty on you. But why? That’s the way we have to look at it. There’s always a reason, and it may not be one you’d ever think of. Why, would you say?”

  “Because she loves another man,” said Francis.

  “O Gawd; sod love!” said Jimsie. “You never know where you are with it. A great cause of trouble.” And as he went on to anatomize love, as it appeared to him both as a man and as a professional dealer in sexual satisfaction, it seemed to Francis that he heard the voice of Tancred Saraceni, explaining the Bronzino Allegory. The face that was clearest in the picture, as he thought of it, was the woman-headed beast with a lion’s claws and a dragon’s tail, who proffered the sweet and the bitter in her outstretched hands. The figure called the Cheat, or in Saraceni’s Latin explication, Fraude. He must have whispered the name.

  “Fraudy? I should think it was fraudy, and rotten, too, walking out on you and the baby,” said the woman.

  When at last Francis was fit to go, he offered the woman two tenpound notes.

  “Oh, no dear,” said she; “I couldn’t think of it. You never had your punch, you see. Not that I’d have blamed you if you’d really socked me.”

  “No, that wasn’t the agreement,” said the man, taking the notes himself, swiftly but delicately. “You’ve got to consider time spent, and an agreement entered into even if not carried out. But I’ll say this, sir. This night does you credit. You’ve behaved like a gentleman.”

  “Oh, sod being a gentleman,” said Francis, then regretted it, and shook hands with them both before running down the stairs into the Soho street.

  THE PREMISES of Sir Geoffrey Duveen and Company were elegant and awesome; Francis would never have presumed to enter on his own volition, but it was here that Colonel Copplestone had said he was to meet him, and the wording of the message had suggested without actually saying so that it was a matter of importance. Something of importance was just what Francis needed. He had never felt so insignificant, so diminished, so exploited in his life since the days at Carlyle Rural. He was smartly dressed and punctual as he presented himself in the great London centre of art dealing and art exportation. The Colonel was in a small panelled room in which hung three pictures that made Francis’s eyes pop. This was the sort of thing that very rich collectors could afford, and that they looked to the Duveen Company to supply.

  “But you have your degree. First Class honours; I saw it in The Times. Just remind me of what that degree implies.”

  The Colonel seemed inclined to brush aside Francis’s story of his marriage and its outcome as something of secondary importance. How callous these old fellows were!

  “Well, it’s called Modern Greats, but the formal name is Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. I concentrated on philosophy, and having a Classics degree already I had a certain advantage over the men who worked with translations; you begin at Descartes, but it’s very useful to know what came before. And modern languages: mine were French and German. The politics is pretty much British constitutional stuff. I did as little economics as I could. Not my thing: I prefer my astrology without water.”

  “Aha. Well, you didn’t waste your time at Oxford,” said the Colonel. “Don’t let the other thing bother you too much. Painful, of course, but I can offer you something that will make you forget it—or almost forget it.”

  “In the profession?”

  “Yes. Not bang in the middle of the profession, of course. That’s for quite a different sort of chap. But something you can do very well, I should think. Better than anyone else available at the moment, certainly. I want you to work with Tancred Saraceni.”

  “Is he—?”

  “Most certainly not. And you must never let him think you are, or you’ll be in the soup. No; Saraceni is in a queer game of his own, which interests us at the moment, and could be important. By the way, quite a few people who believe in that sort of thing say he has the Evil Eye. I don’t completely dismiss that, so watch your step. You told me he had suggested that you might like to work with him? Learn his special trade, or craft, or whatever he calls it?”

  “Yes, but I’m not really sure that’s what I want. I want to be a painter, not a craftsman who tarts up paintings that have been allowed to decay.”

  “Yes, but what the profession wants is that somebody should be with Saraceni on the job he’s undertaking now. Do you know anything about the Düsterstein collection?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “It’s not well known, though these people here at Duveen’s know about it, of course. It’s their business to know such things. It’s a lot of Renaissance and post-Renaissance and Counter-Reformation pictures—not all of them the best, I believe, but still remarkable—that are housed in Schloss Düsterstein in Lower Bavaria, about seventy miles from Munich. The owner is the Gräfin von Ingelheim, and she is interested in having her pictures put in A-1 condition, with a view to sale. Not a vulgar sell-out, you understand; not an ‘Everything Must Be Sold To The Walls By The End Of The Month’ thing. No, a gradual, very high-class unloading that should bring in a great deal of money. We want to know where the pictures are going. She’s persuaded Saraceni to do the work of getting the stuff ready, rather on the quiet, without actually being secret. Saraceni needs an assistant, and we would like the assistant to be a member of the profession. And that’s you, my boy.”

  “I’m to report to you? But what? And how?”

  “No written reports to me, unless something totally unlikely happens. But you’ll come back to England now and then, won’t you? Don’t you want to see little Charlotte and find out how she is getting on? What kind of a father would you be if you didn’t? But there will also be another form of written report, and this afternoon you had better go to Harley Street, where Sir Owen Williams-Owen will see you, and take a look at your heart, and tell you how to report back to him on how it’s getting on.”

  It was plain to Francis that Uncle Jack was enjoying being mysterious, an
d that his best course was to play straight man, and let his instructions come in due course.

  “Williams-Owen knows all about hearts. He will give you a regimen of health that you must follow, which will include regular reports to him on how your heart is functioning. How many heartbeats after strenuous exercise—that sort of thing. But in actual fact it will be a key to observations we want you to make about trains.

  “Schloss Düsterstein sits in a considerable estate, with some parkland and a lot of farms. Less than a mile from the house, or the castle or whatever it is, there is a branch of a railway, and that branch leads to a large compound—a concentration camp, as Lord Kitchener called them, to which freight and cattle cars are taken from time to time, not on any regular schedule but always late at night. You can tell how many cars there are because the train travels quite slowly—what they call a Bummelzug—and at one place it crosses an intersection point, and makes a characteristic sound with its wheels. If you keep your ears open, and count the times you hear that sound, and then divide by two, you can reckon the number of freight or goods vans that have passed over the point, and are thus bound for the camp. And that’s what you report to Williams-Owen, every fortnight, according to a scheme he will give you, in a letter in which you can whimper and play the hypochondriac as much as you please. He’ll see that the information gets to the right place.”

  “It’s better than staying here and feeling sorry for myself, I suppose.”

  “Much better. It’s your first professional job, and if you haven’t thought so already, you’re damned lucky to get it.”

  “Well, but what about—oh, sod being a gentleman! Sorry to be sordid, Uncle Jack, but—am I paid anything?”

  “As I told you, this is something of a sideline, and we haven’t any appropriation for it. But I think you may count on something eventually. Anyhow, you needn’t pretend to me that you need money. I’ve heard about your grandfather’s will. Your father mentioned it in a letter.”

  “I see. I’m in training, as it were?”

  “No; it’s a real job. But take my advice, Frank, don’t fuss about money. The profession is run on a shoestring, and there are lots of people fighting for a quarter-inch of the string already. When there’s anything for you, you can rely on me to let you know. But if there’s no money, I can at least offer you some information. We know where Charlie Fremantle is.”

  “Is she with him?”

  “I suppose so. He’s in a very hot place to be at the moment. If those two are counting on a peaceful old age, they’re out of their minds. Oh, and your friend Buys-Bozzaris is dead.”

  “What? How?”

  “Carelessness. Actually he was a futile agent, and his recruiting was a joke; Charlie Fremantle was the only fish he caught, and even Charlie—who is an idiot—managed to cheat him about some gambling money. So Basil found himself in what we might call an untenable position, and it looks as if he shot himself.”

  “I don’t believe it. I doubt if he could hit himself—on purpose, anyhow.”

  “Perhaps not. Perhaps he had expert assistance—Well, anything more?”

  “Just a matter of curiosity, Uncle Jack. These goods vans—these freight cars—what’s in them?”

  “People.”

  YOUR MAN WAS LUCKY to be quit of Ismay, said the Lesser Zadkiel.

  —My man was lucky to have known her, said the Daimon Maimas. She doesn’t show up well in Francis’s story: an unscrupulous little sexual teaser and a crook about money; if she had stayed with him, what sort of cat-and-dog life would they have had? They would have torn one another apart and quite soon she would have betrayed him with somebody. But she thought herself a free agent, and that always leads to trouble.

  —Oh quite. She was really an adjunct of Charlie Fremantle; one aspect of his fate. Odd, isn’t it, that these adventurous, feather-brained fools like Charlie always have some woman who is ready to put up with anything to serve him and his folly? My records show it again and again.

  —What lies before her in Spain? Scampering around from one squalid, endangered hovel to another, always under threat, often under gunfire, imagining she is serving the people’s cause—which neither she nor Charlie could have defined—but really just Charlie’s woman and slave. If pity lay in my sphere, said the Daimon, I think I should pity her.

  —But pity is not in your sphere, brother. You don’t even pity poor Francis, who broke his heart over her.

  —Certainly not. A heart is never really stout until it has broken and mended at least once. Francis might be grateful to me for finding him such an interesting heart-breaker. Lots of men break their hearts over women who are no more interesting than turnips.

  —Yet he knew she was no good. Not to him, anyway. What was she to him?

  —Surely you remember how, in his bedroom at Blairlogie, he used to posture in front of his mirror, rigged up as a sort of woman? Searching for the Mystical Marriage, though he didn’t know it; looking for the woman in himself, for the completion of himself, and he thought he had found it in Ismay. And he most certainly did find part of it in Ismay, for she was what he was not, she had qualities he would never possess, and she had the beauty and the sluttish irresistible charm to make him love her whatever she did, and whatever he knew about her. I think I did rather well in enlarging his life with Ismay.

  —As when she told him he was the kind of man things happened to, and not the kind that made them happen?

  —Oh, come, brother, you were not taken in by that old chestnut, were you? You know as well as I that people often make the most astonishing reversals of what seems to be their basic nature, when they are compelled to do it. Really, my dear colleague, you astonish me! I don’t wish to be offensive, but here we are, a couple of Minor Immortals, watching Francis’s life unfold before us, as you have it filed away in your archive, and yet sometimes you talk as if we were no wiser than a pair of human beings watching television, where the unexpected, the unpredictable is rigorously forbidden to happen. The laws of such melodrama are not binding on us, brother. You have typed Francis, and you talk of Ismay as if she were vanished forever. As for me, you seem to degrade me to the level of that detestable theological fraud, a Guardian Angel! Come, come!

  —Don’t scold, brother. I am sorry if I have appeared to underestimate your daimonic role in this affair. But I have so much to do with mortals that sometimes I think a little of their sentimentality is rubbing off on me.

  —Don’t be distracted by trivialities, said the Daimon Maimas. What do the theologians say? Circumcise yourself as to the heart and not as to the foreskin. And never neglect what is bred in the bone. Do you think it was bred in Francis to be a victim all his life? How would that reflect on me? As a rather superior mortal once said to a sentimental friend, Clear your mind of cant! Shall we continue?

  Five

  CLICK-CLACK … CLICK-CLACK … twenty-four repetitions of the sound, and a melancholy toot as if from an entirely innocent Bummelzug passing over a switch-point. But why would an innocent Bummelzug be rumbling through the Bavarian countryside at half past eleven at night, when all decent freight-trains were at rest on their sidings? Twenty-four click-clacks meant twelve vans. Twelve vans, loaded, perhaps, with people, were being hauled to the internment camp that lay obscurely in a nearby valley.

  Francis made a note in the book he carried always in his breast pocket. Tomorrow he would write to Sir Owen Williams-Owen in Harley Street, to report on the condition of his heartbeat under particular conditions of stress.

  This was the first such observation he had made during his first week at Schloss Düsterstein. It was providential that his bedroom lay on the side of the great house that was nearest to the railway line.

  The great house had been a surprise—was still a surprise, after a week’s exploration. To begin, in spite of its name it was not particularly suggestive of melancholy. Old it unquestionably was, and large even as country houses go, but its chief quality was that of the centre of a large farming
district, and on its own lands and tenant-farms adjacent the Gräfin von Ingelheim conducted a big agricultural industry with exemplary efficiency. Motor trucks took vegetables, fowls, and veal or pork every week to the railway that carried them on to Munich, where wholesale dealers awaited them, and distributed them to a number of hotels, restaurants, and butchers. In a wing of the castle was an office from which the farms were managed and the dispatching of the foodstuffs was arranged, probably in some of the goods vans that now and then visited the camp in the hills. Schloss Düsterstein was, as agricultural matters go, big business.

  Castle it was called, but there was nothing of the medieval fortress about it. There were reminders of the seventeenth century and a large square tower that was considerably earlier, but its appearance and plan were of the latter part of the eighteenth century; if shabby in some of its details and furnishings—the sort of shabbiness that suggests an aristocratic indifference to newfangledness rather than poverty—it was comfortable and as pleasant as a decidedly grand house could be. It was not domestic in the English sense, but it was not a comfortless imitation of a French château, either. Francis’s bedroom, for instance: a heavily furnished room so large that the big bed seemed accidental rather than central, with armchairs and a desk and plenty of room for all his artist’s equipment, and in one corner a large and fine porcelain stove. True, he washed in a little closet concealed in one of the walls, to which hot water was brought through an inner passage, so that he never saw the servant who carried it; but the ewer and basin, the two large chamber-pots, and the slop-pail were of an expensive eighteenth-century china, marked with the crest of Ingelheim. Slops were spirited away every day by means of the same inner passage. Baths were to be taken in a large chamber set out with Empire furniture and a marble tub of almost Roman aspect, into which rather rusty water gushed through huge brass taps; it was a long walk from the bedroom, but as an Oxford man Francis was accustomed to distant baths.