What's Bred in the Bone

by Robertson Davies

  IT WAS MIDSUMMER 1939 before Saraceni returned, and Francis was growing anxious. He had received a letter in late June from Sir Owen Williams-Owen, saying:

  Your record of your heart’s action for the past several months is causing me some concern, and I think it advisable that I examine you again. I suggest that you return to England as soon as you conveniently can, so that I may have another look at you. Your godfather, whom I saw the other day, sends his regards.

  THAT WAS NOT HARD to interpret, even by a preoccupied painter who had not been paying much attention to the world’s news. But he must see the Meister before he left Düsterstein. In late July, Saraceni was with him in the shell-grotto, and Francis, not without a sense of drama, unveiled The Marriage at Cana, baked and with Augsburg dust in its craquelure.

  The Meister followed the familiar routine. He looked at the picture for a quarter of an hour without speaking. Then he went through the inspections with the field-glasses, the large magnifying glass, the poking at the back of the canvas, the sniffing, the rubbing of a corner with a wetted finger—all the ceremonies of expertise. But then he did something which was not usual; he sat down and looked at the picture for a considerable time, grunting now and then with what Francis hoped was satisfaction.

  “Well, Corniche,” he said at last, “I expected something good from you, but I confess you have astonished me. You know what you have done, of course?”

  “I think I do, but I’d be glad if you would reassure me.”

  “I can understand your bewilderment. Your picture is by no means an exercise in a past manner; those things always betray a certain want of real energy, and this has plenty of energy, the unmistakable impression of here and now. Something unquestionably from the Mothers. Reality of artistic creation, in fact. You have found a reality that is not part of the chronological present. Your here and now are not of our time. You seem not to be trapped, as most of us are, in the psychological world of today. I hate such philosophical pomposities, but your immanence is not tainted by the calendar. One cannot predict with certainty, but this should wear well—which Letztpfennig fakery and fancy-dress painting never does.”

  “So—am I out of my apprenticeship?”

  So far as this picture goes, you are indeed. Whether you can keep this up, or whether you want to do that, remains to be seen. Offhand, I should say that if you continue to paint in this manner, and let it be known, your goose is cooked. The whole world of criticism would be down on you like hawks attacking a—what? A phoenix? Some very rare bird, certainly.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “Ah, well, that is a question I can answer without hesitation. You get back to England as soon as you can. And I am off to Italy in the morning. Things are growing very uncomfortable, if you haven’t noticed.”

  “What about the picture?”

  “If I can arrange it, I shall see that it is sent to you. But it is big, and too stiff to go in a cask, and that may not be easy. But for a while I think it must go into one of the dark service corridors here.”

  “That isn’t quite what I meant. You know how I regard you, Meister. Have I satisfied you? That is what has been gnawing me.”

  “Satisfied me? I find it very hard to say, because satisfaction is not part of my metier, and I rarely step outside my metier. But here I have no choice, and little time to delay. So, for the present, a rivederci—Meister.”

  Six

  Wars are national and international disasters, but everyone in a warring nation fights a war of his own and sometimes it cannot be decided whether he has won or lost. Francis Cornish’s war was long and painful, even though he was a non-combatant.

  Indeed, being a non-combatant was one of his lesser, if more obvious, troubles. To be an able-bodied man in his thirties, not apparently doing any important work, required frequent explanation, and aroused dislike and suspicion. He had, of course, his letter from Sir Owen Williams-Owen, guaranteeing his troublesome heart and exemption from service, but he could not wear it pinned to his coat; from Uncle Jack, for whom he was working long hours, he had nothing at all, because it was unthinkable, if he should be injured, or challenged, that he should be identified with what he now called, not “the profession”, but frankly MI5.

  As soon as he returned to England in late July of 1939, Francis became officially—in the sense that he was paid a rather small salary—a counter-intelligence man, which meant that his job was to find out whatever he could about people representing themselves as refugees from Europe, who were in fact German agents. It was not Secret Service in the romantic style; what it meant was that by day he worked with an agency that interviewed refugees and helped them, and at night he hung about in doorways watching who entered and left certain buildings that were under observation. Careful reports of what he learned, which were chiefly timetables, he took as unobtrusively as he could to Uncle Jack, who worked from a small office at the back of a house in Queen Anne’s Gate.

  It was drudgery, but he managed to give it an individual touch, for which he blessed the name of Harry Furniss and those long hours in Blairlogie, where he had sketched everybody and everything, alive and dead. Once he had seen a man or woman, he could produce a useful likeness, and he was not deceived by disguises. Few people have any aptitude for disguise; they put too much faith in dyed hair, changes of clothes, and peculiar walks; they disguise their fronts, but they neglect to disguise their backs, and Francis, who had learned the lesson from Saraceni, could identify a back when he might be puzzled by a face. So he amused himself by decorating his reports with sketches that were doubtless more useful than he knew, because Uncle Jack was not communicative, and never praised. He was not permitted to use a typewriter, because the sound, late at night, might rouse the suspicion of a landlady; his reports, written in an exquisite, tiny Italic hand, and ornamented with sketches, were little works of art. But Uncle Jack seemed impervious to art, and filed them without comment on their appearance.

  What was drudgery for the first months of the war became dangerous misery after the coming of the air raids on London, by day and night in the autumn of 1940, and by night until May of 1941. It was in the great fire-raid of December 29 that Francis lost what had become his chief treasure.

  He had rediscovered Ruth Nibsmith, meeting her by chance one October night in a Lyons restaurant where he had gone for a meal before taking up one of his long vigils across the street from a suspected house.

  “Le Beau Ténébreux! What a piece of luck! What are you up to? Not that I need to ask; you look the complete snoop. Who are you snooping on?”

  “What do you mean, I look a snoop?”

  “Oh, my dear—the stained felt hat, the seedy raincoat, the bulge in the pocket where the notebook is kept—of course you’re a snoop.”

  “You only say that because you’re a psychic. My disguise is impenetrable. I am The Unknown Civilian, who is catching it so hard these bad days.”

  “Not half so hard as he’ll be catching it before the end of the year—speaking as a psychic.”

  “You’re right, of course. I am doing confidential work. What are you doing?”

  “Also confidential.” But after some chat it came out that Ruth was in Government Code and Cipher. “Of course, I have the puzzle-solving sort of mind,” she said; “I think it was my ability to do the Times crossword in half an hour that got me the job. But being a psychic does no harm, either. And that’s enough of that.” She glanced up at the poster on the wall, which was a picture by Fougasse of Hitler with an enormous ear cocked, and the legend “Careless Talk Costs Lives”.

  They renewed their friendship, so far as Francis’s peculiar assignments and Ruth’s occasional night duties allowed, and this meant renewal of their happy hours in bed. Ruth lived in a very small flat in Mecklenburgh Street where the landlady was either indulgent or indifferent and perhaps once a week they contrived a happy hour or so. In wartime London, which had become so grey and stuffy, where laundry was a difficulty and baths were uncertain
because of broken water-pipes, it was bliss to strip off their clothes and tumble into the not very clean sheets and lose themselves in a communion where no rules of security had to be remembered and tenderness and kindness were all that mattered. Perhaps it was odd that they never talked of love, or exchanged promises of fidelity; but they felt no need of such words. Without ever saying so, they knew that time was short and the present everything, and a union achieved when chance permitted was a treasure snatched from destruction.

  “If a bomb were to blow us up now,” said Francis, one night when they had disobeyed the sirens and stayed in the warm bed when they ought to have gone to the nearest chilly shelter, “I would feel I had died at the peak of my life.”

  “Don’t worry, Frank. No bomb is going to get you. Don’t you remember your horoscope at Düsterstein? Old age and fame for you, my darling.”

  “And you?”

  She kissed him. “That’s Classified Information,” she said. “I’m the decoder, not you.”

  On the night of December 29, when the great fire-raid struck, Francis was on the job, watching a door through which nobody came or went, until it became impossible to keep at his post any longer, and he went to a Tube station, where he lay on the hard pavement with some hundreds of others, unsleeping and in terror. When at last the all-clear sounded he went as far toward Ruth’s flat as was possible, for fires were raging and whole streets of houses had disappeared.

  She had been rescued, and in a shorter time than he had dared to hope he found her in a hospital. Rather, he found a body swathed in packs of saline solution, a body so heavily sedated that only one hand could be seen, and he sat for several hours, holding it, and praying as he had not prayed since childhood that by holding it he was being of some comfort. But the time came when the ward sister beckoned him away.

  “No use now. She’s gone. Was she your wife? A friend?”

  “A friend.”

  “Do you want a cup of tea?” It was not much, but it was everything the hospital had to offer. Francis did not want a cup of tea.

  So ended the greatest comfort he had ever known, which had lasted, he reckoned, a little less than ten weeks. Nothing during the forty-one years of life and a kind of distinction that remained to him brought anything to equal it.

  A hero of romance might have undergone what is called, not very descriptively, a nervous breakdown, or might have thrown away his letter of exemption and pushed his way into the armed services, seeking death or revenge. Francis’s heroism was of another sort; he pulled about him a harsh cloak of stoicism, shut the door on love, and drudged on at his tedious work until Uncle Jack, perhaps sensing a great change in him, or finding new worth in him, promoted him to something a little more interesting. He next sat for several months in a small office in a building that did not in the least suggest MI5, and co-ordinated reports that had been brought in by watchers like himself, and tried to make sense of information that was usually uninformative. Only once, in all this time, did he have any certainty that he had been instrumental in uncovering an enemy agent.

  It was not wholly loneliness and drudgery. Early in 1943 his father turned up, now revealed as MI5’s Security Liaison Officer for Canada, and rather a bigwig, for he stayed at Claridge’s and could have commanded a car for his use, if he had not preferred to walk. The Wooden Soldier was more wooden than ever, and his monocle was, if possible, more a part of his face than it had been before. He brought news of home.

  “Grand’mère and Aunt Mary-Ben won’t be long with us, I’m afraid. They’re old, of course; the old lady is well over eighty, and Aunt is eighty-five if she’s a day. But it isn’t age that ails them; it’s parsimony and bad food. That miserable Doctor is even older, but he is remarkably bobbish and keeps the old girls ticking. I never liked him. The worst sort of Irishman. Your mother is well, and as beautiful as the first day I saw her, but she’s developing some odd tricks; faulty memory—that kind of thing. The surprise of the pack is your young brother Arthur. No university for him; he says you went to two and that’s enough for the family. He’s been deep in the business already, and very sharp. But he’s in the Air Force now; I expect he’ll do well.

  “And you’re doing well, Jack Copplestone tells me.”

  “I wish he’d tell me once in a while. I sometimes think he’s forgotten me.”

  “Not Jack. But you’re not the easiest man to place, Frank. Not a swashbuckler, thank God. He’ll use you when the right thing turns up. Still, I’ll say a word to him. Not as though you had said anything to me, of course. But just to keep the wheels turning.

  “You know that both the O’Gorman boys are in the Army? Very junior, mind you, but keen. Unfortunately not very bright—not in a Service way—but full of beans. And of course O’Gorman is up to his neck in what he calls his War Work—selling Victory Bonds and that sort of thing. I suppose somebody has to do it. You know, I think that fat ass is pushing for some kind of official recognition. He’s never recovered from that Knight of St. Sylvester fiasco. He wants something non-retractable.”

  It occurred to Francis that his father could not be very young. He must be at least ten years older than his mother. But Sir Francis Cornish, never having looked young, had not grown to look old, and as he was still part of the profession he must have been good at whatever it was he did. Certainly he looked like a revenant from an Edwardian past, but his step was light, and he was slim without being scrawny.

  “You know, Frank, looking back over the years, and the Canadian part of the family, I think I liked the old Senator best of all. If he had had a chance, he might have been a remarkable man.”

  “I always thought he was remarkable. He certainly became very rich.”

  “And founded the Trust. You’re right, of course; I was thinking of—well, of social advantages. The Cornish Trust—that always surprised me. He thought I was a figure-head, and I suppose I was, really. We lived in different worlds, and it’s rum that our worlds should ever have intersected. But they did, to everybody’s advantage.”

  “Grand-père was a man of deep feeling.”

  “Ah? I suppose so. I never understood much about that, myself. Y’know, Frank, you really must get some decent clothes. You look dreadful. It’s still possible to get good clothes, y’know. You’ve got lots of cash, haven’t you?”

  “I suppose so. I never think about clothes. They don’t seem relevant to what’s going on.”

  “Trust me, my boy, they’re always relevant. Even in the profession, you know, protective colouring is of different kinds. If you look like an underling you’ll be taken for an underling, because people haven’t always time to find out what you really are. So do smarten up. Go to my man, and get him to make you the best suit he can for your coupons. You should wear a school tie, or a college tie. Suppose you get knocked over in one of these raids? When they found you, how would they know who you were?”

  “Would it matter?”

  “Of course it would. Looking like a lout when you aren’t one is just as much affectation as being a dandy. Affectation in death is as ridiculous as affectation in life.”

  The next day Francis was marched to Savile Row, measured, and promised a suit of dark grey, to be followed by a blue one, in God’s and the ration’s good time. Sir Francis, having cowed his son, pressed his advantage and gave Francis some decent socks and shirts from his own wardrobe. They were not too bad a fit. To be dressed by one’s father when one is thirty-three perhaps suggests unusual compliance of character, but Francis took it humorously; he had been aware for some time that his profession as a lurker had made him look like a lurker, and that something would have to be done about it. The Major provided the necessary shove.

  He was well dressed, if still somewhat doubtful in the matter of shoes, when he called on Signora Saraceni at her house in South London. A note from the Meister, smuggled from Paris, had asked him to do so.

  The Signora was very English, but perhaps some life in Italy had given her the swooning, fruity man
ner which she probably thought proper in the wife of an artist. She was confiding.

  “Sometimes I wonder if, when this dreadful war is over, Tancred and I will live together again. It will have to be here. I keep my English passport still, you know. I never really liked Rome. And that apartment—well, it really was a bit much, wasn’t it? I mean, what domesticity can survive in the middle of so much history? There wasn’t a chair that didn’t have a lineage, and one really cannot relax perched on a lineage, can one? Not, you must understand, that there was any unkindness between Tancred and me. The war has kept us apart, but before that he visited me every year, and we were lovers. Oh, indeed we were! But I don’t suppose Tancred could ever settle happily in this house, and I love it. These chintzes, and this marvellous pickled-wood furniture—isn’t it divine? Really, Mr. Cornish, artist though you are, and friend of Tancred’s, isn’t it divine? From Heal’s, every stick of it, and nothing more than a few years old. One ought to live in one’s age, don’t you think? But I do hope we may live together again.”

  Her wish was not to be granted. A few weeks later a stray bomb, which was probably meant for the City, wiped out the Signora’s street, and the Signora as well, and it was Francis’s miserable job to write to the Meister about it, and find a way of reaching him.