He was well-behaved, indeed charming, at his mother’s sister’s house in Arizona. Nevertheless his Uncle Jack took a poor view of him and presently wrote to say so.
Mr. Baxter got tough, refused more funds, and Giorgio was home again before his year was up. He appeared unsettled, buzzing between Rome and Florence, his head full of projects for making money. Some months later the principessa was in London, and one afternoon she told Constanza that she would like to have a talk about her will.
“Oh, mama, are you going to make one?”
As a matter of fact, Anna said, she had. Ages ago when they first lived in England. “Those men insisted. You see, the trust fund——”
“Yes, mama, we’ve had all of it. It’s yours to leave it any way you please and I hope you’ll do exactly that.”
Anna went on to say that in the will she made then, three quarters were left to her daughter and the remaining quarter to her son. “You see the money will go absolutely to my heirs—Mr. Baxter says they can lose it in one throw—and I did not know then how Giorgio might turn out. One quarter to him seemed, well . . . safe. Now I have made a new will leaving everything to you.”
“Ought you to cut out Giorgio entirely?” said Constanza.
“That is what Jack and Mr. Baxter pressed me to do, and I’ve come to agree with them. They wrote something about his trying to buy on margin when he was over there, it’s a thing they do on the stock exchange, but Giorgio’s scheme made their hair stand on end. Jack writes it isn’t that Giorgio is a gambler, but that he has simply no idea, he just does not know how things work. And Jack says he doesn’t want to bother to find out. He says it’s ingrained and invincible. They say that everything he touches melts away. It’s more than extravagance: he’s not responsible, he doesn’t know what responsibility is. To leave anything to him at all would be total waste. So I am not leaving him anything. And I shall tell him that. I want you all to know.”
“You can’t leave him with nothing,” said Constanza. “And wills are such public things.”
“It’s not as if he didn’t have property coming to him, as you know he stands to have the lion’s share from Rome. As it’s not money, it will be safe.” A gleam came into Anna’s eye, and she added, “I know that he can never sell the palazzo.”
“You know more than I do.”
“And there are other reasons. Giorgio has already had a good slice of the fund, in one way or another.”
“I’ve no doubt of that. So have we all.”
“More’s been done for him than you know,” Anna said and blushed.
Constanza laughed. “Between the two of you! Now, why don’t you leave him a share in trust? Surely a new trust could be set up for him?”
“They’ve gone into that and are against it—I must say it surprised me, I thought they were all for tying money up. They say things are too uncertain nowadays. Mr. Baxter doesn’t even trust the dollar. And we all think it’s safe to leave everything to you. If Giorgio needed something to keep him going, you would look after him, wouldn’t you?” Of course, said Constanza. “I look on you as the real future head of the family. Help Giorgio in instalments, they mean. They seem to have worked it all out; I’ve never had so many letters from Jack. They think that Giorgio is bound to marry, in spite of his lack of tact, well . . . the way Italian boys often have to marry, and then he will be looked after. And you may not.” Anna gave her daughter a look in which there was disapproval, entreaty, interrogation. “When I think of the chances——”
“And I may not,” Constanza said in her cold voice. “Let’s leave it at that, mama.”
“They don’t let me forget that you have no other expectations—they boil at the way you have been treated by Northumberland.”
“Let’s leave it at that.”
Anna changed her tone. “My poor child. And you were brought up at a time when women like you were not trained to earn their living. And you have Flavia to think of. With her English grandparents not even asking to look at her!”
“Just as well. I don’t want her to look at them: she might be turned to stone.”
Anna began to launch herself into a set-piece against Simon’s parents.
Constanza cut across. “They have lost three sons.”
“A judgement.”
“Mama, I beg you. Left with that dreary daughter, who became what she is because they always showed how little use they had for her. Poor people—prisoners of a code, and nobody to show them early enough a way to walk out of it. Poor man, believing himself on thin ice all his life because he married into trade. Poor woman. It is such an unnecessary tragedy.”
“You always find excuses for everybody, Constanza,” said her mother. “It’s moral laxity.”
“If I escaped being shut into a code it is because I was confronted by so many. When the whole point of a code is that there can be no choice.” Constanza smiled again. “Well, I owe that to you in a way. Like so much else, mama. Providence moves in a mysterious way.”
It was Anna now who did not feel like going into it. She almost snapped, “I know that I owe you some form of financial security. And this means that I have to protect you from your brother. I’m ashamed that, as it is, there may not be so much left——”
“Have you actually made this new will?” said Constanza.
“I have,” said Anna, “and it’s signed and sealed and witnessed. I had Mena and Mr. James in for it. Always best to have people who know about one’s affairs. It’s on its way to Mr. Baxter’s safe. It is my will and my intention, and now you know it, and I shall not change my mind. I never do.”
Constanza left her mother feeling that on the whole her decision might be right. “How many disappointments she has had,” she afterwards told Mr. James.
“There is one thing I must say for her,” he answered, “she never played her wills. Anna has never used her money as a weapon; and I don’t think she is doing so now.”
“She could have, I suppose?”
“That hasn’t occurred to you?”
“Not until this instant. It never crossed my mind.”
“And that,” said Mr. James, “is a very great compliment indeed to Anna.”
•
In the course of the years Constanza’s life in London became one of diminishing returns. Most of her friends had gone one way or the other, were settled in the country with a family, settled in their job, their college, absorbedly successful or mediocre; gone to live abroad, en poste, as dedicated writers, as failed writers. After a certain point everybody is housed, cased, fitted or misfitted; those who remain at disposal, are too much so. Constanza’s present lovers were replicates and echoes, the Greek poet, the Latin youth, the young man with the ball at his feet. By thirty-five or forty most men have become what they set out to be or fallen short of it. The good writers seemed to work harder and talk less. The new writers appeared less good. The Liberal politics that had moved her so much in her youth were no more. Her early socialist hopes had been shaken by abhorrence of regimentation and distrust of bureaucracy. She had never been captured by communism; and thought she saw a human flaw in everyone over thirty years of age who was. She could not stand the Tories, and found much she could not sympathize with in the Labour Party. Perhaps it was too English. She felt that she was outgrowing everything or that it was outgrowing her. The times change and our lives change, but they do not always change in the same direction.
Constanza did not really take to abstract painting; it was not that she found it bad, but that she found the other richer, better. Her taste for music had never been more than that, a taste: good, slight, shallow. The ubiquitous use of Freud and all his works rather repelled her. She would not have called it unnecessary as her mother did (who now treasured À la Recherche du Temps Perdu and Mrs. Dalloway); much of it might be true and some of it quite necessary. It was the solemn and indulgent tittle-tattle which she found unwholesome, tedious, ugly: a reduction to the mechanical and the ignoble.
Toward the end of the Twenties Constanza had come to feel that she must make some break.
“I spent one half of my life in Italy and the other half in England or based on England,” she said to Mr. James.
Mr. James knew her too well to ask a factual question.
“I have a sense it’s come full circle. I have a sense I have to go.”
“Return to the first half, dear girl?”
“Not while the fascisti are there. Nor would they let me. I can only go as a tourist, a few weeks now and again.”
“Any plans?”
“An instinct: Off with the old. That may well be the price of the future—to burn one’s boats.”
“Before seeing land?”
“That’s the idea. Not that I have a fleet of boats. I could begin by giving up my flat. I’ve had it for three years. That’s a chunk of time the way we’ve been living, mama and I.”
“Travel?”
“Mama’s idea.”
“The world is large.”
“So they say. Did you hear that mama is moving again? She’s been complaining about the Florentine climate. She’s taking a villa at Alassio. The place is full of old English beaux. I’m rather for it: the régime is getting tougher every month. When I was in Rome papa tipped me off: they’re keeping an eye on her. She’d be much better off in a place near the border.”
Mr. James looked worried. “We can’t have more trouble for Anna.”
“I know! I should have liked her to go to Bordighera which is only a step from France, but didn’t like to suggest it. I can’t worry her. Flavia doesn’t want to go. She’s got an idea about school in England. She’s working on it.”
He said, “And what will you do with yourself?”
“It’ll sort itself out.”
He looked at her.
“What do you want to say?”
“My dear . . . Only that you might make some people very happy.” Constanza thought of the people she had loved most. “It hasn’t quite worked out that way,” she said.
•
Constanza gave up her flat. Doing this kept her in London later into the summer than was her usual way. It was hot, most of the people she knew were somewhere else; the streets, full of ice-cream papers and strollers in shirt-sleeves, had a dishevelled, faintly raffish air. Constanza, too, felt herself already a stranger. On one of her last days, a Friday afternoon, she had to go to a shipping office in the Haymarket to see to some arrangements. She was handed a bundle of forms, asked for a pen and sat down at one of the low tables. As she was writing, she became gradually conscious of somebody looking at her. She looked up in her turn and saw a big darkish man stand in front of her. He was burly and at the same time glossy, he wore no hat and she could see that he was rather bald. He stood quietly, smiling down on her with a friendly, faintly ironic expression in his eyes.
“Mrs. Herbert, do you remember me?”
And then she knew who he was. “My co-respondent,” she said, and held out her hand. She had never seen him dressed in anything but khaki. “Captain Ware. If it is still Captain?”
“Neither,” he said. “That was just a name I took. Now I’m Crane.”
“Lewis Crane?” she said.
With another smile, with full irony and pleasure, he said: “Lewis Crane.”
“Douanier Rousseau,” she said. “You did it!”
Lewis Crane’s reputation at that time—as a critic and manipulator of the modern-art market—was far greater than it is today when the painters he has made or helped to make are household words and astronomical picture deals have become commonplace. His dual role as distinguished writer and marchand amateur shocked many and what was known about him did nothing to soften or explain. He was reported to be aloof and ruthless, living like a tycoon with the tastes and language of an intellectual. If he wrote an article it would appear in a quarterly; he did not contribute to the Weekly or the Sunday Press. His books were few, authoritative, original and, if one could discount the buying and selling side, independent in judgement. They were badly written. (All but the first one which showed patches of style and grace.) His financial transactions were discreet and very successful. He was much talked about and a frequent figure in gossip columns, yet few people had met him. He did not live in England, did not consort with his fellow writers, was known only impersonally to dealers and appeared to have no clique or hangers-on.
He said, “Let’s get out of here. There’s no need for you to fill in all that stuff yourself.”
Constanza obeyed. Lewis Crane put a hand on her arm and steered her to the door.
A clerk rushed out to him. “Sir——”
“It can wait till Monday. Send the lot to my hotel.”
“But sir—your tickets, sir——”
They were through the door and in the street. “Let’s sit somewhere. I want to talk to you.”
Constanza said she had a flat quite near. “Full of crates and dust-sheets, I’m getting out of it next week.”
They walked to her flat. It was in the state she had described. In the sitting-room, already off the wall, stood a large flamboyant canvas of a bright beast in the jungle.
Lewis Crane stopped in his tracks, hit by a second shock of recognition.
“So you have it!”
Constanza said, “One of the customs man’s rum pictures. Did you know it? It was Simon’s. It doesn’t belong to me. It’s my daughter’s, he left it to her. That—and this one.” She turned to a small, quite exquisite Juan Gris that was still hung. “I never knew he had them.”
“He didn’t like them much,” said Lewis Crane. “They were not his period.”
“So you do know about them?”
“Sure,” he said. “I sold them to him. I sold them to him for two-pence to do him a good turn. Simon’s been a good friend to me.”
“Tell me,” said Constanza, her eyes on him.
“Simon had a very kind side.” Oh, about the two pictures—that was quickly told. “I had to have a sum of money in 1917. Simon lent it to me. It was quite a big sum.”
“He probably borrowed it from my mother,” said Constanza.
“As a matter of fact he did. He told me so. When the Armistice came and I was able to lay hands on some of my assets, I was able to pay him back. It was also necessary for me to get out of the Army quick——”
“Captain Ware, D.S.O.?”
“That part was all right. Only Ware didn’t stick. Simon was able to help again. He pulled strings and I got demobbed.”
“Like Angelina’s soldier,” said Constanza.
Lewis ignored him. “I happened to have the pictures then and I offered to let him have them for what I’d paid myself some years before. Cash wasn’t anything to Simon by then, anyway it was so little, so I persuaded him to take them as an investment. It was the best I could do for him at that time, and later we drifted apart. And now here they are.”
Constanza told him about Simon’s will.
“They won’t stretch to an interesting life,” he said, “but they’ll make her a whopping good dowry. Does she need one—your daughter?”
“One never can tell,” said Constanza.
He stepped to the canvas on the floor, ran a finger over it. “Could do with a light varnish,” he said. “You are moving house: where’re you taking them? Who’s crating them? Who are your insurers?”
“I thought of having them shipped to my mother in Italy.”
“Shouldn’t do that. Italy’s tricky. Might get torn up as decadent art. Store them in England or get them to America. I can do it for you.”
When he left, he had arranged to call for her in an hour to take her out to dinner.
It did not occur to Constanza to say no. She had liked him eleven years ago, and she liked him now. She had found him attractive then, and she found him more attractive now. He had mildly intrigued her then, and he still intrigued her. He appeared a different man in various ways, and yet he did not; and this, too, added to the sense of double-vis
ion she had floated in since that moment he first spoke to her in the shipping office. All this meant much, meant nothing—what exercised the magnet pull was the feeling he had for, the glimpse she had through him, of Simon.
In the course of their evening she learnt casually that he had been supposed to leave for Amsterdam that night. By next morning they had reached the stage of discussing where they could go away to for a few days. “I’m sailing from Cherbourg on Tuesday,” he said and that, too, was the first she heard of it.
If you have three days in front of you on a Saturday in August, he told her, the best thing to do is to stay where you are. Less wear and tear. Less waste, less people. “Though we could fly to Paris.”
Constanza said she had never really been to Paris. “A few times with my mother, at a Right-Bank hotel. I never got what other people have, what one knows they’ve got when one reads their books.”
“It’s still in front of you.”
“Perhaps.”
“Well, shall we go now?”
“Perhaps not.”
“Right,” he said. “We stay where we are. I don’t want you involved with Paris. I want to be alone with you.”
He asked her to move into the Savoy with him. “Separate rooms, this time. Separate suites.” But Constanza said she would rather stay on at her flat, camp at her flat. “I’m practically gone. Nobody is going to disturb us.”
•
They remained as she had said, moving invisible, alone, in the high summer anonymity of London. He spent the nights at her flat; disappeared early and came back in a few hours after a slow morning at the Turkish baths. They lunched at restaurants he knew that even now were cool, uncrowded and not glum. The afternoons were best at the Savoy, on a high floor, the blinds drawn, an electric fan humming. At night they dined on the river, strolled endlessly, returned late in the hired, chauffeur-driven car. On Monday Lewis asked her, “Will you sail with me tomorrow?”
“Why not,” she said.
Right, he said; and not to think of anything. “I will send my own packers to the flat, they’ll do everything beautifully.”
A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error Page 24