“Altostratus – straight above the tithe barn. Warm moist air flowing up over a cold front. I’ve never explained cold fronts to you. But about Daddy”—Charles’s voice grew elaborately casual—”there’s quite a lot to find out still, don’t you think?” Clouds were the only subject on which Charles claimed even parity of knowledge with his brother; about their father as about everything else Tim must know a little more; his twelve months’ start made that self-evident. “Could he have been a conscientious objector? Turk says that conscientious objectors have to clean out the lats in lunatic asylums.”
“Turk’s an ass.”
“Perhaps he is a bit of an ass. But it’s queer, isn’t it, that Daddy wasn’t really fighting?”
“There wasn’t anything queer about it,” Tim said impatiently. “And I’m sure it’s been explained to you. It was his health – not letting him fight. But he was on a commission. The commission went with the Army to try to keep churches and pictures and things safe during the war.”
“Did the Germans have a commission too?”
“Yes, they did. And Daddy was killed when he was trying to reach the other commission and persuade it to prevent the German soldiers from blowing up a very beautiful bridge.”
“There you are! That’s more than they ever told me!” Charles spoke without indignation. “I suppose it’s because I get nightmares and you don’t. Was it that he was . . . very badly killed?”
Tim hesitated. “Yes – very badly, I think. He was on the bridge when it was blown up. I suppose there was nothing left but hundreds of bits.”
“Of the bridge?”
Tim took a moment to deal with this. “Well,” he said, “of the bridge too, I suppose.”
“You mean, Daddy was . . . gobbets?”
Tim got hastily to his feet. “You have disgusting words,” he said. “And when you ought to be shocked, you’re not. I don’t believe in your nightmares any more. When you next pretend to be having one, I shall scrag you. Honest.”
“Well, I know now, anyway. And he seems to have been behaving quite sensibly when he got killed. I mean, if the bridge was really very fine. You don’t think it was perhaps against the rules of war – going to find the people on the other side like that?”
Tim pulled in his line and looked gloomily at the worm; its appearance was unattractive. “I have sometimes wondered. You see, it was pretty brave, walking across a bridge that was going to go sky-high. So oughtn’t there to have been a medal? But I’ve never heard of one. And of course you have to be careful not to talk to the enemy while the war is going on just in the ordinary way.”
“But you say he wasn’t a soldier.”
“Well, I suppose the people on the commission were half and half. I don’t even know whether Daddy wore uniform. We could ask Mummy about that.”
Charles shook his head doubtfully. “It might be embarrassing.”
“You’re always thinking things would be embarrassing.” Tim removed the pallid and juiceless worm from its hook and threw it away in disgust. “It’s the phase of agonising self-consciousness.”
“Who’s been eavesdropping now?” Charles hurled this at his brother in a fiercely triumphant shout – only to add without a pause, and in the friendliest manner, “here comes your telegram. I bet it will be all right.”
It was quite characteristic that Charles Arnander, although his head was so learnedly in the clouds, had glimpsed the flash of the red bicycle first. The brothers raced across the paddock. But the house was nearly half a mile away, and the telegraph boy would beat them to it easily.
Tim drew ahead. Pinn, long and low and stone-roofed, with behind it the curved yew hedge that was the tallest in England, stretched itself in modest luxury to the clear spring sunshine, as if aware that cumulonimbus and nimbostratus were likely to spoil things later in the day. From each end of the house a column of smoke went up: one from the kitchen and one from the nursery. In between, they could see the line of dormer windows in their own domain: bedroom, schoolroom and the long attic that held only the electric train. Soon the children would be beginning to take a vexatious interest in that. And then, presumably, there would be changes. The children would move up, the nursery would go out of commission for a generation, they themselves would be promoted to rooms of adult dignity on the first floor. Ponies would become horses and bicycles would become ancient but presentable cars. Other boys would come from Winchester – if Winchester it was to be – and Rupert would mount them, would find them a rod, a gun. After that there would be two years in the Army – in the Coldstream, if they could grow tall enough – and then they would nearly all go up to New College. And after that, becoming a banker would probably be natural. Even for Charles.
Tim scrambled over a gate. He was still ahead. His legs had really been growing during the last few months, and perhaps he would be a long-limbed sort of person after all. He was in the big home paddock that some of Rupert’s City friends politely called the park. Pinn bobbed up and down as he ran, so that it seemed to be nodding its agreement with the future that tumbled in quick pictures through his mind. Only the sun flickered on the dormer windows, and it was possible to feel that they were not nodding, but winking. You can’t tell, the winking seemed to say slyly. You can’t tell at all.
Jill Craine stood on the small paved space outside her husband’s book-room. The open telegram was in her hand. She saw the boys come racing towards her as if on the wings of disaster. She frowned. Their sort of disaster, of course: the dinghy foundered, both wheels buckled, the old grey pony lamed. She had been startled when she looked up and saw them. But it could only be something like that.
They vanished behind a high hedge and then appeared again, perilously skimming the verge of the swimming-pool where the lichened statues postured patiently in cypress niches. Tim was ahead. They would neither of them ever be tall or notably athletic, but they were without their father’s physical meagreness, his bodily insignificance which had been so extreme that he could carry it like a distinction. Rupert’s world was claiming them; it could be read in their faces, which took more and more from nurture, gave prominence to the clear complexion, the good teeth, the straight glance, the promise of setting into firm lines and equable motions. Beneath this, John Arnander’s features – pinched and skimped and plebeian in repose, yet so transformed at a breath of suffering or joy – showed only like a ghost haunting a fadingly familiar place.
Jill Craine folded the telegram and slipped it back into its orange envelope.
But they had zigzagged through the rose garden and tumbled to a halt in front of her. “Is it . . . “Tim began. He broke off, panting. The words he wanted were too big for him, too naked. He had another, an awkward, shot. “Is it about—about my future?”
She stared at him.
“He means his schol.” Charles spoke quickly. “But it isn’t. I see it isn’t.”
She remembered. She smiled. “Of course it isn’t. That can’t be till the afternoon. The Dong said so. What a shame, Tim – to run so hard and draw a blank! Go and wash and tidy – both of you.” She looked at her eldest child and gave way to something she rarely gave way to – the small propitiatory word offered to another whose being is the consequence of one’s own act. “Lemon sponge,” she said.
Tim flushed. He didn’t think all that of lemon sponge; it was only a family convention that each child had a favourite dish; what affected him was something quite different. He had seen for the first time that his mother was beautiful, that her face was a strange and beautiful object. For a long time he had believed that because it was strange it couldn’t be beautiful. Certainly it bore no resemblance to the photographs of fashionable women in weekly magazines in the drawing-room. But now he saw this as without significance. He saw too that his mother’s head was entirely like what it ought to be like: the bronze bust which he could see at this moment glinting in a cleared wall-space amid Rupert’s books. He felt an odd resentment towards the books, a jealousy. And suddenly
he was visited by a quite extraordinary thought which he had an impulse to frame in words: that unlike the women in the magazines she would remain wholly beautiful if she stood on her head. But of course one couldn’t say that, either seriously or as if it were a joke. It would be a wet weed’s thing to say. So he said something else instead. “And cream?” He used his tough bargaining voice. “It’s no good without cream, you know.”
“Quite definitely no cream.”
Their mother spoke briskly, and Tim found the reply entirely in order. But Charles had hardly heard it. His heart was thumping still at the queerness of the moment in which the scholarship had meant nothing to her, and in which he had glimpsed trouble in her eyes as she stood quite still in the sunshine, the unexplained telegram in her hand.
CHAPTER THREE
Craine’s secretary caught him at lunch-time with transforming news. There had been a cable from Washington. Mr. Auldearn was coming home.
Over his chop Craine chuckled at it – silently, since he was entertaining a serious banker from Bonn. Hadn’t he been telling himself that you never know what a telegraph boy may bring you, these days?
The cable had been brief, but Craine could guess what lay behind it. Old Mungo, like his father the judge, was a man of rapid decisions. And he was through with trying to hold their hands over there. His advice had been disregarded once too often; he had written a characteristic note to the P.M.; and now he was packing his bag. Once back in London, he would be spoiling to hog the whole show. He would take a single glance at Craine – if indeed he remembered to take as much as that – and pronounce him to be on the verge of collapse. He would disturb the calm of clubs by calling out to eminent physicians to come over and inspect a fellow member palpably in articulo mortis. By hook or by crook, in fact, he would get rid of his junior partner for a month, and indulge himself in a high old time. Everybody would be the better for it. Craine had no illusions as to that. There would be a general toning up, whether of gentlemen in Threadneedle Street or of tellers flicking their abaci in Aden or Hong Kong. But of course a month would be enough. For longer than a month, Auldearn without Craine wouldn’t do.
The German banker was elderly, and two or three years out of date. He spoke of the wickedness of putting children into uniform – even, he would venture to say, uniform of the speciously civilian type which he understood to have been retained at Eton. In Germany children would never wear uniform again. As he lit his cigar the German banker warmed to his topic. His jaw squared and his voice barked. You may be all right in a boardroom, Craine thought, but a barrack square is your spiritual home.
The coffee was taken away; the ash lengthened on the cigars. This sort of lunch, Craine said to himself, is a curse. My father always declared that, granted a single glass of decent madeira, one did best on something brought over from a pub. But there’s no need to be impatient, all the same. Not now. For Mungo’s coming back and I can get off that bridge whenever I want to. I’ll celebrate by going down to Pinn tonight, after all. As soon as I’m through with Weidle, I’ll drive straight out of town. Yes, by Jove, and with the Amico di Sandro in the boot. We’ll arrange our holiday, Jill and I, before we go to bed. On Monday or Tuesday we’ll fly out. Malpensa, and a couple of nights for La Scala in Milan. And then . . .
The banker from Bonn had risen. “Leider,” he said – for blessedly he had an appointment with somebody much more important than Craine. Hats and umbrellas. There is something about Tim, Craine thought. Yes – his scholarship. The boy will get it, all right. The Dong is confident, and he’s been shoving lads at these things for forty years. Jill’s clever, and John Arnander must have possessed high intelligence. Artists of that calibre do. Pleasant to be back on the evening the news comes. Might I give Tim the Amico? Would there be any sense in that?
He didn’t know. He shook hands with the banker from Bonn and walked west, realising that he didn’t know this small thing. Would the boy appreciate such a present? Or would he feel that he was being got at, was being nudged into remembering that he was a great painter’s son? Wouldn’t something more commonplace, more orthodox, be safer – say a gun? Although perplexed, Craine gently smiled to himself as he walked. A gun is safe in one sense. But Jill might point out it isn’t so in another. Anyway, one gets nowhere in such matters on the strength of deliberation. To give this, to give that: the decision has to be intuitive if it’s to be any good.
But Lord, he said to himself as he hailed a cab in the Strand, don’t let’s have this sort of thing again. It’s settled that I have to guess about people – even about my wife, a little. And I oughtn’t to have plans for the Arnander boys. For what do I know about them? There’s not even the link of blood. Tim and Charles are two enigmas. Is it fair to hope that an enigma won’t become an accountant like Groocock or a banker like Mungo or myself; that he will rebel, even, against the whole establishment? And the danger will be greater with my own children, even if a little less of them is concealed from me. It isn’t so much the sins of the fathers that are visited on the succeeding generation. It’s the grade the fathers haven’t made, the challenge they didn’t square up to.
He took a turn round the gallery before allowing the young man in charge to call Weidle. The Amico was still there, and a ticket announced that it stood reserved. Whether for Tim or for himself, therefore, Craine looked at it with a proprietary eye. There wasn’t much to be said for that; it was an irrelevant sentiment to entertain in front of a picture. On the other hand innumerable works of art would never have been executed if rich men had no fondness for possession, and the acquisitive instinct might surely exercise itself with particular harmlessness upon this small charming thing.
The Florentine lady looked out full face upon the few who stepped aside from Bond Street to hobnob with her. She had not made up her mind, one might say, about London. Indecisiveness indeed was her charm – and only the more so because one didn’t determine whether the quality inhered veritably in her character or reflected simply the painter’s uncertainty in modelling eyes and mouth. In the background’s steep panelled and pillared perspectives sunlight tumbled through doors and apertures venturesomely drawn. The cramped space was all blond and golden, so that Craine was reminded absurdly of Groocock’s office in its brief transfiguration.
But now Weidle’s young man was hovering. “Reserved,” he murmured. “For a regular client.”
Craine said nothing, and continued to look at the picture. He had schooled himself not to make kindly gestures in the face of incompetence. And in a place like this a salesman—were they called that?—was incompetent who didn’t know Craine.
“Raffaellino del Garbo.”
Now Craine looked at the young man. “What’s that?”
“Of course it came to us from a private collection in which it was known as an Amico di Sandro.”
The young man produced a tight smile as he said this. It seemed designed as a gesture of admittance to some respectable outer circle of connoisseurship in these matters. Craine didn’t care for it. “Raffaellino?” he asked. “That attribution hasn’t lapsed too? I’m sure your client wouldn’t care to be back with old pictor ignotus.”
“Ah – the anonimi.” The young man’s smile was fading, but he remained confident “No, that’s not in question. Quite a secure attribution. Raffaellino.”
“Really? But you know Vasari’s life of Chimenti Camicia?”
“Yes, indeed.” Making an emergency effort, the young man put depths of quiet asseveration into this.
“Then what about Berto Linaiuolo? He ought to be allowed a modest canvas or panel here and there, poor chap. For instance, the first audience of Esther and Ahasuerus at Chantilly. And why not this? Do you see any relationship to the Haman and Mordecai in the Liechtenstein Collection?”
The young man was looking round for help. But for the decorum that had to be observed in this solemn little place, he would no doubt have hollered for his boss. However, he tried again. “Most interesting,” he said –
and Craine reflected that this was a verbal resource he held in common with Groocock. “There’s a large field for speculation, of course. But at least we can say—can’t we?—that this painter is wholeheartedly a quattrocentist. And that’s always precious, you’ll agree. In fact, that’s what makes it command the figure it does.” Having been thus led to touch on the commercial fringe of his priestlike task, the young man promptly made a compensatorily sensitive gesture in front of the Florentine lady’s faintly faulty nose. “Nothing at all that prefigures the late Bolognese. Austerely quattrocentist.”
The young man retreated in good order. His feet glided over Weidle’s expensive carpet. He was dressed in the same sort of clothes as Craine- – but, unlike Craine, he wouldn’t have been happier in knickerbockers. Not that he wasn’t reasonably put together in a small compact way. A kindlier fate might have turned him into quite a decent scrum-half. But here the poor devil was, with his sacred books – Berenson’s and the rest – got as yet only imperfectly by heart, so that Craine remembered as much of them as he did.
Craine mooned around the gallery. He wasn’t pleased with himself – celebrating his coming spell of freedom by playing ball like that with a scrum-half manqué. It was depressing that all day the Florentine lady had to look out on, and harken to, such ballyhoo. No wonder she was doubtful about London in the twentieth century; no wonder she was half minded to turn round and move off through these steep perspectives to whatever quiet salotto lay beyond. Craine continued to moon. But nothing much happened. Looking at a little Lorenzo Costa – the young man ought to have remembered he was peddling that before disparaging the Bolognese – Craine found himself thinking of Jill’s awkward new money and comparing discount houses. Well, that was all right. You mustn’t kid yourself about pictures. Sometimes they went to work on you and sometimes they didn’t move a muscle. They were inert now. But was this, partly at least, because there was a paucity of good ones on Weidle’s walls?
A Use of Riches Page 3