“I oughtn’t to have left Italy.”
“As you know, I don’t know about that. We’ve never gone over it, you and I – not in detail.” Craine had managed to set himself shaving. “But I can give a guess. He’d been imposs”Oh, yes – of course he’d been that.” She sounded impatient
“I’d say he had very conventional feelings, really.” Craine brought the razor down his jaw. “Even after a good many showdowns, he’d have a solid lower-middle-class conviction that one’s adulteries ought to be concealed from the wife.”
“You don’t like John.”
He turned and stared at her. “Of course I don’t like John. Despite anything I’ve maintained, I think there’s almost nothing to be said for him. But I like Arnander. He pleases my taste tremendously. Or – to speak more honestly – he fills me with absolute awe. But let me go on. He’d think it clever – and even respectable and morally beautiful – to conduct his infidelities in secret. But probably he was no good at it.”
“He wasn’t.”
“And when, with his eyes on some slut or stunner, he began making a pother about your safety amid the horrors of war—”
“And the children’s – Tim’s and the unborn child’s.” Jill’s eyes were suddenly blazing. “He had a lot to say about that.”
“Well – then you’d had enough.”
“For a lifetime. But I didn’t like it when I heard that he was dead.”
Uproar from below made it impossible to speak for a space. The man with the tricycle affair was excelling himself. “In this country,” Craine said presently, “they think that the chief function of the internal combustion engine is to make as much row as possible. And yet you couldn’t have better engineers.”
“Rupert, how utterly fair you are. I believe I can trust you even to be fair to me.” She was sitting before a looking-glass, holding a lipstick. “Whatever happens.”
“Why ‘even’?”
“It might be more difficult with me than with the Italian people.” She paused, frowning into the glass. It was as if she had spoken in a sudden abstraction so deep that she couldn’t be certain of what she had said. “Must I go?”
“Yes.”
“Hadn’t you better come too – or at least part of the way? There are some interesting things near Castelarbia. Etruscan tombs.”
“Nothing would make me fair to Etruscan tombs. I think them utterly dismal. In fact they frighten me quite a lot.”
She had been ordering her few toilet things carefully on the dressing-table before her, and now she turned round. “I can hardly imagine anything frightening you, Rupert.”
He was taken aback. He believed that she trusted his judgment, his devotion, perhaps some other qualities. It had never occurred to him that she might see in him a symbol of strength. “Lord, yes,” he said. “Sometimes, for instance, I have a child’s fear of death.”
“Like John on that bridge.” She didn’t say this at all as if she was making any sort of point. Then she rose. “Had we better be going to see about a car? There’s no advantage in putting it off.”
He walked to the door. “None at all. The sooner you set out, the sooner you’ll be back again.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
For a long time he sat in the café opposite his hotel, reading an Italian newspaper, making a business of drinking a tepid cappuccino. He could have taken a bus to Sansepolcro in time for lunch. But it would have been an artistic excursion and he was chary of that – for what Jill has flashed at him about artistic paddlings had left, if not a scorched, at least a small singed area in his mind. Of course there was Perugia. Perugia was even more replete with art; nevertheless one could make for it with nothing but gastronomical designs. But Perugia was too far away unless he hired a car, nor had he any impulse to regale himself. He would spend most of the day, he foresaw, prowling about Arezzo. Until restlessness overcame him, he had better stay put.
So he sat measuring by how much all this wasn’t his sort of crisis – for he felt that in sizing himself up without illusions he would make the best start towards what might prove to be adequacy after all. It wasn’t his sort of crisis, and only grotesquely could his own familiar idiom be twisted to fit it. Rupert Craine had suffered a sharp and unexpected contraction of credit. But had he? He didn’t know. Jill, being driven alone now towards Castelarbia and Arnander, might be more aware of him, Craine, as her principal asset than she had been twenty-four hours earlier. Certainly he might have been excused for thinking it was so when she had put out her arms to him that morning. But these moments – he said to himself – aren’t moments of knowledge. It is only the ironic genius of language that has attached the word to them. They may be profoundly treacherous, wrong.
He wanted to do the decent thing. It was a discovery he’d made rapidly, but he continued to be surprised at the strength of the simple fact. The feeling went deep – there was the sense of an anchor and cable in it – and he had to remind himself that anything going deep went into an obscurity where the emotions keep queer company. Still, it stated itself in his consciousness as a firm desire. Ordering more coffee, and pushing his newspaper aside, he tested this firm desire as an engineer in a laboratory might test the strength of materials. He stretched it out in stilted phrases – telling himself that, having been placed in a trying situation, he was anxious to comport himself like an English gentleman. And at this – he reported to himself – there wasn’t as much as an ominous creak. He recalled a friend who, in an acrid moment not long before, had assured him that, like all Wykehamists, he regarded virtuous discomfort as the summum bonum achievable by man. Again there wasn’t a shiver. Decency held firm. He could credit it with being really there. Unless his personality strangely transformed itself, he’d get no change out of doing other than trying to behave in a civilised fashion.
There was a stir on the steps of the church. A Franciscan had appeared from the interior, leading a scraggy brown dog. The dog had got into the church and was being expelled. Several old women – bent, crumpled and in pervasive black – came out at the same time. They regarded the case of the dog as one of some scandal, and debated it vociferously. The Franciscan paid no attention to them, but addressed the dog, wagging an admonitory finger at it, making a reasoned point, gesturing with an explanatory palm. The dog nodded – or at least to Craine it appeared to nod – and walked away. The Franciscan turned to the old women with a swift practised geniality, joked with them, picked up his skirts and retreated into the church. How well – Craine thought – they know their job. But trying situations – at least of an unexpected kind – seldom come their way. The rope slaps against the wall, the bell rings, the next stage in the day’s long gentle discipline has started.
But to discover the decent thing as almost a physical need was no occasion for sitting back in an ethical glow. Blundering good intentions, an insensitive high-mindedness; these might be the real villains of such a piece as he had been handed a part in. What he lacked the power of achieving was a view from well back in the stalls. It would only be by finding some means to distance his spectacle that he would have any chance of controlling it. He thought of other husbands and wives. He tried to think of this extraordinary thing happening to the Hallidays, the Dilgers, the Petford-Smiths, the Voyseys – couples drawn at random from his acquaintance. He tried to think of it as happening to old Mungo and his wife twenty years back; he even tried to think of it as happening to the Groococks, although this necessitated his inventing a Mrs. Groocock on the spot.
For nearly an hour he continued to sit in the café, watching these shadowy people and listening in on them as they talked out just such a predicament as his and Jill’s. But the effect was blurred and unsatisfactory; he was a banker and not a writer; it wasn’t any sort of interior peepshow either that was his line. Yet, when he told himself he was an ass and had better cogitate on other principles, his mind didn’t wholeheartedly acquiesce. Some of these people continued to flicker in his fantasy, although the effort to inv
olve them in a relevant situation had faded out. The husbands and wives remained for a ghostly review – and presently it was only the wives. Diana Voysey, Jane Petford-Smith; he knew more about them – about their manner of regarding and phrasing things, about how their minds worked and their bodies moved – than it had ever occurred to him to notice. And particularly Jane Petford-Smith. He was certain that she was a woman whose actual acquaintance he would never develop in any significant degree. But here and now, as a phantom hovering in his head, her conduct might turn irresponsible at any moment. In that event, moreover, Diana Voysey wouldn’t consent to linger far behind her.
He got up and, as he had foreseen, wandered restlessly about the town. He was shocked and shaken, but also curiously relieved. The excitement which, almost from the first moment of revelation, had companioned his dismay, had at least now unmuffled itself and revealed an honest unassuming face. He had been given a wink from the simple, ever-hopeful eye of plain male promiscuity. Well, that was all right. It would be merely sinister if, with his whole system of life given a sudden damnable jolt, the bleak wind whistling and the windows rattling and the doors swinging on their hinges, there was absolutely no accompanying disturbance in the cellarage. He summoned up Jane Petford-Smith again for the purpose, as it were, of briefly expressed gratitude for the clarification she had supplied; he was perfectly willing to acknowledge their brief spectral familiarity by dismissing her with an admonitory smack.
He bought a couple of picture postcards – they were of uncompromisingly artistic objects – for Tim and Charles; he bought a third, a cat with a saucer of milk, which he thought might be within the grasp of his own elder child. When he had provided these with appropriate messages he climbed up the hill and entered the cathedral.
He’d paddle, he told himself, if he wanted to; and with this resolution he walked straight towards Piero’s Magdalen. But his attention was distracted by a woman with an imbecile child who had entered just before him. She had brought the child for what was perhaps a daily exercise, the attempt to teach him to kneel and cross himself before an altar. The child was finely formed, but his head moved without reference to his surroundings, and he made a low gobbling sound. Patiently, intently, again and again, the mother moved his hand from forehead to breast. Craine wondered from just what limbo she sought to preserve him through this minimal endowment of religious comportment. What would the priests teach her about the fate of a soul unfit for judgment? He had no idea; he only believed that it was a question heavy with centuries of theological debate. Very probably it was some mild doctrine that now obtained. But, whatever it was, it didn’t abate the mother’s intense concentration on her task. She wanted the same felicity for her child that she was herself instructed to hope for; not a special compassionate sort laid on at a remove. Craine still had his three picture postcards in his pocket, and they spoke to him of hostages to fortune. He wanted to put out his hand to the imbecile child, to please him by offering him some small bright object. But the discomfort of an intruder assailed him, and he made to leave the cathedral. Then he thought better of it. In these places, after all, one was entitled to what one could get. He turned back and sought out his Magdalen.
And there she was – sculptural and massive in her mysterious world, wafer-thin on the plaster wall. Once upon a time somebody had hit on the notion of tracing round the shadow of a man, an animal, as it fell on the rock. And now there was this: a head held so, discourse in the volumes of a robe.
For some minutes Craine studied the fresco. Then he walked away, recalling relevant things: the Masaccios in the Brancacci chapel, Donatello learning to lay great folds of bronze between parted knees. But he was aware of something factitious in these reflections, as if he were entertaining himself to a patter reminiscent of Weidle’s young man. It wasn’t that the object he’d been looking at hadn’t moved him. It had. It had moved him after a fashion which he was exploiting these artistic musings to dodge.
There was now a pleasant warmth in the sun. He wandered into the public garden and sat down beside a large monumental composition of the sort in which the municipal genius of Italy delights; its subject appeared to be Petrarch with allegorical trimmings. His mind went back to the cathedral. It would be inapposite to say that Piero’s picture represented a beautiful woman. There were things you thought about his Magdalen: for example, that she knew all the burden and the pride of being part of a story not invented by man. She was even a little insolent about it; she knew your place. But her pride wasn’t in being any sort of stunner; and it hadn’t remotely been part of the painter’s intention to commemorate some special instance of what in a woman attracts the desire of a man. Yet in actual women, or in an actual woman, he must have discerned a disposition of sensible matter that gave him his hint beyond sense. As, humbly in a smoothed pebble, a broken shell, an eroded log cast up by the tide, there may lie the first prompting to exploration of a world with which such debris has little to do, so in a specific human face or body there can be that which prompts the contemplative as distinct from the appetitive energies of certain men.
And that was where Jill came in. For of course it was Jill that was all the question. If, today, looking at cunningly daubed pigment raised in him any genuine response at all, Jill must be mixed up in it. He would be heaven knew what – say one of Nature’s ninnies or eunuchs – if it were otherwise.
There was a Jill who must be admitted – to put it with a stark directness – John Arnander’s by right. An accident of the way she came from the womb, of the fashion in which her limbs, her features waxed and formed themselves under the skies of Virginia, had produced beauty of a strangeness beyond or aside from what may be discerned and desired by any sensually cognisant man. And that strangeness had been the catalyst of Arnander’s art.
It didn’t mean that Arnander had obsessively planted his easel before Jill. In actual fact, he had tried to make a big thing of her only once – and the effort hadn’t been a success. Nevertheless there had been in her that which held and sustained him as an artist. It had been – strangely but absolutely – the mystery of Jill’s beauty that compelled him when he managed such a declared triumph as the View from Cortona. Craine was sure of this. He was also sure that it all hadn’t made Arnander the better husband – or at times, perhaps, any sort of husband at all.
The queer fact – perhaps the grand complicating fact – was that Craine’s own Jill was in part this Jill too. If Diana Voysey and Jane Petford-Smith discussed his wife, their charitable agreement would be that she was striking; if they were feeling catty, they would say something quite different. And Craine’s relation with her had its origin – it simply had to be confessed – in his flair; in his very real capacity for what, in anger, she had called paddling. Crudely put, he shared Arnander’s eye for Jill.
But there was so much more – there was unspeakably so much more – to his own marriage! When everything was said, Jill was a hundred miles from being a mere object of his contemplation. There was, there continued to be, all the mystery of the body in their marriage; and no number of Janes and Dianas, however oddly peeping out from the wings of his consciousness, would persuade him that he wasn’t rather a monogamous type. And in the children – hers, theirs – and in what the children could be surrounded with and trained and tempered to there was creation which, if not of the grandest, had its honest place on the line. So it wasn’t even true that a grand difference between Arnander and himself lay in this: that he would never create as much as a tea-cosy or milk-jug on the strength of Jill. He could create, he was creating, a whole texture of life that wouldn’t exist without her.
In short – he said to himself, getting up and walking away – if his marriage had to be defended, there could be a pretty confident appeal to the traditional human sanctities. Only it would all be simpler – at least from his point of view – if there wasn’t, in the solid wall of his own commonplace personality, that small imaginative chink or cranny through which he could catch a glimpse
of the obscurely crucial function which Jill had performed in the chemistry of Arnander’s vision.
And yet Arnander had walked out on her. However much of reticence there still was in Jill’s account of their parting, it was clear that he had walked out on her as definitely as he had walked out of his assignment on that damned bridge. The bridge had been too big for him, and she had been too big for him too. He wasn’t much of a chap, Lord help him, and she had simply owned an awkward overplus of human qualities, not readily concealed, which had ended by putting him out of conceit with himself. What compelled him in her as an artist he had perhaps exhausted – or fallen back from, baffled; Craine didn’t pretend to guess. What attracted him as a man could be had all over the place. So he had walked out – and in such a way that he had deftly left her with a lurking sense of guilt and responsibility. There was a sort of revenge on her in that. What, if anything, he had at that time planned for the future, one couldn’t tell. Actual crisis had come along; the bridge had come along, and then blindness; and after that something in Arnander much deeper than impatience or resentment or promiscuousness had taken control.
For Arnander had his depths. Even as a man he had them. Finally they had drawn him to his present condition. Indeed, he had his qualities. His marriage, despite its appearance, had been no more mercenary than Craine’s; and there didn’t appear to have been any subsequent time at which the fact of Jill’s fortune had formed any part of his calculations.
CHAPTER NINE
Walking down the hill, dropping his postcards into a box, returning to his café for the glass of vermouth which would fill in, after a fashion, the last half-hour before an early lunch, Jill’s second husband – if he could be called that – continued to give Jill’s first husband his due. It had, of course, to be nearly all a matter of what Arnander had achieved; and even of what he might further have achieved, had matters gone with him otherwise than they had done.
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