A Use of Riches

by J. I. M. Stewart

  That this last consideration had any place or weight in the scale seemed doubtful, but Craine did his best to toss it in. It was a counter in the affair which he now knew Jill herself was going to claim to have no patience with. That it had been so profoundly to the artist in Arnander that she had appealed was a fact that Craine couldn’t conceive of her having been blind to. Yet she wasn’t going to allow anyone to import into the present situation an atom of talk about Arnander’s immortal genius; she was going to take her stand on the proposition that anything of the sort only darkened counsel. If the man’s return from the dead was at this moment a weight about her heart, a problem of which the very terms, let alone the solution, had to be groped for in the recesses of her being, it had nothing to do – she was going to maintain – with the fact that he had once painted the La Verna. At the same time she must certainly be vividly aware of the special poignancy of his case; the difference there would be, say, if Arnander’s art were the art of music or poetry.

  And here something stirred in Craine’s mind that he couldn’t quite catch hold of. It was a glimmering that there was a point at which, merely in virtue of being an intelligent man of the world, he could at once effectively act. He had been aware of it when talking to Marchesa Forni, and he guessed that its eluding him now was a manoeuvre of that part of his mind in which a fair hearing for Arnander didn’t get much of a show. But it would come back – and probably in a few minutes, as he was eating his lunch.

  There was a car with an English registration in the square. It had been there when he sat down, and he had noticed the porter from his own hotel lifting out a couple of suitcases. The owners weren’t visible, and he supposed that they were inspecting the treasures of San Francesco while the light was still more or less that recommended in the guide-books. One hardly expected to see one’s fellow countrymen in Arezzo at this season; the tourists were in the main indefatigable Germans, whose Sehnsucht for Latin civilisation marched with the circling year, or Americans convinced that they were making a last inspired dash through Europe before things got too bad altogether. These reflections accompanied Craine down to his subterranean restaurant, and almost into the alcove in which Jill and he had eaten their ashen dinner on the previous night. It was thus that he came suddenly upon two people he knew. They were Jim Voysey and Jane Petford-Smith.

  The position didn’t, in the instant, strike Craine as difficult. There was an inner room, and although it wasn’t in use at midday he knew that he had only to stride into it, with a significant glance meantime at the attentive proprietor, for a table at once to be prepared for him in tactful obscurity. And in passing his acquaintances, as pass them he must, he need only nod to Voysey as casually as if this were a London restaurant; so casually, indeed, that his eye wouldn’t travel on to Voysey’s companion at all.

  But he’d forgotten what an inept creature Voysey was. The man had got to his feet, his face beneath his iron-grey hair flushed like a detected schoolboy’s. And now he was making a large pleasurable fuss over the meeting. What they call – Craine thought – brazening it out. Voysey was even drawing up a chair for him, and as he was himself demonstrably alone he couldn’t very well decline it.

  He looked at Jane. She was sitting quite still, her eyes bright with mingled apprehension and triumph. Her appearance would have afforded no satisfaction to a moralist; she looked younger and prettier than she had done for years. Her escapade – for this somehow instantly betrayed itself as that – was in some enormously agreeable phase. And Voysey too was in high spirits which weren’t much marred by his confusion; if he was awkwardly tongue-tied as he sat down again it was only because he couldn’t decide whether it would be quite the thing to offer Craine a sort of invisible wink. Deciding against this, he occupied himself in giving unnecessary guidance in the ordering of a third lunch, and when he did venture an expressive look it was directed at Jane. Craine, although this meeting was disturbing him strangely, couldn’t help being amused at it. Poor Voysey was signalling that she had the quicker wits of the two, and had better launch out on the explanations.

  “Rupert, darling, how amusing this is!” Jane looked at him with conscientious wickedness – she had decided on a bold line – and arched her back like a tart in a film. “And isn’t Jill with you?”

  “Oh, yes. We’re together. But she’s gone off for the day.”

  “Lots of jolly day trips round about here.” Voysey appeared to feel that he had been given a cue too good to miss. “Jane and I ran into each other in Florence quite early this morning, and found we both had it clear till dinner-time. So I drove her over. There’s said to be a lot of good stuff. I’ve never been in Arezzo before, as a matter of fact. Nice place. But a bit out of the way.”

  Craine nodded. “It’s quiet. You’d hardly expect to meet anybody you knew.”

  “I suppose not.” Voysey’s cheerfulness was waning. He must be thinking – Craine thought – that Craine wasn’t the fellow he’d have chosen for an awkward sort of encounter like this.

  Jane again did something with her body – gave it a lift and a twist at the waist. “But you never know,” she said, “who you’ll rub up against on the Continent. That’s what makes it such an exciting place.” She raised a wineglass in a hand that trembled slightly. “Cheers, Rupert,” she murmured. “Thousands of cheers.”

  Craine said nothing. It hadn’t presumably been a coincidence that an hour or two ago these people had begun to run in his head. Probably Voysey’s car was obscurely familiar to him, and a glimpse of it had been the reason for his choosing the particular dramatis personae he had for his speculative musings on husbands and wives. Still, the resulting effect was very queer. Two of his puppets had promptly turned up – and in a combination that hadn’t occurred to him. Moreover they brought dead into the centre of his vision something that he acknowledged as having been disreputably hovering on the fringes of it. Here, in fact, was divorce-court stuff – call it the sort of situation that may develop with anyone once things come unstuck. And here, in Jane Petford-Smith, was eminently the sort of person it may develop with. His musings – even more than he’d acknowledged – had discovered that for him earlier on.

  “What happens when Jill gets back?” Voysey spoke with lumbering casualness. “Do you stop, or go ahead?”

  “We’re stopping for a time, at the hotel across the square.”

  Craine saw a look pass between his companions. They must be called, he supposed, the guilty couple. Certainly their adventure wasn’t all before them. A glance at either rather brutally told you that. Jane’s expectations had been fulfilled. And Voysey already had much occasion for an uneasy conscience. One could see that he gave it an airing from time to time; he felt a little bad, perhaps, that he and poor old Hugo Petford-Smith belonged to the same regiment. Still, it was only a small fly in the ointment. Voysey plainly couldn’t glance at Jane without experiencing the sensations of a man who has done, and is doing, a marvellous job. To one less unsympathetic than Craine he would murmur that these things are a matter of technique. But meanwhile he faced a practical problem, and he was trying to canvass an answer to it in Jane’s eye. Must they have those damned suitcases back in the car and drive on somewhere else? But Jane seemed to put the question aside. She turned to Craine and talked to him in a manner which – he realised with discomfort – he might have taken, on a less disenchanted occasion, for amusingly daring.

  And at first Voysey liked it. He liked having a woman to exhibit who was all keyed up like this. But when Jane produced certain sallies that couldn’t be called decent he grew uncomfortable. There was some book of rules, no doubt, in which he’d read that a woman in her situation preserved without difficulty a more than common modesty when in public view. So he was wondering whether, after all, she came from quite the right stable. The simple sensual man in Voysey was at odds with the rather elementary social being who had been told you didn’t, if you could help it, sleep with a fellow’s sister. There was sweat on his forehead – h
e had been eating in nervous haste – and now there was a thin lock of hair across it. Craine looked at this and made a discovery.

  It was the small discovery that, when he called Voyseys and Petford-Smiths and Dilgers and Hallidays to mind in the sort of context he had lately been creating for them, his fancy took them for granted as a good deal younger than they in fact now were. And he would somehow less have disliked the insignificant intrigue upon which he had stumbled if Voysey’s hair hadn’t been touched by middle age even more than his own, and if Jane – in spite of all that her adventure was doing for her looks – hadn’t hollows to conceal in her neck, and certain small but unobliteratable lines round the eyes. It wasn’t a logical feeling, but it was certainly an instinctive one. An aesthetic rather than a moral sense was in question. If these two people were – what Craine didn’t for a moment believe – in some deeply passionate relationship, their state might speak powerfully to the imagination and the sympathies. But it couldn’t speak directly to the senses, simply because it came to one as a vagary unsupported by the heyday in the blood. One preserved towards these matters, it seemed, the judgment of one’s adolescence – the judgment that the amative ceases to be agreeable or even excusable when it exhibits itself in the parental age-group. And yet clearly – clearly, Craine repeated to himself, looking at his companions – one can make no end of an ass of oneself at an age when one’s grandchildren might well be at one’s knee.

  “Do you say Jill is visiting friends – Italian friends?” Jane Petford-Smith was sharply curious. “Didn’t she once live in Italy quite a lot? Wasn’t she in with the nobs?”

  “I don’t know about the nobs.” Craine hated the affectation that used such terms. “But she certainly spent several years in Italy. It was before I knew her, and during her first marriage. And yes – it’s an Italian acquaintance she’s visiting, Marchesa Forni.”

  “Somebody you don’t know yourself, Rupert?”

  “Somebody I met for the first time yesterday.” Jane, Craine could see, was in a state to scent intrigue anywhere, and she had formed the notion that there was something odd about his being alone here in Arezzo. So, for that matter, there was. He did, for the present at least, quite substantially have something to conceal – for he couldn’t dream of communicating to these casually encountered adulterers the first intelligence of John Arnander’s being alive. So he said a few words about the Marchesa’s present situation and a few more by way of speculation on the manner of life awaiting her in Florence. If he gave the impression of being close he didn’t at all mind. And Jane couldn’t positively push, since he could give an overtly awkward twist to her own position by himself asking some of the simplest of questions. Presently, indeed, she gave up, rose with a word, and vanished.

  If she wanted to powder her nose, presumably the small restaurant had at least primitive accommodation for the purpose. It was Craine’s sense, however, that it was with malice she had left the two men together. She got some amusement from the thought of their sitting in uncomfortable silence. Yet it was somehow just not this that happened. They didn’t, indeed, for some time speak; but they did – if only metaphorically – breathe more freely. They even exchanged a glance. This couldn’t be called collusion, but at least it signalled sympathetic intelligence. They might have been two males escaping unobtrusively from a drawing-room on the simple lure of a game of billiards.

  And presently Voysey spoke. “I say,” he asked cautiously, “how d’you like the look of oil?”

  “I think oil looks better than some of them are running about saying.”

  “Do you, now?” Voysey was impressed. “It’s the devil of a business knowing what to do with people’s money, all the same. They have such a damned lot of it.”

  Craine considered. “There are the Scottish trusts.”

  “Yes, of course. Get you a bit of spread in dollars, I agree. But I’ve had a fly out over that stream for some time . . . By Jove, better get a bill.” Voysey waved to a waiter. “Put you in with me, old chap.”

  “No, no. I’ll pay for myself.”

  “Eh? Oh, I see.” Voysey looked awkward, as if he now felt there had been some indelicacy in proposing to treat Craine as a guest at his guilty board. “Well, we must be getting along. Back to Florence, that is.”

  “But you’re going to look at a few more things here first?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps Jane will want to take a walk round. Care to come along? I realise you know a devilish lot more about it all than either of us do. Quite a line of yours, I’ve heard.”

  Craine shook his head. “Letters to write, I’m afraid. Don’t miss Santa Maria della Pieve. It’s halfway up the hill.”

  “Some good stuff, eh?”

  “Well, there’s a Madonna by Pietro Lorenzetti. But the great thing’s the façade.”

  “The façade.” Voysey appeared to take adequate mental note of this circumstance. “Here’s Jane again. We’ll be off.”

  And in a couple of minutes they had gone. Jane Petford-Smith spoke only half a dozen further words to Craine. But she parted with a look that shook him. For it was a look – there was no other way of interpreting it – that told him mockingly and triumphantly that he had been too slow and too late. The insinuation was, it couldn’t be other than, a monstrous and insolent fabrication. He had never, in the vulgar phrase, made the ghost of a pass at the woman. Yet how queerly she had been hovering in his mind only a couple of hours ago! He sat for some time frowning at this – at what, once more, may bob up when things threaten to come unstuck. He smoked a cigarette. He even ordered a brandy, and then thought better of drinking it.

  Even with this lingering, he found he had miscalculated his time. He came up into the square to see his late companions climbing into their car, and a discontented porter shoving a couple of suitcases in the boot. They drove off with a wave, and he strolled to the corner and watched them down the hill. The car went straight on beneath the winking traffic light at the bottom. Wherever they were going, it wasn’t Florence. Perhaps they had decided that Siena was the best place to spend the night. Craine turned away, and stretched his legs to some effect in the other direction.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Above the old town squats a fortress big enough to play football in. It was being so used when Craine returned that way in the late afternoon. For some time he watched the play. Those who hadn’t boots, he noticed, made do with gym shoes, and he had to admire an energy that didn’t seem very substantially based on an intake of calories. But he soon turned away to circle the ramparts – to circle them again and again as a chill wind began to blow down from the Apennines and the light faded across the Valle di Chiana. One had here at least the illusion of commanding the approaches to the city. There would have been no difficulty in spotting an army, a large troop of horse, even a railway train. But a motor-car was another matter, and he had to acknowledge as irrational, the prompting that took his gaze so often into distance. He was familiar with suspense; there were times when he sat, alone or in a small group, waiting some sufficiently fateful word from Tokyo or New York or Rome. But this felt different. Part of the strain came from his inability not to strive to persuade himself that there wasn’t, that there wasn’t really any occasion for a feeling of suspense at all.

  His lunch-hour encounter nagged at him – only the more so because it had, after all, no clear relevance. He wasn’t going to run away with anybody and Jill wasn’t either; and this was sensible, since they would neither of them make much of it. If Jim Voysey and his mistress were having a wonderful time – and they certainly were, although there might be headaches later – one wished them luck and moved on.

  Craine moved on. He made, that is to say, another circle of the battlements; and in the course of it, sure enough, his late experience did at last drop out of his mind. But this wasn’t to his comfort; it left nothing except the urgency of his wish that Jill should come back to him. Or just that she should come back, that he should catch a glimpse of her bef
ore night fell. Arezzo thrust lengthening shadows at him as he stood looking into the west – shadows like exploring fingers intent on getting him where it hurt. For a moment he was frightened of the simple fact that it would soon be dark; as frightened as a child might be when left alone.

  But you looked these unweaned moments straight in the eye and they retreated rapidly. If they didn’t, it was just too bad and you bewrayed yourself, as John Arnander had done on that abominable bridge. He’d take another turn round this gloomy place – the footballers had departed and it now lay deserted – and then go back to his hotel. He could reasonably calculate that Jill would arrive, as he himself had done on the previous day, for a rather late dinner.

  Lights were coming out in the city. He paused a moment or two to look at them, and for some reason thought of the watch-fires of the Greeks kindling on the plain of Xanthus. On ramparts vaguely like these a young man had lingered, waiting for the return of Cressida. Craine shook his head. It wasn’t a good comparison. Indeed, it couldn’t be called a comparison at all; it was an almost random image fished up in him by some lurking taste for pathos or self-pity. He was no Troilus, the young lover of a night. He was a maturely married man. At home he had two children and an umbrella and a bowler hat. Jill had four children, and pearls which she put on for his birthday. Neither of them had anything to do with windy Troy. They couldn’t have. They simply couldn’t. He turned away and walked back into Arezzo.

  Hours later, he dined alone. The little restaurant was empty. Its evening clientele, at this time of year mostly unattached business men, had departed, and for entertainment he had the choice of either a television set or his own thoughts. The television offered a boxing match – which in any circumstances he would have judged poorly of as an aid to digestion. On the other hand he found that his head no longer admitted any succession of fancies tenuously tied to his situation. His mind was now concentrated on Arnander, concentrated on the blind man who had turned from his basket-making to put himself in some small degree of relationship with a visitor the day before.