“I don’t think that’s ever a good sort of question – a general question like that.”
“Well, I think I can give a pretty good answer myself. It’s that he should get easily frightened. And I get easily frightened. I live in fear now.”
“Do you mean,” Charles asked in a careful voice, “that you’re afraid the second operation isn’t going to go right, after all? For it is, you know. I’m certain it is. And they all say so.”
Arnander shook his head. “No, Charles. It’s something different. And there’s one point of comfort about it. The moment they have to tell me the surgeon has made a muck of things, that fear dies. Others, I suppose, may come along. But not that one ever again.”
“Here’s Mummy,” Tim said. “She’s coming over from the villa now.” He got to his feet. “And I think Charles and I will go back. They still say, you know, that you oughtn’t to have a crowd.”
“Do they? But I’m never likely to have that.” Their father’s mood had changed abruptly, and he was almost gay. “Is she bringing a book? She reads to me from all sorts of young geniuses I’ve never heard of.”
Charles, although without alacrity, had got to his feet too, and was preparing to follow his brother. “Yes,” he said, “she’s got a book. Shall we come back in the afternoon?”
“Certainly come back in the afternoon.”
“And – Daddy – will you, some time, tell us all that happened on the bridge?”
“You’ve rather missed the point of what I’ve been saying, Charles. I’m not very confident that I know all that happened on the bridge.”
The boys were back at the villa before either spoke. “Sometimes,” Charles said cautiously, “he’s difficult to understand. Don’t you think?”
Tim didn’t reply to this, but gave a moment to watching, with serious attention, the Italian girl who was laying the table for lunch on the terrace. “It wouldn’t be true,” he said presently, “to say he dramatises himself. Or not badly.”
“What does that mean?”
Patiently Tim explained. “But I think,” he went on, “that most of his thinking is about himself. When his head goes back into his shell – and I agree that was a good picture of yours, although I don’t know that you should have come out with it – it is himself that he carries on with. That’s why he’s so different from Rupert.”
“Rupert’s more civilised. But what’s really important about Daddy is his knowing about the mystery – the small thing at the centre. When you know that – know it even in what he called a shadow – you can do it.”
“Do it?” Tim frowned.
“Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa. What if he paints again – like that?”
“And what if he does?” Suddenly Tim’s eyes blazed as his mother’s sometimes could. “Do you think another whole gallery of the things will mend Rupert’s heart?”
They looked at each other, awkward and flushed and silent, before they turned together to the table and sat down.
CHAPTER TWO
“In a way,” Groocock said, “it would be easier for a younger man. A broken heart is at least a simplification. Just sign in each of the places where there’s a pencilled cross.”
Rupert Craine signed the unimportant papers before him. Groocock, he was thinking, came out unexpectedly strong in this situation. He had his bachelor’s acrid slant on it, and moreover seemed to have decided that it couldn’t be handled in terms of his usual professional manner. In fact he was uncommonly good – much better than the lawyers, who were collecting substantial fees simply for expressing despondency and alarm.
Craine pushed the papers away. “I must admit,” he said, “that I had a moment in which I cast myself in young Troilus’s role. But of course it didn’t do. I saw it didn’t do, as soon as I’d got the measure of the thing. Which, mind you, took a little time. I hope the story ends with Arnander sighted – if only to balance its having begun with me blind. I hadn’t a glimpse, that is, of the ruthlessness required.”
“Not to fight?”
“Not to fight.”
Groocock pressed papers back into a file. “You must have been conscious,” he said calmly, “of choosing what might conventionally be called an unmanly course.”
“Decidedly.”
“It would add to the difficulty. And I gather that your wife didn’t herself set any emphasis on the special circumstances of Arnander’s being a man of genius?”
“If she had, I think I’d almost have contrived not to do so myself.”
“And it wasn’t, on the other hand, his helplessness?”
“She expressly said it wasn’t pity. And it wasn’t religion any more than it was concupiscence. It was – well, whatever it is that is deepest in that sphere.” Craine paused for a fraction of a second. “At once and quite without hesitation, you see, she did an entirely definitive thing. I state the sufficient truth when I say that she went back to her husband – not to the artist but to the man.”
“She’d be clever if she could go back to the one without going back to the other. Particularly in view of what I understood you to say.” Groocock gave Craine a glance less appropriate to an important client than to a doubtful column of figures. “Didn’t you maintain that she had been much more than a wife to the man; that she had been, in fact, a powerful inspiration to the artist?”
“In a queer fashion – yes. He would take a good look at her, and then paint a tremendous landscape.”
“Then she’s not likely to have forgotten it. In fact it may be something rather more important to her than she was prepared to admit to herself while feeling some irritation before your own artistic enthusiasms and interests.”
Craine was silent. He hadn’t realised that he had told Groocock so much. The fact of his having done so was a measure of the uncertainties by which he still felt himself to be surrounded. “I don’t know,” he presently said, “that anything ambiguous or unrevealed in Jill’s motive matters, really. Here we are.”
“Waiting.”
“What’s that?” Craine hadn’t understood.
“Waiting for the result of this second surgical operation. It’s extremely important to all three of you. The whole complex of your relationships depends on it. Incidentally, I find it hard to believe in.”
“Hard to believe that anything can, after all those years, be done? I assure you that I thought it a very long shot myself, when I took it up. And it’s a long shot still.”
“And you’re gambling on it – all of you. If he doesn’t see, if he doesn’t paint, it will be a terrible sell all round.” Groocock paused grimly on this homely expression. “Or am I wrong?”
Craine considered this. “Well,” he said, “take Arnander first . . . “
“Yes, take Arnander first. The man brought back from the dead. For it seems virtually to have been that. And it’s something, I’d suppose, that the dead don’t always like. Did Lazarus?”
“Somebody certainly wrote a play suggesting he didn’t.” Craine looked curiously at Groocock. You never know what may turn up in a chap – he was thinking – when you get him in a new relation. “Obviously it will, for Arnander, be a terrible sell. Nothing can express, I imagine, the intensity of his suspense, his expectation. If it’s not unbearable to him, that’s because he’s got a strain of strength, you know, as well as certain notable elements of weakness. I don’t care, myself, to think of failure. Still, can his last state be worse than his first? He’ll still have, after all, his wife.”
“Yes – the Lord help her.”
Craine took a deep breath. But he didn’t speak.
“And finally there’s yourself. I suspect you’ve been prompted, and I’m sure you’ve been sustained, by the notion of this fellow getting down to the production of another set of masterpieces. It’s a civilised way to take the thing, of course. But, in the way of being civilised, we can easily live beyond our income, if you ask me.”
“I’m not thinking of myself as a ge
nerous donor.” Craine felt himself to have flushed. “And I’ll thank you, my dear man, not to travesty me as a fellow willing to cuckold himself in order to give a leg up to the National Gallery. The plain fact is that I wasn’t a chooser. Jill chose. But I’ll admit that before she chose – or before I was certain she had chosen – there did come to me a glimmer of what I must do, if I was going to keep any proper pride. And the glimmer came – it will amuse you to know – among some pictures. Not that I was very conscious of them at the time.” Craine paused. It still seemed queer to him that it was with Groocock that this conversation was taking place. “You see, I’ve always set store by painting. It’s a liking that has found quite commonplace expression with me in various ways. You know how it drifts into my talk. Remember, for instance, my jawing away to you about that Amico I was buying. Well, it’s a real enough devotion in its way – and when I was a lad I even had other dreams about it. They came to nothing, of course. They weren’t sensible in a banker’s son. But I’ve always kept a sense of what’s what. So there you are. What glimmered at me was the perception that – very strangely – I had come on ground where I just mustn’t thrust forward with violence or self-will. There were other interests at stake. And it would be a good thing if I could advance them.”
A telephone purred on Groocock’s desk; he pressed a button on it and it fell silent. “And the children?” he pursued remorselessly. “Both families. How will it bear on them?”
“I don’t think Tim Arnander will be greatly affected. He’s launched, and he’s an intellectual sort of lad. I expect I’ll always be by way of having a word with him. Charles is different, and might take a fairly heavy impress from the change – although just of what character I don’t know. In any case, Tim won’t be useless to him. My own children, of course, are very young. Still, they’re a tougher aspect of the problem, I’ll allow. At the moment, their main impact is on the profits of the air lines. Jill and I do rather a lot of Box and Cox. She comes to Pinn. I go to London. It isn’t one of those absolute muddles, you know. We haven’t been in bed together since she went to bed with him.”
“Quite so, quite so.” For a moment Groocock had a relapse into his tactfully abstracted manner. He might, however, have been reflecting that the ruthlessness which his client had found himself obliged to practise was reflected in certain more direct ways of speech. “And your decision to continue keeping it quiet for a time; is that going all right?”
“It worries the lawyers. They’re terrified that something may happen which will have the effect of making us parties to a fraud. That, of course, is why Weidle had to be told at once. He was in the middle of a big operation with Arnanders, and I had to persuade him to bring it to a standstill. Clearly I couldn’t let him sell as by a dead man paintings I knew to be by somebody who is alive. As it happened, he was on the verge of tumbling to something like the truth. He’s been very decent about the whole thing.”
“There are circumstances in which he stands to lose a lot of money?” Groocock’s voice quite failed to take on the tone customary in it when he turned to the consideration of important financial affairs.
“Certainly there are. If Arnander has a second innings as a painter, every dab of pigment he sets on canvas will bring down the value of the canvases Weidle already holds.”
Groocock was amused. “It seems then, that even in those rarefied spheres one doesn’t escape the operation of common economic laws. But surely counteracting factors might come into play? If the second innings was so brilliant that Arnander’s reputation soared even higher than it has done—”
“Yes, of course. But, even so, it would mean that Weidle was facing a desperate gamble where he believed himself to have engineered a comfortable certainty.”
Groocock laughed outright. “I’m blessed if I feel like letting my heart bleed for him. If he really were caught out in that odd way – his dead painter, I mean, coming alive on him and turning disastrously prolific – it might come hard on his pocket, I don’t doubt. But no spectator would find more than the merest light comedy in his situation. Whereas yours”—Groocock paused—”might conceivably come to hold a pretty large dash of irony.”
“Tragic irony, as they say? Chucking a boomerang?”
“Well, yes – more or less that. Acting powerfully, as one thinks, to secure something – and in fact landing oneself with the opposite. I hope it doesn’t come at you like that.”
Craine looked at his watch and stood up. “As a matter of fact, I’m going along to see Weidle now. So I’ll tell him you judge him merely a figure of fun.”
Groocock shook his head. “He won’t be impressed. I don’t collect pictures.”
“I don’t know that I shall, ever again.” Craine smiled. He didn’t want to close his interview with Groocock on a portentous note. “As a matter of fact, Weidle bustles around in the matter after a fashion that could be represented as comic enough. He’s just back from Saltino. That’s why I’m dropping in on him.”
“Saltino? That’s where they are?”
“Yes, close by Vallombrosa. Weidle was good enough to bring the boys back at the end of their holidays.”
“They wanted to come?”
“I don’t think that Charles did. But, of course, they can’t miss school. And probably it’s best that they shouldn’t be on the spot – just at the moment of crisis. Or so they thought.”
“They?” Groocock asked.
“Yes – the Arnanders.”
“That’s what the parents are to be called, no doubt.” Suddenly, and with a gesture that would certainly have astonished the young accountants lurking behind their glass partitions, Groocock threw up his hands. “My God, Craine – what a mess!” He got to his feet and moved to open the door. “The crisis has come?”
“They should be operating any day now. And then almost at once – perhaps in about ten days – we’ll know.”
Groocock looked very sober. “I’m sorry that bridge didn’t get the fellow,” he said. “But, as it is – well, I can only say I wish him his eyes. And much good may they do him – and the National Gallery as well.”
CHAPTER THREE
Once before, Craine thought, he had gone on from Groocock’s to Weidle’s. But on that occasion there had been another engagement in between. Lunch with a German banker – that had been it. Well, today too he had seen a German banker – a younger man this time, who had talked not about the wickedness of putting another generation into uniform but about its near impossibility. They had exchanged views which would have been sombre if they hadn’t been merely and grimly practical. It remained the devil, this carrying of the big collective headaches, and Craine couldn’t be sure that his own share of that wasn’t going to grow. Mungo’s flair was as strong as ever, but it was operating, progressively and to a point of danger, in a void – or at least in a world that the old man could no longer intuitively size up. In twenty years Craine would be on that hazardous sort of shelf himself – and it would be younger men’s hair that he would set tingling on their scalps. Mungo was talking the “dash for freedom” stuff which Craine had thought of as the natural idiom of Tories so elderly as to be virtually in the Bath-chair bracket. It was harmless on the home front – demos being only too damned good at setting trip-wires nowadays. But let the same sort of nostalgia loose in the F.O. and there might be the devil to pay. Dispatch a gunboat, send in the Marines, organise a punitive expedition. Roberts and Kitchener and Jackie Fisher. If Mungo went badly atavistic in that way it wouldn’t do at all.
Not – Craine told himself as he waited for a bus – that the general grimness of things necessarily bore hardest on those, like himself, on whom it bore most directly and openly. It wasn’t amongst bankers and industrialists, or even in the gibbering crew at Westminster, that one commonly met the really angsty boys. Dons, B.B.C. producers, National Service subalterns, louts in a dance hall, Arts Council daubers, Faber and Faber songsters, old Tom in the kitchen garden and young Bill at the garage: you never kne
w on whose back the dog clung. It was a lurking social malaise – if a dog could be a malaise – that lowered vitality, here of the gentle and there of the simple, and made the purely private rubs and bugs more formidable.
Or did it? Climbing to the top of his bus, he took himself up sharply. When war comes along, people lay off committing suicide; and even a cold war should perhaps, if anything, help the better-informed to balance up on their private anxieties. He might look at what lay on his desk, and think of what was building up at Saltino, and then sweep the whole thing together and complain that he really had too much on his plate. But it was probably sheer fallacy to suppose that the private life would be more endurable if lived amid conditions of unshakable public security. Suppose that all this – all this of Jill and Arnander and himself – were happening just fifty years ago; was there the slightest reason to believe that it would be less disagreeable ?
Craine sat down with a frown. He liked a speculative question, but this wasn’t one in which he seemed to take much satisfaction. Nevertheless he must have continued to muse on it in considerable absence of mind, since he was presently quite unreasonably startled by a voice that spoke in his ear.
“Hullo, old boy,” Jim Voysey said. “How are you getting along?”
It was a moment before Craine could account for the distaste he felt at this encounter. Voysey had undoubtedly spoken across a semantic chasm, since there existed a highly conventional Craine who froze at “old boy” but would have taken “old man” as venial. But this wasn’t, of course, the idiocy at work; Voysey existed pretty freshly in his mind in a context that explained any lack of enthusiasm at running into him. “Hullo,” he replied civilly. “How are you?”
“Just starting to surface, I hope.” Voysey, although adopting a facetious idiom, took the enquiry seriously. “It’s the devil of a business, you know, that sort of thing – however smart the fellows you set to work on it.” He paused, glanced round the top of the bus, found it almost empty, and moved himself over to Craine’s seat. “Technically, you see, I’m still poor old Hugo’s C.O. So it doesn’t look too good, from an old-fashioned point of view.”
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