There was another long silence, and then Craine came back fighting. “Sight . . . vision? That’s mere word-chopping.”
“It’s nothing of the sort. Shall we go into your drawing-room and look at the Maremma?”
“I don’t need to look at the Maremma.”
“Of course you don’t. And we needn’t argue over the right word for what John Arnander has lost. I talked about vision because I think of him as a visionary painter. You can call him a transcendental painter, and say that he’s lost that dimension. Or you can express it quite differently. Think of that Mantegna.”
Craine slowly took this in. “The Perino Mantegna?”
“Yes. You heard about his taking a look at that. Think of it, I say – Christ and Judas, and then the birds and the small creatures, there in a complete otherness, and yet a part both of the picture’s rhythm and of its thought. It’s a great intellectual statement, Mantegna’s picture. And it scared him. So perhaps, in a last analysis, it’s an intellectual power he’s lost. Anyway, the thing has happened.”
“And Jill scares him too?”
“At least she puzzles him. There’s a very simple turn of words for the situation.” Weidle paused. “He can’t imagine what he once saw in her.”
“Yes.” Craine took it squarely now. “His sense of her was part of the very process of his genius. Now, when he searches for that old sense of her in vain, his confidence flickers and he knows himself to be on the verge of some unbearable discovery. Jill’s presence – perhaps the strangeness of her beauty that he sees he no longer sees – whispers to him, can’t but whisper to him, of the nullity that has come over his art. So he can’t bear her. Isn’t that it?” Craine scarcely waited for Weidle’s slow nod. “And Jill herself?” he asked. “What does she know about his painting? You told her the truth?”
Weidle shook his head. “She knows nothing about that. She hasn’t connected up. And I didn’t feel I could tell her. I felt that job to be yours.”
“Good God, no!” Craine was on his feet again. “Do you realise how I’ve let her down?”
“I can’t say I’ve heard of it.” Weidle spoke suddenly with a sort of weary dryness.
“Her, him, me.” Craine reached for the sherry decanter. It was a futile gesture prompted by the perception – which came to him thus oddly in the middle of his crisis – that Weidle was indeed a sick man. “Her, him, me,” he repeated. “The boomerangs I’ve sent singing round our ears!”
“The boomerangs?” Weidle asked.
“I fought for his sight, Weidle – I fought for it! There was a sense in which his blindness was a deep, deep refuge – a shell, you might say. And I winkled him out of it. It was his chance, Jill’s chance – even my own. The roof had been whipped off and everything gone sailing. But there was at least the possibility of retrieving something. And it was something pretty big.”
“Well – it all hasn’t answered,” Weidle said. His fatigue was growing, and beneath his sympathy there lurked something bleak and chill. “Plans do miscarry in a way that suggests a malign skill. That’s the moment to talk about boomerangs, no doubt. But I don’t know that there’s much to be done.”
“Him, her, me. I brought him back from the dead – and to a disillusionment which, when it comes, he’ll never forgive. Blind, he had a wife to whom he at least—”
“Be quiet, man!” Weidle had raised his head and spoken with authority. “Pack your bag and shoulder your responsibility.”
It pulled Craine up. “I should go out?” he said.
“At once. Don’t you remember in what state you found him at Castelarbia? Can you tell what morbid turn he mayn’t take, once the truth breaks on him? And your wife’s there, and the boys.”
“My wife?”
“She’s a woman with two husbands, Lord help her. Such things don’t cease to be facts, you know, simply because they seldom obtain among the clergy.” Weidle shrugged, as if not caring for his own feeble flicker of humour. “You might at least get them moving. It’s an absurd place to spend the winter in. Perched on a precipice, with a view that isn’t there! There’s no sense in it.”
“That’s true enough.” Craine got to his feet again and walked to the telephone on his desk. “I’ll get on the next plane. If you stay to lunch, we can go up to Town together.”
Weidle nodded silently. He appeared relieved; and while Craine made his call he sat forward, his hands stretched out to the fire. “Where’s the Amico?” he asked, when the booking was concluded.
“The Amico?” Craine had to make an effort. Then he smiled. “Oh, I gave it to Tim. I was wondering whether he’d consider such a present thoroughly foolish, when he asked me for it. He would like, he says, a small painting every birthday.”
“Didn’t I know I’d make a collector of him?” Weidle brought his hands away from the fire in a small triumphant movement. For a moment his gaiety had returned to him.
Craine smiled. “Then save up something good for his twenty-firster,” he said.
“I certainly will – if I’m about.” Weidle’s smile answered Craine’s, and he reached idly for a cigarette. “I’d like just to walk round your pictures,” he said. “If it wouldn’t be a bore for you. And if there’s nothing more that we can usefully discuss.”
“Clearly one can talk unprofitably. And I’m grateful to you for telling me, a little time back, that I’d do better to shut up. But”—and Craine hesitated—”you are quite sure?”
“Well, even if I am, I may be wrong. Otto Frink, after all, has his own absolute certainty, just the other way. Then again, I was wildly astray about the time and effort that it would take Arnander simply to recover the use of paint. So you’ve good reason not to take my word as decisive.”
Craine shook his head. “I can’t believe you are wrong – not about what is, or is not, on those canvases in his studio now. But mayn’t it come? Mayn’t it yet come back – the vision, or whatever we are to call it? Isn’t the very speed with which he has recovered his technique perhaps significant? If he has put such concentrated effort into that . . . “
“No.” Weidle looked straight at Craine. “For what my conviction is worth: no. The thing isn’t in abeyance. It’s lost. We can, you know, lose things. It’s another hard fact.”
“But when . . . how?” Craine brought out the words rather desperately. “And why?”
“The sibyl has no answer to give.” Weidle clicked a finger and thumb; it was another of his ways of showing that he disliked his own words. “Of course, there was the bridge.”
“The bridge?”
“Yes, man – the bridge. He went to pieces on it. And, when he took himself off, there was perhaps some small vital piece that he failed to pick up and take with him.”
For a moment Craine stared at Weidle in silence. And, when he did speak, it was rather weakly. “But art doesn’t work like that!”
Fyodor Weidle was on his feet – and producing the first flash of anger Craine had ever seen in him. “So you know how art works? Then you ought to be giving lectures on it. You’re wasted – believe me – in that damned bank.” He took a step forward, and for a second held Craine lightly by both arms – surprisingly, since he had never come to other than the most formal handshake before. “No, no! We don’t know much about it, you and I.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The plane dropped into Italy on the tail of a storm. It had been bumpy going over the Alps, and beneath a film of twilight there had appeared only a kaleidoscope of darknesses, with here and there a savagely upthrust fang of rock and snow. Travelling thus in the twentieth century, one can be caught by the sort of horror the region held for one’s earth-bound ancestors: the horror of sterility and formlessness and the void. The young woman in charge of the flight sold large quantities of cigarettes. It was a ritual of reassurance, an assertion of the continuing consequence of economic man amid all that silence and all that cold. Craine, acknowledging himself in the same boat, absorbed the Financial Times.
; When one reads the geography of Europe at such a pace, he thought, the punctuation marks accent themselves with an unnatural heaviness. The bus to trundle the little group of passengers across the airfield was late in turning up, and they seemed to wait interminably in a wind of ice. The same wind blew through the sheds as they shuffled past officials, and pounced on them again after the long drive into Milan. The small discomforts of travel in a bitter season took on a disproportionate persuasive force, so that there seemed to be temerity and futility in the whole modern assault upon man’s immemorial measures of space and time. We’re up to no good, Craine told himself, in all this demand upon the freedom of the continents. Politicians, for instance. If they hadn’t the means to hurtle from capital to capital, confusing and irritating each other, we’d conceivably be in a less desperate way.
The train was luxurious, and the dinner timed to occupy the greater part of the smooth swift run through darkness to Florence. He ate it conscientiously, and exchanged a few sentences in his careful Italian with an elderly man in the opposite seat. When the train stopped at Piacenza, he could glimpse on the platform people still buffeted by the wind.
It was his own journey that he distrusted, and nothing else. Weidle had dispatched him on it. But it had been Weidle who, not so long ago, had been hinting that he ask himself whether the Arnanders were any longer very substantially his business. Did the nullity of John Arnander’s recovered art really alter that? And was it going to help Jill so to arrange things that it should be Craine himself who would reveal it to her? If it were true – and he didn’t doubt its being true – wasn’t the right thing to hope for some merciful gradualness of disclosure? But Weidle’s sense was all of urgency; was of the sort of situation upon which, whether by any apparent logic of events or not, crisis is likely to supervene. No doubt he felt that Arnander might at any moment see – a sudden moment of revelation bringing home to him, too, that absoluteness of difference between abeyance and loss. But in such a moment – as far, at least, as Arnander was concerned – Craine supposed himself to be the very last man likely to be helpful. Unless it came, no doubt, to clearing up the merely practical aspects of a real mess.
The train hurtled through Parma, and he thought fleetingly of Stendhal. All that exquisite mathematics of passion; it’s as irrelevant to you and me – he said to himself – as is an elegant but arbitrary geometry. He almost said something about Stendhal to the man opposite – a professor, it had appeared, from Bologna – but he thought better of it and continued to pick in silence at his polio. He became aware that he was carrying with him on this dash south a great load of apprehensiveness and anxiety. Perhaps it was the passing shade of Stendhal that had released the knowledge to him: the mercilessness, the tearing of illusion to the quick. Or perhaps it was simply this journey through a wild night. The train was moving very fast. He thought he felt the wind flick at it, as if urging it to yet greater speed towards some fatal terminus. The wine swayed gently in his glass – and then the coffee in his cup. The meal was taken away and the sound of the train changed – the purely subjective change that announces the last stage of a journey in the dark. The lights of Prato flashed past. They were in Florence.
There was still the wind. Blasts of it blew through the great station where bright cold light beat down on muffled and huddled passengers waiting for trains. It was cleaner than Birmingham or Leeds – but it might have been Birmingham or Leeds apart from that. It was hard to believe that Santa Maria Novella lay just outside, baked by centuries of sun; that into this turbulent air rose Giotto’s tower and Brunelleschi’s dome. Craine picked up his bag and walked down the platform. There might be deep snow at three thousand feet, but none of the taxis outside would make any bones about driving up to it. He had passed the barrier when a voice spoke respectfully in his ear. “Signor Craine?”
He turned in surprise. It was a chauffeur. The man had no sooner made sure of his identity than he took his bag and led the way to a closed car. He opened the door – with a subdued drama appropriate to the successful accomplishing of a mission – and invited Craine to enter. There was already an occupant: a woman clothed entirely in black. And Craine was in doubt about her only for a moment. She was Marchesa Forni.
He kissed her hand, and she spoke unemotionally as the car drove off. “I had no doubt it would be this train. Nevertheless I am relieved. We can drive straight out.”
“It is very kind of you to meet me, Marchesa.” Craine was puzzled. He had sent no message ahead of him. So presumably this was Weidle’s work. “But surely you don’t mean to venture up to Saltino tonight?”
“To Saltino? No, no – there is nobody there.”
“Nobody there?” He was bewildered – more bewildered, he realised, than the Marchesa’s words required him to be. There would be nothing unnatural in the Arnander household’s having decided, after all, to pack up, to descend from its unseasonable aerie. He saw that his response to this small mystery was bound up with his own suppressed anxieties – and moreover that beneath the Marchesa’s calm there lay something very far wrong indeed. “Why,” he asked, “should there be nobody there?”
“You don’t know?” She, in her turn, appeared surprised. “The villa went too. The wind. The terrible wind.”
“The wind!” For a moment a wholly grotesque image rose in Craine’s mind, that of a massive house whipped from its foundations by the gale, and floating down like a spinning leaf into the valley of the Arno.
“But my cable – that has brought you here. You understood it?”
This time, Marchesa Forni’s voice was almost alarmed. She might have been recalling that cables were not her strong line in intelligible communication. He hastened to put her out of doubt about this. “I received no cable. I haven’t come in response to one. It must have reached my home just after I left it. So please explain. For instance, where are we going now?”
“To my very old friends, Luigi and Laura Perino. I have myself, you understand, no accommodation. And I knew they would much wish to help. Your—the signora knew them as a child. Tim Arnander, too, will go there. He will rejoin the others as soon as he leaves the hospital. I have just come from the hospital. It is terrible.”
The old lady’s coherence was faltering, and he was afraid that she might break down before he had made sense of the situation. “What is wrong with Tim?” he asked urgently. “Is he in any danger?”
“No, no – not that. He has only broken a leg.” Marchesa Forni braced herself. “And it was while behaving with courage. It is something he may have from his mother, no doubt. From his father – I think we are agreed – he could hope only for other qualities.” Unexpectedly, she laughed – and he sensed with alarm that she was violently trembling. “It is Nino!” she cried. “It is Nino who is perhaps in danger. They could tell me very little. It is terrible. But his – but the signora and Charles, at least, are unharmed.”
Craine drew a long breath. The car – he supposed it, from its amplitude and antiquity, to be the vehicle shared by so many Forni ladies – was nosing its way eastward out of the city. It was late, but there were still some shops and cafes lit up; and two glances would have told him, somehow, that it was Florence he was traversing. “Was it a fire?” he asked. “Was that it?”
“A terrible fire. Everything, everything destroyed. And with snow on the roofs, on the ground! But they could not control it. The wind. The terrible wind.”
“But there has been no loss of life?”
“Not yet.” In the gloom of the car he could see her shake her head – and again he knew her to be trembling. “There was a woman. She might have died. But Tim saved her.”
“I’m very glad to hear that.” Craine managed to speak calmly. “Is it known how it began?”
“It was in the studio. There was a new, a badly built fireplace. Nino would kindle great fires in it. And he grew more and more careless, it seems. And last night it happened.”
“You say everything was destroyed?”
; “Nearly everything. The fire had spread to the villa and gained a hold there before the danger of it was realised. They did, I believe, drag a few things out.”
“But from the studio?”
“Nothing. Nothing was saved.”
There had indeed been severe weather, Conte Luigi agreed. Something like a blizzard was reported at Bibbiena. One might as well be in the Abruzzi. But what he himself feared was a long succeeding frost – one of those wicked winters in which the threat to the olive and the mulberry advances beyond the Apennines.
Craine hoped it would not be as bad as that. The old gentleman thanked him, and pursued his theme for a few minutes longer. He had already expressed welcome, solicitude, concern – all with the discreet vagueness appropriate to his not quite knowing what it was all about. His wife displayed an equal composure. It was impossible to tell whether they were aware of being in the presence of marital complication; it was only apparent that they had guests. Marchesa Forni, Craine saw, had chosen her emergency haven well.
And Jill might have been a daughter of the house. Craine didn’t himself readily kindle to such places – they were apt to touch off his deep squirarchal distrust of a nobility – but he saw how perfectly she stood composed amid these mellow measured splendours. With her head turned away from him against the background of an old silk screen in faded aquamarine, she suggested nothing so much as a profile pricked out in the great age of the city now slumbering below them. She had said hardly a word on greeting him, but a glance had told how much she acknowledged the need of his support when matters looked to be getting out of hand. And they had very much looked to be doing that, he gathered, when she had allowed the Marchesa to send off her cable. Tim’s leg had been one thing; but for a time his head had threatened to be quite another. It was no more than concussion, however, and it had lifted; so he was in no worse condition than, say, the scores of English boys now in Swiss hospitals as the consequence of over-enthusiastic slithering about on ski. Jill herself produced this comparison with a faint incongruousness that suddenly pierced Craine’s heart. She was more or other than that sort of forthright mother of English public-school boys. But it was a part she played well. Hadn’t he always acknowledged that everything became her? If John Arnander’s resurrection had prospered, he oddly thought – if, for the first time in history, an Englishman had become indisputably the greatest of living European painters – then Jill would most admirably have filled the role of that painter’s wife.
A Use of Riches Page 19