“Counting them?” Craine was really startled.
“Yes. He was checking them over, quite composedly – supposing them quite out of danger, no doubt, and certainly without a thought for himself or any other living creature. It didn’t quite square—did it?—with his notion of a Feast of the Grand Combustion. And then it came down on him, and them.”
“The roof did?”
“The roof – like the lid of an enormous flaming coffin. It took very resolute men to get him out. For seconds his head and shoulders lay in something like a furnace. But they managed it. He was halfway to Florence in an ambulance before I knew anything about it.”
There was a final long silence. “But he’ll live?” Craine asked.
“Oh, yes – he’ll live. You might call it a second resurrection.”
Craine poured brandy. It was certainly a good idea now. The great strange house lay all mute around them. No doubt – this being Italy – there were servants awake somewhere, ready to see them with any necessary ceremony to their beds. But the only sound came, very faintly, from outside: the bitter tramontana still sweeping south over Tuscany, Umbria, Rome, to lose itself in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Craine thought for a long time before speaking. “You can’t go on doing it,” he said. “You mustn’t.”
Jill let the brandy circle in her glass, and looked at him in silence.
“There’s no reason why great artists shouldn’t have women – and even wives – if the wives will rise to it. But I’m damned if they ought to have children. What sort of a thing is that for boys to remember?”
“What, indeed.” She was quite still.
“You suspect that the whole basis of John’s personality has changed. You know, you positively know, that his relationship with you has. When he was blind, he was utterly dependent on you; he was living on a memory – perhaps no more than a dimly recovered memory – of what that relationship had been. But, when he got back his sight, it was – well, the wrong sort of sight. It produces the wrong sort of pictures, and surely no sort of relationship at all. And he’ll go on. He’ll go on now, fighting his own deeper knowledge of what’s become of him, reading what people say about his work, finally being driven into the open with himself. And you’ll be involved. Fundamentally, it’s all happened already. There have been moments when it has peeped out that—”
“Yes, I know.” She interrupted him calmly. “When it has peeped out that he can’t bear me.”
“I say you can’t go on.”
Jill shook her head slowly. When it came to rest, her gaze was very steady. “But you haven’t got it all,” she said. “Not quite all. There was a telephone message. It came while you were with Charles. They’ll save his life. But they can’t save his eyes.”
EPILOGUE
The city had been knocked down; the City had been built up again. Soon – Craine thought as he walked through autumn sunshine – it would be complete: the last great lattice of steel sheathed in its glass or stone or concrete; the last acre of offices advertised for sale in The Times. It wasn’t his, Craine’s, idea of a City of London; no, it wasn’t his cup of tea. But he didn’t know that it was, after all, too bad. The needs it served, the drives it expressed, were nothing to be ashamed of. Yes – he supposed – it would do; it was all very much of a compromise, but, after a fashion, it marched. And it was only of some very rare things in life that you could say more.
Craine walked, perhaps, a little faster than he used to. Old Mungo was definitely out of things; Craine had even more on his own plate; private business – such as today’s – was harder than ever to fit in. Still, he didn’t move sightlessly. As long as you avoided that, you had – well, some chance of a glimpse of something. Once, he remembered, just here, he had seen a red bicycle.
He turned into Watling Street.
Mrs. Eggins continued in the best of health, and Mr. Groocock was free at once. Groocock was going grey, Craine thought as he entered the inner office and shook hands. But not so grey as you might expect, in a man for whom life was presumably one long audit. He wondered whether this would be one of Groocock’s reserved or communicative days.
The question answered itself almost at once. “I saw the obituary of our friend,” Groocock said. “Most interesting. And entertaining, in a discreet way, on the manner in which, as a youth, he emerged more or less out of the blue. I hope you’ll send in something of your own. They call them tributes, don’t they? The affairs that appear a few days later.”
“A. B. G. writes that the late X had, above all things, a genius for friendship?” Craine shook his head. “No, I don’t think I could manage that – even about Fyodor Weidle, of whom I had become rather fond.”
“Was it sudden?” Groocock asked.
“No, he’d known for quite a long time. I can’t tell you much about his last weeks, or months. We didn’t often meet. He was, in fact, rather avoiding me.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Groocock put out a hand to the papers on his desk – a sign of precipitate retreat upon discretion. “Well, I think everything’s ready, more or less, for the lawyers to come in with their rigmaroles.” He tapped first one file and then another. “Here you are. The Arnander Trust. The Craine Trust.” He paused, suddenly self-convicted of having been remiss. “I hope,” he asked, “that Mrs. Craine is well?”
“Yes, thank you – although she was as sad about Weidle as I was. She hadn’t been seeing much of him either. We neither of us had, since just after John Arnander’s death. He didn’t want much to discuss it, I suppose.”
“Ah, yes – a very sad accident, that. And after such an extraordinary escape.”
At the risk of the largest impropriety, Craine laughed. He was really amused. Groocock had even assumed his slightly abstracted manner. “My dear man,” Craine said, “you’ve been good enough to talk to me frankly about my strange fortunes before this. We needn’t relapse.”
“No, no – that’s true.” It was almost possible to believe that Groocock had flushed. He pushed his papers away. “Tell me,” he said. “Was it an accident?”
“It may have been. But I don’t think so.”
Groocock shook his head. “I must say, suicide isn’t surprising. It was a plight – a dire plight, poor devil. To have had it all in his grasp again, actually to have achieved his old heights, and then to be plunged into that second darkness – it doesn’t bear thinking about.”
“He certainly couldn’t bear thinking about it. He was Lazarus – brought back to live in hell. Perhaps because—because he had his wife still, he couldn’t even relapse readily into the condition to which his first blindness had brought him. He raged. He wouldn’t reconcile himself by one iota to his condition. He struggled at incredible things. He remembered that Degas, when nearly blind, had taken to modelling. There’s a famous little ballerina. Arnander tried that sort of thing – in clay, in wax. In every sense, it was a terrible mess.”
Craine paused, and Groocock fished cautiously for an understatement. “He can’t,” he said, “have been easy to live with.”
“No. And yet one mustn’t exaggerate.” Craine’s inexpungable fair-mindedness rose up. “He got something from Jill, and that meant something to her. It was killing her, but he got something. Not much, to any mortal seeming. But such things can’t be measured. And his hostility, remember – for hostility to her had been growing in him – sank back, with his renewed blindness, into a renewed dependence. She was right never to leave him.”
This time, Groocock said nothing. He knew when to hold his tongue.
“He brooded – it was inevitable that he should brood – over the work he’d done in those few precious months before the fire and the catastrophe. If only those canvases had been preserved, he thought, it would all have been worthwhile, after all. Even the moment – I’ve told you of it – when he left that girl screaming.”
“But in fact, they’d perished – every one of them?”
Craine nodded. “In fact they’d perished in the fire. If the
y can be said ever to have existed.”
Groocock sat up and stared. “What’s that?”
“It hasn’t yet been made generally known, and I don’t know that it ever need be. They were only, so to speak, dream-paintings – triumphs Arnander imagined that, during his period of miraculous resurrection, a relenting fate had allowed him to achieve. It wasn’t so. His genius had gone out of him.”
“And he didn’t know?”
“He didn’t – in any common sense of the term – know. No doubt the seed of knowledge lurked somewhere deep in his mind. If he’d kept his sight, it must have thrust up through the surface sooner or later and confronted him. As it was, it remained a seed – no more. When he didn’t rage – which wasn’t very often – it was because he believed that his genius had really flowered again in those months of recaptured vision. But then the thought that the fruit of that flowering had perished would catch him and throw him back into torment. And that was the point at which irrational processes began to come in.”
“You mean – insanity?”
“Well, he began to have times when it appeared to him incredible that his work – his work that he’d carried from the studio to safety at such fearful cost – could have perished. Rather it had been hidden away, stolen from him in his helplessness. There was a monstrous fraud, a conspiracy, a persecution. Somewhere, somehow, somebody else was holding an exhibition, was getting the credit for paintings greater, he believed, than the La Verna or the Maremma.”
Groocock considered. “Then wasn’t he,” he asked, “a case for the psychiatrists?”
“Of course he was – in the sense that persons of that sort were consulted. They said these were merely episodes of aberration which might remain entirely manageable. They advised that Arnander shouldn’t be argued with, or indeed addressed on the subject at all. That kind of thing.”
“And that was as far as they got in—what do they call it?—prognosis?”
“One of them supposed that, very slowly, he might sink back into the sort of state I’d found him in at Castelarbia. It would be a matter of years. And meanwhile, there he was: first in hospital with those fearful burns, then in the Saltino clinic when it opened again in the spring, and then in a pensione down the road. And there too was Jill. And there, from time to time, were his two boys. He was in torment, and might so remain for thirty years. And they all knew it.”
Groocock again briefly pondered. “I don’t know,” he said, “how you feel about suicide, from the point of view of religious belief. But if ever a man was justified in . . . “
“Suicide?” Craine shook his head. “Perhaps it was that. Or might it have been murder?”
“But I read about it!” Groocock was shocked. “It seemed precisely the sort of affair that leaves one a little wondering – but certainly not about possible foul play. There was a very full account. The terrace of the burnt-out villa – he would go and sit there. It was said that he took satisfaction in listening to the workmen who had begun to rebuild or repair the place. There was a safe quiet walk to it, and nobody suspected the slightest danger. Wasn’t all that true?”
“Perfectly true.”
“But in fact, beyond the terrace, or beyond one end of it, there was a sheer drop to rock below. And, just at one point above this, a balustrade or railing was defective . . . “
“And that’s perfectly true, too. So was the testimony of the workmen up on a scaffolding. Arnander had sat on the terrace all afternoon, like a man gazing out over the view. Then he got up and took a turn up and down. He was very sure of himself physically, never troubled about his sense of direction. But suddenly he seemed to become disorientated – and without knowing it. Quite confidently, and simply holding his stick out before him, he walked straight to the gap and went over. Of course he was dead when they reached him.”
“That was something.” Groocock seemed to feel that his tone carried a satisfaction that might be misinterpreted. “That there wasn’t, I mean, some long final agony. And I agree that, as you tell the thing, it doesn’t convey a convincing impression of accident. But how it could in any sense be . . . “
“Weidle was there, you know,” Craine interrupted. “They’d had lunch together.”
“Well, what if they did? Weidle can’t very well have poisoned the poor chap.” Groocock paused on this, frowning – so that Craine was reminded of how Weidle himself had used to dislike sounding a dubiously facetious note. “Unless he poisoned his mind,” he added sharply.
“I don’t know whether telling him the truth is to be called poisoning his mind. For that’s what I think Weidle did. He told Arnander the truth about what had happened to his powers, his genius. One might say that he uncaged the truth – for, as I’ve said, it was already there, prowling the darkness of Arnander’s unconscious.” Craine looked up. “Darkness. That reminds me of something that Weidle once said to Jill. He said that there are kinds of pathos that are best for the dark. And I remember, too, something he said to me on what must have been almost the last occasion that we met. It was again something that might be thought sententious. A gnomic habit was growing on him, towards the end. He said that there was absolutely no safety in the truth, but there was always liberation in it.”
Groocock stirred uneasily. “Even so . . . “He hesitated. “Even so, his intention mayn’t have been what you could call lethal. Say that telling Arnander this truth was a risk that nobody else was prepared to take. Once taken, its effect might have been of liberation other than in that fatal sense. Arnander might have faced that last irony about himself – the irony of his having elected to rescue those virtually worthless pictures instead of the girl – and survived, all the same.”
Craine nodded. “Yes. Kill or cure. It may have been that. One can’t tell. And, even if one could, it would be rash to bring in a judgment. Only I do believe this. It was something that Weidle wouldn’t have done, if he hadn’t been facing the dark himself.”
The two men looked at each other seriously, and for some time neither spoke. It became clear that their topic was exhausted. Groocock put out a hand for his two files: the Craine Trust, the Arnander Trust. Then he changed his mind, and reached for some loose papers. “By the way,” he said, “before we go on, there’s something else. Some signatures. In each of the places where there’s a pencilled cross.”
And Craine signed the unimportant papers presented to him.
Works of J.I.M. Stewart
‘Staircase in Surrey’ Quintet
These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as standalone novels
The Gaudy (1974)
Young Pattullo (1975)
Memorial Service (1976)
The Madonna of the Astrolabe (1977)
Full Term (1978)
Other Works
Published or to be published by House of Stratus
A. Novels
Mark Lambert’s Supper (1954)
The Guardians (1955)
A Use of Riches (1957)
The Man Who Won the Pools (1961)
The Last Tresilians (1963)
An Acre of Grass (1965)
The Aylwins (1966)
Vanderlyn’s Kingdom (1967)
Avery’s Mission (1971)
A Palace of Art (1972)
Mungo’s Dream (1973)
Andrew and Tobias (1980)
A Villa in France (1982)
An Open Prison (1984)
The Naylors (1985)
B. Short Story Collections
The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories (1959)
Cucumber Sandwiches (1969)
Our England Is a Garden (1979)
The Bridge at Arta (1981)
My Aunt Christina (1983)
Parlour Four (1984)
C. Non-fiction
Educating the Emotions (1944)
Character and Motive in Shakespeare (1949)
James Joyce (1957)
Eight Modern Writers (1963)
Thomas Love Peacock (1963)
&n
bsp; Rudyard Kipling (1966)
Joseph Conrad (1968)
Shakespeare’s Lofty Scene (1971)
Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography (1971)
Plus a further 48 Titles published under the pseudonym ‘Michael Innes’
Select Synopses
Staircase in Surrey
The Gaudy
The first volume in J.I.M. Stewart’s acclaimed ‘A Staircase in Surrey’ quintet, (but the second in time), ‘The Gaudy’ opens in Oxford at the eponymous annual dinner laid on by the Fellows for past members. Distinguished guests, including the Chancellor (a former Prime Minister) are present and Duncan Pattullo, now also qualified to attend, gets to meet some of his friends and enemies from undergraduate days. As the evening wears on, Duncan finds himself embroiled in many of the difficulties and problems faced by some of them, including Lord Marchpayne, now a Cabinet Minister; another Don, Ranald McKenechnie; and Gavin Mogridge who is famous for an account he wrote of his adventures in a South American jungle. But it doesn’t stop there, as Pattullo acquires a few problems of his own and throughout the evening and the next day various odd developments just add to his difficulties, leading him to take stock of both his past and future.
Young Pattullo
This is the second of the ‘A Staircase in Surrey’ quintet, and the first in chronological order. Duncan Pattullo arrives in Oxford, destined to be housed off the quadrangle his father has chosen simply for its architectural and visual appeal. On the staircase in Surrey, Duncan meets those who are to become his new friends and companions, and there occurs all of the usual student antics and digressions, described by Stewart with his characteristic wit, to amuse and enthral the reader. After a punting accident, however, the girl who is in love with Duncan suffers as a result of his self-sacrificing actions. His cousin, Anna, is also involved in an affair, but she withholds the name of her lover, despite being pregnant. This particular twist reaches an ironical conclusion towards the end of the novel, in another of Stewart’s favourite locations; Italy. Indeed, Young Pattullo covers all of the writer’s favourite subjects and places; the arts, learning, mystery and intrigue, whilst ranging from his much loved Oxford, through Scotland and the inevitable Italian venue. This second volume of the acclaimed series can be read in order, or as a standalone novel.
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