A Palace of Art

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘I’m sorry not to have had the pleasure of meeting Miss Montacute,’ he said. ‘Domberg pointed her out to me as we were driving up. She seemed to be marching off with her dogs.’

  For long enough to disconcert one so self-conscious as Chevalley, Mrs Montacute made no reply to this. Perhaps she was marking a legitimate sense of impertinence in this young man’s hinted amusement at having detected a decamping daughter. Or perhaps her mind had merely drifted back to brood darkly over the gelid Wu Pin. When she did speak, however, it was in a conciliatory tone.

  ‘I hope Gloria may have returned before our guests leave. When she is at home I encourage her to be as much in the open air as possible. Unfortunately there are many weekends in which she has to remain in London. Gloria is quite devoted to her hospital.’

  ‘Is she a nurse?’ It didn’t seem probable to Chevalley that the florid and lumbering, if curiously haunting, Madonna of the fox-hounds was a rising young lady doctor.

  ‘Gloria’s responsibilities,’ Mrs Montacute said, ‘are on the catering side.’

  Chapter Four

  ENTER A DISTRIBUTIST

  AND EXIT A COLLECTOR

  Domberg wandered round by himself. Although acquainted with many of his fellow guests, he had no present wish for their conversation, and he therefore intimated that kind of aesthetic abstraction which nicely bred people know must not be broken in upon. His head, slightly inclined to one side as he studied Titian’s rough satyrs wooing nymphs in shady places, or as he estimated the unsatisfactoriness of the wretched Wang Meng, might have been one of those notices which hotels provide to be hung on door-knobs with the injunction Do not disturb. Or (in a figure more appropriate to Nudd) he might have been murmuring the musical Italian equivalent of this – Però non me destar – which Michelangelo imagines as proceeding from the marble lips of Night in the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo.

  Mrs Montacute didn’t run to anything by Michelangelo, but she ran to the devil of a lot. It was borne in upon Domberg that even three million was an underestimate of the likely knock-down total one day to be achieved at the great Nudd sale. It wasn’t so much a matter of the really major things – the Titians and the Velazquez and the tremendous La Tour – as of the innumerable articles of vertu which the luck of the draw seemed almost invariably to have brought out at the top of their class. Domberg held that sort of bric-à-brac in no very high regard. He had a special expression of amused disdain, indeed, for those marks of high authenticity at times triumphantly discoverable on the underside of old plates. Still, in an age in which a soup-tureen might fetch more than your grandfather would have given for a Rembrandt or a Claude, it was not for a prudent man altogether to neglect such matters. So Domberg peered about him with care. He reminded himself, moreover, that even a mania for collecting soup-tureens was meritorious – always provided that, within a reasonable number of years, the collector tired of his treasures, sold up, and started in on something else. It is only public-spirited conduct of this sort, after all, that keeps art going.

  But in this regard there was plainly nothing to expect, so far as Fenella Montacute was concerned. A glance at the old girl told one she was booked to live into her nineties, and even then she would probably die while still holding on. Which would mean that young Chevalley might see the great Nudd sale, but that he, Domberg, would not. And in the interim depressingly little would be happening. Mrs Montacute’s instinct for investment would no doubt prompt her to occasional adjustments in her holdings here and there. But these would be minimal, and would doubtless be conducted privately, as between collector and collector, in the course of convivialities very much like the present party.

  This thought caused Domberg to scowl – into the recesses, as it happened, of a dark cabinet within which there subaqueously swam, like scraps of seaweed, various objects in ancient jade. His scowl deepened – he chanced rather to dislike jade – and then he became aware that there also floated in the cabinet a kind of ghostly jellyfish. But this was only the reflection in glass of a human face which had hove up behind him. He turned, still scowling, and found himself more or less eyeball to eyeball with a much more ferociously scowling young man.

  The young man was untidily but colourfully dressed. Save for the improbability of such a person’s being present at Mrs Montacute’s party, Domberg would have taken him for an artist. He had picked up from a side-table what appeared to be a delicate little sea-horse in faience, and this, to Domberg’s horror, he was lightly and absently tossing in air. Some protest was essential.

  ‘I think,’ Domberg said firmly, ‘you had better put it down. These things break easily.’

  ‘Oh – are you the detective?’

  ‘No, I am not.’

  ‘Sorry. You looked a bit bored.’ The young man, despite an alarming wildness of regard, spoke inoffensively enough. And he had even restored the sea-horse to its place with decent care. ‘So I thought you might be a private eye. They probably hire two or three for an affair like this. Bloody lot of junk it is, isn’t it?’ The young man’s scowl became fleetingly an engaging smile, but he made no pause to receive either agreement or disagreement. ‘Can you tell me which is the old woman herself? Is she the one dressed like a Christmas cracker?’

  ‘Yes, she is.’ Veracity constrained Domberg to this reply, although he disapproved of Mrs Montacute’s being thus insultingly referred to by a guest. ‘Did you neglect to make her acquaintance on your arrival?’

  ‘Christ, yes! I gate-crashed, man. Old Fenella wouldn’t care for the idea of my being here at all. I’m a kind of relation, you see. Are you?’

  ‘No, I am not. I am merely’—Domberg stretched a point, being curious about the young man— ‘an old friend of the family.’

  ‘Then you must have heard of the Counterpaynes. I’m Jake Counterpayne. How do you do?’

  ‘How do you do?’ Domberg accepted this irregular introduction grudgingly. ‘My name is Lambert Domberg.’

  ‘Comberback and Domberg?’ A return to ferocity on Mr Counterpayne’s part accompanied this question.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I’m buggered!’ The young man evinced a kind of savage cheerfulness as he offered this extravagant information. ‘I’ve never met one of the top operators before. Quite your sort of thing, all this must be. And I’m bound to say it staggers me a bit. Of course I’ve heard a lot about it, since it’s a family affair, and I thought I’d come and see. Waiter!’

  This shout had been directed at Mrs Montacute’s butler, whom Domberg knew to be named Guise. Guise had been passing with a bottle of champagne, and this shocking young man was now waving an empty glass at him. What made his conduct peculiarly deplorable was the evident fact that his manner of summoning Mrs Montacute’s chief retainer had not in the least been an innocent solecism. It had been an outrageously tasteless joke. Domberg felt that he ought simply to move away. As it happened, however, Guise’s manner of coping with the situation was to relegate Counterpayne to second place. So Domberg watched with satisfaction the bottle being emptied into his own glass, and stayed put.

  ‘One up to you,’ Counterpayne said without animus as Guise retreated. ‘I know what I’d do with it.’

  ‘The champagne?’

  ‘The collection, or whatever it’s called. Chuck it out.’

  ‘Chuck it out?’ This conception eluded Domberg. ‘Disperse it,’ he added hopefully, ‘in a series of sales?’

  ‘Pitch it through the windows, and let the villagers come and take their pick. If there are any villagers, that is. A bit here and a bit there might liven up some dull interiors. But all this purse-proud accumulation in one house is disgusting.’

  ‘I suppose’—Domberg spoke with his accustomed irony— ‘you are what, when I was young, was called a distributist.’

  ‘Was that a kind of pointilliste? You’re quite right that I’m a painter.’

  ‘I am interested to hear it, Mr Counterpayne. But I was referring to what appear to be your political persuasio
ns.’

  ‘Maoist.’

  ‘Dear me! Do you carry that Little Red Book?’

  ‘Here you are.’ With a promptitude disconcerting to Domberg, Mr Jake Counterpayne fished a small volume out of a baggy pocket. ‘Care to borrow it? I doubt whether it would do you much good. Excuse me just a moment!’ This time, there had appeared in a corner of the room a female assistant of Guise’s bearing a trayful of brimming glasses. The young man’s capture of her was so rapid that Domberg had no chance to move on before he was back again with a glass in each hand. ‘The foaming grape of eastern France,’ he said poetically. ‘And I asked for one for my wife.’

  ‘Mrs Counterpayne has gate-crashed too?’

  ‘Not married, man.’ Counterpayne deftly secreted his reserve refreshment behind one of Mrs Montacute’s less considerable camels. ‘By the way – is the young wench here, do you happen to know?’

  ‘I suppose you mean Miss Montacute.’ Domberg’s tone was severe. Charity is elusive, but decorum it is always possible to preserve. ‘I believe she is exercising some dogs.’

  ‘Ought to be exercising herself, from what I hear. Gloria’s said to turn the scale at fifteen stone. Would you say that’s about right?’

  ‘I have had no occasion to consider the matter. But I should judge it to be an exaggeration.’

  ‘It was partly to have a dekko at her that I barged in.’ Jake Counterpayne was perhaps approximating his vocabulary to what he judged an old-fashioned colloquial note. ‘Gloria and I are cousins of a sort, of course, but we haven’t met since we were kids. There was a family row, and it rumbles on. Cash-nexus stuff. The strains and contradictions of an acquisitive society. Montagues and Capulets, you might say. And here I am at the party.’

  Domberg received these final odd remarks in silence. They would not have been offered to a stranger, he judged, had the young man not been briskly at work on the champagne for some time. Counterpayne had been far from speaking of the daughter of the house as one who could teach the torches to burn bright, or even who showed as a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear. But Gloria Montacute, if not a Juliet, was very much an heiress, and her cousin must know it. Domberg doubted whether the possession of the most pronounced Maoist principles would render such a circumstance wholly uninteresting. So it was not improbable that Jake Counterpayne had come to Nudd on a reconnaissance of a mercenary sort.

  Certainly the young man didn’t appear to take much interest in what he had called a bloody lot of junk. This was unsurprising in itself. It was very much within Lambert Domberg’s knowledge that the attitude of young artists to the labours of their predecessors through the centuries is frequently a compost of arrogant indifference and rapid theft. You can see them in the National Gallery or the Tate every day, and wonder why they have indefinably the air of pickpockets. It is because their every instinct is plagiaristic rather than contemplative.

  These opinions of Lambert Domberg’s are not to be judged illiberal. He had nothing against young painters and the like considered simply as human beings. It was merely that he held a strong conviction that artistic activity was best regarded as a definable historical phenomenon which had come to an end with the eighth Impressionist Exhibition in 1886. After that, when considered from a professional point of view, the continued coming into being of further works of art was mainly a nuisance. At least it had to be called that as soon as anything of the sort achieved some spurious and assuredly evanescent celebrity. To date, Jake Counterpayne was probably innocent here; it was unlikely that anybody had got round to paying for his empty sardine-tins, or abandoned motor-tyres, or whatever it was he painted, money adequate to the purchase of, say, a perfectly respectable little Calvert or Cotman.

  But now, and quite suddenly, Counterpayne struck Domberg in a new light. A penny dropped, so to speak, that ought to have dropped several minutes before.

  ‘I think,’ Domberg said, ‘that you must be a grand-nephew of Hugo Counterpayne, who formed the collection?’

  ‘And left it all to old Fenella. You’re quite right. And that was the start of the row, you know. My father – he’s Cedric Counterpayne, old Fenella’s first cousin – resented it. Old Hugo left him quite a lot of lolly instead, but he doesn’t seem to have managed it very well. And he still gets steamed up about all this stuff – doing nothing but hang on the walls or lurk in the cabinets or piddle like that glorified cattle trough in the hall, and yet appreciating in value like mad all the time. I feel for my father. He’s rather dotty, of course – but harmlessly enough.’ Jake Counterpayne paused to negotiate his switch of champagne glasses. ‘He and I get on not too badly, all things considered. I’d say I quite like him, on the whole.’

  ‘That must be most gratifying to you both.’ Domberg’s own father had died forty years before, and Domberg in consequence possessed, if faintly, all the right feelings about him. He was therefore offended by this somewhat casual expression of filial regard. ‘Do I gather that, although Gloria was known to you as a child, you have never so much as met her mother?’

  ‘Correct. Gloria once came on a visit to us, and I suppose it must have been a manoeuvre by our parents towards a reconciliation. The angel-children were to do the trick. But it didn’t come off. When the time for it came I refused to do a return visit. I said I wasn’t going to waste my holidays living with a beastly girl. It’s wonderful how one’s inclinations change.’

  ‘No doubt. But it isn’t, you know, too late for a reconciliation now.’ Domberg said this because he had become aware of his hostess as only a couple of paces away from him – and because of a sudden impulse either meritorious or malicious according to one’s point of view. He put a hand on the young man’s elbow and swung him round. ‘Dear lady!’ he said. ‘May I have the pleasure of introducing your kinsman, Jake Counterpayne?’

  Mrs Montacute’s gaze was blank. For a moment at least, this seemed quite natural. She had been confronted by something surprising – and this through the instrumentality of discourteous, or at least outré, behaviour on the part of a customarily circumspect trafficker in the fine arts. But the blank gaze unnervingly continued. It would have been fair to inform Mrs Montacute, as Macbeth informed the ghost of Banquo, that she had no speculation in those eyes that she did glare with.

  Then Mrs Montacute spoke. Or rather she didn’t exactly speak; she merely emitted sounds that might be held compatible with the state known as being speechless with indignation. But was Mrs Montacute really indignant? It didn’t seem quite like that. In fact, Mrs Montacute was smiling pleasantly – or was so smiling until a curious sliding or gliding movement made itself perceptible over one side of her face. She then sat down, also in a sliding way, and not without a certain appearance of conscious grace. Unfortunately the chair that she had chosen owned the status only of what the learned call an eidetic image. In brute fact it wasn’t there. What Mrs Montacute sat down on, therefore, was the floor; and on the floor she lay supine a moment later. Not many seconds had to pass before it became evident that she was dead.

  Chapter Five

  A SENSE OF SHOCK

  Nothing sinister or even, in the strict sense, unexpected attached to Mrs Montacute’s sudden death. It was to turn out that the family doctor (who was at the party as representing what Mrs Montacute called local society) had foreboded it, or at least something approximating to it, for a year or more. Such conclusive cerebral disasters threaten and occur. And if Mrs Montacute herself had fully understood the extent of her own vulnerability she had very successfully kept mum about it. Were the news to have got around, it is very probable, after all, that she would have been increasingly pestered by sundry persons evincing a disinterested concern for the well-being of the fine arts.

  But, of course, so sudden a stroke – or coup de théâtre – as Mrs Montacute had achieved came to many as a considerable shock. It was certainly a shock to Lambert Domberg, who spent some time under the distressing impression that a mild and unwonted impropriety on his part had proved instantly lethal to
his hostess. It turned out, however, that Mrs Montacute had been behaving oddly – had, to put it crudely, been gibbering instead of talking – for some minutes before her clouding gaze had been solicited for her long-lost kinsman, Jake Counterpayne. It was a shock to Jake. Never before had this young man been invited to make his bow to one whose death-rattle was more or less in her throat.

  But, naturally enough, it was chiefly a shock to Gloria.

  Chapter Six

  WALKING ROUND WITH

  GLORIA MONTACUTE

  Yet Gloria had, to some extent, experienced a premonition. Or perhaps it had been Harry Carter who had done that – who had picked up some hint of a message from the manner in which a departing motor-car seemed impatient to shake off the dust of Nudd behind it. Gloria was to recall this later as an instance of that feral alertness – so decidedly to be reckoned with – which distinguished Harry from the rest of her acquaintance.

  They had walked down the hill contentedly enough. Gloria, as was her habit, revolved various practical issues in her mind and came to a decision on each. She chose the train by which she would return to London next day. Exercising her imagination to practical effect, she estimated the likely weight of her suitcase and concluded that it would be unnecessary to hire a taxi at Paddington. She pondered taking Harry’s barely rifled box of chocolates as a present to the assistant tea lady, but judged she didn’t know the assistant tea lady quite well enough as yet to render this impaired gift appropriate. Fortunately Mrs Bantry, her mother’s cook, could be relied on to be pleased with it.