A Palace of Art

by J. I. M. Stewart

  The puppies had to be returned to the kennels, a quarter of a mile away, and some words exchanged with the kennel-man. This took time. Nudd, when they reached it, was in a state of unnatural quiet, all the same.

  ‘They’ve gone, my dear – every one of them.’ Harry, who was a little awed by the big house, produced this gravely. He even came to a momentary halt.

  ‘So they have, and I’m afraid it looks rather dull.’ Gloria had a sense of wanting to be alone. ‘Perhaps, Harry—’

  ‘I’m coming in, my dear – like we said.’ Harry was striding ahead again.

  ‘Yes, of course. But something must have happened, it seems to me.’

  ‘Yes,’ Harry said unemotionally. ‘Something must.’

  The family doctor had remained, and so had a strange young man who introduced himself on a subdued note as Gloria’s cousin Jake Counterpayne. Nobody else had felt sufficiently an intimate of the household to do other than depart at once. Jake, having said something reasonably appropriate and quite without mumbling, neither lingered nor gave any effect of being anxious to bolt. Gloria, dimly conscious that this forgotten kinsman was what her mother would have called un garçon farouche, chalked him up a mark for decent manners when he did leave. Harry saw him out of the house. Gloria was amused by the spectacle. Only when she became conscious of her amusement as very shocking did she seem to realise that her mother was dead. She went up to her bedroom and wept.

  It was late in the evening when she came downstairs again. Guise had turned on lights sparingly here and there. Most of them were designed not for general illumination but to pick out particularly notable stretches and hunks of art. Mrs Montacute’s top camel – the outsize T’ang one – glowed within a nimbus of its own, as if raised to sainthood among its kind. The small boy called Don Balthasar Carlos, joyously caracoling on a rocking-horse which the courtly tact of Velazquez had transformed into a live and prancing steed, was held in a mild radiance perhaps grateful to a child booked for the gloomiest of thrones. And the mysterious candle-lit world of La Tour, being hung in a recess in which there now glimmered other points of light, made an effect which would have had to be judged theatrical if it hadn’t somehow triumphantly (in a favourite phrase of the late Mrs Montacute’s) ‘come off’.

  But these and similar appearances Gloria passed by without much, or indeed any, regard. This was not attributable to her grief. She had ceased paying attention to the priceless contents of Nudd from the moment at which she had successfully rebelled against her mother’s notion that she was an appropriate person ‘to take people round’. Had she recalled at this moment the positiveness of her stance on that occasion she might have blamed herself bitterly. But that would have been irrational, as guilt- feelings at times of bereavement commonly are (or are declared by well-balanced people to be). Certainly the job of cicerone wouldn’t have been at all Gloria’s thing. It hadn’t, for that matter, been quite her mother’s either, except with visitors themselves owning a lively sense of how markets move.

  She came into the hall, that area of Nudd which was fortunately so spacious as to present an uncramped arena for the fontana minore. The fontana minore still splashed and trickled, and a beam of light from below undercut the sharp features of Henry of Cornwall – whose murder, in sacrilegious circumstances, by Guy de Montfort was the most spirited of the small spectacles on view. Harry was viewing it now. Harry had stayed put.

  ‘The doctor went off,’ Harry said, rapidly and by way of explaining himself. ‘So really there’s nobody around, is there? Except all those servants.’

  This was an exaggerated expression. Guise and Mrs Bantry did, it was true, require supporting presences, but all except two of these were unassuming females who came in from the village on a daily basis. Nudd couldn’t be called a great household. It was a considerable place, all the same. Perhaps a sense of its mere dimensions was troubling Harry.

  ‘Haven’t you got any relations?’ he said on a demanding note. ‘An aunt or something?’

  ‘I have some elderly cousins I never see. They must be the parents of that young man you saw off the premises – Jake Counterpayne.’

  ‘What silly names the aristocracy have, my dear.’

  ‘We haven’t anything to do with the aristocracy – not any of us.’ Gloria often had to wonder whether Harry Carter was quite the social innocent he seemed. ‘We’re just plain money. But didn’t you think Jake looked as if he might be a bit reacting against it?’

  ‘At least he didn’t say he’d got a job as a tea lady.’ Harry had achieved one of his rare strokes of wit. ‘I don’t think I liked him much, Gloria. He said something a bit odd, just as he drove away. He said he’d been gate-crashing, which had made things awkward. I don’t think it’s manners, to go where you’re not asked.’ Harry looked comfortably round the hall of Nudd Manor. He had been asked – and (it was to be supposed) by the Manor’s new proprietor.

  ‘If he felt it to be awkward, that was quite nice of him.’ It wasn’t clear to Gloria why she was engaging in this defence of her virtually unknown cousin.

  ‘I thought we were well rid of him, Gloria my dear. A kind of hippie, he seemed to me. I don’t expect his mother would be much use to you. Look, Gloria – shall I ask my mother to come across? She could stay the night easily.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think—’ Gloria checked her first impulse to turn down this proposal. It sounded like making a fuss (which you mustn’t do when people die) and moreover she wasn’t certain that there didn’t lurk in Harry’s offer, whether guilefully or not, his unslumbering instinct to prosecute his suit (if it could be called a suit). But Gloria was a tea lady, and tea ladies in great hospitals are a secular priesthood, perpetually holding out a cup of communion to persons often for one reason or another in deep states of feeling; and this develops in tea ladies a sensitiveness which their outward seeming may not betray. So Gloria was aware of Harry’s suggestion as having an impersonal source in the mortuary ritual of the folk. This was the big house, and in the big house it would be peculiarly shocking that only hired people should assist at a wake. ‘Yes, Harry – please,’ she said. ‘I’d like your mother to come.’

  ‘Then I’ll go and fetch her right away.’ Harry paused on this; he didn’t, in fact, seem ready to move. ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you. The vicar came. But I told him you were asleep, and cleared him out.’

  Gloria didn’t know how to receive this surprising news. Chiefly she felt relieved. Not believing that her mother was now in heaven (or anywhere else, for that matter), she was disposed to feel (perhaps fallaciously) that there would have been only awkwardness in a precipitate encounter with a person professionally committed to the contrary persuasion. On the other hand it was undeniable that Harry Carter, perhaps assuming, once more, even greater social innocence than was actually his, had acted decidedly out of turn. It wasn’t Harry’s business to chase away clergymen from a house of mourning in which he himself had no standing whatever – which, indeed, he had never before entered in his life. But yet again there hovered for Gloria on the edge of all this a ludicrous yet attractive vision of Harry taking charge of the whole thing: sending for the undertaker, and notifying The Times, and ordering the funeral baked meats, and tipping the sexton. It was wrong to be amused, whether by this or anything else. She owned, however, a curious feeling that just at this moment, within hours of her mother’s death, moods and responses were possible which would not be possible on the following day or for a good many days to come.

  ‘Harry,’ she said suddenly, ‘did Guise get you anything?’

  ‘Get me anything? No, of course not.’ Harry appeared startled.

  ‘But you’ve very kindly stayed here for hours! You must have a drink – before going back to the farm for your mother. Come on. We can still find something.’ Gloria divined a possible occasion of shyness on Harry’s part. ‘And without bothering the servants.’

  ‘They seem to be keeping away.’ Harry’s bright eyes were searchingly on Gloria across
an angle of the fountain. A sense of propriety had prompted him to button his shirt almost to the neck, and to roll down his sleeves. But he still looked like something which Gloria found it difficult to put a name to. It was something heathen, she vaguely supposed: some minor divinity having to do with vintages and harvests. Titian could have made quite something of Harry.

  ‘Oh, they’ll come around when you leave,’ Gloria said – meaning Guise and Mrs Bantry and the housemaid.

  ‘Has that man been here for a long time?’

  ‘Guise? He’s been with us for ages – in fact he belonged here before we came to Nudd. He’ll be very good and comforting. But, of course, it will be wonderful to have your mother for the night, if she can really manage it. Now, come along.’

  The dining-room at Nudd opened into the drawing-room through wide folding doors, and it was in this combined apartment that a light collation had chiefly been on offer at the late party. Much had been hastily cleared away by injured caterers, unaccustomed to the impropriety of sudden death at a banquet. But there was still a long table at the far end of the room, draped in Nudd’s best linen. Fishing under a corner of this as one who knew the customs of the house, Gloria produced a silver bucket in which floated, in what had recently been ice, an unopened bottle of champagne. She mopped the bottle with a table-napkin, handed it silently to Harry, and turned to find clean glasses in a basket nearby. Harry eyed the bottle doubtfully, as if feeling involved by a suddenly unaccountable Gloria in monstrous indecorum. Gloria enjoyed this, although she knew she ought not to be enjoying anything. Harry, bracing himself, applied strong fingers to the wire and thrusting thumbs to the knobbly and obscurely fascinating cork. In the silent house the cork came out with the effect of a cannon-shot and flew across the room. The bottle foamed at the neck as Gloria pushed a glass under it. Harry – such was his sense of a wild indecency – had gone pale, like a harvest more than ready to reap. And then they were drinking together, soberly enough.

  ‘May I walk round?’ Harry asked surprisingly.

  ‘Yes, of course – and I’ll come with you. Only, you mustn’t ask me about all those things. I’m not clued up on them at all.’ Gloria paused, aware that Harry was puzzled. ‘Except,’ she added defensively, ‘that I do sometimes know just the names.’

  They walked round, much as the late Mrs Montacute’s guests had done. Italian condottieri, French courtesans, Spanish beggar-boys, English soldiers and bishops and bluestockings looked down on them from the walls, and the camels fastidiously averted their noses as they went by. Harry stared for a long time at a picture of a lion eating a horse, and said that only a fool would let a lion get within a mile of a horse like that. This was his sole comment on the collection. Gloria found such continence comfortable.

  It was rather a forlorn perambulation, all the same – and would have been so quite apart from the waves of misery which, like birth-pangs, were now coming to Gloria with accelerating frequency and force. Two children who had paid their penny for Punch and Judy and had become spectators, instead, of Polyeucte or Sejanus His Fall would have been in an analogous situation. At length they came back to the drawing-room and the champagne, and Harry asked a simply wondering question.

  ‘Gloria – if you have only those Counterpayne cousins, does that mean that all this stuff is now going to belong to you?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know at all.’ It surprised Gloria to realise that this speculation had never entered her head. ‘Perhaps it’s going to be given to the National Gallery, or some place like that.’

  ‘People say it’s enormously valuable. I suppose that’s so?’

  ‘Yes, I know it is. My mother was rather keen on all that.’

  Harry was silent for a moment, perhaps judging a pause respectful after the mention of Mrs Montacute. But when he spoke again, it was to continue on a practical note.

  ‘She mayn’t even have made a will – dying suddenly like that. Then you certainly would have everything. That’s the law.’

  ‘I suppose so. Yes.’

  ‘And you’ll be a tremendous catch, my dear. So God knows who will be after you.’

  This, in the circumstances of the evening, seemed much more indecent than drinking a glass of champagne, and it was Gloria’s impulse to bring her wake with Harry to a close. But she didn’t want to snub him. Furthermore she had sensed, in his manner and tone rather than his words, something that was insidiously pleasing even if perplexing. It could be put, she thought, like this: if she had pointed at little Don Balthasar Carlos and said ‘That one alone would pay several times over for the largest farm in England’, Harry would thereby be presented with an idea, which at present wasn’t remotely in his head. Her probable future proprietorship of the collection, and her consequent extreme eligibility as a bride, were indeed matters upon which he had just touched. But it had been distinguishably in a disinterested spirit, or at the most out of what might be described as a brotherly regard. Not that his look was brotherly; his glance under that tumble of chestnut hair remained much more unbrotherly than was proper at the moment. But it did seem as if no mercenary shadow fell across Harry’s bright passion, unreliable though that might be.

  Gloria (although the point is doubtful) might have taken a useful further step in the analysis of the situation had not Harry interrupted her train of thought by picking up the half-empty champagne bottle.

  ‘Have some more, my dear.’

  ‘No, thank you.’ Gloria was as clear about this as she had been earlier about the chocolates. ‘And now I think perhaps you’d better—’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Harry was all decent alacrity, and together they made their way back to the hall. The fontana minore was still at play. Harry stopped before it. ‘Can’t that thing,’ he asked brusquely, ‘be stopped from peeing?’ His sense of the impiety of champagne-drinking had not much affected his actual conduct in the matter. And he clearly owned a poor opinion of a trecento fountain as a twentieth-century domestic convenience.

  ‘There’s a tap just at your foot,’ Gloria said meekly. She herself had always been impatient with the fontana minore: this dated from the moment in her childhood at which Mrs Montacute had vetoed the keeping of goldfish in it.

  Harry turned off the water. The pattering sound produced by the fountain at its accustomed half-cock was negligible. Yet the silence that now fell was shattering. It was as if the vital pulse of the entire house had stopped. Gloria burst into tears.

  It was perhaps to make up for this foolishness that she committed the further foolishness of accompanying Harry some way down the drive. Dusk was deepening into darkness, and there was no moon. Harry’s misinterpretation of the state of the case was disastrous. When his right hand crept up from Gloria’s waist to cup her right breast she said ‘No’ in a tone he ought to have listened to. But Priapus himself must have been whispering in Harry’s other ear, since he was now prompted to explore expertly with finger and thumb. A moment later Gloria found that she had not merely broken away from behaviour crudely outrageous at such a time. She had slapped Harry’s face very hard as well, and was striding back to the house. Harry made no attempt to follow.

  Half an hour later Harry’s mother turned up, all the same. She was a woman of strong character and robust practical sense. Her people had farmed in the adjoining parish for centuries, and in Harry’s world she was regarded as superior to the Carters and at the same time reasonably unblemished by pride. With all this, she was a motherly woman as well. She comforted Gloria quite a lot. It was only when she had brought her a hot drink in bed, however, that she said something the actual sense of which much caught Gloria’s attention.

  ‘It was an unfamiliar situation for Harry to find himself in,’ Mrs Carter said.

  ‘I suppose it was.’ Gloria realised that the words probably meant almost nothing at all; were intended as a conventional acknowledgement that a big house remains a big house in any circumstances. Or wasn’t it quite that? Had Harry confessed his bad conduct to his mother, and aske
d her to put in a good word for him? Gloria felt a stab of unaccustomed feeling as this possibility came to her, and was surprised to have to identify it as jealousy. Certainly she didn’t want Mrs Carter to know anything that had happened between Harry and herself, and she wouldn’t have dreamt of revealing to her the unfortunate incident on the drive.

  But Gloria did dream during the brief spell of sleep she got that night. It was a confused dream. Only in the morning she could just recall that Harry had been present in a corner of it.

  Part II

  Chapter Seven

  THE FINGER OF TASTE

  The shutters were up at Nudd. Or rather the lattices were down: steel contraptions of the kind long favoured by jewellers and silversmiths, and latterly much adopted by private householders of the more substantial sort. Various types of burglar-alarm go along with them, and any attempt to tamper with those at Nudd was supposed to ring a bell both in the nearest police station and in the cottage of the local constable.

  Mr Guise the butler and Mrs Bantry the cook, who were now alone in the house, slept securely behind these devices. At the instance of Miss Montacute’s solicitor, indeed, the lattices remained locked in position all day. But as they admitted as much direct daylight as was normally allowed to play upon the treasures of Nudd, this caused no inconvenience.

  Guise – ‘Be pleased to pronounce it like “wise”,’ he would tell the uninstructed – looked after the air-conditioning, as he had always done. Mrs Bantry looked after Guise. From the village two women continued to come in to do the rough; and twice a week two others of somewhat superior station performed the more responsible cleaning directly under Guise’s eye.