A Palace of Art

by J. I. M. Stewart

  Meanwhile, the whistle was repeated. It was a rural whistle; a whistle, indeed, such as you might hear from a shepherd who is bringing a dog to heel. Gloria turned round. Harry was doing his wood-god act. In wholly decent areas, that is to say, he was naked; and where he was naked, he was splendidly bronzed. On an afternoon full of lingering autumnal warmth this was entirely in order. So was the implement he carried: a wicked-looking, gently-concave blade on a long pole. It was a billhook, she supposed, and he had been thinning out a coppice with it. She thought, however, of pictures she had been seeing in Italy in which saints major and minor – and young and handsome as well as old and with elaborately crimped beards – stroll negligently around carrying the instruments of their martyrdom. But that was not quite what she was really seeing. There was something more elusive and teasing, something from farther back, that she was being reminded of. It was an illustration in a history book used at school. Had it been about the French Revolution – or about Jack Cade, and people of that sort? Certainly it was with improvised weapons just such as Harry was carrying now that persons of a plebeian order had been represented as advancing threateningly upon their betters.

  This recollection, totally irrelevant as it seemed, struck Gloria less than the fact that, having twice whistled, Harry was standing quite still on the path behind her. It was almost as if he expected her to trot obediently back to him. But this effect lasted only for a moment; it was a minute calculated joke made possible only by that nice sense of timing which a good rugger player must possess. Harry was advancing at a run, with his billhook high in air. Its carriage in this fashion was a simple safety precaution; at the same time he might have been a charging Zulu or the like out of a boy’s artless imagining.

  ‘Gloria, my dear!’ Harry said. And he was standing laughing in front of her.

  ‘Hullo, Harry.’ Gloria spoke with a calm hollow even to her own ear. She had realised instantly how very definitely Harry was out of that corner and roaming. ‘I was going over to have a chat with your mother.’

  ‘Chat’ was a word unknown to Gloria’s natural vocabulary, and although she wasn’t normally sensitive to extreme linguistic nicety she recognised it as another sign that she mightn’t be going to do too well. She noticed, too, that she had used an unfortunate tense – and it was a slip which Harry’s swift grin showed he hadn’t missed either. Yet Harry’s intuitions couldn’t, in these few moments, have been sharper than hers. Fleetingly she found herself in two places at once – with neither of them a field-path near Nudd. One was inside Nudd itself, and she was walking round the house with Harry in the dusk of a fatal evening, looking at pictures: an uncomprehending couple, but not indisposed to join hands. The other was the Accademia, and she was having pictures explained to her by Octavius. These two imagined places, remembered occasions, belonged to different universes.

  Or not quite. And here she was confronted by – or, rather, peripherally aware of – something very difficult indeed. Harry’s impact owed a little of its momentum to Octavius, and rather more than a little of its momentum – absurd as this was – to her cousin Jake. In fact, she’d been put on skids, got on the run. Or she was like a ball in one of those idiotic gambling machines men fool around with in pubs. Down she went, bumped from one pin to another. Once started, just that happened. And there wasn’t much the ball could do about it.

  ‘Oh, my mother’s gone out,’ Harry was saying easily. ‘She won’t be back till supper time. You must come to tea with her tomorrow. We always have a tremendous tea on Sundays.’ He glanced around him, as if admiring the afternoon. ‘We’ll go for a walk.’ He tossed the billhook carelessly on the ground. ‘And I shan’t need that.’

  They went for a walk, climbing rapidly to the down. Harry pretended that Gloria went too fast for him, and puffed and blew. He pretended they had a leash of puppies with them, and disentangled them from Gloria’s feet. But he appeared not to have in mind any recapitulation of a former occasion. For when they arrived in front of the ruined barn he hesitated and then shook his head.

  ‘No good there,’ he said decisively. ‘Full of harvest bugs by now. In half an hour you’d be scratching at your tummy like mad.’

  It was characteristic of Harry that, having conjured up this not wholly polite image, he didn’t cap it with anything further in a similar vein. Gloria wondered whether his talk was equally impeccable when he was out with village girls. The thought of village girls was displeasing – but what it gave rise to, she had to admit, was a jealous rather than a misdoubting reaction. There were a good many frank-hearted young women in the neighbourhood, and she had come to acknowledge that it would be silly to think of Harry Carter as a virginal soul. Of course he’d been with some of them. She found herself wondering whether Octavius Chevalley had ever been with a girl at all. But these were gross speculations, which she resolved not to pursue.

  ‘Harry,’ she asked abruptly, ‘how’s Australia?’

  ‘Australia?’ For a moment Harry seemed uncomprehending. ‘Oh, yes! It may come to that yet. But at least not for a while.’

  ‘It sounds attractive in some ways. Marvellous surf.’

  ‘Not if you’re hundreds of miles in the interior, wrenching your guts out clearing scrub.’ Harry had glanced at her swiftly and curiously, as well he might. It was mysterious to Gloria that she had brought this subject up.

  ‘I think you should go,’ she said decidedly. ‘And take care not to get married first. An Australian wife’s essential, if you hope to settle down.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ Harry shouted this word to the winds. His spirits were rising, and she sensed him as very sure of himself. ‘I shall marry you, my dear. And, as you’re a great heiress, we’ll buy a sheep station six times the size of Warwickshire, and live happily ever after.’

  There was something about this that, at least for the moment, disconcerted Gloria very much. She couldn’t quite make out why. Of course she had herself turned on a flippant note – under an impulse rather like that which makes one grab at a slipping shoulder-strap. So perhaps it was no more than that Harry was being flippant in return. It was certain that, no time ago, he had seemed serious in his wooing her with talk about Australia. Now he was making a joke of it, and she felt it to be a joke beneath which there lay nothing substantial at all. What had happened in the interval? Well, she had indeed become, with unexpected promptness, what Harry called a great heiress. Perhaps he was saying – being so cockily confident as he was – that they’d marry without buying an Australian sheep station; that they’d make do with buying Warwickshire instead.

  But that was quite wrong. For there were two things, and two things only, that she confidently knew about Harry. The first was the simple one that he had for her a powerful and specific appeal of a sort which she’d been brought up to regard as perilous to maidenhood. The second was just coming back to her now. She’d never buy Harry Warwickshire, or anything else in a big way. He wouldn’t let her. Some principle of pride in him – and it couldn’t be of a Satanic sort – insisted that her wealth was an irrelevance with which he’d have nothing to do. Even if there was something perverse in this – sub-Satanic, say – there was something very heady as well. Gloria had fled from Italy, having been hunted, however indecisively and ineptly, for her gold. Harry was a hunter, without a shadow of doubt. She believed he was also a suitor, which is a different thing. And her possessions didn’t come into it.

  These two pieces of knowledge which Gloria had, or believed she had, about Harry Carter had only to run together to render her very vulnerable indeed. If Gloria had a Guardian Angel (although she had perhaps never so much as heard of such a being) he was certainly alerting himself for rapid downward flight as he watched this walk on a Saturday afternoon.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  HAZARDS OF CHECKING UP

  This time, there was no question of a stockade, or of a sofa and chairs whimsically constructed out of straw. Harry was making love to her on the open turf. Only it was so decorous a
love-making that it would scarcely have been awkward if the vicar himself, or a whole crocodile of schoolgirls, had come wandering by. Harry didn’t issue commands (whether about chocolates or anything else) and prepare to pounce if they were disobeyed. His fingers didn’t – as upon that unfortunate nocturnal walk down the drive at Nudd – grossly misbehave. They didn’t misbehave at all. He had kissed her once – very decisively but not for alarmingly long. And now he seemed to be feeling that eternity ought to be spent holding Gloria lightly and chastely in his arms, while occasionally engaging in lazily affectionate conversation. It was, she supposed, how a man, a man who really loved you, would behave after love-making rather than before it. She wasn’t herself in a state of calm, nor was it clear to her how the occasion was, so to speak, to be switched off. That, she suspected, was something simpler for a man than for a girl.

  ‘Do you know,’ Harry was saying idly, ‘that the hippie came down to Nudd?’

  ‘The hippie?’ Gloria stirred very gently. It was undoubtedly a luxurious thing to do. ‘What hippie?’

  ‘The one who was here the day your ma died, and who said he was a cousin or something.’

  ‘Oh, yes – Jake.’ Gloria stirred again, but this time to a different effect. ‘Yes, of course. He told me he’d come to Nudd to … to call on me.’

  ‘Told you?’ As if he had sensed Gloria’s very small withdrawal, Harry made a more pronounced, but entirely casual, movement of his own. In fact, he rolled over, smacked her inoffensively on the bottom by way of inviting her to sit up, and sat up himself. ‘Where did he tell you, my dear?’

  ‘In Venice. Jake came out to Venice.’ Gloria felt that, until thus announcing this circumstance to Harry, she had somehow failed to face up to its full surprisingness. ‘And I remember now that he said it was you who told him I was going there.’ Gloria paused for a moment. ‘How very odd,’ she added, and was conscious that this was a vague and feeble comment.

  ‘Odd? Oh, I don’t know.’ Harry had found a stray blade of rye grass, and was sucking it with his baffling air of relaxed and appeased sensuousness. Looking at his lips engaged thus, Gloria was aware of wanting to be kissed again. The discovery made her tell herself, although without full conviction, that all this had better stop – had better stop, that was to say, until Harry’s intentions became explicitly honourable. And perhaps there was really something wrong. Perhaps it was a sign of something wrong – was a small red light – that a prudential notion of that sort should come into your head.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ As Harry repeated this, he called his most rustic, his most arrogantly non-U, burr into his voice. ‘Although he did say that a bus fare to Margate would be beyond him at the moment.’

  Gloria almost said: ‘But he arranged to make ice-cream’. But she didn’t. Harry, even although he’d kissed her continently but with staggering effect, wasn’t entitled to that sort of information about the tiresome (yet reassuringly forthright) Jake. But this discrimination so disturbed Gloria somewhere at the very bottom of her mind that what she did say was entirely crude.

  ‘But the Counterpaynes aren’t all that poor, although Jake’s father pretends they are. They could find more than a bus fare at a pinch.’

  ‘Then that would be it.’ Although with an air of leisure, Harry had spoken before Gloria realised she had said an unjust and vulgar thing. ‘A penny to land a pound, my dear. And your Jake certainly led off with a good nose round Nudd.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Well, it came through on the grapevine by way of your Mrs Bantry. Hippie Jake didn’t content himself with enquiring for you at the front door. He did another tour of the house, more or less. You can ask Guise, who kept an eye on him.’

  ‘Why should Jake want to do that?’

  ‘He’s some sort of artist, isn’t he?’ Harry didn’t sound as if he had any particular interest in discussing Jake Counterpayne. ‘He’d know whether it’s fourpence or fivepence that Titian’s tarts or Velazquez’s little Don Thingummy are likely to rate at. And some chaps – even hippies – like to get their sums just right.’ Harry chucked away his grass-stalk, stretched himself, yawned, and sank back supine on the turf. He straddled his legs, stuck his eight fingers in his breeches-pockets, and regarded Gloria across the flat of his belly.

  Gloria, who didn’t want to think about Jake at all, found herself thinking that Jake wouldn’t do precisely this. Jake wasn’t at all like Octavius, but Jake wouldn’t look at you with a kind of mocking innocence over his own crutch. Harry, who had great airs of spontaneity, was a virtuoso in contrivance and calculation. Only he oughtn’t to repeat identical effects.

  ‘Stop that stupid seduction stuff,’ Gloria heard herself say. ‘And sit up.’

  Once more, as they walked down the hill, Harry gave no sign of bearing malice. Perhaps it was commonplace to him that action can seesaw to and fro across a battlefield. Perhaps he subscribed to the comfortable Terentian view that the quarrels of lovers are the renewal of love. Gloria, although without considering either of these propositions, was honestly shaken by his unimpaired confidence. He had believed himself (which was extremely absurd) to be threatened by Jake Counterpayne as a rival, and he had at once moved rapidly and decisively into the attack – which was just what might be expected of him. The attack hadn’t quite paid off. For reasons obscure to Gloria, Gloria had reacted against it. Probably, she thought, it was the class-thing, and unfair to Harry. Harry hadn’t obeyed some code which Jake or Octavius would have obeyed unthinkingly. Something about not being in a hurry to tell tales.

  And perhaps there was something else in the same area – something that now came to her in that image of Harry charging at her and waving what might have been a pike. Her fortune didn’t count with him; there was a strand in him that forbade that. But her mere position did. The tenant’s son felt he owed it to himself to capture and humiliate the lady of the manor. And his assurance was formidable. Despite this further check, he believed he had her where he wanted her. It was because he believed just that that he was feeling – as he obviously was – extremely friendly and well-disposed. Put more crudely, and in the disgusting sense of the term men used, he knew he was going to have her, as certainly as he’d known it (she now convinced herself) of half a dozen girls round Nudd.

  These weren’t pleasant thoughts, and the fact that she could entertain them without their instantly rubbing out all sense of Harry’s attractions was a discovery which alarmed her a good deal. A mature counsellor would probably have told her that there was no occasion for panic; that she had unconsciously absorbed from the spirit of her age an exaggerated estimate of the awful potency of the drives of sex. It wouldn’t have followed that she was making an unnecessary bogy-man of Harry as she walked down the hill with him. That he was quite a wicked youth was, as a mere statistical matter, very much on the cards. Only she was perhaps making an unnecessary bogy-girl of something inside herself.

  They parted amicably. Almost, indeed, they parted in a face-saving way, so that the occasion bore a faint kinship to her parting with Octavius – with the difference that Harry plainly wasn’t giving up. To her parting with Jake it bore no kinship at all.

  At least there was one point on which she could check up. All she needed was the telephone, and she went straight to it as soon as she entered Nudd.

  ‘I was coming to call on you this afternoon,’ she told Mrs Carter over the instrument. ‘But I met Harry, and he told me you were out.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Mrs Carter’s reply was unhesitating but thoughtful. ‘I was going out, but something prevented me.’

  ‘It’s a long time since I’ve seen you.’ With Harry thus unmasked in cold fact, it was surprising that Gloria’s voice remained perfectly controlled. ‘Perhaps I might drop over now?’

  ‘Would you mind Spot?’

  ‘Spot?’

  ‘My terrier, Miss Montacute.’ (Gloria was rather struck by this manner of address.) ‘I was just going to take him for his r
un. So perhaps we might come over to you?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Gloria said. It was evident that Harry had gone home. He’d have plans for later in the evening, she told herself with remorseless realism. After the recent course of things he’d have an itch for some sort of satisfactory round-off to the day, but no doubt he was going to have a bite of something first. ‘Yes,’ she repeated. ‘Do please come. Both of you. I love Spot.’

  Mrs Carter talked about one thing and another. She wasn’t being evasive, or shilly-shallying. But conceivably she had a certain amount of experience at interviews of this kind, and was waiting for a lead-in that would spare Gloria’s feelings. At length she decided to go at it straight.

  ‘I thought I’d come over here,’ she said, ‘because Harry will like to have the place more or less to himself if his fiancée drops in.’

  ‘I didn’t know. But how very nice.’

  ‘Yes.’ Mrs Carter seemed to feel better. The two women looked at each other with a level gaze. ‘Harry is very impressionable, Miss Montacute.’ Gloria

  ‘Gloria – please.’

  ‘Harry is very impressionable, Gloria, and very susceptible.’