A Palace of Art

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And not always properly thoughtful about the feelings of others. He has been an anxiety to us. So we are most relieved. It’s an entirely suitable match.’

  ‘Do tell me about it.’ Gloria was hearing her own voice as if from very far away.

  ‘The Mercers own their farm. They bought it when the Gracechurch estate was broken up, and the mortgage isn’t too heavy. Of course there is no son. Only Beryl. So it all fits very well.’

  ‘How splendid! I’m extremely happy for Miss Mercer.’ Gloria wasn’t bookish, but it must have been out of a book that she rather nobly managed this old-fashioned expression of courtesy. ‘Has it just been settled?’

  ‘Oh, no. For business reasons, we’ve had to keep it very quiet. But it has been a fixed thing since – let me see – shortly before your mother’s death.’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  IN BELMONT IS A LADY RICHLY LEFT

  That evening Gloria sat numb and dumb at dinner. The numbness needs no explanation. The dumbness followed from the fact that Guise, although always willing to converse when waiting at table upon domestic occasions, very properly expected the initiative to be taken by his employer. Gloria didn’t feel up to this – and the less so because there was still an obscure oddity in Guise’s manner. She wondered whether he was proposing to give notice. With no more parties at Nudd – whether magnificently musical or unassumingly dedicated to the plastic arts – he must be having a dull life.

  And there would never be parties again. Gloria, as if taking breath before tackling her central perplexity, reflected on the strangeness of her condition in this presumably exceptional house. Perhaps it had never been very securely a home because it had always been so uncompromisingly a museum – and a museum so much less satisfactory than others she had sometimes wandered in. Pickled whales, doll’s houses, lavish recreations behind glass of the haunts and habits of Stone Age Man, motor cars of almost similar antiquity, galleons made out of mutton bones by prisoners of war: these had appeared to her, from a tender age, as objects of rational curiosity. But the fine arts (as Octavius Chevalley and others had from time to time found out) were somehow not her thing. And here lay just one more reason – she swiftly asserted to herself – for disregarding the perplexing attentions of her cousin Jake. Jake was an artist. It would be absurd to marry a man whose pictures one would be liable ignorantly to hang upside down on the wall. And – what was the immediate point – it would be almost equally absurd to take up permanent residence as the mistress of a wilderness of treasures one’s natural attitude to which had become a defensive inattention. She didn’t even try to imagine herself standing beside the fontana minore and receiving guests like Mr Lambert Domberg of Messrs Comberback and Domberg. No more parties: she was at least certain of that.

  Mrs Bantry, as if aware of spiritual crisis and the uses of material recruitment, had sent in her favourite final dish – known in her nursery long ago as a light steamed pudding with a jam sauce. Gloria did her best to do it justice, and she even let Guise fill her glass a second time with whatever modest wine he had judged appropriate to her solitary situation. That it was also a forlorn situation was the only distinguishable consequence of her drinking it. She would be feeling not quite so bad, she was sure, if she had returned firmly to her flat in Bethnal Green and was there opening a can of beer. And in that event there would not have happened what had happened that afternoon.

  Harry Carter had almost possessed himself of her – on a tump of grass on the open down. She faced this resolutely now. It was staggering, but true. It would have happened if Harry, for his own pleasure, hadn’t been playing some connoisseur’s delayed-action game. And if he hadn’t mentioned Jake and started crabbing him.

  This last fragment of analysis was so bewildering that Gloria turned away from it at once, and thought instead to entrench herself in the sternest of attitudes by meditating the subsequent revelation of Harry’s perfidy so deliberately (and kindly and wisely, no doubt) made by Harry’s mother. She immediately arrived at the discovery, more staggering still, that the revelation had quite failed of its intended effect. On the contrary, it had been what a psychologist (or was it an economist?) would have called counterproductive. There was only one conclusion it was possible to draw. She was jealous of Miss Beryl Mercer and her prospective felicity.

  At this point Gloria’s thoughts went, if only briefly, quite haywire. Harry had intended to evoke just such a jealous reaction. A Machiavellian seducer, long practised in such subtle guile, he had actually put his mother up to her brutal disclosure. It was all a plot.

  The idea remained with her for the full minute during which Guise removed the remains of the pudding and set before her some nuts and a bowl of fruit. (Guise was remorseless in such matters.) Then she recognised it as nonsense – this not because of what she knew about Harry, but because of what she knew about Mrs Carter. Nature, perhaps in compensation for creating her so helpless before the tactile values of Giotto and things of that sort, had endowed her with a reasonable sense of human character. She knew that Mrs Carter, far from being a procurer of disreputable enjoyments for her son, was a perfectly honest woman.

  She also knew at least some things about herself. For example, she now knew that she was not jealous of Beryl Mercer. That young woman – on whom she supposed she had never so much as set eyes – just wasn’t in the picture at all. If Harry still had his appeal, if at this moment he had mysteriously what was even an enhanced appeal, some other explanation must be found. So just what had happened? What had Mrs Carter’s disclosure set squarely before her, if only she ventured to look at it?

  She reiterated the answer to herself as she dutifully cracked a nut. There was something she had always instinctively felt about Harry, which the discovery of his present intentions made wholly certain. Harry could do with £40,000. But they weren’t going to be Gloria’s £40,000. That particular need was going to be supplied by the Mercers’ prosperous acres, and this had been clear to Harry from the first. He’d get the girl in the big house if he could, and talk nonsense about Australia as part of his design. He was, it was true, going to marry where money was. But the girl would be of his own sort, and he’d remain within the context in which he’d been brought up.

  Gloria told herself it had to be reckoned admirable in its own way. She also told herself that he might have wanted her as a social scalp or trophy on the cheap, but that at least he hadn’t viewed her as a winning coupon in the pools. It was because Mrs Carter’s disclosure confirmed the second part of this proposition quite as much as the first that it had produced not exactly the reaction it ought to have. If she had rather a considerable kindness for Harry at the moment, she suddenly thought, it was because it’s better to be hunted for one’s self alone (or at least for that plus the pleasure of successful class-warfare) than for one’s Titians and T’ang camels.

  In these confused speculations Nature again doubtless bore a part. The great creating goddess contrives what the human intellect can interpret as compensations, as checks and balances, but contrives ironies as well. She surrounds with peculiar perils the girl who is beautiful and glamorous – but she surrounds with perils too the girl who is plain, who is ungainly, or who believes herself to be either or both of these. If Gloria Montacute had been in demand as a model by the major fashion houses of Europe, or even paintable as a remarkably pretty young woman, the inglorious conclusion to the episode of Octavius Chevalley might not, even for a time, have been as upsetting as in fact it was. Nor would she have viewed with muddled suspicion a second youth, awkwardly constrained by his situation to urge anything so unlikely as love at first sight. There is a girl in a poem who sighs for a man who will love her for herself alone and not her yellow hair. Gloria was heading for the conviction that almost everybody must be after her not even for her hair but for her bank balance. Harry Carter had been rather dramatically proved a perplexing special case.

  She had been given to understand that, in
a literal sense, the bank balance was not at present very remarkable. It was a consequence of her mother’s fanatical devotion to the collection that almost everything was locked up in it. She could survey her total fortune in the course of a fifteen minutes’ stroll through Nudd. And it was this that, as soon as she had risen from table, she now undertook.

  From the walls, the cabinets, even the carpeted floors and gilded ceilings, her affluence surveyed her. That she lacked the knack of appreciating works of art made the effect, somehow, very much that way on. It was uncomfortable. She was like a newly acceded monarch, most horribly inadequate in terms of every personal endowment, who must run the gauntlet, stretching through endless apartments of state, of contemptuous courtiers ranked with mocking deference on his either hand. The camels, of course, were always supercilious, but tonight their insolent nonchalance had communicated itself to Buddhas and mandarins, to gipsy girls and infantas and homely nudes in bath-tubs. Even little Don Balthasar Carlos was infected. She had often paused before him in aesthetically illegitimate appreciation – feeling, that is to say, that it would be very jolly indeed to bear and rear so radiant a child. But now he seemed to be regarding her with a precocious regal disdain, so that she was constrained to a defensive fault-finding in return. She didn’t like the obtrusive pedigree effect of his chin and his upper lip, or the absurd elaboration of his attire, or the miniature marshal’s baton he was balancing so confidently on a hip.

  But of course it was something else that had destroyed the charm of this incredibly valuable square of canvas. Hadn’t she gathered from Jake Counterpayne that his family believed they had a claim to it? Her memory wasn’t clear, but it had been something like that. Her memory wasn’t clear now because her head hadn’t been at all clear then. There had been Octavius, and her just not knowing whether his confession had been honourable or shameful – but knowing very well that it had been humiliating and painful in a fashion she’d never experienced before. And then at once there had been Jake, and she had felt like a hare that doubles from the one greyhound to tumble under the muzzle of the other. Perhaps that hadn’t been fair to Jake. But finding out what Jake really had in his head – she obscurely felt – would have been very much easier if she hadn’t become the owner of Don Balthasar Carlos and all his shadowy company. It was no doubt a mildly shocking thing – but the plain fact was that she would do nothing but rejoice if the entire Nudd collection went up in smoke. Or at least departed in one way or another. It would be a satisfactory start, for instance, if the portraits – English or Italian, French or Flemish – behaved like those in the old whisky advertisement. Once they had stepped out of their frames, she would certainly encourage them to pack their bags and clear off elsewhere. If they chose to ride away on the camels, that would be all to the good.

  These fancies may have hinted a Gloria who was recovering her spirits, but it would be rash to conclude that beneath them no deeper current of feeling flowed. And of something of the kind it is conceivable that Guise was aware. That she was not walking round Nudd as a rich man rejoicing in his own (nor yet as a poor man like Guise himself, rejoicing in the sole possession of a seeing eye) was apparent enough. When she had taken her after-dinner promenade through the whole place (thus reproducing a habit of her mother’s, although she had forgotten this) she might have been aware of a mingling of commiseration and apprehensiveness in the regard with which her butler accosted her in the hall.

  ‘Your coffee is in the library, Miss Gloria.’ (Guise had once or twice tried out ‘Madam’ on Gloria, but had gathered without admonishment that she didn’t much take to such a form of address.)

  ‘Thank you, Guise. Please tell Mrs Bantry it was a splendid pudding.’

  ‘She will be very pleased. Would it be convenient, Miss Gloria, if you and I were to have a short conversation?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Come back to the library now.’ Gloria wasn’t paying any very close attention to Guise, since her own thoughts were still of an insistent sort. But she was dimly aware that he was taking some sort of plunge. ‘Is it about what you wrote to me when I was in Italy?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Gloria. It is very decidedly about that.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  A REPORT FROM THE CURATOR

  Gloria couldn’t recall ever having heard her mother ask Guise to sit down, but perhaps it had been her habit to do so when the two were closeted together over the domestic accounts. Anyway, she herself asked him to sit down now, which he at once did without fuss. There remained the distinction that she had coffee to drink and he hadn’t. But as she could hardly suggest he fetch another cup, she drank her own coffee and let this be. She then saw that, although he had asked for the interview, it was his idea that she ought to offer the first remark.

  ‘Were there many visitors,’ she hazarded vaguely, ‘while I was abroad?’

  ‘There were a number, Miss Gloria. In one category and another.’

  ‘I believe my cousin came down?’ Gloria hadn’t in the least intended this question. ‘Mr Jake Counterpayne,’ she amplified.

  ‘Yes, Mr Counterpayne paid a call. A courtesy call, it might no doubt be called.’

  ‘What did you think of him?’ This further question was involuntary too, and Gloria was struck by Guise’s not putting on any eyebrow-raising turn before its shocking impropriety.

  ‘I formed no very pronounced impression, Miss Gloria.’ Guise paused on this discreet reply. ‘An impression of sorts, of course, I had arrived at on a previous occasion. On the day of Mrs Montacute’s decease, in fact. If I may be pardoned for bringing it up.’

  ‘Yes, I remember. He very kindly stayed to see me.’

  ‘It was thoughtful, no doubt. I don’t recollect that his name was on the list of invited guests.’

  ‘Then it ought to have been.’ Gloria was again surprised by her promptness in saying this, and a little upset by a sharpness of tone which might sound like an indecent stricture on her mother. Guise was a man to notice such things. ‘However, it was neither here nor there.’

  ‘I didn’t venture to say it was. And his behaviour was very proper, I remember. When, that is, the sad news broke.’

  ‘But not before?’

  ‘The gentleman was perhaps a little free. For a gentleman, that is. One makes allowances for those who are not. But one can see that Mr Counterpayne is a public school man.’

  ‘All sorts go to those places now.’ Gloria was conscious that this, which was intended to cut down Guise’s piece of portentous rubbish to size, had emerged as a socially confused comment. ‘Just how was he free, as you call it?’

  ‘A little concerned, perhaps, to make a show of rejecting the manners of his class.’ Guise wasn’t one to abandon a line lightly. ‘Nothing to speak of, of course. And he was certainly very interested in the collection. In a slightly covert way, it may have been. The same as when he made this second call.’

  ‘I see.’ Gloria’s heart sank. Guise, too, was crabbing Jake. She wasn’t to know that he was speaking of somebody who had scandalously shouted ‘Waiter!’ at him.

  ‘But he is an artist of sorts, it seems, and he was undoubtedly attracted by the pictures. Sensitive, too, I’m bound to add. He saw the point of a small adjustment I was prompted to make while in his presence. It was before what we’d like to think of as the Giorgione.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘A small Venetian painting, Miss Gloria.’ There was a hint of grimness in Guise’s voice. He was perhaps recalling what he was up against. ‘But my point is that the young gentleman was observant, beyond a doubt. As he walked through the house – for one of the women had shown him into this library – there wasn’t much he saw that he didn’t take note of. Or such was my impression.’

  ‘It’s what the things are meant for, I suppose.’ Gloria felt she didn’t want to hear more about Jake from Guise. ‘And who else has been here?’

  ‘That brings us to business, Miss Gloria. If you will permit me, that’s to say.’ Guise paused. ‘I
t’s a liberty,’ he said. He paused again, and spoke in a new voice. ‘Miss Gloria – my anxieties are very great.’

  Long before receiving his mysterious letters while in Italy, Gloria had been aware of Guise as no common butler. So she wasn’t surprised by the avowal just made to her.

  And certainly she wasn’t disposed to distrust Guise. Mr Thurkle – who had also written mysteriously – appeared to be in two minds about his client’s butler. And as it is an undeniable social truth that butlers may not properly concern themselves with the proper manner of disposing of a deceased employer’s estate, the significant fact must be that Mr Thurkle hadn’t advised the firing of Guise off-hand.

  This shrewd view of the matter hadn’t, however, taken Gloria very far. If she had feelings about Guise, it was without ever having arrived at any very distinct ideas concerning him. But she did know something that he had always shared with her mother: they had both thought a great deal less of her than of the collection. She even knew, if in a totally unformulated way, that the collection existed for Guise (as for her mother it didn’t quite do) in a sphere elevated above all personal connections. Yet to Gloria herself, since childhood so lamentably lacking in aesthetic responsiveness of any sort, he had always been extremely decent. On the art-front he could never have kidded himself that she was anything but a dead loss. Nevertheless he had also recognised certain other facts of her condition, and been kind to her in various ways. So Gloria liked Guise, and would if it came to a crunch be rather far from disposed to letting him down. If he was dotty about the pictures and things, that was all right by her.

  Until the present moment, this was as far as Gloria’s notions of Guise had gone. Now he had uttered a few words not particularly striking in themselves. Anybody may tell you he has great anxieties. But Gloria had heard this manner of utterance before – heard it, say, from some stolid man, waiting patiently in a hospital reception area, who suddenly blurts out over his tea-cup that his wife has left him or that his daughter is dying of leukaemia. She braced herself to listen with attention and respect.