What’s Bred in the Bone tct-2

by Robertson Davies

  Francis went to Lady Margaret Hall, where, as it still lacked a quarter of an hour before the closing of the gate, he was able to have a short talk with Ismay.

  “Oh yes, Charlie’s scarpered. I knew he would.”

  “Where’s he gone?”

  “I don’t suppose it matters if you know, because he won’t be back and he won’t be found. He’s gone to Spain to join the Cause.”

  “Which of the many possible Causes would that be?”

  “The Loyalists, obviously. Thinking as he does.”

  “Well—at least your name hasn’t been mentioned. And won’t be, if you have enough sense to keep your mouth shut.”

  “Thanks, Frank. You’re sweet.”

  “That’s what I’m beginning to be afraid of.”

  Being sweet might mean being a gull, but there were compensations. Francis was invited by his Aunt Prudence Glasson to spend a fortnight at St. Columb Hall, the Glasson family seat, when the Oxford term ended. He seemed, said Aunt Prudence, to have become a great chum of Ismay’s, and they would be delighted to welcome him, as it was such a long time since he had stayed at nearby Chegwidden. At that time, Francis remembered, the Glassons had not troubled to ask him to visit them, though Aunt Prudence was his father’s sister, and her pestilent younger children had seen a great deal of him and found him mockable. But he had no mind for resentment; the thought of having Ismay under his eye for two weeks, without Charlie and the pleasures of Oxford to distract her, was irresistible.

  The horrible children had become more tolerable since last he saw them. The two girls, Isabel and Amabel, were lumpy, fattish schoolgirls, who blushed painfully if he spoke to them and giggled and squirmed when he reminded them of the dead adder in his bed. Their older brother, Roderick, who was seventeen, was at this stage very much a product of Winchester, and seemed to have become a Civil Servant without ever having been a youth; but he was not seen much, as he spent a lot of time winding himself up for a scholarship examination that lay some time in the future. Ismay alone retained any of the wildness he had associated with his Glasson cousins.

  She was offhand and dismissive with her mother, and contradicted her father on principle. The older Roderick Glasson, it is true, provoked contradiction; he was of the same political stripe as Uncle Arthur Cornish—that is to say, his Toryism was a cautious echo of an earlier day—and though he never quite sank to saying that he didn’t know what things were coming to, he used the word “nowadays” frequently in a way that showed he expected nothing from a world gone mad, a world that had forgotten the great days before 1914. This extended even to female beauty.

  “You should have seen your mother when your father married her,” he said to Francis. “An absolute stunner. There aren’t any women like that now. They’ve broken the mould.”

  “If he had seen his mother when his father married her,” said Ismay, “it would have been rather a scandal, wouldn’t it?”

  “Ismay, darling, don’t catch Daddy up on everything he says,” said Aunt Prudence, and a familiar wrangle was renewed.

  “Well, why can’t people say what they mean, and not simply waffle?”

  “You know perfectly well what I meant, but you can’t resist any opportunity to show how clever you’ve become at Oxford.”

  “If you didn’t want me to become clever at Oxford, you shouldn’t have nagged me to go for that miserable, inadequate scholarship. I could have stayed at home and studied stupidity. That would have had the advantage of being cheap.”

  “As I suppose you are too old to be sent from the table, Ismay, I have no recourse but to leave it myself. Francis, would you like a cigar?”

  “We’ve finished anyway, and I wish you wouldn’t take refuge in Christian-martyring, Daddy. It isn’t argument.”

  “I do so well remember your mother’s wedding,” said Aunt Prudence, the peacemaker. “But Francis, didn’t you have an older brother? I seem to remember a letter from Switzerland, from your father.”

  “There was an older brother, also Francis, but he died.”

  It was the memory of that older Francis that softened the opinions of the living Francis about Ismay and her parents. In a world that contained such secrets as the Looner, these disputes seemed trivial. What did Wordsworth call it? The still, sad music of humanity—to chasten and subdue? Something like that. The underlying, deep grief of things. One must try to understand, to overlook sharp edges. Of course he was on Ismay’s side, but certainly not as a combatant. Her parents were dull and tedious, and she was too young, too radiant and full of life, to have learned to be patient. Probably she had never had to be patient about anything. Without knowing it, Francis’s view of family life was much like that of Shakespeare; parents, unless they happened to be stars like King Lear, were minor roles, obstructive, comic, and not to be too much heeded. Only Coriolanus paid attention to his mother, and look what happened to him!

  If Shakespeare was not present in his mind, the Grail legend had returned to it in full force. Once again he was on the holy ground of Cornwall, and the pedal-point of his passion for Ismay was the story of Tristan and Iseult, and another more primitive and magical tale.

  A passion it certainly was. He was twenty-four years old, so he did not moon and brood like a boy, but he ached for Ismay, and longed to see her happy and pleased with life. He had the lover’s unjustified belief that love begets love. It was impossible that he should love Ismay so much without her loving him by infection. He did not think ill of himself; he did not consider himself deficient, compared with other young men. But faced with the splendour of Ismay he could only hope that she might let him serve her, devote his life to her and whatever she wanted.

  Ismay knew all of this, and therefore it was perhaps surprising that she let him persuade her to spend a day with him at Tintagel. She tormented him, of course. Shouldn’t they take Isabel and Amabel, who did not get many outings; they mustn’t be selfish, must they? But it was Francis’s intention, on this occasion, to be wholly selfish.

  They had a fine day for their picnic, though as it was Cornwall it was certainly not a dry day. Ismay had never been to Tintagel, and Francis held forth about its history: the castle of the Black Prince, and before that the monastic community that had gathered around the hermitage of St. Juliot, and, far back in the mists, Arthur, that mysterious fifth-century figure who might have been the last preserver of Roman order and Roman culture in a Britain overrun by savage northerners, or—even better—have been the mighty figure of Welsh legend.

  “Did he live here?” said Ismay, who seemed to be yielding a little to the nature of the story and the spirit of the place.

  “Born here, and strangely begotten here.”

  “Why strangely?”

  “His mother was a wonderfully beautiful princess, who was wife to the Duke of Cornwall. Her name was Ygraine. A very great Celtic chieftain, Uther Pendragon, saw her and desired her and could not rest until he had possessed her. So he took counsel of the magician Merlin, and Merlin surrounded this castle with a magical spell, so that when her husband was absent Uther Pendragon was able to come to her in her husband’s guise, and it was here that he begot the marvellous child who grew to be Arthur.”

  “Didn’t the Duke ever find out?”

  “The Duke had no luck; he was killed and cuckolded the same night, though not by the same man. Arthur was brought up by another knight, Sir Ector, and educated by Merlin.”

  “Lucky lad.”

  “Yes. Didn’t you ever learn any of this at school? You, a Cornish girl—a Cornish princess.”

  “My school thought mythology meant Greeks.”

  “Not a patch on the great Northern and Celtic stuff.”

  Thus Francis began the casting of a spell that had been long working in his mind, and with such success that Ismay yielded to it, becoming tenderer and more compliant than he had ever known her, until at last on a motor rug in the embrace of what might have been part of the Black Prince’s castle, or one of the hermitag
es of the companions of St. Juliot, or just possibly a remnant of that castle of Duke Gorlois (who figures ignominiously in legend as cuckolds must) in which Arthur was begotten, he possessed Ismay, and it seemed to him that the world could never have been so splendid, or blessing so perfect, since the days of the great legend.

  Ismay was subdued as they made their way back to the Glasson family car (itself almost a vehicle of legend) and walked somewhat uneasily.

  “Anything wrong?”

  “Not seriously. But there were a few stones under that rug. Frank, do you know the one—

  There was a young fellow named Dockery

  Who was screwing his girl in a rockery;

  Oh what did she wail

  As they thumped on the shale?

  “This isn’t a fuck—it’s a mockery!”

  Francis was so lost in the splendour of the afternoon that he was ready to accept this as the plain-spoken jesting of the age of legend, befitting a Celtic princess.

  Francis had taken sereiously Saraceni’s advice that he should stop flirting with colour and find out what it truly was. That meant working in oils, and except for some tentative messing he had never done much with oils, and knew he must make a serious beginning. When he left Cornwall, reluctantly but aware that his fortnight could not be extended, he went to Paris, and during the summer months worked almost every day at La Grande Chaumière, an art school directed at the time by Othon Friesz. He bought the tickets that were sold by the concierge, arrived early and left late, spoiled a substantial amount of canvas, and achieved some dreadful messes of dirty colour until, in time, he was able to put into practice the few precepts Friesz threw to him, almost inaudibly and apparently with contempt.

  Always paint fat on lean. Always lay in your warms over your colds. The groundwork should be done in paint well thinned with turpentine: afterward your fat colour, mixed with mastic or Venice turps. Don’t mess your paint about on the palette: fresh paint gives the best quality. Never put more of a colour over the same colour. Always paint warm on cold and after your body coat every successive coat must be thinner until you get to the top. Always fat on lean. Simplicity itself, like the few notes Mozart wrote on the back of a letter and gave to his pupil Sussmayer to explain how to compose music. But not easy to do. It was Francis’s skill in drawing that saved him from abject failure. There were plenty of students in the atelier who knew nothing of drawing, and from their easels Friesz sometimes turned with a murmured “Quelle horreur!” But Friesz did not turn up often. Having given advice, he allowed the student to struggle until he had mastered it or abandoned the contest. Friesz provided a place to work, an ambience, a name, and infrequent, good advice; it was enough.

  After ten weeks of hard work Francis thought he had earned a holiday, and would go to Rome. He would see the sights of Rome, and he would find out if Tancred Saraceni had meant anything more than pleasantry when he said to hunt him up.

  Saraceni meant much more than that. He insisted that Francis stay with him, and allow him to display the wonders of the great city. There was more than enough room in his apartment.

  The apartment was a marvel of splendid clutter. For thirty years Tancred Saraceni had never been able to deny himself a bargain, or a good piece of painting or furniture, or tapestry, or embroidery, or sculpture, whenever one turned up that he could afford, and in his life such things turned up all the time. It was not a pack-rat’s nest and there was not a thing in it that was not fine of its own kind; everything was disposed with taste and effect, so far as space allowed. But even in the generous space of that apartment there were limitations, and though Saraceni would not have admitted it, the limitations had long ago been exceeded. The effect was overwhelming.

  Why overwhelming? Because it was vastly more than the sum of its parts. It was a collection various in kind, but coherent in representing the taste of one avid, brilliant, greatly gifted connoisseur. It was Saraceni swollen to immense proportions. It was a man’s mind, the size of a house.

  The apartment itself was part of an old palace that faced what had once been a charming little square with a fountain playing gently in its middle. But that had been in the days before the motor car degraded and despoiled Rome as it has degraded and despoiled so many cities. Now the little square was every day parked full of cars that came and went, leaving their stink on the heavy September air. The little fountain still played, but its basin was full of food wrappers and trash, rarely cleared out. Because the air outside was fouled by cars, Saraceni logically refused to open his windows, and this did nothing to lighten the oppressive feeling of his dwelling. Literally it had an air of an earlier day.

  He was alone. A woman came every morning and did such cleaning as he would permit; he dusted all the objects of art, and himself polished whatever needed to be polished. He had been married, yes, to a wonderful English lady who had at last decided that she could no longer bear to live under such circumstances, and they had parted amicably. Tancredo, she had said, you must make a decision—shall it be the collection or me? He had not needed long to decide. My dearest one, he had said, the collection is timeless and you, alas that it should be so, are trapped in time. She had laughed so marvellously that he had almost been tempted to change his mind, but had not done so, in the end. A wonderful woman! They met and had delightful encounters every time he visited England. He had a daughter, also, but she was happily married and lived in Florence, where he saw her from time to time. She could not be tempted back to the apartment, even for a brief visit.

  Saraceni was philosophical about the lonely state. He had made his choice. If it was art or human relationships, art unquestionably had the prior call.

  He was an admirable host. He took Francis everywhere, and showed him things that even a privileged tourist could not have seen. It may not be said that at the Vatican doors flew open, because they moved gently on oiled hinges, but there were few doors that did not move for Saraceni; there were cardinalical palaces to which the public was not admitted, but where the chamberlain knew Saraceni as a privileged friend of the household. And in many great churches, chapels, and palaces he let it be known, with modesty, that such-and-such a splendid piece had regained its beauty because he had worked on it.

  “You keep the Renaissance in repair,” said Francis, meaning it as a joke.

  But Saraceni did not take it as a joke. “I do,” said he; “it is a trust that must be taken very seriously. But it is not repair. Call it re-creation. That demands special knowledge and special techniques. But if you want to know what these are, you must come and work with me.” And he looked intently at Francis.

  “I must get my degree first. No sense spending two years on it and then chucking it away. I have a third year to go. Then, if you will have me.”

  “By then I shall be busy on a long and tricky problem. A private collection that has been allowed to decline fearfully. But I think much of it may be reclaimed. I shall want an assistant. I promise that you could learn a great deal.”

  “I have everything to learn. Working in Paris I have found out what a totally incompetent painter I am.”

  “No, no, no; you have learned some basic things, and it takes time to make them work for you. All that you tell me about laying fat over lean, and so forth, is excellent, and you were doing it with modern paint. If you come to me you will have to learn to do it with old paint, which is harder in some ways, easier in others.”

  “Old paint? Where does it come from?”

  “I make it. Make it as the masters made it. They did not buy their paint in tubes, you know. They mixed their own, and much of the work is to discover what they used, and how they mixed it. Did you know that Nicholas Hillyard used ear-wax in those splendid Elizabethan miniatures? What is ear-wax, when you have painstakingly gathered the yield of many ears? I know. Chemistry is the secret. You cannot satisfactorily repair an old picture with a paint that is too much unlike what the painter used. And when you have done that—Ah, well, you shall see what follows, what
must follow if restoration is to be that, and not simply cobbler’s work.”

  At night they sat in the awesome apartment sipping Scotch whisky, which was Saraceni’s preferred tipple, and as they mellowed, Francis talked about his own taste in art. He was inclined to deplore the fact that, strive as he would, he liked the painting of an earlier day better than that of contemporary artists. What was he to make of himself? How could he hope to be an artist, even of the humblest rank, if he did not live and feel in tune with his own time? When the paintings that haunted him were not modern either in technique or in taste? The Bronzino, for instance…

  “Ah, the Bronzino, The so-called Allegory of Love. Who gave it that inexpressive name, I wonder? It is not about love at its highest, but about Luxury—the indulgence of the senses. For all its erotic splendour and evocation of sensual pleasure it is a profoundly moral picture. Those old painters were great moralists, you know, even such a man as Angelo Bronzino, who so many imperceptive critics have called a cold and heartless artist. Surely you have seen the morality behind it?”

  “I’ve looked at it literally for hours, and the more I look the less I know what is behind it.”

  “Then you must look again. You, who once won a prize for Classics!”

  “It isn’t really a classical theme. Venus and Cupid are the principal figures, but not doing anything I can associate with any classical reference I know.”

  “You must understand the classics as the Renaissance understood them, which is not the way a boys’ school understands them. You must penetrate the classical world, which is by no means dead, I assure you; classical morality, classical feeling. Venus is tempting her son Cupid to a display of love that is certainly not simply filial. Is not that what many mothers do? Since Freud there has been a great deal of cocktail-hour chatter about the Oedipus complex and the love of a son for his mother, but who ventures on the dangerous theme of the mother’s part in that affair? Come now, Francis, has your mother, whose beauty I have heard you praise, never flirted with you? Never caressed you in a way that was not strictly maternal?”