Ross’s preoccupation with the art world of Canada, which might have puzzled a less astute person, was no mystery to Francis. Ross wanted to be the Director of the National Gallery in Ottawa, and to secure such an appointment it was well to lay his plans some years ahead of the event.
“I really am a Canadian, you know,” he said; “a Canadian in my bones, and I want to do something important here. I want to raise the Gallery to a level of world importance, which it isn’t now. Of course, it has some fine things. The collection of eighteenth-century drawings is enviable, and there are other good individual holdings. But not enough. Not nearly enough. The buying has usually been unexceptionable in terms of a budget that is simply derisory; but there is far too much that has merely been donated, and we know what that can mean, in a country without many real connoisseurs. It’s hard to turn down donations, or to stick ’em in the cellar when you’ve got ’em. Too many feelings to be hurt. But the time must come. There must be some ruthless weeding and some major buying.—Look here, Frank, what are you going to do with the best of what you have?”
“I haven’t really thought about it,” said Francis, which was a lie.
“My dear man, the time to think about it is now.”
And so, after much haggling about choices, Francis gave his six finest Canadian pictures to the Gallery, and Ross let it leak out in the proper places that it was he who had secured this benefaction, and from whom it came, although Francis tried his best to keep the gift anonymous.
“If it gets out every gallery in the country will be after me,” he said.
“Do you blame them? Come on, Frank, get wise to yourself. If you’re not a benefactor, what in God’s name are you? When are you going to give the Gallery some of that fine Italian stuff?”
“Give away? But why? Why is it assumed that someone who has fine things is under an obligation to give them away?”
In the course of time, and quite a short time as such things go, the Director of the National Gallery had to be replaced, and who was a more obvious candidate for the post than Aylwin Ross?
True to Canadian style in such matters, the committee that was empowered to recommend a successor to the relevant Minister of the Crown fretted and agonized before they did so. Would Ross, now a man with a wide and brilliant reputation, think of accepting such a post? Should not some worthy but relatively unknown scholar from a Canadian university, who for rather vague reasons was thought to deserve something from his country, be appointed instead? Were there not rumours about Ross’s private life? Would Ross want more money than the job at present paid? It was possible for Francis to exercise some influence with certain members of the committee, and he did so, but with caution lest the other members of the committee, who hated him for his knowledge and his wealth, should discover that he was interfering. But at last, when the committee had enjoyed as much of this obligatory Gethsemane as could be endured, the recommendation was made to the Minister, the Minister wrote to Ross, Ross asked for a month in which to consider whether he could see his way clear to making the inevitable sacrifice of an international career as a critic, and in the end he agreed to make the sacrifice—at a substantially increased stipend.
The Minister announced the appointment, and as things happened it was the last appointment he did announce, for the Government of which he was a member fell, and after the hubbub and pow-wow incidental to a General Election had been completed, a new Ministry was formed, and the Minister to whom Ross was to be responsible proved to be a woman. What could be more suitable? Among a large number of Canadians it was assumed that women were good at art and culture. After all, in pioneer days, such things, embodied chiefly in quilts and hooked rugs, had lain entirely in their hands, and there was a great deal of pioneer opinion still operative in a fossilized state in the political world.
Ross had not paid much attention to the election. He said himself that he was in no way a political man. He had not heeded, if indeed he heard, the vehement promises made by the political party that now formed the Government to cut expenditures, to lance the boil of a swollen Civil Service, and above all to get rid of what the politicians assured the voters were “frills”. But expenditures, especially when so many of them are baby bonuses, mothers’ allowances, medical subventions, or pensions to the old and the disabled, are not easy to reduce; indeed, the clamour of the deserving and the needy is always mounting and always for more. Nor is it really possible to reduce the Civil Service without offending multitudes of voters, for all Civil Servants, and especially those on the humbler levels, come not from families but from tribes, engorged with tribal loyalty. This leaves only frills to provide showy economies. And when a country has a National Gallery already full of pictures, as any fool who visits it on a wet day may plainly see, are not more pictures frills, and frills of a peculiarly dispensable, elitist, and effete nature?
Nothing of this struck in upon the consciousness of Aylwin Ross, who was jaunting from one side of Canada to the other, and back again by a different path, explaining to interested groups that it was time Canada had a National Gallery worthy of it, that its present Gallery was not even in the second rank of excellence, and that something decisive must be done, and done at once. His eloquence was much admired. We cannot take our place in the world as a nation of millions of hockey-watchers and a few score hockey-players, he said. He quoted from Ben Jonson: “Whosoever loves not picture is injurious to truth, and all the wisdom of poetry. Picture is the invention of Heaven, the most ancient, and most akin to Nature.” (He did not continue the passage, in which Jonson says flatly that painting is inferior to poetry; the art of the quoter is to know when to stop.) His splendid voice, in which the Canadian accent was softened but not obliterated, was in itself a guarantee of his sincerity. His great good looks enchanted the women and not a few of the men. This was a Canadian presence of a kind to which they were not accustomed. And how he could joke, and drink, and tell good stories of the art world at the receptions that followed his public addresses. Ross’s popularity grew like a pumpkin, and was as bright and shiny. When he had completed his great tour, by which time the new Ministry was comfortably in the saddle, Ross exploded his firework.
A firework that misfires can be like a bomb. Ross let it be known, in an unwise press conference, that it lay in his power, at a stroke, to lift the National Gallery to a new level, and set it well on the way to recognition as a collection of world importance. He had, by long negotiation and a lightning trip to Europe, succeeded in pledging all the Gallery’s allocation for acquisitions for the forthcoming year, and in addition a sum that would gobble it up for six years to come. He had agreed to purchase six pictures, six pictures of world importance, from a great private collection in Europe. He had got them at bargain rates, by dint of keen negotiation and, it was hinted in the gentlest terms, by personal charm.
Who was the owner? Ross let it be teased out of him that the owner was Amalie von Ingelheim, who had recently inherited the collection from her grandmother, and as the Gräfin—for so Ross incorrectly but impressively called her—had need of money (her husband, Prince Max, was taking over a large cosmetic empire with its headquarters in New York), she was letting some of her private treasures out into the world, where they had never been seen before. For a few paltry millions Canada could put itself on the map as a country possessing a notable national collection.
Comparatively few people know what a million dollars actually is. To the majority it is a gaseous concept, swelling or decreasing as the occasion suggests. In the minds of politicians, perhaps more than anywhere, the notion of a million dollars has this accordion-like ability to expand or contract; if they are disposing of it, the million is a pleasing sum, reflecting warmly upon themselves; if somebody else wants it, it becomes a figure of inordinate size, not to be compassed by the rational mind. When the politicians learned that one of their functionaries, an understrapper holding a minor post in a cul de sac, had promised several millions abroad, for the acquirement of pi
ctures—pictures, for God’s sake—they burst into flames of indignation, and none were more indignant than those of the party, now Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, who had appointed Ross just before they fell from power.
The Minister was under the gun. She did not like Ross, whom she had met two or three times, and her Assistant Deputy Minister, who dealt directly with Ross, was another woman who liked him even less. He had quoted Jonson to her, and she had assumed that he was talking about Samuel Johnson, and had made a goat of herself. (Or so it seemed to her, for Ross, who was used to this misunderstanding, paid little attention.) The Assistant Deputy Minister was a feminist, and certain that Ross’s deferential manner toward women was mockery. She had her suspicions that Ross was a homosexual—so handsome a man, and unmarried—and she detailed a trusted henchman (one of the Palace Eunuchs of her Department) to get the goods on Ross if he could, by any means short of making him a proposition in a Parliamentary lavatory. Ross, in his dealings with this lady, was unquestionably tactless; in the words of his favourite author, he was “plagued with an itching leprosy of wit,” and he could not dissemble it in his dealings with politicians and Civil Servants.
The Minister relied on the advice of her Deputy, who relied on the advice of her assistant (who was not quite her lover but would have been if they were not both so busy and so tired), and her path was clear. A Civil Servant under her Ministry had behaved with unwarrantable freedom, making deals involving money not yet allocated, and without a word to her. She made a statement in the House repudiating the purchases, and assuring the Commons that no one was more zealous in cutting down unwarrantable expenditures than she. Piously, she said that she yielded to no one in her love of art in all its forms, but there were times when even she had to regard art as a frill. When grave financial problems confronted the country, she knew where her priorities lay. She went no further, but it was assumed that these priorities lay in the Maritimes, or on the Prairies, where money problems are endemic.
Without an election, the press was in need of a political punching-bag, and Ross provided one for at least two weeks. The most conservative insisted that he be humbled, made to understand the facts of Canadian life, taught a sharp lesson: the more extreme papers demanded that his appointment be revoked, and hinted that he ought to go back to Europe, where he obviously belonged, having learned that decent people didn’t blaspheme against hockey.
THE RIGHTEOUS UPROAR was almost over when Ross appeared one night in the Old Curiosity Shop. Looking at him, in his painfully reduced state, Francis knew that he loved him. But what was there to say?
“The Ark of the Lord seems to have fallen into the hands of the Philistines” was what he did say.
“I have never met this kind of thing before. They hate me. I think they wish me dead,” said Ross.
“Oh, not at all. Politicians get far worse abuse all the time. It will blow over.”
“Yes, and I will be left discredited in the eyes of my staff and perpetually school-marmed by the Minister, who will grudge me every penny that goes to the Gallery. I’ll be nothing more than a caretaker, looking after a cat-and-dog collection and without any hope of improving it.”
“Well, Aylwin, I don’t want to be stuffy, but you really shouldn’t have spent money you didn’t have in your grip. And the Minister—you know that as a woman she has to show herself tougher than any of the men; she can’t afford a single feminine weakness. The Prime Minister reserves all those for himself.”
“She’s out to get me, you know. Wants to prove me a fairy.”
“Well—are you? I’ve never known.”
“Not more than most men, I suppose. I’ve had affairs with women.”
“Well, why don’t you make a pass at the Minister? That would answer her question.”
“Grotesque suggestion! She smells of drug-store perfume and cough-drops! No, there’s only one thing that will put me right.”
“And that is—?”
“If only I could get one of those pictures for the Gallery. Just one would raise enough interest in the international art world to show the Minister I wasn’t completely a fool.”
“Yes, but how could you do that?” But even as he spoke, Francis knew.
“If I could get a private benefactor to give one to the Gallery, it would do an immense amount to put me right, and eventually it would put me totally right. If I could get the one I want, that’s to say.”
“Benefactors are very elusive creatures.”
“Yes, but not unknown. Frank—will you?”
“Will I what?”
“You know damn well what. Will you stump up for one of those pictures?”
“With art prices what they are at present? You flatter me!”
“No I don’t. I know what you have been paying in London in the past two or three years. You could do it.”
“Even if I could, which I don’t for a moment admit, why would I?”
“Haven’t you any patriotism?”
“It is variable. I take off my hat when our flag goes by—heraldic eyesore though it is.”
“For friendship?”
“From what I’ve seen of the world the worst thing that can happen to friendship is to put a price on it.”
“Frank, you’re making me beg. All right, damn it, I’ll beg.—Will you?”
Never in his life, which had not been sparing of discomfort, had Francis been so cornered. Ross looked so wretched, so beaten, and so beautiful in his wretchedness. In the biblical phrase, his bowels yearned toward Ross. But his compassion was not the whole of Francis’s complex of emotions. The more money he had, the more he loved money. And—he couldn’t explain it but he felt it—having relinquished his work as an artist, so much of what was deepest in him was now caught up with possessions, and therefore with money. To give a picture to the nation—very fine in the saying, and so dangerous in the doing. Be known as a benefactor and everybody wants something, often to sustain mediocrity. Yet—there was Ross, the last of his loves, and miserable. He had loved Ismay with his whole heart—and like a fool. He had loved Ruth like a man, and Ruth had died with hundreds of thousands of others, a victim of the world’s cruel stupidity. He loved Ross, not because he wanted Ross physically, but for his daring youth, which the years had not touched, for his defiance of conventions that Francis knew had kept himself in chains, had made him the sustainer of a failing estate and the supporter of a child who was not his own, had held him back from claiming a great painting as his work. Yes, he must yield, whatever the hurt to his purse, which was now almost his soul. Almost; not wholly.
And so Francis was about to say yes, and would have done if Ross had been able to hold his tongue. But his fatal urge toward speech stepped between Ross and his success.
“The gift could be anonymous, you know.”
“Of course. I would insist on that.”
“Then you agree.—Frank, I love you!”
The words startled Francis more than any blow. Oh God, this was putting a price on friendship, and no doubt about it!
“I haven’t agreed yet.”
“Oh yes you have! Frank, this will put everything right! Now, about price—let me get in touch with Prince Max tomorrow!”
“Prince Max?”
“Yes. Even you, drinker of cheap schlock though you are, must know about Prince Max, head of the great Maximilian wine-importers in New York? He’s acting on behalf of his wife. She was Amalie von Ingelheim and she inherited the whole collection from the old Gräfin.”
“Amalie von Ingelheim. I didn’t know she’d married Max! I know her—knew her.”
“Yes, she remembers you. Calls you Le Beau Ténébreux. Said you taught her to play skat when she was a kid.”
“Why is she selling?”
“Because she’s a girl with a head on her shoulders. She and Max are a thriving pair of aristocratic survivors. They even look alike, though he must be a good deal older than she is. She’s had a good career already as a model, but you know those car
eers don’t run much more than eighteen months. She’s been on the covers of the two biggest fashion magazines, and there’s no place else to go. She and Prince Max are buying a cosmetic business—a really good one—and she’ll make herself a hugely rich, international beauty.”
“And the pictures?”
“She says she never gave a damn about the pictures.”
“So? Little Amalie has certainly grown up—in a way.”
“Yes, but she’s not without heart. She’ll listen to reason. And if I tell her you are the buyer, everything will work out well. That’s to say, as cheaply as we have any right to expect—from aristocratic survivors. The picture could be here and in the Gallery before Christmas. What a gift to the nation!”
“There are six pictures, I believe. I’ve never seen any report that said which pictures. I can guess which ones might make a big price in the market. Is it the little Raphael?”
“No, not that one.”
“The Bronzino portrait?”
“No. Nor the Grunewald. Since the row here other buyers have appeared and five are gone. But she’s holding the one I want.”
Ruth had told Francis he had plenty of intuition. It had been slow in acting, but it worked now with full force.
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