‘I don’t know what on earth—’
‘Come, Mr Huffer. Rodin’s model, you know, was a young Belgian soldier who was a carpenter in civil life. And the bronze is so staggeringly realistic that everybody believed that the sculptor had cheated and taken moulds from the living man. But that’s by the way. The pose is a very striking one – and rather disturbing, to my mind. But don’t tell me you’ve forgotten stripping and taking it up for Fulke’s camera. It’s true that I admit an element of conjecture at this point. Your turn would have come several years after the last of the youths at that time commemorated in the album. When I saw it, it finished up with somebody called Cyril. Probably you haven’t been the only boy-friend to go in after him. But I wouldn’t really know. Fulke may have had his phases of fidelity.’
‘Well, that’s a little less cock-eyed than most of your notions.’ Bernie had momentarily recovered his lightness of air. But at the same time he was scowling, which was perhaps his habit when he felt he was losing his bearings in a situation. ‘And just where do we go from here?’
‘I know where I’m heading, Mr Huffer. Just where you go when you leave Le Colombier is a matter of indifference to me. But leave it you shall.’
‘I’ll do nothing of the sort. And you have no title to be here at all. So it’s you who had better clear out.’
‘Let us try to be reasonable, Mr Huffer. Clearly, were I to show that second album to Mrs Ferneydale, your silly play would be over – but at the cost of a sudden and brutal shock to the lady. I want to avoid that. You can see that I want to avoid it, and that your only remaining bargaining point consists in just that. The album as a whole is perfectly publishable, you see. It couldn’t even be stigmatised as outright pornographic. And it would give enormous amusement to everybody who knows you. There you’d be – tagging along in the dusty rear of a whole platoon of fancy boys. Have you a car here?’
‘Of course I have.’
‘Then pack up and take yourself off. You can send a van later to collect whatever you have to leave behind.’
‘I suppose this is the point at which I say you win. But don’t think I’d ardently set my heart on seeing the silly business through. I just thought it might be fun to bring it off.’
‘Precisely. Your whole character is there in a nutshell. But I must know, by the way, just what the dénouement was going to be.’
‘You never will – or not unless you first unearth those albums and hand them over to me.’ Bernie was now doing his best to assume the manner of a cool negotiator. ‘Is that agreed?’
‘Decidedly not. But they shall be destroyed, undivulged, at the proper time.’
‘Do you think I’m going to believe that?’
‘Yes, I do, as it happens. It’s plain to you that I’m endowed with common honesty, and in consequence a man of my word.’
‘Oh, very well. It’s not all that elaborate. I was to win my way into Penelope’s affections, and then make her rather jealous through a bit of apparent philandering with the local girls. I’ve been working quite hard at that; I even contrived that she’d discover me to have been engaged on a series of sketches of the female form divine. She very nearly discovered something quite different about one of the local boys. But she was just too simple-minded to make it.’ Bernie provided this last piece of information almost resentfully. ‘So the play went on. You probably know we’ve been sorting through Fulke’s papers. Sketches for plays and novels and short stories: that sort of thing.’
‘Well?’
‘What was to turn up eventually, and be presented to Penelope, is the outline of a story in which a young English woman inherits a villa in France, and along with it – forgive my blushes, Doctor – an enchanting young man, who unfortunately turns out to be totally uninterested in—’
‘I think that will do.’ Gaston had stood up abruptly. ‘But please understand one thing. Perhaps because of my profession, but I rather think just as a matter of temperament, I’m not at all bothered by the general spectacle of homosexual relationships and activities. They’ve existed since the beginning of time – and good luck to them. But a twisted-up performance such as Fulke has here devised and you have here been treacherously enacting is another matter. It may be said to be letting down the side.’
‘Do you know, I think there’s something in that last point?’ As Bernie made this rejoinder he actually recovered his most engaging smile. ‘But I’m quite glad it’s all over – and off I’ll go. But if I might just have those two albums to take with me—’
‘Most certainly not. I repeat that you have my promise to destroy them in due season, and that must be enough. And now I am going for an hour’s walk in those woods. When I return, you will have cleared out. Good morning.’
XVI
Gaston was away for a little more than an hour, and when he returned to the villa it was to find that Bernie Huffer had departed. Nor was there any sign of the old woman who came in to clean, so it could be assumed that she was taking a day off. But on the terrace a youth in patched blue jeans was engaged in the unexacting task of here and there hoeing out a weed from crevices in the stone surface. He straightened up as Gaston approached.
‘André,’ he said informatively, as he regarded the visitor with more interest than seemed required. ‘You are Monsieur Bernie’s new friend – yes?’
André was a good-looking boy, and gave Gaston the impression of going about with a permanent awareness of the fact. There was a certain impudence in the manner in which he had planted himself in the path of Mrs Ferneydale’s unknown guest.
‘Very new,’ Gaston said shortly. ‘I met him for the first time this morning.’
‘But now Monsieur Bernie has driven away dans sa voiture, and with much bags: quatre, cinq valises. As on holidays.’ André was clearly as proud of his English as of his well-favoured person. ‘So you and I, monsieur, are now here alone.’ The boy smiled brilliantly as he offered this uncontrovertible information. And he accompanied it with a slight gesture that was impudent indeed. Gaston, although he had so recently assured Bernie that he felt no sense of outrage before evidence of deviant behaviour, found this decidedly too much for him.
‘Allez-vous-en!’ he said brusquely.
‘Mais, monsieur—’
‘Va-t’en, vite, André?’
At this even less polite expression, André realised that he had been under a misconception about Monsieur Bernie’s friend, and took himself off the terrace with satisfactory speed. Gaston went into the villa, glanced absently at the Modigliani, and then noticed on a low table in front of the picture, a scrap of paper written on in a bold hand. He picked it up and read:
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean!
So I have checked out. B.H.
This final token of levity on Bernie’s part Gaston crumpled and thrust in a pocket, before mounting the stairs to the large, low room in which it had been Fulke’s habit to work. Except for the break of a couple of dormer windows, books went up to the ceiling on three sides of it. But the wall facing the door was bare except for a single painting. This was what might properly be called the Ferneydale Cézanne.
It was a self-portrait. The painter, black-coated, black-bearded, was looking at you with black eyes from beneath the broad rim of a very black hat. To Gaston in his present circumstances there was something oppressive in the mere thought of what it would fetch in hard cash. Fulke’s final venture in experimental psychology had after a malign fashion a touch of the princely about it. Gaston, however, was not prompted to behave with decent respect before this masterpiece. He walked straight up to it, seized it by the frame, and then – instead of lifting it from the hook on which it might be judged to be suspended – rotated it through an angle of ninety degrees. As this was done in a clockwise direction Paul Cézanne tilted over backwards, so that the hat might fairly have been expected to tumble from his head. The portrait now came away in Gaston’s hands, to reveal a small and unpretending wall-cupboard on a simple latch. Gaston put t
he picture down, opened the cupboard, and withdrew the two photograph albums which it alone contained. His inspection of them was brief. As he had expected, there were no more Uffizi Venuses than when he had been shown the album by its owner several years before. But the Bronze Age striplings were considerably augmented. The final addition was indeed Bernie Huffer.
But now there was a more difficult search. The room abounded in typescript material. There were box files crammed with the stuff, and there were piles of it tied together with string. The first essential was to discover whether Bernie had imposed something like chronological order on the chaos. And there was immediate evidence that this was so. The spines of the box files had inscribed on them, in the same bold hand that had equated Gaston with Jesus Christ, Bumf One, Bumf Two, and so on into double figures. Gaston searched out the last of the series, opened it, and examined its contents. Here, sure enough, was the final discovery that was to be brought to Penelope’s notice. It was a scenario-like performance of no more than three or four pages, but decidedly adequate to its purpose. Bernie had annotated it – lightly in pencil which could be readily rubbed out:
And here’s the bloody damp squib.
Gaston felt that there were faint traces of a saving compunction distinguishable in Bernie. But this didn’t mean that he ever wanted to run into him again. With the typescript in one hand and the photograph albums in the other, he went downstairs and returned to the living-room.
He needn’t, he told himself, hurry about deciding what should be his next step. There was no reason to doubt Bernie’s statement that Penelope meant not to return until the late afternoon, and it was now no more than lunch-time. He had better find himself something to eat, and when thus recruited think the matter out. But this reasonable plan he failed to put into immediate effect. The living-room was full of the warmth of the midday sun in June. It contained, however, a big fireplace for use in other seasons, and stacked beside this were several old newspapers and a bundle of faggots. Even in summer, he supposed, there might be chilly evenings from time to time. And what this sight told him was that he already knew what was the first thing to do.
Without difficulty he lit a fire, and when he had got a substantial blaze going he consigned to it those few pages of Fulke’s typescript which outlined the story of a young Englishwoman who inherited a villa in France with disillusioning consequences. He then went to work on the photograph albums. The Venuses kindled at once; they curved, shrivelled, and were gone. The Bronze Age youths proved for some reason more resistant. Their extravagant pose, designed to express the dawning of intellect and awakening of homo sapiens, contorted itself further in the flames, so that they seemed to pass into nothingness, one by one, amid purgatorial fires. When the photographs were become grey ash Gaston, for good measure, fell to destroying the handsome leather albums in which they had been preserved. This was more difficult, and added to the effect of holocaust a grotesquely sacrificial smell. But they, too, became unrecognisable in the end. Then Gaston went into the kitchen and provided himself with a cheese sandwich and the better part of a bottle of wine. After that, he went outside and strolled up and down André’s lawn. What he had done he by no means repented of. But there was still some stiff thinking ahead.
He had to admit that over an uncomfortably long period he had declined from the role of a patient and purposeful lover to that of a mere family friend of the Riches and Ferneydales alike. It had, indeed, been a role almost avuncular so far as Penelope was concerned. And now here he was in a very similar position at Le Colombier: an experienced older man, wise to the ways of the world, helping a young woman to escape the consequences of her own innocence of mind. That Penelope was not in fact an ingénue, and had indeed to be described as having her first youth a good way behind her, scarcely affected this. His unease, his sense of a trickiness in his situation, had, he supposed, something to do with the spirit of the age, which discounted the notion of there being any propriety in a quasi-paternal component in courtship and marriage. Few Emma Woodhouses were nowadays to be found wedded to Mr Knightleys.
But these were confused ideas, and his approaching crisis would be best met by not indulging them. He was convinced that he had done right in burning that bundle of rubbish, and he was equally clear that he must not prevaricate. The malignity of the whole design in which she was to have been involved must be explained to Penelope without evasions. And he mustn’t regard his own effective intervention as any sort of passport to Penelope’s affections. Or he must at least try not to do anything of the kind.
He returned to the house and prowled restlessly through it. The lavish nature of Fulke’s munificence in its material regards again irked his mind and set it questioning. The Cézanne was the high-light here. With the money it would fetch you could buy a Le Colombier several times over. Add the Modigliani, the Giacometti, and sundry other objets d’art now for the first time coming within his notice, and the solid benefaction became very large indeed. How had Fulke viewed this? Penelope was to lose her head or her heart to Bernie Huffer, and was then to be humiliated by the conjoined discoveries of Bernie’s true sexual disposition and her own role as a marionette in a minor Ferneydale literary project. And then, these revelations made, there Penelope was still to be: the sole possessor of a little private museum in the middle of France. Could Fulke have seen this as a large compensation for the small posthumous joke he had achieved? Gaston gave this charitable notion a fair scrutiny, and turned it down. Fulke Ferneydale, with all his skill as a writer, could sometimes be curiously in the dark about the anatomy of individual minds. But he could not conceivably believe that Penelope would continue to live on in the enjoyment of his villa.
With this thought in his mind, Gaston went into the open air again. He studied the view. He looked up at the sky. Two black kites were performing slow gyrations there, and his gaze lingered on them – reluctantly, as if they were creatures of ill omen. When he again looked down Penelope was standing before him.
‘Charles,’ Penelope said, ‘how very nice! But however have you managed to turn up here?’
It was an awkward moment. ‘However’ was unavoidably ‘why ever’ as well, and the true answer had to be some politic modification of ‘To meddle in your affairs’.
‘I hired a car at Bordeaux,’ Gaston said. ‘It’s a drive of only a few hours. And I can announce myself as your father’s ambassador – although that’s only a small part of the truth.’
‘How very odd!’ Penelope seemed amused rather than perplexed. ‘But come into the house. Bernie Huffer will have spotted us, and be putting on the kettle. You mayn’t have heard of Bernie. He was Fulke’s secretary, and is still at Le Colombier, clearing things up.’
‘I have heard of him. And in fact I’ve met him – here in your house earlier today. But clearing things up isn’t his function. Messing things up would be nearer the mark. The truth is, Penelope, that I’m here to tell you something disagreeable about him.’
‘Heavens above!’ Penelope was looking at Gaston in an unnerving astonishment. ‘You haven’t come all the way from Mallows to tell me he’s homosexual?’
It was some moments before Charles Gaston found a reply to this. To feel that he was in any sense making a fool of himself was to get off decidedly on the wrong foot.
‘Well, that’s the start of it,’ he managed to say. ‘And I suppose I needn’t be surprised that you’ve become aware of the fact.’
‘You can feel as surprised as you like. For what it’s worth, I didn’t become aware of it for quite some time. The penny only dropped with me a couple of days ago, when I’d properly interpreted something that occurred in the dovecot – which is where Bernie has his quarters here at Le Colombier. It somehow came together with some odd things I’d vaguely heard about Fulke long ago, and not much attended to. My walk this morning has been a kind of thinking walk, to decide whether there’s anything I can do about it. It does seem such rotten luck, to be made that way.’ For the first time, Penelope lesita
ted for a moment. ‘But tumbling to the truth about Bernie did give me a very nasty jolt. I don’t quite know why – except, I suppose, that I’ve grown rather fond of him. But I imagine there really isn’t much one can do. Do you think, Charles, that any means can be found of helping him?’
Gaston’s heart sank – or at least his mind misgave him – before such inferences as might have to be drawn from this unexpected attitude. Penelope, of course, was perfectly right in terms of her still only fragmentary knowledge of Bernie Huffer and what he had been ending himself to.
‘There’s quite a lot more to be told,’ he said. ‘And, for a start, I must tell you that Bernie isn’t putting on that kettle. I asked him to pack up and go. And he went.’
‘But, Charles, this is horrible! I can’t think why you should presume to give such an order to Bernie, and still less can I understand why he obeyed you. I think it’s wholly wrong: hounding people because their sexuality isn’t quite like one’s own.’ Penelope was now very angry. ‘And coming all the way from England to interfere in a perfectly gratuitous way! Do you take me for a child? And understand that, although I haven’t known Bernie for long, I happen – as I’ve said – to like him a good deal.’
‘Are you telling me, Penelope, that, having discovered about the young man’s constitution, you’ve nevertheless decided to fall in love with him?’
‘Charles, dear, you must be completely off your head – or think that I am.’ Penelope had regained her composure, and showed no resentment in face of Gaston’s bald question. In her glance at him, indeed, there might have been detected something like frank affection a little at odds with a most inappropriate glint of fun. ‘I suppose, though, that it’s a conceivable piece of nonsense for you to—well—get agitated about. Of course I’ve hated that miserable discovery. I’m prepared to say I’ve even been oddly wounded by it. But even before the truth came to me I couldn’t have been in love with poor Bernie.’ Penelope paused for a moment, almost as if seeking substantiating evidence for the truth of her assertion. ‘Only consider, Charles! I’m old enough to be Bernie’s mother.’
A Villa in France Page 22
