“But I think you think Arthur and I are unwary.”
“If you had been wary, would you ever have got yourselves into this opera thing?”
“That’s beside the point.”
“I think it’s the very finest end of the point. What has it brought you?”
“We don’t know, yet,” said Arthur. “We shall have to wait and see.”
“While you’re waiting, will you give some thought to my idea?”
“Now that you’ve brought it up, I don’t see how we can help it.”
“Good. That’s all I ask. But I must talk to the New York people, you know. After all, I am going to explode their picture. From one point of view, that is.”
“Look, Simon, can’t you somehow soft-pedal the whole business of the picture?”
“No, Arthur, I can’t and I won’t. It isn’t just the heart of my book. It’s the truth, and you can’t suppress truth forever. That skeleton is banging very loudly on the doors of the cupboard, and if you don’t want to let it out my way, you may be sure somebody else will eventually let it out by smashing the cupboard. Don’t forget all those sketches Francis bequeathed to the National Gallery.”
“Will that concern us? We don’t own the picture.”
“No, but I shall have written the book and if I soft-pedal this material it will be shown up as a stupid, know-nothing book. I don’t see why I should put up with that, just to satisfy your Kater Murr notions.”
“You make a lot of fuss about your damned book.”
“My damned book will be on the shelves when all of us are dust, and I want it to be the best book I can leave behind me. And I ask you, Arthur, as a friend, to think of that. Because I am going to write it, and write it my way, whatever you choose to do, and if it costs me your friendship, that will be part of the price of authorship.”
“Simon, don’t be pompous. Maria and I value your friendship highly, but we could live without it if we had to.”
“Oh shut up, both of you!” said Maria. “Why can’t men ever disagree without all this high-stomached huffing and puffing? No friendships are going to be broken, and if you and Simon part brass rags, Arthur, I’ll leave you and live in sin with him. So shut up! Have another drink, Simon.”
“Thank you, no. I have to be going. But do you mind telling me what that stuff is you are drinking? It looks delicious.”
“It is delicious. It’s milk with a good slug of rum in it. My doctor recommends it at bedtime. I haven’t been sleeping well, and he says this is better than sleeping-pills, even if the milk is a bit fattening for a lady in an interesting condition.”
“Marvellous! Do you think I could have a small one of those? After all, I am great with book, and I need all the little comforts of one who is about to give birth.”
“Will you get it for him, Arthur? Or are you too much on your dignity to help poor Simon in his delicate state? I was drinking this last night when Al and Sweetness were here, and Sweetness was shocked.”
“Shocked by rum and milk?—Oh, thanks, Arthur.—What shocked her?”
“She gave me a long, confused talk about what she called the foetal alcohol syndrome; booze in pregnancy can lead to pixie-faced, pin-headed, mentally retarded children. I knew something about that; you have to drink rather a lot to be in danger. But Sweetness is a zealot, and she’s deep into the squalor of pregnancy, poor wretch. I heard all about her agonizing little balls of gas, which won’t come up or go down; and how she can’t do a thing with her hair—not even wash it, I thought, looking at her; and she has to be dashing off every half-hour to what she delicately calls the tinkle-pantry, because her bladder capacity is now minimal. She is paying the full price nasty old Mother Nature can exact for Al’s baby. I just hope it’s a nice baby.”
“Did she say why they don’t get married, if they are so devoted?”
“Indeed she did. Sweetness has a cliché for everything. They do not admit that their union would be hallowed more than it is, if some parson mumbled a few words over them.”
“I wonder why people like that always talk about parsons mumbling a few words. I’ve married lots of people and I never mumble. I would scorn to mumble.”
“You have no proper respect for cliché. Performing your ignominious, outdated office, you ought to mumble for very shame.”
“I see. I’ll remember that. Am I to mumble at the christening, by the way? I’d very much like to.”
“Of course, Simon dear. Mumble, mumble, mumble.”
“Have you chosen any names, yet? Always wise to be ready with names.”
“Arthur and I haven’t made up our minds, but Geraint keeps putting forward Welsh names that are crammed with ancient chivalry and bardic evocation, but are rather demanding for the Canadian thick tongue.”
Darcourt had finished his rum and milk, and took his leave. Maria was loving and kind, and Arthur was friendly, with a hint of reserve. On the whole, Darcourt thought he had achieved about as much as he expected.
As he walked home he thought about pixie-faced, pin-headed, mentally retarded children. That was what Francis the First had been. But had Francis the First’s mother been a heavy drinker? Nothing he had found in his investigations suggested it. But a biographical researcher must reconcile himself to the fact that there are many things he will never know.
7
“It certainly seems as though le beau ténébreux had been much more shadowy than any of us suspected,” said Princess Amalie.
“Frankly, I am astounded! Astounded!” said Prince Max, who liked to multiply his verbal effects. “I remember Cornish well. Charming, reserved fellow; spoke little but was a splendid listener; handsome, but didn’t seem aware of it. I thought Tancred Saraceni lucky to have found such a gifted assistant; his picture of the Fugger dwarf was a little gem. I wish I had it now. And certainly the Fugger dwarf looked very much like the dwarf in The Marriage.”
“I remember that curious man Aylwin Ross saying precisely that when the Allied Commission on Art had a chance to look at both pictures. Ross was no fool, though he came to grief in a rather foolish way.”
The speaker was Addison Thresher. He is the man to watch and the man to convince, thought Darcourt. The Prince and Princess Amalie know a lot about pictures, and a very great deal about business, but this man knows the art world, and his Yes or No is decisive. Until now he has given no hint that he had known The Marriage at Cana in Europe. Watch your step, Darcourt.
“Did you know Francis Cornish well?” he asked.
“I did. That’s to say, I met him in The Hague when he made that astonishing judgement on a fake Van Eyck. He played with his cards very close to his vest. But I had a few chats with him later in Munich, during the meetings of the Art Commission. He told me something then that clicks with your surprising explanation of this picture, that we have all loved for so many years. Do you know how he learned to draw?”
“I have seen the beautiful copies of Old Master drawings he made when he was at Oxford,” said Darcourt. He saw no reason to say more.
“Yes, but before that? It was one of the most extraordinary confessions I ever heard from an artist. As a boy he learned a lot about technique from a book written by a nineteenth-century caricaturist and illustrator called Harry Furniss. Cornish told me he used to do drawings of corpses in an undertaking parlour. The embalmer was his grandfather’s coachman. Furniss was an extraordinary parodist of other men’s styles; he once showed a gigantic hoax exhibition in which he parodied all the great painters of the late Victorian era. Of course they hated him for it, but I wish I knew where those pictures are now. Drawing lies at the root of great painting, of course—but imagine a child learning to draw like that from a book! An eccentric genius. Not that all genius isn’t eccentric.”
“Do you really think our picture was the work of le beau ténébreux?” said the Princess.
“When I look at these photographs Professor Darcourt has been showing us, I don’t see how I can think anything else.”
/> “Then that smashes the favourite in our collection. Smashes it to smithereens,” said Prince Max.
“Perhaps,” said Thresher.
“Why perhaps? Isn’t it shown to be a fake?”
“Please—not a fake,” said Darcourt. “That is what I am anxious to prove. It was never intended to deceive. There is not a scrap of evidence that Francis Cornish ever attempted to sell it, or show it, or gain any sort of worldly advantage from it. It was a picture of wholly personal importance, in which he was setting down and balancing off the most significant elements in his own life, and doing it in the only way he knew, which was by painting. By organizing what he wanted to look at in the form and style that was most personal to him. That is not faking.”
“Try telling that to the art world,” said the Prince.
“That is precisely what I shall try to do in my life of Francis. And I hope I’m not immodest in saying that I shall do it. Not to unveil a fake, or smash your picture, but to show what an astonishing man Francis Cornish was.”
“Yes, but my dear professor, you can’t do one without the other. We shall suffer. We shall be made to look like fools, or collaborators in a deception. Think of that article in Apollo that Aylwin Ross wrote, explaining the sixteenth-century importance of this picture. It’s well known in the world of art history. A very clever piece of detective work. People will think we kept our mouths shut to save our picture, or else that we were victims of Francis Cornish’s little joke. No—his big joke. His Harry Furniss joke, as Addison has told us.”
“Incidentally, that figure of the fat artist who is drawing on a little ivory tablet is Furniss to the life, now that I know what we know,” said Thresher.
“Francis was not wanting in humour. I admit it. He loved a joke and particularly a dark joke that not everybody else understood,” said Darcourt. “But that again is an argument on my side. Would a man who intended to deceive put such a portrait of a known artist—and an artist at work—in such a picture as this? I repeat: this is not a picture for anyone but the painter himself. It is a confession, a deeply personal confession.”
“Addison, what would you say was the market value of this picture, if we didn’t know what Professor Darcourt has told us?” said Princess Amalie.
“Only Christie’s or Sotheby’s could answer that question. They know what they can get. A good many millions, certainly.”
“We were ready to sell it to the National Gallery of Canada a few years ago for three millions,” said Prince Max.
“That was when we wanted to raise some capital to expand Amalie’s business. Aylwin Ross was the Director then, but at the last minute he couldn’t raise the money, and not long after he died.”
“That would have been cheap,” said Thresher.
“We were rather under the spell of Ross,” said the Princess.
“He was a most beautiful man. We offered him several pieces, at an inclusive price. This was by far the cheapest. But in the end they went to other buyers. We decided to keep this one. We like it so much.”
“And you have so many others,” said Thresher, not altogether kindly. “But three million was certainly a bargain. Now, if it weren’t for what we have heard this evening, you could treble or quadruple that money.”
This was Darcourt’s moment. “Would you sell now, if you could get a price that pleased you?”
“Sell it as a distinguished fake?”
“Sell it as the greatest work of The Alchemical Master, now known to be the late Francis Cornish? Let me tell you what I have in mind.”
With all the persuasive skill he could summon up, Darcourt told them what he had in mind.
“Of course, it’s extremely conditional,” he said when he had finished, and the Prince and the Princess and Thresher were deep in consideration.
“Very iffy indeed,” said Thresher. “But it’s a hell of a good idea. I don’t know when I’ve heard of a better in forty years in the art world.”
“There is no hurry,” said Darcourt. “Are you willing to leave it with me?”
And that was where the matter rested when Darcourt flew back to Canada.
8
“I really think one of the names must be Arthur. After all, it was my father’s name, and it’s my name, and it’s a good name. Not unfamiliar; not peculiar; easy to pronounce; has good associations, not the least of them being this opera.”
“I entirely agree,” said Hollier. “As a godfather, with a right to give the boy a name of my choice, I declare for Arthur.”
“No regrets about Clement?” said Arthur.
“It’s not a name I’ve ever liked much.”
“Well, thank heaven one name is settled. Now, Nilla, you’re the godmother. What name have you chosen?”
“I have a weakness for Haakon, because it was my father’s name, and it is a name of great honour in Norway. But it might embarrass a Canadian child. So also with Olaf, which is another favourite of mine. So—what about Nikolas? He need not even spell it with a ‘k’ if he doesn’t want to. A fine saint’s name, and I think every child should have a saints name, even if it isn’t used.”
“Brilliant, Nilla. And eminently reasonable. Nikolas let it be, and I’ll undertake that he uses the ‘k’ to keep him in mind of you.”
“Oh, I’ll keep him in mind of me. I intend to take my work as godmother very seriously.”
“Well then—Geraint?”
This, thought Darcourt, is where the trouble lies. To be melodramatic, this is where the canker gnaws. Geraint has all the Welsh passion for genealogy, and names, and he wants to keep signalling that he is this child’s true father. This is going to call heavily on Arthur’s skill as a Chairman.
“Of course, I think at once of my own name,” said Powell. “A beautiful, poetic, sweetly-sounding name which I bear with pleasure. But Sim bach advises strongly against it. Of course I wish to confer a Welsh name on the boy, but you all keep nattering about how hard they are to pronounce. Hard for whom? Not for me. To me, you see, a name has great significance; it colours a child’s whole outlook on itself and gives it a role to play. Aneurin, for instance; a great bardic name. He of the Flowing Muse—”
“Yes, but bound to be pronounced ‘An Urine’ by the unregenerate Saxons,” said Arthur. “Remember poor Nye Bevan and what he went through. The Sitwells always called him Aneurism.”
“The Sitwells had a very vulgar streak,” said Powell.
“Unfortunately, so have lots of people.”
“There are other splendid names. Aidan, for instance; now there’s a saint for you, Nilla! And Selwyn, which means great ardour and zeal; that would spur him on, wouldn’t it? Or Owain, the Well Born; suggesting a distinguished descent, particularly on the father’s side. Or Hugo, a name very popular in Wales; I propose it rather than the Welsh Huw, which might look odd to an uninstructed eye; it is the Latin form. But the one I propose with pride is Gilfaethwy, not one of the greatest heroes of the Mabinogion but especially appropriate to this child, for reasons that need not be chattered about now. Gilfaethwy! Nobly wild, wouldn’t you say?”
“Pronounce it again, will you?” said Arthur.
“It is simplicity itself. Geel-va-ith-ooee, with the accent lightly on the ‘va’. Isn’t it splendid, boyos? Doesn’t it smack of the great days of legend, before Arthur, when demigods trod the earth, dragons lurked in caves, and mighty magicians like Math Mathonwy dealt out reward and punishment? Powerful stuff, let me tell you.”
“How do you spell that?” said Hollier, ready with pencil and paper. Geraint spelled it.
“Looks barbarous on the page,” said Hollier.
Powell took this very badly. “Barbarous, you say? Barbarous, in a country where every name from every part of the earth, and ridiculous invented names, are seen in the birth announcements every day? Barbarous! By God, Hollier, let me tell you that the Welsh had enjoyed five centuries of Roman civilization when your ancestors were still eating goat with the skin on and wiping their arses with bunches
of thistles! Barbarous! Am I to hear that from a pack of morlocks who can think of nothing except what is easy for them to pronounce or has some sentimental association? I pity your ignorance and despise you.”
“That, by the way, is a Dickensian quotation,” said Hollier. “I’m sure you could find something more bardic to express your contempt.”
“Now, now, let’s not come to harsh words,” said Darcourt. “Let’s make a decision, because I have things to say to you, parents and godparents, and we must make up our minds.”
But Powell was in a black sulk, and it took a lot of cajoling to make him speak.
“Let the child have the commonest of Welsh names, if you must have it so,” he said at last. “Let his name be David. Not even Dafydd, mark you, but bloody English David.”
“Now that’s a good name,” said Gunilla.
“And another saint’s name,” said Darcourt. “David let it be. Now—what order? Arthur Nikolas David?”
“No. It would spell AND on his luggage,” said Hollier, who seemed to be suffering an unexpected bout of practicality
“His luggage! What a consideration,” said Powell. “If you insist on this damned reductive nonsense, why don’t you call the child SIN?”
Arthur and Darcourt looked at each other bleakly. Was Geraint going to let the cat out of the bag? This was what nobody wanted, except Powell, whose Welsh dander was up.
“Sin?” said Hollier. “You’re joking. Why sin?”
“Because that is what he will be called by his bloody country,” shouted Powell. “Social Insurance Number 123 dash 456789, and when he gets his pension in old age he will be SOAP 123 dash 456789. By the time he is SOAP nobody will have any other name except the one the God-damned civil servants have given him! So why don’t we steal a march on them and call him SOAP from the start? This is a land dead to poetry, and I say the hell with it!” In his indignation he drained a large whisky at a gulp, and filled his glass again, to the brim.
It was a time to rise above passing furies and disdains, so Darcourt said, in his most honeyed tones, “Then it’s to be Arthur David Nikolas, is it? An excellent name. I congratulate you. I shall pronounce the names with my warmest approval. Now, about the other matters.”
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