Saturn Over the Water

by J. B. Priestley

  ‘Please continue, Mr Bedford,’ said Steglitz pleasantly. ‘I think you don’t agree with me about other things. About the masses perhaps?’

  ‘All right then,’ I said. ‘I can’t help feeling wary when I hear anything said about the masses. First you take their faces from ’em by calling them masses, and then you accuse ’em of not having any faces. To me there are still just a lot of people about – too many perhaps and too much alike nowadays – but still people, not masses. The back street I grew up in might look to an outsider like a typical warren of the masses, but it didn’t look to me like that, because I knew the people and they were all different.’

  Steglitz gave me a little smile. A wide one might have cracked his brown eggshell face. ‘Allow me to remind you of two things, Mr Bedford. First, you are an artist. Second, you are speaking of a quarter of a century ago, when you were a boy. But much has happened since then, especially in the years since World War Two. Processes are at work, producing quicker and quicker results. As a social philosopher I have to make a careful study of these processes and their results.’

  There didn’t seem any reply to that so I didn’t try to make one, though his lofty manner irritated me. Arnaldos, with the patient calm of successful old age, simply waited for the next thing to happen. Rosalia, I noticed out of the corner of my eye, wriggled her shoulders impatiently. Steglitz looked as if he was about to say something else but then apparently decided to finish his green figs and ice-cream while retreating into the depths of his social philosophy. I began asking myself what I thought about him, but got nowhere. Arnaldos made a motion, and a bell rang somewhere. Two Indian-looking women, left over from the Incas, came in carrying trays. We followed them on to a balcony, facing away from the Institute and on to an ebony sea that occasionally flashed a diamond and an emerald at us; and we drank coffee, and Steglitz and I had cigars and brandy, Rosalia a cigarette and some Cointreau, and Arnaldos nothing but the weight of his years. But after some dreamy chit-chat, the old man said that he and Steglitz still had some business to discuss and that, if I cared to see them, Rosalia could show me some of his treasures of the Mochica and Inca cultures.

  ‘Would you like some more brandy?’ she asked when the other two had gone.

  ‘No, thank you, Miss Arnaldos – ’

  ‘Oh – just call me Rosalia.’ She said it impatiently, with no suggestion of liking me any better. I’ll admit I didn’t feel quite so critical of her, but that was simply because I’d had a damned good dinner and was enjoying one of the best cigars I’d had for a long time. In fact, I asked permission, calling her Rosalia too, to enjoy ten minutes more of that cigar before we examined the treasures. She told me it was all the same to her, though she was indifferent, not downright rude.

  We sat in silence for a minute or so, and then, rather to my annoyance, she broke it abruptly. ‘Are you married?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Perhaps you have a mistress.’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘There isn’t anything the matter with me,’ I said with some irritation. ‘If you have to know, Rosalia, I’ve had affairs but it so happened that none of them made a husband out of me. Give me a little more time, that’s all. If we have any of those silly little cards printed, with silver doves and bells on them, I’ll send you one.’

  ‘Everybody says the English aren’t interested in normal sex,’ she said in that brittle bright way people have when they’re repeating something idiotic.

  ‘If they weren’t, there wouldn’t be any English. What do you know about us anyhow?’

  ‘Not much. I knew two or three English boys in Paris – drips, I thought. I only spent a week in London. I hated it.’

  ‘So do I sometimes,’ I said. ‘At other times I think it’s the only city I want to live in.’ I let that sink in, then said: ‘I’ve answered your questions, Rosalia, so now, before the Incas take hold of us, you can answer just one question I have. All right?’

  ‘All right,’ she said, with no enthusiasm. But then she rushed on. ‘But first I ought to tell you one thing, just to warn you. I haven’t any sense of humour. I hate jokes, funny stories – ’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of telling you any,’ I cut in.

  ‘Oh – you win. Well, what’s the question?’

  I leant across – we were sitting on long chairs now – and stared at her and spoke in a whisper. ‘What about Dr Steglitz?’

  ‘Well, what about him?’

  This rammed me up against a blank wall. I’d hoped that the question and the way I’d staged it might have caught her off balance, and of course they didn’t. All I could say was that perhaps we ought to go and look at her grandfather’s collection. I squashed my cigar into a big glass ashtray and left with it any hopes I’d had of getting any information that night.

  The museum-cum-library was a very long narrow room running along the other side of the house. We looked at a lot of fascinating stuff there, statuettes and pots and head ornaments, some of them solid gold. Rosalia was quiet and sensible, showing me these things. She knew about them, partly no doubt to please her grandfather but also because she was very conscious of the Indian strain in the Arnaldos family. ‘I’m very proud of it,’ she said to me. We’d been admiring a sandstone figure of an old woman, only about nine inches high – a little masterpiece.

  ‘If I’ve worked it out right, based on what I heard your grandfather say, you’re one-sixteenth Indian at the most,’ I said. ‘But if I know anything about girl art students, I’ll bet you put in some heavy Inca work when you first went to Paris.’

  She stopped, looked at me uncertainly for a moment, then surprised me by laughing.

  ‘You said you’d no sense of humour – ’

  ‘I haven’t. I really do hate jokes and funny stories and professional comics. But when you said that about Paris, I suddenly remembered myself as I was then – ’

  ‘And had to laugh,’ I said quickly. ‘At yourself. That’s what I call having a sense of humour – that, and not giggling at comics.’

  We looked at some old specimens of weaving. She hadn’t switched on the general overhead lighting but only the lights along the walls illuminating the objects set out below. The books were on low shelves and also in high shelving that jutted out from the walls at regular intervals. So we moved through patches of dimness to bays bright with colour and gleaming with gold. Not a sound reached us; the room had been sound-proofed, she told me. It was very odd in there. I felt queerly remote, as if it was a dream scene and the other end of the room might dissolve into a wood or some street I’d known as a child.

  ‘Why did you ask me about Steglitz?’ she suddenly demanded, turning to face me.

  ‘No good reason. I was just curious. He’s a rum type, says he’s a social philosopher, and I couldn’t imagine what kind of business brought him here.’ I was laying myself wide open for a snub, but it seemed worth taking the chance.

  ‘Grandfather’s interested in all kinds of things and all kinds of people,’ she said. She said it in that proudly affectionate way women have when they’re talking about people they’re devoted to. Arnaldos may have been finding her difficult, as I could well believe, but she was obviously very fond of him. ‘Some of the people who come here to see him are rum types, as you say, and I don’t like them. But – so what?’

  So what, indeed! I was tempted to mention several of the names on Joe’s list, just to discover what her reaction would be, but realised in time that I might easily give myself away and get nothing in return. So, not knowing how to play it, I merely muttered something about not keeping her there any longer, calling it a day.

  She nodded, then frowned and pushed out her lower lip, as children do when they’re thinking hard, trying to arrive at a decision. ‘I locked up my studio when I went out this morning. I expect you were told.’ She gave me a quick look. ‘Mrs Candamo is really an old sweetie, but she’s getting very bossy and still
tries to handle me as if I was about ten. I’m twenty-four,’ she said defiantly. ‘I don’t see why you should look at my painting.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ I replied promptly. ‘I didn’t come here to tell Mr Arnaldos what he ought to think about your work. Not my idea at all. And anyhow his opinion – or anybody else’s – might be as good as mine. But he’s an old man probably used to having his own way. He very kindly invited me to stay here. So what could I do? But if you prefer to keep your work under lock and key until I go, he’ll hear no complaint from me. On the other hand, I like looking at other painters’ work. So please yourself, Rosalia.’

  ‘Your name’s Tim, isn’t it?’ She didn’t smile or even look friendly, rather sulky in fact. ‘Okay, Tim. It won’t be locked up tomorrow morning. It’s above the garage. Grandfather had it built for me,’ she said as she led me out, on our way back to the entrance hall. ‘You can’t miss it. And say what you like about them, I don’t care.’ She hesitated a moment or two, not looking at me. I felt she wanted to say something about her work, was probably keeping back a rush of words. She decided against it. ‘Good night, Tim.’

  ‘Good night, Rosalia. And thanks for showing me those things.’ I was hearty and impersonal, grandfather’s guest. We weren’t friends yet, and before the next day was done I might easily be high up among her many dislikes.

  6

  Some people, perhaps the élite, don’t like waking up and can’t face breakfast, but I’m one of the other sort, the coarser lot, and when I wake up I’m alive at once and looking forward to breakfast, even if I have to make it myself. My breakfast that morning was brought to my room by a woman and a girl, both silent and sad and magnificent in a way, apparently carved out of red mahogany; if they’d been smaller and immobile they could have been added to Arnaldos’s collection. After I’d dealt manfully with the fruit, boiled eggs, toast and honey, and three cups of wonderful coffee, and had shaved and dressed, I was buzzed on the telephone. It was Mrs Candamo, who said she had several messages for me. I told her I was up and dressed and that she might prefer to talk to me in my room. It was a good guess.

  So when she arrived, clearly not against enjoying a bit of gossip, I made her sit down, and then without much hesitation she accepted a cigarette. This was after she’d asked if I was comfortable and did I want anything and so forth.

  ‘Mr Arnaldos is feeling tired this morning and may rest most of the day,’ she told me. ‘He asked me to make his apologies, Mr Bedford. He suggests you might like to take lunch with the senior members of the Institute in their dining-room, which is quite nice. That is agreeable to you? Then I will arrange it. At half-past one, please. Rosalia has told him she is leaving her studio open this morning, so that you may look at her pictures. You will go there, Mr Bedford? That is good. Mr Arnaldos also asks me to remind you that in the studio you will find everything you might need – ’

  ‘Very kind of him,’ I said, giving her a grin. ‘But has he told Rosalia that I’m to help myself – ’

  ‘Oh – but there is so much – you have no idea – ’

  ‘I have. I know how much I’d lay in stock if I was a multimillionaire’s granddaughter. But even so, she’ll probably object, most strongly. I know I would, unless I dished it out myself. However, we’ll see. Perhaps you’d like to look at three gouache sketches I did yesterday, Mrs Candamo.’

  I could tell at once by the way she looked at them that she was open and alive to art, not half-dead to it as most people are, for all their chatter. She gave herself to each one in turn, sitting there heavy and still and solemn, ‘They’ve gone down in tone,’ I told her. ‘Gouaches always do. I always think I’m making allowance for it, but I never make enough. I’ll key the next lot higher.’

  ‘I know all this of course,’ she said. She waved a hand to show she meant the land and the sky. ‘And I do not see it as you do. You are a very talented artist, I can see that. They are very fine, these things. But there is something in you coming out in them – a restless feeling – an impatience – that is not in our country here. I am reminded a little of Rosalia’s pictures – though of course she has not your talent and experience. Perhaps you will like them, perhaps not. If she has been rude to you’ – and she looked at me appealingly – ‘you will please remember what I said yesterday, will you? And not be too unkind? Of course. She came into my office before she went out this morning. She spoke of you for a minute. She likes you, Mr Bedford.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it, Mrs Candamo. I liked her when she was showing me Mr Arnaldos’s collection.’

  She was ready to go now, and stood up. ‘She can behave sometimes like a spoilt child because she still is a child, not a woman yet although it is quite time.’ She didn’t move then, as I expected her to do, but stood there looking hard at me. ‘Mr Bedford, why did you come here?’

  ‘Because I was invited, Mrs Candamo.’ I said it lightly and smiled at her, hoping she wouldn’t notice that she’d startled me.

  ‘Of course. But that is not what I meant. And of course you know that. But I must attend to my work.’ She turned and began moving towards the door.

  ‘Is Dr. Steglitz still here?’

  ‘He left for Lima about an hour ago.’ She stopped at the door, and faced me without opening it. ‘We have many visitors, coming mostly to see the Institute. And today you take lunch there.’ And then the smile vanished. I could barely catch what she said. ‘So be careful, please, Mr Bedford.’

  Before I could ask her what she meant, she’d gone. I spent the next half hour playing a useless guessing game with myself. What was wrong with me as an investigator was that after travelling about six thousand miles I didn’t know where and how to start investigating. But I knew how to look at pictures, so off I went to Rosalia’s studio. I took my three gouaches along with me, in the hope she’d have a mount or two that would fit them. Not that I wanted to take her mounts, only to look at my gouaches framed in them.

  I found some mounts. She’d everything up there, more gear of every sort than Picasso would have known how to cope with. I took a good look at my gouaches in the mounts – not bad, though they’d lost some of their original blaze and glory. I had to hold out against digging round for some tubes of gouache and then touching up the sketches a bit. But I’m not a genius, I just have some talent, and so I felt I’d been the self-centred artist long enough. I left my own work where it was, at the door end of a long table, and began to look at Rosalia’s. There were lashings of it, some framed, some not. It easily divided itself into a Paris, a New York and a recent Peru period. Not that it was representational; on the whole it was trying not to be. It went in for tachisme, action painting, bashing around on the edge of that inner world Steglitz talked about; but some representational bits had crept in, so to speak, when she wasn’t looking. I picked out ten of the least revolting, all fairly recent, put them in line, and concentrated on them.

  I was still considering them when Rosalia came tearing in. She might have been fired here by rocket from some Espresso in the King’s Road, Chelsea. Her hair was a mess. There were dabs of blue paint on her chin and right cheek. She was wearing a shapeless short smock thing, and underneath that a pair of those tight pants that make nine girls out of ten look silly and were certainly dead wrong for her. I’d have hated the sight of her even if she’d been in a good temper. I knew I was in for a scene, and the way she’d come charging in, looking like that, made me almost ready to welcome one.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she shouted. ‘Stop looking at my pictures. Go away.’

  ‘Oh – for God’s sake!’ I sounded disgusted and I hope I looked disgusted.

  ‘You needn’t look at me like that. Just go away.’ She came forward and I think if she’d been holding anything she’d have thrown it at me. ‘It’s my studio – and I don’t want you here.’

  ‘And I never asked to come here. How many times have you to be told?’

  ‘Oh – shut up! And go away.’

  Then I put my hands
just below her shoulders and held her firmly at arm’s length. She didn’t say anything, just glared at me. I glared back at her and rocked her a little as I talked. She could easily have pulled away, but although she still seemed very angry, she never tried. ‘Now, Rosalia ducky, you’re going to listen to me for two minutes even if it means I’ll have to hitchhike back to Lima today. You can’t have your own way all the time, even if your grandfather’s ready to buy the Beaux Arts and the Slade and give them to you on your next birthday. Now stop being a rich spoilt child – and give yourself a chance. I’ve been looking at your work – ’

  ‘I won’t listen, I won’t listen,’ she cried, not knowing now whether to be angrier still or to burst into tears. ‘Just go away, that’s all. Go away.’

  ‘It’ll be a pleasure. But first you’re going to listen for a minute.’ I still had my hands on her and now I gave her a shake. ‘This work of yours isn’t good – but it could be a lot better quite soon. The chief trouble is – you’re divided in your mind. You’re trying to be four different kinds of painters all at the same time, and it can’t be done. The next thing is that you’re working with a messy and rather sour palette. Your colour’s never clear, crisp and appetising. It’s too mixed up – like you.’

  She pulled herself away and swore at me very rapidly in English, French and Spanish. But having relieved her feelings, she was quiet again long enough for me to give her some technical advice that isn’t worth repeating here. When I’d finished, she glowered at me for a moment and then, while I was filling and lighting a pipe, she went and stared at my gouaches. When finally I moved towards her, she looked up.

  ‘I suppose you think you’re wonderful.’ The disdain was tremendous. No man has ever been able to talk from that height.

  ‘No, I don’t. But I know what I’m trying to do, even though I don’t often succeed in doing it. And I earn a living trying to do what I want to do. If you think that’s easy, you try.’