Groocock flicked over papers expertly. “Roughly speaking,” he said, “Mrs. Craine will continue to float her children by the first marriage, and you will be responsible for those by the second?”
“Certainly. It seems the reasonable thing.”
Groocock nodded. He had a professional trick of discussing affairs of this sort in a state of slight abstraction. Presumably it was tact. There was nothing wrong with two families. But in some circumstances they might be held to constitute at least a minor indelicacy. So Groocock kept on the safe side. “Of course,” he was saying, “the problems are different. Mrs. Craine can’t have more children by her late husband, but she can by you.”
A silence succeeded this bleakly obvious statement. Craine reflected that Groocock must do business for some extraordinarily stupid people. “Quite so,” he said briskly. “We expect more children.”
Groocock gave another abstracted nod. This time, he was acknowledging that with men at the top such an expectation is a public-spirited act. He accompanied the gesture, however, with words that were unexpectedly acrid. “You’ll get no thanks for it.”
Craine laughed. He was pleased when a chap spoke up. “Fiscally, you mean?”
“From the universe at large.” Groocock pursued his theme firmly. He wasn’t the first Groocock to have held down this job, and he talked as a fellow should. It was the absence of this capacity, Craine reflected, that made a lot of one’s dealings with the new administrative classes tedious. “Although I’m a bachelor,” Groocock added in a vein of gloomy satisfaction, “and oughtn’t to speak out of turn.”
“Oh, I’m prepared for anything.” Craine took it lightly. “Lear’s hovel on the heath, and Tom of Bedlam in the straw.”
“Perhaps it won’t come to that. You haven’t got a kingdom to divide.” From gloom Groocock returned to geniality. “Although you may end up with something near a principality.”
But Craine found himself not liking this. At bottom it was flattery over what only a fool would rejoice in. “What we have to contrive,” he said, “is fair shares – or something near it – for each of the little blighters as their several dates come along.”
“Exactly. And you’ll want to avoid covenants, or anything like that. Nothing to be said for pitching large incomes at the heads of subalterns and undergraduates.” Groocock spoke with the assurance of one accustomed to address wealthy parents on this point. “The Arnander boys—Tim and Charles, aren’t they?—might have a great deal, if there wasn’t some careful disposition. As for your own children”—Groocock appeared to do a rapid actuarial calculation—”you’re more likely than not to be dead before some of the unborn ones come of age.”
Craine nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I’ve worked out that one too.”
“You won’t be, of course. Still, it’s probable that you will.” Groocock judged this an occasion for cheerful irrationality. “As for what you should fix up, a trust’s the thing, if you ask me.”
“Certainly a trust.”
“The trustees to have discretion to survey the field when the grandchildren thin out.”
“Thin out?”
“When it’s clear that they’ve pretty well stopped getting themselves born. Or say when the youngest existing grandchild comes of age.”
“That sort of thing’s common, of course,” Craine said. He felt depressed. He wasn’t all that wealthy, and surely he never would be. Nor did he fancy ending up as a dead hand from the grave. That would be a dreadful sort of immortality; not at all the kind he had once been absurd enough to imagine for himself when a young man. “But I don’t know,” he said aloud to Groocock, “that one wants to conserve to that extent. After all, it would be for a world you and I can’t guess at. Do we want to secure young men their manor houses and their hunters in the opening decades of the next century? Or even to put up a thoroughly cussed fight against the whole trend of social legislation – of history, if you like – in this one?”
“These are large questions,” Groocock said, and looked shocked. You could fancy him alarmed in case his client’s irregular sentiments carried through the surrounding glass panelling to the innocent young accountants round about. “And there are several things I haven’t got clear. The Arnander boys, for instance: is there anything on the father’s side?”
“Only genius.”
Craine had spoken promptly. It was a fence he could always take at once. And he was amused to see that it left Groocock quite blank. “That’s something, of course,” the accountant was saying vaguely. “That’s a great deal. But your stepsons will have nothing in the way of property from their late father?”
“Nothing at all. He had nothing – although my wife, when he married her, was already a wealthy woman. An aunt in Virginia, you know, who didn’t have your sound views about pitching fortunes at undergraduates – even female ones. But Arnander had no money, and never thought to acquire any. He was a painter.”
“I see.” For a moment Groocock continued blank. He would have been quicker on any of the amici of Amico. Presumably the lessons at the progressive school hadn’t come right down to modern times. But a second later he got there. “Arnander? Good Lord! Do you know, I never connected up?”
“Well, you have now,” Craine said a shade shortly, for he disliked being looked at with a new interest – particularly when the impact was vicarious. But the unworthiness of this response struck him immediately. “John Arnander was a great painter. It isn’t just his early death and the paucity of his mature work that has given him his reputation, and begun to produce some striking prices in the salerooms. It’s the fact that he was right there. If not with Mantegna and El Greco, certainly with Cezanne and Picasso.”
“And he got nothing material out of it all?” Groocock assumed a properly sombre expression. “Bad luck. It doesn’t seem right . . . one who gave all that to the world.” He shook his head – a man of affairs who could yet sympathise with the artist’s lot.
“A painter commonly has a certain amount of stuff in his studio when he dies,” Craine said. “If he has any sort of market, it no doubt constitutes what you might call an estate. But the circumstances of Arnander’s death were exceptional.”
“I see, I see.” Groocock appeared to judge that here was something into which it would not be profitable to enquire. “It must be extraordinarily interesting,” he pursued, “to have the boys. Do they show artistic promise?”
Craine was often asked this question about his stepsons, and he had a number of replies calculated to lead to a little speculative talk. On the whole, he liked things kept lively but impersonal. “Don’t they say,” he asked, “that every child possesses the potentialities of an artist – of a painter? It’s demonstrable whenever one looks at the walls of a kindergarten. But of course – unfortunately or fortunately – the survivors into adult life are few. My stepsons may survive in that sense – particularly Charles. It’s impossible to tell.”
“Most interesting.” Groocock, who presumably had no occasion to inspect the walls of kindergartens, civilly took on the air of one under instruction. “And I suppose it applies to music, too. Mozart, for instance.”
“That’s a different thing.” These rambling chats, Craine thought, are seldom quite honestly time off. They size a man up for you, perhaps reveal some foggy area in his mind. “It’s a different thing,” he repeated carefully. “In music one gets occasional prodigies, virtually abreast of the grown-ups while still in pinafores. But one doesn’t get, in the infant population at large, the widely diffused ability and disposition to take the first positive steps. And the reason, if you ask me, is this: Nature has given the eye a big start over the ear. Ages ago, the ear was perhaps still exclusively on the alert for danger while the eye was already allowing itself spells at just having a nice look round. Or perhaps – and this is quite a different notion – there’s a more effective group of primary industries working for the eye all the time.” Craine hesitated. It was certainly one of his unabashed days
– but he wasn’t sure that all this wasn’t a bore. Groocock said nothing, contenting himself with an expression that acknowledged the other’s deft touching in of a metaphor from the real world. “You see,” Craine went on, “the ordinary man doesn’t, as he moves about, ever hear in Nature something uncommonly like a fugue or a symphony. But he does from time to time see something uncommonly like a picture. At least I do.”
“Most interesting,” Groocock repeated.
The conversation had turned disagreeable to Craine. To say At least I do was awkward. And Groocock was now regarding himself as humouring a client with an eccentric streak in him. It wasn’t for Craine to say the fellow was wrong – and anyway one must tail the thing courteously off. “I don’t mean that one necessarily sees anything remotely resembling a significant work of art simply by looking out of a window. But objects – a tree, a door, a wall, a bowl of fruit – present themselves sometimes . . . well, with splendour. Their own essential quiddity shines out in them. And there you are. But I don’t think Nature ever does that for one through the ear.”
“There might be exceptions. Wordsworth. Certain sounds, quite simply in Nature, haunted him like a passion.” Groocock had landed neatly on another set of lessons. “A shock of mild surprise.”
“But Wordsworth didn’t make music out of his mild surprises. He made poetry.”
“Well, that’s a kind of music.” Groocock, an open-minded man, produced a concessive gesture. “Although I’ve been told there’s no correlation between the musical and poetic faculties. When we talk of the music of poetry we’re merely using a figure of speech.”
That was enough – particularly if Groocock was thus left with the last pregnant word. Craine stirred on his chair, and presently they were back with the business on hand. In a week or two’s time they would have a meeting with the solicitors, and Mrs. Craine would come up from Pinn. But as he made these and other arrangements, Craine’s mind continued to move in a different world. Where the deuce did music come from? What, for musicians, was the raw material equivalent to Rembrandt’s armour and similar junk, to Cezanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire, to the wenches Titian would whistle up from a neighbouring bawdy-house? Come to think of it, he had never met a musician – and his sisters used to bring shoals about the place – who knew one bird-call from another. But now he must sign one or two papers, ask Groocock to look into this and that. He did so, quickening his pace; and in ten minutes was nodding to the commissionaire and making his way downstairs.
That had been as it should be. A family responsibility was on the way to being discharged. And at least he hadn’t treated Groocock – a hard-working chap with a good deal below the surface – as if he were a piece of office equipment. Nevertheless Craine felt discomfort accompany him back into Watling Street. A shaft of sunlight – the same that had gilded the poky glass partitions of the office – was at play on a red bicycle by the kerb. Another telegraph boy.
And there, suddenly, was the experience – fleeting but indubitable. The bicycle seemed not a bicycle of earth. A city man, a reasonable shot, a farmer well known for his Gloucestershire Old Spots, he would always have these glimpses of this particular channel beyond sense. It was the ground of his proposing, that afternoon, to get old Weidle down to a reasonable figure for the Amico di Sandro. A little analysis might reveal it as the reason for his having married John Arnander’s widow. That was all right. But what walked at his elbow now, as he made his way to the chop-house where he was to give a man lunch and a cigar, was Arnander’s shade. What would Arnander think of artistic talk in Watling Street? Craine thought he knew.
CHAPTER TWO
The Arnander boys were at a private school given to liberal policies. They came home at half-term. Their appearances at meals were civil and reasonably punctual, but they spent most of the time on the banks of the Pinn where it skirted the lower paddock. Tim fished industriously – sometimes with a worm and sometimes with a shamelessly childish net. Back at school, and questioned by other boys about how he had spent his time, he would say, “Oh, flogging our bit of water, you know, for nothing very much.” This reply, judiciously combining modesty with an intimation of the right sort of background, gained him general approval. But Charles, who would say in answer to the same question, “Just mucking around,” was equally respected, because nothing so much commends itself to small boys as reticence and veracity.
Here by the stream, Tim would lie on his stomach, peering into the water, and Charles would sprawl on his back, gazing at the clouds. Charles was an authority on clouds, and kept a diary in which their appearance and disappearance was recorded. In Charles’s heaven the clouds were varied and abundant; they sailed past all day in every variety of form known to science. A cloud, unlike a butterfly or a bird’s egg, is never there next morning, to be checked in a disenchanting light.
“Cumulonimbus,” Charles said. “That’s a cloud of convectional type.”
“I don’t suppose you know what convectional means.”
“Yes, I do. It means formed by currents of rising air.” Charles thought for a moment how to retort upon this warfare. “Why don’t you get on with your fishing? Your schol won’t come any sooner just because you keep staring at the road.”
Tim was making an untidy job of getting a fresh worm on his hook. With all the forces of his will he was striving to bring a red bicycle up the road from Pagan Episcopi. The telegram would say whether or not he was to be a scholar of Winchester. “Naturally I’m impatient,” he said reasonably. “And old Barker promised to send a wire.”
“Are you sure you want to go to Winchester anyway?” Thrusting back in his pocket the notebook in which he had recorded his latest cloud, Charles continued his challenging manner. “When we went there in summer I thought it was a squashing sort of place. And Turk says a lot of artists’ and writers’ sons go to newer schools.”
Turk, a junior master much given to tickling and slapping his charges, was at present Charles’s oracle. Tim disapproved of him. “Turk’s an ass,” he said. “Although of course it might be different if our father was alive.” Tim was always fair-minded. “He might talk to other artists and get ideas about schools. But I don’t see what’s wrong with Winchester. Rupert’s a Wykehamist, and Rupert’s all right.”
“Of course Rupert’s all right – only perhaps rather a conventional person.”
“Don’t you mean convectional – formed by currents of rising air?” Tim waited to let this jeer sink in. “You’ve been eavesdropping again.”
Charles sat up indignantly. “I haven’t been eavesdropping!”
“Yes you have. You must have been. That was just not the sort of expression an eleven-year-old thinks of. You’ve been listening to some disgusting trog being beastly about Rupert, and now you’re parroting him.” Again Tim paused and his glance wandered. “Does the post office shut at lunch-time? And would that mean they’d telephone it?”
Charles pointed to the horizon. “Nimbostratus. There’s going to be rain. But if it does come by telephone, Mummy’s sure to rush down and tell you. Unless she’s taken the children over to the vicarage.” It was always as the children that the young Arnanders referred to the young Craines. “I’d hate to be a vicar – or even an archdeacon. Do you think Rupert will want us to be bankers?”
“I suppose it’s quite likely.”
“I don’t think I want to be that, either. I’ve been into the bank in Newbury sometimes. Standing there, handing out wads of pound notes to farmers and shopkeepers, would be frightfully dull.”
Tim shook his head. “I don’t think that’s quite what banking means – not for people like us.”
“You mean we’d be somewhere behind – and looking after the gold?”
“Well, certainly behind. But in London or New York, not Newbury. And we’d have to decide things. I mean, of course, after we’d learnt about it all. People would come asking for credit – a sort of loan, that is – and we’d say whether they could have it or not. It would be v
ital to decide properly, because it would affect the wealth of the nation.”
“Would important people come – a headmaster, for instance, wanting money to build a new gym?”
Tim nodded. “Much more important than that. Men wanting to build factories and ocean liners and new sorts of experimental aeroplanes. I know Rupert had to decide something about a new sort of jet plane last week.” Tim had taken his eyes away from the road. “It might be fun.”
“I won’t have anything to do with it.” Charles spoke so decidedly that Tim looked at him in surprise, and he felt obliged to proceed to the sort of rational and decorous explanation that his brother was inclined to accept. “For quite a long time the people who came would be older than I was. It would be embarrassing. I think I shall be a painter. I won the drawing prize, after all.”
“You know what Rupert says about that.” Tim met reason with reason. “It’s no good going after anything like that unless you’re as mad as mad about it. If you’re that, he says, good luck to you. But make sure first.”
“I don’t see how you can make sure first.”
“Neither do I, really.” Tim always conducted discussions honestly. “But I suppose people do. Daddy, for instance. I expect he was as mad as mad, and as sure as sure. The great ones are.”
“Of course he was.” The boys usually accepted each other’s theories and speculations about their father. “But how old was he when he began? And of course I don’t expect he had anybody who was inclined to suggest making him a banker.”
Tim tossed his line rather absently into the Pinn; his gaze was back on the road from the village. “But they’d have wanted him to be an assistant in a grocer’s, or even a boot boy in a school. His people were quite poor. We must find how soon he knew he was mad as mad.”
A Use of Riches Page 2
