“A beguiling hypothesis, Weidle. I hadn’t known you were a bit of a literary historian too. And the story’s given you a hint as well? It’s suggested a fantastic sort of threat to your proposed near-monopoly in Arnanders? What a wary fellow you are!”
“Come, come – I appeal to you, as one merchant to another. For I suppose a banker is a merchant?” Weidle had his most charming smile.
“Certainly a banker’s a merchant.”
“Then you know how it’s one’s business to have a reasonable care to one’s profits. No one, believe me, would rejoice more if a dozen further canvases like that”—and Weidle waved at the self-portrait—”should be discovered cached somewhere in Italy. But when you get into the present century – which is a thing, you know, I don’t much do – and are dealing, say, with a painter who died young, or who for some other reason left a very circumscribed body of work, then the sudden popping up of a lot of unsuspected stuff would be thoroughly tricky. Think, for instance, of Christopher Wood. There were certainly several years during which, had anyone come unexpectedly on another score of important paintings—”
Craine nodded impatiently. “No doubt, no doubt. I don’t question your knowledge of your own market. And I can see that this obscure phase at the end of Arnander’s life may make you begin to wonder. But if you regard these drawings as evidence that he went in some way to pot—” Craine broke off, and stared for a moment at the topmost of the drawings. “Drink?”
Weidle shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “Not behind that line.”
“Well, the enigma’s yours.” Craine reached for his hat. “Did you know I’d picked up a small Van Stry?”
“Of course I knew. I hear all these little things.” Weidle instantly acquiesced in the change of subject. “And you’re hoping it’s really a Cuyp, eh? Well, I hope it is, too. Make up for the Amico’s being a Raffaellino.”
Craine nodded and shook hands. “A protean crowd, the painters,” he said. “You never know where you have them.”
CHAPTER FOUR
It was only when Tim’s celebration was over, and both boys were in bed, that Craine spoke of his day. “I’ve had news,” he said. “A cable.”
“A cable?” Jill didn’t look up, but for a moment her right hand paused over her work. Then she drew the silk softly home. “I had one too.”
“Mine was from Mungo. One of the old boy’s bombshells.”
“Does he want you to go out?” Jill might have been bored, so that he couldn’t help catching her eyes and smiling. She hated his flying the Atlantic, and her skill in dissimulation was unimpressive.
“Nothing of that sort. He’s handed in his cheque. He’ll be home tomorrow morning, and giving the Chancellor a bit of his mind in the afternoon. And I think we can do one of our Box and Cox turns – he and I.” Craine knocked out his pipe. “I suppose everything’s all right with the children?”
She laughed. “Of course it is! An almost Edwardian order reigns in your household, Rupert. Nannie is satisfied with Jane, Mrs. Moore is satisfied with Nannie, I’m satisfied with Mrs. Moore, and I believe you’re satisfied with me. Of course none of it may last.”
“None of it?”
Jill tossed aside her embroidery with a subtle luxuriousness that was its own answer. She raised her head so that her features were softly lit by a flicker of firelight from below. They were features so strange that he still through the mounting intimate years felt what he had first felt before her: a fascination having its substantial basis in alarm. Looking at her, a stranger might assign him the position of a man who marries a prima ballerina, a famous executant on an instrument, a poet, a fanatic of some social or political cause: a position interesting, perhaps, yet not likely to comprehend any large element of repose. But it would be no more than a conjecture founded on the way the bones built themselves together in Jill’s skull. There was nothing of happy accident in the fact that order reigned at Pinn; nor was that state of affairs likely to be impermanent. Jill’s instinct was entirely for the equivalents, here in England, of the life of the South in which she had been bred. Glancing up now at John Arnander’s visionary unquiet Maremma which hung over the chimney-piece before them, Craine understood the attraction Arnander had held for her. It had been the polar attraction that the textbooks recommend as the basis of a satisfactory sexual relationship. And no doubt the textbooks were right – as a matter of short-term policy. But perhaps there was something to be said for the old-fashioned persuasion that community of tastes affords the best buy in the long run. It was conceivably the desuetude of this idea that had resulted in long runs being not much the go nowadays.
“Then if everything’s all right”—Craine’s tranquil marital reflections had led to his stretching out his legs towards the fire—”let’s go to Italy. I don’t mean for long. Say a fortnight, three weeks.”
“Italy? You haven’t had any other cables?”
Something made him draw back his legs, as if it might be necessary to sit up. “I’ve had scores of cables. They pour in all day, prophesying woe. But we don’t worry about them.”
Jill took up her embroidery again. “You know I don’t mean that. Nothing’s put Italy in your head – as a place where we might have private business? Nothing about John?”
He stared at her. “John? Well, Weidle’s been talking to me about John this afternoon. But my thinking of a getaway for us has nothing to do with that. Weidle’s planning big business with Arnanders. He’s got hold of a lot, including the View from Cortona, and the La Verna, and a tremendous self-portrait I’d never seen. And he wanted to know about John’s last months. He thinks he may have been painting away through all that chaos, and that somewhere or other there may be treasures it would be nice to get in on.”
“I see. Well, that fits.”
This time Craine did sit up – although covering the action by bending forward to give the fire a jab with the poker. “Fits with just what?” he asked.
“It doesn’t – really. Only my cable was from Italy too. And it’s about what Weidle’s interested in. John’s last months.”
“Good Lord!” For some reason that he couldn’t distinguish, Craine felt himself at a relaxed tension.
“John did, it seems, continue creative work almost to the last.” Jill paused and carefully selected a fresh silk. “In collaboration, I think it must have been, with an Italian girl.”
For just a second Craine simply didn’t take it in – perhaps because Jill, although she loved faint mockery, hadn’t the habit of expressing herself in an oblique or sardonic way. Then he asked, “Just how does this appear?”
“There’s a boy. Doesn’t it seem odd? Another posthumous child. He must be just a few months younger than Charles.”
It didn’t seem at all odd to Craine – or not the mere fact of it. That such information should pop up now, and only now, was another matter. But presumably there would be a speedy explanation. He wanted to ask Jill whether she was surprised. But he didn’t. He mustn’t go blundering about. Whether or not she was surprised, she was considerably stirred up; he could divine that. And he didn’t feel any longer alone with her in the room. He looked up at the Maremma – there wasn’t a single figure in it, but it was in essence a sombre statement about the human condition – and he felt Arnander walk. They talked about him seldom – it had never occurred to him that it was perhaps too seldom – which was the reason, no doubt, of Arnander’s retaining a certain power of joining in when they did. And now Craine felt that he must say something. “It’s not anything staggeringly out of the way,” he tried. “Not as things go. Not, certainly, as they were going in Italy then.”
“Oh, quite. And I’d quit, after all.” Jill spoke dispassionately – so that he was surprised when she added, although in the same dispassionate tone, “Of course he was a most unreliable – a quite thoroughly unsatisfactory – person.”
She had never said anything like this about Arnander before, and for a moment he was disconcerted that it came
from her now without the slightest emphasis. She might have been voicing a piece of knowledge they already held in common: that the vicar’s wife was having a great struggle, or that it had been a wonderful March day.
This was his mind for a moment; then, as so often, he convicted himself of obtuseness. He did, after all, know a good deal about Arnander – and even about Jill’s life with Arnander – that had never come to him in set words. It was Jill’s taking this for granted – taking for granted the play of implication, the depth and volume of silent communication between them – that informed her manner of speaking now. He lay back in his chair, once more at ease. “Artists,” he said, “are often disconcertingly egoistic.”
She laughed – and her amusement didn’t astonish him. It was a joke between them: his disposition when facing tricky ground to find a jumping-off place on some tump of incontrovertible platitude, of solid generality. But now she raised her fine head and gazed seriously into the fire. “Simple egotism wouldn’t have made John what I’ve called him – unreliable and unsatisfactory. Or not both. For with a simple egoist, I suppose, you do at least know just where you are – which is nowhere, in a last analysis. He’s insulated, entirely. But John was an egotist who was very delicately aware of everything around him – and not merely of things that touched him. He knew about the play of your feelings even when they had no concern with him, or he with them. He had antennae, you might say, that he just couldn’t command to let be. It must have been frightfully wearing, poor chap.”
“It certainly must.” Craine realised with dismay that discomfort was attending this conversation. He would have supposed that, when things were all right, your wife’s late husband would be no more awkward a topic than, say, the children she had borne him. But it wasn’t so. You found yourself listening for you didn’t know what and indulging responses coming you didn’t know whence. Jill’s “poor chap” was lingering on his ear now. It sounded considered. And he found himself resenting what had the air of a correction in her speech – as if she had been saying that there had been more to Arnander than he was allowing; that Arnander had been rather a special sort of person, whose quality a solid banker might entirely miss.
Craine’s thought had got as far as this when – so to speak – he stopped and stared at himself. He was strict with his own mind. He didn’t, for instance, license a large disparity between thought and speech, between fantasy and what was conceivable and decent in act. And always, for him, there was a peculiar horror – a terror, almost – in all that ambivalence of the emotions which the age had rediscovered with such an air. It wasn’t so much the large operation of the thing that could shock him. It was rather the little domestic exemplifications. Love and hate revolving on their monstrous axis was one thing. If caught in that awful revolution there would be some sort of dignity at which one might have a chance of clutching. But when it came to small irrational jealousies, to the sense of unappreciated merit, to sulking, as it were, over the breakfast bacon; then, certainly, one’s spiritual state was desperate.
He had supposed long ago that he was through with all danger of a touchy reaction to any of the residual consequences of his wife’s having formerly been married to a genius. But now, for a moment at least, he felt not sure of it. At least his mind had gone off at a useless tangent when it ought to have been considering a specific situation, and how that situation was best to be handled in Jill’s interest. Essentially it didn’t seem to be – this of Arnander’s having had an illegitimate child in Italy long ago – Jill’s business at all. But the circumstances were still obscure to him, and he was wasting time until he got hold of them. “How has this turned up?” he asked. “Just as information, or as an appeal for help, or what? Have we to act?”
She stretched out her hands to the flame between them, and gave him a smile of such confidence that he knew she was going to balance up by saying something mocking. “Are you stepping into the breach, Rupert,” she asked, “and saying ‘This had better be left to me’?”
“That’s possible. It depends on the facts.”
“They’re not abundant, as yet. It’s different, I suppose, with bankers. But among common mortals, cables are apt to be on the skimpy side.”
“No doubt.” He was smiling back at her – and at the same time he was conscious that this again wasn’t quite her style. Whatever the form in which her news had come to her, its impact had, for the moment at least, stirred, opened, quickened he didn’t know what. And how much – he always came back to it – he didn’t know! For instance, with what force, and to what effect, would it strike her that the child whose existence had just been revealed was not merely the son of the dead Arnander but the half-brother of the living Tim and Charles?
He watched her rise and walk across the room to her writing-table.
PLEASE COME AND TAKE SHARE ARRANGING FUTURE LIVING NINO ARNANDER ELEVEN YEARS HE IS NOW IN MY CHARGE BUT NO LONGER POSSIBLE
MARIA FORNI
Craine read the cable and handed it back to Jill at once. He mustn’t seem to be baldly taking command of things. “Who is this Maria Forni?” he asked. “Is she someone you know?”
“I used to know her. She must be an old woman now.”
“Where does she live? There’s no address.”
“Look at the top. The cable comes from Castelarbia. I think that must mean that her husband is still alive. But quite long ago he was an invalid, and she managed the place.”
“You mean they’re landed folk – aristocracy?”
“He’s the Marchese Forni – and what you might call an impoverished landowner.”
“I see.” Craine felt impatience and anger unwisely rising in him. “Or rather I don’t. That sort of Italian isn’t commonly impoverished nowadays. He’s right back on top again – and about the smartest tax-dodger in the world.”
“I don’t think these people are like that.” Jill was looking at him intently, as if trying to decide what prompted the harshness of his tone. “I’ve heard they’re in far from a flourishing way.”
“Then they’re rapacious.” He snapped this out.” Rapacity is the absolute keynote of an impoverished aristocracy.” He barely paused. “Do I understand that this is a woman who made your acquaintance years ago, and that nevertheless this cable is a bolt from the blue?”
Jill nodded. “Just that.”
“Then its motive is mercenary, and its form is an outrage. If this little Nino has waited more than ten years, he could clearly wait another week. The woman could have written, with proper consideration and proper explanations. As it is, she’s patently trying to bounce you into scurrying off to Italy and signing a large cheque. She probably thinks of Master Nino as a scandal you’ll pay to have suppressed.”
Jill was silent for a moment. “It’s possible,” she said gently, “that you’re being unjust.”
“That’s true.” Craine found that he had got to his feet – and now he abruptly sat down again. He was shocked that his conviction of being in the presence of a calculated assault on his wife had betrayed him into harsh speaking. Whatever was the motive of Marchesa Forni, she had disclosed the existence of something to the handling of which there must go quite as much of gentleness as of strength. “Look,” he went on, “we can start—can’t we?—from the quite certain ground that we don’t think in terms of a scandal – that if that’s what’s in this old lady’s hopeful mind, she’s entirely barking up a wrong tree?”
Unexpectedly, Jill laughed – so that, absolutely, there wasn’t a shadow between them. “Darling,” she said, “you should have been Archimedes – or was it Euclid? With your passion, I mean, for starting from self-evident truth. Of course Nino’s not to be kept dark. Tim and Charles would take him in their stride tomorrow.”
“And if it’s best to bring him home, I’ll address him like the chap in the advertisements.”
“’Let me be your father’?” Jill laughed again. “You’ll have to say it in Italian, Rupert. Let me see. I think you’d have to say padr
e adottivo. But I shall be something different.” Suddenly she was thoughtful. “Matrigna? But of course not. Nothing at all.”
“We won’t stumble over words. Now, let me see.” Craine was on his feet again, and this time pacing the room. “We know nothing about the mother, and she may have been a fool. Even so, it’s fifty-fifty that the boy has brains. And he’s younger than Charles. He can have decent English in under two years, and pass Common Entrance as well. And I’d be prepared to bet that Winchester—” He broke off – aware, without dismay, that Jill was once more amused. “That’s all nonsense?” he asked.
She came up to him and kissed him. “Probably. But at least it’s positive, and confident, and . . . and a line. Whereas I’m bewildered – really.” She looked at him candidly. “I don’t know what this strange news is telling me. And, alone, I don’t think I’d know what practical steps to take.” She paused. “But you were talking about an Italian holiday. That means you’ll have time to go with me?”
He nodded. “We can fly out any day. But when we get there, will you let me have first go?”
“At seeing the boy?”
“At seeing the whole set-up. I still think this old woman has behaved in an uncommonly odd way. It may be the impulsive Latin temperament, no doubt. And instant suspicion is, of course, as ignoble as you please—”
“But I don’t please. I’ll be absolutely as suspicious myself as you care to direct. It’s up to the Marchesa to prove that she’s not a monster. So there.”
He made a comical face at her, feeling that she was wonderful. But he held to his point. “And I’ll do a reconnaissance?”
“Agreed.”
A Use of Riches Page 5
