A Use of Riches

by J. I. M. Stewart

  He wondered in the first place whether he had himself achieved at all an accurate and adequate impression. To what extent, for instance, was Arnander in command of his own moods? How much fuller and more definite a communication with others could he manage if he were minded to it? Craine couldn’t be certain that the man had even very securely identified his visitor, or understood that visitor’s relationship to Jill. Perhaps then he himself in his recital – here in this restaurant the night before – had altogether understated Arnander’s mere strangeness, and so sent Jill unprepared to the full shock of it. After all, it was she who must take the brunt of comparing then and now. Perhaps, for her, nothing that she could call John Arnander still existed. Perhaps this would be the definitive result of that day’s meeting.

  Certainly it was what he found himself hoping for. He was entitled, in his heart, to do that – but not entitled to go on doing so if his intellect told him that he was thereby deluding himself. And there remained another, and quite different, possibility. It was that Arnander did command his moods, and that yesterday he had, in a sense, been foxing. Whatever his feelings for Jill had been during these absent years, when she was round the corner he wanted her – as he certainly didn’t want the man who had set up as her husband. So he would be a far more positive person today than he had been yesterday. Craine glanced at his watch – an action he was managing to avoid except at substantial intervals. It seemed indeed as if Arnander might have been progressively a more positive person into the late evening.

  The restaurant door opened, and he looked up quickly. It was the porter from his hotel, and he knew the meaning of his appearance. He had arranged to be summoned if a telephone call came through, and in a moment he was crossing the small square. The shuttered façades, uncertainly suspended under a black velvet sky, seemed as flat as a back-drop, so that one almost expected to see them stir in the thin chill wind. He heard a faint sound of cheering, as if his appearance against this décor were being applauded by some audience of interested dwarfs. The sound came from behind the glass doors of the café, where the televised boxing match was providing excitement for a dimly distinguishable fuggy crowd. He passed through the lobby of the hotel and picked up the telephone receiver. What he heard was Marchesa Forni’s voice.

  She spoke, harshly and rapidly, in English. It was the language in which she had contrived grotesque misapprehension before, and he at once tried to change to Italian now. But she would not be deflected, and he had to put up with a message the bare sense at least of which was clear, although the implications of the tone in which it was conveyed baffled him. Jill was staying at Castelarbia for the night. She would be back in Arezzo by noon on the following day. What more the Marchesa said before ringing off was unintelligible, and he had a sense that it wasn’t meant to be otherwise. If the old lady had been for a brief space potentially an ally, she was that no longer. He put down the instrument, thanked the porter, and went slowly up to his room.

  He hesitated for a moment before undressing, for it came to him that he ought to find a car and drive straight over to Castelarbia through the night. But that wouldn’t do; it had been the understanding that Jill should find her own line. If she had been in any way knocked out by the situation, the Marchesa would presumably have said so – and it was an inherently improbable conjecture, anyway. Only the fact that Jill hadn’t herself done the telephoning was queer.

  Thought upon, it proved to be queerness of a numbing order. Half an hour later, and against all his expectations, Craine had fallen into deep sleep.

  But very early he woke up – before the labourers had begun their excavations beneath his window. He had no fancy for a solitary breakfast here, and as soon as he had dressed he left the hotel. There had been a drift of rain at dawn, and the smells around him, although urban, suggested spring. He walked down to the railway station and bought a newspaper; sitting in an Espresso bar he turned over its damp sheets, forcing himself to read. Then he walked back to the square. The front of San Francesco lay in shadow, cold and uninviting. But people were coming and going on the steps, disappearing through, or emerging from, the small leather door in an ant-like activity, straggling and irregular but purposeful. When he had watched for some time he went into the church himself.

  The business of the place already went forward. A little knot of people knelt before the Tarlati chapel, and as he walked up the nave he heard the sanctus bell. At the same time a lay brother was at work with a broom; he plied it in a practised circle round an old man who knelt in isolation before some waxwork contrivance against the west wall. The whole church stood chill and dim, with only a pale light striking through the high disorientated windows beyond the altars. Opposite the waxwork a bustling functionary was opening up a booth; he flicked a feather duster over the authorised guide-books, the beads and bangles and medals, the quattrocento reproductions that were stacked indifferently with the popular iconographic monstrosities of contemporary Catholic devotion. It all seemed to Craine alien and meaningless, like some old mouldering volume in a language to which he hadn’t the key.

  He edged round the worshippers and went into the choir. He sat down on a meagre bench. He was in the presence of a decayed harmonium, badly in need of dusting, and suggesting to his Anglican mind the utmost dismalness of dissent. He was in the presence of a pile of tattered music, several broken chairs, and a tangle of electric flex so perished and casual that one would have expected the high altar to which it led to have gone up in flame long ago. He was in the presence, too, of what he had now for many years considered to be the supreme achievement of Western art.

  It had been apparently without design that he had drifted here – but he supposed that he must really have come in to see if these things were any good; if Piero’s frescoes had any virtue for a London banker in a great state of personal anxiety. And of course they had none at all. If he made a firm effort of the will, he might succeed in exploiting them as a distraction – as in some degree he had managed to do with the same painter’s Magdalen the day before. But in that role they would come, surely, a poor second to the cinema.

  He looked at the Torture of Judas. The officer conducting the interrogation was, in his impassive way, entirely benevolent; it was unexpectedly that he had one hand in Judas’s hair and the other grasping a cudgel. And why did he have a ticket in his cap, like the Mad Hatter? This was something to the explaining of which, surely, the learned had never got round.

  Craine sat for a long time in a sort of nadir of sensation. There had been times when he judged the fine arts to be famous nonsense. But now he just wasn’t attending to them. Perhaps it came to the same thing. And it was sensible enough to feel that he had, at the moment, other things to think about. Or had – if he could think. He didn’t now seem to be doing much in that way either. He was simply sitting in the choir of San Francesco in Arezzo. That seemed about all that could be said.

  And he would have to sit some time longer. He made this discovery presently, just as he had made it on several occasions here before. The Minor Friars were demons – if one might put it that way – for non-stop devotion; and no sooner was a celebration finished in the Tarlati chapel than another began either in the Guasconi or – as now – at the high altar itself. And that made one a prisoner here in the choir, unless – what indeed nobody might much mind – one emerged rather awkwardly as from the wings upon the ritual. Craine didn’t care for that. He would wait here until he could leave without a sense of apology. The choir was cold, but he didn’t mind a little external chill. It matched the way he felt inside.

  He stayed for a long time, with no more than a hovering sense of what was around him – as if, almost, he had been a corpse laid up in some austerely splendid tomb. Even when the mass was over he didn’t stir. An old man entered the choir, and climbed painfully to a low scaffolding against the east wall. He was engaged – whether for purposes learned or artistic or commercial it was impossible to say – in making a water-colour copy of the head of St.
Helena. Then came a woman with a guide-book. Although the morning was not yet far advanced, she had the air of one who is bored and tired. But her face brightened a little when she saw that something was going forward; she paused beside Craine and watched for a moment the old man arranging his brushes. Then she spoke in a cautious whisper. “Is he touching them up?” she asked. “They do look as if they needed it.” Her voice became aggrieved, baffled. “They look so old, so mouldering!”

  The woman drifted away. Italy was letting her down badly, it must be supposed. Craine shifted his seat. He’d take one look at the Death of Adam. He did so, and again without much conscious sensation; only he was obscurely aware of a sort of phantom scene-shifting at the back of his mind, a change of stresses and proportions and perspectives accomplishing itself behind a curtain that might presently rise. He stood up and walked down the long nave of the church, pausing only to put a small sum of money in a box. He had a notion that he owed the place something – and a notion too that he would never enter it again.

  Clear sunlight filled the square. The woman with the guide-book had sat down outside the café and put on dark glasses; through these she was looking about her with regained poise. Craine felt his own vision to be improved – or at least he’d brought back into focus the salient features of his scene. A job he could get down to without delay, for instance; it had oddly slipped from him but now he had hold of it again. He walked over to the hotel, collected some letters and went up to his room. There was still a clatter going on outside. He crossed to the window and looked down. The man with the horse and cart was at work; he had just thrown aside his pick and was shovelling up earth and broken brick; dust rose in clouds around him and changed to gold where it caught the sunshine. Craine turned to his letters. He had opened the first of them when he heard a step – Jill’s step – in the corridor. A moment later she was in the room.

  When she saw him she stopped – as if their moment had come minutes earlier than she had expected. Downstairs, the porter couldn’t have told her he was in the hotel. She made as if to speak, stopped, and sat down on his bed.

  She looked old – not so young as he’d remembered. What first flickered in his mind was just that; it was as if she were an acquaintance he hadn’t seen for some time. Then in an instant this detached response vanished and he was flooded with anxiety, with a shocking fear that she must be ill.

  She was stroking the coverlet where it rose over the pillow. Then her hand became motionless. “I slept with him,” she said.

  “I see.” The words didn’t represent his first impulse. He wanted to cry out, strangely and indecently, that at least she might have enjoyed it, at least not come back looking like this. More strangely and indecently still, there rose before him the face of Jane Petford-Smith, renewed and radiant from her wretched amour, and he felt a bitter helpless anger that sprang from he didn’t know what and directed itself at he didn’t know whom – a mere incoherence of emotion that left him trembling.

  “It wasn’t pity,” she said.

  This time his thought came clear. “I hope it was passion. Otherwise it’s a muddle – a mess.”

  “Passion?” She shook her head. “I don’t think I’d call it that.” Her hand again strayed across the coverlet, and again checked itself. “I was his wife, I suppose.”

  “You’re certainly his wife.”

  She looked at him as if he had said something puzzling. “I didn’t say that,” she said. “Not that I am his wife. Just that I was.”

  “Last night?”

  “In the past, I was meaning. But, yes – last night too.” She raised her exhausted face and gave him a long look. “Have I lost you? It can’t be true. Rupert, it can’t be! It doesn’t make sense.”

  He saw that she hardly knew what she said; that she had come back shocked as from some ghastly accident. And suddenly Arnander was almost physically before him – the blind, meagre man. His anger returned and took direction. “Is it your idea,” he asked, “that you might shuttle . . . commute, as they say?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It used to be all the go, here in Italy. They called it cicisbeism. A husband and a lover.”

  She stood up – and he realised that he had said a meaningless, unforgivable thing. “Of course not, Rupert.” She made a helpless gesture. “But it’s happened so suddenly!”

  “Yes – thanks to that incompetent old woman. I take it she must have approved your coming together again?”

  “Yes, Rupert. She pretty well took the money at the door.”

  The wild joke might have left him gasping – but somehow it drew him towards her unbearably. “And I thought,” he said, “she’d be jealous of any other woman!”

  “I think she is. But she has strong orthodox feelings, I suppose, about who’s who – with husbands and wives, I mean.”

  “No doubt. Do you know that, the day before yesterday, she was all for conspiring with me to keep you ignorant of John Arnander’s existence?”

  “So you told me. But, I suppose, once I was there—” Jill broke off. “But the Marchesa isn’t—is she?—important. What’s important is”—she looked at him in grave desperate appeal—”that I’ve done something final?”

  He found no reason to hesitate for an instant. Jill herself didn’t yet know; her confusion was deep and real. But he knew – knew that an absolute of her character was concerned. “Yes,” he said.

  She looked straight into his eyes. Then, unexpectedly, she smiled – so that his heart was pierced and uplifted at once. “I’m glad,” she said, “that I’m not a fallen woman.”

  There was a roar and a clatter from below. The man with the motor-tricycle was back on the job. Underneath the wall of San Francesco – the very wall on the other side of which, like the symbolic obverse of a medal, the sons of Adam cried out their timeless woe – the common business of Arezzo was being achieved with a bit of heave and sweat. Craine went over to the telephone which stood between their beds. He waited till the noise had stopped. “I suppose they can get me Rome,” he said.

  “Rome?” She had turned to her suitcase, opened it, and begun to pack; and now it was with a flicker of her familiar comradely mockery that she spoke. “Do you want to talk about us to the Pope?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll leave that to Marchesa Forni. But what I won’t leave to her is Arnander’s eyes. I got the impression that only some local man was consulted. Probably his opinion was sound – and even if anything could have been done, it’s now likely to be too late. But you never know. We’ll get hold of their best people here. The world’s best people, if there’s a shadow of doubt.”

  Jill stared at him, and then slowly nodded. “And you’ll find out how to do it?”

  “Of course. It’s the least I can do for him.”

  He picked up the receiver. Quietly, so as not to disturb him, she continued to pack.

  PART TWO

  THE ARNANDERS

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Do you remember,” Charles Arnander asked, “how I used to be terribly keen on clouds?”

  “Yes, I remember.” Tim Arnander glanced tolerantly at his younger brother. Charles, he was thinking, had immature notions of what constituted a large passing of time. Although of course – and Tim’s gaze went back to the veranda of the clinic upon which it had been fixed – quite recent parts of one’s life can seem a long way off when important and transforming events have happened since. “But what about it?” he asked. “What makes you think of your old clouds now?”

  “Simply that it wouldn’t be any good – not, I mean, here in Italy. Because there aren’t any.”

  “That’s just a matter of the season. At other times of year there are tremendous storms here. Mummy was talking about them this morning. They go growling and muttering through these hills.”

  “From crag to crag leaps the live thunder?”

  “That sort of thing. There’s a pine tree behind this villa that’s been blasted by lightning. So if we come b
ack to Vallombrosa at Christmas you can have clouds to your heart’s content.”

  “Shall we come back?”

  “I suppose it depends on how Daddy gets on.” Tim gazed out into distance, frowning. There was a tremendous view from the terrace. That was one reason why their villa was considered the grandest here. You can’t deny – Tim said to himself – that’s it’s useful, this being rich enough to have what you like. Only it would be dangerous if what you liked wasn’t really at all nice, or the thing. Aloud, he said: “Of course there’s to be the second operation. Then we’ll know. But I wish we could have Daddy at Pinn.”

  Charles straightened himself on the chair in which he had been lounging. “But it wouldn’t be proper. Would it?”

  “Not if Rupert were there. The whole situation’s difficult.”

  “I suppose it is.” Charles let his attention wander – as he was prone to do when talk of difficulties turned up. He got to his feet and strolled to the edge of the terrace. There was a sheer drop – it must be hundreds of feet, he thought – and beyond this the sunlit valley lay like a great golden beaker. He stretched out his arms as if proposing to pick up the whole spectacle and drink; discreetly switched this to a gesture of mere laziness; and wandered back to his brother, gazing upwards as he did so at the line of dark trees behind the villa. “Thick as autumnal leaves,” he said. “Tim – you know? Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa. And here we are. Isn’t it extraordinary?”