A Use of Riches

by J. I. M. Stewart

  “Is it?” Tim was still watching the clinic. “You can write an essay about it when you get back to school. Poets I thought about on my holidays.”

  “And that line – it’s mysterious. Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa. It is mysterious, isn’t it? You agree?” Charles asked his question with anxiety.

  “Certainly it’s mysterious. It would continue mysterious however tiresomely you went on spouting it.” As usual, Tim was fair even when irritated. “But it isn’t more mysterious than Virgil. Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.”

  “I suppose that’s all right,” Charles said doubtfully. And he repeated at once: “Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa. Tim, don’t you think this is a most extraordinary country?”

  “I like it very much.”

  “No – I mean extraordinary. The journey didn’t seem to me through part of the ordinary world at all. The towns on the hills, the poplars and the cypresses, the light—” Charles broke off. He was in a state of simmering imaginative excitement. “All really there,” he went on, “but more like what you just miss seeing before you go to sleep.”

  “I’ve told you nothing of that sort happens to me before I go to sleep.” Tim’s impatience persisted. Virgil was much more to him than stuff to construe, and he would grow up with quick responses to whatever life offered him. But there was something in Charles – an imprudent degree of involvement with the touch and sight and sound of things – that it was his instinct to hold off. “Here he comes,” he said.

  Their father had appeared on the veranda opposite. He was fully dressed today, and they knew that it was something he had insisted on. His eyes were still bandaged. There was a nurse at his elbow; she guided him to a chair and began to arrange his pillows. But he had hardly sat down when he waved her away with a quick impatient gesture.

  “Have you noticed?” Charles asked. “He doesn’t like her.”

  “Sister Barfoot? No, I don’t think he does. Perhaps she won’t come with him, after all.”

  “Come with him?”

  “Over here – when he’s ready to leave the clinic. She’s a private nurse, you know, and the idea is she’ll stay on for a time. She’s frightfully pretty.”

  “Yes, isn’t she.” Charles agreed quickly, but only because he thought Tim’s remark strange. It was like a clock striking unexpectedly and telling you the hour is later than you’d supposed. “Shall we go across?” he asked.

  “Better wait till we’re called. Mummy’s over there now. She’ll come out in a minute. You can see he’s waiting for her now.”

  “Yes, you can.” Charles had sat down again, and now he lay back in his chair with a careful appearance of relaxation. “Wouldn’t you say,” he asked, “that Daddy’s frightfully dependent on her?”

  Tim nodded. “He hasn’t much use for anybody else. But that’s quite right, you know.”

  “I suppose it is. But aren’t you jealous of him?”

  “Yes.” Tim, although he disliked the question, didn’t hesitate to give it a straight answer. “Rupert said there must be an awkward period of readjustment all round.”

  “Rupert says quite absurd things. But he’s the most civilised person we know.”

  “He’d certainly never wave anybody away like that.”

  Charles sat up again. “But you must remember Daddy’s had a frightful time.”

  “I’m not criticising.”

  “Are you sure?” Charles was challenging. “What do you honestly think of Daddy?”

  “Oh, shut up!” Tim was now really disapproving.

  “I think it’s a proper question. It’s not as if he’d always been there. He’s new. So one has to make up one’s mind.”

  “I think perhaps you’re right.”

  “But probably one oughtn’t to talk it out in a hurry.” Charles often executed rapid retreats before his brother’s open-mindedness. “Not while he’s almost quite new. Not that it isn’t months and months since we were first told about it. Why are the doctors so slow?”

  “There has to be rather a long interval between the first operation and the second. And there was delay over the first. Don’t you remember? Far the best man to do it was in New York. But Daddy wouldn’t go.”

  “Daddy was difficult at first – queer, almost?”

  “I think so. Certainly he wouldn’t go to America. And Rupert had a tremendous business persuading the surgeon to come to Italy. The second operation is going to be just as difficult. But fortunately the right man for it is in Rome. Look, there’s Mummy.”

  Charles sprang up. “And she’s waving us to go across.”

  “Then come on.”

  Although it was Charles who was eager, it was Tim who had been waiting, and who already led the way. He strode forward – his legs were really lengthening – with his lips compressed and the frown that gathered on his forehead on stiff occasions. They were a family, the Arnanders, and it was proper that they should be together. But the thing shook him, all the same, every day. And he said to himself openly that his heart was at Pinn, with Rupert.

  And they weren’t, this time, together for very long. Almost at once, their mother went away – leaving the boys sitting on the veranda, on either side of their father’s knees. Tim was displeased by an action that had too much design in it. It had happened two or three times before, this manoeuvre like a match-making, a leaving together of persons whom it is designed to make lovers. Tim felt his body go stiff, and he knew that if he wasn’t careful his voice would go stiff as well. But that wouldn’t do; it wouldn’t be at all fair. For their mother was right in the efforts she made to bring them together. Tim had it clear in his head that his father wasn’t ever going to be really important to him, although it might be different with Charles. But he knew that, on the other hand, he might be important to his father – and that his mother might much want him to be. His father was certainly short of human beings who meant much to him.

  And there was something more. Their mother might well feel the need to share the burden so suddenly reimposed on her. For there was something here that Tim had no difficulty in seeing. Presumably it was a joy, getting back a husband from the dead; presumably it was a joy, even when you had one already. About that, Tim didn’t certainly know; it was outside his range. But he did know that you had only to look at John Arnander to realise that he was a burden and a problem and a responsibility as well. Most of all, perhaps, a responsibility. That, at least, was how Rupert would feel about it: Rupert who, quite early on, had said abruptly that Arnander was a man in a million. Tim didn’t at all suppose he was a father in a million, or that his mother’s anxiety to bring them together proceeded from any calculation tending that way. Although again it might be different with Charles, there was no doubt about himself. His mother would be using him to help with some sort of support of his father – distinctly that, and not the other way about.

  As Tim arrived at this perception, he felt his stiffness leave him. He’d resent, in this relation, being planned for. But he didn’t mind being used. And provided it was clear that he carried on with Rupert Craine as a stepfather, he didn’t at all mind having a shot at being John Arnander’s real son. Having got thus far, he felt prompted to speak. “It’s a perfectly gorgeous day,” he said.

  Most unexpectedly – for he had never done it before – his father laughed. “Do you know what you sound like, Tim? A civil servant – a high-up civil servant – who has cleared what’s called his ‘in’ tray and feels that he can conscientiously look out of the window.”

  Charles giggled delightedly. He couldn’t have made much of the joke, but he liked his father’s voice: the foreignness on the surface, the faint cockney underneath. Tim didn’t smile. He knew that his father, from the darkness in which he still lived and must, perhaps, go on living, was exercising some special power that went along with his being not an ordinary person. He was exercising it rather clumsily, as if for long he hadn’t exercised it at al
l. Tim knew that it was something to be welcomed. He understood – although, in fact, nobody had put it to him that way – that his father would recover his sight in vain, unless he recovered other possessions as well: faculties or powers such as flickered in him when he said these rather raw perceptive things. Understanding this, Tim felt that any lead must be followed, any sort of talk kept up. “And what about Charles, Daddy?” he asked. “What does he sound like when he talks?”

  “Something fizzy. It might be champagne, or it might be lemonade.”

  “And what do we think about you?” Charles almost shouted this – shouted it through laughter, so that Tim looked at him in reproof. Charles was going full tilt into this new relationship, just as, at home, he would take those reckless headers into the swimming-pool.

  “Yes, what do you think about me?” Their father had spoken after a moment’s silence. But it wasn’t that he had been disconcerted by Charles. It was simply that his mind had taken a dive after their mother; he was wondering where she had gone, when she would come back. “Charles, what do you think I’m like?”

  “Well, we don’t know what you look like, to begin with. It depends on your eyes.” Charles was so wound up that he let himself be checked only for a second by the way Tim froze at this. “But you’re small, with a very thin neck; and you’re almost bald, and there are wrinkles on your skull. So I think you’re like a tortoise. Your head comes out – an ageless sort of head. It moves to and fro, and takes in an awful lot, and then goes in again under a very hard shell.”

  “There’s something else about a tortoise, that fits in.” Their father’s voice was suddenly harsh. “A tortoise moves intolerably slowly. And so do I. God, how slowly!”

  “It isn’t true.” Tim hadn’t meant to speak; and now he didn’t know whether there was warmth or coldness in his voice. “Of course I know that the doctors need a lot of time. That’s slow. It has to be. But you’ve come a long way, all the same – for instance, just to be sitting talking with us now; just to be bothering with us.”

  “You’re quite right, Tim. And I think it’s a habit you’re forming.”

  “A habit?”

  “Being quite right – or the next thing to it.” Their father’s voice was gentle again, and quite untouched by irony. “Stick to it.”

  There was a silence. John Arnander had a small glass on a table beside him. He reached for it and drank. Tim didn’t know whether it was medicine or an aperitif, but he noticed – now for the second or third time – the certainty with which his father’s hand found it, picked it up, and set it down again. There was satisfaction in watching the small action performed – and moreover, although so small, it was somehow rather largely significant.

  “Supposing I see.” Arnander’s voice had changed again. This time it was spuriously casual, was almost comically like Charles’s voice when approaching something serious. “Supposing I see. Shall I be able to jump on a bicycle and ride away on it? Or shall I always wobble a bit, even if I don’t take positive tumbles? That’s the question, you know. Tim, you understand me?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “Good boy. It’s a matter of what happens to acquired skills.” Arnander’s voice rose again. “It’s quite devilishly a matter of that.” He paused. “I was in very poor fleece, you know.” He paused again. “Until your mother came. You see, I’d thrown up the sponge. And sheep get in desperately poor fleece when they do that. I don’t know how it is with tortoises.”

  Charles’s laughter rang out across the veranda – to be checked as his father’s hand came to rest for a moment on his head. “Sorry,” Charles said. “Am I disturbing the other patients?”

  “Bother the other patients. There aren’t any about, are there?”

  “I can’t see any.”

  “And that tiresome English nurse – she’s cleared out?”

  “Yes. She’s probably making herself tea.”

  “Then for two or three minutes we can be serious. That’s what your mother would like: that we should be extremely serious – the three Arnander men.” Arnander raised a hand – so that it was exactly as if he had seen Tim’s lips coming firmly together. “Wait. Wait until you hear what I say. It’s about painting. Neither of you is going to be a painter, thank goodness. Of course I expect that Tim, when he goes up—isn’t it?—to New College, will take with him a nice talent for sketching in oils. But that isn’t painting. Charles, poor chap, will never do more than swim in ink. So there’s no call to exhibit painting to you – well, in glowing colours.”

  “You mean,” Tim asked, “as inspiration, and tremendous joy in making things, and so on?”

  “It’s an immense labour of learning. You know, Tim, what faces a Chinese if he wants to learn to read and write? Painting’s worse. There are not thousands of small intricate things that you must learn, but millions. You have to paint and paint – until you’re blind, pretty well.”

  “You mean,” Charles asked, “that it’s frightfully technical?”

  “It’s frightfully technical. You have the void and you have chaos: a square of canvas, say, and a mess of pigments. And you have to go ahead. It’s a great sweat, and I’ve often thought it astonishing that painters have any energy to spare to talk about it. But they do, endlessly – about all the brute hard work of it. What they don’t much talk about, because it’s useless and perhaps dangerous, is the something else.”

  “There is something else?” Charles asked gravely. He was looking at his father’s shrouded face round-eyed.

  “There’s the small still thing at the centre, the mystery it’s all about. Nobody has ever so much as caught a glimpse of it – not of the thing itself. But there are shadows of it. And one of the shadows is all that one can hope to have the tremendous luck to meet.”

  “A person?” Tim asked in a low voice.

  “Yes. And the queer thing is that it may be so without one’s very clearly knowing it. A person may be carrying the mystery, whom you think of as carrying no more than some of the fairly common desirable things of life.” Arnander was silent for a few moment. “A priest,” he said, “carrying the chalice. And you treat him as a wine-waiter bringing a sound claret.”

  The boys sat quite still. Neither of them could have moved a muscle. Then their father turned his head as if listening. “Where’s your mother?” he asked.

  “I think she’s gone over to the villa,” Tim said. “But she’ll be back in no time. Can we get you anything?”

  “Can we get you Sister Barfoot?” Charles asked this apparently as a slapdash means of relieving tension. And he added – as he wouldn’t have done except from the same motive: “Tim says she’s frightfully pretty.”

  “No doubt she is.” Their father received this indifferently. “But she’s a nuisance, all the same. The only mistake your mother ever made.” He drained his glass. “Shall we go back to being rather serious?”

  “Yes, certainly.” Tim spoke at once. He still felt sure that he was going to go on observing his father from a distance. But this didn’t mean that he mightn’t grow to like him. Some things he liked already. John Arnander didn’t have the common affectation of treating young people absolutely as if they were grown up. But he didn’t talk down or patronise either. And his jokes – although they might have something lurkingly cruel in them – were jokes and not facetiousness.

  “You said I’d come a long way, Tim. That’s frank and true. You might have added that it wasn’t under my own steam. The question seems to be whether it’s likely to be worth it. All round, I mean. Because there’s a heavy bill.”

  For a moment Tim was astray – thinking of what it cost, for instance, to bring a surgeon across the Atlantic. Then he understood. “There’s Rupert,” he said coldly. “And the children.”

  “Exactly.” Their father spoke unemotionally. But he had turned his head and was listening again – almost, Tim thought, as a man might do who feels the approach of danger. “I suppose,” he asked abruptly, “you’ve been told all abou
t how it began? Rupert will have told you all about the bridge, and so forth?”

  “Yes, of course.” Charles answered eagerly. “Rupert told us – although we knew a little already. He told us how you volunteered for something frightfully tough—”

  “A sort of Commando job,” Tim interrupted.

  “—and how you were badly knocked out, trying to carry it through.”

  There was another silence, and then John Arnander nodded his bandaged head. “So I was,” he said. “Very badly knocked out indeed. And that’s all Rupert said?”

  “Yes. He didn’t explain what happened afterwards. He said you might care to talk about it one day, but that we mustn’t expect you to. He told us about a friend of his, a fighter pilot with a wonderful record in the Battle of Britain, who would never say a word about the war.”

  “I see.” Arnander’s hands had been on the arms of his chair. Now they rose restlessly in the first groping action that Tim had seen him perform – rose, and then dropped idly on his knees. “But you are both old enough, I think, to realise that this noble silence has to cover quite a lot?” He paused. “You haven’t, I imagine, many friends whose fathers have let their mothers marry again and have children, and then bobbed up on them out of the blue – or the dark?” He had hesitated on the last word – and now he made another pause. But the boys said nothing. They were looking straight into one another’s eyes, as was their habit in crisis. “The fact is,” their father went on, “that if you are to accept me at all, it must be as the sort of person I am. It’s hateful and vulgar to talk about being an artist. Still, an artist I am. And my art and myself are one thing. That’s a hard saying – but there’s more truth in it than in your Rupert’s tactful picture of me. I’ve always been far too interested in that one thing – far too absorbed in it, commanded by it – to be any sort of Horatius when a bridge comes along. Or to be any sort of husband when a wife comes along, or any sort of father when sons come along.” His voice had risen and gone harsh again. “Or even to behave with ordinary responsibility under the impact of a dire calamity. Tim, what’s the disposition, above all others, that a boy wouldn’t choose in his father?”