A Use of Riches

by J. I. M. Stewart

  But now she had once more come over to him. “Will you,” she asked quietly, “go up and see Charles? I’m sure he’s not asleep. He’s been hoping – he’s been hoping against hope – that you might really turn up tonight.”

  He smiled at her. “That’s very handsome of him. I’ll go at once.”

  But it was with gravity that she returned his glance – even though it was a gravity that acknowledged gratitude. “I’m afraid you’ll find him disturbed still,” she said. “He had a shock.”

  Craine nodded. “Tim’s injury – and his father’s?”

  Rather oddly, Jill hesitated. “Well, yes,” she said. “These things too.”

  And she didn’t offer to go with him. A servant showed him the way. Charles was sitting up in bed reading, or making a show of reading, Bevis – a romance the provision of which was a singular testimony to the resources of the household. The chamber in which he had been accommodated was vast and shadowy; it would have looked like something on a stage, if it hadn’t more resembled a contemporary illustration to Dickens – one designed to furnish with a maximum of pathetic suggestion the figure of a single forlorn small boy.

  “Rupert!”

  Charles had thrown down his book, jumped out of his gigantic bed, and flung himself into Craine’s arms. Craine lifted him in air, set him down again, ruffled his hair. It was all common form between them – until he realised the boy was convulsively sobbing. It was something Charles hadn’t done for a long time.

  “Bad sort of day, old man.” Craine produced a handkerchief. The tears weren’t of a sort you could pretend not to notice. “But it’s coming straight. Tim’s all right – the old donkey. And so will your father be quite soon, I hope.”

  Charles took the handkerchief and blew his nose. He was making a big effort after self-control. “I’ve got to the fight,” he said with a gulp.

  “The fight, Charles?” Craine was puzzled.

  “Where Mark and Bevis fight in the jungle. But of course, I’ve skipped.”

  “Of course. One does – the fifth time.”

  “It’s the sixth. I think it’s the sixth – counting your reading it aloud.” Charles paused, and seemed to concentrate upon decorous breathing. “It wasn’t even a day,” he said. “It was a night. A very bad sort of night.”

  “A big fire can be pretty startling.” Craine heard his own voice, firm and informative, and was reminded of Nannie at Pinn. “The first time, that is to say. It’s probably not the same a fifth time – or a sixth. Firemen scarcely notice, I suppose.” He sat Charles on the edge of the bed. “There were firemen? They came? I’ve hardly, you know, heard about it yet.”

  Charles nodded. The sense of having something to communicate steadied him. “First some of the foresters. And then the engines from Pontassieve. They came charging up the hill. But it all happened so quickly. They say it was because of the wind. Wasn’t that queer? Because you blow out a candle, after all.”

  “Think of a bellows.”

  “Yes, of course. And is become the bellows and the fan to cool a gipsy’s lust. That’s mysterious, isn’t it?”

  Craine laughed. “Well – it’s complicated. Too complicated, I’ve always thought, for a simple soldier. What was his name? Philo, was it?”

  “It’s mysterious.” Charles wasn’t interested in the dramatic context of his scrap of Shakespeare. “But how important are things, simply because they’re mysterious in that way?”

  “It sounds a big question.” Craine looked curiously at the boy, and realised that he was obscurely grappling with some urgent moral issue. “We might have a go at it at breakfast. You can’t have had much sleep last night.”

  But Charles shook his head impatiently. “Tim hadn’t any doubts. He made up his mind at once.”

  “Tim’s good at that.”

  “Of course, Tim knows more. He hasn’t read more than I have- – at least, I don’t believe he has. But he remembers what they teach him. Virgil. Tendebantque manus. You know that?”

  “Yes, I know that.” Craine saw that Charles’s eyelids were dropping. It should surely be possible to get him off to sleep. “I can say more of it, I think – although it’s a very long time since I learnt it.” He repeated the few lines of the Aeneid, and then, when his memory failed, switched to another piece. It was a kind of cheating, but perhaps that was pardonable. “What about tucking up?” he asked presently.

  “Yes. Yes, please.” Charles remained passive while Craine got him under the blankets. His eyes closed, and he seemed to be asleep. But suddenly they opened again. “Rupert!” he said urgently.

  “Yes, Charles?”

  “She was screaming, you know. Screaming and screaming.”

  “Yes. But it’s all right now.” He put his hand on the boy’s forehead. “It’s all right now.”

  “Yes,” Charles said. “Yes, please.” He sighed. He was really asleep.

  Craine sat beside him for some time, listening to his light breathing. Tim, Charles, Martin, Rachael. He thought of them simply like that. He got up, turned off the light, and went downstairs.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Jill was alone. They might have been two country-house guests, of nocturnal habits, attracted into cautious confabulation in the small hours. But Craine’s first words were aside from such a fancy. “He’s asleep,” he said. He remembered how often he had said it before.

  “I shall be next door – if he wakes up later. But he won’t. Not now that he knows you’re here. There are drinks on the table.”

  “What about you?” Craine didn’t want a drink – but a glance at Jill suggested she might be the better for one. He thought he had never seen her so pale. And he wondered whether this now so startlingly appeared only because they were undistracted and alone together. Or had something happened – some fresh news come – while he was with Charles? He was about to ask her, and then changed his mind. “Brandy?” he said.

  She shook her head. “But have you got a cigarette?”

  It was a familiar reply, and with a familiar movement he produced his case. “Are the old people coming back?”

  “No. Maria Forni has driven home. She was uneasy, poor dear, about having swiped the car for a whole day, out of turn. And I persuaded the Perinos to go to bed. They said various discreet things, and went off. They’re nice, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, they’re very nice.”

  There was a silence. “You came – without knowing?” she asked.

  “Yes. Weidle thought it would be a good idea.”

  She nodded. “He left, didn’t he, in order to send you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And because of something about John’s work? That was why?”

  “That was why.”

  “Otto Frink was wrong? It’s no good?”

  Craine hesitated. But he understood that Jill’s mind had caught up with a great deal. “Well, Frink was rather wrong. The technique is pretty well all there. But the real thing isn’t. Not, that’s to say, if Weidle’s judgment is to be trusted.”

  “Of course it’s to be trusted. You know it is. The thing’s true. It fits too well not to be. John, me, everything.”

  “Yes.”

  Again they were silent. Jill gazed at the tip of her cigarette. Then she turned her eyes to him and he was startled. “But I can’t tell you,” she cried, “how strange the certainty of it makes everything last night!”

  “I don’t yet know much about last night.”

  “You might call it just the queerest of epilogues.”

  He walked across the room to her. “Look, Jill. You must tell me. Now. We can think up a name for it later.”

  She smiled – although her eyes still held some final trouble he felt he didn’t begin to understand. “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I must talk sense.” But still she hesitated. “Charles didn’t come out with much?”

  “I didn’t want him to, if he could be got to sleep. But he did get one thing off his chest. Indeed, as soon as he’d me
ntioned it, he seemed to feel he needn’t stay awake any longer. He said there had been a woman screaming. A woman screaming and screaming.”

  Jill nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Celia.”

  Just for a moment, Craine was actually at a loss. Celia Barfoot, presumably, had not struck him as other than very much a super in the affair. “That wretched girl!” he exclaimed. “Hadn’t he turfed her out?”

  Jill shook her head. “No. Or perhaps he thought he had. John was always able to persuade himself of the strangest untruths. He had, in fact, more or less hidden her away. He may have thought it the same thing.”

  “Yes. I see. You wrote that Tim thought he’d seen her. You hadn’t supposed John would really keep her about, once the boys came.”

  “Well, I was wrong. He had some real infatuation for her, I think. It was something new in him. Of course fornication, a mistress, wasn’t new. But this was different. John had seemed much the same, you know. But I’ve sometimes had a feeling that the whole basis of his personality has changed.”

  “Like his art.”

  “Like his art, it seems.” Jill stubbed out her cigarette. “But his deep attachment to the person of Miss Barfoot proved, after all, not to carry very far.” She paused again, and Craine knew that this irony preluded the core of what she had to tell. “He let her roast, you see, while he rescued his paintings.”

  “Really roast?” The words sounded absurd to Craine even as he uttered them. “Go on roasting – and screaming?”

  “Just that. She might have perished. It was a deliberate act of choice. What they call a judgment of value, I suppose.”

  Disconcertingly, Craine found himself almost moved to laughter – as he might have been by some neat savage farce, some abominable outrage perpetrated upon Pluto or his kind on a screen. “It has given Charles something to chew on,” he said – and noticed that there was nothing remotely like laughter in his voice. “The importance of what he calls mysterious things. Set over against the importance of a screaming girl. Good God!”—he was now staring at Jill round-eyed—”you had this as—as positively a spectacle?”

  “Yes, last night. And certainly as a spectacle. It might have been a stage – a stage upon which the curtain had gone up very suddenly indeed. I hadn’t known that fires – well, worked at that pace.” She looked at him strangely again. “It was in every sense an éclaircissement.”

  “No doubt. But just how did it happen, Jill?”

  It pulled her up once more. “Do you know, I don’t think I can run to much of a narrative? Perhaps it will come back to me more coherently later on. At present it’s a series of flashes, as if it had all happened under the beam of a crazy lighthouse. And I’ve forgotten what you know, what you remember, about Saltino. There is – there was – a range of stables, a stone’s throw from the villa. And a wooden storey added on top.”

  Craine nodded. “Yes, I understand about that. The place John turned into his studio.”

  “And into his own independent establishment, as you know. I went there only by invitation. But that was like old times. So much was like old times – and yet wasn’t. He slept there, as often as not – I mean, since he began to work again. And at one end there was a third storey, more or less. Or not quite that. The studio ceiling was lower, and a sort of attic had been fitted in. I’m explaining this badly, but it’s all not important after all. The things that happened are what’s important.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, it was into this little attic that he must have shoved the girl – shoved her when he didn’t want her to be about. She was prepared to take a lot, I must say. But, of course, people are, quite often – with John.”

  Craine was silent.

  “And she slept there, I suppose, when he couldn’t be bothered with her. Which would be most of the time, poor child. He had this rather new sort of infatuation for her – I believe he thought her ravishingly beautiful – but when a man is working as John was working, it would take a Phryne or a Cleopatra to get much of a look-in. Well, that was the set-up. And then, in the small hours, it was suddenly blazing. There’s another thing I didn’t know about a fire – that it makes such a noise. I woke up imagining that great animals were roaring outside the villa; and I was still half in that dream, I believe, when I looked out of my bedroom window and realised the truth. Or part of the truth. For I didn’t realise that the fire had actually got a hold on the villa itself. That was something I discovered only when I’d run downstairs and got outside. It complicated the next – well, I suppose the next fifteen minutes. There were the boys, and there were our servants – four of them, and all women. Why should we want four servants? How absurd Italy is.”

  “And then?”

  “I had to get them out, of course. And meantime, over the way, was John – rushing up and down his staircase. I haven’t told you about the staircase.”

  “You did actually mention it when you were writing, as it happens. The way up to the studio was by an outside wooden staircase.”

  Jill nodded. “That was it. Like a fire-escape, only not in the least likely to escape a fire itself. Not, of course, that it made the place any sort of death-trap – or not to anybody who was remotely keeping his head. And John couldn’t be said not to be doing that. He was simply hurrying frantically up and down, carrying his precious canvases and everything else to safety. It was strange and alarming, but I had other things to think about. I had begun to realise the pace of it all. The decisive factor was the wind, the really terrible and terrifying wind. It hurled fire all over the place. One might have been in the path of some horrible weapon, of a flamethrower directed by a maniac. I got Tim and Charles into the open air, and then I had to see to the women. They slept quite high up at the back, and there really did seem some possibility of a death-trap in their case. I had to go through the house to get at them. There wasn’t any flame the way I went, and it might have been easier if there had been. I might have seen my way. As it was, there was nothing but darkness and smoke. The lights wouldn’t go on, and altogether it was quite a business. By the time I’d got up to the servants’ rooms I wasn’t at all sure how I was going to get them, or myself, back. Anyway, my rescue expedition ended absurdly. They had climbed down a trellis to the roof of the loggia, and from that lowered themselves without any difficulty to the terrace. When I got to a window, there they were – and they started shouting and waving when they saw me. I can remember feeling absolutely furious with them. And then I climbed down the same way. When I got round to the other side of the house again, the situation had changed drastically.”

  Jill paused as if for breath; she was now pouring out her story rapidly. “Surely,” Craine asked, “John must have got all his stuff away by this time?”

  “No, he hadn’t. He was still behaving in just the same frantic but purposeful way. Something, I suppose, must have held him up for a time. And now there he still was, carrying things down and stacking them near the foot of the staircase. What made the drastic difference was Celia. There she stood, at her attic window, screaming her head off. It wasn’t perhaps unnatural, for there were actually flames licking up behind her. Then the really unnerving thing happened. John stopped and stared up at her – and at once carried on precisely as before. There was a great deal of shouting from not far away, and I knew that help couldn’t be far off. I looked round for it, and what I saw was Charles. It was clear to me in an instant that he had seen precisely what I had seen. I hadn’t time to feel this was unfortunate, for I was suddenly aware that Tim had vanished. And Celia – as Charles has said – was screaming and screaming.”

  Again Jill was silent for a moment, and Craine gently prompted her. “This attic window – was it really high up?”

  “Of course not. The fool had only to lower herself from it and drop. Only she was helplessly in the grip of her hysteria. Then I saw Tim. He was on the roof of the studio. I thought I must be fainting, because the roof seemed to sway. But it was swaying – and flames were coming through.
The hard bit for him must have been getting in at the window. But he managed it. What he did then, I don’t know. Perhaps he punched her on the jaw, perhaps he only slapped her good and hard. Anyway, for a moment he got her passive. And then he must have gathered up every ounce of strength he had. He used it simply to pitch Celia out of the window.”

  There was another silence. It represented a period during which Craine wasn’t very sure if he could trust himself to speak. “Good show,” he said.

  “The wretched girl landed in snow, and got no more than a shaking. Tim, when he jumped, was less lucky. His foot caught in something, and his head came a bad crack on the wall of the stable. But he might have been a great deal unluckier. The studio might have collapsed that way – and buried him and Celia together. As it was, it collapsed at the other end. Mainly, I suppose, it was the roof – three-parts burnt, and simply lifted up and over by the wind. It came down like a great torch hurled to earth by a giant. I hadn’t much time to be horrified, because I was making a dash for Tim. We were rather isolated up there, you know, with most of the villas and the clinic shut up; and actually it was quite surprising how quickly things got organised. It was lucky, too – for John.”

  “Just what happened to John?”

  “I saw nothing of it myself.” Jill was now speaking quietly and carefully, almost as if she were giving evidence in a court. “But one of the foresters told me. Clearly, it took John in a queer moment – a very queer moment, if you add in the knowledge of what those paintings and sketches were. He was counting them.”