A Palace of Art

by J. I. M. Stewart

  Having achieved this somewhat confused water-imagery, Domberg slipped into gear and drove down the hill.

  As he drove down, a girl walked up. She might compassionately have been called a stoutly-framed girl – so stoutly-framed that it was surprising she tackled the acclivity as buoyantly as she did. When she paused momentarily – as she was observed to do now – it was for the purpose, not of taking breath, but of disentangling a double leash of juvenile fox-hounds surrounding her. She must be puppy-walking, Octavius Chevalley thought – thus recalling, dimly beyond an urban adolescence, a childhood in some contact with rural pursuits. The activity made her, he conjectured, a red-faced daughter of a red-faced gentry – and not, as her general tenue might suggest, the equally red-faced daughter of some boor or hind.

  This social discrimination was, no doubt, insignificant, but may have been in Domberg’s mind too when he made rather a ceremonious business of slowing his car to a crawl. The girl struggled with her canine charges, among whom some indiscipline appeared to have broken out. She cursed them heartily, and seconded this with physical exertions and contortions which made her, for the time, chiefly a spectacle of generous gluteal muscles sheathed in faded jeans. She straightened up, to reveal her high complexion as balanced by light blue eyes, almost flaxen hair, and a flash of teeth not merely perfect but deserving to be called imposing as well. Chevalley found himself in imagination stripping off the jeans and everything else on the spot. That this state of mind was not lascivious in intention appeared in the fact that he immediately dowered the pinkish object thus conjured up with a tiara, several pearl necklaces, and an answeringly pinkish cloud upon which to perch. The result might have been a spectacle thrown on canvas or ceiling by Rubens himself. It was at least more agreeable than a globular milkmaid by Cuyp.

  The girl with the puppies waved the car on, decisively and with a hint of impatience which she apparently saw no need to dissimulate. Chevalley, although his own glance at her had been a little too amused, was disappointed at not seeming to receive the briefest glance in return. She was, after all, an abounding Flanders mare of a wench. Domberg offered her a grave salute. The car purred decorously past. The six puppies yelped at it derisively.

  ‘Well, there you are,’ Domberg said. ‘You’ve seen her.’

  ‘The village Juno? Or one of Diana’s nymphs alarmed, and about to produce a thundering displacement in a forest pool?’

  ‘The daughter, Octavius. Your high-born maiden from her palace-tower. And now I remember what she’s called. Gloria. Gloria Montacute.’

  ‘What a God-awful name!’

  Domberg responded to this consciously coarse ejaculation with a curious glance. In a not particularly interesting way – he reflected – there was something slightly problematic about Chevalley. Perhaps he hadn’t coped too well with what a current jargon called the identity-crisis of adolescence. Certainly he did at times appear to dislike himself, although at other times he could be rather amusing. And to dislike oneself struck Domberg as an incomprehensible folly- – particularly in one who has been fortunate enough to secure a job in a first-rate firm. So Domberg followed his swift look with a disapproving silence. They had passed through the gates of Nudd Manor before he spoke.

  ‘She’s cutting her mother’s party,’ he said. ‘What do we learn from that?’

  Chapter Two

  HARRY CARTER’S THREE-PIECE SUITE

  Gloria continued to climb, first up the dusty secondary road and then, when she had passed through a field-gate, across deserted pasture towards a hazel spinney. The puppies, unconscious of the serious pursuits to which their adult lives were to be devoted in such surroundings, circled and tumbled innocently at her feet. It was late afternoon but the day had been hot; it was still warm even in the airy beech-wood beyond the hazels; had a forest pool indeed presented itself, Gloria might have been tempted to plunge, hounds and all. As it was, she strode straight through, to emerge upon a stretch of bare hill, down-like in character, upon the ridge of which stood a ruined barn.

  It was the first untidy object her path had encountered. At one end a stretch of battered brick and mortar survived, but in the main it had been a weatherboard and thatch structure, and this – whether accidentally or in an exuberance of rural malice – had at some late period been burnt down. An oblong of charred uprights suggested the carious maw of a prehistoric monster of the wold – or perhaps, to a more exotic imagination, the surviving evidences of a minor auto-da-fé. This latter fancy would have been supported by the appearance here and there of bits and pieces of abandoned agricultural machinery suggestive of preliminary torments conscientiously carried out. What might have been tightly faggoted fuel for the godly bonfire was effectively represented by cubes of straw, gathered and compacted by ingenious mechanical means, hut then abandoned in disordered heaps like the building-blocks of a bored child. Some of these had been shifted since Gloria’s last visit here. They had been formed into a semi-circular breastwork as if by an imagination having cowboys and Indians in mind, or perhaps with the more practical object of commanding the approaches to the place from a view-point itself concealed. Gloria was directing upon this innovation a thoughtful regard when a figure rose up behind the barricade and vaulted it. The figure was that of a young man.

  ‘There, now!’ the young man said. He spoke as if resuming an argument from a moment before. ‘You’ve come.’

  ‘And so have you, Harry.’

  ‘Of course I have. Although I had a chance, as a matter of fact, of playing for the Fifteen.’

  ‘Then it was stupid of you not to take it.’ If the young man called Harry had expected approbation or gratitude he was disappointed. ‘It’s pretty good – being asked to play for your college in your first term.’

  ‘Even a grotty agricultural college?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I’ll bet you could give any Oxford college points. And you’ll feel a fool if they find somebody else. There’s only one full back in a rugger team.’

  ‘Oh, I expect they’d let me shove in the scrum. I can shove quite hard when I want to.’

  ‘I expect you can.’ Gloria regarded her rural admirer – for it was this that Harry Carter might be called – attentively. He was her own age, the younger son of the tenant of the manor farm, and had been one of the facts of life – although not an absorbing fact – during the couple of years in which he had doggedly worked to get his college entrance. Having gained it, he had gained confidence as well – so that one didn’t know in what direction he mightn’t now show rather more of the quality than he ought to. This made Harry interesting, as did his having lately grown quite as much a man as his elder brother.

  Gloria could remember peeping through a hedge (for she had a country girl’s habits) and seeing the elder brother get some sort of wrestler’s grip on Harry and push his head into a cattle trough. This exciting event wouldn’t happen again. Or, if it did, it would be the other way round. On this hot September afternoon Harry had rolled up his shirt-sleeves to the armpits, and beneath the skin, golden-bronze as barley, his muscles rippled pleasingly. ‘But you must go on being a full back, all the same,’ Gloria said seriously. ‘You must practise your place kicking like anything. Particularly from near touch and on your awkward side. It’s what counts most of all in the end.’ Gloria paused, and saw that Harry was accepting this counsel attentively; indeed, he was looking at her with the brightest interest. This gratified her very much. Although not a visionary girl, she suddenly saw him at Twickenham, bringing off the vital conversion in the last fifteen seconds of the match. Against France, she decided – for there was an additional and patriotic glory in that, absent from merely defeating Scotland or Wales.

  ‘Come and sit down,’ Harry was saying. ‘These bales are quite dry, and I’ve made a kind of sofa out of them.’ He held out a reassuringly brotherly hand. ‘A couple of chairs too, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘That’s very industrious of you.’ Gloria wondered what she would have found to say i
f Harry’s second announcement had been: ‘And a perfectly enormous double bed.’ She knew, but did not approve, several young men who would run to a joke like that. Harry didn’t make venturesome conversation. It wasn’t, she suspected, his conception of going seriously to work.

  But now Harry was looking not at her but at the puppies. They had flopped down on the straw-strewn floor of the barn, and two or three of them were putting on an ostentatious turn as deserving canines in distress. Their tongues lolled out and their fat little tummies were behaving like bellows.

  ‘Humbugs,’ Harry said. ‘But they’d do with a drink – a small one – all the same.’

  ‘No water.’

  ‘Yes, there is. I got the ball-cock working in that rusty trough outside. Had a wash, as a matter of fact.’ Harry held out, with conscious pride, remarkably clean hands. ‘An old pannikin, too. Just half a jiffy’

  Harry vanished from the barn – or round the corner of what remained of it – so that Gloria was virtuously left deserted in favour of a job of work that ought to be done. She didn’t know whether this was engaging in Harry, or merely clever. There was a clatter and a swish of water – and then he was back, laughing and triumphant, with the brimming pannikin balanced before him. For a moment there seemed to be a great deal of sunlight in his hair. He’d taken to wearing his hair student-length, and it too gave the effect of a very recent wash. Gloria studied him appraisingly as he stooped among the puppies and straightened up again. Twickenham was still in her mind. Harry’s shoulders were broad but not heavy. His hips were admirably slim.

  He in turn, she saw, studied her. Under a fallen lock of the hair – dark chestnut hair – his dark eyes were very bright. She wasn’t able to suppose that he was visualising her in any situation, appropriate to her sex, which at all corresponded to an international rugger match. But at least Harry’s gaze didn’t give, somehow, the effect of a stare. And now he had turned away again, walked across to his schoolboy stockade, and was peering over it with all the caution that an expected cloud of redskin arrows might prompt.

  ‘Not a soul in sight,’ Harry announced decisively. ‘Come on.’

  The sofa and twin chairs were a fact, and the effect was rather touchingly domestic. Being built up out of cubes of straw, they had the appearance of the sort of three-piece suite, chunky and over-stuffed, displayed in the windows of cheap furniture shops. Gloria liked them at once. There was nothing of the kind at Nudd. And the whole effort was an unexpected flight of fantasy on Harry’s part.

  ‘Sit down,’ Harry commanded, and Gloria sat down – on the sofa because it might hurt Harry’s feelings if she chose one of the chairs. The action unfortunately hurt her, since jeans are very inadequate protection against the spiky assault that baled straw can contrive. But she bore this stoically, and a wriggle presently caused the agony to abate. Harry sat down beside her, at what appeared to be a precisely – indeed, premeditatedly – calculated interval of eighteen inches. And for this a motive appeared at once. He reached behind him and produced a paper bag. ‘I brought you some chocolates,’ he said with satisfaction; and from the bag produced a sizeable box. Gloria saw that Harry was not a sophisticated purchaser of such things. Quantity rather than quality had been his idea. But now, without the idle preliminary ceremony of handing her his handsome gift, he tugged the box open and set it down between them. ‘Have one of the round ones,’ Harry ordered.

  Gloria, although she knew she oughtn’t to eat chocolates, had one of the round ones. Harry, remarking that for every couple of chocolates he ate it was easy to do a fast quarter-mile, took a round one too.

  ‘Oh, Gloria!’ Harry suddenly exclaimed. ‘Gloria, you are the most gorgeous girl!’

  Harry had given ‘girl’ a rustic roll of the tongue so attractive that Gloria didn’t at all resent the fact that this spontaneous outburst was a rehearsed effect. The mere alliteration would have told one that – in addition to which (she reflected sagely) Harry Carter would never make much of an actor. So now she didn’t merely take another chocolate she didn’t particularly want. She spoke with marked kindness as well.

  ‘Harry, dear, don’t be an ass. And tell me about things. Is it very hard work?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind that!’ Harry, if checked, was cheerful. ‘There are a couple of idiots from public schools, and half a dozen chaps from higher up their grammar schools than I ever got. But they’ve got no practical know-how. They wouldn’t know a pig’s behind if you shoved it at them.’ Harry paused in self-appreciation. This was about as far in coarse speech as he would go with a girl like Gloria, he appeared to be saying – and it was a bond between them that he could go so far. ‘So I expect I’ll make do.’

  ‘I’m sure you will. But what about after that? Is there any chance of getting a farm?’

  ‘Not an earthly. I’d need forty thousand flat.’

  ‘I suppose that is rather a lot of money.’

  ‘I suppose it is.’ Harry gave a satiric laugh, and accompanied it with a mocking glance. This struck Gloria as quite a complicated response from so simple a youth.

  ‘What about the manor farm? If my mother—’

  ‘Your ma could do nothing about it, my dear. Any of my father’s sons will have a title to the tenancy. But Ted’s the eldest and Ted will take it. I could wring his bloody neck.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Gloria, of course, didn’t really suppose so at all. She was astonished by a sentiment so lacking in fraternal regard. Here was just another of the gaps between Harry’s world and her own.

  ‘So it sounds like Australia, my dear.’ Harry had taken a fancy to this form of address. He probably thought of it as affectionate without being familiar. ‘A wonderful country, some say. A man came and talked about it at the Young Farmers. With ciné-films.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you need that forty thousand there too?’

  ‘I’ve got an uncle well established on the land. He’d see me in. Hard work, of course. But I’m up to that.’ For the moment, Harry’s voice had the ring of perfect truth. ‘Gloria, do you think you’d like Australia?’

  ‘I don’t know enough about it to say.’

  ‘Gloria, dear, if you and I—’

  ‘No, Harry. It isn’t sensible.’

  Harry was silent, as if really dashed. One of the puppies appeared to have resumed panting. Only it wasn’t the puppy. It was Harry himself, to whose breathing something was happening. Gloria reflected on whether she ought to feel alarmed.

  ‘Take the big one in the middle,’ Harry said in a perceptibly changed voice.

  ‘No, thank you.’ Gloria had looked at the big one in the middle and judged that it would be full of unpalatable marzipan. ‘I don’t think I want another just at the moment.’

  ‘Do as you’re told.’

  This was Harry going into a routine. The sequence was masculine command, feminine disobedience, masculine discipline. It wasn’t exactly sadistic, she supposed. It was just that Harry’s notions of courtship, being what her mother would have called plebeian, included a kind of skylarking rough-and-tumble. The ritual had amused and excited her once or twice, although Harry’s hand was heavier than he knew. But she wasn’t going to dig it again now, or perhaps again ever. So she stopped him, not by dodging (since she knew there was no eluding Harry’s lightning grab) but with a straight look.

  ‘We’re not kids, Harry.’ She said this by way of easing the situation, but for some moments Harry didn’t respond. He looked first baffled and furious and then sheepish and awkward, so that she wondered if she liked him in the least. After this, however, he grinned cheerfully, picked up the big middle chocolate, bit it in half, and held up the other half to her mouth.

  ‘Halves,’ Harry said, and watched with alert pleasure as Gloria’s notable teeth accepted this token of peace. Then he threw himself back on the sofa (demolishing a large part of it in the process) in an admirable posture of relaxed ease, so that Gloria did for a moment find herself wondering whether he was not a bit of an actor after all
. He cocked his thumbs into the band of his breeches and spread his fingers over a belly as flat as a shove-halfpenny board. Down this vista, and from beneath a further tumble of chestnut hair, he contrived to gaze at Gloria with the lazy satisfaction that a man might bend upon a submissive six months’ bride. ‘What’s on at the big house?’ he asked. ‘Another of your ma’s parties?’

  ‘Why do you insist on calling my mother my ma?’

  ‘To make fun of you, my dear.’ Harry’s laugh was that of one who has regained control of a situation. ‘A party for looking at all those pictures and things?’

  ‘Yes, of course. All our parties are like that. I was passed by some of the people coming up. In a car, I mean. A man who buys and sells pictures, whose name I forget. And a younger one with him.’ Gloria was not clear why she was going into all this. ‘The younger one didn’t see I was looking at him. But he was looking at me—’

  ‘He had no business to be looking at you at all. But just how was he looking at you?’

  ‘As if I was a ludicrous spectacle, I suppose.’

  ‘Just point him out to me some time, Gloria, and I’ll belt him till he snivels.’

  ‘And won’t that be gay?’ It came into Gloria’s head as she made this mocking response that Harry meant what he said. She wasn’t clear about him as a husband, but he would make a good guard dog. ‘I’ll have to be going back,’ she said – and as she spoke stood up and looked down at him. His shirt was open over a small dark nipple, and there were coils of dark hair on his chest. ‘Walk down with me,’ she said. ‘You can take one lot of those tiresome animals.’

  From his supine and super-extended position upon the straw, and without moving a leg an inch or stirring his thumbs from their negligent cache, Harry in slow motion came upright at the hips. It was childish, Gloria thought, to be so proud of one’s belly muscles. Or perhaps not. To enjoy thus possessing oneself – and in ways that would stop happening when one ceased to be young – was perhaps more sensible than to enjoy possessing a whole palaceful of objets d’art.