A Palace of Art

by J. I. M. Stewart

  Guise’s eye was the only particularly notable thing about him – or was so to those who did not also remark a certain precision of movement, and notably of the hands, which indefinably failed to be butler-like in character. The eye would have suggested nothing but a commonplace concern with the tangible and visible surfaces of life but for a perceptible steadiness and concentration of regard, and for an oddly arresting effect which an opthalmologist might have explained as the habit of making minute changes of focus all the time. The late Mrs Montacute had been rather proud of Guise. Like herself (she explained) Guise possessed the inestimable gift of natural taste, and this had been refined in him by the position he had for long occupied. There had been occasions (she would add) upon which she had not hesitated to consult Guise on aesthetic issues. His responses, although necessarily untutored, had been positively helpful from time to time. But one must not exaggerate, and Guise was fortunately not to be thought of as owning an intelligence inappropriate to his condition in life. By this reservation Mrs Montacute meant that her butler had no understanding of, or interest in, the movement of the market.

  Both Guise and Mrs Bantry had received several picture postcards from Gloria – signed ‘Gloria’ in acknowledgement of their status as ancient retainers (or perhaps only because Gloria, if quite unconsciously, was of an egalitarian turn of mind). They might have been called blue postcards, since they chiefly depicted lakes and skies. Gloria was in Italy and enjoying it very much – particularly, she stated, since discovering that it was not necessary to eat pasta twice, or even once, a day. Gloria was always candid about the problem of the weighing-machine.

  Mrs Bantry ranged her postcards on her kitchen mantelpiece. Guise shoved his away in a drawer in his pantry. He wasn’t, he informed Mrs Bantry, fond of blue. It was the most unstable of colours. From Giotto in the Cappella degli Scrovegni to Reynolds at the Tate, there could be only one verdict on that. And if you wanted to know whether any good could come of the monkeying by restorers and cleaners with God’s natural malediction upon blue – well, you need only go to the National Gallery and take a glance at Bacchus and Ariadne.

  It was partly on the score of remarks of this kind that Mrs Bantry (who had never been to the National Gallery, let alone to Padua) held Guise in high regard. It was a regard which she sought to express in terms of the best fillet steak and similar dishes categorised as ‘tasty’ in her quite unassuming culinary vocabulary. Guise accepted these tokens of respect with proper expressions of appreciation, for he was a well-mannered man. Often, however, Mrs Bantry had to suspect that he was without much consciousness of what he ate, his mind being preoccupied with matters remote from the grosser pleasures of sense. A shrewd if simple woman, she was aware of the presence in Guise of some passion beyond her ken. Whatever it was, it fortunately didn’t express itself in any sort of conduct likely to generate disapproval in the neighbourhood of Nudd.

  In addition to the postcards, Guise had received a couple of letters from Gloria, presumably in response to reports he had despatched to her on the state of affairs at home. Guise did not communicate the content of these letters to Mrs Bantry, and this Mrs Bantry accepted as inherent in their relationship. Guise’s sense of his status as higher than hers was quite unforced and inoffensive, and it retained these qualities now that, in some indefinable way, it was increasing fairly rapidly. ‘Mr Guise,’ Mrs Bantry would say comfortably in the small society of her own equals round about Nudd, ‘is quite somebody. Mark my words.’ Her words were marked, and invariably without even tacit disagreement. The superiority of Guise, like that of Harry Carter’s mother, was a generally accepted fact. And, like Mrs Carter, he was himself punctiliously discreet about it.

  It wasn’t only Gloria who wrote to Guise. The volume of his correspondence had suddenly increased. Mrs Bantry was the more aware of this since it was prescriptively among her duties to receive the letters from the postman. Some of these had begun to declare themselves as coming from the United States, a distant territory in which it wasn’t within Mrs Bantry’s knowledge that Guise owned relatives. Besides which, the envelopes were typewritten, and frequently had printed on them the titles and addresses of what Mrs Bantry took to be business (or even, she might dimly have conjectured, learned) concerns.

  A morning came upon which it was with one of these that she entered Guise’s pantry.

  ‘”The Curator, Nudd Manor”,’ Mrs Bantry read from the envelope. ‘Would that be for you, Mr Guise?’

  ‘Certainly, Mrs Bantry.’ Guise put out a hand and received the letter. It was observable that between these two close associates of many years there was preserved a certain formality of appellation. ‘You will remember it being distinctly stated by Miss Gloria that I was to regard myself as caretaker of Nudd during her absence.’

  ‘Of course, Mr Guise.’

  ‘”Curator”, Mrs Bantry, is simply “caretaker” in the Latin tongue. A more dignified form, of course, and judged appropriate by some, it seems, to the importance of what I am in charge of.’

  ‘Very proper, I’m sure,’ Mrs Bantry said. ‘Would there be a more dignified form for me?’

  ‘”Curatrix”, perhaps.’ Guise offered this distinguishably at a venture. ‘But I would not advise the adopting of it. Not at present. We have to be cautious, have we not?’

  ‘Oh, certainly, Mr Guise.’ Guise’s question, which might have been detected by a more acute intelligence than Mrs Bantry’s as escaping from some inner region of Guise’s mind, impressed Mrs Bantry, as all slightly mysterious remarks were apt to do.

  ‘And by the way, Mrs Bantry, I think we must now expect callers from time to time. Please tell the women that should they chance to answer the door-bell and be asked for the Montacute Curator, the callers are to be brought to me. Or rather they are to be shown into the library, where I shall come to receive them.’

  ‘The library? Yes, of course.’ For a moment – and surprisingly – Mrs Bantry’s innocent regard might almost have been taking in certain slight modifications which had lately been manifesting themselves in Guise’s attire. ‘The Montacute Curator?’ she added.

  ‘Just that. And another thing. There must be the utmost discretion about such visitors. They are not to be gossiped about in the village. Definitely not.’

  ‘Certainly not. And would these callers be from America, perhaps?’

  ‘That is as may be.’ Guise had pursed his lips. ‘Some of them may wish, incidentally, to inspect our domestic arrangements. The number of bedrooms, and so on. In default of a housekeeper, that will fall within your province.’ Guise paused. ‘Be your job,’ he added in an explanatory tone.

  ‘If you say it’s in order, Mr Guise, I’ll be quite agreeable, of course. Everything is tidy enough, I’m happy to say.’

  ‘Naturally it is. There may also be an architect from London. Or several architects. But nothing of that kind is to be talked about, either. Miss Gloria would not wish it.’

  ‘Nothing of the kind is my habit, I’m sure.’

  ‘It would be most improper, if it were. I am thinking, Mrs Bantry, of the servants.’

  ‘Of the—?’ Briefly, Mrs Bantry had the appearance of almost blinking at this. ‘Yes, I see.’

  ‘I am sure we shall continue to understand each other very well.’ Guise offered this reassurance apparently out of sincere, if vague, benevolence. ‘But I am detaining you, Mrs Bantry. And it is time that I took my walk through the rooms.’ With some gravity, Guise had consulted his watch. ‘And checked the instruments, Mrs Bantry. I confess to a shade of anxiety about humidity in the East Wing.’

  The nature, the quidditas, of aesthetic experience has through a good many millenniums perplexed the speculative intelligence. It is improbable that any clear ideas on the problem obtained in the valley of the Dordogne during the post-glacial era, or that other than obscurely animistic and magical notions touched the minds of those incomparable artists who there laboured in the grotte de Lascaux. Rather later, say 15,000 years later, A
ristotle judged that grown men remain sufficiently childlike to delight in imitations, and that the pleasure they thus obtain is not necessarily as pernicious as his master Plato – himself very much an artist in the broader sense of the word – had been inclined to suppose. Quite shortly after that (in terms of the time-scale such reflections involve us with) Sigmund Freud held a roughly similar opinion. Artists, by thus delighting people, can more or less harmlessly do themselves a bit of good, gaining wealth which will obtain for them a fulfilment of desires that otherwise might have eluded them. More importantly (for Freud was a scientist) art, like a tomtom or a psychotropic drug, can loosen up the mind of an individual exposed to it, lulling some bits and activating others, so that interesting observations on how we really tick can be made. Later still (and only a few seconds ago in the effluxion of anthropological time) much was said for the existence of a simple Aesthetic Sense. There it is, and that’s that. But this was perhaps to throw up the philosophic sponge.

  We are not likely to arrive on firmer ground here by following Guise round Nudd, or even by attempting an excursus into the past history of this not unremarkable man. Mrs Montacute’s theory of natural taste is a respectable one, and may be supported by much observation. It is demonstrable that in all classes of society there are people who like art and people who do not; and the American lady who declared enthusiastically her conviction that art is beautiful surely hints the more or less random distribution of vulnerability to aesthetic impression. One house-painter simply decorates your room; another is passionate over the potentialities of yellow and grey. Of course, frequentation and familiarity are important, and nobody will ever know what sort of person Guise would have been had he not as a boy, and at a humble level, entered the employment of that Hugo Counterpayne who had been among the most perceptive and diligent collectors of his time. When Nudd passed to the Montacutes Guise was part of the package. Promoted, he had made himself competent in the management of wine, and had been esteemed accordingly by Nicholas Montacute, Gloria’s father. But if below stairs he had kept an impeccable cellar-book, above stairs he had looked about him to what advantage he might. Yet one doesn’t really know why. We are back where we started.

  Here he is, however, taking his daily walk through the late Mrs Montacute’s ever-appreciating treasure house. Although the market does not really interest him, he has a fairly accurate notion of the size of the cheques that might pass. No strategy, however disinterestedly conceived in the service of a passion, of an idea, can afford to neglect economic facts. He cherishes a reasonable confidence that he could hold his own with them if required. Lately, too, he has been picking up a certain amount of legal knowledge – or if not knowledge, at least relevant information and useful tips. But nothing of this is in his mind as he moves about Nudd at present. Nor is he quite the man who, only a few minutes ago, has been in conversation with Mrs Bantry. Were he to speak now – and it could be only to himself – it would not be as an upper servant, finding dignity in formal utterance and composed command. It would be – we can only say – as a lover, a worshipper, a guardian, a tutelary spirit. This is the queer fact about Guise.

  The humidity has been controlled, as is immediately evident from the finely pointing needle on its dial. The air-conditioning plant, though moving, seems asleep; its low breathing answers the soft splash of the fountain in the hall. Guise finds himself satisfied with the light-level in the various rooms. To everything of this sort he gives careful attention, although his continental pilgrimages (for generous holidays have made him a well-travelled man) incline him to a sceptical view of the necessity for scientifically cosseting paintings. There are plenty of places in which masterpieces accept the play of the elements – hot or cold, moist or dry – and appear none the worse for it. He even has a sense – for he is in some degree an imaginative man – that these mysterious creations touch us most nearly when breathing with us a common air. You can be too pernickety with art, he thinks sagely, just as you can be too pernickety with wine. The way the French treat their wine! Without ceremony, you might call it. But the same stuff is better there than here, all the same. A living relationship is what’s involved. It might be the same with art. Finer if handled more freely. Not made a thing of, you might say.

  But here we have arrived at a rather deep level of Guise’s thought or feeling. It may conflict, one day, with his predominant attitude: the attitude his long service at Nudd has bred into him. This attitude has to be called hermetic. Nudd is a hortus conclusus, a shrine. Above all, Nudd is integral, is almost something organic. This conception controls Guise and his policies.

  He halts before the Titians. These, he tells himself grimly, are at the greatest immediate risk. The lawyers are cagey – and he has no standing with them, after all; can only fish respectfully for information when they come around. But he knows that those two paintings can go under the hammer for an enormous sum, realisable if an export licence is subsequently granted by something called the Reviewing Committee. He suspects – although it is obscure territory, on which he knows he can go wrong – that this stage may become a spring-board for further manoeuvre: a fund to ‘save’ them, or a move to make them over to the nation in lieu of estate duty. He does know that Mrs Montacute, at least until recently believing her middle years robust, admitted no measure that would have taken the collection out of her absolute ownership and control. So the undertaker’s bill is not exactly the principal liability occasioned by her death. He wonders what attention Miss Gloria, her mother’s sole heir, is capable of giving to the problem. He even finds it possible to wonder whether the Philistine child would so much as notice the disappearance of the Titians from the wall.

  Guise moves on. This morning these considerations have not commanded him quite so urgently as they have been doing of late. He has something else on his mind. It is a problem so momentous that he hesitates, that he defers confronting it. In the peacock drawing-room – a nomenclature he has never much liked – he pauses, and takes a second turn round the impressive place. It might be better called the caravanserai drawing-room, he tells himself with a very rare incursion into humour, since it contains a concentration of camels. The largest of them, which he can remember Mrs Montacute as showing off to a young man from London on that fatal day, is virtually sniffing at a gay and fussy Famille Rose jar of the Ch’ien-lung period. It is a small incongruity of which Guise has long been aware. T’ang porcelain is unknown, but at least the camel can be accommodated with Sung. Guise walks off with the jar to a far corner of the room, and returns holding between his hands all the depth and softness of a celadon piece in yellowish green. The camel takes to this at once. And the whole balance of the room has subtly altered. Its every relationship has been affected by this small harmonising act. Guise pauses for a few moments before the mystery, and then walks on. Here has been no more than a skirmish, a delaying action. And now the La Tour is in front of him.

  He flicks a switch, and momentarily takes refuge in such reflections as an ardent amateur Kunsthistoriker can command. Extraordinary that out of the agitated chiaroscuro of Caravaggio, and by a route leading through coppery Honthorst and his farthing dips, should come this monumental, mathematical thing. La Tour’s women have brought a single candle to the Tomb. The Magdalene holds it in her left hand. Her right hand, raised in the simple act of masking the small flame, commands stillness, is a hieratic gesture sealing the solemnity of the scene. At the centre, of necessity, is emptiness; La Tour is painting what isn’t any longer there. The light picks out a crease in the napkin lying folded and apart; dimly silhouetted in the foreground is the curve of the great stone. But it is as if the light shines out further; catches, here and there on the sides of some cavern within which the sepulchre lies, a stalactitic gleam that frames the sacred spectacle within vast reaches of geological time. This is the effect of the two or three minute lamps which Guise has switched on in the alcove where the painting hangs. Guise has been proud of his device, and Mrs Montacute was enchanted
by it – declaring to visitors that the only comparable experience is turning to view Las Meninas in the great mirror which the authorities of the Prado provide for the purpose.

  But Guise has been uneasy for a long time, and now he acts. He switches off the lights, crosses the room, draws up first one and then another faintly translucent blind. Clear daylight floods in, and strikes directly upon the canvas. The late Mrs Montacute’s butler takes a deep breath. Yes, mystery has withdrawn where it belongs, which is within the picture-space which Georges de la Tour alone has created. And The Two Marys at the Tomb has become more moving and more beautiful – and these. Guise thinks, are one and the same thing.

  Guise’s, then, is once more, as it has always been, the finger of taste at Nudd.

  Chapter Eight

  A JOURNEY PROPOSED

  ‘It’s not to be denied,’ Lambert Domberg said, ‘that a finger of taste has been operative at Nudd.’ Domberg had grown attached to the phrase he had employed to his young colleague Chevalley some months before. ‘But it has certainly not been your client’s.’

  ‘I am no judge of these matters.’ Mr Thurkle frowned as he offered this disclaimer – and since he glanced round Domberg’s office at the same time might have been thought to be disapproving of it. But in fact it was not unlike his own office in Gray’s Inn. Comberback and Domberg were far from being the sort of people to go in for what property promoters hopefully call prestige premises. Most of the objects permanently on view declared themselves as solid, respectable, old-fashioned, and even worn out. Only, what lay around here in apparent casual disorder was not obsolete legal journals, forgotten briefs, bundles of yellowing letters tied together with faded red tape, empty ink-wells and useless quill pens; rather it was Rembrandt etchings, Beardsley drawings, maquettes by Rodin or the assistants of the aged Renoir, obscurely rare maps, incunabula, and dim coins in faded velvet trays.