A Palace of Art

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Thank you. My point is that, if we did get on friendly terms, it might all go swimmingly. Wandering around a place like Venice, the business of the collection would naturally crop up. And I might influence the girl towards a sensible view. In which case we’d have the sale in our pocket before the end of the year.’

  Lambert Domberg sighed gently – a man of fine feeling, subdued to what he worked in. He pointed to the telephone on his desk.

  ‘You’ll need travellers cheques,’ he said. ‘Get the bank.’

  Chapter Nine

  THE COUNTERPAYNES AT HOME

  The domestic rituals of the Counterpaynes were undeviatingly upper class. The lower the higher, Jake would say to his sister Mary, meaning that the rituals tended to be further accentuated every time the dividends shrank. But were they really shrinking, Mary would ask, or was their father merely indulging himself in congenial gloom? Certainly the imagination of disaster – an endowment said to be invaluable to a novelist, but of little use in the world of practical affairs – was Cedric Counterpayne’s in the largest measure. He would predict economic calamity, public or private, with all the sombre glee of a weather man reiterating over the air his dismal tale of depressions everywhere closing in upon the British Isles. Jake gave it as his own opinion that their father, like the weather chap, was, if only marginally, more often right than wrong, and that to some extent it must therefore be objectively true that things were going from bad to worse. Mary didn’t care for such a state of affairs at all; she had rather a wide variety of interests in the pursuit of which ready cash is indispensable. Jake wasn’t much bothered. For one thing, he was dedicated to tearing down the fabric of society, and it would have been illogical to deplore the misfortunes, whether real or fictitious, of an individual rentier. For another thing, when he wasn’t thinking about tearing down this fabric, he was much more absorbedly engaged in covering other fabrics, suitably disposed on outsize easels, with bold expanses of time, when quite broke, made do, amiably enough, with acrylic paint. So Jake, who lived at home from time to even the more vexatious practical consequences of his father’s persuasions.

  One of these consequences was the port, which now always came from the grocer. It was disgusting stuff, and Cedric Counterpayne didn’t fail to make, so to speak, a poor mouth about it. Jake would reply cheerfully that all port was disgusting, and at the same time treat himself to a private grin at the absurdity of a proponent of cultural revolution engaged in taking dessert in a formal way with his papa. It happened every night. His mother and Mary (having eaten a date or shared a banana) would withdraw, and the decanter would then make its second and final round. It really was a round, at least to the extent of circumambulating the single candle that burned in the centre of the table. Jake would draw the decanter in its coaster towards him from what was roughly the position of three o’clock, replenish his glass, move the decanter a foot to the left, and then shove it to the nine o’clock station – from which it would be retrieved by his father and brought finally to rest until the two gentlemen, having concluded their dignified occasion, rose, trundled everything into the kitchen, and did the washing up. This last as a masculine activity was another instance of upper class convenances. Jake didn’t suppose it happened that way in China. But then when you don’t live in China it must sometimes be more or less in order not to do as the Chinese do. The same thing applies, for that matter, if you don’t live in Clerkenwell or Golders Green.

  The Counterpaynes lived at Olney, in a Georgian house of some impressiveness which, over a period of at least twenty years, Cedric Counterpayne had been constantly announcing must be put on the market at once. In a rural situation it is still possible to find those who come in to oblige, and the Counterpayne ladies were thus assisted in their domestic tasks fairly liberally from 9 a.m. till noon. Jake suspected, and Mary confirmed, that a semi-nocturnal presence of this kind would also have been feasible enough. Thus the washing up was rather a matter, perhaps, of showing the flag. In a general way showing the flag was an activity which Jake much approved. So – although he was often as lazy and self-absorbed as most artists of any sort are – he had never protested against this conclusion to the day.

  It was happening now. Cedric Counterpayne had donned a butcher’s apron, and was rinsing plates in cold water as a careful preliminary to getting down to the serious detergent job. Jake, whose turn it was to dry, filled in time stoking the stove.

  ‘Nothing at all!’ Cedric Counterpayne said. ‘It’s entirely out of the way.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jake said, in the tone of one who hasn’t caught on to what is being talked about.

  ‘Simply not done.’

  ‘No – not done.’

  ‘In more civilised times, even a man’s mere acquaintances got something. Mourning rings, for example.’

  ‘They must rather have piled up – at least if one lived to an advanced age.’ Jake now knew what was to be discussed. ‘And you couldn’t exactly wear a dozen mourning rings. Perhaps you just stowed them away, and bequeathed them to your own pals in turn.’

  ‘And I haven’t even received the common courtesy of being shown Fenella’s will.’

  ‘They may have reckoned it would be embarrassing, since there wasn’t a ring or a bean for you. Anyway, later on you can go and read it at Somerset House. Cost you a bob – if you can run to it.’ Humorous reference to the perpetual res-angusta-domi theme was one of Jake’s techniques for coping with his father’s more tedious side.

  ‘I wonder what the girl thinks about it.’

  ‘Gloria? I don’t suppose she thinks about it at all.’ Jake took the first of the port glasses from his father, dried it with care, and then tossed it into the air and caught it again. (We have already met this bad habit of Jake Counterpayne’s.) ‘Why should she?’

  ‘One ought to think about one’s relations occasionally. And particularly at times of bereavement.’

  ‘I suppose Gloria was bereaved, but it couldn’t honestly be said that you were. The death of a first cousin isn’t a bereavement – particularly when you haven’t passed the time of day for thirty years.’

  ‘You take a very unfeeling view.’

  ‘Whereas you think you ought to be able to touch somebody.’

  ‘And it isn’t an occasion for wit – a death in the family. If only because there may always be another death at any time. We’re in the midst of the thing. I might die tomorrow, Jake, and it would be the very devil. Even your mother’s death would be distinctly awkward.’ Cedric Counterpayne extracted a soup plate from the bubble-filled bowl with an air of comfortable gloom. ‘Quite frankly, it would be a difficult corner to turn.’

  ‘Whereas Mary or I would be expendable.’

  ‘There you go again. A callous attitude to sacred things. Not that I wholly blame you, my dear boy. So long as one government after another pursues these utterly damnable fiscal policies, all decent and generous feeling will be virtually impossible to sustain. So I don’t wholly blame Fenella, either. No doubt she was having a hard time – and that was why she neglected this gesture – it needed to be no more than that – of common family duty.’

  ‘She didn’t seem to be having too hard a time.’ Jake was waiting patiently for the second soup plate. ‘Everything brassed up all over, it seemed to me. It’s true that the champagne wasn’t too good. But then the thing was pretty well a garden-party.’ Jake paused to produce, quite unconsciously, his peculiar effect of virtually simultaneous scowl and grin. He might have been reflecting that he had just achieved a discrimination which would seem a bit obscure to Chairman Mao. ‘There was a butler and all that, and dabs of caviar on the canapés. In fact your poor cousin Fenella Montacute was very comfortably in the mun. From day to day, I mean, and quite apart from owning all that museum junk. Do get on with those plates. I want to watch the news on the box. There’s been a big demo in Trafalgar Square.’

  Cedric Counterpayne got on with the plates. He judged televised demos to constitute a poor form of
spectator sport, but considered that Jake was entitled to his own estimation of such things. Buried beneath decades of fretful idleness in him there was enough intelligence to make him prize a working relationship with his son.

  ‘Anti-something?’ he asked jocosely, and produced a couple of plates in brisk succession.

  ‘Yes – anti-something. Was there anything definite you were going to say about Gloria?’

  ‘About Gloria?’ Understandably, Cedric Counterpayne was a little struck by the slant thus given to the conversation. ‘Well, yes. It seems to me up to her to make good this neglect – we’ll be prepared to call it an inadvertent neglect – on her mother’s part.’

  ‘Gloria ought to send you that mourning ring?’

  ‘Not exactly a mourning ring. For good or ill, that belongs to a past age. But a memento, say. Or a keepsake. Rather a charming word, keepsake.’

  ‘Can be a charming thing too. There’s a young doctor in Scott Fitzgerald—’

  ‘Scott Fitzgerald?’

  ‘Irrelevant. A young doctor who’s jilted by a girl, and who goes into the morgue, and cuts out of a female corpse—’

  ‘Jake.’

  ‘Sorry. You’re absolutely right. Well – what about Gloria?’

  ‘If the matter were simply brought to her mind, I’ve little doubt she would repair her mother’s neglect.’

  ‘Send something?’

  ‘Just that. But the right thing. Recall Lady Lumber.’

  ‘Can’t. Never heard of her.’

  ‘My dear boy, she lived at Stoke Goldington. When she was dying, your mother used to go over a great deal. Read the Bible to her, and Lord knows what. And the old soul was very insistent she should have something. Just to remember her by.’

  ‘I’d remember anybody I read the Bible to in these circumstances, without what you call “something” arriving by post afterwards. But go on.’

  ‘Not by post. We’re no distance from Stoke Goldington. You must remember that. A groom brought it over in a trap.’

  ‘I see. And what was it?’

  ‘Well, that’s the odd thing. After the funeral, and so forth, the old girl’s son rang up, and asked what your mother would like to have. Which shows that poor Lady L. must have been muttering about the matter with her dying breath. Difficult for your mother. She couldn’t very well say a thimble or a pin-cushion on the one hand, or the prize piece of Lumber family plate on the other. But she remembered that the house was absolutely stuffing with footstools. Regency footstools, for what that’s worth. So she said she’d dearly like a Regency footstool.’

  ‘And the groom brought one over?’

  ‘No. He brought a parasol.’

  ‘A parasol?’ Jake stared blankly at his father.

  ‘A parasol. Small summer umbrella.’

  ‘But one couldn’t say “Regency footstool” and be heard as saying—’

  ‘Quite so. It was very mysterious.’

  Father and son had arrived momentarily on common ground. They might be described as having entered the theatre of the absurd. They regarded each other with gravity. With gravity (or against it) Jake sent a plate spinning to within an inch of the ceiling, and caught it again without giving it a glance.

  ‘Well, well!’ Jake said. ‘Mary will have made the coffee.’

  Mary Counterpayne had made the coffee, as usual, in a bulbous glass contraption, vaguely suggestive of alchemical enterprise, for which her father had paid half-a-crown in his favourite local junk-yard. It was perfectly efficient, and the memory of this unwontedly triumphant episode in his long struggle with economic adversity cheered him up regularly every evening.

  ‘Jake and I,’ he said amiably to the ladies, ‘have been having a chat about Gloria Montacute. And I was about to tell him that I think he ought to go and pay his respects.’

  ‘Well, I’m—’ Being in the presence of his mother, Jake checked himself in what it was natural to say. ‘What an odd notion.’

  ‘You mean,’ Mary asked her father, ‘that Gloria’s to be regarded as the head of the family?’

  ‘Nothing of the kind. It would simply be the decent thing. After all, we none of us went to the funeral.’

  ‘We weren’t invited,’ Mrs Counterpayne said over her embroidery. ‘And they put “private” in the notice in The Times’

  ‘At least Jake may be said to have been in at the death,’ Mary pointed out. ‘In fact, poor Fenella died as he goggled at her, like the serpent-woman under the gaze of the philosopher in the poem.’

  ‘Lamia didn’t die, dear.’ Mrs Counterpayne had long struggled in the interest of the literary cultivation of her children. ‘But you are quite right, in a way. She screamed and vanished, which is more or less the same thing.’

  ‘I have always been glad,’ Cedric Counterpayne said seriously, ‘that Jake attended that party – unhappy though its outcome was. His presence indicated proper family feeling.’

  ‘I gate-crashed,’ Jake said, and gulped his coffee. He still had his mind on the nine o’clock news. ‘Vulgar curiosity.’

  ‘It was that, was it?’ Mary looked hard at her brother. ‘I’ve another theory.’

  ‘Which you can bloody well keep to yourself. As for that party, the girl wasn’t there, and I got a bit tight—’

  ‘Because she wasn’t there?’ Mary asked.

  ‘Because the champagne was bad. And I shouted at the butler, and it was a bit of a shambles all round. I’d be persona non thingummy, you may take it from me, if I ever went near Nudd again.’

  ‘But I understand you remained,’ Cedric Counterpayne said. ‘As a member of the family, you very properly remained, and had a word with your cousin—’

  ‘It’s rot that second cousins are cousins.’

  ‘And had a word with Gloria after the sad news had been broken to her. I judge it unlikely that you made a fool of yourself.’

  ‘Perhaps I didn’t.’ Jake scowled ferociously as he was obliged to make this admission. ‘But what’s all this in aid of, anyway? Mourning rings all round?’

  ‘Mourning rings?’ Mrs Counterpayne repeated.

  ‘Father thinks it would show nice feeling in Gloria if she gave us something to remember her mama by. And nothing can be more benevolent in intention than encouraging the growth of nice feeling in what used to be called an unformed girl.’

  ‘Unformed?’ Mary said. ‘Gloria, by all accounts, is far from that. Her having a form is the first thing one notices about her.’

  ‘Mary, you do say the most dead common things from time to time.’ Jake offered this opinion dispassionately.

  ‘I’m to go to Nudd again, and ingratiate myself with the girl, and say your mother is uncommonly fond of Regency footstools.’

  ‘Regency footstools?’ Mrs Counterpayne echoed, perplexed. ‘I suppose there are such things. But I can’t remember ever—’

  ‘Footstools are a joke,’ Cedric Counterpayne said. ‘But something – unspectacular, but good of its kind – I do think it would be pleasant to receive. And pleasant to give. That’s what I chiefly have in mind. Once she’d done it, she’d be glad she’d done it. A picture, say. Something like that.’

  ‘Is your memory good enough,’ Jake asked mildly, ‘for you to have any particular picture in mind?’

  ‘I do remember a small boy in fancy dress and on horseback. Rather a delightful affair. And just about right, wouldn’t you say? Appropriate and all that.’

  ‘The small boy happens to be by Velazquez, and to be worth more than an unfortunate black would earn if he laboured without stopping for two thousand years.’

  ‘An unfortunate black?’ Jake’s mother reiterated. She was clearly much puzzled. ‘What unfortunate black?’

  But at this Jake Counterpayne made a gesture of despair and left the room.

  In Trafalgar Square, Robert Dougall told him, eight youths had been arrested, but were understood to have been subsequently released. This mild end to the demo seemed to encourage Mr Dougall, who smiled cheerfully as
he added that that was all from him tonight. The weather chap appeared next, but Jake was uninterested in weather and switched off. He then found that his sister had followed him into the room where the box was kept. It was their old nursery, and still used for any ganging up they did. Feud, indeed, was quite as much a part of its history as was conspiracy. A bold scratch across the middle of the hardwood floor still bore witness to the summary resolution of some boundary dispute long before. At one end there continued to hang framed snapshots of Mary jumping over unimpressive barriers on a fat pony, and at the other end the wall was a palimpsest of carelessly pinned up and overlapping photographs, drawings and posters commemorating the development – whether intellectual, moral or artistic – of her brother. There was a page torn out of Babar and Father Christmas upon which some ruthless raid on a family album, followed by an infantile but ingenious labour of collage, had resulted in the helpful Professor Gillianez, the celebrated Professor William Jones, and even Socrates himself, all having been transmogrified into a much younger Cedric Counterpayne. There was a faded, cardboard-mounted group in which a stripling Jake glowered cross-legged from between the knees of a beefier boy clutching a football. There was the standard poster-like portrait of Che Guevara. There were reproductions of various bits and pieces of contemporary art – all dating from before the astounding day upon which Jake had discovered and asserted that he was an artist himself. If anything was missing, it was what might be called tokens or manifestos of erotic interests. It was Mary’s opinion (she was three years older than Jake) that this lacuna was rather far from testifying to her brother’s sexual innocence. But she may have been quite wrong. It is a sphere in which young men develop more variously than can readily be deduced from the pages of the Modern English Novel.

  ‘What an idiotic conversation!’ Mary said. ‘But might there be anything in it?’

  ‘Getting something convertible into hard cash out of Gloria?’ Neither brother nor sister was often astray as to what the other was talking about. ‘It seems improbable. But you never can tell. We know nothing about her.’