A Palace of Art

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘You don’t mean that you will go to Nudd – and pay your respects, as Daddy calls it?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why not? It isn’t exactly you, for one thing.’ Mary didn’t say this approvingly. Her mother was vague and her father was hopeless, so it would balance things up a little if only Jake would adopt a practical slant towards the family fortunes. She gave utterance to this feeling now. ‘You care damn-all about money.’

  ‘You couldn’t be farther wrong. I’m a bloody Forsyte, if you only knew. Hardly ever think of anything else.’

  ‘Half the year, you have to live at home like a kid—’

  ‘So have you – and you’re older than I am.’

  ‘This is utterly stupid.’ Not being able to say something like ‘Girls are different, God help them’, Mary was baffled for a moment. So she went off at a tangent. ‘Just what was the set up you found at Nudd?’

  ‘Well, Gloria wasn’t living half the year there.’

  ‘Of course not. The Montacutes are rolling.’

  ‘My dear child, neither was she putting in her time idling at St. Tropez. She was holding down a job. Think of that. Probably still is.’

  ‘Then you must go to Nudd at a week-end.’ Mary was instantly practical. ‘Unless you exchange letters or something first.’

  ‘Don’t feel much like that. Laborious. Just drop in.’

  ‘That would probably be best.’ For a moment Mary looked as perplexed as her mother was accustomed to do. She had little faith in the emergence of anything that could be called a calculating or venal Jake. ‘Tell me more about the place. And about the people. Are there other Montacutes? I’m not clued up on it at all.’

  ‘I don’t think there are any other Montacutes – except, perhaps, far away out. We seem to be her nearest relations. That’s what Daddy’s on about, wouldn’t you say? Nearest relations should get their whack. Let’s say we agree.’

  ‘Let’s say anything that comes into our heads.’ Mary resented the mocking hypothetical cast of this proposal. ‘Just who was at Nudd when Fenella died – apart, I mean, from all the people who’d come to stare at Velazquez, and all that?’

  ‘Nobody at all. A butler and some hired waiters. It was a bit awful, really. Oh! There was a young man.’

  ‘A young man?’

  ‘A young prole. And you needn’t grin. Social class exists. It’s just something we have to cope with. So let’s face it. I resented this chap, partly just because he was a prole.’ Jake had flushed. ‘At least I’m prepared to be suitably ashamed.’

  ‘There was some other reason for resenting him?’

  ‘He seemed to think he was running the thing. Poor old Fenella’s death and its aftermath, I mean. He was running it. Quite competently, too.’

  ‘Just who was he?’

  ‘The local farmer’s son, or something. I think he’d been out with Gloria. I wasn’t sure I liked him terribly.’

  ‘Because he was—’

  ‘Not that at all.’ Jake was suddenly confident. ‘I had a feeling there was something rather cunning about him.’

  ‘You mean he may be after the Montacute millions?’

  ‘No, I don’t think I do.’

  ‘Then he must just be—’ Mary checked herself. ‘Let’s face a bit more of it,’ she said.

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘That you’ve always had a thing about this Montacute cousin. Ever since you funked her as a kid.’

  ‘Funked her?’ Jake stared at his sister. ‘You’re bats. We were kids. Do you mean that I failed in some lovely infantile romance?’

  ‘Something like that. She came here. And then you refused to go and stay there.’

  ‘I accept that, at least as a stupid family joke. I’ve even repeated it. But you’re not pretending it has left some sort of scar, or something?’

  ‘A trauma. You failed in masculinity, my dear.’

  It would have been reasonable to call the Counterpaynes, brother and sister, clever young people. They talked to each other like this. But, at the moment, there was something not quite idle in the nursery air.

  ‘Have you any memory,’ Jake asked, ‘of just how old I was?’

  ‘Of course I have. But what have you always remembered about her?’

  ‘That she was rather a jolly kid.’ Jake Counterpayne had a considerable command of straight answers.

  ‘There you are. And just why did you take it into your head to gate-crash that party, and have what you called a dekko at her?’

  ‘I’ve told you. Vulgar curiosity.’

  ‘You’re crude, and rude, and egotistical, and variously disreputable. You put on turns. You haven’t the slightest notion of earning an honest living.’ Mary Counterpayne offered these remarks sweetly. ‘But I wouldn’t say you’re vulgar. Your little dreams and purposes aren’t vulgar. Or not exactly. And that’s the difference between us.’

  Jake Counterpayne appeared to feel that this was the kind of point from which family conversations do not usefully continue.

  ‘I’m going out to the barn to square up a canvas,’ he said shortly. ‘And I’m going to Nudd on Sunday.’

  Chapter Ten

  ENCOUNTER WITH RUSTIC LOVERS

  Sunday came, and Jake went. If he went, in the end, none too willingly, this was less a matter of his own deeper disposition in the affair (something pretty obscure to him, anyway) than of reacting to family fuss. His father made as much ado over the expedition as if he really expected Jake to bring home Velazquez’s Don Balthasar Carlos in the back of his mini-van. His mother appeared to judge it more probable that what he would bring back was Gloria Montacute herself – and perhaps no longer just as Gloria Montacute, but as one whom lightning action on the part of the Archbishop of Canterbury had translated into a Counterpayne. Some dream of this sort even revealed itself as having been in Mrs Counterpayne’s mind a dozen years before – upon the occasion, in fact, of the more or less infant Gloria’s unreturned visit to Olney. So long ago, Jake realised, had his mother seen what might be called a solution in this grand alliance. So long ago, therefore, had the poor lady already been perpending what she was accustomed to refer to as ‘your father’s difficulties’. All this rather browned Jake off.

  Ought Jake to take Gloria a present? Mrs Counterpayne distinctly remembered that Gloria, on the occasion of her historic sojourn at Olney, had brought Jake nothing less than an air-gun – a weapon discharging either small lead slugs or brightly tufted darts with equal velocity. The gift, having been a little beyond Jake’s years, had occasioned some anxiety at the time. It was positively transformed into an augury now.

  Jake had no intention of taking Gloria a present. Anything of the kind would render implausible the fiction under cover of which he was going to make his bow: to wit, that finding himself quite unexpectedly in the neighbourhood of Nudd he had thought he might as well drop in. Jake rehearsed the delivery of this twaddle to himself several times, being without a clue that it would be beyond him to deliver it. The young know singularly little about themselves. Almost as little as do the aged.

  Jake drew to a halt on the brow of a hill. (It is a spot we have visited before.) He wondered who Nudd had been. The name suggested an uncouth personage in a saga, or something of that kind. Perhaps he had been a Dane who had gone in for a spot of rapine in these parts before grabbing some land in a more permanent way and settling down. In which case he would find his old territory not wholly congenial now. It suggested nothing more warlike than the domestication, in modestly genteel dwellings dotted all over the view, of retired Indian Army colonels lingering out their shivering span beyond any last residual warmth that might be at play upon them from the sunset of the raj.

  Nudd Manor itself was all right. Jake found that, despite his social and political convictions, he quite took to it. What disturbed him was the larger, although still quite local, prospect. Where the hell had it come from? Why had it been allowed to come about? He reckoned himself – apart from the rudiments of his
own profession – as being as superlatively uneducated as any other public-school boy. But he wasn’t sure that there hadn’t been history lessons to which he had sufficiently listened to render him now perplexed before this queerly gentrified scene. It couldn’t have any historical roots, this unnatural concentration of ingeniously mellow-looking country houses (which was what estate agents would call them) all within shouting distance (not that anybody here would shout) of a genuine ye-olde parish church. Something had simply gone wrong with history – with all that stuff about the manorial system and what have you – to produce such a result. Modern England, or Death Warmed Up. There were depressed moments – for example, when he told himself he couldn’t even learn to draw – in which Jake gloomily fancied he might one day find himself writing books. Well, at least he’d write one with just that title.

  These were Gloria Montacute’s surroundings, and they must a bit have rubbed off on her. Yet he didn’t remember her as like that. And he did remember her – very vividly indeed. He’d never again in all his life stand, a complete stranger, before a girl who minutes before had learnt of her mother’s sudden death. Once was enough. But a good sort of girl she’d certainly been. That, as his sister had acutely guessed, was what this was all about.

  Scowling at his own incoherence, Jake put his hand on the ignition-switch of the van, and then thought better of this and looked at his watch. It was half past twelve, which struck him as an awkward hour. If he drove up to Nudd now, he’d pretty well be inviting himself to lunch. Not on.

  He looked behind him and to his right. Up there, and with surprising abruptness, quite a different terrain appeared: something like a ridge of downland, with here and there the hump of a tumulus or an old barn. It was a beckoning leg-stretching prospect, so that on an impulse he scrambled out of the van. Perhaps it was a cowardly and delaying tactic, but he’d walk for the outside of an hour and arrive on Gloria a little after two o’clock. He reached back into one of the van’s capacious pouches and brought out a packet of chocolate biscuits. These, although betraying a somewhat juvenile taste, would be a perfectly satisfactory meal.

  He climbed to the skyline, which didn’t take long. And everything was suddenly as solitary as you could please. The only visible work of man was some sort of large tumble-down shed and a few chunks of baled straw. You could sing at the top of your voice, or shout any scraps of poetry in your head, and nobody would be the wiser. Jake almost started singing and then, for some reason, refrained. Instead – which was to prove to be unfortunate – he decided to explore the not very interesting ruin in front of him. It had been a barn or cow-house: something like that. He vaulted a little rampart of straw, turned inward, and stopped dead. With shocking abruptness, he had come on a couple making love.

  Love-making was not, for one of Jake’s generation, quite invariably a wholly private affair. But to his own way of thinking it was certainly that, and this made it odd that he now stayed put and watched, in a paralysed but interested way, just what was going on. He had become, of an instant, a voyeur, and for some seconds, at least, the fact didn’t at all trouble him. He realised intuitively, rather than saw, that the couple were very young: quite as young as he was himself. It passed through his head that this was obscurely a factor in his behaviour; that it somehow made his spectatorship innocent. But almost at once he wasn’t liking the reaction of his own heart and pulse. There was something demeaning in that kind and degree of excitement, it seemed, when one wasn’t oneself in on the act. So he was really turning away, or was about to do so, when the man rolled over and he glimpsed the girl. She was a sallow, narrow-hipped creature, who looked less in need of a lover than of a square meal. Jake was suddenly horrified – and in this instant the man sat up and looked at him. And Jake looked at the man. It was the farmer’s son, or whoever, who had once seen him out of Nudd. The young man had arched himself awkwardly in air, and was furiously pulling up his trousers, as Jake mumbled confused words and walked very rapidly away.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE MONTACUTE CURATOR

  He walked for an hour, just as he had promised himself. Rather to his surprise, it took a good part of this time to sort himself out. He was quite clear that having paused to witness a spot of copulation hadn’t in itself much worried him. Perhaps it ought to have, but it hadn’t. A couple of times he deliberately ran the thing through his head again, as one might a length of tape on a tape recorder, and it remained merely exciting and amusing, with no overtones of guilt attaching to his own bad behaviour at all. He didn’t even feel ashamed of not feeling ashamed.

  It hadn’t been exactly agreeable, all the same. In fact, it had gone bad on him, and in two swift stages. There had been an odd shock, for a start, in the sudden glimpse of the half-stripped girl. Perhaps that had been what he’d once heard somebody call the John Ruskin syndrome. Poor young John R., brought up on the classical Nude as it culminated in Ingres and all that, suddenly confronted with the real thing in the person of his bride, and making no recovery to the end of his days. But it couldn’t be that. Jake hadn’t been an art student for four years without seeing plenty of naked girls. He hadn’t, of course, known this girl from Adam – or rather from Eve – and he’d never see her again. It had just been the sudden perception that she was, so to speak, one particular girl, one individual and unique human being, here tumbled in straw upon the bestial floor, that had revealed itself as a thoroughly shocking thing. Jake felt that this piece of enlarged experience was quite worth brooding over.

  But the real rub – if it might be put that way – was that he had known the young man. There the chap had been, detected and ludicrously feeling that there might be restored dignity in pulling his pants up. Come to think of it, though, he might have had a more practical aim. He couldn’t have scrambled to his feet and come hobbling at Jake without further ignominy. It had been his idea to get himself in fighting trim.

  Jake rather took to this view of the matter. If they’d had a fight, he himself might be feeling better now. It came to him as he strode over the down that he was nursing a blind and baffled rage, and that there would have been salubrity in agreeing to have a punch-up. He’d himself have landed some stiff ones, since he wasn’t by any reckoning a weakling. But he had a notion that his adversary would have had the edge on him, would have given a shade more than he’d got.

  This still dodged the main fact. It had been this lecherous young yokel who’d believed himself in charge of things at Nudd – and ‘things’ in this context had included Gloria herself – in the hours immediately following the death of Fenella Montacute at that bloody party.

  It was the party that was increasingly in Jake’s head as he made his way back to the van, and it stuck there as he sat in the little tin box munching chocolate biscuits. He’d hated all that hoarded treasure and hated all those people, dripping real wealth and bogus responses, who’d been yattering their way through it. In particular – although it wasn’t all that relevant – he’d hated the smooth peddling rascal who was one half of Comberback and Domberg. So he’d put on a cheap turn. And then there had been catastrophe.

  He felt, in an extravagant fashion he condemned in himself, that he’d like a bath. If there had been so much as a puddle up here on the down he’d almost have stripped and splashed in it before going on to Nudd. But he was going on to Nudd. He was quite clear about that.

  His first impression was that the house must have been sold. There had, so far as he knew, been no family communication with Nudd, so the thing might have happened without the Counterpaynes hearing about it. It had been sold and – quite clearly – turned into an expensive private lunatic asylum.

  Jake’s notions of the custodial care of the mentally infirm were not particularly up to date, and his conjecture was based on the fact that every visible window of the mansion was screened on its inside by a fine metal lattice. These lattices, it was possible to discern, were of considerable elegance in themselves, which showed a very nice feeling on somebody’s
part for the susceptibilities of the inmates. And this was further proof that they must be a well-to-do crowd, since sensibility does not survive insanity except among the prosperous classes.

  Not intending, however, to retreat without enquiry, Jake drove up to the front door, got out, and rang the bell. There was a long wait. Then he heard footsteps, and received a distinct impression of keys being turned and bolts drawn. The door was opened – cautiously, he thought – and he was being surveyed by a heavily built girl of rustic demeanour.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ Jake said conventionally and not hopefully. ‘Is Miss Montacute at home?’ The girl looked bewildered, so that it was apparent the question had been an unexpected one. ‘Or has she—’

  ‘The Curator will receive you in the library.’

  The girl had said this, it seemed to Jake, rather with the effect of an automatic device at the other end of a telephone line; he felt that she must be programmed to go on repeating the same phrase until, somehow, you cut her off. But in fact she now stood back and ushered him into the hall. He didn’t particularly want to be interviewed by some sort of medical superintendent or head keeper. On the other hand the girl didn’t seem to be a likely source of reliable information, so he decided he’d better go ahead. It was queer being inside Nudd again; it was queer to find himself skirting once more what he had heard that poor old Fenella called her fontana minore. But it was even queerer hearing what his conductress said next.

  ‘Another American gentleman was here only this morning, sir. There has surely been a lot of interest of late. Not that I’m supposed to speak of it, mind you.’ The utterance of this female attendant upon the insane again had its curious quality of going by rote. ‘From Harvard, he was. There’s a lot there, it seems, as they’d like to send to Nudd.’