A Palace of Art

by J. I. M. Stewart

  Jake found this intelligence astonishing. He was inclined, it was true, to think of all universities as crackpot places, but Harvard must be in a bad way if it had to export its lunatics across the Atlantic pretty well en masse. Perhaps Nudd had been taken over by some institution with a reputation for coping successfully with demented professors and egg-heads generally.

  He was shown into the library, and left alone. It wasn’t one of the rooms he had wandered through on his earlier visit, and he tried to look round it with proper curiosity. But it wasn’t easy, he found, since there was really nothing but Gloria in his head. It was clear that no Gloria was going to show up – and this, perplexingly, seemed to be both a disappointment and a relief. He supposed he was afraid that, if she had been at Nudd, he might have come out with something impossibly presuming about the company she had been choosing to keep on the day of her mother’s death. He’d like that beastly young man to have receded a little into the background before he saw her again.

  The library door opened, and as he turned round he recognised at once the figure framed in it. It was simply the late Mrs Montacute’s butler.

  And Jake saw that the late Mrs Montacute’s butler in his turn recognised him.

  ‘I regret that Miss Montacute is not in residence, sir.’

  ‘Oh! Then she does still live here?’ Jake jerked this out awkwardly. For a start, the butler’s form of words had been unexpected. Presumably Guise – he remembered that to be the chap’s name – regarded it as appropriate to Gloria’s new dignity as owner of Nudd, but to Jake’s ear it sounded more the sort of thing you would say about an absentee duke, or somebody of that kind. Then again, here was the man he had shouted ‘Waiter!’ at when doing his thing as a young social iconoclast and scourge of the bourgeoisie. Guise wasn’t likely to have forgotten it.

  ‘Most certainly, sir. I know of no other intention at present, I am glad to say. I believe I may be speaking to Mr James Counterpayne?’

  ‘That’s me.’ Jake was impressed that Guise should be clued up on family matters in this way. Of course his name had eventually transpired on the occasion of old Fenella’s death. But it was smart of the chap to have held on to it, and moreover he now seemed to be comporting himself very properly. If you believed in the rules, that was. Jake added this to himself hastily. He had no intention of digging master-and-man stuff with Guise or anybody else. Still, it was useful to be recognised as having a kind of family status.

  ‘Is Gloria going to be away for long?’ Jake asked.

  There was a brief silence. Jake saw that calling Gloria ‘Gloria’ had been a mistake. The intention, of course, had been to get on a reformed social footing with Guise, but Guise clearly received it as a familiarity.

  ‘I’m afraid I have no information on that point, sir. When she returns to Nudd, I will take occasion to inform her of your call.’

  This sounded dismissive, but to Jake it carried some other suggestion as well. Butlers were cattle who seldom came his way. But did a real butler talk like a stage butler unless he was himself in some obscure fashion enacting a role? And there was something elusive about Guise’s wave-length, anyway. It was partly that he was being watchful and almost wary, as if he suspected this visitor of being after the family spoons. But then – Jake asked himself reasonably – why shouldn’t he? Jake’s accent (which Jake couldn’t help) was the only socially respectable ticket he carried around with him, and his previous appearance at Nudd had been pretty well in the character of a Bolshevik – a word which no doubt actually existed in this elderly lackey’s vocabulary. So if Guise had calling the police at the back of his head – well, good luck to him.

  But there was something else about Guise which Jake found himself completely unable to define or identify. The chap had an aura – although that was a silly term – that Jake didn’t at all react against. It was something which, if it were to emerge more clearly, might take on the character almost of a link or bond. Perhaps, Jake thought rather wildly, he was himself by nature what might be called a servant-class person. Perhaps he ought to have begun life as a page or a bell-hop or a boot-boy. It was an ideologically alluring vision, this of himself as anima naturaliter proletariana, but he doubted whether he really believed in it. No – it was something different and wholly elusive that hovered between Guise and himself.

  But now another puzzle came into Jake’s head. He had entered Nudd to the accompaniment of some very unaccountable remarks. All that about lunatics from Harvard, for instance. It would be difficult to bring up just that, but there had been something else he could fairly have a go at. And he’d do so, he decided, by way of bold challenge.

  ‘The woman who showed me in, Mr Guise, said something about a Curator. What was the meaning of that?’

  ‘A Curator, sir? I hardly think so. Caretaker, perhaps.’

  ‘Curator was the word.’

  ‘A somewhat similar word. Confusion is no doubt possible. Miss Montacute has instructed me to act as caretaker here during her absence abroad.’

  ‘Abroad?’ This took Jake off at a tangent. He somehow didn’t associate Gloria with foreign parts.

  ‘Miss Montacute is at present travelling on the continent.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Well, just where is she now?’

  ‘On that, sir, I am unable to afford you any information.’

  It was an impasse – and with the chap talking like a book again. Moreover Guise had distinguishably spoken with a deliberate ambiguity. He might have been saying, ‘You don’t get that out of me, young man’. Or he might not.

  ‘And you don’t know when she’ll be back?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Didn’t she have a job in London? Has she given it up?’

  There was a silence which Jake was young enough to find unnerving. And Guise had raised his eyebrows. A moment later he moved to the library door and respectfully opened it. It would never have occurred to Jake that a door could be opened respectfully. But there the thing was.

  ‘You have your car, sir?’ Guise asked.

  Jake had his car, or at least he had his van. And it didn’t look as if more was going to be said. He didn’t think he was going to say more himself. For not at all deeply buried in Jake Counterpayne was a sensitive and misdoubting youth. He remembered his father’s idiotic notions about Don Balthasar Carlos. At home they were rather endearing, but they wouldn’t carry well. He had no fancy for himself as a prowling and predatory relative. He withdrew into dignity and allowed himself to be conducted through Nudd.

  And that might have been all. But he did look about him as he walked. You couldn’t move among these things, among these tremendous and imprisoned presences, without doing that. And – this time – there weren’t all those awful people. There was only Guise.

  Suddenly Jake came to a halt. It was before a small picture – a bit of Venetian poesie, it might have been called – displayed on an easel. The easel had a swathe of dark crimson velvet draped over the back of it. The arrangement was effective, but rather suggested a shop. There was a little tag on the frame – the late Mrs Montacute had owned a weakness for informative tags – which read School of Giorgione. And Jake made a grab at his own most farouche manner.

  ‘George only, again!’ Jake said. ‘Well, well.’

  In the resulting silence, Guise did a strange thing – the stranger for being not in the least directed at Jake. It was almost as if Guise had forgotten Jake, and as if he was doing something he had long meditated doing. He walked up to the easel, removed the velvet cloth, folded it, and laid it aside. Then he stood back.

  ‘Yes,’ Guise said.

  ‘Yes,’ Jake echoed – and it was somehow the most expressive syllable he had managed to utter in Nudd.

  ‘And School of Giorgione isn’t right either,’ Guise said in a new voice. ‘It was in the nature of some to have Schools, you might say, and some not. I speak in ignorance, sir, as you must know. But I suggest “Mystery” as a better word. A mysterious business, Mr Counterpayn
e, all that about Giorgione. Very mysterious, indeed.’

  Chapter Twelve

  TWO YOUNG MEN IN CONVERSATION

  Half-a-pound of chocolate biscuits, consumed neat, would probably constitute a somewhat burdensome refection to one of mature years. But to a young man lately emerged from his nonage – and masticating, moreover, in a condition of brooding cerebration – such a mere snack or nuncheon is likely to leave a feeling of inanition little more than an hour or two later.

  This was Jake Counterpayne’s state as, beneath the thoughtful regard of Mr Guise, he scrambled into his van before the august façade of Nudd and drove away. He hadn’t, indeed, much idea of doing anything except distancing the mansion by some miles prior to starting to think. Gloria’s absence had dashed him; the butler by whom he had been ‘received’ puzzled him a good deal; he couldn’t get the pilgrims from Harvard, whether supposititious or real, out of his head. It was a case in which distance might lend a measure of clarity to the view.

  In the village over which Nudd presided like a throned lady, however, he had to slow down. He was a careful driver, and there were a lot of kids fooling around in the road. It was thus that he spotted the tea-shoppe. Shoppe was not, in fact, what it called itself, but it was that sort of place. Frail gentlewomen of advanced years no doubt ran it for their health. More pertinently, displayed in its window, without (somehow) the slightest effect of grossness, was a handsome pyramid of outsize muffins. It is well known that muffins correct chocolate biscuits just as brandy corrects port – and particularly if accompanied by three or four cups of China tea. Jake brought the van to a halt and went inside.

  It was a tiny place and almost empty – an unsurprising fact since it was not yet half past three. Still, lunch (if the ladies did lunches) must by now be ‘off’ and tea correspondingly ‘on’. In a just confidence as to this, Jake sat down. A lady appeared almost at once, and didn’t seem in the least put out when he modestly admitted his persuasion that tea and muffin would be precisely it.

  A man with a military bearing and a dog on a lead left the shop, and as a result Jake now found himself alone in it with only two other customers, a couple of women of uninteresting age who were in a window-recess just over his left shoulder. He ought to have sat down at a table a little farther away, but by this time his tea had arrived and he sat tight.

  ‘Not yet awhile,’ he heard one of the women say. ‘No, we don’t expect Miss Gloria – Miss Montacute, Mr Guise says I ought to say now – back just yet. It seems she’s quite seeing the world – a thing very proper to her station, after all.’

  The voice offering this information and opinion had somehow contrived to suggest communication of the most confidential kind, so that Jake realised with misgiving that he was listening in on gossip. Having so surprisingly done a peeping Tom act only a few hours before, he was quite without a fancy for eavesdropping now. For some minutes, however, it didn’t seem avoidable.

  ‘Where is she at present?’ the second woman asked. She spoke in quite a different tone, one of brisk interrogation and of a certain authority. In a rural hierarchy of which Jake had some understanding, there was a distinction between the two women.

  ‘Now, that I don’t know, Mrs Carter. Mr Guise may know. Carrying the responsibilities he does, I’d say he must know. But he has always been a little close, Mr Guise has. Perhaps Mr Harry might know?’

  This, plainly, had been a foray between the venturesome and the impertinent. It got no change.

  ‘Harry would have no occasion to know anything of the sort, Mrs Bantry.’

  ‘Ah, it would be my mistake – him being, like yourself, Mrs Carter, on proper visiting terms at Nudd. And so clever a young man, bound to go far. At college already! Who knows where he may go?’

  ‘He works quite hard at times,’ Harry’s mother said. She didn’t speak as if she judged her son exceptional among human kind.

  ‘And knowing so many of the young people hereabouts. Very attractive to the young women, your son is said to be. And I’m not surprised, I’m sure. Such a well set-up lad! Thoughtful, too. For instance, that time that he brought you to Nudd—’

  ‘Won’t you have another pastry, Mrs Bantry?’

  It was plain that the woman called Mrs Carter wasn’t having more of this. Nor was Jake. He was bolting his muffin furiously and as fast as he could. He did wonder, however, why Mrs Carter was giving tea to Mrs Bantry at all. Mrs Bantry must be some sort of upper domestic at Nudd. There could be no doubt who Harry was. And if Harry was a farmer’s son, then Mrs Carter was that farmer’s wife. She had wanted information out of Mrs Bantry, information as to just when Gloria was likely to come home. And she hadn’t, somehow, sounded as if she’d be heartbroken if the mistress of Nudd remained abroad for quite some time. Jake felt that Mrs Carter was a sensible woman.

  But he also felt, and much more vividly, that this just wouldn’t do. As a lurker in other people’s backgrounds he’d damn-well done his stint for the day. He jumped up, paid his bill, and charged out of the shop.

  In the doorway he charged into somebody – somebody who appeared to own the power, in these circumstances, of rooting himself to the ground. Jake recoiled, perceptibly jolted, and found it was Harry he was staring at.

  ‘I’ve come to fetch my mother,’ Harry said, and thumbed in the direction of a Land-Rover behind him. He spoke just as if he and Jake were acquaintances of a casual order. In a sense they were.

  ‘You’ll find her inside.’ Jake was constrained to reply more or less on the same note. And with this he made to pass on. He found the encounter upsetting. There Harry Carter had been, after all, pulling up his pants in the straw.

  ‘She can wait,’ Harry said.

  ‘Why should she wait?’ Jake asked crossly. There wasn’t quite room to get past.

  ‘You and I might have a word. Come and have a look at our cricket field.’

  ‘Very well.’

  Jake spoke under what proved to be a misapprehension. It was a misapprehension generated by that last image of Harry Carter as struggling with a garment in the interest of unimpeded motion – no longer of an amorous sort but aggressively in his, Jake’s, direction. Jake had really supposed that Harry was intending a fight. He had himself subsequently imagined a fight as he strode over the down. And he had now taken it into his head that the local cricket field was the prescriptive spot upon which the lads of the village had it out with each other. Although he still felt the odds to be rather stiffly against him, he was quite ready to muck in.

  But Harry, now heading for the outskirts of the village, was glancing sideways at him without any belligerent effect. It was a wary and calculating glance, perhaps, but it seemed perfectly friendly as well.

  ‘We met at Nudd,’ Harry said. ‘You’re a relation of Gloria’s?’

  ‘We’re second cousins.’ Jake was a little startled by this directness.

  ‘Have you come to these parts to look her up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She’s abroad. Do you know where?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She’ll be in Venice by now. At least, that’s what her last postcard said.’

  Jake received this blow in silence. It had certainly been effectively planted. What Harry Carter was up to was a kind of gloat. He was in correspondence with Gloria, and letting Jake know the fact. Jake felt a spurt of impotent rage. The sensation reminded him oddly of some juvenile occasion when a beastly prefect had the whip hand on him and was demonstrating the fact.

  ‘Here we are,’ Harry said easily, and sat down sprawling on a bench. ‘A peaceful spot.’

  Naturally a village cricket field is a peaceful spot. But something in Harry’s voice spoke to Jake of an ironical intention. Harry had guessed Jake had been thinking in terms of a punch-up. And Harry was amused.

  ‘But seriously,’ Harry said suddenly.

  ‘Seriously?’ Jake echoed. He wasn’t too pleased by his vacant repetition of a word. He was letting this assured yokel make all the runni
ng. Not that ‘yokel’ was exactly right. At Olney there were several Harrys (only perhaps less formidable) whom he had played around with on terms of honest equality all his life. It would be a bloody inferior thing to turn on class-stuff now – and most of all inside his own head.

  ‘About that up at the barn.’ Harry Carter was suddenly picking his words with care. ‘It can be between ourselves, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Of course.’ Despite what he’d just been thinking, Jake spoke very stiffly indeed.

  ‘Girls don’t understand those things.’

  ‘I think that girl did.’ Jake took some comfort in having got in this.

  ‘Nice girls, I mean.’

  ‘If you take to dividing girls into girls and nice girls, you’re pretty well on the way to becoming a cheerful young blackguard, if you ask me.’

  Here had been another good reply. Only, this time, Jake didn’t care for it. It was probably just and true, but it had sounded a ghastly piece of priggery, all the same. And his own erotic experience, although not even a parson could have called it heinously murky, didn’t license him to chuck stones quite in this fashion.

  Harry Carter looked at him comically – they were sitting side by side now, and the effect was undeniably companionable – and then suddenly swayed backwards on the bench so unexpectedly that Jake thought he must have fainted, or something of that kind. But he had merely turned his body into a seesaw. His bottom, although obviously not a true centre of gravity, had become a pivot upon which for a moment he relaxedly swayed. His shoulders went down to the turf, then his heels, and then he was composedly upright again by Jake’s side. Jake found it not easy to work out in terms of his own muscular structure just how it was done. But it had been a brief and effective appeal to the life of the body as something granted for his enjoyment to man.

  Jake’s impulse to self-criticism – an exercise to which Maoist principles should have inclined him, anyway – now strengthened. He’d been proposing to himself a kind of excommunication of Harry Carter from decent society – or from Gloria’s decent society, which was the point – just because of what Harry called ‘that up at the barn’. But wasn’t this sheer hypocrisy? About girls and how they should be it was difficult and he didn’t feel he knew: if most men still harboured a yen for marrying a virgin they weren’t necessarily being virtuous and beautiful but might simply be wanting an extra kick for their money. About men, however, it was hard to get away from the immemorial thing, and he doubted whether women much in their hearts revolted from it. Nature – after all, and to put it crudely – didn’t package up much extra kick with a virgin husband. Anyway, it was himself he had to judge. And he knew very well that he wouldn’t regard having laid one girl in a barn one day as debarring him from looking another girl straight in the eye on another. So this treating Harry Carter as a leper was shocking humbug. Really and truly, they were cheerful young blackguards together.