Whatever the validity of these moral reflections, they now induced Jake to favour Harry with a grin.
‘It comes to this,’ he said challengingly. ‘You’re dead scared I’ll tell Gloria you’ve had that girl – and probably others round about the village as well.’
‘She’d have a fair idea of it already, if you ask me.’ Harry produced his own grin. It had a cocky quality which momentarily brought back all Jake’s hostility.
‘It would be a bit different – actually being told.’
‘That’s true.’ Harry accepted this at once. And he hesitated. ‘Particularly – well, about anything of the sort happening up there.’
‘I see.’ Jake suddenly found his soul deeply troubled, and his sage reflections on sexual conduct of a few moments before blown away like cobweb on a gust of primitive jealousy. ‘Do you really suppose I would tell?’ he demanded coldly.
‘Might do. All’s fair in—’
‘Man, one doesn’t hoist oneself up by giving the other chap a kick in the balls.’
‘Doesn’t one? Not at Eton and ‘Arrer, I suppose.’ Harry produced this gibe rather weakly. He had been visibly impressed.
‘I don’t know anything about Eton and Harrow. And they’ve nothing to do with the case, anyway. So don’t talk like a bloody fool.’
There was a silence, in which the two young men found themselves regarding each other uncertainly and with no great enmity.
‘If only the pub was open,’ Harry said, ‘we could finish it up on a pint.’
‘A beery truce?’ This homespun notion quite pleased Jake. ‘Shaking hands, and so forth? You must read uncommonly wholesome fiction in your spare time.’
‘I haven’t got much spare time, mate.’ Harry had taken what Jake realised was a silly gibe in irritatingly good part. ‘When I do read it’s most sci-fi.’
Sci-fi being a staple diet with a number of Jake’s acquaintance, this bid to generate a little cultural antagonism fell flat. It became evident that the young men hadn’t much more to say to each other. In addition to which, Harry’s mother oughtn’t to be kept waiting longer. So Jake stood up.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘why did you tell me that Gloria is probably in Venice? Was it a bit of playing fair?’
‘Play fair my arse,’ Harry said robustly. ‘I was taunting you, wasn’t I? It was what I meant to do. A mistake, perhaps. You’re completely idle, and could go off to Venice at any time. Some kind of an artist, aren’t you?’
‘Not some kind of an artist. Just an artist. And I’m not idle. As for going to Venice, I reckon a bus fare to Margate would, be beyond me at the moment. You know, I suppose, that Gloria’s going to be enormously wealthy?’
‘Yes, I do.’ Harry too had stood up. He wasn’t only good-looking, Jake noted. Plenty of those Renaissance characters who did sums about the human body would have given him high marks. ‘And, what’s more,’ Harry said, ‘you know it as well.’
‘I’m not mercenary, as it happens.’
‘I could do with forty thousand to buy a farm.’ Harry laughed suddenly – and almost as if some pleasing inwardness attended this remark. ‘Do you know, I remember telling Gloria that? But, as it happens, I’m not—’ Harry hesitated. ‘What’s that word?’
‘Mercenary.’
‘I’m not mercenary either. Or not in this connection.’ Harry gave the same laugh. ‘Can’t think why. With an heiress around, it seems just silly. Pride or something. Spoils fun.’
Jake made no reply. He was puzzled by Harry, and less than pleased. But he somehow believed what Harry had said.
He returned home by a route so indirect that it involved getting into a lay-by and sleeping in the van. One can sleep very well in a mini-van, provided one doesn’t mind a little curling up. So it was Monday evening before he again shoved the port on to nine o’clock.
‘Can you let me have £100?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’ Jake’s father accompanied this instant reply with small, agitated gestures and a look of alarm. Jake was far from criticising them. Occasions like these abundantly licensed the mild putting on of an act. ‘Not that it isn’t a little difficult,’ his father said. ‘Rolls-Royce, you know, and trouble with motor-bicycles at the other end of the scale, and more trouble brewing.’
‘Brewing where?’
‘No, no. The breweries. They’re in a ferment. Still, it can be managed, my dear boy.’
‘Lucky I haven’t got a job in a brewery. But I’m going to make ice-cream. In Rugby. I went there and saw a friend this morning.’
‘Ice-cream?’ Cedric Counterpayne was bewildered. ‘At the school?’
‘Nothing to do with the school. There’s a town as well as a school. You must remember that. I start in three weeks and work for two months. So you get your money back, with proper gratitude, twelve weeks from today.’
‘Isn’t it rather unseasonable – ice-cream, I mean – with autumn drawing on?’
‘Oh, it’s for next summer. They put it in enormous cold-storage places.’
‘It must mean locking up a lot of capital.’ Cedric Counterpayne shook his head dubiously. ‘Are you sure this won’t interfere with your work?’
‘Just the opposite. Tremendous inspiration in machinery. Ever since Léger.’ Jake didn’t feel too happy about producing this rubbish. But his father, a truly amiable man, was fishing out his cheque-book now, and it seemed decent to say anything that would preserve his peace of mind. Jake’s work was important to Jake’s father, who probably felt that over the past half-dozen years he had locked up a lot of capital in it. For that matter, it was important to Jake too – only at the moment Jake was responding to the tug of another mystery.
‘Shall you be at home,’ Cedric Counterpayne asked as he handed over the cheque, ‘until you go off to this ice-cream?’
‘Probably not.’ His father, Jake reflected, could scarcely have expected an affirmative reply. Nobody would go through the discomfort of borrowing £100 from a professedly penurious parent merely for the purpose of continued residence in Olney.
‘Time to wash up, don’t you think?’ It was the only further question this admirable man asked.
Not so with Mary Counterpayne.
‘I’ve borrowed a hundred quid from Daddy,’ Jake told her as soon as they had made their retreat to the nursery. It was unfortunately a point of honour between them that they reported to each other all financial transactions of this sort. ‘Repayable in twelve weeks’ time.’
‘Good God! Do you imagine that in the next three months you’re going to sell a picture?’
‘Not for a moment. Not bonkers.’
‘Then what?’
‘Going to make ice-cream.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Going to make ice-cream. Job. J-O-B. Like our kinswoman Gloria dishing out tea.’
‘You have our kinswoman Gloria on the brain, all right. I suppose that’s what this is in aid of?’
‘Correct.’ Jake knew prevarication to be idle.
‘You’ve said nothing at all about what happened at Nudd. How did you find her?’
‘Didn’t. Gloria’s abroad.’
‘So Jake sets out for Lyonnesse, a hundred quid away.’ It was with considerable acuteness, Jake felt, that his sister thus travestied a celebrated lyric. ‘Or a sprat to catch a whale.’
‘If it was that, I’d jump up and pretend to be furious with you.’ Jake was in fact sprawled luxuriously on a broken-springed sofa. ‘A damned insulting thing to say, etcetera.’
‘But at least perhaps Daddy sees it as that?’
‘As a sprat? Nothing of the kind. He hasn’t a notion what the money’s in aid of.’
‘You asked him for all that money without any explanation at all?’
‘It’s the best way.’
A short silence showed that Mary acknowledged this as true.
‘But look,’ she said. ‘I just don’t understand. You’ve only had one glimpse of this girl since you were a kid. And every
body knows she’s less like a woman than a performing elephant.’
‘It’s an exaggeration.’ Jake was totally unoffended. ‘Gloria’s simply a well-built girl. And, of course, these are deeply and marvellously irrational.’
‘And you’re telling me it would make no difference if she were a pauper?’
‘Not a flicker. I suppose that’s very wrong. There’s certainly no virtue in it. As a matter of fact, I met a chap yesterday who feels exactly the same about her. And he’s nothing but a lecherous young yeoman.’
‘Young what?’
‘Yeoman. Respectable word for modified prole.’
‘And used, I suppose, in your Little Red Book?’
‘Oh, yes – or something like it.’ Jake paused. ‘So I’m off to Venice.’
‘What, in heaven’s name, is Gloria Montacute doing in Venice? I thought she spent her time walking through some London hospital with a little red lamp. Under a kind of samovar.’
‘I don’t know what she’s doing in Venice. That’s what I’m going to find out.’
‘On £100? You can get there, and stay there, and get back, on £100?’
‘Of course. You have the most fantastic notions. I’m taking the van—’
‘You can’t drive that round the Piazza San Marco, or whatever it’s called.’’
‘There’s a multi-storey car-park. And I can get the van over the channel and back for under ten quid. I know a chap who does it in the dark.’
Mary Counterpayne made a gesture expressive of the fact that she gave her brother up. She had to admit that beginning the pursuit of a girl on a kind of black-market or at least cut-price ferry was quite something. She even had to admit that Jake might go far. But would it be as a painter? Being a loyal sister, she wished the idea well, since it seemed to be Jake’s ultimate dream. But now up had bobbed this other dream of the fat cousin from Nudd. She was going to be enormously wealthy – which meant that, if Jake married her, Jake would to all intents and purposes be enormously wealthy too. He would be this even if he was now pursuing Gloria in the utmost purity of heart. Rather to her surprise, Mary found that she didn’t take to the idea a bit. The last thing that would be any good to Jake as a serious artist would be any amount of money dolloped out by a Philistine wife.
Part III
Chapter Thirteen
TWO YOUNG WOMEN IN CONVERSATION
‘Each of those flags must be half as big as a tennis court.’
Sitting outside Quadri’s – for Florian’s was in the shade – Gloria made this discovery with the satisfaction of a traveller in antique lands who comes momentarily in contact with some familiar thing. Tennis had perhaps been in her head; she wouldn’t at all have minded three brisk sets; she had been rather short of exercise – except of the tramping round sort – since coming to this astonishing city. You could swim on the Lido, and according to the guide book it was the most fashionable seaside resort in Italy. But when she reflected that it was only a few miles away from all those canals she had her doubts about it. The idea that the Adriatic and indeed the whole Mediterranean had become one big cesspool was obviously modish rot, and into any sea that looked right she was willing enough to plunge without demanding preliminary bacteriological analysis. But the Lido she hadn’t taken to at all.
She had taken to this enormous square, just as she was now taking to these enormous flags. Two were national flags, brightly banal except for their breathtaking size. But on the other two St Mark’s winged lion (a ubiquitous creature, and frequently for some reason provided with a football) was blazoned in gold upon a maroon ground. But ‘maroon’ was ridiculous; here was a colour indescribably splendid which had been familiar to her, she nostalgically thought, on certain expanses of ancient stuff at Nudd. And this didn’t end the impressiveness of these two civic flags; each of them ended in six long points or tails which flared like comets against the background of the extraordinary church – not in the least like a church – beyond.
‘Wunderschon!’ Gloria said – still about the flags.
‘Wunderbar!’ Miss Christine Anderson echoed. Miss Anderson was Gloria’s travelling companion.
‘Ausgezeichnet!’ Gloria brilliantly offered. On Garda there had been numerous Germans – hundreds of them, in fact – and their enthusiasms had amused the English ladies very much. Here in the Piazza San Marco (described by a more sophisticated traveller as the drawing-room of Europe) they were aware of, but not much disturbed by, their own unfurnished cultural condition.
‘You’d think,’ Miss Anderson said on a practical note, ‘that when they take them down for the night they could use them as dust-sheets to cover the whole cathedral. For I suppose it is a cathedral. Basilica seems to be the local word. That’s what’s in the book.’
‘What about another ice?’ Gloria asked, on a note more practical still.
‘They cost the earth in this square.’
‘Oh, well!’ And Gloria waved at a waiter. It was the wrong waiter, but he hurried obligingly over to them, all the same. During their wanderings it had come to be admitted that Gloria had no need to travel on twopence, and she and Kirstie were sufficiently good friends not to have to bother about small reckonings. Gloria’s social conscience, which was robust but not fanatical, would even have stretched to decent hotels. But that would have required a different proposal at the start, and turned Kirstie into a kind of semi-paid companion, which would be absurd. So, on the whole, they were doing Italy on the cheap. Kirstie was a Theatre Sister; she slaved like a probationer and carried large responsibilities; they paid her,
Gloria supposed, about what they paid a dustman.
‘The campanile looks quite new,’ Kirstie said. She remembered to speak disapprovingly, although anybody who works in an East End hospital should have nothing but praise for a modern fabric.
‘It is new.’ This odd fact had caught Gloria’s eye in her Blue Guide. ‘The old one fell down, and this one was opened on 25 April 1912.’ A respect for dates was something she had caught from her mother.
‘Opened?’
‘Yes – you go up in a lift. But if you want to pay less there’s an easy sloping walk.’
‘An easy sloping walk?’ Kirstie echoed unbelievingly. She turned her gaze from the towering brick monster to cast an anticipatory glance on the second ice. It had arrived, complete with a glass of water and a hospital-looking spoon, with commendable speed.
‘That’s what it says. Do you think they have a band playing here all the year round? It’s almost winter now.’
‘It doesn’t feel like winter.’
‘An old man in the pensione told me it can turn wintry at any time. There are storms, and all this goes under water. It can even freeze.’
‘Think of those flags frozen hard. Like the tin ones they leave on the moon.’
The flags were almost like that now. A brisk breeze, cunningly insinuating itself into the drawing-room of Europe by way of the Mercerie, was blowing them stiffly out in the direction of the Piazzetta. It was four o’clock. The mori on the Torre dell’Orologio, as if abruptly awakening to the fact, phrenetically banged out the hour on their bell. A thousand well-trained pigeons rose obediently in air. The lady peddling granturco in the middle of the Piazza (she was without commercial rivals now that the high holiday-season was over), encouraged by this activity on the part of the beneficiaries of her zeal, waved her wares and uttered shrill cries in competition with the band. The band, playing Gounod, played Gounod louder. On the shady side of the vast space ranks of cleared tables and empty chairs suggested a deserted theatre, but without much affecting the general animation of the scene. It would be another month before the tourists finally departed and the Venetians themselves became distinguishable again.
One Venetian, however, in addition to the waiters and the granturco lady, was identifiable now. He wore, indeed, in addition to a pair of ragged shorts, a T-shirt upon which the word ‘Oxford’ was imprinted in large letters beneath a representation of three crowns and
an open book. But this appeared to be a tribute to, rather than a claim to residence within, a celebrated place of learning, since its owner was a boy of eleven or twelve. He was selling newspapers. And as that is an occupation commonly reserved in Italy for male citizens of mature years he was rather pleased with the job.
Kirstie bought a paper. She bought an Italian one, although this was difficult to achieve and even seemed a little to offend the young Oxonian. At school she had done Spanish, since at that time she had appeared doomed to a commercial career, and she could work her way through Italian sentences as a result. This useful accomplishment impressed Gloria a good deal. But for the moment Kirstie deferred intellectual exercise, to occupy herself alternately with her ice and the astonishing edifice beyond the flags. The light was changing – in Venice it never does anything else – and the Basilica was changing with it; it seemed to claim less and less to be a building, and to admit itself more and more an exhalation merely. The spectacle has never been described. ‘Clear as amber and delicate as ivory,’ Ruskin tried, and went on to evoke ‘marble foam’, ‘sculptured spray’, and similar bold tropes. Competent authorities aver his to be the best shot, but it still won’t quite do. For one thing, amid all this ethereal delicacy a certain high-handed mastering of architectural and decorative incongruities is an element in the effect, and analysis of this is difficult to achieve. Kirstie arrived upon the fringes of it with her next remark.
A Palace of Art Page 11
