A Palace of Art

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Dormitories? Are they thinking of starting a prep school?’

  ‘No, no. Recollect, my dear Domberg. “Dormitory” is a word used by the Americans, very absurdly, to describe what we should call a court, quad, or even hall of residence. Not that there would be any intention, I imagine, of housing droves of undergraduates in Nudd. It would be for scholars in all that sort of thing – your sort of thing – at a high academic level. With the collection – or the entire inspiring ambience, as one might put it – left entirely as it is. I’m bound to say it appeals to me as a very convenient way for Miss Montacute to dispose of her property. If the price is right, that’s to say.’

  ‘Have you any idea why this man Guise should concern himself with the matter, whether one way or another?’

  ‘It is certainly not conduct at all usual in a butler. Or so I should judge. I cannot say that I have ever retained one in my employment.’

  ‘It must obviously be self-interest of some kind. Perhaps he simply hopes to keep his job if Nudd remains a going concern.’

  ‘Possibly so. But on my visits there he has struck me – the Montacute Curator – as rather an unusual man. He would have to be, come to think of it, to assume such a title.’

  Domberg, who had now drunk as much of his tea as civility required, did not dispute this proposition. On the contrary, he seized upon it.

  ‘Exactly so. The mildest thing one can possibly say is that his conduct has been extremely eccentric. And he’s in complete charge down there?’

  ‘That was Miss Montacute’s arrangement, and it holds until she returns to Nudd herself – which, as I have said, she may now have done. I myself put in a word only upon one or two points of security. Locks and keys, in fact. Insurance companies are always happier when there are plenty of those in use.’

  ‘Insurance companies? I’d be uncommonly surprised to learn from you, Thurkle, that the collection is insured for anything like its full value. The premiums would be prohibitive. Am I right?’

  Thurkle frowned – signalling thereby that professional discretion must not be impaired, and that his client’s dispositions in this matter were no part of Domberg’s business. Here he was undoubtedly right – the more so in that his visitor had turned up on him without invitation. And now he replied only obliquely to Domberg’s question.

  ‘The collection is undoubtedly an anxiety. If Miss Montacute were devoted to it, I would make every endeavour to find means of keeping it, or the greater part of it, in being, and as her property. But we are agreed, I think, that her interests lie elsewhere. That being so—’

  ‘That being so, your own responsibility is the heavier.’ Domberg offered this proposition in what was itself a thoroughly heavy way. ‘The security of the collection must be very much your concern. I confess that I am concerned about it too.’

  ‘That is most obliging of you.’ Thurkle wasn’t taking to being taught his business.

  ‘And I hope my concern is entirely disinterested. I am simply conscious that it would be a tragedy if the Nudd collection were lost.’

  ‘Lost, Domberg! What the devil do you mean? Is it going to be carried off in pantechnicons by an army of thieves?’

  ‘Even that isn’t totally impossible nowadays. But I am still thinking of this fellow Guise. What if he’s a maniac?’

  ‘My dear sir – what if you are a maniac? It’s an idle question, which one can ask about anybody. Why should Guise be a maniac?’

  ‘Because he has an idée fixé.’ Domberg suddenly spoke as a man inspired. ‘His conduct isn’t motivated by any rational consideration whatever.’

  ‘I understood you to be advancing the view that he was obviously governed by some form of self-interest.’

  ‘Well, it may very possibly be only in the most crazy sense. He’s determined to keep Nudd exactly as it is. And if that isn’t lunacy, what is? Rather than see the collection dispersed, he’d take some positively maniacal action. Burn the whole place down, perhaps.’

  Thurkle was plainly impressed by Domberg’s voice of doom. Being a conservative person, he was probably addicted to reading Victorian novels, in which great houses fairly regularly go up in flame in the last chapter. And a place like Nudd was eminently combustible. Where would an adequate fire-fighting force have to come from? Gloucester, perhaps, or Swindon, or even Oxford. Thurkle was appalled.

  ‘You seriously think,’ he asked, ‘that the man may do this at any time?’

  ‘Certainly I do. But I believe the likeliest moment to be upon the occasion of Miss Montacute’s return to Nudd. He will be cunning enough, you know, to seek to give some colouring of accident to the thing. And remember that she will be arriving for the first time as owner of the estate. It will seem very proper that an old family retainer – such as we understand this demented Guise to be – should make preparations to celebrate the occasion. With the loyal tenantry joining in.’

  ‘There aren’t any tenantry, loyal or otherwise.’ Thurkle was making a first attempt to rally. ‘Only a single home farm.’

  ‘No matter. Guise will be a host in himself. He will have arranged fireworks—’

  ‘Fireworks!’

  ‘Fireworks, and a bonfire, and little paper lanterns festooned all over the house. In these circumstances, arson will be simplicity itself.’

  ‘My dear Domberg, what ought I to do?’

  ‘Ah!’ Domberg’s exclamation held a hint of glee. Too often had he been snubbed by this wretched little lawyer. Now he was giving him a bad half-hour. ‘In the first place, you ought to send down somebody of your own at once. A confidential clerk, or person of that sort. Thoroughly able-bodied, if possible. He can pretend to be making an inventory, or sorting out papers – and actually he can keep an eye on this rascally butler. But the important thing, of course, is to apprise Miss Montacute.’

  ‘Apprise her?’

  ‘Of the constant risks to which a collection such as hers is exposed. Guise is only an instance, you know – nothing but an instance. Impress upon her—’

  ‘That the sooner she disperses the collection and banks the money the better?’

  ‘Precisely so. You couldn’t give her better advice.’

  ‘Not, certainly, in your interest.’ Thurkle had made an effort, and was himself again. The momentary scales had dropped from his eyes, and Domberg was a shark once more. ‘I will certainly make proper inquiries about the man Guise and his courses. An explanation is undoubtedly required. But his American contacts, however come by, are not to my mind to be rejected out of hand. There may conceivably be powerful interests behind them: the Carnegie people, the Rockefeller people’—with these august names a just confidence returned to Thurkle’s voice— ‘or other of the great foundations to which such short-term financial stringencies as you were speaking of are, in my judgement, unlikely to apply. I may communicate with you again in the event of nothing coming of them.’

  ‘Then I wish you all good fortune in your quest.’ Domberg had risen to his feet with dignity, as if proudly determined to take this dire decision – and deplorable folly – well. ‘It is what a man needs, my dear Thurkle, when he goes after fairy gold.’

  And having delivered himself of this powerful commination upon the Almighty Dollar, the active half of Comberback and Domberg treated Thurkle to a commiserating shake of the head and hastened to quit the dusty purlieus of Gray’s Inn.

  It had been the occasion – one might have said – of Domberg’s Last Throw.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  SOLITUDE AT NUDD

  Back at Nudd, and with a week in hand before starting her new job, Gloria applied herself to sorting out this and that. But neither this nor that was among her more intimate affairs. These, whether wholesomely or not, were proving elusive, or had gone to earth for a time. She sorted out Mrs Bantry’s sister, Mrs Pottinger, who had been waiting for a bed in the local hospital longer than was tolerable; and she sorted out the gardener’s boy, who had conceived an antipathy towards a probation officer and
was in some danger of receiving the renewed attention of the magistrates as a result. She even sorted out the vicar, a nervous man unable to decide whether Mrs Montacute’s death was yet sufficiently in the past to render appropriate some rustic merrymaking or other in the village hall.

  When not involved with these matters Gloria did a good deal of thinking about the Admin canteen. It needed a spot of sorting out, too; and this was no doubt why she had taken it on. She had misgivings as to whether it was really her sort of thing. She could do it, she knew; but she wasn’t clear about it in terms of job satisfaction. Job satisfaction had been explained to her by somebody as important. Drop your job satisfaction quotient too far and it was mathematically—or was it psychologically?—impossible to do the job well. This worried her. There had been a lot of j-s in being a tea lady in a great hospital – so much as to make her feel almost guilty. She could recall – because her mother had been fond of the recreative resource known as a ‘cruise’ – those men who, in not quite spotless white dungarees, ceaselessly prowled around the vast engine-rooms of more or less obsolescent liners, applying here and there, from oil-cans answeringly vast, some humble but essential emollient drop. Precisely this was a tea lady’s line.

  Midway between professional and wholly private matters came the problem of the collection. She didn’t want to think about the collection at all – much less go round looking at it. Even little Don Balthasar Carlos, of whom she had been rather fond, was to be avoided. He reminded her of the more disturbing of the two disturbing young men who had turned up on her in Venice. Her cousin Jake had said something about his father wanting Don Balthasar as a Christmas card. She hadn’t understood him in the least – or why he had suddenly been sitting in front of her in that little café, saying such extraordinary things. She would have to be clever, she obscurely felt, to understand Jake – cleverer, oddly enough, than to understand Octavius Chevalley, who himself went in for being clever much more obviously than Jake did. Thinking about these two young men made her remember (as she’d resolved not to) that there had lately been not two but three young men in her life. It was a bit much, that. As for a distinction between them, she could see that Jake and Harry held about equal shares in something Octavius hadn’t got. It was surprising that she was coming to think quite affectionately of Octavius, and that she didn’t feel in this way about either of the others, at all.

  None of the three was entirely isolated from the problem of the collection. Nor was somebody else – and that other person was Guise. In this there wasn’t a surprise, although there was certainly an element of the mysterious. For almost as long as she could remember, Gloria had known that it was Guise who really understood the pictures – and, for that matter, the camels and the pots and jars and the scraps of velvet and nuggets of jade and the fontana minore itself. Nobody else had appeared to know this; and, what was more, she didn’t believe that Guise knew that she knew. Her mother had sometimes talked about Guise’s taste – but only to visitors, and with a great air of advancing an amusing paradox. In fact, if you were observant, and even although you weren’t yourself remotely with it art-wise, you couldn’t miss the simple truth. It emerged in the way that Guise, seemingly just buttling round, would unobtrusively move one object six inches towards, or away from, another object. It had occasionally emerged in the frigid deference he would accord to some of his employer’s gushing and chattering guests.

  This endowment of Guise’s had never struck Gloria as all that important; and the extent to which it was something out of the way in a butler even seemed to her a measure of the extent to which Guise might be mildly dotty. But Guise had always been nice to her, even although she had been (she somehow knew) a disappointment to him. It wasn’t her intention that Guise shouldn’t have his due. All these circumstances made her particularly annoyed with Mr Thurkle’s strange letter.

  Mr Thurkle’s letters were invariably circumspect, which meant that they were hard to make much of. What he had chiefly on his mind was estate duty, and the diminished extent to which, nowadays, being clever enough to own works of art instead of stocks and shares gave you any edge over others when confronted by this iniquitous imposition. Gloria failed to see it as iniquitous in the least. If you’d enjoyed, in whatever form, a whacking fortune during your life, it seemed to her fair enough that, at your death, a sizeable chunk of it should be carried off and used to build a school or hospital or something of that kind. But Mr Thurkle had given her to understand – although with a very great deal of circumspection indeed – that this was, if laudable, yet an immature and insufficiently informed view, and that nothing but ruin lay ahead of a society giving countenance to it. Mr Thurkle also had a lot to say (surprisingly enough) about charities, and about the blessings that attended being able to involve one’s affairs with activities and institutions classifiable as such.

  Gloria didn’t follow much of this, but she was arrested by the way in which, in Mr Thurkle’s last letter, Guise’s existence had cropped up. There was, it appeared, a praiseworthy side to Guise. There were initiatives which, although not properly his to take, he had been taking with a certain ability. Nevertheless Gloria must observe caution in her relations with Guise, and anything the man advanced to her Mr Thurkle would be obliged if he might have reported to him immediately.

  It all seemed very great nonsense to Gloria, and she was disposed to speak to Guise about it at once. Unfortunately, although she didn’t in the least want to be cautious towards Guise, Guise did seem disposed to be cautious towards her. Where Mr Thurkle was circumspect, Guise was wary. He gave an effect of biding his time. Moreover, in addition to this, something seemed to have happened to Mrs Bantry. Mrs Bantry was adopting towards Gloria an attitude of unnecessary solicitude. It might be accounted for by her sense of her young employer’s recent loss. It took the form, however, of an expressed conviction that Gloria was ‘out of sorts’ and ‘run down’ – an undesirable state of affairs which she monotonously attributed to ‘all that kickshaw foreign food’.

  This wasn’t the less annoying because Gloria did feel by no means a hundred per cent. She didn’t suppose herself entitled to be aggrieved by the mere fact in itself; her Italian journey could be described, she supposed, as having ended in a mildly trying way; and in any case one’s ups and downs shouldn’t be too much attended to. But there was no denying that Mrs Bantry wasn’t exactly a resource, and it was even possible to suspect that her fussing was a cover-up for something else. She had a good deal to say in a dark and gossiping fashion about ‘goings-on’ in one or another supposedly respectable gentlefolks’ house in the neighbourhood. Gloria wondered whether there could conceivably have been ‘goings-on’ at Nudd.

  All this had the effect of making her feel rather alone. She wished she could have brought Kirstie Anderson home with her, even although Kirstie’s presence would have been a standing reminder of one or two things she wanted to forget. She had thoughts of returning to London at once, and of occupying her time until the Admin canteen claimed her by decorating her flat. But when a girl does that she is widely supposed by her acquaintance to be in retreat from some unsatisfactory affair of the heart. Gloria felt she would resent any such inference about herself – whether justified or not.

  And then she remembered a social duty which was incumbent upon her. Mrs Carter had been kind to her on the night of her mother’s death. Mrs Carter, moreover, was a thoroughly sensible woman. It would be a good idea to walk over to the home farm and have a talk with Mrs Carter.

  Gloria put this resolve – which can be seen as wholly admirable in itself – into execution at once.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  AVOIDING THE HARVEST BUGS

  What was now called Nudd Manor was a mansion of considerable antiquity, and would undoubtedly be described by the estate agents as ‘mellow’ should Miss Montacute decide to sell it up. Even so, the centuries behind it were not nearly so numerous as those behind the home farm. The farm, in fact, had been the original manorial dwell
ing, and was still not without suggestions of its former feudal consequence. For example, the kitchen – familiar to Gloria for as long as she could remember – was as large as the hall in which the late Mrs Montacute, posed beside the playing or piddling fontana minore, had been accustomed to receive her guests. And from the kitchen you could look out on a grove of oaks. Mr Carter (who was now blind and never seen in the fields) had always been proud of the oaks and of their having been let stand where corn might grow. Gloria could recall his telling her, when quite a small girl, that the oaks were as old as England.

  There was a lane to traverse and a stream to cross; Gloria paused on a footbridge to survey the scene. She was without much grasp of leases and tenancies, but she did know that she owned the farm quite as definitely as she owned the manor. The knowledge somehow troubled her. The farm was quite clearly the Carters’ farm, and yet in law it was nothing of the kind. If old Mr Carter suddenly went mad and ordered the cutting down of the oak trees she could stop it at once. Mr Thurkle would take this sort of proprietorship for granted, but it seemed strange to her that she should have any sort of control over mature people who for generations had been doing just what they were doing now: conjuring wheat and turnips, milk and wool, out of the quickened earth. It put her in an unsatisfactory relationship with the Carters – with any Carter. The money-thing – which was also the class-thing – would always make itself felt.

  But why, after all, should it matter? Without being particularly prompted to articulate an answer, Gloria walked on. She had done so for only a dozen paces, however, when she was brought to a halt by a loud whistle from not far behind her.

  If a whistle brings you to a stop, it may be expected to make you turn round as well. For a moment, at least, Gloria didn’t do this. She was occupied by the amazing discovery that it was Saturday, and that on a Saturday Harry was quite likely to have come home for the weekend. She felt properly disconcerted at having chosen a Saturday afternoon to call on Harry’s mother. Not that she had made any resolve to shun Harry or ignore his existence. She acknowledged to herself, on the contrary, that he occupied some rather urgent corner of her mind – and that he was quite clever enough to break free of it, if given half a chance, and roam about as he pleased. It was just that he required thought. There was some dimension to Harry that she hadn’t at all grasped, and which it was important that she should.