What's Bred in the Bone

Six

Wars are national and international disasters, but everyone in a warring nation fights a war of his own and sometimes it cannot be decided whether he has won or lost. Francis Cornish’s war was long and painful, even though he was a non-combatant.

Indeed, being a non-combatant was one of his lesser, if more obvious, troubles. To be an able-bodied man in his thirties, not apparently doing any important work, required frequent explanation, and aroused dislike and suspicion. He had, of course, his letter from Sir Owen Williams-Owen, guaranteeing his troublesome heart and exemption from service, but he could not wear it pinned to his coat; from Uncle Jack, for whom he was working long hours, he had nothing at all, because it was unthinkable, if he should be injured, or challenged, that he should be identified with what he now called, not “the profession”, but frankly MI5.

As soon as he returned to England in late July of 1939, Francis became officially—in the sense that he was paid a rather small salary—a counter-intelligence man, which meant that his job was to find out whatever he could about people representing themselves as refugees from Europe, who were in fact German agents. It was not Secret Service in the romantic style; what it meant was that by day he worked with an agency that interviewed refugees and helped them, and at night he hung about in doorways watching who entered and left certain buildings that were under observation. Careful reports of what he learned, which were chiefly timetables, he took as unobtrusively as he could to Uncle Jack, who worked from a small office at the back of a house in Queen Anne’s Gate.

It was drudgery, but he managed to give it an individual touch, for which he blessed the name of Harry Furniss and those long hours in Blairlogie, where he had sketched everybody and everything, alive and dead. Once he had seen a man or woman, he could produce a useful likeness, and he was not deceived by disguises. Few people have any aptitude for disguise; they put too much faith in dyed hair, changes of clothes, and peculiar walks; they disguise their fronts, but they neglect to disguise their backs, and Francis, who had learned the lesson from Saraceni, could identify a back when he might be puzzled by a face. So he amused himself by decorating his reports with sketches that were doubtless more useful than he knew, because Uncle Jack was not communicative, and never praised. He was not permitted to use a typewriter, because the sound, late at night, might rouse the suspicion of a landlady; his reports, written in an exquisite, tiny Italic hand, and ornamented with sketches, were little works of art. But Uncle Jack seemed impervious to art, and filed them without comment on their appearance.

What was drudgery for the first months of the war became dangerous misery after the coming of the air raids on London, by day and night in the autumn of 1940, and by night until May of 1941. It was in the great fire-raid of December 29 that Francis lost what had become his chief treasure.

He had rediscovered Ruth Nibsmith, meeting her by chance one October night in a Lyons restaurant where he had gone for a meal before taking up one of his long vigils across the street from a suspected house.

“Le Beau Ténébreux! What a piece of luck! What are you up to? Not that I need to ask; you look the complete snoop. Who are you snooping on?”

“What do you mean, I look a snoop?”

“Oh, my dear—the stained felt hat, the seedy raincoat, the bulge in the pocket where the notebook is kept—of course you’re a snoop.”

“You only say that because you’re a psychic. My disguise is impenetrable. I am The Unknown Civilian, who is catching it so hard these bad days.”

“Not half so hard as he’ll be catching it before the end of the year—speaking as a psychic.”

“You’re right, of course. I am doing confidential work. What are you doing?”

“Also confidential.” But after some chat it came out that Ruth was in Government Code and Cipher. “Of course, I have the puzzle-solving sort of mind,” she said; “I think it was my ability to do the Times crossword in half an hour that got me the job. But being a psychic does no harm, either. And that’s enough of that.” She glanced up at the poster on the wall, which was a picture by Fougasse of Hitler with an enormous ear cocked, and the legend “Careless Talk Costs Lives”.

They renewed their friendship, so far as Francis’s peculiar assignments and Ruth’s occasional night duties allowed, and this meant renewal of their happy hours in bed. Ruth lived in a very small flat in Mecklenburgh Street where the landlady was either indulgent or indifferent and perhaps once a week they contrived a happy hour or so. In wartime London, which had become so grey and stuffy, where laundry was a difficulty and baths were uncertain because of broken water-pipes, it was bliss to strip off their clothes and tumble into the not very clean sheets and lose themselves in a communion where no rules of security had to be remembered and tenderness and kindness were all that mattered. Perhaps it was odd that they never talked of love, or exchanged promises of fidelity; but they felt no need of such words. Without ever saying so, they knew that time was short and the present everything, and a union achieved when chance permitted was a treasure snatched from destruction.

“If a bomb were to blow us up now,” said Francis, one night when they had disobeyed the sirens and stayed in the warm bed when they ought to have gone to the nearest chilly shelter, “I would feel I had died at the peak of my life.”

“Don’t worry, Frank. No bomb is going to get you. Don’t you remember your horoscope at Düsterstein? Old age and fame for you, my darling.”

“And you?”

She kissed him. “That’s Classified Information,” she said. “I’m the decoder, not you.”

On the night of December 29, when the great fire-raid struck, Francis was on the job, watching a door through which nobody came or went, until it became impossible to keep at his post any longer, and he went to a Tube station, where he lay on the hard pavement with some hundreds of others, unsleeping and in terror. When at last the all-clear sounded he went as far toward Ruth’s flat as was possible, for fires were raging and whole streets of houses had disappeared.

She had been rescued, and in a shorter time than he had dared to hope he found her in a hospital. Rather, he found a body swathed in packs of saline solution, a body so heavily sedated that only one hand could be seen, and he sat for several hours, holding it, and praying as he had not prayed since childhood that by holding it he was being of some comfort. But the time came when the ward sister beckoned him away.

“No use now. She’s gone. Was she your wife? A friend?”

“A friend.”

“Do you want a cup of tea?” It was not much, but it was everything the hospital had to offer. Francis did not want a cup of tea.

So ended the greatest comfort he had ever known, which had lasted, he reckoned, a little less than ten weeks. Nothing during the forty-one years of life and a kind of distinction that remained to him brought anything to equal it.

A hero of romance might have undergone what is called, not very descriptively, a nervous breakdown, or might have thrown away his letter of exemption and pushed his way into the armed services, seeking death or revenge. Francis’s heroism was of another sort; he pulled about him a harsh cloak of stoicism, shut the door on love, and drudged on at his tedious work until Uncle Jack, perhaps sensing a great change in him, or finding new worth in him, promoted him to something a little more interesting. He next sat for several months in a small office in a building that did not in the least suggest MI5, and co-ordinated reports that had been brought in by watchers like himself, and tried to make sense of information that was usually uninformative. Only once, in all this time, did he have any certainty that he had been instrumental in uncovering an enemy agent.

It was not wholly loneliness and drudgery. Early in 1943 his father turned up, now revealed as MI5’s Security Liaison Officer for Canada, and rather a bigwig, for he stayed at Claridge’s and could have commanded a car for his use, if he had not preferred to walk. The Wooden Soldier was more wooden than ever, and his monocle was, if possible, more a part of his face than it had been before. He brought news of home.

“Grand’mère and Aunt Mary-Ben won’t be long with us, I’m afraid. They’re old, of course; the old lady is well over eighty, and Aunt is eighty-five if she’s a day. But it isn’t age that ails them; it’s parsimony and bad food. That miserable Doctor is even older, but he is remarkably bobbish and keeps the old girls ticking. I never liked him. The worst sort of Irishman. Your mother is well, and as beautiful as the first day I saw her, but she’s developing some odd tricks; faulty memory—that kind of thing. The surprise of the pack is your young brother Arthur. No university for him; he says you went to two and that’s enough for the family. He’s been deep in the business already, and very sharp. But he’s in the Air Force now; I expect he’ll do well.

“And you’re doing well, Jack Copplestone tells me.”

“I wish he’d tell me once in a while. I sometimes think he’s forgotten me.”

“Not Jack. But you’re not the easiest man to place, Frank. Not a swashbuckler, thank God. He’ll use you when the right thing turns up. Still, I’ll say a word to him. Not as though you had said anything to me, of course. But just to keep the wheels turning.

“You know that both the O’Gorman boys are in the Army? Very junior, mind you, but keen. Unfortunately not very bright—not in a Service way—but full of beans. And of course O’Gorman is up to his neck in what he calls his War Work—selling Victory Bonds and that sort of thing. I suppose somebody has to do it. You know, I think that fat ass is pushing for some kind of official recognition. He’s never recovered from that Knight of St. Sylvester fiasco. He wants something non-retractable.”

It occurred to Francis that his father could not be very young. He must be at least ten years older than his mother. But Sir Francis Cornish, never having looked young, had not grown to look old, and as he was still part of the profession he must have been good at whatever it was he did. Certainly he looked like a revenant from an Edwardian past, but his step was light, and he was slim without being scrawny.

“You know, Frank, looking back over the years, and the Canadian part of the family, I think I liked the old Senator best of all. If he had had a chance, he might have been a remarkable man.”

“I always thought he was remarkable. He certainly became very rich.”

“And founded the Trust. You’re right, of course; I was thinking of—well, of social advantages. The Cornish Trust—that always surprised me. He thought I was a figure-head, and I suppose I was, really. We lived in different worlds, and it’s rum that our worlds should ever have intersected. But they did, to everybody’s advantage.”

“Grand-père was a man of deep feeling.”

“Ah? I suppose so. I never understood much about that, myself. Y’know, Frank, you really must get some decent clothes. You look dreadful. It’s still possible to get good clothes, y’know. You’ve got lots of cash, haven’t you?”

“I suppose so. I never think about clothes. They don’t seem relevant to what’s going on.”

“Trust me, my boy, they’re always relevant. Even in the profession, you know, protective colouring is of different kinds. If you look like an underling you’ll be taken for an underling, because people haven’t always time to find out what you really are. So do smarten up. Go to my man, and get him to make you the best suit he can for your coupons. You should wear a school tie, or a college tie. Suppose you get knocked over in one of these raids? When they found you, how would they know who you were?”

“Would it matter?”

“Of course it would. Looking like a lout when you aren’t one is just as much affectation as being a dandy. Affectation in death is as ridiculous as affectation in life.”

The next day Francis was marched to Savile Row, measured, and promised a suit of dark grey, to be followed by a blue one, in God’s and the ration’s good time. Sir Francis, having cowed his son, pressed his advantage and gave Francis some decent socks and shirts from his own wardrobe. They were not too bad a fit. To be dressed by one’s father when one is thirty-three perhaps suggests unusual compliance of character, but Francis took it humorously; he had been aware for some time that his profession as a lurker had made him look like a lurker, and that something would have to be done about it. The Major provided the necessary shove.

He was well dressed, if still somewhat doubtful in the matter of shoes, when he called on Signora Saraceni at her house in South London. A note from the Meister, smuggled from Paris, had asked him to do so.

The Signora was very English, but perhaps some life in Italy had given her the swooning, fruity manner which she probably thought proper in the wife of an artist. She was confiding.

“Sometimes I wonder if, when this dreadful war is over, Tancred and I will live together again. It will have to be here. I keep my English passport still, you know. I never really liked Rome. And that apartment—well, it really was a bit much, wasn’t it? I mean, what domesticity can survive in the middle of so much history? There wasn’t a chair that didn’t have a lineage, and one really cannot relax perched on a lineage, can one? Not, you must understand, that there was any unkindness between Tancred and me. The war has kept us apart, but before that he visited me every year, and we were lovers. Oh, indeed we were! But I don’t suppose Tancred could ever settle happily in this house, and I love it. These chintzes, and this marvellous pickled-wood furniture—isn’t it divine? Really, Mr. Cornish, artist though you are, and friend of Tancred’s, isn’t it divine? From Heal’s, every stick of it, and nothing more than a few years old. One ought to live in one’s age, don’t you think? But I do hope we may live together again.”

Her wish was not to be granted. A few weeks later a stray bomb, which was probably meant for the City, wiped out the Signora’s street, and the Signora as well, and it was Francis’s miserable job to write to the Meister about it, and find a way of reaching him.

“She was the blood of my heart,” wrote the Meister in the reply which at last found its way to Francis, “and I truly believe that she would say the same of me. But Art, my dear Cornish, is a cruel obsession, as you may yet learn.”

This letter came shortly before Uncle Jack called Francis to him, and at last gave notice that he had never really forgotten about him. Forgetting was not Colonel Copplestone’s way.

“You know that we are going to win this war, don’t you? Oh yes we are, appearances to the contrary. It will take a while, but it’s perfectly clear that we shall win, in so far as anybody wins. The Americans and the Russians will probably be the big winners. And victory will bring some tricky problems, and we shall have to get to work on them now, or be caught unprepared. One of them will be the Art thing.

“It’s important, you know. Psychologically. A kind of barometer of psychological and spiritual strength. The losers mustn’t seem to be getting away with a lot of spiritual swag, or they’ll look too much like winners. So we must be ready to recover a lot of stuff that has gone astray—looted, quite frankly—during the fighting. That’s why I’m sending you to South Wales to work with some people who have been keeping an eye on all that. You have a name, you see. That Letztpfennig business gave you a name, but not too big a name, and you must be ready to move as soon as the time is right. Glad to see you’ve done something about your clothes. You had better do a little more in that direction. Mustn’t go to conference tables and sit on commissions looking like a loser, must you?”

Two weeks later Francis was in a quiet place near Cardiff, where what had been a manor-house was now, without attracting too much notice, a part of MI5’s curious domain. There, during some of the harshest days of the war, he studied for the coming victory.

It was here, so far from London, that he gained a better idea than ever before of what he was working for, and who he was working with. In London he had been a lowly kind of agent, a snoop, hanging around dark streets making notes of the journeys and walks and appointments of suspects. He had studied to acquire the knack of invisibility. He learned the psychological hazard of the snoop’s trade; anybody one follows for a few days begins to look furtive. He had begun to feel foolish, but it was not for him to ask questions; his job was to lurk in doorways and around corners, to peep into shop windows at the image of the suspect as he passed, to take care that he did not himself attract suspicion, for a few of Uncle Jack’s snoops had made themselves ridiculous by reporting on unknown colleagues. In his long hours of waiting he had begun to hate his work, to hate all “systems” and all nationalism. He had begun, indeed, to fall into the state of mind that makes a snoop a possible recruit for the enemy; the lure of becoming a double agent. For what high principle can a man cling to when he has been brought to the lowly employment and personal bankruptcy of a snoop?

In Cardiff he had the job of interviewing many snoops, and weighing them in the balance of his information and judgement. Some of them had been working in MI6, the overseas branch. Again and again Ruth’s voice sounded in his head, in a wisdom pieced together from many of their conversations.

“Some of our best agents are very bad boys, Frank, and some of the worst are members of the Homintern—you know, the great international brotherhood of homosexuals. Imagine squealing on somebody you had gone to bed with! But a lot of it’s done, and more by the men than the women, I believe. Really, they need more women in the secret-service game: men are such frightful goofs. You can trust a woman—except in love, maybe—because women are proud of what they know, but men are proud of what they can tell. It’s a nasty world, and you and I are too innocent ever to get any of the top jobs in the profession.”

Yet there he was, in Cardiff, in a job which, if not anywhere near the top, seemed pretty important. Had he sunk so low? Or had Ruth simply spoken from the goodness of her decent heart, without really knowing what she was talking about?

As well as the job, he had to find time for some of the obligations, and the nuisances, of common life. Roderick Glasson wrote to him about once a month, bemoaning the lot of the agriculturist in wartime, and hinting strongly that if more money were not forthcoming which would make possible really big reforms on his estate, all would be lost, and Francis would have his own close-fistedness to blame for bringing the family to ruin. Aunt Prudence wrote less often, but perhaps more pointedly, to report on the growth and progress of Little Charlie, for whom more money was needed if the child were to be brought up in a manner befitting a Cornish. It was in one of these that Aunt Prudence said frankly that it was time Little Charlie had a proper home with parents in it, and should not Francis and Ismay reconsider their position?

This letter was followed in a few days by one from Ismay herself, written from Manchester, saying nothing about Little Charlie, or a proper home, or that she had his address from her mother. But stating plainly that she was very hard up, and did Francis feel like doing anything about it?

So Francis absented himself from his work for a few days, making the roundabout journey, doubly difficult in wartime, from Cardiff to Manchester, and met Ismay again, after almost ten years, over a bad dinner in a good hotel.

“I should judge that this substance had once been whale,” he said, turning over the stuff on his plate. But Ismay was not fastidious; she was eating with avidity. She was very thin and, though still a beauty in her own particular way, she was now bony, almost gaunt, and her hair looked as if she might have cut it herself. Her clothes were grubby and of several dark colours, and everything about her spoke of a woman devoted to a cause.

So it was: Ismay was now a full-time zealot, but for what it was hard to tell. Hints that she dropped suggested that she was doing everything in her power to bring about a Revolt of the Workers. Such a revolt, in all the warring countries, would force the conflict to a halt in a matter of weeks, and substitute a Workers’ International that would create order and justice in a much-wronged world.

“You don’t have to go into detail,” said Francis. “As I came through London I was allowed, as a great favour, to look at the file on you at our offices. How you have kept out of jail I don’t really know, but my guess is that you are too small fry to worry about.”

“Balls!” said Ismay, whose vocabulary had not greatly changed from her student years. “Your lot simply hope that if they leave me at large I’ll lead them to people they really want. Catch me!” she said rancorously through a mouthful of whale.

“Well, that’s not what we need to talk about,” said Francis. “I gather that you have been having some sort of correspondence with your mother, who naturally has no idea what you’re up to; she thinks we ought to get together again.”

“Fat chance,” said Ismay.

“I fully agree. So what have we to talk about?”

“Money. Will you let me have some?”

“But why?”

“Because you’ve got a lot of it, that’s why.”

“Charlie used to have some. What’s happened to Charlie?”

“Charlie’s dead. Spain. Charlie was a fool.”

“Did he die for the Loyalists?”

“No, he died because he didn’t settle some gambling debts.”

“I can’t say you surprise me. Charlie never understood the grammar of money.”

“The what?”

“I am pretty good at the grammar of money. Money is one of the two or three primary loyalties. You might forgive a man for trifling with a political cause, but not with your money, especially money that Chance has sent your way. That’s why I’m not rushing to give you money now. Chance sent it to me, and I hold it in trust far more than if I had earned it by hard work.”

“Come on, Frank. Your family is rich.”

“My family are bankers; they understand the high rhetoric of money. I am simply a grammarian, as I said.”

“You want me to beg.”

“Listen, Ismay, if I am to help you, you must answer a few straight questions in a straight way and shut up about the people’s war. What’s chewing you? What’s all this underdoggery really about? Are you simply revenging yourself on your parents? Why do you hate me? I’m just as much against tyranny as you are, but I see lots of tyranny on your side. Why is a tyranny of workers any better than a tyranny of plutocrats?”

“That’s so simple-minded I won’t even discuss it. I don’t hate you; I merely despise you. Your mind works in clichés. You can’t imagine any great cause that doesn’t boil down to a personal grievance. You can’t think and you have no objectivity. The fact is, Frank, you’re simply an artist and you don’t give a sweet God-damn who rules as long as you can paint and mess about and stick spangles on an unjust society. My God, you must know what Plato had to say about artists in society?”

“The best thing about Plato was his good style. He liked inventing systems, but he was too fine an artist to trust his systems fully. Now I’ve come to hate systems. I hate your pet system, and I hate Fascism, and I hate the system that exists. But I suppose there must be some system and I’ll take any system that leaves me alone to get on with my work, and that probably means the least efficient, ramshackle, contradictory system.”

“Okay. No use talking. But what about money? I’m still your wife and the cops know it. Do you want me to have to go on the streets?”

“Ismay, you astound me! Don’t try that sentimental stuff on me. Why should I care whether you go on the streets or not?”

“You used to say you loved me.”

“A bourgeois delusion, surely?”

“What if it was? It was real to you. You haven’t forgotten how you used to work up artistic reasons for getting me to strip so that you could stare at me for hours without ever getting down to anything practical?”

“No, I haven’t forgotten that. A fine, high-minded ass I was, and a slippery little cockteaser you were, and I dare say the gods laughed fit to bust as they watched us. But time has passed since then.”

“I suppose that means you’ve found another woman.”

“For a time. An immeasurably better woman. Unforgettable.”

“I’m not going to beg, so don’t think it.”

“Then what are we doing here?”

“You want me to beg, don’t you? You shit, Frank! Like all artists and idealists, a shit at the core! Well, I won’t beg.”

“It would do no good if you did. I won’t give you a penny, Ismay. And it’s no good murmuring about cops, because you deserted me—scarpered. I’ll go on supporting Little Charlie, because the poor brat isn’t to blame for any of this, but I won’t support her like a princess, which seems to be your mother’s idea. I’ll even go on for a few more years pouring money into that ill-managed mess your father calls an estate. But I won’t give you anything.”

“Just for the interest of the thing, would you have given me money if I’d grovelled?”

“No. You tried the sentimental trick and I choked you off. Grovelling would have served you no better.”

“Will you order some more food? And drink? Not that I’m grovelling, mind you, but I am a guest.”

“And we both grew up under a system where a guest is sacred. For the moment I acknowledge that system.”

“Noblesse oblige. A motto dear to the heart of bourgeois with pretensions to high breeding.”

“I know a bit more about high breeding than I did when last we met. Thou shalt perish ere I perish. Ever hear that one? And if I fell for your beauty again—and you are still beautiful, my dear wife—I should certainly perish, and deservedly, of stupidity. I have made myself a promise: I shan’t die stupid.”

IN DUE COURSE the war did end. That is to say, the fighting with fire and explosives ended, and the fighting with diplomacy burst into action. The special task of what was called victory in which Francis was to play a part began to take shape. Something like peace had to be restored in the world of art, that barometer of national good and bad weather, that indefinable afflatus that a modern country must possess for its soul’s good. But that would not begin until many other things had been settled, and Francis put in for leave to make a visit to Canada on compassionate grounds. Grand’mère had indeed died in the early days of 1945, and Aunt Mary-Ben, being no longer anybody’s Right Bower, had not been long in following her. Indeed, Mary-Tess said, somewhat unfeelingly, that Grand’mère, arriving in Heaven, had needed somebody to manage eternity for her, and had rung the bell for Mary-Ben.

Francis was not surprised, or reluctant, when the family laid on him the task of going to Blairlogie and settling affairs there, and, in effect, ending the McRory family’s long connection with the place. His brother Arthur and his cousins Larry and Mick were still abroad in the services, and anyhow they were young for such work; G.V. O’Gorman (a very big man now in the world of finance) certainly could not be spared, and Sir Francis was too grand for an extended errand of that kind. Besides, Sir Francis had had a stroke, and although his condition was not grave, he tended, as his wife phrased it, to look wonky by the end of the day. After all, he was well over seventy, though nobody said quite how much “over” implied.

As for Mary-Jim (all the family had called her Jacko for years) she was now sixty-one, and although she had the ability to look the best possible for her age, her speech and behaviour were disturbing and Francis felt tenderness and affection for her, which was something other than the obligatory, forced worship he had offered her since childhood. If ever he was to speak to her about the Looner, now was the time.

“Mother: I’ve always wondered about my elder brother—Francis the First, you know. Nobody has ever said anything to me about him. Can’t you tell me anything?”

“There’s nothing to tell, darling. He was never a thriving child, and he died very young and very sadly.”

“What did he die of?”

“Oh—of whatever very tiny babies do die of. Of not living, really.”

“He had something wrong with him?”

“Mm? He just died. It was a long time ago, you know.”

“But he must have lived for at least a year. What was he like?”

“Oh, a sweet child. Why do you ask?”

“I just wondered. Odd to have a brother one’s never known.”

“A sweet child. I’m sure if he’d lived you would have loved him very much. But he died as a baby, you see.”

Francis got nothing more from his father.

“I don’t really remember anything about him, Frank. He died very young. You saw his marker up there in the graveyard.”

“Yes, but that suggested he died a Catholic. You’ve always insisted that I’m a Protestant.”

“Of course. All the Cornishes have been Protestants since the Reformation. I forget how he came to be buried there. Does it matter? He was too young to be anything, really.”

Is that so, thought Francis. You don’t know anything about it. You don’t even know that I’m a Catholic by strict theological reckoning. Neither you nor Mother know one damn thing about me, and all the talk about love was a sham. So far as my soul is concerned neither of you ever gave a sweet damn. Only Mary-Ben, and for all her gentle ways she was a fierce old bigot. None of you ever had a thought that wasn’t a disgrace to anything it would be decent to call religion. Yet somehow I’ve drifted into a world where religion, but not orthodoxy, is the fountain of everything that makes sense.

At Blairlogie, to which he made a last journey, taking sandwiches so that he would not have to eat at the dreadful table of “th’old lady”, Francis went at once to Dr. Joseph Ambrosius Jerome, now ninety, a tiny figure whose blazing eyes still spoke of an alert intelligence.

“Well, if you must know, Francis—and you once told me you knew about that fellow in the attic—he was an idjit. I was the one who arranged for him to live up there. Your grandfather would have thanked me if I’d killed him, but none o’ that for me. My profession is not that of murderer.”

“But it was such a wretched existence. Couldn’t he have been put some place to be cared for that wasn’t so much like a prison?”

“Had you had no education at Oxford? Don’t you remember what Plato says? ‘If anyone is insane let him not be openly seen in the city, but let the family of such a person watch over him at home in the best manner they know of, and if they are negligent let them pay a fine.’ Well—they did their best, but they paid a fine, right enough. That thing in the attic rotted St. Kilda. It cost them all dear in the coin of the spirit, in spite of your grandmother’s card mania, and your grandfather keeping himself busy in Ottawa.”

“Were they afraid that whatever ailed him might come out again in me?”

“They never said boo to me about it if they did.”

“But why not: I had the same parents.”

“Had you so?” Dr. J.A. burst into loud laughter. Not the cackle of a nonagenarian, but a robust laugh, though not a particularly merry one.

“Didn’t I?”

“You’ll not get that out of me. Ask your mother.”

“Do you suggest—?”

“I don’t suggest anything, and I’m not answering any more questions. But I’ll tell you something that few people ever get told. They say it’s a wise child that knows its own father, but it’s a damn sight wiser child that knows its own mother. There are corners of a mother no son ever penetrates, and damn few daughters. There was a taint in your mother, and so far it hasn’t turned up in you or Arthur—not that Arthur isn’t such a blockhead that a taint could pass unnoticed—but you’ve plenty of time yet. You may live to be as old as me, and God grant you manage it with a safe hide. What’s bred in the bone will come out in the flesh: never was a truer word spoken. Have a dram, Frank, and don’t look so dawny. Whatever became of all that first-rate whisky your grandfather had tucked away in his cellar?”

“There’s some there still, and it must be dealt with. I’ll send it over to you, shall I?”

“God bless you, dear lad! That stuff’ll be proper old man’s milk by this time. And at my age I need regular draughts of that very milk.”

CLEANING OUT ST. KILDA was a weary job, and it took Frank, with two men to fetch and carry and drag loads of stuff to the auctioneer, and to the dump, three weeks to achieve it. He could not live in the house, though Anna Lemenchick was still on the strength as caretaker; he could not face Anna’s dreadful food. He stayed at the Hotel Blairlogie, which was miserable, but had no clinging memories. He insisted on dealing with the contents of every room himself: to the auctioneer, all the Louis furniture; to the presbytery, all Aunt’s holy pictures and such of her furniture as the priests might use. Francis left the nudes in the portfolio, thinking the priests might appreciate them. To the Public Library went the books and some further prints, and (this was in despair, and rather against the wishes of the librarian) the lesser oil paintings. The Cardinal pictures went to an art dealer in Montreal and fetched a goodish price. Victoria Cameron, now a woman of property, was invited to take anything she wanted, and, characteristically, wanted nothing but a drawing Francis had made, many years ago, of Zadok in top hat and white choker, driving Devinney’s hearse. In his own old room he had some things to dispose of, which would not have attracted the attention of anyone else, but which were full of meaning for him.

There was a small collection of old movie magazines, now crumbling and yellow, over which he had once gloated with the ignorant lust of an adolescent boy. The beauty queens of an earlier day showed their knees daringly, and peeped from beneath grotesquely marcelled hair. There were some pictures cut from Christmas Editions of The Tatler, the Bystander, and Holly Leaves that his grandfather had brought home as part of the seasonal celebration, and in these were drawings of coy girls of the twenties in “teddies”, or transparent nightgowns, or (very daringly) playing with a dear doggie whose body concealed the breasts and The Particular—but not quite. He saw these now as part of the pathology of Art, the last gasps of the school of erotic painting that had flowered under Boucher and Fragonard. Kitsch, as Saraceni called it.

What he was most anxious to find and destroy was a small bundle of rags—odds and ends of silk and chiffon—in which, in his adolescent days, he had absurdly rigged himself up as a girl, in what he believed was the manner of Julian Eltinge. He now knew, or thought he knew, what that had meant; it was the yearning for a girl companion, and for the mystery and tenderness he thought he might find in such a creature. He had even some intimation that he sought this companion in himself. Browning’s lines, written when he was still very young, came to mind:

And then I was a young witch, whose blue eyes,

As she stood naked by the river springs,

Drew down a god.…

But even Ruth had not been that young witch, and Ismay, who so completely looked the part, was a sardonic parody of its spirit. Where was the young witch? Would she ever come? It was not as a lover he wished for her, but as something even nearer; as a completion of himself, as a desired, elusive dimension of his spirit.

Thus Francis came to terms, as he thought, with his strange boyhood, in which there had been so much talk of love, and so little to warm the heart. He did not feel lonely in Blairlogie, even as he sat for long evenings in the hotel, rereading—how many times had he read those pages—his favourite parts of Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. He did not feel lonely when he visited the Catholic cemetery, and found the marker for Francis the First, the Looner, the shadow of his boyhood and, if Uncle Doctor was to be believed, still an unexploded bomb in his manhood—the secret, the inadmissible element which, as he now understood, had played so great a part in making him an artist, if indeed he might call himself an artist.

But had not Saraceni, that stern judge, called him Meister, without irony and without offering an explanation?

He could not visit the grave of Zadok. Not even Victoria knew where it was, except that it was in that part of the Protestant cemetery which was called, with Blairlogie harshness, the Potter’s Field. But Francis was not by nature a hunter of tombs, and he did not care. He remembered Zadok tenderly, and that was what mattered.

So St. Kilda was put up for sale at auction, as was also Chegwidden Lodge, which had been on rental for several years. A local speculator bought them both, cheap, and there was the end of an old song, as Francis told the family in Toronto, wondering if any of them would understand the reference. From his childhood home he took nothing, except the picture that had hung in his bedroom. No, not the remarkable picture of Christ that opened its eyes when you looked at it, but Love Locked Out.

IN THE MANOR NEAR CARDIFF, in 1946, there was much to be done, many files to be digested and put in order, and hundreds of photographs to be catalogued. Francis needed an assistant who knew what was in the wind, and Aylwin Ross, not long out of the Canadian Navy, was sent to him.

Aylwin Ross was not at all the sort of young man Francis had come to associate with the work of MI5 and MI6. There was no hint of the snoop about him, and he had some trouble concealing his amusement at the cautious, official way in which Francis explained what had to be done.

“I get you, chief,” he said. “We’ve got to know all these pictures well enough to recognize them, even if they reappear somewhat hocussed to deceive the eye, and so far as we can we’ve got to get them back to the people with the best claim to them. I’m pretty good at recognizing pictures, even from rotten black-and-white photographs like these. And if any ownership is in doubt, as will certainly be the case, we’ve got to nab as many as we can for the people we’re working for.”

Francis was shocked. Of course, what Ross said was true, but that wasn’t at all the way to phrase it. He protested.

“Oh come on, Frank,” said Ross. “We’re both Canadians. We don’t have to kid each other. Let’s make it as simple as we can.”

SO, WHEN AT LAST the Allied Commission on Art moved into action, and the sector of it in which Francis and Ross were to work assembled in Munich, that was indeed the way they worked, and Ross had so far loosened Francis from his official persona that he greatly enjoyed himself.

Their part in the Commission’s work was a large one, and there were many familiar figures in the splendid room—a section of a palace—before which pictures recovered from the enemy were deployed for identification and reclamation. Francis and Ross were by no means the whole deputation from the United Kingdom. The formidable Alfred Nightingale was there, from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and Oxford was represented by the no less knowledgeable John Frewen. From the National Gallery and the Tate there were, predictably, Catchpoole and Seddon. But Francis and Ross were the experts on what paintings had gone astray in the war years, and what paintings might have vanished beyond recovery in the New World.

Saraceni was there, wearing conspicuously on his left arm a black band which Francis interpreted as mourning for the Signora, although it was fully three years since she had been obliterated in her South London refuge of pickled oak and cheery chintz.

“I shall never forget her,” the Meister said, “a woman of the greatest, most tender spirit, even though we did not see eye to eye on matters of taste. While I live I shall not cease to mourn.” But grief had in no way clouded his fearful vision—could it really be the Evil Eye?—or diminished the ironic mirth with which he treated the opinions of colleagues who disagreed with his judgements. The chief of these was Professor Baudoin, from Brussels, more evil-smelling than ever and not mellowed by wartime sufferings. From Holland Dr. Schlichte-Martin was present, and with him Hausche-Kuypers, who had been in a resistance group and lost an arm, but was merry as ever, and greeted Francis with a shout.

“Aha, the Giant-Killer! Poor Letztpfennig! How you polished him off.”

“Ah yes, the young man who knows so much about (sniff) monkeys,” said Professor Baudoin. “We shall have to keep our eyes open for any zoological problems that evade our mere connoisseur’s estimations.”

“Who’s the old bugger with the charnel-house breath?” whispered Ross. “He’s got it in for you, chief; I can see it in his eye.”

The German members of the commission were not Frisch and Belmann; their eagerness in the matter of the Führermuseum had discredited them. Germany was represented instead by Professors Knüpfer and Brodersen. From France came Dupanloup and Rudel, and there were men from Norway, Luxembourg, and a number of other interested states. From the U.S. Francis was glad to see Addison Thresher, who would certainly be a voice of reason, as his country had lost no art in the conflict, though what it might have gained it would not be tactful to inquire.

“One of the problems I have had to face is to find some way of preventing high-ranking Air Force officers from sending home planes packed with art loot. They don’t know much about art but they certainly know what they like, and they’ve heard that hand-painted oils fetch big money. I needn’t tell you I haven’t solved the problem. Still—it’s the nature of fighting men to loot.” Thresher was a cheerful cynic.

In all, fourteen states were represented, usually by two experts and a secretary, who was aspiring to be an expert. Ross was one of these. An Englishman, Lieutenant-Colonel Osmotherley, who was not an art expert but a redoubtable administrator, acted as chairman.

“What an array of boffins,” said Ross. “I feel totally out of my league.”

“You are out of your league,” said Francis. “So keep your trap shut, at the sessions and everywhere else. Leave everything to me.” “Am I not even to have an opinion?” said Ross.

“Not out loud. Just keep your eyes and ears open.”

ROSS’S CHEERFUL ESTIMATE of the Commission’s work showed total lack of acquaintance with the way in which such things are done. After a war in which art had not been a first consideration, the experts were determined to assert its importance. After years of serving as air-raid wardens, standing in queues for coffee made of tulip bulbs, watching powerless as the invaders snatched their dearest treasures, being snubbed by Occupation forces, and being in most cases made to feel the weight of their years, they were once again men of importance, to whom their governments turned for expert advice. After wretched food, shortages of tobacco and drink, cold rooms, and no hot water, they were lodged in a hotel which, if not functioning at prewar standard, was the best place they had known in years. Best of all, they were once again in that world of scholarship, of connoisseurship, of hair-splitting, haggling, wrangling, and quarrelling which was their very own, and in which they moved like wizard-kings. Were they going to hurry, to cut corners, to compromise, to take any steps whatever to hasten the evil day when their work would be done and they would have to go home? As Francis explained to Ross, only a dumb-bell Canadian, fresh out of the Navy, could suppose any such absurd thing.

Of course, he knew long before they went to Munich that Ross was no dumb-bell. He was brilliant; he had, in terms of his years and experience, extraordinary knowledge of art. Best of all, he had flair. His perception was swift and sure. But what especially endeared him to Francis was that Ross was light-hearted, and thought that art was for the delight and enlargement of man, rather than a carefully guarded mystery, a battleground for experts, and a treasure-house to be plundered by the manipulators of taste, the merchants of vogue, the art dealers.

Ross was self-educated in art, but a graduate of a Canadian Western university and later of Oxford (he had been some sort of Commonwealth scholar), where he had studied modern languages. Like many young men from the prairies, he had been drawn toward the Navy, where he was fairly useful, and very ornamental. Ross was that unusual creature, a male beauty, fair but not a Scandinavian blond, fine-skinned, fine-featured, and with a good, though not markedly athletic, figure. There was nothing epicene about him: he was, quite simply, beautiful and knew it. Among the commissioners, and their serious secretaries (most of whom were already gripped by the premature age of the intellectual), he glowed like a rosebush in a forest of evergreens—a rosebush that had not already succumbed to the acid, evergreen soil.

“You preserve my sanity, Aylwin,” Francis said one night in the Munich hotel, when he had drunk rather too much. “If I have to listen once again to Schlichte-Martin and Dupanloup hashing it out about whether a canvas is a Rembrandt or simply a Goveart Flink, or if what looks like a Gerard Dou is really a Donner, I may scream and froth and have to be led from the room and plunged in a cold shower. What does it matter? Get the things back to wherever they came from.”

“You take it all too seriously,” said Ross. “You’ve simply got to hang on and not care too much. Do you realize that there were over five thousand of these pictures, most of them nothing more than classy crap, in that salt mine at Alt Aussee where so much of the Führermuseum stuff was stashed? And what about all the stuff that has turned up near Marburg? Not to speak of Göring immense personal loot. We shall have to consider them all, and if we did fifty a day, how many days does that make? Why don’t you relax and stop listening? Just look at the pictures, the pictures we do look at. Wonderful! How many Temptations of St. Anthony have we seen already? And in every one of them an old geezer nearly dead of starvation is being tempted by a few pesky demons but chiefly by meaty girls over whom he is in no condition to throw a saintly leg. If I were a painter I would show him being offered a lobster à la Newburg. That would have tempted him! Temptation works in the place where the weakness is greatest.”

“You speak with a banal wisdom beyond your years.”

“Always have. Born wise. You weren’t born wise, Francis. Not wise and not banal; you were born with a skin too few.”

Saraceni was not so greatly taken with Aylwin Ross as was Francis. “He has talent,” said he to Francis one day when they met over lunch, “but he is at heart a careerist. And why not? He is not an artist. He creates nothing, preserves nothing. What has he?”

“Insight,” said Francis, and told him what Ross had said about St. Anthony’s temptations.

“Shrewd,” said Saraceni. “Commonplace, but it takes shrewdness to see the wisdom in the commonplace. The temptation gets us at the point of weakness. What is your weak point, Corniche? You’d better take care it isn’t Aylwin Ross.”

Francis was offended. Of course, he was usually seen in the company of the beauty of the Commission, and he had not quite understood that some of the other commissioners, for reasons best not examined, interpreted this in their own way. In 1947 homosexuality was not so easily accepted as it became later, but for that reason it was much on people’s minds.

Because Saraceni was still the Meister in his world, Francis faced what he had said. Of course he liked Ross. Was he not a fellow-Canadian, and one for whom it was not necessary to make apologies to people who saw Canadians as a pseudo-nation of beaver-skinners? Was Ross not witty and merry in a group where wit never arose except as a weapon with which to strike down a rival? Was he not comely among the swag-bellied and the wrinkled? And—Francis did not face this quite honestly—was he not the nearest thing he had ever met to the elusive figure, apparently a girl, who was needed for the completion of himself? To make a friend, and a close and dear friend, of Aylwin Ross was the most natural thing in the world. In this association Francis did not feel himself a pupil, as he was aware that he had always been with Ruth, nor was he a gull, as he had been with the desirable, treacherous Ismay. This was, he told himself, a relationship in which emotion played as little part as it can play in anything, and kinship of mind and friendship were everything.

Nevertheless, he thought he ought to tell Ross what was apparently being said. Ross laughed.

“ ‘Helter-skelter, hang sorrow, care kill’d a cat, up-tails all, and a louse for the hangman’.”

“What’s that?”

“Ben Jonson. I did a lot of work on him at one time. Full of excellent good sense, expressed with a trumpeting masculinity. It simply means, Screw ’em all! What does it matter what they think? We know it isn’t so, don’t we?”

Did they? Did they know that? Francis thought he knew it, but Francis’s conception of what was being hinted at was to be seen in the bold-eyed, painted youths who hung about in the shadows of the Munich nights. Of the subtler sodomy of the soul he knew nothing. As for Aylwin Ross, he knew only that he often got what he wanted by enchanting those whose lives had been poor in enchantment, and he saw no harm in it. And indeed, could there be any harm in it?

IT WOULD HAVE BEEN ABSURD for the Commission to examine every picture that had changed its ground during the war. Its job was to concentrate on treasures. Francis recognized in the lists that were distributed pictures by Nobody-in-Particular of Nobody Special which were certainly from the Düsterstein studio where he had worked with Saraceni; they were in the Führermuseum group, and nobody wanted them, so they were allowed to stay where they were. Because it was known to a few experts and had caused some sensation in London just before the war, Drollig Hansel appeared before the Commission in person—that is to say, exhibited on an easel—and was admired as a pleasing minor work, but as it had no known provenance, and was clearly marked with what looked like the Fugger family Firmenzeichen, it was decided that it had better go to Augsburg. This decision sat well with Knüpfer and Brodersen, and was firm evidence of the Commission’s desire to be fair.

Francis felt no emotion he could not dissemble when Drollig Hansel was on the easel, and he was pleased that Ross thought highly of it.

“There’s a kind of controlled grotesquerie about it I’ve never seen before,” said he. “Not the rowdy horrors of all those Temptations of poor old St. Anthony, but something deeper and colder. Must have been an odd chap that painted it.”

“Very likely,” said Francis.

It was a different matter, however, when unexpectedly, on a November afternoon, The Marriage at Cana was carried in by the porters and put on the easel.

“This picture is something out of series,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Osmotherley. “No provenance at all, except that it comes from Göring’s personal collection, if you call that robber’s cave a collection. But it’s thought to be important, and you must make a decision about it.”

“The Reichsmarschall knew a good thing when he saw it,” said Brodersen, who ought to have known, for the Reichsmarschall had taken all the best things from his own gallery, leaving behind cynical receipts, saying that the pictures had been removed for their own protection. Brodersen had not been a Nazi, and only his reputation, and his unstained Aryanism, had kept him in his appointment.

It was a good thing. Seeing it after almost ten years, Francis knew it was a good thing. He said nothing and left the superior experts to say their say, which they did at such length that the light faded and the chairman adjourned the sitting until the following morning.

What the experts said was flattering and alarming to the Calvinist side of Francis’s conscience. Could this possibly be a hitherto unknown Mathis Neithart? The vigour and brilliance of the colour, and the calligraphic line, the distortion of some of the figures and the grotesquerie (that word again!) supported such an attribution, but there were Italianate, Mannerist features that made it unlikely—indeed impossible. The experts plunged into an orgy of happy haggling, of high-powered knowing-best, that filled a whole day.

Ross simply could not keep his mouth shut.

“I know that I shouldn’t speak in such company,” he said, smiling at the great men about him. “But if you will be good enough to indulge my amateurish hunch, may I ask if anyone sees a quality in this picture that suggests the Drollig Hansel we examined a few weeks ago? Merely a hunch.” And he sat down, smiling with a boyish charm that might perhaps have been a little overdone.

This started a dispute in a new direction. There were those who said they had felt something of the kind and had meant to bring it up until Mr. Cornish’s secretary anticipated them: there were others who brushed the suggestion aside as absurd. But was there not some whiff of Augsburg about both pictures, said others who fancied such intuitions. Knüpfer and Brodersen did not want to hear anything about Mathis der Maler, who had not been a favourite in Germany for some time because Hindemith’s opera about him had made his name unacceptable. Anyhow, elements in the picture put such an attribution out of the question. Strive as he might, Colonel Osmotherley could not push them toward a decision.

What were they looking at?

The picture was a triptych, of which the central panel was five feet square, and the two flanking panels were of the same height, but only three feet wide. What impressed at first sight was the complexity of the composition and its jewel-like richness of colour, so arranged as to throw primary emphasis on the three figures that dominated the central panel, and indeed the whole picture. Two of these were plainly the couple who had been married; they wore fine clothing in the style of the early years of the sixteenth century, and their expressions were serious, indeed elevated; the man was pressing a ring on the fourth finger of his bride’s left hand. Their faces seemed to be male and female versions of the same features: a long head, prominent nose, and light eyes that might have been thought at variance with their black hair. The smiling woman who was third of this dominant group must surely be the Mother of Jesus, for she wore a halo—the only halo to be seen in the whole composition; she was offering the bridal pair a splendid cup from which a radiance mounted above the brim.

There were no figures on the right side of this group, but on their left stood a stout old man of a merry, bourgeois appearance, who seemed to be making a sketch of the scene on an ivory tablet, and somewhat behind him, but clearly to be seen, was a woman, smiling like the Virgin, who was holding an astronomical, or perhaps an astrological, chart. Completing this group was a man who might have been a superior groom or huissier, with a smiling, sonsy face, richly liveried; he held a coachman’s whip in one hand, but in the other what might have been a scalpel, or small knife; almost concealed behind his back hung a leather bottle; obviously this guest was feeling no thirst. This lesser group—wedding guests? specially favoured friends?—was completed by the figure of a dwarf, in full ceremonial armour, but with no weapon unless the onlooker chose so to define the rope that was coiled around his left arm; with his right hand he was holding out toward the stout artist a bundle of what looked like very sharp pencils, or silver-points.

The startling figure in this otherwise spirited but not inexplicable composition was a creature floating high on the left above the heads of the bridal pair. Was he an angel? But he had no wings, and although his face was at once sanctified and inhuman, the effect was idiotic; the small head rose almost to a point. From the lips of this creature, or angel, or whatever it was, issued an ornate ribbon, or scroll, on which was written, in Old German script, Tu autem servasti bonum vinum usque adhuc. Over the heads of the wedded pair it held, in its left hand, a golden crown, while with its right it seemed to point at the couple who dominated the right wing of the triptych.

The background of this central panel, which also appeared in varied form in the other two panels, was a landscape merging in the farthest distance to a range of sun-tipped mountains.

Compared with this arresting central portion, the flanking wings were subdued, almost in some areas to a treatment in grisaille, though here and there were some relieving accents of colour. The wing on the left might seem at first to be readily understood; in it Christ was kneeling amid the six water-pots of stone, his hands extended in blessing. In the foreground, in shadow, were three figures easily identified as disciples: Simon Zelotes, a vigorous man of middle age in whose girdle hung a broad-headed woodsman’s axe; St. John, identifiable by his pen and inkhorn hanging at his waist, and by the youthful beauty of his features; and—surely not?—yes, it must be Judas, red-haired and with the purse of the holy community safe under his left hand while with his right he calls the attention of his brethren to figures in the central panel.

But before the eye followed that gesture, what was it to make of the two women with Christ, the one standing in what might almost have been an attitude of anger over the kneeling figure, one hand raised as if in rhetorical condemnation, while the other, reaching bare from a servant’s smock, pointed downward at the wine-pots. The other woman, kneeling and seeming almost to protect her Lord, was small, and beneath a curious enveloping cap upon her head her expression was sweet with adoration. Around the head of Christ was a radiance, not strongly emphasized, and otherwise the figure was unremarkable, almost humble.

Following Judas’s gesture the eye moves toward the right-hand panel. The figures here might be taken for wedding guests; a knightly figure, one eye obliterated by a bandage, wears a sword but has a warning finger at its lips, as if cautioning to silence; his companion is a lady of great but cold beauty. If any connoisseur were so pernickety as to extend a string from the pointing finger of Judas to its termination in this picture, it would strike a wealthy merchant and his wife, apparently concerned only with themselves; the male figure carries a heavy purse at his girdle. The physician, somewhat apart, stands with his lancet ready in his hand, ready to let blood from any of the marriage group, all of whom are included in the scope of his penetrating, rodent eyes. But if these are wedding guests, surely those others in the background must be beggars at the feast—that rabble of children with twisted, ugly, hungry faces. They are not looking toward the marriage scene, but are concentrated on one of their number who is gouging the eye from a cat with a sharp stone. In this panel the background is markedly desolate, as compared with the landscape elsewhere.

A strange picture, and the experts were happy to sink their learned teeth into it and worry it to some sort of satisfactory interpretation or attribution.

It was in vain that Colonel Osmotherley reminded them that their task was to say what should be done with the picture, and not to decide beyond question who had painted it, or what its curious assemblage of elements might mean. Schlichte-Martin said that he did not think it could ever have been intended for a Christian church; the relegation of the Saviour to a place on a side wing made it wholly unacceptable. Knüpfer wanted to know why the dwarf was in armour; of course, everyone had seen ceremonial armour that had been made for dwarfs, but why was this dwarf wearing it to hold pencils, and had anybody noticed how much the dwarf looked like Drollig Hansel? (Ross nodded vigorously at this.) Everybody was puzzled by the fact that the Virgin had a halo, but her Son did not. And the floating figure? What was anyone to make of that?

Predictably, it was Professor Baudoin who said the disagreeable thing. As the others disputed he glared at the picture from very close range, plied the flashlight and the magnifying glass, rubbed an inch of paint with his spittle, and at last said loudly, “I don’t like the craquelure; I don’t like it at all; much too even; seems to have happened all at once. I recommend that we get the scientific men to work on it. I will lay any money it proves to be a fake.”

This brought an opinion—protest, demur, some inclination to agree—from all the experts. But even in his deep discomfort Francis could not miss the glance that Saraceni threw toward Baudoin, from his ill-coordinated blazing eyes. It had an impact like a blow, and Baudoin retreated to his chair as if a fierce gust of hot air had passed him.

When Colonel Osmotherley had quieted the uproar he explained that the Commission had no instructions to act as Baudoin suggested, and it would take a long time to get them, if that were possible. Could the experts not reach some conclusion based simply on what they saw? Giving every consideration to their widely acknowledged ability to see beyond what was given to lesser people, added the Colonel, who had a turn for diplomacy.

It was at this point that Francis, who had been suffering for two days and a half the torments of an inflamed conscience, disputing with a mischievous inclination to let the experts go on and commit themselves to positions from which they could not retreat, felt that he should rise to his feet and make a speech in the manner of the late Letztpfennig: “Gentlemen, I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little paintbox.” And then, what? Not hang himself, certainly, with his hat and overshoes on, as poor Letztpfennig had ridiculously done. But what a sea of explanations, of excuses or denials would follow any such declaration! The only person who could corroborate anything he said was Saraceni, and steadfast as the Meister could be in some things, he might prove altogether too supple in such a matter as this.

He had underestimated Saraceni, who now rose to his feet. This was in itself significant, for the experts usually spoke seated.

“Mr. Chairman; Esteemed Colleagues,” he began with heavy formality; “please permit me to point out that our attempts to explain the curious nature of this picture in terms of Christian iconography are bound to fail, because it is not solely—perhaps not even primarily—a Christian picture. Of course, it demands to be called The Marriage at Cana because of the words issuing from the mouth of that curious floating figure—Thou hast kept the good wine until now. In the Scripture story it is the so-called ‘governor of the feast’ who says that; here it is this mysterious figure who seems to be addressing the parents—the Knight and his Lady in the right-hand panel. This strange figure holds a unifying crown over the heads of Bride and Groom. Who are they? You will not have missed that they look more like brother and sister than a wedded pair. These facial resemblances are surely crucial to an interpretation of the picture? Look at the face of Christ. Is he not kin to the Bride and Groom? Look at the Knight and his Lady in the right-hand wing; are they not plainly the parents of both the married ones? Look at the old artist; a fat, elderly version of the same face. We cannot pretend that these resemblances come about because the artist can only draw one face; the man with the whip, the astrologer, the dwarf, the old woman in the curious cap, the Judas, all show how adept he was at portraiture and revelation of character. No, no, gentlemen; there is only one way to explain this picture, and I suggest, humbly, that I know what it is.

“Consider where it comes from. You don’t know? Of course not, because it has been hidden. But I know. It comes from Schloss Düsterstein, where, as you do know, there is an extraordinary collection of masterworks (or was, until General Göring took the best of them under his protection) upon which I was engaged for some years in repair and restoration work, before the war. But this picture was not among those that were hung. These panels were under wraps in a storage room very near the Chapel, where they had served as the altar-piece until the Chapel was wholly transformed in the Baroque taste by Johann Lys at some time during the first quarter of the seventeenth century. The old altar-piece was replaced by one painted by Lys, or one of his pupils, an inoffensive Madonna and Child with saints, which may still be seen. The old altar-piece had by that time become disagreeable to the taste of the Ingelheim family.

“Why? The picture we see here had grown out of fashion, and it was also, to a strict Christian taste, heretical. Look at it: this is a picture with strong alchemical suggestions. Of course, alchemy and Christianity were never incompatible, but to seventeenth-century theological orthodoxy, which was that of the Counter-Reformation, it was too near a rival to the true Faith.

“I don’t know what you may know of alchemy, and you must forgive me if I seem to tell you what is already clear in your minds. But this is plainly a depiction, given a Christian gloss, of what was called The Chymical Wedding. The alchemical uniting of the elements of the soul, that is to say. Look at it: the Bride and Groom look like brother and sister because they are the male and female elements of a single soul, which it was one of the higher aims of alchemy to unite. I won’t harass you with alchemical theory, but that unity—that wedding—was not achieved in youth or with ease, and so the Groom, at least, is not a man in his first youth. That such a unity is brought about by the intervention of the highest and purest element in the soul—which is, of course, what Christ has long been, and was to the Middle Ages, and is still in a somewhat altered but not destructively altered sense—is plain enough. Here we see Christ as a beneficent power at the Wedding. But in this picture it is the Holy Mother—what unorthodox but not heretical thinkers sometimes call Mother Nature—who blesses the Marriage of the Soul, the achievement of spiritual union. Am I making myself clear?”

“Clear so far as you go, Maestro,” said Professor Nightingale. “But who are these other figures? That creature in the sky, for instance; a very nasty-looking piece of work, like a pinhead in a circus. Who may he be?”

“I cannot tell you, though of course we all know that in Gothic and late-Gothic art—there are lingering elements of Gothicism in this picture—such an angelic figure often represented a relative—big brother, it might be—who had died before The Chymical Wedding was achieved, but whose memory or spiritual influence might have been helpful in bringing it about.”

“All very fine, but I don’t trust the craquelure,” said Professor Baudoin.

“Oh for God’s sake forget the craquelure,” said John Frewen.

“With your permission,” said Baudoin, “I shall not forget the craquelure, and I would thank you, sir, not to snarl at me.”

“I do well to snarl,” said Frewen, who was a Yorkshireman and hot-tempered. “Do you suppose anybody would trouble to fake such a farrago of forgotten rubbish as this? Alchemy! What’s alchemy?”

“ ‘That alchemy is a pretty kind of game

Somewhat like tricks o’ the cards,

to cheat a man

With charming.’ ”

It was the irrepressible Aylwin Ross who spoke.

“No, Mr. Ross, not that!” said Saraceni. “Some alchemists were cheats, of course, as some priests of all faiths are cheats. But others were truly sincere seekers after enlightenment, and are we who have suffered so much during the past five years under the evil alchemy of science to jeer at any sincere belief of the past, whose style of thought and use of words has grown rusty?”

“Mr. Ross, I should remind you that your position here does not extend to expressing opinions,” said Colonel Osmotherley.

“I am very sorry,” said Ross. “Just a few words from Ben Jonson, that slipped out.”

“Ben Jonson was a great cynic, and a great cynic is a great fool,” said Saraceni, with unwonted severity. “But, gentlemen, I do not pretend to explain all the elements in this picture. That would give an iconographer work for many days. I merely suggest that we could be looking here at a picture prepared to the taste of Graf Meinhard, who, four and a half centuries ago, was reputed to be an alchemist himself—a friend and patron of Paracelsus—and to do things at Düsterstein in what was the most advanced science of his time. His chapel was not, after all, a public place of worship. May he not have pleased himself in this way?”

The experts, credulous perhaps in a matter not within the range of their own knowledge, were inclined to agree that this could have been so. Their discussion was long and cloudy. When he thought it had gone on long enough, Saraceni summed it up.

“Might I suggest, Mr. Chairman and Esteemed Colleagues, that we agree that these panels, which certainly came from Düsterstein, be returned to the great collection there, and that we attribute this picture, which we are all agreed is a splendid previously unknown work of art, and a great curiosity as well, to The Alchemical Master, whose name, alas, we cannot determine more exactly?”

And so it was agreed, Professor Baudoin abstaining.

“YOU SAVED MY BACON,” said Francis, catching Saraceni on the great staircase, as they left the session.

“I will confess to being a little pleased with myself,” said the Meister. “I hope you listened attentively, Corniche; I did not utter one word of untruth in anything I said, though of course I was not officious in stripping Truth naked, as so many painters have done. You never knew I studied theology for a few years in my youth? I recommend it to every ambitious young man.”

“I’m grateful forever,” said Francis. “I really didn’t want to confess. Not because of fear. It was something else that I can’t just put a name to.”

“Justifiable pride, I should say,” said Saraceni. “It is a very fine picture, wholly unique in its approach to a biblical subject. Yet a masterpiece of religious art, if one means religion in the true sense. I forgive you, by the way, for giving Judas my features, if not my hair. The Masters must find their models somewhere. I did not call you Meister idly or mockingly, you know. You have made up your soul in that picture, Francis, and I do not joke when I call you The Alchemical Master.”

“I don’t know anything about alchemy, and there are things in that picture I don’t pretend to explain. I just painted what demanded to be painted.”

“You may not have a scholar’s understanding of alchemy, but plainly you have lived alchemy; transformation of base elements and some sort of union of important elements has worked alchemically in your life. But you do know painting as a great technical skill, and such skills arouse splendid things in their possessors. What you do not understand in the picture will probably explain itself to you, now that you have dredged it up from the depths of your soul. You still believe in the soul, don’t you?”

“I’ve tried not to, but I can’t escape it. A Catholic soul in Protestant chains, but I suppose it’s better than emptiness.”

“I assure you that it is.”

“Meister—I shall always call you Meister, though you say I’ve graduated from alunno to amico di Saraceni—you have been very good to me, and you have not spared the rod.”

“He that spareth his rod, hateth his son. I am proud to be your father in art. So do something for me: I ask it as a father. Watch Ross.”

Nothing more could be said, because of a commotion that broke out on the great staircase behind them. Professor Baudoin had misjudged his step, fallen on the marble, and broken his hip.

THAT WAS SARACENI’S EVIL EYE, I suppose, said the Lesser Zadkiel.

—Nobody becomes as great a man as Saraceni without extraordinary spiritual energy, and it isn’t all benevolent, said the Daimon Maimas. The Masters and Sibyls turn up in lucky people’s lives, and I am glad I could put such good ones in Francis’s path.

—Lucky people? I suppose so. Not everybody finds Masters and Sibyls.

—No, and at the present time—I mean Francis’s time, of course, because you and I have no truck with Time ourselves, brother—many people who are lucky enough to come into the path of a Master or a Sibyl want to argue and have their trivial say, and prattle as if all knowledge were relative and open to argument. Those who find a Master should yield to the Master until they have outgrown him.

—If Francis has really made up his soul, as Saraceni said, what lies ahead of him? Hasn’t he achieved the great end of life?

—You are testing me, brother, but you won’t catch me that way. Having got his soul under his eye, so to speak, Francis must now begin to understand it and be worthy of it, and that task will keep him busy for a while yet. Making up the soul isn’t an end; it’s the new beginning in the middle of life.

—Yes, it will take some time.

—You are fond of that foolish word time. Time in his outward life will run much faster for him now, but in the inward life it will slow down. So we can get on much faster with this record, or film, or tape, or whatever fashionable word Francis’s contemporaries would apply to it, because his external life occupies less of his attention. Onward, brother!

WHAT WAS FRANCIS NOW in the world of MI5? Not one of the great ones, who inspire novelists to write about danger and violence and unexplained deaths. His work with the Allied Commission on Art continued when the conferees in Europe were completed, because the decisions of the conferees created all sorts of problems that had to be settled diplomatically, with much bargaining, much soothing of ruffled national pride, and a few arbitrary judgements in which he played a significant if not a leading role. He had a liaison association with the British Council. But only Uncle Jack knew that he was expected to keep a watchful eye on some people who were important in the world of art but who had other loyalties that did not jibe with those of the Allied cause.

It was this secret aspect of his work that gave him the air of Civil Servant, a conventional man, a clubman who might turn up anywhere in the art world, the country-house world, the fashionable world, and sometimes even close to the Court. Anywhere, in fact, where there were clever people who did not think him clever, or quite one of themselves—not a Cambridge man—and who therefore sometimes talked less discreetly when he was present than they would otherwise have done. He was thought to be rather a dull dog who somehow managed to have a finger in the art pie. But he was also a useful man who could arrange things.

For instance, he arranged that Aylwin Ross should receive favours that might not otherwise come his way and Ross, being what he was, showed gratitude but not for long, because he thought the favours the natural outcome of his own brilliant abilities. It was through Francis that Ross gained a good appointment in the Courtauld Institute, and began his rapid climb toward influence as a critic and creator of taste.

Saraceni had warned Francis to watch Ross, so watch him he did, and saw nothing but a brilliant, attractive young man whose career it was a pleasure to advance. He would have watched Ross at closer range if Ross had not been so busy with his concerns and a little inclined to patronize Francis.

“I really think you misjudge Ross,” he said to Saraceni on one of his yearly visits to the crammed, cluttered flat in Rome. “He is coming on like a house on fire; soon he will be a very big figure in the critical world. But you hint as though he were somehow dishonest.”

“No, no; not dishonest,” said the Meister. “Probably he is all you say. But my dear Corniche, I mean that he is not an artist, not a creator; he is a politician of art. He turns with the wind, and you stand like a rock against the wind—except when it is Ross’s wind. You are a little too fond of Ross, and you don’t understand how.”

“If you suggest that I am in love with him, you are totally mistaken.”

“You don’t want to snuggle up with Ross and whisper secrets on the pillow—or I don’t suppose you do. That might not be so dangerous, because lovers are egotists and may quarrel. No: I think you see in Ross the golden youth you never were, the free spirit you never were, the lucky man you think you never were. There is some grey in your hair. Youth has flown for you. Do not try to be young again through Ross. Do not fall for the charm of that sort of youth. People who are young in the way Ross is young never grow old, and never to grow old is a very, very evil fate, though the twaddle of our time says otherwise. Remember what that angel, or whatever it was, says in the great painting you have made: Thou has kept the good wine until now. Do not pour out the good wine on the altar of Aylwin Ross.”

ROSS MET FRANCIS on an autumn day, walking along Pall Mall.

“ ‘Thou look’st like Antichrist in that lewd hat,’ ” said he, in greeting.

“Jonson, I suppose. What’s wrong with my hat?”

“It is the epitome of what you have become, my dear Frank. It is an Anthony Eden hat. Sedate, gloomy, and out of fashion. Come with me to Locke’s and we’ll get you a decent hat. A hat that speaks to the world of the Inner Cornish, the picture-restorer—but of the highest repute.”

“I haven’t restored a picture for years.”

“But I have! I most certainly and indubitably have! I’m restoring it to its proper place in the world of Art. And it’s a picture you know, so why don’t you take me to Scott’s for lunch, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

Over the sole Mornay at Scott’s Ross told his news with exuberance extraordinary even for him.

“You remember that picture we saw at Munich? The Marriage at Cana? You remember what happened to it?”

“It went back to Schloss Düsterstein, didn’t it?”

“Yes, but not to oblivion. No indeed. I was tremendously taken with that picture—that triptych, I should say. And don’t you remember that I spoke about a link between it and the Drollig Hansel we had seen earlier? The picture that was clearly marked as having belonged to the Fuggers of Augsburg? I’ve proved the link.”

“Proved it?”

“The way we prove things in our game, Frank. By the most careful examination of brushwork, quality of paint, colours, and of course a great deal of flair backed up with expertise. The full Berenson bit. Short of all that really rather inconclusive scientific stuff, I’ve proved it.”

“Aha. A nice footnote.”

“If I weren’t eating your lunch, I’d kill you. Footnote! It makes clearer the whole affair of that unknown painter Saraceni called The Alchemical Master. Now look: this is obviously a man who loves to deal in puzzles and hints to the observant. That device in the corner of Drollig Hansel could have been the Fuggers’ family trademark, or it could have been a gallows. A hangman, you see? A dwarf hangman. And who turns up in The Marriage at Cana but the same dwarf hangman, and this time he is holding his rope! And he is glorious in his dress armour!

“That bothered me for years, until at last I was able to get a grant—never do anything without a grant, Frank—to go to Düsterstein and persuade the old Countess to let me see The Marriage. She’s tremendously chuffed with it now, you know. It hangs in the best gallery. I stayed for three days—she was very hospitable (lonely I suppose, poor old duck)—and I’ve cracked the code.”

“Cracked what code?”

“What The Marriage is really about, of course. The Alchemical Master cloaked it all in alchemical mystery, and for a very good reason, but it’s not really an alchemical picture. It’s political.”

“You astonish me. Go on.”

“What do you know about The Interim of Augsburg?”

“Not a thing.”

“It’s not on everybody’s tongue, but it was important when that picture was painted. It was a scheme to reconcile the Catholics and the Protestants in 1548. It was a compromise that led up to the Council of Trent. The Catholics made certain concessions to the Protestants, the biggest one being communion in both kinds, if you know what that means.”

“Don’t insult me, you prairie Protestant. It means the laity receive both the bread and the wine at Communion.”

“Good boy. So—the Marriage at Cana, where Christ certainly gave everybody the wine, the best they’d ever had. But look who’s the principal figure in the picture: Mother Church, personified as the Virgin Mary, offering the Cup. So that’s one-up for the Catholics because they are graciously yielding something very precious to the Protestants. The married couple are the Catholic and Protestant factions united in amity.”

“There’s a hole in your explanation. Mary may be yielding the Cup to the Protestants, but she certainly isn’t giving it to the Catholics, and they haven’t got it yet.”

“I thought of that, but I don’t think it really matters. The ostensible point of the picture is not to shout its message to every chance visitor to the Düsterstein Chapel, but to offer an altar-piece representing the Marriage at Cana.”

“Well—what about the other figures?”

“Some can be identified. The old man with the writing-tablet is obviously Johann Agricola, one of the framers of the Interim of Augsburg. Who is holding his spare writing materials? Who but Drollig Hansel, the hangman with his rope, but he is in parade armour and thus dressed for a celebration, which he assists by holding the pens. Symbolic of the cessation of persecution, do you see? The Knight and the Lady in the right-hand wing of the triptych are surely Graf Meinhard and his wife—the donors of the picture, just where you would expect to find them. Even Paracelsus is there—that shrewd little chap with the scalpel.”

“And what about all the others?”

“I don’t see that they really matter. The significant thing is that the picture celebrates the Interim of Augsburg, by linking it with the Marriage at Cana. The message of the angel, about the good wine, obviously refers to the Protestant-Catholic reconciliation. Those women quarrelling over Christ—Protestant preaching versus Catholic faith, obviously. And The Alchemical Master has laid out the whole squabble so that the picture, if necessary, could be explained in a number of different ways.”

“What did the Gräfin say to all this?”

“Just smiled, and said I astonished her.”

“Yes, I see. But Aylwin, I really do think you ought to be careful. It’s ingenious, but a historian could probably blow it full of holes. For instance, why would the Ingelheims want such a thing? They were never Protestants, surely?”

“Perhaps not avowedly so. But they were—or Graf Meinhard was—alchemists, and they chose a painter with this obvious alchemical squint. Graf Meinhard probably had something up his sleeve, but that’s not my affair. I shall simply write about the picture.”

“Write about it?”

“I’m doing a large-scale article for Apollo. Don’t miss it.”

FRANCIS CERTAINLY DID NOT miss it. He worried for many weeks before the article appeared. Obviously he should tell Aylwin the history of The Marriage at Cana. But why “obviously”? Because conscience required it? Yes, but if conscience were given a foremost place in the matter, it would be Ross’s duty, as a matter of conscience, to denounce Francis as a faker, who had sat in silence while The Marriage was praised by the Munich experts. Conscience would involve the Gräfin, who, if she were really as innocent as she seemed about The Marriage, was certainly not innocent in the matter of Drollig Hansel. And if the Gräfin were involved, what about all those other pictures that had been so stealthily prepared by Saraceni and palmed off on the collectors for the Führermuseum? This was not a time to expose impostures practised on the Third Reich by Anglo-Franco-American entrepreneurs, which had involved the loss to Germany of genuine and splendid pictures; Germany, as the loser, was in the wrong, and must be firmly kept in the wrong for a time, to satisfy public indignation. Francis’s dilemma had a bewildering array of horns.

And there was the matter of Ross himself. He counted on his article about The Marriage to provide a fine step upward in his career. Was Francis to hold him back by a confession which, if it were to be made at all, should have been made years earlier?

Finally, Francis had to admit, there was sheer pride in having brought off a splendid hoax. Had not Ruth Nibsmith warned him about the strong Mercurial element in his nature? Mercury, who added so much that was uplifting and delightful in the world, was also the god of thieves and crooks and hoaxers. The division between art and deviousness and—yes, it had to be admitted—crime was sometimes as thin as a cigarette paper. Beset by conscience on the one hand, he enjoyed a deep, chuckling satisfaction on the other. He was no Letztpfennig, to be brought down to ruin by a monkey: his picture, though anonymously, was to be given wide exposure and an interesting ambience by a rising young expert in the Mercurial world of connoisseurship. Francis decided to keep mum.

The article, when it did appear, was everything he could have wished. It was soberly, indeed elegantly written, without any of the gee-whiz enthusiasm Ross had shown when he told Francis what he was about to do. It was modest in tone: this very fine picture, hitherto unknown, had at last come to light, and except for Drollig Hansel it was the only example from the brush of The Alchemical Master, whoever he might be. He must have been known to the Fuggers, and to Graf Meinhard, and these facts and the quality of the painting put it with the best of the Augsburg group, of whom Holbein had been the finest master. Was The Alchemical Master a pupil or associate of Holbein? It was more than likely, for Holbein had delighted in pictures that offered concealed messages to those who had the historical knowledge and the flair to read them. Fuller explication of the iconographic intricacies of the masterpiece Ross was happy to leave to scholars of greater insight than himself.

It was a fine article, and it caused a sensation among those who cared about such things, which meant several hundred thousand professional critics, connoisseurs, and that large body of people who could never hope to own a great picture, but who cared deeply for great pictures. Perhaps best of all, it offered a fine colour reproduction of the triptych as a whole, and a detailed picture of each of its three parts. The Marriage at Cana, now dated and explicated, became art history, and Francis (the Mercurial Francis, not the possessor of the tormented Catholic-Protestant conscience) was overjoyed.

The Countess refused all subsequent requests to examine the picture. She was, she said, too old and too busy with her great farm to oblige the curious. Did she smell a rat? Nobody ever knew. Thou shalt perish ere I perish.

THE ARTICLE DESTROYED Francis forever as a painter. Clearly he could not go on in the style which he had, with so much pain and under the whip of Saraceni, made his own. The danger was too great. But with the perversity of his Mercurial aspect, he now found himself eager to paint again. He had done nothing since the end of the war except amuse himself with a few drawings in the Old Master manner and executed with his Old Master technique. After Ross’s article appeared he enlarged his portfolio of sketches in this style that had been preliminary studies for The Marriage at Cana; created them, so to speak, after the fact. They had to be kept locked up. Now he wanted to paint. The obvious thing—he had grown fond of Ross’s word “obvious”—was to learn to paint in a contemporary style. He bought new, ready-made paints and canvases prepared by an artist’s supplier, and remembering his early enthusiasm for Picasso he set to work to find a style related to that of the greatest of modern painters, but which would be the true style of Francis Cornish.

That could never have been easy but it became wholly impossible after Picasso made a statement to Giovanni Papini, which was included in an interview that appeared in Libro Nero in 1952. The Master said:

In art the mass of people no longer seeks consolation and exaltation, but those who are refined, rich, unoccupied, who are distillers of quintessences, seek what is new, strange, original, extravagant, scandalous. I myself, since Cubism and before, have satisfied these masters and critics with all the changing oddities which passed through my head, and the less they understood me, the more they admired me. By amusing myself with all these games, with all these absurdities, puzzles, rebuses, arabesques, I became famous and that very quickly. And fame for a painter means sales, gains, fortune, riches. And today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone with myself, I have not the courage to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term. Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt were great painters. I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and exploited as best he could the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than it may appear, but it has the merit of being sincere.

HE LOST NO TIME in bringing this interview to the attention of Ross. He had to translate it, because Ross had only a smattering of tourist-Italian; he was always meaning to learn the language properly, so that he could read things like Libro Nero, but he never did so.

“What do you make of that?” said Francis.

“I make nothing whatever of it,” said Ross. “You know how artists are; they have bad days and fits of self-doubt and self-accusation when they think their work is rubbish, and abase themselves before the artists of the past. Often they are trying to coax whoever they are talking to into contradicting them—giving them new assurance. I suppose Papini, whoever he may be, caught Pablo on a bad day, and took all that rubbish for his real opinion.”

“Papini is a rather well-regarded philosopher and critic. He doesn’t write to create sensations and I am certain he would have asked Picasso to reread and consider such a statement as this before he published it. You can’t brush it aside as a passing comment, made in a fit of depression.”

“Yes I can. And I do. Listen, Frank: when you want opinions about an artist’s work you don’t ask the artists for them. You ask somebody who knows about art. A critic, in fact.”

“Oh, come on! Do you really think artists are inspired simpletons who don’t know what they’re doing?”

“Artists have tunnel vision. They see what they are doing themselves, and they are plagued by all sorts of self-doubt and misgivings. Only the critic can stand aloof and see what’s really going on. Only the critic is in a position to make a considered and sometimes a final judgement.”

“So Picasso doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he talks about Picasso?”

“You’ve put your finger on it. He is talking about Picasso the man—troubled, influenced by ups and downs in his health, his love-life, his bank account, his feelings about Spain—everything that makes the man. When I talk about Picasso I talk about the genius who painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the master of every genre, the Surrealist, the visionary who painted the prophetic Guernica—one of the greatest things to come out of this rotten era—The Charnel House, the whole bloody lot. And about that Picasso, the mere man Picasso knows bugger-all, because he is sitting inside himself and has too close a view of himself. About the artist Picasso I know more than Pablo Picasso does.”

“I envy your assurance.”

“You’re not a critic. You’re not even a painter. You’re a craftsman, a creation of that old scamp Saraceni. And you ought to understand this, Frank, because it’s part of the truth. A very big part of it. Too much rides on the reputation of Picasso to allow any rubbish like that interview to rock the boat.”

“Money, you mean? Fashion in taste?”

“Don’t be cynical about fashion in taste. Among other things, art is very big business.”

“But what about what he says about seeking consolation and exaltation in art?”

“That was the fashion of an earlier day. That was probably true about the Age of Faith, which has been bleeding badly ever since the Renaissance, and which got its death blow with the revolutions in America and France. The Age of Faith took a deadly disease from the Reformation. Ever see a really great picture inspired by Protestantism? But the passing of the Age of Faith didn’t mean the death of art, which is the only immortal, everlasting thing.”

“But he says in so many words that he was serving fashion, pleasing the crowd, devising absurdities and puzzles.”

“Don’t you hear what I’m telling you? What he says is rubbish. It’s what he does that counts.”

FRANCIS COULD NOT WIN the argument, but he was not convinced, and it was his determination that consolation and exaltation must somewhere and somehow be the chief care of the artists that pushed him to his decision to return to Canada, where art was still not big business, where art was indeed little considered, and where therefore art might be persuaded to remain true to the path he was convinced was the right one.

He could not embark on this great missionary journey, this return to his roots, quickly or easily. First of all he had to detach himself from MI5, and to his surprise Uncle Jack was not willing to release him without argument.

“My dear boy, perhaps you feel that you’ve been neglected—not pushed ahead in the profession as you might have been. But you don’t understand how we work—how we are compelled to work. We get a trustworthy, first-rate man in a key job, and we leave him there. You are just what we need in this art connection. Knowledgeable, respected, but not too visible; able to go anywhere without making too much of a stir; a Canadian and therefore supposed to be a bit dumb by people who value a glittering cleverness above everything else. You’ve got enough money not to be always nagging me for extras. I’d describe you as ideal for what you are doing. You’ve provided quite enough useful tips about dangerous people to have fully earned your passage in this work. And now you want to throw it up.”

“Nice of you to say all that. But where does it lead?”

“I can’t possibly promise that it leads anywhere other than where you are at present. Doesn’t that satisfy you? Your father never worried about where things led.”

“For him it led to a knighthood.”

“Do you want a knighthood? What would you get it for? Most of the chaps you are keeping an eye on are pestering for knighthoods for themselves. A thing like that would tip off every clever rogue that you were something more than you seemed.”

“Well, I’m grateful for everything, but in fact I am certain that I am something more than I seem, and I want to go home, and be what I am in my own country.”

That would have been that, if another upheaval—not a blow or a misfortune, but a disturbing change of circumstances—had not shaken Francis profoundly.

Saraceni died, and as his wife had died in the Blitz, and his daughter had died from a less dramatic cause, Francis discovered that he was the Meister’s sole heir.

That meant going to Rome and spending long hours with Italian lawyers and civil servants who explained to him the complexities of inheriting a large private collection of art—not all of it art of the highest quality but every bit of it of museum quality—in a country that had been virtually beggared by a war it had never really wanted.

The Italian lawyers were rueful, and very courteous, but firm that the law must be served in every respect. Serving the law in Italy, as in every civilized country, was an extremely expensive business, but Saraceni had left plenty of money to take care of that and leave some over. What the Italian lawyers could not control, though they tried, was whatever Saraceni had deposited in numbered accounts in Switzerland.

This was what shocked Francis, for he had never thought of the Meister as a very rich man. But the Meister must have made some remarkably good deals with the people who paid him and Prince Max and the Gräfin for the pictures that had made their way to England from Düsterstein. When he made himself known to the quiet men at the banks, and established his undoubted right to Saraceni’s wealth, Francis could not believe the record of millions in good hard currency that were his. He came of a banking family and money in substantial sums was not strange to him. But until now his income had reached him from Canada without any necessity for him to think about the capital sums that generated it. Money, to him, meant a lump that appeared in his account every quarter, a lump from which he allotted sums for the miserable estate in Cornwall that never fulfilled the promises that were made for it by Uncle Roderick, and an increasing sum for the maintenance of Little Charlie, who was now almost grown up and appeared to eat money, so great were the demands made on her behalf by aunt Prudence. Francis, who thought of himself as “careful”, sighed and sometimes cursed whenever he signed these cheques, and although he never spent anything like the remainder of his income, he considered himself as a man financially somewhat straitened.

It was a two-year job to shake himself loose from MI5 and make the best he could of Saraceni’s estate, but at last it was done, and he returned to the land of his birth.

THE LAND OF HIS BIRTH had not stood still in the years since Francis had left it to go to Oxford. The war had taught it something about its place in the world, and about the exploitative attitude taken by great countries toward small countries—small in population and influence, however gigantic they might be in physical dimension. Canada the wide-eyed farm boy was becoming street-wise, though not truly wise. Large numbers of immigrants from every part of Europe saw a future for themselves in Canada, and their attitude was understandably exploitative and somewhat patronizing. Nevertheless, they could not wholly abandon the sort of intelligence they had gained as a birthright in Europe, and in some respects the Canadian surface became observably smoother. Perhaps the most significant change, in the long term, was that of which Ruth Nibsmith—intuitive as always—had spoken at Düsterstein; the little country with the big body, which had always been introverted in its psychology—an introversion that had shown itself in a Loyalist bias, a refusal to be liberated by the military force of its mighty neighbour from what the mighty neighbour assumed was an intolerable colonial yoke—was striving now to assume the extraversion of that mighty neighbour. Because Canada could not really understand the American extraversion, it imitated the obvious elements in it, and the effect was often tawdry. Canada had lost its way, had suffered what anthropologists call Loss of Soul. But when the Soul was such a doubting, flickering, shy entity, who would regret its loss when there were big, obvious, and immediate gains to be had?

Thus Francis returned to a homeland he did not know. His real homeland, compounded of the best of Victoria Cameron and Zadok Hoyle, of the broad adventurous spirit of Grand-père, of the sentimental goodness of Aunt Mary-Ben, was nowhere to be found in the city of Toronto. Like many another, Francis thought his homeland was the world of childhood, and it had fled.

What he did find in Toronto was a new version of the Cornish and McRory family, with Gerald Vincent O’Gorman a very big man in the financial community and a power of great but undefined influence in the Conservative Party. If the Tories ever came to power, Gerry was a sure bet for a seat in the Senate, an appointment safer and richer than a knighthood of St. Sylvester, and something which would, in his opinion and his wife’s, make him the true successor to Grand-père. Gerry was Chairman of the Board of the Cornish Trust, which was now very big business; the President, succeeding Sir Francis (who had died while Francis was deep in financial affairs in Rome, and could not return to Canada), was a Tory senator of unimpeachable dullness and respectability, and he gave Gerry no trouble. Gerry’s sons Larry and Michael were high in the Trust and they were as friendly to Francis as he would allow them to be. But he missed his younger brother Arthur, who, with his wife, had been killed in a car crash, leaving their son Arthur to the care of the O’Gormans, who did their best, but confided Arthur chiefly to men and women Trust officers. Francis didn’t want any help with his money; his fortune from Saraceni was the first money he had ever possessed—apart from the miserable stipend paid him by M15—that was not controlled and managed by the family, and he was determined not to reveal its extent or let any part of it be ruled by another hand.

“Frank, you must do as you think best, but for God’s sake don’t get skinned,” said Larry.

“Don’t worry,” said Francis. “I’ve been skinned enough in my time to know my way around.”

As soon as it could be managed he settled a modest—in the light of his wealth, a mingy—sum on Little Charlie, and informed Uncle Roderick and Aunt Prudence that the girl was to be maintained out of the interest on it until she was twenty-five, when she could take over the management of it herself. He also informed them that under his new circumstances—which he did not explain—he could no longer provide anything more than a very small annual sum for the maintenance of the estate, and he left unanswered the wailing, beseeching letters that followed. He thought it was good of him to give them anything at all.

He then settled himself to the task of devoting his very large income (for he never thought of touching his correspondingly larger capital) to the encouragement of art in Canada, and the experience was like that of a man who bites into a peach and breaks a tooth on the stone.

It was not that the Canadian painters whom he very quickly sought out were disagreeable, but they were strongly independent. More accurately, the good ones were independent and the ones who responded with glee to the appearance of a possible patron were not good. Francis could not get rid of his money because he would not divorce it from his advice, and the painters did not want advice. He tried to band some of them together to do work that consoled and exalted, and his words fell on politely deaf ears.

“You seem to want to create a new Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,” said one of the best, a large man of Ukrainian antecedents named George Bogdanovich. “You can’t get away with it, y’know. Buy some pictures. Sure, we’re glad to sell pictures. But don’t try to be a big influence. Just leave us alone. We know what we’re doing.”

What they were doing was respectable enough, but it did not appeal to Francis. They were utterly in love with the Canadian landscape, and tried to come to terms with it in a variety of ways, some of which, Francis knew, were admirable, and a handful splendid.

“But no people ever appear in your pictures,” he said, again and again.

“Don’t want ’em,” said Bogdanovich, answering for all. “The people stink. Most of ’em, anyway. We paint the country, and maybe after a while the people will learn about the country from the pictures, and stink a little less. Got to begin with the country. That’s consolation and exaltation. We have to do it our own way.”

There could be no quarrelling with that. There were painters, of course, who followed the newest, fashionable trends. Without being pressed, they would explain that they dipped deep into their own Unconscious—a word that was new to Francis in this context—and drew up conceptions that were expressed in pictures that might be gaudy and rather messy rearrangements of what they saw, or felt; some were carefully wrought arrangements of colours, usually dingy. These messages from the Unconscious were deemed to be infinitely precious, evoking in sensitive viewers some hint of an Unconscious deeper than any they could explore unaided. But Francis was not impressed. What had Ruth said? “You can’t talk to the Mothers by getting them on the phone. They have an unlisted number.” These delvers clearly did not have the number. It was such fakers of a chthonic inner vision whom Francis grew to detest above all others.

So Francis had to content himself with buying pictures that he thought good, but did not much like. Without being quite sure how it happened he found that he was taking pictures from painters who lived in inaccessible places, and keeping them in his Toronto dwelling, where from time to time he was able to sell them and remit the money to the painter. He took no fee, but in a way he was a dealer. The world of collectors, not large in Canada, understood that he knew a good picture when he saw one, and his recommendation was a guarantee of quality. But this did not satisfy him, though in a desultory way it occupied him.

His satisfaction came from the pictures that had been in Saraceni’s collection, which he was able to sneak into Canada by not altogether blameless means, and store in his Toronto headquarters.

These headquarters were on the top floor of an apartment house he owned in a decent, though not a fashionable, part of Toronto. He had bought it, years before, on the advice of his cousin Larry, who had told him that he ought to diversify his holdings, and get some good real estate. There were three apartments on the top floor of the dull building, product of an unadventurous period of architecture, and Francis spread his possessions among all three. To begin, this top floor looked like a richly if oddly furnished large single apartment, but as time went on the rooms became more and more cluttered, and the space in which Francis lived grew smaller and smaller.

“God, what a magpie’s nest,” said Aylwin Ross, the first time he visited it. “ ‘Blind Fortune still bestows her gifts on such as cannot use them.’ Jonson, not me, but apt, I’m sure you will admit. Where in God’s name did all this stuff come from?”

“Inherited,” said Francis.

“From Saraceni. You don’t have to tell me.”

“In part. Much of it I have bought.”

“With the ghost of Saraceni looking over your shoulder,” said Ross. “Frank, how do you endure it?”

Frank endured it because he never thought of it as a permanent state. He was always meaning to go through his possessions carefully, banishing some to storage, perhaps selling some others, and arriving at last at a dwelling space over-furnished and over-decorated, perhaps, but recognizable as a human habitation. Meanwhile he lived in something like an antique dealer’s warehouse, to which he was continually adding the contents of new crates, cartons, and parcels. It was fortunate that his apartment house possessed a freight elevator, as well as the shuddering, murmurous bronze cage in which visitors ascended to what Ross named The Old Curiosity Shop.

Ross was a frequent visitor, for he had taken to returning to Canada several times a year, to give a lecture here, offer advice to an aspiring municipal or provincial gallery there, and contribute articles to Canadian periodicals on the state of art and the dizzy ascent of art prices in the international sale-rooms. He brought Francis the gossip of the art world—the sort of thing that could not be printed—and stories about its personalities, some of whom were people Francis had watched on behalf of Uncle Jack. Not that Francis ever mentioned his real London work to Ross; he was as close-mouthed as ever about that, and he was expert in deflecting delicate inquiries that might give a hint as to the extent of his fortune. But it could not be concealed that he was rich, and very rich, for such eccentricity as he was developing could not be sustained by less than a large fortune. He bought pictures at Christie’s and Sotheby’s at high prices, and although he did so through an agent, Ross was the kind of man who could ferret out who the real buyer was. What Ross did not know was that such heavy purchasing was Francis’s way of assuaging the great yearning he felt to paint himself. More than once he tried to find a new style, and every time he gave it up in disgust. The Mothers would not speak to him in a contemporary voice.

Ross’s preoccupation with the art world of Canada, which might have puzzled a less astute person, was no mystery to Francis. Ross wanted to be the Director of the National Gallery in Ottawa, and to secure such an appointment it was well to lay his plans some years ahead of the event.

“I really am a Canadian, you know,” he said; “a Canadian in my bones, and I want to do something important here. I want to raise the Gallery to a level of world importance, which it isn’t now. Of course, it has some fine things. The collection of eighteenth-century drawings is enviable, and there are other good individual holdings. But not enough. Not nearly enough. The buying has usually been unexceptionable in terms of a budget that is simply derisory; but there is far too much that has merely been donated, and we know what that can mean, in a country without many real connoisseurs. It’s hard to turn down donations, or to stick ’em in the cellar when you’ve got ’em. Too many feelings to be hurt. But the time must come. There must be some ruthless weeding and some major buying.—Look here, Frank, what are you going to do with the best of what you have?”

“I haven’t really thought about it,” said Francis, which was a lie.

“My dear man, the time to think about it is now.”

And so, after much haggling about choices, Francis gave his six finest Canadian pictures to the Gallery, and Ross let it leak out in the proper places that it was he who had secured this benefaction, and from whom it came, although Francis tried his best to keep the gift anonymous.

“If it gets out every gallery in the country will be after me,” he said.

“Do you blame them? Come on, Frank, get wise to yourself. If you’re not a benefactor, what in God’s name are you? When are you going to give the Gallery some of that fine Italian stuff?”

“Give away? But why? Why is it assumed that someone who has fine things is under an obligation to give them away?”

In the course of time, and quite a short time as such things go, the Director of the National Gallery had to be replaced, and who was a more obvious candidate for the post than Aylwin Ross?

True to Canadian style in such matters, the committee that was empowered to recommend a successor to the relevant Minister of the Crown fretted and agonized before they did so. Would Ross, now a man with a wide and brilliant reputation, think of accepting such a post? Should not some worthy but relatively unknown scholar from a Canadian university, who for rather vague reasons was thought to deserve something from his country, be appointed instead? Were there not rumours about Ross’s private life? Would Ross want more money than the job at present paid? It was possible for Francis to exercise some influence with certain members of the committee, and he did so, but with caution lest the other members of the committee, who hated him for his knowledge and his wealth, should discover that he was interfering. But at last, when the committee had enjoyed as much of this obligatory Gethsemane as could be endured, the recommendation was made to the Minister, the Minister wrote to Ross, Ross asked for a month in which to consider whether he could see his way clear to making the inevitable sacrifice of an international career as a critic, and in the end he agreed to make the sacrifice—at a substantially increased stipend.

The Minister announced the appointment, and as things happened it was the last appointment he did announce, for the Government of which he was a member fell, and after the hubbub and pow-wow incidental to a General Election had been completed, a new Ministry was formed, and the Minister to whom Ross was to be responsible proved to be a woman. What could be more suitable? Among a large number of Canadians it was assumed that women were good at art and culture. After all, in pioneer days, such things, embodied chiefly in quilts and hooked rugs, had lain entirely in their hands, and there was a great deal of pioneer opinion still operative in a fossilized state in the political world.

Ross had not paid much attention to the election. He said himself that he was in no way a political man. He had not heeded, if indeed he heard, the vehement promises made by the political party that now formed the Government to cut expenditures, to lance the boil of a swollen Civil Service, and above all to get rid of what the politicians assured the voters were “frills”. But expenditures, especially when so many of them are baby bonuses, mothers’ allowances, medical subventions, or pensions to the old and the disabled, are not easy to reduce; indeed, the clamour of the deserving and the needy is always mounting and always for more. Nor is it really possible to reduce the Civil Service without offending multitudes of voters, for all Civil Servants, and especially those on the humbler levels, come not from families but from tribes, engorged with tribal loyalty. This leaves only frills to provide showy economies. And when a country has a National Gallery already full of pictures, as any fool who visits it on a wet day may plainly see, are not more pictures frills, and frills of a peculiarly dispensable, elitist, and effete nature?

Nothing of this struck in upon the consciousness of Aylwin Ross, who was jaunting from one side of Canada to the other, and back again by a different path, explaining to interested groups that it was time Canada had a National Gallery worthy of it, that its present Gallery was not even in the second rank of excellence, and that something decisive must be done, and done at once. His eloquence was much admired. We cannot take our place in the world as a nation of millions of hockey-watchers and a few score hockey-players, he said. He quoted from Ben Jonson: “Whosoever loves not picture is injurious to truth, and all the wisdom of poetry. Picture is the invention of Heaven, the most ancient, and most akin to Nature.” (He did not continue the passage, in which Jonson says flatly that painting is inferior to poetry; the art of the quoter is to know when to stop.) His splendid voice, in which the Canadian accent was softened but not obliterated, was in itself a guarantee of his sincerity. His great good looks enchanted the women and not a few of the men. This was a Canadian presence of a kind to which they were not accustomed. And how he could joke, and drink, and tell good stories of the art world at the receptions that followed his public addresses. Ross’s popularity grew like a pumpkin, and was as bright and shiny. When he had completed his great tour, by which time the new Ministry was comfortably in the saddle, Ross exploded his firework.

A firework that misfires can be like a bomb. Ross let it be known, in an unwise press conference, that it lay in his power, at a stroke, to lift the National Gallery to a new level, and set it well on the way to recognition as a collection of world importance. He had, by long negotiation and a lightning trip to Europe, succeeded in pledging all the Gallery’s allocation for acquisitions for the forthcoming year, and in addition a sum that would gobble it up for six years to come. He had agreed to purchase six pictures, six pictures of world importance, from a great private collection in Europe. He had got them at bargain rates, by dint of keen negotiation and, it was hinted in the gentlest terms, by personal charm.

Who was the owner? Ross let it be teased out of him that the owner was Amalie von Ingelheim, who had recently inherited the collection from her grandmother, and as the Gräfin—for so Ross incorrectly but impressively called her—had need of money (her husband, Prince Max, was taking over a large cosmetic empire with its headquarters in New York), she was letting some of her private treasures out into the world, where they had never been seen before. For a few paltry millions Canada could put itself on the map as a country possessing a notable national collection.

Comparatively few people know what a million dollars actually is. To the majority it is a gaseous concept, swelling or decreasing as the occasion suggests. In the minds of politicians, perhaps more than anywhere, the notion of a million dollars has this accordion-like ability to expand or contract; if they are disposing of it, the million is a pleasing sum, reflecting warmly upon themselves; if somebody else wants it, it becomes a figure of inordinate size, not to be compassed by the rational mind. When the politicians learned that one of their functionaries, an understrapper holding a minor post in a cul de sac, had promised several millions abroad, for the acquirement of pictures—pictures, for God’s sake—they burst into flames of indignation, and none were more indignant than those of the party, now Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, who had appointed Ross just before they fell from power.

The Minister was under the gun. She did not like Ross, whom she had met two or three times, and her Assistant Deputy Minister, who dealt directly with Ross, was another woman who liked him even less. He had quoted Jonson to her, and she had assumed that he was talking about Samuel Johnson, and had made a goat of herself. (Or so it seemed to her, for Ross, who was used to this misunderstanding, paid little attention.) The Assistant Deputy Minister was a feminist, and certain that Ross’s deferential manner toward women was mockery. She had her suspicions that Ross was a homosexual—so handsome a man, and unmarried—and she detailed a trusted henchman (one of the Palace Eunuchs of her Department) to get the goods on Ross if he could, by any means short of making him a proposition in a Parliamentary lavatory. Ross, in his dealings with this lady, was unquestionably tactless; in the words of his favourite author, he was “plagued with an itching leprosy of wit,” and he could not dissemble it in his dealings with politicians and Civil Servants.

The Minister relied on the advice of her Deputy, who relied on the advice of her assistant (who was not quite her lover but would have been if they were not both so busy and so tired), and her path was clear. A Civil Servant under her Ministry had behaved with unwarrantable freedom, making deals involving money not yet allocated, and without a word to her. She made a statement in the House repudiating the purchases, and assuring the Commons that no one was more zealous in cutting down unwarrantable expenditures than she. Piously, she said that she yielded to no one in her love of art in all its forms, but there were times when even she had to regard art as a frill. When grave financial problems confronted the country, she knew where her priorities lay. She went no further, but it was assumed that these priorities lay in the Maritimes, or on the Prairies, where money problems are endemic.

Without an election, the press was in need of a political punching-bag, and Ross provided one for at least two weeks. The most conservative insisted that he be humbled, made to understand the facts of Canadian life, taught a sharp lesson: the more extreme papers demanded that his appointment be revoked, and hinted that he ought to go back to Europe, where he obviously belonged, having learned that decent people didn’t blaspheme against hockey.

THE RIGHTEOUS UPROAR was almost over when Ross appeared one night in the Old Curiosity Shop. Looking at him, in his painfully reduced state, Francis knew that he loved him. But what was there to say?

“The Ark of the Lord seems to have fallen into the hands of the Philistines” was what he did say.

“I have never met this kind of thing before. They hate me. I think they wish me dead,” said Ross.

“Oh, not at all. Politicians get far worse abuse all the time. It will blow over.”

“Yes, and I will be left discredited in the eyes of my staff and perpetually school-marmed by the Minister, who will grudge me every penny that goes to the Gallery. I’ll be nothing more than a caretaker, looking after a cat-and-dog collection and without any hope of improving it.”

“Well, Aylwin, I don’t want to be stuffy, but you really shouldn’t have spent money you didn’t have in your grip. And the Minister—you know that as a woman she has to show herself tougher than any of the men; she can’t afford a single feminine weakness. The Prime Minister reserves all those for himself.”

“She’s out to get me, you know. Wants to prove me a fairy.”

“Well—are you? I’ve never known.”

“Not more than most men, I suppose. I’ve had affairs with women.”

“Well, why don’t you make a pass at the Minister? That would answer her question.”

“Grotesque suggestion! She smells of drug-store perfume and cough-drops! No, there’s only one thing that will put me right.”

“And that is—?”

“If only I could get one of those pictures for the Gallery. Just one would raise enough interest in the international art world to show the Minister I wasn’t completely a fool.”

“Yes, but how could you do that?” But even as he spoke, Francis knew.

“If I could get a private benefactor to give one to the Gallery, it would do an immense amount to put me right, and eventually it would put me totally right. If I could get the one I want, that’s to say.”

“Benefactors are very elusive creatures.”

“Yes, but not unknown. Frank—will you?”

“Will I what?”

“You know damn well what. Will you stump up for one of those pictures?”

“With art prices what they are at present? You flatter me!”

“No I don’t. I know what you have been paying in London in the past two or three years. You could do it.”

“Even if I could, which I don’t for a moment admit, why would I?”

“Haven’t you any patriotism?”

“It is variable. I take off my hat when our flag goes by—heraldic eyesore though it is.”

“For friendship?”

“From what I’ve seen of the world the worst thing that can happen to friendship is to put a price on it.”

“Frank, you’re making me beg. All right, damn it, I’ll beg.—Will you?”

Never in his life, which had not been sparing of discomfort, had Francis been so cornered. Ross looked so wretched, so beaten, and so beautiful in his wretchedness. In the biblical phrase, his bowels yearned toward Ross. But his compassion was not the whole of Francis’s complex of emotions. The more money he had, the more he loved money. And—he couldn’t explain it but he felt it—having relinquished his work as an artist, so much of what was deepest in him was now caught up with possessions, and therefore with money. To give a picture to the nation—very fine in the saying, and so dangerous in the doing. Be known as a benefactor and everybody wants something, often to sustain mediocrity. Yet—there was Ross, the last of his loves, and miserable. He had loved Ismay with his whole heart—and like a fool. He had loved Ruth like a man, and Ruth had died with hundreds of thousands of others, a victim of the world’s cruel stupidity. He loved Ross, not because he wanted Ross physically, but for his daring youth, which the years had not touched, for his defiance of conventions that Francis knew had kept himself in chains, had made him the sustainer of a failing estate and the supporter of a child who was not his own, had held him back from claiming a great painting as his work. Yes, he must yield, whatever the hurt to his purse, which was now almost his soul. Almost; not wholly.

And so Francis was about to say yes, and would have done if Ross had been able to hold his tongue. But his fatal urge toward speech stepped between Ross and his success.

“The gift could be anonymous, you know.”

“Of course. I would insist on that.”

“Then you agree.—Frank, I love you!”

The words startled Francis more than any blow. Oh God, this was putting a price on friendship, and no doubt about it!

“I haven’t agreed yet.”

“Oh yes you have! Frank, this will put everything right! Now, about price—let me get in touch with Prince Max tomorrow!”

“Prince Max?”

“Yes. Even you, drinker of cheap schlock though you are, must know about Prince Max, head of the great Maximilian wine-importers in New York? He’s acting on behalf of his wife. She was Amalie von Ingelheim and she inherited the whole collection from the old Gräfin.”

“Amalie von Ingelheim. I didn’t know she’d married Max! I know her—knew her.”

“Yes, she remembers you. Calls you Le Beau Ténébreux. Said you taught her to play skat when she was a kid.”

“Why is she selling?”

“Because she’s a girl with a head on her shoulders. She and Max are a thriving pair of aristocratic survivors. They even look alike, though he must be a good deal older than she is. She’s had a good career already as a model, but you know those careers don’t run much more than eighteen months. She’s been on the covers of the two biggest fashion magazines, and there’s no place else to go. She and Prince Max are buying a cosmetic business—a really good one—and she’ll make herself a hugely rich, international beauty.”

“And the pictures?”

“She says she never gave a damn about the pictures.”

“So? Little Amalie has certainly grown up—in a way.”

“Yes, but she’s not without heart. She’ll listen to reason. And if I tell her you are the buyer, everything will work out well. That’s to say, as cheaply as we have any right to expect—from aristocratic survivors. The picture could be here and in the Gallery before Christmas. What a gift to the nation!”

“There are six pictures, I believe. I’ve never seen any report that said which pictures. I can guess which ones might make a big price in the market. Is it the little Raphael?”

“No, not that one.”

“The Bronzino portrait?”

“No. Nor the Grunewald. Since the row here other buyers have appeared and five are gone. But she’s holding the one I want.”

Ruth had told Francis he had plenty of intuition. It had been slow in acting, but it worked now with full force.

“Which picture?”

“Not the greatest name, but the very picture we need, because it has mystery, you see, and historical importance, and it’s virtually unique because only one other picture from the same hand is known to exist. It’s a picture that I dearly love, because it did more than anything else to establish me in my present place as an expert. You’ve seen it! A prize! The Marriage at Cana, by the so-called Alchemical Master!”

Intuition was now working furiously. “Why has she kept it? Aylwin, did you tell her you might still be able to arrange to buy it?”

“I may have dropped a hint to Max. You know how one talks in these deals.”

“Did you hint that I might put up the money?”

“Certainly your name came into it. And as you’re an old friend they have agreed to hold it for a month or so.”

“In other words, you have once again spent some money that you didn’t have assured. My money.”

“Come on, Frank, you know what these situations are like. Don’t talk like a banker.”

“I won’t buy it.”

“Frank—listen—I simply did what had to be done. Buying art on this level is extremely sensitive business. When I had Max and Amalie in the right mood I had to move quickly. You’ll see it all quite differently tomorrow.”

“No, I won’t. I will never buy that picture.”

“But why? Is it the money? Oh, Frank, don’t say it’s the money!”

“No, I give you my word it isn’t the money.”

“Then why?”

“I have personal reasons that I can’t explain. The Raphael, the Bronzino, two or three others—yes, I would have done it for you. But not The Marriage at Cana.”

“Why, why, why! You’ve got to tell me. You owe it to me to tell me!”

“Anything I owed you, Aylwin, has been paid in full with six excellent modern paintings. I won’t buy that picture, and that’s flat.”

“You shit, Frank!”

“Oh come, I should have thought that under these circumstances you could have found a quotation from Ben Jonson.”

“All right! ‘Turd in your teeth’.”

“Pretty good. Nothing else?”

“ ‘May dogs defile thy walls,

And wasps and hornets breed beneath thy roof,

This seat of falsehood and this cave of cozenage!’ ”

And Ross flung out of the room. To Francis it seemed that he was laughing at his own apt quotation, but in truth he was weeping. The two grimaces are not so far apart.

Francis washed his hands and retired to the narrow space he had kept for his bed. Before he went to sleep he looked long at a picture that puzzled those of his friends who had seen it, and that still hung over his bed’s head. It was not a great picture. It was a cheapish print of Love Locked Out and to him at present it was more poignant than any of his heaped-up masterworks.

OF COURSE Francis did the only possible thing. He couldn’t under any circumstances have allowed the friend he loved to be taken in by a picture he knew to be a fake, and his own fake at that, to place it in the principal gallery of the country to which they were both supposed to owe their first allegiance, said the Lesser Zadkiel.

—I disagree totally, said the Daimon Maimas. He could certainly have done it, and what he called his Mercurius influence—myself, really—urged him to do it. I reminded him of what Letztpfenning had said: What is being sold, a great picture or the magic of the past? Is it a work of grave beauty that is being purchased, or such a work given its real worth by the seal of four centuries? I was disgusted with Francis. Indeed, I nearly deserted him at that instant.

—Can you do that?

—You know I can. And when a man’s daimon leaves him, he is finished. You remember that when Mark Antony was playing the fool with that Egyptian woman his daimon left him in disgust. That was because of a stupid love, as well.

—Francis’s love for Ross was not stupid, brother. I thought it had a flavour of nobility, because it asked nothing.

—It made him betray what was best of himself.

—Questionable, brother. Love, or worldly gratification? Love, or vanity? Love, or a wry joke on the world of art that seemed to have no place for him? If poor Darcourt, who longs to know the truth about Francis, knew what we know, he would rank Francis very high.

—Darcourt is a Christian priest, and Christianity cost Francis dear. It gave him that double conscience we have seen plaguing him throughout his life. Darcourt would have said he did the right thing. I do not.

—Yet you did not reject him.

—I was disgusted with him. I hate to leave a job uncompleted. I was told to make Francis a great man, and he went directly contrary to my urging.

—Perhaps he was indeed a great man.

—Not the great man I would have made.

—You are not the final judge, brother.

—Nor was I wholly defeated, brother. Greatness is achieved in more than one way. Watch what follows.

THE SUICIDE OF AYLWIN ROSS caused the usual curiosity, the flow of easy pity, the satisfaction at having been witness at second hand to something that newspapers describe as a tragedy, in the public at large. The world of connoisseurship mourned him as a fine talent brought untimely to an end. In Canada it was assumed that he had been unable to bear public disgrace, and there were expressions of regret, mingling guilt with covert contempt that a man had broken under stress, when he should have taken his medicine like a little soldier. There was some speculation of the easy psychological kind that he had killed himself in order to make his enemies and detractors feel cheap, and although some of them did feel cheap they were angry with themselves for having been manipulated in such a way. In Parliament the Minister spoke briefly of Ross as a man who had meant well, but who was not a realist in public affairs; nevertheless, the Honourable Members were charged to think of him as a great Canadian. And the Honourable Members, who are accustomed to such work, obediently did so for a full minute. A memorial service was mounted at the National Gallery and the dead savant was accorded the usual public honours: poetry was spoken, some Bach was played, and the Deputy Minister read a carefully worded tribute, written by a minor poet from the pool of governmental speechwriters; it said many splendid things, but admitted nothing. It enjoined the National Gallery staff, and the nation, never to forget Aylwin Ross in its upward journey toward prudent, economical greatness.

As for Francis, who had suffered no nervous breakdown when Ruth was killed, he allowed himself such a collapse of the spirit now, and he toughed it out by himself in his cave of cozenage, living on beer and baked beans, cold from the can. Perhaps because he sought no professional help in dealing with his misery, he was as much himself in a few weeks as he would ever be again.

HIS FINAL YEARS were productive, in their way, and he had his satisfactions. These were years when it was fashionable to speak of the Century of the Common Man, but Francis saw little real evidence that it was so, and as he remembered his years at Carlyle Rural, spent with the Common Child, he was neither surprised nor regretful. People who met him casually thought him a misanthrope, but he had friends, drawn chiefly from the academic community. Extensive and curious knowledge of European life during the few centuries that most appealed to him established a kinship between Francis and Professor Clement Hollier, who sought historical truths in what many historians chose to overlook. Professor the Reverend Simon Darcourt (the splendour of his title amused Francis) became a great friend because he and Francis were fellow enthusiasts for rare books, manuscripts, old calligraphy, caricatures, and a ragbag of half a dozen other things about which he was not always deeply informed, but that came within the net of his swelling collections. It was Darcourt who revived Francis’s sleeping love of music—better music than had ever been known to Mary-Ben—and they were often seen at concerts together.

There were evenings when these cronies gathered in the Old Curiosity Shop and while Hollier sat almost silent, Francis listened as Darcourt poured out a stream of lively, amusing, endearing talk, like wine bubbling out of the bottles that Darcourt always remembered to bring, for Francis was tight about hospitality. It amused him that Darcourt, something of a connoisseur, favoured vintages that bore the distinguished label of Prince Max on which the motto “Thou shalt perish ere I perish” was of course assumed to refer to the wine.

Another friend, not so close but valued, was Professor Urquhart McVarish, whose appeal to Francis (though McVarish never guessed it) was that in him there was something of the Mercurial spirit he felt so strongly in himself, though he kept it hidden, whereas McVarish let it rip, and boasted, and lied and cheated, with a vigour Francis found amusing and refreshing. It was Darcourt who persuaded Francis to read the works of Ben Jonson in a fine First Folio, and because of that Francis often addressed McVarish as Sir Epicure Mammon—a reference McVarish never troubled to check, and assumed to be complimentary. Indeed, in Jonson Francis discovered a spirit he would never have divined from the carefully chosen quotations of Aylwin Ross—a spirit apparently harsh, but inwardly tender, much like Francis himself.

McVarish had the Mercurial trait of thievery, as well; his method was the tried-and-true one of borrowing something which somehow he never remembered to return, and after the disappearance of a valued old gramophone record—Sir Harry Lauder singing “Stop Your Tickling, Jock”—Francis had to take care that only lesser objects got out of his hands to this merry, amoral Scot. But McVarish never felt the need to do anything in return for what arose from his friendship with Francis. It was Hollier and Darcourt who contrived to have Francis elected an honorary member of the Senior Common Room at the College of St. John and the Holy Ghost in the University of Toronto—Francis’s old college, affectionately known as Spook. This was the reason why Francis put Spook down for a handsome inheritance in his will—the will that he now delighted to revise, daub with codicils, and play with.

The will cost him much thought, and some anxiety. He had the document acknowledging that what he had done about Little Charlie was all that the child could expect; but he prudently, though not very agreeably, had his London lawyers secure a document from Ismay, who was still pursuing The Workers’ Cause in the Midlands, guaranteeing that Little Charlie was not the child of his loins, and that neither Ismay nor Little Charlie could make any claim on his estate. This was not easy, because Ismay was still in law his wife, but Francis provided his lawyers with the names of one or two members of the profession who knew a good deal about Ismay, and could make things uncomfortable for her if she did not toe the line.

He was still enough of a McRory to feel that he must remember relatives in his will, and he arranged bequests—mean, in the light of his great wealth—to Larry and Michael. Something better, but by no means lavish, was left to his nephew Arthur, son of his brother Arthur. Now and then Francis felt some guilt about this young Arthur, some stirring of a parental instinct that was never really strong. But what has a man in his sixties to say to a boy? Francis had an un-evolved Canadian idea that an uncle ought to teach a boy to shoot, or fish, or make a wigwam out of birch bark, and such ideas filled him with dismay. The notion that the boy could be interested in art never entered his head. So to Arthur he remained a taciturn, rather smelly, un-Cornish old party who turned up now and then at family affairs, and who was always good at Christmas and birthdays for a handsome money gift. But although Francis was convinced that a boy must necessarily be interested only in what he himself thought of as boyish things, he saw a glint in Arthur’s eye which persuaded him, as the years passed and the boy became a man and an innovative, imaginative figure in the Cornish Trust, to name Arthur as his executor. With his three cronies, of course, to guide the supposedly Philistine young man in the disposal of his now unwieldy accumulation of art. For a collection it could no longer be called.

Once a week, if he remembered, he visited his mother, now in her mid-eighties, beautiful and frail, and with all her wits, if she chose to use them. They were both old people and it was possible for Francis to admit that he had never been on close terms with her, but that now he was past the obligatory, unquestioning love that had been required of him earlier, he quite liked her. She had once taken refuge in her useful vagueness when he asked about the first Francis, whom he still thought of as the Looner, but he thought he might sound her out about those flirtations, which had so embarrassed him as a boy, and which his father had brushed aside as insignificant.

“Mother, you have never told me anything about your youth. Were you and Father very much in love?”

“Franko, what an odd question! No: I wouldn’t say we were much in love, but he understood me wonderfully, and we were the greatest friends.”

“But were you never in love?”

“Oh—dozens of times. But I never took it very seriously, you know. How can one? It’s such a troublesome feeling if you let it go too far. I knew lots of men, but I never gave your father cause for anxiety. He was always Number One, and he knew it. He was rather a strange man, you know. He rode his life on a very easy rein.”

“I’m awfully glad to hear that.”

“Once, before your father came along, I was desperately in love, the way young girls are. He was the most beautiful man I have ever seen. Beauty is such a disturbing thing, isn’t it? I was so young, and he was an actor, and I never met him—only saw him on the stage, but that was the love that really hurt.”

“There were a lot of very handsome actors then. It was the fashion. Do you remember which one he was?”

“Oh, indeed I do. I think I’ve got a picture postcard of him somewhere still, in a play called Monsieur Beaucaire. His name was Lewis Waller. What a perfect man!”

So much, then, for Dr. J.A. and his scientific malice about an unspecified taint. This cool, ancient, beautiful flirt had loved once, and with abandonment, and the fruit of that passion was the Looner!

What a punishment! What a slap in the face for a Catholic girl from the God she had been taught to worship! No wonder she had put all passion from her, and had become, like Venus in the Bronzino Allegory, someone to whom love was a toy. Francis thought a great deal about it, and formed some highly philosophical conclusions. They were utterly mistaken, of course, because he knew nothing of the well-intentioned, maternally solicitous meddlings of Marie-Louise. Nobody ever knows the whole of anything. But if he had known, his compassion would doubtless have extended to his grandmother, as it now embraced more fully than ever before his mother, Zadok Hoyle, and that poor wretch, the Looner.

THUS IT WAS that when Francis came to die, he had pretty well made up his accounts with all the principal figures in his life, and although he seemed to the world, and even to his few close friends, an eccentric and crabbed spirit, there was a quality of completeness about him that bound those friends tighter than would have been the case if he had been filled with one-sided, know-nothing sweetness and easy acceptance.

The end of his life, though not of his fame, came on a September night, following a Sunday that had been close and humid as Toronto often is in September. As it was his birthday he had made himself go out to dinner, although he was not hungry, and afterward he lay on a sofa in the Old Curiosity Shop, hoping that a breeze from the window would help him to breathe more easily. The sofa had been Saraceni’s, and it was beautiful, but it was not well suited to lying; it was for some reclining beauty of the early nineteenth century, who saw herself in the image of Madame Récamier. But Francis could not make himself go to bed, and so when he felt the first shock of his quietus he was fully clothed, and in a position that was neither sitting nor lying. And after that shock, he knew he could not move.

Indeed, he knew he would never move again.

So this was it? Death, whom he had seen so often represented in art, usually as a figure of cruel menace, was there in the Old Curiosity Shop, and Francis was surprised to understand that he had no fear, though his breathing was now laborious and increasingly so. Well, one had always understood that there must be some struggle.

His vision was clouding, but his mind was clear; uncommonly clear. The reflection drifted through his consciousness that this was very different from what Ross must have felt, dying of a surfeit of sleeping-pills washed down with gin. How different was it from the last hours of Ruth? Who could say what that burned body enveloped of an active, certainly courageous and wise mind? But death, though people prate about its universality, is doubtless individual in the way it comes to everyone.

His feeling was going, but another sort of feeling was taking its place. Was this the famous cliché of all one’s life passing before one’s eyes that drowning men are supposed to experience? It was not all of his life. Rather it was a sense of the completeness of his life, and an understanding—oh, this was luck, this was mercy!—of the fact that his life had not been such a formless muddle, not quite such a rum start, as he had come to believe. He was humble in the recognition that he had not done too badly, and that even things that he had often wished otherwise—the crushing of the wretched Letztpfennig, for instance—were part of a pattern not of his making, and the fulfilling of a destiny that was surely as much Letztpfennig’s as it was his own. Even his denial of Ross, which he had so often looked back on as a denial of love itself—death to the soul!—had been brought about as much by Ross as by any fault in himself. Ross was dear, as dear as Ruth, in another way, but something else was dearer and had to be protected. That was his one masterwork, The Marriage at Cana, now in a position of honour in a great gallery in the States, gloated over by lovers of art and by countless students who had university degrees in Fine Art, guaranteeing the infallibility of their knowledge and taste. If that bomb ever exploded, it would not explode in Canada, and ruin a friend.

No: that was hypocrisy, and he had no time now for hypocrisy. Surely Death had given a hint of His coming a week ago when he had carefully bundled up the preliminary studies, and those he had done after the fact, for The Marriage at Cana, and labelled them in careful Italic “My Drawings in Old Master style, for the National Gallery”. Some day, somebody would tumble to it.

Discover who The Alchemical Master had been—that was a certainty and it would give the wiseacres a great deal to chatter about, anatomize, and discuss in articles and even books. Lives would be written of The Alchemical Master, but would they ever come close to the truth, or even the facts? In the picture in which, Saraceni had said, he had made up his soul, both as it had been and as it was yet to be, the figure of Love was indeed the two figures at the very centre, but it was love of the ideal wholeness that was shown there, and not the real loves of his life. Would they read his allegory, as he had once read the great allegory of Bronzino? In that picture, so dear to him, Time and his daughter Truth were unveiling the spectacle of what love was, as some day Time and Truth would unveil The Marriage at Cana. And when that day came there would be, to begin with, a great deal of harsh talk about deceit and fakery. But had not Bronzino said much that was relevant about deceit and fakery in the wonderfully painted figure of Fraude, the sweet-faced girl offering the honeycomb and the scorpion, whose lower parts were depicted as the chthonic dragon’s claws and swingeing serpent tail? This was Fraude not simply as a cheat, but as a figure from the deep world of the Mothers, whence came all beauty, and also all that was fearful to timid souls seeking only the light, and determined that Love must be solely a thing of light. How lucky he was to have known Fraude, and to have tasted her enlarging, poisoned kiss! Had he, at the end, found the allegory of his own life? Oh, blessing on the angel in The Marriage at Cana who declared, so mysteriously, “Thou hast kept the best wine till the last.”

Francis was laughing now, but laughter was such an effort that there came another shock, and he dropped deeper into the gulf that was enclosing him.

Where was this? Unknown, yet familiar, more the true abode of his spirit than he had ever known before; a place never visited, but from which intimations had come that were the most precious gifts of his life.

It must be—it was—the Realm of the Mothers. How lucky he was, at the last, to taste this transporting wine!

After that, nothing, for to any outward observer it would have seemed that Francis had stood on the threshold of death some time before, and now he had taken the last step.

SO YOU STOOD BY HIM to the end, brother, said the Lesser Zadkiel.

—The end is not yet. Though he had sometimes defied me, I obey my orders still, said the Daimon Maimas.

—Your orders were to make him a great, or at least a remarkable man?

—Yes, and posthumously he will be seen as both great and remarkable. Oh, he was a great man, my Francis. He didn’t die stupid.

—You had your work cut out for you.

—It is always so. People are such muddlers and meddlers. Father Devlin and Aunt Mary-Ben with their drippings of holy water, and their single-barrelled compassion. Victoria Cameron with her terrible stoicism masked as religion. That Doctor with his shallow science. All ignorant people determined that their notions were absolutes.

—Yet I suppose you would say they were bred in the bone.

—They! How can you talk so, brother? Of course, we know that it is all metaphor, you and I. Indeed, we are metaphors ourselves. But the metaphors that shaped the life of Francis Cornish were Saturn, the resolute, and Mercury, the maker, the humorist, the trickster. It was my task to see that these, the Great Ones, were bred in the bone, and came out in the flesh. And my task is not yet finished.

“I’VE BEEN thinking.”

Arthur had returned from his two-day absence, and, having eaten grapefruit, porridge with cream, and bacon and eggs, had now moved into the coda of his usual breakfast and was busy with toast and marmalade.

“I’m not at all surprised. You think quite often. What now?” said Maria.

“That life of Uncle Frank. I was wrong. We’d better tell Simon to go ahead.”

“No more worry about possible scandal?”

“No. Suppose a few drawings turn up at the National Gallery that look like Old Masters but are really by Uncle Frank? That doesn’t make him a faker. He was an art student once, in the days when a lot of them copied Old Master drawings and even drew that way themselves, just to find out how it was done. Not faking at all. The Gallery people will spot them at once, though of course Darcourt mightn’t. Nothing will come of it, you mark my words. Simon’s a literary type, not an art critic. So let’s give him the go-ahead, and get on with the real work of the Foundation. We ought to get some applications soon from needy geniuses.”

“I have a few on my desk already.”

“You call Simon, darling, and tell him I’m sorry I was arbitrary. Could he come in tonight? We could look at your letters and get on with the real job. Being patrons.”

“The modern Medici?”

“No immodesty, please. But it should be sport.”

“Blow your whistle, Arthur, and let the sport begin.”