What’s Bred in the Bone tct-2 Read online

  What’s Bred in the Bone

  ( The Cornish Trilogy - 2 )

  Robertson Davies

  Francis Cornish was always good at keeping secrets. From the well-hidden family secret of his childhood to his mysterious encounters with a small-town embalmer, a master art restorer, a Bavarian countess, and various masters of espionage, the events in Francis’s life were not always what they seemed.

  In this wonderfully ingenious portrait of an art expert and collector of international renown, Robertson Davies has created a spell-binding tale of artistic triumph and heroic deceit. It is a tale told in stylish, elegant prose, endowed with lavish portions of Davies’s wit and wisdom.

  Robertson Davies

  What’s Bred in the Bone

  “What’s bred in the bone will not out of the flesh.”

  English provereb from the Latin, 1290

  Part One

  Who Asked the Question?

  “The book must be dropped.”

  “No, Arthur!”

  “Perhaps only for a time. But for the present, it must be dropped. I need time to think.”

  The three trustees in the big penthouse drawing-room were beginning to shout, which destroyed all atmosphere of a business meeting—not that such an atmosphere had ever been strong. Yet this was a business meeting, and these three were the sole members of the newly founded Cornish Foundation for Promotion of the Arts and Humane Scholarship. Arthur Cornish, who was pacing up and down the room, was unquestionably a business man; a Chairman of the Board to his business associates, but a man with interests that might have surprised them if he had not kept his life in tidy compartments. The Reverend Simon Darcourt, pink, plump, and a little drunk, looked precisely what he was: a priest-academic pushed into a tight corner. But the figure least like a trustee of anything was Arthur’s wife Maria, barefoot in gypsy style, and dressed in a housecoat that would have been gaudy if it had not been made by the best couturier of the best materials.

  There is an ill-justified notion that women are peacemakers. Maria tried that role now.

  “What about all the work Simon’s done?”

  “We acted too quickly. Commissioning the book, I mean. We should have waited to see what would turn up.”

  “What’s turned up may not be as bad as you think. need it, Simon?”

  “I haven’t any idea. It would take experts to decide, and they could be years doing it. All I have is suspicions. I’m sorry I ever mentioned them.”

  “But you suspect Uncle Frank faked some Old Master drawings he left to the National Gallery. Isn’t that bad enough?”

  “It could be embarrassing.”

  “Embarrassing! I admire your coolness. A member of a leading Canadian financial family may be a picture-faker!”

  “You’re neurotic about the business, Arthur.”

  “Yes, Maria, I am, and for the best of reasons. There is no business so neurotic, fanciful, scared of its own shadow, and downright loony as the money business. If one member of the Cornish family is shown to be a crook, the financial world will be sure that the whole Cornish family is shady. There’ll be cartoons of me in the papers: ‘Would You Buy an Old Master from This Man?’ That kind of thing.”

  “But Uncle Frank was never associated with the business.”

  “Doesn’t matter. He was a Cornish.”

  “The best of the lot.”

  “Perhaps. But if he’s a crook, all his banking relations will suffer for it. Sorry: no book.”

  “Arthur, you’re being tyrannous.”

  “All right; I’m being tyrannous.”

  “Because you’re scared.”

  “I have good reason to be scared. Haven’t you been listening? Haven’t you heard what Simon has been telling us?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve been clumsy about this whole thing,” said Simon Darcourt. He looked miserable; his face was almost as white as his clerical collar. “I shouldn’t have told you my suspicions—because that’s all they are, you know—the very first thing. Will you listen while I tell you what is really bothering me? It isn’t just your Uncle Frank’s cleverness with his pencil. It’s the whole book.

  “I’m a disciplined worker. I don’t mess about, waiting for inspiration, and all that nonsense. I sit down at my desk and wire in and make prose out of my copious notes. But this book has twisted and turned under my hands like a dowser’s hazel twig. Does the spirit of Francis Cornish not want his life to be written? He was the most private man I’ve ever known. Nobody ever got much out of him that was personal—except two or three, of whom Aylwin Ross was the last. You know, of course, that Francis and Ross were thought to be homosexual lovers?”

  “Oh my God!” said Arthur Cornish. “First you suspect he was a picture-faker and now you tell me he was a poofter. Any other little surprises, Simon?”

  “Arthur, don’t be silly and coarse,” said Maria; “you know that homosexuality is an O.K. kink nowadays.”

  “Not in the money-market.”

  “Oh, to hell with the money-market.”

  “Please, my dears,” said Darcourt. “Don’t quarrel, and if I may say so, don’t quarrel foolishly about trivialities. I’ve been busy on this biography for eighteen months and I’m not getting anywhere. You don’t frighten me by threatening to quash it, Arthur. I’ve a good mind to quash it myself. I tell you I can’t go on. I simply can’t get enough facts.”

  Arthur Cornish had his full share of the human instinct to urge people to do what they do not want to do. Now he said, “That’s not like you, Simon; you’re not a man to throw in the towel.”

  “No, please don’t think of it, Simon,” said Maria. “Waste eighteen months of research? You’re just depressed. Have a drink and let us cheer you up.”

  “I’ll gladly have a drink, but I want to tell you what my position is. It’s more than just author’s cold feet. Please listen to my problem. It’s serious.”

  Arthur was already getting drinks for the three of them. He set a glass that was chiefly Scotch with a mere breathing of soda in front of Darcourt, and sat down on the sofa beside his wife.

  “Shoot,” he said.

  Darcourt took a long and encouraging swig.

  “You two married about six months after Francis Cornish died,” said he. “When at last his estate was settled, it became apparent that he had a lot more money than anybody had supposed—”

  “Well, of course,” said Arthur. “We didn’t think he had anything but his chunk of his grandfather’s estate, and what his father left, which could have been considerable. He was never interested in the family business; most of us thought of him as an eccentric—a man who would rather mess around with his collections of art than be a banker. I was the only member of the family who had an inkling of what made him feel that way. Banking isn’t much of a life if you have no enthusiasm for it—which fortunately I have, which is why I’m now Chairman of the Board. He had a comfortable amount of money; a few millions. But ever since he died, money has been turning up in substantial chunks from unexpected places. Three really big wads in numbered accounts in Switzerland, for instance. Where did he get it? We know he got big fees for authenticating Old Masters for dealers and private collectors, but even big fees don’t add up to additional millions. What was he up to?”

  “Arthur, shut up,” said Maria. “You promised to let Simon tell us his problem.”

  “Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Simon. Do you know where the extra money came from?”

  “No, but that’s not the most important thing I don’t know. I simply don’t know who he was.”

  “But you must. I mean, there are verifiable facts.”

  “Indeed, there are, but they don’t add up to the man we knew.�
��

  “I never knew him at all. Never saw him,” said Maria.

  “I didn’t really know him,” said Arthur. “I saw him a few times when I was a boy, at family affairs. He didn’t usually come to those, and didn’t seem at ease with the family. He always gave me money. Not like an uncle tipping a nephew, with a ten-dollar bill; he would slip me an envelope on the sly, often with as much as a hundred dollars in it. A fortune to a schoolboy, who was being brought up to respect money and look at both sides of a dollar bill. And I remember another thing; he never shook hands.”

  “I knew him much better than either of you, and he never shook hands with me,” said Darcourt. “We became friends because we shared some artistic enthusiasms—music, and manuscripts, and calligraphy, and that sort of thing—and of course he made me one of his executors. But as for shaking hands—not Frank. He did once tell me that he hated shaking hands. Said he could smell mortality on his hand when it had touched somebody’s else’s. When he absolutely had to shake hands with some fellow who didn’t get his clear signals, he would shoot off to the washroom as soon as he could and wash his hands. Compulsive behaviour.”

  “That’s odd,” said Arthur. “He always looked rather dirty to me.”

  “He didn’t bathe much. When we cleared out his stuff he had three apartments, with six bathrooms among them, and every bathtub was piled high with bundles of pictures and sketches and books and manuscripts and whatnot. After so many years of disuse I wonder if the taps worked. But he had preserved one tiny washroom—just a cupboard off an entry—and there he did his endless hand-washing. His hands were always snowy white, though otherwise he smelled a bit.”

  “Are you going to put that in?”

  “Of course. He hadn’t a bad smell. He smelled like an old, leather-bound book.”

  “He sounds rather a dear,” said Maria; “a crook who smells like an old book. A Renaissance man, without all the boozing and sword-fighting.”

  “Certainly no boozing,” said Darcourt. “He didn’t drink—at least not in his own place. He would take a drink, and even several drinks, if somebody else was paying. He was a miser, you know.”

  “This is getting better and better,” said Maria. “A booky-smelling, tight-fisted crook. You can surely make a wonderful biography, Simon.”

  “Shut up, Maria; control your romantic passion for crooks. It’s her gypsy background coming out,” said Arthur to Darcourt.

  “Would you two both shut up and let me get on with what I have to say?” said Darcourt. “I am not trying to write a sensational book; I am trying to do what you asked me to do nearly two years ago, which is to prepare a solid, scholarly, preferably not deadly-dull biography of the late Francis Cornish, as the first act of the newly founded Cornish Foundation for Promotion of the Arts and Humane Scholarship, of which you two and I are at present the sole directors. And don’t say you ‘commissioned’ it, Arthur. Not a penny changed hands and not a word was written in agreement. It was a friendly thing, not a money thing. You thought a nice book about Uncle Frank would be a nice thing with which to lead off a laudable Foundation devoted to the nice things that you thought Uncle Frank stood for. This was a typically Canadian act of smiling niceness. But I can’t get the facts I want for my book, and some of the things I have not quite uncovered would make a book which—as Arthur so justifiably fears—would cause a scandal.”

  “And make the Foundation and the Cornish name stink,” said Arthur.

  “I don’t know about the Cornish name, but if the Foundation had money to give away I don’t think you’d find artists or scholars fussing about where it came from,” said Darcourt. “Scholars and artists have no morals whatever about grants of money. They’d take it from a house of child prostitution, as you two innocents will discover.”

  “Simon, that must have been an awfully strong drink,” said Maria. “You’re beginning to bully us. That’s good.”

  “It was a strong drink, and I’d like another just like it, and I’d like to have the talk to myself to tell you what I know and what I don’t know.”

  “One strong Scotch for the Reverend Professor,” said Arthur, moving to prepare it. “Go on, Simon. What have you actually got?”

  “We might as well begin with the obituary that appeared in the London Times, on the Monday after Francis died. It’s a pretty good summing up of what the world thinks, up to now, about your deceased relative, and the source is above suspicion.”

  “Is it?” said Maria.

  “For a Canadian to be guaranteed dead by The Times shows that he was really somebody who could cut the mustard. Important on a world level.”

  “You talk as if the obituary columns of the London Times were the Court Circular of the Kingdom of Heaven, prepared by the Recording Angel.”

  “Well, that’s not a bad way of putting it. The New York Times had a much longer piece, but it isn’t really the same thing. The British have some odd talents, and writing obituaries is one of them. Brief, stylish, no punches pulled—so far as they possessed punches. But either they didn’t know or didn’t choose to say a few things that are public knowledge. Now listen: I’ll assume a Times voice:

  MR. FRANCIS CHEGWIDDEN CORNISH

  On Sunday, September 12, his seventy-second birthday, Francis Chegwidden Cornish, internationally known art expert and collector, died at his home in Toronto, Canada. He was alone at the time of his death.

  Francis Cornish, whose career as an art expert, especially in the realms of sixteenth-century and Mannerist painting, extended over forty years and was marked by a series of discoveries, reversals of previously held opinions, and quarrels, was known as a dissenter and frequently a scoffer in matters of taste. His authority was rooted in an uncommon knowledge of painting techniques and a mastery of the comparatively recent critical approach called iconology. He seemed also to owe much to a remarkable intuition, which he displayed without modesty, to the chagrin of a number of celebrated experts, with whom he disputed tirelessly.

  Born in 1909 in Blairlogie, a remote Ontario settlement, he enjoyed all his life the freedom which comes with Ample means. His father came of an old and distinguished family in Cornwall; his mother (née McRory) came of a Canadian family that acquired substantial wealth first in timber, and later in finance. Cornish never engaged in the family business, but derived a fortune from it, and he was able to back his intuitions with a long purse. The disposition of his remarkable collections is as yet unknown.

  He received his schooling in Canada and was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, after which he travelled extensively, and was for many years a colleague and pupil of Tancred Saraceni of Rome, some of whose eccentricities he was thought to have incorporated in his own rebarbative personality. But in spite of his eccentricities it might always have been said of Francis Cornish that for him art possessed all the wisdom of poetry.

  During and after the 1939-45 war he was a valuable member of the group of Allied experts who traced and recovered works of art which had been displaced during the hostilities.

  In his later years he made generous gifts of pictures to the National Gallery of Canada.

  He never married and leaves no direct heirs. It is authoritatively stated that there was no foul play in the manner of his death.

  “I’m not mad about that,” said Maria. “It has a snotty undertone.”

  “You don’t know how snotty a Times obit can be. I suspect most of that piece was written by Aylwin Ross, who thought he would outlive Francis, and have a chuckle over the last sentence. In fact, that obit is Ross’s patronizing estimate of a man who was greatly his superior. There’s a question in it that is almost Ross’s trade mark. It’s quite decent, really, all things considered.”

  “What things considered?” said Arthur. “What do they mean, ‘no foul play’? Did anybody suggest there was?”

  “Not here,” said Darcourt, “but some of the people on the Continent who knew him might have wondered. Don’t find fault with it; obviously Ross chose t
o suppress a few things the Times certainly has in its files.”

  “Like—?”

  “Well, not a word about the stinking scandal that killed Jean-Paul Letztpfennig, and made Francis notorious in the art world. Reputations fell all over the place. Even Berenson was just the teeniest bit diminished.”

  “Obviously you know all about it, though,” said Arthur, “and if Uncle Frank came out on top, that’s all to the good. Who was Tancred Saraceni?”

  “Queer fish. A collector, but known chiefly as a magnificent restorer of Old Masters; all the big galleries used him, or consulted him, at one time or another. But some very rum things went through his hands to other collectors. Like your Uncle Frank, he was rumoured to be altogether too clever with his paintbox; Ross hated him.”

  “And that Times piece is the best that was said about Francis?” said Maria.

  “Do you notice they say he went to school in Canada but was educated at Oxford?” said Arthur. “God, the English!”

  “The Times was generous in its own terms,” said Darcourt. “They printed the piece I sent to them as soon as I saw their obit. Listen to this: published in their issue of September 26:

  FRANCIS CORNISH

  Professor the Rev. Simon Darcourt writes:

  Your obituary of my friend Francis Cornish (Sept. 13) is correct in all its facts, but gives a dour impression of a man who was sometimes crusty and difficult, but also generous and kind in countless personal relationships. I have met no one who knew him who thought for an instant that his death might have been from other than natural causes.

  Many leading figures in the art world regarded him as a knowledgeable and co-operative colleague. His work with Saraceni may have gained him the mistrust of some who had felt the scorn of that ambiguous figure, but his authority, based on unquestioned scholarship, was all his own, and it is known that on several occasions his opinion was sought by the late Lord Clark. In a quarrel it was rarely Cornish who struck the first blow, although he was not quick to resolve a dispute or forget an injury.