The Rebel Angels tct-1 Page 3

  “Our first task must be to find out what has to be disposed of in the way of works of art, and ‘that sort of stuff’, to use your own phrase, Mr. Cornish.”

  “I suppose there must be an inventory somewhere.”

  Now it was McVarish’s turn. “Did you know your uncle well?”

  “Not really. Saw him now and then.”

  “You never visited his dwelling?”

  “His home? No, never. Wasn’t asked.”

  I thought I had better put in a few words. “I don’t think home is quite the word one would use for the place where Francis Cornish lived.”

  “His apartment, then.”

  “He had three apartments,” I continued. “They occupied a whole floor of the building, which he owned. And they are crammed from floor to ceiling with works of art—and that sort of stuff. And I didn’t say over-furnished: I said crammed.”

  Hollier resumed the job of putting the rich brat in his place. “If you didn’t know your uncle, of course you cannot imagine how improbable it was that he possessed an inventory; he was not an inventory sort of man.”

  “I see. A real old bachelor’s rat’s-nest. But I know I can depend on you to sort it out. Get help if you need it, to catalogue the contents. We must have a valuation, for probate. I suppose in aggregate it must be worth quite a lot. Any clerical assistance you need, lay it on and my secretary will countersign chits for necessary payments.”

  After a little more of this we left, passing through the office of the secretary who had countersigning powers (a middle-aged woman of professional charm) and through the office of the other secretaries who were younger and pattered away on muted, expensive machines, and past the uniformed man who guarded the portals—because the big doors really were portals.

  “I’ve never met anybody like that before,” I said as we went down sixteen floors in the elevator.

  “I have,” said McVarish. “Did you notice the mahogany panelling? Veneer, I suppose, like young Cornish.”

  “Not veneer,” said Hollier. “I tapped it to see. Not veneer. We must watch our step with that young man.”

  McVarish sniggered. “Did you notice the pictures on his walls? Corporation taste. Provided by a decorator. Not his Uncle Frank’s sort of stuff.”

  I had looked at the pictures too, and McVarish was wrong. But we wanted to feel superior to the principal executor because we were a little in awe of him.

  4

  During the week that followed, Hollier, McVarish, and I met every afternoon at Francis Cornish’s three apartments. We had been given keys by the countersigning secretary. After five days had passed our situation seemed worse than we could have imagined and we did not know where to start on our job.

  Cornish had lived in one of the apartments, and it had some suggestion of a human dwelling, though it was like an extremely untidy art dealer’s shop—which was one of the purposes to which he put it. Francis Cornish had done much in his lifetime to establish and gain recognition for good Canadian painters. He bought largely himself, but he also acted as an agent for painters who had not yet made a name. This meant that he kept some of their pictures in his apartment, and sold them when he could, remitting the price to the painter, and charging no dealer’s fee. That, at least, was the theory. In practice he acquired pictures from young painters, stacked them in his flat, forgot them or absent-mindedly lent them to people who liked them, and was surprised and hurt when an aggrieved painter made a fuss, or threatened a lawsuit.

  There was no real guile in Francis Cornish, but there was no method in him either, and it was supposed that it was for this reason he had not taken a place in the family business, which had begun in his grandfather’s time as lumber and pulpwood, had grown substantially in his father’s time, and in the last twenty-five years had left lumber to become a very big bond and investment business. Arthur, the fourth generation, was now the head of the firm. Francis’s fortune, partly from a trust established by his father, and partly inherited from his mother, had made him a very rich man, able to indulge his taste for art patronage without thinking much about money.

  He had seldom sold a picture for an artist, but when it became known that he had some of them for sale, other and more astute dealers sought out that artist, and in this haphazard way Cornish was a considerable figure in the dealer’s world. His taste was as sure as his business method was shaky.

  Part of our problem was the accumulation, in apartment number one, of a mass of pictures, drawings, and lithographs, as well as quite a lot of small sculpture, and we did not know if it belonged to Cornish, or to the artists themselves.

  As if that were not enough, apartment number two was so full of pictures that it was necessary to edge through the door, and push into rooms where there was hardly space for one person to stand. This was his non-Canadian collection, some of which he had certainly not seen for twenty-five years. By groping amid the dust we could make out that almost every important name of the past fifty years was represented there, but to what extent, or in what period of the artist’s work, it was impossible to say, because moving one picture meant moving another, and in a short time no further movement was possible, and the searcher might find himself fenced in, at some distance from the door.

  It was Hollier who found four large packages in brown paper stacked in a bathtub, thick in dust. When the dust was brushed away (and Hollier, who was sensitive to dust, suffered in doing it) he found that the packages were labelled, in Cornish’s beautiful hand, “P. Picasso Lithographs—be sure your hands are clean before opening.”

  My own Aladdin’s cave was apartment number three, where the books and manuscripts were. That is, I tried to make it mine, but Hollier and McVarish insisted on snooping; it was impossible to keep scholars away from such a place. Books were heaped on tables and under tables—big folios, tiny duodecimos, every sort of book ranging from incunabula to what seemed to be a complete collection of first editions of Edgar Wallace. Stacks of books like chimneys rose perilously from the floor and were easily knocked over. There were illuminated books, and a peep was all that was necessary to discover that they were of great beauty; Cornish must have bought them forty years ago, for such things are hardly to be found now, for any money. There were caricatures and manuscripts, including fairly modern things; there was enough stuff by Max Beerbohm alone—marvellous unpublished mock portraits of royalty and of notabilities of the nineties and the early nineteen-hundreds—for a splendid exhibition, and my heart yearned towards these. And there was pornography, upon which McVarish pounced with snorts of glee.

  I know little of pornography. It does not stir me. But McVarish seemed to know a great deal. There was a classic of this genre, nothing less than a fine copy of Aretino’s Sonnetti Lussuriosi, with all the original plates by Giulio Romano. I had heard of this erotic marvel, and we all had a good look. I soon tired of it because the pictures—which McVarish invariably referred to as “The Postures”—illustrated modes of sexual intercourse, although the naked people were so classical in figure, and so immovably classic in their calm, whatever they might be doing, that they seemed to me to be dull. No emotion illuminated them. But in contrast there were a lot of Japanese prints in which furious men, with astonishingly enlarged privates, were setting upon moon-faced women in a manner almost cannibalistic. Hollier looked at them with gloomy calm, but McVarish whooped and frisked about until I feared he might have an orgasm, right there amid the dust. It had never occurred to me that a grown man could be so powerfully fetched by a dirty picture. During that first week he insisted again and again on returning to that room in the third apartment, to gloat over these things.

  “You see, I do a little in this way myself,” he explained; “here is my most prized piece.” He took from his pocket a snuffbox, which looked to be of eighteenth-century workmanship. Inside the lid was an enamel picture of Leda and the Swan, and when a little knob was pushed to and fro the swan thrust itself between Leda’s legs, which jerked in mechanical ecstasy. A nas
ty toy, I thought, but Urky doted on it. “We single gentlemen like to have these things,” he said. “What do you do, Darcourt? Of course we know that Hollier has his beautiful Maria.”

  To my astonishment Hollier blushed, but said nothing. His beautiful Maria? My Miss Theotoky, of New Testament Greek? I didn’t like it at all.

  On the fifth day, which was a Friday, we were further from making a beginning on the job of sorting this material than we had been on Monday. As we moved through the three apartments, trying not to show to one another how utterly without a plan we were, a key turned in the lock of apartment number one, and Arthur Cornish came in. We showed him what our problem was.

  “Good God,” he said. “I had no idea it was anything like this.”

  “I don’t suppose it was ever cleaned,” said McVarish. “Your Uncle Francis had strong views about cleaning-women. I remember him saying—‘You’ve seen the ruins of the Acropolis? Of the Pyramids? Of Stonehenge? Of the Colosseum in Rome? Who reduced them to their present state? Fools say it was invading armies, or the erosion of Time. Rubbish! It was cleaning-women.’ He said they always used dusters with hard buttons on them for flogging and flailing at anything with a delicate surface.”

  “I knew he was eccentric,” said Arthur.

  “When people use that word they always suggest something vague and woolly. Your uncle was rather a wild man, especially about his works of art.”

  Arthur did not seem to be listening; he nosed around. There is no other expression for what one was compelled to do in that extraordinary, precious mess.

  He picked up a little water-colour sketch. “That’s a nice thing. I recognize the place. It’s on Georgian Bay; I spent a lot of time there when I was a boy. I don’t suppose it would do any harm if I took it with me?”

  He was greatly surprised by the way we all leapt at him. For the past five days we had been happening on nice little things that we thought there would be no harm in taking away, and we had restrained ourselves.

  Hollier explained. The sketch was signed; it was a Varley. Had Francis Cornish bought it, or had he taken it at some low point in Varley’s life, hoping to sell it, thereby getting some money for the artist? Who could tell? If Cornish had not bought it, the sketch was now of substantial value, belonged to the dead painter’s estate. There were scores of such problems, and how were we expected to deal with them?

  That was when we found out why Arthur Cornish, not yet thirty, was good at business. “You’d better query any living painter who can be found about anything signed that’s here; otherwise it all goes to the National Gallery, according to the will. We can’t go into the matter of ownership beyond that. ‘Of which I die possessed’ is what the will says, and so far as we’re concerned he dies possessed of anything that is in these apartments. It will mean a lot of letters; I’ll send you a good secretary.”

  When he went, he looked wistfully at the little Varley. How easy to covet something when the owner is dead, and it has been willed to a faceless, soulless public body.

  Second Paradise II

  1

  During the first ten days after Parlabane settled himself in Hollier’s outer room I went through a variety of feelings about him: indignation because he invaded what I wanted for myself; disgust at having to share a place which he quite soon invested with his strong personal smell; fury at his trick of nosing into my papers and even my briefcase when I was elsewhere; irritation at his way of talking, which mingled a creepy-crawly nineteenth-century clerical manner with occasional very sharp phrases and obscenities; a sense that he was laughing at me and playing with me; feminine fury at being treated mockingly as the weaker vessel. I was getting no work done, and I decided to have it out with Hollier.

  It was not easy to catch him, because he was out every afternoon; something to do with the Cornish business, I gathered. I hoped that soon the mysterious manuscript of which he had spoken would be mentioned again. But one day I caught him in the quadrangle and persuaded him to sit on a bench while I told my tale.

  “Of course it is tedious for you,” he said; “and for me, as well. But Parlabane is an old friend, and you mustn’t turn your back on old friends. We were at school together, at Colborne College, and then we went through Spook together and began academic careers together. I know something about his family; that wasn’t a happy story. And now he’s down on his luck.

  “I suppose it’s his own fault. But I always admired him, you see, and I don’t imagine you know what that means among young men. Hero-worship is important to them, and when it has passed, it is false to yourself to forget what the hero once meant. He was always first in every class, and I was lucky to be fifth. He could write brilliant light verse; I have some of it still. His conversation was a delight to all of our group; he was witty and I’m most decidedly not. The whole College expected brilliant things from him, and his reputation spread far beyond the College, through the whole University. When he graduated with the Governor General’s Medal and top honours of all kinds, and whizzed off to Princeton with a princely scholarship to do his doctoral work, the rest of us didn’t envy him; we marvelled at him. He was so special, you see.”

  “But what went wrong?”

  “I’m not much good at knowing what goes wrong with people. But when he came back he was immediately grabbed by Spook for its philosophy faculty; he was obviously the most brilliant young philosopher in the University and in the whole of Canada, I expect. But he had become different during those years. Medieval philosophy was his thing—Thomas Aquinas, chiefly—and all that fine-honed scholastic disputation was victuals and drink to him. But he did something not many academic philosophers do; he let his philosophy spill over into his life, and just for fun he would take the most outrageous lines in argument. His speciality was the history of scepticism: the impossibility of real knowledge—no certainty of truth. Making black seem white was easy for him. I suppose it affected his private life, and there were a few messes, and Spook found him too rich for its blood, and by general consent he moved on, leaving rather a stink.”

  “Sounds like too much intellect and too little character.”

  “Don’t be a Pharisee, Maria; it isn’t becoming either to your age or your beauty. You didn’t know him as I know him.”

  “Yes, but this monk business!”

  “He does that to spook Spook. And he was a monk. It was his latest attempt to find his place in life.”

  “You mean he isn’t a monk now?”

  “Legally, perhaps, but he went over the wall, and it wouldn’t be easy for him to climb back again. I had lost touch with him, but a few months ago I had a most pathetic letter saying how unhappy he was in the monastery—it was in the Midlands—and begging for help to get out. So I sent him some money. How could I do otherwise? It never entered my head that he wouldturn up here, and certainly not in that rig-out he wears. But I suppose it’s the only outfit he owns.”

  “And is he going to stay forever?”

  “The Bursar is getting restless. He doesn’t mind me having a guest overnight, now and then, but he spoke to me about Parlabane and said he couldn’t allow a squatter in the College, and he’d refuse to let Parlabane charge meals in Hall unless he had some assurance that he could pay his bill. Which he can’t, you see. So I shall have to do something.”

  “I hope you won’t take him on as a permanent responsibility.”

  “Ah, you hope that, do you Maria? And what right have you to hope for any such thing?”

  There was no answer to that one. I hadn’t expected Hollier to turn professor on me—not after the encounter on the sofa which had now become Parlabane’s bed. I had to climb down.

  “I’m sorry. But it’s not as if it were none of my business. You did say I was to work in your outer room. How can I do that with Parlabane sitting there all day knitting those interminable socks of his? And staring. He fidgets me till I can’t stand it.”

  “Be patient a little longer. I haven’t forgotten you, or the work I want you
to do. Try to understand Parlabane.”

  Then he stood up, and the talk was over. As he walked away I looked upward, and in the window of Hollier’s rooms—very high up, because Spook is nothing if not Gothic in effect—I saw Parlabane’s face looking down at us. He couldn’t possibly have heard, but he was laughing, and made a waggling gesture at me with his finger, as if he were saying, “Naughty girl; naughty puss!”

  2

  Try to understand him. All right. Up the stairs I went and before he could speak I said: “Dr. Parlabane, could you have dinner with me tonight?”

  “It would be an honour, Maria. But may I ask why this sudden invitation? Do I look as if I needed feeding up?”

  “You pinched a big block of chocolate out of my briefcase yesterday. I thought you might be hungry.”

  “And so I am. The Bursar is looking sour these days whenever I appear in Hall. He suspects I shall not be able to pay my bill, and he is right. We monks learn not to be sensitive about poverty.”

  “Let’s meet downstairs at half past six.”

  I took him to a spaghetti joint that students frequent, called The Rude Plenty; he began with a hearty vegetable broth, then ate a mountain of spaghetti with meat sauce, and drank the whole of a flask of Chianti except for my single glass. He wolfed a lot of something made with custard, coconut shreds, and plum jam, and then made heavy inroads on a large piece of Gorgonzola that came to the table whole and was removed in a state of wreckage. He had two big cups of frothed coffee, and topped off with a Strega; I even stood him a fearful Italian cigar.

  He was a fast, greedy eater and a notable belcher. He talked as he ate, giving a good view of whatever was in his mouth, plying me with questions that called for extended answers.

  “What are you doing these days, Maria? That’s to say, when you are not glaring at me as I knit my innocent, monkish long socks; we monks wear ‘em long, you know, in case the robe should blow aside in the wind, and show a scandalous amount of middle-aged leg.”