Miss Nibsmith was by no means bad company; in the absence of the Countess she expanded considerably, and although Francis never saw her during the day, they met at dinner, which was served at the same stately pace as always. To fill up the time between courses they drank a good deal of the Countess’s excellent wine, and resorted after dinner to the brandy bottle.
“I can never really settle myself in these German rooms,” said Miss Nibsmith, kicking off her substantial shoes and putting her feet on the side of the splendid porcelain stove in the family drawing-room. “They have no focus. You know what I mean? Focus, in the true Latin meaning of the word. No hearth. I long for an open fire. It is as good as a dog in a room to give it life. These German stoves are beautiful, and they are certainly practical. This room is warmer than it would be if it had a fireplace, but where does one look for the centre of the room? Where does one stand when making a pronouncement? Where does one warm one’s bottom?”
“I suppose the focus is wherever the most important person is,” said Francis. “When the Countess is here, she is obviously the focus. Now—you ought to know these things, as an intimate of Düsterstein: I understand that for Christmas we are to entertain a Prince Max—will he be the focus? Or does the Countess always top the heap in her own castle?”
“Prince Max will be the focus,” said Miss Nibsmith, “but not just because of his rank. He is quite the bounciest man I have ever met, and his laugh and his chatter make him the centre wherever he is. The Countess adores him.”
“A relative?” said Francis.
“A cousin—not the nearest sort. A Hohenzollern, but poor. Poor, that is, for a prince. But Maxi is not one to repine and blame Fortune. No, no; he stirs his stumps and deals extensively in wine, and he gets rid of a lot of it in England and especially in the States. Maxi is what our Victorian ancestors would have called a smooth file. He will be the focus, you will see. The hot air from Prince Max will keep us all warm, and perhaps uncomfortably hot.”
What did Miss Nibsmith do with herself all day? Francis made a polite inquiry.
“I write letters for the Countess in French, English, and German. At the moment I keep an eye on the business. I type quite well. I give lessons to Amalie, chiefly in history; she reads a lot and we talk. History is my thing. My Cambridge degree is in history. I’m a Girton girl. If I have any spare time I work on my own notes, which might be a book some day.”
“A book? About what?”
“You’ll laugh. Or no, I think you have too much intelligence to laugh. Anybody who works with Tancred Saraceni must be used to odd ventures. I’m making a study of astrology in Bavaria, particularly during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What do you make of that?”
“I don’t make anything of it. Tell me about it.”
“Astrology is part of the science of the past, and of course the science of the present has no place for it, because it is rooted in a discredited notion of the universe, and puts forward a lot of Neo-Platonic ideas that don’t make much sense—until you live with them for a while.”
“Does that remark mean that you believe in astrology yourself?”
“Not as hard-boiled science, certainly. But as psychology—that’s quite another thing. Astrology is based on a notion nobody wants to accept in our wonderfully reasonable Western World, which is that the position of the stars at the moment of your birth governs your life. ‘As above, so below’ is the principle in a nutshell. Utterly dotty, obviously. Lots of people must be born under the same arrangement of stars, and they don’t have similar fates. Of course, it’s necessary to take careful heed of precisely where you were born, and that varies greatly, so far as the stars are concerned. But anyhow, if the astrologer has your date, and time, and place of birth he can cast a horoscope, which can sometimes be quite useful—sometimes no good at all.”
“You sound as if you half believe it, Ruth.”
“Half yes: half not. But it’s rather like the I Ching. Your intuition has to work as well as your reason, and in astrology it’s the intuition of the astrologer that does the trick.”
“Are you strongly intuitive?”
“Well, Girton girl though I am, I have to say yes, against what my reason tells me. Anyhow, what I’m studying is how widespread and how influential astrology was in this part of the world at the time of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, when most people here were fierce Catholics and were supposed to leave all spiritual things—and that meant all psychological things as well—to the Church, which of course knew best, and would see you through if you were a good child. But lots of people didn’t want to be good children. They couldn’t fight down the pull of whatever was in the depths of their being; couldn’t fight it down and couldn’t channel it into being a contemplative, or whatever the Church approved. So they sought out astrologers, and the astrologers were usually in hot water with the Church. Very much like our modern world, where we are supposed to leave everything to science, even when science is something as spook-ridden as psychoanalysis. But people don’t. Astrology is very big business in the extroverted, science-ridden U.S.A., for instance. The Yanks are always whooping it up for Free Will, and every man’s fate being his own creation, and all that, but they’re just as superstitious as the Romans ever were.”
“Well! You’re a funny historian, Ruth.”
“Yes I am, aren’t I?”
“But as a wise man I know—or knew, for the poor fellow is dead now—used to say, Life’s a rum start.”
“The very rummest. Like this room, in a way. Here we are, cosy as can be, even if we have no focus. What makes us so snug?”
“The stove, obviously.”
“Yes, but have you never thought what makes the stove so warm?”
“I’ve wondered—yes. How is it fed?”
“That’s one of the interesting things about these old castles. Dividing all the main rooms are terribly narrow passages—not more than eighteen inches wide, some of them, and as dark as night—and through those corridors creep servants in soft slippers who poke firewood into these stoves from the back. Unseen by us, and usually unheard. We don’t give them a thought, but they are there, and they keep life in winter from being intolerable. Do they listen to us? I’ll bet they do. They keep us warm, they are necessary to us, and they probably know a lot more about us than we would consider comfortable. They are the hidden life of the house.”
“A spooky idea.”
“The whole Universe is a spooky idea. And in every life there are these unseen people and—not people exactly—who keep us warm.—Have you ever had your horoscope cast?”
“Oh, as a boy I sent away money for a horoscope from some company in the States that advertised them in a boys’ magazine. Awful rubbish, illiterate and printed on the worst kind of paper. And at Oxford a Bulgarian chap I met insisted on casting a horoscope for me, and it was blatantly obvious that what he found in the stars was pretty much what he wanted me to do, which was join some half-assed Communist spy outfit he thought he commanded. Not a very deep look into astrology, I am sure you would say.”
“No, though the Bulgarian one has a familiar ring. Lots of horoscopes used to be cast that way, and still are, obviously. But I’ll do one for you, if you like. The genuine article, no punches pulled. Interested?”
“Of course. Who can resist anything so flattering to the ego?”
“Dead right. That’s another element. A horoscope means somebody is really paying attention to you, and that is rarer than you might think. Where, and when, were you born?”
“September 12, apparently at seven o’clock in the morning, in 1909.”
“And where?”
“A place called Blairlogie, in Canada.”
“Sounds like the Jumping-Off Place. I shall have to consult the gazetteer to get the exact position. Because the stars over Blairlogie weren’t precisely like the stars over anywhere else.”
“Yes, but suppose somebody else had been born at just that moment, in Blairlogie, wou
ldn’t he be my twin, in all matters of Fate?”
“No. And now I shall let the cat out of the bag. This is what separates me from your boys’-paper fraud, and your Bulgarian Commie fraud. This is my great historical discovery that the real astrologers guarded with their lives, and if you breathe it to anybody before my book comes out, I shall hunt you down and kill you very imaginatively. When were you conceived?”
“God, how would I know? In Blairlogie; I’m sure of that.”
“The usual answer. Parents are terribly niminy-piminy about telling their children these things. Ah, well; I shall just have to count backward and make an approximation. But anyhow—when were you baptized and christened?”
“Oh, I can tell you that, right enough. It was about three weeks later; September 30, actually, at roughly four o’clock in the afternoon. Church of England rite. Oh, and now I come to think of it, I was baptized again, years later, Catholic, that time. I’m sure I can remember the date if I try. But how does that come in?”
“When you were begotten is obviously important. As you seem to be a healthy chap I presume you were a full-term baby, so I can get the date fairly near. Date of entry upon the stage in the Great Theatre of the World is important, and that is the only one the commoner sort of astrologers bother with. But the date when you were formally received into what your community looked upon as the world of the spirit, and were given your own name, is important because it supplies a few shades to your central chart. And to be baptized twice!—spiritual dandyism, I’d call it. You let me have all that on a piece of paper at breakfast, and I’ll get to work. Meanwhile, just one more teensy cognac before we retire to our blameless couches.”
DAYS ALONE in the shell-grotto and nights with Ruth Nibsmith were doing much to restore Francis’s battered self-esteem. Getting away from England had been a bruising experience. There was all the trouble of explaining to Ismay’s parents what had happened, and putting up with their obvious, though unexpressed, opinion that it must have been his fault. Then there was the trouble of making arrangements about the child Charlotte—Little Charlie as everybody but Francis insisted on calling her, slurring the “Ch” so it sounded like “Sharlie”—because the Glassons wanted to have control over her, but did not particularly want to be bothered with her. Their days of bringing up children were, they said reasonably, in the past. Were they now to take on a baby, who needed care every hour of the day? They worried, understandably, about Ismay, who was God knows where with God knows who in a country on the brink of civil war. The girl, they admitted, was a fool, but that did not seem to lessen their conviction that Francis was to blame for everything that had happened. When he was pushed at last to the point of telling them that Little Charlie was not his child, Aunt Prudence wept and Uncle Roderick swore, but they were no more sympathetic toward Francis. Cuckolds are fated to play ignominious and usually comic roles.
Never had Francis felt so low as when at last he came to an arrangement with the Glassons; in addition to the money already promised to keep the estate afloat, he agreed to pay all the costs of maintaining Little Charlie, which were substantial, because the child must have a first-rate nanny, and money for whatever a child needs—and the Glassons were not prepared to stint their granddaughter—and also a sum indefinitely allocated but definitely estimated for unforeseen costs. It was all reasonable enough, but Francis had the feeling that he was being exploited, and when his honour and his affections were under ruinous attack, he was astonished to find how greatly the assault on his bank-account affected him also. It was ignoble, under the circumstances, to think so much about money, but think about it he did. What did he care about Little Charlie, at present a dribbling, squalling, slumbrous lump?
In the circumstances, it was not surprising that he had jumped at Uncle Jack’s offer of something to do, some place to go, a necessary task to undertake. But that had resolved itself into three months of grubby devilling for Tancred Saraceni, who had kept him grinding away with mortar and pestle, boiling up the smelly muck that went into the “black oil” the painter needed for his work, and generally acting as chore-boy and sorcerer’s apprentice.
What was the sorcerer up to? Faking pictures, or at least improving existing worthless pictures. Could the great Saraceni really be sunk in this worst sort of artistic sin? Certainly that was what it looked like.
Well, if this was the game, if this was what he had been dragged into, he might as well play it to the hilt. He would show Saraceni that he could daub in the sixteenth-century German manner as well as anyone. He was to paint a picture that would agree in quality and style with the panels that had been completed and that now sat all around the shell-grotto, staring at him with the speculative eyes of the unknown dead. As Francis sat down to plan his picture he laughed for the first time in several months.
He did many preliminary drawings, and just to show what a conscientious faker he was, he did them on some of the expensive old paper culled from old books and artists’ leavings he had from his Oxford days, coating it with an umber base, and making his careful preliminaries (for they were not sketches in the modern sense) with a silver-point. Yes, it was coming quite well. Yes, that was what he wanted and what would surprise the Meister. Rapidly and surely, he began to paint on his miserable old panel, in the Meister’s own careful mode, with unexceptionable, authentic colours, and every stroke mixed with the magical formula of phenol and formaldehyde.
He realized with surprise that he was happy. And in his happiness, he sang.
Many painters have sung at their work, as a form of incantation, an evocative spell. What they sing may not impress an outsider as having much to do with their painting. What Francis sang was an Oxford student song to the tune of the Austrian national anthem of an earlier and happier time, “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser”:
Life presents a dismal picture,
Home is gloomy as the tomb:
Poor old Dad has got a stricture,
Mother has a fallen womb;
Brother Bill has been deported
For a homosexual crime,
And the housemaid’s been aborted
For the forty-second time.
On and on he moaned, happy at his work. The Happy Faker, he thought. As I do this, no one can touch me.
“ARE YOU HAPPY? I am.” Ruth Nibsmith turned her head on the pillow to look at Francis. She was not a beautiful woman, or a pretty woman, but she was well-formed and she was incontestably a jolly woman. Jolly was the only possible word. A fresh, high-spirited, merry, and, it proved, an amorous woman, who had in no way set out to lure Francis into her bed, but had cheerfully agreed to his suggestion that they advance their friendship in this direction.
“Yes, I am happy. And it’s nice of you to say that you are. I haven’t had much luck making anyone happy in this way.”
“Oh, but it’s good sport, isn’t it? How would you rank our performance, in university terms?”
“I’d give us a B+.”
“An excellent second class. Well, I dunno—I’d call it an A-. That’s modest, and keeps us well below the Romeo and Juliet level. Anyhow, I’ve enjoyed it immensely these last few days.”
“You speak as if it were over.”
“It is over. The Countess brings Amalie back from Munich tomorrow, and I must take to my role as the model of behaviour and discretion. Which I do without regret, or not too much regret. One has to play fair with one’s employers, you know; the Countess trusts me, and so I can’t be having it off with another of the upper servants in the Castle when I am watching over Amalie. Oh, if Amalie could see us now she’d be green with envy!”
“What? That kid?”
“Kid my foot! Amalie’s fourteen, and warm as one of those porcelain stoves. She adores you, you know.”
“I’ve hardly spoken to her.”
“Of course. You are distant, unattainable, darkly melancholy. Do you know what she calls you? Le Beau Ténébreux. She’s eating her heart out for you. It would plunge her into despa
ir to think you were content with her governess.”
“Oh, shut up about the governess! And about upper servants; I’m nobody’s servant.”
“Balls, my boy! One’s lucky if that’s all one is. The Countess isn’t a servant; she’s a slave to this place, and to her determination to restore the family fortunes. You and I are just paid hands, able to leave whenever we please. I like being an upper servant. Lots of my betters have been upper servants. If it wasn’t too much for Haydn to wear the livery of the Esterhazys, who am I to complain? There’s a lot to be said for knowing one’s place.”
“That’s what Victoria Cameron used to say.”
“One of the women in your gaudy past?”
“No. Something like my nurse, I suppose. I have no gaudy past, as I’m sure you’ve read in the stars. My wife was always rubbing it in.”
“A wife? So that’s the woman in the horoscope?”
“You’ve found her, then?”
“A woman who gave you the most frightful dunt.”
“That’s Ismay, right enough. She always said I was too innocent for my own good.”
“You’re not innocent, Frank. Not in any stupid way. Your horoscope makes that extremely clear.”
“When are you going to unveil the great horoscope? It’d better be soon, if the Countess comes back tomorrow.”
“Tonight’s the night. And we must get out of this nest of guilty passion right away, because I’ve got to dress and so have you, and we both want a wash.”
“I’d been thinking about a bath. We both reek, in an entirely creditable way.”
“No, no bath. The servants would be on to us at once if we bathed during the late afternoon. In the Bavarian lexicon of baths, an afternoon bath means sex. No, you must be content with a searching wash, in your pre-dinner allowance of hot water.”
“Okay. ‘Ae fond kiss, and then we sever’.”
“ ‘Ae farewell, alas, forever’.”
“Oh Ruth, don’t say forever.”
“Of course not. But until dinner, anyhow. And now—up and out!”