“Not a word. He didn’t need to.”
“Maria, it’s awfully fishy. I’m no great expert but surely there are things you expect and are used to—caresses, sounds, and of course smells. Did he smell like Arthur?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Come on, Maria. That won’t do.”
“Well—yes and no.”
“But you didn’t protest.”
“Does one protest at such a time?”
“No, I don’t suppose one does. I do think I understand, you know.”
“Thanks, Simon. I hoped you might. But one can’t be sure. Men are so incalculable about things like that.”
“You said it all yourself a few minutes ago. It’s a story that roams back through the ages, and it’s a story that doesn’t grow old. It’s the Demon Lover. Have you told Arthur?”
“How can I, when he’s being so restrained and bloody saintly?”
“You’d better try. Arthur understands a lot of things you wouldn’t suspect. And Arthur isn’t perfectly in the clear in this affair. He didn’t tell you what you had a right to know. You and Arthur had better have a divano. Nothing like a good Gypsy divano to clear the air.”
5
There is a special frustration that afflicts authors when they cannot claim enough time for their own work, and Darcourt was unwontedly irritable because he was not getting on with his life of the late Francis Cornish. The sudden illumination that had struck him in the drawing-room of Princess Amalie and Prince Max demanded to be explored and enlarged, and was he doing that? No, he was involved in the unhappiness of Arthur and Maria, and because he was truly a compassionate man—though he detested what the world thought was compassion—he spent a great deal of time thinking about them and indeed worrying about them. Like most dispensers of wisdom, Darcourt was bad at taking his own medicine. Worrying and fretting will do no good, he told his friends, and then when they had left him he fell into quicksands of worry and fretfulness on their behalf. He was supposed to be enjoying a sabbatical year from his university work, but the professor who does not leave his campus knows that no complete abandonment of responsibility is possible.
There was Penny Raven, for instance. Penny, who seemed to be the complete academic woman, scholarly, well-organized, and sensible, was in a dither about whatever was going on between Schnak and Gunilla Dahl-Soot. What was it? Do you know anything, Simon? Darcourt tried to be patient during her long telephone calls. I know that the Doctor and Schnak are getting on like a house afire with this opera, and are merciless in their demands on me that I should supply new material for the libretto, or change and tinker stuff I have already done: I am in and out of their house at least once a day, fussing over scraps of recitative; I never realized that a librettist lived such a dog’s life. Verdi was an old softy compared with Gunilla. They are working, Penny, working!—Yes, yes, Simon, I realize that, but they can’t work all the time. What is the atmosphere? I hate to think of that poor kid being dragged into something she can’t handle.—The atmosphere is fine: master guiding but not dominating pupil, and pupil blossoming like the rose—well, perhaps not like the rose, but at least putting on a few shy flowers—clean and well-fed and now and then giving a sandy little laugh.—Yes, Simon, but how? What price is being paid?—I don’t know, Penny, and frankly I don’t care because it’s none of my business. I am not a nursemaid. Why don’t you go and see for yourself? You were supposed to be working with me on this libretto and so far you have done sweet-bugger-all.—Oh, but you’re so good at that kind of thing, Simon, and I have this big paper to get ready for the next meeting of the Learned Societies and honestly I haven’t a moment. But I’ll come in at the end and touch up, I promise.—The hell you will, Penny. If I do it there’ll be no touching up. I get all the touching up I need from Nilla, and in English verse she has a touch like a blacksmith.—All right, if you want to disclaim all responsibility for a young person who is supposed to be in your care, at least to some extent.—Not in my care, Penny; if she’s in anybody’s care it is Wintersen’s care, and you won’t get any outraged moral action out of him. And if you insist on sticking your nose in, you may get it punched by Schnak, so I warn you.—Oh, very well. Very well. But I’m worried and disappointed.—Good, Penny; you get right on with that. Meanwhile, do you know a two-syllable word meaning “regret” that isn’t “regret”? Because “regret” isn’t a word that sings well if it has to be matched up with a quarter-note followed by an eighth-note. That’s the kind of thing I have to cope with. Listen—I think I’ve got it! How about “dolour”? Lovely word, right out of Malory, and the accent falls on the first syllable and pips off on the second. Singable! A nice big open vowel followed by a little one.—No, Simon. Won’t do at all. Too olden-timesy and cutesy.—Oh, God, Penny! Get off my back, you—you critic!
Lots of conversations like that. Powell was right. Penny was jealous, mad as a wet hen because Gunilla had taken on Schnak as—what? As a pupil, of course, but also as a—what do you call it? When it’s a man there are plenty of words. A minion, a pathic, a catamite, a bardash, a bumchum—but, when it was a woman? Darcourt knew no word for it. Petite amie might do. Did Penny want Schnak for herself? No, that wasn’t Penny’s style at all. In so far as she was anything of a sexual nature, Penny was a lesbian, but of the smothery-mothery variety, brooding possessively over the successes of her little darlings. Sexually a dog-in-the-manger, who would not eat herself, or suffer others to eat. Penny resented the buccaneering success of Dr. Gunilla, the easy command, the scorn of Kater Murr.
But every day, and all day, and sometimes in dreams, the biography of Francis Cornish nagged. Was it really fated to be such a worthy, dull, unremarkable book? The spy stuff was not bad but he wanted something bigger.
It was that picture. The Marriage at Cana. Where had he seen those faces? Not among the mass of drawings and rough sketches he had sent to the National Gallery. The picture was surely the lock that secured the real life of Francis Cornish, but where was the key? Nothing to do but search, and search, and search again. But where?
It was lucky that he was so very much persona grata at the University Library, where all the left-overs from Francis Cornish’s crowded apartments were locked away, awaiting the attention of cataloguers. Certainly that material would not receive such attention quickly, because those packages were precisely what he had called them when he first transferred them to the Library. They were left-overs. Francis Cornish’s splendid pictures, his enviable collection of modern art, Canadian modern art, Old Master drawings, rare books, and expensive art books, his musical manuscript accumulation (it was not sufficiently coherent to be thought of as a collection), and everything else of any value had gone to the galleries and library where they would be, in the glacier-like progress of cataloguing, put in order. But there was still the mass of left-overs, the stuff which had been glanced at, but under the pressure of time not thoroughly examined by him in his capacity as an executor with a job to do quickly.
Without any great hope in his heart, Darcourt decided that he must rummage through the left-overs. He told his friend at the Library what he wanted to do, and was promised every help. But help was exactly what he did not want. He wanted to snoop, and seek, and see if anything would crop up that would give him a hint about that astonishing picture.
The picture itself was known to the art world, though few people had seen it. But there was, of course, the definitive article that had been written about it by Aylwin Ross, and which had appeared in Apollo a few years ago. Before Francis Cornish died, so he must have been acquainted with it. Must surely have approved it, or at least kept quiet about it. The article was well illustrated, and when Darcourt dug it out of the Library’s files of Apollo it troubled him with new urgency. He read and reread Ross’s elaborate, elegantly written explanation of the picture, its historical implications (something about the Augsburg Interim and the attempt to reconcile the Church of Rome with the Protestants of the Reformation), and Ross had concluded that the picture was the work of an unknown painter, but a master of fine attainment, whom he chose to identify simply as The Alchemical Master, because of some alchemical elements he identified in the triptych.