Robertson Davies
What’s Bred in the Bone
“What’s bred in the bone will not out of the flesh.”
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.”