Chevalley had heard about the fountain – her fontana minore, Mrs Montacute liked to call it by way of a side-glance at its big brother in Perugia – so at least he was prepared for that. It was planted bang in the middle of the hall at Nudd, and what ought first to have struck one, no doubt, was the incongruity of such an appearance in a Tudor manor-house. But in whichever of three directions one looked – and three vistas did notably radiate from it – the small complex achievement somehow remained in perfect keeping with its background.
Waiting to pay his respects to his hostess, whose agreeable custom it was to receive her guests beside this valuable possession, Chevalley recalled Domberg’s assurance that the fontana minore had recently been most rigorously researched, and that several of the figures were attested as Nicola Pisano’s without a doubt. So it was quite a prize to have in one’s pocket. Somebody had stolen it, one gathered, from many-fountained Viterbo, but too many centuries ago to make its recovery by a despoiled municipality a viable proposition.
‘Considerable subtlety of design,’ Domberg was saying. Indoors, he spoke in a rather loud but confidently well-bred voice. ‘Notice, Octavius, that whereas the lower basin is a twenty-sided polygon, the upper basin has nine sides and not ten. As a consequence, it is a perfect example of Op art – something that young people believe themselves to have invented a few years ago. But, of course, all art is Op. It involves, my dear lad: And here, you see, because of this twenty-and-nine relationship, one is constantly edged round the thing in quest of a visual symmetry that isn’t there. Delightful. Very delightful. Only we shan’t ourselves be able to circumambulate it at the moment, because of the stance the good lady has taken up.’
‘It ought to give the place the air of a museum at once.’ Chevalley spoke in a voice more discreetly lowered than that of his principal. In the apprenticeship which he was undergoing it seemed to be expected of him that he should learn to conduct much of his conversation through the medium of what used, he supposed, to be called persiflage. ‘A fountain’s an absurd object to be asked to hang one’s hat and coat on. It’s playing, too! Or at least dripping. One feels one ought to open one’s umbrella – not abandon it.’
‘Ah, yes – but then you can’t, in this day and age, thrust the labours of the Pisani and their kind into the garden among the plastic dwarfs and china gnomes.’
‘Are there plastic dwarfs and china gnomes?’
‘It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that the late Nicholas Montacute had picked a few up from time to time. And there are numerous nineteenth-century terracottas from L’Impruneta, which is pretty well the same thing.’
‘What you called the finger of taste is certainly evident.’ Chevalley was peering beyond the fountain. ‘Vigorously stirring in every pie.’
‘Yes, Octavius – but whose finger of taste? There is a small mystery there. It cannot be the poor lady’s. Remark her attire.’
Chevalley remarked Mrs Montacute’s attire – cautiously, since it was now no more than a yard away. He and Domberg were, in fact, next in the short line of the later arrivals. Mrs Montacute (whose dress was certainly striking rather than felicitous) had elected to converse at some length with a Japanese gentleman who was bowing vigorously over her every sentence. Domberg seemed not impatient; he regarded the spectacle with complacency; nothing of late years had been more gratifying, after all, than the bobbing up (and down) in the sale-rooms of London of industrial magnates from the Orient disposed to collect in a big way.
‘Hakagawa’—Domberg quoted, wittily if much too loudly— ‘bowing among the Titians.’ And then he was himself bowing over Mrs Montacute’s hand. ‘You wave your wand,’ he said gaily, ‘and Nudd is around me once more. How very, very kind! And this is my young colleague, Octavius Chevalley, whom you have been so gracious as to allow me to bring along.’
Mrs Montacute was a handsome woman. On this particular afternoon, being keyed up for her party, it is possible that she was looking even more handsome than usual. Anyone wishing to hint a critical note in describing her might have murmured that dear Fenella was almost obtrusively in rude health. Her daughter had inherited her complexion and, for that matter, her teeth, but not her boldly cut and somewhat masculine features. These Mrs Montacute chose to accentuate by wearing spectacles massively framed in what could be called a boardroom taste, and jewellery which, although genuinely barbaric and Scythian in origin, might have been more readily conceived as draped round Tamburlane than Zenocrate. She had large hands, and the habit of holding them out slightly in front of her thighs – thus presenting the appearance of a lady wrestler or of a piece of outmoded sculpture of the Epstein era: this according to the particular cultural context one brought to her.
‘You shall walk round with me,’ she said to Chevalley, when she had dismissed his companion until some later moment.
‘That’s awfully kind of you.’
‘Nothing of the sort. Everybody new walks round with me. Did I hear you say something about the Titians?’
‘Oh, no! That was Lambert Domberg.’ Chevalley was alarmed. ‘He was quoting Gerontion.’
‘Gerontion?’ Mrs Montacute glanced suspiciously at her guest. ‘I never heard of him. I can’t believe that he is any sort of authority on Titian.’
‘T. S. Eliot’s Gerontion.’ Chevalley attempted this piece of sorting out not too hopefully.
‘I don’t see that his being the protégé of an American poet can affect the matter.’
‘No, of course not.’ Chevalley would almost have liked to feel he was being made fun of. Nudd as aesthetic tour de force was now all around him, and there was something monstrous in the thought that its guardianship was in the hands – the great hammy hands – of a totally moronic woman. ‘I think you have two Titians?’
‘Yes, I have – and very troublesome they are.’
‘Troublesome?’ Chevalley felt his head begin to swim. Mrs Montacute might have been speaking of a couple of valuable but hopelessly over-bred and delicate dogs.
‘Certainly. Titian wouldn’t have kept his place in a decent Rotary Club a twelvemonth. “Self not Service” – that was Titian. No ethical standards whatever. He marketed as his own – complete with signature – no end of pictures he had never touched. But there were others just as bad. Signorelli – I’ve had trouble with him. Not with Raphael, but that’s probably only because I don’t possess a Raphael. I wouldn’t touch a Raphael. Could you believe it! He signed a Madonna he’d simply had painted by Giulio Romano. And you know about him.’
‘Giulio? Well, he’s mentioned by Shakespeare.’
‘He may be mentioned by T. S. Eliot, for all I care.’ Mrs Montacute gave this the effect of withering repartee. ‘Giulio was a painter of straight porn – for cardinals and people of that sort. Raphael, who had a wholly reputable line in Madonnas and Saints and Donors, ought to have been ashamed of himself for associating with such a shady person.’ Mrs Montacute paused. ‘And don’t suppose, young man, that I can’t give you what you people call references. The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, Second Series. Rudiments of Connoisseurship. By—’
‘Yes, of course.’ Early Berenson, Chevalley reflected, was not exactly up to date. But it was evident that the woman did, in a brutal way, know her onions. And that was just the right expression for it. Domberg had not exaggerated. Mrs Montacute regarded her treasures as a greengrocer’s wife would regard the coarsest of her marketable commodities.
‘And here the Titians are,’ Mrs Montacute said.
Chevalley surveyed the Titians. They weren’t large Titians, but they were by no means small. They weren’t excessively famous, but they were undoubtedly important: Chevalley recalled how often bits and pieces of them were reproduced for learned purposes. Unless Mrs Montacute’s Titian-trouble was bad Titian-trouble – which he didn’t believe – just these two pictures alone would account for a large dollop of Domberg’s notional three million pounds. He decided to say something bald and professional to this effect.
‘The brace of them would knock down for a pretty packet,’ he said – and at once wanted to retract so gross a turn of phrase.
‘Unless somebody started whispering.’ Mrs Montacute was unoffended. ‘And Titian’s credibility is a worry, one has to admit. It’s like those showy companies with a bunch of directors you don’t somehow hear much of elsewhere. A little invested in a quarter like that is all very well; you sometimes take quite a profit even if there’s trouble brewing. But it unbalances a portfolio if you go in at all deep in that way.’
Chevalley nodded agreement with this proposition – or, rather, bowed agreement, since he was picking up the archaic graces that went with his trade. He then transferred his attention from the Titians (he was constantly seeing such things, after all) to adjacent aspects of what might be called the Nudd portfolio. ‘Balance’ was certainly the appropriate word for it. For example, and to an instructed eye, not much less remarkable than these two canvases themselves was the richness and incredible preservation of the Venetian velvet with which the wall behind them was hung. And indeed, as soon as you got out of the lofty hall – stripped to its stone in the interest of composing with the fontana minore – you were everywhere conscious of backgrounds of fabulous stuffs. Not of tapestries, which are boring things, but of subtly figured, napped, damasked, shot, brocaded fabrics of the sort which, because perishable, is priceless when it survives. These backcloths were, for the most part, sombrely toned. Against them the fine cabinets were insubstantial, were ghostly except where sparely picked out in gold, so that the glowing, smouldering, gleaming porcelains and enamels they guarded seemed to float like mysterious chalices, holy grails, in air. It came to Octavius Chevalley, as upon a sudden note of sobriety, that Nudd was not a joke. It was only this absurd woman who was that. And the widow of the late modestly prosperous Nicholas Montacute wouldn’t be around forever. But much – even if unhappily not all – of what she presided over was as nearly imperishable as made no matter.
Not that there was anything about Mrs Montacute to suggest imminent demise. On the contrary, she was growing upon Chevalley as a creature of preternatural vitality. There was something sinister about it. It was as if she battened, vampire-like, upon the aesthetic essences around her to what would be an ultimate effect of leaving Nudd an exhausted vial, an empty shell, and herself some hideous extreme in the mere exuberance of the flesh.
This was a fantasy so pleasingly macabre that it distracted Chevalley’s attention from the actual presence and conversation of his hostess, and it was abruptly that he became aware of her as asking him in what his present interest lay. He had a wild thought of replying ‘Your daughter’ – which would at least have been true to the extent that the fat girl with the puppies had lodged herself as a curiously disturbing image in his consciousness. But being a circumspect young man, he switched on his modesty-persona and explained that, although the Venetian cinquecento was his chief interest, he had lately been endeavouring to improve himself in the field of ceramics.
‘Excellent!’ There was a sudden warmth of approbation in Mrs Montacute’s voice. ‘A thoroughly sound choice. A most rewarding sector. Really amazing growth. I must show you my top camel – a quite exceptionally large camel.’
‘You have a camel that’s been growing amazingly?’ Vaguely in Chevalley’s mind was the confused notion that Mrs Montacute must run her artistic treasure house in double harness with a private zoo.
‘A T’ang camel. Size is very important in T’ang camels. Whereas with things like Tou Ts’ai chicken cups it’s quite the other way: the smaller they are, the better – rather as with toy dogs. But, as I was saying, the overall growth-rate in oriental ceramics at present is most gratifying to anybody with large holdings. Particularly Sung. I am thankful to say I have several Ju and Kuan pieces from the imperial kilns. Blue chips, if ever there were any.’
‘Blue chips—?’ It was a moment before Chevalley recalled that this was not a technical term in the discussion of Chinese pots. ‘But yes, of course. Most impregnable investments. I congratulate you.’
‘Oriental painting, now, is quite a different matter. And particularly the Chinese. Wang Meng has been a great disappointment to me. And so have my river scenes by Wu Pin. Wu Pin is absolutely stagnant.’
‘I’m very sorry to hear it. But of course, despite Heracleitus, one can’t expect everything to flow all the time.’
‘And now you must see the ikons.’ Mrs Montacute had ignored or failed to comprehend Chevalley’s brilliant joke, and this naturally disappointed him. ‘Ikons have been very active of late, as you know. Several may be said to have worked miracles – chiefly in New York.’
Having communicated this surprising piece of thaumaturgical intelligence, Mrs Montacute led the way through several apartments to a farther corner of Nudd. Here and there she indicated to perambulating guests – mainly through the bold flourishing of a champagne glass – her resolute intention of conversing with them ere long. Chevalley, although he felt proper gratification at being kept so firmly in tow, found himself inwardly acknowledging that a modicum of artistic discussion with his hostess went quite a long way. As a consequence, when the Byzantine aspect of the portfolio had been honoured, he ventured to strike out a line of his own.
‘I’m sorry not to have had the pleasure of meeting Miss Montacute,’ he said. ‘Domberg pointed her out to me as we were driving up. She seemed to be marching off with her dogs.’
For long enough to disconcert one so self-conscious as Chevalley, Mrs Montacute made no reply to this. Perhaps she was marking a legitimate sense of impertinence in this young man’s hinted amusement at having detected a decamping daughter. Or perhaps her mind had merely drifted back to brood darkly over the gelid Wu Pin. When she did speak, however, it was in a conciliatory tone.
‘I hope Gloria may have returned before our guests leave. When she is at home I encourage her to be as much in the open air as possible. Unfortunately there are many weekends in which she has to remain in London. Gloria is quite devoted to her hospital.’
‘Is she a nurse?’ It didn’t seem probable to Chevalley that the florid and lumbering, if curiously haunting, Madonna of the fox-hounds was a rising young lady doctor.
‘Gloria’s responsibilities,’ Mrs Montacute said, ‘are on the catering side.’