Francis could not win the argument, but he was not convinced, and it was his determination that consolation and exaltation must somewhere and somehow be the chief care of the artists that pushed him to his decision to return to Canada, where art was still not big business, where art was indeed little considered, and where therefore art might be persuaded to remain true to the path he was convinced was the right one.
He could not embark on this great missionary journey, this return to his roots, quickly or easily. First of all he had to detach himself from MI5, and to his surprise Uncle Jack was not willing to release him without argument.
“My dear boy, perhaps you feel that you’ve been neglected—not pushed ahead in the profession as you might have been. But you don’t understand how we work—how we are compelled to work. We get a trustworthy, first-rate man in a key job, and we leave him there. You are just what we need in this art connection. Knowledgeable, respected, but not too visible; able to go anywhere without making too much of a stir; a Canadian and therefore supposed to be a bit dumb by people who value a glittering cleverness above everything else. You’ve got enough money not to be always nagging me for extras. I’d describe you as ideal for what you are doing. You’ve provided quite enough useful tips about dangerous people to have fully earned your passage in this work. And now you want to throw it up.”
“Nice of you to say all that. But where does it lead?”
“I can’t possibly promise that it leads anywhere other than where you are at present. Doesn’t that satisfy you? Your father never worried about where things led.”
“For him it led to a knighthood.”
“Do you want a knighthood? What would you get it for? Most of the chaps you are keeping an eye on are pestering for knighthoods for themselves. A thing like that would tip off every clever rogue that you were something more than you seemed.”
“Well, I’m grateful for everything, but in fact I am certain that I am something more than I seem, and I want to go home, and be what I am in my own country.”
That would have been that, if another upheaval—not a blow or a misfortune, but a disturbing change of circumstances—had not shaken Francis profoundly.
Saraceni died, and as his wife had died in the Blitz, and his daughter had died from a less dramatic cause, Francis discovered that he was the Meister’s sole heir.
That meant going to Rome and spending long hours with Italian lawyers and civil servants who explained to him the complexities of inheriting a large private collection of art—not all of it art of the highest quality but every bit of it of museum quality—in a country that had been virtually beggared by a war it had never really wanted.
The Italian lawyers were rueful, and very courteous, but firm that the law must be served in every respect. Serving the law in Italy, as in every civilized country, was an extremely expensive business, but Saraceni had left plenty of money to take care of that and leave some over. What the Italian lawyers could not control, though they tried, was whatever Saraceni had deposited in numbered accounts in Switzerland.
This was what shocked Francis, for he had never thought of the Meister as a very rich man. But the Meister must have made some remarkably good deals with the people who paid him and Prince Max and the Gräfin for the pictures that had made their way to England from Düsterstein. When he made himself known to the quiet men at the banks, and established his undoubted right to Saraceni’s wealth, Francis could not believe the record of millions in good hard currency that were his. He came of a banking family and money in substantial sums was not strange to him. But until now his income had reached him from Canada without any necessity for him to think about the capital sums that generated it. Money, to him, meant a lump that appeared in his account every quarter, a lump from which he allotted sums for the miserable estate in Cornwall that never fulfilled the promises that were made for it by Uncle Roderick, and an increasing sum for the maintenance of Little Charlie, who was now almost grown up and appeared to eat money, so great were the demands made on her behalf by Aunt Prudence. Francis, who thought of himself as “careful”, sighed and sometimes cursed whenever he signed these cheques, and although he never spent anything like the remainder of his income, he considered himself as a man financially somewhat straitened.
It was a two-year job to shake himself loose from MI5 and make the best he could of Saraceni’s estate, but at last it was done, and he returned to the land of his birth.
The land of his birth had not stood still in the years since Francis had left it to go to Oxford. The war had taught it something about its place in the world, and about the exploitative attitude taken by great countries toward small countries—small in population and influence, however gigantic they might be in physical dimension. Canada the wide-eyed farm boy was becoming street-wise, though not truly wise. Large numbers of immigrants from every part of Europe saw a future for themselves in Canada, and their attitude was understandably exploitative and somewhat patronizing. Nevertheless, they could not wholly abandon the sort of intelligence they had gained as a birthright in Europe, and in some respects the Canadian surface became observably smoother. Perhaps the most significant change, in the long term, was that of which Ruth Nibsmith—intuitive as always—had spoken at Düsterstein; the little country with the big body, which had always been introverted in its psychology—an introversion that had shown itself in a Loyalist bias, a refusal to be liberated by the military force of its mighty neighbour from what the mighty neighbour assumed was an intolerable colonial yoke—was striving now to assume the extraversion of that mighty neighbour. Because Canada could not really understand the American extraversion, it imitated the obvious elements in it, and the effect was often tawdry. Canada had lost its way, had suffered what anthropologists call Loss of Soul. But when the Soul was such a doubting, flickering, shy entity, who would regret its loss when there were big, obvious, and immediate gains to be had?
Thus Francis returned to a homeland he did not know. His real homeland, compounded of the best of Victoria Cameron and Zadok Hoyle, of the broad adventurous spirit of Grand-père, of the sentimental goodness of Aunt Mary-Ben, was nowhere to be found in the city of Toronto. Like many another, Francis thought his homeland was the world of childhood, and it had fled.
What he did find in Toronto was a new version of the Cornish and McRory family, with Gerald Vincent O’Gorman a very big man in the financial community and a power of great but undefined influence in the Conservative Party. If the Tories ever came to power, Gerry was a sure bet for a seat in the Senate, an appointment safer and richer than a knighthood of St. Sylvester, and something which would, in his opinion and his wife’s, make him the true successor to Grand-père. Gerry was Chairman of the Board of the Cornish Trust, which was now very big business; the President, succeeding Sir Francis (who had died while Francis was deep in financial affairs in Rome, and could not return to Canada), was a Tory senator of unimpeachable dullness and respectability, and he gave Gerry no trouble. Gerry’s sons Larry and Michael were high in the Trust and they were as friendly to Francis as he would allow them to be. But he missed his younger brother Arthur, who, with his wife, had been killed in a car crash, leaving their son Arthur to the care of the O’Gormans, who did their best, but confided Arthur chiefly to men and women Trust officers. Francis didn’t want any help with his money; his fortune from Saraceni was the first money he had ever possessed—apart from the miserable stipend paid him by MI5—that was not controlled and managed by the family, and he was determined not to reveal its extent or let any part of it be ruled by another hand.
“Frank, you must do as you think best, but for God’s sake don’t get skinned,” said Larry.