“A sweet child. I’m sure if he’d lived you would have loved him very much. But he died as a baby, you see.”
Francis got nothing more from his father.
“I don’t really remember anything about him, Frank. He died very young. You saw his marker up there in the graveyard.”
“Yes, but that suggested he died a Catholic. You’ve always insisted that I’m a Protestant.”
“Of course. All the Cornishes have been Protestants since the Reformation. I forget how he came to be buried there. Does it matter? He was too young to be anything, really.”
Is that so, thought Francis. You don’t know anything about it. You don’t even know that I’m a Catholic by strict theological reckoning. Neither you nor Mother know one damn thing about me, and all the talk about love was a sham. So far as my soul is concerned neither of you ever gave a sweet damn. Only Mary-Ben, and for all her gentle ways she was a fierce old bigot. None of you ever had a thought that wasn’t a disgrace to anything it would be decent to call religion. Yet somehow I’ve drifted into a world where religion, but not orthodoxy, is the fountain of everything that makes sense.
At Blairlogie, to which he made a last journey, taking sandwiches so that he would not have to eat at the dreadful table of “th’old lady”, Francis went at once to Dr. Joseph Ambrosius Jerome, now ninety, a tiny figure whose blazing eyes still spoke of an alert intelligence.
“Well, if you must know, Francis—and you once told me you knew about that fellow in the attic—he was an idjit. I was the one who arranged for him to live up there. Your grandfather would have thanked me if I’d killed him, but none o’ that for me. My profession is not that of murderer.”
“But it was such a wretched existence. Couldn’t he have been put some place to be cared for that wasn’t so much like a prison?”
“Had you had no education at Oxford? Don’t you remember what Plato says? ‘If anyone is insane let him not be openly seen in the city, but let the family of such a person watch over him at home in the best manner they know of, and if they are negligent let them pay a fine.’ Well—they did their best, but they paid a fine, right enough. That thing in the attic rotted St. Kilda. It cost them all dear in the coin of the spirit, in spite of your grandmother’s card mania, and your grandfather keeping himself busy in Ottawa.”
“Were they afraid that whatever ailed him might come out again in me?”
“They never said boo to me about it if they did.”
“But why not: I had the same parents.”
“Had you so?” Dr. J.A. burst into loud laughter. Not the cackle of a nonagenarian, but a robust laugh, though not a particularly merry one.
“Didn’t I?”
“You’ll not get that out of me. Ask your mother.”
“Do you suggest—?”
“I don’t suggest anything, and I’m not answering any more questions. But I’ll tell you something that few people ever get told. They say it’s a wise child that knows its own father, but it’s a damn sight wiser child that knows its own mother. There are corners of a mother no son ever penetrates, and damn few daughters. There was a taint in your mother, and so far it hasn’t turned up in you or Arthur—not that Arthur isn’t such a blockhead that a taint could pass unnoticed—but you’ve plenty of time yet. You may live to be as old as me, and God grant you manage it with a safe hide. What’s bred in the bone will come out in the flesh: never was a truer word spoken. Have a dram, Frank, and don’t look so dawny. Whatever became of all that first-rate whisky your grandfather had tucked away in his cellar?”
“There’s some there still, and it must be dealt with. I’ll send it over to you, shall I?”
“God bless you, dear lad! That stuff’ll be proper old man’s milk by this time. And at my age I need regular draughts of that very milk.”
Clearing out St. Kilda was a weary job, and it took Frank, with two men to fetch and carry and drag loads of stuff to the auctioneer, and to the dump, three weeks to achieve it. He could not live in the house, though Anna Lemenchick was still on the strength as caretaker; he could not face Anna’s dreadful food. He stayed at the Hotel Blairlogie, which was miserable, but had no clinging memories. He insisted on dealing with the contents of every room himself: to the auctioneer, all the Louis furniture; to the presbytery, all Aunt’s holy pictures and such of her furniture as the priests might use. Francis left the nudes in the portfolio, thinking the priests might appreciate them. To the Public Library went the books and some further prints, and (this was in despair, and rather against the wishes of the librarian) the lesser oil paintings. The Cardinal pictures went to an art dealer in Montreal and fetched a goodish price. Victoria Cameron, now a woman of property, was invited to take anything she wanted, and, characteristically, wanted nothing but a drawing Francis had made, many years ago, of Zadok in top hat and white choker, driving Devinney’s hearse. In his own old room he had some things to dispose of, which would not have attracted the attention of anyone else, but which were full of meaning for him.
There was a small collection of old movie magazines, now crumbling and yellow, over which he had once gloated with the ignorant lust of an adolescent boy. The beauty queens of an earlier day showed their knees daringly, and peeped from beneath grotesquely marcelled hair. There were some pictures cut from Christmas Editions of The Tatler, the Bystander, and Holly Leaves that his grandfather had brought home as part of the seasonal celebration, and in these were drawings of coy girls of the twenties in “teddies”, or transparent nightgowns, or (very daringly) playing with a dear doggie whose body concealed the breasts and The Particular—but not quite. He saw these now as part of the pathology of Art, the last gasps of the school of erotic painting that had flowered under Boucher and Fragonard. Kitsch, as Saraceni called it.
What he was most anxious to find and destroy was a small bundle of rags—odds and ends of silk and chiffon—in which, in his adolescent days, he had absurdly rigged himself up as a girl, in what he believed was the manner of Julian Eitinge. He now knew, or thought he knew, what that had meant; it was the yearning for a girl companion, and for the mystery and tenderness he thought he might find in such a creature. He had even some intimation that he sought this companion in himself. Browning’s lines, written when he was still very young, came to mind:
But even Ruth had not been that young witch, and Ismay, who so completely looked the part, was a sardonic parody of its spirit. Where was the young witch? Would she ever come? It was not as a lover he wished for her, but as something even nearer; as a completion of himself, as a desired, elusive dimension of his spirit.
Thus Francis came to terms, as he thought, with his strange boyhood, in which there had been so much talk of love, and so little to warm the heart. He did not feel lonely in Blairlogie, even as he sat for long evenings in the hotel, rereading—how many times had he read those pages—his favourite parts of Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. He did not feel lonely when he visited the Catholic cemetery, and found the marker for Francis the First, the Looner, the shadow of his boyhood and, if Uncle Doctor was to be believed, still an unexploded bomb in his manhood—the secret, the inadmissible element which, as he now understood, had played so great a part in making him an artist, if indeed he might call himself an artist.
But had not Saraceni, that stern judge, called him Meister, without irony and without offering an explanation?
He could not visit the grave of Zadok. Not even Victoria knew where it was, except that it was in that part of the Protestant cemetery which was called, with Blairlogie harshness, the Potter’s Field. But Francis was not by nature a hunter of tombs, and he did not care. He remembered Zadok tenderly, and that was what mattered.