CHAPTER THREE

 

There was silence in Ward Sixteen of the Stoyte Home for Sick Children; silence and the luminous twilight of drawn venetian blinds.  It was the mid-morning rest period.  Three of the five small convalescents were asleep.  A fourth lay staring at the ceiling, pensively picking his nose.  The fifth, a little girl, was whispering to a doll as curly and Aryan as herself.  Seated by one of the windows, a young nurse was absorbed in the latest issue of True Confessions.

      'His heart gave a lurch,' she read.  'With a strangled cry he pressed me closer.  For months we'd been fighting against just this; but the magnet of our passion was too strong for us.  The clamorous pressure of his lips had struck an answering spark within my melting body.

      '"Germaine," he whispered.  "Don't make me wait.  Won't you be good to me now, darling?"

      'He was so gentle, but so ruthless too - as a girl in love wants a man to be ruthless.  I felt myself swept away by the rising tide of ...'

      There was a noise outside in the corridor.  The door of the ward flew open, as though before the blast of a hurricane, and someone came rushing into the room.

      The nurse looked up with a start of surprise which the completeness of her absorption in 'The Price of a Thrill' rendered positively agonizing.  Her almost immediate reaction to the shock was one of anger.

      'What's the idea?' she began indignantly; then she recognized the intruder and her expression changed.  'Why, Mr Stoyte!'

      Disturbed by the noise, the young nose-picker dropped his eyes from the ceiling, the little girl turned away from her doll.

      'Uncle Jo!' they shouted simultaneously.  'Uncle Jo!'

      Starting out of sleep, the others took up the cry.

      'Uncle Jo!  Uncle Jo!'

      Mr Stoyte was touched by the warmth of his reception.  The face which Jeremy had found so disquietingly grim relaxed into a smile.  In mock protest he covered his ears with his hands.  'You'll make me deaf,' he cried.  Then, in an aside to the nurse, 'Poor kids!' he murmured.  'Makes me feel I'd kind of like to cry.'  His voice became husky with sentiment.  'And when one thinks how sick they've been ...'  He shook his head, leaving the sentence unfinished; then, in another tone, 'By the way,' he added, waving a large square hand in the direction of Jeremy Pordage, who had followed him into the ward and was standing near the door, wearing an expression of bewildered embarrassment, 'this is Mr ... Mr ... Hell! I've forgotten your name.'

      'Pordage,' said Jeremy, and reminded himself that Mr Stoyte's name had once been Slob.

      'Pordage, that's it.  Ask him about history and literature,' he added derisively to the nurse.  'He knows it all.'

      Jeremy was modestly protesting that his period was only from the invention of Ossian to the death of Keats, when Mr Stoyte turned back to the children and in a voice that drowned the other's faintly fluted disclaimers, shouted: 'Guess what Uncle Jo's brought you!'

      They guessed.  Candies, bubble gum, balloons, guinea pigs.  Mr Stoyte continued triumphantly to shake his head.  Finally, when the children had exhausted their power of imagination, he dipped into the pocket of his old tweed jacket and produced, first a whistle, then a mouth-organ, then a small musical box, then a trumpet, then a wooden rattle, then an automatic pistol.  This, however, he hastily put back.

      'Now play,' he said, when he had distributed the instruments.  'All together.  One, two, three.'  And, beating time with both arms, he began to sing, 'Way down upon the Swanee River.'

      At this latest in a long series of shocks and surprises, Jeremy's mild face took on an expression of intenser bewilderment.

      What a morning!  The arrival at dawn.  The Negro retainer.  The interminable suburb.  The Beverly Pantheon.  The Object among the orange trees, and his meeting with William Propter and this really dreadful Stoyte.  Then, inside the castle, the Rubens and the great El Greco in the hall, the Vermeer in the elevator, the Rembrandt etchings along the corridors, the Winterhalter in the butler's pantry.

      Then Miss Maunciple's Louis XV boudoir, with the Watteau and the two Lancrets and the fully equipped soda-fountain in a rococo embrasure, and Miss Maunciple herself, in an orange kimono, drinking a raspberry and peppermint ice-cream soda at her own counter.  He had been introduced, had refused the offer of a sundae and been hurried on again, always at top speed, always as though on the wings of a tornado, to see the other sights of the castle.  The  Rumpus Room, for example, with frescoes of elephants by Sert.  The library, with its woodwork by Grinling Gibbons, but with no books, because Mr Stoyte had not yet brought himself to buy any.  The small dining-room, with its Fra Angelico and its furniture from Brighton Pavilion.  The large dining-room, modelled on the interior of the mosque at Fatehpur Sikri.  The ballroom, with its mirrors and coffered ceiling.  The thirteenth-century stained-glass in the eleventh-floor W.C.  The morning-room, with Boucher's picture of 'La Petite Morphil' bottom upwards on a pink satin sofa.  The chapel, imported in fragments from Goa, with the walnut confessional used by St François de Sales at Annecy.  The functional billiard-room.  The indoor swimming-pool.  The Second Empire bar, with its nudes by Ingres.  The two gymnasiums.  The Christian Science Reading Room, dedicated to the memory of the late Mrs Stoyte.  The dentist's office.  The Turkish bath.  Then down, with Vermeer, into the bowels of the hill, to look at the cellar in which the Hauberk Papers had been stored.  Down again yet deeper, to the safe-deposit vaults, the powerhouse, the air-conditioning plant, the well and pumping-station.  Then up once more to ground level and the kitchens, where the Chinese chef had shown Mr Stoyte the newly arrived consignments of turtles from the Caribbean.  Up again to the fourteenth, to the bedrooms which Jeremy was to occupy during his stay.  Then up another six stories to the business office, where Mr Stoyte gave orders to his secretary, dictated a couple of letters and had a long telephone conversation with his brokers in Amsterdam.  And when that was finished, it had been time to go to the hospital.

      Meanwhile, in Ward Sixteen, a group of nurses had collected and were watching Uncle Jo, his white hair flying like Stokowski's, frantically spurring his orchestra to yet louder crescendos of cacophony.

      'He's like a great big kid himself,' said one of them in a tone of almost tender amusement.

      Another, evidently with literary leanings, declared that it was like something in Dickens.  'Don't you think so?' she insisted to Jeremy.

      He smiled nervously and nodded a vague and noncommittal assent.

      More practical, a third wished she had her Kodak with her.  'Candid Camera portrait of the President of Consol Oil, California Land and Minerals Corporation, Bank of the Pacific, West Coast Cemeteries, etc., etc....'  She reeled off the names of Mr Stoyte's chief companies, mock-heroically, indeed, but with admiring gusto, as a convinced legitimist with a sense of humour might enumerate the titles of a grandee of Spain.  'The papers would pay you good money for a snap like that,' she insisted.  And to prove that what she was saying was true, she went on to explain that she had a boyfriend who worked with an advertising firm, so that he ought to know, and only the week before he had told her that ...

      Mr Stoyte's knobbed face, as he left the hospital, was still illuminated with benevolence and happiness.

      'Makes you feel kind of good, playing with those poor kids,' he kept repeating to Jeremy.

      A wide flight of steps led down from the hospital entrance to the roadway.  At the foot of these steps Mr Stoyte's blue Cadillac was waiting.  Behind it stood another, smaller car which had not been there when they arrived.  A look of suspicion clouded Mr Stoyte's beaming face as he caught sight of it.  Kidnappers, blackmailers - one never knew.  His hand went to the pocket of his coat.  'Who's there?' he shouted in a tone of such loud fury that Jeremy thought for a moment that the man must have suddenly gone mad.

      Moon-like, a large, snub-featured face appeared at the car window, smiling round the chewed butt of a cigar.

      'Oh, it's you, Clancy,' said Mr Stoyte.  'Why didn't they tell me you were here?' he went on.  His face had flushed darkly; he was frowning and a muscle in his cheek had begun to twitch.  'I don't like having strange cars around.  Do you hear, Peters?' he almost screamed at his chauffeur - not because it was the man's business, of course; simply because he had happened to be there, available.  'Do you hear, I say?'  Then, suddenly, he remembered what Dr Obispo had said to him that time he had lost his temper with the fellow.  'Do you really want to shorten your life, Mr Stoyte?'  The doctor's tone had been one of cool amusement; he had smiled with an expression of politely sarcastic indulgence.  'Are you absolutely bent on having a stroke?  A second stroke, remember; and you won't get off so lightly next time.  Well, if so, then go on behaving as you're doing now.  Go on.'  With an enormous effort of will, Mr Stoyte swallowed his anger.  'God is love,' he said to himself.  'There is no death.'  The late Prudence McGladdery Stoyte had been a Christian Scientist.  'God is love,' he said again, and reflected that if people would only stop being so exasperating he would never have to lose his temper.  'God is love.'  It was all their fault.

      Clancy, meanwhile, had left his car and, grotesquely pot-bellied over spindly legs, was coming up the steps, mysteriously smiling and winking as he approached.

      'What is it?' Mr Stoyte enquired, and wished to God the man wouldn't make those faces.  'Oh, by the way,' he added, 'this is Mr ... Mr ...'

      'Pordage,' said Jeremy.

      Clancy was pleased to meet him.  The hand he gave to Jeremy was disagreeably sweaty.

      'I got some news for you,' said Clancy in a hoarse conspiratorial whisper; and, speaking behind his hand, so that his words and the smell of cigar should be for Mr Stoyte alone, 'you remember Tittelbaum?' he added.

      'That chap in the City Engineer's Department?'

      Clancy nodded.  'One of the boys,' he affirmed enigmatically and again winked.

      'Well, what about him?' asked Mr Stoyte; and in spite of God's being love, there was a note in his voice of renascent exasperation.

      Clancy shot a glance at Jeremy Pordage; then, with the elaborate by-play of Guy Fawkes talking to Catesby on the stage of a provincial theatre, he took Mr Stoyte by the arm and led him a few feet away, up the steps.  'Do you know what Tittelbaum told me today?' he asked rhetorically.

      'How the devil should I know?'  (But no, God is love.  There is no death.)

      Undeterred by the signs of Mr Stoyte's irritation, Clancy went on with his performance.  'He told me what they've decided about ...' he lowered his voice still further, 'about the San Felipe Valley.'

      'Well, what have they decided?'  Once more Mr Stoyte was at the limits of his patience.

      Before answering, Clancy removed the cigar-butt from his mouth, threw it away, produced another cigar out of his waistcoat pocket, tore off the cellophane wrapping and stuck it, unlighted, in the place occupied by the old one.

      'They've decided,' he said very slowly, so as to give each word its full dramatic effect, 'they've decided to pipe the water into it.'

      Mr Stoyte's expression of exasperation gave place at last to one of interest.  'Enough to irrigate the whole valley?' he asked.

      'Enough to irrigate the whole valley,' Clancy repeated with solemnity.

      Mr Stoyte was silent for a moment.  'How much time have we got?' he asked at last.

      'Tittelbaum thought the news wouldn't break for another six weeks.'

      'Six week?'  Mr Stoyte hesitated for a moment; then made his decision.  'All right.  Get busy at once,' he said with the peremptory manners of one accustomed to command.  'Go down yourself and take a few of the other boys along with you.  Independent purchasers - interested in cattle-raising; want to start a Dude Ranch.  Buy all you can.  What's the price, by the way?'

      'Averages twelve dollars an acre.'

      'Twelve,' Mr Stoyte repeated, and reflected that it would go to a hundred as soon as they started laying the pipe.  'How many acres do you figure you can get?' he asked.

      'Maybe thirty thousand.'

      Mr Stoyte's face beamed with satisfaction.  'Good,' he said briskly.  'Very good.  No mention of my name, of course,' he added, and then, without pause or transition: 'What's Tittelbaum going to cost?'

      Clancy smiled contemptuously.  'Oh, I'll give him four or five hundred bucks.'

      'That's all?'

      The other nodded.  'Tittelbaum's in the bargain basement,' he said.  'Can't afford to ask any fancy prices.  He needs the money - needs it awful bad.'

      'What for?' asked Mr Stoyte, who had a professional interest in human nature.  'Gambling?  Women?'

      Clancy shook his head.  'Doctors,' he explained.  'He's got a kid that's paralysed.'

      'Paralysed?' Mr Stoyte echoed in a tone of genuine sympathy.  'That's too bad.'  He hesitated for a moment; then, in a sudden burst of generosity, 'Tell him to send the kid here,' he went on, making a large gesture towards the hospital.  'Best place in the State for infantile paralysis, and it won't cost him anything.  Not a red cent.'

      'Hell, that's kind of you, Mr Stoyte,' said Clancy admiringly.  'That's real kind.'

      'Oh, it's nothing,' said Mr Stoyte, as he moved towards his car.  'I'm glad to be able to do it.  Remember what it says in the Bible about children.  You know,' he added, 'I get a real kick out of being with those poor kids in there.  Makes you feel kind of warm inside.'  He patted the barrel of his chest.  'Tell Tittelbaum to send in an application for the kid.  Send it to me personally.  I'll see that it goes through at once.'  He climbed into the car and shut the door after him; then, catching sight of Jeremy, opened it again without a word.  Mumbling apologetically, Jeremy scrambled in.  Mr Stoyte slammed the door once more, lowered the glass and looked out.  'So long,' he said.  'And don't lose any time about that San Felipe business.  Make a good job of it, Clancy, and I'll let you have ten per cent of all the acreage over twenty thousand.'  He raised the window and signalled to the chauffeur to start.  The car swung out of the drive and headed towards the castle.  Leaning back in his seat, Mr Stoyte thought of those poor kids and the money he would make out of the San Felipe business.  'God is love,' he said yet once more, with momentary conviction and in a whisper that was audible to his companion.

      The drawbridge came down as the blue Cadillac approached, the chromium portcullis went up, the gates of the inner rampart rolled back to let it pass.  On the concrete tennis-court the seven children of the Chinese cook were roller-skating.  Below, in the sacred grotto, a group of masons were at work.  At the sight of them, Mr Stoyte shouted to the chauffeur to stop.

      'They're putting up a tomb for some nuns,' he said to Jeremy as they got out of the car.

      'Some nuns?' Jeremy echoed in surprise.

      Mr Stoyte nodded, and  explained that his Spanish agents had bought some sculpture and iron-work from the chapel of a convent that had been wrecked by the anarchists at the beginning of the civil war.  'They sent some nuns along too,' he added.  'Embalmed, I guess.  Or maybe just sun-dried: I don't know.  Anyhow, there they are.  Luckily I happened to have something nice to put them in.'  He pointed to the monument which the masons were in process of fixing to the south wall of the grotto.  On a marble shelf above a large Roman sarcophagus were the statues by some nameless Jacobean stonemason of a gentleman and lady, both in ruffs, kneeling, and behind them, in three rows of three, nine daughters diminishing from adolescence to infancy.  'Hic jacet Carolus Franciscus Beals, Armiger ...' Jeremy began to read.

      'Bought it in England, two years ago,' said Mr Stoyte, interrupting him.  Then, turning to the workmen, 'When will you boys be through?' he asked.

      'Tomorrow noon.  Maybe tonight.'

      'That's all I wanted to know,' said Mr Stoyte, and turned away.  'I must have those nuns taken out of storage,' he said, as they walked back to the car.

      They drove on.  Poised on the almost invisible vibration of its wings, a humming-bird was drinking at the jet that spouted from the left nipple of Giambologna's nymph.  From the enclosure of the baboons came the shrill noise of battle and copulation.  Mr Stoyte shut his eyes.  'God is love,' he repeated, trying deliberately to prolong the delightful condition of euphoria into which those poor kids and Clancy's good news had plunged him.  'God is love.  There is no death.'  He waited to feel that sense of inward warmth, like the after-effect of whisky, which had followed his previous utterance of the words.  Instead, as though some immanent fiend were playing a practical joke on him, he found himself thinking of the shrunken leathery corpses of those nuns, and of his own corpse, and of judgement and the flames.  Prudence McGladdery Stoyte had been a Christian Scientist; but Joseph Budge Stoyte, his father, had been a Sandemanian; and Letitia Morgan, his maternal grandmother, had lived and died a Plymouth Sister.  Over his cot in the attic room of the little farmhouse in Nashville, Tennessee, had hung the text, in vivid orange on a black background: 'IT IS A TERRIBLE THING TO FALL INTO THE HANDS OF THE LIVING GOD.'  'God is love,' Mr Stoyte desperately reaffirmed.  'There is no death.'  But for sinners, such as himself, it was only the worm that never died.

      'If you're always scared of dying,' Obispo had said, 'you'll surely die.  Fear's a poison; and not such a slow poison either.'

      Making another enormous effort, Mr Stoyte suddenly began to whistle.  The tune was, 'I'm making hay in the moonlight in my Baby's arms,' but the face which Jeremy Pordage saw and, as though from some horrible and indecent secret, immediately averted his eyes from, was the face of a man in a condemned cell.

      'Old sour-puss,' the chauffeur muttered to himself as he watched his employer get out of the car and walk away.

      Followed by Jeremy, Mr Stoyte hurried in silence through the Gothic portal, crossed the pillared Romanesque lobby like the Lady Chapel at Durham, and, his hat still pulled down over his eyes, stepped into the cathedral twilight of the great hall.

      A hundred feet overhead, the sound of the two men's footsteps echoed in the vaulting.  Like iron ghosts, the suits of  armour stood immobile round the walls.  Above them, sumptuously dim, the fifteenth-century tapestries opened windows upon a leafy world of phantasy.  At one end of the cavernous room, lit by a hidden searchlight, El Greco's 'Crucifixion of St Peter' blazed out in the darkness like the beautiful revelation of something incomprehensible and profoundly sinister.  At the other, no less brilliantly illuminated, hung a full-length portrait of Hélène Fourment, dressed only in a bearskin cape.  Jeremy looked from one to the other - from the ectoplasm of the inverted saint to the unequivocal skin and fat and muscle which Rubens had so loved to see and touch; from unearthly flesh-tints of green-white ochre and carmine, shadowed with transparent black, to the creams and warm pinks, the nacreous blues and greens of Flemish nudity.  Two shining symbols, incomparably powerful and expressive - but of what, of what?  That, of course, was the question.

      Mr Stoyte paid attention to none of his treasures, but strode across the hall, inwardly cursing his buried wife for having made him think about death by insisting that there wasn't any.

      The door of the elevator was in an embrasure between pillars.  Mr Stoyte opened it, and the light came on, revealing a Dutch lady in blue satin sitting at a harpsichord - sitting, Jeremy reflected, at the very heart of an equation, in a world where beauty and logic, painting and analytical geometry, had become one.  With what intention?  To express, symbolically, what truths about the nature of things?  Again, that was the question.  Where art was concerned, Jeremy said to himself, that was always the question.

      'Shut the door,' Mr Stoyte ordered; then, when it was done, 'we'll have a swim before lunch,' he added, and pressed the topmost of a long row of buttons.