The Merry Muse Read online

  ‘That’s the most cowardly advice I ever heard! And whatever I am, I’m not a coward, and I know my duty. I’m going to Peebles this morning, as soon as I can, to give her immediate help in her hour of need! What’s her telephone number?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘Then I’ll soon find out. It’s in the book, isn’t it? Or if it isn’t I’ll give the Post Office a piece of my mind.’

  Max Arbuthnot rose angrily, threw down the Scotsman, and stalked out of the room.

  ‘Poor father,’ said Jane. ‘I wonder what’s happened to put him in such a bad mood this morning?’

  ‘He’s been stalking for three days, climbing all over those ridiculous mountains in Lochaber, and tired himself out,’ said her mother. ‘It’s nonsensical for a man of his age to go crawling and creeping about the hills, chasing wild deer — and it’s we who have to suffer for his folly.’ She turned to her son-in-law, and added, ‘I’m sorry indeed that you should have had to share such an unpleasant scene.’

  ‘It didn’t worry me in the least,’ said Telfer. ‘I grew up in a family that had spent most of its life, for two or three generations, in India; and one of my earliest recollections is being chased round the garden by a mad uncle with a boar-spear. I grew to manhood — if such it can be called — in an atmosphere tense with memories of civic disturbance, frontier wars, malaria, and too much curry-powder. I was devoted to my father, but when he trumpeted like an elephant we all took cover.’

  He stood up and went to look more closely at a very large picture that overhung a long Victorian sideboard. The room was wholly furnished with the fine dark mahogany of the 19th century, and the three great pictures that chiefly decorated it were also of that age. There was an Orchardson over the sideboard, an enormous Pettie on the west wall, and a McTaggart seascape, of equal size, on the east. Some smaller pieces hung here and there, but the three major pictures so dominated the room that a visitor was hardly aware of others.

  ‘It isn’t the fashionable idea of what a picture should be, but I like it,’ said Telfer. ‘I like it very much.’

  ‘I should hope so!’ exclaimed Mrs Arbuthnot. ‘Look at the way those three figures — the three principals — fill and dominate all that vast canvas!’

  The picture was entitled The Snub, and in a now outmoded fashion ‘told a story’. Or rather, illuminated in the clarity of a moment’s vision an incident in a story that the spectator was allowed to tell, in his own way, for his own uncovenanted pleasure. It was a fashionable scene: a carriage in the Row, an arrogant and portly gentleman of rather more than middle age with a beautiful and arrogant young woman beside him, and in the foreground a young man, on foot, his hat in hand, who bowed low to the lady, and was ignored. A dozen minor figures — idlers and passers-by — contributed to both the drama and the design by their pointed awareness, ironic or amused, of the situation; but, as Mrs Arbuthnot had said, it was the triangular insistence on the relationship of the three principals that occupied and animated the canvas. Except for the darkness of the carriage the colours were pale, but the characters in the story were drawn with such solidity that their pallor exuded an extraordinary liveliness.

  ‘If it were mine,’ said Telfer, ‘I would go to almost any length to keep it. But if it belonged to either of my sisters, she would say “This must be valuable,” and take it to an auction-room immediately.’

  ‘That’s exactly what Aunt Jessie wanted to do,’ said Jane.

  ‘Did he really swindle her?’

  ‘When his father died, about twenty years ago,’ said Mrs Arbuthnot, ‘he left a small but very good collection of Scotch pictures of the sort that isn’t much regarded nowadays. Dyce and Noel Paton, Daniel Macnee, Horatio McCulloch, Sam Bough — I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of them?’

  ‘No,’ said Telfer.

  ‘They’re well worth looking at. But they all went — all except two — to the small town where old Peter Arbuthnot had been born; and a great embarrassment they were. For the town had nowhere to hang them, and it cost Max a lot of money to raise a fund to build a gallery. The two remaining pictures were this Orchardson, and what was generally thought to be a very good Raeburn: quite a small one, a girl called Miss Gibbs, who was some sort of forebear.’

  ‘Aunt Jessie’s great-aunt,’ said Jane.

  ‘Quite possibly. Anyway, the old man left these two to Max and Jessie, and let them take their choice. — Max’s other sister, Annie, got a necklace: she isn’t very clever, poor thing. — Well, Jessie naturally asked for the Raeburn: partly out of sentiment, and partly because it was small enough to go into their house. Her husband, old Charlie who’s dead now, was a country schoolmaster. That suited Max very well, and for a few years both were quite pleased. But then someone came along, someone from the Scottish Academy, and told Jessie that the Raeburn was only a copy, and worth practically nothing. Jessie made a great fuss about it, and accused Max of having known from the start that the picture was worthless. And when he refused to sell the Orchardson, and divide the proceeds, she accused him of swindling her, and called him a thief. He laughed at her and said she was a fool, and they haven’t spoken to each other since.’

  ‘Do you think he did know the Raeburn was only a copy?’

  ‘Of course he did! Max knows a great deal about pictures.’

  ‘And at one time or another,’ said Jane, ‘we’ve all been sacrificed for them. We were going to Brittany for a holiday once, the whole family, but suddenly it was cancelled because father said we couldn’t afford it. That was when he had just bought that Pettie, which I don’t like at all. We went to North Berwick instead of Brittany, and I don’t like North Berwick either.’

  ‘You don’t really know this house yet, do you?’ asked Mrs Arbuthnot.

  ‘I haven’t had much opportunity,’ said Telfer.

  ‘There are pictures everywhere. I have a Dufy in my bedroom that was a great disappointment to me; though it’s a very lovely picture. Max gave it to me for a silver wedding present. I, like the vulgar woman I am, wanted sables. I’ve never had a good coat — we can’t afford good coats, not with all these pictures — and after twenty-five years of marriage to Max I thought sables were what I deserved. But not a bit of it. I got a Dufy.’

  ’On the same occasion,’ said Telfer, ‘my mother got a lawn-mower.’

  ‘Your father’s more practical than mine,’ said Jane, ‘but his temper’s just as bad.’

  ‘They are both survivals from an older habit of life,’ said Telfer. ‘An explosive temper is a rare thing nowadays. It went out with the horse-whip. Nowadays we merely grumble, quietly and passively, and are swept downstream to a chorus of ineffectual remonstrance.’

  ‘Who’s remonstrating here? And why?’ demanded Max Arbuthnot, returning with vigour in his stride and triumph in his gaze to pour himself another cup of coffee. He drank noisily. ‘It’s cold,’ he said.

  ‘Have you been talking to Jessie all this time?’ asked his wife.

  ‘I had to make her see reason.’

  ‘Poor Jessie! How is she?’

  ‘She was stubborn, very stubborn to begin with. She told me I’d never spoken a civil word to poor old Charlie, and I told her I’d never failed to offer him a second glass of port. And what had she to say to that? She said I knew perfectly well that the doctors wouldn’t allow him to drink, and he’d never dined here without being ill for three days after. As if I was to blame! I’m not sure she wasn’t implying that I’d helped to kill him.’

  ‘What did he die of?’

  ‘Dropsy. “That’s water, not wine,” I said, and then she began to cry. Over the telephone! And then — and then, I don’t quite understand why, she suddenly seemed quite pleased when I said I was coming to see her. Coming at once. — No, she wasn’t exactly pleased, but relieved. There’s something on her mind, something she wants to tell me, and I can’t think what. Something to do with Charlie, of course, though I don’t see how he can have got into a scrape. Not an old woman
like him. Old women are past getting into trouble at seventy-five. — You’ve got a long time before you’re out of danger, haven’t you, Jane?’

  Jane asked her husband, ‘Does your father make vulgar jokes at the breakfast-table?’

  ‘He would if he could think of them,’ answered Telfer loyally.

  Mrs Arbuthnot, a little coldly, interrupted to say, ‘You’ll want Thomson, of course, if you’re going to Peebles, but I shan’t need the Morris till eleven, and so —’ she spoke to Telfer — ‘Jane can drive you to Leith, if you like.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Jane. ‘But can we start quite soon?’

  ‘What else have you to do?’ asked her mother.

  ‘Nothing important, nothing of any consequence’ — Jane, for no known reason, was suddenly embarrassed — ‘but there’s somewhere I must go. I mean, I’ve been asked to go there.’

  ‘Make your own arrangements,’ said Mrs Arbuthnot, ‘but bring the Morris back before eleven. And you’re coming again to-night, aren’t you, Simon? In time for dinner?’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’

  Telfer opened the door for her, and she went out. Jane, following, said with a young wife’s pleasant assumption of authority, ‘I’ll be ready in a quarter of an hour, Simon.’

  Max Arbuthnot, frowning at a newspaper again, asked, ‘How serious is this affair in New Brabant?’

  ‘I know no more than you do,’ said Telfer. ‘I was at the War Office yesterday morning — I flew north in the afternoon — and I heard nothing of it there. My orders, at present, are simply to take the regiment to Malaya … ’

  ‘By request of the Malayan Government?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And when you get there, what are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m told I shall be given further orders before we arrive.’

  ‘But there’s nothing to indicate that they need another armoured regiment, is there?’

  ‘Not so far as I know.’

  ‘Well, you’re quite right to be discreet… ’

  ‘It isn’t that at all … ’

  ‘All right, all right. I’m not trying to pry into official secrets. — But what are you going to do in Leith?’

  ‘Talk about shipping arrangements, and look at accommodation plans.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do to help you? I’ve got a finger in shipping myself.’

  ‘I know you have, and that’s a very kind offer. If, later on … ’

  ‘Well, let me know. I’ll do anything I can. But I wish to God you weren’t going so far away!’

  ‘So do I,’ said Telfer.

  With a sudden snarl of rage Max Arbuthnot crumpled The Times and the Scotsman into a tight ball, and moving to one side of the table took a drop-kick towards the Orchard-son. The ball fell short of the picture and disintegrated among the coffee-pots, milk-jugs and dirty plates on the sideboard.

  ‘That’s how I used to deal with life!’ he said. ‘Kick ahead and follow up! But you can’t do it now. The world’s too much for us. Oh, it’s a bloody, bloody world!’

  His spine appeared to slump, his shoulders sagged. ‘Why can’t they leave us in peace?’ he asked. ‘But no, that’s too much to hope for. You’ve got to go off to Malaya, and New Brabant, to deal with Communists and revolutions — and I’ve got to go to Peebles to deal with a couple of bleating women and an old ninny lying in his coffin. Well, it’s all I’m fit for, at my time of life, I suppose. All I’m fit for.’

  He stumped heavily to the door, and there, as though gathering the remnants of a broken spirit, said in a voice that sounded more like a threat than an invitation, ‘I’ll see you at dinner — and don’t be late!’

  II

  Max Arbuthnot lived high on an eastern slope of Corstorphine Hill in a house built primarily for comfort on a site chosen for the diverse and spacious view it commanded. It was a large but unostentatious house, with solid walls, well proportioned windows, and two acres of carefully tended grounds falling to a belt of trees beyond which could be seen, on the one hand the grey glint of the Forth, on the other the Braid Hills, and in the centre, where a couple of beeches had been felled for the prospect, Edinburgh Castle riding on its narrow promontory above the mist of the city. It was a view that gave Max Arbuthnot unfailing pleasure, for not only was it fair in any judgment, but from such an eminence he could, in orgulous mood, look down at Scotland’s capital as if it lay within his care. Sometimes, indeed, after dinner on a fine summer evening, he would take a glass of port to drink out of doors, with the late sun shining over his shoulder, and say, ‘And a damned good thing it would be, for Edinburgh and Scotland, too, if I had a bit more power in my hands!’ — And when his spirit was despondent he rarely failed to find comfort in meditating on the brutalities of history which had not crushed, but created the city that, in his petulant, intolerant way, he dearly loved. — His wife, however, whose zeal for cleanliness and order maintained the house and its garden in an aspect of immaculate serenity, complained that at such a height it was impossible to keep out the cold, and asked bitterly why anyone should live facing the east wind for no better purpose than to enjoy a view.

  Their daughter, Jane, who had been born in it, took the house and its view for granted, but sometimes grumbled because it was so far from the theatres, the cinemas, and the Gargoyle Restaurant. She was the youngest of a family of four, and the only one who had not, from an early age, unhesitatingly declared what she meant to do with her life. The others had all known their own minds, and estimated their abilities, by the time they were fourteen or fifteen: with the consequence that the oldest of the family, a girl, was now a lecturer in Zoology at London University; the elder of the two brothers, having been called to the English Bar, was practising with a steely ambition and hard-faced efficiency on the Northern Circuit; and the younger, a more genial youth, was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy who ardently scanned the world of his choice through the periscope of a submarine.

  There were those who said, unkindly, that they had all chosen careers which would let them leave home as soon as possible, and so escape the blighting shadow of their father; but that was unjust. Each had made his or her own choice, and Max Arbuthnot had not only admitted his children’s right to choose their way of life, but applauded it. ‘Give me a boy who knows what he wants to do, and I’ll help him do it,’ he would say. ‘If one of them had made up his mind to be a smuggler, I’d have bought him a boat, had him taught navigation, the elements of book-keeping, and something about foreign exchange, and put him in touch with the proper people in Tangier. But heaven preserve me from the sort of boy who wants his father to find him a niche and plaster him in. I wouldn’t raise a finger for him! A foot, maybe, but not a finger.’

  When Jane, however, showed no inclination to make a career for herself, and no desire for any niche other than her own home, he was perfectly complaisant. She was not only the youngest of the family — ‘the last shake of the bag,’ he would say, with a pretended sigh — but easily the best-looking. Lithe and slim, and very pretty, with a well modelled chin, a laughing mouth, and eyes that unwittingly deceived some of the young men who fell in love with her. They were large eyes, very dark, and in repose they seemed to reflect thoughts far graver and more profound than any she had ever entertained, or was capable of entertaining. Though she was not unintelligent, her capacity for thought was limited to a simple assessment of what she saw and felt. She was rarely deceived by her own emotions, which were normal and not obsessive, and being unburdened by great imagination she was easily pleased by the common amusements of the young, and had made herself generally popular by the zest and good humour which she brought to them.

  She had gone to school in the south of England — a school whose high reputation depended in no way on the number of scholarships, or even entrances to the university, that its pupils might obtain — and leaving at the age of seventeen, had spent the next three years at home. She gave up lacrosse, and took to golf: she drove with a stylish swing, and her fat
her spoke warmly of her approach-shots. She joined a musical society, and sang in a choir. She joined an amateur dramatic society, and played a number of small parts with natural grace.

  Her father found no fault in her, but her mother — even after she was married, but living at home again while Simon Telfer was in Cyprus — her mother would sometimes say, to an old friend, ‘Heaven knows I don’t want the child to kick over the traces, but I should like to feel that she could, if the proper occasion arose. But I don’t think she ever will. She’s too easily pleased, and she doesn’t want things enough.’

  In this judgment, however, her mother was wrong; and now, after she had driven Simon to Leith, and obediently brought the Morris home again — now, while Max Arbuthnot was on his way to comfort or coerce his bereaved sister in Peebles — now Jane was walking slowly down from Corstorphine to meet a man with whom, in her mother’s phrase — that so charmingly evoked a vanished world where horses in harness were a commonplace, and a common hazard — she had indeed ‘kicked over the traces’; and one of her reasons for walking slowly was to give herself time to think why she had done so, and remember, if she could, the emotions of her adventure. She regretted it now, but not very keenly, because in the last three months it had become so blurred in memory that it had lost much of its reality. She could remember — no, not excitement itself, but the memory of excitement; and a sense of being flattered, a sense of being made to feel important. But what else?

  Her mind, her simple practical habit of thought, was so full of Simon and the happiness of being with him again, that she had little room in her head, and none in her heart, for anyone else. She resented the intrusion of the letter she had just received; but in spite of real annoyance she could not exclude the caress of flattery, the sensation of becoming curiously important, that she had known before. She admitted them grudgingly, and still preferred to think of Simon. She could remember, in perfect clarity, almost every moment of her wedding day.