“That’s odd,” said Arthur. “He always looked rather dirty to me.”
“He didn’t bathe much. When we cleared out his stuff he had three apartments, with six bathrooms among them, and every bathtub was piled high with bundles of pictures and sketches and books and manuscripts and whatnot. After so many years of disuse I wonder if the taps worked. But he had preserved one tiny washroom—just a cupboard off an entry—and there he did his endless hand-washing. His hands were always snowy white, though otherwise he smelled a bit.”
“Are you going to put that in?”
“Of course. He hadn’t a bad smell. He smelled like an old, leather-bound book.”
“He sounds rather a dear,” said Maria; “a crook who smells like an old book. A Renaissance man, without all the boozing and sword-fighting.”
“Certainly no boozing,” said Darcourt. “He didn’t drink—at least not in his own place. He would take a drink, and even several drinks, if somebody else was paying. He was a miser, you know.”
“This is getting better and better,” said Maria. “A booky-smelling, tight-fisted crook. You can surely make a wonderful biography, Simon.”
“Shut up, Maria; control your romantic passion for crooks. It’s her gypsy background coming out,” said Arthur to Darcourt.
“Would you two both shut up and let me get on with what I have to say?” said Darcourt. “I am not trying to write a sensational book; I am trying to do what you asked me to do nearly two years ago, which is to prepare a solid, scholarly, preferably not deadly-dull biography of the late Francis Cornish, as the first act of the newly founded Cornish Foundation for Promotion of the Arts and Humane Scholarship, of which you two and I are at present the sole directors. And don’t say you ‘commissioned’ it, Arthur. Not a penny changed hands and not a word was written in agreement. It was a friendly thing, not a money thing. You thought a nice book about Uncle Frank would be a nice thing with which to lead off a laudable Foundation devoted to the nice things that you thought Uncle Frank stood for. This was a typically Canadian act of smiling niceness. But I can’t get the facts I want for my book, and some of the things I have not quite uncovered would make a book which—as Arthur so justifiably fears—would cause a scandal.”
“And make the Foundation and the Cornish name stink,” said Arthur.
“I don’t know about the Cornish name, but if the Foundation had money to give away I don’t think you’d find artists or scholars fussing about where it came from,” said Darcourt. “Scholars and artists have no morals whatever about grants of money. They’d take it from a house of child prostitution, as you two innocents will discover.”
“Simon, that must have been an awfully strong drink,” said Maria. “You’re beginning to bully us. That’s good.”
“It was a strong drink, and I’d like another just like it, and I’d like to have the talk to myself to tell you what I know and what I don’t know.”
“One strong Scotch for the Reverend Professor,” said Arthur, moving to prepare it. “Go on, Simon. What have you actually got?”
“We might as well begin with the obituary that appeared in the London Times, on the Monday after Francis died. It’s a pretty good summing up of what the world thinks, up to now, about your deceased relative, and the source is above suspicion.”
“Is it?” said Maria.
“For a Canadian to be guaranteed dead by The Times shows that he was really somebody who could cut the mustard. Important on a world level.”
“You talk as if the obituary columns of the London Times were the Court Circular of the Kingdom of Heaven, prepared by the Recording Angel.”
“Well, that’s not a bad way of putting it. The New York Times had a much longer piece, but it isn’t really the same thing. The British have some odd talents, and writing obituaries is one of them. Brief, stylish, no punches pulled—so far as they possessed punches. But either they didn’t know or didn’t choose to say a few things that are public knowledge. Now listen: I’ll assume a Times voice:
On Sunday, September 12, his seventy-second birthday, Francis Chegwidden Cornish, internationally known art expert and collector, died at his home in Toronto, Canada. He was alone at the time of his death.
Francis Cornish, whose career as an art expert, especially in the realms of sixteenth-century and Mannerist painting, extended over forty years and was marked by a series of discoveries, reversals of previously held opinions, and quarrels, was known as a dissenter and frequently a scoffer in matters of taste. His authority was rooted in an uncommon knowledge of painting techniques and a mastery of the comparatively recent critical approach called iconology. He seemed also to owe much to a remarkable intuition, which he displayed without modesty, to the chagrin of a number of celebrated experts, with whom he disputed tirelessly.
Born in 1909 in Blairlogie, a remote Ontario settlement, he enjoyed all his life the freedom which comes with Ample means. His father came of an old and distinguished family in Cornwall; his mother (née McRory) came of a Canadian family that acquired substantial wealth first in timber, and later in finance. Cornish never engaged in the family business, but derived a fortune from it, and he was able to back his intuitions with a long purse. The disposition of his remarkable collections is as yet unknown.
He received his schooling in Canada and was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, after which he travelled extensively, and was for many years a colleague and pupil of Tancred Saraceni of Rome, some of whose eccentricities he was thought to have incorporated in his own rebarbative personality. But in spite of his eccentricities it might always have been said of Francis Cornish that for him art possessed all the wisdom of poetry.
During and after the 1939-45 war he was a valuable member of the group of Allied experts who traced and recovered works of art which had been displaced during the hostilities.
In his later years he made generous gifts of pictures to the National Gallery of Canada.
He never married and leaves no direct heirs. It is authoritatively stated that there was no foul play in the manner of his death.
“I’m not mad about that,” said Maria. “It has a snotty undertone.”
“You don’t know how snotty a Times obit can be. I suspect most of that piece was written by Aylwin Ross, who thought he would outlive Francis, and have a chuckle over the last sentence. In fact, that obit is Ross’s patronizing estimate of a man who was greatly his superior. There’s a question in it that is almost Ross’s trade mark. It’s quite decent, really, all things considered.”
“What things considered?” said Arthur. “What do they mean, ‘no foul play’? Did anybody suggest there was?”
“Not here,” said Darcourt, “but some of the people on the Continent who knew him might have wondered. Don’t find fault with it; obviously Ross chose to suppress a few things the Times certainly has in its files.”
“Like—?”
“Well, not a word about the stinking scandal that killed Jean-Paul Letztpfennig, and made Francis notorious in the art world. Reputations fell all over the place. Even Berenson was just the teeniest bit diminished.”
“Obviously you know all about it, though,” said Arthur, “and if Uncle Frank came out on top, that’s all to the good. Who was Tancred Saraceni?”
“Queer fish. A collector, but known chiefly as a magnificent restorer of Old Masters; all the big galleries used him, or consulted him, at one time or another. But some very rum things went through his hands to other collectors. Like your Uncle Frank, he was rumoured to be altogether too clever with his paintbox; Ross hated him.”