As Far as You Can Go (12 page)

Of the sixteen original portraits, seven were now in museums, besides the two in Cincinnati. The Fogg at
Cambridge
, Massachusetts, had a Van Dyck, for instance, and Harold had an excuse to spend two days looking round Harvard, frozen picturesquely along the Charles, its modern versions of the New England classical style splendid against the hard grey skies. He was reminded strongly of Oxford, and felt rather pointless and old among the throngs of young Americans, all more serious and eager than he and his
undergraduate
friends had ever been. He was taken to Concord and Lexington, where the American revolution began, and felt strangely embarrassed that the English should ever have behaved so badly, and that his hosts should assume so easily that these frozen fields and the snowbound river would merely interest him. They were interesting, it was true: but he felt isolated and alone again, standing on the tiny bridge at Concord, observing the statue of the American hero, the grave of the first British casualty, a gentle slope the other side of the river, Hawthorne’s and Emerson’s Old Manse so close by, dark and forbidding and alien. But it was he that was alien, and conscious of his descent from the enemy, he was ashamed that England had, not for the last time, been a foolish and incompetent aggressor. Occasionally Americans would make
oblique remarks about Suez, and though Harold had been firmly and loudly against it at the time, attending the Trafalgar Square rally and marching against the Whitehall Cavalry, now he felt responsible for his country’s acts—or at least their unwilling victim and representative. He had never been particularly conscious of his Englishness before, but Boston made him uncomfortable, with all its relics of the great revolution against Harold’s country. It was little solace to feel sure that he would have been on the right side at the time. The time was over, and all Englishmen had to bear the marks of shame.

In other cities he felt better. Washington, with its straight streets and massive government marble everywhere, was phrenetic with preparations for the political conventions, for this was election year. The burning of the White House during the war of 1812 was considered rather a joke, anyway. The Potomac rolled gravely past the marmoreal shrines to Lincoln and Jefferson, absorbed with more important
considerations
. Chicago was bitterly cold, without a trace of Al Capone. Gravely disappointed at finding no speakeasies, he reflected that America was probably more mythical to most Europeans than real. Like most Englishmen, he had never really accepted that Prohibition had been repealed (in fact before he was born), and to find liquor readily available was something of a shock. Minneapolis, which had no English connections at all that Harold knew of (unlike Chicago, whose mayor once threatened to punch King George V on the nose, presumably being unaware that time had passed since George III), was curiously like North Oxford or the Victorian middle-class area of any English town. Huge Scandinavian houses lined the streets, and in them lived eminent professors. It was even colder than Chicago.

By the time Harold had assembled the basic material of a report to Mr Dangerfield, he considered himself an expert on the American city. He was very much in favour of properly
heated houses and hotels, very bored with the endlessly repeated grid street-plan, and longing desperately for spring. His researches established that the seven pictures not in museums were all still in private American hands, except one, which had been burnt in a fire in Fargo, North Dakota. He did not feel obliged to go and check the ashes. Of the remaining six, three were on the east coast, one in Texas, one in Denver, and the last, the Hilliard miniature, in
California
. At least, it had last been heard of in California, having been sold to a Mr Carter Washburn in Los Angeles. Harold received no reply to any of the letters of inquiry he sent after it: he supposed that it had probably disappeared. Mr Washburn was dead, in all likelihood, and in any case he would absolutely certainly have moved since 1937: all Americans moved a good deal, but west coast Americans, he gathered, could hardly keep still from one day to the next. There seemed little chance of tracing either Mr Washburn or the picture.

Of the east coast pictures, he had succeeded in buying two for Mr Dangerfield. Mrs Moore, indeed a rich lady who lived in Virginia, was so impressed by Harold’s story of the Dangerfields’ decline and resurrection that she wanted to give her picture back to the family.

She lived in a very attractive colonial house near
Charlottesville
, with a view of the Blue Ridge. White pillars stood at the front, as in pictures, and the slave-quarters had been turned into a double-garage. The snow was melting fast as Harold drove from Washington to see Mrs Moore, and he was astonished by the bright red earth and the deep blue shadows in the dwindling patches of snow. The countryside was gently rolling and rather English, but for the astonishing redness of the earth, almost jarring against the green of the scant winter grass.

From her porch Mrs Moore could see Monticello, the house Jefferson had built for himself, and she insisted on
taking Harold to see it, and the University, laid out by Jefferson with all the expansiveness of a medieval
almshouse-builder
. Around this attractive old campus the new buildings clustered, and Harold was forcibly reminded of how his own university had solved the problem of getting up to date by sending all scientists to the far end of the city. Being away from England made him, he discovered, much more critical of it. Besides, there was a lot to be said for old Southern architecture: good proportions, and a certain modesty
without
abstinence, were highly attractive. He thought of some of the vulgarly large and coarse mansions of the same period in England: the smallness of Monticello contrasted favourably with—but that was to be unfair. The leaders of the American revolution were not men of enormous wealth.

Mrs Moore, though, was a woman of enormous wealth.

“You see, it’s like this, Mr Barlow,” she said. “My
grandmother
—that’s on my mother’s side, of course—was from Boston. And
her
mother was e
anti-slavery
movement. A
passionate
leader, Mr Barlow.”

“Yes, Mrs Moore.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. I have never been quite easy in my mind, Mr Barlow. This is a big country, and South and North have a lot to forgive each other for, and things get forgotten.”

Harold had no idea of what she was driving at. He tried to look intelligent.

“Now this here picture you say is a Reynolds——”

“Allegedly,” said Harold, quickly.

“Well, allegedly or not allegedly, I guess it belongs back with the family that’s descended from the man in it. You might say that’s my Southern side. Now here’s my Northern side. My Northern side says I should get paid for the picture, but it also says that maybe I’m rich enough already.” She sighed. “We Americans can get kind of mixed-up, Mr Barlow, at times.”

He made a sympathetic noise.

“You read about the demonstrations, Mr Barlow?”

“Which demonstrations, Mrs Moore?”

“The negroes.” She pronounced the word “nigras”. “Sitting down at lunch-counters. You read about that?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, I guess I wouldn’t be my great-grandmother’s great-granddaughter if I wasn’t a little bit on the side of the negroes, even if I do live in Virginia. So why don’t you send the money along to the National Association for the
Advancement
of Coloured People?”

“If you’re sure that’s what you’d like,” said Harold, thinking of black faces looking up from the red earth as he drove along side-roads.

“That’s what I’d like,” she said. “And you can tell them that it comes from a Southern lady.”

Later that day Harold heard her being very sharp with her negro butler, accusing him, and by implication his race, of idleness and slovenliness. Harold supposed that the
outburst
was to keep the conscience sharp on both sides. Rich ladies, after all, should be careful with their money. He drove away next day wondering how anyone dared to generalize about Americans.

Mr Dangerfield was extremely pleased to hear about the acquisition of the alleged Reynolds, and even more pleased when he heard about Harold’s success with Mr Grant Halliday.

Grant Halliday was a lawyer who lived near Princeton, in New Jersey, in the most luxurious house Harold had ever seen. The house itself had once been a farm-house, and still looked like one: but inside it was as though a panel of interior decorators had been competing to see how much they could spend. What Harold mistook for reproductions of Matisse and Picasso were in fact genuine, but his gaffe was quickly swallowed in the effortlessly deep purple carpet which lay everywhere, even in the cupboards.

Halliday welcomed him with an enormous Martini, and said, “I’m ashamed to tell you, Mr Barlow, but I don’t have the picture here right now. It didn’t fit, kind of. In fact it’s been in the bank ever since my father died. He used to tell people it was his English great-great-grandfather, but that was a lie. I’m telling you, it was one big lie.”

“Well, there’s no harm in that,” said Harold.

“What!” said Halliday. “But we’re Ukrainian Jews, Mr Barlow. The real name’s Varitsky, or some such. My
grandfather
called himself after the first man he met over here some guy in the Customs shed, I guess. And he kept it secret what his real name was. I never did discover.”

“Well, I wouldn’t let it worry me,” said Harold.

“It doesn’t. But I didn’t like to have the picture in the house. It seemed kind of phoney, you know what I mean? And anyway, look at this house. What does it want with a portrait, for Christ’s sake?”

“Well, if you’re willing to part with it, Mr Halliday——”

“Call me Grant. Yes, I’m willing.”

They had another drink and discussed the price. Halliday nodded when Harold told him what Dangerfield hoped to buy it for.

“That sounds fair enough. I had an art dealer look at it when you first wrote me. He said it was worth round about that. O.K. It’s a deal.”

They drove to the bank and looked at the picture. It was an indifferent early eighteenth-century portrait of a young man, unquestionably Aubrey Dangerfield, the one who had altered Dangerfield House.

Halliday made Harold move from his hotel in Princeton to the luxurious house, to spend the weekend, at the end of which Harold had drunk a great deal and learned something of Jewish cooking. Halliday and his wife, a pretty woman of Harold’s age with black hair and a discontented mouth that suddenly flicked its corners into laughter, kept up a continual
and exhausting quarrel which both obviously enjoyed
enormously
—all the more so for Harold’s presence.

As he went back to New York it occurred to Harold that he hadn’t looked out of a window in all the time he had stayed at the house.

“We are the ex-urbanites,” Halliday had said. “At least, I guess that’s what they call us now. We used to be just the millionaire commuters around here, but now we’re
exurbanites
like everyone else.”

No doubt, Harold thought as he joined the Turnpike, they commuted to New York for a little relaxation after their strenuous weekends. There had been a party for every meal, and no one went to bed before three.

With the other east coast portrait Harold had less
success
. It was owned by a Miss Woodbury, of Montpelier, Vermont. She lived some way from the city, in a narrow crack in the hills. Her house was small and friendly-looking, but rather sad, for Miss Woodbury had devoted it to the memory of her father.

“I have not moved a stick of furniture since he died,” she told Harold. “Nor shall I ever do so.”

Miss Woodbury’s father had been a local judge.

“I have been called obstinate in my time. But to me the obedience of children to their parents does not stop when the parents pass on. My father loved this house, he loved every picture, every carpet, every stone in the fireplace. To despoil the work of a man’s lifetime would be a heinous assault on morality, would it not, Mr Barlow?”

Taken aback, Harold said, “Well——”

“So good-bye, Mr Barlow. It has been a pleasure to meet you. I am only sorry that I cannot possibly help you.”

Harold managed to stay a little longer, however, and to establish that Miss Woodbury was an only child. Delicately he approached the subject of the house’s contents after Miss Woodbury’s death.

“I suppose,” he said, “that you will open the house to the public, Miss Woodbury?”

“Why, no,” she said, looking most put out. “What makes you think I would do a thing like that?”

“I’m sorry. I thought you meant the house to be a sort of

museum.”

“That is true, Mr Barlow.” She fidgeted with the lid of an old tobacco-jar. “But I don’t expect my father’s memory will live much beyond me. This is more of a
personal
museum, than a public one.”

“Then I’m sure you will understand Mr Dangerfield’s anxiety to ensure the return of his family pictures to his family house, Miss Woodbury.”

Miss Woodbury understood perfectly. She was tall and thin and fifty-five, with iron-grey hair and pale but shining blue eyes. She could not possibly part with the picture during her lifetime, she said. But she promised to leave instructions in her will that at her death Mr Dangerfield was to be given the opportunity of buying his ancestor’s portrait.

Privately, Harold considered it an offensively nasty picture. It was of Mr Dangerfield’s great-grandfather’s second wife, apparently swooning over some lilies. She didn’t look in the least attractive, and she had been painted more carelessly than Harold, who had begun to develop an eye for such things in spite of Mr Dangerfield’s certain disapproval, had thought possible for a man so famous in his day. However, he said nothing of this to Miss Woodbury, thanked her profusely, got her to put her promise in writing in a letter to
Dangerfield
, and went back to New York.

He also refrained from passing judgment on the portrait in his letter to Dangerfield, who was becoming increasingly excited. He had had Mrs Moore’s Reynolds flown to
London
, and it was being cleaned. He was lyrical about its beauty and the charm of the sitter. Expert after expert was being summoned to give his opinion of its authenticity.