A firework that misfires can be like a bomb. Ross let it be known, in an unwise press conference, that it lay in his power, at a stroke, to lift the National Gallery to a new level, and set it well on the way to recognition as a collection of world importance. He had, by long negotiation and a lightning trip to Europe, succeeded in pledging all the Gallery’s allocation for acquisitions for the forthcoming year, and in addition a sum that would gobble it up for six years to come. He had agreed to purchase six pictures, six pictures of world importance, from a great private collection in Europe. He had got them at bargain rates, by dint of keen negotiation and, it was hinted in the gentlest terms, by personal charm.
Who was the owner? Ross let it be teased out of him that the owner was Amalie von Ingelheim, who had recently inherited the collection from her grandmother, and as the Gräfin—for so Ross incorrectly but impressively called her—had need of money (her husband, Prince Max, was taking over a large cosmetic empire with its headquarters in New York), she was letting some of her private treasures out into the world, where they had never been seen before. For a few paltry millions Canada could put itself on the map as a country possessing a notable national collection.
Comparatively few people know what a million dollars actually is. To the majority it is a gaseous concept, swelling or decreasing as the occasion suggests. In the minds of politicians, perhaps more than anywhere, the notion of a million dollars has this accordion-like ability to expand or contract; if they are disposing of it, the million is a pleasing sum, reflecting warmly upon themselves; if somebody else wants it, it becomes a figure of inordinate size, not to be compassed by the rational mind. When the politicians learned that one of their functionaries, an understrapper holding a minor post in a cul de sac, had promised several millions abroad, for the acquirement of pictures—pictures, for God’s sake—they burst into flames of indignation, and none were more indignant than those of the party, now Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, who had appointed Ross just before they fell from power.
The Minister was under the gun. She did not like Ross, whom she had met two or three times, and her Assistant Deputy Minister, who dealt directly with Ross, was another woman who liked him even less. He had quoted Jonson to her, and she had assumed that he was talking about Samuel Johnson, and had made a goat of herself. (Or so it seemed to her, for Ross, who was used to this misunderstanding, paid little attention.) The Assistant Deputy Minister was a feminist, and certain that Ross’s deferential manner toward women was mockery. She had her suspicions that Ross was a homosexual—so handsome a man, and unmarried—and she detailed a trusted henchman (one of the Palace Eunuchs of her Department) to get the goods on Ross if he could, by any means short of making him a proposition in a Parliamentary lavatory. Ross, in his dealings with this lady, was unquestionably tactless; in the words of his favourite author, he was “plagued with an itching leprosy of wit”, and he could not dissemble it in his dealings with politicians and Civil Servants.
The Minister relied on the advice other Deputy, who relied on the advice of her assistant (who was not quite her lover but would have been if they were not both so busy and so tired), and her path was clear. A Civil Servant under her Ministry had behaved with unwarrantable freedom, making deals involving money not yet allocated, and without a word to her. She made a statement in the House repudiating the purchases, and assuring the Commons that no one was more zealous in cutting down unwarrantable expenditures than she. Piously, she said that she yielded to no one in her love of art in all its forms, but there were times when even she had to regard art as a frill. When grave financial problems confronted the country, she knew where her priorities lay. She went no further, but it was assumed that these priorities lay in the Maritimes, or on the Prairies, where money problems are endemic.
Without an election, the press was in need of a political punching-bag, and Ross provided one for at least two weeks. The most conservative insisted that he be humbled, made to understand the facts of Canadian life, taught a sharp lesson: the more extreme papers demanded that his appointment be revoked, and hinted that he ought to go back to Europe, where he obviously belonged, having learned that decent people didn’t blaspheme against hockey.
The righteous uproar was almost over when Ross appeared one night in the Old Curiosity Shop. Looking at him, in his painfully reduced state, Francis knew that he loved him.
But what was there to say?
“The Ark of the Lord seems to have fallen into the hands of the Philistines,” was what he did say.
“I have never met this kind of thing before. They hate me. I think they wish me dead,” said Ross.
“Oh, not at all. Politicians get far worse abuse all the time. It will blow over.”
“Yes, and I will be left discredited in the eyes of my staff and perpetually school-marmed by the Minister, who will grudge me every penny that goes to the Gallery. I’ll be nothing more than a caretaker, looking after a cat-and-dog collection and without any hope of improving it.”
“Well, Aylwin, I don’t want to be stuffy, but you really shouldn’t have spent money you didn’t have in your grip. And the Minister—you know that as a woman she has to show herself tougher than any of the men; she can’t afford a single feminine weakness. The Prime Minister reserves all those for himself.”
“She’s out to get me, you know. Wants to prove me a fairy.”
“Well—are you? I’ve never known.”
“Not more than most men, I suppose. I’ve had affairs with women.”
“Well, why don’t you make a pass at the Minister? That would answer her question.”
“Grotesque suggestion! She smells of drug-store perfume and cough-drops! No, there’s only one thing that will put me right.”
“And that is—?”
“If only I could get one of those pictures for the Gallery. Just one would raise enough interest in the international art world to show the Minister I wasn’t completely a fool.”
“Yes, but how could you do that?” But even as he spoke, Francis knew.
“If I could get a private benefactor to give one to the Gallery, it would do an immense amount to put me right, and eventually it would put me totally right. If I could get the one I want, that’s to say.”
“Benefactors are very elusive creatures.”
“Yes, but not unknown. Frank—will you?”
“Will I what?”
“You know damn well what. Will you stump up for one of those pictures?”
“With art prices what they are at present? You flatter me!”
“No I don’t. I know what you have been paying in London in the past two or three years. You could do it.”
“Even if I could, which I don’t for a moment admit, why would I?”
“Haven’t you any patriotism?”
“It is variable. I take off my hat when our flag goes by—heraldic eyesore though it is.”
“For friendship?”
“From what I’ve seen of the world the worst thing that can happen to friendship is to put a price on it.”
“Frank, you’re making me beg. All right, damn it, I’ll beg.—Will you?”
Never in his life, which had not been sparing of discomfort, had Francis been so cornered. Ross looked so wretched, so beaten, and so beautiful in his wretchedness. In the biblical phrase, his bowels yearned toward Ross. But his compassion was not the whole of Francis’s complex of emotions. The more money he had, the more he loved money. And—he couldn’t explain it but he felt it—having relinquished his work as an artist, so much of what was deepest in him was now caught up with possessions, and therefore with money. To give a picture to the nation—very fine in the saying, and so dangerous in the doing. Be known as a benefactor and everybody wants something, often to sustain mediocrity. Yet—there was Ross, the last of his loves, and miserable. He had loved Ismay with his whole heart—and like a fool. He had loved Ruth like a man, and Ruth had died with hundreds of thousands of others, a victim of the world’s cruel stupidity. He loved Ross, not because he wanted Ross physically, but for his daring youth, which the years had not touched, for his defiance of conventions that Francis knew had kept himself in chains, had made him the sustainer of a failing estate and the supporter of a child who was not his own, had held him back from claiming a great painting as his work. Yes, he must yield, whatever the hurt to his purse, which was now almost his soul. Almost; not wholly.