The Center of the World (2 page)

So now let me come to Mrs. Spencer. She sits by His Lordship’s side and presides over the table. When conversation flags, she revives it; when it strays into unprofitable areas, she redirects it. She is His Lordship’s mistress.

Egremont has always set conventional pieties at defiance. For many years Wyndham’s mother lived at Petworth and bore His Lordship’s children without benefit of marriage. He married her eventually, but when she died, his grief was so extreme that he went up to London to recover and returned with Mrs. Spencer. She is a great and ageless beauty. I would guess that she is forty years younger than her lord and master, but she looks and may be as young as thirty, younger than his son and heir. She has good teeth, fair hair, and wonderful skin. Her smile would bring cheer to a dead man, and even Wyndham is sometimes unable to resist her charms, although he makes no secret of the fact that he hates her with all the strength a small soul is capable of.

The food is good solid English fare, served out with a liberal hand. Fresh game and fish from Petworth’s forests and streams and ponds; vegetables from the model kitchen gardens. There is good wine, but not extravagant, poured liberally, but not to
excess. Between the wine and Mrs. Spencer the conversation is most delightful. She makes a point of drawing everyone out and manages to make the dullest person at table seem interesting. The only blemish on my happiness is the fear that I will be found wanting and cast out of this Paradise prematurely. Do not take that to mean that I do not miss you; far from it. Nothing could increase my joy more than to have you by my side to share it.

Last night after we dined I joined a small group gathered in the library. The conversation was of the usual sort to be heard in country houses: talk of land reform, of the state of the deer herd at Petworth and other agricultural topics, of the latest news from France—but it was all carried on in the most agreeable way.

At length everyone tendered their good nights, but I knew I should be unable to sleep for the sheer delight of my situation. I had found a beautiful edition of Pope’s translation of Homer and settled down before the fire with the volume on my lap; it seemed the right thing to be reading in a room which also contained a bust of Aphrodite said to be by Praxiteles.

I was thus engaged for about half an hour when I heard voices approaching. It was His Lordship, Turner, and Mr. Jones. As I rose to greet them, Egremont waved me back into my seat.

“Well, Grant, what are you doing here?”

I said something to the effect that I was not yet tired and wanted to read. I offered to retire if he and his companions wished to continue their conversation in private.

“Nonsense,” he said in his gruff manner. “I don’t plan to say anything to these fellows that I would not say in front of
any other gentleman.” He settled himself into an armchair, as did Turner and Mr. Jones. His Lordship called for a bottle of brandy and a plate of biscuits. The three of them smelled like paint and mineral spirits. There is a room above the chapel to which Turner has been given a key and where he has set up his studio. No one is allowed in without his permission except, of course, Lord Egremont. I surmised that they had just been there looking at Turner’s latest painting.

“I hope,” His Lordship said, addressing me, “that you have found everything to your liking so far. I look forward to seeing what you will make of the collection here. That was a very pretty essay you wrote in the
Westminster
. Have you had much chance to look about yet?”

I said that I had seen very little, but already much to admire.

“Well, you must take your time and get to know the place. Turner here has studied our collection as well as anyone. You must have him show you round. But I look forward to your article. It will be a pleasure to see a good essay on the collection. Get it known more in the world, you know. No point hiding one’s light under a bushel. But not too long, mind you.”

I said that I would do my best to provide satisfaction, but it would be difficult to decide which pieces to single out for praise.

“That,” he said, “is your job, not mine. So what are you reading that keeps you up after dark?”

“Pope’s
Iliad
, my lord,” I replied. “This is a remarkably fine edition. A pleasure to hold in one’s hand, and the poetry, sir, is always nourishing.”

“Well said, young man, well said.”

Turner meanwhile had taken his first (and not particularly modest) swallow of brandy. I began to understand why his nose was so often red. His Lordship turned to the painter.

“Ah, Turner,” he said. “You daubers and paint-smearers can never approach Homer and Virgil. The authors of antiquity show us all we need to know of men and morals. You poor present-day fellows can do nothing but embellish and illustrate what their genius proved.”

Turner seemed at first somewhat taken aback by Egremont’s sally, although I suspected that this was not a new topic between them. He looked at his patron sideways for a moment and then took another swallow of brandy.

“My compliments,” he said. “This is most excellent brandy.” He resumed his study of the fire. “But words,” he said, “and images. Altogether different. Not even images. Light. Color. Paint. Shadow. A different order of things, sir.”

Mr. Jones now spoke. He is a bluff and commonsensical sort of man. “But you have to admit, Turner, that the ancients knew more of the truth of things than most men of our time will ever imagine.”

Turner fairly snorted. “Truth, sir? What is it? There is more truth between a woman’s legs than there ever was between Homer’s ears.”

All of us were startled by this extraordinary remark. I began to think that the brandy had done its work too quickly. Turner held his hand out before him, extending it several times, like a man trying to reach for something in the dark. “All of us.
Painters. Poets. The world is before us. What is it? It is a damn hard business, gentlemen.”

“But a woman’s legs,” said Jones. “What does that have to do with it?”

Turner looked at Jones with something like anger. He pointed one of his short stubby fingers and shook it at his friend as he spoke.

“The truth, sir, is what
matters
. My lord, you understand. Good night, gentlemen, good night!” And with that Turner, the man they call the greatest painter of the age, rose abruptly from his chair and left the room.

 
I AM NOT
a remarkable person, but I have had a glimpse into the heart of things.

I was born in the same year as the hydrogen bomb; I grew up in the New York suburbs; I have lived an ordinary life. My parents got divorced in 1967, when I was in high school. It was a messy business: alcohol, unexplained charges on the company card, calls to the police. I was sent away to a third-tier prep school to join the other lost boys who were there for similar reasons. When I returned, my mother was living on a golf course in Boca Raton with most of my father’s money and one of his partners. My father got me and the summer house on Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks.

I was an unhappy kid, my childhood wrapped up in my parents’ miserable marriage, but the summers I spent at the lake were cool drinks in the desert. It was only when we were up there that they stopped fighting. They would play golf in the morning; my father would take me sailing in the afternoon. We would sit on
the dock in the evening as they had their cocktails, chatting amiably until my mother was too drunk to stand. My father would laugh, offer her his arm, and drag her up to the house.

Except for the lake frontage, the house is a modest place. Upstairs are three small bedrooms and an old-fashioned bathroom; downstairs, a fifties-style kitchen and a living room with a view of the lake and a moose head on the wall. I spent hours when I was little staring at this sad and giant creature. It seemed, like me, to be trapped on the wrong side of my parents’ picture window.

My father always claimed that the moose was killed by Cornelius Rhinebeck, the original owner of Birch Lodge, the estate next door. Rhinebeck, a banker and industrialist from New York City, built the compound in the early years of the twentieth century. In the 1930s the estate was broken up and the individual houses have changed hands any number of times since then. Our house and the barn were originally built for the groundskeeper. A small stream and a band of trees separate us from the main buildings, although an ornate stone bridge that connects us with the estate still stands.

My father was always a tight and controlling man, but from the time of the divorce until his death on January 27, 2002, he drank more and more and became tighter and tighter with his money. His whiskey got cheaper, and it became harder for him to throw things away. It was as if he had promised himself that, having lost his wife, he would never lose anything again.

By the time he died the house was a mess and the barn even worse. They were both filled with crap that reminded me of
the worst of him and seemed like a stain on the lake and the only happy memories I had. I didn’t have a lot of money at the time, but I hired two guys to take all his junk out of the house. Most of the stuff went straight to the dump, but the stuff that I couldn’t decide what to do with I had them toss in the barn, on top of the junk that was already there.

It was a year and half later, on July 6, 2003, that I started to work on the barn. I had been up at the lake with my wife, and she was heading back to Princeton. I guess you could say that we had had a nice week together, in a middle-aged way. We had not quarreled. We made love once after a nice dinner without too much wine. But she had meetings to go to in New York and I had some vacation to burn. I had a dumpster delivered to the barn and started to fill it up. There was something deeply satisfying about taking my father’s stuff and smashing it.

I had been working for about an hour when I saw Jeffrey Mossbacher walking up the driveway. He was wearing a pair of Bermuda shorts that looked as if they had just been pressed. Rita and Jeffrey had recently purchased the main house of Birch Lodge and restored the place to what it must have looked like when Rhinebeck was alive. Photographs, with Rita posed fetchingly in front of a fireplace, had been featured in
Architectural Digest
. They were nice enough people, but they made me feel embarrassed about who I was. They were not the sort of people who let their lives be encumbered by junk; they were able to use their money to make any troubling bits of the past disappear, while for me the past was always present. Jeffrey kept quiet about what he did, but Rita, who used to be a model,
let it slip that he worked on Wall Street, something to do with hedge funds. They flew up for weekends in their plane.

“I heard all the banging and thought I would come over,” he said as he held out his hand.

I apologized for disturbing them.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you since your father passed away. I’m sorry about your loss. I never got to know your father very well.”

I thanked him for his condolences.

“So you’re starting to fix the place up?”

“That’s probably a bit strong. Just cleaning up a bit.”

“You have to start somewhere. These old places can take a lot of work.”

“There’s only so much we can do,” I said. “The taxes up here are murder.”

“It’s the waterfront that’s killing you. Fourteen K. That’s a lot, given what you have, no offense. You guys pay almost as much as we do. From a market value perspective the two places don’t compare, but from an assessment perspective, they’re pretty darn close.”

I asked him how he knew all this.

“My people were looking into our assessment—considering an appeal and all that—and so they were checking out ‘comparable’ properties.” I found his use of air quotes annoying, but let it pass. “You’re not thinking of selling, are you?”

“We’re trying to figure out how to hang on to it,” I said. “It’s a lot of expense—and some debt. It’s sort of complicated for us right now.”

“Well, if you ever want to sell, I hope you’ll give me the opportunity to meet any offer you get. One point three, one point four. It wouldn’t be out of the question, the way the market’s going. It would be fitting, in a way, to bring the old property together again. Good to close the loop, you know.” He gave me his card. “It’s got my email and cell number. If you ever even think about it, get in touch. You won’t regret it.”

I thanked him again.

“I’ll let you get back to work,” Jeffrey said. “But I’m serious. I’ve redone the old wine cellar. You should come over and check it out. We can have a glass of wine and talk.”

 
EVERYTHING ABOUT STOKES
was aggressively English, from the cut of his suit to the way he slicked back his blond hair and held out his soft right hand. He was pale, thin-lipped, and beautiful. And later, when the true and astounding—the absolutely remarkable—extent of the smash became known to the world, it was difficult to imagine such a perfectly groomed face so badly shattered that the blood and pieces of bone had to be cleaned off the Constable before it could be brought to auction.