Read Online Saturn Over the Water by J. B. Priestley, J.B. Priestley - Free Book Online

many of the English do, quietly die while still moving around and talking. Jewish zombies are hard to find. While they’re living, they’re alive. I don’t mind people being tough and aggressive if at the same time they’re intelligent and warm-hearted. This was Sam Harnberg, who was a noisy fat New York Jew who’d start shouting when better bred types would merely raise an eyebrow, and if you were dead against him and acted hard he would try to hammer you into the ground. Sam and I were friends, and had taken to each other from the time we first met, at my dealer’s in London. He loved good painting, really loved it, even more than he did good food and drink and honest men’s talk. Up to the age of about forty-five he’d worked all out in some family dress-goods business, and then, having no wife and family, he’d walked out of it to buy and sell pictures. We didn’t always agree about painting of course, but I had respect for his judgment and a growing affection for him. He met me at Idlewild Airport – and going there and waiting aren’t most people’s idea of a Saturday afternoon – and told me he hadn’t booked me an hotel room because he’d a spare bed in his apartment, above his gallery on East 57 th Street. ‘The plumbing’s guesswork, it still has steamheat, and stinks of something – hot varnish, I guess – but it’s human. And when a man first comes to this town, he needs to be reminded that all the human race hasn’t gone.’
    We must have spent nearly an hour, in a big car he’d hired, travelling in a maze of roads. The afternoon seemed to be cold and dry, with occasional flurries of snowflakes. I didn’t feel particularly tired after the trip, but I didn’t feel quite right in my mind, I wasn’t firmly anchored to reality, and I might have been drinking too much for days and nights on end.
    ‘What the hell’s the idea, Tim,’ said Sam in his deep harsh voice, ‘arriving today and leaving Monday? Who do you think you are – Foreign Secretary?’
    ‘I can’t help it, Sam. I have to look for the husband of a cousin of mine, who’s dying.’ Then I explained about Isabel and Joe Farne, but I left out the fancier speculations, not because I didn’t trust Sam – I’d have trusted him with anything – but because I didn’t know what to think of them myself. If this car, these roads, the desperate darkening landscape of Long Island, didn’t seem real, I simply couldn’t start talking about Mrs Semple, Sir Reginald and Company, and Mitchell. As for Joe Farne’s list of names and places, which I’d brooded over again on the plane and now kept securely in my wallet, it didn’t make sense to me and Sam would have thought I was barmy to take it seriously.
    ‘Arnaldos Institute? I know old Arnaldos. And don’t let that surprise you, Tim. These South American collectors are always coming up here, and mostly go back loaded with fake Utrillos and factory-fresh Renoirs. Not old Arnaldos, though. You couldn’t fool him with that junk. He’s a real collector and of course he’s got all the money in the world. I got him an early Monet, a Pissarro and a Sisley. All fresh as daisies, not that I’ve seen a goddam daisy for years. Now wait,’ Sam shouted, as if I’d been silly enough to try to interrupt, ‘if I didn’t sell him a picture of yours, when he came round in the fall, then I nearly did. I know we were talking about it.’
    ‘Is he there now – I mean, at the Institute?’
    ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Sam said. ‘But it’s summer down there, don’t forget. And I remember him telling me he’s on the coast, with desert behind him – wonderful climate, he told me – and he’s into his eighties now – I’ll bet he doesn’t weigh a hundred pounds – he might well be there. Why? You want to get acquainted with him?’
    ‘I was wondering how to do it,’ I said. ‘And this is just what I need. Sam, do me a favour. Write him an airmail letter, getting it off today, to