Pat stood up, sweaty, burly, and stooped to find his jeans in the tangle of clothes on the chair. In the bleak dissociation after sex there was something touching still in seeing him move naked around their room – soft light through the curtains on his broad back and hairy thighs and long fat member, retiring now after a hard half-hour’s work. There was the noise, like a rough breath, of the drawer pulled open for socks and pants, the surprised little squeak of the wardrobe and the flick of hangers as he chose a shirt. Everything businesslike about him seemed to Johnny a guarantee of everything else. He stood at the foot of the bed with his clothes in his hands and looked down on him. ‘What time are you meeting David?’
‘Oh, Christ,’ said Johnny, and pulled the duvet back up to his chin.
‘You hadn’t forgotten?’
Johnny closed his eyes. ‘Twelve forty-five.’
‘Well, give him my best.’
‘I will,’ said Johnny.
‘Make sure you do,’ said Pat, and went off to the bathroom.
It was one of those sad things they had to live with: his father wouldn’t come to Fulham. There was a bit of puffing about it being too far, a sly access of elderly exhaustion at the prospect. He had visited them once, the year they’d moved in, and given them a lot of advice about the garden. The arrangements in the house itself – the studio, the big bedroom the men shared – were stubborn evidence of the way Johnny lived his life: the puzzle and worry of his being an artist, the subtler problem of no one, in David’s world, having heard of him, and hiding behind these convenient concerns (‘You’ll be working, I don’t want to disturb you’) the irreducible fact that Johnny was doing openly what for David had been a matter of secrecy and then of very public shame.
Johnny dozed and woke and dozed, nursed the afterglow, the slight invalidish luxury of having been had, while Pat was shaving and showering and pushing on, yet again, with the day. The day could be held off a little longer, in the stale refuge of the bed, while the parent, up as always at six, was already inexorably in motion; a hundred teenage mornings were huddled in the heap of the duvet. His father’s habit was to be early for everything; June would drive him to the station, he would wait, noticed probably but speaking to no one, and when the signal changed he would stroll to the end of the platform, where the first-class carriage was due to halt. His figure, tall, lean, muscled to an abnormal degree for a man in his seventies, was ghosted now, in Johnny’s mind, by the boyish figure of Freddie’s chapters, Dad in training, exploring his strength and a latent power he had over others – he wasn’t sure Ivan was right to make him read it, it was something entirely unsuspected that he needn’t have known, and he saw the knowledge burning in his face when he met his father in four hours’ time.
After Pat had left, Johnny went down, made coffee, and worked on the curtains in the Chalmers job, then applied himself to the round brass studs of the doge’s chair, each carried off with a quick curled highlight, dimmed almost to nothing in the shadow of George’s knee. Important of course not to let the interest of the background distract from the beauty of the sitter . . . In a further background, Johnny’s thoughts took shape from the work of the three brushes, in delicate dashes, quick circlings, inexplicable fusings of his actions with his remote and shifting ideas. His practised hand brought some order to his unruly and incompetently managed feelings about his father – the wan dutiful optimism as each visit loomed, the magnetic conflicts of the visits themselves, when a longing for harmony was always frustrated by deep-set habits of rejection. The thought that he should really go home and paint his father’s portrait hung in the air today. Was that portrait a palpable absence, a gesture David hoped for but could never ask for? Johnny could bring it up at lunch, if the mood seemed right, and if, seated in the old man’s strong personal atmosphere, he felt they could stand the much longer hours of mutual scrutiny. His plan for later in the afternoon had been agreed to in a cheerily unreflecting tone, but it might be unwise to press any harder. In London David was away from June, and so notionally more pliable; though invitations to bend often made him more vertical still.
The fact was that David had his own London, so long established that it was now in part imaginary. From Euston he took a cab to the RAF Club in Piccadilly. From there he might pay calls on a shirt-maker in Queen Victoria Street, and, early in the evening, an expensive Chinese restaurant at the narrow top end of Kensington High Street. There were better shirt-shops and restaurants of all kinds far closer to the Club, but the journeys by black cab between his places were as much a part of his knowing London as the places themselves. He had a number of contacts, and in the old days had had lunch at the Club, every March, with his stockbroker, ‘old Veezey’, but Veezey had retired three years ago, his firm absorbed into a huge conglomerate, and the one attempt to have lunch with his successor had led to a casual rebuff. After that he had shifted his business to a broker in Birmingham. And then he had sold out to a huge conglomerate himself. The Works, DDS Engineering, which for decades had welcomed arrivals on that side of the town with its high brick wall and chimney, was now someone else’s: a good business move, the money in the bank a salve perhaps for his suddenly purposeless days.
His father never said so, but Johnny believed that in his keen, unpoetical mind a feeling endured that he had helped save London and everything it once represented. He must have known it first in the War, when large parts of it were already in rubble. Even twenty years later, when Johnny was first brought here by his parents, grass-grown ruins still flanked Ludgate Hill. A disgrace, his father said, but gratifying proof, even so, of the scale of the crisis he’d played his part in. Johnny remembered their arrival that day – he was seven or eight, with every reason, coming down from the Midlands, with the noisy street ahead of them, to take his mother’s hand. He pulled her round, to look up at it – the Euston Arch, the height and the mass of the pillars so frightening and compelling that a shiver of submission went through him. His father’s feelings seemed divided – he was proud of it, part of railway history, the entry to London, to which he’d brought his wife and son; but he was pleased too, in his progressive way, that it was going to be pulled down, and a brand new station built. Somehow, in the sway of his confidence, they ignored the taxi rank, and he led them on, till he stood by the Euston Road in his trilby, his raincoat over one arm, the other arm raised as a dozen cabs ran past with passengers already in them, smoking, reading the paper and leaning forward to joke with the driver. It was a first glimpse of his father’s fallibility, just when he’d intended to impress.
‘Squadron Leader Sparsholt . . .’
The young woman in a dark suit looked at him over the desk as if she thought this unlikely. ‘Oh, yes . . . ?’
Johnny stared, then laughed. ‘Oh, not me! No, I’m his son. He said to meet him in the lounge.’
She smiled calmly at his muddle. ‘You should go up to the first floor.’
Sloping across the hall Johnny saw himself in a big mirror, something mutinous in his lumpy shirt collar, the tie twisted probably under it. His hair, plastered down after his shower, had jumped to life again. But the trim and blazered old men coming past him on the stairs or, at the top, holding the door for him, seemed less conscious of his oddity, brown boots worn with a baggy black suit, than he did himself. He said thank you, held the door in turn for a man in uniform – four stripes, group captain – and though he saw at once his father wasn’t there made his way with a mild searching frown to the far end of the busy room. A party of three got up, Johnny hovered and bagged the table, sat down in the low armchair looking blankly at their sudded half-pint mugs and the glass beaker of toothpicks.
Did his father even notice the things that sank on Johnny’s spirits here? – perhaps, yes: at a level beneath thought, he was reassured by the clusters of maroon armchairs and sofas, the thin Georgian pretensions of the pastel-coloured panelling, the table lamps, the fake mahogany desk; was cheered by the tied-back chintz curtains and brightly lit portrait of the Queen. It wasn’t a posh club, the RAF, it was united by something other than class and money, woven into Johnny’s life so early on that his rebellion against it was matched by a helpless understanding and even sympathy for it. It wasn’t White’s, thank god, or Boodle’s, to which George Chalmers kept making it clear he wasn’t going to invite him. Still, it required a surrender, to meeting-room monotony, bare institutional comfort, the knowledge that no one here saw anything wrong with it. In a way, what Johnny liked best were the paintings of aeroplanes on the stairs – a subject even more resistant to art than the Queen, and not much depicted anywhere else.
It was unlike David to be late, but very slight debilities and lapses were entering his behaviour, which to Johnny felt almost a relief. He looked down the long room to the door, told the waitress who cleared and wiped the table he would hang on till he arrived. For ten years or more his father had avoided the Club, after the crisis, till some time in the late 70s Terry Barkworth had asked him in for a game of squash, which led on to the braving of the bar, and dinner – David had done a lot of braving by then, but it must have been stiff, at the RAF Club, even for a former squadron leader, DFC. There were members who didn’t speak to him still, and it was that sense of courted rejection that Johnny found more painful than anything else about meeting him here – silly snobberies about the furniture were a buffer for that other barely visible thing.
Ah, there he was, looming in pieces through the bevelled panes of the door, pushing into the room, strolling past the seated groups almost as if disguising his destination – though Johnny raised an arm, grinned and half stood up. But he had seen someone, stopped by his table, was introduced to the woman with him, the name Sparsholt said clearly, the woman’s smile and tilt of the head at the touch of fame and at her own skill in greeting and absorbing it. Johnny thought no one in person was the person you expected, and pictured, wrote to or spoke to on the phone; and his father especially seemed at each appearance to be more strangely and sharply himself. Each phase of his life suited him, he was startlingly handsome in old age, in his old-fashioned way, the small moustache darker than his hair, and with the upright bearing of a man quite as fit as his son, who was thirty years younger. All this would have charmed the woman too. David in himself wasn’t charming, and had no way with words, but a power glanced off him; so that when he moved on at last with a smile and a nod towards Johnny in the far corner the whole story of Evert’s love for him fifty years earlier made unanswerable sense, in a way that it hadn’t for Johnny when toiling through Freddie’s peculiar memoir.
David sat down, the waitress took their order and left, and he and Johnny looked at each other and at the table, intimates or strangers, neither of them seemed sure. Johnny heard that the journey had been eventless, that his health was good, and that he’d mowed the lawn for the last time this year. He got it out of the way as smoothly as he could: ‘And June’s all right?’
‘Oh, she’s fine . . . you know, she’s got this neck problem, trapped nerve, gives her a bit of grief’ – his own sympathy vague, or as if sparing Johnny.
‘Ah, well, give her my love.’
His father smiled quickly at him, in gratitude or doubt, and sat back as the drinks arrived – his perpetual sherry and a glass of white wine for Johnny. ‘Ah, good . . .’ It was all settled in, and had been for years, not ideal and not easy to change – the way they got on, the way June and his father lived. ‘She makes me happy,’ his father said to him once, not in answer to a question, but from a pondered need to make it clear. It was amazing to think anyone as perennially dissatisfied as June could bring happiness to another person’s life, but it seemed she’d done it. She was so unlike Connie as to suggest a radical correction, a try at something bracingly different, but perhaps always needed and missed. And presumably she loved him, she’d guarded his door and typed his letters for years; the sheer force of her forbearance in marrying him, knowing what she did, must have come as a great blessing to him.
‘Well, cheers!’
‘Cheers. And how about you, old lad? Keeping busy?’ – as if Johnny was a pensioner too.
‘Yes, Dad, I’m always busy! I’ve got a big portrait nearly done – old chap who must have been at Oxford the same time as you, though he says he didn’t know you.’
David raised his eyebrows – ‘I was hardly there.’
‘George Chalmers.’ To someone else he might have said Chalmers was an awful old queen; today it felt daring just to mention Oxford.
His father said, quite modestly, ‘I don’t really count myself as having been to Oxford – you know, I could have gone back after the War, but I chose not to.’
‘I know.’
‘What did it add up to, really? – just a few weeks. I can barely remember it, if I’m honest.’
‘Well,’ said Johnny as he lifted his glass, ‘it will be interesting for you to see Evert again’; and found he was blushing, while his father grunted and said,
‘Yes, I wonder what gave him that idea?’
‘Mmm, he just mentioned he’d like to see you.’
‘I hope he won’t want to talk about art.’
Johnny laughed forgivingly and said, ‘I expect he’ll want to talk about the past.’
But his father gave nothing on that. ‘He was in the Army, wasn’t he?’ – that was what the past meant above all.
‘Yes, he’s never said much about it – to me at least.’
‘Ah,’ said his father, and set down his glass, already empty. ‘We might as well go down,’ with a note of welcome routine.
‘Steady on, Dad . . .’ Johnny took a moment to knock back his wine, then stood up and said, ‘Oh, Pat sends his best, by the way.’
‘Ah . . . yes,’ his father smiled, accepted it, but didn’t ask him to send his to Pat.
In the noisy dining room, they were led to a small table at the back; white napkins stood lop-eared in the wine glasses. The head waiter pushed in David’s chair as they sat, and laid the wine list beside him. ‘Well now . . .’: they both needed more drink to have lunch together, and in a minute David said as usual, ‘Merlot all right?’ while Johnny worked his way through the verbiage of the menu towards equally inevitable questions. In a minute or two another waiter came, sleekly handsome, in white shirt and tight black trousers, and so young that the battles commemorated all around must have been mere remote and random hearsay to him. Johnny sent him off again to check about ingredients. ‘They’ll see you right,’ said David. That his son was a vegetarian was something he fully accepted, he took a practical interest in it, and complained about menus and kitchens as sternly as if he’d been one of that troublesome minority himself. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, when the waiter returned to confirm there was chicken stock in the soup. Johnny bent the waiter to his will, with a slow smile that he saw wake some other recognition in the boy, quickly repressed, but then coming out again in a sly smile of his own as he said he was sure the chef would do something special for him. Johnny raised his hand as his father started to say it was the least they could do – ‘It’s OK, Dad’ – watching the waiter move off, and the old irresolvable thing in the air, of not knowing what the old man picked up on or blocked out.
Over the soup (green salad for Johnny) they talked about the Works, and what the new people were making of it. It was a difficult subject, charged with the regrets of an active man who had made a decision to give up something he loved. ‘Well, they’ve taken the sign down,’ he said.
‘DDS?’
His father nodded. ‘Not that it matters, but they left it for six months, you know, out of respect.’
Johnny wondered if that was the reason. ‘What is it now?’
‘Stella. In huge bloody letters, hideous.’
‘Stella . . . It must look like a brewery.’
His father perhaps didn’t get the allusion. ‘They’re Chinese,’ he said, ‘of course,’ and it was that that made him almost laugh.
‘Are they laying people off?’
He dabbed at his moustache with his napkin. ‘I see Stewart Dibden at the Lions, he keeps me in the picture. He says they’re planning to expand.’
‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it?’
‘No, excellent.’ In his gloomy look across the table some suggestion, not aired for twenty years, seemed still to be remembered: that Johnny might have taken an interest in the firm himself.
‘I think you were quite right to get out when you did, Dad,’ he said.
Johnny had a view, beyond his father’s head, of a portrait of an airman in flying suit, goggles raised, very simple: the tall square-jawed figure against a tan-coloured background. Well, he couldn’t do him like that, and the question of just how he might do him was a hard one – how much of the glorious past to convey without irony or sentiment. He’d had enough to drink, when his pasta arrived, to say, ‘Dad, have you ever had your portrait done?’
Was there something bashful in his father’s tone: ‘No, not really.’
‘Not really?’ Johnny smiled at him. ‘Not in the RAF?’
‘Well, there was a chap who did a picture of me, yes, a portrait.’
‘Oh?’
‘I’ve no idea what became of it. He was killed, lost at sea, so I heard.’ He raised his eyebrows as he lifted his fork: ‘A very talented artist.’
It was a phrase he had never heard his father utter. ‘What was his name?’
‘Well, you’ll probably have heard of him. He was called Coyle.’
‘Peter Coyle, do you mean?’ – Johnny hopeless at dissembling, though his father, eating, briefly contemplative, didn’t notice anything odd. ‘Well, yes, I have heard of him. Didn’t he go into camouflage in the War?’
‘He may well have done. All this was before I signed up – at Oxford.’
‘So you do remember Oxford!’
‘A few things, obviously,’ with the hint of a scowl at any clever contradiction. ‘I don’t suppose the picture still exists.’
‘Well, I bet someone’s got it. Just a sketch, probably, was it?’
He seemed doubtful for a moment, but not of his facts: ‘I’m not sure what you mean. I wouldn’t say a sketch, it was a big oil painting, of me in rowing kit. It took weeks – he kept asking for more time. Of course I was very tied up with other things then.’
‘I can imagine.’ Johnny sat back, then remembered his food, and got on with it. What his father had said, for the very first time, seemed to fix and authenticate the whole story Freddie had told – though the claim about the large oil painting showed in a salutary way that Freddie didn’t know everything. David himself seemed unaware of the value of what he had let drop.
‘So what are your holiday plans, old lad?’ he said. ‘Italy again?’
‘Dad, the thing is, I wondered if you’d sit for me?’
The slightly technical way of putting it delayed the reaction by a further second or two. Then, ‘Ooh, you don’t want to be bothered with that.’
‘It wouldn’t be a bother, Dad.’
‘No, no.’ He cut at the thick lump of lamb on his plate. ‘I’m not the right . . . subject for you.’
‘Well, I don’t agree with that at all. It’s ridiculous I’ve never painted you before.’
‘You’re too busy,’ said his father, and in his quick look down and away Johnny knew he had glimpsed a long-established habit of making excuses for him, and for his failure, as a prize-winning portrait painter, to turn his gaze on his own father. It was as touching as it was annoying.
‘In fact I’ve got a fairly empty period coming up, so that’s not a problem.’
‘Anyway, where would we do it?’
‘I could come up and stay for a week, if you like; we could have a sitting each day.’
The prospect was so unusual it seemed almost to alarm him. ‘Too much bother,’ he said again, chasing the lamb down with a swig of wine; though something in his eyes suggested he was moved too by the thought of the visit. The bother, Johnny thought, would really be with June.
‘Well, think about it, will you?’
He didn’t promise to do so, but a moment later said, ‘You must have drawn me dozens of times when you were a lad.’
‘I certainly did.’
‘Yes. You were always bloody good at capturing people.’
‘You never told me that before!’
‘Of course I did.’
Johnny weighed up the situation. ‘Well, it’s good to come back to someone years later. They’ve changed, and so have you.’
‘God knows,’ said his father, and after a second looked straight at him.
When their cab came down the Old Brompton Road, David, vigilant for reference points, Tube stations, street names, saw Cranley Gardens, and said, ‘A good part of town.’ Though when he saw the house itself, the flaking porch and high-hanging swag of tarpaulin, he seemed to take in, with a little flinch and then a setting of his features, that the visit might require unexpected tact. Johnny rang the bell, they were let in and went upstairs. His father, peering up and down, tongue on lip, examined the antique apparatus of the lift. ‘They ought to get this going,’ he said. The house, quite new and strange to him, appeared in an odd light to Johnny too, pictures reshuffled on the landing, and the glimpse through the door of ‘his’ room of different things hanging on the stained and bleached wallpaper: the room seemed a cell, a shrine almost, of the precious life he had led wholly without his father’s knowledge or participation.
David hung back on the landing to look at the Chagall print – he had the air of someone humorously suppressing his prejudices, and with a hint of nerves too as a new arrival in this long-established household: ‘À mon ami Dax . . .’ Johnny went into the sitting room, where Evert was standing by the fire.
‘Hi, Evert – I’ve just brought my dad in to see you.’
Evert looked up, and across towards the door, with a hint of alarm, not knowing whom to expect – the entrance delayed by a few seconds. Then, ‘Oh, hello, David . . .’ as if he came round all the time, and was even a bit of a nuisance; but it was probably shyness. He walked away from him and then turned. ‘You’re looking very well.’
‘You know me,’ said David; and then, obliged to reply: ‘So are you, Evert. You’ve hardly changed.’
‘I must have been a bloody wreck before, then!’ said Evert, and laughed cheerfully. ‘Have a seat.’ There was a faint sense still that he didn’t know exactly who his visitor was. And Johnny couldn’t tell for a minute or two if they needed him there, or if nothing much could happen or be said until he’d gone. What would two long-ago lovers be likely to feel, one of them twice-married, the other losing his memory?
‘I’ll make you some tea, shall I?’ he said.
‘Oh, thank you, darling,’ said Evert.
‘Well!’ said David, sitting down and looking round keenly. ‘So this is the famous house.’
‘Ah,’ said Evert, ‘you’ll have heard about it, I expect.’
‘Well, from Jonathan, of course. And a long time ago, Evert, from you!’
‘Oh, really, yes,’ said Evert.
‘Your father was still alive then, of course – in the War.’ He smiled at him. ‘I remember you saying what a monster he was.’
‘Oh, did I?’
‘I’ll never forget that.’
Evert looked at Johnny, hovering. ‘Do you want a hand?’
‘No, no, it’s fine,’ said Johnny, and went out to the kitchen, where in a minute the roar of the kettle covered all that could be heard of their talk.
When he came back with the tray his father had stood up again and was going round looking up and down at the pictures, and then, on rather surer ground, out of the window. Evert sat watching him, with a host’s patience and some other calculation under it. He was taking him in. Johnny, confused by his own feelings and expectations, said, ‘Shall I be Herta?’
‘Mm?’ said his father.
‘Oh, do,’ said Evert.
Johnny took him a cup first. Then, ‘Dad, I’ll put yours here.’
‘Oh, thanks, old lad,’ his father coming over and sitting on the other side of the hearth, in Ivan’s chair, with the double stack of books, biographies, memoirs, on the floor beside it.
‘And I found these eclairs in the fridge.’ They were his father’s favourite, odd tea-room predilection from Johnny’s childhood, bought fresh then from Pinnock’s in Abbey Street – now, packaged, the chocolate sweating slightly, from Waitrose in the King’s Road.
‘My one vice,’ said David, taking the little plate, with its cusped cake fork and folded napkin, and setting it on the table beside him.
Johnny stood back, surveyed the two men, wondering quite what he’d done. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it,’ he said.
‘You won’t stay and have a cup, lovie?’ said Evert.
‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours. I’ve got to pick up Lucy from one party and take her to another – it’s Thomas’s birthday, you see’ – he just came out with it, and let his father handle it as he would. In fact it was Evert who seized on it, with relief but a certain vagueness.
‘Ah, Thomas, yes . . . how is he?’
‘I think he’s all right.’ Johnny didn’t much care for this boy, whom Lucy called her brother though as Una’s child he was no blood relation at all – and could hardly have been more unlike her. ‘It’s his eighteenth today.’
‘I always forget how much older he is than . . . er . . . your little girl.’
‘Than Lucy . . . yes.’
‘That’s right.’ And there they were – David rarely mentioned Lucy, and found the whole thing tricky when his friends went on about their grandchildren and the like. He sat there now as if the subject had never been mentioned. Evert looked at him. ‘Johnny took quite a while to decide to be a father.’
Miraculously, David, with a narrow smile, as if doubting this strange opportunity to shine, said, ‘Well, so did I, Evert, come to that!’
They all laughed, though for Johnny the strangeness lay in his saying something so personal: it was promising. It was only as he went out and down the stairs, past large pale shadows where pictures had hung, that he realized what he’d done for Evert and his father was just what Freddie had done for them, fifty-five years ago. He’d set them up together. It wasn’t clear what Freddie had hoped for from the meeting, and he’d acted himself on a conviction he couldn’t explain.
He left Lucy back at Belsize Grove, and when he was let into Evert’s house again and went upstairs he found his mood of mild anxiety about his daughter’s social life carried over to his father’s – had he had a nice time? had they got on? did they play games? He looked round the door of the drawing room not knowing if he was their saviour or if he was spoiling the fun at a critical moment. They were sitting just where they had been, Evert with an excited but unfocused expression, David, saying something in desultory agreement, with a look of unusual and virtuous patience. They had drunk their tea, and the little chocolate and cream-smeared plates lay on the tables beside them. Johnny as Herta cleared them away, not asking questions. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better be going, Evert,’ his father said, in a tone of polite regret unusual to him.
The odd moment came when they stood and said goodbye. Johnny worried, wondered, hoped for a moment that Evert was about to kiss his father. He watched him come close to him, in front of the fire, perhaps uncertain what to say, not looking him in the eye; then he raised his right hand and abstractedly but tenderly fingered the Fighter Command badge in David’s buttonhole – a small gesture of quizzical familiarity that struck Johnny as quite outside the repertoire of his father’s life, or of what he knew of it. Then David patted Evert on the shoulder – it was half an embrace. ‘Do come again!’ Evert said, and left it to Johnny to lead him out of the room.
He’d just opened the door when the light on the stairs came on, and in a second or two the noise from far down of someone climbing, determined and unseen. Johnny and his father waited a moment at the top and Ivan appeared at the turn below, looked up and saw them, saw he had arrived only just in time. ‘Hello!’ he said, beaming at David, rich in his sense of the moment, which to David of course meant nothing – he’d never heard of Ivan. ‘I’m so glad I caught you.’
‘Dad, this is Ivan, old friend of mine, and Evert’s.’
His father, courteous, nodded, said, ‘David Sparsholt,’ pleasantly and with an indissoluble grain of awareness of all the name had meant.
And now what would Ivan say? I’ve heard so much about you . . . ? His strange randy feeling for old men, and handsome well-preserved ones especially, seemed to Johnny to glow in his smiling face as he got his breath back – he must have left work early, rushed home. ‘It’s a great pleasure to meet you – at last.’
‘Well,’ said David, unaware of just how long that had been.
‘Johnny and I’ve been friends for twenty-one years, so I feel I know you already.’
Their position at the top of the downward flight, David’s hand already on the knob of the banister, didn’t promise a long chat. ‘Well, Evert’s just been telling me all about you,’ he said, wrong-footing Johnny; and Ivan said,
‘Oh, dear!’
David gave a smile Johnny hadn’t seen since childhood, cautiously teasing, entering a game, though at seventy-three he made a bigger effect with it. ‘His saviour, he called you’ – and the smile played on Ivan as if surprised at the fact, but obliged, and even pleased, to accept it, in this house full of gay men.
‘Oh, well . . .’ said Ivan, with a little slump, as though under the weight of those duties. Then he beamed again: ‘Do you have to go? Stay and have a drink, it will mean so much to Evert, seeing you again after all this time.’
The old man’s smile narrowed a little, but he was still genial as he went down the first step. ‘He did write to me, at least twice, and I’m ashamed to say I didn’t reply.’ This really wasn’t for discussion, and he was almost at the turn of the stair when he looked back and said, ‘I’ve never been much of a letter-writer’; he waved his hand in the air as he went on down and was hidden by the cage of the lift.
It was only when they were in the hall, Johnny picking up the second post from the floor, greeting but not introducing Mrs Lenska on the doorstep, that he saw, with his father beside him, how filial his feelings for Evert had become. Had his father himself sensed this, and been touched by it – wounded, perhaps, though possibly reassured? And if so, had he admitted the irony, or anyway oddity, of these two father-figures having long ago been friends, and then, astonishingly, lovers? They walked quickly away from the house, towards the Old Brompton Road – to Johnny the very pavement, the area gates, the numbered pillars of the porches, familiar to him for twenty years, seemed proof of his belonging, and of his father’s transience, a rare and wary visitor. As they turned the corner into the brighter street, David’s face seemed to show the uneasy relief of another kind of visitor, leaving a hospital when the time is up. ‘Poor old Evvie,’ he said – it wasn’t a diminutive any of his real friends used, and seemed a clumsy claim on intimacy, and sympathy. Though might it, just possibly, have been what he called him at Oxford?
‘You were very close once, weren’t you?’ Johnny said – and then to lessen the pressure of implication: ‘I mean, fifty years ago!’
His father glanced with habitual interest at a parked Bentley, S-series, his own sliding reflection in its windows and bodywork. He said, ‘I suppose he was pretty keen on me then. You know, looking back.’
‘Mm, and what did you feel about him?’ It was almost as if in the chill and change of the dusk, in the ambiguous minutes when streetlights came on under a high pink sky, a new freedom was possible. That strange ‘Evvie’, like a girl’s name, with its touch of pathos and nostalgia, seemed to hint at a desire for it. Things had happened, not quite named before; why not name them now? His father looked at him, with a pinch of a smile, as if at a much cleverer cross-examiner.
‘Things were very different then, old lad. But no, you’re right, we were good mates for a while.’
‘Oh, Dad, well that’s lovely.’
There was a pause before he said, ‘Just for a moment’ – explaining but not subtracting from what he’d said. They walked on, Johnny looking around, with only a quick concealed peek at his father. There was a wine bar just opening – could the new mood carry them across the street and into the red glow of its doorway? He sensed his father’s restlessness, and it came out oddly for all the inner rehearsal:
‘I didn’t know before that you’d been in trouble with the authorities.’
‘What’s that!’ – the shadows of a later trouble were as tall as the houses.
‘You know, at Oxford, about having Mum in your room.’ Any mention of Mum to his father had a hint of reproach, an unwelcome persistence, though it could hardly be avoided. But now he seemed almost pleased, he had the set smile of someone making a good-natured effort to think back, even if pretty sure what he was going to find. It was candour that cost him nothing, and he shook his head amiably—
‘No, no, old lad, there was never any trouble like that.’
‘Oh,’ said Johnny, ‘I’d heard you were fined twenty pounds by the College!’
His father laughed briefly at this further absurdity. ‘Have you got a clue how much that was then? No, no . . .’ Though as they walked on he seemed to see some charm in the idea. ‘I won’t deny we got up to no good, but I wasn’t so stupid as to get caught.’
‘Right,’ said Johnny, not knowing how to proceed, but knowing of course his father’s ingrained habit of denial. ‘I heard Evert lent you the money.’
‘Is this what old Evvie says? You can’t really believe him, not these days, he was talking all kinds of nonsense just now.’ And then again, more freely and more considerately, ‘Not that I care a damn. It just didn’t happen.’
They never knew how to say goodbye, his father sensed and avoided any impulse of Johnny’s to hug him or kiss him, and his parting words were said over his shoulder as he strode suddenly into the road: ‘I must get to Euston!’ – hand raised, a grin of clarified affection and relief. The taxi signalled and slowed to a stop fifty yards down the street. Johnny watched his father as he went towards it, silver hair and turned-up collar of the sheepskin jacket, the suggestion, even now, of an impulse to march subdued to the civilian briskness of his walk. He said two words to the driver and got into the cab without glancing back. The new intimacy had been just for a moment too.