‘Have you read his new book?’ Francesca said.
‘I haven’t actually,’ said Johnny.
‘I wonder if you’ll like it,’ said Francesca.
‘I’m not a big reader,’ said Johnny.
‘Francesca hasn’t read it either,’ said Iffy. ‘Pay no attention.’
‘Oh,’ said Johnny, and started to blush. ‘Who is Freddie, exactly?’
‘Ah . . .’ said Evert, with a gasp and a smile, ‘who is Freddie?’ – appealing to himself as well as the others.
‘Oh, well . . .’ said Francesca, drawing her head back.
‘Where to start,’ said Iffy and shook her head.
‘No reason you should know,’ said Evert, so courteously as to suggest the opposite. There was a pause as they considered how best to educate him in this large subject.
‘I know his name,’ said Johnny.
‘So you haven’t read The Lion Griefs?’ Francesca said, biting her lip.
‘I’d be amazed if he’d read The Lion Griefs,’ said Iffy.
‘What is it?’ Johnny said, not even understanding the title.
‘It’s a memoir,’ said Iffy, ‘but of course he also writes fiction.’
‘Mm, and not always easy to tell which is which,’ said Evert.
‘He keeps a famous diary,’ said Iffy, ‘which we all live in terror of.’ She sat forward over the tray, the ruined cake on its doily. ‘Are you sure you don’t want a cup of tea?’
‘Oh – no thanks.’ He was dying for a beer, or a glass of wine.
‘Well, sit down anyway,’ said Evert. ‘Take your coat off.’
Johnny did so, laid his coat over a chair, sat down and looked around, explored the view of the sitting room in its normal and private arrangement, books on the floor, the small red light of the stereo, the Nicholsons and what he now knew were the Goyles in their everyday habit of being seen and ignored.
‘I want to have a look at your work, by the way,’ said Francesca.
‘I’m not doing much at the moment,’ said Johnny.
‘Oh, Brian Savory said you were sketching the old gang the other night.’
‘Oh, did he?’ said Johnny, and laughed.
‘Were you drawing us?’ said Iffy. ‘You must let us see.’
‘Well it wasn’t anything – it’s just a habit of mine.’
Francesca came towards him, coolly inescapable. ‘Do you have them on you?’
‘Well,’ said Johnny, feeling it was dangerous territory – not only his skill would be assessed but his view of the people who’d welcomed him in. He unbuttoned his jacket pocket and pulled out the little sketchbook. It might be one of those occasions when you had to explain the pictures as you showed them. It went to Iffy first.
‘Oh, yes . . .’ she said, nodding slowly as she turned the pages. There were really only four quick drawings, and she flicked back through them pretending not to have seen the sketches of something quite different that followed. She passed it to Evert.
‘I messed up the one of you,’ Johnny said, wishing he hadn’t shown them. But Evert looked at it as if he could take anything. Francesca leant over him to see, and though she didn’t say a word she looked across at Johnny in a way he found both friendly and unnerving. He was putting the book away as Denis strode in, striped shirt and tie under a dark blazer.
‘Ah! How nice: Jonathan.’
‘He’s come to see Ivan,’ said Francesca.
‘Are you all ready for a drink?’ said Denis, crossing to the table by the window where a dozen bottles and the soda siphon were. ‘Iphigenia?’
‘What? . . . For once I won’t, love, thanks.’
‘Jonathan, how about you?’ Denis smiled at him, as if any answer he gave would be wrong.
‘A gin and tonic, please,’ said Johnny.
‘A gin and tonic.’ Denis snapped the cap on a new bottle of gin.
‘Though I should probably tell Ivan I’m here . . .’ He found he had seized on the unexpected diversion from being alone with him.
‘And what are you young people doing this evening?’ said Denis.
‘They’re going to the Sol y Sombra,’ said Francesca.
‘What fun,’ said Denis, holding up the tumbler like a chemist as he poured in the tonic.
‘I hope so . . . !’ said Johnny, amazed to hear a gay club mentioned so matter-of-factly among adults of his parents’ age, who seemed less bothered about it than he was himself.
‘No, I must say I give full marks to Ivan,’ Denis said. ‘I’d always had him down as a gerontophile.’
Johnny smiled and looked from side to side; through some association with the name Geraint he guessed this was a word for a Welshman. He said, ‘I don’t really know him yet.’ He remembered how in thirty minutes he’d been violently kissed by Denis and had then more affectionately kissed Ivan, and how the memory of the first had interfered like a lingering but more exotic taste with the milder but nicer second. Then Ivan came in, so suddenly they all wondered if he’d heard them, Johnny smiled, his heart raced, feeling his desires were somehow on view to the whole room, but no one seemed to mind or to notice, and it was as if Ivan himself hadn’t seen him, he nodded to Evert, and to Denis, who offered him his ‘usual’ as he crossed to the drinks tray.
‘We’ve had another loss,’ said Iffy.
‘What’s that?’ said Ivan, and now he smiled and raised his eyebrows at Johnny as he came round and sat on the sofa beyond her.
‘Poor Evert has.’
Evert hesitated. ‘Oh, just that little Chelsea figure that was on the mantelpiece.’
‘The dear little Falstaff,’ said Iffy.
‘When did you last see it?’ said Ivan competently.
‘You know I’m not sure – a week ago?’
‘Herta must have broken it,’ said Denis. ‘She’s getting awfully clumsy, poor old thing.’
‘It was my mother’s,’ said Evert, ‘but . . . well, it doesn’t really matter.’
‘So you haven’t seen it, Denny?’ said Iffy, in a flat tone, as if voicing a general suspicion.
But Denis merely snuffled as he sat down and crossed his legs, and said, ‘Cheerio.’
‘I can’t abide losing things,’ said Iffy. ‘A lot of Daddy’s stuff has gone – or I can’t find it. Quite valuable things, probably.’
Evert said semi-obliquely, ‘Iffy’s father was a rather important architect.’
‘Oh, yes?’ said Johnny.
After another pause in which the others nursed their shared knowledge, Francesca said, ‘Yah, do you know, Peter Orban.’
It was a further room suddenly opened beyond the remarkable one they were already in. ‘Oh wow,’ Johnny said.
‘It sounds as if you’ve heard of him, then, that’s good!’ said Iffy.
‘Well . . . yes,’ said Johnny, sitting forward with a small shake of the head and a cautious feeling he might have something to say. ‘You see, I did my fine art diploma at Hoole College. So I lived in a Peter Orban building for two years.’
Francesca looked at him narrowly, as if to signal that a lot hung on his answer. ‘And how was it for you?’
‘Oh, it was marvellous, it was beautiful.’ He grinned at Iffy with a new fascination, as if to compare this other product of the great Hungarian Modernist. All his artist’s instincts, and loyalties, acclaimed the Hoole campus, though it was a divisive matter, and many people hated it. There were certain impracticalities – the studio windows leaked, the classrooms in summer were stiflingly hot, in the halls where they lived you could hear your neighbour turn over in bed, and you had to get out of bed yourself to turn off the light. Horrible smells came up through the shower outlets. ‘I loved it, anyway.’
‘I didn’t know you were at Hoole,’ said Ivan, an airy admission followed smoothly by a claim: ‘I expect you know Peter designed a house for my uncle?’
‘Oh, no, I didn’t.’
‘It was the first thing he did in England, almost. Well it’s not in England, of cour
se, it’s in Wales – you’ll have to see it!’ – his dark eyes glittering over his raised glass, his mouth hidden.
‘I’d love to,’ said Johnny, not sure how this would be arranged. ‘You mean Stanley Goyle?’
‘Uncle Stanley, yes.’
‘What part of Wales is it exactly? We used to go to Criccieth each year.’
‘As a matter of fact it’s in Pembrokeshire,’ said Ivan.
‘It’s become a bit of a worry,’ said Iffy, ‘I’m afraid. Your grandfather’s buildings tend to need a great deal of care.’
‘Indeed they do,’ said Francesca piously.
‘As, I may say, did your grandfather . . .’
They laughed mildly at this, Johnny naturally curious.
‘Peter wasn’t an easy man, was he,’ said Evert.
‘He could be bloody difficult,’ said Iffy. She looked at Denis. ‘Perhaps I will have a drink.’
‘So, we’ve all had difficult fathers,’ said Evert, looking kindly at Johnny, who coloured again and saw Ivan watching him.
‘Well, can I just say: I didn’t,’ Ivan said.
‘No, but yours died, didn’t he, love, when you were still awfully young,’ said Iffy.
‘You mean he might have got difficult later on?’ said Ivan. Everyone laughed, though Johnny sensed from the way she did so that Francesca thought Ivan an interloper in her mother’s world – perhaps she’d been the favourite here before. She glanced aside as she laughed as if to find something more worthwhile to do.
In the pause that followed, Johnny peeped at Evert, half-wanting to ask about his father at Oxford, that brief period of which no word or image seemed to survive. I knew your father, he had said, and something merely myth, or hearsay, took on colour, and might darken with a dozen details if he asked him more; but Johnny was so deeply in the habit of avoiding and deflecting talk about him that he said nothing.
5
Johnny closed the shop door, went quickly down the street, and as soon as he turned the corner into the King’s Road reached up and with two deft twists freed his hair and shook it out – a man in a passing van whistled, and a middle-aged woman getting into her car said sportingly, ‘I wish I could do that.’ He saw himself in a couple of shop windows, and in the angled doorway of the Bazaar there was a full-length mirror, where he peered as he parted the jackets on the rail outside. It was after eleven, but the boutiques woke up late, and at some the doors were just being unlocked. He could have taken the bus the whole length of the street, but looked forward each time to the life of the pavement, where even on a dull Tuesday morning odd fashionable figures were about, the first drifters and shoppers alongside the regulars waiting by the pubs. Joss sticks burned somewhere as he passed and from a cave of knotted scarves and batik hangings came the worrying smell of sesame. He was glad Cyril trusted him with these little jobs that got him out of the shop in the daylight hours; though making his way past all this colour and temptation, the Man Boutique, the weird owl windows of the Chelsea Drug Store, the shop he had not yet been into called SEX, he started to resent being made to do anything at all.
At Sloane Square he jogged down to the station platform with a sense almost of truancy, and had to go in a smoking carriage to follow an Italian couple, the man in white jeans so astonishingly tight that he travelled on two stops beyond Victoria just to look at him. Then he quickly changed platforms and came back, he ran up the escalator and the stairs, but the queue was slow at the booking office and when he reached the platform the blank back end of the train he was meant to be on was jolting over the points and out of view.
There was another train in half an hour, and he could still be in Gipsy Hill with a clear thirty minutes before the auction started. He tucked his ticket in his wallet and wandered looking up at the departures boards, and at the men looking up at them; then stood shifting in the onward rush of arrivals from two trains – fantasies of greetings in faces that held his own for a second as they swept past. It was arrival in London, and Johnny felt its excitement as well as the subtler pleasure of noting, as a Londoner himself, the blind air of routine in most of the travellers’ faces. Some slowed and waited, roaming, half-preoccupied. A space opened up and he saw the movement round the entrance marked Gentlemen, men going in hurriedly and down the stairs, past others coming out with a businesslike look. He thought he might just go himself – in and down. The copper coin in the turnstile was the price of admission, the admission in his case of a guilty thought – overseen by a man in a glass box for whom any interest in the endless traffic in and out had long been exhausted.
Johnny passed a row of blue doors, all engaged, towards the step and the white wall where the pitted copper pipe started hissing and rasping over the tiles. He saw himself in the mirror above the basins, but in his mind he was hardly visible, the mere magnetized observer of the man who dried his hands for ever on the roller towel, the three men spaced along the gutter, workman, businessman, old gent. He leaned forward and peeped past the curtain of his hair as he tried to piss, stopped up by the presence of the others and the gripping sensation of standing on the brink. The businessman was shockingly hard, the workman, thirtyish, with a roll-up kept dry behind his ear, floppy but bigger. Johnny blushed, looked down with a racing heart, the quick ratchet and thud all the time of the turnstile behind them and a man setting down a big suitcase and pushing in between himself and the workman, heavy-built, coat and hat, off the boat train perhaps, and perhaps unaware of the tense patience of the others who waited him out, frowning as if at their own stubborn failure to make even a dribble. And as he waited with them Johnny saw himself drawn into the criminal collusion of the other men, and under cover of the visitor’s last sullen shakes and wheezy buttoning up he stepped down too, as he zipped, and was away through the turnstile and up the stairs with the still-panicked heartbeat of a narrow escape; and a feeling growing, after four or five eventless minutes, while the businessman emerged without seeing him and strode off to the taxi rank, that if he didn’t catch a train he would have to go back in again; and that the going in again, past the attendant who seemed neither to condone nor prevent what was going on, would set a visible seal on his guilt.
But the thought of the workman being down there still, down there all morning perhaps, in thick jeans and boots and a donkey jacket moodily used to reveal and close off what he had on offer, was so thrilling that the air in the great noisy concourse above seemed to pulse with a barely concealed new purpose. A cloud shifted and the sun angled down through the high glass roof. He looked boldly at one or two men who were waiting like him for their trains to be announced; but the boldness was met with irritated puzzlement and Johnny drifted away and looked blankly at the cafe and shops. Just inside the open door of John Menzies Ivan was standing. He was at the counter, in a duffel coat and a knitted green scarf which for a long ten seconds seemed to isolate his sleek pale face against the muddled background in a woolly nimbus. Johnny turned away to absorb the shock, the abrupt opportunity, on top of the others, missed and ebbing. He hardly knew if he wanted to see him. Then he turned round just as Ivan came out of the shop with a magazine, and walked towards him with the unseeing look of someone looking for someone else. Ivan seemed aware of a person smiling before he had his own little shock – ‘Oh, hello!’ and stuck out his hand, which Johnny, disconcerted, took a moment to accept, and shake. It was a fleeting fragment of time, ten seconds again, in which something was irrevocably exposed – though Ivan scooted round to cover it up. ‘Oh, gosh – I’m . . .’ – he grinned at him. ‘I didn’t expect to see you out and about in the middle of the day.’
‘I didn’t, either,’ said Johnny: ‘expect to see you.’
‘What are you doing?’ – and now Ivan tapped him on the arm, almost reproachfully.
‘I’m going to an auction,’ said Johnny, as if it was his own idea.
‘In Brighton?’ said Ivan vaguely.
‘Brighton? – no, Gipsy Hill.’
‘My dear . . .’ said Ivan
.
Johnny wasn’t sure of the implication – he looked down at Ivan’s magazine: The Yachtsman. ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were . . .’
‘Oh . . . !’ He looked at it too, and laughed distantly. It was odd, but Ivan’s discomfort seemed unrelated to the soreness in Johnny’s own mind about their supposed night out, though it wasn’t Ivan’s fault it had all gone wrong. Ivan rather stalled, he said, ‘Well, fancy meeting you at Victoria.’
‘I’m glad,’ said Johnny, moved again by his presence, his glow in the cold air heightened by the morning’s mood of chance and temptation – his fringe had grown longer and caught in the long lashes of his right eye as he blinked and then shook his head.
‘Freddie says everyone has their terminal. His is Paddington, you know, coming from Devon, and then going to Oxford all the time, of course.’
‘Oh, yes.’ It was the sort of London game he could see Freddie playing.
‘I’m Paddington too, of course, what are you – King’s Cross, I suppose?’
‘I’m Euston.’
‘Oh, Euston – shame,’ said Ivan.
Johnny tutted humorously at this, though he knew what he meant, about the new station. His first London memory, at seven or eight, was of the Euston Arch – just before it was demolished: the six huge gilded letters EUSTON, cut deep in the blackened stone, seemed to dance, more a spell than a name, not like any other word, beneath a deep blue sky. ‘Well, you don’t spend much time in the station, do you.’
‘That depends . . .’ said Ivan, and looked away as if he’d said something else.
‘Anyway, where are you going?’
Ivan stared at him, baffled: ‘Oh, I’m not going anywhere,’ and then laughed, ‘No, I’m waiting to meet my uncle, and he seems’ – he craned round again – ‘to have missed his train.’
‘Oh, I see!’ said Johnny, saddened and obscurely relieved. ‘I thought your uncle was dead.’
‘What? Oh, not Uncle Stanley!’ said Ivan. ‘No, no, he died years ago, two years, anyway. No, this is another uncle, I haven’t seen him for absolutely ages.’
The Sparsholt Affair Page 21