‘He was killed, I believe, in 1942,’ said Ivan.
‘Alas,’ said Evert.
‘A certain problem of scale here, too, I think, don’t you?’ said Hughie with a laugh. ‘Or do you imagine the model really looked like that?’
‘Hah – I wonder,’ said Evert; he smiled for a moment at Lucy, then leaning on her father’s arm he led them into the bedroom.
Therefore, when she arrived at Hughie’s gallery for the Private View Lucy knew most of the pictures, and the main interest lay in seeing them uprooted, divorced, regrouped, and sometimes repaired; her little Ben Nicholson had been very cleverly patched up – even in the bright spotlight you could only tell if you already knew. It struck her it all became a Collection, with a beautiful book about it, just at the moment it was being dispersed. She felt the pictures were like . . . not friends really, but acquaintances – like those adults in the room who had met you before but now boomed at each other over your head. She stood for a while by the desk at the front, reading the backwards writing on the window: ‘Modern British Art The Evert Dax Collection’. Even after she’d worked it out it remained to be solved. Evert was standing in the middle of it all, red in the face, with Ivan helping him, and Hughie saying, ‘Evert, you remember Georgia Screamer,’ (or something like that) as people came up. She went back through the room. She was the only child there, glimpsed, greeted, disregarded, and the onset of boredom was mixed with a larger disappointment, a sadness she felt hanging, lurking in the heat and noise of the party. No one paid much attention to the pictures, and soon the gallery was so crowded you couldn’t have looked at them properly even if you’d wanted to. For the guests it was really a private view of each other.
She went to her father, who was on the edge of a group of people who’d been at the funeral earlier and had the unstuck look that came with drinking all day.
‘I know . . . I found myself thinking, what did it all add up to, really?’ a tall red-faced man said.
‘Well, it wasn’t a bad life, was it?’ – this was the woman called Sally.
‘No, no, I wouldn’t say bad. Funerals always throw me.’
‘If it wasn’t exactly a good life, it was one that Freddie himself thoroughly enjoyed,’ said a small amusing man.
‘He enjoyed being Freddie, I suppose. I don’t think I’d have liked it, but it quite suited him.’
Lucy looked up and her father took her hand. All the reverence of earlier seemed to have vanished, the tributes she’d heard spoken over the coffin, and in the garden afterwards; she felt for the first time that she’d been quite fond of Freddie.
‘A shame he never had children,’ said Sally.
‘Probably a good thing,’ said the tall man, and after a second gave a crinkly smile at Lucy.
‘I sometimes wondered,’ said the short man, ‘if he wasn’t really queer, you know, deep down.’
‘Oh . . .’ – Sally gave a worried laugh, and also a quick glance at Lucy, and then her father. ‘I think you’d have to ask Clover that!’
‘Mm, perhaps later,’ the man said, and they laughed and turned with their glasses out in barely concealed rivalry as the pretty girl with the bottle of champagne came alongside.
Lucy tugged her father’s hand, and they went round together, sidling, pushing, rubbing backs with these fickle drinkers. There was the Barbara Hepworth, put on a special plinth. She jumped protectively as a large man, making way for the waitress, backed into it, it jolted but didn’t fall. ‘Oops . . . must be more careful,’ he said, glanced down at Lucy, the witness, with a moment’s rough calculation, then turned and went on shouting at the woman beyond him.
5
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 expe
nsive 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.
The Sparsholt Affair Page 37