‘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 course, 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.