‘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.’
‘Right. Where’s he coming from?’
‘Mm?’ said Ivan – his gaze ran with momentary adhesion over the cascading departure boards, in which the trains jumped with a fluttering rattle from column to column as their time grew nearer. Johnny saw his own train had gone and panicked till he saw it drop with its long list of stops like a Venetian blind two places to the left: nine minutes to departure and the platform now announced, platform 8, through the gates just ahead. ‘He’s coming from Horsham,’ said Ivan.
‘I don’t mind waiting with you,’ Johnny said. ‘I’ve got a few minutes.’
Ivan smiled again, and pulled back his inner sleeve to look at his watch. ‘No, you mustn’t,’ he said. ‘But look, I’ll see you soon – come over to the house.’
‘Oh . . . yes,’ said Johnny.
‘I know Evert would love to see you.’
Johnny, stung, had to touch him – it was a pat on the shoulder, as he turned and went towards the barrier with the idea of a kiss that was lost for ever stiffening his face. Ivan too had turned and moved away, and once he’d shown his ticket Johnny was gripped for the second time by the pain of not having acted, and under it, a little salve, the sense of having escaped. The midday trains leaving London were largely deserted, and he got into the first carriage, still dotted with commuters’ litter from hours before. He sat staring across the platform, but then since he had five minutes more he got out again, stood and glanced casually back into the concourse of the station. He couldn’t see Ivan now, and it struck him with a quick burn of jealousy that he might have gone into the Gents himself. Or had he been a fool – Ivan wasn’t here to meet his uncle at all, he was after the unmentionable, the workman in the donkey jacket, with Johnny for a minute a blundering obstacle. But no – there he was, talking to a man by the coffee shop and then moving away: he stood, checking the board, not of course the departure board but the arrivals one. Now a long train was pulling in two platforms across from where Johnny stood, and Ivan came hesitantly forward as the doors all along clattered open in the faces of those stepping down, who doubled and redoubled on their way to the exit. Ivan was staring at them as they came past him, but hanging back, as if wanting to be discovered by his uncle. He held his magazine, with its bright blue masthead, across his chest.
Then he put his head on one side, with a questioning smile, as a man of about sixty stopped in front of him – Johnny couldn’t see, through the stream of other passengers, quite what happened. There was a quick greeting, and a sort of discussion, about what they were going to do, perhaps. He had a clearer feeling now that Ivan hadn’t wanted him to meet the uncle, who looked very smart, with combed grey hair and a darker moustache, and also, in the way he held himself, in his short dark mac and pink paisley scarf, a bit camp. The whistle blew twice and Johnny got back into the train.
Rustin’s Auction Rooms were in a former Sunbeam garage, a few hundred yards from the station. The first time he’d come was with Cyril himself, to look at a landscape catalogued as a Bargery – ‘after Bargery’ had been Cyril’s dry judgement, and he’d watched with a cunning hint of self-denial as the auctioneer, raising his eyebrows towards him as the price jumped up and up, sold it for three times its estimate to a well-known collector from Hove. Standing there beside Cyril at the back of the room, Johnny saw them both at an angle in a tall cheval mirror, a surprising pair, the stout old man in his brown mac, Johnny in his father’s RAF greatcoat, loose on him, large-lapelled, double-breasted, his hair pulled up in his corduroy cap. He’d never been to an auction before – he was bored and excited almost at the same time, as the short tight dramas of the bidding ran on one after the other, lulls now and then of dead lots that no one raised a hand for, buyers coming in from the tea room next door as particular items drew near. Then Cyril nodded resignedly at a batch of drawings no one had noticed, but of course they noticed him, there was a flurry of interest which he weathered with small impassive flickers of the eyebrows – Johnny glanced at him nervously, in the mirror his movements were so slight as to be invisible, but the auctioneer, leaning forward, grinning with surmise about this overlooked lot, seemed to dance on the spot for him and bring down the hammer with a smack as if to say this was what made his life worth living.
If it was a Sickert, tucked in amongst them, as Cyril explained on the train going back, it was much the best thing in the sale – if not . . . well, the whole racket of money and dealing and grubbing around was as mad and as seepingly depressing as Johnny felt it was now, walking into the sale room alone and taking his first breaths of its musty ambiguous air. Today it was merely some frames he had to look at, and then bid for them himself. He found them, several lots, stacked against the wall at the back; a red-haired man in an anorak was looking at them, picking them up and turning them over and clattering them back. Johnny waited for him to move away, feeling he hadn’t got the knack of indifference yet, the dealer’s surly way of handling the goods. He came forward, squatted down, peered at the frames and handled them too, checking for damage, and wondering how much more damage would be done to them before they were sold. It was a small ebonized ripple-moulded frame Cyril was after, but it came in a lot with three others. There was a Watts frame in another lot, in need of repair, but which Johnny was told to buy if he thought it worthwhile. He held it at arm’s length, which seemed to draw others to look at it, so that he was displaying it to them, his potential rivals. He made a disillusioned snuffle and shake of the head and put it back with as much roughness as he dared. Cyril had taught him what to look for, and he felt pretty certain the black Dutch frame was seventeenth century, but the decision was his, and the whole business of the auction weighed on him in a new way.
He dawdled off, to fill the time, between the long tables crowded with clocks, vases, canteens of cutlery, stacked dinner services with unequal numbers of plates and bowls. There were things here he recognized from last month’s sale, one lot-number sticker on top of another, estimates on the roneoed sheet perhaps a bit lower: the bronze Mercury tiptoe on a globe with his raised right hand missing, the Viennese wall clock that lacked all but one of its bulbous brass finials. ‘Losses’ was the word for damage to any kind of artefact. There were two portrait heads, called ‘manner of Epstein’, life-size in painted plaster: a lank-haired, long-nosed young woman, and a man like Thomas Beecham whose thickly moulded goatee had suffered some losses since Johnny had last seen him. He thought they must have come from local houses, local figures in effigy that no one after twenty or thirty years had wanted to hang on to. Perhaps some of the older bidders in these sales had known the sitters; and if you hadn’t known them it was very hard indeed to imagine wanting to possess these forlorn lumps of matter. Johnny thought of his father’s friends: would you really want a head of Ken Cudlip leering at you every time you went into the sitting room? Even put in the loo as a joke it would soon grow oppressive, and perhaps with time unnerving.
He went through a box of photographs, but thinking about Ivan – was the meeting at Victoria in any way a positive one? It was another event in their story, it gave more substance to their friendship, though it hadn’t exactly been friendly in itself. In his fantasies Johnny had run way ahead of where, in the sudden chance of this morning, he confusedly found himself. He thought of his meeting with Colin at the Portrait Gallery, and Colin’s flat, which seemed from here, over the ramparts of commodes and chests of drawers with chipped veneers, like the inaccessible room where real life went on, tormentingly separate from his dusty day-to-day dealings.