‘Gosh, look . . .’ said Johnny. ‘What do you think that lady’s doing?’ It was the wrong tone, baby-talk nearly.
She pulled him away, apparently towards another picture, as if anything would be better than the one they were looking at already. She twirled round, a kaleidoscope of cows, trees, boats and rivers. ‘Daddy . . . ?’
‘Yes, Lucy?’
She stared up at him, almost pitying. ‘This is really boring!’
It was a clearer statement than the dismal disaffected, ‘It’s OK,’ and he laughed and gave in. He saw what she meant, in a way. And now she was happy, good sense had prevailed, she seemed to feel she’d saved them both from an experience not only trying but unnecessary. ‘So not even a drink,’ he said, ‘or an ice cream?’
This time she smiled as she said it, as if he’d done enough: ‘It’s OK.’
‘Sure?’
‘I’m sure,’ she said. ‘Sure, sure, sure . . .’
She’d won, he felt it too much, as they went back, past the Van Dycks and Reynoldses, other canvases skyed high above all adults, let alone children. And then a kind of puzzlement settled in him that he should be so vulnerable to his own child. Too much was focused on these visits, these outings, with their inbuilt obstacles to success.
Fifteen minutes later they had left the car and chosen not the looping accessible path but the steep romantic steps down through the trees. In the late afternoon light the wooded dell with its fifteen looming inhabitants (a couple kinetic, and turning on their axes now and then to catch the wind, and thus the light) had the otherworldly mood of a Symbolist painting; autumn leaves were fluttering down and the passers-through thinned out and only one or two voices could be heard, from the planted maze at the top corner of the site. To Lucy it was a playground of choices, of sequence, she had her favourites, and climbed first into the broad curl of a Caro, her little boots striking echoes from the iron; then she was off. As she saw more she remembered more, the sculptures hid from one another among bushes and round corners, and she wanted to give each piece its due; though as she ran on she looked round for Johnny, moving at a fatherly pace along the path. She came back to him, with a breathless report or plan, then was off again, leaving him with an odd emptiness in the air beside him: the phantom adult, not exactly her mother, whose talk, as they ambled, would have risen, each time Lucy ran up to them, into brief shows of interest and encouragement, before dropping back, when she ran off, into the mysterious monotone of grown-up affairs.
He was relieved she was happy with a place he liked well enough himself, but he sensed that something else about the garden unnerved her. She took his hand as they went up the path on the far side, where the tall silver mobile creaked as it swivelled towards them. Their previous visit had been on a summer Sunday, other children in possession of certain sculptures, engaging her, abruptly, or doubtingly, in games and challenges. Now, in the last thirty minutes before November closing time, it issued a subtle challenge of its own. They pressed on, arms swinging.
What they both called the maze, the tapering half-acre where the garden ran up to the junction of two neighbouring properties, was really a pattern of joining and dividing paths between high-hedged circles, three of them, with sculptures in each. The big gardens of the houses beyond, with their dense firs and laurels, made you think that the maze was much bigger, until, pushing through a clump of young hazels, you came up against the high black fence. To a child, of course, the place had a scale that Johnny, looking through and over the hedges, brown beech and dark green yew, could see beyond. In the three clearings people liked to dawdle, or sit on the curved benches, ambiguously sculptures in themselves, carved from the branches of a fallen oak. Now the sun was nearly horizontal, the paths and circles were filled with shadow, and Johnny felt a faint nervousness, not only on Lucy’s behalf, pressed on him through her cool tight hand, but of his own. The voices, two men talking quietly, inconstantly, as if engaged in some task, the gardeners perhaps, seemed already to have claimed the place – they spoke quietly, but with no thought of being overheard, in the rhythms and pauses of unselfconscious speech. ‘I think you like this one, don’t you?’ Johnny said, somehow shy to be overheard himself.
‘Yes, I do,’ said Lucy, as they stood in front of the bronze Diana with a bow, on her cusp of moon, a figure rescued from some Deco fountain and quite different from the assorted abstractions in the garden below. She enjoyed the closeness with him now. ‘It’s different, isn’t it.’
‘It is,’ he said, aware as they got closer and walked right round Diana, of a pause in the nearby talk, and then a brisk continuation which showed the men were aware of the newcomers. The sunlight, in its odd scattered piercings of the foliage, fell on litter far under the hedge, torn squares of black and silver foil. But the idea moved slowly in Johnny’s head. ‘Do you want to see the others, or shall we go back now?’
‘Let’s see,’ she said, and shook her head, a completist when she wanted to be.
They went on, round the corner, and saw a man coming towards them, jeans and denim jacket, bald, muscular, about Johnny’s age, and looking at him sharply for a moment, as if spotting and then doubting something and showing, with a grunt of acknowledgement, he had got it wrong. He walked quickly past them, and after a pace or two Lucy glanced back, frowning still. ‘Daddy, do you know that man?’ she said.
‘What? Good lord no,’ said Johnny; and was suddenly more apprehensive about the other, unseen, stranger. He smiled and peered ahead, imperceptibly restraining Lucy as she led him forward. But in the small third circle there was no sign of anyone else, and the tapering steel shaft, by some Japanese disciple of Brancusi, didn’t keep them there long. So the other man had left along the further path. But the atmosphere of what they had surely been doing quickened Johnny’s pulse and seemed to haunt the deepening shadows under the trees. He found he wanted to see what the other man was like, and looked out for him while talking emptily about something else. He might still be lurking somewhere – it was almost a relief to hear the hand-bell ringing, from the gate by the car park. ‘Ah, time to head back,’ Johnny said, and Lucy again agreed.
She had no sense of direction, his was a rarely faulted instinct, and her doubts about it were forgotten in the moment of escaping the maze. A path along the top led more directly to the exit, across lawns half-hidden in fallen leaves and screened by sombre clumps of rhododendrons. They swung their linked hands. ‘Daddy, where are we going for supper?’ Lucy said.
‘Oh, Lucy . . .’ – her demands had their own economy, one treat triggered the need for another one. Would Francesca give in, was this how decisions were made at Belsize Grove? Or was he being tested? He said, ‘Well, we’ll see,’ and from a gap in the bushes to the left of them a man emerged, hands in pockets, scuffing the leaves with his boots.
‘Daddy . . .’ she said, warningly, though against what he couldn’t tell.
‘We’ll see,’ he said again. He could tell she was glad of his protection, though she scorned any sign of timidity, and stared at the stranger. She would have spun herself a story, a mere thread of rationale, for the man’s presence here, though to a small girl a looming giant in black was a creature of a different order from the potent beauty Johnny saw, hands in pockets of a short leather jacket pulled tight across the top of his bum. They nodded curtly but pleasantly as he came down to the path, there was a moment’s uncertainty if he would wait, but he cut in in front of them, jogged a pace or two, looking back with a quick tut of thanks, and after a few paces looking back again, with the little doubting smile of recognition.
‘It is you,’ he said, so that Johnny seemed to see himself, and wondered if it was.