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 expensive 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.