‘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.’