Johnny laughed forgivingly and said, ‘I expect he’ll want to talk about the past.’
But his father gave nothing on that. ‘He was in the Army, wasn’t he?’ – that was what the past meant above all.
‘Yes, he’s never said much about it – to me at least.’
‘Ah,’ said his father, and set down his glass, already empty. ‘We might as well go down,’ with a note of welcome routine.
‘Steady on, Dad . . .’ Johnny took a moment to knock back his wine, then stood up and said, ‘Oh, Pat sends his best, by the way.’
‘Ah . . . yes,’ his father smiled, accepted it, but didn’t ask him to send his to Pat.
In the noisy dining room, they were led to a small table at the back; white napkins stood lop-eared in the wine glasses. The head waiter pushed in David’s chair as they sat, and laid the wine list beside him. ‘Well now . . .’: they both needed more drink to have lunch together, and in a minute David said as usual, ‘Merlot all right?’ while Johnny worked his way through the verbiage of the menu towards equally inevitable questions. In a minute or two another waiter came, sleekly handsome, in white shirt and tight black trousers, and so young that the battles commemorated all around must have been mere remote and random hearsay to him. Johnny sent him off again to check about ingredients. ‘They’ll see you right,’ said David. That his son was a vegetarian was something he fully accepted, he took a practical interest in it, and complained about menus and kitchens as sternly as if he’d been one of that troublesome minority himself. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, when the waiter returned to confirm there was chicken stock in the soup. Johnny bent the waiter to his will, with a slow smile that he saw wake some other recognition in the boy, quickly repressed, but then coming out again in a sly smile of his own as he said he was sure the chef would do something special for him. Johnny raised his hand as his father started to say it was the least they could do – ‘It’s OK, Dad’ – watching the waiter move off, and the old irresolvable thing in the air, of not knowing what the old man picked up on or blocked out.
Over the soup (green salad for Johnny) they talked about the Works, and what the new people were making of it. It was a difficult subject, charged with the regrets of an active man who had made a decision to give up something he loved. ‘Well, they’ve taken the sign down,’ he said.
‘DDS?’
His father nodded. ‘Not that it matters, but they left it for six months, you know, out of respect.’
Johnny wondered if that was the reason. ‘What is it now?’
‘Stella. In huge bloody letters, hideous.’
‘Stella . . . It must look like a brewery.’
His father perhaps didn’t get the allusion. ‘They’re Chinese,’ he said, ‘of course,’ and it was that that made him almost laugh.
‘Are they laying people off?’
He dabbed at his moustache with his napkin. ‘I see Stewart Dibden at the Lions, he keeps me in the picture. He says they’re planning to expand.’
‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it?’
‘No, excellent.’ In his gloomy look across the table some suggestion, not aired for twenty years, seemed still to be remembered: that Johnny might have taken an interest in the firm himself.
‘I think you were quite right to get out when you did, Dad,’ he said.
Johnny had a view, beyond his father’s head, of a portrait of an airman in flying suit, goggles raised, very simple: the tall square-jawed figure against a tan-coloured background. Well, he couldn’t do him like that, and the question of just how he might do him was a hard one – how much of the glorious past to convey without irony or sentiment. He’d had enough to drink, when his pasta arrived, to say, ‘Dad, have you ever had your portrait done?’
Was there something bashful in his father’s tone: ‘No, not really.’
‘Not really?’ Johnny smiled at him. ‘Not in the RAF?’
‘Well, there was a chap who did a picture of me, yes, a portrait.’
‘Oh?’
‘I’ve no idea what became of it. He was killed, lost at sea, so I heard.’ He raised his eyebrows as he lifted his fork: ‘A very talented artist.’
It was a phrase he had never heard his father utter. ‘What was his name?’
‘Well, you’ll probably have heard of him. He was called Coyle.’
‘Peter Coyle, do you mean?’ – Johnny hopeless at dissembling, though his father, eating, briefly contemplative, didn’t notice anything odd. ‘Well, yes, I have heard of him. Didn’t he go into camouflage in the War?’
‘He may well have done. All this was before I signed up – at Oxford.’
‘So you do remember Oxford!’
‘A few things, obviously,’ with the hint of a scowl at any clever contradiction. ‘I don’t suppose the picture still exists.’
‘Well, I bet someone’s got it. Just a sketch, probably, was it?’
He seemed doubtful for a moment, but not of his facts: ‘I’m not sure what you mean. I wouldn’t say a sketch, it was a big oil painting, of me in rowing kit. It took weeks – he kept asking for more time. Of course I was very tied up with other things then.’
‘I can imagine.’ Johnny sat back, then remembered his food, and got on with it. What his father had said, for the very first time, seemed to fix and authenticate the whole story Freddie had told – though the claim about the large oil painting showed in a salutary way that Freddie didn’t know everything. David himself seemed unaware of the value of what he had let drop.
‘So what are your holiday plans, old lad?’ he said. ‘Italy again?’
‘Dad, the thing is, I wondered if you’d sit for me?’
The slightly technical way of putting it delayed the reaction by a further second or two. Then, ‘Ooh, you don’t want to be bothered with that.’
‘It wouldn’t be a bother, Dad.’
‘No, no.’ He cut at the thick lump of lamb on his plate. ‘I’m not the right . . . subject for you.’
‘Well, I don’t agree with that at all. It’s ridiculous I’ve never painted you before.’
‘You’re too busy,’ said his father, and in his quick look down and away Johnny knew he had glimpsed a long-established habit of making excuses for him, and for his failure, as a prize-winning portrait painter, to turn his gaze on his own father. It was as touching as it was annoying.
‘In fact I’ve got a fairly empty period coming up, so that’s not a problem.’
‘Anyway, where would we do it?’
‘I could come up and stay for a week, if you like; we could have a sitting each day.’
The prospect was so unusual it seemed almost to alarm him. ‘Too much bother,’ he said again, chasing the lamb down with a swig of wine; though something in his eyes suggested he was moved too by the thought of the visit. The bother, Johnny thought, would really be with June.
‘Well, think about it, will you?’
He didn’t promise to do so, but a moment later said, ‘You must have drawn me dozens of times when you were a lad.’
‘I certainly did.’
‘Yes. You were always bloody good at capturing people.’
‘You never told me that before!’
‘Of course I did.’
Johnny weighed up the situation. ‘Well, it’s good to come back to someone years later. They’ve changed, and so have you.’
‘God knows,’ said his father, and after a second looked straight at him.
When their cab came down the Old Brompton Road, David, vigilant for reference points, Tube stations, street names, saw Cranley Gardens, and said, ‘A good part of town.’ Though when he saw the house itself, the flaking porch and high-hanging swag of tarpaulin, he seemed to take in, with a little flinch and then a setting of his features, that the visit might require unexpected tact. Johnny rang the bell, they were let in and went upstairs. His father, peering up and down, tongue on lip, examined the antique apparatus of the lift. ‘They ought to get this going,’ he said. The house, quite new and strange to him, appeared in an odd light to Johnny too, pictures reshuffled on the landing, and the glimpse through the door of ‘his’ room of different things hanging on the stained and bleached wallpaper: the room seemed a cell, a shrine almost, of the precious life he had led wholly without his father’s knowledge or participation.