David hung back on the landing to look at the Chagall print – he had the air of someone humorously suppressing his prejudices, and with a hint of nerves too as a new arrival in this long-established household: ‘À mon ami Dax . . .’ Johnny went into the sitting room, where Evert was standing by the fire.
‘Hi, Evert – I’ve just brought my dad in to see you.’
Evert looked up, and across towards the door, with a hint of alarm, not knowing whom to expect – the entrance delayed by a few seconds. Then, ‘Oh, hello, David . . .’ as if he came round all the time, and was even a bit of a nuisance; but it was probably shyness. He walked away from him and then turned. ‘You’re looking very well.’
‘You know me,’ said David; and then, obliged to reply: ‘So are you, Evert. You’ve hardly changed.’
‘I must have been a bloody wreck before, then!’ said Evert, and laughed cheerfully. ‘Have a seat.’ There was a faint sense still that he didn’t know exactly who his visitor was. And Johnny couldn’t tell for a minute or two if they needed him there, or if nothing much could happen or be said until he’d gone. What would two long-ago lovers be likely to feel, one of them twice-married, the other losing his memory?
‘I’ll make you some tea, shall I?’ he said.
‘Oh, thank you, darling,’ said Evert.
‘Well!’ said David, sitting down and looking round keenly. ‘So this is the famous house.’
‘Ah,’ said Evert, ‘you’ll have heard about it, I expect.’
‘Well, from Jonathan, of course. And a long time ago, Evert, from you!’
‘Oh, really, yes,’ said Evert.
‘Your father was still alive then, of course – in the War.’ He smiled at him. ‘I remember you saying what a monster he was.’
‘Oh, did I?’
‘I’ll never forget that.’
Evert looked at Johnny, hovering. ‘Do you want a hand?’
‘No, no, it’s fine,’ said Johnny, and went out to the kitchen, where in a minute the roar of the kettle covered all that could be heard of their talk.
When he came back with the tray his father had stood up again and was going round looking up and down at the pictures, and then, on rather surer ground, out of the window. Evert sat watching him, with a host’s patience and some other calculation under it. He was taking him in. Johnny, confused by his own feelings and expectations, said, ‘Shall I be Herta?’
‘Mm?’ said his father.
‘Oh, do,’ said Evert.
Johnny took him a cup first. Then, ‘Dad, I’ll put yours here.’
‘Oh, thanks, old lad,’ his father coming over and sitting on the other side of the hearth, in Ivan’s chair, with the double stack of books, biographies, memoirs, on the floor beside it.
‘And I found these eclairs in the fridge.’ They were his father’s favourite, odd tea-room predilection from Johnny’s childhood, bought fresh then from Pinnock’s in Abbey Street – now, packaged, the chocolate sweating slightly, from Waitrose in the King’s Road.
‘My one vice,’ said David, taking the little plate, with its cusped cake fork and folded napkin, and setting it on the table beside him.
Johnny stood back, surveyed the two men, wondering quite what he’d done. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it,’ he said.
‘You won’t stay and have a cup, lovie?’ said Evert.
‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours. I’ve got to pick up Lucy from one party and take her to another – it’s Thomas’s birthday, you see’ – he just came out with it, and let his father handle it as he would. In fact it was Evert who seized on it, with relief but a certain vagueness.
‘Ah, Thomas, yes . . . how is he?’
‘I think he’s all right.’ Johnny didn’t much care for this boy, whom Lucy called her brother though as Una’s child he was no blood relation at all – and could hardly have been more unlike her. ‘It’s his eighteenth today.’
‘I always forget how much older he is than . . . er . . . your little girl.’
‘Than Lucy . . . yes.’
‘That’s right.’ And there they were – David rarely mentioned Lucy, and found the whole thing tricky when his friends went on about their grandchildren and the like. He sat there now as if the subject had never been mentioned. Evert looked at him. ‘Johnny took quite a while to decide to be a father.’
Miraculously, David, with a narrow smile, as if doubting this strange opportunity to shine, said, ‘Well, so did I, Evert, come to that!’
They all laughed, though for Johnny the strangeness lay in his saying something so personaclass="underline" it was promising. It was only as he went out and down the stairs, past large pale shadows where pictures had hung, that he realized what he’d done for Evert and his father was just what Freddie had done for them, fifty-five years ago. He’d set them up together. It wasn’t clear what Freddie had hoped for from the meeting, and he’d acted himself on a conviction he couldn’t explain.
He left Lucy back at Belsize Grove, and when he was let into Evert’s house again and went upstairs he found his mood of mild anxiety about his daughter’s social life carried over to his father’s – had he had a nice time? had they got on? did they play games? He looked round the door of the drawing room not knowing if he was their saviour or if he was spoiling the fun at a critical moment. They were sitting just where they had been, Evert with an excited but unfocused expression, David, saying something in desultory agreement, with a look of unusual and virtuous patience. They had drunk their tea, and the little chocolate and cream-smeared plates lay on the tables beside them. Johnny as Herta cleared them away, not asking questions. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better be going, Evert,’ his father said, in a tone of polite regret unusual to him.
The odd moment came when they stood and said goodbye. Johnny worried, wondered, hoped for a moment that Evert was about to kiss his father. He watched him come close to him, in front of the fire, perhaps uncertain what to say, not looking him in the eye; then he raised his right hand and abstractedly but tenderly fingered the Fighter Command badge in David’s buttonhole – a small gesture of quizzical familiarity that struck Johnny as quite outside the repertoire of his father’s life, or of what he knew of it. Then David patted Evert on the shoulder – it was half an embrace. ‘Do come again!’ Evert said, and left it to Johnny to lead him out of the room.
He’d just opened the door when the light on the stairs came on, and in a second or two the noise from far down of someone climbing, determined and unseen. Johnny and his father waited a moment at the top and Ivan appeared at the turn below, looked up and saw them, saw he had arrived only just in time. ‘Hello!’ he said, beaming at David, rich in his sense of the moment, which to David of course meant nothing – he’d never heard of Ivan. ‘I’m so glad I caught you.’
‘Dad, this is Ivan, old friend of mine, and Evert’s.’
His father, courteous, nodded, said, ‘David Sparsholt,’ pleasantly and with an indissoluble grain of awareness of all the name had meant.
And now what would Ivan say? I’ve heard so much about you . . . ? His strange randy feeling for old men, and handsome well-preserved ones especially, seemed to Johnny to glow in his smiling face as he got his breath back – he must have left work early, rushed home. ‘It’s a great pleasure to meet you – at last.’
‘Well,’ said David, unaware of just how long that had been.
‘Johnny and I’ve been friends for twenty-one years, so I feel I know you already.’