Their position at the top of the downward flight, David’s hand already on the knob of the banister, didn’t promise a long chat. ‘Well, Evert’s just been telling me all about you,’ he said, wrong-footing Johnny; and Ivan said,
‘Oh, dear!’
David gave a smile Johnny hadn’t seen since childhood, cautiously teasing, entering a game, though at seventy-three he made a bigger effect with it. ‘His saviour, he called you’ – and the smile played on Ivan as if surprised at the fact, but obliged, and even pleased, to accept it, in this house full of gay men.
‘Oh, well . . .’ said Ivan, with a little slump, as though under the weight of those duties. Then he beamed again: ‘Do you have to go? Stay and have a drink, it will mean so much to Evert, seeing you again after all this time.’
The old man’s smile narrowed a little, but he was still genial as he went down the first step. ‘He did write to me, at least twice, and I’m ashamed to say I didn’t reply.’ This really wasn’t for discussion, and he was almost at the turn of the stair when he looked back and said, ‘I’ve never been much of a letter-writer’; he waved his hand in the air as he went on down and was hidden by the cage of the lift.
It was only when they were in the hall, Johnny picking up the second post from the floor, greeting but not introducing Mrs Lenska on the doorstep, that he saw, with his father beside him, how filial his feelings for Evert had become. Had his father himself sensed this, and been touched by it – wounded, perhaps, though possibly reassured? And if so, had he admitted the irony, or anyway oddity, of these two father-figures having long ago been friends, and then, astonishingly, lovers? They walked quickly away from the house, towards the Old Brompton Road – to Johnny the very pavement, the area gates, the numbered pillars of the porches, familiar to him for twenty years, seemed proof of his belonging, and of his father’s transience, a rare and wary visitor. As they turned the corner into the brighter street, David’s face seemed to show the uneasy relief of another kind of visitor, leaving a hospital when the time is up. ‘Poor old Evvie,’ he said – it wasn’t a diminutive any of his real friends used, and seemed a clumsy claim on intimacy, and sympathy. Though might it, just possibly, have been what he called him at Oxford?
‘You were very close once, weren’t you?’ Johnny said – and then to lessen the pressure of implication: ‘I mean, fifty years ago!’
His father glanced with habitual interest at a parked Bentley, S-series, his own sliding reflection in its windows and bodywork. He said, ‘I suppose he was pretty keen on me then. You know, looking back.’
‘Mm, and what did you feel about him?’ It was almost as if in the chill and change of the dusk, in the ambiguous minutes when streetlights came on under a high pink sky, a new freedom was possible. That strange ‘Evvie’, like a girl’s name, with its touch of pathos and nostalgia, seemed to hint at a desire for it. Things had happened, not quite named before; why not name them now? His father looked at him, with a pinch of a smile, as if at a much cleverer cross-examiner.
‘Things were very different then, old lad. But no, you’re right, we were good mates for a while.’
‘Oh, Dad, well that’s lovely.’
There was a pause before he said, ‘Just for a moment’ – explaining but not subtracting from what he’d said. They walked on, Johnny looking around, with only a quick concealed peek at his father. There was a wine bar just opening – could the new mood carry them across the street and into the red glow of its doorway? He sensed his father’s restlessness, and it came out oddly for all the inner rehearsaclass="underline"
‘I didn’t know before that you’d been in trouble with the authorities.’
‘What’s that!’ – the shadows of a later trouble were as tall as the houses.
‘You know, at Oxford, about having Mum in your room.’ Any mention of Mum to his father had a hint of reproach, an unwelcome persistence, though it could hardly be avoided. But now he seemed almost pleased, he had the set smile of someone making a good-natured effort to think back, even if pretty sure what he was going to find. It was candour that cost him nothing, and he shook his head amiably—
‘No, no, old lad, there was never any trouble like that.’
‘Oh,’ said Johnny, ‘I’d heard you were fined twenty pounds by the College!’
His father laughed briefly at this further absurdity. ‘Have you got a clue how much that was then? No, no . . .’ Though as they walked on he seemed to see some charm in the idea. ‘I won’t deny we got up to no good, but I wasn’t so stupid as to get caught.’
‘Right,’ said Johnny, not knowing how to proceed, but knowing of course his father’s ingrained habit of denial. ‘I heard Evert lent you the money.’
‘Is this what old Evvie says? You can’t really believe him, not these days, he was talking all kinds of nonsense just now.’ And then again, more freely and more considerately, ‘Not that I care a damn. It just didn’t happen.’
They never knew how to say goodbye, his father sensed and avoided any impulse of Johnny’s to hug him or kiss him, and his parting words were said over his shoulder as he strode suddenly into the road: ‘I must get to Euston!’ – hand raised, a grin of clarified affection and relief. The taxi signalled and slowed to a stop fifty yards down the street. Johnny watched his father as he went towards it, silver hair and turned-up collar of the sheepskin jacket, the suggestion, even now, of an impulse to march subdued to the civilian briskness of his walk. He said two words to the driver and got into the cab without glancing back. The new intimacy had been just for a moment too.
FIVE
Consolations
1
Bella Miserden was a friend of Una’s, famous from makeover TV, and married to Alan Miserden, who’d got out of rightnow.com with eight million a mere two days before it folded in 1999. At a corporate party held in the NPG, Bella had been trapped for ten minutes in a side room showing new accessions, which included Johnny’s portrait of Freddie Green, bequeathed by his widow. Bella captured the label displaying these facts on her iPhone: Jonathan Sparsholt (b 1952) – so, sixty years old, and fairly experienced, but, since she’d never heard of him, perhaps not too expensive. She’d barely heard of Freddie Green either – 1920–1995 . . . Writer and broadcaster . . . a scrawny old thing though possibly attractive to women – but she felt, as she stared at him over her empty champagne glass, that Jonathan Sparsholt had ‘got’ him. All this she relayed by chance to Una, who said, ‘God Bella it was Johnny that did the sperm for Lucy,’ and after a rather breathless two minutes had offered to put them in touch.
At the meeting it had been unnervingly (for Bella) as if she were asking for sperm for herself – she couldn’t get the idea out of her mind. She knew he was gay, but he wasn’t like other sixty-year-old gays Bella knew, who tended to fine suits, directorships and much younger boyfriends not everyone got to meet. He was handsome, with a thick shock of grey hair, and clothes – suede boots, thick jeans, a sort of waistcoat worn over a roll-neck sweater – that spoke of a dogged adherence to a style he had settled on decades before. There was nothing you could do for someone like that. Of course he had recently lost his husband (how Alan had snorted when she’d used that word, quite smoothly, over breakfast), and this made him seem almost touchingly ditched, all alone, into a modern world whose styles had long ago moved on. He had a large brown album with photos of earlier commissions; there was nothing swaggering or presumptuous about him, and she felt he might almost be rather simple – simple anyway to push around, and get what she wanted. She wanted a ‘conversation piece’, all the family, six feet wide. She saw herself changing her will, and leaving the picture to the National Portrait Gallery; it would save the kids from bickering about who should keep it. Alan said if he was called Sparsholt he might well be the son of a man who’d been in some sort of scandal – before either of them were born; she’d googled it, and confirmed it, didn’t really take it in, and didn’t mention it at all, of course, at that first meeting; she planned to work tactfully round to it during the sittings, when they would each be at the other’s mercy.