Soon Johnny was driving down in the Volvo to the Miserdens’ would-be-Georgian mansion in Virginia Water for the first of a wearisome sequence of sittings: with the vain but restless Alan, with the amusing bitch Bella, and with Samuel (16), Alfie (12) and Tallulah (7). Work was the thing, and there was something oddly bracing, in his new solitude, about examining a couple and their offspring still locked in their furious collective life. Upstairs at the NPG, Bella had also admired the portrait of George V and family by Lavery, which she thought might work as a model for the Miserdens. Johnny never contradicted his sitters, but hoped it would be enough to use a sofa, as Lavery had done. There would doubtless be squabbles, the first day, about who was going to sit on it; and as only two of George V’s children appeared in the original, the violent economy of musical chairs seemed to haunt the arrangements.
In the first week he had driven to and fro three times, M40 and M25, the vast blue signs to Heathrow Airport looming and dropping behind, plunging reminders of travels with Pat that were over for ever. Could he imagine flying anywhere again, whom would he fly with, who share his tastes and urges so unspeakingly? These stifled traipses through commuter traffic, tailbacks, closed lanes and contraflows, were his ambit now. There was muddy grass, red buses, but England had descended already into driver’s grey, grey road, grey sky, grey buildings and leafless trees between, the cars all grey to match. The old red Vulva, so useful and depended-on, dear and derided, was smelly, dented and rusted, its windows rimmed in a delicate moss that had itself now died. Bella, coming out on to the circular drive of her house, had hovered between mocking and tactfully ignoring the car; then suggested he drive it round to the back, into the paved yard where their Range Rovers and Porsches glinted from the shadows of six garages.
On that first day, he’d got them all together, old party conjuror, the moment of novelty, the sitters’ uncertainty and readiness for surprise. The setting for the portrait was the drawing room, with its shiny simulacra of country-house style: white marble fireplace, low squashy sofas, books by celebrities and media tie-ins stacked on a round table, a large number of lamps clashing with the battery of ceiling spots trained on the nondescript pictures on the walls. It was a funny thing about working on location that you might have to paint other people’s pictures in the background – they were part of the portrait too. He tried a number of groupings, Alan sitting down, Bella sitting down, Alan and Bella standing and the children sitting down. ‘I thought, you, know, George the Fifth . . .’ said Bella. ‘Well, quite,’ said Johnny. Samuel was red-haired, skinny, taller than both his parents, his face a tragi-comedy of spots. His mother wanted him to stand behind. Alan was neat, handsome, silky-haired and oddly devoid of sex appeal; Bella, heightened and hardened by being so much seen, was sharply pretty, a businesslike blonde with a good figure. The room near the back door with weights and an exercise bike was clearly much used, though not perhaps by fat little Alfie, in his Arsenal strip: he hoped to be painted holding a ball. Tallulah was self-possessed, gracious, and sitting for her picture from the moment she entered the room.
Johnny made quick sketches, rearranged the grouping, tapped what excitement there was among the boys, staved off cleverly the boredom that threatened after half an hour when he saw a slight resentment setting in that the picture wasn’t finished already. They were glimpsing the enormity of the thing – the dawn of an appalled understanding that painting a portrait took time. The trick then was to make the very length of the process intriguing to them. They would all want to keep looking, and there was an art to that too – the managing of their vanity, curiosity and impatience. ‘You could just take a photograph, and be done with it,’ said Alan amiably. ‘Darling . . . !’ said Bella, disgraced by this remark but redeemed by it too perhaps, as the artistic member of the family, the one with an eye.
Johnny perched on a stool, at the same height he would be when standing at the easel. This first day he wanted one workable sketch of the whole group – much smaller in scale than the planned picture. ‘Sort of a dress rehearsal,’ said Bella, for whom the whole thing had a flavour of showbiz. But then – it was hard to bring it up, but how were they going to dress? It was like giving notes to a cast of slightly truculent amateurs. ‘Now remember,’ Johnny called out, as they all got up and started talking, ‘whatever you wear when you come for your first sitting you’ll have to wear all the way through.’ He raised his eyebrows at Alfie, humorously, but the boy seemed alarmed. Surely Bella didn’t want him captured for all time in football shorts and a red top.
Then Johnny packed up and left them and set off home, became part of the eternal evening traffic, bored, protesting at one delay after another, but hardly wanting to be back. The house he was returning to held nothing that he craved, and he neglected it. In the garden unchecked summer growth fell under rains and frosts into leafless dereliction. Yet he dreaded the time when he would tend it again carefully, resigned to the facts. He unlocked the door, stooped for the mail, one uncertain post a day now, and the envelopes impersonal, thrown unopened on the hall table. His own pictures, with their evident merits and flaws, crowded up the stairs, witness to his years of painting while Pat was at his office or out for days on end at churches in Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire – the slow solitude of those weeks passing in the confidence of his coming back, and of the talk when he did. Each person if he was lucky found the place where he could shine, and the person to shine on. At Cranley Gardens Johnny had been audience, to Evert, to Ivan, to the whole clever, memoir-swapping gang. But with Pat he was a closely attended performer – he was funny, almost articulate, and rich in things worth saying.
He always needed a lot of sittings, and the Miserden job, which he would have liked to do quickly, looked set to take an especially long time. Because of school terms and the parents’ crowded diaries the visits were oddly spaced out. Johnny went to bed and turned out the light on to a special shade of darkness when he knew he was going to Virginia Water next day – what he saw in his mind’s eye was the journey, the grey road in the rain. He set the alarm, and woke before it went off. Waking alone had a different darkness from sleeping alone, singleness reasserted and unremitting. But later in the day he would find himself there, and the work would pick up and go on and he was glad to be out of his own house, and with other people, even with people like this.
He seemed to see them, as they sat individually, with a new clarity – he felt more than ever his power to expose them lurking like under-drawing to the flattery, the diplomacy of the commissioned portrait. Alan, fit and sleek in tight jeans, with no apparent genitals, had the overall smoothness of features that expects good fortune but never attracts much personal devotion. He seemed to Johnny a child conditioned by success that had never failed him yet. To paint a man so uninteresting to look at became a challenge. Samuel was in the Sixth Form at Harrow, and was set on a more formal style than his parents – an awful tweed hacking jacket doubling the colours of his face and hair. Tallulah showed an unworldly neglect of her appearance, as if she believed not only in the artist but in her own innate interest to make the thing a masterpiece. She just came in and sat, and Johnny, feeling he’d met his match, made a bright infanta of her, in school uniform.