‘I’ll tell you if you want,’ said Johnny, wondering if Freddie would have heard of the artist. There was really only room for two in the lift, and if the power went off, as it did almost daily, they might be trapped there, testing the warmth of their new-found friendship for an hour or more. Freddie gestured gallantly, Johnny stepped forward—
‘Oh, don’t worry, I’ll take the stairs.’ He held up the wrapped painting.
‘I’m sure we can all squash up,’ said Clover.
‘You know it’s the second floor,’ said Freddie, stepping in with a humorous stoop of submission.
As Johnny climbed the stairs the lift creaked steadily upwards beside him, and at each turn he saw Freddie and Clover from another angle, pressed together and speaking quietly, in a register between public and private. Freddie glanced out, at some remark she made, met his eye and gave him a friendly nod. Johnny smiled and looked down, at the shabby stair carpet, and up, at the gilt-framed paintings climbing in the gloom beside him. It wasn’t a race, but he was there already on the second floor to hold back the grille for them. He could hear the muted noise of voices from nearby.
‘Evert’s father had the lift put in,’ said Freddie as he emerged – ‘you know, having only one leg.’
‘I haven’t actually met Mr Dax,’ said Johnny, not sure if this father was still alive – much less still living here. He imagined Evert Dax to be getting on a bit himself.
‘Oh, you haven’t . . . ?’
‘I only know his secretary.’
‘Ah, I’m not sure . . .’ – Freddie jiggled the door closed and made sure the latch had engaged.
‘Denis Drury?’
Clover laughed. ‘Oh, you know Denis,’ she said, and as she went along the hallway, she turned and looked at Johnny again. ‘I suppose you’d call Denis his secretary’; her smile seemed both to put him in the wrong and to give him a mischievous hint. They threw down their coats in a small bedroom. Johnny said, unexpectedly caught up, ‘I’m only staying a minute . . .’ and then, ‘Well, when I say I know Mr Drury . . . It was him who brought the picture in to be cleaned, you see . . .’ He remembered his unnerving stillness, in the shop, and his dark unblinking eyes.
Mr Drury himself wasn’t to be seen in the room they then went into, where a small crowd of people were talking quietly, as if at a funeral, a group of women on a sofa below a tall mirror, and a darker huddle standing by the fireplace. The dusk seemed to have taken them unawares. From the big west-facing window there was a view of chimney stacks and a church spire against the last faint pink of the sky. ‘It’s the deterioration of money in general,’ a grand but piping voice was saying, as Freddie and Clover were greeted and absorbed into the standing group, while Johnny hung back, looking shyly at the nearest pictures, which he’d been told were worth seeing. There was a small off-white relief by Ben Nicholson, behind glass, and another large abstract painting in a stark black frame, whole areas of the grubby white paint, when you looked closely, cracked and pooled like a skin on boiled milk. Next to it was a print of an airborne blue cow, with a pencilled inscription, ‘À mon ami Dax – Chagall’. The pictures seemed to confer a quality on the people in the room, too familiar with them perhaps to bother looking at them. On the table behind the sofa stood what must have been a Barbara Hepworth sculpture, a hollow globe of auburn wood, its white-painted aperture strung with white wires. Johnny saw the curved back of it in the mirror, and himself slipping past, meeting his own eye for reassurance.
‘Are you going to join us?’ said one of the seated women.
Johnny looked down at her and grinned – again he thought it would be rather a squash. ‘Is it a party?’ he said.
‘I wouldn’t say a party’ – she shook her square grey head. And it was true no one had a drink – it was a meeting of some kind, just about to get going, and best avoided before it did so. He looked at the window again and from here the reflected room half-concealed the dark mass of the house-backs beyond, the lamp beside him equal for a minute to the light that had come on in a bedroom there.
‘You must be a friend of Denis’s,’ said the second woman.
‘Yes, of course,’ said the third.
‘Well, not really,’ Johnny said and gripped his parcel, and peered round. In a room of middle-aged and elderly people he was much the youngest, and he felt now like a child under the lightly teasing scrutiny of a trio of aunts. ‘I’m working for Cyril Hendy, you know, the art dealer.’ There was still a novelty to saying this, though he knew he could hardly speak for the great Cyril, who himself hardly spoke at all.
‘Ah,’ said the first woman, ‘you’re a picture person. We thought you might be going to read to us.’
‘Read to you?’ said Johnny, with a giggle.
‘Well, Evert will be reading tonight himself,’ said the second woman, looking round. ‘You know he’s writing this book about his father.’
‘Oh I didn’t know,’ said Johnny, ‘no.’
‘You know about Evert’s father, at least,’ the grey-haired woman said, with her slightly arch severity, as if to suggest he would feel foolish when he realized who she was.
‘He only had one leg, didn’t he,’ said Johnny.
‘Well, there was rather more to him than that,’ said the second woman.
‘Oh God yes,’ said the third woman, who’d been gazing up at him in a preoccupied way. A smile spread slowly across her face. ‘You must forgive me if I say I’m madly envious of your hair.’
‘Oh, er, thank you . . .’ said Johnny, feeling he mustn’t look too closely at hers, which was fluffy and dyed a strange rustred; he glanced up into the mirror again.
‘But isn’t it an awful nuisance to you?’ asked the second woman, with artless curiosity, and a sense she was glad the subject had been broached.
‘We haven’t been told your name,’ said the first woman.
Johnny told them now, and on one face at least he saw the familiar momentary suspicion, and its tactful suppression, and the lingering curiosity, half cunning, half sympathetic, that ensued. As if to discountenance all this, the third woman said, ‘I’m iffy, by the way.’
‘Oh . . . um . . .’
‘Iphigenia,’ the second explained.
‘Old, old friend of Evert’s.’
‘Mm, you go back a long way, don’t you,’ said the second woman.
‘But look, do you know Freddie Green?’ – Iffy sat forward as if to make an introduction.
‘He doesn’t know anyone,’ said a man’s voice at his shoulder; and as he turned Johnny saw Denis Drury’s face in the mirror and felt a hand placed lightly in the small of his back. ‘He’s completely new.’
‘Hello!’ said Johnny, and put out his free hand, which Denis took without looking but kept hold of and squeezed as he went on,
‘I hope you’ve all been nice to him.’
‘Oh, we have,’ they more or less agreed. Evert Dax’s secretary looked just as he had when he came into the shop, formal and old-fashioned, in a dark suit with waistcoat and striped tie, speaking without moving his head and with the tiny suggestive concession of a smile on his small, plump mouth. His hair, cut short above the ears, was sleek and black, his dark eyes large and challenging. His age though had grown mysterious – in the shop he was like a snooty school prefect, but close to, in the softly raking lamplight, Johnny saw that he might be forty. Denis let his hand go, in a conditional sort of way, but the pressure in the small of his back seemed to count on some further understanding between them. Johnny was worried what the women might think; he said firmly,
‘Well, I’ve brought your painting back.’
‘So I see,’ said Denis, surveying in a long second the parcel and Johnny’s corduroys and of course his hair. ‘We’ll all have a look at it afterwards. I know Evert will want to meet you.’
‘Oh, you see—’ said Johnny, and all the lights went out. There was a staggered sigh of annoyance and weary amusement, while Denis, raising his voice to say ‘It’s all right,
it’s all right,’ let his hand drop as if inadvertently across Johnny’s backside as he moved away. Someone flicked on a lighter and held it up, above the subtly altered group. ‘My dear, it’s like the War,’ a woman said. ‘But not half so much fun,’ said someone else. ‘Well, we’re all a good deal older,’ said the grey lady, in a very steady tone, and got a laugh. After a moment Iffy said, ‘Was the War so much fun? I must have missed it . . .’ and a high-pitched man said, ‘Gordon, can you just get on to the Prime Minister and tell him to sort this nonsense out,’ at which everyone laughed and a deeper voice from the hall said, ‘Too late for that, I’m afraid,’ and then, ‘Now don’t panic!’ as the beam of a torch swung in through the door: ‘We’ve got this down to a very fine art.’ The torch flashed upwards for a second to show the speaker’s face – a ghoulish impression of a grey-haired man in glasses, with a preoccupied smile as he turned to light the way for the person behind him: ‘Herta is here . . .’ – and a small white-haired woman with a tray followed him into the room. On the tray was a collection of old candlesticks.
‘Ah, Herta . . . !’ said two or three of the guests, rather warily.
‘We have the candles,’ said Herta, absorbed in her task to the exclusion of social niceties. ‘Please take off the books.’ She came forward, in the beam of the torch, like a figure in a primitive ritual, people clearing the way in front of her. Johnny wondered why the man didn’t carry the heavy tray, and Herta the torch; but something told him their roles had been unchangeably fixed a long time ago. She bumped the tray down on a table, and the man, who must surely be Evert Dax himself, watched her with a certain impatience while she struck a match and then another match and got all the candles lit. By their light Dax himself lit the two candelabra on the mantelpiece, with their twisted silver arms and driblets of red wax. Soon the room was glowing, with an effect that Johnny found beautiful. It was a little experiment in history, like the oil lamp in Cyril’s workshop, and the half-lit streets, and the other lamented but enjoyable effects of the present crisis, which had lasted the whole six weeks of his London life so far. He put down his package, and helping to pass the candles round he found a role, so that one or two others made spaces for him and introduced themselves. There was a friendly superfluity in these proffered names of people he would never see again. The last thing on the tray was an old brass candleholder like one his father had, with a snuffer and a square slot to hold a box of matches, and he set it down beside Freddie Green with a fairly certain feeling of some ongoing joke.
‘And there was light,’ said Freddie.
‘Mm, but was there drink?’ said Iffy.
2
When Evert Dax started reading, Johnny took his small sketchbook from his pocket and held it closed on his knee. It gave him a sense of purpose, and security, while he sipped from his glass of punch, smiled with the general laughter at something Dax had said, and looked around in a curious prickle of feelings. There had been a strange moment, as people were finding their seats, when Denis mentioned he’d asked ‘the boy from Hendy’s’ to stay on. Dax had peered at him pleasantly over his glasses, Johnny came forward to shake hands, raising the candle in his other hand as if to see his way, and said his name – and then, instead of the usual quick blink or two of absorption and adjustment, Dax blushed, laughed rather oddly, a queer five seconds while his blue eyes ran quickly over Johnny’s face and then away, as if too shy to look at him again: ‘Johnny, you say? . . . yes, indeed . . . well, of course – please!’ before he turned his back, ‘Right! Right!’, raising his voice and calling them all to order. These days the fairly rapid deduction that Johnny was David Sparsholt’s son rarely led to such obvious confusion.
He was glad he was at the back. He opened the sketchbook and tilted it discreetly towards the candle beside him. It was really a subject that needed colour, the room reimagined in soft-edged zones of crimson and grey, with a dozen little flames picked up in the mirror and in the broad still depth of the window. The elderly faces were hollowed and highlit by the candle glow, caressed and gently caricatured. Dax’s boyish head, with its wavy grey hair and blurred glasses, was a subject Johnny could stare at without being rude – and Dax himself still seemed shy of looking at him: he sat forward, the bright edge of the typewritten sheaf trembling slightly. On the wall beyond him were six or seven pictures, hints of colour and dim reflections lost in shadow. The event he was describing took place in Oxford during the War – it seemed his famous father was a writer, who had come to speak to a club that Dax was a member of, an occasion when various things had gone wrong. There was no mention of his only having one leg, and Johnny wondered if this was another thing this group of old friends took for granted. The tone was ironic and old-fashioned, and Freddie Green himself appeared in the story, which added a kind of nervous humour to the reading: people glanced at him all the time. Beyond that, the article was bobbing with names that meant nothing to Johnny, and he knew from the start, with the buzz of the drink and the distraction of drawing, that he wasn’t going to take much of it in. The present gathering of unknown faces had opened at once into another, a crowd without faces and even more ungraspable.
He peered across the rough half-circle of guests, who were drinking and smoking and paying attention in their own ways, one woman with her eyes closed but moving her hands on the arm of her chair to show she wasn’t asleep. Furthest away, by the window, and almost hidden behind Dax, a middle-aged man with a grey goatee was leaning into the light to take notes. Johnny quickly captured the tilt of his head, and the way he kept glancing at Clover, who was on the floor, curled like an enormous cat at Freddie’s feet. They made a base for the drawing, with the bearded man at the apex, a triangle of unguessed relationships, with all the teasing oddity and secret connectedness of London life.
He tried to get Freddie’s long comical face, fixed in a self-deprecating smirk, which slid, before Johnny could get it right, into a listener’s unwitting look of regret and boredom. Iffy, leaning on the arm of the sofa, was smoking, her head lowered and eyes raised towards Dax, nodding now and then as if taking instruction from him. When the others laughed she carried on staring and nodding, then gave a rueful grunt and stubbed out her cigarette. Next to her the grey lady sat with her empty glass in her lap and her left eyebrow raised a sceptical quarter-inch, as if she’d already thought of several things to say.
Behind them both and leaning on the console table Denis Drury stood watching. Had he given up the last chair for Johnny? Or did he, as Dax’s secretary, prefer to stand, like a servant, while the guests were seated? He didn’t laugh with the others, he had the functionary’s blankness of respect or indifference, his thoughts possibly focused on what was to follow the reading. The candlelight suited his pale clear skin, arched eyebrows and large brown eyes; Johnny outlined the fine nose, small full-lipped mouth, the glossy black lick of hair, shaded it tight over the ears. Maybe his mother was Italian, or Spanish? He was like the Carreras twins at Johnny’s school who came from Tenerife. Denis Drury was hardly an exotic name – unlike Evert Dax, though Dax himself, in a well-cut tweed suit, looked wholly English, and spoke in a pleasant deep voice like an ideal family doctor, or solicitor. ‘Such,’ he said, ‘were my father’s troubles, equipped with a wife and two mistresses who lived, unknowingly he supposed, within half a mile of each other. Faced with such troubles, his reaction was naturally to make them worse.’ Now Freddie was grinning again, and Dax himself, with a sudden smile, paused and looked at Johnny before going on. One or two of the others turned, and then looked away with the tact that betrays itself. Denis himself slowly turned his head, stared at him for four or five seconds, then closed his eyes with an almost invisible smile. Johnny blushed and reached down for his drink; a minute later he turned back the page and went again over the lines around Dax’s mouth and neck, knowing he was spoiling it.
Over by the window, the grey-bearded man caught his eye, shot him a narrow smile, looked down, stared up at him through his eyebrows, then looked do
wn again: Johnny looked down quickly too, at the simple but confusing recognition that he wasn’t taking notes, and that all the while he’d been drawing he was being drawn himself. He closed his little notebook, sheathed the pencil in its spine, and tilted the last oily drop out of his glass. The man frowned and rubbed and peered again, as if the relation had acceptably cleared between them, and put in what Johnny knew were the long swoops of his hair. He couldn’t help a quick shiver under the inspection, as he turned his head.
The reading seemed to end sooner than anyone expected, after a moment there was a scatter of thoughtful applause and a few nods and murmurs of praise, as people reached for their glasses and several stood up. It wasn’t clear if Dax also expected more – as he tidied his papers he had the haunted look of someone who must adjust in ten seconds to a smaller success than he’d hoped for. Johnny picked up his parcel and came forward quickly. ‘Yes, very good, Evert,’ Freddie Green was saying, and Dax said, ‘Was it all right?’ as though he’d already forgotten it.
‘Someone should write a history of the old Club.’
‘I think Evert sort of has,’ put in Iffy, who standing up was taller than both of them, and a striking figure with her red hair and long red skirt above brown suede boots.
‘That year I was in charge, it was really rather marvellous,’ said Freddie. ‘I got Orwell later on, of course.’
‘Well, indeed,’ said Dax, ‘I was in the Army by then,’ smiling anxiously at Johnny as though his opinion was what he most wanted: ‘I hope that wasn’t too dreary for you.’
‘Oh! . . . not at all,’ said Johnny, and feeling as he said it that he might sound rude, ‘I’m afraid I didn’t know who most of the people were.’