When she agreed it was safe to go in, he turned on the lamp again. ‘This one should be a bit more thrilling,’ he said, tipping the debris into the grate and setting a small black cone on the saucer. ‘These used to be my favourites.’ He crouched down and struck a match. ‘Your granny used to get them for me as a special treat, darling.’
‘Yes,’ said Lucy.
‘They can be really pretty.’ He touched the match to the tip of the cone which caught and smoked at once. The paper peeled back, and before he’d turned the light off the softly fizzling volcano spewed out purple worms for four seconds and then went out – dormant or extinct it was hard to say, though they stood back in case of some further eruption, even a titchy one, in the flat half-minute that followed. An unpleasant nitrous smell hung in the air. It was her mother that Johnny heard in Lucy’s voice from the darkness: ‘That was really pathetic!’ At which, disappointingly, Timothy giggled.
Well, there were still the sparklers. ‘Let’s play with fire,’ said Johnny, and saw Timothy’s uncertain smile. The harmlessness of sparklers was their magic, as much as the danger of other fireworks – the sparks showered where they would, on chairs and carpets, and left no trace. At the centre, though, the wand of incandescence, fading at the tip as the sparks crept fizzing towards the hand, must surely be hot. These particular sparklers were made of very thin and bendy wire. ‘Be careful now . . .’ And with the lamp switched off again, Johnny lit a Vesta, the children dipped their two tips into the flame, they were slow to catch, then seemed to fuse for a second in the glare before they lifted them away and Johnny shook out the match that was suddenly burning his fingers. The sparklers cast only a short-range light, there was a dreamy weakness of effect. Timothy drew decorous circles in the air with his, Lucy was a bit more arabesque, the portrait of herself glimmering in its varnish as she waved in front of it. Then the three of them were in the dark again. ‘Great, well there are four more each!’ said Johnny.
They grew more adventurous with the next two goes, they shuffled round the room, writing vanishing letters on the air in front of them, Lucy made fairy swoops, and Timothy was a plane, with cautious sound effects, coming quickly, even so, to the limits of sparklers and what you could do with them. When they had got through three of them, Lucy said, ‘Daddy, why don’t you have a go?’
‘Yes, do, Mr Sparsholt,’ said Timothy.
‘No, no, I bought them for you,’ said Johnny, with a laugh at his cut-price benevolence.
‘Well, we’ve had a go,’ said Lucy; and when he still demurred, ‘In fact we’ve had three goes.’
So he took one, as instructed, and let Lucy light it, her face intent and to him very beautiful. The thing spat and crackled, and then it was going. He stood, with the advantage of height, and not a clue what to do with it, he was conducting in the air above their heads, it seemed to be the Tragic Overture, then he waited staring with a patient smile at the sparks hissing down over his raised hand into the shadows.
At six o’clock Annabel Gorley-Whittaker arrived to pick up her son, just as Pat was getting home from work. He pushed open the door with a flourish, but she showed an odd reluctance to come into the house. She advanced as far as the coat stand and tried to carry off the difficult feat of not actually looking at any of the two dozen pictures on the walls. ‘Ah, Timothy, there you are,’ she said, as if kept waiting for hours, when he appeared at the head of the stairs.
‘He’s been no trouble,’ said Johnny, amazed to find himself, as a parent, in relations with this woman.
She looked at him keenly for a second – whatever she had imagined was surely the other way round. Her politeness, like her son’s, was excessive – for two or three seconds her face became a mask of intimate understanding and apology. ‘It’s been awfully good of you to have him,’ she said.
The following day was set aside for an outing. There was an expectation of outings and also a slight resistance to them. Lucy could take an interest in houses and pictures, he flattered her and got her on his side by saying he knew she liked art – but he knew too that the liking was finite and fatiguable. A place with a lot of gilding and drapery excited her for fifteen or twenty minutes, as an ideal setting for herself, but then the monotony of history made her eyes restless and her feet on the tourists’ drugget would drag in mutiny or her hand jerk him hopefully forward and round the corner. Now and then he would see their passing image in the depth of an old mirror hung between windows, an ill-assorted pair, scruffy man with his thick, too-long hair, and neat, restless, critical child.
Coming at it another way, he once stopped her without explanation in the Bayswater backstreet where the great Peter Orban had fitted a cool Corbusian house (his first in London) into the long shabby terrace. ‘Isn’t it beautiful,’ he said. For a moment she gave him credit for a joke – of the forced paternal kind – and she seemed to think it an unfair trick when he told her her own great-grandfather had built it. She cocked her head as she looked at it afresh; but it wasn’t going to wash. Better gilding and drapes than that.
‘Why couldn’t he make it the same as all the other houses?’ she said.
‘Well, sometimes, darling,’ said Johnny, holding her there just a little bit longer, ‘there’s a point in being completely different and new.’
‘Well, I think it’s nasty,’ she said quietly, and turned her head to carry on down the street.
‘A bomb knocked down the old house, you see, in the War,’ said Johnny, now rather on his mettle to defend the building. But talk of the War, which had coloured and conditioned so much of his own childhood, was meaningless to her.
Today’s outing was to Dulwich, to see the picture gallery. She had been there, unrememberingly, before, when she was small enough to ride in a backpack, little ranee on a jogging elephant, her view of the paintings relieved by the back of her father’s neck. Though he said, ‘Look!’ from time to time they had gone there wholly for his own pleasure. She had combed his hair with her fingers, produced tiny ditties and operatic shrieks, and by the room of the Poussins was emitting a powerful smell. It was one of his favourite places, and today’s return was threatened from the start by the way he talked it up to her. Like her mother, she disliked being told what to think, or feel – ‘great art in a great building, sweetheart’, he said, and saw the small frown of incipient resistance. Off they went in the Volvo, with its muddle of Pat’s things and Johnny’s things, and an unignorable smell of its own. The safety net was the Fairmile sculpture garden, a short drive further on, where they’d been last summer, when Lucy had said it was ‘lovely’ and ‘enormous fun’; though she was capable of hair-raising changes of mind.
Well, the gallery wasn’t a success, and not, somehow, for itself, but because of what he’d said, all the greatness of it. Greatness didn’t excite her yet – it had if anything the opposite effect. ‘What do you think, then?’ he said, holding her to him parentally in her red coat with black velvet collar. She shrugged him off to look round, as if the question hadn’t crossed her mind in the previous half-hour.
‘It’s OK,’ she said.
‘Oh, well that’s good!’ said Johnny, wounded of course but knowing enough now not to press her and harden her further. ‘We’ll just look at one more room, shall we.’
‘Daddy, when can we see the sculpture garden?’ She looked up at him, she could be charming.
‘You want to go there now, do you?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘Just one more room?’
She thought it through. ‘OK.’ And he took her hand again and strolled with her into the cross-gallery at the end, where twenty little Dutch pictures hung, small oils, full of interest and even comedy of a kind.
‘Gosh, look . . .’ said Johnny. ‘What do you think that lady’s doing?’ It was the wrong tone, baby-talk nearly.
She pulled him away, apparently towards another picture, as if anything would be better than the one they were looking at already. She twirled round, a kaleidoscope of cows,
trees, boats and rivers. ‘Daddy . . . ?’
‘Yes, Lucy?’
She stared up at him, almost pitying. ‘This is really boring!’
It was a clearer statement than the dismal disaffected, ‘It’s OK,’ and he laughed and gave in. He saw what she meant, in a way. And now she was happy, good sense had prevailed, she seemed to feel she’d saved them both from an experience not only trying but unnecessary. ‘So not even a drink,’ he said, ‘or an ice cream?’
This time she smiled as she said it, as if he’d done enough: ‘It’s OK.’
‘Sure?’
‘I’m sure,’ she said. ‘Sure, sure, sure . . .’
She’d won, he felt it too much, as they went back, past the Van Dycks and Reynoldses, other canvases skyed high above all adults, let alone children. And then a kind of puzzlement settled in him that he should be so vulnerable to his own child. Too much was focused on these visits, these outings, with their inbuilt obstacles to success.
Fifteen minutes later they had left the car and chosen not the looping accessible path but the steep romantic steps down through the trees. In the late afternoon light the wooded dell with its fifteen looming inhabitants (a couple kinetic, and turning on their axes now and then to catch the wind, and thus the light) had the otherworldly mood of a Symbolist painting; autumn leaves were fluttering down and the passers-through thinned out and only one or two voices could be heard, from the planted maze at the top corner of the site. To Lucy it was a playground of choices, of sequence, she had her favourites, and climbed first into the broad curl of a Caro, her little boots striking echoes from the iron; then she was off. As she saw more she remembered more, the sculptures hid from one another among bushes and round corners, and she wanted to give each piece its due; though as she ran on she looked round for Johnny, moving at a fatherly pace along the path. She came back to him, with a breathless report or plan, then was off again, leaving him with an odd emptiness in the air beside him: the phantom adult, not exactly her mother, whose talk, as they ambled, would have risen, each time Lucy ran up to them, into brief shows of interest and encouragement, before dropping back, when she ran off, into the mysterious monotone of grown-up affairs.
He was relieved she was happy with a place he liked well enough himself, but he sensed that something else about the garden unnerved her. She took his hand as they went up the path on the far side, where the tall silver mobile creaked as it swivelled towards them. Their previous visit had been on a summer Sunday, other children in possession of certain sculptures, engaging her, abruptly, or doubtingly, in games and challenges. Now, in the last thirty minutes before November closing time, it issued a subtle challenge of its own. They pressed on, arms swinging.
What they both called the maze, the tapering half-acre where the garden ran up to the junction of two neighbouring properties, was really a pattern of joining and dividing paths between high-hedged circles, three of them, with sculptures in each. The big gardens of the houses beyond, with their dense firs and laurels, made you think that the maze was much bigger, until, pushing through a clump of young hazels, you came up against the high black fence. To a child, of course, the place had a scale that Johnny, looking through and over the hedges, brown beech and dark green yew, could see beyond. In the three clearings people liked to dawdle, or sit on the curved benches, ambiguously sculptures in themselves, carved from the branches of a fallen oak. Now the sun was nearly horizontal, the paths and circles were filled with shadow, and Johnny felt a faint nervousness, not only on Lucy’s behalf, pressed on him through her cool tight hand, but of his own. The voices, two men talking quietly, inconstantly, as if engaged in some task, the gardeners perhaps, seemed already to have claimed the place – they spoke quietly, but with no thought of being overheard, in the rhythms and pauses of unselfconscious speech. ‘I think you like this one, don’t you?’ Johnny said, somehow shy to be overheard himself.
‘Yes, I do,’ said Lucy, as they stood in front of the bronze Diana with a bow, on her cusp of moon, a figure rescued from some Deco fountain and quite different from the assorted abstractions in the garden below. She enjoyed the closeness with him now. ‘It’s different, isn’t it.’
‘It is,’ he said, aware as they got closer and walked right round Diana, of a pause in the nearby talk, and then a brisk continuation which showed the men were aware of the newcomers. The sunlight, in its odd scattered piercings of the foliage, fell on litter far under the hedge, torn squares of black and silver foil. But the idea moved slowly in Johnny’s head. ‘Do you want to see the others, or shall we go back now?’
‘Let’s see,’ she said, and shook her head, a completist when she wanted to be.
They went on, round the corner, and saw a man coming towards them, jeans and denim jacket, bald, muscular, about Johnny’s age, and looking at him sharply for a moment, as if spotting and then doubting something and showing, with a grunt of acknowledgement, he had got it wrong. He walked quickly past them, and after a pace or two Lucy glanced back, frowning still. ‘Daddy, do you know that man?’ she said.
‘What? Good lord no,’ said Johnny; and was suddenly more apprehensive about the other, unseen, stranger. He smiled and peered ahead, imperceptibly restraining Lucy as she led him forward. But in the small third circle there was no sign of anyone else, and the tapering steel shaft, by some Japanese disciple of Brancusi, didn’t keep them there long. So the other man had left along the further path. But the atmosphere of what they had surely been doing quickened Johnny’s pulse and seemed to haunt the deepening shadows under the trees. He found he wanted to see what the other man was like, and looked out for him while talking emptily about something else. He might still be lurking somewhere – it was almost a relief to hear the hand-bell ringing, from the gate by the car park. ‘Ah, time to head back,’ Johnny said, and Lucy again agreed.
She had no sense of direction, his was a rarely faulted instinct, and her doubts about it were forgotten in the moment of escaping the maze. A path along the top led more directly to the exit, across lawns half-hidden in fallen leaves and screened by sombre clumps of rhododendrons. They swung their linked hands. ‘Daddy, where are we going for supper?’ Lucy said.
‘Oh, Lucy . . .’ – her demands had their own economy, one treat triggered the need for another one. Would Francesca give in, was this how decisions were made at Belsize Grove? Or was he being tested? He said, ‘Well, we’ll see,’ and from a gap in the bushes to the left of them a man emerged, hands in pockets, scuffing the leaves with his boots.
‘Daddy . . .’ she said, warningly, though against what he couldn’t tell.
‘We’ll see,’ he said again. He could tell she was glad of his protection, though she scorned any sign of timidity, and stared at the stranger. She would have spun herself a story, a mere thread of rationale, for the man’s presence here, though to a small girl a looming giant in black was a creature of a different order from the potent beauty Johnny saw, hands in pockets of a short leather jacket pulled tight across the top of his bum. They nodded curtly but pleasantly as he came down to the path, there was a moment’s uncertainty if he would wait, but he cut in in front of them, jogged a pace or two, looking back with a quick tut of thanks, and after a few paces looking back again, with the little doubting smile of recognition.
‘It is you,’ he said, so that Johnny seemed to see himself, and wondered if it was.
‘Hi . . .’
‘You don’t remember. Well, I am hurt!’ – his voice big, saucy, capable.
Johnny knew a face, it was his calling and career, but something in him delayed a second longer the emergence from the past of this brown-eyed humorous mask, changed inexorably by the journey, but settling and clarifying now, the lips sharper, the curly hair thinner and cropped short, the big powerful frame itself heavier, with the lumbering ease of continuous training. ‘It’s Mark . . .’ said Johnny, in the awkward pleasure of finding the stranger was a friend all along.
‘Well, how are you!’
 
; ‘I’m very well . . .’ They had stopped, Johnny stuck out his hand to prevent a hug or a kiss, and Mark shook it and winked, squaring his shoulders.
‘Johnny Sparsholt . . . How amazing.’
‘I know . . .’ – Johnny watched Mark turn his seductive smile on the red-coated child beside him. ‘This is Lucy,’ he said firmly, and not to say more.
‘Hello, Lucy! I’m Mark’ – stooping to her but sensing no handshake was forthcoming.
‘Hello,’ said Lucy, suddenly younger, turning on her heel in boredom or unease while she held her father’s hand. She felt for the currents of adult talk, hints of reserve, of real or merely pretended warmth, but she made her own immediate judgements on people too, not easy to shift.
‘It must be fifteen years,’ said Johnny.
‘Yeah,’ said Mark tolerantly. ‘What have you been up to? Still painting?’
‘I certainly am.’
‘Going well?’
‘Yeah, I think so . . .’
The bell rang again from the gate, some sad echo of school in the darkening afternoon. ‘Daddy . . .’ said Lucy.
Johnny touched Mark’s upper arm and they moved on together.