They both had a large drink at six, June a brandy and ginger ale which she took into the kitchen with her, to get on. Johnny carried his Scotch and soda upstairs, a new carpet on the landing, the bathroom re-decorated, a new walk-in shower installed. The return to the house was an oddly clear lesson in the history of his parents’ taste, long ago, of June’s restless alterations and improvements, and, still detectable, of his own taste. In his room there were pictures he’d done at school, the drawing of the Abbey which had won second prize in the Warwickshire Schools Junior Art Competition nearly half a century before.
Was he taking all this away – now, or after the funeral perhaps? Did either of them suppose he would come back to see her, or that she would want him to? ‘I’m sorry, Jonathan,’ June had said, on the way back from the hospital, ‘I feel you’ll be without an anchor’ – which was a kind remark, perhaps, or a reproachful one, since he had been there so rarely. He was touched by an uncomfortable sense of duty towards her, the woman who had made his father happy, and who had always dreaded the talk among their friends coming round to what her stepson was doing – he has a daughter, doing very well – you know he painted the Countess of Wessex – Sophie, yes – charming, apparently . . . no he’s not married . . . oh, it all came back to Dad, and the much huger embarrassment she’d shouldered already, in her blind decisive youth, in a long-sustained feat of deniaclass="underline" fending off reporters, pretending the wounding articles and later the books about her husband didn’t exist. They’d lived together for forty-five years, and had known each other for two or three years before the crisis and divorce. She had come to dinner sometimes, when his mother was away. What he’d hated from the start, far more than the corruption case, which he’d never fully grasped, or the intimate shame of the Haxby business, was David’s sequence of betrayals of Connie, begun more than seventy years ago now, with poor besotted Evert. It was in his power, it was how he got his way.
Johnny pulled out the four drawers of the chest, the bottom one had the Christmas decorations in it, but in the others he found a roll-neck jersey and folded shirts he hadn’t worn since the 80s, but had left for some reason in the limbo of neglect and just possible resurrection. On the shelf above the bed there were school books, his James Bond Aston Martin with bulletproof shield and ejector seat (the ejected figure long lost), a brown-glazed pot he’d made at Hoole: things the long steady continuum of his father’s life had robbed him of any desire to take away. He opened the wardrobe, a jangle of hangers, and on the top shelf among a heap of teenage daubs found a worn old sketchbook that he knew but could barely place. He sat on the bed with it, slipped off the perished elastic strap. Scrawny studies of roots, a vase of snowdrops, schoolboy stuff, a woman in a hat whom he didn’t recognize. What on earth was it? Who was that . . . ? The almost forgotten holiday, in Cornwall. And there, oh god, thick, overworked, a little bulging mannequin: Bastien! Bastien, Bastien, again and again. With almost a sixth sense he knew the drawings, but the occasions when he’d made them had gone completely. They were childishly stiff, with a stroke here and there of something like talent, a mannered dash forwards. At the time they had been private triumphs, acts of magic over thwarted desire.
June made them cauliflower cheese, a supper out of the past which Johnny, his stomach shrunken and his palate dead from a night of drugs, ate what he could of. In the welcome reprieve, the sweet second chance, of the whisky and wine he saw a bright poignancy in the objects June took pride in, the glass and china, the small silver pheasants on the sideboard and the glinting silver labels round the necks of the decanters. ‘Gosh, this takes me back,’ he said, with a smile across the glooming mahogany of the table, where she had laid their places face to face.
‘It’s the best I can do in the circumstances,’ June said; which might still have been awkward modesty, and not just her nose for a slight in any compliment. Later she went to the hatch and brought through two stemmed bowls of gooseberry fool, each with a brandy snap.
‘Mm, lovely!’ said Johnny.
June ate with a rather compromised air. ‘I had the gooseberries in the freezer,’ she said.
*
He yawned and signalled readiness for bed at a childish hour. ‘You look tired,’ said June.
‘Yes – I didn’t sleep very well last night.’
She looked quickly at him – ‘No . . . well, an awful shock for you.’
When he got into bed he found he filled it, or it had shrunk under him, and might even shrink more. He seemed to hang on the edge of the mattress, in a kind of headlong reverse – condemned to sleep alone since Pat had died, and now to squash back into adolescence. He really was tired, he hadn’t slept at all with Z, they had lain together in a sweaty parched fatigue, the news and its gravity clarifying in his mind, and the need for sex inexplicably, compellingly strong. He’d popped one of Pat’s blue pills, with a new half-spooky half-comical sense of drawing on his strength whom he missed more than ever at this moment; but after a good hour of trying he’d been unable to come, though the need to do so drove him on till all pleasurable sensation had gone. Z suffered none of these senior setbacks, and came like a dream after five or six minutes. Johnny had to keep getting up to piss, and saw himself in the bathroom mirror, a grizzled old figure with the swollen belly and implacable erection of a satyr.
Now he turned on his back, and resignedly took in the late noises of the house; after London, with its endless roar just this side of silence, the stillness of the suburb was unsparing. It threw the creaks of cooling radiators, the little whine and click of the immersion heater going off, into clearer relief. The bed still made the quick nagging noise it had always made when you turned in it; the moment you thought of having a wank the news was announced to the rest of the house. The room in which June too was lying alone after decades of coupledom was far enough away for him to risk it. He wondered about Zé, which was really his name, José, and if he would see him again – he felt he would never have noticed him himself, but Zé seemed crazy about Johnny, and it was a stroke of amazing luck to have got off with someone half his age who was simply so kind. He was the opposite of Michael. Johnny reached for his phone by the bedside and thumbed in a message which magically corrected itself: I’m in bed and thinking of you X, and sent it with a beating heart and forgotten sense of daring. In a second the perky arpeggio, the bright screen, how could he have written so much so quickly? – thinking of you 2 all day!! sleep well my darlin Wish I was there with u!! Cum back soon!!! XXXXXZ. The words were abnormally vivid to him, a caress and above all a promise, and he switched off the lamp, turned on his side and dropped gaping into sleep as if under a spell.