5
There seemed to be no more to do on the Miserden job, and he was keen to be shot of it; still, something kept him dabbing away. His preliminary sketches, lively and rhythmical, were pinned up in the studio, and the five individual oil studies painted at the house stood propped in their clearer and narrower promise along the wall. And there, across two easels, was the almost finished canvas. Large, expert, pointless, it seemed to Johnny, when he stood back from it. Certain passages still had the interest of his remembered work on them, but this would soon fade; the room was evoked with all the skill of a lifetime, suggestive but precise, the figures were cleverly grouped in their odd open knot as a family, with shades of doubt and humour to set off their staring self-importance. Yet the joy of construction, the magic of depiction, the bright run up the keyboard that told you suddenly it was done, all eluded him.
He suggested to Bella she might like to come by herself to take a look. And she did like that idea, with its hint of secrecy and the glamour of a studio visit. Johnny himself felt apologetic, exposed, in the place where he padded about all day; it was just the old dining room, with a dais made of pallets and a dingy velvet throne. But Bella was in TV, she knew about illusion, and there was something underlying their contract, that it was a meeting of illusionists. She came on a Sunday afternoon, about three o’clock: a white Range Rover Evoque outside, the bang of the knocker, Bella in the hall in tight jeans and trainers and a short coat of thick golden fur that Johnny peered at in a quandary of confirmation as he followed her through. In the studio the painting had its back to them, facing the window, and he watched her go round, acting just a little, for her first encounter. He tried to imagine seeing it for the first time himself, and the inescapable pressure to say, as she did, ‘It’s brilliant, Jonathan’ – as a first position, while her eyes kept running over it into more specialized kinds of reaction, harder to know how to put into words. He knew she would want to like it, wouldn’t want to let herself down, as a person with an eye, and hoped she would take its small critical notes as compliments to her intelligence, if not to her pride. He came round and joined her, as if to find out if he deserved her praise, and also to help her, and lead her interpretation of it.
‘God, you’ve got both my boys, to the life!’ Bella said.
‘Oh . . . good!’ said Johnny.
‘And little Tallulah, look at her . . .’
She hung back about the two adults. ‘Alan’s jolly hard to get, I must say,’ said Johnny.
‘Oh . . .’ said Bella, going close, perhaps sensing a chance to say Tell me about it! but in fact saying, ‘Oh, no, I know that look very well.’
Now Johnny stood back, against the window. ‘He didn’t like sitting, that was the thing.’
‘Well, he can’t always do what he likes, can he.’ She turned and looked at him. ‘Oh, it’s marvellous, Jonathan,’ she said and ran over and gave him a kiss on the cheek and a hard fluffy hug in which he felt all sorts of other hopes and worries were buried.
‘People often don’t like their portrait when they see it first,’ he said; ‘because it’s not how they see themselves, or the idea they have from photos, or just looking in the mirror.’
‘Well, I like it,’ said Bella, with affected stubbornness. And then, more slyly, ‘I can’t wait to see what the kids say.’
‘Can I get you something?’
‘Oh . . .’ She winced, denying herself. ‘Perhaps a herbal?’
Johnny listed them, till she grew confused, ginger, ginkgo, ginseng . . . ‘Shall I come?’ she said. But he wanted to leave her for a minute or two by herself with the portrait, in case something settled after all, some little objection.
When he came back she was standing looking out into the garden. He gave her the mug with the fluttering tag. ‘I’m sorry it’s taken so long,’ he said.
‘Oh . . .’
‘The whole business of Dad’s death put me out by a few weeks.’
‘Oh . . . darling, of course it did,’ said Bella. ‘And are you all right?’
‘I’m all right about him dying, really, yes.’
‘Hmmm. All the other stuff, though . . . I must say I felt for you, when I saw all that.’
‘I ought to be used to it by now, but it was all so long ago I’d got used to it being forgotten – and young people of course had never heard of it.’
‘Well, I hardly had, you know, myself . . .’ – not knowing how to place herself.
‘Anyway, everyone knows now.’ Bella wasn’t someone to confide in, but her fame and energy drew something from him, a desire for validation. Not, of course, that he’d ever heard of her till she asked him to paint her.
‘Funny, though,’ she said, ‘having an affair named after you.’
‘It’s not quite the honour it may seem,’ said Johnny, not for the first time. ‘It’s not like a TV show, say . . .’
Bella hesitated. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this, it’s what my Samuel calls the picture – our portrait, I mean. The Sparsholt Affair.’
‘Oh . . . yes . . . hah.’ Again this wasn’t original of Samuel.
‘Seriously, though,’ said Bella, ‘I suppose with something like that, it could colour your whole life, if you let it.’
‘Well . . . I dare say everyone’s whole life is coloured by something.’ Given the chance, he forgot it for months on end, but could never be wholly free from requests to explain, and have feelings about it, though his cautious patter was now nearly meaningless with repetition. ‘I do remember how terrible it was when it all blew up, I’d just started a new school, and I think I told you I always had problems reading.’
‘You were dyslexic, darling.’
‘Yeah, thick was the word in those days. The other kids read about it in the papers – they knew more about what Dad had been up to than I did.’
Bella nursed her mug. ‘Think what they’d know now,’ she said.
‘Well, I suppose.’
‘It scares me, what my kids can see online. Porn, and – oh god, I shouldn’t tell you this, I found Samuel has one of these dating apps on his phone.’
‘Oh, lord!’ said Johnny, and went over and looked closely at Alan Miserden’s gleaming left loafer.
‘It must feel strange,’ said Bella a bit later, ‘when you finish a big piece like this. I know I feel awful when we’ve wrapped a new series.’
‘I always have something else on the go,’ Johnny said. ‘I’m never not doing a job. That’s something really positive I get from my dad.’
‘You’re a worker,’ said Bella, ‘like me.’ And she went off a few steps round the back of her own picture to see what else might be going on. ‘Anything interesting?’
‘Oh . . . well, I’ve been painting my daughter – I told you she’s getting married next month, so I want to do it first.’
‘Before you lose her – aah, darling,’ said Bella.
‘I hope not.’
‘Can I see . . . ?’
‘Well, it’s not nearly finished . . .’ It wasn’t a good idea to show sitters other work in progress – it gave them unhelpful ideas, retrospective doubts. Yet he wanted Bella to admire this one – the sitter as much as the picture, eyes, nose, mouth worked on with extraordinary care amid the loose swirls of hair and curve of her collar. He went over to where it was propped up, not touched for a week, and covered with a cloth – he lifted it out, and she followed him to the light.
‘Oh, she’s a beauty, isn’t she.’
‘Her dad’s not the best judge of that,’ said Johnny.
Bella glanced at him. ‘I can see her mother in her, but she’s more like you.’
‘Really?’ This pleased him, as the picture itself did; the patient re-creation of his own daughter lent the work on the portrait a challenge and a charge of emotion quite lacking in the Miserden job.