‘And you like the husband – husband-to-be?’
‘Yeah, he’s OK,’ said Johnny, and grinned – neither of them quite knew what he meant.
‘Well, thank you for sharing,’ said Bella, watching as he took the canvas away. ‘And what’s this?’ There was a danger of her getting into her stride, and Johnny said absent-mindedly,
‘Which one’s that . . . ? Ah, no, that’s not by me.’ He came over and they looked at the drawing hanging by the door into the hall, Bella with eyes narrowed, as if preparing to speak. ‘It was left to me by an old friend who died a few years ago – Evert Dax?’
She half-nodded, then made a little moue: ‘I don’t think . . .’
‘Fran knew him – in fact I first met her in his house, long ago.’
‘Ah . . . yes.’
‘It’s by an artist called Peter Coyle, who was killed in the War, very young. I’ve only ever seen one other thing by him.’
‘Well, it’s very striking,’ said Bella. ‘I mean, marvellous drawing . . .’ There was a little teeter on the boundary between them, what could be said about so much muscular male flesh.
‘I’d been looking at this picture for years at Evert’s house without guessing what it was.’
‘And that is?’
Johnny paused respectfully, ‘It’s my father.’
Bella’s head went back. ‘My word, Jonathan.’
‘Done when he was a student, early in the War.’
She leaned in more closely. ‘No wonder he had affairs!’
Johnny didn’t mind this. ‘He was a handsome man,’ he said.
‘But he didn’t want his head in the picture.’
‘I suppose not – who knows?’
‘You never asked him?’
Johnny’s eyes ran over the ridged abdomen and sleek pectorals, familiar in chalk, in reality known differently, and remotely. ‘We never talked about things like that.’
‘No . . . perhaps . . . And you never painted him yourself?’ – Bella turning her gaze on him now.
‘Sadly, no. We had a first sitting for a portrait about twenty years ago, but then we had a terrible row, it was impossible.’
‘That’s a real shame.’
‘We never really knew each other,’ said Johnny, ‘what with everything.’
It wasn’t clear from Bella’s thoughtful stare if she was absorbing wisdom or about to dispense it.
When she had gone Johnny drifted back almost reluctantly into the studio, and looked at the family portrait again. The afternoon was darkening, and he switched on the big lamp – the colours leapt into gallery brilliance, and the handling seemed more exposed and temperamental. He knew Bella felt it could all have been glossier, goldener, while part of his own regret was that he hadn’t been blacker and sharper. He had failed as both eulogist and satirist: it was the compromise of his trade, though at best, of course, the truth. Then the sweep of harp strings in his pocket, the upward run after all, Johnny read the words carefully and smiled.
A week later a boy came to take the Miserden family away and enshrine them in the massive gilt frame that Bella had ordered, twenty times the weight of the canvas itself – which was so long, on its light pine stretcher, that it wobbled and twisted slightly as they lifted it. He was called Eduard, a Catalan, yes from Barcelona, lean, long-faced, clear-skinned, with short dark hair that was roughed up into a sort of quiff at the front, and at his nape, as he bent forwards, tapered and graded so delicately to the neck it seemed more like nature than barbering. His white teeth and his short dark beard were together something Johnny wanted to paint, so that he was smilingly distracted in the way he looked at him doing his work. Eduard wore green boxer shorts whose rear waistband, and a crescent of brown back, were shown every time he squatted down or leant across the package once he’d laid it flat. Johnny studied the waistband for ten seconds, the word overlapping itself nonsensically at the join.
Eduard smiled and nodded at the portrait before he half-hid it, as if underwater, in bubble-wrap, then hid it wholly in a second glistening layer: ‘Is Bella’ – his recognition not for the work of art but for its subject, a celebrity. Millions were on first-name terms with this woman they’d never met. Johnny had a mental glimpse of the hundreds and hundreds of pictures Eduard spent his days wrapping and packing, taping and boxing, with the professional pride and personal indifference of a security guard. Well, sometimes perhaps he liked one picture more than another, but Johnny’s instincts towards him were so tender and disproportionate he kept off the subject of art. It killed his interest if a man said something stupid about a picture. In a minute they angled the package out together, with quick clenches and grunts, giver and receiver, to the van. Johnny signed the manifest, and was handed the third pink under-copy, barely legible, his signature not visible at all. And then Eduard was gone, Johnny went back indoors, and stood holding and folding the piece of paper, in a room that was doubly empty, of the large expensive portrait and the priceless warm young man.
Lucy came at lunchtime, her keen-eyed commitment to keeping her engagement made clearer by the number of other things she was evidently holding off – she dealt with a string of intrusive texts, saying, ‘Sorry, Daddy . . .’ but sounding nearly annoyed with him for putting her in this position, on a busy day in a hectic week. ‘I’m going to turn the thing off,’ she said, as they went through into the studio.
‘OK,’ said Johnny mildly.
She sat in the chair, shook her shoulders, shutting things out. ‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ she said.
He smiled, raised his eyebrows. ‘I got married once, you know.’
‘True,’ she said, straightening herself, her mother’s prompt distance from her own careless remarks. ‘You did. But not in York Minster, I think.’
Johnny squeezed out the third of the colours that made up her hair, a little duck-shit squirt on the palette. ‘You’re right, Chelsea Town Hall was good enough for us.’
‘I think Ollie would be happy with that too,’ said Lucy.
‘And what about you?’
‘Oh, I’ve come round to doing it in the grand style.’
‘Indeed . . .’ said Johnny, quickly abstracted as she settled, and to help her negotiate the first invisible fence of a face-to-face sitting, the unsocial staring at one another. Within a minute or two she would transmute into a subject, while to her he would be something more ambiguous, a quietly busy peeper and gazer licensed by work and practice. It was the third time he’d painted her, and the lessons for both of them changed.
‘Talking of style,’ she said a little later.
‘Oh, yes . . . ?’
‘Mummy said to ask if you’ve got your suit ordered.’
Johnny peered, tongue on lip, as he brought up the gilt swerve of the hair behind her right ear. She had very well looked-after hair. ‘You don’t want old man Steptoe marching you up the aisle.’
‘Mm?’
‘Or rather up the nave.’
‘Aisle? – well, you would know,’ she said. ‘But you are going to make an extra effort, aren’t you.’
‘I am.’
‘Top hats too.’
He clenched his jaw. ‘I don’t know about top hats.’
‘Oh, Daddy.’
‘Well, I will if your mother does.’
She laughed semi-humorously. To Johnny the hunger for a wedding, a ‘society’ wedding, was a mystery, people of all ages decked up in beaming submission and acclaim of a union between two young people they barely knew, everyone in disguise, though something loutish broke out now and then among the ushers and the uncles. At Chelsea he and Pat had had ten guests, both groom and groom were in their fifties, and the event was no less heartfelt for the element of irony and surprise that ran all through it.
He heard the key in the front door, and saw Lucy absorb his lack of concern, as footsteps passed down the hall and then a noise of running water came from the kitchen. ‘Your cleaner,’ she said.