‘Gosh,’ said Connie, pleased but a little flustered; and Sparsholt, who never admitted to surprise, said,
‘Yes, he’s a good man,’ and nodded as he lifted his pint.
‘You never said you knew him,’ said Connie.
‘I know all kinds,’ said Sparsholt, and winked at her over the top of the glass.
‘Oh, Drum,’ she said; but she was preoccupied for a minute by the prospect of the encounter.
There was no sign of him after a quarter of an hour, though, when a new round had to be bought. I went to the bar and Sparsholt joined me, leaving Connie to her attempted seduction of Tiger. ‘Won’t you call me David?’ he said, and I said of course I would. The barmaid, not specially friendly to students, took her time to turn round from the counter of the Public, framed through an archway like a picture of a brighter and more natural life. She carried on talking over her shoulder as she drew our drinks (stout for Connie, another bitter for David, and a gingerly half for me). David said he was paying (he had a sort of hard purse, the coins shaken out on to its leather tongue), and as he waited for the change his eyes studied the barmaid’s round backside until he said, ‘Isn’t that your friend?’ I was puzzled for a second, then looked through into the further space. It was clever of him to have known that the figure in a cap on the far side of the room, turned away from us as he bent over a newspaper, was Evert. ‘It’s Evert, isn’t it?’ he checked; then said ‘Evert!’ in such a sudden and carrying way that the dart-players turned, and Evert himself twisted round, alarmed as he was by any public attention, and overwhelmed to be called in this way by Sparsholt himself. He stood up, red-faced, grinning, channelling his confusion into the mime of taking his glass and his paper, going out into the street and fighting his way back, through a convulsion of curtains, into the snug.
‘I didn’t know you were in this bar,’ he said – but the muddle had turned into a success, an endearing little incident, and he himself, in his time in the Public, had found the Dutch courage he needed. ‘I’m so pleased to meet you,’ said Connie, and Evert somehow found it in himself to say, ‘And you too!’ I seemed to see, in a crowded few seconds, his judgement of her voice, her look, his snobbish reserve at odds with his keen and jealous curiosity. I saw too that he focused his attention on her because he was too shy to look at David himself, who said, in the same hearty way, ‘Evert, what are you having?’ He’d got the name now, and he was using it as freely as he used mine.
Evert didn’t look at me much either, but somehow conveyed a reluctant gratitude. I changed places and put him next to his idol, who sat forward with his splayed legs and their big boots tucked round his chairlegs and his knees in casual contact with Evert’s. ‘Well, this is nice,’ said David, ‘cheers, Evert!’ and they jogged their drinks together, Evert’s hand trembling and the thin spume of his pint slopping down the outside of the glass.
‘Yes, cheers!’ he said. If I hadn’t been his chaperon I’d have laughed at his eagerness and terror. He had the nervous lover’s long-held habit of backing away from what he most wanted, and here, although no one but me knew it, he was knee-to-knee with the man he adored. The whisky he’d had in the other bar must have helped; he was staring furtively at David’s profile as if to confirm and explore his incredible situation. Connie said,
‘I just wanted to say I’m a huge admirer of your father’s books.’ Evert said nothing. ‘A. V. Dax,’ she explained. If his flinching ‘Oh, thank you’ was meant as a snub, she was only a little discouraged. ‘I expect people say that to you all the time . . . I just can’t imagine growing up in a house where those wonderful books were being written’ – and she gave a happy shudder.
‘No, well . . .’ said Evert. She wasn’t to know of the difficult atmosphere at Cranley Gardens.
‘It must have been so exciting,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t a bit exciting,’ said Evert, and with a brief smile, ‘quite the contrary, I’m afraid.’
I thought I’d better step in, though it’s hard to know what you can say to a stranger about a friend’s private affairs. ‘I don’t believe Evert saw much of his father when he was growing up, just because he was so busy writing.’
‘Well, I suppose,’ said Connie. ‘Yes, I see. They often say having a famous father isn’t easy.’ I’d never heard anyone say that myself, but I saw what she meant. ‘Did he read aloud to you from his books?’
‘Good God no . . .’ Evert said, as David stared amusedly over his head, raised his chin and said, ‘Gordon!’
Connie too looked relieved. ‘There you are at last,’ she said, as the drama of the curtain subsided, and a neat little fair-haired man in a trench coat stood smiling beside us. I waited to be introduced, while Evert folded himself over his pint and hid his face.
‘Freddie, this is my old mate Gordon Pinnock, from back home’ – David was already a bit noisy with drink.
‘Hello . . . !’ – and seeing Evert, ‘Ooh, hello! We’ve met already. Gordon Pinnock.’
‘Oh yes . . . that’s right . . .’ said Evert, in a negligent drawl at odds with his high colour.
‘Oh, aye . . . ?’ said David.
I said quickly, ‘So were you two at school together?’
‘That’s right,’ said Gordon.
‘But not you?’ I said to Connie; and by the time a small discussion of the matter had been got through, the question of Evert and Pinnock’s earlier meeting was, perhaps shallowly, submerged. Gordon bought himself a gin-and-tonic, which I wished I’d had the sense to do too.
David was amused by the speed with which Evert downed his first pint – we all felt he had set a new pace, and knocked ours back too. Now the evening would be got through in a cheerful and approximate way, David would grow louder and more physical, Evert would be even more intoxicated, and the friendly closeness would grow all the more painful, with Connie holding David’s hand on the tabletop, the pale blue stone of her engagement ring sparkling in the light. I felt I’d done my bit and I reached for my hat, but Connie looked truly upset. ‘Please don’t go, Freddie,’ she said. I smiled regretfully. ‘I want to talk to you about . . . Woodstock, and everything.’
Evert said boldly, ‘Fred’s got an ancient aunt who lives in Woodstock, but no one’s ever met her.’ I thought it was probably time to explode my aunt, but I couldn’t do so here, in this company. I said,
‘Ah, yes . . . well, excuse me a moment,’ and went out to the foul-smelling gutter at the back, with its one light bulb and conspectus of venerable graffiti. Ten seconds later I heard footsteps and glancing sideways found David had come straight in after me – making loud grunts and sighs of urgency and enthusiasm. I valued a certain discretion at the urinal, the mild embarrassment covered by genial remarks unlikely to lead to conversation, a certain huddled concentration. But to David it was a chance for a confidential chat. He stood well back on the wet raised step, hands on his hips as a lively tide swept down the gutter towards me; he seemed almost to invite me to admire his performance. ‘What do you think of my pet, then?’ he said, and for a moment as I glanced at him I thought pet was his word for his organ. I studied the undead jokes in front of my nose, the intercalations by two or three hands in particular. ‘Oh, I like her very much,’ I said, and when I glanced again I found him looking shrewdly at me. ‘Yes . . . yes, she’s a great girl, isn’t she,’ he said, nodding steadily and relieved that I’d given my approval.
It wasn’t a long evening, and we left before time was called, hurried through by the beer which they all had more stomach for than me. I was dismayed by how plastered I felt; and next day, when I wrote it all up in my diary, I was dim about the end of our session. I remembered my growing interest in Connie, and her extraordinary figure, which walked the giddy edge between comedy and dream. Much of the time Evert talked with David, exchanges hard to analyse, and which I was keen not to monitor too closely. At times it was as if the crisis was over, as Evert, after the shock of contact, was confronted by the cultureless blank of David’s personality; certainly he had no other friends like him. But I noticed two other things. David himself seemed excited by contact with Evert: there was a subtle mixture of teasing and respect in the way he looked up at him through his eyebrows as he listened to the stories that Evert, in a tipsy and hit-and-miss attempt at impressing him, was excitably reeling out. And then there was that gleam of Evert’s, controlled but breaking through the fug of the room, the grubby gloom of the pub, in passionate flashes, when he in turn listened to whatever David was saying.