‘Well, I’ve brought your painting back.’
‘So I see,’ said Denis, surveying in a long second the parcel and Johnny’s corduroys and of course his hair. ‘We’ll all have a look at it afterwards. I know Evert will want to meet you.’
‘Oh, you see—’ said Johnny, and all the lights went out. There was a staggered sigh of annoyance and weary amusement, while Denis, raising his voice to say ‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ let his hand drop as if inadvertently across Johnny’s backside as he moved away. Someone flicked on a lighter and held it up, above the subtly altered group. ‘My dear, it’s like the War,’ a woman said. ‘But not half so much fun,’ said someone else. ‘Well, we’re all a good deal older,’ said the grey lady, in a very steady tone, and got a laugh. After a moment Iffy said, ‘Was the War so much fun? I must have missed it . . .’ and a high-pitched man said, ‘Gordon, can you just get on to the Prime Minister and tell him to sort this nonsense out,’ at which everyone laughed and a deeper voice from the hall said, ‘Too late for that, I’m afraid,’ and then, ‘Now don’t panic!’ as the beam of a torch swung in through the door: ‘We’ve got this down to a very fine art.’ The torch flashed upwards for a second to show the speaker’s face – a ghoulish impression of a grey-haired man in glasses, with a preoccupied smile as he turned to light the way for the person behind him: ‘Herta is here . . .’ – and a small white-haired woman with a tray followed him into the room. On the tray was a collection of old candlesticks.
‘Ah, Herta . . . !’ said two or three of the guests, rather warily.
‘We have the candles,’ said Herta, absorbed in her task to the exclusion of social niceties. ‘Please take off the books.’ She came forward, in the beam of the torch, like a figure in a primitive ritual, people clearing the way in front of her. Johnny wondered why the man didn’t carry the heavy tray, and Herta the torch; but something told him their roles had been unchangeably fixed a long time ago. She bumped the tray down on a table, and the man, who must surely be Evert Dax himself, watched her with a certain impatience while she struck a match and then another match and got all the candles lit. By their light Dax himself lit the two candelabra on the mantelpiece, with their twisted silver arms and driblets of red wax. Soon the room was glowing, with an effect that Johnny found beautiful. It was a little experiment in history, like the oil lamp in Cyril’s workshop, and the half-lit streets, and the other lamented but enjoyable effects of the present crisis, which had lasted the whole six weeks of his London life so far. He put down his package, and helping to pass the candles round he found a role, so that one or two others made spaces for him and introduced themselves. There was a friendly superfluity in these proffered names of people he would never see again. The last thing on the tray was an old brass candleholder like one his father had, with a snuffer and a square slot to hold a box of matches, and he set it down beside Freddie Green with a fairly certain feeling of some ongoing joke.
‘And there was light,’ said Freddie.
‘Mm, but was there drink?’ said Iffy.
2
When Evert Dax started reading, Johnny took his small sketchbook from his pocket and held it closed on his knee. It gave him a sense of purpose, and security, while he sipped from his glass of punch, smiled with the general laughter at something Dax had said, and looked around in a curious prickle of feelings. There had been a strange moment, as people were finding their seats, when Denis mentioned he’d asked ‘the boy from Hendy’s’ to stay on. Dax had peered at him pleasantly over his glasses, Johnny came forward to shake hands, raising the candle in his other hand as if to see his way, and said his name – and then, instead of the usual quick blink or two of absorption and adjustment, Dax blushed, laughed rather oddly, a queer five seconds while his blue eyes ran quickly over Johnny’s face and then away, as if too shy to look at him again: ‘Johnny, you say? . . . yes, indeed . . . well, of course – please!’ before he turned his back, ‘Right! Right!’, raising his voice and calling them all to order. These days the fairly rapid deduction that Johnny was David Sparsholt’s son rarely led to such obvious confusion.
He was glad he was at the back. He opened the sketchbook and tilted it discreetly towards the candle beside him. It was really a subject that needed colour, the room reimagined in soft-edged zones of crimson and grey, with a dozen little flames picked up in the mirror and in the broad still depth of the window. The elderly faces were hollowed and highlit by the candle glow, caressed and gently caricatured. Dax’s boyish head, with its wavy grey hair and blurred glasses, was a subject Johnny could stare at without being rude – and Dax himself still seemed shy of looking at him: he sat forward, the bright edge of the typewritten sheaf trembling slightly. On the wall beyond him were six or seven pictures, hints of colour and dim reflections lost in shadow. The event he was describing took place in Oxford during the War – it seemed his famous father was a writer, who had come to speak to a club that Dax was a member of, an occasion when various things had gone wrong. There was no mention of his only having one leg, and Johnny wondered if this was another thing this group of old friends took for granted. The tone was ironic and old-fashioned, and Freddie Green himself appeared in the story, which added a kind of nervous humour to the reading: people glanced at him all the time. Beyond that, the article was bobbing with names that meant nothing to Johnny, and he knew from the start, with the buzz of the drink and the distraction of drawing, that he wasn’t going to take much of it in. The present gathering of unknown faces had opened at once into another, a crowd without faces and even more ungraspable.
He peered across the rough half-circle of guests, who were drinking and smoking and paying attention in their own ways, one woman with her eyes closed but moving her hands on the arm of her chair to show she wasn’t asleep. Furthest away, by the window, and almost hidden behind Dax, a middle-aged man with a grey goatee was leaning into the light to take notes. Johnny quickly captured the tilt of his head, and the way he kept glancing at Clover, who was on the floor, curled like an enormous cat at Freddie’s feet. They made a base for the drawing, with the bearded man at the apex, a triangle of unguessed relationships, with all the teasing oddity and secret connectedness of London life.
He tried to get Freddie’s long comical face, fixed in a self-deprecating smirk, which slid, before Johnny could get it right, into a listener’s unwitting look of regret and boredom. Iffy, leaning on the arm of the sofa, was smoking, her head lowered and eyes raised towards Dax, nodding now and then as if taking instruction from him. When the others laughed she carried on staring and nodding, then gave a rueful grunt and stubbed out her cigarette. Next to her the grey lady sat with her empty glass in her lap and her left eyebrow raised a sceptical quarter-inch, as if she’d already thought of several things to say.
Behind them both and leaning on the console table Denis Drury stood watching. Had he given up the last chair for Johnny? Or did he, as Dax’s secretary, prefer to stand, like a servant, while the guests were seated? He didn’t laugh with the others, he had the functionary’s blankness of respect or indifference, his thoughts possibly focused on what was to follow the reading. The candlelight suited his pale clear skin, arched eyebrows and large brown eyes; Johnny outlined the fine nose, small full-lipped mouth, the glossy black lick of hair, shaded it tight over the ears. Maybe his mother was Italian, or Spanish? He was like the Carreras twins at Johnny’s school who came from Tenerife. Denis Drury was hardly an exotic name – unlike Evert Dax, though Dax himself, in a well-cut tweed suit, looked wholly English, and spoke in a pleasant deep voice like an ideal family doctor, or solicitor. ‘Such,’ he said, ‘were my father’s troubles, equipped with a wife and two mistresses who lived, unknowingly he supposed, within half a mile of each other. Faced with such troubles, his reaction was naturally to make them worse.’ Now Freddie was grinning again, and Dax himself, with a sudden smile, paused and looked at Johnny before going on. One or two of the others turned, and then looked away with the tact that betrays itself. Denis himself slowly turned his head, stared at him for four or five seconds, then closed his eyes with an almost invisible smile. Johnny blushed and reached down for his drink; a minute later he turned back the page and went again over the lines around Dax’s mouth and neck, knowing he was spoiling it.