Johnny’s heart skittered with worry, and pleasure too, and he said, ‘So how many people live here?’
‘Oh, more than you’d think,’ said Ivan, turning but with his left hand resting still in the curve of Johnny’s back, where Denis’s hand had laid claim to him before. He led him upstairs, and in the stumbling shadow of the next landing took a pen from his pocket and turned a narrow line of white light on the doorways to left and right.
‘So what does Mr Dax do?’ said Johnny, just behind him.
Ivan looked round, seemed surprised. ‘Well, he’s a writer, and an art historian, obviously.’
‘He seems very nice,’ said Johnny, not sure if he meant it.
‘Evert? Yes, isn’t he heaven – now careful here . . .’ – at the far end of the landing a door like a large black cupboard opened on a narrower, steeper stair. The short ascent was a muddle of shadows and lost bearings.
‘My God . . .’ said Johnny, chuckling, careful but not wanting to be left behind. Now in the space under the roof the spindly beam jumped across bookshelves, heaps of books, a desk with a typewriter, a small bed that had been made and then lain on, the cover screwed up. It was extremely cold, and Johnny hugged himself before he hugged Ivan, hands slipped round him inside his jacket, and then he found he had kissed him.
‘So this is my room,’ Ivan said, holding him back with his free hand, as if overlooking what had just happened, and delaying whatever might happen next. Johnny laughed in the dark just at the moment the overhead light came on: ‘Oh shit!’ From far downstairs the noise of jeering relief just tinged with regret made a weird acoustic comment on their situation, squinting under the bright bulb of the attic room.
3
Evert started to undress, observing himself in the mirror with an anxious new interest: how had he seemed to David Sparsholt’s son? Alarming and absurd that someone half his age should wake in him the need to be admired. ‘I knew your father,’ Evert had said – awful phrase that a number of loyal old men and cagey old ladies had said to him over the years, but which he himself had never uttered till now: the motto of obsolescence. He rolled up his tie as he thought of the boy’s answer, which was a kind of reproach: ‘You should get in touch with him.’ And Evert had said humbly, ‘I really must.’ He had no idea what was allowed, in talk about David – about Drum, if he was still called that. He took off his shirt and looked at himself in his vest with the same sense of newly awoken confusion: a man whose unnoticeable small changes were revealed after thirty years in one cumulative picture of shrinkage and slippage, skinny, paunchy and puckered around the armpits and waist.
And the fact was that he had been in touch, as lately as seven or eight years ago. At the time of the crisis, the ‘Sparsholt Affair’, he had written Drum a letter, of wary and perhaps rather futile support. And a few days later a policeman had come round, to have a word with him about it. What had he known about David Sparsholt’s private life? How well did he know him himself? Had there ever been any suggestion of impropriety on Mr Sparsholt’s part towards him? ‘Absolutely not,’ said Evert, frightened by the question but amused by the private perspective in which he saw the answer, as if naked figures were holding their breath behind the curtains or crouched under the desk. ‘We knew each other slightly at Oxford’ – not sure these days if this mere fact would deflect suspicion. ‘But of course we were both called up almost at once’ – which he thought had a better chance. ‘One knew about his marvellous war, squadron leader at twenty-two, wasn’t it? The DFC . . .’ Perhaps this was overdoing it, but the policeman paused respectfully. ‘I simply felt sorry for him – I imagine anyone would.’ When the door opened and Denis came in, behind the inspector’s back, Evert said, ‘I’ll give you those letters in a minute,’ in a very sharp tone which made Denis jump and then with a quick calculating look from one to the other of them go out and pull the door to with almost farcical discretion till it made its sharp click. As he saw it now Denis was wearing yellow shorts and sandals, and looking about as queer as you could get. Evert had always more or less done what he liked, but it was risky still, in 1966, as the Sparsholt business showed. He remembered the inspector’s wintry hesitation, in the hall as he was leaving, as if to say he knew exactly not only what had happened then but what was happening now.
There was too much of David in Jonathan – was it partly to dodge this biblical ghost of a joke that he offered himself as Johnny: with immediate modesty and hesitant intimacy and as with all Johnnies a half-hidden plea to be indulged, and forgiven? To introduce yourself as ‘Johnny’ was to say ‘You won’t have heard of me, but I think you’ll like me’ – and as ‘Sparsholt’ to say ‘You know me all too well.’ And of course Evert did know him: the squarish face and large mouth and something guarded about the eyes, for all the ingenuous smiles. His hair was like a girl’s, coarser probably; one day he would cut it all off and see the relief in his friends’ faces. Evert pictured Drum, as he’d appeared in the papers, the ‘flawed hero’ with his airman’s crop and small thick moustache: what did he make of his son’s disguise? He saw it perhaps as just that – saw the need for concealment in the forward-sloping curtain of hair (though of course the boy stood out on account of it). Perhaps it was a way of embarrassing his father, in return for the years of embarrassment he must have inflicted on him. Evert went to wash his face and clean his teeth, and without his glasses on, a further faint estrangement, he saw something blurred but still seductive in the smile that the mirror returned. Since his twenties he had rarely been seen bare-faced by anyone but lovers and barbers. Now going to bed was a surrender to suggestion, glasses laid on the table. He’d been able to see all right in the War, but Drum had preferred being fucked in the dark. Memories of that were the ineffable hauntings of touch, fingers on smooth skin . . . and kisses, reluctant, then intense, then regretted, and repeated.
Evert climbed into bed, and sat up with his hands on the covers, like a patient. On the bedside table a carafe of water, beaded with standing, waited on a crocheted doily, one of the hideous artefacts Herta made for him that had to be found room for somewhere in the house. How had it all blown up, so suddenly, seven years ago, a dim nexus of provincial misconduct that for a month or more was news? A foolish Tory MP was involved, which made it a national scandal, but it was Drum in his beauty and wartime glory who emerged as the hero – if that was the word. Evert found even now he didn’t want to think about it – a horrible mess in the life of a man he’d once adored.
He reached out for the book he was reading each night, in small well-intentioned instalments – his father’s third novel, The Heart’s Achievement, which he had never got so far through before. It had come out in 1933, and was dedicated to Evert’s mother, at a moment his recent researches had shown to be one of hair-raising infidelities. It ran to 634 pages, a monstrous length, and had been a comparably huge success, especially in France, where it seemed it was still spoken of as a key work of modern English fiction. In England it had been turned into a play, with Celia Johnson, which Evert had been thought too young at the time to see. Now he put on his glasses again and found his place; he was on page 107, the beginning of the second of five ‘Books’ it was divided into. He found it as hard as ever to imagine his father writing it, though it must have been going on, day after day, in the study downstairs, opening on to the garden, where he and Alex were never permitted to play before lunch. It took a kind of mania to write like this, in vast unparagraphed sweeps, with sentences sometimes two pages long. The challenge now was to look both kindly and objectively at A. V. Dax’s peculiar style, and technique.