At last there was some action. Old Harris, who ran the repair business, was out in his overalls, and giving Roy a hard time about being late, no doubt. He too knew not to believe a word Roy said. On the landing below, Denis put on his overcoat and was checking his silk scarf in the mirror when Evert emerged from his study. ‘I’m just going down to see if that imbecile’s got the magneto fixed yet,’ Denis said.
‘Ah, yes,’ said Evert. He frowned at the break in his chain of thought – it was that maddening look of having to get on with things without the expected help, a little squinting challenge quite wasted on Denis. Then he smiled rather nastily. ‘I’ve always envied your grasp of mechanics.’
Evert had been asked to write 500 words about his work in progress for a column in The Author, a task he found almost as hard as writing the memoir itself. There was so much to explain, and his father’s position was a tricky one. In his life Victor Dax had been a vaunted novelist, as well as a traveller, collector, philanderer, all interesting roles; but now, some twenty years after his death, he was best known in England as an unread writer – he was almost famously neglected. When anyone asked, or a survey was done, ‘Who are the great forgotten novelists?’, A. V. Dax was likely to be cited. Sometimes such polls could lead to a revival in an author’s value, reprints, even a film; but Dax’s name was always mentioned with a strange collective suspension of will, an abstracted pause after which people moved on to talk about other writers they really did mean to read one day. Evert hoped that a memoir of his father’s rackety life might form a sounder basis for new interest in his work; but he found it the stiffest thing he’d ever had a go at. Though never a demonic writer like Victor, he had always produced with reasonable ease: Modern British Painting, the monographs on Pasmore and Goyle, countless reviews for The Burlington and the TLS; now he was very nearly stuck, unmanned by his own father. He was glad at least to have read that short extract to the gang, though this morning at breakfast Denis had suggested that Jill hadn’t liked it either. Well, Jill had never been easy to please, but hadn’t several of the others (not members of the long-ago Oxford Club) said how much they’d enjoyed it? Having shared it he believed a little more in its existence.
In truth the memoir was a game of postponement – a trick he played on himself almost daily, and fell for every time. There would be a poor and evasive morning, with letters to write as well, and a number of phone calls that had to be made; then lunch, at a place not necessarily close, and several things to do after lunch, with mounting anxiety in the two hours before six o’clock: and then a drink, a glow of resolve and sensible postponement till the following morning, when, too hung-over to do much work before ten, he would seek infuriated refuge, about eleven forty-five, in the trying necessity of going out once more to lunch. Over lunch, at Caspar’s or at the Garrick, he would be asked how work was going, when it could be expected, and the confidence of the questioner severely inhibited his answers – they had a bottle of wine, no more, but still the atmosphere was appreciably softened, his little hints at difficulties were taken as mere modesty – ‘I’m sure it will be marvellous’ – ‘It will take as long as it takes’ – and he left fractionally consoled himself, as if some great humane reprieve were somehow possible, and time (as deadline after deadline loomed and fell away behind) were not an overriding question. In the evenings especially, and towards bedtime, half-drunk, he started seeing connexions, approaches, lovely ideas for the work, and sat suffused with a sense of the masterly thing it was in his power to do the next morning.
Herta was hoovering expressively upstairs, so the pert triple tap at the door could only be Ivan. Evert tugged up his zip and pulled down his jersey and sat forward. There were further little knocks, timidity conquered in a comical crescendo. Evert called, ‘Come in!’ He hadn’t been thinking about Ivan at all, but he coloured at Ivan’s intrusion on his brutal little reverie. This was another thing that slowed up work on the memoir, though he wasn’t going to tell the readers of The Author about it; his hung-over mornings often started with these easy and absorbing diversions from impracticable work. ‘Hullo, poppet.’
Ivan closed the door and came towards him; kissed him on the cheek as Evert turned in his chair, but stayed seated.
‘Did you want to start with the photos?’ Ivan said. Did he scent sex in the air, however swiftly muffled?
‘Oh, goodness . . . well! . . . how’s your head?’
‘Oh, not too bad at all – I was drinking Pepsi later.’
‘My god . . .’
Ivan looked at him from under his fringe, and Evert smiled back with a hint of caution. Ivan was dressed this morning in large corduroys cinched at the waist, brown brogues, a collarless white shirt, black waistcoat, and a red paisley neckerchief – most of it from Oxfam (‘My tailor,’ Ivan said when they walked past the King’s Road shop); he was like an extra in an opera, Peter Grimes perhaps. The second-hand look seemed to fit with the boy’s strange attraction to the world of thirty or forty years ago, when Evert and his friends had been young themselves. He claimed not to feel the cold, which was a blessing for a lodger in Evert’s attic in a national fuel shortage. Today, though, was a day, downstairs at least, of glowing lamps and a smell of burnt dust from the two-bar fire.
The photographs were heaped in a cardboard box with the appealing legend ‘Château Granjac / Pauillac / Douze Bouteilles’ on the side: old bursting brown envelopes, little Kodak wallets with the negatives in milky paper strips, a slew of loose pictures where nameless Edwardian ladies were mixed with Evert’s childhood holidays and small colour snaps of the early 1950s. On top like a lid was a heavily bound album kept by his mother, in which over time the concealed paper mounts had one by one perished – now when you opened it the last photos slithered together in the gutter of the binding or tumbled out on to the floor, leaving only her inscriptions in white ink – ‘Edwina’, ‘Cousin Patrick’ – under the empty spaces. Ivan’s brainwave was to get a new album, and mount all the photos of Victor’s life together and in sequence, with new captions of his own. First they needed to be sorted and dated, and the people in them as far as possible identified. It was the kind of thing Denis might have helped him with, ten years ago; though Denis had surely never been so keen.
Now Ivan cleared the books from the table under the window, and tipped all the loose photos out on to it. They did a first glancing shuffle through, like looking for sea or sky in a jigsaw, grouping pictures loosely by period or type; sometimes there were several of one event. Ivan, when Evert glanced at him, had a look of gleaming good luck at the treasure swimming under his fingers, curbed by a responsible frown and simple sense of strategy. ‘Is this Victor?’ he said, holding out a creased snapshot of a young man in a white suit and straw hat. ‘Um . . . yes, it must be,’ said Evert, piqued for a moment by the first-name terms, and a moment later puzzled at himself for minding. He saw it touched on a larger worry. What was he going to call him himself? ‘Victor’ might look like cheek in a son, a patronizing closeness. But to write starchily of ‘Dax’ would be a weird discipline, silly and spooky by turns, for the biographer who shared his name.