Here was a photograph of his father as a boy, at the seaside, this one with a pencilled date on the back, the now well-known scrawl of his grandmother, whom he’d never known in person: ‘Scheveningen, August 1888’ – Victor eight years old. Already he knew how to wear his hat; he stood with his beach spade at an angle like a dandy’s cane. He’d been a very nice-looking boy, whose face had slowly lost distinction as its owner had gained it. Here he was aged thirty-two, in front of the large theatrical portrait of him by George Lambert, barely completed. This was the time, just before the Great War, when he wore a beard, the twisted ends of the moustache pointing upwards, and a broad-brimmed black hat that added swagger and already concealed baldness. In the photo, with the painting unframed, still on the easel, he seemed pleased by it, amazed, happily outdone by the panache of the painter, while giving just a hint of the sitter’s inadmissible sense of disappointment.
‘What became of that portrait?’ said Ivan.
‘The Lambert? I let my old college have it.’
‘Oh, I see, right – because the papers are at the University of Lichfield.’
‘Yes, indeed.’ Evert didn’t need reminding of that; he felt some small and unreasonable guilt at the arrangement. It had been an undeserved relief to find so eager a home for something he’d so wanted to get rid of. The papers had been welcomed and catalogued, and the gift had led to the naming of the A. V. Dax Theatre – Evert thought at first a stage and stalls, a little Duke of York’s, but of course it was a lecture theatre. He had been there only once, for the opening, when he sat under humming strip lights and heard Professor Jack Bishop talk in confident and surprising detail about the man they were honouring. Now Evert was going to need a good two weeks in Lichfield checking up on details he should have made sure of before the papers went, the whole thing typical of his indecisiveness and delay.
At eleven Herta came in and asked if they wanted coffee. Ivan was on all fours squirrelling for dropped items under the table, his round rump sticking out. Her gaze settled on it for a moment. ‘And for Denis?’ she said.
‘No, Denis has gone out to see about the Triumph,’ said Evert, with her German way of saying the name, and glanced at his watch to see how long it had been. ‘The fuel injection . . .’ He gave a bland smile.
‘Still the injection,’ said Herta heavily, and went off to the kitchen.
‘That Treeoomph,’ said Ivan from under the table.
‘Now, now . . .’ said Evert, looking as if thinking about something else at the taut brown corduroy, the appealing dip of his lower back. ‘How are you getting on down there?’ Ivan wriggled out backwards till it was safe to raise his head.
‘I don’t want you to miss anything,’ he said. He passed three little snapshots back over his shoulder to Evert in his chair; then he sat back on his heels, ran his hand through his hair and smiled, as if at something else they both might have in mind.
When the coffee came in Ivan stood by the window holding his cup and saucer daintily and peering into the street. There were various telling and touching little ways he made himself at home here, which today Evert wondered about more than before. His eyes seemed to follow someone on the pavement below as he said, ‘Oh, I was wondering, what you made of Jonathan, by the way?’
‘Sparsholt, you mean?’
‘I do.’
‘Oh, he seems nice enough.’
Ivan looked at him, as he turned from the window, in a humorously suspicious way – or so Evert suspected. ‘I didn’t know you knew David Sparsholt.’
‘Yes, our paths crossed early in the War.’
‘Well, lucky you,’ said Ivan.
‘And why do you say that?’
Ivan hesitated nostalgically. ‘Oh, I had quite a crush on him.’
‘That seems unlikely.’
‘You know, when I was at school. I used to cut the pictures of him out of the paper.’
‘Extraordinary child you were.’
‘I’ve still got them somewhere. You remember the famous photo taken through a window, with Clifford Haxby and another man.’
‘Oh God, Clifford Haxby . . .’ said Evert.
‘Do you remember?’
‘Hardly’ – the name now a tawdry token of its moment.
‘They never found out who the third man was.’
‘Oh, who cares?’ – at which Ivan looked crestfallen. ‘To be honest I’ve forgotten most of it – certainly all the business side of it.’
‘Well, it was rather complicated,’ Ivan allowed.
‘And the MP, I couldn’t even remember his name.’
‘Leslie Stevens. He was the one with the house parties in Cornwall,’ said Ivan. ‘That was when I first learned that there was such a thing as male prostitutes.’
‘Oh, really . . . ? Oh, dear . . . !’ Evert felt the stale squalor of the thing seep over him again, the prurient press, of course, but also the imagined and salaciously reconstructed events themselves. That was all people kept, of a scandal, as time passed and the circumstances were lost – a blurred image or two, the facts partial or distorted, the names eluding memory. Still, he said, ‘Why shouldn’t people have a bit of fun if they want to?’
‘No, I quite agree,’ said Ivan warmly, and looked away before he looked back at him.
‘Awful for the boy, of course,’ Evert said.
‘If they’d been called Brown, it wouldn’t be half so bad.’
‘Or indeed Green,’ said Evert.
Ivan laughed. ‘And being, you know, queer too.’
‘Ah . . . yes,’ Evert said. ‘I see.’
Ivan put down his cup and saucer on the desk. ‘Did you fancy his dad, in the War?’
Evert peered, as if trying to remember – his sudden decision, like a kick under the table, that he wouldn’t tell Ivan broke out in a blush which Ivan noticed and no doubt made his own sense of.
*
Today Evert wasn’t going out to lunch, but a new anxiety made him feel he would rather not share his cottage pie with Ivan. He looked at his watch. ‘Will you come back after lunch?’ he said.
‘Oh . . . Yes, well, I need to go to the London Library anyway.’
‘Ah, good,’ said Evert. ‘And you might pick up a copy of Freddie’s new book at Hatchard’s – put it on my account.’ He hoped the little task would muffle the little snub.
The afternoon post brought a letter addressed in watery blue ink, the writing itself the trace of a memory. Surely an old lady’s hand, formed long ago, eccentric, the tremor and charm of a voice obliquely conveyed in its broad-nibbed strokes, now made with more effort. It was from Doris Abney, a two-month-delayed reply to his letter to her, asking, in vague terms, about something specific, the affair he was almost certain she’d had with his father. He hoped he’d judged the tone correctly. People of her generation did just the same destructive lustful things in 1925 as they did now, but they talked about them differently, if they talked of them at all. ‘My dear Evert’, she wrote, as she had done when he was at school, and with a touching trust, surely, in resuming correspondence after thirty-five years; but she signed off ‘Affly, Doris Abney’, as if she’d found a certain inescapable formality settle on her in the course of writing and saying, in essence, no. Not the unequivocal no of refusal, or of saying she had not been seduced by Victor. ‘I’m rather blind now,’ she said, ‘and getting ga-ga, though Gilbert and Jasmine have been marvellous. I don’t know if you’d heard . . .’ – and then a string of gossip about people whose names meant nothing to him. Gilbert was her son, a surgeon, and that was the family in which her history had been furthered, and sheltered. A month or two’s indiscretion fifty years ago with a man himself now dead for twenty was something she hardly cared to remember. Did she want her friends, her grandchildren reading about it? If secrecy had been of the essence at the time, why boast about it now? Boast, or confess – these were the two ways of speaking up, sometimes artfully muddled. Doris did neither. It was in a PS that she said, ‘I hope you will be able to convey your father’s charm as well as his more forceful aspects!’ There it was again, several of them had mentioned it: ‘charm’ – a transient magic hard to convey in a person’s absence, and against the grain of other, more lasting, evidence. Evert lifted the spring and added the letter to the rest in the black box-folder, replies from his father’s friends, some of them now dead too and their words stale in his mind with lying there, pressed together.