To be friends, to be among the little group of regulars at Cranley Gardens in the old days, was to be a devotee of Victor’s work, though it was rarely talked about in the house itself, since he was so absurdly touchy about it. Evert could see them still, from the fifteen-year-old’s vantage, arriving for a dinner party, their look of walking simultaneously on air and on eggshells. They gleamed with the privilege of proximity, and the terror of saying the wrong thing. Sometimes a naively direct question from a woman who was very attractive, or possibly titled, could produce a simple and illuminating answer – Evert noted how the others listened, with concealed attentiveness, while smiling in friendly pity at the questioner. But in general Victor’s books were taken as read. Was it, oddly, as if to mention them by name might expose them to ungovernable breezes of humour and doubt? Only his mother ever got away with it, in the years before the War, at her end of the candle-lit table, when she struck a glass and proposed a toast and won from her husband a brief flushed smile of consent, or defeat. After the War the arrangements were so original, with the upstairs and downstairs flats, that his parents’ social scene disbanded – and Victor, with his new prosthesis, stumped around up above unobserved, if not unheard. Evert, working at the Tate, had his own little flat in Chiswick, and when he came to visit his mother he did occasionally see (what she must have seen very often) an unknown woman creaking downwards in the lift, and then hurrying to the front door.
Evert feared he was painting the portrait of a monster, when what Victor Dax should be remembered for was his dense, unfashionable but not insignificant writings. A harrowing exposé was all very well if the subject was famous and pretended to be virtuous; but Victor, disagreeable in life, was now almost unknown to the reading public. Evert imagined a cocktail conversation: ‘Have you heard of someone called A. V. Dax?’ ‘Haven’t, I’m afraid.’ ‘Well, nor had I, till I read this book, and it turns out he was a swine.’
He thought about the days after his father died. The undertaker was a genial little man, who referred to the dead person as ‘the party’; it was just the wrong word for Victor, and helped Evert get through the day, the arrival of the hearse at the house, going down rigid-faced with Alex on his arm to the big black limousine that followed it, the long half-defiant, half-apologetic crawl through the London streets to Kensal Green, and the unstoppable burial, which wrenched up emotions in him that seemed quite apart from his wary feelings about his father in life. After that there was the ‘party’ itself, the oddest gathering there had ever been at Cranley Gardens, a black matinee at which Herta, as mourner and ministrant, was in commanding form. It was the moment she had switched her loyalties, completely, emphatically, to Evert, whom up to that point she had generally obstructed. She seemed to manage and embody, quite cannily, the inevitable process of change, and descent. The survivors from the little group of admiring friends had come together to mark the passing, there was the unavoidable heaviness of occasion, and just audible beneath it a letting-out of breath.
4
All these weeks, the old stove in the workshop was kept drowsily going, with its small scratchy whispers, now and then, of combustion and collapse, and when the power went off it was Johnny’s job to open the air vent, rattle out the cinders, hook up the cast-iron disc of the lid and slide in another helping of coke from the hod. Cyril lit the kerosene lamp, replaced its glass chimney and turned the little wheel to bring up the flame. Once his eyes had adjusted Johnny liked the lamp’s heavy brilliance, renewed, at an angle, in the sloping glass roof above, where he looked up from time to time and watched their upside-down movements. They seemed to twitch and sidle, like creatures in an experiment, according to their own laws and needs, which careful study might explain. The whole crisis was a nuisance and potentially a disaster, but it had these accidental beauties, winter evenings out of the past. There was something banal in the first startled seconds when the radio spoke and the strip light blinked back into life.
What Cyril’s views were on Edward Heath and the miners Johnny never learned. The radio did most of the talking, when the power was on, the news edging forward with small adaptations through the course of the day. Sometimes Johnny looked up, at a joke or some provocative remark by Arthur Scargill, but Cyril seemed never to have heard it. Johnny sensed that the old man’s fondness for the radio had little to do with what was said on it. It was a kind of clock, often speaking the time, but more palpably parcelling out the day into news and weather, Farming Today, The Archers, even Woman’s Hour. It made other talk unnecessary, and more difficult. It was a form of starvation to a child of Radio 3, which Johnny imagined going on like a better life in a nearby room, but didn’t dare ask for, all the time he was rubbing down frames, making moulds of broken details, or learning from Cyril the invisible art of touching up a painting. It was one of Cyril’s lessons that most oil paintings more than a hundred years old had been restored, and even much younger ones needed a bit of work. What was more vulnerable than a painted surface, screened only by varnish which itself darkened and distorted and sometimes even damaged what it was meant to protect? Cyril shared his knowledge with a certain reluctance, and expressed approval in a tone of disappointment. ‘Yes, well you’ve got the hang of that,’ he would say, and turn away with a pinched look. When the wireless was silent in the power cuts so too, for the most part, was Cyril. Johnny said helpfully they could get a transistor, but Cyril seemed to see this as meddling. It was the ignorant good sense of someone fresh to the job, and no doubt to act on the suggestion would have put him, slightly but unacceptably, in Johnny’s debt.
Now the day had come for Johnny’s first date with Ivan: he was going round to Cranley Gardens after work, and all afternoon, as he cut down one frame with the mitre saw and curled the wet tip of his brush into the old carved flowers of another, he was picturing repetitively how it might be. In the few days since he’d seen him he had lost the look of him, and wished he’d had a chance to draw him. If he took himself unawares he could catch the brown fringe and the sexy slant of his teeth, and hear the chime of his speech in little phrases which seemed to flirt with him and hold him off at once. They’d kissed, but the kiss had been nearly nothing, and not yet repeated, though Johnny still held a mysterious trace of the feel of him in his hands, the rough warm front and the cool silk back of his waistcoat. He sensed it was best not to hope for too much from Ivan; but his thoughts ran back to him again and around him, and the last two days as soon as he’d woken he’d made love to him triumphantly before getting up.
Sometimes a picture drew him in – it exacted a surrender with no show of force, it seduced by something precisely unsaid. Last Saturday, out of the cold London morning, he’d gone into the National Portrait Gallery, and seen they had a show called ‘Londoners at Home’. He hadn’t heard of the photographer but was drawn at once by a newcomer’s feel for the subject, the curiosity and the dream of assimilation: he imagined resilient cockneys, eccentrics posed with their lapdogs and Afghan hounds, aristos in evening dress – that air of nostalgia for itself that pervades the life of a great city, ubiquitous as fog and soot. It wasn’t like that at all. The photographer, an American woman not much older than Johnny, had her own curiosity, and had found a different London, so real that it was hard to recognize. The reality was that of anxiety, confinement, a slowly forming despair. Almost all the subjects were alone, in their rooms, with a TV, an unmade bed, some worthless but probably treasured object. They stared, rarely smiled, but seemed madder when they did. Occasionally there were a couple of figures, two men, friends or brothers, father and son. Johnny’s instinct was for the lurking hint of sex in a photo, the shock of what a photo could catch. As someone who wanted to paint people he envied it.