‘Ah,’ said Francesca, settling as the waitress brought their drinks. ‘No, it’s not Greta . . .’
Johnny turned in his seat. ‘What is it . . . ?’
‘I admire her, though, don’t you?’
At this late hour for lunch only half the tables were taken, shopping bags tilted against chairs, and between them, moving patiently and courteously, strolled a tall young woman in a beige tartan suit with a short matching cape and a pillbox hat. With raised hands turning and pointing as if discreetly undecided about which way to go, she gave the sense, none the less, of having a clear purpose. She smiled at the lunchers, her gaze dropping across the tables, as though to note what they were having, but not meeting their eye. She engaged them and released them in a passing moment of goodwill and just perceptible embarrassment: it was odd to be invited to stare – though she was too polite, in her serene revolutions, to stare at them.
‘They don’t still do that . . .’
‘Don’t you love it?’ Francesca did stare, a calculating look, with a sly lift of an eyebrow when the woman came alongside. ‘Is it available in other colours?’ she said.
The young woman stopped, though a tendency to revolve still showed itself above the waist. There was a consciousness of drama in asking her to speak. ‘Yes, love – I think there’s sort of a reddish one? Maybe a blue, but I’m not sure we’ve got it.’ She snubbed her nose. ‘Do you like it then?’
‘Oh, it’s not for me,’ said Francesca. ‘Do a turn for me?’
And with a subtle feeling, not unwelcome to either, that the rules had been broken, the girl turned her back on them, lifted the cape and angled her bottom first one way then the other.
7
He met up with Francesca and Una again at six thirty, outside Liberty’s, and they took him to a small bar in a side street off Regent Street, where you wouldn’t have expected a bar to be – was it a new arrival or a survivor? Beyond the pub door with its small opaque window was a heavy curtain that kept the draught from the drinkers and his main effort once they’d skirmished past it was to seem unfazed, even happy, at being the only man there. Una pushed her way through to the bar, though it wasn’t a struggle, she was greeted and patted by two friends as she pressed past, and she leant across the counter, unsmiling, for a kiss from the barmaid – if that was the right word. Johnny did spot a grumpy-looking man with short grey hair in the corner, who suddenly got up and came to the bar with the unmistakable arse of a woman. His main worry was that they would object to him, and he nodded his hair forward to conceal himself, without supposing it would fool them.
In fact when they’d been there ten minutes, and Una had introduced him to one or two of them, he had a feeling he’d been briefly admitted to a more civilized place than usual – a kind of high-minded solidarity, untouched by any sexual interest, seemed to support him, without going quite so far as to welcome him. He felt it would be bad manners to stay too long. He saw too that Una, who said almost nothing, was a figure in the bar – not far from where she worked, on the hinge between Mayfair and Soho. Francesca this evening was decidedly Mayfair, played up to her poshness and temperament, and drank beer from the bottle with just a bit too much carelessness. Una and Johnny had gin and tonics. A friend of theirs called Mary, small, dark, beautiful, in tweed jacket and brown jodhpurs, asked him what he did.
‘I’m an artist,’ he said, ‘yes, I’m a painter,’ in the palpable spirit of the bar of being what you wanted to be.
‘What sort of thing?’
He sensed the question was clever, not philistine. ‘At college I was an abstract expressionist,’ he said, ‘well, lots of us were, not just me! Now I’m hoping to focus on portraits.’
‘Not abstract . . . ?’
‘That’s right.’ A quick flirty calculation was allowed in his study of her head, and her clothes. She seemed wittily to be a lesbian now and also forty years ago, but he wasn’t sure. ‘Have you been painted?’
‘Oh, not yet,’ she said, as though she had a proper sense of when such a thing should happen. But also as if some proposal had casually formed. In the first small lift of the gin, a pub measure, not much, but nicely unfixing, he felt (what he wasn’t of course) in love with her, and watching her then, as she drew out a soft leather pouch and constructed a roll-up, was abashed by her quiet authority. ‘You wouldn’t have so much freedom, of course,’ she said, ‘being a portrait painter. You have to please people who often have no idea about painting.’
‘I hope once I’ve got started they’ll know what sort of thing they’re in for.’
‘That’s true. And it’s certainly a more dependable source of income,’ Mary said. ‘I only say all this because my grandfather’s a painter. You may not have heard of him.’
‘What’s his name?’ He sat forward on the low stool and twiddled the ends of his hair.
‘You don’t have to pretend you’re a woman,’ said Una.
He blushed and laughed, on his mettle not to take offence. He never thought of himself as feminine, though women looked at him and spoke to him, in rivalry and understanding, on the street, or in the disordering gale of the Underground. And at that moment someone touched him on the shoulder, he turned apologetically, and she said, ‘I like your hair!’
‘Oh, thank you . . . very much,’ said Johnny, and kept on blushing, the centre of all this chaste female attention.
‘I’ll do it for you, if you want,’ said Una.
‘Oh . . .’ said Johnny, flattered, and unnerved a little, as he hadn’t thought it needed doing. Then he played up, shook it back. ‘That would be great’ – he tried to hold Una’s eye as she studied him, speculatively, biting her lip at the scale of the task.
In the restaurant Fran and Una spoke about the Sol y Sombra with a mixture of excitement and scepticism Johnny found hard to follow. ‘You’ve been to the Solly, haven’t you?’ said Francesca.
‘No, I haven’t,’ Johnny said. ‘That’s the thing.’ It had been dangled in front of him for the past two months; he’d stood outside its door.
‘I thought you were going with Ivan?’
Johnny shook his head. ‘Well, we went. But the power went off that night. We got there and they’d put a sign up – they’d had to close.’
‘Oh, you’ll love it,’ said Francesca.
Una didn’t seem so sure. ‘It’s somewhere to go,’ she said. ‘Anyway, we’ll be all right now.’
‘You mean, now the power’s back on?’
‘Oh god, do you think Audrey will be there?’ Una said.
‘God,’ said Francesca. ‘I don’t believe she’d dare.’
‘I think she will,’ said Una. And they talked to each other about Audrey for a bit, while Johnny’s smile faded. The girls were taking him out and showing him life, and he felt a small shameful reluctance that he didn’t have a man to explore with. Well, Ivan was supposed to be turning up later, but he was a worry as much as a help. ‘So shall we get the bill?’ he said.