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‘Not paintings, I don’t think. There are some of his things – you’ll see.’ Ivan struggled with the key, there was a moment’s smiled-through doubt about it, and then they were in.

In the dark lobby Johnny felt at home, for all the mystery of that first minute, of closed curtains, half-seen objects, the stored and pickled smell of winter damp and baking sun. Hard to know now, in the small kitchen, with bathroom beyond, if it was warm or chilly. Ivan went ahead into a larger room, pulled back one floor-length curtain, then another, the sunshine fell instantly at an angle on low tables and a sofa which kept for a few seconds a look of intimate surprise. It was the living room, and behind a folding wall the studio, two easels, a high window looking the other way. Ivan turned a key, reached for a sliding bolt, pushed open a tall glass door and stepped out, as if his first impulse on being here again was to leave. Johnny followed him, more slowly, smiling, fingers on the metal frame, the tapered wing of the steel handle. He turned, stood, put his arm through Ivan’s in thanks and encouragement, but said nothing as he took it in. It was a small house, and the whole point was its simplicity, as he’d known it would be, the very act of construction tempered by a longing to have next to nothing. Not much money, according to Iffy, a house for one artist built by another, both fired up with ideas about space, form, economy, something mystical as well as technical in Orban’s soul. For Johnny the sense of being home was partly a feeling of being back at Hoole, where all these precepts still filled the air. Here a platform had been built, bedded into the hillside at the back and projecting in a broad deck at the front. The whole front of the house was glass, gazing out across the valley to the last ridge of hills that hid the sea. He craned over his shoulder at the edge of the deck, a drop of six feet into nettles and grass; then looked back at the house, the trees pushing round, grass and a small bush in the choked guttering, the sun-bleached and damp-stained linings of the curtains against the glass. He said, ‘I love it!’ and squeezed Ivan’s arm.

‘Was your college like this?’ said Ivan, as they went back in.

‘We had the same sort of windows,’ said Johnny, making do with a detail, and caught in an unshareable memory—

‘Leaky ones, you mean . . . ?’— Ivan scuffed his shoe-tip over the swollen and blistered sill.

‘Well, they could be.’

‘I just can’t imagine living here, can you?’

It was something Johnny was imagining so vividly that he laughed. ‘I think it’s got everything I need,’ he said, thinking really it would need Ivan too. He knew the hard square armchairs were an Orban design, and in the sagging bookshelves on the far side of the room he recognized three or four of the spines, bold lettering on torn jackets, Henry Moore, Mondrian, Kandinsky, old books on modern art. Ivan searched for a moment and pulled out a smaller book, wide-format, and passed it to him: ‘Did you read this, I expect?’

‘What is it?’

‘Evert’s little monograph on Stanley.’

‘Oh . . . yes . . . interesting,’ turning a few pages, ‘I mean no, not yet.’

‘Ah, I see,’ said Ivan, crossing towards a further door. ‘Well, have a look at it.’

‘I will . . .’

‘It’s very good indeed.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ said Johnny, sensing there was a line about Stanley and that he must be careful. He stood looking at the small sameish colour plates for a minute, then put the book down and went after Ivan, who was pulling back the curtains in the room beyond.

There was the main bedroom, which had a low double bed covered by a yellow counterpane but with no sheets underneath – long unused but still with the indefinable presence of a bed a particular couple had occupied for years, its confidence and privacy. And in a windowless room behind there was a narrow single bed, with boxes stacked on it, cardboard soft and bulging, books dropping from the bottom of one as Ivan lifted it and quickly put it down, brown bowls and plates and pitted chrome candlesticks in the other, which Johnny looked at distractedly as the unnamed but undenied likelihood came clear: they would be sleeping together. Ivan went out to turn on the water and electricity, while Johnny picked up the bags and came back alone into the main bedroom. Vacant, cross-lit by the three o’clock sun, the bed was a stage, floating in shadow. The truth was he had never spent the night in a double bed. They had come with four single sheets and Kitty’s electric blanket, and he spread them out under the cover, and plugged the blanket in; nothing, then the little red light came on. On the wall above the near bedside table hung a small woodcut: a naked man and woman, Adam and Eve, rough and darkly inked, the man heavy-hung, the woman heavy-breasted. Johnny sat down on the hard edge of the mattress, the Goyles just out of view but present, as a challenge and perhaps a reproach.

To make tea they had to link up the Calor-gas cylinder to the stove, and give the lime-scaled kettle a good clean-out. Johnny liked these tasks, playing house with Ivan, a hand on his back as they passed in the narrow space between sink and table. ‘I’ll make a fire later if you like, dry the place out a bit.’ He felt one eagerness merge and take cover in another.

‘Oh, if you like,’ said Ivan. ‘Or I can do it.’

‘I’m just going to look in the studio.’

He found there were paintings, six or seven oil sketches stacked in the corner, unframed and possibly unfinished, in Goyle’s later minimal style; they looked feeble to Johnny, routine startings going nowhere. He felt but of course didn’t say that there was something depressing in general about the way Goyle repeated himself, to the point of monotony; perhaps to him each new work had been an adventure, but to the casual eye he appeared to be stuck in a rut. In a cupboard in the lobby, smelling of old macs and boots, there was a folder of drawings on an upper shelf. ‘I found these,’ he said, taking them into the kitchen, where Ivan was pouring boiling water into a brown-glazed teapot.

‘It was always said,’ said Ivan, as if from a vantage point much later in life than twenty-three, ‘that Stanley couldn’t draw at all. He said himself that when he got into the Slade he couldn’t draw for toffee, but the professor there was very sympathetic and said, “Don’t worry about it, young man – just get on with painting” – he saw he had a gift.’

‘Yes,’ said Johnny, who could see that Stanley had thought in paint, not in line, there was nothing graphic at all to his slabs of slate colour and dull green and his grey-black sea. He remembered the small landscape, almost an abstract, that Cyril had cleaned and which had introduced him to Evert and to Ivan himself. Without that little painting he wouldn’t be here now.

They sat down side by side with their tea to go through the folder of drawings. ‘I don’t know, they look all right to me. What do you think of them?’ said Ivan. Johnny turned over the dog-eared sheets of cartridge paper, faintly damp and spotted here and there with mildew; the sketches seemed to him perfectly competent, and more varied than the paintings: details of walls, fallen trees, the tin-roofed chapel they’d passed in the village. Tucked in underneath them were three studies of a middle-aged woman in the nude. ‘Oh, my god, it’s Auntie Jen,’ said Ivan, ‘ – sorry, I wasn’t expecting to see that.’ He giggled and covered his mouth. And there was something funny in the contrast of Auntie Jen’s large-breasted figure and her tightly permed sharp-featured head. She wasn’t a nude model, such as Johnny had got used to studying at Hoole; she was a housewife who’d taken her clothes off in the middle of the day. She sat with thighs stoutly apart, and a worried look, as if she’d just remembered something in the oven.

‘He was a randy old goat,’ said Ivan. ‘You know he wrote these poems about her that caused a bit of a stir locally. There was a famous one that began, I come to you, loins bared.’ They both laughed, Johnny gazed at him and thought, wouldn’t it be best to kiss him now, put an arm round him, get the whole thing going?