‘I suppose so . . .’ Johnny saw that he was right – in England, in Wales, a building like this appeared a double self-assertion, against bad taste and bad weather. How much longer would it be there? As they walked in single file along the headland towards the ruined barn Johnny felt the pang of regret that came before leaving a place he would never see again. Ivan pressed on, while Johnny lingered and was brought almost to a stop. His father’s word came from industrial relations – when they were out for a walk Johnny went on a ‘go-slow’: his parents got on with it while he hung back, unaccountably transfixed by the colour and the feeling of a field, a summer hedgerow, a church tower among trees. ‘I don’t know what you’re gawping at, young man,’ his father said, ‘you look all gone out’; though his mother’s impatience was different perhaps, a soft thwarted glance at the things she herself had once loved looking at and had been obliged to give up. In her smile there was a hint of hopeless allegiance. But not in Ivan’s. He caught up with him, they walked to the next gate shoulder to shoulder, but it was a game of closeness, and Johnny, in the loneliness of his difference, felt something subtler than their failure in bed, but confirming it, that someone who shared so little of his mood could never share his life.
9
Fran said Johnny must do a picture of Una and herself together. The lesbian double portrait would be a novelty – at least she and Johnny couldn’t think of any. Male lovers together were rare enough. There was the one from the 1940s where Benjamin Britten appeared oddly collaged on top of Peter Pears, and Johnny had cut out a picture from a magazine of a Hockney portrait of Isherwood and his boyfriend, sitting in chairs some way apart. But women together? They didn’t discount the chance of there being some, but as Fran said it was the men who got all the attention. And now how were they going to be done? ‘I’ve got a few thoughts about that,’ she said.
The next Friday, after the shop had shut, Johnny walked down the street and round the corner into Cheyne Walk. He carried the black leather drawing case his mother and Barry had given him for his twenty-first, ‘J. D. S.’ stamped in gold across one corner. It was a bright early evening, the river at high tide, the throb and fume of traffic along the Embankment. He hadn’t been asked to Sir George’s house before, and he saw the visit as a nice step forward in his friendship with Fran, just shadowed by a feeling that he’d been called in, like some other workman, to do a job. He had an almost oppressive sense, as he pushed down the latch of the tall iron gate, which swung closed on a weighted string behind him, of being on her father’s property, his flagged front path, in front of his tall red-brick house, a place where Fran and her friends would be kept in check by his sarcasm; and there was something further, intermittent but persistent, despite everything, the feeling of trailing a hint of scandal, in his makeup and in his very name, into places that would rather have done without it. Well, Sir George was away, ‘In Frankfurt,’ said Fran, as if that explained everything. Johnny stood a moment and looked at the beautiful old building. An ancient wistaria climbed up between the ground-floor windows and under the frail white balcony above, which it seemed to hold up while surely, over many slow decades, wrenching it away from the wall; mauve droplets of flowers showed still among the leaves. Two French windows gave on to the balcony, and one of them was open now, the narrow panes at an angle throwing back the sunlight.
Johnny spoke into the entryphone, but Una came down to let him in. In the gloom of the long narrow hall, closing the door and slipping past him to lead him upstairs, she was not just a friend but the inhabitant of Francesca’s life, he felt it now – she went ahead of him, barefoot on the dark rugs and polished oak, with a kind of moody pride in the whole set-up, and a shy sense, when she showed him into the drawing room above, of admitting him to some new intimacy. But this, after all, was what he was here to capture. She stood and watched as he took in the room, the mild gleam from the river on plain oak panelling, the rich scent of polish, beeswax with a trace of turpentine, mixed up with the sweetness of white lilies in tall vases. He’d expected the place to be crammed with paintings, like Evert’s house, but in this room at least there were only three, each glowing under its own brass picture-light: the Whistlers. He crossed to look at the smallest one, above the bureau opposite: a dusky horizontal with a boat and a man at the oar in silhouette against the grey water.
‘This is amazing . . .’
‘Do you like it,’ said Una.
Then he had the dilemma of which to look at next. All three were Thames views, calmly hanging a few hundred yards from where they’d been painted. There was something worrying as well as wonderful about the narrow focus – it had the cool ruthlessness of Sir George himself, it was the soft-spoken proof of a complete success.
Francesca came in a moment later, kissed him on both cheeks and sat down before she’d really looked at him. She winced as she lit a cigarette, and snapped the lighter shut. ‘You’d better take your shoes off, Johnny, with these priceless carpets.’ He couldn’t tell how much mockery, how much boredom at this house rule, was concealed by her hint of a smile. He felt the more clumsy as he set down his drawing case and hopping forward undid his desert boots. She was wearing pointed black heelless slippers, with tight black silk trousers and an embroidered red chemise.
‘Doesn’t your father wear shoes in the house?’ Johnny said, placing the boots together by the door.
‘What? – oh, Daddy does, yes, but his shoes never get dirty.’
He stood kneading the short silky pile of the carpet through his old socks.
‘Do you want a drink?’ said Una. And though he did he said,
‘No, I’ll wait till I’ve done the drawing, it’s probably best . . .’ – wanting to be sober, and not wanting them drunk, when he was working.
‘We’ll all wait,’ said Francesca, and looked thoughtfully at Una.
Johnny went to the window, stepped out, a bit testingly, on to the thin strip of the balcony, with its delicate wrought-iron fence. It was curious, the little altitude above the pavement, the island of public garden with holly trees and benches, and then the road, the balcony trembling when the lights changed to amber and the juggernauts started their rumbling ascent through the low gears. Beyond the traffic, between the plane trees, lay the grey expanse of the river, the cold wellings and streakings of its currents. And on the other side, an odd ruinous nothing – which Whistler (when Johnny came back in and looked again) seemed already to have noted in the three brown brushstrokes whose mere accidents, the spread and flick of a loose hair, the ghost of a bubble, the sticky split second as the brush left the canvas, were also small miracles of observation, a wall, a roof, a chimney rising through mist. Well, it was genius, and he smiled round at the women, who were looking at each other steadily through Fran’s cigarette smoke.
Genius was inspiring, but Johnny felt he would rather not draw them in here. ‘Is there another room we can use?’ he said.
‘Another room?’ said Fran.
‘Somewhere a bit brighter?’
‘Oh, I see,’ she said, with a smile that showed she was only partly convinced.
‘The kitchen,’ said Una.
‘Well, OK,’ said Johnny.
‘Or what about upstairs?’ said Fran.
‘OK,’ said Una.
Fran stood up and carried her cigarette on to the balcony, from where she flicked it into the garden of the adjacent house. ‘I’ve got this idea for the pose,’ she said.
‘Yes, I’ve got a few ideas,’ said Johnny. He felt it was important to keep some control of the situation. He followed them upstairs, and along a passage, taking everything in slyly as they talked. And there, above a bowl of potpourri on a walnut chest, was Late Summer, Dusk. ‘Aha!’ he said.