Francesca turned, saw him smiling thinly at it. ‘Oh, isn’t it your picture, darling?’
‘Yes, it is . . .’ He was proud to find it here, ahead of him, but it was worrying too, after the pristine works downstairs. The retouches gleamed treacherously. He didn’t like to look too closely, but surely Sir George must know?
It was something he wondered again as they shifted things round in the bedroom. If Fran and Una, pulling up the duvet, throwing clothes into a cupboard, were so in love and so inseparable, if they were even planning now to have a baby, Sir George must be aware of it all, and have accepted it, more or less. They occupied that large enlightened room he had not yet dared to enter with either of his own parents – Evert’s room came the closest to the image in his mind.
There was a small French sofa whose curved back would bind the composition. ‘Grimly uncomfortable,’ Fran said, but they tried it out, the girls at an angle, both looking down, past each other, as if absorbed in the same thought. ‘That’s good,’ said Johnny.
‘You don’t think we should touch more?’
‘No, it’s really good like that.’ It had crept up on him, but this was really the first day of his professional career, he had to do it as if he knew how to do it, on his own – there was instinct, of course, and training, he had a Diploma, and memory of a hundred portraits, more a muddle than a help. And then when they were set he had to find his own angle on them, and his own distance. He looked round, shifted a chair, carefully moved the black bra that was on it, and sat down to draw.
He loved drawing, but it was a funny thing about portraits that you had an audience. Still, in a minute or two he settled, in the self-aware silence they all kept, just Una’s breathing and the soft scratch of the chalk. ‘You can put some music on if you like,’ he said.
‘Oh, let’s not bother,’ said Fran.
Their two heads were a contrast, and there was a question he hadn’t thought out as to which of them should have more prominence, Una being bigger, but Fran the dominant partner, so it seemed to him. So there was tact in it.
‘How are you getting on?’ said Fran, slightly breaking the pose after five minutes to look across at him. Johnny smiled pleasantly as he worked with the edge of the chalk and stared across at them, not as conversationists but as subjects, whom he was free, and obliged, to stare at. ‘Coming along?’
‘Well, you know, I think so.’ He was pleased by how little he now felt frightened of her.
‘How long will it be, do you imagine?’
‘Mm, don’t be so impatient.’
She settled back, was silent for a minute, and then spoke with eyes dutifully averted. Only her blinking betrayed her tension. ‘We were wondering if you might do a baby for us.’
He tried pretending to himself he didn’t know what she meant, his heart raced and the heat flooded his face; he took refuge in obtuseness. ‘How big?’
‘Well . . .’ – the girls looked at each other.
‘I mean, in oils, or a drawing like this?’
Una made one of her rare statements: ‘We want your sperm, for god’s sake.’ He gasped, blushed deeper, shaded heavily with the chalk.
‘Oh, I see!’ he said.
‘You see, we’ve rather set our hearts on having a baby,’ said Fran.
‘Right . . .’
‘But we need, you know’ – she glanced at Una – ‘a donor.’
‘We think you’re quite nice,’ said Una, in the tone of an unforeseen concession – she kept her pose, but there was something fleeting in her face now that Johnny would never capture.
‘And reasonably good-looking,’ said Fran. ‘We don’t want a hideous baby. And you’re healthy, aren’t you, darling.’
‘Um . . . yes, I think so,’ said Johnny.
‘You mustn’t do it for at least a week before,’ said Una. ‘You know, with anyone else.’
‘That shouldn’t be too much of a problem,’ said Johnny, feeling they were getting ahead of themselves.
‘Or indeed with yourself,’ said Fran severely.
‘Can I think about it?’ said Johnny, though it sounded already as if he couldn’t.
‘Darling, of course you can,’ said Fran, as if she too thought it merely a formality.
‘I mean . . . who’s going to be mother – if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘No, fair question,’ said Fran. ‘I am.’
‘Well, we’ll have one each, love,’ said Una. ‘We agreed on that.’
Johnny kept drawing, he worked up the back of the sofa between the near-blanks of the faces, glad of the task. He sensed the girls themselves, both a little flushed now, were glad of the pose – it made the whole strange conversation possible. But it wasn’t so easy for the artist. He put his head on one side, and made showy marks like someone pretending he could draw. To be asked for your sperm seemed an outrageous compliment and then huge consequences, of a kind any young man might rather avoid, reared beyond it – the whole thing was a challenge, to his humour, his friendship and that untested thing his manhood. Had they really asked Ivan? If so, he had turned them down; and that in itself put pressure on him, even as it gave him an excuse, a precedent.
‘You said you haven’t got much money?’ said Una.
‘No, not really,’ said Johnny, relieved for once, and not liking to ask how much they had. ‘I get twenty-five pounds a week from Cyril; and my dad gives me ten pounds a month. I mean, we’re not getting married, are we?’ – finding he hadn’t been paying attention to that large part of the conversation that hadn’t yet happened, but that his friends must have been through ahead of him in great detail. He thought the lack of funds might be an invaluable get-out clause.
‘You mean to both of us?’ said Una, and smiled distantly at his silliness.
‘Would the father be allowed to see the child?’ said Johnny, taking shelter in a more abstract view; he supposed if they didn’t get him they’d get someone else. He was surprisingly jealous of the idea, the ridiculous image, of Ivan with a baby.
‘That could be part of it,’ said Una, ‘yes – if you like.’
‘She’d have to take my name, though,’ said Fran.
‘Or he . . .’ said Una, and Johnny, not quite in unison.
‘Well, all right,’ said Fran impatiently – whether at their simple-mindedness or at this undesirable alternative. Though it was other alternatives that occurred to Johnny – he felt his child was being taken away from him within seconds of its first being mentioned.
‘I’ll have to think about it,’ he said absurdly and again.
‘I want you to think about it very carefully,’ Fran said.
He laughed at the redundancy of what he was saying – ‘I mean, I’ve never done anything like this before.’
‘No, nor have we,’ said Una, very simply. Johnny saw it was a clever ploy. They had already planted the unthought-of possibility of being a father in his heart. He imagined for a moment telling his own father the news, the uncertain pride in this nearly heterosexual act, the unhoped-for vindication; and then he started thinking of all the richly ironic reasons he couldn’t tell him.
‘I can’t do any more on this today,’ he said with a surprising loud laugh, and flipped the cover of the pad back over the drawing. He felt things would be very different for all of them the next time they sat.
Fran sighed. ‘Oh, thank god,’ she said, quickly getting up. ‘Let’s have a drink.’
They went down to the kitchen and in a minute they all had cold glasses of rosé in their hands – ‘It looks like a rather important one,’ Fran said as she slipped it back into the fridge; but a strange mute fell over them, the felt lack of a toast, there being nothing, as yet, to celebrate. Johnny was glad of the drink, even so, whose effect he felt descending and spreading to mask the simultaneously spreading sense of everything that was entailed. Shouldn’t he just say at once it was impossible? An odd diplomacy kept them off the subject, now it had been named. The girls sat down at the table side by side again, Johnny opposite them, with a sudden sense of his own yearning inadequacy, not having a partner of his own. ‘Now, how was your romantic weekend in Wales?’ said Fran.