When they got home Evert went to lie down, and Ivan dealt with the mail that had come that morning. The main item was from the Dean of Humanities at Lichfield University, at first glance just a brochure about their development programme, but with a covering letter that concealed towards the end a rather delicate piece of news. The enhanced facilities, the expanded library, the new Gottfried Wenk International Business School, were described in Utopian detail, or lack of it. It was all going to be marvellous, and the one possibly regrettable consequence of the works was the demolition of the old 1960s Arts Building, whose much-loved but now sadly outdated amenities included of course the A. V. Dax Theatre. ‘It is hoped’, the Dean wrote, ‘that the memory of your father will be preserved in some other way in the department. I believe Professor Bishop will be in touch with you soon about the digitisation of the A. V. Dax Archive.’ This sounded like a good thing, though Ivan couldn’t help wondering if the actual manuscripts, once digitally preserved, would still be thought necessary. He saw a van arriving at Cranley Gardens with the forty boxes which Evert had so cleverly got rid of twenty-five years earlier.
He kept it till they were going to bed, and the two or three minutes when Evert, in his pyjama bottoms, sat on a stool in the bedroom while Ivan, standing behind him, worked Deep Heat into his stiff neck and left shoulder. It was a moment when he had him captive, and with his gently kneading thumbs and fingers could coax and comfort and half-hypnotize him. He smiled at him in the mirror: ‘You had a funny letter today from the man at Lichfield.’
‘Oh!’ said Evert, fluttering his eyelashes at the appearance of something so remote from his present thoughts. ‘I’d forgotten about them.’
‘Just as well, perhaps,’ said Ivan. Evert’s skin was warm now and soft, the springy little grey hairs on his shoulders were smoothed flat by the ointment; then curled up again. The fumes of menthol and eucalyptus, the trace of turpentine, offered their old-fashioned reassurance. Ivan told him about the Theatre. He didn’t present it as something bad, and had little idea, after all these years, how Evert would take it.
‘Oh, lord,’ he said.
‘It’s a shame, isn’t it,’ Ivan said.
‘You’ve never seen it, have you,’ said Evert. ‘It wasn’t a very nice theatre.’
‘No, you said.’
‘I mean it wasn’t a theatre, it was a lecture room.’
‘And at least it’s going to be demolished,’ said Ivan. ‘They’re not renaming it after someone else.’
‘Someone with more money usually.’
‘That would be an insult. Still, it’s rather awful,’ said Ivan, slipping his arms round Evert’s neck and resting his chin on the crown of his head. They examined themselves in the mirror.
‘Yes, it’s awful,’ said Evert, looking down as if he might be about to cry, or was just possibly stifling a laugh. Ivan had a sense he minded it more than Evert did. If the memorial itself was destroyed, then what remained? ‘Thanks,’ Evert said, and rolled his shoulders as he stood up. ‘Mm, that’s much better.’ He put on his pyjama jacket and buttoned it as he went off to clean his teeth.
Ivan got undressed too. He had a responsible feeling of surviving, tonight, of carrying on in the world when a friend had left it for ever. He imagined Jill’s godson Adrian, a kindly hard-working man of about his own age, clearing up after the strangers had gone and turning out the lights on the prospects of a small, entirely unforeseen scandal. Margaret would do her best to control it, but all organizations were leaky, the V&A literally so, crumbling and underfunded, with staff laid off – Ivan knew about it, and saw he must press for the obituary to appear before the story broke.
They usually read for ten minutes or so in bed, but tonight Ivan, halfway through Chips Channon’s Diaries, felt tired and switched off his light after a page or so. Evert had been livelier in bed since his stroke, which was nice, but made Ivan himself a bit cautious, out of worry he might have another stroke from the exertion. They now had their once-a-monthers about three times a week. Ivan heard him coming back from the bathroom, his quiet, random, spaced-out remarks. Evert, who’d been half of a couple for the past forty years, now talked to himself like someone who lived alone. He had always spoken in his sleep, odd phrases that turned over as if in bed themselves and settled some unheard argument (‘which of course was why . . .’ ‘so you see he couldn’t . . .’); now he talked in his sleep when he was awake, made passing observations, wistful or sly, and often surely sexual, wandering in a field of reminiscence peopled by men other and earlier than Ivan. He smiled contentedly as he came into the room, set down his glass of water, and slipped into bed. ‘Good night,’ said Ivan with a vocal sort of yawn, pulling up the covers.
Evert pushed up beside him. ‘Because he was always passive, you know, in bed,’ he said, cosily but conclusively.
Ivan’s voice was toneless, a last dim formality before sleep as he turned away from Evert and shrugged into the pillow. ‘Who was that, Evert?’
‘Mm, never you mind,’ said Evert, raising a knee and breathing a kiss on to his neck; and it soon became clear Ivan wasn’t going to get off that lightly.
3
George Chalmers hung his coat up in the hall, folded his silk scarf and laid his gloves on top of it on the table. He had chosen to be painted in a crimson velvet smoking jacket, and cut a quaint figure at ten in the morning in the cold studio. The portrait, it turned out, was his present to himself for his seventieth birthday, though he said he’d been urged by any number of old friends to have it done. It stood now, a pale sketched ghost with a staring pink face, on the big easel, still so far from the desired effect that he walked past without looking at it; he stepped up with a short grunt on to the low rostrum and took his place in the high-backed chair. Johnny had picked up the chair for £10 at an auction – fake Venetian, oak and shabby velvet not quite the same colour as George’s jacket, and fixed with rows of brass studs. George sat upright, crossed his legs, and laid his hands along the down-curling arms of the throne.
So the new sitting, the fifth, began, Johnny passing in a minute or two through social self-consciousness into the familiar absorption of work. He preferred to have music playing, but because George was deaf it made talk even harder, so he dabbed and darted and pondered to the soundtrack of his subject’s monologues. Sometimes talk in the studio formed mysterious counterpoints to the actions of painting, sometimes it distracted and interfered. George Chalmers was a good subject, but an unsympathetic person. He preserved into old age something starkly coquettish, an unrelinquished belief in his own naughtiness and appeal. His stories about himself at Oxford, and in the Navy, and in Egypt and Italy after the War, were both savage and sentimental. He’d been madly in love, his heart had been broken; but Peter Coyle and Willy Fitchet and Jack Ducane were all shits and he’d seen through them and outlived them all – Peter of course by half a century. Outliving his lovers, a mere accident, seemed to suit his competitive view of life. Johnny’s compliant smiles and absent murmurs of ‘Oh!’ and ‘Really . . . ?’ flattered him at first, but offered not enough resistance. Pressed for anecdotes about his own love life, Johnny felt like an unadventurous simpleton. ‘Yes, well I once met this really nice Irish guy . . .’ Chalmers anyway didn’t seem to take in what he said, he wasn’t looking for any parity between the younger man’s fumblings and his own legendary adventures; though occasionally, from fatigue and good manners, he showed a distant interest, a weak unexpectant encouragement. Because of the deafness Johnny had to say his little stories loudly, as if addressing and failing to amuse a whole roomful of people.