Johnny’s strength, from the social point of view, was knowing Evert, who had encouraged George to commission the portrait; but Johnny had never had the gift of anecdote, and things he said about Freddie, or Iffy Skipton, or the goings-on at the Royal Soc of Portrait Painters, stories which had tickled Pat, and Evert himself, made little impression on Chalmers. He expected the old man to come round at some point to the Sparsholt Affair, but he never did, perhaps simply because it didn’t involve him or anyone he knew personally, and was, besides, a hideous balls-up, of the kind that Chalmers himself, for all his much wilder adventures, had been far too clever to get caught up in. Johnny felt his father’s term at Oxford might have overlapped with George’s time there, but it seemed most unlikely they would have met.
It was people with a different kind of fame that he talked about as he sat. ‘Of course I’ll never forget when I was in Florence for a few months in 1947, picked up this amazing young kid, who wanted to get into the theatre. I say kid, he was probably only a year or so younger than me. He was already working for Visconti, whom I knew reasonably well, of course. I had the clap at the time, can’t remember if it was in the arse or the cock, both probably, what? so I had to let that one pass. Then a few years later he turned up in London and gave me a ring – he was directing Tosca at Covent Garden! Of course you realize who it was.’
‘Daddy?’
Johnny didn’t turn, but he gasped at the thought of what she might have heard. ‘What is it, sweetheart?’ And now there was the creak of the floorboards behind him.
‘When are we going out?’
‘Not till after lunch, I’m working this morning, as you can see.’
‘Oh . . .’ He was aware of her, at the edge of his vision, standing.
‘Good morning,’ said George crisply.
‘George, this is my daughter Lucy – this is Mr Chalmers, I told you about.’
‘Good morning,’ said Lucy, with a momentary lowering of the voice and (he knew) the eyes. He pictured her view of the studio, the opaque adult world of the process, the talk, the canvas taller than she was. Once she had sat for him herself, or wriggled and slumped and slept for him, and he knew he must paint her again, on one of their weeks together. It was a long time since he’d done anything more than a sketch for love, not money.
On the Wednesday afternoon, Timothy Gorley-Whittaker, a superbly polite little boy, sanctioned even by Francesca, came round for the second time to see Lucy. Although it was half-term he arrived with his satchel, ‘T. G.-W.’ stamped on the flap. They were up in her room for over an hour, and as on his previous visit no sound of voices or footsteps could be heard in the studio below. At four Johnny went upstairs to tell them tea was ready and stood for a moment outside the door – there was continuous but rather strained, even argumentative, conversation. He tapped and went in a little anxiously to find Lucy seated on the bed and Timothy leaning against the mantelpiece, which for him was at shoulder height. They each held a small open book, and they stared at him with a mixture of impatience and embarrassment. ‘Tea’s up!’ said Johnny.
‘OK,’ said Lucy, glancing at Timothy.
‘May we just finish this scene, sir?’ Timothy said.
Johnny smiled dimly at the phrase before he saw that of course they were reading a play – he ducked his head and withdrew. Timothy’s gentlemanly treble went on. ‘Fanny, let us keep it to ourselves.’
‘Oh . . . sorry . . . um, um,’ said Lucy.
Johnny put his head round the door again and said quite loudly, ‘You don’t have to call me sir, you know.’ Then he went downstairs. His own father had liked Johnny’s schoolfriends to call him sir, which they either resented or overdid, both things mortifying to Johnny himself.
On the kitchen table he had set out a plate of Jaffa Cakes, a glisteningly dense but fat-free fruit cake that Pat had made, and a nice trimmed stack of banana and peanut-butter sandwiches he had made himself, eating one impulsively with a spasm of nostalgia at the peanut paste parching his throat. After tea it would be dark enough for some indoor fireworks that had caught his eye at the corner shop, the red packet like a box of combustible biscuits, volcanoes, Roman candles and five sparklers each. The children came down a minute later. ‘May I wash my hands, sir?’ said Timothy.
Johnny let it pass. ‘Both wash your hands,’ he said, and peeped at his own, which as usual were scabbed with paint, and the nails black. Lucy washed her hands first, and passed the towel apologetically to Timothy. ‘So what have you two been up to?’ Johnny said.
Timothy sat on the chair Lucy indicated. ‘We’re reading Mary Rose,’ he said.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Johnny: ‘what’s that?’
Timothy looked bewildered for a second, but decided it wasn’t a joke and smiled reassuringly: ‘Oh – it’s by J. M. Barrie . . . you know.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Johnny.
‘It’s very amusing, actually.’
‘Have something to eat, have a sandwich.’
‘Thank you, Mr Sparsholt.’
‘There’s quite a lot of writing in it,’ said Lucy.
Timothy glanced at her tenderly. ‘Yes, all the stage directions.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Johnny.
‘I read those out as well, it’s almost like reading a book, you know.’
‘We have to be several people at once,’ explained Lucy, as if this were both exciting and rather a drawback.
‘Well, I hope it’s suitable,’ said Johnny, just a little bit as a joke; he thought it was all rather rum. Lucy looked as if she’d like to make a further comment, but her own politeness prevented her. Timothy was protractedly chewing a mouthful of bread and peanut butter, but his eyebrows signalled a desire to speak.
‘Oh, completely suitable, sir,’ he said at length.
‘Good lad,’ said Johnny, and wondered again at the language that his own part, the bluff but caring parent, was written in.
After tea he went into the studio and came back with the box of indoor fireworks. ‘I thought these might be fun,’ he said.
There was a trace of anxiety on Lucy’s face, but Timothy smiled. ‘I used to love them when I was small,’ he said.
‘Hmm, so did I,’ said Johnny. ‘Shall we go in the other room, we can make it darker in there.’
They went out through the hall, and into the sitting room; the doors into the studio were closed, and the street light outside the gate threw autumnal gleams among the shadowy sofas and armchairs. Johnny switched just one lamp on, before he pulled the heavy curtains across. A saucer on the marble hearth – and the children to stand back, while he lit the little tabs of blue paper. He saw, when he opened the box and peered at the contents, that they were not only few in number but poor quality – in the shop he hadn’t noticed the brand, which evidently wasn’t English: ‘Putt in Earth or flower-pots’ it said on the Roman candle. He did just that, in the pot of an old cactus, lit the fuse and quickly turned off the lamp. In the dark the tiny burning dot twitched slightly and after a wavering ten seconds appeared to expire. ‘Daddy . . .’ warned Lucy as he went towards it, and at just that moment there was a pop and a low fountain of blue sparks began to play from the top, much more on the right than the left, where it sputtered and seemed blocked. The mouth of the fireplace and the brown Minton tiles around it were lit up, and in the mantelpiece mirror Johnny saw the youngsters’ faces, ghostly against the dark, Lucy biting her cheek.