When she agreed it was safe to go in, he turned on the lamp again. ‘This one should be a bit more thrilling,’ he said, tipping the debris into the grate and setting a small black cone on the saucer. ‘These used to be my favourites.’ He crouched down and struck a match. ‘Your granny used to get them for me as a special treat, darling.’
‘Yes,’ said Lucy.
‘They can be really pretty.’ He touched the match to the tip of the cone which caught and smoked at once. The paper peeled back, and before he’d turned the light off the softly fizzling volcano spewed out purple worms for four seconds and then went out – dormant or extinct it was hard to say, though they stood back in case of some further eruption, even a titchy one, in the flat half-minute that followed. An unpleasant nitrous smell hung in the air. It was her mother that Johnny heard in Lucy’s voice from the darkness: ‘That was really pathetic!’ At which, disappointingly, Timothy giggled.
Well, there were still the sparklers. ‘Let’s play with fire,’ said Johnny, and saw Timothy’s uncertain smile. The harmlessness of sparklers was their magic, as much as the danger of other fireworks – the sparks showered where they would, on chairs and carpets, and left no trace. At the centre, though, the wand of incandescence, fading at the tip as the sparks crept fizzing towards the hand, must surely be hot. These particular sparklers were made of very thin and bendy wire. ‘Be careful now . . .’ And with the lamp switched off again, Johnny lit a Vesta, the children dipped their two tips into the flame, they were slow to catch, then seemed to fuse for a second in the glare before they lifted them away and Johnny shook out the match that was suddenly burning his fingers. The sparklers cast only a short-range light, there was a dreamy weakness of effect. Timothy drew decorous circles in the air with his, Lucy was a bit more arabesque, the portrait of herself glimmering in its varnish as she waved in front of it. Then the three of them were in the dark again. ‘Great, well there are four more each!’ said Johnny.
They grew more adventurous with the next two goes, they shuffled round the room, writing vanishing letters on the air in front of them, Lucy made fairy swoops, and Timothy was a plane, with cautious sound effects, coming quickly, even so, to the limits of sparklers and what you could do with them. When they had got through three of them, Lucy said, ‘Daddy, why don’t you have a go?’
‘Yes, do, Mr Sparsholt,’ said Timothy.
‘No, no, I bought them for you,’ said Johnny, with a laugh at his cut-price benevolence.
‘Well, we’ve had a go,’ said Lucy; and when he still demurred, ‘In fact we’ve had three goes.’
So he took one, as instructed, and let Lucy light it, her face intent and to him very beautiful. The thing spat and crackled, and then it was going. He stood, with the advantage of height, and not a clue what to do with it, he was conducting in the air above their heads, it seemed to be the Tragic Overture, then he waited staring with a patient smile at the sparks hissing down over his raised hand into the shadows.
At six o’clock Annabel Gorley-Whittaker arrived to pick up her son, just as Pat was getting home from work. He pushed open the door with a flourish, but she showed an odd reluctance to come into the house. She advanced as far as the coat stand and tried to carry off the difficult feat of not actually looking at any of the two dozen pictures on the walls. ‘Ah, Timothy, there you are,’ she said, as if kept waiting for hours, when he appeared at the head of the stairs.
‘He’s been no trouble,’ said Johnny, amazed to find himself, as a parent, in relations with this woman.
She looked at him keenly for a second – whatever she had imagined was surely the other way round. Her politeness, like her son’s, was excessive – for two or three seconds her face became a mask of intimate understanding and apology. ‘It’s been awfully good of you to have him,’ she said.
The following day was set aside for an outing. There was an expectation of outings and also a slight resistance to them. Lucy could take an interest in houses and pictures, he flattered her and got her on his side by saying he knew she liked art – but he knew too that the liking was finite and fatiguable. A place with a lot of gilding and drapery excited her for fifteen or twenty minutes, as an ideal setting for herself, but then the monotony of history made her eyes restless and her feet on the tourists’ drugget would drag in mutiny or her hand jerk him hopefully forward and round the corner. Now and then he would see their passing image in the depth of an old mirror hung between windows, an ill-assorted pair, scruffy man with his thick, too-long hair, and neat, restless, critical child.
Coming at it another way, he once stopped her without explanation in the Bayswater backstreet where the great Peter Orban had fitted a cool Corbusian house (his first in London) into the long shabby terrace. ‘Isn’t it beautiful,’ he said. For a moment she gave him credit for a joke – of the forced paternal kind – and she seemed to think it an unfair trick when he told her her own great-grandfather had built it. She cocked her head as she looked at it afresh; but it wasn’t going to wash. Better gilding and drapes than that.
‘Why couldn’t he make it the same as all the other houses?’ she said.
‘Well, sometimes, darling,’ said Johnny, holding her there just a little bit longer, ‘there’s a point in being completely different and new.’
‘Well, I think it’s nasty,’ she said quietly, and turned her head to carry on down the street.
‘A bomb knocked down the old house, you see, in the War,’ said Johnny, now rather on his mettle to defend the building. But talk of the War, which had coloured and conditioned so much of his own childhood, was meaningless to her.
Today’s outing was to Dulwich, to see the picture gallery. She had been there, unrememberingly, before, when she was small enough to ride in a backpack, little ranee on a jogging elephant, her view of the paintings relieved by the back of her father’s neck. Though he said, ‘Look!’ from time to time they had gone there wholly for his own pleasure. She had combed his hair with her fingers, produced tiny ditties and operatic shrieks, and by the room of the Poussins was emitting a powerful smell. It was one of his favourite places, and today’s return was threatened from the start by the way he talked it up to her. Like her mother, she disliked being told what to think, or feel – ‘great art in a great building, sweetheart’, he said, and saw the small frown of incipient resistance. Off they went in the Volvo, with its muddle of Pat’s things and Johnny’s things, and an unignorable smell of its own. The safety net was the Fairmile sculpture garden, a short drive further on, where they’d been last summer, when Lucy had said it was ‘lovely’ and ‘enormous fun’; though she was capable of hair-raising changes of mind.
Well, the gallery wasn’t a success, and not, somehow, for itself, but because of what he’d said, all the greatness of it. Greatness didn’t excite her yet – it had if anything the opposite effect. ‘What do you think, then?’ he said, holding her to him parentally in her red coat with black velvet collar. She shrugged him off to look round, as if the question hadn’t crossed her mind in the previous half-hour.
‘It’s OK,’ she said.
‘Oh, well that’s good!’ said Johnny, wounded of course but knowing enough now not to press her and harden her further. ‘We’ll just look at one more room, shall we.’
‘Daddy, when can we see the sculpture garden?’ She looked up at him, she could be charming.
‘You want to go there now, do you?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘Just one more room?’
She thought it through. ‘OK.’ And he took her hand again and strolled with her into the cross-gallery at the end, where twenty little Dutch pictures hung, small oils, full of interest and even comedy of a kind.