‘Hi . . .’
‘You don’t remember. Well, I am hurt!’ – his voice big, saucy, capable.
Johnny knew a face, it was his calling and career, but something in him delayed a second longer the emergence from the past of this brown-eyed humorous mask, changed inexorably by the journey, but settling and clarifying now, the lips sharper, the curly hair thinner and cropped short, the big powerful frame itself heavier, with the lumbering ease of continuous training. ‘It’s Mark . . .’ said Johnny, in the awkward pleasure of finding the stranger was a friend all along.
‘Well, how are you!’
‘I’m very well . . .’ They had stopped, Johnny stuck out his hand to prevent a hug or a kiss, and Mark shook it and winked, squaring his shoulders.
‘Johnny Sparsholt . . . How amazing.’
‘I know . . .’ – Johnny watched Mark turn his seductive smile on the red-coated child beside him. ‘This is Lucy,’ he said firmly, and not to say more.
‘Hello, Lucy! I’m Mark’ – stooping to her but sensing no handshake was forthcoming.
‘Hello,’ said Lucy, suddenly younger, turning on her heel in boredom or unease while she held her father’s hand. She felt for the currents of adult talk, hints of reserve, of real or merely pretended warmth, but she made her own immediate judgements on people too, not easy to shift.
‘It must be fifteen years,’ said Johnny.
‘Yeah,’ said Mark tolerantly. ‘What have you been up to? Still painting?’
‘I certainly am.’
‘Going well?’
‘Yeah, I think so . . .’
The bell rang again from the gate, some sad echo of school in the darkening afternoon. ‘Daddy . . .’ said Lucy.
Johnny touched Mark’s upper arm and they moved on together.
‘So things have changed a bit for you,’ said Mark, ‘by the look of it.’
‘Yes – a lot of things, actually.’
Mark looked at him in friendly calculation. ‘So you’re married . . .’
‘Married . . . ? Oh, I see. No – well, Lucy here is my daughter, but I’m not married, no’ – as she scuffed the leaves and yanked on his hand.
‘Hmm . . .’ said Mark.
‘And what about you? Still in Camberwell?’
‘God, it was that long ago . . .’
‘I remember the house,’ said Johnny – it was a glimpse, as if he’d pulled open the front of a doll’s house, of a dozen different lives going on on five floors, a cooperative, with its meetings and parties in bright-coloured rooms and the danger, all the time, of a small group of members seizing control.
‘We were kicked out of there in the end,’ Mark said. ‘We had some good times, though.’
‘Yes,’ said Johnny, ‘indeed,’ not sure if he meant the times he had there with him in particular. Good times were a basic requirement for Mark – dazzling, exhausting all-nighters. He must have had a job, but Johnny, then as now, never quite took in what people did. ‘And what are you doing these days?’
‘Ooh, I keep pretty busy,’ said Mark, ‘if you know what I mean!’ The patter, it had always been a thing about Mark, everything bounced into a joke of a kind, innuendo so endless you checked what you were about to say, with a longing, after days of it, for talk as dull and unequivocal as could be. Still, feeling the tug of his presence now, hands pouched in jacket pockets, the faint raw smell of the leather, Johnny was amazed to think someone so handsome, active and unthinking had spent a whole month of nights with him, drinking, dancing and in bed.
They came up towards the big Henry Moore by the gate, only two cars beyond in the further hedged maze of the small car park. ‘I must nip off for a sec,’ said Mark with a grin, ‘but great to have seen you.’
‘And you!’ said Johnny, not sure what he meant by nip off – but it seemed he needed a piss.
‘Run into you again, maybe’ —and now a quick hug, Mark’s warm breath at Johnny’s ear. He walked off fast, with a minute to spare, as the attendant came back with the key tied to a short red baton.
‘He’s just coming,’ said Johnny, and as Lucy ran out by herself towards the Volvo he turned and watched him for a moment through the gap in the Henry Moore – a two-piece reclining figure which from most points of view overlapped and combined as if one but from this narrow vantage was revealed as two separate weathered hunks.
Lucy sat up in the car, in the dignity and disadvantage of a small person, as they made their way through thickening traffic on to the South Circular. The ebbing of enthusiasm in a child was upsetting to Johnny in part because he understood it – it was like a judgement on himself. His own dawdles and go-slows, the beauty-struck trances of childhood and adolescence, had been lonely at the time, understood by none of the other boys. Why should Lucy share this peculiar, faintly disabling gift? ‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘did you ever want to get married?’
‘Oh, darling . . . it never really seemed likely.’ He slid a glance at her. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘I wish you’d marry Mummy,’ she said.
‘Sweetheart . . .’ – the wish was too poignant to sound quite believable; but something had unsettled her this afternoon. ‘I don’t think we’d have got on very well, do you?’
‘Lots of people’s parents don’t get on,’ Lucy said.
‘Well, that’s very true. But then what happens? Think of Granny and Grandpa.’
‘Hmm. Which ones?’
‘Well, I meant my parents – but Mummy’s too, come to that. Your mother and I are very different sorts of people. I’m sure you’d agree.’
She stared out at the cars and vans which seemed to close in, to slow and set firm all round them as they waited for a light a hundred yards ahead. ‘Timothy’s asked me to marry him,’ she said.
Important not to laugh – and not to take it too seriously, which would soon sound like mockery. ‘I see. When did this happen?’
‘When we went upstairs after the fireworks.’
‘The excitement must have got to him.’
‘Daddy,’ said Lucy.
‘And what did you say?’
She perhaps thought him unworthy of this confidence after all. ‘I said I’d think about it.’
‘Quite right.’ The lights changed, the slow release of inertia passed backwards through the crowd of cars. ‘What he needs to do, of course, is come and ask me for your hand in marriage.’
‘Hm.’
‘That’s the proper thing.’
‘OK.’
‘I mean it would have to be quite a long engagement, wouldn’t it.’
‘I know,’ said Lucy: ‘I just don’t know what I’ll feel when the time comes.’
‘And nor does he, sweetheart, remember that.’
The journey home took much longer than the easy drive down. Sidelights, headlights, were on, the long line of streetlights stretched ahead as the road turned to night, and high above, even so, the sky whitened and gleamed clear, long strands of purple-black cloud sinking over the housetops. Once or twice he sensed she was asleep, but she moved irritably when he peeped at her to check. He thought about what they would do later, ideally something with Pat, a game of Cluedo, which she loved, or Monopoly, with its different kind of killings, which she naturally expected to win; and he thought of Mark, strolling towards him so suddenly out of the past, and then jogging off under the trees, surely never to be seen again.
4
Freddie’s funeral was held at Kensal Green, and Lucy was taken to it, at her own insistence. She was aware of the disagreements about whether she should go, her father’s wishes more or less clear from her mother’s response to them on the phone. When the day arrived she got up in a thoughtful variant of her dark school uniform and went into her mother and Una’s room to look in the big mirror; she was to travel to the crematorium with the Skipton family, but would come away from the ‘wake’ that followed with her father. In the evening she would go on with him, wearing something nicer, but still, she imagined, with a lingering gravity, to the Musson Gallery for the private view of Evert’s pictures. ‘It’s unfortunate,’ said her mother, ‘having the two things on the same day.’ But Lucy, adjusting her hat and looking for her in the mirror, disagreed. ‘After all the sadness,’ she said, ‘I think it will be a blessed relief.’