But how strange the chat between artist and sitter became in the long shadow of Pat’s death, he couldn’t describe it, it seemed a molecular change in the material of life itself. He knew his role so well, thirty years in the business, part servant, part entertainer, the visiting artisan with his humble superiority, his gift, and now and then the air of inspiration with which he pleased them, reassured them, and kept his distance. He followed the familiar pattern of talk, nothing serious or sequential; he agreed, made brief distracted demurrals, eyes focused on detail; he kept things away from himself, an inveterate habit with new force. Everything in their talk was somehow of having (however fretful and spoilt and blind), as if having was their right, and unending. They hadn’t started to imagine his condition, where everything was crystallized in the aching cold of having lost.
Johnny liked to have Radio 3 on and brought in from the car, with his easel, paintboxes and groundsheet, the spattered old ghetto-blaster with its yard-long aerial, and its cassette deck, which dropped open sleepily, as if surprised to be still in use. ‘Composer of the Week’ first of all was Haydn, a happy one to work to. Alfie was learning the violin but had no more interest in classical music than the others – Tallulah, something saccharine about her, said she really liked this bit or that bit, but Johnny saw this as social training, instilled early. There was some vacant buck-passing between Alan and Bella, who in their separate sittings both claimed that their spouse’s lack of interest in music had sadly prevented them from going to concerts and so forth. Johnny was in charge of the music, and more than ever it was a screen. Sometimes of course he’d had sitters who were musical, and the music itself formed a medium of agreement, sustaining them both in the strange social intercourse of the sessions. But these days fewer and fewer people knew music, they couldn’t be expected to, there was no shame to Alan in talking all through the slow movement of the Lark Quartet about the relative performance of equities and gilts.
Something further emerged, in the careful process of building up their two figures, which also meant breaking them down. It was like those brief raw glimpses, in adolescence, of the private life of his parents – moments of lust or animosity, frighteningly unlike the normal banter of home. The summer, the autumn when everything went wrong, had been full of them, tones overheard from another room, of muttered violence or dead calm, the hard ‘I’m sorry?’ of a couple not wanting to hear one another: a cold irritated question, rising to hold off the downward truth, apology and regret, ‘I’m sorry,’ ‘No, I’m sorry.’ Now he was watching two adults younger than himself hiding, and hinting at, their mutual dissatisfaction. It struck him the portrait was like a late child, produced to lend new purpose to a marriage – all Bella’s idea, of course.
Both Alan and Bella asked him, ‘How am I doing?’ – he with a grin of impatience, as if saying ‘How am I doing for time?’ Bella was more anxious to feel she was getting it right and giving of her best, as if 1.5 million viewers were watching. The way with any impatient subject, anyone who couldn’t attain the right kind of passive alertness, was to tell them what good sitters they were. Alan was briefly convinced by this; though a suspicion it was just the ruse of an underling, and a slight discontent with himself for having swallowed it, showed in his tight hint of a smile after a further ten minutes. Such physical inspection was unusual for him, beyond the sanitized codes of the barber’s or dentist’s half-hour. But to Bella, who lived in, and lived off, the world of appearances, any sacrifice was reasonable, and she entered into it wholeheartedly. Johnny found himself giving her tart unsentimental features small spiritual touches – unsure as he did so if they were flattery or divination.
Bella, he knew, would want Johnny to talk, like an indiscreet cleaner, about other people he’d done, a famous cricketer, a famous dancer, and Sophie Wessex, of course. Royalty was approached with a mixture of irony and raw fascination. ‘You’re awfully discreet,’ Bella said. ‘Well, I hope you’re reassured by that,’ said Johnny, very smoothly, as his glance went back and forth between her left eyebrow and its image on the canvas. The fact was, of course, he knew no one who would be interested in Bella’s ratings rivalries and feuds with producers. She asked him a bit about himself, perkily at first, anticipating no resistance – he felt a heightened risk in disclosure, in colouring the sitting with his own emotions, his history, his artist’s escape from worlds like this.
He was forced, by the nature of the thing, to show the children as their children. No doubt the picture would go in to the Royal Soc of Portrait Painters’ annual show, and be seen then, if never again, by strangers. They would recognize Bella, and look from face to face, and at the room with its flashes of crimson and gilt, for a glimpse of her life, much as she had given them glimpses, in fact terrible glaring analyses, of the homes of others. They would look at smug, impatient little Alan, at wide-eyed Tallulah, Alfie posing with his ball, and Samuel, lazily fomenting all that was worst in his parents’ world. He kept Samuel’s sittings to a minimum, which suited both of them, since he was a fidget, casually mutinous, full of dismissive gossip about people in his mother’s world whom he was none the less proud to know. He was always hard to find, when the time for his sitting came, and took his position ten minutes late with an air of disdain for the process, but a moody concern with the result. On Johnny’s fourth visit to Virginia Water he was kept waiting for nearly half an hour. The door into the hall was ajar, and at last he heard voices.
‘For fuck’s sake, Mummy,’ Samuel was saying, ‘I’ve sat for him already for hundreds of hours.’
‘Yes, well, real proper art takes a bit of time you know, sweetie.’
‘Well, he’s hardly Sir John Lavvy, is he?’ said Samuel, snorting in spite of himself; ‘not, I hasten to add, that I’m that familiar with Lavatory’s work.’
‘Jonathan Sparsholt just happens to be a first-rate painter – he’s painted royalty, you know.’
‘Mother, royalty have their portraits painted twice a week, there’s nothing special about it, in fact they’re usually a load of wank.’
‘None the less, my darling,’ said Bella grimly, ‘they sit, they damn well have to. Now get in there.’ Clearly, by the inexplicable physics of motherhood, she was winning, despite having (even Johnny felt) the worse arguments. Samuel was whinily yielding as he said,
‘And he’s such an awful old pervert, I don’t like him peering at me all day long.’ But here a dull whack of something, half missing its target, sent the boy with a laugh and a shout of ‘All right!’ into the room.
‘Good afternoon,’ said Johnny.
‘Hi, Jonathan – sorry I’m late!’ said Samueclass="underline" ‘got held up by the great nattering mother-bird.’
‘Right, let’s get on,’ said Johnny, with a snap of a smile. He peered, reluctantly, at the boy, whose physical repulsiveness he’d previously felt bound to disguise; but over the following hour (he kept him fixed on the hard stool a long twenty minutes more than was needed) he gave himself with a kind of sour enthusiasm to telling the truth.
‘Oh, Christ,’ said Samuel, when he stood up at last and came round to see the work, ‘I’m covered in shag-spots.’ Johnny had brought up two or three of them, tiny flushed confections of impasto in the hot translucency of teenage skin. ‘God, you awful man, you’re going to have to take those out. I mean, I can’t go in the National Portrait Gallery looking like that.’
‘Well, it’s a risk you take,’ said Johnny, with a rueful shake of the head, ‘when you have your portrait painted.’