‘Can you see me in that sort of pose, darling?’ – Alan turning the screen to show them one of Johnny’s pictures of Svend, the tall Danish model he’d painted several times ten years ago.
‘Well . . .’ she said, loyalty tested.
‘Extraordinary,’ said Alan, turning the screen back. Johnny saw that he thought himself rather broad-minded in employing him, and if put on the spot would explain it as his wife’s doing. Women were often quite thick with the gays, they prided themselves on knowing them, just as Alan took care to keep his distance. ‘Now . . .’ he said, ‘Families,’ peering down like some old buffer, one of David Sparsholt’s friends: ‘That’s more like it!’
2
Waiting while Michael unlocked the front door, he wasn’t sure if he was going to meet his parents, or what to say to them if he did; he imagined them, smart, wealthy, busy, and ten years younger than himself. It was hard to ask about them without sounding anxious. ‘So what does your dad do?’ he said.
The door swung open on to a long empty entrance hall, floored in grey and white marble. ‘Oh . . . all kinds of stuff!’ said Michael.
‘Right.’
‘He’s in LA right now.’
‘Oh, OK.’
Michael seemed to be both English and American. ‘Well, this is it’ – he locked the door behind them, and there was something about him, haunted or haunting, touching buttons on a lit panel, going on down the hall with his coat on, the young man in the absent father’s house: it was a drawing charged with inexplicable emotion, a dozen quick strokes converging on a line and a shape.
‘Wow . . .’ – on the left a vast rectangular stairwell rose into shadow, and Johnny walked into the centre of it and stared upwards at the glimmering skylight four floors above. ‘That’s amazing’ – with an echo, subtle index of true Georgian grandeur. ‘These are Adam houses, aren’t they?’
‘Yeah, it’s Adam,’ said Michael, coming back.
‘You’ll have to show me.’ He felt it lent glamour to the frictionless unfolding of the date; he would have the house to remember at least. He put out an arm and found himself holding Michael’s cool hand. Then he turned, bent his head and kissed him on the mouth.
‘Hey . . .’ said Michael.
A door under the cantilever of the stairs opened and a woman, Chinese perhaps, in a dark skirt and blouse appeared. She stood smiling, not quite in greeting, but in readiness. ‘Hey, Lin,’ said Michael. Johnny smiled back, wondering for a moment what unrehearsed fiction would explain his presence, and was still standing there as Michael started up the stairs – he nodded and turned and went up after him.
On the first floor were two large interconnecting rooms, and Johnny hardly knew what to say about the pictures, while Michael switched on lamps, closed the shutters on the two tall windows to the street, activated the TV, volume low, on some unknown channel, music videos, edited like distraction itself, near-naked black women lip-synching from six different angles. High above, the drawing-room ceiling, with its graceful light roundels and quadrants of stucco, its lovely repeating formulae of fans, bows and garlands, had been painted all over a heavy brassy gold, shiny enough to reflect the lamps below. It was such a glaring disaster that it made you wonder, almost, if it mightn’t be rather a triumph. Michael opened a door and a light came on in a mirrored cupboard. ‘Do you want a drink?’ Johnny asked for a whisky with ice, watched Michael’s reflection, sleek, attractive, pale, as he took down glasses, clinked among bottles, triggered the short clatter of an ice machine. It was Jack Daniel’s he gave him, they tipped glasses, the whole focus of the date, imagined by Johnny as hungry and immediate, blurred again as Michael went out of the room for a minute. Johnny hovered, looking at the expensive contemporary furniture, all of it very low, in steel, black glass, white leather, and barely impinging on the tall expanses of wall given over to the paintings. These were two or three times larger than anything he himself had painted, or felt the least urge to paint, and must have been difficult to get into the house; they seemed to him monstrous, garish, trophies of international art-fairs made for fashionable buyers with a great deal of money. He sat down and slithered forward in involuntary mimicry of a laidback person on a low pony-skin sofa, staring up at a huge pink and black daub. And again a little bleakness of uncertainty crept in, that these were in fact brilliant works of art, which he was too old, too stubborn, or too ill-informed, to like or value. The contemporary had left him behind.
The soft burn of the drink was a comfort, as he watched Michael come back, carefully close the door, set down laptop, iPad, a small lacquered box on the low table. Johnny moved up to make room, but he sat cross-legged on the floor. His movements and conversation made no allusion at all to these surroundings, he seemed not to see them, and it was hard to know if to him they were a glorious given modestly ignored or an obvious eyesore tactfully disowned. With his laminated student card he squashed and chopped a lump of what Johnny assumed was coke on the glass tabletop, drew it out into four stubby lines. He rolled a twenty-pound note and held it up to Johnny, and smiled – he had a beautiful smile that Johnny thought, as he crouched forward, blocked one nostril and snorted through the other, would be interesting but hard to capture, innocent and sceptical. The snort was a thought, an unexpected zip back eight or nine years, to when he last did it with Pat, and Lucy came in early from a party and caught them at it.
Things sped up a bit then, Johnny happy but wary, his strange eloquence heard at moments as if he were someone else. Michael nodded, grinned and chatted too, they had another drink, the completely talentless half-sung songs pulsed on in the background, glances now and then at the crouching and strutting figures, explosions, odd banal details, a car, a bed, in teeming succession on the screen. A man older than himself whom Johnny had sat next to at dinner last week had told him dating apps were tickets to instant sex, and had shown him two that he used, scores of men a mere hundred yards away, always ready. ‘Not for me,’ said Johnny; and three days later found himself downloading one, which meant inescapably setting up a profile, a sort of self-portrait – his old holiday snap had its undertow of lost happiness, and he sighed as he tried to define what his interests were. But then it had all happened, quite quickly and naturally, in this wholly new way; and now here he was as if on a date forty years ago, having a drink and a chat about Michael’s course. Michael had three modules to do. ‘Three modules,’ said Johnny, ‘right.’
‘Yeah, I’ve got till the end of this month to complete my Subjectivity module.’
Johnny said, ‘What is that, exactly?’ and leant forward to take Michael’s hand again, but just as the phone chirped, and he picked it up and dealt with the message and another one that followed.
‘Are you on WhatsApp?’ Michael said.
‘Not yet,’ said Johnny.
‘You should do it! We can WhatsApp each other.’
‘We’ve sort of got each other anyway, haven’t we,’ said Johnny.
Then Michael seemed to have finished all his phoning and texting. He sat back, grinned at Johnny in anticipation, and said, ‘So, hey, enough about my dad, what did your dad do?’
‘My dad?’ said Johnny briskly. ‘He was a manufacturer – you know, he made machine parts, engines, generators.’
‘Oh cool,’ said Michael, his eye distracted at once by the small coloured screen.
‘I mean he’s still alive. He’s nearly ninety now, he’s sold the business.’
‘Right . . .’ It all probably seemed small beer to Michael, picking up his phone, with a quick chuckle over the message he’d just got. Why did Johnny say this, when for decades he’d done all he could to avoid and deflect the subject: ‘You’ve probably heard of the Sparsholt Affair?’