He didn’t like being pestered, but then wondered why not, the feel of Tony’s body, as they danced with their arms round each other’s waists, was beautiful, warm hard muscle under the thin T-shirt, Johnny mostly avoiding his gaze, and when Tony pulled him in tighter and his hand slid down over his arse he found he was hard in spite of himself. ‘There you are . . .’ said Tony, but didn’t press his advantage. ‘You’re a great dancer!’
‘Oh, thank you,’ said Johnny, very gratified but wary of Tony getting round him.
‘I can’t believe I’m dancing with you.’
‘Oh . . .’ said Johnny.
‘It’s so cool.’
Johnny shrugged, he saw what was happening.
Tony smiled at him more narrowly, pushed his right hand through Johnny’s hair and said in his ear, as if it wouldn’t have struck him before, ‘David Sparsholt’s son’s gay!’
‘Well, there you are . . .’ said Johnny, pushing back.
‘I mean, what does he say about that? Could be interesting!’
‘I’m sure it could,’ said Johnny. He looked away, at the floor between the dancers’ feet, the lights changing in their not quite followable sequence. ‘I’ve got to go to the gents,’ he said, Tony holding his forearms now, just above the wrist, keeping him captive and certain of success. He held on longer, quelling resistance, and grinned still as Johnny jerked his hands away—
‘Hurry back . . . !’
Johnny took his time, roamed back afterwards to the bar, in a growing childish feeling that he wasn’t enjoying himself. When he’d bought a beer he had £1.05 left. He went and danced by himself, on the edge of the dance floor, looking round for Ivan. Tony was dancing with another man, dark-skinned, curly-headed, older and more attuned to his game. He looked over and touched Johnny on the shoulder. ‘No problem, by the way.’
‘That’s what you think,’ said Johnny, not loud enough to be heard over the music, and taken by Tony perhaps as some kind of gratitude. It was ‘Living for the City’, it brought everyone out, playing up, friends shouting along with the words, which Johnny construed in his own way. Una and Fran were locked together, Johnny didn’t like to look at them, in their closeness, though they were sealed up too in the obliviousness of drink. He danced beside them, Fran reached out to him, and staggered as she did. ‘Have you seen Ivan?’ he said. She looked down solemnly as if weighing some much larger question; it was Una who said, ‘He’s gone.’ ‘Gone where?’ Una looked round rather vaguely, as if she might still find him. Fran leant on him, said in his ear, ‘He said to say goodbye, you were tied up with Tony at the time, darling, he said he didn’t want to barge in.’ It was hard to judge her own feelings about this news, though she seemed, quite promptly, to understand his. She brought him close to her, they danced willy-nilly, bumping each other, and in a minute he felt the almost impersonal weight of Una’s arm on his shoulder, and the scented warmth of her as the girls, saying nothing more, pulled him in.
8
‘You’re not a bad driver,’ said Ivan.
‘Oh, thanks very much!’ said Johnny, and wondered mildly why it had taken him two hours to say so.
‘I should really learn to drive.’
‘I’ll teach you if you like . . .’ – Johnny put his foot down as he shifted into the outside lane, and was aware of Ivan glancing at the speedometer.
‘It can’t be all that difficult,’ he said.
‘You mean, if I can do it?’
‘No, silly’ – Ivan tutted and twitched back his fringe as he looked away.
‘It’s best to start when you’re young, obviously.’
‘No time to lose, then.’
‘Ha, ha. I mean, I was driving when I was about fourteen.’
Ivan thought and said, ‘Did your father teach you, I suppose?’
‘He certainly did.’
‘But how could you drive when you were fourteen?’
‘Dad had permission to go on this old aerodrome near us, you could do what you liked.’
‘You were lucky, then,’ said Ivan, in a tone Johnny’d noted before – of pathos about his own father mixed with hidden curiosity about Johnny’s. ‘I expect your dad’s a fantastic driver.’
‘For god’s sake. He was a fighter pilot, wasn’t he,’ said Johnny and not wanting the questions about him to start up again he pressed the black knob of the radio, turned it up. It was something he felt at once that he knew, massive, thickly scored, aerated by the wireless’s warbles of distance and dense crunches of distortion. He edged the tuning dial very slightly into someone talking, and back more slightly still, and it focused and held for ten seconds, a quiet passage, hard to hear through the racket of the engine, Johnny pushing his head forward, staring down the fast lane as if at the not quite catchable name of the piece. Prokofiev . . . but he wanted to get it right, in front of Ivan. Now the heavy brass came tramping back, with battering timps and a bass drum too that jammed into a rattling fuzz of sound. He turned it down. And again it cleared, as they cleared the brow of a hill, the march stamped gleefully through to its slamming end, and applause burst out, fuzzy washes of sound, the ineffably judged pause before the announcer said, ‘The Sixth Symphony by Sergei—’
‘Prokofiev,’ said Johnny, a fraction of a second before she did, ‘yes.’
Ivan looked up from the map and said, ‘Now, when we’ve crossed the Severn Bridge, we keep straight on till the motorway turns into the A48.’
‘Just tell me when to go right or left,’ said Johnny, and twiddled the volume right down so that the talk and then the music that followed could be barely made out amid the roar of the road and the thunder and whine of the overtaking traffic.
‘Ah, there it is . . .’ – over a crest in the road, the two towers, the low arc of the roadway, at an angle and foreshortened, the two white arcs descending to kiss it, a haze of rain on the river and the Welsh shore. ‘Isn’t it beautiful.’ He felt Ivan took some pride in it: he looked up from the map, but said nothing. As they approached, it was as if a sketch resolved into a monument, sublime in its abstract absence of scale; then they came closer still and it rose and settled into place and detail. A minute later there was the swerve of freedom, half a dozen lanes, before the dark traps of the tollbooths. ‘Have you got 30p?’
Ivan groped in a pocket. ‘I’m not sure I have.’
‘Look in the glovebox, Auntie Kitty usually has some change in there.’ He slowed, joined a queue, wound his window right down. There was something to Johnny’s eye quite new as they came in under the canopy, a flash of light against shadow as if a photo had been taken, when the woman in her cabin looked down into the car and saw them together, Ivan beyond him, peering across as he offered the coins with an up-stretched arm. They were a couple, travelling. And then, doubted still for the second or two before it happened, the barrier flicked upwards and rocked where it stopped in the air, in a passing salute.
When they were on the bridge there was no stopping, and the two rows of fences screened off the view of the river, the high-loaded ship that was sliding beneath. The rhythmical pulse of the air through the open window smelt of the sea. After the great bridge was the smaller unheralded bridge, over the Wye – and ten seconds later they were back on land. ‘Welcome to Wales,’ said Ivan.
‘Thank you,’ said Johnny, and laid his left hand on Ivan’s knee.
Ivan shifted. ‘Do you want one of your auntie’s sweets?’
‘Yes, please.’ Ivan eased off the lid of the tin, in which chipped and sugared tablets, orange, yellow and lime-green, had fused long ago in a crystallized lump. ‘Can I have orange?’
‘You’ll have what you’re given,’ said Ivan, prising off a fragment, and when Johnny kept his hands on the wheel, pushing the sharp sticky lump into his mouth, which Johnny pretended to resist, and licked Ivan’s finger as well as the sweet. ‘You’ve got sugar on your chin,’ said Ivan; but this Johnny had to wipe off himself.
Twenty miles later the motorway ended, and they were
on their own, and within half an hour on hilly roads almost deserted. Now the bluster of the wind in the car had a local softness and smell, freshened to a nice chill when they went fast, then slowing into warmth at a crossroads or a steep bend. They passed through villages and small towns with their chapels and shut houses and not much to look at. Sometimes a farm in the middle distance, in its shelter of old oaks, caught Johnny’s eye. ‘I can’t wait to see West Tarr,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Ivan, ‘I hope you like it.’
Johnny said, ‘As a Peter Orban fan . . .’ and smiled at him, picturing the house from a small grey photograph, a thin glass-fronted box on a bushy slope; if nothing happened between them he would have to make the most of the building. He was nervously optimistic – the weekend was Ivan’s idea, he was purposeful but mysterious. And at least in a Welsh valley, miles from anywhere, he probably wasn’t going to slip off with someone else, as it now seemed clear he had done from the Solly.
Ivan was the host, with a necessary belief in the treat he was offering, and with something new in his tone, once the name of the nearest town appeared on the signposts: a furtive evasion of responsibility. ‘Of course I don’t know what it’s like now, Jonathan. As I told you, no one’s been there for two years, at least.’
‘But someone keeps an eye on it.’
‘Sort of. It’s very hidden away.’
‘Mm, I like the sound of that,’ Johnny warming the talk when he could.
Ivan said, ‘Of course you like modern things.’
‘Don’t you?’ said Johnny.
They couldn’t see the sea but there was a sense of it in the sky above the long bare hill, a freshness, a deflected lustre. The lane turned back from it, dropped slowly then steeply into the sheltered valley, there were a dozen grey cottages, a chapel, tiny, tin-roofed, and then the messy gateway to a farm, ruts strewn with hay. The broad fields above had just been mown. ‘It’s after the farm,’ said Ivan, ‘if I remember correctly.’ They passed an overgrown gate. ‘I think that’s it.’
Johnny backed up, pulled in and let him get out – watched him walk down the short incline in front of the car, small, neat, urban against the unpeopled landscape. It was a light five-barred field gate, aluminium, tall nettles round the posts. Along the verge, and on the far side of the low broken wall, cow parsley held up its tilting crowns. Ivan was fiddling with the padlock. He was a puzzle, a stranger, grey flannels, Viyella shirt, no tie at least today, but a jacket on the back seat with everything checked in the pockets before they left: wallet, address book, fountain pen. At the petrol station near Chippenham, the pub where they’d had lunch, he had seemed embarrassed by Johnny’s threadbare jeans, and the way people looked at his hair. Now he turned, and beamed, lifted and thrust the gate wide, and Johnny smiled back and let his foot off the brake.
The way down to the house had a high bank on the left, and a view through a hedge across the valley on the right. Clearly it was used, once in a while, by farm machinery, a tractor and trailer – the tyre-gouged ruts held long shallow puddles. Johnny was anxious about his aunt’s Renault; anxious too that it should do the job. He smirked guiltily as they dropped and jolted, brambles tearing vainly at the doors, wild flowers thrusting their heads through the open window and then rearing back. The Calor gas canister thumped in the boot. Round a bend the track swung to the right into a field, ignoring the second gate, straight in front of them; beyond which Johnny saw no more than a pale horizontal, a gleam of glass among leaves, and felt, as he had all his life, the pull of any unknown building, and the odd but essential twist of fear in his need to look at it.
The door was at the side, the narrow end of the box. Johnny stood with the bags, shifting between concern about the blocked gutter and strip of white trim hanging off and a guest’s pretence of being happy with everything. Ivan had a further key, a tatty label attached to the key ring, ‘West Tarr’, in rusted ink, a glimpse, as he pushed it into the lock, of the habits of the Goyles, who had come here thirty-five years ago. ‘Are there any paintings by Stanley here?’ said Johnny.
‘Not paintings, I don’t think. There are some of his things – you’ll see.’ Ivan struggled with the key, there was a moment’s smiled-through doubt about it, and then they were in.
In the dark lobby Johnny felt at home, for all the mystery of that first minute, of closed curtains, half-seen objects, the stored and pickled smell of winter damp and baking sun. Hard to know now, in the small kitchen, with bathroom beyond, if it was warm or chilly. Ivan went ahead into a larger room, pulled back one floor-length curtain, then another, the sunshine fell instantly at an angle on low tables and a sofa which kept for a few seconds a look of intimate surprise. It was the living room, and behind a folding wall the studio, two easels, a high window looking the other way. Ivan turned a key, reached for a sliding bolt, pushed open a tall glass door and stepped out, as if his first impulse on being here again was to leave. Johnny followed him, more slowly, smiling, fingers on the metal frame, the tapered wing of the steel handle. He turned, stood, put his arm through Ivan’s in thanks and encouragement, but said nothing as he took it in. It was a small house, and the whole point was its simplicity, as he’d known it would be, the very act of construction tempered by a longing to have next to nothing. Not much money, according to Iffy, a house for one artist built by another, both fired up with ideas about space, form, economy, something mystical as well as technical in Orban’s soul. For Johnny the sense of being home was partly a feeling of being back at Hoole, where all these precepts still filled the air. Here a platform had been built, bedded into the hillside at the back and projecting in a broad deck at the front. The whole front of the house was glass, gazing out across the valley to the last ridge of hills that hid the sea. He craned over his shoulder at the edge of the deck, a drop of six feet into nettles and grass; then looked back at the house, the trees pushing round, grass and a small bush in the choked guttering, the sun-bleached and damp-stained linings of the curtains against the glass. He said, ‘I love it!’ and squeezed Ivan’s arm.
‘Was your college like this?’ said Ivan, as they went back in.
‘We had the same sort of windows,’ said Johnny, making do with a detail, and caught in an unshareable memory—
‘Leaky ones, you mean . . . ?’— Ivan scuffed his shoe-tip over the swollen and blistered sill.
‘Well, they could be.’
‘I just can’t imagine living here, can you?’
It was something Johnny was imagining so vividly that he laughed. ‘I think it’s got everything I need,’ he said, thinking really it would need Ivan too. He knew the hard square armchairs were an Orban design, and in the sagging bookshelves on the far side of the room he recognized three or four of the spines, bold lettering on torn jackets, Henry Moore, Mondrian, Kandinsky, old books on modern art. Ivan searched for a moment and pulled out a smaller book, wide-format, and passed it to him: ‘Did you read this, I expect?’
‘What is it?’
‘Evert’s little monograph on Stanley.’
‘Oh . . . yes . . . interesting,’ turning a few pages, ‘I mean no, not yet.’
‘Ah, I see,’ said Ivan, crossing towards a further door. ‘Well, have a look at it.’
‘I will . . .’
‘It’s very good indeed.’
‘I’m sure it is,’ said Johnny, sensing there was a line about Stanley and that he must be careful. He stood looking at the small sameish colour plates for a minute, then put the book down and went after Ivan, who was pulling back the curtains in the room beyond.
There was the main bedroom, which had a low double bed covered by a yellow counterpane but with no sheets underneath – long unused but still with the indefinable presence of a bed a particular couple had occupied for years, its confidence and privacy. And in a windowless room behind there was a narrow single bed, with boxes stacked on it, cardboard soft and bulging, books dropping from the bottom of one as Ivan lifted it and quickly put it down, brown bowls and p
lates and pitted chrome candlesticks in the other, which Johnny looked at distractedly as the unnamed but undenied likelihood came clear: they would be sleeping together. Ivan went out to turn on the water and electricity, while Johnny picked up the bags and came back alone into the main bedroom. Vacant, cross-lit by the three o’clock sun, the bed was a stage, floating in shadow. The truth was he had never spent the night in a double bed. They had come with four single sheets and Kitty’s electric blanket, and he spread them out under the cover, and plugged the blanket in; nothing, then the little red light came on. On the wall above the near bedside table hung a small woodcut: a naked man and woman, Adam and Eve, rough and darkly inked, the man heavy-hung, the woman heavy-breasted. Johnny sat down on the hard edge of the mattress, the Goyles just out of view but present, as a challenge and perhaps a reproach.
To make tea they had to link up the Calor-gas cylinder to the stove, and give the lime-scaled kettle a good clean-out. Johnny liked these tasks, playing house with Ivan, a hand on his back as they passed in the narrow space between sink and table. ‘I’ll make a fire later if you like, dry the place out a bit.’ He felt one eagerness merge and take cover in another.
‘Oh, if you like,’ said Ivan. ‘Or I can do it.’
‘I’m just going to look in the studio.’
He found there were paintings, six or seven oil sketches stacked in the corner, unframed and possibly unfinished, in Goyle’s later minimal style; they looked feeble to Johnny, routine startings going nowhere. He felt but of course didn’t say that there was something depressing in general about the way Goyle repeated himself, to the point of monotony; perhaps to him each new work had been an adventure, but to the casual eye he appeared to be stuck in a rut. In a cupboard in the lobby, smelling of old macs and boots, there was a folder of drawings on an upper shelf. ‘I found these,’ he said, taking them into the kitchen, where Ivan was pouring boiling water into a brown-glazed teapot.
The Sparsholt Affair Page 26
