The Sparsholt Affair

6

It was dark under the trees on the far side of the meadow, though spots of distant light showed through between them, and a late glow coloured the dull green wall of leaves above. In the foreground three pale saplings made a line. The early evening flared before it darkened into deeper mystery. Behind the right-hand sapling, covered by its grey trunk, ran a knotty thread. It was a rough canvas ‘laid down’ on a piece of hard-board, and damaged later by water down the left-hand edge. The delicate detachment and re-sticking of the damaged portion had been done by Cyril, but the cleaning and retouching, with a fine brush whose every sleek and graded hair showed distinctly through the magnifying visor, was Johnny’s own work.

Never before had he paid such minute attention to a painting, certainly not to one of his own – he saw it decompose itself under the lens, he had a view of it not even the artist had had, although elements in the design, which the artist must have understood, refused to give up their secrets. Evening in Kensington Gardens had been nearly night when the picture came in and was taken from its wrapping, the brittle layers of a twelve-year-old Daily Mail. The lifting of old brown varnish had brought out a low fence, a row of mere transparent dashes, across the foreground, and an unsuspected hurrying figure half-seen at the right-hand edge. And in the mid-distance, almost under the trees, was another small vertical presence, that might have been a person, a man in a jacket and hat or a woman in a short cape, but was so slender it could have been a statue, a bust on a plinth. Were there statues like that in Kensington Gardens? The vertical mark, a few quick brushstrokes, was a riddle. Over the week that he worked on the picture (itself painted surely in an hour or two), the image, the finite information of the brushstrokes and the indefinitely large suggestion they made, became somehow secret knowledge, and the presence beneath the trees took on an occult significance, like a figure of London life he was yet to meet. When he raised the goggles there was a second of giddy confusion that the picture he’d come from was only eight inches by five. Johnny had never heard of the artist, Paul Maitland, before last week, but now he felt an eerie involvement in his work. The buyer would see the scratched ‘PM’ in the dark impasto of the foreground, and never know that a half-inch of grey-gold grass, cut hay perhaps, in the middle distance, and other minute touchings-in among the dim green foliage, were the work of the invisible JS, some eighty years on.

‘I’m going out,’ said Cyril, ‘which means you’ll be in charge,’ pursing his lips as he looked (which he rarely did) directly at Johnny.

‘Oh, all right’ – Johnny wiped his hands on his apron. ‘Where will you be?’

‘I’m going to have a look at something,’ said Cyril. He sounded both stern and slightly shifty. ‘Try not to sell anything, and for God’s sake don’t buy anything.’

‘I’ll just take it in, shall I.’

‘Just take it in and give them a ticket,’ said Cyril. ‘They can reserve things, if they look serious. And of course don’t let them in here. Never let anyone in here.’ But just as he was putting his coat on the bell jingled and he looked through the door into the shop to see who it was. ‘Ah . . . good morning!’

‘You’re going out,’ said a man’s voice from the shop.

‘It’s not at all urgent,’ said Cyril.

‘I’ve not been in for a while.’

‘No, I’m pleased to see you,’ said Cyril, with a drop to another register, guardedly flattering. He slipped off his coat and hung it on the back of the door, which he pulled half-to as he went to talk to the customer. It was a thin-voiced man, with the uncommon vowels, some plumped, some pinched, and the scurrying, dawdling manner that still flourished in the London art world. The tone of the conversation was almost abrupt, and neither he nor Cyril addressed each other by name. In the workshop the radio, on at medium volume, engrossed by the events that had followed the election, muddied the conversation. Johnny went to the bench where the cut-down frame for the Maitland was waiting.

Late Summer, Dusk was very much a Cyril picture. Cyril liked paintings small, and it was one of his hang-ups that subjects were spoiled by being treated on too large a scale – his ideal was the ‘big small picture’, in which a lot of life was conveyed in a tiny space. To Johnny, who at college had been encouraged to splosh paint over areas of canvas as tall as himself, this took a bit of getting used to. He felt its charm and its constraints. The Maitland also owed a great deal to Whistler, who was Cyril’s god: it had the quality of a sketch, the rapid lifelike movement he lacked so completely in himself, but had an eye for in a picture. Cyril didn’t deal in prints, and Johnny was told no painting by Whistler had passed through the shop in ten years; so the ‘school’ of Whistler was the thing to focus on. Once you’d gone for the school, obscurity became a lure, almost a virtue. It seemed Maitland himself was an artist only experts knew of, no one had written about, and no member of the public was likely to find in a museum.

Johnny freed the frame from its clamps and laid it over the painting lying on the workbench. Frame-making, at Hoole, was neglected – they showed their freaky portraits and gigantic abstracts unadorned on their stretchers and boards, or at best with a thin rim of untreated plywood tacked round, no gallery pretensions. Cyril was teaching him the further art of the wooden oblong – this little green and brown canvas now, on its first loose try in its ‘Whistler’ frame (really one gilt frame inside another), became suddenly focused and desirable, more present and also more covetably remote. It still looked too small – a further narrow slip would have to be cut and gilded in just the right shade to enclose it and hold it exactly in its shrine.

‘Perhaps he’d care to bring it through,’ said the voice from the shop, with its note of scant patience under perfect politeness.

Cyril looked round the door. ‘I’ve got Sir George Skipton here,’ he said, ‘he wants to see the Maitland.’

‘Oh . . . shall I bring it just as it is?’

Cyril stared and nodded confidentially. For a moment there was a clear understanding between them.

The customer wasn’t how Johnny had pictured him. He had a lean hawkish face, his long sideburns a gesture at fashion resisted entirely by his camel overcoat, red scarf and trilby hat, which he’d kept on. He seemed carefully wrapped up against any of Cyril’s inveiglements about a rare new picture; his thin smile made it clear that his listening to you did not in any way imply that he agreed with you. It was the smile of someone proud of his own judgement – hence surely the cleverly deferential tone that Cyril adopted with him.

Johnny laid the picture on the table, and said, ‘The frame’s not quite finished . . .’ Sir George moved his head up and down as if surveying a far larger canvas, and made two barely audible noises, the first, with head raised, a momentary high-pitched whine, in which surprise and reserve were both implied, the other, with head lowered, a warm but regretful grunt. Johnny looked from one face to the other, unsure if he was being praised or condemned. Then Skipton’s smile slid upwards from the painting to him.

‘How do you find it here?’ he said.

‘How do I find it . . .’ – Johnny gasped and glanced at Cyril. ‘Working here, you mean. Oh, it’s very interesting, sir.’

‘You’ll learn a lot from Mr Hendy’ – at which Cyril looked aside and down in a strange way. ‘He knew Sickert, you know.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Johnny.

Sir George chuckled. ‘Small oils,’ he said, ‘that’s the thing.’ His look played round Johnny’s head, with a kind of critical amusement about his hair in its ponytail, folded up twice. ‘Have you been working here long?’

‘Oh . . . two months now, sir,’ said Johnny.

‘Two months’ – again, praise and ridicule in his tone. ‘And what do you think? Should I buy this picture?’

This time Johnny didn’t look at Cyril, though he used his words: ‘It’s an extremely nice little painting.’

‘Yes, quite. I expect you’ve done a certain amount to it?’

‘We’ve just cleaned it up a bit,’ said Cyril.

‘Indeed,’ said Sir George with a sigh, but still looking at Johnny. Cyril seemed unhappy at this turn of events and Johnny himself felt uncomfortable till Cyril said rather brusquely,

‘I’m asking ninety guineas for it.’

Johnny couldn’t tell if this seemed steep to Skipton – whose face was impregnable to any vulgar shock of cost. ‘Look, would you hold it for me, Hendy, and I’ll come by next week and look at it again.’ Was ‘Hendy’ how you spoke to a servant, or a colleague? – Johnny wasn’t sure.

Cyril said he would, and looked displeased but unsurprised. There was a tempo to the art world – delays were written in to it, as well as frighteningly swift decisions. ‘Thanks so much,’ said Skipton, and as he went, as if unwilling to waste more time, towards the door he turned back and said, ‘No, my daughter told me you were working here.’

‘Oh . . . really?’ said Johnny.

‘The exquisite Francesca,’ said Sir George.

‘Oh! I see . . .’ said Johnny, beaming suddenly and feeling himself in some sort of trap. ‘I don’t really know her.’

‘Oh? Well, she’s taken quite a shine to you,’ said Sir George, which sounded the kind of parental certainty often far from the truth, and in this case embarrassing in other ways. Johnny felt he could tell one truth at least, but it came out oddly,

‘I think I’m a bit scared of her.’

Her father seemed puzzled for a second by his tone, but added very drily, as he opened the door and tightened his scarf round his neck, ‘I think I know what you mean.’

When Skipton had left, Cyril put on his coat with resumed impatience, and dashed off. The door banged, the bell protested losingly, and a little Chelsea view hung seductively near the entrance rocked from side to side on its hook. Johnny stood in the eddy, oddly aware of how Cyril, prey to the rival tugs of selling and buying, owned everything here, it was the world he had made and would live and die in; while he himself was merely, barely responsibly visiting on his way to a very different life, where of course he would be painting pictures of his own.

Today was Thursday, early closing, so it was only till one. He stood looking out past the wares in the window at the parked cars by the kerb and the occasional pedestrians, any one of whom might decide to turn in to the shop and set the still air, with its smell of wax and linseed, jangling again. He felt relieved, light-hearted and exposed, and went through to the back of the shop frowning at his own desire to mess around. His rebellion took the form of turning the milled dial of the old wireless ten degrees, to Radio 3. Beethoven, at once, but which symphony? He ruled out Three, and Five to Nine inclusive – he wasn’t so sure about the earlier ones. As often in the past at home, or in his shared study at school, where he had to claim odd half-hours between his friends’ Doors and Stones for intoxicating shots of Mahler and Strauss, he felt the presence of an orchestra as a private overwhelming luxury; and then, being alone, he turned it up and made noises, not singing along, little hisses and yelps of emphasis and agreement.

He got back to work, painting the fine angled slip with a gold paint that sank into the untreated wood. It gleamed and then dulled in the violent dazzle of the scherzo – number Four, surely? He set it on a sheet of paper to dry, and there was the racket of the bell again, and the repeated jangle that half-covered the closing of the door. He looked apprehensively through the blue and then through the clearer red glass in the door of the back-shop, a woman by herself; then he went in – it took him a moment to recognize her from behind, in a long black coat and red boots, peering closely at a landscape then standing off with a shake of the head. ‘Oh, hello!’ he said. ‘That’s funny.’

She looked at him over her shoulder. ‘Why is it?’ she said.

‘Oh, it’s just that your father was in here half an hour ago.’ He came forward.

‘That is funny,’ said Francesca, ‘very funny.’ She looked at parts of him other than his face when she spoke, she examined his paint-smeared old Sotheby’s apron. ‘So you’ve met Daddy’ – she smiled narrowly at him then, so that he saw her daddy in her, at the moment she distanced herself from him: ‘Was he being difficult?’

Johnny sniffed. ‘I think he rattled Cyril a bit.’

‘That’s what he does,’ said Francesca, sounding pleased at least by her father’s consistency. ‘He’s a great rattler. I don’t suppose he bought anything?’

‘He’s thinking about it.’

She savoured this. ‘Well, he’s a great thinker too.’

‘He seemed to know what’s he’s talking about.’

Francesca perhaps found this remark misplaced. ‘You’ll have to come and see his collection,’ she said, in a tone which didn’t promise an immediate invitation.

‘I’d love to, thank you,’ said Johnny, feeling this must be a privilege. ‘What does he collect, mainly?’

‘Well, he’s got three Whistlers, for instance,’ she said. And as if that was enough about that, ‘So this is where you beaver away.’ She looked round again, as if more intrigued by the existence of the shop than by anything specific in it. ‘A lot of pictures’ – advancing and looking very quickly at two or three in a way that might equally have conveyed ignorance or unhesitating connoisseurship. Then she stared at the half-open door behind Johnny, with its coloured glass window let in and the uninterrupted noise of the radio beyond. ‘I suppose all the fun takes place at the back.’

‘I don’t know about fun,’ said Johnny, and felt slightly ashamed. ‘No, it can be fun.’ He was pleased she wasn’t going to see round the back. ‘That’s where I am mainly, I don’t come out here much.’

And in a moment of course she was going towards the door, and Johnny with a pained smile following her. She peered in broad-mindedly, a hand on the doorknob, like an adult shown the children’s playroom. ‘Gosh, all those frames.’

‘I know,’ said Johnny, keeping close by her as she crossed the threshold. ‘You’re not really —’: he felt he couldn’t say it to her; and she ignored the bad form of what he’d started to say. Anyway, why shouldn’t she go into the room? He found he wanted her to see it, it confirmed what was otherwise a mere rumour about what he did all day. He made something chivalrous of it, looking round with fresh eyes at the stove, the tables, the two hundred frames hanging inside each other on the wall: ‘Cyril doesn’t like people coming in here, I don’t know why.’

‘Well, Cyril’s not going to know, is he,’ said Francesca.

The Maitland which her father was or was not about to buy was on the table. She picked up the magnifying visor and fitted it over her blonde curls and was suddenly inside what Johnny had been doing. He thought even so she wouldn’t be able to tell. Standing back she was clumsy for a second before she took the visor off. Neither of them said anything about the picture.

‘So do you get time off for lunch?’ she said, direct but tactful. Who knew what picture-dealers’ apprentices got?

‘Well, today it’s early closing. I’ll be shutting the shop in ten minutes.’

‘Oh, good. So we can have lunch together.’

‘Oh! . . . yes . . . all right’ – he had no other plans, but this one was a bit of a jump. ‘If you don’t mind waiting.’

‘Not a bit,’ she said, and sat down unnervingly in Cyril’s chair.

‘I suppose, um . . .’ – but anyway he got on with fixing the gilt slip, with the feeling, as she watched him, that he was acting out his own job. He didn’t want to refuse her, that was the thing.

She got up after a minute, and looked into the small glass-windowed cubicle, like the office in a garage, which was where Cyril did the books and where there was a square safe under the desk. Johnny had never had more than a glimpse into the safe, last thing on Fridays, which was when the week’s takings were carried in Cyril’s briefcase to the safe deposit chute at the bank, and when Johnny himself was paid, with an odd little cough on Cyril’s part, as if to counter any hint of warmth or congratulation. He had seen that the safe had things in it other than money. ‘Is this him?’ she said.

‘What’s that?’ He was worried about her making trouble for which she, at least, would not be punished. He put down his brush and went over. She was looking at the framed photo on the wall above the filing cabinet, Cyril thirty years ago, with another man, looking at a picture, which Cyril was holding in his hands. ‘Yes, I don’t know who the other man is.’

‘Oh, well, it’s John,’ said Francesca, ‘John Rothenstein. Daddy knows him – and Evert, all that lot. Evert used to work with him at the Tate.’

This should really have been Johnny’s territory. ‘Oh, did he?’

‘John used to run the Tate,’ said Francesca, masking her impatience with a sentimental smile at his pug-like Mandarin face and circular horn-rimmed glasses. Beside him Cyril, looking not a day younger, was wearing a remarkable canvas garment with buttons up to the chin and no collar. Its cuffs too were buttoned back, perhaps to save them trailing in paint and glue. It gave him a specialized, ecclesiastical air.

‘Cyril hasn’t changed,’ said Johnny.

‘He’s still got that silly coat on,’ said Francesca, and the joke was funnier than it should have been – a first break in the high-pitched tone.

The bell jangled again and Johnny went through to see who it was. To his horror it was Cyril, closing the door and turning towards him with a picture in a carrier bag under his arm. ‘Success?’ said Johnny eagerly, stepping forward as if expecting him to unwrap it and share the joy at once. There was no way Francesca could be smuggled out of the back room, but his instinct, even so, was for delay.

Cyril’s response was a clearing of the throat suggesting it was none of Johnny’s business. ‘Anyone been in?’ he said.

Well, it was a chance. ‘Actually, Sir George Skipton’s daughter came in. Francesca, you know?’

‘The one you’re scared of,’ said Cyril.

‘Well, not really,’ said Johnny, ‘no, no. In fact she’s here now.’

Cyril stared. ‘Where is she then?’

‘Well, she wanted to see the Maitland that her father’s interested in, so I said—’

‘I’m here,’ said Francesca, looking round the door, and coming towards Cyril with her head on one side as if at the great pleasure of meeting him at last. ‘Francesca Skipton.’

‘How do you do,’ said Cyril.

‘My father’s always talking about you,’ she said.

‘Well . . .’ said Cyril, and with a little nod at them both he went past her and into the workshop. Johnny followed a few seconds later. A dread of almost parental disapproval was mixed with a feeling of defiance that was just as childish. The music carried on, a harp concerto now, and he hovered by the radio, unsure whether to turn it off. Cyril went through to the office, where Johnny saw him stoop to unlock the safe and slide the white carrier bag and its contents into it, and lock it up again.

‘Have I dragged you into the mire?’ said Francesca when they were out on the pavement – ‘I wasn’t quite sure.’

‘I’ll let you know tomorrow,’ said Johnny. And now there was the more pressing thing of lunch to cope with. They went up Old Church Street, both slightly self-conscious.

‘Ivan’s going to join us later,’ said Francesca.

‘Oh . . . OK,’ said Johnny, and his relief that he wouldn’t be alone with Francesca was mixed with relief that he wouldn’t be alone with Ivan. Again he had a certain flustered feeling of being talked about: Francesca seemed to have a plan. ‘I don’t know about Ivan,’ he said.

‘Oh, Ivan . . .’ – she chuckled in an odd way that suggested no friend of hers could be safe from ridicule. She glanced at him narrowly. ‘No one’s quite sure what’s going on between you two.’

‘Well, nor am I!’ said Johnny.

Francesca had a judicious look. ‘You don’t fancy him.’

‘No, he’s extremely attractive . . .’

‘Just not your type, then.’ It was as if Johnny was spoiling things.

He blushed. ‘I’m just not his type, I think.’

But it seemed she was on his side. ‘Well, you’re far more attractive than he is,’ she said.

‘I think he likes me,’ said Johnny, laughing in his surprise at her remark.

‘Hmm,’ said Francesca. ‘So you mean you’ve never done it with him?’

Johnny had done it with few enough people to feel reluctant as he said, ‘We kissed, you know, but that’s about it.’

‘Well, he’s sillier than I thought,’ she said, and as they turned the corner on to the busy street she took his arm, as though to reassure him. They were astonishing questions from someone he hardly knew, but they showed she had got his number: she wasn’t taking him out with any designs of that kind herself – and at this he felt suddenly light-headed. ‘We’re going to Bond Street,’ she said, looking over her shoulder. ‘Blast, that cab’s gone.’ She left him and went back past the turning to get ahead of the shoppers spaced along the kerb but the only cabs that came in the next few minutes were already taken too.

‘If we’re going to Bond Street,’ Johnny said, ‘we can get the 14 bus.’

Francesca blinked distractedly at this. She even ran thirty yards, to catch the eye of a cabbie emerging from the mews opposite, but he turned right, very slowly, ignoring her in his turn. ‘Wanker,’ she said.

‘There’s a 14 coming,’ shouted Johnny, running the other way, towards the stop, and raising his hand.

They sat at the front of the upper deck, the one place of notional privilege on a democratic bus, amid the sour fug of smokers past and present. Francesca had nothing smaller than a five-pound note, but she paid for them both, when the conductor at last came upstairs. ‘This is on me,’ she said. ‘Well, this is fun.’ Of course Johnny felt responsible for the bus, and for the heavy delays it fell into by some clumsy instinct. Francesca watched its progress, and watched the black cabs slipping past it and darting ahead and out of sight. Now the bus lumbered to a bus stop where a large group of tourists in bright rainwear almost blocked the pavement as they massed and funnelled in at the rear. At last the conductor pinged the cord, and they edged out five yards into the traffic backed up at the lights; which, on account of a blockage beyond the junction, changed twice before they passed them, the brief roar of progress braked immediately as they homed in on the person with arm raised at the next stop along.

‘I mean, it’s hopeless if they’re going to keep stopping,’ said Francesca.

‘Well, it’s sort of how it works, I suppose,’ said Johnny, with a little shrug at its undeniable drawbacks.

‘Do you do this a lot?’

Johnny knew the rhythms and speeds of London transport, knew his Tube lines and four or five bus routes, and in the routines of waiting, letting one bus dismissively go and nodding satirically at the long-delayed sight of another, he still sensed the original beauty of living here. ‘Every day,’ he said. ‘To get to work, you know.’ He was pretty sure Francesca didn’t go to work herself. ‘Do you have a job?’

‘Not yet . . .’ she said. She might have meant things were not that desperate, but just possibly that she did have something in view. ‘No, I’m making plans, about various things – you’ll see.’

‘Oh, OK,’ said Johnny. ‘About work, you mean.’

She smiled but didn’t quite look at him. ‘You’ll see.’

It was late for lunch when they got off the bus outside Burlington House, but clearly Francesca had no hidebound ideas about mealtimes. ‘So where do you want to eat?’ Johnny said. He was ravenous.

‘We’re going up here,’ said Francesca. And as he followed her up Bond Street, past Asprey’s and other old jewellers whose names he didn’t recognize, past clothes shops English and Italian, the Fine Art Society soon on one side, Sotheby’s on the other, with not a glimpse of anywhere to have lunch, he began to feel not only hungry but resentful. Francesca, striding onward in her scarlet boots and black coat, was the match for any of the mannequins in the windows; men and women coming towards them dwelt on her with just a hint of amusement at her style, and looked at him too to see how he was related. He felt he had to absorb, or share, or repel their varying reactions to her, the penalty of the shy with the un-shy. ‘Here we are,’ she said, leaning suddenly on the tall glass door of Fenwick’s and with a second’s show of weakness as Johnny reached above her to push and hold it open.

‘I’ve not been in here before,’ he said, ‘have they got a cafe?’ All he could see was the complicated gleam, mirrors among panels of white and gold, the round and square stations of the cosmetics sellers with their glass display counters and further small angled mirrors, among which you had to thread your way to reach hats, scarves and lingerie. A strolling woman in a wide-shouldered suit offered Francesca a squirt from a tester and as she ignored her Johnny bared his wrist instead. In the fifteen seconds before it dried, flapping his hand obligingly, Johnny caught a sweet stab of freesia – it was a game the assistant didn’t much like playing, with a woman’s perfume. To him it was a memory of a game, with his mother, in Freeman’s at home, or for a big day’s shopping in Coventry, she quite firm, when they went in, about what she wanted, but testing anything on offer. ‘I’ve no space left,’ she would say, ‘try it on him!’ In the car going home he offered her his wrists in turn, she took her hands in turn off the wheel, and they shared a world of sensation and suggestion, not always agreeing. He saw Francesca on the far side of the shop, and went after her.

She was standing with her hand on one of the tall stools where customers perched for consultations, and gazing at a woman on a similar stool two counters across. The intervening displays half-concealed her, though the young woman in a black frock who was applying the make-up was perhaps aware they were being looked at. The customer was a woman of about fifty, in a green floral dress – she had taken off her coat, which lay on the counter beside her handbag. She had something awkward but committed about her, greying hair fiercely permed, the fading discomfort of someone still hot from the dryer. Francesca said nothing, but her raised hand brought Johnny under the puzzling spell of the moment – were they avoiding an encounter, or springing a surprise, or simply spying? He wondered for a minute if the woman might be a member of the Memo Club (but he didn’t think so); a friend of Iffy’s, perhaps . . . ? The girl moved round to fill in the merely sketched make-up of the left eye and eyebrow and Johnny saw her now full on. Framed by the upright of a cabinet on one side and by a pillar on the other the cosmetic artist was a work of art in herself, her large oval face burnished with graded layers of pink and something close to gold. Her eyes glittered between long black lashes, her mouth was a glossy purple red. It was flawless, a make-up for the camera, a diva on a box set, and with something underneath it pressing through none the less, a certain heaviness of resistance. She glanced across at them now – with a twitch of the mouth which might have been amusement or irritation at being watched.

Perhaps the customers were stirred by the glamour of the staff, who were advertisements as well as artists. Johnny felt unhappy watching, with other shoppers passing by, but Francesca’s outstretched hand made him play the strange game. The woman raised her chin and turned her head patiently, as prompted by the large girl in black; when she could, she glanced in the mirror on the counter. She was unaware of the spectators, but determined to present a new face to the world, to the street, when the session was done. She looked somewhat anxious, but the session itself was a treat, and not to be rushed. There was a sense besides that the girl had nothing else to do, and was lazily stretching the job out, anchoring her customer’s attention with a raised knuckle under her chin, two fingers at the temple to steady her as she darkened the doubting lashes into beating signals of attention. She said things to her, barely audible, now and then, calming and convincing her. When the woman looked down, the girl turned to Francesca and Johnny, stared for a second, and stuck out her tongue.

At last it was done, the customer stood, looked quickly in the mirror over the counter, put on her coat. She didn’t want to stare at herself, transformed now like the assistant, a Turandot among the Thursday afternoon shoppers. She bought a little box, like Johnny’s watercolour tin, coloured squares, and took her purse from her handbag. Francesca came forward, smiling like a waiting customer, her impatience concealed in a cool concern for the customer before her. ‘You do look nice,’ she said.

‘Oh . . . !’ – the woman looked at her uncertainly, almost touchily, but a compliment had to be taken for what it was. ‘Thank you.’ The girl gave her her change, which she put into her purse, and then, very quickly, as if forced to perform some intimate act in public, she took out a pound note, folded it, and slipped it into the girl’s relaxed but retentive hand. ‘Till next time,’ she said.

They watched her go, her tight-curled head passing out into the street.

‘Lovely,’ said the girl.

‘Wasn’t she a darling,’ said Francesca.

‘Mrs Tucker,’ said the girl, ‘from Guildford.’

‘Mm, and where is she going now?’

‘She sees her friend Sylvia in Clapham once a month. She always comes to me first.’

‘Wise woman,’ said Francesca, with a funny chuckle.

Johnny was aware the girl was looking at him, as she tidied the counter. ‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Johnny, this is Una.’ Una put her hand out coyly, but when he shook it her grip was firm. He stood there in the well-meaning uncertainty of introduction to the friend of a friend.

‘Johnny Sparsholt,’ he said. She studied him, as she must have studied strangers twenty times a day, with the still competence of the professional. She saw problems and possibilities.

‘We’re going upstairs, dear,’ said Francesca.

‘OK,’ said Una, turning to replace her pencils and brushes beneath the counter.

‘Who’s on this afternoon?’

‘Not sure – Greta?’

‘Oh, I love her.’ Francesca drew him on, with a hand for a moment under his upper arm. ‘See you in a bit.’

They went through to where the steep-stepped escalator trundled untiringly upwards.

‘Is Una coming up here?’

‘She’ll come up when she finishes. She’s meant to have forty minutes, but if they’re busy . . .’ – she looked at him, on the step below but level with her: ‘Poor thing, she works so hard.’

In the cafe everything was small and expensive, a menu of items you didn’t precisely want; he ordered fish pie. As the waitress turned away Francesca excused herself and went off to the Ladies, and Johnny sat back and slipping the coloured band off his wrist pulled his hair into a bunch and snapped the band around it. He looked blankly at the menu in its stand, and was sunk for a minute in the department-store mood, the dim murmur of voices beyond rhythmical escalators, the air of refuge from the street, the interest and tedium of shopping for clothes, toiletries, soft furnishings. It was his own school holidays again, only child of a mother who didn’t work, but kept busy, who took him in with her through glass doors, over flashy marble downstairs, along carpeted perspectives above, where men in late middle age fussed for you over measurements and checked on the phone about discontinued lines. All the shop’s promise of abundance was pinched and sorted into lines, things in stock, or on order, or no longer available. The most imperious shopper must adjust herself to the available, fall in with the range, the season’s styles, become in a way the servant of the shop – or of course take her custom elsewhere.

‘Ah,’ said Francesca, settling as the waitress brought their drinks. ‘No, it’s not Greta . . .’

Johnny turned in his seat. ‘What is it . . . ?’

‘I admire her, though, don’t you?’

At this late hour for lunch only half the tables were taken, shopping bags tilted against chairs, and between them, moving patiently and courteously, strolled a tall young woman in a beige tartan suit with a short matching cape and a pillbox hat. With raised hands turning and pointing as if discreetly undecided about which way to go, she gave the sense, none the less, of having a clear purpose. She smiled at the lunchers, her gaze dropping across the tables, as though to note what they were having, but not meeting their eye. She engaged them and released them in a passing moment of goodwill and just perceptible embarrassment: it was odd to be invited to stare – though she was too polite, in her serene revolutions, to stare at them.

‘They don’t still do that . . .’

‘Don’t you love it?’ Francesca did stare, a calculating look, with a sly lift of an eyebrow when the woman came alongside. ‘Is it available in other colours?’ she said.

The young woman stopped, though a tendency to revolve still showed itself above the waist. There was a consciousness of drama in asking her to speak. ‘Yes, love – I think there’s sort of a reddish one? Maybe a blue, but I’m not sure we’ve got it.’ She snubbed her nose. ‘Do you like it then?’

‘Oh, it’s not for me,’ said Francesca. ‘Do a turn for me?’

And with a subtle feeling, not unwelcome to either, that the rules had been broken, the girl turned her back on them, lifted the cape and angled her bottom first one way then the other.