The Sparsholt Affair

5

There seemed to be no more to do on the Miserden job, and he was keen to be shot of it; still, something kept him dabbing away. His preliminary sketches, lively and rhythmical, were pinned up in the studio, and the five individual oil studies painted at the house stood propped in their clearer and narrower promise along the wall. And there, across two easels, was the almost finished canvas. Large, expert, pointless, it seemed to Johnny, when he stood back from it. Certain passages still had the interest of his remembered work on them, but this would soon fade; the room was evoked with all the skill of a lifetime, suggestive but precise, the figures were cleverly grouped in their odd open knot as a family, with shades of doubt and humour to set off their staring self-importance. Yet the joy of construction, the magic of depiction, the bright run up the keyboard that told you suddenly it was done, all eluded him.

He suggested to Bella she might like to come by herself to take a look. And she did like that idea, with its hint of secrecy and the glamour of a studio visit. Johnny himself felt apologetic, exposed, in the place where he padded about all day; it was just the old dining room, with a dais made of pallets and a dingy velvet throne. But Bella was in TV, she knew about illusion, and there was something underlying their contract, that it was a meeting of illusionists. She came on a Sunday afternoon, about three o’clock: a white Range Rover Evoque outside, the bang of the knocker, Bella in the hall in tight jeans and trainers and a short coat of thick golden fur that Johnny peered at in a quandary of confirmation as he followed her through. In the studio the painting had its back to them, facing the window, and he watched her go round, acting just a little, for her first encounter. He tried to imagine seeing it for the first time himself, and the inescapable pressure to say, as she did, ‘It’s brilliant, Jonathan’ – as a first position, while her eyes kept running over it into more specialized kinds of reaction, harder to know how to put into words. He knew she would want to like it, wouldn’t want to let herself down, as a person with an eye, and hoped she would take its small critical notes as compliments to her intelligence, if not to her pride. He came round and joined her, as if to find out if he deserved her praise, and also to help her, and lead her interpretation of it.

‘God, you’ve got both my boys, to the life!’ Bella said.

‘Oh . . . good!’ said Johnny.

‘And little Tallulah, look at her . . .’

She hung back about the two adults. ‘Alan’s jolly hard to get, I must say,’ said Johnny.

‘Oh . . .’ said Bella, going close, perhaps sensing a chance to say Tell me about it! but in fact saying, ‘Oh, no, I know that look very well.’

Now Johnny stood back, against the window. ‘He didn’t like sitting, that was the thing.’

‘Well, he can’t always do what he likes, can he.’ She turned and looked at him. ‘Oh, it’s marvellous, Jonathan,’ she said and ran over and gave him a kiss on the cheek and a hard fluffy hug in which he felt all sorts of other hopes and worries were buried.

‘People often don’t like their portrait when they see it first,’ he said; ‘because it’s not how they see themselves, or the idea they have from photos, or just looking in the mirror.’

‘Well, I like it,’ said Bella, with affected stubbornness. And then, more slyly, ‘I can’t wait to see what the kids say.’

‘Can I get you something?’

‘Oh . . .’ She winced, denying herself. ‘Perhaps a herbal?’

Johnny listed them, till she grew confused, ginger, ginkgo, ginseng . . . ‘Shall I come?’ she said. But he wanted to leave her for a minute or two by herself with the portrait, in case something settled after all, some little objection.

When he came back she was standing looking out into the garden. He gave her the mug with the fluttering tag. ‘I’m sorry it’s taken so long,’ he said.

‘Oh . . .’

‘The whole business of Dad’s death put me out by a few weeks.’

‘Oh . . . darling, of course it did,’ said Bella. ‘And are you all right?’

‘I’m all right about him dying, really, yes.’

‘Hmmm. All the other stuff, though . . . I must say I felt for you, when I saw all that.’

‘I ought to be used to it by now, but it was all so long ago I’d got used to it being forgotten – and young people of course had never heard of it.’

‘Well, I hardly had, you know, myself . . .’ – not knowing how to place herself.

‘Anyway, everyone knows now.’ Bella wasn’t someone to confide in, but her fame and energy drew something from him, a desire for validation. Not, of course, that he’d ever heard of her till she asked him to paint her.

‘Funny, though,’ she said, ‘having an affair named after you.’

‘It’s not quite the honour it may seem,’ said Johnny, not for the first time. ‘It’s not like a TV show, say . . .’

Bella hesitated. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this, it’s what my Samuel calls the picture – our portrait, I mean. The Sparsholt Affair.’

‘Oh . . . yes . . . hah.’ Again this wasn’t original of Samuel.

‘Seriously, though,’ said Bella, ‘I suppose with something like that, it could colour your whole life, if you let it.’

‘Well . . . I dare say everyone’s whole life is coloured by something.’ Given the chance, he forgot it for months on end, but could never be wholly free from requests to explain, and have feelings about it, though his cautious patter was now nearly meaningless with repetition. ‘I do remember how terrible it was when it all blew up, I’d just started a new school, and I think I told you I always had problems reading.’

‘You were dyslexic, darling.’

‘Yeah, thick was the word in those days. The other kids read about it in the papers – they knew more about what Dad had been up to than I did.’

Bella nursed her mug. ‘Think what they’d know now,’ she said.

‘Well, I suppose.’

‘It scares me, what my kids can see online. Porn, and – oh god, I shouldn’t tell you this, I found Samuel has one of these dating apps on his phone.’

‘Oh, lord!’ said Johnny, and went over and looked closely at Alan Miserden’s gleaming left loafer.

‘It must feel strange,’ said Bella a bit later, ‘when you finish a big piece like this. I know I feel awful when we’ve wrapped a new series.’

‘I always have something else on the go,’ Johnny said. ‘I’m never not doing a job. That’s something really positive I get from my dad.’

‘You’re a worker,’ said Bella, ‘like me.’ And she went off a few steps round the back of her own picture to see what else might be going on. ‘Anything interesting?’

‘Oh . . . well, I’ve been painting my daughter – I told you she’s getting married next month, so I want to do it first.’

‘Before you lose her – aah, darling,’ said Bella.

‘I hope not.’

‘Can I see . . . ?’

‘Well, it’s not nearly finished . . .’ It wasn’t a good idea to show sitters other work in progress – it gave them unhelpful ideas, retrospective doubts. Yet he wanted Bella to admire this one – the sitter as much as the picture, eyes, nose, mouth worked on with extraordinary care amid the loose swirls of hair and curve of her collar. He went over to where it was propped up, not touched for a week, and covered with a cloth – he lifted it out, and she followed him to the light.

‘Oh, she’s a beauty, isn’t she.’

‘Her dad’s not the best judge of that,’ said Johnny.

Bella glanced at him. ‘I can see her mother in her, but she’s more like you.’

‘Really?’ This pleased him, as the picture itself did; the patient re-creation of his own daughter lent the work on the portrait a challenge and a charge of emotion quite lacking in the Miserden job.

‘And you like the husband – husband-to-be?’

‘Yeah, he’s OK,’ said Johnny, and grinned – neither of them quite knew what he meant.

‘Well, thank you for sharing,’ said Bella, watching as he took the canvas away. ‘And what’s this?’ There was a danger of her getting into her stride, and Johnny said absent-mindedly,

‘Which one’s that . . . ? Ah, no, that’s not by me.’ He came over and they looked at the drawing hanging by the door into the hall, Bella with eyes narrowed, as if preparing to speak. ‘It was left to me by an old friend who died a few years ago – Evert Dax?’

She half-nodded, then made a little moue: ‘I don’t think . . .’

‘Fran knew him – in fact I first met her in his house, long ago.’

‘Ah . . . yes.’

‘It’s by an artist called Peter Coyle, who was killed in the War, very young. I’ve only ever seen one other thing by him.’

‘Well, it’s very striking,’ said Bella. ‘I mean, marvellous drawing . . .’ There was a little teeter on the boundary between them, what could be said about so much muscular male flesh.

‘I’d been looking at this picture for years at Evert’s house without guessing what it was.’

‘And that is?’

Johnny paused respectfully, ‘It’s my father.’

Bella’s head went back. ‘My word, Jonathan.’

‘Done when he was a student, early in the War.’

She leaned in more closely. ‘No wonder he had affairs!’

Johnny didn’t mind this. ‘He was a handsome man,’ he said.

‘But he didn’t want his head in the picture.’

‘I suppose not – who knows?’

‘You never asked him?’

Johnny’s eyes ran over the ridged abdomen and sleek pectorals, familiar in chalk, in reality known differently, and remotely. ‘We never talked about things like that.’

‘No . . . perhaps . . . And you never painted him yourself?’ – Bella turning her gaze on him now.

‘Sadly, no. We had a first sitting for a portrait about twenty years ago, but then we had a terrible row, it was impossible.’

‘That’s a real shame.’

‘We never really knew each other,’ said Johnny, ‘what with everything.’

It wasn’t clear from Bella’s thoughtful stare if she was absorbing wisdom or about to dispense it.

When she had gone Johnny drifted back almost reluctantly into the studio, and looked at the family portrait again. The afternoon was darkening, and he switched on the big lamp – the colours leapt into gallery brilliance, and the handling seemed more exposed and temperamental. He knew Bella felt it could all have been glossier, goldener, while part of his own regret was that he hadn’t been blacker and sharper. He had failed as both eulogist and satirist: it was the compromise of his trade, though at best, of course, the truth. Then the sweep of harp strings in his pocket, the upward run after all, Johnny read the words carefully and smiled.

A week later a boy came to take the Miserden family away and enshrine them in the massive gilt frame that Bella had ordered, twenty times the weight of the canvas itself – which was so long, on its light pine stretcher, that it wobbled and twisted slightly as they lifted it. He was called Eduard, a Catalan, yes from Barcelona, lean, long-faced, clear-skinned, with short dark hair that was roughed up into a sort of quiff at the front, and at his nape, as he bent forwards, tapered and graded so delicately to the neck it seemed more like nature than barbering. His white teeth and his short dark beard were together something Johnny wanted to paint, so that he was smilingly distracted in the way he looked at him doing his work. Eduard wore green boxer shorts whose rear waistband, and a crescent of brown back, were shown every time he squatted down or leant across the package once he’d laid it flat. Johnny studied the waistband for ten seconds, the word overlapping itself nonsensically at the join.

Eduard smiled and nodded at the portrait before he half-hid it, as if underwater, in bubble-wrap, then hid it wholly in a second glistening layer: ‘Is Bella’ – his recognition not for the work of art but for its subject, a celebrity. Millions were on first-name terms with this woman they’d never met. Johnny had a mental glimpse of the hundreds and hundreds of pictures Eduard spent his days wrapping and packing, taping and boxing, with the professional pride and personal indifference of a security guard. Well, sometimes perhaps he liked one picture more than another, but Johnny’s instincts towards him were so tender and disproportionate he kept off the subject of art. It killed his interest if a man said something stupid about a picture. In a minute they angled the package out together, with quick clenches and grunts, giver and receiver, to the van. Johnny signed the manifest, and was handed the third pink under-copy, barely legible, his signature not visible at all. And then Eduard was gone, Johnny went back indoors, and stood holding and folding the piece of paper, in a room that was doubly empty, of the large expensive portrait and the priceless warm young man.

Lucy came at lunchtime, her keen-eyed commitment to keeping her engagement made clearer by the number of other things she was evidently holding off – she dealt with a string of intrusive texts, saying, ‘Sorry, Daddy . . .’ but sounding nearly annoyed with him for putting her in this position, on a busy day in a hectic week. ‘I’m going to turn the thing off,’ she said, as they went through into the studio.

‘OK,’ said Johnny mildly.

She sat in the chair, shook her shoulders, shutting things out. ‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ she said.

He smiled, raised his eyebrows. ‘I got married once, you know.’

‘True,’ she said, straightening herself, her mother’s prompt distance from her own careless remarks. ‘You did. But not in York Minster, I think.’

Johnny squeezed out the third of the colours that made up her hair, a little duck-shit squirt on the palette. ‘You’re right, Chelsea Town Hall was good enough for us.’

‘I think Ollie would be happy with that too,’ said Lucy.

‘And what about you?’

‘Oh, I’ve come round to doing it in the grand style.’

‘Indeed . . .’ said Johnny, quickly abstracted as she settled, and to help her negotiate the first invisible fence of a face-to-face sitting, the unsocial staring at one another. Within a minute or two she would transmute into a subject, while to her he would be something more ambiguous, a quietly busy peeper and gazer licensed by work and practice. It was the third time he’d painted her, and the lessons for both of them changed.

‘Talking of style,’ she said a little later.

‘Oh, yes . . . ?’

‘Mummy said to ask if you’ve got your suit ordered.’

Johnny peered, tongue on lip, as he brought up the gilt swerve of the hair behind her right ear. She had very well looked-after hair. ‘You don’t want old man Steptoe marching you up the aisle.’

‘Mm?’

‘Or rather up the nave.’

‘Aisle? – well, you would know,’ she said. ‘But you are going to make an extra effort, aren’t you.’

‘I am.’

‘Top hats too.’

He clenched his jaw. ‘I don’t know about top hats.’

‘Oh, Daddy.’

‘Well, I will if your mother does.’

She laughed semi-humorously. To Johnny the hunger for a wedding, a ‘society’ wedding, was a mystery, people of all ages decked up in beaming submission and acclaim of a union between two young people they barely knew, everyone in disguise, though something loutish broke out now and then among the ushers and the uncles. At Chelsea he and Pat had had ten guests, both groom and groom were in their fifties, and the event was no less heartfelt for the element of irony and surprise that ran all through it.

He heard the key in the front door, and saw Lucy absorb his lack of concern, as footsteps passed down the hall and then a noise of running water came from the kitchen. ‘Your cleaner,’ she said.

Johnny smiled but said nothing, waited to hear what would happen next; the footsteps came back, there was a tap at the door – ‘Hi’ as he came in.

‘Sorry . . .’

‘No, come in, Zé. Zé, this is my daughter Lucy.’

‘Hello,’ said Lucy firmly, with a little break of her pose, and a sense of her own pleasantness in talking socially to staff. ‘Zé?’

‘Zé – José. How you do?’

‘Well, as you can see . . .’ said Lucy.

‘I heard a lot about you.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘Johnny talk about you. You getting married.’

‘Yes, that’s absolutely right,’ said Lucy.

Johnny looked across from the canvas at him: could he see him as Lucy saw him, without intimacy, without interest? He smiled and Zé came close for a moment, examined the picture and the sitter in rapid comparison (always a tease to the sitter), then kissed Johnny on the cheek, out of pride it seemed.

*

Johnny thought they might all have lunch, but she only had the ninety minutes for him today. ‘Well, nice to meet you,’ said Zé, going upstairs, he must have thought tactfully, to leave father and daughter alone in the hall.

‘Thanks so much, dear Daddy,’ said Lucy. ‘See you in York!’

‘Oh, darling . . .’ He hugged her, lovely scent of this creature known in a way, but at once with the reasserted push of independence. They heard the door close above.

‘And, you know . . . if you want to bring . . . José.’

Johnny nodded. ‘Well, I’m sure he’d love it’ – more, probably, than he would love it himself. He smiled at her.

‘Let me know, you know, for the seating.’ She looked him in the face, differently now, with no easel between them. ‘He’s rather a find.’

‘Ah,’ said Johnny. ‘Yes, you could say that.’

He saw her off at the door, and when he looked out five minutes later she was still there, sitting in the car, talking on the phone to someone he almost certainly didn’t know. Now and then she ran her hand through her hair, a gesture of self-assertion, of controlled impatience not seen but felt perhaps at the other end of the line. When she turned her head suddenly he wasn’t sure if she saw him watching. He went back into the studio, capped the paint-tubes and peered with familiar yearning and dissatisfaction at the portrait, the eyes the blue-grey (he saw it at last) of her dead grandfather’s, the lips, redone, still wet and workable.