Ten minutes later, Gordon was waiting for a bus in Baker Street. To do so was not at all pleasant on this autumn morning, but to go where he was going by Tube would have meant a longer walk at the distant end. He wished he could have dealt half as easily with the problem presented just now by Brian Harris, or more truly brought into the open by him. When Gordon had first thought of writing about Jimmie Fane he had had in mind a sort of working subtitle, something to be imagined as coming after the subject’s name and a colon on the title-page, something no livelier or more inventive than Neglected Genius and not even to be committed to paper. Then as soon as he started looking to any purpose he had glimpsed something like Sexual Adventurer looming up on the other flank. Both phrases, he foresaw, would eventually seem appropriate in some measure, but he wanted to work all that out for himself, not be influenced by any pressure one way or the other. Well, there was one consolation, that the time for making up his mind about such matters was not yet.
These reflections lasted him till his bus came and he was climbing into it, at which point they were superseded or shoved out by a closer sight than before of the legs belonging to a girl of student age and general appearance just in front of him. It was not that the rest of her was specially attractive, nor even that the legs themselves were, it was simply that they did seem to extend a very long way upwards. No, he must mean he could see a very long way up them. How their owner stood the weather apparently wearing nothing between foot and crotch but a pair of tight tights was not his present concern. That was to do with Jimmie, had been suggested by thinking of Jimmie. Gordon settled himself in a seat from which he could see only the student’s back view and only as far down as her shoulders and went on with the same line of thought.
Jimmie had presumably come to puberty in the late 1920s or early ’30s, the golden age of the female leg, as was testified by many things, including films and mildly erotic calendar drawings of the period. By the 1940s, the decade of Gordon’s own birth, the focus had shifted to the breasts and the pin-up, often emphasizing the nipples, which could not then be shown or seen in public. By 1960 anything went, or had started to go, and not long after that had come the golden age of everything or else nothing in particular. Gordon was just old enough to remember the departure of the brassiere along with its contents, and it happened to be no comfort to him among many others that behind all this the old female bottom had continued jogging along on its way undisturbed.
In a thin drizzle Gordon’s bus made its way along Knights-bridge. He found that when he tried to call up an erogenous image of Louise in his mind he got little more than a blur. That might have been the result of defective sexuality on his part. Or more remotely of the kind of changes in socio-erotic history he had been trying to assemble. Or the fact that he was in a bus on a chilly, damp morning.
When the time came he got out into the middle of it. Not far to walk, though, towards the river but not all the way. To identify the house, ring its bell and wait called for no unusual powers. On the first floor above his head a window was opened, but by whom he could not see. The next moment a small metal object dropped through the air and tinkled on the pavement near by and the window slammed shut. The object proved to be a latchkey. While approaching and climbing the stairs within, Gordon called to mind his observations on legs and dates, but forgot them again on entering the first-floor front room and being greeted by the Hon. Mrs Jimmie Fane. He had reckoned that she was eleven or twelve years older than he, though he had to admit she looked less, today at any rate. She had on a snuff-coloured pullover with ribbing at neck and cuffs and a royal-blue skirt of smooth but non-shiny material. Apart from an unmemorable ring or two she was wearing no jewellery.
‘Would you like a drink?’ she asked Gordon.
The sort of drink that he would have liked was a cup of tea or coffee, but he felt he could not very well ask for such a thing here, it’s a bit early in the day for me,’ he said.
‘It’s a bit early in the day for anybody, but would you like one?’
‘To be honest I’d rather not.’
‘Fine, I’ll keep you company and not have one too.’ She smiled in a friendly way. ‘Come and sit down. It’s warmer up this end where the heating is. Jimmie went off to Gray’s as advertised. He’s lunching with a couple of earls and a marquis so he might as well be in Timbuctoo as far as we’re concerned.’
Joanna smiled again. He thought to himself she had obviously been a very good-looking woman when younger. Then he thought his use of the pluperfect might look or sound ungallant, so he amended his first thought to signify that she was still a good-looking woman now, at that very moment. He could have sworn his expression had remained constant throughout this interior shift, but when she smiled for the third time it was not the same.
‘Rather a waste from one point of view,’ she said, ‘don’t you think?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I gather he took a pretty flashy lunch off you the other day. I got him to let you choose the place but he didn’t want to and you wouldn’t have been able to influence what he ate and drank.’
‘I survived.’
‘Did you ever get the feeling he was choosing the expensive stuff on purpose, just because it was expensive?’
‘Now you mention it, I did once or twice.’
‘Good for you. But I don’t think he was just enjoying the simple pleasure of getting somebody else to spend money on him, though perhaps one shouldn’t put that past him in general. No, I think what he was doing was showing you who was master, coming out on top in a battle of wills. I’m sorry, Gordon, aren’t you going to take notes?’
‘I’ve a very good memory. As long as I write a few things down afterwards I’ll be all right.’
‘Did you write down how much that lunch cost you?’
‘I didn’t need to.’
‘I can’t help feeling I ought to reimburse you for what you had to cough up.’
‘Don’t worry about that, Joanna, I’ll get it off expenses and anyhow I couldn’t take your money.’
‘How Scottish are you, darling?’
‘M’m? Oh, only by descent. All my grandparents were born in London and I’ve no particular connections with Scotland. Why do you ask?’
‘Oh, I just wondered. Look, er, isn’t it time we got down to business? How are you on the early years of the great man?’
They quickly established between them that James Reginald Pruett Fane had been born in 1918 in Cheltenham, the son of the comfortably-off but not rich second son of a baronet who had made a study of country houses. JRPF had attended a small public school in Shropshire, where he had shown a precocious talent for painting in watercolour.
‘Has any of that stuff survived?’ asked Gordon.
‘No. He renounced painting for ever when he went up to King’s and made a bonfire of all his work, all he could lay his hands on anyway. He doesn’t mind people knowing he used to paint but he’s never tried to trace what he sold, not that there was much of it.’
At Cambridge 1936–39 JRPF had vocally supported the Nationalist side in the Spanish civil war, though he had not himself visited Spain at that time.
‘Rather