Page 7 of The House on Sunset Lake

‘Considering I’ve just been butchered. Pretty good for a walking corpse, yes.’

He was being provocative; his default setting. In actual fact he did look well, despite his heart attack only four months previously. When Jim remembered his father in that hospital bed, his skin grey, tubes curling out of his nose and chest, he barely looked the same man. He’d always been strong, like a bull in both body and attitude towards life, and it had upset Jim more than he liked to admit to see him lying there weak and vulnerable.

‘Dad, you remember Melissa.’

‘Of course. We all went to lunch. The duck was very good, if I remember rightly.’

As he stepped forward to kiss her, Melissa blushed. Over the years, Bryn Johnson’s extraordinary good looks had been much remarked upon: the striking blue eyes, the jet-black hair. Even at seventy, he could still have an effect on women.

‘For you,’ said Melissa, handing over the bottle of Scotch, which Bryn examined with careful eyes.

‘Twenty-Five Year Old Talisker single malt. Very nice. It must be my birthday.’ He looked at Jim. ‘Nothing from you?’

‘It’s from both of us,’ said Jim, shifting uncomfortably. ‘The sommelier at Munroe got hold of it for me. It’s excellent. A vintage year. Only a few thousand bottles were ever laid down,’ said Jim, but his father had already put it on the mantelpiece.

‘Francis, Edward, Peter. Come here. I don’t think you’ve met James Johnson. The very fruit of my loins. Isn’t he handsome?’

Hasty introductions were made to three men: a publisher, a sculptor and a playwright.

‘Are you a writer too?’ asked Edward, the wiry white-haired sculptor.

Jim shook his head. ‘I work for a property company.’

‘Property? I thought it was poetry.’

‘He showed tremendous literary potential at university,’ said Bryn, interjecting. ‘Saul – that’s my American agent – wanted to sign him, but Jimmy wouldn’t hear of it.’

‘That was a long time ago, Dad.’

‘Instead he became a wage slave. Scandalous, isn’t it?’ he said. His laugh was loud and raucous.

Jim wasn’t sure if his comment had been designed to wound. In his black moods, Bryn Johnson could be brutal, merciless, picking at any aspect of your personality until you felt worthless. On the other hand, just a few generous words from him and he pumped you up until you felt full of air. Jim had spent his entire childhood swinging between the two extremes, although these days he found the most hurtful treatment from his father was his ambivalence to the career he had worked so hard for.

‘Good turnout,’ he said.

‘It is my seventieth.’

‘Is Ian coming?’

Ian McConnelly was Jim’s godfather. A friend of Bryn’s from their Cambridge days, he had gone on to have a hugely successful career writing a series of quirky comic novels that were considered the literary successor to P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories, but which Bryn privately dismissed as ‘populist crap’.

‘I’ve got to congratulate him on the knighthood. It’s amazing,’ said Jim, who had been texted the news by his godfather and had been delighted for him.

‘Someone at the Palace probably felt sorry for him,’ said Bryn with an ill-disguised huff.

‘Really?’

‘The Alzheimer’s.’

‘Ian has Alzheimer’s?’ said Edward, turning round to rejoin the conversation.

‘He’d better not have forgotten about the party tonight,’ frowned Bryn.

‘Dad . . .’

‘So who do you think is going to win the Nobel this year?’ he continued, turning his attention back to his cronies.

Jim shook his head and tugged Melissa’s sleeve.