The Sparsholt Affair

by Alan Hollinghurst

  I nodded, left my hat on their table and fetched a glass of Ind Coope. I’ve never been a beer-drinker, and the wartime beer was especially foul, but I felt it was the thing to order. We sat for a minute admiring the sooty atmosphere of the pub – the soft thwack of the dartboard and murmur of scoring could be heard from the Public just visible beyond the bar. ‘Have you been here before?’ Connie asked – she was slumming it cheerfully with her Drum, but a certain fastidiousness peeped out. I said how my half-brother Gerald had brought me here when he visited in my first term; and how he himself had been brought here as a freshman by Wystan Auden. ‘Auden liked St Ebbe’s,’ I said. ‘He liked to show people the gasworks.’ ‘Oh, yes . . .’ said Connie, and laughed unsurely; if her taste was for Dax’s romances, she was probably less attuned to the angular new poetry of railways and revolt. I quite wanted to add that Gerald had gone to bed with Auden later that day, but I felt that just now it was a subject to steer clear of. I said merely that I remembered the cat, which seemed not to have moved in the past two years. There it lay, fat, hot and possessive in front of the coke fire, deaf to endearments and hostile to all strokes and tickles. The old man who was the only other occupant of the snug shook his head and said, ‘Ah, Tiger . . .’ in the tone one might use of a long-lasting problem, like arthritis, or the War itself. Connie smiled sternly at it. ‘And what about Jill?’ she said. She seemed to picture a feminine ally in this dingy place.

  I sensed Sparsholt paying careful attention to my answer. ‘She’s awfully sorry but she can’t come. She has an essay to write.’ I felt sad that this respectable excuse would not last any of us much longer. And before she could put more questions, ‘In fact I’ve asked my poet-friend Evert Dax to join us – I hope he can make it. He’s A. V. Dax’s son, and I thought since you like his books so much you might care to meet one of his other productions.’

  ‘Gosh,’ said Connie, pleased but a little flustered; and Sparsholt, who never admitted to surprise, said,

  ‘Yes, he’s a good man,’ and nodded as he lifted his pint.

  ‘You never said you knew him,’ said Connie.

  ‘I know all kinds,’ said Sparsholt, and winked at her over the top of the glass.

  ‘Oh, Drum,’ she said; but she was preoccupied for a minute by the prospect of the encounter.

  There was no sign of him after a quarter of an hour, though, when a new round had to be bought. I went to the bar and Sparsholt joined me, leaving Connie to her attempted seduction of Tiger. ‘Won’t you call me David?’ he said, and I said of course I would. The barmaid, not specially friendly to students, took her time to turn round from the counter of the Public, framed through an archway like a picture of a brighter and more natural life. She carried on talking over her shoulder as she drew our drinks (stout for Connie, another bitter for David, and a gingerly half for me). David said he was paying (he had a sort of hard purse, the coins shaken out on to its leather tongue), and as he waited for the change his eyes studied the barmaid’s round backside until he said, ‘Isn’t that your friend?’ I was puzzled for a second, then looked through into the further space. It was clever of him to have known that the figure in a cap on the far side of the room, turned away from us as he bent over a newspaper, was Evert. ‘It’s Evert, isn’t it?’ he checked; then said ‘Evert!’ in such a sudden and carrying way that the dart-players turned, and Evert himself twisted round, alarmed as he was by any public attention, and overwhelmed to be called in this way by Sparsholt himself. He stood up, red-faced, grinning, channelling his confusion into the mime of taking his glass and his paper, going out into the street and fighting his way back, through a convulsion of curtains, into the snug.

  ‘I didn’t know you were in this bar,’ he said – but the muddle had turned into a success, an endearing little incident, and he himself, in his time in the Public, had found the Dutch courage he needed. ‘I’m so pleased to meet you,’ said Connie, and Evert somehow found it in himself to say, ‘And you too!’ I seemed to see, in a crowded few seconds, his judgement of her voice, her look, his snobbish reserve at odds with his keen and jealous curiosity. I saw too that he focused his attention on her because he was too shy to look at David himself, who said, in the same hearty way, ‘Evert, what are you having?’ He’d got the name now, and he was using it as freely as he used mine.

  Evert didn’t look at me much either, but somehow conveyed a reluctant gratitude. I changed places and put him next to his idol, who sat forward with his splayed legs and their big boots tucked round his chairlegs and his knees in casual contact with Evert’s. ‘Well, this is nice,’ said David, ‘cheers, Evert!’ and they jogged their drinks together, Evert’s hand trembling and the thin spume of his pint slopping down the outside of the glass.

  ‘Yes, cheers!’ he said. If I hadn’t been his chaperon I’d have laughed at his eagerness and terror. He had the nervous lover’s long-held habit of backing away from what he most wanted, and here, although no one but me knew it, he was knee-to-knee with the man he adored. The whisky he’d had in the other bar must have helped; he was staring furtively at David’s profile as if to confirm and explore his incredible situation. Connie said,

  ‘I just wanted to say I’m a huge admirer of your father’s books.’ Evert said nothing. ‘A. V. Dax,’ she explained. If his flinching ‘Oh, thank you’ was meant as a snub, she was only a little discouraged. ‘I expect people say that to you all the time . . . I just can’t imagine growing up in a house where those wonderful books were being written’ – and she gave a happy shudder.

  ‘No, well . . .’ said Evert. She wasn’t to know of the difficult atmosphere at Cranley Gardens.

  ‘It must have been so exciting,’ she said.

  ‘It wasn’t a bit exciting,’ said Evert, and with a brief smile, ‘quite the contrary, I’m afraid.’

  I thought I’d better step in, though it’s hard to know what you can say to a stranger about a friend’s private affairs. ‘I don’t believe Evert saw much of his father when he was growing up, just because he was so busy writing.’

  ‘Well, I suppose,’ said Connie. ‘Yes, I see. They often say having a famous father isn’t easy.’ I’d never heard anyone say that myself, but I saw what she meant. ‘Did he read aloud to you from his books?’

  ‘Good God no . . .’ Evert said, as David stared amusedly over his head, raised his chin and said, ‘Gordon!’

  Connie too looked relieved. ‘There you are at last,’ she said, as the drama of the curtain subsided, and a neat little fair-haired man in a trench coat stood smiling beside us. I waited to be introduced, while Evert folded himself over his pint and hid his face.

  ‘Freddie, this is my old mate Gordon Pinnock, from back home’ – David was already a bit noisy with drink.

  ‘Hello . . . !’ – and seeing Evert, ‘Ooh, hello! We’ve met already. Gordon Pinnock.’

  ‘Oh yes . . . that’s right . . .’ said Evert, in a negligent drawl at odds with his high colour.

  ‘Oh, aye . . . ?’ said David.

  I said quickly, ‘So were you two at school together?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Gordon.

  ‘But not you?’ I said to Connie; and by the time a small discussion of the matter had been got through, the question of Evert and Pinnock’s earlier meeting was, perhaps shallowly, submerged. Gordon bought himself a gin-and-tonic, which I wished I’d had the sense to do too.

  David was amused by the speed with which Evert downed his first pint – we all felt he had set a new pace, and knocked ours back too. Now the evening would be got through in a cheerful and approximate way, David would grow louder and more physical, Evert would be even more intoxicated, and the friendly closeness would grow all the more painful, with Connie holding David’s hand on the tabletop, the pale blue stone of her engagement ring sparkling in the light. I felt I’d done my bit and I reached for my hat, but Connie looked truly upset. ‘Please don’t go, Freddie,’ she said. I smiled regretfully. ‘I want to talk to you about . . . Woods
tock, and everything.’

  Evert said boldly, ‘Fred’s got an ancient aunt who lives in Woodstock, but no one’s ever met her.’ I thought it was probably time to explode my aunt, but I couldn’t do so here, in this company. I said,

  ‘Ah, yes . . . well, excuse me a moment,’ and went out to the foul-smelling gutter at the back, with its one light bulb and conspectus of venerable graffiti. Ten seconds later I heard footsteps and glancing sideways found David had come straight in after me – making loud grunts and sighs of urgency and enthusiasm. I valued a certain discretion at the urinal, the mild embarrassment covered by genial remarks unlikely to lead to conversation, a certain huddled concentration. But to David it was a chance for a confidential chat. He stood well back on the wet raised step, hands on his hips as a lively tide swept down the gutter towards me; he seemed almost to invite me to admire his performance. ‘What do you think of my pet, then?’ he said, and for a moment as I glanced at him I thought pet was his word for his organ. I studied the undead jokes in front of my nose, the intercalations by two or three hands in particular. ‘Oh, I like her very much,’ I said, and when I glanced again I found him looking shrewdly at me. ‘Yes . . . yes, she’s a great girl, isn’t she,’ he said, nodding steadily and relieved that I’d given my approval.

  It wasn’t a long evening, and we left before time was called, hurried through by the beer which they all had more stomach for than me. I was dismayed by how plastered I felt; and next day, when I wrote it all up in my diary, I was dim about the end of our session. I remembered my growing interest in Connie, and her extraordinary figure, which walked the giddy edge between comedy and dream. Much of the time Evert talked with David, exchanges hard to analyse, and which I was keen not to monitor too closely. At times it was as if the crisis was over, as Evert, after the shock of contact, was confronted by the cultureless blank of David’s personality; certainly he had no other friends like him. But I noticed two other things. David himself seemed excited by contact with Evert: there was a subtle mixture of teasing and respect in the way he looked up at him through his eyebrows as he listened to the stories that Evert, in a tipsy and hit-and-miss attempt at impressing him, was excitably reeling out. And then there was that gleam of Evert’s, controlled but breaking through the fug of the room, the grubby gloom of the pub, in passionate flashes, when he in turn listened to whatever David was saying.

  Sometimes David asked Connie something, or put his hand on hers or on her knee, but he was happy to let her gossip with Gordon, the old friends reunited. They had the whole world of home to talk about. In Gordon’s earnest attention to her, and his occasional shrieks of laughter, I quickly saw something else – that he was no threat to David, who looked on them both, almost smugly, as people devoted to himself. In fact Gordon, in his way, was more feminine than she was. Connie, with her coat thrown back on the chair, her hair down and feet sturdily apart, was reaching forward for her pint of stout, while Gordon centred his gin and tonic on the damp cardboard mat and made a private gesture with his tongue to tell her she had foam on her upper lip.

  David had been eyeing the shove-ha’penny board and towards the end we all had to have a game. We huddled round the small bar-room table, I with the bland resignation of the born loser, but encouraged by the occasional astonishing pressure of Connie’s bust against my arm. We smiled as the slipping and lazily revolving coins coasted over the board, smooth-worn old halfpennies with the profiles of Edward and George in helpless indignity as they swivelled and smacked off the frame at the top of the run. The right side of the board was faster than the left, and the middle was almost sticky. It was a question which was the cleverest way through, to bring the old coin up short in the topmost band, or to sail on past and deflect back into a good position. I was happy, briefly, to make an ass of myself, while Gordon made wild comic shots right off the table, followed by a grope between our legs on the grimy floor, David already lining up his next shot. It was a study in competition, and its avoidance. Evert played with the uncanny precision of the first-timer: the coin hovered and then halted between the lines as if drawn to a magnet. David gave us a valuable talk on the physics of inertia, but he wasn’t nearly so good. He muffled his shame in quick heavy embraces, so that Evert had to shake him off to play, and at the end his wounded pride was almost concealed by a staring grin of congratulation. Gordon had kept score and announced the final order: ‘5th Green, 4th Pinnock, 3rd Forshaw, runner-up Sparsholt, winner Dax!’ He squeezed Evert’s arm, and it struck me he’d taken a shine to him on this second meeting: some hinted feelings had passed between these two men, and I wondered if they might not bury their shared passion for Sparsholt in a much more suitable tendresse for each other.

  8

  ‘What nice cups you have,’ said Jill.

  ‘Oh, yes, they’re Meissen.’ She had seen them several times, and had never appeared to notice them. ‘Of course I’m flattered – I know you like your tea-things a millennium or two older.’ Jokes were always a risk with Jill, but she made a comic moue I hadn’t seen before, a little snubbing of the nose which struck me as a momentary foretaste of intimacy, in its unguarded gestures and feelings. She was in a new mood, more trusting and intriguingly less sure of herself. I set the low table in front of the fire. Behind me on the hearthstone the electric kettle had shifted from its first sharp sighs and creakings into a more enthusiastic rumble. ‘I brought them from home,’ I said.

  ‘You have nice things then,’ she said – and in her smile at the cup, with its tiny picture of pink hills, I saw a further prospect opening, in which I took her down to Devonshire with me to see other things we had, and to meet my mother.

  ‘A few passable pictures, I suppose,’ I said, ‘but nothing exceptional. Don’t forget my grandfather started as a humble grocer’s boy.’

  She surveyed this fact with a touch of complacency. When I’d made the tea she said, ‘You’ve never asked me about my family,’ so that her own reticence appeared almost to be my fault.

  ‘Well, I’d love to hear about them, Jill dear.’ I was charmed to watch her enter such personal territory for the first time – more than I was by the story itself.

  ‘I had a difficult upbringing,’ she said, tucking her chin in to suggest the unforgotten stress as well as her firmness in facing it.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ I said, as I took the place beside her on the little sofa. She budged up slightly but kept on talking.

  ‘By difficult I mean harsh and loveless and . . . confusing.’ I thought she might have been describing a historical era, not the girlhood whose closing years she still inhabited.

  ‘From the start?’ I said.

  ‘It was reasonably happy at first – I think you know my father was a solicitor, and my sister . . . well, I had a little sister.’

  ‘You had?’ – I turned sideways as I listened to her, and laid my left arm along the back of the sofa.

  ‘She was knocked down by a van and killed, when she was six.’

  ‘Ah, I’m sorry . . .’

  ‘My father blamed my mother, and my mother frankly rather hit the bottle.’

  ‘She felt she was to blame.’

  ‘Well, she was to blame, she was with her at the time. This was in Fordingbridge,’ she explained.

  ‘You must have been a great consolation to them.’

  Jill sighed emphatically but said nothing for a moment. ‘I was away at school, and when I came home for the holidays I found my father had left.’

  ‘Oh, I see . . . so just you and your mother . . .’

  ‘Indeed. And before long my mother was quite unable to look after me. She sent me away to an aunt in Lancashire.’ I don’t know why I was smiling at this terrible precis of her family history. I laid my right hand consolingly on her wrist; she looked blankly at it for a second and then swiftly sat forward to reach her cup. ‘I never had anything of my own,’ she said, in a petulant tone, and took several quick, dissatisfied sips of tea.

  ‘And what of your parents n
ow?’ I said. ‘Your mother must—’

  There was a rap on the door and Peter Coyle came straight in. ‘Aha!’ he said. ‘My dears . . . well, well.’ His smile was awful but flattering too. For some reason I justified myself:

  ‘You know Jill’s taking tutorials from Marley at Corpus, so I asked her to look in afterwards.’

  ‘Very naturally,’ said Peter.

  Jill herself seemed conscious of the imputation in the air. ‘I haven’t seen you for ages,’ she said. They’d never much cared for each other, but I could tell Jill was pleased he’d come in. Whether because she liked to be seen with me, or because it put an end to our tête-à-tête, it was hard to say.

  ‘I’ve been so hideously busy,’ Peter said, walking round the tea table with continuing mild amusement at what he’d found, ‘painting the sets for this bloody Triumph of Time. And any number of other things,’ he added slyly as he turned away and took off his hat and coat. ‘Is there more in the pot?’