The Sparsholt Affair

by Alan Hollinghurst

  ‘Is she pretty?’ David wanted to know.

  ‘Yes, she is,’ said Evert, ‘well, they both are!’ – annoyed by his mechanical interest in Alex instead of himself.

  ‘Perhaps she’ll come and visit you,’ said David.

  ‘You can meet her if she does,’ said Evert. ‘If you’re still here.’

  ‘Ah . . . well!’ said David, and nodded over his pint at the justice of the remark. ‘Anyhow, you’re not bad-looking yourself, you know.’

  ‘Well . . .’ said Evert, astonished, and grateful, but caught at once in the maze of impossible replies. David’s own beauty was the unspoken context, and of course his incalculable modesty and vanity shaded any such compliment. ‘As I say, my mother’s very pretty,’ he said.

  ‘There,’ said David, almost reproachfully, and for the first time, miraculously, he blushed.

  It was on their brief walk back to College, in the barely penetrable dark, that the new possibility took shape, unseen, between them. That it couldn’t be happening, was only a possibility, gave it a kind of terror to Evert. The walk by the bickering river, that had been stiff and self-conscious on the way out, now was hurried along home on a giddy-making swirl of altered meanings. When David abruptly took his arm Evert stumbled to get into step – ‘Shape up!’ said David, and the unstated promise of the light grip and then squeeze of his elbow against David’s ribs had to struggle with the wild unlikeliness that anything further could happen. The white rings painted round tree trunks marked out their passage to the footbridge. Surely it was a mean and wicked game, to encourage a belief without putting it in words, ready to rebuff it if Evert dared to act on it. But not to dare would leave him with tormenting regret. Their element was the night and the unspoken, in all its queasy ambivalence. When they reached the great gateway and ducked through its small postern Evert’s pulse was bouncing in his ear. Then inside, with the vast unseen courtyard a mere intuition beyond them, he said, ‘I’ve got whisky in my room, if you’re on for another drink.’ There was something in him that hoped David would say no, and restore him to his accustomed state of unbreachable longing; but something else that made him smile in the face of the darkness when he said, ‘Yes, all right,’ and then, ‘Show me the way!’

  Evert seemed to retain just a few impressions of what happened in the room. To him it raced with tension, and David himself showed a jocular unease as he hung up his coat and flung himself down in the armchair by the grey fire. Then he sprang forward, poked the embers gently to uncover them before he put on the last two pieces of coal from the box. They both watched the fire as if it were the most important thing in the world. Evert saw that the room, which he disliked, and its precious books and pictures, were not of the slightest interest to David.

  He poured out a good inch of whisky, and offered water, which David rejected. There was something quite rough in his reach for reassurance, the stiff fix of alcohol. Evert hovered near the window, smiling like someone alone at a party. After a minute David sat forward to tug off his sweater, and barely looked round as he chucked it on the floor beside his chair. Evert stared at it, talking distractedly as he made his way slowly towards it. He picked it up, while discussing with elaborate pointlessness the essay he was meant to be writing, which itself was as pointless and remote as starlight when he held the warm homemade mass of the sweater, with its smells, soft or sharp, of David’s person against himself and then slowly folded it and set it on the table as if quite unaware he had done so. David’s look, his near-smile, tongue on lip, was mocking and as it lingered almost tenderly questioning. ‘You’re as bad as my Connie,’ he said – and the mention of her seemed to reassure him, and to clarify perhaps his sense of whatever it was he was doing now. He slid forward in his chair, head thrown back, boots straight out across the hearthrug. Evert knew already how David took drink, and noted the way he mugged being drunker than he was. He saw for three seconds David was showing him a thing beyond speech, and looked away and back again in hot-faced excitement. Then David dropped his hand and covered himself loosely, as if Evert were indeed a pervert to peep at a man’s lap. In his other hand, flung out across the arm of the chair, the whisky glass was at an angle, only lightly held. ‘Careful . . .’ said Evert, and David, lifting his head, saw what he meant, and drank a slug of it as if swallowing a pill. Now his sly little smile had faded, the instinctive command of mere gesture became a scowl, as if something faintly unreasonable had been asked of him. ‘Well, we’ll have to have the light out,’ he said.

  It was with an incredulous tension, as if carrying some large delicate object, that Evert, with his eyes fixed on David’s, slid back step by step towards the bedroom door. In there too the blackout was up, the dark air, as he pushed the door open, as cold as a pantry. He didn’t dare disobey by flicking the light switch, or feeling for the bedside lamp. He felt he had a look of terrified coquetry as he stood there, and watched David get up, with the sigh of a strong man who’s been called on to help, the nod of almost concealed satisfaction, and come towards him with the whisky bottle in his hand.

  In the calm after David had gone he thought lucidly of the Goyle that he’d seen and would perhaps never now own; the strange economics of the thing appeared to him – the loan had been made for love, it was the unexpected surrender of something lifeless but lasting for something impulsive and unrepeatable. His collector’s obsession seemed mere consolation, a sad shadow of his obsession with David, whom he would never own, but had borrowed for an astonishing few hours. For the moment the heat of the memory peopled the chilly room where he lay, with the blankets pulled up, staring into the darkness. He was awake, and alone in a new way, pulsing with hope and triumph and a quite unexpected prospect of despair. The beauty of the thing was that the surrender had been wholly unnecessary for David – he had won the promise of the loan already, on the sheer intuited force of Evert’s feelings for him. He showed a leader’s strength, a sixth sense of what others would do for him. But then to come to his room, to encourage him and submit to him, was pure will and hunger, and a taste for danger – freed from one kind of sexual trouble he entangled himself at once in another. Evert imagined him a few months ahead, as a fighter pilot of idiotic daring and brilliance. And then, as the first sounds of day began, and he waited for his scout to come into the next-door room, open the black curtains, and take out the ashes and the empty glasses, the thought of David on the far side of the world, in the unknowable future of the War, turned him suddenly cold. He got out of bed, put on his dressing gown and went into the sitting room, where old Joe, who was always so tickled and confused by the Anders Zorn woman, big-hipped, heavy-breasted on a Nordic beach, was plumping the cushions in a genteel mime of curiosity and reproach. ‘A bit of a session, sir?’ he said.

  Evert’s yawn and stretch as he crossed the room disguised a sudden horror of discovery; he pretended unconcern at whatever Joe was doing. ‘A friend came round for a bit of a . . .’ – for a moment he couldn’t decide . . . ‘I suppose it was a bit of a session,’ he said. He peered out at the dull dawn – no, there was nothing to worry about here, but in the bedroom? For a wild few seconds he saw himself being called up by the Censor, on grim evidence from Joe, and being made to pay a further £20 to get out of trouble. There was the slight noise of the gate being opened down below to the left, and as he half-knelt on the window seat, and looked out, he heard a quick shout and saw the squad of two dozen men in dark running gear swing out at speed on to the Broad Walk and cross in ten seconds into the avenue beyond. The dark path as much as the gleams of the reflected room had swallowed them up. But he had seen David there, in the thick of the other men, in their fast forward rush. He seemed restored to his rightful element – nothing made the chasm between them clearer than this instant unswerving return to the life of the crew, and their charge to the river at first light.

  Evert cut his tutorial that morning, and it wasn’t till after ten that he went to the lodge and found the postcard he had shown me, and which he now
took back, with a look of slight mistrust. It seemed very likely to me that David would regard the nighttime favour as itself the repayment of the promised loan, but I couldn’t tell if Evert had yet made the calculation of his own folly – a feverish two or three hours in bed at a cost of £20. He said, ‘So we return to the question of the card, Fred, the alpha and omega. Does he mean that I’m the be-all and end-all?’

  ‘Well, indeed,’ I said. ‘Or does he mean,’ and I was as tactfully objective as possible, ‘that that was not only the first time, but the last time too?’

  Evert and I went down to the station to meet his father, and said nothing more about the matter; our talk was bright but empty for the lack of it. And in that evasion I saw something else – that this Sparsholt affair, which had consumed my friend’s life and pressed for a few weeks so oddly on my own, was surely quite unknown to the rest of the world. Evert, I felt certain, had no other confidant, and it was unthinkable that Sparsholt himself would speak of it. It had already assumed its true scale, something fleeting, and entirely personal, too hidden to rate even a footnote in the history of its time. I doubt anyone has spoken a word of it till now. I glanced at Evert as we hurried down past the Castle. ‘Did Dad write to you about the train?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, I had a note from his secretary.’

  ‘Oh, yes? I didn’t know he had a secretary. What’s she called?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘It’s probably just the woman who does his typing: Miss Hatchet?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said, though it didn’t sound quite right.

  The train was late, of course, and we sat for ten minutes in the blacked-out waiting room, sharing a discarded copy of the Oxford Times. Unlike Evert I was hungry, but the once friendly chocolate machine had been empty for months. Still, I tugged at the drawer. Then the train was in the station, and we had to jog along beside it towards the first-class carriage, in which Evert had spotted his father sailing past as the engine slowed. I’d caught a glimpse of a severe pale face and of a figure behind him, hovering or reaching up to the rack above his head, a woman in a wide-brimmed hat and a ginger fur. The grinding scream of the brakes lent an edge to my nerves.

  I had no idea how Evert would greet his father – in fact they both avoided a greeting, Victor turning as he stepped down to address the woman behind him, with the wide hat, who I saw was a complete surprise to Evert. ‘This is Miss Holt,’ Victor said, ‘my secretary.’ We all shook hands, Miss Holt hanging back and looking after a large briefcase as well as her own handbag and two umbrellas. Victor wore a grey trilby and a red paisley scarf, between which his smooth blue-eyed face looked out blankly. His book jackets bore no photographs, but I had seen his picture in the paper, and imagined a much larger man. Evert stood two inches taller, but no doubt saw him in all the psychological grandeur of a parent; to me the first impression was of a humourless businessman of superior rank, neat, preoccupied, more likely to be a slave than a master of the word.

  ‘I don’t know what you’d like to do,’ I said, preparing my small menu of amusements.

  ‘We’ll go straight to the Mitre,’ he said. ‘I need to press on with an article for Sweden.’

  Evert looked relieved, and I’m not sure what I felt.

  A taxi was an expensive rarity, and I proposed that we go into town by bus. A bus was waiting, nearly full, at the station entrance, and we clambered on, Victor absorbing the indignity by pretending not to be in a bus at all; I paid their fares. Evert sat beside his father, and I squeezed up with Miss Holt and her bags in the seats behind them. Every now and then Victor turned and said loudly, ‘That’s Worcester College, Miss Holt . . . That’s Elliston & Cavell’s . . .’ At another time Evert might have been embarrassed by his father, but today he was barely with us; his yawns were his helpless tribute to the night before. If Victor was conscious of the minor stir he caused on the bus he perhaps put it down to his being known; and there was something unaccountably distinctive about him, it seemed to me, which made anyone who’d glanced at him once do so again. His voice carried, even in Oxford, a city of unstoppably self-confident talkers: it was crisp, autocratic, he had caught to perfection the drawl and snap of the upper classes, but with the charm and oddity of an ‘r’ rolled lightly in the back of the throat. In his mouth such familiar monuments as the Radcliffe Camera and the Clarendon Building emerged in a subtly glamorized light. ‘That’s Christ Church down to the right, Miss Holt, where my son is.’ Evert turned and smiled in confirmation and apology.

  Evert, Charlie Farmonger and I went over at five-thirty to collect our guest for dinner; we planned a drink in the bar first. He came in with a small cigar going, and Miss Holt again just behind.

  ‘There’s one thing I’d ask,’ he said, as he took his glass of gin. ‘Will you be introducing me later on?’

  ‘I will, sir, yes. I thought—’

  ‘Keep it brief, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘I won’t go on long,’ I promised.

  ‘I gave a talk in Paris last year – chap went on for a good twenty minutes, full of praise, of course, finest writer alive and all that, but it eats into one’s own time.’

  ‘I’ll have to praise you a bit,’ I said. But this was close to teasing, and Victor showed by his congested frown over his cigar that I wasn’t to try anything in that line. I’d wondered for a second if Victor was teasing himself, but of course he wasn’t mocking his French introducer – he was in strict agreement with him. It appeared Miss Holt agreed with him too, though with a hint of anxiety, as if telling herself to concentrate.

  When we sat down at a small round table with our drinks I looked more closely at her. She was about thirty-five, slender but not frail, with hesitant brown eyes, and dark hair pulled back from a face more intelligent than beautiful. ‘Have you been with Mr Dax long?’ I asked. ‘Hardly any time,’ she said, with an uncertain smile. I said it must be fascinating. She thought for a moment before murmuring, rather sweetly, ‘I’m still learning the ropes.’ Her accent was refined, she seemed to say ‘the reps’, and I guessed she was an educated woman making ends meet. I couldn’t help seeing her in that moment as Lorna Monamy in The Heart’s Achievement or Christine Lant in Horseman, What Word?, those obscurely troubled helpmeets to the war-blinded artist and the disillusioned sage. Her delicate fingers trembled slightly, and I noticed when she reached for her glass the soft ridge where a long-worn ring had been removed.

  Poor Evert wasn’t really with us. He’d produced his famous father and now sat beside him with an empty beer glass, as if hardly knowing who he was. We shared a few long glances, which made me feel uncomfortably not merely his friend but his accomplice. Victor carried on as if his son weren’t there, and after a while Evert seemed to feel the need to remind him that he was. A silence had fallen over all of us before he said pleasantly, ‘How’s Herta, Father?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’ said Victor, rather crossly; and Miss Holt too looked uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard about the German Blitzkrieg presently being waged over the very roof of your family home’ – he looked quickly round at us to enlist us in his sarcasm. Charlie laughed loudly, and Evert said he had heard, that was why he was asking; he was as unsure as the rest of us what he had said wrong. A silence fell, and I changed the subject and nervously asked Victor about the name Dax – was it Dutch? I think I must have known it was his mother’s family who were Dutch. ‘No, it’s an old Shropshire name,’ Victor said, ‘as a matter of fact.’

  ‘I wonder then if it’s a Norman name,’ I said, ‘that has lost its apostrophe.’ I thought myself it was extraordinary how he elicited this kind of flattery and submission merely by sitting there and staring at us over his drink. He seemed to compute the relative problems and advantages of the Norman idea – he blew up a big cloud of smoke in busy, rather wounded-looking thought before he said, ‘You may well be right,’ superbly making no claim himself to such ancient lineage, and making it sound as if I cared far more about the mat
ter than he did.

  Jill came to join us just as we were leaving the hotel. Victor perked up a bit at the sight of another woman, and as our little group trailed back down Alfred Street towards the College, they walked together, in the noncommittal good humour of such brief moments between strangers. Jill held the torch, Miss Holt and I came just behind, with Evert and Charlie in the rear. The night was so clear, after the earlier drizzle, and the moon already so strong that the torch was barely needed. The roofs across the street gleamed steeply, and the reflected moon slid from window to dark window like a searchlight. By now I was measuring the length of dinner, which was all that remained before my speech, but I watched Jill too. Her confidence with Victor had a touching new note of bravery to it – she flattered him, which was what he demanded, and where from a man the flattery, once secured, was treated with disdain, from her he was prepared to take it. ‘I hugely enjoyed The Gift of Hermes,’ I heard her say, and Victor said something about enjoyment being the least he hoped readers would get from it. ‘In my considered opinion,’ she said (and here I regretted that dear bossy tone of hers), ‘it’s the finest thing you’ve done.’

  ‘Well, it’s a great book,’ said Victor briskly, as if there were no point in either of them pretending otherwise. But he smiled as he turned to her. ‘Though not as good, I hope you’ll think, as the one I’m writing now.’ Like others of our writers he took no interest in his hosts, but with her there was a glint of engagement through the cigar-smoke. I suppose I was jealous.