The Sparsholt Affair

by Alan Hollinghurst

  ‘He looks about twenty years older!’ said Norma, glancing round for agreement.

  ‘I say, David,’ said Clifford, ‘was your friend Freddie a bit of a fruit?’

  His father laughed quickly but there was some lingering annoyance in him as he went for a moment into the kitchen. ‘He had a bloody great girlfriend, Cliff,’ he said, ‘I can tell you that.’

  ‘He looks like a fruit,’ said Clifford.

  ‘Con met him as well, you know.’

  ‘Did you, Mum?’ said Johnny.

  ‘Don’t tell me you were up at Oxford too,’ said Norma, as if it was getting beyond a joke.

  ‘Not really – not at the university’

  ‘You know my wife was a spy, of course,’ said his father.

  ‘You weren’t, Con . . . ?’ said Norma.

  ‘Well, hardly,’ said his mother, though she seemed not to mind the suggestion. ‘We did the spies’ typing.’

  ‘I see . . .’

  ‘Typing and filing.’

  ‘You must have seen quite a lot then.’

  ‘Well, we signed the Official Secrets Act,’ said his mother, her eyes to the screen.

  ‘You’ll not get a thing out of her,’ said his father. ‘I never have.’

  ‘I can keep a secret if I have to,’ said his mother.

  ‘Oh, so can I,’ said Norma, and looked round rather fretfully for her cardigan.

  *

  By the time they finished dinner, everyone but Johnny was drunk. His mother had drunk enough, it seemed, to forget her annoyance at having to make them all dinner in the first place. Bastien had wangled a glass of red wine, and topped it up when he refilled Norma’s glass. Then Johnny’s father had got out a bottle of brandy. Johnny helped clear the pudding plates and took them to the kitchen. In the other room the TV had been switched on again. ‘Turn it up a bit,’ said Norma, ‘I like this.’ Johnny heard and saw, as he went back through with a quick rush of the pulse, that it was Tom Jones, smiling and nodding, hips, knees and shoulders starting up like sliding pistons as the music started, tight black trousers with a huge-buckled belt like a cowboy’s crowning the famous unmentionable bulge, which the set made it hard to see in enough detail. The top three buttons of his shirt were open, a cross glinted in black chest hair as he danced. He was singing ‘It’s Not Unusual’ as he swayed and swung about, girls in the audience screaming and staring, Johnny knowing all the words and feeling them slide like hands around Bastien, and also a little bit around Tom Jones himself. He blushed at his thrusts, and looked away blankly. Clifford was sitting forward, peering mockingly at the little screen. ‘Ah, that’s what the ladies like . . . !’ he said, and knocked back the rest of his brandy.

  Johnny took the wine glasses and the crumby cheese plate into the kitchen, regretting every missed second of the song. When he came back he saw his father, with a little mock-serious bow, trying to dance with Norma. ‘Ooh, David,’ she said, ‘you’ll have my husband after you.’ But Clifford only tutted, as if he had better things to worry about. She looked down to make sure of her footing. ‘Cliff never takes me dancing.’ She laid her hand, as she must have been taught, along his upper arm, and her right was swallowed up almost in his left. They moved off quite fast round the end of the dining table and out on to the lit square of the patio, where he steered her with a pilot’s skill between the white chairs.

  ‘Oh, David’s a good dancer,’ said Connie, rather irritably, and looking let down. There was a sort of implication that Clifford should ask her to dance, though a quick cold smile passed between them as they agreed to avoid it. The song ended, to studio applause, and Tom Jones started on ‘What’s New, Pussycat?’, the girls screaming dementedly as they heard the first phrase. It was then that Bastien came forward, swaying from the hips and with his arms raised in front of him, clowning, but not entirely. He stopped by Connie’s chair.

  ‘You like to dance?’ he said, with a welcome glimpse of nerves in his big grin.

  ‘No, you cheeky monkey,’ said Connie. Bastien, still grinning, not wanting to show he minded, kept up his jiggling movements round her chair, his thighs in trousers almost as tight as Tom Jones’s. ‘Oh, come on, then,’ she said, and got up and fitted herself to him – ‘And not too close!’ as his hand went round her waist and Johnny sat down at the far end of the sofa from Clifford, and they watched, each with his own thin smile.

  6

  The Jensen crept forward with a crackling sound over the small rough stones of the drive: the beauty of its slowness was its mighty potential for speed. At the gateway the tail-lights flashed red for two seconds, and then, with a turn so fast that a short spray of stones leapt out across the road, it powered out of sight up the hill to the left. Three whooping growls were heard as it climbed through the gears, but at the fourth the sound was lost in the deep lane. They had gone. The mid-morning sun beat down on the lawn; it was wholly still, until, for a moment, a breeze off the sea shook the pampas grass and opened the Daily Mail on the patio table.

  ‘So it’s just us!’ said Connie. In the general relief there was a small unplaceable cause for worry – perhaps about what they would tell the two men they had done when they got back.

  Norma sat down again at the table and lit a cigarette. ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘Let’s go to the beach, Mum,’ Johnny said.

  Norma blew out a slow stream of smoke. ‘Oh, I don’t know about the beach,’ she said; though she liked to be coaxed into agreement with any plan. Small reminders of her goodness in yielding spiced up the day. She was wearing her white bell-bottoms and the floppy straw hat with a blue ribbon. ‘Look at me!’ she said.

  ‘Mum, we’ve been here four days and we haven’t even been to the beach yet’ – to Johnny it was a long-imagined scene. ‘In fact Bastien was complaining about it.’

  ‘Well, if Bastien wants to’ – with a weary laugh at what things had come to. ‘You’d better get the Zulus.’

  Norma stared at her, ignorant of Zulus, and Johnny said, ‘I’ll get them!’

  ‘You don’t mind, Norma? And see if Bastien’s up, while you’re about it . . .’ But here he was, scuff and flap of his flip-flops, blinking as he stepped out through the French windows, voice still throaty from sleep, and it seemed with a small worry of his own.

  ‘Your husbands have both gone?’ He smiled and spread his hands with bleary chivalry towards the women, as if faced with a double duty in the men’s absence.

  ‘Yes, it’s just us,’ said Johnny.

  ‘But where are they?’ said Bastien.

  The women ignored this question, but Johnny said, ‘They’ve gone to Truro in the Jensen. Truro’ – and he thought perhaps he shouldn’t say this again – ‘is the county town of Cornwall, I told you . . . with the cathedral.’

  ‘I think Cliff just wanted a go in David’s car,’ Norma said.

  Connie gave a dry laugh at this childishness, said, ‘Your car’s just as good, Norma,’ but added an adult note, ‘They’re going to have lunch with Leslie Stevens.’

  ‘Oh, Leslie Stevens, well . . .’ said Norma.

  ‘Well, they’re cooking something up.’

  ‘We’re going to the beach,’ said Johnny, laying his hand on Bastien’s strong shoulder.

  ‘Is there some coffee?’ said Bastien, looking seductively past him at his mother.

  ‘I’ll make you some,’ she said. ‘We’ll leave in ten minutes.’ From her mouth such orders were wonderfully lacking in authority. Norma had to totter down to ‘Greylags’ to change and fetch her bathing suit; Bastien cajoled his way into bacon and eggs, then went to the lavatory for fifteen minutes; and it was nearly lunchtime when they set off down the hill, crossed the big road and picked their way down through the ginnels and steep stairways between cottages to the high sea front, and its dizzy gap from which a further steep stair, mere stone blocks jutting from the harbour wall, with a frayed rope passing between rings as a rail, descended to the bright underworld of the beach.


  The choice of a spot to lay out their towels was a tug of small calculations – there were strips of fine sand between diagonal ridges of rock, exposed now by the outgoing tide, some further away from the big outlet pipe and slimy cascade across the beach below it, but too close for Johnny’s mother’s liking to a noisy family with transistor and dog driving people away, and a sun-browned blond son or son-in-law in green trunks drawing Johnny in furtive abstraction towards them. Further along, but right up at the rocks at the top of the beach, was a woman with two daughters, and Bastien, still partly in role as the senior male, made a firm move towards them. Norma stood in ladylike patience until the decision had been made. Johnny watched the blond man amble down into the water and with a quick unflustered gesture fall forward into a lazy crawl. Connie, free of the men, seemed more open than usual to the charm of having no plan, and almost no will. They settled in a minute at a place a few yards above the tideline, the sand smooth and warm in front of them but still damp to the digging toes.

  Now the two baskets, carried by Johnny and his mother, were set down and emptied – towels and sun cream, a book, lemon squash, and the swimming things, glimpses of furled linings and straps. ‘Do you want a Zulu, Mrs Haxby?’ said Johnny.

  ‘I’ll just sit here for a bit, thank you,’ said Norma.

  ‘Bas?’

  Bastien smiled at him narrowly as he took it in both hands. No one knew why they were called this, it was some very obscure connexion with the film, which Johnny had seen three times at the Ritz. Mrs Sparsholt’s Zulus were made for modesty, old bath towels sewn together and worn like a poncho with a hole for the head. Inside them you could change in and out of your swimsuit on the beach; and after a swim dry and warm yourself. Bastien unrolled it and stretched it out under his chin like a shapeless frock. ‘What is this bloody thing?’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Norma.

  ‘It’s to change your clothes in,’ said Connie firmly, ‘or under.’

  Bastien shook his head – ‘I don’t need,’ and rolled it up again loosely.

  ‘He can just use a towel,’ said Johnny, in a reasonable tone; but in a moment Bastien had tugged off his shirt and was unbuttoning his jeans. They all looked or didn’t look. He had his trunks on already, thin blue and white stripes, he stepped out of the jeans and folded them and put them safe in the basket.

  ‘Voilà, Madame!’ he said, and looked down at himself, pleased as he had been last year, on the burning French beach, by his own sleek elegance and indecency. Johnny had a breathless intimation of the warmth and tightness of the swimming trunks worn under clothes, the lucky loop of the drawstring now tucked inside. Getting changed himself, he found his pleasure in the Zulus drain away, he felt prudishly British beside the French boy’s simplicity.

  Next it was his mother’s turn to cover herself in the long towelling smock. Johnny noted, while not quite looking at her, the little active bulges, the intuited moments of release from bra and so forth as she got undressed. The never-seen nakedness of his parents was never more present to him than when they were hopping and wriggling in their Zulus. When she emerged, in her black one-piece, she seemed confident but self-conscious – or maybe Johnny’s self-consciousness leaked into her: she looked oddly at him for a second, stooped for her red bathing cap, put her hair up in a few quick tucks under its snappy rim, and walked down, lively, heavy-footed, to the lifting and tumbling water’s edge. Bastien watched her going in, something awestruck for a second in his impudence. Then Johnny ran down and joined her, the cold grip of the water shocked him in a way she hadn’t hinted at, in her quick duck and rise, the steady breaststroke that took her out, red head bobbing. He wanted to swim with Bastien, tangle with him in the waves, in the element where he was superior; but he knew, he’d known from the moment they left the house, that Bastien was not going to put himself at that disadvantage. He pushed out fast, then lay back in the water, the shore as if seen by periscope, with the background restored, white-painted houses lined above the sea wall. He waved, as though Bastien might have missed him: ‘Come in!’ Bastien was being talked to by Norma, who had laid down her hat – she must have asked him something, he stared at her, then came over, reluctant, with no escape, to help her with her Zulu: he dropped it over her head like a cloth on a parrot’s cage. She struggled out, fussing about her hair. Bastien turned away from her, with his fastidious smirk, and it struck Johnny, as he swivelled and swam on again, that probably no one much cared about Norma undressing, however she did it.

  It was fun swimming with his mother, little bits of talk if they were close, ‘Hello!’ like delighted friends, then unannounced races to and fro, and companionable circlings, in breaststroke, round a moored dinghy, My Boy Lollipop, or the two red marker buoys. He was a stronger swimmer now than last year, and his mother acknowledged this, with a hint of distance in her laugh. They were different in the water, daily habits dissolved, his mother all features with her thick hair sleeked away, and the chill of the sea not to be ignored. He felt it once or twice, with the pitch of a small unexpected wave in his face, her look, entirely used to him but not quite sure what she was seeing. He loved his father not being here, but he wished his father could see him, hanging for a moment on an upstretched arm from the gunwale of the dinghy, with an easy new sense of his own strength. ‘Oh, he’s off,’ said his mother, and Johnny swung about almost reluctantly to see the shore, further off now, church and trees in the picture above the town roofs, and Bastien a hundred yards away from Norma, walking calmly towards the far rocky corner that led round, at low tide, to Crab Beach.

  When they came out, and ran up the sand, and stood dripping and drying themselves in front of Norma, the indescribable alertness to change, to his own unmannerly growth, seemed to glow off them both, as the breeze ran across them and the force of the sun took over from the cold of the sea. He was nearly as tall as his mother now, in a year she would look up to him, as she did to her husband. She had sturdy legs, scratched around the ankles from walking in sandals, her large breasts were squashed together by the black bathing suit, her high cleavage goosefleshed under droplets of water. He knew she was forty-four, an age not mentioned, far ahead in the dense tangled stasis of adult life, whose language he still hardly understood, though he was learning to hear new tones in it, hardness and significant silence.

  No point in following Bastien to Crab Beach, the rumour of topless women . . . he hoped it wasn’t true . . . but ached at the thought of him there with them, while he was left behind here, with his mother and her friend. He squatted down by her while she rubbed sun cream on his back, feeling her take stock again, unseen, of the new size of him. He thought about how Bastien had changed in a year, the hair on his legs, the shadowed upper lip and chin, and how when he himself went off next month to boarding school he would surprise his mother each time he came home. ‘Don’t go too far,’ she said, as he walked off, not knowing really where to go. His mother and Norma settled down, saying nothing; he went where they couldn’t see him, past the family with the dog and the striped canvas windbreak, the young man was changing, Johnny a second too late as he pulled up his pants with a snap and stood wringing the wet from the tiny green trunks. Johnny could be so absorbed in looking he forgot he was visible, and being looked at. ‘All right?’ said the man – a clench of shame for Johnny, but it was just pleasantness, unsuspecting. The dog ran over, and Johnny scratched its head with sudden rough energy and relief.

  Talk had started up when he drifted back behind his mother and Norma – he went perching and shifting over the ridge of rocks, little creatures in the trapped weedy pools hiding from his shadow. His mother had her book from the library, The Red and the Green, and Norma, excluded, made conversation in idle, vaguely nettled resistance to it. The niceness of his mother glowed through, her book turned face down, answering, hitching one thing of no great interest to another, and keeping it going. He knew very well she didn’t care much for Norma Haxby, and not at all for Clifford – it was a keen little glimpse int
o the marital machinery to overhear her talking for her husband. ‘I’ve brought the Mail,’ she said, ‘if you want it,’ and reached over to the basket; Norma took it, but perhaps couldn’t read it in her sunglasses. He was aware of her turning her head and watching him, and wondering perhaps where the other boy was. He hopped down to a place where he could make drawings in the firm wet sand. He could only just hear them through the general noise of the beach and the gulls, and they spoke now with confidential flatness. His mother looked up over her book, ‘I hope they’re getting on all right. I think Bastien’s rather bored.’

  ‘It’s that age, I expect, isn’t it,’ said Norma vaguely.

  ‘He only seems interested in girls.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘He’s fifteen.’

  Norma peered out to sea. ‘He could pass for older, couldn’t he.’

  ‘Mm, I know what you mean.’

  ‘Good-looking . . .’ said Norma.

  His mother peered humorously down the beach. ‘Lazy puppy. I wish he had some other things to wear.’

  ‘Well,’ said Norma, ‘I suppose they grow out of things, at that age.’

  ‘Actually, I don’t care, but he’ll need something smarter for dinner at the Boat Club.’

  ‘They’re quite relaxed, aren’t they?’

  ‘They may be, but Drum isn’t. He won’t take him there in those trousers.’

  ‘Ah, I see . . .’

  ‘He’s very proper, is Drum!’

  ‘Oh, well so’s Cliff,’ said Norma.

  Johnny had made a face, like a great luscious boy doll, huge eyes and lips: sand was a tricky medium. He erased the whole thing in a stamping dance, smoothed it again with a stick of driftwood. Then he lay down on his front and closed his eyes. The talk ambled on, his mother’s reasonable tone each time Norma brought her out of her book.

  ‘I say, Cliff was quite surprised about David being at Oxford University.’