The Sparsholt Affair

by Alan Hollinghurst

  Sally peered at Johnny’s knees with a smile of timorous interest. ‘They’re certainly a lovely colour.’

  ‘Honey,’ said Brian; then flinched and looked away again. Johnny ran his hands down his thighs and leaning forward flapped a crumb off the wide triangle of the flare. He felt hurried into boldness,

  ‘I want to see your sketches.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Brian. ‘So you shall. But only if I can see yours.’

  When he spotted the first people coming in with trifle, Johnny took all their plates for them and went into the kitchen, where Herta told him curtly to leave them on the table; she seemed annoyed at being helped, or at least at being helped by him. On the landing as he came back Freddie and Clover were doing up their coats. ‘Oh, are you off?’ said Johnny, amused by his own tone.

  Freddie nodded, and looked round with a quick wince; Clover, throwing her hair back over her coat collar, gave him an expectant look. ‘Yes, we’ll slip away,’ said Freddie. There was something confidential in his smile. ‘We like to be home in time for Kojak.’

  ‘Oh, well . . . !’ said Johnny, as Freddie, picking up the candlestick he’d given him earlier, moved to the top of the stairs. Above them, a further flight rose into immediate darkness. ‘But the telly won’t be working, will it.’

  ‘Of course I take your point,’ said Freddie. ‘But it would be awful to miss it if the power comes on. You know the plots can be quite hard to follow, and we’ve found if you miss the start . . .’

  ‘Right,’ said Johnny. He was puzzled to be still here when they were going, but he had already a preoccupied sense that he had to get back to Ivan.

  ‘We’ll see you again, I’m sure,’ said Freddie, while Clover nodded in her oddly teasing solidarity with him, and they set off carefully downstairs, with one or two sharp admonitions to each other. Johnny watched the candlelight inattentively pass a dark portrait below, and then fan and fade when they’d turned the corner and were hidden by the cage of the lift.

  ‘Oh, are they going.’ It was Ivan, beside him, amused but unsurprised.

  ‘Oh hello!’ – with the soft jolt of happiness he touched his arm. Then, ‘You’re not going too?’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ said Johnny boldly.

  Now Ivan leant to his ear: ‘My dear, I live here.’

  ‘Oh, do you? What, in this house . . . ?’

  Ivan stood close, looking over his shoulder as if quickly assessing the situation. ‘Come and see my room if you like.’

  Johnny’s heart skittered with worry, and pleasure too, and he said, ‘So how many people live here?’

  ‘Oh, more than you’d think,’ said Ivan, turning but with his left hand resting still in the curve of Johnny’s back, where Denis’s hand had laid claim to him before. He led him upstairs, and in the stumbling shadow of the next landing took a pen from his pocket and turned a narrow line of white light on the doorways to left and right.

  ‘So what does Mr Dax do?’ said Johnny, just behind him.

  Ivan looked round, seemed surprised. ‘Well, he’s a writer, and an art historian, obviously.’

  ‘He seems very nice,’ said Johnny, not sure if he meant it.

  ‘Evert? Yes, isn’t he heaven – now careful here . . .’ – at the far end of the landing a door like a large black cupboard opened on a narrower, steeper stair. The short ascent was a muddle of shadows and lost bearings.

  ‘My God . . .’ said Johnny, chuckling, careful but not wanting to be left behind. Now in the space under the roof the spindly beam jumped across bookshelves, heaps of books, a desk with a typewriter, a small bed that had been made and then lain on, the cover screwed up. It was extremely cold, and Johnny hugged himself before he hugged Ivan, hands slipped round him inside his jacket, and then he found he had kissed him.

  ‘So this is my room,’ Ivan said, holding him back with his free hand, as if overlooking what had just happened, and delaying whatever might happen next. Johnny laughed in the dark just at the moment the overhead light came on: ‘Oh shit!’ From far downstairs the noise of jeering relief just tinged with regret made a weird acoustic comment on their situation, squinting under the bright bulb of the attic room.

  3

  Evert started to undress, observing himself in the mirror with an anxious new interest: how had he seemed to David Sparsholt’s son? Alarming and absurd that someone half his age should wake in him the need to be admired. ‘I knew your father,’ Evert had said – awful phrase that a number of loyal old men and cagey old ladies had said to him over the years, but which he himself had never uttered till now: the motto of obsolescence. He rolled up his tie as he thought of the boy’s answer, which was a kind of reproach: ‘You should get in touch with him.’ And Evert had said humbly, ‘I really must.’ He had no idea what was allowed, in talk about David – about Drum, if he was still called that. He took off his shirt and looked at himself in his vest with the same sense of newly awoken confusion: a man whose unnoticeable small changes were revealed after thirty years in one cumulative picture of shrinkage and slippage, skinny, paunchy and puckered around the armpits and waist.

  And the fact was that he had been in touch, as lately as seven or eight years ago. At the time of the crisis, the ‘Sparsholt Affair’, he had written Drum a letter, of wary and perhaps rather futile support. And a few days later a policeman had come round, to have a word with him about it. What had he known about David Sparsholt’s private life? How well did he know him himself? Had there ever been any suggestion of impropriety on Mr Sparsholt’s part towards him? ‘Absolutely not,’ said Evert, frightened by the question but amused by the private perspective in which he saw the answer, as if naked figures were holding their breath behind the curtains or crouched under the desk. ‘We knew each other slightly at Oxford’ – not sure these days if this mere fact would deflect suspicion. ‘But of course we were both called up almost at once’ – which he thought had a better chance. ‘One knew about his marvellous war, squadron leader at twenty-two, wasn’t it? The DFC . . .’ Perhaps this was overdoing it, but the policeman paused respectfully. ‘I simply felt sorry for him – I imagine anyone would.’ When the door opened and Denis came in, behind the inspector’s back, Evert said, ‘I’ll give you those letters in a minute,’ in a very sharp tone which made Denis jump and then with a quick calculating look from one to the other of them go out and pull the door to with almost farcical discretion till it made its sharp click. As he saw it now Denis was wearing yellow shorts and sandals, and looking about as queer as you could get. Evert had always more or less done what he liked, but it was risky still, in 1966, as the Sparsholt business showed. He remembered the inspector’s wintry hesitation, in the hall as he was leaving, as if to say he knew exactly not only what had happened then but what was happening now.

  There was too much of David in Jonathan – was it partly to dodge this biblical ghost of a joke that he offered himself as Johnny: with immediate modesty and hesitant intimacy and as with all Johnnies a half-hidden plea to be indulged, and forgiven? To introduce yourself as ‘Johnny’ was to say ‘You won’t have heard of me, but I think you’ll like me’ – and as ‘Sparsholt’ to say ‘You know me all too well.’ And of course Evert did know him: the squarish face and large mouth and something guarded about the eyes, for all the ingenuous smiles. His hair was like a girl’s, coarser probably; one day he would cut it all off and see the relief in his friends’ faces. Evert pictured Drum, as he’d appeared in the papers, the ‘flawed hero’ with his airman’s crop and small thick moustache: what did he make of his son’s disguise? He saw it perhaps as just that – saw the need for concealment in the forward-sloping curtain of hair (though of course the boy stood out on account of it). Perhaps it was a way of embarrassing his father, in return for the years of embarrassment he must have inflicted on him. Evert went to wash his face and clean his teeth, and without his glasses on, a further faint estrangement, he saw something blurred but still seductive in the smile th
at the mirror returned. Since his twenties he had rarely been seen bare-faced by anyone but lovers and barbers. Now going to bed was a surrender to suggestion, glasses laid on the table. He’d been able to see all right in the War, but Drum had preferred being fucked in the dark. Memories of that were the ineffable hauntings of touch, fingers on smooth skin . . . and kisses, reluctant, then intense, then regretted, and repeated.

  Evert climbed into bed, and sat up with his hands on the covers, like a patient. On the bedside table a carafe of water, beaded with standing, waited on a crocheted doily, one of the hideous artefacts Herta made for him that had to be found room for somewhere in the house. How had it all blown up, so suddenly, seven years ago, a dim nexus of provincial misconduct that for a month or more was news? A foolish Tory MP was involved, which made it a national scandal, but it was Drum in his beauty and wartime glory who emerged as the hero – if that was the word. Evert found even now he didn’t want to think about it – a horrible mess in the life of a man he’d once adored.

  He reached out for the book he was reading each night, in small well-intentioned instalments – his father’s third novel, The Heart’s Achievement, which he had never got so far through before. It had come out in 1933, and was dedicated to Evert’s mother, at a moment his recent researches had shown to be one of hair-raising infidelities. It ran to 634 pages, a monstrous length, and had been a comparably huge success, especially in France, where it seemed it was still spoken of as a key work of modern English fiction. In England it had been turned into a play, with Celia Johnson, which Evert had been thought too young at the time to see. Now he put on his glasses again and found his place; he was on page 107, the beginning of the second of five ‘Books’ it was divided into. He found it as hard as ever to imagine his father writing it, though it must have been going on, day after day, in the study downstairs, opening on to the garden, where he and Alex were never permitted to play before lunch. It took a kind of mania to write like this, in vast unparagraphed sweeps, with sentences sometimes two pages long. The challenge now was to look both kindly and objectively at A. V. Dax’s peculiar style, and technique.

  There was the sound of Denis cleaning his teeth, and then he came in, barefoot, in his dark red pyjamas with black piping. ‘What page?’ he said, slipping into bed, so that Evert closed the book and moved over. ‘I thought they would never go.’

  ‘You know Iffy,’ said Evert, with a smile that indulged her and Denis too.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ said Denis. The sleepy provocation of his pyjamas, the dim peppermint of his breath, his hard knees as he pushed for more space, were as natural as yesterday. He let Evert kiss him between the eyes. ‘Mm,’ he said, yawning. ‘I thought Freddie was a bit funny about your reading.’

  ‘Did you?’ said Evert – it was just what he didn’t want to think.

  ‘You can tell he wants to write about the famous Club himself.’

  Evert grunted. ‘Well, no one’s stopping him.’ He saw that Freddie’s approval was what he most needed; and hadn’t he been very nice about it afterwards? But Denis was a great diviner of motives. His excitement showed through his odd flat tone as he went on,

  ‘You haven’t said what you thought about young Sparsholt.’

  ‘Oh – well, he was certainly a surprise,’ said Evert.

  ‘I’m afraid he got awfully drunk,’ said Denis.

  ‘Did he? Yes. He seemed very quiet to me – I didn’t get much out of him, I’m afraid.’

  ‘He’s just a bit shy, Evert. You can all be quite intimidating.’ Denis seemed not to include himself in this image of the gang; and shifted himself away as if to get comfortable. ‘Anyway he knows about art – he’s a picture person.’

  ‘No, you’re right – he said he wants to be a painter,’ said Evert, who in the past had loved their treacherous bedtime breakdowns of their friends’ behaviour, but now longed to change the subject.

  ‘Very nice bum though,’ Denis said.

  ‘I really didn’t notice.’

  ‘You lying old queen,’ said Denis.

  ‘I am not!’ – Evert grinning and running his hand almost nervously over Denis’s chest. Denis had acutely sensitive nipples – he scowled but there was a gasp of a smile as he said,

  ‘Ivan was wildly excited to meet the son of a famous criminal.’

  ‘I’d hardly call him a criminal – what he did would be quite legal now.’

  ‘You’re forgetting the detail.’

  ‘Am I?’ Evert didn’t want to lose the nearness of body heat, and the prospect, surely still not impossible or unworthy, of their getting inside one another’s pyjamas. He took off his glasses, reached round Denis and put them on the table. ‘You’re probably right.’ But there was a sense, all too familiar in recent months, that Denis hadn’t yet made his point.

  ‘I thought it would be nice for you to have someone new, Evert, someone a bit younger.’

  Evert said, with anxious brightness, ‘You’re quite young enough for me.’

  ‘I’m not nearly as young as Ivan, of course.’

  ‘No, Ivan’s a mere baby.’

  ‘He hates me.’

  ‘I don’t know why you say that. I can’t see Ivan hating anybody.’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious? He’s completely besotted with you.’

  Evert tutted mildly at this idea, which didn’t interest him or displease him. The truth was that he was in bed with the person he wanted most. ‘He seemed to get on well with Johnny.’

  ‘Ivan only likes old men.’

  ‘Well, I may be too young for him,’ Evert said gamely, and encouraged by the thought he slid his foot between Denis’s calves. It was absurd to be driven, after fourteen years, to these tense gambits of a first seduction.

  Denis resumed, ‘Anyway, I’m glad you liked Jonathan.’

  ‘Hm, well I hardly know if I do like him yet.’

  ‘Well, it feels as if you like him’ – Denis slipping his hand into the fly of his pyjamas.

  After a tense few moments Evert said, ‘For god’s sake, I like you’ – and had already pushed himself up half on top of him—

  ‘Ow, careful.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Denis made a quick cold sigh and turned his head sharply aside from Evert’s lips. ‘Not now, Evert, please,’ he said, in that tone of renewed disappointment that Evert had come to dread and detest. He disengaged himself, slipped aside and sitting up slid out from under the covers. ‘Well, I’ll see you at breakfast, if you’re up.’

  Evert lay there, saying nothing, knowing that a scene, an outburst of rage, would only be met with puzzlement and faint disgust. He was doubtless meant to see, against the light from the landing, the triangular silhouette of Denis’s pyjamas, like a drawn bow being slowly lowered . . . Then he snatched up The Heart’s Achievement and hurled it against the wall. He flinched as it struck – he had the impression the thick slab of pages was ripped from the binding. Once he had heard the inevitable click of Denis’s door, he got out of bed, and picked the wounded volume up.

  After breakfast, Denis went to the room he had claimed as his study, up on the third floor. The ‘work’ he was engaged in lay on the table . . . Beyond the table was a window, and it was this rather than the notebooks and typewriter that absorbed his attention this morning. Up here the views were both wider and deeper – a sweep westwards, over the tops of the next street, two Victorian churches, great bare plane trees between houses, three or four chimney pots with glinting cowls, which revolved and beckoned to each other no matter how still the day; but also a steep view down, over low roofs into the mews. He stood there now and stretched, with the unconcerned look of someone who thought he might be being watched, and then leaning against the left side of the window, with the pushed-back curtain bunched behind him, he peered down at an angle. But the black doors of the repair shop were closed, and not a soul about.

  Denis was as touchy as Evert himself when asked how his work was going. His manner as they parted after breakfast each day was
one of apparent impatience for study, though in fact most mornings went by in a distracted daze of doodling and wanking, from which he broke off now and then to make trips of indefinite length to the bank or the shops. Sometimes an errand for Evert kept him out all day, on a crazily sparking circuit of excitements, his late return unexplained and the evening enacted, as they moved round each other, poured drinks and shook out the newspaper, to a faint, strange sound, the hum of unvoiced thoughts.

  He wondered if he had an inordinate sex drive, and how many other men of thirty-three gave so much of their lives, when not actually doing it, to the rapt distraction of imagining it. Of course he knew them when he met them, nameless but identified by need, in a dozen locations, and a lot of them a good deal older than he was. It didn’t matter. It was a lesson itself in the power of lust, and in their eyes as they stared and gasped he read his own beautiful fate: for him too it was going to go on and on. The problem really was old Evert. When they’d met all those years ago he was a still virile forty, and a great educator in life and sex to a ravenous new arrival from Jersey, a mere nineteen years old. Now Evert was a lot older, ‘knocking sixty’ as Denis said, and matters were much less satisfactory. To see the silly old thing with nothing on and his bottom in the air was as laughable as it was depressing. The cheeky taunt, ‘Come on, old man!’ that had once thrilled them both as Evert ‘tupped’ Denis twice a day, was now barely usable for its note of pathos and criticism.

  Denis got up again and peered down into the mews, where the doors of the garage at last stood open on an empty strip of cobbles. He didn’t want to go out and enquire about the car unless Roy was there, and there was no sign of him yet. A keen restlessness and jealousy of Roy overtook him – the very thing he liked about him now seemed a great disadvantage. Roy was his ideal kind of cockney (extending the term louchely to any working-class Londoner): he was twenty-five, a bit shorter than Denis, ‘coarse-featured’, it had to be said, but, as Roy himself said, ‘the living end’ when doubled over to examine the entrails of an engine. He had a girlfriend he bragged and complained about, and like Denis he had a surplus of energy that spilled out readily and (it had to be faced) indiscriminately. There was a kind of adulterers’ honour between them, but not the least question of fidelity. In fact even the honour was mixed up with mockery of Denis for being posh, and complaints about his meanness. It was very hard to make Roy believe that he had no money at all of his own.