The Sparsholt Affair

by Alan Hollinghurst

  4

  All these weeks, the old stove in the workshop was kept drowsily going, with its small scratchy whispers, now and then, of combustion and collapse, and when the power went off it was Johnny’s job to open the air vent, rattle out the cinders, hook up the cast-iron disc of the lid and slide in another helping of coke from the hod. Cyril lit the kerosene lamp, replaced its glass chimney and turned the little wheel to bring up the flame. Once his eyes had adjusted Johnny liked the lamp’s heavy brilliance, renewed, at an angle, in the sloping glass roof above, where he looked up from time to time and watched their upside-down movements. They seemed to twitch and sidle, like creatures in an experiment, according to their own laws and needs, which careful study might explain. The whole crisis was a nuisance and potentially a disaster, but it had these accidental beauties, winter evenings out of the past. There was something banal in the first startled seconds when the radio spoke and the strip light blinked back into life.

  What Cyril’s views were on Edward Heath and the miners Johnny never learned. The radio did most of the talking, when the power was on, the news edging forward with small adaptations through the course of the day. Sometimes Johnny looked up, at a joke or some provocative remark by Arthur Scargill, but Cyril seemed never to have heard it. Johnny sensed that the old man’s fondness for the radio had little to do with what was said on it. It was a kind of clock, often speaking the time, but more palpably parcelling out the day into news and weather, Farming Today, The Archers, even Woman’s Hour. It made other talk unnecessary, and more difficult. It was a form of starvation to a child of Radio 3, which Johnny imagined going on like a better life in a nearby room, but didn’t dare ask for, all the time he was rubbing down frames, making moulds of broken details, or learning from Cyril the invisible art of touching up a painting. It was one of Cyril’s lessons that most oil paintings more than a hundred years old had been restored, and even much younger ones needed a bit of work. What was more vulnerable than a painted surface, screened only by varnish which itself darkened and distorted and sometimes even damaged what it was meant to protect? Cyril shared his knowledge with a certain reluctance, and expressed approval in a tone of disappointment. ‘Yes, well you’ve got the hang of that,’ he would say, and turn away with a pinched look. When the wireless was silent in the power cuts so too, for the most part, was Cyril. Johnny said helpfully they could get a transistor, but Cyril seemed to see this as meddling. It was the ignorant good sense of someone fresh to the job, and no doubt to act on the suggestion would have put him, slightly but unacceptably, in Johnny’s debt.

  Now the day had come for Johnny’s first date with Ivan: he was going round to Cranley Gardens after work, and all afternoon, as he cut down one frame with the mitre saw and curled the wet tip of his brush into the old carved flowers of another, he was picturing repetitively how it might be. In the few days since he’d seen him he had lost the look of him, and wished he’d had a chance to draw him. If he took himself unawares he could catch the brown fringe and the sexy slant of his teeth, and hear the chime of his speech in little phrases which seemed to flirt with him and hold him off at once. They’d kissed, but the kiss had been nearly nothing, and not yet repeated, though Johnny still held a mysterious trace of the feel of him in his hands, the rough warm front and the cool silk back of his waistcoat. He sensed it was best not to hope for too much from Ivan; but his thoughts ran back to him again and around him, and the last two days as soon as he’d woken he’d made love to him triumphantly before getting up.

  Sometimes a picture drew him in – it exacted a surrender with no show of force, it seduced by something precisely unsaid. Last Saturday, out of the cold London morning, he’d gone into the National Portrait Gallery, and seen they had a show called ‘Londoners at Home’. He hadn’t heard of the photographer but was drawn at once by a newcomer’s feel for the subject, the curiosity and the dream of assimilation: he imagined resilient cockneys, eccentrics posed with their lapdogs and Afghan hounds, aristos in evening dress – that air of nostalgia for itself that pervades the life of a great city, ubiquitous as fog and soot. It wasn’t like that at all. The photographer, an American woman not much older than Johnny, had her own curiosity, and had found a different London, so real that it was hard to recognize. The reality was that of anxiety, confinement, a slowly forming despair. Almost all the subjects were alone, in their rooms, with a TV, an unmade bed, some worthless but probably treasured object. They stared, rarely smiled, but seemed madder when they did. Occasionally there were a couple of figures, two men, friends or brothers, father and son. Johnny’s instinct was for the lurking hint of sex in a photo, the shock of what a photo could catch. As someone who wanted to paint people he envied it.

  A picture, unlike the dim labyrinth of a book, could be seen at once, but to bring it all to the front of the mind’s eye and hold it there was impossible. Some quite simple image might house an irreducible mystery: this he seemed always to have known. There was a photograph here with an atmosphere that excited and eluded him. In a room lit from the right, two lean young men sat on the end of a large double bed with a dark candlewick covering. There were psychedelic posters behind them and a blown-up photo of Mick Jagger dancing and pointing on the nearer side wall. Close up in the foreground, items on a tabletop loomed large, two glass ashtrays, a gleaming packet of Benson & Hedges, a painted bowl in which objects had been heaped, surmounted by a square white adaptor plug, strangely prominent. They didn’t have much, these two men, but they were tidy, and the adaptor was nothing to be ashamed of. Was it also the photographer’s way of saying something the men themselves couldn’t make so explicit? He got closer and closer to the glazed threshold of the photo, the world behind him receding. He seemed to stare into the room through a two-way mirror – from which, at that moment, both men looked away, as though on the brink of some hesitant exposure. Both sat forward, elbows on thighs, smoking. Both were sexy in the wild new way, the one on the left in a tight patterned sweatshirt, dark hair swept back to the collar, long sideburns, rings on two fingers; the other man, head sideways as if cradling a phone in his shoulder-length hair, was shirtless, with tattooed arms, brushing the tip of his roll-up against the rim of the fluted glass ashtray.

  Johnny stood there as if lost, but conscious now of another man, a live one, reflected in the glass as he strolled and scuffed and stopped along the far side of the room, a bit older than himself, with short dark hair and an amusing face, black flared jeans and a duffel coat; the waiting and pacing deepened his appeal, as did the risk of him passing on, a missed chance. In a minute he came alongside, craned forward to search for what Johnny saw in the photo, while Johnny shifted from one foot to the other as if magnetized and touched shoulder to shoulder with him. The man stepped back a fraction and peered quizzically at Johnny, then back to the photo, as if finding a likeness and then accepting how absurd, and hilarious, it would have been if one of the long-haired men in the bedroom had been Johnny himself. Johnny was slow to see this, and when the stranger said, ‘Not you, then?’ he was able to laugh, ‘Oh . . . no!’ with sufficient surprise and briefly touched the man’s arm.

  Their conversation went by loops and catches then, while they drifted from picture to picture in an English uncertainty about how seriously to take them. They touched shoulder to shoulder again as they tested each other’s tone, and knowledge. It was beautiful the instinct of it, quite new and alarming too to Johnny, though the idea that he fancied the man grew as it was encouraged and returned, and was smoothly akin to their joint enjoyment of the art, which now mattered rather less. He found he was called Colin, not a name he liked, but he adjusted to it – it made him fancy him more. Still the polite uncertainty survived, after the last picture, and they drifted back through the two rooms, nodding and saying yes to the ones they’d agreed on before. Then they were out in St Martin’s Place together, a cold wind blowing and a quick decision made.

  It was cold in Colin’s flat, too, above a busy main road just south
of the river, but they jumped into bed in their underwear and got hot kissing and tugging it up or down. Johnny hadn’t been with someone so hard and rough as Colin before, and he watched him for signals as to how he should behave – he was eager but there was a fractional delay, which oddly made the game more intense. Colin showed how much he liked him as he held him down and pushed him around – ‘Your hair!’ he said, grinning and tutting. He did just what he liked, so that Johnny’s shyness smiled helplessly through in the moment of throwing it off. But it all worked out, and seemed inevitable, the pain as well as the brutal excitement.

  They lay around, Colin hopped out and lit a cigarette, which he shared with Johnny, specks of ash on their chests, as they lay side by side, Johnny’s foot trapped between Colin’s feet. It wasn’t only the area, with the motorbikes and lorries revving at the lights below, but the room itself, clean, carpetless, with a sheet for a curtain, that was so alien and convincing. Of course he thought of the room in the photograph: Londoners at Home. Colin asked him what his name was, and when he told him he said, ‘Oh, yes? Any relation?’ ‘Yeah – well, he’s my dad,’ said Johnny, ‘if that’s what you mean.’ He didn’t want the whole thing of blame and pity; and being in bed with another man, of course, made it awkward. Colin smiled and nodded slowly as he blew out smoke, ‘Would you believe it,’ he said, then dropped the cigarette in a cup by the bed and in a minute they were having another go, a humorous start that led to a quick, almost savage finish. It was amazing, and it was enough. After this they smiled and kissed as they stood close together in the curtained-off end of the bath which was also a shower. Johnny’s hair grew heavy and dark under the falling water, and unwaved itself into a shiny point between his shoulder blades. Colin’s hair was short and neat – he perhaps didn’t know yet that it was thinning on the crown. They towelled each other, which wasn’t easy to do well, and in the way Colin let Johnny dry him between the legs and half-excite him as he did so there was a vision of what day-to-day life with another man might be, everything he wanted of love and coupledom constantly granted. But Colin, with what seemed to Johnny his lavish gift of intimacy, was not one to repeat himself, and so far they had not met again. After two unanswered phone calls, a reawoken bashfulness kept Johnny from making a third.

  Johnny didn’t tell Cyril he was going back to Cranley Gardens – any more than he’d told his father, on the phone, that he’d been there in the first place, and met a man who’d known him at Oxford. He was back in the house, on and off, all week, in his mind, among the pictures and the people, who seemed obscurely the key to a new life which would be damaged by contact with the old. It wasn’t just because of Ivan, he felt somehow homesick for it, after one visit, in a way that he didn’t for either of his parents’ houses. As he put on his coat and scarf he popped into the little cold lavatory at the back of the premises. At work he kept his hair held back in a rubber band; now he looked in the mirror as he folded the thick ponytail upwards and quickly pulled his corduroy cap over it, the peak high at the front, the elasticated hem at the back tight across his nape. As always he saw what he hoped someone else would see in his eyes and lips and broad cheekbones, and then with a turn of the head, as if in a hologram, another lurking image, mouth too big, nose not straight, skin touched up into spots by the oily tips of his hair. He called goodbye to Cyril, and went out into the February night with a chill round his ears.

  Outside, the street lights were glowing at half-power, arrested in the dim early mauve of their sequence. People peered quickly at each other as they passed from shadow to shadow, in doubt, and then brief solidarity. A breath of mist had seeped up the street from the river, and the pavements were slippery in the wan gleam of the lamps. Johnny crossed the Fulham Road, where the car-lights and lit buses were the brightest things; after that the houses grew taller and darker and more densely packed with that quality that was still raw and new to him, in every street name and sitting room glimpsed through unclosed curtains, the self-confidence and difference of London life.

  When he got to Evert Dax’s house he stopped on the far side of the street and looked up. The faint light of the street lamp was lost among the curved wrought iron and dead winter shrubbery of the first-floor balcony, and he could barely make out the balustrade at the top in front of Ivan’s attic window. There was a trace of music, and between the curtains of the bay window on the ground floor, five steps above street level, he saw a boldly dressed woman with white hair and a gaunt man in a dark suit and tie waltz mechanically past the spider plants and standard lamps: the Polish couple – Ivan had mentioned them. The windows on the first floor, behind the balcony railings, were all dark. The two floors above that, with their smaller windows, were where Evert Dax lived and worked, curtains closed but a hint of welcome in the pink gap between them; and above that again, the shadowy balustrade, the dormers of Ivan’s room, the tall party-wall of chimney stacks and aerials spectral against the sky. Was he going to spend the night up there? It was all too vague, silly drunk talk of drinks, and even dancing. Johnny said should they go to a nightclub, a gay disco, something he hadn’t had the nerve to do by himself? Ivan beamed, ‘Yes, of course!’, a silver promise that tarnished in seconds in the air. And if so, would they come back here at one or two, when everyone else was asleep? And what then? What about the morning? The Poles downstairs, the unseen banker on the first floor, could come and go as they pleased, but Ivan’s daily life must be tangled with Evert’s, their comings and goings known to each other.

  When he climbed the steps it was hard to see the bells . . . he pressed the top one and stood looking down into the basement area, a huddled below-decks sheeted in shadow. A voice crackled ‘Hello?’ – ‘It’s Johnny . . . . Johnny Sparsholt’ – the only response a dull buzz and he was in. The entryphone was the glamour of London itself, magic as routine. He felt for another button by the door and lights came on in the hall. Then he closed the street door and stood for a second, alone this time in the limbo of admittance, known to be there but not yet seen. Through the further closed door on the right the waltz music could be heard going on. The lift was down and waiting, but he took the stairs as before, wanting to look at the pictures on the way but then fearing the impatience of whoever had answered the bell.

  He stopped on the second-floor landing and peered upwards into the shadows; where was the next light switch? Talk came from the half-open door of the sitting room – Evert Dax himself, sounding fretful, and Iffy’s gruff voice, and a lighter, very posh woman. ‘I can’t sell,’ Evert said, ‘with sitting tenants, and anyway what about all the stuff.’

  ‘I certainly wouldn’t want to move,’ said Iffy.

  ‘Anyway it’s my home, whoever’s running the bloody country.’

  ‘Mm . . . well, I suppose nothing’s for ever, is it, love.’

  ‘I think you should all stop listening to Gordon,’ said the other woman. ‘He’s just upsetting you for his own amusement.’

  ‘I only hope you’re right,’ Iffy said, rather grimly. ‘I don’t fancy living in a Communist country. It’s a subject I do know something about.’

  Johnny found the switch and plunged the whole staircase into darkness. Evert called out, ‘Oh! Is that Johnny?’

  ‘Sorry!’ said Johnny, and went cautiously across the landing. When he looked round the door he saw Evert and Iffy sitting by the fire with a tea tray on the low stool in front of them while, standing at the window with her back turned, a slim blonde girl in a Davy Crockett jacket and tight black jeans gazed out through her own reflection at the night. Iffy looked up at him briefly, and said, ‘Hullo,’ as if still thinking about something else.

  ‘You’ll want to see Ivan,’ said Evert, ‘but say hello to us first.’

  The young woman stayed watching the scene in the window, and it was only when Johnny, unsure if he was being favoured or gently ticked off, said, ‘If that’s all right . . .’ that she turned round and looked at him directly:

  ‘Of course it’s all right,’ she s
aid.

  ‘Jonathan,’ said Iffy, ‘you haven’t met my daughter Francesca.’

  He said hello over the intervening space, the backs of chairs. Francesca nodded at him, smiled a fraction and raised an eyebrow – like Ivan before her, she had the look of knowing something about him already. She had a severe pale beauty and the poise of a woman of her mother’s age – indeed more poise than Iffy, who today in a yellow Indian skirt with tiny mirrors sewn in rows and a large woolly top had a ramshackle air, and had surely never been so nice to look at. There was a faint pale swooping line round Francesca’s throat, where in a man the Adam’s apple would be, and in an older woman a first fine crease of age. Johnny saw it was where some tight ribbon or necklace had been removed perhaps minutes before. She said, ‘Freddie’s been talking about you.’

  ‘Oh, has he . . .’ said Johnny, while Evert smiled and cleared his throat.