The Sparsholt Affair

by Alan Hollinghurst

  ‘So how are we getting there?’ he said, when they were outside. He wasn’t going to risk the bus again.

  ‘Taxi,’ said Una.

  ‘Or we could take the Underground.’ He saw his funds for the evening running awkwardly thin. ‘It’s probably quicker . . .’

  ‘Oh, the Underground . . . !’ – Francesca stood, in apparent indecision, gazing at a spot a few yards away on the pavement, beneath which she seemed to picture it running. ‘Is it still open?’

  Johnny looked at his watch. It was ten past ten. ‘Well, yes,’ he said. And he saw in a moment the Tube as perhaps she imagined it, rather than as he knew it from frequent use – a deep proletarian labyrinth, a sort of human sewer, rumoured to underlie the whole city.

  ‘Oh, but look—’ and she ran a few steps into the road and somehow caught the eye of a taxi driver passing the end of the street, who backed up and turned and in twenty seconds was taking her instructions through the open window.

  In the cab, as it swept round Trafalgar Square and out into Pall Mall, Johnny had the uncomfortable but elated feeling that his London life had taken off, not how he’d imagined it, but the unimagined, when it happened, had the bite of authenticity. The women travelled side by side, and Johnny sat on the folding seat, looking at them and past them, at the vanishing road and the lights of other vehicles surging up or dropping behind. He still felt hungry, he had only had one thing at the little Chinese, and then the bill was split three ways and he couldn’t protest. You ate almost in the kitchen there, with the poor splayed roasted ducks hanging just above your head like lanterns. He pushed down the window an inch but the throb of the engine shivered it shut in two or three seconds. Racing backwards to his first gay club, he felt a little queasy.

  ‘This is it,’ Francesca shouted to the driver, and they stopped at a narrow white building on the Earl’s Court Road. A small queue had formed outside, and there was a certain defiance in showing so plainly where they were going. The cabbie looked out warily.

  ‘You don’t want to go in there, love,’ he said to Una, ‘it’s a poofs’ place.’

  ‘Yes, we do,’ said Una.

  Francesca paid him, and took the change in full, and flapped her hand in front of her face when he drove off in a loud fart of diesel fumes.

  Ivan was coming down the other way, from the Tube station, his duffel coat unbuttoned, and the long fringe of his woollen scarf bobbing like a sporran between his thighs. ‘Darling!’ said Francesca, so that Johnny didn’t know where he was, after all she’d said about him earlier. Ivan kissed the two girls, dodged a kiss with Johnny by butting his head against the lapel of his coat. Johnny felt the quick squeeze of tension, was anxious and lustful, watching Ivan unwind his scarf, and was drunk enough to put his arm round his shoulders and leave it there. He seemed as drunk as they were, and engaged with the girls more than with the friend who was loosely holding him.

  ‘Here we all are then,’ said Francesca, as they edged a yard closer to the door. She winced at Johnny – ‘Sorry about this hideous wait.’ It was the disconcerting thing, where a brilliant person is drunk. She turned to Ivan, narrowed her gaze again. ‘There’s something funny about you. Where have you been?’

  ‘Me?’ said Ivan, cautious but pleased.

  ‘You’ve been up to something.’

  ‘I had to go and see that old friend of mine in Hampstead Garden Suburb . . . you know.’

  ‘I do think it’s good of you to go all the way out there.’

  ‘What’s this?’ said Johnny.

  Ivan craned round to see who had lined up behind them, and when Johnny squeezed him he shrugged free and murmured, ‘I’ll tell you later,’ which seemed a promise with a hint of a threat in it.

  They went into a narrow space inside the door, music audible now, swing doors beyond like a cinema and a glimpse when they opened of the bare room at the start of a party; the large man in a bomber jacket glanced sceptically at the girls. ‘You know this is a gay club,’ he said.

  ‘We’ve been here thousands of times,’ said Francesca, looking wanly past him.

  ‘So you’re lesbians, are you?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be vulgar,’ said Francesca.

  ‘How you going to prove it?’ said the man.

  Francesca sighed and looked away, as if dealing with this kind of person were a quite new indignity; then Una, with a hint of a smile on her large flawless face, pulled her towards her and with a tilt of the head started kissing her with a steady pushing and chewing motion which Francesca, while taking no active part, made no effort to prevent. Johnny giggled in amazement, and felt a sudden knot of excitement that he and Ivan might be made to do the same thing. ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa,’ said the bouncer, but it took him another ten seconds to separate them. He looked Johnny and Ivan up and down. ‘Right you are, gentlemen,’ he said, and unhitched the rope for them all.

  It turned out you had to be a member – Francesca claimed she was, but this time couldn’t prove it, so they all had to sign a list and give their address, which made Johnny uneasy; he imagined them getting in touch with his aunt, and he put a different number in the street. It cost 50p each – ‘And of course you get your meal,’ said the little Irish boy in the lit cubbyhole. Then it was 10p to leave your coat. ‘Shall we put ours together?’ said Johnny, ‘save money,’ but Ivan said, ‘No, it’s OK.’

  From his duffel coat Ivan emerged in a green silk shirt, rather creased, and very tight black flared jeans. It was a startling change from the Oxfam flannels and braces, and Johnny had a shivery feeling of him revealed in layers. He followed him through into the club, looking secretly at his hard round bum and the sliver of neck where his shirt collar was tucked in. They all stopped at the bar, Ivan turning and showing in his strangely amused stare round the room that standing them a drink was the last thing on his mind. ‘What will you have?’ said Francesca – and while she ordered, Johnny strolled off casually, as if returning to an old haunt, to get the lie of the club, excitement and fear mixed up in his half-drunk sweep through the space. There was the bar, and then round the corner a square room with a diminutive dance floor, a chequerboard five squares by five, the squares pulsing underneath in sequences of red, white, orange, blue, and just two men on it, staring and frowning at each other as they stalked and touched and parted and touched again. They had a long silk scarf that they trailed and drew across each other’s eyes. They were silly, but they were men, a bit older than Johnny, and they touched again and kissed so that Johnny looked away and looked back smiling in confirmation and shock. He went through further swing doors into the black-painted toilets, which like the rest of the club had an odd vacant readiness, Price’s candles on the ledge above the basins, cheap smell of disinfectant. He pissed, washed and dried his hands and looked at himself in the mirror, let his hair down, and put it up again, judging the effect as if he’d never done it before. Was he more in hiding one way or the other? No one knew who he was anyway. He left it up, and went back, past the dance floor, empty now, swinging his hips as he walked, looking forward to dancing, and into the bar, which was filling and getting noisy. He came up behind Ivan, gently straightened his shirt collar, and laid his hands on his shoulders – Ivan looked quickly back, said, ‘Ah, Jonathan,’ and passed him his beer bottle from the bar. ‘Cheers!’ said Johnny, and clinked bottles. Ivan touched him lightly just above the waist. ‘So here we are at last,’ he said.

  Una bagged a table, and they sat leaning forward to hear each other over the music. ‘Did you have any luck at that sale last week?’ said Ivan genially.

  It wasn’t what Johnny wanted to talk about. ‘Oh, yes, well, I got what I wanted.’ He looked narrowly at him for a second. ‘It was so funny,’ he said to the girls, ‘I ran into Ivan at Victoria last week.’

  The girls didn’t seem to think it was that funny. ‘Mm . . .’ said Francesca, and looked away.

  ‘How was your uncle?’ said Johnny.

  ‘Oh, very well – we had a great time.’
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  ‘Where did you go with him?’

  Ivan seemed distracted by talk behind them. Francesca said, ‘Oh, my god, she is here. Don’t look now.’ Una and Ivan turned their heads, and stared at someone who’d just arrived at the bar.

  ‘She looks awful.’

  ‘Frightful,’ said Francesca.

  In a few minutes Johnny offered to get them more drinks, and they all said yes, Ivan drinking up quickly. In the crowd at the bar he wasn’t sure which of the two women the frightful woman was; he had the sense of pressing his way into the gay world, alone among dozens of people all knowing from previous experience what was going to happen. He didn’t know what to expect, in his limbo with Ivan, but people smiled at him, a man turning from the bar with drinks lifted high raised an eyebrow and grinned at him. In the mirror behind the barman he could barely see himself between the optics and ranged bottles. He ordered and waited, holding his wallet, and saw enough to know the man leaning beside him was looking at him, then felt his hand on his upper arm. A handsome man in his thirties, with swept-back blond hair and good teeth. ‘Are you with Franny?’ he said. ‘Yeah, I thought I saw you, I’m an old friend of hers – Tony’ – and they shook hands. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Oh, Johnny,’ said Johnny, pleased to be talking to someone among these strangers, and abashed by Tony’s physical presence, the tight blue T-shirt and, glimpsed when he looked down to pocket his change, the big jutting packet, oddly round, as if he wore a cricket box.

  ‘I’ll come and join you,’ Tony said. ‘Really great to meet you.’

  When Johnny got back to the table a fat middle-aged man with a tray was hovering there. ‘It’s your salads,’ he said, and started to unload little bowls among the bottles and glasses.

  ‘Oh, god,’ said Francesca.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ said Ivan.

  ‘It’s all free, it comes with your membership,’ said the man, smiling firmly.

  ‘We’ve already eaten,’ said Francesca.

  ‘It’s just your salads,’ he said, as if a salad were a medicine, and with the air of someone used to resistance, for all his pleasantness. ‘You’ve got to have them.’ He put down four forks wrapped in paper napkins.

  Johnny peered into the bowls, which each contained a bit of iceberg lettuce, a ring of tomato and (almost hidden, unnameable) a glistening square of meat. He sat down when the man moved on to the next table, and unwrapped a fork. ‘I didn’t know we got this,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t eat it,’ said Una.

  ‘No?’ said Johnny.

  ‘It’s the licensing law,’ said Ivan, ‘they have to serve a meal.’ This seemed to Johnny both absurd and quite fortunate, he was more hungry now than he’d been before dinner, and food was here, the shameful stopgap of the boozing student.

  ‘Well, doesn’t look too bad.’ And with the others gazing at him, and then thinking it better to resume their conversation, he ate his lettuce and tomato, there was no dressing on it, and popped in the pink-grey tongue-sized piece of meat, which he chewed uncertainly, thinking it was probably ham, pre-packed, sweaty, and with a knot of gristle in it that he had to bring out behind his hand and hide in the bowl under his screwed-up napkin. It was dismaying, and connected in a momentary violence of image with the glazed squashed ducks earlier. Sometimes meat disgusted him. He took a swig from his cold beer bottle.

  Ivan raised an eyebrow into his fringe and gestured to his own bowl. ‘Have mine . . .’ he said.

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Johnny. ‘Or, well, actually . . . ,’ and switching the two bowls, he ate Ivan’s salad too, it only took a minute, smiling defiantly as he chewed and thought of other things of Ivan’s he’d like.

  And when that was done, the thing with the force now of some future anecdote, he pulled Una’s salad towards him, and polished it off. He rested, he felt some natural deference as he looked at Francesca, then he smirked, and she said, ‘What? Oh, go on,’ waving her hand over the bowl as she turned her head in mingled amusement and disgust.

  Ivan put up a struggle, only partly humorous, when Johnny tried to pull him to his feet. ‘Maybe later,’ he said, and squeezed Johnny’s hand as he pushed him off. So it was Johnny and Una who edged on to the bright pulsing square of the dance floor. Una hardly danced herself; she angled her shoulders moodily and moved her weight from one foot to the other; now and then a powerful quiver passed upwards through her large body, her head nodded and then settled again as the wave passed downwards. She gazed at a spot beyond Johnny, or else at the floor just in front of her toes. Johnny smiled and touched her loyally on the elbow, feeling men rub against him, bump into him, wanting a man to dance with, feeling the tense start of a new freedom, then starting to strut to and fro between the other dancers, and loving dancing, surprised by a desire to be looked at, smiled at, not laughed at – he felt himself balance and sway, cheerful but lonely. Then he turned back to Una, and found she’d given up dancing and gone to the bar. At the edge of the floor there was the risk of being shoved off it altogether by raised elbows and shrugging shoulders. He stood for a bit jiggling, watching, on the margin, in the hollow tension of not knowing where Ivan was: his eyes searched for him among the cute couples and grinning groups of friends, faces hollowed and shadowed as they danced on the upcast light of the floor. Just behind him when he swivelled Francesca was with the man Tony, looking over the floor like grown-ups at a children’s party.

  He could just hear her saying, ‘Yah, his father’s David Sparsholt, of course.’

  ‘Oh, really . . .’ said Tony. ‘Yeah, he looks a bit like him. Does he talk about it?’

  ‘Oh, god, he wants to get away from all that. He’s . . . he’s an artist,’ Francesca said, ‘a painter.’

  ‘I think I’d like to see his work,’ said Tony.

  ‘I knew you’d fancy him.’

  ‘He’s got a great arse,’ said Tony. And Johnny, thrown by the compliment as much as the bleak inescapable phrases before it, pushed his way into the crowd that was swinging and pointing to ‘You’re So Vain’, and swung his arse about just a bit too, in half-proud, half-indignant reaction. He thought he saw Colin and his heart sped up – it was someone who looked like him, his smile barely returned, the wave slid back down the beach . . . but in his reawakened absence he was gripped by a longing for particular men he’d fixed on in streets and shops, the black businessman reading Le Monde on the morning bus, the young barman at the Chairman’s Arms: why shouldn’t the world of fantasy step on to the dance floor and show itself as real, touchable, kissable? Two men dancing with a girl pulled him in, and he joined the game, pointing and mugging, ‘You’re so vain! You prob’ly think this song is about you . . .’ – it was last summer at college, a song he knew all the words to. ‘What’s your name?’ said one of the boys, hand on Johnny’s shoulder as they bopped. He told him, grinned back at him, unsure if the question was social or something more, but thinking already, did he fancy him, if it came to that? But it seemed he was the boyfriend of the other man, the more handsome one, and they both danced with the girl, pretty, Indian perhaps, as if the point was just to have fun. He saw Ivan, standing beyond the dance floor, looking on, with a faint smile and the hunch, which Johnny understood, of someone unable to let himself go. He took his new friend’s hand, then put his hands on his shoulders and danced with him for a minute, throwing his head back and laughing, and when he looked round again Ivan had disappeared.

  At the bar later on there was a huge fat man who could well have been in his fifties, in a blue shirt hanging out all round like a sheet; he was joking to the barman over the heads of the people in front. Johnny and Ivan had to squeeze round him. ‘Ooh, hello, mischief!’ the man said.

  ‘Hello, Bradley,’ said Ivan, and leant in and up over the broad frontage to kiss him on the cheek. ‘This is my friend Johnny Sparsholt.’

  Happily Bradley didn’t hear. ‘Are we all going to dance?’ he said. It turned out a skinny boy, under-age almost, with dyed blond hair, was with hi
m, and had got them drinks.

  ‘Hello, I’m Jeff,’ he said, rather tartly. They all seemed to consider the prospect of Bradley on the dance floor, and the exodus of other dancers it would require.

  ‘I love dancing,’ said Bradley, and raising his glass he moved his hips in circles, nodded and bit his lip. He leant forward and said to Johnny, ‘They all know me here, darling. I’ve been coming for years.’

  ‘Oh, right, I see,’ said Johnny.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve come across you before, though!’

  ‘Oh . . . no’ – Johnny feeling that Bradley was an act and he would have to play along, while the others watched, amused or pitying, he wasn’t sure. ‘I’ve not been here before.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve been coming here for years. They all know me.’

  ‘How do you know Ivan?’

  Bradley hesitated, put his arm through Johnny’s and pulled him slightly aside. ‘I’ve got a cock, darling.’

  ‘Oh . . . yes.’

  ‘I haven’t seen it for years and years, but I know it’s down there. And do you know how I know?’ Johnny simply shook his head. ‘Because I could feel it being teased, darling – teased and teased beyond endurance by Miss Ivy Goyle. Terrible name, isn’t it, Goyle, sort of goitres and piles, which I don’t have by the way, and never have had.’ He looked sharply at Johnny, who shook his head again—

  ‘No, nor have—’

  ‘She’s the queen of the cock-teasers, is all I’m saying.’ Johnny understood at once, and felt he should defend his friend, even so, and at the same time conceal the humiliating fact that he hadn’t known this all along.

  ‘Come on, Bradley, behave yourself,’ said Jeff, and led him off towards the further room.

  Half an hour later Tony was bumping his bum against Johnny’s as he danced with Francesca, and then when Johnny got out of the way turning round and pulling him in with a long muscular arm. Tony grinned all the time, it made you look a prude or a bore if you took exception to him. Also he was a friend, of some sort, of Franny’s, Francesca’s. The three of them danced together, while beyond them, with all the energy and determination of a normal-sized person, Bradley was bopping and thrusting his arms in the air. It seemed in fact everyone did know him, he was a star as well as a fool, and little Jeff pranced round him in delighted orbits. Johnny smiled at the spectacle, fell in with the mood of the club. Now Tony was getting behind him again, he felt him tugging his hair, and Franny too, very drunk as she helped him – it didn’t matter to him, he let them pull off the band and shook his hair out, shook it in Tony’s face. ‘Wow!’ said Tony. ‘You look amazing.’ With a strange wise pissed look Franny moved away.