The Sparsholt Affair

by Alan Hollinghurst

  ‘It was always said,’ said Ivan, as if from a vantage point much later in life than twenty-three, ‘that Stanley couldn’t draw at all. He said himself that when he got into the Slade he couldn’t draw for toffee, but the professor there was very sympathetic and said, “Don’t worry about it, young man – just get on with painting” – he saw he had a gift.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Johnny, who could see that Stanley had thought in paint, not in line, there was nothing graphic at all to his slabs of slate colour and dull green and his grey-black sea. He remembered the small landscape, almost an abstract, that Cyril had cleaned and which had introduced him to Evert and to Ivan himself. Without that little painting he wouldn’t be here now.

  They sat down side by side with their tea to go through the folder of drawings. ‘I don’t know, they look all right to me. What do you think of them?’ said Ivan. Johnny turned over the dog-eared sheets of cartridge paper, faintly damp and spotted here and there with mildew; the sketches seemed to him perfectly competent, and more varied than the paintings: details of walls, fallen trees, the tin-roofed chapel they’d passed in the village. Tucked in underneath them were three studies of a middle-aged woman in the nude. ‘Oh, my god, it’s Auntie Jen,’ said Ivan, ‘ – sorry, I wasn’t expecting to see that.’ He giggled and covered his mouth. And there was something funny in the contrast of Auntie Jen’s large-breasted figure and her tightly permed sharp-featured head. She wasn’t a nude model, such as Johnny had got used to studying at Hoole; she was a housewife who’d taken her clothes off in the middle of the day. She sat with thighs stoutly apart, and a worried look, as if she’d just remembered something in the oven.

  ‘He was a randy old goat,’ said Ivan. ‘You know he wrote these poems about her that caused a bit of a stir locally. There was a famous one that began, I come to you, loins bared.’ They both laughed, Johnny gazed at him and thought, wouldn’t it be best to kiss him now, put an arm round him, get the whole thing going?

  But there were jobs to do, a start on jobs that could have gone on all weekend. They swept up, hundreds of dead flies, two dead mice, had a go at dusting, the dusters themselves worn through. There was a Ewbank which Ivan pushed squeaking over the three faded Indian rugs. Johnny did the bathroom (narrow, toplit, ingenious), the first water hoarse and rusty from the taps. He went out and picked heads of cow parsley from the bank beyond the house and set them in two earthenware pots on the dining table. It was a pleasure in itself, with a feel of preliminary ritual. ‘They’re not really indoor flowers, are they,’ said Ivan.

  ‘I like them, I’m going to draw them,’ said Johnny. At which Ivan raised his eyebrows and said he would make supper tonight. Johnny politely held back, opened the bottle of Noilly Prat that Kitty had given him, and wandered off with the thick green tumbler in his hand, to look at things – the magic of the house and the lift of the drink offset the tension of the long summer evening.

  Johnny held his nerve when they went into the bedroom. Ivan saw him take his shirt off, a moment’s appraisal as if thinking of something else, then he went out again to clean his teeth. Johnny rolled the band from his wrist and tied his hair back, pulled off his jeans and socks, and slipped in under the sheet and the yellow bedcover, an old waxy smell re-awoken by the blanket beneath. He found the hot oblong in the centre of the bed, his feet in the cold damp margin. Then he got out quickly to turn off the overhead light – just the lamp on the bedside table: he didn’t mind which side he slept, he knew couples had their habits, one side with a small accepted deference to the other, his father, getting up early, nearer the door. Here the person with control of the lamp would perhaps be in charge. In his bag he had some KY jelly, used till now only to practise, breathless tension and yielding to his own fingers, which went only so far: he hid the tube just in reach under the edge of the bed. Ivan came back with a glass of water and a book. Johnny didn’t watch him getting undressed, but saw him lift the cover and slide in beside him, in his vest and his string pants. ‘Ooh . . .’ said Ivan, nudging into the warm centre, where Johnny lay facing him. He sat up with the sheet pulled over his chest, opened the book and uncapped his pen; he wrote something, underlined it, and sat biting his cheek. ‘I hope you’re not a light sleeper,’ he said.

  ‘I can sleep when I have to,’ said Johnny, edging over and with a small yawn raising his knee over Ivan’s left leg and sliding a hand round his stomach.

  Ivan shook his fringe out of his eyes as he wrote. ‘You must be tired after all that driving, aren’t you?’

  ‘Mm? Not really,’ said Johnny. ‘I’m quite drunk, though . . .’

  ‘You drink too much,’ said Ivan, and turned the page with a nod. He wrote fast and vigorously, little rocking and circling movements passing up his arm into his body.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘What do you think?’ said Ivan.

  ‘It must be very important,’ Johnny said, ‘if you have to do it now,’ wriggling his fingers in under the hem of Ivan’s vest.

  ‘I’m writing my diary. It has to be done every day.’

  Johnny worked his hand up over the silky warmth of his stomach, touched his soft right nipple. ‘The day’s not over yet.’

  ‘If you don’t write it down before you go to sleep you forget it,’ said Ivan.

  This didn’t sound very flattering. ‘So what are you saying about me?’

  ‘Well, it’s private, obviously.’

  Johnny raised his head, watched him squint at the page in the lamp-light, amused or annoyed. He pushed himself up, kissed Ivan’s neck and nuzzled under his chin, getting in the way. He let his hard-on make his case, pushing out at the waistband of his pants as he rolled half on top of him. ‘Please . . . !’ said Ivan, but he put the book aside, turned away for a moment for a drink of water, while Johnny in a trance of boldness groped in his pants, plump, semi-hard – then Ivan stretched up and switched off the lamp. ‘That’s better,’ he said, snuggling back beside Johnny, who felt for him again, unaligned and with no idea in the sudden blackness of where Ivan was looking or what face he was making.

  He woke early, 5.20 on his travel clock, the curtains light but the sun still behind the hills. Ivan was hunched away from him and also touching him, buttocks against his hip, a hard heel pressing his calf. Johnny shifted carefully, looked at what he could see of him in the dawn shadows, his shoulders, the back of his neck, the pale swoop of his vest. Rising on an elbow he took in the turned-away profile, soft but heavy in sleep, unwaking for minute after minute; the dark hair squashed up by the pillow where he’d pulled it round for comfort. Johnny dropped back, shifted so that only their bottoms touched, his boldly naked, Ivan at some unnoticed point back in his pants. He couldn’t decide what had happened. He had spent the night with him, an achievement, nudging, turning and settling; but they hadn’t had sex, not as Johnny thought of it and wanted it, and this was a failure – or it had the makings of one, after five months of waiting. Now the day after was beginning, and he felt tenuous, a stranger here, in the bedroom, the bed, of the copulating Goyles.

  Ivan putting out the light – he felt it more than he should have done, like a small but lingering insult to his interest as a lover. Between their sighs and giggles, Ivan saying things, all the squirming round, big kisses sought and then half-avoided, he’d thought keenly of his hour in bed with Colin, its unstoppable, nearly speechless logic. Colin was totally a lights-on person, he loved seeing just what he was doing to you; and it was thinking of all that, in the teeming darkness, that had transformed him and made him fierce with Ivan, though he knew within seconds that he wasn’t happy. ‘Let’s just play around a bit,’ said Ivan, ‘you know.’ A few moments later he realized Ivan had come.

  *

  ‘The sea tumbling in harness,’ said Ivan, very Welsh, looking out with the wind in his hair at the breakers rolling in far below.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Johnny; he locked the car, and felt, by this second day, used to it, and even possessive.

 
‘Oh, it’s just a line from a Dylan Thomas poem,’ said Ivan.

  ‘Which one?’ said Johnny. ‘I love Dylan Thomas.’

  Ivan gave him a quick doubting look. ‘Let’s go down,’ he said.

  The coast seemed to be all rocks and cliffs, except this one place tucked between two headlands, where a narrow white beach curved away for a sheltered quarter-mile. One other car was parked in the scooped-out parking place above; beyond it, a gap in the hedge and a rough path disappearing. A stream drained down through a little wood, the rocky path beside it, a stile at the bottom, and then the sand and breaking waves. The lone couple at the far end stared at the two boys – the woman had been swimming topless and wrapped a towel round herself as she came up to join the man, who lay reading on his front, half-hidden by a canvas bag, his hairy bottom naked to the sun. They were in their fifties perhaps, and to Johnny there was nothing exciting in the rare glimpse of nudity; though Ivan let out a disappointed ‘Hmmm’ when the man, who had ignored the woman’s promptings, at last sat up and pulled on a pair of loose blue shorts.

  ‘We should swim naked too,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Well, you can,’ said Ivan.

  ‘We’ll have to,’ said Johnny, ‘we haven’t got our things.’

  ‘I mean I can’t swim,’ said Ivan; and it was clear from his faint smile at the horizon that he didn’t like admitting this, and was hoping to suggest that swimming was a pointless activity anyway.

  Johnny looked at him quizzically. ‘So what would you do, if I swam out round those rocks and suddenly got into trouble? You’d just sit here and watch, I suppose.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Ivan; and after a pause, ‘I’d get that man over there involved’ – and he glanced again along the beach to the plump figure treading down to the sea’s edge, his chest hair all the whiter on his sun-browned body.

  Ivan’s joke was a kind of intimacy, though something within it was not. Johnny scuffed off his sandals, and pulled his shirt over his head, his hair falling on his bare shoulders. There was an image, lurking and folding in the tumble of the sea: the hour on a Cornish beach a long eight years ago, when Bastien held his eye and grinned and thought of someone else.

  ‘Are you going in, then?’ said Ivan.

  Johnny said, ‘I’ll just soak up some rays,’ and lay back on his elbows on the warm fine sand.

  ‘OK . . . well . . .’ – and Ivan had an odd expression, carrying on talking as he unbuttoned his shirt. ‘I suppose Denis told you I’m a gerontophile, did he.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Johnny, as if he didn’t pay much heed to what Denis said.

  ‘He tells most people.’

  ‘Well,’ Johnny glanced at the pale smooth torso he’d gripped, stroked, kissed here and there last night, but had hardly seen, ‘do you mind?’

  ‘Sometimes . . .’ said Ivan, and sat back beside him. ‘Do you know what it is?’

  It was more delicacy towards Ivan than his own uncertainty that made him say, ‘Sort of . . .’

  ‘I tend to like older men, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh . . . I see,’ said Johnny. Something clarified for him, a small sense of vindication mixed up with the bleaker meanings.

  ‘I mean, I like young men too,’ and he knocked his fist against him, as if Johnny had put him in the wrong.

  ‘I can tell,’ said Johnny chivalrously. ‘Still, you like old men better?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Ivan smiled, the fist a finger now, running down Johnny’s arm. ‘Old-er. Not really old!’

  So he had a new, serious and quite unexpected shortcoming, in Ivan’s eyes: he was too young. It was wisdom turned on its head, but his immediate effort with all these disappointments was to be reasonable about it – it was frank, a confession, after all. ‘I suppose there’s more security, is there, with older men?’

  Ivan twisted round and lay on his front, and to Johnny his round firm bottom seemed subtly different in the light of what he’d admitted. ‘Perhaps that’s it,’ he said.

  ‘Older people don’t run off so much.’

  ‘Oh, they can’t believe their luck,’ said Ivan, and had the grace to laugh at himself.

  Johnny drew with a small stone in the gritty sand. ‘And have you had . . . affairs?’ – a note of irritation after all.

  ‘Just this and that, you know. Nothing serious.’

  ‘Right . . .’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘There are lots of old men out there,’ said Johnny gamely. ‘Oh, there are . . .’

  ‘Just waiting for you.’

  Ivan smiled at him and looked away. ‘There’s quite a lot of rivalry, you know, later on. You remember Jeff and Bradley.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘At the Solly.’

  ‘The really fat old guy?’

  Ivan raised his eyebrows. ‘You say that, but Bradley’s terrified Jeff will find someone even fatter and older, and run off with him instead.’

  ‘Probably not run,’ said Johnny.

  The King’s Arms was the hotel in the town, large and stony at the crest of the main street, and English in its bearing and its beers; Johnny couldn’t decide if he was pleased or disappointed. There was nowhere else to get lunch, and he pushed open the glass-paned door into the hall with the apprehension of childhood holidays at the other end of Wales, the Sparsholt family torn between making do and walking out. ‘It’s all right,’ said his father, his mother said, ‘Mm, I don’t know,’ or it might be the other way round, Johnny prey to his own intuitions about the interest or dirt or smell of the place. Here there was a stale smell of beer and cigarette smoke, and as they looked into the lounge and then the bar something else under it, chilly, residual, the stink of cooked lamb. Johnny screwed up his nose, but Ivan didn’t seem to notice. The waitress looked at them warily, and though the dining room was half-empty she gave them a table almost hidden by the swing door to the kitchen. Thick white cups inverted on saucers were part of the lunch setting, no tablecloth but blistered place mats with Lionel Edwards hunting scenes, just like his father and June now had, though neither of them took the least interest in hunting. The talk on the beach sank in, the odd shifting tension of pain and relief. He had got it all wrong. Ivan liked old men. All the hopes of the past few months were absurd. And yet here they were.

  The lamb smell in the dining room was fresher, juicier, revived each day. Ivan ordered lamb, by unconscious suggestion, and Johnny had the chicken curry, written down carefully by the waitress, and clearly something of an experiment for the kitchen. There was a family at the table by the window, middle-aged couple, younger daughter and son of eighteen or so, towards the end of taking holidays with his parents, half-parental himself with his little sister. He sat back in a bored but uncomplaining way, made interventions, mocking, doctrinaire. His dark hair was parted in the middle, swept behind the ears. The barman came through with a tray, unloaded a Coke for the girl, a bitter lemon, two pints of shandy for the men. Johnny looked away, gently startled by his own absorption in the family, his sense of recall, the boy unreachable on the far side of the room. There was a glimpse under the table of blue shorts, brown legs. ‘Well, don’t make it too obvious,’ said Ivan.

  After lunch Ivan sat reading the obituaries in the Telegraph, and when the other man in the lounge went out he jumped up and seized his Times to compare the obituaries there. Johnny looked at the advertisements in Country Life. Did he prefer a magnificent Georgian house in Hampshire with ten bedrooms or a magnificent Elizabethan house in Cheshire with six acres and a staff cottage? To a guest at West Tarr they both looked rather overdone. He wrinkled his nose. He was struck by how he didn’t get used to it, in fact the reverse, the smell pervaded the room, seemed to hang in the dusty pelmets and curtains and settle deep into the brown armchairs. He got up and wrestled for a minute with the unopening sash window. ‘It’s amazing,’ Ivan said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Percy Slater’s died.’

  ‘Oh, yeah . . . ?’

  ‘The Time
s says, “He never married”, and the Telegraph talks about his work with Hans Oder without even hinting that they were lovers for thirty years, though everyone knew.’

  ‘Did they?’ said Johnny.

  ‘Well, almost everyone . . .’ said Ivan, with a pert little smile.

  Johnny banged at the window frame with his fist. He said, ‘Not everyone wants every detail of their private lives in the paper.’

  ‘Well,’ said Ivan, ‘you could argue . . .’ – but he saw Johnny’s point. ‘I mean, do you know about Percy?’

  Johnny turned, and went towards the door. ‘Tell me later,’ he said.

  *

  When they came back to the house, there was already, for Johnny, a ghostly sense of routine – Ivan getting out to undo the gate, the ruts and drops in the track remembered if not avoided, a more luminous pattern of two men passing their days together latent in the seizing of shopping bags, car doors nudged shut with a hip, the unlocking of the house, and the evidence on the kitchen table and the bedroom floor of the time they had spent here before they went out. Johnny stayed in the bedroom, pulled the curtains closed and lay down for an hour, feeling it just possible Ivan might join him. When he came back out at six o’clock he found him sitting at the little fold-down desk, writing in his diary.

  Tonight Johnny was cooking, something else mastered last year at college, his best dish. Ivan, suddenly flirty, kissed him on the cheek as he poured him a drink and then leant against the sink to watch while he chopped onions. ‘What is it exactly?’ he said.