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The Sparsholt Affair

Page 28

by Alan Hollinghurst


  ‘I’m just doing fegato alla veneziana,’ Johnny said.

  ‘Oh, right . . . great,’ said Ivan, looking thoughtfully at the ingredients on the table. ‘By the way, we mustn’t forget the postcards.’

  ‘We must send one to my auntie, obviously.’

  ‘Yes. And Iffy,’ said Ivan. ‘She’ll want to know about the house.’

  ‘And what about the girls?’ All their friends seemed to have some sort of interest in their weekend.

  ‘The girls definitely,’ said Ivan. ‘And I must send one to Evert.’

  ‘Let’s both send one, shall we?’ said Johnny.

  ‘Oh, OK – if you like,’ said Ivan. ‘And what about your friends? You must have friends from college?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Johnny.

  Ivan smiled narrowly at him. ‘Bit of a lone wolf, aren’t you, Jonathan.’ He tilted his glass one way, then the other. ‘And your parents?’

  ‘Well, I could send one to Mum, I suppose.’

  Ivan looked up almost slyly. ‘What about your dad?’

  ‘He’s not really a postcard person.’

  ‘It might be a nice surprise for him,’ said Ivan.

  Johnny drew the chopped onions into a neat line on the board. ‘No, I’ll send one to Mum and Barry, they’d like that.’ Ivan had the tactical smile of someone framing a new question; but all he said in the end was, ‘I’ll write Evert’s card, anyway, shall I?’

  ‘OK.’ Johnny chuckled. ‘You’re quite close with old Evert, actually, aren’t you?’

  Ivan turned his brown eyes and large smile on him. ‘Old Evert?’ he said, ‘Oh, I love him.’ And as he went out through the door into the main room, ‘Don’t you?’

  When he came back a minute later with the cards he said, ‘I wonder what the girls are up to this weekend.’

  ‘Yeah, I wonder.’ They seemed far enough away to be talked about in a more exploratory light than in London.

  ‘Probably going to that awful club.’

  ‘Oh, I like it. The Solly, you mean.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Ivan, flatly, the matter of their night there just under the surface.

  ‘You’d think Fran and Una couldn’t stand it, from what they say about it, but they seem to go there all the time.’

  Ivan laughed and said, ‘You know they want to have a baby.’

  ‘Really?’ Johnny stooped to light the gas, turned it up and edged it down. ‘That might be a bit difficult!’

  ‘There are ways, of course,’ said Ivan.

  ‘Adopting, you mean? – they wouldn’t be allowed, would they?’

  ‘No, silly, one of them would have a baby and they’d bring it up together.’

  ‘Two mothers.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Oh, OK . . . How would they . . . I mean how would it be done, physically?’

  Ivan was a little obscure: ‘They don’t want to, you know, actually do it,’ he said.

  ‘No, right . . .’ said Johnny, at sea once again in the radical imaginings of the lesbian world. ‘So who do they want to be the father?’

  ‘Well, they want someone they know,’ said Ivan, and looked down rather sternly.

  ‘I see . . . you mean they’ve asked you?’ – Johnny laughed.

  Again Ivan didn’t quite answer. ‘I wouldn’t want to do it,’ he said.

  Johnny got on with moving the onions round in the hot pan – ‘Oh, I don’t know, I like small children.’

  ‘First I’ve heard of that, my dear,’ said Ivan. Johnny didn’t answer either, but a few minutes later, as he dropped in the soft triangles of liver and the cold blood sizzled in the oil he thought two things: that there was a great deal about him Ivan had never heard of; and that after this week, perhaps even after today, he was never going to eat meat again.

  He kept this to himself, and ten minutes later was forking down his dinner in a trancelike state, both eager and reluctant. He loved meat, he loved liver in particular, and while they went on chatting he found himself sighing and smiling at the imminent drama of change. It wasn’t the taste but the intolerable meaning of food that came from slaughter that he wanted to excise from his life. The decision had been shaping inescapably for months, perhaps years, and even now he found he was keeping it, for a day or so longer, to himself. When they went to bed and Ivan snuggled up with his back to him, Johnny was happy just to lay an arm over him and hear him fall asleep. Long afterwards he turned on to his back and lay awake, his eyes reading more detail, and losing it, as the night darkened further, minute by minute, the shadowed rafters, the edge of the cupboard, the just paler stripe of the unlined curtain. The green darts of the hours on the square dial of his travel clock gleamed faintly, the luminous long hand hid the short hand for a minute at five past one, the little tick he’d heard muffled but amplified under his pillow at school for five years busied on uncomplainingly. He was excited, he turned and held Ivan again, his hard-on came and went, his hand lying, barely pressing, on the soft curved strip between his friend’s rucked-up T-shirt and the waistband of his pants. He thought there were countless things he could do nothing about – being gay, and dyslexic, and in Ivan’s eyes far too young. But this was a pure choice, it had the beauty of action, unlike the long compromise of being acted upon.

  He woke again to a much brighter room, raised his head to see the clock, lay back, befuddled with late sleep and slow to understand, as the night’s advances re-occupied his mind, that the pressure against his side was Ivan, sitting up next to him. He half-turned, looked quickly at him – he was on top of the covers, dressed already, in shirt and old grey flannels, leaning on his elbow to look down at him. ‘You are a heavy sleeper,’ he said. ‘I’ve been watching you.’

  ‘Oh have you . . .’ said Johnny, huffing the sheet over himself, turning away, but then, with a slow yawning twist of his whole body rolling back to face Ivan. He had woken up hard as usual and wasn’t sure if Ivan had noticed, or if he wanted him to notice. ‘How did I look?’

  ‘You must have been dreaming, you made little faces.’

  ‘Well I dream a lot.’ All his life he’d disliked being watched, but there was an unexpected sliver of pleasure in having been at Ivan’s mercy. ‘How long have you been up?’

  ‘About an hour? I’m an early riser.’ It was hard to work out the change of mood, Johnny looking up, wary but ready, into Ivan’s eyes, with their glitter of promise and habitual reserve. Ivan reached out, the back of his hand for a moment against Johnny’s cheek, fingertips tracing the line of his neck and running up, through his hair, holding him, his thumb just moving in tentative circles on the secret curve behind the ear. Johnny gasped softly, and with arms pinned under the bedclothes waited powerlessly for the kiss, not in the dark, after all, but in this thinly curtained daylight. He swallowed, closed his eyes, and felt Ivan pushing back his hair. ‘It’s amazing,’ Ivan said.

  Johnny laughed softly as he opened his eyes again. Ivan seemed to marvel at his face, his head, as if he had only just seen it, or seen what he ought to have found in it long before. ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘Has anyone ever told you?’

  Johnny looked solemn. ‘I should get my hair cut.’

  ‘No, silly.’ In the new atmosphere Ivan himself hesitated. ‘You look just like your dad when your hair’s pulled back.’

  ‘Ah . . .’ This again. He turned his head slightly, stared past Ivan’s shoulder. ‘As far as I know, you’ve never met my dad.’

  ‘No, but I know what he looks like, don’t I.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Johnny, ‘I suppose so,’ as if he didn’t really mind, to get dad out of the way.

  Ivan slid down more comfortably next to him, shrugged into his pillow, lay just smiling, his clothed knee above the covers pressing Johnny’s naked one beneath. It was a long gaze, eyes questioning, avoiding and returning, and a doubt still in Johnny’s mind as to what the question was. ‘You poor thing . . .’ said Ivan.

  ‘I’m all right.’ He braced himse
lf, smiled slyly to show he was up for anything.

  ‘It must have been so difficult for you,’ said Ivan, and his hand still behind Johnny’s ear made it hard for him to shift away. ‘And, you know, finding out you were gay yourself.’

  It was still strange to hear, in so many words, that he was. ‘Well, it didn’t help, I suppose,’ said Johnny quietly. The point was, surely, here he was, with Ivan’s soft breath in his face . . .

  ‘Something so public . . .’ Ivan raised his head slightly and leaning over him kissed him softly on the cheek, and then above his eye. ‘I wish you’d tell me about it.’

  The sense of years-long danger was mixed with a faint, never-faced uncertainty as to what the danger was. ‘About what?’

  ‘You know, when it happened.’

  ‘It’s all a bit of a blur . . . you know.’

  Ivan’s smile tightened for a second at this, then relaxed. ‘I mean, did your dad ever talk to you about what went on?’

  ‘No – of course not.’

  ‘No, I suppose . . . .’ Ivan laughed at himself. ‘It would have been a bit odd!’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Johnny, ‘it would.’

  ‘I just think it must have been so awful for you, with it on the news, everyone reading about it in the papers,’ Ivan said.

  ‘I didn’t read the papers, Mum told me not to.’ The bizarre idea that Ivan himself, at what? fifteen, had done so, came to him for the first time. ‘Did you?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Ivan, ‘of course I did. Well, it was a big story, wasn’t it, for a while. Money, power . . . gay shenanigans! It had everything.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, it was perfect,’ said Johnny.

  Ivan lay back a little, still up against him, his hand drifted from his neck to the tight sheet over his shoulder, Johnny helpless in his hidden nakedness gazing close up at him. It had the fright of a new kind of excitement – to be in the power of someone he was shiveringly keen to submit to entirely. ‘And your poor dad at the centre of it. I mean how did he cope at first, you know, when he came out of prison?’

  Johnny almost laughed, at his persistence, and at the coy delay in whatever was starting to happen; he was making him work for it. ‘He just carried on, really.’

  ‘He must have picked himself up, somehow.’

  ‘Dad always said, “Work’s the thing,”’ said Johnny. He thought no one had ever worked like his father, at whatever he did, and whether it was work or not.

  ‘No, that’s very good,’ said Ivan responsibly. He stroked Johnny’s shoulder before he went on: ‘I mean, did you actually meet Clifford Haxby?’ He made him sound like someone you might have wanted to meet, a film star.

  After a moment Johnny said, ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘I just remember that photo,’ said Ivan, ‘taken through a window.’

  ‘Oh . . . yes.’

  ‘I remember trying to work it out . . . you know . . . what was going on.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad it turned you on,’ said Johnny, pushing himself against him, as far as he could, with a little grunt.

  ‘I mean, was Clifford in love with your dad, would you say?’

  Johnny looked at him and at the question through the shimmer of his own early morning sensations. ‘How would I know . . . ? Possibly?’ – tender feelings had been nothing but sex, it seemed, in the glare of the case, and sex itself was a means to something else; but it was hard for him to think about, then or now. He shifted an inch or two, under the weight of Ivan’s knee, drawn up a little further now, and holding him there.

  ‘And what about your dad? Was he in love with him?’

  ‘No!’ said Johnny. ‘Of course not.’ He looked at Ivan, and his words took a strange weight and humour from the position he was in. ‘Dad’s not . . .’ – he didn’t know what was best – ‘gay, not really.’

  Ivan seemed slightly offended. ‘Well, he must be bisexual, anyway, mustn’t he.’

  ‘No . . . well, I suppose he must have been, in a way. If he needed to be.’ He met Ivan’s smile with his own. ‘You seem a bit obsessed with my dad.’

  ‘Oh . . .’ said Ivan.

  ‘I can see I’m going to have to introduce you.’

  Ivan laughed disparagingly, and they lay, not quite meeting each other’s eye, in a tingling nearness that made Johnny gasp and twist with desire in his tight cocoon. Ivan leant in, gave him a soft kiss on the bridge of his nose, then swung round and stood up. He looked down at him for several seconds. ‘When?’ he said.

  After breakfast Johnny said, ‘I want to see what that building is.’

  ‘Which building . . .?’

  ‘Is it a barn – where the trees begin on the far side.’

  ‘Oh, yes . . .’ said Ivan. ‘Well, let’s have a walk before we go.’

  Johnny’s idea had been to go off by himself. ‘If you feel like it.’

  In five minutes they were ready. Johnny jumped off the edge of the platform and got stung on the arm by nettles for his bravado. ‘You won’t need a jacket,’ he said as Ivan came round, having closed the windows, and locked the door. ‘It’s a boiling hot day.’

  ‘Well, you never know,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t tell what it is,’ said Johnny. ‘Have you been to it before?’

  ‘I’ve never noticed it,’ Ivan said, ‘but let’s see.’

  They walked at first over the mown hayfields, already green with foggage. It was a lovely effect, the delicate first blades of grass among the silver stalks. Ivan was cheerful, but evasive, he went ahead, unusually alert for things to comment on; while Johnny was caught almost at once in the strange lulled swoon of each warm step to step: he saw how his footprint flattened the new growth and crunched the soft stubble inseparably. Ivan waited for him at the gate into the next field, nervous perhaps about the cows grazing a hundred yards off. He took Johnny’s arm. ‘Thank you for telling me all that, my dear, you know, earlier.’

  Was he being sarcastic? ‘Oh, well, it wasn’t much.’

  ‘No, no . . .’

  ‘I never talk about it at all, normally, so you were lucky.’

  Two or three of the cows noticed them, stared, unsure at first, and seemed to decide they were just about worth a closer look. Johnny wasn’t frightened of cows; as a child he’d moved among them, on their friend Sam Peachey’s farm; he slowed as he felt Ivan pull him forward: ‘As long as you’re all right,’ squeezing his arm tighter for a second, as he looked round.

  Johnny stopped, turned and waited, looked cheerfully into the brown face of the nearest cow, twenty yards off. ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘I’m a Sparsholt, after all!’, lowering his forehead and shaking his long hair, so that the cow stopped, puzzled a few moments, and cautiously dropped its head again to graze.

  ‘And are we all right?’ said Ivan, with a giggle.

  ‘They’re only cows, for Christ’s sake,’ said Johnny, as the others started coming forward, the whole herd following them for reasons of their own up to the next gate.

  From here, when they climbed over and turned round, there was a clear view back across the valley to West Tarr, at an angle, glinting, and looking larger, among the crowding trees and bushes, than it did close-to. ‘My word, it stands out,’ said Ivan.

  ‘Great, isn’t it.’

  ‘They’d never get away with it now, of course.’

  ‘What year was it, before the War?’

  ‘Nineteen thirty-nine,’ said Ivan. ‘It must have been easier then.’

  From half a mile away the very notion of the glass box, the modernist ideal, seemed more principled, more foreign and more forlorn. Trees, grass, bleaching sun and rotting rain would undo any kind of house in time, but here these elements had been almost recklessly defied.

  ‘It would be different in California or somewhere.’

  ‘I suppose so . . .’ Johnny saw that he was right – in England, in Wales, a building like this appeared a double self-assertion, against bad taste and bad weather. How much longer would it be there? As they walked
in single file along the headland towards the ruined barn Johnny felt the pang of regret that came before leaving a place he would never see again. Ivan pressed on, while Johnny lingered and was brought almost to a stop. His father’s word came from industrial relations – when they were out for a walk Johnny went on a ‘go-slow’: his parents got on with it while he hung back, unaccountably transfixed by the colour and the feeling of a field, a summer hedgerow, a church tower among trees. ‘I don’t know what you’re gawping at, young man,’ his father said, ‘you look all gone out’; though his mother’s impatience was different perhaps, a soft thwarted glance at the things she herself had once loved looking at and had been obliged to give up. In her smile there was a hint of hopeless allegiance. But not in Ivan’s. He caught up with him, they walked to the next gate shoulder to shoulder, but it was a game of closeness, and Johnny, in the loneliness of his difference, felt something subtler than their failure in bed, but confirming it, that someone who shared so little of his mood could never share his life.

  9

  Fran said Johnny must do a picture of Una and herself together. The lesbian double portrait would be a novelty – at least she and Johnny couldn’t think of any. Male lovers together were rare enough. There was the one from the 1940s where Benjamin Britten appeared oddly collaged on top of Peter Pears, and Johnny had cut out a picture from a magazine of a Hockney portrait of Isherwood and his boyfriend, sitting in chairs some way apart. But women together? They didn’t discount the chance of there being some, but as Fran said it was the men who got all the attention. And now how were they going to be done? ‘I’ve got a few thoughts about that,’ she said.

  The next Friday, after the shop had shut, Johnny walked down the street and round the corner into Cheyne Walk. He carried the black leather drawing case his mother and Barry had given him for his twenty-first, ‘J. D. S.’ stamped in gold across one corner. It was a bright early evening, the river at high tide, the throb and fume of traffic along the Embankment. He hadn’t been asked to Sir George’s house before, and he saw the visit as a nice step forward in his friendship with Fran, just shadowed by a feeling that he’d been called in, like some other workman, to do a job. He had an almost oppressive sense, as he pushed down the latch of the tall iron gate, which swung closed on a weighted string behind him, of being on her father’s property, his flagged front path, in front of his tall red-brick house, a place where Fran and her friends would be kept in check by his sarcasm; and there was something further, intermittent but persistent, despite everything, the feeling of trailing a hint of scandal, in his makeup and in his very name, into places that would rather have done without it. Well, Sir George was away, ‘In Frankfurt,’ said Fran, as if that explained everything. Johnny stood a moment and looked at the beautiful old building. An ancient wistaria climbed up between the ground-floor windows and under the frail white balcony above, which it seemed to hold up while surely, over many slow decades, wrenching it away from the wall; mauve droplets of flowers showed still among the leaves. Two French windows gave on to the balcony, and one of them was open now, the narrow panes at an angle throwing back the sunlight.

 

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