The Sparsholt Affair

by Alan Hollinghurst

  ‘I didn’t know before that you’d been in trouble with the authorities.’

  ‘What’s that!’ – the shadows of a later trouble were as tall as the houses.

  ‘You know, at Oxford, about having Mum in your room.’ Any mention of Mum to his father had a hint of reproach, an unwelcome persistence, though it could hardly be avoided. But now he seemed almost pleased, he had the set smile of someone making a good-natured effort to think back, even if pretty sure what he was going to find. It was candour that cost him nothing, and he shook his head amiably—

  ‘No, no, old lad, there was never any trouble like that.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Johnny, ‘I’d heard you were fined twenty pounds by the College!’

  His father laughed briefly at this further absurdity. ‘Have you got a clue how much that was then? No, no . . .’ Though as they walked on he seemed to see some charm in the idea. ‘I won’t deny we got up to no good, but I wasn’t so stupid as to get caught.’

  ‘Right,’ said Johnny, not knowing how to proceed, but knowing of course his father’s ingrained habit of denial. ‘I heard Evert lent you the money.’

  ‘Is this what old Evvie says? You can’t really believe him, not these days, he was talking all kinds of nonsense just now.’ And then again, more freely and more considerately, ‘Not that I care a damn. It just didn’t happen.’

  They never knew how to say goodbye, his father sensed and avoided any impulse of Johnny’s to hug him or kiss him, and his parting words were said over his shoulder as he strode suddenly into the road: ‘I must get to Euston!’ – hand raised, a grin of clarified affection and relief. The taxi signalled and slowed to a stop fifty yards down the street. Johnny watched his father as he went towards it, silver hair and turned-up collar of the sheepskin jacket, the suggestion, even now, of an impulse to march subdued to the civilian briskness of his walk. He said two words to the driver and got into the cab without glancing back. The new intimacy had been just for a moment too.

  FIVE

  Consolations

  1

  Bella Miserden was a friend of Una’s, famous from makeover TV, and married to Alan Miserden, who’d got out of rightnow.com with eight million a mere two days before it folded in 1999. At a corporate party held in the NPG, Bella had been trapped for ten minutes in a side room showing new accessions, which included Johnny’s portrait of Freddie Green, bequeathed by his widow. Bella captured the label displaying these facts on her iPhone: Jonathan Sparsholt (b 1952) – so, sixty years old, and fairly experienced, but, since she’d never heard of him, perhaps not too expensive. She’d barely heard of Freddie Green either – 1920–1995 . . . Writer and broadcaster . . . a scrawny old thing though possibly attractive to women – but she felt, as she stared at him over her empty champagne glass, that Jonathan Sparsholt had ‘got’ him. All this she relayed by chance to Una, who said, ‘God Bella it was Johnny that did the sperm for Lucy,’ and after a rather breathless two minutes had offered to put them in touch.

  At the meeting it had been unnervingly (for Bella) as if she were asking for sperm for herself – she couldn’t get the idea out of her mind. She knew he was gay, but he wasn’t like other sixty-year-old gays Bella knew, who tended to fine suits, directorships and much younger boyfriends not everyone got to meet. He was handsome, with a thick shock of grey hair, and clothes – suede boots, thick jeans, a sort of waistcoat worn over a roll-neck sweater – that spoke of a dogged adherence to a style he had settled on decades before. There was nothing you could do for someone like that. Of course he had recently lost his husband (how Alan had snorted when she’d used that word, quite smoothly, over breakfast), and this made him seem almost touchingly ditched, all alone, into a modern world whose styles had long ago moved on. He had a large brown album with photos of earlier commissions; there was nothing swaggering or presumptuous about him, and she felt he might almost be rather simple – simple anyway to push around, and get what she wanted. She wanted a ‘conversation piece’, all the family, six feet wide. She saw herself changing her will, and leaving the picture to the National Portrait Gallery; it would save the kids from bickering about who should keep it. Alan said if he was called Sparsholt he might well be the son of a man who’d been in some sort of scandal – before either of them were born; she’d googled it, and confirmed it, didn’t really take it in, and didn’t mention it at all, of course, at that first meeting; she planned to work tactfully round to it during the sittings, when they would each be at the other’s mercy.

  Soon Johnny was driving down in the Volvo to the Miserdens’ would-be-Georgian mansion in Virginia Water for the first of a wearisome sequence of sittings: with the vain but restless Alan, with the amusing bitch Bella, and with Samuel (16), Alfie (12) and Tallulah (7). Work was the thing, and there was something oddly bracing, in his new solitude, about examining a couple and their offspring still locked in their furious collective life. Upstairs at the NPG, Bella had also admired the portrait of George V and family by Lavery, which she thought might work as a model for the Miserdens. Johnny never contradicted his sitters, but hoped it would be enough to use a sofa, as Lavery had done. There would doubtless be squabbles, the first day, about who was going to sit on it; and as only two of George V’s children appeared in the original, the violent economy of musical chairs seemed to haunt the arrangements.

  In the first week he had driven to and fro three times, M40 and M25, the vast blue signs to Heathrow Airport looming and dropping behind, plunging reminders of travels with Pat that were over for ever. Could he imagine flying anywhere again, whom would he fly with, who share his tastes and urges so unspeakingly? These stifled traipses through commuter traffic, tailbacks, closed lanes and contraflows, were his ambit now. There was muddy grass, red buses, but England had descended already into driver’s grey, grey road, grey sky, grey buildings and leafless trees between, the cars all grey to match. The old red Vulva, so useful and depended-on, dear and derided, was smelly, dented and rusted, its windows rimmed in a delicate moss that had itself now died. Bella, coming out on to the circular drive of her house, had hovered between mocking and tactfully ignoring the car; then suggested he drive it round to the back, into the paved yard where their Range Rovers and Porsches glinted from the shadows of six garages.

  On that first day, he’d got them all together, old party conjuror, the moment of novelty, the sitters’ uncertainty and readiness for surprise. The setting for the portrait was the drawing room, with its shiny simulacra of country-house style: white marble fireplace, low squashy sofas, books by celebrities and media tie-ins stacked on a round table, a large number of lamps clashing with the battery of ceiling spots trained on the nondescript pictures on the walls. It was a funny thing about working on location that you might have to paint other people’s pictures in the background – they were part of the portrait too. He tried a number of groupings, Alan sitting down, Bella sitting down, Alan and Bella standing and the children sitting down. ‘I thought, you, know, George the Fifth . . .’ said Bella. ‘Well, quite,’ said Johnny. Samuel was red-haired, skinny, taller than both his parents, his face a tragi-comedy of spots. His mother wanted him to stand behind. Alan was neat, handsome, silky-haired and oddly devoid of sex appeal; Bella, heightened and hardened by being so much seen, was sharply pretty, a businesslike blonde with a good figure. The room near the back door with weights and an exercise bike was clearly much used, though not perhaps by fat little Alfie, in his Arsenal strip: he hoped to be painted holding a ball. Tallulah was self-possessed, gracious, and sitting for her picture from the moment she entered the room.

  Johnny made quick sketches, rearranged the grouping, tapped what excitement there was among the boys, staved off cleverly the boredom that threatened after half an hour when he saw a slight resentment setting in that the picture wasn’t finished already. They were glimpsing the enormity of the thing – the dawn of an appalled understanding that painting a portrait took time. The trick then was to make the very length of the process intr
iguing to them. They would all want to keep looking, and there was an art to that too – the managing of their vanity, curiosity and impatience. ‘You could just take a photograph, and be done with it,’ said Alan amiably. ‘Darling . . . !’ said Bella, disgraced by this remark but redeemed by it too perhaps, as the artistic member of the family, the one with an eye.

  Johnny perched on a stool, at the same height he would be when standing at the easel. This first day he wanted one workable sketch of the whole group – much smaller in scale than the planned picture. ‘Sort of a dress rehearsal,’ said Bella, for whom the whole thing had a flavour of showbiz. But then – it was hard to bring it up, but how were they going to dress? It was like giving notes to a cast of slightly truculent amateurs. ‘Now remember,’ Johnny called out, as they all got up and started talking, ‘whatever you wear when you come for your first sitting you’ll have to wear all the way through.’ He raised his eyebrows at Alfie, humorously, but the boy seemed alarmed. Surely Bella didn’t want him captured for all time in football shorts and a red top.

  Then Johnny packed up and left them and set off home, became part of the eternal evening traffic, bored, protesting at one delay after another, but hardly wanting to be back. The house he was returning to held nothing that he craved, and he neglected it. In the garden unchecked summer growth fell under rains and frosts into leafless dereliction. Yet he dreaded the time when he would tend it again carefully, resigned to the facts. He unlocked the door, stooped for the mail, one uncertain post a day now, and the envelopes impersonal, thrown unopened on the hall table. His own pictures, with their evident merits and flaws, crowded up the stairs, witness to his years of painting while Pat was at his office or out for days on end at churches in Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire – the slow solitude of those weeks passing in the confidence of his coming back, and of the talk when he did. Each person if he was lucky found the place where he could shine, and the person to shine on. At Cranley Gardens Johnny had been audience, to Evert, to Ivan, to the whole clever, memoir-swapping gang. But with Pat he was a closely attended performer – he was funny, almost articulate, and rich in things worth saying.

  He always needed a lot of sittings, and the Miserden job, which he would have liked to do quickly, looked set to take an especially long time. Because of school terms and the parents’ crowded diaries the visits were oddly spaced out. Johnny went to bed and turned out the light on to a special shade of darkness when he knew he was going to Virginia Water next day – what he saw in his mind’s eye was the journey, the grey road in the rain. He set the alarm, and woke before it went off. Waking alone had a different darkness from sleeping alone, singleness reasserted and unremitting. But later in the day he would find himself there, and the work would pick up and go on and he was glad to be out of his own house, and with other people, even with people like this.

  He seemed to see them, as they sat individually, with a new clarity – he felt more than ever his power to expose them lurking like under-drawing to the flattery, the diplomacy of the commissioned portrait. Alan, fit and sleek in tight jeans, with no apparent genitals, had the overall smoothness of features that expects good fortune but never attracts much personal devotion. He seemed to Johnny a child conditioned by success that had never failed him yet. To paint a man so uninteresting to look at became a challenge. Samuel was in the Sixth Form at Harrow, and was set on a more formal style than his parents – an awful tweed hacking jacket doubling the colours of his face and hair. Tallulah showed an unworldly neglect of her appearance, as if she believed not only in the artist but in her own innate interest to make the thing a masterpiece. She just came in and sat, and Johnny, feeling he’d met his match, made a bright infanta of her, in school uniform.

  But how strange the chat between artist and sitter became in the long shadow of Pat’s death, he couldn’t describe it, it seemed a molecular change in the material of life itself. He knew his role so well, thirty years in the business, part servant, part entertainer, the visiting artisan with his humble superiority, his gift, and now and then the air of inspiration with which he pleased them, reassured them, and kept his distance. He followed the familiar pattern of talk, nothing serious or sequential; he agreed, made brief distracted demurrals, eyes focused on detail; he kept things away from himself, an inveterate habit with new force. Everything in their talk was somehow of having (however fretful and spoilt and blind), as if having was their right, and unending. They hadn’t started to imagine his condition, where everything was crystallized in the aching cold of having lost.

  Johnny liked to have Radio 3 on and brought in from the car, with his easel, paintboxes and groundsheet, the spattered old ghetto-blaster with its yard-long aerial, and its cassette deck, which dropped open sleepily, as if surprised to be still in use. ‘Composer of the Week’ first of all was Haydn, a happy one to work to. Alfie was learning the violin but had no more interest in classical music than the others – Tallulah, something saccharine about her, said she really liked this bit or that bit, but Johnny saw this as social training, instilled early. There was some vacant buck-passing between Alan and Bella, who in their separate sittings both claimed that their spouse’s lack of interest in music had sadly prevented them from going to concerts and so forth. Johnny was in charge of the music, and more than ever it was a screen. Sometimes of course he’d had sitters who were musical, and the music itself formed a medium of agreement, sustaining them both in the strange social intercourse of the sessions. But these days fewer and fewer people knew music, they couldn’t be expected to, there was no shame to Alan in talking all through the slow movement of the Lark Quartet about the relative performance of equities and gilts.

  Something further emerged, in the careful process of building up their two figures, which also meant breaking them down. It was like those brief raw glimpses, in adolescence, of the private life of his parents – moments of lust or animosity, frighteningly unlike the normal banter of home. The summer, the autumn when everything went wrong, had been full of them, tones overheard from another room, of muttered violence or dead calm, the hard ‘I’m sorry?’ of a couple not wanting to hear one another: a cold irritated question, rising to hold off the downward truth, apology and regret, ‘I’m sorry,’ ‘No, I’m sorry.’ Now he was watching two adults younger than himself hiding, and hinting at, their mutual dissatisfaction. It struck him the portrait was like a late child, produced to lend new purpose to a marriage – all Bella’s idea, of course.

  Both Alan and Bella asked him, ‘How am I doing?’ – he with a grin of impatience, as if saying ‘How am I doing for time?’ Bella was more anxious to feel she was getting it right and giving of her best, as if 1.5 million viewers were watching. The way with any impatient subject, anyone who couldn’t attain the right kind of passive alertness, was to tell them what good sitters they were. Alan was briefly convinced by this; though a suspicion it was just the ruse of an underling, and a slight discontent with himself for having swallowed it, showed in his tight hint of a smile after a further ten minutes. Such physical inspection was unusual for him, beyond the sanitized codes of the barber’s or dentist’s half-hour. But to Bella, who lived in, and lived off, the world of appearances, any sacrifice was reasonable, and she entered into it wholeheartedly. Johnny found himself giving her tart unsentimental features small spiritual touches – unsure as he did so if they were flattery or divination.

  Bella, he knew, would want Johnny to talk, like an indiscreet cleaner, about other people he’d done, a famous cricketer, a famous dancer, and Sophie Wessex, of course. Royalty was approached with a mixture of irony and raw fascination. ‘You’re awfully discreet,’ Bella said. ‘Well, I hope you’re reassured by that,’ said Johnny, very smoothly, as his glance went back and forth between her left eyebrow and its image on the canvas. The fact was, of course, he knew no one who would be interested in Bella’s ratings rivalries and feuds with producers. She asked him a bit about himself, perkily at first, anticipating no resistance – he felt
a heightened risk in disclosure, in colouring the sitting with his own emotions, his history, his artist’s escape from worlds like this.

  He was forced, by the nature of the thing, to show the children as their children. No doubt the picture would go in to the Royal Soc of Portrait Painters’ annual show, and be seen then, if never again, by strangers. They would recognize Bella, and look from face to face, and at the room with its flashes of crimson and gilt, for a glimpse of her life, much as she had given them glimpses, in fact terrible glaring analyses, of the homes of others. They would look at smug, impatient little Alan, at wide-eyed Tallulah, Alfie posing with his ball, and Samuel, lazily fomenting all that was worst in his parents’ world. He kept Samuel’s sittings to a minimum, which suited both of them, since he was a fidget, casually mutinous, full of dismissive gossip about people in his mother’s world whom he was none the less proud to know. He was always hard to find, when the time for his sitting came, and took his position ten minutes late with an air of disdain for the process, but a moody concern with the result. On Johnny’s fourth visit to Virginia Water he was kept waiting for nearly half an hour. The door into the hall was ajar, and at last he heard voices.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Mummy,’ Samuel was saying, ‘I’ve sat for him already for hundreds of hours.’

  ‘Yes, well, real proper art takes a bit of time you know, sweetie.’

  ‘Well, he’s hardly Sir John Lavvy, is he?’ said Samuel, snorting in spite of himself; ‘not, I hasten to add, that I’m that familiar with Lavatory’s work.’

  ‘Jonathan Sparsholt just happens to be a first-rate painter – he’s painted royalty, you know.’

  ‘Mother, royalty have their portraits painted twice a week, there’s nothing special about it, in fact they’re usually a load of wank.’