The Sparsholt Affair

by Alan Hollinghurst

  ‘None the less, my darling,’ said Bella grimly, ‘they sit, they damn well have to. Now get in there.’ Clearly, by the inexplicable physics of motherhood, she was winning, despite having (even Johnny felt) the worse arguments. Samuel was whinily yielding as he said,

  ‘And he’s such an awful old pervert, I don’t like him peering at me all day long.’ But here a dull whack of something, half missing its target, sent the boy with a laugh and a shout of ‘All right!’ into the room.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Hi, Jonathan – sorry I’m late!’ said Samuel: ‘got held up by the great nattering mother-bird.’

  ‘Right, let’s get on,’ said Johnny, with a snap of a smile. He peered, reluctantly, at the boy, whose physical repulsiveness he’d previously felt bound to disguise; but over the following hour (he kept him fixed on the hard stool a long twenty minutes more than was needed) he gave himself with a kind of sour enthusiasm to telling the truth.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ said Samuel, when he stood up at last and came round to see the work, ‘I’m covered in shag-spots.’ Johnny had brought up two or three of them, tiny flushed confections of impasto in the hot translucency of teenage skin. ‘God, you awful man, you’re going to have to take those out. I mean, I can’t go in the National Portrait Gallery looking like that.’

  ‘Well, it’s a risk you take,’ said Johnny, with a rueful shake of the head, ‘when you have your portrait painted.’

  The boy thought about it. ‘I’m going to tell my mother not to bloody well pay you,’ he said.

  Of course, by the time she came next day, half-amused, to see for herself, Johnny had applied the Clearasil of art, he’d smoothed him out, and taken something else out too, his character, such as it was. Now he was any spoilt teenaged brat.

  Before his next visit, Bella suggested he stay the night – they were going to Mexico for Christmas and it would be a chance to get ahead first. They had dinner in the kitchen, cooked and served by Briony, a local woman with a fatuous confidence in her own opinions – she ate with the family too. She’d been to Mexico herself, and had nothing good to say for the place. ‘Don’t touch the food, Bella, that’s my advice. God, was I ill.’

  ‘How will we live then?’ said Samuel, insolent but curious.

  ‘I’m sure we’ll eat splendidly,’ said Alan.

  Briony looked at him, with a pretence of a huff as she opened the lower oven: ‘Of course the sort of place you’re staying I’m sure everything will be very nice.’

  ‘You’ve been to Mexico?’ Alan said.

  ‘Yes – yes, we went about ten years ago,’ said Johnny – lost coupledom trailed and inviting questions. ‘We both loved it.’

  Briony set a plate in front of him, baked pasta in a thick cream gloop, under cheesy breadcrumbs. ‘I’ll have you know I’ve gone to a good deal of trouble over this,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks very much,’ said Johnny. Vegetarians often gave their hosts a new sense of their own virtue.

  ‘You’re missing out on a lovely bit of veal, though I say it myself,’ she said, turning back to the range. Well, they weren’t always as brutal as that.

  Alan glanced at him and said, ‘I was wondering if your old man was still alive? He must be getting on a bit if so.’

  ‘Dad? – oh, yes, he’s fighting fit,’ said Johnny. ‘He’ll be ninety next year’ – startled by the subject, and Alan’s belief it was all right to talk about it. He lifted his fork, sheared the stacked plateful to let it cool and saw with a familiar sinking of the heart a dozen small pink flakes in the sauce. He pressed one discreetly between two tines of the fork: salmon.

  ‘Gosh, marvellous . . .’ – Alan blinked at him and smiled. ‘Because that must have been quite a business, back in the 60s.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Bella, with a wince of sympathy, ‘I heard something about that.’

  ‘Well, it was very famous, darling,’ said Alan. ‘I’m sure Jonathan won’t mind me saying.’

  ‘What was it?’ said Samuel.

  ‘I’m not sure . . .’ said Bella, looking at Tallulah.

  ‘Well, there are books about it, aren’t there.’

  ‘Something very sad,’ said Bella primly, but then looked at Johnny as if half-hoping he would speak. None of them even imagined his quandary, but he knew how it would be once he started to explain – ‘I’m sorry . . .’ ‘No, I’m sorry,’ and Briony’s fury when she took the plate away and offered him the salad they were all due to have later.

  Alan said, ‘It reminded me of the Poulson business, in a way.’

  ‘Well, people sometimes say that,’ said Johnny.

  ‘All the planning carry-on. But of course with the addition of er’ – he looked shrewdly at his daughter – ‘the other business.’

  ‘Sounds interesting,’ said Samuel, sitting back as his veal was put in front of him, and smiling meanly at Johnny – who saw that he still held the cards, he could honour or refuse their claim on him, or, as he usually did, dodge sideways.

  Alan was reasonable. ‘I suppose if it had happened a year or two later, the affair with . . . what was he called?’

  Johnny stared. ‘Clifford Haxby?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right – would have been quite legal. Damn bad luck that.’

  ‘It wasn’t exactly an affair,’ said Johnny.

  ‘And wasn’t there some terrifically dodgy MP involved?’

  ‘Yes, there was.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Briony, tucking her chin in, ‘but it sounds very fishy to me.’

  ‘But your mother’s still alive?’ Alan said, with a note of sympathy for her.

  ‘No. No, she died, some time ago now. In 19 . . . 98,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Right . . .’ – Alan nodding, thrown momentarily off-course. ‘But they . . .’

  ‘Oh, they didn’t stay together. No, Dad remarried, more than forty years ago now . . . what? . . . his secretary, yes,’ said Johnny – so Alan knew, but wanted, for some primitive reason, to have confirmation from the closest and most reluctant source.

  ‘Ooh, wonderful,’ said Alan, unaccommodating as he surveyed his plate.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind us eating meat,’ Bella said.

  ‘Oh! . . . no . . .’ said Johnny. ‘Though, um . . .’

  ‘Poor veals,’ said Tallulah tentatively.

  ‘They’re not bloody veals,’ said Samuel, in grinning disgust at her.

  ‘Actually, that’s just what they are, isn’t it,’ said Bella, receiving her fillet in its nearly black sauce. ‘I often think I could easily become a vegetarian.’

  ‘Mum, do I have to have courgettes?’ said Alfie.

  ‘I mean, I virtually am already. I hardly ever have red meat.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Samuel.

  ‘Samuel,’ said Alan, but laughed rather drily at the idea himself.

  Johnny ran back over what he had said to Bella – he was quite sure, no creatures. He smiled at her. ‘Is something wrong?’ she said.

  After dinner they went through to a sort of family room, beyond the kitchen, with big soft sofas flanking a wood-burning stove, a TV screen about the same size as the portrait he was working on, a table with a jigsaw that Bella and Tallulah were doing, Picasso’s Three Musicians, in 1,687 pieces. Tallulah had told him about it earlier, as she sat – the special problems with modern art, which she seemed determined to solve. ‘Mummy brought it back from New York for me,’ she said. ‘I love art.’ Johnny declined a brandy, which he knew would give him a headache, but yielded to a further glass of wine, which Alan poured for him with a small disparaging smile. ‘You were going to look up Jonathan’s website, darling,’ Bella said.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Alan, sitting down equably beside Johnny and opening the MacBook left on the sofa, which lit up for a second on the Wikipedia page about the Sparsholt Affair – he slumped backwards, pulled it towards him and typed in Johnny’s name instead, seeming unbothered. ‘You’ve got quite
an individual style,’ he said, a minute later, nodding slowly as if taking the measure of what he was in for.

  ‘Well, I’ve been doing it for well over thirty years,’ said Johnny, ‘so I’m sure I have my bad habits as well as some good ones.’

  ‘I like your style,’ said Bella, making no bones about it. ‘Your painting style.’

  ‘Ah, I see you painted Freddie Green,’ Alan said.

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Must have been right at the end of his life, from the look of him.’

  Johnny thought, about the question and about what it implied. ‘Yes, he was very ill. I think his wife wanted to get him on canvas before anything worse happened.’

  ‘Mm . . . terrific,’ said Alan.

  ‘You knew him, then?’

  ‘Oh, I met him a couple of times,’ said Alan.

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ said Bella.

  ‘There’s one of his books around the house somewhere . . . Now, Nudes, I’m not sure I ought to look at those.’

  Johnny saw him do so, sat in the mild inanity of anyone having their work looked at.

  ‘I hope you’re not still hungry,’ said Bella.

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Johnny. Soon he would ask if he could go to bed.

  ‘Golly,’ said Alan. ‘I’m glad my wife didn’t see these before she took you on.’

  ‘Of course I saw them,’ said Bella.

  ‘Can you see me in that sort of pose, darling?’ – Alan turning the screen to show them one of Johnny’s pictures of Svend, the tall Danish model he’d painted several times ten years ago.

  ‘Well . . .’ she said, loyalty tested.

  ‘Extraordinary,’ said Alan, turning the screen back. Johnny saw that he thought himself rather broad-minded in employing him, and if put on the spot would explain it as his wife’s doing. Women were often quite thick with the gays, they prided themselves on knowing them, just as Alan took care to keep his distance. ‘Now . . .’ he said, ‘Families,’ peering down like some old buffer, one of David Sparsholt’s friends: ‘That’s more like it!’

  2

  Waiting while Michael unlocked the front door, he wasn’t sure if he was going to meet his parents, or what to say to them if he did; he imagined them, smart, wealthy, busy, and ten years younger than himself. It was hard to ask about them without sounding anxious. ‘So what does your dad do?’ he said.

  The door swung open on to a long empty entrance hall, floored in grey and white marble. ‘Oh . . . all kinds of stuff!’ said Michael.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘He’s in LA right now.’

  ‘Oh, OK.’

  Michael seemed to be both English and American. ‘Well, this is it’ – he locked the door behind them, and there was something about him, haunted or haunting, touching buttons on a lit panel, going on down the hall with his coat on, the young man in the absent father’s house: it was a drawing charged with inexplicable emotion, a dozen quick strokes converging on a line and a shape.

  ‘Wow . . .’ – on the left a vast rectangular stairwell rose into shadow, and Johnny walked into the centre of it and stared upwards at the glimmering skylight four floors above. ‘That’s amazing’ – with an echo, subtle index of true Georgian grandeur. ‘These are Adam houses, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s Adam,’ said Michael, coming back.

  ‘You’ll have to show me.’ He felt it lent glamour to the frictionless unfolding of the date; he would have the house to remember at least. He put out an arm and found himself holding Michael’s cool hand. Then he turned, bent his head and kissed him on the mouth.

  ‘Hey . . .’ said Michael.

  A door under the cantilever of the stairs opened and a woman, Chinese perhaps, in a dark skirt and blouse appeared. She stood smiling, not quite in greeting, but in readiness. ‘Hey, Lin,’ said Michael. Johnny smiled back, wondering for a moment what unrehearsed fiction would explain his presence, and was still standing there as Michael started up the stairs – he nodded and turned and went up after him.

  On the first floor were two large interconnecting rooms, and Johnny hardly knew what to say about the pictures, while Michael switched on lamps, closed the shutters on the two tall windows to the street, activated the TV, volume low, on some unknown channel, music videos, edited like distraction itself, near-naked black women lip-synching from six different angles. High above, the drawing-room ceiling, with its graceful light roundels and quadrants of stucco, its lovely repeating formulae of fans, bows and garlands, had been painted all over a heavy brassy gold, shiny enough to reflect the lamps below. It was such a glaring disaster that it made you wonder, almost, if it mightn’t be rather a triumph. Michael opened a door and a light came on in a mirrored cupboard. ‘Do you want a drink?’ Johnny asked for a whisky with ice, watched Michael’s reflection, sleek, attractive, pale, as he took down glasses, clinked among bottles, triggered the short clatter of an ice machine. It was Jack Daniel’s he gave him, they tipped glasses, the whole focus of the date, imagined by Johnny as hungry and immediate, blurred again as Michael went out of the room for a minute. Johnny hovered, looking at the expensive contemporary furniture, all of it very low, in steel, black glass, white leather, and barely impinging on the tall expanses of wall given over to the paintings. These were two or three times larger than anything he himself had painted, or felt the least urge to paint, and must have been difficult to get into the house; they seemed to him monstrous, garish, trophies of international art-fairs made for fashionable buyers with a great deal of money. He sat down and slithered forward in involuntary mimicry of a laidback person on a low pony-skin sofa, staring up at a huge pink and black daub. And again a little bleakness of uncertainty crept in, that these were in fact brilliant works of art, which he was too old, too stubborn, or too ill-informed, to like or value. The contemporary had left him behind.

  The soft burn of the drink was a comfort, as he watched Michael come back, carefully close the door, set down laptop, iPad, a small lacquered box on the low table. Johnny moved up to make room, but he sat cross-legged on the floor. His movements and conversation made no allusion at all to these surroundings, he seemed not to see them, and it was hard to know if to him they were a glorious given modestly ignored or an obvious eyesore tactfully disowned. With his laminated student card he squashed and chopped a lump of what Johnny assumed was coke on the glass tabletop, drew it out into four stubby lines. He rolled a twenty-pound note and held it up to Johnny, and smiled – he had a beautiful smile that Johnny thought, as he crouched forward, blocked one nostril and snorted through the other, would be interesting but hard to capture, innocent and sceptical. The snort was a thought, an unexpected zip back eight or nine years, to when he last did it with Pat, and Lucy came in early from a party and caught them at it.

  Things sped up a bit then, Johnny happy but wary, his strange eloquence heard at moments as if he were someone else. Michael nodded, grinned and chatted too, they had another drink, the completely talentless half-sung songs pulsed on in the background, glances now and then at the crouching and strutting figures, explosions, odd banal details, a car, a bed, in teeming succession on the screen. A man older than himself whom Johnny had sat next to at dinner last week had told him dating apps were tickets to instant sex, and had shown him two that he used, scores of men a mere hundred yards away, always ready. ‘Not for me,’ said Johnny; and three days later found himself downloading one, which meant inescapably setting up a profile, a sort of self-portrait – his old holiday snap had its undertow of lost happiness, and he sighed as he tried to define what his interests were. But then it had all happened, quite quickly and naturally, in this wholly new way; and now here he was as if on a date forty years ago, having a drink and a chat about Michael’s course. Michael had three modules to do. ‘Three modules,’ said Johnny, ‘right.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve got till the end of this month to complete my Subjectivity module.’

  Johnny said, ‘What is that, exactly?’ and leant forward to take M
ichael’s hand again, but just as the phone chirped, and he picked it up and dealt with the message and another one that followed.

  ‘Are you on WhatsApp?’ Michael said.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Johnny.

  ‘You should do it! We can WhatsApp each other.’

  ‘We’ve sort of got each other anyway, haven’t we,’ said Johnny.

  Then Michael seemed to have finished all his phoning and texting. He sat back, grinned at Johnny in anticipation, and said, ‘So, hey, enough about my dad, what did your dad do?’

  ‘My dad?’ said Johnny briskly. ‘He was a manufacturer – you know, he made machine parts, engines, generators.’

  ‘Oh cool,’ said Michael, his eye distracted at once by the small coloured screen.

  ‘I mean he’s still alive. He’s nearly ninety now, he’s sold the business.’

  ‘Right . . .’ It all probably seemed small beer to Michael, picking up his phone, with a quick chuckle over the message he’d just got. Why did Johnny say this, when for decades he’d done all he could to avoid and deflect the subject: ‘You’ve probably heard of the Sparsholt Affair?’

  Michael smiled, almost tenderly, at his screen, murmured, ‘No, bitch . . .’ and thumbed in a quick answer. He glanced at Johnny. ‘Sorry, what was it called? A movie, right?’

  ‘Well, not yet,’ said Johnny. ‘No, it was . . . oh, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Oh, OK . . .’ said Michael, with a little doubting look. ‘Is it a book?’

  Johnny lay back, relieved and remotely indignant, dry-mouthed, communicative, waiting to hear himself go on. ‘Well, there have been a couple of books about it, someone called Ivan Goyle wrote one, and there’s one by a Sunday Times journalist.’

  ‘Yeah, I don’t have much time for reading,’ Michael said.

  He had another line of coke (Johnny, still buzzing, not) and fetched them both fresh drinks; then he showed Johnny the profiles of three or four people on Grindr he fancied, and one or two he’d hooked up with. Johnny felt put out by this but agreed magnanimously that they were hot or cute. Michael sent messages to a couple of them and laughed at the replies. There was another app too that he hadn’t heard of, for older men and their admirers. Some of these looked so geriatric as to be beyond sex, even with modern aids. Johnny went out to the lavatory, tall and bright, and when he came back he bent over Michael and ruffled his dark hair. But it seemed that for Michael a half-dozen birds in the bush were worth one in the hand, the shimmer of potential sex was more alluring than the fact of it, here in the gold-ceilinged drawing room. ‘I’m attracted to older men,’ said Michael, as he peered into the screen of his phone.