The Sparsholt Affair

by Alan Hollinghurst

  ‘So what did you say?’ I asked.

  ‘I said I was looking for David, which was perfectly true, of course. And he said, so was he, but he’d just had a little lie down while he was waiting.’ Evert sat forward slightly to take another sip of port – I saw the moment’s calculation as he left a quarter-inch in the glass.

  A strange conversation had ensued between the two intruders, though Evert was so thrown that it didn’t strike him at first that the other man’s story was a very odd one. Both of them were confused, which saved the situation up to a point. They introduced themselves; the stranger was called Gordon Pinnock, he was at St Peter’s College, and he came from Nuneaton – he had been at school with Sparsholt, and claimed outright to be his best friend.

  Over the next few minutes Evert seems to have found out a good deal about him, though whether he revealed as much of himself I doubt. They had quite a chat; and Evert found him attractive, in a peculiar way, with a smile he couldn’t help thinking somehow suspicious. If Pinnock and Sparsholt were such close friends it seemed horribly likely to Evert that Sparsholt must have mentioned him, the strange second-year man who was always staring and hanging about in odd places. And it was certain that after this present encounter Pinnock would tell Sparsholt just what had happened – Evert himself was now listening for footsteps outside, while conscious of the need to use the small time available to make his case. I didn’t like to say I thought it quite likely that Sparsholt had hardly taken Evert in at all.

  Pinnock looked at him a bit comically and said, what was it about? Evert said he just wanted to leave him a message. And of course Pinnock said, ‘Oh, I’ll tell him, what was it?’ – which made Evert feel there was definitely a game of some kind going on. ‘I wonder where he’s got to,’ said Pinnock. Evert said it was all right, he’d leave his message in the lodge, and he mumbled something about the fire-watching roster. He was turning to go when Pinnock surprised him. They were standing beside Sparsholt’s desk, with the heavy discs of the weights on the floor beside them. And Pinnock said, with a strange little smile, ‘Are you an admirer of the male form?’ ‘Well . . .’ said Evert. ‘I know, funny isn’t it,’ Pinnock said; and then he told him something very revealing, which was that up until two years before Sparsholt had been ‘a total weed’, he was ‘weak and skinny’. As a schoolboy he was always being pushed around, and the only sport he was good at was running – running away, in effect. So at some point, he decided to make a man of himself. ‘Get him to show you a picture,’ said Pinnock, ‘the next time you see him: you won’t believe the change.’ ‘Right, yes, I will,’ said Evert. And with that he made his excuses and left.

  He emptied his glass and turned to face me. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that doesn’t sound too bad.’ But I could see that his mind was lurching round new loops, and had seized on Pinnock, who sounded to me like a hundred other affable and lonely freshmen, as a new hazard and a further rival.

  When Evert had left I went over to the lodge to see if some papers I was expecting had arrived, and found a brown cardboard tube in my pigeonhole. I recognized the Art Nouveau writing on the label, and felt I had better not open it till I was back in my room. Once there I coaxed out, tightly rolled so that it seemed to spring free (or half-free, since it kept the disposition to curl), a sheet of pale grey cartridge paper. In fact it curled up coyly in the second I reached away for a book to weight it on the desk. On the back were the pencilled initials, ‘D. S.’ and ‘P. C.’, and the date, 30. X. 40. Was I supposed to imagine a heart and an arrow between them? I held it down flat with Myles on the Papacy and The Code of the Woosters, and had a look at Peter’s effort.

  What did I think of it, really? I was torn between wanting to see genius in a friend’s work and a very much drier view. I had a sense of being provoked. Why, after all, had he sent it, or possibly given it, to me? I suppose it was to prove his point, his seducer’s speed; but I felt he was mocking too at my interest in the matter, which he seemed to feel was excessive: I think he thought he could excite me as he himself had been excited.

  In fact my position gave me a larger scope for criticism, since I’d seen very nearly as much of this model as Peter had: in the strokings, or fingerings, of red chalk, there was a rush to enhance and ennoble Sparsholt’s body beyond the already enhanced reality. Those two years of incessant press-ups and weights had been outdone in ten minutes. It was the portraitist’s usual flattery, no doubt, but fed by Peter’s own desire to worship: a somehow unwholesome collusion of two men with quite different tastes over a question of male beauty. I have always thought the male nude drawing a sadly comical genre. At one time my half-brother Gerald collected those woeful ‘académies’ produced by the thousands in the art schools of Europe – the moustache, the ropy muscles, the merciful cache-sexe, or if not that the intractable silliness of the genitals themselves, were obstacles only the finest artists could surmount. Well, David Sparsholt had as yet no moustache, and no silk pouch was seen in Peter’s drawing of him. Had it not been for the pencilled note, the heroic torso might just as well have been his gardener from Corpus, or any other of his subjects. In an art so prone to exaggeration it was hard to tell. What Peter had created was a portrait of a demigod from neck to knee, the sex suggested by a little slur, conventional as a fig leaf, while the neck opened up into nothing, like the calyx of a flower.

  6

  It was meatless dinner in Hall on Friday – perhaps a bad night to have signed in Jill as my guest. She fell on the charred pilaff with greed and dismay, forking through it in search of bits of carrot and cauliflower; she might almost have been on one of her digs. Her decisive gestures, her bunchy brown hair pushed back behind her ears, those large grey eyes and that jutting jaw, all stirred me more now than they had before – I watched her fondly, and I seemed to watch myself, intrigued by my own deepening feelings. Our talk was academic, in fact archaeological, for the most part. She spoke with earnest excitement about some small Etruscan cups or jars she had been allowed to handle when the contents of the Ashmolean were being packed up and sent away in case of bombing. I’d never been interested in such things myself, but I smiled at her enjoyment and after five minutes I started to wonder if I didn’t share her enthusiasm. We sat facing each other between the yellow lamps, the sleeves of our scholar’s gowns sweeping the table. With those small artefacts, I felt, she must have shown a delicacy of touch she had not yet shown to me; or perhaps to any other person.

  After dinner I sensed she would have liked to come to my room for coffee, but I was due to start my fire-watching almost at once. I lit her through to the Canterbury Gate, and this time as she shook my hand I leant over it and placed a light kiss on her cheek: I still remember its surprisingly available softness and warmth, just threatened by the cold November evening. Her own reaction was hard to make out exactly in the dark, but horrified alarm seemed the main part of it; she muttered something as she quickly went off. I popped up to my room, rather pleased none the less with what I had done. It paved the way for doing it again. Three minutes later I was crossing Tom Quad for my vigil with Barrett. I brought with me, as well as a Thermos flask and a coat and scarf, The Wicket Gate, volume one of A. V. Dax’s Dance of Shadows trilogy. As I was to introduce Evert’s father at the Club, I wanted to be sure of my footing in the crowded twilight of those earlier novels.

  Barrett was another Brasenose refugee, a small northern scientist of some sort, but it struck me he might know Sparsholt and might throw out inadvertent titbits that I could pass on to Evert, before his encounter with him tomorrow night. I was uneasy about this deviously engineered plan, and afraid that Sparsholt himself might think it so odd as to turn against him. As Evert’s confidant I wished the painful story a happy conclusion, and as his friend I saw my duty to prepare him for the worst. When two friends are pursuing the same hopeless object, one with more apparent success than the other, all advice is subtly compromised. I went carefully up the steep dark stair of the tower, and into the square ringing-cham
ber that was our base for the night, with the sallies of the bell ropes, striped red, white and blue, looped up like bunting just above our heads. It was now four months since they’d been used, and I imagined the bells overhead in their downcast vacancy, and seemed almost to hear the strange creaks of ropes and wheels on the day, perhaps not too far off, when they would be raised again and rung. A few church chairs, with slots for hymn books, had been brought up, and a folding table. The small window was blacked out and the room was starkly lit. Barrett and I would each spend half the night here, and the rest of it up on the leads above, looking out for any kind of trouble from the sky. It was the duty of the one who was resting to run with any message called down by the watcher. So far it had always been wearily eventless work, enemy aircraft sometimes at the limit of hearing: in the black early hours after midnight, while nightly raids were burning London, Oxford, in its bowl of hills, was fixed in a new and generalized silence.

  I made a little study in the corner of the room, and found myself growing critical as Barrett was five and then ten minutes late. At last I heard the door bang dully down below, and rapid footsteps on the stairs. I turned away to conceal my impatience, ‘Oh, hello . . .’ he said from the doorway behind me, and I looked round to see a greatcoated figure pluck off his cap – it was David Sparsholt. ‘Oh, hello!’ he said again.

  ‘Oh, David, hello’ – I had spoken without thinking, from a feeling of closeness he could have had no sense of. In his quick blink and shake of the head, his pleasure that I remembered his first name outweighed a trace of awkwardness. It was clear from his little grin, as he took off his coat and looked for somewhere to hang it, that he didn’t know what to call me. I was conscious of what Peter had said – that Sparsholt mistrusted my friendliness. He said, ‘We’ve met before, haven’t we.’

  ‘We met shaving,’ I said. ‘I’m Freddie – Freddie Green.’

  ‘Oh, yes, that’s right,’ he said, and we shook hands again. He wore a heavy brown Army jersey, tight on his powerful frame, and his grasp was strong and his gaze direct. I wondered if Peter had made up his story, to tease me; he had a merciless eye for others’ insecurities.

  ‘But we’ve seen each other a few times since.’ Did he really not remember these? If the first time, waiting under Tom Gate for the rain to slacken, he had been a little unsure how to meet my eye, the second time, when we passed each other in our quad, he returned my nod gratefully enough. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you tonight.’

  ‘No. I’m sorry to be late,’ he said, ‘I swopped with Tom Barrett.’

  ‘I don’t mind at all,’ I said. I was immediately relieved that Evert would be spared his misconceived night alone with him. ‘When were you supposed to be on?’

  ‘I was down for tomorrow.’ He looked at me straight, though he coloured as he spoke – a little sequence I remembered from before. ‘I’ll have my fiancée here this weekend, you see.’

  ‘Your fiancée – aha!’ I said, perhaps overdoing my surprise. I entered into it clumsily, ‘Yes, you don’t want to be stuck on the roof all night when she’s here!’

  ‘Well, no,’ said Sparsholt, so that I saw I had been abruptly intimate. ‘Now how are we going to do this?’

  I started to describe the way I had done it before, but he spoke over me and said he would take the first stint on the roof. He put his coat back on, and his cap: he had found the small military element in the night. I went up the stairs behind him just to show him the way, and he pushed open the low door on to the leads. In a minute we adjusted to the quality of the night. It would grow darker yet, and when the moon, in its last quarter, had slipped down behind Merton tower, the whole city would sink into mere muddled shadow, as if a vast grey net had been thrown over a table heaped with once familiar objects, now enigmatically confused and obscured. I said I would come back in an hour and went cautiously to the door and then down again; decanted some coffee in the lid of my flask, and sat down at the table with my book, but all the time something else was sinking in, the degree to which his presence had intensified. In straightforward terms he held no interest for me, except as a figure from a world so unlike my own that it might be instructive to observe it; but by proxy he had assumed an aura. I was abashed to think that in my room, hidden among jerseys and vests, there was a drawing of him in the nude. It would be difficult now to deal with him as if unaware of how other people desired him, or of how they would envy our spending the night together. What I thought I might find out, in the course of the night, was how much he sensed all this himself.

  In my first hours below decks I ran quite far through The Wicket Gate, ignoring for as long as I could the failure of the magic and the grey dawn of disillusion. It is hard to do justice to old pleasures that cannot be revived – we seem half to disown our youthful selves, who loved and treasured them. There was the scene where Enid returns to Mark Gay at Garstang Hall: ‘Great was his joy to find that she was come’ – in my school dorm the words had brought a new constriction to my throat and given me a glimpse through tears of the wild landscape of adult passion; the archaic solemnity of the prose had clutched at my heart. Now they struck me as an awful simulacrum of literature, though written, I none the less felt, with perfect sincerity. It was a sham that had convinced the author himself. I went up at ten to start my shift with a feeling of relief.

  At first I couldn’t see Sparsholt. By now the moon had set, and I sent my weak torchlight flitting over the sloping leads and the step-shaped battlements. In the centre of the roof, but hidden from the ground, rose the simple wooden housing of the bells, as functional as a shed, and high enough to conceal anyone standing behind it. I made my way round, with an oddly racing heart. There was no one here either. I wondered if he had climbed on up into one of the small corner turrets, which were something like watchtowers, bristling with gargoyles instead of guns. ‘Who goes there?’ – in a sudden angry shout. I gasped and jumped and looked upwards. Hollow footsteps sounded above my head. He had clambered up somehow on to the pitched roof of the shed, and a few seconds later my narrow beam caught him there, massive against the sky, then twisting away from the light. I saw his big white smile, or snarl, before he crouched and slid to the edge and dropped down, almost taking me with him as his feet hit the angled surface and he fell forward and stopped himself on the high parapet. For a second he had clutched at me, saving himself or protecting me, I wasn’t sure. I think he hoped to frighten me. Who goes there? – it was a challenge from a film, from a children’s game, but when Sparsholt said it I caught the thrill, for him, of the game becoming real.

  I found my first watch the strangest. It was still early, though the indiscriminate darkness disturbed the sense of time. Seeing little but outlines of steeples and pinnacles under a thinly clouded night sky, I observed in another way, with the ears. Standing quite still I was at the centre of a townscape drawn not only in charcoal but in sound. At its outer rim there was the mild intermittent noise of cars on the Abingdon Road, which seemed to merge and lose themselves in the episodic sighing of the breeze in the tall elms of the Meadow. A keener ear still might have heard leaves falling and milling on the paths beneath. Now and then there was the muffled rumble of a late bus or car in St Aldate’s, unavoidably drawing attention to itself. For ten minutes there was something close to silence, broken by a moment’s music from an opened door somewhere, and then the quick footsteps and unconcerned conversation of three men crossing the flagged terrace of the quad below. I peered out through the battlements and saw their torch switched on and off, its beam mere momentary scratches on the dark. None of them of course looked round or looked up – I was a secret observer of these trivial happenings, my head unsuspected in the night among a hundred unseen Gothic details. Then a silence that was that of 4 a.m., so that it was a shock, and a bore, to turn the light on my watch and find it was barely eleven.

  When a further hour and five minutes had passed I went downstairs, thinking Sparsholt might have fallen asleep. In fact he was sitting at my
little table with his back to me, his head propped on his left hand as he read a book. ‘Anything doing?’ he said, as he looked round, and stood up, and stretched, and seemed to expand by some further factor of rediscovered muscular power, his fingertips swinging a looped bell rope overhead.

  ‘Not a thing,’ I said, unwinding my long scarf, and glancing down at the open page – a spread of scientific diagrams, with graphs crossing and diverging. ‘Oh, I thought you might be reading my novel.’ I’d been slow to see that I had a subject.

  ‘Mm, I had a look at it,’ he said, with a smile and a lift of the eyebrows, as if to say it confirmed his impression not only of novels, but of people who read them. The wary humour was new, and appealing.

  ‘You might not like it,’ I said. ‘I don’t myself, really – but its author is coming to talk to our Club next week, and I have to introduce him.’

  ‘Oh, I see . . . who is it?’ – turning over the book. ‘A. V. Dax . . .’ He shook his head.

  ‘I used to love his books, but now I’ve seen through them – if you know what I mean.’ I took off my overcoat and dropped it over the back of the chair.

  ‘Well, we all go off things,’ he said.

  I winced. ‘It’s a bit delicate because his son’s a good friend of mine.’

  ‘Oh, is he?’

  ‘In this College,’ I said; ‘you may have met him?’ Again a little moue of unconcern. ‘Evert Dax, he’s reading English, in the second year.’

  Now he nodded hesitantly. ‘Evert . . .’ he said, as though something improbable were being confirmed. ‘Yes, I think I’ve met him. I thought it was Evan.’

  ‘It’s a Dutch name – his father’s partly Dutch.’