The Sparsholt Affair

by Alan Hollinghurst

‘There are more cups over there,’ I said, rather sullenly, and my tone itself made him chuckle. He served himself, topped us up too, and looked sharply at Jill.

  ‘Well, since you’re here, Jill darling, perhaps I’ll draw you.’ It was quite as if she had barged in and not him.

  I watched uneasily as he took his pad from his satchel, and a little tin of chalks. Jill seemed flustered but not displeased. Her attention was now divided between Peter and me, with Peter in charge and my own remarks a stilted sideshow to the portrait sitting. I started to feel I was the one who had barged in. He pulled round my desk-chair and sat with one leg cocked across the other to support his work. From time to time he slurped in his uncouth way from the teacup beside him on the desk.

  ‘I was fire-watching at the Ashmolean last night,’ he said, looking briskly up and down at Jill, who was in profile and pretending to read the book he had given her at random – pretending but soon almost furtively turning the pages while trying not to move her head. ‘You don’t have to sit still,’ he said. ‘The sort of thing I’m doing won’t require it.’

  ‘Oh . . . all right . . .’ she said, adjusting cautiously to the idea of something freer, and perhaps not wanting to move much anyway; she waggled her head once or twice obligingly. Peter was sketching in great sensuous arcs which it was hard to associate with his sitter.

  ‘It’s marvellous up there – you should come, I mean you both should, of course.’

  ‘Jolly cold, I should think,’ said Jill.

  ‘We could try it,’ I said.

  ‘While we were downstairs Gardner got the magic lantern going – we ran through thousands of slides, one after the other. The whole history of art in about two hours. Well, I suppose not the whole history of art. Giotto to Munnings. Plus all those naughty Attic vases, which sadly aren’t there at the moment themselves.’

  ‘Just as well,’ said Jill, with a chuckle, but she coloured, perhaps the more so under Peter’s scrutiny. She had a way of facing down her embarrassments – it was less embarrassing than letting them creep in and confuse her further. ‘The Greeks were sex-mad,’ she said firmly.

  ‘Weren’t they just!’ said Peter.

  ‘I don’t suppose the Greeks carried on like that all the time,’ I said, rather rattled myself to be talking about sex in Jill’s presence. It was just the sort of awkwardness Peter liked to bring about. I recalled that even the Burgon Collection, mere watercolours of ancient objects, with descriptive captions, had caused Jill discomfort: ‘Three nude men dancing,’ she said to me once – ‘oh dear!’

  Peter didn’t explain why he’d come, and I guessed it was something even he was too delicate to mention in Jill’s company. I was anxious Jill’s portrait might be more like a caricature; but felt shy about going round and checking his progress. I made some nervously genial remark about the problems of drawing from life and when there was another firm knock at the door I jumped up quickly to see who it was. To my surprise David Sparsholt was standing there, in cap and greatcoat, and with a formal but distracted look. ‘Oh . . . hello,’ I said, with a small bored feeling that he’d got the wrong idea, and that I, the mere duenna in Evert’s courtship, had become the object of his devotion instead. ‘Who is it?’ called Peter over his shoulder. I saw Sparsholt glance past me into the room. ‘It’s David Sparsholt,’ I said. ‘Come in, Sparsholt, old man!’ said Peter, his surprise absorbed at once in the prospect of mischief; at which point I ushered him into the room.

  Peter seemed quite tickled to see him, but kept steadily at work; Jill, still wary of moving, turned her head a little when he was introduced. Each knew something about the other, since Jill had been there on that evening in first week when we’d watched him half-naked across the quad; and David of course had coaxed certain romantic claims about her from me. So they each had the gleam of being in on a secret, or a joke – which was possibly disconcerting to the other. It was clear from David’s bland politeness, as if to some old lady don, that he could never have fancied her himself. He pulled off his cap and gripped it in his hands throughout his brief visit.

  ‘And what can I do for you?’ I said. There was an idea (though we all showed how ready we were to overlook it) that it was odd of him to have dropped in like this on his elders.

  ‘Am I interrupting you?’ he said.

  ‘Well, hardly’ – I gestured at the sitting in progress, both artist and subject curious about the interrupter. It was clear that he wanted something, and had come to get it, but like Peter before him was inhibited by Jill. But then Peter too made him uncomfortable; he surely remembered their own sessions together, which I pictured like some regretted seduction never to be repeated. I also thought of the red chalk nude rolled up in the drawer in my bedroom. He looked over our heads, as if to far more important matters.

  ‘I was wondering if you’d seen Mr Dax,’ he said, the ‘Mr’ jocular but chilly too.

  ‘How is Evert?’ said Peter, mockery compressed in his frown at Jill.

  ‘I haven’t seen him for a day or two,’ I said, ‘but I’ve been in the country, you know.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said David, with a momentary smile. This was what we had now been told to call our activities at Blenheim Palace.

  ‘Shall I pass on a message,’ said Peter, ‘if I see him?’

  David paced to the window, where he stood and seemed to take in for the first time its relation to his own window, up under the pediment on the far side of the quad. Was a tremor of suspicion a part of his quick bracing movement, the shoulders thrown back, furled cap smacked softly in his palm as a colonel might have done with his gloves? ‘No, it’s not that important,’ he said.

  Peter’s concentration darkened on the pad and the chalk and his sharp glances at his subject seemed slightly overdone. ‘And how is your fiancée?’ he said.

  ‘She’s all right,’ said David. ‘She’s had to go back home for a few days. Her uncle was killed in the air raid last week.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Peter, ‘so you’re all alone for a bit’ – calculating as much as condoling, it seemed to me. I said,

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. And she’ll miss Evert’s father’s talk tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ David said, with reasonable curtness.

  Jill was plainly surprised by how well we all seemed to know each other, and turned a page of her book with the stiff look of someone left out of a game.

  ‘I’m not happy with it,’ Peter said. ‘Jill darling, I’m going to try again, next week.’ He put his things away without letting us see what he’d done, and left abruptly, like someone who has been offended, though no doubt he merely had an assignation elsewhere. Something told me that David no longer mattered to him, and David as ever barely said goodbye to him.

  Jill peered round and then stood up, as if slowly coming back to normality from a spiritual experience of some kind – an unusual look for her. She bent her attention graciously on David. ‘It’s strangely tiring, posing,’ she said.

  ‘You were only posing for ten minutes, dear,’ I said.

  ‘But I imagine you’ve had your portrait done’ – her remarks were all for him.

  He turned and smiled: ‘Yes, I have,’ though his pride in the fact was somehow compromised. I sensed he didn’t want Jill to know that Peter had done him too.

  ‘I hope you were painted in uniform?’ she said, jutting her chin and as it were inspecting him, from bright boots to curly crown.

  ‘No – no, I’m not in uniform yet, in fact,’ said David, and glanced at me with a breath of a laugh. ‘And anyway it was just a drawing.’

  Jill kept smiling, in a rather fixated way. ‘I’d very much like to see it,’ she said. I think I coloured now myself – it was almost as though she knew I had it.

  ‘I’m not sure – oh . . .’ – this third knock at the door had the signature of farce, but it was only Phil, come to fix the blackout. As always at dusk he edged in to the room half-concealed by the oblong screen for my bedroom window, steered i
t through the further door and installed it first of all. The dusk itself had crept forward two hours since the start of the term, and made me wonder, in a bleak sideways thought, what progress I had made in my own affairs in that time. It was only when Phil came back that he noticed who was in the room; he busied himself with the fire with the look of someone withholding criticism. ‘Oh, excuse me,’ he said, almost brusquely, as he went to the window and David, absorbed again in the view of the quad outside, seemed to wake up, and got out of the way. It was Phil of course who’d first told us about Sparsholt, that there had been some trouble, the rhythmical creaking a problem in itself but also perhaps a signal of further problems he had no wish to mention. Who knew what the scouts talked of, in their stark little pantries under the stairs, where they visited each other and drank tea? Phil would never have been openly rude, but there were times when a frustrated wish to sort us all out would darken his features. He heaped all the tea-things on the tray and left the room.

  It felt to me high time that Sparsholt went too, but Jill was holding him there with a seductive intent she had never shown to me. It seemed the little hints of closeness she’d shown me when she arrived had been merely provisional, and had now fastened on to a worthier subject. I suppose the truth was I’d never till then thought she had desires. I said something to remind her the future Mrs Sparsholt had only gone out of town for a day or two; but it had no effect. She even said she’d love to meet her.

  ‘You should have come to the pub with us the other night,’ said David.

  ‘Well,’ said Jill, ‘I would have done if I could’ – a mercifully ambiguous answer. ‘Where do you like to take her?’

  David went quite pink at this. ‘She only got here last week,’ he said. ‘We went to the dance at the Town Hall on Sunday afternoon.’

  ‘Oh, goodness!’ said Jill, in the tone one might have used before the War of a trip to Paris. ‘I bet that was fun.’

  ‘They had a pretty good band,’ said David, as if he’d heard a fair few bands in his time. He was warming to her warily. ‘You should get Freddie to take you.’

  This seemed to remind her that I was in the room. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Freddie doesn’t care for dancing’ – as if the question had ever once come up between us. I didn’t know whether to grin, in the role of comical curmudgeon, or earnestly protest that she had never mentioned the subject. I said, ‘Jill dear, I love dancing, if I’ve had a few drinks.’

  ‘You can do anything on a few drinks,’ said David.

  ‘Well, you can get drunk,’ I said, which wasn’t quite a joke. He stood and waited a second, and then smacking his cap in his palm again he said goodbye and crossed the room.

  ‘Bye . . .’ said Jill, watching the door close.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ I said, as his heavy tread diminished down the stairs; then a moment later was heard in the quad. ‘He’s only seventeen.’ Jill didn’t quite look at me, she had for the second time the smile of someone under the spell of a recent experience, and reluctant to be brought back to reality. ‘You’re only twenty yourself,’ she said.

  This came as a slight surprise even to me. I said, ‘What I mean is, I’m afraid he’s rather a bore.’

  Now she looked at me with droll disparagement. ‘He’s gloriously handsome,’ she said – I could see her own words excited her and deepened the feeling they expressed. It was the exalted tone I knew all too well from Evert. ‘Like Clark Gable.’

  He really didn’t look like Clark Gable, but I answered pleasantly, ‘Well, I never know. I suppose he must be, from the effect he has on all my friends.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said Jill, with an odd chuckle.

  ‘In form and moving how express, and admirable . . . maybe,’ I said.

  ‘Mm?’

  I laughed. ‘Jill darling, if you had to talk to him for more than five minutes you’d be yawning your head off.’ I’d never called her darling before and I couldn’t tell if she took it as a tribute or a liberty. She smiled remotely as she put on her coat.

  ‘Who’s talking about talking?’ she said.

  ‘Ha-ha!’ This was a mad leap from anything I knew of her, and I saw how in twenty minutes the whole occasion, which had started so sweetly, had slewed out of my control. Now it was her turn to tease me, with her admiration for this teenage star, in whose dull square face she claimed to see beauty, where I saw only the vacuum of culture, the cheery indifference to everything Jill and I, surely, most prized. I said with a forced grin, ‘Well, we’ll go dancing, then. I’m going to take you.’

  ‘I’ll hold you to that,’ she said, inattentively, as she looked for her hat.

  I found it for her and guided her to the door, as if about to start dancing there and then. I slipped a hand round her waist and just before I turned the door handle, as I stooped my head with a questioning smile, she said sharply, ‘Freddie, this kissing must stop.’

  Even now I feel the reproving force of those words. She blurted them out, but they had a considered ring, a fatal formula she might have rehearsed many times and which, if so, represented in one stiff phrase a very deep disgust. I stood astonished, and making those immediate convulsive allowances with which one tries to save a person who has been startlingly rude, and almost to reassure them that they haven’t been. I flinched, I blushed, and I believe I giggled, in spite of myself, just for a moment. ‘Freddie,’ she said, ‘you haven’t understood at all.’

  9

  November 14 had arrived, the day of Victor Dax’s talk to the Club. Before lunch I quickly rewrote my two-page introduction, and then stood to rehearse it, looking out at the quad through rain-streaked windows. As secretary I liked to speak without notes (last week I’d surprised myself with a ten-minute eulogy on Cecil Day Lewis, who’d said drolly that it ought to be published); but Victor was making me anxious. It wasn’t only my mixed feelings about his work (I thought much of Day Lewis was windy and derivative), or the fact of his being Evert’s father. It was to do with the portrait of him Evert had created, inadvertently and piecemeal, in my mind: a man with few friends and little humour, proud of his gift and disdainful of his contemporaries; a man of fanatical habits, who worked each day from eight till four, seen by no one but Herta with her lunch tray; who had, like Brahms or Balzac, a coffee-making device and dosed himself into a mania of production, but then emerged and moved, full of remote benignity, among his family; whose children, even so, lived so much in fear of saying the wrong thing that they barely said anything to him at all. Most worryingly for me, it seemed that praise – a full-page notice in the New York Times, the award of a prize or the Légion d’honneur – made him specially touchy, as if it were too late, too small, or itself somehow belittling. Still, praise him I must, and I was changing my little essay once again in my mind when I saw Evert coming across the quad towards my staircase. His umbrella concealed him from the chest up, but there was no mistaking his walk, the quick small steps. ‘My dear, what a day!’ he said, when he’d come into my room and then gone out again to leave the opened brolly on the landing. (‘Bad luck,’ I heard him say, ‘but still . . .’: the War combined with the Sparsholt affair had made him madly superstitious.)

  ‘I think things are more or less in order,’ I said.

  ‘Mm . . . ? Oh, good . . .’ Evert had the look of hollow sleeplessness I’d grown used to, and today he was smiling too, a tense, persistent smile, as if refuting a series of arguments. I’d known from the start that his father’s visit was a challenge for him, which only added to the worry I felt about it myself. A note had come to me from Victor’s secretary announcing his arrival on the 4.30 train, which left us with nearly two hours in which to amuse him before dinner.

  ‘This weather’s not encouraging, but perhaps your father would like to see the tombs in the Cathedral.’

  ‘Oh, Christ!’ said Evert.

  ‘Or I thought some of the Rawlinson manuscripts in Bodley, for instance—’

  ‘My father’s coming.’

  ‘Well,
yes. You mean you’d forgotten?’

  Evert looked at me and shook his head. ‘Oh, Fred,’ he said. ‘That’s not why I’m here, you know.’

  ‘Well, it’s a good job you are, none the less.’

  ‘No, no . . .’ He walked around abstrusely for a minute with a hand raised to forbid questions. Then he took an envelope from his breast pocket. ‘I really wanted you to see this,’ he said, but held it and pondered it for a while before passing it over; then he sat down and crossed his legs, and stared ahead as if mentally ready – for triumph or despair, or simply perhaps to reply. In the envelope was a standard white postcard with the College’s embossed address, and beneath it a mere three characters, in careful blue ink:

  α & Ω

  ‘Little alpha,’ I said, ‘but upper-case omega.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Evert, still gazing ahead, ‘he’s a scientist, not a classicist.’

  I winced, stared again at the card, played the part of the slow-witted friend. ‘So you know who sent it,’ I said. I had my ideas, but felt there must be an element of doubt.

  Evert said nothing, but gazed at the cornice, still with his provoking hint of a smile. He said, ‘The question is not who it’s from but what the person who sent it means by it.’

  ‘I feel to know that one would have to know who the sender was. It might be, as you say, scientific, it might be religious, it might be, well, some other kind of symbol.’

  ‘It’s from him, Freddie – from Drum.’

  ‘Drum is it now?’ He stared ahead. ‘In that case not religious, I think.’

  Evert laughed briefly at my tone but he trembled, or rather a single shiver passed through him, before he said quietly, ‘I spent last night with him. This was in my pigeonhole at ten o’clock this morning.’

  This was a mad way of speaking, and I treated it lightly. ‘You spent the night.’

  ‘I had him,’ said Evert.

  I was never a bit rattled by the sexual anecdotes of my friends but I may have shown that on this occasion I was shocked. Shock no doubt was part of the effect he was aiming for, the shock of the fact and of the brutal little phrase; I think he was startled by it himself. I felt the burn of something darkly secret, even wicked, and I hid the stiffness of my features by returning to the window and gazing down into the quad, as my tutor did when pursuing a complex argument. I saw that likewise I had to test what Evert had said. It was something Peter Coyle threw out once a week – ‘I had him’: but quite what this ‘having’ was one never knew, and hardly liked to ask. Nor could I ask now. I said, ‘What about Connie? It simply doesn’t make sense.’