The Sparsholt Affair

by Alan Hollinghurst

  We came in through the back gate of the College, the achievements of the Boat Club chalked up in the quad all glimmering in the moonlight. Though he was the guest of our Club, Victor dined with the Fellows on High Table: there was just a moment, when Evert left him at the SCR door, when I glimpsed the straightforward affection of father and son, a quick nod, a light pat of Evert’s upper arm as the great man turned away. In Hall he was seated next to the Dean, and I glimpsed him myself now and then between the backs of the nattering dons with a kind of proprietary affection, and a real anxiety, now the thing was unstoppably in motion, about how he would go down with the undergrads. Evert had stuck by me, counting on my understanding, and we wisely sat where we couldn’t see David. Even so, his presence somewhere behind us made the starving Evert turn his meal over incapably and gaze into the dark oak of the table as if it hid untold marvels, or miseries.

  It was when we came down from Hall into the moonlit Tom Quad that we started to hear the noise. We were pulled up short as the crowd of undergraduates pressed behind us and around us. The sound was of a weight and penetration and strange gusted density we hadn’t heard before, outside London: the sickening irregular drone of the Heinkel 111. In a quick flick of the flashlight I saw Evert and his father, side by side, stock-still and staring up at the nearly invisible spectacle. Victor’s head was back, his mouth open, so that even he, with his famous indifference to the Blitz, appeared for a second like a figure witless with fear. On and on it went – no one could count, but there might have been fifty, a hundred, two hundred enemy aircraft, Heinkels and Dorniers, passing high overhead towards the north. I felt a hand grip my elbow and sensed more than saw that it was David. I did my best to stand steady, a little anchor for him, as he swung round on the flood of the crowd, and with his other hand seized on Evert. I had the impression we both held him up, as he stood gaping at the thing he had dreaded above all.

  Sparsholt’s home was destroyed that night, though it was two days before he knew for sure what had happened. Hearing the siren, his parents had gone out as always to the air-raid shelter at the bottom of the garden; the noise of explosions was already loud when they found that the cat wasn’t with them. Frank Sparsholt ran back to the house for it, and died there together with the cat while his wife sat trembling underground thirty yards away, terrified by the noise and by what she had allowed to happen.

  My affairs at Woodstock took more and more of my time in what was left of that Michaelmas term. I saw Connie Forshaw now and then on our special bus, but surrounded by a group of other girls – I raised my hat to her and smiled, and once only she gave me a nod. Had she somehow found out what had happened while she was away? If so, was her coolness towards me a sign that she thought me to blame? At the Palace she worked among the labyrinth of filing cabinets in Vanbrugh’s library, while I had my desk in a Nissen hut out on the freezing forecourt; so we were kept apart. But two small incidents connected with her fiancé remain.

  I gave Peter’s drawing of Sparsholt’s torso to Evert. He was the person likely to value it most, and I felt uneasy keeping it in my bedroom closet. It wasn’t beyond that old investigator Phil to find it, and fiddle it out of its tube, and leapfrog his way to all kinds of conclusions – I imagined already the strained courtesy of our subsequent dealings. It was a relief to pass it to Evert one evening, and a teasing, curious pleasure to see how he took it. As he unrolled it in my room and turned it to catch the light from the fire, I edged my question into his distracted attention. The red chalks and the fire-glow made the drawn image lively and a little satanic. ‘I suppose it was omega?’ I said. He didn’t answer at first. ‘Well, I had to see him to give him the cheque.’ ‘Oh, yes, of course you did.’ ‘Thanks for the drawing, though.’ ‘No – I’m glad you’ve got it’ – we both considered it for a minute. ‘And have you, you know,’ I said, ‘seen him since . . . ?’ ‘Mm, what’s that . . . ?’ Evert murmured – red-faced himself as he hung over the drawing. I found that I couldn’t repeat the question; and saw that he knew I couldn’t.

  Then in eighth week, with its more than usual flurry of packing and departure, I saw David Sparsholt in person for what proved to be the last time. I had been down to Magdalen to visit a friend who himself was leaving prematurely for the Army, and I went on from there, in a melancholy mood, to the Bodleian Library. I was on the first broad stretch of the High Street, with the glowing windows of Schools across the way looking almost friendly in the bitter December morning. An enormous convoy was approaching from behind, over Magdalen Bridge, and as the first lorry drew level with me I became aware of a figure running in the opposite direction on the far side of the street. He was in white shorts and a singlet, as if about to leap into a boat, and his breath made vanishing white plumes round his head. His powerful thighs were pink from the cold, but he seemed almost madly unaware of the weather, and loped forward with who knew what mixture of pride and indifference. A figure so unstoppable was alarming as well as splendid. I slowed as I walked but didn’t wave to him – he was in his own world, and besides it was too late. It was in two successive gaps that I saw him, as the convoy passed, like a man in a Muybridge photo, in exemplary motion: first here, then there, then no longer there, as if swallowed up by his own momentum.

  *

  This narrative, written for, but never read to, the Cranley Gardens Memoir Club, was found among Freddie Green’s papers after his death.

  TWO

  The Lookout

  1

  ‘You like drawing,’ said Norma Haxby.

  Johnny was sorry to be caught out. ‘I like drawing people.’

  Norma took her cigarette case from her handbag. ‘Aren’t people rather hard?’ She treated him like a child, but as she flicked the lighter and raised her head she seemed to assume a pose.

  ‘That’s why they’re interesting,’ Johnny said, beginning to shade in the background, then coming back slyly to her nose.

  ‘I could never draw at all,’ she said. ‘Do you get your artistic side from your mother, I suppose?’

  ‘He doesn’t get it from me,’ said his father, quite sharply. He was just outside the French windows with the rolled oilcloth of his toolkit spread out; he was fixing the patio light.

  ‘Well, you’re more practical, aren’t you, David,’ said Norma, and Johnny could see from the way she lifted her head and blew smoke towards him how much she preferred this; there was something provocative in her voice.

  ‘Connie’s the arty one,’ his father said; ‘always has been.’

  ‘Well, I know Connie’s a great reader, isn’t she,’ said Norma, stretching her neck with a kind of idle satisfaction. ‘I can’t think when I last read a book.’

  ‘Oh, well, Jonathan doesn’t read,’ said his father. ‘Never quite got the knack, have you, old lad.’

  ‘Ah . . .’ She looked at them both uncertainly.

  ‘Of course he’s only fourteen.’

  ‘You don’t read much yourself, Dad,’ said Johnny, holding out for justice.

  ‘I don’t have the time,’ said his father, ‘do I?’ – passing back through the lounge into the kitchen. ‘Is your pal about? We leave in ten minutes.’

  Norma smiled after him, then, left alone with Johnny, blinked, stubbed and squashed her cigarette, and stood up. ‘I hope it’ll stay fine for you,’ she said. She stared out at the gusted palm tree, the Falmouth ferry coming in, the cloud that dragged and blurred above the headland beyond. ‘I don’t know what your mother and I will do if it rains.’ She perhaps hoped to see his drawing but wasn’t going to ask to do so; Johnny closed his sketchbook anyway.

  ‘I’d better find out what Bastien’s up to,’ he said.

  ‘The Lookout’ opened in front on to a patio and steeply dropping lawn, with a broad view of sea above the roofs of the town below; but at the back it was half quarried out of the shaly hillside. The boys’ bedroom looked over a narrow gully at the side wall of the garage of the next house up the hill; so far they’d found it best
to keep the curtains closed. Their beds were bunk beds, kids’ beds which Bastien, a year older than Johnny, was already too big for. The spindly structure shuddered and lurched when he clambered in and out of the top bunk, and when he turned over. Johnny was condemned to lie under the low meshed ceiling, under Bastien’s shifting weight, staring upwards for long minutes in the first dawn light at a dangling sheet or sometimes an unconscious left hand, dimly pulsing inches from his face as Bastien slumbered on his front and Johnny listened, hypnotized, to the tone of his breathing. Bastien didn’t have pyjamas, he slept in his underpants – Johnny lay beneath him picturing him from above. Whenever he finally got to sleep the light would be on and Bastien would be going to the lavatory. Yesterday his mother had suggested not flushing at night, she’d broken the rule and used French words to explain. ‘I don’t mean “rougir”,’ she said, and did so, to Bastien’s sly fascination. She was the person he paid most attention to, and he followed her from sunroom to kitchen and almost into the lavatory with fixated courtesy.

  Johnny went along the landing with a gloomy feeling, but when he opened the door the room was bright: there were the unmade bunks, Bastien’s open suitcase covering half the floor, and Bastien, up, dressed, and lacing up his plimsolls. Johnny checked what he was wearing in one oblique glance: the tight dark-blue jeans with frayed hems, a red polo shirt; now he stood and stroked back his hair and pulled on his ‘Coq Sportif’ cap, with the peak angled high, and there being no mirror in the room he turned to Johnny for approval.

  On the narrow path Johnny fell behind, glad no one would be looking at him for a minute or two. His father was some way in front, moving faster, with a coil of rope round one shoulder, as if about to scale a cliff; Bastien scrambled after him, carrying the two oars; and Johnny came last, clutching the slippery life jackets.

  The path was romantic, twisting, up-and-down, thrown sideways by large stones and the roots of the thorns and hazels that closed it in for much of the way, with glimpses here and there of the weed-covered rocks below. It was a sequence Johnny was still learning – the fenced-off stretch where it turned inland round the back of Parry’s yard, the dip where a rising tide forced you up into the hedge if you wanted to keep dry, the five or six back gates with the names of houses that were hidden in high trees above the estuary, some broken, blocked and overgrown, some giving glimpses of exotic Cornish gardens climbing the slopes. To him the names blurred, ‘Pencawl’, ‘Pencara’, but each gate had its different magic. Now called-out words were heard behind a hedge; here a tumbledown gateway was choked by dank elder, with fox-paths through the nettles. Ahead of him Bastien stopped to look at something Johnny’s father had of course ignored, scattered parts, a wing, stray feathers, a knot of grey gristle, of some not quite nameable bird. Johnny peered at him warily before he pushed against him and as they stooped to examine it he found the warmth of him so painful both to feel and to resist that he was glad when Bastien stood straight again with a sickly smile and moved suddenly ahead. The short oars lodged aslant over each shoulder kept Johnny at a distance all the way to the kissing-gate at the end; here last year he had always claimed a forfeit from his mother, until the day when she told him not to be daft. He burned with the memory of it. Now Bastien edged into the narrow pen of the gate, the paddles tilting and banging on the wall as he tried to hold them with one arm and swing the gate back with the other. Johnny hovered behind, his freedom neutered by the armful of life jackets. ‘Merde!’ said Bastien – Johnny threw down the jackets, leant forward to swing the gate through its tight quadrant, and watched his friend step free. He picked up the jackets again, with a dismal sense of the slavery to tasks that was his father’s ideal of a holiday, and said, ‘You’re meant to kiss me before you let me through.’ But Bastien by now was some way ahead, at the top of the Club’s concrete slipway, where Clifford Haxby was waiting for them.

  2

  First they had to put on their life-jackets. ‘You can all swim, I hope,’ said Clifford as he passed them round.

  ‘You mean you can’t, Cliff?’ said Johnny’s father, with a concerned little smile, at which Clifford tutted scornfully.

  ‘Only in the bloody Navy, wasn’t I.’

  His father looked puzzled for a second – ‘The Navy . . . ? Oh, didn’t I hear something about them once, in the War?’ and he winked at Bastien, who stared blankly and then, alarmingly, winked back.

  Johnny pulled the cord through and tightened it. He retained a subliminal sense of his father’s strong hands holding him, above and below, then pushing him away, the fluid sequence of security, cold fear, freedom, but he couldn’t remember not being able to swim. And Bastien was all right – Johnny pictured him at the big public baths in Nîmes last summer, smashing around, with no fear and not much skill, then surging up out of the pool so fast that his trunks were half torn off by the water. In fact he’d pictured it quite often. Today Clifford was in dark shorts tight across his backside, revealing lean white hairless legs; he had a blue sailing cap pushed back, his oiled forelock fell over his left eye in a ragged comma. He might have been in the Navy in the War but he seemed to be play-acting more than Johnny’s father, in his old khaki running shorts and blue windcheater, taking up the oars Bastien had thrown down and wading into the sea in his deck shoes to get to the little tender. In a minute they were all in, riding low down under their joint weight, and moving off now with the first thrust and quiver of being out of their element. Heavy in the centre, held steady by the boys, lay the motor, sleek white body and two long screws. Clifford watched Johnny’s father rowing, seemed to take the measure of his neatness and power. ‘It’s not the bloody Boat Race, you know, David,’ he said.

  Johnny’s father smiled and raised an eyebrow. ‘So which one is she, skipper?’ There were fifty boats out there at least, different sizes and ages, sleek floating homes one or two of them, riding high above little brown craft that felt more homely and more loved, Doris, Jeanetta. Leslie Stevens’s boat was moored way out beyond the biggest one of all, Aegean Queen, all closed up, curtains drawn, sinisterly private.

  ‘It’s just like Thunderball, Dad,’ said Johnny.

  ‘All right, there she is,’ said Clifford, as they came round, clear of her anchor cables, stretched out by the outgoing tide. Johnny construed the strange word Ganymede in white on the blue strip above the white hull – the letters strange though he knew the name and hoped Clifford didn’t know the story, he was bound to harp on about it if he did.

  ‘Is this what they call a destroyer, Cliff?’ said his father – he was terribly humorous today. Clifford found it more captainlike to ignore him.

  ‘She’s just a pocket cruiser,’ he said, ‘twenty-five foot,’ and looked approvingly at the little boat, which as they clambered on to it from the tender had a comparative stability and even a slightly worrying size. ‘Leslie had her out with his boys at the weekend.’ Bastien seemed nervous as he stepped up on to the narrow edge of it and groped forward for a hand-hold as the tender pushed up and bobbed away. ‘Has he sailed before?’ said Clifford.

  Bastien shrugged and said, ‘Yes,’ and looked away, which Johnny assumed meant ‘No’.

  ‘We’ll have different words for things,’ Clifford said. ‘Port and starboard.’

  ‘They’ll be the other way round, won’t they, in France,’ said Johnny’s father.

  Clifford said, ‘Just tell him to do what I say.’ He handed up a can of fuel, which Johnny took and stood holding with a looming sense of all the discipline of sailing, the shouting and blaming cutting through the fun.

  The boys looked into the small sunken hutch of the cabin, with its two converging seats and Formica-topped table, then scrambled forward to explore, if that was the word – it wasn’t much bigger than the dinghy they’d borrowed last year, but it was to be their world, for the next hour or two, and seemed already made of tiny territories, occupiable surfaces. They stood clutching a diagonal cable with neither of them knowing what its name was or what it was for –
but they were allies, brothers, it seemed to Johnny, within the narrow bounds of the boat and the trip. ‘Who is Leslie? This man’s wife?’

  ‘Leslie,’ said Johnny, ‘no it’s a man, it’s a man’s name too, like . . . well, you wouldn’t know him, probably, Leslie Crowther, on Crackerjack . . . no . . . Leslie Stevens is an MP.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bastien and wrinkled his nose.

  ‘A Member of Parliament. He’s quite important,’ said Johnny.

  ‘You know Leslie?’

  ‘Me? No. Not personally,’ said Johnny. ‘He’s not our MP.’

  ‘And this man is a Member?’

  ‘Who? Mr Haxby?’ – he glanced round but Clifford and his father were caught up in some quiet-voiced routine of their own, business as well as sailing, business as usual. ‘No, he’s on the County Council, you know, very important too, Dad says.’

  Bastien smiled, and scratched his balls. ‘All very important,’ he said.

  The sun, that had been promising the past ten minutes, came out, a great distance of blue showed high over the cloud. Johnny swung on the cable, half seduced by Bastien’s mockery, but not quite ready to forsake so much reflected glory.

  They were going to go out on the motor; a powerful one, only roused past the curt roar of the start-cord into continuous untroubled action when Johnny’s father nudged Clifford aside, strength hoarded all year for these rare and richly satisfying moments. Clifford pursed his lips in a funny way at this further show of muscle, nudging his way back, and when he’d done so revving up the engine in a quick smoking snarl as they cast off. In the estuary still, million-sided sunlight on water green as the woods above, a dazzle over weeded rocks, sudden dark drops below, they went out unhurriedly, responsibly cutting their wash as they passed children kayaking, a couple rowing a skiff with a terrier in the bows. Still, there was a sense of lurking mischief between the two men that Johnny was unsettled by. Threaded along the shore, barely followable, was the path they had taken, and then round the steep point past Parry’s yard the whole painted panorama of the town curled forward into view, Johnny not knowing if the daring and privilege of being out in a boat was worth more to him than the warm solid pleasure of going to the café and the pasty shop and watching the half-naked boys on the harbour wall. ‘I say, David,’ said Clifford, ‘when Archer Square’s done you’ll be getting something a bit bigger than this.’ It was a name out of the air of the recent months, the ‘really big job’ Johnny’s parents stopped talking about if he came into the room, though it wasn’t exactly a secret. A photo of the model had appeared in the paper, blank white cuboids surrounding a blank white tower, ‘the tallest building in the Midlands’, raised roads beside it, dotted with balsa-wood cars.