The Sparsholt Affair

by Alan Hollinghurst

  ‘Well, we’ll see about that, Cliff,’ Johnny’s father said.

  ‘We’ll have a bloody shipshape crew too – not this schoolboy shower – eh?’ – Clifford beamed alarmingly at Johnny, who said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and looked down. The Falmouth ferry was coming past, turning in towards the harbour, and Clifford seemed to flirt with it, running in close, holiday-makers on deck looking down at them, and in a moment they were riding and smacking along the larger boat’s wake, among seagulls dropping and screaming and lifting off. A child at the back of the ferry waved. Clifford twisted the throttle and their bows rose by a few degrees as they curled out beyond the point towards the open sea. Bastien turned his head aside and stood down with Johnny in the step of the cabin. ‘All right, Cliff,’ said Johnny’s father, unruffled but not, Johnny felt, especially impressed.

  The rhythmical jolts across the surface of the sea, the wind making you cry unconsciously and flipping Bastien’s cap off his head without warning (Johnny jumped and saved it where it wrapped for a second round a cable) were things he knew he was meant to enjoy, but almost made him long for the dreaded part, when they put up the sails. It wasn’t a speedboat, after all; he wondered what Leslie Stevens MP would think if he saw his friends using his Ganymede like this, Clifford grinning like a bully to show he at least was having fun. Then he turned the speed quickly to nothing, so they seemed to lurch forward where they stood; they settled down and back. Clifford told the boys to untie the cords that bound the sail to the long horizontal boom, and the other small sail that was in front of the mast. They got on with it, and there was something too interesting to look at closely in Bastien obeying orders, a sort of absent-minded competence worth more to him for an hour or two than his usual effort at showing he didn’t care.

  When the big sail went up it was suddenly serious, and they were all responsible. The uncomfortable fun of the first bit was over, and now there was going to be tacking and being shouted at, hanging on the side with the sea always dashing to get you as you slid over it and giving you a wet slap now and then. Again Johnny’s father seemed more in his element than Clifford, it was a practical lesson in physics, whose laws he had long ago mastered; the two men stared and smiled at each other as the sail ran up in half a dozen hard yanks, hand over hand, and tautened as it had to. And it went as it was meant to, Johnny was proud of his father, watching the sail, which cut off the sun, a new presence among them and above them. Johnny had one of the two ropes to the boom, and after a while his father nodded and passed the other to Bastien. ‘Steady, young feller,’ he said. For two or three minutes they scooted on, sail curving, in their sound-world made only of the creak of the mast in the rush of air and the splash and concussion of the waves on the little hull, Johnny feeling the delight of it after all, and being able to do it – he grinned at Bastien, and looked back at Clifford, and away across the glittering sea at other boats sailing, crews out and about on courses of their own.

  Without warning Clifford shouted, ‘Ready about!’ in a clipped hard tone that had been waiting for its moment – the boom swung across, the sail indecisive, robbed of all will for a moment and then jerking and filling out with a thump and a snap on the other side, as Johnny snatched at Bastien’s shirthem and brought him under. Still, they got in the rhythm of it, and again it wasn’t something Bastien saw any point in being bad at; though he had, once he’d settled in, a blank look on his face, as if tiring of his own obedience. Sailing required such effort and concentration that time itself speeded up and it was hard to enjoy the real beauty of what you could see as you went skimming along – the dazzle of the broken sea and the coast beyond all the while slowly turning, advancing, and falling away. Johnny thought Bastien himself was beautiful, half-unwillingly woken up and with a strength he perhaps didn’t know he had as he gripped his rope and held the boom firm and thrumming against the wind. The wind made the sunlight cold and shaped Bastien’s shirt tightly round him; it went for his cap again, and in the second he snatched for it he let the rope go, and in the second after that his plimsolled right foot caught Johnny in the ribs as he dropped, on his back, into the sea.

  It was a disaster, a fall from a far greater height, in Johnny’s mind, staring back, heart racing, knees locked straight against the new strain on the sail, imagined injury and death all condensed in the few dilated seconds it took to happen – in his life-vest Bastien barely went under, he shouted once, beat the water with his arms as he twisted round, left behind in their long wake, and the cap now twirled and hurried away, far off beyond it. Clifford yelled, Johnny’s father leapt up and in just a few seconds tore the main sail down in armfuls, as if tackling and smothering it; and somehow then they brought the boat about. Bastien, in the water, doggy-paddled towards them, waited, sploshing about over the light swell, and with a strange look as if he wasn’t in communication with them. Johnny thought he was reconstructing his dignity, the idiot emerging as the hero of the story. Then his father threw out a pink lifesaving ring on a rope, it splished into the water close to him, and he bobbed his way in a few strokes towards it and clutched it and was pulled steadily in as the Ganymede twisted and threatened to swing round again. Johnny joined his father to tug him up, leaning down and reaching out a hand, which Bastien grasped with the fear he was hiding behind a distant attempt at a smile. Very heavy, a big fifteen-year-old boy was, in saturated clothes – it was as if by a magical expansion of his own strength that he saw Bastien rise almost vertically from the water in his father’s two-handed grip on his other arm.

  ‘Well done, laddie,’ said Clifford harshly. Johnny stared at Bastien, wanted to hug him and kiss him with relief as he laughed at him, streaming beside him, the cause of concern, and the public menace, the soaking wet person among the still dry. Bastien laughed too, but he was trembling as he undid his life jacket, and took off his shirt. It was a crisis, dealt with by David Sparsholt in swift wordless actions, over almost at once – in a minute the fall was repeating in Johnny’s mind as allowable excitement, even comedy, the interest of talking about what had happened flooded in to replace the fright itself. Bastien, dripping, wiping himself with his hands, pushing his hair out of his eyes, seemed to know and not to know. He didn’t thank anyone for saving him, and it was Johnny who said, ‘Well done, Dad!’

  After a while Clifford started up the motor again – it took a couple of goes. ‘Tell him to take his fucking trousers off,’ he said, ‘we’re all men here’ – with an odd cut-off laugh, Johnny tense at the sound of that word in his father’s presence. He looked nervously at him but he seemed, blank-faced, to allow it. Bastien turned away as he unbuckled his belt, and prised the clinging jeans over his buttocks and down his thighs. His wet underpants hinted at transparency, a flesh-tone through white cotton grey with water, but were decent still. To Johnny it had the hot-making magic of those sudden but longed-for moments when sex ran visibly close to the sunlit surface. Bastien snapped down the hem at the back and gave him a quick smirk from the summer before – which seemed now to throw the scene on the boat in a colder light, Johnny no longer his secret friend but one of the three watching Englishmen. ‘And don’t forget your . . . bloody life-vest,’ said Clifford under his breath, turning the throttle and taking the Ganymede round in a long arc.

  It wasn’t clear what they were doing now – sailing, at least, seemed safely to be over. They were perched out here in the middle of the sea with a worrying new lack of purpose. ‘Dad, shouldn’t we go in?’ said Johnny.

  ‘We’re still OK, aren’t we, David?’ said Clifford – Johnny looked from one to the other, the uncertainty about who was really in charge more serious now. Johnny’s father shook his head and shrugged. ‘Then we’ll catch something, shall we, something to show the girls when we get back?’ He stared briefly at Johnny, ‘You like to fish, don’t you?’ – something about his unease with the boys conveyed in the way he never used their names. ‘Well . . .’ said Johnny. He knew from last summer there was pride in sitting down to a fish you had cau
ght, and with it something that soured and spoiled the taste, the effort to shut out images in the mind, hooks in the throat and the brain. He sat down now, to excuse himself from helping, as Clifford cut their speed and they puttered on with the engine down low, the screws frothing as they came out of the water on the drop of a swell. It turned out there was a gadget in one of the lockers, which could be taken out and clamped at the back of the boat, and half a dozen lines run out from it with what looked like silver spangles hiding the hooks. Clifford set it all up with oddly intent seriousness and thoroughness. Johnny watched the lines paying out from their spools, hoping he would fail.

  When the lines were all set, Clifford said, ‘Gentlemen, refreshments.’ He stooped down into the cabin and took the lid off a plastic box of sandwiches wrapped in grey greaseproof; there was also a Thermos. ‘Your missis prepared this,’ he said, ‘though you might like a drop of something stronger, David.’ He had a flat metal flask, which he unstoppered and took a shot from, and clenched his lips.

  ‘No, not with the boys to look after, Cliff.’ The tea, with milk and sugar in already, was passed round in the cap of the Thermos, Johnny avoided the side Clifford had drunk from, refilled it and passed it forward to Bastien, who sipped and screwed up his face – he never drank tea. Then the sandwiches were offered, paste – again disgusting to Bastien, so that Johnny, crouching in front of him, amazed by his near-nakedness, in his underpants and life-vest, ate his share too, making faces at him as if they were delicious. Bastien grunted and looked away.

  It was hot after all in the relative calm, and once the sandwiches were finished Johnny’s father, steadying himself against the small pitch and slide of the boat as they chugged on, unfastened his own life-vest and pulled his top over his head.

  ‘Going to soak up a few rays, David?’ said Clifford. ‘Good idea.’ He looked up at him with confident blankness – as he said, they were all men here; though Clifford himself, it seemed, was keeping his shirt on.

  Johnny was used to the sight of his father’s heavy upper arms, the rounded-out chest just shadowed with dark hair – he watched him fold up the windcheater, proud of him, and minutely embarrassed too by the display, or by his father’s own pride in making it. ‘Don’t get sunburn, Dad,’ he said.

  His father tutted, turned their attention away from himself to a luxurious white cruiser that was coming in ahead of them towards Falmouth, two uniformed crewmen active on deck.

  ‘I’d say you keep pretty fit, then, David?’ Clifford said.

  His father swung round, as if not expecting the compliment. ‘Oh, I like to keep in shape, Cliff,’ with a modest but competent laugh.

  Clifford made an odd gesture, squaring of the shoulders in forlorn competition. ‘Mind you, we were all pretty fit, weren’t we, in the War.’

  ‘Yes, well . . . I’ve always kept fit,’ Johnny’s father said, raising his arms casually, halfway, and letting them drop, his fingers clenching and flicking. ‘Twenty minutes every day before breakfast. You’re ready for anything then.’

  Clifford smiled, nodded slowly, seemed to take this in, as a possible new regime, sizing the other man up as an example of what could be done. Johnny’s father smiled back, raised his chin: ‘I think you’ve had some joy there,’ he said. It took Clifford a moment to see what he meant, but Johnny hadn’t forgotten about it, the activity on the lines. Clifford got up and leant out and started reeling them in – ambiguous at first among racing ripples and refractions on four of the hooks, but then clearer and grimmer, the sleek fighting black-arrowed shapes of mackerel, and on the end hook something else that Johnny’d never seen, a paler more golden fish with dark fins, curving and jerking frighteningly in the air as it was pulled from the sea, though it was the frightened one, of course. ‘Well, don’t just stand there gaping,’ Clifford said, as he brought them in over the edge of the boat, and it was safe (though not safe for them) to grip them as they fought, and then prise them off the hooks. The first mackerel landed on the boards at Johnny’s feet, and he jumped back, as the fish jumped, bucked and slithered, head and tail beating the floor in mortal desperation. His father, just beside him, with a hand on his shoulder, smiled strangely, at the flailing death, and also, Johnny felt, at Clifford’s furious excitement.

  The boys sat up at the front at an angle, legs hanging down and feet drenched in the irregular buffeting of the waves as they picked up speed; Johnny’s father standing behind them with his hand on the mast, and a feeling too subtle to be explained that he was pleased with him, and forgiving of Bastien, and somehow protecting them both, while Clifford drove the boat. Bastien’s shirt and jeans blew like some makeshift signal from above their heads. Johnny looked round and up at his father, watched him as he turned and went aft balancing himself at each sure stride, and dropped down on to the square of the deck. Pendennis Castle was riding in then out of view as they came in close to the headland, the castle set back, not big, but with the magic of any keep or tower to Johnny, who made Bastien crane round to look at it just as it disappeared. Clifford seemed concerned about a chart, said something inaudible in the bluster to Johnny’s father, who perhaps was looking for it. Now the top of Pendennis appeared again, round and squat, above its low circular wall, no flag on the flagpole, no cannon between the battlements, but Johnny was fixed on it – far more rode on it than he could express or the others would understand. And it would be so easy to go there – he almost wondered if they could land now and clamber up over the rocks and climb through the woods. He got up carefully and saw the engine had been left on a set course while Clifford spoke with his father in the cabin. He scooted aft, glancing up at the castle, and down into the little sunken deck. At some point the two men had dealt with the fish, which lay, dead, gleaming, striped like moving water itself, and seeming, with the thrum of the engine, still to shudder with unrelinquished life on the wet boards below. Perched on the edge of the boat Johnny peered down into the cabin. Clifford and his father were looking closely at something on the table: Johnny couldn’t see their faces, but in their hunched figures there was a sense of something nice being planned after all, a surprise it might be a shame to spoil. His father’s right arm lay loosely across Clifford’s shoulders as they bent forward. ‘Where are the lads?’ said Clifford.

  ‘Both up front, I think,’ said his father.

  ‘That French kid’s a piece of work,’ said Clifford.

  Was it ‘Difficult age . . .’ his father murmured, as he leant over, some private joke, odd bit of grown-up clowning, which made Clifford suddenly grip him round the waist, white hand on brown flesh, in a little rocking tussle, his father distantly amused and turning his face close to Clifford’s as if thinking of something, as Clifford said, ‘Now, now,’ and tapped him lightly on the bum.

  ‘Dad!’ said Johnny.

  His father tensed, annoyed as always by a childish interruption. ‘Yes, what is it, old lad?’

  ‘I just thought, can we go to Pendennis Castle?’

  ‘Oh . . .’ He stood back, stood up straight. ‘Well, we’ll see. You’d better ask your mother.’

  It was nearly good enough. ‘Oh . . . OK,’ Johnny said.

  His father was suddenly restless. ‘We’d better get them back home now, hadn’t we, Cliff?’

  Clifford turned, with a tart little smile that bunched up his moustache. ‘Yes, no castles for you today, I’m afraid, young man,’ he said. He leapt up and took his place by the tiller, flash of tightly clad backside and bare thighs, little ouch, adjusting himself, as he sat down. In five minutes they were cutting their wash as they came in past the town again.

  *

  ‘Ah, look who’s there,’ said Clifford drily.

  But Johnny had made them out already, his mother and Norma, among the stretched weedy cables at the top of the slipway. He waved confidently, and had to do it again before he got a response, Norma a moment later, as if reluctant. There was a sense, as they stood talking, his mother with her arms crossed, Norma lighting a cigarette, that t
hey’d come down to tell them something was wrong. The muffled greeting was a preparation for it. Then they were hidden from view by the silent and secretive blue-and-white bulk of Aegean Queen. It took a while to get Ganymede moored, the sails fully furled and bound, the decks sluiced clean of blood and guts – ‘The scene of the crime,’ his father said, naturally orderly, Clifford worrying about Leslie Stevens, double-checking everything. Bastien hunched in the cabin to pull on his jeans, and button up his damp shirt, watched obliquely by Johnny. Then the boys climbed into the tender, the food box and then the engine and then the two threaded clusters of mackerel were passed down, with the other fish, which Clifford said he thought was a pouting. ‘A what, Cliff?’ Johnny’s father said.

  ‘I will . . . how is it? . . . ramer?’ Bastien said. He didn’t get through at first, seemed to be fighting for some unknown reason with Johnny’s father who was holding the little oars. ‘I,’ he said.

  ‘You’re going to rammy, are you, laddie?’ said Clifford. ‘Well, well.’