The Sparsholt Affair

by Alan Hollinghurst

  Bastien took a few strokes to get used to it, skimming, unbalanced, under the sceptical scrutiny of the rest of them; they were a heavier lot than he’d expected, but he got the hang of it, the kind of pull it needed. Johnny watched and called out to steer him through the other craft in the way. He came in fast for the last bit till Clifford shouted, ‘Christ! Look out . . .’ and they were nearly aground, he stopped abruptly, let both oars go with a splash and looked round with a grin at Johnny’s mother.

  ‘How did it go?’ she said, as Johnny ran up to her and unexpectedly flung his arms round her. He wanted to say Bastien fell in the water. ‘How far did you go?’

  ‘Right out past . . . there’ – Johnny gestured, but from here, in the shelter of the estuary, the vast windy curve of the globe they’d been bouncing across was completely hidden. ‘Bastien fell in the water.’

  His mother looked at him narrowly. ‘He had his life jacket on?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Johnny. ‘He was fine’; and it was another lesson of the day, the dark underlying fact that his mother and father were wholly responsible for Bastien, however much they thought him a pain in the neck.

  ‘What did Dad say?’

  ‘Dad and I pulled him in, it was fine.’

  She smiled narrowly, ‘You make him sound like a fish.’ A few moments later Bastien himself came up, with a serious, almost shy look, and presented her with the mackerel. ‘For you, Madame.’

  ‘Good God . . .’ – she laughed, put her hand to her throat.

  ‘I catch them all for you.’ He looked at her earnestly. ‘We eat for dinner.’

  ‘We’ll be eating these all week. Look at them, Norma.’

  ‘I know,’ said Norma, standing back.

  ‘And what about your clothes?’ – she patted his shoulders, and he held his arms out with a smirk, still holding the dead fish.

  3

  ‘Is he getting up?’

  Johnny sprinkled sugar on his cornflakes. ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

  His mother moved round the kitchen, tied the apron over her pink cotton frock as the tap filled the washing-up bowl. ‘We’ll just let him stew, then, shall we? It is meant to be a holiday.’

  She was sunny, but after a moment Johnny said, ‘Sorry, Mum.’

  ‘Well . . .’ – she looked down at him frankly for a second: ‘I don’t think you’re having much fun, are you.’

  ‘It’s Ok.’

  ‘Was he talking in his sleep again?’

  ‘Oh . . . yeah . . . a bit.’

  ‘You know, I can go back in with Dad, if you want to use the other room.’

  ‘Dad’s snoring’s much worse!’ said Johnny. ‘No, I’ll be OK.’ There was something he didn’t want to lose in the broken nights . . . Bastien clambering in and out, the brief functional rocking of the bunk beds as he had his wank, and then when he slept the loud fragments of speech which suggested an inner life far more dramatic than he gave any hint of when awake.

  ‘Well, you will say,’ said his mother, ‘won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’ The house, downstairs, with just the two of them, was so peaceful. ‘Where’s Dad?’

  ‘Clifford came up just now in the car – they’ve gone off somewhere . . . just for an hour.’

  ‘Oh . . .’

  She tucked her chin in, smiled at him firmly as she turned back to the sink. ‘We’ll all do something nice together this afternoon.’ There was a thump overhead, creaks, the slam of the bathroom door. ‘Ah, here we go . . .’

  Johnny scrunched on his cereal, in the now familiar tension of longing to see him and dreading his coming through the door.

  Bastien had arrived in England a week ago, but the awful disappointment of his visit had begun (Johnny saw it now) many months before. In Nîmes, last year, he’d been Bastien’s gullible pupil, and almost at times his slave. He had gone there to work on his French, his stumbling innocence shown up the more by the barely grasped murmurs and exclamations with which Bastien bossed him around. It went on all the time, Johnny blushingly at war with his own modesty, at the Pont du Gard, on the beach near Aigues-Mortes, in the bedroom the Marcs had thought it would be nice for the boys to share. Nothing like this had happened at school, no one would survive such a scandal, he had had to go to France for it. When they were alone together their roles were easily maintained; when the family were present Bastien, with all the distractable energy of a fourteen-year-old boy, forgot the strict terms of the drama – he was lazy, rowdy, unobservant. Johnny sensed the mysterious force of the parts they played, a structure in the dealings between two friends that kept them going and could never be escaped. Bastien was disdainful, and mocked him each morning and night for wanting the very things he had taught him to ask for. His genius, even then, was his perfect selfishness, a beautiful smile that he must have learned early in life brought him anything he wanted. Mme Marc herself seemed obedient to it.

  Johnny remembered his own laboured efforts at politeness, when the family had taken him to see the sights. None of them had much English and they pretended, to be on the safe side, that they had none at all. Johnny had too little French to say that he thought one particular church they’d seen was very ugly: when he mentioned it they all assumed that he wanted to praise it. ‘Ah, oui!’ they said, ‘la basilique . . .’ Johnny didn’t know the word for ugly; he temporized: ‘Elle n’est pas belle’ – with an instant sense of the difference. Mme Marc, seeing a worthwhile subtlety, said, ‘Pas belle, tout à fait, non, mais assurément magnifique à sa façon.’ Johnny caught his breath and had another go, but felt constrained already by this first demurral. After a minute, the potential offence of what he wanted to say had grown in his mind as these far milder objections were imagined and cautiously allowed (it was very large . . . it was a bit on the dark side . . . it was nineteenth-century), and to insist on its ugliness now would have been positively hostile. When Mme Marc suggested they should all go to Mass there on Sunday, since he was so interested in the building, he gave up, watched mockingly by Bastien who was leaning in the doorway behind his parents with a blatant erection in his little black shorts. Ah, that was what had made all the difference; that was what had been truly beau.

  Nîmes had been different in every way from what he’d been used to – the meals, which either failed his needs and habits (a breakfast of milk coffee and hard-crusted French stick) or heavily exceeded them (rich meats, crêpes for pudding, a small disorienting tumbler of red wine); the movable duvet, the two-pin plugs, the button light-switches, the taps that switched themselves off to save water – all the things with which they, and Bastien above all, were unthinkingly intimate. He was humble, hesitant, in the presence of these fixtures, which had, like the French words for them, an educational quality; and aware of his own good manners in using such starved, stiff and miserably designed things without criticism, even at times with hinted admiration.

  The Marcs’ house, modern, medium-sized, was very close to a busy road out of town, and with its electrically operated shutters and narrow strip of garden behind a green mesh fence hardly looked like a house at all – a closed office, maybe. On the side away from the road it had red and white awnings over the windows as well as steel shutters, a patio crazy-paved in dirty white marble, a dry lawn stretching down to some shrubs and another chain-link fence. The house was completely without character, and the first afternoon, as he unpacked his case dumbly homesick in the twin-bedded room, he saw nothing to console him; it was only after supper, both the boys stoned with the wine, Johnny headachy, dry-mouthed, that Bastien started wrestling with him. By the end of the long three weeks the featureless house, yellow-white pebbledash, the telephone wires coming in at an angle above the lawn to a bracket between the bedroom windows, had something ideal about it. Johnny felt more clearly than before the imperative to draw – he sat at the end of the garden with pencil and paper, aghast at the thought of going home. The Marcs themselves were welcoming, somehow both earnest and relaxed. Mme Marc, source of Bastien
’s large lips and dark eyes, looked steadily at Johnny when they had their exchanges in French: she wanted them to understand each other. And maybe she understood too, from stray glimpses, stifled phrases, the stink of semen in the boys’ room, that something was going on. But he didn’t think so; and if she did, her looking him so firmly in the eye was a sign of her French intelligence on all things to do with sex. The blank-looking house, with its cactuses and spider-plants, and the traffic at the back all day and much of the night, was infused with the mood of permission, experiment, things not to be spoken of yet, in English or French.

  In the long months since then, Johnny’s troubles with reading, his parents’ squabbles, the worry of resitting the Common Entrance, his father’s embarrassment on the subject, and his none the less repeatedly telling people about it, had all been offset by a sequence of memories, melting and reforming, a secret theatre on the edge of sleep where at last, a year on, Bastien himself would be welcomed on stage when he came to Nuneaton for more. Best of all, he would join the Sparsholts for their week in Cornwall, allowed by Johnny’s father as a special privilege.

  Johnny had gone to Birmingham airport with his father to meet him, with a breathless sensation, in the slow, congested traffic on the A45, of running much faster towards something dense and inescapable. They were late, and found Bastien in the arrivals hall chatting with a tall blonde girl in a miniskirt and black halter top. Johnny saw him, went towards him, slowed now by his own wordless calculation, and after ten seconds said to his father, ‘There he is!’ Bastien seemed not to have seen him, or even, when he stood beside him and said ‘Hello!’, to be expecting him. He said something with a smirk to the girl before he turned and came over with a little upward nod to meet Johnny’s father. Of course memory was out of date: he was three inches taller than last year, his lips, nose, chin, fringe still beautiful but all larger and coarser and in a somehow different relation with each other. He wore tight blue jeans of a kind Johnny wasn’t allowed, a black-striped rugby shirt and a blue baseball cap which he didn’t take off when introduced to Johnny’s father. They all shook hands, the long-imagined hug and lustful murmur in the ear obstructed by his huge black suitcase, bound round with red elastic straps. Johnny grappled the case towards the exit, panting and grinning and with a sense of foreboding at its unexplained weight.

  Bastien got into the Jensen as if it was any old car. Johnny climbed in behind, and sat looking fearfully at the lost profile of his friend – there must be an element of nerves in his indifference, his refusal to be at the disadvantage of admiring anything. Johnny’s father was friendly and straightforward with him, but wasn’t a great talker himself. They couldn’t tell yet how good Bastien’s English was, and he gave them little chance to find out. They came into Nuneaton the long way, perhaps to avoid traffic, but almost the first thing they saw was the works, the high brick end-wall of the building with its large white-painted lettering, D. D. SPARSHOLT ENGINEERING, which seemed to Johnny to dominate this side of the town and compel the attention of anyone coming in. His father said nothing, and Johnny, afraid Bastien was missing it, leant forward and touched his shoulder: ‘That’s us.’ He thought it registered, that little upward nod again of guarded, almost sceptical interest, a glance through the gate into the yard as they passed. When they turned off Merivale Road it was still only half an hour since they’d met, and once they were alone without Johnny’s father, things would surely change, Bastien’s heart-turning smile would break out of hiding and the wrestling would begin. They swung into the drive of ‘Hornbeams’ and Bastien took in the red brick, the creeper-covered porch, the half-timbered gable, with a strange throat-clearing, as if about to say something difficult, though it seemed from his distantly matey tone when he came into the hall that he didn’t really consider himself to be there. Johnny’s father said, ‘Welcome,’ and smiled rather oddly: ‘I’ll let Jonathan show you round.’ But the expected tour, run over a hundred times in his head as if ‘Hornbeams’ were Haddon Hall, now felt threatened, a contest of his desire and the visitor’s coolness. They went upstairs. ‘So this is your room!’ he said, and sat dumbly on the bed, while Bastien glanced out of the window and then opened the wardrobe. ‘And I’m just next door!’ They went into Johnny’s room, and he put his arm round Bastien’s shoulders and showed him his Danish biro, with the bronzed young man on the side whose swimming-trunks vanished when you turned it upside down. Bastien turned it over himself, lower lip sticking out, and said, ‘You like that,’ as he gave it back. Then Johnny explained some of his drawings, taped up above the bed; he saw these also needed to be taken in the right spirit. It was starkly unlike how he’d imagined it would be, having Bastien at last in his own room.

  Johnny’s mother was staying with her sister, who’d had an operation, so the set-up for these first three days was odd, his father out early to work, and Mrs Doyle coming in to clean and make lunch. In the evenings June Palmer, his father’s secretary, came back to have dinner with them. There was a feeling of substitute mothers, as there might have been if his real one had died rather than gone to London for five nights. She seemed to be the one thing Bastien was curious about. On the first tour of the house, when they came back downstairs, he picked up the honeymoon photo in the sitting room, taken at Swanage, with the weird grey shapes on the beach behind them. ‘That was in the War,’ Johnny said, leaning forward into Bastien’s breath, then a hand round his shoulder, warm through the rugby shirt. ‘Those were the concrete things they put up in case the Germans invaded. You see Dad’s in his RAF uniform – he was a fighter pilot; in fact he won the DFC.’ Bastien was smiling. ‘That stands for the Distinguished Flying Cross.’

  ‘Elle est bandante, ta mère,’ said Bastien in a murmur, and when Johnny, uncertain, hungry for approval, looked up at him, he made a gesture with his free hand of outlining and then grasping a woman’s breasts. Then he nudged Johnny, pushed against him as he put the photo down, in a momentary overflow of physical feeling that was also a clear signal of where his interests now lay.

  4

  There was nowhere to hide at ‘The Lookout’. Bastien had made the boys’ bedroom his own, and for long half-hours the bathroom too. Johnny found himself corners to draw in, there was a semi-private place between the carport and the dustbins where he could sit and puzzle out the effects of sunlight and clouds on the sea. Norma Haxby spotted him there when she came in next day; ‘Still at it, then?’ she said, and tried to make him show her what he was doing. He showed her the palm tree. ‘You’ve got the shape of that all wrong,’ she said.

  In the house itself there was nothing much to look at. It was the holiday home of some people from Devizes, who came here several times a year themselves; above the phone in the hall a framed colour photo of the family in sailing gear showed them having more fun than their present guests seemed able to manage, the big teenage son beaming and holding an oar. The house was just five years old, and everything in it sturdy and primary-coloured. There were three flashy blue-and-white paintings by the same person, of sailing boats at sea, whose garish deficiencies were shown up each time you lifted your gaze to the real thing. The chairs and tables were modern and plain. There were rag rugs that slid and rode up, and lamps made from bottles, with lampshades of newspapers, overlaid, and repeating, like a wallpaper pattern, with half-hidden headlines and corners of pictures. You made up the stories yourself. Norma tilted her head, semi-sozzled one evening, to look at them. ‘Nothing about you, Cliff!’ she said.

  The Haxbys were round a lot, Johnny’s father taking all this in his stride, as the expected working out of a plan Johnny’s mother seemed not yet to know the extent of. The Sparsholts were never invited to ‘Greylags’, the bungalow just down the hill that the Haxbys had taken, though his mother asked Norma airy questions about its kitchen and provision of crockery. When Johnny’s father needed a discussion with Clifford about the Archer Square plans or some such subject they walked off together to one of the hotel bars – Johnny had seen them
once through the window of the King Mark, sitting over pint glasses, smiling about something. Clifford and Norma were town people, away, but not really on holiday. Where the Sparsholts wore old shorts and moccasins and pulled on unfashionable waterproofs if it looked like rain, Clifford was generally turned out in sharp grey flannels and looked ready to chair a meeting of the planning committee at any moment; a bit of blue piping on a jacket or a bell-bottomed trouser-suit were Norma’s main concessions to the seaside. She was good-looking, in her hard, immaculate way; and Clifford, too, with his black moustache, low broad brow and oiled-down hair, clearly thought himself very dashing. There was something instructive to Johnny in seeing him side with a man as famously handsome as his father. After supper, when they were watching The Saint on the portable TV, Johnny sitting at the table could capture them, under cover of general doodling, without making them self-conscious. He drew his father almost shyly, knowing he needed to do justice not only to the strong clean features in profile across the room but to who he was, something larger and harder to get. Mainly of course he drew Bastien, who wanted the TV on because he was bored but was bored by the programmes themselves which he could hardly understand.

  Johnny found a book at the house called Cornish Landscape and Legend. ‘Bloody fairies!’ Clifford said, hanging over his shoulder and breathing on his neck. ‘Ooh, not in Cornwall, Cliff!’ Norma said – not a joke at all, but they laughed and Johnny darkened with sullen embarrassment, for himself but really for them. Then they left him alone with it, and that small devaluing of pleasure that you had to fight against for a minute or two. It had lovely photographs, in a process called Dufay-colour, sand and cliffs gold and bronze, the sea in the coves the extravagant blue of (he searched for the likeness) the toilet-flush in this house. He was charmed by the chemical magic of the colours, even as he worked out what was wrong with them – well, not wrong, but inaccurate. In a broad stretch of heather on Bodmin Moor the purple and brown were nearly fused, the distant tor either grey or green. He went back over them. The book had been published before the War . . . MCMXXXVII . . . not thirty years old, but a peculiar gel of romance seemed to fix the scenes further back, caught at times of day, early morning, early closing, when no one was about, small boats bobbed at their moorings and no car or coach was seen on the pink and fawn ribbons of the roads.