The Sparsholt Affair

by Alan Hollinghurst

  At last there was some action. Old Harris, who ran the repair business, was out in his overalls, and giving Roy a hard time about being late, no doubt. He too knew not to believe a word Roy said. On the landing below, Denis put on his overcoat and was checking his silk scarf in the mirror when Evert emerged from his study. ‘I’m just going down to see if that imbecile’s got the magneto fixed yet,’ Denis said.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Evert. He frowned at the break in his chain of thought – it was that maddening look of having to get on with things without the expected help, a little squinting challenge quite wasted on Denis. Then he smiled rather nastily. ‘I’ve always envied your grasp of mechanics.’

  Evert had been asked to write 500 words about his work in progress for a column in The Author, a task he found almost as hard as writing the memoir itself. There was so much to explain, and his father’s position was a tricky one. In his life Victor Dax had been a vaunted novelist, as well as a traveller, collector, philanderer, all interesting roles; but now, some twenty years after his death, he was best known in England as an unread writer – he was almost famously neglected. When anyone asked, or a survey was done, ‘Who are the great forgotten novelists?’, A. V. Dax was likely to be cited. Sometimes such polls could lead to a revival in an author’s value, reprints, even a film; but Dax’s name was always mentioned with a strange collective suspension of will, an abstracted pause after which people moved on to talk about other writers they really did mean to read one day. Evert hoped that a memoir of his father’s rackety life might form a sounder basis for new interest in his work; but he found it the stiffest thing he’d ever had a go at. Though never a demonic writer like Victor, he had always produced with reasonable ease: Modern British Painting, the monographs on Pasmore and Goyle, countless reviews for The Burlington and the TLS; now he was very nearly stuck, unmanned by his own father. He was glad at least to have read that short extract to the gang, though this morning at breakfast Denis had suggested that Jill hadn’t liked it either. Well, Jill had never been easy to please, but hadn’t several of the others (not members of the long-ago Oxford Club) said how much they’d enjoyed it? Having shared it he believed a little more in its existence.

  In truth the memoir was a game of postponement – a trick he played on himself almost daily, and fell for every time. There would be a poor and evasive morning, with letters to write as well, and a number of phone calls that had to be made; then lunch, at a place not necessarily close, and several things to do after lunch, with mounting anxiety in the two hours before six o’clock: and then a drink, a glow of resolve and sensible postponement till the following morning, when, too hung-over to do much work before ten, he would seek infuriated refuge, about eleven forty-five, in the trying necessity of going out once more to lunch. Over lunch, at Caspar’s or at the Garrick, he would be asked how work was going, when it could be expected, and the confidence of the questioner severely inhibited his answers – they had a bottle of wine, no more, but still the atmosphere was appreciably softened, his little hints at difficulties were taken as mere modesty – ‘I’m sure it will be marvellous’ – ‘It will take as long as it takes’ – and he left fractionally consoled himself, as if some great humane reprieve were somehow possible, and time (as deadline after deadline loomed and fell away behind) were not an overriding question. In the evenings especially, and towards bedtime, half-drunk, he started seeing connexions, approaches, lovely ideas for the work, and sat suffused with a sense of the masterly thing it was in his power to do the next morning.

  Herta was hoovering expressively upstairs, so the pert triple tap at the door could only be Ivan. Evert tugged up his zip and pulled down his jersey and sat forward. There were further little knocks, timidity conquered in a comical crescendo. Evert called, ‘Come in!’ He hadn’t been thinking about Ivan at all, but he coloured at Ivan’s intrusion on his brutal little reverie. This was another thing that slowed up work on the memoir, though he wasn’t going to tell the readers of The Author about it; his hung-over mornings often started with these easy and absorbing diversions from impracticable work. ‘Hullo, poppet.’

  Ivan closed the door and came towards him; kissed him on the cheek as Evert turned in his chair, but stayed seated.

  ‘Did you want to start with the photos?’ Ivan said. Did he scent sex in the air, however swiftly muffled?

  ‘Oh, goodness . . . well! . . . how’s your head?’

  ‘Oh, not too bad at all – I was drinking Pepsi later.’

  ‘My god . . .’

  Ivan looked at him from under his fringe, and Evert smiled back with a hint of caution. Ivan was dressed this morning in large corduroys cinched at the waist, brown brogues, a collarless white shirt, black waistcoat, and a red paisley neckerchief – most of it from Oxfam (‘My tailor,’ Ivan said when they walked past the King’s Road shop); he was like an extra in an opera, Peter Grimes perhaps. The second-hand look seemed to fit with the boy’s strange attraction to the world of thirty or forty years ago, when Evert and his friends had been young themselves. He claimed not to feel the cold, which was a blessing for a lodger in Evert’s attic in a national fuel shortage. Today, though, was a day, downstairs at least, of glowing lamps and a smell of burnt dust from the two-bar fire.

  The photographs were heaped in a cardboard box with the appealing legend ‘Château Granjac / Pauillac / Douze Bouteilles’ on the side: old bursting brown envelopes, little Kodak wallets with the negatives in milky paper strips, a slew of loose pictures where nameless Edwardian ladies were mixed with Evert’s childhood holidays and small colour snaps of the early 1950s. On top like a lid was a heavily bound album kept by his mother, in which over time the concealed paper mounts had one by one perished – now when you opened it the last photos slithered together in the gutter of the binding or tumbled out on to the floor, leaving only her inscriptions in white ink – ‘Edwina’, ‘Cousin Patrick’ – under the empty spaces. Ivan’s brainwave was to get a new album, and mount all the photos of Victor’s life together and in sequence, with new captions of his own. First they needed to be sorted and dated, and the people in them as far as possible identified. It was the kind of thing Denis might have helped him with, ten years ago; though Denis had surely never been so keen.

  Now Ivan cleared the books from the table under the window, and tipped all the loose photos out on to it. They did a first glancing shuffle through, like looking for sea or sky in a jigsaw, grouping pictures loosely by period or type; sometimes there were several of one event. Ivan, when Evert glanced at him, had a look of gleaming good luck at the treasure swimming under his fingers, curbed by a responsible frown and simple sense of strategy. ‘Is this Victor?’ he said, holding out a creased snapshot of a young man in a white suit and straw hat. ‘Um . . . yes, it must be,’ said Evert, piqued for a moment by the first-name terms, and a moment later puzzled at himself for minding. He saw it touched on a larger worry. What was he going to call him himself? ‘Victor’ might look like cheek in a son, a patronizing closeness. But to write starchily of ‘Dax’ would be a weird discipline, silly and spooky by turns, for the biographer who shared his name.

  Here was a photograph of his father as a boy, at the seaside, this one with a pencilled date on the back, the now well-known scrawl of his grandmother, whom he’d never known in person: ‘Scheveningen, August 1888’ – Victor eight years old. Already he knew how to wear his hat; he stood with his beach spade at an angle like a dandy’s cane. He’d been a very nice-looking boy, whose face had slowly lost distinction as its owner had gained it. Here he was aged thirty-two, in front of the large theatrical portrait of him by George Lambert, barely completed. This was the time, just before the Great War, when he wore a beard, the twisted ends of the moustache pointing upwards, and a broad-brimmed black hat that added swagger and already concealed baldness. In the photo, with the painting unframed, still on the easel, he seemed pleased by it, amazed, happily outdone by the panache of the painter, while giving just a hint of the sitter’s inad
missible sense of disappointment.

  ‘What became of that portrait?’ said Ivan.

  ‘The Lambert? I let my old college have it.’

  ‘Oh, I see, right – because the papers are at the University of Lichfield.’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ Evert didn’t need reminding of that; he felt some small and unreasonable guilt at the arrangement. It had been an undeserved relief to find so eager a home for something he’d so wanted to get rid of. The papers had been welcomed and catalogued, and the gift had led to the naming of the A. V. Dax Theatre – Evert thought at first a stage and stalls, a little Duke of York’s, but of course it was a lecture theatre. He had been there only once, for the opening, when he sat under humming strip lights and heard Professor Jack Bishop talk in confident and surprising detail about the man they were honouring. Now Evert was going to need a good two weeks in Lichfield checking up on details he should have made sure of before the papers went, the whole thing typical of his indecisiveness and delay.

  At eleven Herta came in and asked if they wanted coffee. Ivan was on all fours squirrelling for dropped items under the table, his round rump sticking out. Her gaze settled on it for a moment. ‘And for Denis?’ she said.

  ‘No, Denis has gone out to see about the Triumph,’ said Evert, with her German way of saying the name, and glanced at his watch to see how long it had been. ‘The fuel injection . . .’ He gave a bland smile.

  ‘Still the injection,’ said Herta heavily, and went off to the kitchen.

  ‘That Treeoomph,’ said Ivan from under the table.

  ‘Now, now . . .’ said Evert, looking as if thinking about something else at the taut brown corduroy, the appealing dip of his lower back. ‘How are you getting on down there?’ Ivan wriggled out backwards till it was safe to raise his head.

  ‘I don’t want you to miss anything,’ he said. He passed three little snapshots back over his shoulder to Evert in his chair; then he sat back on his heels, ran his hand through his hair and smiled, as if at something else they both might have in mind.

  When the coffee came in Ivan stood by the window holding his cup and saucer daintily and peering into the street. There were various telling and touching little ways he made himself at home here, which today Evert wondered about more than before. His eyes seemed to follow someone on the pavement below as he said, ‘Oh, I was wondering, what you made of Jonathan, by the way?’

  ‘Sparsholt, you mean?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Oh, he seems nice enough.’

  Ivan looked at him, as he turned from the window, in a humorously suspicious way – or so Evert suspected. ‘I didn’t know you knew David Sparsholt.’

  ‘Yes, our paths crossed early in the War.’

  ‘Well, lucky you,’ said Ivan.

  ‘And why do you say that?’

  Ivan hesitated nostalgically. ‘Oh, I had quite a crush on him.’

  ‘That seems unlikely.’

  ‘You know, when I was at school. I used to cut the pictures of him out of the paper.’

  ‘Extraordinary child you were.’

  ‘I’ve still got them somewhere. You remember the famous photo taken through a window, with Clifford Haxby and another man.’

  ‘Oh God, Clifford Haxby . . .’ said Evert.

  ‘Do you remember?’

  ‘Hardly’ – the name now a tawdry token of its moment.

  ‘They never found out who the third man was.’

  ‘Oh, who cares?’ – at which Ivan looked crestfallen. ‘To be honest I’ve forgotten most of it – certainly all the business side of it.’

  ‘Well, it was rather complicated,’ Ivan allowed.

  ‘And the MP, I couldn’t even remember his name.’

  ‘Leslie Stevens. He was the one with the house parties in Cornwall,’ said Ivan. ‘That was when I first learned that there was such a thing as male prostitutes.’

  ‘Oh, really . . . ? Oh, dear . . . !’ Evert felt the stale squalor of the thing seep over him again, the prurient press, of course, but also the imagined and salaciously reconstructed events themselves. That was all people kept, of a scandal, as time passed and the circumstances were lost – a blurred image or two, the facts partial or distorted, the names eluding memory. Still, he said, ‘Why shouldn’t people have a bit of fun if they want to?’

  ‘No, I quite agree,’ said Ivan warmly, and looked away before he looked back at him.

  ‘Awful for the boy, of course,’ Evert said.

  ‘If they’d been called Brown, it wouldn’t be half so bad.’

  ‘Or indeed Green,’ said Evert.

  Ivan laughed. ‘And being, you know, queer too.’

  ‘Ah . . . yes,’ Evert said. ‘I see.’

  Ivan put down his cup and saucer on the desk. ‘Did you fancy his dad, in the War?’

  Evert peered, as if trying to remember – his sudden decision, like a kick under the table, that he wouldn’t tell Ivan broke out in a blush which Ivan noticed and no doubt made his own sense of.

  *

  Today Evert wasn’t going out to lunch, but a new anxiety made him feel he would rather not share his cottage pie with Ivan. He looked at his watch. ‘Will you come back after lunch?’ he said.

  ‘Oh . . . Yes, well, I need to go to the London Library anyway.’

  ‘Ah, good,’ said Evert. ‘And you might pick up a copy of Freddie’s new book at Hatchard’s – put it on my account.’ He hoped the little task would muffle the little snub.

  The afternoon post brought a letter addressed in watery blue ink, the writing itself the trace of a memory. Surely an old lady’s hand, formed long ago, eccentric, the tremor and charm of a voice obliquely conveyed in its broad-nibbed strokes, now made with more effort. It was from Doris Abney, a two-month-delayed reply to his letter to her, asking, in vague terms, about something specific, the affair he was almost certain she’d had with his father. He hoped he’d judged the tone correctly. People of her generation did just the same destructive lustful things in 1925 as they did now, but they talked about them differently, if they talked of them at all. ‘My dear Evert’, she wrote, as she had done when he was at school, and with a touching trust, surely, in resuming correspondence after thirty-five years; but she signed off ‘Affly, Doris Abney’, as if she’d found a certain inescapable formality settle on her in the course of writing and saying, in essence, no. Not the unequivocal no of refusal, or of saying she had not been seduced by Victor. ‘I’m rather blind now,’ she said, ‘and getting ga-ga, though Gilbert and Jasmine have been marvellous. I don’t know if you’d heard . . .’ – and then a string of gossip about people whose names meant nothing to him. Gilbert was her son, a surgeon, and that was the family in which her history had been furthered, and sheltered. A month or two’s indiscretion fifty years ago with a man himself now dead for twenty was something she hardly cared to remember. Did she want her friends, her grandchildren reading about it? If secrecy had been of the essence at the time, why boast about it now? Boast, or confess – these were the two ways of speaking up, sometimes artfully muddled. Doris did neither. It was in a PS that she said, ‘I hope you will be able to convey your father’s charm as well as his more forceful aspects!’ There it was again, several of them had mentioned it: ‘charm’ – a transient magic hard to convey in a person’s absence, and against the grain of other, more lasting, evidence. Evert lifted the spring and added the letter to the rest in the black box-folder, replies from his father’s friends, some of them now dead too and their words stale in his mind with lying there, pressed together.

  To be friends, to be among the little group of regulars at Cranley Gardens in the old days, was to be a devotee of Victor’s work, though it was rarely talked about in the house itself, since he was so absurdly touchy about it. Evert could see them still, from the fifteen-year-old’s vantage, arriving for a dinner party, their look of walking simultaneously on air and on eggshells. They gleamed with the privilege of proximity, and the terror of saying the wrong thing. Sometimes a n
aively direct question from a woman who was very attractive, or possibly titled, could produce a simple and illuminating answer – Evert noted how the others listened, with concealed attentiveness, while smiling in friendly pity at the questioner. But in general Victor’s books were taken as read. Was it, oddly, as if to mention them by name might expose them to ungovernable breezes of humour and doubt? Only his mother ever got away with it, in the years before the War, at her end of the candle-lit table, when she struck a glass and proposed a toast and won from her husband a brief flushed smile of consent, or defeat. After the War the arrangements were so original, with the upstairs and downstairs flats, that his parents’ social scene disbanded – and Victor, with his new prosthesis, stumped around up above unobserved, if not unheard. Evert, working at the Tate, had his own little flat in Chiswick, and when he came to visit his mother he did occasionally see (what she must have seen very often) an unknown woman creaking downwards in the lift, and then hurrying to the front door.

  Evert feared he was painting the portrait of a monster, when what Victor Dax should be remembered for was his dense, unfashionable but not insignificant writings. A harrowing exposé was all very well if the subject was famous and pretended to be virtuous; but Victor, disagreeable in life, was now almost unknown to the reading public. Evert imagined a cocktail conversation: ‘Have you heard of someone called A. V. Dax?’ ‘Haven’t, I’m afraid.’ ‘Well, nor had I, till I read this book, and it turns out he was a swine.’

  He thought about the days after his father died. The undertaker was a genial little man, who referred to the dead person as ‘the party’; it was just the wrong word for Victor, and helped Evert get through the day, the arrival of the hearse at the house, going down rigid-faced with Alex on his arm to the big black limousine that followed it, the long half-defiant, half-apologetic crawl through the London streets to Kensal Green, and the unstoppable burial, which wrenched up emotions in him that seemed quite apart from his wary feelings about his father in life. After that there was the ‘party’ itself, the oddest gathering there had ever been at Cranley Gardens, a black matinee at which Herta, as mourner and ministrant, was in commanding form. It was the moment she had switched her loyalties, completely, emphatically, to Evert, whom up to that point she had generally obstructed. She seemed to manage and embody, quite cannily, the inevitable process of change, and descent. The survivors from the little group of admiring friends had come together to mark the passing, there was the unavoidable heaviness of occasion, and just audible beneath it a letting-out of breath.