The Sparsholt Affair Read online

  ‘And have you spoken to him?’ I asked.

  Evert was almost shocked. ‘Well, when he bumped into me,’ he said, ‘but not since . . . no, no.’

  Peter Coyle, as I expected, had been much bolder, and had at once written Sparsholt a letter, on the Slade School’s paper, asking if he could draw his portrait. There had been no reply, though I felt, two nights later in Hall, when I took a place facing the rowers’ table, that there was something subtly self-conscious about Sparsholt, a first uneasy suspicion, in his stern young face and his upright aloofness, that he might be being watched, or have turned already, in this place that was so new to him, into the subject of a rumour. Whether he noticed me, or Evert casting keen almost terrified glances in his direction, I rather doubt. He seemed to look at us as an undifferentiated and still alien mass. After Hall he quickly left his fellow diners, and I thought how easily I could have called out to him as we moved with our separate flashlights through the darkened quads.

  It was perfectly easy to find out more about him. In the Lodge next day I saw from the Boat Club notices that his initials were D. D., and from a tutorial list that he was an Engineer. These first meagre scraps were somehow discouraging: scientists and rowers moved in their own severe routines, set apart from the rest of us. But the fact of Sparsholt’s instant appeal to Peter and Evert invested him, even so, with a faint if puzzling glamour. To me there was something unyielding in his surname, a word like a machine part, as Peter said, or a small hard sample, perhaps, of some mineral ore; but now I was curious about the D. D.

  As it happened I stole a march on my two friends. Each morning Phil came in about seven to open the shutters and clean up my sitting room, while I as a rule still lay in bed, drowsing and dreaming to the squeak of casters and the to-and-fro noise of the carpet sweeper next door. He would lay the fire, and take out the china and glass to be washed up. When that was all done he would knock and open my bedroom door in one swift movement, with a policeman’s instinct for surprise. I would then emerge in my dressing gown on to a stage set exactly restored in the interval – ‘The Same. The Following Morning’.

  Today as I waited for the kettle to boil I gazed out gratefully into the quad. There was a heightened sense of relief then, even in Oxford, at having come through the night unscathed. The lights that showed palely again at the windows as the scouts went round were cheering signals of survival. I watched the figures who emerged, in overcoats and slippers, to make their way to distant bathrooms. There were fewer people now, of course, and most I knew only by sight, but we were joined together in a manner that we had not been when I first came up, before the War. I was about to turn away when I realized that the person leaving the first line of footsteps across the wet lawn below was Sparsholt himself, striding out in pyjamas, a blue dressing gown and brown walking shoes, with a towel slung round his neck like a scarf. He gave off a sense of military indifference to the chilly morning as he swiftly disappeared from view.

  Normally I shaved after breakfast, when no one was around, but this morning I seemed barely to take the decision to follow him. I put on my coat and the Homburg hat I had lately affected, and trotted downstairs, thinking of what I would be able to tell Evert over our porridge and tea. It was the comedy of competition that tickled me, rather than any intrinsic interest in the man I had decided to speak to.

  I generally avoided the big subterranean bathroom in the next quad, with its rows of washbasins and maze of cubicles, no locks on the doors. I remembered the uneasy sensation there of being naked and alone, in my steam-filled partition, knowing others were lying almost silently around me. Sometimes someone would ask who was there, and a conversation would start, as if on the telephone, and slightly constrained by the presence of the rest of us, closed more silently still in our own cubicles. When I first came up I’d been told by my half-brother Gerald that it was the best place in College for a long soak, by which I suspect he meant something more. It was taken over at certain times by the muddied and bloodied rugby team, the exhausted rowers, who recovered and stretched in tender self-inspection among densities of steam, a great naked mixing and gathering. They threatened no danger, I went quite unnoticed there, but I knew I was out of my element.

  When I came in, Sparsholt had just started shaving, and glanced at me with a second’s curiosity in the mirror. I confess I felt a jolt of excitement at being in his presence. He was wearing nothing but his pyjama bottoms and his walking shoes, the laces undone. Now I saw his muscular upper body close to, revealed with casual pride. I hung up my coat and hat and went to the basin two along. ‘Good morning!’ I said. He turned his head, razor raised, and said, ‘Morning!’ – more cheerfully than I’d expected: I could tell he was glad to be spoken to. There was a splosh or two from a nearby cubicle, but the cavernous room had a desolate air. He took a stripe of lather off his jaw, and then another, and while I drew hot water I watched discreetly as his face emerged. I felt I hardly knew what it would look like.

  ‘I haven’t seen you before,’ he said – again more in welcome than suspicion, looking across and smiling for a moment. His good strong teeth showed yellow in the square of white foam round his mouth.

  ‘Oh – I’m Freddie Green,’ I said. He set down his razor on the edge of the basin and reached out a hand:

  ‘David Sparsholt.’

  ‘Sparsholt?’ I said, absorbing the ‘David’, to me the most guileless and straightforward of all the Ds. I saw that he was very young, under the pale armour of his muscles. His wrist was streaked with wet hairs but his chest and stomach were quite smooth. ‘It’s an unusual name.’

  He blinked as if sensing criticism. ‘Well, we’re from Warwickshire,’ he said – and there was a mild regional colouring I would never have been skilled enough to place. I didn’t press him further, and in a minute he splashed fresh water over his face and dried himself roughly. As I began to shave I peeped across in a friendly way. He pushed his head to left and right as he inspected his jaw in the mirror, with the businesslike vanity I had rather expected: he seemed pleased enough with what he saw. Was he good-looking? I hardly knew. To me a man is good-looking if he is well dressed; and since Sparsholt was hardly dressed at all I was rather at a loss. It was a broad face with a slightly curved nose and blue-grey eyes set deep under a strong brow. His hair was clipped short above the ears; short, but dark and curly, on top. It was his physique, of course, that was more remarkable, and I could see why Peter would want him as a model; quite what Evert hoped to do with him I didn’t try to imagine. ‘Which force are you signed up with?’ he said.

  I explained to him about my condition, and my permanent exemption from military service; and as I did so I saw a first puzzlement in his eyes.

  ‘That’s bad luck,’ he said – but the condolence hid a murmur of mistrust. He looked narrowly at me, in my vest, and then perhaps took pity on me. He seemed to play, like other physically powerful men I’ve known, with a small, barely conscious, instinct to threaten, as well as to reassure and even to protect. ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Well, I’m doing the third year, history, you know, a full degree. Then we’ll see. Which service are you?’

  He had his towel round his neck again now, his hands on his hips, feet apart. There was a careless glimpse of his sex in the open slit of his pyjamas. ‘Royal Air Force,’ he said, ‘yes, I’ll be learning to fly.’ His narrow smile was again slightly challenging.

  ‘Wonderful,’ I said. And sensing some further approval was due: ‘I can see you do a lot of exercise’ – not liking to say I’d watched him at it, and thinking even so I sounded rather eager; but he smiled acceptingly.

  ‘Well, you’ve got to be ready, haven’t you,’ he said. It was clear that the morbid uncertainty about the future that permeated most of our lives throughout these years had no effect on him. He was looking forward to it. ‘I’m eighteen in January – I’ll be signing up then.’ And he went through his plan for me, in the way that a person nagged by anxiety will, though in
his case I saw only the purposeful alertness of the born soldier. I said I was surprised he’d bothered to come up to Oxford for just one term. But he’d got in, and after the War he would come back – he had that planned too. He would get a degree, and then he would go home again and set up a firm, an engineering business. ‘Well, they’ll always be in demand,’ he said.

  The door of the occupied cubicle opened, and Das, the one Indian man in College, came out, wrapped in a towel and holding his glasses, which he was quickly wiping clean with a discarded sock. He looked with a kind of baffled keenness at Sparsholt, who had evidently encountered him before, and who took the opportunity to pull on his dressing gown and leave. ‘I hope I’ll bump into you again,’ I said, as I heard the thump of the door. Das, who had now got his glasses back on, looked almost accusingly at me.

  ‘Is that young gentleman your friend, Green?’ he said.

  ‘Mm?’ I said, but testing the new possibility, and my feelings about it.

  ‘He is like a Greek god!’

  ‘Oh, do you think . . . ?’

  ‘But arrogant, very much so.’

  I rinsed my razor under the tap. ‘I rather imagine the Greek gods were too,’ I said. I began to see that Sparsholt’s effect might be larger than I’d thought.

  3

  When Evert came to my rooms a few days later he was in uniform again, but I had a feeling he was changing his mind about it. He drooped and sprawled mutinously as usual when muffled in the styleless khaki, but now and then he straightened up; he set his shoulders back when he stood in front of the fire, as if the soldier’s role might just be worth playing after all. ‘How’s Jill?’ he said.

  ‘Jill’s very well,’ I said.

  ‘You seem to be seeing quite a lot of her.’

  In fact I hadn’t seen her since our night-time walk over the bridge to St Hilda’s, and my note in the college mail had got the cryptic reply ‘Henry III!’ – an essay crisis, I assumed. ‘I think we like each other,’ I said. Evert started to roam around. I’d left my diary open on my desk, and I saw it distract his attention for a moment as he spoke:

  ‘By the way, I took your advice about the bathroom.’

  ‘I don’t know that it was advice,’ I said.

  He came and sat on the sofa. ‘Actually I thought I’d missed him, though I trekked over at first light. You notice how well I’ve shaved.’

  ‘I noticed a nick under your chin.’

  ‘That marks the moment when he finally emerged – he must have been in the bath for hours. He was just in a towel.’ Evert smiled painfully through his blush. He’d spoken to him, and it seemed they’d had a brief conversation. He said it had gone very well in fact, and sat rather solemnly picturing it all, before getting up again to glance out across the quad.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I hope Sparsholt won’t grow suspicious about these bathroom encounters.’

  ‘You mean, you feel it’s all right for you to encounter him, but not for anyone else?’ I saw this was actually my view about various matters. ‘You’re not interested in him anyway!’ said Evert; and then, quite suspicious for a second, ‘Or are you?’

  I said, ‘I’ve developed an interest in him purely as the focus of your interest. Yours and Peter’s,’ I added, and watched him scowl. ‘I’m following the whole Sparsholt affair scientifically.’

  ‘I’d hardly call it an affair,’ Evert said; and then, ‘Why, what’s Coyle been up to?’

  ‘No idea. I think no news from him is good news for you. We’ll certainly hear all about it if anything happens.’

  Poor Evert looked haggard at the thought of his rival spending whole hours alone with Sparsholt, with the licence to stare at him and move him around, to ponder at leisure the nakedness he had glimpsed for a mere second, and all the while, in the semi-abstracted way of the artist, to draw him out about his past, his thoughts and his feelings. I wondered though whether Peter’s flamboyance would alarm him. It was all a test, in a way, of Sparsholt’s innocence. Was he still, as a freshman from another college, glad of any friendly attention? Was he even aware that his hours with the weights and clubs had made him, to a certain kind of person, an object of desire? It was one of those questions of masculine vanity hard even to formulate and impossible to put directly to the man himself.

  I said, ‘I expect you’d like a glass of port.’ As it happened an affair of a very different kind had just begun in my own life, though I wasn’t able to speak of it yet, even to someone who showed such trust in me. The bottle of port was related to it.

  ‘Where did you get it from?’ Evert said, seeing how ancient and expensive it was.

  ‘It was given to me by my aunt,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t know you had an aunt,’ said Evert.

  ‘Almost everyone has,’ I said, ‘if you look into it.’ I scraped at the blackened seal with my penknife. ‘She’s just moved to Woodstock – I went to see her yesterday on the bus.’ Evert didn’t really take this in.

  ‘I’ve got an aunt by marriage,’ he said. ‘She’s stuck in The Hague now, poor old thing.’ His family were a source of worry to him of a kind I was spared; my father, twice married, had died when I was ten, and my widowed mother dwelt in the depths of Devonshire; Woodstock I felt was a fairly safe spot for an aunt. I tugged out the cork and poured him a good glassful.

  ‘To victory, Evert,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes . . .’ he said, though there was something further, which he seemed reluctant to come round to. It emerged in a while, under the prompting of the port, and when it did it threw the most withering light on his whole situation. ‘The thing is, there’s a woman,’ he said, not looking at me: perhaps he thought I would laugh, or say (what I said only to myself), ‘Well, of course there is.’

  ‘Have you seen her?’

  ‘No, thank God, but she took up a lot of the conversation.’

  ‘You talked quite a bit, then.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t want to let him go.’

  ‘Who is she, did you gather?’

  ‘The ghastly thing is that she’s coming to Oxford. To live here, I mean.’

  ‘I expect she wants to be near David,’ I said.

  Evert glared at me. ‘She’s going to be very near indeed. As near as she can be. They’re engaged to be married.’

  ‘That does sound a bit rash,’ I said, more tactfully. ‘He’s very young. Anyway, I’m not sure that undergrads are allowed to get married, are they? I’ve never heard of it.’

  ‘Of course I said to him, “What’s the hurry?” and he said, “Well, you never know what’s going to happen, these days, do you. I might be dead otherwise before I get the chance.” I said, “By that thinking, there are quite a lot of things you ought to do now, while you can!” ’

  ‘And what did he say to that?’

  Evert gave a nauseated smile. ‘He said what he wanted most of all was to have a son.’

  I had finished Victor Dax’s novel at last, and wondered what passages from it he would choose to read to the Club. It impressed me, though it wasn’t exactly enjoyable; my regard for it had its share of self-regard, at having got through it and grasped what it was doing. It was unshakeably serious, and I liked my prose to have at least a glimmer of humour. Dax’s nearest approaches to jokes were quotations from Erasmus and occasional mockery of the working classes. Still, I had seen the solemn praise of the book in the latest Horizon, and read the long TLS ‘middle’ which compared it favourably to the Dance of Shadows trilogy, books I’d devoured in the sixth form as the height of modernity and sophistication. If Dax wasn’t going off, I perhaps was going off him.

  I thought I could talk to Peter Coyle about the novel and went over to the Ashmolean the next day. If I expected to find Sparsholt sprawled naked on a rostrum in front of him I was disappointed. Peter had just come out of a drawing class with Professor Schwabe, and was more than usually restless. He missed London, and the evacuation of the whole Slade School to Oxford had been a great frustration to him. N
or did he get on with Schwabe himself, who kept trying to suppress the strong vein of fantasy in Peter’s work. It was an inevitable clash: the Professor was a painstakingly old-fashioned craftsman, expert in topographical drawings and prints, while Peter was romantic, extravagant, at times rather silly, and a reckless taker of short cuts.

  He signed out in the ledger by the door, and we went into the street. I was curious about Sparsholt, but wary of bringing the subject up; these black moods were short-lived but keen while they lasted. Besides, I was conscious by now of seeing the situation from Evert’s angle, and it was possible Peter himself attached little importance to it. In Beaumont Street an eternal Army convoy was rumbling past, the eight-second gap between lorries a subliminal rhythm of those years – Peter dashed across the road, though I, with my lifelong propensity to trip, or drop something, whenever physical speed was required, stood waiting for two minutes till the line and its busy wash of backed-up bicycles had passed. I found him in the Randolph, ordering tea.

  He started talking about a play he’d been asked to design the sets for, and in a minute the annoyances of school were forgotten. It was called The Triumph of Time, an allegorical play of a kind I resisted, but which gave him exciting scope for some large-scale backdrops – I doubted if the Oxford Playhouse was really big enough for the visions he had of them. I was able in a while to say almost dismissively, ‘You might get Sparsholt as one of your devils, can’t you see him painted scarlet?’ and Peter then said that he’d had a brief note from him – it was in his pocket now.

  ‘Dear Mr Coyle,’ Sparsholt had written, ‘I was quite surprised to get your letter, and can’t think how you have heard of me! I do think it would be interesting to have one’s portrait painted, however I am extremely busy at present, and you may prefer to find other models for your work. Thursday evenings are possible for me, if not too late for you. Hoping to hear from you, D. D. Sparsholt.’ The letter was a diagram of divided feelings, written in a stiff schoolboy hand that yielded here and there to wide grown-up flourishes.