The Sparsholt Affair Page 3

  ‘So he’s too busy,’ said Peter. I was surprised by my own alarm that he might be going to drop the whole thing.

  ‘Well, he has a lot on,’ I said, and I filled him in on Sparsholt’s various commitments – his rowing and his PT, and of course the long hours in the labs.

  Peter shrugged, and peered round at the few other people taking tea beneath the dingy Gothic vault of the lounge. I filled up the pot from the scalding hot-water jug and gave it a stir. ‘I’ve been drawing a young gardener at Corpus,’ he said, a clear but mysterious emphasis on the word ‘drawing’.

  ‘Nude?’ I said.

  ‘I find it easier,’ Peter said, and gave a smile that seemed to count on my admiration and perhaps to take pleasure in shocking me a little. I saw that to him it was an advantage to be free of the traps of college life. In his digs at the far end of Walton Street he had no chance of meeting David Sparsholt in the bathroom. There was none of the deadliness of waiting and spying or the fateful flutter of a chance encounter in the quad. I said,

  ‘And you know he has his fiancée to take care of.’

  Peter snuffled slightly, as if trusting this was a joke. ‘Sparsholt, you mean?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, with a shake of the head. ‘He told me all about it.’

  He reflected for a moment. ‘It’s rather sweet,’ he said, ‘in its way. But it won’t last.’

  ‘They mean to get married quite soon,’ I said.

  He glanced again at the letter, and then tucked it away in his big tweed jacket, the pocket thick with what looked like other letters. ‘I’ve got a pretty good hunch that she doesn’t understand his true nature.’

  ‘Well, you may be right,’ I said.

  ‘What’s her name, anyway?’

  ‘That I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but I’ve told him I’d like to meet her.’

  ‘Have you?’ said Peter, more distracted than resentful. The fact that I’d told a lie intrigued me and should perhaps have alarmed me. I’d conceived a blurred involuntary image of the fiancée, as one does of anyone spoken of but unknown. There was still everything to find out. Peter had the pride as well as the charm of a rake, and with it the rake’s ability to dismiss with contempt anyone who resisted him. I wasn’t sure now if I’d sharpened his interest in David, or unwittingly encouraged him to write him off.

  4

  Evert’s rooms were on the far side of College, and unlike mine looked outwards – not exactly at the world, but at the Meadow, with its grazing cows and misty distances. On the gravel walk below his window cadets were drilled and couples strolled, and up the long lime avenue beyond, the rowing eights of half the university would trail home from the river in the dusk. In those days the building he lived in was thought a Victorian eyesore; for me the stone stairs and Gothic windows stirred chilly memories of being at school. To put his mark on his rooms, Evert was already buying pictures, a colour print of a Whistler nocturne, a drawing of Windsor Castle, apparently on fire, by Peter Coyle, a little Sickert drawing and a few other things from home. Victor Dax was a collector, and had what Evert said were important paintings by Derain and Chagall. He had given Evert an etching of a large-bosomed nude by Anders Zorn, which drew odd chuckles from his scout. I felt myself it was a funny thing for a father to have given his son, but I saw there was a certain contempt for convention in much of Victor’s behaviour, and in this case perhaps a touch of wishful thinking.

  ‘Come and have a Camp,’ Evert said, as we jostled together on our way out of Hall a few days later. ‘I haven’t seen you for quite some time’ – with an odd smile: I don’t know if he thought I’d been seeing Sparsholt again. I said,

  ‘I’ve been stopping in Woodstock for a night or two – helping the old aunt I told you about to get settled in.’ I noticed again that my aunt meant little to him, and after a glance at him I thought I would say no more about her. As a fiction she was almost too successful – she escaped detection entirely. We made our way out into the quad, by the twitching light of his taped-over torch, which picked disorienting doorways and steps out of the near-dark. The narrow space behind his building, black-walled and cobbled like a stable yard, reached upward to gables barely darker than the sky.

  His sitting room was doubly gloomy in the blackout, with stifling curtains of some heavy, crudely dyed material that stained your hands if you closed them yourself; they gave off a dim odour of tennis nets, at first pleasant, but over time oppressive. This evening, as I knew but Evert didn’t, Sparsholt was having his first sitting with Peter – I’d noticed his preoccupied look, as we left Hall. The meeting was to happen in Sparsholt’s rooms, behind those tight-closed shutters, and no doubt behind a sported oak. It had the secrecy of an assignation, and I couldn’t help wondering, as Evert doled out drops of Essence into our two cups, just how far it would go. A head and shoulders only, surely, in this first session, which would after all be the first time they had met. Would Peter be patient enough for the long game? I took it from the start that his aim was seduction, and found myself incoherently believing he might pull it off, where poor Evert surely had no chance.

  Evert, it turned out, had made his own small advances. He’d gone down to the river, and trailed along the towpath in the drizzle as the Brasenose Eight streaked past in one direction and then streaked back again. He had managed to be just by the College barge when the boat came in to the landing deck, but he’d fluffed things; his attempt at a surprised greeting over the heads of the crew had gone completely unnoticed. I said why didn’t he do something more straightforward, ask Sparsholt out for a pint at the Bear one evening, or one of the little pubs in St Ebbe’s if he wanted to be more private? It seemed this was a bit too straightforward for him as yet. He said he didn’t know whether Sparsholt drank.

  ‘Ah, you’ve got a new picture,’ I said, and got up to look at it. ‘Hmmm . . .’ It hung over his desk, a small oil painting in a dark frame – I guessed it was an abstract work, though I saw it as a landscape, simplified to stripes of white, green and grey. ‘What is it, exactly?’

  Evert half-warmed to the subject – I thought he said at first Peter had painted it. ‘Not Coyle, Goyle,’ he said: ‘Stanley Goyle. The names are more alike than their work.’

  ‘Well, I thought . . .’ I said hastily. ‘He’s someone you’ve discovered?’

  Evert clearly liked the idea of this, but said, ‘Oh, he’s quite well known.’ He’d found a man in Summertown who sold pictures – he had several of Stanley Goyle’s, and hoped, when his father’s allowance came through next month, to buy a second one off him. He said he’d paid twenty-five pounds for it, which seemed a lot to me. ‘It’s a Pembrokeshire scene, of course.’ We examined it together, but I saw that he couldn’t be distracted by it, or the pleasure it brought, for more than a minute.

  His thoughts now were focused on the weekend after next, and on the fire-watching duties we all had to do. These entailed staying up all night with a colleague in the Bell Tower, taking it in turns to stand around on the roof, looking out for incendiary devices or other activity. We all had the roster two weeks in advance, and the pairings were deliberately mixed. As it happened, I was due to be doing it on the Friday with Barrett, another Brasenose man, whom I barely knew. Evert was down for the Sunday, with someone I’ve entirely forgotten. But in between these two dates, on the Saturday night, the name of D. D. Sparsholt appeared, coupled, amusingly, with C. Farmonger – Charlie took a very dim view of his friends’ obsession with this freshman.

  ‘I wonder what they’ll talk about,’ I said.

  ‘They won’t talk about anything,’ said Evert pertly – but he coloured as he went on: ‘I’ve done a swap with Charlie. I’m going to fire-watch with Sparsholt – with David.’

  ‘And how will you explain the change?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve got to do something else on Sunday,’ said Evert.

  ‘I see. Well, you’ll have a decent chance to get to know each other.’

  ‘We’ll spend the night together,’ sa
id Evert, and the prospect of it seemed to haunt his smile. He poured the boiling water into the cups.

  ‘There could be some very colourful activity,’ I said. The Blitz was still raging, and we were only fifty miles from London. ‘How are your parents?’

  They seemed to preoccupy him less now that Sparsholt was the focus of his worries. ‘My father’s sent my mother off to Wales.’

  ‘You mean, to join your sister?’ – I knew that the beautiful Alex had been sent to her aunt in Tenby earlier in the year. At that time I had yet to visit Cranley Gardens, but it seemed from what Evert said that things there were on a generous scale. ‘So your father’s alone in the house?’

  ‘He has Herta for company.’

  ‘Of course. I hope to meet Herta one day.’

  ‘You might get round her, I suppose,’ said Evert, looking at me consideringly, ‘though few people do.’

  ‘And aren’t you worried about your own things at home?’

  ‘I don’t have many things, really. Most of my books are here. My father’s put all the valuable pictures in the cellar.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t supposed to do that. The firemen’s hoses ruin everything at the bottom of a house.’

  ‘Oh, has he got it the wrong way round?’ said Evert. ‘Still, water does less harm than fire, surely.’ He got up to search through the records stacked beside the bookcase. Most of us at that time were in a rut with records, having few of them and playing them over and over. What he picked out was something wantonly emotional by Tchaikovsky; after four and a half minutes his mood had been worked up effectively. He turned the record over, stood with the small fire smouldering in the grate behind him. ‘God, I wonder what Sparsholt’s doing now,’ he said, throwing out his arms as the brass came in with some fateful motif.

  ‘Yes, I wonder.’

  ‘Do you honestly think Coyle’s interested in him at all?’

  My silence now seemed more culpable than it had before. ‘Oh, Coyle’s interested in a hundred people,’ I said. ‘Even if he is, it won’t last long.’ I felt Evert saw my real meaning – he stared at me and then looked away, so that something seemed to have come between us. The orchestra surged and ebbed.

  ‘I think I’d like to be an artist,’ he said, after a bit.

  ‘I’ve a suspicion,’ I said, ‘that artists don’t have nearly as much fun as they like us to imagine.’ But I could see that in Evert’s mind they had an infinite freedom.

  As it happened, I ran into Peter in Blackwell’s the next morning. He was with a dark young man he seemed reluctant to introduce – I wondered if he even knew his name. ‘I’m Freddie Green,’ I said. ‘Oh, George Chalmers,’ said the stranger, and we shook hands. Peter looked vaguely irritated. ‘How did it go with Sparsholt?’ I said.

  ‘What, last night, you mean?’ – he peered dimly, as if at a much more distant memory. ‘I wasn’t there very long.’

  ‘But you did a drawing?’

  ‘Just a quick sketch or two, you know.’

  ‘And how did you get on with him?’

  ‘I wasn’t really in the mood, Freddie,’ said Peter. ‘Sometimes it just doesn’t happen.’ He smiled at George Chalmers, who was perhaps his next sitter.

  I went on, ‘What on earth did you find to talk about?’

  Peter looked at me rather oddly. ‘If you must know, we talked about you. He doesn’t know what to make of you.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, both amused and very slightly wounded, ‘I thought I was nice to him.’

  ‘No, no, he said you were. He’s probably just not used to your style. He’s from Nuneaton.’

  ‘Oh . . . yes.’ There was something null about it, as a fact, though the only fact I knew about Nuneaton was that George Eliot also came from there.

  ‘Well, we must press on,’ said Peter, and led his silent model, if that’s what he was, out of the shop. In fact George Chalmers must have spoken, because I heard Peter saying quite sharply, ‘No, he’s not,’ as they stepped into the street.

  5

  There were now enough of us going out from Oxford to Woodstock for a special bus to be laid on – it picked us up in St Giles’: filers and typists, who’d been billeted in Keble College, a small body of students which expanded in intriguing ways, and half a dozen dons, linguists mainly, who had not already joined up. We trundled out the five or six miles through the autumn countryside, as if on an excursion away from the War; though once we turned in through the gates of the Palace we found a scene disfigured with the guard huts, Nissen huts and paraphernalia of a wartime base. I was there for two or three days a week, and was often back in College quite late. As a result I saw Evert less, and was so busy with other and, on the whole, graver secrets that I rather forgot about the Sparsholt thing.

  I came up the stairs one evening about nine o’clock, and bumped into Evert coming down. ‘Oh, thank God,’ he said.

  ‘Come and have a drink.’ He followed me back into the room. ‘How are you?’

  He stood and gazed at me with a remote smile, as if it should have been obvious. He was wearing a finely cut suit, as usual, with a soft blue cravat at the throat; he seemed to have put on quite a lot of some rather florid scent. He also looked as if he hadn’t slept for days. ‘Oh, Fred,’ he said, ‘you’re the only person I can really talk to. Most people would be horrified, or disgusted, but you understand.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, cautiously, ‘I don’t know.’ I made him sit down, and poured him a glass of port. ‘So much of that sort of thing went on at school it would seem very odd to me if it suddenly stopped at Oxford – especially now, you know, with things in such a muddle and no one knowing what’s round the corner.’

  ‘I couldn’t bear it any longer,’ he said, ‘I can’t think, I can’t do any work. Garvey gave me hell over my Dryden essay.’

  ‘All because of Sparsholt,’ I said.

  ‘I even wrote him a poem, and left it in his pigeonhole.’

  ‘Garvey’s . . . ?’

  ‘David’s, of course.’

  ‘And what did he say about that?’

  ‘I went back a few minutes later and took it out again.’

  ‘Not good enough,’ I said sternly.

  ‘It was a beautiful poem.’

  ‘I mean, you’ve got to do something, Evert – at least get to know him a bit.’ And when you do, I thought, you’ll see he’s not worth all this trouble.

  Evert sipped his port and stared at the carpet. ‘I just have done something – I’ve just been to his rooms.’

  I sat down too, and Evert stretched out on my little sofa, looking away from me, like an analyst’s patient. The narration that followed was pained and hesitant, and he seemed to run away several times from his own decision to tell the story. But I give it here as I summarized it later that night in my diary, which even now makes me hear particular phrases in his soft deep voice. With the blackout he had been unable to tell from the quad if Sparsholt was in. He had gone upstairs very quietly, two at a time, and found that his oak was open, and stood there for some minutes listening and hardly daring to breathe. He believed he could hear an occasional sound. I said had it been rhythmical creaking? Evert said no, and I couldn’t tell if he smiled. It was perhaps ‘like someone turning the pages of a book’. He remained there in the dark for five minutes or more, but simply couldn’t bring himself to knock. There was only a little light leaking out under the door. ‘It was quite an eerie feeling to be so close to him, without him knowing.’

  I couldn’t help feeling it would have been more eerie for Sparsholt, had he found out. I said, ‘You didn’t stoop to peering through the keyhole.’

  ‘Of course I stooped, but the thing was down on the other side.’

  ‘Do tell me you knocked in the end.’

  ‘I did,’ said Evert, pausing to drink and nod ruefully at the recollection. But there had been no reply. He waited for a while, then knocked again. Whatever the noise was that he thought he could hear had stopped, but he didn’t know if he
had been imagining it, or if Sparsholt was sitting just feet away pretending not to be there. So with sudden decisiveness Evert turned the handle and went in. There he was at last in the room of the loved one in all its unguarded ordinariness. No one was there but he had the strange sensation that the room itself was staring at him, as at a man who was taking advantage of another’s innocence. At the same time he was giving the disappointing contents of the room – the few books, the Ladbroke’s calendar, the commoner’s gown that hung beneath a Boat Club cap on a hook – the most tender and generous appraisal they can ever have received. Next to the desk some barbells and Swedish clubs were placed against the wall. There was a fire in, and Sparsholt had got in some logs, which Evert saw must have been the noise he’d heard. They were crackling behind the old wire fireguard. It was warm in there, and of course with the shutters closed and the curtains pulled across it was quite snug; it had the emptiness of a room which seems to expect any moment the footsteps of its owner on the stairs below. The door was open into the unlit bedroom, and Evert drifted towards it and looked in, and had hardly taken a step inside when there was a sudden rustling noise in the shadows and a voice said, ‘Oh, hello!’

  The feeling of being caught was disastrous, it meant the scandalous exposure of his desires. He hardly knew what he said, as he backed away into the sitting room, apologizing for waking him, and watching fearfully as Sparsholt got off the bed and came towards him into the light – and it wasn’t him. Evert stared and laughed. He thought for a second he must have gone into the wrong room, that all the drama of waiting had been an absurd waste of time and anxious emotion, and that the barbells and the cap and the books on dynamics were mere effects in some bewildering coincidence. But no, he was sure, it was Sparsholt’s room, his bedroom, but with another man in it.