Alan Hollinghurst - The Sparsholt Affair

Eduard smiled and nodded at the portrait before he half-hid it, as if underwater, in bubble-wrap, then hid it wholly in a second glistening layer: ‘Is Bella’ – his recognition not for the work of art but for its subject, a celebrity. Millions were on first-name terms with this woman they’d never met. Johnny had a mental glimpse of the hundreds and hundreds of pictures Eduard spent his days wrapping and packing, taping and boxing, with the professional pride and personal indifference of a security guard. Well, sometimes perhaps he liked one picture more than another, but Johnny’s instincts towards him were so tender and disproportionate he kept off the subject of art. It killed his interest if a man said something stupid about a picture. In a minute they angled the package out together, with quick clenches and grunts, giver and receiver, to the van. Johnny signed the manifest, and was handed the third pink under-copy, barely legible, his signature not visible at all. And then Eduard was gone, Johnny went back indoors, and stood holding and folding the piece of paper, in a room that was doubly empty, of the large expensive portrait and the priceless warm young man.

Lucy came at lunchtime, her keen-eyed commitment to keeping her engagement made clearer by the number of other things she was evidently holding off – she dealt with a string of intrusive texts, saying, ‘Sorry, Daddy . . .’ but sounding nearly annoyed with him for putting her in this position, on a busy day in a hectic week. ‘I’m going to turn the thing off,’ she said, as they went through into the studio.

‘OK,’ said Johnny mildly.

She sat in the chair, shook her shoulders, shutting things out. ‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ she said.

He smiled, raised his eyebrows. ‘I got married once, you know.’

‘True,’ she said, straightening herself, her mother’s prompt distance from her own careless remarks. ‘You did. But not in York Minster, I think.’

Johnny squeezed out the third of the colours that made up her hair, a little duck-shit squirt on the palette. ‘You’re right, Chelsea Town Hall was good enough for us.’

‘I think Ollie would be happy with that too,’ said Lucy.

‘And what about you?’

‘Oh, I’ve come round to doing it in the grand style.’

‘Indeed . . .’ said Johnny, quickly abstracted as she settled, and to help her negotiate the first invisible fence of a face-to-face sitting, the unsocial staring at one another. Within a minute or two she would transmute into a subject, while to her he would be something more ambiguous, a quietly busy peeper and gazer licensed by work and practice. It was the third time he’d painted her, and the lessons for both of them changed.

‘Talking of style,’ she said a little later.

‘Oh, yes . . . ?’

‘Mummy said to ask if you’ve got your suit ordered.’

Johnny peered, tongue on lip, as he brought up the gilt swerve of the hair behind her right ear. She had very well looked-after hair. ‘You don’t want old man Steptoe marching you up the aisle.’

‘Mm?’

‘Or rather up the nave.’

‘Aisle? – well, you would know,’ she said. ‘But you are going to make an extra effort, aren’t you.’

‘I am.’

‘Top hats too.’

He clenched his jaw. ‘I don’t know about top hats.’

‘Oh, Daddy.’

‘Well, I will if your mother does.’

She laughed semi-humorously. To Johnny the hunger for a wedding, a ‘society’ wedding, was a mystery, people of all ages decked up in beaming submission and acclaim of a union between two young people they barely knew, everyone in disguise, though something loutish broke out now and then among the ushers and the uncles. At Chelsea he and Pat had had ten guests, both groom and groom were in their fifties, and the event was no less heartfelt for the element of irony and surprise that ran all through it.

He heard the key in the front door, and saw Lucy absorb his lack of concern, as footsteps passed down the hall and then a noise of running water came from the kitchen. ‘Your cleaner,’ she said.

Johnny smiled but said nothing, waited to hear what would happen next; the footsteps came back, there was a tap at the door – ‘Hi’ as he came in.

‘Sorry . . .’

‘No, come in, Zé. Zé, this is my daughter Lucy.’

‘Hello,’ said Lucy firmly, with a little break of her pose, and a sense of her own pleasantness in talking socially to staff. ‘Zé?’

‘Zé – José. How you do?’

‘Well, as you can see . . .’ said Lucy.

‘I heard a lot about you.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘Johnny talk about you. You getting married.’

‘Yes, that’s absolutely right,’ said Lucy.

Johnny looked across from the canvas at him: could he see him as Lucy saw him, without intimacy, without interest? He smiled and Zé came close for a moment, examined the picture and the sitter in rapid comparison (always a tease to the sitter), then kissed Johnny on the cheek, out of pride it seemed.

*

Johnny thought they might all have lunch, but she only had the ninety minutes for him today. ‘Well, nice to meet you,’ said Zé, going upstairs, he must have thought tactfully, to leave father and daughter alone in the hall.

‘Thanks so much, dear Daddy,’ said Lucy. ‘See you in York!’

‘Oh, darling . . .’ He hugged her, lovely scent of this creature known in a way, but at once with the reasserted push of independence. They heard the door close above.

‘And, you know . . . if you want to bring . . . José .’

Johnny nodded. ‘Well, I’m sure he’d love it’ – more, probably, than he would love it himself. He smiled at her.

‘Let me know, you know, for the seating.’ She looked him in the face, differently now, with no easel between them. ‘He’s rather a find.’

‘Ah,’ said Johnny. ‘Yes, you could say that.’

He saw her off at the door, and when he looked out five minutes later she was still there, sitting in the car, talking on the phone to someone he almost certainly didn’t know. Now and then she ran her hand through her hair, a gesture of self-assertion, of controlled impatience not seen but felt perhaps at the other end of the line. When she turned her head suddenly he wasn’t sure if she saw him watching. He went back into the studio, capped the paint-tubes and peered with familiar yearning and dissatisfaction at the portrait, the eyes the blue-grey (he saw it at last) of her dead grandfather’s, the lips, redone, still wet and workable.

THE SPARSHOLT AFFAIR

ALAN HOLLINGHURST is the author of five previous novels, The Swimming-Pool Library , The Folding Star , The Spell , The Line of Beauty (winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize) and The Stranger’s Child . He lives in London.

ALSO BY ALAN HOLLINGHURST

The Swimming-Pool Library

The Folding Star

The Spell

The Line of Beauty

The Stranger’s Child

First published 2017 by Picador

This electronic edition published 2017 by Picador

an imprint of Pan Macmillan

20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

Associated companies throughout the world

www.panmacmillan.com

ISBN 978-1-4472-1145-7

Copyright © Alan Hollinghurst 2017

Cover photograph: Jeff Cottenden

Author photograph © Robert Taylor

The right of Alan Hollinghurst to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.