Alan Hollinghurst - The Sparsholt Affair

‘Just as well,’ said Jill, with a chuckle, but she coloured, perhaps the more so under Peter’s scrutiny. She had a way of facing down her embarrassments – it was less embarrassing than letting them creep in and confuse her further. ‘The Greeks were sex-mad,’ she said firmly.

‘Weren’t they just!’ said Peter.

‘I don’t suppose the Greeks carried on like that all the time,’ I said, rather rattled myself to be talking about sex in Jill’s presence. It was just the sort of awkwardness Peter liked to bring about. I recalled that even the Burgon Collection, mere watercolours of ancient objects, with descriptive captions, had caused Jill discomfort: ‘ Three nude men dancing ,’ she said to me once – ‘oh dear!’

Peter didn’t explain why he’d come, and I guessed it was something even he was too delicate to mention in Jill’s company. I was anxious Jill’s portrait might be more like a caricature; but felt shy about going round and checking his progress. I made some nervously genial remark about the problems of drawing from life and when there was another firm knock at the door I jumped up quickly to see who it was. To my surprise David Sparsholt was standing there, in cap and greatcoat, and with a formal but distracted look. ‘Oh . . . hello,’ I said, with a small bored feeling that he’d got the wrong idea, and that I, the mere duenna in Evert’s courtship, had become the object of his devotion instead. ‘Who is it?’ called Peter over his shoulder. I saw Sparsholt glance past me into the room. ‘It’s David Sparsholt,’ I said. ‘Come in, Sparsholt, old man!’ said Peter, his surprise absorbed at once in the prospect of mischief; at which point I ushered him into the room.

Peter seemed quite tickled to see him, but kept steadily at work; Jill, still wary of moving, turned her head a little when he was introduced. Each knew something about the other, since Jill had been there on that evening in first week when we’d watched him half-naked across the quad; and David of course had coaxed certain romantic claims about her from me. So they each had the gleam of being in on a secret, or a joke – which was possibly disconcerting to the other. It was clear from David’s bland politeness, as if to some old lady don, that he could never have fancied her himself. He pulled off his cap and gripped it in his hands throughout his brief visit.

‘And what can I do for you?’ I said. There was an idea (though we all showed how ready we were to overlook it) that it was odd of him to have dropped in like this on his elders.

‘Am I interrupting you?’ he said.

‘Well, hardly’ – I gestured at the sitting in progress, both artist and subject curious about the interrupter. It was clear that he wanted something, and had come to get it, but like Peter before him was inhibited by Jill. But then Peter too made him uncomfortable; he surely remembered their own sessions together, which I pictured like some regretted seduction never to be repeated. I also thought of the red chalk nude rolled up in the drawer in my bedroom. He looked over our heads, as if to far more important matters.

‘I was wondering if you’d seen Mr Dax,’ he said, the ‘Mr’ jocular but chilly too.

‘How is Evert?’ said Peter, mockery compressed in his frown at Jill.

‘I haven’t seen him for a day or two,’ I said, ‘but I’ve been in the country, you know.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said David, with a momentary smile. This was what we had now been told to call our activities at Blenheim Palace.

‘Shall I pass on a message,’ said Peter, ‘if I see him?’

David paced to the window, where he stood and seemed to take in for the first time its relation to his own window, up under the pediment on the far side of the quad. Was a tremor of suspicion a part of his quick bracing movement, the shoulders thrown back, furled cap smacked softly in his palm as a colonel might have done with his gloves? ‘No, it’s not that important,’ he said.

Peter’s concentration darkened on the pad and the chalk and his sharp glances at his subject seemed slightly overdone. ‘And how is your fiancée?’ he said.

‘She’s all right,’ said David. ‘She’s had to go back home for a few days. Her uncle was killed in the air raid last week.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Peter, ‘so you’re all alone for a bit’ – calculating as much as condoling, it seemed to me. I said,

‘I’m sorry to hear that. And she’ll miss Evert’s father’s talk tomorrow.’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ David said, with reasonable curtness.

Jill was plainly surprised by how well we all seemed to know each other, and turned a page of her book with the stiff look of someone left out of a game.

‘I’m not happy with it,’ Peter said. ‘Jill darling, I’m going to try again, next week.’ He put his things away without letting us see what he’d done, and left abruptly, like someone who has been offended, though no doubt he merely had an assignation elsewhere. Something told me that David no longer mattered to him, and David as ever barely said goodbye to him.

Jill peered round and then stood up, as if slowly coming back to normality from a spiritual experience of some kind – an unusual look for her. She bent her attention graciously on David. ‘It’s strangely tiring, posing,’ she said.

‘You were only posing for ten minutes, dear,’ I said.

‘But I imagine you’ve had your portrait done’ – her remarks were all for him.

He turned and smiled: ‘Yes, I have,’ though his pride in the fact was somehow compromised. I sensed he didn’t want Jill to know that Peter had done him too.

‘I hope you were painted in uniform?’ she said, jutting her chin and as it were inspecting him, from bright boots to curly crown.

‘No – no, I’m not in uniform yet, in fact,’ said David, and glanced at me with a breath of a laugh. ‘And anyway it was just a drawing.’

Jill kept smiling, in a rather fixated way. ‘I’d very much like to see it,’ she said. I think I coloured now myself – it was almost as though she knew I had it.

‘I’m not sure – oh . . .’ – this third knock at the door had the signature of farce, but it was only Phil, come to fix the blackout. As always at dusk he edged in to the room half-concealed by the oblong screen for my bedroom window, steered it through the further door and installed it first of all. The dusk itself had crept forward two hours since the start of the term, and made me wonder, in a bleak sideways thought, what progress I had made in my own affairs in that time. It was only when Phil came back that he noticed who was in the room; he busied himself with the fire with the look of someone withholding criticism. ‘Oh, excuse me,’ he said, almost brusquely, as he went to the window and David, absorbed again in the view of the quad outside, seemed to wake up, and got out of the way. It was Phil of course who’d first told us about Sparsholt, that there had been some trouble, the rhythmical creaking a problem in itself but also perhaps a signal of further problems he had no wish to mention. Who knew what the scouts talked of, in their stark little pantries under the stairs, where they visited each other and drank tea? Phil would never have been openly rude, but there were times when a frustrated wish to sort us all out would darken his features. He heaped all the tea-things on the tray and left the room.

It felt to me high time that Sparsholt went too, but Jill was holding him there with a seductive intent she had never shown to me. It seemed the little hints of closeness she’d shown me when she arrived had been merely provisional, and had now fastened on to a worthier subject. I suppose the truth was I’d never till then thought she had desires. I said something to remind her the future Mrs Sparsholt had only gone out of town for a day or two; but it had no effect. She even said she’d love to meet her.