Alan Hollinghurst - The Sparsholt Affair

Evert said nothing, but gazed at the cornice, still with his provoking hint of a smile. He said, ‘The question is not who it’s from but what the person who sent it means by it.’

‘I feel to know that one would have to know who the sender was. It might be, as you say, scientific, it might be religious, it might be, well, some other kind of symbol.’

‘It’s from him, Freddie – from Drum.’

‘Drum is it now?’ He stared ahead. ‘In that case not religious, I think.’

Evert laughed briefly at my tone but he trembled, or rather a single shiver passed through him, before he said quietly, ‘I spent last night with him. This was in my pigeonhole at ten o’clock this morning.’

This was a mad way of speaking, and I treated it lightly. ‘You spent the night.’

‘I had him,’ said Evert.

I was never a bit rattled by the sexual anecdotes of my friends but I may have shown that on this occasion I was shocked. Shock no doubt was part of the effect he was aiming for, the shock of the fact and of the brutal little phrase; I think he was startled by it himself. I felt the burn of something darkly secret, even wicked, and I hid the stiffness of my features by returning to the window and gazing down into the quad, as my tutor did when pursuing a complex argument. I saw that likewise I had to test what Evert had said. It was something Peter Coyle threw out once a week – ‘I had him’: but quite what this ‘having’ was one never knew, and hardly liked to ask. Nor could I ask now. I said, ‘What about Connie? It simply doesn’t make sense.’

‘Connie’s gone home for a couple of nights for her uncle’s funeral. And anyway, there’s a side of Drum that doesn’t make sense.’

‘Well, no doubt—’

‘I mean he doesn’t make sense in the sense that you mean sense.’ There was something tryingly riddling about Evert today, a mixture of defiance and anxiety. But he was probably right. I thought of Sparsholt’s unexpected visit to my rooms the day before, and the question he’d asked, almost reluctantly, as to where Evert was. And now I glimpsed, with a wary curiosity close to envy, the two of them together. It wasn’t envy for Evert’s act, however I pictured it, that troubled me, but for his having acted. His body held a knowledge that could neither be expressed nor forgotten, but which invested it, in my young eyes, with the indefinable aura of experience.

I’m not sure if I provoked him into telling me the story, or if he was set on doing it anyway. He seemed still astounded himself that it had happened, that love had flowered in this unlikeliest of places. He wanted to get it clear, and I felt that what I was hearing was the primary text: it would be no good deciding later on that something different had been said or done. I don’t rule out to this day that he may have exaggerated certain points; and I sensed a strange relish that his victory over Sparsholt was a victory over me, of whom he had long been pointlessly jealous. But I saw even so that I was the recipient of the essential truth. Again I give the story as he let me see it.

*

During Hall the previous night they had twice caught each other’s eye: the first time, David looked instantly away, but the second time there was the flicker of an eyebrow and suppression of a smile as he turned his head to speak to his neighbour, and Evert believed that over the following minute David was conscious of him, and that something had not only been acknowledged but promised. Something tiny, no doubt – it was the frail first chapter of a friendship, that might still be screwed up and thrown away without much sense of loss on David’s part. But that they were friends, since their evening in the pub, was surely beyond question. When they stood for grace there was no more than a glance before the bowing of the head – but it now felt to Evert inevitable that on the stairs outside, as they made their way down in the dark like so many fireflies, a hand should grip his elbow and a light flash upwards on the face beside his own. He looked devilish like that, and still gleamed on the eye in the darkness half a minute later, when he could barely be made out in fact; though it wasn’t at all clear what was happening, and neither of them said a word till they were out in the quad, where they would normally have turned in opposite directions. The blackout was no place for polite indecision – in a moment Evert might have lost him. He knew that the grip, and the flash of the torch, might be no more than childish clowning; he foresaw the scene of misunderstanding, the mortified return to his own room, alone; but his pounding heart made him walk on beside David, and then quite accidentally he stumbled against him in the dark – he felt his strong hand grab at him again and steady him. ‘All right there, Evert?’ he said, with a quick laugh; and then, in a very flat voice, in which all the things he would rather have done seemed to loom and die, ‘So what are you doing tonight?’

‘Oh . . . nothing,’ said Evert, with a half-glimpsed image of Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle, the subjects of this week’s essay, tumbling into a dark chasm, where Dryden’s plays and the Life of Johnson already lay abandoned.

‘You don’t fancy a pint, later on?’ And now it was all the other men David might have gone drinking with that Evert pictured, in a shadowy crowd.

‘Oh, well, yes – if you like,’ he said, sounding nearly reluctant with excitement. It was the question he’d failed to ask a dozen times himself, and he thought he detected a slight airy nervousness in David, as if he too had rehearsed it. But he kept his head. ‘Will Connie be joining us?’

‘No . . . no, she’s gone home for a couple of nights. Her uncle’s been killed.’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ said Evert – and in his happiness he almost was sorry for her, in a generous overspill of feelings. Though of course what this meant was that David simply needed someone to fill the time with: no doubt this peculiar second-year man who seemed to quite like him would do as well as any. Evert’s job, very likely, would be to condole with him on Connie’s absence, and to say repeatedly what a great girl she was. ‘What time would suit you?’ he said.

‘I expect you’re too busy,’ said David.

‘No, no – really,’ said Evert.

‘Then what about eight?’

‘Yes, perfect.’ There was something in him that seized on this forty-five minutes’ reprieve, and he went to his room and paced back and forth, glancing at his watch and thinking by turns it had stopped or was running fast.

When he went down to the Tom Gate, David was already waiting, and sounded impatient. ‘Do you want to go to the Marlborough House?’ he said. Evert felt he might be regretting his invitation.

‘Wherever you like,’ he said amiably, though his heart was racing. A smooth remoteness of manner covered him sometimes, the trance of tension. It was a ten-minute walk to the Marlborough, over Folly Bridge and away from the centre of town, into a part where fewer students went. He felt David had chosen it because he wanted to be alone with him; and it was only once they’d set off down St Aldate’s that he saw it was just as likely he didn’t want his rowing friends to see them together. Well, perhaps both things were true. ‘Good to get some exercise,’ he said.

‘If you call this exercise,’ said David – in the dark it was hard to tell if he was teasing. Evert felt already his humour was a thing of situations more than tones, and that irony might nettle him if it didn’t elude him altogether.

‘Not to you, of course,’ said Evert firmly, and rubbed shoulders with him for a step or two. He knew that he was older, and much more sophisticated, but he’d surrendered so much in advance to the figure beside him that it was hard to remember they were barely friends. He saw the heavy disproportion in their feelings for each other, but was too light-headed to worry about it. Surely both of them felt the novelty of their first walk alone together. They heard the far-off drone of planes passing high up to the west, and David grunted and looked skyward. The moon, nearly full, was hidden by the high walls of the College as they went downhill, and disappeared behind cloud as they approached the river. He seemed to Evert both uneasy and determined.