Alan Hollinghurst - The Sparsholt Affair

‘Oh, he’s not sending me down,’ said David. ‘Don’t worry.’

‘Ah good,’ said Evert.

‘No, he says in view of the fact that I’m about to leave anyway, he doesn’t want to mess up my service career.’

‘Well, that’s a relief.’

‘And of course the fact that we’re engaged, which must make a difference.’

‘Yes . . .’

In the pause that followed, while David nodded and then drank and set down his glass, it was as though there were no problem after all. ‘No,’ said David, ‘but he is going to fine me.’

‘Oh, well . . .’ said Evert, and thought he sounded too careless. ‘A lot?’

‘Twenty quid,’ said David.

Evert winced sympathetically. ‘ Quite a lot.’ It was exactly what he was going to pay his North Oxford contact for a second little landscape by Stanley Goyle – in another two weeks, when his December allowance from his father came through. ‘Can you manage?’

David flung himself back in his chair, in a gesture of defeat that was also a kind of display. He showed his wounded magnificence, his sweater tight across his chest as he spread his arms and shrugged. And he looked directly at Evert, with the perfect blankness of someone calculating a move. ‘I can’t ask my parents, of course’ – he gave a curt laugh, and now his look at Evert seemed faintly accusing.

‘I can see that might be difficult.’

‘I mean, they’re very strict – you know what parents are.’

‘Yes,’ said Evert kindly. He thought his own father, though he’d complain about it, would be hugely relieved to hear that he’d had a woman in his room. David sighed deeply, and slid further down in his chair, in a strange abandonment of his normal alertness; one leg pressed against Evert’s calf. ‘Will you be able to manage?’

‘I haven’t got it,’ said David, curtly. ‘We’ve got a bit put away, you know, for the wedding. But that’s untouchable.’

‘No, quite,’ said Evert.

‘That has to be untouchable.’

The word seemed to Evert oddly provoking. His eyes played over his friend in a stunned inventory of his merits. It was a reckless, sickening decision, that must be made briskly and completely. ‘Can’t I help you out?’ he said. David stared back at him, with respect, as well as the proper gloom of someone who must decline the offer they have just solicited.

‘I couldn’t accept,’ he said; but there was something else, as he sat up and leant forward, the dull glint of the tactician, to whom winning is everything.

‘I don’t have a lot of money,’ said Evert, ‘but I could probably lend you, you know . . . what you need . . . tomorrow.’

‘Really?’ said David. Now he seemed all anxious solicitude for him. ‘Isn’t it too much? It’s a hell of a lot. Well, that’s grand’ – sticking out a hand, to shake on it, in a way both gracious and inescapably businesslike. Before he let the hand go he jerked Evert forward, flung his other arm round him and hugged him; did he even kiss his ear? – clumsily spontaneous, it was too as if he’d found a moment to do something long planned. Or so Evert was to feel the next day. ‘You’re a real friend.’ And he sat back, manly and capable again, staring at the table as at the barely doubted outcome of a daring act: he seemed to see his rightful future given back to him.

With the third pint they moved away from the fine and the loan, though the question still gaped darkly for Evert. The beer carried them along for the moment. ‘So tell me more about your family,’ said David, a diplomatic new line. And for a minute or two Evert did so, but stumbling and exaggerating out of worry that he wouldn’t find them interesting. David nodded and gave occasional small smiles of recognition. His question was (Evert sensed it already) the inattentive politeness of a man who still wanted mainly to talk about himself, or who had not yet quite learned the art of conversation. Evert said how his sister was living in Tenby with their mother.

‘Is she pretty?’ David wanted to know.

‘Yes, she is,’ said Evert, ‘well, they both are!’ – annoyed by his mechanical interest in Alex instead of himself.

‘Perhaps she’ll come and visit you,’ said David.

‘You can meet her if she does,’ said Evert. ‘If you’re still here.’

‘Ah . . . well!’ said David, and nodded over his pint at the justice of the remark. ‘Anyhow, you’re not bad-looking yourself, you know.’

‘Well . . .’ said Evert, astonished, and grateful, but caught at once in the maze of impossible replies. David’s own beauty was the unspoken context, and of course his incalculable modesty and vanity shaded any such compliment. ‘As I say, my mother’s very pretty,’ he said.

‘There,’ said David, almost reproachfully, and for the first time, miraculously, he blushed.

It was on their brief walk back to College, in the barely penetrable dark, that the new possibility took shape, unseen, between them. That it couldn’t be happening, was only a possibility, gave it a kind of terror to Evert. The walk by the bickering river, that had been stiff and self-conscious on the way out, now was hurried along home on a giddy-making swirl of altered meanings. When David abruptly took his arm Evert stumbled to get into step – ‘Shape up!’ said David, and the unstated promise of the light grip and then squeeze of his elbow against David’s ribs had to struggle with the wild unlikeliness that anything further could happen. The white rings painted round tree trunks marked out their passage to the footbridge. Surely it was a mean and wicked game, to encourage a belief without putting it in words, ready to rebuff it if Evert dared to act on it. But not to dare would leave him with tormenting regret. Their element was the night and the unspoken, in all its queasy ambivalence. When they reached the great gateway and ducked through its small postern Evert’s pulse was bouncing in his ear. Then inside, with the vast unseen courtyard a mere intuition beyond them, he said, ‘I’ve got whisky in my room, if you’re on for another drink.’ There was something in him that hoped David would say no, and restore him to his accustomed state of unbreachable longing; but something else that made him smile in the face of the darkness when he said, ‘Yes, all right,’ and then, ‘Show me the way!’

Evert seemed to retain just a few impressions of what happened in the room. To him it raced with tension, and David himself showed a jocular unease as he hung up his coat and flung himself down in the armchair by the grey fire. Then he sprang forward, poked the embers gently to uncover them before he put on the last two pieces of coal from the box. They both watched the fire as if it were the most important thing in the world. Evert saw that the room, which he disliked, and its precious books and pictures, were not of the slightest interest to David.

He poured out a good inch of whisky, and offered water, which David rejected. There was something quite rough in his reach for reassurance, the stiff fix of alcohol. Evert hovered near the window, smiling like someone alone at a party. After a minute David sat forward to tug off his sweater, and barely looked round as he chucked it on the floor beside his chair. Evert stared at it, talking distractedly as he made his way slowly towards it. He picked it up, while discussing with elaborate pointlessness the essay he was meant to be writing, which itself was as pointless and remote as starlight when he held the warm homemade mass of the sweater, with its smells, soft or sharp, of David’s person against himself and then slowly folded it and set it on the table as if quite unaware he had done so. David’s look, his near-smile, tongue on lip, was mocking and as it lingered almost tenderly questioning. ‘You’re as bad as my Connie,’ he said – and the mention of her seemed to reassure him, and to clarify perhaps his sense of whatever it was he was doing now. He slid forward in his chair, head thrown back, boots straight out across the hearthrug. Evert knew already how David took drink, and noted the way he mugged being drunker than he was. He saw for three seconds David was showing him a thing beyond speech, and looked away and back again in hot-faced excitement. Then David dropped his hand and covered himself loosely, as if Evert were indeed a pervert to peep at a man’s lap. In his other hand, flung out across the arm of the chair, the whisky glass was at an angle, only lightly held. ‘Careful . . .’ said Evert, and David, lifting his head, saw what he meant, and drank a slug of it as if swallowing a pill. Now his sly little smile had faded, the instinctive command of mere gesture became a scowl, as if something faintly unreasonable had been asked of him. ‘Well, we’ll have to have the light out,’ he said.