Alan Hollinghurst - The Sparsholt Affair

I explained to him about my condition, and my permanent exemption from military service; and as I did so I saw a first puzzlement in his eyes.

‘That’s bad luck,’ he said – but the condolence hid a murmur of mistrust. He looked narrowly at me, in my vest, and then perhaps took pity on me. He seemed to play, like other physically powerful men I’ve known, with a small, barely conscious, instinct to threaten, as well as to reassure and even to protect. ‘What will you do?’

‘Well, I’m doing the third year, history, you know, a full degree. Then we’ll see. Which service are you?’

He had his towel round his neck again now, his hands on his hips, feet apart. There was a careless glimpse of his sex in the open slit of his pyjamas. ‘Royal Air Force,’ he said, ‘yes, I’ll be learning to fly.’ His narrow smile was again slightly challenging.

‘Wonderful,’ I said. And sensing some further approval was due: ‘I can see you do a lot of exercise’ – not liking to say I’d watched him at it, and thinking even so I sounded rather eager; but he smiled acceptingly.

‘Well, you’ve got to be ready, haven’t you,’ he said. It was clear that the morbid uncertainty about the future that permeated most of our lives throughout these years had no effect on him. He was looking forward to it. ‘I’m eighteen in January – I’ll be signing up then.’ And he went through his plan for me, in the way that a person nagged by anxiety will, though in his case I saw only the purposeful alertness of the born soldier. I said I was surprised he’d bothered to come up to Oxford for just one term. But he’d got in, and after the War he would come back – he had that planned too. He would get a degree, and then he would go home again and set up a firm, an engineering business. ‘Well, they’ll always be in demand,’ he said.

The door of the occupied cubicle opened, and Das, the one Indian man in College, came out, wrapped in a towel and holding his glasses, which he was quickly wiping clean with a discarded sock. He looked with a kind of baffled keenness at Sparsholt, who had evidently encountered him before, and who took the opportunity to pull on his dressing gown and leave. ‘I hope I’ll bump into you again,’ I said, as I heard the thump of the door. Das, who had now got his glasses back on, looked almost accusingly at me.

‘Is that young gentleman your friend, Green?’ he said.

‘Mm?’ I said, but testing the new possibility, and my feelings about it.

‘He is like a Greek god!’

‘Oh, do you think . . . ?’

‘But arrogant, very much so.’

I rinsed my razor under the tap. ‘I rather imagine the Greek gods were too,’ I said. I began to see that Sparsholt’s effect might be larger than I’d thought.

3

When Evert came to my rooms a few days later he was in uniform again, but I had a feeling he was changing his mind about it. He drooped and sprawled mutinously as usual when muffled in the styleless khaki, but now and then he straightened up; he set his shoulders back when he stood in front of the fire, as if the soldier’s role might just be worth playing after all. ‘How’s Jill?’ he said.

‘Jill’s very well,’ I said.

‘You seem to be seeing quite a lot of her.’

In fact I hadn’t seen her since our night-time walk over the bridge to St Hilda’s, and my note in the college mail had got the cryptic reply ‘Henry III!’ – an essay crisis, I assumed. ‘I think we like each other,’ I said. Evert started to roam around. I’d left my diary open on my desk, and I saw it distract his attention for a moment as he spoke:

‘By the way, I took your advice about the bathroom.’

‘I don’t know that it was advice,’ I said.

He came and sat on the sofa. ‘Actually I thought I’d missed him, though I trekked over at first light. You notice how well I’ve shaved.’

‘I noticed a nick under your chin.’

‘That marks the moment when he finally emerged – he must have been in the bath for hours. He was just in a towel.’ Evert smiled painfully through his blush. He’d spoken to him, and it seemed they’d had a brief conversation. He said it had gone very well in fact, and sat rather solemnly picturing it all, before getting up again to glance out across the quad.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I hope Sparsholt won’t grow suspicious about these bathroom encounters.’

‘You mean, you feel it’s all right for you to encounter him, but not for anyone else?’ I saw this was actually my view about various matters. ‘You’re not interested in him anyway!’ said Evert; and then, quite suspicious for a second, ‘Or are you?’

I said, ‘I’ve developed an interest in him purely as the focus of your interest. Yours and Peter’s,’ I added, and watched him scowl. ‘I’m following the whole Sparsholt affair scientifically.’

‘I’d hardly call it an affair,’ Evert said; and then, ‘Why, what’s Coyle been up to?’

‘No idea. I think no news from him is good news for you. We’ll certainly hear all about it if anything happens.’

Poor Evert looked haggard at the thought of his rival spending whole hours alone with Sparsholt, with the licence to stare at him and move him around, to ponder at leisure the nakedness he had glimpsed for a mere second, and all the while, in the semi-abstracted way of the artist, to draw him out about his past, his thoughts and his feelings. I wondered though whether Peter’s flamboyance would alarm him. It was all a test, in a way, of Sparsholt’s innocence. Was he still, as a freshman from another college, glad of any friendly attention? Was he even aware that his hours with the weights and clubs had made him, to a certain kind of person, an object of desire? It was one of those questions of masculine vanity hard even to formulate and impossible to put directly to the man himself.

I said, ‘I expect you’d like a glass of port.’ As it happened an affair of a very different kind had just begun in my own life, though I wasn’t able to speak of it yet, even to someone who showed such trust in me. The bottle of port was related to it.

‘Where did you get it from?’ Evert said, seeing how ancient and expensive it was.

‘It was given to me by my aunt,’ I said.

‘I didn’t know you had an aunt,’ said Evert.

‘Almost everyone has,’ I said, ‘if you look into it.’ I scraped at the blackened seal with my penknife. ‘She’s just moved to Woodstock – I went to see her yesterday on the bus.’ Evert didn’t really take this in.

‘I’ve got an aunt by marriage,’ he said. ‘She’s stuck in The Hague now, poor old thing.’ His family were a source of worry to him of a kind I was spared; my father, twice married, had died when I was ten, and my widowed mother dwelt in the depths of Devonshire; Woodstock I felt was a fairly safe spot for an aunt. I tugged out the cork and poured him a good glassful.

‘To victory, Evert,’ I said.

‘Oh, yes . . .’ he said, though there was something further, which he seemed reluctant to come round to. It emerged in a while, under the prompting of the port, and when it did it threw the most withering light on his whole situation. ‘The thing is, there’s a woman,’ he said, not looking at me: perhaps he thought I would laugh, or say (what I said only to myself), ‘Well, of course there is.’

‘Have you seen her?’

‘No, thank God, but she took up a lot of the conversation.’

‘You talked quite a bit, then.’

‘Well, I didn’t want to let him go.’

‘Who is she, did you gather?’

‘The ghastly thing is that she’s coming to Oxford. To live here, I mean.’

‘I expect she wants to be near David,’ I said.

Evert glared at me. ‘She’s going to be very near indeed. As near as she can be. They’re engaged to be married.’