Alan Hollinghurst - The Sparsholt Affair

Johnny pulled out the four drawers of the chest, the bottom one had the Christmas decorations in it, but in the others he found a roll-neck jersey and folded shirts he hadn’t worn since the 80s, but had left for some reason in the limbo of neglect and just possible resurrection. On the shelf above the bed there were school books, his James Bond Aston Martin with bulletproof shield and ejector seat (the ejected figure long lost), a brown-glazed pot he’d made at Hoole: things the long steady continuum of his father’s life had robbed him of any desire to take away. He opened the wardrobe, a jangle of hangers, and on the top shelf among a heap of teenage daubs found a worn old sketchbook that he knew but could barely place. He sat on the bed with it, slipped off the perished elastic strap. Scrawny studies of roots, a vase of snowdrops, schoolboy stuff, a woman in a hat whom he didn’t recognize. What on earth was it? Who was that . . . ? The almost forgotten holiday, in Cornwall. And there, oh god, thick, overworked, a little bulging mannequin: Bastien! Bastien, Bastien, again and again. With almost a sixth sense he knew the drawings, but the occasions when he’d made them had gone completely. They were childishly stiff, with a stroke here and there of something like talent, a mannered dash forwards. At the time they had been private triumphs, acts of magic over thwarted desire.

June made them cauliflower cheese, a supper out of the past which Johnny, his stomach shrunken and his palate dead from a night of drugs, ate what he could of. In the welcome reprieve, the sweet second chance, of the whisky and wine he saw a bright poignancy in the objects June took pride in, the glass and china, the small silver pheasants on the sideboard and the glinting silver labels round the necks of the decanters. ‘Gosh, this takes me back,’ he said, with a smile across the glooming mahogany of the table, where she had laid their places face to face.

‘It’s the best I can do in the circumstances,’ June said; which might still have been awkward modesty, and not just her nose for a slight in any compliment. Later she went to the hatch and brought through two stemmed bowls of gooseberry fool, each with a brandy snap.

‘Mm, lovely!’ said Johnny.

June ate with a rather compromised air. ‘I had the gooseberries in the freezer,’ she said.

*

He yawned and signalled readiness for bed at a childish hour. ‘You look tired,’ said June.

‘Yes – I didn’t sleep very well last night.’

She looked quickly at him – ‘No . . . well, an awful shock for you.’

When he got into bed he found he filled it, or it had shrunk under him, and might even shrink more. He seemed to hang on the edge of the mattress, in a kind of headlong reverse – condemned to sleep alone since Pat had died, and now to squash back into adolescence. He really was tired, he hadn’t slept at all with Z, they had lain together in a sweaty parched fatigue, the news and its gravity clarifying in his mind, and the need for sex inexplicably, compellingly strong. He’d popped one of Pat’s blue pills, with a new half-spooky half-comical sense of drawing on his strength whom he missed more than ever at this moment; but after a good hour of trying he’d been unable to come, though the need to do so drove him on till all pleasurable sensation had gone. Z suffered none of these senior setbacks, and came like a dream after five or six minutes. Johnny had to keep getting up to piss, and saw himself in the bathroom mirror, a grizzled old figure with the swollen belly and implacable erection of a satyr.

Now he turned on his back, and resignedly took in the late noises of the house; after London, with its endless roar just this side of silence, the stillness of the suburb was unsparing. It threw the creaks of cooling radiators, the little whine and click of the immersion heater going off, into clearer relief. The bed still made the quick nagging noise it had always made when you turned in it; the moment you thought of having a wank the news was announced to the rest of the house. The room in which June too was lying alone after decades of coupledom was far enough away for him to risk it. He wondered about Zé, which was really his name, José, and if he would see him again – he felt he would never have noticed him himself, but Zé seemed crazy about Johnny, and it was a stroke of amazing luck to have got off with someone half his age who was simply so kind. He was the opposite of Michael. Johnny reached for his phone by the bedside and thumbed in a message which magically corrected itself: I’m in bed and thinking of you X , and sent it with a beating heart and forgotten sense of daring. In a second the perky arpeggio, the bright screen, how could he have written so much so quickly? – thinking of you 2 all day!! sleep well my darlin Wish I was there with u!! Cum back soon!!! XXXXXZ. The words were abnormally vivid to him, a caress and above all a promise, and he switched off the lamp, turned on his side and dropped gaping into sleep as if under a spell.

He was woken after seven by June moving about, the noise of doors downstairs, never thought of, never forgotten. A bit later he swung out of bed, and parted the curtains. In the grey dusk of the garden only frail winter jasmine made a sign of the world of colour and light. He hadn’t said how long he was staying – he knew June didn’t want him hanging around, but thought she might resent it if he left. The date of the funeral was yet to be fixed, and he longed to be back in London, but there was something bleak and illusionless in going away, a first clear admission they didn’t need each other.

After breakfast he went out for a walk through the town, and there were things June said she needed him to get. He felt flat, colourless himself today, but lurkingly conspicuous, a returning son, who had known these streets, walls, crossroads, gable ends in the 1950s. But no one knew him, even though in Walsh’s he stared smiling at the little man who slipped the loaf into the bag and twizzled the ends as he had forty years ago, but in plastic gloves now and a hairnet, the stay-at-home son turning into his old mother. Walsh’s at least was there, with its yellow linoleum, its doughnuts and cream horns, and the opaque glass dish like an ashtray, where they put your change. Three or four other shops were empty, and stripped bare. Some were chain stores, burger joints, places Johnny might have hung about in, if he’d been a teenager now, looking at men. In Pinnock’s tea rooms the cheap cups and saucers, CDs and high heels of a charity shop were lined up in the window, for the time being. Johnny stared in, remembering, the string curtain in the kitchen door, the steep narrow staircase to the first-floor lavatory, and Gordon Pinnock himself, one of the certain homosexuals of his own childhood, another man who’d once been in love with David Sparsholt. Gordon had retired to Madeira, twenty years ago, with one of his waiters. Johnny strolled on, with an uncanny sense of knowing this town in a thousand details, the past showing through the present, and of being on the brink of saying goodbye to it for ever.

Not wanting to go back yet he cut down Coton Road, over the Ringway and into Riversley Park – here nothing had changed but the seasons, the beds of salvias and geraniums in front of the Museum dug over for winter, but, happy and strange, the soldier back, with his startled look, gun in one hand, eyes lifted under his soft-brimmed hat: a memorial to the Boer War, stolen years ago, a local outrage, and now lovingly recast, when the Boer War was beyond memory. Johnny strolled along the landscaped curve of the river-bank. It felt a moment to think alone about time, loss and change, and the path by the water seemed a fitting invitation, with the bare scraped minimum of poetry to it . . . It had rained in the night, and there was a sheen of damp still on the tarmac, an untraceable sad glimpse out of childhood in this very spot. Fifty yards ahead of him a couple in their twenties were dawdling just where he wanted to be, the man much taller, but their arms round each other, tightly but not quite containing their energy, which broke out in quick wriggles and tuggings apart, mock fights, as if they were ten years younger. Now the man ran away a few yards, struck a pose, she drifted scornfully then rushed at him with a shriek and jumped on him and kissed him. Johnny felt a weary resentment of them, their happiness, claiming the full heterosexual allowance to carry on in public. He fell behind, and in doing so seemed more consciously to be following them. He thought about holding and kissing Zé, and Zé fucking him, and wondered if this could be it – the question turning, as he walked under the bare willows, from a warm but doubtful one about taking things further with him into a much colder one about a future without love, sex, the repeatedly chased and in his case rarely captured affair. The couple ahead were hard to get away from because they kept stopping. Johnny stopped too, with a sudden weird thought they were just like his parents sixty years ago – even, for a moment, tall good-looking man, short lively woman, that they were them. Twice she looked over her shoulder at Johnny, then said something to the man, who glanced round too. He laughed as he saw he was spoiling it for them, just as they were spoiling it for him.