The Sparsholt Affair

  There was a rather oppressive need to keep him focused – on day-to-day matters, and on the looming plans for the house. Victor was tidied up now, really for good. And all the things that had been put off until he was tidied up loomed much larger. The advance for the biography was £10,000, a much smaller figure when the book was delivered than it had been when the contract was signed. The work on the house might cost ten times as much. Besides which, Evert needed a new project. A proper memoir was the obvious idea; but it could be another art book, portraits of artists he had known over fifty years. Otherwise he was going to spend every day forgetting what he’d gone out for and picking up strangers in Marks and Spencer’s.

  Ivan had forced him to make an inventory of all the pictures, which had been like getting a child to do his homework; he wriggled out of it, or else, going through the contents of a print chest on the top landing, fell under the spell of forgotten images and their suddenly woken associations. There were also the various items on loan, to museums and so forth. A certain ruthlessness was called for here, if the sale was to realize the best figure. Ivan felt everything should be looked at, and the threat of ending the loans, if it seemed worth it, put into play.

  A few months ago Evert had been invited to a Feast at his old College, and Ivan had gone with him. He wanted to see the portrait of Victor by George Lambert which Evert was sure he’d given them, but which Ivan discovered on a look through some old files was merely on loan. At the drinks before, in a room that was virtually panelled in old portraits, Ivan brought up the question with one of the dons, who it turned out had never heard of the sitter, let alone the portrait. But he introduced him to a Dr Fraser, who ran the College art collection, and Ivan said again he thought they had it. ‘Indeed we do . . . !’ said Dr Fraser: ‘I’ll ask Mr Tarlow to show it to you after dinner.’ ‘It’s not in here, then,’ said Ivan. ‘We don’t keep it in here,’ said Dr Fraser, with no further explanation, but conveying a sense that wherever it was was the best place for it. He himself had promptly forgotten his promise, but Ivan pressed him again later on, and after dessert he and Evert were taken out by Mr Tarlow across the quad, through an archway and into another quad, then into a staircase next to the kitchens, into a range of old buildings lately adapted for graduate accommodation, where up two flights of stairs were two guest rooms for overnight visitors. They unlocked the first and looked in, but it wasn’t there, so they tried the second, Mr Tarlow emitting a hearty ‘Aha!’ as he stood back and let them have a look. The room contained almost nothing – a single bed, a completely empty bookcase, and a refrigerator. And on the wall above the refrigerator hung Arnold Victor Dax (1880–1954) by George Lambert (1873–1930), in a heavily ornate gilt frame missing a cusp at one corner. It was further described, on the small label on the frame, as on ‘permanent loan’ from Evert Dax, 1939 – the year, of course, of his matriculation. Ivan found himself wondering what on earth the guests made of it, with its wary gleam and villainous moustache. ‘We like to keep as much of the collection on view as we can,’ said Mr Tarlow warmly, stumbling on the tail of his gown as he stepped back across the squawking floorboards. ‘Well, no one could say it brightened up the room,’ said Evert, which left Mr Tarlow a little at a loss as they all trooped out again.

  When they got home Evert went to lie down, and Ivan dealt with the mail that had come that morning. The main item was from the Dean of Humanities at Lichfield University, at first glance just a brochure about their development programme, but with a covering letter that concealed towards the end a rather delicate piece of news. The enhanced facilities, the expanded library, the new Gottfried Wenk International Business School, were described in Utopian detail, or lack of it. It was all going to be marvellous, and the one possibly regrettable consequence of the works was the demolition of the old 1960s Arts Building, whose much-loved but now sadly outdated amenities included of course the A. V. Dax Theatre. ‘It is hoped’, the Dean wrote, ‘that the memory of your father will be preserved in some other way in the department. I believe Professor Bishop will be in touch with you soon about the digitisation of the A. V. Dax Archive.’ This sounded like a good thing, though Ivan couldn’t help wondering if the actual manuscripts, once digitally preserved, would still be thought necessary. He saw a van arriving at Cranley Gardens with the forty boxes which Evert had so cleverly got rid of twenty-five years earlier.

  He kept it till they were going to bed, and the two or three minutes when Evert, in his pyjama bottoms, sat on a stool in the bedroom while Ivan, standing behind him, worked Deep Heat into his stiff neck and left shoulder. It was a moment when he had him captive, and with his gently kneading thumbs and fingers could coax and comfort and half-hypnotize him. He smiled at him in the mirror: ‘You had a funny letter today from the man at Lichfield.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Evert, fluttering his eyelashes at the appearance of something so remote from his present thoughts. ‘I’d forgotten about them.’

  ‘Just as well, perhaps,’ said Ivan. Evert’s skin was warm now and soft, the springy little grey hairs on his shoulders were smoothed flat by the ointment; then curled up again. The fumes of menthol and eucalyptus, the trace of turpentine, offered their old-fashioned reassurance. Ivan told him about the Theatre. He didn’t present it as something bad, and had little idea, after all these years, how Evert would take it.

  ‘Oh, lord,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a shame, isn’t it,’ Ivan said.

  ‘You’ve never seen it, have you,’ said Evert. ‘It wasn’t a very nice theatre.’

  ‘No, you said.’

  ‘I mean it wasn’t a theatre, it was a lecture room.’

  ‘And at least it’s going to be demolished,’ said Ivan. ‘They’re not renaming it after someone else.’

  ‘Someone with more money usually.’

  ‘That would be an insult. Still, it’s rather awful,’ said Ivan, slipping his arms round Evert’s neck and resting his chin on the crown of his head. They examined themselves in the mirror.

  ‘Yes, it’s awful,’ said Evert, looking down as if he might be about to cry, or was just possibly stifling a laugh. Ivan had a sense he minded it more than Evert did. If the memorial itself was destroyed, then what remained? ‘Thanks,’ Evert said, and rolled his shoulders as he stood up. ‘Mm, that’s much better.’ He put on his pyjama jacket and buttoned it as he went off to clean his teeth.

  Ivan got undressed too. He had a responsible feeling of surviving, tonight, of carrying on in the world when a friend had left it for ever. He imagined Jill’s godson Adrian, a kindly hard-working man of about his own age, clearing up after the strangers had gone and turning out the lights on the prospects of a small, entirely unforeseen scandal. Margaret would do her best to control it, but all organizations were leaky, the V&A literally so, crumbling and underfunded, with staff laid off – Ivan knew about it, and saw he must press for the obituary to appear before the story broke.

  They usually read for ten minutes or so in bed, but tonight Ivan, halfway through Chips Channon’s Diaries, felt tired and switched off his light after a page or so. Evert had been livelier in bed since his stroke, which was nice, but made Ivan himself a bit cautious, out of worry he might have another stroke from the exertion. They now had their once-a-monthers about three times a week. Ivan heard him coming back from the bathroom, his quiet, random, spaced-out remarks. Evert, who’d been half of a couple for the past forty years, now talked to himself like someone who lived alone. He had always spoken in his sleep, odd phrases that turned over as if in bed themselves and settled some unheard argument (‘which of course was why . . .’ ‘so you see he couldn’t . . .’); now he talked in his sleep when he was awake, made passing observations, wistful or sly, and often surely sexual, wandering in a field of reminiscence peopled by men other and earlier than Ivan. He smiled contentedly as he came into the room, set down his glass of water, and slipped into bed. ‘Good night,’ said Ivan with a vocal sort of yawn, pulling up the covers.

  Evert pushe
d up beside him. ‘Because he was always passive, you know, in bed,’ he said, cosily but conclusively.

  Ivan’s voice was toneless, a last dim formality before sleep as he turned away from Evert and shrugged into the pillow. ‘Who was that, Evert?’

  ‘Mm, never you mind,’ said Evert, raising a knee and breathing a kiss on to his neck; and it soon became clear Ivan wasn’t going to get off that lightly.

  3

  George Chalmers hung his coat up in the hall, folded his silk scarf and laid his gloves on top of it on the table. He had chosen to be painted in a crimson velvet smoking jacket, and cut a quaint figure at ten in the morning in the cold studio. The portrait, it turned out, was his present to himself for his seventieth birthday, though he said he’d been urged by any number of old friends to have it done. It stood now, a pale sketched ghost with a staring pink face, on the big easel, still so far from the desired effect that he walked past without looking at it; he stepped up with a short grunt on to the low rostrum and took his place in the high-backed chair. Johnny had picked up the chair for £10 at an auction – fake Venetian, oak and shabby velvet not quite the same colour as George’s jacket, and fixed with rows of brass studs. George sat upright, crossed his legs, and laid his hands along the down-curling arms of the throne.

  So the new sitting, the fifth, began, Johnny passing in a minute or two through social self-consciousness into the familiar absorption of work. He preferred to have music playing, but because George was deaf it made talk even harder, so he dabbed and darted and pondered to the soundtrack of his subject’s monologues. Sometimes talk in the studio formed mysterious counterpoints to the actions of painting, sometimes it distracted and interfered. George Chalmers was a good subject, but an unsympathetic person. He preserved into old age something starkly coquettish, an unrelinquished belief in his own naughtiness and appeal. His stories about himself at Oxford, and in the Navy, and in Egypt and Italy after the War, were both savage and sentimental. He’d been madly in love, his heart had been broken; but Peter Coyle and Willy Fitchet and Jack Ducane were all shits and he’d seen through them and outlived them all – Peter of course by half a century. Outliving his lovers, a mere accident, seemed to suit his competitive view of life. Johnny’s compliant smiles and absent murmurs of ‘Oh!’ and ‘Really . . . ?’ flattered him at first, but offered not enough resistance. Pressed for anecdotes about his own love life, Johnny felt like an unadventurous simpleton. ‘Yes, well I once met this really nice Irish guy . . .’ Chalmers anyway didn’t seem to take in what he said, he wasn’t looking for any parity between the younger man’s fumblings and his own legendary adventures; though occasionally, from fatigue and good manners, he showed a distant interest, a weak unexpectant encouragement. Because of the deafness Johnny had to say his little stories loudly, as if addressing and failing to amuse a whole roomful of people.

  Johnny’s strength, from the social point of view, was knowing Evert, who had encouraged George to commission the portrait; but Johnny had never had the gift of anecdote, and things he said about Freddie, or Iffy Skipton, or the goings-on at the Royal Soc of Portrait Painters, stories which had tickled Pat, and Evert himself, made little impression on Chalmers. He expected the old man to come round at some point to the Sparsholt Affair, but he never did, perhaps simply because it didn’t involve him or anyone he knew personally, and was, besides, a hideous balls-up, of the kind that Chalmers himself, for all his much wilder adventures, had been far too clever to get caught up in. Johnny felt his father’s term at Oxford might have overlapped with George’s time there, but it seemed most unlikely they would have met.

  It was people with a different kind of fame that he talked about as he sat. ‘Of course I’ll never forget when I was in Florence for a few months in 1947, picked up this amazing young kid, who wanted to get into the theatre. I say kid, he was probably only a year or so younger than me. He was already working for Visconti, whom I knew reasonably well, of course. I had the clap at the time, can’t remember if it was in the arse or the cock, both probably, what? so I had to let that one pass. Then a few years later he turned up in London and gave me a ring – he was directing Tosca at Covent Garden! Of course you realize who it was.’

  ‘Daddy?’

  Johnny didn’t turn, but he gasped at the thought of what she might have heard. ‘What is it, sweetheart?’ And now there was the creak of the floorboards behind him.

  ‘When are we going out?’

  ‘Not till after lunch, I’m working this morning, as you can see.’

  ‘Oh . . .’ He was aware of her, at the edge of his vision, standing.

  ‘Good morning,’ said George crisply.

  ‘George, this is my daughter Lucy – this is Mr Chalmers, I told you about.’

  ‘Good morning,’ said Lucy, with a momentary lowering of the voice and (he knew) the eyes. He pictured her view of the studio, the opaque adult world of the process, the talk, the canvas taller than she was. Once she had sat for him herself, or wriggled and slumped and slept for him, and he knew he must paint her again, on one of their weeks together. It was a long time since he’d done anything more than a sketch for love, not money.

  On the Wednesday afternoon, Timothy Gorley-Whittaker, a superbly polite little boy, sanctioned even by Francesca, came round for the second time to see Lucy. Although it was half-term he arrived with his satchel, ‘T. G.-W.’ stamped on the flap. They were up in her room for over an hour, and as on his previous visit no sound of voices or footsteps could be heard in the studio below. At four Johnny went upstairs to tell them tea was ready and stood for a moment outside the door – there was continuous but rather strained, even argumentative, conversation. He tapped and went in a little anxiously to find Lucy seated on the bed and Timothy leaning against the mantelpiece, which for him was at shoulder height. They each held a small open book, and they stared at him with a mixture of impatience and embarrassment. ‘Tea’s up!’ said Johnny.

  ‘OK,’ said Lucy, glancing at Timothy.

  ‘May we just finish this scene, sir?’ Timothy said.

  Johnny smiled dimly at the phrase before he saw that of course they were reading a play – he ducked his head and withdrew. Timothy’s gentlemanly treble went on. ‘Fanny, let us keep it to ourselves.’

  ‘Oh . . . sorry . . . um, um,’ said Lucy.

  Johnny put his head round the door again and said quite loudly, ‘You don’t have to call me sir, you know.’ Then he went downstairs. His own father had liked Johnny’s schoolfriends to call him sir, which they either resented or overdid, both things mortifying to Johnny himself.

  On the kitchen table he had set out a plate of Jaffa Cakes, a glisteningly dense but fat-free fruit cake that Pat had made, and a nice trimmed stack of banana and peanut-butter sandwiches he had made himself, eating one impulsively with a spasm of nostalgia at the peanut paste parching his throat. After tea it would be dark enough for some indoor fireworks that had caught his eye at the corner shop, the red packet like a box of combustible biscuits, volcanoes, Roman candles and five sparklers each. The children came down a minute later. ‘May I wash my hands, sir?’ said Timothy.

  Johnny let it pass. ‘Both wash your hands,’ he said, and peeped at his own, which as usual were scabbed with paint, and the nails black. Lucy washed her hands first, and passed the towel apologetically to Timothy. ‘So what have you two been up to?’ Johnny said.

  Timothy sat on the chair Lucy indicated. ‘We’re reading Mary Rose,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Johnny: ‘what’s that?’

  Timothy looked bewildered for a second, but decided it wasn’t a joke and smiled reassuringly: ‘Oh – it’s by J. M. Barrie . . . you know.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Johnny.

  ‘It’s very amusing, actually.’

  ‘Have something to eat, have a sandwich.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Sparsholt.’

  ‘There’s quite a lot of writing in it,’ said Lucy.

  Timothy glanced at her tenderly. ‘Ye
s, all the stage directions.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Johnny.

  ‘I read those out as well, it’s almost like reading a book, you know.’

  ‘We have to be several people at once,’ explained Lucy, as if this were both exciting and rather a drawback.

  ‘Well, I hope it’s suitable,’ said Johnny, just a little bit as a joke; he thought it was all rather rum. Lucy looked as if she’d like to make a further comment, but her own politeness prevented her. Timothy was protractedly chewing a mouthful of bread and peanut butter, but his eyebrows signalled a desire to speak.

  ‘Oh, completely suitable, sir,’ he said at length.

  ‘Good lad,’ said Johnny, and wondered again at the language that his own part, the bluff but caring parent, was written in.

  After tea he went into the studio and came back with the box of indoor fireworks. ‘I thought these might be fun,’ he said.

  There was a trace of anxiety on Lucy’s face, but Timothy smiled. ‘I used to love them when I was small,’ he said.

  ‘Hmm, so did I,’ said Johnny. ‘Shall we go in the other room, we can make it darker in there.’

  They went out through the hall, and into the sitting room; the doors into the studio were closed, and the street light outside the gate threw autumnal gleams among the shadowy sofas and armchairs. Johnny switched just one lamp on, before he pulled the heavy curtains across. A saucer on the marble hearth – and the children to stand back, while he lit the little tabs of blue paper. He saw, when he opened the box and peered at the contents, that they were not only few in number but poor quality – in the shop he hadn’t noticed the brand, which evidently wasn’t English: ‘Putt in Earth or flower-pots’ it said on the Roman candle. He did just that, in the pot of an old cactus, lit the fuse and quickly turned off the lamp. In the dark the tiny burning dot twitched slightly and after a wavering ten seconds appeared to expire. ‘Daddy . . .’ warned Lucy as he went towards it, and at just that moment there was a pop and a low fountain of blue sparks began to play from the top, much more on the right than the left, where it sputtered and seemed blocked. The mouth of the fireplace and the brown Minton tiles around it were lit up, and in the mantelpiece mirror Johnny saw the youngsters’ faces, ghostly against the dark, Lucy biting her cheek.