The Sparsholt Affair

  ‘So things have changed a bit for you,’ said Mark, ‘by the look of it.’

  ‘Yes – a lot of things, actually.’

  Mark looked at him in friendly calculation. ‘So you’re married . . .’

  ‘Married . . . ? Oh, I see. No – well, Lucy here is my daughter, but I’m not married, no’ – as she scuffed the leaves and yanked on his hand.

  ‘Hmm . . .’ said Mark.

  ‘And what about you? Still in Camberwell?’

  ‘God, it was that long ago . . .’

  ‘I remember the house,’ said Johnny – it was a glimpse, as if he’d pulled open the front of a doll’s house, of a dozen different lives going on on five floors, a cooperative, with its meetings and parties in bright-coloured rooms and the danger, all the time, of a small group of members seizing control.

  ‘We were kicked out of there in the end,’ Mark said. ‘We had some good times, though.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Johnny, ‘indeed,’ not sure if he meant the times he had there with him in particular. Good times were a basic requirement for Mark – dazzling, exhausting all-nighters. He must have had a job, but Johnny, then as now, never quite took in what people did. ‘And what are you doing these days?’

  ‘Ooh, I keep pretty busy,’ said Mark, ‘if you know what I mean!’ The patter, it had always been a thing about Mark, everything bounced into a joke of a kind, innuendo so endless you checked what you were about to say, with a longing, after days of it, for talk as dull and unequivocal as could be. Still, feeling the tug of his presence now, hands pouched in jacket pockets, the faint raw smell of the leather, Johnny was amazed to think someone so handsome, active and unthinking had spent a whole month of nights with him, drinking, dancing and in bed.

  They came up towards the big Henry Moore by the gate, only two cars beyond in the further hedged maze of the small car park. ‘I must nip off for a sec,’ said Mark with a grin, ‘but great to have seen you.’

  ‘And you!’ said Johnny, not sure what he meant by nip off – but it seemed he needed a piss.

  ‘Run into you again, maybe’ —and now a quick hug, Mark’s warm breath at Johnny’s ear. He walked off fast, with a minute to spare, as the attendant came back with the key tied to a short red baton.

  ‘He’s just coming,’ said Johnny, and as Lucy ran out by herself towards the Volvo he turned and watched him for a moment through the gap in the Henry Moore – a two-piece reclining figure which from most points of view overlapped and combined as if one but from this narrow vantage was revealed as two separate weathered hunks.

  Lucy sat up in the car, in the dignity and disadvantage of a small person, as they made their way through thickening traffic on to the South Circular. The ebbing of enthusiasm in a child was upsetting to Johnny in part because he understood it – it was like a judgement on himself. His own dawdles and go-slows, the beauty-struck trances of childhood and adolescence, had been lonely at the time, understood by none of the other boys. Why should Lucy share this peculiar, faintly disabling gift? ‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘did you ever want to get married?’

  ‘Oh, darling . . . it never really seemed likely.’ He slid a glance at her. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I wish you’d marry Mummy,’ she said.

  ‘Sweetheart . . .’ – the wish was too poignant to sound quite believable; but something had unsettled her this afternoon. ‘I don’t think we’d have got on very well, do you?’

  ‘Lots of people’s parents don’t get on,’ Lucy said.

  ‘Well, that’s very true. But then what happens? Think of Granny and Grandpa.’

  ‘Hmm. Which ones?’

  ‘Well, I meant my parents – but Mummy’s too, come to that. Your mother and I are very different sorts of people. I’m sure you’d agree.’

  She stared out at the cars and vans which seemed to close in, to slow and set firm all round them as they waited for a light a hundred yards ahead. ‘Timothy’s asked me to marry him,’ she said.

  Important not to laugh – and not to take it too seriously, which would soon sound like mockery. ‘I see. When did this happen?’

  ‘When we went upstairs after the fireworks.’

  ‘The excitement must have got to him.’

  ‘Daddy,’ said Lucy.

  ‘And what did you say?’

  She perhaps thought him unworthy of this confidence after all. ‘I said I’d think about it.’

  ‘Quite right.’ The lights changed, the slow release of inertia passed backwards through the crowd of cars. ‘What he needs to do, of course, is come and ask me for your hand in marriage.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘That’s the proper thing.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I mean it would have to be quite a long engagement, wouldn’t it.’

  ‘I know,’ said Lucy: ‘I just don’t know what I’ll feel when the time comes.’

  ‘And nor does he, sweetheart, remember that.’

  The journey home took much longer than the easy drive down. Sidelights, headlights, were on, the long line of streetlights stretched ahead as the road turned to night, and high above, even so, the sky whitened and gleamed clear, long strands of purple-black cloud sinking over the housetops. Once or twice he sensed she was asleep, but she moved irritably when he peeped at her to check. He thought about what they would do later, ideally something with Pat, a game of Cluedo, which she loved, or Monopoly, with its different kind of killings, which she naturally expected to win; and he thought of Mark, strolling towards him so suddenly out of the past, and then jogging off under the trees, surely never to be seen again.

  4

  Freddie’s funeral was held at Kensal Green, and Lucy was taken to it, at her own insistence. She was aware of the disagreements about whether she should go, her father’s wishes more or less clear from her mother’s response to them on the phone. When the day arrived she got up in a thoughtful variant of her dark school uniform and went into her mother and Una’s room to look in the big mirror; she was to travel to the crematorium with the Skipton family, but would come away from the ‘wake’ that followed with her father. In the evening she would go on with him, wearing something nicer, but still, she imagined, with a lingering gravity, to the Musson Gallery for the private view of Evert’s pictures. ‘It’s unfortunate,’ said her mother, ‘having the two things on the same day.’ But Lucy, adjusting her hat and looking for her in the mirror, disagreed. ‘After all the sadness,’ she said, ‘I think it will be a blessed relief.’

  What she forgot, because it had no purchase on her yet, and she hoped never would, was the drink. Clover put on a party with waiters, back at the house, and it was just as noisy and successful as the party that Lucy had been to a year ago there, when Freddie was alive. Granny Iffy became, as she herself said, ‘Granny Squiffy’, Clover was ‘half-cut’ (according to Evert) before they started, and Evert himself got so sloshed he kissed one of the waiters. ‘It was what he wanted,’ said Clover, angling her glass for a refill: ‘he wanted to go out with a bang’; and to Lucy, standing at first by the door to the kitchen, the pop of champagne corks was the defining noise. Well, perhaps wakes were like this – it took a little getting used to, like the funeral itself, and she wasn’t going to show surprise. The solemn feeling that had silenced and upset her in the crematorium was not really to do with Freddie, whom she’d hardly known, and whose smile at her had always been a general one, of tolerance for all the confusing children of his friends’ children. The sight of the coffin, and the thought of him inside it, just a few feet away – this must have been what her mother wanted to protect her from, and what her father thought she was old enough now to see. She felt somehow both grateful and indignant.

  She arrived at Clover’s with her mother and Una, and didn’t join up with her father and Pat again till later on, when the room was full, and ten or twelve people, in spite of the damp, grey weather, had gone into the garden. ‘There’s your father outside with Clover,’ said her mother: ‘run and talk to them.’ Lu
cy went through the French windows at the tactful pace which mixed eagerness to see one parent with reluctance to leave the other. A waiter had just come up to their little group.

  ‘Now I’ve asked them for things you can eat!’ said Clover, as her father shook his head at a tray of something wrapped in bacon. ‘I mentioned it specifically.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘you’ve got enough to think about.’

  ‘You’ve made something vegetarian, haven’t you,’ she said to the waiter, ‘specifically?’

  ‘I’ll certainly ask, madam,’ said the waiter.

  ‘They’ve taken over the kitchen,’ said Clover, ‘it’s out of my hands.’ She looked down and smiled dimly at Lucy. Her father, in an old striped suit, pulled her to him and kissed her, and Pat stooped too, eyes narrowed in concern.

  ‘Are you all right now, Lucy?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Lucy, though his tenderness threatened to upset her again.

  ‘And have you got a drink?’ said Clover.

  The waiter came back a minute later with a special plate of food for Lucy and condescending flourishes, smiled on by the adults: ‘There you are, young lady, you’ll enjoy that,’ patting her on the head as he went away. The vegetarians were going to have to wait rather longer.

  Lucy had a sense of people being very nice to Clover, considering what they said about her normally, behind her back. She was suddenly a closer friend than she’d been before. This was partly because they were all being nice about Freddie – remarkable tributes were paid to him, now he was gone, and more than once Lucy heard someone say, ‘Well, he was a great man!’ and look away as if overcome with strong feeling.

  ‘Actually, you know, Clover, love,’ a tall drunk woman said, shaking her head in helpless frankness, ‘he was a bloody good writer!’

  ‘Well, he was, wasn’t he,’ said Clover mildly. ‘He understood people so well’ – this drew a thoughtful murmur from the others.

  ‘I was wondering if we were going to have another instalment of the famous diary,’ said a man with a slightly anxious laugh.

  Clover reflected. ‘I mean there’s masses there. He wrote every day of his life, almost to the last. I said something about it to Ivan Goyle, you know – I thought he might make another selection. Or even two.’

  ‘Oh, wonderful . . .’ said the drunk woman.

  ‘The absolute truth is the last one caused such a fuss I’m not sure I can take it.’

  ‘Well not yet anyway perhaps, love.’

  ‘Look, do you want to go inside?’ said Clover.

  ‘No, it’s fine, Clo,’ said her father. He looked round. ‘It’s hardly raining at all.’

  Lucy took her cue from this, and turned her back to the drizzle as she chewed her sausage roll.

  ‘It is quite nice to be out, isn’t it,’ said Clover, a fine mist glistening on the stitch of her shawl.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing much,’ said Pat, looking up reassuringly at the blurred grey sky above the rooftops. Clover stood, smiling dimly, miles away. And a minute later, as the rain turned unignorable, ‘You know, it is rather wet’ – and with a sudden collective coming to their senses everyone in the garden walked, almost ran, back into the house.

  A little later Lucy went and stood near Grandpa George, who was in a corner of the crowded room with a tall white-haired man – she knew he hated people barging in when he was talking. After a minute, though, the older man nodded pleasantly at her and said, ‘And this must be your granddaughter, George?’

  He looked down to check. ‘Yes . . . yes, it is’ – with a momentary smile at her, as if confirming he hadn’t lost his car keys.

  ‘And where is her beautiful mother?’

  ‘Oh, she’s about somewhere . . .’

  ‘It’ll be nice to see her again. They’re still in . . . Belsize Park?’

  ‘The last I heard, yes,’ said George, with quick facetiousness, since, as Lucy knew, the question meant was she still living with Una?

  ‘I thought I saw her friend earlier.’

  ‘I expect,’ said George.

  ‘I couldn’t remember her name.’

  ‘Oh, it’s Una.’

  ‘Una, that’s right. A nice name.’

  ‘Yes. Quite easy to remember.’

  ‘If you can remember anything . . .’ said the man, rather self-admiringly. ‘She does something, doesn’t she.’

  Sir George smiled more pleasantly. ‘She sells completely useless items that she calls Essentials. Rather a clever idea – I believe she’s doing very well.’

  Lucy slipped away.

  She half remembered the house, with its hundreds, its thousands of books, but it was interesting in a new way to see where Freddie had lived and worked – until two weeks ago. Una said the move to Blenheim Crescent had been paid for by the film he wrote about the Cambridge Spies (Communists and homosexuals, whom Lucy imagined peering through binoculars from one college into the next). There were pictures of Freddie all over the house; in the large gloomy study, which she went into, hesitantly, after the lavatory, there was a photo of him getting married to someone who wasn’t Clover, long ago obviously, when he had dark hair and was a foot taller. Other photographs hung in the hall, and if you read the small twiddly writing you could find him in a school photo, which hung in the lavatory itself. Then there was the portrait her father had painted last year, which loomed over the drinks tray in the drawing room, and was smiled at today with respect and regret. Freddie had already been ill when it was done, very gaunt, she remembered her father talking about it, the problems of being truthful but kind. She took in this difficulty, it seemed to her an excellent picture, though not one she would want to have herself. Then she thought of Freddie, gaunter still, in the coffin, perhaps still in that striped jacket and red bow tie – she must remember he would just be ashes now, awful but a relief. (But then, what happened to the ashes? Where were they?)

  She went through the hall, checked up on the visitors’ book, open on the table for the mourners to write their names: her own now two pages back, before her father’s, whose big S swung up and circled Pat’s B on the line above – Patrick Browning. She heard voices and went past the open door of the dining room . . . her father, but with Ivan, sitting with their backs to the door. ‘It’s been worked on recently, but it probably dates from 1967 or 8,’ Ivan was saying, ‘when your dad was in the news again. It may have been meant for the Memos, but I’m pretty sure he never read it there. A bit near the knuckle, perhaps.’

  ‘I thought that was the point of the Memos,’ her father said. He laughed oddly, and laid his hand on a stack of paper on the table. ‘Do I have to read it?’ He lifted the top sheet, up to head height – it was a printout, the pages a long concertina, the strip of punch-holes down the side so pleasing to tear off; then he let it drop, with a momentary rippling noise. ‘Why don’t you just tell me what it says?’

  ‘No, I think you should read it yourself. Of course, I don’t know how accurate it is, I haven’t seen the diary for that period, and we all know Freddie could enhance things a certain amount, but . . . it’s good,’ said Ivan. ‘I don’t want to spoil it for you.’

  Her father sighed. ‘Has Evert seen it?’

  ‘I thought it best not to upset him.’

  ‘What about me?’

  Ivan put a hand on his shoulder, then took it away. ‘I don’t think you will find it upsetting.’

  ‘It’s just more stuff about Dad . . .’

  ‘Well . . . yes,’ said Ivan, ‘it’s about an affair, you know – another one . . . I must say it came as a surprise to me.’

  ‘Daddy,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Oh, hello!’ said Ivan. Both the men glanced round, alarmed for a second – then not alarmed at all. ‘Well, I’ll leave it with you’ – Ivan stood up and smiling remotely at Lucy, patting his pockets as if remembering what was next on his list, he went past her and into the hall. She came forward. Her father’s right hand, alien and familiar, large, big-knuckled
, scrubbed up for the occasion, lay on the document. With his left he pulled her in.

  ‘Are Mummy and Una still here?’

  She said they were. She stood and read the beginning, ‘The evening when we first heard’, and later bits, between his fingers . . . ‘Evert Dax’ . . . ‘secretary’; her father watched her for a moment, then read too, shifting his hand to cover the rest of the page – but she was faster than he was. ‘Is it about you, Daddy?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so, no; it’s something Freddie wrote about your grandpa.’

  ‘Grandpa David,’ she said.

  ‘That’s right.’ He picked it up, rolled it as best he could, tried to push it into his jacket pocket; it was quite thick. She’d become aware, mainly from something Timothy’s mother had said, of some sort of problem about this particular grandfather, and his getting divorced from Granny Connie.

  ‘Is it nice?’

  ‘I’m sure it is – it’s about when they were at Oxford, you know, in the War.’

  ‘Freddie and Grandpa were?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Lucy, ‘I didn’t know that’ – the War again, the great dreary fog that old people conjured up and disappeared into whenever they had a chance.

  Her father frowned at her. ‘Do you want to go?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘You’re supposed to say yes, then I’ll have to take you.’

  ‘Oh, well, yes, then,’ she said, ‘of course.’

  About the evening, and the sale of Evert’s pictures, she felt she knew more than most. Her mother had had the whole story from Ivan, and explained it to her crossly: ‘He needs the money, Lucy, and that’s that.’ Her father was more sympathetic: ‘It’s all very sad really – it’s that great big house, it’ll fall down if he can’t find some extra cash.’

  ‘The House of Horrors?’

  He allowed the name, but he didn’t much like it. ‘You’ve never been there, have you?’

  ‘Mummy said when I was very small.’

  ‘I mean not to remember.’

  She agreed she hadn’t; though in her mind she had visited it, and in a taxi once she was told they’d just gone past it – she’d twisted and stared back, at the tall bleak terrace of identical houses, grey brick, white porches, with numbers on the pillars, she didn’t know which number it was. Now that real grey house had to coexist, rather feebly, with the more enduring one she’d imagined before.