The Sparsholt Affair

  Over the soup (green salad for Johnny) they talked about the Works, and what the new people were making of it. It was a difficult subject, charged with the regrets of an active man who had made a decision to give up something he loved. ‘Well, they’ve taken the sign down,’ he said.

  ‘DDS?’

  His father nodded. ‘Not that it matters, but they left it for six months, you know, out of respect.’

  Johnny wondered if that was the reason. ‘What is it now?’

  ‘Stella. In huge bloody letters, hideous.’

  ‘Stella . . . It must look like a brewery.’

  His father perhaps didn’t get the allusion. ‘They’re Chinese,’ he said, ‘of course,’ and it was that that made him almost laugh.

  ‘Are they laying people off?’

  He dabbed at his moustache with his napkin. ‘I see Stewart Dibden at the Lions, he keeps me in the picture. He says they’re planning to expand.’

  ‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, excellent.’ In his gloomy look across the table some suggestion, not aired for twenty years, seemed still to be remembered: that Johnny might have taken an interest in the firm himself.

  ‘I think you were quite right to get out when you did, Dad,’ he said.

  Johnny had a view, beyond his father’s head, of a portrait of an airman in flying suit, goggles raised, very simple: the tall square-jawed figure against a tan-coloured background. Well, he couldn’t do him like that, and the question of just how he might do him was a hard one – how much of the glorious past to convey without irony or sentiment. He’d had enough to drink, when his pasta arrived, to say, ‘Dad, have you ever had your portrait done?’

  Was there something bashful in his father’s tone: ‘No, not really.’

  ‘Not really?’ Johnny smiled at him. ‘Not in the RAF?’

  ‘Well, there was a chap who did a picture of me, yes, a portrait.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’ve no idea what became of it. He was killed, lost at sea, so I heard.’ He raised his eyebrows as he lifted his fork: ‘A very talented artist.’

  It was a phrase he had never heard his father utter. ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Well, you’ll probably have heard of him. He was called Coyle.’

  ‘Peter Coyle, do you mean?’ – Johnny hopeless at dissembling, though his father, eating, briefly contemplative, didn’t notice anything odd. ‘Well, yes, I have heard of him. Didn’t he go into camouflage in the War?’

  ‘He may well have done. All this was before I signed up – at Oxford.’

  ‘So you do remember Oxford!’

  ‘A few things, obviously,’ with the hint of a scowl at any clever contradiction. ‘I don’t suppose the picture still exists.’

  ‘Well, I bet someone’s got it. Just a sketch, probably, was it?’

  He seemed doubtful for a moment, but not of his facts: ‘I’m not sure what you mean. I wouldn’t say a sketch, it was a big oil painting, of me in rowing kit. It took weeks – he kept asking for more time. Of course I was very tied up with other things then.’

  ‘I can imagine.’ Johnny sat back, then remembered his food, and got on with it. What his father had said, for the very first time, seemed to fix and authenticate the whole story Freddie had told – though the claim about the large oil painting showed in a salutary way that Freddie didn’t know everything. David himself seemed unaware of the value of what he had let drop.

  ‘So what are your holiday plans, old lad?’ he said. ‘Italy again?’

  ‘Dad, the thing is, I wondered if you’d sit for me?’

  The slightly technical way of putting it delayed the reaction by a further second or two. Then, ‘Ooh, you don’t want to be bothered with that.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be a bother, Dad.’

  ‘No, no.’ He cut at the thick lump of lamb on his plate. ‘I’m not the right . . . subject for you.’

  ‘Well, I don’t agree with that at all. It’s ridiculous I’ve never painted you before.’

  ‘You’re too busy,’ said his father, and in his quick look down and away Johnny knew he had glimpsed a long-established habit of making excuses for him, and for his failure, as a prize-winning portrait painter, to turn his gaze on his own father. It was as touching as it was annoying.

  ‘In fact I’ve got a fairly empty period coming up, so that’s not a problem.’

  ‘Anyway, where would we do it?’

  ‘I could come up and stay for a week, if you like; we could have a sitting each day.’

  The prospect was so unusual it seemed almost to alarm him. ‘Too much bother,’ he said again, chasing the lamb down with a swig of wine; though something in his eyes suggested he was moved too by the thought of the visit. The bother, Johnny thought, would really be with June.

  ‘Well, think about it, will you?’

  He didn’t promise to do so, but a moment later said, ‘You must have drawn me dozens of times when you were a lad.’

  ‘I certainly did.’

  ‘Yes. You were always bloody good at capturing people.’

  ‘You never told me that before!’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  Johnny weighed up the situation. ‘Well, it’s good to come back to someone years later. They’ve changed, and so have you.’

  ‘God knows,’ said his father, and after a second looked straight at him.

  When their cab came down the Old Brompton Road, David, vigilant for reference points, Tube stations, street names, saw Cranley Gardens, and said, ‘A good part of town.’ Though when he saw the house itself, the flaking porch and high-hanging swag of tarpaulin, he seemed to take in, with a little flinch and then a setting of his features, that the visit might require unexpected tact. Johnny rang the bell, they were let in and went upstairs. His father, peering up and down, tongue on lip, examined the antique apparatus of the lift. ‘They ought to get this going,’ he said. The house, quite new and strange to him, appeared in an odd light to Johnny too, pictures reshuffled on the landing, and the glimpse through the door of ‘his’ room of different things hanging on the stained and bleached wallpaper: the room seemed a cell, a shrine almost, of the precious life he had led wholly without his father’s knowledge or participation.

  David hung back on the landing to look at the Chagall print – he had the air of someone humorously suppressing his prejudices, and with a hint of nerves too as a new arrival in this long-established household: ‘À mon ami Dax . . .’ Johnny went into the sitting room, where Evert was standing by the fire.

  ‘Hi, Evert – I’ve just brought my dad in to see you.’

  Evert looked up, and across towards the door, with a hint of alarm, not knowing whom to expect – the entrance delayed by a few seconds. Then, ‘Oh, hello, David . . .’ as if he came round all the time, and was even a bit of a nuisance; but it was probably shyness. He walked away from him and then turned. ‘You’re looking very well.’

  ‘You know me,’ said David; and then, obliged to reply: ‘So are you, Evert. You’ve hardly changed.’

  ‘I must have been a bloody wreck before, then!’ said Evert, and laughed cheerfully. ‘Have a seat.’ There was a faint sense still that he didn’t know exactly who his visitor was. And Johnny couldn’t tell for a minute or two if they needed him there, or if nothing much could happen or be said until he’d gone. What would two long-ago lovers be likely to feel, one of them twice-married, the other losing his memory?

  ‘I’ll make you some tea, shall I?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, thank you, darling,’ said Evert.

  ‘Well!’ said David, sitting down and looking round keenly. ‘So this is the famous house.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Evert, ‘you’ll have heard about it, I expect.’

  ‘Well, from Jonathan, of course. And a long time ago, Evert, from you!’

  ‘Oh, really, yes,’ said Evert.

  ‘Your father was still alive then, of course – in the War.’ He smiled at him. ‘I remember you saying what
a monster he was.’

  ‘Oh, did I?’

  ‘I’ll never forget that.’

  Evert looked at Johnny, hovering. ‘Do you want a hand?’

  ‘No, no, it’s fine,’ said Johnny, and went out to the kitchen, where in a minute the roar of the kettle covered all that could be heard of their talk.

  When he came back with the tray his father had stood up again and was going round looking up and down at the pictures, and then, on rather surer ground, out of the window. Evert sat watching him, with a host’s patience and some other calculation under it. He was taking him in. Johnny, confused by his own feelings and expectations, said, ‘Shall I be Herta?’

  ‘Mm?’ said his father.

  ‘Oh, do,’ said Evert.

  Johnny took him a cup first. Then, ‘Dad, I’ll put yours here.’

  ‘Oh, thanks, old lad,’ his father coming over and sitting on the other side of the hearth, in Ivan’s chair, with the double stack of books, biographies, memoirs, on the floor beside it.

  ‘And I found these eclairs in the fridge.’ They were his father’s favourite, odd tea-room predilection from Johnny’s childhood, bought fresh then from Pinnock’s in Abbey Street – now, packaged, the chocolate sweating slightly, from Waitrose in the King’s Road.

  ‘My one vice,’ said David, taking the little plate, with its cusped cake fork and folded napkin, and setting it on the table beside him.

  Johnny stood back, surveyed the two men, wondering quite what he’d done. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it,’ he said.

  ‘You won’t stay and have a cup, lovie?’ said Evert.

  ‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours. I’ve got to pick up Lucy from one party and take her to another – it’s Thomas’s birthday, you see’ – he just came out with it, and let his father handle it as he would. In fact it was Evert who seized on it, with relief but a certain vagueness.

  ‘Ah, Thomas, yes . . . how is he?’

  ‘I think he’s all right.’ Johnny didn’t much care for this boy, whom Lucy called her brother though as Una’s child he was no blood relation at all – and could hardly have been more unlike her. ‘It’s his eighteenth today.’

  ‘I always forget how much older he is than . . . er . . . your little girl.’

  ‘Than Lucy . . . yes.’

  ‘That’s right.’ And there they were – David rarely mentioned Lucy, and found the whole thing tricky when his friends went on about their grandchildren and the like. He sat there now as if the subject had never been mentioned. Evert looked at him. ‘Johnny took quite a while to decide to be a father.’

  Miraculously, David, with a narrow smile, as if doubting this strange opportunity to shine, said, ‘Well, so did I, Evert, come to that!’

  They all laughed, though for Johnny the strangeness lay in his saying something so personal: it was promising. It was only as he went out and down the stairs, past large pale shadows where pictures had hung, that he realized what he’d done for Evert and his father was just what Freddie had done for them, fifty-five years ago. He’d set them up together. It wasn’t clear what Freddie had hoped for from the meeting, and he’d acted himself on a conviction he couldn’t explain.

  He left Lucy back at Belsize Grove, and when he was let into Evert’s house again and went upstairs he found his mood of mild anxiety about his daughter’s social life carried over to his father’s – had he had a nice time? had they got on? did they play games? He looked round the door of the drawing room not knowing if he was their saviour or if he was spoiling the fun at a critical moment. They were sitting just where they had been, Evert with an excited but unfocused expression, David, saying something in desultory agreement, with a look of unusual and virtuous patience. They had drunk their tea, and the little chocolate and cream-smeared plates lay on the tables beside them. Johnny as Herta cleared them away, not asking questions. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better be going, Evert,’ his father said, in a tone of polite regret unusual to him.

  The odd moment came when they stood and said goodbye. Johnny worried, wondered, hoped for a moment that Evert was about to kiss his father. He watched him come close to him, in front of the fire, perhaps uncertain what to say, not looking him in the eye; then he raised his right hand and abstractedly but tenderly fingered the Fighter Command badge in David’s buttonhole – a small gesture of quizzical familiarity that struck Johnny as quite outside the repertoire of his father’s life, or of what he knew of it. Then David patted Evert on the shoulder – it was half an embrace. ‘Do come again!’ Evert said, and left it to Johnny to lead him out of the room.

  He’d just opened the door when the light on the stairs came on, and in a second or two the noise from far down of someone climbing, determined and unseen. Johnny and his father waited a moment at the top and Ivan appeared at the turn below, looked up and saw them, saw he had arrived only just in time. ‘Hello!’ he said, beaming at David, rich in his sense of the moment, which to David of course meant nothing – he’d never heard of Ivan. ‘I’m so glad I caught you.’

  ‘Dad, this is Ivan, old friend of mine, and Evert’s.’

  His father, courteous, nodded, said, ‘David Sparsholt,’ pleasantly and with an indissoluble grain of awareness of all the name had meant.

  And now what would Ivan say? I’ve heard so much about you . . . ? His strange randy feeling for old men, and handsome well-preserved ones especially, seemed to Johnny to glow in his smiling face as he got his breath back – he must have left work early, rushed home. ‘It’s a great pleasure to meet you – at last.’

  ‘Well,’ said David, unaware of just how long that had been.

  ‘Johnny and I’ve been friends for twenty-one years, so I feel I know you already.’

  Their position at the top of the downward flight, David’s hand already on the knob of the banister, didn’t promise a long chat. ‘Well, Evert’s just been telling me all about you,’ he said, wrong-footing Johnny; and Ivan said,

  ‘Oh, dear!’

  David gave a smile Johnny hadn’t seen since childhood, cautiously teasing, entering a game, though at seventy-three he made a bigger effect with it. ‘His saviour, he called you’ – and the smile played on Ivan as if surprised at the fact, but obliged, and even pleased, to accept it, in this house full of gay men.

  ‘Oh, well . . .’ said Ivan, with a little slump, as though under the weight of those duties. Then he beamed again: ‘Do you have to go? Stay and have a drink, it will mean so much to Evert, seeing you again after all this time.’

  The old man’s smile narrowed a little, but he was still genial as he went down the first step. ‘He did write to me, at least twice, and I’m ashamed to say I didn’t reply.’ This really wasn’t for discussion, and he was almost at the turn of the stair when he looked back and said, ‘I’ve never been much of a letter-writer’; he waved his hand in the air as he went on down and was hidden by the cage of the lift.

  It was only when they were in the hall, Johnny picking up the second post from the floor, greeting but not introducing Mrs Lenska on the doorstep, that he saw, with his father beside him, how filial his feelings for Evert had become. Had his father himself sensed this, and been touched by it – wounded, perhaps, though possibly reassured? And if so, had he admitted the irony, or anyway oddity, of these two father-figures having long ago been friends, and then, astonishingly, lovers? They walked quickly away from the house, towards the Old Brompton Road – to Johnny the very pavement, the area gates, the numbered pillars of the porches, familiar to him for twenty years, seemed proof of his belonging, and of his father’s transience, a rare and wary visitor. As they turned the corner into the brighter street, David’s face seemed to show the uneasy relief of another kind of visitor, leaving a hospital when the time is up. ‘Poor old Evvie,’ he said – it wasn’t a diminutive any of his real friends used, and seemed a clumsy claim on intimacy, and sympathy. Though might it, just possibly, have been what he called him at Oxford?

  ‘You were very close once, weren’t you?
’ Johnny said – and then to lessen the pressure of implication: ‘I mean, fifty years ago!’

  His father glanced with habitual interest at a parked Bentley, S-series, his own sliding reflection in its windows and bodywork. He said, ‘I suppose he was pretty keen on me then. You know, looking back.’

  ‘Mm, and what did you feel about him?’ It was almost as if in the chill and change of the dusk, in the ambiguous minutes when streetlights came on under a high pink sky, a new freedom was possible. That strange ‘Evvie’, like a girl’s name, with its touch of pathos and nostalgia, seemed to hint at a desire for it. Things had happened, not quite named before; why not name them now? His father looked at him, with a pinch of a smile, as if at a much cleverer cross-examiner.

  ‘Things were very different then, old lad. But no, you’re right, we were good mates for a while.’

  ‘Oh, Dad, well that’s lovely.’

  There was a pause before he said, ‘Just for a moment’ – explaining but not subtracting from what he’d said. They walked on, Johnny looking around, with only a quick concealed peek at his father. There was a wine bar just opening – could the new mood carry them across the street and into the red glow of its doorway? He sensed his father’s restlessness, and it came out oddly for all the inner rehearsal: