The Sparsholt Affair

  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.

  When he got back to the house, June was putting her coat on and said she was going to top up the bird feeder, but Johnny insisted on doing it for her. He went out through the cold utility room, with its square pot sink where his father had washed his hands after work of all kinds, the cracked white bar of soap marbled with his dirt. When he opened the connecting door into the garage and turned on the light, there was the sleek superannuated Jaguar, heavy and silent, a dead man’s car; and beyond it June’s blue Golf GTi. ‘I’ve done something I never thought I’d do,’ his father had said, ‘I’ve bought a bloody German car.’ Johnny took in the remote chilled smell of oil and wood shavings from the workbench at the back where David had tinkered away his retirement mornings. On the floor in the corner, heavy, as if magnetized and movable by no one else, his large black barbell rested, and, delicately cobwebbed, the hand-weights with their stack of iron discs, used all his adult life, in staring daily sessions, until work on his arms and chest became a threat to his heart.

  Johnny found a bag of birdseed on a shelf and went out through the back door. The absolute confirming greyness of the winter sky, in every direction . . . the lawn dark green with the wet, and the shaped clumps of conifers, severe and cemetery-like today, blocking off the view from the flanking houses. The bark-covered beds, the roses pruned down hard. He unhooked the green tube of the feeder, a cage within a cage, with its squirrel-proof outer guard, jiggled out its little chained lid and poured the pretty particoloured seed in a pleasing flow over the small bars which half-obstructed the entrance. The seed fell as if through time, threshed corn streaming from its chute between timbers and into the dryer at Peachey’s farm. But in a moment it was full, overfull, and he tipped some out and flung it on the grass, where the squirrels could eat it to their heart’s content. Then he hung the feeder back on the rustic frame his father had made and erected, with every structural safeguard, outside the kitchen window, where June could watch it and occasionally, for some rare visitor or a great congregation of coal tits or sparrows, call him through to have a look. Through he would come, just too late, and to a scowl from June that suggested his own thoughtless movements had frightened them off.

  ‘We must talk about the funeral,’ she said, when Johnny joined her again in the sitting room. She had got out three possible photos for the order of service, which might have been captioned ‘War Hero’, ‘Criminal’, ‘Old Gent’.

  ‘Did Dad say anything about it?’

  It seemed that he hadn’t. ‘He wasn’t religious, as you know,’ said June.

  ‘It’s a cremation, anyway, I hope.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said June, ‘he wanted to be buried’ – and looked away at the sudden rush of agreement between them. ‘It’s in his will.’

  Johnny stared at the airman photo and wished very much that the square-jawed squadron leader had given the order, when it finally came to it, for incineration. ‘Well, if that’s what he wants, I mean wanted.’

  ‘And with his own father, of course.’

  ‘Well, I suppose.’ He got up and gazed out of the window at the empty quadrant of the drive. It was a strength to him to know that Pat was (illicitly, nocturnally) scattered on Eel Brook Common – even if he felt a literal-minded reluctance to walk there in the months that followed, when the frost on the grass or the wind-blown grit on the paths might hold microscopic parts of him. He still wondered, when he saw the damp chevrons of his boot soles on the floor of the porch, if in fact he wasn’t treading Pat back into the house. But Dad was going down, in an armour-plated box, into the red Warwickshire earth, and would lie there stubbornly, immaculately dressed, until long after everyone who remembered him alive was dead too.

  5

  There seemed to be no more to do on the Miserden job, and he was keen to be shot of it; still, something kept him dabbing away. His preliminary sketches, lively and rhythmical, were pinned up in the studio, and the five individual oil studies painted at the house stood propped in their clearer and narrower promise along the wall. And there, across two easels, was the almost finished canvas. Large, expert, pointless, it seemed to Johnny, when he stood back from it. Certain passages still had the interest of his remembered work on them, but this would soon fade; the room was evoked with all the skill of a lifetime, suggestive but precise, the figures were cleverly grouped in their odd open knot as a family, with shades of doubt and humour to set off their staring self-importance. Yet the joy of construction, the magic of depiction, the bright run up the keyboard that told you suddenly it was done, all eluded him.

  He suggested to Bella she might like to come by herself to take a look. And she did like that idea, with its hint of secrecy and the glamour of a studio visit. Johnny himself felt apologetic, exposed, in the place where he padded about all day; it was just the old dining room, with a dais made of pallets and a dingy velvet throne. But Bella was in TV, she knew about illusion, and there was something underlying their contract, that it was a meeting of illusionists. She came on a Sunday afternoon, about three o’clock: a white Range Rover Evoque outside, the bang of the knocker, Bella in the hall in tight jeans and trainers and a short coat of thick golden fur that Johnny peered at in a quandary of confirmation as he followed her through. In the studio the painting had its back to them, facing the window, and he watched her go round, acting just a little, for her first encounter. He tried to imagine seeing it for the first time himself, and the inescapable pressure to say, as she did, ‘It’s brilliant, Jonathan’ – as a first position, while her eyes kept running over it into more specialized kinds of reaction, harder to know how to put into words. He knew she would want to like it, wouldn’t want to let herself down, as a person with an eye, and hoped she would take its small critical notes as compliments to her intelligence, if not to her pride. He came round and joined her, as if to find out if he deserved her praise, and also to help her, and lead her interpretation of it.

  ‘God, you’ve got both my boys, to the life!’ Bella
said.

  ‘Oh . . . good!’ said Johnny.

  ‘And little Tallulah, look at her . . .’

  She hung back about the two adults. ‘Alan’s jolly hard to get, I must say,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Oh . . .’ said Bella, going close, perhaps sensing a chance to say Tell me about it! but in fact saying, ‘Oh, no, I know that look very well.’

  Now Johnny stood back, against the window. ‘He didn’t like sitting, that was the thing.’

  ‘Well, he can’t always do what he likes, can he.’ She turned and looked at him. ‘Oh, it’s marvellous, Jonathan,’ she said and ran over and gave him a kiss on the cheek and a hard fluffy hug in which he felt all sorts of other hopes and worries were buried.

  ‘People often don’t like their portrait when they see it first,’ he said; ‘because it’s not how they see themselves, or the idea they have from photos, or just looking in the mirror.’

  ‘Well, I like it,’ said Bella, with affected stubbornness. And then, more slyly, ‘I can’t wait to see what the kids say.’

  ‘Can I get you something?’

  ‘Oh . . .’ She winced, denying herself. ‘Perhaps a herbal?’

  Johnny listed them, till she grew confused, ginger, ginkgo, ginseng . . . ‘Shall I come?’ she said. But he wanted to leave her for a minute or two by herself with the portrait, in case something settled after all, some little objection.

  When he came back she was standing looking out into the garden. He gave her the mug with the fluttering tag. ‘I’m sorry it’s taken so long,’ he said.

  ‘Oh . . .’

  ‘The whole business of Dad’s death put me out by a few weeks.’

  ‘Oh . . . darling, of course it did,’ said Bella. ‘And are you all right?’

  ‘I’m all right about him dying, really, yes.’

  ‘Hmmm. All the other stuff, though . . . I must say I felt for you, when I saw all that.’

  ‘I ought to be used to it by now, but it was all so long ago I’d got used to it being forgotten – and young people of course had never heard of it.’

  ‘Well, I hardly had, you know, myself . . .’ – not knowing how to place herself.

  ‘Anyway, everyone knows now.’ Bella wasn’t someone to confide in, but her fame and energy drew something from him, a desire for validation. Not, of course, that he’d ever heard of her till she asked him to paint her.

  ‘Funny, though,’ she said, ‘having an affair named after you.’

  ‘It’s not quite the honour it may seem,’ said Johnny, not for the first time. ‘It’s not like a TV show, say . . .’

  Bella hesitated. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this, it’s what my Samuel calls the picture – our portrait, I mean. The Sparsholt Affair.’

  ‘Oh . . . yes . . . hah.’ Again this wasn’t original of Samuel.

  ‘Seriously, though,’ said Bella, ‘I suppose with something like that, it could colour your whole life, if you let it.’

  ‘Well . . . I dare say everyone’s whole life is coloured by something.’ Given the chance, he forgot it for months on end, but could never be wholly free from requests to explain, and have feelings about it, though his cautious patter was now nearly meaningless with repetition. ‘I do remember how terrible it was when it all blew up, I’d just started a new school, and I think I told you I always had problems reading.’

  ‘You were dyslexic, darling.’

  ‘Yeah, thick was the word in those days. The other kids read about it in the papers – they knew more about what Dad had been up to than I did.’

  Bella nursed her mug. ‘Think what they’d know now,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I suppose.’

  ‘It scares me, what my kids can see online. Porn, and – oh god, I shouldn’t tell you this, I found Samuel has one of these dating apps on his phone.’

  ‘Oh, lord!’ said Johnny, and went over and looked closely at Alan Miserden’s gleaming left loafer.

  ‘It must feel strange,’ said Bella a bit later, ‘when you finish a big piece like this. I know I feel awful when we’ve wrapped a new series.’

  ‘I always have something else on the go,’ Johnny said. ‘I’m never not doing a job. That’s something really positive I get from my dad.’

  ‘You’re a worker,’ said Bella, ‘like me.’ And she went off a few steps round the back of her own picture to see what else might be going on. ‘Anything interesting?’

  ‘Oh . . . well, I’ve been painting my daughter – I told you she’s getting married next month, so I want to do it first.’

  ‘Before you lose her – aah, darling,’ said Bella.

  ‘I hope not.’

  ‘Can I see . . . ?’

  ‘Well, it’s not nearly finished . . .’ It wasn’t a good idea to show sitters other work in progress – it gave them unhelpful ideas, retrospective doubts. Yet he wanted Bella to admire this one – the sitter as much as the picture, eyes, nose, mouth worked on with extraordinary care amid the loose swirls of hair and curve of her collar. He went over to where it was propped up, not touched for a week, and covered with a cloth – he lifted it out, and she followed him to the light.

  ‘Oh, she’s a beauty, isn’t she.’

  ‘Her dad’s not the best judge of that,’ said Johnny.

  Bella glanced at him. ‘I can see her mother in her, but she’s more like you.’

  ‘Really?’ This pleased him, as the picture itself did; the patient re-creation of his own daughter lent the work on the portrait a challenge and a charge of emotion quite lacking in the Miserden job.

  ‘And you like the husband – husband-to-be?’

  ‘Yeah, he’s OK,’ said Johnny, and grinned – neither of them quite knew what he meant.

  ‘Well, thank you for sharing,’ said Bella, watching as he took the canvas away. ‘And what’s this?’ There was a danger of her getting into her stride, and Johnny said absent-mindedly,

  ‘Which one’s that . . . ? Ah, no, that’s not by me.’ He came over and they looked at the drawing hanging by the door into the hall, Bella with eyes narrowed, as if preparing to speak. ‘It was left to me by an old friend who died a few years ago – Evert Dax?’

  She half-nodded, then made a little moue: ‘I don’t think . . .’

  ‘Fran knew him – in fact I first met her in his house, long ago.’

  ‘Ah . . . yes.’

  ‘It’s by an artist called Peter Coyle, who was killed in the War, very young. I’ve only ever seen one other thing by him.’

  ‘Well, it’s very striking,’ said Bella. ‘I mean, marvellous drawing . . .’ There was a little teeter on the boundary between them, what could be said about so much muscular male flesh.

  ‘I’d been looking at this picture for years at Evert’s house without guessing what it was.’

  ‘And that is?’

  Johnny paused respectfully, ‘It’s my father.’

  Bella’s head went back. ‘My word, Jonathan.’

  ‘Done when he was a student, early in the War.’

  She leaned in more closely. ‘No wonder he had affairs!’

  Johnny didn’t mind this. ‘He was a handsome man,’ he said.

  ‘But he didn’t want his head in the picture.’

  ‘I suppose not – who knows?’

  ‘You never asked him?’

  Johnny’s eyes ran over the ridged abdomen and sleek pectorals, familiar in chalk, in reality known differently, and remotely. ‘We never talked about things like that.’

  ‘No . . . perhaps . . . And you never painted him yourself?’ – Bella turning her gaze on him now.

  ‘Sadly, no. We had a first sitting for a portrait about twenty years ago, but then we had a terrible row, it was impossible.’

  ‘That’s a real shame.’

  ‘We never really knew each other,’ said Johnny, ‘what with everything.’

  It wasn’t clear from Bella’s thoughtful stare if she was absorbing wisdom or about to dispense it.

  When she had gone Johnny drifted back
almost reluctantly into the studio, and looked at the family portrait again. The afternoon was darkening, and he switched on the big lamp – the colours leapt into gallery brilliance, and the handling seemed more exposed and temperamental. He knew Bella felt it could all have been glossier, goldener, while part of his own regret was that he hadn’t been blacker and sharper. He had failed as both eulogist and satirist: it was the compromise of his trade, though at best, of course, the truth. Then the sweep of harp strings in his pocket, the upward run after all, Johnny read the words carefully and smiled.

  A week later a boy came to take the Miserden family away and enshrine them in the massive gilt frame that Bella had ordered, twenty times the weight of the canvas itself – which was so long, on its light pine stretcher, that it wobbled and twisted slightly as they lifted it. He was called Eduard, a Catalan, yes from Barcelona, lean, long-faced, clear-skinned, with short dark hair that was roughed up into a sort of quiff at the front, and at his nape, as he bent forwards, tapered and graded so delicately to the neck it seemed more like nature than barbering. His white teeth and his short dark beard were together something Johnny wanted to paint, so that he was smilingly distracted in the way he looked at him doing his work. Eduard wore green boxer shorts whose rear waistband, and a crescent of brown back, were shown every time he squatted down or leant across the package once he’d laid it flat. Johnny studied the waistband for ten seconds, the word overlapping itself nonsensically at the join.

  Eduard smiled and nodded at the portrait before he half-hid it, as if underwater, in bubble-wrap, then hid it wholly in a second glistening layer: ‘Is Bella’ – his recognition not for the work of art but for its subject, a celebrity. Millions were on first-name terms with this woman they’d never met. Johnny had a mental glimpse of the hundreds and hundreds of pictures Eduard spent his days wrapping and packing, taping and boxing, with the professional pride and personal indifference of a security guard. Well, sometimes perhaps he liked one picture more than another, but Johnny’s instincts towards him were so tender and disproportionate he kept off the subject of art. It killed his interest if a man said something stupid about a picture. In a minute they angled the package out together, with quick clenches and grunts, giver and receiver, to the van. Johnny signed the manifest, and was handed the third pink under-copy, barely legible, his signature not visible at all. And then Eduard was gone, Johnny went back indoors, and stood holding and folding the piece of paper, in a room that was doubly empty, of the large expensive portrait and the priceless warm young man.