The Sparsholt Affair

5

There were now enough of us going out from Oxford to Woodstock for a special bus to be laid on – it picked us up in St Giles’: filers and typists, who’d been billeted in Keble College, a small body of students which expanded in intriguing ways, and half a dozen dons, linguists mainly, who had not already joined up. We trundled out the five or six miles through the autumn countryside, as if on an excursion away from the War; though once we turned in through the gates of the Palace we found a scene disfigured with the guard huts, Nissen huts and paraphernalia of a wartime base. I was there for two or three days a week, and was often back in College quite late. As a result I saw Evert less, and was so busy with other and, on the whole, graver secrets that I rather forgot about the Sparsholt thing.

I came up the stairs one evening about nine o’clock, and bumped into Evert coming down. ‘Oh, thank God,’ he said.

‘Come and have a drink.’ He followed me back into the room. ‘How are you?’

He stood and gazed at me with a remote smile, as if it should have been obvious. He was wearing a finely cut suit, as usual, with a soft blue cravat at the throat; he seemed to have put on quite a lot of some rather florid scent. He also looked as if he hadn’t slept for days. ‘Oh, Fred,’ he said, ‘you’re the only person I can really talk to. Most people would be horrified, or disgusted, but you understand.’

‘Well,’ I said, cautiously, ‘I don’t know.’ I made him sit down, and poured him a glass of port. ‘So much of that sort of thing went on at school it would seem very odd to me if it suddenly stopped at Oxford – especially now, you know, with things in such a muddle and no one knowing what’s round the corner.’

‘I couldn’t bear it any longer,’ he said, ‘I can’t think, I can’t do any work. Garvey gave me hell over my Dryden essay.’

‘All because of Sparsholt,’ I said.

‘I even wrote him a poem, and left it in his pigeonhole.’

‘Garvey’s . . . ?’

‘David’s, of course.’

‘And what did he say about that?’

‘I went back a few minutes later and took it out again.’

‘Not good enough,’ I said sternly.

‘It was a beautiful poem.’

‘I mean, you’ve got to do something, Evert – at least get to know him a bit.’ And when you do, I thought, you’ll see he’s not worth all this trouble.

Evert sipped his port and stared at the carpet. ‘I just have done something – I’ve just been to his rooms.’

I sat down too, and Evert stretched out on my little sofa, looking away from me, like an analyst’s patient. The narration that followed was pained and hesitant, and he seemed to run away several times from his own decision to tell the story. But I give it here as I summarized it later that night in my diary, which even now makes me hear particular phrases in his soft deep voice. With the blackout he had been unable to tell from the quad if Sparsholt was in. He had gone upstairs very quietly, two at a time, and found that his oak was open, and stood there for some minutes listening and hardly daring to breathe. He believed he could hear an occasional sound. I said had it been rhythmical creaking? Evert said no, and I couldn’t tell if he smiled. It was perhaps ‘like someone turning the pages of a book’. He remained there in the dark for five minutes or more, but simply couldn’t bring himself to knock. There was only a little light leaking out under the door. ‘It was quite an eerie feeling to be so close to him, without him knowing.’

I couldn’t help feeling it would have been more eerie for Sparsholt, had he found out. I said, ‘You didn’t stoop to peering through the keyhole.’

‘Of course I stooped, but the thing was down on the other side.’

‘Do tell me you knocked in the end.’

‘I did,’ said Evert, pausing to drink and nod ruefully at the recollection. But there had been no reply. He waited for a while, then knocked again. Whatever the noise was that he thought he could hear had stopped, but he didn’t know if he had been imagining it, or if Sparsholt was sitting just feet away pretending not to be there. So with sudden decisiveness Evert turned the handle and went in. There he was at last in the room of the loved one in all its unguarded ordinariness. No one was there but he had the strange sensation that the room itself was staring at him, as at a man who was taking advantage of another’s innocence. At the same time he was giving the disappointing contents of the room – the few books, the Ladbroke’s calendar, the commoner’s gown that hung beneath a Boat Club cap on a hook – the most tender and generous appraisal they can ever have received. Next to the desk some barbells and Swedish clubs were placed against the wall. There was a fire in, and Sparsholt had got in some logs, which Evert saw must have been the noise he’d heard. They were crackling behind the old wire fireguard. It was warm in there, and of course with the shutters closed and the curtains pulled across it was quite snug; it had the emptiness of a room which seems to expect any moment the footsteps of its owner on the stairs below. The door was open into the unlit bedroom, and Evert drifted towards it and looked in, and had hardly taken a step inside when there was a sudden rustling noise in the shadows and a voice said, ‘Oh, hello!’

The feeling of being caught was disastrous, it meant the scandalous exposure of his desires. He hardly knew what he said, as he backed away into the sitting room, apologizing for waking him, and watching fearfully as Sparsholt got off the bed and came towards him into the light – and it wasn’t him. Evert stared and laughed. He thought for a second he must have gone into the wrong room, that all the drama of waiting had been an absurd waste of time and anxious emotion, and that the barbells and the cap and the books on dynamics were mere effects in some bewildering coincidence. But no, he was sure, it was Sparsholt’s room, his bedroom, but with another man in it.

‘So what did you say?’ I asked.

‘I said I was looking for David, which was perfectly true, of course. And he said, so was he, but he’d just had a little lie down while he was waiting.’ Evert sat forward slightly to take another sip of port – I saw the moment’s calculation as he left a quarter-inch in the glass.

A strange conversation had ensued between the two intruders, though Evert was so thrown that it didn’t strike him at first that the other man’s story was a very odd one. Both of them were confused, which saved the situation up to a point. They introduced themselves; the stranger was called Gordon Pinnock, he was at St Peter’s College, and he came from Nuneaton – he had been at school with Sparsholt, and claimed outright to be his best friend.

Over the next few minutes Evert seems to have found out a good deal about him, though whether he revealed as much of himself I doubt. They had quite a chat; and Evert found him attractive, in a peculiar way, with a smile he couldn’t help thinking somehow suspicious. If Pinnock and Sparsholt were such close friends it seemed horribly likely to Evert that Sparsholt must have mentioned him, the strange second-year man who was always staring and hanging about in odd places. And it was certain that after this present encounter Pinnock would tell Sparsholt just what had happened – Evert himself was now listening for footsteps outside, while conscious of the need to use the small time available to make his case. I didn’t like to say I thought it quite likely that Sparsholt had hardly taken Evert in at all.

Pinnock looked at him a bit comically and said, what was it about? Evert said he just wanted to leave him a message. And of course Pinnock said, ‘Oh, I’ll tell him, what was it?’ – which made Evert feel there was definitely a game of some kind going on. ‘I wonder where he’s got to,’ said Pinnock. Evert said it was all right, he’d leave his message in the lodge, and he mumbled something about the fire-watching roster. He was turning to go when Pinnock surprised him. They were standing beside Sparsholt’s desk, with the heavy discs of the weights on the floor beside them. And Pinnock said, with a strange little smile, ‘Are you an admirer of the male form?’ ‘Well . . .’ said Evert. ‘I know, funny isn’t it,’ Pinnock said; and then he told him something very revealing, which was that up until two years before Sparsholt had been ‘a total weed’, he was ‘weak and skinny’. As a schoolboy he was always being pushed around, and the only sport he was good at was running – running away, in effect. So at some point, he decided to make a man of himself. ‘Get him to show you a picture,’ said Pinnock, ‘the next time you see him: you won’t believe the change.’ ‘Right, yes, I will,’ said Evert. And with that he made his excuses and left.

He emptied his glass and turned to face me. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that doesn’t sound too bad.’ But I could see that his mind was lurching round new loops, and had seized on Pinnock, who sounded to me like a hundred other affable and lonely freshmen, as a new hazard and a further rival.

When Evert had left I went over to the lodge to see if some papers I was expecting had arrived, and found a brown cardboard tube in my pigeonhole. I recognized the Art Nouveau writing on the label, and felt I had better not open it till I was back in my room. Once there I coaxed out, tightly rolled so that it seemed to spring free (or half-free, since it kept the disposition to curl), a sheet of pale grey cartridge paper. In fact it curled up coyly in the second I reached away for a book to weight it on the desk. On the back were the pencilled initials, ‘D. S.’ and ‘P. C.’, and the date, 30. X. 40. Was I supposed to imagine a heart and an arrow between them? I held it down flat with Myles on the Papacy and The Code of the Woosters, and had a look at Peter’s effort.

What did I think of it, really? I was torn between wanting to see genius in a friend’s work and a very much drier view. I had a sense of being provoked. Why, after all, had he sent it, or possibly given it, to me? I suppose it was to prove his point, his seducer’s speed; but I felt he was mocking too at my interest in the matter, which he seemed to feel was excessive: I think he thought he could excite me as he himself had been excited.

In fact my position gave me a larger scope for criticism, since I’d seen very nearly as much of this model as Peter had: in the strokings, or fingerings, of red chalk, there was a rush to enhance and ennoble Sparsholt’s body beyond the already enhanced reality. Those two years of incessant press-ups and weights had been outdone in ten minutes. It was the portraitist’s usual flattery, no doubt, but fed by Peter’s own desire to worship: a somehow unwholesome collusion of two men with quite different tastes over a question of male beauty. I have always thought the male nude drawing a sadly comical genre. At one time my half-brother Gerald collected those woeful ‘académies’ produced by the thousands in the art schools of Europe – the moustache, the ropy muscles, the merciful cache-sexe, or if not that the intractable silliness of the genitals themselves, were obstacles only the finest artists could surmount. Well, David Sparsholt had as yet no moustache, and no silk pouch was seen in Peter’s drawing of him. Had it not been for the pencilled note, the heroic torso might just as well have been his gardener from Corpus, or any other of his subjects. In an art so prone to exaggeration it was hard to tell. What Peter had created was a portrait of a demigod from neck to knee, the sex suggested by a little slur, conventional as a fig leaf, while the neck opened up into nothing, like the calyx of a flower.