The Sparsholt Affair

6

It was meatless dinner in Hall on Friday – perhaps a bad night to have signed in Jill as my guest. She fell on the charred pilaff with greed and dismay, forking through it in search of bits of carrot and cauliflower; she might almost have been on one of her digs. Her decisive gestures, her bunchy brown hair pushed back behind her ears, those large grey eyes and that jutting jaw, all stirred me more now than they had before – I watched her fondly, and I seemed to watch myself, intrigued by my own deepening feelings. Our talk was academic, in fact archaeological, for the most part. She spoke with earnest excitement about some small Etruscan cups or jars she had been allowed to handle when the contents of the Ashmolean were being packed up and sent away in case of bombing. I’d never been interested in such things myself, but I smiled at her enjoyment and after five minutes I started to wonder if I didn’t share her enthusiasm. We sat facing each other between the yellow lamps, the sleeves of our scholar’s gowns sweeping the table. With those small artefacts, I felt, she must have shown a delicacy of touch she had not yet shown to me; or perhaps to any other person.

After dinner I sensed she would have liked to come to my room for coffee, but I was due to start my fire-watching almost at once. I lit her through to the Canterbury Gate, and this time as she shook my hand I leant over it and placed a light kiss on her cheek: I still remember its surprisingly available softness and warmth, just threatened by the cold November evening. Her own reaction was hard to make out exactly in the dark, but horrified alarm seemed the main part of it; she muttered something as she quickly went off. I popped up to my room, rather pleased none the less with what I had done. It paved the way for doing it again. Three minutes later I was crossing Tom Quad for my vigil with Barrett. I brought with me, as well as a Thermos flask and a coat and scarf, The Wicket Gate, volume one of A. V. Dax’s Dance of Shadows trilogy. As I was to introduce Evert’s father at the Club, I wanted to be sure of my footing in the crowded twilight of those earlier novels.

Barrett was another Brasenose refugee, a small northern scientist of some sort, but it struck me he might know Sparsholt and might throw out inadvertent titbits that I could pass on to Evert, before his encounter with him tomorrow night. I was uneasy about this deviously engineered plan, and afraid that Sparsholt himself might think it so odd as to turn against him. As Evert’s confidant I wished the painful story a happy conclusion, and as his friend I saw my duty to prepare him for the worst. When two friends are pursuing the same hopeless object, one with more apparent success than the other, all advice is subtly compromised. I went carefully up the steep dark stair of the tower, and into the square ringing-chamber that was our base for the night, with the sallies of the bell ropes, striped red, white and blue, looped up like bunting just above our heads. It was now four months since they’d been used, and I imagined the bells overhead in their downcast vacancy, and seemed almost to hear the strange creaks of ropes and wheels on the day, perhaps not too far off, when they would be raised again and rung. A few church chairs, with slots for hymn books, had been brought up, and a folding table. The small window was blacked out and the room was starkly lit. Barrett and I would each spend half the night here, and the rest of it up on the leads above, looking out for any kind of trouble from the sky. It was the duty of the one who was resting to run with any message called down by the watcher. So far it had always been wearily eventless work, enemy aircraft sometimes at the limit of hearing: in the black early hours after midnight, while nightly raids were burning London, Oxford, in its bowl of hills, was fixed in a new and generalized silence.

I made a little study in the corner of the room, and found myself growing critical as Barrett was five and then ten minutes late. At last I heard the door bang dully down below, and rapid footsteps on the stairs. I turned away to conceal my impatience, ‘Oh, hello . . .’ he said from the doorway behind me, and I looked round to see a greatcoated figure pluck off his cap – it was David Sparsholt. ‘Oh, hello!’ he said again.

‘Oh, David, hello’ – I had spoken without thinking, from a feeling of closeness he could have had no sense of. In his quick blink and shake of the head, his pleasure that I remembered his first name outweighed a trace of awkwardness. It was clear from his little grin, as he took off his coat and looked for somewhere to hang it, that he didn’t know what to call me. I was conscious of what Peter had said – that Sparsholt mistrusted my friendliness. He said, ‘We’ve met before, haven’t we.’

‘We met shaving,’ I said. ‘I’m Freddie – Freddie Green.’

‘Oh, yes, that’s right,’ he said, and we shook hands again. He wore a heavy brown Army jersey, tight on his powerful frame, and his grasp was strong and his gaze direct. I wondered if Peter had made up his story, to tease me; he had a merciless eye for others’ insecurities.

‘But we’ve seen each other a few times since.’ Did he really not remember these? If the first time, waiting under Tom Gate for the rain to slacken, he had been a little unsure how to meet my eye, the second time, when we passed each other in our quad, he returned my nod gratefully enough. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you tonight.’

‘No. I’m sorry to be late,’ he said, ‘I swopped with Tom Barrett.’

‘I don’t mind at all,’ I said. I was immediately relieved that Evert would be spared his misconceived night alone with him. ‘When were you supposed to be on?’

‘I was down for tomorrow.’ He looked at me straight, though he coloured as he spoke – a little sequence I remembered from before. ‘I’ll have my fiancée here this weekend, you see.’

‘Your fiancée – aha!’ I said, perhaps overdoing my surprise. I entered into it clumsily, ‘Yes, you don’t want to be stuck on the roof all night when she’s here!’

‘Well, no,’ said Sparsholt, so that I saw I had been abruptly intimate. ‘Now how are we going to do this?’

I started to describe the way I had done it before, but he spoke over me and said he would take the first stint on the roof. He put his coat back on, and his cap: he had found the small military element in the night. I went up the stairs behind him just to show him the way, and he pushed open the low door on to the leads. In a minute we adjusted to the quality of the night. It would grow darker yet, and when the moon, in its last quarter, had slipped down behind Merton tower, the whole city would sink into mere muddled shadow, as if a vast grey net had been thrown over a table heaped with once familiar objects, now enigmatically confused and obscured. I said I would come back in an hour and went cautiously to the door and then down again; decanted some coffee in the lid of my flask, and sat down at the table with my book, but all the time something else was sinking in, the degree to which his presence had intensified. In straightforward terms he held no interest for me, except as a figure from a world so unlike my own that it might be instructive to observe it; but by proxy he had assumed an aura. I was abashed to think that in my room, hidden among jerseys and vests, there was a drawing of him in the nude. It would be difficult now to deal with him as if unaware of how other people desired him, or of how they would envy our spending the night together. What I thought I might find out, in the course of the night, was how much he sensed all this himself.

In my first hours below decks I ran quite far through The Wicket Gate, ignoring for as long as I could the failure of the magic and the grey dawn of disillusion. It is hard to do justice to old pleasures that cannot be revived – we seem half to disown our youthful selves, who loved and treasured them. There was the scene where Enid returns to Mark Gay at Garstang Hall: ‘Great was his joy to find that she was come’ – in my school dorm the words had brought a new constriction to my throat and given me a glimpse through tears of the wild landscape of adult passion; the archaic solemnity of the prose had clutched at my heart. Now they struck me as an awful simulacrum of literature, though written, I none the less felt, with perfect sincerity. It was a sham that had convinced the author himself. I went up at ten to start my shift with a feeling of relief.

At first I couldn’t see Sparsholt. By now the moon had set, and I sent my weak torchlight flitting over the sloping leads and the step-shaped battlements. In the centre of the roof, but hidden from the ground, rose the simple wooden housing of the bells, as functional as a shed, and high enough to conceal anyone standing behind it. I made my way round, with an oddly racing heart. There was no one here either. I wondered if he had climbed on up into one of the small corner turrets, which were something like watchtowers, bristling with gargoyles instead of guns. ‘Who goes there?’ – in a sudden angry shout. I gasped and jumped and looked upwards. Hollow footsteps sounded above my head. He had clambered up somehow on to the pitched roof of the shed, and a few seconds later my narrow beam caught him there, massive against the sky, then twisting away from the light. I saw his big white smile, or snarl, before he crouched and slid to the edge and dropped down, almost taking me with him as his feet hit the angled surface and he fell forward and stopped himself on the high parapet. For a second he had clutched at me, saving himself or protecting me, I wasn’t sure. I think he hoped to frighten me. Who goes there? – it was a challenge from a film, from a children’s game, but when Sparsholt said it I caught the thrill, for him, of the game becoming real.

I found my first watch the strangest. It was still early, though the indiscriminate darkness disturbed the sense of time. Seeing little but outlines of steeples and pinnacles under a thinly clouded night sky, I observed in another way, with the ears. Standing quite still I was at the centre of a townscape drawn not only in charcoal but in sound. At its outer rim there was the mild intermittent noise of cars on the Abingdon Road, which seemed to merge and lose themselves in the episodic sighing of the breeze in the tall elms of the Meadow. A keener ear still might have heard leaves falling and milling on the paths beneath. Now and then there was the muffled rumble of a late bus or car in St Aldate’s, unavoidably drawing attention to itself. For ten minutes there was something close to silence, broken by a moment’s music from an opened door somewhere, and then the quick footsteps and unconcerned conversation of three men crossing the flagged terrace of the quad below. I peered out through the battlements and saw their torch switched on and off, its beam mere momentary scratches on the dark. None of them of course looked round or looked up – I was a secret observer of these trivial happenings, my head unsuspected in the night among a hundred unseen Gothic details. Then a silence that was that of 4 a.m., so that it was a shock, and a bore, to turn the light on my watch and find it was barely eleven.

When a further hour and five minutes had passed I went downstairs, thinking Sparsholt might have fallen asleep. In fact he was sitting at my little table with his back to me, his head propped on his left hand as he read a book. ‘Anything doing?’ he said, as he looked round, and stood up, and stretched, and seemed to expand by some further factor of rediscovered muscular power, his fingertips swinging a looped bell rope overhead.

‘Not a thing,’ I said, unwinding my long scarf, and glancing down at the open page – a spread of scientific diagrams, with graphs crossing and diverging. ‘Oh, I thought you might be reading my novel.’ I’d been slow to see that I had a subject.

‘Mm, I had a look at it,’ he said, with a smile and a lift of the eyebrows, as if to say it confirmed his impression not only of novels, but of people who read them. The wary humour was new, and appealing.

‘You might not like it,’ I said. ‘I don’t myself, really – but its author is coming to talk to our Club next week, and I have to introduce him.’

‘Oh, I see . . . who is it?’ – turning over the book. ‘A. V. Dax . . .’ He shook his head.

‘I used to love his books, but now I’ve seen through them – if you know what I mean.’ I took off my overcoat and dropped it over the back of the chair.

‘Well, we all go off things,’ he said.

I winced. ‘It’s a bit delicate because his son’s a good friend of mine.’

‘Oh, is he?’

‘In this College,’ I said; ‘you may have met him?’ Again a little moue of unconcern. ‘Evert Dax, he’s reading English, in the second year.’

Now he nodded hesitantly. ‘Evert . . .’ he said, as though something improbable were being confirmed. ‘Yes, I think I’ve met him. I thought it was Evan.’

‘It’s a Dutch name – his father’s partly Dutch.’

‘And he’s a friend of yours’ – reassessing me in the light of this. I had a confused sense that I might have to defend Evert – that Sparsholt had already marked him down as a pest. Should I concede that he had strange habits – was, as we said then, ‘over-emotional’? Loyalty seemed pliable, for a moment. ‘Well, if he’s the person I’m thinking of,’ Sparsholt said, ‘he seems very decent.’ He pulled his cap down low on his forehead and shrugged on his greatcoat.

‘Why don’t you come along?’ I said, ‘ – to the Club.’

But he shook his head again. ‘I’ve got no time for reading,’ he said, and with that he clambered off up the narrow stair into the dark. I savoured the dry comedy of his remark, as I sat down and poured another inch of coffee into the Thermos lid; and then there was the knowledge that Evert, in so far as he figured at all in his mind, was ‘decent’: he’d been friendly, surely, was what he meant, unlike others in this cold college. Evert, besotted by this great hunk of a boy, his thoughts about him no doubt indecent in the extreme. I picked up Enid and Mark’s romance again but distracted and even guilty at the thought of the longings that had so far escaped young Sparsholt’s detection. My eyes passed across the scant features of the room, barely seeing the gilt-lettered boards that gave the age and weight of the bells, and the framed testimonials to feats of change-ringing.

I can’t now recall the exact order of our passing encounters, on the difficult ribbed leads or on the steep companionway. But as the slow night turned and intermittent winds piled up and then dispersed high continents of cloud, we fell into conversation of a kind that I’ve known only in the War, brief dislocated intimacies, a blurring of boundaries between person and person in the surrounding dark. One time he came up quickly, and stood next to me, saying nothing – I knew from the way his breathing stilled and he shifted almost noiselessly in his greatcoat that he was glad of the company, the mere proximity of another person watching. I pictured a dog, brought back on the invisible leash that links it to a man, standing panting at first, then merely waiting and breathing. Soon a plane was heard, the first of the night, silent after the first doubtful rumble, then more sustained, though distancing already: still we said nothing as we recognized a Wellington – the rumble of reassurance rather than fear. We were standing on the north side of the tower, the squat spire of the Cathedral close by, and beyond that mere conjecture. It was the moment when I sensed the real tenor of Sparsholt’s concern – I saw I had been slow, although something in him repudiated sympathy, or the weakness of requiring it. In that vast northward view (or lack of view) was the world he came from. I said, ‘By the way, I hope your people are all right?’

He said they were, so far, though they’d had a dozen or more air raids already. I asked what they did. His father was a manager at a steel-plant, and his mother worked on the drapery counter at Freeman’s, the local department store. He was an only child – ‘though we also have a cat,’ he said.

‘I suppose your father’s in a reserved occupation?’ I said.

‘That’s right,’ said Sparsholt. ‘To be honest, though, I’m more concerned about him getting killed up there.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘It’s been bad already but we’re still expecting, you know, the big one.’

We stared blindly into the darkness, and I felt for him. To me home was a place tucked away, unsignalled, with the great stone bulwarks of the Moor between it and Plymouth, to the south, which had already been the target of the bombers. But to Sparsholt, gazing north, the world of home lay open as if on a tray, the factories, foundries, munition works offered up to the beak and claws of the enemy. They would have AA guns, he said, but we both knew these were badges of hope and faith more than practical defences.

‘Let’s hope they come through,’ I said. His silence might have covered any number of things, and I wasn’t sure in the dark if we had both settled down on the idea of his home, or if we had drifted apart into separate reflections. He didn’t ask about me; I felt my exemption from service made him uneasy, as if there might be something shameful and embarrassing about the whole Green family. I could have told him that my half-brother Gerald was in Crete right now, a captain in the special forces; and there were things I was prevented from telling him about what I was up to myself. ‘Right, I’ll go down,’ I said, and for a second I was startled to see, in the quick play of my flashlight, the face of a determined young stranger – in the darkness he’d softened into quite another figure, with subtle elements of several other people I knew, and who was I suppose a mere fantasy fathered by his presence.

At another change of the watch he must have found me asleep – and sleeping heavily too, with the weight of sleep postponed. A noise in a dream brought with it a complete rationale of history and consequence, which fled away as I opened my eyes to find Sparsholt staring into my face with mingled apology and impatience and saying again, ‘It’s five o’clock,’ or whatever lonely time of the night we had reached. I apologized myself, with a fuddled sense of foolishness and a trace of something else, a kind of mutinous pleasure in having succumbed. ‘It’s no good falling asleep,’ he said, as if about to list the reasons; but making do with a stare and a quick nod. I saw that something almost hidden was playing out through the night, a little game of seniority. As I pulled on my coat and reached in the pockets for my gloves I felt that my greater age and experience, the people I knew and the thousands of books I’d read, counted for nothing in his eyes. The War had levelled us, and on this platform he was already standing taller and stronger. I might have won the Chancellor’s Essay Prize in my first year, and the Gifford Medal in my second; but to him I was just an eccentric weakling, close friend of other eccentrics, with whom he was thrust into a fleeting alliance.

And yet there was something unguardedly boyish about him too. There was even a strange moment towards dawn, when it felt colder than ever, when he asked me what some vaguely emerging landmark was, and leaning by me in the stepped opening of the battlements he put his arm around my shoulders, while with the other hand he pointed and I squinted down his finger as through the sight of a gun. I had never been used to physical contact, and his loose hug flustered me before it warmed me and even cheered me. He gave off, at this late end of a long day, the faint mildewed smell of someone thirsty, unwashed and unshaven. ‘Thanks for being so decent, Green,’ he said. He half-turned in the grey early light, and I thought, as I peered up at him, that he was smiling. He gave me a squeeze, a quick sample of his withheld power, as he let me go, and his train of thought was no doubt subconscious: ‘Well, I’ll have my Connie here today!’

‘She’s Connie, is she?’ I said, and nodded. I felt I should have asked about her before. He paced off to the far end of the roof, where I saw from his stance he was relieving himself into the corner drain – delayed and just audible came the thin cascade through the gargoyle’s mouth on to the flagstones far below. It was his turn to go down but when he strolled back he said, ‘I’ll stay up a bit and see the day in.’ In fact he had his own question, put with that throwaway air which doesn’t quite conceal a longer curiosity:

‘So do you have a sweetheart?’ he said.

Like his ‘decent’, the word touched me. ‘Well . . .’ I murmured. Something in me longed to say yes, and dress up a mere hope as a certainty, or a boast. But could Jill, even if things went well, ever turn into a sweetheart? I said, ‘As it happens, there is someone, yes.’

‘Is she in Oxford?’

‘Yes, at St Hilda’s.’

‘You’re lucky,’ said David. ‘Do you think you’ll get married?’ This was rather a jump, and I felt my claim had been put to an immediate test.

‘Well, it would be nice to think so,’ I said. ‘What are your plans?’

He seemed conscious of speaking beyond his years. ‘We’re hoping to do it as soon as I leave. Connie’s moving to Oxford at the end of the month.’

‘Well, you’re the lucky one, in that case. Is she a student too?’

‘No, we’re friends from home. She’s just managed to get a job down here.’

‘In the university, you mean?’

I could see him lean forward and peer down, as though even here we might be overheard; but all he said was, ‘No, something else.’

‘Well, there’s a lot of something else going on in Oxford these days,’ I said and looked at him slyly to see his reaction.

‘She’ll be putting up at Keble College,’ he said. ‘She’s a qualified shorthand typist.’

‘Ah, yes, I see,’ I said, ‘I see.’

He seemed warily relieved that I did. ‘Can’t say much more about it,’ he said.

When we left the roof he said, ‘I had another look at that book of yours,’ and he made one or two remarks about how ‘fancy’ the writing was, and how far-fetched the narrative. ‘I don’t know what Enid sees in Mark Gay,’ he said; ‘I don’t think a real woman would have felt like that about such a boring bastard.’ He laughed briefly, conscious but not ashamed of his disrespect. I thought it was the kind of criticism that might have ensued if readers with no literary training were to write the newspaper notices instead of professional reviewers; but I was on the back foot as I found myself trying to defend Victor Dax, since what Sparsholt said, though ignorant, was lethally true. ‘I think there’s rather more to it than that,’ I said, regretting my superior tone. ‘You know it’s all based on Arthurian legends.’

We turned off the light and began our descent from the ringing chamber to the quad and the blessed humdrum of gowns and breakfast. Our conversation had again that air of inadvertent candour: I was coming down rather cautiously with the back of his cap and his close-cropped neck a foot or two below me. ‘Do you know a man called Coyle?’ he said.

‘Well, I know Peter Coyle,’ I said, glad he couldn’t see me – it was the very first time I’d been caught unawares by the Sparsholt affair, and I blushed hotly. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘He asked if he could draw me. Now he wants to paint my picture, for some reason.’

‘Oh, well, I hope you’ll let him,’ I said.

There was a pause as he felt for the light switch for the lower stair. ‘I suppose he’s a bit of a pansy,’ he said. I felt the word itself was a bit of an experiment for him.

‘Peter? Lord, yes,’ I said. ‘But I imagine you can look after yourself.’

Now I wanted to see his face. There was a good deal in reserve in his short laugh.

Once on the ground, I pulled the door to and locked it – in that detail, I hoped, regaining my dignity. As I pocketed the key we stood looking at each other, two friends who’d seen something through. Or merely two chance colleagues? There was no knowing what the relations were between us. Was he, were both of us, chafing to be free? Or did we mean gracefully to carry our alliance through to the moment after breakfast when, like husband and wife, we would have to part and get on with our separate days? It struck me that if I saw Evert as I went into Hall I could ask him to join us, and break the news of the double swop that had given me the prize he longed for: I could bring them together then for a few minutes at least. But I doubted at once if Evert would be able to carry this off – I saw myself reassuring each of them, out of my intimacy with the other. It was a kind of reprieve when Sparsholt was hailed by a rowing friend, and taken off without a backward glance to their table nearest the door.