The Sparsholt Affair

7

I met Connie a few hours later. I had slept all morning, and after lunch went out for a stroll round the Meadow. It was a dazzle of autumn sunshine, eights and fours flashing by on the river, and on the faces of passing couples the wartime pleasure in daylight. As I came back down the avenue I saw the lamp on in Evert’s window, and had a troubled image of him shut up in there, in his fury of desire and suspicion. He was furious, at least, about my night with Sparsholt, and had reacted to the facts I passed on over breakfast – the stuff about Nuneaton, and the steel-works and the marriage plans – with envious mistrust.

I was almost at the College gate when I saw a couple approaching down the centre of the Broad Walk, among the spinning and drifting leaves, the man a good head taller and leaning over sideways to keep his left arm round the girl’s shoulders. There was something clumsy in their linked progress, and I wouldn’t have looked at them again if he hadn’t raised his right arm and held it high – a command as much as a greeting. I stopped, nodded, and moved slowly towards them, seeing him tell her in a quick phrase (what was it?) who I was.

‘Green!’ he said. ‘I want you to meet my Connie.’

I came up to them, smiling with a mixture of pleasure, curiosity and faint irritation at Sparsholt’s matey tone. Connie was a healthy-looking girl, with thick dark hair under a red beret, rather prominent teeth, and a bosom which was all the more striking in a woman of modest height. Tightly covered in green jersey, and crossed by the broad lapels of a belted mac, it seemed to come between us, to be a kind of brag on Sparsholt’s part, unmentionable, but undeniable. I didn’t find her otherwise especially pretty, but she had the interest of being what he wanted. ‘Hello,’ I said, ‘Freddie Green.’

We shook hands and Connie said, ‘I’ve just been hearing about last night.’

‘Ah, yes!’ I said. I saw that Sparsholt was anxious for a moment about what she might repeat. He said cheerfully,

‘So did you get some sleep?’

‘I did,’ I said, ‘I missed two lectures,’ and smiled complacently rather than utter the question which lurked in the air about us, as to how much sleep they had had. ‘I thought you might be on the river,’ I said airily.

‘Not this weekend,’ said Sparsholt, and grinned, as did Connie, colouring but confident. If she hadn’t been there I’d have said a quick word to him about keeping his scout sweet, all the more important if he was unpopular on his staircase. A fiver (or so I’d heard) would buy a scout’s silence about having a woman in College overnight.

‘I hear you’re a great reader,’ Connie said. She had the West Midlands twang more clearly than he did, and a directness, a curiosity as she looked at you, that I enjoyed. There was a flattering suggestion that they’d talked about me quite a lot. ‘What have you got there?’ She nodded at my coat pocket, square with the bulk of Horseman, What Word?. I tugged the book out, wondering how to describe it, and she craned forward to see it. ‘Oh, A. V. Dax,’ she said, ‘yes – do you like him?’

‘I’m not sure any more,’ I said. ‘Do you?’

‘Well, I love the trilogy,’ she said. ‘I’ve read it three times.’

‘I know what you mean,’ I said, anxious again not to sound superior. ‘I’m re-reading them all at the moment, as it happens. You know Dax is coming to speak to this club of ours – if you’re free next Thursday evening, come along. You’d be very welcome.’ This appeared a mere kindness to a new arrival in Oxford, but I felt too I was making a bit of mischief.

‘Oh, drum,’ she said, and grinned eagerly but narrowly at her fiancé. I took this at first as a genteel curse, like ‘oh drat’, but she shook her head. ‘Drum won’t want to come. He never reads a thing.’

‘I do!’ said Sparsholt happily. I had a salutary sense of their differences exposed and forgiven long before they’d taken their wedding vows. ‘Drum’ must be his nickname – or of course his second name, short for Drummond. It suited him much better than his first.

‘Well, I’ll see,’ said Connie.

‘No, you go with Freddie,’ said Sparsholt, ‘I’ve got training on Thursday night.’

It was touching that he trusted me, even if again he took a lot for granted. I saw that in his eyes I presented no threat. I said smoothly: ‘I’ll drop you a line. I think you’ll be at Keble?’

‘Yes . . . yes, I shall,’ she said, and I saw she was surprised not only that I knew, but by the idea itself – it was still a novelty to her.

‘You’d better tell me your surname.’

‘It’s Forshaw,’ she said, ‘yes,’ and nodded as if hearing all that was satisfactory in the word.

‘Are you coming in?’ I said.

Sparsholt said, ‘We’re on our way to see a pal in St Peter’s,’ and Connie smiled and snuggled under his arm – the pal, I suspected, would be Gordon Pinnock, that true intimate of Sparsholt’s, whom I’d never met, but whom Evert envied and almost detested, after their encounter in the loved one’s rooms.

We turned and separated (Sparsholt wasn’t one for saying goodbyes), they slipped at once into their own murmured talk, and it was ten seconds later that Connie called out – ‘Oh . . . Freddie . . . Won’t you join us for a drink tonight – in the pub?’ She spoke as if there were one pub in Oxford, rather than two hundred.

‘Well, if I can,’ I said, as they came back to me.

‘We’ll be at the Gardener’s Arms,’ she said. ‘At half-past eight.’ I noted the way she threw out the name of this place she could never have seen. I had no real desire to go, and believed it would look odd, a third-year man out drinking with a freshman and his girl; but the strange mood of the Sparsholt affair made me feel I might regret missing it.

‘Bring your girl along,’ said Sparsholt.

‘Oh, well . . . yes. I’ll find out if she’s free.’ I didn’t suppose she had a very full diary, but I couldn’t see her in a pub – unless she took it, in her resolute way, as a challenge.

‘What’s her name, by the way?’

‘She’s called Jill.’

Was there something charitable in his hint of a smile? ‘Ah, that’s a nice name.’

‘Well . . .’ I said. It had always made me uneasy, it was too close to chill, and to jilt, and not at all far from gill, a quarter-pint of cold water.

As I left them and turned back to the gateway I glanced up at Evert’s window and saw him standing there, staring down. I nodded and raised a hand, but there was no response, and I went back to my rooms in a muddle of unexpected guilt and excitement.

I hadn’t been to the Gardener’s Arms since my first year. It was one of those dim little locals in St Ebbe’s, with a front of glazed ox-blood brick, and a Public and a snug. I could picture the mild glow of its windows, the cheap Windsor chairs, the shove-ha’penny board by the door at the back. In the blackout it wasn’t so easy to find. I made my way cautiously through the narrow streets, self-conscious in spite of the darkness. It was a pub where you might run into your scout, or people from the market. In fact I made a wrong turning, and took two or three minutes to find the way back. There were others about, of course, indecipherable signallers with their taped-over flashlights; but the dark doorways and alleys re-awoke my sense of being watched or even followed by noiseless figures. I knew the pub, when I came to it, by the noise it made. In its entranceway two curtains were fixed, with a narrow lung of changeable darkness between them, from which I groped half-panicking into the commonplace light of the saloon. I saw Sparsholt and Connie in the far corner and decided I would leave as soon as I’d done my good deed.

I nodded, left my hat on their table and fetched a glass of Ind Coope. I’ve never been a beer-drinker, and the wartime beer was especially foul, but I felt it was the thing to order. We sat for a minute admiring the sooty atmosphere of the pub – the soft thwack of the dartboard and murmur of scoring could be heard from the Public just visible beyond the bar. ‘Have you been here before?’ Connie asked – she was slumming it cheerfully with her Drum, but a certain fastidiousness peeped out. I said how my half-brother Gerald had brought me here when he visited in my first term; and how he himself had been brought here as a freshman by Wystan Auden. ‘Auden liked St Ebbe’s,’ I said. ‘He liked to show people the gasworks.’ ‘Oh, yes . . .’ said Connie, and laughed unsurely; if her taste was for Dax’s romances, she was probably less attuned to the angular new poetry of railways and revolt. I quite wanted to add that Gerald had gone to bed with Auden later that day, but I felt that just now it was a subject to steer clear of. I said merely that I remembered the cat, which seemed not to have moved in the past two years. There it lay, fat, hot and possessive in front of the coke fire, deaf to endearments and hostile to all strokes and tickles. The old man who was the only other occupant of the snug shook his head and said, ‘Ah, Tiger . . .’ in the tone one might use of a long-lasting problem, like arthritis, or the War itself. Connie smiled sternly at it. ‘And what about Jill?’ she said. She seemed to picture a feminine ally in this dingy place.

I sensed Sparsholt paying careful attention to my answer. ‘She’s awfully sorry but she can’t come. She has an essay to write.’ I felt sad that this respectable excuse would not last any of us much longer. And before she could put more questions, ‘In fact I’ve asked my poet-friend Evert Dax to join us – I hope he can make it. He’s A. V. Dax’s son, and I thought since you like his books so much you might care to meet one of his other productions.’

‘Gosh,’ said Connie, pleased but a little flustered; and Sparsholt, who never admitted to surprise, said,

‘Yes, he’s a good man,’ and nodded as he lifted his pint.

‘You never said you knew him,’ said Connie.

‘I know all kinds,’ said Sparsholt, and winked at her over the top of the glass.

‘Oh, Drum,’ she said; but she was preoccupied for a minute by the prospect of the encounter.

There was no sign of him after a quarter of an hour, though, when a new round had to be bought. I went to the bar and Sparsholt joined me, leaving Connie to her attempted seduction of Tiger. ‘Won’t you call me David?’ he said, and I said of course I would. The barmaid, not specially friendly to students, took her time to turn round from the counter of the Public, framed through an archway like a picture of a brighter and more natural life. She carried on talking over her shoulder as she drew our drinks (stout for Connie, another bitter for David, and a gingerly half for me). David said he was paying (he had a sort of hard purse, the coins shaken out on to its leather tongue), and as he waited for the change his eyes studied the barmaid’s round backside until he said, ‘Isn’t that your friend?’ I was puzzled for a second, then looked through into the further space. It was clever of him to have known that the figure in a cap on the far side of the room, turned away from us as he bent over a newspaper, was Evert. ‘It’s Evert, isn’t it?’ he checked; then said ‘Evert!’ in such a sudden and carrying way that the dart-players turned, and Evert himself twisted round, alarmed as he was by any public attention, and overwhelmed to be called in this way by Sparsholt himself. He stood up, red-faced, grinning, channelling his confusion into the mime of taking his glass and his paper, going out into the street and fighting his way back, through a convulsion of curtains, into the snug.

‘I didn’t know you were in this bar,’ he said – but the muddle had turned into a success, an endearing little incident, and he himself, in his time in the Public, had found the Dutch courage he needed. ‘I’m so pleased to meet you,’ said Connie, and Evert somehow found it in himself to say, ‘And you too!’ I seemed to see, in a crowded few seconds, his judgement of her voice, her look, his snobbish reserve at odds with his keen and jealous curiosity. I saw too that he focused his attention on her because he was too shy to look at David himself, who said, in the same hearty way, ‘Evert, what are you having?’ He’d got the name now, and he was using it as freely as he used mine.

Evert didn’t look at me much either, but somehow conveyed a reluctant gratitude. I changed places and put him next to his idol, who sat forward with his splayed legs and their big boots tucked round his chairlegs and his knees in casual contact with Evert’s. ‘Well, this is nice,’ said David, ‘cheers, Evert!’ and they jogged their drinks together, Evert’s hand trembling and the thin spume of his pint slopping down the outside of the glass.

‘Yes, cheers!’ he said. If I hadn’t been his chaperon I’d have laughed at his eagerness and terror. He had the nervous lover’s long-held habit of backing away from what he most wanted, and here, although no one but me knew it, he was knee-to-knee with the man he adored. The whisky he’d had in the other bar must have helped; he was staring furtively at David’s profile as if to confirm and explore his incredible situation. Connie said,

‘I just wanted to say I’m a huge admirer of your father’s books.’ Evert said nothing. ‘A. V. Dax,’ she explained. If his flinching ‘Oh, thank you’ was meant as a snub, she was only a little discouraged. ‘I expect people say that to you all the time . . . I just can’t imagine growing up in a house where those wonderful books were being written’ – and she gave a happy shudder.

‘No, well . . .’ said Evert. She wasn’t to know of the difficult atmosphere at Cranley Gardens.

‘It must have been so exciting,’ she said.

‘It wasn’t a bit exciting,’ said Evert, and with a brief smile, ‘quite the contrary, I’m afraid.’

I thought I’d better step in, though it’s hard to know what you can say to a stranger about a friend’s private affairs. ‘I don’t believe Evert saw much of his father when he was growing up, just because he was so busy writing.’

‘Well, I suppose,’ said Connie. ‘Yes, I see. They often say having a famous father isn’t easy.’ I’d never heard anyone say that myself, but I saw what she meant. ‘Did he read aloud to you from his books?’

‘Good God no . . .’ Evert said, as David stared amusedly over his head, raised his chin and said, ‘Gordon!’

Connie too looked relieved. ‘There you are at last,’ she said, as the drama of the curtain subsided, and a neat little fair-haired man in a trench coat stood smiling beside us. I waited to be introduced, while Evert folded himself over his pint and hid his face.

‘Freddie, this is my old mate Gordon Pinnock, from back home’ – David was already a bit noisy with drink.

‘Hello . . . !’ – and seeing Evert, ‘Ooh, hello! We’ve met already. Gordon Pinnock.’

‘Oh yes . . . that’s right . . .’ said Evert, in a negligent drawl at odds with his high colour.

‘Oh, aye . . . ?’ said David.

I said quickly, ‘So were you two at school together?’

‘That’s right,’ said Gordon.

‘But not you?’ I said to Connie; and by the time a small discussion of the matter had been got through, the question of Evert and Pinnock’s earlier meeting was, perhaps shallowly, submerged. Gordon bought himself a gin-and-tonic, which I wished I’d had the sense to do too.

David was amused by the speed with which Evert downed his first pint – we all felt he had set a new pace, and knocked ours back too. Now the evening would be got through in a cheerful and approximate way, David would grow louder and more physical, Evert would be even more intoxicated, and the friendly closeness would grow all the more painful, with Connie holding David’s hand on the tabletop, the pale blue stone of her engagement ring sparkling in the light. I felt I’d done my bit and I reached for my hat, but Connie looked truly upset. ‘Please don’t go, Freddie,’ she said. I smiled regretfully. ‘I want to talk to you about . . . Woodstock, and everything.’

Evert said boldly, ‘Fred’s got an ancient aunt who lives in Woodstock, but no one’s ever met her.’ I thought it was probably time to explode my aunt, but I couldn’t do so here, in this company. I said,

‘Ah, yes . . . well, excuse me a moment,’ and went out to the foul-smelling gutter at the back, with its one light bulb and conspectus of venerable graffiti. Ten seconds later I heard footsteps and glancing sideways found David had come straight in after me – making loud grunts and sighs of urgency and enthusiasm. I valued a certain discretion at the urinal, the mild embarrassment covered by genial remarks unlikely to lead to conversation, a certain huddled concentration. But to David it was a chance for a confidential chat. He stood well back on the wet raised step, hands on his hips as a lively tide swept down the gutter towards me; he seemed almost to invite me to admire his performance. ‘What do you think of my pet, then?’ he said, and for a moment as I glanced at him I thought pet was his word for his organ. I studied the undead jokes in front of my nose, the intercalations by two or three hands in particular. ‘Oh, I like her very much,’ I said, and when I glanced again I found him looking shrewdly at me. ‘Yes . . . yes, she’s a great girl, isn’t she,’ he said, nodding steadily and relieved that I’d given my approval.

It wasn’t a long evening, and we left before time was called, hurried through by the beer which they all had more stomach for than me. I was dismayed by how plastered I felt; and next day, when I wrote it all up in my diary, I was dim about the end of our session. I remembered my growing interest in Connie, and her extraordinary figure, which walked the giddy edge between comedy and dream. Much of the time Evert talked with David, exchanges hard to analyse, and which I was keen not to monitor too closely. At times it was as if the crisis was over, as Evert, after the shock of contact, was confronted by the cultureless blank of David’s personality; certainly he had no other friends like him. But I noticed two other things. David himself seemed excited by contact with Evert: there was a subtle mixture of teasing and respect in the way he looked up at him through his eyebrows as he listened to the stories that Evert, in a tipsy and hit-and-miss attempt at impressing him, was excitably reeling out. And then there was that gleam of Evert’s, controlled but breaking through the fug of the room, the grubby gloom of the pub, in passionate flashes, when he in turn listened to whatever David was saying.

Sometimes David asked Connie something, or put his hand on hers or on her knee, but he was happy to let her gossip with Gordon, the old friends reunited. They had the whole world of home to talk about. In Gordon’s earnest attention to her, and his occasional shrieks of laughter, I quickly saw something else – that he was no threat to David, who looked on them both, almost smugly, as people devoted to himself. In fact Gordon, in his way, was more feminine than she was. Connie, with her coat thrown back on the chair, her hair down and feet sturdily apart, was reaching forward for her pint of stout, while Gordon centred his gin and tonic on the damp cardboard mat and made a private gesture with his tongue to tell her she had foam on her upper lip.

David had been eyeing the shove-ha’penny board and towards the end we all had to have a game. We huddled round the small bar-room table, I with the bland resignation of the born loser, but encouraged by the occasional astonishing pressure of Connie’s bust against my arm. We smiled as the slipping and lazily revolving coins coasted over the board, smooth-worn old halfpennies with the profiles of Edward and George in helpless indignity as they swivelled and smacked off the frame at the top of the run. The right side of the board was faster than the left, and the middle was almost sticky. It was a question which was the cleverest way through, to bring the old coin up short in the topmost band, or to sail on past and deflect back into a good position. I was happy, briefly, to make an ass of myself, while Gordon made wild comic shots right off the table, followed by a grope between our legs on the grimy floor, David already lining up his next shot. It was a study in competition, and its avoidance. Evert played with the uncanny precision of the first-timer: the coin hovered and then halted between the lines as if drawn to a magnet. David gave us a valuable talk on the physics of inertia, but he wasn’t nearly so good. He muffled his shame in quick heavy embraces, so that Evert had to shake him off to play, and at the end his wounded pride was almost concealed by a staring grin of congratulation. Gordon had kept score and announced the final order: ‘5th Green, 4th Pinnock, 3rd Forshaw, runner-up Sparsholt, winner Dax!’ He squeezed Evert’s arm, and it struck me he’d taken a shine to him on this second meeting: some hinted feelings had passed between these two men, and I wondered if they might not bury their shared passion for Sparsholt in a much more suitable tendresse for each other.