The Sparsholt Affair

1

‘You like drawing,’ said Norma Haxby.

Johnny was sorry to be caught out. ‘I like drawing people.’

Norma took her cigarette case from her handbag. ‘Aren’t people rather hard?’ She treated him like a child, but as she flicked the lighter and raised her head she seemed to assume a pose.

‘That’s why they’re interesting,’ Johnny said, beginning to shade in the background, then coming back slyly to her nose.

‘I could never draw at all,’ she said. ‘Do you get your artistic side from your mother, I suppose?’

‘He doesn’t get it from me,’ said his father, quite sharply. He was just outside the French windows with the rolled oilcloth of his toolkit spread out; he was fixing the patio light.

‘Well, you’re more practical, aren’t you, David,’ said Norma, and Johnny could see from the way she lifted her head and blew smoke towards him how much she preferred this; there was something provocative in her voice.

‘Connie’s the arty one,’ his father said; ‘always has been.’

‘Well, I know Connie’s a great reader, isn’t she,’ said Norma, stretching her neck with a kind of idle satisfaction. ‘I can’t think when I last read a book.’

‘Oh, well, Jonathan doesn’t read,’ said his father. ‘Never quite got the knack, have you, old lad.’

‘Ah . . .’ She looked at them both uncertainly.

‘Of course he’s only fourteen.’

‘You don’t read much yourself, Dad,’ said Johnny, holding out for justice.

‘I don’t have the time,’ said his father, ‘do I?’ – passing back through the lounge into the kitchen. ‘Is your pal about? We leave in ten minutes.’

Norma smiled after him, then, left alone with Johnny, blinked, stubbed and squashed her cigarette, and stood up. ‘I hope it’ll stay fine for you,’ she said. She stared out at the gusted palm tree, the Falmouth ferry coming in, the cloud that dragged and blurred above the headland beyond. ‘I don’t know what your mother and I will do if it rains.’ She perhaps hoped to see his drawing but wasn’t going to ask to do so; Johnny closed his sketchbook anyway.

‘I’d better find out what Bastien’s up to,’ he said.

‘The Lookout’ opened in front on to a patio and steeply dropping lawn, with a broad view of sea above the roofs of the town below; but at the back it was half quarried out of the shaly hillside. The boys’ bedroom looked over a narrow gully at the side wall of the garage of the next house up the hill; so far they’d found it best to keep the curtains closed. Their beds were bunk beds, kids’ beds which Bastien, a year older than Johnny, was already too big for. The spindly structure shuddered and lurched when he clambered in and out of the top bunk, and when he turned over. Johnny was condemned to lie under the low meshed ceiling, under Bastien’s shifting weight, staring upwards for long minutes in the first dawn light at a dangling sheet or sometimes an unconscious left hand, dimly pulsing inches from his face as Bastien slumbered on his front and Johnny listened, hypnotized, to the tone of his breathing. Bastien didn’t have pyjamas, he slept in his underpants – Johnny lay beneath him picturing him from above. Whenever he finally got to sleep the light would be on and Bastien would be going to the lavatory. Yesterday his mother had suggested not flushing at night, she’d broken the rule and used French words to explain. ‘I don’t mean “rougir”,’ she said, and did so, to Bastien’s sly fascination. She was the person he paid most attention to, and he followed her from sunroom to kitchen and almost into the lavatory with fixated courtesy.

Johnny went along the landing with a gloomy feeling, but when he opened the door the room was bright: there were the unmade bunks, Bastien’s open suitcase covering half the floor, and Bastien, up, dressed, and lacing up his plimsolls. Johnny checked what he was wearing in one oblique glance: the tight dark-blue jeans with frayed hems, a red polo shirt; now he stood and stroked back his hair and pulled on his ‘Coq Sportif’ cap, with the peak angled high, and there being no mirror in the room he turned to Johnny for approval.

On the narrow path Johnny fell behind, glad no one would be looking at him for a minute or two. His father was some way in front, moving faster, with a coil of rope round one shoulder, as if about to scale a cliff; Bastien scrambled after him, carrying the two oars; and Johnny came last, clutching the slippery life jackets.

The path was romantic, twisting, up-and-down, thrown sideways by large stones and the roots of the thorns and hazels that closed it in for much of the way, with glimpses here and there of the weed-covered rocks below. It was a sequence Johnny was still learning – the fenced-off stretch where it turned inland round the back of Parry’s yard, the dip where a rising tide forced you up into the hedge if you wanted to keep dry, the five or six back gates with the names of houses that were hidden in high trees above the estuary, some broken, blocked and overgrown, some giving glimpses of exotic Cornish gardens climbing the slopes. To him the names blurred, ‘Pencawl’, ‘Pencara’, but each gate had its different magic. Now called-out words were heard behind a hedge; here a tumbledown gateway was choked by dank elder, with fox-paths through the nettles. Ahead of him Bastien stopped to look at something Johnny’s father had of course ignored, scattered parts, a wing, stray feathers, a knot of grey gristle, of some not quite nameable bird. Johnny peered at him warily before he pushed against him and as they stooped to examine it he found the warmth of him so painful both to feel and to resist that he was glad when Bastien stood straight again with a sickly smile and moved suddenly ahead. The short oars lodged aslant over each shoulder kept Johnny at a distance all the way to the kissing-gate at the end; here last year he had always claimed a forfeit from his mother, until the day when she told him not to be daft. He burned with the memory of it. Now Bastien edged into the narrow pen of the gate, the paddles tilting and banging on the wall as he tried to hold them with one arm and swing the gate back with the other. Johnny hovered behind, his freedom neutered by the armful of life jackets. ‘Merde!’ said Bastien – Johnny threw down the jackets, leant forward to swing the gate through its tight quadrant, and watched his friend step free. He picked up the jackets again, with a dismal sense of the slavery to tasks that was his father’s ideal of a holiday, and said, ‘You’re meant to kiss me before you let me through.’ But Bastien by now was some way ahead, at the top of the Club’s concrete slipway, where Clifford Haxby was waiting for them.