The Sparsholt Affair

4

There was nowhere to hide at ‘The Lookout’. Bastien had made the boys’ bedroom his own, and for long half-hours the bathroom too. Johnny found himself corners to draw in, there was a semi-private place between the carport and the dustbins where he could sit and puzzle out the effects of sunlight and clouds on the sea. Norma Haxby spotted him there when she came in next day; ‘Still at it, then?’ she said, and tried to make him show her what he was doing. He showed her the palm tree. ‘You’ve got the shape of that all wrong,’ she said.

In the house itself there was nothing much to look at. It was the holiday home of some people from Devizes, who came here several times a year themselves; above the phone in the hall a framed colour photo of the family in sailing gear showed them having more fun than their present guests seemed able to manage, the big teenage son beaming and holding an oar. The house was just five years old, and everything in it sturdy and primary-coloured. There were three flashy blue-and-white paintings by the same person, of sailing boats at sea, whose garish deficiencies were shown up each time you lifted your gaze to the real thing. The chairs and tables were modern and plain. There were rag rugs that slid and rode up, and lamps made from bottles, with lampshades of newspapers, overlaid, and repeating, like a wallpaper pattern, with half-hidden headlines and corners of pictures. You made up the stories yourself. Norma tilted her head, semi-sozzled one evening, to look at them. ‘Nothing about you, Cliff!’ she said.

The Haxbys were round a lot, Johnny’s father taking all this in his stride, as the expected working out of a plan Johnny’s mother seemed not yet to know the extent of. The Sparsholts were never invited to ‘Greylags’, the bungalow just down the hill that the Haxbys had taken, though his mother asked Norma airy questions about its kitchen and provision of crockery. When Johnny’s father needed a discussion with Clifford about the Archer Square plans or some such subject they walked off together to one of the hotel bars – Johnny had seen them once through the window of the King Mark, sitting over pint glasses, smiling about something. Clifford and Norma were town people, away, but not really on holiday. Where the Sparsholts wore old shorts and moccasins and pulled on unfashionable waterproofs if it looked like rain, Clifford was generally turned out in sharp grey flannels and looked ready to chair a meeting of the planning committee at any moment; a bit of blue piping on a jacket or a bell-bottomed trouser-suit were Norma’s main concessions to the seaside. She was good-looking, in her hard, immaculate way; and Clifford, too, with his black moustache, low broad brow and oiled-down hair, clearly thought himself very dashing. There was something instructive to Johnny in seeing him side with a man as famously handsome as his father. After supper, when they were watching The Saint on the portable TV, Johnny sitting at the table could capture them, under cover of general doodling, without making them self-conscious. He drew his father almost shyly, knowing he needed to do justice not only to the strong clean features in profile across the room but to who he was, something larger and harder to get. Mainly of course he drew Bastien, who wanted the TV on because he was bored but was bored by the programmes themselves which he could hardly understand.

Johnny found a book at the house called Cornish Landscape and Legend. ‘Bloody fairies!’ Clifford said, hanging over his shoulder and breathing on his neck. ‘Ooh, not in Cornwall, Cliff!’ Norma said – not a joke at all, but they laughed and Johnny darkened with sullen embarrassment, for himself but really for them. Then they left him alone with it, and that small devaluing of pleasure that you had to fight against for a minute or two. It had lovely photographs, in a process called Dufay-colour, sand and cliffs gold and bronze, the sea in the coves the extravagant blue of (he searched for the likeness) the toilet-flush in this house. He was charmed by the chemical magic of the colours, even as he worked out what was wrong with them – well, not wrong, but inaccurate. In a broad stretch of heather on Bodmin Moor the purple and brown were nearly fused, the distant tor either grey or green. He went back over them. The book had been published before the War . . . MCMXXXVII . . . not thirty years old, but a peculiar gel of romance seemed to fix the scenes further back, caught at times of day, early morning, early closing, when no one was about, small boats bobbed at their moorings and no car or coach was seen on the pink and fawn ribbons of the roads.

Always facing was the text, which he sometimes looked at with his abstract, edge-of-the-eye apprehension of a page – the occasional chimneys that ran straight down between words, line after line, or climbed like diagonal flues across a long paragraph, the odd accidental poolings of ascenders, descenders and inverted commas into small abstract images, knots, mouths, sea anemones, and the teasing habit of glimpsed capitals to suggest and then withhold his own name – it happened all the time in the paper, July Sales, Junior Sports, he was abruptly famous, then not, and it seemed to lurk here, in the fabric of Cornwall, with its string of particular saints, St Just, St Piran, St Pinnock.

On the Thursday the Sparsholts escaped by themselves to see Pendennis Castle, just as Johnny wanted, and had lunch in Falmouth, Bastien begging a sip, and then another one, of his mother’s lager and lime, until his father bought him half a pint to shut him up. In the back of the Jensen afterwards Bastien fell asleep, Johnny looking out through his small side window as his parents’ talk moved cagily round a subject Johnny hadn’t detected starting. ‘Well, I don’t think he’s very nice to Norma’, ‘She has nice things, doesn’t she?’, ‘Things aren’t everything’, putting her hand as if absent-mindedly on her husband’s knee; he glanced in the mirror. ‘He’s certainly not a ladies’ man,’ his mother said. ‘No, he’s all right, though. There’s a good brain there.’ She said, ‘Well, he’s got the good sense to think well of my husband, anyway,’ rubbing his knee awkwardly before she took her hand away. And there was the sign, ‘Treterrian. 14th Century Church’ – it was pictured in brown and gold in Johnny’s book.

‘Oh, Dad!’ he said, and his father was oddly amenable – they were having fun by themselves after all; he braked hard, and took the turning. It was up and then down a long sequence of lanes and though marked three miles from the main road was what his mother called ‘psychologically much further’. ‘I’ll get out my psychological map in a minute,’ said his father, braking again and reversing very fast into a passing place for a van to go by. Johnny was excited but tense – his wish had been granted and now he was responsible for it being worthwhile. ‘There it is!’ he said. In a moment they had passed the church gate, and there was nowhere to park. ‘I’ll go in this field,’ said his father, which added another kind of worry as he swung in through an open gate on to rough grass. ‘We’ll only be a minute.’ When the boys were let out from the back, Johnny went ahead across the road, strangely aware he was acting out what he really felt, the pull – the fascination mixed up with fear – of an old building. He was obliged to like it, and if the others didn’t, he would have to like it even more.

In the churchyard there were lines of slate headstones, sliced an inch or two thin and with rich orange lichens spreading over the inscriptions. His mother always enjoyed reading gravestones, and they made out the lettering together, sharing the problem for once. He was a terrible reader but he loved lettering – at school last term they’d done tracings of epitaphs in the abbey churchyard, and followed the change of styles over time. Here each line was in a different font, cut into the hard grey surface, and drawn out in curlicues to fill the surrounding space. The later tombs were heavier and as his mother said ‘more preachy’. His father came and stood behind them: ‘“Most sincerely regretted by his family” – an unfortunate way of putting it!’ and chuckled, and Johnny laughed too, uneasy that he meant something more by it.

He raised the latch and held it for a second as he held his breath at the imminence of unknown space beyond. The church they stepped down into was primitive but well kept – in fact a lot of holiday-makers, scratching round for some point of interest inland from the beach, made their way here. There were welcome signs, enough flowers for a wedding, and a massive collection box made from an iron-bound chest. Even so, it was chilly on bare arms and legs, the old walls were thick and the nave windows small and dark with Victorian glass. Johnny saw in a minute it was the transepts that made the church, with their tall clear windows, and several old marble tablets on the walls, each with its own little commonplace quirk of design. Light from the south transept lay tall across the darker nave: the high pulpit with its rough oak panelling and brass candlesticks glowed, and the hymn-numbers stood out vividly above. His father studied them for a second, looked down at the floor, and told them the Highest Common Factor. Johnny wanted to sit and draw, but knew he would be trying his patience – it was out of the question. His mother went round with a distant smile, of having signed away an interest in these odd old things. His father wasn’t at all at home in a church, he took the building, like the hymn numbers, as a problem. ‘The obvious thing to do,’ he said, ‘would be to close off those two side bits.’

‘The transepts, Dad.’

‘They’re probably never used anyway, and you’d save a bomb on the heating.’

Johnny called them back to sign their names in the visitors’ book. His father always put ‘D. D. Sparsholt’ and underlined it, his mother wrote ‘Constance Sparsholt’ though the surname sort of gave out, and Johnny added the signature he had practised at school all last term, with the crossbar of the final t running on and swept downwards and back to cradle the two words in a stylish curve. He could draw curves and near-perfect circles freehand, but the biro gave out on the final upswing and he had to go over it again in small strokes which spoiled the line. Perhaps for different reasons none of the Sparsholt family wrote a comment in the column provided. They went out into the sunshine again, Johnny darting back to add ‘DFC’ after his father’s name, and then staring one last time at the great slant bar of light across the nave to fix it in his mind for ever before he closed the door. ‘Now, where’s Bastion?’ said his father, un-French as ever. They had left him to sit in the sun, but he was nowhere to be seen in the sunny south churchyard sloping down to the road.

‘Perhaps he’s round the back,’ said Johnny.

‘Run and find him, old lad?’ said his father.

‘We may just have to leave him,’ said his mother.

‘Well, we can’t hang around here all day.’

Johnny marched back up the path and cut off across the grass between the tall slate tombstones. With a phrase like that his father cut at the root of the pleasure he had just so unexpectedly allowed. Johnny glanced at the fanciful inscriptions, their circus-like mixture of lettering – he was never, ever given enough time to look at the things he liked. He came round the west end of the church into the shadowed and neglected far side of the graveyard, with the heaped grass cuttings and the ugly jutting vestry and a water butt. He needed a slash, and looking all around went into the corner where a downpipe from the roof ran into a drain. Before he’d finished he heard voices and hurried to be done. They were coming from round the east end of the church – Bastien, certainly, and some English people. Johnny found them, a middle-aged couple with a teenage daughter in a skirt pulled over a bathing suit. Her blonde hair down over her shoulders had darker matted streaks where it hadn’t quite dried from the beach. She had the look, which Johnny understood in a flash, of being fascinated by Bastien and unable to respond under the moronic supervision of her parents, though perhaps she wasn’t entirely sorry they were there.

‘Do you like it here?’ said the father.

‘It is so beautiful.’

The mother said, ‘Rather like Normandy, I expect you find.’

‘Oh, it is nicer here,’ said Bastien, and smiled outrageously at the girl, the seducer’s smile of self-love, filling Johnny with contempt and envy. Bastien stood with his hands clasped in front of him, like a child wanting to pee, though that wasn’t of course the reason now.

‘Well, we mustn’t keep you from your friends!’ the mother said. Bastien came back, undecided if he was sulking or quietly triumphant, to the car.

‘Here he is!’ said Johnny. As he slid past him into the back seat Bastien thrust against him. Johnny’s father started the car, and Bastien said quietly to Johnny, without looking at him, ‘My friend, now you see why God created woman.’

‘Church seems to have gone to his head,’ said his father, turning, tongue on lip, to reverse out through the gate. And his own mood had changed – the unplanned ten minutes at Treterrian had filled him with a weird but familiar urgency, as if to make up for the time lost. ‘We can get back this way,’ he said, taking the road that ran on, past the church, and appeared to rise, three-quarters of a mile away, a grey line on the high moorland slope beyond. They went down very steeply, to a farm at a crossroads, a fast narrow stream under a bridge. Johnny’s instinct was to turn right, and work back eastwards towards the main road they had left. His father, after a second’s hesitation, went straight on. But the road ahead had its own long-established ideas, slowed them down with a sequence of right-angled bends, which resolved, after four or five minutes, in a clear steady climb to the west. ‘Well, this’ll join the Truro road,’ his father said.

‘Your father’s never lost,’ said his mother, more boldly than he would have dared to.

When they reached the main road ten minutes later, the Jensen asserted itself, down the open expanse, in a punching ascent through the gears (‘Here we go,’ said Johnny’s mother), up the first long hill, overtaking a lorry, two cars, cutting in, a second lorry, until, just over the crest, they dropped fast in three roaring descents to take their regretted and ignoble place as the last and then not the last vehicle in a queue that stretched round the bend and out of sight: in half a minute the second of the lorries drew up with a great sneeze of its brakes two feet behind them.

Well, they were familiar with holiday queues – they’d been held up for an hour on the drive down from Nuneaton, Johnny’s father humorous but far from patient. Some of these old crates didn’t even have synchromesh: you saw the panicky backsliding gear-change on a 1-in-4 hill and from time to time, down one hill and up the next, the immense glinting line of cars behind a stalled and steam-wreathed Morris Minor which should, as his father observed, have been sent to the crusher ten years ago. The crusher was the ultimate weapon in his peacetime arsenal. They sat looking out at cows behind a hedge, breathed the local warmth of the place through the open window; then ran forward a bit, even moved into second gear, before slowing again to a halt. It appeared there was a narrow lane to the right up ahead. Johnny’s father looked in brief concentration at the road map, closed the book, and driving in a sudden stately spurt up the empty other side of the road, swung off at the turning – a wild road to a small high village, with the plunge beyond to the next oddly named place. What happened wasn’t nearly an accident, thanks to his fighter-pilot reactions, but in the high-hedged lane, with its breathtaking drops and sharp bends and only occasional passing places, you needed to be quick and agile as he was to avoid the odd slow-witted trippers in their ancient jalopies. And now there was a nick, just a brush, but they felt it, with a toiling Austin Cambridge, driven by a little old man who lacked David Sparsholt’s instinct for timing and space – he just kept coming. The two wives stayed in the cars, while the men all gathered by the blue off-side fin, Johnny’s father drily practical, Johnny joking but lightly frightened saying there was no scratch at all, while Bastien dropped his head from side to side as if to say he thought the old man had a reasonable case. The old man of course was the frightened one, and not quite in control of his temper. ‘Ruddy playboy,’ he said. ‘And your children with you too.’ This was something they laughed about more than seemed quite explicable once they’d got back in the car.