The Sparsholt Affair

1

‘Hello. You’re new!’

Johnny gave a cautious smile. ‘Am I?’

‘And what have you got for us there?’

‘Well, it’s for Mr Dax, in fact.’ He showed the flat brown-paper parcel, with its pasted label, Evert Dax Esq., Cranley Gardens. ‘It’s a picture.’

‘Of course I thought it must be.’ The man peered at it teasingly, his lean, humorous head on one side. He wore a bow tie, a brown velvet jacket and flared tweed trousers surprising on a man of sixty. The woman with him, who was younger, red ruffles at her bosom under a red coat, said defiantly,

‘Well, we’re going to take the lift.’ They crossed the hall to where the cage of a lift ran up in the narrow embrace of the stairs. ‘I’m Clover, by the way.’

‘Oh, Johnny,’ said Johnny, ‘Johnny Sparsholt.’

She half-turned and looked at him for a moment more closely. ‘Oh, yes. And do you know my husband.’

‘Freddie Green, hello,’ said the man, ‘hello.’ He smiled again, and Johnny wondered if he did in some sense know him – he seemed to expect him to. ‘It may not be working, love.’

Clover pressed a worn brass button; there was a sequence of pneumatic clacks, and after a longish pause, in which they all peered upwards, the hanging loop of cable dropped slowly into view, and then the tiny cabin itself, a cage within a cage. ‘I’m not going to ask you what the picture is,’ said Freddie, as the lift came to rest. He pulled back the folding grille, and let Clover, who was rather larger than him, go in first.

‘I’ll tell you if you want,’ said Johnny, wondering if Freddie would have heard of the artist. There was really only room for two in the lift, and if the power went off, as it did almost daily, they might be trapped there, testing the warmth of their new-found friendship for an hour or more. Freddie gestured gallantly, Johnny stepped forward—

‘Oh, don’t worry, I’ll take the stairs.’ He held up the wrapped painting.

‘I’m sure we can all squash up,’ said Clover.

‘You know it’s the second floor,’ said Freddie, stepping in with a humorous stoop of submission.

As Johnny climbed the stairs the lift creaked steadily upwards beside him, and at each turn he saw Freddie and Clover from another angle, pressed together and speaking quietly, in a register between public and private. Freddie glanced out, at some remark she made, met his eye and gave him a friendly nod. Johnny smiled and looked down, at the shabby stair carpet, and up, at the gilt-framed paintings climbing in the gloom beside him. It wasn’t a race, but he was there already on the second floor to hold back the grille for them. He could hear the muted noise of voices from nearby.

‘Evert’s father had the lift put in,’ said Freddie as he emerged – ‘you know, having only one leg.’

‘I haven’t actually met Mr Dax,’ said Johnny, not sure if this father was still alive – much less still living here. He imagined Evert Dax to be getting on a bit himself.

‘Oh, you haven’t . . . ?’

‘I only know his secretary.’

‘Ah, I’m not sure . . .’ – Freddie jiggled the door closed and made sure the latch had engaged.

‘Denis Drury?’

Clover laughed. ‘Oh, you know Denis,’ she said, and as she went along the hallway, she turned and looked at Johnny again. ‘I suppose you’d call Denis his secretary’; her smile seemed both to put him in the wrong and to give him a mischievous hint. They threw down their coats in a small bedroom. Johnny said, unexpectedly caught up, ‘I’m only staying a minute . . .’ and then, ‘Well, when I say I know Mr Drury . . . It was him who brought the picture in to be cleaned, you see . . .’ He remembered his unnerving stillness, in the shop, and his dark unblinking eyes.

Mr Drury himself wasn’t to be seen in the room they then went into, where a small crowd of people were talking quietly, as if at a funeral, a group of women on a sofa below a tall mirror, and a darker huddle standing by the fireplace. The dusk seemed to have taken them unawares. From the big west-facing window there was a view of chimney stacks and a church spire against the last faint pink of the sky. ‘It’s the deterioration of money in general,’ a grand but piping voice was saying, as Freddie and Clover were greeted and absorbed into the standing group, while Johnny hung back, looking shyly at the nearest pictures, which he’d been told were worth seeing. There was a small off-white relief by Ben Nicholson, behind glass, and another large abstract painting in a stark black frame, whole areas of the grubby white paint, when you looked closely, cracked and pooled like a skin on boiled milk. Next to it was a print of an airborne blue cow, with a pencilled inscription, ‘À mon ami Dax – Chagall’. The pictures seemed to confer a quality on the people in the room, too familiar with them perhaps to bother looking at them. On the table behind the sofa stood what must have been a Barbara Hepworth sculpture, a hollow globe of auburn wood, its white-painted aperture strung with white wires. Johnny saw the curved back of it in the mirror, and himself slipping past, meeting his own eye for reassurance.

‘Are you going to join us?’ said one of the seated women.

Johnny looked down at her and grinned – again he thought it would be rather a squash. ‘Is it a party?’ he said.

‘I wouldn’t say a party’ – she shook her square grey head. And it was true no one had a drink – it was a meeting of some kind, just about to get going, and best avoided before it did so. He looked at the window again and from here the reflected room half-concealed the dark mass of the house-backs beyond, the lamp beside him equal for a minute to the light that had come on in a bedroom there.

‘You must be a friend of Denis’s,’ said the second woman.

‘Yes, of course,’ said the third.

‘Well, not really,’ Johnny said and gripped his parcel, and peered round. In a room of middle-aged and elderly people he was much the youngest, and he felt now like a child under the lightly teasing scrutiny of a trio of aunts. ‘I’m working for Cyril Hendy, you know, the art dealer.’ There was still a novelty to saying this, though he knew he could hardly speak for the great Cyril, who himself hardly spoke at all.

‘Ah,’ said the first woman, ‘you’re a picture person. We thought you might be going to read to us.’

‘Read to you?’ said Johnny, with a giggle.

‘Well, Evert will be reading tonight himself,’ said the second woman, looking round. ‘You know he’s writing this book about his father.’

‘Oh I didn’t know,’ said Johnny, ‘no.’

‘You know about Evert’s father, at least,’ the grey-haired woman said, with her slightly arch severity, as if to suggest he would feel foolish when he realized who she was.

‘He only had one leg, didn’t he,’ said Johnny.

‘Well, there was rather more to him than that,’ said the second woman.

‘Oh God yes,’ said the third woman, who’d been gazing up at him in a preoccupied way. A smile spread slowly across her face. ‘You must forgive me if I say I’m madly envious of your hair.’

‘Oh, er, thank you . . .’ said Johnny, feeling he mustn’t look too closely at hers, which was fluffy and dyed a strange rustred; he glanced up into the mirror again.

‘But isn’t it an awful nuisance to you?’ asked the second woman, with artless curiosity, and a sense she was glad the subject had been broached.

‘We haven’t been told your name,’ said the first woman.

Johnny told them now, and on one face at least he saw the familiar momentary suspicion, and its tactful suppression, and the lingering curiosity, half cunning, half sympathetic, that ensued. As if to discountenance all this, the third woman said, ‘I’m iffy, by the way.’

‘Oh . . . um . . .’

‘Iphigenia,’ the second explained.

‘Old, old friend of Evert’s.’

‘Mm, you go back a long way, don’t you,’ said the second woman.

‘But look, do you know Freddie Green?’ – Iffy sat forward as if to make an introduction.

‘He doesn’t know anyone,’ said a man’s voice at his shoulder; and as he turned Johnny saw Denis Drury’s face in the mirror and felt a hand placed lightly in the small of his back. ‘He’s completely new.’

‘Hello!’ said Johnny, and put out his free hand, which Denis took without looking but kept hold of and squeezed as he went on,

‘I hope you’ve all been nice to him.’

‘Oh, we have,’ they more or less agreed. Evert Dax’s secretary looked just as he had when he came into the shop, formal and old-fashioned, in a dark suit with waistcoat and striped tie, speaking without moving his head and with the tiny suggestive concession of a smile on his small, plump mouth. His hair, cut short above the ears, was sleek and black, his dark eyes large and challenging. His age though had grown mysterious – in the shop he was like a snooty school prefect, but close to, in the softly raking lamplight, Johnny saw that he might be forty. Denis let his hand go, in a conditional sort of way, but the pressure in the small of his back seemed to count on some further understanding between them. Johnny was worried what the women might think; he said firmly,

‘Well, I’ve brought your painting back.’

‘So I see,’ said Denis, surveying in a long second the parcel and Johnny’s corduroys and of course his hair. ‘We’ll all have a look at it afterwards. I know Evert will want to meet you.’

‘Oh, you see—’ said Johnny, and all the lights went out. There was a staggered sigh of annoyance and weary amusement, while Denis, raising his voice to say ‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ let his hand drop as if inadvertently across Johnny’s backside as he moved away. Someone flicked on a lighter and held it up, above the subtly altered group. ‘My dear, it’s like the War,’ a woman said. ‘But not half so much fun,’ said someone else. ‘Well, we’re all a good deal older,’ said the grey lady, in a very steady tone, and got a laugh. After a moment Iffy said, ‘Was the War so much fun? I must have missed it . . .’ and a high-pitched man said, ‘Gordon, can you just get on to the Prime Minister and tell him to sort this nonsense out,’ at which everyone laughed and a deeper voice from the hall said, ‘Too late for that, I’m afraid,’ and then, ‘Now don’t panic!’ as the beam of a torch swung in through the door: ‘We’ve got this down to a very fine art.’ The torch flashed upwards for a second to show the speaker’s face – a ghoulish impression of a grey-haired man in glasses, with a preoccupied smile as he turned to light the way for the person behind him: ‘Herta is here . . .’ – and a small white-haired woman with a tray followed him into the room. On the tray was a collection of old candlesticks.

‘Ah, Herta . . . !’ said two or three of the guests, rather warily.

‘We have the candles,’ said Herta, absorbed in her task to the exclusion of social niceties. ‘Please take off the books.’ She came forward, in the beam of the torch, like a figure in a primitive ritual, people clearing the way in front of her. Johnny wondered why the man didn’t carry the heavy tray, and Herta the torch; but something told him their roles had been unchangeably fixed a long time ago. She bumped the tray down on a table, and the man, who must surely be Evert Dax himself, watched her with a certain impatience while she struck a match and then another match and got all the candles lit. By their light Dax himself lit the two candelabra on the mantelpiece, with their twisted silver arms and driblets of red wax. Soon the room was glowing, with an effect that Johnny found beautiful. It was a little experiment in history, like the oil lamp in Cyril’s workshop, and the half-lit streets, and the other lamented but enjoyable effects of the present crisis, which had lasted the whole six weeks of his London life so far. He put down his package, and helping to pass the candles round he found a role, so that one or two others made spaces for him and introduced themselves. There was a friendly superfluity in these proffered names of people he would never see again. The last thing on the tray was an old brass candleholder like one his father had, with a snuffer and a square slot to hold a box of matches, and he set it down beside Freddie Green with a fairly certain feeling of some ongoing joke.

‘And there was light,’ said Freddie.

‘Mm, but was there drink?’ said Iffy.