The Sparsholt Affair

5

Johnny closed the shop door, went quickly down the street, and as soon as he turned the corner into the King’s Road reached up and with two deft twists freed his hair and shook it out – a man in a passing van whistled, and a middle-aged woman getting into her car said sportingly, ‘I wish I could do that.’ He saw himself in a couple of shop windows, and in the angled doorway of the Bazaar there was a full-length mirror, where he peered as he parted the jackets on the rail outside. It was after eleven, but the boutiques woke up late, and at some the doors were just being unlocked. He could have taken the bus the whole length of the street, but looked forward each time to the life of the pavement, where even on a dull Tuesday morning odd fashionable figures were about, the first drifters and shoppers alongside the regulars waiting by the pubs. Joss sticks burned somewhere as he passed and from a cave of knotted scarves and batik hangings came the worrying smell of sesame. He was glad Cyril trusted him with these little jobs that got him out of the shop in the daylight hours; though making his way past all this colour and temptation, the Man Boutique, the weird owl windows of the Chelsea Drug Store, the shop he had not yet been into called SEX, he started to resent being made to do anything at all.

At Sloane Square he jogged down to the station platform with a sense almost of truancy, and had to go in a smoking carriage to follow an Italian couple, the man in white jeans so astonishingly tight that he travelled on two stops beyond Victoria just to look at him. Then he quickly changed platforms and came back, he ran up the escalator and the stairs, but the queue was slow at the booking office and when he reached the platform the blank back end of the train he was meant to be on was jolting over the points and out of view.

There was another train in half an hour, and he could still be in Gipsy Hill with a clear thirty minutes before the auction started. He tucked his ticket in his wallet and wandered looking up at the departures boards, and at the men looking up at them; then stood shifting in the onward rush of arrivals from two trains – fantasies of greetings in faces that held his own for a second as they swept past. It was arrival in London, and Johnny felt its excitement as well as the subtler pleasure of noting, as a Londoner himself, the blind air of routine in most of the travellers’ faces. Some slowed and waited, roaming, half-preoccupied. A space opened up and he saw the movement round the entrance marked Gentlemen, men going in hurriedly and down the stairs, past others coming out with a businesslike look. He thought he might just go himself – in and down. The copper coin in the turnstile was the price of admission, the admission in his case of a guilty thought – overseen by a man in a glass box for whom any interest in the endless traffic in and out had long been exhausted.

Johnny passed a row of blue doors, all engaged, towards the step and the white wall where the pitted copper pipe started hissing and rasping over the tiles. He saw himself in the mirror above the basins, but in his mind he was hardly visible, the mere magnetized observer of the man who dried his hands for ever on the roller towel, the three men spaced along the gutter, workman, businessman, old gent. He leaned forward and peeped past the curtain of his hair as he tried to piss, stopped up by the presence of the others and the gripping sensation of standing on the brink. The businessman was shockingly hard, the workman, thirtyish, with a roll-up kept dry behind his ear, floppy but bigger. Johnny blushed, looked down with a racing heart, the quick ratchet and thud all the time of the turnstile behind them and a man setting down a big suitcase and pushing in between himself and the workman, heavy-built, coat and hat, off the boat train perhaps, and perhaps unaware of the tense patience of the others who waited him out, frowning as if at their own stubborn failure to make even a dribble. And as he waited with them Johnny saw himself drawn into the criminal collusion of the other men, and under cover of the visitor’s last sullen shakes and wheezy buttoning up he stepped down too, as he zipped, and was away through the turnstile and up the stairs with the still-panicked heartbeat of a narrow escape; and a feeling growing, after four or five eventless minutes, while the businessman emerged without seeing him and strode off to the taxi rank, that if he didn’t catch a train he would have to go back in again; and that the going in again, past the attendant who seemed neither to condone nor prevent what was going on, would set a visible seal on his guilt.

But the thought of the workman being down there still, down there all morning perhaps, in thick jeans and boots and a donkey jacket moodily used to reveal and close off what he had on offer, was so thrilling that the air in the great noisy concourse above seemed to pulse with a barely concealed new purpose. A cloud shifted and the sun angled down through the high glass roof. He looked boldly at one or two men who were waiting like him for their trains to be announced; but the boldness was met with irritated puzzlement and Johnny drifted away and looked blankly at the cafe and shops. Just inside the open door of John Menzies Ivan was standing. He was at the counter, in a duffel coat and a knitted green scarf which for a long ten seconds seemed to isolate his sleek pale face against the muddled background in a woolly nimbus. Johnny turned away to absorb the shock, the abrupt opportunity, on top of the others, missed and ebbing. He hardly knew if he wanted to see him. Then he turned round just as Ivan came out of the shop with a magazine, and walked towards him with the unseeing look of someone looking for someone else. Ivan seemed aware of a person smiling before he had his own little shock – ‘Oh, hello!’ and stuck out his hand, which Johnny, disconcerted, took a moment to accept, and shake. It was a fleeting fragment of time, ten seconds again, in which something was irrevocably exposed – though Ivan scooted round to cover it up. ‘Oh, gosh – I’m . . .’ – he grinned at him. ‘I didn’t expect to see you out and about in the middle of the day.’

‘I didn’t, either,’ said Johnny: ‘expect to see you.’

‘What are you doing?’ – and now Ivan tapped him on the arm, almost reproachfully.

‘I’m going to an auction,’ said Johnny, as if it was his own idea.

‘In Brighton?’ said Ivan vaguely.

‘Brighton? – no, Gipsy Hill.’

‘My dear . . .’ said Ivan.

Johnny wasn’t sure of the implication – he looked down at Ivan’s magazine: The Yachtsman. ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were . . .’

‘Oh . . . !’ He looked at it too, and laughed distantly. It was odd, but Ivan’s discomfort seemed unrelated to the soreness in Johnny’s own mind about their supposed night out, though it wasn’t Ivan’s fault it had all gone wrong. Ivan rather stalled, he said, ‘Well, fancy meeting you at Victoria.’

‘I’m glad,’ said Johnny, moved again by his presence, his glow in the cold air heightened by the morning’s mood of chance and temptation – his fringe had grown longer and caught in the long lashes of his right eye as he blinked and then shook his head.

‘Freddie says everyone has their terminal. His is Paddington, you know, coming from Devon, and then going to Oxford all the time, of course.’

‘Oh, yes.’ It was the sort of London game he could see Freddie playing.

‘I’m Paddington too, of course, what are you – King’s Cross, I suppose?’

‘I’m Euston.’

‘Oh, Euston – shame,’ said Ivan.

Johnny tutted humorously at this, though he knew what he meant, about the new station. His first London memory, at seven or eight, was of the Euston Arch – just before it was demolished: the six huge gilded letters EUSTON, cut deep in the blackened stone, seemed to dance, more a spell than a name, not like any other word, beneath a deep blue sky. ‘Well, you don’t spend much time in the station, do you.’

‘That depends . . .’ said Ivan, and looked away as if he’d said something else.

‘Anyway, where are you going?’

Ivan stared at him, baffled: ‘Oh, I’m not going anywhere,’ and then laughed, ‘No, I’m waiting to meet my uncle, and he seems’ – he craned round again – ‘to have missed his train.’

‘Oh, I see!’ said Johnny, saddened and obscurely relieved. ‘I thought your uncle was dead.’

‘What? Oh, not Uncle Stanley!’ said Ivan. ‘No, no, he died years ago, two years, anyway. No, this is another uncle, I haven’t seen him for absolutely ages.’

‘Right. Where’s he coming from?’

‘Mm?’ said Ivan – his gaze ran with momentary adhesion over the cascading departure boards, in which the trains jumped with a fluttering rattle from column to column as their time grew nearer. Johnny saw his own train had gone and panicked till he saw it drop with its long list of stops like a Venetian blind two places to the left: nine minutes to departure and the platform now announced, platform 8, through the gates just ahead. ‘He’s coming from Horsham,’ said Ivan.

‘I don’t mind waiting with you,’ Johnny said. ‘I’ve got a few minutes.’

Ivan smiled again, and pulled back his inner sleeve to look at his watch. ‘No, you mustn’t,’ he said. ‘But look, I’ll see you soon – come over to the house.’

‘Oh . . . yes,’ said Johnny.

‘I know Evert would love to see you.’

Johnny, stung, had to touch him – it was a pat on the shoulder, as he turned and went towards the barrier with the idea of a kiss that was lost for ever stiffening his face. Ivan too had turned and moved away, and once he’d shown his ticket Johnny was gripped for the second time by the pain of not having acted, and under it, a little salve, the sense of having escaped. The midday trains leaving London were largely deserted, and he got into the first carriage, still dotted with commuters’ litter from hours before. He sat staring across the platform, but then since he had five minutes more he got out again, stood and glanced casually back into the concourse of the station. He couldn’t see Ivan now, and it struck him with a quick burn of jealousy that he might have gone into the Gents himself. Or had he been a fool – Ivan wasn’t here to meet his uncle at all, he was after the unmentionable, the workman in the donkey jacket, with Johnny for a minute a blundering obstacle. But no – there he was, talking to a man by the coffee shop and then moving away: he stood, checking the board, not of course the departure board but the arrivals one. Now a long train was pulling in two platforms across from where Johnny stood, and Ivan came hesitantly forward as the doors all along clattered open in the faces of those stepping down, who doubled and redoubled on their way to the exit. Ivan was staring at them as they came past him, but hanging back, as if wanting to be discovered by his uncle. He held his magazine, with its bright blue masthead, across his chest.

Then he put his head on one side, with a questioning smile, as a man of about sixty stopped in front of him – Johnny couldn’t see, through the stream of other passengers, quite what happened. There was a quick greeting, and a sort of discussion, about what they were going to do, perhaps. He had a clearer feeling now that Ivan hadn’t wanted him to meet the uncle, who looked very smart, with combed grey hair and a darker moustache, and also, in the way he held himself, in his short dark mac and pink paisley scarf, a bit camp. The whistle blew twice and Johnny got back into the train.

Rustin’s Auction Rooms were in a former Sunbeam garage, a few hundred yards from the station. The first time he’d come was with Cyril himself, to look at a landscape catalogued as a Bargery – ‘after Bargery’ had been Cyril’s dry judgement, and he’d watched with a cunning hint of self-denial as the auctioneer, raising his eyebrows towards him as the price jumped up and up, sold it for three times its estimate to a well-known collector from Hove. Standing there beside Cyril at the back of the room, Johnny saw them both at an angle in a tall cheval mirror, a surprising pair, the stout old man in his brown mac, Johnny in his father’s RAF greatcoat, loose on him, large-lapelled, double-breasted, his hair pulled up in his corduroy cap. He’d never been to an auction before – he was bored and excited almost at the same time, as the short tight dramas of the bidding ran on one after the other, lulls now and then of dead lots that no one raised a hand for, buyers coming in from the tea room next door as particular items drew near. Then Cyril nodded resignedly at a batch of drawings no one had noticed, but of course they noticed him, there was a flurry of interest which he weathered with small impassive flickers of the eyebrows – Johnny glanced at him nervously, in the mirror his movements were so slight as to be invisible, but the auctioneer, leaning forward, grinning with surmise about this overlooked lot, seemed to dance on the spot for him and bring down the hammer with a smack as if to say this was what made his life worth living.

If it was a Sickert, tucked in amongst them, as Cyril explained on the train going back, it was much the best thing in the sale – if not . . . well, the whole racket of money and dealing and grubbing around was as mad and as seepingly depressing as Johnny felt it was now, walking into the sale room alone and taking his first breaths of its musty ambiguous air. Today it was merely some frames he had to look at, and then bid for them himself. He found them, several lots, stacked against the wall at the back; a red-haired man in an anorak was looking at them, picking them up and turning them over and clattering them back. Johnny waited for him to move away, feeling he hadn’t got the knack of indifference yet, the dealer’s surly way of handling the goods. He came forward, squatted down, peered at the frames and handled them too, checking for damage, and wondering how much more damage would be done to them before they were sold. It was a small ebonized ripple-moulded frame Cyril was after, but it came in a lot with three others. There was a Watts frame in another lot, in need of repair, but which Johnny was told to buy if he thought it worthwhile. He held it at arm’s length, which seemed to draw others to look at it, so that he was displaying it to them, his potential rivals. He made a disillusioned snuffle and shake of the head and put it back with as much roughness as he dared. Cyril had taught him what to look for, and he felt pretty certain the black Dutch frame was seventeenth century, but the decision was his, and the whole business of the auction weighed on him in a new way.

He dawdled off, to fill the time, between the long tables crowded with clocks, vases, canteens of cutlery, stacked dinner services with unequal numbers of plates and bowls. There were things here he recognized from last month’s sale, one lot-number sticker on top of another, estimates on the roneoed sheet perhaps a bit lower: the bronze Mercury tiptoe on a globe with his raised right hand missing, the Viennese wall clock that lacked all but one of its bulbous brass finials. ‘Losses’ was the word for damage to any kind of artefact. There were two portrait heads, called ‘manner of Epstein’, life-size in painted plaster: a lank-haired, long-nosed young woman, and a man like Thomas Beecham whose thickly moulded goatee had suffered some losses since Johnny had last seen him. He thought they must have come from local houses, local figures in effigy that no one after twenty or thirty years had wanted to hang on to. Perhaps some of the older bidders in these sales had known the sitters; and if you hadn’t known them it was very hard indeed to imagine wanting to possess these forlorn lumps of matter. Johnny thought of his father’s friends: would you really want a head of Ken Cudlip leering at you every time you went into the sitting room? Even put in the loo as a joke it would soon grow oppressive, and perhaps with time unnerving.

He went through a box of photographs, but thinking about Ivan – was the meeting at Victoria in any way a positive one? It was another event in their story, it gave more substance to their friendship, though it hadn’t exactly been friendly in itself. In his fantasies Johnny had run way ahead of where, in the sudden chance of this morning, he confusedly found himself. He thought of his meeting with Colin at the Portrait Gallery, and Colin’s flat, which seemed from here, over the ramparts of commodes and chests of drawers with chipped veneers, like the inaccessible room where real life went on, tormentingly separate from his dusty day-to-day dealings.

The sale opened with a section of jewellery: old pins, brooches, necklaces, the bidding sometimes dragging on unconscionably for items of no interest. Or so it seemed to Johnny, taking in the auctioneer, the same bow-tied whimsical gent as before, the small solid gavel in his left hand, the right used to brace himself on the desk or to summon rival bids from the corners of the room and sometimes, it seemed, to pluck them from the air. He was smilingly both enemy and friend. Johnny watched for a bit, and his anxiety had a saving touch of smugness to it, that he wasn’t remotely covetous of these trinkets, triple strands of pearls shown on velvet charm pads, pre-war ruby rings with damaged but mendable settings. The weathered old dealers, barely raising their chins or lifting their biros from the catalogue to indicate a bid, and showing no joy in success or gloom at defeat, were welcome to them. Already his heart was beating noticeably as the picture section of the sale approached; his impatience for that was mixed with a nervous longing for delay. Now there was a silver and diamond brooch in the shape of a pug, very nearly like the one his father gave June for their fifth anniversary, and Johnny watched the bidding rise till it topped a good eight times its estimate, £420, and didn’t know if he was more impressed or indignant.

He strolled off for a minute or two through the crammed alley of pictures, hung three deep on the whitewashed brick wall of the old garage – a dark unframed canvas with a tear in it, several naked men dancing, warily titled Mythological scene, other po-faced descriptions, ‘Interior with the artist’s wife and a chest of drawers (£5–8)’, ‘Portrait of a middle-aged man (no reserve)’. He was oddly involved as he stared at the bottom left-hand corner of the portrait by the thought that the unknown painter had worked for several hours on it, at an unspecified date in an untraceable place with a sitter perhaps now dead – it wasn’t very good but it recorded a serious effort to be so; and it was somehow sad, like the whole place. In the background, with ponderous flourishes and remorseless speed, the lot numbers were called out, climbing up, and the moment of drama in which he was destined to act moved stiflingly closer. He came back past the frames, which had a look now of having been ravished and jumbled, the batches muddled and the Dutch frame propped up on top, for everyone to see. He crossed and stood, which felt more careless and confident, at the back of the room, by the poised foot of the one-handed Mercury.

‘And now,’ said the auctioneer, ‘the first of our lots of frames, lot 93,’ looking vaguely but fondly towards them. A perfect indifference, as if he had said nothing at all, hung over the room; then a couple of the men who’d been bidding for jewellery got up and walked across in front of the rostrum on their way to the exit. Johnny’s pulse was thumping, and a giddy sense that he alone had heard what the auctioneer said made him focus on his face in urgent embarrassment. ‘Who’ll start me at eighty pounds?’

There was something brutal in that amiable first naming of a figure. Johnny looked confusedly from side to side, his hand fixed halfway up, open-palmed, as if calming someone, and saw the man in the red anorak go out of the room, pulling a cap from his pocket.

‘Seventy, then? A good Watts frame in this lot, a nice lot, four frames in total . . .’

Was no one going to bid? Would he get it, if he bid now? Or would he wait, paralysed, till the lot was passed? He saw a quite unsuspected person, a mere bald patch in the second row, lift an unconcerned forefinger.

‘Thank you, sir. Seventy I have; seventy-five?’

Johnny’s undecided hand seemed to catch the auctioneer’s eye, and amuse him. Found out, he raised it further, and no sooner was his gesture accepted, ‘Seventy-five, thank you very much, sir,’ than he heard ‘Eighty . . . eighty-five . . . ninety, thank you, sir . . . ninety-five,’ in quick appalling sequence, his own attempted intervention swept over in the rapid chase of nods and barely lifted hands around the room, men all of them, sitting or standing, now revealed as the dealers. He felt they knew each other, they were against each other, but more than that, without thought or effort, they were against him, absurd pink-faced boy with shoulder-length hair and trembling hand. His secret strength was being Cyril’s agent; but Cyril’s limit for the lot was £90. Johnny glanced for a moment at the burly old man beside him, the man in the lead, with his thuggish illusionless head and look as if he’d rather be anywhere else. ‘I’m selling . . .’ said the auctioneer, ‘for ninety-five pounds,’ and it was obvious this man knew what he was doing, it was worth it, and Johnny raised his hand at the last moment, couldn’t look at the man but from the corner of his eye saw him shake his head, and found he had won. One hundred pounds. There was a noise like the noise between songs at a concert, of the audience turning the page, as he called out his number, they didn’t hear him and he called it again, and it was written down, his surge of success undermined in an instant by the knowledge he had transgressed.

‘Lot 94,’ no let-up – but Johnny wasn’t bidding for this one. He studied the catalogue and bit his lip, and sensed without looking the sneering curiosity of the crowd about this new buyer. Then the bidding got going and he glanced up and no one was paying him the slightest attention. At once it was lot 95, Johnny double-checked, words and figures in momentary mutiny on the page, but he’d marked it, and it was right. Estimate £70–80, but he could go to a giddy one hundred and twenty, if he was sure of the Dutch frame. It had begun already, a man who had bid before made a shrugging first offer of sixty pounds, Johnny sensing the value of coming in late stood by, there was a bid of sixty-five, as if on the off-chance, and the first man dropped out; and no one else moved a finger, so that almost laughing Johnny lifted his hand, the auctioneer smiled back at him, courteously and to show he’d got him, glanced at the previous bidder, who dropped out too, and repeated ‘Seventy pounds . . .’ into the unexpectant silence. ‘Any advance on seventy pounds? I’m selling . . .’ the gavel lifted as he peered, with a knitted brow of humorous disappointment, from row to row, Johnny willing them to keep silent while an awful void, as unexpected as the crush of interest in the earlier lot, seemed to open around him and under him, in cold doubt of the clearly wrong decision he was making. These sour-faced men had been coming to sales like this all their lives, they knew a pukka Dutch ebonized frame from a fake when they saw one. ‘Sold! for seventy pounds – thank you, sir,’ and they made him call out his number again.

He waited, growing slowly less conspicuous, through a few further lots, and it was half an hour later he came out into the car park, clutching the heavy spoils of less than two minutes’ unrememberable bidding: with a Watts frame he’d disobeyed Cyril to capture, and whose losses, out on the street now, seemed starker than indoors, and a Dutch frame that was a weirdly good bargain, but which might, to Cyril’s eye, be an obvious fake. And how absurd it was, he had to get all the way back to Chelsea with the bloody things, paraphernalia he would never, on his own account, have had anything to do with. Somehow he managed it, on the train, the small frames tied together on the rack, the bigger ones between his knees as he sat and hoped at the half-dozen stops that no one else got in before Victoria. He angled them out, when they got there, very carefully. People looked at him and some of them smiled. He set the frames down, in the rush of the concourse, to sort himself out, and get them in the easiest order for carrying; it would have to be a taxi, and Cyril would pay. He put back his shoulders, lifted the frames up. He hadn’t thought of it, which made it the more uncanny when he saw him, the man in the donkey jacket, head turning as if in its own light against the vast iron pillar, looking with a lazy intent past Johnny and then straight at him for a second through the fast-moving crowd, before walking off, with a work-weary tread, towards the entrance of the Gents. Johnny followed with his eyes, then a short way, hopelessly, on foot, and stood, breathless, unable to adjust or conceal his excitement, the seven frames slung like a punishment round his arms and his neck.