The Sparsholt Affair

1

She sat on the hard wooden bench just in front of the portrait, and heard what members of the public were saying. Some strolled slowly past, others stood for ten seconds until the next picture, or the very bright one beyond it, caught their eye, and now and then a couple, or more often a man or woman with no one to talk to, gave the portrait their full attention for a minute or more, obstructing the sociable onward drift of the crowd. She herself felt proud of the picture, but bored by the long two hours of the occasion; she had her own sketchbook with her, which after initial uncertainty she got out of her bag, with the old cardboard packet of crayons, striped inside by the tips of the crayons when they slid in and out. It was hopeless drawing people when they kept moving, so she drew other things out of her head, or her memory, a house, and then a portrait of her mother; she would show it to her tomorrow, when she went home.

She was pleased if she heard someone praise the picture of Mary Harms, with her staring blue eyes among hundreds of red flowers (it was painted in a kind of conservatory), but took it philosophically if they said they didn’t like it or made funny faces of their own in front of it; the people who strolled past talking about something else and not even looking were the ones she hated. It was a big painting, and a great deal of work (six months, on and off) had gone into it. She didn’t know what she thought of it really, it was what her father did and had always been doing, and it was impossible for her to judge. An old lady, rather mad-looking, in a beret with a pewter badge on the side, spent five minutes studying the picture, getting so close an attendant asked her to stand back. She turned, and smiled sadly at Lucy, as if about to speak, as if she saw the connexion, but then moved on. The others closed in, curious for a moment as to what she had found in it – it wasn’t clear if they found it too. Perhaps she was mad. The crowd at these Portrait Society events was certainly very mixed. ‘Ah! I thought you were drawing a picture of a picture,’ said a large man in a dark suit and a tie with elephants on it, looking over her shoulder.

‘Oh . . . no,’ said Lucy, and let him see what she was doing, since she thought it was quite good.

‘Ah, yes, marvellous – you’ll soon be showing here yourself, I should think.’ Lucy smiled up at him. ‘And what do you think of this portrait, tell me honestly.’ It was almost as if he’d painted it, though she was pleased to know for sure that he hadn’t.

‘I don’t know, really’ – they both stared at it, beyond the intervening figures. She wanted to hear what he said before she explained. The people in her father’s pictures often looked a little bit uncomfortable, as if something was being revealed about them that they’d rather have kept to themselves.

‘It’s my wife,’ he said; and now she thought his stare had something else in it, he felt more exposed, in a way, than his wife, who’d been offered up to the public. People’s comments wouldn’t only be about it as a painting, they were also about the woman, Mrs Harms, and whether they liked the look of her. But before she could decide how to answer, Mr Harms had been called to by another man and with a little encouraging nod to her he drifted off.

Her father’s own attitude was odd but she thought she understood it – he felt uncomfortable hanging round by his own work, so he just came past every few minutes, to check she was all right, and sometimes to introduce her to people, who could be surprised to find he had a daughter at all. Off he went again, not quite such a tramp as usual, he’d done what he thought of as dressing up for the occasion, though it was hardly what you’d call smart. ‘You may have to wear a uniform,’ he said, ‘but I don’t.’ He decided the day he left school he would always wear just what he wanted to wear; and anyway he was an artist. Now a rather drunk couple, the man in a pinstripe suit and bow tie, with gleaming black hair, the woman in a short red and black frock, were looking at Mary Harms’s portrait.

‘Sparsholt!’ said the man, jutting his jaw as he peered at the signature. ‘Hmmm, I don’t think I’d advertise that.’

The woman said, ‘Don’t be silly, Henry, he can’t help what he’s called.’

‘Well . . .’ The man paused, as if trying to be fair. ‘I mean you wouldn’t want . . . I don’t know . . . “Crippen” scrawled all over your portrait, would you?’

‘There’s no comparison, hardly. And anyway he’s rather a good artist, don’t you think? That could almost be Mary.’

‘Mm, almost.’

‘Oh, you’re impossible,’ said the woman and laughed at him happily.

The next couple were much nicer.

‘It’s quite contemporary, isn’t it,’ said the man.

‘Oh, I like it,’ said the woman.

The man smiled and stood back a little. ‘I like it too, my love, in a gallery, but not to live with.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of buying it,’ said the woman, taking his arm. ‘Gosh, I thought that was Germaine Greer for a moment . . .’

‘It is Germaine Greer,’ said the man with a giggle as they moved on to the bright picture two along.

‘Daddy, who’s Crippen?’ said Lucy, when her father came to get her at the end.

‘Crippen?’ he said, with a cautious laugh at the things she picked up. ‘He was a man who murdered his wife.’

‘He escaped on a ship with his girlfriend,’ said Evert, ‘but he was caught by a telegram.’

‘Oh . . .’ said Lucy. It was more mysterious now, and something told her not to go on with it.

‘I don’t know what you’ve been reading,’ her father said.

She zipped up her bag. ‘Oh, nothing.’

‘Right, shall we get out of here. Pat will have supper ready – are you hungry, young lady?’

‘Quite,’ said Lucy, not sure she would like what Pat had cooked.

‘You’re probably rather tired,’ said Evert. ‘I am.’ His face grew round as he hid a yawn; then he smiled goodbye at the portrait of Mrs Harms. ‘You must be pleased, darling,’ he said – but this was to her father. ‘It’s jolly good.’

‘Oh, thanks, Evert,’ said her father, placing his hand on the old man’s shoulders as they steered out of the gallery.

‘Daddy,’ said Lucy, ‘why does Evert call you darling?’

‘I’m getting rather forgetful,’ said Evert, turning and smiling at her, ‘so I just call everyone darling – it’s much easier.’

She thought about it. ‘You remember my name,’ she said.

Evert seemed almost shocked. ‘Of course I remember your name, darling,’ he said.

‘Now, let’s get our coats,’ said her father.

In the taxi she sat squashed between Evert and Clover, and her father went on the seat facing backwards and hanging on to the handle; now and then he glanced over his shoulder. These journeys through the dusk, turning off at the lights beside road signs to unusual places, excited her, but were still slightly coloured by regret that she wasn’t going to her real home, where most of her things were. Evert and her father were talking about art, with names she didn’t know, and she peered out blankly on one side then the other, till Clover said, ‘So how are you getting on at school, Lucy?’, which was the most boring question one had to deal with.

‘It’s OK, thank you.’

‘What do you like best?’

Lucy pretended to think. ‘I’m top in English and art, but third in maths.’

‘Well, third’s not too bad,’ said Clover.

Lucy looked out of the window with a strict little smile. They travelled on, her father now answering questions about money, which always made him uncomfortable – how much a picture had fetched, or would fetch.

‘And how are Mummy and Una?’ said Clover next.

‘Una’s got a cold, but Mummy’s all right.’

Clover gazed for a moment at the passing shops. ‘And how’s your grandfather?’

‘Which one?’ said Lucy.

‘Oh . . . !’ said Clover – she hadn’t thought. It was a funny thing about their family but Lucy had three grandfathers, Sir George, of course, Roy Davey, Una’s father, and David Sparsholt who was her father’s father, whom she seldom saw. In a way there were four, because her big brother Thomas had a different father from hers, who, like her father, lived with another man, and had a father of his own, who was a hopeless drunk and lived in Majorca. Lucy had a curious nature, but her questions about why things had worked out like this were never really answered. ‘I meant Grandpa George,’ Clover said.

‘Oh, he’s very well, thank you,’ said Lucy. What all the grandfathers had was a kind of fierceness, not expressed directly to her but making things a bit tense when they were around.

‘What’s the latest on Freddie, Clo?’ said her father suddenly, so that she felt ensconced in the middle of the adult talk. He used a tone of voice she knew, earnest and direct to cover up his guilt at not having asked about Freddie before.

‘Mm . . .’ – she wrinkled her nose as she said in her usual lethargic way, ‘He should be out on Monday. They’ve taken out the thing, you know, but there’ll be masses of chemo to come.’ She put a heavy hand on Lucy’s arm, so as not to frighten her.

‘Is he in good spirits, though?’ said Evert, as if that would see him through.

‘Oh, you know Freddie,’ said Clover. ‘He’s propped up in bed, reviewing Anita Brookner for the New York Times, and of course getting hundreds more visitors than anyone else in the ward.’

Her father’s house was in Fulham, an area that lay in Lucy’s mind under a thin grey fog: Fullum they said, a dead footfall, flour shaken in a Tupperware box (unlike sugar, with its quick shoosh, which to her mind was the sound of Chelsea, where Sir George lived, close by but a world away). In the Fulham Road the numbers went up and up, what did they get to? – 600 – 700 – she kept a look out as they passed – and for miles it seemed there was nothing but lamp-shops, window after window hung from ceiling to floor with chandeliers. Then they turned off into streets with no shops, which seemed twice as dark. When they stopped outside the house she felt relief and a faint tension, it was home of a kind, but something would have changed since her last stay with her father. The house was semi-detached, square, with a white porch, and frankly a bit decrepit. In the hall there was always the chemical mystery of paint in the nostrils, and turpentine. Just visible through the sitting-room door on the left was her own portrait, painted four years ago, and life-size then, though not so now. She was always very curious to see it, tacitly proud of it, but embarrassed by it too as she grew older and the wide-eyed child in a blue smock remained just the same. Two tall doors opened from the sitting room into what should have been the dining room, but was now her father’s studio, facing north-east, and avoiding direct sunlight. This meant they had to have meals in the kitchen – sometimes whole evenings were spent in the kitchen. It was like watching TV, you followed Pat making ratatouille or a ‘roast’ of some kind from scratch, and if you were an adult you got drunk. This could take an hour or more. Then, when you were just about to die of hunger, he slammed the oven shut and said, ‘Right! That should be done in forty-five minutes.’ Often she shyly declined the strange food that was served while they waited, the horrible hummus Pat made in the blender, and tapenade, bitter and oily (it was meant to have anchovies in it, but no ‘creatures’ of course were allowed in the house).

Tonight as they came in, her father said, ‘Dinner in ten minutes,’ and she hurried upstairs to her room. The hall, stairs and landing were thick with his pictures, ‘Sparsholt’ or ‘JS’ all the way up, too many of them to look right; were they the treasures kept back or the ones no one wanted to buy? They were records of years of encounters in which she had played no part. The hang kept changing, and she noticed there were one or two new things staring out as she ran past; these looked like sketches for portraits, which were too good to throw away, and according to her father had more life in them sometimes than the finished article. Her own little room had a weird blue landscape over the bed, not by her father – it was a view she’d got used to, but with no warm feeling of knowing what or where it was. She carefully detached the picture of her mother from the grey glue binding of her sketch pad, and propped it up on the dressing table. The high bed with frilly pink pillow had the counterpane turned down but neither the comforting hump of a hot-water bottle nor the flex of an electric blanket was to be seen. Still, her row of books was on the mantelpiece, between two black elephants, there were frocks and a cardigan she’d half-forgotten in the wardrobe, and when she caught sight of herself in the wardrobe mirror she saw someone very nearly at home here. She went out to the bathroom (they didn’t have a separate lavatory), which was the opposite of the bathroom at home – throwaway razors, not thrown away, but heaped up on the dirty glass shelf, two kinds of shaving soap, a laundry-basket full of smelly grey boxer shorts and vests. There was a shower with a mildewed curtain that hung over the bath, and dark bottles of body-washes, and an odd rough glove for washing with. When she had a bath or anything here she did it as quickly as possible. The towels were heaped thick on the heated rail, and even her clean one had a remote male smell.

There was a knock at the door and a ‘Sorry!’ when the handle was tried; she hurried to wash her hands. It was Evert, looking perplexed. ‘I just awfully need to go,’ he said, with a distant look on his face, sliding past her as she left and not locking the door behind him. She went back along the landing, and sitting at the little pine desk with her pencils, she coloured in a bit more of her mother’s hair, in a much stronger yellow than the real colour, but it was all she had. The eyes too became a fiercely bright blue. In a minute there was another knock, and Evert looked round the door. ‘Ah! Hello,’ he said. ‘It’s you, um . . .’

‘Hello . . .’ she said, with the hint of reproach of any artist interrupted at work.

He came and stood over her. ‘Ah, yes, now . . . who’s this?’

‘Don’t you know?’ she said.

He sucked in his breath. ‘It’s someone I know.’

‘Yes!’

‘It’s . . . er . . . it’s not, no . . . oh god.’

‘Don’t you know?’ she said again, excited, and then sensing, when she looked up at him, a shallow breath of panic under his fixed smile. Maybe it wasn’t only names he couldn’t remember. ‘It’s . . . Francesca Skipton.’

‘Ah, yes.’

‘She’s my mother, of course.’

‘Well, I know that, darling! I’ve known your mother since the day she was born.’ She held it up again and Evert craned forward, like the visitors in the gallery, and with his own private flinches, as an art expert too. ‘You’ve only got those colours, I expect,’ he said.

‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’

‘It’s not a bad thing – you must make the most of what you have.’

‘Do you think it looks like her?’ said Lucy.

‘It’s hard to draw someone who’s not in front of you,’ he said. ‘We remember things differently, you see, when we can’t see them, especially faces, and so we make things up. You’ve made what I’d call a speculative portrait of your mother.’

‘Oh . . . yes,’ said Lucy. It was hard to tell if this increased or compromised its interest.

‘I’ll just sit quietly before dinner,’ said Evert, ‘if you don’t mind, I get so terribly tired,’ and moving the baby-sized doll from the little nursing chair where Lucy often sat to read, he lowered himself with a smile and a sharp grunt. She was surprised but didn’t object to a visitor who sat quietly; she got on with her drawing, which had now become problematic in ways she felt powerless to solve. So in a minute she started a question, glanced round and saw his eyes were closed – but yes, he was still breathing, and her fright turned into a kind of amusement. She didn’t want to look at him in case he opened his eyes and caught her. There were voices in the hall, Pat saying ‘Is he all right?’ in his competent way, footsteps on the stairs. There was a new tap at the door, and her father looked in, glanced from her to Evert in the armchair, chin down now in a snooze that looked thoughtful, the closed eyes of complete concentration – he pushed his chin forward a little as if grumpily accepting a point. Then he opened his eyes – stared at them both blankly for a second or two, and said, ‘Is everyone here?’

‘Yes, we’re all ready,’ said her father.

As they went downstairs she heard Clover saying to Pat, in the businesslike way of adults among themselves, ‘How old is she now?’ and Pat saying, ‘Oh, God, seven, would she be? I think she was two when we met.’ Lucy was small for her age, and aware of the mild concern this was causing her parents. All she minded was being treated as more of a child than she was.

‘I wonder what it will be,’ Evert said to her as they sat down. He peered at Pat, his aproned bulk obscuring the hob where pans simmered on the flames.

‘Mm, I wonder,’ said Lucy.

‘Do you eat creatures?’ Evert said.

Lucy admitted she did.

‘And so do I, I’m afraid. Which ones do you like eating best?’

Evert’s tone obliged her to be childish too. ‘I think lambs,’ she said.

‘Ah, yes!’ said Evert.

Her father made a horrible face.

‘Now here we are,’ said Pat, turning round with a frown.

A dinner this late was a Fulham thing, not tolerated in Belsize Grove, and she did her practical best to live up to it. It was a thick soup like green porridge to start and they all tried to guess what was in it: she was the one who identified courgettes. She found herself over-active with excitement and determination not to let herself down. Pat said, ‘Well done,’ and she smiled and kept on tasting, almost giving the impression she liked courgettes.

‘I’m sorry Ivan can’t join us,’ said Clover, in her usual tone of not minding very much.

‘I know,’ said Evert.

‘But he’s all right?’ said Pat. With Lucy, on the few times they’d met, Ivan had been very awkward; she’d really had to make the conversational going herself. He was an old friend of her mother’s, and he was one of the funny men who lived in the House of Horrors in Cranley Gardens.

‘Yes, he’s fine. He’s been an angel to me, you know, with this recent thing. But I can still get about by myself!’

‘Well, give him our love,’ said her father. ‘Clover, some more bread?’

‘No, thanks . . . Perhaps some wine . . . So do you have anyone sitting for you?’ she said, not taking her eye off the glass as it was filled.

Lucy’s father looked at Evert as he said, ‘I’ve just started on old George Chalmers, in fact.’

‘Oh, you’re doing him, are you?’ said Evert.

‘Well, thanks to your recommendation.’

‘I’m glad it came off,’ said Evert quietly; he looked at Clover, ‘I don’t expect you know George Chalmers. He used to hang around in Oxford when I was there, though he was still a schoolboy. He was a famous beauty, though rather hard to deal with.’

‘No, I’ve met him, I think,’ said Clover.

‘Why was he?’ said Lucy.

‘Why was he what, darling?’

‘Hard to deal with.’

Evert sighed as he looked for the answer, as though he’d gone into the junk room and didn’t know what to bring out. ‘I suppose really he was just terribly vain, you know . . .’

‘No change there, then,’ Lucy’s father said.

‘Ah, I’m sure . . . Does he come to you?’

‘He does now. We started off down in Wiltshire – you know, I went for the weekend.’

‘Was he all over you, I suppose?’

‘Never came near me’ – he grinned at Lucy, as if to sweep over the matter. ‘A bit old for him, I think,’ he said quietly.

‘Well, you know of course my friend Peter Coyle and George . . .’ said Evert.

‘I don’t think there’s much Johnny doesn’t know about George Chalmers’s private life by now,’ said Pat, who tended to get left out of these art talks; ‘if you can even call it private.’ He laughed, and kept smiling at Lucy too, with a hint of solidarity, as he stood to clear the soup bowls. Lucy smiled cautiously back, at this friend of her father with his unshaven face pink from cooking and drinking wine, and the soft dark eyes.

‘Now how are you liking your lasagne?’ Pat said to her five minutes later.

‘Very nice, thank you,’ said Lucy, with an almost reluctant awareness that she was quite enjoying it; there was something in it remarkably like mince. She thought she had better not mention it, in case Pat had made a terrible mistake, and they would have to go upstairs and make themselves sick, which had happened more than once, apparently, when they were in hotels abroad.

‘Is it Quorn?’ said Clover. ‘I’ve read about it.’

‘What do you think?’ said Pat.

Lucy glanced at her father, who had his deaf-to-all-arguments vegetarian face on.

‘Awfully good!’ said Clover, picking out a tiny forkful, and so behind the others that she was bound, as usual, to leave almost everything on her plate. And yet she was enormous, bigger than Una, so perhaps like her a snacker. She lifted her empty glass – ‘Could I?’

‘Ah, yes’ – Pat leant over to fill it with red wine, and she said,

‘But what about your work, Pat?’

Did he sense, as Lucy did, the hint of helpless courtesy in the question? ‘My work,’ he said, ‘is notoriously boring.’

‘Really?’ she said. ‘I don’t believe that.’

Pat shook his head happily at her. ‘I don’t mean I find it boring, not in the least, I love it, but it bores the socks off anyone I talk to about it.’

This was a challenge, and Clover, pushing her food about with her fork, said, ‘I know it’s organs.’

‘Aha!’ said Pat.

‘Historical, though,’ said Lucy’s father.

‘Restoration,’ said Pat.

‘Yes, of course, you restore organs.’

‘No, Restoration organs.’

‘Ah . . .’

‘Organs built in the 1660s.’

‘Oh, I see. So you do Restoration organ restoration!’

‘I do,’ Pat smiled politely.

‘Goodness!’ said Clover, and took a big swig of wine. ‘I think that could be awfully interesting.’

‘Well . . . So what are your plans, Evert?’ said Pat.

‘Well,’ said Evert.

‘You’ve got this trip, haven’t you, Evert,’ said Lucy’s father.

‘That’s it, darling,’ said Evert tactfully, as if unsure how many shared the secret.

‘And where are you going to?’ said Clover, almost teasing the poor man, Lucy thought.

‘Well . . . !’ – Evert sat back and smiled over their heads.

‘Of course, you’re going to Antwerp,’ said Pat. ‘Isn’t that right?’

‘That’s it,’ said Evert again, with a nod. Now it was out, and they could talk about it. Still, he seemed a little uneasy. He turned to Lucy. ‘Do you know where Antwerp is, darling?’

‘It’s in Belgium,’ said Lucy.

‘Very good,’ said Clover.

‘It’s a port.’

‘Mm, that’s right,’ said Clover.

Evert had the whole thing now. ‘I’m going to an Alternative Book Fair,’ he said. ‘They’ve invited me, to talk about A. V. – you know, he’s coming out in Dutch.’

‘You mean you’re coming out in Dutch,’ said Lucy’s father.

‘Yes – well, he’s in Dutch already, he always has been,’ said Evert. ‘You know, I get a cheque every year for sixty guilders or something, and it’s the royalties.’

‘It’ll be more now,’ said Pat.

‘Will it?’

‘With your book!’

‘Oh, well, let’s hope.’

They sat for a long time over their plates, forgetting Lucy. Pudding was still to come, but to her it was almost too late. Her appetite itself was falling asleep. Her father caught her eye now and then, in an irksome way. But the talk by this stage had moved into a baffling square dance of first names, combining and recombining, Evert and Pat themselves at cross-purposes, and the Olivia, whom she followed hopefully at first, urging her on with smiles of recognition, turned out to be a quite different Olivia from the one who was a friend of her mother’s. Well, she’d known it would happen, the obvious truth of the night was that the adults had their own endless things to talk about, and the wine they were knocking back made them all speak more freely and with less and less thought for her. She was aware of the light burden it put on any adult seated next to her, to keep one ear on the real conversation while they turned to make small talk with her. Now her father was mentioning his mother, who’d been in hospital, but of course was not a celebrity patient like Freddie.

‘Do you know my granny,’ Lucy asked Evert, ‘Granny Connie, I mean?’

‘Well,’ Evert stared at the table, ‘I knew her, let me see, it’s 1994, fifty-four years ago.’

‘It’s not,’ said Lucy, ‘it’s 1995.’

‘Ah, well, in that case even longer. It was when she was engaged to your grandpa, during the War.’

‘Did you know Grandpa David then?’

‘David . . . oh, yes, I knew him awfully well,’ said Evert. ‘We used to do things together . . . sometimes, you know . . .’

These two sentences sounded a little inconsistent. Lucy saw he was being polite, or perhaps couldn’t really remember. She smiled understandingly, but it was too long ago to be interesting now, and a stronger wave of sleep swept through her, she yawned before she could help it. In a minute she was standing and waving them goodnight, pulled in by Clover for an approximate kiss, and then, at a nod from her father, she went off upstairs.