The Sparsholt Affair

2

Waiting while Michael unlocked the front door, he wasn’t sure if he was going to meet his parents, or what to say to them if he did; he imagined them, smart, wealthy, busy, and ten years younger than himself. It was hard to ask about them without sounding anxious. ‘So what does your dad do?’ he said.

The door swung open on to a long empty entrance hall, floored in grey and white marble. ‘Oh . . . all kinds of stuff!’ said Michael.

‘Right.’

‘He’s in LA right now.’

‘Oh, OK.’

Michael seemed to be both English and American. ‘Well, this is it’ – he locked the door behind them, and there was something about him, haunted or haunting, touching buttons on a lit panel, going on down the hall with his coat on, the young man in the absent father’s house: it was a drawing charged with inexplicable emotion, a dozen quick strokes converging on a line and a shape.

‘Wow . . .’ – on the left a vast rectangular stairwell rose into shadow, and Johnny walked into the centre of it and stared upwards at the glimmering skylight four floors above. ‘That’s amazing’ – with an echo, subtle index of true Georgian grandeur. ‘These are Adam houses, aren’t they?’

‘Yeah, it’s Adam,’ said Michael, coming back.

‘You’ll have to show me.’ He felt it lent glamour to the frictionless unfolding of the date; he would have the house to remember at least. He put out an arm and found himself holding Michael’s cool hand. Then he turned, bent his head and kissed him on the mouth.

‘Hey . . .’ said Michael.

A door under the cantilever of the stairs opened and a woman, Chinese perhaps, in a dark skirt and blouse appeared. She stood smiling, not quite in greeting, but in readiness. ‘Hey, Lin,’ said Michael. Johnny smiled back, wondering for a moment what unrehearsed fiction would explain his presence, and was still standing there as Michael started up the stairs – he nodded and turned and went up after him.

On the first floor were two large interconnecting rooms, and Johnny hardly knew what to say about the pictures, while Michael switched on lamps, closed the shutters on the two tall windows to the street, activated the TV, volume low, on some unknown channel, music videos, edited like distraction itself, near-naked black women lip-synching from six different angles. High above, the drawing-room ceiling, with its graceful light roundels and quadrants of stucco, its lovely repeating formulae of fans, bows and garlands, had been painted all over a heavy brassy gold, shiny enough to reflect the lamps below. It was such a glaring disaster that it made you wonder, almost, if it mightn’t be rather a triumph. Michael opened a door and a light came on in a mirrored cupboard. ‘Do you want a drink?’ Johnny asked for a whisky with ice, watched Michael’s reflection, sleek, attractive, pale, as he took down glasses, clinked among bottles, triggered the short clatter of an ice machine. It was Jack Daniel’s he gave him, they tipped glasses, the whole focus of the date, imagined by Johnny as hungry and immediate, blurred again as Michael went out of the room for a minute. Johnny hovered, looking at the expensive contemporary furniture, all of it very low, in steel, black glass, white leather, and barely impinging on the tall expanses of wall given over to the paintings. These were two or three times larger than anything he himself had painted, or felt the least urge to paint, and must have been difficult to get into the house; they seemed to him monstrous, garish, trophies of international art-fairs made for fashionable buyers with a great deal of money. He sat down and slithered forward in involuntary mimicry of a laidback person on a low pony-skin sofa, staring up at a huge pink and black daub. And again a little bleakness of uncertainty crept in, that these were in fact brilliant works of art, which he was too old, too stubborn, or too ill-informed, to like or value. The contemporary had left him behind.

The soft burn of the drink was a comfort, as he watched Michael come back, carefully close the door, set down laptop, iPad, a small lacquered box on the low table. Johnny moved up to make room, but he sat cross-legged on the floor. His movements and conversation made no allusion at all to these surroundings, he seemed not to see them, and it was hard to know if to him they were a glorious given modestly ignored or an obvious eyesore tactfully disowned. With his laminated student card he squashed and chopped a lump of what Johnny assumed was coke on the glass tabletop, drew it out into four stubby lines. He rolled a twenty-pound note and held it up to Johnny, and smiled – he had a beautiful smile that Johnny thought, as he crouched forward, blocked one nostril and snorted through the other, would be interesting but hard to capture, innocent and sceptical. The snort was a thought, an unexpected zip back eight or nine years, to when he last did it with Pat, and Lucy came in early from a party and caught them at it.

Things sped up a bit then, Johnny happy but wary, his strange eloquence heard at moments as if he were someone else. Michael nodded, grinned and chatted too, they had another drink, the completely talentless half-sung songs pulsed on in the background, glances now and then at the crouching and strutting figures, explosions, odd banal details, a car, a bed, in teeming succession on the screen. A man older than himself whom Johnny had sat next to at dinner last week had told him dating apps were tickets to instant sex, and had shown him two that he used, scores of men a mere hundred yards away, always ready. ‘Not for me,’ said Johnny; and three days later found himself downloading one, which meant inescapably setting up a profile, a sort of self-portrait – his old holiday snap had its undertow of lost happiness, and he sighed as he tried to define what his interests were. But then it had all happened, quite quickly and naturally, in this wholly new way; and now here he was as if on a date forty years ago, having a drink and a chat about Michael’s course. Michael had three modules to do. ‘Three modules,’ said Johnny, ‘right.’

‘Yeah, I’ve got till the end of this month to complete my Subjectivity module.’

Johnny said, ‘What is that, exactly?’ and leant forward to take Michael’s hand again, but just as the phone chirped, and he picked it up and dealt with the message and another one that followed.

‘Are you on WhatsApp?’ Michael said.

‘Not yet,’ said Johnny.

‘You should do it! We can WhatsApp each other.’

‘We’ve sort of got each other anyway, haven’t we,’ said Johnny.

Then Michael seemed to have finished all his phoning and texting. He sat back, grinned at Johnny in anticipation, and said, ‘So, hey, enough about my dad, what did your dad do?’

‘My dad?’ said Johnny briskly. ‘He was a manufacturer – you know, he made machine parts, engines, generators.’

‘Oh cool,’ said Michael, his eye distracted at once by the small coloured screen.

‘I mean he’s still alive. He’s nearly ninety now, he’s sold the business.’

‘Right . . .’ It all probably seemed small beer to Michael, picking up his phone, with a quick chuckle over the message he’d just got. Why did Johnny say this, when for decades he’d done all he could to avoid and deflect the subject: ‘You’ve probably heard of the Sparsholt Affair?’

Michael smiled, almost tenderly, at his screen, murmured, ‘No, bitch . . .’ and thumbed in a quick answer. He glanced at Johnny. ‘Sorry, what was it called? A movie, right?’

‘Well, not yet,’ said Johnny. ‘No, it was . . . oh, it doesn’t matter.’

‘Oh, OK . . .’ said Michael, with a little doubting look. ‘Is it a book?’

Johnny lay back, relieved and remotely indignant, dry-mouthed, communicative, waiting to hear himself go on. ‘Well, there have been a couple of books about it, someone called Ivan Goyle wrote one, and there’s one by a Sunday Times journalist.’

‘Yeah, I don’t have much time for reading,’ Michael said.

He had another line of coke (Johnny, still buzzing, not) and fetched them both fresh drinks; then he showed Johnny the profiles of three or four people on Grindr he fancied, and one or two he’d hooked up with. Johnny felt put out by this but agreed magnanimously that they were hot or cute. Michael sent messages to a couple of them and laughed at the replies. There was another app too that he hadn’t heard of, for older men and their admirers. Some of these looked so geriatric as to be beyond sex, even with modern aids. Johnny went out to the lavatory, tall and bright, and when he came back he bent over Michael and ruffled his dark hair. But it seemed that for Michael a half-dozen birds in the bush were worth one in the hand, the shimmer of potential sex was more alluring than the fact of it, here in the gold-ceilinged drawing room. ‘I’m attracted to older men,’ said Michael, as he peered into the screen of his phone.

‘Oh, good . . .’ said Johnny, sitting down again, and starting to wonder if perhaps he just wasn’t old enough.

Michael went upstairs for a bit and left Johnny to swipe through the photos on his phone, endless selfies against backgrounds in Paris, Cape Town or New York, Michael among friends, party-goers, the phone held high so that they looked up from the crowd with arms round each other and always more clown-like expressions than Michael, who seemed fixed, as though by some botched cosmetic surgery, in a rictus of glamour. Here he was last month in a packed London club, among shirtless young beauties, their arms and chests badged, swirled and enlaced in tattoos: Johnny prised the picture wide to read the details. His old friend Graham had said they should go out, the two of them – the idea of joining a crowd like this was both enchanting and absurd. Going out, dancing, not just getting drunk as he had in his twenties, but taking powerful drugs, as he had a few times in his forties, ranked among the high pleasures of his life, free of all inhibition and doubt. Odd, then, that he’d surrendered it, he’d denied himself such nights for ten years or more. It seemed to him part of the tact of age.

Michael came back with his laptop and sat pressing lightly against Johnny on the low sofa. ‘You’ve got to look at this,’ he said, dopy but manic with the coke, clicking on a link that opened a new window, the tall portrait shape of an iPhone video. He smiled at the entertainment Johnny was about to have. ‘It’s my friend Snapstud,’ he seemed to say.

‘That’s an unusual name,’ said Johnny, leaning in, putting an arm round him. ‘Who is he?’ He saw a naked young man wanking and staring at the camera while sliding a translucent blue dildo in and out of his arse. ‘Good grief . . . !’ It wasn’t remotely the sort of thing he was used to looking at, and he was giddy for a moment at the sequence of casual revelations, that people did this, and that they filmed it, and that others watched it. It was like a first teenage glimpse of a hard-core mag, but in its matter-of-fact way not like pornography at all.

‘Do you love him? He’s so cute,’ said Michael.

‘Mm,’ said Johnny, blushing and frowning down at the screen. Snapstud had dirty blond hair, and a left arm sleeved to the neck in multi-coloured tattoos. ‘How do you get this?’

‘What’s that . . . ?’ said Michael, with a slow shake of his head as he watched, ‘It’s just on his Tumblr. Go, Snappy!’ in his hazed mid-Atlantic voice, as Snappy sent up an astonishing plume of semen, a quick sequence of plumes that could be heard very faintly pattering on to a surface out of view. Then he winked and raised a thumb in self-approval as the image froze.

‘Can anybody look at these?’ said Johnny.

‘Yeah, they’re just like on his page . . .’ and Michael clicked back and scrolled through the ‘archive’, where dozens of such videos of himself, alone or having sex with other men, were thumbnailed.

‘What does he do, your friend?’

‘What . . . ? I don’t know, I’ve never met him,’ said Michael. ‘I think he like works in a bank?’ He took Johnny’s confusion for excitement, and selected another, which it took a moment to work out showed Snappy with his knees behind his head fellating himself.

‘Well, well,’ said Johnny, and sat forward and closed the laptop as he took it out of Michael’s hands – it was a small not quite friendly struggle.

‘I thought you were into young guys,’ said Michael.

Johnny set the machine carefully on the table. Hearing his preference defined, as plainly as Michael had stated his own taste for older men, he felt there was something amiss with it, a quick desire to exonerate himself that ran ahead of a more puzzled feeling: that young guys weren’t what he particularly wanted. But he said bluffly, ‘That’s why I’m here, isn’t it,’ and after some brief wriggling and dodging on Michael’s part they started kissing.

Johnny stayed for most of the night. It wasn’t a great success, but belonged even so to a private sub-category in his life, the miss that was an achievement in another way. Michael was twenty-three and it was twenty-three years since Johnny had slept with anyone new. The boy’s body retained something ideal, and he visited it with faintly amused respect, with several admiring intakes of breath at its smoothness and beauty, and some looser but larger dissatisfaction, that it seemed to know nothing. His cock had more character than he did, tight-skinned and curving to the left. Johnny marvelled at it, amazed to think cocks were still going on, all over the place, when for years he’d rarely seen anyone’s but his own and Pat’s. Michael’s made its own undoubting bid for attention; and received it. But it was all very quick when it came to it. ‘Oh, is that it?’ Johnny thought. ‘Well, what did you expect?’

‘So do you have a partner?’ said Michael, a few minutes later, curling up with his head on Johnny’s chest, in a cautious late start at showing a personal interest in him – all his gadgets were elsewhere and Johnny feared doing anything that might alert him to their absence. He pulled him closer against him.

‘Did have,’ he said. ‘He died a few months ago.’

Michael seemed to make, in the blurred close focus, a pouting face. He might have been respectfully absorbing the news – he didn’t say he was sorry to hear it. ‘What did he die of?’ he asked, with a flutter of eyelashes, a silent whirr of scanning the previous half-hour for any possible risk.

‘He had prostate cancer.’

‘Oh, right. That’s bad, isn’t it?’

‘It’s . . . yes, it is.’

‘Must make sex a bit difficult, so I’ve heard.’

‘Oh, our sex life was buggered,’ said Johnny, which was Pat’s joke. ‘Though it didn’t seem so important, you know, compared with life itself.’

‘No . . .’

‘Sex doesn’t matter that much when you’re my age.’

Michael twisted his head round to smile at him. ‘That’s not the impression I got just now,’ he said, as if referring to a rather greater triumph than they’d had ten minutes before.

‘What about you?’ said Johnny. ‘Any long-term affairs?’

‘Yeah, I have a boyfriend,’ said Michael.

‘Hmm, what’s his name?’

‘Oh, Robert.’

‘Is he in London?’

‘He’s in LA right now.’

‘What, with your father?’

Michael laughed rather grimly. ‘Absolutely no way!’ He got out of bed, put on a dressing gown and went into the next room – soon Johnny heard him on the phone, it seemed he’d put an idea into his head, he was talking to Robert, in the early LA afternoon. ‘Yeah? . . . Oh, cool, no . . . Well, I hope you get it, you deserve it! What? . . . Oh, no . . . nothing much going on here, just having a night in by myself . . . You can tell? Yeah, I guess I’m a bit high.’ For a moment Johnny enjoyed the deceit, then suspected its cooler reverse – he wasn’t worth mentioning to Robert.

‘What was your partner called?’ said Michael when he came back into the bedroom.

‘Patrick,’ said Johnny. ‘How was Robert?’

‘Oh, fine,’ said Michael, slipping out of his dressing gown. They snuggled up together again. ‘Did you have rows?’

‘Mm, of course we did,’ said Johnny. ‘They never mattered much – you know, I wasn’t afraid of him. We always said what we liked.’ Though he’d been astonished, as a row-avoider, a conciliator all his life, at Pat’s sudden and furious naming of his faults, new ones he’d never guessed and old ones unforgotten, such as being too conciliatory, and not wanting a good row. Johnny always sat waiting for the humour that crept up through the shouting, and was fatal to it. ‘Why, do you have rows with Robert?’

‘No, no,’ said Michael, as if already thinking of something else.

Johnny ran his hand over the boy’s buttocks and pressed in a middle finger, a forgotten luxury. ‘Could he tell you had someone here?’

Michael didn’t answer, and what he did next made it hard for him to do so coherently.

When they turned off the light Johnny reached a fraternal arm around Michael, who laid his head on it, and shifted every thirty seconds. Johnny had an old idea of his own looming discomfort, the numbness of the well-intentioned embrace when to move the arm is to wake the man sleeping on it; but there was something nostalgic in it too – a trace of forty years ago, when all such embraces were experiments. Still, he detached himself, turned again and lay flat on his back, a thin slip of light above the curtains defining the near zone of the ceiling. He knew now that the coke would keep him awake. That, and Michael snoring, half-waking himself, shifting, and wrapping himself round Johnny in a muttering convulsion, arguments of a dream.

Still, Johnny slept; and in the early winter light, about seven o’clock, found himself awake, eased himself free (Michael turned as if in a huff to the far side of the bed), and went through into the bathroom. He was looking forward to going home. The faint distracting throb grew slowly louder, overlaid after a minute with a higher mechanical whine. He parted the curtain as the busy green bug of the street-cleaning truck roared into view in the mews below, busy but slow-moving, its circular brushes almost beautifully missing the seven or eight bits of rubbish on the cobbles and leaving a wet dirty smear as it circled, turned, and disappeared the way it had come. He watched a little longer, as the swirled pattern started to dry and fade, like a canvas in a dream whose erasure began the moment the brush had made its marks.

The next week Johnny found Michael back in his mind, not the sex, or really his smoothly undeveloped features, but the feel of a warm young person moving in his arms – it wasn’t just making up for Pat, it was something he’d never thought to have again. Better perhaps not to have met Michael, but once met he set off a painful yearning. Johnny decided to write him an email, finding the tone hard to get, not to be clumsily courtly or offputtingly brisk, unsure how much to use their thirty-year difference in age. He heard back from him next day, a cool, almost contentless paragraph, ‘You’re right, I am working on my Subjectivity module. You have a good memory Johnny.’ And signed off disconcertingly, ‘Thanks for reaching out, MX’. The phrase disturbed him, and went on doing so. There was a euphemistic kindness to it, a hint of surprise at his worthy but absurd attempt to see Michael again. He had an image of a hand stretching out through the bars of a cell – he might have reached out, but he hadn’t, by some distance, reached what he wanted; and Michael, it was clear, was unlikely to reach back.