The Sparsholt Affair

4

The next afternoon Johnny made the old train journey from Euston to Nuneaton, an hour and ten minutes with half a century packed into it. For years his rare visits had been made by car, but now he was in no state, sleepless, bog-eyed, ears still distantly ringing, to drive. It was like when he’d first lived in London, long before the red Cortina or the Vulva, going home by train for Christmas in Warwickshire one year, Somerset the next. Now suddenly, at last, he was an orphan; he was ambushed again by the loss of his mother, felt the hard downward drag, too familiar now, of a death close at hand, of things irrefusibly to be done. He slid down in his seat, saw his own face weary and apprehensive in the black screen of his laptop before he turned it on, the chunky positive chord, the photo of himself and Pat in Granada, framed in ripples of white stucco – another life: unknown to these hikers with backpacks on the seat, the couple who’d been up to town for a show, students plugged into smartphones, parents with kids sallying to and from the bar, none of them aware that among them was a man whose father had died last night.

He looked at new emails, no news yet, in a Google search, the story still slept, on a winter Sunday. He looked out of the window, travelling fast towards childhood, a hundred half-forgotten sights in their half-remembered sequence reeling him in, warehouse, sewage farm, rusty barn, the brick tower of an edge-of-town Tesco. And other odd evidence, exposed in the winter woods – a round pond fenced off, two blue tents, a long shed of unguessable purpose, its roof under moss and dead leaves, the tone of dead leaves over all.

He googled again, and now the Coventry Telegraph had it, he felt the clutch of alarm at his father’s name in a headline, and scrolled in long jerks down the article, a crude cut-and-paste of all the old lumpy quotes and blown-up photos, ‘David Sparsholt at the time of his trial’ – it was a local story first and last. His own name appeared at the end, ‘an artist, who lives in London’ – he was paranoid today, but he felt the thrust of that plain provincial phrase. David and Connie’s divorce was mentioned, and Johnny again had a nearly palpable sense of her presence. She’d got away, of course. She’d had a perfectly good thirty years with Barry in Bridgwater, after her life had been publicly ruined by David. She was Connie Jefferies, a new person in a way her ex-husband could never quite be, for all his industry.

And now the overgrown slagheaps had appeared, like the steep tufted hills of a Caribbean island, exotic markers of home, and Nuneaton was announced as the next station stop.

He took a taxi from the station to the house, the driver a cheerful young Sikh whose talk at first was so beside the point of anything Johnny was doing or feeling that he entered into it gratefully and cheerfully himself. ‘No, I grew up here,’ he admitted; so did he have family in Nuneaton? Johnny smiled wistfully at the young man’s softly bearded profile, then found he was being talked to in the mirror – their eyes met. But you couldn’t land all that on a boy merely doing his job. ‘My stepmother still lives here,’ he said, tactful to both of them, and felt the thing close at his throat again for a moment. They turned into Weddington Avenue. ‘Very good area,’ said the driver. ‘The last house on the left,’ Johnny said, his horror of meeting June abruptly darker when he saw the firs, the brick gateposts, the light on in the sitting room. They came in at a respectful speed over the deep gravel, with a sound as if the car drew its own wash.

Did he still have a key to the house? – certainly not on him. It was the place even June called ‘home’ when she spoke of his coming here; but he stood with his bag in the porch and after the driver had gone he rang the bell.

June opened the door, small, perfect, no thought of smiling – he stepped in, dropped his bag, found he’d kissed her on the cheek. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. They stood and spoke stiffly in the hall, which he was keenly aware of today as hers. He sensed at once that he mustn’t look at anything with curiosity or even affection, which she might misread, as irony or possessiveness. The primary impact of the drugs had long worn off, but he was still largely attuned, he saw through things and round things with intuitive speed and feeling; perhaps he saw too much. Nothing, as yet, had been said, but he assumed all this had been left to her.

The house held the strangely unexpected evidence of his father’s most recent life. In the downstairs cloakroom there were rails flanking the loo, in the sitting room a hideous adjustable armchair, outsize intruder among the oak and chintz; on the coffee table a square magnifying glass. ‘I’ve put a few bits and pieces away,’ June said. A year or more’s history was elided in those first tactful glances as he talked to her, and tried to find out how she was taking things. How he was taking them himself came as a rough shock, five minutes later, when he found himself staring at the photos on the windowsill: his father in uniform, the invulnerable smile of early success, not a man Johnny remembered, an ideal one, and next to him at an angle, in a silver frame, Johnny himself, in the Sixth Form, soft-faced, wary in front of the camera – he felt a pain like a thump in the throat, the corners of his mouth pulled down as fiercely as a tragic mask: he couldn’t help it, though to June it perhaps looked unmanly, theatrical. She rested her fingers briefly on his forearm, then the touch was a push: ‘I’ll make some tea.’

Johnny stayed, recovered himself, snorted again in a bewildering access of grief, went for decency into the sunroom at the back, where he stood at the window, looking out across the lawn but seeing a brief jerky loop of his father, a momentary montage, walking, turning, smiling at him as he climbed into the parked Jensen.

June made a noise in the sitting room with the tray, and he went back to her. She looked at him with guarded curiosity, as a fellow griever who was taking it in his own way. He sat holding his cup in both hands with a sense of it as symbolic, although he was thirsty, while June ran quietly over just what had happened the day before, the shout, the fall, the ambulance. ‘Do you want to see him?’ she said – and it was almost like years ago, when she’d welcomed or discouraged the callers at his father’s office. It was a question, a decision, Johnny had dreaded, but he said yes straight away. ‘I’ll take you,’ she said, ‘in a minute. I won’t see him again myself.’ He finished his tea quickly then, and put on his coat while she got out the Golf. In six minutes they were at the hospital. She waited in the car, it wasn’t expected to be a long visit. He went in, explained, was led down long hallways to a door and shown into a room that he entered as considerately as if his father were still alive. Then he was alone with him. There was a sort of calm distinction in the completely immobile face with its eyes closed. Johnny saw the formal sadness of the moment, all its cues for feeling and reflection, but felt almost nothing – it was his father’s absence that had dealt him the primitive shock. This was just a dead man’s face, which the light of scandal might play over as readily as that of acclaim. He thought the convention was to kiss the dead parent on the brow, but a sense that that wasn’t his father’s style deterred him, and he felt he wouldn’t regret not having done so. He took out his pocketbook, moved the visitor’s chair to the head of the bed and sat down and drew him, a rapid but careful and observant sketch, five minutes’ intent work. He thought, this is what we get to do. He couldn’t remember for the life of him what colour his father’s eyes had been.

They both had a large drink at six, June a brandy and ginger ale which she took into the kitchen with her, to get on. Johnny carried his Scotch and soda upstairs, a new carpet on the landing, the bathroom re-decorated, a new walk-in shower installed. The return to the house was an oddly clear lesson in the history of his parents’ taste, long ago, of June’s restless alterations and improvements, and, still detectable, of his own taste. In his room there were pictures he’d done at school, the drawing of the Abbey which had won second prize in the Warwickshire Schools Junior Art Competition nearly half a century before.

Was he taking all this away – now, or after the funeral perhaps? Did either of them suppose he would come back to see her, or that she would want him to? ‘I’m sorry, Jonathan,’ June had said, on the way back from the hospital, ‘I feel you’ll be without an anchor’ – which was a kind remark, perhaps, or a reproachful one, since he had been there so rarely. He was touched by an uncomfortable sense of duty towards her, the woman who had made his father happy, and who had always dreaded the talk among their friends coming round to what her stepson was doing – he has a daughter, doing very well – you know he painted the Countess of Wessex – Sophie, yes – charming, apparently . . . no he’s not married . . . oh, it all came back to Dad, and the much huger embarrassment she’d shouldered already, in her blind decisive youth, in a long-sustained feat of denial: fending off reporters, pretending the wounding articles and later the books about her husband didn’t exist. They’d lived together for forty-five years, and had known each other for two or three years before the crisis and divorce. She had come to dinner sometimes, when his mother was away. What he’d hated from the start, far more than the corruption case, which he’d never fully grasped, or the intimate shame of the Haxby business, was David’s sequence of betrayals of Connie, begun more than seventy years ago now, with poor besotted Evert. It was in his power, it was how he got his way.

Johnny pulled out the four drawers of the chest, the bottom one had the Christmas decorations in it, but in the others he found a roll-neck jersey and folded shirts he hadn’t worn since the 80s, but had left for some reason in the limbo of neglect and just possible resurrection. On the shelf above the bed there were school books, his James Bond Aston Martin with bulletproof shield and ejector seat (the ejected figure long lost), a brown-glazed pot he’d made at Hoole: things the long steady continuum of his father’s life had robbed him of any desire to take away. He opened the wardrobe, a jangle of hangers, and on the top shelf among a heap of teenage daubs found a worn old sketchbook that he knew but could barely place. He sat on the bed with it, slipped off the perished elastic strap. Scrawny studies of roots, a vase of snowdrops, schoolboy stuff, a woman in a hat whom he didn’t recognize. What on earth was it? Who was that . . . ? The almost forgotten holiday, in Cornwall. And there, oh god, thick, overworked, a little bulging mannequin: Bastien! Bastien, Bastien, again and again. With almost a sixth sense he knew the drawings, but the occasions when he’d made them had gone completely. They were childishly stiff, with a stroke here and there of something like talent, a mannered dash forwards. At the time they had been private triumphs, acts of magic over thwarted desire.

June made them cauliflower cheese, a supper out of the past which Johnny, his stomach shrunken and his palate dead from a night of drugs, ate what he could of. In the welcome reprieve, the sweet second chance, of the whisky and wine he saw a bright poignancy in the objects June took pride in, the glass and china, the small silver pheasants on the sideboard and the glinting silver labels round the necks of the decanters. ‘Gosh, this takes me back,’ he said, with a smile across the glooming mahogany of the table, where she had laid their places face to face.

‘It’s the best I can do in the circumstances,’ June said; which might still have been awkward modesty, and not just her nose for a slight in any compliment. Later she went to the hatch and brought through two stemmed bowls of gooseberry fool, each with a brandy snap.

‘Mm, lovely!’ said Johnny.

June ate with a rather compromised air. ‘I had the gooseberries in the freezer,’ she said.

*

He yawned and signalled readiness for bed at a childish hour. ‘You look tired,’ said June.

‘Yes – I didn’t sleep very well last night.’

She looked quickly at him – ‘No . . . well, an awful shock for you.’

When he got into bed he found he filled it, or it had shrunk under him, and might even shrink more. He seemed to hang on the edge of the mattress, in a kind of headlong reverse – condemned to sleep alone since Pat had died, and now to squash back into adolescence. He really was tired, he hadn’t slept at all with Z, they had lain together in a sweaty parched fatigue, the news and its gravity clarifying in his mind, and the need for sex inexplicably, compellingly strong. He’d popped one of Pat’s blue pills, with a new half-spooky half-comical sense of drawing on his strength whom he missed more than ever at this moment; but after a good hour of trying he’d been unable to come, though the need to do so drove him on till all pleasurable sensation had gone. Z suffered none of these senior setbacks, and came like a dream after five or six minutes. Johnny had to keep getting up to piss, and saw himself in the bathroom mirror, a grizzled old figure with the swollen belly and implacable erection of a satyr.

Now he turned on his back, and resignedly took in the late noises of the house; after London, with its endless roar just this side of silence, the stillness of the suburb was unsparing. It threw the creaks of cooling radiators, the little whine and click of the immersion heater going off, into clearer relief. The bed still made the quick nagging noise it had always made when you turned in it; the moment you thought of having a wank the news was announced to the rest of the house. The room in which June too was lying alone after decades of coupledom was far enough away for him to risk it. He wondered about Zé, which was really his name, José, and if he would see him again – he felt he would never have noticed him himself, but Zé seemed crazy about Johnny, and it was a stroke of amazing luck to have got off with someone half his age who was simply so kind. He was the opposite of Michael. Johnny reached for his phone by the bedside and thumbed in a message which magically corrected itself: I’m in bed and thinking of you X, and sent it with a beating heart and forgotten sense of daring. In a second the perky arpeggio, the bright screen, how could he have written so much so quickly? – thinking of you 2 all day!! sleep well my darlin Wish I was there with u!! Cum back soon!!! XXXXXZ. The words were abnormally vivid to him, a caress and above all a promise, and he switched off the lamp, turned on his side and dropped gaping into sleep as if under a spell.

He was woken after seven by June moving about, the noise of doors downstairs, never thought of, never forgotten. A bit later he swung out of bed, and parted the curtains. In the grey dusk of the garden only frail winter jasmine made a sign of the world of colour and light. He hadn’t said how long he was staying – he knew June didn’t want him hanging around, but thought she might resent it if he left. The date of the funeral was yet to be fixed, and he longed to be back in London, but there was something bleak and illusionless in going away, a first clear admission they didn’t need each other.

After breakfast he went out for a walk through the town, and there were things June said she needed him to get. He felt flat, colourless himself today, but lurkingly conspicuous, a returning son, who had known these streets, walls, crossroads, gable ends in the 1950s. But no one knew him, even though in Walsh’s he stared smiling at the little man who slipped the loaf into the bag and twizzled the ends as he had forty years ago, but in plastic gloves now and a hairnet, the stay-at-home son turning into his old mother. Walsh’s at least was there, with its yellow linoleum, its doughnuts and cream horns, and the opaque glass dish like an ashtray, where they put your change. Three or four other shops were empty, and stripped bare. Some were chain stores, burger joints, places Johnny might have hung about in, if he’d been a teenager now, looking at men. In Pinnock’s tea rooms the cheap cups and saucers, CDs and high heels of a charity shop were lined up in the window, for the time being. Johnny stared in, remembering, the string curtain in the kitchen door, the steep narrow staircase to the first-floor lavatory, and Gordon Pinnock himself, one of the certain homosexuals of his own childhood, another man who’d once been in love with David Sparsholt. Gordon had retired to Madeira, twenty years ago, with one of his waiters. Johnny strolled on, with an uncanny sense of knowing this town in a thousand details, the past showing through the present, and of being on the brink of saying goodbye to it for ever.

Not wanting to go back yet he cut down Coton Road, over the Ringway and into Riversley Park – here nothing had changed but the seasons, the beds of salvias and geraniums in front of the Museum dug over for winter, but, happy and strange, the soldier back, with his startled look, gun in one hand, eyes lifted under his soft-brimmed hat: a memorial to the Boer War, stolen years ago, a local outrage, and now lovingly recast, when the Boer War was beyond memory. Johnny strolled along the landscaped curve of the river-bank. It felt a moment to think alone about time, loss and change, and the path by the water seemed a fitting invitation, with the bare scraped minimum of poetry to it . . . It had rained in the night, and there was a sheen of damp still on the tarmac, an untraceable sad glimpse out of childhood in this very spot. Fifty yards ahead of him a couple in their twenties were dawdling just where he wanted to be, the man much taller, but their arms round each other, tightly but not quite containing their energy, which broke out in quick wriggles and tuggings apart, mock fights, as if they were ten years younger. Now the man ran away a few yards, struck a pose, she drifted scornfully then rushed at him with a shriek and jumped on him and kissed him. Johnny felt a weary resentment of them, their happiness, claiming the full heterosexual allowance to carry on in public. He fell behind, and in doing so seemed more consciously to be following them. He thought about holding and kissing Zé, and Zé fucking him, and wondered if this could be it – the question turning, as he walked under the bare willows, from a warm but doubtful one about taking things further with him into a much colder one about a future without love, sex, the repeatedly chased and in his case rarely captured affair. The couple ahead were hard to get away from because they kept stopping. Johnny stopped too, with a sudden weird thought they were just like his parents sixty years ago – even, for a moment, tall good-looking man, short lively woman, that they were them. Twice she looked over her shoulder at Johnny, then said something to the man, who glanced round too. He laughed as he saw he was spoiling it for them, just as they were spoiling it for him.

When he got back to the house, June was putting her coat on and said she was going to top up the bird feeder, but Johnny insisted on doing it for her. He went out through the cold utility room, with its square pot sink where his father had washed his hands after work of all kinds, the cracked white bar of soap marbled with his dirt. When he opened the connecting door into the garage and turned on the light, there was the sleek superannuated Jaguar, heavy and silent, a dead man’s car; and beyond it June’s blue Golf GTi. ‘I’ve done something I never thought I’d do,’ his father had said, ‘I’ve bought a bloody German car.’ Johnny took in the remote chilled smell of oil and wood shavings from the workbench at the back where David had tinkered away his retirement mornings. On the floor in the corner, heavy, as if magnetized and movable by no one else, his large black barbell rested, and, delicately cobwebbed, the hand-weights with their stack of iron discs, used all his adult life, in staring daily sessions, until work on his arms and chest became a threat to his heart.

Johnny found a bag of birdseed on a shelf and went out through the back door. The absolute confirming greyness of the winter sky, in every direction . . . the lawn dark green with the wet, and the shaped clumps of conifers, severe and cemetery-like today, blocking off the view from the flanking houses. The bark-covered beds, the roses pruned down hard. He unhooked the green tube of the feeder, a cage within a cage, with its squirrel-proof outer guard, jiggled out its little chained lid and poured the pretty particoloured seed in a pleasing flow over the small bars which half-obstructed the entrance. The seed fell as if through time, threshed corn streaming from its chute between timbers and into the dryer at Peachey’s farm. But in a moment it was full, overfull, and he tipped some out and flung it on the grass, where the squirrels could eat it to their heart’s content. Then he hung the feeder back on the rustic frame his father had made and erected, with every structural safeguard, outside the kitchen window, where June could watch it and occasionally, for some rare visitor or a great congregation of coal tits or sparrows, call him through to have a look. Through he would come, just too late, and to a scowl from June that suggested his own thoughtless movements had frightened them off.

‘We must talk about the funeral,’ she said, when Johnny joined her again in the sitting room. She had got out three possible photos for the order of service, which might have been captioned ‘War Hero’, ‘Criminal’, ‘Old Gent’.

‘Did Dad say anything about it?’

It seemed that he hadn’t. ‘He wasn’t religious, as you know,’ said June.

‘It’s a cremation, anyway, I hope.’

‘I’m afraid,’ said June, ‘he wanted to be buried’ – and looked away at the sudden rush of agreement between them. ‘It’s in his will.’

Johnny stared at the airman photo and wished very much that the square-jawed squadron leader had given the order, when it finally came to it, for incineration. ‘Well, if that’s what he wants, I mean wanted.’

‘And with his own father, of course.’

‘Well, I suppose.’ He got up and gazed out of the window at the empty quadrant of the drive. It was a strength to him to know that Pat was (illicitly, nocturnally) scattered on Eel Brook Common – even if he felt a literal-minded reluctance to walk there in the months that followed, when the frost on the grass or the wind-blown grit on the paths might hold microscopic parts of him. He still wondered, when he saw the damp chevrons of his boot soles on the floor of the porch, if in fact he wasn’t treading Pat back into the house. But Dad was going down, in an armour-plated box, into the red Warwickshire earth, and would lie there stubbornly, immaculately dressed, until long after everyone who remembered him alive was dead too.