The Sparsholt Affair

2

Evert wrote to his father, and came round a few days later to say that our invitation had been accepted: Victor Dax would be more than happy to address the Club. The great man’s letter was short and virtually illegible; the notepaper was headed with a murky crest and the motto ‘Montez Toujours’. ‘We’ll put him down for fifth week, shall we?’ – I smiled confidently and started to feel nervous myself about whether people would come.

Evert was still in khaki, having spent the past hour or so being marched back and forth along the great stone terraces of Tom Quad by old Edmund Blunden. I mean Blunden seemed old to us, when he came in to teach drill or to take the reluctant volunteers out on map-reading courses, though in fact he was still in his forties, a small bird-like figure with shadowy reserves of knowledge. I almost envied them their forays out to Cumnor Hill or Newnham Courtenay, overlaid, as I saw them, on a spectral map of the earlier war he had witnessed and written about. But Evert hated it all, and looked wretched in uniform; he marched, on the couple of times I’d seen him training, with an air of slighted dignity, close to insubordination.

He sat down and picked up a book with a just perceptible awareness of becoming a regular guest in my rooms. We had known each other a little in his first year, and now that all the friends he’d made then had been called up he clearly felt lonely. No doubt he dreaded the fast-approaching moment when he would be called up himself. There was something unsettled about him, his pale, dark-eyed face under its tumbling forelock gave hints of feelings that he rarely expressed. To me he had all his own interest, and then the glamour, and the burden, of his short but famous name. It had always been a part of his appeal to me that he was A. V. Dax’s son; just as it was a sign of our friendship that I half-forgot the fact. To him it was a knottier and more inescapable matter. He sighed and put the book down, and showed me another letter, from his mother – I gathered that his parents, though still together in their house in Chelsea, led semi-independent lives, but I didn’t feel I could ask more. It wasn’t clear how much Evert himself understood of the situation. His mother’s letter described the terrors of the Blitz in a cheerfully carping way. She said that his father had laughed when she’d flung herself on to the ground as a bomb came down, and ruined a good coat; he himself refused to go into the shelters with the ordinary people.

Evert got up to go, and said, ‘Oh, by the way, have you seen any more of . . . what was his name?’

‘Who was that?’ I said.

‘Sparsholt, was it, the new man?’ He went to look out but it was only three o’clock and the long row of top-floor windows was opaque. Neither of us was exactly sure now which window it had been, and this year many rooms were uninhabited and locked up.

‘Well, I think I saw him in Hall,’ I said cautiously.

‘Oh, I know,’ said Evert. ‘He sits at the rowers’ table. They’ve put all the Eights together. It’s enough to make you take up rowing – not Sparsholt, I mean, but all the extra food they get.’ He blushed but the subject was fairly clear between us; I saw him deciding to say more. It turned out that the moment in my rooms in first week had not been his first sighting of Sparsholt. He had seen him before, jogging back from the river in his rowing kit, he had seen him in Hall, and late one night he had failed to see him, colliding with him in near darkness at the corner of Kilcannon. But the vision from my window, of Sparsholt half-naked in his square of light, had been the turning point, when interest roused by these random sightings had thickened into an obsession. I struggled slightly to understand it. It was as if he had willed his own submission, which assumed, as the minutes passed, a luxurious inevitability. He knew nothing about this young man, but at that moment he had given himself up to him. Or, as he put it, he had fallen in love.

‘And have you spoken to him?’ I asked.

Evert was almost shocked. ‘Well, when he bumped into me,’ he said, ‘but not since . . . no, no.’

Peter Coyle, as I expected, had been much bolder, and had at once written Sparsholt a letter, on the Slade School’s paper, asking if he could draw his portrait. There had been no reply, though I felt, two nights later in Hall, when I took a place facing the rowers’ table, that there was something subtly self-conscious about Sparsholt, a first uneasy suspicion, in his stern young face and his upright aloofness, that he might be being watched, or have turned already, in this place that was so new to him, into the subject of a rumour. Whether he noticed me, or Evert casting keen almost terrified glances in his direction, I rather doubt. He seemed to look at us as an undifferentiated and still alien mass. After Hall he quickly left his fellow diners, and I thought how easily I could have called out to him as we moved with our separate flashlights through the darkened quads.

It was perfectly easy to find out more about him. In the Lodge next day I saw from the Boat Club notices that his initials were D. D., and from a tutorial list that he was an Engineer. These first meagre scraps were somehow discouraging: scientists and rowers moved in their own severe routines, set apart from the rest of us. But the fact of Sparsholt’s instant appeal to Peter and Evert invested him, even so, with a faint if puzzling glamour. To me there was something unyielding in his surname, a word like a machine part, as Peter said, or a small hard sample, perhaps, of some mineral ore; but now I was curious about the D. D.

As it happened I stole a march on my two friends. Each morning Phil came in about seven to open the shutters and clean up my sitting room, while I as a rule still lay in bed, drowsing and dreaming to the squeak of casters and the to-and-fro noise of the carpet sweeper next door. He would lay the fire, and take out the china and glass to be washed up. When that was all done he would knock and open my bedroom door in one swift movement, with a policeman’s instinct for surprise. I would then emerge in my dressing gown on to a stage set exactly restored in the interval – ‘The Same. The Following Morning’.

Today as I waited for the kettle to boil I gazed out gratefully into the quad. There was a heightened sense of relief then, even in Oxford, at having come through the night unscathed. The lights that showed palely again at the windows as the scouts went round were cheering signals of survival. I watched the figures who emerged, in overcoats and slippers, to make their way to distant bathrooms. There were fewer people now, of course, and most I knew only by sight, but we were joined together in a manner that we had not been when I first came up, before the War. I was about to turn away when I realized that the person leaving the first line of footsteps across the wet lawn below was Sparsholt himself, striding out in pyjamas, a blue dressing gown and brown walking shoes, with a towel slung round his neck like a scarf. He gave off a sense of military indifference to the chilly morning as he swiftly disappeared from view.

Normally I shaved after breakfast, when no one was around, but this morning I seemed barely to take the decision to follow him. I put on my coat and the Homburg hat I had lately affected, and trotted downstairs, thinking of what I would be able to tell Evert over our porridge and tea. It was the comedy of competition that tickled me, rather than any intrinsic interest in the man I had decided to speak to.

I generally avoided the big subterranean bathroom in the next quad, with its rows of washbasins and maze of cubicles, no locks on the doors. I remembered the uneasy sensation there of being naked and alone, in my steam-filled partition, knowing others were lying almost silently around me. Sometimes someone would ask who was there, and a conversation would start, as if on the telephone, and slightly constrained by the presence of the rest of us, closed more silently still in our own cubicles. When I first came up I’d been told by my half-brother Gerald that it was the best place in College for a long soak, by which I suspect he meant something more. It was taken over at certain times by the muddied and bloodied rugby team, the exhausted rowers, who recovered and stretched in tender self-inspection among densities of steam, a great naked mixing and gathering. They threatened no danger, I went quite unnoticed there, but I knew I was out of my element.

When I came in, Sparsholt had just started shaving, and glanced at me with a second’s curiosity in the mirror. I confess I felt a jolt of excitement at being in his presence. He was wearing nothing but his pyjama bottoms and his walking shoes, the laces undone. Now I saw his muscular upper body close to, revealed with casual pride. I hung up my coat and hat and went to the basin two along. ‘Good morning!’ I said. He turned his head, razor raised, and said, ‘Morning!’ – more cheerfully than I’d expected: I could tell he was glad to be spoken to. There was a splosh or two from a nearby cubicle, but the cavernous room had a desolate air. He took a stripe of lather off his jaw, and then another, and while I drew hot water I watched discreetly as his face emerged. I felt I hardly knew what it would look like.

‘I haven’t seen you before,’ he said – again more in welcome than suspicion, looking across and smiling for a moment. His good strong teeth showed yellow in the square of white foam round his mouth.

‘Oh – I’m Freddie Green,’ I said. He set down his razor on the edge of the basin and reached out a hand:

‘David Sparsholt.’

‘Sparsholt?’ I said, absorbing the ‘David’, to me the most guileless and straightforward of all the Ds. I saw that he was very young, under the pale armour of his muscles. His wrist was streaked with wet hairs but his chest and stomach were quite smooth. ‘It’s an unusual name.’

He blinked as if sensing criticism. ‘Well, we’re from Warwickshire,’ he said – and there was a mild regional colouring I would never have been skilled enough to place. I didn’t press him further, and in a minute he splashed fresh water over his face and dried himself roughly. As I began to shave I peeped across in a friendly way. He pushed his head to left and right as he inspected his jaw in the mirror, with the businesslike vanity I had rather expected: he seemed pleased enough with what he saw. Was he good-looking? I hardly knew. To me a man is good-looking if he is well dressed; and since Sparsholt was hardly dressed at all I was rather at a loss. It was a broad face with a slightly curved nose and blue-grey eyes set deep under a strong brow. His hair was clipped short above the ears; short, but dark and curly, on top. It was his physique, of course, that was more remarkable, and I could see why Peter would want him as a model; quite what Evert hoped to do with him I didn’t try to imagine. ‘Which force are you signed up with?’ he said.

I explained to him about my condition, and my permanent exemption from military service; and as I did so I saw a first puzzlement in his eyes.

‘That’s bad luck,’ he said – but the condolence hid a murmur of mistrust. He looked narrowly at me, in my vest, and then perhaps took pity on me. He seemed to play, like other physically powerful men I’ve known, with a small, barely conscious, instinct to threaten, as well as to reassure and even to protect. ‘What will you do?’

‘Well, I’m doing the third year, history, you know, a full degree. Then we’ll see. Which service are you?’

He had his towel round his neck again now, his hands on his hips, feet apart. There was a careless glimpse of his sex in the open slit of his pyjamas. ‘Royal Air Force,’ he said, ‘yes, I’ll be learning to fly.’ His narrow smile was again slightly challenging.

‘Wonderful,’ I said. And sensing some further approval was due: ‘I can see you do a lot of exercise’ – not liking to say I’d watched him at it, and thinking even so I sounded rather eager; but he smiled acceptingly.

‘Well, you’ve got to be ready, haven’t you,’ he said. It was clear that the morbid uncertainty about the future that permeated most of our lives throughout these years had no effect on him. He was looking forward to it. ‘I’m eighteen in January – I’ll be signing up then.’ And he went through his plan for me, in the way that a person nagged by anxiety will, though in his case I saw only the purposeful alertness of the born soldier. I said I was surprised he’d bothered to come up to Oxford for just one term. But he’d got in, and after the War he would come back – he had that planned too. He would get a degree, and then he would go home again and set up a firm, an engineering business. ‘Well, they’ll always be in demand,’ he said.

The door of the occupied cubicle opened, and Das, the one Indian man in College, came out, wrapped in a towel and holding his glasses, which he was quickly wiping clean with a discarded sock. He looked with a kind of baffled keenness at Sparsholt, who had evidently encountered him before, and who took the opportunity to pull on his dressing gown and leave. ‘I hope I’ll bump into you again,’ I said, as I heard the thump of the door. Das, who had now got his glasses back on, looked almost accusingly at me.

‘Is that young gentleman your friend, Green?’ he said.

‘Mm?’ I said, but testing the new possibility, and my feelings about it.

‘He is like a Greek god!’

‘Oh, do you think . . . ?’

‘But arrogant, very much so.’

I rinsed my razor under the tap. ‘I rather imagine the Greek gods were too,’ I said. I began to see that Sparsholt’s effect might be larger than I’d thought.