The Sparsholt Affair

4

Evert’s rooms were on the far side of College, and unlike mine looked outwards – not exactly at the world, but at the Meadow, with its grazing cows and misty distances. On the gravel walk below his window cadets were drilled and couples strolled, and up the long lime avenue beyond, the rowing eights of half the university would trail home from the river in the dusk. In those days the building he lived in was thought a Victorian eyesore; for me the stone stairs and Gothic windows stirred chilly memories of being at school. To put his mark on his rooms, Evert was already buying pictures, a colour print of a Whistler nocturne, a drawing of Windsor Castle, apparently on fire, by Peter Coyle, a little Sickert drawing and a few other things from home. Victor Dax was a collector, and had what Evert said were important paintings by Derain and Chagall. He had given Evert an etching of a large-bosomed nude by Anders Zorn, which drew odd chuckles from his scout. I felt myself it was a funny thing for a father to have given his son, but I saw there was a certain contempt for convention in much of Victor’s behaviour, and in this case perhaps a touch of wishful thinking.

‘Come and have a Camp,’ Evert said, as we jostled together on our way out of Hall a few days later. ‘I haven’t seen you for quite some time’ – with an odd smile: I don’t know if he thought I’d been seeing Sparsholt again. I said,

‘I’ve been stopping in Woodstock for a night or two – helping the old aunt I told you about to get settled in.’ I noticed again that my aunt meant little to him, and after a glance at him I thought I would say no more about her. As a fiction she was almost too successful – she escaped detection entirely. We made our way out into the quad, by the twitching light of his taped-over torch, which picked disorienting doorways and steps out of the near-dark. The narrow space behind his building, black-walled and cobbled like a stable yard, reached upward to gables barely darker than the sky.

His sitting room was doubly gloomy in the blackout, with stifling curtains of some heavy, crudely dyed material that stained your hands if you closed them yourself; they gave off a dim odour of tennis nets, at first pleasant, but over time oppressive. This evening, as I knew but Evert didn’t, Sparsholt was having his first sitting with Peter – I’d noticed his preoccupied look, as we left Hall. The meeting was to happen in Sparsholt’s rooms, behind those tight-closed shutters, and no doubt behind a sported oak. It had the secrecy of an assignation, and I couldn’t help wondering, as Evert doled out drops of Essence into our two cups, just how far it would go. A head and shoulders only, surely, in this first session, which would after all be the first time they had met. Would Peter be patient enough for the long game? I took it from the start that his aim was seduction, and found myself incoherently believing he might pull it off, where poor Evert surely had no chance.

Evert, it turned out, had made his own small advances. He’d gone down to the river, and trailed along the towpath in the drizzle as the Brasenose Eight streaked past in one direction and then streaked back again. He had managed to be just by the College barge when the boat came in to the landing deck, but he’d fluffed things; his attempt at a surprised greeting over the heads of the crew had gone completely unnoticed. I said why didn’t he do something more straightforward, ask Sparsholt out for a pint at the Bear one evening, or one of the little pubs in St Ebbe’s if he wanted to be more private? It seemed this was a bit too straightforward for him as yet. He said he didn’t know whether Sparsholt drank.

‘Ah, you’ve got a new picture,’ I said, and got up to look at it. ‘Hmmm . . .’ It hung over his desk, a small oil painting in a dark frame – I guessed it was an abstract work, though I saw it as a landscape, simplified to stripes of white, green and grey. ‘What is it, exactly?’

Evert half-warmed to the subject – I thought he said at first Peter had painted it. ‘Not Coyle, Goyle,’ he said: ‘Stanley Goyle. The names are more alike than their work.’

‘Well, I thought . . .’ I said hastily. ‘He’s someone you’ve discovered?’

Evert clearly liked the idea of this, but said, ‘Oh, he’s quite well known.’ He’d found a man in Summertown who sold pictures – he had several of Stanley Goyle’s, and hoped, when his father’s allowance came through next month, to buy a second one off him. He said he’d paid twenty-five pounds for it, which seemed a lot to me. ‘It’s a Pembrokeshire scene, of course.’ We examined it together, but I saw that he couldn’t be distracted by it, or the pleasure it brought, for more than a minute.

His thoughts now were focused on the weekend after next, and on the fire-watching duties we all had to do. These entailed staying up all night with a colleague in the Bell Tower, taking it in turns to stand around on the roof, looking out for incendiary devices or other activity. We all had the roster two weeks in advance, and the pairings were deliberately mixed. As it happened, I was due to be doing it on the Friday with Barrett, another Brasenose man, whom I barely knew. Evert was down for the Sunday, with someone I’ve entirely forgotten. But in between these two dates, on the Saturday night, the name of D. D. Sparsholt appeared, coupled, amusingly, with C. Farmonger – Charlie took a very dim view of his friends’ obsession with this freshman.

‘I wonder what they’ll talk about,’ I said.

‘They won’t talk about anything,’ said Evert pertly – but he coloured as he went on: ‘I’ve done a swap with Charlie. I’m going to fire-watch with Sparsholt – with David.’

‘And how will you explain the change?’

‘Oh, I’ve got to do something else on Sunday,’ said Evert.

‘I see. Well, you’ll have a decent chance to get to know each other.’

‘We’ll spend the night together,’ said Evert, and the prospect of it seemed to haunt his smile. He poured the boiling water into the cups.

‘There could be some very colourful activity,’ I said. The Blitz was still raging, and we were only fifty miles from London. ‘How are your parents?’

They seemed to preoccupy him less now that Sparsholt was the focus of his worries. ‘My father’s sent my mother off to Wales.’

‘You mean, to join your sister?’ – I knew that the beautiful Alex had been sent to her aunt in Tenby earlier in the year. At that time I had yet to visit Cranley Gardens, but it seemed from what Evert said that things there were on a generous scale. ‘So your father’s alone in the house?’

‘He has Herta for company.’

‘Of course. I hope to meet Herta one day.’

‘You might get round her, I suppose,’ said Evert, looking at me consideringly, ‘though few people do.’

‘And aren’t you worried about your own things at home?’

‘I don’t have many things, really. Most of my books are here. My father’s put all the valuable pictures in the cellar.’

‘I thought you weren’t supposed to do that. The firemen’s hoses ruin everything at the bottom of a house.’

‘Oh, has he got it the wrong way round?’ said Evert. ‘Still, water does less harm than fire, surely.’ He got up to search through the records stacked beside the bookcase. Most of us at that time were in a rut with records, having few of them and playing them over and over. What he picked out was something wantonly emotional by Tchaikovsky; after four and a half minutes his mood had been worked up effectively. He turned the record over, stood with the small fire smouldering in the grate behind him. ‘God, I wonder what Sparsholt’s doing now,’ he said, throwing out his arms as the brass came in with some fateful motif.

‘Yes, I wonder.’

‘Do you honestly think Coyle’s interested in him at all?’

My silence now seemed more culpable than it had before. ‘Oh, Coyle’s interested in a hundred people,’ I said. ‘Even if he is, it won’t last long.’ I felt Evert saw my real meaning – he stared at me and then looked away, so that something seemed to have come between us. The orchestra surged and ebbed.

‘I think I’d like to be an artist,’ he said, after a bit.

‘I’ve a suspicion,’ I said, ‘that artists don’t have nearly as much fun as they like us to imagine.’ But I could see that in Evert’s mind they had an infinite freedom.

As it happened, I ran into Peter in Blackwell’s the next morning. He was with a dark young man he seemed reluctant to introduce – I wondered if he even knew his name. ‘I’m Freddie Green,’ I said. ‘Oh, George Chalmers,’ said the stranger, and we shook hands. Peter looked vaguely irritated. ‘How did it go with Sparsholt?’ I said.

‘What, last night, you mean?’ – he peered dimly, as if at a much more distant memory. ‘I wasn’t there very long.’

‘But you did a drawing?’

‘Just a quick sketch or two, you know.’

‘And how did you get on with him?’

‘I wasn’t really in the mood, Freddie,’ said Peter. ‘Sometimes it just doesn’t happen.’ He smiled at George Chalmers, who was perhaps his next sitter.

I went on, ‘What on earth did you find to talk about?’

Peter looked at me rather oddly. ‘If you must know, we talked about you. He doesn’t know what to make of you.’

‘Oh,’ I said, both amused and very slightly wounded, ‘I thought I was nice to him.’

‘No, no, he said you were. He’s probably just not used to your style. He’s from Nuneaton.’

‘Oh . . . yes.’ There was something null about it, as a fact, though the only fact I knew about Nuneaton was that George Eliot also came from there.

‘Well, we must press on,’ said Peter, and led his silent model, if that’s what he was, out of the shop. In fact George Chalmers must have spoken, because I heard Peter saying quite sharply, ‘No, he’s not,’ as they stepped into the street.