When Evert came to my rooms a few days later he was in uniform again, but I had a feeling he was changing his mind about it. He drooped and sprawled mutinously as usual when muffled in the styleless khaki, but now and then he straightened up; he set his shoulders back when he stood in front of the fire, as if the soldier’s role might just be worth playing after all. ‘How’s Jill?’ he said.
‘Jill’s very well,’ I said.
‘You seem to be seeing quite a lot of her.’
In fact I hadn’t seen her since our night-time walk over the bridge to St Hilda’s, and my note in the college mail had got the cryptic reply ‘Henry III!’ – an essay crisis, I assumed. ‘I think we like each other,’ I said. Evert started to roam around. I’d left my diary open on my desk, and I saw it distract his attention for a moment as he spoke:
‘By the way, I took your advice about the bathroom.’
‘I don’t know that it was advice,’ I said.
He came and sat on the sofa. ‘Actually I thought I’d missed him, though I trekked over at first light. You notice how well I’ve shaved.’
‘I noticed a nick under your chin.’
‘That marks the moment when he finally emerged – he must have been in the bath for hours. He was just in a towel.’ Evert smiled painfully through his blush. He’d spoken to him, and it seemed they’d had a brief conversation. He said it had gone very well in fact, and sat rather solemnly picturing it all, before getting up again to glance out across the quad.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I hope Sparsholt won’t grow suspicious about these bathroom encounters.’
‘You mean, you feel it’s all right for you to encounter him, but not for anyone else?’ I saw this was actually my view about various matters. ‘You’re not interested in him anyway!’ said Evert; and then, quite suspicious for a second, ‘Or are you?’
I said, ‘I’ve developed an interest in him purely as the focus of your interest. Yours and Peter’s,’ I added, and watched him scowl. ‘I’m following the whole Sparsholt affair scientifically.’
‘I’d hardly call it an affair,’ Evert said; and then, ‘Why, what’s Coyle been up to?’
‘No idea. I think no news from him is good news for you. We’ll certainly hear all about it if anything happens.’
Poor Evert looked haggard at the thought of his rival spending whole hours alone with Sparsholt, with the licence to stare at him and move him around, to ponder at leisure the nakedness he had glimpsed for a mere second, and all the while, in the semi-abstracted way of the artist, to draw him out about his past, his thoughts and his feelings. I wondered though whether Peter’s flamboyance would alarm him. It was all a test, in a way, of Sparsholt’s innocence. Was he still, as a freshman from another college, glad of any friendly attention? Was he even aware that his hours with the weights and clubs had made him, to a certain kind of person, an object of desire? It was one of those questions of masculine vanity hard even to formulate and impossible to put directly to the man himself.
I said, ‘I expect you’d like a glass of port.’ As it happened an affair of a very different kind had just begun in my own life, though I wasn’t able to speak of it yet, even to someone who showed such trust in me. The bottle of port was related to it.
‘Where did you get it from?’ Evert said, seeing how ancient and expensive it was.
‘It was given to me by my aunt,’ I said.
‘I didn’t know you had an aunt,’ said Evert.
‘Almost everyone has,’ I said, ‘if you look into it.’ I scraped at the blackened seal with my penknife. ‘She’s just moved to Woodstock – I went to see her yesterday on the bus.’ Evert didn’t really take this in.
‘I’ve got an aunt by marriage,’ he said. ‘She’s stuck in The Hague now, poor old thing.’ His family were a source of worry to him of a kind I was spared; my father, twice married, had died when I was ten, and my widowed mother dwelt in the depths of Devonshire; Woodstock I felt was a fairly safe spot for an aunt. I tugged out the cork and poured him a good glassful.
‘To victory, Evert,’ I said.
‘Oh, yes . . .’ he said, though there was something further, which he seemed reluctant to come round to. It emerged in a while, under the prompting of the port, and when it did it threw the most withering light on his whole situation. ‘The thing is, there’s a woman,’ he said, not looking at me: perhaps he thought I would laugh, or say (what I said only to myself), ‘Well, of course there is.’
‘Have you seen her?’
‘No, thank God, but she took up a lot of the conversation.’
‘You talked quite a bit, then.’
‘Well, I didn’t want to let him go.’
‘Who is she, did you gather?’
‘The ghastly thing is that she’s coming to Oxford. To live here, I mean.’
‘I expect she wants to be near David,’ I said.
Evert glared at me. ‘She’s going to be very near indeed. As near as she can be. They’re engaged to be married.’
‘That does sound a bit rash,’ I said, more tactfully. ‘He’s very young. Anyway, I’m not sure that undergrads are allowed to get married, are they? I’ve never heard of it.’
‘Of course I said to him, “What’s the hurry?” and he said, “Well, you never know what’s going to happen, these days, do you. I might be dead otherwise before I get the chance.” I said, “By that thinking, there are quite a lot of things you ought to do now, while you can!” ’
‘And what did he say to that?’
Evert gave a nauseated smile. ‘He said what he wanted most of all was to have a son.’
I had finished Victor Dax’s novel at last, and wondered what passages from it he would choose to read to the Club. It impressed me, though it wasn’t exactly enjoyable; my regard for it had its share of self-regard, at having got through it and grasped what it was doing. It was unshakeably serious, and I liked my prose to have at least a glimmer of humour. Dax’s nearest approaches to jokes were quotations from Erasmus and occasional mockery of the working classes. Still, I had seen the solemn praise of the book in the latest Horizon, and read the long TLS ‘middle’ which compared it favourably to the Dance of Shadows trilogy, books I’d devoured in the sixth form as the height of modernity and sophistication. If Dax wasn’t going off, I perhaps was going off him.
I thought I could talk to Peter Coyle about the novel and went over to the Ashmolean the next day. If I expected to find Sparsholt sprawled naked on a rostrum in front of him I was disappointed. Peter had just come out of a drawing class with Professor Schwabe, and was more than usually restless. He missed London, and the evacuation of the whole Slade School to Oxford had been a great frustration to him. Nor did he get on with Schwabe himself, who kept trying to suppress the strong vein of fantasy in Peter’s work. It was an inevitable clash: the Professor was a painstakingly old-fashioned craftsman, expert in topographical drawings and prints, while Peter was romantic, extravagant, at times rather silly, and a reckless taker of short cuts.
He signed out in the ledger by the door, and we went into the street. I was curious about Sparsholt, but wary of bringing the subject up; these black moods were short-lived but keen while they lasted. Besides, I was conscious by now of seeing the situation from Evert’s angle, and it was possible Peter himself attached little importance to it. In Beaumont Street an eternal Army convoy was rumbling past, the eight-second gap between lorries a subliminal rhythm of those years – Peter dashed across the road, though I, with my lifelong propensity to trip, or drop something, whenever physical speed was required, stood waiting for two minutes till the line and its busy wash of backed-up bicycles had passed. I found him in the Randolph, ordering tea.
He started talking about a play he’d been asked to design the sets for, and in a minute the annoyances of school were forgotten. It was called The Triumph of Time, an allegorical play of a kind I resisted, but which gave him exciting scope for some large-scale backdrops – I doubted if the Oxford Playhouse was really big enough for the visions he had of them. I was able in a while to say almost dismissively, ‘You might get Sparsholt as one of your devils, can’t you see him painted scarlet?’ and Peter then said that he’d had a brief note from him – it was in his pocket now.
‘Dear Mr Coyle,’ Sparsholt had written, ‘I was quite surprised to get your letter, and can’t think how you have heard of me! I do think it would be interesting to have one’s portrait painted, however I am extremely busy at present, and you may prefer to find other models for your work. Thursday evenings are possible for me, if not too late for you. Hoping to hear from you, D. D. Sparsholt.’ The letter was a diagram of divided feelings, written in a stiff schoolboy hand that yielded here and there to wide grown-up flourishes.
‘So he’s too busy,’ said Peter. I was surprised by my own alarm that he might be going to drop the whole thing.
‘Well, he has a lot on,’ I said, and I filled him in on Sparsholt’s various commitments – his rowing and his PT, and of course the long hours in the labs.
Peter shrugged, and peered round at the few other people taking tea beneath the dingy Gothic vault of the lounge. I filled up the pot from the scalding hot-water jug and gave it a stir. ‘I’ve been drawing a young gardener at Corpus,’ he said, a clear but mysterious emphasis on the word ‘drawing’.
‘Nude?’ I said.
‘I find it easier,’ Peter said, and gave a smile that seemed to count on my admiration and perhaps to take pleasure in shocking me a little. I saw that to him it was an advantage to be free of the traps of college life. In his digs at the far end of Walton Street he had no chance of meeting David Sparsholt in the bathroom. There was none of the deadliness of waiting and spying or the fateful flutter of a chance encounter in the quad. I said,
‘And you know he has his fiancée to take care of.’
Peter snuffled slightly, as if trusting this was a joke. ‘Sparsholt, you mean?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said, with a shake of the head. ‘He told me all about it.’
He reflected for a moment. ‘It’s rather sweet,’ he said, ‘in its way. But it won’t last.’
‘They mean to get married quite soon,’ I said.
He glanced again at the letter, and then tucked it away in his big tweed jacket, the pocket thick with what looked like other letters. ‘I’ve got a pretty good hunch that she doesn’t understand his true nature.’
‘Well, you may be right,’ I said.
‘What’s her name, anyway?’
‘That I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but I’ve told him I’d like to meet her.’
‘Have you?’ said Peter, more distracted than resentful. The fact that I’d told a lie intrigued me and should perhaps have alarmed me. I’d conceived a blurred involuntary image of the fiancée, as one does of anyone spoken of but unknown. There was still everything to find out. Peter had the pride as well as the charm of a rake, and with it the rake’s ability to dismiss with contempt anyone who resisted him. I wasn’t sure now if I’d sharpened his interest in David, or unwittingly encouraged him to write him off.