The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst

Author:Alan Hollinghurst
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

7

He met up with Francesca and Una again at six thirty, outside Liberty’s, and they took him to a small bar in a side street off Regent Street, where you wouldn’t have expected a bar to be – was it a new arrival or a survivor? Beyond the pub door with its small opaque window was a heavy curtain that kept the draught from the drinkers and his main effort once they’d skirmished past it was to seem unfazed, even happy, at being the only man there. Una pushed her way through to the bar, though it wasn’t a struggle, she was greeted and patted by two friends as she pressed past, and she leant across the counter, unsmiling, for a kiss from the barmaid – if that was the right word. Johnny did spot a grumpy-looking man with short grey hair in the corner, who suddenly got up and came to the bar with the unmistakable arse of a woman. His main worry was that they would object to him, and he nodded his hair forward to conceal himself, without supposing it would fool them.

In fact when they’d been there ten minutes, and Una had introduced him to one or two of them, he had a feeling he’d been briefly admitted to a more civilized place than usual – a kind of high-minded solidarity, untouched by any sexual interest, seemed to support him, without going quite so far as to welcome him. He felt it would be bad manners to stay too long. He saw too that Una, who said almost nothing, was a figure in the bar – not far from where she worked, on the hinge between Mayfair and Soho. Francesca this evening was decidedly Mayfair, played up to her poshness and temperament, and drank beer from the bottle with just a bit too much carelessness. Una and Johnny had gin and tonics. A friend of theirs called Mary, small, dark, beautiful, in tweed jacket and brown jodhpurs, asked him what he did.

‘I’m an artist,’ he said, ‘yes, I’m a painter,’ in the palpable spirit of the bar of being what you wanted to be.

‘What sort of thing?’

He sensed the question was clever, not philistine. ‘At college I was an abstract expressionist,’ he said, ‘well, lots of us were, not just me! Now I’m hoping to focus on portraits.’

‘Not abstract . . . ?’

‘That’s right.’ A quick flirty calculation was allowed in his study of her head, and her clothes. She seemed wittily to be a lesbian now and also forty years ago, but he wasn’t sure. ‘Have you been painted?’

‘Oh, not yet,’ she said, as though she had a proper sense of when such a thing should happen. But also as if some proposal had casually formed. In the first small lift of the gin, a pub measure, not much, but nicely unfixing, he felt (what he wasn’t of course) in love with her, and watching her then, as she drew out a soft leather pouch and constructed a roll-up, was abashed by her quiet authority.

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