The Swimming-Pool Library

by Alan Hollinghurst

  It had been wonderful after three days of this to go to the Corry, and when I got back I made no mention of Lord Nantwich and my own adventures. I saw at once that their secrecy would be essential to me. They were my right to a privacy outside this forced sharing of my home. Stepping into the roasting heat of the flat I found Arthur restive and relieved to see me. He came up and held me. He had altered his appearance in my absence, and undone his braids, though his hair still retained much of its former tightly combed and twisted nature and jutted out in wild spirals. The swelling of his face was going down and he had begun to look beautiful again, the protective dressing on his cheek almost decorative. Yet as he stood there in my old red jersey and my army surplus fatigues I felt a kind of hatred for him and his need to disguise himself in my things.

  There was a pretty bad half-hour after that, when I was not in control of myself. I poured myself a drink, though I did not give him one—and he didn’t seem to mind. My whole wish was to throw things around, make a storm to dispel the stagnant heat, assert myself. Yet I found myself fastidiously tidying up, tight-lipped, not looking at him. He followed me helplessly around, at first retailing jokes from the television, dialogue from Star Trek, but then falling silent. He was confused, wanted to be ready to do what I wanted, but found he could only annoy me further. Then I hurled the stack of newspapers I was collecting across the floor and went for him—pulled the trousers down over his narrow hips without undoing them, somehow tackled him onto the carpet, and after a few seconds’ brutal fumbling fucked him cruelly. He let out little compacted shouts of pain, but I snarled at him to shut up and with fine submission he bit them back.

  Afterwards I left him groaning on the floor and went into the bathroom. I remember looking at myself, pink, excited, horrified, in the mirror.

  I took all my clothes off and after a few minutes went back into the sitting-room. I don’t know if it was just his confused readiness to take what I gave him, or if he really understood the absolute tenderness that I now felt for him as I picked him up and dumped him on the sofa; but he held me very tight as I lay down beside him. I was the only person he had; the very melodrama of the case had repelled me before, but for a while I allowed myself to accept it. I had been disgusted by his need for me, but now it moved me, and I burbled into his ear about how I loved him. ‘I love you too—darling,’ he said. It was a word that he could never have used before, and the tears poured down my face and smudged all over his, as we lay there and hugged, rocking from side to side.

  There were several occasions of this kind, when I was exposed by my own mindless randiness and helpless sentimentality. I made a point of going out to the baths each day, and while I was there, talking to friends, exercising, looking at other men, I could see with more detachment how these scenes weakened my authority. I was eight years older than Arthur, and our affair had started as a crazy fling with all the beauty for me of his youngness and blackness. Now it became a murky business, a coupling in which we both exploited each other, my role as protector mined by the morbid emotion of protectiveness. I saw him becoming more and more my slave and my toy, in a barely conscious abasement which excited me even as it pulled me down.

  The Corry featured in these days as a lucid interlude—with an institutional structure that time in the flat entirely lacked. I tended to stay late or go to a bar afterwards, not for sex, but for the company of strangers and for talk about sport or music. Walking back up the drive and feeling for my keys I even felt reluctance to plunge back into my private life, its unsterilised warmth in which sensation seemed both heightened and degraded. Yet going to the bathroom to hang up my wet towel and swimming trunks, I could be touched unexpectedly by the sight of Arthur’s few possessions, and his muddied cords, stiff where they had dried, tangled up with my silk shirt on the airing-cupboard floor, had me sighing and wincing at their pathos—even if, the next morning, I wished I had never seen them and that I had myself to myself. Perhaps we should have burnt them: the empty, crumpled tubes of his trousers, the blood-stained pink of the shirt, were evidence of a kind. We were such inexpert criminals.

  At the Corry, too, I could more easily examine the question, which we barely asked each other, and certainly never answered, of what we were going to do. The present impasse was unbearable, its resolution unimaginable. I insisted on Arthur telling me what had happened and why, but though we went through it several times a strange opacity came over him, the facts seemed not to tie up. I determined that his brother, like Arthur, had no work, and had got his girlfriend pregnant, that their father found out Arthur was gay, that there had been fights, that the brother, Harold, had a friend who was a drug-dealer, who had been inside more than once, and who had got Harold involved in the business, that the friend had stolen money Arthur was saving in his mattress in the room the brothers still had to share, that he had denied it, that there had been a fight, and that it had gone desperately wrong, that Harold, uncertain who to side with, had drawn a knife, Arthur had been wounded but had grabbed the weapon and, in one sudden, unintended, irrevocable moment, had slashed the friend’s throat—all this on a late rainy afternoon in a ruinous house in the East End, bombed out in the Blitz and still standing. This last detail, as if to give verisimilitude to an otherwise incoherent narrative, had been something he had learned at school. But the other details, produced with fluctuating expressions of sulkiness and hopelessness, a lurid compendium of miseries, were unstable from day to day. I felt I pressed him to the edge of his articulacy, and at the same time as I sought to protect him appeared to him dangerously inquisitive, threatening to topple the beliefs and superstitions which were the private structure of his life, and which had never before been exposed.

  The one thing I did not question was that he had killed this man, Tony; but to accept this was to admit that I knew nothing about how murder worked in the real world. No reports in the papers? No newsflash on the radio? Arthur knew about these things from experience: Tony was a wanted man, a criminal treated with violence by the police and revulsion by the older community. And then it seemed that violence against a black would rarely reach the national press, that radio silence could envelop the tragedies of the world from which he came. This silence also intensified his fear. It made the prospects now as uncertain to him as the background of the event was to me. Were the police looking for Arthur? How had Arthur’s parents reacted? Would they, while throwing him off, silently thwart the course of justice? Or would they, or Harold at least, independently seek him out to administer some justice of their own?

  It did not take me long to fear the consequences to myself of any of these possible events. If it had not been for our week of love I would perhaps have been frightened of Arthur too; but I was never even critical of his crime. A rare, unjustified trust kept me on his side. Even so, that part of the road, with its parked cars and spring trees, which could be seen from the windows took on an ominous feel. I scanned it as one looks at a photograph with a glass to make out half-decipherable details, but its mundanity was unaltered: it rained and dried, wind blew scraps of litter across, children walked dogs—dawdling, looking in at the houses, nosey for details, but only as people always, routinely are. I’m not sure what form I expected the threat to take; a police car actually stopping outside, a powerfully built black man darting up the drive? I had several dreams of siege, in which the house became a frail slatted box, shadowy and exquisite within, the walls all cracked and bleached louvres which fell to powder as one brushed against them. In one dream Arthur and I were there, and others, old school friends, a gaggle of black kids from the Shaft, my grandfather tearful and hopeless. We knew we had no chance of surviving the violence that surrounded us, closing in fast, and I was gripped by a nauseating terror. I woke up in the certain knowledge that I was about to die: the bedsprings were ticking from the sprinting vehemence of my heartbeat. I didn’t dare go back to sleep and after a while sat up and read, while Arthur slept deeply beside me. It took days to lose the mood of the dream, and
its power to prickle my scalp. The neighbourhood seemed eerily impregnated with it, and its passing made possible a new confidence, as if a sentence had been lifted.

  That Thursday I had my lunch with Lord Nantwich. I told Arthur I had a long-standing arrangement and he made a point of saying, ‘Okay, man—I mean you’ve got to lead your own life: I’ll be all right here.’ I realised I’d been apologising in a way and I was relieved by his practical reply.

  ‘You can always have some bread and cheese, and you can finish off that cold ham in the fridge. Anything you want me to get you?’

  ‘No, ta.’ He stood and smiled crookedly. I didn’t kiss him but just patted him on the bum as I slipped out.

  I’d put a suit on, smarter perhaps than I needed to be, but I enjoyed its protective conformity. I so rarely dressed up, and not having to wear a suit for work I seldom took any of mine off their hangers. My father had had me kitted out with morning suits and evening dress as I grew up and I had always relished the handsomeness of dark, formal clothes, wing-collars, waistcoats over braces: I looked quite the star of my sister’s wedding when the pictures appeared in Tatler. But I rarely wore this stuff. I had always been a bit of a peacock—or rather, whatever animal has brightly coloured legs, a flamingo perhaps.

  I was a bit late so I took a cab—which also solved the problem of finding Wicks’s. My father was a member of the Garrick and my grandfather a member of the Athenæum, but otherwise I was unsure about London Clubs. I could easily confuse the Reform and the Travellers’, and might well have wandered into three or four of them this morning before hitting on Wicks’s. Cabbies, through a mixture of practicality and snobbery, always know which of those neo-classical portals is which.

  ‘I’ve come to see Lord Nantwich,’ I told the porter in his dusty glass cabin. ‘William Beckwith.’ And I was told to make my way upstairs to the smoking-room. As I climbed the imposing stairway, lined with blackened, half-familiar portraits, a mild apprehensiveness mingled with a mood of irresponsibility in my heart. I had no idea what we might talk about.

  Entering the smoking-room I felt like an intruder in a film who has coshed an orderly and, disguised in his coat, enters a top-secret establishment, in this case a home for people kept artificially alive. Sunk in leather armchairs or taking almost imperceptible steps across the Turkey carpets, men of quite fantastic seniority were sleeping or preparing to sleep. The impression was of grey whiskers and very old-fashioned cuts of suiting, watchchains and heavy handmade shoes that would certainly see their wearers out. Some of those who were sitting down showed an inch or two of white calf between turn-up and suspenders. Fortunately, perhaps in recognition of the dangers involved, almost no one was actually smoking; nonetheless the room had a sour, masculine smell, qualified by the sweetness of the polish with which fire-irons, tables and trophies were brought to a blinding sheen.

  Lord Nantwich was sitting at the far end of the room, in front of one of the windows which looked down on the Club’s small and colourless garden. In this context, unlike that in which I had last seen him, he appeared almost middle-aged, robust and rosy-cheeked. I approached him self-consciously, although I reached his chair before his gaze, which wandered halfway between the cornice and a book he had open on his knee, distinguished me.

  ‘Aah …’ he said.

  ‘Charles?’

  ‘My dear fellow—William—goodness me, gracious me.’ He sat forwards and held out a hand—his left—but did not struggle to get up. We shared an unconventional handshake. ‘Turn that chip-chop round.’ I looked about uncertainly, but saw from his repeated gesture that he meant the chair behind him, which I trundled across so as to sit in quarter-profile to him, and then dropped into it, the elegance of the movement overwhelmed by the way the springing of the chair swallowed me up.

  ‘Comfy, aren’t they,’ he said with approval. ‘Jolly comfy, actually.’ I hauled myself forwards so as to perch more decorously and nervously on the front bar. ‘You must be dying for a tifty. Christ! It’s quarter to one.’ He raised his right arm and waved it about, and a white-jacketed steward with the air of a senile adolescent wheeled a trolley across. ‘More tifty for me, Percy; and for my guest—William, what’s it to be?’

  I felt some vague pressure on me to choose sherry, though I regretted the choice when I saw how astringently pale it was, and when Lord Nantwich’s tifty turned out to be a hefty tumbler of virtually neat gin. Percy poured the two drinks complacently, jotted the score on a little pad and wheeled away with a ‘Thank you, m’lord,’ in which the ‘thank you’ was clipped almost into inaudibility. I thought how much he must know about all these old codgers, and what cynical reflections must take place behind his impassive, possibly made-up features.

  ‘So, William, your very good health!’ Nantwich raised his glass almost to his mouth. ‘I say, I hope it wasn’t too horrible …?’

  ‘Your continuing good health,’ I replied, able only to ignore the question, which drew improper attention to what had passed between us; though I also felt a certain pride in what I had done, in a British manner wanting it to be commended, but in silence.

  ‘What a way to be introduced, my goodness! Of course I know nothing about you,’ he added, as if he might be exposing himself, though morally this time, to some degree of danger.

  ‘Well I know nothing about you,’ I hastened to reassure him.

  ‘You didn’t look me up in the book or anything?’

  ‘I don’t think I have a book to look you up in.’ My father, I thought, would have looked him up straight away; in Debrett, as in Who’s Who, the volumes in his study always fell open at the Beckwith page, as if he had been checking up credentials that he might forget, or that were too remarkable to be readily believed.

  ‘Well that’s splendid,’ Nantwich declared. ‘We’ve still got everything to find out. What utter fun. When you get to be an old wibbly-wobbly, as one, alas, now is, you don’t often get the chance to have a go at someone absolutely fresh!’ He took a mouthful of gin, confiding in the glass as he did so a remark I could barely make out as it drowned, but which sounded like ‘Quite a corker, too.’

  ‘It’s an agreeable room, this, isn’t it,’ he observed with one of his unannounced changes of tack.

  ‘Mmm,’ I just about agreed. ‘That’s an interesting picture.’ I tilted my head towards a large and, I hoped, mythological canvas, all but the foreground of which receded into the murk of two centuries or so of disregard. All that one saw were garland-clad, heavy, naked figures.

  ‘Yes. It’s a Poussin,’ said Nantwich decisively, turning his gaze away. It so evidently was not a Poussin that I wondered whether to take him up, whether he knew or cared what it was; if he were testing me or merely producing the philistine on-dit of the Club.

  ‘I think it could do with cleaning,’ I suggested. ‘It appears to be happening in the middle of the night, whatever it is.’

  ‘Ooh, you don’t want to go cleaning everything,’ Nantwich assured me. ‘Most pictures would be better if they were a damned sight dirtier.’ Mildly dismayed, I treated it as a joke. ‘Bah!’ he went on. ‘You get these fellows—women mostly—doing all the old pictures up. No knowing what they’ll find. And then they look like fakes afterwards.’

  I saw he was dribbling gin from his glass onto the carpet. He touched my outstretched hand. ‘Whoopsy!’ he said, as if I were being a nuisance. His gaze drifted into the middle distance and I too looked about, a little at a loss for talk.

  ‘Actually, I love art,’ he announced. ‘One day, if we get on quite well, I’ll show you my house. You’re keen on art, I should say?’

  ‘I do have quite a lot of time for it,’ I conceded; then, fearing he might think my tone was rude, I enlarged a figure of speech into an observation. ‘I mean, I don’t have a job, and I have plenty of time to go to galleries and look at pictures.’

  ‘You’re not married or anything are you?’

  ‘No, nothing,’ I assured him.

  ‘Too young,
I know. You’ve been up to university, of course?’

  ‘I was at Oxford, yes—at Corpus—reading History.’

  He drank this in with some more gin. ‘Do you like girls at all?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, I like them quite a lot really,’ I insisted.

  ‘There are chaps who don’t care for them, you know. Simply can’t abide them. Can’t stand the sight of them, their titties and their big sit-upons, even the smell of them.’ He looked down the room authoritatively to where Percy was dispensing Sanatogen to a striking likeness of the older Gladstone. ‘Andrews, for instance, cannot tolerate them.’

  It took me a moment to work this out. ‘In the gym?’ I said. ‘Yes, I’m not surprised—he seems very much a man’s man. You must know Andrews then,’ I lamely concluded. But I had lost my host already; I saw that he attacked questions with excitement but abandoned them within seconds. Or perhaps they abandoned him.

  ‘If you’ll give me a hand I do think we might go through now, so that we can get a good seat. They’re like hyenas here. They eat everything up if you’re not in there quick.’ I lifted one of his elbows as he pushed himself up with the other, his whole frame shaking with the effort. ‘Let’s have a look at the Library,’ he said, as if speaking to someone who was very deaf, winking at me in a musical-comedy way. ‘That’ll fool them,’ he explained, in a voice only slightly quieter. Then, returning the stare of a nonagenarian wild-dog in the chair nearest the door, ‘We have a history of self-abuse in duodecimo—but it’s probably out.’

  The dining-room was a far finer place. There was a long collegiate table in the middle, and smaller tables, set for two or four, allowed for more private talk around the walls. Contemporary copies of Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress hung in a double rank opposite the windows, and the famous full-length Batoni of Sir Humphry Clay, Roman statuary behind him and garlands of dead game at his feet, dominated the end wall. Beneath it the dining-room staff were arranging plates, tureens and cheeses at an immense funerary sideboard. The ceiling had an Adamish rosette at its centre, and from it hung a fairly elaborate crystal chandelier which had been conspicuously converted to electricity. Yet despite the tarnished brilliance of the room, some residual public-school thing, quintessential to Clubs, infected the atmosphere. The air retained a smell of cabbage and bad cooking that made me apprehensive about lunch.