The Swimming-Pool Library

by Alan Hollinghurst

  This was all very good and with my hangover I felt it with electric intensity. But I was aware of his reluctance, and let him stop. He was inexpert, and though he was excited, needed help. We sat back for a while, my hand all the time on his shoulder. I loved the nerve with which I’d done all this, and like most random sex it gave me the feeling I could achieve anything I wanted if I were only determined enough. There was now a fairly complicated set-up on screen, with all six boys doing something interesting, and one of them I realised was Kip Parker, a famous tousle-headed blond teen star. I ran my hand between my new friend’s legs and felt his cock kicking against the tightish cotton of his slacks. He helped me take it out, a short, punchy little number, which I went down on and polished off almost at once. God, he must have been ready. After a shocked recuperation he felt for his bag and went out without a word.

  I’d had a growing suspicion throughout this sordid but charming little episode, which rose to a near certainty as he opened the door and was caught in a slightly brighter light, that the boy was Phil from the Corry. He had smelt of sweat rather than talcum powder and there was a light stubble on his jaw, so I concluded that if it were Phil he was on his way to rather than from the Club, as I knew he was fastidiously clean, and that he always shaved in the evening before having his shower. I was tempted to follow him at once, to make sure, but I realised it would be easy enough to tell from seeing him later; and besides, a very well-hung kid, who’d already been showing an interest in our activities, moved in to occupy the boy’s former seat, and brought me off epically during the next film, an unthinkably tawdry picture which all took place in a kitchen.

  On the train home I carried on reading Valmouth. It was an old grey and white Penguin Classic that James had lent me, the pages stiff and foxed, with a faint smell of lost time. Wet-bottomed wine glasses had left mauve rings over the sketch of the author by Augustus John and the price, 3/6, which appeared in a red square on the cover. Nonetheless, I was enjoined to take especial care of the book, which also contained Prancing Nigger and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli. James had a mania for Firbank, and it was only out of his love for me that he had let me take away this apparently undistinguished old paperback, which bore on its flyleaf the absurd signature ‘O. de V. Green’. James held the average Firbank-lover in contempt, and professed a very serious attitude towards his favourite writer. I had long deferred reading him in the childishly stubborn way that one resists all keen and repeated recommendations, and had imagined him until now to be a supremely frivolous and silly author. I was surprised to find how difficult, witty and relentless he was. The characters were flighty and extravagant in the extreme, but the novel itself was evidently as tough as nails.

  I knew I would not begin to grasp it fully until a second or third reading, but what was clear so far was that the inhabitants of the balmy resort of Valmouth found the climate so kind that they lived to an immense age. Lady Parvula de Panzoust (a name I knew already from James’s reapplication of it to a member of the Corry) was hoping to establish some rapport with the virile young David Tooke, a farm boy, and was seeking the help of Mrs Yajñavalkya, a black masseuse, to set up a meeting. ‘He’s awfully choice,’ Mrs Yaj assured the centenarian grande dame. Much of the talk was a kind of highly inflected nonsense, but it gave the unnerving impression that on deeper acquaintance it would all turn out to be packed with fleeting and covert meaning. Mrs Yaj herself spoke in a wonderful black pidgin, prinked out with more exotic turns of phrase. ‘O Allah la Ilaha!’ she reassured the anxious Lady Parvula. ‘Shall I tell you vot de Yajñavalkya device is? Vot it has been dis thousand and thousand ob year? It is bjopti. Bjopti! And vot does bjopti mean? It means discretion. S-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-sh!’ It was such a long ‘Sh!’ that I found myself quietly vocalising it to see what its effect would be.

  ‘Quiet, Damian,’ the woman opposite me said to her little boy. ‘Gentleman’s trying to read.’

  It was about nine when I reached home. The tall uncurtained window at the turn of the stairs still let in just enough of the phosphorescent late dusk to make it unnecessary to turn on a light. I enjoyed a proprietorial secrecy as I walked slowly and silently up, as well as the frisson of bleakness that comes from being in a deserted place as darkness gathers. There was something nostalgic in such spring nights, recalling the dreamy abstraction of punting in the dark, and the sweet tiredness afterwards, returning to rooms with all their windows open, still warm under the eaves.

  The door of the flat was slightly ajar, which was unusual. I was inclined to keep it shut as I was (or had been) often the only inhabitant of the house, the businessman in the main floors below being frequently abroad. And I had occasionally witnessed Arthur pushing it to, or checking as he passed through the hall that it was closed. My heart sank as I nudged it open and heard Arthur’s voice, not addressing me—he could not possibly have known I was there—but talking quietly to somebody else. The door of the sitting-room, which was open, hid whatever was going on; the light from that room fell across the further side of the hall.

  My first assumption was that he was on the telephone, which would have been reasonable enough except that he had said he hated the phone. For a sickening moment I felt that I was being somehow betrayed, and that when I went out he rang people up and carried on some other existence. A plan was afoot of which I was the dupe; he had not killed anybody at all … Then I heard another voice, just odd syllables, high—it sounded like a young girl. I heard Arthur say ‘Yeah, well I expect he’ll be back here soon.’ I made a noise and went into the room.

  ‘Will, thank God,’ Arthur said, half rising from the sofa, but encumbered by the heavy breadth of my photograph album, which lay open across his lap and across that of a small boy sitting beside him and leaning over it as if it were a table. It was my nephew Rupert.

  Rupert had had longer than me to work out what to say. Even so, he was clearly unsure of the effect he would have. First of all he wanted it to be a lovely surprise: he stared up at me, mouth slightly open, in a spell of silence, while Arthur, too, looked very uncertain. Again I found myself suddenly responsible for people.

  ‘This is an unexpected pleasure, Roops,’ I said. ‘Have you been showing Arthur the pictures?’ I thought something might be seriously wrong.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, a little shamefaced. ‘I’ve decided to run away.’

  ‘That’s jolly exciting,’ I said, going over to the sofa, and lifting up the photograph album. ‘Have you told Mummy where you’ve gone?’ I held the heavy, embossed leather book in my arms, and looked down at him. Arthur caught my eye, frowned and expelled a little puff of air. ‘Blimy, Will,’ he said confidentially.

  Rupert was then six years old. From his father he had inherited an intense, practical intelligence, and from his mother, my sister, vanity, self-possession, and the pink and gold Beckwith colouring that Ronald Staines had so admired in me. I had always liked Gavin, a busy, abstracted man, whose mind, even at a dinner party, was still absorbed in the details of Romano-British archaeology, which was his passion and career, and who would have had nothing to do with the way his son now appeared, in knickerbockers and an embroidered jerkin, with a Millais-esque lather of curls, as if about to go bowling a hoop in Kensington Gardens. Philippa had a picturesque and romantic attitude to her children (there was also a little girl, Polly, aged three), and Gavin allowed her a free hand, concentrating his affection for them in sudden bursts of generosity, unannounced treats and impulsive outings which disrupted the life of the picture-book nursery at Ladbroke Grove, and were rightly popular.

  ‘I left a note,’ Rupert explained, standing up and beginning to walk around the room. ‘I told Mummy not to worry. I’m sure she’ll see that it’s all for the best.’

  ‘I don’t know, old chap,’ I demurred. ‘I mean, Mummy’s jolly sensible, but it is quite late, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she were getting a bit worried about you. Did you tell her where you were going?�
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  ‘No, of course not. It was a secret. I didn’t even tell Polly. It had to be very very carefully planned.’ He picked up a Harrods carrier-bag. ‘I’ve brought some food,’ he said, tipping out on to the sofa a couple of apples, a pack of six Penguin biscuits and a roughly sawn-off chuck of cold, cooked pork. ‘And I’ve got a map.’ From inside his jerkin he tugged out an A-Z, on the shiny cover of which he had written ‘Rupert Croft-Parker’ with a blue biro in heavy round writing.

  I went into the bedroom and rang Philippa. A maid, Spanish by the sound of her, answered the phone; they had a fast turnover of staff, and if I had been Philippa I would have been led by now to ponder why. Almost immediately she came through from another extension.

  ‘Hello, who is this?’

  ‘Philippa, it’s me, I’ve got Roops here.’

  ‘Will, what the hell do you think you’re playing at? Can’t you imagine how worried I’ve been?’

  ‘I thought you would be—that’s really why I’m phoning …’

  ‘Is he all right? What’s been going on?’

  ‘I gather he ran away. Didn’t you see his message?’

  ‘Of course not, Will, don’t be so bloody silly. He doesn’t leave messages. He’s six years old.’

  ‘I’m sure I left messages when I was six and I wasn’t nearly so clever as Rupert.’

  ‘Will, we are talking about my baby.’ (I suppressed recall of the song of that name by the Four Tops.) ‘Look, I’m coming round straight away.’

  ‘OK. Or give it a minute or two. We haven’t really had a chance for a little chat yet.’ I was aware that Rupert had entered the room.

  ‘Are you talking to Mummy?’ he said, with a solemn look on his face. I nodded as I carried on listening to Philippa, and winked at him. I sat on the edge of the bed and he came and leant beside me and slipped his arm around my back.

  ‘You can have a little chat with him any time you like,’ his mother asserted. ‘It’s gone nine o’clock—it’s way past his bedtime. We were supposed to be going to the Salmons for supper—I had to ring and say there was this crisis, we couldn’t come. It’s just ruined everything.’

  ‘I’ll bring him over if you like,’ I offered, the problem of Arthur and visitors suddenly surfacing in my mind.

  ‘No, that would take far too long. I’ll come in the car.’ She put down the receiver as I was about to make another suggestion.

  ‘Is Mummy coming round here?’ asked Rupert, his expression an intriguing transition between petulance and relief.

  ‘She’ll be round in a minute,’ I confirmed. And it would not be very much more than that. I walked abstractedly towards the door. He trotted round, looking up at me.

  ‘Was she frightfully cross?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m afraid she was a bit, old chap.’ I made a plan. ‘Look, you can keep a secret, can’t you?’

  ‘Of course I can,’ he said, assuming a very responsible air.

  ‘Well, look. What time was it when you left home?’

  ‘About six o’clock.’

  ‘And what did you do then?’

  ‘First of all I went for a walk. A really long walk, actually, up that very steep path, you know—where the homosexuals go.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ I muttered.

  ‘And then down to the bottom where we went roller-skating that time. And then all the way round to the top again. And then’ (he raised his arm in the air to designate the main thrust of his campaign) ‘all the way down here. I rang the bell for quite some time, but I could see there was a light on, and at last that African boy came down.’

  ‘Did you tell him who you were?’

  ‘Naturally. I told him I had to come in and wait for you.’

  ‘Well the thing is, love, that that African chap, wants us to keep it a secret that he’s here. So what we’re going to do is hide him away when Mummy comes round, and pretend we’ve never seen him. All right?’

  ‘Quite all right by me,’ Rupert said. ‘Has he done something wrong, then?’

  ‘No, no,’ I laughed naturally. ‘But he doesn’t want his mother to know he’s here—just like you, really. So if we don’t tell anybody at all, then she’ll never find out.’

  ‘Good,’ said Rupert. He was clearly dissatisfied.

  We went into the sitting-room. ‘I think it would be better if you stayed in the bedroom, darling,’ I said to Arthur. ‘This child’s mother is coming round. We’ve agreed to keep it all a secret.’ He left the room directly, and I heard him shut the bedroom door. ‘I expect Mummy will be here any moment,’ I said.

  My nephew was determined and casual. ‘Can we go on looking at the pictures?’ he asked.

  ‘All right,’ I agreed. Then another thought struck me. ‘How long were you here before I arrived?’

  ‘I was here for about twenty minutes—before you arrived.’

  ‘Perhaps best to pretend to Mummy that I found you on the doorstep. Otherwise she’ll wonder how you got in—or why I didn’t ring her sooner.’

  He looked at his large, rather adult watch. ‘Yes, that’s fine,’ he said. We sat down side by side, and I lifted the album on to my knee. It was one of a set in which my grandfather had had all his loose and various collection of snaps, taken over a long life, mounted. He had had more volumes bound than he needed and gave one to me. It had the generous proportions of an Edwardian album, many, many broad dark grey pages, tied in with thick silk cords which knotted at the edge outside, the whole protected with weighty boards covered with green leather, tooled with flowers around the border, and with a pompous but impressive ‘B’ beneath a coronet in the centre.

  ‘How far did you get?’ I asked, offering to open it halfway through.

  ‘Let’s start again,’ Rupert urged. We’d once spent an hour looking through this album together, and I had had the impression that he was committing it to memory, working out the connections. It was a sort of book of life to him, and I was the authoritative expounder of its text.

  The early part was fairly random, this scion of the family photograph collection being merely the duplicates and duds. There was me with a cap and a brace on my teeth, at my tother; there were Philippa and I in our bathing costumes in Brittany (a windy day by the look of it); me in my shorts in the garden at Marden, my grandfather and my mother in deckchairs behind, looking cross. ‘There’s Great Grandpa, look: I don’t think he was in a very good mood, do you?’ Rupert giggled, and banged his heels against the front of the sofa. ‘Then it’s Winchester.’

  ‘Hooray!’ cried Rupert, who, though an independent child, was still strongly patriotic about such things as the school from which, one day, he would doubtless run away.

  ‘Now can you find me in this one?’ I asked. It was my first-year College photograph. I looked along the rows so as not to give him any clues; but I need not have troubled. It was with only a slight diffidence that he brought his finger down on me, standing in the middle of the back row. I looked utterly sweet, short-haired, and rather sad, giving the impression that my mind was on higher things. That this was not the case was made clear by the next photograph, of the swimming team. It was posed by the pool, where the springboard was anchored to the concrete; three boys stood on its landward end so as to make a two-tiered composition. The Matheson Cup, the perfectly hideous schools trophy which we had won that year, was held aloft by Torriano, the boy in the centre of the back row. But the most noticeable thing about the picture was what by then could fairly have been called my manhood. I had on some very sexy white trunks with a red stripe down the side; and I remember how, when the picture went up on school NoBos, with a list for people to sign who wanted a copy (normally not even all the members of the team in question), there was an unprecedented demand, and the trunks themselves, of which I was crazily fond, disappeared from the drying-room overnight and I never saw them again. On my face, rounder and saucier then, there was an expression of almost disturbing complicity.

  Rupert’s finger came down, hesitatingly though, on
me. ‘That’s you,’ he said. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘That’s Eccles,’ I said reflectively, haunted for a second by the already period-looking photograph, in which the faces took on a greater clarity as time went by. The boy’s stocky body and outward-bulging thighs were untypical build for a swimmer, but he used to move with a bucking, concentrated energy. With his sleek black hair, long pointed nose and a smile showing his small, square teeth, he looked impishly young and, with his head tilted slightly to one side, would give, for as long as the picture survived, an impression of unqualified charm.

  ‘Is he the one that changed his name?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Why did he?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t so much him as his father, I suppose, or his grandfather even. He was Jewish, and before the war Jewish people changed their names so that people wouldn’t know. His real name was Ecklendorff.’

  ‘Why didn’t they want people to know what their name was?’

  ‘It’s a long story, old boy. I’ll tell you another time.’

  ‘Yes,’ he frowned, turning the page. It was Oxford now—the matriculation photograph, posed in the stony front quad at Corpus, the pelican on top of the sundial appearing to sit on the head of the lanky, begowned chemist at the centre of the back row. I looked rather anonymous in it and once Rupert had identified me we moved to some colour snaps of a summer picnic at Wytham. There I sat, cross-legged on a rug, shirtless, brown, blue-eyed—perhaps the most beautiful I had ever been or ever would be. ‘That’s you,’ cried Rupert, splodging his forefinger down on my face as if recording his fingerprints for the police. ‘And that’s James! Isn’t he funny?’