The Swimming-Pool Library

by Alan Hollinghurst

  ‘Yes, isn’t he a scream.’ James had on his panama hat, was quite drunk and had been caught at an unflattering angle (one I had never seen him from in real life), so that he looked lecherously seedy.

  ‘And is that Robert Carson um Smith?’

  ‘Smith-Carson, actually, but jolly good all the same.’

  ‘Was he a homosexual?’

  ‘Certainly was.’

  ‘I don’t like him.’

  ‘No, he wasn’t very nice really. Some people liked him, though. He was great friends with James, you know.’

  ‘Is James a homosexual, too?’

  ‘You know perfectly well he is.’

  ‘Yes, I thought he was, but Mummy said you mustn’t say people were.’

  ‘You say what you like, sweetheart; as long as it’s true, of course.’

  ‘Of course. Is he a homosexual as well?’ he chimed on, pointing to the remaining person in the picture, the blazered, boatered man-mountain, Ashley Child, a wealthy American Rhodes scholar whose birthday, as far as I could remember, we had been celebrating.

  ‘A bit hard to say, I’m afraid. I should think so, though.’

  ‘I mean,’ Rupert looked up at me cogitatively, ‘almost everyone is homosexual, aren’t they? Boys, I mean.’

  ‘I sometimes think so,’ I hedged.

  ‘Is Grandpa one?’

  ‘Good heavens no,’ I protested.

  ‘Am I one?’ Rupert asked intently.

  ‘It’s a bit early to say yet, old fellow. But you could be, you know.’

  ‘Goody!’ he squealed, banging his heels against the front of the sofa again. ‘Then I can come and live with you.’

  ‘Would you like that?’ I asked, my avuncular rather than my homosexual feelings deeply gratified by this. And really Rupert’s cult of the gay, his innocent, optimistic absorption in the subject, delighted me even while its origin and purpose were obscure.

  I was saved from the sexual analysis of the next set of pictures, the Oscar Wilde Society Ball, by the doorbell ringing. (The dressnote that year had been ‘Slave Trade’, and the spectacle of predominantly straight boys camping it up to the eyeballs would have been confusing to the child’s budding sense of role-play.)

  It was not Philippa but Gavin who had come. ‘Sorry about this, Will,’ he said. ‘Has he been a frightful bother?’

  ‘Not a bit, Gavin. Come in. We were just having a talk about homosexuality.’

  ‘He is frightfully interested in that at the moment, although he can’t have the least idea of what it is—can he? It must be the effect of his overbearing and possessive mum. Odd what little children get up to; I was a committed transvestite at his age. But that seemed to get it out of the system,’ he added hastily.

  ‘I’m surprised the overbearing mum let you come to collect him,’ I admitted.

  ‘Got a bit of a head,’ said Gavin, in a way that suggested this was a known euphemism.

  The reunion with his son was a low-key affair, conducted by both as if nothing had happened, while Gavin and I carried on a pleasant conversation over the child’s head. ‘At least this little escapade has saved us from dinner at the Salmons,’ he conceded. ‘That man is the most insufferable little twerp. I’d better just give Philly a call, if I may.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ The phone was in the bedroom. ‘But you will be back home in no time at all.’ I tried to disguise my sudden swerve of attitude. ‘I mean, if you really want to, then do …’

  ‘Thanks. Where is the phone?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll show you.’ I felt extremely anxious, and as Gavin followed me across the hall, I turned and addressed him outside the bedroom door in an unnaturally carrying tone: ‘I suppose you want to confirm to the child’s mother that I have been a responsible uncle and not encouraged him in hard drugs or any other dangerous abuse.’

  Gavin smiled at me politely, sensing he was missing a joke. ‘Partly that, but also I’m going to have a little talk with our runaway before he goes home to be eaten alive.’

  ‘Yes, do save him from all that,’ I gabbled. ‘So you’re ringing to say you’ll not be coming straight home.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  I paused, considering how I could possibly disallow this. ‘Right,’ I said with a nod, opening the door resolutely and going into the room. To take another person in there was in itself disquieting; it made me conscious of how unaired it was, and of the fetor of socks and semen which would never have been allowed to accumulate in the Croft-Parkers’ dustless Regency sleeping quarters. Dirty clothes amassed on chairs and on the surrounding floor. The wardrobe doors were open.

  This was the most alarming thing to my eye, as I had imagined it as the only place in which Arthur could reasonably have hidden. As I went into the room I was ready, if need be, to find him merely sitting there, or standing around, waiting. Though a surprise, it would not have seemed so remarkable; only my failure to warn Gavin would have been thought odd. But to warn him would have been a treacherous concession. I showed Gavin the phone, on the bedside table. The curtains were closed, as always, but I had put on the overhead light, and as the duvet was thrown into a heap at the foot of the bed, the rumpled green sheets and pillows showed their shamingly stained and fucked-over countenance; Gavin remained standing as he phoned.

  I wandered back into the hall, where Rupert was standing, an expression of the utmost apprehension on his face. ‘Isn’t that boy …’ he mouthed, his eyebrows raised and then biting his lower lip, which I laid my finger across in a gesture of silence. The bed came down to within an inch or two of the floor. He must be behind the curtains.

  ‘Thanks, Will,’ said Gavin as he emerged, with a slightly amazed look.

  ‘Everything OK?’ I enquired, with extreme casualness.

  ‘We’ll be off now, young feller.’

  I saw them to the door of the flat. ‘Thanks, Will,’ said Gavin again. ‘See you soon. You must come round or something …’ He laid a hand fraternally on my shoulder.

  ‘Bye, Roops,’ I said, expecting my normal kiss but getting instead a handshake, which, nevertheless, I recognised as a sign of greater intimacy.

  Farce is always more entertaining to watch than to enact, and I was relieved to hear the house door slam and a car start. I turned back to the bedroom, crossing to the window as I said, ‘It’s all right, they’ve gone.’ But when I tweaked open the curtains, it was my own face, with a silly hide-and-seek smirk on it, that I saw reflected in the window. ‘Funny,’ I said aloud. There was a rustle behind me, and I swung round to see the flung-back duvet heave, lurch upwards, and after a further convulsion, bring forth Arthur. He had been curled up there like a young stowaway, his flexible body folded so as to be almost imperceptible. He hammed up his recovery rather, flustered at the alarm, boastful of his ingenuity. ‘Man, you didn’t know where I bloody was!’ He fell back giggling, then clutched his head, still leaden from his hangover.

  I sat by him on the bed and drummed my fingers on his belly. ‘I’m surprised you let him in,’ I said, ‘after all the never going out.’

  ‘He just kept ringing the bell, man. I stuck me head out the lav window, and there was this little nipper. He must a rung the bell ten times, fifteen times. So I thought, no ’arm in a little kid. So I went down. Very sure of ’imself, he was, come up ’ere, asked me who I was and that. Just a friend of Will’s, I said.’ He looked up into my eyes. ‘Anyway you come back after a bit.’

  ‘How’s your face feeling?’ I asked. ‘James says he’ll come tomorrow and take the stitches out—just the ends, apparently, and the rest all dissolves.’

  ‘Not too bad.’

  I ran my hands over his soft half-open mauve lips. His tongue slid up and licked my fingers. I had certainly never fallen in love more inconveniently, and more and more I wanted it to end. Even when he spoke, in his basic, unimaginative way, I felt almost sick with desire and compassion for him. Indeed, the fact that he had not mastered speech, that he laboured towards saying the simplest things
, that his vocal expressions were prompted only by the strength of his feelings, unlike the camp, exploitative, ironical control of my own speech, made me want him more.

  Loving him was all interpretation, creative in its way. We barely used language at all to communicate: he sulked and thought I was putting him down if I made complicated remarks, and sometimes I felt numb at the compromise and self-suppression I submitted to. Yet beyond that it was all guesswork; we were thinking for two. The darkened air of the flat was full of the hints we made. The stupidity and the resentment were dreadful at times. But then in sex he lost his awkwardness. He showed his capacity to change as I rambled over him now with my fingertips and watched him glow and gulp with desire; his clothes seemed to shrivel off him and he lay there making his naked claim for the only certainty in his life. It wasn’t something learnt, I suspected, from the guys before me who’d picked him up and fucked him and fucked him around. It was a kind of gift for giving, and while he did whatever I wanted it emerged as the most important thing there was for him. It was all the harder, then, when the resentment returned and I longed for him to go.

  After James had taken out Arthur’s stitches we took the Tube to the Corry together, leaving Arthur to do—whatever he did when I wasn’t there.

  ‘He watches telly most of the time, I think,’ I said.

  ‘Does he read or anything?’ James wanted to know.

  ‘He once asked me to buy him some War Picture Library comics, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it in our local newsagents.’

  ‘I can see it would sort ill with Apollo, Tatler and GQ—but I expect newsagents get used to the strangest combinations of taste. They have to look on patiently while kids thumb through Men Only and Penthouse and end up buying the Beano and the Bucks Fizz fan mag. I saw someone the other day buy the Spanking Times and the Amateur Yachtsman, for instance …’

  ‘That’s not so odd—and isn’t a spanker some sort of rope or something?’

  ‘A sail, I believe—as in the limerick which ends “haul up the top sheet and spanker”.’

  The train moved a few yards out of Queensway station and then stopped abruptly. ‘Could you ever get into spanking?’ James asked in the selfconscious silence that ensued. I was obliged to live up to it.

  ‘Not in a serious way. I put our young friend over my knee from time to time, but …’ In fact, drunk one night and recalling an evening when I had been picked up by a Polish workman who got me to whip his ass with his thick leather belt, I had made Arthur half kneel, half lie over the corner of the bed and given him several strokes of my old webbing corps-belt from school. I knew he would have let me go on, but excited though I was I dropped it.

  ‘I just can’t see the point of it,’ complained James. ‘Does Arthur actually like it?’

  ‘I think he does rather. I mean it gives him a hard-on, and all that.’ The man beyond James looked up in a bothered way as the train started again. With James I often reverted to the flaunted deviancy we practised at Oxford, queening along the Cornmarket among the common people (as we more or less ironically called them), passing archly audible comments on boys from the town who took our fancy: ‘Quite go for that’, ‘Don’t think much of yours, dear’, ‘Get the buns on that’. James had worked up a cult of an overweight black youth, with a central gold tooth and a monstrous, lolling member.

  ‘What’s he really like?’ he asked, as we hammered into Lancaster Gate and the racket of the train spaced out and slowed. ‘I mean, is he a nice sort of person?’

  ‘He is, actually, very nice, I think.’ I felt entirely penned in by not being able to speak of all the things that made the set-up so strange, and which, depriving Arthur of initiative, made him a non-social being. ‘Very nice in bed, certainly.’

  James and I both saw how crass this comment was. ‘But what happens when you go out? I assume you’ve tired of each other’s company sufficiently to go to the pub or the flicks or whatever.’

  I longed to tell him, whom I could completely trust; but my trust to Arthur, enforced by the whole way I was living my life, had become an unbreakable code to me, that is to say a principle of honour as well as an enigma. I merely shrugged.

  ‘And that fight, for God’s sake.’

  I shrugged again. Could he really believe the fight story? ‘It’s all pretty much a mystery to you, isn’t it?’ I said, both proud and pained at the unplanned and inexplicable way things stood. There was nothing I could adduce in evidence of Arthur’s charm. ‘Sometimes I just put my arms round his shoulder and burst into tears.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ was James’s comment.

  At the Corry the mood was perverse. A few bull-necked mutants were hogging the weights, the room was crowded, and crossness was given voice to. Bradley was training for a contest the following week, and did so many presses that he lost count and, red-faced and shuddering, insisted on starting again. Others, who worked out for more trivial reasons, forced to stand around, lapsed from their normally passing and formal chat into extended conversations, like housewives with shopping waiting for a bus.

  ‘I know—well, that’s what she said.’

  ‘But have you seen her since?’

  ‘Only briefly, and then I couldn’t say anything, because of course you-know-who was in attendance.’

  ‘I really like her actually; from what I’ve seen of her, that is.’

  It was the typical transsexual talk of the place, which had been confusing to me at first and which had thrown poor James into deep dejection when he innocently overheard a boy he had a crush on talking of his girlfriend. It was all a game, any man in the least attractive being dubbed a ‘she’ and only males too dire for such a conceit being left an unadorned ‘he’ or, occasionally, sinisterly, ‘mister’—as in the poisonous declaration ‘I trust you won’t be seeing Mister Elizabeth Arden again.’

  ‘You know that new girl behind the bar?’ one square-jawed athlete enquired of his bearded companion.

  ‘What, the blonde, you mean—no, she’s been there a while.’

  ‘No, not her, no, the dark one with big tits.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’ve seen her. Nice, is she?’

  It was conversation thrown out with a complex bravado, its artifice defiant as it was transparent. I half listened to it as I waited, and looked around at the dozens of bodies, squatting, lying, straining, muscles sliding to the surface in thick-veined upper arms, shoulders bending and pumping, the sturdiness of legs under pressure, the dark stains on singlets that adhered to the sweating channel of the back, the barely perceptible swing of cocks and balls in shorts and track-suits, with, permeating it all, the clank and thud of weights and the rank underarm essence of effort.

  When I finally got a chance at the bench I realised I felt strangely weary, and going in a rotation with three other guys I slightly knew, cut my ration each time from ten to eight lifts. After a couple of turns I saw that Bill was watching me. ‘I only made that eight, Will,’ he said, with a worried look.

  ‘Hi, Bill. Yes, I’m doing them in eights now.’

  I watched him thinking and deciding not to censure what he obviously saw as an absurd infringement of tradition. ‘Well, everything going okay, Will? Too many people here, I think. Too many people. It’s getting ridiculous. Never used to be like this.’ I agreed that it was inconvenient, and suggested that the club was hungry for the money more membership must bring. ‘Very true, Will. But the interests of the members there are already have to be considered. It’s supposed to be democratically run, you know, this place.’ He looked around mournfully. ‘Seen young Phil lately?’ he asked with slight bashfulness.

  I hadn’t seen him here the previous evening, and I was left uncertain if it had been him in the cinema. ‘I haven’t, actually. Has he been neglecting his training?’

  ‘He may have been coming in earlier,’ Bill assured himself. ‘There may be some other gym he goes to, too. I don’t know. He needs to keep in trim, though. Very nice little body, that.’

>   ‘Not so little,’ I suggested, remembering the beautiful hard heaviness in the dark. ‘What does he do, anyway?’

  ‘He works in a hotel actually,’ Bill declared, proud to know this fact, which might be taken as the token of a fuller intimacy than was, evidently, the case.

  ‘How extraordinary,’ I said, my image of Phil as a military figure distorted by this notion, but settling into a new image of him, still in uniform however, marching along an upstairs corridor with a tray of coffee and sandwiches held at shoulder height. ‘Which one, do you know?’

  ‘Not sure about that, Will,’ Bill admitted. ‘One of the big famous ones, I think.’

  James had been swimming diligently while I was in the weights room and when I went down to the pool he was hanging by his elbows in the deep end, in spasmodic conversation with a person I hadn’t seen before. By a silly convention I always affected a censorious attitude towards men he might actually be getting somewhere with. I stopped by him at the end of my first length, pretended to adjust the strap of my goggles, and raising my eyebrows (an effort doubtless diminished by the goggles themselves) declared, ‘I don’t think much of yours, dear,’ before plunging on.

  Up in the showers afterwards he was standing beside the same person, and the reason for it became clearer. The boy, very brown all over, except for a pink triangle above the crack of his ass, was thin and wiry, though not quite unattractively so, his colour glamorising (as it can do a nondescript Italian or Arab) what would have been a meagre body if pale. There was something strained about him, particularly his gaunt, narrow head, hollow-cheeked and with short dark curls. His sunken eyes were a cold blue, made the more striking by his tan; when he turned round I saw that he had shaved off all his pubic hair, which added a kinky and intenser nakedness to his salient, sideways-curving, pink-headed and very large cock.

  The conversation was not fluent. The youth would pass some bland comment, and James would try to reply with adequate enthusiasm or insouciance. ‘See you,’ said the youth, abruptly turning off his shower and going off to dry. ‘Yes, see you,’ said James, managing to make it seem a careless possibility, though the smile faded off his face in a way that showed it was not spontaneous. He had effectively been put down, as it is impossible to go padding out after someone in simulated sportsman-like ease when they have just said goodbye to you. I crossed over and took my place beside James.