The Swimming-Pool Library

by Alan Hollinghurst

  We did a lot more of this, and a lot more reading, on his first weekend off, when he came to Holland Park. Its ‘country-house’ smell and the established presence of my things subdued him rather. He gazed abashed at my Whitehaven picture and, with an access of solemnity, embarked on a reading of Tom Jones. I was glad of his self-reliance; and companionable hours passed with him, sprawled in an armchair with his book, and me behind him, at my writing-table, going through Charles’s papers and looking up now and again with a sudden rush of the blood at his powerful figure and sober head, his face, full of thoughts, turned from me in a lost profile.

  The quiet, slightly contrived domestic mood made me think of Arthur again, and I couldn’t help being grateful for the open windows, the normality, the cool of the new set-up. Not that there weren’t things I missed. It was fine, making love to Phil, and I was obsessed with his body. But he lacked the illiterate, curling readiness of Arthur, his instinct for sex. Both of them were teenagers over whom I had many advantages; both of them watched me for the moves I would make. But where with Arthur, when I did move, there was an immediate transport, a falling-open of the mouth, a mood of necessity that was close to possession, with Phil there was a more selfconscious giving, callow at times and imitative. When I was rough with him it was to break through all that.

  Phil’s affection expressed itself too in a kind of wrestling, which was sweatily physical but which wasn’t quite sex. There were no rules and it generally involved him in his pants and me in nothing at all, clinching wildly on the sofa or wherever we happened to be, tumbling on to the floor, straining, twisting and squeezing at each other but showing enough decorum not to knock things over. I suppose all this assertion of muscle was his familiar shyness, and silly as it was it had something authentic of him in it, which was beautifully exposed over those few seconds when our eyes at last held each other’s, he fell into a silent slackness of submission and the ragging and bragging dissolved into tenderness and release.

  I had had a brief talk with Bill after the boxing. The contest itself went on and on and through much of it I sat around in the changing-room while Bill exhorted or solaced his team and a succession of teenaged boys got dressed in front of me. Sometimes fathers, who fancied themselves as boxing pundits, came in with brothers or friends, and lectured, berated or praised their bruised progeny. Bill’s behaviour with the fathers was torn: longing to be smoothly accepted as a mentor and character, he also resented the parental intrusions into the bond of trainer and pupil. Then Limehouse lost the cup, and Alastair was not the man of the match (to whom a specially tinny trophy, redolent of prep-school sports, was presented). In an overlong speech, the sadistic-looking head of the judges, a thin-lipped man with oiled, old-fashioned hair, said how close it had been, and praised the generosity of Lord Nantwich, ‘who not only gave this magnificent cup, but ’elped the Boys’ Club movement in so many and varied ways.’ It was regretted he was not well enough to be there himself. The audience showed appreciation in a hearty fashion, and the Cup, a kind of baroque tureen with handles in the form of upward-reaching youths, was presented amid generous applause to the ferocious, broken-nosed little tyke who captained the St Albans gang. Bill could not contain the mood of futility which overcame him. I imagined he would be taken for a consolatory drink by friends, fellow trainers, even, illicitly, the older of the boys. But they were all frightfully busy. The place drained and grew quiet.

  I took him for a beer at the nearest pub, a cavernous saloon where a few men gazed stunned at a television above the bar.

  ‘Never mind, Bill,’ I said, bringing back two pints to a corner table he had chosen.

  ‘Oh, thanks, Will. Thanks a lot. Cheers.’ He picked up the glass and sucked off the frothy head of the beer—then set it aside with an apprehensive look. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve had one of those,’ he said.

  ‘Really? Would you like something different?’

  He was shocked at having seemed ungrateful. ‘No, no, no. It’s great. It’s just I don’t drink much these days. Used to, though; if you know what I mean.’ There were more sadnesses in him this evening than I’d known about before. He took a tentative sip. ‘Still, even I need cheering up sometimes,’ he said, as though he were widely known as a figure of high spirits.

  ‘There’s always another time,’ I condoled feebly. ‘The sport’s the thing.’ He shook his head in self-denying acceptance of what I said. ‘To tell you the truth, I was quite surprised to find you here. I didn’t realise that was your name. I had this idea you were called … Hawkins,’ I added, laughing at my own absurdity.

  Bill looked at me earnestly. ‘I can explain that,’ he said, in the tone of one who has just dreamt up an alibi and is about to test it on a sceptical CID man. But he didn’t do so. ‘I will explain it to you one day. You’re quite right though. At the Corinthian Club I’m Hawkins, but down here with the lads I’m Shillibeer—Shilly Billy, they call me. All in good fun, of course.’

  ‘You’re a dark one,’ I said flirtatiously, and he looked pleased. ‘But tell me about the Nantwich Cup.’

  ‘The Nantwich? Well, his Lordship established it in 1955. He did a lot for this Club—he paid for those new changing-rooms. He used to come down a good deal himself, but we don’t see much of him nowadays.’

  ‘So you’ve been coming here a long time.’

  ‘Thirty years or so, I suppose.’ Bill picked up his drink, then put it down again. ‘No, Hitler knocked it about, you see. It used to be the Congregational Church for this area, but it was burnt out in the Blitz. The old club building was completely destroyed, but they say it was much too small anyway. Then his Lordship says, I’ll put up the money if you can find somewhere else and convert it. That was all done, of course, when I started coaching here.’

  ‘But not the changing-rooms, I guess.’

  ‘That’s right. There was just an outside latrine at the back. The lads’d get all their kit on at home. Or else they just had to change in the gym.’

  ‘I suppose he’s always been interested in boxing,’ I asked.

  ‘Lord Nantwich? Oh, he loves it, yes. I believe he used to be quite a fighter himself. I think that’s why he was interested in the Boys’ Clubs—boxing’s always been at the heart of the Clubs. It’s what holds them together, and the kids respect the boxers, of course. Some of the lads spend all day at the Club. It’s what gives meaning to their lives; they don’t hang around the streets, you know, that lot. What do you do, by the way, Will, if you don’t mind me asking?’ We had got on for years without such questions being put.

  ‘Ah. Nothing, I’m afraid.’ I tried to make the best of it. ‘Not until now, anyway. Now I’m going to write about Lord Nantwich.’

  Bill looked perplexed. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘His life. He’s asked me to do his biography.’

  ‘Oh yes …’ He weighed this up and looked again at his untouched drink. ‘You’ll be a kind of ghost writer, don’t they call it?’

  I hadn’t thought of this. ‘I don’t think so, no. It’ll just be by me. I think he thinks he’ll be dead by the time it comes out. That’s why I’m trying to find out all about him.’

  Bill still looked disturbed. ‘He’s a wonderful man, Lord Nantwich,’ he said. ‘That’s one of the things you’ll find out.’

  ‘You see, I didn’t know until today that you even knew him.’

  ‘I didn’t even know until yesterday that you did.’ He did not smile, and I suspected some slight friction, or horripilation of jealousy like that of the cattily possessive Lewis. ‘He knows a huge number of people,’ he said more tolerantly. ‘How did you get caught up with him?’

  It seemed disloyal to tell the truth so I said simply that I had met him at the Corry.

  ‘He doesn’t go there very often these days,’ said Bill, as if to imply that in that case I had been exceptionally lucky.

  ‘No, it was fortunate. The thing is, Bill, I would value your help—what you know about him. I would acknowledge
it of course in the book.’ He appeared satisfied by this. ‘I suspect you may be a leading witness.’

  ‘You make it sound like a trial or something,’ said Bill. I picked up my beer and looked at him interrogatively. ‘Do you want me to tell you now?’ he asked, clearly uncertain, as I was, about how biographers worked.

  ‘Not now,’ I smiled. ‘But I’d like it if we could get together soon. You’re not touching your drink.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Will. I’d like to in a way, but I think with the mood I’m in tonight it wouldn’t be a good thing. It’s never a good thing, to be honest, when I go back on the booze. Somehow it always lands me in trouble.’ Looking at his ungainly muscularity, I wondered if it nursed and suppressed an instinct for violence. Perhaps his self-denial had been painfully learnt, and was the clue to a double life whose difficult side was all in the past.

  We walked together through bleak, twilit streets to the Underground, and rode into town on the Central Line. Over, or rather under, the noise of the train and in the near-emptiness of the carriage he confided in me. His confidences, though, were not about himself: they were the secrets and crises of others that he had observed. He told me feelingly about how the boy Alastair’s mother had died of leukaemia, and the struggles of the father to look after him properly. He said how Roy, at the Corry, had come off his motorbike and severed a tendon in his knee. Something more came out about the Nantwich Cup too—how Charles had created it in memory of a friend of his who had been killed, though Bill was vague about the details, and when I asked him how he had met Charles, assumed a kind of dignified obtuseness, as though so intimate and critical a subject could not be so lightly approached. Could there have been something between the two men? It was the recurrent problem of imagining them twenty, thirty years earlier—before I was born, when Charles was the age that Bill was now, and Bill was Phil’s age. He was looking forward then, building up his body like a store, a guarantee of his place in the future. Now the future had come he still hoarded and packed it. It sat opposite me, massive, gathering bullishly at the shoulders, the open shirt showing a broad V of black hair, the thighs splayed ponderously on the slashed and stitched upholstery of the banquette. I knew I could never love it or want it, but it was an achievement, this armour of useless masculinity.

  As we travelled west, through lit City stations like Bank and St Paul’s which I thought purposeless at night till I recalled that Charles, for one, would need them, that here and there in the City that was emptied for the weekend, people, eccentric or indigenous, still lived, my thoughts deserted Bill (though I still looked at him), and fled on down the rails to Phil. We were nearly at Tottenham Court Road, where Bill would have to change for the Northern Line, when he said, with tense cheeriness: ‘How’s young Phil getting on these days?’

  I didn’t know how much he knew. Phil and I had been discreet, though together, at the Corry; but it was hard to tell what, in the crowded complex of the Club, had been seen, guessed or overheard. I gave a smile which could be read as a happy admission or an amiable ignorance. ‘All right, I should say,’ I offered neutrally.

  The old bashful earnestness crossed Bill’s face, and as the train fiercely slowed and the inertia carried him towards me he said bravely: ‘I loves that boy.’ His innocence and embarrassment were revealed in the relish he summoned up in his tone, and even more in the tortured affectation of saying loves. The train abruptly stopped, tilting him backwards as he rose, and he bustled off with a sad and hasty goodbye.

  June 9, 1925: Back in London after nearly 2 years, & everyone complaining about the heat. Unable to wear shorts, open shirt & topi, I begin to see what they mean. The town, after Cairo & then Alexandria, is strikingly brisk & convenient—also much smaller, in detail if not in plan, than I’d expected; I’ve been going about with the sort of pleasure I used to have on getting back to Oxford after the vac, checking that it’s all there (which in fact it isn’t).

  At Brook St, Sandy had called already before I got in, & left a message, in his inimitable style, on a page torn out of a book; it was in French, & highly, if florally & indirectly, improper, about how ‘il y a une chose aussi bruyante que la souffrance, c’est le plaisir’, & so on. I was tantalised at the end of the page & only then turned to the message, which was florally and indirectly improper, but in English. I sat for a while in the little morning room, with the old brass clock ticking busily away, & some lovely calceolarias, & Poppy’s picture looking down sternly, & thought of all the days that have passed there since I went to Africa, with no more happening than occasional visits from Wilson with a duster. It was deliciously calming, like an Egyptian nobleman’s tomb, where the guide angles the sun in off an old piece of tin-foil, & the departed embrace the gods on the walls.

  After that a round of visits of a dutiful kind before seeking out Sandy at his bizarre address in Soho. For a while I thought I wasn’t going to find it, but after ringing at one house where I was welcomed by a vast, fair woman with pink feathers I heard his characteristic whistling of ‘La donna è mobile’ from way up above & stepping back saw him leaning over a balcony between 2 palm trees. He dropped down a key, & I made my way up. It was wonderful to see him & despite joyful exclamations I cd think of nothing to say at first, so we hugged each other for ages until we needed a drink.

  It is quite the oddest place, with the balcony which is like a tiny garden, & inside a high, cool studio with steps going up to a kitchen on one side, & to a bedroom on the other. Beyond the studio you can climb out on to a roof where Sandy apparently sunbathes naked with his friends & where there is a fine view of the old Wren church with its bulbous spire. We had some American cocktails with all sorts of muck in them & got frightfully drunk.

  Later on a friend of his came up (he had his own key). He is called Otto Henderson, an artist, & apparently very well in with Cocteau & the Parisian world. I fear I showed I knew nothing about it all. He, I gather, is a keen practitioner of Sandy’s bare-bum sun-worship, as his mother, who is Danish, comes from a family of pioneering nudists. He was very interested to hear about the tribesmen of Kordofan, & wanted to know how they went on when they became amorously excited. He is a striking-looking fellow, with thick fair hair, shifting eyes & huge lyrical moustaches. His clothes, on another, wd have been enough to incite nudism—a boisterously checked jacket, bright yellow trousers & a bowtie with dogs on it.

  I rather liked him, but I was sorry not to have Sandy to myself. We all went on to a dingy little chophouse, the idea of which, apparently, was to reintroduce me to the epitome of English culture. Between us we made a thoroughly English nuisance of ourselves, & Sandy & Otto regaled me with the news of London life, Otto showing a thorough familiarity with all our old friends & treating me as if we had been at school together. Timmy Carswell has married, ‘extremely well’ Otto assured me. I felt a little pang, and a little gloom, too, which I dashed away with some more of the sour red wine we’d ordered. Sandy—who at the House had really I suppose been madly in love with Tim—cursed him obscenely & teetered into maudlin reminiscence. I sat back and looked around the restaurant while this was going on, though I cdn’t avoid remembering Tim and his angelic beauty at 15. It was not nice to think of female fingernails doodling over his smooth man’s body.

  June 15, 1925: Odd—though perfectly natural—how going away disconnects one from life. Everything has gone on at such a pace. Sandy painting his pictures, & clearly more or less living with the effusive Otto—and this puts me in a strange position. The paintings themselves I do not understand, & have been thinking about over this week, when I’ve seen him often. Their colours are unnatural, & their subjects are peculiarly distorted; but above all they are large. It is not a largeness I can claim to like, or even believe in. Their largeness is the largeness of Sandy’s own gestures, of his drinking, of his fantastical filthy talk—it is not the largeness of large pictures. He has an extraordinary study of Otto, naked to the waist, seen from somewhere right down on the ground, so that he towers up abov
e, his chin turned heroically, all the features exaggerated almost into brutality. It’s larger than life-size. It’s ridiculous, I can’t help myself feeling. But I know that that might be because Otto is himself ridiculous. S. is so absorbed in him, so greedily goes on about him, that I feel his thoughts are not really with me any more. His manner is wilder than ever, but beneath it all there is restraint & even boredom between us.

  About Africa, about everything that has happened to me, he shows no curiosity. I fear he even finds me a dull dog.

  June 18, 1925: On Friday I had a meeting with Sir Arthur Cavill—early evening at the Reform, whisky-and-soda, talk about nothing in particular. He appeared almost embarrassed to touch on the purely routine matters we were supposed to discuss. I liked him—austere, detached at first, fastidiously bachelorly—& was not surprised when keen feelings flashed under the surface of his conversation. At the end, after many formalities, he talked briefly about Meroe, & the first time he had seen the pyramids there. It was as if both of us, lightly warmed with drink, suddenly felt our spirits freed. For a moment we were very far away from Pall Mall, & though little was said we shared an exalted almost tender glance.

  June 23, 1925: Last night a bizarre encounter. I was at Sandy’s studio in the afternoon when without a word he & Otto tore off their clothes & clambered on to the roof. I sat around reading about Lawrence of Arabia and Queen Marie of Rumania in the Times Literary Supplement until I had mustered the insouciance to join them. They are brown as what—Corsicans?—all over, but of course I need not have felt ashamed. Otto seemed to respect me more when he saw how sunburned I was. ‘We must go to the Tropics,’ he said to Sandy, ‘and run around like the darkies.’