The Swimming-Pool Library

by Alan Hollinghurst

  ‘I wish I’d talked to you before. There is a whiff of black magic sometimes at Skinner’s Lane.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. It’s not my kind of thing. Henderson was said to be mixed up with some sort of spiritualist society himself, and Cecil said something about Nantwich getting in touch with I think a friend who had died tragically. I must say it rather gave me the creeps, as did Nantwich himself. Worth it, for the pavement, though.’

  ‘This was before you were married.’

  ‘Actually it was just about the time that P. and I started seeing each other. The irony was not lost on Cecil; he very much came from that world, and it was he who told me about Denis. Very tight lips, as you may imagine. Of course, the irony’s rather worse for you, being, you know, gay, and—I’m frightfully sorry, Will.’

  ‘My dear Gavin. Anyway, I must think a whole lot more.’

  I looked around my untidy bedroom, and was surprised to find I missed the invitation that the Nantwich book had offered for the past few weeks. I had played hard to get without ever envisaging an outcome such as this. ‘I’d love to see you, too. We must all get together. Now that I’m not writing a book I’ll have so much more time.’ Gavin made a miraculous little humming sound, in which sympathy and scepticism were perfectly combined. ‘He must have known gay people—he was a cultured man. What did he think he was playing at?’

  ‘Well I’m too young to know. But I suspect it really was a different world—not only the law, of course, but political pressures, and we just don’t know. It’s Uncle Will. Yes, you can. Hold on, Will, I’ve got your nephew here to speak to you. Very important, right … See you soon, my dear!’

  There was a plonk and a series of rustlings and a protest of ‘Daddy’ before Rupert came on the line: ‘Hello, this is Rupert,’ in his serious treble.

  ‘Roops, how nice to hear you. How are things.’

  ‘All right, thank you. I’ve got to wait before Daddy goes out of the room.’ This took a while, as apparently he came back for something, and was, as I pictured it, being expelled from his own study and his important work on Romano-British drains.

  ‘It must be jolly secret,’ I said encouragingly.

  ‘It’s that boy,’ he hissed.

  ‘Arthur, you mean? Have you seen him then?’ And looking across the empty bed and out into the hazy sky, chimneypots among still trees, I felt a sudden plunging need for him, a Straussian phrase sweeping from the top to the bottom of the orchestra.

  ‘Yes, I have. It was in the road, yesterday.’

  ‘It was jolly clever of you to spot him.’

  ‘Well, I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for him, you know.’

  ‘What a good spy you are. What was he doing, did he recognise you?’ I tried to repress my eagerness and anxiety: to think of him being so close to here …

  ‘I saw him walking along the road first of all, and I thought it was him, so I followed him.’

  ‘Good boy! Now what did he have on?’

  ‘Um—trousers. And a shirt.’

  ‘Terrific.’ I wanted to know if his tight cords cut into the crack of his bum, if you could make out his nipples through his T-shirt; but I made do with the more general answer. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, he went along our road, and then turned right, and when I went round the corner he was coming back again. So I went into a house and hid behind the hedge, I was pretending that it was my house, you see. I’m sure he didn’t recognise me. Then he shouted when he was just outside the hedge, and there was another man.’

  ‘Did you see him?’

  ‘I saw his legs and hands. He was a black man too, and I think he was called Harold.’

  ‘Harold, yes, that’s Arthur’s big brother. Arthur sort of works for him sometimes.’

  ‘I think he was very cross. He said he was going to give him a smack.’

  ‘The idea!’ I exclaimed, as the real idea—which I had never seriously been able to disallow—seeped inexorably through my system.

  ‘It was so funny being where I was, because he had something hidden in his sock, all wrapped up in silver paper, and when he got it out he didn’t know I was there!’ Rupert sounded very excited by this bit. ‘What was in the paper?’ he asked, a shade cautious now.

  ‘I wouldn’t know, old boy.’ His silence told of his disappointment. ‘Did they say anything else?’

  ‘Yes. Arthur said, “Where’s fucking Tony?” ’ He giggled.

  ‘Mm—there’s no need to do the accent and everything.’

  ‘And Harold said, “He’s in the car,” or something, I can’t quite remember … And Arthur said something about “That Tony was lucky to be alive” and Harold said “Watch your—um—lip”—does that mean mind your ps and qs?’

  ‘Yup, more or less. That’s very interesting, Roops.” I pictured Arthur’s lips, and imagined Tony, and wondered if it could possibly be the same one. ‘You didn’t get to see Tony, then?’

  ‘No, he was in the car. Actually, they walked down the street a bit, and then there was a car going parp, parp. When I came out again they were just climbing into the car.’

  ‘Was it a big yellow car?’

  ‘It was a quite big yellow car—and all the windows were black.’

  ‘That’s the one. Darling, you are a great genius. One day I shall have to give you a medal.’

  ‘Well, I promised I’d tell you. Will?’

  ‘Yes?’ I sensed some more probing question was coming.

  ‘Does Arthur and Harold still live in England?’

  ‘Oh, I think so, yes.’

  ‘He didn’t escape then?’

  ‘It doesn’t look like it, my old duck.’

  I spent a lackadaisical afternoon, sprawling in the window-seat half-reading the paper, then closing my eyes, as the sun came round. I drifted in and out of sleep, took off my shirt, woke to find the coarse stitching of the tapestry bolster had patterned my slightly sweating back. I thought about Arthur, and how minutely brief our affair had been, and difficult to understand. I saw him again licking my balls; or swallowing as he slowly sat down on my cock; or helpless beneath me, locking his dry heels behind my neck. I hated to think it was over—yet dawdled half-awake in a maudlin, jealous reverie. I imagined him servicing the scarred and despotic Tony as they rolled towards the West End in their black-windowed Cortina.

  So much had ended, so many things gone crooked and bad—and yet the high June afternoon lasted and lasted, grew stiller, more crystalline. There was no friendly darkness in it. I shifted and slept again.

  At about drinks time I began to want to do something. I wrapped up my trunks in a towel, flung them in my sports bag with my goggles and soap-box and an American ‘gay thriller’ I had been loaned by Nigel the pool attendant, and trotted off out. The pavements and gardens were exuding their summer smells, and as I approached the Tube station I walked against the current of people coming home, youngsters in pinstripes from the City fanning out from the gates, jackets here and there hooked over a shoulder, smart clippety-clop of old-fashioned City shoes. They were quite handsome, some of these boys, public-school types with peachy complexions and contemptuous eyes. Already they commanded substantial salaries, took long, overpriced lunches, worked out perhaps in private City gyms. In many ways they were like me; yet as they ambled home in the benign and ordered vastness of the evening, as I fleetingly caught their eye or felt them for a moment aware of me, they were an alien breed. And then I was a loafer who had hardly ever actively earned money, and they were the eager initiates, the coiners of the power and the compromise in which I had unthinkingly been raised.

  My disaffected mood persisted in the sweaty train. Goldie was one of the poorer accessions of the swimming-pool library. It was not, alas, about the Cambridge second eight, but about rent-boys, blackmail and murder in Manhattan; Goldie was the gay police officer who got to buy the favours of the chief suspect, and seemed bound to fall in love with him before the sorry end. The book’s formula was to alternate blocks of fas
t, bloodthirsty action with exhaustive descriptions of sexual intercourse. Nigel, night-sighted in the pool’s subterranean gloom, had said it was a good one; but I resented its professional neatness and its priapic attempts to win me over. The trouble was that, as attempts, they were half-successful: something in me was pained and removed; but something else, subliterate, responded to the book’s bald graffiti. ‘Fuck me again, Goldie,’ the slender, pleading Juan Bautista would cry; and I thought, ‘Yeah, give it to him! Give it to him good ’n’ hard!’

  As we slowed towards stops I looked around at the other passengers, wary slumpers and strap-hangers who never met each other’s eyes for more than a fraction of a second. Half-heartedly playing the game James and I used to play I tried to select which person in the carriage I would least object to having sex with. Occasionally the choice could be made difficult by the presence of too many scrumptious schoolboys or too many dusty-handed navvies. Normally, as now, the problem was to choose between that businessman, regular and suited but with a moody something about him, and the too-tall youth in the doorway giving off a tinny, high-hat patter from his headphones, and looking flightily around through a haze of Trouble for Men. It was James’s theory that everyone had about them some wrinkle at least of lovability, some peculiar and attractive thing—a theory which gained poignancy from the problems in applying it.

  Consoling and yet absurd, how the sexual imagination took such easy possession of the ungiving world. I was certainly not alone in this carriage in sliding my thoughts between the legs of other passengers. Desires, brutal or tender, silent but evolved, were in the shiftless air, and hung about each jaded traveller, whose life was not as good as it might have been. I remembered for some reason a little public lavatory in Winchester, a urinal and a couple of cubicles visited by bandy-legged old men going to the market and at night by ghostly fantasists who left their traces. It was up an alley where the College turned one of its high stone corners against the town—not a place for boys, for scholars, though I went there once or twice with an almost scholarly curiosity. The cistern filled for ever, the floor was slippery, there was no toilet paper, and between the cubicles a number of holes had been diligently bored, large enough only to spy through. Talentless drawings covered the walls, and wishful assignations, and also, misspelt in laborious capitals, long unparagraphed accounts of sexual acts—‘they had her together … 12 inches … at the bus station’. In between these were fantastic rendezvous, often vague to allow for disappointment, but able sometimes to touch you with their suggestion of a shadowy world in which town and gown pried on each other. I had read: ‘College boy, blond, big cock, in here Friday—meet me next Friday, 9 pm.’ Then: ‘Tuesday?’ Then: ‘Next Friday November 10’ … I had thought almost it could have been me, until I just made out, bleared and over-written, the date ‘1964’: a decade of dark November Fridays, generations of College blonds, had already passed since those anonymous words were written.

  At the Corry life was going on full blast. I swam more joylessly than usual, hoping I might catch Phil, starved of him, longing to have and to hold him: I wanted the solidness of him in my arms, and for a moment excitedly mistook another swimmer for him as he lounged at the shallow end. He had trunks on just like Phil’s and when I surfaced grinning in front of him he gave me a bothered look before pushing off in a panicky, old-fashioned side-stroke. I felt keenly about the discipline of swimming, and then was suddenly bored by it, and by the taste of chlorinated water. When I hopped out I had a few words with Nigel. He was sprawling in those viewing seats erected long ago for matches and galas which never now took place.

  ‘Hullo, Will—good swim?’

  ‘I’m not in the mood, I’m afraid, today. I can do it, you know, what’s the point?’

  ‘Mm, still, good for you. How are you getting on with that book then? Good one, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m a bit disappointed by it, actually. You’ve lent me better.’

  ‘Mm, but that Goldie, is it, I’d like to meet him. He can give me a taste of his truncheon any time.’

  I shook my head sorrowingly. ‘He doesn’t exist, love. It’s just a silly book.’

  ‘Get out,’ said Nigel, tutting and turning his head away.

  ‘I could show you something really sexy—and true,’ I said, in a sudden treacherous bid for his interest—he who didn’t interest me at all, handsome and idle though he was. ‘I’ve got some private diaries of a guy’ (Charles a guy? some affronted guardian spirit queried) ‘with amazing stuff in them. It’s even got things happening here—years ago …’ I had doubts and petered out.

  My true come-uppance not from a fascinated insistence I should tell more but from a deliberate lack of attention, as if to endorse my self-reproach. ‘You still going with that Phil?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Yup.’ I squared my shoulders and tried to appear worthy.

  ‘He’s looking good.’ Nigel smiled at me slyly. ‘He was down here earlier on, splashing about, diving and that. Showing off. I wouldn’t mind a bit of that, I thought. Gave me a really fresh look too.’

  ‘You little slut,’ I said, and flicked at him with my towel as I darted off. But I was reassured by how he had got it wrong, for though Phil was taken with his own body he almost stubbornly never tarted. His love was all bottled up and kept for me.

  I thought of him with such tenderness in the shower and the changing-room that I was hardly aware of the bustle around me. I had not been good enough to him. I had often been sarcastic, and used him as a kind of beautiful pneumatic toy. He was the only true, pure, simple thing I could see in my life at the moment, and I wished I was with him, and wanted to thank him, and say I was sorry. I decided I would go up to the Queensberry and hope to catch him before he went out. Then I would go to James, who was true and pure too of course in his way, and worrying about his looming court appearance.

  I went through the deeply familiar streets and squares, through the equally intimate cooling and soft-fingered evening. Then there were the high plane trees and the bold splashing fountains—my mood escaping all the while from its bleak morning pacings and ambling into a more romantic melancholy. I became somehow picturesque to myself, prone as ever to the aesthetic solution.

  I was about to go round to the side of the hotel, where I was well enough known now, but I was suddenly tired of my laundryman’s-eye view of life, and swung up the main shrub-flanked steps and into the hall. I had become so used to the back stairs that I was quite surprised to see svelte couples coming down for pre-dinner drinks, others checking in, their anxieties melting as uniformed boys magicked their monogrammed luggage away. One or two people, waiting to meet friends, half-concentrated on the lit showcases where scarves, watches, perfumes and china figurines were displayed, or revolved the squeaking postcard racks, soothed by the customary London views.

  I loitered too for a minute, charmed—or at least amazed—by all this bought pleasantness. And then I saw a wonderful young man, perhaps about my age, and with just that air of bland international luxury about him, come from the lift and saunter towards the cocktail bar. He was tall and graceful but gave the impression of weighing a great deal; as he approached I was startled by his deep-set brown eyes, long nose and curling lips and his trotting, swept-back hair; as he walked away I took in his maroon mocassins, his immaculate pale cotton trousers, through which the shadow of his briefs could be seen, the cashmere slip cast around his shoulders. I felt he must belong to some notable Latin American family.

  It hardly required thought to follow him, though I gave him a second or two to get settled. I feared he might have gone to sit at a table or have joined his diplomat father and ragging, adoring younger brothers and sisters. But no, he was perched at the marble curve of the bar, and I was able to greet Simon—all in braid and tumbling his cocktail-shaker—as I took up a convenient high stool.

  ‘What are you having?’ Simon wanted to know. He was a skinny Lancashire boy who loved fucking girls and should ideally have been followin
g a career as a pianist. He played extremely well, and had a long, long tongue with which he could easily lick the tip of his nose. He knew all about my little ways.

  ‘What’s he having?’ I said, as I watched the wild pink liquid rattle from the shaker into the inverted cone of the glass.

  He raised an eyebrow and murmured disgustingly, ‘Cunnilingus Surprise.’

  ‘Mm. Not quite my kind of thing perhaps.’

  Here the notable Latin American said: ‘It’s really good. You should try one.’ And then smiled immensely so that I went funny inside.

  His lips curled back in a friendly primitive way, and gave an unexpected animation to his dully beautiful face. I realised he reminded me of one of the sketches of Akhnaten on Charles’s stele—not the final inscrutable profile, but one of the intermediate stages, half human, half work of art.

  I watched incredulously as the various ingredients, some exotic, some European, were measured into the shaker. Simon gave me a smirk of lewd surmise as he agitated it. Mr Latin America and I glanced at each other and then found it proper to look around the lofty bar, with its concealed lighting, reproductions of Old Masters and vulgarly gathered blinds half down against the westering sun. Across the road were the boles of the great trees in the square into whose upper branches I had so often gazed; and that did remind me of Phil, and how I must not take long over this drink.

  ‘Perfectly revolting,’ I pronounced after taking a sip. ‘If that’s what cunnilingus tastes like, I think I’ve done well to stay away from it.’

  ‘You like?’ said my new friend.

  I nodded, as if to say it was nice enough.

  ‘You are staying in this hotel?’

  ‘No—no, I’ve just come in for a drink. After my swimming.’

  ‘Oh you like swimming. I am a very bad swimmer.’ I smiled politely; perhaps in his country, which I believed to be poor and old-fashioned, there were few swimming-pools. Even in Italy there were few: hence the fondness of the language children for hours of bombing and showering. ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ he asked.