‘No, no,’ I said, actually slightly shocked at his naive forwardness. I let a minute or more pass in silence, but had to grin when Simon started humming Tristan. I wasn’t sure what to do. The boy was undoubtedly a find. I swivelled on my stool so that we were sitting with our legs apart and knee to knee. He looked frankly at my crotch before meeting my gaze and we smiled enquiringly at each other as he ran his finger up the back of my hand where it dangled from the bar.
‘If you come to my room, I will show you something very interesting,’ he said. ‘Do you want to finish your drink?’
‘Um—no.’ I started to reach in my pocket for change, but he stopped me with a firm hand.
‘Number 205,’ he said curtly to Simon.
‘I must have got the name of that one wrong,’ said Simon perplexedly as I followed my conquest—my conqueror?—out.
Room 205 was a small but grand suite—a sitting-room with a flower arrangement in front of a mirror, a gloomy bedroom looking on an inner well, and a neon-bright bathroom with a roaring extractor fan. The thick double-glazing on the front gave the rooms a strange feeling of remoteness. I walked around in them for a bit before Gabriel—as he was fetchingly called—said, ‘Hey, Will, look at this,’ and flung open a suitcase on the bed. It was stuffed with pornography—videos and magazines, many of them still in their rip-off cellophane wrappers. The buying had been prodigal and indiscriminate.
‘You like it?’ I was asked, as if it were a triumph of his own.
‘Well up to a point—but I thought—’
‘In my country these things, these dirty pictures, do not exist.’
‘I should be highly surprised if that were the case. What is your country anyway?’
‘Argentina,’ he said, with a neutrality of tone which showed that this news was likely to have some effect. It made me want to apologise to him; at the same time I could have castigated him for buying up all this trash. Surely if any British self-esteem could have been thought to have survived the recent war it must be something to do with our … cultural values? The top magazine in the suitcase was a tawdry old thing I could remember from schooldays, called Latin Lovers.
‘But what about the war?’ I said dismally, seeing a TV news map of the Southern Atlantic and imagining too the customs-check at Buenos Aires.
‘That’s all right,’ he said, putting his arms around my neck. ‘You can suck my big cock.’
He stood patiently while I unbuttoned his trousers and slid them down over brown hairy thighs. The black briefs I had glimpsed before turned out to be leather. ‘I suppose you bought these today as well,’ I said; and he nodded and grinned as I prised them down and saw the studded leather cock-ring he was also wearing. He had clearly wasted a small fortune in some Soho dump. His assessment of his cock had not, however, been wrong. It was a sumptuously heavy thing, purpling up with blood as the cock-ring bit into the thickening flesh. ‘I’m not a size queen, but …’ would have been my classic formulation of the affair.
I hadn’t had anything like it all summer, and gorged on it happily. But Gabriel’s own performance was becoming off-putting. Every few seconds he would make some coarse exhortation, some dumbly repeated catchphrase, and I came to realise with dismay that this trick too he had picked up from crudely dubbed American porn films. ‘Yeah,’ he would croon, ‘suck that dick. Yeah, take it all. Suck it, suck that big dick.’
I took a pause to say, ‘Um—Gabriel. Do you think you could leave out the annunciations?’ But it wasn’t the same for him without them, and I felt unbelievably stupid appearing to respond to them.
‘Okay,’ he said brightly, as I abandoned the job. ‘You like to fuck with me?’
‘Of course.’ There was after all some charm in his childlike openness. ‘But in silence …’
‘Wait a minute,’ he said and kicking off shoes and tugging off trousers and pants, ambled into the bathroom, his dick bouncing with a kind of mock-majesty before him.
I slipped off my own shoes and jeans and lay playing with myself on the bed. Gabriel took his time getting ready and after a couple of minutes I called through to ask if he was all right. He came in almost at once, now completely naked except for his cock-ring, the pale gold wafer of his watch and—which I should somehow I suppose have expected—a black leather mask which completely covered his head. There were two neat little holes beneath the nostrils, and zipped slits for the eyes and mouth. He knelt on the bed beside me and was perhaps looking to me for approval or amusement—it was impossible to tell. Close to I could see only his large brown pupils and the whites of his eyes, blurred for a split second if he blinked, like the lens of a camera. It was hard and disturbing the way the eyes could not vary their expression isolated from the rest of the frowning or smiling face. I felt that childhood fear of rubber party masks, and of the idiot amiability of clowns who you knew, as they bent down to pinch your cheeks, were fearful old drunks.
Gabriel held my head to look at me closely, and I unzipped his mouth and breathed in his hot breath and the expensive smell of leather. His body was supple though slightly gone to seed—but I liked it and bit it. There wasn’t much he could do in his mask, and when I had nosed around him for a while he hoiked me over and pushed my legs apart. I was anxious not to take all that raw, and had begun to complain, when I felt something cold and wet, like a dog’s nose, trailing up my thigh. I looked over my shoulder to find that from somewhere this madman had produced a gigantic pink dildo, slippery with Crisco. I heard him giggle tensely inside the mask. ‘Do you want to smell some poppers?’ he asked.
I rolled over and sat up and spoke in a strange tone of voice which I seemed to have invented for the occasion. ‘Look, pal, I’d need more than poppers to take that thing.’ It was all very well to be violated as I had been last night by Abdul, but I did not like the idea of inanimate objects being forced up my delicate inner passages. He turned and walked across the room—angry, hurt, careless, I couldn’t tell—and threw the great plastic phallus into the bathroom. I imagined the maid finding it there when she came to tidy up and turn down the bedclothes. ‘Okay, so you don’t like me that much,’ he said, thickly from inside the leather.
‘I like you very much. It’s just the moving toyshop I can’t be doing with.’ And I decided I had better go, and reached for my jeans.
‘I could whip you,’ he suggested, ‘for what you did to my country in the war.’ He seemed to think this was a final expedient which might really appeal to me; and I had no doubt he could have provided a pretty fearsome lash from one of his many items of luggage.
‘I think that might be to take the sex and politics metaphor a bit too seriously, old chap,’ I said. And I could see the whole thing deteriorating into a scene from some poker-faced left-wing European film.
When I was dressed and had my bag again slung over my shoulder Gabriel was wandering around the sitting-room, his huge erection barely flagging, but somehow no longer of interest to me. I stood and looked at him and he grasped and grunted and writhed out of his mask. His hair was moist and standing up, and his clear olive complexion was primed with pink—as it might have been if we had just simply made love. I went over to him and kissed him, but he closed his teeth against me, kept his hands at his sides. I left the room without saying goodbye.
Well, it served me right, I thought, as I wandered with a vague sense of direction along uniform carpeted corridors—Phil’s terrain, where he did his job. All this had certainly got me in the mood and now I would be too late to catch him and the uncomplicated solace he could give. Surely hotels must be hotbeds of this kind of carry-on, easy encounters at the bar or unlocking the doors of adjacent rooms. My little Philanderer could make a fortune out of escorting truly glamorous men—and not all of them would turn out to be as weird as the eye-catching Gabriel. It was quite likely, wasn’t it, that Phil had already caught Gabriel’s eye?
I found the corner by the service lift and the steep flight of stairs up to Phil’s attic. It was a drab, cheapjack l
ittle area, unambiguously removed from the public, and yet I had come to love it in a way I never could the rest of the monstrous edifice. The little room—and above it the lonely roof—were nothing really, but like the lovers’ cottage in ‘Tea for Two’ they had been wonderfully sufficient for our romance. I knew there was no chance of finding him in—he would be well off on his laddish booze by now—but it would be comforting to sit there for a bit with the window open and surrounded by his empty clothes. When I put my key in the lock, though, there was a muffled call of surprise, I thought, from within.
Phil and Bill were kneeling face to face on the bed. Bill’s hand rested on Phil’s shoulder, and it looked like some College jerk-off job. Their tilting dicks, alert as orgiasts’ on a Greek vase, withered astonishingly under my expressionless stare. Not for them the witless priapism of Gabriel; but there was enough defiance in their confusion for them not to blabber excuses—not to say anything at all. And I couldn’t think of anything much to say. I know I swallowed and coloured and took in, as if I needed to satisfy myself, the circumstantial details. Certainly there were no signs of passionate haste. Bill’s trousers were neatly folded and his vast smalls were spread like an antimacassar across the back of the chair. I nodded repeatedly and slowly withdrew, closing the door as if not to disturb a sleeper. Before I had reached the top of the stairs I heard a gasped ‘Oh my God’ and a loud frightened laugh.
And so to James’s. By the time I got there my anger, hurt, care were welling up under the frigid discipline I had instinctively assumed. I smeared away stupid tears. Thank heavens at least no crass, unforgettable words had been spoken. ‘Darling, whisky’ was my own first utterance—and I thought, none of your namby-pamby Caribbean aphrodisiac nonsense.
James was eating scrambled eggs standing up and listening to some fathomlessly gloomy music. ‘Bad day, dear?’ he enquired maritally.
‘The last twenty-four hours have actually been quite extraordinarily hideously awful.’
‘Oh, darling.’
‘I thought I was just about managing it until half an hour ago, when I went up to Phil’s room at the hotel—I don’t know why, just on some sentimental whim, I thought I’d put on some of his clothes and lie there for a bit and just be him, you know—he having arranged to go off drinking with some of his appalling friends. Well, they may not be appalling, I’ve never met them. I say, we couldn’t possibly take this music off? It’s driving me insane.’
‘It’s Shostakovich’s viola sonata,’ said James pettishly.
‘Exactly … That’s better. And the drink?’ He poured a generous Bell’s. ‘Dearest—thank you. So I opened the door, to which as you know I have a key, and find Phil in there with old Bill Hawkins, from the Corry, messing around stark naked, etc, etc.’
‘Fucking hell.’
‘I do find it very terrible actually.’ I flopped onto the sofa and gulped at my drink. ‘I mean, I absolutely hate the thought of Phil going with someone else. But one would understand if it were just some spur-of-the-moment fling—some sexy guy staying in the hotel or something. To go with Bill, who is anyway a pal of mine and what? three times his age …’
‘No?’
‘Well, just about.’ I stared at James, through him, as I realised how slow I had been. ‘You know, I should have been on to this. I’ve seen Bill hanging around near the Queensberry before now—and of course I knew he was sweet on Phil, sweet on him before I was. Indeed it was really Bill’s interest in him that got me going, made me see how good he was. And then last week, when I took Phil to the Shaft, I knew something funny was going on. We were sort of horsing around outside the BM and I realised someone was watching us from across the road. I don’t think Phil saw him, but I’m convinced it was Bill.’
‘Kind of creepy, n’est-ce pas?’ said James, wandering off and looking out of the window. He was my only friend but I knew that he would take a kind of wistful satisfaction in things having at last—at last: it was what? two months?—gone awry. ‘This needn’t mean it’s all over, though, surely?’ he said.
I stared some time into my glass. ‘I don’t know. No, it needn’t. It will, I think, mean that whatever’s going on between those two is all over. What you don’t know, and what Bill doesn’t know I know, is that he has already been inside for interfering with young boys.’ But these were the kind of real-life details that never shocked James: it was only on the fantasy level that one got to him. ‘He’ll be pretty scared about all this.’
‘Well, you’re hardly going to shop him to the police, are you?’
‘Ooh, I don’t know,’ I said with a rueful laugh, finishing my drink and getting up to splosh in another half-tumbler full. I walked over and hugged him from behind, resting my chin on his shoulder. ‘It’s like one of those frightful seventeenth-century epitaphs: I’ve had my Will, I’ve had my Fill, and now they’ve sent in my Bill. Or something like that.’
‘Do you want something to eat?’
‘I think I’ll just stick on the booze, actually. Darling, can I stay here tonight? I just don’t fancy going home—and I’m sure he’ll try and ring up and it will all be too appalling.’
‘Yes, of course you can.’ I sensed his nervous pleasure at the certainty of companionship. He turned round in my arms and gave me a tight squeeze and a kiss on the blunted bridge of my nose.
‘There’s actually something in a way much more awful that I’ve just found out,’ I began, sliding off and taking to an armchair. ‘It all came up in old Nantwich’s papers, you know? He led me on a long way and then he sprang his journal on me for 1954, from which it emerged, in brief, that he’d been sent to gaol for six months for soliciting and I think conspiracy to commit indecent acts, I’m not sure about all that. As if that wasn’t hideous enough it turns out that the person behind it all—there was a whole sort of gay pogrom apparently—was my grandfather. When he was Director of Public Persecutions.’
James sank to the chair opposite me and looked at me intently. ‘Lord B,’ he said, quietly and calculatingly.
‘Lord B, as you say. Did you know anything about this? Of course it just fucks up absolutely everything, it’s soured everything. It seems Lord B, as he was yet to become, was so successful in cleaning up the perves that he was whisked off to the Upper House. His whole career was made by it.’ We held each other’s eye. ‘Of course it turns out that when Charles was in gaol he met up with Bill Hawkins, doing his aforementioned stretch for being in love with a kid. He was a kid himself at the time, needless to say. And there are all sorts of other connections with people I know. It’s all come horrifically at the same time. And we’re only kids ourselves,’ I huffed.
James felt entitled to draw on professional language. ‘I guess if those things are building up and building up, when they erupt there will be a bit of a mess. There will be pockmarks,’ he seventeenth-centurily went on.
I got him to play me some more positive music, some courtly, phlegmatic Haydn; and I turned the conversation round artificially to more general subjects. We watched a mirthless comedy on the television from beginning to end. It was only when we were in bed, and I was now dry-throated and woozy-headed from the drink, that I came back to the subject.
‘It’s the way we didn’t know about it,’ I murmured. ‘The gruesome incongruity of it.’
‘Isn’t there a kind of blind spot,’ James said, ‘for that period just before one was born? One knows about the Second World War, one knows about Suez, I suppose, but what people were actually getting up to in those years … There’s an empty, motiveless space until one appears on the scene. What do you know about your own family anyway? They’re such secretive organisms, I can’t be doing with them.’
I felt his erection—the idiot emblem of the day—yearning against my thigh, and waited resignedly as his hands wandered down towards my own. It was a curious experience, for while he stroked he seemed instinctively to be feeling for other symptoms, exercising that slight pressure which discovers a tender kidney or a swollen gla
nd. He was rather fastidious when he reached his objective too.
I turned on my front, and he gave a little humorous sigh and tipped his forehead against mine while I told him of a thing that happened on the train. It was while I was coming to see him and had taken place just in front of me, an ordinary thing and yet calmly beyond the turmoil of my own mood, in fact wonderfully self-sufficient and entire. Among the crowd that got on at Tottenham Court Road were a black couple with a baby: they took the two places against the glass partition, so that the man and I sat—as I had done with Gabriel shortly before—knee to knee. Once he had looked at me politely as I shifted to make room for him he had no interest in me at all—and I hardly took notice of him. His wife held the impassive and very young child in her arms: despite the heat it was dressed in a quilted one-piece suit, but with the hood back. My thoughts were all elsewhere, though I saw the man, about thirty, I suppose, lean over the baby’s open flawless face, and smile down on it, out of pure pleasure and love. His fingertips moved from his own softly bearded lips and gently stroked and almost held within their span his child’s lolling wispy head. His other hand lay loosely in his lap, and it took me a while to see that he was hiding and coaxing—yes—a hard-on in his respectable grey slacks. I was not aroused by this; but did I dwindle, if only for a moment, in the face of their glowing, fertile closeness? I felt perhaps I did.
Last thing of all before sleep we muttered about the charge against James, though he was shy of my ruse not only to get him off but to bring Colin down. He had pleaded not guilty to the magistrate on the morning after his arrest, and so gained time, the case being deferred. He had a good lawyer, one of his Holland Park patients, who was gay himself and knew how to fight and what such fights could mean if lost. We wondered if it depended on whether the court would accept works of art as evidence; and besides, whether they would accept that Staines’s photographs were works of art. It was a shaky idea, and I fell asleep and dreamed that they confiscated all Staines’s pictures and sent him to gaol instead. When I woke before dawn, parched and aching, I felt lost. I decided that if necessary, and if it might save James, I would testify in court to what I had done with Colin—and so perhaps do something, though distant and symbolic, for Charles, and for Lord B’s other victims. I had that most oppressive of feelings—that some test was looming.
The Swimming-Pool Library Page 37
