The Swimming-Pool Library

by Alan Hollinghurst

  ‘Here we are, splendid, splendid,’ whistled Lord Nantwich as he chose the corner table which was most sequestered and afforded the best view. ‘Not quite the first, I see; or are they still having breakfast? You can get a good breakfast here: kidneys. For me they do a black pudding—though they won’t often do it for all the old farts in here. I enjoy a good understanding with the staff. Been coming here since I was a lad, of course, and damn good tuck and tack. What do you want?’ he demanded, as a busy little waiter-boy arrived with menus that seemed to have been typed out on a pre-war Remington, with all the capital letters jumping up into the course above.

  When I looked across from my menu I saw that his Lordship was staring at, or rather through, the reddening and nervous boy. ‘Derek, isn’t it?’ he said at last.

  ‘No, sir, I’m Raymond. Derek’s left, sir, in fact.’

  ‘Raymond! Of course—forgive me, won’t you?’ begged Lord Nantwich, as if pleading with a society woman.

  ‘That’s all right, sir,’ said the boy, smoothing down his order pad, and Nantwich turned his attention briefly to the card. More silence followed, and Raymond felt moved to add: ‘I saw Derek this week, as a matter of fact, sir. He seems all right again now …’ but he trailed off as Nantwich was evidently not hearing him. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he added inconsequently.

  ‘Now what’s Abdul got for us today?’ Nantwich ruminated.

  ‘Pork’d be very nice, sir,’ said Raymond dispassionately.

  ‘I will have the pork, Raymond—with carrots, have you got? And the boiled potatoes—and I want a whole estuary of applesauce.’

  ‘See what I can do, sir. And for your guest, sir. Any starter at all, sir?’

  My mind recoiled from Brown Windsor soup to prawn cocktail to melon. ‘No, I think I’ll just have the trout—with peas and potatoes.’

  ‘Bring a bottle of hock, too, Raymond,’ my host requested; ‘cheapest you’ve got.’ And the moment the boy turned away, added, ‘Delightful child, isn’t he. Quite a little Masaccio, wouldn’t you say? Nothing compared to Derek, mind you, but I like to see a nice little bumba when I’m eating.’

  I smiled and felt oddly bashful; and the boy was pretty ordinary. I also felt a guest’s obligation to charm, and was aware that I was giving nothing. How loaded dirty talk is between strangers, seeming to imply some sexual rapport between them, removing barriers which in this case I was interested in preserving.

  ‘Do you live in London all the time?’ I asked him partyishly.

  He thought about this: ‘I do, though I’m often elsewhere—in my thoughts. At my age it doesn’t matter where you live. Passent les jours, passent les semaines, as the Frenchman said. I blank a lot, you know. Do you blank?’

  ‘You mean, just let your mind go blank? Yes, I suppose I do. Or at least, I like letting my mind wander.’

  ‘There you are. You see, I’ve had such an interesting life and now it’s so bloody dull and everyone’s dead and I can’t remember what I’m saying and all that sort of thing.’ He seemed to lose his thread.

  ‘What is it you think about mostly?’

  ‘Ooh, you know …’ he muttered broodily. I crudely assumed he meant sex. ‘I’m eighty-three,’ he said, as if I had asked him. ‘And how old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-five,’ I said with a laugh, but he looked sad.

  ‘When I was your age,’ he said, ‘I was hard at work. When I stopped working you hadn’t even been born.’ His eyes seemed to unveil in the curious way they had, and to concentrate on my face—or rather on my head, which he held in his gaze as if in his hands; it was with the appraisal of a connoisseur that he pronounced his expert, cupidinous sentence: ‘Youth!’

  One younger yet arrived at this point, with wine. It was a very inferior stuff, though Nantwich knocked it back with enthusiasm. Then ‘Ah, here is Abdul!’ he exclaimed. From the swinging kitchen door a very black man entered the dining-room pushing a domed platter on a trolley. He was perhaps forty, well built, with fierce, deep-set eyes and a moustache that lent a subtle violence to his expression; his thick lips, black at their edges, were red where they curved into his mouth, and his colouring was intensified by the pressed white linen of his chef’s pyjamas and apron and the battered funnel of his chef’s hat.

  I watched Raymond go up for a respectful word with him, and Abdul, casting a glance in our direction, began to wheel the trolley around to where we were sitting. Various other lunchers, wandering in, nodded to him as they looked for their places; and as the hour got under way another boy of a similar tartish blond appearance came to join Raymond.

  ‘Good afternoon, my Lord,’ said Abdul punctiliously.

  ‘Aah, Abdul,’ replied Nantwich with satisfaction. ‘Thou bringest the meat unto us, the spices and the wine.’

  ‘It’s a pleasure, sir,’ Abdul assured him with a formal smile.

  ‘My guest is called William, Abdul.’

  ‘How do you do,’ I said.

  ‘Welcome to Wicks’s Club, Mr William,’ said Abdul with a hint of servile irony, lifting the lid off the lean and tightly bound leg of pork on the trolley. Flicking his eyes across to Nantwich he commented, ‘Your guest is not having the pork, my Lord.’

  He had a strong presence and I looked at him casually as he cut the meat (which looked slightly underdone) into thick juicy slices. His hands were enormous, though dextrous, and I was attracted by the open neck of his uniform, which gave no suggestion that he wore anything beneath it. As he concentrated the lines of his face deepened, and he poked out his pink tongue.

  Nantwich proved to be a voracious eater with poor table manners. Half the time he ate with his mouth open, affording me a generous view of masticated pork and applesauce, which he smeared around his wine glass when he drank without wiping his lips. I attended to my trout with a kind of surgical distaste. Its slightly open barbed mouth and its tiny round eye, which had half erupted while grilling, like the core of a pustule, were unusually recriminatory. I sliced the head off and put it on my side-plate and then proceeded to remove the pale flesh from the bones with the flat of my knife. It was quite flavourless, except that, where its innards had been imperfectly removed, silvery traces of roe gave it an unpleasant bitterness.

  ‘Tell me why you don’t have a job,’ Nantwich asked after we had busied ourselves with our food for an uneasily long time. ‘We all need a job of work. Christ! Without a job doesn’t one just go do-lally?’

  ‘It’s because I’m spoilt, I’m afraid. Too much money. I wanted to stay on at Oxford, but I didn’t get a First, though I was supposed to. I did work for a publisher for two years, but then I got out.’

  ‘I mean, if you want a job I’ll get you one,’ Nantwich interrupted.

  ‘You’re very kind … I suppose I should do something soon. My father thought he could get me a job in the City, but I couldn’t face the idea of it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘Yes, he’s chairman of, oh … a group of companies.’

  ‘Your money comes from him, then?’

  ‘No, as it happens, it’s all from my grandfather. He’s very well off, as you can imagine. He’s settling his estate on my sister and me. We get it all in advance to avoid death duties.’

  ‘Capital,’ said Nantwich; ‘as it were.’ He munched on for a bit. ‘But tell me, who is your grandfather?’

  I had been supposing, somehow, that he knew, and I took a second to rethink everything in the light of the recognition that he didn’t. ‘Oh—er, Denis—Beckwith,’ I then hastened to explain.

  Again the sudden emission of interest. ‘My dear charming boy, do you mean to say that you are Denis Beckwith’s grandson?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I thought you knew.’ Often the intelligence met with a less enthusiastic reception. Then Nantwich’s interest had gone. ‘I suppose you come across each other in the House of Lords,’ I ventured. He had half turned and stared out of the window. When he swung back he leaned close to me and I smelt the pork in his mouth as he
said:

  ‘That chap is a very interesting photographer, indeed.’

  ‘Really? I don’t think …’ Then I saw that it was one of his conversational hairpins. I followed his glance across the room to where a dapper man, with crisp gold hair going grey, was sitting at the central table. Nantwich made a kind of diving or salaaming motion with his hands, and the man nodded and smiled.

  ‘Ronald Staines, you must know his stuff, of course.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I do.’ I was sure he must be a dreadful photographer. ‘What sort of thing does he specialise in?’

  ‘Oh, very special. You must meet, you’d love him,’ said Nantwich recklessly. I suffered a twinge of the mildly oppressive sensation one gets when one realises that the person one is talking to has plans.

  ‘Actually, there are lots of people, not yet dead, that I’d like you to meet. All my society is pretty bloody interesting. Falling to bits, of course, ga-ga as often as not, and a coachload of absolute Mary-Anns, I won’t deny it. But you young people know less and less of the old, they of you too, of course. I like young people around: you’re a bonny lot, you’re so heartless but you do me good.’ After this bizarre outburst he sat back and lapsed into one of his vacant spells, occasionally emitting an ‘Eh?’ or giving a shrug. I wondered what his complaint was: not just senility, clearly, as he could be sharp and to the point; was it hardening of the arteries, some slowly spreading constriction that brought on his spasmodic torpor? I knew that I must judge it by medical criteria, although I reckoned that he took advantage of his condition to further the egocentric discontinuities of his talk.

  Looking around the room I saw clear cases of other such afflictions, and thought how people of a certain kind gather together as if to authenticate a caricature of themselves—their freaks and foibles, unremarkable in the individual, being comically evident in the mass. As spoonfuls of soup were raised tremblingly to whiskery lips and hands cupped huge deaf ears to catch murmured and clipped remarks, the lunchers, all in some way distinguished or titled, retired generals, directors of banks, even authors, lost their distinction to me. They were anonymous, a type—and it was impossible to see how they could cope outside in the noise and race of the streets. How much did they know of the derisive life of the city which they ruled and from which they preserved themselves so immaculately and Edwardianly intact? As my eyes roamed across the room they came to rest on Abdul, who stood abstractedly sharpening his knife on the steel and gazing at me as if I were a meal.

  After doing more than justice to bowls of family-hotel trifle we made our slow progress back to the smoking-room. As Percy poured coffee we were joined by Ronald Staines. He was dressed entirely properly, but there was something about the way he inhabited his clothes that was subversive. He seemed to slither around within the beautiful green tweed, the elderly herringbone shirt and chaste silk tie which plumped forward slightly between collar and waistcoat. His wrists were very thin and I saw that he was smaller than his authoritative suiting. He was a man in disguise, but a disguise which his gestures, his over-preserved profile and a Sitwellian taste in rings drew immediate attention to. It was a strikingly two-minded performance, and, though I found him unattractive, just what I was looking for in the present surroundings.

  ‘Charles, you must introduce me to your guest.’

  ‘He’s called William.’ I held out a hand which Staines shook with surprising vigour. ‘We’ve been getting on very well,’ Nantwich added.

  ‘Don’t fret, my dear, I’m not going to break anything up. Ronald Staines, by the way,’ he said to me. ‘With an “e”.’ He pulled up a chair, not risking to ask if he could join us. ‘And how did you get involved with Charles?’ he asked. ‘Charles has some terrible secret, I’m sure—his success rate with the ragazzi is quite remarkable. He always has some very, very handsome young man in tow.’

  I had always been a sucker for this kind of thing, out of vanity, and liked to allow the old their unthreatening admiration.

  ‘You’re bloody lucky he hasn’t got his camera with him, William,’ said Nantwich. ‘He’d have you stripped off in a moment and covered in baby oil.’ I got the impression of a long-lasting relationship conducted in a bitchy third-person.

  ‘I have seen photographs of you, though, William,’ Staines recalled. ‘Surely Whitehaven did one, or am I wrong?—little swimming things, and a stripe of shadow covering those dreamy blue eyes? So talented, that young man, though some of his stuff can be a little … strong. Not this one, mind you: I saw it in that New York exhibition—there have been several, I know, but last year, in a kind of abattoir in Soho …’

  ‘He’s Beckwith’s grandson,’ said Nantwich, as if to discount the possibility which Staines was outlining.

  ‘Of course,’ exclaimed Staines in a curiously condescending way; ‘how interesting!’—turning his head aside to suggest a sudden loss of interest. ‘My dear, I’ve done some pieces which will delight you. I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if they delighted William as well—I’m certainly delighted myself. They’re a new departure, newish anyway, and rather religious and full of feeling. One’s a kind of sacra conversazione between Saint Sebastian and John the Baptist. The young man who modelled Sebastian was almost in tears when I showed it to him, it’s so lovely.’

  ‘How did you do the arrows?’ I interrupted, remembering Mishima’s arduous posing in a self-portrait as Sebastian.

  ‘Oh, no arrows, dear; it’s before the martyrdom. He’s quite unpierced. But he looks ready for it, somehow, the way I’ve done it.’

  ‘How can you tell it’s Sebastian, then,’ said Nantwich emphatically, ‘since the only thing that identifies Se-bloody-bastian is that he’s got all those ruddy arrows sticking up his arse?’ This seemed a fair criticism, but Staines ignored it.

  ‘You’ll admire the Baptist, though,’ he added. ‘An Italian lad, a porter at Smithfield, in fact—a more virile Saint than one normally sees, perhaps, quite sort of hairy and rough. Are you interested in photography?’

  ‘I am, rather,’ I answered, ‘but I don’t know a lot about it. I used to take photographs when I was at Oxford, but they’re nothing special, I don’t suppose.’

  ‘Hold on to them, William, hold on to them!’ he warned. ‘Never destroy a photograph, William; it’s a bit of life sealed in for ever. If you become famous, which I’ve no doubt you will, people will want to see them. I’m being rediscovered myself, and I promise you they’ll buy anything. To be honest, I’ve sold a lot of tat lately, but at Christie’s they like it. I’m a sort of period figure, you see, and put something in those bit photography sales and you find the aura of the famous names rubs off on you. Their catalogue person calls me “the unacknowledged master of postwar male photography in Britain”. I fetch a price, now, you know. But then, and this is what I’m saying, I feel absolutely awful about it, I just want to have them all back.’

  ‘I’ve told William he must come and see your studio,’ Nantwich declared.

  ‘My dear, of course. Let me just get a bit straight and I’ll be thrilled to see you. I’ve got a big job of work on à ce moment, but when that’s finished. And who knows, I might do a few little pickies of you—fully clothed, needless to say. I think you’d make an interesting subject for me. It’s such a very English look, that, the pink and gold number and the long, straight nose. None of your Master Whitehaven anonymous stuff, though. It’s a character study I want.’ For the second time I had the sensation of being somehow professionally appraised.

  “Well, we’ll see,’ I said, pleased to think of sitting again, but not keen to be rushed into some shady deal.

  ‘How’s the big job of work coming on?’ Nantwich asked with suspicious casualness.

  ‘Wonderful to have met you,’ piped Staines, with a switch of conversational direction worthy of Nantwich himself. We shook hands again and he was already leaving us. ‘Take care, Charles,’ he advised.

  My host was silent for a moment or two. ‘Bit of a cunt,’ he s
aid. ‘But still really frightfully good.’ He looked very weary now, and I too prepared to leave.

  ‘Thank you so much for lunch, Charles; I have enjoyed it.’

  He turned a surprised gaze on me. ‘You like the old Club?’ he asked. ‘Not too bad, is it?’ Fine hair-veins branched merrily over his pinkish cheeks, but his dark eyes were sunken and his big head looked heavy with impending sleep. I thought how I had seen him dead on the lavatory floor. I felt quite fond of him, and was glad that I had belonged to him and not to the talkative, rather sinister Staines. ‘I do hope we’ll have another little chin-wag soon,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you at the baths, of course.’ Again it seemed inconceivable to me that this man could be capable of physical exercise. As if reading my thoughts he explained: ‘I find the water most … therapeutic. Swimming, if you can call it swimming, is the only thing that makes me feel young. Floating around, splish-splosh, flip-flop …’

  Downstairs again on my way out, I stopped off for a pee. The lavatory was off the hall, down a corridor where lesser but brighter portraits were hung, late Victorian and Edwardian mostly, the flashy brushwork making the sitters seem all the more roguish and parvenus. Staines was coming out as I entered, and uttered a ‘Whoops,’ though he did not otherwise indicate that he knew me. As I stood at the urinal, along the front of which ran a tilted glass plate to prevent the old buffers from piddling on their shoes, a voice said, ‘Enjoy your meal, sir?’ It was Raymond, our waiter, who I had not realised was there. He caught my eye in the mirror as I glanced across.