I looked again. ‘And who are the other two?’
‘Ah,’ said Charles with pleasure. ‘They’re King Akhnaten as well.’ He chuckled, though it could by no means be the first time he had explained its mystery. ‘It’s an artist’s sketch, like a notepad or something, but done straight on to the stone. You know about Akhnaten, do you?’
‘No, I’m afraid I don’t.’
‘I thought not, otherwise you would see the significance of it straight away. Like so many bizarre-seeming things, it has its logic. Akhnaten was a rebel. His real name was Amonhotep the Third—Fourth, I can’t remember—but he broke away from the worship of Amon (as in Amonhotep) and made everyone worship the sun instead. Something I’m sure you’d agree with him over,’ he added, patting my wrist. ‘But such apostasy was not in itself enough. Oh no. He had to change the way he looked as well. He shifted the court from Thebes, where it had been for God knows how long, and set it up at Tel-el-Amarna …’
‘Aha,’ I said, remembering there had been a battle of that name.
‘As it was all made out of mud, it didn’t survive the end of his régime by long, sad to say. But there are bits and pieces in museums. There’s a thing like this at Cairo. You haven’t been to Cairo. And there’s this one, which has one more head on it. You can see how the artist changed the king’s appearance until he got the image which we know today.’
Looking again, I could see, reading Arabically from right to left, how the wide Pharaonic features were modified, and then modified again, elongated and somehow orientalised, so that they took on, instead of an implacable massiveness, an attitude of sensibility and refinement. A large, blank, almond-shaped eye was shown unrealistically in the profile, and the nose and the jaw were drawn out to an unnatural length. The rearing cobra on the brow was traditional, but its challenge seemed qualified by the subtle expression of the mouth, very beautifully cut, with a fuzz of shadow behind the everted curl of the upper lip.
‘It’s wonderful,’ I said. ‘Where did you get it?’
‘In Egypt before the war. Made my trunk pretty heavy … I was coming back from the Sudan for the last time.’
‘It becomes more wonderful the more you think about it.’ I could not have delighted him more.
‘I’m so glad you see the point. For a while it was quite an icon to me.’ The point, as I saw it, was that you could take an aesthetic decision to change shape. The king seemed almost to turn into a woman before our eyes. ‘A chappie came from the Louvre and wrote a thing about it. It doesn’t yet have the Pharaonic beard, you see—you know, the ugly, square beard—which he does have in most of the remaining statues, even the female Pharaohs, whatever they were called, are shown with beards—perfectly lifelike, though, wouldn’t you think?’ Charles loved making these misogynistic gibes.
‘So what happened to him?’ I asked.
‘Ooh—it all came to an end. They went back to worshipping boring old Amon. The whole thing only lasted about twenty years—it could have happened within your lifetime. There are those who say it was a bad thing—like Methodism, someone once declared—but I disagree. Cover him up again will you?’ I put the sun-worshipper back into his millennial darkness.
The drawing-room was behind the dining-room and had larger plate-glass windows that brought in all the light they could from a tiny paved garden bounded by a tall whitewashed wall. The room was papered a pale green and had a suite of white and gilt chairs, tables, and a square, spindly-legged sofa. A plumply cushioned modern armchair on one side of the fireplace looked at a portable television.
‘I’ll sit down, my dear,’ Charles decided, ‘It’s so tiring, talking.’ He took the comfortable seat.
‘Really, I should go,’ I said.
‘No, no—I don’t mean that. And look at this fine picture; and there’s more to show you.’
I sat on the fragile, entirely unupholstered sofa. ‘Well, you must say when you want me to go.’
‘It’s another of my icons.’ He looked from me to an oval portrait which hung above the fireplace. From its mandorla of gilded oak leaves a livery-clad negro turned towards us. A sky of darkening blue was sketched behind him, and the shadowy form of a palm-tree could just about be made out. He appeared to be an eighteenth-century colonial servant; evidently a favoured one. ‘It’s Bill Richmond,’ Charles explained.
No wiser, I stood up to look more closely at the pugnacious brown face with its thick lips, flat nose and short curly hair. It frowned ironically from the crimson and gilt of the high-necked footman’s coat. ‘I’m afraid he’s not as pretty as the King Akhnaten,’ I said.
‘He wasn’t in a pretty business, poppet. Well … he was a man with several lives: first of all he was a slave, then he got brought back to England by a General whatsaname in the War of Independence. He found him in Richmond, which is where his name comes from. Bill was one of those big strong lads we like so much, so the General trained him up as a boxer. He became quite well known for a while—along with Molineux, of course, that Byron sparred with. They were the first of their kind to break out, really—they were good fighters, so they made a figure in the world. Don’t he look kind of sad, though.’
‘Very sad. He don’t—doesn’t look much like a boxer, either.’
‘No. You see, he became a valet or what-have-you to some Lord. When he’d done with fighting he just carried on in service. Hence the livery. It makes for a good picture but a sad story. I’m sure the artist must have scaled him down, too. Byron says, when he met him later in life, that he was a great strong fellow. I’ll look it up for you some time. I believe he used to work in Molineux’s corner too.’
‘You don’t know who it’s by?’ But Charles seemed to have lapsed into reflection on the fate of Bill Richmond, and wore a nostalgic expression as though he had known him personally. As ever, I let it pass; I was learning not to worry about silences in the conversation. I was happy to ponder his treasured artifacts and the secret metamorphoses that they enshrined.
‘A last leg, and a question,’ he proposed. ‘Both rather special.’ I took his arm again and we went out into the hall. ‘Are you interested in boxing? That’s not the question, by the way.’
‘I suppose I am,’ I said. ‘I boxed a bit at school.’
‘Oho! You be careful. You don’t want to get that pretty nose broken.’
‘I don’t do it any more. Don’t worry.’
‘It’s been a great interest of mine. You’ll have to find out about all that side if you go into this.’
I looked at him humorously. ‘Go into what?’ He was unlocking a door under the shadow of the cantilevered stairs and groping for the light switch.
‘Come down here. Whoopsy! That’s it.’
In front of us a narrow staircase ran steeply down between unplastered rubble walls. It was a squeeze for us side by side, and I tended to be half a step behind, as he, one hand on the rope banister, committed himself with a heavy, lurching tread to each new stair.
‘This is the most remarkable thing,’ he said in a tone of enthusiasm. ‘Oh, he’ll like this, won’t he. There’s no other house in the world that has anything like this. Come along in, come along in.’ He took on for a moment the air of a horror-film villain, muttering gleeful asides while leading his victim into the trap. The stairs turned a corner, and we went down two or three more steps and under a rough wooden lintel into a cool, mildewy darkness.
Various fleeting ideas, tinged with alarm, went through my mind as I stood and brushed at my upper arm where it had rubbed against the chalky staircase wall. Then Charles found the second light switch and the darkness fled, revealing a squarish quite lofty cellar room. Though it contained nothing at all there were two remarkable things about it. The walls, which were plastered and painted cream, had a continuous frieze running round, which, being above head height, looked tastefully classical at a glance but, like the library over-door, were homosexual parodies when inspected close to. And the floor, uneven, pitted in places, was a mosaic.
We made our way along the walls on old drugget, through which the roughness of the floor obtruded, so that I was afraid of Charles stubbing his toe or even twisting his ankle. On the further side of the room he stopped. ‘You see it best from here,’ he explained. The colours were very subdued, the white almost a light brown, the reds rusty like dried blood. ‘Now, what do you make out?’
I thought about it; it was evidently a Roman pavement—a relic of some riverside palace or temple? I knew nothing about Roman London, had forgotten all but a handful of images from some illustrated lectures that Gavin had given several years before. In the top quarter was a large bearded face, with open mouth and the vestiges of neck and shoulders above a broad rent in the fabric where the tesserae merged into the restorer’s grey cement. To the left at the bottom stylised fish shapes, like an emblem of Pisces, could be made out, sliding past each other; and to the right, and above, the upper parts of two figures could be seen, the one in front turning to the one behind with open, choric mouth as they dissolved into the nothingness beyond the broken edge of the pavement.
‘Nobody is quite agreed on what the figures are,’ Charles conceded hospitably. ‘The chappie at the back could be Neptune but he could be the Thames god with an urn or whatever. Then these are little fishes, évidemment; and here are these young boys going swimming.’
I nodded. ‘Swimming, you think, do you? Isn’t it a bit hard to tell?’
‘Oh no, swimming. That’s the whole point. This is the floor of a swimming-bath, do you see. There used to be a great baths here, in the very early days. There were springs. The water soaked through the gravel and what-have-you until it hit the London clay and then out it came!’ He seemed delighted at this trick of geology, as if it had operated for his special benefit.
‘And what’s happened to it now?’
‘Stuck it in a pipe,’ he replied with breezy contempt. ‘Led it away. Buried it. Whatever. This little bit of the baths is all that’s left to show how all those lusty young Romans went leaping about. Imagine all those naked legionaries in here …’
I did not have to look far to do so. The scenes around the walls were as graphic an imagining as Petronius could have come up with. ‘I think your friend has given us his impression,’ I said.
‘Eh? Oh, Henderson’s pictures, yes.’ He laughed hollowly. ‘They’re a trifle embarrassing, I’m afraid—when eggheads come to look at the floor, you know. They think they’re going to get caught up in an orgy.’ We both looked up at the section nearest us, where a gleaming slave was towelling down his master’s buttocks. In front of them two mighty warriors were wrestling, with legs apart, and bull-like genitals swinging between. ‘Quite amusing though, too, n’est-ce pas?’ He looked down pointedly at my crotch. ‘They used to fairly turn me on. But needless to say it was a long time ago.’
I didn’t want to pursue this vein, and strolled reflectively along to where the two boys ran, as Charles saw it, towards the water. Or perhaps they were already standing in water, lapping round their long-eroded legs. They were intensely poignant. Seen close to, their curves were revealed as pinked, stepped edges, their moving forms made up of tiny, featureless squares. The boy in full-face had his mouth open in pleasure, or as an indication that he was speaking, but it also gave a strong impression of pain. It was at once too crude and too complex to be analysed properly. It reminded me of the face of Eve expelled from Paradise in Masaccio’s fresco. But at the same time it was not like it at all; it could have been a mask of pagan joy. The second young man, following closely behind, leaning forward as if he might indeed be wading through water, was in profile, and expressed nothing but attention to his fellow. What did he see there, I wondered—a mundane greeting or the ecstasy which I read into it? That it was merely a fragment compounded and rarefied its enigma.
Charles rested his hand on my shoulder as I bent over it. ‘Jolly fellows, aren’t they?’
‘I was thinking they were rather tragic.’
‘My dear, what I want to ask you is this.’ Feeling the physical weight of him on me, I was sure for a moment that he had some physical demand in mind. Would I let him take my clothes off, or kiss me. A don at Winchester had asked a friend of mine to masturbate in front of him, and though he didn’t, such things can harmlessly be done. I stood up straight and looked away over his shoulder. ‘Will you write about me?’
I caught his eye. ‘Well—how do you mean?’
He looked down, quite bashfully, at the bathers. ‘About my life, you know. The memoirs I’ve never written, as it were. I assume you can write?’
I felt touched, and relieved; I also felt that it was quite impossible. ‘I did once write two thousand words on Coade Stone garden ornaments.’
‘Oh, it would be much more than that.’
‘But I don’t know anything about you,’ was a second reservation.
He smiled. ‘I thought you might be interested to find out, as you say you haven’t anything else to do. I could pay you, of course,’ he added.
‘It’s not that, Charles,’ I said, resting my hand in turn on his shoulder. He looked almost tearful at having brought his idea to a head and facing possible disappointment.
‘Before you say anything else I want to ask you, take time to consider it. Because, though I say it myself, I think it would prove to interest you a very great deal. It wouldn’t be an immense amount of work, in a sense. I’ve got masses of papers. All my diaries and what-have-you since I was a child—you could have it all to read.’
It seemed at first a monstrous request, although I could see it was quite reasonable in a way. If he had had an interesting life, which it appeared he had, he could not possibly hope to write it up himself now. If I didn’t do it, nothing might come of it. It was partly because I idly disliked any intrusion into my constant leisure—my leisure itself having taken on an urgent, all-consuming quality—that I instinctively repelled the idea. But it was not, after all, impossible.
‘I’ll think about it, of course,’ I said non-committally. ‘Give me a few days.’
He was extremely grateful. And of course he would be able to see the shape and possibilities of the whole project, when I had barely begun to imagine what it might entail. Suddenly he looked drained again. ‘We’ll go upstairs, my dear, and then you’d better push off.’
We left the Romans in the dark, and climbed to the hall, where I handed my host over to a silently hostile Lewis. He held him there, almost by force, in the picture-lined gloom, and together they watched me fumble with the lock, and let myself out.
When I arrived in the changing-room Phil was drying: not the preliminary stand-up towelling but those final points to which he paid so much attention, and which were executed sitting down. Naked on the bench, legs wide apart, one foot raised in front of him, he rubbed his towel carefully between each toe, and patted powder (I looked, yes, Trouble for Men!) into the dry pink crevices. I approached him at an angle—noticed how his ass spread on the cheap deal of the bench, showing just a shadowy hint of hair between the buttocks, admired the band of muscle which had begun to harden above his hips, and coming round him and picking a locker not far away, glanced down at his cock and balls trailing on the edge of the seat. He looked up at me for a second with his dark, bright, expressionless eyes.
‘Hi, Phil.’
‘Hullo,’ he said, glancing up again. There was something more than usually inhibited about his manner, and his selfconsciousness came out in a flush. I was casual in the extreme, walked over to the mirror, looked with satisfaction at myself, and at him. Though I was ostensibly chasing a speck of dirt in my eye, my gaze searched the mirror in more depth, to find his attention flickering time and again towards me.
I came back and started undressing. I was so completely accustomed to undressing in changing-rooms that the act had lost that charge which it had for me elsewhere. Still, I felt a small warm amorous hum as I pulled off my shoes, tugged down my jeans and caught Phil’s fleeting inspection of my cock. I str
oked it with a single indolent gesture as if to set it free, and to present it to the boy who, with surely affected indifference, was sitting in front of me, pulling on his white ankle-socks.
‘How’s the hotel?’ I asked.
‘Oh, er, okay,’ he said, surprisingly unsurprised that I should know about it. ‘Hard work,’ he added.
‘What do you do in it?’
‘In the hotel, you mean?’
‘Indeed.’
‘Oh. Everything, at one time or another. At the moment I’m waiting.’
‘Mm, me too,’ I agreed. But he was clearly not a person that I could win over with collusive bad jokes. I feared for a second he might take it up literally; his ignoring it suggested that he had understood what I meant—but was incapable of indicating the fact. More silence followed, in which I felt that I had the upper hand. He was now standing and putting on his old-fashioned and manly white underpants.
‘Going to work out?’ he asked. It was his first unsolicited remark to me, and despite its consummate blandness it had the air of being the final fruit of a long internal quest for something to say.
‘That’s right: nothing heavy, you know.’ I was in shorts and singlet now, and tying up my white plimsolls. ‘I’m not aiming to have a beautiful physique like yours.’
Something masculine in him momentarily bridled, though the new pleasure of being called beautiful, which must have been the secret purpose of all his body-work, won over and he smiled with shy pride. ‘Do us a favour,’ he said. It was a moment at which a more experienced person could well have turned to admiration of my own, less ambitious, build.
As I prepared to go off into the gym I asked him, ‘What hotel is it you work in, actually?’
The Swimming-Pool Library Page 11