The Swimming-Pool Library

by Alan Hollinghurst

‘And I also wanted to find out how you were.’

  After a silence he said: ‘Are you coming to see me again?’

  ‘Of course, I’d love to—there’s so much I want to talk to you about.’

  ‘Don’t come tomorrow.’

  ‘No, all right.’

  ‘You’re pretty interested in my story, then, are you?’ he said with a chuckle. ‘Quite a tale, isn’t it?’

  ‘It may be too much of a tale for me to tell …’ I said with pussyfooting kindness.

  ‘My dear, I think it would be a good thing,’ Charles pursued as if he had not heard (and perhaps he hadn’t), ‘if you went down to Stepney on Friday. Have a little parley with old Shillibeer at the Limehouse Boys’ Club. Friday’s the big night—it would save me telling you … so much. It’s a seven o’clock start, of course.’

  ‘Er—yes, all right …’ I said.

  ‘And come and see me at the weekend? It’s lonely as bloody hell here’ (he whispered the last three words as if there had been ladies present). ‘My new man will have to meet you …’ Then the line went dead. He had simply, impractically, absent-mindedly, hung up.

  I lay back on my bed and thought about the many lives of Charles Nantwich—the schoolboy discovering black beauty, the frivolous undergraduate beagling, drinking and ragging, the dreaming District Commissioner in the Nuba Hills, the old man who had forgotten the functions and protocol of the telephone.

  When I suggested an evening in Limehouse to Phil he was less than enthusiastic. ‘Why don’t you go?’ he said.

  ‘I am going.’

  ‘Oh, right. I think I’ll stay in, though.’ He looked worried by the idea. ‘I’d have to get back here to be on duty—so I couldn’t drink or anything.’

  We were in his little attic room at the hotel again, and he licked me and fiddled with my nipples as though to make me forget that this fractional disobedience was taking place.

  ‘I probably won’t be there very long.’ I said. Although we had been together a lot in the previous week I had privately told him nothing about the Nantwich affair. ‘I’ve just got to talk to some old man about something—I don’t imagine there’ll be much to it.’

  Phil stayed silent. It would soon be time for him to go to work, and I felt him already preparing to abstract himself. Tonight this distancing gave me a little qualm, and as he sat up to get dressed I pushed him back roughly and fucked him hard and fast, his asshole still tacky with spunk and grease from our slower, longer lovemaking just before. As he cleaned up afterwards and looked out his laundered clothes there was still a reserve in his manner, nothing so strong as resentment, but the first suggestion of an independence which it was only dignified that I should allow. All the same I felt unhappy. While he sat on the end of the bed with his back turned to me and pulled on his socks, I looked baffledly at his compact physique. Then he was sitting very still and I caught his eye in the gloomy recess of the dressing-table mirror.

  ‘Man, I really do love you,’ he said, both as if it were a discovery and to reassure me and chide me for being silly just because he didn’t want to go on a journey to Limehouse (a journey whose only conceivable interest for him would have been that of being with me). To show goodwill he came back upstairs a few minutes after leaving and quite startled me as I stood naked looking out at the stars. He had brought me, under cover of Room Service, a tray with a smoked salmon sandwich and a glass of Drambuie—things which hardly went together, but which had touchingly been chosen for their luxuriousness.

  The following evening, after an early swim, I went on east on the Central Line. The City had already evacuated, and though the train was crowded to Liverpool Street there was only a scattering of us left for Bethnal Green, Mile End and beyond. All the other people in my car—Indian women with carrier-bags, some beery labourers, a beautiful black boy in a track-suit—looked tired and habituated. When I got out at Mile End, though, other passengers got on, residents of an unknown area who used the Underground, just as I did, as a local service, commuting and shopping within the suburbs and rarely if ever going to the West End, which I visited daily. I felt more competent for my mobility, but also vaguely abashed as I came out into the unimpressionable streets of this strange neighbourhood.

  I was a touch nervous as well: it was my first independent research into Charles’s life and finding myself doing it I also found myself precipitately involved in the project. I had brought a notebook with me on which I had even written ‘Nantwich’ in bold letters. But I had no idea what I was going to write in it, who ‘old Shillibeer’ was or what to expect from him. I remembered seeing a letter addressed to him at Charles’s house, the unusual name. It was a Dickensian or Arnold Bennettish sort of name, with a patina of East End commerce and grime to it. It had a portly, self-made propriety about it as well as a coarse, bibulous slur. I rehearsed things I might say to him, and anticipated hostility or dislike.

  And then coming out this far—though only this far—symbolised for me uncomfortably how I had fallen short in helping Arthur. It was only a few weeks since his disappearance and I had done nothing about him and already was so absorbed in someone else that I didn’t even think of him for days at a stretch. There was nothing I could do, of course. I didn’t know where he lived, and I could hardly report the disappearance of a murderer to the police. Saying that to myself gave me a shock, made me flush and my heart race. The awful fact, which I had grown domestically used to while we were together, struck me badly when I came on it suddenly, from some way off. It was as if, sweeping a distant view with binoculars, I glimpsed the violent act and came back to it hurriedly, sharpening the focus with trembling hands.

  I had left far too much time for my journey to the Boys’ Club and dreading to arrive conspicuously early I walked by on the other side of the street, crossed over Commercial Road and went briskly along to St Anne’s church, whose bizarre and gigantic tower I had seen from the distance. The day had grown heavier as it grew older, and the early evening light was neutral and overcast as I crossed the churchyard. The leaning birches along the path gathered a further gloom to them, and I gazed up through their branches at the giant uprearing of masonry beyond.

  A slight noise like a snapped stick made me look sideways and peer at where, under the young trees, a youth was sitting on one of the table-tombs, elbows on knees, flicking and stripping a long twig in his hands. I could make out no expression, and barely hesitated in my walk, continuing to the north door, which I had no doubt would be locked, and then, with affected nonchalance such as I would have shown equally under the gaze of a mugger or a pick-up, sauntered up the half-open fan of steps beneath the tower, my absorption in its weight-lifting baroque disturbed and strained by my awareness of the boy.

  There is always that question, which can only be answered by instinct, of what to do about strangers. Leading my life the way I did, it was strangers who by their very strangeness quickened my pulse and made me feel I was alive—that and the irrational sense of absolute security that came from the conspiracy of sex with men I had never seen before and might never see again. Yet those daring instincts were by no means infallible: their exhilaration was sharpened by the courted risk of rejection, misunderstanding, abuse.

  The church was thoroughly locked and the west door, with fine grit and year-old leaves driven against it, was clearly never used. The abandoned mood, and the mental image I had of the vast, dusky interior, made the church somehow repugnant to me, monolithic, full of dead sensibility. I turned and casually took in the figure sitting under the trees. It was hard to see, but I had the feeling he was looking at me, picking at the bark on the stick in his hands in an indolent, time-wasting way. I trotted down the steps and turned back across the churchyard.

  When I got close to him, he was looking around as if unaware of me, as it might be waiting for his mates to show up. But the solitude of the churchyard made this altogether unlikely—it was not a thoroughfare, but a sequestered rendezvous. On the other hand, if he was on the lookout
for sex, he had chosen a spot where he might have gone unseen all evening. There was something desolate and adolescent about his singleness, and I was not surprised to see that he was only sixteen or so. He did not meet my gaze as I walked past him, but when I was just beyond he said, in a pure Cockney voice, ‘’Ere, got a light?’

  It was faintly incredible too to have this oldest of pick-up questions put to me, though I suppose all techniques have their freshness and wit when one is very young. I span round with a welcoming grin. ‘No, sorry,’ I said.

  He met my smile with a shy blue gaze. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I ain’t got no fags.’

  This could have been a calculated snub, expressed in the strange symbolic style of the streets. Still, I kept on grinning, to show I didn’t mind, and so perhaps to stir his worse contempt. He looked away, and I took in his appearance: tight old jeans, a blue T-shirt with a horizontal pink stripe running under the arms, baseball boots; a slender build, a roundish face touched with acne about the mouth, heavy dark blond hair, naturally oily, swinging forward like that of a Sixties model. I scuffed around in the dry, unmown grass beside him, my cock lurching into a hard-on which he could hardly fail to notice. His own genitals were pinched up tight in the crotch of his jeans, and he squeezed the swelling outline of his cock with the palm of his hand.

  ‘Live round ’ere, do you?’ he said, squinting up at me provocatively and sarcastically. I smiled again and shook my head. ‘Thought not,’ he said, looking away and snapping the stick up now in his hands. My uneasy imagination saw in this some covert allusion to ‘faggot’. Still, I was determined to have him. It was partly the insolent way he sat and spoke, his overvaluing of his own charms itself making him more sexy. But it was also his youth, and the boredom and randiness of the mid-teens, that got me going. It brought back to me the time, like the erotomaniac nights and days that Charles evoked in his diary, when life was all hanging about and fantasy. It was the mood of long car journeys through France with my mother map-reading for my father, whilst Philippa and I fought or slept in the back seat and I dreamt of men. Then we would arrive at some cathedral town and I would climb out of the car attempting to master an overwhelming erection. During the trip I was drawn compulsively to public lavatories where the drawings and graffiti confirmed my sex-obsessed but impractical view of things, their mystery heightened by repeated but incomprehensible words of argot. As our family group strolled through the square in the evening, dressed in beautiful light clothes, I would drag behind, my gaze searching out the bulging flies of the lads gathered round the war memorial, the clenching buttocks of the boys who slammed the pinball machines just inside the doorways of bars.

  I didn’t have much time. ‘Do you?’ I said.

  He stood up and began to wander off. ‘Eh?’

  ‘Live round here …’

  ‘What d’you think?’ he said. He had this tight, mean, logical talk, highly defensive and dull. I followed him, feeling more and more at a disadvantage—old, too, as people over twenty are to their juniors. He reached the low wall by the road, and turned round, stroking the outline of his quite big dick. Just along the street people were waiting at a bus-stop. It was no place for a scene. I came up close to him and put my hand on his shoulder, and he smiled in a way that for the first time revealed his nervousness.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, seizing this advantage. But immediately he closed down again; it was with studied shrewdness that he said:

  ‘How much money ’ave you got, then?’

  I nodded my head and chuckled ironically—the only way was to behave like him. ‘Just enough for myself,’ I said.

  ‘ ’sthat so? Well you’ll need a lot more than that if you want a nice bit of bum round ’ere’—almost in a whisper, as if trying to keep the great bargain he was offering me a secret from the group at the bus-stop.

  I’d had enough. I dropped my hand, half-turned and jumped over the wall. ‘Bye-bye,’ he called cheerily as I waited to cross the road—and chose a bad moment that meant I had to run; a van honked at me. I felt the boy’s absolutely unfriendly eyes on me, and annoyance and humiliation, and, as I turned up the road to the Club, conflicting urges to dismiss him as rubbish and to run back and pay whatever he wanted. I saw myself pissing over him, jamming my cock down his throat, forcing my fingers up his ass—disturbing images with which to enter a Boy’s Club. I resented his ability to resist me, and that I had no power over someone so young.

  The Club building must formerly have been a Nonconformist chapel. The bulk of it was built of a rebarbative grey stone, with mean pointed windows; tacked on in front and at the side were modern extensions in red brick, with metal-framed windows (the frosted glass spoke of changing-rooms) and peeling white trim. It was, as Charles had said, a big night, and the lino-tiled hallway was full of family people—rather got up, I suspected: mothers with arms crossed anxiously under their bosoms, and fathers showing the suppressed pride of parents at a speech-day. Many youngsters were rushing about, and the sense of private occasion made me feel more than ever out of place. I went over to the glass-fronted NoBos and communed for a second with my reflection before scanning the lists of activities, notices about excursions, and team photographs, routinely seeking out the faces of pretty boys (of which there were several) and those inevitable glimpses of underwear up the rucked short-legs of seated footballers. Then, in the next frame, there was a larger notice, printed in an old-fashioned and distinguished way, announcing that on this very day, in contests of three rounds each, the London and Home Counties Boys’ Club Boxing Championship would be decided, and the winning team presented with ‘the Nantwich Cup’.

  I felt how slow and incurious I had been now that I saw this evidence of Charles’s further influence and philanthropy. Of course he hadn’t sent me all this way merely to speak to the mysterious Shillibeer; I was amused and impressed that there was more to it, as well as getting the uneasy feeling that Charles was orchestrating his revelations with some expertise. I became convinced that when the line had gone dead two nights before it was a deliberate foreclosure on his part, and that back in the City he would now be nodding expectantly. Coming hard upon the grotesque and momentary episode in the churchyard it made me feel just a little out of control. I heard applause and a voice raised beyond the swinging green doors into the hall. I went in, trying to look as if I knew what to expect.

  The ring was raised in the middle of the room, which still had its galleries on three sides, supported on thick wooden pillars. Seating rose in scaffolded tiers around the ring, leaving a kind of ambulatory under the galleries, through which I could walk almost unnoticed. Up above, too, the place was packed, and I hoped I would be allowed to drift around rather than getting penned in a seat for the evening. I loitered in one of the aisles, leaning against the stepped edge of the temporary arena. The man whose feet were by my elbow leant over and said, ‘You want a seat?’—making accommodating gestures and showing how he and his party could squeeze up. But I declined. The dinner-jacketed M C completed his announcement and stepped down, a balloon-bellied referee in white shirt and trousers that lacked any visible means of support squeezed between the ropes, and a few moments later the first couple of lads sprang into the ring.

  There’s something about boxing which always moves me, although I know it is the lowest of sports, degrading the spectator as much as the fighter. For all its brutality, and the danger of those blows to the head, those upward twisting punches that are so tellingly called cuts and which tear the fronds of the brain known as the substantia nigra, an inner damage more terrible than that of pouchy, sewn-up eyes, mangled ears and flattened noses, it has about it a quality that I would not be the first to call noble.

  Boys’ boxing, of course, is not nearly so awful. The bouts are short, the refereeing paternal and attentive. Any moderately heavy punch is followed by a standing count, and fights are swiftly brought to an end if there are signs of stunning or bleeding. It maintains too, in some ideal, Greek way, an ethos of sport rat
her than violence. In the hall tonight the Limehouse supporters far outnumbered the St Albans visitors—and the place was small enough for individual voices shouting their encouragement to be heard, just as they might have been decades before in hymns or prayers in the same building. But when the fights were over, and the referee held the boys’ huge gloved hands in his smaller fingers, jerking aloft the winner’s arm as the result was announced, there was a touching mood of friendship, the boys embracing, patting each other clumsily with their upholstered fists, clasping the hands of the cutmen and the trainers in their gentle paws.

  In the first fight, between two fourteen-year-olds, the Limehouse youngster had started well, but it was a sloppy affair, the St Albans boy always retreating to the ropes and clinching with his opponent rather than putting up a fight. In the second break I strolled off round the back and came in again on the side where the judges’ table was, just below the ringside. A lean sixty-year-old man, with no forehead and grey pointed sideburns that curved across his cheeks like a Roman helmet, was standing talking with some parents in the audience. When he turned round I saw the words ‘Limehouse Boys’ Club’ on the back of his sweatshirt. Just as the bell rang I said, ‘Excuse me, can you tell me where I can find Mr Shillibeer?’ He looked at me stonily, not out of aggression but out of slowness.

  ‘Bill? Yeah, he’s out the back somewhere, I should say. Try over there, through the blue door. Come on, Sean, let ’im ’ave it,’ switching without notice to the really important matter and showing in his wild singlemindedness that he had already forgotten me.

  It seemed a foregone conclusion, anyway, and as the sporadic engagements of the final round began I slipped away and made for the blue door. It was a fire door, and had a window of wired glass in it, through which I saw, as I pushed it open, two figures approaching down a corridor: a boy in pumps, singlet, shorts and gloves, and the massive, stocky figure of Bill Shillibeer—Bill, that is to say, who had befriended me years before at the Corry, and whose courteous adoration of Phil I had been privy to over the last few months.