The Swimming-Pool Library

by Alan Hollinghurst

  The leader passed the broken bottle-end backwards and forwards in front of my eyes and under my nose. ‘I don’t think we like you,’ was his reasonable summary. The two of them pushed me down till I was almost kneeling in subjection, my legs twisted under me. Very carelessly, as if getting into bed or dropping into water, the boy on the bin slid forward, fell for a fraction of a second and hurled me over backwards, my head smacking against the concrete floor, a tearing pain in my knees, and a sack of rubbish toppling after him and bouncing down on us, sodden paper and peelings bursting over the ground. It was actually happening. It was actually happening to me.

  I twisted my whole body sideways to throw him off, and he did tumble half over. The other two were standing over me. The skinny boy, as if slyly taking a tag in Winchester Football, kicked me sharply in the stomach. I was tensed and fit for it, but could not help curling up. I saw two things: my beautiful new copy of The Flower Beneath the Foot had been jerked from my pocket in the scuffle. It was just in front of my eyes, standing on end, its pages fanned open. There was a peculiar silence of several seconds, in which I thought they might be calling it off. I read the words ‘perhaps I might find Harold …’ two or three times. That must have been enough to show how I cared for it. A boot slammed down on it, buckling the binding, and then again and again, grinding the pages into the warmsmelling spilt rubbish, scuffing to pulp the lachrymose saint on the wrapper. The second thing, as my head was jerked back by the hair, my cheek squashed and grazed on the ground, was a boot drawn back, very large and hard, then slamming towards my face.

  ‘But darling, I was going to give it to you.’

  James was terribly upset about the book. ‘I haven’t got one with the wrapper. It was probably worth £100—more, if it was as mint as you say.’ He sat beside me on the sofa, holding my hand. It was rather awful to see him so cheated of his treasure, his aghast look of cupidity and disbelief.

  ‘I’m afraid the dustmen will have cleared it away by now.’ I spoke thickly, as though I were very drunk. By a miracle I had only lost one tooth, but as it was right in the front it gave me the fatuous air of a defaced advertisement. My left cheek was purple, my mouth swollen and lopsided, and my left eye narrowed to a gluey slit in a bed of tenderest black, like an exposed mollusc. Over the bridge of my beautiful nose, broken and cut, an apache stripe of dressing was stuck.

  My James was so movingly practical over all this, not repelled, even slightly in his element, somehow vindicated. Deliberately or not, he kept making me laugh, which I could hardly bear, with my bludgeoned head, cracked ribs, and the bruises and contusions on my side and my legs. I had always had such good health—never a broken bone, never a filling, all the household ailments checked off in childhood—that James had had no occasion to prescribe to me for more than a hangover. Because we were always so private with each other he seemed almost to be play-acting when he sounded me and felt me expertly with his still mottled, childish hands, and took my pulse and gave me tiny, painkilling pills. I surrendered to his doctoring, since it resembled the special kindnesses and attentions of an intimate, done for our mutual pleasure. At the same time I knew he was judging me physically and professionally, despite his look of doleful pride at having such a dangerous friend.

  Phil came too, each afternoon, fresh from his lunchtime breakfast. Though still hot, the weather had turned rainy and bothersome, and he wore a blue showerproof jacket with a hood. He would look lightly flushed when he came in and took it off, and he concealed his initial dismay at my appearance with a preoccupied, evasive manner. For ten days or so I hardly went out and he sweetly brought me food—tinned soups, fruit juice, bread and milk—which he unpacked on the kitchen table for me to see. But I didn’t have much appetite. His catering, out of a baffled desire to make everything better, was over-generous, and I twice found myself throwing bread away—guilty about it as I never would be about throwing out overripe fruit, an unpicked carcass of partridge or grouse.

  Despite the pleasant passivity of being a patient, a condition ministered to as by some perverse kind of luxury, I was profoundly shocked by what had happened. I was constantly reliving the sudden sickening panic of it. James gave me things to help me sleep, which left me drowsy and dozing through the morning, running in and out of horrible, sour little dreams. I hated it when Phil had to leave for work, and longed for him to arrive the following day.

  James felt that my mother at least should be told, but I was fiercely against it. She was due in town shortly to restock the deep freeze with exquiseria unavailable in Hampshire, and to buy new clothes to fit her ever-expanding figure. When she rang to fix the routine lunch in Harrods (it had to be on the spot so as to minimise the loss of spending time) I told her I would be going to stay with Johnny Carver in Scotland that week—though in fact I had not seen Johnny since the day of his crassly youthful wedding two years before. My mother said I sounded odd, and I said I had just come from the dentist—a lie nearer to the truth.

  It took something of an effort to look at myself in the mirror which usually gave me such quick, uncomplicated pleasure. As I stood washing my face with extreme gentleness, even the fronds of the sponge seeming rough on my puffed and tender skin, I found it took that kind of mastery to meet my eye in the shaving-mirror that I had needed, as a child, to look at certain pictures not manifestly horrible in themselves but subtly repulsive or awesome through some accretion of mood. My grandfather had at Marden a portrait of his aunt, Lady Sybil Gossett, by Glyn Philpot. It showed an ivory-faced society woman, of the kind perplexingly referred to as ‘a famous beauty’, with bobbed fair hair and large, lugubrious eyes. She wore a misty pale blue frock, cut very low at the bosom, and sat back in a little chair beside a tub of mauve hyacinths. Her melancholy, so intense it seemed almost depraved, and the vulgar sensuality of the colour scheme, were deeply terrible to me as a child, and I could not bear being alone in the dining-room where she hung. It was a family joke that I was ‘snubbing Sybil’ by having always to eat with my back to her, and I was not unpleased to be the victim of so abnormal and aesthetic an emotion. At times I would steel myself and look. It was just like now, keeping my eyes fixed there until the spirit-lamp of rationality guttered, my gaze flicked away in fear.

  James had said humorously that I wouldn’t like having my beauty spoiled, and though it could all be remedied I found my injured appearance unbearable. My vanity, which was so constitutional that it had virtually ceased to be vanity, was shown up for what it was; I bit Phil’s head off when he blandly suggested that I didn’t look too bad. For a while I became the sort of person that someone like me would never look at.

  After a few days I took a turn around the block with Phil. Accustomed to daily exercise, I now experienced an aching restlessness which mingled with the pain of my bruises and bones. I couldn’t make my limbs comfortable, and had to get out. It was a bright, blowy tea-time. Already people were coming home, the traffic was building up at the lights. The pavements were normal, the passers-by had preoccupied, harmless expressions. Yet to me it was a glaring world, treacherous with lurking alarm. A universal violence had been disclosed to me, and I saw it everywhere—in the sudden scatter across the pavement of some quite small boys, in the brief mocking notice of me taken by a couple of telephone engineers in a parked van, in the dark glasses and cigarette-browned fingers of a man—German? Dutch?—who stopped us to ask directions. I understood for the first time the vulnerability of the old, unfortified by good luck or inexperience. The air was full of screams—the screams of children’s games which no one mistakes for real screams as they blow on the wind from street to street. If there were real screams, I found myself wondering, would it be possible to tell the difference, would anyone detect the timbre of tragedy? Or could an atrocity take place whose sonority was indistinguishable from the make-believe of youngsters, their boredom and scares? I had never screamed in my life. Even when the three boys had laid into me I had uttered only formal little oaths, ‘Christ’, ‘God’
and ‘Oh no’.

  There was a lot of time to fill, but I hardly did anything useful. Mainly I closed the curtains and watched Wimbledon, alternately alerted by a breathtaking rally and soothed by the drowsy putterings of Dan Maskell, like some rich stew left bubbling all day long over a low flame. James brought me videos from the rental shop, as well—not the bath-house freak-shows he usually offered, but charming old films to make me feel better. On his day off—which was drizzly, the covers were on at the Centre Court—we sat and watched The Importance of Being Earnest together. Michael Redgrave and Michael Denison were such bliss, so brittle and yet resilient, so utterly groomed and frivolous, dancing about whistling ‘La donna è mobile’ … Afterwards James told me his theory about Bunbury and burying buns, and how earnest was a codeword for gay, and it was really The Importance of Being Uranist. I had heard it all before, but I could never quite remember it.

  Charles’s books were lying around, of course, and James picked them up and showed curiosity enough to make me feel ashamed that I was not getting on with them. ‘What’s it all like?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Rather wonderful in parts—when he’s having adventures and things. Other bits are rather—earnest.’

  ‘You must have read all of it by now.’

  ‘Good God no. There’s so much, it rather puts one off. And then he’s so frightfully keen about it himself, and regards it all as a big treat for me. I’ve got to try and be honest about it.’

  James looked at me sceptically. ‘You must show me the bit about R.F.,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, that is good. Parts of it are—he must have put a lot of care into it. There are some rather Bridesheady bits about Oxford—though somewhat more candid than that deplorable novel. They would be good in a book. But a lot of the stuff in the Sudan is very routine—and he has this trying kind of nature-worship thing about blacks. He has only to see the back of a black hand or the curl of a black lip and he’s off.’

  ‘I thought you were rather the same.’

  ‘Well, up to a point—but I don’t go writing about it in this secret, religious kind of way. There’s no indication that old Charlie ever actually got it together with any of these tribesmen, bearers, and so on.’

  ‘I think you’re going to have to brush up on one or two things, dear. I mean, you could hardly have the District Commissioner riding round on his camel rogering the subject people, could you? I know that’s what you would have done, but it would really have been rather frowned on in the Political Service.’

  I smiled in gap-toothed, humorous shame. ‘I haven’t been very systematic about it,’ I further confessed. ‘I’ve read bits here and there—just to see if I like it, if I think I can do it. The idea of writing a whole great big book—it’s too ghastly. Of course,’ I added, ‘I haven’t got everything here. The diaries stop, I think about 1950.’

  ‘Does he still keep one, do you suppose?’

  ‘I don’t know. He could do. He’s full of energy, even though he’s so old and not, strictly speaking, all there.’

  ‘He’s probably writing about you now—the peaches and cream of your complexion—soon to be restored—the well-knit frame.’ I aimed a swipe at him with a cushion, and then clutched at my ribs. ‘The subject describing his biographer … It all gets rather complicated and modern,’ he said, frowning and getting up to go.

  As usual he had been a corrective, and when Phil turned up later he found me aloof with a volume of the diaries, and hardly interested in his anecdotes about Pino and the hotel lift, and how there was a gay couple staying who had made a pass at him. He unpacked some veal, some ripe peaches, some wine and more bread. He seemed to believe in bread in some literal way as the staff of life.

  I watched him moving about, doing a little tidying, neatly stacking up Charles’s tumbled notebooks. For all his compact, self-contained ordinariness he was a shape-changer. He was exercising his ability to make himself bigger, stronger, and more beautiful. I could still summon up one image of him when he first came to the Corry—standard material, a bit overweight, uncommunicative. Now he grew better week by week. His whole gait was changing as his thighs became more massive, rubbing together as he walked and so pushing his knees apart and turning his toes slightly in. As a result his ass, even more than before, seemed to be proffered, thrust out ingenuously towards the admiring hand. Whilst I was Impotens he was a great consolation just to hold and touch—like those exhibitions of sculpture that are put on for the handicapped. Instead of the normal brutal rush our lovemaking was tentative and respectful—it was as if we were both of us afflicted by some cruel, slowing illness that made us think everything out from scratch.

  ‘Still reading those books?’ he said, with a hint of reserve, as he came and sat on the floor by my chair and activated the remote control of the TV. I don’t think he really knew what the books were, and looked on them as some tiresome academic pursuit to which I was snobbishly attached.

  ‘There’s no tennis,’ I said, as the still of the court welled up in the screen, accompanied by optimistic light music.

  ‘Do you fancy any of the tennis players?’ he asked.

  ‘I think tennis the least erotic of all sports,’ I lied firmly, ‘marbles and pigeon-fancying not excluded. Please turn it off.’

  He fairly jabbed down the button, and I could see him forcing back a reasonable riposte and remembering to be tolerant of me. He sat with his head bowed, until I reached down and stroked the side of his neck, pulling his chin back, and running my fingers over his face. When my palm covered his mouth, he kissed it slightly, and I was perhaps forgiven. ‘No telly today,’ I said. ‘I’m going to read to you. Please excuse my temporary lisp. Our hero is just arriving at Port Said, with him three rather keen young men, Harrap, Fryer and, um, Stearn; all are wearing panama hats and too many clothes. The date, September 12, 1923.’

  We were all jolly stirred, though we showed it in different ways. Harrap was particularly struck, & gasped ‘I say, I say’ over & over, taking his hat off & then prudently putting it back on again. I imagine he’ll say ‘I say, I say’ quite a lot more as Africa offers up its wonders. Not that the landfall itself is in the least remarkable: we had shuffled along in & out of sight of land for the last day or more, but it gave nothing of itself away: a certain amount of traffic evidently going in & out of Alex, & smallish freighters passing near enough for us to see our first Africans. Their lack of any sense of occasion was infinitely touching & humbling. Here was your fellah at his changeless labours—and us Englishmen, coming to rule & to help, so young & calm. I was in the most delirious mixture of silliness & solemnity, & as we approached the entrance to the Canal, & saw the cranes on the docks, the frankly undistinguished buildings, soldiers too as we drew closer, & crowds in djellabas somehow indifferent & yet in a flurry at our arrival, Oxford and England and Poppy seemed almost giddily remote.

  The heat was rocketing up all the time of course, & when the ship finally stopped moving, & we stood along the rail disdaining to wave at the children & waiting for the gangway to be lowered, it slammed in our faces for the first time. We had 12 hours here while refuelling took place, and I was so much looking forward to it that I cd hardly bring myself to go ashore, & had to think hard about deadly serious things to keep myself from grinning like a fool as I went at a canter down the virtually perpendicular gangplank & shot into the melee of people. I longed to look at them & shake their outstretched, begging, greeting hands, instead of marching implacably through, as we had to.

  Custom dictated that we go to Simon Artz’s emporium to buy our sola topis; Fryer and I stood wearing them in front of a huge dim mirror, which made us look very historic, and rather silly. I found mine uncomfortable, & was afraid it suddenly drew all the character out of my face & turned me into just another hard-hatted, heavy-handed empire-builder.

  I wandered alone through the shop, from the clothing department, which is like a designated school outfitters, stocked with the kit which Europeans will need for the term
, through rooms with shelves of rolled & folded cloth, with grubby-suited Arab attendants climbing up tapering ladders to get down fabrics—printed cotton mostly—from the top. Occasional lethargic fans stirred the air. There seemed to be no windows, & beyond irregular pools of electric light lay mysterious, abundant semidarkness. I came to a sort of dead end, a tall, stuffy place like an airing cupboard, a store-room perhaps, with a young boy barefoot, climbing up & down the shelves, checking stock, a pressure-lamp in his raised hand, his black face concentrating, dazzling in the plane of light that he swung about him. I stayed & watched, mesmerised, feeling that nothing else mattered. Down he clambered, his supple child’s body comically bursting out of his khaki cotton uniform. When he saw me he smiled. I smiled back—though I was at the very edge of the field of light, & perhaps he cd not really see me. He kept on smiling—an immense, gentle, jolly smile—not yet a vendor’s smile, nothing calculating in it. He was a pure Negro, from far south evidently, like the people we are going to, quite different from the crossbred scamps who haunt the quays. I turned & went back, & as I did so he called out, ‘Welcome Port Said, m’sieur’—in a heartbreaking voice, its boy’s clarity just cracking into manhood.

  I was inordinately, unaccountably moved by this—except that I knew it for what it was, a profound call of my nature, answered first at school by Webster, muffled, followed obscurely but inexorably since. Was it merely lust? Was it only baffled desire? I knew again, as I had known when a child myself, confronting a man for the first time, that paradox of admiration, of loss of self, of dedication … call it what you will. Back in the sunshine—fiercely hot now, so that I at once put on my topi, & walked out conscious of some inner effort of self-effacement, of humility wrestling with grandeur & compassion—the scamps, repelled from Simon Artz’s door by a fearsome old Arab with a peaked cap and a cane, flocked about me, some pushy & assertive but others festive and friendly, trying to take me by the hand. I had the absurd vision of myself as a doting schoolmaster leading off his charges on some special treat, & for the first time I had to assert myself, strike out airily with my hand to repel the little demons. Then I felt childlike myself, very pink & white, laughable in my indignation, & my authority much too big for me, as if bought in anticipation of my ‘growing into it’.