Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

‘I do have quite a lot of time for it,’ I conceded; then, fearing he might think my tone was rude, I enlarged a figure of speech into an observation. ‘I mean, I don’t have a job, and I have plenty of time to go to galleries and look at pictures.’

‘You’re not married or anything are you?’

‘No, nothing,’ I assured him.

‘Too young, I know. You’ve been up to university, of course?’

‘I was at Oxford, yes-at Corpus-reading History.’

He drank this in with some more gin. ‘Do you like girls at all?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I like them quite a lot really,’ I insisted.

‘There are chaps who don’t care for them, you know. Simply can’t abide them. Can’t stand the sight of them, their titties and their big sit-upons, even the smell of them.’ He looked down the room authoritatively to where Percy was dispensing Sanatogen to a striking likeness of the older Gladstone. ‘Andrews, for instance, cannot tolerate them.’

It took me a moment to work this out. ‘In the gym?’ I said. ‘Yes, I’m not surprised-he seems very much a man’s man. You must know Andrews then,’ I lamely concluded. But I had lost my host already; I saw that he attacked questions with excitement but abandoned them within seconds. Or perhaps they abandoned him.

‘If you’ll give me a hand I do think we might go through now, so that we can get a good seat. They’re like hyenas here. They eat everything up if you’re not in there quick.’ I lifted one of his elbows as he pushed himself up with the other, his whole frame shaking with the effort. ‘Let’s have a look at the Library,’ he said, as if speaking to someone who was very deaf, winking at me in a musical-comedy way. ‘That’ll fool them,’ he explained, in a voice only slightly quieter. Then, returning the stare of a nonagenarian wild-dog in the chair nearest the door, ‘We have a history of self-abuse in duodecimo-but it’s probably out. ’

The dining-room was a far finer place. There was a long collegiate table in the middle, and smaller tables, set for two or four, allowed for more private talk around the walls. Contemporary copies of Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress hung in a double rank opposite the windows, and the famous full-length Batoni of Sir Humphry Clay, Roman statuary behind him and garlands of dead game at his feet, dominated the end wall. Beneath it the dining-room staff were arranging plates, tureens and cheeses at an immense funerary sideboard. The ceiling had an Adamish rosette at its centre, and from it hung a fairly elaborate crystal chandelier which had been conspicuously converted to electricity. Yet despite the tarnished brilliance of the room, some residual public-school thing, quintessential to Clubs, infected the atmosphere. The air retained a smell of cabbage and bad cooking that made me apprehensive about lunch.

‘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.’