Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

‘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 said. ‘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.

I did so regret it was the Central Line I used most. I couldn’t get any kind of purchase on it. It had neither the old-fashioned openair quality of the District Line, where rain misted the tracks as one waited, nor the grimy profundity of the Northern Line, nor the Piccadilly’s ingenious, civilised connexiveness. For much of its length it was a great bleak drain, and though some of its stops-Holland Park, St Paul’s, Bethnal Green-were historic enough, they were offset on my daily journeys by the ringing emptiness of Lancaster Gate and Marble Arch, and the trash and racket of Tottenham Court Road, where I got out. Somewhere, I knew, the line had its ghost stations, but I had given up looking out for their unlit platforms and perhaps, in a flash from the rails, the signboards and good-humoured advertisements of an abandoned decade.

I had been waiting now at Holland Park for a long time. I was far too familiar with its typical social mix: girls with pearls and pink stockings, some arrogant-looking Italian youths and a grand, pouchy old couple were also waiting, though the train they would get into would be quite heavily peopled with blacks and Indians coming in from Acton to the West End. That was the saving grace of the Central Line, the way that beyond Shepherd’s Bush and Liverpool Street, it veered off at either end to outlying towns to the north. I stood for a minute or more with my toes over the platform’s edge, looking down into the concrete gully where a whole family of nervous, sooty little mice shot back and forth as if themselves operated by electricity. Then, thinking again about the abolished stations at the British Museum and Wood Green, I wandered along and looked, tourist-like, at the Underground map. It was a clever piece of work, all the lines being made to run either up and down, from left to right, or at forty-five degrees, so that the whole thing became a set of dissolving and interpenetrating parallelograms. It was perhaps only of that very stretch of the Central Line which I always travelled that its fastidious rectilinearity gave a true picture: from Shepherd’s Bush to Liverpool Street the line had that Roman straightness which I so admired above ground and which below contributed to the great speed the trains sometimes got up. In rush-hour congestion though, the trains collected behind each other, and there would be long, numbing waits in the tunnels. Then I hated the Underground.

My fondness for it was anyway somewhat forced, and my concern with the smaller details of its history and performance had been worked up artificially to give it some faint aesthetic interest after I had been banned from driving. (Unhappily, I had had a few too many glasses of Pimm’s when I was caught by my blind spot, twitching out to overtake and smacking into a little old car that was trundling past me, invisible in either of my mirrors… My mother was now using my Lancia for her forays into Fordingbridge and for her occasional journeys up to London from the ranch in Hants.) So I made the best of the Tube, and found it often sexy and strange, like a gigantic game of chance, in which one got jammed up against many queer kinds of person. Or it was a sort of Edward Burra scene, all hats and buttocks and seaside postcard lewdery. Whatever, one always had to try and see the potential in it.