Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

I went into the bedroom and rang Philippa. A maid, Spanish by the sound of her, answered the phone; they had a fast turnover of staff, and if I had been Philippa I would have been led by now to ponder why. Almost immediately she came through from another extension.

‘Hello, who is this?’

‘Philippa, it’s me, I’ve got Roops here.’

‘Will, what the hell do you think you’re playing at? Can’t you imagine how worried I’ve been?’

‘I thought you would be-that’s really why I’m phoning…’

‘Is he all right? What’s been going on?’

‘I gather he ran away. Didn’t you see his message?’

‘Of course not, Will, don’t be so bloody silly. He doesn’t leave messages. He’s six years old.’

‘I’m sure I left messages when I was six and I wasn’t nearly so clever as Rupert.’

‘Will, we are talking about my baby.’ (I suppressed recall of the song of that name by the Four Tops.) ‘Look, I’m coming round straight away.’

‘OK. Or give it a minute or two. We haven’t really had a chance for a little chat yet.’ I was aware that Rupert had entered the room.

‘Are you talking to Mummy?’ he said, with a solemn look on his face. I nodded as I carried on listening to Philippa, and winked at him. I sat on the edge of the bed and he came and leant beside me and slipped his arm around my back.

‘You can have a little chat with him any time you like,’ his mother asserted. ‘It’s gone nine o’clock-it’s way past his bedtime. We were supposed to be going to the Salmons for supper-I had to ring and say there was this crisis, we couldn’t come. It’s just ruined everything.’

‘I’ll bring him over if you like,’ I offered, the problem of Arthur and visitors suddenly surfacing in my mind.

‘No, that would take far too long. I’ll come in the car.’ She put down the receiver as I was about to make another suggestion.

‘Is Mummy coming round here?’ asked Rupert, his expression an intriguing transition between petulance and relief.

‘She’ll be round in a minute,’ I confirmed. And it would not be very much more than that. I walked abstractedly towards the door. He trotted round, looking up at me.

‘Was she frightfully cross?’ he asked.

‘I’m afraid she was a bit, old chap.’ I made a plan. ‘Look, you can keep a secret, can’t you?’

‘Of course I can,’ he said, assuming a very responsible air.

‘Well, look. What time was it when you left home?’

‘About six o’clock.’

‘And what did you do then?’

‘First of all I went for a walk. A really long walk, actually, up that very steep path, you know-where the homosexuals go.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ I muttered.

‘And then down to the bottom where we went roller-skating that time. And then all the way round to the top again. And then’ (he raised his arm in the air to designate the main thrust of his campaign) ‘all the way down here. I rang the bell for quite some time, but I could see there was a light on, and at last that African boy came down.’

‘Did you tell him who you were?’

‘Naturally. I told him I had to come in and wait for you.’

‘Well the thing is, love, that that African chap, wants us to keep it a secret that he’s here. So what we’re going to do is hide him away when Mummy comes round, and pretend we’ve never seen him. All right?’

‘Quite all right by me,’ Rupert said. ‘Has he done something wrong, then?’

‘No, no,’ I laughed naturally. ‘But he doesn’t want his mother to know he’s here-just like you, really. So if we don’t tell anybody at all, then she’ll never find out.’

‘Good,’ said Rupert. He was clearly dissatisfied.

We went into the sitting-room. ‘I think it would be better if you stayed in the bedroom, darling,’ I said to Arthur. ‘This child’s mother is coming round. We’ve agreed to keep it all a secret.’ He left the room directly, and I heard him shut the bedroom door. ‘I expect Mummy will be here any moment,’ I said.

My nephew was determined and casual. ‘Can we go on looking at the pictures?’ he asked.

‘All right,’ I agreed. Then another thought struck me. ‘How long were you here before I arrived?’

‘I was here for about twenty minutes-before you arrived.’

‘Perhaps best to pretend to Mummy that I found you on the doorstep. Otherwise she’ll wonder how you got in-or why I didn’t ring her sooner.’

He looked at his large, rather adult watch. ‘Yes, that’s fine,’ he said. We sat down side by side, and I lifted the album on to my knee. It was one of a set in which my grandfather had had all his loose and various collection of snaps, taken over a long life, mounted. He had had more volumes bound than he needed and gave one to me. It had the generous proportions of an Edwardian album, many, many broad dark grey pages, tied in with thick silk cords which knotted at the edge outside, the whole protected with weighty boards covered with green leather, tooled with flowers around the border, and with a pompous but impressive ‘B’ beneath a coronet in the centre.

‘How far did you get?’ I asked, offering to open it halfway through.

‘Let’s start again,’ Rupert urged. We’d once spent an hour looking through this album together, and I had had the impression that he was committing it to memory, working out the connections. It was a sort of book of life to him, and I was the authoritative expounder of its text.

The early part was fairly random, this scion of the family photograph collection being merely the duplicates and duds. There was me with a cap and a brace on my teeth, at my tother; there were Philippa and I in our bathing costumes in Brittany (a windy day by the look of it); me in my shorts in the garden at Marden, my grandfather and my mother in deckchairs behind, looking cross. ‘There’s Great Grandpa, look: I don’t think he was in a very good mood, do you?’ Rupert giggled, and banged his heels against the front of the sofa. ‘Then it’s Winchester.’

‘Hooray!’ cried Rupert, who, though an independent child, was still strongly patriotic about such things as the school from which, one day, he would doubtless run away.

‘Now can you find me in this one?’ I asked. It was my first-year College photograph. I looked along the rows so as not to give him any clues; but I need not have troubled. It was with only a slight diffidence that he brought his finger down on me, standing in the middle of the back row. I looked utterly sweet, short-haired, and rather sad, giving the impression that my mind was on higher things. That this was not the case was made clear by the next photograph, of the swimming team. It was posed by the pool, where the springboard was anchored to the concrete; three boys stood on its landward end so as to make a two-tiered composition. The Matheson Cup, the perfectly hideous schools trophy which we had won that year, was held aloft by Torriano, the boy in the centre of the back row. But the most noticeable thing about the picture was what by then could fairly have been called my manhood. I had on some very sexy white trunks with a red stripe down the side; and I remember how, when the picture went up on school NoBos, with a list for people to sign who wanted a copy (normally not even all the members of the team in question), there was an unprecedented demand, and the trunks themselves, of which I was crazily fond, disappeared from the drying-room overnight and I never saw them again. On my face, rounder and saucier then, there was an expression of almost disturbing complicity.

Rupert’s finger came down, hesitatingly though, on me. ‘That’s you,’ he said. ‘Who’s that?’

‘That’s Eccles,’ I said reflectively, haunted for a second by the already period-looking photograph, in which the faces took on a greater clarity as time went by. The boy’s stocky body and outward-bulging thighs were untypical build for a swimmer, but he used to move with a bucking, concentrated energy. With his sleek black hair, long pointed nose and a smile showing his small, square teeth, he looked impishly young and, with his head tilted slightly to one side, would give, for as long as the picture survived, an impression of unqualified charm.