Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

When I finally got a chance at the bench I realised I felt strangely weary, and going in a rotation with three other guys I slightly knew, cut my ration each time from ten to eight lifts. After a couple of turns I saw that Bill was watching me. ‘I only made that eight, Will,’ he said, with a worried look.

‘Hi, Bill. Yes, I’m doing them in eights now.’

I watched him thinking and deciding not to censure what he obviously saw as an absurd infringement of tradition. ‘Well, everything going okay, Will? Too many people here, I think. Too many people. It’s getting ridiculous. Never used to be like this.’ I agreed that it was inconvenient, and suggested that the club was hungry for the money more membership must bring. ‘Very true, Will. But the interests of the members there are already have to be considered. It’s supposed to be democratically run, you know, this place.’ He looked around mournfully. ‘Seen young Phil lately?’ he asked with slight bashfulness.

I hadn’t seen him here the previous evening, and I was left uncertain if it had been him in the cinema. ‘I haven’t, actually. Has he been neglecting his training?’

‘He may have been coming in earlier,’ Bill assured himself. ‘There may be some other gym he goes to, too. I don’t know. He needs to keep in trim, though. Very nice little body, that.’

‘Not so little,’ I suggested, remembering the beautiful hard heaviness in the dark. ‘What does he do, anyway?’

‘He works in a hotel actually,’ Bill declared, proud to know this fact, which might be taken as the token of a fuller intimacy than was, evidently, the case.

‘How extraordinary,’ I said, my image of Phil as a military figure distorted by this notion, but settling into a new image of him, still in uniform however, marching along an upstairs corridor with a tray of coffee and sandwiches held at shoulder height. ‘Which one, do you know?’

‘Not sure about that, Will,’ Bill admitted. ‘One of the big famous ones, I think.’

James had been swimming diligently while I was in the weights room and when I went down to the pool he was hanging by his elbows in the deep end, in spasmodic conversation with a person I hadn’t seen before. By a silly convention I always affected a censorious attitude towards men he might actually be getting somewhere with. I stopped by him at the end of my first length, pretended to adjust the strap of my goggles, and raising my eyebrows (an effort doubtless diminished by the goggles themselves) declared, ‘I don’t think much of yours, dear,’ before plunging on.

Up in the showers afterwards he was standing beside the same person, and the reason for it became clearer. The boy, very brown all over, except for a pink triangle above the crack of his ass, was thin and wiry, though not quite unattractively so, his colour glamorising (as it can do a nondescript Italian or Arab) what would have been a meagre body if pale. There was something strained about him, particularly his gaunt, narrow head, hollow-cheeked and with short dark curls. His sunken eyes were a cold blue, made the more striking by his tan; when he turned round I saw that he had shaved off all his pubic hair, which added a kinky and intenser nakedness to his salient, sideways-curving, pink-headed and very large cock.

The conversation was not fluent. The youth would pass some bland comment, and James would try to reply with adequate enthusiasm or insouciance. ‘See you,’ said the youth, abruptly turning off his shower and going off to dry. ‘Yes, see you,’ said James, managing to make it seem a careless possibility, though the smile faded off his face in a way that showed it was not spontaneous. He had effectively been put down, as it is impossible to go padding out after someone in simulated sportsman-like ease when they have just said goodbye to you. I crossed over and took my place beside James.

‘Who’s your friend?’ I enquired. He merely gave me a sceptical look. ‘Why don’t you go after him?’

‘I don’t think I care for him.’

‘Oh come on! He looked to me as if he quite cared for you-if Dame Tumescence is anything to go by.’

‘Another time, perhaps.’ He shampooed his receding hair in a listless fashion. ‘I see Miss Manners is having a ball.’ It was one of James’s almanac of nicknames.

‘She is the end, that one,’ I agreed, glancing at the man in question, one of that breed of middle-aged queens whose strategy, as they become uncontestably unattractive, is to cultivate a barging, unsmiling manner, sensitive to imagined infringements of their rights and never getting out of anyone’s way. Like James’s ‘Miss Marple’, a portly man who wore his glasses even in the shower and would blunder round and round the changing-room in his underwear for thirty or forty minutes, his spectacles misting up from the heat of his body, he was one of the odd crew at the Corry who, knowing no one there, existed in a kind of unseemly limbo of paranoia and repression. James, who himself occupied the club in a highly fantastical way, had catalogued many of its members with fantasy names. Some of them confused me-Miss De Meanour and Miss Anthropy were impossible to distinguish, whilst a pair of boneheaded identical twins could be referred to indiscriminately as ‘Biff’. There was no doubt about ‘Miss World’, however, the hilariously vain queen of uncertain years, known to me also as Freddie, who came into the shower now, casting off his towel as if it were the hungrily awaited climax to a striptease.

‘Hullo, Will ,’ he said as he came alongside, his tanned, creased, sinewy body swivelling balletically. He spoke in a carrying, recital manner, as if testing some primitive broadcasting machine. ‘How are you? You’re looking wildly wicked and young.’

‘I am wildly wicked and young,’ was the best I could do before I, as the French say, saved myself-inevitably bumping into Miss Manners as I did so.

‘Clumsy little slut!’ he hissed, with such venom that I couldn’t help laughing.

On the train home I carried on with Firbank. I was on Prancing Nigger now, though I shared James’s preference for its other title, Sorrow in Sunlight. How Miami longed to lift up Bamboo’s crimson loincloth! ‘She had often longed to snatch it away.’ I lolled into reflection on Bamboo’s charming words, ‘I dat amorous ob you, Mimi’; and as I approached the house they were becoming a catchphrase of the sort I sometimes keep nonsensically saying to myself and anyone else for days on end, or singing in the style of Handel arias or Elvis Presley songs. I found myself muttering it, with mounting intensity and irrelevance, when I came into the flat, called out, searched round and found that Arthur had gone.

Charles Nantwich’s house was in a street off Huggin Hill, so narrow that it had been closed to traffic and was no longer marked in the London A-Z ; it was a cobbled cul-de-sac obstructed at its open end by two dented aluminum bollards padlocked to the ground. Halfway down on the left rose the tall façade of purplish London brick, the dormers behind its upper parapet looking out over the roofs of the surrounding semi-derelict buildings. It was an elegant post-Fire merchant’s house, prosperously plain, the only ostentation the door-case, with its delicately glazed fanlight and heavy projecting hood, the richly scrolled brackets of which were clogged with generations of white gloss paint. Much of the glass in the tall windows appeared to be original: warped, glinting and nearly opaque. I waited opposite for a minute, surprisingly taken back, by its air of secrecy and exclusion, to the invalidish world of Edwardian ghost stories, to a world where people never went out.

Though close to Cannon Street, Upper Thames Street and the approach to Southwark Bridge, this little knot of side streets was very quiet. Drivers avoided the narrow gauge of its alleyways, and much of it seemed to have been given over to somnolent trades-a bespoke tailor, a watch repairer. One or two of the premises were warehouses; some had battened-up windows or displayed bleached and cracked signs for businesses long defunct. Though the buildings were eighteenth- or seventeenth-century, the streets were medieval, and, sloping quite steeply towards the Thames, gave the unsettling feeling that they could not long avoid being swept away. Skinner’s Lane, ending in a wall topped with spikes like spurs, half hidden amid tufts of brilliant yellow alyssum, had a mortal mood to it, and gave Charles’s residence the eccentric rectitude of a colonial staying on, unflaggingly keeping up appearances.