Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

I rang the bell twice before the door was opened by a man in shirt-sleeves and an apron, who let me in and then seemed to think better of it. ‘His Lordship expecting you, is he?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘Yes, William Beckwith. He asked me to come for tea.’

‘First I’ve heard of it,’ the man said unsmilingly. ‘You’d better wait here.’ He went off with an ambiguous tread, his sergeant-majorish bearing infected with an ambling carelessness.

It was a narrow, dark hall, the stairs going up ahead to the left, an old-fashioned coat-and-stick stand, of the kind on which one could conceivably sit, behind the door, and a high, marbletopped table against the opposite wall. On it was a salver with letters stamped for the post-one to the bank, another to a person called Shillibeer with the outlandish address of E7. Above it was a gloomy mirror in a gilt frame. The rest of the panelled walls were covered with pictures, hung one above the other to the cornice, and ascending the stairs too, where their glass collected some light from an upstairs window. There were oils, water-colours, drawings, photographs, all mixed up. There was an unusually large David Roberts of a Nubian temple, choked almost to the eaves with sand, with blue-robed figures giving a sense of its stunted, colossal scale. I was looking at a lovely pastel head of a boy which hung beside it, when the door at the back of the hall opened and Charles and the paramilitary butler appeared in it, issuing from a brighter room beyond, which cast new light over the bizarre, threadbare rugs on the floor.

‘Rosalba,’ said Charles, shuffling forward before greeting me. ‘My dear William. I do hope Lewis wasn’t rude to you. He can be most cantankerous at times. Can’t you, Lewis?’

Lewis had a look of being above such things. Following patiently behind, his square moustached head, with its cropped greying hair, indicated no emotion. ‘You never said he was coming.’

‘Oh, nonsense, nonsense-I told you days ago I would be having an interesting young guest for tea for two. My word, you’re jolly brown, young fellow.’ We stood now in front of the mirror and I looked in, needlessly, to confirm what he was saying. We were having an early May of wonderful weather, and I was already as dark as some of the half-caste boys I showered with at the Corry. My hair, though, grew lighter, and my eyes too, as I met my own glance, appeared arrestingly pale. It was that faintly depraved effect I admired in James’s thin friend at the baths. Charles laid a hand heavily on my shoulder. ‘Kind of sand-brown, isn’t it. Jolly good, jolly good.’ He also indulged the mirror’s grouping of us for a moment, his eye flinching from the stare of the taller Lewis, who hung about behind us. There was evidently a strange, and I thought pathetic, story behind all this.

‘Let’s go into the library,’ Charles said, pushing me forward as a kind of support. ‘We’ll have tea in there, Lewis, please.’

‘You do realise I’m cleaning the silver?’ Lewis complained.

‘Well, it won’t hurt to have a break-and I’m sure you’d like a cup yourself, you know. Then you can get back to cleaning the silver; what’s left of it.’

Lewis gave him a calculating nod, and retreated without a word. We went on into the room on the left of the front door.

Library seemed a grand term for a room that, like all the rooms in the house, was modest-sized; but it was stuffed with books. Some were housed in a handsome break-fronted bookcase with Gothic windows; others furnished shelves and tabletops, or were stacked up like hypocaust pillars across the floor. If the room had once been panelled, it was no more. The walls were white, and above the door a pink and grey pediment had been painted, perhaps as a trompe l’oeil relief; within it classical figures posed, and it was almost with embarrassment that I noticed that exaggerated phalluses protruded in each case from toga and tunic.

‘Funny little chaps, aren’t they?’ said Charles, who was hohumming his way towards a chair. ‘Come and sit down, my dear, and we can have some chit-chat. I’ve had no one to talk to for ages, you see.’

We sat on either side of the empty grate in which a huge jug of bulrushes and peacock feathers stood. Above the mantelpiece, with its little brass carriage clock, hung a life-size chalk drawing of a black boy, just the head and shoulders, a slight smile and large, speaking eyes conveying happiness and loyalty.

‘So, have you been at the Corinthian Club today?’

‘No-I prefer to go in the evenings. I’ll drop in after I leave here.’

‘Hmm. There’s more going on in the evenings, wouldn’t you say. Actually, I think it can get too crowded. And some of the people are so rude and hasty, don’t you find? Some young thug called me an old wanker the other day. What do you do-argue or try to be witty? I said I’m way past that, I can assure you. But he didn’t smile, you know. It’s so terrible when people don’t smile. It seems to be a new thing…’

I pictured the old boy’s determined, naked totterings around the changing-room. He was terribly vulnerable, I now saw. A few days before, when I ran into him and he invited me to tea, he was feebly trying to open the wrong locker (it was the old confusion between 16 and 91). He clearly had no recollection of where he had left his clothes, and was wholly dependent on the little disc attached to his key. As he fumbled and muttered to himself the tenant of 16 came up, a trim little student I’d seen around. ‘No dear, you’re 91 and I’m 16,’ he said impatiently, and found himself equipped with a joke-‘give or take a year or two.’ Charles didn’t understand at first, and as 16 propelled him away I felt an unusual upsurge of kindness for him as against the sexy complicity with the boy that I would normally have encouraged. I came to Charles’s rescue, suspecting he would allow me to be gently protective. When he didn’t, at first, even recognise me, I knew that it was necessary.

‘I suppose the place must have changed a lot?’ I blandly hazarded. But he wasn’t with me; he even screwed up his eyes as he stared through me, perhaps reliving some hurtful episode. I let a few moments pass, looked over the spines of black-bound art folios- Donatello, Sandro Botticelli, Giovanni Bellini -which lay on the table beside me. My grandfather had them too, in the library at Marden, and I recalled childhood afternoons looking at their fine-toned sepia plates; they must have been a special series in the Thirties.

‘You’re not cold, are you, William?’ Charles suddenly asked. I assured him I was fine, though the sunless room was surprisingly cool after the glare of the streets. ‘We don’t get any sun here-only in the attic. Those houses block it out. We’re very cut off here, of course.’ It was an odd remark to make of a house almost in the precincts of St Paul’s Cathedral, but as I looked out of the window I knew what he meant. The ear picked up a constant faint rumble of traffic, but the little clock sounded far louder; no one passed by outside and it was hard to imagine a breeze ruffling the papers strewn about in the rich stuffy air of the room where we sat. ‘It’s a shady little street,’ he added. ‘In the old days it was known as Gropecunt Lane, where the lightermen and what-have-you used to come up for the whores. There’s a reference to it in Pepys-I can’t find it now.’

‘It’s a beautiful house.’

‘Do you like it? It’s a very special house, more special than you might think. I bought it at the end of the war-it was all knocked to hell round here of course by the bloomin’ Blitz. I was wandering about with Sandy Labouchère, seeing the extent of the damage. This was several years later but there was still all the rubble, covered in flowers and so on-frightfully pretty, actually. Look at this little street, he said-this little bit seemed to have survived O K. Down we came. You could do that up, Charles, he said. You wouldn’t believe the state it was in, broken windows and plants and things growing out of it. We asked about it in a little grocer’s there used to be over the road.’ He paused and looked around rather bashfully. ‘It is now very sadly closed, but the grocer’s son… my dear William, you cannot imagine how handsome he was… seventeen, big strong lad of course, carrying sacks of flour-it was like pollen on his hair and hands, big strong hands of course. Well, my dear, said Sandy afterwards, if you don’t buy it I will, just for that, you know. Of course, that was him all over.’