Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

I smiled at the story, though I hadn’t the least idea who Sandy Labouchère was. It was Charles’s most sustained utterance to date, and in the chair of his own little library he was far more in command than in his wavering and insane peregrinations outside. Or at least so it seemed until Lewis came in with the tea.

‘He joined the merchant navy and went sailing about all over the place,’ Charles said, looking at Lewis picking his way among the books, but referring, I imagined, to the beautiful grocer’s boy. ‘Thank you, I’m sure William will pour if you’d like to put it down here.’

‘I’m sure he will, sir,’ said Lewis, slamming the tray on to the table between us. The wide china cups with their twig-like handles jumped in their saucers. ‘He looks the type who’d pour out very nicely, sir, in my opinion.’ He was sulking terribly about something. Charles reddened with irritation and anxiety.

‘You’re ridiculous today,’ he muttered. I felt awkward watching this going on, but also detached, as one can be witnessing people mired in their own domestic quandaries.

‘He’s wildly jealous,’ Charles explained when we were alone again and he was raising his teacup between two tremulous hands. ‘Oh, he’s making my life a misery.’ His big jovial head looked at me pathetically.

‘Has he been with you long?’

‘I’d give him his notice but I can’t face the idea of interviewing a replacement. Someone in your own home, William-it’s such a, such a thing.’ I thought inevitably of Arthur, and swallowed guilt with my strong Indian tea. ‘But I do need someone to look after me, you know.’

‘I’m sure you do. Isn’t there an agency?’ Charles was fingering the biscuits, unable to decide which he wanted.

‘I always try to help them.’ He spoke almost to himself. ‘One day I’ll tell you the whole story. But I can tell you now, he is not the first. Others have had to go. If I can’t entertain a young man to afternoon tea…’

‘You mean I am the cause of all this, it can’t be.’ He nodded at me as if to say that he too found it incredible-indeed, as if not sure that I believed it.

‘He is not normal,’ he explained. ‘But he will have to get used to it, when you come again.’

I thought for a moment about the implications of this. ‘I don’t want to make things worse for you,’ I insisted. ‘We could have tea somewhere else.’

‘It’s important to me that you come here,’ Charles said calmly. ‘There are things I want to show you, and ask you, too. It’s quite a little museum I have here.’ He looked around the room, and I politely did the same. ‘I’m the prime exhibit, of course, but I’m afraid I’m about to be removed from display; returned to my generous lender, as it were.’ How does one treat such baleful jokes from the elderly? I looked blank, as if not with him-and so perhaps showed that I knew it to be true.

‘I’m sure you must have some fascinating things. Of course I still don’t know anything about you. I still haven’t looked you up.’

He grunted, but his mind was clearly running on to something else, so that he broke through my following platitudes: ‘Come on, let me show you around.’ We were still on our first cup of tea. He had begun to push himself out of his armchair and I jumped up to help him. ‘That’s what it’s all about,’ he confirmed mysteriously. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll come back here-want to take a biscuit with you?’

I gave him my arm and we made for the door. ‘So much stuff in here,” he complained. ‘God knows what it all is… books, of course. Need more shelves but don’t want to spoil the room. Still, it won’t matter soon.’ In the hall he hesitated. His suited forearm lay along my bare brown one, and his hand gripped mine, half-interlocked with it. It was a broad, mottled, strong hand, the knuckles slightly swollen by arthritis, the fingertips broad and flattened, with well-shaped yellow nails. My hand looked effete and inexperienced in its grasp. ‘Straight across,’ he decided.

The room we entered was a panelled dining-room with a carved overmantel and a leafy frieze picked out in gold, an effect rather like paint-sprayed holly at Christmas-time. It had the sleepy acoustic quality that some rooms have which are rarely, if ever, used.

‘This is the salle à manger ,’ announced Charles. ‘As you can see that slut Lewis never bothers to dust in here, because I haven’t actually mangé in it for years. It’s a jolly nice table, that, isn’t it.’ It was indeed a very handsome Georgian oak table with ball-and-claw feet, and in the middle stood a silvery statuette of a boy with upraised arms and Donatellesque buttocks, an incongruously kitsch item.

‘That little bit of nonsense is by the same chap who did the willies in the other room. We’ll see some more of his stuff, but come over here first.’ He led me-or I led him-towards a side-table where a green baize cloth covered a square object, perhaps a foot high and eighteen inches long; it might have been a picture in a stand-up frame. He leant forward and tugged the cloth away. It was a display case of dark polished dowling, rather British Museum in appearance, within which stood a tablet of pale sandy stone, a couple of inches thick. On its smooth front face three contrasting heads were incised, full profile, in shallow relief. I inspected it appreciatively, and looked to Charles for information. He was nodding in satisfaction at having turned up something interesting. ‘Fascinating, isn’t it. It’s a stele showing the King Akhnaten.’

I looked again. ‘And who are the other two?’

‘Ah,’ said Charles with pleasure. ‘They’re King Akhnaten as well.’ He chuckled, though it could by no means be the first time he had explained its mystery. ‘It’s an artist’s sketch, like a notepad or something, but done straight on to the stone. You know about Akhnaten, do you?’

‘No, I’m afraid I don’t.’

‘I thought not, otherwise you would see the significance of it straight away. Like so many bizarre-seeming things, it has its logic. Akhnaten was a rebel. His real name was Amonhotep the Third-Fourth, I can’t remember-but he broke away from the worship of Amon (as in Amonhotep) and made everyone worship the sun instead. Something I’m sure you’d agree with him over,’ he added, patting my wrist. ‘But such apostasy was not in itself enough. Oh no. He had to change the way he looked as well. He shifted the court from Thebes, where it had been for God knows how long, and set it up at Tel-el-Amarna…’

‘Aha,’ I said, remembering there had been a battle of that name.

‘As it was all made out of mud, it didn’t survive the end of his régime by long, sad to say. But there are bits and pieces in museums. There’s a thing like this at Cairo. You haven’t been to Cairo. And there’s this one, which has one more head on it. You can see how the artist changed the king’s appearance until he got the image which we know today.’

Looking again, I could see, reading Arabically from right to left, how the wide Pharaonic features were modified, and then modified again, elongated and somehow orientalised, so that they took on, instead of an implacable massiveness, an attitude of sensibility and refinement. A large, blank, almond-shaped eye was shown unrealistically in the profile, and the nose and the jaw were drawn out to an unnatural length. The rearing cobra on the brow was traditional, but its challenge seemed qualified by the subtle expression of the mouth, very beautifully cut, with a fuzz of shadow behind the everted curl of the upper lip.

‘It’s wonderful,’ I said. ‘Where did you get it?’

‘In Egypt before the war. Made my trunk pretty heavy… I was coming back from the Sudan for the last time.’