Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

‘And what’s happened to it now?’

‘Stuck it in a pipe,’ he replied with breezy contempt. ‘Led it away. Buried it. Whatever. This little bit of the baths is all that’s left to show how all those lusty young Romans went leaping about. Imagine all those naked legionaries in here…’

I did not have to look far to do so. The scenes around the walls were as graphic an imagining as Petronius could have come up with. ‘I think your friend has given us his impression,’ I said.

‘Eh? Oh, Henderson’s pictures, yes.’ He laughed hollowly. ‘They’re a trifle embarrassing, I’m afraid-when eggheads come to look at the floor, you know. They think they’re going to get caught up in an orgy.’ We both looked up at the section nearest us, where a gleaming slave was towelling down his master’s buttocks. In front of them two mighty warriors were wrestling, with legs apart, and bull-like genitals swinging between. ‘Quite amusing though, too, n’est-ce pas? ’ He looked down pointedly at my crotch. ‘They used to fairly turn me on. But needless to say it was a long time ago.’

I didn’t want to pursue this vein, and strolled reflectively along to where the two boys ran, as Charles saw it, towards the water. Or perhaps they were already standing in water, lapping round their long-eroded legs. They were intensely poignant. Seen close to, their curves were revealed as pinked, stepped edges, their moving forms made up of tiny, featureless squares. The boy in full-face had his mouth open in pleasure, or as an indication that he was speaking, but it also gave a strong impression of pain. It was at once too crude and too complex to be analysed properly. It reminded me of the face of Eve expelled from Paradise in Masaccio’s fresco. But at the same time it was not like it at all; it could have been a mask of pagan joy. The second young man, following closely behind, leaning forward as if he might indeed be wading through water, was in profile, and expressed nothing but attention to his fellow. What did he see there, I wondered-a mundane greeting or the ecstasy which I read into it? That it was merely a fragment compounded and rarefied its enigma.

Charles rested his hand on my shoulder as I bent over it. ‘Jolly fellows, aren’t they?’

‘I was thinking they were rather tragic.’

‘My dear, what I want to ask you is this.’ Feeling the physical weight of him on me, I was sure for a moment that he had some physical demand in mind. Would I let him take my clothes off, or kiss me. A don at Winchester had asked a friend of mine to masturbate in front of him, and though he didn’t, such things can harmlessly be done. I stood up straight and looked away over his shoulder. ‘Will you write about me?’

I caught his eye. ‘Well-how do you mean?’

He looked down, quite bashfully, at the bathers. ‘About my life, you know. The memoirs I’ve never written, as it were. I assume you can write?’

I felt touched, and relieved; I also felt that it was quite impossible. ‘I did once write two thousand words on Coade Stone garden ornaments.’

‘Oh, it would be much more than that.’

‘But I don’t know anything about you,’ was a second reservation.

He smiled. ‘I thought you might be interested to find out, as you say you haven’t anything else to do. I could pay you, of course,’ he added.

‘It’s not that, Charles,’ I said, resting my hand in turn on his shoulder. He looked almost tearful at having brought his idea to a head and facing possible disappointment.

‘Before you say anything else I want to ask you, take time to consider it. Because, though I say it myself, I think it would prove to interest you a very great deal. It wouldn’t be an immense amount of work, in a sense. I’ve got masses of papers. All my diaries and what-have-you since I was a child-you could have it all to read.’

It seemed at first a monstrous request, although I could see it was quite reasonable in a way. If he had had an interesting life, which it appeared he had, he could not possibly hope to write it up himself now. If I didn’t do it, nothing might come of it. It was partly because I idly disliked any intrusion into my constant leisure-my leisure itself having taken on an urgent, all-consuming quality-that I instinctively repelled the idea. But it was not, after all, impossible.

‘I’ll think about it, of course,’ I said non-committally. ‘Give me a few days.’

He was extremely grateful. And of course he would be able to see the shape and possibilities of the whole project, when I had barely begun to imagine what it might entail. Suddenly he looked drained again. ‘We’ll go upstairs, my dear, and then you’d better push off.’

We left the Romans in the dark, and climbed to the hall, where I handed my host over to a silently hostile Lewis. He held him there, almost by force, in the picture-lined gloom, and together they watched me fumble with the lock, and let myself out.

When I arrived in the changing-room Phil was drying: not the preliminary stand-up towelling but those final points to which he paid so much attention, and which were executed sitting down. Naked on the bench, legs wide apart, one foot raised in front of him, he rubbed his towel carefully between each toe, and patted powder (I looked, yes, Trouble for Men!) into the dry pink crevices. I approached him at an angle-noticed how his ass spread on the cheap deal of the bench, showing just a shadowy hint of hair between the buttocks, admired the band of muscle which had begun to harden above his hips, and coming round him and picking a locker not far away, glanced down at his cock and balls trailing on the edge of the seat. He looked up at me for a second with his dark, bright, expressionless eyes.

‘Hi, Phil.’

‘Hullo,’ he said, glancing up again. There was something more than usually inhibited about his manner, and his selfconsciousness came out in a flush. I was casual in the extreme, walked over to the mirror, looked with satisfaction at myself, and at him. Though I was ostensibly chasing a speck of dirt in my eye, my gaze searched the mirror in more depth, to find his attention flickering time and again towards me.

I came back and started undressing. I was so completely accustomed to undressing in changing-rooms that the act had lost that charge which it had for me elsewhere. Still, I felt a small warm amorous hum as I pulled off my shoes, tugged down my jeans and caught Phil’s fleeting inspection of my cock. I stroked it with a single indolent gesture as if to set it free, and to present it to the boy who, with surely affected indifference, was sitting in front of me, pulling on his white ankle-socks.

‘How’s the hotel?’ I asked.

‘Oh, er, okay,’ he said, surprisingly unsurprised that I should know about it. ‘Hard work,’ he added.

‘What do you do in it?’

‘In the hotel, you mean?’

‘Indeed.’

‘Oh. Everything, at one time or another. At the moment I’m waiting.’

‘Mm, me too,’ I agreed. But he was clearly not a person that I could win over with collusive bad jokes. I feared for a second he might take it up literally; his ignoring it suggested that he had understood what I meant-but was incapable of indicating the fact. More silence followed, in which I felt that I had the upper hand. He was now standing and putting on his old-fashioned and manly white underpants.

‘Going to work out?’ he asked. It was his first unsolicited remark to me, and despite its consummate blandness it had the air of being the final fruit of a long internal quest for something to say.

‘That’s right: nothing heavy, you know.’ I was in shorts and singlet now, and tying up my white plimsolls. ‘I’m not aiming to have a beautiful physique like yours.’