Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

In the hallway, as I was leaving, I found Phil hanging around. It was the first time I had seen him since the day we had made our tentative assignation, and I felt a not quite pleasant choking and thumping of the heart. I had wondered-as Bill used to do-where he had been all week, though I suspected I had altered my own pattern slightly so as not to see him, as though, like a bride and groom, our contract would somehow be spoilt if we met before the appointed hour. He was sitting now on one of the long upholstered benches, leaning forward, his forearms on his knees, reading a leaflet from the Club rack, which carried information about concerts, plays and events. I came on him in profile, before he realised I was emerging from downstairs, and saw at once that he was merely killing time. He turned the leaflet over and over in his hands, and as he shifted there was a swift sleek gathering and relaxing of the muscles of his upper arms, left uncovered by a pale blue T-shirt. His bag was on the floor at his plimsolled feet. When he saw me he at once stood up, with a look of strained matiness.

I grinned and changed gear. ‘Hi, Phil!’ I went towards him with one arm extended, and touched him on the shoulder.

‘Hi,’ he replied. A smile fled across his face. It was clear enough that he had been waiting for me but there was a childlike wariness to our greeting, like that of schoolboys introduced to each other by their parents.

‘How have you been? I didn’t see you downstairs.’

‘Oh, I was there,’ he said. ‘Earlier on.’

He picked up his bag. It was impossible for either of us to say ‘Well, is this it, then?’; instead we found ourselves going towards the door together. A close follower of Corry form might have seen it as an interesting development-a suspicion confirmed by Michael, at the reception-desk, who said, ‘Goodnight, gentlemen’ in a tone of bitter reproach. It was about 8.30 and in the winter ‘Goodnight’ would have been the instinctive word; but Phil and I strolled out on to the street to find the sky still bright, the pavements and the buildings warm. The slow, late expanses of a high summer evening were before us.

I carried on talking and, without hesitating turned not towards the station but in the direction of the Queensberry Hotel. We reacted differently to the slight panic of the occasion, he shutting up completely and looking very serious, whilst I carried on with unnatural brightness and ease.

‘Mm, it’s good to be out in the open air,’ I said. ‘What a beautiful evening!’ He seemed unable to find a reply to this. ‘It gets so crowded in there,’ I expanded.

‘Oh-yes…’ he said, catching and letting go the conversational straw. We walked on, and I came very close to him for a step or two, as one does walking with a friend: our upper arms brushed and then parted once, twice, with a gentle lurch in my stride. When we had started touching, everything would be all right, I told myself. ‘Yes,’ he added, ‘it can get very crowded.’

I turned towards him with a broad, calculated grin. ‘That’s because chaps like you hog the weights all the time.’

Perhaps because he had heard such complaints before, he seemed to take this as a genuine sarcasm. ‘No, it’s not that,’ he insisted-which, of course, it wasn’t. ‘No, it’s because they let so many new members in.’ Still I carried on grinning at him.

‘You must be on the weights a lot, though,’ I said. ‘The way you’re filling out, my dear…’ I thought it was important to drop in a casual endearment, but he showed no response to it.

We had about a ten-minute walk to Phil’s hotel, and an uncomfortable amount of it was spent in silence, with both of us looking about with affected interest at the buildings, the shops, the parked cars. Normally, if I was leaving a pub or nightclub with a pickup, and taking a cab or a tube to his place or mine, we had both of us been drinking, time sped by, and we were openly set upon sex. I had rarely felt as sober as I did on this summer evening walk; each speechless step seemed more fateful than the last; and deeply embarrassing doubts began to occupy me. I was so lucky in general, so blessed, that my pick-ups were virtually instantaneous: the man I fancied took in my body, my cock, my blue eyes at a glance. Misunderstandings were almost unknown. Any uncertainty in a boy I wanted was usually overcome by the simple insistence of my look. But with Phil I had let something dangerous happen, a roundabout, slow insinuation into my feelings. Though I very much wanted to fuck his big, muscly bum-and several times dropped behind a step or two to see it working as he walked-my stronger feeling was more protective and caressing. It was growing so strong that it allowed doubts not entertained in the brief certainties of casual sex. If I had got it all wrong, if going back to his place meant a drink in the bar, a game of chess, a handshake-‘I’ve got an early start tomorrow’-the evening would be agony. Already I dreamt up headaches, queazy tums, excuses for dullness and an early escape; and I was so tense that as I did so I even began to feel the symptoms.

In Russell Square I grabbed him by the upper arm (its instant, globed hardness was thrilling) and pushed him from the pavement through the gate into the garden in the middle, half-running beside him, and conducting him not down the path under the gigantic plane trees but close along by the hedge that screens the lawns from the street.

‘Sorry,’ I said, letting go of him, my fingertips trailing for a second down the length of his arm. ‘I just saw someone I wanted to avoid.’

‘Oh,’ he said, not without excitement, and looking back over his shoulder. ‘Who was it?’

I did not answer, but kept on walking. He had not yet come into view, but when we both looked round again a few moments later, we glimpsed, through the gap of the gateway behind us, the familiar figure of Bill from the Club go past, smartly got up in maroon slacks and a dark green short-sleeved shirt. His burliness made his fast walk seem the more flustered and ungainly.

A strange look went over Phil’s face. ‘Oh, it’s Bill,’ he said, with an awkward little laugh.

‘Yes. Did you want to see him?’ A split second after this reasonable-sounding dissimulation I thought that perhaps he did.

‘Oh-no. Is he a friend of yours?’ Phil asked.

‘Isuppose he is, yes. I often see him at the Corry. He’s a very decent sort. Very decent.’ I sounded quite unlike myself. ‘You must know him too,’ I added.

‘Oh yes.’ He said this rather weightily, and we walked on, crossing the lawn now that the danger was past. It would have been disastrous for the three of us to have met, but my success in avoiding it was soured by wondering what Bill was doing in Russell Square anyway. No reason whatever that he shouldn’t be there, of course. But he lived in Highgate; and he had been coming from the direction of the Queensberry Hotel.

The Russell Square Gardens have three wonderful fountains at their centre. Water, shot upwards in high single jets, falls onto huge concrete discs, raised only a few inches above the surrounding paving, and flees away over their concave surfaces into a narrow channel beneath their rims. They are unusable in any but the stillest weather, for even a light breeze fans the falling water away, drenching the paths and benches. Although it was late for such things, they were still working now, and we stopped to look at them without a word.

The westering sun shot through the upper zones of the planes, picking out the flaky pastel trunks and branches amid the motionless green and gilt of the leaves. Below was a dusky gloom through which people moved, breathing the warm, dusty summer smell. And the fountains pounded upwards, as if to cling to the light, and fell with only the slightest wavering of pulse onto the wide grey discs in front of us.