Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

His cock remained as inert as it always had in the showers: circumcised, wrinkled, self-contained as the rest of him; it seemed equally to await discovery. I held it in the palm of my hand and ran my thumb backwards and forwards over it as if it had been a pet mouse. Nothing happened-or if anything, it shrank a little. I was taking things too fast.

I stepped back, tugged off my shoes (shabby old suede laceups which were never unlaced, a lazy affectation which I believed to be overtly sexy), unbuttoned and flung off my white cotton shirt, and with a hint of suspense, undid my fly and yanked off my trousers. Phil’s eyes were mesmerised by mine, and seemed reluctant to go down on my nodding dick. Then he too suddenly got undressed, and stood away from the window, his head bowed under the sloping ceiling. His body looked fantastic, highly developed, everywhere convex, hard and innocent. His whiteness was broken only by the red blotch of an insect bite in the tender, creased skin at his waistband.

I was much more gentle with him now, stroking, kissing and nibbling-smiling, too, and making small pleasurable noises. And he began to respond, imitating me at first, but then making it up himself. Several times, though, it simply came to a stop, we stood back for a moment, seeing each other as we most often had before, in the showers or the changing room, naked and restrained. Perhaps the fact that the restraints of the public space had been taken away made us feel unnatural, inept at using our freedom.

The small bed was like being at school or university. It wouldn’t encourage changes of position, but was all right for any simple sex act. When Phil and I rolled about our legs or our shoulders were hanging over the edge, increasing the precariousness of the situation: there was a strangely constricting need to cling together. Then he was on the point of falling on to the floor, his stomach muscles ridged to hold himself horizontal as I hauled him back by the waist, his head lurched upwards and our skulls cracked together quite painfully. The next day I had a perceptible bruise. Things were not working out with the instinctive ease I’d imagined. But I felt it was important to get on with it, and after a while and some laughter to relax him (though it also brought back an inhibiting normality) I turned him over and started to nose around his bum. It was deeply beautiful, creamily smooth when slack and when he clenched his buttocks almost cubic with built muscle. There was still the dust of Trouble for Men on the hairs in his crack, which I oiled back with my tongue, and sniffed through the dry smell of the talc to his own rectal smell-a soft stench like stale flower-water. His asshole was a clean pale purple, and shone with my saliva.

He rolled over, feet swinging above my head, and snuggled down beside me again, hugging me and resting his chin on my chest, putting off the looming fuck. My cock did look thick and threatening between his thighs, nudging its head up under his balls. Though he wanted to go through with all this he seemed baffled by some deeper incapacity. The childlike embraces were spontaneous, but the kisses, and the stroking of my cock, were acting, and made me an actor too.

There followed a weird, long nothingness-perhaps an hour and a half of lying together, holding each other, barely whispering a word, occasionally shifting and rubbing against each other fiercely, but only for a few seconds. At one point blood-warm water ran suddenly from my ear and dried along my neck. Later, both our stomachs moaned at the same time: we had had nothing, couldn’t have managed anything, to eat. I felt I had lost all the command I’d had in the cinema, the certainty that made each seduction, as James drily remarked, ‘an act of Will’. Then Phil sat on the edge of the bed and said, ‘I’ve got to get ready.’ I’d been waiting for this moment, staring at the angle of the dormer embrasure, lining up the chair and the edge of the open window, first with my right eye, then with my left. I lay on the bed, and watched him put on dark socks, clean Y-fronts, a laundered white shirt, dark blue trousers with red side-tapes like the soldier I still wanted him to be. Then he took the shirt off again, and smiled at me sweetly as he put on his high-collared blue uniform jacket over his bare skin. I was stunned by his body, but thrilled to see him dressed up, warm and hard, privately beautiful in his uniform. He sat down again to lace up soft-soled black shoes, and leant over me before going and kissed me with a charming assumed air, as if I were a country girl with whom he had enjoyed a night of passion before riding off to join his regiment at dawn. At the door he paused and buffed up his shoes on the backs of his trouser-legs in a schoolboyish way. ‘I’ll be along soon,’ he said.

When he had gone I jumped up and walked around stretching, flapping my hands as championship swimmers do before taking up positions. I gazed out into the warm, still night, and heard twelve strike somewhere far off, just as I used to at Oxford and so rarely did in London. I also peered at the one picture in the room, which I’d not been able to make out from the bed. It was an Aerofilms view of Ludlow-the circuit of the roofless castle, the silver loop of the river, the massive church tower foreshortened at the head of its street-long shadow. It had that vacant quality that the photographs of chateaux and provincial towns have in the compartments of French trains: sunlit prospects of places one will never visit and which could never look the same again. Then I settled down to read about Charles’s doings long ago.

We have been in Dekatil two days now, pleasantly busy with tax matters, crop inspections & medical help. I think perhaps this is the fulfilment of my dream, or the nearest I can hope to come to it.

The Nuba people are enchanting, with an openness & simplicity sadly lacking among the people of the north: indeed the contrast with the past few months could hardly be greater. Those swathed Muslim figures seem from this distance to be the embodiment of restraint & secrecy, whereas here no one wears a stitch of clothing, with the exception of a rare string of beads about the waist. I saw one pair of adolescent boys-very tall & elegant-sauntering along with their fingers intertwined, wearing scarves of red cotton tied round their upper arms. One old man, too, had a watch, & encouraged people to ask him the time, which had to be done in a very respectful manner. Then he wd listen to its ticking, & give a knowing & superior smile.

It is this, which I hardly dare to call innocence, for fear it might not be, or that I do not understand, which has moved me particularly, & has given me a sense of contentment, almost of elation, even when doing the repetitive chores of the DC. The beauty of the men is so openly displayed that it seems a reproach to lust. I felt anger & something akin to remorse last night when I thought of how this noble, graceful people has, until so recently, been stolen into slavery or mutilated into eunuchry.

Also last night, a dream of Winchester (the events are vague to me now, but the mood was powerful); & all day I have been haunted by it, & felt the intensity of its passions all over again. Not the forgettable saturnalia (which of course I have not forgotten) but the adoration and devotion. I thought mainly, needless to say, of Strong & of Webster. If the truth be told it is them that I think of most often, when I turn out the light, when I wake here, in the hour or so before dawn, when all the night warmth has gone, & for a short spell, until the light begins, the cool wind blows & I unroll the blanket at the foot of the bed. At the same time my memory of them warms me, stealing out from somewhere within and permeating my person. Though it is usually accompanied by excitement, it is not in essence a sexual thing (that is Ross or Van Orde in Mob Lib, or Chancey Brough out at Burford or B. Howard in my rooms after the Commem Ball-or any of the others who stock my private case of lust-its dog-eared pages!) No, with Strong & (more) with sweet Webster, it was the dumb love, the somehow utterly graceful restraint… I wonder often, having no idea, having dreaded even to find out, what all those boys are doing now, hate to think that I remember them alone, while they-Brough where?, in the City? Webster doubtless in some easy colonial office-pass their days among casual acquaintances, returning home by train or trap in the evening to young wives, working out their plans…