Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

Strong died the following year. A splinter from a shell lodged in his head, & he spent some time in a mental hospital near St Albans. I used to think about him & imagine him raving: apparently he was sometimes quite insane. And then it was read out that he’d died. About a month later I received a letter saying he’d left me £50. It wasn’t in his will, but he had told his mother when he was in hospital that he wanted me to have something, & she had suspected then that he was going to die. She came over to have tea with the Second Master, who told me all this.

By then things were beginning to turn round. The worship I felt for bigger boys, the heroic ones already taking on beauty as their leaving drew near, & the glamour of the Army glowed about them, was as strong, or almost so. But by the time I was 16 my eyes swung about & saw the younger boys. The emotions were far more complex, for being senior I had power, which I could use over them & then luxuriously abdicate in making my feelings clear. The idolatry was to do with not having-it was idealised, & above lust, which was catered for anyway by incessant parties, mutual pleasurings & painings. For two years or so we were utterly abandoned. An intoxicating, almost deranging mood possessed us. Of course there were one or two men who never joined in, who slept or pretended to sleep whilst the rest of us writhed round in passionate couplings or orgiastic free-for-alls. A boy called Carswell was our Lord of Misrule, an incredibly lusty little chap. We looked forward to night-time like some kind of animal that sits out the day, listless & almost blind; then as we undressed for bed a light came into our eyes. Not that we didn’t frig in the day-time too. Our conversation was as salty as we could make it, and there was excitement to be had in seizing brief opportunities for lust in ever more public places. The occasional exposures, as when Carswell was conspicuously brought off in Chapel, must have opened the eyes of the dons, if they didn’t know already, to the occupational depravity of the College men. Oh there will never again be a time of such freedom. It was the epitome of pleasure. When I sink back into the mood of those days, & then think of what happened afterwards, I am amazed. Those who were not killed are running the country & the empire, examples of righteousness, & each of them knowing they have done these unspeakable things. I suppose it is a part of the tacit lore of manhood, like going with whores or getting drunk, which are not incompatible with respectability and power.

Webster was not a College man-he was in Phil’s-so my infatuation with him was bound to be more poetic. He was a well-made little fellow, smooth & brown, with luxuriant curly hair, & he had a beautiful sad expression. His father was a wealthy rum-distiller from Tobago, & his mother was English, & had aspired to give him the best education she could. He was the first negro I had ever known, & in the beginning I suspected he must be slow. Later I found he had a sophisticated, literary mind: he was inclined to be solitary & read a great deal. In his first summer I saw him one day at Gunner’s Hole, lying on the bank in his swimming-drawers, buried in some history book. His colour, among the trees, the green water & the faded grass struck me like a Gauguin.

I found that he went to swim whenever the school’s stiff regimen allowed, and if the weather was fine. I had never had much time for it, though it had its erotic side; but I started to swim too. He was a much finer swimmer than I, it should be said, but I was much bigger & could sometimes beat him as we thrashed round the bend together. At the end of our races he gasped & gave his dazzling smile and I lounged beside him in the water, or put my arm round his shoulders, saying ‘That was damned close’ but thinking inside ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ When we climbed out on to the bank I was fascinated by the way the water stood off him, leaving him no need to dry himself with a towel, and when he shook his head, the droplets flew away, leaving his black cushion of hair barely damp. Though his head hair was so thick, the rest of his body, though he had passed into manhood already, was virtually without hair, & on the frequent disinterested occasions I contrived to touch him I found his skin as smooth as a dream. It was the beginning of all this thing. In a way it was like my admiration for Strong, but now transformed by a stronger, even ethical power. I formed the impression that I was in the presence of a superior kind of person.

Now this was a very strange impression to form. Here at Dekatil, surrounded by the radiant darkness of the Nuba, with not another white man for hundreds of miles, I am continuing to act on it. Does anyone else feel it, or understand? Did anyone then, at Winchester? It was the wildest apostasy. It was the greatest revelation. It affected one’s view of everything.

It did not do so at first, it is true. It was something deeper than articulate thought-a twilight luxuriance of my own, a heretical fantasy. I did not even put up much of a fight when other men commented on our being together, & called him cruel, unthinking names. Perhaps I did not even want them to share the secret or to know how wrong they were. And the manners that were making us men kept the boys from insulting him to his face. Webster himself was scrupulously courteous, & considerately friendly to mild men who spoke to him.

By a strange coincidence, the incursion of this black-skinned boy into my life was paralleled by the quartering of a goodish number of American soldiers at Winchester in the last year of the war, among them a squad of negroes. They excited a great deal of comment, appearing as they did in the profession which at that time we venerated above all others. One night in my last term I had gone on a secret escapade with some friends to the Willow Tree, & several of the soldiers were in the bar. They were noisy, but not I suppose dangerous or even unfriendly. After a while a tall, burly negro in the group came over & asked if we knew where he could get a girl for the night. We were all awed by his colour and his quiet but resonant voice, & we said we were sorry, we had no idea. ‘Well, what do you do?’ he wanted to know. There was something sarcastic beneath his respectful tone, and we blustered priggishly & inadequately. I suddenly thought how strange it was for a working man from America to be faced with these effete, distinguished youngsters of another colour, almost another language. I doubt if any of us, despite hints some of us put about, had ever had a girl anyway. He nodded at us contemptuously & said ‘I know what you fucking do.’ It was a word we sometimes used, but to hear it used against us by someone from the class where rough language ( & ‘fucking’ itself) were known to thrive, was a shocking & belittling experience.

Later on, before our group left, I went to the pissoir in the back yard of the pub, a narrow room with a gutter & a powerful smell of Jeyes’ Fluid (it is the same smell in the latrines here-it brought the memory flooding back on my very first day in the Sudan). I had just begun to relieve myself when another figure came in to the shadowy, twilit urinal, and squeezed past me to stand at a position further along. Of course it was the negro soldier. As he urinated copiously he made noises of pleasure and satisfaction, & then began talking quietly & confidentially, as if we were old friends. He said how he had a beautiful girlfriend in Wilmington, Delaware, how lonely it was being a soldier, how he wanted some action (this in a very loaded voice). I felt terrified but also thrilled that he was talking to me. Everything about him was strange, forceful; he was utterly his ordinary self yet to me he was abrasively, rankly new. I could think of nothing to say. I turned to look at him, at least to say goodbye. He stirred some primitive instinct of hospitality in me. I saw his eyes in the gloom, and his teeth. He was looking at me, grinning. My eyes darted about & I just made out that he was stroking his penis. He took his hands away from it & reached towards me, leaving his brutal, aching sex massive and erect.