Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

I fled from that pissor & joined my half-drunken friends for the walk back to College, the awkward, well-tried climb back in, my head ringing with the unutterable shock of it. It had been too sudden an offering of what I too deeply desired. I never saw the soldier again. A thousand, thousand times I’ve wished I had…

I was asleep when Phil came in, and I woke to feel him sitting on the bed, taking his shoes off. I reached out to touch whatever part of him was nearest (it was his right knee) and mumblingly asked him the time (it was six o’clock). I was ready to snuggle down with him for his off-beat, shiftwork sleep, but in a few moments he was lying on top of me, kissing me. The taste of his breath was remarkable, especially since I had just woken and was babyishly vulnerable to him: there was whisky, and laid over it, to conceal it from me as much as from the guests and management, there was peppermint. He was quite slavish with his hands and tongue, and he licked me, lapped at me, in a deaf, drunken homage for several minutes. Then he sat back on his heels, astride me, and unbuttoned and took off his tight little jacket. I stretched out my arms and dreamily stroked his shoulders and tits, smiling in a stupid, sleepy way that he seemed to find just as sexy as I intended.

I found James leaning in a corner of the foyer, lips pursed over the score.

‘Taking it a bit seriously, aren’t you, darling?’ I said.

‘Darling.’ We kissed drily, rapidly. ‘No, it’s frightfully good, actually.’

‘Well, I’m glad you’re going to enjoy it.’ I gazed around despairingly at the white tuxedos and bare shoulders. It was far too hot to be in an opera-house, and I had come along in what was virtually a pair of pyjamas-a super-light African cotton outfit, the queenery of which was chastened by a hint of martial arts.

‘Everybody’s looking at you,’ said James, who, adorably, was wearing a suit and tie. ‘God knows what Lord B. will think.’ He had a pleasantly snobbish respect for our family; my grandfather was very fond of James, whom he saw as a humane and practical person, with charming manners and a keen interest in the arts.

‘I despise them all,’ I protested, turning away from a macabre trio of queens, very got-up with gloves and velvet bow-ties. ‘The way some of these creatures look at you, you feel as though you’re being violated-ocularly.’

James was a little embarrassed, had not yet slipped out of the responsibilities of the day, was to be on his best behaviour, and yet also, I knew, longed to side with extravagance. I was in a mood of atrocious egotism, brought on by what had turned out to be absolute adoration from Phil, but I seemed to sense, as I looked across the hall and up the long mirrored stairway, a further perspective, in which James and I were together as we had been in the past.

‘They might pay less attention to you,’ he said, ‘if you don’t look like something out of the Arabian Nights. You appear to have an erection, as well.’

‘Of course I’ve got an erection. I’m in love.’

James gave me a comically shrewd look. ‘Oh God. And who’s the victim this time?’

‘What a horrid thing to say!’ I swept the audience with another glare. ‘He’s a boy from the Corry, actually-a body-builder-short-dark hair-called Phil.’ Just saying that made me wish I were with him even more. I glanced at James and saw a look of terrible anxiety pass over his face.

‘I wonder if it’s anyone I’ve seen there,’ he said. Then: ‘Ah-here’s Lord B.’

My grandfather, looking very fine with sleek grey hair and sun-browned face, was making his way courteously through the crowd. ‘James. Very good to see you.’ They shook hands and grinned. ‘Turning in, old boy?’ he said to me. ‘I could have a bed made up in the box.’ At the same time he shook me by the scruff of the neck, insisting on his joke even as he showed he did not mean it. The glow of mutual appreciation permeated my mood. We started upstairs

‘Did you have a sleep after lunch?’ I enquired.

‘I think I probably did drop off-how about you?’

‘Mm-I spent all afternoon in bed,’ I replied truthfully.

‘Frightfully good lunch, though. Do you know this restaurant, James?’

‘Where did you go?’

‘The Crépuscule des Dieux.’ He chuckled. ‘It ought to be just up your street…’ He meant, because of Wagner, though he can’t have been unaware of the discreetly homosexual style of the whole place, the waiters in tails with long white aprons, the rich older men treating their bored and flirtatious young dolly-boys. ‘Not the food for you, though, perhaps-all swimming in blood!’ James loathed jokes of this kind but he managed a disgusted smile. He’d passed a demanding New Year at Marden once, subsisting entirely on roast potatoes and Stilton, and pretending indifference as chargers of pheasant, goose and almost raw beef were borne in by the staff.

Upstairs, my grandfather remembered the name of the doorman who walked along the corridor with us, saying, just at the last moment, ‘And how’s your wife, Roy?’ (Roy being the man’s surname rather than his Christian name).

‘I’m afraid she died, my Lord,’ Roy said in a well-seasoned way. Here was a test for my grandfather, for a merely courtesy concern had turned on him and presented him with a real little tragedy. I stood and watched him pat the man on the back in a brotherly way, and nod his head impressively.

‘They’re pretty terrible, these bereavements,’ he said. ‘And it doesn’t get any better, I’m afraid.’ As Roy said, ‘No, my lord,’ he was already leaving him, having done the convincingly human thing and yet not involved himself in the least. He pulled the door to and placed us, him in the middle, and James nearer the stage.

My grandfather was a Director of Covent Garden, and I had seen many operas with him from this same box. Yet I never felt it was a good point to watch the performance from: for the privacy and elevation of the box we paid the cost of seeing the orchestra, a view into the wings and an imperfect vantage on the upper stage. The privacy, anyway, was an ambiguous thing, since the eyes of the stalls dwelt on the boxes as though on the balconies of a royal residence. I was aware of the bad effect this had on me-an affected unawareness of the rest of the house, exaggerated laughter and enthralment in the remarks of my companions. I did not like myself much for this-indeed the box represented to me in some ways the penalties of exposure, discomfort and pitilessness which were paid for privilege. Tonight I sprawled over the red plush sill and let James and my grandfather talk until the lights went down.

It was Billy Budd , an opera I recalled as a gauche, almost amateur affair, and I had not in the least expected to enjoy it; and yet, when Captain Vere’s monologue ended and the scene on board the Indomitable opened up, with the men holy-stoning the deck and singing their oppressed, surging chorus, I was covered in goose-flesh. When Billy, press-ganged from his old ship, sang his farewell to his former life and comrades-‘Farewell, old Rights o’ Man , farewell’-the tears streamed down my face. The young baritone, singing with the greatest beauty and freshness, brought an extraordinary quality of resisted pathos to Billy; in the stammering music his physiognomy, handsome and forthright and yet with a curious fleshy debility about the mouth, made me believe it as his own tragedy.

None of this should have surprised me. I had not heard any music for a few days, and I was all charged up, glowing and gratified, so that my sense of everything was heightened. I felt every phrase of the music in a physical way, as if I had turned into a little orchestra myself.