Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

In the interval we had champagne, though James would only take a drop, saying it would give him a headache. He was prone to bad headaches, often of a nervous kind (for instance, when he had a clear weekend after being on call for two or three weeks he would spend it supine in a darkened room, a hand pressed to his brow). The heat and intensity of a theatre always brought on a bit of a head for him too. I think he concentrated exceptionally hard-at a concert he would either follow the score or his knuckles would be white with tension-whereas I, though I was gripped and appalled by the opera, blubbing again at the despair of the poor little Novice, his body and spirit broken by his flogging, had also had periods of several minutes’ duration when I had paid no attention at all, thinking about Phil, and sex, and what I was going to do later.

My grandfather looked at me apprehensively. ‘Are you enjoying it, darling?’ he asked.

‘I think it’s wonderful,’ I said. ‘It’s a funny old production, but there’s something quite touching about that.’

‘Mm-I agree. Quite unchanged since the very first performance, of course. It’s a museum piece, still being used after thirty years. We had a lot of talk about a new production, but we felt the loot could be better spent on something else.’

‘Yes.’ I was on for more champagne already.

‘What do you think, James?’

‘Oh, I’m enjoying it,’ James said, with an emphasis that suggested reservations. His eyes were darkly rimmed, he looked sallow with lack of sleep, and I wondered what it would be like to come to the crowded unreality of a theatre after a day’s long concentration on illness and misery.

‘I don’t know if it’s a piece you especially care for.’

‘It’s always more moving and impressive than you expect,’ James said, as so often echoing my own feelings; but our solidarity brought us to the edge of difficult terrain. What he would want to talk about would be the suppressed or (in his usual term) deflected sexuality of the opera. We must all have recognised it, though it would have had an importance, even an eloquence, to James and me that would have been quite lost on my grandfather. He had spent all his adult life in circles where good manners, lofty savoir-faire and plain callousness conspired to avoid any recognition that homosexuality even existed. The three of us in our hot little box were trapped with this intensely British problem: the opera that was, but wasn’t, gay, the two young gay friends on good behaviour, the mandarin patriarch giving nothing of his feelings away.

I decided to brave it, and said: ‘It’s an odd piece, though, partly the sex thing, of course. Claggart’s bit about beauty and handsomeness could win a prize for general ghastly creepiness. He’s sort of coming out with it and not coming out with it at the same time.’

My grandfather hesitated diplomatically before saying: ‘That was very much Forster’s line actually. Though I don’t think it’s generally known.’

‘Did you meet Forster?’ James blurted in reverence and surprise.

‘Oh, only occasionally, you know. But I do clearly recall the first night of Billy Budd. Britten himself was in the pit, of course. It made a fairly big impression, though I remember opinion was very divided about it. Many people understandably didn’t altogether care for the Britten-Pears thing.’ James looked blank and I frowned, but my grandfather went on. ‘There was a party afterwards that Laura and I went to and I had quite a long chat with old Forster about the libretto.’

‘What was he like?’ asked James. My grandfather smiled wearily-he did not care to be interrupted. Then James looked mortified.

‘He seemed satisfied with it, but there was something distinctly contrary about him. I was quite surprised when he openly criticised some of the music. Claggart’s monologue in particular he thought was wrong. He wanted it to be much more… open, and sexy, as Willy puts it. I think soggy was the word he used to describe Britten’s music for it.’

I thought this was extremely interesting, and my grandfather looked pleased, as if he had belatedly discovered the use of something he had dutifully been carrying about for years. I felt matters had subtly changed, an admission been made. But then that ‘understandable’ dislike of Britten and Pears-there was a little phrase I might myself take on through life, wanting to forget it or to disprove the unpleasant truth it hinted at. I tilted out the last of the champagne and watched James talking to his host. I seemed to see him as a boy, a shy but exemplary sixth-former reporting to a master. The open score on the sill of the box was like a book in a portrait codifying some special accomplishment, the entry to a world of sensibility where he had found himself when young, and to which, hard-working and solitary, he must still have access.

I was smiling reflectively, perhaps irritatingly, at him as we were joined by Barton Maggs, one of the most assiduous and proprietary opera-goers in London and abroad, on his interval tour of the nobs.

‘Oh dear, oh dear-Denis, Will…’ He nodded upswept, sandy eyebrows at us.

‘Do you know James Brooke? Professor Maggs…’ He discharged a further nod at James. He seemed to be out of breath, getting round everybody in time, and his weight was emphasised by a too tight and youthful seersucker suit and white moccasins on small womanly feet.

‘Fair to middling, I’d say, wouldn’t you?’ he proposed.

‘We were just saying how good we thought it was.’ Maggs had no sense of humour and no awareness either that we would instinctively treat him with irony.

‘Oh dear-it’s funny, isn’t it, I always think how funny, there not being any women in it. Some people claim not to notice.’ He looked around as if anything might happen.

‘You couldn’t have women in it, though, could you. I mean, it takes place on a ship. ’ I felt that just about summed it up.

My grandfather engaged with it drolly. ‘Still, I think you want a sort of Buttercup figure, don’t you, Barty-selling tobacco and peppermints to the crew…’

‘Perhaps Captain Vere’s sisters and his cousins and his aunts could be brought in,’ I said. ‘I’m sure they’d quell any mutiny.’

‘Oh yes, h’m. I do miss hearing a good soprano though,’ he said, and looked almost bereft, as if Britten had let him down in not providing the display of palpitating femininity that so many homosexuals crave. The warning bell was already ringing and he busily took his leave.

My grandfather was reminiscing about Forster again (matter which was all new to me as well, so that I asked myself why I had never as it were interviewed him about his past) when James broke in a second time. ‘I say, isn’t that Pears down there?’ We all turned to look.

Pears was shuffling very slowly along the aisle towards the front of the stalls, supported by a man on either side. Most of the bland audience showed no recognition of who he was, though occasionally someone would stare, or look away hurriedly from the singer’s stroke-slackened but beautiful white-crested head. Then there was the protracted and awkward process of getting him along his already repopulated row. James and I were mesmerised, and seeing him in the flesh I felt the whole occasion subtly transform, and the opera whose ambiguity we had carped at take on a kind of heroic or historic character under the witness of one of its creators. Even though I felt he would be enjoying it, I believed in its poignancy for him, seeing other singers performing it on the same stage in the same sets as he had done decades before, under the direction of the man he loved. It had become an episode in his past, just as the blessing of Billy Budd was in the memory of the elderly Captain Vere. Indeed, gazing at Pears, who was doubtless embarrassed and uncomfortable as he finally regained his seat, I reacted to him as if he were himself an operatic character-just as I had entered with spurious, or purely aesthetic, emotion into Charles Nantwich’s war-time adolescence, and the loss of his shell-damaged idol in a Hertfordshire mental hospital. It was an irresistible elegiac need for the tendernesses of an England long past.