Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

Then the lights went down, my grandfather said curtly, ‘I don’t give him long,’ and we all applauded the orchestra.

I didn’t see Phil the following night as he was going for a drink with some friends and I couldn’t face the boredom and frustration of it. Besides, I would have been out of place, and a puzzle to his mates, who didn’t know-it was so soon, they couldn’t yet know-that he was gay. ‘Why don’t you go and see your friends,’ Phil had suggested to me, and I had retorted, ‘But, dearest, I don’t have any friends’-a hyperbole which expressed a surprising truth. There were people I was glad to see, but almost no one I would seek out, or invite for a meal or a drink. Instead, I sat up in the dining-room with a bottle of Scotch and Charles’s Oxford diary:

October 26, 1920 : After a groggy start, over to Sandy’s rooms. He was as bad as I was, & said had he made a fool of himself with Tim (he couldn’t remember a thing after we left the Grid). I said probably, but Tim was surely used to it by now. S. had an eggnog & got dressed & didn’t look too foul; I read a letter from his mother out loud to him, imitating the prim tones of a schoolmarm (perhaps I shouldn’t have done?). She has the fantastic impression that S. does not drink. Back to Oriel & the others were already waiting for us-Tim Carswell, Chancey Brough, Eddie Lossiter & the rest. The rest went off in Hubert’s car with much honking and shouting, which made me doubt the wisdom of going-head less clear than a bell, & it was a dank, foggy morning so the ground wd be heavy going. Tim seemed fine with Sandy, but when we got in Eddie’s car he suddenly got out and went to sit in front with Eddie, so it was S., Chancey & me in the back. Ch was bursting with vulgar health, his skin, close up, had a waxy smoothness like church candles. I felt how big he was, squashed up next to me-his trousers immaculately white & straining. S., who thinks him so handsome (as well as a boor), cd barely be fagged to speak to him; whilst I, who don’t think he’s handsome, chatted to him happily enough-the usual thing. Tim & Eddie were madly earnest in front & talked about the League of Nations all the way to Witney.

Tom Flew had brought the dogs in his van, & since a couple of other friends of Eddie’s joined us at Witney (one of them I thought I’d seen before, fair & amiable with a broken nose), they went on the last bit in the car, while Chancey & I took a ride in the van. The smell, as ever, was asphyxiating, & what with the lurching of the van I thought I was going to bring up the excellent kidneys and bacon Matthew had fixed for me earlier on. Old Tom himself, in his dog-eared, dog-mouthed, dogshit-coloured cap & hacking jacket, stank as bad as the dogs. He kept turning round while he was driving & swearing at them through the cage. Then they wd yap & whine, panting all the while in a rank, warm, excited sort of way. I was quite glad to be penned up against Chancey (we had a buttock each on the passenger’s seat) for he at least smelt of shaving-soap & hair-lotion.

We stopped just in time. Tom’s boy (who improves on acquaintance-farcically rustic, of course, but his hands are magnificent, an octave and a half, I shd think) said there had been a fair few hares-but he’d been kicking about in the lane for hours, marking the spot, & it seemed fairly hopeless. At this stage I wd have been glad to find myself back in Oxford, & Sandy was pretty tragically keen on the idea of bed, a darkened room & a bottle of aspirins. Still, off we set, for what turned out to be an utterly futile morning’s sport, with poor visibility, a kind of clinging drizzle in the air, the mud making things very tricky, & not a sniff of a hare less than several hours old. Eventually Tim called off & we toiled through to another road, up which Tom’s boy miraculously appeared in Hubert’s car, looking absolutely terrified, with the lunch in the back.

This was Hubert’s idea, rather than go over to the public house as normal where we had felt less than welcome before when S. was very drunk & indiscreet (not to say made up like a Regent Street margery); but the question was, where to have it? Some said in the car & Tim said we cd take it to the house of someone he knew not far away, but Eddie’s friend with the broken nose said he owed that someone a thousand pounds, so that wd never do. Then Tom’s boy suggested what he called the Old Castle, which was in the wood we cd see not far ahead, looming out of the mist. Tom said he thought it wd be acceptable to us-it was designed for just this, he said. The boy opined that it was an old place, but Tom scorned this vigorously & said it was just a ‘make-believe’, a ‘fairy-tale castle’, so we gathered it was some kind of folly or woodland lodge.

We went on up the lane & then cut along the side of a field. The fence at the edge of the wood was no more than a few rotten posts, sticking out of the bracken. Many of the trees were dead or decrepit, & there was a surprising number of yews, which made the wood even darker. It must have been deathly quiet when free of people like us, swearing and pranking about. Sandy & I rather fell back & came on after the others, arm-in-arm, enjoying the melancholy mood, I thought, until S. said ‘God, I feel sick!’ & I realised his was the silence of a man who’s had too much the night before. I cd see too that he felt anxious about Tim, from the way he pretended to pay no attention to him & then I wd catch him looking at him through his eyebrows-full of humiliated fondness.

The Castle was a funny old place, smaller than I’d expected & completely irregular. There was a hall in the middle, with a dark panelled room off it at the back. On either side half-collapsed walls made off into the wood, & were cunningly topped with small trees to look like authentic medieval ruins. Some of the windows were pointed, some round, some square, & through the ivy you cd see that the walls were patterned with huge pieces of vermiculated stone-not, I think, the usual builders’ material, which is drilled artificially, but the real thing, brought from some volcanic site. The whole surface of the little Castle was freakish & grotesque, with the hairy fingers of long-dead creepers, the dull gloss of the ivy, the arrow-slits, & the rough, labyrinthine lava. S. & I slid our fingers into the inviting little passages, & lots of woodlice & things came scampering out. At the back we went through an arch into a little dank yard, with ferns lolling from the walls, a heap of old beer-bottles in one corner, & the ash & half-burnt logs of a fire that had been lit there long ago. It was strange that whoever had camped there had not gone inside-we had found it unlocked, & there was a huge blackened chimney-breast in the hall.

When S. & I went in the others were already flinging the picnic around as if it were a hare & they were dogs. There were some long trestle-tables, with benches, & at either end colossal Arthurian chairs made out of whole trees. The entire thing was like some mad college hall, except with pigeons flopping around, & more bird-droppings than usual on the tables. There were other bits of furniture too, hideous Victorian things too big to destroy, like a carved cupboard with a ruched scarlet curtain (all torn & stained) & an old S-shaped loving-chair, where 2 people cd sit acceptably side-by-side with a balustrade in between. ‘This is a queer old dive,’ said Chancey to me, in a confidential sort of way. ‘Do you think so?’ I said. ‘I was just thinking how like home it was.’ I cd see he didn’t know quite whether to believe me.

It was a lesson in manners at lunch. Hubert & Eddie were particularly abandoned, cramming ham & gherkins into their mouths, slopping drink about, & behaving in a thoroughly aristocratic fashion. When Tim got up, Hubert spread mayonnaise on the bench, hoping he’d sit down in it, but Sandy, of course, who rather grandly partook only of a bread-roll & a glass of champagne, shouted out to him just in time, & earned some sullen gratitude. I ate, I think I can say, in a perfectly decorous fashion, with a slight sprawling over the table in deference to the occasion. But Chancey was a paragon of etiquette, wielding cutlery like a born lady in his rugger-player’s hands. He never relaxes, & seems constantly aware of his inferior station, though everyone else would gladly forget it. ‘Of course, we never had champagne at home,’ he confessed to me-so I made him drink from the bottle till the foam ran down his chin. All the while Tom & his boys sat by the door eating in silence, Tom taking frequent top-ups from a bottle he seemed to have established as his own, & saying ‘None for the boy’ whenever Eddie proffered a glass in his direction. Poor Tom’s boy! I soon felt revived by the drink & looked at him with more interest. His clothes were all too small, which made him look wretched and absurd at the same time as showing how large he was. Only his tweed cap was big enough, & threatened to come down altogether over his wide, if incurious, gaze. I had quite a vivid idea of him wrestling with me & throwing me about.