Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

‘It may be too much of a tale for me to tell…’ I said with pussyfooting kindness.

‘My dear, I think it would be a good thing,’ Charles pursued as if he had not heard (and perhaps he hadn’t), ‘if you went down to Stepney on Friday. Have a little parley with old Shillibeer at the Limehouse Boys’ Club. Friday’s the big night-it would save me telling you… so much. It’s a seven o’clock start, of course.’

‘Er-yes, all right…’ I said.

‘And come and see me at the weekend? It’s lonely as bloody hell here’ (he whispered the last three words as if there had been ladies present). ‘My new man will have to meet you…’ Then the line went dead. He had simply, impractically, absent-mindedly, hung up.

I lay back on my bed and thought about the many lives of Charles Nantwich-the schoolboy discovering black beauty, the frivolous undergraduate beagling, drinking and ragging, the dreaming District Commissioner in the Nuba Hills, the old man who had forgotten the functions and protocol of the telephone.

When I suggested an evening in Limehouse to Phil he was less than enthusiastic. ‘Why don’t you go?’ he said.

‘I am going.’

‘Oh, right. I think I’ll stay in, though.’ He looked worried by the idea. ‘I’d have to get back here to be on duty-so I couldn’t drink or anything.’

We were in his little attic room at the hotel again, and he licked me and fiddled with my nipples as though to make me forget that this fractional disobedience was taking place.

‘I probably won’t be there very long.’ I said. Although we had been together a lot in the previous week I had privately told him nothing about the Nantwich affair. ‘I’ve just got to talk to some old man about something-I don’t imagine there’ll be much to it.’

Phil stayed silent. It would soon be time for him to go to work, and I felt him already preparing to abstract himself. Tonight this distancing gave me a little qualm, and as he sat up to get dressed I pushed him back roughly and fucked him hard and fast, his asshole still tacky with spunk and grease from our slower, longer lovemaking just before. As he cleaned up afterwards and looked out his laundered clothes there was still a reserve in his manner, nothing so strong as resentment, but the first suggestion of an independence which it was only dignified that I should allow. All the same I felt unhappy. While he sat on the end of the bed with his back turned to me and pulled on his socks, I looked baffledly at his compact physique. Then he was sitting very still and I caught his eye in the gloomy recess of the dressing-table mirror.

‘Man, I really do love you,’ he said, both as if it were a discovery and to reassure me and chide me for being silly just because he didn’t want to go on a journey to Limehouse (a journey whose only conceivable interest for him would have been that of being with me). To show goodwill he came back upstairs a few minutes after leaving and quite startled me as I stood naked looking out at the stars. He had brought me, under cover of Room Service, a tray with a smoked salmon sandwich and a glass of Drambuie-things which hardly went together, but which had touchingly been chosen for their luxuriousness.

The following evening, after an early swim, I went on east on the Central Line. The City had already evacuated, and though the train was crowded to Liverpool Street there was only a scattering of us left for Bethnal Green, Mile End and beyond. All the other people in my car-Indian women with carrier-bags, some beery labourers, a beautiful black boy in a track-suit-looked tired and habituated. When I got out at Mile End, though, other passengers got on, residents of an unknown area who used the Underground, just as I did, as a local service, commuting and shopping within the suburbs and rarely if ever going to the West End, which I visited daily. I felt more competent for my mobility, but also vaguely abashed as I came out into the unimpressionable streets of this strange neighbourhood.

I was a touch nervous as well: it was my first independent research into Charles’s life and finding myself doing it I also found myself precipitately involved in the project. I had brought a notebook with me on which I had even written ‘Nantwich’ in bold letters. But I had no idea what I was going to write in it, who ‘old Shillibeer’ was or what to expect from him. I remembered seeing a letter addressed to him at Charles’s house, the unusual name. It was a Dickensian or Arnold Bennettish sort of name, with a patina of East End commerce and grime to it. It had a portly, self-made propriety about it as well as a coarse, bibulous slur. I rehearsed things I might say to him, and anticipated hostility or dislike.

And then coming out this far-though only this far-symbolised for me uncomfortably how I had fallen short in helping Arthur. It was only a few weeks since his disappearance and I had done nothing about him and already was so absorbed in someone else that I didn’t even think of him for days at a stretch. There was nothing I could do, of course. I didn’t know where he lived, and I could hardly report the disappearance of a murderer to the police. Saying that to myself gave me a shock, made me flush and my heart race. The awful fact, which I had grown domestically used to while we were together, struck me badly when I came on it suddenly, from some way off. It was as if, sweeping a distant view with binoculars, I glimpsed the violent act and came back to it hurriedly, sharpening the focus with trembling hands.

I had left far too much time for my journey to the Boys’ Club and dreading to arrive conspicuously early I walked by on the other side of the street, crossed over Commercial Road and went briskly along to St Anne’s church, whose bizarre and gigantic tower I had seen from the distance. The day had grown heavier as it grew older, and the early evening light was neutral and overcast as I crossed the churchyard. The leaning birches along the path gathered a further gloom to them, and I gazed up through their branches at the giant uprearing of masonry beyond.

A slight noise like a snapped stick made me look sideways and peer at where, under the young trees, a youth was sitting on one of the table-tombs, elbows on knees, flicking and stripping a long twig in his hands. I could make out no expression, and barely hesitated in my walk, continuing to the north door, which I had no doubt would be locked, and then, with affected nonchalance such as I would have shown equally under the gaze of a mugger or a pick-up, sauntered up the half-open fan of steps beneath the tower, my absorption in its weight-lifting baroque disturbed and strained by my awareness of the boy.

There is always that question, which can only be answered by instinct, of what to do about strangers. Leading my life the way I did, it was strangers who by their very strangeness quickened my pulse and made me feel I was alive-that and the irrational sense of absolute security that came from the conspiracy of sex with men I had never seen before and might never see again. Yet those daring instincts were by no means infallible: their exhilaration was sharpened by the courted risk of rejection, misunderstanding, abuse.

The church was thoroughly locked and the west door, with fine grit and year-old leaves driven against it, was clearly never used. The abandoned mood, and the mental image I had of the vast, dusky interior, made the church somehow repugnant to me, monolithic, full of dead sensibility. I turned and casually took in the figure sitting under the trees. It was hard to see, but I had the feeling he was looking at me, picking at the bark on the stick in his hands in an indolent, time-wasting way. I trotted down the steps and turned back across the churchyard.

When I got close to him, he was looking around as if unaware of me, as it might be waiting for his mates to show up. But the solitude of the churchyard made this altogether unlikely-it was not a thoroughfare, but a sequestered rendezvous. On the other hand, if he was on the lookout for sex, he had chosen a spot where he might have gone unseen all evening. There was something desolate and adolescent about his singleness, and I was not surprised to see that he was only sixteen or so. He did not meet my gaze as I walked past him, but when I was just beyond he said, in a pure Cockney voice, ‘’Ere, got a light?’