Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

It was a touching advertisement for free speech. But at the same time it caused me a twist of jealousy. If he was getting into this kind of mood about Alan, Nigel and the rest, who knows what might not happen when I wasn’t there to receive his confidences but Pete or Guy in person was, with queeny smile, easy tumescence and buttock-appraising eye? In the pool one evening I’d introduced him to James, who had clearly fallen parasitically for him at once; but I saw no danger there. There were more reckless propositioners, like the laid-back Ecuadorian Carlos with his foot-long Negroni sausage of a dick; his (successful) opener to me had been: ‘Boy, you got the nicest dick I ever see’-a gambit only really useful to those who are pretty well set up themselves. And a few days ago, as we were all drying, I had heard him, forgetful or careless of this, say to Phil: ‘Hey, you got a really hot ass, boy,’ and watched Phil redden and ignore him-and say nothing of it to me.

I probably needn’t have worried. We were having such a good time ourselves. Most of the days I spent at the hotel, where I got to know Pino and Benito and Celso and the others. Late evenings and nights were passed in sleep and sex in that transitory little attic room with its picture of Ludlow from the air. Phil would sleep until eleven or so each morning, but the fabulous weather went on and for the heat of the day until we hit the Corry at six, we were up on the roof in the sun.

It was a narrow, gravelled island we had to lie on, guarded by glazed brick chimneys and, running along the sides, a prickly little gothic fence of iron finials and terracotta quatrefoils. Beyond this, on either side, the roofs fell steeply away, caught up here and there into dormers, and punctuated with parapets and turretlike protrusions. On the left we looked out into the upper branches of our close neighbours, the plane trees in the square; from here the road, in the gulf between them, was lost to view, though we heard its rumbling and squealing far below, and in the silence between the lights the distant slap and splash of the three fountains in the public garden. On the right we looked down on the bulk of the hotel, its inner wells, ventilation shafts and fire-escapes. Beyond all this we were in the company of other tall buildings-the humourless monoliths of the Senate House and the deserted Centre Point, the green dome of the British Museum Reading Room-beyond which the pretentious corner cupola of the Corinthian Club could just be discerned. There was no one much about on these eminences, on all the surprising secret acres among the water tanks, the escape-ways and the maintenance ladders. The hotel roof itself we always enjoyed alone.

We spread towels over the softening asphalt, and lay on them in our swimming-trunks, at first, but later, when no one threatened to disturb us, naked. We fed each other’s bodies with sun lotions-a low-screen one for most of me, but for Phil, who was just starting on his tan, and for my hitherto untanned bum, one with a high protection factor, which needed (I suggested) almost continuous reapplication. We were very happy on the roof, sometimes reading, sometimes stroking and exciting each other, mostly just soaking up the sun. Phil would rub my tits or my cock, or send his fingertips over me more gently than tickling, whilst the sun beat on my closed eyelids like summer lightning over crimson lacquer. When I opened my eyes the sky would be so bright it looked almost dark. Then I would turn over and doze for an hour with my face half-buried between the spread cheeks of his ass.

And we talked-hours of particular, loving banalities. I insisted on how his opinions mattered, and developed and construed his platitudes into aperçus he was far from entertaining himself. Because I was in love with him, and had brought him out, I believed in a core of redeemable talent and goodness in him. I had found him frowningly reading the Daily Telegraph but had nudged him on to The Times , which we pulled apart on the roof for him to read the news whilst I dawdled over the crossword, or tried to decipher the misprint-coded concert notices. One day I read a review of a Shostakovich concert that I had been booked to go to with James, and realised with a lurch of guilt that I had stood him up. I had rushed back to the hotel with Phil instead-he would have been sitting on my face just as the ‘terminal introspection’ commended by the reviewer was at its most abysmal.

Not that Phil was stupid, but he had made his way in the world without the constant love, the lavished education I had had. Indeed, being lonely, he had read a surprising amount-Hardy, The Forsyte Saga , Dorothy L. Sayers, John le Carré, Wuthering Heights -but without forming any ideas about the books. Intermittently, on the roof, he was getting through The Go-Between.

‘What d’you make of it?’ I asked.

‘Oh, it’s okay. It’s a bit boring in places, when he’s fighting with the plants and stuff. Ted Burgess is all right, though. I imagine him looking like Barry at the Club.’ He smiled wistfully. When at last he finished the book he said he didn’t think much of the ending.

‘Well, the idea is that seeing Ted and Marian shagging in the barn so freaks him out that he can never form a serious relationship with anybody when he grows up.’ He was clearly dissatisfied with this.

‘That couldn’t happen, could it?’

‘I suppose it is pretty unlikely,’ I agreed. ‘Still, in a general way it holds good. I expect you had something momentous in your childhood. It’s the whole gay thing, isn’t it. The unvoiced longing, the cloistered heart…’ He looked at me cautiously and was struggling into some unpromising anecdote until I climbed on top of him and kissed him quiet.

We did a lot more of this, and a lot more reading, on his first weekend off, when he came to Holland Park. Its ‘country-house’ smell and the established presence of my things subdued him rather. He gazed abashed at my Whitehaven picture and, with an access of solemnity, embarked on a reading of Tom Jones. I was glad of his self-reliance; and companionable hours passed with him, sprawled in an armchair with his book, and me behind him, at my writing-table, going through Charles’s papers and looking up now and again with a sudden rush of the blood at his powerful figure and sober head, his face, full of thoughts, turned from me in a lost profile.

The quiet, slightly contrived domestic mood made me think of Arthur again, and I couldn’t help being grateful for the open windows, the normality, the cool of the new set-up. Not that there weren’t things I missed. It was fine, making love to Phil, and I was obsessed with his body. But he lacked the illiterate, curling readiness of Arthur, his instinct for sex. Both of them were teenagers over whom I had many advantages; both of them watched me for the moves I would make. But where with Arthur, when I did move, there was an immediate transport, a falling-open of the mouth, a mood of necessity that was close to possession, with Phil there was a more selfconscious giving, callow at times and imitative. When I was rough with him it was to break through all that.

Phil’s affection expressed itself too in a kind of wrestling, which was sweatily physical but which wasn’t quite sex. There were no rules and it generally involved him in his pants and me in nothing at all, clinching wildly on the sofa or wherever we happened to be, tumbling on to the floor, straining, twisting and squeezing at each other but showing enough decorum not to knock things over. I suppose all this assertion of muscle was his familiar shyness, and silly as it was it had something authentic of him in it, which was beautifully exposed over those few seconds when our eyes at last held each other’s, he fell into a silent slackness of submission and the ragging and bragging dissolved into tenderness and release.