Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

I wished we were there too. It felt selfconscious & absurd lying up on the leads as if we were laundry, & there was something so prurient about the nudity when I compared it to days on tour when all our party wd stop at a river, & the men strip off their shirts & drawers to wash them & spread them on the boulders to dry. I nursed those little idylls to myself, & thought of sitting among the bushes with my pipe while the men dived & splashed, or roamed through the muddy shallows. Then we were many miles from civilisation; here I made strategic play with the tepee of the paper while Otto & Sandy brazened it out in a strange discipline of their own.

In the evening we wandered down to Regent Street. All along by the Café Royal people were swarming around & there was a mood (which was quite oriental) of clamour & grime with underneath it a great passive summery calm. Life in England is so little of the streets that it was delicious to loiter. There were fantastical characters about, & several girlish young men, at intervals, waiting & waiting. One felt how this corner of Town has seen so much of that kind of thing. Across the road in the monumental mason’s showroom, the angels hovered with outstretched wings and lilies in their hands: they seemed to reproach us mutely through the plate-glass windows-or perhaps they cast some benediction over us.

Inside the Café there was an unreal, subaqueous atmosphere, early lights burning though it was still hot & bright outside, & layers of smoke drifting above the marble tables. I hadn’t been there since I was an undergraduate & it seemed as unlikely to me now as then that England cd have come up with somewhere so thoroughly democratic, where I, a Lord after all, might share a table with a bookmaker. Actually it excites a rather corrupt & non-democratic emotion in me-of the daring ‘chic’ of slumming it. I think Sandy feels this less, & goes there as a bohemian & for the fun.

It was fun, too, & we drank champagne and smoked Turkish cigarettes & sprawled on the benches. Eddy St Lyon was there with an actorish young man & winked at us hugely across the room; he has aged extraordinarily & looks ripe with corruption & self-abuse. At the next table some roughish characters were playing dominoes, a thick-set older man, a kind of foreman with his gang. S. was clearly somewhat preoccupied with one of them, eighteen or so, with grubby, sun-bleached hair & broad features: there was something both delicate & brutal about him, with dark stains spreading from the armpits of his shirt & preternaturally powerful, dirty hands that showed a surprising refinement when he pushed the dominoes out, or raised his beer-glass to his lips. When the glass was empty, S. reached over and half-filled it with champagne. The boy smiled candidly, revealing a broad gap in his front upper teeth which made me swallow & tingle with lust, & the ‘foreman’ looked across with pride and gratitude, as if we had somehow helped the boy with his education. When their game was over, S. told the youth that he wanted to draw him, & they arranged a time & shook hands on a price; I began to see how the mixed nature of the clientele worked to everyone’s advantage. After this Sandy rather basked in his own savoir-faire , & we ordered another bottle of champagne.

I had noticed a solitary figure sitting across the room, also drinking freely, even heavily. He was slender, & beautifully dressed, of indeterminate age but clearly older than he wanted to be. He must in fact have been about 40, but his flushed appearance & what may well have been a discreet maquillage gave him an air of artifice & sadly made one feel that he must be older, not younger. He was not only by himself but in some heightened, almost dramatic way, alone. He squirmed & twitched as if a thousand eyes were on him, & then composed himself into a kind of harlequin melancholy, holding out his long ivory hands & admiring his polished nails. His gaze wd wander off & fix on some working-boy or freak until an appalling rasping cough, which seemed too vehement to come from within so frail & flowerlike a body, convulsed him, doubling him up into a hacking, flailing caricature. After these attacks he sat back exhausted & quelled the tears in the corners of his eyes with the back of his trembling hands.

Otto took notice of this & said in his know-all familiar way: ‘Old Firbank seems to be in a bad condition.’ I asked him more, & he told me that the man was a writer. ‘He writes the most wonderful novels,’ said Otto, ‘all about clergymen, & strange old ladies, &- & darkies: you really ought to read him.’

Sandy was standing up. ‘Let’s go & join him,’ he said. I demurred, but it was no use. Poor Firbank looked quite alarmed as this boisterous trio of young men converged on him. But I saw there was something pathetically like relief in his reply to Otto’s greeting, as if, when we gathered about him, the world cd see at last that he had friends.

There was a similar contradiction in his reaction when Otto, fixing him with a manly & companionable smile, began to recite a poem-some nonsense about a negress ‘frousting in the sun, thinking of all the little things that she had left undone’ & a good deal of hey-nonny to follow. Firbank seemed to shudder & smile at once (I learnt subsequently that he was the author of this doggerel) & when it was finished said in a kind of airy gasp: ‘How wonderful it must be not to wear a tie!’

He had a curious & characteristic action of sliding his hands down his legs (which were twisted round each other more often than is customarily possible) until he was gripping his ankles & his head had virtually disappeared beneath the table. When he straightened up his breath came more raspingly than ever-or he wd cough again, & burst into a suppressed purple under the powdered finish of his flat, high cheekbones. Physically I found him terrible to be with, & conversation too was well nigh impossible; but there was something fascinating about his exquisite self-preservation & the reckless drinking & coughing which threatened to tear the whole thing apart.

As if he knew what I was thinking he said, with a hint of pride, ‘I’m going to die, you know, quite soon.’ This didn’t seem at all unlikely, but when I none the less havered, he insisted that his ‘Egyptian fortune-teller’ had confirmed it. When he next left the country-for France, quite soon, and then to winter in the desert villages around Cairo-he wd never return. It was a childish & theatrical moment, difficult to respond to seriously, & yet, like occasional lines in melodrama, mordantly moving & true. ‘I don’t want to die,’ he added.

I was beginning to see why he did not attract drinking companions, & wondering whether we too might not be moving on, when he invited us all to go & hear the negro band at the Savoy: ‘It’s the most wonderful music there is,’ he said. So we knocked off the rest of the champagne at giddy speed, & lurched out into the street: I assumed we wd walk, but our author’s pedestrian performance was as wayward as his sessile one: it combined the futile caution of the drunkard with a true instinct for elegance-if of a somewhat decadent kind. With each step he rippled upwards, from foot to head, whilst appearing somehow to steer & balance himself with low-down oscillations of his hands: again I was reminded of wall-paintings in Egyptian tombs-there was so linear a quality to him. We hailed a cab in Piccadilly Circus & as he slumped into the smoky compartment beside me he exhaled his new resolve: ‘We must have the most heavenly talk about Africa.’

Phil agreed to come with me to visit Ronald Staines, and since we were at my flat I dressed him myself. I forbade him underwear, and forced him into an old pair of fawn cotton trousers which, tight on me, were anatomically revealing on him. The central seam cut up deeply between his balls, and his little cock was espaliered across the top of his left thigh. A loose, boyish, blue Aertex shirt set this off beautifully, and as I followed him downstairs I was thrilled at my affront to his shyness, and could hardly wait for the strapping I would give him when we got back. All along the pavement in the beating sunshine I kept letting my hands knock him, my fingertips trail over him as they swung.