Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

We crossed over Holland Park Avenue and were strolling north up Addison Avenue when there was the slap-slap of running sandalled feet behind us, and my little nephew Rupert was prancing along beside us.

‘Roops-this is a pleasure,’ I said. ‘Are you running off somewhere again? You don’t seem very well kitted out if you are.’ He had on smartly pressed shorts with an elasticated waistband and a T-shirt advertising the previous year’s Proms.

‘No, I’m just going for a walk,’ he said. ‘It’s such a lovely day-one would hate to stay indoors!’

‘One would indeed,’ I agreed. ‘Roops, this is my friend Phil, who’s staying with me for a bit.’

‘Hello,’ he said breezily, and then gambolled along backwards in front of us, so as to get a good look at the two of us. I thought it must be like being filmed, walking towards an ever-receding camera, and I put on silly faces to make him laugh. When he decided he liked us he dropped into place between us, and we swung along hand-in-hand. He was as touching and confidential as ever, and I felt we must look like a young couple that by some dazzling agamogenesis had produced this golden-haired offspring.

I was keeping an eye out for the house numbers and we were already nearly there. ‘We’re going in here, darling,’ I said, and Phil looked up a shade apprehensively while Rupert, disappointed that our meeting was over so soon, took on a serious air, not quite understanding what was going on, and glancing from one to the other of us, as though some decision had to be taken.

‘Why don’t you come round for tea one day?’ I suggested. ‘If old Pollywog will let you.’

‘Yes, I will,’ he said. But something else was clearly worrying him and he tugged on my hand and led me off to several parked cars’ length away. He looked around carefully, and I knew what he was going to talk about. For a moment I thought he was going to tell me he had seen Arthur, and I felt that perhaps life would suddenly become quite different. ‘What ever happened to that boy?’ he asked.

‘Oh, he went away a bit ago,’ I said plausibly, as if it were a lie.

‘Did he manage to run away all right, then?’

‘Oh yes-he got clean away.’

‘Have you heard where he went to? Did he go abroad?’

‘Funnily enough, old chap, I don’t know quite where he is. It was all top secret, you know. I hope you didn’t tell anyone about it?’

‘No,’ he whispered, shocked that I could imagine that.

‘As a matter of fact,’ it struck me, ‘if you should see him I’d quite like to know. It would have to be really hush-hush, though. Keep your eyes skinned when you’re going for a walk or anything’ (here he rubbed his eyes quickly, carrying out my orders at once) ‘and if you do see him, and you’re really sure it’s him, why don’t you give me a ring?’

‘All right,’ he said. I was glad I had made a little game or experiment out of it, and began already to look anxiously forward to it.

We went back towards Phil, who had been left in the middle of the pavement. I grinned at his fidelity, his cleanness, the plump relief of his… copper’s helmet. Rupert shook hands with both of us and made off, looking about like anything. When he was out of view Phil and I walked up the short flagged path to the front door of Staines’s house; it was the left-hand portion of a spacious 1830s villa, with a woody privet hedge (the kind with rooms inside it large enough for a child to hide in) round the garden, and curtains at the downstairs windows drawn in a degenerate way suggestive of late rising and afternoon TV.

Staines came to the door and welcomed the two of us with the air of a man who has a good appetite. As I thought when I had met him before at Wicks’s, there was someone strangely passionate and slavish holed up inside his immaculate clothes-today an almost transparent suit of sour cream Indian silk.

‘I’m so glad Charles got you ,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ I replied. ‘Do you mean there have been others?’

‘Oh, there was a frightfully old young man with bad breath who ran a printing press. He was around a lot last year, looking at everything. Happily Charles got rid of him, for being too snobbish.’

We went through into a drawing room with heavy theatrical curtains held back by tasselled cords, and floor-length windows open onto a terrace; a lawn and a huge weeping beech were visible beyond. A zealous sense of good taste pervaded the room: unread classics in the bookcase showed the uniform gilding of their spines, and the flowers could have graced a wedding of minor royalty. On a Sheraton side-table lay a vast, tooled portfolio; a crowd of framed photographs surmounted a mahogany writing-desk and gave the impression of a glamorous and sentimental past. Phil, trained to accommodate the whims of guests, seemed uncomfortable to be a guest himself. He hung back awkwardly, unable to get his hands in his pockets.

‘And what do you do?’ Staines asked him.

‘I’m a waiter.’

‘Ooh.’ There was a peculiar silence. ‘Well, I’m sure you won’t have to wait very long,’ he said encouragingly, appraising Phil’s physique with an artful glance. ‘Are you a friend of Charles’s too?’

‘Oh, no-I’m just a friend of Will’s.’ It became clear to me that Staines did not know why he had come, but was, as I had expected, glad that he had.

‘Quite so! Well, please, make yourself absolutely at home. I’m afraid there isn’t a pool-but you may like to sunbathe outside with Bobby’-he gestured tritely towards the garden-‘or whatever!’

‘I think Ronald and I will have things to talk about, darling,’ I said. ‘But do sit in on it if you want.’ I felt a shiver of possessiveness and cruelty, as if I were some vile businessman addressing his wife. We all went to the windows and stepped out. To the side there was a gathering of expensive garden furniture, chairs with curved wicker arms and flowered cushions, a long, unfolding sun-bed, and a glass-topped table with a jug of Pimm’s and a matching set of Deco beakers: there was something ideal about it, as if it were in a catalogue. Beyond, at the edge of the terrace, stood tubs of alpine plants-dwarf conifers, lichen-yellow, and wiry tufts of heather leading their perfectly senseless existence. ‘We can all have a drink,’ said Staines. Then round the corner from the garden Bobby appeared.

Bobby was-what?-thirty-five? He had been deeply indulged, had eaten too much, drunk too much, and his face and body were the record of it. I could see at once what sort of a child he had been: the loose mouth, the cheap, unblinking, china-blue eyes, the lock of glossy blond hair that he pushed back as he ambled towards us-all were features of a school tart, as it might be Mountjoy, aged by a decade and a half (and where was Mountjoy now?). His clothes made the idea inevitable: a crumpled white shirt, plimsolls, and baggy white flannels held up round the waist with what I recognised (from James having one the same) as an Old Gregorians tie. When we were introduced he said ‘Hullo’ in a plummy, straight manner and extended a hot damp hand with plump, double-jointed fingers and long chalky nails. I thought confusedly of theories of the humours, and could not imagine intimacy with a man with such hands. ‘So you’re going to do old Charles,’ he said, and chuckled as though Charles were a delinquent like himself. ‘Well, good luck is all I can say.’

He had pitched into the subject with charmless suddenness, but I was obliged to ask him more. ‘The old boy’s not all there, you know. I shouldn’t wonder if there was some mental thing. The mother was quite barmy, of course. Whole lot of them were pretty odd. ’

‘The previous Lord Nantwich, Charles’s father, was a gifted poet,’ Staines reassured me formally, dispensing the Pimm’s in little dribbles and sploshes as the fruity garnish fell in. ‘He wrote plays in verse for his servants to perform. My grandmother used to know him-which is how I came to meet Charles, you see. He dandled me I think would be the word-longer ago than even I can remember.’