Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

‘Where did the family come from?’

‘Oh, they still lived in Shropshire. They had a house in town, but they never came down. I don’t think the old man appeared in the House of Lords once. They were madly out of touch with the modern world-no telephones or anything-and I suppose that’s why they became a bit queer. Charles was devoted to his mother; they wrote to each other every single day. And there was Franky, of course. Has Charles told you about him?’

‘Charles has told me almost nothing.’ (Should I be writing this down? The ‘Nantwich’ notebook still had nothing in it, except for some scribbles on the back page where I had tried to get a biro to work.)

‘Well some time I’ll recount that sad, sad tale. Suffice it to say, William, that Franky was Charles’s big brother, and would have come into the title in the normal course of events. He was a nymphomaniac, if a man can be. They used to say the farmworkers at Polesden sewed up their fly-buttons. He was always getting them in a corner and making them do things. And of course in those days you could -I may be embroidering a little but I think I’m right in saying that virtually any, you know, working-class lads could be had for… not more than ten shillings. They needed the money, dear. It’s too amusing really, or was until one of Franky’s boys got nasty and simply smashed him to pieces. That was what finally turned their poor mother’s mind, I should think.’

‘And the uncle,’ Bobby prompted impatiently.

‘Oh, the uncle -yes, Charles had this heavenly uncle who everyone thought was a terrific lady’s man, and carried on very chivalrously and was seen a lot with the great beauties of the day and all that. But really, of course, he was nothing of the kind; and used to tool about with guards-on the train, I mean; well, the other sort, too, I dare say. So there was really a lot of that sort of thing going on there. Compared with the rest, Charles was quite the white sheep of the family.’

Bobby dropped onto the sun-bed. ‘They all liked a “bit of rough”,’ he said, with the same pompous dissimulation, as if he were a policeman reporting the language of an offender in court. ‘I must say, though, Charles’s “gentleman’s gentlemen” are the end. Who’s he got at the moment, some other old lag?’

‘I believe there is someone new,’ I said. ‘I haven’t met him yet. Lewis I met. He seems to have been rather unsatisfactory.’

Staines looked hesitant, even troubled. His account and Bobby’s would not be the same, I knew, and where Staines spoke with affection, Bobby refracted matters through a kind of slothful contempt. Now he said: ‘You know how he gets them, don’t you. Bloody motors out to Wormwood Scrubs or wherever and when he sees someone likely coming out, he picks them up and offers them a job. Ridiculous way of engaging a person.’

‘It’s not quite as simple as that,’ Staines said. ‘Charles has a lot of feeling for the underdog, the underchap as it were. He’s made great friends that way, and changed the whole course of people’s lives. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out. One doesn’t know quite what goes on , of course, but they tend to become very possessive and jealous, and then there’s usually trouble. Oh dear! Look, come inside, William, and let me show you some things.’

We were going in, and I dithered on the sill as to whether I could leave my darling Phil with Bobby. Phil looked resigned-or perhaps actually didn’t mind: I had been surprised and shamed by his tolerance of people to whom I took an unhesitating dislike. But Staines seemed to sense the problem, and turned back. ‘Come along too,’ he called, extending his arm and dropping his wrist in a perfect Shuckburgh.

‘I’ll stick by the booze,’ said Bobby, gruffly.

If the drawing-room had the unnatural, aspiring look of a room about to be photographed, the room where the photography actually went on had a cultivated air of clutter, as if the clean and discrete camera should lay claim to the turmoil, the evident symptoms of art, of a painter’s studio. Empty drums of developing fluid accumulated around an ostentatiously full waste bin, a dramatic spot picked out the workbench where the only painterly act, the touching up of prints with a fine brush, took place. Otherwise it was a deserted theatre-of the acting or of the operating kind. The powerful lights, with their silvery reflecting umbrellas, were switched off, and as the curtains were closed I had a quick recall of school play rehearsals in vacated classrooms, gestures made with imaginary props, embarrassed boys swallowing syllables, the sense of a final achievement lugubriously remote. Nonetheless I looked around admiringly and just as I still naughtily mount the pulpit when I visit a church, clutched Phil to me histrionically in front of one of the heavy unrolled backdrops of eggshell cartridge-paper. The lens of the crouching camera eyed us enigmatically, daring us to move. Phil grinned, and only saw too late what I was playing at.

‘Actually, over here is where I would want to shoot you, William.’ Behind the sheet of paper, at the rear of the studio, was a setting of another kind, a painted canvas flat showing a balustrade, a curtain tumbling down above, and a hazy impression of parkland beyond. It was similar in kind to the scene in the mysterious early photograph of Charles with a woman-though such backdrops must have been common in photographers’ studios all over the world before the war. ‘I picked it up from a demolition site out at Whitechapel,’ said Staines, coming up behind me to look at it, and resting a ringed hand on my shoulder. ‘It’s not all I picked up there, either, if you must know.’ I smirked. ‘No, I’m going to use it for my kind of Edwardian pics. So touching. You did say you’d do one of them didn’t you-you’ve got just the looks for it. Nothing naughty, nothing naughty at all. ’

‘I should be pleased to,’ I decided.

‘But first I want to look out some pickies of old Charles and others. It’s all in the most frightful mess. Really I need someone-well, someone like you really-to come and sort out the archivi. It’s been a help selling lots of stuff, but still.’

Together we tugged out the wide shallow drawers in which hundreds and hundreds of photographs were laid up. Crazed, silky sheets of tissuepaper interleaved the older prints and, pulled back, revealed anonymous society faces of the Forties-I supposed-sulking, or smiling complacently. Some I wanted to look at more closely, but Staines dismissed them and hurried on; or if he told me about them they were people I had never heard of. It was depressing to think of the scene of Charles’s life crowded with such glossy Mayfair figures, the women with their jutting busts and lacquered lips, the men with their conceited crinkly hair.

‘This is all Bond Street stuff,’ Staines reassured me. ‘Some of it’s brilliant , but it’s not what we want.’ So Phil and I carried the trays of photographs through into the drawing-room-and I asked if we could see the new work too, the martyrdoms and butcher’s boys. Staines went off to hunt for other things, letters he might have had, while Phil and I sat like spoiled children on the sofa by the empty fireplace and looked through it all. There was something wanton about the way he let us rummage, and about the muddle of the system. I felt each picture encourage a question, or hint at some urgent, tawdry secret.

Phil, of course, had no idea what we were looking for. But he was very quick to spot that the subject of one photograph, taken from an odd angle so that he seemed to turn into a kind of naked coastline, was Bobby. And Bobby turned up quite a bit, in soulful vigil at a window, or in his whites, more dazzling then, against a bright white wall in Tunis, or, less convincingly, leaning into lamplight over an old book. There were some camp fantasies-Bobby as sailor; or as Airforceman, with perched cap and oiled kiss-curl. In one, dated eighteen years ago, he appeared, wearing only sandals and a cincture of vine-leaves, between two classical garden statues. Staines could have had no difficulty in inducing that expression of tossed-back pagan pleasure: degeneracy was already evident in the luscious good looks and the unclassical softness of his body. It seemed that Bobby must have run off with the much older man, by then perhaps an acclaimed society portraitist with the entrée to country houses. I imagined Bobby being pampered and disapproved of by their hostesses, and, though the Sixties were beginning, posing for the adoring Staines in the artistic, Sicilian manner of an earlier age.