Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

Staines came rattling back in at this point, carrying a camera on a tripod, its legs unsplayed making it tall and unwieldy. I suppose it was inevitable that it would be a film, that this swaying, powerful chef, with all his virile elegance, would be doing something with these common little waiters. I was surprised to remember that Charles had told me there was no dining at Wicks’s on a Sunday evening. But I was staggered to think that he-and Staines-could actually lure the staff elsewhere and make them act out those fantasies which they must have fathered in sly glances over their fatty beef, soapy veg and boiled school puddings. What bizarre transactions and transitions must have taken place. The whole thing had that achieved bizarrerie which made it normal to the participants, demonic to the outsider.

Staines’s hand was on my shoulder. ‘It’s the very last bit, dear,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be the most wonderful film ever. We’ve been doing it for months now-a cast of tens… I thought you’d like to see us polish it off in this sensationally sensational scene.’

‘I don’t know,’ I hesitated. The backdrop, cracked in places where it had been rolled up, took on an air of redundant charm as the lights were switched on, isolating an area of tawdry small-ness in which the action was clearly to unfold.

Aldo grew confidential. ‘Is very old-fashion,’ he explained. ‘I am in another part, in the garden. There I met the young milordo, and we do all sort of thing, and up a ladder too. Now he is on holiday, and the servant is left-just Derek and Raymond and Abdul.’ Aldo fluttered his lashes at me, restoring an illusion of gentility, as if we had been discussing the new vicar, and whether or not he favoured the Series III communion. I couldn’t pretend that I hadn’t wondered what it would be like to make a porn film. I had cast my own on parched, electric mornings after, putting the boys through their paces; but those were unstable little loops, that oxidised and decomposed in the light of day. I wasn’t sure it would be possible to watch these acts, fearing to be aroused, fearing not to be.

Charles laid his hand on my forearm. ‘Isn’t our chef a splendid fellow? He’s devoted to me, you know. Utterly devoted.’

The camera had not yet begun to run, but Abdul, seemingly careless of whether or not he started, strolled back on to the set. He wore a sumptuous calf-length fur coat, and, as one saw when he sat back on the bed and it fell open, nothing else. His flat stomach was crossed by the longest scars I had ever seen, as though long ago, and with the crudest means, someone had removed all his insides. With his scarred black skin inside the thick black fur he struck me, who adored him for a moment, like some exquisite game animal, partly skinned and then thrown aside still breathing. I excused myself for the lavatory, tiptoed to the front door; but then slammed it behind me.

No headaches; painless breathing; bruises, with all their touchy, indwelling tenderness, mysteriously fading out: I felt well again, whole, and wholesome. I didn’t need the decadent secrecy of Charles and his pals-and as I had left Staines’s house I had thought of putting the whole thing behind me. Why be encumbered with the furtive peccadilloes of the past, and all the courteous artifice of writing them up? I wasn’t playing the same game as that lot. I looked forward to clear July days, days of no secrets, of nothing but exercise and sun, and the company of Phil. I was enthralled, almost breathless, at the very idea of men, the mythological beauty of them running under trees and sunlight in the Avenue or in the long perspectives of Kensington Gardens. But I was pure and concentrated as well. No longer loathing myself I was once again in love, and turning the full beam of my devotion upon Phil. I dreaded somehow to find that he had grown complicated, that my hatefulness of the past few weeks had left a stain on him, or eroded that ingenuousness which struck me almost as a property of his body, residing speechlessly in his palms and wrists, in his strong calves and ridged stomach, in the crisp hair above his cock, in the pumping heart I laid my ear to, the neck I kissed and bit, the glossy, speckled darkness of his pupils in which I looked and looked and saw myself, miniature, as if engraved on a gemstone, looking.

But no. He was surprised, relieved-like a child released at last from some unfair and arbitrary penance. But there was no resentment in him-and he had I suppose the further relief of finding me pretty again, with only the knotty broadening of the bridge of my nose and the too American whiteness of my ingenious new tooth to remind him of our little season of misery. Unlike recovery from a cold or a hangover this took me forward, not merely back to the old unthinking well-being. It made me romantically ambitious for sweetness and strength, and for the moment I felt all over some seasonal convulsion, quite exhilarated by that grand illusion, that I could make myself change. It was the return of physical strength-and at just the time when, sitting apprehensively, watching those two stoned boys and that beautiful scarred stitched-up man, I had seen myself, with weird detachment, in the society of corruption: the baron, the butcher, the boozed-up boyfriend, and most corrupt of all the photographer.

I went straight to Phil that night, though he was not expecting me. I had not been at the Queensberry for weeks, and as I got out of the taxi a new boy on the door-very thin and formal, not at all my kind of thing-asked me if he could help. I looked in on the staff TV room, where one of the receptionists was watching the news and a commis chef, fast asleep, had fallen half out of his chair. In the corridor I ran into Pino, who was fantastically pleased to see me and shook my hand between both of his, insisting on a complete account of the injuries Phil had told him about. He was keen too not to keep me from my friend. ‘You go to see Phil? Is upstairs. Is gettin is beauty-sleep.’ We shook hands again before he left me, and I heard him laugh aloud with pleasure as he went on his way.

Up under the roof, in the hot, shadowy corridor, outside Phil’s door… distant traffic and a creaking floorboard making no impression on the silence, residual, anticipatory… dream echoes of childhood evenings, going up to fetch a book, drawn to the open window and the stillness of the elms… or at school, waiting for Johnny, knees under my chin on the sill of a gothic dormer, heart thumping, swallows plunging into the darkening court below… pushing open the rattling, leaded panes at Corpus Christi, the sky precipitating its blues, its darker blues… the surprising, secret moistness of the twilight, sloping down to the Swimming-Pool Library, the faint, midsummer-night illumination of a glowing cigarette… exquisite, ancient singleness in moments just before whispers, the brush of lips and love… I felt it all again, the romance of myself, for three or four seconds squeeze urgently about me, and my mouth went dry.

I barely knocked, tapped with the backs of my nails. It seemed like a cowardly knock, hoping not to be heard. If he were awake he might just hear, and I listened for an answering rustle or call. But what I wanted was to come upon him as he was, to stream through the keyhole, to be with him without any prosaic ado. One morning, weeks before, when he was asleep I had pinched his key and had it copied in a heel and key bar at the station. Phil was so orderly and cautious that he always dropped the catch, and I envisaged some picaresque occasion when I might need to get in, some about-turn in a sex comedy that called for a surprise entry.

I slid the key into the lock notch by notch and opened the door a fraction. There was no light on, though the last of the day still lingered and without yet going in I could see the room in the dressing-table mirror, Phil lying on the bed, the white of his underpants. He didn’t move as I came forward, silently closed the door, and stood at the end of the bed. His breathing was extremely slow and distant and he was clearly deeply asleep. He was lying face downwards, but slightly turned to one side, his left leg half-drawn up, his mouth squashed open on the pillow, his thighs apart but not widely apart, his ass slewed a little to the right. I wanted x-ray eyes for that, though the barrack-room modesty of his sleeping in his knickers was beautiful too. Beside the pillow, trapped under a slumberous arm, was Tom Jones -the fat, squashy Penguin redolent of O levels and essays on virtue.