Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

I could hardly bear to look at him any longer, and shook him roughly to wake him up, falling on him before he knew what was happening and bothering him with kisses.

I hadn’t made love like I did then since I was a schoolboy. It was extraordinarily innocent, fervent and complete. By the time Phil had to get to work it had begun to rain, and after he had gone I lay in the dark with the window open and listened to it pattering on the leads. Falling asleep I slid briefly through a zone of luminous happiness, a vision as clear as summer-not the ominous clarity of Hampshire or Yorkshire summer but a kind of desert radiance where rocks and water and scrawny shade, lying by chance together, seemed divinely disposed and glowed in their changelessness.

I more or less forced Phil, who did it with a certain comical reluctance, to take the following night off in exchange with Celso. Celso, it transpired, was anxious to have Friday off to treat his wife on her birthday-a musical and dinner and then, one assumed, some especially Spanish and honourable congress. I’d hoped for a high noon of sunbathing, back on the roof, but it was one of those close dark days when one can never get dry and longs for a thunderstorm that never comes. We went back to my flat and lounged about and I came on rather fierce about wanting sex several times, at which Phil showed at first a demure disbelief though clearly, when it came to it, he wanted it just as much himself. Later we went up to the Corry, which was unmomentous, no one seeming to have noticed that I had been away and the virulent strains of exercise going on much as normal.

It was wonderful though, additionally hot from weights, to plunge into the sombre coldness of the pool. No discipline made me feel more free, or contained me and delighted me within its own element so much as swimming. Even so, when Phil came down the spiral stairs-displaying (some well-judged vanity of his own) new trunks cut high on the hips, black behind and gold in front-I was happy to do things I normally deplore, getting in people’s way, doing handstands or swimming between his splayed and sturdy legs. For a while we gloomed Cousteau-like in the depths of the deep end, swivelling our goggled heads from side to side, searching for our locker keys which we had thrown in and left to settle, buffeted and wandering in the choppy water. Where the end wall met the floor of the bath Phil pointed out to me with slowed, speechless gestures the melancholy aperture where the water escaped, and, gathered round it, dozens of sticking-plasters, bleached clean by their long immersion and waving over the filter like albino, submarine plants. Then I saw him give out his breath, the bubbles crowding from his mouth, flooding around his head and up towards the light with baroque exuberance. He himself shot up then and I followed a second or two later. We hung on our elbows to regain our breath.

The plan was to go later to the Shaft and dance and get drunk and have a wonderful time. Phil had never been there with me: our funny routine isolated us from the normal gay world, and what with one thing and another I had not been there myself for a couple of months-though for a year or more before that I was impelled towards it, without any power to resist, every Monday and Friday night. I had been an addict of the Shaft. If I was out to dinner I would grow restless towards eleven o’clock, particularly if I was away in the western districts and had several miles to travel. I would go to the opera very inappropriately got up, and had more than once exploited the privacy of the Covent Garden box to slip off during the last act as the anticipation of sex welled up inside me, rapidly distancing and denaturing the carry-on on stage into irksome nonsense. The Shaft itself I hardly ever left alone, and I had made countless taxi-journeys down the glaring, garbage-stacked wasteland of Oxford Street and along the great still darkness of the Park, a black kid, drunk, chilled in his sweat, lying against me, or secretly touching me. I took home boys from far out-from Leyton, Leytonstone, Dagenham, New Cross-who like me made their pilgrimage to this airless, electrifying cellar in the West End, but had no way, if they failed to score, at three or four a.m., of getting home.

Phil took a practical attitude to his initiation, and we walked from the Corry through dusky, cooling Bloomsbury to have supper at the hotel. In Russell Square, under the planes, there was at last a perceptible breeze. The immense, leafy twilight shivered, and the three fountains, shooting up their forceful jets, reckless and almost invisible, splattered down across the path and caught us in their spray. Phil put his arm round me, remembering too, I suppose, our first terrifying walk here.

The kitchen at the Queensberry was a high, white-tiled hall into which plunged a series of writhing air-ducts, tubes of aluminium, riveted along their joints, and opening out into wide, battered hoods above the loaded and archaic gas-ranges. Even so, it was wearyingly hot in there, and the team of chefs, in their crumpled white jackets and hats and their blue and white checked bags, were testy and pink-faced, shying the portions that were ordered along the metal counter beyond which the waiters waited. As ‘staff’ we had to wait there too, until there was a convenient pause. I felt awkward, ready to be resented, whenever we visited the kitchen. Its incessant toil, unadorned by the servility and charm of the public parts of the hotel, made me feel a frivolous observer of some truly serious industry.

Tonight Phil got us some whitebait-dull, Rotarian starter-and then excellent beef olives, the fat tongue of veal juicy in its meaty sheath. We ate it in the staff dining-room, keeping to ourselves whilst two of the washing-up women and a leathery old porter smoked fanatically through the last minutes of their dinner-hour.

‘Off out tonight, then, young Philip?’ enquired the porter, preparing to go, hoisting up his waistband and buttoning his hot jacket. There seemed to be some hint of contempt in his voice, a sarcasm in his civility which showed it to be a challenge, even an insult. As he drew himself up, he was somehow shielding and shepherding the two women-though they themselves betrayed no sense of danger.

‘Yes, I’ll probably go out for a drink or two.’ A subfusc, minimal answer.

‘Don’t stay in this fucking shithouse anyway,’ said one of the women kindly.

‘I won’t.’

‘Don’t go breakin’ too many ’earts, neither,’ said the other with a chuckle.

I said nothing until they had gone. They probably thought me very stuck up, but I felt a kind of duty not to incriminate Phil. It was hard to believe they didn’t see me for what I was, but a pretence, a performance, was sustained that we were just pals. Rather like James, Phil cultivated a reserve that grew into a sort of authority. I must have needed their discretion just as they were freed by my lack of it. It was all a question of bjopti.

I finished eating and laid my knife and fork side by side. ‘Am I a frightful liability to you, darling?’ I said, conceitedly and solemnly.

In a swift, unconscious convulsion he clutched together the bevelled glass salt and pepper pots. ‘Of course not. I love you.’ He looked up for a split second and then went on very quickly and quietly, pushing the last French beans around his plate with his fork, ‘I really love you, I don’t think I could live without you. I couldn’t bear it when you were ill, and… I don’t know…’

It was much more of an avowal than I’d asked for, and the tears came to my eyes and I grinned at the same time. I covered his hand that was coupling the cruet with my own, and looked anywhere but at him-around the horrible, narrow but disproportionately tall room, which had obviously been made by splitting some more generous space in two.