Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

I colour to remember how at first I assumed that James fancied me, so infatuated was I with myself. A few days later we met again at a cricket match in the Parks (my French boy having turned moody and hostile), drank beer together all afternoon, sat up late listening to Wagner, and I realised that what he liked was my company, and the fact that we felt the same about boys and music. We reached the stage of drunkenness where Brünnhilde’s Immolation seems to last only thirty seconds or so, though each bar is still a miraculous revelation. When he turned off the gramophone, stood up and said, ‘Well, you must go, darling,’ I was smitten with friendship, moved especially that he did not want me to stay. After that we met almost every day of our undergraduate careers.

Tonight we were meeting in the Volunteer, my local gay pub. Mildly art-nouveau and metropolitan outside, with mysteriously opaque acid-etched windows, the Volunteer inside, after disastrous refurbishments, was an eternal parable of disappointment. A little back bar, favoured by the elderly, retained some period character, but the rest had been laid waste into the vast areas required for the mass jostling and cruising of a Friday or Saturday night. Round tables with beaten copper tops were aligned in front of the leather-covered tram which ran along the walls. In season, a fire burnt in the grate, the adjustable gas jets failing to kindle the synthetic logs. When it was lit the flames showed up the hundreds of fag-ends that had unthinkingly been thrown in.

The pub was at its least inspiriting in the early evening. Hardy regulars, resigned to hours of waiting, lounged at the bar or filled in time with the Evening Standard , inching their way down pints of lager, glowering at any newcomers and exchanging greetings in tones that suggested that things were pretty bad. And so they were. The Volunteer was a second-division gay pub, and while the glamorous and fashionable were chatting each other up in King’s Cross or St Martin’s Lane, a mood of provincial neglect settled over it. It seemed, as I bought my bottle of Guinness and retired to a corner, like the waiting-room of a station on a branch line where the last train was not expected for quite some time.

One of the barmen, very thin in very tight jeans, and with a lugubrious, made-up manner, wandered across to the door and stood looking out over the pavement, a lust-quenching advertisement to any potential drinker. ‘Startin’ to rain,’ he said to no one in particular as he turned back into the bar. James, of course, had an umbrella and trotted in a minute or two later looking very respectable. He had just come from surgery.

‘You look tired,’ he said. ‘Too much sodomy, I should say.’ And then, as if in surgery, picking up my Guinness bottle: ‘Take this tonic twice a day and have a complete rest: we’ll soon have you back to normal.’

It was charming to see him, though looking (worthily, selflessly) tired himself. I didn’t comment on this, for his overwork and his unfairly long spells on call depressed him and were making him look older. He sat beside me with his drink, and I ran my hand over his head, bald now to half way back. He smiled, and put a kiss on my cheekbone.

‘How are the ill?’ I asked.

‘Oh, fine,’ he said.

‘Anything interesting?’ The bizarre things that people said and did in the consulting room were a staple of our conversation.

‘Not really. The woman with the stones came back. And I had a lad in this morning with the most enormous donger.’ James was obsessed by big cocks, many of which seemed to pass through his hands in his professional capacity-though all too few, I suspected, in his private one.

‘How big?’ I enquired.

‘Ooh…’ he gestured with his hands, like a fisherman-‘in its flaccid condition that is. Quite unbearably hideous youth, alas. He seemed to think there was something wrong with it-so I told him to go to the clinic.’ He took a deep draught of beer. ‘Fantastic cock, though,’ he added wistfully.

I chuckled. ‘You’d have been proud of me the other day,’ I said, ‘when I did a very heroic deed and saved the life of a queer peer.’ And I related the incident in the Kensington Gardens bog. ‘It was all due to you, darling,’ I said. ‘I remembered what you do on trains.’

‘I’m impressed and proud,’ James said. ‘But a Lord-a Baron, or something bigger do you suppose?’

‘Looked like a Baron to me,’ I said-and with a silly smirk, ‘anyway you wouldn’t find a Viscount cottaging…’

‘Not yet, you wouldn’t,’ James tartly rejoined. ‘Has he been in touch since?’

‘He has not. A man just came along when the ambulance arrived and ran about saying “Oh dear, my Lord” and that kind of thing. I imagine we may never find out who it was.’ I looked at James. ‘But to think you do that all the time. God, I felt wonderful afterwards…’

‘Yes; you get over that, you’ll find, should you ever do it again. But what about this boy? I suppose you’d better tell me.’

I must have bored James for many hours with the pitiless recollection of every detail of my sexual encounters. Often his response to my saying ‘I met this fucking wonderful man last night’ would be ‘Thank you, I don’t want to hear about it’-though this could never quite forestall at least a synopsis of the main events. The routine was a joke now, though behind it lay all his inhibitions, the uninvestigated secrecy of his own private life. Being a doctor, too, made him circumspect, as well as giving him a kind of authority for his lack of adventurousness. And even when I knew he had had some fling he would never mention it himself, so that lone events, which I suspected to be exceptional, could equally be interpreted as typical of a thriving sex life. Somehow he had made it impossible to ask him directly.

‘What is there to say?’ I for once replied. ‘Except: total bliss, endless fuck, suck, schmuck.’

‘You mean he’s stupid.’

‘He’s no Einstein, I grant you.’

‘So what do you talk about all the time?’

‘I don’t know, really. We have a kind of baby-talk-except all the words are rude-and we giggle a lot, and generally praise each other’s personal appearance. We had a meal at the Testudo one night, and the conversation did run a bit thin. And I did something rather terrible.’ I looked down in mock-confusion.

‘Don’t tell me.’ He looked at me narrowly. ‘Not Massimo?’

‘Wasn’t it too frightful of me? But I had to have him…’

‘My God!’ squealed James. ‘You absolute bastard. How ever did you manage? I don’t want to know.’

‘We just slipped out the back, not in the lav, but actually in the sort of yard with the crates. Ever so quick.’

‘But what about poor little whatsisname?’

‘Arthur? Oh, he was sitting there waiting for me, all sleepy and unsuspecting. Actually, Massimo said he wanted to have him too, but I did draw the line there.’

‘Was it like we always imagined?’

‘Mm, was rather. Everything on the menu, you know; full helpings.’ I leered helplessly. ‘But I should have a go some time-I’m sure he’s anybody’s…’

‘Thanks!’

‘No, I mean, I’m sure there’d be no problem.’

‘They do say, waiters…’ murmured James, in a tone of smothered excitement. ‘What’s Arthur’s… member like, incidentally?’

‘Entirely delightful. Not your kind of thing, perhaps-short, stocky, ruthlessly circumcised, and incredibly resilient and characterful.’

James let a pause fall in which the brio of my testimonial edged towards embarrassment and then said, ‘So you’re in love with him, are you?’ I took a professional sip of Guinness.

‘I can’t be, actually,’ I admitted. ‘We couldn’t sit down and listen to Idomeneo and feel a deep spiritual bond. It must just be an infatuation. Sometimes I don’t feel I know him at all, which adds to the poignancy of the thing no end. And then Holland Park and my place is all a completely new world to him. He lives with all his family in a tower block. I said wouldn’t his mother worry about where he was, but he said he often didn’t go back home. They don’t have a phone, so he couldn’t let them know. But I imagine he’s gone back there today-he had to go and sign on. But’-I drew round to it-‘you’re quite right: it can’t last. I don’t want it to really-it’s just been a heavenly week.’