Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

Everything in this job is personal: it is government on the ground, journeys of many days with a band of men across deserts or through sudden floods & then the instantaneous fields of flowers. It is not sitting at a desk: it is standing in scant shade & deciding between one naked tribesman and another. It is not bookish & bureaucratic: it takes place in open spaces almost without end, in which the rare, unobvious & beautiful people materialise out of the quivering heat. Their beauty of course is neither here nor there: their heads could grow beneath their shoulders… But when I went back through the doorless aperture into the room where Taha was, asleep, unaware, & yet tormented, like some saint in ecstasy or martyrdom, I felt all my vague, ideal emotions about Africa & my wandering, autocratic life here take substance before my bleary eyes. He lay with his head back, half off the pillow, an arm flung out, the fingers twitching with his pulse, only an inch above the floor… At once I saw he was my responsibility made flesh: he was all the offspring I will never have, all my futurity. He became so beautiful to me that my mouth went dry, & when he woke he found me staring at him. I’m not sure if he was the one I prayed for or the one to whom I made my intercession.

I am very, very drunk. It is half past two in the morning. I tiptoe in with fantastical caution, & see him sleeping quietly. Everything I have an impulse to do wd wake him- & that wd be inexcusable. All my love to him goes out in a sweet bedside gesture of self-denial, a kind of blessing, a sweeping of the arms that comes from I don’t know where and is lost into the air. And in a mood of certainty & faint ridiculousness, I stagger to bed.

June 1, 1926 : A terrible head this morning. I cancelled all engagements, such as they were, & fell into a routine of parallel convalescence with my boy. Hassan evidently foully jealous.

This evening, as he was much brighter, I sat with Taha in close & utterly irregular comradeship & had him tell me about his family. I even told him a bit about mine, until he said that being British I must know Mr Mills, a missionary apparently, who comes from New York, & I recognised that our understandings were a trifle out of kilter. Finally I told him the story of Prince Ahmed; it was the one I had learnt most recently to tell after dinner, & a strange amusement & entrancement came over his features to hear me recite to him in my painfully correct Arabic, as if he had been some dignitary. But then the story too held him like a revelation. I made use of various props for the three magical gifts of the princes: for the flying carpet the old rush mat on the floor, for the spying-tube which showed whatever one desired my field-glasses, & for the apple which cured all ills the lime on the tray with my drink. He laughed with that delight which children show at certain well-worn jokes whose very repetition is a guarantee of pleasure & security, & I capered around, squatting on the mat, peering out of the window through the binoculars-though I saw not the Princess Nural-Nihar but birds coming down into the nim-trees, a stupendous sunset above the rocks, a girl loping home with a dog at her heels- & then wafting the lime under my nose & rolling my eyes as if it smelt divine. But all the gifts were of equal wondrousness, I explained, sitting solemnly down on the edge of the bed: and then, as I went on about the shooting of the arrows, & how the Princess wd be given to him who shot the furthest, the most exquisite thing happened. Taha slid his hand shyly across the blanket & clasped my own. I scarcely faltered as I spoke of Ahmed’s arrow, which going so far was assumed to have vanished so that he lost the Princess to his brother Ali, but I felt a squeezing in my chest & throat & hardly dared look at him as, all unconsciously, I made our two hands more comfortable together, interweaving his long fingers with my own. By a simple gesture I wd never have dared to make & without words which neither of us cd have said, he conveyed his trust in me, & holding my hand held on to a simple faith that all wd be well with Ahmed, wretched though his current state now was. And when the others had all turned home, I went on, saying that the arrow wd never be found & that they must make haste for the wedding-feast of Prince Ali & the Princess Nur-al-Nihar, Ahmed went on alone & lo he encountered the radiant fairy Peri-Banou & fell in love with her & married her & lived in happiness with her all the days of his life. Then Hassan was scuffling & waiting at the door, & Taha with less than innocence drew his hand away-

The phone was ringing. Phil, I knew, would never answer it, though it was at the bedside, and when I came in he was sprawled over the sheets, pale, bleary and tumescent. ‘Leave us out with the phone,’ he groaned. I half sat on him and picked up the receiver.

‘Darling, it’s James. You couldn’t come over, could you?’

‘Sweetest, I’ve got a pretty frightful head and it’s only seven o’clock. Can’t it wait?’

‘A bit, I suppose. I’m in a terrible mess. I’ve been arrested.’

As I came up he was dithering on the doorstep and had a look, not uncommon with him, of bitten-back anxiety and determined self-control. He gripped my arm and said, ‘God, this is intolerable. I’ve just had a call.’

‘Don’t worry, old girl, I’ll wait for you.’ I patted him on the shoulder and smiled with a quiet confidence that I didn’t altogether feel after this traumatic night. A gorgeous summer day was unfolding and as James went off flapping his car keys I stood at the gate and let it sink in. The steady rumble of far-off traffic, the thinning haze, the suited people hurrying past, all seemed invitations to some wearying and majestic happening. I almost seemed to see, above the houses across the street, an immense golden athlete stretching into the sky like the drop-curtain of a ballet or a gigantic banner at a Soviet rally, full of appalling promise. It was a relief to go indoors.

James’s flat was quite nice-clean and roomy and safely sandwiched half-way up a house of geriatrics and absentee Greeks. The little cosmopolis of Notting Hill, its littered streets, its record exchanges, its international newsagents, late-night cinemas, late-night delis, was to hand. The elegant vacancy of the Park was admirably near; you could walk to the museums, to Knightsbridge even, and a little later in the year, to the Proms. And at the back, a block away, you were in Carnival country.

Even so, the very convenience and accessibility of James’s house gave it a bleak and transitory feel. The shelf in the hallway was always stacked with post addressed to former tenants whom nobody knew-bills, circulars, mailing-shots aimed with desolate regularity at a population of migrants. In the small carpeted lift (which this morning I allowed myself to take) one would meet strangers who were just polite, incredibly well dressed, sometimes carrying tiny fancy dogs.

James liked the insularity of his flat, liked having a place all to himself, but was clearly affected by this mood of transience, a sense of valuelessness despite the climbing prices and the mortgage. He could never bring himself to do much to it, and though he loved pictures seemed not to notice the half-furnished bareness of his own few rooms. He had a fine Piranesi-all tumbled masonry and sprouting bushes-that he had bought years ago in a sale but had never framed. It was propped, sagging in its mount, on the mantelpiece, above the dusty and ornate black ironwork of the blocked-off grate. There were comfortable, nondescript armchairs, and a heavyweight stereo system. He was obsessed with Shostakovich and had innumerable records of baleful quartets and sarcastic little songs. They put me into a gloom and a fidget within seconds but I think their bleakness met some otherwise inarticulate inner compulsion of his own, of a piece perhaps with the featurelessness of the apartment and his fatalistic disdain of possessions.