Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

I heated up some coffee in the kitchen. James’s life-like Phil’s in a way-followed such awkward and demanding patterns, was so thrown out for the service of others, that ordinary things like mealtimes and provisions obeyed a quite different logic. Often he would live for weeks on three-minute snacks, and he was used to breakfasting at five in the morning or lunching at five in the afternoon. The fridge and cupboards were always full of little items to eat, many of them bought from the local Japanese supermarket. I riffled through packets of seaweed, red-hot crackers and the sprouts of various beans before deciding that coffee alone, perhaps, would be the thing.

There were two kinds of specialist publication James took. As I sat on a stool and leafed through to the end of the Guardian , I was alarmed to find one of them underneath, lying on the kitchen work-top. This was Update , a medical monthly that kept GPs abreast of the latest in sores, goitres, growths and malformations of all kinds. The articles were sober to a fault, and cast an assumption of disturbing normality over conditions which the accompanying photographs showed to be quite revoltingly unusual. This effect was worsened by the colour spectrum used, a flashlight glare which lent to the contorted limbs, the misted-over eyes and weeping wounds the high tonality of well-hung game. It was hard to imagine looking forward to the arrival of Update as one might to that of Autocar or Hampshire Life.

The other mags were not left lying about. The fact that even in his own home he kept them neatly hidden away (under some jerseys in the second drawer of his dressing-table) showed I suppose the secret and illicit power they still had for him. I hauled them out to see if there was anything new-though it was actually hard to remember. He dealt largely in material put out from Chicago by the Third World Press-a title which might have been thought to chasten rather than excite the exploitative urge, though James was clearly unabashed. The Third World Press specialised in blacks with more or less enormous cocks, and in leaden titles like Black Velvet, Black Rod or even Black Male. James was no bigot, however, and other publications such as Whoppers and Super Dick kept up with big boys of other creeds and colours. Often enough these were sexy men towards whom one could feel a notional sort of warmth, but the premium on the massive member resulted in some weird inclusions: skinny little lads, stout middle-aged men, a boy with one eye. Turning the pages of the new Nineteen-Inch Pipeline I half expected to come on illustrations of boil-ringed sphincters and mis-set bones.

And then what the hell had James done? Though he had his mischievous side he was a conscientiously good citizen. He parked on yellow lines, but he always displayed his ‘Doctor on Call’ sticker. He was a member of CND, but when he went on demonstrations was ingenious at lending support without actually sitting down in the road or being dragged away. The obvious thing was some sexual hitch: I didn’t know what the dear boy got up to, but as I assumed it wasn’t much, the idea of him procuring in a Gents or interfering with a minor seemed desperately unlikely. He would surely have had to have been in a crisis, a crack-up, to do anything like that: for whatever his eccentricities James was wonderfully well-adjusted to being ill-adjusted. I hated to think of him in the sudden scary spotlight of an arrest, the humiliation and the shock of its being for real.

Odd how, in the space of a few weeks, the police had come twice into my life. After the business with the skinheads they had been at the hospital, and I had been to the station and looked at photographs. It was a surreal thing, to look through several pages of criminal skinheads, all, apart from those with tattoos on their foreheads and necks, doing their utmost to look the same. Like the unfortunates in Update they squared up to the camera with an odd mixture of pride and reluctance. And I too, though angry and in great pain, was almost afraid to find the culprits and to throw my weight behind the whole machinery of prosecution. The policemen themselves were very businesslike: they were adamant against crime. But they weren’t prepared to be friendly, to be such suckers as unreservedly to take my part. What, after all, had I been doing at Sandbourne? And as I could not mention Arthur I had been a little vague and capricious, and taken refuge in my bandages. An amazing number of other things were going on at the station too, and I was encouraged not to consider myself special. It took a senior officer, seeing that my father was an ‘Hon’, to make the connection with my grandfather, to enquire if ‘by any chance’ I was related to the former Director of Public Prosecutions whom he remembered, and thence to soften into cautious sycophancy. What was more horrifying, though, was how, in the company of the police, my vulnerable, brutalised state was not soothed but exacerbated; the feeling that anyone might turn on me came over me again as I worried about James. To show my confidence and calm him I had suppressed my vulgar need to know what had happened. Now I began to want calming myself.

James’s diaries were always a good read and at Oxford I had made no pretence of not knowing what was in them. Nowadays he kept a more spasmodic record, was often weeks behind, and I found less opportunity to keep up. This was a shame, since they had for me the famous fascination of containing a good deal about myself. They pandered to my heart-throb image-‘Will adorable’, ‘W. looked fabulous’-though there was always a certain risk, as in hesitating at the door of a room where one is being discussed. There were pages-‘W. insufferable’, ‘What a jerk! No regard for my feelings’-where I was obliged to see myself from another point of view. It was like suddenly finding out that someone I knew quite well had been leading a double life: the delectable blond super-stud I loved so much was really a selfish little rich boy, vain, spoilt and even, on one stinging occasion, ‘grotesque’.

None of this was quite innocent. Like all diaries it envisaged a reader. The odious Robert Smith-Carson had read long sections of it about himself when James was so infatuated with him, and was both pleased and alarmed by the Wagnerian pitch of the entries (whole paragraphs delirious with exclamations: ‘Weh! Weh! Schmach! Sehnsucht!’ and so on). Other passages had an obscure biblical fervour: one which began ‘His thighs are like bronze doors’ I had subsequently annotated with exclamation marks of my own. My readings were also somehow allowed for, and the baroque candour of the diaries enabled James (who could never bear an argument or cross words) to tell me what he thought of me, without ever letting on in so many words that he was doing so. Between us we enacted a secret charade, a charade whose very subject was ‘secrecy’.

The sober, maroon-spined notebooks, drink-stained, rubbed and buckled, took up part of the very special shelf where the Firbank books were, those pocket-sized first editions with their gilt lettering or torn wrappers wrapped again in cellophane. Now that I was reading them myself I looked at them with more interest- Caprice, Vainglory, Inclinations , though not, alas, The Flower Beneath the Foot -and patted their backs encouragingly. Along from them the current volume of the diary was neatly in place, history already although only half-filled. Fairly a professional now at reading other people’s private bits and pieces, I settled down with my mug of coffee to find out what had been going on.

Reading Charles’s journal I could be confident that nothing in it, however boring on the one hand or touching on the other, could ever implicate me; whereas in James’s there was the uneasy excitement of some certain entanglement and my eye would skip down the page in search of myself. He had that elegant, artnouveau kind of writing which many architects still use on plans, and the Ws were very strong and conspicuous, like a pair of brick-hods side by side. How annoying it was when he was going on about Rheingold or Parsifal: Wagner and I shared an abbreviation, which cropped up pretty often-though in general it was possible to tell which of us he meant.