Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

I discovered that he was hopelessly behind, and realised that I would find no clues here to last night’s events. The latest entry was from several weeks before: ‘To Corry 6.30. The boy Phil, W’s new thing, was in the showers. Fantastic body, disappointing little dick. Still, felt quite a pang for it-smiled at him, but he looked straight through me. Humiliation! I had made such an effort when we met to be charming, but now I wish I hadn’t bothered. Perhaps all lovers resent such old friends, who know things that they don’t? Either that, or they really court them. But again it was that terrible feeling that no one ever notices me or remembers me.’

I felt a mixture of shame and cruel pleasure in this, that my little Philibuster was not giving anyone else a foothold on his hard, soap-slippery self-possession. And the unvoiced envy, vainly denied in the disparagement of Phil’s cock, came through good and clear. I worked back to the evening of Billy Budd with a masochistic sense that I wouldn’t come out of it well, though I was sure there would be very beautiful and insightful stuff about the music. It began: ‘ Billy Budd -box-Beckwiths-bloody! Not the music, but W. impossible. What poor Ld B thought I don’t know-he, of course, urbane & charming, tho’ at moments somehow steely & abstracted: one wdn’t want to be on the wrong side of him, & so one becomes faintly sycophantic (but that I’m not sure he likes either). W. has taken up with some boy at the Corry-it sounds to me as if it’s that gorgeous little tough with red trunks I’m half-crazy about. He told me as soon as we met & so ensured an evening of tortuous envy, regret & failure for me, which the music both soothed & inflamed à la fois. There was something rather infuriatingly consoling about the opera-struck by the mystery that comes from its not being about love but about goodness, and the way Britten channelled what he felt about love away into some obscurer, less appealing theatre of debate. We kind of mentioned this in the interval-Ld B it turns out knew EMF-perhaps quite well. For the first time ever I got the sense that he might like to talk about these things which are so difficult for people of his age and standing. As usual one was all discipline & good manners- unlike Miss W., who smirked & simmered & did her “Great Lover” number. Home. Miserable supper of old tofu-burgers; listened op. 117 & felt much worse. And then, what are these affairs? I thought of W. doubtless already back with his boy & made myself madly rational about it all, how it wdn’t last, how it was just sex, how yet again he had picked on someone vastly poorer & dimmer than himself-younger, too. I don’t think he’s ever made it with anyone with a degree. It’s forever these raids on the inarticulate. Appallingly tired, but cdn’t sleep. Lay there longing for someone poor, young and dim to hold me tight…’

I think I preferred the envy unvoiced. I sidled into the entry across the page. ‘… Surgery. Then to swim-40 lengths, exhausted but good. Hung around in the showers-full of mutants & geriatrics. About to go when that heavenly Maurice came in & took the shower next to mine. His skin, close to, exquisitely fine & silky- & his great lazy cock, half-erect, with that thick vein meandering down it, the dull purple head when he pulled back the skin… Extase! Then on call. Out at once to a basement flat that time forgot, the stinking dereliction most people know nothing about. Miserable, thousand-year-old husband & wife-she senile, he incontinent. She had slipped on the stairs, he cdn’t lift her, pissing himself. A great fat dog that kept getting in the way. Huge malodorous furniture, photographs, war-time wireless. I was so businesslike-its utter & absolute seriousness to them. Once I was outside in the car again I breathed freely-feelings of pity & misery, but no longer moony about Maurice. And this was only the beginning of a really useful night.’

This touched me far more than the attacks on me-which I read as a kind of flattery-and humbled me with a true sense of my uselessness. James was like Charles in this: without in the least intending it they exposed my egoism by the example of their goodness, by all their sweet, philanthropic sublimations.

There was the jolt of the lift being called, and its whining descent. I jumped up and put the diary back, but not quite in line, so that it would be clear that I had looked at it. I nipped into the kitchen for the Guardian , sprawled on the sofa and then-since there was something farcical and implausible in this-decided I would be asleep. I pretended to surface as James came in: ‘Dearest! Sorry, I’m so tired-frightful night. Down the Shaft till all hours.’

He didn’t seem too thrilled about this. ‘I hope it was fun.’

‘Up to a point. I went with my little Philpot but ran into Arthur…’

‘So you had them both, I imagine?’

‘Well…’-I left it in the realm of possibilities.

He slammed around the kitchen, ground more coffee, put bread in the toaster almost as if to complain that I should have done all this for him already; but to fend off what had to be said, too. ‘You’d better tell me what happened,’ I said. He hugged me suddenly and hard.

‘Yes; do you mind if I tell you the whole thing? At the risk of sounding rather foolish.’

‘My darling.’

‘Let’s go in the other room.’ We did so and he opened one of the big windows on the faint summer roar, and walked about and gazed into the rooms across the road while I sat attentively. ‘I suppose I’ve been feeling a bit wretched lately,’ he said, and then stopped.

‘What sort of wretched?’

‘About love and sex and life in general.’ He put down his coffee mug as if it were a nuisance. ‘I don’t know, I just feel so out of it. I’m working so hard I can scarcely do anything I want-I never see anybody. Well, I see hundreds of people, but never anybody I want to see. When did we last meet, for instance? I know you’re busy with your boys and what have you-but I would like to see you darling a bit more often, you know? You are one of my oldest, dearest friends, fuck it.’

‘I do feel the same, James. I’m always thinking of you and having conversations with you in my head and imagining what you would say about things. You’re my most constant companion, even though I’m so pathetic and never get in touch with you.’

He smiled: ‘You see, just talking to you now makes me feel better. Which proves we should meet more often.’ He turned away. ‘How’s it going with Phil?’

I wasn’t sure if he wanted the gratifying news that it was all over, a mere flash amid the long day of our relationship, or the mortifying assurance that it was all going fine. ‘I must say, we do rather adore each other,’ I offered, with a modesty that may have sounded like bragging. ‘He’s really cuddly.’

‘That’s it,’ James said, with nodding recognition. ‘It’s cuddling I want really as much as everything else. It’ll sound stupid to you, Willy, but over the last few weeks I’ve just felt… so out of it. I’ve gone so long without love and I’ve become simply so accustomed to it all, as if that’s how life is and evermore shall be-death-horror-amen. It struck me that I’ve turned into the archetypal middle-class intellectual out of touch with everything, just like someone in a Forster novel, and that was eighty years ago… It’s all very well being ironic, but then it keeps coming over me that no one wants me, the summer’s burning away, and no one makes a move for me, I don’t preoccupy anyone…’ He wailed a little but was unable to cry.

I went over and held him. ‘Darling heart, of course people want you. You’re so adorable.’ I kissed away the tears that weren’t there. I found him very slightly repellent.