Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

September 28: A fairly terrible day, which seemed to have been designed as the counterpart to Tuesday, all choking catastrophe instead of the sentimental camaraderie & avoided intimacy of that brief afternoon. Taha went out for me after lunch to deliver some papers to GS & to find me if he cd some flowers-I had a sudden yearning for those great bronze chrysanthemums. As I sometimes do, I imagined him going through the streets on my behalf, saw him by some supernatural, aerial sixth sense moving among the people, pointing to the flowers, taking the long, top-heavy cone of paper in his hands… I knew how people noticed him, sometimes were rude or cruel, all of which only deepened my pride in him. It was a mystery-for as he ambled about the prosaic London streets he moved too in the realm of my imagination, inviolable, invested with my love.

He took an age to return & when he finally did come in with the chrysanthemums in a vase I asked him if everything had passed off all right, feeling a little anxious at the confidentiality of the things I gave him to carry-not on his account, whom I trust utterly, but lest he shd be waylaid. He said he was very sorry and cd he ask me something. I said of course. He said he wanted to marry Niri. I congratulated him, shook his hand, wished him every happiness, & said I looked forward to meeting his intended. He went out & shut the door, & a minute or two later I heard him leave the house.

It was only then that I allowed myself to absorb the news, or rather to be transfixed by it, for it filled me with the most piercing anguish, & as he went out, wearing-I knew-his comical broad-brimmed hat, it was as if something within me had been released & I found myself gasping for breath, tears rolling down my face & the whole room & its furniture & pictures & books somehow sodden & heavy with the misery of it. It is true that the announcement of any marriage, however dear to me the couple & however perfectly suited to each other, invariably fills me with the blackest gloom; it may lift after a day or two, though not before an enduring sense has been instilled, not of the beginning of something new, but of the irrevocable ending of something innocent & old. But when the innocence is that of my own Taha… I felt it almost as if he had died-or worse, been magically translated into some other element. It was as if I saw him through field-glasses dancing & singing in a place so far away that when he opened his mouth, when his lips moved, no sound disturbed the silence.

I went round & round the room, mastering my feelings & then yielding to them again. I fetched up in front of the chrysanthemums, which he had arranged in the tall Tang vase that used to be in the hall at Polesden. They were utterly immaculate, ripe yet dry & glossy, the colour of their great clustering heads autumnal while their leaves were green. They might almost have been lacquered art-works, & one had to squeeze them or pinch their petals to prove that they were perishable. I ran over the brief scene of a few minutes before again & again in my mind, each time with renewed pain, & recognised the unspeakable deference with which he had as it were offered the flowers & suppressed his own excitement. He showed, as so often, his tender & acute intimation of my feelings while not altogether being able to contain his own. I understood too in time why he had been so cocky for the last few days, pulled as he must have been between gaiety & apprehension. So the chrysanthemums-in that way that inanimate things have of implicating themselves in moments of crisis-swam before my eyes like emblems of his years of fidelity, and festive tokens of his future, now elegiac, now heartlessly splendid.

I pulled myself together & went into the study & swallowed a large glass of whisky. I tried to get on with the proofs of my Sudan book, as a mechanic exercise, but of course the merest table of figures seemed to speak of my sweet Taha & our past together, & sent the memory ferreting around for the tenderest spots, the purest moments of selflessness & mutual service. Perhaps these inspired me in a way-for I wrote him a cheque for £200, then thinking better of it wrote him one for £100 instead; then I tore them both up & wrote another for £500 and put it in an envelope, and trotted up to the attic to leave it in his room. It’s a room I’ve so rarely been into, & I had to hold myself back from maudlin pillow-stroking reverie. It reminded me too of a room in the Sudan, since there is nothing in it save the bed covered with its beautiful shawl, a rug on the bare boards, & a little table with a photograph of Murad, and that other taken just before we left Khartoum, outside the Sudan Club-he & I standing side by side, smiling against the sun. But I cd scarcely bear to look at it, & hurried out again. Such simple, reassuring things were turning against me.

So many changes will come about, things that I haven’t even begun to think of, can’t think of. Will Taha stay with me, will they want to live here? Niri, I believe, lives with her mother and an old uncle out west somewhere… I thought of the appalling magnanimity I will have to show & realising I wd not be able to control myself if I saw him again so soon I went out, had a further drink or two at Wicks’s & then as evening came on found myself wandering somnambulistically towards Clarkson’s Cottage. It was welcome enough: I needed some narcotic, some soulless distraction.

The broken light has been replaced, so it was rather bright in there. There was a sort of businessman at one end in a raincoat & that thin, anxious little chap who’s always there & keeps Cave at the other. He reminds me of a college servant, making sure that the gentlemen are happy-his payment, I suppose, being the dubious pleasure of having a jolly good look. I took up my position in the middle & fiddled about for a bit as my brief mood of anticipation dwindled & then there was a familiar clippety-clop & Chancey Brough came in & force majeure took the stall on my right. He had the most tremendous & businesslike pee-he must have been saving it up for hours so as to seem (vain hope!) an authentic convenience-patron- & then weighed his immense tackle in the palm of his hand for a while. We obviously cdn’t remain where we were, but I knew his sticking-power & so I buttoned up & slipped off, tipping my hat with a polite ‘Good evening’ & best wishes to his wife.

I went along Old Compton Street, wishing Sandy were still there, & rather wanting a pal to get drunk with. The Leicester Square lavs seemed a possibility, so I popped in, but there were all the usual faces turning expectantly, Major Sprague & that butler from Kensington Palace & a few anxious youngsters on the make. Andrews tells me you can have a wonderful whirl at Victoria these days with all the tommies & tars; he picked up a couple of the latter there some time last week & had the night of his life, if he is to be believed. I wandered down towards Trafalgar Square, thinking I might get a bus, but the sunset came on & I was suddenly flooded with misery again & just gave it all up & went back to the Club for a chop & a glass of beer & was wretchedly rude to anybody who approached me.

It was with a mind worried by the gloom and misfortune of my friends and with my appearance newly toughened, Marine-style, by Mr Bandini that I went that evening to the view of Ronald Staines’s little exhibition. Normally I would have kept away, but James’s news made me realise I must put in an appearance. I had had to go through the rubbish bin to find the invitation again, a purple card with, scrawled on the back in white ink, the note ‘Sorry to lose you so soon the other evening-Ronnie’. I could quite happily have remained lost, but I needed to keep in with him and to secure from him those moody but surely incriminating photographs of Colin.