Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

The exhibition was called Martyrs , and was hung at the Sigma Gallery in Lamb’s Conduit Street, a home, or at least a stopping place, for many ‘alternative’ figures. Founded in the Thirties by Rycote Prideaux, it had catered in its earlier days for left-wing artists, and Prideaux’s Sigma Pamphlets had been launched there with readings and exhibitions. In my lifetime, though, it had been run by Prideaux’s much younger friend Simon Sims, who had diluted his late mentor’s style, showed a lot of banal mystical art interspersed with often embarrassing gay and ethnic shows, and opened an austere vegan café, with harpsichord music and wooden plates, in the basement. The whole establishment was tinged with a mood of high-principled disappointment.

Through the front window I saw the few early arrivals, clutching wine glasses, frowning selfconsciously at the pictures. To one side Staines, dressed in black and white, was talking to a man with a notebook. He had that look of insincere good behaviour that people have when they are working on their own public relations. As I came in the coppery clack of the shop-bell had all heads turning-it was like the showers at the Corry-and Staines twisted round to smile at me and give me a presumptuous wink before carrying on with his interview. I signed the book and made for the drinks table.

I wasn’t warmly disposed towards the pictures, but knowing about their background I felt a slight anxiety on their behalf, as I do when I see a friend on stage. I hoped that their tawdry Smithfield muses would be sufficiently glamorised by Staines’s lens and the finery of the studio. By and large, I should not have worried. The photographs were intensely professional, the lighting and tonality were beautiful, and the silkiest of purses had been made from even the hairiest of sows’ ears. I spotted young Aldo at once, in his role of the Baptist, his naked torso broadening into brightness, his stiff little pennant at an angle over his head, an expression of faint surprise about his sleepy dark eyes and stubble-roughened jaw.

The controversial conversation piece in which Aldo appeared with the as yet unmartyred St Sebastian hung alongside. Sebastian was a boy of tedious, waxen beauty, with a little loincloth about to tumble down. They had been cleverly posed against a projected backdrop taken from some Tuscan master, but for all the quattrocento piquancy of their gestures they reminded me of nothing so much as those queeny fashion spreads in Tatler and Uomo Vogue. The impression was reinforced by a surge of Trouble for Men across my nostrils and the appearance at biceps level of the luminous pink spectacles of Guy Parvis. For a second I thought I might actually be caught up in one of his Alternative Image TV programmes, and prepared to sidestep the cameras as they zoomed in on Sebastian’s Gillette-smooth profile. But it seemed he was there in a private capacity. I distanced myself even as I was perversely drawn to stare at him, keen to pick up any absurd and memorable remarks.

I finished my glass of wine and downed most of another while I looked at the handsome bearded St Laurence with his dinky little gridiron, and the St Stephen who crouched appealingly in a shaft of light while above him the shadowy form of an immense black whom I would have liked to meet held a stone aloft. St Peter was Ashley, who worked out at the Corry, but he was not seen to best advantage upside-down.

The bell clacked frequently now and we early browsers became subsumed into the crowd of callers, who greeted each other, kissed, caught up on their news, walked backwards into other guests without apologising and generally, as if they were in a private house where such curiosity would have been unseemly, ignored the pictures. Those who had equipped themselves with a price list were forced into the crude necessity of asking the drinkers to move so as to get some distance on the martyrs or to squinny at the numbered labels. I took another drink and moved downstairs.

Here there was a series of life-size nudes, in a sculptural Whitehaven style-martyrs only to the bench and the Nautilus machine-and a set of plates made to illustrate a limited edition of John Gray’s Tombeau d’Oscar Wilde along with Stephen Devlin’s setting of the poem for tenor, string quartet and oboe d’a-more-a martyrdom with a whole teeming afterlife. The photographs were balletic and metaphorical, with a good deal of emphasis on the slim gilt soul aspect and a number of images, in Staines’s most typical style, crossed and half-obscured by the shadows of prison bars.

I was following a line of the music-a sort of Mahler-and-French which came as close as sexless music could to being explicitly homosexual-when there was a nudge, and Aldo himself was standing beside me. He didn’t say anything, but announced himself in this physical way as some people do in clubs and bars, or as boys do abroad, when there is a language problem. I smirked at him and carried on reading, and he seemed happy to stand by. ‘Ronnie didn’t think you’d come,’ he said after a minute.

‘I’m a bit of a martyr myself,’ I said. ‘One day one of Ronnie’s little jeux d’esprit will finish me off altogether.’

‘You don’t like the pictures?’ Aldo looked cast down.

‘Oh they’re all right. I like these ones here.’ We turned and ran our eyes over the plated athletes. ‘They aren’t martyrs, are they? I don’t like the martyrs so much-they’re just soft porn. You look very pretty in them… but I honestly prefer to have hard porn-or no porn at all. It’s all pretending, that stuff.’

‘Still, you didn’t stay long at Ronnie’s house the other day,’ he objected. ‘It was very good fun. We made this great scene and then at the end everyone joined in.’

‘That was just what I was afraid of.’

‘Even Lord Charlie had a feel.’

‘Please!’

‘Those boys Raymond and Derek were so tired,’ he had to go on. ‘Not Abdul, though. He could have kept at it all night.’

‘They should be showing the film here,’ I suggested, and Aldo was full of giggly shock. I looked him over candidly. In his tight white jeans and red-and-white checked shirt he reminded one vaguely of an Italian restaurant.

‘Is that all you?’ I asked, my question loitering around his groin. He seemed not to get it, and chuckled vacantly rather than asking me to repeat or explain. I pressed past him, squeezing his heavy bulge as I did so-it seemed real enough-a situation which my brother-in-law Gavin’s expression, as he suddenly reached out to me over several people’s heads, seemed to suggest he found tolerably typical.

‘Gavin! Wonderful to see you.’ We shook hands warmly and he said, ‘Good to see you, my dear,’ in that agreeable, almost nostalgic way that straight men sometimes flirt with gays. ‘How are things?’

‘Things are rather sort of emotional and peculiar… fortunately one is in good shape and can cope.’

‘Sounds fascinating!’ He looked quickly aside to Aldo, wondering perhaps if he could be the source of this peculiarity, and I hastened to introduce them.

‘Gavin, this is Aldo, he’s in some of the pictures upstairs, he impersonates John the Baptist-Aldo, this is Gavin, who’s married to my sister.’ The two of them shook hands, and Gavin bumbled on about how in that case he must know Ronnie. What puzzled me was how Gavin himself knew Ronnie, and I asked him.

‘You know, some of us lot do have contacts with some of you lot.’ He waggled a finger. ‘You may like to think that you live in a world all of your own, but in fact you live considerably further away from Ronnie Staines than we do. We were together on the committee about the traffic and the one-way system, and a very useful committee member he was too.’ I stood in mock-penitence. ‘I won’t ask how you met him.’