Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

‘Will it ever get better,’ I said, hardly as a question.

Charles puffed helplessly. ‘I’m beginning to feel a kind of relief that I shan’t be around to find out.’

It was graceless of me to put Charles on the spot but I said I found it hard to reconcile his views on race with the film that Staines had made and he himself-according to Aldo-had paid for. But I did it with as much cheek and charm as possible. He was bemused.

‘I don’t think race comes into it, does it? I mean, Abdul is black and the others aren’t… but I don’t want any rot about that. Abdul loves doing that sort of thing-and he’s actually jolly good at it. He’s a pure exhibitionist at heart.’

‘I must say I was rather amazed by the whole affair-you know, seeing half the staff of a famous London Club about to copulate in front of the camera.’

‘I think you’ll find a good many of them do it-though not always on film, I agree. They’re a close little team, there at Wicks’s, and they like to do what I want. But then I got them all their jobs,’ he added. It was one of those moments when I had the feeling, chilling and flustering at the same time, that Charles was a dangerous man, a fixer and favouritiser. In the world beyond school, though, perhaps one could have what favourites one wanted.

‘Even so…’ I shrugged. ‘Do you have any idea what will happen to the film?’

‘Well, it’ll have to be edited and everything of course, which is actually frightfully difficult with blue films, the continuity, and putting the close-ups in the right place. We have some contacts-well, friends really, who do all the technical side. We made a few mistakes in the last one we did-filmed over several days so that the boys could come up with the goods, but then you found, if you had an eye for such things, that they’d somehow mysteriously changed their socks in the middle of a fuck or whatever.’

‘I didn’t realise this was such an established business-I’m astonished.’

‘This is our third,’ said Charles, with the personal satisfaction of the amateur. ‘Much the best. It should be ready quite soon; and then we’ll put it out to one or two of those little basement cinemas in Soho where there are people we know. I don’t suppose you ever go to such places.’

So now my rather prickly line sprang back and snagged on my own moral woollies. I was embarrassed and laughed. ‘Well, yes, I have sometimes been to them.’

‘I think they’re jolly good value,’ Charles went on in candid, reasonable tones. ‘I mean, you pay your what is it, fiver, and nine times out of ten you’ll see something that really takes your fancy.’

‘I confess I go to them more for the off-screen entertainment,’ I archly bragged.

‘Ah yes… well…’

‘In fact, I first got off with my current friend in a cinema in Frith Street. He was very shy afterwards about admitting that it had been him-in the dark, you know. He’s a very shy boy, actually, but in those places people seem to lose their inhibitions.’ Charles was not paying attention, and perhaps I shouldn’t have been telling this story. I still wasn’t wholly sure it had been Phil that I had felt up that day in the basement of the Brutus. Blushing, abstruse, he would not, when I put it to him, confirm or deny it. If it had been him, then he seemed to want it forgotten; if not, then he showed an odd readiness to be incorporated into some half-apprehended fantasy of my own. If it had been him, that squalid and exaggerated little episode must alter my understanding of him, open up the faintly sickening possibility of there being another Phil, whom I could not account for. He might have been at the Brutus at this very moment-or at the Bona or the Honcho or the Stud…

‘It’s always gone on, of course,’ Charles recalled. ‘We had little private bars, sex clubs really, in Soho before the war, very secret. And my Uncle Edmund had fantastic tales of places and sort of gay societies in Regent’s Park-a century ago now, before Oscar Wilde and all that-with beautiful working boys dressed as girls and what-have-you. Uncle Ned was a character…’ Charles sat beaming.

‘I’m always forgetting how sexy the past must have been-it’s the clothes or something.’

‘Oh, it was unbelievably sexy-much more so than nowadays. I’m not against Gay Lib and all that, of course, William, but it has taken a lot of the fun out of it, a lot of the frisson. I think the 1880s must have been an ideal time, with brothels full of off-duty soldiers, and luscious young dukes chasing after barrow-boys. Even in the Twenties and Thirties, which were quite wild in their way, it was still kind of underground, we operated on a constantly shifting code, and it was so extraordinarily moving and exciting when that spurt of recognition came, like the flare of a match! No one’s ever really written about it, I know what you mean, sex somehow becomes farcical in the past,’ Charles looked at me very tenderly. ‘Perhaps you will, my dear.’

‘Are you finished, my Lord?’ Graham was enquiring in his complaisant basso.

‘Graham, yes, yes. Do clear away. And William, I must give you just before you go something else to read.’ I hopped up, alert to these covert stage directions in Charles’s talk, and helped him up too. He shuffled round his chair, and looked about for whatever it was. I was convinced he knew where to find it, and had politely and theatrically introduced this air of uncertainty. He handed me a document of several pages, the size of a pamphlet of poems, bound in black shot silk boards and tied legalistically with pink ribbon. ‘Don’t read it now,’ he cautioned. ‘Read it when you get home.’

Graham had gone out with the tray, and we followed a few moments afterwards, Charles’s hand on my shoulder. ‘Thanks so much,’ I said.

‘Thank you, my dear.’ He leant on me and-which he had never done before-kissed me on the cheek. I clumsily patted him on the back.

On my way home I stopped at the Corry for a swim. It was that transitional half-hour before six o’clock, and the last of the afternoon customers-oldsters, college boys, the unemployed-were combing their hair and wringing out their trunks as the evening crowd, the workers, began to pour in and down the stairs. In twenty minutes every locker would be taken, and those who had been held up in traffic, late for their fitness classes or for a squash booking fast elapsing, would come cantering through the swing doors flushed and swearing. Like restaurants and Underground stations the Corry had its times of day, and to come in on a weekday afternoon or a Sunday evening was to find it in the unhindered possession of a small number of people-like a school at half-term, when only the masters and those boys who live abroad are left. The pool, the gym, the handball court had the grateful calm of places only briefly reprieved from habitual clamour. As I arrived the calm was yielding fast.

I took advantage of the crowd, and of the need I always felt on leaving Charles to be childish and naughty. In the showers were a gaggle of Italian kids, in London on a language course. The Club often played host to these groups, and though their bored ragging was a nuisance in the pool the members by some unspoken agreement forgave them everything for their sleek brown bodies, the tiny wet leaves of their swimwear and all their posturing and tossing back of curls. I halted under a fizzing nozzle before going down to the pool and looked them over frankly. It was impossible, with my opera-goer’s Italian, to understand what they were saying, but as they took notice of me I heard their chatter sprinkled with cazzo… cazzo , slurred, whispered and then called aloud, almost chanted, so that they fell about in coarse, lazy giggles at their audacity.