Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

Between the high neo-classical façade and that of the adjacent office block was a narrow chasm, gated from the street. The gate opened, and Abdul emerged, evidently also on his way home; he had on a light anorak over a T-shirt, and cheap grey slacks. I went up to him, surprised him as he locked the gate, greeted him with the conviction that he somehow held the answer to my problem.

‘Hey, William,’ he said, ‘all finished now.’ He gave me a flashy smile and was ready, I think, to move off and abandon me, so that I said recklessly:

‘Oh Abdul, did you know that Lord Nantwich had been to prison?’ He turned back and looked at me and I looked back at him closely, his lined face, pink inner lips and fierce eyes slightly bloodshot, more guarded in the street’s shadow.

‘Of course,’ he said lightly. ‘Everyone knows that.’

I pursed my lips and nodded three or four times. ‘Have you always known?’

‘I have always known. Of course. I went to see him in there when I was a little boy. No place to take a kid,’ he added. It was a detail that gave my evening a sickening completeness, like an orchid seen in a nature film brought in a few seconds from bud to heavy perfection.

I was laughing nervously as he turned back towards the gate. ‘Hey, come in here,’ he said. I followed him with a kind of absent-minded excitement and waited as he locked the gate behind us and went along after him past bins and milk-crates that were hard to make out in the alleyway’s blackness. He opened a door and the flickering of the strip-lights was dazzling.

It was the Club’s kitchen, abundantly old-fashioned, with many pantries and offices, windowed partitions and white-tiled walls. Cleaned and swabbed for the night it tingled in the fluorescent glare as if I was drunk. It had about it the discipline of institutional life and beyond that, for all its emptiness, something of the melancholy and teeming sense of order of an Edwardian country house. Abdul, who had sauntered to the far side of the room, came back to me where I lounged wondering against a table. He put his hands on my chest and sliding them up pushed my jacket back off my shoulders; it was then I realised that I had no tie on, and could never have been admitted to the Club proper, even if Charles had been there.

Abdul tugged my shirt out at the waist, and ill-temperedly opened my fly and pulled my trousers down about my knees. I saw his cock curving and buckling in his pants with anticipation before he turned me round and spread me out. It was one of those worn, foot-thick chopping tables, eaten away by incessant jointings and slicings into a deep, curved declivity. I waited greedily, and yelped as his hand came down, and again and again, tenderising my ass with wild, hard slaps. Then he crossed the room in front of me and yanked down from a shelf a catering-size drum of corn oil. It fell cold on my skin as he splashed it from a height then slicked my cheeks and slot, driving a strong unhesitating finger in. I heard the graphic rustle of his clothes, his trousers dropping to the floor with the weight of the keys in his pocket. He fucked me with a thrilling leisured vehemence, giving each long stroke, when it was in to the balls, a final questing shunt that had me gurgling with pleasure and grunting with pain, my cock chafing beneath me against the table’s furred and splintered edge.

It was quickly finished, and he slurped out of me, and slapped me again. ‘Hmm,’ he said noncommittally; then, ‘Fuck off out of here, man.’

I was woken by Andrews crossing the wide expanse of the bedroom and tugging back the curtains with a cruel flourish, shouting, ‘Good morning, my Lord.’ Behind him came the naked Abdul, pushing a trolley on which his cock, perhaps three feet long, was supported, curved and garnished like an eel. He wheeled it to the bedside and I looked at it anxiously: it had a dull grey-black sheen to it, and a slight pile, like wet suede. ‘I’m going to be very late,’ I said, sitting up abruptly and kicking back the bedclothes. ‘I have to give my maiden speech in the House at ten o’clock.’ Then other sounds broke in, and I woke up, heart racing, in the pink penumbra of my own room.

It had gone eleven, but I had not slept until four or five, turning over the uncomfortable revelations of the previous evening. If Charles had been orchestrating his campaign, as I sometimes believed he had, then he had brought it brilliantly and comprehensively to a head. The prison was the key. The one unspeakable thing that no one had been able to tell me threw light on everything else, and only left obscure the degrees of calculation and coincidence in Charles’s offering me his biography to write-a task he must have known I could never, in the end, accept.

And as for my grandpa… As I shaved I looked at myself quizzically, yet his image was also in my mind, the groomed, sharp-eyed, authoritative face, ‘handsome suaveté’… I remembered the rather frightening figure of my childhood, the trenchancy and reserve, and what I could now see as a slow softening of outline as he left politics and received his viscountcy. In retirement he had grown more accommodating, and with the arrival of Philippa’s children and the death of my grandmother had taken on something of the remote glamour of abdicated monarchy. His power was exercised with deference, calling on remembered allegiance. Yet his dynasty was not, in any strict sense, secure. Perhaps his fear that I would never have children explained the nervy familiarity of our relationship these days, the sense I had of being encouraged and yet kept at a hygienic distance. Perhaps it explained my own wariness of him, and the exaggerated obligation I felt under for the help he had given me. Oh, I wanted the flat and everything, but I was irked, graceless, I knew, and coltish about recognising its provenance. I loved my grandfather, too. Whether by the hoped-for sunbursts of our childhood holidays or the more watchful indulgence of his old age, he made one feel part of something superior and precious.

All that could hardly change now that he turned out to be in part a tyrant and bigot-not just the elder statesman I had been so proud of at my tother, but (the first saddening strands of evidence suggested) a kind of bureaucratic sadist, a man who had built his career on oppression. Perhaps his precious and superior coterie was not so desirable after all. I was at a loss what to do. I wanted somehow to record my dissent but without callow scenes. I needed, without altogether wanting, to know more.

I gave Gavin a ring, and was relieved when the long-suffering Spanish maid answered the phone: I didn’t want to bring it up with Philippa. After a few moments Gavin came amiably through.

‘Gavin, you must think me the most frightful fool.’

‘Good heavens…’ he laughed.

‘About Charles Nantwich-I hadn’t the faintest idea the other evening what you were talking about.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘I have now, though. It’s so ghastly-have you known for ages?’

‘Mm-quite some time. I mean that whole episode is more or less forgotten now, it was what?-thirty years ago. You must feel pretty awful about it, I suppose.’

‘You’re right. And was grandpa really the driving force of all this sort of anti-gay thing?’

‘I’m afraid he probably was. With the Home Secretary, I suppose, and the police.’

‘I’m so appalled by people knowing all this, and me going prancing around making passes at anything in trousers and not having the remotest inkling. And Charles and his friends leading me on…’ Gavin laughed nervously. ‘I don’t know what to say to him, either of them. Is Philippa aware of all this?’

‘She might be. She probably wouldn’t take it as seriously as you. I guess it was before either of you was born-I mean it’s another world, thank heavens ,’ he hastily emphasised.