Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

So much had ended, so many things gone crooked and bad-and yet the high June afternoon lasted and lasted, grew stiller, more crystalline. There was no friendly darkness in it. I shifted and slept again.

At about drinks time I began to want to do something. I wrapped up my trunks in a towel, flung them in my sports bag with my goggles and soap-box and an American ‘gay thriller’ I had been loaned by Nigel the pool attendant, and trotted off out. The pavements and gardens were exuding their summer smells, and as I approached the Tube station I walked against the current of people coming home, youngsters in pinstripes from the City fanning out from the gates, jackets here and there hooked over a shoulder, smart clippety-clop of old-fashioned City shoes. They were quite handsome, some of these boys, public-school types with peachy complexions and contemptuous eyes. Already they commanded substantial salaries, took long, overpriced lunches, worked out perhaps in private City gyms. In many ways they were like me; yet as they ambled home in the benign and ordered vastness of the evening, as I fleetingly caught their eye or felt them for a moment aware of me, they were an alien breed. And then I was a loafer who had hardly ever actively earned money, and they were the eager initiates, the coiners of the power and the compromise in which I had unthinkingly been raised.

My disaffected mood persisted in the sweaty train. Goldie was one of the poorer accessions of the swimming-pool library. It was not, alas, about the Cambridge second eight, but about rent-boys, blackmail and murder in Manhattan; Goldie was the gay police officer who got to buy the favours of the chief suspect, and seemed bound to fall in love with him before the sorry end. The book’s formula was to alternate blocks of fast, bloodthirsty action with exhaustive descriptions of sexual intercourse. Nigel, night-sighted in the pool’s subterranean gloom, had said it was a good one; but I resented its professional neatness and its priapic attempts to win me over. The trouble was that, as attempts, they were half-successful: something in me was pained and removed; but something else, subliterate, responded to the book’s bald graffiti. ‘Fuck me again, Goldie,’ the slender, pleading Juan Bautista would cry; and I thought, ‘Yeah, give it to him! Give it to him good ’n’ hard!’

As we slowed towards stops I looked around at the other passengers, wary slumpers and strap-hangers who never met each other’s eyes for more than a fraction of a second. Half-heartedly playing the game James and I used to play I tried to select which person in the carriage I would least object to having sex with. Occasionally the choice could be made difficult by the presence of too many scrumptious schoolboys or too many dusty-handed navvies. Normally, as now, the problem was to choose between that businessman, regular and suited but with a moody something about him, and the too-tall youth in the doorway giving off a tinny, high-hat patter from his headphones, and looking flightily around through a haze of Trouble for Men. It was James’s theory that everyone had about them some wrinkle at least of lovability, some peculiar and attractive thing-a theory which gained poignancy from the problems in applying it.

Consoling and yet absurd, how the sexual imagination took such easy possession of the ungiving world. I was certainly not alone in this carriage in sliding my thoughts between the legs of other passengers. Desires, brutal or tender, silent but evolved, were in the shiftless air, and hung about each jaded traveller, whose life was not as good as it might have been. I remembered for some reason a little public lavatory in Winchester, a urinal and a couple of cubicles visited by bandy-legged old men going to the market and at night by ghostly fantasists who left their traces. It was up an alley where the College turned one of its high stone corners against the town-not a place for boys, for scholars, though I went there once or twice with an almost scholarly curiosity. The cistern filled for ever, the floor was slippery, there was no toilet paper, and between the cubicles a number of holes had been diligently bored, large enough only to spy through. Talentless drawings covered the walls, and wishful assignations, and also, misspelt in laborious capitals, long unparagraphed accounts of sexual acts-‘they had her together… 12 inches… at the bus station’. In between these were fantastic rendezvous, often vague to allow for disappointment, but able sometimes to touch you with their suggestion of a shadowy world in which town and gown pried on each other. I had read: ‘College boy, blond, big cock, in here Friday-meet me next Friday, 9 pm.’ Then: ‘Tuesday?’ Then: ‘Next Friday November 10’… I had thought almost it could have been me, until I just made out, bleared and over-written, the date ‘1964’: a decade of dark November Fridays, generations of College blonds, had already passed since those anonymous words were written.

At the Corry life was going on full blast. I swam more joylessly than usual, hoping I might catch Phil, starved of him, longing to have and to hold him: I wanted the solidness of him in my arms, and for a moment excitedly mistook another swimmer for him as he lounged at the shallow end. He had trunks on just like Phil’s and when I surfaced grinning in front of him he gave me a bothered look before pushing off in a panicky, old-fashioned side-stroke. I felt keenly about the discipline of swimming, and then was suddenly bored by it, and by the taste of chlorinated water. When I hopped out I had a few words with Nigel. He was sprawling in those viewing seats erected long ago for matches and galas which never now took place.

‘Hullo, Will-good swim?’

‘I’m not in the mood, I’m afraid, today. I can do it, you know, what’s the point?’

‘Mm, still, good for you. How are you getting on with that book then? Good one, isn’t it?’

‘I’m a bit disappointed by it, actually. You’ve lent me better.’

‘Mm, but that Goldie, is it, I’d like to meet him. He can give me a taste of his truncheon any time.’

I shook my head sorrowingly. ‘He doesn’t exist, love. It’s just a silly book.’

‘Get out,’ said Nigel, tutting and turning his head away.

‘I could show you something really sexy-and true,’ I said, in a sudden treacherous bid for his interest-he who didn’t interest me at all, handsome and idle though he was. ‘I’ve got some private diaries of a guy’ (Charles a guy? some affronted guardian spirit queried) ‘with amazing stuff in them. It’s even got things happening here-years ago…’ I had doubts and petered out.

My true come-uppance not from a fascinated insistence I should tell more but from a deliberate lack of attention, as if to endorse my self-reproach. ‘You still going with that Phil?’ he wanted to know.

‘Yup.’ I squared my shoulders and tried to appear worthy.

‘He’s looking good.’ Nigel smiled at me slyly. ‘He was down here earlier on, splashing about, diving and that. Showing off. I wouldn’t mind a bit of that, I thought. Gave me a really fresh look too.’

‘You little slut,’ I said, and flicked at him with my towel as I darted off. But I was reassured by how he had got it wrong, for though Phil was taken with his own body he almost stubbornly never tarted. His love was all bottled up and kept for me.

I thought of him with such tenderness in the shower and the changing-room that I was hardly aware of the bustle around me. I had not been good enough to him. I had often been sarcastic, and used him as a kind of beautiful pneumatic toy. He was the only true, pure, simple thing I could see in my life at the moment, and I wished I was with him, and wanted to thank him, and say I was sorry. I decided I would go up to the Queensberry and hope to catch him before he went out. Then I would go to James, who was true and pure too of course in his way, and worrying about his looming court appearance.