Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

I took a pause to say, ‘Um-Gabriel. Do you think you could leave out the annunciations?’ But it wasn’t the same for him without them, and I felt unbelievably stupid appearing to respond to them.

‘Okay,’ he said brightly, as I abandoned the job. ‘You like to fuck with me?’

‘Of course.’ There was after all some charm in his childlike openness. ‘But in silence…’

‘Wait a minute,’ he said and kicking off shoes and tugging off trousers and pants, ambled into the bathroom, his dick bouncing with a kind of mock-majesty before him.

I slipped off my own shoes and jeans and lay playing with myself on the bed. Gabriel took his time getting ready and after a couple of minutes I called through to ask if he was all right. He came in almost at once, now completely naked except for his cock-ring, the pale gold wafer of his watch and-which I should somehow I suppose have expected-a black leather mask which completely covered his head. There were two neat little holes beneath the nostrils, and zipped slits for the eyes and mouth. He knelt on the bed beside me and was perhaps looking to me for approval or amusement-it was impossible to tell. Close to I could see only his large brown pupils and the whites of his eyes, blurred for a split second if he blinked, like the lens of a camera. It was hard and disturbing the way the eyes could not vary their expression isolated from the rest of the frowning or smiling face. I felt that childhood fear of rubber party masks, and of the idiot amiability of clowns who you knew, as they bent down to pinch your cheeks, were fearful old drunks.

Gabriel held my head to look at me closely, and I unzipped his mouth and breathed in his hot breath and the expensive smell of leather. His body was supple though slightly gone to seed-but I liked it and bit it. There wasn’t much he could do in his mask, and when I had nosed around him for a while he hoiked me over and pushed my legs apart. I was anxious not to take all that raw, and had begun to complain, when I felt something cold and wet, like a dog’s nose, trailing up my thigh. I looked over my shoulder to find that from somewhere this madman had produced a gigantic pink dildo, slippery with Crisco. I heard him giggle tensely inside the mask. ‘Do you want to smell some poppers?’ he asked.

I rolled over and sat up and spoke in a strange tone of voice which I seemed to have invented for the occasion. ‘Look, pal, I’d need more than poppers to take that thing.’ It was all very well to be violated as I had been last night by Abdul, but I did not like the idea of inanimate objects being forced up my delicate inner passages. He turned and walked across the room-angry, hurt, careless, I couldn’t tell-and threw the great plastic phallus into the bathroom. I imagined the maid finding it there when she came to tidy up and turn down the bedclothes. ‘Okay, so you don’t like me that much,’ he said, thickly from inside the leather.

‘I like you very much. It’s just the moving toyshop I can’t be doing with.’ And I decided I had better go, and reached for my jeans.

‘I could whip you,’ he suggested, ‘for what you did to my country in the war.’ He seemed to think this was a final expedient which might really appeal to me; and I had no doubt he could have provided a pretty fearsome lash from one of his many items of luggage.

‘I think that might be to take the sex and politics metaphor a bit too seriously, old chap,’ I said. And I could see the whole thing deteriorating into a scene from some poker-faced left-wing European film.

When I was dressed and had my bag again slung over my shoulder Gabriel was wandering around the sitting-room, his huge erection barely flagging, but somehow no longer of interest to me. I stood and looked at him and he grasped and grunted and writhed out of his mask. His hair was moist and standing up, and his clear olive complexion was primed with pink-as it might have been if we had just simply made love. I went over to him and kissed him, but he closed his teeth against me, kept his hands at his sides. I left the room without saying goodbye.

Well, it served me right, I thought, as I wandered with a vague sense of direction along uniform carpeted corridors-Phil’s terrain, where he did his job. All this had certainly got me in the mood and now I would be too late to catch him and the uncomplicated solace he could give. Surely hotels must be hotbeds of this kind of carry-on, easy encounters at the bar or unlocking the doors of adjacent rooms. My little Philanderer could make a fortune out of escorting truly glamorous men-and not all of them would turn out to be as weird as the eye-catching Gabriel. It was quite likely, wasn’t it, that Phil had already caught Gabriel’s eye?

I found the corner by the service lift and the steep flight of stairs up to Phil’s attic. It was a drab, cheapjack little area, unambiguously removed from the public, and yet I had come to love it in a way I never could the rest of the monstrous edifice. The little room-and above it the lonely roof-were nothing really, but like the lovers’ cottage in ‘Tea for Two’ they had been wonderfully sufficient for our romance. I knew there was no chance of finding him in-he would be well off on his laddish booze by now-but it would be comforting to sit there for a bit with the window open and surrounded by his empty clothes. When I put my key in the lock, though, there was a muffled call of surprise, I thought, from within.

Phil and Bill were kneeling face to face on the bed. Bill’s hand rested on Phil’s shoulder, and it looked like some College jerk-off job. Their tilting dicks, alert as orgiasts’ on a Greek vase, withered astonishingly under my expressionless stare. Not for them the witless priapism of Gabriel; but there was enough defiance in their confusion for them not to blabber excuses-not to say anything at all. And I couldn’t think of anything much to say. I know I swallowed and coloured and took in, as if I needed to satisfy myself, the circumstantial details. Certainly there were no signs of passionate haste. Bill’s trousers were neatly folded and his vast smalls were spread like an antimacassar across the back of the chair. I nodded repeatedly and slowly withdrew, closing the door as if not to disturb a sleeper. Before I had reached the top of the stairs I heard a gasped ‘Oh my God’ and a loud frightened laugh.

And so to James’s. By the time I got there my anger, hurt, care were welling up under the frigid discipline I had instinctively assumed. I smeared away stupid tears. Thank heavens at least no crass, unforgettable words had been spoken. ‘Darling, whisky’ was my own first utterance-and I thought, none of your namby-pamby Caribbean aphrodisiac nonsense.

James was eating scrambled eggs standing up and listening to some fathomlessly gloomy music. ‘Bad day, dear?’ he enquired maritally.

‘The last twenty-four hours have actually been quite extraordinarily hideously awful.’

‘Oh, darling.’

‘I thought I was just about managing it until half an hour ago, when I went up to Phil’s room at the hotel-I don’t know why, just on some sentimental whim, I thought I’d put on some of his clothes and lie there for a bit and just be him, you know-he having arranged to go off drinking with some of his appalling friends. Well, they may not be appalling, I’ve never met them. I say, we couldn’t possibly take this music off? It’s driving me insane.’

‘It’s Shostakovich’s viola sonata,’ said James pettishly.

‘Exactly… That’s better. And the drink?’ He poured a generous Bell’s. ‘Dearest-thank you. So I opened the door, to which as you know I have a key, and find Phil in there with old Bill Hawkins, from the Corry, messing around stark naked, etc, etc.’

‘Fucking hell.’