Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

‘I do find it very terrible actually.’ I flopped onto the sofa and gulped at my drink. ‘I mean, I absolutely hate the thought of Phil going with someone else. But one would understand if it were just some spur-of-the-moment fling-some sexy guy staying in the hotel or something. To go with Bill, who is anyway a pal of mine and what? three times his age…’

‘No?’

‘Well, just about.’ I stared at James, through him, as I realised how slow I had been. ‘You know, I should have been on to this. I’ve seen Bill hanging around near the Queensberry before now-and of course I knew he was sweet on Phil, sweet on him before I was. Indeed it was really Bill’s interest in him that got me going, made me see how good he was. And then last week, when I took Phil to the Shaft, I knew something funny was going on. We were sort of horsing around outside the BM and I realised someone was watching us from across the road. I don’t think Phil saw him, but I’m convinced it was Bill.’

‘Kind of creepy, n’est-ce pas?’ said James, wandering off and looking out of the window. He was my only friend but I knew that he would take a kind of wistful satisfaction in things having at last- at last: it was what? two months?-gone awry. ‘This needn’t mean it’s all over, though, surely?’ he said.

I stared some time into my glass. ‘I don’t know. No, it needn’t. It will, I think, mean that whatever’s going on between those two is all over. What you don’t know, and what Bill doesn’t know I know, is that he has already been inside for interfering with young boys.’ But these were the kind of real-life details that never shocked James: it was only on the fantasy level that one got to him. ‘He’ll be pretty scared about all this.’

‘Well, you’re hardly going to shop him to the police, are you?’

‘Ooh, I don’t know,’ I said with a rueful laugh, finishing my drink and getting up to splosh in another half-tumbler full. I walked over and hugged him from behind, resting my chin on his shoulder. ‘It’s like one of those frightful seventeenth-century epitaphs: I’ve had my Will, I’ve had my Fill, and now they’ve sent in my Bill. Or something like that.’

‘Do you want something to eat?’

‘I think I’ll just stick on the booze, actually. Darling, can I stay here tonight? I just don’t fancy going home-and I’m sure he’ll try and ring up and it will all be too appalling.’

‘Yes, of course you can.’ I sensed his nervous pleasure at the certainty of companionship. He turned round in my arms and gave me a tight squeeze and a kiss on the blunted bridge of my nose.

‘There’s actually something in a way much more awful that I’ve just found out,’ I began, sliding off and taking to an armchair. ‘It all came up in old Nantwich’s papers, you know? He led me on a long way and then he sprang his journal on me for 1954, from which it emerged, in brief, that he’d been sent to gaol for six months for soliciting and I think conspiracy to commit indecent acts, I’m not sure about all that. As if that wasn’t hideous enough it turns out that the person behind it all-there was a whole sort of gay pogrom apparently-was my grandfather. When he was Director of Public Persecutions.’

James sank to the chair opposite me and looked at me intently. ‘Lord B,’ he said, quietly and calculatingly.

‘Lord B, as you say. Did you know anything about this? Of course it just fucks up absolutely everything, it’s soured everything. It seems Lord B, as he was yet to become, was so successful in cleaning up the perves that he was whisked off to the Upper House. His whole career was made by it.’ We held each other’s eye. ‘Of course it turns out that when Charles was in gaol he met up with Bill Hawkins, doing his aforementioned stretch for being in love with a kid. He was a kid himself at the time, needless to say. And there are all sorts of other connections with people I know. It’s all come horrifically at the same time. And we’re only kids ourselves,’ I huffed.

James felt entitled to draw on professional language. ‘I guess if those things are building up and building up, when they erupt there will be a bit of a mess. There will be pockmarks,’ he seventeenth-centurily went on.

I got him to play me some more positive music, some courtly, phlegmatic Haydn; and I turned the conversation round artificially to more general subjects. We watched a mirthless comedy on the television from beginning to end. It was only when we were in bed, and I was now dry-throated and woozy-headed from the drink, that I came back to the subject.

‘It’s the way we didn’t know about it,’ I murmured. ‘The gruesome incongruity of it.’

‘Isn’t there a kind of blind spot,’ James said, ‘for that period just before one was born? One knows about the Second World War, one knows about Suez, I suppose, but what people were actually getting up to in those years… There’s an empty, motiveless space until one appears on the scene. What do you know about your own family anyway? They’re such secretive organisms, I can’t be doing with them.’

I felt his erection-the idiot emblem of the day-yearning against my thigh, and waited resignedly as his hands wandered down towards my own. It was a curious experience, for while he stroked he seemed instinctively to be feeling for other symptoms, exercising that slight pressure which discovers a tender kidney or a swollen gland. He was rather fastidious when he reached his objective too.

I turned on my front, and he gave a little humorous sigh and tipped his forehead against mine while I told him of a thing that happened on the train. It was while I was coming to see him and had taken place just in front of me, an ordinary thing and yet calmly beyond the turmoil of my own mood, in fact wonderfully self-sufficient and entire. Among the crowd that got on at Tottenham Court Road were a black couple with a baby: they took the two places against the glass partition, so that the man and I sat-as I had done with Gabriel shortly before-knee to knee. Once he had looked at me politely as I shifted to make room for him he had no interest in me at all-and I hardly took notice of him. His wife held the impassive and very young child in her arms: despite the heat it was dressed in a quilted one-piece suit, but with the hood back. My thoughts were all elsewhere, though I saw the man, about thirty, I suppose, lean over the baby’s open flawless face, and smile down on it, out of pure pleasure and love. His fingertips moved from his own softly bearded lips and gently stroked and almost held within their span his child’s lolling wispy head. His other hand lay loosely in his lap, and it took me a while to see that he was hiding and coaxing-yes-a hard-on in his respectable grey slacks. I was not aroused by this; but did I dwindle, if only for a moment, in the face of their glowing, fertile closeness? I felt perhaps I did.

Last thing of all before sleep we muttered about the charge against James, though he was shy of my ruse not only to get him off but to bring Colin down. He had pleaded not guilty to the magistrate on the morning after his arrest, and so gained time, the case being deferred. He had a good lawyer, one of his Holland Park patients, who was gay himself and knew how to fight and what such fights could mean if lost. We wondered if it depended on whether the court would accept works of art as evidence; and besides, whether they would accept that Staines’s photographs were works of art. It was a shaky idea, and I fell asleep and dreamed that they confiscated all Staines’s pictures and sent him to gaol instead. When I woke before dawn, parched and aching, I felt lost. I decided that if necessary, and if it might save James, I would testify in court to what I had done with Colin-and so perhaps do something, though distant and symbolic, for Charles, and for Lord B’s other victims. I had that most oppressive of feelings-that some test was looming.