Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

James was off to work early, so I walked home through the awakening streets. I moped about in the flat, now furious with Phil, now reproachful, and held a hundred imaginary conversations with him, in which I would often speak out loud-‘What do you mean, you did it out of pity?’, ‘How could you imagine that I wouldn’t find out?’, ‘I’ve never heard anything so absurd in my life…’ and on and on. But when the phone rang I was terrified to answer it and embroil myself in the meanness and misery of arguments. I sat on the bed looking at it and summoning my resolve; but when I did pick up the receiver it was someone I had been at Winchester with-one of those City youngsters-informing me of the memorial service for a not-much-liked don.

I was apprehensive about going to the Corry too, but after a day of fretting, squalid inactivity, I decided to take the chance. It was Phil and Bill who were the naughty ones and I refused to be cowed by them further. My mood was all torn, and had not been helped by my finding, when I was in the bath, a single dark hair (too dark to be mine) trapped on the soap in a long looped wiggle like Corporal Trim’s flourish with his stick. It wouldn’t just wipe off, and I had to scratch at it and gouge at the soap with a fingernail to get rid of it, all knotted up as I was with revulsion and pathos. It was the most thoughtlessly intimate of all the reminders of Phil in the flat-his trainers, his throw-away razors, his bits of paper-insisting it could hardly be over. The Corry too, of course, was running with the idea of him-but he was nowhere to be seen, and Nigel, who would have noticed, assured me he had not been in the pool. I looked abruptly into the weights room, but Bill’s worried features were not to be made out either.

I did, however, run into Charles on my way out. He was sitting in the melancholy cafeteria, looking through the plate-glass windows at the gym-floor below. He was finding it difficult to drink hot coffee from his flimsy plastic beaker. I sat down heavily opposite him.

‘Fascinating athlete, that young man down there,’ he said.

I followed his gaze to the shirtless figure dancing at the punchbag. ‘Yes, that’s Maurice. He’s a dream, isn’t he. Not, however, musical.’

‘Quite so, quite so. I must get him a job.’

‘I think you’ll find he’s got one already,’ I said with a little fading snigger. Charles was looking at me closely, and I looked down, and then away again to Maurice, cutting and jabbing in wonderful ignorance of his spectators and their quandary.

‘I’ve made a mess of things, haven’t I,’ said Charles.

I shook my head. ‘ You’ve made a mess of things! Dear Charles. I’ve been thinking about this all the time but I still don’t know what to say. But you have not made a mess of anything. Except, of course, that I can’t do the book.’

‘You could.’

‘I can’t.’

He followed Maurice again. ‘You’ve no idea of the quite extraordinary, powerful and-my dear-entirely kind conviction of rightness I had when I discovered who you were. It was such a perfect idea; too perfect perhaps to be enacted by decent human beings. Good punching! Marvellous boy! But perhaps, when your grandfather… is dead-and I’m dead-you’ll come round to it.’

‘All I could write now,’ I said, ‘would be a book about why I couldn’t write the book.’ I shrugged. ‘I suppose there are enough unwritten books of that kind to make that of some interest.’

Charles was not following me. ‘It was naughty to keep back so much-though I kept thinking you would be bound to learn about all that from other people. I felt sure our friend Bill, for instance, would spill the beans.’

‘Bill’s a pretty careful, secretive character,’ I said, my benign and contemptuous views of him appearing to me suddenly at the same time.

‘We’ll still be the most terrific friends, won’t we? I mean, it has been worth it, even if, you know…’

‘Of course it has.’ I didn’t want to get caught up in all this today. ‘What brought you into the Club?’

‘Oh-a meeting. Very dull, I’m afraid. And you’ve been swimming, I imagine. Gosh how I envy you,’ he unnaturally rushed on. ‘There’s nothing like it, is there? It’s one’s real element. It was a thing one missed most frightfully inside-you know.’

‘Yes.’

‘I must say this coffee’s quite revolting. I must get them to do something about it. Maurice you say? I’ve seen him before, of course. And now I think I’d better shuffle home. You couldn’t, my dear…?’

I gave him my arm, and we made our way slowly up to the hall. I knew that, although he came to meetings and could get the coffee changed, he valued being seen with some young thing more, as a sign that he belonged and was wanted. I felt my familiar bafflement with him, and that our meeting had not been at all as I hoped. It was so brief and profitless.

‘You won’t kind of believe me when I say this,’ he began. ‘But old Ronnie Staines has found something most frightfully interesting. Not what you’re thinking; indeed quite the opposite, by all accounts. I’m going to go and see it tomorrow after lunch. Ronnie said actually he wondered if you would come. And I think-I daren’t tell you more-that you should bring that friend of yours you’ve told me about, the Prancing Nigger buff, you know.’

‘It’s an invitation I could normally resist-but Ronnie has promised me some pictures, which I must go soon to collect. I suppose I could do it all at once.’ It was typical of my friendship with Charles that I told him nothing about what really mattered to me while he had laid himself bare, systematically, decade by decade. ‘I was going to mention it to you: my friend James, the Firbank buff, has got into a bit of trouble with the law, picked up by a policeman who just happens to be one of Ronald’s porno models. I don’t know, I thought it might be useful to get hold of the photos.’

Charles absorbed this information with the narrowed eyes and thoughtful nod of someone beyond surprise at human duplicity; but he said nothing.

‘So I will come. But honestly Charles, I’m not on for any more bellboys-get-it-up-the-bum stuff. I’ve had it up to here with all that lately. If not to here.’

‘I promise you, my dear,’ he said, with cloying candour.

James had expressed an interest in Staines, and a dirty-minded and vengeful interest in the pictures of Colin: I liked him in that mood, when he got rid of his selfless wretchedness and we could drunkenly slag people off together. I knew he would be ready to visit the photographer’s house.

There was no word from Phil that night. I was in a tense, vacant condition, but I drank a bottle of wine, and managed to sleep. Dreamlife was wildly disturbed, however. There was a barely remembered sequence in which I met Taha, who was a very old but beautiful man, and began to interview him about Charles and their life together. And there was another, more vivid, in which Phil and Bill were going off on holiday. They were loading up the roofrack on my old Fiat with tentpoles and buckets and spades, and standing about in the road with various other things they had brought from my flat. I wanted to help but kept getting in the way. ‘Be careful where you put that,’ I said. ‘Don’t forget about the blind spot.’ Phil was already in tiny swimming-trunks and Bill gave him a saucy slap on the rear, leaving a large oily handprint. Across the top of the windscreen the sticker read ‘PHIL and BILL’. It was funny, I thought, as I came round, how you never did see cars saying ‘GARY and CHRIS’ or ‘LANCE and DEREK’. They would probably have got smashed up.

James came to lunch with me, and I had taken special care to stuff some aubergines and make a bitter and original little salad. I felt something of that homely, maternal impulse which would occasionally surface in me at times of strain. One could potter pathetically with one’s chicory and watercress and enjoy an almost creative feeling. James, of course, had been hard at work for hours, and I thought what a great narcotic a job could be; and then one earned one’s own money.