Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

‘How are you getting on?’ he asked.

‘I feel pretty helpless. I thought it was a good thing there had been no sordid row or anything, but one would like some kind of contact. It’s so stupid. I don’t know what’s going on. Why doesn’t the little fucker ring me? I feel furious for a while, and then-well, I love him so much. I want to be with him again. And then at other times I feel like a sort of Pantaloon figure, who’s been hoodwinked. Actually I don’t see how any of us can do anything without a certain loss of dignity.’

‘You could just go round to the hotel.’

‘What, and find them frigging away again? I’m not into that.’

‘I thought you thought it couldn’t possibly still be going on.’

I opened the oven door and shoved my hands into the linked asbestos pockets of the oven-gloves, slapping them together a few times as if I were a lunatic in some restraining garment. A good garlicky smell blossomed. ‘I don’t honestly believe they can be having an affair,’ I said carefully. ‘On the other hand, I do believe that the heart, and more particularly the willy, have some very strange ways. It’s just possible,’ I allowed as I squatted down, ‘that a handsome eighteen-year-old could prefer a waddling fifty-year-old to someone as beautiful and well-endowed as me.’

James embarrassedly ruffled the top of my head, but I shouted ‘Out of the way!’ as I made for the table. The oven-gloves were never as efficient as they should have been.

After lunch we popped into James’s Mini and made the two-minute journey over the avenue to Staines’s house. These were the very streets where little Rupert had seen Arthur and Harold at their miserable business: I looked out for them, in a fairly ridiculous and superstitious way. I wanted to save Arthur. At least, I think that’s what I wanted to do to him. It was a strange conviction I had, that I could somehow make these boys’ lives better, as by a kind of patronage-especially as it never worked out that way.

Staines was on his very best behaviour, though it didn’t fool me. One could perceive his slight polite disappointment that James was not more beautiful. The ego was smartly suited, buttoned up, and though at any moment I expected some rude eruption, a comic photographer’s surprise the split second before the flash, the most explosive thing about him was the pink of his socks. Charles was already there, glass in hand, at the end of lunch, and I introduced him to James, whose enthusiasm was precisely modulated to disguise the intimate knowledge he had of him from me. We strolled through at Charles’s pace into the studio, and I heard him saying to James: ‘So you’re the Firbank fellow, eh? I knew him, of course-though not well, not well…’

Staines let down a roll of white paper from the ceiling and had us sit in a row in front of the projector on its high table. As he turned the main lights out and began to speak I was reminded strongly of those scenes, early on in thrillers, when the agent is briefed and shown film clips of leading suspects, taken largely from the back of moving cars.

‘I’m going to show you a short piece of film which I believe will interest you all. It’s part of a whole lot of home-movie stuff I’ve just bought at Christie’s. Most of it’s too madly dull for words-you know, gay young things arsing around with no shame. I just thought it might be fun, and give me some sort of ideas for some Twenties and Thirties-er-pictures I want to make. And then in amongst it there was this fragment-quite exceptional…’

The bright white square at which we had been looking was convulsed with running black and grey, and white flashes. The first thing we could make out was a brief and static view of a lake with steep woods around it. The light in the picture was strangely bleak, and a hundred little lines ran up and down the screen. Even so there was something mysterious about that seemingly black circle of water. Remembered books suggested it was an extinct volcano. ‘Aha,’ said Charles, very smugly. The camera angle jumped to include, possibly by mistake, the bonnet of an early-looking motorcar.

‘You know where we are, Charles,’ said Staines from behind the purring projector.

‘Oh yes-Lake Nemi. Unmistakable.’

There was then a shot held unnecessarily long, of a tin sign saying ‘Genzano-Città Infiorita’.

‘I think we all know where we are now,’ Staines added patly. An old peasant in a hat and carrying a stick as tall as himself limped into view, looking troublesome.

The following sequences took place presumably in the precipitous streets of Genzano. Here was the car again, drawn up outside what might have been the town’s smartest café. The citizens, some aware of the camera, some at least showing no awareness, went stiffly up and down the pavement, turning flickering smiles or frowns. Some of them were getting up from the tables outside under the awning, couples bustling off, while others, with raising of hats, went into the absolute blackness of the interior. One side of the picture was then obscured by a man’s back. He half-turned and wavered in evident response to the cameraman’s protest, and shuffled away to the left. Then he reappeared full-length further off, and took up a position against the car, full of Chaplinesque fidgets, crossing his arms, cocking an ankle on the running-board, turning his head in ladylike parody from side to side.

It clearly wasn’t Charles, though even a sensible person, I knew, might act up like this when a camera was running. It was a taller but thinner man. Moreover it was a bona fide queen. He had on elegant, unEnglish light suiting, with a bow-tie and a broad-brimmed straw hat which gave him a sweetly arcadian character, at the same time as shadowing his face. Then, overcome with embarrassment, he walked rapidly towards the camera, loomed in with peculiar closeness for a couple of seconds, high cheekbones, a long curved nose, funny little mouth.

James was gripping my arm. ‘It’s Ronald Firbank,’ he said.

‘I don’t think there can be any doubt, do you?’ said Staines.

‘That’s certainly him,’ pronounced Charles.

‘If it’s what I think it is,’ said James, ‘it must be at the very end of his life.’ And in the next little bit he was laughing and suddenly it was going wrong: he had started to cough and cough, doubling up, his long hand gestured the camera away.

I understood then, in the next scene, why he looked so frail, had the air of a man nonetheless confronting a threat. He was tackling a steep cobbled hill at the top of which a church was outlined in the late afternoon sun. His whole walk was anyway extraordinary, not best calculated for getting from one place to another, a business of undulating hands and picked tiny steps, and yet obviously inescapable: that was how he walked. A couple of small children at the roadside watched him pass and then started to follow him. One understood their sense that anything so conspicuous must be done deliberately, as an entertainment or as the origin of a procession. A taller boy, a ten-year-old in ragged clothes, joined them, imitating the novelist’s walk. The little ones, emboldened, skipped round him, running ahead as well to see him coming on, openly curious, asking questions, it seemed, of two or three syllables. The hectic jerkiness of the film lent them all a fantastical twitching energy. Then Firbank’s hand went into his pocket and flung backwards a scatter of nickel coins.

Unsurprisingly the next scene showed the crowd about twenty strong. They were reaching the brow of the hill, capering around, others almost marching, but in a volatile Firbankian way, like some primitive disco dance. They were calling and waving their hands, and then chanting something together-a name, an epithet. The camera, with a certain artistic flair, concentrated on the youngsters: tots and urchins with a droll seriousness to them, rowdy pubescent boys bursting out of children’s clothes, and others, with their wide-eyed Italian faces, gazing into the lens as they half-strode, half-loitered with the crowd, plucking at the sleeve of the heart.