The Swimming-Pool Library (17 page)

So, as the train began to slow up, I tentatively gathered Charles’s bag to me in a hint, which was reversible if need be, that my stop was next. I was relieved to see, while we agreed that the Corry was indeed too crowded these days, that he also bent forward, ready to stand up. As we elbowed our way out and started along the platform I spotted my other suitor again, savouring the last seconds he might ever see me, and looking almost nauseous as the train pulled away past us and bore him off.

‘Do you live round here, then?’ I said to the boy, across another funny kind of distance.

‘Not exactly, no,’ he said, with something complacent about him that brought back to me my original impression that he wasn’t very nice. I smiled interrogatively. ‘I thought I might come and check out your place, actually,’ he explained.

After some efficient sex, we had a glass of Pimm’s and sat on the window-seat in the evening sun. The air was streaming with seeds, to which Colin was sensitive, and after sneezing and screwing up his eyes for a few minutes, he announced that he had to go. I was not sorry; my mind was already running on to the prospect of opening the bag and getting a feel of what lay ahead. When I closed the door of the flat behind Colin, there the bag was, where I had propped it on a chair before making a grab at him. Retrieving it now, I saw how disrespectful I had been to cast it so hastily aside for the sake of that good but rather professional and chilly trick.

I took the bag into the dining-room, tugged open its straps and pulled the contents on to the table. I closed the window to prevent papers from blowing round; since Arthur’s disappearance I had been a fiend for light and fresh air.

The main part of the archive was a set of quarto notebooks, bound in brown boards, rubbed and worn at the edges—most of them with a clear ink inscription on the front cover; ‘Oxford,
1920’ and ‘1924: Khartoum’ were the first two I picked up. They were written in a fast, elegant and not especially legible hand, in black ink, and there were odd items tucked between the pages—postcards, letters, drawings, even hotel bills and visiting cards. There was also a fat five-year diary, of the kind which can be locked, with other letters and documents, and a large buff envelope bulky with photographs. I drew up a chair at once to look at these, as I believed they would be, although enigmatic, the keys or charms to open the whole case to me.

There were snapshots, group photographs and studio portraits, all mixed up together. A mounted picture of a set of cocky young men was captioned ‘University Shooting VIII, 1921’ in the amateur Gothic script still favoured at Oxford for matriculation and team photos. After a bit I was sure that one of the standing figures, a big boy with swept-back glossy hair and an appealing smirk, must be Charles. The face was far leaner than now, and his whole person seemed well set-up; I had seen him less and less in control of his life, and was surprised for a moment to find a young man who would have known how to have a good time. He appeared again in a more studied portrait, where he was less handsome: the spontaneity and camaraderie, perhaps, of the shooting photo had animated him into beauty.

Most of the pictures, however, derived from his African years. There were predictable snaps of Charles on a camel, with the Sphinx in the background—a tourist memento explained by the inscription on the back, ‘On leave, 1925’. Most of them, though, clearly—or, in many cases, fuzzily—depicted life in the field, and were full of reticent authenticity. Typically, they showed groups of natives, largely or wholly naked, standing round under dead-looking trees, gazing at flocks of goats or herds of cattle. In some Charles appeared, in shorts and sola topi, flanked by robed, shock-headed men of intense blackness. There was one heavily creased photograph of an exquisitely soulful black youth, cropped at an angle, where presumably another figure in the picture had been scissored off. After the scene in Charles’s bedroom this gave me a mild unease, as if it might be a magical act of elimination.

In only one picture did a woman appear prominently. This was a very old-fashioned studio item, in which Charles, still young, and beautifully dressed, leant over the back of a little gilt sofa,
on which a pretty, thin-lipped woman was sitting. Behind them the balustrade and pillars of the photographer’s set made as if to recede into a romantically hazy background and to confer on the couple the flushed transience of a Fragonard. Such arcadian hints, however, seemed to have been ignored by the sitters, who appeared tense, and though skilfully grouped by the artist, curiously separate. Had there been a woman in Charles’s life, then, an episode of which this was the unhappy reminder? It seemed more probable that it was a sister; and there was a troubled quality about the eyes of both sitters that suggested some family connexion. Did the people in wherever it was that they hailed from talk of the melancholy and ill-starred Nantwiches? It was certainly time to do that basic research which Charles had already several times recommended to me.

I returned the photographs to their envelope: most of them had no annotation on the back, and though suggestive and informative in a general sort of way, they did little to enlighten me. I did not know how thoughtfully Charles had collected them for me, but it was quite possible that his had not been a very thoroughly photographed career. Evidently doing this job would be as much a matter of probing his memory for links and identifications, as of reading his personalia and getting up the history of the Sudan.

I flipped about through the notebooks, picking on odd sentences, getting caught for a paragraph, but feeling irritated, almost piqued by the way the life in them went parochially on. I suppose I expected them to fall open at the dirty bits, but they were discreet enough to fall open at records of duties, quarrels with officials, guest-lists for parties. More than that, I expected there to
be
dirty bits, and the slightly repellent introduction to the trivia of colonial existence gave me sudden doubts. It was the awful sense of another life having gone on and on, and the self-importance it courted by being written down and enduring years later, that made me think frigidly that I wasn’t the man for it.

It was really the present which reassured me. Charles’s life now was so incoherent, such a mixture of fatigue and obsessive, vehement energy, of knowing subtlety and juvenile broadness, of presence and absence, that he gave me the hope which the books withheld. The more recent incident at his house, for instance, was excellent copy. From what I could gather, he had been locked
in the dressing-room by Lewis, not as a punishment but to protect him, and prevent him from interfering while Lewis fought with another man in the bedroom. This man was a previous employee. I asked Charles why he had come to the house, and rather guessed that he had been invited as a possible replacement for Lewis. Lewis, as I already knew, was a model of jealousy, and I could easily imagine his slothful, sarcastic violence breaking out if his pitch was queered. Yet if he had fought for his devotion to Charles, why had he then attacked him through the schoolboy voodoo of the effigy? Like all the other miscellaneous symptoms, it made sense to Charles himself. He castigated himself after he woke up and we went down to the kitchen and made tea. ‘It was bound to happen,’ he felt. But he was unable to explain it to me. ‘Lewis was a damn good scrapper,’ he said several times.

The phone rang. When I answered it, a formal and affected voice said, ‘Is that William?’

‘Speaking.’

‘I have Lord Beckwith on the line for you.’ Some thirty seconds elapsed before my grandfather picked up the receiver. He had become so very grand that he commanded servants to do even the simplest things for him. His butler was an efficient, humourless man, almost as old as himself, one of a race virtually extinct, stifled by their own correctness. He would never, one felt, have locked his employer in his dressing-room. This was the first time, though, that he had been commissioned to dial my number, and I felt that slight anxious remoteness that thousands must have experienced during my grandfather’s life in government and the law.

‘Will? How are you, darling?’ This was the other side of his magnificence, the unhesitating intimacy and charm that, more than the talent to command, had meant power and success. His endearments were not amative or effete, but manly like Churchill’s, and gave one a sense of having been singled out, of having value. His ‘darlings’ were not public, like Cockney ‘darlings’ or the ‘darlings’ we queens dispense, but private medals of confidence, pinned on to reward and to inspire.

‘Grandpa. I’m extremely well—how are you?’

‘I feel somewhat overwhelmed by the heat.’

‘Is it as hot up there?’

‘No idea. Hotter, I should think. Look, I’ll be in town all next week—will you take me out to lunch?’

‘You’re sure you wouldn’t rather take me out?’

‘I always take you out. I thought we could change it round for once. Of course, I’d suggest coming over to Holland Park, but you can’t cook, can you?’

‘Not at all, no.’ It was our customary bluff, shy patter. ‘You’d regret it deeply. I’ll take you somewhere very expensive.’ And besides, I felt the demands of an ever-intensifying privacy. Very few people came to the flat; I had whittled my social life down almost to nothing. Since my grandfather had more or less bought the flat for me, I churlishly resented any interest in it on his part; he had not been to it since its previous owner had left. Beneath our joky talk lay the awareness, which neither of us would ever have mentioned, that he had given his money to me already. ‘It’s so nice to be paid for!’ he expanded.

Going back to the journals later on I found that they had changed; some of them had noticeably long entries in them, but not, in the two or three I studied, to tell the story of a very complex incident, or gather up several days’ entries. The entries were anyway irregular, and periods of more than a week sometimes elapsed between them. The longer passages, which might start with a routine description, gave way after a paragraph to an earlier period recalled in detail, like a story. One of these, I noticed from the names, was about Winchester, though it had been written up in the course of a visit to the Nuba Hills. I saw Charles retiring from the company of his boorish companions to sit at a little camp table in his tent and reconstruct, amid the boulders and thorn-bushes of Africa, an episode of his English life.

At the time Winchester itself had been recorded in the five-year diary. It was written in a studied, microscopic hand, with tangling ascenders and capital letters which emerged from snakelike scrolls. On the bordered title-page the printer’s lettering (again, that effortful Gothic) announcing ‘This diary belongs to: _____’ was outdone by the looping tendrils with which ‘The Hon. Charles Nantwich’ was laboriously rendered in the manner of the signature of Elizabeth I. At a cursory look this diary was unreadable in more senses than one. With a schoolboy’s typical mixture of secrecy and conventionality the entries (which could only cover three lines per day) were written almost entirely in abbreviations.

What was more interesting was to see how, over the five years at the school, the hand had changed, casting off the juvenile fanciness for later, adolescent, affectations. Equally illegible, the writing came to look less monkish and stilted, and took on a passionate, cursive air. Certain characters, ‘d’, for example, and ‘g’, became the subject for worried stylistic amendment and experiment. Little ’e’s, in particular, were restless—now Greekly sticking out their pointed tongues, now curling up in copperplate propriety. I remembered people at school attaching similar prestige to handwriting, though I never did much to adjust my own frankly careless scrawl.

I would certainly have been too slovenly to have stuck, as Charles had done, to the virtually useless annotation of my life in a book for five years. It was one of those changeless schooltime occupations, which have no function beyond themselves, and I was touched to think of Charles as a prefect fitting in the details of match scores and books each evening on the same page that he had used as a new man, his eye flicking back each year over the slowly accumulating trivia. There must have been so much more, for the book showed only the self-imposed thoroughness of the dull-witted or the lonely. I had no doubt that Charles’s wits had been quick; and if he was lonely, then his thoughts would not have been taken up with fixtures and Latin verbs, he would have been living in his imagination.

The next time I saw him was in the pool, where I was thrashing up and down as usual and nearly bumped into him in the underwater gloom. He was not swimming, but floating just off the deep end: head back, hands on hips, his body seemed to be buoyed up by the white balloon of his stomach, and his legs hung down at an angle below. He was quite still, and his pushed-back goggles gave the impression that his eyes had rolled back into his head, while his body was abandoned to a trance. Though to my mind he looked dead, there was something wonderfully natural about the way he just lay on and in the water, as though on a half-submerged lilo; among the heavy swimmers and divers he seemed serenely disengaged, and I was amused, when I realised who it was, that he inhabited the water in a way that was all his own. At every other turn I saw him, from underwater; and he revolved occasionally with little flips of the hands, like some benign though monstrous amphibian. I left the pool without disturbing him.

In the hallway, as I was leaving, I found Phil hanging around. It was the first time I had seen him since the day we had made our tentative assignation, and I felt a not quite pleasant choking and thumping of the heart. I had wondered—as Bill used to do—where he had been all week, though I suspected I had altered my own pattern slightly so as not to see him, as though, like a bride and groom, our contract would somehow be spoilt if we met before the appointed hour. He was sitting now on one of the long upholstered benches, leaning forward, his forearms on his knees, reading a leaflet from the Club rack, which carried information about concerts, plays and events. I came on him in profile, before he realised I was emerging from downstairs, and saw at once that he was merely killing time. He turned the leaflet over and over in his hands, and as he shifted there was a swift sleek gathering and relaxing of the muscles of his upper arms, left uncovered by a pale blue T-shirt. His bag was on the floor at his plimsolled feet. When he saw me he at once stood up, with a look of strained matiness.