The Swimming-Pool Library (32 page)

I went straight to Phil that night, though he was not expecting me. I had not been at the Queensberry for weeks, and as I got out of the taxi a new boy on the door—very thin and formal, not at all my kind of thing—asked me if he could help. I looked in on the staff TV room, where one of the receptionists was watching the news and a commis chef, fast asleep, had fallen half out of his chair. In the corridor I ran into Pino, who was fantastically pleased to see me and shook my hand between both of his, insisting on a complete account of the injuries Phil had told him about. He was keen too not to keep me from my friend. ‘You go to see Phil? Is upstairs. Is gettin is beauty-sleep.’ We shook hands again before he left me, and I heard him laugh aloud with pleasure as he went on his way.

Up under the roof, in the hot, shadowy corridor, outside Phil’s door … distant traffic and a creaking floorboard making no impression on the silence, residual, anticipatory … dream echoes of childhood evenings, going up to fetch a book, drawn to the open window and the stillness of the elms … or at school, waiting
for Johnny, knees under my chin on the sill of a gothic dormer, heart thumping, swallows plunging into the darkening court below … pushing open the rattling, leaded panes at Corpus Christi, the sky precipitating its blues, its darker blues … the surprising, secret moistness of the twilight, sloping down to the Swimming-Pool Library, the faint, midsummer-night illumination of a glowing cigarette … exquisite, ancient singleness in moments just before whispers, the brush of lips and love … I felt it all again, the romance of myself, for three or four seconds squeeze urgently about me, and my mouth went dry.

I barely knocked, tapped with the backs of my nails. It seemed like a cowardly knock, hoping not to be heard. If he were awake he might just hear, and I listened for an answering rustle or call. But what I wanted was to come upon him as he was, to stream through the keyhole, to be with him without any prosaic ado. One morning, weeks before, when he was asleep I had pinched his key and had it copied in a heel and key bar at the station. Phil was so orderly and cautious that he always dropped the catch, and I envisaged some picaresque occasion when I might need to get in, some about-turn in a sex comedy that called for a surprise entry.

I slid the key into the lock notch by notch and opened the door a fraction. There was no light on, though the last of the day still lingered and without yet going in I could see the room in the dressing-table mirror, Phil lying on the bed, the white of his underpants. He didn’t move as I came forward, silently closed the door, and stood at the end of the bed. His breathing was extremely slow and distant and he was clearly deeply asleep. He was lying face downwards, but slightly turned to one side, his left leg half-drawn up, his mouth squashed open on the pillow, his thighs apart but not widely apart, his ass slewed a little to the right. I wanted x-ray eyes for that, though the barrack-room modesty of his sleeping in his knickers was beautiful too. Beside the pillow, trapped under a slumberous arm, was
Tom Jones
—the fat, squashy Penguin redolent of O levels and essays on virtue.

I could hardly bear to look at him any longer, and shook him roughly to wake him up, falling on him before he knew what was happening and bothering him with kisses.

I hadn’t made love like I did then since I was a schoolboy. It
was extraordinarily innocent, fervent and complete. By the time Phil had to get to work it had begun to rain, and after he had gone I lay in the dark with the window open and listened to it pattering on the leads. Falling asleep I slid briefly through a zone of luminous happiness, a vision as clear as summer—not the ominous clarity of Hampshire or Yorkshire summer but a kind of desert radiance where rocks and water and scrawny shade, lying by chance together, seemed divinely disposed and glowed in their changelessness.

I more or less forced Phil, who did it with a certain comical reluctance, to take the following night off in exchange with Celso. Celso, it transpired, was anxious to have Friday off to treat his wife on her birthday—a musical and dinner and then, one assumed, some especially Spanish and honourable congress. I’d hoped for a high noon of sunbathing, back on the roof, but it was one of those close dark days when one can never get dry and longs for a thunderstorm that never comes. We went back to my flat and lounged about and I came on rather fierce about wanting sex several times, at which Phil showed at first a demure disbelief though clearly, when it came to it, he wanted it just as much himself. Later we went up to the Corry, which was unmomentous, no one seeming to have noticed that I had been away and the virulent strains of exercise going on much as normal.

It was wonderful though, additionally hot from weights, to plunge into the sombre coldness of the pool. No discipline made me feel more free, or contained me and delighted me within its own element so much as swimming. Even so, when Phil came down the spiral stairs—displaying (some well-judged vanity of his own) new trunks cut high on the hips, black behind and gold in front—I was happy to do things I normally deplore, getting in people’s way, doing handstands or swimming between his splayed and sturdy legs. For a while we gloomed Cousteau-like in the depths of the deep end, swivelling our goggled heads from side to side, searching for our locker keys which we had thrown in and left to settle, buffeted and wandering in the choppy water. Where the end wall met the floor of the bath Phil pointed out to me with slowed, speechless gestures the melancholy aperture where the water escaped, and, gathered round it, dozens of
sticking-plasters, bleached clean by their long immersion and waving over the filter like albino, submarine plants. Then I saw him give out his breath, the bubbles crowding from his mouth, flooding around his head and up towards the light with baroque exuberance. He himself shot up then and I followed a second or two later. We hung on our elbows to regain our breath.

The plan was to go later to the Shaft and dance and get drunk and have a wonderful time. Phil had never been there with me: our funny routine isolated us from the normal gay world, and what with one thing and another I had not been there myself for a couple of months—though for a year or more before that I was impelled towards it, without any power to resist, every Monday and Friday night. I had been an addict of the Shaft. If I was out to dinner I would grow restless towards eleven o’clock, particularly if I was away in the western districts and had several miles to travel. I would go to the opera very inappropriately got up, and had more than once exploited the privacy of the Covent Garden box to slip off during the last act as the anticipation of sex welled up inside me, rapidly distancing and denaturing the carry-on on stage into irksome nonsense. The Shaft itself I hardly ever left alone, and I had made countless taxi-journeys down the glaring, garbage-stacked wasteland of Oxford Street and along the great still darkness of the Park, a black kid, drunk, chilled in his sweat, lying against me, or secretly touching me. I took home boys from far out—from Leyton, Leytonstone, Dagenham, New Cross—who like me made their pilgrimage to this airless, electrifying cellar in the West End, but had no way, if they failed to score, at three or four a.m., of getting home.

Phil took a practical attitude to his initiation, and we walked from the Corry through dusky, cooling Bloomsbury to have supper at the hotel. In Russell Square, under the planes, there was at last a perceptible breeze. The immense, leafy twilight shivered, and the three fountains, shooting up their forceful jets, reckless and almost invisible, splattered down across the path and caught us in their spray. Phil put his arm round me, remembering too, I suppose, our first terrifying walk here.

The kitchen at the Queensberry was a high, white-tiled hall into which plunged a series of writhing air-ducts, tubes of aluminium, riveted along their joints, and opening out into wide,
battered hoods above the loaded and archaic gas-ranges. Even so, it was wearyingly hot in there, and the team of chefs, in their crumpled white jackets and hats and their blue and white checked bags, were testy and pink-faced, shying the portions that were ordered along the metal counter beyond which the waiters waited. As ‘staff’ we had to wait there too, until there was a convenient pause. I felt awkward, ready to be resented, whenever we visited the kitchen. Its incessant toil, unadorned by the servility and charm of the public parts of the hotel, made me feel a frivolous observer of some truly serious industry.

Tonight Phil got us some whitebait—dull, Rotarian starter—and then excellent beef olives, the fat tongue of veal juicy in its meaty sheath. We ate it in the staff dining-room, keeping to ourselves whilst two of the washing-up women and a leathery old porter smoked fanatically through the last minutes of their dinner-hour.

‘Off out tonight, then, young Philip?’ enquired the porter, preparing to go, hoisting up his waistband and buttoning his hot jacket. There seemed to be some hint of contempt in his voice, a sarcasm in his civility which showed it to be a challenge, even an insult. As he drew himself up, he was somehow shielding and shepherding the two women—though they themselves betrayed no sense of danger.

‘Yes, I’ll probably go out for a drink or two.’ A subfusc, minimal answer.

‘Don’t stay in this fucking shithouse anyway,’ said one of the women kindly.

‘I won’t.’

‘Don’t go breakin’ too many ’earts, neither,’ said the other with a chuckle.

I said nothing until they had gone. They probably thought me very stuck up, but I felt a kind of duty not to incriminate Phil. It was hard to believe they didn’t see me for what I was, but a pretence, a performance, was sustained that we were just pals. Rather like James, Phil cultivated a reserve that grew into a sort of authority. I must have needed their discretion just as they were freed by my lack of it. It was all a question of
bjopti.

I finished eating and laid my knife and fork side by side. ‘Am
I a frightful liability to you, darling?’ I said, conceitedly and solemnly.

In a swift, unconscious convulsion he clutched together the bevelled glass salt and pepper pots. ‘Of course not. I love you.’ He looked up for a split second and then went on very quickly and quietly, pushing the last French beans around his plate with his fork, ‘I really love you, I don’t think I could live without you. I couldn’t bear it when you were ill, and … I don’t know …’

It was much more of an avowal than I’d asked for, and the tears came to my eyes and I grinned at the same time. I covered his hand that was coupling the cruet with my own, and looked anywhere but at him—around the horrible, narrow but disproportionately tall room, which had obviously been made by splitting some more generous space in two.

Afterwards we got changed upstairs and shared a tooth-mug of vodka, which made me if anything more amorous, though in a generalised way, as if it were not just Phil but the whole world that was in love with me. I put on some very old, faded, tight-loose pink jeans and a white T-shirt with no arms and side-seams ripped open almost to my hips. Phil squeezed into other new acquisitions—some hugging and rather High Street dark blue slacks with a thin white belt, and a gripping pale blue T-shirt.

When we were clear of the hotel I took Phil’s arm. It moved me to do this, to insist out loud that he was mine (he himself, keen to be so claimed, didn’t quite flow with it, butchly somehow held himself apart—though I locked my fingers through his). At Winchester one summer day I had run across a couple of queens-one perhaps an old Wykehamist showing his friend the places where his honour died. They had wandered over to Gunner’s Hole, that curving canal-like backwater, drawn off and returning to the Itchen, where in Charles’s day swimming had taken place. Now, of course, there was a beautiful indoor pool—where I was soon to establish my freestyle record—and the Hole had surrendered, as it must always have promised to do, to crowding cow-parsley and heavy seeded grasses, while in the water itself long green weeds curled to and fro in the current. I came scuffing past through the meadow, hot, shirt undone, and saw them gazing,
one pointing at the rioting May-time flowers, then spotting me, giving me a glance—very brief but I felt it—and then the two of them turning back towards College, arm in arm. I mastered a frisson of shock into pleasure—not at them individually (they seemed hopelessly old and refined) but at the openness of their gesture. I wanted men to
walk out
together. I wanted a man to walk out
with.

Well, I had one. My heel was suddenly tacky, and I stopped—though Phil kept going and almost pulled me over. I hopped forwards, supported by him, and turned my sole upwards under the yellow street light. A tongue of white chewing-gum, rough with grit, had welded itself to the rubber and squelched into a curl under the step of the heel. It was surprisingly difficult to detach—and I had a certain revulsion from it, and reluctance to touch it. So with drunken insouciance I remained, leaning on Phil’s bunched shoulder, one flamingo leg drawn up, and spoke quite seriously about the British Museum, outside whose bleak north entrance we were standing. On a huge pillar above our heads a poster advertised the Egyptian galleries, with a number of aproned, broken-nosed pharaohs standing stonily, but rather pathetically, in a row. As I spoke of Charles’s relief of Akhnaten Phil actually started giggling, and only giggled more when I told him to fuck off.

‘If you really cared you’d get this stuff off for me,’ I said. ‘At the one time I need help, you refuse it to me.’

He was not quite sure of the rhetorical conventions now, but muttering ‘Oh, give it here’ grabbed my foot and jerked it upwards, so that I hopped round involuntarily and hung on his neck. I don’t know how slow I was to realise that we were being watched. Certainly my eyes dwelled incuriously on the far pavement for several seconds and though I took in a figure waiting under one of the gently stirring young trees I did so abstractly, and focused all sensation in my hands on Phil’s cropped neck. To the watcher we must have been a well-lit and enigmatic group. I looked away as Phil flung down my foot, but still embraced him while he groped for a handkerchief, a quiver of protective anxiety ruffling my sexy, complacent mood. Two seconds later, the figure had moved. I was slow again to spot him, now further off, under the next tree, and screened to chest height by cars parked at meters
along the middle of the street. His act was to be going away, disarming the suspicion he had aroused in me. Or perhaps he did not know he had been seen. He was looking back again now, but still moving, sidling inexpertly under a street-lamp. Then I quickly led Phil away, keeping him turned in towards me, my arm and hand oppressively around his shoulder, so that he was squashed and stumbling against me. But there could be no doubt who it was.