The Swimming-Pool Library (40 page)

We sat, as before, in the little library, Charles’s den, the only part of the house which did not come under Graham’s orderly care. Each time I visited it there were signs of new disturbances, books moved from table to floor, old Kalamazoo folders stacked or scattered, as if some task of sorting and searching were being executed, leaving only greater confusion, like a site turned over for coins and amulets by amateurs. Books whose titles had caught my eye last time atop their teetering plinths were now cast down or overlaid by other strata: atlases with cracked spines, popular sheet-music (the ‘Valse’ from
Love-Fifteen
), magazines whose
colour printing had freaked with sun and age and, Gauguin-like, showed brown royalty, pink dogs, pale blue grass.

I felt at home there. As we sat on either side of the empty hearth, I was reminded of my Oxford tutorials, and the sense I often used to have of inadequacy and carelessness in the face of my tutor, whose hours with me, he came to imply, were needless distractions from his own, decades-long work on succession and the law. There was a similar maleness and candour to it, that scholarly inversion of the rules of the drawing-room that allowed one to talk about sodomy and priapism as though one were really talking about something else. There was a similar toleration of silence.

‘Most tiresome,’ Charles enigmatically resumed. ‘One lives in the past fully enough as it is, without people coming
back
like that.’

‘Your grocer’s boy. Yes, I confess to having been a bit disappointed.’

‘He couldn’t see that he only had meaning in the past, poor fellow.’

‘I think
Martyrs
were perhaps a bit much for him.’

Charles smiled wistfully. ‘I thought they’d scare him off, but he rather took to them.’

‘I can see that he must have been pretty hot stuff once,’ I conceded. ‘And the shop-boy thing is so glamorous, all the whistling and the boredom, and the way they’re trapped there, on show.’

‘He used to go out on a bicycle,’ Charles corrected my over-warm reconstruction. ‘He did the deliveries with an apron on.’

I lifted the fluted shallow teacup to my lips, and my eyes rose again, as they inevitably did in this room, to the chalk drawing above the fireplace. Taking a risk on it, I said, ‘Is that Taha in that picture?’

Charles was looking at it too, and repeated the name, but stressing it differently. ‘Yes, yes, that’s him,’ he said, with a sad breeziness.

‘He’s very beautiful,’ I said honestly.

‘Yes. It’s not an especially good likeness. Sandy Labouchère did it soon after we got back from Africa—you can see he had a rather brilliant line when he wanted to. But he hasn’t brought out
the child’s gaiety, a kind of radiance … He was the most beautiful thing on earth. You just wanted to look at him and look at him.’

‘Is he still alive?’ I asked, unable to imagine him going the way of the grocer’s boy into banal middle age; but Charles muttered ‘No, no,’ unanswerably, and then bashed on: ‘So you’ve read all the books I gave you.’

‘Yes, I have. Well, I haven’t read every word, but I’ve taken a pretty fair sample.’ He nodded reasonably. ‘I would read them really thoroughly, of course, if I decided to take on this … job.’

Charles was quite quick and tactical. ‘Quite so, quite so,’ he said. ‘But tell me, I don’t know what sort of impression those books give. Do they appeal at all to, to a younger person?’

‘Oh, I think they’re very interesting indeed. And you’ve done so much,’ I obviously went on, ‘and known such extraordinary people.’

He sighed heavily at this. ‘I ought to have been able to make something of it myself; but it’s too late now. As you get near the end of your life you realise you’ve wasted nearly all of it.’

‘But that’s not the impression I have at all. I’m sure you don’t really think that,’ I said, in the way that one blandly comforts those whose torments one cannot imagine. ‘I mean, I really am wasting my life, and it’s not like what you were doing.’

Charles took this up directly. ‘I’ve no time for idleness,’ he said. ‘I want you to have a job.’

‘I just don’t want the wrong one,’ I said, sounding spoilt even to myself. ‘I’d like it if I could simply disappear, like you did. It was wonderful how you could disappear into Africa.’

‘One disappeared,’ Charles admitted. ‘But one also remained in view.’

I came back to it carefully, weighing the weightless teacup and saucer in my hands. ‘What I rather got the impression of is that you were lost in a dream. It’s very beautiful that feeling the diaries give of a constant kind of transport when you were in the Sudan. It’s like a life set to music,’ I said, in a fantastic impromptu, which Charles ignored.

‘We were doing a job, of course. It was exceedingly hard work: relentless and exhausting.’

‘Oh, I know.’

‘But you’re right in a way—of me, at any rate. It was a vocation. Not all of them in the Service saw it in quite the same light as I did, perhaps. Many of them hardened. Many of them were dryish sticks long before they reached the desert. They write books about it, even now—fantastically boring.’ Charles shot out his foot and sent a book across the hearth-rug to me. It was the memoirs of Sir Leslie Harrap, privately printed and inscribed to Charles: ‘With best wishes, L. H.’. A photograph of the author, in puzzled superannuation, took up the back of the dust-jacket.

‘He was one of the people who went out with you, wasn’t he?’

‘He was a good administrator, loyal, fair, stayed on longer than me, went back in fifty-six to help with the independence arrangements: utterly sound—Eton, Magdalen. Not a breath of imagination in his body. It was reading his book—what’s it called?
A Life in Service
—that made me realise I didn’t want to write anything of that kind. There is a book in my life, but it’s almost entirely to do with imagination and all that. The facts, my sweet William, are as nothing.’

I looked on abashed. ‘You have published something about the Sudan though?’

‘Oh—yes, I did a little book in the war; part of a series that Duckworth brought out on various different countries, I can’t quite remember why. It wasn’t much good. Fortunately almost all the stock was destroyed when a bomb hit the warehouse. It’s probably worth a fortune now.’ He laughed hollowly; and then lapsed into a vacant half-smile. I was trying to decide whether or not he was looking at me, whether this lull was an enigmatic path of our intercourse or merely one of Charles’s unsignalled abstentions, a mental treading water, ‘blanking’ as he called it. I thought, not for the first time, how odd it was to know so much about someone I didn’t know. A person could only reveal himself as Charles had done to me in love or from a deliberate distance. For half a minute, as I took in his heavy frame, the eyes dark and somnolent in his pink, slightly sunburned head, either reading seemed possible.

‘If you’ve looked at the diaries for when I first went out,’ he said, ‘then you’ll understand how young and aspiring we were. We were quite sophisticated in a way, but with that kind of sophistication which only throws into relief one’s childlike ignorance.
It was a bizarre system, when you think about it. There was one of the vastest countries in the world, and they sent out to govern it a handful of boys each year who had never in their brief lives experienced anything even remotely comparable. It wasn’t like India, of course, there wasn’t the same element of domination—indeed, the whole enterprise was utterly different. Anyone could go to India, but for the Sudan there was this careful selection, screening don’t they call it nowadays. They got some worthy Leslie Harrap types of course, and plenty of sprinters and blues to keep things running on time, and they also got their share of cranks and unconventional fellows. There were possibly more of the latter. It was an absurd system and yet very, very subtle, I’ve come to believe. It singled out men who would give themselves.’

‘They didn’t make objections to people’s—private lives?’ I carefully queried, reaching across with the teapot.

‘Thank you, my dear. No, no, no. On the gay thing’ (he unselfconsciously brought it out, seizing a lot of sugar again) ‘they were completely untroubled—even to the extent of having a slight preference for it, in my opinion. Quite unlike all this modern nonsense about how we’re security risks and what-have-you. They had the wit to see that we were prone to immense idealism and dedication.’ Charles sipped his tea excitedly. ‘And of course in a Muslim country it was a positive advantage …’ We laughed at this, though the implications were not quite clear.

‘I’m sure you weren’t such innocents as you make out,’ I said. ‘You must have been trained, after all.’

‘We read a book about the sort of crops and stuff, and did a bit of Arabic.’ Charles shrugged. ‘And then they sent us up to the Radcliffe Infirmary to watch the operations. The idea was that if you saw a lot of blood and severed limbs and so on it would prepare you in some mysterious way for the tropics. They’d bring in chaps who’d been run over, or undergrads who’d tried to do themselves in, and we all had a jolly good look. Fascinating, in a way, but of no obvious benefit for a career in the Political Service.’

Charles was in knowingly good form. ‘So you simply followed your instincts much of the time?’

‘Mm—up to a point. There was a tendency to treat Africa as
if it were some great big public school—especially in Khartoum. But when you were out in the provinces, and on tour for weeks on end, you really felt you were somewhere
else
. If you’d had the wrong sort of character you could have gone to the bad, in that vast emptiness, or abused your power. I expect you know about the Bog Barons in the south—truly eccentric fellows who had absolute command, quite out of touch with the rest of the world.’

‘It sounds like something out of Conrad.’

‘So it is often said.’

‘I must say, I see you as more of a Firbankian figure—or at least that’s how you seem to see yourself.’

‘I don’t know about that …’ Charles rumbled.

‘It’s this idea that rather appeals to me, of seeing adults as children. His adults don’t have any dignity as adults, they’re all like over-indulged children following their own caprices and inclinations …’

‘Well, I don’t know!’ Charles gave a brusque laugh of disagreement.

‘Don’t you feel that, though? I’m always being struck by it, especially with very grand and humourless people who can’t afford to see that they’re behaving just like prefects. And men are often like that together—I don’t mean … gay men particularly, but the sense I have that men don’t really want women around much. I think most men are happiest in a male world, with gangs and best friends and all that.’

‘I believe I’ve always conducted myself with dignity,’ said Charles.

I let a properly respectful pause be felt. ‘I suppose what I’m trying to say is that you were very lucky in being able to turn your caprices into a career.’ I was slow to realise how carefully Charles would measure everything I said against his wish that I should write his life. My slight nervousness, frivolousness, trying to be clever, perhaps put him off.

‘There was this absolute adoration of black people,’ Charles said, ‘you could say blind adoration, but it was all-seeing … I don’t know. I think it was more of a sort of love affair for me than for most of the others. I’ve always had to be among them, you know, negroes, and I’ve always gone straight for them.’ He
put down his cup. ‘I’ve been jolly lucky with them, too. All my true friends were black,’ he added in a desolate imperfect. ‘Oh, I tangled with a few cads and sharpers, bar-room heartbreakers—’ he broke off actorishly.

‘But all your true friends …’

He was bound to slight me just a shade in replying: ‘Unwavering loyalty, you knew you would die for each other you were such pals.’

‘I hope you see me as a true friend, Charles,’ I said with half-pretended hurt. ‘And I know people—white people—who are immensely loyal to you. Old Bill Hawkins or whatever he’s called; and all these servants who fight over you.’

‘I do command loyalty,’ Charles assented. ‘In Lewis’s case perhaps too much loyalty.’ He sighed and chuckled. ‘Did I tell you about when he locked me in my dressing-room while he fought it out with Graham?’

‘Oh, I was there, if you remember.’

‘My dear child, I’d entirely forgotten. And all that sort of black magic stuff? Most unacceptable, I think, in a gentleman’s companion. He thought I’d betrayed him—but he’d been troublesome for a long time, and when he’d flogged off half of my beautiful Georgian cutlery I could no longer turn a blind eye. He’s inside again, now, I hear. He does these very artistic, kind of
symbolic
burglaries—with effigies of the people, and little arrangements of things. So there’s never any doubt about who did it.’ Charles chuckled and sighed again. ‘He had a way with him, though.’

‘How did you take him on in the first place?’

I was not surprised when he hummed ‘Oh …’ and wandered into his stratospheric vagueness, broken only by heavy, widely spaced, sibilant breaths: it was like the end of some visionary anthem by Stockhausen. The little gilt carriage clock whirred and chimed five.

‘One quite interesting episode,’ he said, ‘which I think would make a telling bit of the book, was about Makepeace. Did you read that in the diary?’

‘I don’t think I did.’

‘It was a little romance of mine, back in London. I was most frightfully smitten with a young Trinidadian barman at the Trocadero,
who went under the charming name of Makepeace. The Troc was a very big, rather vulgar restaurant in Shaftesbury Avenue, with masses of mauve marble—long since gone now, of course. I don’t know quite why I was in there, but one evening in the cocktail bar I was served by this fabulously handsome boy, and I stayed on and got him talking, though he was madly shy, but then I’ve always liked that. It turned out he’d had a rather extraordinary experience, as he’d worked his passage over on a ship—this was long before West Indians came in any number, of course—and then, missed the boat home. He walked into town from the Docks and as it was rather cold and rainy and not I suppose at all what he’d hoped for he went into the National Gallery to keep warm, and there he was found by an artist called Otto Henderson, who was a madly
musical
type as we used to say—and also a third-rate painter by the way—and he sort of picked him up. He lived with Otto for a bit, but Otto was a terrible drunk and it got rather difficult, so Otto found him a job in the Trocadero, where, as it happened, he knew the head barman who was very Scottish and respectable
apparently
but underneath, according to Otto, wore ladies’ knickers. Scottie was terribly jealous, needless to say, when I hit it off so with his black Adonis. Later on, he even threatened to expose me, but he changed his tune when I promised to tell all about the knickers.’ Charles laughed, and waved a hand in the air, as if shaking a tambourine.