The Swimming-Pool Library Read online

  I came up dripping and panting from the pool to the changing-room. As I pushed open the swing door with its steamed-up little window designed, like those in restaurants, to prevent hurrying people from knocking each other flat, I heard the hiss of the crowded showers, and felt the warm, dense atmosphere of the place in my throat and on my skin. I sauntered along between the two files of hot jets whose spray danced up off the black tiles, shifting or suddenly cutting off as the men, naked or in their trunks, edged about, soaped a foot raised against the wall, gave their stomachs resounding smacks, or turned, as the doors to the outside world thwacked open, to see what beauty had arrived. Exchanging short greetings with a couple of chaps I scarcely knew, I chose a vacant position between a pale, ravaged-looking youth with tattoos snaking up his arms and a huge dark brown man, six foot eight tall at a guess, very round and heavy, with an enormous childish face and not a hair on his head—or, I soon found, anywhere on his body. His sleek, heavy cock, cushioned on a tight, crinkled scrotum, stuck out from beneath a roll of fat. He was soaping himself vigorously, leaving a silky smear over his smooth, plump expanses of back and belly; and with cheery unselfconsciousness singing as he went about it. I nodded to him, as if to say that I could see he was happy enough, then, and he grinned back in a way that suggested a fond, exuberant disposition. I felt that he might stroke me as a golem does some little girl who trusts him, or inadvertently crush me to death. I set down my soap box and shampoo, let the water drum on my shoulders, and looked about.

  At the Corry the men undress at their lockers, and then bring their towels to the duckboarded place at the end of the shower room. Often those who have swum still have their trunks on and some stud may allow a mocking minute of tension before the languid unknotting of the drawstring, and the peeling down of the tiny garment, freeing the cock and balls in one of the most mundane and heartstopping moments there is. An American guy, I thought, was doing this just now on the other side of the room; square and trim he stood breathing heavily and luxuriating under the water before turning his back and loosening his glittering briefs to reveal a firm hairless ass, milky white between the sun or sunbed-tanned zones of his back and thighs. I still had my really absurdly tiny black trunks on, and felt my cock protesting against their constraint, thickening up, and aching as it did so after the pounding it had lately been taking.

  At first I used to feel embarrassed about getting a hard-on in the shower. But at the Corry much deliberate excitative soaping of cocks went on, and a number of members had their routine erections there each day. My own, though less regular, were, I think, hoped and looked out for. There is a paradoxical strength in display; the naked person always has the social advantage over the clothed one (though the naked person can forget this, as innumerable farces show), and under the shower I was reckless.

  The effect of this on others, though, was not necessarily a good thing. It would be vain to pretend that all the men at the Corry looked like the stars of a physique magazine. There were gods—demi-gods, at least—but a place which gathered the fantasies of so many, young and old, was bound to have its own sorry network of unspoken loyalties, stolen and resented glances, ungainly gambits and humiliating crushes. This naked mingling, which formed a ritualistic heart to the life of the club, produced its own improper incitements to ideal liaisons, and polyandrous happenings which could not survive into the world of jackets and ties, cycleclips and duffel-coats. And how difficult social distinctions are in the shower. How could I now smile at my enormous African neighbour, who was responding in elephantine manner to my own erection, and yet scowl at the disastrous nearly-boy smirking under the next jet along?

  I first met James at Oxford, where he had heard of me but I knew nothing of him: it was at one of the little parties organised by my tutor at Saturday lunchtimes, with red and white wine, and nuts—genially queeny occasions where gay chaplains (chaplains, that is to say) and the more enlightened dons mingled with undergraduates chosen for their charm or connections, while one or two very old and distinguished people sat among the standing guests, holding audience and spilling their drinks on the carpet. I was feeling particularly full of myself: I had been fucking a French boy from Brasenose, it was a hot early summer in my second year, and I had the strange experience, on arriving in the crowded college room, of standing just behind my tutor and one of his graduate students who said to him, ‘I hope you’ve asked young Beckwith; I must say I should think he’s just in his prime this year …’ before I watched the graduate’s pleasure seep away in blushing discomfiture. James, in a crumpled linen jacket, open Aertex shirt, and baggy russet cords, was standing by the window. He looked very young, innocent, and yet mature, as he was already losing his fair, fine hair. His eyes, in contrast to his general colouring, were deep brown, and as my tutor introduced us James said ‘Oh, how do you do?’, indicating pleasure and surprise, and I said, in the rude way that I then thought brilliant, ‘He has very beautiful eyes.’

  I colour to remember how at first I assumed that James fancied me, so infatuated was I with myself. A few days later we met again at a cricket match in the Parks (my French boy having turned moody and hostile), drank beer together all afternoon, sat up late listening to Wagner, and I realised that what he liked was my company, and the fact that we felt the same about boys and music. We reached the stage of drunkenness where Brünnhilde’s Immolation seems to last only thirty seconds or so, though each bar is still a miraculous revelation. When he turned off the gramophone, stood up and said, ‘Well, you must go, darling,’ I was smitten with friendship, moved especially that he did not want me to stay. After that we met almost every day of our undergraduate careers.

  Tonight we were meeting in the Volunteer, my local gay pub. Mildly art-nouveau and metropolitan outside, with mysteriously opaque acid-etched windows, the Volunteer inside, after disastrous refurbishments, was an eternal parable of disappointment. A little back bar, favoured by the elderly, retained some period character, but the rest had been laid waste into the vast areas required for the mass jostling and cruising of a Friday or Saturday night. Round tables with beaten copper tops were aligned in front of the leather-covered tram which ran along the walls. In season, a fire burnt in the grate, the adjustable gas jets failing to kindle the synthetic logs. When it was lit the flames showed up the hundreds of fag-ends that had unthinkingly been thrown in.

  The pub was at its least inspiriting in the early evening. Hardy regulars, resigned to hours of waiting, lounged at the bar or filled in time with the Evening Standard, inching their way down pints of lager, glowering at any newcomers and exchanging greetings in tones that suggested that things were pretty bad. And so they were. The Volunteer was a second-division gay pub, and while the glamorous and fashionable were chatting each other up in King’s Cross or St Martin’s Lane, a mood of provincial neglect settled over it. It seemed, as I bought my bottle of Guinness and retired to a corner, like the waiting-room of a station on a branch line where the last train was not expected for quite some time.

  One of the barmen, very thin in very tight jeans, and with a lugubrious, made-up manner, wandered across to the door and stood looking out over the pavement, a lust-quenching advertisement to any potential drinker. ‘Startin’ to rain,’ he said to no one in particular as he turned back into the bar. James, of course, had an umbrella and trotted in a minute or two later looking very respectable. He had just come from surgery.

  ‘You look tired,’ he said. ‘Too much sodomy, I should say.’ And then, as if in surgery, picking up my Guinness bottle: ‘Take this tonic twice a day and have a complete rest: we’ll soon have you back to normal.’

  It was charming to see him, though looking (worthily, selflessly) tired himself. I didn’t comment on this, for his overwork and his unfairly long spells on call depressed him and were making him look older. He sat beside me with his drink, and I ran my hand over his head, bald now to half way back. He smiled, and put a kiss on my cheekbone.

  ‘How are the ill?’ I aske
d.

  ‘Oh, fine,’ he said.

  ‘Anything interesting?’ The bizarre things that people said and did in the consulting room were a staple of our conversation.

  ‘Not really. The woman with the stones came back. And I had a lad in this morning with the most enormous donger.’ James was obsessed by big cocks, many of which seemed to pass through his hands in his professional capacity—though all too few, I suspected, in his private one.

  ‘How big?’ I enquired.

  ‘Ooh …’ he gestured with his hands, like a fisherman—‘in its flaccid condition that is. Quite unbearably hideous youth, alas. He seemed to think there was something wrong with it—so I told him to go to the clinic.’ He took a deep draught of beer. ‘Fantastic cock, though,’ he added wistfully.

  I chuckled. ‘You’d have been proud of me the other day,’ I said, ‘when I did a very heroic deed and saved the life of a queer peer.’ And I related the incident in the Kensington Gardens bog. ‘It was all due to you, darling,’ I said. ‘I remembered what you do on trains.’

  ‘I’m impressed and proud,’ James said. ‘But a Lord—a Baron, or something bigger do you suppose?’

  ‘Looked like a Baron to me,’ I said—and with a silly smirk, ‘anyway you wouldn’t find a Viscount cottaging …’

  ‘Not yet, you wouldn’t,’ James tartly rejoined. ‘Has he been in touch since?’

  ‘He has not. A man just came along when the ambulance arrived and ran about saying “Oh dear, my Lord” and that kind of thing. I imagine we may never find out who it was.’ I looked at James. ‘But to think you do that all the time. God, I felt wonderful afterwards …’

  ‘Yes; you get over that, you’ll find, should you ever do it again. But what about this boy? I suppose you’d better tell me.’

  I must have bored James for many hours with the pitiless recollection of every detail of my sexual encounters. Often his response to my saying ‘I met this fucking wonderful man last night’ would be ‘Thank you, I don’t want to hear about it’—though this could never quite forestall at least a synopsis of the main events. The routine was a joke now, though behind it lay all his inhibitions, the uninvestigated secrecy of his own private life. Being a doctor, too, made him circumspect, as well as giving him a kind of authority for his lack of adventurousness. And even when I knew he had had some fling he would never mention it himself, so that lone events, which I suspected to be exceptional, could equally be interpreted as typical of a thriving sex life. Somehow he had made it impossible to ask him directly.

  ‘What is there to say?’ I for once replied. ‘Except: total bliss, endless fuck, suck, schmuck.’

  ‘You mean he’s stupid.’

  ‘He’s no Einstein, I grant you.’

  ‘So what do you talk about all the time?’

  ‘I don’t know, really. We have a kind of baby-talk—except all the words are rude—and we giggle a lot, and generally praise each other’s personal appearance. We had a meal at the Testudo one night, and the conversation did run a bit thin. And I did something rather terrible.’ I looked down in mock-confusion.

  ‘Don’t tell me.’ He looked at me narrowly. ‘Not Massimo?’

  ‘Wasn’t it too frightful of me? But I had to have him …’

  ‘My God!’ squealed James. ‘You absolute bastard. How ever did you manage? I don’t want to know.’

  ‘We just slipped out the back, not in the lav, but actually in the sort of yard with the crates. Ever so quick.’

  ‘But what about poor little whatsisname?’

  ‘Arthur? Oh, he was sitting there waiting for me, all sleepy and unsuspecting. Actually, Massimo said he wanted to have him too, but I did draw the line there.’

  ‘Was it like we always imagined?’

  ‘Mm, was rather. Everything on the menu, you know; full helpings.’ I leered helplessly. ‘But I should have a go some time—I’m sure he’s anybody’s …’

  ‘Thanks!’

  ‘No, I mean, I’m sure there’d be no problem.’

  ‘They do say, waiters …’ murmured James, in a tone of smothered excitement. ‘What’s Arthur’s … member like, incidentally?’

  ‘Entirely delightful. Not your kind of thing, perhaps—short, stocky, ruthlessly circumcised, and incredibly resilient and characterful.’

  James let a pause fall in which the brio of my testimonial edged towards embarrassment and then said, ‘So you’re in love with him, are you?’ I took a professional sip of Guinness.

  ‘I can’t be, actually,’ I admitted. ‘We couldn’t sit down and listen to Idomeneo and feel a deep spiritual bond. It must just be an infatuation. Sometimes I don’t feel I know him at all, which adds to the poignancy of the thing no end. And then Holland Park and my place is all a completely new world to him. He lives with all his family in a tower block. I said wouldn’t his mother worry about where he was, but he said he often didn’t go back home. They don’t have a phone, so he couldn’t let them know. But I imagine he’s gone back there today—he had to go and sign on. But’—I drew round to it—‘you’re quite right: it can’t last. I don’t want it to really—it’s just been a heavenly week.’

  We strolled off under James’s umbrella to Westbourne Grove. One of the slight bores about James was that he was a vegetarian—so going out to dinner with him required careful planning. In the event we had a delicious Belpoori that cost almost nothing, served by a boy James ogled with a quite new kind of forwardness, while the rain lashed down outside. Perhaps it was the rain that made us reminisce, about beautiful Oxford contemporaries and how they had become bankers, or put on weight, or got married.

  It was still raining when we left, so I suppressed my fondness for the Underground and took a lighted cab that was approaching. The cabby looked unimpressionable as I rather ostentatiously kissed James goodbye, and let my hand run down over his backside. He was so lovable, shy, manly, I couldn’t see why he wasn’t adored more, or more often. Yet if I couldn’t do it there might be a reason others couldn’t: he didn’t project sex enough, he was too subtle a taste for the instant world of clubs and bars. We had slept together once or twice, but we were both funny with each other and did no more than kiss and cuddle.

  ‘See you when all this is over, darling,’ I said, and nipped from under his umbrella into the taxi, looking, as I always instinctively do, at the cabby’s hand on the wheel to see if he wore a wedding-ring. I had had some good experiences with cabbies, and even straight ones could reach such a pitch of frustration, stuck in their cab and driving around mindlessly for hundreds of miles every day, that they were glad to come in for half an hour and talk filth, or you could show them a video and suck them off. This particular man, however, offered no temptation, and seemed to have become grafted into the grimy, bulging box of his cab.

  As we left the crowded, shop-brightened streets behind us and crossed into the exclusive quiet of Holland Park I yawned and looked out with pleasure at the deserted pavements, glistening where a street-lamp stood, the overhanging budding branches of trees in front gardens, the unthinking stability which wealth lent the small mansions behind them, where occasional windows, with curtains it was felt unnecessary to draw, revealed books reaching to coved ceilings, figures holding glasses moving about, discreet lighting picking out pictures in dull gold frames.

  I paid off the cabby at the gate, and jogged across the short gravel sweep to the door at the side of the dark house which gave access to the stairs to my apartment. A small lamp glowed above it, and the wet dripped down from the bare twigs of the creeper which surrounded the recessed porchway. My heart leapt when I saw there was a figure slumped in the shadow on the ground, sheltering from the rain.

  It was with an unsteady lurch into jocularity that I said, ‘Arfer, what the fuck are you doing there?’

  ‘Man, I thought you was never coming,’ he said in a tense voice, and sniffed heavily. ‘I been sitting here fucking ages waiting for you.’

  ‘But I didn’t know you were coming ba
ck tonight.’

  He didn’t reply but stood up and moved towards me. I felt his heavy breath on my face, and annoyance that he was there. I suppose it was because he had frightened me. He gripped my upper arms with his long, strong hands, and pressed himself against me. The rain fell on us, but as I lifted my hands to embrace him, I realised that he was already soaked through, his body warming the damp clothes just as they were chilling him.

  ‘Baby, you’re really wet,’ I said in a practical tone. ‘You should have said you were coming.’ I freed myself and felt for my keys. ‘Come in and take everything off,’ I exclaimed, adjusting to the idea that he had returned, and not unmoved that he couldn’t keep away. I stepped past him and unlocked the door, flicking on the light, and passing into the hallway at the foot of the back-stairs. He hesitated, then followed me in, his feet squelching in his sodden trainers, and pushed the door to.

  I turned back to smile at him, already full of maternal good-will. ‘Baby,’ I breathed … ‘what the fuck have you done.’ He sniffed, and ran the back of his hand across his nose and mouth. He winced under the light. There was a broad cut across his right cheek, clogged and dirty with blood. A purplish patina of blood could be made out on his black throat. Beneath a shabby old cardigan the upper right side of the pink silk shirt I had given him was soaked in blood, its new colour itself bleeding through the rain-wet material. I felt frightened again, unwittingly involved in something bad. There was something repulsive and careless about him, his nose clogged with bloody snot and his eyes tired from crying (though he tried to disguise this weakness with a mutinous look). But at the same time he was utterly defenceless: everything about him spoke of need.

  We went upstairs. I felt relieved that no one was in the main part of the house. He followed me wearily, the wet corduroy chafing his thighs; I looked down hastily at the turn of the stair and saw his blurred brown footprints on the carpet.