The Swimming-Pool Library Read online

In the flat, I helped him take off his clothes. He groaned and ached as I pulled his arm back to slide the shirt off. ‘My fucking shoulder, man,’ he half-shouted, and I passed my trembling fingertips gently over his back and he breathed in suddenly when I brushed a bruise that was mysteriously welling up in the blackness of his skin. He was shivering and chilled, his lower lip hanging miserably. I pulled off his shoes and stood them on the doormat, becoming more practical, concerned only with immediate necessities. At the same time he grew more passive and inert. I pulled down his zip and tugged his tight, rain-slimed corduroys and his little briefs down over his ass and thighs; he managed to lift each foot as I pulled the wet, resisting trousers off, kneeling in front of him and glancing at his shrunken cock and his scrotum shrivelled up tight with cold and fear.

  I propelled him to the bathroom and sat him down before attempting to clean and dress his wound. It was very painful, but he said nothing beyond the occasional ouch. I used some lint that I found in the cupboard, and stuck it down with several small Band-Aids. When James was back I would ring him. I ran a hot bath and got Arthur to sit in it whilst I gently sponged water down his back, washed his flat muscular chest, lifted his arms and soaped his armpits and sides. Then I slid my hand between his legs and stroked his cock and balls. He lay back in the long, deep tub as if relaxing.

  ‘Darling, what happened?’

  ‘I got in a fight.’ He looked at me crossly but sorrily. ‘I wouldn’t have come back here, only I didn’t know where else to go. I didn’t see why you should get mixed up with all this.’

  ‘Who did you get in a fight with?’

  ‘My brother—Harold. My big brother. He got this knife, he cut me with it—the fucking bastard cut me with it.’ He looked at me with a kind of tired outrage. ‘I can’t go back there no more, my brother’ll murder me. Only he don’t know where I am, ’ere. I’ll have to stay ’ere—for a bit, Will.’ He splashed his hands down in the water. Blood was seeping out again through the lint of his dressing. He looked lop-sided and comical, and intensely distressed. Tears ran freely down his face and over the waterproof pink of the Band-Aids. I dabbed at them with the sponge, and he shook his head, and winced, and winced again at the twisting of his wound that wincing caused. In my other hand, under the water, in spite of himself and his misery, his cock was hard. I wanked him slowly, the ripples slapping rhythmically against the side of the tub.

  ‘Will,’ he said, as if he must get it out before succumbing, ‘I killed my brother’s mate.’

  2

  I finished my fifty lengths and sat for a while at the shallow end with my feet in the water, my goggles pushed back on my head like a smoky second pair of eyes. Phil had come down from the gym and put on a brief and laborious display of butterfly: giving up towards the end of his last length he made some perfunctory strokes, then stood up and waded to the edge. I nodded and smiled at him.

  ‘All right?’ he said, as if he did not want to talk to me, or did not know how. I watched him in profile: a strong pleasant face which might barely change between leaving school and middle age, an incurious, dependable look. But he was coming on well. His tits now bulged out impressively; and as he raised his hands to his temples and pushed back his wet hair, his biceps doubled smoothly, sleek as coupling animals. He was the sort of boy who might be in the army, except that his weight-training suggested a labour towards some private image of himself, a solitary perfection. As often happens when I know someone else fancies a person I might otherwise have ignored, I realised that Bill’s taste for him had made me want the boy too, and I looked at him lustfully and competitively.

  It was getting late. I had deliberately taken my time in the gym, and spent a while joining in with some Malaysian boys, very supple and clever, who were training on the parallel bars. Old Andrews was coaching them—a man who still bore the stiffness of the drill square in his straight carriage and wiry limbs, and who, by a strange anomaly in the democratising ambience of the Corry, was always known simply as Andrews: Andrews himself wore this as the badge of an old-school sense of equality, though it sometimes sounded, in the mouths of the boys who, vaulting and balancing, literally passed through his hands, like an old-school formula of command. He was a difficult, demanding man, from whom those who used the gym a lot could win a tight-lipped affection. This evening his discipline was what I needed after the anxiety of home, and the oriental boys, with their intuitive sense of space and balance, and their wide, courteous smiles, provided a brief antidote to Arthur and our joint troubles. Then the nearly deserted pool, the water lapping at the edge, had tired me and calmed me more. I watched Phil spring up out of the bath, shoot me a little look, self-conscious but somehow, I felt, pleased, and amble off to the stairs. His trunks were becoming small for the weight he was putting on in the ass.

  It would have been trite to follow him too soon, and I kicked about for a minute more. As I did so a head approached, old and large, held above the water, but given a sinister vacuity by pinktinted goggles and a white rubber bathing-cap. Its progress was extremely slow, and each time it rode up and pale, heavy shoulders were seen, a weak opening of the arms, a nugatory kicking of the legs, had evidently taken place. When it got very close it submerged completely for several seconds, then came up looking at me, as it had clearly been doing beneath the water, stopped dead and lurched up to the full height of a plump, dripping, wheezing old man, with smooth, drooping breasts. When he pushed the goggles up on to his brow I knew for certain that it was his Lordship.

  My curiosity about him delayed my surprise that he should already be out and taking exercise only ten days after a cardiac arrest. And on the other hand something abnormal in him made me feel that all his manifestations would be unpredictable and irreconcilable with each other. He stared at me, or through me, and I wondered what to say, to what extent recognition was taking place. He doesn’t know at all who I am, I thought; he’s just looking at a pretty young man; he would hardly be able to remember me. And to confirm this he seemed suddenly not to be there himself, appeared to die out of the scene in a moment. He turned and made off slowly to the steps at the corner of the bath; Nigel, the attendant, barely looked up from his book as the old boy hauled himself out and moved with heavy, wavering steps to the stairs. I gave him time to get up them, imagining already a further incident like that in the Kensington Gardens lavatory.

  The shower-room was in its busy last shift: one of the sudden and unpredictable fluctuations in water temperature occurred as I came in, and there were cat-like yells as naked men leapt aside from the scalding jets. Darting movements of hands tried to regulate the taps, steam filled the air, and through it an impression of Bacchic pinkness was suffused, the colour of Anglo-Saxon flesh flushed by just tolerable heat. Warm from exercise I showered in water that was almost cold, and observed the strange variety of physical forms which were making their lingering transit back to the clean, clothed world.

  His Lordship was upset by the temperature of his shower, and made feeble efforts to adjust it. He looked unhappy, the rubber cap, which he kept on, intensifying the babyish whiteness of his figure. He took tiny steps back and forth, and peered around with his mouth slightly open, revealing his lower teeth à l’anglaise. Beneath his round belly candy-striped bathing shorts sagged dispiritedly. It struck me I might often have seen him here before but, so selective was my vision, never paid him any attention until he had fallen down in front of me and made his claim to be taken care of.

  Now he had chanced on one of the standard hard-on sessions of the shower, as on both sides of him and across the room three queens sported horizontal members which they turned round from time to time to conceal or to display, barely exchanging looks as they revolved. The old man took no interest in this activity, knowing perhaps from long experience that it rarely meant anything or led anywhere, was a brief and helpless surrender to the forcing-house of the shower. In a few seconds the hard-on might pass from one end of the room to the other with the foolish perfection of a Bus
by Berkeley routine.

  I was interested to see what effect this would have on Phil, who was washing in a thorough, slightly over-hearty way; but though he glanced shyly at what was going on, his own simple little cock remained unstirred. A couple of Cypriot men, who talked loudly and securely in Greek, old friends with thick moustaches and frames rectangular with muscle, shampooed flossily opposite me; and some greyer specimens, voyeurs who came only for the showers, mooned hungrily at the other end of the room.

  I was quite brisk, and followed his Lordship out to the drying area. He had a rough old towel, the grey of institutional laundering. He gathered it into a knot and dabbed at himself with it, breathing in a manner that was nearly a whistle, and seemed always about to become a well-known Mozartian tune. I paced around drying myself, then tied my towel round my waist in a kind of Polynesian skirt and couldn’t resist saying to him, with a step forwards and a bid for his attention:

  ‘Are you feeling better now?’

  ‘Hello, hello,’ he said, not at all taken aback. ‘Goodness me …’ he looked around as if something interesting had just started happening somewhere else.

  ‘I was surprised to see you swimming so soon after your … accident.’

  ‘Like to swim you know,’ he said promptly. ‘Floating around in lovely, lovely water.’ I waited for some recognition of the drift of my remarks. He wouldn’t really look at me, though. ‘Do you know, I’ve been swimming here for over forty years? Oh yes—up and down. I expect I’ve swum right round the globe by now—if you added it all together, you know. Splish-splosh, flippety-flop!’ I identified already the abstracted tone with which he produced these inane jingling phrases, as if to prevent objections being made by filling up the space and time with nonsense. Yet somehow, at this stage, I wasn’t going to let him escape.

  ‘I was there, you know,’ I remarked factually, ‘in Kensington Gardens, when you were taken ill.’

  He looked at me with a suddenly summoned attentiveness. ‘I’m quite over all that nasty business now,’ he said patiently.

  ‘In fact,’ I pursued, ‘it was I who looked after you, you know …’

  This seemed to knock him rather, and he started to shamble off into the changing-room and then to think better of it, coming back to me in a sideways manner. His eyes ran down my front and he looked at my long, gappy toes as he said, ‘You were the chappy that, er, puff-puff, bang-bang … I say, goodness me. My dear fellow!’ He did not know what to do.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, disappointed of a show of gratitude, ‘I’m glad to see you’ve recovered’—and I moved away feeling foolish and a little cross.

  It was the year of Trouble for Men, a talc and aftershave lotion of peculiar suggestiveness that, without any noticeable advertising, had permeated the gay world in a matter of weeks. Every bar and locker-room hummed with it, you picked it up on the Tube or waiting to cross the road. It was in the air and, had it been advertised, it could have been called decadent and irresistible. Re-entering the changing room I passed through a cloud of it, registering at first its quite bracing, outdoor quality before discovering the paler bluey-green femininity within.

  I found my locker that evening was next to Maurice—a lean black boxer, straight, and one of the most attractive men in the Corry, with a high forehead and a mischievous, sentimental expression. I asked him about a match that was coming up next week, and he made a few feint swipes at me as he talked. I involuntarily flinched a centimetre or two, and my stomach muscles clenched. ‘Don’t worry, mate,’ he said, ‘I won’t hit you—hard,’ and he grinned and cuffed me round the ear. If only life were always so simple, I thought, as he tugged off his singlet and his Lordship, looking perturbedly about, came back into view at the end of the alley of lockers.

  ‘I really am most frightfully obliged,’ he said loudly when he saw me, and I readied myself, half-dressed, to conduct this conversation under the casual scrutiny of all the other men who were sitting and standing around us.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ I said brightly, embarrassed by the crass double entendre that might publicly arise. He came up closer, and Maurice stepped aside with a droll raised eyebrow.

  ‘See you, then,’ he said as he went off to the shower.

  ‘What is your name?’ his Lordship enquired, and then, with the forced Christian candour of one who has learnt the ways of teams and charities, ‘I am Charles.’

  ‘William,’ I replied (though I am not often called that).

  ‘William, I want to show you my gratitude. Heavens!’ he added theatrically. ‘It is to you I owe my presence here.’

  ‘There’s really no need. I did what anyone would have done.’

  He raised a finger and knocked it on my chest. ‘Lunch,’ he said, nodding his head. ‘You’ll come to luncheon—my Club, nothing extraordinary, but it will do.’

  ‘Well, that’s very kind of you …’ I felt drawn because I thought he was interesting and might have a distracting story to tell. If he were a nuisance I needn’t see him again: there was also Arthur and the odder story of home and love and guilt, and I didn’t know that I wanted to take on anything new.

  ‘I think you should come on Friday,’ he said. Then: ‘Who knows, I may be dead by Friday. Perhaps better make it tomorrow—I should still be quick then.’ It was a bizarre usage, which it took me a second or two to see; I had a fleeting image of him chasing me round a huge mahogany table.

  ‘Well, that would be very nice.’

  ‘Nice for me, William,’ he insisted.

  It seemed to be settled in his mind, and he wandered away holding his towel in front of him as though he expected to bump into something. I had to seek him out when I had finished dressing, to enquire which Club it was and what name would find him.

  At home it was always very hot; the central heating throbbed away as if we feared exposure, and often, though high up and not overlooked, we kept the curtains drawn in the daytime, only a mild bloom of pinkish light penetrating into the rooms from outside. The creation of this climate was barely conscious, as people in crisis habitually transform their surroundings, the miserable sitting cold through the dusk without turning lights on, and the endangered, like Arthur and I, craving rosiness and security.

  The penumbra helped us to hide from each other. As soon as the new terms were forced upon us by Arthur’s coming back he must have felt as much as I did a sinking of the heart at our incompatibility. Inflicted with this new anxiety, we were afraid to annoy or burden each other. He spent much of the time asleep or sitting in a chair; and he bathed long and often. Very young and worried, he seemed to fear my resentment, and his gestures towards me took on a nervous respect; I would go to the dining-room and read alone, and he would come in with a cup of tea and touch me on the arm. If I had not been so fiercely and sexually in love with him, these days would have been utterly intolerable. And even so there were spells of repugnance, both at him and at my own susceptibility. Sex took on an almost purgative quality, as if after hours of inertia and evasion we could burn off our unspoken fears in vehement, wordless activity. Sex came to justify his presence there, to confirm that we were not just two strangers trapped together by a fateful mistake.

  The immediate concern, the first night, had been to get him patched up. I lied to James on the phone, and felt the sudden sadness of complicity. I said that we had been fooling around in the kitchen and there had been an accident with a knife. He came over promptly in his car, and I went down to let him in. He adjusted with only slight awkwardness to his professional role, with a practical briskness which did not quite conceal his curiosity. Arthur was hanging about in my dressing-gown, apprehensive of a doctor; when I introduced them I assumed James would find him attractive, although the makeshift dressing on his cheek spoilt the general impression.

  It had to be stitched and there was an injection. I watched, out of the way, James’s absorption in the intimate, serious work, running through a long series of subcutaneous stitches and drawing the skin neatly together a
bove. That way, he said, the scar would be smaller. Arthur shot me little tear-whelmed glances as it took place, and I looked on, firm and encouraging, as a parent might over some necessary ordeal of its child. I was touched, too, by James’s expertise, his deft, slender hands holding Arthur’s head, his intent application to a task that I could never perform for him. When it was done Arthur looked as if deservedly reproved, past the worst now, his face rueful and very swollen.

  James washed his hands and said, ‘I’ll have that whisky.’ As I poured it for him he shook his head disbelievingly. ‘Don’t do that again, Will,’ he recommended. ‘Bloody terrifies me.’ I was struck by the uncertainty of it all: he clearly thought we had had a fight and made his own interpretation of what was itself a lie. It was almost amusing how far he was from the truth. ‘I won’t ask you how it happened.’

  ‘Oh …’ I waved my arm about. ‘You know.’ I saw that though appalled by it all he was also impressed: I took on the spurious glamour of a wildly passionate person, my dwindling agitation being read as the wake of a violent erotic upheaval. Arthur had gone to the bedroom, and I longed to tell James everything, to clear myself at once. Yet I feared his advice, the necessity of action it would entail. I remained standing up and kept the conversation short and superficial, so that he would have felt embarrassed to make any personal observations on the boy he’d heard so much about. I closed down on James in a graceless, scared way.

  But it was once these practical measures had been taken that the impractical day after day of Arthur and me in the flat began. The only thing to do was nothing. Life this week was a black parody of life the week before. Then we had stayed in for pleasure; now we could not risk going out. I was free, but Arthur did not dare go out, and was nervous to be left alone. If the phone rang he looked ill with anxiety. Ordinary sounds, such as distant police sirens in Holland Park Avenue, took on for both of us a retributory grimness. I was shocked to find that my heart raced when I heard them, and the look we exchanged as they died away must have told him how frightened I was.