The Swimming-Pool Library (12 page)

‘How’s your face feeling?’ I asked. ‘James says he’ll come tomorrow and take the stitches out—just the ends, apparently, and the rest all dissolves.’

‘Not too bad.’

I ran my hands over his soft half-open mauve lips. His tongue slid up and licked my fingers. I had certainly never fallen in love more inconveniently, and more and more I wanted it to end. Even when he spoke, in his basic, unimaginative way, I felt almost sick with desire and compassion for him. Indeed, the fact that he had not mastered speech, that he laboured towards saying the simplest things, that his vocal expressions were prompted only by the strength of his feelings, unlike the camp, exploitative, ironical control of my own speech, made me want him more.

Loving him was all interpretation, creative in its way. We barely used language at all to communicate: he sulked and thought I was putting him down if I made complicated remarks, and sometimes I felt numb at the compromise and self-suppression I submitted to. Yet beyond that it was all guesswork; we were thinking for two. The darkened air of the flat was full of the hints we made. The stupidity and the resentment were dreadful at times. But then in sex he lost his awkwardness. He showed his capacity to change as I rambled over him now with my fingertips and watched him glow and gulp with desire; his clothes seemed to shrivel off him and he lay there making his naked claim for the only certainty in his life. It wasn’t something learnt, I suspected, from the guys before me who’d picked him up and fucked him and fucked him around. It was a kind of gift for giving, and while he did whatever I wanted it emerged as the most important thing there was for him. It was all the harder, then, when the resentment returned and I longed for him to go.

After James had taken out Arthur’s stitches we took the Tube to the Corry together, leaving Arthur to do—whatever he did when I wasn’t there.

‘He watches telly most of the time, I think,’ I said.

‘Does he read or anything?’ James wanted to know.

‘He once asked me to buy him some War Picture Library comics, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it in our local newsagents.’

‘I can see it would sort ill with
Apollo, Tatler
and
GQ
—but I expect newsagents get used to the strangest combinations of taste. They have to look on patiently while kids thumb through
Men Only
and
Penthouse
and end up buying the
Beano
and the Bucks Fizz fan mag. I saw someone the other day buy the
Spanking Times
and the
Amateur Yachtsman
, for instance …’

‘That’s not so odd—and isn’t a spanker some sort of rope or something?’

‘A sail, I believe—as in the limerick which ends “haul up the top sheet and spanker”.’

The train moved a few yards out of Queensway station and then stopped abruptly. ‘Could you ever get into spanking?’ James asked in the selfconscious silence that ensued. I was obliged to live up to it.

‘Not in a serious way. I put our young friend over my knee from time to time, but …’ In fact, drunk one night and recalling an evening when I had been picked up by a Polish workman who got me to whip his ass with his thick leather belt, I had made Arthur half kneel, half lie over the corner of the bed and given him several strokes of my old webbing corps-belt from school. I knew he would have let me go on, but excited though I was I dropped it.

‘I just can’t see the point of it,’ complained James. ‘Does Arthur actually like it?’

‘I think he does rather. I mean it gives him a hard-on, and all that.’ The man beyond James looked up in a bothered way as the train started again. With James I often reverted to the flaunted deviancy we practised at Oxford, queening along the Cornmarket among the common people (as we more or less ironically called them), passing archly audible comments on boys from the town who took our fancy: ‘Quite go for that’, ‘Don’t think much of yours, dear’, ‘Get the buns on that’. James had worked up a cult of an overweight black youth, with a central gold tooth and a monstrous, lolling member.

‘What’s he really like?’ he asked, as we hammered into Lancaster Gate and the racket of the train spaced out and slowed. ‘I mean, is he a nice sort of person?’

‘He is, actually, very nice, I think.’ I felt entirely penned in by not being able to speak of all the things that made the set-up so strange, and which, depriving Arthur of initiative, made him a non-social being. ‘Very nice in bed, certainly.’

James and I both saw how crass this comment was. ‘But what happens when you go out? I assume you’ve tired of each other’s company sufficiently to go to the pub or the flicks or whatever.’

I longed to tell him, whom I could completely trust; but my trust to Arthur, enforced by the whole way I was living my life, had become an unbreakable code to me, that is to say a principle of honour as well as an enigma. I merely shrugged.

‘And that fight, for God’s sake.’

I shrugged again. Could he really believe the fight story? ‘It’s all pretty much a mystery to you, isn’t it?’ I said, both proud and pained at the unplanned and inexplicable way things stood. There was nothing I could adduce in evidence of Arthur’s charm. ‘Sometimes I just put my arms round his shoulder and burst into tears.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ was James’s comment.

At the Corry the mood was perverse. A few bull-necked mutants were hogging the weights, the room was crowded, and crossness was given voice to. Bradley was training for a contest the following week, and did so many presses that he lost count and, red-faced and shuddering, insisted on starting again. Others, who worked out for more trivial reasons, forced to stand around, lapsed from their normally passing and formal chat into extended conversations, like housewives with shopping waiting for a bus.

‘I
know
—well, that’s what
she
said.’

‘But have you seen her since?’

‘Only briefly, and then I couldn’t say anything, because of course you-know-who was in attendance.’

‘I really
like
her actually; from what I’ve seen of her, that is.’

It was the typical transsexual talk of the place, which had been confusing to me at first and which had thrown poor James into deep dejection when he innocently overheard a boy he had a crush on talking of his girlfriend. It was all a game, any man in the least attractive being dubbed a ‘she’ and only males too dire for such a conceit being left an unadorned ‘he’ or, occasionally, sinisterly, ‘mister’—as in the poisonous declaration ‘I trust you won’t be seeing Mister Elizabeth Arden again.’

‘You know that new girl behind the bar?’ one square-jawed athlete enquired of his bearded companion.

‘What, the blonde, you mean—no, she’s been there a while.’

‘
No
, not her, no, the dark one with big tits.’

‘I’m not sure I’ve seen
her.
Nice, is she?’

It was conversation thrown out with a complex bravado, its artifice defiant as it was transparent. I half listened to it as I waited, and looked around at the dozens of bodies, squatting,
lying, straining, muscles sliding to the surface in thick-veined upper arms, shoulders bending and pumping, the sturdiness of legs under pressure, the dark stains on singlets that adhered to the sweating channel of the back, the barely perceptible swing of cocks and balls in shorts and track-suits, with, permeating it all, the clank and thud of weights and the rank underarm essence of effort.

When I finally got a chance at the bench I realised I felt strangely weary, and going in a rotation with three other guys I slightly knew, cut my ration each time from ten to eight lifts. After a couple of turns I saw that Bill was watching me. ‘I only made that eight, Will,’ he said, with a worried look.

‘Hi, Bill. Yes, I’m doing them in eights now.’

I watched him thinking and deciding not to censure what he obviously saw as an absurd infringement of tradition. ‘Well, everything going okay, Will? Too many people here, I think. Too many people. It’s getting ridiculous. Never used to be like this.’ I agreed that it was inconvenient, and suggested that the club was hungry for the money more membership must bring. ‘Very true, Will. But the interests of the members there are already have to be considered. It’s supposed to be democratically run, you know, this place.’ He looked around mournfully. ‘Seen young Phil lately?’ he asked with slight bashfulness.

I hadn’t seen him here the previous evening, and I was left uncertain if it had been him in the cinema. ‘I haven’t, actually. Has he been neglecting his training?’

‘He may have been coming in earlier,’ Bill assured himself. ‘There may be some other gym he goes to, too. I don’t know. He needs to keep in trim, though. Very nice little body, that.’

‘Not so little,’ I suggested, remembering the beautiful hard heaviness in the dark. ‘What does he do, anyway?’

‘He works in a hotel actually,’ Bill declared, proud to know this fact, which might be taken as the token of a fuller intimacy than was, evidently, the case.

‘How extraordinary,’ I said, my image of Phil as a military figure distorted by this notion, but settling into a new image of him, still in uniform however, marching along an upstairs corridor
with a tray of coffee and sandwiches held at shoulder height. ‘Which one, do you know?’

‘Not sure about that, Will,’ Bill admitted. ‘One of the big famous ones, I think.’

James had been swimming diligently while I was in the weights room and when I went down to the pool he was hanging by his elbows in the deep end, in spasmodic conversation with a person I hadn’t seen before. By a silly convention I always affected a censorious attitude towards men he might actually be getting somewhere with. I stopped by him at the end of my first length, pretended to adjust the strap of my goggles, and raising my eyebrows (an effort doubtless diminished by the goggles themselves) declared, ‘I don’t think much of yours, dear,’ before plunging on.

Up in the showers afterwards he was standing beside the same person, and the reason for it became clearer. The boy, very brown all over, except for a pink triangle above the crack of his ass, was thin and wiry, though not quite unattractively so, his colour glamorising (as it can do a nondescript Italian or Arab) what would have been a meagre body if pale. There was something strained about him, particularly his gaunt, narrow head, hollow-cheeked and with short dark curls. His sunken eyes were a cold blue, made the more striking by his tan; when he turned round I saw that he had shaved off all his pubic hair, which added a kinky and intenser nakedness to his salient, sideways-curving, pink-headed and very large cock.

The conversation was not fluent. The youth would pass some bland comment, and James would try to reply with adequate enthusiasm or insouciance. ‘See you,’ said the youth, abruptly turning off his shower and going off to dry. ‘Yes, see you,’ said James, managing to make it seem a careless possibility, though the smile faded off his face in a way that showed it was not spontaneous. He had effectively been put down, as it is impossible to go padding out after someone in simulated sportsman-like ease when they have just said goodbye to you. I crossed over and took my place beside James.

‘Who’s your friend?’ I enquired. He merely gave me a sceptical look. ‘Why don’t you go after him?’

‘I don’t think I care for him.’

‘Oh come on! He looked to me as if he quite cared for you—if Dame Tumescence is anything to go by.’

‘Another time, perhaps.’ He shampooed his receding hair in a listless fashion. ‘I see Miss Manners is having a ball.’ It was one of James’s almanac of nicknames.

‘She is the end, that one,’ I agreed, glancing at the man in question, one of that breed of middle-aged queens whose strategy, as they become uncontestably unattractive, is to cultivate a barging, unsmiling manner, sensitive to imagined infringements of their rights and never getting out of anyone’s way. Like James’s ‘Miss Marple’, a portly man who wore his glasses even in the shower and would blunder round and round the changing-room in his underwear for thirty or forty minutes, his spectacles misting up from the heat of his body, he was one of the odd crew at the Corry who, knowing no one there, existed in a kind of unseemly limbo of paranoia and repression. James, who himself occupied the club in a highly fantastical way, had catalogued many of its members with fantasy names. Some of them confused me—Miss De Meanour and Miss Anthropy were impossible to distinguish, whilst a pair of boneheaded identical twins could be referred to indiscriminately as ‘Biff’. There was no doubt about ‘Miss World’, however, the hilariously vain queen of uncertain years, known to me also as Freddie, who came into the shower now, casting off his towel as if it were the hungrily awaited climax to a striptease.

‘Hullo,
Will
,’ he said as he came alongside, his tanned, creased, sinewy body swivelling balletically. He spoke in a carrying, recital manner, as if testing some primitive broadcasting machine. ‘How are
you?
You’re looking wildly wicked and young.’

‘I
am
wildly wicked and young,’ was the best I could do before I, as the French say, saved myself—inevitably bumping into Miss Manners as I did so.

‘Clumsy little slut!’ he hissed, with such venom that I couldn’t help laughing.

On the train home I carried on with Firbank. I was on
Prancing Nigger
now, though I shared James’s preference for its other title,
Sorrow in Sunlight.
How Miami longed to lift up Bamboo’s crimson loincloth! ‘She had often longed to snatch it away.’ I lolled
into reflection on Bamboo’s charming words, ‘I dat amorous ob you, Mimi’; and as I approached the house they were becoming a catchphrase of the sort I sometimes keep nonsensically saying to myself and anyone else for days on end, or singing in the style of Handel arias or Elvis Presley songs. I found myself muttering it, with mounting intensity and irrelevance, when I came into the flat, called out, searched round and found that Arthur had gone.

Charles Nantwich’s house was in a street off Huggin Hill, so narrow that it had been closed to traffic and was no longer marked in the London
A-Z
; it was a cobbled cul-de-sac obstructed at its open end by two dented aluminum bollards padlocked to the ground. Halfway down on the left rose the tall façade of purplish London brick, the dormers behind its upper parapet looking out over the roofs of the surrounding semi-derelict buildings. It was an elegant post-Fire merchant’s house, prosperously plain, the only ostentation the door-case, with its delicately glazed fanlight and heavy projecting hood, the richly scrolled brackets of which were clogged with generations of white gloss paint. Much of the glass in the tall windows appeared to be original: warped, glinting and nearly opaque. I waited opposite for a minute, surprisingly taken back, by its air of secrecy and exclusion, to the invalidish world of Edwardian ghost stories, to a world where people never went out.