The Swimming-Pool Library (25 page)
Read The Swimming-Pool Library Online
Authors: Alan Hollinghurst
Bill looked at me earnestly. ‘I can explain that,’ he said, in the tone of one who has just dreamt up an alibi and is about to test it on a sceptical CID man. But he didn’t do so. ‘I will explain it to you one day. You’re quite right though. At the Corinthian Club I’m Hawkins, but down here with the lads I’m Shillibeer—Shilly Billy, they call me. All in good fun, of course.’
‘You’re a dark one,’ I said flirtatiously, and he looked pleased. ‘But tell me about the Nantwich Cup.’
‘The Nantwich? Well, his Lordship established it in 1955. He did a lot for this Club—he paid for those new changing-rooms. He used to come down a good deal himself, but we don’t see much of him nowadays.’
‘So you’ve been coming here a long time.’
‘Thirty years or so, I suppose.’ Bill picked up his drink, then put it down again. ‘No, Hitler knocked it about, you see. It used to be the Congregational Church for this area, but it was burnt out in the Blitz. The old club building was completely destroyed, but they say it was much too small anyway. Then his Lordship says, I’ll put up the money if you can find somewhere else and
convert it. That was all done, of course, when I started coaching here.’
‘But not the changing-rooms, I guess.’
‘That’s right. There was just an outside latrine at the back. The lads’d get all their kit on at home. Or else they just had to change in the gym.’
‘I suppose he’s always been interested in boxing,’ I asked.
‘Lord Nantwich? Oh, he loves it, yes. I believe he used to be quite a fighter himself. I think that’s why he was interested in the Boys’ Clubs—boxing’s always been at the heart of the Clubs. It’s what holds them together, and the kids respect the boxers, of course. Some of the lads spend all day at the Club. It’s what gives meaning to their lives; they don’t hang around the streets, you know, that lot. What do you do, by the way, Will, if you don’t mind me asking?’ We had got on for years without such questions being put.
‘Ah. Nothing, I’m afraid.’ I tried to make the best of it. ‘Not until now, anyway. Now I’m going to write about Lord Nantwich.’
Bill looked perplexed. ‘How do you mean?’
‘His life. He’s asked me to do his biography.’
‘Oh yes …’ He weighed this up and looked again at his untouched drink. ‘You’ll be a kind of ghost writer, don’t they call it?’
I hadn’t thought of this. ‘I don’t think so, no. It’ll just be by me. I think he thinks he’ll be dead by the time it comes out. That’s why I’m trying to find out all about him.’
Bill still looked disturbed. ‘He’s a wonderful man, Lord Nantwich,’ he said. ‘That’s one of the things you’ll find out.’
‘You see, I didn’t know until today that you even knew him.’
‘I didn’t even know until yesterday that you did.’ He did not smile, and I suspected some slight friction, or horripilation of jealousy like that of the cattily possessive Lewis. ‘He knows a huge number of people,’ he said more tolerantly. ‘How did you get caught up with him?’
It seemed disloyal to tell the truth so I said simply that I had met him at the Corry.
‘He doesn’t go
there
very often these days,’ said Bill, as if to imply that in that case I had been exceptionally lucky.
‘No, it was fortunate. The thing is, Bill, I would value your
help—what you know about him. I would acknowledge it of course in the book.’ He appeared satisfied by this. ‘I suspect you may be a leading witness.’
‘You make it sound like a trial or something,’ said Bill. I picked up my beer and looked at him interrogatively. ‘Do you want me to tell you now?’ he asked, clearly uncertain, as I was, about how biographers worked.
‘Not now,’ I smiled. ‘But I’d like it if we could get together soon. You’re not touching your drink.’
‘I’m sorry, Will. I’d like to in a way, but I think with the mood I’m in tonight it wouldn’t be a good thing. It’s never a good thing, to be honest, when I go back on the booze. Somehow it always lands me in trouble.’ Looking at his ungainly muscularity, I wondered if it nursed and suppressed an instinct for violence. Perhaps his self-denial had been painfully learnt, and was the clue to a double life whose difficult side was all in the past.
We walked together through bleak, twilit streets to the Underground, and rode into town on the Central Line. Over, or rather under, the noise of the train and in the near-emptiness of the carriage he confided in me. His confidences, though, were not about himself: they were the secrets and crises of others that he had observed. He told me feelingly about how the boy Alastair’s mother had died of leukaemia, and the struggles of the father to look after him properly. He said how Roy, at the Corry, had come off his motorbike and severed a tendon in his knee. Something more came out about the Nantwich Cup too—how Charles had created it in memory of a friend of his who had been killed, though Bill was vague about the details, and when I asked him how
he
had met Charles, assumed a kind of dignified obtuseness, as though so intimate and critical a subject could not be so lightly approached. Could there have been something between the two men? It was the recurrent problem of imagining them twenty, thirty years earlier—before I was born, when Charles was the age that Bill was now, and Bill was Phil’s age. He was looking forward then, building up his body like a store, a guarantee of his place in the future. Now the future had come he still hoarded and packed it. It sat opposite me, massive, gathering bullishly at the shoulders, the open shirt showing a broad V of black hair, the thighs splayed ponderously on the slashed and stitched
upholstery of the banquette. I knew I could never love it or want it, but it was an achievement, this armour of useless masculinity.
As we travelled west, through lit City stations like Bank and St Paul’s which I thought purposeless at night till I recalled that Charles, for one, would need them, that here and there in the City that was emptied for the weekend, people, eccentric or indigenous, still lived, my thoughts deserted Bill (though I still looked at him), and fled on down the rails to Phil. We were nearly at Tottenham Court Road, where Bill would have to change for the Northern Line, when he said, with tense cheeriness: ‘How’s young Phil getting on these days?’
I didn’t know how much he knew. Phil and I had been discreet, though together, at the Corry; but it was hard to tell what, in the crowded complex of the Club, had been seen, guessed or overheard. I gave a smile which could be read as a happy admission or an amiable ignorance. ‘All right, I should say,’ I offered neutrally.
The old bashful earnestness crossed Bill’s face, and as the train fiercely slowed and the inertia carried him towards me he said bravely: ‘I loves that boy.’ His innocence and embarrassment were revealed in the relish he summoned up in his tone, and even more in the tortured affectation of saying
loves.
The train abruptly stopped, tilting him backwards as he rose, and he bustled off with a sad and hasty goodbye.
June 9, 1925
: Back in London after nearly 2 years, & everyone complaining about the heat. Unable to wear shorts, open shirt & topi, I begin to see what they mean. The town, after Cairo & then Alexandria, is strikingly brisk & convenient—also much smaller, in detail if not in plan, than I’d expected; I’ve been going about with the sort of pleasure I used to have on getting back to Oxford after the vac, checking that it’s all there (which in fact it isn’t).
At Brook St, Sandy had called already before I got in, & left a message, in his inimitable style, on a page torn out of a book; it was in French, & highly, if florally & indirectly,
improper, about how ‘il y a une chose aussi bruyante que la souffrance, c’est le plaisir’, & so on. I was tantalised at the end of the page & only then turned to the message, which was florally and indirectly improper, but in English. I sat for a while in the little morning room, with the old brass clock ticking busily away, & some lovely calceolarias, & Poppy’s picture looking down sternly, & thought of all the days that have passed there since I went to Africa, with no more happening than occasional visits from Wilson with a duster. It was deliciously calming, like an Egyptian nobleman’s tomb, where the guide angles the sun in off an old piece of tin-foil, & the departed embrace the gods on the walls.
After that a round of visits of a dutiful kind before seeking out Sandy at his bizarre address in Soho. For a while I thought I wasn’t going to find it, but after ringing at one house where I was welcomed by a vast, fair woman with pink feathers I heard his characteristic whistling of ‘La donna è mobile’ from way up above & stepping back saw him leaning over a balcony between 2 palm trees. He dropped down a key, & I made my way up. It was wonderful to see him & despite joyful exclamations I cd think of nothing to say at first, so we hugged each other for ages until we needed a drink.
It is quite the oddest place, with the balcony which is like a tiny garden, & inside a high, cool studio with steps going up to a kitchen on one side, & to a bedroom on the other. Beyond the studio you can climb out on to a roof where Sandy apparently sunbathes naked with his friends & where there is a fine view of the old Wren church with its bulbous spire. We had some American cocktails with all sorts of muck in them & got frightfully drunk.
Later on a friend of his came up (he had his own key). He is called Otto Henderson, an artist, & apparently very well in with Cocteau & the Parisian world. I fear I showed I knew nothing about it all. He, I gather, is a keen practitioner of Sandy’s bare-bum sun-worship, as his mother, who is Danish, comes from a family of pioneering nudists. He was very interested to hear about the tribesmen of Kordofan, &
wanted to know how they went on when they became amorously excited. He is a striking-looking fellow, with thick fair hair, shifting eyes & huge lyrical moustaches. His clothes, on another, wd have been enough to incite nudism—a boisterously checked jacket, bright yellow trousers & a bowtie with dogs on it.
I rather liked him, but I was sorry not to have Sandy to myself. We all went on to a dingy little chophouse, the idea of which, apparently, was to reintroduce me to the epitome of English culture. Between us we made a thoroughly English nuisance of ourselves, & Sandy & Otto regaled me with the news of London life, Otto showing a thorough familiarity with all our old friends & treating me as if we had been at school together. Timmy Carswell has married, ‘extremely well’ Otto assured me. I felt a little pang, and a little gloom, too, which I dashed away with some more of the sour red wine we’d ordered. Sandy—who at the House had really I suppose been madly in love with Tim—cursed him obscenely & teetered into maudlin reminiscence. I sat back and looked around the restaurant while this was going on, though I cdn’t avoid remembering Tim and his angelic beauty at 15. It was not nice to think of female fingernails doodling over his smooth man’s body.
June 15, 1925
: Odd—though perfectly natural—how going away disconnects one from life. Everything has gone on at such a pace. Sandy painting his pictures, & clearly more or less living with the effusive Otto—and this puts me in a strange position. The paintings themselves I do not understand, & have been thinking about over this week, when I’ve seen him often. Their colours are unnatural, & their subjects are peculiarly distorted; but above all they are large. It is not a largeness I can claim to like, or even believe in. Their largeness is the largeness of Sandy’s own gestures, of his drinking, of his fantastical filthy talk—it is not the largeness of large pictures. He has an extraordinary study of Otto, naked to the waist, seen from somewhere right down on the ground, so that he towers up above, his chin turned
heroically, all the features exaggerated almost into brutality. It’s larger than life-size. It’s ridiculous, I can’t help myself feeling. But I know that that might be because Otto is himself ridiculous. S. is so absorbed in him, so greedily goes on about him, that I feel his thoughts are not really with me any more. His manner is wilder than ever, but beneath it all there is restraint & even boredom between us.
About Africa, about everything that has happened to me, he shows no curiosity. I fear he even finds me a dull dog.
June 18, 1925
: On Friday I had a meeting with Sir Arthur Cavill—early evening at the Reform, whisky-and-soda, talk about nothing in particular. He appeared almost embarrassed to touch on the purely routine matters we were supposed to discuss. I liked him—austere, detached at first, fastidiously bachelorly—& was not surprised when keen feelings flashed under the surface of his conversation. At the end, after many formalities, he talked briefly about Meroe, & the first time he had seen the pyramids there. It was as if both of us, lightly warmed with drink, suddenly felt our spirits freed. For a moment we were very far away from Pall Mall, & though little was said we shared an exalted almost
tender
glance.
June 23, 1925
: Last night a bizarre encounter. I was at Sandy’s studio in the afternoon when without a word he & Otto tore off their clothes & clambered on to the roof. I sat around reading about Lawrence of Arabia and Queen Marie of Rumania in the
Times Literary Supplement
until I had mustered the insouciance to join them. They are brown as what—Corsicans?—all over, but of course I need not have felt ashamed. Otto seemed to respect me more when he saw how sunburned I was. ‘We must go to the Tropics,’ he said to Sandy, ‘and run around like the darkies.’
I wished we were there too. It felt selfconscious & absurd lying up on the leads as if we were laundry, & there was something so prurient about the nudity when I compared it to
days on tour when all our party wd stop at a river, & the men strip off their shirts & drawers to wash them & spread them on the boulders to dry. I nursed those little idylls to myself, & thought of sitting among the bushes with my pipe while the men dived & splashed, or roamed through the muddy shallows. Then we were many miles from civilisation; here I made strategic play with the tepee of the paper while Otto & Sandy brazened it out in a strange discipline of their own.
In the evening we wandered down to Regent Street. All along by the Café Royal people were swarming around & there was a mood (which
was
quite oriental) of clamour & grime with underneath it a great passive summery calm. Life in England is so little of the streets that it was delicious to loiter. There were fantastical characters about, & several girlish young men, at intervals, waiting & waiting. One felt how this corner of Town has seen so much of that kind of thing. Across the road in the monumental mason’s showroom, the angels hovered with outstretched wings and lilies in their hands: they seemed to reproach us mutely through the plate-glass windows—or perhaps they cast some benediction over us.
Inside the Café there was an unreal, subaqueous atmosphere, early lights burning though it was still hot & bright outside, & layers of smoke drifting above the marble tables. I hadn’t been there since I was an undergraduate & it seemed as unlikely to me now as then that England cd have come up with somewhere so thoroughly democratic, where I, a Lord after all, might share a table with a bookmaker. Actually it excites a rather corrupt & non-democratic emotion in me—of the daring ‘chic’ of slumming it. I think Sandy feels this less, & goes there as a bohemian & for the fun.
It was fun, too, & we drank champagne and smoked Turkish cigarettes & sprawled on the benches. Eddy St Lyon was there with an actorish young man & winked at us hugely across the room; he has aged extraordinarily & looks ripe with corruption & self-abuse. At the next table some roughish characters were playing dominoes, a thick-set older
man, a kind of foreman with his gang. S. was clearly somewhat preoccupied with one of them, eighteen or so, with grubby, sun-bleached hair & broad features: there was something both delicate & brutal about him, with dark stains spreading from the armpits of his shirt & preternaturally powerful, dirty hands that showed a surprising refinement when he pushed the dominoes out, or raised his beer-glass to his lips. When the glass was empty, S. reached over and half-filled it with champagne. The boy smiled candidly, revealing a broad gap in his front upper teeth which made me swallow & tingle with lust, & the ‘foreman’ looked across with pride and gratitude, as if we had somehow helped the boy with his education. When their game was over, S. told the youth that he wanted to draw him, & they arranged a time & shook hands on a price; I began to see how the mixed nature of the clientele worked to everyone’s advantage. After this Sandy rather basked in his own
savoir-faire
, & we ordered another bottle of champagne.
I had noticed a solitary figure sitting across the room, also drinking freely, even heavily. He was slender, & beautifully dressed, of indeterminate age but clearly older than he wanted to be. He must in fact have been about 40, but his flushed appearance & what may well have been a discreet
maquillage
gave him an air of artifice & sadly made one feel that he must be older, not younger. He was not only by himself but in some heightened, almost dramatic way, alone. He squirmed & twitched as if a thousand eyes were on him, & then composed himself into a kind of harlequin melancholy, holding out his long ivory hands & admiring his polished nails. His gaze wd wander off & fix on some working-boy or freak until an appalling rasping cough, which seemed too vehement to come from within so frail & flowerlike a body, convulsed him, doubling him up into a hacking, flailing caricature. After these attacks he sat back exhausted & quelled the tears in the corners of his eyes with the back of his trembling hands.
Otto took notice of this & said in his know-all familiar way: ‘Old Firbank seems to be in a bad condition.’ I asked
him more, & he told me that the man was a writer. ‘He writes the most wonderful novels,’ said Otto, ‘all about clergymen, & strange old ladies, &—& darkies: you really ought to read him.’
Sandy was standing up. ‘Let’s go & join him,’ he said. I demurred, but it was no use. Poor Firbank looked quite alarmed as this boisterous trio of young men converged on him. But I saw there was something pathetically like relief in his reply to Otto’s greeting, as if, when we gathered about him, the world cd see at last that he had friends.
There was a similar contradiction in his reaction when Otto, fixing him with a manly & companionable smile, began to recite a poem—some nonsense about a negress ‘frousting in the sun, thinking of all the little things that she had left undone’ & a good deal of hey-nonny to follow. Firbank seemed to shudder & smile at once (I learnt subsequently that he was the author of this doggerel) & when it was finished said in a kind of airy gasp: ‘How wonderful it must be not to wear a tie!’
He had a curious & characteristic action of sliding his hands down his legs (which were twisted round each other more often than is customarily possible) until he was gripping his ankles & his head had virtually disappeared beneath the table. When he straightened up his breath came more raspingly than ever—or he wd cough again, & burst into a suppressed purple under the powdered finish of his flat, high cheekbones. Physically I found him terrible to be with, & conversation too was well nigh impossible; but there was something fascinating about his exquisite self-preservation & the reckless drinking & coughing which threatened to tear the whole thing apart.
As if he knew what I was thinking he said, with a hint of pride, ‘I’m going to die, you know, quite soon.’ This didn’t seem at all unlikely, but when I none the less havered, he insisted that his ‘Egyptian fortune-teller’ had confirmed it. When he next left the country—for France, quite soon, and then to winter in the desert villages around Cairo—he wd never return. It was a childish & theatrical moment, difficult to respond to seriously, & yet, like occasional lines in
melodrama, mordantly moving & true. ‘I don’t want to die,’ he added.
I was beginning to see why he did not attract drinking companions, & wondering whether we too might not be moving on, when he invited us all to go & hear the negro band at the Savoy: ‘It’s the most wonderful music there is,’ he said. So we knocked off the rest of the champagne at giddy speed, & lurched out into the street: I assumed we wd walk, but our author’s pedestrian performance was as wayward as his sessile one: it combined the futile caution of the drunkard with a true instinct for elegance—if of a somewhat decadent kind. With each step he rippled upwards, from foot to head, whilst appearing somehow to steer & balance himself with low-down oscillations of his hands: again I was reminded of wall-paintings in Egyptian tombs—there was so
linear
a quality to him. We hailed a cab in Piccadilly Circus & as he slumped into the smoky compartment beside me he exhaled his new resolve: ‘We must have the most heavenly talk about Africa.’