The Swimming-Pool Library (30 page)
Read The Swimming-Pool Library Online
Authors: Alan Hollinghurst
Charles’s books were lying around, of course, and James picked them up and showed curiosity enough to make me feel ashamed that I was not getting on with them. ‘What’s it all like?’ he wanted to know.
‘Rather wonderful in parts—when he’s having adventures and things. Other bits are rather—earnest.’
‘You must have read all of it by now.’
‘Good God no. There’s so much, it rather puts one off. And then he’s so frightfully keen about it himself, and regards
it all as a big treat for me. I’ve got to try and be honest about it.’
James looked at me sceptically. ‘You must show me the bit about R.F.,’ he said.
‘Yes, that is good. Parts of it are—he must have put a lot of care into it. There are some rather Bridesheady bits about Oxford—though somewhat more candid than that deplorable novel. They would be good in a book. But a lot of the stuff in the Sudan is very routine—and he has this trying kind of nature-worship thing about blacks. He has only to see the back of a black hand or the curl of a black lip and he’s off.’
‘I thought you were rather the same.’
‘Well, up to a point—but I don’t go writing about it in this secret, religious kind of way. There’s no indication that old Charlie ever actually got it together with any of these tribesmen, bearers, and so on.’
‘I think you’re going to have to brush up on one or two things, dear. I mean, you could hardly have the District Commissioner riding round on his camel rogering the subject people, could you? I know that’s what you would have done, but it would really have been rather frowned on in the Political Service.’
I smiled in gap-toothed, humorous shame. ‘I haven’t been very systematic about it,’ I further confessed. ‘I’ve read bits here and there—just to see if I like it, if I think I can do it. The idea of writing a whole great big book—it’s too ghastly. Of course,’ I added, ‘I haven’t got everything here. The diaries stop, I think about 1950.’
‘Does he still keep one, do you suppose?’
‘I don’t know. He could do. He’s full of energy, even though he’s so old and not, strictly speaking, all there.’
‘He’s probably writing about you now—the peaches and cream of your complexion—soon to be restored—the well-knit frame.’ I aimed a swipe at him with a cushion, and then clutched at my ribs. ‘The subject describing his biographer … It all gets rather complicated and modern,’ he said, frowning and getting up to go.
As usual he had been a corrective, and when Phil turned up later he found me aloof with a volume of the diaries, and hardly interested in his anecdotes about Pino and the hotel lift, and how
there was a gay couple staying who had made a pass at him. He unpacked some veal, some ripe peaches, some wine and more bread. He seemed to believe in bread in some literal way as the staff of life.
I watched him moving about, doing a little tidying, neatly stacking up Charles’s tumbled notebooks. For all his compact, self-contained ordinariness he was a shape-changer. He was exercising his ability to make himself bigger, stronger, and more beautiful. I could still summon up one image of him when he first came to the Corry—standard material, a bit overweight, uncommunicative. Now he grew better week by week. His whole gait was changing as his thighs became more massive, rubbing together as he walked and so pushing his knees apart and turning his toes slightly in. As a result his ass, even more than before, seemed to be proffered, thrust out ingenuously towards the admiring hand. Whilst I was Impotens he was a great consolation just to hold and touch—like those exhibitions of sculpture that are put on for the handicapped. Instead of the normal brutal rush our lovemaking was tentative and respectful—it was as if we were both of us afflicted by some cruel, slowing illness that made us think everything out from scratch.
‘Still reading those books?’ he said, with a hint of reserve, as he came and sat on the floor by my chair and activated the remote control of the TV. I don’t think he really knew what the books were, and looked on them as some tiresome academic pursuit to which I was snobbishly attached.
‘There’s no tennis,’ I said, as the still of the court welled up in the screen, accompanied by optimistic light music.
‘Do you fancy any of the tennis players?’ he asked.
‘I think tennis the least erotic of all sports,’ I lied firmly, ‘marbles and pigeon-fancying not excluded. Please turn it off.’
He fairly jabbed down the button, and I could see him forcing back a reasonable riposte and remembering to be tolerant of me. He sat with his head bowed, until I reached down and stroked the side of his neck, pulling his chin back, and running my fingers over his face. When my palm covered his mouth, he kissed it slightly, and I was perhaps forgiven. ‘No telly today,’ I said. ‘I’m going to read to you. Please excuse my temporary
lisp. Our hero is just arriving at Port Said, with him three rather keen young men, Harrap, Fryer and, um, Stearn; all are wearing panama hats and too many clothes. The date, September 12, 1923.’
We were all jolly stirred, though we showed it in different ways. Harrap was particularly struck, & gasped ‘I say, I say’ over & over, taking his hat off & then prudently putting it back on again. I imagine he’ll say ‘I say, I say’ quite a lot more as Africa offers up its wonders. Not that the landfall itself is in the least remarkable: we had shuffled along in & out of sight of land for the last day or more, but it gave nothing of itself away: a certain amount of traffic evidently going in & out of Alex, & smallish freighters passing near enough for us to see our first Africans. Their lack of any sense of occasion was infinitely touching & humbling. Here was your
fellah
at his changeless labours—and us Englishmen, coming to rule & to help, so young & calm. I was in the most delirious mixture of silliness & solemnity, & as we approached the entrance to the Canal, & saw the cranes on the docks, the frankly undistinguished buildings, soldiers too as we drew closer, & crowds in djellabas somehow indifferent & yet in a flurry at our arrival, Oxford and England and Poppy seemed almost giddily remote.
The heat was rocketing up all the time of course, & when the ship finally stopped moving, & we stood along the rail disdaining to wave at the children & waiting for the gangway to be lowered, it slammed in our faces for the first time. We had 12 hours here while refuelling took place, and I was so much looking forward to it that I cd hardly bring myself to go ashore, & had to think hard about deadly serious things to keep myself from grinning like a fool as I went at a canter down the virtually perpendicular gangplank & shot into the melee of people. I longed to look at them & shake their outstretched, begging, greeting hands, instead of marching implacably through, as we had to.
Custom dictated that we go to Simon Artz’s emporium to
buy our sola topis; Fryer and I stood wearing them in front of a huge dim mirror, which made us look very historic, and rather silly. I found mine uncomfortable, & was afraid it suddenly drew all the character out of my face & turned me into just another hard-hatted, heavy-handed empire-builder.
I wandered alone through the shop, from the clothing department, which is like a designated school outfitters, stocked with the kit which Europeans will need for the term, through rooms with shelves of rolled & folded cloth, with grubby-suited Arab attendants climbing up tapering ladders to get down fabrics—printed cotton mostly—from the top. Occasional lethargic fans stirred the air. There seemed to be no windows, & beyond irregular pools of electric light lay mysterious, abundant semidarkness. I came to a sort of dead end, a tall, stuffy place like an airing cupboard, a store-room perhaps, with a young boy barefoot, climbing up & down the shelves, checking stock, a pressure-lamp in his raised hand, his black face concentrating, dazzling in the plane of light that he swung about him. I stayed & watched, mesmerised, feeling that nothing else mattered. Down he clambered, his supple child’s body comically bursting out of his khaki cotton uniform. When he saw me he smiled. I smiled back—though I was at the very edge of the field of light, & perhaps he cd not really see me. He kept on smiling—an immense, gentle, jolly smile—not yet a vendor’s smile, nothing calculating in it. He was a pure Negro, from far south evidently, like the people we are going to, quite different from the crossbred scamps who haunt the quays. I turned & went back, & as I did so he called out, ‘Welcome Port Said, m’sieur’—in a heartbreaking voice, its boy’s clarity just cracking into manhood.
I was inordinately, unaccountably moved by this—except that I knew it for what it was, a profound call of my nature, answered first at school by Webster, muffled, followed obscurely but inexorably since. Was it merely lust? Was it only baffled desire? I knew again, as I had known when a child myself, confronting a man for the first time, that paradox of admiration, of loss of self, of dedication … call
it what you will. Back in the sunshine—fiercely hot now, so that I at once put on my topi, & walked out conscious of some inner effort of self-effacement, of humility wrestling with grandeur & compassion—the scamps, repelled from Simon Artz’s door by a fearsome old Arab with a peaked cap and a cane, flocked about me, some pushy & assertive but others festive and friendly, trying to take me by the hand. I had the absurd vision of myself as a doting schoolmaster leading off his charges on some special treat, & for the first time I had to assert myself, strike out airily with my hand to repel the little demons. Then I felt childlike myself, very pink & white, laughable in my indignation, & my authority much too big for me, as if bought in anticipation of my ‘growing into it’.
I have omitted to mention the smell, which as soon as the ship docked & the wind it made was stilled, rose to the nostrils from the land. ‘Ah, the East!’ Harrap had said connoisseurially. It is not a smell one could anticipate, or even much care for in itself, but I relished its authenticity at once—a dusty dryness, & a sweetness, a foetor, as it might be near some perpetual meat-market, a smell utterly unhygienic and inevitable.
The other streets here might have borne exploring, but I was thirsty & went to sit in the shade of the tea-terrace. The tea, served impractically in a glass, was refreshing, somehow muddy & more sustaining than tea I am used to. All the while there was Sinai, very hazily apparent in the distance, & near to the spectacle of the ship being refuelled, which is done by an endless chain of Egyptians, some in blue or white djellabas, others naked but for a knotted nappy around the loins, lean, by & large, & sinewy. All the while they pass on baskets of coal, their foreman leading them in monotonous chanting, a call raised, a general echoing response, the words, indistinguishable to my Oxford Arabic, intensifying the impression of changeless pharaonic labour. Meanwhile on the quay, & even for a while from the bows of the ship until an official stopped them, three or four youths, virtually naked & entrancingly wild & fearless, were diving for coins.
As I sat & watched them, my pleasure & fascination evident perhaps in my gaze, a handsome young man with the immemorial flat, broad features of the Egyptian, a blue djellaba & a circular embroidered hat that made him look like an exotic afterthought of Tiepolo, sidled among the tables towards me, half-concealing behind him a battered valise. I had been thoroughly trained to expect him & his inevitable offers of fake antiquities, but as I was still alone—the others not yet having arrived at the rendezvous—& in my mood of exultant curiosity & celebration, I let him approach. The major-domo, I noticed, kept an eye out for my reaction, & when I did not object, looked at the youth in a way which suggested some sinister understanding between them, as if, the protocol of deference having been observed, I was now a legitimate victim of their antique trade.
‘You see Lesseps statue, m’sieu,’ he said, standing over me solicitously.
‘No, no,’ I replied tolerantly.
‘Is very good, m’sieu. You like. You like, I take you. Only 50 piastres. Is most instructive.’
‘No thank you,’ I said firmly, but with an amused look, I suppose, which may have encouraged him—if encouragement were needed—to carry on. He hoisted his case up then on to the table, although I raised a hand to promise him it was no use.
‘Here is postcard picture of statue of Lesseps, m’sieu. Is most instructive & also relaxing. Also is only ten piastres.’ I bought one of these &, since we wd not go there, one of the Pharos & one of Pompey’s Pillar. Encouraged, he rummaged inside a cloth bag, & produced a small brown bottle, taking the opportunity too to pull a chair up beside me & sit down. He had a strong, not particularly pleasant smell. ‘Here is very special drink, m’sieu. Very good for you & for your lady.’ He looked at me keenly & I felt myself colour. ‘Is the cocktail of love, m’sieu. Is the wine of Cleopatra.’
‘No, no, no,’ I said, flustered. To my surprise he was sensitive to this & put the bottle away. He seemed prepared already to give me up, afraid to overstep the mark, & packed
up his case again; some other Europeans approached an adjacent table, & I was glad to be seen successfully repulsing this mountebank, fascinating & confidential though he was. Leaning forwards as though to rise, & so hiding what he did from our neighbours, he produced, almost prestidigitated, from inside his robe, from somewhere mysterious about his person, a hand of postcards which he quickly fanned & as quickly swept together again & covered. It should not have surprised me that there was a market for such things here. He may only have been taking an inspired commercial guess in showing them to me. But I was keenly dismayed, humiliated, feeling that he had read me like a book & I, in the glimpse I caught of naked poses—all male, young boys, fantastically proportioned adults, sepia faces smiling, winking—had confusedly admitted as much. I declined him sternly, & with an amiable, philosophical bow he withdrew to pester the newly arrived party.
Tonight we travel south along the Canal. I have just walked on deck under stars; it was quite bracingly cold. Beyond the sheer canal walls there are occasional lights & fires: otherwise featurelessness & a distant horizon of hills to the east, and plain to the west, just perceptible as darker than the sky. Like a child I feel far too excited to sleep through my first night in Africa.