The Swimming-Pool Library (7 page)

‘You can always have some bread and cheese, and you can finish off that cold ham in the fridge. Anything you want me to get you?’

‘No, ta.’ He stood and smiled crookedly. I didn’t kiss him but just patted him on the bum as I slipped out.

I’d put a suit on, smarter perhaps than I needed to be, but I enjoyed its protective conformity. I so rarely dressed up, and not having to wear a suit for work I seldom took any of mine off their hangers. My father had had me kitted out with morning suits and evening dress as I grew up and I had always relished the handsomeness of dark, formal clothes, wing-collars, waistcoats over braces: I looked quite the star of my sister’s wedding when the pictures appeared in
Tatler.
But I rarely wore this stuff. I had always been a bit of a peacock—or rather, whatever animal has brightly coloured legs, a flamingo perhaps.

I was a bit late so I took a cab—which also solved the problem of finding Wicks’s. My father was a member of the Garrick and my grandfather a member of the Athenæum, but otherwise I was unsure about London Clubs. I could easily confuse the Reform and the Travellers’, and might well have wandered into three or four of them this morning before hitting on Wicks’s. Cabbies, through a mixture of practicality and snobbery, always know which of those neo-classical portals is which.

‘I’ve come to see Lord Nantwich,’ I told the porter in his dusty glass cabin. ‘William Beckwith.’ And I was told to make my way upstairs to the smoking-room. As I climbed the imposing stairway, lined with blackened, half-familiar portraits, a mild apprehensiveness mingled with a mood of irresponsibility in my heart. I had no idea what we might talk about.

Entering the smoking-room I felt like an intruder in a film who has coshed an orderly and, disguised in his coat, enters a top-secret establishment, in this case a home for people kept artificially alive. Sunk in leather armchairs or taking almost imperceptible steps across the Turkey carpets, men of quite fantastic seniority were sleeping or preparing to sleep. The impression was of grey whiskers and very old-fashioned cuts of suiting, watchchains and heavy handmade shoes that would certainly see their wearers out. Some of those who were sitting down showed an inch or two of white calf between turn-up and suspenders. Fortunately, perhaps in recognition of the dangers involved, almost no one was actually smoking; nonetheless the room had a sour, masculine smell, qualified by the sweetness of the polish with which fire-irons, tables and trophies were brought to a blinding sheen.

Lord Nantwich was sitting at the far end of the room, in front of one of the windows which looked down on the Club’s small and colourless garden. In this context, unlike that in which I had last seen him, he appeared almost middle-aged, robust and rosy-cheeked. I approached him self-consciously, although I reached his chair before his gaze, which wandered halfway between the cornice and a book he had open on his knee, distinguished me.

‘Aah …’ he said.

‘Charles?’

‘My dear fellow—William—goodness me, gracious me.’ He
sat forwards and held out a hand—his left—but did not struggle to get up. We shared an unconventional handshake. ‘Turn that chip-chop round.’ I looked about uncertainly, but saw from his repeated gesture that he meant the chair behind him, which I trundled across so as to sit in quarter-profile to him, and then dropped into it, the elegance of the movement overwhelmed by the way the springing of the chair swallowed me up.

‘Comfy, aren’t they,’ he said with approval. ‘
Jolly
comfy, actually.’ I hauled myself forwards so as to perch more decorously and nervously on the front bar. ‘You must be dying for a tifty. Christ! It’s quarter to one.’ He raised his right arm and waved it about, and a white-jacketed steward with the air of a senile adolescent wheeled a trolley across. ‘More tifty for me, Percy; and for my guest—William, what’s it to be?’

I felt some vague pressure on me to choose sherry, though I regretted the choice when I saw how astringently pale it was, and when Lord Nantwich’s tifty turned out to be a hefty tumbler of virtually neat gin. Percy poured the two drinks complacently, jotted the score on a little pad and wheeled away with a ‘Thank you, m’lord,’ in which the ‘thank you’ was clipped almost into inaudibility. I thought how much he must know about all these old codgers, and what cynical reflections must take place behind his impassive, possibly made-up features.

‘So, William, your very good health!’ Nantwich raised his glass almost to his mouth. ‘I say, I hope it wasn’t too horrible …?’

‘Your continuing good health,’ I replied, able only to ignore the question, which drew improper attention to what had passed between us; though I also felt a certain pride in what I had done, in a British manner wanting it to be commended, but in silence.

‘What a way to be introduced, my goodness! Of course I know nothing about you,’ he added, as if he might be exposing himself, though morally this time, to some degree of danger.

‘Well I know nothing about you,’ I hastened to reassure him.

‘You didn’t look me up in the book or anything?’

‘I don’t think I have a book to look you up in.’ My father, I thought, would have looked him up straight away; in Debrett, as in
Who’s Who
, the volumes in his study always fell open at the
Beckwith page, as if he had been checking up credentials that he might forget, or that were too remarkable to be readily believed.

‘Well that’s splendid,’ Nantwich declared. ‘We’ve still got everything to find out. What utter fun. When you get to be an old wibbly-wobbly, as one, alas, now is, you don’t often get the chance to have a go at someone absolutely fresh!’ He took a mouthful of gin, confiding in the glass as he did so a remark I could barely make out as it drowned, but which sounded like ‘Quite a corker, too.’

‘It’s an agreeable room, this, isn’t it,’ he observed with one of his unannounced changes of tack.

‘Mmm,’ I just about agreed. ‘That’s an interesting picture.’ I tilted my head towards a large and, I hoped, mythological canvas, all but the foreground of which receded into the murk of two centuries or so of disregard. All that one saw were garland-clad, heavy, naked figures.

‘Yes. It’s a Poussin,’ said Nantwich decisively, turning his gaze away. It so evidently was not a Poussin that I wondered whether to take him up, whether he knew or cared what it was; if he were testing me or merely producing the philistine
on-dit
of the Club.

‘I think it could do with cleaning,’ I suggested. ‘It appears to be happening in the middle of the night, whatever it is.’

‘Ooh, you don’t want to go cleaning everything,’ Nantwich assured me. ‘Most pictures would be better if they were a damned sight dirtier.’ Mildly dismayed, I treated it as a joke. ‘Bah!’ he went on. ‘You get these fellows—women mostly—doing all the old pictures up. No knowing what they’ll find. And then they look like fakes afterwards.’

I saw he was dribbling gin from his glass onto the carpet. He touched my outstretched hand. ‘Whoopsy!’ he said, as if I were being a nuisance. His gaze drifted into the middle distance and I too looked about, a little at a loss for talk.

‘Actually, I love art,’ he announced. ‘One day, if we get on quite well, I’ll show you my house. You’re keen on art, I should say?’

‘I do have quite a lot of time for it,’ I conceded; then, fearing he might think my tone was rude, I enlarged a figure of speech
into an observation. ‘I mean, I don’t have a job, and I have plenty of time to go to galleries and look at pictures.’

‘You’re not married or anything are you?’

‘No, nothing,’ I assured him.

‘Too young, I know. You’ve been up to university, of course?’

‘I was at Oxford, yes—at Corpus—reading History.’

He drank this in with some more gin. ‘Do you like girls at all?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I like them quite a lot really,’ I insisted.

‘There are chaps who don’t care for them, you know. Simply can’t abide them. Can’t stand the sight of them, their titties and their big sit-upons, even the smell of them.’ He looked down the room authoritatively to where Percy was dispensing Sanatogen to a striking likeness of the older Gladstone. ‘Andrews, for instance, cannot tolerate them.’

It took me a moment to work this out. ‘In the gym?’ I said. ‘Yes, I’m not surprised—he seems very much a man’s man. You must know Andrews then,’ I lamely concluded. But I had lost my host already; I saw that he attacked questions with excitement but abandoned them within seconds. Or perhaps they abandoned him.

‘If you’ll give me a hand I do think we might go through now, so that we can get a good seat. They’re like hyenas here. They eat everything up if you’re not in there quick.’ I lifted one of his elbows as he pushed himself up with the other, his whole frame shaking with the effort. ‘Let’s have a look at the Library,’ he said, as if speaking to someone who was very deaf, winking at me in a musical-comedy way. ‘That’ll fool them,’ he explained, in a voice only slightly quieter. Then, returning the stare of a nonagenarian wild-dog in the chair nearest the door, ‘We have a history of self-abuse in duodecimo—but it’s probably
out.
’

The dining-room was a far finer place. There was a long collegiate table in the middle, and smaller tables, set for two or four, allowed for more private talk around the walls. Contemporary copies of Hogarth’s
Rake’s Progress
hung in a double rank opposite the windows, and the famous full-length Batoni of Sir Humphry Clay, Roman statuary behind him and garlands of dead game at his feet, dominated the end wall. Beneath it the dining-room
staff were arranging plates, tureens and cheeses at an immense funerary sideboard. The ceiling had an Adamish rosette at its centre, and from it hung a fairly elaborate crystal chandelier which had been conspicuously converted to electricity. Yet despite the tarnished brilliance of the room, some residual public-school thing, quintessential to Clubs, infected the atmosphere. The air retained a smell of cabbage and bad cooking that made me apprehensive about lunch.

‘Here we are, splendid, splendid,’ whistled Lord Nantwich as he chose the corner table which was most sequestered and afforded the best view. ‘Not quite the first, I see; or are they still having breakfast? You can get a good breakfast here: kidneys. For me they do a black pudding—though they won’t often do it for all the old farts in here. I enjoy a good understanding with the staff. Been coming here since I was a lad, of course, and damn good tuck and tack. What do you want?’ he demanded, as a busy little waiter-boy arrived with menus that seemed to have been typed out on a pre-war Remington, with all the capital letters jumping up into the course above.

When I looked across from my menu I saw that his Lordship was staring at, or rather through, the reddening and nervous boy. ‘Derek, isn’t it?’ he said at last.

‘No, sir, I’m Raymond. Derek’s left, sir, in fact.’

‘Raymond! Of course—forgive me, won’t you?’ begged Lord Nantwich, as if pleading with a society woman.

‘That’s all right, sir,’ said the boy, smoothing down his order pad, and Nantwich turned his attention briefly to the card. More silence followed, and Raymond felt moved to add: ‘I saw Derek this week, as a matter of fact, sir. He seems all right again now …’ but he trailed off as Nantwich was evidently not hearing him. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he added inconsequently.

‘Now what’s Abdul got for us today?’ Nantwich ruminated.

‘Pork’d be very nice, sir,’ said Raymond dispassionately.

‘I will have the pork, Raymond—with carrots, have you got? And the boiled potatoes—and I want a whole
estuary
of applesauce.’

‘See what I can do, sir. And for your guest, sir. Any starter at all, sir?’

My mind recoiled from Brown Windsor soup to prawn cocktail
to melon. ‘No, I think I’ll just have the trout—with peas and potatoes.’

‘Bring a bottle of hock, too, Raymond,’ my host requested; ‘cheapest you’ve got.’ And the moment the boy turned away, added, ‘Delightful child, isn’t he. Quite a little Masaccio, wouldn’t you say? Nothing compared to Derek, mind you, but I like to see a nice little bumba when I’m eating.’

I smiled and felt oddly bashful; and the boy was pretty ordinary. I also felt a guest’s obligation to charm, and was aware that I was giving nothing. How loaded dirty talk is between strangers, seeming to imply some sexual rapport between them, removing barriers which in this case I was interested in preserving.

‘Do you live in London all the time?’ I asked him partyishly.

He thought about this: ‘I do, though I’m often elsewhere—in my thoughts. At my age it doesn’t matter where you live.
Passent les jours, passent les semaines
, as the Frenchman said. I blank a lot, you know. Do you blank?’

‘You mean, just let your mind go blank? Yes, I suppose I do. Or at least, I like letting my mind wander.’

‘There you are. You see, I’ve had such an interesting life and now it’s so bloody dull and everyone’s dead and I can’t remember what I’m saying and all that sort of thing.’ He seemed to lose his thread.

‘What is it you think about mostly?’

‘Ooh, you know …’ he muttered broodily. I crudely assumed he meant sex. ‘I’m eighty-three,’ he said, as if I had asked him. ‘And how old are you?’

‘Twenty-five,’ I said with a laugh, but he looked sad.

‘When I was your age,’ he said, ‘I was hard at work. When I stopped working you hadn’t even been born.’ His eyes seemed to unveil in the curious way they had, and to concentrate on my face—or rather on my head, which he held in his gaze as if in his hands; it was with the appraisal of a connoisseur that he pronounced his expert, cupidinous sentence: ‘Youth!’

One younger yet arrived at this point, with wine. It was a very inferior stuff, though Nantwich knocked it back with enthusiasm. Then ‘Ah, here is Abdul!’ he exclaimed. From the swinging kitchen door a very black man entered the dining-room pushing a domed platter on a trolley. He was perhaps forty, well built, with fierce, deep-set eyes and a moustache that lent a subtle violence
to his expression; his thick lips, black at their edges, were red where they curved into his mouth, and his colouring was intensified by the pressed white linen of his chef’s pyjamas and apron and the battered funnel of his chef’s hat.