The Swimming-Pool Library

by Alan Hollinghurst

I wasn’t in work—oh, not a tale of hardship, or a victim of recession, not even, I hope, a part of a statistic.

And so I had found myself turning up each day at St James’s Square and sitting in a little back office, disguising my hangover as a kind of wincing, aesthetic abstraction, and knocking box-folders of research material into shape.

Today was one of those April days, still and overcast, that felt pregnant with some immense idea, and suggested, as I roamed across from one perspective to another, that this was merely a doldrums, and would last only until something else was ready to happen.

balustraded

The sky was uniformly grey, though a glare on the white frippery of the pavilion suggested a sun that might break through.

and I felt a delicious surplus of lust and satisfaction at the idea of fucking him while another boy waited for me at home.

I felt a faint revulsion—not disapproval, but a fear of one day being like that.

What long investment they made for what paltry returns

they were engaged, in a silently agreed silence, in looking out endlessly for something they couldn’t have.

It was a place I loved, a gloomy and functional underworld full of life, purpose and sexuality.

prurient:

‘I’d like to see you do some more work,’ he said with a sucking in of his breath. ‘You’ve got the makings of something really choice.’

“cunt-stabulareh,”

nodded to him, as if to say that I could see he was happy enough, then, and he grinned back in a way that suggested a fond, exuberant disposition.

freeing the cock and balls in one of the most mundane and heartstopping moments there is.

the naked person always has the social advantage over the clothed one (though the naked person can forget this, as innumerable farces show), and under the shower I was reckless.

This naked mingling, which formed a ritualistic heart to the life of the club, produced its own improper incitements to ideal liaisons, and polyandrous happenings which could not survive into the world of jackets and ties, cycleclips and duffel-coats.

how difficult social distinctions are in the shower.

genially queeny occasions where gay chaplains (chaplains, that is to say) and the more enlightened dons mingled with undergraduates chosen for their charm or connections, while one or two very old and distinguished people sat among the standing guests, holding audience and

I realised that what he liked was my company, and the fact that we felt the same about boys and music.

When it was lit the flames showed up the hundreds of fag-ends that had unthinkingly been thrown in.

‘You look tired,’ he said. ‘Too much sodomy, I should say.’

‘What is there to say?’ I for once replied. ‘Except: total bliss, endless fuck, suck, schmuck.’ ‘You mean he’s stupid.’

I looked at him lustfully and competitively.

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.

penumbra

verisimilitude

to admit that I knew nothing about how murder worked in the real world. No reports in the papers? No newsflash on the radio?

violence against a black would rarely reach the national press, that radio silence could envelop the tragedies of the world from which he came.

‘Well that’s splendid,’ Nantwich declared. ‘We’ve still got everything to find out. What utter fun.

pustule,

Without a job doesn’t one just go do-lally?’

I got the impression of a long-lasting relationship conducted in a bitchy third-person.

‘Bit of a cunt,’ he said. ‘But still really frightfully good.’

‘I find the water most … therapeutic. Swimming, if you can call it swimming, is the only thing that makes me feel young. Floating around, splish-splosh, flip-flop …’

So I made the best of the Tube, and found it often sexy and strange, like a gigantic game of chance, in which one got jammed up against many queer kinds of person.

I loved the nerve with which I’d done all this, and like most random sex it gave me the feeling I could achieve anything I wanted if I were only determined enough.

A really long walk, actually, up that very steep path, you know—where the homosexuals go.’

I suppose, or his grandfather even. He was Jewish, and before the war Jewish people changed their names so that people wouldn’t know. His real name was Ecklendorff.’

There I sat, cross-legged on a rug, shirtless, brown, blue-eyed—perhaps the most beautiful I had ever been or ever would be.

lecherously

‘You say what you like, sweetheart; as long as it’s true, of course.’

‘almost everyone is homosexual, aren’t they? Boys, I mean.’

avuncular

I was saved from the sexual analysis of the next set of pictures, the Oscar Wilde Society Ball, by the doorbell ringing. (The dressnote that year had been ‘Slave Trade’, and the spectacle of predominantly straight boys camping it up to the eyeballs would have been confusing to the child’s budding sense of role-play.)

Farce is always more entertaining to watch than to enact,

I had certainly never fallen in love more inconveniently, and more and more I wanted it to end.

It was all the harder, then, when the resentment returned and I longed for him to go.

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:

adduce