The Swimming-Pool Library

by Alan Hollinghurst

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.’

It was conversation thrown out with a complex bravado, its artifice defiant as it was transparent.

sinewy body swivelling balletically.

‘In the old days it was known as Gropecunt Lane, where the lightermen and what-have-you used to come up for the whores. There’s a reference to it in Pepys—I can’t find it now.’

peregrinations

The point, as I saw it, was that you could take an aesthetic decision to change shape.

I put the sun-worshipper back into his millennial darkness.

To the left at the bottom stylised fish shapes, like an emblem of Pisces, could be made out, sliding past each other; and to the right, and above, the upper parts of two figures could be seen, the one in front turning to the one behind with open, choric mouth as they dissolved into the nothingness beyond the broken edge of the pavement.

It was partly because I idly disliked any intrusion into my constant leisure—my leisure itself having taken on an urgent, all-consuming quality—that I instinctively repelled the idea. But it was not, after all, impossible.

he was clearly not a person that I could win over with collusive bad jokes.

of so much of gay life, where happiness can depend on the glance of a stranger, caught and returned.

fatuously

I smirked and half-laughed. ‘I thought my last words were to be “How do I look?” ’

After all, you saved his life once; now he wants you to do it again.’

‘Okay. Just think what fun it will be choosing your author’s photograph for the dust-jacket.’ ‘Mm—I hadn’t thought of that.’ We were both laughing as we hung up.

As before, nothing happened, so I rang again, stepping back as I did so into the street, in the way that callers do, both to nerve themselves for an encounter and to lessen the embarrassment that comes from being one of the street users who is seeking admittance to the private realm of the house.

enmity

protuberant cock,

After some efficient sex,

In only one picture did a woman appear prominently.

I was so lucky in general, so blessed, that my pick-ups were virtually instantaneous: the man I fancied took in my body, my cock, my blue eyes at a glance.

Perhaps the fact that the restraints of the public space had been taken away made us feel unnatural, inept at using our freedom.

saturnalia

I knew that one day I should leave the water for other men younger than myself.

if they didn’t know already, to the occupational depravity of the College men. Oh there will never again be a time of such freedom. It was the epitome of pleasure. When I sink back into the mood of those days, & then think of what happened afterwards, I am amazed. Those who were not killed are running the country & the empire, examples of righteousness, & each of them knowing they have done these unspeakable things.

I suppose it is a part of the tacit lore of manhood, like going with whores or getting drunk, which are not incompatible with respectability and power.

At the end of our races he gasped & gave his dazzling smile and I lounged beside him in the water, or put my arm round his shoulders, saying ‘That was damned close’ but thinking inside ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’

It had been too sudden an offering of what I too deeply desired. I never saw the soldier again. A thousand, thousand times I’ve wished I had …

slavish

‘The way some of these creatures look at you, you feel as though you’re being violated—ocularly.’

‘Of course I’ve got an erection. I’m in love.’

‘Mm—I spent all afternoon in bed,’

the rich older men treating their bored and flirtatious young dolly-boys.

the box represented to me in some ways the penalties of exposure, discomfort and pitilessness which were paid for privilege.

The three of us in our hot little box were trapped with this intensely British problem: the opera that was, but wasn’t, gay, the two young gay friends on good behaviour, the mandarin patriarch giving nothing of his feelings away.

assiduous

‘But, dearest, I don’t have any friends’—a hyperbole which expressed a surprising truth. There were people I was glad to see, but almost no one I would seek out, or invite for a meal or a drink.

cd barely be fagged to speak to him; whilst I, who don’t think he’s handsome, chatted to him happily enough—the usual thing.

felt that frightful inner convulsion of lust, my heart in my mouth & blushing like a rose.

There is nothing worse than making a bid for someone’s body & getting their soul instead.

I was very struck that, as well as the Winchester stuff, which, despite its period, spoke for me too, down to the very details of places and customs, there was a much less expected fore-echo of my own life in the episode of the Old Castle.

It was only a few weeks since his disappearance and I had done nothing about him and already was so absorbed in someone else that I didn’t even think of him for days at a stretch.

There is always that question, which can only be answered by instinct, of what to do about strangers. Leading my life the way I did, it was strangers who by their very strangeness quickened my pulse and made me feel I was alive—that and the irrational sense of absolute security that came from the conspiracy of sex with men I had never seen before and might never see again. Yet those daring instincts were by no means infallible: their exhilaration was sharpened by the courted risk of rejection, misunderstanding, abuse.

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I ain’t got no fags.’

‘Thought not,’ he said, looking away and snapping the stick up now in his hands. My uneasy imagination saw in this some covert allusion to ‘faggot’.

As our family group strolled through the square in the evening, dressed in beautiful light clothes, I would drag behind, my gaze searching out the bulging flies of the lads gathered round the war memorial, the clenching buttocks of the boys who slammed the pinball machines just inside the doorways of bars.

conflicting urges to dismiss him as rubbish and to run back and pay whatever he wanted.

I resented his ability to resist me, and that I had no power over someone so young.

appellation

Swimming-Pool Librarian.