The Swimming-Pool Library

by Alan Hollinghurst

‘There are times when I can’t think of my country without a kind of despairing shame.

‘Will it ever get better,’ I said, hardly as a question. Charles puffed helplessly. ‘I’m beginning to feel a kind of relief that I shan’t be around to find out.’

squalid

‘I’m always forgetting how sexy the past must have been—it’s the clothes or something.’

‘Oh, it was unbelievably sexy—much more so than nowadays. I’m not against Gay Lib and all that, of course, William, but it has taken a lot of the fun out of it, a lot of the frisson.

sex somehow becomes farcical in the past,’

salacity

barminess;

whelmed under in the world of last night’s voyagings, their mood of ripeness and reciprocation.

cretinous

all closures, all

endings, give warning of closures, greater yet, to come.

ascetic

cunctatory

In a way what had happened was a comic reversal of the circumstances which had put us all in there in the first place, with the prison authorities bringing us together, admitting our liaisons, and protecting us from the persecution of the outside world.

gurgling with pleasure and grunting with pain,

‘He doesn’t exist, love. It’s just a silly book.’

‘I’m not a size queen, but …’ would have been my classic formulation of the affair.

‘Isn’t there a kind of blind spot,’ James said, ‘for that period just before one was born?

one must keep the body if not the soul together.’