The Swimming-Pool Library

10

As I came up he was dithering on the doorstep and had a look, not uncommon with him, of bitten-back anxiety and determined self-control. He gripped my arm and said, ‘God, this is intolerable. I’ve just had a call.’

‘Don’t worry, old girl, I’ll wait for you.’ I patted him on the shoulder and smiled with a quiet confidence that I didn’t altogether feel after this traumatic night. A gorgeous summer day was unfolding and as James went off flapping his car keys I stood at the gate and let it sink in. The steady rumble of far-off traffic, the thinning haze, the suited people hurrying past, all seemed invitations to some wearying and majestic happening. I almost seemed to see, above the houses across the street, an immense golden athlete stretching into the sky like the drop-curtain of a ballet or a gigantic banner at a Soviet rally, full of appalling promise. It was a relief to go indoors.

James’s flat was quite nice-clean and roomy and safely sandwiched half-way up a house of geriatrics and absentee Greeks. The little cosmopolis of Notting Hill, its littered streets, its record exchanges, its international newsagents, late-night cinemas, late-night delis, was to hand. The elegant vacancy of the Park was admirably near; you could walk to the museums, to Knightsbridge even, and a little later in the year, to the Proms. And at the back, a block away, you were in Carnival country.

Even so, the very convenience and accessibility of James’s house gave it a bleak and transitory feel. The shelf in the hallway was always stacked with post addressed to former tenants whom nobody knew-bills, circulars, mailing-shots aimed with desolate regularity at a population of migrants. In the small carpeted lift (which this morning I allowed myself to take) one would meet strangers who were just polite, incredibly well dressed, sometimes carrying tiny fancy dogs.

James liked the insularity of his flat, liked having a place all to himself, but was clearly affected by this mood of transience, a sense of valuelessness despite the climbing prices and the mortgage. He could never bring himself to do much to it, and though he loved pictures seemed not to notice the half-furnished bareness of his own few rooms. He had a fine Piranesi-all tumbled masonry and sprouting bushes-that he had bought years ago in a sale but had never framed. It was propped, sagging in its mount, on the mantelpiece, above the dusty and ornate black ironwork of the blocked-off grate. There were comfortable, nondescript armchairs, and a heavyweight stereo system. He was obsessed with Shostakovich and had innumerable records of baleful quartets and sarcastic little songs. They put me into a gloom and a fidget within seconds but I think their bleakness met some otherwise inarticulate inner compulsion of his own, of a piece perhaps with the featurelessness of the apartment and his fatalistic disdain of possessions.

I heated up some coffee in the kitchen. James’s life-like Phil’s in a way-followed such awkward and demanding patterns, was so thrown out for the service of others, that ordinary things like mealtimes and provisions obeyed a quite different logic. Often he would live for weeks on three-minute snacks, and he was used to breakfasting at five in the morning or lunching at five in the afternoon. The fridge and cupboards were always full of little items to eat, many of them bought from the local Japanese supermarket. I riffled through packets of seaweed, red-hot crackers and the sprouts of various beans before deciding that coffee alone, perhaps, would be the thing.

There were two kinds of specialist publication James took. As I sat on a stool and leafed through to the end of the Guardian, I was alarmed to find one of them underneath, lying on the kitchen work-top. This was Update, a medical monthly that kept GPs abreast of the latest in sores, goitres, growths and malformations of all kinds. The articles were sober to a fault, and cast an assumption of disturbing normality over conditions which the accompanying photographs showed to be quite revoltingly unusual. This effect was worsened by the colour spectrum used, a flashlight glare which lent to the contorted limbs, the misted-over eyes and weeping wounds the high tonality of well-hung game. It was hard to imagine looking forward to the arrival of Update as one might to that of Autocar or Hampshire Life.

The other mags were not left lying about. The fact that even in his own home he kept them neatly hidden away (under some jerseys in the second drawer of his dressing-table) showed I suppose the secret and illicit power they still had for him. I hauled them out to see if there was anything new-though it was actually hard to remember. He dealt largely in material put out from Chicago by the Third World Press-a title which might have been thought to chasten rather than excite the exploitative urge, though James was clearly unabashed. The Third World Press specialised in blacks with more or less enormous cocks, and in leaden titles like Black Velvet, Black Rod or even Black Male. James was no bigot, however, and other publications such as Whoppers and Super Dick kept up with big boys of other creeds and colours. Often enough these were sexy men towards whom one could feel a notional sort of warmth, but the premium on the massive member resulted in some weird inclusions: skinny little lads, stout middle-aged men, a boy with one eye. Turning the pages of the new Nineteen-Inch Pipeline I half expected to come on illustrations of boil-ringed sphincters and mis-set bones.

And then what the hell had James done? Though he had his mischievous side he was a conscientiously good citizen. He parked on yellow lines, but he always displayed his ‘Doctor on Call’ sticker. He was a member of CND, but when he went on demonstrations was ingenious at lending support without actually sitting down in the road or being dragged away. The obvious thing was some sexual hitch: I didn’t know what the dear boy got up to, but as I assumed it wasn’t much, the idea of him procuring in a Gents or interfering with a minor seemed desperately unlikely. He would surely have had to have been in a crisis, a crack-up, to do anything like that: for whatever his eccentricities James was wonderfully well-adjusted to being ill-adjusted. I hated to think of him in the sudden scary spotlight of an arrest, the humiliation and the shock of its being for real.

Odd how, in the space of a few weeks, the police had come twice into my life. After the business with the skinheads they had been at the hospital, and I had been to the station and looked at photographs. It was a surreal thing, to look through several pages of criminal skinheads, all, apart from those with tattoos on their foreheads and necks, doing their utmost to look the same. Like the unfortunates in Update they squared up to the camera with an odd mixture of pride and reluctance. And I too, though angry and in great pain, was almost afraid to find the culprits and to throw my weight behind the whole machinery of prosecution. The policemen themselves were very businesslike: they were adamant against crime. But they weren’t prepared to be friendly, to be such suckers as unreservedly to take my part. What, after all, had I been doing at Sandbourne? And as I could not mention Arthur I had been a little vague and capricious, and taken refuge in my bandages. An amazing number of other things were going on at the station too, and I was encouraged not to consider myself special. It took a senior officer, seeing that my father was an ‘Hon’, to make the connection with my grandfather, to enquire if ‘by any chance’ I was related to the former Director of Public Prosecutions whom he remembered, and thence to soften into cautious sycophancy. What was more horrifying, though, was how, in the company of the police, my vulnerable, brutalised state was not soothed but exacerbated; the feeling that anyone might turn on me came over me again as I worried about James. To show my confidence and calm him I had suppressed my vulgar need to know what had happened. Now I began to want calming myself.

James’s diaries were always a good read and at Oxford I had made no pretence of not knowing what was in them. Nowadays he kept a more spasmodic record, was often weeks behind, and I found less opportunity to keep up. This was a shame, since they had for me the famous fascination of containing a good deal about myself. They pandered to my heart-throb image-‘Will adorable’, ‘W. looked fabulous’-though there was always a certain risk, as in hesitating at the door of a room where one is being discussed. There were pages-‘W. insufferable’, ‘What a jerk! No regard for my feelings’-where I was obliged to see myself from another point of view. It was like suddenly finding out that someone I knew quite well had been leading a double life: the delectable blond super-stud I loved so much was really a selfish little rich boy, vain, spoilt and even, on one stinging occasion, ‘grotesque’.

None of this was quite innocent. Like all diaries it envisaged a reader. The odious Robert Smith-Carson had read long sections of it about himself when James was so infatuated with him, and was both pleased and alarmed by the Wagnerian pitch of the entries (whole paragraphs delirious with exclamations: ‘Weh! Weh! Schmach! Sehnsucht!’ and so on). Other passages had an obscure biblical fervour: one which began ‘His thighs are like bronze doors’ I had subsequently annotated with exclamation marks of my own. My readings were also somehow allowed for, and the baroque candour of the diaries enabled James (who could never bear an argument or cross words) to tell me what he thought of me, without ever letting on in so many words that he was doing so. Between us we enacted a secret charade, a charade whose very subject was ‘secrecy’.

The sober, maroon-spined notebooks, drink-stained, rubbed and buckled, took up part of the very special shelf where the Firbank books were, those pocket-sized first editions with their gilt lettering or torn wrappers wrapped again in cellophane. Now that I was reading them myself I looked at them with more interest-Caprice, Vainglory, Inclinations, though not, alas, The Flower Beneath the Foot-and patted their backs encouragingly. Along from them the current volume of the diary was neatly in place, history already although only half-filled. Fairly a professional now at reading other people’s private bits and pieces, I settled down with my mug of coffee to find out what had been going on.

Reading Charles’s journal I could be confident that nothing in it, however boring on the one hand or touching on the other, could ever implicate me; whereas in James’s there was the uneasy excitement of some certain entanglement and my eye would skip down the page in search of myself. He had that elegant, artnouveau kind of writing which many architects still use on plans, and the Ws were very strong and conspicuous, like a pair of brick-hods side by side. How annoying it was when he was going on about Rheingold or Parsifal: Wagner and I shared an abbreviation, which cropped up pretty often-though in general it was possible to tell which of us he meant.

I discovered that he was hopelessly behind, and realised that I would find no clues here to last night’s events. The latest entry was from several weeks before: ‘To Corry 6.30. The boy Phil, W’s new thing, was in the showers. Fantastic body, disappointing little dick. Still, felt quite a pang for it-smiled at him, but he looked straight through me. Humiliation! I had made such an effort when we met to be charming, but now I wish I hadn’t bothered. Perhaps all lovers resent such old friends, who know things that they don’t? Either that, or they really court them. But again it was that terrible feeling that no one ever notices me or remembers me.’

I felt a mixture of shame and cruel pleasure in this, that my little Philibuster was not giving anyone else a foothold on his hard, soap-slippery self-possession. And the unvoiced envy, vainly denied in the disparagement of Phil’s cock, came through good and clear. I worked back to the evening of Billy Budd with a masochistic sense that I wouldn’t come out of it well, though I was sure there would be very beautiful and insightful stuff about the music. It began: ‘Billy Budd-box-Beckwiths-bloody! Not the music, but W. impossible. What poor Ld B thought I don’t know-he, of course, urbane & charming, tho’ at moments somehow steely & abstracted: one wdn’t want to be on the wrong side of him, & so one becomes faintly sycophantic (but that I’m not sure he likes either). W. has taken up with some boy at the Corry-it sounds to me as if it’s that gorgeous little tough with red trunks I’m half-crazy about. He told me as soon as we met & so ensured an evening of tortuous envy, regret & failure for me, which the music both soothed & inflamed à la fois. There was something rather infuriatingly consoling about the opera-struck by the mystery that comes from its not being about love but about goodness, and the way Britten channelled what he felt about love away into some obscurer, less appealing theatre of debate. We kind of mentioned this in the interval-Ld B it turns out knew EMF-perhaps quite well. For the first time ever I got the sense that he might like to talk about these things which are so difficult for people of his age and standing. As usual one was all discipline & good manners-unlike Miss W., who smirked & simmered & did her “Great Lover” number. Home. Miserable supper of old tofu-burgers; listened op. 117 & felt much worse. And then, what are these affairs? I thought of W. doubtless already back with his boy & made myself madly rational about it all, how it wdn’t last, how it was just sex, how yet again he had picked on someone vastly poorer & dimmer than himself-younger, too. I don’t think he’s ever made it with anyone with a degree. It’s forever these raids on the inarticulate. Appallingly tired, but cdn’t sleep. Lay there longing for someone poor, young and dim to hold me tight…’

I think I preferred the envy unvoiced. I sidled into the entry across the page. ‘… Surgery. Then to swim-40 lengths, exhausted but good. Hung around in the showers-full of mutants & geriatrics. About to go when that heavenly Maurice came in & took the shower next to mine. His skin, close to, exquisitely fine & silky- & his great lazy cock, half-erect, with that thick vein meandering down it, the dull purple head when he pulled back the skin… Extase! Then on call. Out at once to a basement flat that time forgot, the stinking dereliction most people know nothing about. Miserable, thousand-year-old husband & wife-she senile, he incontinent. She had slipped on the stairs, he cdn’t lift her, pissing himself. A great fat dog that kept getting in the way. Huge malodorous furniture, photographs, war-time wireless. I was so businesslike-its utter & absolute seriousness to them. Once I was outside in the car again I breathed freely-feelings of pity & misery, but no longer moony about Maurice. And this was only the beginning of a really useful night.’

This touched me far more than the attacks on me-which I read as a kind of flattery-and humbled me with a true sense of my uselessness. James was like Charles in this: without in the least intending it they exposed my egoism by the example of their goodness, by all their sweet, philanthropic sublimations.

There was the jolt of the lift being called, and its whining descent. I jumped up and put the diary back, but not quite in line, so that it would be clear that I had looked at it. I nipped into the kitchen for the Guardian, sprawled on the sofa and then-since there was something farcical and implausible in this-decided I would be asleep. I pretended to surface as James came in: ‘Dearest! Sorry, I’m so tired-frightful night. Down the Shaft till all hours.’

He didn’t seem too thrilled about this. ‘I hope it was fun.’

‘Up to a point. I went with my little Philpot but ran into Arthur…’

‘So you had them both, I imagine?’

‘Well…’-I left it in the realm of possibilities.

He slammed around the kitchen, ground more coffee, put bread in the toaster almost as if to complain that I should have done all this for him already; but to fend off what had to be said, too. ‘You’d better tell me what happened,’ I said. He hugged me suddenly and hard.

‘Yes; do you mind if I tell you the whole thing? At the risk of sounding rather foolish.’

‘My darling.’

‘Let’s go in the other room.’ We did so and he opened one of the big windows on the faint summer roar, and walked about and gazed into the rooms across the road while I sat attentively. ‘I suppose I’ve been feeling a bit wretched lately,’ he said, and then stopped.

‘What sort of wretched?’

‘About love and sex and life in general.’ He put down his coffee mug as if it were a nuisance. ‘I don’t know, I just feel so out of it. I’m working so hard I can scarcely do anything I want-I never see anybody. Well, I see hundreds of people, but never anybody I want to see. When did we last meet, for instance? I know you’re busy with your boys and what have you-but I would like to see you darling a bit more often, you know? You are one of my oldest, dearest friends, fuck it.’

‘I do feel the same, James. I’m always thinking of you and having conversations with you in my head and imagining what you would say about things. You’re my most constant companion, even though I’m so pathetic and never get in touch with you.’

He smiled: ‘You see, just talking to you now makes me feel better. Which proves we should meet more often.’ He turned away. ‘How’s it going with Phil?’

I wasn’t sure if he wanted the gratifying news that it was all over, a mere flash amid the long day of our relationship, or the mortifying assurance that it was all going fine. ‘I must say, we do rather adore each other,’ I offered, with a modesty that may have sounded like bragging. ‘He’s really cuddly.’

‘That’s it,’ James said, with nodding recognition. ‘It’s cuddling I want really as much as everything else. It’ll sound stupid to you, Willy, but over the last few weeks I’ve just felt… so out of it. I’ve gone so long without love and I’ve become simply so accustomed to it all, as if that’s how life is and evermore shall be-death-horror-amen. It struck me that I’ve turned into the archetypal middle-class intellectual out of touch with everything, just like someone in a Forster novel, and that was eighty years ago… It’s all very well being ironic, but then it keeps coming over me that no one wants me, the summer’s burning away, and no one makes a move for me, I don’t preoccupy anyone…’ He wailed a little but was unable to cry.

I went over and held him. ‘Darling heart, of course people want you. You’re so adorable.’ I kissed away the tears that weren’t there. I found him very slightly repellent.

‘They don’t. No one ever wants to fuck me.’

I chuckled almost. ‘I’ll fuck you-here and now, if that’s what you want,’ and I let my hand drift down his back and over his big schoolboy bum. He smiled shyly.

‘That would never do,’ he said.

It wouldn’t of course. I held him away from me, looked at him frankly. ‘Last night,’ I reminded him.

‘Oh last night. I was driving home, full of these kinds of thoughts. I’d just been on one of those really appalling calls, to certify someone dead-suicide-at least three weeks ago-locked room-in this weather. You can imagine-no, I think you can’t imagine actually. One could hardly go into the room… I was coming along the Park, about nine o’clock-it was very heavy and still, you remember. The Creation was on the wireless, the Karajan from Salzburg last year, you know, with José van Dam, gloriously good. And suddenly it was that unspeakably sublime bit ‘Seid fruchtbar, Alle’-go forth and multiply, fill the heavens and the seas and so on? I thought I’d never heard anything more beautiful and profound-I was in hysterics-I had to pull over and put on my hazard lights and I sat there weeping and weeping until it got on to a jolly section, which it always does with Haydn, bless him.’

‘It is a good bit.’

‘Unutterably great. Did we use to listen to it? I felt as though I knew it but hadn’t heard it for a thousand years. Anyway, back here, I thought what does this all mean? It means we must be as creative as possible-even if we can’t actually have children, we must give ourselves completely to whatever we do, as I’ve always sort of thought, we must make something out of everything we do.’

‘Quite so.’

‘And I thought, I must have a man.’

I was relieved that he saw the funny side of it. ‘Of course, I was still on call. All the same I put on some sexier clothes and a bit of mascara and really looked quite nice-a bit bald, but clearly an exceptionally nice guy. I had that old shirt with the button-down pockets that I put my bleep in-it looked like a packet of fags, I hoped. I went off down the Volunteer. I knew I couldn’t get drunk or anything, but I sipped my way down a Pils for about half an hour and then fell quite naturally into chat with a fellow-a Scotsman, but pleasant, black hair, jeans, sweatshirt, that sort of bruised look about the eyes, vulnerable, but dangerous: you know the type. You’ve probably had him, indeed.’

‘Oh, him…’ I played along.

‘I bought him a drink, we talked about music: he said he played the violin. I said did he know The Creation? He did not, needless to say. I was trying to decide whether to accept a drink if he offered me one when another Scot came up and slapped him on the back and off they went.’

‘I hope you weren’t put out.’

‘The resolve did wobble a little. But I knew what I had to do, or rather what I had not to do. I hung about for a minute, but as can happen there it dawned on me dismayingly that I was by far the most attractive person in the room, and I wanted something ravishing and epic. I was about to go, I thought I’d tootle down to the Coleherne perhaps, then I wouldn’t be too far away if the bleep went. Then I saw this guy come out of the loo-lean, tanned, denim top and bottom and, what I noticed first of course, a big curving prick sort of lolloping about. He walked through the bar in a very come-and-buy fashion, looked at me, then looked away at once and went out on to the street. I realised who it was, that bloke I was once rather worked up about at the Corry and you were horrid about, very thin but quite muscled and somehow incredibly sexy.’

Out of an unaccustomed sense of decency I had never told James about the afternoon I had had this boy, Colin, had even cut him when I ran into him at the Club with James a week or two later. ‘I think I know the one,’ I said.

‘He was what I really wanted, though the look he gave me wasn’t very encouraging. And then, naturally, having seen what I wanted I came over all incapable, and faffed around at the bar, and then I went to the loo. But when I finally left the pub, it must have been about five minutes later, beginning to feel a bit miz, there he was outside, leaning against the pillar at the corner, one foot raised behind him-very rent-looking, actually, which should have made me wonder, but I found I was talking to him. Really tat stuff about haven’t I seen you at the Corry et cetera, but I know you’ve told me it doesn’t matter what you say as long as you say something. In spite of my earlier doubts, he was amazingly keen and responsive, said where shall we go, I was completely practical and said I had a car just round the corner, we could go to my flat, and suddenly the whole thing had just taken off and I didn’t feel apprehensive at all, just happy, almost, and sexy.’

‘Fantastic,’ I said. ‘Really good.’ I hadn’t liked him much myself but I even felt a shade possessive now about him, and then decided to be generous, and wished James well with him.

‘Anyway, we got in the car, put on our seatbelts; I made a little grab for him, which he didn’t seem to mind-I just had to get a feel of it, you know. Then he calmly reaches in his jacket pocket, as it might be for a fag, and hoiks out this kind of fob, and says, very pleased with himself indeed, “You might as well drive round to the station, I’m a police officer.” ’

I was quite speechless and James was shaking from the recollection and from having brought off his story. I had been with him all the way at a nodding, trainer’s distance and then he had knocked me out. But it wasn’t quite over. ‘I didn’t say a word, but started the car, and of course just as I did so my bleep went. Then I saw the evening was inevitable in a different way, and the irony was all working overtime in that hideous way it can do. So it was my turn to grope in my breast pocket for my little professional accoutrement. I tried to make something of this with what now seems a fantastic gallantry and said how neither of us was what he seemed. I needn’t have fucking bothered. He changed completely and became all textbook-not actually taken down and used in evidence et cetera, but calling me sir and not giving an inch (as it were)…’

‘James,’ I had become angry. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t say anything about this for obvious reasons. I have had that man-Colin he’s called, isn’t he?’ He nodded. ‘I picked him up on the Tube, ages ago, just after we’d seen him at the baths. He followed me off the train, almost invited himself back to my place. I fucked him. He fucked me. He’s as queer as-whatever is very, very queer: me, you. He can’t possibly get away with this pretty policeman thing.’

James looked at me very closely. Under no other circumstances could all this have been good news to him.

I carried on being angry all day. My tiredness made it harder to resist and as I went into town later I was muttering audibly about people around me, and when they showed signs of offence, deviating abruptly into sarcastic good manners. I was full of outrage at an act in which the brittle shoppers in Liberty’s (where I went to buy socks) and the incurious drifters of Oxford Street (who got in my way) seemed all to be careless conspirators. At the Corry, I did a few ferocious exercises and then flaked out and dropped into the pool with more than usual relief. But even there the slowness and clumsiness of others enraged me, and I was becoming the victim of one of those premature oldsters who bump into one on purpose, just for the muffled charge of contact. I wondered what I would do or say if I saw Colin. Was the whole matter strictly speaking sub judice? Would it have been any service to James to deal angrily, even ironically, with the officer who had charged him? I had all sorts of plans, not necessarily the wiser for their violent neatness.

James’s experience, like mine with the skinheads, made me abruptly selfconscious, gave me an urge to solidarity with my kind that I wasn’t used to in our liberal times. In the busy one o’clock changing-room, cross though I was, I looked at the others, the bankers, the teachers, the journos, the advertising johnnies, the managers of hamburger outlets, the actors, the consultants, the dancers from West End musicals, the scaffolders, the rack-renters, queuing for the hair dryer and clouding the air with Trouble for Men, with a kind of foreboding, as an exotic species menaced by brutal predators. It was outrageous that Colin should have joined the brutes. I could see him clearly in memory, his tan and his weird eyes-hungry and yet chilly-and his habit of hanging about, the feeling he gave that something might happen.

Afterwards I went to have my hair cut. A while ago I had affected an old-fashioned barber in Neal Street, who would keep me trimmed and tidy for £1.05-a guinea, as he always insisted. In the window were black-and-white photographs of men tipping their heads forward, and inside, where one waited, a colour poster of the Prince and Princess of Wales simpered above the boxes of Durex. The shop was an outpost of neighbourly simplicity amid the chic revamping of Covent Garden, and Mr Bandini, who ran it with his middle-aged bachelor son Lenny, would talk with motiveless fluency about boxing and about life during the war, and the hard time he had had then. Unlike modern studios, where each haircut has the pretensions of a work of art, Mr Bandini’s shop, with its floral linoleum, its clippers and ivory-handled razors, gave me the reassuring feeling that exactly the same thing had been happening in it for half a century. There was something melancholy but entrancing in imagining the hundreds of thousands of identical, routine haircuts that Mr Bandini had given as the decades slipped by. Though, like other Soho Italians, he had been interned in the war, he had been at work on this spot for almost forty years. I could easily imagine Charles, in handsome middle age, popping in for his fortnightly short back and sides and a friction of eau de quinine.

Wartime London, which I had always imagined half bombed to bits, the rest of it keeping going on five-shilling dinners and a lot of selflessness and doing without, emerged quite differently in Charles’s journal. It appeared (and I suppose this was the other side of my apprehension about war) as an era of extraordinary opportunity, when all kinds of fantasy became suddenly possible, and when the fellow-feeling of allies and soldiers could be creamed off in sex and romance.

September 26, 1943: My birthday… It’s so dull being as old as the century, it makes one’s progress seem so leaden & inevitable, with no scope for romantic doubts about one’s age. However, a beautiful, hazy pre-war sort of day-lunch at the Club with Driberg, who was very flattering & said he thought I only looked 42. He told me about some of his exploits, though I was perhaps a shade reticent about mine: with him one simply doesn’t know where they’ll end up-careless talk etc. We lamented the still frequent attacks & insults meted out to coloured servicemen, by the English though mainly of course by the Yanks. It seems all Driberg’s attempts to counter the foul American laws, in Parliament & out, have been unsuccessful. Never mind, he said, he tried to make it up to them personally.

Afterwards I wandered through Soho & then in Charing Cross Road saw three black GIs loitering along rather idyllically, smoking cigarettes & looking at girls. They had that touching quality which off-duty soldiers so often do have, as if they knew they ought to be up to something but didn’t quite know what it was. There was a fat one, a thin one & an inbetween one with a lost, ingenuous expression which was decidedly heart-stopping. He was clearly the butt of his two smart friends’ humour & had an infinitely tolerant, good-hearted glow about him. I walked beside them to pick up their talk, & then went on & took up an insouciant pose on the other side of Oxford Street, by the Lyon’s Corner House.

By some sublime, birthday miracle they split up on the corner opposite, Fat & Thin turning back down Charing Cross Rd as if to have a second, more determined go at something they had funked or got wrong the first time, while my friend crossed over & then crossed again, to the far side of Tottenham Court Road. When I strolled over myself he was looking at the posters at the little cinema there. He appeared uncertain about the prospect of an afternoon of This Happy Breed and something else with Jack Hulbert in. He asked me if I’d seen these films, & I said I had (which I hadn’t) and that they were unutterably tedious. It seemed to me that if he cd be kept out of the cinema then there were possibilities: I wasn’t going to go in with him & sit it out expectantly in the dark for hours on end, smoking American cigarettes. I said why didn’t he come & have a swim at the Corinthian Club, that’s what I was going to do. Like a child who had been hoping for guidance, & with only the faintest hint of adult irony or doubt, he came along, & when he saw the bombed-out far end of the building under all its tarpaulins & scaffolding reacted to it as though it were a cause for personal sympathy and congratulation.

I cd hardly wait to get him in the showers, but I hired him some drawers & a towel & drew out our time in the pool as if I were only there for the exercise. Roy (his name, Roy Bartholomew) was a clumsy swimmer, but jolly fast, soldier-fit & divinely constructed. I tested him gently by saying how muscly he was, & he flexed his arms & had me punch him in the stomach-at the same time saying how I shd see so-and-so in his regiment, who evidently has the biggest muscles imaginable. I discovered he likes to box, & wished for a moment I was twenty years younger & cd have taken him on.

In the showers he was all I cd have hoped for, flawed only by a little appendicitis scar; but he was selfconscious-not, I realised, about nudity, but about showering with whites. He was like other American negro servicemen I’ve seen in the Corry, used to segregation & despite their often transcendent beauty & presence somehow cowed or fearful of rejection. The regulars, however, were impressed, & Fox was very pointedly doing his ‘Get a bunk on last night, Charlie?’ patter, while young Andrews lathered his conversation with my Lord this and my Lord that-which of course impressed Roy in turn.

I took him back to Brook St & opened a bottle of champagne. Taha looked at me very knowingly before going off to see his uncle, & then, having the place to myself, I more or less did what I wanted. There was a statutory preamble of remarks about girlfriends and what-have-you, but that out of the way we started kissing & stroking each other pretty uninhibitedly, & stripped off & had it away on the sofa & then on the floor three or four times. I must say he was absolute bliss, with that kind of innocence that so appeals to me, & very manly & friendly-nothing affected or girly about it. I’ve never known anyone ejaculate such quantities. Even the last time, when I brought him off by hand, it shot right up into his face.

September 27: In a moment of foolishness I’d given Roy my telephone number. I was out most of the morning & didn’t return home until 5 or so, when I asked Taha if there had been any calls & he said ‘No Sir’ with a noticeably self-satisfied air. It wd have been wonderful to have had Roy again, but I found I was glad not to, & decided that if he shd get in touch I wd not see him. Any repetition wd lack the spontaneity & beauty of yesterday, & I wd rather remember it as one of those rare & wonderful days when two strangers come together in deliberate ignorance of each other for their mutual pleasure.

September 28: A fairly terrible day, which seemed to have been designed as the counterpart to Tuesday, all choking catastrophe instead of the sentimental camaraderie & avoided intimacy of that brief afternoon. Taha went out for me after lunch to deliver some papers to GS & to find me if he cd some flowers-I had a sudden yearning for those great bronze chrysanthemums. As I sometimes do, I imagined him going through the streets on my behalf, saw him by some supernatural, aerial sixth sense moving among the people, pointing to the flowers, taking the long, top-heavy cone of paper in his hands… I knew how people noticed him, sometimes were rude or cruel, all of which only deepened my pride in him. It was a mystery-for as he ambled about the prosaic London streets he moved too in the realm of my imagination, inviolable, invested with my love.

He took an age to return & when he finally did come in with the chrysanthemums in a vase I asked him if everything had passed off all right, feeling a little anxious at the confidentiality of the things I gave him to carry-not on his account, whom I trust utterly, but lest he shd be waylaid. He said he was very sorry and cd he ask me something. I said of course. He said he wanted to marry Niri. I congratulated him, shook his hand, wished him every happiness, & said I looked forward to meeting his intended. He went out & shut the door, & a minute or two later I heard him leave the house.

It was only then that I allowed myself to absorb the news, or rather to be transfixed by it, for it filled me with the most piercing anguish, & as he went out, wearing-I knew-his comical broad-brimmed hat, it was as if something within me had been released & I found myself gasping for breath, tears rolling down my face & the whole room & its furniture & pictures & books somehow sodden & heavy with the misery of it. It is true that the announcement of any marriage, however dear to me the couple & however perfectly suited to each other, invariably fills me with the blackest gloom; it may lift after a day or two, though not before an enduring sense has been instilled, not of the beginning of something new, but of the irrevocable ending of something innocent & old. But when the innocence is that of my own Taha… I felt it almost as if he had died-or worse, been magically translated into some other element. It was as if I saw him through field-glasses dancing & singing in a place so far away that when he opened his mouth, when his lips moved, no sound disturbed the silence.

I went round & round the room, mastering my feelings & then yielding to them again. I fetched up in front of the chrysanthemums, which he had arranged in the tall Tang vase that used to be in the hall at Polesden. They were utterly immaculate, ripe yet dry & glossy, the colour of their great clustering heads autumnal while their leaves were green. They might almost have been lacquered art-works, & one had to squeeze them or pinch their petals to prove that they were perishable. I ran over the brief scene of a few minutes before again & again in my mind, each time with renewed pain, & recognised the unspeakable deference with which he had as it were offered the flowers & suppressed his own excitement. He showed, as so often, his tender & acute intimation of my feelings while not altogether being able to contain his own. I understood too in time why he had been so cocky for the last few days, pulled as he must have been between gaiety & apprehension. So the chrysanthemums-in that way that inanimate things have of implicating themselves in moments of crisis-swam before my eyes like emblems of his years of fidelity, and festive tokens of his future, now elegiac, now heartlessly splendid.

I pulled myself together & went into the study & swallowed a large glass of whisky. I tried to get on with the proofs of my Sudan book, as a mechanic exercise, but of course the merest table of figures seemed to speak of my sweet Taha & our past together, & sent the memory ferreting around for the tenderest spots, the purest moments of selflessness & mutual service. Perhaps these inspired me in a way-for I wrote him a cheque for £200, then thinking better of it wrote him one for £100 instead; then I tore them both up & wrote another for £500 and put it in an envelope, and trotted up to the attic to leave it in his room. It’s a room I’ve so rarely been into, & I had to hold myself back from maudlin pillow-stroking reverie. It reminded me too of a room in the Sudan, since there is nothing in it save the bed covered with its beautiful shawl, a rug on the bare boards, & a little table with a photograph of Murad, and that other taken just before we left Khartoum, outside the Sudan Club-he & I standing side by side, smiling against the sun. But I cd scarcely bear to look at it, & hurried out again. Such simple, reassuring things were turning against me.

So many changes will come about, things that I haven’t even begun to think of, can’t think of. Will Taha stay with me, will they want to live here? Niri, I believe, lives with her mother and an old uncle out west somewhere… I thought of the appalling magnanimity I will have to show & realising I wd not be able to control myself if I saw him again so soon I went out, had a further drink or two at Wicks’s & then as evening came on found myself wandering somnambulistically towards Clarkson’s Cottage. It was welcome enough: I needed some narcotic, some soulless distraction.

The broken light has been replaced, so it was rather bright in there. There was a sort of businessman at one end in a raincoat & that thin, anxious little chap who’s always there & keeps Cave at the other. He reminds me of a college servant, making sure that the gentlemen are happy-his payment, I suppose, being the dubious pleasure of having a jolly good look. I took up my position in the middle & fiddled about for a bit as my brief mood of anticipation dwindled & then there was a familiar clippety-clop & Chancey Brough came in & force majeure took the stall on my right. He had the most tremendous & businesslike pee-he must have been saving it up for hours so as to seem (vain hope!) an authentic convenience-patron- & then weighed his immense tackle in the palm of his hand for a while. We obviously cdn’t remain where we were, but I knew his sticking-power & so I buttoned up & slipped off, tipping my hat with a polite ‘Good evening’ & best wishes to his wife.

I went along Old Compton Street, wishing Sandy were still there, & rather wanting a pal to get drunk with. The Leicester Square lavs seemed a possibility, so I popped in, but there were all the usual faces turning expectantly, Major Sprague & that butler from Kensington Palace & a few anxious youngsters on the make. Andrews tells me you can have a wonderful whirl at Victoria these days with all the tommies & tars; he picked up a couple of the latter there some time last week & had the night of his life, if he is to be believed. I wandered down towards Trafalgar Square, thinking I might get a bus, but the sunset came on & I was suddenly flooded with misery again & just gave it all up & went back to the Club for a chop & a glass of beer & was wretchedly rude to anybody who approached me.

It was with a mind worried by the gloom and misfortune of my friends and with my appearance newly toughened, Marine-style, by Mr Bandini that I went that evening to the view of Ronald Staines’s little exhibition. Normally I would have kept away, but James’s news made me realise I must put in an appearance. I had had to go through the rubbish bin to find the invitation again, a purple card with, scrawled on the back in white ink, the note ‘Sorry to lose you so soon the other evening-Ronnie’. I could quite happily have remained lost, but I needed to keep in with him and to secure from him those moody but surely incriminating photographs of Colin.

The exhibition was called Martyrs, and was hung at the Sigma Gallery in Lamb’s Conduit Street, a home, or at least a stopping place, for many ‘alternative’ figures. Founded in the Thirties by Rycote Prideaux, it had catered in its earlier days for left-wing artists, and Prideaux’s Sigma Pamphlets had been launched there with readings and exhibitions. In my lifetime, though, it had been run by Prideaux’s much younger friend Simon Sims, who had diluted his late mentor’s style, showed a lot of banal mystical art interspersed with often embarrassing gay and ethnic shows, and opened an austere vegan café, with harpsichord music and wooden plates, in the basement. The whole establishment was tinged with a mood of high-principled disappointment.

Through the front window I saw the few early arrivals, clutching wine glasses, frowning selfconsciously at the pictures. To one side Staines, dressed in black and white, was talking to a man with a notebook. He had that look of insincere good behaviour that people have when they are working on their own public relations. As I came in the coppery clack of the shop-bell had all heads turning-it was like the showers at the Corry-and Staines twisted round to smile at me and give me a presumptuous wink before carrying on with his interview. I signed the book and made for the drinks table.

I wasn’t warmly disposed towards the pictures, but knowing about their background I felt a slight anxiety on their behalf, as I do when I see a friend on stage. I hoped that their tawdry Smithfield muses would be sufficiently glamorised by Staines’s lens and the finery of the studio. By and large, I should not have worried. The photographs were intensely professional, the lighting and tonality were beautiful, and the silkiest of purses had been made from even the hairiest of sows’ ears. I spotted young Aldo at once, in his role of the Baptist, his naked torso broadening into brightness, his stiff little pennant at an angle over his head, an expression of faint surprise about his sleepy dark eyes and stubble-roughened jaw.

The controversial conversation piece in which Aldo appeared with the as yet unmartyred St Sebastian hung alongside. Sebastian was a boy of tedious, waxen beauty, with a little loincloth about to tumble down. They had been cleverly posed against a projected backdrop taken from some Tuscan master, but for all the quattrocento piquancy of their gestures they reminded me of nothing so much as those queeny fashion spreads in Tatler and Uomo Vogue. The impression was reinforced by a surge of Trouble for Men across my nostrils and the appearance at biceps level of the luminous pink spectacles of Guy Parvis. For a second I thought I might actually be caught up in one of his Alternative Image TV programmes, and prepared to sidestep the cameras as they zoomed in on Sebastian’s Gillette-smooth profile. But it seemed he was there in a private capacity. I distanced myself even as I was perversely drawn to stare at him, keen to pick up any absurd and memorable remarks.

I finished my glass of wine and downed most of another while I looked at the handsome bearded St Laurence with his dinky little gridiron, and the St Stephen who crouched appealingly in a shaft of light while above him the shadowy form of an immense black whom I would have liked to meet held a stone aloft. St Peter was Ashley, who worked out at the Corry, but he was not seen to best advantage upside-down.

The bell clacked frequently now and we early browsers became subsumed into the crowd of callers, who greeted each other, kissed, caught up on their news, walked backwards into other guests without apologising and generally, as if they were in a private house where such curiosity would have been unseemly, ignored the pictures. Those who had equipped themselves with a price list were forced into the crude necessity of asking the drinkers to move so as to get some distance on the martyrs or to squinny at the numbered labels. I took another drink and moved downstairs.

Here there was a series of life-size nudes, in a sculptural Whitehaven style-martyrs only to the bench and the Nautilus machine-and a set of plates made to illustrate a limited edition of John Gray’s Tombeau d’Oscar Wilde along with Stephen Devlin’s setting of the poem for tenor, string quartet and oboe d’a-more-a martyrdom with a whole teeming afterlife. The photographs were balletic and metaphorical, with a good deal of emphasis on the slim gilt soul aspect and a number of images, in Staines’s most typical style, crossed and half-obscured by the shadows of prison bars.

I was following a line of the music-a sort of Mahler-and-French which came as close as sexless music could to being explicitly homosexual-when there was a nudge, and Aldo himself was standing beside me. He didn’t say anything, but announced himself in this physical way as some people do in clubs and bars, or as boys do abroad, when there is a language problem. I smirked at him and carried on reading, and he seemed happy to stand by. ‘Ronnie didn’t think you’d come,’ he said after a minute.

‘I’m a bit of a martyr myself,’ I said. ‘One day one of Ronnie’s little jeux d’esprit will finish me off altogether.’

‘You don’t like the pictures?’ Aldo looked cast down.

‘Oh they’re all right. I like these ones here.’ We turned and ran our eyes over the plated athletes. ‘They aren’t martyrs, are they? I don’t like the martyrs so much-they’re just soft porn. You look very pretty in them… but I honestly prefer to have hard porn-or no porn at all. It’s all pretending, that stuff.’

‘Still, you didn’t stay long at Ronnie’s house the other day,’ he objected. ‘It was very good fun. We made this great scene and then at the end everyone joined in.’

‘That was just what I was afraid of.’

‘Even Lord Charlie had a feel.’

‘Please!’

‘Those boys Raymond and Derek were so tired,’ he had to go on. ‘Not Abdul, though. He could have kept at it all night.’

‘They should be showing the film here,’ I suggested, and Aldo was full of giggly shock. I looked him over candidly. In his tight white jeans and red-and-white checked shirt he reminded one vaguely of an Italian restaurant.

‘Is that all you?’ I asked, my question loitering around his groin. He seemed not to get it, and chuckled vacantly rather than asking me to repeat or explain. I pressed past him, squeezing his heavy bulge as I did so-it seemed real enough-a situation which my brother-in-law Gavin’s expression, as he suddenly reached out to me over several people’s heads, seemed to suggest he found tolerably typical.

‘Gavin! Wonderful to see you.’ We shook hands warmly and he said, ‘Good to see you, my dear,’ in that agreeable, almost nostalgic way that straight men sometimes flirt with gays. ‘How are things?’

‘Things are rather sort of emotional and peculiar… fortunately one is in good shape and can cope.’

‘Sounds fascinating!’ He looked quickly aside to Aldo, wondering perhaps if he could be the source of this peculiarity, and I hastened to introduce them.

‘Gavin, this is Aldo, he’s in some of the pictures upstairs, he impersonates John the Baptist-Aldo, this is Gavin, who’s married to my sister.’ The two of them shook hands, and Gavin bumbled on about how in that case he must know Ronnie. What puzzled me was how Gavin himself knew Ronnie, and I asked him.

‘You know, some of us lot do have contacts with some of you lot.’ He waggled a finger. ‘You may like to think that you live in a world all of your own, but in fact you live considerably further away from Ronnie Staines than we do. We were together on the committee about the traffic and the one-way system, and a very useful committee member he was too.’ I stood in mock-penitence. ‘I won’t ask how you met him.’

I saw no reason not to say. ‘I met him in a rather less grownup and public-spirited way. Do you know an old boy called Charles Nantwich? He introduced me to him-at Wicks’s, I should add: all madly respectable.’

Gavin raised his eyebrows and nodded several times, then took a sip from his wine glass and allowed a faintly sinister pause to continue. ‘I’d no idea you knew Nantwich,’ he then said briskly.

‘I’ve only got to know him over the last few months. He’s terribly nice-and he’s told me a lot about his past…’ (how far should I go?)

Gavin smiled. ‘I’m just surprised that he should want to strike up with one of the Beckwiths.’

‘Well, you did,’ I reasonably observed.

He laughed, overlong, so that I saw his embarrassment and knew I shouldn’t pursue the subject, on which he swallowed further drink and shut up. ‘How is my ugly sister?’ I asked. ‘She’s not here?’

‘No, it’s not really her tasse de thé, is it? Not that it’s much mine,’ he added cautiously.

‘Roops, though, I imagine, would have loved it. It’s right up his street.’

‘Roops, as you rightly surmise, was extremely keen to come. When Philippa told him all the reasons he wouldn’t like it he got very excited: but he had to go round to a children’s party at the Salmons’ instead-it’s Siegfried’s sixth birthday, you see. Roops, being a sophisticated child, naturally holds all the members of the Salmon shoal in unqualified contempt-so it’s been a rather difficult afternoon. Apart from that we’re fine!’

‘You must give them my love.’

Aldo, who had been happily listening in, nodded as though to add his love to mine, and Gavin, good chap that he was, took a nervous gulp of wine and plunged into the unknown waters of male photography: ‘Do you do a lot of modelling?’

‘No, this is the first time I have done it.’

‘Really! I wonder how on earth you get started.’

‘In my case I was very lucky. Mr Staines discovered me.’ Aldo looked modestly down at this, giving the impression that some vast show-business career had sprung from that ordinary but fateful encounter. ‘Do you like the art?’ he appealed.

‘Um, some of them are rather striking, aren’t they? I haven’t really had a chance to see… the ones upstairs…’-he craned round-‘some of them are rather strong meat, perhaps, for me!’

Aldo was rather delighted to be given a cue and produced a remark of the kind that pass for jokes among people who can barely speak the same language: ‘Ah yes, you see, I am a butcher.’

Gavin smiled and I explained that Staines had found him while doing some studies of working people in Smithfield. ‘I was carrying half a cow,’ said Aldo, ‘all covered in blood. Ronnie said I looked like bacon.’

There were a few seconds of puzzlement before I worked it out: ‘I expect he meant that you looked like a Bacon.’ But it was going to take too much explaining. Aldo continued pleasantly with an account of portering opportunities in offal and the many under-the-counter benefits of his trade (some nice heart or brains one day, the next perhaps some good fresh liver). I found my eyes resting with momentary respect on the chalked-up menu of alfalfa-sprout salad, chickpea casserole, lentil and parsnip pie…

‘Sorry, William, Gavin Croft-Parker, what an honour, Aldo poppet…’-Staines was among us, clutching at hands, emphatically friendly and humble on his great night. ‘Do forgive me. There was that dullest of men from the whatsit, Bright City Lights, whatever it’s called. Apparently everyone’s opinion is simply made by consulting his organ, so you have to be dreamily dreamily compliant and answer all his dreary dreary questions. So ignorant,’ Staines whispered, ‘he’d no idea what a pyx was; and as for a scapular… he said, “Do you mean the collarbone?” I said “I don’t-and anyway it isn’t the collarbone, it’s the shoulderblade.” Clearly he was never a Catholic, and then I’ve ticked him off and he’ll say something vile in his article just because I’ve made him feel small.’ He took a swig from his glass. ‘Still, I suppose it’ll only be half an inch under the “Gay Listings” ’ (a prophecy with which I was bound to agree).

‘I must have a look upstairs,’ said Gavin, weaving away from us, and I nodded to him, realising he was going altogether. When I turned back Staines was negligently fondling Aldo’s muscly shoulder and gazing distractedly around the crowded room. It was probably better to catch him while I could.

‘Excellent show,’ I said.

‘My dear, do you like it. I’m not utterly utterly displeased with it myself. But of course other people’s praise means more to one even than one’s own!’

‘You’ve managed to find some fascinating models. I like your St Peter particularly-but then I have known him for some time.’

‘Old Ashley!-or rather Billy, as he calls himself professionally.’

‘I’d no idea.’

‘Mm-he thought Ashley was too girly, especially after April… But I still think of him as “Old Ash”-Ash on an old man’s sleeve, dear…’

‘Fabulous tits!’

‘Don’t!’ Staines shivered, and looked at me with a new, suspicious curiosity.

‘There’s one of your models I’m sorry not to see stretched on the rack tonight.’ I looked about and tried to keep my manner sluttish and casual. ‘One of your most intriguing ones, I should say.’

‘My dear, I’m sorry. Not all of my boys were ready, or indeed eager, for divine sacrifice.’

‘He’s called Colin-thin, short curly hair, blue eyes, permanent tan, permanent everything else pretty well too.’

‘Oh, Colin. You like him do you? He is rather extraordinaire. But he’s not really a regular of mine. He doesn’t have the sort of innocence I needed for this… cycle.’

I agreed. ‘He does look pretty naughty.’

‘Oh, he’s wildly naughty.’ Staines lowered his voice. ‘And you know the most ridiculous thing about him. What do you think he does?’

‘Absolutely everything, I should imagine.’

‘True, true,’ Staines almost boasted. ‘But I mean as a job?’

‘He’s not one of your butchers, is he? I don’t know-a florist…’

‘No!’

‘I can’t guess.’

‘My dear, he’s a policeman. Isn’t it wonderful?’ I blinked and then rolled my eyes in a way I would never have done if I had been genuinely amazed. ‘In fact I first spotted him on the beat-you could see at once he was something special. But what I say is, with boys like that in the police force, things can’t be all bad!’ He began to move off, but returned to his subject. ‘Not an eyelash, though, not a teardrop, of innocence. The one I’d have loved to do, the really innocent one, was your little friend Phil…’

I wondered at first if I was going to have to strike a bargain. ‘I’d like to buy one of your studies of Colin.’

Staines had virtually left me, so that he called out to me as Guy Parvis pressed himself upon him, ‘Dear, I’m far too dear!’ And then mouthed, in a kind of grimacing secrecy: ‘I’ll give you one…’

Now I was alone with Aldo again. I wasn’t utterly utterly uninterested in doing something with him afterwards, but the social work was a strain, so I struggled back upstairs. I planned another drink before escaping, and looked round the main gallery too to see if there was anyone else I wanted to escape with. It was as full as it sensibly could be now, and there were some interesting punky-looking boys with public-school voices as well as real leather queens and a sprinkling of those dotty types with monocles and panama hats who seem to exist for ever in some fantastic Bloomsbury of their own.

I was excited by a heavily built man with thick slicked-back hair, and was showing an implausible degree of interest in the picture hanging just by his right shoulder, when the bell went again. We both turned, though he looked away at once while I, seeing Charles shuffle in, felt my mood lighten with friendliness and a flicker of guilt. I had been neglecting the old boy, and seeing him now in this noisy, confusing place recalled my responsibilities. I went to help him.

‘Ah… ah…’, he was saying, looking regretfully to left and right.

‘Charles! It’s William.’

He took my arm at once. ‘I know perfectly well who it is. What an orgy… Good heavens.’ He gave off, close to, the elderly smell of sweat and shaving-soap. ‘We almost didn’t come,’ he admitted, with what I took for humorous grandeur.

‘I’m very glad you did. I haven’t seen you for ages.’

He was prodding his other hand behind him, like someone searching for the armhole of a coat. ‘This is Norman,’ he explained, as another man, thus encouraged, came forward from his shadow. ‘The grocer’s boy.’

Norman reached round Charles to shake my hand. ‘I’m the grocer’s boy,’ he confirmed, very happy, it seemed, to be remembered by his juvenile role. As he was a man in his mid-fifties I found it hard to place him at first. ‘I used to work in the grocer’s in Skinner’s Lane,’ he said, smiling, nodding, ‘years and years ago, when Lord Nantwich first moved in.’

I cottoned on. ‘And then you joined the merchant navy and sailed all over the world.’ He smiled again, as at the successful recitation of an old tale.

‘I left the service some time ago now, though.’ Service, one could see, was something he was proud of, and his whole manner spoke of it. He was soberly dressed, in an ill-fitting grey suit and shiny casual shoes of a kind that had been fashionable in my earliest childhood (my father had worn something very similar on family holidays). The suit, which was broad in the shoulders and stood off the neck, was the sort of thing that students bought in second-hand shops, and on one or two of the modish boys in this room could have had a certain chic. Norman’s wearing of it was without irony and he reminded me, as the man in the lavatory had reminded Charles forty years before, of a College scout, habituated, stunted by service. His face shone.

‘Norman dropped in this afternoon,’ said Charles. ‘Quite amazing. I hadn’t seen him for over thirty years.’

‘I sent him a picture of me from Malaya, though.’

‘Yes, he sent me a picture from Malaya.’

‘I was surprised Lord Nantwich recognised me, even so.’

Charles puffed and muttered something about a tifty. ‘Come and have a drink,’ I said to both of them, and I took Charles’s wrist to lead them through the crowd. I could see, as I swivelled round to pass Norman a glass of wine, that he would always be recognisable. His broad cheekbones, large mouth, grey eyes and blond hair, now indistinctly grey, were elements in a formula of beauty, whatever disappointments and desertions might have taken place. Charles was politely inscrutable, but I sensed that he was pained to be disabused. He turned away from the ‘grocer’s boy’ who had needlessly returned to destroy the sentimental poetry with which he had been invested. I felt sorry for them both. And then, drunk again, hated the past and all going back.

‘I share a house with my sister,’ Norman was explaining to me. ‘It’s very near the middle of Beckenham, quite convenient for the station and the shops.’

‘You should have brought her today,’ said Charles loftily.

Norman flushed at this, and looked around hectically at the straining torsos and ecstatic mouths upon the wall.

‘Can I come and see you soon, Charles?’ I asked. ‘I’ve been picking my way through the books, and I’ve almost got up to the end. I need some briefing.’

‘Briefing, tomorrow?’ His eye had been caught by Staines, and I watched his attention waver and then switch abruptly away. Staines reached a ringed hand to him and I heard Charles saying ‘… splendid evening, most memorable…’

I kept up with him and squeezed his arm: ‘I’ll come for tea, as before’-and he patted my hand. Then I was talking to the thick-set man, laughing overmuch so as to charm, and with my shirt half unbuttoned, running my hand over my chest. He was keen on photography, had his reservations about Staines-I agreed with him brutally-but liked Whitehaven. I told him Whitehaven had photographed me, but I saw that he thought I was taking a rise out of him. ‘Well, have you done any modelling?’ I asked.

Aldo came up and said, ‘Oh, let’s be going.’ He looked tipsy and abandoned. It was only when the three of us were virtually through the door that I realised his words had been addressed to the thick-set man rather than to me.

‘Nice meeting you,’ said the thick-set man; and other perfectly pleasant remarks were exchanged before the two of them strolled away, arm in arm. I lurched off furiously to the hotel.