The Swimming-Pool Library

11

‘Sugar?’

‘I don’t, thank you.’

‘I rather do these days. I’ve given in.’ Charles discarded the tongs, and shovelled up roughly half a dozen sugar-lumps in his bowed, flat fingers. We sat and sipped as Graham came in again with more hot water, and Charles watched his manservant with confident gratitude. At Skinner’s Lane everything was running like clockwork. ‘I have my own teeth,’ he added.

We sat, as before, in the little library, Charles’s den, the only part of the house which did not come under Graham’s orderly care. Each time I visited it there were signs of new disturbances, books moved from table to floor, old Kalamazoo folders stacked or scattered, as if some task of sorting and searching were being executed, leaving only greater confusion, like a site turned over for coins and amulets by amateurs. Books whose titles had caught my eye last time atop their teetering plinths were now cast down or overlaid by other strata: atlases with cracked spines, popular sheet-music (the ‘Valse’ from Love-Fifteen), magazines whose colour printing had freaked with sun and age and, Gauguin-like, showed brown royalty, pink dogs, pale blue grass.

I felt at home there. As we sat on either side of the empty hearth, I was reminded of my Oxford tutorials, and the sense I often used to have of inadequacy and carelessness in the face of my tutor, whose hours with me, he came to imply, were needless distractions from his own, decades-long work on succession and the law. There was a similar maleness and candour to it, that scholarly inversion of the rules of the drawing-room that allowed one to talk about sodomy and priapism as though one were really talking about something else. There was a similar toleration of silence.

‘Most tiresome,’ Charles enigmatically resumed. ‘One lives in the past fully enough as it is, without people coming back like that.’

‘Your grocer’s boy. Yes, I confess to having been a bit disappointed.’

‘He couldn’t see that he only had meaning in the past, poor fellow.’

‘I think Martyrs were perhaps a bit much for him.’

Charles smiled wistfully. ‘I thought they’d scare him off, but he rather took to them.’

‘I can see that he must have been pretty hot stuff once,’ I conceded. ‘And the shop-boy thing is so glamorous, all the whistling and the boredom, and the way they’re trapped there, on show.’

‘He used to go out on a bicycle,’ Charles corrected my over-warm reconstruction. ‘He did the deliveries with an apron on.’

I lifted the fluted shallow teacup to my lips, and my eyes rose again, as they inevitably did in this room, to the chalk drawing above the fireplace. Taking a risk on it, I said, ‘Is that Taha in that picture?’

Charles was looking at it too, and repeated the name, but stressing it differently. ‘Yes, yes, that’s him,’ he said, with a sad breeziness.

‘He’s very beautiful,’ I said honestly.

‘Yes. It’s not an especially good likeness. Sandy Labouchère did it soon after we got back from Africa-you can see he had a rather brilliant line when he wanted to. But he hasn’t brought out the child’s gaiety, a kind of radiance… He was the most beautiful thing on earth. You just wanted to look at him and look at him.’

‘Is he still alive?’ I asked, unable to imagine him going the way of the grocer’s boy into banal middle age; but Charles muttered ‘No, no,’ unanswerably, and then bashed on: ‘So you’ve read all the books I gave you.’

‘Yes, I have. Well, I haven’t read every word, but I’ve taken a pretty fair sample.’ He nodded reasonably. ‘I would read them really thoroughly, of course, if I decided to take on this… job.’

Charles was quite quick and tactical. ‘Quite so, quite so,’ he said. ‘But tell me, I don’t know what sort of impression those books give. Do they appeal at all to, to a younger person?’

‘Oh, I think they’re very interesting indeed. And you’ve done so much,’ I obviously went on, ‘and known such extraordinary people.’

He sighed heavily at this. ‘I ought to have been able to make something of it myself; but it’s too late now. As you get near the end of your life you realise you’ve wasted nearly all of it.’

‘But that’s not the impression I have at all. I’m sure you don’t really think that,’ I said, in the way that one blandly comforts those whose torments one cannot imagine. ‘I mean, I really am wasting my life, and it’s not like what you were doing.’

Charles took this up directly. ‘I’ve no time for idleness,’ he said. ‘I want you to have a job.’

‘I just don’t want the wrong one,’ I said, sounding spoilt even to myself. ‘I’d like it if I could simply disappear, like you did. It was wonderful how you could disappear into Africa.’

‘One disappeared,’ Charles admitted. ‘But one also remained in view.’

I came back to it carefully, weighing the weightless teacup and saucer in my hands. ‘What I rather got the impression of is that you were lost in a dream. It’s very beautiful that feeling the diaries give of a constant kind of transport when you were in the Sudan. It’s like a life set to music,’ I said, in a fantastic impromptu, which Charles ignored.

‘We were doing a job, of course. It was exceedingly hard work: relentless and exhausting.’

‘Oh, I know.’

‘But you’re right in a way-of me, at any rate. It was a vocation. Not all of them in the Service saw it in quite the same light as I did, perhaps. Many of them hardened. Many of them were dryish sticks long before they reached the desert. They write books about it, even now-fantastically boring.’ Charles shot out his foot and sent a book across the hearth-rug to me. It was the memoirs of Sir Leslie Harrap, privately printed and inscribed to Charles: ‘With best wishes, L. H.’. A photograph of the author, in puzzled superannuation, took up the back of the dust-jacket.

‘He was one of the people who went out with you, wasn’t he?’

‘He was a good administrator, loyal, fair, stayed on longer than me, went back in fifty-six to help with the independence arrangements: utterly sound-Eton, Magdalen. Not a breath of imagination in his body. It was reading his book-what’s it called? A Life in Service-that made me realise I didn’t want to write anything of that kind. There is a book in my life, but it’s almost entirely to do with imagination and all that. The facts, my sweet William, are as nothing.’

I looked on abashed. ‘You have published something about the Sudan though?’

‘Oh-yes, I did a little book in the war; part of a series that Duckworth brought out on various different countries, I can’t quite remember why. It wasn’t much good. Fortunately almost all the stock was destroyed when a bomb hit the warehouse. It’s probably worth a fortune now.’ He laughed hollowly; and then lapsed into a vacant half-smile. I was trying to decide whether or not he was looking at me, whether this lull was an enigmatic path of our intercourse or merely one of Charles’s unsignalled abstentions, a mental treading water, ‘blanking’ as he called it. I thought, not for the first time, how odd it was to know so much about someone I didn’t know. A person could only reveal himself as Charles had done to me in love or from a deliberate distance. For half a minute, as I took in his heavy frame, the eyes dark and somnolent in his pink, slightly sunburned head, either reading seemed possible.

‘If you’ve looked at the diaries for when I first went out,’ he said, ‘then you’ll understand how young and aspiring we were. We were quite sophisticated in a way, but with that kind of sophistication which only throws into relief one’s childlike ignorance. It was a bizarre system, when you think about it. There was one of the vastest countries in the world, and they sent out to govern it a handful of boys each year who had never in their brief lives experienced anything even remotely comparable. It wasn’t like India, of course, there wasn’t the same element of domination-indeed, the whole enterprise was utterly different. Anyone could go to India, but for the Sudan there was this careful selection, screening don’t they call it nowadays. They got some worthy Leslie Harrap types of course, and plenty of sprinters and blues to keep things running on time, and they also got their share of cranks and unconventional fellows. There were possibly more of the latter. It was an absurd system and yet very, very subtle, I’ve come to believe. It singled out men who would give themselves.’

‘They didn’t make objections to people’s-private lives?’ I carefully queried, reaching across with the teapot.

‘Thank you, my dear. No, no, no. On the gay thing’ (he unselfconsciously brought it out, seizing a lot of sugar again) ‘they were completely untroubled-even to the extent of having a slight preference for it, in my opinion. Quite unlike all this modern nonsense about how we’re security risks and what-have-you. They had the wit to see that we were prone to immense idealism and dedication.’ Charles sipped his tea excitedly. ‘And of course in a Muslim country it was a positive advantage…’ We laughed at this, though the implications were not quite clear.

‘I’m sure you weren’t such innocents as you make out,’ I said. ‘You must have been trained, after all.’

‘We read a book about the sort of crops and stuff, and did a bit of Arabic.’ Charles shrugged. ‘And then they sent us up to the Radcliffe Infirmary to watch the operations. The idea was that if you saw a lot of blood and severed limbs and so on it would prepare you in some mysterious way for the tropics. They’d bring in chaps who’d been run over, or undergrads who’d tried to do themselves in, and we all had a jolly good look. Fascinating, in a way, but of no obvious benefit for a career in the Political Service.’

Charles was in knowingly good form. ‘So you simply followed your instincts much of the time?’

‘Mm-up to a point. There was a tendency to treat Africa as if it were some great big public school-especially in Khartoum. But when you were out in the provinces, and on tour for weeks on end, you really felt you were somewhere else. If you’d had the wrong sort of character you could have gone to the bad, in that vast emptiness, or abused your power. I expect you know about the Bog Barons in the south-truly eccentric fellows who had absolute command, quite out of touch with the rest of the world.’

‘It sounds like something out of Conrad.’

‘So it is often said.’

‘I must say, I see you as more of a Firbankian figure-or at least that’s how you seem to see yourself.’

‘I don’t know about that…’ Charles rumbled.

‘It’s this idea that rather appeals to me, of seeing adults as children. His adults don’t have any dignity as adults, they’re all like over-indulged children following their own caprices and inclinations…’

‘Well, I don’t know!’ Charles gave a brusque laugh of disagreement.

‘Don’t you feel that, though? I’m always being struck by it, especially with very grand and humourless people who can’t afford to see that they’re behaving just like prefects. And men are often like that together-I don’t mean… gay men particularly, but the sense I have that men don’t really want women around much. I think most men are happiest in a male world, with gangs and best friends and all that.’

‘I believe I’ve always conducted myself with dignity,’ said Charles.

I let a properly respectful pause be felt. ‘I suppose what I’m trying to say is that you were very lucky in being able to turn your caprices into a career.’ I was slow to realise how carefully Charles would measure everything I said against his wish that I should write his life. My slight nervousness, frivolousness, trying to be clever, perhaps put him off.

‘There was this absolute adoration of black people,’ Charles said, ‘you could say blind adoration, but it was all-seeing… I don’t know. I think it was more of a sort of love affair for me than for most of the others. I’ve always had to be among them, you know, negroes, and I’ve always gone straight for them.’ He put down his cup. ‘I’ve been jolly lucky with them, too. All my true friends were black,’ he added in a desolate imperfect. ‘Oh, I tangled with a few cads and sharpers, bar-room heartbreakers-’ he broke off actorishly.

‘But all your true friends…’

He was bound to slight me just a shade in replying: ‘Unwavering loyalty, you knew you would die for each other you were such pals.’

‘I hope you see me as a true friend, Charles,’ I said with half-pretended hurt. ‘And I know people-white people-who are immensely loyal to you. Old Bill Hawkins or whatever he’s called; and all these servants who fight over you.’

‘I do command loyalty,’ Charles assented. ‘In Lewis’s case perhaps too much loyalty.’ He sighed and chuckled. ‘Did I tell you about when he locked me in my dressing-room while he fought it out with Graham?’

‘Oh, I was there, if you remember.’

‘My dear child, I’d entirely forgotten. And all that sort of black magic stuff? Most unacceptable, I think, in a gentleman’s companion. He thought I’d betrayed him-but he’d been troublesome for a long time, and when he’d flogged off half of my beautiful Georgian cutlery I could no longer turn a blind eye. He’s inside again, now, I hear. He does these very artistic, kind of symbolic burglaries-with effigies of the people, and little arrangements of things. So there’s never any doubt about who did it.’ Charles chuckled and sighed again. ‘He had a way with him, though.’

‘How did you take him on in the first place?’

I was not surprised when he hummed ‘Oh…’ and wandered into his stratospheric vagueness, broken only by heavy, widely spaced, sibilant breaths: it was like the end of some visionary anthem by Stockhausen. The little gilt carriage clock whirred and chimed five.

‘One quite interesting episode,’ he said, ‘which I think would make a telling bit of the book, was about Makepeace. Did you read that in the diary?’

‘I don’t think I did.’

‘It was a little romance of mine, back in London. I was most frightfully smitten with a young Trinidadian barman at the Trocadero, who went under the charming name of Makepeace. The Troc was a very big, rather vulgar restaurant in Shaftesbury Avenue, with masses of mauve marble-long since gone now, of course. I don’t know quite why I was in there, but one evening in the cocktail bar I was served by this fabulously handsome boy, and I stayed on and got him talking, though he was madly shy, but then I’ve always liked that. It turned out he’d had a rather extraordinary experience, as he’d worked his passage over on a ship-this was long before West Indians came in any number, of course-and then, missed the boat home. He walked into town from the Docks and as it was rather cold and rainy and not I suppose at all what he’d hoped for he went into the National Gallery to keep warm, and there he was found by an artist called Otto Henderson, who was a madly musical type as we used to say-and also a third-rate painter by the way-and he sort of picked him up. He lived with Otto for a bit, but Otto was a terrible drunk and it got rather difficult, so Otto found him a job in the Trocadero, where, as it happened, he knew the head barman who was very Scottish and respectable apparently but underneath, according to Otto, wore ladies’ knickers. Scottie was terribly jealous, needless to say, when I hit it off so with his black Adonis. Later on, he even threatened to expose me, but he changed his tune when I promised to tell all about the knickers.’ Charles laughed, and waved a hand in the air, as if shaking a tambourine.

‘How did it all end up?’

‘Oh, Scottie had him dismissed for drunkenness (he did put it away rather) so I took him on myself for a bit. That didn’t really work out, what with Taha in the house as well, so I farmed him out to a friend.’ His face clouded. ‘There was quite a lot of talk about it at the time. Of course in a way it helped being a Lord-the English have such a superstitious awe of the aristocracy. But it also had its disadvantages, in terms of gossip and what-have-you-the English having such prurient and priggish minds. As you will find out, my dear, when you succeed’-words which seemed to anticipate not only my succession but my success.

‘I suppose black people were comparatively rare then-in England.’

Charles half suppressed a burp of agreement. ‘There were a few seamen-they had a hostel out at Limehouse. I had some good friends there, brave, reckless fellows, many of them. There were jazz players in London, of course, who had quite a following. But I suppose most people in the country didn’t see a black person in all their lives. It was impossible to imagine the hatred that would be unleashed against them later on.’

‘You’ve seen a lot of that.’

‘You could say so.’ Charles nodded, staring fiercely at the carpet as if caught by some bitter and ironic memory. I started to speak but he cut across me: ‘There are times when I can’t think of my country without a kind of despairing shame. Something literally inexpressible, so I won’t bother to try and speechify about it.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘Only last year out at Stepney there were hateful scenes-precisely hateful. Oh-National Front and their like, spraying their slogans all over the Boys’ Club, where, as you know, a lot of… non-whites go. Every day there were leaflets, just full of mindless hatred-I’m sorry to keep saying it. The horrific thing was that several of those boys were boys who used to come to the Club themselves. It’s the only time I’ve seen our excellent friend Bill get truly angry. He threw out a boy by main force, simply picked him up, carried him to the door and hurled him into the street. He’s as strong as an ox, old Bill. I remember the boy-but boy is too beautiful a word-had a Union Jack pinned to the back of his sort of coat, and Bill had torn it off, accidentally I think, as he ejected him, and was left scowling absolute thunder and holding it in his hand. I was very frightened as I’m not the man I was in a fight, but all being cowards in the bone these louts sidled away when they saw they had met their match. And I wondered to myself what on earth that flag could mean now.’ He paused, mouth agape. ‘We had an outstanding young Pakistani boy, a genius at badminton, who was horribly beaten up last winter-much worse even than you, knifed in the arm and also completely deafened in one ear. Those youngsters feel they have to go about in groups now. And then of course the police think they’re out to cause trouble.’

‘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.’

It was graceless of me to put Charles on the spot but I said I found it hard to reconcile his views on race with the film that Staines had made and he himself-according to Aldo-had paid for. But I did it with as much cheek and charm as possible. He was bemused.

‘I don’t think race comes into it, does it? I mean, Abdul is black and the others aren’t… but I don’t want any rot about that. Abdul loves doing that sort of thing-and he’s actually jolly good at it. He’s a pure exhibitionist at heart.’

‘I must say I was rather amazed by the whole affair-you know, seeing half the staff of a famous London Club about to copulate in front of the camera.’

‘I think you’ll find a good many of them do it-though not always on film, I agree. They’re a close little team, there at Wicks’s, and they like to do what I want. But then I got them all their jobs,’ he added. It was one of those moments when I had the feeling, chilling and flustering at the same time, that Charles was a dangerous man, a fixer and favouritiser. In the world beyond school, though, perhaps one could have what favourites one wanted.

‘Even so…’ I shrugged. ‘Do you have any idea what will happen to the film?’

‘Well, it’ll have to be edited and everything of course, which is actually frightfully difficult with blue films, the continuity, and putting the close-ups in the right place. We have some contacts-well, friends really, who do all the technical side. We made a few mistakes in the last one we did-filmed over several days so that the boys could come up with the goods, but then you found, if you had an eye for such things, that they’d somehow mysteriously changed their socks in the middle of a fuck or whatever.’

‘I didn’t realise this was such an established business-I’m astonished.’

‘This is our third,’ said Charles, with the personal satisfaction of the amateur. ‘Much the best. It should be ready quite soon; and then we’ll put it out to one or two of those little basement cinemas in Soho where there are people we know. I don’t suppose you ever go to such places.’

So now my rather prickly line sprang back and snagged on my own moral woollies. I was embarrassed and laughed. ‘Well, yes, I have sometimes been to them.’

‘I think they’re jolly good value,’ Charles went on in candid, reasonable tones. ‘I mean, you pay your what is it, fiver, and nine times out of ten you’ll see something that really takes your fancy.’

‘I confess I go to them more for the off-screen entertainment,’ I archly bragged.

‘Ah yes… well…’

‘In fact, I first got off with my current friend in a cinema in Frith Street. He was very shy afterwards about admitting that it had been him-in the dark, you know. He’s a very shy boy, actually, but in those places people seem to lose their inhibitions.’ Charles was not paying attention, and perhaps I shouldn’t have been telling this story. I still wasn’t wholly sure it had been Phil that I had felt up that day in the basement of the Brutus. Blushing, abstruse, he would not, when I put it to him, confirm or deny it. If it had been him, then he seemed to want it forgotten; if not, then he showed an odd readiness to be incorporated into some half-apprehended fantasy of my own. If it had been him, that squalid and exaggerated little episode must alter my understanding of him, open up the faintly sickening possibility of there being another Phil, whom I could not account for. He might have been at the Brutus at this very moment-or at the Bona or the Honcho or the Stud…

‘It’s always gone on, of course,’ Charles recalled. ‘We had little private bars, sex clubs really, in Soho before the war, very secret. And my Uncle Edmund had fantastic tales of places and sort of gay societies in Regent’s Park-a century ago now, before Oscar Wilde and all that-with beautiful working boys dressed as girls and what-have-you. Uncle Ned was a character…’ Charles sat beaming.

‘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. I think the 1880s must have been an ideal time, with brothels full of off-duty soldiers, and luscious young dukes chasing after barrow-boys. Even in the Twenties and Thirties, which were quite wild in their way, it was still kind of underground, we operated on a constantly shifting code, and it was so extraordinarily moving and exciting when that spurt of recognition came, like the flare of a match! No one’s ever really written about it, I know what you mean, sex somehow becomes farcical in the past,’ Charles looked at me very tenderly. ‘Perhaps you will, my dear.’

‘Are you finished, my Lord?’ Graham was enquiring in his complaisant basso.

‘Graham, yes, yes. Do clear away. And William, I must give you just before you go something else to read.’ I hopped up, alert to these covert stage directions in Charles’s talk, and helped him up too. He shuffled round his chair, and looked about for whatever it was. I was convinced he knew where to find it, and had politely and theatrically introduced this air of uncertainty. He handed me a document of several pages, the size of a pamphlet of poems, bound in black shot silk boards and tied legalistically with pink ribbon. ‘Don’t read it now,’ he cautioned. ‘Read it when you get home.’

Graham had gone out with the tray, and we followed a few moments afterwards, Charles’s hand on my shoulder. ‘Thanks so much,’ I said.

‘Thank you, my dear.’ He leant on me and-which he had never done before-kissed me on the cheek. I clumsily patted him on the back.

On my way home I stopped at the Corry for a swim. It was that transitional half-hour before six o’clock, and the last of the afternoon customers-oldsters, college boys, the unemployed-were combing their hair and wringing out their trunks as the evening crowd, the workers, began to pour in and down the stairs. In twenty minutes every locker would be taken, and those who had been held up in traffic, late for their fitness classes or for a squash booking fast elapsing, would come cantering through the swing doors flushed and swearing. Like restaurants and Underground stations the Corry had its times of day, and to come in on a weekday afternoon or a Sunday evening was to find it in the unhindered possession of a small number of people-like a school at half-term, when only the masters and those boys who live abroad are left. The pool, the gym, the handball court had the grateful calm of places only briefly reprieved from habitual clamour. As I arrived the calm was yielding fast.

I took advantage of the crowd, and of the need I always felt on leaving Charles to be childish and naughty. In the showers were a gaggle of Italian kids, in London on a language course. The Club often played host to these groups, and though their bored ragging was a nuisance in the pool the members by some unspoken agreement forgave them everything for their sleek brown bodies, the tiny wet leaves of their swimwear and all their posturing and tossing back of curls. I halted under a fizzing nozzle before going down to the pool and looked them over frankly. It was impossible, with my opera-goer’s Italian, to understand what they were saying, but as they took notice of me I heard their chatter sprinkled with cazzo… cazzo, slurred, whispered and then called aloud, almost chanted, so that they fell about in coarse, lazy giggles at their audacity.

When I got back to the flat I was half expecting Phil to be there, and remembered as I slouched sulkily and randily around the kitchen taking a glass of Scotch in great hot nips that he had arranged a couple of nights ‘off’ to see some South African friends, and, tomorrow, to go to a leaving party at the ‘Embassy’. In the sitting-room, remote control in hand, I tripped from channel to channel on the TV, trying to find something attractive in the personnel of various sitcoms and panel games. Abandoning that forlorn pursuit, I put on the beginning of Act Three of Siegfried and conducted it wildly, with great tuggings at the cellos and stabbings at the horns, but without, after five minutes or so, having made myself feel the faintest interest in it. It was in a reluctant mood that I finally settled down at my writing-desk to read Charles’s precious document. When I untied it I found it to be, unlike anything else of his I had seen, an elegant fair copy, from which a compositor could easily have set type.

Although it would have been allowed, I did not keep a journal over those six months. From the start I saw that what I wanted to say, although ‘hereafter, in a better world than this’ it might find other readers and do its good, would have brought nothing but scorn and salacity at the time. And later, long after the start, when I thought writing might earn some slight remission of my solitude and pent-up thoughts, I shunned it, mistrusted it like one of those friends to whom one is drawn and drawn again and yet each time comes away cheapened, wasted or over-indulged. My journal has always, since my childhood, been my close, silent and retentive friend, so close that when I lied to it I suffered inwardly from its mute reproach. Now, though, it seemed to hold out the invitation to something shameful-self-pity, and, worse, the exposure of my narrow, treadmill circuit of memories and longings.

There was too my catastrophic change of station. I had fallen, and though my fall was brought about by a conspiracy, by a calculated spasm of malevolence, its effect on me at first was like that of some terrible physical accident, after which no ordinary thoughtless action could be the same again. The fall had its beginning in that very fast, dazed and escorted plunge from the dock after the sentence had been given, down and down the stone stairs from the courtroom to the cells. I had the illusion-so active is the faculty of metaphor at moments of crisis-of being flung, chained, into water: of a need to hold my breath. In a sense I kept on holding it for half a year.

Chaps did keep journals there-little Joe his childlike weekly jottings for his wife eventually to see, ‘Barmy’ Barnes his notebooks of visions and apocalypses-but they were licensed by their childishness and barminess; whereas I had been violently removed from my rightful lettered habitat, and as an invisible and inner protest refused to write a syllable. Now that I am home again I may write a few pages, merely to attest to what happened-and perhaps to feel my way towards recovery, to patch up my for ever damaged understanding with the world.

One thing I notice already is that since leaving prison I have had long and logical dreams of being back in it, just as when I was in it I dreamt insistently and raptly of happy days long before and also of a day-now, as it might be-when I had been released, and various longed-for things would happen, or promise to happen. Dreams had a powerful and sapping hold on me there. I am the sort of sleeper who has always dreamt richly, so perhaps I should have been prepared for the futile mornings, sewing mail-bags, filling infinite time with that cruel simulacrum of work, but whelmed under in the world of last night’s voyagings, their mood of ripeness and reciprocation. These-and other waking wishes-had such supremacy over the prison’s abstract, cretinous routines that to tell the story of those months with any truthfulness would be to talk of dreams. When, after evening Association-at some infantile early hour-we were sent to our cells, I gained a kind of confidence from the certainty that another world was waiting, a certainty, if you like, of uncertainty, the only part of my life whose goings-on were subject to nobody’s control. The prisoner dreams of freedom: to dream is to be free.

Perhaps the strangest dream I had was one which recalled the evening of my arrest. The frequency with which it recurred could of course be explained by the frequency with which I anyway dwelt on those few crucial minutes. What puzzled me was the variations on the actual events. Always the sequence began with my leaving a group of friends and walking off briskly and excitedly, as I had done, towards the cottage. Which cottage it was, however, altered from night to night, much as it did, of course, in my actual routine. Sometimes I would make for the merry little Yorkshire Stingo, sometimes for the more dangerous shadowy dankness of Hill Place. Sometimes I would find myself going out to Hammersmith, intent on one of those picaresque ‘Lyric’ evenings; and this involved a cab, or bus or train, inevitably subject to diversions, wilful misunderstandings by the driver, or bodies on the line. Even if I was only walking a few hundred yards to a spot in Soho or that ever-fruitful market-barrow, the Down Street Station Gents, I was liable to lose my way or to be caught up in other business, other people’s demands, which only served to increase the frustrated urgency of my quest. Often I would arrive at the correct location to find that the cottage had disappeared, or been closed down and turned into a highly respectable shop. And in reality the places that I sought had in some cases long been closed or demolished. Down Street was shut up before the war; and the station at the British Museum, although I recall no lavatory there, was another imaginary rendezvous, that now is an abandoned Stygian siding; so that my dream dissolved one nostalgia in another, and showed how all closures, all endings, give warning of closures, greater yet, to come.

I enter the narrow, half-dark space-again certain that there will be something for me there, but always uncertain what. In the dream it is only the acrid, medicinal scent that is missing-but the excitement from which it is almost indistinguishable survives. It is a smell as remote as can be from supposedly aphrodisiac perfumes, but its effect on me is electrifying. I unbutton at once, or in the dream remove most or even all of my clothes; my mood is optimistic and youthful-and my body too puts off half a lifetime of weight and care.

After a few moments a handsome young man comes in, his eyes obscured by the brim of his hat; or the lightbulb in its wire cage is behind him, so that he is a figure of promising darkness. I realise that of course I had seen him in the street on my way here, and had had the impression that he returned my glance. He must have followed me in.

He stands well back from the wall and the gutter as he eases his bladder, his penis is preternaturally visible and his attitude encourages me to look at it. Sometimes he seems to drop his trousers round his knees or to undo a wide fly with buttons up both sides, like a sailor’s. In the light of day I can discern elements of many people in him, some of whom he may for a few seconds become, so that I whisper in welcome ‘O Timmy’ or ‘O Robert’ or ‘Stanley!’ At each moment he embodies a conviction of happiness, of a danger overcome. His penis is not quite that of any of the ghosts of whom he is compounded: it is not either large or small, thick or thin, pale or dark, but has an ideal quality, startling me like some work of art which, seen for the first time, outwits thought and senses and strikes in an instant at the heart.

He puts his arms around my neck, and I lick his face and push back his hat, squashing it down urchin-like on his springy black curls. His features are serious and beautiful with lust. We two-step backwards into what is no longer simply the cottage but a light-filled space whose walls alter or roll away like ingenious stage machinery in a transformation scene. We make love in the drying-room at Winchester, or in a white-tiled institutional bathroom, or the white house at Talodi, bare of my scraps of furniture and revealed in all its harmonious vacancy: simple places whose very emptiness prompts desire. In one version we are in a beach shelter of poles and canvas-the sides, luminous as screens of shadow-plays, thrum in the wind, while overhead tiny white clouds are blown across the radiant blue.

In another version, of course, it is not like this. I enter the lavatory and within a few seconds hear the click of metal-tipped shoes approaching the doorway, and look casually across at the young man who takes his place next to me. He is so gorgeously beautiful, in American jeans and a flying-jacket, that I can hardly believe, as he vigorously shakes his prick and with his other hand pushes back his lustrous hair, that his act is aimed at me, a man of twice his age, an old gent in an old Gents. In a cottage one takes what one is given, and is thankful; but nonetheless I am fifty-four-I hesitate before such golden opportunities. I am looking down intently, paying no attention, though my heart is racing, and then I hear other footsteps outside. I have missed my chance. But oddly the footsteps stop, recede, and then after a few seconds start back again. Somebody is waiting there. I glance quickly at the young man and his thick erection, and find he is looking at me steadily. I take a deep breath, and my heart sinks like a stone as I realise I am about to be robbed, more, perhaps badly beaten. If I try to leave I will be caught between the lovely boy-whom I see now for what he is, a steely young thug, perhaps the very one there has been talk of lately in the pubs-and his companion nervily keeping watch outside.

It is a horrifying moment, and I button up hastily and step back, all my instinct being to preserve myself as far as possible from the physical and moral outrage which almost visibly gathers itself to strike. There is a thumping silence, and the light of the one lamp across the wet tiled floor seems conscious that it will illuminate this and many other atrocities, just as it will go on shining through days and months of sudden speechless lusts, and all the intervening hours of silent emptiness. The boy, seeing I have begun to escape, himself adjusts his dress, but says nothing to me. As I go out at an ungainly scuttle he is behind me, almost beside me, and I see the other man, in a dark overcoat, step forward and look interrogatively past me. The boy lets out a little affirmative grunt, the man raises his hand to my lapel and speaks: ‘Excuse me, sir…’ but I am slipping past him, dreading to become involved in their insults and sarcasms. It is only a second later when I hear a car approaching and make for the opening in the bushes, beginning or meaning to cry out, that I slam full length to the ground, my arm is jerked behind my back, the boy is astride over me, and the man in the coat says: ‘We are police officers. You are under arrest.’

My months in the Scrubs were a kind of desert in time: beyond their strict and ascetic routines they were featureless, and it is hard in retrospect to know what one did on any day or even in any month. I had had, of course, some experience of deserts, even a taste for them, and knew how to fall back, like a camel on its fat, on an inner reserve of fantasy and contemplation. I was a kind of ruminant there. Even so, it did not turn out in quite the way that-in the first numbed and degraded hours-I had imagined it would. Indeed, for several weeks the time rushed by, and it was really only in the final month, when freedom grew palpably close, that every minute took on a crabwise, cunctatory manner, came near to stalling altogether. I was haunted then by an image, a visionary impression of young spring greenery-birches and aspens-quickened by breeze but seen as if through frosted glass, blurred and silent. But by then a real atrocity had happened, something more than my freedom had been taken away from me.

My early days there called on my resilience. It was like being pitched again into the Gothic and arcane world of school, learning again to absorb or deflect the vengeful energies which governed it. But a difference soon emerged, for while the schoolboys were bound to struggle for supremacy, and in doing so to align themselves with authority, thus becoming educated and socially orthodox at once, we in the prison were joined by our unorthodoxy: we were all social outcasts. The effects of this were often ambiguous. Many of the distinctions of the outside world survived: respect for class, disgust at certain violent or inhumane crimes, and the ostracising of those who had been convicted of them. But at the same time, since we were all criminals, a layer of social pretence had been removed. There could be no question of pretending one was not a lover of men; and since many of the inmates of my wing were sex criminals-or ‘nonces’ in the nonce-word of the place-there was between us a curiously sustaining mood of sympathy and understanding. Of course guilt and shame were not magically annulled by this, but a goodish number of us-by no means all first offenders-had been caught for soliciting or conspiring to perform indecent acts, or for some intimacy (often fervently reciprocated) with underage boys. And many of the prisoners themselves, of course, were little more than children, old enough only to know the dictates of their hearts and to be sent to prison. The place was fuller than it ever had been with our people, as a direct result of the current brutal purges, and many were the tales of treachery and deceit, of bribed and lying witnesses, and false friends turning Queen’s Evidence, and going free. Such tales circulated constantly among us-and I added my own mite to this worn and speaking currency.

My case, on account I suppose of my title, had been the subject of more talk than most-though nothing like as much as that of Lord Montagu, which shows all the signs of iniquity and hypocrisy evident in the handling of my arrest and prosecution, but wickedly aggravated by police corruption. In the prison my fellows felt sure that we two must be acquainted, and imagined us, I think, swopping young men’s phone numbers in the bar of the House of Lords. It was hard to convince them that not all peers-just as not all queers-know each other. Even so it appears that his case-and in its little way mine-are doing some good: even the decorous British, with their distrust of the life of instinct, their pleasure in conformity, are saying that enough is enough. Some of them, even, are saying that a man’s private life is his own affair, and that the law must be changed.

My dim lavatorial notoriety became in the prison a kind of glamour, and helped me, as I looked about and learnt the faces and moods of the men, to make friends. Covert gestures of kindness saved me from trouble, or explained the punctilio of some futile but unavoidable chore. Matchboxes and half-cigarettes were slipped to me as we jostled together for Association. Warnings were given of the foibles of particular screws. And so the nonce-world, which became my world, closed about me, offered me its pitiful comforts, and began to reveal its depths-now murky, now surprisingly coralline and clear.

My guide and companion in this was a young man I met after a week or so, a well set-up, rather tongue-tied little chap called Bill Hawkins. I had noticed him early on, and was not surprised to find that he spent a lot of time in the gym: he had a fine torso and packed shoulders. We played a few games of draughts together on my first Sunday evening. He clearly wanted to talk to me, but was uncertain how to go about it, so I drew him out. It transpired that he had been for over a year the lover of a teenage boy who trained at the sports club in Highbury where Bill was employed. They saw each other every day, and were blissfully happy, though Alec, as the boy was called, avoided his old friends and caused concern to his parents by his singular behaviour. Twice Bill and Alec went to Brighton and spent the weekend in a guesthouse owned by a friend of the sports club manager: if anyone asked questions they were to pretend to be brothers, for Bill himself was only eighteen, and Alec was a couple of years younger. After a while, though, Alec became more distant, and it soon became clear that he was involved with another man. Bill, in all the torments of first love, took precipitately to drink, and would make a nuisance of himself banging on the door of Alec’s parents’ house. Then foolish, intimate letters were written: and found, by the parents. They showed them to Alec’s new friend, an insurance salesman with a Riley whom they, in a fine hypocritical fashion, considered more suitable and respectable than poor, passionate, uncontrollable Bill. Together the salesman and the parents took the letters to the police. Bill, when questioned, did nothing to conceal his feelings. He was sent down for eighteen months with hard labour.

Bill and I became great friends, and he, who was regarded as a kind of mascot by many of his fellows, and entrusted with secrets in the way that one might pour out one’s feelings to one’s dog or cat, knew a great deal about almost everybody, and seemed to feel keenly their various trials and tragedies. He pointed out to me a number of relationships between the men, confirmed my suspicious interpretations of odd gestures and habits, and revealed what was fairly a structure of submerged bonds and loyalties. There were half a dozen longstanding affairs going on, and various other men and boys were available if properly approached, or shared their favours with a satisfactory polygamy between two or three of their companions. 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. The screws themselves were by no means indifferent, it transpired, and two of them at least were having sex on a daily ration with prisoners-though those prisoners were treated with the greatest suspicion by their fellows as being probable grasses. One of them was provided with lipstick and other maquillage by his officer, and his femininity, at least, was tolerated as it would not have been outside.

Bill drew me out too, and I have a clear and rather touching picture of him sitting opposite me, his powerful, stocky young frame transforming the stiff grey flannel of his uniform so that he looks like a handsome soldier in some poor, East European army. He concentrates on me closely as I tell him about my childhood, or about life in the Sudan; and he is interested to hear about my house and my servants. I have promised him that when he is released, early next year, I will find him something to do: a job in a gymnasium, if possible, where his feeling for men and physical exercise can be fulfilled, rather than baulked and denied in some clerkly work. It was rather desperate to see him toiling for weeks over detective novels from the prison library: he doggy-paddled through books in a mood of miserable aspiration, but they were not his element.

I took to the prison library with more duck-like promptness. It was a bizarre collection, made up almost entirely of gifts. Ordinary well-wishers and a number of voluntary bodies gave miscellaneous fiction and popular encyclopaedic works on technology and natural history; an outgoing governor had presented a collection of literary texts, some deriving from his own schooldays but also including French classical drama and the complete works of Wither in twenty-three volumes; and the Times Literary Supplement had charitably for some years sent to the prison all those books it felt no interest in reviewing, a body of work ranging from bacteriology to handbooks on historic trams.

I picked on something which must have come from the ex-governor’s bequest: a schools edition of Pope, with notes by A. M. Niven, MA-one of those frustrating near-palindromes with which life is strewn. It had seen active service, and words such as ‘zeugma’ filled the margins in a round, childish script. I had not read Pope since I was a child myself, but I had a sudden keen yearning for his order and lucidity, which was connected in my mind with a vision of eighteenth-century England, and rides cut through woodland, and Polesden and all my literate country origins. The book contained the ‘Epistle to a Lady’ and various other shorter poems; of the longer works it gave only ‘The Rape of the Lock’ complete, and I fastened on this poem, and on Mr Niven’s account of how it had been designed to laugh two families out of a feud, as the flashings and gleams of a civilised world, where animosities were melted down and cast again as glittering artefacts. I determined to learn it all by heart, and put away twenty lines a day. The discipline, and the brilliance of the work itself, were a kind of invisible enrichment to me-though, lest I should feel like an actor learning a great part with no prospect of a performance, I had Bill hear my lines each time I mastered a new canto; and he seemed to enjoy it.

Tempting though it was to retire into this inner world, there were always visits to look forward to-and to regret, for their cruel brevity and for the new firmness with which, afterwards, the door was shut, the walls of the cell confined one. The visitors carried their horror of the place about them and for a while after they had gone left one with an anguished vacancy of a kind I had never known before. All one’s little accommodations were laid bare.

My first visit was from Taha-a ‘box-visit’, a reunion conducted through glass. I was wildly shaken to see him, so that I could not think of much to say. He smiled and was solicitous, and I looked at him closely, masochistically, for signs that he was ashamed of me. It was extraordinary how his confidence was undimmed: he spoke very quietly, so as not to be overheard by the guards or the other prisoners, and told me a score of sweet, inconsequential things. The second time he came, a few weeks later, we were allowed to sit at a table together: he had his little boy with him now, who seemed very excited at being allowed into a prison but frightened too of being left behind. Taha told him to hang on tight to my hand, and as he himself was holding my other hand we sat linked in a triangle, as if conducting a seance. The day before had been Taha’s birthday-and of course I had nothing to give him. He was forty-four! I can honestly say that he was no less beautiful to me than he had been when I saw him first, twenty-eight years ago. His brow was higher, his face scored with lines that had been mere charcoal strokes on the boy’s velvety brow and cheeks. His eyes, though, had deepened their immensity of melancholy and laughter, and his exquisite hands too were lined and shiny as old leather, as if he had done far more than merely polishing my shoes and silver.

That night I lay long awake, caught up again, with a vividness of recall, in the life we had spent together. Despite a thousand differences it was like a marriage, a great, chaste bond of love and tact-which made it all the odder that he had really married and become a father. I was gripped again by my mood of awful falseness and despair on his wedding day, when I gave him away into that little house in North Kensington and into a world more unknown and inaccessible than the Nuba Hills where I had found him first. Since then I have seen this period simply as a test, challenging our bond only to affirm it again. The terms were different, his independence, as each evening he went off on the Central Line, took a concrete, dignified form; but his loyalty was unaltered. Perhaps his distancing even endeared him to me more, and showed me afresh a devotion to which we had both become over-accustomed.

Such thoughts were still uppermost in my mind when I was called to see the governor a couple of days later. We had not met since the cursory talking-to of my first day, an occasion when I was strongly aware of the unease that his brief and accidental superiority had given him. Dressed though I was in my deforming prison bags I was made to feel wickedly sophisticated. He knew the disadvantage I suffered under would not-even should not-last. Today he was absent, and one of the senior officers took his place, pacing behind the desk but starchily resisting the temptation to sit down. I was not asked to sit myself, and as I refused to stand to attention, I adopted a rather decadent kind of slouch, which the officer did not like, visibly suppressing his criticism. I wondered what was up and had faint expectations of some kind of remission.

‘I have some’-he seemed to hesitate to choose and then reject an adjective-‘news for you, Nantwich. You have a servant, a houseboy. What is his name?’

‘I have a companion. He is called Taha al-Azhari.’ I spoke with assumed calm, suddenly afraid that Taha had done something stupid, something he thought would help me.

‘Azhari, exactly. He came from the Sudan, I believe?’

‘Yes.’

‘How old a man?’

‘He is just forty-four.’

‘Wife and children?’

‘I really don’t see the point of this. Yes, he has a wife and a seven-year-old boy. I think you saw the boy yourself,’ I added, ‘when he came to visit me last week, and Taha himself of course…’

The officer showed no recollection. ‘Azhari will not be coming to visit you again,’ he said. I shrugged, not out of carelessness, but out of a refusal to show care, and in a mute lack of surprise that to my current deprivations others were to be added.

‘Have I done something wrong?’ I suggested. ‘Or perhaps he has?’

‘He’s dead,’ said the officer, in a tone overwhelmingly vibrant and severe, as if this event were indeed a proper part of my punishment and as if to Taha too some kind of justice had at last been done.

‘I confess,’ I said, ‘I am surprised you should find it fitting to convey such news, even such news, in the form of an interrogation.’ I stepped with a kind of blind resolve from word to word, and it was only my utter determination to deprive him of the sight of my agony that kept me pressing on. He said nothing. ‘Perhaps you will tell me how this happened. Where did it happen?’

‘I gather he was set on by a gang of youths, over Barons Court way. It was late at night. I’m afraid they showed no mercy: stones and dustbins were used as well as knives.’

‘Is any… motive known?’

‘I wouldn’t know. The police have no idea of course who did it. It seems not to have been for money-he still had money on him. Did he usually carry money?’

I ignored the lazily loaded question. ‘There can be no doubt that this was an act of racial hatred and ignorance.’

‘I’m afraid so, Nantwich. I think there will be more of them, too.’ He looked confident of vindication, almost proud. I was still standing in the middle of the room, though by now I was beginning to shake, and had to force my knees back and grip my hands together.

‘Your opinion is of no interest to me,’ I said.

He gave a little smirk. ‘You will be allowed to attend the funeral,’ he said, as if I had been wrong to judge him so harshly.

And so the light of my life went out.

The morning of the funeral was ragged and squally, and I was stunned to find how readily I returned to the Scrubs and hid myself away: even if a car had been waiting to drive me home I would have been incapable of accepting it-and throughout the first few days of choking grief the hermit bleakness of my cell served to contain me in the fullest sense. In my own house I would have fallen apart. The other men, my friends, too, helped me and held me, and showed in their laconic condolences an understanding I could never have received in the world at large.

It would be unedifying to describe as it would be needless torture to recall those days when the world first changed, and became a world without my Taha. It was a terrible destitution, and my knowledge is all bound up with my physical experience of the hard coir mattress where I lay, the few properties of my cell, the bladeless razor, the little framed square of looking-glass in which I caught my tear-blotched face, the steady night-time smell of the chamberpot. As the autumn drew on it grew colder in the prison, but if one held one’s hand to the black iron vent through which warm air was supposed to issue into each cell one felt only a slight chill stirring, which seemed to come from far away.

It was a time of incessantly recurrent images of my sweet dead friend, and of a thousand memories fanned into the air by this cold draught. I haunted and interrogated the past even as it interrogated me. London, Skinner’s Lane, Brook Street, the Sudan-how had we passed all that time? Why did we not burn up every moment of it, as we would if we could have it all again? The journey back to England surfaced in dreams and occupied my days, the train to Wadi Halfa panting across the desert, reading old newspapers in the white, shuttered carriages while Taha, alas, was obliged to travel with the guard; and the stops, which had no names, but only a number, painted on a little shelter beside the track; and the steamer to the First Cataract and the visionary beauty of Aswan.

And I went further back, prone and defenceless, to Oxford and Winchester, shrinking from the world, curling up in the warm leaf-mould of earlier and earlier times, drawing some wan, nostalgic sustenance from those dead days. My life seemed to go into reverse, and for a month, two months, I was a thing of shadows. It was in vain to tell myself that this was not my way: I was impotent with misery and deprivation.

Then, as the end came in sight-it was the dead of winter-something hardened in me. I saw the imaginary verdure beyond the frosted glass. I began to think of the world I must go back to, with its brutal hurry and indifference. I would have to take on a new man. I would have to move again in the company of my captors and humiliators and be glanced at critically for signs of the scars they had inflicted. I would have to do something for others like myself, and for those more defenceless still. I would have to abandon this mortal introspection and instead steel myself. I would even have to hate a little.

I see in The Times today that Sir Denis Beckwith, following calls in the House for the reform of sexual offence law, is to leave the DPP’s office and take a peerage. Oddly typical of the British way of getting rid of troublemakers by moving them up-implying as it does too some reward for the appalling things he has done. Perhaps I will have the opportunity to argue with him over law reform in the House-perhaps the only occasion in Hansard when a Noble Lord will have challenged another such who more or less sent him to prison. And he is a man I could hate, the one who more than anybody has been the inspiration of this ‘purge’ as he calls it, this crusade to eradicate male vice. Though one always treated him with contempt, he will now be a powerful voice in the Lords, with others like Winterton and Ammon-though beside their ninnyish rant he will be the more powerful in his cultured, bureaucratic smoothness. I have the image of him before me now in the courtroom at my sentencing, to which he had come out of pure vindictiveness, and of his handsome suaveté in the gallery, his flush and thrill of pride as I went down…

It was Graham who answered the phone. ‘Oh Graham, it’s Will Beckwith-is Lord Nantwich there?’

‘I’m sorry, sir, he’s dining at his Club this evening.’

‘At Wicks’s? When will he be back?’

‘I don’t expect him until late, sir.’

‘I’ll try again tomorrow.’

But tomorrow was too far away. I was so confused by this digest of disasters, I felt so stupid and so ashamed that I walked around the flat talking out loud, getting up and sitting down, scratching my crew-cut head as if I had lice. It was impossible so quickly to formulate a plan, but I felt the important thing was to go to Charles, to say something or other to him.

It took me ages to get a cab, and as at last it locked and braked its way through the West End closing-time crowds, I found all my ideas of what I might do rattling away, leaving me in a queer empty panic. I left the cab in a jam a block from the Club and ran along the pavement and up the steps. The porter emerged from his cabin with an expression of moody servility and told me Charles had left quarter of an hour before. I hardly thanked him, but dawdled out again, realising that at this moment he was probably roaring along the Central Line on his way home. I drifted around in front of the Club as if waiting for somebody, hands in jacket-pockets, chewing my lip.

Between the high neo-classical façade and that of the adjacent office block was a narrow chasm, gated from the street. The gate opened, and Abdul emerged, evidently also on his way home; he had on a light anorak over a T-shirt, and cheap grey slacks. I went up to him, surprised him as he locked the gate, greeted him with the conviction that he somehow held the answer to my problem.

‘Hey, William,’ he said, ‘all finished now.’ He gave me a flashy smile and was ready, I think, to move off and abandon me, so that I said recklessly:

‘Oh Abdul, did you know that Lord Nantwich had been to prison?’ He turned back and looked at me and I looked back at him closely, his lined face, pink inner lips and fierce eyes slightly bloodshot, more guarded in the street’s shadow.

‘Of course,’ he said lightly. ‘Everyone knows that.’

I pursed my lips and nodded three or four times. ‘Have you always known?’

‘I have always known. Of course. I went to see him in there when I was a little boy. No place to take a kid,’ he added. It was a detail that gave my evening a sickening completeness, like an orchid seen in a nature film brought in a few seconds from bud to heavy perfection.

I was laughing nervously as he turned back towards the gate. ‘Hey, come in here,’ he said. I followed him with a kind of absent-minded excitement and waited as he locked the gate behind us and went along after him past bins and milk-crates that were hard to make out in the alleyway’s blackness. He opened a door and the flickering of the strip-lights was dazzling.

It was the Club’s kitchen, abundantly old-fashioned, with many pantries and offices, windowed partitions and white-tiled walls. Cleaned and swabbed for the night it tingled in the fluorescent glare as if I was drunk. It had about it the discipline of institutional life and beyond that, for all its emptiness, something of the melancholy and teeming sense of order of an Edwardian country house. Abdul, who had sauntered to the far side of the room, came back to me where I lounged wondering against a table. He put his hands on my chest and sliding them up pushed my jacket back off my shoulders; it was then I realised that I had no tie on, and could never have been admitted to the Club proper, even if Charles had been there.

Abdul tugged my shirt out at the waist, and ill-temperedly opened my fly and pulled my trousers down about my knees. I saw his cock curving and buckling in his pants with anticipation before he turned me round and spread me out. It was one of those worn, foot-thick chopping tables, eaten away by incessant jointings and slicings into a deep, curved declivity. I waited greedily, and yelped as his hand came down, and again and again, tenderising my ass with wild, hard slaps. Then he crossed the room in front of me and yanked down from a shelf a catering-size drum of corn oil. It fell cold on my skin as he splashed it from a height then slicked my cheeks and slot, driving a strong unhesitating finger in. I heard the graphic rustle of his clothes, his trousers dropping to the floor with the weight of the keys in his pocket. He fucked me with a thrilling leisured vehemence, giving each long stroke, when it was in to the balls, a final questing shunt that had me gurgling with pleasure and grunting with pain, my cock chafing beneath me against the table’s furred and splintered edge.

It was quickly finished, and he slurped out of me, and slapped me again. ‘Hmm,’ he said noncommittally; then, ‘Fuck off out of here, man.’