The Swimming-Pool Library

12

I was woken by Andrews crossing the wide expanse of the bedroom and tugging back the curtains with a cruel flourish, shouting, ‘Good morning, my Lord.’ Behind him came the naked Abdul, pushing a trolley on which his cock, perhaps three feet long, was supported, curved and garnished like an eel. He wheeled it to the bedside and I looked at it anxiously: it had a dull grey-black sheen to it, and a slight pile, like wet suede. ‘I’m going to be very late,’ I said, sitting up abruptly and kicking back the bedclothes. ‘I have to give my maiden speech in the House at ten o’clock.’ Then other sounds broke in, and I woke up, heart racing, in the pink penumbra of my own room.

It had gone eleven, but I had not slept until four or five, turning over the uncomfortable revelations of the previous evening. If Charles had been orchestrating his campaign, as I sometimes believed he had, then he had brought it brilliantly and comprehensively to a head. The prison was the key. The one unspeakable thing that no one had been able to tell me threw light on everything else, and only left obscure the degrees of calculation and coincidence in Charles’s offering me his biography to write-a task he must have known I could never, in the end, accept.

And as for my grandpa… As I shaved I looked at myself quizzically, yet his image was also in my mind, the groomed, sharp-eyed, authoritative face, ‘handsome suaveté’… I remembered the rather frightening figure of my childhood, the trenchancy and reserve, and what I could now see as a slow softening of outline as he left politics and received his viscountcy. In retirement he had grown more accommodating, and with the arrival of Philippa’s children and the death of my grandmother had taken on something of the remote glamour of abdicated monarchy. His power was exercised with deference, calling on remembered allegiance. Yet his dynasty was not, in any strict sense, secure. Perhaps his fear that I would never have children explained the nervy familiarity of our relationship these days, the sense I had of being encouraged and yet kept at a hygienic distance. Perhaps it explained my own wariness of him, and the exaggerated obligation I felt under for the help he had given me. Oh, I wanted the flat and everything, but I was irked, graceless, I knew, and coltish about recognising its provenance. I loved my grandfather, too. Whether by the hoped-for sunbursts of our childhood holidays or the more watchful indulgence of his old age, he made one feel part of something superior and precious.

All that could hardly change now that he turned out to be in part a tyrant and bigot-not just the elder statesman I had been so proud of at my tother, but (the first saddening strands of evidence suggested) a kind of bureaucratic sadist, a man who had built his career on oppression. Perhaps his precious and superior coterie was not so desirable after all. I was at a loss what to do. I wanted somehow to record my dissent but without callow scenes. I needed, without altogether wanting, to know more.

I gave Gavin a ring, and was relieved when the long-suffering Spanish maid answered the phone: I didn’t want to bring it up with Philippa. After a few moments Gavin came amiably through.

‘Gavin, you must think me the most frightful fool.’

‘Good heavens…’ he laughed.

‘About Charles Nantwich-I hadn’t the faintest idea the other evening what you were talking about.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘I have now, though. It’s so ghastly-have you known for ages?’

‘Mm-quite some time. I mean that whole episode is more or less forgotten now, it was what?-thirty years ago. You must feel pretty awful about it, I suppose.’

‘You’re right. And was grandpa really the driving force of all this sort of anti-gay thing?’

‘I’m afraid he probably was. With the Home Secretary, I suppose, and the police.’

‘I’m so appalled by people knowing all this, and me going prancing around making passes at anything in trousers and not having the remotest inkling. And Charles and his friends leading me on…’ Gavin laughed nervously. ‘I don’t know what to say to him, either of them. Is Philippa aware of all this?’

‘She might be. She probably wouldn’t take it as seriously as you. I guess it was before either of you was born-I mean it’s another world, thank heavens,’ he hastily emphasised.

‘But if you met Charles Nantwich, who’s the dearest and most extraordinary old boy, you would see that it isn’t another world. He was sent to prison and it’s obviously scarred him or whatever-and he was set up by some pretty policeman, and that’s really not another world, Gavin, it’s going on in London now almost every day.’

After a moment Gavin said: ‘I have met him actually; I think it was more than just the soliciting, there was a conspiracy charge and they raked up all sorts of other stuff. I heard about it originally from old Cecil Hughes when we were doing the London Bridge project. As you perhaps know, Lord Nantwich’s house has a remarkable first-century Roman pavement under it.’

‘Yes, I’ve seen it-why didn’t I ask you if you knew it?’

‘Cecil took me to see it then. It’s exceptionally beautiful, don’t you think, with the swimming figures and the Thames deity? It really ought to be removed to somewhere safe.’

‘I don’t see Charles taking to that idea. But it must be rather damp.’

‘It’s not only that,’ Gavin said in a strange, camp tone of voice. ‘There are other things. I remember Cecil and I had the distinct impression that orgies or something went on down there: there were candles and old leather-bound books going mouldy, and the queerest smell. And of course those outrageous Otto Henderson doodles on the walls. I must say it was more than a touch embarrassing-though Cecil I think quite enjoyed it.’

‘I wish I’d talked to you before. There is a whiff of black magic sometimes at Skinner’s Lane.’

‘I’m not surprised. It’s not my kind of thing. Henderson was said to be mixed up with some sort of spiritualist society himself, and Cecil said something about Nantwich getting in touch with I think a friend who had died tragically. I must say it rather gave me the creeps, as did Nantwich himself. Worth it, for the pavement, though.’

‘This was before you were married.’

‘Actually it was just about the time that P. and I started seeing each other. The irony was not lost on Cecil; he very much came from that world, and it was he who told me about Denis. Very tight lips, as you may imagine. Of course, the irony’s rather worse for you, being, you know, gay, and-I’m frightfully sorry, Will.’

‘My dear Gavin. Anyway, I must think a whole lot more.’

I looked around my untidy bedroom, and was surprised to find I missed the invitation that the Nantwich book had offered for the past few weeks. I had played hard to get without ever envisaging an outcome such as this. ‘I’d love to see you, too. We must all get together. Now that I’m not writing a book I’ll have so much more time.’ Gavin made a miraculous little humming sound, in which sympathy and scepticism were perfectly combined. ‘He must have known gay people-he was a cultured man. What did he think he was playing at?’

‘Well I’m too young to know. But I suspect it really was a different world-not only the law, of course, but political pressures, and we just don’t know. It’s Uncle Will. Yes, you can. Hold on, Will, I’ve got your nephew here to speak to you. Very important, right… See you soon, my dear!’

There was a plonk and a series of rustlings and a protest of ‘Daddy’ before Rupert came on the line: ‘Hello, this is Rupert,’ in his serious treble.

‘Roops, how nice to hear you. How are things.’

‘All right, thank you. I’ve got to wait before Daddy goes out of the room.’ This took a while, as apparently he came back for something, and was, as I pictured it, being expelled from his own study and his important work on Romano-British drains.

‘It must be jolly secret,’ I said encouragingly.

‘It’s that boy,’ he hissed.

‘Arthur, you mean? Have you seen him then?’ And looking across the empty bed and out into the hazy sky, chimneypots among still trees, I felt a sudden plunging need for him, a Straussian phrase sweeping from the top to the bottom of the orchestra.

‘Yes, I have. It was in the road, yesterday.’

‘It was jolly clever of you to spot him.’

‘Well, I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for him, you know.’

‘What a good spy you are. What was he doing, did he recognise you?’ I tried to repress my eagerness and anxiety: to think of him being so close to here…

‘I saw him walking along the road first of all, and I thought it was him, so I followed him.’

‘Good boy! Now what did he have on?’

‘Um-trousers. And a shirt.’

‘Terrific.’ I wanted to know if his tight cords cut into the crack of his bum, if you could make out his nipples through his T-shirt; but I made do with the more general answer. ‘Go on.’

‘Well, he went along our road, and then turned right, and when I went round the corner he was coming back again. So I went into a house and hid behind the hedge, I was pretending that it was my house, you see. I’m sure he didn’t recognise me. Then he shouted when he was just outside the hedge, and there was another man.’

‘Did you see him?’

‘I saw his legs and hands. He was a black man too, and I think he was called Harold.’

‘Harold, yes, that’s Arthur’s big brother. Arthur sort of works for him sometimes.’

‘I think he was very cross. He said he was going to give him a smack.’

‘The idea!’ I exclaimed, as the real idea-which I had never seriously been able to disallow-seeped inexorably through my system.

‘It was so funny being where I was, because he had something hidden in his sock, all wrapped up in silver paper, and when he got it out he didn’t know I was there!’ Rupert sounded very excited by this bit. ‘What was in the paper?’ he asked, a shade cautious now.

‘I wouldn’t know, old boy.’ His silence told of his disappointment. ‘Did they say anything else?’

‘Yes. Arthur said, “Where’s fucking Tony?” ’ He giggled.

‘Mm-there’s no need to do the accent and everything.’

‘And Harold said, “He’s in the car,” or something, I can’t quite remember… And Arthur said something about “That Tony was lucky to be alive” and Harold said “Watch your-um-lip”-does that mean mind your ps and qs?’

‘Yup, more or less. That’s very interesting, Roops.” I pictured Arthur’s lips, and imagined Tony, and wondered if it could possibly be the same one. ‘You didn’t get to see Tony, then?’

‘No, he was in the car. Actually, they walked down the street a bit, and then there was a car going parp, parp. When I came out again they were just climbing into the car.’

‘Was it a big yellow car?’

‘It was a quite big yellow car-and all the windows were black.’

‘That’s the one. Darling, you are a great genius. One day I shall have to give you a medal.’

‘Well, I promised I’d tell you. Will?’

‘Yes?’ I sensed some more probing question was coming.

‘Does Arthur and Harold still live in England?’

‘Oh, I think so, yes.’

‘He didn’t escape then?’

‘It doesn’t look like it, my old duck.’

I spent a lackadaisical afternoon, sprawling in the window-seat half-reading the paper, then closing my eyes, as the sun came round. I drifted in and out of sleep, took off my shirt, woke to find the coarse stitching of the tapestry bolster had patterned my slightly sweating back. I thought about Arthur, and how minutely brief our affair had been, and difficult to understand. I saw him again licking my balls; or swallowing as he slowly sat down on my cock; or helpless beneath me, locking his dry heels behind my neck. I hated to think it was over-yet dawdled half-awake in a maudlin, jealous reverie. I imagined him servicing the scarred and despotic Tony as they rolled towards the West End in their black-windowed Cortina.

So much had ended, so many things gone crooked and bad-and yet the high June afternoon lasted and lasted, grew stiller, more crystalline. There was no friendly darkness in it. I shifted and slept again.

At about drinks time I began to want to do something. I wrapped up my trunks in a towel, flung them in my sports bag with my goggles and soap-box and an American ‘gay thriller’ I had been loaned by Nigel the pool attendant, and trotted off out. The pavements and gardens were exuding their summer smells, and as I approached the Tube station I walked against the current of people coming home, youngsters in pinstripes from the City fanning out from the gates, jackets here and there hooked over a shoulder, smart clippety-clop of old-fashioned City shoes. They were quite handsome, some of these boys, public-school types with peachy complexions and contemptuous eyes. Already they commanded substantial salaries, took long, overpriced lunches, worked out perhaps in private City gyms. In many ways they were like me; yet as they ambled home in the benign and ordered vastness of the evening, as I fleetingly caught their eye or felt them for a moment aware of me, they were an alien breed. And then I was a loafer who had hardly ever actively earned money, and they were the eager initiates, the coiners of the power and the compromise in which I had unthinkingly been raised.

My disaffected mood persisted in the sweaty train. Goldie was one of the poorer accessions of the swimming-pool library. It was not, alas, about the Cambridge second eight, but about rent-boys, blackmail and murder in Manhattan; Goldie was the gay police officer who got to buy the favours of the chief suspect, and seemed bound to fall in love with him before the sorry end. The book’s formula was to alternate blocks of fast, bloodthirsty action with exhaustive descriptions of sexual intercourse. Nigel, night-sighted in the pool’s subterranean gloom, had said it was a good one; but I resented its professional neatness and its priapic attempts to win me over. The trouble was that, as attempts, they were half-successful: something in me was pained and removed; but something else, subliterate, responded to the book’s bald graffiti. ‘Fuck me again, Goldie,’ the slender, pleading Juan Bautista would cry; and I thought, ‘Yeah, give it to him! Give it to him good ’n’ hard!’

As we slowed towards stops I looked around at the other passengers, wary slumpers and strap-hangers who never met each other’s eyes for more than a fraction of a second. Half-heartedly playing the game James and I used to play I tried to select which person in the carriage I would least object to having sex with. Occasionally the choice could be made difficult by the presence of too many scrumptious schoolboys or too many dusty-handed navvies. Normally, as now, the problem was to choose between that businessman, regular and suited but with a moody something about him, and the too-tall youth in the doorway giving off a tinny, high-hat patter from his headphones, and looking flightily around through a haze of Trouble for Men. It was James’s theory that everyone had about them some wrinkle at least of lovability, some peculiar and attractive thing-a theory which gained poignancy from the problems in applying it.

Consoling and yet absurd, how the sexual imagination took such easy possession of the ungiving world. I was certainly not alone in this carriage in sliding my thoughts between the legs of other passengers. Desires, brutal or tender, silent but evolved, were in the shiftless air, and hung about each jaded traveller, whose life was not as good as it might have been. I remembered for some reason a little public lavatory in Winchester, a urinal and a couple of cubicles visited by bandy-legged old men going to the market and at night by ghostly fantasists who left their traces. It was up an alley where the College turned one of its high stone corners against the town-not a place for boys, for scholars, though I went there once or twice with an almost scholarly curiosity. The cistern filled for ever, the floor was slippery, there was no toilet paper, and between the cubicles a number of holes had been diligently bored, large enough only to spy through. Talentless drawings covered the walls, and wishful assignations, and also, misspelt in laborious capitals, long unparagraphed accounts of sexual acts-‘they had her together… 12 inches… at the bus station’. In between these were fantastic rendezvous, often vague to allow for disappointment, but able sometimes to touch you with their suggestion of a shadowy world in which town and gown pried on each other. I had read: ‘College boy, blond, big cock, in here Friday-meet me next Friday, 9 pm.’ Then: ‘Tuesday?’ Then: ‘Next Friday November 10’… I had thought almost it could have been me, until I just made out, bleared and over-written, the date ‘1964’: a decade of dark November Fridays, generations of College blonds, had already passed since those anonymous words were written.

At the Corry life was going on full blast. I swam more joylessly than usual, hoping I might catch Phil, starved of him, longing to have and to hold him: I wanted the solidness of him in my arms, and for a moment excitedly mistook another swimmer for him as he lounged at the shallow end. He had trunks on just like Phil’s and when I surfaced grinning in front of him he gave me a bothered look before pushing off in a panicky, old-fashioned side-stroke. I felt keenly about the discipline of swimming, and then was suddenly bored by it, and by the taste of chlorinated water. When I hopped out I had a few words with Nigel. He was sprawling in those viewing seats erected long ago for matches and galas which never now took place.

‘Hullo, Will-good swim?’

‘I’m not in the mood, I’m afraid, today. I can do it, you know, what’s the point?’

‘Mm, still, good for you. How are you getting on with that book then? Good one, isn’t it?’

‘I’m a bit disappointed by it, actually. You’ve lent me better.’

‘Mm, but that Goldie, is it, I’d like to meet him. He can give me a taste of his truncheon any time.’

I shook my head sorrowingly. ‘He doesn’t exist, love. It’s just a silly book.’

‘Get out,’ said Nigel, tutting and turning his head away.

‘I could show you something really sexy-and true,’ I said, in a sudden treacherous bid for his interest-he who didn’t interest me at all, handsome and idle though he was. ‘I’ve got some private diaries of a guy’ (Charles a guy? some affronted guardian spirit queried) ‘with amazing stuff in them. It’s even got things happening here-years ago…’ I had doubts and petered out.

My true come-uppance not from a fascinated insistence I should tell more but from a deliberate lack of attention, as if to endorse my self-reproach. ‘You still going with that Phil?’ he wanted to know.

‘Yup.’ I squared my shoulders and tried to appear worthy.

‘He’s looking good.’ Nigel smiled at me slyly. ‘He was down here earlier on, splashing about, diving and that. Showing off. I wouldn’t mind a bit of that, I thought. Gave me a really fresh look too.’

‘You little slut,’ I said, and flicked at him with my towel as I darted off. But I was reassured by how he had got it wrong, for though Phil was taken with his own body he almost stubbornly never tarted. His love was all bottled up and kept for me.

I thought of him with such tenderness in the shower and the changing-room that I was hardly aware of the bustle around me. I had not been good enough to him. I had often been sarcastic, and used him as a kind of beautiful pneumatic toy. He was the only true, pure, simple thing I could see in my life at the moment, and I wished I was with him, and wanted to thank him, and say I was sorry. I decided I would go up to the Queensberry and hope to catch him before he went out. Then I would go to James, who was true and pure too of course in his way, and worrying about his looming court appearance.

I went through the deeply familiar streets and squares, through the equally intimate cooling and soft-fingered evening. Then there were the high plane trees and the bold splashing fountains-my mood escaping all the while from its bleak morning pacings and ambling into a more romantic melancholy. I became somehow picturesque to myself, prone as ever to the aesthetic solution.

I was about to go round to the side of the hotel, where I was well enough known now, but I was suddenly tired of my laundryman’s-eye view of life, and swung up the main shrub-flanked steps and into the hall. I had become so used to the back stairs that I was quite surprised to see svelte couples coming down for pre-dinner drinks, others checking in, their anxieties melting as uniformed boys magicked their monogrammed luggage away. One or two people, waiting to meet friends, half-concentrated on the lit showcases where scarves, watches, perfumes and china figurines were displayed, or revolved the squeaking postcard racks, soothed by the customary London views.

I loitered too for a minute, charmed-or at least amazed-by all this bought pleasantness. And then I saw a wonderful young man, perhaps about my age, and with just that air of bland international luxury about him, come from the lift and saunter towards the cocktail bar. He was tall and graceful but gave the impression of weighing a great deal; as he approached I was startled by his deep-set brown eyes, long nose and curling lips and his trotting, swept-back hair; as he walked away I took in his maroon mocassins, his immaculate pale cotton trousers, through which the shadow of his briefs could be seen, the cashmere slip cast around his shoulders. I felt he must belong to some notable Latin American family.

It hardly required thought to follow him, though I gave him a second or two to get settled. I feared he might have gone to sit at a table or have joined his diplomat father and ragging, adoring younger brothers and sisters. But no, he was perched at the marble curve of the bar, and I was able to greet Simon-all in braid and tumbling his cocktail-shaker-as I took up a convenient high stool.

‘What are you having?’ Simon wanted to know. He was a skinny Lancashire boy who loved fucking girls and should ideally have been following a career as a pianist. He played extremely well, and had a long, long tongue with which he could easily lick the tip of his nose. He knew all about my little ways.

‘What’s he having?’ I said, as I watched the wild pink liquid rattle from the shaker into the inverted cone of the glass.

He raised an eyebrow and murmured disgustingly, ‘Cunnilingus Surprise.’

‘Mm. Not quite my kind of thing perhaps.’

Here the notable Latin American said: ‘It’s really good. You should try one.’ And then smiled immensely so that I went funny inside.

His lips curled back in a friendly primitive way, and gave an unexpected animation to his dully beautiful face. I realised he reminded me of one of the sketches of Akhnaten on Charles’s stele-not the final inscrutable profile, but one of the intermediate stages, half human, half work of art.

I watched incredulously as the various ingredients, some exotic, some European, were measured into the shaker. Simon gave me a smirk of lewd surmise as he agitated it. Mr Latin America and I glanced at each other and then found it proper to look around the lofty bar, with its concealed lighting, reproductions of Old Masters and vulgarly gathered blinds half down against the westering sun. Across the road were the boles of the great trees in the square into whose upper branches I had so often gazed; and that did remind me of Phil, and how I must not take long over this drink.

‘Perfectly revolting,’ I pronounced after taking a sip. ‘If that’s what cunnilingus tastes like, I think I’ve done well to stay away from it.’

‘You like?’ said my new friend.

I nodded, as if to say it was nice enough.

‘You are staying in this hotel?’

‘No-no, I’ve just come in for a drink. After my swimming.’

‘Oh you like swimming. I am a very bad swimmer.’ I smiled politely; perhaps in his country, which I believed to be poor and old-fashioned, there were few swimming-pools. Even in Italy there were few: hence the fondness of the language children for hours of bombing and showering. ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ he asked.

‘No, no,’ I said, actually slightly shocked at his naive forwardness. I let a minute or more pass in silence, but had to grin when Simon started humming Tristan. I wasn’t sure what to do. The boy was undoubtedly a find. I swivelled on my stool so that we were sitting with our legs apart and knee to knee. He looked frankly at my crotch before meeting my gaze and we smiled enquiringly at each other as he ran his finger up the back of my hand where it dangled from the bar.

‘If you come to my room, I will show you something very interesting,’ he said. ‘Do you want to finish your drink?’

‘Um-no.’ I started to reach in my pocket for change, but he stopped me with a firm hand.

‘Number 205,’ he said curtly to Simon.

‘I must have got the name of that one wrong,’ said Simon perplexedly as I followed my conquest-my conqueror?-out.

Room 205 was a small but grand suite-a sitting-room with a flower arrangement in front of a mirror, a gloomy bedroom looking on an inner well, and a neon-bright bathroom with a roaring extractor fan. The thick double-glazing on the front gave the rooms a strange feeling of remoteness. I walked around in them for a bit before Gabriel-as he was fetchingly called-said, ‘Hey, Will, look at this,’ and flung open a suitcase on the bed. It was stuffed with pornography-videos and magazines, many of them still in their rip-off cellophane wrappers. The buying had been prodigal and indiscriminate.

‘You like it?’ I was asked, as if it were a triumph of his own.

‘Well up to a point-but I thought-’

‘In my country these things, these dirty pictures, do not exist.’

‘I should be highly surprised if that were the case. What is your country anyway?’

‘Argentina,’ he said, with a neutrality of tone which showed that this news was likely to have some effect. It made me want to apologise to him; at the same time I could have castigated him for buying up all this trash. Surely if any British self-esteem could have been thought to have survived the recent war it must be something to do with our… cultural values? The top magazine in the suitcase was a tawdry old thing I could remember from schooldays, called Latin Lovers.

‘But what about the war?’ I said dismally, seeing a TV news map of the Southern Atlantic and imagining too the customs-check at Buenos Aires.

‘That’s all right,’ he said, putting his arms around my neck. ‘You can suck my big cock.’

He stood patiently while I unbuttoned his trousers and slid them down over brown hairy thighs. The black briefs I had glimpsed before turned out to be leather. ‘I suppose you bought these today as well,’ I said; and he nodded and grinned as I prised them down and saw the studded leather cock-ring he was also wearing. He had clearly wasted a small fortune in some Soho dump. His assessment of his cock had not, however, been wrong. It was a sumptuously heavy thing, purpling up with blood as the cock-ring bit into the thickening flesh. ‘I’m not a size queen, but…’ would have been my classic formulation of the affair.

I hadn’t had anything like it all summer, and gorged on it happily. But Gabriel’s own performance was becoming off-putting. Every few seconds he would make some coarse exhortation, some dumbly repeated catchphrase, and I came to realise with dismay that this trick too he had picked up from crudely dubbed American porn films. ‘Yeah,’ he would croon, ‘suck that dick. Yeah, take it all. Suck it, suck that big dick.’

I took a pause to say, ‘Um-Gabriel. Do you think you could leave out the annunciations?’ But it wasn’t the same for him without them, and I felt unbelievably stupid appearing to respond to them.

‘Okay,’ he said brightly, as I abandoned the job. ‘You like to fuck with me?’

‘Of course.’ There was after all some charm in his childlike openness. ‘But in silence…’

‘Wait a minute,’ he said and kicking off shoes and tugging off trousers and pants, ambled into the bathroom, his dick bouncing with a kind of mock-majesty before him.

I slipped off my own shoes and jeans and lay playing with myself on the bed. Gabriel took his time getting ready and after a couple of minutes I called through to ask if he was all right. He came in almost at once, now completely naked except for his cock-ring, the pale gold wafer of his watch and-which I should somehow I suppose have expected-a black leather mask which completely covered his head. There were two neat little holes beneath the nostrils, and zipped slits for the eyes and mouth. He knelt on the bed beside me and was perhaps looking to me for approval or amusement-it was impossible to tell. Close to I could see only his large brown pupils and the whites of his eyes, blurred for a split second if he blinked, like the lens of a camera. It was hard and disturbing the way the eyes could not vary their expression isolated from the rest of the frowning or smiling face. I felt that childhood fear of rubber party masks, and of the idiot amiability of clowns who you knew, as they bent down to pinch your cheeks, were fearful old drunks.

Gabriel held my head to look at me closely, and I unzipped his mouth and breathed in his hot breath and the expensive smell of leather. His body was supple though slightly gone to seed-but I liked it and bit it. There wasn’t much he could do in his mask, and when I had nosed around him for a while he hoiked me over and pushed my legs apart. I was anxious not to take all that raw, and had begun to complain, when I felt something cold and wet, like a dog’s nose, trailing up my thigh. I looked over my shoulder to find that from somewhere this madman had produced a gigantic pink dildo, slippery with Crisco. I heard him giggle tensely inside the mask. ‘Do you want to smell some poppers?’ he asked.

I rolled over and sat up and spoke in a strange tone of voice which I seemed to have invented for the occasion. ‘Look, pal, I’d need more than poppers to take that thing.’ It was all very well to be violated as I had been last night by Abdul, but I did not like the idea of inanimate objects being forced up my delicate inner passages. He turned and walked across the room-angry, hurt, careless, I couldn’t tell-and threw the great plastic phallus into the bathroom. I imagined the maid finding it there when she came to tidy up and turn down the bedclothes. ‘Okay, so you don’t like me that much,’ he said, thickly from inside the leather.

‘I like you very much. It’s just the moving toyshop I can’t be doing with.’ And I decided I had better go, and reached for my jeans.

‘I could whip you,’ he suggested, ‘for what you did to my country in the war.’ He seemed to think this was a final expedient which might really appeal to me; and I had no doubt he could have provided a pretty fearsome lash from one of his many items of luggage.

‘I think that might be to take the sex and politics metaphor a bit too seriously, old chap,’ I said. And I could see the whole thing deteriorating into a scene from some poker-faced left-wing European film.

When I was dressed and had my bag again slung over my shoulder Gabriel was wandering around the sitting-room, his huge erection barely flagging, but somehow no longer of interest to me. I stood and looked at him and he grasped and grunted and writhed out of his mask. His hair was moist and standing up, and his clear olive complexion was primed with pink-as it might have been if we had just simply made love. I went over to him and kissed him, but he closed his teeth against me, kept his hands at his sides. I left the room without saying goodbye.

Well, it served me right, I thought, as I wandered with a vague sense of direction along uniform carpeted corridors-Phil’s terrain, where he did his job. All this had certainly got me in the mood and now I would be too late to catch him and the uncomplicated solace he could give. Surely hotels must be hotbeds of this kind of carry-on, easy encounters at the bar or unlocking the doors of adjacent rooms. My little Philanderer could make a fortune out of escorting truly glamorous men-and not all of them would turn out to be as weird as the eye-catching Gabriel. It was quite likely, wasn’t it, that Phil had already caught Gabriel’s eye?

I found the corner by the service lift and the steep flight of stairs up to Phil’s attic. It was a drab, cheapjack little area, unambiguously removed from the public, and yet I had come to love it in a way I never could the rest of the monstrous edifice. The little room-and above it the lonely roof-were nothing really, but like the lovers’ cottage in ‘Tea for Two’ they had been wonderfully sufficient for our romance. I knew there was no chance of finding him in-he would be well off on his laddish booze by now-but it would be comforting to sit there for a bit with the window open and surrounded by his empty clothes. When I put my key in the lock, though, there was a muffled call of surprise, I thought, from within.

Phil and Bill were kneeling face to face on the bed. Bill’s hand rested on Phil’s shoulder, and it looked like some College jerk-off job. Their tilting dicks, alert as orgiasts’ on a Greek vase, withered astonishingly under my expressionless stare. Not for them the witless priapism of Gabriel; but there was enough defiance in their confusion for them not to blabber excuses-not to say anything at all. And I couldn’t think of anything much to say. I know I swallowed and coloured and took in, as if I needed to satisfy myself, the circumstantial details. Certainly there were no signs of passionate haste. Bill’s trousers were neatly folded and his vast smalls were spread like an antimacassar across the back of the chair. I nodded repeatedly and slowly withdrew, closing the door as if not to disturb a sleeper. Before I had reached the top of the stairs I heard a gasped ‘Oh my God’ and a loud frightened laugh.

And so to James’s. By the time I got there my anger, hurt, care were welling up under the frigid discipline I had instinctively assumed. I smeared away stupid tears. Thank heavens at least no crass, unforgettable words had been spoken. ‘Darling, whisky’ was my own first utterance-and I thought, none of your namby-pamby Caribbean aphrodisiac nonsense.

James was eating scrambled eggs standing up and listening to some fathomlessly gloomy music. ‘Bad day, dear?’ he enquired maritally.

‘The last twenty-four hours have actually been quite extraordinarily hideously awful.’

‘Oh, darling.’

‘I thought I was just about managing it until half an hour ago, when I went up to Phil’s room at the hotel-I don’t know why, just on some sentimental whim, I thought I’d put on some of his clothes and lie there for a bit and just be him, you know-he having arranged to go off drinking with some of his appalling friends. Well, they may not be appalling, I’ve never met them. I say, we couldn’t possibly take this music off? It’s driving me insane.’

‘It’s Shostakovich’s viola sonata,’ said James pettishly.

‘Exactly… That’s better. And the drink?’ He poured a generous Bell’s. ‘Dearest-thank you. So I opened the door, to which as you know I have a key, and find Phil in there with old Bill Hawkins, from the Corry, messing around stark naked, etc, etc.’

‘Fucking hell.’

‘I do find it very terrible actually.’ I flopped onto the sofa and gulped at my drink. ‘I mean, I absolutely hate the thought of Phil going with someone else. But one would understand if it were just some spur-of-the-moment fling-some sexy guy staying in the hotel or something. To go with Bill, who is anyway a pal of mine and what? three times his age…’

‘No?’

‘Well, just about.’ I stared at James, through him, as I realised how slow I had been. ‘You know, I should have been on to this. I’ve seen Bill hanging around near the Queensberry before now-and of course I knew he was sweet on Phil, sweet on him before I was. Indeed it was really Bill’s interest in him that got me going, made me see how good he was. And then last week, when I took Phil to the Shaft, I knew something funny was going on. We were sort of horsing around outside the BM and I realised someone was watching us from across the road. I don’t think Phil saw him, but I’m convinced it was Bill.’

‘Kind of creepy, n’est-ce pas?’ said James, wandering off and looking out of the window. He was my only friend but I knew that he would take a kind of wistful satisfaction in things having at last-at last: it was what? two months?-gone awry. ‘This needn’t mean it’s all over, though, surely?’ he said.

I stared some time into my glass. ‘I don’t know. No, it needn’t. It will, I think, mean that whatever’s going on between those two is all over. What you don’t know, and what Bill doesn’t know I know, is that he has already been inside for interfering with young boys.’ But these were the kind of real-life details that never shocked James: it was only on the fantasy level that one got to him. ‘He’ll be pretty scared about all this.’

‘Well, you’re hardly going to shop him to the police, are you?’

‘Ooh, I don’t know,’ I said with a rueful laugh, finishing my drink and getting up to splosh in another half-tumbler full. I walked over and hugged him from behind, resting my chin on his shoulder. ‘It’s like one of those frightful seventeenth-century epitaphs: I’ve had my Will, I’ve had my Fill, and now they’ve sent in my Bill. Or something like that.’

‘Do you want something to eat?’

‘I think I’ll just stick on the booze, actually. Darling, can I stay here tonight? I just don’t fancy going home-and I’m sure he’ll try and ring up and it will all be too appalling.’

‘Yes, of course you can.’ I sensed his nervous pleasure at the certainty of companionship. He turned round in my arms and gave me a tight squeeze and a kiss on the blunted bridge of my nose.

‘There’s actually something in a way much more awful that I’ve just found out,’ I began, sliding off and taking to an armchair. ‘It all came up in old Nantwich’s papers, you know? He led me on a long way and then he sprang his journal on me for 1954, from which it emerged, in brief, that he’d been sent to gaol for six months for soliciting and I think conspiracy to commit indecent acts, I’m not sure about all that. As if that wasn’t hideous enough it turns out that the person behind it all-there was a whole sort of gay pogrom apparently-was my grandfather. When he was Director of Public Persecutions.’

James sank to the chair opposite me and looked at me intently. ‘Lord B,’ he said, quietly and calculatingly.

‘Lord B, as you say. Did you know anything about this? Of course it just fucks up absolutely everything, it’s soured everything. It seems Lord B, as he was yet to become, was so successful in cleaning up the perves that he was whisked off to the Upper House. His whole career was made by it.’ We held each other’s eye. ‘Of course it turns out that when Charles was in gaol he met up with Bill Hawkins, doing his aforementioned stretch for being in love with a kid. He was a kid himself at the time, needless to say. And there are all sorts of other connections with people I know. It’s all come horrifically at the same time. And we’re only kids ourselves,’ I huffed.

James felt entitled to draw on professional language. ‘I guess if those things are building up and building up, when they erupt there will be a bit of a mess. There will be pockmarks,’ he seventeenth-centurily went on.

I got him to play me some more positive music, some courtly, phlegmatic Haydn; and I turned the conversation round artificially to more general subjects. We watched a mirthless comedy on the television from beginning to end. It was only when we were in bed, and I was now dry-throated and woozy-headed from the drink, that I came back to the subject.

‘It’s the way we didn’t know about it,’ I murmured. ‘The gruesome incongruity of it.’

‘Isn’t there a kind of blind spot,’ James said, ‘for that period just before one was born? One knows about the Second World War, one knows about Suez, I suppose, but what people were actually getting up to in those years… There’s an empty, motiveless space until one appears on the scene. What do you know about your own family anyway? They’re such secretive organisms, I can’t be doing with them.’

I felt his erection-the idiot emblem of the day-yearning against my thigh, and waited resignedly as his hands wandered down towards my own. It was a curious experience, for while he stroked he seemed instinctively to be feeling for other symptoms, exercising that slight pressure which discovers a tender kidney or a swollen gland. He was rather fastidious when he reached his objective too.

I turned on my front, and he gave a little humorous sigh and tipped his forehead against mine while I told him of a thing that happened on the train. It was while I was coming to see him and had taken place just in front of me, an ordinary thing and yet calmly beyond the turmoil of my own mood, in fact wonderfully self-sufficient and entire. Among the crowd that got on at Tottenham Court Road were a black couple with a baby: they took the two places against the glass partition, so that the man and I sat-as I had done with Gabriel shortly before-knee to knee. Once he had looked at me politely as I shifted to make room for him he had no interest in me at all-and I hardly took notice of him. His wife held the impassive and very young child in her arms: despite the heat it was dressed in a quilted one-piece suit, but with the hood back. My thoughts were all elsewhere, though I saw the man, about thirty, I suppose, lean over the baby’s open flawless face, and smile down on it, out of pure pleasure and love. His fingertips moved from his own softly bearded lips and gently stroked and almost held within their span his child’s lolling wispy head. His other hand lay loosely in his lap, and it took me a while to see that he was hiding and coaxing-yes-a hard-on in his respectable grey slacks. I was not aroused by this; but did I dwindle, if only for a moment, in the face of their glowing, fertile closeness? I felt perhaps I did.

Last thing of all before sleep we muttered about the charge against James, though he was shy of my ruse not only to get him off but to bring Colin down. He had pleaded not guilty to the magistrate on the morning after his arrest, and so gained time, the case being deferred. He had a good lawyer, one of his Holland Park patients, who was gay himself and knew how to fight and what such fights could mean if lost. We wondered if it depended on whether the court would accept works of art as evidence; and besides, whether they would accept that Staines’s photographs were works of art. It was a shaky idea, and I fell asleep and dreamed that they confiscated all Staines’s pictures and sent him to gaol instead. When I woke before dawn, parched and aching, I felt lost. I decided that if necessary, and if it might save James, I would testify in court to what I had done with Colin-and so perhaps do something, though distant and symbolic, for Charles, and for Lord B’s other victims. I had that most oppressive of feelings-that some test was looming.

James was off to work early, so I walked home through the awakening streets. I moped about in the flat, now furious with Phil, now reproachful, and held a hundred imaginary conversations with him, in which I would often speak out loud-‘What do you mean, you did it out of pity?’, ‘How could you imagine that I wouldn’t find out?’, ‘I’ve never heard anything so absurd in my life…’ and on and on. But when the phone rang I was terrified to answer it and embroil myself in the meanness and misery of arguments. I sat on the bed looking at it and summoning my resolve; but when I did pick up the receiver it was someone I had been at Winchester with-one of those City youngsters-informing me of the memorial service for a not-much-liked don.

I was apprehensive about going to the Corry too, but after a day of fretting, squalid inactivity, I decided to take the chance. It was Phil and Bill who were the naughty ones and I refused to be cowed by them further. My mood was all torn, and had not been helped by my finding, when I was in the bath, a single dark hair (too dark to be mine) trapped on the soap in a long looped wiggle like Corporal Trim’s flourish with his stick. It wouldn’t just wipe off, and I had to scratch at it and gouge at the soap with a fingernail to get rid of it, all knotted up as I was with revulsion and pathos. It was the most thoughtlessly intimate of all the reminders of Phil in the flat-his trainers, his throw-away razors, his bits of paper-insisting it could hardly be over. The Corry too, of course, was running with the idea of him-but he was nowhere to be seen, and Nigel, who would have noticed, assured me he had not been in the pool. I looked abruptly into the weights room, but Bill’s worried features were not to be made out either.

I did, however, run into Charles on my way out. He was sitting in the melancholy cafeteria, looking through the plate-glass windows at the gym-floor below. He was finding it difficult to drink hot coffee from his flimsy plastic beaker. I sat down heavily opposite him.

‘Fascinating athlete, that young man down there,’ he said.

I followed his gaze to the shirtless figure dancing at the punchbag. ‘Yes, that’s Maurice. He’s a dream, isn’t he. Not, however, musical.’

‘Quite so, quite so. I must get him a job.’

‘I think you’ll find he’s got one already,’ I said with a little fading snigger. Charles was looking at me closely, and I looked down, and then away again to Maurice, cutting and jabbing in wonderful ignorance of his spectators and their quandary.

‘I’ve made a mess of things, haven’t I,’ said Charles.

I shook my head. ‘You’ve made a mess of things! Dear Charles. I’ve been thinking about this all the time but I still don’t know what to say. But you have not made a mess of anything. Except, of course, that I can’t do the book.’

‘You could.’

‘I can’t.’

He followed Maurice again. ‘You’ve no idea of the quite extraordinary, powerful and-my dear-entirely kind conviction of rightness I had when I discovered who you were. It was such a perfect idea; too perfect perhaps to be enacted by decent human beings. Good punching! Marvellous boy! But perhaps, when your grandfather… is dead-and I’m dead-you’ll come round to it.’

‘All I could write now,’ I said, ‘would be a book about why I couldn’t write the book.’ I shrugged. ‘I suppose there are enough unwritten books of that kind to make that of some interest.’

Charles was not following me. ‘It was naughty to keep back so much-though I kept thinking you would be bound to learn about all that from other people. I felt sure our friend Bill, for instance, would spill the beans.’

‘Bill’s a pretty careful, secretive character,’ I said, my benign and contemptuous views of him appearing to me suddenly at the same time.

‘We’ll still be the most terrific friends, won’t we? I mean, it has been worth it, even if, you know…’

‘Of course it has.’ I didn’t want to get caught up in all this today. ‘What brought you into the Club?’

‘Oh-a meeting. Very dull, I’m afraid. And you’ve been swimming, I imagine. Gosh how I envy you,’ he unnaturally rushed on. ‘There’s nothing like it, is there? It’s one’s real element. It was a thing one missed most frightfully inside-you know.’

‘Yes.’

‘I must say this coffee’s quite revolting. I must get them to do something about it. Maurice you say? I’ve seen him before, of course. And now I think I’d better shuffle home. You couldn’t, my dear…?’

I gave him my arm, and we made our way slowly up to the hall. I knew that, although he came to meetings and could get the coffee changed, he valued being seen with some young thing more, as a sign that he belonged and was wanted. I felt my familiar bafflement with him, and that our meeting had not been at all as I hoped. It was so brief and profitless.

‘You won’t kind of believe me when I say this,’ he began. ‘But old Ronnie Staines has found something most frightfully interesting. Not what you’re thinking; indeed quite the opposite, by all accounts. I’m going to go and see it tomorrow after lunch. Ronnie said actually he wondered if you would come. And I think-I daren’t tell you more-that you should bring that friend of yours you’ve told me about, the Prancing Nigger buff, you know.’

‘It’s an invitation I could normally resist-but Ronnie has promised me some pictures, which I must go soon to collect. I suppose I could do it all at once.’ It was typical of my friendship with Charles that I told him nothing about what really mattered to me while he had laid himself bare, systematically, decade by decade. ‘I was going to mention it to you: my friend James, the Firbank buff, has got into a bit of trouble with the law, picked up by a policeman who just happens to be one of Ronald’s porno models. I don’t know, I thought it might be useful to get hold of the photos.’

Charles absorbed this information with the narrowed eyes and thoughtful nod of someone beyond surprise at human duplicity; but he said nothing.

‘So I will come. But honestly Charles, I’m not on for any more bellboys-get-it-up-the-bum stuff. I’ve had it up to here with all that lately. If not to here.’

‘I promise you, my dear,’ he said, with cloying candour.

James had expressed an interest in Staines, and a dirty-minded and vengeful interest in the pictures of Colin: I liked him in that mood, when he got rid of his selfless wretchedness and we could drunkenly slag people off together. I knew he would be ready to visit the photographer’s house.

There was no word from Phil that night. I was in a tense, vacant condition, but I drank a bottle of wine, and managed to sleep. Dreamlife was wildly disturbed, however. There was a barely remembered sequence in which I met Taha, who was a very old but beautiful man, and began to interview him about Charles and their life together. And there was another, more vivid, in which Phil and Bill were going off on holiday. They were loading up the roofrack on my old Fiat with tentpoles and buckets and spades, and standing about in the road with various other things they had brought from my flat. I wanted to help but kept getting in the way. ‘Be careful where you put that,’ I said. ‘Don’t forget about the blind spot.’ Phil was already in tiny swimming-trunks and Bill gave him a saucy slap on the rear, leaving a large oily handprint. Across the top of the windscreen the sticker read ‘PHIL and BILL’. It was funny, I thought, as I came round, how you never did see cars saying ‘GARY and CHRIS’ or ‘LANCE and DEREK’. They would probably have got smashed up.

James came to lunch with me, and I had taken special care to stuff some aubergines and make a bitter and original little salad. I felt something of that homely, maternal impulse which would occasionally surface in me at times of strain. One could potter pathetically with one’s chicory and watercress and enjoy an almost creative feeling. James, of course, had been hard at work for hours, and I thought what a great narcotic a job could be; and then one earned one’s own money.

‘How are you getting on?’ he asked.

‘I feel pretty helpless. I thought it was a good thing there had been no sordid row or anything, but one would like some kind of contact. It’s so stupid. I don’t know what’s going on. Why doesn’t the little fucker ring me? I feel furious for a while, and then-well, I love him so much. I want to be with him again. And then at other times I feel like a sort of Pantaloon figure, who’s been hoodwinked. Actually I don’t see how any of us can do anything without a certain loss of dignity.’

‘You could just go round to the hotel.’

‘What, and find them frigging away again? I’m not into that.’

‘I thought you thought it couldn’t possibly still be going on.’

I opened the oven door and shoved my hands into the linked asbestos pockets of the oven-gloves, slapping them together a few times as if I were a lunatic in some restraining garment. A good garlicky smell blossomed. ‘I don’t honestly believe they can be having an affair,’ I said carefully. ‘On the other hand, I do believe that the heart, and more particularly the willy, have some very strange ways. It’s just possible,’ I allowed as I squatted down, ‘that a handsome eighteen-year-old could prefer a waddling fifty-year-old to someone as beautiful and well-endowed as me.’

James embarrassedly ruffled the top of my head, but I shouted ‘Out of the way!’ as I made for the table. The oven-gloves were never as efficient as they should have been.

After lunch we popped into James’s Mini and made the two-minute journey over the avenue to Staines’s house. These were the very streets where little Rupert had seen Arthur and Harold at their miserable business: I looked out for them, in a fairly ridiculous and superstitious way. I wanted to save Arthur. At least, I think that’s what I wanted to do to him. It was a strange conviction I had, that I could somehow make these boys’ lives better, as by a kind of patronage-especially as it never worked out that way.

Staines was on his very best behaviour, though it didn’t fool me. One could perceive his slight polite disappointment that James was not more beautiful. The ego was smartly suited, buttoned up, and though at any moment I expected some rude eruption, a comic photographer’s surprise the split second before the flash, the most explosive thing about him was the pink of his socks. Charles was already there, glass in hand, at the end of lunch, and I introduced him to James, whose enthusiasm was precisely modulated to disguise the intimate knowledge he had of him from me. We strolled through at Charles’s pace into the studio, and I heard him saying to James: ‘So you’re the Firbank fellow, eh? I knew him, of course-though not well, not well…’

Staines let down a roll of white paper from the ceiling and had us sit in a row in front of the projector on its high table. As he turned the main lights out and began to speak I was reminded strongly of those scenes, early on in thrillers, when the agent is briefed and shown film clips of leading suspects, taken largely from the back of moving cars.

‘I’m going to show you a short piece of film which I believe will interest you all. It’s part of a whole lot of home-movie stuff I’ve just bought at Christie’s. Most of it’s too madly dull for words-you know, gay young things arsing around with no shame. I just thought it might be fun, and give me some sort of ideas for some Twenties and Thirties-er-pictures I want to make. And then in amongst it there was this fragment-quite exceptional…’

The bright white square at which we had been looking was convulsed with running black and grey, and white flashes. The first thing we could make out was a brief and static view of a lake with steep woods around it. The light in the picture was strangely bleak, and a hundred little lines ran up and down the screen. Even so there was something mysterious about that seemingly black circle of water. Remembered books suggested it was an extinct volcano. ‘Aha,’ said Charles, very smugly. The camera angle jumped to include, possibly by mistake, the bonnet of an early-looking motorcar.

‘You know where we are, Charles,’ said Staines from behind the purring projector.

‘Oh yes-Lake Nemi. Unmistakable.’

There was then a shot held unnecessarily long, of a tin sign saying ‘Genzano-Città Infiorita’.

‘I think we all know where we are now,’ Staines added patly. An old peasant in a hat and carrying a stick as tall as himself limped into view, looking troublesome.

The following sequences took place presumably in the precipitous streets of Genzano. Here was the car again, drawn up outside what might have been the town’s smartest café. The citizens, some aware of the camera, some at least showing no awareness, went stiffly up and down the pavement, turning flickering smiles or frowns. Some of them were getting up from the tables outside under the awning, couples bustling off, while others, with raising of hats, went into the absolute blackness of the interior. One side of the picture was then obscured by a man’s back. He half-turned and wavered in evident response to the cameraman’s protest, and shuffled away to the left. Then he reappeared full-length further off, and took up a position against the car, full of Chaplinesque fidgets, crossing his arms, cocking an ankle on the running-board, turning his head in ladylike parody from side to side.

It clearly wasn’t Charles, though even a sensible person, I knew, might act up like this when a camera was running. It was a taller but thinner man. Moreover it was a bona fide queen. He had on elegant, unEnglish light suiting, with a bow-tie and a broad-brimmed straw hat which gave him a sweetly arcadian character, at the same time as shadowing his face. Then, overcome with embarrassment, he walked rapidly towards the camera, loomed in with peculiar closeness for a couple of seconds, high cheekbones, a long curved nose, funny little mouth.

James was gripping my arm. ‘It’s Ronald Firbank,’ he said.

‘I don’t think there can be any doubt, do you?’ said Staines.

‘That’s certainly him,’ pronounced Charles.

‘If it’s what I think it is,’ said James, ‘it must be at the very end of his life.’ And in the next little bit he was laughing and suddenly it was going wrong: he had started to cough and cough, doubling up, his long hand gestured the camera away.

I understood then, in the next scene, why he looked so frail, had the air of a man nonetheless confronting a threat. He was tackling a steep cobbled hill at the top of which a church was outlined in the late afternoon sun. His whole walk was anyway extraordinary, not best calculated for getting from one place to another, a business of undulating hands and picked tiny steps, and yet obviously inescapable: that was how he walked. A couple of small children at the roadside watched him pass and then started to follow him. One understood their sense that anything so conspicuous must be done deliberately, as an entertainment or as the origin of a procession. A taller boy, a ten-year-old in ragged clothes, joined them, imitating the novelist’s walk. The little ones, emboldened, skipped round him, running ahead as well to see him coming on, openly curious, asking questions, it seemed, of two or three syllables. The hectic jerkiness of the film lent them all a fantastical twitching energy. Then Firbank’s hand went into his pocket and flung backwards a scatter of nickel coins.

Unsurprisingly the next scene showed the crowd about twenty strong. They were reaching the brow of the hill, capering around, others almost marching, but in a volatile Firbankian way, like some primitive disco dance. They were calling and waving their hands, and then chanting something together-a name, an epithet. The camera, with a certain artistic flair, concentrated on the youngsters: tots and urchins with a droll seriousness to them, rowdy pubescent boys bursting out of children’s clothes, and others, with their wide-eyed Italian faces, gazing into the lens as they half-strode, half-loitered with the crowd, plucking at the sleeve of the heart.

And yet it was the mood which fascinated. This marionette of a man, on his last legs, had been picked on by the crowd, yet as they mobbed him they seemed somehow to be celebrating him. He became perhaps for a moment, what he must always have wanted to be, an entertainer. The children’s expressions showed that profoundly true, unthinking mixture of cruelty and affection. There was fear in their mockery, yet the figure at the heart of their charivari took on the likeness not only of a clown, but of a patron saint. It was a rough impromptu kind of triumph.

There was a brief tableau in which order had been more or less imposed. The children gathered round Firbank and glared and grinned at the camera; Firbank flapped his hat in his hand and looked hot and bothered. A little girl tugged at his trousers and he pulled his pocket inside-out with a drooping and muffled gesture to say he had no more to give. He smiled too, but showed that he wished it was all over: it was a tiring situation for so childless and singular a man. In the final few seconds he was walking away by himself: there was something decisive and businesslike about him; in spite of everything he was in a hurry, he had work to do. Then a fat boatered man and a woman with a parasol were parading past a tent with the word STEWARD on it. ‘Ah, that’s the end of our film,’ said Staines, and put out the projector’s bulb. We were in virtual darkness for several seconds, and James squeezed my hand and I felt his charge of emotion.

‘It’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen,’ he said, in the way that one does to a host, but he meant it.

‘Quite a find, eh?’ Staines agreed, putting on the light. ‘I want to turn it into a little feature, with a commentary perhaps by you, Mr Brooke, if you would care to.’

‘I’ve got some ideas about it,’ said James.

‘I’ve been to Genzano, of course,’ muttered Charles, who did not want to be left out. ‘They have this festival of flowers, and the main street is carpeted with… er… with flowers.’

‘Very Firbankian,’ I put in my obvious bit.

‘You mean, on another day,’ said James, ‘if it only had been another day, we would have seen the flowers beneath his feet.’

Chatter about this went on, and I asked Staines surreptitiously about the Colin pictures. ‘Oh, I’d forgotten,’ he said, hand raised chidingly to brow. ‘Will I ever be able to find them?’

‘Is it a frightful bore?’ I said courteously. ‘I just thought as I was here, and you had kindly said…’

‘Oh, I know. But there’s no system, as you doubtless recall.’

‘Actually I think I can remember roughly where they were.’

He allowed me to take out the huge print drawer that Phil (ouch!) and I had shuffled through weeks before. ‘You’re welcome to look,’ said Staines, as if he held out little hope.

But it was the right place. I recognised the Mayfair portraits, the louche studies of Bobby-Bobby who today was nowhere to be seen, banished doubtless under the good behaviour clause-and all the randomness of it was right to me, as that was how it had been before. But when I got to the bottom, and peeled back the last piece of protective tissue, I had to acknowledge that none of the pictures of Colin, those artfully lewd compositions, was there. I searched the drawers above and below as well, but with dwindling hope. Charles called out, ‘What’s he looking for?’ and when Staines replied, ‘I promised him some photographs of a boy called Colin, but I just don’t know where they are,’ I knew he was lying.

‘Colin?’ said Charles. ‘Oh, I don’t think I know that one. Do I know that one?’

I nodded at him to signal that this was the boy I had told him about, the thing that mattered to me; but he was quite inscrutable, full of diplomatic ignorance. Half an hour later, when we shook hands and parted, he wouldn’t meet my eye.

‘Well, that was a mixed success,’ I said to James, as he climbed down into his car, and I leant over the open door.

‘Don’t worry about the Colin thing,’ he said.

I drummed on the roof. ‘I want to get him! I don’t seem to have anything else to do.’

‘Do you want a lift?’

‘No, I’m going home. Then I’m going to have a swim: one must keep the body if not the soul together.’

‘See you soon.’

‘See you my darling.’

It was very quiet at the Corry, when I arrived mid-afternoon. The few people there looked at each other with considerate curiosity rather than rivalry. There was a sense of various different routines equably overlapping. There were several old boys, one or two perhaps even of Charles’s age, and doubtless all with their own story, strange and yet oddly comparable, to tell. And going into the showers I saw a suntanned young lad in pale blue trunks that I rather liked the look of.