The Swimming-Pool Library

3

I did so regret it was the Central Line I used most. I couldn’t get any kind of purchase on it. It had neither the old-fashioned openair quality of the District Line, where rain misted the tracks as one waited, nor the grimy profundity of the Northern Line, nor the Piccadilly’s ingenious, civilised connexiveness. For much of its length it was a great bleak drain, and though some of its stops-Holland Park, St Paul’s, Bethnal Green-were historic enough, they were offset on my daily journeys by the ringing emptiness of Lancaster Gate and Marble Arch, and the trash and racket of Tottenham Court Road, where I got out. Somewhere, I knew, the line had its ghost stations, but I had given up looking out for their unlit platforms and perhaps, in a flash from the rails, the signboards and good-humoured advertisements of an abandoned decade.

I had been waiting now at Holland Park for a long time. I was far too familiar with its typical social mix: girls with pearls and pink stockings, some arrogant-looking Italian youths and a grand, pouchy old couple were also waiting, though the train they would get into would be quite heavily peopled with blacks and Indians coming in from Acton to the West End. That was the saving grace of the Central Line, the way that beyond Shepherd’s Bush and Liverpool Street, it veered off at either end to outlying towns to the north. I stood for a minute or more with my toes over the platform’s edge, looking down into the concrete gully where a whole family of nervous, sooty little mice shot back and forth as if themselves operated by electricity. Then, thinking again about the abolished stations at the British Museum and Wood Green, I wandered along and looked, tourist-like, at the Underground map. It was a clever piece of work, all the lines being made to run either up and down, from left to right, or at forty-five degrees, so that the whole thing became a set of dissolving and interpenetrating parallelograms. It was perhaps only of that very stretch of the Central Line which I always travelled that its fastidious rectilinearity gave a true picture: from Shepherd’s Bush to Liverpool Street the line had that Roman straightness which I so admired above ground and which below contributed to the great speed the trains sometimes got up. In rush-hour congestion though, the trains collected behind each other, and there would be long, numbing waits in the tunnels. Then I hated the Underground.

My fondness for it was anyway somewhat forced, and my concern with the smaller details of its history and performance had been worked up artificially to give it some faint aesthetic interest after I had been banned from driving. (Unhappily, I had had a few too many glasses of Pimm’s when I was caught by my blind spot, twitching out to overtake and smacking into a little old car that was trundling past me, invisible in either of my mirrors… My mother was now using my Lancia for her forays into Fordingbridge and for her occasional journeys up to London from the ranch in Hants.) So I made the best of the Tube, and found it often sexy and strange, like a gigantic game of chance, in which one got jammed up against many queer kinds of person. Or it was a sort of Edward Burra scene, all hats and buttocks and seaside postcard lewdery. Whatever, one always had to try and see the potential in it.

Before going to the Corry I cut down through Soho Square to a cinema in Frith Street. It wasn’t so much to see a film as to sit in a dark, anonymous place and do dark, anonymous things. Arthur and I had got wrecked on tequila the night before, the bottled romance of Mexico, as it described itself. The evenings had been getting longer lately, in two senses, and we both needed a little help with our own bottled romance. As it was he had become brash and giggly and fallen into an open-mouthed, stertorous sleep during the first five minutes of the Royal Command Performance. Deeply drunk myself, I roamed off to bed, and the next morning, when I woke groaning and groping at nine, dimly remembered looking at myself with immense self-satisfaction in the hall mirror and giving a barely prophetic rendition of ‘Nessun dorma’ seven or eight times.

As always when I had a bad hangover I felt criminally randy, but Arthur, whom I found still lying on the sitting-room floor, his chin sticky with a dozer’s saliva, spent the morning alternately shitting and vomiting (which was painful for him) and walking very slowly from one item of furniture to another, his lower lip drooping and with a funny look about him which I realised was his equivalent of pallor.

Though it was not much fun, this hangover created a minor drama in our life and we reacted to it with disbelieving shakings of the head, exaggerated winces and a vocabulary honed down to ‘man’, ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ produced in gasps or cracked whispers. Then Arthur, with a comical ungainliness, as if he were running a three-legged race with an invisible partner, would canter off to the lavatory once more. Later I got him to go to bed and went out, still quite speedy from the drink and in the mood for what sex-club owners call an experience.

The Brutus Cinema occupied the basement of one of those Soho houses which, above ground-floor level, maintain their beautiful Caroline fenestration, and seemed a kind of emblem of gay life (the piano nobile elegant above the squalid, jolly soussol) in the far-off spring of 1983. One entered from the street by pushing back the dirty red curtain in the doorway beside an unlettered shop window, painted over white but with a stencil of Michelangelo’s David stuck in the middle. This tussle with the curtain-one never knew whether to shoulder it aside to the right or the left, and often tangled with another punter coming out-seemed a symbolic act, done in the sight of passers-by, and always gave me a little jab of pride. Inside was a small front room, the walls bearing porn-mags on racks, and the glossy boxes of videos for sale; and there were advertisements for clubs and cures. In a locked case by the counter leather underwear was displayed, with cock-rings, face masks, chains and the whole gamut of dildoes from pubertal pink fingers to mighty black jobs, two feet long and as thick as a fist.

As I entered, the spotty Glaswegian attendant was getting stuck into a helping of fish and chips, and the room stank of grease and vinegar. I idled for a minute and flicked through some mags. These were really dog-eared browsers, thumbed through time and again by those rent-boys who had the blessing of the management and waited there for pick-ups; curiously incredible stations of sexual intercourse, whose moving versions, or something similar, could be seen downstairs. I looked at the theatrical expressions of ecstasy without interest. The attendant had a small television behind the counter which was a monitor for the films being shown in the cinema; but as there was no one else in the shop he had broken the endless circuit of video sex and was watching a real TV programme instead. He sat there stuffing chips and oozing batter-covered sections of flaky white cod into his mouth, his short-sighted attention rapt by the screen, as if he had been a teenaged boy getting his first sight of a porn film. I sidled along and looked over his shoulder; it was a nature programme, and contained some virtuoso footage shot inside a termite colony. First we saw the long, questing snout of the ant-eater outside, and then its brutal, razor-sharp claws cutting their way in. Back inside, perched by a fibre-optic miracle at a junction of tunnels which looked like the triforium of some Gaudí church, we saw the freakishly extensile tongue of the ant-eater come flicking towards us, cleaning the fleeing termites off the wall.

It was one of the most astonishing pieces of film I had ever seen, and I felt a thrill at the violent intrusion as well as dismay at the smashing of something so strange and intricate; I was disappointed when the attendant, realising I was there and perhaps in need of encouragement, tapped a button and transformed the picture into the relative banality of American college boys sticking their cocks up each other’s assholes.

‘Cinema, sir?’ he said. ‘We’ve got some really hot-core hard films…’ His heart wasn’t in it so I paid him my fiver and left him to the wonderful world of nature.

I went down the stairs, lit by one gloomy red-painted bulb. The cinema itself was a small cellar room, the squalor of which was only fully apparent at the desolating moment in the early hours when the show ended for the night and the lights were suddenly switched on, revealing the bare, damp-stained walls, the rubbish on the floor, and the remaining audience, either asleep or doing things best covered by darkness. It had perhaps ten tiers of seats, salvaged from the refurbishment of some bona fide picture house: some lacked arms, which helped patrons get to know each other, and one lacked a seat, and was the repeated cause of embarrassment to diffident people, blinded by the dark, who chose it as the first empty place to hand and sat down heavily on the floor instead.

I had not been there for months and was struck again by its character: pushing open the door I felt it weigh on sight, smell and hearing. The smell was smoke and sweat, a stale, male odour tartishly overlaid with a cheap lemon-scented air-freshener like a taxi and dusted from time to time with a trace of Trouble for Men. The sound was the laid-back aphrodisiac pop music which, as the films had no sound-track, played continuously and repetitively to enhance the mood and cover the quieter noises made by the customers. The look of the place changed in the first minute or so, as I waited just inside the door for my eyes to accustom themselves to the near dark. The only light came from the small screen, and from a dim yellow ‘Fire Exit’ sign. I had once taken this exit, which led to a fetid back staircase with a locked door at the top. Smoke thickened the air and hung in the projector’s beam.

It was important to sit near the back, where it was darker and more went on, but also essential to avoid the attentions of truly gruesome people. Slightly encumbered with my bag I moved into a row empty except for a heavy businessman at the far end. It was not a very good house, so I settled down to watch and wait. Occasionally cigarettes were lit and the men shifted in their seats and looked around; the mood faltered between tension and lethargy.

The college boys were followed by a brief, gloomy fragment of film involving older, moustachioed types, one of them virtually bald. This broke off suddenly, and without preamble another film, very cheery and outdoors, was under way. As always with these films, though I relished the gross abundance of their later episodes, it was the introductory scenes, buoyant with expectation, the men on the street or the beach, killing time, pumping iron, still awaiting the transformation our fantasy would demand of them, that I found the most touching.

Now, for instance, we were in a farmyard. A golden-haired boy in old blue jeans and a white vest was leaning in the sun against a barn door, one foot raised behind him. A close-up admired him frowning against the sun, a straw jerking between his lips. Slowly we travelled down, lingering where his hand brushed across his nipples which showed hard through his vest, lingering again at his loose but promising crotch. On the other side of the yard, a second boy, also blond, was shifting bags of fertiliser. We watched his shirtless muscular torso straining as he lifted the bags on to his shoulder, traced the sweat running down his neck and back, got a load of his chunky denim-clad ass as he bent over. The eyes of the two boys met; one close-up and then another suggested curiosity and lust. In what seemed to be very slightly slow motion the shirtless boy ambled across to the other. They stood close together, both extremely beautiful, perhaps eighteen or nineteen years of age. Their lips moved, they spoke and smiled, but as the film had no sound-track, and we heard only the cinema’s throbbing, washing music, they communicated in a dreamlike silence, or as if watched from out of earshot through binoculars. The picture was irradiated with sunlight and, being fractionally out of focus, blurred the boys’ smooth outlines into a blond nimbus. The one in the vest appeared to put a question to the other, they turned aside and were swallowed up into the darkness of the barn.

Where did they get them from, I wondered, these boys more wonderful than almost everything one came across in real life? And I remembered reading somewhere that a Californian talentspotter had photographic records of three thousand or more of them ranging back over twenty or thirty years and that a youngster, after a session in the studio, mooching through the files, had found pictures of his own father, posed long before.

In the meantime there were other arrivals at the cinema, though it was difficult to make them out; while the sunlit introduction had brightened up the room and cast its aura over the scattered audience in the forward rows, the sex scenes within the barn were enacted in comparative gloom, allowing the viewers a secretive darkness. I tugged my half-hard cock out through my fly and stroked it casually.

One new entrant tottered to the deserted front row, which in this tiny space was only a few feet from the screen. There was a rustle of papers, and I could see him in silhouette remove his coat, fold it neatly and place it on the seat next to that in which he then sat down. The rustling recurred intermittently, and I guessed he must be a man I’d seen at the Brutus the very first time I went there, a spry little chap of sixty-five or so who, like a schoolgirl taken to a romantic U picture, sat entranced by the movies and worked his way through a bag of boiled sweets as the action unfolded. A fiver from his pension, perhaps, and 30p for the humbugs, might be set aside weekly for this little outing. How he must look forward to it! His was a complete and innocent absorption in the fantasy world on screen. Could he look back to a time when he had behaved like these glowing, thoughtless teenagers, who were now locked together sucking on each other’s cocks in the hay? Or was this the image of a new society we had made, where every desire could find its gratification?

The old man was happy with his cough-drops, but I wanted some other oral pleasure (the Winchester slang ‘suction’, meaning sweets, I realised was the comprehensive term). Not, however, from the person who came scouting up to the rear rows now, one of the plump, bespectacled Chinese youths who, with day-return businessmen and quite distinguished Oxbridge dons, made a haunt of places like this, hopping hopefully from row to row, so persistent that they were inevitably, from time to time, successful.

The man on the end of the row had to shift, and I realised I was to be the next recipient of Eastern approaches. The boy sat down next to me, and though I carried on looking at the screen and laid my hand across my cock, I was aware that he was staring at me intently to try and make out my face in the darkness, and I felt his breath on my cheek. Then there was the pressure of his shoulder against mine. I gathered myself emphatically, and leant across into the empty place on the other side. He sprawled rather, with his legs wide apart, one of them straying into my space and pressing against my thigh.

‘Leave off, will you,’ I whispered, thinking that a matter-of-fact request would do the trick. At the same time I crossed my legs, squashing my balls uncomfortably, to emphasise that I was not available. The sack-lifting boy was now sliding his finger up the other one’s ass, spitting on his big, blunt cock and preparing for the inevitable penetration. As he pressed its head against the boy’s glistening sphincter, which virtually filled the screen in lurid close-up, I felt an arm go along the back of the seat and a moment later a hand descend unfalteringly on my dick. I didn’t move but, sensing the power that speech had in this cryptic gathering, I said loudly and firmly: ‘If you come anywhere near me again I’ll break your neck.’ A couple of people looked round, there was an ‘Oooh’ from the other side of the room, spoken in a uniquely homosexual tone of bored outrage, the tentacles withdrew, and after a few moments, compatible perhaps with some fantastic notion of the preservation of dignity, the advancer retreated, earning a curse from the man at the end of the row, who was forced to get up again, attempting to conceal his erection as he did so.

Exhilarated by my control of the situation, I spread myself again; the boy duly came over the other’s face, and very pretty it looked, the blobs and strings of spunk smeared over his eyelids, nose, and thick half-opened lips. Then, abruptly, it was another film. Half a dozen boys entered a locker-room, and at just the same moment the door from the stairs opened and something came in that looked, in the deep shadow, as if it might be nice. It was a sporty-looking boy with, evidently, a bag. He was not sure what to do, so I bent my telepathic powers on him. The poor creature struggled for a moment… but it was hopeless. He stumbled up towards the back, groped past the businessman (I heard him say ‘Sorry’) and sat a seat away from me, putting his bag on the seat between us.

I let a little time elapse and distinctly heard him swallow, as if in lust and amazement, as the boys stripped off and, before we knew where we were, one of them was jacking off in the shower. Something made me certain that it was the first time he had been to a place like this, and I remembered how enchanting it is to see one’s first porn-film. ‘Christ! They’re really doing it,’ I recalled saying to myself, quite impressed by the way the actors seemed genuinely to be having sex for the pleasure of it, and by the blatant innocence of it all.

I then proceeded by a succession of distinct and inexorable moves, shifting into the place between us and at the same time pushing his bag along the floor to where I had been sitting. I sensed some anxiety abour this, but he carried on looking at the screen. Next I slid my arm along the back of his seat, and as he remained immobile I made it as clear as I could in the dark that I had my cock out and was playing with it. Then I leant over him more, and ran my hand over his chest. His heart was racing, and I felt all the tension in his fixed posture between excitement and fear, and knew that I could take control of him. He had on a kind of bomber jacket, and under that a shirt. I let my hand linger at his waist, and admired his hard, ridged stomach, slipping my fingers between his shirt buttons, and running my hand up over his smooth skin. He had beautiful, muscular tits, with small, frosted nipples, quite hairless. My left hand gently rubbed the base of his thick neck; he seemed to have almost a crew-cut and the back of his head was softly bristly. I leant close to him and drooled my tongue up his jaw and into his ear.

At this he could no longer remain impassive. He turned towards me with a gulp, and I felt his fingertips shyly slide on to my knee and shortly after touch my cock. ‘Oh no,’ I think he said under his breath, as he tried to get his hand around it, and then jerked it tentatively a few times. I continued stroking the back of his neck, thinking it might relax him, but he kept on feeling my dick in a very polite sort of way, so I brought pressure to bear, and pushed his head firmly down into my lap. He had to struggle around to get his stocky form into the new position, encumbered by the padded arm between our seats; but once there he took the crown of my cock into his mouth and with me moving his head puppet-like up and down, sucked it after a fashion.

This was all very good and with my hangover I felt it with electric intensity. But I was aware of his reluctance, and let him stop. He was inexpert, and though he was excited, needed help. We sat back for a while, my hand all the time on his shoulder. I loved the nerve with which I’d done all this, and like most random sex it gave me the feeling I could achieve anything I wanted if I were only determined enough. There was now a fairly complicated set-up on screen, with all six boys doing something interesting, and one of them I realised was Kip Parker, a famous tousle-headed blond teen star. I ran my hand between my new friend’s legs and felt his cock kicking against the tightish cotton of his slacks. He helped me take it out, a short, punchy little number, which I went down on and polished off almost at once. God, he must have been ready. After a shocked recuperation he felt for his bag and went out without a word.

I’d had a growing suspicion throughout this sordid but charming little episode, which rose to a near certainty as he opened the door and was caught in a slightly brighter light, that the boy was Phil from the Corry. He had smelt of sweat rather than talcum powder and there was a light stubble on his jaw, so I concluded that if it were Phil he was on his way to rather than from the Club, as I knew he was fastidiously clean, and that he always shaved in the evening before having his shower. I was tempted to follow him at once, to make sure, but I realised it would be easy enough to tell from seeing him later; and besides, a very well-hung kid, who’d already been showing an interest in our activities, moved in to occupy the boy’s former seat, and brought me off epically during the next film, an unthinkably tawdry picture which all took place in a kitchen.

On the train home I carried on reading Valmouth. It was an old grey and white Penguin Classic that James had lent me, the pages stiff and foxed, with a faint smell of lost time. Wet-bottomed wine glasses had left mauve rings over the sketch of the author by Augustus John and the price, 3/6, which appeared in a red square on the cover. Nonetheless, I was enjoined to take especial care of the book, which also contained Prancing Nigger and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli. James had a mania for Firbank, and it was only out of his love for me that he had let me take away this apparently undistinguished old paperback, which bore on its flyleaf the absurd signature ‘O. de V. Green’. James held the average Firbank-lover in contempt, and professed a very serious attitude towards his favourite writer. I had long deferred reading him in the childishly stubborn way that one resists all keen and repeated recommendations, and had imagined him until now to be a supremely frivolous and silly author. I was surprised to find how difficult, witty and relentless he was. The characters were flighty and extravagant in the extreme, but the novel itself was evidently as tough as nails.

I knew I would not begin to grasp it fully until a second or third reading, but what was clear so far was that the inhabitants of the balmy resort of Valmouth found the climate so kind that they lived to an immense age. Lady Parvula de Panzoust (a name I knew already from James’s reapplication of it to a member of the Corry) was hoping to establish some rapport with the virile young David Tooke, a farm boy, and was seeking the help of Mrs Yajñavalkya, a black masseuse, to set up a meeting. ‘He’s awfully choice,’ Mrs Yaj assured the centenarian grande dame. Much of the talk was a kind of highly inflected nonsense, but it gave the unnerving impression that on deeper acquaintance it would all turn out to be packed with fleeting and covert meaning. Mrs Yaj herself spoke in a wonderful black pidgin, prinked out with more exotic turns of phrase. ‘O Allah la Ilaha!’ she reassured the anxious Lady Parvula. ‘Shall I tell you vot de Yajñavalkya device is? Vot it has been dis thousand and thousand ob year? It is bjopti. Bjopti! And vot does bjopti mean? It means discretion. S-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-sh!’ It was such a long ‘Sh!’ that I found myself quietly vocalising it to see what its effect would be.

‘Quiet, Damian,’ the woman opposite me said to her little boy. ‘Gentleman’s trying to read.’

It was about nine when I reached home. The tall uncurtained window at the turn of the stairs still let in just enough of the phosphorescent late dusk to make it unnecessary to turn on a light. I enjoyed a proprietorial secrecy as I walked slowly and silently up, as well as the frisson of bleakness that comes from being in a deserted place as darkness gathers. There was something nostalgic in such spring nights, recalling the dreamy abstraction of punting in the dark, and the sweet tiredness afterwards, returning to rooms with all their windows open, still warm under the eaves.

The door of the flat was slightly ajar, which was unusual. I was inclined to keep it shut as I was (or had been) often the only inhabitant of the house, the businessman in the main floors below being frequently abroad. And I had occasionally witnessed Arthur pushing it to, or checking as he passed through the hall that it was closed. My heart sank as I nudged it open and heard Arthur’s voice, not addressing me-he could not possibly have known I was there-but talking quietly to somebody else. The door of the sitting-room, which was open, hid whatever was going on; the light from that room fell across the further side of the hall.

My first assumption was that he was on the telephone, which would have been reasonable enough except that he had said he hated the phone. For a sickening moment I felt that I was being somehow betrayed, and that when I went out he rang people up and carried on some other existence. A plan was afoot of which I was the dupe; he had not killed anybody at all… Then I heard another voice, just odd syllables, high-it sounded like a young girl. I heard Arthur say ‘Yeah, well I expect he’ll be back here soon.’ I made a noise and went into the room.

‘Will, thank God,’ Arthur said, half rising from the sofa, but encumbered by the heavy breadth of my photograph album, which lay open across his lap and across that of a small boy sitting beside him and leaning over it as if it were a table. It was my nephew Rupert.

Rupert had had longer than me to work out what to say. Even so, he was clearly unsure of the effect he would have. First of all he wanted it to be a lovely surprise: he stared up at me, mouth slightly open, in a spell of silence, while Arthur, too, looked very uncertain. Again I found myself suddenly responsible for people.

‘This is an unexpected pleasure, Roops,’ I said. ‘Have you been showing Arthur the pictures?’ I thought something might be seriously wrong.

‘Yes,’ he said, a little shamefaced. ‘I’ve decided to run away.’

‘That’s jolly exciting,’ I said, going over to the sofa, and lifting up the photograph album. ‘Have you told Mummy where you’ve gone?’ I held the heavy, embossed leather book in my arms, and looked down at him. Arthur caught my eye, frowned and expelled a little puff of air. ‘Blimy, Will,’ he said confidentially.

Rupert was then six years old. From his father he had inherited an intense, practical intelligence, and from his mother, my sister, vanity, self-possession, and the pink and gold Beckwith colouring that Ronald Staines had so admired in me. I had always liked Gavin, a busy, abstracted man, whose mind, even at a dinner party, was still absorbed in the details of Romano-British archaeology, which was his passion and career, and who would have had nothing to do with the way his son now appeared, in knickerbockers and an embroidered jerkin, with a Millais-esque lather of curls, as if about to go bowling a hoop in Kensington Gardens. Philippa had a picturesque and romantic attitude to her children (there was also a little girl, Polly, aged three), and Gavin allowed her a free hand, concentrating his affection for them in sudden bursts of generosity, unannounced treats and impulsive outings which disrupted the life of the picture-book nursery at Ladbroke Grove, and were rightly popular.

‘I left a note,’ Rupert explained, standing up and beginning to walk around the room. ‘I told Mummy not to worry. I’m sure she’ll see that it’s all for the best.’

‘I don’t know, old chap,’ I demurred. ‘I mean, Mummy’s jolly sensible, but it is quite late, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she were getting a bit worried about you. Did you tell her where you were going?’

‘No, of course not. It was a secret. I didn’t even tell Polly. It had to be very very carefully planned.’ He picked up a Harrods carrier-bag. ‘I’ve brought some food,’ he said, tipping out on to the sofa a couple of apples, a pack of six Penguin biscuits and a roughly sawn-off chuck of cold, cooked pork. ‘And I’ve got a map.’ From inside his jerkin he tugged out an A-Z, on the shiny cover of which he had written ‘Rupert Croft-Parker’ with a blue biro in heavy round writing.

I went into the bedroom and rang Philippa. A maid, Spanish by the sound of her, answered the phone; they had a fast turnover of staff, and if I had been Philippa I would have been led by now to ponder why. Almost immediately she came through from another extension.

‘Hello, who is this?’

‘Philippa, it’s me, I’ve got Roops here.’

‘Will, what the hell do you think you’re playing at? Can’t you imagine how worried I’ve been?’

‘I thought you would be-that’s really why I’m phoning…’

‘Is he all right? What’s been going on?’

‘I gather he ran away. Didn’t you see his message?’

‘Of course not, Will, don’t be so bloody silly. He doesn’t leave messages. He’s six years old.’

‘I’m sure I left messages when I was six and I wasn’t nearly so clever as Rupert.’

‘Will, we are talking about my baby.’ (I suppressed recall of the song of that name by the Four Tops.) ‘Look, I’m coming round straight away.’

‘OK. Or give it a minute or two. We haven’t really had a chance for a little chat yet.’ I was aware that Rupert had entered the room.

‘Are you talking to Mummy?’ he said, with a solemn look on his face. I nodded as I carried on listening to Philippa, and winked at him. I sat on the edge of the bed and he came and leant beside me and slipped his arm around my back.

‘You can have a little chat with him any time you like,’ his mother asserted. ‘It’s gone nine o’clock-it’s way past his bedtime. We were supposed to be going to the Salmons for supper-I had to ring and say there was this crisis, we couldn’t come. It’s just ruined everything.’

‘I’ll bring him over if you like,’ I offered, the problem of Arthur and visitors suddenly surfacing in my mind.

‘No, that would take far too long. I’ll come in the car.’ She put down the receiver as I was about to make another suggestion.

‘Is Mummy coming round here?’ asked Rupert, his expression an intriguing transition between petulance and relief.

‘She’ll be round in a minute,’ I confirmed. And it would not be very much more than that. I walked abstractedly towards the door. He trotted round, looking up at me.

‘Was she frightfully cross?’ he asked.

‘I’m afraid she was a bit, old chap.’ I made a plan. ‘Look, you can keep a secret, can’t you?’

‘Of course I can,’ he said, assuming a very responsible air.

‘Well, look. What time was it when you left home?’

‘About six o’clock.’

‘And what did you do then?’

‘First of all I went for a walk. A really long walk, actually, up that very steep path, you know-where the homosexuals go.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ I muttered.

‘And then down to the bottom where we went roller-skating that time. And then all the way round to the top again. And then’ (he raised his arm in the air to designate the main thrust of his campaign) ‘all the way down here. I rang the bell for quite some time, but I could see there was a light on, and at last that African boy came down.’

‘Did you tell him who you were?’

‘Naturally. I told him I had to come in and wait for you.’

‘Well the thing is, love, that that African chap, wants us to keep it a secret that he’s here. So what we’re going to do is hide him away when Mummy comes round, and pretend we’ve never seen him. All right?’

‘Quite all right by me,’ Rupert said. ‘Has he done something wrong, then?’

‘No, no,’ I laughed naturally. ‘But he doesn’t want his mother to know he’s here-just like you, really. So if we don’t tell anybody at all, then she’ll never find out.’

‘Good,’ said Rupert. He was clearly dissatisfied.

We went into the sitting-room. ‘I think it would be better if you stayed in the bedroom, darling,’ I said to Arthur. ‘This child’s mother is coming round. We’ve agreed to keep it all a secret.’ He left the room directly, and I heard him shut the bedroom door. ‘I expect Mummy will be here any moment,’ I said.

My nephew was determined and casual. ‘Can we go on looking at the pictures?’ he asked.

‘All right,’ I agreed. Then another thought struck me. ‘How long were you here before I arrived?’

‘I was here for about twenty minutes-before you arrived.’

‘Perhaps best to pretend to Mummy that I found you on the doorstep. Otherwise she’ll wonder how you got in-or why I didn’t ring her sooner.’

He looked at his large, rather adult watch. ‘Yes, that’s fine,’ he said. We sat down side by side, and I lifted the album on to my knee. It was one of a set in which my grandfather had had all his loose and various collection of snaps, taken over a long life, mounted. He had had more volumes bound than he needed and gave one to me. It had the generous proportions of an Edwardian album, many, many broad dark grey pages, tied in with thick silk cords which knotted at the edge outside, the whole protected with weighty boards covered with green leather, tooled with flowers around the border, and with a pompous but impressive ‘B’ beneath a coronet in the centre.

‘How far did you get?’ I asked, offering to open it halfway through.

‘Let’s start again,’ Rupert urged. We’d once spent an hour looking through this album together, and I had had the impression that he was committing it to memory, working out the connections. It was a sort of book of life to him, and I was the authoritative expounder of its text.

The early part was fairly random, this scion of the family photograph collection being merely the duplicates and duds. There was me with a cap and a brace on my teeth, at my tother; there were Philippa and I in our bathing costumes in Brittany (a windy day by the look of it); me in my shorts in the garden at Marden, my grandfather and my mother in deckchairs behind, looking cross. ‘There’s Great Grandpa, look: I don’t think he was in a very good mood, do you?’ Rupert giggled, and banged his heels against the front of the sofa. ‘Then it’s Winchester.’

‘Hooray!’ cried Rupert, who, though an independent child, was still strongly patriotic about such things as the school from which, one day, he would doubtless run away.

‘Now can you find me in this one?’ I asked. It was my first-year College photograph. I looked along the rows so as not to give him any clues; but I need not have troubled. It was with only a slight diffidence that he brought his finger down on me, standing in the middle of the back row. I looked utterly sweet, short-haired, and rather sad, giving the impression that my mind was on higher things. That this was not the case was made clear by the next photograph, of the swimming team. It was posed by the pool, where the springboard was anchored to the concrete; three boys stood on its landward end so as to make a two-tiered composition. The Matheson Cup, the perfectly hideous schools trophy which we had won that year, was held aloft by Torriano, the boy in the centre of the back row. But the most noticeable thing about the picture was what by then could fairly have been called my manhood. I had on some very sexy white trunks with a red stripe down the side; and I remember how, when the picture went up on school NoBos, with a list for people to sign who wanted a copy (normally not even all the members of the team in question), there was an unprecedented demand, and the trunks themselves, of which I was crazily fond, disappeared from the drying-room overnight and I never saw them again. On my face, rounder and saucier then, there was an expression of almost disturbing complicity.

Rupert’s finger came down, hesitatingly though, on me. ‘That’s you,’ he said. ‘Who’s that?’

‘That’s Eccles,’ I said reflectively, haunted for a second by the already period-looking photograph, in which the faces took on a greater clarity as time went by. The boy’s stocky body and outward-bulging thighs were untypical build for a swimmer, but he used to move with a bucking, concentrated energy. With his sleek black hair, long pointed nose and a smile showing his small, square teeth, he looked impishly young and, with his head tilted slightly to one side, would give, for as long as the picture survived, an impression of unqualified charm.

‘Is he the one that changed his name?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Why did he?’

‘Well, it wasn’t so much him as his father, I suppose, or his grandfather even. He was Jewish, and before the war Jewish people changed their names so that people wouldn’t know. His real name was Ecklendorff.’

‘Why didn’t they want people to know what their name was?’

‘It’s a long story, old boy. I’ll tell you another time.’

‘Yes,’ he frowned, turning the page. It was Oxford now-the matriculation photograph, posed in the stony front quad at Corpus, the pelican on top of the sundial appearing to sit on the head of the lanky, begowned chemist at the centre of the back row. I looked rather anonymous in it and once Rupert had identified me we moved to some colour snaps of a summer picnic at Wytham. There I sat, cross-legged on a rug, shirtless, brown, blue-eyed-perhaps the most beautiful I had ever been or ever would be. ‘That’s you,’ cried Rupert, splodging his forefinger down on my face as if recording his fingerprints for the police. ‘And that’s James! Isn’t he funny?’

‘Yes, isn’t he a scream.’ James had on his panama hat, was quite drunk and had been caught at an unflattering angle (one I had never seen him from in real life), so that he looked lecherously seedy.

‘And is that Robert Carson um Smith?’

‘Smith-Carson, actually, but jolly good all the same.’

‘Was he a homosexual?’

‘Certainly was.’

‘I don’t like him.’

‘No, he wasn’t very nice really. Some people liked him, though. He was great friends with James, you know.’

‘Is James a homosexual, too?’

‘You know perfectly well he is.’

‘Yes, I thought he was, but Mummy said you mustn’t say people were.’

‘You say what you like, sweetheart; as long as it’s true, of course.’

‘Of course. Is he a homosexual as well?’ he chimed on, pointing to the remaining person in the picture, the blazered, boatered man-mountain, Ashley Child, a wealthy American Rhodes scholar whose birthday, as far as I could remember, we had been celebrating.

‘A bit hard to say, I’m afraid. I should think so, though.’

‘I mean,’ Rupert looked up at me cogitatively, ‘almost everyone is homosexual, aren’t they? Boys, I mean.’

‘I sometimes think so,’ I hedged.

‘Is Grandpa one?’

‘Good heavens no,’ I protested.

‘Am I one?’ Rupert asked intently.

‘It’s a bit early to say yet, old fellow. But you could be, you know.’

‘Goody!’ he squealed, banging his heels against the front of the sofa again. ‘Then I can come and live with you.’

‘Would you like that?’ I asked, my avuncular rather than my homosexual feelings deeply gratified by this. And really Rupert’s cult of the gay, his innocent, optimistic absorption in the subject, delighted me even while its origin and purpose were obscure.

I was saved from the sexual analysis of the next set of pictures, the Oscar Wilde Society Ball, by the doorbell ringing. (The dressnote that year had been ‘Slave Trade’, and the spectacle of predominantly straight boys camping it up to the eyeballs would have been confusing to the child’s budding sense of role-play.)

It was not Philippa but Gavin who had come. ‘Sorry about this, Will,’ he said. ‘Has he been a frightful bother?’

‘Not a bit, Gavin. Come in. We were just having a talk about homosexuality.’

‘He is frightfully interested in that at the moment, although he can’t have the least idea of what it is-can he? It must be the effect of his overbearing and possessive mum. Odd what little children get up to; I was a committed transvestite at his age. But that seemed to get it out of the system,’ he added hastily.

‘I’m surprised the overbearing mum let you come to collect him,’ I admitted.

‘Got a bit of a head,’ said Gavin, in a way that suggested this was a known euphemism.

The reunion with his son was a low-key affair, conducted by both as if nothing had happened, while Gavin and I carried on a pleasant conversation over the child’s head. ‘At least this little escapade has saved us from dinner at the Salmons,’ he conceded. ‘That man is the most insufferable little twerp. I’d better just give Philly a call, if I may.’

‘Yes, of course.’ The phone was in the bedroom. ‘But you will be back home in no time at all.’ I tried to disguise my sudden swerve of attitude. ‘I mean, if you really want to, then do…’

‘Thanks. Where is the phone?’

‘Oh, I’ll show you.’ I felt extremely anxious, and as Gavin followed me across the hall, I turned and addressed him outside the bedroom door in an unnaturally carrying tone: ‘I suppose you want to confirm to the child’s mother that I have been a responsible uncle and not encouraged him in hard drugs or any other dangerous abuse.’

Gavin smiled at me politely, sensing he was missing a joke. ‘Partly that, but also I’m going to have a little talk with our runaway before he goes home to be eaten alive.’

‘Yes, do save him from all that,’ I gabbled. ‘So you’re ringing to say you’ll not be coming straight home.’

‘Quite so.’

I paused, considering how I could possibly disallow this. ‘Right,’ I said with a nod, opening the door resolutely and going into the room. To take another person in there was in itself disquieting; it made me conscious of how unaired it was, and of the fetor of socks and semen which would never have been allowed to accumulate in the Croft-Parkers’ dustless Regency sleeping quarters. Dirty clothes amassed on chairs and on the surrounding floor. The wardrobe doors were open.

This was the most alarming thing to my eye, as I had imagined it as the only place in which Arthur could reasonably have hidden. As I went into the room I was ready, if need be, to find him merely sitting there, or standing around, waiting. Though a surprise, it would not have seemed so remarkable; only my failure to warn Gavin would have been thought odd. But to warn him would have been a treacherous concession. I showed Gavin the phone, on the bedside table. The curtains were closed, as always, but I had put on the overhead light, and as the duvet was thrown into a heap at the foot of the bed, the rumpled green sheets and pillows showed their shamingly stained and fucked-over countenance; Gavin remained standing as he phoned.

I wandered back into the hall, where Rupert was standing, an expression of the utmost apprehension on his face. ‘Isn’t that boy…’ he mouthed, his eyebrows raised and then biting his lower lip, which I laid my finger across in a gesture of silence. The bed came down to within an inch or two of the floor. He must be behind the curtains.

‘Thanks, Will,’ said Gavin as he emerged, with a slightly amazed look.

‘Everything OK?’ I enquired, with extreme casualness.

‘We’ll be off now, young feller.’

I saw them to the door of the flat. ‘Thanks, Will,’ said Gavin again. ‘See you soon. You must come round or something…’ He laid a hand fraternally on my shoulder.

‘Bye, Roops,’ I said, expecting my normal kiss but getting instead a handshake, which, nevertheless, I recognised as a sign of greater intimacy.

Farce is always more entertaining to watch than to enact, and I was relieved to hear the house door slam and a car start. I turned back to the bedroom, crossing to the window as I said, ‘It’s all right, they’ve gone.’ But when I tweaked open the curtains, it was my own face, with a silly hide-and-seek smirk on it, that I saw reflected in the window. ‘Funny,’ I said aloud. There was a rustle behind me, and I swung round to see the flung-back duvet heave, lurch upwards, and after a further convulsion, bring forth Arthur. He had been curled up there like a young stowaway, his flexible body folded so as to be almost imperceptible. He hammed up his recovery rather, flustered at the alarm, boastful of his ingenuity. ‘Man, you didn’t know where I bloody was!’ He fell back giggling, then clutched his head, still leaden from his hangover.

I sat by him on the bed and drummed my fingers on his belly. ‘I’m surprised you let him in,’ I said, ‘after all the never going out.’

‘He just kept ringing the bell, man. I stuck me head out the lav window, and there was this little nipper. He must a rung the bell ten times, fifteen times. So I thought, no ’arm in a little kid. So I went down. Very sure of ’imself, he was, come up ’ere, asked me who I was and that. Just a friend of Will’s, I said.’ He looked up into my eyes. ‘Anyway you come back after a bit.’

‘How’s your face feeling?’ I asked. ‘James says he’ll come tomorrow and take the stitches out-just the ends, apparently, and the rest all dissolves.’

‘Not too bad.’

I ran my hands over his soft half-open mauve lips. His tongue slid up and licked my fingers. I had certainly never fallen in love more inconveniently, and more and more I wanted it to end. Even when he spoke, in his basic, unimaginative way, I felt almost sick with desire and compassion for him. Indeed, the fact that he had not mastered speech, that he laboured towards saying the simplest things, that his vocal expressions were prompted only by the strength of his feelings, unlike the camp, exploitative, ironical control of my own speech, made me want him more.

Loving him was all interpretation, creative in its way. We barely used language at all to communicate: he sulked and thought I was putting him down if I made complicated remarks, and sometimes I felt numb at the compromise and self-suppression I submitted to. Yet beyond that it was all guesswork; we were thinking for two. The darkened air of the flat was full of the hints we made. The stupidity and the resentment were dreadful at times. But then in sex he lost his awkwardness. He showed his capacity to change as I rambled over him now with my fingertips and watched him glow and gulp with desire; his clothes seemed to shrivel off him and he lay there making his naked claim for the only certainty in his life. It wasn’t something learnt, I suspected, from the guys before me who’d picked him up and fucked him and fucked him around. It was a kind of gift for giving, and while he did whatever I wanted it emerged as the most important thing there was for him. It was all the harder, then, when the resentment returned and I longed for him to go.

After James had taken out Arthur’s stitches we took the Tube to the Corry together, leaving Arthur to do-whatever he did when I wasn’t there.

‘He watches telly most of the time, I think,’ I said.

‘Does he read or anything?’ James wanted to know.

‘He once asked me to buy him some War Picture Library comics, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it in our local newsagents.’

‘I can see it would sort ill with Apollo, Tatler and GQ-but I expect newsagents get used to the strangest combinations of taste. They have to look on patiently while kids thumb through Men Only and Penthouse and end up buying the Beano and the Bucks Fizz fan mag. I saw someone the other day buy the Spanking Times and the Amateur Yachtsman, for instance…’

‘That’s not so odd-and isn’t a spanker some sort of rope or something?’

‘A sail, I believe-as in the limerick which ends “haul up the top sheet and spanker”.’

The train moved a few yards out of Queensway station and then stopped abruptly. ‘Could you ever get into spanking?’ James asked in the selfconscious silence that ensued. I was obliged to live up to it.

‘Not in a serious way. I put our young friend over my knee from time to time, but…’ In fact, drunk one night and recalling an evening when I had been picked up by a Polish workman who got me to whip his ass with his thick leather belt, I had made Arthur half kneel, half lie over the corner of the bed and given him several strokes of my old webbing corps-belt from school. I knew he would have let me go on, but excited though I was I dropped it.

‘I just can’t see the point of it,’ complained James. ‘Does Arthur actually like it?’

‘I think he does rather. I mean it gives him a hard-on, and all that.’ The man beyond James looked up in a bothered way as the train started again. With James I often reverted to the flaunted deviancy we practised at Oxford, queening along the Cornmarket among the common people (as we more or less ironically called them), passing archly audible comments on boys from the town who took our fancy: ‘Quite go for that’, ‘Don’t think much of yours, dear’, ‘Get the buns on that’. James had worked up a cult of an overweight black youth, with a central gold tooth and a monstrous, lolling member.

‘What’s he really like?’ he asked, as we hammered into Lancaster Gate and the racket of the train spaced out and slowed. ‘I mean, is he a nice sort of person?’

‘He is, actually, very nice, I think.’ I felt entirely penned in by not being able to speak of all the things that made the set-up so strange, and which, depriving Arthur of initiative, made him a non-social being. ‘Very nice in bed, certainly.’

James and I both saw how crass this comment was. ‘But what happens when you go out? I assume you’ve tired of each other’s company sufficiently to go to the pub or the flicks or whatever.’

I longed to tell him, whom I could completely trust; but my trust to Arthur, enforced by the whole way I was living my life, had become an unbreakable code to me, that is to say a principle of honour as well as an enigma. I merely shrugged.

‘And that fight, for God’s sake.’

I shrugged again. Could he really believe the fight story? ‘It’s all pretty much a mystery to you, isn’t it?’ I said, both proud and pained at the unplanned and inexplicable way things stood. There was nothing I could adduce in evidence of Arthur’s charm. ‘Sometimes I just put my arms round his shoulder and burst into tears.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ was James’s comment.

At the Corry the mood was perverse. A few bull-necked mutants were hogging the weights, the room was crowded, and crossness was given voice to. Bradley was training for a contest the following week, and did so many presses that he lost count and, red-faced and shuddering, insisted on starting again. Others, who worked out for more trivial reasons, forced to stand around, lapsed from their normally passing and formal chat into extended conversations, like housewives with shopping waiting for a bus.

‘I know-well, that’s what she said.’

‘But have you seen her since?’

‘Only briefly, and then I couldn’t say anything, because of course you-know-who was in attendance.’

‘I really like her actually; from what I’ve seen of her, that is.’

It was the typical transsexual talk of the place, which had been confusing to me at first and which had thrown poor James into deep dejection when he innocently overheard a boy he had a crush on talking of his girlfriend. It was all a game, any man in the least attractive being dubbed a ‘she’ and only males too dire for such a conceit being left an unadorned ‘he’ or, occasionally, sinisterly, ‘mister’-as in the poisonous declaration ‘I trust you won’t be seeing Mister Elizabeth Arden again.’

‘You know that new girl behind the bar?’ one square-jawed athlete enquired of his bearded companion.

‘What, the blonde, you mean-no, she’s been there a while.’

‘No, not her, no, the dark one with big tits.’

‘I’m not sure I’ve seen her. Nice, is she?’

It was conversation thrown out with a complex bravado, its artifice defiant as it was transparent. I half listened to it as I waited, and looked around at the dozens of bodies, squatting, lying, straining, muscles sliding to the surface in thick-veined upper arms, shoulders bending and pumping, the sturdiness of legs under pressure, the dark stains on singlets that adhered to the sweating channel of the back, the barely perceptible swing of cocks and balls in shorts and track-suits, with, permeating it all, the clank and thud of weights and the rank underarm essence of effort.

When I finally got a chance at the bench I realised I felt strangely weary, and going in a rotation with three other guys I slightly knew, cut my ration each time from ten to eight lifts. After a couple of turns I saw that Bill was watching me. ‘I only made that eight, Will,’ he said, with a worried look.

‘Hi, Bill. Yes, I’m doing them in eights now.’

I watched him thinking and deciding not to censure what he obviously saw as an absurd infringement of tradition. ‘Well, everything going okay, Will? Too many people here, I think. Too many people. It’s getting ridiculous. Never used to be like this.’ I agreed that it was inconvenient, and suggested that the club was hungry for the money more membership must bring. ‘Very true, Will. But the interests of the members there are already have to be considered. It’s supposed to be democratically run, you know, this place.’ He looked around mournfully. ‘Seen young Phil lately?’ he asked with slight bashfulness.

I hadn’t seen him here the previous evening, and I was left uncertain if it had been him in the cinema. ‘I haven’t, actually. Has he been neglecting his training?’

‘He may have been coming in earlier,’ Bill assured himself. ‘There may be some other gym he goes to, too. I don’t know. He needs to keep in trim, though. Very nice little body, that.’

‘Not so little,’ I suggested, remembering the beautiful hard heaviness in the dark. ‘What does he do, anyway?’

‘He works in a hotel actually,’ Bill declared, proud to know this fact, which might be taken as the token of a fuller intimacy than was, evidently, the case.

‘How extraordinary,’ I said, my image of Phil as a military figure distorted by this notion, but settling into a new image of him, still in uniform however, marching along an upstairs corridor with a tray of coffee and sandwiches held at shoulder height. ‘Which one, do you know?’

‘Not sure about that, Will,’ Bill admitted. ‘One of the big famous ones, I think.’

James had been swimming diligently while I was in the weights room and when I went down to the pool he was hanging by his elbows in the deep end, in spasmodic conversation with a person I hadn’t seen before. By a silly convention I always affected a censorious attitude towards men he might actually be getting somewhere with. I stopped by him at the end of my first length, pretended to adjust the strap of my goggles, and raising my eyebrows (an effort doubtless diminished by the goggles themselves) declared, ‘I don’t think much of yours, dear,’ before plunging on.

Up in the showers afterwards he was standing beside the same person, and the reason for it became clearer. The boy, very brown all over, except for a pink triangle above the crack of his ass, was thin and wiry, though not quite unattractively so, his colour glamorising (as it can do a nondescript Italian or Arab) what would have been a meagre body if pale. There was something strained about him, particularly his gaunt, narrow head, hollow-cheeked and with short dark curls. His sunken eyes were a cold blue, made the more striking by his tan; when he turned round I saw that he had shaved off all his pubic hair, which added a kinky and intenser nakedness to his salient, sideways-curving, pink-headed and very large cock.

The conversation was not fluent. The youth would pass some bland comment, and James would try to reply with adequate enthusiasm or insouciance. ‘See you,’ said the youth, abruptly turning off his shower and going off to dry. ‘Yes, see you,’ said James, managing to make it seem a careless possibility, though the smile faded off his face in a way that showed it was not spontaneous. He had effectively been put down, as it is impossible to go padding out after someone in simulated sportsman-like ease when they have just said goodbye to you. I crossed over and took my place beside James.

‘Who’s your friend?’ I enquired. He merely gave me a sceptical look. ‘Why don’t you go after him?’

‘I don’t think I care for him.’

‘Oh come on! He looked to me as if he quite cared for you-if Dame Tumescence is anything to go by.’

‘Another time, perhaps.’ He shampooed his receding hair in a listless fashion. ‘I see Miss Manners is having a ball.’ It was one of James’s almanac of nicknames.

‘She is the end, that one,’ I agreed, glancing at the man in question, one of that breed of middle-aged queens whose strategy, as they become uncontestably unattractive, is to cultivate a barging, unsmiling manner, sensitive to imagined infringements of their rights and never getting out of anyone’s way. Like James’s ‘Miss Marple’, a portly man who wore his glasses even in the shower and would blunder round and round the changing-room in his underwear for thirty or forty minutes, his spectacles misting up from the heat of his body, he was one of the odd crew at the Corry who, knowing no one there, existed in a kind of unseemly limbo of paranoia and repression. James, who himself occupied the club in a highly fantastical way, had catalogued many of its members with fantasy names. Some of them confused me-Miss De Meanour and Miss Anthropy were impossible to distinguish, whilst a pair of boneheaded identical twins could be referred to indiscriminately as ‘Biff’. There was no doubt about ‘Miss World’, however, the hilariously vain queen of uncertain years, known to me also as Freddie, who came into the shower now, casting off his towel as if it were the hungrily awaited climax to a striptease.

‘Hullo, Will,’ he said as he came alongside, his tanned, creased, sinewy body swivelling balletically. He spoke in a carrying, recital manner, as if testing some primitive broadcasting machine. ‘How are you? You’re looking wildly wicked and young.’

‘I am wildly wicked and young,’ was the best I could do before I, as the French say, saved myself-inevitably bumping into Miss Manners as I did so.

‘Clumsy little slut!’ he hissed, with such venom that I couldn’t help laughing.

On the train home I carried on with Firbank. I was on Prancing Nigger now, though I shared James’s preference for its other title, Sorrow in Sunlight. How Miami longed to lift up Bamboo’s crimson loincloth! ‘She had often longed to snatch it away.’ I lolled into reflection on Bamboo’s charming words, ‘I dat amorous ob you, Mimi’; and as I approached the house they were becoming a catchphrase of the sort I sometimes keep nonsensically saying to myself and anyone else for days on end, or singing in the style of Handel arias or Elvis Presley songs. I found myself muttering it, with mounting intensity and irrelevance, when I came into the flat, called out, searched round and found that Arthur had gone.