The Swimming-Pool Library

4

Charles Nantwich’s house was in a street off Huggin Hill, so narrow that it had been closed to traffic and was no longer marked in the London A-Z; it was a cobbled cul-de-sac obstructed at its open end by two dented aluminum bollards padlocked to the ground. Halfway down on the left rose the tall façade of purplish London brick, the dormers behind its upper parapet looking out over the roofs of the surrounding semi-derelict buildings. It was an elegant post-Fire merchant’s house, prosperously plain, the only ostentation the door-case, with its delicately glazed fanlight and heavy projecting hood, the richly scrolled brackets of which were clogged with generations of white gloss paint. Much of the glass in the tall windows appeared to be original: warped, glinting and nearly opaque. I waited opposite for a minute, surprisingly taken back, by its air of secrecy and exclusion, to the invalidish world of Edwardian ghost stories, to a world where people never went out.

Though close to Cannon Street, Upper Thames Street and the approach to Southwark Bridge, this little knot of side streets was very quiet. Drivers avoided the narrow gauge of its alleyways, and much of it seemed to have been given over to somnolent trades-a bespoke tailor, a watch repairer. One or two of the premises were warehouses; some had battened-up windows or displayed bleached and cracked signs for businesses long defunct. Though the buildings were eighteenth- or seventeenth-century, the streets were medieval, and, sloping quite steeply towards the Thames, gave the unsettling feeling that they could not long avoid being swept away. Skinner’s Lane, ending in a wall topped with spikes like spurs, half hidden amid tufts of brilliant yellow alyssum, had a mortal mood to it, and gave Charles’s residence the eccentric rectitude of a colonial staying on, unflaggingly keeping up appearances.

I rang the bell twice before the door was opened by a man in shirt-sleeves and an apron, who let me in and then seemed to think better of it. ‘His Lordship expecting you, is he?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘Yes, William Beckwith. He asked me to come for tea.’

‘First I’ve heard of it,’ the man said unsmilingly. ‘You’d better wait here.’ He went off with an ambiguous tread, his sergeant-majorish bearing infected with an ambling carelessness.

It was a narrow, dark hall, the stairs going up ahead to the left, an old-fashioned coat-and-stick stand, of the kind on which one could conceivably sit, behind the door, and a high, marbletopped table against the opposite wall. On it was a salver with letters stamped for the post-one to the bank, another to a person called Shillibeer with the outlandish address of E7. Above it was a gloomy mirror in a gilt frame. The rest of the panelled walls were covered with pictures, hung one above the other to the cornice, and ascending the stairs too, where their glass collected some light from an upstairs window. There were oils, water-colours, drawings, photographs, all mixed up. There was an unusually large David Roberts of a Nubian temple, choked almost to the eaves with sand, with blue-robed figures giving a sense of its stunted, colossal scale. I was looking at a lovely pastel head of a boy which hung beside it, when the door at the back of the hall opened and Charles and the paramilitary butler appeared in it, issuing from a brighter room beyond, which cast new light over the bizarre, threadbare rugs on the floor.

‘Rosalba,’ said Charles, shuffling forward before greeting me. ‘My dear William. I do hope Lewis wasn’t rude to you. He can be most cantankerous at times. Can’t you, Lewis?’

Lewis had a look of being above such things. Following patiently behind, his square moustached head, with its cropped greying hair, indicated no emotion. ‘You never said he was coming.’

‘Oh, nonsense, nonsense-I told you days ago I would be having an interesting young guest for tea for two. My word, you’re jolly brown, young fellow.’ We stood now in front of the mirror and I looked in, needlessly, to confirm what he was saying. We were having an early May of wonderful weather, and I was already as dark as some of the half-caste boys I showered with at the Corry. My hair, though, grew lighter, and my eyes too, as I met my own glance, appeared arrestingly pale. It was that faintly depraved effect I admired in James’s thin friend at the baths. Charles laid a hand heavily on my shoulder. ‘Kind of sand-brown, isn’t it. Jolly good, jolly good.’ He also indulged the mirror’s grouping of us for a moment, his eye flinching from the stare of the taller Lewis, who hung about behind us. There was evidently a strange, and I thought pathetic, story behind all this.

‘Let’s go into the library,’ Charles said, pushing me forward as a kind of support. ‘We’ll have tea in there, Lewis, please.’

‘You do realise I’m cleaning the silver?’ Lewis complained.

‘Well, it won’t hurt to have a break-and I’m sure you’d like a cup yourself, you know. Then you can get back to cleaning the silver; what’s left of it.’

Lewis gave him a calculating nod, and retreated without a word. We went on into the room on the left of the front door.

Library seemed a grand term for a room that, like all the rooms in the house, was modest-sized; but it was stuffed with books. Some were housed in a handsome break-fronted bookcase with Gothic windows; others furnished shelves and tabletops, or were stacked up like hypocaust pillars across the floor. If the room had once been panelled, it was no more. The walls were white, and above the door a pink and grey pediment had been painted, perhaps as a trompe l’oeil relief; within it classical figures posed, and it was almost with embarrassment that I noticed that exaggerated phalluses protruded in each case from toga and tunic.

‘Funny little chaps, aren’t they?’ said Charles, who was hohumming his way towards a chair. ‘Come and sit down, my dear, and we can have some chit-chat. I’ve had no one to talk to for ages, you see.’

We sat on either side of the empty grate in which a huge jug of bulrushes and peacock feathers stood. Above the mantelpiece, with its little brass carriage clock, hung a life-size chalk drawing of a black boy, just the head and shoulders, a slight smile and large, speaking eyes conveying happiness and loyalty.

‘So, have you been at the Corinthian Club today?’

‘No-I prefer to go in the evenings. I’ll drop in after I leave here.’

‘Hmm. There’s more going on in the evenings, wouldn’t you say. Actually, I think it can get too crowded. And some of the people are so rude and hasty, don’t you find? Some young thug called me an old wanker the other day. What do you do-argue or try to be witty? I said I’m way past that, I can assure you. But he didn’t smile, you know. It’s so terrible when people don’t smile. It seems to be a new thing…’

I pictured the old boy’s determined, naked totterings around the changing-room. He was terribly vulnerable, I now saw. A few days before, when I ran into him and he invited me to tea, he was feebly trying to open the wrong locker (it was the old confusion between 16 and 91). He clearly had no recollection of where he had left his clothes, and was wholly dependent on the little disc attached to his key. As he fumbled and muttered to himself the tenant of 16 came up, a trim little student I’d seen around. ‘No dear, you’re 91 and I’m 16,’ he said impatiently, and found himself equipped with a joke-‘give or take a year or two.’ Charles didn’t understand at first, and as 16 propelled him away I felt an unusual upsurge of kindness for him as against the sexy complicity with the boy that I would normally have encouraged. I came to Charles’s rescue, suspecting he would allow me to be gently protective. When he didn’t, at first, even recognise me, I knew that it was necessary.

‘I suppose the place must have changed a lot?’ I blandly hazarded. But he wasn’t with me; he even screwed up his eyes as he stared through me, perhaps reliving some hurtful episode. I let a few moments pass, looked over the spines of black-bound art folios-Donatello, Sandro Botticelli, Giovanni Bellini-which lay on the table beside me. My grandfather had them too, in the library at Marden, and I recalled childhood afternoons looking at their fine-toned sepia plates; they must have been a special series in the Thirties.

‘You’re not cold, are you, William?’ Charles suddenly asked. I assured him I was fine, though the sunless room was surprisingly cool after the glare of the streets. ‘We don’t get any sun here-only in the attic. Those houses block it out. We’re very cut off here, of course.’ It was an odd remark to make of a house almost in the precincts of St Paul’s Cathedral, but as I looked out of the window I knew what he meant. The ear picked up a constant faint rumble of traffic, but the little clock sounded far louder; no one passed by outside and it was hard to imagine a breeze ruffling the papers strewn about in the rich stuffy air of the room where we sat. ‘It’s a shady little street,’ he added. ‘In the old days it was known as Gropecunt Lane, where the lightermen and what-have-you used to come up for the whores. There’s a reference to it in Pepys-I can’t find it now.’

‘It’s a beautiful house.’

‘Do you like it? It’s a very special house, more special than you might think. I bought it at the end of the war-it was all knocked to hell round here of course by the bloomin’ Blitz. I was wandering about with Sandy Labouchère, seeing the extent of the damage. This was several years later but there was still all the rubble, covered in flowers and so on-frightfully pretty, actually. Look at this little street, he said-this little bit seemed to have survived O K. Down we came. You could do that up, Charles, he said. You wouldn’t believe the state it was in, broken windows and plants and things growing out of it. We asked about it in a little grocer’s there used to be over the road.’ He paused and looked around rather bashfully. ‘It is now very sadly closed, but the grocer’s son… my dear William, you cannot imagine how handsome he was… seventeen, big strong lad of course, carrying sacks of flour-it was like pollen on his hair and hands, big strong hands of course. Well, my dear, said Sandy afterwards, if you don’t buy it I will, just for that, you know. Of course, that was him all over.’

I smiled at the story, though I hadn’t the least idea who Sandy Labouchère was. It was Charles’s most sustained utterance to date, and in the chair of his own little library he was far more in command than in his wavering and insane peregrinations outside. Or at least so it seemed until Lewis came in with the tea.

‘He joined the merchant navy and went sailing about all over the place,’ Charles said, looking at Lewis picking his way among the books, but referring, I imagined, to the beautiful grocer’s boy. ‘Thank you, I’m sure William will pour if you’d like to put it down here.’

‘I’m sure he will, sir,’ said Lewis, slamming the tray on to the table between us. The wide china cups with their twig-like handles jumped in their saucers. ‘He looks the type who’d pour out very nicely, sir, in my opinion.’ He was sulking terribly about something. Charles reddened with irritation and anxiety.

‘You’re ridiculous today,’ he muttered. I felt awkward watching this going on, but also detached, as one can be witnessing people mired in their own domestic quandaries.

‘He’s wildly jealous,’ Charles explained when we were alone again and he was raising his teacup between two tremulous hands. ‘Oh, he’s making my life a misery.’ His big jovial head looked at me pathetically.

‘Has he been with you long?’

‘I’d give him his notice but I can’t face the idea of interviewing a replacement. Someone in your own home, William-it’s such a, such a thing.’ I thought inevitably of Arthur, and swallowed guilt with my strong Indian tea. ‘But I do need someone to look after me, you know.’

‘I’m sure you do. Isn’t there an agency?’ Charles was fingering the biscuits, unable to decide which he wanted.

‘I always try to help them.’ He spoke almost to himself. ‘One day I’ll tell you the whole story. But I can tell you now, he is not the first. Others have had to go. If I can’t entertain a young man to afternoon tea…’

‘You mean I am the cause of all this, it can’t be.’ He nodded at me as if to say that he too found it incredible-indeed, as if not sure that I believed it.

‘He is not normal,’ he explained. ‘But he will have to get used to it, when you come again.’

I thought for a moment about the implications of this. ‘I don’t want to make things worse for you,’ I insisted. ‘We could have tea somewhere else.’

‘It’s important to me that you come here,’ Charles said calmly. ‘There are things I want to show you, and ask you, too. It’s quite a little museum I have here.’ He looked around the room, and I politely did the same. ‘I’m the prime exhibit, of course, but I’m afraid I’m about to be removed from display; returned to my generous lender, as it were.’ How does one treat such baleful jokes from the elderly? I looked blank, as if not with him-and so perhaps showed that I knew it to be true.

‘I’m sure you must have some fascinating things. Of course I still don’t know anything about you. I still haven’t looked you up.’

He grunted, but his mind was clearly running on to something else, so that he broke through my following platitudes: ‘Come on, let me show you around.’ We were still on our first cup of tea. He had begun to push himself out of his armchair and I jumped up to help him. ‘That’s what it’s all about,’ he confirmed mysteriously. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll come back here-want to take a biscuit with you?’

I gave him my arm and we made for the door. ‘So much stuff in here,” he complained. ‘God knows what it all is… books, of course. Need more shelves but don’t want to spoil the room. Still, it won’t matter soon.’ In the hall he hesitated. His suited forearm lay along my bare brown one, and his hand gripped mine, half-interlocked with it. It was a broad, mottled, strong hand, the knuckles slightly swollen by arthritis, the fingertips broad and flattened, with well-shaped yellow nails. My hand looked effete and inexperienced in its grasp. ‘Straight across,’ he decided.

The room we entered was a panelled dining-room with a carved overmantel and a leafy frieze picked out in gold, an effect rather like paint-sprayed holly at Christmas-time. It had the sleepy acoustic quality that some rooms have which are rarely, if ever, used.

‘This is the salle à manger,’ announced Charles. ‘As you can see that slut Lewis never bothers to dust in here, because I haven’t actually mangé in it for years. It’s a jolly nice table, that, isn’t it.’ It was indeed a very handsome Georgian oak table with ball-and-claw feet, and in the middle stood a silvery statuette of a boy with upraised arms and Donatellesque buttocks, an incongruously kitsch item.

‘That little bit of nonsense is by the same chap who did the willies in the other room. We’ll see some more of his stuff, but come over here first.’ He led me-or I led him-towards a side-table where a green baize cloth covered a square object, perhaps a foot high and eighteen inches long; it might have been a picture in a stand-up frame. He leant forward and tugged the cloth away. It was a display case of dark polished dowling, rather British Museum in appearance, within which stood a tablet of pale sandy stone, a couple of inches thick. On its smooth front face three contrasting heads were incised, full profile, in shallow relief. I inspected it appreciatively, and looked to Charles for information. He was nodding in satisfaction at having turned up something interesting. ‘Fascinating, isn’t it. It’s a stele showing the King Akhnaten.’

I looked again. ‘And who are the other two?’

‘Ah,’ said Charles with pleasure. ‘They’re King Akhnaten as well.’ He chuckled, though it could by no means be the first time he had explained its mystery. ‘It’s an artist’s sketch, like a notepad or something, but done straight on to the stone. You know about Akhnaten, do you?’

‘No, I’m afraid I don’t.’

‘I thought not, otherwise you would see the significance of it straight away. Like so many bizarre-seeming things, it has its logic. Akhnaten was a rebel. His real name was Amonhotep the Third-Fourth, I can’t remember-but he broke away from the worship of Amon (as in Amonhotep) and made everyone worship the sun instead. Something I’m sure you’d agree with him over,’ he added, patting my wrist. ‘But such apostasy was not in itself enough. Oh no. He had to change the way he looked as well. He shifted the court from Thebes, where it had been for God knows how long, and set it up at Tel-el-Amarna…’

‘Aha,’ I said, remembering there had been a battle of that name.

‘As it was all made out of mud, it didn’t survive the end of his régime by long, sad to say. But there are bits and pieces in museums. There’s a thing like this at Cairo. You haven’t been to Cairo. And there’s this one, which has one more head on it. You can see how the artist changed the king’s appearance until he got the image which we know today.’

Looking again, I could see, reading Arabically from right to left, how the wide Pharaonic features were modified, and then modified again, elongated and somehow orientalised, so that they took on, instead of an implacable massiveness, an attitude of sensibility and refinement. A large, blank, almond-shaped eye was shown unrealistically in the profile, and the nose and the jaw were drawn out to an unnatural length. The rearing cobra on the brow was traditional, but its challenge seemed qualified by the subtle expression of the mouth, very beautifully cut, with a fuzz of shadow behind the everted curl of the upper lip.

‘It’s wonderful,’ I said. ‘Where did you get it?’

‘In Egypt before the war. Made my trunk pretty heavy… I was coming back from the Sudan for the last time.’

‘It becomes more wonderful the more you think about it.’ I could not have delighted him more.

‘I’m so glad you see the point. For a while it was quite an icon to me.’ The point, as I saw it, was that you could take an aesthetic decision to change shape. The king seemed almost to turn into a woman before our eyes. ‘A chappie came from the Louvre and wrote a thing about it. It doesn’t yet have the Pharaonic beard, you see-you know, the ugly, square beard-which he does have in most of the remaining statues, even the female Pharaohs, whatever they were called, are shown with beards-perfectly lifelike, though, wouldn’t you think?’ Charles loved making these misogynistic gibes.

‘So what happened to him?’ I asked.

‘Ooh-it all came to an end. They went back to worshipping boring old Amon. The whole thing only lasted about twenty years-it could have happened within your lifetime. There are those who say it was a bad thing-like Methodism, someone once declared-but I disagree. Cover him up again will you?’ I put the sun-worshipper back into his millennial darkness.

The drawing-room was behind the dining-room and had larger plate-glass windows that brought in all the light they could from a tiny paved garden bounded by a tall whitewashed wall. The room was papered a pale green and had a suite of white and gilt chairs, tables, and a square, spindly-legged sofa. A plumply cushioned modern armchair on one side of the fireplace looked at a portable television.

‘I’ll sit down, my dear,’ Charles decided, ‘It’s so tiring, talking.’ He took the comfortable seat.

‘Really, I should go,’ I said.

‘No, no-I don’t mean that. And look at this fine picture; and there’s more to show you.’

I sat on the fragile, entirely unupholstered sofa. ‘Well, you must say when you want me to go.’

‘It’s another of my icons.’ He looked from me to an oval portrait which hung above the fireplace. From its mandorla of gilded oak leaves a livery-clad negro turned towards us. A sky of darkening blue was sketched behind him, and the shadowy form of a palm-tree could just about be made out. He appeared to be an eighteenth-century colonial servant; evidently a favoured one. ‘It’s Bill Richmond,’ Charles explained.

No wiser, I stood up to look more closely at the pugnacious brown face with its thick lips, flat nose and short curly hair. It frowned ironically from the crimson and gilt of the high-necked footman’s coat. ‘I’m afraid he’s not as pretty as the King Akhnaten,’ I said.

‘He wasn’t in a pretty business, poppet. Well… he was a man with several lives: first of all he was a slave, then he got brought back to England by a General whatsaname in the War of Independence. He found him in Richmond, which is where his name comes from. Bill was one of those big strong lads we like so much, so the General trained him up as a boxer. He became quite well known for a while-along with Molineux, of course, that Byron sparred with. They were the first of their kind to break out, really-they were good fighters, so they made a figure in the world. Don’t he look kind of sad, though.’

‘Very sad. He don’t-doesn’t look much like a boxer, either.’

‘No. You see, he became a valet or what-have-you to some Lord. When he’d done with fighting he just carried on in service. Hence the livery. It makes for a good picture but a sad story. I’m sure the artist must have scaled him down, too. Byron says, when he met him later in life, that he was a great strong fellow. I’ll look it up for you some time. I believe he used to work in Molineux’s corner too.’

‘You don’t know who it’s by?’ But Charles seemed to have lapsed into reflection on the fate of Bill Richmond, and wore a nostalgic expression as though he had known him personally. As ever, I let it pass; I was learning not to worry about silences in the conversation. I was happy to ponder his treasured artifacts and the secret metamorphoses that they enshrined.

‘A last leg, and a question,’ he proposed. ‘Both rather special.’ I took his arm again and we went out into the hall. ‘Are you interested in boxing? That’s not the question, by the way.’

‘I suppose I am,’ I said. ‘I boxed a bit at school.’

‘Oho! You be careful. You don’t want to get that pretty nose broken.’

‘I don’t do it any more. Don’t worry.’

‘It’s been a great interest of mine. You’ll have to find out about all that side if you go into this.’

I looked at him humorously. ‘Go into what?’ He was unlocking a door under the shadow of the cantilevered stairs and groping for the light switch.

‘Come down here. Whoopsy! That’s it.’

In front of us a narrow staircase ran steeply down between unplastered rubble walls. It was a squeeze for us side by side, and I tended to be half a step behind, as he, one hand on the rope banister, committed himself with a heavy, lurching tread to each new stair.

‘This is the most remarkable thing,’ he said in a tone of enthusiasm. ‘Oh, he’ll like this, won’t he. There’s no other house in the world that has anything like this. Come along in, come along in.’ He took on for a moment the air of a horror-film villain, muttering gleeful asides while leading his victim into the trap. The stairs turned a corner, and we went down two or three more steps and under a rough wooden lintel into a cool, mildewy darkness.

Various fleeting ideas, tinged with alarm, went through my mind as I stood and brushed at my upper arm where it had rubbed against the chalky staircase wall. Then Charles found the second light switch and the darkness fled, revealing a squarish quite lofty cellar room. Though it contained nothing at all there were two remarkable things about it. The walls, which were plastered and painted cream, had a continuous frieze running round, which, being above head height, looked tastefully classical at a glance but, like the library over-door, were homosexual parodies when inspected close to. And the floor, uneven, pitted in places, was a mosaic.

We made our way along the walls on old drugget, through which the roughness of the floor obtruded, so that I was afraid of Charles stubbing his toe or even twisting his ankle. On the further side of the room he stopped. ‘You see it best from here,’ he explained. The colours were very subdued, the white almost a light brown, the reds rusty like dried blood. ‘Now, what do you make out?’

I thought about it; it was evidently a Roman pavement-a relic of some riverside palace or temple? I knew nothing about Roman London, had forgotten all but a handful of images from some illustrated lectures that Gavin had given several years before. In the top quarter was a large bearded face, with open mouth and the vestiges of neck and shoulders above a broad rent in the fabric where the tesserae merged into the restorer’s grey cement. To the left at the bottom stylised fish shapes, like an emblem of Pisces, could be made out, sliding past each other; and to the right, and above, the upper parts of two figures could be seen, the one in front turning to the one behind with open, choric mouth as they dissolved into the nothingness beyond the broken edge of the pavement.

‘Nobody is quite agreed on what the figures are,’ Charles conceded hospitably. ‘The chappie at the back could be Neptune but he could be the Thames god with an urn or whatever. Then these are little fishes, évidemment; and here are these young boys going swimming.’

I nodded. ‘Swimming, you think, do you? Isn’t it a bit hard to tell?’

‘Oh no, swimming. That’s the whole point. This is the floor of a swimming-bath, do you see. There used to be a great baths here, in the very early days. There were springs. The water soaked through the gravel and what-have-you until it hit the London clay and then out it came!’ He seemed delighted at this trick of geology, as if it had operated for his special benefit.

‘And what’s happened to it now?’

‘Stuck it in a pipe,’ he replied with breezy contempt. ‘Led it away. Buried it. Whatever. This little bit of the baths is all that’s left to show how all those lusty young Romans went leaping about. Imagine all those naked legionaries in here…’

I did not have to look far to do so. The scenes around the walls were as graphic an imagining as Petronius could have come up with. ‘I think your friend has given us his impression,’ I said.

‘Eh? Oh, Henderson’s pictures, yes.’ He laughed hollowly. ‘They’re a trifle embarrassing, I’m afraid-when eggheads come to look at the floor, you know. They think they’re going to get caught up in an orgy.’ We both looked up at the section nearest us, where a gleaming slave was towelling down his master’s buttocks. In front of them two mighty warriors were wrestling, with legs apart, and bull-like genitals swinging between. ‘Quite amusing though, too, n’est-ce pas?’ He looked down pointedly at my crotch. ‘They used to fairly turn me on. But needless to say it was a long time ago.’

I didn’t want to pursue this vein, and strolled reflectively along to where the two boys ran, as Charles saw it, towards the water. Or perhaps they were already standing in water, lapping round their long-eroded legs. They were intensely poignant. Seen close to, their curves were revealed as pinked, stepped edges, their moving forms made up of tiny, featureless squares. The boy in full-face had his mouth open in pleasure, or as an indication that he was speaking, but it also gave a strong impression of pain. It was at once too crude and too complex to be analysed properly. It reminded me of the face of Eve expelled from Paradise in Masaccio’s fresco. But at the same time it was not like it at all; it could have been a mask of pagan joy. The second young man, following closely behind, leaning forward as if he might indeed be wading through water, was in profile, and expressed nothing but attention to his fellow. What did he see there, I wondered-a mundane greeting or the ecstasy which I read into it? That it was merely a fragment compounded and rarefied its enigma.

Charles rested his hand on my shoulder as I bent over it. ‘Jolly fellows, aren’t they?’

‘I was thinking they were rather tragic.’

‘My dear, what I want to ask you is this.’ Feeling the physical weight of him on me, I was sure for a moment that he had some physical demand in mind. Would I let him take my clothes off, or kiss me. A don at Winchester had asked a friend of mine to masturbate in front of him, and though he didn’t, such things can harmlessly be done. I stood up straight and looked away over his shoulder. ‘Will you write about me?’

I caught his eye. ‘Well-how do you mean?’

He looked down, quite bashfully, at the bathers. ‘About my life, you know. The memoirs I’ve never written, as it were. I assume you can write?’

I felt touched, and relieved; I also felt that it was quite impossible. ‘I did once write two thousand words on Coade Stone garden ornaments.’

‘Oh, it would be much more than that.’

‘But I don’t know anything about you,’ was a second reservation.

He smiled. ‘I thought you might be interested to find out, as you say you haven’t anything else to do. I could pay you, of course,’ he added.

‘It’s not that, Charles,’ I said, resting my hand in turn on his shoulder. He looked almost tearful at having brought his idea to a head and facing possible disappointment.

‘Before you say anything else I want to ask you, take time to consider it. Because, though I say it myself, I think it would prove to interest you a very great deal. It wouldn’t be an immense amount of work, in a sense. I’ve got masses of papers. All my diaries and what-have-you since I was a child-you could have it all to read.’

It seemed at first a monstrous request, although I could see it was quite reasonable in a way. If he had had an interesting life, which it appeared he had, he could not possibly hope to write it up himself now. If I didn’t do it, nothing might come of it. It was partly because I idly disliked any intrusion into my constant leisure-my leisure itself having taken on an urgent, all-consuming quality-that I instinctively repelled the idea. But it was not, after all, impossible.

‘I’ll think about it, of course,’ I said non-committally. ‘Give me a few days.’

He was extremely grateful. And of course he would be able to see the shape and possibilities of the whole project, when I had barely begun to imagine what it might entail. Suddenly he looked drained again. ‘We’ll go upstairs, my dear, and then you’d better push off.’

We left the Romans in the dark, and climbed to the hall, where I handed my host over to a silently hostile Lewis. He held him there, almost by force, in the picture-lined gloom, and together they watched me fumble with the lock, and let myself out.

When I arrived in the changing-room Phil was drying: not the preliminary stand-up towelling but those final points to which he paid so much attention, and which were executed sitting down. Naked on the bench, legs wide apart, one foot raised in front of him, he rubbed his towel carefully between each toe, and patted powder (I looked, yes, Trouble for Men!) into the dry pink crevices. I approached him at an angle-noticed how his ass spread on the cheap deal of the bench, showing just a shadowy hint of hair between the buttocks, admired the band of muscle which had begun to harden above his hips, and coming round him and picking a locker not far away, glanced down at his cock and balls trailing on the edge of the seat. He looked up at me for a second with his dark, bright, expressionless eyes.

‘Hi, Phil.’

‘Hullo,’ he said, glancing up again. There was something more than usually inhibited about his manner, and his selfconsciousness came out in a flush. I was casual in the extreme, walked over to the mirror, looked with satisfaction at myself, and at him. Though I was ostensibly chasing a speck of dirt in my eye, my gaze searched the mirror in more depth, to find his attention flickering time and again towards me.

I came back and started undressing. I was so completely accustomed to undressing in changing-rooms that the act had lost that charge which it had for me elsewhere. Still, I felt a small warm amorous hum as I pulled off my shoes, tugged down my jeans and caught Phil’s fleeting inspection of my cock. I stroked it with a single indolent gesture as if to set it free, and to present it to the boy who, with surely affected indifference, was sitting in front of me, pulling on his white ankle-socks.

‘How’s the hotel?’ I asked.

‘Oh, er, okay,’ he said, surprisingly unsurprised that I should know about it. ‘Hard work,’ he added.

‘What do you do in it?’

‘In the hotel, you mean?’

‘Indeed.’

‘Oh. Everything, at one time or another. At the moment I’m waiting.’

‘Mm, me too,’ I agreed. But he was clearly not a person that I could win over with collusive bad jokes. I feared for a second he might take it up literally; his ignoring it suggested that he had understood what I meant-but was incapable of indicating the fact. More silence followed, in which I felt that I had the upper hand. He was now standing and putting on his old-fashioned and manly white underpants.

‘Going to work out?’ he asked. It was his first unsolicited remark to me, and despite its consummate blandness it had the air of being the final fruit of a long internal quest for something to say.

‘That’s right: nothing heavy, you know.’ I was in shorts and singlet now, and tying up my white plimsolls. ‘I’m not aiming to have a beautiful physique like yours.’

Something masculine in him momentarily bridled, though the new pleasure of being called beautiful, which must have been the secret purpose of all his body-work, won over and he smiled with shy pride. ‘Do us a favour,’ he said. It was a moment at which a more experienced person could well have turned to admiration of my own, less ambitious, build.

As I prepared to go off into the gym I asked him, ‘What hotel is it you work in, actually?’

He was prefacing every remark with ‘Oh’ as if unsure of the way statements might begin. ‘Oh… the Queensberry, yes.’

‘Not far from here, then.’ I took my key from the lock.

‘No.’

‘Well, see you.’ I was making off down the alley of lockers and would soon have been lost to his view, when he said:

‘Yeah, you ought to come over some time.’

I half turned and grinned: ‘I’d like that.’ He didn’t grin back; in fact he looked very serious-and there had been something about the way he said ‘you ought to come over some time,’ casual and comradely and yet pondered, or even rehearsed, that convinced me that this was the same uptight, hungry boy I had blown in the Brutus, and that he needed my help, had passively picked on me as the one to show him what it was all about. I held his gaze a little longer, thinking of saying, ‘Well, how about tonight?’ Arthur-less, I was moronically ready for it, but somehow I deferred. I sensed he was relieved when I said, ‘Next week some time?’

‘OK.’ He lifted his right hand a few inches off the bench in a strangely touching, almost secret wave. Two other hearty figures pushed past me, coming in red and sweaty from the gym. ‘How’re ya doin’, Phil boy,’ said one of them in the routine American disguise of some British queens. I went on into the gym, believing that some kind of agreement had been made, that it filled his thoughts now as it did mine. Then for a few minutes I made myself think about something else, concentrated on my exercises on the mat, stretching and limbering up. Because I was so easily moved by people, I had learned to distance myself, just in those moments when I felt them taking hold: I made myself regard them, and even more myself, with a careless, almost cynical detachment. But as I gathered, spread and folded up my body now, endeavouring to feel alive all over, ready and independent, I saw Phil again, in one of those odd coups d’oeil, typical not only of his hesitant mobile manner but of so much of gay life, where happiness can depend on the glance of a stranger, caught and returned. Aptly enough, I was lying on my back, with my legs in the air, wide apart. Between them I saw him pass the open gym door, his bag in his hand, his shirt-sleeves rolled up in tight bands around his biceps. He went by, but a second or two later stepped back again, and peeped into the gym. Our eyes met, I raised my head, he looked for a moment longer, and then, moved perhaps by the secrecy which characterised his doings, without smiling, turned and went off. As I sat up it was as if a fist squeezed my heart and cracked a tiny flask at its centre, saturating it with love.

An hour or so later I found James in the shower. He held out his hands to me in a pathetic gesture; the fingertips were white and puckered.

‘A long time, eh?’ I commiserated.

‘There’s just been nothing, darling. I don’t know why I bother.’

‘Nor, I confess, do I.’ James, in his maudlin way, was waiting around for something worth looking at to stroll in. ‘How long, as a matter of interest?’

He had no watch on. ‘It may be as much as half an hour.’

‘You must be jolly clean, anyway.’ I pulled off my trunks, and noticed him peek, with the neutralised sexual interest that existed between us, at my dick.

‘Spotless. But enough of me. How are you?’

‘In a strange position.’

‘Tiring of His Speechlessness the Khedive of Tower Hamlets?’

‘Oh-no, that’s all over ages ago.’

‘Oh…’ A veneer of commiseration covered a discernible pleasure at the news. I chose not to expand on it.

‘No, it’s my queer peer, you remember? He wants me to write his life.’ James gave me an old-fashioned look.

‘Whitewash, I imagine?’

I considered this. ‘I think not, actually. He talks of handing over diaries, telling all.’

‘But what is there to tell?’

‘I think a lot. I’ve just been to see his memorabilia. It’s all very suggestive. He was in Africa for a long time, I gather. It’s the queer side, though, which would give it its interest. I have the feeling that’s what he wants made known.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Nantwich, Lord, Charles.’

‘Oh really,’ said James irritatingly. ‘Well, it would be interesting, then.’

‘You know about him?’ I stumbled. Because he had come into my life up the back-stairs, I had fatuously assumed that no one else could have heard him announced.

‘A certain amount. He’s the sort of chap who crops up in the lives of other people. Kind of diplomatic-artistic, Harold Nicolsony circles. In fact, he must be about the last person in those circles not to have had his life written. You must do it.’

‘Well, I’m glad I asked you. I’ll get reading.’

‘He’s surely incredibly old.’

‘Eighty-three, he claims. He wanders rather, and it’s hard to tell what’s what and what, as it were, isn’t.’

‘What’s his house like, frightfully grand?’

‘Frightfully grandish. Very nice, actually-stuffed with pictures, blacks, for the most part. He has a somewhat terrifying servant who’s horrible to him and looks like a criminal. I must say I’ve become rather fond of the old boy. He has a Roman mosaic in the cellar and there are rather awful decorations of Romans with great big willies, Tom of Finland avant la lettre, but not what you expect to see in the homes of the aristocracy. Lord Beckwith, certainly, would frown on them…’

‘It’s too exciting. I’ll look some things up for you when I go home.’

I didn’t sleep well that night. It was hot enough to sleep without any covering, but I woke in the small hours feeling just perceptibly cold. The day’s spasm of emotion for Phil recurred and recurred, and the prospect of the Nantwich book, which was alluring, was also oppressive; suppressed guilt and helplessness over Arthur, as well, added their weight, and as the first light felt its way around the curtains, all the things which showed promise seemed only troublesome, agitating the white sheet of a future imagined without them. I started to fantasise over Phil, but didn’t have the heart for it, had at last no sensation of sex, somehow, in my person. I dozed off, and dreamt of having tea with him in the British Museum; there was a mood of intense restraint between us, and when I woke I could not believe that we could possibly become friends.

Uncharacteristically, though the birds were cheeping from four in the morning, I lay in bed slovenly and indecisive until eleven o’clock. By then I had more or less resolved not to write Charles’s memoirs, and to keep my life clear of interference from the demands and misery of other people. Even so, the vacuity of a whole wasted morning showed me how much I needed demands to be made. Sleepier for having overslept, I shaved as the bath ran, the steam repeatedly obscuring my image in the mirror. At first flushed with the heat of the water, I sprawled in the bath till it cooled. I remembered sharing a bath at school with the house tart Mountjoy (it rhymed with ‘spongy’) and the long talk with my housemaster, Mr Bast, which had ensued. Mr Bast had taken the opportunity, in that zealous, companionable way which housemasters have when they rediscover the pastoral nature of their vocation, to criticise the lack of one in me. ‘You’ve got a good brain, William,’ he said; ‘you’re good at games-and I can see why the other boys find you attractive (oh yes, I know all about that). But you should have better things to do with your spare time than messing around with Mountjoy. You lack vocation, William, that is what troubles me.’ At that disaffected age, I felt it was a lack to be proud of. In the following weeks I messed around with Mountjoy far more than before. ‘This is my vocation,’ I would tell him, as we met up after books and sloped off over to Meads for a quick one.

I was nearly asleep when the phone rang; I lurched dripping into the bedroom, sheltering myself in an enormous bath towel. It was James.

‘There are various references in Waugh’s Diaries,’ he said.

‘To Nantwich, you mean?’

‘Yes. They’re mostly only glancing-he must have known him at Oxford, and after. There’s no Oxford diary of course. The most interesting one is before Waugh goes to Africa: “Dinner with Alastair, who returns to Cairo on Sunday. We ran over the Abyssinian plan again. Later we were joined by Charlie Nantwich. He was quite drunk, having been at Georgia’s. Georgia says he is having a liaison with a Negro waiter at the Trocadero, and it is not going well. We pretended to know nothing. He passionate about Africa, beauty, grace, nobility etc of Negroes. He gave me copious advice, which I promised to remember. A. very quiet.” ’

‘Amazing,’ I said. ‘Is that all about him?’

‘That’s the main thing. Quite juicy, isn’t it? Dearest, you must do this. You are going to, aren’t you?’

I rubbed at my legs with the towel. ‘Actually, I’ve just about come to the decision not to.’

‘Well, I think you’re mad.’

‘I know.’

‘Look, he’s obviously selected you specially. You’re meant to do it.’ In James a scientific mind coexisted with a fantastic and romantic belief in Providence. ‘And you’ve got fuck-all else to do. And you can write-your essay on Coade Stone vases was heart-breaking. And you’re very keen on the grace, nobility and so forth of Negroes. It’s an ideal opportunity. If you don’t do it, some other creep will get on to him. Or worse, the old boy will die. It would be an inestimable advantage,’ James concluded, ‘to do it while he was alive, to talk to about it all.’

‘You’ve obviously thought about this far more clearly than I have,’ I said flippantly but truthfully.

‘I’d do it myself, but you know how it is-the sick to heal…’

‘I agree there are reasons for doing it. I’ve just been preoccupied with the reasons for not doing it.’

‘It’s too pathetic. I know you think you’re too grand to do any work, but you’ve got to commit yourself to something. Otherwise you’ll end up an old-young queen who’s done nothing worthwhile. Famous last words of the third Viscount Beckwith: “Fuck me again”.’

I smirked and half-laughed. ‘I thought my last words were to be “How do I look?” ’ James, himself in his grandest mood, was doing his occasional lecture, for which he stood in, it struck me, as an updated version of Mr Bast. ‘It’s just the thought of it going on for years and years, and perhaps not being interesting in the least.’

‘There is also the thought that it will undoubtedly be a bestseller. Come on, he was obviously testing you out at his house-what did you think of the pictures, how did you react to the statue of King Thingamy.’

‘There’s no doubt of that, and he obviously fancies me.’

‘Surely you can handle that, my dear,’ James objected silkily. ‘I mean, you may have to pleasure him once or twice. Mostly with these very old queens they just ask you to go swimming in their pool, or they burst into the bathroom by mistake when you’re having a bath. They just like to have a look, you know.’

‘For God’s sake, James, I’m not bothered about all that. It’s me that’s doing him a favour in the first place. He’s already seen me in my birthday suit several times. He hasn’t got a pool. That’s why I know him.’

‘Promise me you’ll do it. Write the book, I mean.’

‘But darling, you know how it is,’ I squirmed. Instinctively I was playing with myself. ‘I mean, I hate the idea of tying myself down. I want to go out all the time and-you know.’

‘As far as I know, writing books does not preclude having sex. Admittedly some great authors have gone without: Jane Austen, for example, never partook of coition while she was working on a book. Bunyan, too, I believe, wrote the whole of Pilgrim’s Progress without a single fuck. But no such restraints need apply to you. Why, within half an hour of finishing your day’s work you could be in some back room, buggering away like nobody’s business.’

I quite enjoyed these sarcastic smacks. ‘Anyway, I don’t have to make my mind up yet. I said I’d let him know in a few days. It’s partly that I’ve never done anything like this-you know, there must be so many professional biographers. I’m completely inappropriate.’

‘Do you think he doesn’t know that? He knows he could set any of the latter-day Mrs Asps on to it. He’s chosen you because he thinks you will understand. After all, you saved his life once; now he wants you to do it again.’

‘Don’t get carried away with the poetic justice of the whole thing,’ I requested. ‘Look, I’ve got nothing on, and I’ve made the carpet all wet.’

‘All right. But I thought I’d better set you straight on this one. I’m late for my visits as it is-boils, babes, buboes, they’re all being kept waiting. That shows you how important I think it is.’

‘Okay, dear. I’ll speak to you soon.’

‘Okay. Just think what fun it will be choosing your author’s photograph for the dust-jacket.’

‘Mm-I hadn’t thought of that.’ We were both laughing as we hung up.

Three days later I left St Paul’s station, and skirting round the back of the Cathedral headed for Skinner’s Lane. The weather was still hot, but windless and grey: there was a glare in the sky, but I cast no shadows on the pavement. The lane itself and the house were smaller than in my thoughts.

I rang the bell and prepared myself and my expression for the curt reception by Lewis and the subsequent pleasure of Charles in seeing me and knowing that I would take on the work. Over the phone I had agreed at least to look at some of the material; I was to tell him in a month if I thought that I could turn it into a book. ‘I know it’s queer,’ he had said. ‘I’m not famous. But the book could be.’ As before, nothing happened, so I rang again, stepping back as I did so into the street, in the way that callers do, both to nerve themselves for an encounter and to lessen the embarrassment that comes from being one of the street users who is seeking admittance to the private realm of the house. The windows were as opaque as before, but because I now knew what waited behind them I looked at them as if I could see through them into the friendly cluttered library and the silent dining-room.

There was still no response, and I found myself complaining under my breath, ‘You did say four o’clock.’ There was no one else about, though after ringing the bell a third time and also, to command attention but not to seem importunate, knocking soundly a couple of times, I looked round again to see if I was still alone. A middle-aged man had now appeared at the end of the lane, and as he passed and went into one of the derelict properties across the way I felt obliged to go through a minimal pantomime of impatience and perplexity. This involved trying the door with the flat of my hand and finding that it was unlocked and gave, slightly, inwards. I pushed it half open; and darted in.

In a voice quite unlike my own, I called out ‘Hello’. There was no reply. The library door, on the left, was open, so I went cautiously in. It looked untidier than before, with papers and cuttings spread on the main table: this I attributed to Charles’s search for material for me. I was surprised, as I turned to leave, by the sudden rising, yawning and shaking of a large black cat. It had been lying in Charles’s armchair by the fire and stared at me for a moment with something close to enmity before looking away, licking itself, and carrying on as if I weren’t there. It was a beautiful animal, tall and slender, with a nose both broad and long, and erect, triangular ears; it seemed a ceremonial more than a domestic cat, and its voiceless indifference to me heightened my sense of unease and irreality.

I did not try the dining-room but went, knocking and looking in, to the drawing-room at the back. It was empty and orderly, with folded newspapers, a sewing-basket and a darning mushroom on a side-table-things that a masculine household must have. From here a door was open into the kitchen, which I had not seen before. With its wall-cupboards with frosted glass sliding doors, its stoneware sink, round-topped Electrolux fridge and green enamelled gas-range, it resembled a colour plate from my dead grandmother’s just post-war copy of Mrs Beeton; the plugs, which were of black Bakelite and only two-pinned, perfected the image. At a small table under the window Charles and Lewis evidently ate their meals. The pans and plates of a modest lunch stood untouched in the sink.

I felt a strong desire to loiter and look, but also, in case I was observed, to appear not to. And I began to worry about Charles. If Lewis was not around the old fellow might have collapsed undiscovered. I had not noticed whether there were bells in the rooms. I might be alone in the house with a cat and a dead man. It was an idea I did not find wholly unattractive. I strolled back through the hall, glancing at the pictures; hesitating at the foot of the stairs I peered at a little sketch of a dragoman, just a few swift lines that denoted turban, smile, sword and curled-up shoes. As I turned I saw a figure move beside me. My heart leapt and continued to pound when I realised it was only myself swivelling towards the dim old mirror I had looked in before. The gloom made it more mysterious and nervousness quickened my reaction. I did not wait to look at myself, but started to climb the stairs.

I never wore metal-tipped or noisy shoes, preferring to sneak around unheard. Still, the treads of the stairs themselves so moaned and cracked as I went up that there was no chance of being furtive and I climbed boldly, two at a time, to the first floor. In the silence as I stood at the top I heard another dull noise, faint but heavy, and the indistinct sound of a voice talking. It seemed to come from the room at the back of the house, the one above the drawing-room, which would very likely, I thought, be Charles’s own bedroom. I didn’t want to interrupt what might have been a private rite, but I acted on a more reasonable belief that something must be seriously amiss. When I pushed open the door and went in it was at first impossible to say which was really the case.

‘Charles,’ I said clearly.

‘For God’s sake!’ The reply was desperate, muffled and close at hand. ‘Open the bloody door-please!’ I can only have taken a second to work this out, but already there came the pent-up banging I’d heard before. I crossed the room to a smaller door whose handle I tried and a moment later turned its stiff brass key; it was a door which was rarely locked, but which, gratifyingly, still could be if need be. Charles was not gratified. He had retreated to the other side of what was evidently a little dressing-room, with a chest-of-drawers, an open wardrobe, and a corner washbasin against which he leant, red in the face, his tie and collar undone, a look of both apprehension and fury on his face. He made me think of a boxer, penned in his corner, honour-bound to make a final and fatal sortie. He had no idea who I was.

‘Where’s Lewis?’ Though questioning me he seemed to look through me. He was out of breath. ‘Has Graham gone?’

I went towards him with my arms open, but he stepped forward with no purpose of greeting or reconciliation. He lurched past me, though I turned to support him and in the event merely pawed at his shoulder, and followed him closely into the bedroom. There he grappled with a chair which was lying on its side on the floor; the stooping and the effort seemed too much and I stepped around him to help. ‘Charles, it’s William.’

He took no notice of this until he had righted the chair, and dropped on to it heavily. Then he looked at me silently and intently. ‘They’ve gone,’ he said, after a while in which I squatted in front of him and watched him with an anxious smile. ‘They locked me in there-or Lewis did. He didn’t want me to get involved. Look at this room.’

Already Charles was struggling to his feet, though he reached towards me, and I felt he had gone through a transformation, and while doubting its logic, accepted that I was there. I held his considerable weight against me, while his left arm draped round my shoulders and we tottered towards the bed like a pair of drunks. When we got to it he held out his other arm in an eloquent gesture of amazement and desolation.

Actually in the bed, its wide featureless face absurdly crowned by a panama hat, lay a full-sized human effigy. It was only the rudimentary dummy that schoolboys make to suggest their sleeping forms in the near-darkness of an abandoned dorm, but in the light of a summer afternoon the bunched-up bedding and clothes of which it consisted were revealed as glaringly offensive. Its lolling pillow of a head was meant not to deceive but to warn. Looped around it, and displayed over the bedcover, was an Old Wykehamist tie, ineptly knotted, which made me remember, for a second, how my mother used to stand behind me at the mirror each morning to knot my tie when I was a little boy. Red rose petals were scattered artistically around, and where the heart of the effigy might have been there was a rust-red stain on the white bedspread that did resemble the colour of long-dried blood. I reached for a little bottle on the bedside table: it was vanilla essence.

After we’d looked at it for a bit, I let Charles turn, and sit down on the edge of the bed, and then yanked the doll apart, casting its hat on to an armchair and rolling up the tie. ‘You recognise that tie,’ said Charles, with surprising detachment. I smiled. ‘What a pickle, eh?’ And indeed it was the general state of the room, in which a fight had clearly taken place, that had shocked me when I first entered it. The composition on the bed had been in bizarre, attentive contrast to the slewed pictures, toppled knick-knacks and pillaged drawers of the rest of the room. ‘I can’t take another of these melodramas,’ Charles said.

Though I was deeply curious, I felt a strong reluctance to ask Charles what had taken place, or to probe the humiliation he had undergone. I helped him to take off his jacket and shoes, and laid him down on the pillow that had recently imitated his head. As if entranced, he was asleep within seconds.