The Swimming-Pool Library

6

I found James leaning in a corner of the foyer, lips pursed over the score.

‘Taking it a bit seriously, aren’t you, darling?’ I said.

‘Darling.’ We kissed drily, rapidly. ‘No, it’s frightfully good, actually.’

‘Well, I’m glad you’re going to enjoy it.’ I gazed around despairingly at the white tuxedos and bare shoulders. It was far too hot to be in an opera-house, and I had come along in what was virtually a pair of pyjamas-a super-light African cotton outfit, the queenery of which was chastened by a hint of martial arts.

‘Everybody’s looking at you,’ said James, who, adorably, was wearing a suit and tie. ‘God knows what Lord B. will think.’ He had a pleasantly snobbish respect for our family; my grandfather was very fond of James, whom he saw as a humane and practical person, with charming manners and a keen interest in the arts.

‘I despise them all,’ I protested, turning away from a macabre trio of queens, very got-up with gloves and velvet bow-ties. ‘The way some of these creatures look at you, you feel as though you’re being violated-ocularly.’

James was a little embarrassed, had not yet slipped out of the responsibilities of the day, was to be on his best behaviour, and yet also, I knew, longed to side with extravagance. I was in a mood of atrocious egotism, brought on by what had turned out to be absolute adoration from Phil, but I seemed to sense, as I looked across the hall and up the long mirrored stairway, a further perspective, in which James and I were together as we had been in the past.

‘They might pay less attention to you,’ he said, ‘if you don’t look like something out of the Arabian Nights. You appear to have an erection, as well.’

‘Of course I’ve got an erection. I’m in love.’

James gave me a comically shrewd look. ‘Oh God. And who’s the victim this time?’

‘What a horrid thing to say!’ I swept the audience with another glare. ‘He’s a boy from the Corry, actually-a body-builder-short-dark hair-called Phil.’ Just saying that made me wish I were with him even more. I glanced at James and saw a look of terrible anxiety pass over his face.

‘I wonder if it’s anyone I’ve seen there,’ he said. Then: ‘Ah-here’s Lord B.’

My grandfather, looking very fine with sleek grey hair and sun-browned face, was making his way courteously through the crowd. ‘James. Very good to see you.’ They shook hands and grinned. ‘Turning in, old boy?’ he said to me. ‘I could have a bed made up in the box.’ At the same time he shook me by the scruff of the neck, insisting on his joke even as he showed he did not mean it. The glow of mutual appreciation permeated my mood. We started upstairs

‘Did you have a sleep after lunch?’ I enquired.

‘I think I probably did drop off-how about you?’

‘Mm-I spent all afternoon in bed,’ I replied truthfully.

‘Frightfully good lunch, though. Do you know this restaurant, James?’

‘Where did you go?’

‘The Crépuscule des Dieux.’ He chuckled. ‘It ought to be just up your street…’ He meant, because of Wagner, though he can’t have been unaware of the discreetly homosexual style of the whole place, the waiters in tails with long white aprons, the rich older men treating their bored and flirtatious young dolly-boys. ‘Not the food for you, though, perhaps-all swimming in blood!’ James loathed jokes of this kind but he managed a disgusted smile. He’d passed a demanding New Year at Marden once, subsisting entirely on roast potatoes and Stilton, and pretending indifference as chargers of pheasant, goose and almost raw beef were borne in by the staff.

Upstairs, my grandfather remembered the name of the doorman who walked along the corridor with us, saying, just at the last moment, ‘And how’s your wife, Roy?’ (Roy being the man’s surname rather than his Christian name).

‘I’m afraid she died, my Lord,’ Roy said in a well-seasoned way. Here was a test for my grandfather, for a merely courtesy concern had turned on him and presented him with a real little tragedy. I stood and watched him pat the man on the back in a brotherly way, and nod his head impressively.

‘They’re pretty terrible, these bereavements,’ he said. ‘And it doesn’t get any better, I’m afraid.’ As Roy said, ‘No, my lord,’ he was already leaving him, having done the convincingly human thing and yet not involved himself in the least. He pulled the door to and placed us, him in the middle, and James nearer the stage.

My grandfather was a Director of Covent Garden, and I had seen many operas with him from this same box. Yet I never felt it was a good point to watch the performance from: for the privacy and elevation of the box we paid the cost of seeing the orchestra, a view into the wings and an imperfect vantage on the upper stage. The privacy, anyway, was an ambiguous thing, since the eyes of the stalls dwelt on the boxes as though on the balconies of a royal residence. I was aware of the bad effect this had on me-an affected unawareness of the rest of the house, exaggerated laughter and enthralment in the remarks of my companions. I did not like myself much for this-indeed the box represented to me in some ways the penalties of exposure, discomfort and pitilessness which were paid for privilege. Tonight I sprawled over the red plush sill and let James and my grandfather talk until the lights went down.

It was Billy Budd, an opera I recalled as a gauche, almost amateur affair, and I had not in the least expected to enjoy it; and yet, when Captain Vere’s monologue ended and the scene on board the Indomitable opened up, with the men holy-stoning the deck and singing their oppressed, surging chorus, I was covered in goose-flesh. When Billy, press-ganged from his old ship, sang his farewell to his former life and comrades-‘Farewell, old Rights o’ Man, farewell’-the tears streamed down my face. The young baritone, singing with the greatest beauty and freshness, brought an extraordinary quality of resisted pathos to Billy; in the stammering music his physiognomy, handsome and forthright and yet with a curious fleshy debility about the mouth, made me believe it as his own tragedy.

None of this should have surprised me. I had not heard any music for a few days, and I was all charged up, glowing and gratified, so that my sense of everything was heightened. I felt every phrase of the music in a physical way, as if I had turned into a little orchestra myself.

In the interval we had champagne, though James would only take a drop, saying it would give him a headache. He was prone to bad headaches, often of a nervous kind (for instance, when he had a clear weekend after being on call for two or three weeks he would spend it supine in a darkened room, a hand pressed to his brow). The heat and intensity of a theatre always brought on a bit of a head for him too. I think he concentrated exceptionally hard-at a concert he would either follow the score or his knuckles would be white with tension-whereas I, though I was gripped and appalled by the opera, blubbing again at the despair of the poor little Novice, his body and spirit broken by his flogging, had also had periods of several minutes’ duration when I had paid no attention at all, thinking about Phil, and sex, and what I was going to do later.

My grandfather looked at me apprehensively. ‘Are you enjoying it, darling?’ he asked.

‘I think it’s wonderful,’ I said. ‘It’s a funny old production, but there’s something quite touching about that.’

‘Mm-I agree. Quite unchanged since the very first performance, of course. It’s a museum piece, still being used after thirty years. We had a lot of talk about a new production, but we felt the loot could be better spent on something else.’

‘Yes.’ I was on for more champagne already.

‘What do you think, James?’

‘Oh, I’m enjoying it,’ James said, with an emphasis that suggested reservations. His eyes were darkly rimmed, he looked sallow with lack of sleep, and I wondered what it would be like to come to the crowded unreality of a theatre after a day’s long concentration on illness and misery.

‘I don’t know if it’s a piece you especially care for.’

‘It’s always more moving and impressive than you expect,’ James said, as so often echoing my own feelings; but our solidarity brought us to the edge of difficult terrain. What he would want to talk about would be the suppressed or (in his usual term) deflected sexuality of the opera. We must all have recognised it, though it would have had an importance, even an eloquence, to James and me that would have been quite lost on my grandfather. He had spent all his adult life in circles where good manners, lofty savoir-faire and plain callousness conspired to avoid any recognition that homosexuality even existed. The three of us in our hot little box were trapped with this intensely British problem: the opera that was, but wasn’t, gay, the two young gay friends on good behaviour, the mandarin patriarch giving nothing of his feelings away.

I decided to brave it, and said: ‘It’s an odd piece, though, partly the sex thing, of course. Claggart’s bit about beauty and handsomeness could win a prize for general ghastly creepiness. He’s sort of coming out with it and not coming out with it at the same time.’

My grandfather hesitated diplomatically before saying: ‘That was very much Forster’s line actually. Though I don’t think it’s generally known.’

‘Did you meet Forster?’ James blurted in reverence and surprise.

‘Oh, only occasionally, you know. But I do clearly recall the first night of Billy Budd. Britten himself was in the pit, of course. It made a fairly big impression, though I remember opinion was very divided about it. Many people understandably didn’t altogether care for the Britten-Pears thing.’ James looked blank and I frowned, but my grandfather went on. ‘There was a party afterwards that Laura and I went to and I had quite a long chat with old Forster about the libretto.’

‘What was he like?’ asked James. My grandfather smiled wearily-he did not care to be interrupted. Then James looked mortified.

‘He seemed satisfied with it, but there was something distinctly contrary about him. I was quite surprised when he openly criticised some of the music. Claggart’s monologue in particular he thought was wrong. He wanted it to be much more… open, and sexy, as Willy puts it. I think soggy was the word he used to describe Britten’s music for it.’

I thought this was extremely interesting, and my grandfather looked pleased, as if he had belatedly discovered the use of something he had dutifully been carrying about for years. I felt matters had subtly changed, an admission been made. But then that ‘understandable’ dislike of Britten and Pears-there was a little phrase I might myself take on through life, wanting to forget it or to disprove the unpleasant truth it hinted at. I tilted out the last of the champagne and watched James talking to his host. I seemed to see him as a boy, a shy but exemplary sixth-former reporting to a master. The open score on the sill of the box was like a book in a portrait codifying some special accomplishment, the entry to a world of sensibility where he had found himself when young, and to which, hard-working and solitary, he must still have access.

I was smiling reflectively, perhaps irritatingly, at him as we were joined by Barton Maggs, one of the most assiduous and proprietary opera-goers in London and abroad, on his interval tour of the nobs.

‘Oh dear, oh dear-Denis, Will…’ He nodded upswept, sandy eyebrows at us.

‘Do you know James Brooke? Professor Maggs…’ He discharged a further nod at James. He seemed to be out of breath, getting round everybody in time, and his weight was emphasised by a too tight and youthful seersucker suit and white moccasins on small womanly feet.

‘Fair to middling, I’d say, wouldn’t you?’ he proposed.

‘We were just saying how good we thought it was.’ Maggs had no sense of humour and no awareness either that we would instinctively treat him with irony.

‘Oh dear-it’s funny, isn’t it, I always think how funny, there not being any women in it. Some people claim not to notice.’ He looked around as if anything might happen.

‘You couldn’t have women in it, though, could you. I mean, it takes place on a ship.’ I felt that just about summed it up.

My grandfather engaged with it drolly. ‘Still, I think you want a sort of Buttercup figure, don’t you, Barty-selling tobacco and peppermints to the crew…’

‘Perhaps Captain Vere’s sisters and his cousins and his aunts could be brought in,’ I said. ‘I’m sure they’d quell any mutiny.’

‘Oh yes, h’m. I do miss hearing a good soprano though,’ he said, and looked almost bereft, as if Britten had let him down in not providing the display of palpitating femininity that so many homosexuals crave. The warning bell was already ringing and he busily took his leave.

My grandfather was reminiscing about Forster again (matter which was all new to me as well, so that I asked myself why I had never as it were interviewed him about his past) when James broke in a second time. ‘I say, isn’t that Pears down there?’ We all turned to look.

Pears was shuffling very slowly along the aisle towards the front of the stalls, supported by a man on either side. Most of the bland audience showed no recognition of who he was, though occasionally someone would stare, or look away hurriedly from the singer’s stroke-slackened but beautiful white-crested head. Then there was the protracted and awkward process of getting him along his already repopulated row. James and I were mesmerised, and seeing him in the flesh I felt the whole occasion subtly transform, and the opera whose ambiguity we had carped at take on a kind of heroic or historic character under the witness of one of its creators. Even though I felt he would be enjoying it, I believed in its poignancy for him, seeing other singers performing it on the same stage in the same sets as he had done decades before, under the direction of the man he loved. It had become an episode in his past, just as the blessing of Billy Budd was in the memory of the elderly Captain Vere. Indeed, gazing at Pears, who was doubtless embarrassed and uncomfortable as he finally regained his seat, I reacted to him as if he were himself an operatic character-just as I had entered with spurious, or purely aesthetic, emotion into Charles Nantwich’s war-time adolescence, and the loss of his shell-damaged idol in a Hertfordshire mental hospital. It was an irresistible elegiac need for the tendernesses of an England long past.

Then the lights went down, my grandfather said curtly, ‘I don’t give him long,’ and we all applauded the orchestra.

I didn’t see Phil the following night as he was going for a drink with some friends and I couldn’t face the boredom and frustration of it. Besides, I would have been out of place, and a puzzle to his mates, who didn’t know-it was so soon, they couldn’t yet know-that he was gay. ‘Why don’t you go and see your friends,’ Phil had suggested to me, and I had retorted, ‘But, dearest, I don’t have any friends’-a hyperbole which expressed a surprising truth. There were people I was glad to see, but almost no one I would seek out, or invite for a meal or a drink. Instead, I sat up in the dining-room with a bottle of Scotch and Charles’s Oxford diary:

October 26, 1920: After a groggy start, over to Sandy’s rooms. He was as bad as I was, & said had he made a fool of himself with Tim (he couldn’t remember a thing after we left the Grid). I said probably, but Tim was surely used to it by now. S. had an eggnog & got dressed & didn’t look too foul; I read a letter from his mother out loud to him, imitating the prim tones of a schoolmarm (perhaps I shouldn’t have done?). She has the fantastic impression that S. does not drink. Back to Oriel & the others were already waiting for us-Tim Carswell, Chancey Brough, Eddie Lossiter & the rest. The rest went off in Hubert’s car with much honking and shouting, which made me doubt the wisdom of going-head less clear than a bell, & it was a dank, foggy morning so the ground wd be heavy going. Tim seemed fine with Sandy, but when we got in Eddie’s car he suddenly got out and went to sit in front with Eddie, so it was S., Chancey & me in the back. Ch was bursting with vulgar health, his skin, close up, had a waxy smoothness like church candles. I felt how big he was, squashed up next to me-his trousers immaculately white & straining. S., who thinks him so handsome (as well as a boor), cd barely be fagged to speak to him; whilst I, who don’t think he’s handsome, chatted to him happily enough-the usual thing. Tim & Eddie were madly earnest in front & talked about the League of Nations all the way to Witney.

Tom Flew had brought the dogs in his van, & since a couple of other friends of Eddie’s joined us at Witney (one of them I thought I’d seen before, fair & amiable with a broken nose), they went on the last bit in the car, while Chancey & I took a ride in the van. The smell, as ever, was asphyxiating, & what with the lurching of the van I thought I was going to bring up the excellent kidneys and bacon Matthew had fixed for me earlier on. Old Tom himself, in his dog-eared, dog-mouthed, dogshit-coloured cap & hacking jacket, stank as bad as the dogs. He kept turning round while he was driving & swearing at them through the cage. Then they wd yap & whine, panting all the while in a rank, warm, excited sort of way. I was quite glad to be penned up against Chancey (we had a buttock each on the passenger’s seat) for he at least smelt of shaving-soap & hair-lotion.

We stopped just in time. Tom’s boy (who improves on acquaintance-farcically rustic, of course, but his hands are magnificent, an octave and a half, I shd think) said there had been a fair few hares-but he’d been kicking about in the lane for hours, marking the spot, & it seemed fairly hopeless. At this stage I wd have been glad to find myself back in Oxford, & Sandy was pretty tragically keen on the idea of bed, a darkened room & a bottle of aspirins. Still, off we set, for what turned out to be an utterly futile morning’s sport, with poor visibility, a kind of clinging drizzle in the air, the mud making things very tricky, & not a sniff of a hare less than several hours old. Eventually Tim called off & we toiled through to another road, up which Tom’s boy miraculously appeared in Hubert’s car, looking absolutely terrified, with the lunch in the back.

This was Hubert’s idea, rather than go over to the public house as normal where we had felt less than welcome before when S. was very drunk & indiscreet (not to say made up like a Regent Street margery); but the question was, where to have it? Some said in the car & Tim said we cd take it to the house of someone he knew not far away, but Eddie’s friend with the broken nose said he owed that someone a thousand pounds, so that wd never do. Then Tom’s boy suggested what he called the Old Castle, which was in the wood we cd see not far ahead, looming out of the mist. Tom said he thought it wd be acceptable to us-it was designed for just this, he said. The boy opined that it was an old place, but Tom scorned this vigorously & said it was just a ‘make-believe’, a ‘fairy-tale castle’, so we gathered it was some kind of folly or woodland lodge.

We went on up the lane & then cut along the side of a field. The fence at the edge of the wood was no more than a few rotten posts, sticking out of the bracken. Many of the trees were dead or decrepit, & there was a surprising number of yews, which made the wood even darker. It must have been deathly quiet when free of people like us, swearing and pranking about. Sandy & I rather fell back & came on after the others, arm-in-arm, enjoying the melancholy mood, I thought, until S. said ‘God, I feel sick!’ & I realised his was the silence of a man who’s had too much the night before. I cd see too that he felt anxious about Tim, from the way he pretended to pay no attention to him & then I wd catch him looking at him through his eyebrows-full of humiliated fondness.

The Castle was a funny old place, smaller than I’d expected & completely irregular. There was a hall in the middle, with a dark panelled room off it at the back. On either side half-collapsed walls made off into the wood, & were cunningly topped with small trees to look like authentic medieval ruins. Some of the windows were pointed, some round, some square, & through the ivy you cd see that the walls were patterned with huge pieces of vermiculated stone-not, I think, the usual builders’ material, which is drilled artificially, but the real thing, brought from some volcanic site. The whole surface of the little Castle was freakish & grotesque, with the hairy fingers of long-dead creepers, the dull gloss of the ivy, the arrow-slits, & the rough, labyrinthine lava. S. & I slid our fingers into the inviting little passages, & lots of woodlice & things came scampering out. At the back we went through an arch into a little dank yard, with ferns lolling from the walls, a heap of old beer-bottles in one corner, & the ash & half-burnt logs of a fire that had been lit there long ago. It was strange that whoever had camped there had not gone inside-we had found it unlocked, & there was a huge blackened chimney-breast in the hall.

When S. & I went in the others were already flinging the picnic around as if it were a hare & they were dogs. There were some long trestle-tables, with benches, & at either end colossal Arthurian chairs made out of whole trees. The entire thing was like some mad college hall, except with pigeons flopping around, & more bird-droppings than usual on the tables. There were other bits of furniture too, hideous Victorian things too big to destroy, like a carved cupboard with a ruched scarlet curtain (all torn & stained) & an old S-shaped loving-chair, where 2 people cd sit acceptably side-by-side with a balustrade in between. ‘This is a queer old dive,’ said Chancey to me, in a confidential sort of way. ‘Do you think so?’ I said. ‘I was just thinking how like home it was.’ I cd see he didn’t know quite whether to believe me.

It was a lesson in manners at lunch. Hubert & Eddie were particularly abandoned, cramming ham & gherkins into their mouths, slopping drink about, & behaving in a thoroughly aristocratic fashion. When Tim got up, Hubert spread mayonnaise on the bench, hoping he’d sit down in it, but Sandy, of course, who rather grandly partook only of a bread-roll & a glass of champagne, shouted out to him just in time, & earned some sullen gratitude. I ate, I think I can say, in a perfectly decorous fashion, with a slight sprawling over the table in deference to the occasion. But Chancey was a paragon of etiquette, wielding cutlery like a born lady in his rugger-player’s hands. He never relaxes, & seems constantly aware of his inferior station, though everyone else would gladly forget it. ‘Of course, we never had champagne at home,’ he confessed to me-so I made him drink from the bottle till the foam ran down his chin. All the while Tom & his boys sat by the door eating in silence, Tom taking frequent top-ups from a bottle he seemed to have established as his own, & saying ‘None for the boy’ whenever Eddie proffered a glass in his direction. Poor Tom’s boy! I soon felt revived by the drink & looked at him with more interest. His clothes were all too small, which made him look wretched and absurd at the same time as showing how large he was. Only his tweed cap was big enough, & threatened to come down altogether over his wide, if incurious, gaze. I had quite a vivid idea of him wrestling with me & throwing me about.

After a while people wandered outside, Tom was reluctantly pulled back into action, holding on to his bottle & advising against any further sport in the afternoon. S. retired to the car & Chancey & I strolled into the little back room, with glasses in our hands, as though we had been at a party at a house in town, & were going to look at the pictures. And there were pictures. The room had a bowed church window, which looked as if it had been ripped out of a much older building, with rather lurid stained glass & in the middle two medallions with portraits of sweet, curly-headed little boys in ruffs, haloed in urine-coloured light. There must have been some curious family tale behind it. ‘A fine pair of fairies,’ quoth Chancey, with ill-judged humour.

Then something very strange began to happen-or perhaps it had really begun to happen much earlier on. Ch had walked back across the room, scuffing the plaster & rubbish that covered the floor where part of the ceiling had collapsed. Rainwater must have built up above it, & indeed the whole room, with the somewhat sepulchral effect of the stained glass, felt hideously damp & had that sad mouldy smell that must have meant the beginning of the end for the old Castle. I turned around myself & found Chancey looking at me in the queerest way, his glass stiffly held out in one hand at an angle, so that the contents were very slowly running out down the stem & dripping on to the floor. Outside I heard Eddie shouting ‘Charlie’ & then Tom’s boy saying ‘They’ve all gone, sir.’ There were whoops & whistles from the wood & Tim, presumably, tooting on his horn. I smiled quizzically at Chancey, wondering no end about the possibility of all this, though I didn’t really think I cd go through with it, & went back into the hall. The door was open, but the party had been cleared away, apart from a dozen empty Bollinger bottles which had been left where they had fallen. There was no one there.

I went & sat in the old loving-chair, rather appalled by its hackneyed readiness for the occasion, & after a moment Ch came back in, & walked over with the same intent look on his face. As he sat down I noticed, as I hadn’t been able to help noticing earlier in the van, how terrific his private parts were, & now he was conspicuously more excited. As old Roly Carroll wd have said, ‘you cd see the copper’s ’elmet’. I looked at them coming towards me, & felt that frightful inner convulsion of lust, my heart in my mouth & blushing like a rose. The mud, too, spattered up his boots & over his white breeches as tight as a trapeze-artist’s, had some strangely unsettling effect on me.

But as soon as he sat down he changed tack completely, & went on about his wretched family as if nothing had happened. How hard his father had worked, & what his mother had done to give him a good education, & how people like Eddie looked down on him because he had been to a school he’d never heard of, & how- & this was the unearned climax to his peroration, which went on for a good 5 minutes while I said nothing whatever-I was the only person who showed him any true consideration, & thought about his inner life. Now this fairly astonished me, as, without being callous, I had never for a moment imagined he had an inner life & frankly, the glimpse he had just afforded me of it was none too appealing. There is nothing worse than making a bid for someone’s body & getting their soul instead.

I looked at him in a contemptuous way, I fear. There we were, side by side, gazing past each other, our elbows resting on the rail between us. ‘Enough of this,’ I said & clasped his hand in mine, our elbows wobbling on the rail as if we were Indian arm-wrestlers. Then suddenly he seemed to panic, & was hugging me boisterously. We clung to each other for some while, leaning over the little fence, which was less than comfortable. He said many extravagant things about me, most of which, on reflection, were apt enough, & which people don’t say to me sufficiently often…

How amply misnamed is the loving-chair! I suggested we have a walk outside-partly because there was no refuge if anyone came back to look for us-so off we went, & he got going once again on how he thought Tim didn’t trust him, was it because he knew about his ‘real nature’, & so forth. I told him about Tim at school & what he had been like then, whatever censorious woman-chasing attitudes he took on now. ‘I must have buggered Tim Carswell at least 500 times,’ I said, calling up a random figure which can’t have been far from the truth. Poor old Chancey was fairly shattered at this. ‘I’ve missed out on my youth,’ he said, rather melodramatically.

When we got into a particularly thick knot of yews, I caught his arm & we set to it. I knew he had to have me, which was very painful (after so long without anything of this kind) though over quickly. I was quite unaroused throughout, had had quite enough of it all by the time he was waxing melancholy and emotional, kind of victorious & guilt-laden at the same time. It was only afterwards-only now-I saw the beauty of it.

We eventually found the others back where we’d started & ready to give us up & go home without us, which wd have been an intolerable price to pay for so little pleasure. Loud were the exclamations & I suppose widespread the obvious conjecture. Only Sandy actually said, as I climbed into the car where he had been resting all this while, ‘Poodlefaking with Chancey Brough, eh? You wicked little slut.’ Later, on the journey, though with Tim this time on the other side of me, Chancey, feeling all rejected, having chosen to ride in the front, Sandy said, his eyes closed & I had thought asleep, ‘So tell me about our bourgeois Priapus, Charlie,’ quite loudly, so that I had to tickle him & fight all the way back to College…

It was the middle of the evening, and not too late, I thought, to ring Charles up. I was amused to see that there were two C. Nantwiches in the directory, and that mine did not choose to distinguish himself from his namesake in Excelsior Gardens, SE 13. The phone was answered at once by a brusque-sounding man, evidently Lewis’s replacement; I was relieved that Charles had found someone and felt ashamed of my self-centred neglect of the old boy. ‘I’ll see if his Lordship’s in,’ said the man, which struck me as an especially absurd formula in this case. Charles came on almost immediately.

‘Hello! Hello!’ he was going. He had evidently started talking before picking up the receiver.

‘Charles! It’s William… William Beckwith.’

‘My dear. How frightfully pleasant to hear you. Are you reading my stuff?’

‘I certainly am. I was just ringing to say how terrific I think it is.’

‘Are you enjoying it, then?’

‘I think it’s wonderful. I’ve just read about you and Chancey Brough in the woods near Witney.’

‘Oh…?’ I chose not to elaborate on something he appeared, at least, to have forgotten. But I was very struck that, as well as the Winchester stuff, which, despite its period, spoke for me too, down to the very details of places and customs, there was a much less expected fore-echo of my own life in the episode of the Old Castle. I had been to the same place, Pevsner in hand, on an architectural drive with my tutor. The end whose beginning Charles had witnessed over sixty years before was near at hand: the roof had fallen in, the stained-glass windows were boarded up, a barbed-wire fence surrounded the site and red and white signs said ‘Danger-Falling Masonry’.

‘And I also wanted to find out how you were.’

After a silence he said: ‘Are you coming to see me again?’

‘Of course, I’d love to-there’s so much I want to talk to you about.’

‘Don’t come tomorrow.’

‘No, all right.’

‘You’re pretty interested in my story, then, are you?’ he said with a chuckle. ‘Quite a tale, isn’t it?’

‘It may be too much of a tale for me to tell…’ I said with pussyfooting kindness.

‘My dear, I think it would be a good thing,’ Charles pursued as if he had not heard (and perhaps he hadn’t), ‘if you went down to Stepney on Friday. Have a little parley with old Shillibeer at the Limehouse Boys’ Club. Friday’s the big night-it would save me telling you… so much. It’s a seven o’clock start, of course.’

‘Er-yes, all right…’ I said.

‘And come and see me at the weekend? It’s lonely as bloody hell here’ (he whispered the last three words as if there had been ladies present). ‘My new man will have to meet you…’ Then the line went dead. He had simply, impractically, absent-mindedly, hung up.

I lay back on my bed and thought about the many lives of Charles Nantwich-the schoolboy discovering black beauty, the frivolous undergraduate beagling, drinking and ragging, the dreaming District Commissioner in the Nuba Hills, the old man who had forgotten the functions and protocol of the telephone.

When I suggested an evening in Limehouse to Phil he was less than enthusiastic. ‘Why don’t you go?’ he said.

‘I am going.’

‘Oh, right. I think I’ll stay in, though.’ He looked worried by the idea. ‘I’d have to get back here to be on duty-so I couldn’t drink or anything.’

We were in his little attic room at the hotel again, and he licked me and fiddled with my nipples as though to make me forget that this fractional disobedience was taking place.

‘I probably won’t be there very long.’ I said. Although we had been together a lot in the previous week I had privately told him nothing about the Nantwich affair. ‘I’ve just got to talk to some old man about something-I don’t imagine there’ll be much to it.’

Phil stayed silent. It would soon be time for him to go to work, and I felt him already preparing to abstract himself. Tonight this distancing gave me a little qualm, and as he sat up to get dressed I pushed him back roughly and fucked him hard and fast, his asshole still tacky with spunk and grease from our slower, longer lovemaking just before. As he cleaned up afterwards and looked out his laundered clothes there was still a reserve in his manner, nothing so strong as resentment, but the first suggestion of an independence which it was only dignified that I should allow. All the same I felt unhappy. While he sat on the end of the bed with his back turned to me and pulled on his socks, I looked baffledly at his compact physique. Then he was sitting very still and I caught his eye in the gloomy recess of the dressing-table mirror.

‘Man, I really do love you,’ he said, both as if it were a discovery and to reassure me and chide me for being silly just because he didn’t want to go on a journey to Limehouse (a journey whose only conceivable interest for him would have been that of being with me). To show goodwill he came back upstairs a few minutes after leaving and quite startled me as I stood naked looking out at the stars. He had brought me, under cover of Room Service, a tray with a smoked salmon sandwich and a glass of Drambuie-things which hardly went together, but which had touchingly been chosen for their luxuriousness.

The following evening, after an early swim, I went on east on the Central Line. The City had already evacuated, and though the train was crowded to Liverpool Street there was only a scattering of us left for Bethnal Green, Mile End and beyond. All the other people in my car-Indian women with carrier-bags, some beery labourers, a beautiful black boy in a track-suit-looked tired and habituated. When I got out at Mile End, though, other passengers got on, residents of an unknown area who used the Underground, just as I did, as a local service, commuting and shopping within the suburbs and rarely if ever going to the West End, which I visited daily. I felt more competent for my mobility, but also vaguely abashed as I came out into the unimpressionable streets of this strange neighbourhood.

I was a touch nervous as well: it was my first independent research into Charles’s life and finding myself doing it I also found myself precipitately involved in the project. I had brought a notebook with me on which I had even written ‘Nantwich’ in bold letters. But I had no idea what I was going to write in it, who ‘old Shillibeer’ was or what to expect from him. I remembered seeing a letter addressed to him at Charles’s house, the unusual name. It was a Dickensian or Arnold Bennettish sort of name, with a patina of East End commerce and grime to it. It had a portly, self-made propriety about it as well as a coarse, bibulous slur. I rehearsed things I might say to him, and anticipated hostility or dislike.

And then coming out this far-though only this far-symbolised for me uncomfortably how I had fallen short in helping Arthur. It was only a few weeks since his disappearance and I had done nothing about him and already was so absorbed in someone else that I didn’t even think of him for days at a stretch. There was nothing I could do, of course. I didn’t know where he lived, and I could hardly report the disappearance of a murderer to the police. Saying that to myself gave me a shock, made me flush and my heart race. The awful fact, which I had grown domestically used to while we were together, struck me badly when I came on it suddenly, from some way off. It was as if, sweeping a distant view with binoculars, I glimpsed the violent act and came back to it hurriedly, sharpening the focus with trembling hands.

I had left far too much time for my journey to the Boys’ Club and dreading to arrive conspicuously early I walked by on the other side of the street, crossed over Commercial Road and went briskly along to St Anne’s church, whose bizarre and gigantic tower I had seen from the distance. The day had grown heavier as it grew older, and the early evening light was neutral and overcast as I crossed the churchyard. The leaning birches along the path gathered a further gloom to them, and I gazed up through their branches at the giant uprearing of masonry beyond.

A slight noise like a snapped stick made me look sideways and peer at where, under the young trees, a youth was sitting on one of the table-tombs, elbows on knees, flicking and stripping a long twig in his hands. I could make out no expression, and barely hesitated in my walk, continuing to the north door, which I had no doubt would be locked, and then, with affected nonchalance such as I would have shown equally under the gaze of a mugger or a pick-up, sauntered up the half-open fan of steps beneath the tower, my absorption in its weight-lifting baroque disturbed and strained by my awareness of the boy.

There is always that question, which can only be answered by instinct, of what to do about strangers. Leading my life the way I did, it was strangers who by their very strangeness quickened my pulse and made me feel I was alive-that and the irrational sense of absolute security that came from the conspiracy of sex with men I had never seen before and might never see again. Yet those daring instincts were by no means infallible: their exhilaration was sharpened by the courted risk of rejection, misunderstanding, abuse.

The church was thoroughly locked and the west door, with fine grit and year-old leaves driven against it, was clearly never used. The abandoned mood, and the mental image I had of the vast, dusky interior, made the church somehow repugnant to me, monolithic, full of dead sensibility. I turned and casually took in the figure sitting under the trees. It was hard to see, but I had the feeling he was looking at me, picking at the bark on the stick in his hands in an indolent, time-wasting way. I trotted down the steps and turned back across the churchyard.

When I got close to him, he was looking around as if unaware of me, as it might be waiting for his mates to show up. But the solitude of the churchyard made this altogether unlikely-it was not a thoroughfare, but a sequestered rendezvous. On the other hand, if he was on the lookout for sex, he had chosen a spot where he might have gone unseen all evening. There was something desolate and adolescent about his singleness, and I was not surprised to see that he was only sixteen or so. He did not meet my gaze as I walked past him, but when I was just beyond he said, in a pure Cockney voice, ‘’Ere, got a light?’

It was faintly incredible too to have this oldest of pick-up questions put to me, though I suppose all techniques have their freshness and wit when one is very young. I span round with a welcoming grin. ‘No, sorry,’ I said.

He met my smile with a shy blue gaze. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I ain’t got no fags.’

This could have been a calculated snub, expressed in the strange symbolic style of the streets. Still, I kept on grinning, to show I didn’t mind, and so perhaps to stir his worse contempt. He looked away, and I took in his appearance: tight old jeans, a blue T-shirt with a horizontal pink stripe running under the arms, baseball boots; a slender build, a roundish face touched with acne about the mouth, heavy dark blond hair, naturally oily, swinging forward like that of a Sixties model. I scuffed around in the dry, unmown grass beside him, my cock lurching into a hard-on which he could hardly fail to notice. His own genitals were pinched up tight in the crotch of his jeans, and he squeezed the swelling outline of his cock with the palm of his hand.

‘Live round ’ere, do you?’ he said, squinting up at me provocatively and sarcastically. I smiled again and shook my head. ‘Thought not,’ he said, looking away and snapping the stick up now in his hands. My uneasy imagination saw in this some covert allusion to ‘faggot’. Still, I was determined to have him. It was partly the insolent way he sat and spoke, his overvaluing of his own charms itself making him more sexy. But it was also his youth, and the boredom and randiness of the mid-teens, that got me going. It brought back to me the time, like the erotomaniac nights and days that Charles evoked in his diary, when life was all hanging about and fantasy. It was the mood of long car journeys through France with my mother map-reading for my father, whilst Philippa and I fought or slept in the back seat and I dreamt of men. Then we would arrive at some cathedral town and I would climb out of the car attempting to master an overwhelming erection. During the trip I was drawn compulsively to public lavatories where the drawings and graffiti confirmed my sex-obsessed but impractical view of things, their mystery heightened by repeated but incomprehensible words of argot. As our family group strolled through the square in the evening, dressed in beautiful light clothes, I would drag behind, my gaze searching out the bulging flies of the lads gathered round the war memorial, the clenching buttocks of the boys who slammed the pinball machines just inside the doorways of bars.

I didn’t have much time. ‘Do you?’ I said.

He stood up and began to wander off. ‘Eh?’

‘Live round here…’

‘What d’you think?’ he said. He had this tight, mean, logical talk, highly defensive and dull. I followed him, feeling more and more at a disadvantage-old, too, as people over twenty are to their juniors. He reached the low wall by the road, and turned round, stroking the outline of his quite big dick. Just along the street people were waiting at a bus-stop. It was no place for a scene. I came up close to him and put my hand on his shoulder, and he smiled in a way that for the first time revealed his nervousness.

‘Come on,’ I said, seizing this advantage. But immediately he closed down again; it was with studied shrewdness that he said:

‘How much money ’ave you got, then?’

I nodded my head and chuckled ironically-the only way was to behave like him. ‘Just enough for myself,’ I said.

‘ ’sthat so? Well you’ll need a lot more than that if you want a nice bit of bum round ’ere’-almost in a whisper, as if trying to keep the great bargain he was offering me a secret from the group at the bus-stop.

I’d had enough. I dropped my hand, half-turned and jumped over the wall. ‘Bye-bye,’ he called cheerily as I waited to cross the road-and chose a bad moment that meant I had to run; a van honked at me. I felt the boy’s absolutely unfriendly eyes on me, and annoyance and humiliation, and, as I turned up the road to the Club, conflicting urges to dismiss him as rubbish and to run back and pay whatever he wanted. I saw myself pissing over him, jamming my cock down his throat, forcing my fingers up his ass-disturbing images with which to enter a Boy’s Club. I resented his ability to resist me, and that I had no power over someone so young.

The Club building must formerly have been a Nonconformist chapel. The bulk of it was built of a rebarbative grey stone, with mean pointed windows; tacked on in front and at the side were modern extensions in red brick, with metal-framed windows (the frosted glass spoke of changing-rooms) and peeling white trim. It was, as Charles had said, a big night, and the lino-tiled hallway was full of family people-rather got up, I suspected: mothers with arms crossed anxiously under their bosoms, and fathers showing the suppressed pride of parents at a speech-day. Many youngsters were rushing about, and the sense of private occasion made me feel more than ever out of place. I went over to the glass-fronted NoBos and communed for a second with my reflection before scanning the lists of activities, notices about excursions, and team photographs, routinely seeking out the faces of pretty boys (of which there were several) and those inevitable glimpses of underwear up the rucked short-legs of seated footballers. Then, in the next frame, there was a larger notice, printed in an old-fashioned and distinguished way, announcing that on this very day, in contests of three rounds each, the London and Home Counties Boys’ Club Boxing Championship would be decided, and the winning team presented with ‘the Nantwich Cup’.

I felt how slow and incurious I had been now that I saw this evidence of Charles’s further influence and philanthropy. Of course he hadn’t sent me all this way merely to speak to the mysterious Shillibeer; I was amused and impressed that there was more to it, as well as getting the uneasy feeling that Charles was orchestrating his revelations with some expertise. I became convinced that when the line had gone dead two nights before it was a deliberate foreclosure on his part, and that back in the City he would now be nodding expectantly. Coming hard upon the grotesque and momentary episode in the churchyard it made me feel just a little out of control. I heard applause and a voice raised beyond the swinging green doors into the hall. I went in, trying to look as if I knew what to expect.

The ring was raised in the middle of the room, which still had its galleries on three sides, supported on thick wooden pillars. Seating rose in scaffolded tiers around the ring, leaving a kind of ambulatory under the galleries, through which I could walk almost unnoticed. Up above, too, the place was packed, and I hoped I would be allowed to drift around rather than getting penned in a seat for the evening. I loitered in one of the aisles, leaning against the stepped edge of the temporary arena. The man whose feet were by my elbow leant over and said, ‘You want a seat?’-making accommodating gestures and showing how he and his party could squeeze up. But I declined. The dinner-jacketed M C completed his announcement and stepped down, a balloon-bellied referee in white shirt and trousers that lacked any visible means of support squeezed between the ropes, and a few moments later the first couple of lads sprang into the ring.

There’s something about boxing which always moves me, although I know it is the lowest of sports, degrading the spectator as much as the fighter. For all its brutality, and the danger of those blows to the head, those upward twisting punches that are so tellingly called cuts and which tear the fronds of the brain known as the substantia nigra, an inner damage more terrible than that of pouchy, sewn-up eyes, mangled ears and flattened noses, it has about it a quality that I would not be the first to call noble.

Boys’ boxing, of course, is not nearly so awful. The bouts are short, the refereeing paternal and attentive. Any moderately heavy punch is followed by a standing count, and fights are swiftly brought to an end if there are signs of stunning or bleeding. It maintains too, in some ideal, Greek way, an ethos of sport rather than violence. In the hall tonight the Limehouse supporters far outnumbered the St Albans visitors-and the place was small enough for individual voices shouting their encouragement to be heard, just as they might have been decades before in hymns or prayers in the same building. But when the fights were over, and the referee held the boys’ huge gloved hands in his smaller fingers, jerking aloft the winner’s arm as the result was announced, there was a touching mood of friendship, the boys embracing, patting each other clumsily with their upholstered fists, clasping the hands of the cutmen and the trainers in their gentle paws.

In the first fight, between two fourteen-year-olds, the Limehouse youngster had started well, but it was a sloppy affair, the St Albans boy always retreating to the ropes and clinching with his opponent rather than putting up a fight. In the second break I strolled off round the back and came in again on the side where the judges’ table was, just below the ringside. A lean sixty-year-old man, with no forehead and grey pointed sideburns that curved across his cheeks like a Roman helmet, was standing talking with some parents in the audience. When he turned round I saw the words ‘Limehouse Boys’ Club’ on the back of his sweatshirt. Just as the bell rang I said, ‘Excuse me, can you tell me where I can find Mr Shillibeer?’ He looked at me stonily, not out of aggression but out of slowness.

‘Bill? Yeah, he’s out the back somewhere, I should say. Try over there, through the blue door. Come on, Sean, let ’im ’ave it,’ switching without notice to the really important matter and showing in his wild singlemindedness that he had already forgotten me.

It seemed a foregone conclusion, anyway, and as the sporadic engagements of the final round began I slipped away and made for the blue door. It was a fire door, and had a window of wired glass in it, through which I saw, as I pushed it open, two figures approaching down a corridor: a boy in pumps, singlet, shorts and gloves, and the massive, stocky figure of Bill Shillibeer-Bill, that is to say, who had befriended me years before at the Corry, and whose courteous adoration of Phil I had been privy to over the last few months.

‘Hallo, Will,’ he said as usual.

‘Hi, Bill…’

‘His Lordship said you’d be coming down. This is Alastair, by the way.’ He rested his hand on the boy’s head.

‘Hello,’ I nodded. Alastair blinked, shuffled and pummelled the air in front of him, breathing in and out like a steam train. I laughed with relief that Phil had not come with me.

‘It’s a big night for us,’ said Bill, ‘hosting the Nantwich and being in the finals. We’re placing a lot of hope in this young man.’ Looking at Alastair, I was not surprised. Unlike the scrawny little bruisers of the first bout, here was a boy, older, certainly, broad-shouldered, with some unconscious charismatic glow to him. Bill’s hopes, too, cannot all have been sporting. His protégé had a handsome, square-jawed head, pink and gold colouring like my own, and instead of the bog-brush haircuts of his team-mates a trendy coiffure, cropped short and close at the sides, with sprouting golden curls on top: he looked like the inmate of a penitentiary as imagined by Genet. Along his erotically plump upper lip ran the licked blond wisps of his first baby moustache. I felt a churning of lust for him, and the mood of the churchyard, which had abated a bit among the mums and dads, crazed me again. ‘Come and see him do his stuff,’ said Bill-and we went back into the hall as the bell for the end of the first fight rang out.

I didn’t know if Bill was being very cool and ironic, or if he assumed I would know that he was Shillibeer and that he played a part in the Nantwich feudal system. For the moment he was too engaged with the boxing, running across to speak to Alastair’s father (who was biting his cheek with anxiety in the second row) and showing how he belonged by making fluent, familiar remarks-‘All right, Sean? That’s the stuff!’ ‘You gotta watch that left, Simon’-all with a slightly forced or stagey air, brought on by the tension of the occasion (for Bill was a shy, sober man) and perhaps by my presence there.

We had seats right at the front, by the Limehouse corner, and the floor-level view of the ring, the scuffling of feet on the canvas, the alarming lurch of the ropes towards us when one of the boys fell against them, made it a disturbingly immediate spectacle. When Alastair’s name and age and weight were called out, Bill subsided to the seat beside me and seemed exhausted by his anticipation on the child’s behalf. ‘He’s darned good, he’s darned good,’ he said to me. Then the bell rang.

He was paired with a black boy, heavier than him but less agile. Alastair, who had hyped himself into a state of dancing aggression by the time that the two of them touched their white-knuckled gloves together, moved about with wonderful deftness, rather keeping himself to himself at first, but darting in for arhythmic, chancy jabs. Like many boxers I’d seen, people like Maurice at the Club, Alastair was not physically large; his shoulderblades and scruff, uncovered by his royal blue singlet, were not packed with muscle, and his upper arms, though long and powerful, lacked the volatile, easy massing that many ordinary working boys could muster. He ambled in for a swift succession of blows, left, right, left, that sent his opponent onto the ropes, half tripping as he fell backwards. As the referee sprang between them, conjuring an eight-second standing count with the deaf-and-dumb gestures of the ring, the voices rose for Alastair-his father loud and abrupt, and the juvenile babble of his team supporters and mates. One trio of teenage stylists bawled their encouragement while grinning and chewing, selfconscious, acting manly, caring and not caring. After a little more capering about the round ended.

Bill was on his feet in a second, propelled by sheer anxiety and commitment. The helmet-whiskered man was planning to do the mopping and pepping up, but Bill snatched the stool and bounded up between the ropes, pushing his boy into the corner with an awkward, forceful accolade. I looked up at them and half caught Bill’s remarks, a mixture of love and surprising complaints. ‘You’re letting him off, you’re letting him off,’ he said. ‘And don’t forget your fists’-useful advice that was followed by dogmatic, nodding one-worders, as he sponged Alastair’s flushed, upturned face, wiping brusquely at the unspoilt features, and running his sopping embrace around the boy’s shoulders and up the shorn, gold fuzz of his neck. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘Great. Smashing.’ Alastair just nodded back, saying nothing, staring entranced at Bill, breathing in keenly through his nostrils. When the bell rang, Bill popped the gumshield back into his mouth, swelling and spreading the pink lips into a fierce sneer. Then, as the referee bobbed backwards to the ropes, they were off again.

The second round was unspectacular at first; the St Albans boy was by no means unattractive, I decided, if of a rather slow-witted, suspicious expression-and he managed to place a couple of good body-shots under Alastair’s guard, shots that were rare in this kind of fight. Then Alastair sent through a vicious jab to the black boy’s face, where we heard not only the muffled smack of the glove but beneath it a strange, squinching little sound, as of the yielding of soft, adolescent bone and gristle. As the boy fell back Alastair followed up, before anyone could stop him, with a second blow of punitive accuracy. Cutting the air between them with his arm, the referee held Alastair off, gestured him away, and as he did so caught up his left glove in his hand. Across its blancoed surface, smeared by the impact of the second blow, was the bright trace of blood.

Bill turned to me with a look of relief. ‘He’s done it,’ he said. ‘They’ll have to stop it now. Yes, he’s done it.’ The shouts in the hall were modified with a sympathy easily accorded to the loser, and Alastair, himself looking rather stunned, cheated somehow by his own victory, jogged about in the ring, punching the air, which was all that was left for him, and showing he had hardly noticed, he needed a fight. After brief deliberations between the ref and the officious, serious judges (this was their life, after all) the unanimous decision was announced. Then Alastair relaxed, hugged and patted his opponent with a careless fondness, and did his lively round of thanks and handshakes. I was moved by the propriety of this.

Bill of course went off with his champion, and after I’d watched the opening of the next fight, which didn’t promise to go so well for Limehouse, I wondered what the hell I was doing and sloped off too through the audience and out by the swinging blue doors. Through another door on the right I heard the familiar fizz of showers and felt the familiar need to see what was going on in them.

There was such an innocence to the place that they saw nothing suspicious in my presence there-nothing either in Bill’s, who, freed from adult prerogatives, absorbed himself with earnest complicity in this little manly world. The mood here also was one of pure sportsmanship, of candid bustle, like a chorus dressing room. Both teams shared the facilities, and Alastair and his opponent sat side by side on a bench, Alastair undoing, with patient, soldierly tenderness, the bandages that bound the black boy’s hands, and then offering his own hands to be undone, his wrists lying intimately on the other’s hairless thigh. The black boy wore a plaster woefully along his already puffing cheekbone.

‘I’d have a shower, lads,’ said Bill professionally. Watching the lads undress I felt, as perhaps Bill always felt too, not only randy curiosity but a real pang of exclusion, in every way outside their world. The shower was a perfunctory business and soon Alastair was back by us, towelling himself with surprising unselfconsciousness for a sixteen-year-old. I realised why it was, when, after tucking his long-skinned dick into cheap red knickers, and pulling on a grey jersey and those baggy, splotch-bleached jeans which look as though a circle of kids have jacked off all over them, he said to Bill: ‘I got to go and see my girlfriend.’

Bill grinned at him wretchedly. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ he said.