Read The Swimming-Pool Library Online
Authors: Alan Hollinghurst
The Swimming-Pool Library (35 page)
May 31, 1926:
Terrific drama yesterday, as Taha was bitten by a scorpion … I was just coming home: the heat had become too intense & I had failed to resolve a contention between two men over a pig—a pig which had been given to one of them as a reward for his prompt payment of taxes. I was in no doubt of that, & the pig was branded, but the other chap, a rather svelte character with a distinctly flirtatious manner, said that this admirable tax payer had owed him a pig—indeed, owed him two pigs, & he thought it was only his right to take it. The whole issue will need further attention. Both men tucked their hands under my elbows as if confident that I wd side with them against the other. As I approached the house I had the startling sight of Hassan, that most immovable and cynical of men, limping across the little sandy piazza at a dangerous speed, a large wooden spoon still clasped in his hand like a weapon or the
emblem of a guild. ‘Sir, Lord,’ he gasped, ‘the boy is very very stung.’
For a second or two, half-stupid in the heat as I was, I thought decorously, Englishly—or possibly Arabicly—only in metaphors. I actually thought I had committed some frightful
faux pas
, some mortal infringement of an obligation, & that
the boy
, my Taha, had made off in a dust cloud of enraged propriety or was at least in a mutinous sulk somewhere & giving Hassan an angry fright. But he did a funny little jabbing gesture with his spoon, & I realised he was speaking ‘without music’.
It seems Taha had been sitting on the wooden step of the kitchen, engaged in no less an occupation than polishing my shoes, when, dropping the brush by accident, he had antagonised a scorpion which happened to be sauntering past & which had promptly stung him on the calf (his bare feet being doubtless too tough for a mere scorpion to pierce & his djellaba, as I saw it in my mind’s eye, being drawn up, bunched up between his knees). All of which, of course, was nothing uncommon, & I knew clearly enough what I had to do. Yet I was almost shocked to see how I took on Hassan’s panic, how it touched me myself & left me suddenly short of breath. I ran down to the house, with Hassan following on & making lachrymose interjections in Nubian, the words of each outburst bubbling and shrinking away like water thrown out from the house over the stones.
Of course I have dealt with snake bites & so on several times before, & managed to master my sympathy & anxiety & present an impassive doctorly face. The poor boy was still sitting, but half lying back, in the kitchen doorway, motionless with fright or caution, but breathing heavily, salivating, sweat on his upper lip. He knew enough to be holding his leg tight in both hands just below the knee.
I shd have gone straight to the house, & darted over to it now to get my medicine case, fumbled to check it & close it, bounded out across the yard. My change of role made it possible for me to push him around, to enter with brusque disinterest into a kind of closeness to him that otherwise wd
have remained unattainable—though it beckoned & was approached through a thousand hints & formalities. I tugged him, & he half slithered, to the step’s edge, & tugged at his hands too which were locked with desperate tightness around his leg. The sting was some way below, on the shallow, boyish incline of the calf—just where one
would
have stung, I thought—& looking pretty nasty. I whipped out the tourniquet & drew it to its tightest notch around his upper leg (I was severe as a matron with that stiff rubber strap). And fussily, necessarily, I shoved back the gathered folds of his djellaba, baring his thighs, glancing at them as well—though with a curiosity almost annulled by the ethical transfiguration I was enabled for a few minutes to undergo. Not so Hassan, however, who had been hovering excitedly behind me, in a state somewhere between despair & delight, & leant forward all helpfully at this point to draw the djellaba up tidily and expose the child’s private parts to his greedy glance—though after a second or two Taha brushed the folds of cloth forward again & gave Hassan, I noticed, a pained, abstracted look. As well he might, for the old lecher had hardly chosen the best moment—indeed it was a prurient piece of advantage-taking, & since it also satisfied a curiosity of my own I admonished him & sent him back indoors, before (& all this was only the matter of seconds) taking my scalpel to the boy’s inflamed leg and cutting out the sting with such delicate suddenness & firmness that he was amazed when I showed it to him between my fingers, & when he sat up & saw the blood trickling down his calf.
I squeezed & cleaned & dressed the thing as best I could. Though I had been quick enough, some damage had been done & he was already a little feverish; so I picked him up—he was quite heavy & hung on to my neck with both arms, like a child not fully awoken—& took him in & laid him on the camp-bed in the room next to mine.
He is there now, almost better I think, though I have put him to sleep. Hassan has been bringing in meals for us both—Taha cd manage for the first time this evening some broth, & I sat with him & ate some gazelle & some beans—excellently
done, though I was stern with the cook & told him Taha was very ill & that he must treat him with consideration & not bother him. I thought this was important, as I was out for most of the day & the invalid has been more or less in his hands. Yesterday he was very bad & I spent much of the night with him, huddling on a stool under the mosquito net, giving him analgesics & mopping his brow. It was terribly hot & he seemed to be on fire: the sweat stood on his brow within seconds of my sponging it away, his long eye-lashes fluttered, his mouth hung open. He drank literally gallons of water. When at last he slept—murmuring and shifting incessantly—I felt again for a moment alone, weary & longing for sleep myself, yet sick with anxiety that I had not done it right, that he wd not recover. Of course when I went to bed I lay awake & tossed about & sweated as if it had been me that had been the scorpion’s victim. Then almost at once the dawn came up through the shutters, the heat, that seemed only to have faded for a moment, built up alarmingly & for once the beautiful simplicity of the house revealed itself as a menacing bareness, a kind of trap in which to escape from one room was only to be imprisoned in the next. I felt my responsibility weigh on me, at the same time as it buoyed me up—an asphyxiating feeling. More strictly it was like a cramp when swimming—a sudden challenge in a friendly element, threatening where before it had only sustained.
Everything in this job is personal: it is government on the ground, journeys of many days with a band of men across deserts or through sudden floods & then the instantaneous fields of flowers. It is not sitting at a desk: it is standing in scant shade & deciding between one naked tribesman and another. It is not bookish & bureaucratic: it takes place in open spaces almost without end, in which the rare, unobvious & beautiful people materialise out of the quivering heat. Their beauty of course is neither here nor there: their heads could grow beneath their shoulders … But when I went back through the doorless aperture into the room where Taha was, asleep, unaware, & yet tormented, like some saint
in ecstasy or martyrdom, I felt all my vague, ideal emotions about Africa & my wandering, autocratic life here take substance before my bleary eyes. He lay with his head back, half off the pillow, an arm flung out, the fingers twitching with his pulse, only an inch above the floor … At once I saw he
was
my responsibility made flesh: he was all the offspring I will never have, all my futurity. He became so beautiful to me that my mouth went dry, & when he woke he found me staring at him. I’m not sure if he was the one I prayed for or the one to whom I made my intercession.
I am very, very drunk. It is half past two in the morning. I tiptoe in with fantastical caution, & see him sleeping quietly. Everything I have an impulse to do wd wake him—& that wd be inexcusable. All my love to him goes out in a sweet bedside gesture of self-denial, a kind of blessing, a sweeping of the arms that comes from I don’t know where and is lost into the air. And in a mood of certainty & faint ridiculousness, I stagger to bed.
June 1, 1926
: A terrible head this morning. I cancelled all engagements, such as they were, & fell into a routine of parallel convalescence with my boy. Hassan evidently foully jealous.
This evening, as he was much brighter, I sat with Taha in close & utterly irregular comradeship & had him tell me about his family. I even told him a bit about mine, until he said that being British I must know Mr Mills, a missionary apparently, who comes from New York, & I recognised that our understandings were a trifle out of kilter. Finally I told him the story of Prince Ahmed; it was the one I had learnt most recently to tell after dinner, & a strange amusement & entrancement came over his features to hear me recite to him in my painfully correct Arabic, as if he had been some dignitary. But then the story too held him like a revelation. I made use of various props for the three magical gifts of the princes: for the flying carpet the old rush mat on the floor, for the spying-tube which showed whatever one desired my
field-glasses, & for the apple which cured all ills the lime on the tray with my drink. He laughed with that delight which children show at certain well-worn jokes whose very repetition is a guarantee of pleasure & security, & I capered around, squatting on the mat, peering out of the window through the binoculars—though I saw not the Princess Nural-Nihar but birds coming down into the nim-trees, a stupendous sunset above the rocks, a girl loping home with a dog at her heels—& then wafting the lime under my nose & rolling my eyes as if it smelt divine. But all the gifts were of equal wondrousness, I explained, sitting solemnly down on the edge of the bed: and then, as I went on about the shooting of the arrows, & how the Princess wd be given to him who shot the furthest, the most exquisite thing happened. Taha slid his hand shyly across the blanket & clasped my own. I scarcely faltered as I spoke of Ahmed’s arrow, which going so far was assumed to have vanished so that he lost the Princess to his brother Ali, but I felt a squeezing in my chest & throat & hardly dared look at him as, all unconsciously, I made our two hands more comfortable together, interweaving his long fingers with my own. By a simple gesture I wd never have dared to make & without words which neither of us cd have said, he conveyed his trust in me, & holding my hand held on to a simple faith that all wd be well with Ahmed, wretched though his current state now was. And when the others had all turned home, I went on, saying that the arrow wd never be found & that they must make haste for the wedding-feast of Prince Ali & the Princess Nur-al-Nihar, Ahmed went on alone & lo he encountered the radiant fairy Peri-Banou & fell in love with her & married her & lived in happiness with her all the days of his life. Then Hassan was scuffling & waiting at the door, & Taha with less than innocence drew his hand away—
The phone was ringing. Phil, I knew, would never answer it, though it was at the bedside, and when I came in he was sprawled over the sheets, pale, bleary and tumescent. ‘Leave us out with
the phone,’ he groaned. I half sat on him and picked up the receiver.
‘Darling, it’s James. You couldn’t come over, could you?’
‘Sweetest, I’ve got a pretty frightful head and it’s only seven o’clock. Can’t it wait?’
‘A bit, I suppose. I’m in a terrible mess. I’ve been arrested.’
As I came up he was dithering on the doorstep and had a look, not uncommon with him, of bitten-back anxiety and determined self-control. He gripped my arm and said, ‘God, this is intolerable. I’ve just had a call.’
‘Don’t worry, old girl, I’ll wait for you.’ I patted him on the shoulder and smiled with a quiet confidence that I didn’t altogether feel after this traumatic night. A gorgeous summer day was unfolding and as James went off flapping his car keys I stood at the gate and let it sink in. The steady rumble of far-off traffic, the thinning haze, the suited people hurrying past, all seemed invitations to some wearying and majestic happening. I almost seemed to see, above the houses across the street, an immense golden athlete stretching into the sky like the drop-curtain of a ballet or a gigantic banner at a Soviet rally, full of appalling promise. It was a relief to go indoors.
James’s flat was
quite
nice—clean and roomy and safely sandwiched half-way up a house of geriatrics and absentee Greeks. The little cosmopolis of Notting Hill, its littered streets, its record
exchanges, its international newsagents, late-night cinemas, late-night delis, was to hand. The elegant vacancy of the Park was admirably near; you could walk to the museums, to Knightsbridge even, and a little later in the year, to the Proms. And at the back, a block away, you were in Carnival country.
Even so, the very convenience and accessibility of James’s house gave it a bleak and transitory feel. The shelf in the hallway was always stacked with post addressed to former tenants whom nobody knew—bills, circulars, mailing-shots aimed with desolate regularity at a population of migrants. In the small carpeted lift (which this morning I allowed myself to take) one would meet strangers who were just polite, incredibly well dressed, sometimes carrying tiny fancy dogs.
James liked the insularity of his flat, liked having a place all to himself, but was clearly affected by this mood of transience, a sense of valuelessness despite the climbing prices and the mortgage. He could never bring himself to do much to it, and though he loved pictures seemed not to notice the half-furnished bareness of his own few rooms. He had a fine Piranesi—all tumbled masonry and sprouting bushes—that he had bought years ago in a sale but had never framed. It was propped, sagging in its mount, on the mantelpiece, above the dusty and ornate black ironwork of the blocked-off grate. There were comfortable, nondescript armchairs, and a heavyweight stereo system. He was obsessed with Shostakovich and had innumerable records of baleful quartets and sarcastic little songs. They put me into a gloom and a fidget within seconds but I think their bleakness met some otherwise inarticulate inner compulsion of his own, of a piece perhaps with the featurelessness of the apartment and his fatalistic disdain of possessions.
