The Swimming-Pool Library (43 page)

‘I’m sorry, sir, he’s dining at his Club this evening.’

‘At Wicks’s? When will he be back?’

‘I don’t expect him until late, sir.’

‘I’ll try again tomorrow.’

But tomorrow was too far away. I was so confused by this digest of disasters, I felt so stupid and so ashamed that I walked around the flat talking out loud, getting up and sitting down, scratching my crew-cut head as if I had lice. It was impossible so quickly to formulate a plan, but I felt the important thing was to go to Charles, to say something or other to him.

It took me ages to get a cab, and as at last it locked and braked its way through the West End closing-time crowds, I found all my ideas of what I might do rattling away, leaving me in a queer empty panic. I left the cab in a jam a block from the Club and ran along the pavement and up the steps. The porter emerged from his cabin with an expression of moody servility and told me Charles had left quarter of an hour before. I hardly thanked him, but dawdled out again, realising that at this moment he was probably roaring along the Central Line on his way home. I drifted around in front of the Club as if waiting for somebody, hands in jacket-pockets, chewing my lip.

Between the high neo-classical façade and that of the adjacent office block was a narrow chasm, gated from the street. The gate opened, and Abdul emerged, evidently also on his way home; he had on a light anorak over a T-shirt, and cheap grey slacks. I went up to him, surprised him as he locked the gate, greeted him with the conviction that he somehow held the answer to my problem.

‘Hey, William,’ he said, ‘all finished now.’ He gave me a flashy smile and was ready, I think, to move off and abandon me, so that I said recklessly:

‘Oh Abdul, did you know that Lord Nantwich had been to prison?’ He turned back and looked at me and I looked back at him closely, his lined face, pink inner lips and fierce eyes slightly bloodshot, more guarded in the street’s shadow.

‘Of course,’ he said lightly. ‘Everyone knows that.’

I pursed my lips and nodded three or four times. ‘Have you always known?’

‘I have always known. Of course. I went to see him in there when I was a little boy. No place to take a kid,’ he added. It was a detail that gave my evening a sickening completeness, like an orchid seen in a nature film brought in a few seconds from bud to heavy perfection.

I was laughing nervously as he turned back towards the gate. ‘Hey, come in here,’ he said. I followed him with a kind of absent-minded excitement and waited as he locked the gate behind us and went along after him past bins and milk-crates that were hard to make out in the alleyway’s blackness. He opened a door and the flickering of the strip-lights was dazzling.

It was the Club’s kitchen, abundantly old-fashioned, with many pantries and offices, windowed partitions and white-tiled walls. Cleaned and swabbed for the night it tingled in the fluorescent glare as if I was drunk. It had about it the discipline of institutional life and beyond that, for all its emptiness, something of the melancholy and teeming sense of order of an Edwardian country house. Abdul, who had sauntered to the far side of the room, came back to me where I lounged wondering against a table. He put his hands on my chest and sliding them up pushed my jacket back off my shoulders; it was then I realised that I had no tie on, and could never have been admitted to the Club proper, even if Charles had been there.

Abdul tugged my shirt out at the waist, and ill-temperedly opened my fly and pulled my trousers down about my knees. I saw his cock curving and buckling in his pants with anticipation before he turned me round and spread me out. It was one of those worn, foot-thick chopping tables, eaten away by incessant jointings and slicings into a deep, curved declivity. I waited greedily, and yelped as his hand came down, and again and again, tenderising my ass with wild, hard slaps. Then he crossed the room in front of me and yanked down from a shelf a catering-size drum
of corn oil. It fell cold on my skin as he splashed it from a height then slicked my cheeks and slot, driving a strong unhesitating finger in. I heard the graphic rustle of his clothes, his trousers dropping to the floor with the weight of the keys in his pocket. He fucked me with a thrilling leisured vehemence, giving each long stroke, when it was in to the balls, a final questing shunt that had me gurgling with pleasure and grunting with pain, my cock chafing beneath me against the table’s furred and splintered edge.

It was quickly finished, and he slurped out of me, and slapped me again. ‘Hmm,’ he said noncommittally; then, ‘Fuck off out of here, man.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Good heavens …’ he laughed.

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

‘Oh, yes.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘This was before you were married.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It’s that boy,’ he hissed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Good boy! Now what did he have on?’

‘Um—trousers. And a shirt.’

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

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

‘Did you see him?’

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

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

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

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