The Swimming-Pool Library (6 page)

‘Well, that’s very kind of you …’ I felt drawn because I thought he was interesting and might have a distracting story to tell. If he were a nuisance I needn’t see him again: there was also Arthur and the odder story of home and love and guilt, and I didn’t know that I wanted to take on anything new.

‘I think you should come on Friday,’ he said. Then: ‘Who knows, I may be dead by Friday. Perhaps better make it tomorrow—I should still be quick then.’ It was a bizarre usage, which it took me a second or two to see; I had a fleeting image of him chasing me round a huge mahogany table.

‘Well, that would be very nice.’

‘Nice for me, William,’ he insisted.

It seemed to be settled in his mind, and he wandered away holding his towel in front of him as though he expected to bump into something. I had to seek him out when I had finished dressing, to enquire which Club it was and what name would find him.

At home it was always very hot; the central heating throbbed away as if we feared exposure, and often, though high up and not overlooked, we kept the curtains drawn in the daytime, only a mild bloom of pinkish light penetrating into the rooms from outside. The creation of this climate was barely conscious, as people in crisis habitually transform their surroundings, the miserable sitting cold through the dusk without turning lights
on, and the endangered, like Arthur and I, craving rosiness and security.

The penumbra helped us to hide from each other. As soon as the new terms were forced upon us by Arthur’s coming back he must have felt as much as I did a sinking of the heart at our incompatibility. Inflicted with this new anxiety, we were afraid to annoy or burden each other. He spent much of the time asleep or sitting in a chair; and he bathed long and often. Very young and worried, he seemed to fear my resentment, and his gestures towards me took on a nervous respect; I would go to the dining-room and read alone, and he would come in with a cup of tea and touch me on the arm. If I had not been so fiercely and sexually in love with him, these days would have been utterly intolerable. And even so there were spells of repugnance, both at him and at my own susceptibility. Sex took on an almost purgative quality, as if after hours of inertia and evasion we could burn off our unspoken fears in vehement, wordless activity. Sex came to justify his presence there, to confirm that we were not just two strangers trapped together by a fateful mistake.

The immediate concern, the first night, had been to get him patched up. I lied to James on the phone, and felt the sudden sadness of complicity. I said that we had been fooling around in the kitchen and there had been an accident with a knife. He came over promptly in his car, and I went down to let him in. He adjusted with only slight awkwardness to his professional role, with a practical briskness which did not quite conceal his curiosity. Arthur was hanging about in my dressing-gown, apprehensive of a doctor; when I introduced them I assumed James would find him attractive, although the makeshift dressing on his cheek spoilt the general impression.

It had to be stitched and there was an injection. I watched, out of the way, James’s absorption in the intimate, serious work, running through a long series of subcutaneous stitches and drawing the skin neatly together above. That way, he said, the scar would be smaller. Arthur shot me little tear-whelmed glances as it took place, and I looked on, firm and encouraging, as a parent might over some necessary ordeal of its child. I was touched, too, by James’s expertise, his deft, slender hands holding Arthur’s head, his intent application to a task that I could never perform for him.
When it was done Arthur looked as if deservedly reproved, past the worst now, his face rueful and very swollen.

James washed his hands and said, ‘I’ll have that whisky.’ As I poured it for him he shook his head disbelievingly. ‘Don’t do that again, Will,’ he recommended. ‘Bloody terrifies me.’ I was struck by the uncertainty of it all: he clearly thought we had had a fight and made his own interpretation of what was itself a lie. It was almost amusing how far he was from the truth. ‘I won’t ask you how it happened.’

‘Oh …’ I waved my arm about. ‘You know.’ I saw that though appalled by it all he was also impressed: I took on the spurious glamour of a wildly passionate person, my dwindling agitation being read as the wake of a violent erotic upheaval. Arthur had gone to the bedroom, and I longed to tell James everything, to clear myself at once. Yet I feared his advice, the necessity of action it would entail. I remained standing up and kept the conversation short and superficial, so that he would have felt embarrassed to make any personal observations on the boy he’d heard so much about. I closed down on James in a graceless, scared way.

But it was once these practical measures had been taken that the impractical day after day of Arthur and me in the flat began. The only thing to do was nothing. Life this week was a black parody of life the week before. Then we had stayed in for pleasure; now we could not risk going out. I was free, but Arthur did not dare go out, and was nervous to be left alone. If the phone rang he looked ill with anxiety. Ordinary sounds, such as distant police sirens in Holland Park Avenue, took on for both of us a retributory grimness. I was shocked to find that my heart raced when I heard them, and the look we exchanged as they died away must have told him how frightened I was.

It had been wonderful after three days of this to go to the Corry, and when I got back I made no mention of Lord Nantwich and my own adventures. I saw at once that their secrecy would be essential to me. They were my right to a privacy outside this forced sharing of my home. Stepping into the roasting heat of the flat I found Arthur restive and relieved to see me. He came up and held me. He had altered his appearance in my absence, and undone his braids, though his hair still retained much of its former
tightly combed and twisted nature and jutted out in wild spirals. The swelling of his face was going down and he had begun to look beautiful again, the protective dressing on his cheek almost decorative. Yet as he stood there in my old red jersey and my army surplus fatigues I felt a kind of hatred for him and his need to disguise himself in my things.

There was a pretty bad half-hour after that, when I was not in control of myself. I poured myself a drink, though I did not give him one—and he didn’t seem to mind. My whole wish was to throw things around, make a storm to dispel the stagnant heat, assert myself. Yet I found myself fastidiously tidying up, tight-lipped, not looking at him. He followed me helplessly around, at first retailing jokes from the television, dialogue from
Star Trek
, but then falling silent. He was confused, wanted to be ready to do what I wanted, but found he could only annoy me further. Then I hurled the stack of newspapers I was collecting across the floor and went for him—pulled the trousers down over his narrow hips without undoing them, somehow tackled him onto the carpet, and after a few seconds’ brutal fumbling fucked him cruelly. He let out little compacted shouts of pain, but I snarled at him to shut up and with fine submission he bit them back.

Afterwards I left him groaning on the floor and went into the bathroom. I remember looking at myself, pink, excited, horrified, in the mirror.

I took all my clothes off and after a few minutes went back into the sitting-room. I don’t know if it was just his confused readiness to take what I gave him, or if he really understood the absolute tenderness that I now felt for him as I picked him up and dumped him on the sofa; but he held me very tight as I lay down beside him. I was the only person he had; the very melodrama of the case had repelled me before, but for a while I allowed myself to accept it. I had been disgusted by his need for me, but now it moved me, and I burbled into his ear about how I loved him. ‘I love you too—darling,’ he said. It was a word that he could never have used before, and the tears poured down my face and smudged all over his, as we lay there and hugged, rocking from side to side.

There were several occasions of this kind, when I was exposed by my own mindless randiness and helpless sentimentality. I made
a point of going out to the baths each day, and while I was there, talking to friends, exercising, looking at other men, I could see with more detachment how these scenes weakened my authority. I was eight years older than Arthur, and our affair had started as a crazy fling with all the beauty for me of his youngness and blackness. Now it became a murky business, a coupling in which we both exploited each other, my role as protector mined by the morbid emotion of protectiveness. I saw him becoming more and more my slave and my toy, in a barely conscious abasement which excited me even as it pulled me down.

The Corry featured in these days as a lucid interlude—with an institutional structure that time in the flat entirely lacked. I tended to stay late or go to a bar afterwards, not for sex, but for the company of strangers and for talk about sport or music. Walking back up the drive and feeling for my keys I even felt reluctance to plunge back into my private life, its unsterilised warmth in which sensation seemed both heightened and degraded. Yet going to the bathroom to hang up my wet towel and swimming trunks, I could be touched unexpectedly by the sight of Arthur’s few possessions, and his muddied cords, stiff where they had dried, tangled up with my silk shirt on the airing-cupboard floor, had me sighing and wincing at their pathos—even if, the next morning, I wished I had never seen them and that I had myself to myself. Perhaps we should have burnt them: the empty, crumpled tubes of his trousers, the blood-stained pink of the shirt, were evidence of a kind. We were such inexpert criminals.

At the Corry, too, I could more easily examine the question, which we barely asked each other, and certainly never answered, of what we were going to do. The present impasse was unbearable, its resolution unimaginable. I insisted on Arthur telling me what had happened and why, but though we went through it several times a strange opacity came over him, the facts seemed not to tie up. I determined that his brother, like Arthur, had no work, and had got his girlfriend pregnant, that their father found out Arthur was gay, that there had been fights, that the brother, Harold, had a friend who was a drug-dealer, who had been inside more than once, and who had got Harold involved in the business, that the friend had stolen money Arthur was saving in his mattress in the room the brothers still had to share, that he had denied it,
that there had been a fight, and that it had gone desperately wrong, that Harold, uncertain who to side with, had drawn a knife, Arthur had been wounded but had grabbed the weapon and, in one sudden, unintended, irrevocable moment, had slashed the friend’s throat—all this on a late rainy afternoon in a ruinous house in the East End, bombed out in the Blitz and still standing. This last detail, as if to give verisimilitude to an otherwise incoherent narrative, had been something he had learned at school. But the other details, produced with fluctuating expressions of sulkiness and hopelessness, a lurid compendium of miseries, were unstable from day to day. I felt I pressed him to the edge of his articulacy, and at the same time as I sought to protect him appeared to him dangerously inquisitive, threatening to topple the beliefs and superstitions which were the private structure of his life, and which had never before been exposed.

The one thing I did not question was that he had killed this man, Tony; but to accept this was to admit that I knew nothing about how murder worked in the real world. No reports in the papers? No newsflash on the radio? Arthur knew about these things from experience: Tony was a wanted man, a criminal treated with violence by the police and revulsion by the older community. And then it seemed that violence against a black would rarely reach the national press, that radio silence could envelop the tragedies of the world from which he came. This silence also intensified his fear. It made the prospects now as uncertain to him as the background of the event was to me. Were the police looking for Arthur? How had Arthur’s parents reacted? Would they, while throwing him off, silently thwart the course of justice? Or would they, or Harold at least, independently seek him out to administer some justice of their own?

It did not take me long to fear the consequences to myself of any of these possible events. If it had not been for our week of love I would perhaps have been frightened of Arthur too; but I was never even critical of his crime. A rare, unjustified trust kept me on his side. Even so, that part of the road, with its parked cars and spring trees, which could be seen from the windows took on an ominous feel. I scanned it as one looks at a photograph with a glass to make out half-decipherable details, but its mundanity was unaltered: it rained and dried, wind blew scraps of
litter across, children walked dogs—dawdling, looking in at the houses, nosey for details, but only as people always, routinely are. I’m not sure what form I expected the threat to take; a police car actually stopping outside, a powerfully built black man darting up the drive? I had several dreams of siege, in which the house became a frail slatted box, shadowy and exquisite within, the walls all cracked and bleached louvres which fell to powder as one brushed against them. In one dream Arthur and I were there, and others, old school friends, a gaggle of black kids from the Shaft, my grandfather tearful and hopeless. We knew we had no chance of surviving the violence that surrounded us, closing in fast, and I was gripped by a nauseating terror. I woke up in the certain knowledge that I was about to die: the bedsprings were ticking from the sprinting vehemence of my heartbeat. I didn’t dare go back to sleep and after a while sat up and read, while Arthur slept deeply beside me. It took days to lose the mood of the dream, and its power to prickle my scalp. The neighbourhood seemed eerily impregnated with it, and its passing made possible a new confidence, as if a sentence had been lifted.

That Thursday I had my lunch with Lord Nantwich. I told Arthur I had a long-standing arrangement and he made a point of saying, ‘Okay, man—I mean you’ve got to lead your own life: I’ll be all right here.’ I realised I’d been apologising in a way and I was relieved by his practical reply.