The Swimming-Pool Library Read Online Free PDF Page A

erections there each day. My own, though less regular, were, I think, hoped and looked out for. There is a paradoxical strength in display; the naked person always has the social advantage over the clothed one (though the naked person can forget this, as innumerable farces show), and under the shower I was reckless.
    The effect of this on others, though, was not necessarily a good thing. It would be vain to pretend that all the men at the Corry looked like the stars of a physique magazine. There were gods—demi-gods, at least—but a place which gathered the fantasies of so many, young and old, was bound to have its own sorry network of unspoken loyalties, stolen and resented glances, ungainly gambits and humiliating crushes. This naked mingling, which formed a ritualistic heart to the life of the club, produced its own improper incitements to ideal liaisons, and polyandrous happenings which could not survive into the world of jackets and ties, cycleclips and duffel-coats. And how difficult social distinctions are in the shower. How could I now smile at my enormous African neighbour, who was responding in elephantine manner to my own erection, and yet scowl at the disastrous nearly-boy smirking under the next jet along?
    I first met James at Oxford, where he had heard of me but I knew nothing of him: it was at one of the little parties organised by my tutor at Saturday lunchtimes, with red and white wine, and nuts—genially queeny occasions where gay chaplains (chaplains, that is to say) and the more enlightened dons mingled with undergraduates chosen for their charm or connections, while one or two very old and distinguished people sat among the standing guests, holding audience and spilling their drinks on the carpet. I was feeling particularly full of myself: I had been fucking a French boy from Brasenose, it was a hot early summer in my second year, and I had the strange experience, on arriving in the crowded college room, of standing just behind my tutor and one of hisgraduate students who said to him, ‘I hope you’ve asked young Beckwith; I must say I should think he’s just in his prime this year …’ before I watched the graduate’s pleasure seep away in blushing discomfiture. James, in a crumpled linen jacket, open Aertex shirt, and baggy russet cords, was standing by the window. He looked very young, innocent, and yet mature, as he was already losing his fair, fine hair. His eyes, in contrast to his general colouring, were deep brown, and as my tutor introduced us James said ‘Oh, how do you do?’, indicating pleasure and surprise, and I said, in the rude way that I then thought brilliant, ‘He has very beautiful eyes.’
    I colour to remember how at first I assumed that James fancied me, so infatuated was I with myself. A few days later we met again at a cricket match in the Parks (my French boy having turned moody and hostile), drank beer together all afternoon, sat up late listening to Wagner, and I realised that what he liked was my company, and the fact that we felt the same about boys and music. We reached the stage of drunkenness where Brünnhilde’s Immolation seems to last only thirty seconds or so, though each bar is still a miraculous revelation. When he turned off the gramophone, stood up and said, ‘Well, you must go, darling,’ I was smitten with friendship, moved especially that he did not want me to stay. After that we met almost every day of our undergraduate careers.
    Tonight we were meeting in the Volunteer, my local gay pub. Mildly art-nouveau and metropolitan outside, with mysteriously opaque acid-etched windows, the Volunteer inside, after disastrous refurbishments, was an eternal parable of disappointment. A little back bar, favoured by the elderly, retained some period character, but the rest had been laid waste into the vast areas required for the mass jostling and cruising of a Friday or Saturday night. Round tables with beaten copper tops were aligned in front of the