The Swimming-Pool Library Read Online Free PDF

leather-covered tram which ran along the walls. In season, a fire burnt in the grate, the adjustable gas jets failing to kindle the synthetic logs. When it was lit the flames showed up the hundreds of fag-ends that had unthinkingly been thrown in.
    The pub was at its least inspiriting in the early evening. Hardy regulars, resigned to hours of waiting, lounged at the bar or filled in time with the
Evening Standard
, inching their way down pintsof lager, glowering at any newcomers and exchanging greetings in tones that suggested that things were pretty bad. And so they were. The Volunteer was a second-division gay pub, and while the glamorous and fashionable were chatting each other up in King’s Cross or St Martin’s Lane, a mood of provincial neglect settled over it. It seemed, as I bought my bottle of Guinness and retired to a corner, like the waiting-room of a station on a branch line where the last train was not expected for quite some time.
    One of the barmen, very thin in very tight jeans, and with a lugubrious, made-up manner, wandered across to the door and stood looking out over the pavement, a lust-quenching advertisement to any potential drinker. ‘Startin’ to rain,’ he said to no one in particular as he turned back into the bar. James, of course, had an umbrella and trotted in a minute or two later looking very respectable. He had just come from surgery.
    ‘You look tired,’ he said. ‘Too much sodomy, I should say.’ And then, as if in surgery, picking up my Guinness bottle: ‘Take this tonic twice a day and have a complete rest: we’ll soon have you back to normal.’
    It was charming to see him, though looking (worthily, selflessly) tired himself. I didn’t comment on this, for his overwork and his unfairly long spells on call depressed him and were making him look older. He sat beside me with his drink, and I ran my hand over his head, bald now to half way back. He smiled, and put a kiss on my cheekbone.
    ‘How are the ill?’ I asked.
    ‘Oh, fine,’ he said.
    ‘Anything interesting?’ The bizarre things that people said and did in the consulting room were a staple of our conversation.
    ‘Not really. The woman with the stones came back. And I had a lad in this morning with the most enormous donger.’ James was obsessed by big cocks, many of which seemed to pass through his hands in his professional capacity—though all too few, I suspected, in his private one.
    ‘How big?’ I enquired.
    ‘Ooh …’ he gestured with his hands, like a fisherman—‘in its flaccid condition that is. Quite unbearably hideous youth, alas. He seemed to think there was something wrong with it—so I toldhim to go to the clinic.’ He took a deep draught of beer. ‘Fantastic cock, though,’ he added wistfully.
    I chuckled. ‘You’d have been proud of me the other day,’ I said, ‘when I did a very heroic deed and saved the life of a queer peer.’ And I related the incident in the Kensington Gardens bog. ‘It was all due to you, darling,’ I said. ‘I remembered what you do on trains.’
    ‘I’m impressed and proud,’ James said. ‘But a Lord—a Baron, or something bigger do you suppose?’
    ‘Looked like a Baron to me,’ I said—and with a silly smirk, ‘anyway you wouldn’t find a Viscount cottaging …’
    ‘Not yet, you wouldn’t,’ James tartly rejoined. ‘Has he been in touch since?’
    ‘He has not. A man just came along when the ambulance arrived and ran about saying “Oh dear, my Lord” and that kind of thing. I imagine we may never find out who it was.’ I looked at James. ‘But to think you do that all the time. God, I felt wonderful afterwards …’
    ‘Yes; you get over that, you’ll find, should you ever do it again. But what about this boy? I suppose you’d better tell me.’
    I must have bored James for many hours with the pitiless recollection of every detail of my sexual encounters. Often his response to my saying ‘I met this fucking wonderful man last