The Swimming-Pool Library Read Online Free PDF Page B

night’ would be ‘Thank you, I
don’t
want to hear about it’—though this could never quite forestall at least a synopsis of the main events. The routine was a joke now, though behind it lay all his inhibitions, the uninvestigated secrecy of his own private life. Being a doctor, too, made him circumspect, as well as giving him a kind of authority for his lack of adventurousness. And even when I knew he had had some fling he would never mention it himself, so that lone events, which I suspected to be exceptional, could equally be interpreted as typical of a thriving sex life. Somehow he had made it impossible to ask him directly.
    ‘What is there to say?’ I for once replied. ‘Except: total bliss, endless fuck, suck, schmuck.’
    ‘You mean he’s stupid.’
    ‘He’s no Einstein, I grant you.’
    ‘So what do you talk about all the time?’
    ‘I don’t know, really. We have a kind of baby-talk—except allthe words are rude—and we giggle a lot, and generally praise each other’s personal appearance. We had a meal at the Testudo one night, and the conversation did run a bit thin. And I did something rather terrible.’ I looked down in mock-confusion.
    ‘Don’t tell me.’ He looked at me narrowly. ‘Not Massimo?’
    ‘Wasn’t it too frightful of me? But I had to have him …’
    ‘My God!’ squealed James. ‘You absolute bastard. How ever did you manage? I don’t want to know.’
    ‘We just slipped out the back,
not
in the lav, but actually in the sort of yard with the crates. Ever so quick.’
    ‘But what about poor little whatsisname?’
    ‘Arthur? Oh, he was sitting there waiting for me, all sleepy and unsuspecting. Actually, Massimo said he wanted to have him too, but I did draw the line there.’
    ‘Was it like we always imagined?’
    ‘Mm, was rather. Everything on the menu, you know; full helpings.’ I leered helplessly. ‘But I should have a go some time—I’m sure he’s anybody’s …’
    ‘Thanks!’
    ‘No, I mean, I’m sure there’d be no problem.’
    ‘They do say, waiters …’ murmured James, in a tone of smothered excitement. ‘What’s Arthur’s … member like, incidentally?’
    ‘Entirely delightful. Not your kind of thing, perhaps—short, stocky, ruthlessly circumcised, and incredibly resilient and characterful.’
    James let a pause fall in which the brio of my testimonial edged towards embarrassment and then said, ‘So you’re in love with him, are you?’ I took a professional sip of Guinness.
    ‘I can’t be, actually,’ I admitted. ‘We couldn’t sit down and listen to
Idomeneo
and feel a deep spiritual bond. It must just be an infatuation. Sometimes I don’t feel I know him at all, which adds to the poignancy of the thing no end. And then Holland Park and my place is all a completely new world to him. He lives with all his family in a tower block. I said wouldn’t his mother worry about where he was, but he said he often didn’t go back home. They don’t have a phone, so he couldn’t let them know. But I imagine he’s gone back there today—he had to go and sign on. But’—I drew round to it—‘you’re quite right: it can’t last. I don’t want it to really—it’s just been a heavenly week.’
    We strolled off under James’s umbrella to Westbourne Grove. One of the slight bores about James was that he was a vegetarian—so going out to dinner with him required careful planning. In the event we had a delicious Belpoori that cost almost nothing, served by a boy James ogled with a quite new kind of forwardness, while the rain lashed down outside. Perhaps it was the rain that made us reminisce, about beautiful Oxford contemporaries and how they had become bankers, or put on weight, or got married.
    It was still raining when we left, so I suppressed my fondness for the Underground and took a lighted cab that was approaching. The cabby looked unimpressionable as I rather ostentatiously kissed James goodbye, and let my hand run down