Read Online The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst - Free Book Online Page B

understanding with the staff. Been coming here since I was a lad, of course, and damn good tuck and tack. What do you want?’ he demanded, as a busy little waiter-boy arrived with menus that seemed to have been typed out on a pre-war Remington, with all the capital letters jumping up into the course above.
    When I looked across from my menu I saw that his Lordship was staring at, or rather through, the reddening and nervous boy. ‘Derek, isn’t it?’ he said at last.
    ‘No, sir, I’m Raymond. Derek’s left, sir, in fact.’
    ‘Raymond! Of course—forgive me, won’t you?’ begged Lord Nantwich, as if pleading with a society woman.
    ‘That’s all right, sir,’ said the boy, smoothing down his order pad, and Nantwich turned his attention briefly to the card. More silence followed, and Raymond felt moved to add: ‘I saw Derek this week, as a matter of fact, sir. He seems all right again now …’ but he trailed off as Nantwich was evidently not hearing him. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he added inconsequently.
    ‘Now what’s Abdul got for us today?’ Nantwich ruminated.
    ‘Pork’d be very nice, sir,’ said Raymond dispassionately.
    ‘I will have the pork, Raymond—with carrots, have you got? And the boiled potatoes—and I want a whole
estuary
of applesauce.’
    ‘See what I can do, sir. And for your guest, sir. Any starter at all, sir?’
    My mind recoiled from Brown Windsor soup to prawn cocktailto melon. ‘No, I think I’ll just have the trout—with peas and potatoes.’
    ‘Bring a bottle of hock, too, Raymond,’ my host requested; ‘cheapest you’ve got.’ And the moment the boy turned away, added, ‘Delightful child, isn’t he. Quite a little Masaccio, wouldn’t you say? Nothing compared to Derek, mind you, but I like to see a nice little bumba when I’m eating.’
    I smiled and felt oddly bashful; and the boy was pretty ordinary. I also felt a guest’s obligation to charm, and was aware that I was giving nothing. How loaded dirty talk is between strangers, seeming to imply some sexual rapport between them, removing barriers which in this case I was interested in preserving.
    ‘Do you live in London all the time?’ I asked him partyishly.
    He thought about this: ‘I do, though I’m often elsewhere—in my thoughts. At my age it doesn’t matter where you live.
Passent les jours, passent les semaines
, as the Frenchman said. I blank a lot, you know. Do you blank?’
    ‘You mean, just let your mind go blank? Yes, I suppose I do. Or at least, I like letting my mind wander.’
    ‘There you are. You see, I’ve had such an interesting life and now it’s so bloody dull and everyone’s dead and I can’t remember what I’m saying and all that sort of thing.’ He seemed to lose his thread.
    ‘What is it you think about mostly?’
    ‘Ooh, you know …’ he muttered broodily. I crudely assumed he meant sex. ‘I’m eighty-three,’ he said, as if I had asked him. ‘And how old are you?’
    ‘Twenty-five,’ I said with a laugh, but he looked sad.
    ‘When I was your age,’ he said, ‘I was hard at work. When I stopped working you hadn’t even been born.’ His eyes seemed to unveil in the curious way they had, and to concentrate on my face—or rather on my head, which he held in his gaze as if in his hands; it was with the appraisal of a connoisseur that he pronounced his expert, cupidinous sentence: ‘Youth!’
    One younger yet arrived at this point, with wine. It was a very inferior stuff, though Nantwich knocked it back with enthusiasm. Then ‘Ah, here is Abdul!’ he exclaimed. From the swinging kitchen door a very black man entered the dining-room pushing a domed platter on a trolley. He was perhaps forty, well built, with fierce, deep-set eyes and a moustache that lent a subtle violenceto his expression; his thick lips, black at their edges, were red where they curved into his mouth, and his colouring was intensified by the pressed white linen of his chef’s pyjamas and apron