The Swimming-Pool Library

It was hard to convince them that not all peers-just as not all queers-know each other

Then I felt childlike myself, very pink & white, laughable in my indignation, & my authority much too big for me, as if bought in anticipation of my ‘growing into it’

The buildings, prefabricated units slotted and pinned together, showed a systematic disregard for comfort and relief, for anything the eye or heart might fix on as homely or decent

Will? How are you, darling?’ This was the other side of his magnificence, the unhesitating intimacy and charm that, more than the talent to command, had meant power and success. His endearments were not amative or effete, but manly like Churchill’s, and gave one a sense of having been singled out, of having value. His ‘darlings’ were not public, like Cockney ‘darlings’ or the ‘darlings’ we queens dispense, but private medals of confidence, pinned on to reward and to inspire

His butler was an efficient, humourless man, almost as old as himself, one of a race virtually extinct, stifled by their own correctness

More than that, I expected there to be dirty bits, and the slightly repellent introduction to the trivia of colonial existence gave me sudden doubts. It was the awful sense of another life having gone on and on, and the self-importance it courted by being written down and enduring years later, that made me think frigidly that I wasn’t the man for it

It seemed at first a monstrous request, although I could see it was quite reasonable in a way. If he had had an interesting life, which it appeared he had, he could not possibly hope to write it up himself now. If I didn’t do it, nothing might come of it. It was partly because I idly disliked any intrusion into my constant leisure-my leisure itself having taken on an urgent, all-consuming quality-that I instinctively repelled the idea. But it was not, after all, impossible

I wandered along and looked, tourist-like, at the Underground map. It was a clever piece of work, all the lines being made to run either up and down, from left to right, or at forty-five degrees, so that the whole thing became a set of dissolving and interpenetrating parallelograms. It was perhaps only of that very stretch of the Central Line which I always travelled that its fastidious rectilinearity gave a true picture: from Shepherd’s Bush to Liverpool Street the line had that Roman straightness which I so admired above ground and which below contributed to the great speed the trains sometimes got up. In rush-hour congestion though, the trains collected behind each other, and there would be long, numbing waits in the tunnels. Then I hated the Underground.
My fondness for it was anyway somewhat forced, and my concern with the smaller details of its history and performance had been worked up artificially to give it some faint aesthetic interest after I had been banned from driving. (Unhappily, I had had a few too many glasses of Pimm’s when I was caught by my blind spot, twitching out to overtake and smacking into a little old car that was trundling past me, invisible in either of my mirrors… My mother was now using my Lancia for her forays into Fordingbridge and for her occasional journeys up to London from the ranch in Hants.) So I made the best of the Tube, and found it often sexy and strange, like a gigantic game of chance, in which one got jammed up against many queer kinds of person. Or it was a sort of Edward Burra scene, all hats and buttocks and seaside postcard lewdery. Whatever, one always had to try and see the potential in it

He pulled up a chair, not risking to ask if he could join us

a severely handsome black of about thirty-five