‘Very Firbankian,’ I put in my obvious bit.
‘You mean, on another day,’ said James, ‘if it only had been another day, we would have seen the flowers beneath his feet.’
Chatter about this went on, and I asked Staines surreptitiously about the Colin pictures. ‘Oh, I’d forgotten,’ he said, hand raised chidingly to brow. ‘Will I ever be able to find them?’
‘Is it a frightful bore?’ I said courteously. ‘I just thought as I was here, and you had kindly said …’
‘Oh, I know. But there’s no system, as you doubtless recall.’
‘Actually I think I can remember roughly where they were.’
He allowed me to take out the huge print drawer that Phil (ouch!) and I had shuffled through weeks before. ‘You’re welcome to look,’ said Staines, as if he held out little hope.
But it was the right place. I recognised the Mayfair portraits, the louche studies of Bobby—Bobby who today was nowhere to be seen, banished doubtless under the good behaviour clause—and all the randomness of it was right to me, as that was how it had been before. But when I got to the bottom, and peeled back the last piece of protective tissue, I had to acknowledge that none of the pictures of Colin, those artfully lewd compositions, was there. I searched the drawers above and below as well, but with dwindling hope. Charles called out, ‘What’s he looking for?’ and when Staines replied, ‘I promised him some photographs of a boy called Colin, but I just don’t know where they are,’ I knew he was lying.
‘Colin?’ said Charles. ‘Oh, I don’t think I know that one. Do I know that one?’
I nodded at him to signal that this was the boy I had told him about, the thing that mattered to me; but he was quite inscrutable, full of diplomatic ignorance. Half an hour later, when we shook hands and parted, he wouldn’t meet my eye.
‘Well, that was a mixed success,’ I said to James, as he climbed down into his car, and I leant over the open door.
‘Don’t worry about the Colin thing,’ he said.
I drummed on the roof. ‘I want to get him! I don’t seem to have anything else to do.’
‘Do you want a lift?’
‘No, I’m going home. Then I’m going to have a swim: one must keep the body if not the soul together.’
‘See you soon.’
‘See you my darling.’
It was very quiet at the Corry, when I arrived mid-afternoon. The few people there looked at each other with considerate curiosity rather than rivalry. There was a sense of various different routines equably overlapping. There were several old boys, one or two perhaps even of Charles’s age, and doubtless all with their own story, strange and yet oddly comparable, to tell. And going into the showers I saw a suntanned young lad in pale blue trunks that I rather liked the look of.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alan Hollinghurst is the author of three other novels, The Folding Star, The Spell, and The Line of Beauty, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2004. In addition, he has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. He lives in London.
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