Tenderness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I saw to it that a slave should no longer be anonymous merchandise sold without regard for the family ties which he has formed, or a contemptible object whom a judge submits to torture before taking his testimony, instead of accepting it upon oath. I prohibited forced entry of slaves into disreputable or dangerous occupations, forbidding their sale to brothel keepers, or to schools of gladiators. Let only those who like such professions practice them; the professions will but gain thereby. On farms, where overseers exploit the strength of slaves, I have replaced the latter, wherever possible, by free shareholders. Our collections of anecdotes abound in stories of gourmets who feed their household servants to their fish, but scandalous crimes are readily punishable, and are insignificant in comparison with the thousands of routine atrocities perpetrated daily by correct but heartless people whom no one would think of questioning. There was a great outcry when I banished from Rome a rich and highly esteemed patrician woman who maltreated her aged slaves; any bad son who neglects his old parents shocks the public conscience more, but I see little difference between these two forms of inhumanity. The condition of women is fixed by strange customs: they are at one and the same time subjected and protected, weak and powerful, too much despised and too much respected. In this chaos of contradictory usage, the practices of society are superposed upon the facts of nature, but it is not easy to distinguish between the two. This confused state of things is in every respect more stable than might appear: on the whole, women want to be just as they are; they resist change, or they utilize it for their one and only aim. The freedom of the women of today, which is greater, or at least more visible, than that of earlier times, is but an aspect of the easier life of a prosperous period; the principles and even the prejudices of old have not been seriously disturbed. Whether sincere or not, the official eulogies and epitaphs continue to attribute to our matrons those same virtues of industry, chastity, and sobriety which were demanded of them under the Republic. These real or supposed changes have in no respect modified the eternal freedom of morals in the humbler classes, nor the perpetual prudery of the bourgeoisie; time alone will prove which of these changes will last.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Then I would start the engine and swill the rain off with a couple of sweeps of the wipers. Everything took on a new clarity—it was like putting on my glasses and catching the world as it came to attention, legible and commonplace. Then the corner of a window wobbled and ran, the concrete canopy of the porch twitched and melted. Marcel was easily bored and easily scared, but he took to the long tedium of the stake-out better than I did. He said it reminded him of a scene in a film where Eddie Murphy was being watched in a hotel by two incompetent cops in a car; he had it on video and gave me verbatim, twice, the sequence where Murphy, who in fact has come and gone as he pleases, surprises his guards with a tray of coffee and rous. I winced to think how far away the morning was. I falled to rise to his little performance, too taken up with my own memories of waiting and watching, the involuntary predator. "I'm sorry about Luc bullying you," I said, almost taking responsibility for him, swallowing at the memory of his softly interrogative kisses, seeing in the blurred glass a weird and displaced image of his naked body rinsed with my sweat. "It doesn't matter," Marcel said, sounding weary of indignities. "I don't suppose he could help it." I gave a snuffly little laugh. "Well, anyone can help builying, surely?" Marcel nodded from side to side, as if weighing up long experience. An approaching car washed us with light, like a couple in front of a television, then left us in shadow. "He was, you know, very mad. A lot of people at school were not friends of his. Then Dr Boesmans used to come and see him." "Oh yes. You mean my landlord in St Alban Street?" Marcel nodded. "And what did Dr Boesmans say?" "I don't know. It's confidential. He used to see some of the boys in the sick-room after school—if they had problems. . ."—and he tapped his temple with his forefinger. "You mean he's a psychiatrist. I thought he was just . . . an ordinary doctor." "He's a very famous psychiatrist," Marcel said quietly. I felt a futile retrospective tenderness for Luc, having his boyhood troubles sorted out by this famous old man. And then I saw, with a bleak little sinking of the heart, what the scrap of paper in his pocket had been. It wasn't my address he was remembering, but Dr Boesmans'. It was just the sort of thing his mother would keep from me: she must have sent him to him again. That was why he had faltered for a moment when he saw where I lived, the escapade was shadowed for him by meetings of another kind. "How do you know this?" I said. He rubbed his side-window and peered out. His answer was reluctant.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  A second or two later he was grinding one hand up and down on my bum and with the other guiding me down to rub his cock where it stood out hard and at an angle in his loose old jeans. On the way from the Museum we had crossed a bridge above swans and the putter of an empty bâteau-mouche, the commentary running on regardless, when he had suddenly held out in his palm a little packet with a rubber's squashed ring contour. I didn't mind the wordless confirmation, but I turned my head away, too full of feeling for this boy, who had only been my friend for twenty minutes, who felt nothing for me but was so unhesitatingly himself, a little overweight, his upper lip and chin roughened already with shadow. Now he was sitting in my lap, riding on me with a certain urgent disregard—I swept my hands across his sleek and trusting back, and reached up to shoulders where muscles powerful from work gathered and dispersed. I was glad he couldn't see me, gaping and heavy-hearted with praise for him. We were on the end of the bed, and I hugged up close to look round his shoulder and into the full-length mirror. Our eyes met there, but he was a little bothered by that intimacy. Then, as I was climbing to the end, he got right off me and stood on the floor. I scrambled up too, confused for a moment by my own reflection in the glass, as if without my specs the image needed to be blinked back into focus, or as if a sixth sense revealed a face within my face, ghostly features caught in the very silvering of the mirror. Cherif took a half-step forward, and fell against the glass with flattened palms. A sequence of sounds emerged from it, or from a distance beyond it; and then for a couple of seconds we saw ourselves dematerialise and a perspective open up within—a shuttered room with stacks of chairs, lit from the side by an opening and closing door. Cherif was sighing and laughing quietly, and sat down again on the bed while I pulled on my trousers, hopping and treading on the legs.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Our marriage has been challenging, but it’s been a good ride and I’m hanging on till the end.’” Gary was choking up as he recalled his father’s words and blinking back tears. We smiled at each other. “Your father gave you a great gift. Very few dads talk that way to their young sons.” He nodded silently, unable to speak. Finally, he said, “That was one of the most important conversations of my whole life.” When a Marriage Is Unhappy— What Should a Parent Do? T HE CONVERSATION THAT Gary described in such moving detail is one of the most valuable legacies that a father could provide his child. It’s worth examining closely because it was so absolutely right, and there is so much to be learned from this remarkably honest, loving, and obviously unhappy man. The first important principle is for the parent to take the child’s concerns seriously and to acknowledge that his observations are valid. “Yes, we are having trouble and I’m glad that you are bringing it up” is the best response. The temptation is to brush the child’s worries aside, to plead being busy, to postpone, or worst of all to deny that anything is amiss. But all of those would be serious mistakes. They can do the child a great deal of harm. Most children will sooner or later perceive that parent’s behavior as cowardly or dishonest or both. He will learn that he cannot trust the parent to provide a straight answer or to help him. Brushing aside a child’s accurate perception of trouble increases his confusion, misery, and disenchantment with the parent as someone he can turn to when he is distressed. As important, parent and child will have missed an opportunity for a meeting of hearts and minds that may never reoccur. When a child expresses concern or worry about his parents’ marriage, he needs and deserves priority over other concerns of the day. At that moment the child is absolutely open to what the parents have to say and they may never have another chance like it. Handled properly and treated with respect, the conversation that ensues can be one of the most important conversations in the lives of each adult and child. Parents need to speak honestly and from the heart. This is their time to tell the child the moral principles that they believe in, not abstractly or in fancy language, but as simply as they can. They should say what they believe and show him how they’re acting in accord with these principles. First they need to tell him honestly that his perceptions are on target, that each adult is indeed in trouble, that they’re both worried and sad about what’s happening. Both are giving it their full attention.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Voluptuous memories, if ever there had been any, were completely effaced for me; this was no more than a pleasant exchange with a creature marked like me by sickness or age; I felt the same slightly irritated sympathy that I would have had for an elderly cousin from Spain, or a distant relative coming from Narbonne. I am trying for a moment to recapture mere curls of smoke, the iridescent bubbles of some childish game. But it is easy to forget. ... So many things have happened since the days of those ephemeral loves that doubtless I no longer recognize their flavor; above all I am pleased to deny that they ever made me suffer. And yet among those mistresses there was one, at least, who was a delight to love. She was both more delicate and more firm than the others, gentler but harder, too; her slender body was rounded like a reed. I have always warmed to the beauty of human hair, that silken and undulating part of a body, but the headdresses of most of our women are towers, labyrinths, ships, or nests of adders. Hers was simply what I liked them to be: the cluster of harvest grapes, or the bird's spread wing. Lying beside me and resting her small proud head against mine, she used to speak with admirable candor of her loves. I liked her intensity and her detachment in loving, her exacting taste in pleasure, and her consuming passion for harrowing her very soul. I have known her to take dozens of lovers, more than she could keep count of; I was only a passer-by who made no demands of fidelity. She fell in love with a dancer named Bathyllus, so handsome that all follies for his sake were justified in advance. She sobbed out his name in my arms, and my approbation gave her courage. At other times we laughed a great deal together. She died young, on a fever-ridden island to which her family had exiled her after a scandalous divorce. She had feared old age, so I could only rejoice for her, but that is a feeling we never have for those whom we have truly loved. Her need for money was fantastic. One day she asked me to lend her a hundred thousand sesterces. I brought them to her the next morning. She sat down on the floor like some small, trim figure playing at knucklebones, emptied the sack on the marble paving, and began to divide the gleaming pile into heaps.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  He told me to put the toy down and get out.” Chastised, young Jimmy stood outside in the cold until Mamaw and Papaw strolled by and asked if he’d like to go inside the pharmacy. “I can’t,” Jimmy told his father. “Why?” “I just can’t.” “Tell me why right now.” He pointed at the store clerk. “That man got mad at me and told me to leave. I’m not allowed to go back inside.” Mamaw and Papaw stormed in, demanding an explanation for the clerk’s rudeness. The clerk explained that Jimmy had been playing with an expensive toy. “This toy?” Papaw asked, picking up the toy. When the clerk nodded, Papaw smashed it on the ground. Utter chaos ensued. As Uncle Jimmy explained, “They went nuts. Dad threw another of the toys across the store and moved toward the clerk in a very menacing way; Mom started grabbing random shit off the shelves and throwing it all over the place. She’s screaming, ‘Kick his fucking ass! Kick his fucking ass!’ And then Dad leans in to this clerk and says very clearly, ‘If you say another word to my son, I will break your fucking neck.’ This poor guy was completely terrified, and I just wanted to get the hell out of there.” The man apologized, and the Vances continued with their Christmas shopping as if nothing had happened. So, yes, even in their best times, Mamaw and Papaw struggled to adapt. Middletown was a different world. Papaw was supposed to go to work and complain politely to management about rude pharmacy employees. Mamaw was expected to cook dinner, do laundry, and take care of the children. But sewing circles, picnics, and door-to-door vacuum salesmen were not suited to a woman who had almost killed a man at the tender age of twelve. Mamaw had little help when the children were young and required constant supervision, and she had nothing else to do with her time. Decades later she would remember how isolated she felt in the slow suburban crawl of midcentury Middletown. Of that era, she said with characteristic bluntness: “Women were just shit on all the time.” Mamaw had her dreams but never the opportunity to pursue them. Her greatest love was children, in both a specific sense (her children and grandchildren were the only things in the world she seemed to enjoy in old age) and a general one (she watched shows about abused, neglected, and missing kids and used what little spare money she had to purchase shoes and school supplies for the neighborhood’s poorest children). She seemed to feel the pain of neglected kids in a deeply personal way and spoke often of how she hated people who mistreated children. I never understood where this sentiment came from—whether she herself was abused as a child, perhaps, or whether she just regretted that her childhood had ended so abruptly. There is a story there, though I’ll likely never hear it.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The longer passages, which might start with a routine description, gave way after a paragraph to an earlier period recalled in detail, like a story. One of these, I noticed from the names, was about Winchester, though it had been written up in the course of a visit to the Nuba Hills. I saw Charles retiring from the company of his boorish companions to sit at a little camp table in his tent and reconstruct, amid the boulders and thorn-bushes of Africa, an episode of his English life. At the time Winchester itself had been recorded in the five-year diary. It was written in a studied, microscopic hand, with tangling ascenders and capital letters which emerged from snakelike scrolls. On the bordered title-page the printer’s lettering (again, that effortful Gothic) announcing ‘This diary belongs to: _____’ was outdone by the looping tendrils with which ‘The Hon. Charles Nantwich’ was laboriously rendered in the manner of the signature of Elizabeth I. At a cursory look this diary was unreadable in more senses than one. With a schoolboy’s typical mixture of secrecy and conventionality the entries (which could only cover three lines per day) were written almost entirely in abbreviations. What was more interesting was to see how, over the five years at the school, the hand had changed, casting off the juvenile fanciness for later, adolescent, affectations. Equally illegible, the writing came to look less monkish and stilted, and took on a passionate, cursive air. Certain characters, ‘d’, for example, and ‘g’, became the subject for worried stylistic amendment and experiment. Little ’e’s, in particular, were restless—now Greekly sticking out their pointed tongues, now curling up in copperplate propriety. I remembered people at school attaching similar prestige to handwriting, though I never did much to adjust my own frankly careless scrawl. I would certainly have been too slovenly to have stuck, as Charles had done, to the virtually useless annotation of my life in a book for five years. It was one of those changeless schooltime occupations, which have no function beyond themselves, and I was touched to think of Charles as a prefect fitting in the details of match scores and books each evening on the same page that he had used as a new man, his eye flicking back each year over the slowly accumulating trivia.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  When he turned off the gramophone, stood up and said, ‘Well, you must go, darling,’ I was smitten with friendship, moved especially that he did not want me to stay. After that we met almost every day of our undergraduate careers. Tonight we were meeting in the Volunteer, my local gay pub. Mildly art-nouveau and metropolitan outside, with mysteriously opaque acid-etched windows, the Volunteer inside, after disastrous refurbishments, was an eternal parable of disappointment. A little back bar, favoured by the elderly, retained some period character, but the rest had been laid waste into the vast areas required for the mass jostling and cruising of a Friday or Saturday night. Round tables with beaten copper tops were aligned in front of the 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 pints of 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.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I felt quite fond of him, and was glad that I had belonged to him and not to the talkative, rather sinister Staines. ‘I do hope we’ll have another little chin-wag soon,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you at the baths, of course.’ Again it seemed inconceivable to me that this man could be capable of physical exercise. As if reading my thoughts he explained: ‘I find the water most … therapeutic. Swimming, if you can call it swimming, is the only thing that makes me feel young. Floating around, splish-splosh, flip-flop …’ Downstairs again on my way out, I stopped off for a pee. The lavatory was off the hall, down a corridor where lesser but brighter portraits were hung, late Victorian and Edwardian mostly, the flashy brushwork making the sitters seem all the more roguish and parvenus. Staines was coming out as I entered, and uttered a ‘Whoops,’ though he did not otherwise indicate that he knew me. As I stood at the urinal, along the front of which ran a tilted glass plate to prevent the old buffers from piddling on their shoes, a voice said, ‘Enjoy your meal, sir?’ It was Raymond, our waiter, who I had not realised was there. He caught my eye in the mirror as I glanced across. 8 Next day I was earlier at the Corry than usual, swimming with the lunchtime set before going east to Charles and then, alarmingly, perhaps futilely, beyond. Phil was back to work on an awkward split shift, and I would see him in the evening, over at the hotel. The shower room was crowded, so that I had to wait at the entrance with one or two others, anxious to be through and in their offices again, eyeing the more determined lingerers with a sceptically raised eyebrow. The gross-cocked Carlos cooed ‘Hey, Will’ and beckoned, so I jumped the queue and joined him under his nozzle, his rose. ‘Is very busy,’ he acknowledged, ‘but I like to see the boys.’ Here was the conscience of the Corry in a phrase. He soaped my shoulderblades in halting, appreciative arcs, slowly moving further down my back, and I began to get a hard-on. Andrews the gym instructor was across the way, austerely washing his head with coal tar soap. With his wiry, pre-war, slightly bowlegged body and his square, thin-lipped, grizzled head, he seemed to be scrubbing away in search of some lost puritanical cleanness; and as he left to dry he looked at Carlos and me with an almost regimental reproach. His place was taken by a dal-coloured Indonesian boy with strong yellow teeth, enormous hands and an exceptionally extensile cock, which, quite ordinary in size to start with, filled out lavishly with a few casual strokes of a soapy hand and was burdensomely erect a few seconds later when he grinned across the room—in response, of course, to Carlos’s frank appreciation. O the difference of man and man.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Quite all right by me,’ Rupert said. ‘Has he done something wrong, then?’ ‘No, no,’ I laughed naturally. ‘But he doesn’t want his mother to know he’s here—just like you, really. So if we don’t tell anybody at all, then she’ll never find out.’ ‘Good,’ said Rupert. He was clearly dissatisfied. We went into the sitting-room. ‘I think it would be better if you stayed in the bedroom, darling,’ I said to Arthur. ‘This child’s mother is coming round. We’ve agreed to keep it all a secret.’ He left the room directly, and I heard him shut the bedroom door. ‘I expect Mummy will be here any moment,’ I said. My nephew was determined and casual. ‘Can we go on looking at the pictures?’ he asked. ‘All right,’ I agreed. Then another thought struck me. ‘How long were you here before I arrived?’ ‘I was here for about twenty minutes—before you arrived.’ ‘Perhaps best to pretend to Mummy that I found you on the doorstep. Otherwise she’ll wonder how you got in—or why I didn’t ring her sooner.’ He looked at his large, rather adult watch. ‘Yes, that’s fine,’ he said. We sat down side by side, and I lifted the album on to my knee. It was one of a set in which my grandfather had had all his loose and various collection of snaps, taken over a long life, mounted. He had had more volumes bound than he needed and gave one to me. It had the generous proportions of an Edwardian album, many, many broad dark grey pages, tied in with thick silk cords which knotted at the edge outside, the whole protected with weighty boards covered with green leather, tooled with flowers around the border, and with a pompous but impressive ‘B’ beneath a coronet in the centre. ‘How far did you get?’ I asked, offering to open it halfway through. ‘Let’s start again,’ Rupert urged. We’d once spent an hour looking through this album together, and I had had the impression that he was committing it to memory, working out the connections. It was a sort of book of life to him, and I was the authoritative expounder of its text. The early part was fairly random, this scion of the family photograph collection being merely the duplicates and duds. There was me with a cap and a brace on my teeth, at my tother; there were Philippa and I in our bathing costumes in Brittany (a windy day by the look of it); me in my shorts in the garden at Marden, my grandfather and my mother in deckchairs behind, looking cross. ‘There’s Great Grandpa, look: I don’t think he was in a very good mood, do you?’ Rupert giggled, and banged his heels against the front of the sofa. ‘Then it’s Winchester.’ ‘Hooray!’ cried Rupert, who, though an independent child, was still strongly patriotic about such things as the school from which, one day, he would doubtless run away.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  His voice, light, insistent, trust less, the heart-breaking Brutus of a school play; the occasional early-morning throatiness as if he were a smoker already. "I can't believe they've all dropped you. Decided not to be your friends any more." "There are some, few, people who will always be your friends, even though you may not be with them often, and there are others who you see, whom you see, all the time who, sure, they are your friends, but when life moves on you begin to forget them, and I find you do not have too much to say to each other any more." "How very true." "For instance my friend Jeroen at St Narcissus, you know we used to see each other every day, and so it was before then. His father was at the very same school with my father, and I used to play with Jeroen when we were just little kids. We both are, well, quite good runners, but he became faster than me, and perhaps I was unfriendly to him—not on the surface, you know, but more on the bottom. Yes, underneath. But now, when I see him in the town, like yesterday, I am actually quite upset because we just say a few words and maybe I am embarrassed a little bit because I am not in the school any more, but then I think he would like to be more grown-up and not to be in the school too, even though he is now one of the top duxes—do you say, the prefects, yes—and the captain of everything. So we just laugh at each other for a minute and then we go away." My poor darling Luc! What hateful lessons you have to learn. I grimaced avuncularly—not too avuncularly: the understanding smirk of a real friend. And it was cheering to think of his old unappreciative friends dropping away, leaving only our little corps of idolaters, unencumbered by other flatterers and time-wasters (though schism and betrayal within so fanatical a clique were a further danger not to be discounted). Even so there was a certain grossness in my pushing the next question forward, and I felt again for a second the interrogator's planned scorn for etiquette, moved by the fiercer logic of his need to know. "So who are your main friends, your best friends now?" And my hand shuddered so that I had to return the cup to the saucer untasted. A faint smile suggested surprise at a perhaps harmless intrusion, registered the challenge of summing up so private a matter and of setting about it in another language. But then, he seemed to say, as he looked down and studied the dark swirls and blooms of the walnut table-top, he wanted challenges, he needed to excel, and I was right to test him so intimately within the businesslike confines of our hour.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  He came up closer, and Maurice stepped aside with a droll raised eyebrow. ‘See you, then,’ he said as he went off to the shower. ‘What is your name?’ his Lordship enquired, and then, with the forced Christian candour of one who has learnt the ways of teams and charities, ‘I am Charles.’ ‘William,’ I replied (though I am not often called that). ‘William, I want to show you my gratitude. Heavens!’ he added theatrically. ‘It is to you I owe my presence here.’ ‘There’s really no need. I did what anyone would have done.’ He raised a finger and knocked it on my chest. ‘Lunch,’ he said, nodding his head. ‘You’ll come to luncheon—my Club, nothing extraordinary, but it will do.’ ‘Well, that’s very kind of you …’ I felt drawn because I thought he was interesting and might have a distracting story to tell. If he were a nuisance I needn’t see him again: there was also Arthur and the odder story of home and love and guilt, and I didn’t know that I wanted to take on anything new. ‘I think you should come on Friday,’ he said. Then: ‘Who knows, I may be dead by Friday. Perhaps better make it tomorrow—I should still be quick then.’ It was a bizarre usage, which it took me a second or two to see; I had a fleeting image of him chasing me round a huge mahogany table. ‘Well, that would be very nice.’ ‘Nice for me, William,’ he insisted. It seemed to be settled in his mind, and he wandered away holding his towel in front of him as though he expected to bump into something. I had to seek him out when I had finished dressing, to enquire which Club it was and what name would find him. At home it was always very hot; the central heating throbbed away as if we feared exposure, and often, though high up and not overlooked, we kept the curtains drawn in the daytime, only a mild bloom of pinkish light penetrating into the rooms from outside. The creation of this climate was barely conscious, as people in crisis habitually transform their surroundings, the miserable sitting cold through the dusk without turning lights on, and the endangered, like Arthur and I, craving rosiness and security. The penumbra helped us to hide from each other. As soon as the new terms were forced upon us by Arthur’s coming back he must have felt as much as I did a sinking of the heart at our incompatibility. Inflicted with this new anxiety, we were afraid to annoy or burden each other. He spent much of the time asleep or sitting in a chair; and he bathed long and often.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Taha slid his hand shyly across the blanket & clasped my own. I scarcely faltered as I spoke of Ahmed’s arrow, which going so far was assumed to have vanished so that he lost the Princess to his brother Ali, but I felt a squeezing in my chest & throat & hardly dared look at him as, all unconsciously, I made our two hands more comfortable together, interweaving his long fingers with my own. By a simple gesture I wd never have dared to make & without words which neither of us cd have said, he conveyed his trust in me, & holding my hand held on to a simple faith that all wd be well with Ahmed, wretched though his current state now was. And when the others had all turned home, I went on, saying that the arrow wd never be found & that they must make haste for the wedding-feast of Prince Ali & the Princess Nur-al-Nihar, Ahmed went on alone & lo he encountered the radiant fairy Peri-Banou & fell in love with her & married her & lived in happiness with her all the days of his life. Then Hassan was scuffling & waiting at the door, & Taha with less than innocence drew his hand away— The phone was ringing. Phil, I knew, would never answer it, though it was at the bedside, and when I came in he was sprawled over the sheets, pale, bleary and tumescent. ‘Leave us out with the phone,’ he groaned. I half sat on him and picked up the receiver. ‘Darling, it’s James. You couldn’t come over, could you?’ ‘Sweetest, I’ve got a pretty frightful head and it’s only seven o’clock. Can’t it wait?’ ‘A bit, I suppose. I’m in a terrible mess. I’ve been arrested.’ 1 I came home on the last train. Opposite me sat a couple of London Transport maintenance men, one small, fifty, decrepit, the other a severely handsome black of about thirty-five. Heavy canvas bags were tilted against their boots, their overalls open above their vests in the stale heat of the Underground. They were about to start work! I looked at them with a kind of swimming, drunken wonder, amazed at the thought of their inverted lives, of how their occupation depended on our travel, but could only be pursued, I saw it now, when we were not travelling.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Bill, when questioned, did nothing to conceal his feelings. He was sent down for eighteen months with hard labour. Bill and I became great friends, and he, who was regarded as a kind of mascot by many of his fellows, and entrusted with secrets in the way that one might pour out one’s feelings to one’s dog or cat, knew a great deal about almost everybody, and seemed to feel keenly their various trials and tragedies. He pointed out to me a number of relationships between the men, confirmed my suspicious interpretations of odd gestures and habits, and revealed what was fairly a structure of submerged bonds and loyalties. There were half a dozen longstanding affairs going on, and various other men and boys were available if properly approached, or shared their favours with a satisfactory polygamy between two or three of their companions. In a way what had happened was a comic reversal of the circumstances which had put us all in there in the first place, with the prison authorities bringing us together, admitting our liaisons, and protecting us from the persecution of the outside world. The screws themselves were by no means indifferent, it transpired, and two of them at least were having sex on a daily ration with prisoners—though those prisoners were treated with the greatest suspicion by their fellows as being probable grasses. One of them was provided with lipstick and other maquillage by his officer, and his femininity, at least, was tolerated as it would not have been outside. Bill drew me out too, and I have a clear and rather touching picture of him sitting opposite me, his powerful, stocky young frame transforming the stiff grey flannel of his uniform so that he looks like a handsome soldier in some poor, East European army. He concentrates on me closely as I tell him about my childhood, or about life in the Sudan; and he is interested to hear about my house and my servants. I have promised him that when he is released, early next year, I will find him something to do: a job in a gymnasium, if possible, where his feeling for men and physical exercise can be fulfilled, rather than baulked and denied in some clerkly work. It was rather desperate to see him toiling for weeks over detective novels from the prison library: he doggy-paddled through books in a mood of miserable aspiration, but they were not his element.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Bill and I became great friends, and he, who was regarded as a kind of mascot by many of his fellows, and entrusted with secrets in the way that one might pour out one’s feelings to one’s dog or cat, knew a great deal about almost everybody, and seemed to feel keenly their various trials and tragedies. He pointed out to me a number of relationships between the men, confirmed my suspicious interpretations of odd gestures and habits, and revealed what was fairly a structure of submerged bonds and loyalties. There were half a dozen longstanding affairs going on, and various other men and boys were available if properly approached, or shared their favours with a satisfactory polygamy between two or three of their companions. In a way what had happened was a comic reversal of the circumstances which had put us all in there in the first place, with the prison authorities bringing us together, admitting our liaisons, and protecting us from the persecution of the outside world. The screws themselves were by no means indifferent, it transpired, and two of them at least were having sex on a daily ration with prisoners—though those prisoners were treated with the greatest suspicion by their fellows as being probable grasses. One of them was provided with lipstick and other maquillage by his officer, and his femininity, at least, was tolerated as it would not have been outside. Bill drew me out too, and I have a clear and rather touching picture of him sitting opposite me, his powerful, stocky young frame transforming the stiff grey flannel of his uniform so that he looks like a handsome soldier in some poor, East European army. He concentrates on me closely as I tell him about my childhood, or about life in the Sudan; and he is interested to hear about my house and my servants. I have promised him that when he is released, early next year, I will find him something to do: a job in a gymnasium, if possible, where his feeling for men and physical exercise can be fulfilled, rather than baulked and denied in some clerkly work. It was rather desperate to see him toiling for weeks over detective novels from the prison library: he doggy-paddled through books in a mood of miserable aspiration, but they were not his element. I took to the prison library with more duck-like promptness. It was a bizarre collection, made up almost entirely of gifts. Ordinary well-wishers and a number of voluntary bodies gave miscellaneous fiction and popular encyclopaedic works on technology and natural history; an outgoing governor had presented a collection of literary texts, some deriving from his own schooldays but also including French classical drama and the complete works of Wither in twenty-three volumes; and the Times Literary Supplement had charitably for some years sent to the prison all those books it felt no interest in reviewing, a body of work ranging from bacteriology to handbooks on historic trams.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I opened the oven door and shoved my hands into the linked asbestos pockets of the oven-gloves, slapping them together a few times as if I were a lunatic in some restraining garment. A good garlicky smell blossomed. ‘I don’t honestly believe they can be having an affair,’ I said carefully. ‘On the other hand, I do believe that the heart, and more particularly the willy, have some very strange ways. It’s just possible,’ I allowed as I squatted down, ‘that a handsome eighteen-year-old could prefer a waddling fifty-year-old to someone as beautiful and well-endowed as me.’ James embarrassedly ruffled the top of my head, but I shouted ‘Out of the way!’ as I made for the table. The oven-gloves were never as efficient as they should have been. After lunch we popped into James’s Mini and made the two-minute journey over the avenue to Staines’s house. These were the very streets where little Rupert had seen Arthur and Harold at their miserable business: I looked out for them, in a fairly ridiculous and superstitious way. I wanted to save Arthur. At least, I think that’s what I wanted to do to him. It was a strange conviction I had, that I could somehow make these boys’ lives better, as by a kind of patronage—especially as it never worked out that way. Staines was on his very best behaviour, though it didn’t fool me. One could perceive his slight polite disappointment that James was not more beautiful. The ego was smartly suited, buttoned up, and though at any moment I expected some rude eruption, a comic photographer’s surprise the split second before the flash, the most explosive thing about him was the pink of his socks. Charles was already there, glass in hand, at the end of lunch, and I introduced him to James, whose enthusiasm was precisely modulated to disguise the intimate knowledge he had of him from me. We strolled through at Charles’s pace into the studio, and I heard him saying to James: ‘So you’re the Firbank fellow, eh? I knew him, of course—though not well, not well …’ Staines let down a roll of white paper from the ceiling and had us sit in a row in front of the projector on its high table. As he turned the main lights out and began to speak I was reminded strongly of those scenes, early on in thrillers, when the agent is briefed and shown film clips of leading suspects, taken largely from the back of moving cars.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  A thousand, thousand times I’ve wished I had … I was asleep when Phil came in, and I woke to feel him sitting on the bed, taking his shoes off. I reached out to touch whatever part of him was nearest (it was his right knee) and mumblingly asked him the time (it was six o’clock). I was ready to snuggle down with him for his off-beat, shiftwork sleep, but in a few moments he was lying on top of me, kissing me. The taste of his breath was remarkable, especially since I had just woken and was babyishly vulnerable to him: there was whisky, and laid over it, to conceal it from me as much as from the guests and management, there was peppermint. He was quite slavish with his hands and tongue, and he licked me, lapped at me, in a deaf, drunken homage for several minutes. Then he sat back on his heels, astride me, and unbuttoned and took off his tight little jacket. I stretched out my arms and dreamily stroked his shoulders and tits, smiling in a stupid, sleepy way that he seemed to find just as sexy as I intended. 6 I found James leaning in a corner of the foyer, lips pursed over the score. ‘Taking it a bit seriously, aren’t you, darling?’ I said. ‘Darling.’ We kissed drily, rapidly. ‘No, it’s frightfully good, actually.’ ‘Well, I’m glad you’re going to enjoy it.’ I gazed around despairingly at the white tuxedos and bare shoulders. It was far too hot to be in an opera-house, and I had come along in what was virtually a pair of pyjamas—a super-light African cotton outfit, the queenery of which was chastened by a hint of martial arts. ‘Everybody’s looking at you,’ said James, who, adorably, was wearing a suit and tie. ‘God knows what Lord B. will think.’

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I found I was longing for his confidence: I wanted to step in and take the place of the absent friends, soothe the unacknowledged bereavements of his awkward time of life. I thought how pained and creepy I might seem to him—both predatory and vicarious. "I wish I could have helped him more," I said. But he was reasonable: "You did what you could. You've been all around the place on that merry goose hunt!" He slapped the table to mark his pleasure in knowing this imaginary idiom, and frowned in slightly forced exasperation. "He's a bloody nuisance!" he said, and ran on quickly, "Do you think he might be dead?" I hushed the idea away, and as I did so saw Orst's simple panel of the beach and the sea and the dusk sky. Chapter 17 A suntanned blond dawdled past, looking down at me coyly, noncommittally, seeing if the memory hook caught in the murky pond. "Hi," I said. "Oh hi!" He dropped on to the banquette beside me. I felt him briefly adjusting to the gloom that I gave off and my lowered stare across a clutter of empty glasses. "How are you?" he said brightly. "How are you, Ty? you're looking very brown." "Mm—I've been in London." "Oh . . . " (And what sort of name was Ty, anyway? It sounded like an actor in one of Matt's films. "And then at last Casey submits to Ty's throbbing fuck-pole . . . " And there it still evidently, self-importantly, was.) "How is the old dump?" I saw him wince to have the city of his dreams mocked. I knew to him it was size and grandeur and fashion-shoots and nights at Heaven; it wasn't crap and decay, the maze trodden by the wispy-bearded youngsters who slept in doorways when you glamorously left Heaven at two or three. "Oh, it was great. I did a lot of work, you know, modelling? Everything from anoraks right down to jockey-shorts!" "And who was all this for?" "That was for C & A," he said negligently. "Soon I shall be on all the bus-stops." "And do you show off your dick in the C & A brushed-cotton slacks?" "No, you are not allowed to," he giggled. "They make you put it out of the way." So living models had to aspire, as one had sometimes surmised, to the generalised sexlessness of the old chocolate mannequins. He took the opportunity to change gear, I remembered it all now, up to the sing-song fifth of his fantasies and achievements, he set the cruise control button, he might go on for hours. "I met this really sexy man in the Bloomsbury area, he is in the fashion business—well, he makes window displays, you know, they call them charm pads, and—" "Charm pads!" "Yes, you know, charm pads for the jewellery and rings.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I decided to take on the case. We ultimately got Charlie’s case transferred to juvenile court, where the shooting was adjudicated as a juvenile offense. That meant Charlie wouldn’t be sent to an adult prison, and he would likely be released before he turned eighteen, in just a few years. I visited Charlie regularly, and in time he recovered. He was a smart, sensitive child who was tormented by what he’d done and what he’d been through. At a talk I gave at a church months later, I spoke about Charlie and the plight of incarcerated children. Afterward, an older married couple approached me and insisted that they had to help Charlie. I tried to dissuade these kind people from thinking they could do anything, but I gave them my card and told them they could call me. I didn’t expect to hear from them, but within days they called, and they were persistent. We eventually agreed that they would write a letter to Charlie and send it to me to pass on to him. When I received the letter weeks later, I read it. It was remarkable. Mr. and Mrs. Jennings were a white couple in their mid-seventies from a small community northeast of Birmingham. They were kind and generous people who were active in their local United Methodist church. They never missed a Sunday service and were especially drawn to children in crisis. They spoke softly and always seemed to be smiling but never appeared to be anything less than completely genuine and compassionate. They were affectionate with each other in a way that was endearing, frequently holding hands and leaning into each other. They dressed like farmers and owned ten acres of land, where they grew vegetables and lived simply. Their one and only grandchild, whom they had helped raise, had committed suicide when he was a teenager, and they had never stopped grieving for him. Their grandson struggled with mental health problems during his short life, but he was a smart kid and they had been putting money away to send him to college. They explained in their letter that they wanted to use the money they’d saved for their grandson to help Charlie. Eventually, Charlie and this couple began corresponding with one another, building up to the day when the Jenningses met Charlie at the juvenile detention facility. They later told me that they “loved him instantly.” Charlie’s grandmother had died a few months after she first called me, and his mother was still struggling after the tragedy of the shooting and Charlie’s incarceration. Charlie had been apprehensive about meeting with the Jenningses because he thought they wouldn’t like him, but he told me after they left how much they seemed to care about him and how comforting that was. The Jenningses became his family.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “No, I know it’s not funny. I’m sorry.” He lay on top of her and kissed her, cupping her head tenderly in his hands. They kissed and touched each other and then broke apart to talk some more. She told him about the conversation with Brett and how it made her feel. She told him about the opening she had been to the night before, leaving out her almost frightened sense of isolation. She asked what his wife was like. “She’s intelligent, and very independent. She’s better at being alone than I am. And she’s adventurous in her own way. Last year she went to South America by herself, which isn’t something most woman her age would do.” “How old is she?” “Thirty-nine.” “What does she do?” “Teaches high school, which she likes very much. I enjoy her, even if it isn’t passionate. We actually have separate bedrooms.” “I couldn’t be married like that,” she said. “There would have to be passion.” “You’re very idealistic.” “You’re not?” “No, I’m not. Anyway, marriage isn’t about passion for me. We’re excellent company for each other. And I don’t want to be alone.” They were silent for a moment; she gently felt his earlobes. “Why do you come to places like this?” she asked. “Why do you think?” “I really don’t know. How any grown man can accept what happens here as sex is beyond me. You could have affairs if you wanted, I’ll bet. You don’t seem that interested in sex here, anyway. So why do you come?” “To meet fascinating creatures I’d never meet in the usual course of my life. Like you.” He touched her nose and smiled. Of course, she realized what he liked about her. He loved the idea of kooky, arty girls who lived “bohemian” lives and broke all the rules. It was the kind of thing he regarded with a certain admiration, but did not want to do himself. He had probably had affairs with eccentric, unpredictable women in college, and then married the most stable, socially desirable woman he could find. This did not make her feel contempt or draw away from him. She liked this vicarious view of herself; it excited and reassured her. She wasn’t a directionless girl adrift in a monstrous city, wandering from one confusing social situation to the next, having stupid affairs. She was a bohemian, experimenting. The idea made rock music start playing in her head. She kissed him with something resembling passion. “I would like to actually fuck you sometime,” he said. “But I don’t think you enjoy sex here. I don’t want it if you can’t enjoy yourself.” She smiled and tweaked the light layer of flab at his waist. “But that doesn’t apply to blow jobs, right?” After he left, the day suddenly became very busy. Most of the men she saw were unpleasant, and she found herself taking refuge in the idea of Bernard the lawyer as she endured their malodorous company.