‘All right?’ he said, as if he did not want to talk to me, or did not know how. I watched him in profile: a strong pleasant face which might barely change between leaving school and middle age, an incurious, dependable look. But he was coming on well. His tits now bulged out impressively; and as he raised his hands to his temples and pushed back his wet hair, his biceps doubled smoothly, sleek as coupling animals. He was the sort of boy who might be in the army, except that his weight-training suggested a labour towards some private image of himself, a solitary perfection. As often happens when I know someone else fancies a person I might otherwise have ignored, I realised that Bill’s taste for him had made me want the boy too, and I looked at him lustfully and competitively.

It was getting late. I had deliberately taken my time in the gym, and spent a while joining in with some Malaysian boys, very supple and clever, who were training on the parallel bars. Old Andrews was coaching them-a man who still bore the stiffness of the drill square in his straight carriage and wiry limbs, and who, by a strange anomaly in the democratising ambience of the Corry, was always known simply as Andrews: Andrews himself wore this as the badge of an old-school sense of equality, though it sometimes sounded, in the mouths of the boys who, vaulting and balancing, literally passed through his hands, like an old-school formula of command. He was a difficult, demanding man, from whom those who used the gym a lot could win a tight-lipped affection. This evening his discipline was what I needed after the anxiety of home, and the oriental boys, with their intuitive sense of space and balance, and their wide, courteous smiles, provided a brief antidote to Arthur and our joint troubles. Then the nearly deserted pool, the water lapping at the edge, had tired me and calmed me more. I watched Phil spring up out of the bath, shoot me a little look, self-conscious but somehow, I felt, pleased, and amble off to the stairs. His trunks were becoming small for the weight he was putting on in the ass.