The Dreamers by Gilbert Adair Page A

rediscovering some long-unvisited haunt of her childhood years.
    Matthew didn’t move a muscle. He watched her, fascinated, from under the covers.
    Finally, she turned to face him.
    ‘What are you waiting for?’
    ‘Isabelle, please, I’m not dressed.’
    She smiled at him, raised her eyebrows as though to say ‘So what?’ and continued to glide around the room, flitting from the bed to one of the straight-backed chairs, from the chair to a Biedermeier chest-of-drawers, from the chest-of-drawers to Delacroix’s
Liberté
, dusting each of them lightly with her fingertips or else lovinglystroking it with the palm of her hand.
    Suddenly, at the height of this gala performance, she fired a question at Matthew.
    ‘Who in what film?’
    Without a second’s hesitation he answered, ‘Garbo in
Queen Christina
. The scene where she bids farewell to the room in which she made love to John Gilbert.’
    ‘In the future, in my memory,’ croaked Isabelle, imitating the accent of the Swedish actress, ‘I shall live a great deal in this room.’
    High-kicking a bare leg behind her from under the trailing robe, she opened the bedroom door and called back to him, ‘The bathroom’s at the end of the corridor, then first on the left. We’ve got a private wing to ourselves, you know. If you aren’t there in one minute, we’re coming to get you.’
    The door slammed shut.

Cleanliness is next to godliness
    Cleanliness is next to godliness as a swimming-pool may be located next door to a church. Innocuous as this little vignette was, it filled Matthew’s nostrils with the ambiguous aroma of all the swimming-pools he had ever known.
    As a boy, he’d had such a fondness for public pools that he eventually developed into a better, faster,stronger swimmer than either he or anyone else could have predicted of one so frail.
    It wasn’t really the pools themselves to which he had felt drawn, though he liked to watch their youthful, virile divers, like those delightful statues which earn their living as caryatids or fountains, plunge into the water with the heavy grace of torpedos then furiously set about cutting it into strips like so many pairs of scissors. Rather, it was what took place backstage that had excited his scarcely developed senses. There, with a jolt, he had discovered a cocktail of soap and sperm and sweat, as lithe young men, millionaires of beauty, dandies of nudity, gold medallists in vigour, poise and assurance, would stroll to and fro among squalid cubicles, exhibiting their bodies like mannequins, in the poses of mannequins , in the pose of Botticelli’s Venus or Boucher’s Miss O’Murphy, on the rosy cheeks of whose bottom one would so like to lay a resounding slap. Nor was it unusual to glimpse, cross-legged, a carelessly draped towel revealing just the skylight of his body, an adolescent Narcissus
in flagrante delicto
with himself, his pose and grimaces making one think of a Samurai at the height of hara-kiri.
    *

‘Here,’ said Théo
    â€˜Here,’ said Théo, pressing the electric razor into Matthew’s hands. ‘Use this.’
    For a moment Matthew was uncertain how to respond; and it was by hesitating as he did that he forfeited his chance to dissemble. All at once Théo scrutinised his features, the features of a housebroken mama’s boy, as intently as his father had done the evening before.
    â€˜You don’t use a razor, do you?’
    Isabelle slid off the bathtub and approached Matthew.
    â€˜Let me see!’
    These two white vests, these two pairs of white underpants, one of them bloated at the crotch, the other undershadowed by the dark silhouette of a triangular mound – nothing was more calculated to arouse him, to thrill him to the core, and at the same time to alarm him.
    He backed off, only to be pinioned against the closed door, on which a variety of dressing gowns and bathrobes were hanging up.
    When Isabelle extended a hand to caress his cheek, he held