Reading for pleasure
Olivia Stewart-Liberty finds that the British Library is buzzing with sexual tension The first time I went to the British Library, I was waiting to collect my reader’s card in the foyer beside a lightly tinkling fountain, when a short fat man ambled over. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I’m Leon.’ He dipped a finger into the round pool of water. ‘I’m writing a book on sensual massage,’ he said and, taking my hand in his own, rubbed it. ‘Feel good?’ he asked. His languid eye charted the progress of other women in and out of the library.
It did feel good, even if it was a little unexpected. It would probably have felt even better if Leon had been a little less short and a little less fat. However, when he followed me down into the basement and made as though he was about to rub my other hand, I told him that, nice though it had been, enough was enough. He shrugged. ‘You gotta be more relaxed to pleasure,’ he said.
The British Library might squat like a monstrous red toad on one of the more dismal streets in London, but inside it’s a very different story. Within those red brick walls, it’s clear that most of those you meet are, in no small way, ‘relaxed to pleasure’.
‘Yes,’ confirms a library spokesperson, Catriona Finlayson, ‘there have been occasions when our older readers have brought it to our attention that some of our younger readers are perhaps involved in a clinch behind one pillar or another. These days,’ she continues, ‘they seem to favour the piazza. It offers a certain degree of privacy.’ So what is it about the British Library and sex? ‘All study places are erotic,’ says historian Simon Sebag Montefiore. ‘But the British Library is incredibly sexy. It’s very hard to concentrate. I love it.’ ‘It’s the way people look at you,’ says Nicola Ball, a scriptwriter who goes there most days. ‘It’s as though you’ve got no clothes on.’ Her eyes are drawn from the croissant on her plate in the café to a tousle-haired man in a red T-shirt who is negotiating the tables, a shiny teapot balanced on his tray. She watches until he’s out of sight.
‘There’s something about this building,’ she pushes the croissant around her plate. Indeed there is: well-oiled escalators slide silently from floor to floor, whitewashed walls soar upwards, distant balconies rise one on top of the other. A stack of dark leather books thrusts 100 feet up through the building’s core. Low-light lamps hang long and pendulous, and in the lobby there is picture which consists of the words Yes, Yes, Yes repeated 169 times.
But it’s the panting throb of the ventilation system which sets the pace. The whole building sighs with hothouse groans which swell and fade to muffle other sounds. The man in the red T-shirt is on his feet again. Perhaps in search of milk. ‘Humanities Two,’ says Nicola, identifying him as a fellow occupant of the reading room she uses. ‘Not bad.’ The air in Humanities Two is thick with the smell of books and the intimacy of thought. The hush of the carpet, the whisper of a turned page. This is the reading room favoured by scriptwriters, storyboarders, novelists and dissertation-writers. It’s always packed. Hands reach up to stretch, stroke foreheads, tug hair, slip out of a cardigan; readers emerge from thought and stare intently at one another.
‘You build up relationships with people,’ says Tom, 30, who is compiling a miscellany of champagne. ‘People are territorial. They tend to sit in the same place. And stare at the same people. It’s about eye contact and the repressed sexual tension of the school library.’ ‘If things get too intense in Humanities Two and I need to concentrate,’ says Charles, a 36-year-old scriptwriter, ‘I’ll go up to Manuscripts or India and Oriental for a couple of weeks. Usually puts the fire out.’ That might work for Charles, but there are those who consider India and Oriental the epicentre of the inferno. ‘There is no doubt,’ says the travel writer William Dalrymple, ‘that the Oriental and India collection has the highest quotient of beautiful girls, and up there one does find one’s fellow workers a distraction of some sort.’ Similarly with Manuscripts. Here the collection includes Charlotte Brontë’s letters to her tutor, Jonathan Swift’s to Vanessa, Essex’s to Elizabeth, and Lord Rochester’s poetry. Yet it’s not the collection that troubles Jane, a 31-year-old library employee. ‘It’s got quieter nooks and crannies up here where proper fantasies can kick in,’ she says. ‘And then we get the people wearing gloves.’ Her hands tighten on the trolley of books she’s holding, her eyes glaze over. ‘But we don’t allow rubber up here.’ In the reading rooms the sexual tension may be repressed, but there is little that is repressed in the dimly lit coffee shop. Here glances are not furtive. Or fleeting. They’re penetrative and insistent. Among the pedagogues with their trailing white beards who sit opposite wide-eyed young women, amid the corporate women and the wittering men in suits conducting meetings over cappuccinos, a very different dynamic goes on: hot glances turn heads for long seconds.
Two good-looking individuals sit opposite each other over tea and shared chocolate cake. They’re deep in talk. I approach them to see whether they have noticed what others have noticed. ‘That’s so strange that you mention sex!’ says the man, 24-year-old Ben Long, who is researching a history book for his father. ‘We were just talking about sex!’ Not that strange, really, considering this is the British Library.
‘Really strange,’ agrees 24-year-old Ruth Lux, who is finishing off her dissertation. ‘We were discussing whether infidelity can ever be justified.’ Stuart is resting outside Humanities Two besides a water fountain on a leather banquette. He looks exhausted. He is, he says, writing a dissertation on Shakespeare and sex. ‘Twine, turn, tumble, tup, tug, try, trim, trifle,’ he says. ‘Trick, trap, toy, toss, top, tilt, tickle, thrum, thresh, text,’ he counts each word off on his fingers. ‘And that’s just the T’s. Work, wrestle, wap, wup... ’ Back outside on the Euston Road it’s always a relief if it’s raining.
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