The Yellow Room Conspiracy Read online

  Especially don’t pity me about not being beautiful any more. Actually I’m not too dusty. Being ill has given me a sort of holy, marble-saint look. A saint who’s been kissed by so many pilgrims that she’s worn away a bit, which makes her look a lot more interesting than when she came all polished out of the sculptor’s studio. I suppose I’d better get this business about being beautiful over. Last winter there was a Life of Churchill on the telly. When he was old but before he went gaga he got Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier to come to lunch with him at Chartwell. He sat her next to him and didn’t say anything, just kept looking at her. Once or twice he told her how beautiful she was. That’s all. For God’s sake, I thought, that’s not what you go and have lunch with Churchill for! I don’t think being beautiful was the only reason she was a nutcase, but it can’t have helped.

  Don’t worry—I’m not going to start a special brand of feminist hoo-ha. Beautyist it’d have to be, I suppose. Aesthetic harassment. Of course when I was very young and didn’t know how to handle it I sometimes wished it would go away, and it doesn’t help when you’re in a real teapot-throwing temper to be told how terrific you look when you’re cross. And of course you want to eat your cake and have it. You want the pluses and not the minuses. You want the fun and the attention and the parties and you don’t want the slobs barging up and expecting to get off with you. I know I wouldn’t have preferred to be out-and-out plain, but suppose I’d been about as good-looking as Harriet—not a head-turner, but not bad … I don’t know …

  People who know me well, Paul for instance, say they can tell if I’m upset because then I look specially calm. I suppose it’s true. I’ve heard singers being interviewed and they have this funny way of talking about what they do. They don’t say “my voice”, they say “the voice”, as if it was right outside them, not part of them at all, like a cello or something. It’s a bit like that with me, not that I’ve ever talked about “the face”, but that’s how I felt. It was something I wore. “Me” was the person who wore it, quite different, much brighter than I looked for a start, but not specially brave or calm, erratic, impulsive, silly about some of the risks I took, like everyone else, really, only I had this face to hide behind. Just a few people—Father, of course—Gerry was another—they didn’t seem to pay any attention to the face, so the person they saw was me.

  No, Paul wasn’t one of them. He still isn’t.

  I think that’s probably important. If you don’t understand it, you won’t understand a lot. It certainly doesn’t explain everything. Nothing ever does, about people, does it?

  Now I’m afraid I’m tired. I hope I get better at this. I’m going to have a snooze, because Paul’s at his Historic Dorset committee and he’ll ask me if I have when he gets back.

  PAUL II

  1934-39

  Though we were almost exact contemporaries I knew Gerry Grantworth only slightly at Eton. For one thing he was in College, at a phase when there were marked social barriers between Collegers and Oppidans, Collegers being there on scholarships, and so assumed to come from families who were unable to afford the Eton fees. Then I belonged to a different group of unacceptables, having been brought up as a practising Jew. To judge by old photographs I was not very obviously Jewish, in fact as my connections with my ancestral faith and nation have withered over the decades, my appearance seems to have gone in the other direction, so that now I am almost a caricature—apart from the damaged side of my face—of a certain kind of elderly Semite, slight, quick-eyed, smooth-voiced, saurian, cultured, mysteriously wealthy.

  (To get it over, though it has no connection with what follows apart from the fact that I have always been able to afford what I wanted and to arrange my time as I chose, there is no mystery about my wealth. I inherited from my father, who died shortly before the end of the war, a business dealing in office equipment. From my Intelligence work in the war I was able to grasp, sooner than most people, the enormous changes that would come with the so-called information revolution. I am good at analysing documents and reports. I have a natural understanding of how bureaucracies and other organisations function. I was lucky in one or two people I met. I acquired the right agencies, backed new enterprises which fulfilled their promise—I won’t go into detail. My father’s modest fortune, enough to send his only son to Eton, though with some sacrifice on his part, became considerable in my hands. That’s all that need be said.)

  To return to Eton: it is difficult for anyone much younger than me to appreciate the nature of the anti-Semitism that pervaded our culture in those days. I am talking not only of the class of people who sent their sons to the major public schools, but the considerably larger class of those who would have done so if they could have afforded to. It was not the virulent, Hitlerian strain of the disease (though I believe it could under different circumstances have mutated to that) but it was the air we breathed, so familiar as to have no odour in our nostrils for most of the time. Jews were outsiders, not “one of us”. You blackballed a Jew from your club as automatically as you blackballed a candidate who had been seen wearing brown suede shoes with a blue suit. I can remember myself looking at another boy—my second cousin, as it happens—who conformed much more closely than I did to the stereotype, with oily black curled hair, loose sensual features and so on, and wondering with a kind of distaste why he needed to seem so blatantly Jewish. His parents, more ambitious for acceptance than my father, had Christianised, but that made no difference. People nowadays make a fuss about the hints of anti-Semitism in writers such as Kipling and John Buchan, and the more-than-hints in the egregious Sapper, and seem amazed that we didn’t reject them out of hand. It crossed very few people’s minds to do so. A Jew myself, I read such writers with pleasure, and accepted the passing slurs as the way things were. As I say, that was the air we breathed.

  I’ve always found it easy to make friends, so after the first few weeks I got on well enough with boys in my house of my own age. I had trouble with some of the older boys, particularly with Bobo Smith, who later married Harriet Vereker. He became Captain of Games in my house and used the position to pick on me unjustly, more than once. Though I was no use at games I had the wits to conform to the petty rules about compulsory exercise and so on. Still, he found excuses. Being thrashed on your arse with a cane by an athletic eighteen-year-old hurts almost as much as any pain I have so far known. Any physical pain, that is. Bobo was a bully, and if I had not been available he would have picked on someone else. My Jewishness made him choose me. Even then, it seemed to me part of the natural order of things, and I don’t believe I resented it much.

  I’ve strayed. What I was attempting to explain was that both Gerry Grantworth and I were members of despised minorities, he as a Colleger and I as a Jew, but that did not put us on the same side of any fence. We might have spent five years at Eton and still never have spoken to each other, but in my last year I got to know him a bit, through cricket.

  From my second year on I had messed with Tommy Havers and Dick Hall-Fisher. Both died in the war, Tommy from a mine at Alamein and Dick run down by an American truck in Salerno, during the Italian campaign. Dick was a quiet, dull, self-sufficient boy, pleasant enough but never important to me. Tommy and I became close companions throughout our time at Eton, met when we could afterwards and wrote to each other till he died. He was not a natural games-player but possessed the most extraordinary will-power, so that if he decided he was going to achieve something he nearly always succeeded. Early on he had told me that before he left he intended to be in the First XI, cricket, and School Field—a weird form of ur-soccer which the school in those days took with great seriousness. (I believe it is still played, but it must be more as a sort of folk ritual than as a living game.) It was as Tommy’s hanger-on that I came to know Gerry.

  Gerry was a natural athlete. Indeed, he seemed to me then to be a natural everything. This is not to say he was the traditional young Apollo, golden-haired, dreaming on
the edge of strife. For a start he was not obviously handsome. Striking, yes, with his slightly too-large head stiff-necked above wide, muscular shoulders. I have seen him stripped, in changing rooms. His torso appeared gnarled with strength, his legs like those of a billiard-table, but he was by no means muscle-bound. His large hands hung loose and low, he walked lightly and could move with unbelievable speed and precision. Boys think much of sport and are impressed by abilities such as Gerry’s, even when allied to a dull mind and brutish temperament, but Gerry seemed gifted at anything to which he turned his attention. He had won his scholarship in a perhaps unprecedented manner, on his mathematics, coming from a prep school where they taught Latin to a moderate standard at best and no Greek at all. Having won it he crammed Latin and Greek through the summer holidays and arrived pretty well level with boys who’d had their noses rubbed in the languages for five years. He read voraciously. His conversation at seventeen, when I first knew him, was electric with unpredictable thoughts and phrases, quite as good, even then, as anyone’s I have met since. My sole physical talent is that I am a tolerably good dancer. Women I have spoken to on the subject have told me that Gerry was the best—most proficient, most exciting—partner they had ever taken the floor with.

  I know of two blemishes on the image of the easy, all-achieving demi-god. First, he had no head for alcohol. I learnt this in the summer holidays before my final year. Drink was forbidden at Eton. If you were seen in a pub you would very likely be expelled—certainly if alcohol were found in your room. Senior boys could drink a very mild beer bought from a source controlled by the school. My father regarded a cocktail before supper as a necessity of life, and since I was sixteen I had joined him, but home practice among the boys varied considerably. There was a short cricket tour that holidays, playing village teams around Tommy’s area, and I went along as scorer. (I have to explain that despite being a duffer at cricket I enjoy watching the game. I have the compulsory games system to thank for this. Being forced to play two or three times a week all summer, though with other incompetents and at a level of farcical dullness, at least gave me an imaginative grasp of the skills involved in the performance of serious players.)

  On our first evening at Tommy’s there was wine for supper. Gerry had never tasted wine before (nor was he the only one). After one glass his talk became excited, but not quite to the point of incoherence. After his second he passed out and we had to put him to bed. We all thought this a great joke, and made further experiments, to which he submitted a couple of times, and then went on the wagon.

  Gerry’s other blemish, if I can call it that, was vaguer. My first intimation of it also came to me by way of cricket. One afternoon I was watching a match against some other school—Charterhouse, I seem to remember. They had a notoriously big hitter at number five. Soon after I arrived Dirty Dan settled into the chair beside me. He was, I suppose, the most notable figure of fun on the Eton staff in those days. He earned his nickname by shaving irregularly, reeking of male odours only partly concealed by his dreadful pipe-tobacco, and wearing clothes a tramp would have refused. The boys in his house held sweepstakes on how long he would sport the same pair of trousers, identical pin-stripes which could be told apart by the food-stains on them. He was spectacularly shy of women. Mothers were said to have interviewed him without discovering what he looked like, so thorough a smoke-screen rose from his pipe under the stress of such a meeting. He was a savage dispenser of punishments but a better teacher of French than most in that dismally-taught subject. His passion, his genius, his life-blood was the boys in his own house. They dreaded him for their first two years, but left adoring him—I am told that a cabinet minister was seen weeping at his memorial service.

  Tommy had opened the bowling and had a good spell with his fast-medium inswing, taking a couple of wickets. There was a minor stand, another wicket fell and the big hitter—I have forgotten his name—came in. Such players depend to a great extent on a self-confidence that amounts to a kind of psychic dominance over their opponents, and this chap had it, and to spare, that afternoon. He hit two fours and a six in his first over, cleanly, not slogging, but with stylish violence. Dirty Dan took out his binoculars, normally used only to study the performance of boys in his house. Anyone watching must have been aware that we were in the presence of something unusual, a player who might be captaining England in years to come, though of course that kind of startling early talent can disappear as quickly as it came. We were never to know. The boy was drowned at Dunkirk.

  The score rattled up, Tommy was brought back on, but the ball had lost its shine and barely swung. He was no threat, and suffered. In apparent desperation the captain, a boy called Thayer, put himself on to bowl at the other end. He was mainly an opening bat, but could at need bowl slow leg tweakers, spinning them a mile but without much control of length and line. Dirty Dan hummed with excitement—Thayer was in his house. The first two balls spun all right but were such long-hops that I felt I could have hooked them for six myself. The batsman did so with disdain.

  “Ground bait,” muttered Dirty Dan.

  Another master, I forget who, chuckled derisively from the chair beyond.

  The third ball was no improvement but spun far enough across the wicket for the batsman to decide to pull rather than hook it. His stroke was beautifully timed, and hit by a powerful young man from the meat of the bat.

  Gerry Grantworth was fielding at short leg. This was in the days before helmets, and it was lunacy to have left him there against such a hitter with such erratic bowling. I have no idea how fast the ball was travelling. I saw Gerry leap, his hands full stretch above his head. His upper body whipped back so that for an instant I, and others to judge by the gasp, thought the ball must have caught him in the face. Then he had landed and was tossing the ball back to Thayer as unconcernedly as if he’d picked it up in a net. I was on my feet and yelling, and so was the master beyond Dirty Dan and most of the other spectators.

  “That’s the most extraordinary catch I’ve ever seen,” said the other master as he settled into his chair. “You know, I believe that boy is capable of anything.”

  Dirty Dan was relighting his pipe (he expended far more matches than tobacco) so his answer came late enough to seem isolated from what had prompted it, and thus vaguely oracular.

  “Including, ultimately, his own destruction,” he said.

  The other master grunted questioningly. Further pipe-suckings repeated the pause.

  “He believes himself invulnerable,” said Dirty Dan.

  “All adolescents do,” said the other master. “What’s more he broke his thumb in last year’s Winchester match.”

  (We all remembered this event, because Gerry had retired hurt, but returned at eighth wicket down to bat one-handed, scoring thirty-odd and achieving a draw.)

  “Morally invulnerable,” said Dirty Dan. “Automaton in armour, eh?”

  I heard another grumble of incomprehension from the master. Dirty Dan sighed.

  “Adolescent invulnerability, I grant you,” he said. “This one’s different. Cap-à-pie on the outside, no moral innards. What’s he for, eh? Merely to be Master Grantworth. His own purpose, that’s all. All bets are certs, because he’s risking nothing, his side. Only they ain’t. As he’ll find out. But a sly bit of bowling from young Thayer, eh?”

  As I say, we considered Dirty Dan a figure of fun, and I didn’t take his comments seriously. I don’t believe I’ve thought about them again until I came to write these words, and even now I am not sure what weight to give them.

  I think that’s all about Eton, except that I remember having the Vereker girls pointed out to me at Lord’s in my last year. They were all five there. Nancy was already in the gossip-columns and Harriet occasionally mentioned. The story as told at Eton—as reliable as any other gossip among adolescents—was that old Vereker had explained when he proposed that the object was to produce a male heir to Blatchards, an
d that the future Lady Vereker, a lawyer’s daughter, had replied that she would bear five children and no more, and that that done he should keep her in hunters for as long as she was able to ride. If all five were girls it was either his fault, biologically, or his bad luck, actuarially. If true, my guess is that it was no more than a joking bargain between a couple who were marrying for love. When I knew them later they gave no hint of discontent with each other, nor with the knowledge that the inheritance must now pass through the female line.

  I regarded Lord’s as a bore. Whatever interest the cricket might have had was obscured by the social event. I can no more than have glanced at the Vereker party. They belonged to a world in which I had no prospect of moving, nor, then, any wish to.

  The war swept that world into abeyance. Unlike most of my Eton contemporaries, who were concerned to get themselves into congenial regiments, I took no special steps and let myself be hoovered up in the general mêlée of conscription. Then there was a bureaucratic hitch, which resulted in my presenting myself at a camp at Bury St Edmunds as instructed in my call-up notice, only to be told that as far as the camp was concerned I didn’t exist, and I must go home and wait for my position to be clarified. This took some weeks, with the result that I did my basic training not with the main flood of public-school leavers but with a far more heterogeneous bunch. An odd thing happened here. Having been picked on in my early days at Eton for being a Jew, I was now picked on for being an Etonian. The corporal in charge of my platoon, a sly, lively Welshman, seemed fascinated by my education. He was always bringing it up.