Frederic Raphael the Glittering Prizes

FREDERIC RAPHAEL THE GLITTERING PRIZES For Stella Richman and in memory of David Gore-Lloyd CONTENTS An Early Life A Sex Life A Past Life A Country Life An Academic Life A Double Life AN EARLY LIFE 'Hullo,' Adam said, when the girl opened the door, 'it's only me. Anyone at home?' 'Only me,' she said. 'Any news?' Adam looked blank. 'News?' 'Don't be silly. From Cambridge.' 'Oh from Cambridge!' He went past her into the sitting room. 'Well, they did send me this.' He was holding out a telegram. Sheila took it from him and read it. When she looked at him again, he was grinning. 'Aren't you a pig?' she said. 'Major Scholarship! You are a pig. "They did send me this!" Pig.' He tried to put his arms round her, as if he had earned something. She was a pretty, dark girl with green eyes and a very red mouth. In 1952 most girls had very red mouths, but Sheila's mouth had a pout at once sensual and disapproving, which gave its redness a particular charm. She wore a tartan skirt with a stainless steel safety pin in it, and a white angora sweater, enchantingly tight. She disengaged herself from Adam and went, awkwardly, to the mantelpiece, where candlesticks and family pictures in silver frames were arranged with symmetrical propriety. 'So,' she said, 'the secret is out. Adam Morris is a genius.' 'It's now official, that's all. It's no news to me.' 'Three years,' Sheila said. "You know what I'd like to do now? I'd like to drive down to my dear old school in a fleet of limousines — I've now officially left incidentally, as of the aforesaid telegraphic communication - and I'd like to wrap the good news round a large brick and sling it personally through the Headmaster's window.' 'What for? He got you your scholarship, didn't he? What's your grouse?' 'What's my grouse, what's my pheasant, what's my hard-boiled egg? He only did his damnedest to stop me getting anything at all.' 'Why would he want to do that?' Sheila was turning a chocolate round and round in its crinkled paper. There was a little red Venetian glass dish of them on the side table. 'What's he got against you?' Adam assumed the voice of The Man in Black. 'It all started one winter afternoon, in the School Chapel,' he-said. The sermons on Sunday evenings were always given by a visiting preacher, if possible an Old Benedictine, though Benedict's was not a religious foundation. Its original buildings, in South London, had been confiscated from the Benedictine order by Henry the Eighth and acquired by a merchant adventurer who became pious at the onset of his final illness, when he founded a school to commemorate his name and decorate his not entirely amiable reputation. The school had moved to the Surrey countryside in the nineteenth century and was there housed in what looked like a congeries of overgrown Victorian branch-line railway stations. It was said to be one of the great Public Schools of England. Adam sat in the pews reserved for members of the Sixth Form. Chapel was compulsory. When Adam's father raised the question with the Headmaster, after Adam had won his entrance scholarship, Mr. Charlesworth was succinct. Jewish boys must come to services. 'They are not required to believe, but they are expected to attend.' Adam didn't mind all that much. He sang the hymns, after a fashion, and refrained from bowing his head in the Creed. In large, he conformed. He sat in the Sixth Form pews and yawned like a Christian at the sermons. On this particular night, the preacher was the Provost of Ipswich, a gaunt man with a gaunt voice who leaned over the Memorial Pulpit and put his hands under the lacy sleeves of his surplice and held onto his own elbows. 'When I think of Him as a young man,' he was saying, 'I like to imagine Christ - or Jesus as he was then - working simply at his trade as a carpenter in his native Nazareth. A man skilled with his hands. And at the end of the week, he would take the work he had finished, be it never so humble, down to the village shop and offer to sell it to the shopkeeper. And the shopkeeper - being a Jew - would give him as little for it as he possibly could...' The Sixth Formers round Adam woke into a guffaw of laughter. It was quickly repressed, but its echoes whispered away down the Chapel and even when it had died out completely, people had to avoid looking at each other in case they laughed again. Adam stared ahead of him, red with rage and embarrassment and fear. When a Benedictine said somebody had jewed him, Adam adopted the same attitude of stiff unhearing. But now that same ugly usage had been endorsed from the pulpit. After Chapel, he sat down and wrote to the Provost of Ipswich. And a week after that, he received a message to go and see the Headmaster. 'Did you write this letter, Morris?' ‘Yes, sir.' 'To a guest of the school. Someone whom I personally invited to come and preach. You call him, among other choice things, a - bigot and a - a - I can't read it.' 'Simpleton, sir.' 'Yes, and a - a - a psychotic, which also happens to be misspelt.' 'Misspelt? Is it really? I'm terribly sorry about that.' 'The word, if you must use it, comes from psyche, the soul, and it's spelt with an aitch. You actually go on to call Basil Staunton a fascist.' 'Correctly spelt, I hope, sir, from fasces, meaning a bundle of rods.' 'Your housemaster once had cause to beat you, I seem to remember, Morris, because of insolence.' 'Oh? I wasn't entirely sure of his motives, sir.' 'Do you honestly imagine that this kind of abusive trash is going to advance your cause in the world?' 'My cause, sir?' 'This is hardly likely to recruit Basil Staunton to your point of view.' 'No, sir. I wonder if you would care to give me some advice about what might.' 'Basil Staunton, you may care to know, spent three years in the trenches in the First War. He was also decorated for gallantry.' Adam stood there, fighting back his rage, and his tears. 'You're your own worst enemy, you know, Morris.' 'History doesn't suggest that, sir, but - May I ask you, sir, quite honestly, did you personally approve of the Provost's sermon?' 'You've elected to live in a Christian society, Morris.' 'Yes, sir, of course. Stupid of me.' 'I want you to write and apologize to Mr. Staunton.' 'Apologize to Mr. Staunton?' 'Yes. I can tell you one thing, however, and that is that Mr. Staunton does assure me that he would never have said what in fact he did say, had he known that there were any Jews in the chapel.' iii They were on the cut velvet sofa. They had often been on it before, the girl lying back, with her stockinged feet over the far arm rest and Adam balanced urgently on what was left of the cushions. Sheila sat up suddenly, almost tipping him onto the floor. 'Adam,' she said, 'you're bleeding on me. You're bleeding on me.' There were drops of blood on her sweater. She dabbed at it with a hankie, while he tilted his head back to staunch the blood from his nose. 'It's oddly satisfying, isn't it?' Sheila said, dreamily. 'French kissing.' 'I can think of something that'd be a lot more satisfying still.' 'You're the one who wants to go to Cambridge,' she said. 'I'm never going to get this out. Never. Oh do stop.' 'What's Cambridge got to do with it?' 'I shall be twenty-two. By the time you've finished. Twenty-two. Look at it.' 'Take it off. I wish you would. Take it off, why don't you?' 'It's different for men.' 'I read a story the other day,' Adam said. 'About two people. He was about to go away, join the army actually, in the American Civil War it was supposed to be, and he was engaged to a girl and the night before he was due to go into the army, they rowed out to an island and you know what they did?' 'I can guess.' 'On the contrary. They took their clothes off and all they did was, they looked at each other. And that was it. It was a sort of marriage, and after that he went off to the war.' She sat there for a moment, looking at the blotted blood on her lovely angora breasts. 'You won't want me when you come back,' she said. 'I'm going to go and change my sweater.' 'I love you,' he shouted at her. II Cambridge was wet and cold that October. But to Adam the weather was irrelevant; he had come to the greatest university in the world (that he had once dreamed of going to Oxford was soon forgotten) and he was about to join a community of intellectual equals, an elite - as he did not hesitate to think of it - amongst which, as a scholar, he would have an unquestioned place. Pride and humility jostled among his feelings. Who could not be proud to be armed with such eminence, or humble when he passed for the first time through the fortress gates of a College badged with a famous history? He belonged now among the happy few.

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