The Man Who Won the Pools

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Crazy?’ He didn’t stop to get what this was directed at. ‘Jean,’ he said, ‘you told that Aubrey Moore?’

  She went paler, if that was possible.

  ‘My engagement’s been published,’ she said. ‘In The Times this morning.’

  He stared at her stupidly.

  ‘The Times?’ he said. The Court page?’

  ‘I don’t know. Yes, I suppose it’s called that.’ She was impatient at this senseless question. ‘Anyway, it’s in.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have stopped it?’ Pretty well, he wasn’t following.

  ‘Don’t you see it was crazy – that … that idea about you and me?’ Over her wretched face there had come a horrible approximation to that wonderful smile. ‘A bout of week-end madness. It’s a thing that happens.’

  He just thought he had a whole big fight in his hands again, and he took a step forward.

  ‘No! Get back!’ She had cried it out in a panic that staggered him, and he found that he had halted dead.

  ‘Jean,’ he said very gently, ‘what is it? Please, what is it? Think. You got to think.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking. It’s the trouble. I’ve been seeing myself. As I am. Not as a heroine.’

  ‘A heroine?’ he said. There was some dull echo in the word.

  ‘I can imagine myself doing extraordinary things. But it’s as if it was in a book or a play. Really I’m an ordinary person, as I told you. Timid. Utterly conventional.’ The words were coming fast now, and he saw she was prepared to say anything that was the ghost of an explanation of something she seemed scarcely to understand. ‘I truly think you carried me away, for a time, as—as a lover must. But when I think, Phil, about everything that’s familiar to me, and then about you and me married—’ she had a long hesitation, and then got it desperately out— ‘I feel my whole body .going back on me. It’s—’ She faltered and was silent.

  ‘Like it was a clergyman?’ He knew his face was ablaze with blood. ‘Like it was a black?’

  ‘Don’t Phil! Please, please don’t go on.’ She was pleading, but he saw too that somehow she was quite hard. ‘For I can’t.’ She managed again, very wanly, a smile. ‘I can’t, like,’ she said.

  Within the seconds that the lift took to drop him to earth he seemed to know the whole of how bad it was. The horror of this humiliation was that it was just a humiliation, and that it was becoming fused with another that he’d hardly known was there. He’d been prepared to ditch Beryl and he didn’t ever want to see her again now. But that didn’t alter how he felt when he faced it that a chap he despised had lifted Beryl from him. And something he despised – call it class and that – had lifted Jean from him. And what was left of it all was nothing but resentment and wounded vanity. He couldn’t believe that there was a corner of himself that he’d ever respect again.

  As he stepped out of the lift he thought how he’d been bundled into it, all bleeding, by that gang of crooks. And he remembered how he’d thought they were going to throw him into the river. It came to him that there was an idea in that. The river couldn’t be far off. Only, perhaps, he’d have to wait for darkness.

  ‘A gentleman waiting for you, sir.’

  It was the new porter – the new porter in the old one’s silly kind of uniform – who had come up and spoken to him. And Phil hadn’t time to turn before there was a hand took him firmly by the elbow.

  ‘I’ve got a taxi,’ Peter Sharpies said – for of course it was him. ‘So come along, man. And you’ll have to smile.’

  ‘Where you taking me?’ Phil asked when they’d got into the cab. He asked it like a kid.

  ‘Out of England,’ Peter said grimly. ‘That’s why you’ve got to raise a smile. Five years on, you won’t want a bloody tragedy looking at you out of your passport photograph – which is what we’re going to have taken now. Believe me.’

  ‘I got to get back to Mark and that.’ Phil spoke out of a kind of stupor.

  ‘I know you have.’ Peter spoke in a slow level way like he might be a hypnotist. ‘But you’re going to have a little change of air first. Walking, mostly. So you’ll need a pair of shoes a damned sight more sensible than those.’ And Peter pointed with a gracing contempt to the floor of the cab.

  ‘A bit parvenoo, are they?’ Phil thought he’d managed the ghost of a grin, but perhaps he hadn’t. ‘Peter,’ he asked presently, ‘why you come back to that Prendick’s office?’

  ‘I kind of knew, man. You see, I just didn’t much like anything I heard.’

  ‘I see,’ Phil said humbly. Although he didn’t. Then he thought of something else. ‘How does it go on,’ he asked,’ – that bit about violent delights?’

  ‘They in their triumph die.’

  ‘Peter – I’ll never get over this.

  ‘Probably not,’ Peter said.

  ‘Peter—’ Phil had sat up at the café table— ‘did you see that one?’

  Peter nodded casually. It was five weeks later. They’d done quite a bit of walking. And you can’t – not at twenty-one – count time on clocks.

  ‘Nice way the skirt moves,’ Peter said. ‘Tip-top complexion, too. It’s the air up here. Urbino’s windy hill.’

  ‘Yes.’ Phil was gazing across the little piazza. Already he was thinking of something else. ‘What you say the name of the chap did that Flagellation?’ he asked.

  ‘Piero. See more of him later.’

  ‘Uhuh. Why those three – remember? – just chatting as it goes on? It doesn’t seem religious, that doesn’t.’

  ‘Nobody knows. It’s a celebrated iconographical problem.’

  ‘I see.’ Phil allowed this the tribute of a moment’s respectful silence. ‘And that one!’ he then said.

  ‘Come off it, you dirty old man.’ Nobody could have guessed from Peter’s uninterested tone that this was about the first day Phil had allowed that girls exist. ‘Poor man’s sport, that is, Phil. Capitalist like you has other concerns.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Phil said contentedly. ‘I got to think, Peter.’ His eye was still following in luxurious innocence the figure of this second mountain maid. ‘I got to think big.’

  ‘Just that,’ Peter said. Well pleased with himself – and having seen plenty of Italian girls before – he sat back and gazed at the incredible sky.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  ‘There you are!’

  Mark Thickthorne had thrown down his newspaper, and now he thumped it violently.

  ‘There you are!’ he said. ‘We’re in the first week of August – and already they’re softening us up about the winter.’

  ‘Softening us up?’ his father asked mildly. ‘I’d have thought we ought to be hardened for an English winter.’

  ‘Preparing the public for some outrageous shortages of their rotten solid fuel. We’d like to keep your home fires burning – but unfortunately there won’t be enough shunters, guards and footplate staff. It says just that. And why won’t they have these people? Because they can’t pay them enough. Why can’t they pay them enough? Because the whole method’s uneconomic. It’s a vicious circle.’

  ‘Your head’s a vicious circle,’ Phil said. He hadn’t been back long, but he’d slipped back easily. ‘Not that you’re not right. But it don’t help – not just blowing your top. We got to get on with the job.’

  ‘I don’t doubt,’ Lord Braydon said, ‘that we’ll get on quicker now that you’re back at Thickthorne.’ He spoke entirely without reproach. ‘You provide Mark with a certain ballast, if I may say so. Not that we’ve been entirely idle. You’ll find we’ve made decided progress with that expansion valve. And I’ve been going into the matter of financing our Pilot Scheme. It will need a surprising amount of money.’

  ‘I got money,’ Phil said. It was the second time he’d managed to say this. The first time, Lord Braydon had passed it over absently, so that Phil had seen he’d been being polite about what he took to be something you’d call naïve. But he had to take some notice of it now.

  �
�Ah, yes,’ Lord Braydon said. ‘We can all dip into our savings in the good cause.’ He looked at Phil in a kind of reserved but friendly way he had. ‘We’ll have a private company. With five and ten pound shares – something like that.’

  Alice Thickthorne, who was pouring out coffee for them all at the breakfast table, burst out laughing. ‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘you don’t understand – and Mark doesn’t either. Phil has an enormous sum of money. He told me yesterday. He got it by gambling.’

  ‘By gambling?’ Lord Braydon asked, rather gravely. ‘When you were abroad? Have you been to Monte Carlo?’

  But now Mark was staring at Phil.

  ‘Or was it earlier?’ he asked. ‘I’ve sometimes wondered about you, just a little. But, of course, one doesn’t ask questions about a man’s private affairs.’

  ‘It’s for a man,’ Alice said – and Phil wasn’t sure which of them the kid was making fun of – ‘to come forward with his own modest information.’ She turned to her father. ‘Phil’s a confirmed gambler,’ she said. ‘You can see it in those desperate, haunted eyes.’

  Lord Braydon didn’t seem to find this amusing. Phil had to explain himself in an atmosphere of some seriousness.

  ‘And I think,’ Lord Braydon said, ‘that it isn’t as a student that you live in Oxford at present? You are on the industrial side?’

  Phil agreed he was on the industrial side.

  ‘You have problems in front of you. Mark – wouldn’t that be right?’

  ‘We all have that.’ But Mark, too, was looking at Phil in a serious and considering way. It was clear that, for the time being, British Omnigas and the Thickthorne Pilot Scheme had gone clean out of any Thickthorne head.

  ‘I got to get a training,’ Phil said. ‘I see that. Even an education – if it’s not too late.’

  Lord Braydon smiled for the first time since this news had broken.

  ‘I sometimes tell Alice,’ he said, ‘that time is passing over her – and that she isn’t gathering her academic rosebuds with quite the diligence she ought. And Alice is only sixteen. But, of course, that is only a tiresome habit that fathers have.’

  ‘That’s all right, Daddy,’ Alice said. ‘I don’t mind a bit.’

  ‘My dear, I wasn’t precisely designing an apology. My point is – to come to it more directly – that Phil has not, in my judgement, ceased to be educatable.’

  ‘The other question,’ Mark said, ‘being whether Alice has begun.’

  Alice was industriously piling a plate with bacon.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said, ‘let’s get lost in irrelevant recrimination. Let’s start educating Phil.’

  ‘That’s it.’ Phil spoke quickly, for he was afraid that Alice was going to get squashed for her last remark. ‘Matter of fact, I seen a man in Oxford. A professor. He says I got to go to Cambridge.’

  ‘Phil – you wouldn’t dare!’ Alice seemed to be really angry – just in Mark’s sudden way. ‘You promised me my first Commem. ball.’

  ‘But it will take two years, like I thought,’ Phil went on. He was quite comfortable sometimes ignoring Alice Thickthorne now. ‘When I’d talked to this professor a bit—’ Phil blushed— ‘when he’d talked to me a bit, I mean, he said he’d fix a college, all right. But there’s a Varsity exam.’

  ‘A University examination,’ Alice said.

  ‘You be quiet,’ Phil said. You had to speak out sometimes with this kid. ‘It would have to be home study, like. And I was wondering if—’ he hesitated, and blushed again— ‘if I could do it here. While giving Mark a hand, any way I can. Lab. boy, as they say.’

  Lord Braydon did take a second to think about this. But, when he spoke, it was all matter-of-fact.

  ‘Certainly you can,’ he said. ‘I see no difficulty. You have this money. You can have resident coaches, and so on. I suppose you’ll plan to read Engineering at the Varsity?’ He gave his daughter a cold look. ‘I understand that Cambridge does that sort of thing very well.’

  Phil nodded. He was suddenly feeling so happy and so sure of himself that he made the nod enormously casual.

  ‘So they say,’ he said. ‘Not—’ he added loyally— ‘that they don’t say it’s pretty good at Oxford too.’

  Alice found him again that afternoon in the part of Mark’s lab. he’d taken over.

  ‘I’ve thought of something,’ she said.

  ‘What’s that?’ He’d looked up absently from his drawing.

  ‘About those coaches. We’ll have no difficulty in putting them up. We got a coach-house.’

  ‘We have got a coach-house,’ Phil said seriously. ‘You mustn’t get talking common.’ He was thinking they made the same sort of jokes, him and this kid. ‘Now you get along,’ he said. ‘There’s work waiting for me, young Alice.’

  Works of J.I.M. Stewart

  ‘Staircase in Surrey’ Quintet

  These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as standalone novels

  The Gaudy (1974)

  Young Pattullo (1975)

  Memorial Service (1976)

  The Madonna of the Astrolabe (1977)

  Full Term (1978)

  Other Works

  Published or to be published by House of Stratus

  A. Novels

  Mark Lambert’s Supper (1954)

  The Guardians (1955)

  A Use of Riches (1957)

  The Man Who Won the Pools (1961)

  The Last Tresilians (1963)

  An Acre of Grass (1965)

  The Aylwins (1966)

  Vanderlyn’s Kingdom (1967)

  Avery’s Mission (1971)

  A Palace of Art (1972)

  Mungo’s Dream (1973)

  Andrew and Tobias (1980)

  A Villa in France (1982)

  An Open Prison (1984)

  The Naylors (1985)

  B. Short Story Collections

  The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories (1959)

  Cucumber Sandwiches (1969)

  Our England Is a Garden (1979)

  The Bridge at Arta (1981)

  My Aunt Christina (1983)

  Parlour Four (1984)

  C. Non-fiction

  Educating the Emotions (1944)

  Character and Motive in Shakespeare (1949)

  James Joyce (1957)

  Eight Modern Writers (1963)

  Thomas Love Peacock (1963)

  Rudyard Kipling (1966)

  Joseph Conrad (1968)

  Shakespeare’s Lofty Scene (1971)

  Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography (1971)

  Plus a further 48 Titles published under the pseudonym ‘Michael Innes’

  Select Synopses

  Staircase in Surrey

  The Gaudy

  The first volume in J.I.M. Stewart’s acclaimed ‘A Staircase in Surrey’ quintet, (but the second in time), ‘The Gaudy’ opens in Oxford at the eponymous annual dinner laid on by the Fellows for past members. Distinguished guests, including the Chancellor (a former Prime Minister) are present and Duncan Pattullo, now also qualified to attend, gets to meet some of his friends and enemies from undergraduate days. As the evening wears on, Duncan finds himself embroiled in many of the difficulties and problems faced by some of them, including Lord Marchpayne, now a Cabinet Minister; another Don, Ranald McKenechnie; and Gavin Mogridge who is famous for an account he wrote of his adventures in a South American jungle. But it doesn’t stop there, as Pattullo acquires a few problems of his own and throughout the evening and the next day various odd developments just add to his difficulties, leading him to take stock of both his past and future.

  Young Pattullo

  This is the second of the ‘A Staircase in Surrey’ quintet, and the first in chronological order. Duncan Pattullo arrives in Oxford, destined to be housed off the quadrangle his father has chosen simply for its architectural and visual appeal. On the staircase in Surrey, Duncan meets those who are to become his new friends and companions, and there occurs all of the usual student antics and digressions, des
cribed by Stewart with his characteristic wit, to amuse and enthral the reader. After a punting accident, however, the girl who is in love with Duncan suffers as a result of his self-sacrificing actions. His cousin, Anna, is also involved in an affair, but she withholds the name of her lover, despite being pregnant. This particular twist reaches an ironical conclusion towards the end of the novel, in another of Stewart’s favourite locations; Italy. Indeed, Young Pattullo covers all of the writer’s favourite subjects and places; the arts, learning, mystery and intrigue, whilst ranging from his much loved Oxford, through Scotland and the inevitable Italian venue. This second volume of the acclaimed series can be read in order, or as a standalone novel.

  Memorial Service

  This is the third novel in the Oxford quintet entitled ‘Staircase in Surrey’. Duncan Pattullo returns in middle age to his old college. The Provost is heavily engaged in trying to secure a benefaction from a charitable trust which the old and outrageous Cedric Mumford influences. One significant complication is the presence in college of Ivo Mumford, Cedric’s grandson. He is badly behaved and far from a credit to the college. His magazine, ‘Priapus’ proves to be wholly objectionable. Stewart explores the nature of the complicated relationships between the characters with his usual wit, literary style and intellectual precision and turns what might otherwise be a very common and ordinary situation into something that will grip the reader from cover to cover.

  The Madonna of the Astrolabe

  In the fourth of J.I.M. Stewart’s acclaimed ‘Staircase in Surrey’ quintet the gravity of a surveyor’s report given to the Governing Body is the initial focus. The document is alarming. The Governing Body, an assembly of which Pattullo was in awe, was equally awed by the dimensions of the crisis revealed. It would seem that the consideration was whether there would literally be a roof over their heads for much longer. The first rumblings from the college tower brings the thought well and truly home to Pattullo. ‘Professor Sanctuary,’ the Provost said evenly, ‘favours the immediate launching of an appeal . . .’ And so it begins . . . In J.I.M. Stewart’s superbly melding of wit, mystery, observation and literary prowess a gripping novel develops that will enthral the reader from cover to cover. This can be read as part of the series, or as a standalone novel.