Shadows On the Grass

by Simon Raven

  ‘“Have some Froom,” said the Iron Duchess, “a florin a bottle and every bit as good as real bubbly. You have to hide the label though, as so many people have silly snobbish ideas.”

  ‘Froom tasted like fizzy white lemonade with an after flavour of semolina.

  ‘“I’m afraid that I have silly snobbish ideas,” I said. “Can I have some whisky or a dry martini?”

  ‘“Sorry, Malcolm, it would take too long. We’ve got to be at table in two minutes flat in order not to spoil the first course.”

  ‘This at least sounded hopeful, so I gave up any idea of an aperitif and wondered what the first course would be. Not caviar, because that can wait as long as you like; it must be something cooked and still hot, a lobster soufflé perhaps, or quenelles of some kind.

  ‘In fact it turned out to be a boiled egg each.

  ‘“You see why we had to be so punctual,” he said, “they get hard if you leave them.” Mine was hard, as hard as granite, in any case. So was his. “Little mistake in the kitchens,” he said, “Never mind, the next course will make up for it.”

  ‘The next course came in under a vast canopy and was announced as pheasant.

  ‘“It isn’t yet in season,” I said.

  ‘“That doesn’t matter if you run over them by accident, like we did,” said my host, “and it’s a great lot of nonsense about having to hang them. The Germans eat ’em fresh, so why shouldn’t we?”

  ‘“Because they’re as tough as a squaddy’s boots,” I said, “except, in this case, for the bits the wheels went over, which taste like minced gizzard.”

  ‘I tried a mouthful of what I took to be spinach. They can’t have got that wrong, I thought. It was like mashed sewage.

  ‘“One of the good things about the war,” said His Grace, “was all those interesting discoveries about vegetables. You’d never guess – would you? – that this delicious purée is made of those nettles I spotted this afternoon. I heard about eating them on the wireless in 1942.”

  ‘After which, as I need hardly tell you, we had blackberry fool. Then an invalid’s tawny Port, from the Chemist.

  ‘“Douro,” he drivelled, holding up the bottle, “one of the family titles, you know. Deuced good name, deuced good stuff.”’

  ‘What sort of breakfast did the Iron Duchess put up?’ I enquired.

  ‘The Duke of Wellington to you,’ said Noël Annan briskly. ‘You must understand that one does not talk with familiarity of those, whether they be dukes or bed-makers, whom one does not know. If you are not careful, you will grow up to be like Goronwy Rees.’

  ‘Who is Goronwy Rees?’

  ‘A third XI writer,’ said Maurice Bowra, ‘and a first string shit. He was the model for the juvenile lead in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart. She had an affair with him, you know, and he behaved quite poisonously. Eddie in the book is really rather a charitable version.’

  ‘It would be fun,’ said Francis, ‘to have a lady novelist for a mistress.’

  ‘Now’s your chance,’ said Bob Boothby, as Dadie Rylands came up with a large, blonde lady and a saturnine, hollow-cheeked gentleman, on whose hair was a suspicion of Brylcreme.

  ‘Mrs Philipps,’ said Dadie to Francis and myself, ‘better known to you both as Rosamund Lehmann; and Mr John Sparrow.’

  ‘We were talking of Goronwy Rees,’ said Noël.

  ‘He has just published a novel,’ said Rosamund, ‘about spies during the war. It is called Where No Wounds Were, and it is a peculiarly dreadful work.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It is without love.’

  ‘Goronwy may not be very strong on love,’ said Maurice Bowra, ‘but he ought to know a bit about spies by now.’

  ‘If I am not badly mistaken,’ said John Sparrow, ‘there will be trouble in that quarter before long.’

  ‘Trouble for Goronwy?’

  ‘Trouble at least for some of his friends.’

  ‘Guy was down here some months back,’ said Noël, ‘he was slightly less drunk than usual.’

  ‘But even more dirty,’ Dadie sighed. ‘And talking of all that crowd, I had dinner in London last month with Wicked Ant. Only of course he isn’t wicked any more, he’s terribly respectable and so highly thought of in the art world that I can hardly believe it’s true.’

  ‘I don’t know what you see in that left wing mob,’ said Sparrow. ‘If they’re sincere they’re no better than cut-throats, and if they’re insincere they’re the meanest kind of opportunists.’

  ‘Poor John – he will oversimplify,’ breathed Rosamund.

  ‘Wicked Ant at any rate,’ said Dadie, ‘is a man of industry and purpose.’

  ‘But exactly what purpose,’ said Maurice darkly, ‘we have yet to find out.’

  An innings now closed, giving Dadie and Noël their cue to go among their fellow-actors. Bowra waddled off with Sparrow and Boothby, Francis started to worship Rosamund, and I was propelled by Malcolm Bullock across Parker’s Piece towards the Roman Catholic Cathedral.

  ‘I cannot resist this building,’ he said, ‘a real banquet of ugliness.’

  Once we were inside, however, he paid it little enough attention, but concentrated instead on stories about John Sparrow.

  ‘Of course you know that he edited Donne while still at Winchester,’ Malcolm said, ‘and later was a Fellow of All Souls. He became a brilliant, brilliant barrister as well as an eminent legal scholar, and will almost certainly be Warden of All Souls when the present incumbent goes – which will be at any second now.’

  ‘Any competition for the post?’

  ‘Considerable competition, there always is. But Sparrow will get it because he is determined to have it. When Sparrow is determined he always gets his way. Look at what happened when the war started. They came to Sparrow and offered him quite a high position in the expanded Army Legal Department. Yes, yes, cried patriotic Sparrow, I’d love to do my bit and Military Law is just my dish, but I have one little request: when my Commission is drawn, can I be gazetted into the Coldstream Guards? He wanted, you see, to dress up as a Guardee. But what on earth, they said, is the point of being commissioned into the Coldstream Guards (as if they didn’t know) if you’re to be working in the Army Legal Department? That’s my biz, says Sparrow. It’s also ours, said they, because we would have to arrange it and what you ask is just not on. The Regimental Lieutenant-Colonel of the Coldstream would have a fit if we went to him begging combatant Commissions for legal advisers. If that’s your attitude, huffs Sparrow, you can count me out. It’s a Guards’ Commission for me, or nothing.

  ‘Now it happened that they very much wanted Sparrow, because when all was said and done he really knew his stuff and had a considerable presence in Court, should they ever need him in one. So some senior chappie in the Army Legal Department goes cringing along Bird-Cage Walk and grovels into the office of the Regimental Lieutenant-Colonel of the Coldstream Guards – and of course is thrown straight out into the Park. Please, please, they now say to Sparrow: we can’t manage the Guards, but we love you very much and we think we can fix you up with a Commission as a Hussar. Won’t that do? Well, for a minute or two Sparrow’s mouth waters at the thought of riding boots and spurs, but no, he remains firm: it must be the Guards; it’s what he’s always dreamed about ever since he first saw pairs of Guardsmen walking out in Kensington Gardens with scarlet coats and swagger canes and Nanny told him what they were.

  ‘And in the end, through sheer determination, Sparrow wins the battle. He just won’t budge, and they need him more and more desperately, so the head of the Legal Department nobbles a Field Marshal to thump the table in Bird-Cage Walk, and our Trusty and Well Beloved John Sparrow, Esquire, becomes an Officer of the Guard. Whereupon he joins the Guards’ Club – for how can they decently stop him? – in which he sits to this day, writing letters to his intellectual and pacifist friends on Guards’ Club paper, and annoying elderly Generals with his theories about Lady Chatterley’s anus.’

  An e
vening or two later, I was asked to dinner by E M (Morgan) Forster (an Honorary and resident Fellow of King’s) to meet his friends J R (Joe) Ackerley, at that time Library Editor of The Listener, and Christopher Isherwood.

  Now, I am rather embarrassed to be dropping names like this. I do not wish to give the impression that I passed my entire time as an undergraduate hobnobbing with famous novelists and fashionable dons. The fact remains that I was, for a time at least, taken up by some of the more glittering Fellows of King’s and other Colleges, and that I did, during that time, meet and talk with certain distinguished and even powerful men and women who visited Cambridge, as the guests of Dadie and others, to take a look at the oncoming form. I did indeed see E M Forster and Christopher Isherwood plain, and they did stop and speak with me, and I did answer them again. This being the case, it occurs to me that what we said, or at any rate what they said, may be of more interest to any reader who is still with me than an account of the progress of my classical studies or of my political development (nil) or of what my precocious friends said about Kant while we walked in the Fens. Ah, you may say, but this book is advertised as being Memoirs of a Cricketer: certainly Kant and the Classics have no place in it – but neither has E M Forster. Well, I should reply, even the most dedicated cricketers cannot be playing the game every day and talking about it forever; of if they can, I for one would have small wish to read their Memoirs.

  So back to Morgan Forster’s dinner party. I am told, and I partly believe, that Morgan was quite generous in the way of private charity: in matters of entertainment, however, he was the meanest man that ever drew breath, compared with whom Professor Adcock was Lord Bountiful. The dinner which Morgan had ordered for us that evening was the cheapest to be had from the College kitchens; the wines – all the one bottle of them – were thin, pale and sour. Since Isherwood and Ackerley were convivial men the evening promised very drearily, and indeed was only rescued by a ruse of Isherwood, who pretended he had forgotten to bring his ‘present for Morgan’ over from his guest room, went off to get it, and came back with three bottles of Champagne, one of Port and one of Cognac, which he had, of course, bought from the College Buttery. We all knew this because Christopher, perhaps deliberately, had carried the bottles back in a packing case prominently labelled TO THE BUTTERY, KING’S COLLEGE. Ackerley and I exchanged winks, while Morgan gently simpered. Christopher opened the first bottle, which we drank with the grey-green ‘shape’ served to us as dessert, and thereafter, despite the absence of savoury, cheese, fruit and even coffee, the evening began to revive.

  As I remember, Christopher was spouting about the American Dream, particularly that version of it which was current in Los Angeles. He came at length to the story of a young weightlifter or muscleman of his acquaintance, who spent his entire life ‘working out’ in gymnasia and developing more and more hideous and congested lumps of gristle on his biceps and shoulders. The two other things about this creature were, first, that he had an extremely gentle presence and temperament, and, second, that he had excellent degrees in Literature and Philosophy, on the strength of which he could have had a prestigious job in the Groves of Academe for the mere asking. Why, then, did he not ask? ‘Because,’ he once told Christopher, ‘I am sick.’

  The significance of this tale, said Christopher, was that what the youth was in fact seeking through his endless exercises was the beauty, the strength and the immortality of the Gods. In short his, the American, dream was to live for ever. The reason why he described himself as ‘sick’ was that while he was intelligent enough to know that the dream was an absurd delusion he yet continued to pursue it.

  ‘You refer to the “beauty” of the Gods,’ said Joe. ‘But if these mounds of sinew he keeps sprouting are as unsightly as you say, how can he imagine he is achieving divine beauty?’

  ‘I have already told you,’ said Christopher, ‘that he knows his quest to be illusory and despises himself for persisting in it. And so he is punishing and satirising himself. It is perfectly possible to follow a regimen, in Californian gymnasia, which does indeed make for a correctly proportioned and beautiful physique as well as for strength. He, so far from following such a regimen, is deliberately making a freak of himself. Why? Because he knows that the great American Dream premise, the assumption that physical immortality will one day be made possible by the medical profession, is just so much rubbish. And yet, in a way, he wants to believe it. Angry with himself for sharing the folly of the West Coast rabble, he purposely deforms himself, thus symbolising by distortion of his body the distorted and diseased thoughts of the mind which lies within it.’

  ‘Where does dear old sex come into all this?’ enquired Joe.

  ‘The American Dream promises an eternity of abundant and deeply fulfilling sexual activity – another load of old rubbish, if ever there was one. Our muscle boy, as a protest against such imbecility, is making himself sexually repulsive.’

  Morgan quietly put the Port and one bottle of Champagne away in a cupboard.

  ‘Why are they so afraid of death?’ I asked.

  ‘Because death is an insult to American know-how. They can move mountains and put girdles round the earth: and can they not live longer than a hundred years? Can they not keep the mechanisms of the flesh in sound running order for more than three paltry generations? No, they cannot, and it’s a goddamn disgrace. Every American citizen is entitled, not just to eternal life, but to eternal youth and eternal happiness.’

  ‘“Eternal” means without beginning or end,’ said Morgan mousily, ‘you should revert to the word “Immortal” – something that, having been born, cannot die.’

  ‘Thank you, dear Morgan. Now we come to the interesting question: why are they so desirous that their immortality should be physical? Only a few years ago they were prepared to settle for immortality of the spirit –’

  ‘– If a spirit is immortal, it must also, by definition, be eternal,’ nattered Morgan. ‘Spirits are not born. Spirits – should they exist – would be of coeternal being with their creator.’

  ‘Thank you, dear Morgan. Let me recast the question as follows: why are the Americans no longer content to live on in the spirit? Why do they hanker to do so in the flesh? In the old days, there were any number of sects that were liberally subsidised by their proselytes to cater for the needs of the spirit, to promise and to ensure its happy continuance hereafter and forever. Now many of these sects are derelict and bankrupt, outmoded by the gymnasia, which undertake to preserve physical form and gloss against the day – the day which is surely, they tell each other, at hand – when the medical profession will have conquered physical death. Now why have they rejected the spirit? Why is physical survival so important to them?’

  ‘Because they’ve rumbled the great Christian lie,’ said Joe, ‘they’ve realised, at last, that there is neither soul nor spirit. All they have, all any of us has, is this bag of bones and lights we call the body. So they want to make it eternal.’

  ‘Immortal,’ Morgan said.

  ‘And are doomed to disappointment,’ Joe went on, winking at me once more, ‘because a body can no more be immortal than this bottle can remain for ever charged with liquor. But luckily, though we cannot renew or exchange our vile bodies, we can always find fresh, sweet bottles of cordial when the old are taken from us by the Ferryman.’

  And with this he went to Morgan’s cupboard and retrieved the Champagne and the Port.

  ‘Heart’s ease, heart’s ease,’ he proclaimed, raising them on high, then rapidly opened them both.

  Morgan looked cross but was too timid to prevent him. Christopher began a new speech, about Americans and their mothers this time. Apparently the swearword ‘motherfucker’ was so popular in America quite simply because any American worth his salt wanted to fuck his mother. Morgan went rather prim. Joe said he’d never wanted to fuck his mother. Morgan muttered something sotto voce about Joe’s dog. I went out for a pee and was very soon joined by Joe.

  ‘The thing abou
t Morgan,’ said Joe, ‘is that he’s just an old auntie. He is mean, coy, prudish (although he purports to be of Rabelaisian tolerance) and very, very spiteful.’

  I agreed that there had recently been many amusing instances of all the personal defects he had catalogued.

  ‘Ah, dear boy, how rich your life down here,’ said Joe. ‘In London I miss all this. I adore Morganiana, yet I am wholly deprived of such – except when I spend a day or two here.’

  So there and then, as we buttoned our flies, we made a bargain. I would supply Joe with occasional ‘Morganiana’, i.e. deleterious items about the shabbier aspects of Morgan’s conduct, while Joe would supply me with occasional work for The Listener. In those days reviews in this journal (except for the fortnightly novel review) were printed unsigned and paid for unhandsomely; but at least, I thought, it would be some kind of beginning. In fact it was a jolly good one, for which I have been most grateful to Joe ever since; for while we were both as good as our word, Joe was much better: whereas I could only supply Morgan stories up to the time I left Cambridge, Joe supplied me with work, when I needed it, for long afterwards, and twice let me have a three months’ stint at the fatly paid and fully signed novel column.

  Our bargain concluded, we returned to Morgan’s rooms, where Joe began a story about how he once slept with Ivor Novello, who smelt of fish when sexually excited and was seriously underhung.

  XI

  FULL CIRCLE

  About a year and a half before all this, Dickie Muir had asked me to play fifth and last string for the College Squash Racquets Team in a match against Eton. As Peter Dixon had affirmed would be the case, a special petrol allowance was duly made available, and off we went to Windsor, where I hoped that my abominable conduct on the cricket field had by now been forgotten. Forgotten or not, it was not raised against me, although one of the boys in their Squash side was the one with the pretty cap who had caught me on the boundary and was now, being their last string, my opponent.