The Yellow Room Conspiracy Read Online Free

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,