The Man Who Won the Pools Read online

  ‘Come again,’ Phil said. The speaker’s being an undergrad made him use this cheap Yank challenge.

  ‘The cowl, or whatever it is, doesn’t make the monk. And that affair doesn’t make the chap able to cook.’

  Phil took a quick, shy look at the person on the next stool.

  It was another young man of his own age, just as it had been in Melchizedek’s. This one had dark hair cut in a straight fringe just above his eyebrows like a kid’s. He was wearing cavalry twills and a draught-board jersey with a neck that came right up round his chin. He was looking at Phil a bit shyly in turn. Talking that Latin, or whatever it was, he must have been taking Phil for an undergrad. But he couldn’t think that for long.

  ‘It’s a soft job,’ Phil said contemptuously. ‘Slapping out fish and slush.’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’ The young man spoke with an air of authority. ‘Not among all those ovens and hot plates on a sticky day. No fun at all.’

  The young man said ‘fun’ like it might rhyme with ‘Goon’ in ‘Goon Show’. So Phil knew at once that this wasn’t a public schoolboy. He was one of the ones that was at the Varsity on that bleeding paye, all right. Grammar School after the Eleven-Plus, and stayed there, and then everything paid out of what was missing from his, Phil Tombs’s, pay packet. At the end of the Varsity term, likely enough, he’d return to Nottingham or Leeds to a home very like Phil’s own.

  This discovery didn’t in itself at all make Phil take to his neighbour. If he had to choose a companion to live on a desert island with, he thought, he’d as soon have Sir Aubrey What-had-his-name-been as a jumped-up kid out of his own class. On the other hand, Phil had rather liked being casually addressed, even in gibberish, by an undergrad. Here they were, side by side, and a bit of talk was only sensible. Phil, who liked things to make sense, and who suspected that he was soon to be at grips with things that somehow didn’t, felt he should manage a civil reply.

  ‘What d’you think he pulls in – him with the white cap?’ he asked.

  ‘Ten pounds. That, and a bit of overtime. I know, because I’ve done it myself.’

  ‘Done it yourself?’ Phil was puzzled. ‘Before becoming an undergrad?’

  ‘No. Last Long Vac.’

  ‘Last long what?’

  ‘In the holidays – the university holidays. It helped a bit at home. And, after that, I had £30 left to get to Italy on.’

  Remembering Cyprus, yet aware of unknown worlds, Phil asked truculently: ‘What did you want to be going to Italy for?’

  ‘It must have been to further my education. At least, I got an extra £15 from my college’s travel fund on that assumption.’ The young man seemed to reflect that Phil mightn’t make much of this note. ‘I loved Italy,’ he said. ‘And it’s very queer, you know – seeing so many staggeringly beautiful things which one already has a notion of from pictures.’

  ‘I can’t say I’ve ever seen Italian pictures like that.’ Phil glanced at the young man, and was aware of misunderstanding. ‘Nothing but slums and starvation and thievery in the pictures that have come my way. But bleeding well-made, some of them.’

  ‘Of course the poverty’s frightful.’ Phil could see that the young man was anxious to deny taking only an arty view of the Wops and their country. ‘Particularly in the south. And they say Sicily’s worst of all. Did you hear Danilo Dolci?’

  ‘Dolci?’ Phil was mystified by what appeared to be an abrupt change of subject. ‘Would he be one of those crooners in Saturday Club?’

  ‘No, he’s nothing like that.’ The young man flushed under his kid’s fringe, just as if he felt it had been him and not Phil who had said something silly. ‘A chap who’s done astonishing things among absolutely destitute people there in Sicily. He was talking about it in the Town Hall not long ago.’

  ‘Never heard of him, I’m sure.’ Phil accompanied these ungracious words with a carefully uncouth gesture to the man in the white cap, who responded by slapping him out another portion of sausage and tomato. Then he realised that he had no honest impulse to act tough. ‘I’ll bet,’ he said, jerking a thumb towards the white-capped man, ‘he doesn’t spend his ten quid on going off to Italy. Still, that was quite an idea of yours. The Leaning Tower and the Pope and the Lido, all done on fish and slosh.’ He found himself giving his new acquaintance a friendly grin. ‘Not that ten quid’s much for a week’s work. We get that during strikes for no work at all.’

  ‘Cowley?’

  ‘Uhuh. But I’m getting out. Telecommunications for me.’ Phil hesitated, remembering that this was perhaps no longer true. ‘After finishing some exams at the ‘Tec,’ he added doggedly.

  ‘You said ten pounds?’ The young man was staring at Tombs in honest respect. ‘You don’t mean that strike benefit—?’

  ‘Strike benefit my foot. We get a flat ten quid from the bosses when we’re laid off because there’s a strike in Birmingham, and the blokes in Birmingham get a flat ten quid from the bosses when there’s a strike here in Oxford. See? Seems to be the way we’re fixing it, since that bleeding General Election.’

  The young man with the fringe suddenly banged the formica-topped, coffee-slopped counter in front of him. The action startled Phil quite a bit.

  ‘But don’t you see,’ the young man demanded, ‘that Labour lost the Election because that was the way everyone was thinking to fix it already? Putting their shirt on industrial action and the hope of another ten bob a week? And letting political action, which is the only ultimately effective weapon, go to the devil?’

  ‘I don’t take much stock of all that.’ Phil changed his friendly grin to an expression which he intended to be contemptuous. ‘Never been uppety, I haven’t. Never been paid, like you lot, to spend all day with the weight off my feet, nosing through books.’

  The young man appeared to consider how best to take this. It was obviously to give himself time to think that he ordered a cup of tea. He didn’t – not in a place like this, he didn’t – secure service as rapidly as Phil did.

  ‘Probably you were cheated of it,’ the young man said. ‘Education, I mean. The bloody fraud of the Opportunity State. Cheated just as blatantly as if the Prime Minister himself had slunk up and pickpocketed your last sixpence.’

  ‘Had done what?’ Phil felt a sudden horrid sinking inside. He stared at his second portion of sausage and tomato. He’d been crazy. A last sixpence was precisely what he had – and it wouldn’t pay for half the first plateful, let alone this one.

  ‘The whole educational ladder’s weighted against the—working-class child.’ The young man had hesitated, and Phil thought it was perhaps because he was thinking that ladders aren’t things you weight against a chap. But no – it was because the words ‘working-class child’ had worried him. Self-conscious about it, you might say.

  ‘Rotten primary schools,’ the young man went on. ‘Rotten old text-books. Parents hostile or indifferent to the whole idea of grammar school. And the struggle goes on like the ten little niggers. Sixteen working-class children out of a hundred pass the Eleven-Plus. But only one of those gets as far as the university.’

  ‘Two,’ Phil said – and at once felt better about his approaching moment of bankruptcy. You can’t work with electricity without respecting figures.

  ‘All right, two. The point is that you might have been a little nigger later on, just because of some rotten unfairness or another, even if you had passed your Eleven-Plus.’

  Phil laughed – so loudly that the girl behind the tea-urn stared at him in cold disapproval. Recklessly he waved at her to give him a cup.

  ‘That!’ he said. ‘You couldn’t not pass that if you was paid for it. And as for hostile parents, my uncle made me take extra lessons for the flipping thing from an old wife down our street. And passed it in spite of her, I did.’

  ‘Then you were at a grammar school?’ The young man asked this with inoffensive surprise. The grammar, he was clearly thinking, hadn’t stuck.

  ‘Christ, I was. And out ag
ain as quickly as I could get them to put a boot in my bottom, man. Took a look at Latin and all that, and just knew I had to go either technical or cracked. Yes, I’d have been psychological by the time I was eighteen if I hadn’t got out of it.’

  ‘It must have taken a bit of nerve.’ From under the black fringe the young man was again looking at Phil respectfully.

  ‘But you’re lucky, probably. You’ll make more money out of your telecommunications than I’ll ever do after reading P.P.E.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.’

  ‘I see.’ Phil noticed the lack of any edge, this time, to his own voice. Suddenly, he was feeling rather depressed. It was as if he’d been sitting drinking beer for a long time, and not this stuff meant to taste like char? ‘You at one of these colleges?’ he asked abruptly, although he knew perfectly well that the young man was. ‘Know a friend of mine, name of Sir Aubrey Moore?’

  ‘Aubrey Moore?’ The young man turned towards Phil, so that the fringe parted like a theatre-curtain above his nose. ‘I know him by sight. He’s at my college. But I’ve never spoken to him. He’s a most frightful bloody.’

  For a moment Phil was puzzled. Then he understood. ‘Do you mean,’ he asked, ‘Two Nations – that sort of thing? Even inside your bleeding college?’

  ‘Four, I’d say.’ The young man had flushed slightly, almost like he was a teacher starting to give the kids a talk on sex. ‘Etonians, for a start. And perhaps Wykehamists. Then all the people from all the other public schools.’

  ‘That’s two? Wouldn’t it be a bit a matter of dads and so on, as well as schools?’

  ‘Yes, of course. There are cross-currents one would never get to understand, even if one wanted to. But, roughly, that’s two. And then there are two quite distinct lots from grammar schools. And it’s nothing but dads, this time. White-collar dads – the lower-middle class, in fact. And then plain proletarian dads, like mine who’s a coalminer.’

  ‘I see.’ Phil, having an inquiring mind, found this interesting. It wasn’t, on the other hand, very important. At least it wouldn’t be, except for this odd thing that was due to happen.

  ‘That about this Moore being a friend of mine,’ he said. ‘It was only a crack, of course.’

  ‘Well, that was the explanation that did just cross my mind.’

  The young man with the fringe smiled briefly – it was something he didn’t often do – and then looked serious again. ‘My name’s Peter Sharples,’ he said hurriedly.

  ‘Mine’s Phil Tombs.’

  Phil said this and waited. There were those who said ‘Work in the cemetery, I suppose?’ like they were asking for one on the clock. And there were those who refrained.

  ‘Pitiful tea they do you here,’ Sharples said.

  This Pompadour was filling up so that you began to think there was something wrong with your elbows. There was a narrow shelf along one wall, and these pillars with shelves round them, and stools so narrow you felt you were perching on the end of a pole. But mostly people stood about, and he’d been wrong about its being chiefly undergrads. In the centre it was Teds and some girls lounging round, like the place was a straight coffee-bar juke-box joint down St Ebbe’s. But there was a group of Wops over by the Espresso, and if the crush went on like this they’d soon be able to get around to pinching the girls’ behinds, which is a Wop’s chief idea of fun. And there were five or six Yanks off an airfield, crew-cut and drinking cokes like kids, only it wasn’t much like kids that their eyes went up and down when there was a girl to be let know that their eyes were going up and down her. It was hot and airless in here and there were a lot of smells around, and when Phil looked at these three plastic oranges they always have churning round under glass on the surface of the orange squash he almost felt giddy for a moment and he wasn’t sure that they didn’t suggest something. But now he looked at the undergrad Peter Sharples who had said nothing about filling tombs. Then he surprised himself by the question he asked Peter Sharples straight out.

  ‘What would you do,’ Phil asked – and because he’d finished his char he was rasping that sixpence in his groin again – ‘with twenty thousand pounds?’

  ‘That’s an easy one,’ Sharpies said, and got out a packet of cigarettes. ‘Smoke?’

  ‘Thanks.’ Phil took a cigarette. They were common fags, and he somehow didn’t feel like bringing out his Camels and suggesting an exchange. Once he had read a book called Inside Oxford or something like that, so he wasn’t surprised that Sharples wasn’t surprised by his question. He knew that the undergrads sit up all night asking each other questions and usually nothing personal involved. Taught to exercise unsleeping intellectual curiosity was what the book had said. He’d rather be taught telecommunications himself, but he saw the idea – which was something he hadn’t been sure the man who wrote the book had. Perhaps if you had a real line on unsleeping intellectual curiosity yourself you didn’t write books with names like Inside Oxford. But now Sharpies was answering him.

  ‘Twenty thousand?’ Sharpies said. ‘I’d be an M.P. before I was in my thirties.’

  ‘But what would you do with it?’

  ‘Invest it, of course. I could invest it perfectly safely so that it would bring in a thousand a year. Then I could afford to take a job on low pay on the Labour Party Research Unit, and begin nursing a constituency as well.’

  ‘How d’you know you’d get a constituency?’

  ‘I’m not a moron, Phil. I’ll quite possibly get a First in Schools. And a thousand a year would be just the job after that. Bless their egalitarian hearts. They’d jump at me.’

  Not all of this speech was meaningful to Phil Tombs, who was much struck, however, by the casual way in which he had been called Phil.

  ‘You a socialist, Peter?’ he asked. ‘Would you still be a socialist if you had that twenty thousand?’

  ‘Of course I should – and a much more effective one at that.’

  ‘You don’t think a lot of money is likely to change a man?’

  ‘If he’s any good, he’ll use it to change himself the way he wants to change himself. Of course there would be pitfalls. But I don’t think twenty thousand is enough to bring you much in the way of the really serious ones.’

  ‘Not enough?’ Phil made an effort to get hold of this point of view. It was a matter of orders of magnitude. ‘As for what?’ he demanded. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the man in the white cap was making out a bill.

  ‘Well, a life of dissipation, for instance. A thousand a year wouldn’t take you far on that.’

  ‘Happen not.’ Phil picked up the bill, looked at it with a great air of casual interest, and dropped it again. ‘But you could have a pretty hot year or two if you blew the whole capital.’

  ‘Is that what you’d do?’ Peter Sharples did now seem to be a little wondering what this was in aid of. And he had paid his own bill. Farther down the counter, the man in the white cap was pretty well driving a couple of lingering customers from their stools. There wasn’t long to go. Phil put his hand up to his collar and tugged at it like he was in pain. ‘What would I?’ he asked with some genuine inattentiveness. ‘Search me if I blamed well know.’ He gave another tug, and then contrived to sway alarmingly on his stool. ‘Bleeding hot in here.’ He glanced behind him, being anxious to see whether the Pompadour kept much in the way of staff on this side of the counter. There really was a terrific crush. ‘No bleeding air.’ He did a rapid rocking movement this time, first bumping into Peter Sharples’s shoulder and then into a hunched-up man who was noisily eating soup on his other side. He raised his voice to a pitch at which there was no chance of its being neglected. ‘Believe,’ he said loudly, ‘I’m going to pass out.’

  ‘Easy with your shoving, there.’ The hunched-up man had straightened himself and turned indignantly towards Phil, soup dribbling down his chin. Then his expression changed. ‘You going to be sick?’ he said.

  This was better tha
n could have been hoped for. Phil gave a retch and this time pitched straight forward. Everybody immediately round about was aware of him now, and he became the subject of a widening circle of comment.

  ‘Chap passed out.’

  ‘Young chap puking all over the counter.’

  ‘Not surprised … worse’n a submarine … anyone would faint.’

  ‘ ‘Ere, I can’t see. Lemme look.’

  ‘Eaten their bloody prawns, I expect. Fatal this time of year … Stop shoving, can’t you?’

  ‘Now then, order please.’ The man with the white cap was leaning angrily over the counter. ‘Let him have a bit of air, can’t you?’

  At this Phil lifted his head rapidly.

  ‘Air!’ he said loudly, and dropped it again.

  ‘You’re his friend, aren’t you?’ The man in the white cap addressed Peter Sharples challengingly. ‘Get him to the door, for Christ’s sake, before he really is sick. He’s only groggy. Get him on his feet, can’t you? How often have I told the boss the ventilation here’s a disgrace? Take him out and let him breathe a bit. Gangway there, please. No crowding. Nothing but a patron slightly indisposed.’

  The indisposed patron was already on his feet and – although leaning picturesquely on the arm of his friend – making pretty good speed for fresh air. The crowd in the Pompadour parted, gaped curiously, closed up again as he went by.

  For a moment Phil’s head positively lolled on Sharples’s shoulder.

  ‘Peter,’ he hissed, ‘when we’re out—run!’

  And they ran – Phil because that was the extravagant plan that had come to him, Sharples because simple manhood would admit of nothing else. There were a few angry shouts as they pelted down George Street. These didn’t matter at all. And then, very disconcertingly, there was a blast on what could only be a policeman’s whistle. Shoulder to shoulder, they ran on panting. Once they glanced sideways at each other, excited and very scared. They were back in the same sort of childhood, a childhood in which there had been much bolting from coppers who were commonly imaginary but sometimes real, and in which awesome talk went round of borstals and remand homes and what happened if they got you there.