of good old St Bart's had only grown dirty. Under the cross and immediately over the sonorous-looking but really echo-less arc of the entrance was carved a dagger of sorts, an attempt to represent the butcher's knife so reproachfully held (in the Vienna Missal) by St Bartholomew, one of the Apostles - the one, namely, who had been flayed alive and exposed to the flies in the summer of A.D. 65 or thereabouts, in Albanopolis, now Derbent, south-eastern Russia. His coffin, when cast by a furious king into the Caspian Sea, had blandly sailed all the way to Lipari Island off the coast of Sicily - probably a legend, seeing that the Caspian had been strictly an inland affair ever since the Pleistocene. Beneath this heraldic weapon - which rather resembled a carrot pointing upward - an inscription in burnished church text read: 'Sursum'. Two gentle English shepherd dogs belonging to one of the masters and greatly attached to each other could generally be found drowsing in their private Arcadia on a lawn before the gate.
Liza on her first visit to the school had greatly admired everything about it from the fives courts and the chapel to the plaster casts in the corridors and the photographs of cathedrals in the classrooms. The three lower forms were assigned to dormitories with windowed alcoves; there was a master's room at the end. Visitors could not help admiring the fine gymnasium. Very evocative, too, were the oaken seats and hammer-beamed roof of the chapel, a Romanesque structure that had been donated half a century ago by Julius Schonberg, wool manufacturer, brother of the world-famous Egyptologist Samuel Schonberg who perished in the Messina earthquake. There were twenty-five masters and the headmaster, the Reverend Archibald Hopper, who on warm days wore elegant clerical grey and performed his duties in radiant ignorance of the intrigue that was on the point of dislodging him.
5
Although Victor's eye was his supreme organ, it was rather by smells and sounds that the neutral notion of St Bart's impressed itself on his consciousness. There was the musty, dull reek of old varnished wood in the dorms, and the night sounds in the alcoves - loud gastric explosions and a special squeaking of bed springs, accentuated for effect - and the bell in the hallway, in the hollow of one's headache, at 6.45 a.m. There was the odour of idolatry and incense coming from the burner that hung on chains and on shadows of chains from the ribbed ceiling of the chapel; and there was the Reverend Hopper's mellow voice, nicely blending vulgarity with refinement; and Hymn 166, 'Sun of My Soul', which new boys were required to learn by heart; and there was, in the locker room, the immemorial sweat of the hamper on wheels, which held a communal supply of athletic supporters - a beastly grey tangle, from which one had to untwist a strap for oneself to put on at the start of the sport period - and how harsh and sad the clusters of cries from each of the four playing fields!
With an intelligence quotient of about a hundred and eighty and an average grade of ninety, Victor easily ranked first in a class of thirty-six and was, in fact, one of the three best scholars in the school. He had little respect for most of his teachers; but he revered Lake, a tremendously obese man with shaggy eyebrows and hairy hands and an attitude of sombre embarrassment in the presence of athletic, rosy-cheeked lads (Victor was neither). Lake was enthroned, Buddha-like, in a curiously neat studio that looked more like a reception room in an art gallery than a workshop. Nothing adorned its pale grey walls except two identically framed pictures: a copy of Gertrude K ä sebier's photographic masterpiece 'Mother and Child' (1897), with the wistful, angelic infant looking up and away (at what?); and a similarly toned reproduction of the head of Christ from Rembrandt's 'The Pilgrims of Emmaus', with the same, though slightly less celestial, expression of eyes and mouth.
He had been
Liza on her first visit to the school had greatly admired everything about it from the fives courts and the chapel to the plaster casts in the corridors and the photographs of cathedrals in the classrooms. The three lower forms were assigned to dormitories with windowed alcoves; there was a master's room at the end. Visitors could not help admiring the fine gymnasium. Very evocative, too, were the oaken seats and hammer-beamed roof of the chapel, a Romanesque structure that had been donated half a century ago by Julius Schonberg, wool manufacturer, brother of the world-famous Egyptologist Samuel Schonberg who perished in the Messina earthquake. There were twenty-five masters and the headmaster, the Reverend Archibald Hopper, who on warm days wore elegant clerical grey and performed his duties in radiant ignorance of the intrigue that was on the point of dislodging him.
5
Although Victor's eye was his supreme organ, it was rather by smells and sounds that the neutral notion of St Bart's impressed itself on his consciousness. There was the musty, dull reek of old varnished wood in the dorms, and the night sounds in the alcoves - loud gastric explosions and a special squeaking of bed springs, accentuated for effect - and the bell in the hallway, in the hollow of one's headache, at 6.45 a.m. There was the odour of idolatry and incense coming from the burner that hung on chains and on shadows of chains from the ribbed ceiling of the chapel; and there was the Reverend Hopper's mellow voice, nicely blending vulgarity with refinement; and Hymn 166, 'Sun of My Soul', which new boys were required to learn by heart; and there was, in the locker room, the immemorial sweat of the hamper on wheels, which held a communal supply of athletic supporters - a beastly grey tangle, from which one had to untwist a strap for oneself to put on at the start of the sport period - and how harsh and sad the clusters of cries from each of the four playing fields!
With an intelligence quotient of about a hundred and eighty and an average grade of ninety, Victor easily ranked first in a class of thirty-six and was, in fact, one of the three best scholars in the school. He had little respect for most of his teachers; but he revered Lake, a tremendously obese man with shaggy eyebrows and hairy hands and an attitude of sombre embarrassment in the presence of athletic, rosy-cheeked lads (Victor was neither). Lake was enthroned, Buddha-like, in a curiously neat studio that looked more like a reception room in an art gallery than a workshop. Nothing adorned its pale grey walls except two identically framed pictures: a copy of Gertrude K ä sebier's photographic masterpiece 'Mother and Child' (1897), with the wistful, angelic infant looking up and away (at what?); and a similarly toned reproduction of the head of Christ from Rembrandt's 'The Pilgrims of Emmaus', with the same, though slightly less celestial, expression of eyes and mouth.
He had been
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