A Week in December Read Online Free PDF Page B

slide, because it freed him, retrospectively, from years of anguish. Foreign grandees were simple coconuts in Tranter's shy; firing off a bucketful of balls was second nature, routine stuff, and he doubted that it did much good in the face of universal fawning. But reading praise for the work of a British contemporary gave him a stomach pain as fierce as the cramps of gastroenteritis. Over the years he'd had to develop strategies for dealing with it, and the simplest was to write an anonymous review of his own at the back end of The Toad , a monthly magazine that was edited by an old Oxford contemporary. Here Tranter could place a powerful antidote to compliments that had appeared elsewhere. The savvy readers of The Toad were told that such praise had been offered in bad faith - by old Etonians, by former lovers of the author or by 'poor saps' who were the victims of fashion. The truth was that the novel was full of 'reach-me-down platitudes' and wasn't worth the time of unillusioned Toad -readers. Sometimes Tranter had already reviewed the book under his own name in a newspaper, where, for plausibility's sake, he'd been obliged to mute his criticisms or leaven them with guarded praise; and then his anonymous Toad piece acted as a bracing corrective, even to himself.
    Money was tight chez Tranter. Two book reviews a week generated PS450, and a monthly Toad piece was worth a further PS300. With other oddments, he had brought his year's income up to roughly PS30,000, he thought. Then, eighteen months earlier, he had had a piece of luck. He received a letter from the headmaster of a famous private school near London, making him an offer. Although the pupils regularly came near the top of the national league of exam results, most taking home a full house of A-stars and As, they had little idea of spelling or grammar, and neither had their teachers. The headmaster of the school had been sent a letter by an elderly parent, educated back in the 1950s, lamenting what he called the 'basic errors of literacy' in his child's end-of-term report and suggesting that for PS25,000 a year he was entitled to a teacher who knew the difference between 'I' and 'me' or 'bought' and 'brought'.
    The headmaster called a meeting of the staff, who shrugged. It wasn't their fault. Most of them had been educated by teachers who believed that spelling was at best a 'fetish' and, more probably, just a way of trying to keep poor children out of university. Such things had long since been discounted by public examiners and it was far too late now, as the head of History put it, to 'reinvent the wheel'. And anyway, no one had ever complained about the teachers' literacy before.
    One of the French staff, however, was married to a man in management consultancy who'd been at Oxford with Tranter and had kept vaguely in touch. She thought Tranter might be of an age and background still to have access to such arcana and she promised to dig out his address for the Head.
    Tranter was intrigued to receive an approach from such a famous school and went in to see them, as requested. He crossed the cobbles that ringed the grassy quadrangle and thought how very different they were from the tarmac apron of his own old school. He went beneath a stone arch in which pupils had carved their names (Wm Standforth 1822) and into another, smaller courtyard, ivied with age and bogus distinction.
    'Very kind of you to come,' said the Head, a tall, dynamic man with bushy black hair. 'It's a slightly embarrassing request, really. I do personally recall the rudiments of spelling. Bit of a tyrant about it in fact. It's just that I don't have time to go through every single report and change "Johnny appears disinterested" to "Johnny appears uninterested" and so on. The current headmaster's life is largely one of conferences and administration, making speeches, marketing and so on.' He coughed self-deprecatingly. 'I can't pretend it's creative work we're offering you, Mr Tranter, but we'd