Fatal Glamour Read Free Page B

too. Justin’s two older brothers had gone directly from school into the family firm; Justin, his father decided, could best serve the enterprise by qualifying as a lawyer. He duly went to Emmanuel in 1904 but took a backhanded revenge on his father by devoting most of his time and energy to the theatre. Through Justin, Rupert began a long but not very fruitful involvement with the theatre too. His looks got him onto the stage, but once there he didn’t quite know what to do with himself.
    Jacques Raverat’s father Georges was also a successful businessman in Le Havre, with much other property scattered around, including a Paris apartment and two chateaux. He was a friend of the educationalist Edmond Demolins, who in 1897 had published
A quoi tient la superiorité des Anglo-saxons
? 1 The Anglo-Saxons were a superior breed, he argued, who had started by dominating the Celts and the Normans, and were now on their way to dominating the entire planet. They were a thoroughbred race who deserved to rule over lesser breeds and mongrels. Not only that, the English educational system produced well-rounded individuals with energy and enterprise, whereas the French Lycée aimed at nothing more than producing successful bureaucrats. Demolins went to visit Cecil Reddie at Abbotsholme and J.H. Badley at Bedales, and sent his son to the latter. Georges Raverat did the same for Jacques. When Jacques was sixteen in 1901, he left Bedales to study mathematics at the University of Paris. But he was discontented there, and in 1906 he persuaded his father to send him to Cambridge.
    Justin Brooke could hardly miss a new arrival at King’s who was making a splash with his looks and neo-decadent style, and who had the same name as his elder brother. Obviously, this Rupert Brooke and Jacques should meet, since they were both poets (though Jacques destroyed his verses without letting anybody see them). Jacques’s first impression was not favourable. Rupert struck him as an affected schoolboy aesthete. After a while, he realised that this was how Rupert coped with so much open-mouthed admiration of his good looks: “a childish beauty, undefined and fluid, as if his mother’s milk were still in his cheeks . . . The forehead was very high and very pure, the chin and lips admirably moulded; the eyes were small, grey-blue and already veiled, mysterious and secret. His hair was too long, the colour of tarnished gold, and parted in the middle; it kept falling in his face and he threw it back with a movement of his head.” 2
    Jacques, Justin, and Rupert were soon talking from breakfast to midnight of poetry, art, sex, suicide; laughing at “the ridiculous superstitions about God and Religion; the absurd prejudices of patriotism and decency; the grotesque encumbrances called parents.” 3 On 23 November, Jacques’s mother committed suicide and he returned to France. He came back to Emmanuel in January, and he and Rupert would become the closest of friends. Rupert and Justin were never as intimate, though Justin remained at Cambridge and brought Rupert into a long series of theatrical projects. Jacques and Justin also made Rupert aware of what Bedales stood for, as an altogether different kind of school from Rugby. This connection became a vital one two years later, when Noel Olivier became a student there.
    Justin had been taught by Badley that the spoken word had more life in it than the written one. He was a star actor at Bedales, and soon became a mainstay of the Cambridge Amateur Dramatic Club, specialising in leading ladies since female students were forbidden to act alongside men. His neat, birdlike features and twenty-two-inch waist made him a natural ingénue. Not surprisingly, his looks appealed strongly to his own sex, though he chose not to return the interest. So far as Jacques was concerned, Justin did not return anyone’s interest. Justin once admitted that he didn’t understand