‘Yes, Hooper, I did. I’ve been here before.’

The words seemed to ring back to me enriched from the vaults of my dungeon.

‘Oh well, you know all about it. I’ll go and get cleaned up.’

I had been there before; I knew all about it.

BOOK ONE

ET IN ARCADIA EGO

CHAPTER ONE

‘I have been here before,’ I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.

That day, too, I had come not knowing my destination. It was Eights Week. Oxford – submerged now and obliterated, irrecoverable as Lyonnesse, so quickly have the waters come flooding in – Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman’s day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days – such as that day – when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour. Here, discordantly, in Eights Week, came a rabble of womankind, some hundreds strong, twittering and fluttering over the cobbles and up the steps, sight-seeing and pleasure-seeking, drinking claret cup, eating cucumber sandwiches; pushed in punts about the river, herded in droves to the college barges; greeted in the Isis and in the Union by a sudden display of peculiar, facetious, wholly distressing Gilbert-and-Sullivan badinage, and by peculiar choral effects in the College chapels. Echoes of the intruders penetrated every corner, and in my own College was no echo, but an original fount of the grossest disturbance. We were giving a ball. The front quad, where I lived, was floored and tented; palms and azaleas were banked round the porter’s lodge; worst of all, the don who lived above me, a mouse of a man connected with the Natural Sciences, had lent his rooms for a Ladies’ Cloakroom, and a printed notice proclaiming this outrage hung not six inches from my oak.

No one felt more strongly about it than my scout.

‘Gentlemen who haven’t got ladies are asked as far as possible to take their meals out in the next few days,’ he announced despondently. ‘Will you be lunching in?’

‘No, Lunt.’

‘So as to give the servants a chance, they say. What a chance! I’ve got to buy a pin-cushion for the Ladies’ Cloakroom. What do they want with dancing? I don’t see the reason in it. There never was dancing before in Eights Week. Commem. now is another matter being in the vacation, but not in Eights Week, as if teas and the river wasn’t enough. If you ask me, sir, it’s all on account of the war. It couldn’t have happened but for that.’ For this was 1923 and for Lunt, as for thousands of others, things could never be the same as they had been in 1914. ‘Now wine in the evening,’ he continued, as was his habit half in and half out of the door, ‘or one or two gentlemen to luncheon, there’s reason in. But not dancing. It all came in with the men back from the war. They were too old and they didn’t know and they wouldn’t learn. That’s the truth. And there’s some even goes dancing with the town at the Masonic – but the proctors will get them, you see…Well, here’s Lord Sebastian. I mustn’t stand here talking when there’s pincushions to get.’