‘That beast Hobson has put Aloysius next door,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it’s as well, as there wouldn’t have been any plovers’ eggs for him. D’you know, Hobson hates Aloysius. I wish I had a scout like yours. He was sweet to me this morning where some people might have been quite strict.’

The party assembled. There were three Etonian freshmen, mild, elegant, detached young men who had all been to a dance in London the night before, and spoke of it as though it had been the funeral of a near but unloved kinsman. Each as he came into the room made first for the plovers’ eggs, then noticed Sebastian and then myself with a polite lack of curiosity which seemed to say: ‘We should not dream of being so offensive as to suggest that you never met us before.’

‘The first this year,’ they said. ‘Where do you get them?’

‘Mummy sends them from Brideshead. They always lay early for her.’

When the eggs were gone and we were eating the lobster Newburg, the last guest arrived.

‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t get away before. I was lunching with my p-p-preposterous tutor. He thought it very odd my leaving when I did. I told him I had to change for F-f-footer.’

He was tall, slim, rather swarthy, with large saucy eyes. The rest of us wore rough tweeds and brogues. He had on a smooth chocolate-brown suit with loud white stripes, suède shoes, a large bow-tie and he drew off yellow, wash-leather gloves as he came into the room; part Gallic, part Yankee, part, perhaps, Jew; wholly exotic.

This, I did not need telling, was Anthony Blanche, the ‘aesthete’ par excellence, a byword of iniquity from Cherwell Edge to Somerville. He had been pointed out to me often in the streets, as he pranced along with his high peacock tread; I had heard his voice in the George challenging the conventions; and now meeting him, under the spell of Sebastian, I found myself enjoying him voraciously.

After luncheon he stood on the balcony with a megaphone which had appeared surprisingly among the bric-à-brac of Sebastian’s room, and in languishing tones recited passages from The Waste Land to the sweatered and muffled throng that was on its way to the river.

‘I, Tiresias, have foresuffered all,’ he sobbed to them from the Venetian arches;

‘Enacted on this same d-divan or b-bed,

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall

And walked among the l-l-lowest of the dead…’

And then, stepping lightly into the room, ‘How I have surprised them! All b-boatmen are Grace Darlings to me.’

We sat on sipping Cointreau while the mildest and most detached of the Etonians sang: ‘Home they brought her warrior dead’ to his own accompaniment on the harmonium.

It was four o’clock before we broke up.

Anthony Blanche was the first to go. He took formal and complimentary leave of each of us in turn. To Sebastian he said: ‘My dear, I should like to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pin-cushion,’ and to me: ‘I think it’s perfectly brilliant of Sebastian to have discovered you. Where do you lurk? I shall come down your burrow and ch-chivvy you out like an old st-t-toat.’