‘When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating. Alex is hating all the illusions of boyhood – innocence, God, hope. Poor Lady Marchmain has to bear all that. A woman has not all these ways of loving.

‘Now Alex is very fond of me and I protect him from his own innocence. We are comfortable.

‘Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy. His teddy-bear, his nanny…and he is nineteen years old….’

She stirred on her sofa, shifting her weight so that she could look down at the passing boats, and said in fond, mocking tones: ‘How good it is to sit in the shade and talk of love,’ and then added with a sudden swoop to earth, ‘Sebastian drinks too much.’

‘I suppose we both do.’

‘With you it does not matter. I have watched you together. With Sebastian it is different. He will be a drunkard if someone does not come to stop him. I have known so many. Alex was nearly a drunkard when he met me; it is in the blood. I see it in the way Sebastian drinks. It is not your way.’

—

We arrived in London on the day before term began. On the way from Charing Cross I dropped Sebastian in the forecourt of his mother’s house; ‘Here is “Marchers”,’ he said with a sigh which meant the end of a holiday. ‘I won’t ask you in, the place is probably full of my family. We’ll meet at Oxford’; I drove across the park to my home.

My father greeted me with his usual air of mild regret.

‘Here today,’ he said; ‘gone tomorrow. I seem to see very little of you. Perhaps it is dull for you here. How could it be otherwise? You have enjoyed yourself?’

‘Very much. I went to Venice.’

‘Yes. Yes. I suppose so. The weather was fine?’

When he went to bed after an evening of silent study, he paused to ask: ‘The friend you were so much concerned about, did he die?’

‘No.’

‘I am very thankful. You should have written to tell me. I worried about him so much.’

CHAPTER FIVE

‘It is typical of Oxford,’ I said, ‘to start the new year in autumn.’

Everywhere, on cobble and gravel and lawn, the leaves were falling and in the college gardens the smoke of the bonfires joined the wet river mist, drifting across the grey walls; the flags were oily underfoot and as, one by one, the lamps were lit in the windows round the quad, the golden lights were diffuse and remote, new figures in new gowns wandered through the twilight under the arches and the familiar bells now spoke of a year’s memories.

The autumnal mood possessed us both as though the riotous exuberance of June had died with the gillyflowers, whose scent at my windows now yielded to the damp leaves, smouldering in a corner of the quad.