The Charity matinée was over, I felt; the impresario had buttoned his astrakhan coat and taken his fee and the disconsolate ladies of the company were without a leader. Without him they forgot their cues and garbled their lines; they needed him to ring the curtain up at the right moment; they needed him to direct the lime-lights; they needed his whisper in the wings, and his imperious eye on the leader of the band; without him there were no photographers from the weekly press, no prearranged goodwill and expectation of pleasure. No stronger bond held them together than common service; now the gold lace and velvet were packed away and returned to the costumier and the drab uniform of the day put on in its stead. For a few happy hours of rehearsal, for a few ecstatic minutes of performance, they had played splendid parts, their own great ancestors, the famous paintings they were thought to resemble; now it was over and in the bleak light of day they must go back to their homes; to the husband who came to London too often, to the lover who lost at cards, and to the child who grew too fast.

Anthony Blanche’s set broke up and became a bare dozen lethargic, adolescent Englishmen. Sometimes in later life they would say: ‘Do you remember that extraordinary fellow we used all to know at Oxford – Anthony Blanche? I wonder what became of him.’ They lumbered back into the herd from which they had been so capriciously chosen and grew less and less individually recognizable. The change was not so apparent to them as to us, and they still congregated on occasions in our rooms; but we gave up seeking them. Instead we formed the taste for lower company and spent our evenings, as often as not, in Hogarthian little inns in St Ebb’s and St Clement’s and the streets between the old market and the canal, where we managed to be gay and were, I believe, well liked by the company. The Gardener’s Arms and the Nag’s Head, the Druid’s Head near the theatre, and the Turf in Hell Passage knew us well; but in the last of these we were liable to meet other undergraduates – pub-crawling hearties from BNC – and Sebastian became possessed by a kind of phobia, like that which sometimes comes over men in uniform against their own service, so that many an evening was spoilt by their intrusion, and he would leave his glass half empty and turn sulkily back to college.

It was thus that Lady Marchmain found us when, early in that Michaelmas term, she came for a week to Oxford. She found Sebastian subdued, with all his host of friends reduced to one, myself. She accepted me as Sebastian’s friend and sought to make me hers also, and in doing so, unwittingly struck at the roots of our friendship. That is the single reproach I have to set against her abundant kindness to me.