Climbing together had reinforced the bonds of our friendship. The illegality and the danger both inspired trust, the first through a need for secrecy, the second because we placed our safety in one another’s hands. It kept our bodies lean and ready, like a population primed for revolution, and our minds burning with possibility. It was, I see now, a kind of apprenticeship for what followed.

That thought first occurred to me two years later, though I did not then appreciate its full implications. I was sitting in a lecture hall in the Michaelmas term of my final year, long after my friends were gone, listening to a middle-aged woman discourse upon the Athenian tragic festivals, and the image of Francis appeared before me so vividly, it was as if his ghost had walked on to the podium, tall and proud, with the look of easy triumph in his eyes, the way he was in those early days. The lecturer was giving the assembled students her theory on why the young men of Athens danced in the great masques that punctuated the tragic plays of Sophocles and Euripides. The standard line was that the dancing of the chorus was in the spirit of the festival, part of a pattern of art and culture which was to resonate through the millennia. But she told us this was wrong, the misunderstanding of a modern age obsessed with leisure, with no concept of duty. She told us that the male youths may have seemed to dance for joy, but what they were really doing was training their feet for the phalanx. The plays themselves were about the aftermath of battles, of the siege of Troy or the fall of Thebes, and the complicated ballet of young men moving in perfect unison was done in anticipation of battles to come. When the Athenian army fought together, the men went out as one unit, shields closed together, spears raised, feet following specific movements at the command of the officers. What appeared to be the expression of youthful and cultural activity was in fact a drill for the bloody conquests of the empire. I thought of Francis urging us on, driving us to new heights, forcing us to work more closely together and to expand our ideas of what we could accomplish, all under the guise of wild celebration, and then of his final project.

In the phalanx each shield locked with the next, covering not just the warrior holding it, but also the man to his left. Any hoplite who died or fell uncovered his neighbour to the swords and arrows of the enemy. If you lost your footing, you would murder not yourself, but your brother dancing beside you. It was perhaps this last detail that most brought Francis to my mind.

10

WHEN TERM WAS over I went back to live with my father in Wandsworth. Jessica, Lisa and Michael all lived in London, though Michael had announced his intention to spend Christmas in Barbados in Sandy Lane, where his parents had a house. Francis would be returning to his father’s estate in Northamptonshire, and he warned us not to expect to see too much of him, as his father was unleashing a horde of entertainments on the local community. The mooted ban on fox hunting had given him a good foothold in local sympathy, and he was capitalizing on this by giving over his whole energy to various blood sports. Francis would be expected to look dashing in pink at the local hunt, bring home a brace or two from the weekend shooting parties and make up bridge fours. He had no real taste for any of these activities when they were undertaken in a formal social context, though he was an accomplished rider and an excellent shot. He said that being armed in the proximity of Lord Soulford always gave him a pleasant patricidal buzz. ‘It’s like climbing and suddenly feeling a powerful urge to throw yourself off,’ he told me and Jessica. ‘I can feel the barrels twitching towards him of their own accord, like a divining rod.’