‘Angus!’
I turned to see the tall figure of Stephen ambling towards me in an open-necked shirt and sunglasses.
‘Good to see you, old man! Let me take that.’
Stephen grabbed my scratched suitcase and led me out to his car, a two-seater electric-blue Railton with the top down.
Stephen had spent nearly two weeks in France already, driving out from London in his sports car. He had attended the wedding at the de Parzacs’ chateau just south of Orléans, and then driven down to the Riviera to stay with his mother. The plan was to meet me there, and then drive through Italy to Tony Volstead’s villa on the island of Capri, where the newly married couple would stay for the last week of their honeymoon.
The newly married couple were Nathan and Madeleine.
When I had opened Nathan’s letter telling me they were getting engaged, I was so surprised I had had to read it twice. Nathan and I had corresponded regularly since we had left Oxford two years before. I was aware that Alden’s will had been a mess. Alden had intended to leave his French property to his wife, and his considerable stake in Wakefield Oil to his favourite nephew, Nathan. The trouble was that the will had been drawn up by an American lawyer friend on holiday in Paris, who had failed to take proper account of French inheritance laws. Madeleine’s lawyers had taken aim at Nathan’s lawyers and war had ensued. However, the more the two principals saw of each other, the less belligerent they became, until, as Nathan put it, he had suggested the perfect solution. And, amazingly, Madeleine had agreed. So now they were married.
Stephen drove me through the lazy palm-lined streets of Antibes with the Mediterranean sparkling over to our left. We would set out for Italy in the morning; in the meantime there were cocktails to be drunk and a pool to be swum in at his mother’s villa. This was small and white, but right by the sea, with a terrace overlooking the swimming pool, and beyond that, the Baie des Anges.
It was the first time I had met Stephen’s notorious mother, and I was nervous. She must have been about forty, but she looked much younger. She was blonde, tall, with Stephen’s long nose, and her smooth legs went on for ever. She insisted that I plunge into the pool right away after my long journey. By six o’clock I was sitting watching the sailing boats in the bay, clutching a Manhattan and thinking life was pretty good.
We set off early the next morning, equipped with hangovers. Mrs Trickett-Smith emerged in her dressing gown to wave us off.
‘Angus, promise me something,’ Stephen said as the car drifted along the empty esplanade at Antibes. ‘If my mother tries to jump on you, please fend her off.’
I laughed. ‘She’d never do that.’
‘Oh yes, she would,’ said Stephen. ‘You underestimate yourself. You always have.’
I smiled. ‘I seem to be a natural target for the Trickett-Smiths.’
‘I shall ignore that,’ said Stephen.
‘Speaking of which, have you heard from Maurice?’
‘He and I have rather lost touch,’ said Stephen. ‘But he hasn’t grown up. He’s still at Oxford; the last I heard he was besotted with an undergraduate at New College called Daisy Haughton- Jones who won’t acknowledge his existence.’
I laughed. ‘Is Daisy Mr Haughton-Jones’s real name, do you think?’
‘He probably doesn’t even know he’s called Daisy, poor sod.’
It was Maurice’s roving eye that had first brought me to Stephen’s attention. Stephen later told me Maurice had considered me rough and handsome, yet innocent, and hence ideal prey. So Maurice had challenged Stephen to seduce me, and Stephen had spent a week good-humouredly trying. I knew what was going on; there had been some homosexuality at my boarding school, although clearly not nearly as much as at Stephen’s.
Then one evening Stephen had arrived in my room completely drunk and very upset. He had tried to pour his heart out to me. It had started out as an embarrassing paean to my supposed rough beauty, but it had soon become something else, something more genuine. He had received a letter from his mother saying she was never going to return to his father, but was going to live in Antibes with a French count. Stephen knew that his parents’ marriage was a sham, but now he could no longer pretend that the sham was the truth, he felt the ground taken away from underneath him.
I had listened and understood. Stephen had disappeared, returning with two bottles of wine that I helped him polish off late into the night. Stephen explained what it was like being Stephen. The wealth, the popularity, the position in society, the open admiration from boys and women alike. Yet underneath it all, the foundations of his life were cracked. He felt at any moment as if he were going to fall into an abyss of despair.
He didn’t fancy me at all, he said, he admired me. He admired my stable family, my ability to work hard, my obvious love for my subject. He didn’t want to seduce me, he wanted to be like me. And he had never told anyone any of this.
That was why he and I were friends.
It took us three days to motor from Antibes to Naples. I would have liked to take a week: we passed Genoa, Florence, Siena and Rome on the way, all of which I wanted to explore. The June weather was fabulous — the Tuscan hills were still green and lush, and poppies nodded to us from roadside verges as we swept by.
I had not seen Stephen for a couple of months, and there was a lot to catch up on. After Oxford, I had gone on to Bart’s Hospital in the City of London. I loved the life of a medical student — the beer and the rugger as much as the anatomy and the physiology. But once Hitler’s troops had stomped into what remained of Czechoslovakia in March, I decided that if a war was coming, I was going to fight in it.
To fight, not to tend the wounded. That proved to be a bit of a problem, because the authorities wanted me either to finish my medical studies or to become a medical orderly. Also, a severe concussion I had suffered in a rugger match in February against Guy’s had caused trouble at my physical examination. But I had tried a different angle, with more success. Thanks to an old friend of my father, I was due to join the Green Howards in two weeks as a private.
Stephen too had been busy. He had decided he needed a proper, steady, responsible job after university, and had begun training as an articled clerk with a firm of chartered accountants. He told me he was determined to break away from his family’s lackadaisical attitude to money and work. All very admirable, but accountancy was not something to which Stephen was well suited. A friend had introduced him to a film producer, who had fixed him up with a couple of jobs as an extra at Pinewood Studios, and he had just landed his first speaking role, in a film called A Breeze From the Sea. He played the bounder from whom the leading lady was trying to escape. It wasn’t a big role, but Stephen had enjoyed it and was hoping it would lead to more opportunities. So he had chucked the accountancy before the accountancy had had a chance to chuck him.
There was one subject that I was eager to broach, but felt reluctant to do so. I summoned up the courage, for I needed courage, as we were just finishing off a bottle of red wine after lunch at a restaurant in a tiny town perched on a hill in Umbria. The view was astounding — fields of hay, vines and poppies stretching for miles in every direction, interspersed with steep green domes, most of which were topped with fortified towns. The roofs and bell tower of an abbey nestled in a grove of cypresses in the valley beneath us. It looked just like the background of a portrait by Bellini or Titian.