Michael Ridpath - Amnesia

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.

‘Was Sophie at the wedding?’

‘Yes, of course. She was a bridesmaid. She looked gorgeous.’

‘I’m sure she did,’ I said. Then came the tricky question: ‘Was she alone?’

‘You mean did she have a man in tow?’ Stephen asked with a grin.

‘Yes,’ I admitted.

Stephen’s grin disappeared, replaced with the ghost of a frown. He hesitated before replying. ‘No. No, she didn’t.’

Thank God for that. Sophie was joining us on Capri. I hadn’t seen her since Deauville, but I had thought of her many times. It was stupid really, I knew I had no chance, but I couldn’t help it.

‘She said you had written to her,’ said Stephen.

‘Yes, once or twice.’ I would have written to her every day, if I had allowed myself, but I didn’t want to appear overly keen. Actually, what I didn’t want to do was provoke rejection. Which was probably going to happen anyway, on Capri. I hadn’t admitted my infatuation to Stephen, but I could tell he could see it, and I could tell it troubled him.

‘Be careful, old man,’ said Stephen. ‘Don’t set yourself up for a disappointment.’

I felt both crushed and irritated by this comment in equal measure. Stephen was a good friend who rarely looked down his impressive nose at me. But every now and then he could be so arrogant and insensitive. Of course Sophie was too good for me, I knew that. But Stephen could be just a little more encouraging; could let me dream.

We finished our wine in silence, paid the bill, and set off southwards once again.

It was a relief to get out of the bustle of Naples and on to the bay. The steamer puffed into a steady breeze from the west. Behind and to the left rose the broken cone of slumbering Vesuvius, with the remains of Pompeii splattered on to its lower slopes. From there the Cape of Sorrento reached out and pointed towards the two hunks of rock that formed Capri. The island appeared dark at first glance against the sparkling blue sea, but as the boat neared, it resolved itself into light-grey cliff and dark-green trees, with a smattering of white houses in the cradle in the middle.