|
COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
A Saturday evening in May, 1949, and I am taking a moonlight leak in the garden at Ditchley. Hedges and statuary cast elegant shadows nearby, but I've had a bit of wine and it probably doesn't occur to me that this is one of the better alfresco loos I have visited--the Italianate garden installed by Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe in 1935, as a culminating grace note to the celebrated Georgian pile of Ditchley Park, in Oxfordshire, designed by James Gibbs and built in 1722. Ditchley, with a deer park and a village within its borders, is headed inexorably for the English Heritage Register but for the moment remains the country home of my old friend Marietta FitzGerald and her delightful, fairly recent second husband, Ronald Tree, who is standing a few feet to my left here, in identical posture, his chin in the air as he breathes in traces of boxwood and early primrose. Beyond him, also aiming, is Major Metcalfe, a neighbor of Ronnie's and another dinner guest of his on this evening. He is the same Major Metcalfe who proved such a staunch friend to the Prince of Wales at Fort Belvedere during the difficult abdication days, in 1936, and who stood up as best man the following year, when the Prince, reborn as the Duke of Windsor, married Wallis Warfield Simpson in Monts, France. Major Edward Dudley Metcalfe, M.V.O., M.C., I mean, who at any moment, surely, will invite me to call him Fruity, the way everybody else does. He and I are in black tie, and the moonlight lies magically on his satin lapels, just as it does on mine. Ronnie is wearing a beige velvet smoking, perfectly O.K. for a country host, I guess, but he looks less dashing or narrow, less right, than Fruity and I do. Good old Fruity. Soon we three will amble back up the terrace steps, toward the tall lighted doors and the sounds of conversation and rattled dice within. My wife, Evelyn, ravishing in her silk top and shimmery gray skirt, will look up from the backgammon table, where she has taken on Ronnie's first son, Michael (he's in his late twenties), and has just realized that she's in over her head. "How much is eleven pounds?" she whispers urgently. It's around forty-five dollars, I figure quickly--big bucks, to us--but of course none of this is for keeps. Only it is, we find.
Memory stops here. Nothing more can be made of that ancient weekend. Evelyn and I were impostors--not members of the bon ton but a visiting, unembarrassed American couple, still in their twenties, on a lucky six-week dive into England and France, mostly paid for by the magazine Holiday, where I was an editor and writer. I was scouting the Continent for writers and picture ideas, or some such scam. We had married in 1942, were separated by the war, and when it was over...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
