by Pirate Irwin
“What the hell is he . . .” Stone stopped mid-sentence as he saw exactly what his maverick of a pupil was up to as he swivelled his head to the right and there, bobbing up and down with his arms thrashing at the water, was Steiner.
“My God! Go on, Stuart, go on, Sebastian, you can do it!” rose the cry from the river banks, where as ever bad news had led to a huge increase in onlookers.
Stuart, who was by no means Stone’s favourite given his propensity for oily charm and smugness but it had to be said was a superb athlete, reached the by now virtually motionless body of Steiner and tucking one arm under the unfortunate rower’s neck summoned up enough energy to swim back to the shore, shrugging off the efforts of the newly arrived boats to take them on board.
Once back on land, which took three other boys to haul the sodden couple up the slippery bank, Stone got to work on Steiner, forcing him to bring up the copious amounts of dirty water he had just involuntarily imbibed, while Stuart, his golden Adonis-like hair splayed out on the dandelion covered grass lay there panting and surrounded by a newly won group of admirers.
“I’d like to propose a toast . . . a toast to my Messiah, Sebastian Stuart,” said Steiner.
Steiner, who had spent three days recuperating in the sanatorium, had repaid Stuart’s selflessness by inviting his saviour to dine with him and his girlfriend Mirabelle at the Ritz Hotel in London.
“As long as it isn’t that bloody river water, I will drink to that!” Stuart smiled.
Mirabelle, who was regarded as the beauty of her year at St Mary’s Ascot with her long black hair forming a hypnotic mix with blue eyes, large breasts and long stilt-like legs, laughed at Stuart’s joke and raised her glass.
The toast over, Steiner leant back in his chair, surveyed the richness of their surroundings and the magnificence of the interior, and stroked his earlobe.
“So, Sebastian, why on earth did you risk your life for me?”
Stuart, whose sportsmanlike physique was rounded off with a thick mop of blond hair and striking green blue eyes, paused for a moment before replying.
“I reckoned the odds favoured me, or at least I felt that at the start,” he said.
“At the start? Well, why didn’t you give up and turn back once you thought the outcome would be less favourable?” Mirabelle pondered.
“Well, I thought, what the heck, I’m wet now so I might as well carry on, and besides, Stone would probably have given me a right beating for being so reckless . . . I’d rather drown in the attempt than be a sodding failure,” he replied.
“Besides, Adam, despite your moodiness and nocturnal meanderings along the corridors of the college, which I can’t blame you for as it goes with your Count Dracula dark and saturnine looks, I consider you as a pretty good chap,” he added.
“Honoured, I’m sure,” Steiner responded drily.
Steiner, whose suspicious mind never allowed him to make friends easily and who but for his ever ambitious father would not have gone to Oxford, received a sharp kick from under the table and looked up to see Mirabelle staring daggers at him.
“I’m sorry, Sebastian, I didn’t mean to be so sarcastic. As you are painfully aware, it is one of my failings not to throw myself into people’s arms too quickly,” he apologized.
Sebastian, who was wondering when the brandies would be brought along as he needed a sharp pick me up if he was to endure Steiner’s rather humourless conversation for much longer, nodded in acceptance of the apology.
Steiner, who wanted the dinner over with because he was finding being beholden to Stuart in front of Mirabelle a humiliating experience, ordered the brandies and then paid the bill.
As they waited for their separate cabs, Mirabelle was in the lobby, as it was a bitterly cold night despite it already being May. Steiner decided at the very least to pose the question to Stuart, though he pretty much knew what the response would be.
“Sebastian, you know that I will always owe you for this. The dinner was just an entertaining way of saying thank you,” Steiner said.
Christ, thought Sebastian, if that’s what you call entertaining.
“And while I know you would ever be loathe to admit it, if you hit a rough patch in the future I will do anything I can to help you out,” Steiner added.
Stuart stiffened and thought, God you can be so patronising, but with Mirabelle having rejoined them, swallowed deeply and tried to sound relatively sincere in his response.
“That’s frightfully decent of you, Adam, but I don’t think it will be necessary, though of course I will bear it in mind . . . ah, there’s a cab, I believe I will take this one as I don’t want to keep my mother waiting up for me,” he said.
“You on the other hand, Adam, will be up all night, I should imagine,” he whispered in Steiner’s ear.
Steiner blushed and laughed while Sebastian bent forward and kissed Mirabelle on both cheeks, told her to say hello to her mother for him, and disappeared into the back of his cab and thence into the night.
“Nice to see Sebastian is as charming as ever. He’s great company, isn’t he?” Mirabelle said.
“He’s certainly that, although sometimes I think he just regards life as a game and doesn’t give a damn about anything or anyone,” Steiner replied coldly.
Sebastian Averill Stuart thought a lot about himself and that much was clear to everybody that came into contact with him.
Sebastian, of course, felt that his overweening arrogance, he described it as self-confidence, was justified, after all he had been captain of the Eton First XV, Keeper of the Field, that quaint game unique to Eton which was a mixture of rugby and football, and President of Pop, which in any other school would have been simply termed Sixth Form but it being Eton, it had to have another name, and effectively meant he was head boy.
It mattered little to Stuart that he had reached these heady heights more because of his sporting prowess than his popularity within his year, for most of his contemporaries held him in a certain amount of awe rather than affection and similar ability had carried him far at Oxford.
All this he had achieved in spite of his father, the explorer Sir Frederick Ponsonby, who had rejected him from birth because he said he had only been interested in sampling the delights or otherwise of Western women after a long stay among an African tribe in the Congo, whose corporal charms had persuaded him to prolong his adventures for another year.
Ponsonby, however, had nevertheless felt some pangs of remorse and set aside money for his education which allied to funds from his mother Annabelle Stuart’s family, who had made a fortune out of banking, had paved the way for him to go to Eton and mix with people he could have some use for in the future as Sebastian held high ambitions for himself.
His father had disappeared soon after Sebastian’s fifth birthday and apparently ended up ensconced in the arms of some “maiden” on Pitcairn Island, where Fletcher Christian, overcome by the charms of his Tahitian Princess, had sailed with several of his fellow mutineers from the Bounty to escape the English hangman’s noose. Like Christian, his father was never to return.
Stuart felt proud of the fact that he had succeeded at Eton and then Oxford despite rejecting his housemaster and subsequently Stone’s flimsy attempts to be a father figure to him, which once spurned had led to him being disciplined at every turn. Whether he liked it or not, he had inherited his father’s wanderlust in the sexual sense and thus was not prone to long stays in his girlfriends’ beds – a habit which lost him further popularity points although again he took that in his rather formidable stride.
Some of the kinder remarks made by Sebastian’s enemies reflected that his father had also evidently brought him back an elephant hide, so thick was his skin.
However, as Sebastian remarked to Steiner, he’d rather revel in carnal desires than avoid them so he wouldn’t hurt anybody’s feelings.
“Apparently Hell hath no more fury than a woman scorned but in my book it is Hell hath no more fury than a woman spurned.
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“Anyway, I do not intend to court popularity unnecessarily because I am never going to be short of girls to bed, given my looks and physical attributes,” he added.
While the more sheltered Steiner could not comment on the first statement, given that his experience of women extended to just Mirabelle, he found the second part of it pretty obnoxious even by Sebastian’s standards.
However, Steiner had to admit that if it hadn’t been for Sebastian he would have dropped out of Oxford altogether and to hell with his father, whose authoritarian ways he was getting increasingly weary of.
Aside from the little matter of saving his life, Sebastian had defended him against the increasing amounts of abuse he was getting from the so-called gentleman elite, who had gently ribbed him at the start over him being Jewish. However, as Fascism gained ground all across mainland Europe so the ribbing turned to nastier and more pernicious name-calling and bullying which wasn’t helped by the fact there appeared to be several supporters of Adolf Hitler’s within the Conservative Government ranks, and they had sons or grandsons feeding off their example at Oxford.
Sebastian found it extremely distasteful, although he couldn’t resist commenting to Steiner that he saw himself as the Winston Churchill of the college, a maverick outsider who didn’t give a damn about whom he trod on if he thought he was right, which invariably he felt he always was.
Chief among Steiner’s torturers was Count Eric von Preetz, whose father was high up in the German embassy in London, but unlike many of the career diplomats was not indisposed towards supporting Hitler after the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty and the subsequent Depression in his once proud homeland.
Stuart wanted to provoke von Preetz so he could teach him a lesson and thus invited him to have tea with him and Steiner at a tearoom in Oxford, one of those faux Tudor Ye Olde England style places. It had fake brown beams embedded in the white walls but it tried so hard to be the real thing that the headroom was so limited the owners obviously believed people’s heights had not progressed since the 14th century.
Sure enough, von Preetz fell for the ruse and accepted the invite and it didn’t take long before his Germanic pride got the better of him.
“There is no way that the Western powers will go to war over Czechoslovakia,” he declared confidently while biting into his cream-covered scone.
“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure, although I grant you this that were it Churchill rather than Chamberlain in power I would guarantee you it would be war,” Sebastian replied.
“It is hard to imagine that Hitler will push the West so hard, he daren’t,” Steiner interjected.
“Oh, and why is that, Steiner? He appears to be able to reclaim what was ours, before that grand theft at Versailles, rather easily, and I don’t imagine the British people, let alone the French, are that keen on sending their loved ones to defend a patch of land which most of them would have trouble spelling let alone know where it is,” von Preetz said.
“Well, my father says . . .”
“Who cares what your father says or thinks, Steiner, after all he is only regurgitating all that Jewish propaganda which arrives with those so-called ‘refugees’ alleging we are doing this and that to them . . . it’s only because the Führer has decided like a good National Socialist to balance out things so every German can have a share of the economy and not be the preserve of selfish and profiteering Jews,” von Preetz smiled and sipped at his tea before ordering more scones and muffins along with the delicious raspberry jam.
Steiner wanted to hit this preening cocky Aryan “superhuman” but decided instead to hold his fire because Stuart had assured him that he would sort him out and Sebastian was much better at those sorts of things.
“Ach, see, Adam, you have no response to this so I must be right or at least the Führer is. Maybe you should share my views with your father,” again von Preetz smiled, though his eyes carried no warmth in them at least when he looked at Steiner.
“Well, I certainly don’t and I am not only a so-called Aryan like you but also pretty cynical, and yet it is clear that you and your Führer believe in terrorising the Jews so you can blame somebody should the National Socialist dream turn into a nightmare,” Sebastian interjected.
“Personally what I find horrifying and repellent is that a man of your background and education should be so stupid as to believe all this bullshit,” he added.
Bingo, thought Steiner, squirm you little rat and turned to von Preetz, whose lips had pursed to such an extent he thought he had swallowed them with the scones, which he had been devouring with relish.
“I find it most surprising, Stuart, that you find it necessary to defend him and his kind and it just shows you that they will repeat what they did during the First World War in Germany, allow the pure Germans to go out and spill their blood so they can stay rich and safe at home . . . only this time it could be pure English blood which will be expended for them,” von Preetz said with an icy tone.
“Well, I would be prepared to gamble on that and it will give me great pleasure to share tea with you again, only this time looking at you eating it inside a cell,” Sebastian said, making Steiner laugh.
“What are you laughing at, you Kike! You are no better than the vermin which live on the riverbanks here! And you, Stuart, obviously have a stupid crush on this piece of shit otherwise why would you hang around him because it isn’t for his charm, that is for sure!” von Preetz screamed.
With that Sebastian, sure that everyone in the tearoom had heard this outburst, sprang to his feet and hit his German fellow tea traveller with a left hook to the head. As the stunned aristocrat dropped to the floor, Sebastian hit him with a blow to the stomach and pinned the bill to his chest.
“There, that should help your digestion. Come on, Adam, let’s go,” Sebastian said.
With that Stuart and Steiner departed – the owner and waitress having heard the altercation felt justice had been done – leaving von Preetz unconscious on the floor.
Von Preetz, who was never to broach the subject again, at least with Stuart and Steiner, was later found slumped outside the sanatorium doused in alcohol, which had been an extra touch from the waitress of the establishment who had rather fancied the young pugilist of an Englishman. Despite his protestations to the contrary, von Preetz was sent home in disgrace for a fortnight for bringing the good name of the college into disrepute by indulging in drunken brawls.
The friendship between Sebastian and Steiner always slightly bemused others in their College and outside – Stone for one could never get to grips with it – as the two were so radically different to each other.
While Sebastian had the genius within him, he couldn’t be bothered to use it too often on his German and History degrees while Steiner, who was studying Law, worked as if there was no tomorrow, as nothing less would have satisfied his father Benjamin, and indeed there wasn’t much sleep for Adam when Sebastian was too lazy to do his work for him and his sidekick would dutifully write it out for him.
However, the two got rumbled finally by Stone, though as usual with their master it was by accident rather than design. One night doing his rounds he fell through the floorboards and while extricating himself discovered a wire wrapped round his ankle, which he traced back to Steiner’s room and found his “David” as he liked to call him tapping some form of code – it turned out to be for a German literature essay – down to Stuart’s room.
Despite Stone inflicting severe punishments on the two of them – how it pained him as he cast himself drunk and all in the role of King Saul to punish his dear “David” – their merry little working agreement continued in varying different methods, none of which ever again fell prey to their prying master.
However, if there was to be any difference between them it always came back to the central figure of Mirabelle, who ironically Sebastian had introduced to Steiner and whom he had been dating for a year.
Sebastian couldn’t fathom how Mirabelle could be interested in
such a serious and boring fellow, who had failed miserably to show anything but a nice side since he had met him despite Sebastian tutoring him in the arts of tart responses and doing over people who he felt had slighted him.
While several of their contemporaries wondered aloud, albeit out of Sebastian’s hearing, about Steiner having secured Mirabelle’s affection because of his physical attributes, below the belt Sebastian decided to go about it in a more direct fashion and address the issue face to face.
However, he hardly received a satisfactory reply to his question.
“We love each other, that’s all there is to it,” mumbled Steiner.
Many would have been sated by the limp reply but it only made Sebastian, the bastard son born not even into a loveless union but because of an experiment by a thoughtless adventurer, more determined to test the limits of the love his two best friends felt for each other and unwittingly sow the seeds of his ultimate destruction.
“Would you like to join us for the Finals day extravaganza, Sebastian?” Steiner asked his friend, knowing that like the previous year the answer would be yes as his mother never ventured out of London, save to the family’s country house.
While he adored his mother, Sebastian wasn’t upset that she wouldn’t be coming to Oxford’s social event of the year where everyone who was anyone in the English social hierarchy descended on the town and ate expensively assembled picnics on the very grass where so many of England’s finest generals and politicians had tasted their first successes.
Sebastian had become quite accustomed to eating off celebrated turf, as it had been the Duke of Wellington who had remarked that the battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton – though Sebastian treated the remark with some scepticism. However, he had never thought it the right impression to give of a successful person such as he, having lunch with his single mother and did not want that to remain in the minds of the peers and Ministers, let alone their daughters – who descended en masse along with other highflying debutantes in the hope of continuing the tradition of some sort of upmarket breeding ritual to prolong the upper classes’ bloodline.
