Oliver Russell and David Read had been at school together. They were in the same house, and they became full prefects on the same day, sharing the joys and cares of suddenly being in a position to exercise despotic authority over forty or fifty other boys. It was a civilised school as schools went in the early 1930s, but you could be pretty Draconian if that amused you. Russell tackled the job more robustly, more in his stride, than Read. Read was inclined to be now hard and now soft, to be ashamed and even guilt-ridden over mild routine sadisms, and to bore the housemaster by over-conscientious endeavours. But it all really went quite well. The year ended with the house taking a creditable position in the school at one thing and another. Russell and Read were both popular. Both won scholarships to Oxford.
The achievement took them to different colleges, since when you are after an award you have to go, within limits, where the dons take it into their heads to send you. People seldom complained about the system, an open scholarship being a prestige affair; the equivalent, in the brainy world into which you were moving, of rugger caps and cricket colours. Being quartered on different sides of Oxford’s High Street didn’t much affect the friendship of Russell and Read, who had long before (and even in those formal days) become Olly and David to one another. But it brought Timothy Merton into their joint life and companionship. Tim was at Olly’s college, and it thus came about that, although all three were pretty thick together, Olly and Tim were thicker on the whole. This continued to be so to some extent thereafter, and perhaps the more so because, paradoxically, it was between Tim and David that there existed a closer underlying temperamental affinity. Tim and David continued a little shy of one another, as if not wanting to pry. But for several years Tim, David and Olly were to continue a triumvirate, like chums in a school story.
Rather to the surprise of his friends, it was Olly who took a First in Schools, the other two just missing this tricky distinction. They then all found plausible reasons for continuing their education in Vienna: the Vienna of Chancellor Dollfuss (who was a midget) and the Kreditanstalt bankruptcy. They had thought of Berlin, which precocious writers a few years older than themselves had begun to celebrate in various curious ways. But Tim’s father, who was in the Foreign Office, knew things about Berlin that he didn’t at all like. So the young men closed with Vienna in the interest of a discreet solidarity. Besides, Vienna was a good deal cheaper than Berlin; you could live almost affluently for a year there on the allowance you had barely made do on at Oxford during three eight-week terms. And that wasn’t quite all. They were clever youths, all three; they came of good families, traditional in feeling and cultivated after a fashion; the instinct for rebellion proper to their age didn’t extend to sympathy with, or even tolerance of, anything like a riff-raff, raggle-taggle society. None of them would have been – or at the start would have been – much at home among people whom it would have been impossible to introduce to a sister. Vienna was understood to conduct its affairs with a certain eighteenth-century refinement unknown to Berlin, which was unashamedly vulgar. Olly had been to Berlin with his family, and he said it was quite unbelievable. It was true that on the banks of the Havel at Potsdam there had been naked youths chucking javelins and discuses in an amusing neo-Greek fashion (and even, he swore, picking up chunks of rock and hurling them at each other like the warriors before windy Troy). But the Palace itself was sick-making to anybody who knew Versailles: it would be just the place for this howling maniac Adolf Hitler. Neither Tim nor David had been to Versailles, let alone Potsdam, both happening to have Italomaniac parents, who had dragged them through the Uffizi and the Brera from their tender years. So they had to receive these judgements with respect.
David, who had in fact become first resigned to and then a lover of those artists referred to by his mother as the Old Masters, looked forward to spending a good deal of time in the Kunsthistorisches Hofmuseum. And since he had played the recorder at school he believed himself all agog to hear Vienna’s principal orchestras other than on his old portable gramophone.
Olly, who affected philistinism although he was the best-read of the three, said that you could ride very decent horses for next to nothing in the Prater, skate all winter at the Eislaufverein, and play tennis there for the rest of the year when on a fixed date the ice miraculously vanished and the place turned into dozens of tennis courts instead. You could still dine at Sachers, if you wanted to, in one of the private rooms in which the Grand-dukes had industriously seduced ballet-girls after tanking them up with the imperial Tokay.
Tim was the only one of the three booked for any academically respectable activity in Vienna. His Second in Schools had perplexed and for a time outraged his tutors. But having discovered through a family grapevine that it had been the consequence of some private disaster too delicate to be discussed, they had rallied round in a big way, securing for him various introductions to influential and even exalted persons such as would enable him, he believed, to advance as a diplomatic historian and set Metternich in a clear light once and for all.
This serious purpose apart, what were they chiefly thinking about, all three, as they thus exchanged a familiar Oxford (then an enlarged public school) for an unknown continent? It is a question hard to answer, and which they would have found hard to answer with any seriousness themselves. Olly professed to view their situation in terms of the Grand Tour. Here they were, sent abroad to improve themselves as ornaments of society, but fortunately without that superintendence by a bear-leading tutor which had been prescriptive even when Grand Tourists had been little younger – if younger at all – than themselves. Olly even averred that his parents, worldly-wise as became their station in life, had packed him off to sow his wild oats in regions conveniently remote, and had chosen David and Tim for his companions as discerning in them youths ripe for similar profligacy at the drop of a hat. So time and occasion must be found for low pleasures were the old folks at home not to be let down.
Tim and David played up to this sort of nonsense effectively enough, although each was inclined to wonder why the other could be detected as not terribly liking it. None of the three would very readily have admitted much thinking about sex except when talking about it in a routine bawdy way that grew boring if it went on for long. Had they been questioned on the subject by somebody who must be given an answer, they would have produced a common front on reticent and defensive lines. Sex lay within a category of activities that must definitely be got round to soon. The behaviour of their bodies (including their heads when their heads swam at a mere glimpse of one thing or another) told them that. But the thing required to be slotted in with other activities, physical, intellectual and even aesthetic, which it was taking a good deal of energy to get the hang of. Beyond this – even if so far – they wouldn’t have been communicative. Young American men, of whom there were plenty around Vienna at the time, seemed perpetually absorbed in, and prepared lavishly to discuss, plans for laying this woman or that in a fashion that struck Olly, David and Tim as highly ludicrous and mildly contemptible. The Americans on their part, confronting an attitude so perplexingly compounded of the half-baked and the immature, were inclined to declare that so protracted a latency in the three Britishers simply betrayed the fact that they couldn’t be too well hung. But this, as well as being coarse, was untrue. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any story.