Chapter 1: Prologue Chapter Text

As I reached the top of the hill, I turned and surveyed the landscape. When the army marched in three months before, the place was under snow. Now it was early spring, though the change did little to rejuvenate troop morale, worn down by the perpetual cycle: establish camp in a new location every few months, settle in for preparatory drills and training courses, move on again with no particular articulated goal, other than a vague commitment towards 'maintaining security'.

It was a gruesome grind – at the age of thirty-nine, I began to be old. I felt stiff and weary in the evenings, and turned in early. Despite the three glasses of gin that I regularly took before dinner, I would toss and turn in fitful sleep, and find myself awake and fretful an hour before reveille.

Here, love had died between me and the army. One early morning some weeks ago, as I lay staring, turning over in my mind the items to be done for the day, I realized that I no longer had any curiosity as to what was to come, and possessed no wish to please – all that remained was mere adherence to law and duty and custom.

So it was with indifference that I undertook the direction of my company to our new destination at an unspecified location. On arrival at the train station, we unloaded and transferred the stores and supplies, and climbed aboard the stifling carriages, which conveyed us slowly through the countryside until dark. As part of our training in active service conditions, there was no use of the station or platforms. We disembarked by dropping from the running board to the cinder track. With much grumbling, my men fell in and marched down the road to locate the trucks for driving to our new basecamp.

I was met by Weaver, my second-in-command, who was part of the reconnaissance team for this exercise. "Captain Watson - it's a big stately pile surrounded by pasture and farmland. Nothing else for miles around. Brideshead Castle, I think is its name. Frightfully ornate. Got a fountain with sculptures out in the front and – would you believe it – a Greek temple of some sort in the rear of the house near the stream -"

"Yes, Weaver, I would. I know exactly where we are going. I have been here before."

Weaver gaped at me. "There? To live in? Are you rich?" Then he caught himself, cleared his throat, and hurried through the rest of his report. But I was no longer listening. My mind was being drawn, by an unseen hook and invisible line, through the years, back to when I first laid eyes on the place.

My first visit to Brideshead – one of many to follow - had been with Sherlock, more than twenty years ago, on a brilliant June day. That day too, I did not know where I was heading.

It was towards the end of Eights Week in Oxford, a lively whirl of rowing races down the Isis and College balls bringing in an influx of women, whose unusual presence inspired all manner of folly among the students.

I was about to set out from my rooms for a stroll, when Sherlock swept in and announced, "You are to come away with me at once! I've got a motor-car for the afternoon from Stamford. I know a nice little place where we can hide away with a basket of strawberries and a bottle of Château Peyraguey."

We climbed into an open, two-seater Morris-Cowley, and drove off, basking in the sunlight, much welcome after a cold, dismal spring. Sherlock soon launched into a dissertation on the effect of the weather on strawberries. "The cool spring means the plants have flowered later, and had longer to put down a more extensive root system. Four weeks ago, Mummy mentioned in her letter that the berries were still green from the dreary grey days we've been having. She had the berries sent to Oxford today, which is a fortnight later than she normally has them. All that additional time makes for sweeter, larger, and more complex berries."

At Swindon we turned off the main road, and bumped along some number of unpaved tracks, flanked waist-high with meadowsweet, green laced through with creamy splashes of white blossom. It was about eleven when Sherlock, without warning, stopped the car under a clump of elms. We sat in the shade, ate the strawberries and drank the wine. As Sherlock had promised, they were "heaven together".

Afterwards, we lit fat Turkish cigarettes and laid on our backs. Sherlock's eyes were on the dappled canopy of light and shade above him, following the blue-grey smoke we made as it swirled upwards and disappeared.

"Just the place to bury a crock of gold," mused Sherlock. "I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I was old and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember."

This was my third term since matriculation, but I date my Oxford life from my first meeting with Sherlock, which had happened, by chance, at the start of the week a few days before. We were in different colleges and came from different schools; nor was there any mingling of the company that we kept, but for his getting drunk one evening in my college and of my having ground-floor rooms in the front quadrangle.