I was reclining with delicious languor in my Oxford rooms – do note the plural – surrounded by inscrutably expensive reproductions of tempura frescoes by the lesser known Venetian masters of the High Renaissance (there were three separate Bellinis, you should know) and a mahogany bookshelf stacked with modish yet hopelessly trivial monographs of the very latest literary criticism, when I was of a sudden overcome with a desire for a mid-afternoon session of rare champagne and homo-erotic badinage with my indecent friend Sebastian.
So I dropped my lightly thumbed H.G. Wells novel (a lamentably derivative dirge, as I later discovered, and a perfect waste of my time) and walked in a brisk, effeminate manner to Sebastian's rooms – again, be so gracious as to note the plural – carrying beneath my spindly arms, unsullied by sporting exertion, a tin of shortbread to gift his beloved teddy bear, Sir Catamite the Elder, as part of a general effort to prove to Sebastian and his friends that I was not in fact a middle class sponge of a social parasite with few qualities of my own.
Sebastian was doing something wicked elsewhere, so I helped myself to a fecund bowl of quails' eggs he had thoughtfully placed on his dressing table – one could expect such things of an Oxbridge student in those halcyon days – and with quiet, gluttonous impatience awaited the arrival of one deemed, by common consensus among the many repressed sodomites of my recent acquaintance, exquisite: the sauciest, most iniquitous aesthete then present in that shady, cloistered seat of learning (or should I say, sin).
In preparation for Sebastian I withdrew from the inner pocket of my rough tweed jacket – mark how I flaunted the wearisome injunctions of my cousin Jasper to 'dress as one would in a country house' (the very idea!) – and placed on the dressing table a single-stemmed white rose (to symbolise purity and the transience of youth), a glass bottle of lightly perfumed lubricant, a slim hardback volume of Baudelaire's naughtiest verse, and a crude cardboard parcel containing a young hamster I had christened Sir Catamite the Younger.
Those were innocent days. How heavy our passions, how light our pleasures.
(To be continued.)
Charles Ryder, Oxford, 1923.
So I dropped my lightly thumbed H.G. Wells novel (a lamentably derivative dirge, as I later discovered, and a perfect waste of my time) and walked in a brisk, effeminate manner to Sebastian's rooms – again, be so gracious as to note the plural – carrying beneath my spindly arms, unsullied by sporting exertion, a tin of shortbread to gift his beloved teddy bear, Sir Catamite the Elder, as part of a general effort to prove to Sebastian and his friends that I was not in fact a middle class sponge of a social parasite with few qualities of my own.
Sebastian was doing something wicked elsewhere, so I helped myself to a fecund bowl of quails' eggs he had thoughtfully placed on his dressing table – one could expect such things of an Oxbridge student in those halcyon days – and with quiet, gluttonous impatience awaited the arrival of one deemed, by common consensus among the many repressed sodomites of my recent acquaintance, exquisite: the sauciest, most iniquitous aesthete then present in that shady, cloistered seat of learning (or should I say, sin).
In preparation for Sebastian I withdrew from the inner pocket of my rough tweed jacket – mark how I flaunted the wearisome injunctions of my cousin Jasper to 'dress as one would in a country house' (the very idea!) – and placed on the dressing table a single-stemmed white rose (to symbolise purity and the transience of youth), a glass bottle of lightly perfumed lubricant, a slim hardback volume of Baudelaire's naughtiest verse, and a crude cardboard parcel containing a young hamster I had christened Sir Catamite the Younger.
Those were innocent days. How heavy our passions, how light our pleasures.
(To be continued.)
Charles Ryder, Oxford, 1923.
