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Francis looked like a degenerate in a Beardsley drawing and talked like a character in a Wilde play. In response to my fascinated inquiry the college porter told me that this exotic incarnation of the spirit of the age was the younger son of the Marquis of Hindhead. The porter spoke reverently. Even in those early days of our Varsity career Francis was acclaimed as ‘a character’.
    I wanted to be ‘a character’ myself, but I was up at Cambridge on a scholarship, my allowance was meagre and I knew none of the right people. Francis, I heard, gave smart little luncheon parties in his rooms and offered his guests caviar and champagne. Barely able to afford even the occasional pint of ale I nursed my jealousy in solitude and spent the whole of my first term wondering how I could ‘get on’.
    ‘If you get on as you should,’ my mother had said to me long ago, ‘then no one will look down on you because I was once in service.’
    I was just thinking in despair that I was doomed to remain a social outcast in that bewitching but cruelly privileged environment when Francis noticed me. I heard him say to the porter as I drew back out of sight on the stairs: ‘Who’s that excessively tall article who looks like a bespectacled lamp-post and wears those perfectly ghastly cheap suits?’ And later he said to me with a benign condescension: ‘The porter mentioned that you told his fortune better than any old fraud in a fair-ground, and it occurred to me that you might be rather amusing.’
    I received an invitation to his next smart little luncheon-party and put myself severely in debt by buying a new suit. The fortune-telling was a success. More invitations followed. Soon I became an object of curiosity, then of respect and finally of fascination; I had discovered that by devoting my psychic gifts to the furtherance of my ambition the closed doors were opening and I had become ‘a character’ at last.
    ‘Darrow’s the most amazing chap,’ said Francis to his latest ‘chère amie’. ‘He reads palms, stops watches without touching them and makes the table waltz around the room during a seance – and now he’s taken to healing! He makes his hands tingle, strokes you in the right place and the next moment you’re resurrected from the dead! He’s got this droll idea that he should be a clergyman but personally I think he was born to be a Harley Street quack – he’d soon have all society beating a path to his door.’
    By that time we were in our final year and I was more ambitious than ever. It was true that I was reading theology out of a genuine interest to learn what the best minds of the past had thought about the God I already considered I knew intimately, but I was also possessed by the desire to ‘get on’ in the Church and I saw an ecclesiastical career as my best chance of self-aggrandisement; I used to dream of an episcopal palace, a seat in the House of Lords and invitations to Windsor Castle. Naturally I had enough sense to keep these worldly thoughtsto myself, but an ambitious man exudes an unmistakable aura and no doubt those responsible for my moral welfare were concerned about me. Various members of the divinity faculty endeavoured to give me the necessary spiritual direction, but I was uninterested in being directed because I was fully confident that I could direct myself. I felt I could communicate with God merely by flicking the right switches in my psyche, but it was a regrettable fact that my interest in God faded as my self-esteem, fuelled by my social success, burgeoned to intoxicating new dimensions.
    ‘How divinely wonderful to see you – I’m in desperate need of a magic healer!’ said Francis’ new ‘chère amie’ when I arrived to ‘dine and sleep’ one weekend at her very grand country house. A widowed twenty-year-old, she had already acquired a ‘fin de siècle’ desire to celebrate her new freedom with as much energy as discretion permitted. ‘Dear Mr Darrow, I have this