A Saturday evening in May, , and I am taking a moonlight leak in the garden at Ditchley. Ditchley, with a deer park and a village within its borders, is headed inexorably for the English Heritage Register but for the moment remains the country home of my old friend Marietta FitzGerald and her delightful, fairly recent second husband, Ronald Tree, who is standing a few feet to my left here, in identical posture, his chin in the air as he breathes in traces of boxwood and early primrose.
He is the same Major Metcalfe who proved such a staunch friend to the Prince of Wales at Fort Belvedere during the difficult abdication days, in , and who stood up as best man the following year, when the Prince, reborn as the Duke of Windsor, married Wallis Warfield Simpson in Monts, France. Major Edward Dudley Metcalfe, M.
He and I are in black tie, and the moonlight lies magically on his satin lapels, just as it does on mine. Ronnie is wearing a beige velvet smoking, perfectly O. Good old Fruity. Soon we three will amble back up the terrace steps, toward the tall lighted doors and the sounds of conversation and rattled dice within.
Only it is, we find. Memory stops here. Nothing more can be made of that ancient weekend. Evelyn and I were impostorsβnot members of the bon ton but a visiting, unembarrassed American couple, still in their twenties, on a lucky six-week dive into England and France, mostly paid for by the magazine Holiday , where I was an editor and writer. I was scouting the Continent for writers and picture ideas, or some such scam. We had married in , were separated by the war, and when it was over swiftly acquired New York jobs and friends, an apartment in the upper reaches of Riverside Drive, a two-tone Ford Tudor, a bulldog, and, sixteen months before this, a baby daughter, now in the hands of an affectionate grandmother.
The works. But, given this chance, we grabbed it, booked passage on the slowpoke liner De Grasseβthe only French Line vessel as yet restored to the Atlantic run after the warβand after six entrancing days and nights debarked and did the tourist thing.
