Loose Head Read Online Free Page B

doorway?”
    “Lady Delvemere! What an unexpected pleasure! Just wanted a quick word with Bernie before the party.”
    “What’s he done this time?  Aren’t you going to arrest him?”
    “Nah, let him off with a caution for impersonating a lord, and criminal abuse of a tie.”
    Her eyes sparkled gaily. “Really pathetic, isn’t it? Are you coming to the party? Of course you are – black tie, you look smashing.”
    “Just my usual Wednesday night attire, Jane. Look, I won’t keep you – I know you need to get ready. I’ll see you later.”
    “Right, see you at John’s, then.” And with that heartbreak smile and an airy flutter of her fingers, she was gone from my life. Again.
     
    III
     
    Ten years ago tonight, on a stormy autumn afternoon, Ian Chalmers, the charismatic captain of the Hastewicke Gentlemen, boarded his twin-engine Cessna at Gatwick for a routine business trip to Paris. Instead, he had joined Glenn Miller’s choir invisible. Early the next morning, his business partner, awaiting his arrival, reported him overdue. Two days later, the plane’s tail section was found floating in the Channel. The main wreckage, and Ian’s body, were never recovered.
    The team were shattered. For a time, we considered never playing again. How can you overcome the loss of such a man? Ian was the heart and soul of the team – our unquestioned leader, on and off the field, a rugby player of consummate skill and ferocity, the most charming and loyal of companions off the pitch, the ringleader of a thousand merry pranks, dating back to a time when we were all kids together. He seemed to lead a charmed life – born wealthy and noble, lucky in love and business, unfailingly generous, tall, strong and unfairly handsome, with a charmingly self-effacing sense of humor. And then, one day, he was gone.
    For many months afterwards, the team struggled to come to grips with his death. And then, late one night in the venerable bar of the Hastewicke Gentlemen’s Hampstead clubhouse, John Weathersby, Lord Southhampton, our loose-head prop and newly-elected skipper, rose to his feet. “Here’s to Ian – may all the buxom barmaids in rugby Valhalla vie to fill his horn.”
    We somberly raised our glasses and drank the toast. John remained standing. “Listen. We can’t replace Ian. But we can remember him, as long as one of us has the strength to raise a glass. I propose that we gather together each year on the anniversary of his death, and tell stories about the old bugger. My house, my treat.”
    And so it came to pass that I stood in the sumptuous, candlelit main hall of Penthorne House, John Weathersby’s posh Notting Hill address, on the night of October 11, 2005, with my arms around two of my teammates, clutching a flute of Veuve Cliquot and fighting back the tears. For some reason, I found myself harkening back to the first time I laid eyes on the man who would have such a profound effect on my life.
    Hastewicke, in Devon, is one of the oldest public schools in England, an academic hothouse which, for more than two centuries, has nurtured some of the most exotic blooms of British society: poets and Prime Ministers, saints, scientists and scoundrels, explorers, big-game hunters, and an impressive roster of the mightiest names in Debrett’s Peerage.
    Each year, Hastewicke also admits a handful of scholarship students of humbler means. In the fall of 1969, having attracted the favorable attention of the masters of my neighborhood school, I received the Sir Arthur Nichols Scholarship, and found myself, a skinny little sprog nine years of age, enrolled at Hastewicke.
    I’ll spare you the gory details; suffice to say that life among the sons of the mighty and privileged wasn’t always easy for a publican’s son from East London. There was a series of ugly and humiliating incidents involving the scholarship boys, which culminated in the expulsion of my best mate, a gentle and studious lad named Bill Tanner, when a valuable