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7

Chronologically speaking then, we all by and large leaped off the starting blocks together, Tim and Caro, Ant and I. All got away at the same time. Tim and Caro, as we know, had a minuscule head start, but it didn't take Ant and me long to catch up. Ant, being a gent, went through the motions of buying me drinks and suppers, but under my guidance quickly dispensed with formalities and we soon ended up in bed, where we stayed for the next few weeks. Ant occasionally got up to give a lecture, and I occasionally got up to work in a bookshop, but as a rule, we were horizontal. When we eventually emerged from base camp, sated, smiling foolishly, and blinking in the sunlight, it was to find Tim and Caro waiting for us.

And from the word go, it was a success. We made a good team, the four of us, a good posse. We drank in pubs together, cooked suppers together, went bowling, saw films – three of us knowing each other from the year dot, one of us a new boy, never having heard the jokes, but roaring dutifully, his eyes opening to the lighter side of life.

Ant's background, I discovered, was subdued. The only child of a widowed mother who'd ‘given in rather gratefully’ – Ant's words – to a bout of pneumonia four years ago, assuring her son it was time she went to see his father, he'd had, not an unhappy time of it, but a quiet one.

Tim and I, on the other hand, came from a long line of practical jokers, and Tim was the biggest. He was forever organizing parties at which Ant and I were the only ones to arrive in fancy dress, whilst everyone else was in jeans. We'd walk in and Tim and Caro would shout ‘Surprise!’ and fall about laughing, and I'd fall about too, as Ant stood blinking behind his specs in nothing but a sheet and a crown of thorns. We introduced him to flaming sambucas, setting fire to his coffee beans and roaring when he predictably burned his lips on the glass; we taught him to drive the remains of the car Tim had written off, and which had pride of place in our sitting room; how to take imaginary bends making screeching tyre noises, to have a snog on the back seat: he loved it. He bought into the frivolity, finding it a refreshing change, I think, from tedious faculty drinks parties at the University, where he had to nurse a glass of wine for hours, and where everyone vied to be cleverer than anyone else, whilst the Milligans vied to be sillier.

The only practical joke he did draw the line at was when he went for an interview for Provost at Balliol, and before he went, found a note on his desk saying ‘Don't forget to take your urine sample.’ Off he went and, at the end of the interview, when asked if he had any questions, produced it from his pocket saying uncertainly, ‘Um… what shall I do with this?’

On the whole, though, he found us entertaining. We raced around town in his terrible old Citroën, and even went on holiday in it together, Ant driving, Caro navigating – naturally – through the Dordogne and right down to the coast, whilst Tim and I giggled in the back. Ant, hunched over the steering wheel, would search myopically for signs, as Caro, leaning out of the window, waved down passers-by and asked directions to the beach.

‘Garçon! Garçon!’ she called imperiously on one occasion. ‘Ou est votre bêche?’ She received a horrified stare and a Gallic shrug as her man walked on.

‘You just called him a waiter and asked him where his spade is,’ Ant informed her.

‘Yes, but he got my drift, for heaven's sake,’ Caro muttered, rolling up her window.

It was on that holiday that Tim asked Caro to marry him. I remember them coming back from the beach one day, when Ant and I had been to see a monastery; Tim looking sheepish, Caro pink, keeping it to themselves for a bit – well, like ten minutes – before Caro, unable to resist, blurted out, ‘We've got something to tell you.’

To this day I can remember my heart dropping like a brick through water. My best friend and my brother – of course I was delighted, of course, but… it wasn't me. I hated myself, still do, but even as I was rushing