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Stein went to the man and confronted him. I went with him to back him up. This was at B.’s father’s offices in Great Titchfield Street. The old man had us thrown out.
    Throughout it all, Stein affected to be aloof and amused. But we who knew him could see that he took the affair hard—the meanness of it and the bitter, small-minded malice. “It’s literature’s loss,” declared one of our fellow pupils one night in Stein’s rooms.
    Stein laughed. “Not to mention England’s.”
    Of course none of us had read his manuscript. Stein had shown it to no one.
    The caucus broke up. We students felt like the disciples at Gethsemane. When Stein asked me to stick around, I imagined he wished to discuss my work in Milton, which was faltering. The rooms cleared out. Stein poured sherry.
    â€œChap, would you consider taking a squint at my manuscript?”
    I was speechless.
    â€œIt would have to be tonight,” said Stein. “You’ll need to read it here. I have no other copy, and I can’t let you take the pages away.”
    It would be my privilege, I said. I only hoped I’d prove worthy.
    â€œDon’t disparage your capacity, Chap. You’ve a keen mind. I can think of no one whose opinion I should value more.”
    I stayed up all night. I read the manuscript straight through, returning to critical passages twice and even three times. The book was far more political than sexual. It was Swift, not Rabelais. Stein’s reach was fearless; the work bore ambition beyond anything I had anticipated. And it was funny. I was terrified of offering some boneheaded critique, particularly now that Stein had demonstrated such faith in me. The tower bell tolled six; I asked Stein if I could have the rest of the morning to order my thoughts. “No,” he said. “It has to be now.”
    We walked down by the river. I proffered reams of conventional praise. Stein chafed. He was getting angry. We had stopped at a bench beneath a row of hornbeam trees. Stein drew on his dead-coals pipe. I took a breath.
    â€œThe book is too good, Stein. Too true, too brave. Too far ahead of anything the public will tolerate. No publisher will have the guts to bring it out, and if they did, the critics would savage it and crucify you.”
    I had dreaded offering this assessment, which I was certain was accurate and which I feared would devastate Stein. Instead, he threw back his head and loosed a great, roaring whoop. “Chapman, my friend, let’s get bloody, stinking pissed!”
    My review, it turned out, had been precisely what Stein had hoped for.
    â€œBy God, if you had offered tamer praise, I’d have leapt in the flipping river.”
    I couldn’t get drunk with Stein that day; I had two examinations and a rowing club meeting to attend. “Why,” I asked him, “did you need me to read this so fast?”
    â€œBecause,” he said, “I’ve joined the army.”
    He took the train to Aldershot that afternoon. The date was February 1939. War with Hitler was only half a year away.

4
    STEIN ENLISTED as a private soldier but was soon summoned forth and commissioned. The army assigned him to the Royal Horse Artillery, the smartest of the gunnery regiments. We celebrated one night in late summer at a pub called the Melbourne in Knightsbridge; Jock with his sweetheart, Sheila, I with Jock’s sister Rose. Stein was fresh out of OCTU—Officer Cadet Training Unit—at Sandhurst. He looked fit and military in his RHA uniform with its single second lieutenant’s pip.
    â€œDo you really have horses,” Rose teased, “in the Royal Horse Artillery?”
    â€œHorses? We’re lucky to have artillery!”
    Stein had orders for Egypt. Wavell’s Army of the Nile was defending Cairo and the Canal from thirteen divisions of Mussolini’s
fascisti,
who were building up in Cyrenaica and outnumbered our fellows by between