Free Too Close to the Sun by Sara Wheeler Page A

noted Alan Parsons, “…was in a street fight in Abingdon. He set about his opponents for twenty minutes or so and enjoyed himself hugely, gigantic and triumphant.” But his nonchalance concealed a state of mental alert. “Under a guise of laziness and even slovenliness,” Parsons continued, “Finch Hatton never let his keen brain rest idle for a moment.”
    At the bookmakers or around the roulette table, Denys thrived on risk. Inheriting the family gene that ruined his uncle George, he had begun betting at school, and quickly found that it took him to a place where reality was blotted out and adrenaline hijacked his functions. Besides danger, he craved the visceral thrill of winning and the challenge of outwitting his opponents. Naturally, he was keen to fill No. 117 with gambling partners. When, in the winter term of his final year, a vacancy came up, he wrote to John Craigie asking if he would like to fill it. Craigie, a bluff golfer three years Denys’s junior who had kept a betting syndicate at Eton, was about to go up to Magdalen. “Denys was such a celebrity,” Craigie recalled, “that Dr Herbert Warren, president of Magdalen, allowed me as a freshman to say yes to this, and forgo my first year in college.” Craigie shared many of Denys’s delinquent tendencies, but even he could not always keep up. He remembered one particular roulette session at No. 117 attended by the mayoral bookmaker John Langley, Count Felix Elston, whose real name was Prince Yusupov, and C. T. Chu, a convivial little man who liked to bruit about the observation that he was “the 52nd heir to the Chinese emperor.” Craigie bailed out halfway through and was awakened the next morning by a gray-faced Feltham announcing, “It’s ’arf past seven, sir, the ball is still rollin’ and the Chinaman’s lost two ’undred.” In a single session, Denys had lost and retrieved his entire annual allowance of £300.
    “In a long life, Denys has remained with me as an almost unique personality,” Craigie recalled in old age. “Above all was the remarkable individuality with which he said and did things, including games…[in golf ] even his swing was unique. He was generous to a degree and greathearted, popular, loyal and forthright. A non-sufferer of fools, he always amusingly chaffed them.”
    By the time Denys left Oxford, he was gambling so ferociously that he was poised over the abyss of self-indulgence—a Prince Hal fallen into the hands of his own Falstaff. But the risks were, over time, to grow exponentially. The terrestrial pleasures of gambling failed to hold Denys down. He took to the air, where the stakes were higher.

    THE YEAR DENYS turned twenty, he fell in love with Catherine Bechet de Balan, a pretty young Frenchwoman a daring five years his senior. Known as both Kitty and Pussy, she spoke English and German without an accent and could hold her own in Spanish and Italian as well. At the age of sixteen, she had moved to London and lived with an aunt who was a friend of Nan’s. Petite and fragile, her skin almost transparent, like a shrimp in sunlight, she had an exotic side, as did many of Denys’s girlfriends, and once traveled around North Africa dressed up in the brocaded costume of a Moroccan beauty. Denys danced attendance when Pussy visited the Winchilseas in Harlech or stayed with Topsy at the family town house, and one summer he and she spent two months walking and fishing in Norway. But she was not his only girlfriend. Through Alan Parsons, he became close to Viola and Iris Tree, whom he met while he was at Eton. The girls were daughters of the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm, who took the additional name of Tree. Although his half brother Max was more famous, Herbert was among the most influential figures in the theatrical world. He and his wife kept a fashionable house in London, and their three daughters—Viola, Iris, and Felicity—moved in the young aristocratic set that circled around the Ribblesdales,