Consensual homosexual acts, conducted in private, between men over the age of 21, had become legal in 1965; at that time, although such acts were within the law, they were still widely viewed with disgust by the general public. Gay sex Oscar had decided, quite exceptionally, to beat the three sixth-formers in each other’s presence. During Oscar’s three undergraduate years at Oxford, where he – to his credit – immersed himself in Greats, he sowed wild oats with gay abandon, as he hopped, somewhat peripatetically, from one male conquest to another, never managing to find the right guy, with whom he could develop a stable relationship. His English grandfather, Colonel Henry Conway then died in the year following his wife’s death and left his entire estate, to his daughter, Paulo’s mother, Elizabeth Ann Conway-Alvaro, who had never remarried after the untimely, sudden death of her Brazilian husband. He, thereby, relieved Paulo of the somewhat, nail-biting decision of whether to sell or keep what was an old-established family business, about which he knew nothing. Oscar and he resigned their posts at Churton and Paulo bought a spacious flat for them in the centre of Oxford, where they had first met many years earlier.
