The list, which I found lying on the pillow when I went up to my bed, was not long. But it still included some surprises. There were five names and all of them, it seems, had slept with Damian before he had been sterilised en vacances under the hot Portuguese sun. They had also all given birth to a child within the dictated time span. Lucy Dalton was there, I was a little sad to see. I had hoped for better from her, since she had been one of the first to see through Damian’s disguise. Joanna Langley’s inclusion surprised me less. I had been aware of a romance between them at the time and they seemed to me well matched. I’d wondered then why nothing came of it. No doubt I was about to find out. I was not expecting HRH Princess Dagmar of Moravia to figure among the notches on Damian’s bedpost, nor the red-faced, loud, man-eater of the day, Candida Finch, whom I wouldn’t have thought his type at all. Heavens. There was no denying that he got about a bit. Terry Vitkov, on the other hand, was a routine entry on many lists of that year’s conquests, including mine. An American adventuress from the Middle West, she had less money than she liked to suggest and only came to London after exhausting the social possibilities of Cincinnati. Her sexual mores, which would prefigure the next decade rather than, like most of the girls, harking back to a time before our own, ensured that she would be made welcome. At any rate by the boys.
Each name was neatly typed. Next to it was the woman’s current, married surname and, where clarification was needed, the name of the husband. After that came the name, sex and birth date of the child in question with a brief note of any other children in the family. Finally, there was a column of addresses, in some cases two or even three, with telephone numbers and e-mail contacts, although somehow I didn’t imagine much of this was going to be accomplished via the Internet. A covering note at the top, ‘as far as we have been able to ascertain, the details are as follows,’ meant that I could not be wholly confident about the information and some of the entries were much fuller than others, but most of it looked pretty accurate to me. I no longer ran into any of them, but the little that I did know tallied with the contents of the sheet. Behind the paper, held to it with a small clip, was an envelope. This turned out to contain, as promised, a platinum credit card made out in my name.
I breakfasted alone, with what seemed like every newspaper in the known world neatly arranged at the other end of the long table. The butler asked if he might pack, or was there some reason for him to delay this? There wasn’t. He bowed, thrilled with my permission to be of use, but before he left the room to carry out his task he spoke: ‘Mr Baxter wonders if you might have time to look in on him before you leave for the station.’ I can recognise an order when I hear one.
Damian’s bedroom was in a different part of the house from the one I had occupied. A wide gallery from the top of the staircase led towards a pair of double doors, standing half open. I heard my name called as I lifted my hand to knock and found myself in a light, high chamber, lined with panelling painted in a soft gris Trianon. Perhaps I had been expecting some dark, magician’s lair but no, this was clearly the other place, along with the library, where Damian actually lived. A large Georgian mahogany four-poster stood against a tapestry-hung wall, facing a carved rococo chimneypiece, which was in turn surmounted by one of the many Romneys of the lovely Lady Hamilton. Three tall windows looked out across the gardens to what I saw now was a kind of mini-park, with a tidy and impressive display of, I am sure, rare trees. There were inlaid chairs dotted about, and a desk, and little tables piled with books and precious things, and a rather beautiful day bed, of the type that is called a duchesse brisèe, with a folded rug at the end, waiting to make its master comfortable. The whole effect was charming and delicate and curiously feminine, the room of a finer spirit than I would have credited him with.
Damian was in the bed. I did not see him immediately as the shadow of the canopy blurred him for a moment, hunched and crunched up as he was against the pillows, surrounded by letters and another mass of newspapers. I could not help but feel it would be a black day for the local newsagents when Damian shuffled off his mortal coil. ‘You found the list,’ he said.
‘I did.’
‘Were you surprised?’
‘I knew about Joanna. At least I suspected it.’
‘Our main thing was over long before. But I slept with her one last time the night she got back from Lisbon. She came round to my flat. I suppose she wanted to see if I was all right.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
‘We went on from there.’
‘But hadn’t you already got the mumps?’
‘I didn’t develop a sore throat until a few days afterwards and, anyway, apparently you store a certain amount of whatsit, which isn’t affected.’
‘A little too much information.’
‘As you can imagine, I am by this point the world’s greatest living expert.’ He gave a wry chuckle. He was wonderfully unbowed by the whole thing. ‘What about the rest of them?’
‘Well, even I slept with Terry and I’m not exactly surprised by Candida, though I wouldn’t have thought she was your type. But I didn’t suspect the other two.’
‘I suppose you’re disappointed in your old pal, Lucy.’
‘Only because I thought she disliked you as much as I did.’ This made him laugh for the first time that morning. But the effort was painful and we had to wait for a second while he recovered.
‘She was only attracted to people she disliked. All the others she turned into friends. Including you.’ This was probably true in its way, so I didn’t interrupt him. ‘Do you see any of them now?’
It was strange to hear him talk so breezily, when I considered how it had all ended. ‘Not really. One bumps into people. You know how it is. They all married, then?’ It seemed odd, suddenly, that I didn’t know.
‘Yes, for better or, in some cases, very much for worse. Candida’s a widow. Her husband was killed in 9/11. But I’m told they were happy before that.’
Moments like this, when friends from a different era of your life are suddenly forcefully connected to the modern world, can be quite shocking. ‘I’m sorry. Was he American?’
‘English. But he worked for some bank that had its New York office on one of the top floors. It was his bad luck that he was summoned to a meeting there on that day.’
‘God, how awful. Any children?’
‘Two with him. But he couldn’t be the father of the baby I’m interested in. The boy was eight when they married.’
‘I remember she was a single mother. Very courageous.’
‘For a peer’s niece in 1971? You bet. But she was courageous. She was a bit rough but she was punchy. That’s why I liked her.’ He paused, a slight smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. ‘Were there any names missing that you expected to find?’
We stared at each other. ‘Not when the list isn’t complete.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s only the girls who gave birth within the time limit.’
Damian nodded. ‘Of course. That’s right. No, in any other sense it’s not complete.’ But he didn’t elaborate and I so didn’t want him to. ‘You got the card?’
‘Yes. Though I don’t think I’ll need it.’
‘Please don’t be English and silly.’ He sighed. ‘You have no money. I have so much that if I spent a million pounds a day for the rest of my life I wouldn’t dent it. Use the card. Have some fun. Do what you like with it. Take it as your payment. Or my thanks. Or my apology, if you must. But use it.’
‘I don’t have “no” money,’ I said. ‘I just don’t have as much money as you.’ He did not trouble to confirm this and I did not protest further, so I must have been convinced.
‘Do you have any preference as to where I should begin?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘None in the least. Start where you will.’ He paused to take a breath. ‘But please don’t delay more than you have to.’ His speech was coarser and more rasping than it had been the previous evening. Was this usual in the mornings? I wondered. Or is he getting worse? ‘Of course, I don’t want to hurry you,’ he added. What made this poignant, even to me, was his striving to achieve a kind of light courtesy, like something out of a Rattigan comedy. ‘Anyone for tennis?’ he might have said in just such a tone. Or, ‘Who needs a lift to London?’ It was brave. I don’t deny that.
‘I imagine it must take some time,’ I said.
‘Of course. But no more time, please, than it has to take.’
‘Suppose I can’t find any evidence either way?’
‘Eliminate the ones it cannot be. Then we’ll worry about who’s left.’
There was logic in this and I nodded. ‘I still don’t know why I’m doing it.’
‘Because if you refuse, you’ll feel guilty when I die.’
‘Guilty for the child, maybe. Not about you.’ I wouldn’t describe myself as a harsh person in the normal way of things, and I do not completely understand why I was so harsh with him on that morning. The crimes I held against him were old crimes by then, forgotten, or if not forgotten then irrelevant, even to me. That said, he seemed to understand.
My words had died away in the silence between us, when he looked at me quite steadily. ‘I have never had a friend in all my life I cared for more than I cared for you,’ he said.
‘Then why did you do it?’ He misjudged me if he thought these nice, saccharine sentiments would somehow cancel out the memory of his behaviour on the worst evening of my, and I would hope anyone’s, life.
‘I’m not entirely sure.’ He seemed to lose himself in thought for a while, concentrating his gaze on the view beyond the windows. ‘I think I have suffered since I was a child from a kind of claustrophobia of the heart.’ He smiled. ‘The truth is I was always uncomfortable with any kind of love. Most of all when I was the recipient.’
Which is how we left it.
It may sound as if I had been obsessed with all these people, and mainly with Damian, since I had walked off the last dance floor over forty years before, but I had not. Like anyone else, I’d spent the time between dealing with the bewildering illogicality of my life and it had been many years since I had taken the time to consider the way I was, the way we all were. The world we lived in then was a different planet, with different hopes and very different expectations and, like other planets, it had simply drifted away in its own orbit. I glimpsed a few of the girls, now lined and greying matrons, from time to time, at a wedding or a charity function, and we smiled and talked of their children and why they’d left Fulham, and whether Shropshire had proved a success, but we did not tear at the changes in the world around us. I had abandoned that world completely in the years immediately after Portugal and, even after it was all forgotten, I never really went back in. Now, when I thought about it, there were some characters from that time I regretted. Lucy Dalton, for example, had been a great ally of mine. Indeed, it was she who sealed my commitment to the Season. I didn’t like her husband, it is true, and I suppose that’s why we drifted apart, but now that seemed a feeble reason to lose a friend and I decided on the spot to begin my investigations with her. The sheet told me she had moved to Kent, not far from Tunbridge Wells, so it would not be difficult to call her and ask myself for lunch, on the pretext of being ‘in the area.’
I say my commitment had been ‘sealed’ by Lucy for the simple reason that it was at her invitation I attended Queen Charlotte’s Ball, then the official launch of the dances and the central ceremony of the whole business. Not to be there meant one was not quite a full player but I had made no plans to go since I had not originally aimed at full membership. In fact, the ball wasn’t far off when, to my surprise, I received a card from Lady Dalton asking me to join their party. I rang her daughter before I answered. ‘We were taking my cousin, Hugo Grex, but he’s chucked,’ said Lucy without any prevarication. ‘Don’t worry if you can’t come, but say now so we can find someone else. Almost everyone who wants to is already going.’ It was not the most flattering invitation known to man but I was quite curious and I had begun to feel that, when it came to the Season proper, if I was going to do it I might as well do it.
‘No. I’d like to come. Thank you.’
‘Write to Mummy or she’ll think you’re odd. Then she’ll tell you where to be and when. You know it’s white tie?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘See you then if not before.’ She had rung off.
Perhaps because I had not originally intended to be at the ball it came as something of a revelation later that day, to discover that Damian Baxter was already going. In those days students at Magdalene, and in many other colleges no doubt, were not provided with anything so simple as a bedsit. Instead, every student had a sitting room as well as a bedroom, which required a certain spread in the accommodation. That year my rooms were to be found in an old converted cottage, which had been swallowed by the new 1950s quadrangle built round it on the other side of Magdalene Street from the college itself. They were rather charming apartments and I still remember them with affection, but they were in separate parts of the building, so it was a surprise to walk back into the sitting room, having gone to my bedroom for a book, to find Damian standing by the chimneypiece, warming his legs in front of the gurgling gas fire. ‘I gather you’re going to Queen Charlotte’s with the Daltons,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance you could put me up? I really don’t want to struggle back here after that one.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Lucy told me. I said I was in the Waddilove party, so she told me she was going to ring you. I’m rather jealous.’ Now, there was a good deal of information in this statement. More, possibly, than he knew. But then again, perhaps not. Clearly, he had been determined to go to the ball and knowing and I am sure nursing the captive Georgina’s crush on him, he had seen that as a route. But what he was also telling me was that he had been Lucy’s first choice as a replacement when her cousin had dropped out. I was only the fallback, and he wanted me to know it.
‘You never said you were going.’
‘You never asked.’ He pulled a slight grimace. ‘Georgina Waddilove. Yikes.’ We shared a smile, which was shamefully disloyal on my part. ‘Where are you hiring your white tie?’
‘I’ve got my own,’ I said. ‘Inherited from a cousin. I think it still fits. Or it did when I went to a hunt ball last Christmas.’
He nodded a little grumpily. ‘Of course you’ve got your own. I wasn’t thinking.’ The mood had altered slightly. He sipped the sour white wine I had provided him with. ‘I don’t know why I’m going, really.’
‘Why are you going?’ I was genuinely curious.
He thought for a moment. ‘Because I can,’ he said.
The history of costume is, as we know, a fascinating subject in itself and I find it interesting that I will almost certainly live to see the death of one outfit, at least, that was significant enough in its heyday, namely White Tie. From early in the nineteenth century, thanks to Mr Brummell, until the middle of the twentieth, it was the male costume of choice for any Society evening, the club colours of the British aristocracy. When, in the late 1920s, the Duke of Rutland was asked by his brother-in-law if he ever wore a dinner jacket he thought for a moment. ‘When I dine alone with the Duchess in her bedroom,’ he replied.
Of course, it was a surprise to some that it survived the war, since six years of dinner jackets and uniforms might have killed it off, but Christian Dior’s revival of an almost Edwardian style of dress, with his bustles and corsets and paddings and linings, had launched a fashion for sumptuous evening clothes that made the short, dull dinner jacket seem quite inadequate as a pair. Then, in the summer of 1950, the Countess of Leicester gave a ball for her daughter, Lady Anne Coke, at Holkham, which was attended by the King and Queen. The following morning yielded two discoveries. The first was a waiter who had fallen into the fountain and drowned, the second that white tie for men was definitely back. Of course, what Dior and so many others failed to understand was that white tie was not just a costume, it was also a way of life, and it was a way of life that was already dead. White tie belonged to the ancient bargain between the aristocrat and those less fortunate that they would spend much of their day in discomfort in order to promote a convincing and reassuring image of power. After all, splendour and glamour had been inextricably linked to power for centuries, until the comparatively recent appearance of Government by the Drab. Before the first war, among the upper classes, five or six changes a day, for walking, shooting, breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner, were de rigueur at any house party and three at least were necessary for a day in London. They observed these tiresome rituals of dress for the simple reason that they knew once they stopped looking like a ruling class they would soon cease to be a ruling class. Our politicians have only just learned what the toffs have known for a thousand years: Appearance is all.
Why, then, did it die so suddenly? Because they stopped believing in themselves. It was not just the loss of the valet that was to prove fatal to the costume; it was a loss of nerve that gripped the Establishment in 1945, and would continue to undermine their confidence until, by the end of the Seventies, for all but a few their role in our National life, and with it the point of their white tie, was gone. My generation saw the last of it. When I was eighteen, all hunt balls were still white tie, as well as all the May balls at Cambridge and the Commem Balls at Oxford. A few coming-out parties still tried for it and one event where it was worn without dispute was Queen Charlotte’s Ball. Now, when, apart from a state banquet at Buckingham Palace or Windsor, or something rich and rare at one of the Inns of Court, it has almost vanished, it seems strange to think that forty years ago we still got enough use out of our tails for it to be worth owning them.
Queen Charlotte’s Ball was not a private party. It was a large-scale charitable event and, as such, did not conform to the normal rules. To start with, it was what was then called a dinner-dance, meaning that we were to eat there and so we would assemble much earlier than usual. Dinner-dances, in those pre-breathaliser days were thought by some to be rather common, I forget now why, perhaps because they had an air of a night out ‘at the club’ in some Imperial outpost, but on this particular evening there was a ceremony to be got through that was considered sufficient to justify it. The plan was to gather at the Daltons’ London flat in Queensgate, to make sure that the group was all present and correct, and then to move on to Grosvenor House almost immediately.
I rang the bell at the Daltons’ front door, the buzzer (for we already had those) admitted me and I knew their flat was on the ground floor, so there was no long climb ahead. The front door must once have been the door into the dining room, when the newly built house had been home to a prosperous late-Victorian family, but by the 1960s that dining room had been carved up into an entrance hall and a medium-sized drawing room. A few good things, as is the wont of such families, had been spared for the flat, in case we might mistake their rank, and what looked like a Lazlo of Lucy’s grandmother, painted as a girl of nineteen, stared down glassily from above the chimneypiece, which, owing to the division of the room, was awkwardly off centre. The oddness of proportion was enhanced by the fashion, then prevalent, for blocking grates with large flat sheets of hardboard, often, as in this case, with an electric fire placed in front. I cannot think of any vogue in my entire life more guaranteed to kill a room stone dead than this blanking of the fireplace, but we all did it. Like the hideous enclosing of banisters on a staircase, which one found in almost every house divided into flats, it was supposed to make the space look modern and streamlined. It failed.
‘There you are.’ Lucy kissed me briskly. ‘Are you dreading it?’ There were four other girls in the room and, counting Lucy, all five were dressed entirely in white, a survival of the custom of wearing white for a girl’s first presentation at Court before the war. It had not, of course, been continued in the last period of Royal Presentation, which had taken the form of garden parties, and the girls would then wear pretty, summer dresses and wide-brimmed hats, but with the end of that and the installation of Queen Charlotte’s as the official start of the Season, the white rule had been revived. They wore long, white gloves, too, but instead of the Prince of Wales feathers that decorate the heads of both mothers and daughters in all those pre-war photographs by Van Dyck or Lenare, this year, at least, white flowers were worn in the hair, tiaras not being considered proper for unmarried girls. Lady Dalton, I was pleased to see, sported rather a good one, which flashed its fire round the room as she walked towards me, smiling pleasantly.
‘You are kind to come,’ she said, holding out her own gloved hand.
‘You’re very kind to ask me.’
‘Lord knows what we’d have done if you’d said no,’ added a bluff, soldier type, whom I took, correctly, to be Sir Marmaduke. ‘Flag down a bus and just collar someone, I suppose.’ One often suspects that a late invitation signifies that a certain scraping of the barrel has gone on. But it is a little depressing to be told it.
‘Pay no attention,’ said his wife firmly and led me away to where the other young stood. The party was more of an age mixture than usual as most of the mothers and fathers of the girls, if not the boys, were to be with us for the evening, so I met a couple of pleasant enough bankers and their wives, together with a rather pretty, Italian woman, Mrs Wakefield, married to Lady Dalton’s cousin, who’d come up from Shropshire to begin the launch of her youngest daughter, Carla. We moved on to the girls themselves. Among them was a plain and russet-faced character, Candida Finch, whom I’d already met. To be honest, I had found her a bit uphill, but we were programmed in those days to make conversation with anybody nearby and so I fell into the small talk demanded of me without much hardship, naming mutual acquaintances, reminding her that we had both been at this drinks party and that one, although we had never spoken more than a few words to each other before now. She nodded and answered, civilly enough but, as always with her, too loudly, too aggressively and, every now and then, with a sudden, stentorian laugh that made you jump out of your skin. Of course, now I can see that she was very angry at what had happened to her life, but one can be so blind and so heartless in youth. I looked at the grown ups sipping their cocktails at the other end of the room.
‘Is your mother here?’
She shook her head. ‘My mother’s dead. She died when I was a child.’ This was, of course, rather more than I had bargained for and her voice, as she said it, was raw. I muttered vaguely about being sorry and how I must have muddled her with someone else as I thought I’d seen a photograph of them together in a magazine. This time she spoke with considerably more authority. ‘You mean my stepmother. No. She is not here. Thank God.’ There was no mistaking the tone and the expletive at the end was presumably intended to bring me, and anyone standing near us, up to date with the way things were between them. I wonder sometimes why people can be so anxious to share their unsatisfactory domestic situation with strangers. It must be because it is often the only arena where they have the power to say what they think of the people concerned and there is some satisfaction in that. Anyway, I grasped the situation. It was not, after all, a very unusual one.
As I later learned, Candida’s was a sad story. Her mother had been the sister of Serena Gresham’s mother, Lady Claremont, making the girls first cousins, but Mrs Finch had died in her thirties, I don’t think I ever knew what of, and her widowed husband, already rather looked down on in the family, had proceeded, once his tears were dry, to make what was referred to as an ‘unfortunate’ marriage to a former estate agent from Godalming, saddling Candida with an unhelpful stepmother, whom incidentally she detested, and the Claremonts with a nearly-sister-in-law from hell. To make matters worse, when the girl was in her early teens, the father, Mr Finch, had also died, of a heart attack this time, leaving Candida entirely in the clutches of his widow, to whom he had left every penny of what remained of his fortune, as well as custody of his daughter. At this point her aunt, Lady Claremont, had stepped in and tried to take the reins. But Mrs Finch from Godalming was no pushover. She was deaf to any advice on schooling and it was only with the greatest difficulty that her permission had been gained for Candida to do the Season, for which, so one gathered, Lady Claremont was footing the bill. Obviously, all this placed the girl in an invidious position, which one might have sympathised with more, had it not been reflected in her loud and awkward manner. Nor was she helped by her appearance, with her dark, unruly, frizzy hair somehow compounding the complexion of a navvy. She had freckles, too, and a nose straight out of Pinocchio. All in all, Candida Finch had been dealt a tough hand.
‘Right. Time to leave, everyone.’ Lady Dalton clapped her hands firmly. ‘How are we going? Who’s got a car?’ Some of the fathers drained their double martinis and held up their hands.
One detail of the different world I once inhabited that is not often referred to, but which affected every minute of almost every day, was the traffic. That is to say, there wasn’t any. Or none to compare with today’s. The cars one encounters now midmorning on a normal weekday in London would only have been seen at six o’clock on a Friday night in late December, as people were leaving town for Christmas. The whole business of parking being impossible simply hadn’t started. The time you allowed for a journey was the time it would take. London, or the London most of us occupied, was still small and it was rare that one left more than ten minutes before any appointment. In terms of the general stress of being alive, I cannot tell you what a difference it made.
Another contrast with today concerned the area we lived in. To start with, in London, the upper middle, and upper classes had not yet strayed from their traditional nesting grounds of Belgravia, Mayfair and Kensington – or Chelsea, if they were a bit wild. I remember my mother driving me past a very pretty Georgian terrace on the Fulham Road, before one gets to the football ground. I admired the houses and she nodded. ‘They’re charming,’ she said. ‘It’s such a pity no one could ever live here.’ And if Fulham was outside the pale, Clapham, or worse, Wandsworth, had no hold in their lives or on their mental map whatever, other than as the place where their daily lived, or where one might get glass cut or rugs mended or find a cheaper saleroom. This would soon change when my own generation started to marry and the gentrification of the south bank of the Thames would begin. But in the late Sixties it had not quite happened yet. I remember distinctly driving with my parents to have dinner with some impoverished friends of theirs, who, faute de mieux, had bought a house in Battersea, just at the dawn of the new era. As my mother carefully read the scribbled directions to my father at the wheel and the location of our destination became ever clearer, she looked up from the paper. ‘Have they lost their minds?’ she said.
One must remember that, until the middle Sixties at any rate, there was fairly cheap housing to be found in any part of the city, so there was no pressing need to move out. One might not occupy a palace but that didn’t mean one couldn’t stick around. We lived at one time on the corner of Hereford Square and, behind the west side, if you can believe it, lay a small field where someone kept a pony. In the corner of this was a cottage, probably originally part of some stabling arrangement, and in my mid-Fifties childhood it was lived in by a not-very-successful actor and his potter-wife. They were delightful and we saw a lot of them but they must have been as poor as church mice. Still, there they were, living in a cottage on the corner of a fashionable square. The next time I entered that building was thirty years later. It had been rented by a Hollywood star who was shooting a movie at Pinewood. Recently it retailed for seven million. The result of the property boom was not just the dispersal of people from their home territory, but the end of the ‘mix’ in London’s population. Struggling painters and penniless writers no longer live in the mews cottages in Knightsbridge or behind Wilton Crescent, where they would once rub shoulders with countesses and millionaires in the local shops and post office. Teachers and poets and professors and explorers and seamstresses and political subversives have all been driven away. They have been replaced by bankers. And we are the poorer for it.
The Great Room at Grosvenor House was an appropriate setting for the formal opening race of the Season. It twinkled with that now distinctive, self-important, 1960s, sub-deco glamour, so memorably christened ‘Euro-Splendour’ by Stephen Poliakoff. One came through the hall of the hotel on to a kind of gallery, where a wide, aluminium-balustered staircase within the room itself led down towards the gleaming floor below. At the sight of it I was suddenly glad that I had come. It was early June, and a warm night, too warm for the boys’ comfort, really, as our tails in those days were made from woollen cloth, but there is something about a party on a warm summer night that always seems to promise much. Usually more than it delivers.
Some years later, before the end of it all, the Season would have to take account of the exam year and cater for career girls sitting their A levels and the like, but not then. For such a consideration to have been raised by anyone in 1968 would have been regarded as quirky, eccentric and very middle class. Looking back, I realise there was hardly a parent there who thought their daughters’ future would be anything more than an extended repeat of their own present. How can they have been so secure in their expectations? Didn’t it occur to them that more change might be on its way? After all, their generation had lived through enough of it to push the world off its axis.
I stood for a moment against the balustrade. There was something very seductive about looking down from above on a ballroom apparently filled with flower-decked swans. At that moment, whatever the rights and wrongs of the ritual, I confess I was happy to be part of it, as Lucy and I descended together, smiling and nodding in the way one does. From across the room, Serena gave me a slight wave, which was gratifying. ‘Whose table is she on?’ I asked.
Lucy followed my gaze. She did not need to be told whom we were discussing. ‘Her mother’s. She’s the one in blue. The couple talking at the end look like the Marlboroughs and I’m pretty sure the fat one next to Lord Claremont is a princess of Denmark. I seem to remember she’s one of Serena’s godmothers.’ I decided not to push in.
Lucy stopped. ‘There’s your friend, making hay while the sun shines.’ A few yards ahead of us Damian was joking merrily with Joanna Langley.
I wasn’t going to let her get away with that. ‘Your friend, too, I gather,’ I said sharply, which earned me an apologetic glance.
Watching the gossiping couple, somewhat sourly, was the tragic figure of Georgina Waddilove. Pitiful Georgina. The style that was so becoming to almost all the others did not show her to much advantage and she resembled nothing more than an enormous, white blancmange. The flowers sewn on to a mountain of artificial ringlets battened to her head looked like scraps of torn paper caught in a tree. I walked up to where Damian was standing. ‘Have you brought your stuff here?’
Damian nodded. ‘It’s all in the cloakroom.’ He smiled at Joanna. ‘He’s putting me up for the night.’
‘Don’t your parents have a place in London?’ By such questions Joanna would occasionally give herself away. At least she would signify that she was not a founder member of this set-up. I am confident, even at this distance, that there was no malice in her, far from it, but she had not learned to spare someone’s feelings by avoiding any subject that might prove delicate. This was partly because, despite her great expectations, she was not really interested in money. If the reason Damian’s parents did not have a London home was because they could not afford one, she would not have thought any the less of them for that. Which is to say she was possessed of a larger generosity of spirit than most of us. Damian, as usual, was unfazed.
‘No, they haven’t,’ he said, without further qualification. I had not yet noticed it in him, but he never gave out any information about himself unless asked a direct question. Even then it was carefully rationed.
‘I think we’d better sit down.’ Georgina had clearly had just about enough of Damian’s being cornered by Miss Langley, as she would have put it.
I smiled at the object of her irritation. ‘Are you in this party?’
‘With my mother? Of course not.’ Joanna shook her head, laughing, and I found myself watching the movement of her lips. To me, her beauty had a mesmerising perfection, as if one were standing close to a celluloid icon projected on to an invisible screen. ‘You don’t think she would have missed out on the chance of hosting a dinner of her own?’ She nodded at a point further up the room and I could see an eager, bustling, little woman, wearing a good deal of jewellery, who was staring anxiously in our direction. ‘Better go.’ She sauntered away.
‘I suppose you’re going, too,’ said Damian, ‘Think of me.’ The last was added in an annoying half-whisper, just audible enough for Georgina to have caught it, although I am not sure that she did.
‘You didn’t have to be in this group. You could have had my seat if you hadn’t taken the first offer.’ I made no attempt to prevent Lucy hearing this, nor had I intended to, so Damian was able to direct his answer at her.
‘To quote Madame Greffulhe: “Que j’ai jamais su.”’ Lucy laughed. But by now people really were starting to sit down, and so we set out on the journey back to her mother’s table.
‘Who’s Madame What-Not?’ I asked.
‘Marcel Proust used to go to her parties, when he was young. Years later, they asked her what it was like having such a genius in her salon, and she replied: “Que j’ai jamais su!”’
‘If only I’d known.’
‘Precisely.’
I was silent, wondering how Damian knew these things. How did he know Lucy knew them? I learned later it was one of his gifts. Like a squirrel, he would seek out and store any unlikely tidbit, in this case the startling news that Lucy Dalton read Proust, and he would save it for a time when it could be used to create an instant, magic bond that would exclude the others present, making him and whoever his target might be into a cosy club of two. I have seen the trick employed by others, but seldom to such effect. He never misjudged the moment. Lucy smiled. ‘Please don’t tell me you’re surprised.’
‘I am a bit.’ I looked around at the chattering, giggling throng, pulling their chairs up to the tables with their shining, white cloths. ‘I doubt that most of this lot read Proust.’
‘If they did, they wouldn’t tell you. The men here will exaggerate what they know. The women will conceal it.’ I hope these words would not be true now, but I’m afraid they were true then.
She enjoyed my wrong-footed silence, until I was the one to break it. ‘I thought you didn’t like him,’ I said, which seemed a non sequitur, but wasn’t.
She shrugged. ‘I don’t much. Who told you I’d asked him first?’
‘He did. Why? Was it a secret?’
‘No.’ She looked at me. ‘I’m sorry. I should have invited you before him. I must have assumed you’d already be going.’
I nodded genially. ‘That’s all right. Don’t apologise. Why shouldn’t you ask him first? He’s much better looking than I am.’ Which annoyed her as I intended that it should, but the opportunity for rebuttal was gone. We were back with their party and Lady Dalton was pointing us to our allotted chairs. I had been placed between Carla Wakefield and Candida.
During the first course I talked to Carla about whom we both knew and where we’d both studied, about our plans for the summer and the sports we enjoyed, until the half-eaten salmon was taken away and the inevitable chicken was brought in and I turned to my other neighbour. I could see at once that more of the same would not quite answer.
‘You’re very good at this, aren’t you?’ she said and, while it was not exactly voiced in a hostile manner, it wasn’t all that friendly, either.
‘Thank you,’ I replied. She had not, of course, meant it as a compliment, but by taking it as one I hadn’t left her any room for manoeuvre. She glowered at her plate. I tried a more honest approach. ‘If you don’t enjoy it, why are you doing it?’ I asked.
She stared at me. ‘Because my aunt arranged the whole thing before I was given a choice. Because she is the only relative I have who cares whether I live or die. Most of all, because I don’t know what else to do.’ As usual, when discussing her family arrangements she spoke with a kind of ill-repressed fury. ‘My stepmother has had charge of me since I was fourteen, and as a result of her bizarre requirements when it comes to female instruction, I am uneducated, untrained and completely unequipped for any productive work. Now I am supposed to “make a life for myself,” whatever that means. My cousin Serena tells me that things would improve if I knew more people in London. I do not dispute this – only these are not the sort of people I want to know more of.’ With a dismissive snort she indicated the body of the room.
It did seem very hard to have lost both parents by the time she was eighteen, even if Oscar Wilde would have thought it careless. ‘Where were you at school?’
‘Cullingford Grange.’
I had vaguely heard of it. ‘Isn’t that in Hertfordshire?’
Candida nodded. ‘It’s the kind of place where they worry if you’re reading too much, instead of being out in the nice fresh air.’ She rolled her eyes at the strangeness of her stepmother’s choices. ‘I could recite the rules of hockey in my sleep, but unfortunately nothing was taught about literature, mathematics, history, art, politics or life.’ I believed her because her account was only too familiar.
I think, I pray, I come from the last generation of the privileged to pay no attention to the education of their daughters. Even in 1968 there were women’s colleges at Cambridge and Oxford, but they were, as a rule, filled with the daughters of the bourgeois intelligentsia. Posh girls were an oddity and indeed almost the only one I can remember from my own year left after one term to marry a man with a castle in Kent. There were exceptions, but these generally came from families who were known to cherish an eccentric tradition of educating their women, rather than from the run-of-the-mill squireachy. For the rest, parents would scrimp and save to send the boys to Eton or Winchester or Harrow, while their sisters were put into the charge of some alcoholic, Belgian countess, whose main instruction was not to bother the parents.
After leaving, a girl might spend a year at a finishing school where she could polish her languages and her skiing, then another year would pass in coming out, after which she would get a job arranging flowers in the boardroom or cooking lunches for directors or working for her father, until she had discovered Mr Right who, with any luck, would be the heir to Lord Right. And that would be that. Hopefully, the Hon. John Right would be right for Mummy and Daddy, too, since they, like their own parents, would expect to approve the choice. Our mothers may not have been pushed into their marriages in the Thirties and Forties, but they had certainly been kept out of any marriages their parents disapproved of. We all had stories of aunts and great-aunts who had been sent to study painting in Florence, or to live with a grandmother in Scotland, or to improve their French at some mountainous chateau in the Swiss Alps, to break them of a bad love habit and, lest those Barbara Cartland addicts think differently, usually it worked.
I do not mean to imply that all who followed this path were wretched. Lots of them were as happy as clams. They spent the early years of marriage in some part of London their mothers found unlikely, then, if they’d chosen well, they might move into the big house on their father-in-law’s estate (‘Fizzy and I were just rattling around and we thought it was time to let the kids have a go’). For some the father proved stubborn and wouldn’t move out, and for most there wasn’t a house to inherit, so the young couple would generally buy a cottage or a farmhouse or, if things were going really well in the City, a Queen Anne manor house in Gloucestershire or Oxfordshire or Suffolk. After that, he would shoot and complain about politics, they’d both ski and worry about the children, and she would work for charity, entertain and, if things were going less well in the City, sell artificial jewellery to her captive friends. Until the children grew up and it was time first to downsize and then to die. All of which, lest we forget and before we feel too sorry for them, was a lot better than scratching for a living in the dirt of the plains of Uzbekistan.
But where did it leave someone like Candida Finch? She was obviously clever but her appearance and her manner would not help to offset her lack of qualifications to say the least. Nor would I have thought there was any certainty of a husband coming up on the next lift. And there wouldn’t be much money. What were her options? ‘Do you know what you’d like to do?’ I asked.
Again, she rolled her eyes in exasperation. ‘What can I do?’
‘I asked what would you like to do.’
This was enough to soften her a little. It was, after all, a genuine enquiry. ‘I think I might have liked to work in publishing, but I have no degree. And before you suggest I take one now, we both know that won’t happen. It’s too late and I’ve missed it. I thought I might squeeze a few quid out of a godparent and push into a vanity publishing firm, but they’d have to accept they’d lose every penny, and all to buy me the right to talk about publishing at dinner parties. Which is the most I’d achieve.’
‘Be careful you’re not determined to fail in order to annoy your stepmother. It doesn’t sound to me as if she’ll care much either way.’ I nearly didn’t say this, since our very brief acquaintance did not at all justify it, but she laughed.
‘Well, that’s true anyway.’ Her voice was warmer than it had been. ‘You know, you really are quite good at this.’
When dinner was over, by some pre-arranged signal the white-clad debutantes slipped away, leaving the tables occupied only by the parents, the young men and the odd non-deb girl, glum and in colour. It was time for the ceremony that we had come for and while I would not pretend to the ecstasy of anticipation that gripped the mothers throughout the room, the rest of us were quite curious. First, an enormous cake, literally six or seven feet high, was wheeled out on to the centre of the dance floor. Next the Patroness of the Ball arose from her chair with sober grandeur and walked across to stand next to it. I seem to remember that this was always Lady Howard de Walden, but maybe I’m wrong, maybe it alternated with the Duchess of Somewhere. Either way, she was a heavyweight in the scales by which these things are weighed. I don’t actually think the whole thing would have worked if she were not. As it was, her rigid upright posture and the confident dignity of a crowned monarch, which a lot of those women seemed to possess quite naturally then in contrast to so many of their daughters, gave the exercise a certain credibility even before it had begun. The band struck up and we looked towards the head of the staircase, where the Girls of the Year stood lined up in couples, side by side, poised, waiting. Then, slowly, they began to descend at a measured pace, as solemnly as if they were serving at a Pope’s funeral.
Down they came, the lights playing on the white flowers among their gleaming curls, on their long white gloves, on the white lace and silk of their dresses, on their shining, haughty, hopeful faces. Once they had reached the bottom, each pair advanced to where the Patroness stood, dropped into a deep Court curtsey, and moved on. They were not all presented to absolute advantage. Georgina looked like Godzilla in a shroud as she lumbered down towards terra firma. But for most of them there was something almost ethereal in their uniformity. Sixty versions of the Angel of Mons coming down to ease the pain of those beneath.
It may, of course, be with the wisdom of hindsight, but I am fairly sure it was at that precise moment that I first became aware that what we were witnessing did not have long to live. That there would not be many more generations taking part in this performance or, indeed, anything like it. That our parents’ dream of somehow rescuing enough of the old, pre-war world for their children to live in, was a chimera, that I was, in short, witnessing the start of the finish. Funnily enough, and you probably will not believe me, it was an impressive sight. Like all disciplined, synchronised movement, the procession was commanding in its execution, as on and on they came, pair after matched pair, gliding down, curtseying low, moving on. All before a giant cake. Yet it was not ridiculous. It probably sounds ridiculous in the telling. Absurd. Even laughable. I can only say that I was there and it was not.
The display was done. The girls were blooded, their status as this year’s debutantes confirmed and it was time for the dancing to begin. To counter their former solemnity, the band now played a tune at the top of the hit parade of the day, Simple Simon Says, one of those rather exhausting songs, which is full of uninvited instructions for the listener, ‘Put your hands on your head, shake them all about,’ and so on, but, although almost definitively naff, it was quite a good icebreaker. Lucy was already dancing with one of the other men in the party, so I made the offer to Candida and we walked together on to the floor. ‘Who’s that man you were talking to, before dinner?’ she asked. I did not need to follow her eye-line to know the answer.
‘Damian Baxter,’ I said. ‘He’s up at Cambridge with me.’
‘You must introduce us.’ It was at this moment that I first encountered a particularly terrifying part of Candida’s repertoire. Whenever she spotted someone she thought attractive there would ensue a kind of manic, as she thought flirtatious, ritual rather like a Maori dance of welcome, where she would roll her eyes and snicker and rock back and forth with a kind of shouted laugh more suited to a thirsty bricklayer than a young girl coming out. In fairness, I suppose it must have achieved her immediate ends reasonably often, since there could be no doubt as to what was on offer and we were not spoiled for choice in those days, but I do not think, as a routine, it was ever very conducive to long-term commitment, and in fact earned Candida a reputation, by the end of the Season, of being something of a bicycle. I was never treated to this display head on, as she was not at all interested in me, but even for a witness from the stalls it was pretty unnerving.
Following her hungry glance, I looked back to where Damian was standing at the centre of a small but admiring crowd. Serena Gresham was there, laughing, with Carla Wakefield and a couple of girls I did not recognise. Georgina was hanging back in her usual position of resentful witness to the fun of others. I saw now that Andrew Summersby was one of the party and Mrs Waddilove was busily, but ineffectually, trying to draw him into conversation; or, more to the point, she was trying to involve him in a conversation with her own daughter. But neither would play due, I would imagine, to a complete lack of interest on both sides. A friend of mine from Atlanta always called this kind of social interchange ‘Pumping Mud.’ They were watched from the other side of the table by an older woman, presumably another of Mrs Waddilove’s guests, but I did not recognise her. She was an odd specimen, even in that company. Her face was that of a snobbish, Dutch doll, while the weird combination of her unlikely near-black hair, more Benidorm than good old British, with a pair of piercing pale-blue eyes flecked with shades of green and amber, made her look more than slightly mad, half Lizzie Borden, half stoat. She stood very still as she listened to the conversation limping along, but her stillness held a kind of inner threat of danger, a beast of prey, motionless but waiting to spring. ‘Who’s that standing opposite Mrs Waddilove and Andrew Summersby?’
Candida tore her eyes away from feasting on Damian and glanced across. ‘Lady Belton. Andrew’s mother.’ I nodded. I might have guessed since I could now see that his sister, Annabella Warren, was among the girls in the Waddilove group. I looked back at Madame Mère, as she stood surveying the troops. I had heard of Lady Belton but I had not seen her before that night. One glance was enough to endorse the truth of her reputation.
The Countess of Belton was not generally liked, probably because she was not at all likeable. She was stupid, snobbish to the point of dementia and inexplicably arrogant. Admittedly, she was not vain, nor was she extravagant, but she took this to such a degree that it ceased to be a virtue. In fact, that night she was dressed in what looked like the window display of a Sue Ryder shop in West Hartlepool. Later I would come to know and loathe her, but despite all this, in a funny way I cannot quite explain at this distance, she did have something. Perhaps her absolute refusal to bend to her own times gave her a sort of moral conviction. Certainly she stands out vividly in my memory among the mothers of that year, although I had not then met her beleaguered husband, who always seemed to find an excuse to stay away, and I had only chatted, and not much more, to Lord Summersby, the dull and lumpen eldest son and heir. But even without all this information I saw at once that Georgina’s mother was too obvious and her ambition was not realistic.
Watching her flash her smiles between them all and attempt to ensnare her daughter’s interest, Candida spoke my thoughts. ‘Dream on, Mrs Waddilove.’
She was right. This was a hopeless fantasy. It was quite clear to the most casual observer that Lady Belton’s prejudices would never favour a match with the likes of the Waddiloves, however happy she was to dine and drink through that night at their expense. She wouldn’t have dreamed of it, even if the girl had been pretty. That is unless a sum of money had been involved that was roughly equivalent to the combined African National Debt. As for the boy, I already suspected he was incapable of independent thought, in which I would be proved right. But anyway, the sad truth is that Georgina was not the type to inspire reckless love.
We danced on. Like the well-mannered chap I was then, I partnered my hostess, Lady Dalton, a custom universally observed in those days but almost abandoned now. To me, there was always something faintly comic in the practice, as one steered these middle-aged women around the floor, she wishing it were a foxtrot, you longing for it to end, one’s hand resting lightly on the stiffened stays that were usually detectable beneath the fabric of the evening gown, but, funny as I found it, I am not glad the tradition of dancing with one’s friends’ parents has gone. It made a kind of bridge between the generations in our increasingly fragmented society and I suspect we can use all the bridges that are going. ‘Do you know what you’re planning to do when you leave university?’ she said genially, as we stumbled around in our unsyncopated way.
I shook my head. ‘Not really. Not yet.’
‘There isn’t a preordained pattern to be followed?’
Again I answered in the negative. ‘There’s no estate to come, or family business to swallow me up.’
‘What does your father do?’ At the time, in the late 1960s, this question would have bordered on impertinence, since the smart English had not yet abandoned their pretence that one’s professional activity was of minor, and then only personal, interest. But of course Lady Dalton was engaging in research.
‘He’s a diplomat. But the Foreign Office isn’t looking for my type any more, even if I wanted to follow him.’ Which was more or less true. Had I been an exceptional candidate it might have been different, but for the more regular intake the Foreign Office, always a kingdom of its own in Britain, had decided at some point in the sixties that the day of the gentleman ambassador was over, that henceforth the role must be downgraded socially in order, I imagine, to be taken more seriously by the post-war intelligentsia. Either that, or it was a way of shifting their political loyalties. Forty years later, the results of the policy have been mixed, especially since it has not been adopted by the rest of mainland Europe. The British ambassador these days is generally regarded as rather an oddball in the world’s capitals, both by the international brigade and by the Society of whichever city they find themselves in. One would have thought this might have diminished our backstairs influence. But perhaps that was what they were after.
Lady Dalton nodded. ‘It’s going to be so very interesting, seeing which directions you all go in.’ With that the music ended and I walked her back to the table. She was a nice woman and we were friendly for as long as our paths were to cross, but from that moment she had entirely lost interest in me.
Some time around one in the morning the band leader approached the microphone, instructing us to take our partners for the gallop, and by this sign we knew the evening was nearly done. As always, surveying the modern generation, it seems perfectly incredible that we, who were after all simultaneously participating in the swinging sixties, still ended a good many parties with this period romp, but we did. Unlike the Scottish reels that were also part of most of the parties, the gallop was only ever the last dance of the event and it was really just an excuse to show how drunk you were. You seized some luckless girl and raced back and forth across the floor, bumping around, vaguely in time to some loud, rum-ti-tum music, falling over, shouting and generally demonstrating that you were a very good sport. Needless to say there was a rather desperate quality to it, even a sort of lonely sadness, as one watched those shrieking girls up from the country, their ringlets collapsing, their dresses frequently torn, their make-up vanishing beneath a sheen of red jowls and sweat. At any rate for good or ill we, the merrymakers of 1968, danced it and with that, Queen Charlotte’s Ball was over for another year.
My parents’ flat was to be found on the ground floor of a tall house in Wetherby Gardens, a street that runs between South Kensington and Earl’s Court. In those days this was roughly like passing from heaven into hell and it was an important detail to my mother that the flat was considerably nearer the former than the latter. Now, naturally, either end would command a price beyond rubies. Again, much like the Daltons’ London home, the former dining room of the Victorian family for whom it was built had been carved into drawing room, hall and, in our case, kitchen. What had presumably been some sort of library had become a small, dark and rather poky place to eat in, and what must have been a charming morning room, overlooking the small garden attached to the flat and, beyond it, the very large communal garden shared by the block, had been split into two bedrooms, with some unsatisfactory jiggling of the paper wall to get one half of a double door and a reasonable proportion of window into each. Like so many of their generation, my parents were curiously accepting about their accommodation. When, later, in the Seventies and Eighties, we all started pulling down walls and moving bathrooms and converting attics, they watched in semi-horrified wonder, my father, particularly, believing that if God had wanted that shelf in a different place He would have arranged it and who was he to interfere with Providence? It’s odd, really, when one thinks how their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ancestors thought nothing of pulling down ancient family houses to build something more voguish in their place. Maybe it had something to do with rationing or making do during the war.
I was already in bed and asleep when I was summoned back to the surface by the repeated ringing of the doorbell. For a while this took the form of a church bell being rung, for some strange reason, by William Ewart Gladstone, but then I woke up and the ringing continued.
Damian was hugely apologetic. ‘I’m so sorry. I should have asked for a key. Then I thought you’d probably be going on with the rest of us.’
‘Where?’
He shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Round and about. We looked into the Garrison for a drink and then we went to get a sandwich and a cup of coffee from that hut on the other side of Chelsea Bridge.’ As it happens, we would do this quite often as the year wore on, boys and girls in evening dress, queuing at dawn behind the bikers for a bacon butty from the little wooden kiosk in the shadow of the great power station. They were nice people, those motorcycle men, and friendly as a rule, amused rather than affronted by our pampered appearance. I wish them well.
‘Was that the end of it?’
Damian smiled. ‘Not quite. We wound up at the Claremonts’ house.’
‘On Millionaire’s Row.’
‘Next to Kensington Palace.’
I nodded. ‘That’s the one,’ I said. How cool and ordered he looked. He could have been about to go out, rather than coming in after what could only be described as a long night. ‘You have been busy. How did you manage that?’
He shrugged again. ‘Serena suggested it and I didn’t see why not.’ ‘Did you wake up her parents?’
‘Not the mother. Her dad came down and asked us not to make too much noise.’ He looked round the drawing room vaguely.
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Just one, maybe. If you’ll join me.’
I poured out two glasses of whisky and water. ‘Do you want any ice?’ ‘Not for me.’ He was learning fast.
‘What happened to Georgina? Was she with you?’
He could barely suppress a laugh. ‘No, thank the Lord. We didn’t even have to lie. They were dropping off Lady Belton and Andrew at their flat, and Mrs Waddilove wouldn’t let Georgina escape.’
There was something slightly unsatisfactory in this. ‘Poor Georgina. I’m afraid she’s a bit in love with you.’
This time he did laugh. ‘There are many who must carry that burden.’ It seemed to me, in that moment, that to have this kind of self-confidence at the age we then were must be a kind of Paradise. He mistook the envy in my eyes for a trace of disapproval and hurried to reassure me. ‘Come on. I chummed her to Queen Charlotte’s. I’ll always be friendly when we meet. You can’t expect me to marry her because she was the first to ask me to her party.’
Which, of course, I could not and would not. ‘Just be nice to her,’ I said. Then I took him down the passage and showed him into what was usually my own, cramped bedroom. But my parents were in the country and I had chosen to sleep in theirs. ‘Was it what you expected?’ I asked, as we were about to close our respective doors. ‘Or did you disapprove?’
‘I don’t know what I expected.’ Damian thought for a moment. ‘And I’m in no position to disapprove of anything.’ He paused. ‘One thing I do notice and even perhaps envy.’ I waited. ‘You all belong to something, even if it’s hard to define quite what. Contrary to myth, you don’t necessarily all know each other and you certainly don’t all like each other. But you do have some sort of group identity, which I don’t share.’
‘Perhaps you will.’
He shook his head. ‘No, I won’t. But I don’t think I’d want to. Not for much longer, anyway. I have a suspicion that before we’re finished I’ll be the one who belongs to something. And you won’t.’
Which, of course, is exactly what happened.
I cannot tell you with any real exactitude whether it made me laugh or cry when I heard, late in 1970, that Lucy Dalton was going to marry Philip Rawnsley-Price. I do remember it came as something of a shock. It was not only his awkward and unsubtle courtship, of her and every other girl who would stop to listen, that made him so unsatisfactory a character. He was born unsatisfactory. He had one of those flat faces, like a carnival mask that had been dropped in the road and run over by a heavy lorry. His skin was sallow, verging on olive, but this did not, as it might have, give him an exotic quality. Rather, he resembled an ailing Mediterranean lift attendant, with round, moist eyes resting in a pool of wrinkles, two fried eggs in fat. After what seemed a very short engagement I was invited to the wedding and I went, but it was a restrained and slightly bewildering affair. Lady Dalton was not her usual, cheery self, as she kissed and handed us down the line, and while all the usual forms were observed – the ancient village church, the marquee on the lawn, the plates of unappetising nibbles, the rather good champagne – none of it seemed to be celebrated with much brio. Even the speeches were pretty formulaic, the only memorable bit being when Lucy’s aged uncle forgot what he was doing and addressed us as ‘fellow members,’ though quite what he thought we were fellow members of was never revealed.
Obviously, all of the above became comprehensible when Lucy was delivered of a baby girl early the following year. I saw the couple for a bit after that, kitchen suppers with other girls like her and boys like me, but long before the Sloane Ranger Handbook had given that tribe a name and an identity. In my day they were just the girls in pearls and we were the chinless wonders. But I never thought much of Philip, even after the dancing was done and we had all begun to grow up a little. He was one of those who manage to combine almost total failure with breathtaking arrogance and in the end life gently separated us. Besides, they had enthusiastically embraced the Sixties (which, as we know, largely took place during the Seventies) and like many others had to find ways of dealing with the disappointment that set in once it had become clear that the Age of Aquarius was not going to happen after all. They moved out of London while Philip went through a series of jobs or, as he would put it, careers, the last of which, I now learned, was some sort of farm shop that he and Lucy had opened in Kent. By that stage catering, ‘hospitality,’ sportswear and, I think, a variation of property development had all played their part, so it was hard to feel optimistic in the long term and I was curious to learn if the number on the list still worked, when I rang her for the first time in, I should imagine, at least thirty years. But Lucy answered and, after our initial joshing, I explained that I was going to be in her neighbourhood the following week and I thought it would be fun to look in and catch up. There was a slight silence at the proposal. Then she spoke again. ‘Of course. How lovely. What day were you thinking of?’
‘Up to you. I’ll fit my other stuff round whenever you’re free.’ Which was unfair of me, but I suspected that if I had been specific it would have been the one day she couldn’t manage. This way there was no alternative but to give in gracefully.
‘Don’t expect much to eat. I’m no better in the kitchen than when we last met.’
‘I just want to see where you live.’
‘I’m flattered.’ She didn’t sound very flattered but even so, the Thursday after that, I found myself bowling through the Kent lanes on my way to Peckham Bush.
I followed the directions, through the centre and out the other side, until eventually I turned into a gap between two high hedges and drove down a bumpy track into a former farmyard. Large signs pointed me to a brightly lit shop and showed me to a car park with a surfeit of empty spaces, but the old, red-tiled farmhouse lay a little beyond this commercial centre, so I stopped outside that instead. I wasn’t out of the car before Lucy emerged. ‘Well, hello,’ she said. We had not seen each other, as I have explained, for many years, and it is only by such long gaps that we can chart the cruelty of time as well as, in this case, disappointment.
Things were not always so for her. In what I now see was the restrained manner of the days of our youth, she had been a modest darling of the media in her way, an early ‘It Girl,’ a precursor of the celebrity culture that was soon to overwhelm us. The point was that, unlike most of the girls, she had embraced the trendy Swinging Sixties to quite a degree, if not so fiercely as to frighten the mothers. She wore miniskirts that were slightly shorter and eyeliner that was slightly blacker, and she would give quotes to make journalists laugh. She would praise ‘those darling train robbers’ or declare Che Guevara the world’s sexiest martyr. Once she was asked for her happiest moment and she replied it was when P. J. Proby split his jeans which made a headline in the Evening Standard. It was soft rebellion, drawing-room subversion, an endorsement of every value that would destroy her kind, but done with a cheeky grin. It played well and raised her profile and, during the Season, there had been model shoots and photographs on those feature pages in the Tatler, that read today like a message from the Land that Time Forgot: ‘This Year’s Debs,’ ‘Fashions to Watch,’ ‘The Young Trend Setters,’ and so on. Lord Lichfield asked to take her picture and was accepted, and I distinctly recall some now forgotten television ‘personality’ (a concept so new as to be barely dry) inviting her on to his show. She declined, of course, at the insistence of her mother, but even the request had given her a certain cachet.
Of all this fun and bubble there remained not a trace in the sad, tired face before me. She still wore her shoulder-length hair loose, but the bounce had gone, and it was lank, thin and greying. Her clothes, which had once been racy, were now just old: old jeans, old shirt, old scuffed shoes. They covered her nakedness and that was all. Even her make-up was no more than a tired acknowledgement that she was female. She nodded towards the house. ‘Come in.’
After this beginning it was almost a relief to see that time had not converted her to domesticity. In fact, it looked as if a terrorist bomb had just exploded in the hall, blowing every possession of the family into a new and illogical place. There is a kind of messy house that cannot quite be explained by the laziness of the occupants; where a sort of anger, a protest against the values of the world, seems to be involved in its brand of farrago, and I would pay Lucy the compliment of thinking this was one of them. The whole place seemed to have been decorated in the very worst years of the 1970s, with bold, depressing designs in brown and orange, framed posters of over-praised films and a good deal of cane and Indian weave. The kitchen was predictably pine-slatted with terracotta, tiled surfaces, the grouting blackened with filth. Its walls were lined with lots of shelves supporting a jumble of non-matching mugs, pictures of the children, ornaments won at long-ago fairs, pages of magazines torn out for some lost reason. And dirt. Lucy looked around, seeing it all with fresh eyes, as one does when a stranger arrives. ‘Jesus. I’m afraid we’re in rather a pickle. Let me give you a drink and we’ll get out of here.’ She fished about in the large refrigerator, found a huge, half-empty bottle of Pinot Grigio and, grabbing two cloudy, furry-looking glasses from beneath the sink, led the way into what must have been the parlour of the farmer’s wife who lived here once, so tidily, before the world turned upside down.
If anything, the drab, disintegrating chaos was even more dispiriting than in the other rooms I had passed through, with tired, crocheted rugs strewn over the lumpy, disconnected chairs and sofas, and a bookshelf made from planks of wood and bricks. Quite a nice portrait of a young woman in the 1890s hung skew-whiff above the chimneypiece, making an improbable status statement from another time and another place. Two invitations and a bill were jammed into its chipped frame. Lucy followed my eyes. ‘My mother gave me that. She thought it might help make the room more normal.’ She leant forward and straightened it.
‘Who is it?’
‘My great-grandmother, I think. I’m not sure.’ For a second I thought of that earlier Lady Dalton, coming in from riding, dressing for luncheon, deadheading the roses. What would she make of her role in this dustbin?
‘Where’s Philip?’
‘In the shop, I’m afraid. He really can’t leave it. I’m going to give you some lunch, then we’ll walk over together.’ She sipped her wine.
‘How’s the shop going?’ I grinned brightly. In fact, I could feel myself consciously trying to inject a perky quality into my speech, though whether I was attempting to cheer her up, or myself, I could not tell you.
‘Oh, all right,’ she smiled vaguely. ‘I think.’ Obviously yet another of Philip’s ventures was about to bite the dust. ‘The thing is, a shop ties one down so much. Before we started I thought it would be friends coming in all the time for a chat, and having cups of tea and baking cakes and things, but it isn’t. One just stands there, hour after hour, talking to complete strangers who never know what they want. And by the time you pay for everything, you know, the stock and the people who help and so on, there’s only about threepence left.’ She pronounced ‘threepence’ in the old way: ‘Thruppence.’ For a moment, I felt quite nostalgic.
‘What will you do if you pack it in?’
She shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. Philip’s got some idea about renting paintings to people.’
‘What paintings? To which people?’
‘I know,’ she acknowledged my query disloyally. ‘I don’t understand it, either. He thinks there might be quite a lot of money in it, but I can’t see how. Are you OK with pasta?’
I followed her back into the germ-rich kitchen and watched her take small bowls filled with leftover, dark, half-eaten things out of the fridge. She set about shuffling plates and banging saucepans together as she organised our feed. ‘How’s your mother?’ I asked.
Lucy nodded ruminatively, as if somehow this question had already been the subject of a long consideration. ‘Fine. Good.’ She looked across at me. ‘You know they sold Hurstwood?’
‘No, I didn’t. I’m sorry.’
She shook her head firmly from left to right. ‘Don’t be.’ She wasn’t having any of that. ‘Best thing that could have happened.’ Having rapped this out as severely as a Tsarist ukase to get the point of no regret across, she allowed herself to relax and elaborate. ‘It was about four years ago and of course it was terribly boo-hoo when it was going on, but there was no alternative. Not when Daddy did the sums. And the bonus is that they’re completely free now, for the first time in their lives. Johnny was never very interested in taking over, so it really is…’ She hesitated, trying to find a word she had not already employed that would support her argument effectively. She failed. ‘It’s fine.’
This phenomenon, where the losers in a revolution try to demonstrate their support for, and approval of, the changes that have destroyed them, always fascinates me. I suppose it is an offshoot of the Stockholm Syndrome, where kidnap victims start to defend their captors. Certainly, we’ve seen and heard a lot of it over the past few decades, especially among those toffs who are determined to show they are not being left behind. ‘We mustn’t cling on to the past,’ they say cheerily, ‘we have to move with the times.’ When the only movement possible for them, once all their values have been denigrated and destroyed, is down and out. ‘Where are they living?’ I asked.
‘Quite near Cheyne Walk. They’ve got a flat in one of those blocks.’
‘And Johnny and Diana? What happened to them?’ I had got to know Lucy’s brother and sister as the Season went on, not all that well, but enough to smile and kiss when we met.
‘Johnny’s got a restaurant. In Fulham. At least, he had a restaurant in Fulham. When I last spoke to him it sounded as if it was all going a bit off piste. But he’ll be OK. He’s always full of ideas.’
‘Is he married?’
‘Divorced. Two boys, but they live with his ex quite near Colchester, which is a bit trying. Mummy made a terrific effort at the beginning. But you know what it’s like, it meant hours on the train for the kids and all they ever wanted to do when they got to her was go home. So she’s slightly given up at the moment, but she says it’ll be much easier when they’ve grown up a bit.’ Lucy brought over the unappetising plates of yellow-grey pasta, smeared with what looked like the guts of a rabbit, and laid mine reverently before me. The world-weary bottle of Pinot Grigio was back in play.
‘What was his wife like?’ I lifted my fork without enthusiasm.
‘Gerda? Rather dull, to be honest, but not horrible or anything. She wasn’t someone you’d know. She’s Swedish. They met at Glastonbury. I quite liked her, actually, and the whole split was very civilised. They just didn’t have anything in common. She’s married to a neurosurgeon now, which seems to be much more the ticket.’
‘What about Diana?’ I always thought Lucy’s elder sister was the more beautiful of the two. She looked like a young Deborah Kerr and, unlike her more frenetic sibling, she had a sort of serenity unusual in someone of her age. We all thought of her as quite a catch and, to her mother’s unfeigned delight, she’d been heavily involved with the heir to a borders earldom when I knew them, though I had heard since that this hadn’t, in the end, come off. I noticed the question had penetrated Lucy’s armour slightly and I understood before I was told that all was not well here either. Time, it seemed, had been unkind to all the Daltons. ‘I’m afraid Diana’s not too good just now. She’s divorced as well, but hers was pretty grim.’
‘I know she didn’t marry Peter Berwick.’
‘No. More’s the pity, though I never thought I’d say it. He was always so stuck up and tedious when they were going out, but now, glimpsed across the chasm of the years, he seems like Paradise Lost. Her husband was American. You wouldn’t know him either. Nor would I, if I didn’t have to. They met in Los Angeles and he keeps promising to go back there, but he hasn’t so far. Worse luck.’
I had a sudden, vivid memory of Diana Dalton laughing at a joke I had told her. We were next to each other in the dining room at Hurstwood, before going on to a ball somewhere nearby. She was drinking at the time and did a massive nose trick, right into the lap of the Lord Lieutenant, seated blamelessly on her other side. ‘Did she have any children?’
‘Two. But of course they’re grown up now. One’s in Australia and the other’s working on a kibbutz near Tel Aviv. It’s annoying because since she’s been in the Priory the whole thing has landed on me and Mummy.’
One more sentence and I would have cried. Poor Lady Dalton. Poor Sir Marmaduke. What had they done to merit this annihilation by the furies? When I last saw them they were model representatives of the class that had run the Empire. They managed their estates, played their part in the county, frightened the village and generally did their duty. And I knew too well they had dreamed of a future for their children that would have consisted of much the same. Certainly their reveries bore no resemblance to what had actually come to pass. I thought of Lady Dalton at Queen Charlotte’s, gently probing me about my prospects. What splendid marriages she had planned for her two daughters, pretty and funny and well-born as they were. Would it have damaged the universe if just one of her wishes had come true? Instead, in forty years the entire Dalton edifice, centuries in the building, had come crashing down into the street. Their money was gone, and what little was left would soon be gobbled up by a feckless son and a reckless son-in-law. That’s if the Priory fees didn’t drain the pot dry before then. And the crimes that merited this punishment? The parents had not understood how to manage the changes the years would bring, and the children, all three of them, had believed the siren song of the Sixties, and invested everything in the brave new world they were so mendaciously promised.
There was a noise at the door. ‘Mum. Have you got it?’ I looked up. A young woman of about twenty was standing there. She was tall and would have been quite good looking, had she not been encased in an angry mist, irritated and impatient, as if we were needlessly keeping her waiting. Not for the first time I was struck by the phenomenon, another by-product of the social revolution of the last four decades, whereby parents these days frequently belong to an entirely different social class from their children. Obviously, this was Lucy’s daughter, but she spoke with a south London accent, harsh and unlovely in its delivery, and her plaited hair and rough clothes would have told a stranger of long, hard struggles on an under-supported housing estate, not weekends with her grandfather, the baronet. Having known Lucy at roughly the same age, I can testify that they could have come from different galaxies for all they shared. Why don’t parents mind this? Or don’t they notice it? Isn’t the desire to bring up your young with the habits and customs of your own tribe one of the most fundamental imperatives in the animal kingdom? Nor is this restricted to any one part of our society. Everywhere in modern Britain parents are raising cuckoos, aliens from a foreign place.
The newcomer paid no attention to me. She was obviously solely concerned in obtaining an answer to her query. ‘Did you get it, Mum?’ The words hung sharply in the air.
Lucy nodded. ‘I’ve got it. But they only had it in blue.’
‘Oh, no.’ I write ‘Oh, no,’ but, in truth, it was much nearer ‘ow now.’ She sounded like Eliza Doolittle before Higgins has taken her on. ‘I wanted the pink one. I told you I wanted the pink one [i.e. Oi wan’ed ve pink wun].’
Lucy’s even, patient tone never wavered throughout. ‘They didn’t have any left in pink, so I thought blue was better than nothing.’
‘Well, you were wrong.’ The girl flounced off, sighing and stamping her way upstairs.
Lucy looked at me. ‘Do you have children?’
I shook my head. ‘I never married.’
She laughed. ‘Not quite the same thing these days.’
‘Well, I haven’t.’
‘They drive you completely mad. But of course one couldn’t do without them.’
I felt I could do without the recent exhibit pretty easily. ‘How many have you got?’
‘Three. Margaret’s the oldest. She’s thirty-seven and a farmer’s wife. Then there’s Richard, who’s thirty and trying to get into the music business. And that one. Kitty. Our surprise.’
Needless to say, the eldest was the object of my special interest. ‘And Margaret’s marriage has turned out well?’
Lucy nodded. ‘I think so. Her husband’s not very exciting, to be honest, but nobody’s perfect and he is quite… steady. That seems to be what she wants.’ Thank heaven for small mercies, I thought. ‘They’ve got four children and she still runs her own business. I can’t imagine how she manages, but she has sixty times as much energy as any of the rest of us.’ An image of Damian hovered over the table.
‘They’re quite spaced out, then. The children.’
‘Yes. Mad, really. Just when one thinks the days of bottle warmers and carting cots round the country are over they begin again. For twenty years, whenever we loaded the car for a weekend away, we looked like refugees trying to get out of Prague ahead of the Russians.’ She laughed at the memory. ‘Of course, I never meant to start quite so early, but when Margaret-’ She broke off, her laugh tapering to a nervous little giggle.
‘When Margaret what?’
Lucy gave me a shy glance. ‘People don’t mind these days so much, but she was already on the way when we got married.’
‘I hate to shock you, but most of us had worked out that few healthy babies are born at five months.’
She acknowledged this with a nod. ‘Of course. It’s just one didn’t talk about it then. It all got lost in the wash.’ She thought for a moment, then looked up at me. ‘Do you ever see anyone from those days? I mean, what brought on this sudden interest?’
I shrugged as nonchalantly as I could manage. ‘I don’t know. I looked at the map and saw I was passing your front door.’
‘But whom do you keep up with?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m in a different crowd now. I’m a writer. I get asked to publishers’ parties and PEN quiz nights and the Bad Sex Awards. My days of making small talk with countesses from Shropshire are done.’
‘Aren’t everyone’s?’
‘I still shoot occasionally. When I’m asked. That’s when some red-faced major comes staggering across the room and says “Weren’t we at school together?” or “Didn’t you come to my sister’s dance?” I never get over it. I’m always shocked into silence that I could belong to the same generation as this boring, bibulous old fart.’ She did not answer, sensing my evasion. ‘I do run into some familiar faces occasionally. I saw Serena at a charity thing not long ago.’
This seemed to confirm an unraised issue. ‘Yes, I thought you might have stayed in touch with Serena.’
‘But I haven’t. Not really.’ She raised an eyebrow quizzically and so, to move things on, I volunteered: ‘As a matter of fact I saw Damian Baxter quite recently. Do you remember him?’
The last question was redundant. She had changed colour. ‘Of course I remember him. I was there, remember.’
I nodded. ‘Of course you were.’
‘Anyway, even without that nobody forgets the Heartbreaker of the Year.’ This time her laugh had a slightly bitter twinge. ‘I gather he’s terribly rich now.’
‘Terribly rich and terribly ill.’
Which sobered her up. ‘I’m sorry. Is he going to be all right?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Oh.’ This information appeared to put her bitterness back into its cage, and she became more philosophical. ‘It used to make me laugh to think how our mothers steered us away from him. Had they but known at the time, he was almost the only man we ever danced with who could have kept the show on the road. Did he marry?’
‘Yes, but not for long and no one you’d know.’
She absorbed this. ‘I was terribly keen on him.’
I found myself becoming rather irritated by my own apparent ignorance. ‘You wouldn’t have known it,’ I said.
‘That was only because you were starting to hate him by that stage. I’d never have dared tell you. Are you disappointed in me?’
‘A bit. You always pretended to dislike him as much as I did. Even before. Even when he and I were friends.’
She passed easily over my contradiction. ‘Well…’ Her voice had now progressed through philosophical to wistful. ‘It was a long time ago.’ Then, as if ashamed of her momentary retreat, she rallied. ‘I’d have married him if he’d proposed.’
‘What would your mother have said about that?’
‘I wouldn’t have cared what she said. In fact, at one point I thought I was going to have to force him.’ This was accompanied by a little, indignant puff. I looked at her, waiting for an explanation. She smirked. ‘When I started Margaret I wasn’t completely sure whose she was.’ Naturally, this almost made me cry out. Could I have scored a goal with the very first kick? It was with some difficulty that I kept quiet and let her finish her story. ‘I wasn’t really going out with Damian at that stage, but then there was a moment, one afternoon in Estoril.’ She gave an embarrassed giggle. ‘You were all on the terrace and I sneaked off, and…’ I suppose I must have looked disapproving in some way as she gave a little, comic snort. ‘It was the Sixties! Did we use the term “Wild Child”? Had it been invented by then? I can’t remember. Anyway, I suppose I was one. It’s funny, because Margaret is much the straightest of my children. The only one who’s straight at all, really.’
This was a familiar situation to me. ‘Our parents used to talk about the problem child in any family,’ I said. ‘Now, it seems to be more the norm to have one child who isn’t a problem. If you’re lucky.’
Lucy laughed. ‘Well, that’s Margaret in this house. It’s odd, when you think of it, because we had quite a scare with her when she was little.’
‘What sort of scare?’
‘Heart. Which seems so cruel for a child, doesn’t it? She developed something called familial hypercholesterolaemia.’
‘Blimey.’
‘I know. It was about a month before I even learned to say it.’
‘It trips off your tongue now.’
‘You know how it is. At the start you can’t pronounce it and by the end you’re qualified to open a clinic.’ She vanished momentarily into that never quite forgotten, terrible episode in her life. ‘Funny. I can almost laugh about it, but it was unbelievably ghastly at the time. It means you’re making far too much cholesterol, which eventually gives you a heart attack and kills you. Of course, nowadays no sentence is complete without that word but then it was foreign and frightening. And apparently it had always been more or less a hundred per cent fatal. The first doctor who diagnosed it in Margaret, at some hospital in Stoke, thought it still was. So you can imagine what we went through.’
‘What were you doing in Stoke?’
‘I can’t remember now. Oh, I think Philip had an idea of reviving a china factory. It didn’t last long.’ I’d had another glimpse of the tangled odyssey that was Philip’s non-career. ‘Anyway, my mother turned up and scooped us off to a specialist in Harley Street and the news improved.’
‘So it was treatable by the time Margaret had it?’
She nodded, reliving her relief. ‘Completely, thank God. But only just. Literally, it had all changed something like four years before. It took us ages to get over the shock. We were both in the grip of terror for months. I remember getting up one night and finding Philip bending over her cot and crying. We never talk about it now, but whenever I get cross with him I secretly think of that moment and forgive him.’ She hesitated, contradicted inwardly by the Spirit of Honesty. ‘Or I try to,’ she added. I nodded. I could easily see why. The Philip who wept for his innocent child in a darkened nursery sounded not only much nicer but a thousand times more interesting than the ballroom show-off I had known. Lucy was still talking. ‘What we couldn’t understand was that we kept being told it was completely hereditary, but neither of us had any knowledge of its occurring in our families. We questioned our parents and so on, but there was no clue. Still, as I say, Mummy found us a wonderful doctor and once we’d nailed it properly it came right.’ She paused. I would guess she didn’t venture into this territory very often. ‘I always think that Margaret’s passion for normal, ordinary life was probably fostered by that early threat of losing it. Don’t you agree?’
Obviously, this entire speech went straight to the heart of the case that had brought me to Kent, but before I could say another word I was aware of a presence in the door. ‘Hello, stranger.’ The battered, bloated figure of a man who bore only the slightest resemblance to the boy I had known as Philip Rawnsley-Price was standing there. In our salad days Philip had resembled a young and much better-looking, cheeky-chappy actor called Barry Evans, famous then for a film, Round the Mulberry Bush, in which he represented those of us who wanted to be trendy but didn’t quite know how, a large group at any time, which ensured his popularity. Sadly, his stardom didn’t last and the former actor was found dead in the company of an empty whisky bottle at the age of fifty-two, having spent the previous three years driving a taxi in Leicester. I seem to recall there was some pressure on the police to investigate the circumstances of Evans’s death, involving, as they did, cut telephone wires and other peculiar details, which naturally gave his relatives concern, but the police could not be bothered. A decision that might, I imagine, have been different had the unfortunate Mr Evans died at the peak of his fame.
Looking at Philip, framed in the doorway, it was hard not to feel at that moment, that the fate which had engulfed him was almost as bad. He wore ancient, stained cords, scuffed loafers and an open-necked check shirt with a worn, frayed collar. Old clothes were obviously a family uniform. Like me, he had put on weight and his hair was thinning. Unlike me, he had developed the mottled red face of a drinker. More than anything it was the sagging, tired look about those poached-egg eyes, so characteristic of the born privileged who fail, that gave him away. He held out his hand with what he imagined to be a roguish grin. ‘Good to see you, old chap. What brings you to this part of the forest?’ He took hold of my fingers and gave them the ruthless, wince-making squeeze that such men use in a vain attempt to persuade you they are still in charge. Lucy, having waxed so lyrical about him, now seemed put out to be interrupted.
‘What are you doing here? We were coming over as soon as we’d finished lunch. Who’s in the shop?’
‘Gwen.’
‘On her own?’ Her voice was sharp and admonitory. And it was directed to include me. It was obviously her deliberate intention to show me that her husband was an incompetent fool. One minute earlier we had been swept up in the moving pathos of the tear-drenched daddy, but now it was apparently necessary for Lucy to point out that things had not gone wrong in their lives because of her. On the face of it this behaviour was of course illogical and contradictory, but among these people it is not uncommon. Their marriage had clearly reached that stage where she, and probably he, could be generous and gallant about the other when they were apart, but the actual physical presence of their partner would set their teeth on edge. This emotional conundrum often occurs in a culture where divorce is still seen as essentially giving in. Even today, the upper and upper middle classes find personal unhappiness, at any rate the admission of it, tedious and ill-bred, and they must always talk in public, or to close friends for that matter, as if everything to do with their family situation were going tremendously well. Maintaining the legend is the preferred option for most of them, as long as nobody is in the room whose presence undermines the performance. They generally adhere to this, right up to the moment of blow-up. It can be quite odd for members of this social group, as their circle will often contain many couples who appear to be perfectly content, until a call out of the blue, or a scribbled line in a Christmas card, will suddenly announce the divorce.
Philip nodded in answer to her harsh interrogation. ‘She can manage. Nobody’s been in for more than an hour.’ There was a kind of resigned hopelessness in this simple account of the state of his business. In the area of his professional activity Philip had lost the energy required by pretence. He could just about stand behind the counter, but to talk up his drudgery would have been too exhausting. He picked a spoon off the counter and started to feed himself out of the pasta pot. ‘Lucy tells me you’re a writer now? What have you written that I might have read?’
Naturally, this was a defensive attempt to diminish me and my activities, but I do not believe it was malicious. He suspected, rightly, that I was judging him, so he was showing that he reserved the right to judge me. Anyone of my kind and my generation who has chosen to make their living in the Arts will be familiar with this treatment. In our youth the careers we had decided on were considered completely mad, by our parents and by our friends, but as long as we were struggling our more sober contemporaries were happy to encourage and sympathise and even to feed us. The trouble came when we arty folk achieved any kind of success. Then the idea that we should be making money or, worse, making more money than our adult and sensible acquaintance, was akin to impertinence. They had chosen the boring route in order to be secure. To have achieved security but to have enjoyed jokes and larks along the way was nothing short of irresponsible and deserved to be punished. I smiled. ‘Nothing, I should think. Since if you had read anything by me I have no doubt you would have made the connection.’
He raised his eyebrows at Lucy, comically signifying, presumably, that I was a touchy artist who must be humoured. ‘Lucy’s read some of your stuff. I gather she thinks very highly of it.’
I did not point out that this remark meant his earlier question had been entirely redundant. ‘I’m glad.’ My words fell into a silence and we sat for a moment. There was an inertia in the room and we all three felt it. This often happens when old friends get together after an interval of many years. Prior to the meeting they imagine that something explosive and fun will come out of it, but then they are usually faced by a lacklustre group, in late middle age, who have nothing much in common any more. For better or worse, the Rawnsley-Prices had negotiated their journey, I had travelled mine and now we were just three people in a very dirty kitchen who didn’t know each other. Besides, I needed further information before my pilgrimage could be considered complete and I wasn’t going to get it while Philip was with us. It was time to break up the group. ‘Can I see the shop?’ I said. There was a pause, with a sense of the unspoken in the air. I assume this was simply Philip’s male need to present himself as my equal in terms of worldly success which, modest as mine has been, might prove hard when I had actually seen the business. Or maybe it was Lucy’s sudden realisation that for the same reason I was not going to take away from our day spent together the idea that everything was going swimmingly. It is an unspoken ambition for most of us that our contemporaries should see us as successful, but in Lucy’s case she was about to be denied it.
After a pause, Philip nodded. ‘Of course.’
It will come as no surprise that the farm shop was a hopeless place. Fittingly, I suppose, it was housed in a former cattle shed, which had been converted quickly and with insufficient money. There was a cheery, if forced, optimism in the inevitable pine counters and shelves. Above them, brightly coloured cards in faux, red, giant handwriting proclaimed the scintillating array of produce on offer: ‘Fresh vegetables!’ they shouted. ‘Home made Jams and Jellies!’ But in that yawning, unpeopled space they took on a dismal, pathetic quality, like someone eating alone in a paper hat. The floor was cheap and the ceiling had not been properly finished and, as I could have predicted, the whole place was full of items no one in their right mind would ever want to buy. Not just tinned pâté made from wild boar or goose wings, but gadgets to prevent wine losing its flavour in the fridge and woolly things to wear inside your boots while fishing. Christmas stocking presents to be bought and given by someone who knows nothing about it. The meat counter looked particularly unattractive, even to a carnivore like me, and seemed actively to repel further investigation. A single customer was paying for a cauliflower. Other than that the place was deserted. We looked around in silence. ‘The trouble is all these shopping malls -’ Philip drawled the word in a bad, American accent, trying to convert his pain into a joke. ‘They’re building them everywhere. It’s impossible to match the prices without going broke.’ I hesitated to mention that they seemed to be going broke anyway. ‘We keep being told that everyone’s environmentally conscious nowadays, that they care about where their food comes from, but…’ He sighed. What might have been intended as an ironic shrug just turned into a sad sag of his shoulders. I freely confess I felt tremendously sorry for him in that moment. Whether or not I used to dislike him, I had after all known him for a very long time and I did not wish him ill.
It is a fact that in the brutal periods of history, what changes is not the cutting edge of every new market, or the ambition that drives a new factory owner or a new hostess, or a new conquest from the performing stage, or a new triumph in a political drawing room. All that is constant. It is the level of coasting that goes on behind the bright and harsh façade that is different. In a gentle era – and my youth was passed in a fairly gentle era – people of little ability could drift by in every class, at every level of society. Jobs were found for them. Homes were arranged. Someone’s uncle sorted it out. Someone’s mother put in a word. But when things get tough, when, as now, the prizes are bigger but the going is rougher, the weaklings are elbowed aside until they fall back and slip over the cliff. Unskilled workers or stupid landowners alike, they are crushed by a system they cannot master and find themselves ejected on to the roadside. Just such a one was Philip Rawnsley-Price. Subconsciously, he thought his braggadocio would carry him through, that he had the charm and the connections to make it work, however he might choose to live his life. Alas, his connections were the wrong connections and his charm was non-existent, and now he was in his late fifties there was no one left alive who cared much whether he swam or sank.
I had never taken to Philip when we were young, but I pitied him now. He had been defeated by our ‘interesting times’ and he would not rise again. A hand-to-mouth existence lay ahead, of inheriting a cottage from a cousin and trying to rent it out, of hoping he would be remembered when the last aunt bit the dust, of wondering if his children might manage a little something for him on a regular basis. That was what he had to look forward to and it was anyone’s guess whether Lucy would hang around to share it. It rather depended on what alternatives presented themselves. All this we both knew as we shook hands awkwardly outside. ‘Come back and see us again,’ he said, knowing that I never would.
‘I will,’ I lied.
‘Don’t leave it so long the next time.’ And he was gone, back to his vacant counters and his empty till.
Lucy followed me to the car. I stopped. ‘Did you ever get to the bottom of Margaret’s condition?’ She looked at me, puzzled, for a moment. ‘You said it was hereditary but there was no trace of it on either your side or Philip’s.’
‘That was the thing. Of course I had the most nerve-racking suspicions. I kept thinking I ought to be poring through Damian’s medical records…’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘No. I was about to confess and suggest it, with a sinking heart as you can imagine, when we found out that Philip’s aunt, his mother’s eldest sister, had died of it, the very same thing, in childhood. And his mother never knew. Nor did either of her siblings. You can imagine how it was in those days.’ She gave a little grimace. ‘They were all just told that our Father in heaven had taken their sister because he loved her. Basta.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘Total luck. My ma-in-law was talking to her mother, who must have been about a million by then, and for some strange reason she told her all about Margaret. We’d never explained to Granny what was wrong, because we didn’t want to worry her. At any rate this time she finally learned the truth, and right away she started weeping like a fire hydrant and it all came pouring out.’
‘Poor woman.’
‘Yes. Poor old thing. Of course she blamed herself and it more or less finished her off. We all told her that it wasn’t her fault, that it wasn’t a killer any more and so on, but I don’t think it made much difference.’ She smiled sadly. ‘So the mystery was solved. The tragic thing was that the aunt could so easily have been saved with the right drugs but it happened in the twenties, when it was a question of hot drinks and cold compresses and having your tonsils out on the kitchen table. Anyway, as I say, Margaret’s been fine ever since.’
‘Were you at all sorry?’
This time she was genuinely bewildered. ‘About what?’
‘That she was definitely Philip’s and not Damian’s.’ This was unkind of me, since it would hardly help her to dwell on heaven, trapped, as she was, in an outer circle of hell.
But Lucy only smiled and, just for a second, the minxish child-woman she had once been, looked out from behind her wrinkles. ‘I’m not sure. Not at the time, because the whole drama had been explained and that was such a relief. Later, maybe. A little. But please don’t give me away.’
We’d kissed and I was back in the car, when she tapped on the window. ‘If you see him…’
I waited. ‘Yes?’
‘Tell him I remember him. Wish him luck for the future.’
‘That’s the point. I don’t think he’s got a future. Not a very long one, anyway.’
This made her silent and, to my amazement, I thought for a second she was going to cry. At last she spoke again, with a softer and more gentle voice than I had heard from her since my arrival. Or indeed, ever. ‘All the more so, then. Give him my best love. And say that I wish him nothing but good things. Nothing but good, good things.’ She stepped back from the vehicle and I nodded. Her simple encomium spoke more for Damian’s treatment of her than I would have credited him with.
The interview was over. I put my foot on the accelerator and started on the road back to London.