By the time I had got lost finding the motorway and caught in the evening traffic as I came into London, the whole excursion took longer than I’d planned and I did not arrive home much before eight. Bridget had let herself in some time earlier, and polished off half a bottle of Chablis in the interim. This made her rather sour as she banged around the kitchen making dinner. I cannot now think why I never questioned that she should always cook for me, when she spent her days in an office tussling with important decisions behind a desk, while I lolled around for most of the time, performing needless, invented tasks to fill the daylight hours as I waited for inspiration. In my defence, I don’t remember her ever objecting to the arrangement. If it was my turn we went out. If it was her turn she cooked. Sometimes you just accept things.
‘Your father rang,’ she said. ‘He wants you to call him back.’
‘What about?’
‘He didn’t say, but he tried twice and the second time he sounded rather annoyed that you weren’t here.’
There was a vague but completely unreasonable reprimand buried in this somewhere. ‘I can’t manage my day in case my father might ring.’
‘Don’t blame me.’ She shrugged and went back into the kitchen.
‘I’m just the messenger.’ I was struck, not for the first time, by the tremendous mistake that about half the human race usually finds itself making when it comes to wobbly relationships. The division is not by sex or class or nationality or race or even age, since almost every type is found on both sides of the divide. The mistake is this: When they are in a partnership that is not going well, they attempt to inject a kind of drama into it by becoming moody and critical and permanently not-quite-satisfied. ‘Why do you always do that?’ they say. ‘Now, are you listening because you never get this right?’ Or, ‘Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten again!’
Not belonging to this team, I find it hard to penetrate their thinking. Do they imagine that by being demanding and edgy and cross, they will force you to work harder to make things better? If so, they are, of course, completely wrong. This kind of talk just gives one permission to go. The more dissatisfied they are, the more their gloom will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In fact, the first time you hear that put-upon sigh, ‘I suppose I’m expected to clean this up,’ you know it is simply a matter of time. The irony being that the ones who are truly hard to leave are those who are always happy. To desert a happy lover, to make them unhappy when they were not unhappy before, is hard and mean, and involves guilt of a major kind. To leave a miserable whinger just seems logical.
Of course, this implies it is easy to get up the nerve to end an affair that is past its sell-by date. But for many it is not. They tell themselves they are being nice, or honourable, or adult, in struggling on, but what they are being is weak. I do not mean a bad marriage or when there are children involved. But when we’re only talking childless cohabitation it is plain cowardice to settle for failure. The years spent after we have decided that we will not die and be buried next to this one, are just wasted, so why do we put it off? Is it misguided kindness or false optimism or because we’ve taken a villa for the whole of August with the Grimstons and we can’t let them down? Or even: Where on earth would I put all this stuff? It doesn’t matter. Once the inner voice has spoken and given the verdict, every day spent evading the end is unworthy of you. And when it came to Bridget FitzGerald, I was unworthy.
My father was quite grouchy when he picked up the receiver. ‘Where have you been all day?’ he said.
‘I had to go to Hampshire for lunch.’
‘Why, for God’s sake?’ As any adult child knows, when dealing with an aged parent there is no point in engaging with this stuff.
‘You could have rung me on the mobile,’ I suggested.
‘It’s illegal if you were driving.’
‘I’ve got an ear thing.’
‘Even so.’ Again, silence is the only sensible option. At last, his anger spent, he returned to his topic. ‘I want you to come down and see me. There are some things we ought to talk about.’ In fact, he lived above London on the map, on the border of Gloucestershire and Shropshire, but my father was of that generation where London was the highest point in Britain. So he went ‘up’ to London and ‘down’ to everywhere else. I rather loved him for it. I suppose he went down to Inverness, but I don’t remember trying him on this. I cannot ask him now for he has died since I lived through these events. I miss him every day.
Bridget came out of the kitchen, carrying a plate of food on to which she had already spooned a huge helping of some stew and various vegetables. ‘I’ve served it up in the kitchen. I know you don’t like me to, but we haven’t got all day.’
I always find this kind of talk intensely irritating, draped as it is with self-importance. ‘You are quite right,’ I said coolly. ‘I don’t like having a plate piled up with things I have not chosen since I have been out of the nursery for some years. Nor do I see why we haven’t got all day. What pressing engagement are we racing to meet?’ Having delivered this twaddle, no less self-important than the speech that had provoked it, I sat down at the table.
But Bridget had not quite finished. ‘I’m afraid it’s very overcooked,’ she sighed, as she laid the concoction before me.
It was clearly time to acknowledge that we were having a spat and with that remark she had finally used up the last stock of patience I had kept in reserve. ‘I cannot think why, since I was here before eight,’ I muttered, deliberately using a harsh and frigid tone to combat hers. ‘At what hour were you planning to eat?’ She bit her lip and said nothing.
Of course, as I knew well enough, this was a dishonourable dig. Before meeting me, Bridget had generally tucked into her evening feed at about half past six or seven, and she still found my insistence on dining at half past eight or nine not so much unreasonable as weird. This will be familiar to many who have ventured beyond their home pastures to find a mate. Even in this day and age, even after almost everyone, south of Watford anyway, says ‘lunch’ and when all sorts of foods from avocados to sushi have become ordinary fare, still the time for evening eating can provoke an absolute clash of cultures. To me, early eating can only be explained if food is considered essentially as fuel to strengthen one for the adventures yet to come. So, people will dine at six or six thirty in order to be fuelled by seven, in time to fill the next few hours with fun. This time may be spent in a club or in a pub or keeping fit or studying macramé or learning Mandarin or line dancing or simply watching television while sitting on a sofa. The evening is your oyster and, by eating early, you are free to enjoy every pleasure while it lasts.
The reason this is completely bewildering for the upper middle and upper classes is simply because for them the dinner is the pleasure. It is the apex, the core, the point. If the whole business of feeding is over by half past seven, what on earth is one to do until bed? These people don’t go to self-help groups, or engage in amateur acting, nor do they study art or quilting, or drop into a bar. This is why any role in local government is so difficult for them. It takes place just when they prefer to be sitting at a table for a very different purpose. For those who cross the great social divide, there can be few habits harder to adjust to, whichever direction they have travelled. Certainly, Bridget had found it difficult and now, here I was, deliberately goading her, insulting her, putting her down. I was ashamed of myself. But not, it seems, sufficiently ashamed to regain my good humour. I stared at the plate. ‘And I wish you wouldn’t pile it up like that. It’s so off-putting.’ I whined as I unfolded my napkin. ‘I feel like a tramp being fed before retiring to my cubicle in a Rowton House.’
‘And I feel like the skivvy serving him,’ said Bridget without the trace of a smile, and we let it rest there.
At the time of these events my father lived in a modest village called Abberley, on the Gloucestershire borders. He was eighty-six then and he’d chosen it as his retreat after my mother’s fairly early death ten years before. There was no pressing reason for him to go there, since their marriage had largely been spent abroad and the first years of his retirement had been passed in Wiltshire, but I suppose he wanted a change and our family had been based for the latter half of the nineteenth century at Abberley Park, a rather over-christened large house of negligible architectural merit, situated behind a cobbled forecourt, at one end of the main street of the village. It meant little to me, as it had only been a third-rate hotel in my lifetime; still we would visit it occasionally for lunch or tea, and Pa would pretend a kind of nostalgia for the place. This, I suspect, was to encourage me to take an interest in my family’s history, but I always found his Turgenev-style melancholy fairly unconvincing. The large, dreary hall and the largish dreary drawing and dining rooms on either side of it were all hideously decorated, and any trace of private life had long since vanished from the atmosphere. My father had no memories of the house anyway, since his grandfather had sold it, after the agricultural depression, in the early years of the twentieth century before he was even born. I suppose the staircase, in slightly crude nineteenth-century baroque, was pretty and the dark, panelled library may once have been nice, but its translation into a bar, complete with upside-down bottles on silver holders, had obliterated its fragile charm. However, the seller-grandfather, plus his wife and various other members of the two preceding generations of our clan, lay in the graveyard of the local church and were commemorated with plaques in the nave, and I imagine this gave my papa a sense of belonging, something neither he nor my mother had ever quite achieved in their previous home.
His life in Abberley was pleasant enough but a bit sad, of course, as all old men living on their own are sad, in a way that old women are not. He had a housekeeper called Mrs Snow, who was reasonably civil and would cook him lunch every day and depart after it was washed up and put away. She would leave his dinner in the fridge, in a terrifying array of dishes covered in cling film, with post-it notes carrying strict instructions: ‘Boil for twenty minutes,’ ‘Put in a pre-heated oven at gas mark 5 for half an hour.’ I could never see the point of this, since she wasn’t a very good cook, to say the least of it, her repertoire consisting entirely of English nursery food from the 1950s, and he could have bought everything at the local Waitrose. It would have been quicker and easier to prepare, as well as much nicer to eat. But, looking back, I think he rather enjoyed the disciplined activity of unwrapping everything and obeying her iron will. It must have taken up quite a bit of the evening and that would have been a real bonus.
On the day that I went to see him Mrs Snow was preparing our lunch when I arrived, but he told me in dulcet tones, as he poured two glasses of very dry sherry, that she was going to leave us as soon as she had brought in the pudding. In other words she was not going to stay to wash up. ‘We’ll have the place to ourselves,’ he muttered out of the side of his mouth as he led the way to a chair in his chilly and unsuccessful drawing room. Why is it that some people can live in a house for twenty years, yet the furniture still looks as if the removal van has just pulled out of the gates? In this, his last house he had copied a few rooms from earlier homes that my mother had decorated, but he never seemed to find a template for the little, irregularly shaped drawing room, so it just waited, with its magnolia walls and disparate collection of furniture, for an inspiration that never came.
‘Good,’ I answered, since that was what seemed to be called for.
He nodded briskly. ‘I think it’s better.’ Years in the diplomatic had made him secretive as a rule, in addition to which he shared the usual prejudice of his kind that it was impossible to have any kind of conversation about money, outside the walls of a bank or a brokers’, were it not serving one of two purposes. These comprised discussing your future son-in-law’s net worth and prospects, and talking about your own will. Since my sister was long married, I gathered at once that the second was what we were in for and so it proved.
We had exchanged bits of family information in a desultory fashion through some unsalted, tasteless shepherd’s pie and we were staring at an uninviting plum duff with custard, when Mrs Snow leant round the door in her coat and hat. ‘I’ll be off, then,’ she said to my father. ‘I’ve put coffee in the library, Sir David, so don’t let it get cold.’ In response to this, he twisted his face into something akin to a wink, signifying that as with all, lonely old people who employ one servant, the relationship was becoming dangerous, and he nodded his thanks. We heard the door bang and he started.
‘I had rather a turn the other day and I went to see old Babbage. He’s run a few tests and it seems I may be cracking up at last.’
‘I thought you said Babbage ought to be struck off.’
‘I never did.’
‘You said he couldn’t diagnose a gunshot wound.’
‘Did I?’ My father was slightly cheered by this. ‘Perhaps I did. Anyway, it doesn’t alter much. I’m going some time and it won’t be long now.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Nothing to bother you with.’
‘I have driven for two and a quarter hours. I deserve details.’
But he could not break the habits of a lifetime. ‘It was all about blood being where it shouldn’t be. Revolting stuff that I have no intention of discussing over pudding.’ There wasn’t much to come back with, so I waited while he got to the point. ‘Anyway, I realised that you and I had never had a proper talk about everything.’
How strange death is. It seems to make such nonsense of the years that have gone before. Here was my father about to die, presumably of some form of cancer, and what had been the point of it all? What had it all been for? He’d worked pretty hard, in the way his generation did work, which was different from, and more sensible than ours, with their late starts and long lunches and getting home by half past six. Even so, he had done his best and travelled the world and stayed in horrible hotels, and sat through boring meetings and listened to heads of state lying, and experts making dire predictions that proved quite unfounded; he had studied worthless reports without number, and pretended to believe government spokesmen when they made ludicrous and mendacious claims for their inadequate ministers, and… for what? He had no money. Or not what my mother would have called ‘real’ money. This house, a few shares, one or two nice things left over from his forebears who had lived better than he did, a pension that would perish with him. My sister and I had been given good educations, which must have set them back, but Louise had largely thrown hers away by marrying a very ordinary stockbroker and bringing up three children, all of whom were dull to the point of genius, while I-
‘I want you to know what I’ve arranged, in case you think I’ve made anything unnecessarily complicated. You’re the executor, so you’ll have to deal with it if I’ve made a nonsense.’
I nodded. My thoughts would not get back in their box. Poor old boy. It had been a good life, I suppose. At least that’s what people would say when his funeral eventually came to pass. ‘He had a good life.’ But did he really? Was it a good life? Was it enough? He met my mother towards the end of the war, when she was working for someone in the Foreign Office. He had been seconded to assist with the settlement of Poland and other places where the British would make the wrong decisions, as a preparatory move to taking up his career again when the fighting stopped. They married in 1946, just before he was appointed second secretary to our embassy in Madrid, and, on the whole, they’d been quite happy. I honestly believe that. She liked travelling and the constant relocation of their home had pleased, rather than annoyed her. Once he made ambassador, I would go as far as to say she had a good time and, while he never got one of the really big ones, Paris or Washington or Brussels, still he did get Lisbon and Oslo, both of which they enjoyed, as well as Harare, which proved a lot more interesting than either had bargained for, and not in a good way. But when it was all over they’d come home to a farmhouse which they’d bought near Devizes, and that was it. He’d been knighted before his second-to-last posting and I was glad, as it helped them to feel they had made their mark, which of course they hadn’t. It was also probably of mild use in getting them started socially in what was, for them, a brand-new part of England. But I never really understood the compulsion to make their home in the country when neither of them was the type to spend their lives walking dogs and working for local causes. Certainly, they were not at all sporty. My father had given up shooting twenty years before, after he spent four days on a grouse moor in the Borders without hitting a single bird, and my mother never cared much for anything that made her cold.
There is a tyranny that forces people of a certain class to insist they are only happy in the country and it is a cruel one. My parents were among its many victims. As everyone but they could see, their natural milieu was urban. They liked varied and informed conversation. They liked to mingle with different social groups. They liked their gossip from its source. They liked to talk politics and art and theatre and philosophy, and none of this, as we know, is much to be found beyond the city limits. Nor were they big local employers and, since their families had no historic connection with the part of Wiltshire they had chosen, they would never have more than a day pass to the County proper, so their egos were doomed to starvation rations as long as they remained there. In short, there was no real chance for them of happiness, or even entertainment, in that society, not as there would have been in Chelsea or Knightsbridge or Eaton Square but they made do, with introductions and dinners and charity functions and signing petitions about local planning and getting cross about the way the village pub was run and all the rest of it. And then my mother died, which was exactly what my father had never expected. But he showed courage as he packed up his life in Devizes and exchanged it for an equally meaningless one in Gloucestershire, and now here he was, after ten years of non-event, telling me about his own approaching death as we tucked into the disgusting splodge on our plates. I have never felt the ultimate absurdity of most lives more strongly than at that moment.
‘It’s all written down, so there shouldn’t be any confusion,’ my father said, producing from somewhere near the table a plastic folder filled with typed sheets. He handed it to me as he stood up. ‘Let’s go through.’
He led the way into the little library, which he used for most of his daily activities, and as usual I was touched by the sight of it. Unlike the characterless drawing room, the library was an exact reproduction, in miniature, of one my mother had designed for the Wiltshire farmhouse, with walls lined in red damask and fluted bookshelves in a soft dove grey. Even the cushions and lamps had been transferred intact after the move. A portrait of her, rather a good one, painted just after their marriage, in a snappy, 1940s suit, hung over the chimneypiece and my father would glance at it from time to time as he spoke, as if seeking her approval for his decisions, which I imagine was exactly what he was doing.
In front of the green corduroy sofa, a table held a tray made ready by the indefatigable Mrs Snow, with coffee equipment for two. He poured himself a cup, nodding at the folder. ‘Funeral, memorial, it’s all there. Prayers, hymns, who should do the address if you don’t want to, everything.’
‘I thought you hated hymns.’
‘So I do, but I don’t think a funeral is a good place for a “statement,” do you?’
‘It’s your last chance to make one.’ Which made him smile. ‘I’ll do the address,’ I said.
‘Thank you.’ He chuckled gently to cover his emotions. ‘I’ve left this house to Louise, since you got the flat.’
His words were perfectly logical and true but, irrationally, I felt a twinge of irritation. Does anyone ever feel content with the way things are arranged at these times? An only child, perhaps. Never a sibling. ‘What about the stuff?’
‘I thought you could split it. But I haven’t really specified.’
‘I wish you would.’
‘What? Every teaspoon?’
‘Every last teaspoon.’ He looked sorrowful at this. He probably wanted to believe that his children got on well, which we did, quite, but we were not really close any more and I knew Louise’s über-tiresome husband would push in and make her take anything decent if he weren’t stopped now. ‘Tom will say that they have children, and I don’t, so they must have all the family things. Then there’ll be a fight and Louise will cry and I’ll shout and Tom will look wounded. That’s unless you just write it down in black and white so there’s no argument.’
‘All right, I will.’ He nodded gravely. ‘In fact, I tell you what. I’ll leave your mother’s jewellery to her and you can have the rest of the contents. If you want to give her a stick or two you can. I suppose it’ll all go back to her sprogs if you don’t have any of your own.’
‘I imagine so. It’s not going to the cats’ home, anyway.’
‘I wish you had a family.’
This was a frequent observation and normally I would have fobbed it off with a joke or an exasperated sigh, depending on my state of mind; but given the topic we were discussing, a bit of honesty felt more appropriate. ‘So do I, really,’ I said.
‘You still could, you know. Look at Charlie Chaplin.’
‘I don’t even need to go back that far.’ Why does everyone over fifty still quote Charlie Chaplin in this context? Every day, there is some demented actor in the news, saying what fun it is to be a parent in his seventies, and how it makes every day bright and new. I sometimes wonder how long they can keep up this fantasy before they succumb to rage and clinical exhaustion.
‘Of course…’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t suppose… what’s-her-name?’
‘Bridget.’
‘Bridget. I expect it’s a bit late for her.’
Since Bridget was fifty-two, this was almost a compliment. I nodded. ‘I expect so. But that doesn’t necessarily…’ It was my turn to tail away. We both knew what I was saying. My father cheered up considerably, which I have to say I found a bit annoying. I’d always known she wasn’t his type, even if I’d pushed it to the back of my mind, but he’d been unfailingly polite to her and by that stage she was quite fond of him. It felt unjust to realise that he had secretly been hoping throughout that eventually she would pass on by.
‘Oh, I see. Well. You’re a dark horse.’ He poured himself another cup from the silver pot of lukewarm, brownish coffee’ish liquid left for our delectation. ‘Do I know her?’
‘There isn’t anyone, in particular.’ I gave a brisk shake of the head.
‘What’s the matter?’
I was unprepared for this, both the question and the tone, which was uncharacteristically warm. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You’ve been in a funny mood since you got here.’ His comment was clearly directed at far more than my relations with Ms FitzGerald. I was taken aback because my father was not much given to introspection, either for himself or with regard to anyone else. When we were young, whenever a conversation at dinner threatened to get interesting he was inclined to cap it with the proto-English imprecation: ‘now, don’t let’s get psychological.’ I do not mean he didn’t appreciate the importance of other people’s inner life. He just didn’t see that it was anything to do with him. Gossip bored him. He couldn’t remember incidents or personalities well enough to savour the punchlines and he used to get quite impatient whenever anyone tried to intrigue him with some local scandal.
In truth, his stance drained my mother, since she was never allowed to discuss the private affairs and theoretical activities of their acquaintance, and this inevitably made their conversation very arid. ‘What business is it of ours?’ he would say, and she would nod and agree with him, and say of course and how right he was, and thereby be silenced. After I’d grown up, I used to defend her and quote Alexander Pope: ‘The proper study of mankind is man’ and so on. The fact remained he felt uncomfortable and ungenerous delving into the murky waters of others’ personal histories and she gave up trying to change him, retaining these topics to enjoy with her friends and her children. It was all right, but I do give thanks that their later years were spent in the era of television, or the evenings would have been silent indeed. Still, here he was, showing an interest, asking for some sort of private explanation of my mood. It was so rare an event, that I couldn’t waste time on prevarication.
‘I have a feeling that I want to change my life.’
‘What do you mean by that? Get rid of Bridget? Stop writing? Sell the flat? What?’
‘Yes,’ I said. We stared at each other. Then I thought again. ‘Actually, I don’t think I want to stop writing.’
‘What’s brought this on?’
I told him about Damian’s request and how I had fared so far. He thought for a moment. ‘I quite liked him at the time, until you had your falling-out.’ He paused, but I had no comment to make. ‘Even so, I’m rather surprised to find he left such a mark on all those lives.’
‘Far be it from me to defend him after what he put me through, but he is the only member of that gang who went on to be one of the most successful men of his generation.’
‘Yes, you’re right. Of course that’s right. I wasn’t thinking.’ My father spoke as one who feels himself justly corrected. ‘So, what is it?’
‘I’m not completely clear in my own head, but I believe I’m finding it depressing to be obliged to compare what we all thought was coming when we were young with what actually arrived.’
My father nodded. ‘To quote Nanny, comparisons are odious.’
‘They are also pointless, but that doesn’t prevent one from making them.’ For some reason, I felt it was important that he understood me. ‘It’s more than that. I’m not sure what we’re all doing with our lives. Damian may have made his mark, but none of the rest of us has.’
‘Not everyone can be a world-famous billionaire.’
‘Nor should they be, but everyone needs to feel they’re part of something worthwhile. That, in the last analysis, their life has some meaning in a larger context. The question is what am I part of? What have I done?’
But he couldn’t take this very seriously. ‘Don’t you think people have been asking themselves that since Chaucer first sharpened his pencil?’
‘I think there have been times when the majority felt they belonged to a culture that was working, that they had an identity within a worthwhile whole. “I am a Roman Citizen,” “God Bless America,” “The man who is born an Englishman has drawn a winning ticket in the lottery of life.” All that. People have felt their own civilisation was valuable and that they were lucky to belong to it. I’m fairly sure I believed that too, or something like it, forty years ago.’
‘You were young forty years ago.’ He smiled. Clearly, he was not very worried by my soul-searching. ‘So what are you asking? Do you want to sell the flat? If so, then that’s what you must do.’
In a way I could have left then as, if I’m honest, I had really gone down there seeking his permission to do this very thing. I was taken unawares by his swift and open reaction to my complaints, as I had assumed it was all going to take much longer to get his agreement. Because I should be clear, this response on his part was very generous, more generous than an outsider can perhaps immediately appreciate. As I have said, my mother was the one who insisted on their giving me the London flat, thereby cutting down their capital by quite a chunk. He’d resisted it for a time, because he saw their standard of living would suffer, which it did, but he eventually surrendered to her pleading. Now, here I was, proposing to cash in my chips, to pocket the boodle, to take the money and run, and he wanted to make it clear that he did not mind in the least. Some months later I would learn that he’d already known he was much more ill than he had let on and that death could not be long distant, so I suppose he wanted us to be in step at the end, but to me that thought only makes his kindness more moving. ‘That’s so fantastically nice of you,’ I said.
‘Nonsense, nonsense.’ He shook his head at the very notion. Now, what about some more coffee?’
Of course, his instinctive desire to downplay the moment was precisely what made it so poignant. Like too many of his type, my father had an absolute inability to express the love that motivated him, being always far too English to demonstrate his feelings. Even when we were little he hated kissing us goodnight and was visibly thrilled when the custom was allowed to lapse in our early teens. But there was nevertheless a silent unspoken affection in his words at this moment that makes my eyes fill now, months later, when I remember them. ‘I don’t want you to think it was wrong to give it to me when you did,’ I said. ‘It provided me with the perfect base, with a fantastic start. I was, and am, incredibly grateful.’
‘I know. But because something was right for you then, doesn’t mean it’s right for you now. If you want to sell it you must sell it.’
‘Thank you.’
‘And the girl? Isn’t it working?’
I couldn’t help thinking, disloyally, that Bridget would be ecstatic to hear herself referred to as ‘the girl,’ however politically incorrect that might sound. She was very good-looking and had the kind of looks that would last, but she was no spring chicken, if not quite yet an old boiler. I wasn’t sure how to answer him. ‘It’s not that, exactly. It works as well as it ever did.’
‘But?’
‘My problem is that during my searches I’ve been reminded of what it feels like to be in love. I think I’d forgotten.’
‘Again, you are remembering what it feels like to be young and in love. Love at nearly sixty, whatever sentimental American films may try to tell you, ain’t the same.’
‘Maybe not. But I’m fairly sure it’s more than I’ve got now.’
‘Then of course you must move on.’ He nodded slowly. ‘Tell me, do you ever see Serena Gresham in your travels?’
The question came flying out of the blue and almost winded me. On this day my dear old father was full of surprises. Could he really remember Serena? Why would he know what I had felt about her? Unless he’d had some kind of personality transplant? We hadn’t mentioned her name in thirty years at least and anyway I would never have given him credit for taking enough interest in my life to notice my romantic sufferings. ‘No. At least, barely. Sometimes. At the odd thing in London. That’s all.’
‘She married, didn’t she?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that was satisfactory?’
‘I don’t see enough of her to have an opinion. She’s got two grown-up children and she’s still with him.’
He considered my limp reply for a second. ‘I’m not convinced you would have been happy, you know.’
This sort of thing is hard to take at any age from any parent, but it came so closely upon one of the kindest gestures he’d ever made that I didn’t want to snap. ‘I just wish I’d had the chance to find out’ was all I said.
‘You could never have been a writer. You’d have ended up in the City. To make the kind of money it would have taken to keep her.’
‘Not necessarily.’ At this he gave a little snort. As always with a father, the assumption of superior knowledge, particularly where it concerned people I had been close to and he barely knew, was infuriating. But again, after the earlier exchange I didn’t want a fight. ‘Plenty of people nowadays live completely differently from the way they were brought up. You do for a start.’
‘Maybe. But my generation wasn’t given the option and, believe me, old habits die hard. I should know.’ He saw I was struggling not to join battle on Serena’s behalf and relented. ‘I don’t mean I didn’t like her, but I just never thought you were suited. For what it’s worth.’
‘Yes. Well.’ I spoke and was silent.
An awkwardness had entered the proceedings. My father was suddenly uncomfortably aware that he had ventured into alien, possibly even hurtful, territory. He smiled jocularly to get things back to normal. ‘Well, I hope I’m still around to meet the new girl, when she turns up.’
‘So do I,’ I said and I meant it. I’m very sorry that he won’t be.
We spent the rest of the afternoon discussing his will, which I was now allowed to read. He had, as he said, left his home to my sister and the remainder of his capital was divided between my niece, my two nephews and myself. This wasn’t quite fair, in my opinion, since for these purposes Louise and her children should have weighed as one person, but he telephoned his lawyer while I was there and dictated a codicil that gave me the entire contents of the house, so I didn’t like to cavil. Then it was done. His requests for the church services seemed gentlemanly. In fact, it was all pretty modest, more of a decorous whimper than a bang.
We were in the kitchen, making a cup of tea prior to my departure, before my father mentioned the state of my life again. Mrs Snow had left the things laid out on the kitchen table, complete with cling-filmed biscuits. Obviously, she didn’t believe him capable of instigating even the smallest domestic operation from scratch and she was probably right. ‘I don’t think Damian is behaving correctly in this,’ he said after another silence, as he poured out two cups of builders’ brew. ‘You’ll almost certainly end by disturbing the balance of a perfectly workable life. Some man or some woman will suddenly find themselves a thousand million times richer than their siblings, richer than every relation they have in the world. Their mother will face the task of explaining to her husband that the eldest child is a bastard. It’s not going to be easy.’
‘And if the money should mean that a life encumbered by poverty might suddenly take wing and achieve great things?’
‘You sound like a novel from a railway bookstall.’
‘You sound like an officer from Health and Safety.’
He bit into his digestive. Mrs Snow was not a risk taker, with biscuits or anything else. ‘Nor do I think it fair for Damian to lay this burden on you. It’s not as if he had much credit to call on.’
‘No.’ But I did not want to pretend that I didn’t know why I had been asked. ‘Unfortunately there really wasn’t anyone else who could have undertaken it.’
‘Maybe. But I don’t believe he understood what he was exposing you to.’
This was an odd comment, which I had not anticipated. ‘Why? What have I been “exposed to”?’
‘You’ve been made to go back into your own past and to compare it with your present. You’ve been forced to remember what you wanted from life at nineteen, forty years ago, before you knew what life was. Indeed, you must face what you all wanted from life, those silly, over-made-up girls and the vain, self-important young men you ran around with then. Now, thanks to Damian, you must bear witness to what happened to them. To what happened to you. Eventually, in old age, almost everyone with any brains must come to terms with the disappointment of life, but this is very early for you to have to make that discovery. You’ve been rendered discontented when it’s too late, or nearly too late, to fix, but soon enough for you to have many years ahead to live with that discontent. Damian ought to have spoiled his own life, not yours.’
‘He doesn’t have much of his own life left to spoil.’
‘Even so.’
And of course he was right, really.
Is it serendipity? That explanation for those strange, coincidental happenings that seem, for a moment, to create a sense of planning in our arbitrary lives? Or is serendipity more to do with accidental knowledge of things? Of chance deductions that lead to greater understanding? Either way, I believe it was serendipity that took a hand in the next stage of my Damian-led journey.
We were staying for the weekend, Bridget and I, with a very tiresome architect and his very charming wife at a house he had purchased some years before in Yorkshire. It was an old house, a historical house, a ‘great house’ in a way and, oh boy, didn’t he know it. The architect in question was called Tarquin Montagu. I did not believe that this was a name he, or more probably anyone, would have received at the baptismal font, and I certainly never discovered any link between him and the ducal house of Manchester, a connection that he liked to imply. He came into my life as the husband of a delightful novelist called Jennifer Bond who was also with my publisher. We’d been paired for a book tour one summer a few years before, forging a friendship in the process. I was not then clear about how he came by his money, since he was never associated with any vividly spectacular building, but he lived in a way that Vanbrugh would have envied and some years before our visit he had bought a splendid semi-ruin near Thirsk, called Malton Towers.
A George IV, Gothic confection, abandoned by its family after the war, Malton had followed the sad trail of such places in those years as first a school and then a training college, and after that a home for old people, and I am fairly sure at one point a finishing school specialising in Nouvelle Cuisine. Until finally it achieved a slight, if spurious, fame in the mid 1990s as a ‘World Centre’ for some later version of Transcendental Meditation, which attracted the members of one of the manufactured Boy Bands of the era. This last incarnation was run by a dubious character who claimed the authority and support of, I seem to remember, the Dalai Lama, but I may be wrong in that. At any rate the day dawned when a red-topped Sunday scandal sheet revealed that he was not, in fact, a philosopher in touch with the higher plane, as his earnest pupils had no doubt assumed, but instead an old fraud from Pinner who had previous form for shoplifting, car theft and making false claims on his insurance. His exposure resulted in a mass exodus of the faithful, shortly followed by that of their non-spiritual leader, and for the next eight years the wind had whistled through the dusty galleries and servants’ attics and former drawing rooms of the decaying folly until, at what can only have been the eleventh hour, Tarquin showed up. I am quite sure that from the house’s point of view it was a very good thing that he did. Whether it was quite so beneficial to Jennifer’s quality of life is rather more open to question.
The continuing craving on the part of the successful to reproduce the lifestyle and customs of the nineteenth-century aristocracy must be trying for our Labour masters. They would deny this, as they deny so many aspects of human nature, but I’m sure it is so. And the life these aspirants choose to ape is from a very specific period. Not for them the casual round of the eighteenth-century aristo, sleeping sitting upright, breakfasting at noon on sticky chocolate before a ride; who wore no uniforms for his sporting or social activities, who dined at five in the afternoon, drank three or four bottles of port a night and frequently, when travelling, shared a bed with his manservant, while his wife might hunker down with her maid. This is not an attractive model for the modern millionaire. Nor, certainly, would they copy the altogether more brutish customs of the sixteenth-century toff, whose personal hygiene, to say nothing of his politics, would make a strong man faint. No, their template was developed by the late Victorians, who had such a talent for mixing rank with comfort: Majesty and deference combined with warmth and draught-free bedrooms, splendour with thick carpets and interlined curtains, where the food is hot, but there are still footmen to serve it.
Sadly, to live like this requires much, much more money than most modern copiers ever imagine. They do the sums and there seems to be enough to bring the house up to date, tidy the garden, hire someone nice to help at table and they begin. Alas, these palaces were designed to preside over thousands of rent-producing acres, to be the window display of huge fortunes in trade and manufacturing, which might have been concealed from Society but, like the mole, were working busily all the while in the dark. Because these houses eat money. They gobble it up, as the rampaging giants of the Brothers Grimm eat children and every other good thing in their path.
When the genuinely, very rich buy these palaces I am sure they enjoy them and, even if they do not often stay long, still the houses are the better for their passing. The trouble comes when they are bought by the not-quite-rich-enough, who think they can just about manage. With these, as a rule, there is a pattern. They make their fortune, such as it is. They buy a castle to celebrate. They restore it and entertain like mad for eight to ten years and then they sell, exhausted by their own poverty and the constant effort to stay afloat. While the County, those families whose fortunes were never deconstructed, and whose houses and pretensions are built on solid rock, smile, occasionally with regret, and move on to the next candidates. Tarquin Montagu was about six years into the process.
Reviewing him now, having not seen him for a while, I feel more sympathy for him than I did. That is to say that I feel some sympathy, when before I felt none at all. At that time, when we were staying with him, he must have been worried that his whole self-ennobling adventure would implode, but it was part of his personality not to admit or ever discuss his fears. He would have seen that as weakness and loss of control. In fact, his main problem was his total inability to relax control under any circumstances. I would go as far as to say that his nature was the most controlling I have ever encountered. This made him not only impossible to entertain, or to be entertained by, but also lonely and desolate, for he could not admit to anyone, least of all his wife, that events were slipping out of his grasp. I had known him as a difficult and rather ill-tempered man, who always found any conversation not centred on him, hard to follow and harder still to contribute to. But I had not fully understood the extent of his mania before we arrived at his house, tired from the long drive, at tea time on that summer Friday. We were normal people. All we wanted was to be shown our room, to have a hot bath and generally to recover in order, like the model guests we were, to come downstairs refreshed, changed and ready to eat, or talk about, whatever our hosts might throw at us.
It was not to be. First, apparently, we had to sit and listen to a history of the house and when Jennifer suggested that we might be more in the mood for this lesson after we had rested, Tarquin replied that he did not judge us yet as ‘ready’ to see the rooms he had prepared. Naturally, my almost overpowering instinct was to tell him to piss off and drive straight back to London. But looking at Jennifer’s tired and harassed face, I suspected this was an option taken by more than one guest before now, so in pity and to Bridget’s relief, I allowed myself to be led into the library, to listen to the lecture like a good boy.
‘The thing is,’ said Tarquin, getting into his interminable stride, ‘you have to understand that when Sir Richard decided to rebuild in eighteen twenty-four, he wanted both to be in the height of fashion, but at the same time not to lose the sense of historicity that his ancient blood demanded.’ He took a deep breath and looked at us as if waiting for a response though what this might be I could not fathom.
‘So that’s why he chose Gothic?’ I volunteered eventually, wondering if we were ever going to be offered sustenance. I had arrived wanting a cup of tea, but after twenty minutes of this I was ready for whisky, neat and in a pint pot.
Tarquin shook his head. ‘No. Not exactly.’ The smugness of his tone was enough to make one seize a chair and smash it over his head, like a cowboy in a Mack Sennett comedy. ‘That was why he chose Sir Charles Barry as his architect. Barry was still young then. This was before the old Houses of Parliament burned down. He was known as a designer of churches and a restorer of ancient monuments, not a maker of country houses. To have a servant of God as the master of the works gave the whole project a gravitas that ensured respect from his neighbours.’
‘Because he built it in Gothic,’ I suggested. I wasn’t going to give up easily and my boredom was making me angry. But I felt this was as challenging as I could be while still pretending to listen to Tarquin with respect. In other words I was a living lie.
‘No!’ he spoke, this time, with a harsh edge to the word. ‘The style of the building is not the issue! The style is not important! I am talking of the spiritual background with which he approached the design.’
‘In Gothic,’ I murmured.
‘Can I go to the loo? I’m bursting,’ said Bridget and, as so often in the company of women, I wondered why I hadn’t thought of that myself.
‘Of course,’ said Jennifer. ‘I’ll show you your room.’ With a sharp glance at her husband she led the way out, stopping to allow us to take up our cases in the hall. During all of this Tarquin was so annoyed at having his dissertation interrupted that he remained, still and sulking, in the library, watching us in glowering silence as we made our way up the imperial, double staircase.
‘God Almighty.’ I fell backwards on to the bed, with a loud sigh, which I rather hoped the retreating Jennifer had caught as she crossed the landing. If she did, it cannot have been a novel experience. ‘I don’t think I can manage a weekend of this.’ The bed itself was a large four-poster, at first sight grand and imposing, but in fact Edwardian export, cheap and clumsily carved, and clearly purchased by the Montagus for the overall effect, not for any intrinsic quality, presumably because they couldn’t afford the real McCoy. I had already noticed that the whole house was like this, impressive at a glance but disappointing to any further study, like a lovely stage set to be admired from the stalls but not explored too closely. In fact, the whole thing was a stage set, on which Tarquin could play out his personal fantasies of high-born and literate grace. Oi vey.
That night, matters did not improve as we gathered to eat in the gloomy and under-furnished dining room, Bridget shivering beneath her gauzy shawl. A huge Jacobethan table dominated the centre of the room and as we came in I heard Tarquin remonstrate that the places had all been laid at one end, instead of the four of us being ranged around the vast board like the characters in an Addams Family film. That, or a BBC period drama where a combination of modern prejudice and complete ignorance frequently obliges their fictionalised upper classes to adopt inexplicable customs. ‘If you’re going to give us a sermon, I’d prefer to listen and not just watch your lips move,’ said Jennifer, which brought the exchange to an end. We sat, Tarquin, needless to say, as our master at the head. He glanced at us, toying with a bottle of white wine on a coaster in front of him, a slight smile tweaking at the corners of his mouth. ‘Give them some of that wine,’ Jennifer murmured as she brought round plates of ethnic-looking broth.
‘I’m not sure they deserve it,’ said Tarquin, continuing to favour us with his twinkling, quirky gaze. ‘For better or worse, I’ve chosen this. It’s a fairly unusual Sauvignon, crisp but zingy at the same time, which I tend only to use on very special occasions. Is this one? I can’t decide.’
‘Oh, just give them some fucking wine,’ said Jennifer, voicing accurately my own unspoken response. She sat down heavily on her husband’s left, opposite Bridget, with me on her other side, and started to drink her soup. Tarquin did not answer her. Clearly, these rumblings of revolution had been getting more frequent of late. Like an unimaginative king, he was bewildered by the challenge to his authority and could not quite gauge the appropriate response. For a moment he sat in still and sober silence. Then he stood and poured the hallowed liquid into our glasses.
As he did so, I caught Jennifer’s eye for a moment but she looked away, not quite ready to acknowledge, as one does in just such a glance, that she was trapped in a ghastly marriage to a crashing bore. I sympathised with her decision, not least because I didn’t, for a moment, believe that I knew all the facts. There are many factors in a marriage or in any cohabiting arrangement, and just because someone gets too cross at dinner parties, or hates your best friend, or cannot tell an anecdote to save their life, these are not necessarily faults that outweigh the benefits of the union. That said, Marriage to a Controller is one of the hardest kinds of relationship for the outside witness to understand.
Genuine controllers are anti-life, killers of energy, living fire blankets that smother all endeavour. For a start, they are always unhappy on anyone’s territory but their own. They cannot enjoy any party they are not giving. They cannot relax as guests in a public place, because that would involve gratitude and gratitude is, to them, a sign of weakness. But they are intolerable as hosts, especially in restaurants, where their manner to waiters and fellow diners alike poisons the atmosphere. They cannot admire anyone who is more successful than they are. They cannot enjoy the friends of their partner because these strangers may not agree to accept them for the superior being they are. But since they have no friends themselves, it means they must regard any human gathering with suspicion. They cannot praise, because praise affirms the worth of the person to whom it is given and the process of controlling is built on the suppression of any self-worth in whomever they are with. They cannot learn, because learning first demands an acknowledgement that the teacher knows more than they, which they cannot give on any subject. Above all, they are boring. Boring beyond imagining. Boring to the point of madness. Yet I have known women to espouse and move in with such men, clever, interesting women, good-looking, witty women, hard-working and successful women, who have allowed themselves to be taken in and dominated by these tedious, mediocre bullies. Why? Is it sexy to be controlled? Is it safe? What?
‘Are there any plans for tomorrow?’ Bridget, almost blue with cold by this stage, looked brightly across the table.
‘That depends,’ said Tarquin.
But Jennifer could not wait to learn what it depended on. ‘Nothing until the evening, but then we thought we’d go to a charity fireworks thing at a house not very far from here. We’ve already got the tickets so we might as well. You take a picnic and there’s some sort of concert. It could be fun, as long as it’s not raining.’
‘Are we to be limited by something so slight as the weather?’ Tarquin adopted a dark and supposedly mysterious tone, by which I assume he was attempting to snatch back the conversation, but something in Jennifer’s independent response had empowered us, and we carried on as if he had not spoken.
‘That’d be lovely,’ said Bridget and the matter was settled.
We got through the evening somehow, finishing up back in the library, an apartment that must once have been handsome indeed, with really superb late-Regency mahogany bookshelves, which had somehow survived the depredations of the post-war decades. I was quite surprised that the bogus high priest had not flogged them during his tenure or after his fall. Could the Sunday papers have been unjust? Of course, the original collection of books was long gone and Tarquin had been quite unable to replace it. He had made do with those huge sets, entitled Stories from the Empire, or something similar, bound in red artificial leatherette and machine-tooled, but there were lots of them and they did at least fill the space, creating once again a reasonable impression from a distance. ‘Where is this house? Where we’re going tomorrow?’ asked Bridget, before Jennifer returned with a tray of coffee.
Tarquin raised his eyebrows, hesitating for the maximum effect. ‘You’ll find out.’
My sigh must have been audible.
I don’t quite know why, but it was not until we were nearly there that I began to suspect our destination. We turned off the main road at a point I did not at first recognise. When I’d known it the road had not been a dual carriageway and there was no estate of modern housing, with its sickly yellowish street lighting, near the corner. But then, as we came into the village a bell did start to ring. The peripheries might have altered but the main street was much as it had always been, unspoiled and, if anything, improved. The pub was certainly much smarter, catering no doubt for the yuppie weekend trade and not just for the thirsty farm labourers who had crushed into the bar forty years before. We passed it by and, once out of the village, it was no more than five or ten minutes before I could see the familiar little Palladian lodge, and in a loosely stretched-out line of cars we turned through the gates into the drive and enjoyed the comfortable crunch of private gravel beneath the wheels.
But I said nothing. Not even to Bridget, who did not know the place or much about my life when I was a visitor here. My reason was simple: I could not see any profit in reviving the association, given the circumstances of my last meeting, not with Serena but with her parents. I could, after all, be fairly sure they had not forgotten that dinner, since few lives boast many such evenings. Thank Christ. And there was another, weaker motive for my silence, which was that they might have forgotten both the episode and me. My worst nightmare would have been for Tarquin to talk up my acquaintance with the family to gain some local mileage from it among the assembled throng, which he was more than capable of doing, and then for me not to be recognised by any of them. This may seem like vanity. It was vanity. But it was also a reluctance to let daylight in on my dreams. Even if my career with the Greshams had ended in disaster, I liked to think that I had been a feature of their lives in that distant era, when they had been so vital a feature in mine. And while logic told me this was unlikely, still I’d preserved the fantasy thus far and I wished to get back into the car at the end of the evening with my chimera intact. Anyway, they would not be there. I was quite sure of that when I thought more about it. They would be in London or on holiday or at any rate somewhere else when the locals and the lesser County invaded their demesne. ‘Oh, look,’ said Jennifer and there was the house, perched high on its terraces, lording it over the valley beneath, as we made our way down the winding drive. It was lit, rather gracefully, by spotlights concealed in the surrounding shrubs, an innovation since my time, and the shining beams seemed to give the cool grey stone façade a kind of ethereal beauty in the dusk.
‘What a fabulous place,’ said Bridget. ‘What’s it called?’
‘Gresham Abbey,’ said Tarquin, as if the words belonged to him and he was reluctant to allow them free range.
‘Is it National Trust?’
‘No. Still private. Lord and Lady Claremont.’
‘Are they nice?’
He hesitated. ‘Nice enough.’ Which meant, of course, that he did not know them. ‘They’re quite old. They’re not really out and about much.’ As he said it, I found it strange to think of Lady Claremont as ‘quite old.’ She had been a frightening, powerful, if fundamentally benevolent figure in my youth, elegant, crisp, always competent, always charming, but with a rod of tungsten in her spine. She had not, of course, paid much attention to me as I hung about on the edge of her parties, obediently sitting where I was told, usually in the most junior spot at the table, obligingly talking to my neighbours during dinner, walking with their old relations in the gardens, buying things I did not want at the village fête, reading in the library.
I remember her coming in on me once, as I sat squinting at the page before me in the gathering gloom. She laughed and I looked up as she turned on all the lamps in the room with a single switch. ‘You mustn’t be too scared to put the lights on,’ she said with a brisk smile and went on about her business, and I felt so humiliated that my back started to prickle with embarrassed sweat. Because I suppose I had been too scared to turn them on, or rather I was just hoping that someone else would come to turn them on for me and I wouldn’t have to take responsibility for it. But as I say, she was never unkind. Nor was she cross to see me there again and again. Just uninterested.
As we approached the house, we were greeted by the customary cheery gardeners and groundsmen, each equipped with their torches, who waved and signalled and called instructions to each other, until we had been safely routed off the drive and into a large field, where row upon row of cars gave us an idea of the scale of the gathering. ‘Will you look at this,’ said Bridget, ‘there can’t be much else happening in Yorkshire tonight.’
‘I think you’ll find the music is of a very high standard,’ said Tarquin in the voice of an ageing geography mistress, which momentarily stifled our good humour. We parked and started to lug the various bits of picnic apparatus out of the car. Tarquin had already taken responsibility for a frightful plastic ‘wine carrier’ and was legging it towards the gate that would lead us back to the festivities. By parking in the field, we had skirted the house, so the gate in the pretty, iron, sheep fencing led directly into one side of the gardens that stretched away from the back of the abbey in a falling series of terraces, leading down to the distant lake in the valley below. Clearly, taking in the crowd that was already here, Tarquin was determined to find a good spot and he was soon out of sight, leaving us to manage the rest. Bridget followed him with a collection of rugs and cushions, obliging Jennifer and me to carry the long, white cold box between us. We staggered along, nearly tripping on the tufts of cow grass, until we reached the gate.
‘Can we stop for a moment?’ said Jennifer. Actually, it was quite heavy and the rope handles were cutting into our sissy palms. We leant for a moment against the rail. In the distance we could hear the murmurs and laughter of the crowd, and some sort of canned music was coming out of hidden loudspeakers, Elgar or Mahler, or at any rate an inoffensive choice for those oh-so-British ears. Jennifer broke our silence. ‘I think we’ve got until nine to eat and then the real music starts.’ I nodded. ‘You are kind to come,’ she added in a tone of real gratitude. ‘I know we kept saying we’d make a date, but I never thought we would and I do appreciate it.’
‘Nonsense. We’re loving being here.’ But of course it wasn’t nonsense and we weren’t loving it. I was, as I have mentioned, very fond of Jennifer. There is something about a publicity tour that is so ghastly, and makes one feel so vulnerable, as your book or film or whatever it might be that you are flogging is paraded in front of the public gaze, like a Spartan baby exposed to the cruelties of Mount Tygetus, that a bond is formed with fellow sufferers which is hard to describe to anyone who has not been through it. Like survivors in a lifeboat, I suppose. Selling things is part of the modern world and if you have a product, you have to sell it, but by heaven it’s no fun if it does not come naturally to you; and Jennifer, like me, came from a world that was uncomfortable with selling in any guise. Even buying should not be advertised, but professional, or worse, personal, selling can only ever be shameful. This prejudice manifests itself in lots of sharp, spiky comments. ‘I saw you on the box with that man who can’t pronounce his Rs. I never watch it normally but the au pair turned it on.’ Or ‘I heard you on the car wireless being grilled by some angry little northerner. Grim.’ Or ‘What on earth were you doing on afternoon television? Haven’t you got any work to get on with?’ And you listen, knowing that this same afternoon programme sells more books than any billboard or advertising campaign in Britain and in fact you’re lucky, incredibly lucky, to have been invited on to it.
Of course you want so much to say that. Or at the very least to tell them to grow up or drop dead, or to open their eyes to the fact that the Fifties are over. But you don’t. My late mother would have said ‘they’re just jealous, darling’ and maybe they are, a bit, even when they don’t know it. But I am jealous, too. Jealous that their living never requires them to make an ass of themselves at the end of the pier at a shilling a go, which is exactly what it feels like most of the time. In any life, in any career, only people who’ve made the same journey understand each other completely. Mothers want advice from other mothers, not from childless social workers, cancer sufferers need to hear from survivors of cancer, not from the doctors who cure it, even victims of a scandal will only really want to compare notes with some other politician or celebrity who has similarly gone down in flames. This was the bond that Jennifer and I shared. We were published authors of moderate and precarious success, and I valued her friendship. I wanted to please her and for some reason I knew it was important to her that we should come and stay in Yorkshire. I had assumed her urgency was a measure of her love but I suspect, now, that by this stage, it was because very few people would stay, certainly nobody would come twice who didn’t need to borrow money, and that the weekends when she was alone with Tarquin were becoming intolerable.
‘Is he always like this?’ I asked. I felt that her honesty in thanking me for coming merited a bit of straight talking, although, as the words left my mouth I wondered if I hadn’t overstepped the mark.
But she smiled. ‘Not when he’s asleep.’ Her expression developed into an ironic laugh. ‘I can’t decide whether he was the same when we first married and I was so young and so insecure that I mistook his pomposity for knowledge and his patronising for instruction, or whether he’s got worse.’
‘I think he must have got a bit worse,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure Helen Keller would have married him if he’d been as he is now.’
She laughed again, but still her laugh was sad. ‘I wish we’d had a child,’ she said, but then caught my look. ‘I know. Everyone thinks it would have solved everything and everyone is wrong.’
‘Don’t ask me. I’m the sad old bachelor who could never commit.’
‘I just think, with him, it would have shored him up. Allowed him that bat squeak of immortality that children bring. Or even if he’d just succeeded at something convincingly. Because he never really has.’
‘He lives very well for a failure.’
She shook her head. ‘It’s all inherited.’
This surprised me. ‘Really? I hadn’t got him down for a Trustafarian.’
She knew what I was saying and she wasn’t offended. ‘It’s not old money. All that stuff about the Montagus is bollocks. It isn’t even our real name. His father arrived from Hungary after the uprising of 1956. He started as a lorry driver, built up a transport business and sold out in the mid Nineties. Tarquin’s his only child. He was a lovely man, actually. I doted on him, but Tarquin used to keep him hidden, so none of our friends were allowed to meet him. Now he wants you to think the money is the remains of an ancient fortune, amplified by his own recent success. It’s neither. But I expect you knew that.’
I didn’t confirm this, as it seemed superior and smug. ‘It’s rather a romantic fantasy, in a way,’
‘It can’t last for much longer.’ She sighed wearily at the thought of impending collapse. ‘The whole thing costs far more than either of us realised and there’s very little coming in, now we’ve tied it all up in the house. I write my books so at least we can eat and go to the theatre, but I’m not sure how long that’ll keep us above the waterline. He’s a hopeless architect, you know. He gets taken on for particular jobs now and then, when a practice needs some extra help, but nobody ever asks him to stay.’
‘Would you?’
This time she laughed out loud. ‘Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps he’s a fabulous architect but anathema to have in the office.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
Which made her stop laughing. ‘I don’t know. Everyone says I should leave him, most of all my mother, which would have astonished her and me if anyone had predicted such a thing twenty years ago, but the odd thing is, in a funny way I do still rather love him. You’ll say I’m mad, but I watch him boring everyone to death and trying to control and impress and make people admire him, and I know he’s so puzzled and frightened and bewildered inside. He can tell it isn’t working, but he just doesn’t understand why not. No one comes to stay any more.’
‘Except us.’
‘Except fools like you. And nobody wants to know us down here. I’ve seen them literally roll their eyes when we walk into a room. I somehow feel I can’t leave him open to attack, when it’s so obvious to everyone but him that he can’t protect himself.’
As often as I am reminded that love, like everything else in this world, comes in many different shapes and sizes, I can still be amazed by some of the forms it takes. ‘I don’t think you’re mad. It’s your life,’ I said.
‘I know. And it isn’t a dress rehearsal. But even if I don’t add up to much in the end, the fact is I took him on, nobody forced me, and I have to see it through. I suppose that sounds like a quote from G. A. Henty.’
‘It sounds like something only a very decent woman would say.’ She blushed and at that moment Bridget reappeared at the fence. ‘Please come. If he doesn’t stop talking about the wine we’re going to drink I swear to God I’ll break a bottle of it over his head.’ So saying, she relieved Jennifer of her burdensome share of the cold box and guided us to our site on the top terrace where Tarquin had staked his claim. To a restful mixture of chattering crowd noise, music and Tarquin droning on, we unpacked our food and spread it forth luxuriously upon our waiting, cushioned rugs.
We had nearly finished eating when Tarquin suddenly broke off his current lecture. He had been telling us about the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt or some subject equally fascinating, and we had each retreated into a kind of glazed, mental cave of our own making, when his voice altered and took on a nervous edge: ‘They’re here.’
‘Who?’ Bridget was keen to support the introduction of any new topic, never mind what.
‘The family. The Claremonts.’
As he said their name, I was amazed to find that, like a lyric in a wartime love song, my heart actually skipped a beat. Dear Lord, does there never come a time when we are too old for such foolishness? But when I looked there was no sign of Serena, only an elderly group, all in evening dress; presumably they had enjoyed a smarter, better dinner inside. They glanced benevolently at the crowds enjoying their policies in so pleasant and decorous a manner, and in their midst were two ancient pensioners who seemed to be impersonating the Earl and Countess of Claremont, darling Roo and Pel, as I had never known them well enough to call them, who had once been such a vivid part of my life. I looked at them now, these icons of my youth, confident that they could not see me. Was I avoiding them because the sight of me would make them start and stretch their eyes in horror, or because I could not bear to see that they did not recognise me and I was forgotten? Probably the latter. I was sneakily afraid that if someone had mentioned that one of the hundreds of picnickers was an acquaintance of theirs from four decades before and had thought of them many, many times in the interim, they would have been none the wiser. Not even had I been paraded before them in person.
This deflating suspicion was reinforced by the sad but apparent truth that my Lord Claremont had been more or less exchanged for another man. The handsome, corpulent, sexy, flirty hedonist, with his thick, wavy hair and his wavier smile, had completely vanished and been replaced by a bony, stooped individual. His nose, stripped of its flesh and unsupported by the plump cheeks on either side, had become prominent, hooked like the Duke of Wellington’s to whom he was no doubt related in some wise, while his generous lips had been shaved down, as if by a razor, and he had almost no hair left. I would not say he appeared less distinguished. Not at all. This fellow looked like someone who read poetry and philosophy and pondered the great issues of life, while the Lord Claremont of my memories knew how to get a good table at the last minute and where you could find an excellent Château d’Yquem, but not much else. For a moment he glanced my way but of course registered nothing, which was not surprising since, while I knew him in those distant days, he did not know me. Not really. Certainly, he gave little sign of being aware of that awkward, plain young man whose only use was to make up a table for bridge. Even so, looking at this stick-like figure, with a Baron Munchausen outline, I missed the man he had been and it was hard not to feel a pang at the pitiless work of the passing years.
Lady Claremont was less altered. It seems odd to think of it, but I must have known her first when some of the bloom of youth was still upon her. Serena was the eldest child and her mother had married young so she cannot have been much more than forty-two or -three, when we met. It is always odd for the young grown old to realise how youthful the dominating creatures of their early years must in many cases have been. In those days her haughty, witty confidence was further empowered by her cold beauty and as a result, to me she had seemed formidable. It is true that her looks had largely, though not entirely, disappeared. But I could see, even from a distance, that she had replaced whatever she had lost with other qualities, some more sterling than the earlier version. She glanced our way and for a moment, forgetting everything that had kept me huddled out of her eyeline, I was tempted to signal my presence in some way, but the thought of her ignoring my wave and the fun it would give Tarquin when she did kept me still. Then came the broadcast announcement that told us the concert was about to begin. She looked at her husband, muttering some suggestion, I would assume about returning to their seats and a moment later, with a final, general acknowledgement, the group from the house climbed the stone steps towards the top terrace.
The concert was cheerful rather than profound, a Hungry Hundreds medley of Puccini, Rossini and Verdi, with a bit of Chopin thrown in to make you cry. The lead-up to the interval was the Drinking Song from Traviata, which was adequately sung by quite a good tenor from some northern company, and a fat soprano over from Italy, who was supposed to be much better than him but wasn’t. It was an appropriate choice as the throats of the watching hoards were dry as dust by this time, and you could hear the champagne corks starting to pop as the couple trilled the final soaring note. Tarquin, naturally, had provided some rare sustenance, Cristal, or the like, and was lecturing us on how to savour it, when we were interrupted by a man in the neolivery of the modern butler, striped trousers and a short black jacket. There was no mistaking Tarquin as our leader and he went over to him, murmuring in his ear. Tarquin’s surprise deepened to astonishment as he pointed me out. ‘That’s him,’ he said, and the man scuttled over towards me.
‘Her Ladyship wonders if you and your party would like to join the family after the concert, Sir, to watch the fireworks from the terrace.’
I cannot deny I felt a warm sense of self-justification at his words, as anyone must when they find what they had supposed was a one-way relationship, is in fact reciprocal. I had been forgiven, or at any rate I had not been forgotten. I turned to the others. ‘Lady Claremont has asked us up to the house for the fireworks.’ Silence greeted this extraordinary development. ‘After the music’s finished.’
Jennifer was the first to gather her wits. ‘How tremendously kind. We should love it. Please thank her.’
The man nodded with a slight inclination of his head, rather than a bow, and pointed towards the steps. ‘If you go up to the top there – ’ He stopped, looking back at me. ‘Of course, you’ll know the way, Sir.’
‘Yes.’
‘They’ll be in the Tapestry Drawing Room.’
‘Thank you.’ He hurried back to his normal duties. There was silence as the other three stared at me.
‘You’ll know the way, Sir?’ For once, Tarquin’s determination never to be impressed had deserted him.
‘I used to come here when I was younger.’
Tarquin was silent. I knew him well enough by now to understand that he was considering the facts with a view to reimposing his mastery of the situation. So far, the solution had eluded him.
‘Why didn’t you say?’ Jennifer’s enquiry was, under the circumstances, a reasonable one.
‘I didn’t know where we were coming until we got here. We asked but Tarquin wouldn’t tell us.’ Jennifer threw a swift, admonitory glance at her pensive spouse. ‘And I wasn’t sure they’d be interested in seeing me again after such a long time. It’s true that I used to stay here at one period of my misspent youth, but it was forty years ago.’
‘Then she must have very sharp eyes, this “Lady Claremont” of yours.’ Bridget spoke in derisive, inverted commas, as she always did when dealing with any part of my past that threatened her. I knew already, without being told, that of all the aspects of this uncomfortable weekend, the present episode would prove the most uncomfortable for her. But before we could discuss it further, the orchestra struck up and we were being sprayed with a deeply accessible version of ‘Quando M’en Vo’ from La Bohème, which may be played for laughs in context but is generally more lachrymose in concert and soon had all those MFHs and lifetime presidents of the village flower show committee reaching for their handkerchiefs.
I knew that in fact the Tapestry Drawing Room opened directly on to the gardens above us, but some trace of late-teen diffidence told me that to push in through the French windows with a crowd of strangers was overplaying my hand, so I devised the plan that at the end of the performance we would deposit our debris in the car, to obviate the need to collect it later, and make our way to the front of the house. The programme of events stated clearly that there was a fifty-minute break between concert and fireworks to allow the night to get properly dark, so I knew we had time. In that way we could come into the house via the front door, like normal people, and not be suspected of springing an ambush on our hosts.
I was glad of the decision when we got there, as quite a crowd was arriving and it was clear that the Claremonts had cunningly devised this plan to placate those locals who felt they had a right to be acknowledged by the family without the bore of giving them all dinner. The hall at Gresham was vast and high, stone-floored and with a screen of columns completing the square, behind which a graceful cantilevered staircase rose up to the next floor, its steps so shallow that a woman descending in a long skirt, which for our generation meant evening dress, seemed to float down as if her feet barely skimmed the steps beneath. It was a more awkward progress for men, who had to adjust quickly to the fact that each step taken only brought them about an inch nearer their destination, but for women the effect was like gliding, flying, and quite magical to watch, as I remembered so very well.
The portraits displayed here had been selected by Lady Claremont in a massive re-hang when she and her husband took over the house in 1967, just before my first visit, and which I could see at once had not been altered. They were chosen, as she freely confessed, unashamedly and entirely for their looks, and despite the anguished protests of Lord Claremonts’ surviving aunts, those distinguished Victorian statesmen in undertakers’ frock coats, those fearsome Georgian soldiers, all red faces and stubborn chins, those wily Tudor statesmen with their shifty eyes and avaricious mouths and generally the uglier members of the family, had been banished to anterooms and passages and bedrooms, except the ones by really famous painters, who had wound up either in the library or hung in fearsome double tiers against the crimson, damask walls of the great dining room. Both these chambers, Lady Claremont had explained to me at the time, were masculine rooms and so needed to be impressive but not pretty. Here, in the hall, charming children from every period were interlarded with handsome, nervous, young men in their Eton leaving portraits, trembling with anticipation at the welcoming life ahead, and lovely Gresham girls, painted on their betrothal to other lordly magnates or as part of some series of Court beauties for King Charles II or the Prince Regent, smiled down on their worshippers beneath. Their shining, gilded frames were set off by the apricot walls and the intricate plasterwork, picked out in varying shades of grey and white, while in the centre of the ceiling hung a huge chandelier, like a shower of glistening raindrops, frozen in their fall by a glance from the Snow Queen.
‘How perfectly lovely,’ said Jennifer, looking around, provoking a severe look from her husband, which I understood. Anything giving away that they were not regular visitors was to be suppressed. Jennifer grasped this too, of course, but had obviously made the interesting decision not to play along with his self-importance. Bridget, needless to say, was retreating into one of her silent-but-ironic moods, but I couldn’t spare the time to administer to it. I was back at Gresham, which I never thought to be again, and I was determined to enjoy it.
The Tapestry Drawing Room was on the corner of the garden front, and the easiest way to reach it was through an oval anteroom at the back of the hall, where facing doors led left, to the dining room, and right, to our destination. It was a lovely place. The walls were lined in a kind of dusty blue moiré, with cream panelling edged in gilt up to the dado, and high panelled doorcases with over-door paintings set into them, taking the cream and gilt on up to the ceiling. Against the huge spaces of blue hung a set of Gobelin tapestries, celebrating a series of victories, achieved, I am pretty sure, by Marlborough. I forget precisely why they were here. Maybe an earlier Claremont had been in part responsible for the great duke’s glory; in fact, now I am writing it I think that was why they were upped to an earldom in the 1710s. Beneath our feet was a ravishing Aubusson carpet, with its slight, distinctive wrinkling, and on it sat various magnificent pieces of furniture, most spectacularly a pedestal clock, seven foot high on its plinth, its inlaid case embellished with gilding, which had been presented to the third Earl by the Empress Catherine of Russia in return for some unspecified personal service, which no one had ever convincingly explained. The butler we had spoken to during the interval held a tray of glasses and a couple of maids were wandering about with more wine and bits of food. Lady Claremont, with that amazing eye for detail that had clearly not deserted her, had provided mini-savouries in the form of angels on horseback and tiny, pick-up bits of Welsh Rabbit or mushrooms on itsy bits of toast, all of which would be welcome, even after eating dinner.
‘There you are. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we saw you.’ Lady Claremont kissed me swiftly and efficiently on one cheek, not for her the double-kiss import of the 1970s. ‘You should have let us know you were coming.’ I presented my party, who all shook hands. Jennifer alone thanked her for inviting us and Tarquin tried to start a conversation about the famous clock on which, needless to say, he had a great deal of information at his fingertips. But she had spent a life avoiding just such overtures, and soon gave a nod and a smile to indicate she had heard enough. Then she turned to her ancient neighbour, introducing me. ‘Do you remember Mrs Davenport?’ Since the woman did look a bit familiar I nodded as I shook her wizened hand. ‘He was here all the time at the end of the Sixties,’ Lady Claremont explained with a gay laugh. ‘We used to feel terribly sorry for him.’ She looked at me indulgently and I could sense my throat tightening at the prospect of what was coming next, but nothing could stop her as she looked about to gain the maximum audience. ‘He was so in love with Serena!’
And she and the said Mrs Davenport laughed happily together at the memory of my roiling misery, which could still keep me awake at nights, and which I had thought private and brilliantly concealed from all but me. I smiled by way of response, to show I too thought it a terrific joke that I had wandered through these same charming rooms with my heart actually hurting in my chest. But her steady, even voice served to calm my remembered pain, as she chatted on about this and that, Serena and the other children, the lovely weather, the ghastly government, all standard stuff for a drinks party at a country house. I was interested that she had not mentioned the event we shared, that made an effective end to those dreams of long ago. Of course, it is a relatively modern American import, the notion that we must ‘have these things out,’ while the old, English traditions of letting sleeping dogs lie, and brushing things under the carpet, have been spurned. But who gains from this constant picking at the scabs of life? ‘We have to talk,’ says at least one character in almost every television drama these days, until one longs to scream at the screen, ‘Why? Just let it go!’ But I was not surprised Lady Claremont had avoided the culture of revisiting old wounds. In a way, her asking me up for a drink was her way of saying, ‘It’s all right. Like you, we’ve moved on. After so many years, surely we can have a chat again like normal people without even mentioning it.’ And if she had made fun of my love pangs, still I appreciated her courtesy in this.
By the time I’d concluded my ruminations the tide of the party had separated us. Tarquin, having listened to the exchange with glee, could not decide whether to turn our hostess’s ribbing into a way to belittle me and thereby derive some fun from my failed romance of long ago, or whether the mere fact that I had been to Gresham sufficiently often for Lady Claremont even to be aware that I was in love with her daughter and to welcome me now as an old friend entitled me to special handling. I left him to his indecisive review. Across the room, Jennifer had unearthed somebody they actually knew and seemed to be chatting quite merrily, and Bridget, as usual making a virtue of being out of her depth, was sulking, so I was essentially alone again in this, the haunting, painful setting of my earlier self.
Clutching my glass, nodding and smiling, I pushed back through the crush into the oval anteroom. We had passed through it quickly on our way in but, as I remembered so well, it was a lovely place, not huge but delicate and inviting, upholstered in a light and feminine chintz, and filled with light and feminine things. In this house it served as the boudoir and Lady Claremont’s desk sat against one wall, a beautifully carved bureau plat, its surface littered with papers and letters and lists of things-to-do. I looked idly at a set of small Flemish paintings depicting the five senses, painted by David Teniers the younger some time in the 1650s. I had always admired them and I greeted them now like old friends. How delicate they were, how fine the detail, how strange that, since the paint first dried, not one, not two, but twenty generations had been born, had planned, had dreamed, had coped with disappointment and had died. I wandered over to the dining-room doors. They were closed but I turned the handle and pushed one open, startling a maid who was finishing laying the table. ‘More than fourteen for breakfast?’ I smiled to show that I came in peace.
She relaxed a little, answering in a rich, warm Yorkshire accent, ‘We’re nineteen tomorrow. And that’s with two of the ladies staying in bed.’
‘I remember the rule was always that fourteen or under ate breakfast in the small dining room. More than that and it was laid in here.’
I had succeeded in catching her attention. In fact, she was quite curious. She looked at me more closely. ‘Did you used to stay here, then?’
‘I did. At one time. It’s reassuring to know that nothing’s changed.’ Actually, this was true. It was reassuring to find so much was still the same here, in this isolated appendix of my life, when almost everything had changed elsewhere. Although I later learned there was an element of illusion in this and that the estate, along with the country, had taken a downturn during the Seventies, successfully reversed from the mid-Eighties onwards in the hands of a new and gifted manager.
In fact, this happy story was true for many families I had known before their temporary fall. It should have been true for all of them, really, had not too many succumbed to that most dangerous of modern fashions among the born-rich, the desire to prove, to themselves and to everyone else, that their money is a reflection of their own brains and talent. The advantage of this is that it obviates the need to feel grateful to their forebears, or obliged to respect their successful, self-made acquaintance, who might otherwise demand some kind of moral superiority over those whose enviable position owes all to the efforts of others. The disadvantage, of course, is that it is not true. In denial of which, rich but silly aristocrats up and down the land will blithely launch into schemes they do not understand and investments that have no real worth, on the word of advisors without either judgement or merit, until their ignorance inevitably overturns them. I could name at least twenty men of my acquaintance who would be worth many millions more than they are if they had never left their bedrooms and come downstairs. And more than a few who began with everything and ended up with literally almost nothing. In this field I suspect that women, more pragmatic as a rule and less needy of self-worth when it comes to having a ‘head for business,’ have generally proved more sensible. Certainly, Lady Claremont would never have allowed her dearly loved spouse to get his hands on the wheel, or even near it, when it came to steering the Gresham inheritance.
‘Mummy shouldn’t have said that. I hope she hasn’t driven you in here.’ Her voice could always unnerve me. ‘If you were even a bit in love with me I find it tremendously flattering.’ That Serena should be so near to me was a joy, that she should have heard her mother’s words was a nightmare, so it was with mixed emotions that I turned to find her looking at me through the door from the middle of the anteroom.
‘At the time, I always rather hoped no one had guessed.’
‘I didn’t at the beginning.’
‘Until Portugal.’
‘Before. But never mind.’ Unsurprisingly, she didn’t want to be drawn into that one. ‘Of course, Mummy told me afterwards that she knew when you first stayed here, but I suppose one’s mother is bound to be more aware of these things.’
‘Yours is.’ We both smiled. ‘It was kind of her not to bring up the whole Estoril thing, seeing it was the last time I saw them.’
‘Was it really?’
‘I might have glimpsed them across the room at a summer party at Christie’s or something, but I haven’t spoken to them properly between that night and this.’
She shrugged gently. ‘Well, it was ages ago.’ I wondered at her. As I have already mentioned, I had run into Serena occasionally over the years, so there was no four-decade gap to be leaped, but the sight of her was always an amazement. To start with, she seemed to have aged one year for every ten that the rest of us had gone through. In fact, she was hardly changed at all. A few fine lines at the sides of her eyes, a shallow crease by her mouth, her hair a slightly paler colour, nothing more. ‘Are you all here for the weekend?’
‘Most of us. Mummy made it a three-line whip. In case the whole thing went belly-up and we had to save the show. But the organisers were much better this year than last.’
‘Is Mary with you? And Rupert?’
‘Mary is. She was in the hall when I last saw her. Poor old Rupert’s in Washington. He’s been posted there for the last three years.’
‘Washington? What an honour.’
‘An honour and a bore. We’re aching for him to get something in Paris or Dublin or anywhere he can get home from for the weekend.’
‘What about Peniston? Have you brought him with you?’ Serena had two children. The elder, Mary, whom I was doubtless about to see again after many years, was now married to the first secretary in the Washington embassy, Rupert Wintour, and was well on her way to being an ambassadress. When a child, she was ordinary in every way, and horribly like her father to look at, so I confess I suspected her husband’s motives when I first heard about the marriage. His father, Sir Something Wintour, was an entrepreneur and his mother a former beautician, so the eldest child of an earl seemed like a suspiciously welcome choice, but once I had met him I felt I’d been unjust to Rupert. He was quite a bright spark. Serena’s other child was the essential boy, Peniston, a little younger than his sister, whom I had seen occasionally in their house in Lansdowne Crescent, just as our friendship was petering out.
‘Peniston’s here but he arrived under his own steam, since he’s married and has children of his own. These days I’m a grandmother three times over.’
‘I need proof.’
She smiled pleasantly, used to compliments. ‘Helena’s come with William and the boys. You must say hello. And Anthony. I’m not sure where Venetia’s got to. Mummy says she’s in New York, but I got a card last week from Singapore. You know what she’s like.’ She rolled her eyes ceilingwards, with a tolerant laugh. There were three girls, starting with Serena herself and a brother who was, of course, heir to the kingdom. Helena, the second Gresham sister, had married an amiable landowning banking baronet in a neighbouring county, a union that had satisfied her mother, if it did not send her into ecstasies. However the youngest sister, Venetia, had defied the family by accepting the proposal of a pop impresario, an episode I remember only too well. The Claremonts had absolutely refused to countenance it at first. But to everyone’s surprise, since she was not seen as particularly strong or rebellious, Venetia had stuck to her guns and in the end they caved in rather than endure the scandal of a wedding without their presence. As my own father used to say, ‘Never provide material for a story.’ Venetia was the winner in the end. Her husband made an immense fortune in the music industry and now she was richer than, or at least as rich as, any of them but the family exacted its revenge by continuing to patronise her, as if her life had been a trivial and wasteful mass of nothing, up to the present day.
Oddly, the male sibling, Anthony, was the one we all knew least. He came after Serena and before the others. He was still young, not much more than a boy, when Serena and I were running around together, but I can’t say that even when he was grown up we were ever much the wiser where he was concerned. He was polite, of course, and pleasant to talk to at dinner or while having a drink before lunch, but he was always curiously opaque. He revealed nothing. The kind of person who, years later, might turn out to be a terrorist or a serial killer, without causing any great surprise. I liked him though, and I will say that he never demonstrated that supremely tedious habit that some people acquire, of loudly advertising to all and sundry the amount of information they are concealing. He hid everything about himself, but without pretence, mystery or conceit.
‘So, how are you?’ she said. ‘Have you got another book out? I shouldn’t have to ask. I feel rather feeble, not knowing.’ There is a way of enquiring into an artistic career, which may sound or read as generous, but which in fact manages to reduce the value of it almost to nothing. The contempt is contained within its enthusiastic kindness, rather as a little girl’s painting will be praised by someone who is hopeless with children. No one can do this better than the genuinely posh.
‘There’s one coming out next March.’
‘You must let us know when it does.’ Such people often say this sort of thing to their acquaintance in the media: ‘Let me know when you’re next on television,’ ‘Let us know when it’s published,’ ‘Let us know when you’re back on Any Questions.’ As if one is likely to sit down and send off three thousand postcards when a personal appearance is scheduled. Obviously, they understand this will never happen. The message is really: ‘We are not sufficiently interested in what you do to be aware of it if you don’t make us aware. You understand that it does not impinge on our world, so you will please forgive us in future for missing whatever you are involved in.’ Serena did not mean it unkindly, which is the case with many of them, but I cannot deny it is disheartening at times.
Her friendliness continued unabated. ‘When did you know you’d be here tonight? You might have given us some warning. You could have come to dinner.’ I explained the situation. Serena raised her eyebrows. ‘Are they friends of yours? He’s acquired the title of Bore of the County, but perhaps we’re being unjust.’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
She laughed. ‘Well, it’s nice to welcome you back. Has it changed?’
‘Not really. Not as much as most of the rest of my life.’
‘A trip down Memory Lane.’
‘I’m living in Memory Lane at the moment.’ Naturally, this demanded an explanation and I gave a partial one. I did not tell her the reason for why I was interviewing all these women from our joint past, only that Damian wanted to check up on what had happened to them and he’d asked me to do it, because he met them all through me in the first place.
‘But why did you agree? Isn’t it very time-wasting? And you certainly don’t owe him a favour.’ She raised her eyebrows to punctuate this.
‘I’m not completely sure why I’m doing it. I didn’t intend to when he made the request, but then I saw that he was dying-’ I broke off. She was visibly shocked and I rather regretted blurting it out as I had done.
‘Dying?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
She took stock, regaining command of herself. ‘How odd. You don’t think of someone like Damian Baxter as “dying.”’
‘Well, he is.’
‘Oh.’ By now she had quite recovered her equilibrium. ‘Well, I’m sad. Surprised and sad.’
‘I think he was always quite surprising.’
But Serena shook her head. ‘I don’t agree. He was exciting, but most of what he got up to was not surprising, it was inevitable. It wasn’t at all surprising that he gatecrashed the Season so effectively. And it wasn’t a bit surprising that he made more money than anyone else in recorded history. I knew all that would happen from the moment I met him. But dying thirty years before his time…’
‘How did you know?’
Serena thought for a moment. ‘I think because he was always so angry. And in my experience people who are angry when young, either explode and vanish or do tremendously well. When I heard he’d gone into the City I knew he’d end up with zillions.’
I could not contain my curiosity, even if it felt like biting down on a loose tooth. ‘Did you like him? When all was said and done?’
She looked at me. She knew the significance of the question, despite the years that we had travelled since it had the smallest relevance to either of our lives. On top of which she shared the usual reluctance of her tribe to give emotional information that might later be used in evidence against her. But at last she nodded. ‘At one point,’ she said. Then she seemed to gather up her carapace from the floor and wrap it firmly round herself once more. ‘We really ought to join the others. I think it’s about to start.’ In answer to her words there was a sudden fizzing roar and through the uncurtained tall windows we could see a rocket darting across the night sky. With a loud bang, it exploded into a wide shower of golden sparks, accompanied by an appreciative ‘ooh!’ from the watching crowd.
‘Is Andrew here?’ In common courtesy I could avoid the question no longer. Even so, it felt lumpy, as if it had stuck to my lips.
She nodded. ‘He’s outside with the children. He always loves fireworks. ’ Behind her, the anteroom was suddenly filling up again, as some of the contents of the drawing room beyond spilled out to take advantage of another way outside. Serena started towards them. I fell into step beside her as we passed through the open French windows and in a moment we were enveloped in the sudden chill of the now dark, night air. Further along to the right, the rest of the house’s guests were emerging from the doors of the Tapestry Drawing Room itself and the wide terrace was already becoming quite crowded. Another rocket, another bang, another twinkling shower, another ooh. ‘Andrew, look who’s here.’
It is still an offence to me that, of all people on earth, she should have married Andrew Summersby. How could my goddess have married this clottish beast of burden willingly? At least Shakespeare’s Titania chose Bottom when she was on drugs. My Titania picked her Bottom when stone-cold sober and with her eyes wide open. Obviously, we all knew that Lady Claremont had propelled her daughter towards it, as in those days she did not question the accepted wisdom that a mother’s job was to promote a suitable marriage, and a husband of equal rank and fortune trumped every trick. And obviously we all knew that Lady Belton was pushing from the other side until her shoulder must have been out of joint. But even so, it was hard to understand at the time, and harder still now, looking back. I wondered silently if Lady Claremont, with the different values and awarenesses of the modern world, would have promoted the match quite so furiously today. I rather thought not. But what good are such contemplations? If my grandmother had had wheels, she would have been a trolley car.
Andrew’s stupid, bovine face, wider and flatter and redder and, if possible, even more repulsive than when I knew him, turned blankly towards me, with a solemn, self-inflating nod. ‘Hello,’ he said, without any question or courtesy to mark the gap since we last met.
Bridget had now found her way to us through the crowd and she chose this moment to curl her arm through mine in a deliberately possessive manner, advertising ownership, smiling smugly at Serena as she did so, all of which I found incredibly irritating but I did not show it. ‘May I present Bridget FitzGerald?’ I nodded towards my companions. ‘Andrew and Serena Summers-’ I corrected myself. This was wrong. Andrew’s father was dead, which I knew. I just wasn’t thinking. ‘Sorry. Andrew and Serena Belton.’ Serena smiled and shook Bridget’s hand, but Andrew for some reason looked rather insulted and raised his glance back towards the fireworks. I thought at the time it was because I had got his name wrong, but I have a horrible suspicion, knowing his absolute lack of brain or imagination, that he had objected to being introduced to a stranger of lower rank as anything other than ‘Lord Belton.’ You may find this suggestion hard to believe, but I can assure you he was not alone among perfectly genuine toffs in this brand of foolishness, which takes the form of imitating the clothes and customs of their fathers from half a century ago and more. This is in the mistaken belief that it is an indicator of their good breeding, as opposed to absolute proof of their idiocy,
Serena continued blithely on, as if his rudeness were quite normal, which I suppose to her it was. ‘This is my daughter, Mary. And my son, Peniston.’ The introduction was for Bridget’s benefit. I smiled and said hello, which greeting was returned by Mary pleasantly, as I willingly concede, and Peniston also held out his hand. They clearly knew who I was, which was pathetically gratifying. Serena smiled too, enjoying the presence of her children. ‘When did you last see them?’
‘In another lifetime, I’m afraid.’ I smiled and shook the young man’s hand in my turn. ‘I won’t mention the girl in sulks over having to wear some party dress she hated, or the boy in blue rompers, peddling his first tricycle round the kitchen.’
‘That’s a relief,’ said Peniston.
‘I remember that dress,’ said Mary. ‘Granny sent it and it was covered in the most hideous smocking, like an illustration from a Jack and Jill reader in the Fifties. I screamed the place down rather than wear it and I would do the same today.’ We laughed, and I found myself revising my opinion of Mary, even if her resemblance to Andrew was very off-putting. Through all this, Bridget looked blank and Andrew once again assumed the expression of affront that I could already tell had become habitual. There was no obvious reason for this, although it might have been because the reference to his daughter’s tantrums or his heir’s rompers, or perhaps to his wife’s kitchen, was some piece of iniquitous lèse majestè on my part. I neither knew nor cared.
But the young siblings eased the touchy moment by chatting away about mundane things and Andrew’s gaucheness was soon forgotten. Presumably Peniston and his sister often had to perform this service to cover the tracks of their tiresome Papa. I was not, in truth, much disposed to like the new Viscount Summersby, as he now was, since his very name still made me shudder, but even I had to admit he seemed a nice fellow. I can’t pretend he was exactly attractive, being overweight and shortish, and if his face was pleasant, it was not good-looking. But then again, my impression of him may be suspect. Most men, or women too for aught I know, have ambivalent feelings towards the children of those they once loved. Particularly if it was not their choice to end the relationship. In a way these boys and girls, symbols of some horrible misjudgement by the gods, should never have been born if things had gone right. Yet it’s not their fault, is it? As one usually comes to see in the end. So it was for me, with Mary Wintour and Peniston Summersby. The news of their impending births had cut me like a knife from fore to aft, but of course, presented with this nice man, this agreeable woman, it was quite a different matter, and even I could see it wasn’t fair to hate them because their father was a blockhead and their mother broke my heart. There wasn’t much of Serena in either of them, to be honest, and even less as they had grown. As a little girl, Mary had been a miniature of Andrew, far more than her brother, but on that night he too looked more like his father, if he looked at all like either. Happily for them and for their prospects, neither seemed to resemble Andrew in charm.
Peniston smiled. ‘Granny was frightfully excited when she spotted you. She’s terribly proud to know a real novelist. She’s read everything you’ve ever written.’›
‘I’m flattered.’ I was. And astonished. Suddenly it was less extraordinary that I’d been found among the crowd.
‘She just loves knowing a writer. Most of her friends have the greatest difficulty reading to the end of a restaurant bill.’ A pretty woman in her early thirties had joined us. ‘This is my wife, Anne.’
‘What he says is quite true. Roo’s thrilled you’re here. She’s got all your books, you know. I expect she’s lining them up for you to sign.’
‘She has only to ask.’ Since Lady Claremont’s interest in my work presumably implied an albeit slight interest in me, I was amused that in forty years she had never invited me to a single gathering either here at Gresham or in London, nor made the smallest attempt to reestablish contact. Why was that, if her fascination with my career was so great? At the time, my paranoia immediately attributed the cause to the Estoril evening, but I am fairly sure now that I was wrong. Occasionally one does come across this curious diffidence on the part of the posh and there is nothing sinister or deflating in it. I suppose it is the flip side of their tendency to patronise. They are still marking the absolute divide between their world and yours, but in this case it is demonstrated by a kind of modesty, a tacit recognition that their muscular, social powers may not always impress those who have other choices.
‘You’re missing everything.’ Andrew’s voice cut across our merriment, and we obediently turned our attention back to the fireworks. Fizz, bang, ooh. Fizz, bang, ooh. The display ended with what should have been a very impressive showing of the Gresham crest, a rearing lion holding a flag of some sort. In the event it didn’t quite work, as most of the lion’s head failed to ignite, rendering the image faintly macabre, but even so it delivered a reasonably big finish. And then it was over, and time for the guests, inside and out, those not staying the night anyway, to make their exit and not to take too long about it. I managed to find our hosts in the throng to thank them and say goodbye.
Lady Claremont was still smiling, with that glint in her eye. ‘We must get you down here. If you could ever spare the time.’
‘I’m down this weekend, so I must have some time to spare.’
‘Of course you are. With those funny people who’ve got Malton Towers.’ The phrase ‘those funny people’ told me everything I needed to know about Tarquin’s chances of ever getting in with the County. ‘One of Henry’s great-grandmothers grew up at Malton. He used to stay there quite often before the war. But you thought it was ghastly, didn’t you?’ She looked at her aged husband.
He nodded. ‘Coldest bloody house I ever entered. Cold food, cold baths, cold everything. I never had a wink of sleep in all the years I went there.’ It was easy to see that his lordship had had about enough of this interminable evening and was more than ready for bed, but he hadn’t quite finished. ‘They’re crackers to have taken it on. Ruined my cousins, ruined every organisation that came after them. And at least my relations had the land, much good did it do them. Your friends have just bought a bottomless pit.’ Actually, to me this sounded not only like fairly accurate reporting but also curiously reassuring. It is easy to forget, watching the Tarquins fling every last penny they possess into supporting some pseudo-aristocratic, gimcrack fantasy, that there are still people for whom these are normal houses in which normal lives should be led. If they’re uncomfortable then they’re uncomfortable and that’s that. Never mind the plasterwork or the Grinling Gibbons carving, or the ghost of Mary Stuart in the East Wing. There was a kind of no-nonsense quality to his dismissal of Malton Towers that seemed to earth my own experience of it, releasing me from reverence. At any rate Lord Claremont had said his piece and there didn’t seem much point in getting him to elaborate, so I nodded and moved on.
I caught sight of Serena in the hall. She was with her family and talking to Helena, who was looking a good deal older than her older sister. But she was friendly when we met again, kissing me and wishing me well, as I grinned across her at the object of my ancient and unrequited passions. Looking back I cannot quite explain why the sight of Serena that evening, far from making me sad as it might so easily have done, had in fact given me a terrific lift. I felt marvellous, giddy, tight, high, whatever Seventies word is most appropriate, at being reminded of how much I once could love. Still loved, really. A whole set of muscles that had atrophied through lack of use sprang to life again within my bosom. Rather as you are empowered by discovering an ace has been dealt you when you pick up the cards from the baize. Even if you never get a chance to play it, you know that you are the better and stronger for having an ace in your hand.
‘It’s been so lovely to see you,’ Serena said, sounding wonderfully as if she meant it.
‘I have enjoyed it.’ As I answered her I knew that my tone was strangely steady, almost cold, in fact, when I did not feel cold towards her in the least, very much the opposite. I cannot explain why, except to say that an Englishman of my generation will always protect himself against the risk of revealing his true feelings. It is his nature and he cannot fight it.
Again, she smiled her smile of the blessed. ‘We’re all fans, you know. We must try and get you down to Waverly.’
‘I’d love it. In the meantime, good luck with everything.’
We touched cheeks and I turned away. Stepping out of the front door, I had not gone more than a few paces when I heard Andrew’s indignant enquiry. ‘Good luck with what? What did he mean by that?’ I confess the temptation was too great and I sneaked back, staying out of sight from the front door.
‘He didn’t mean anything. Good luck. That’s all.’ Serena’s patient and modulated tones dealt with him as one might soothe a frisky horse or dog. ‘Good luck with life.’
‘What an extraordinary thing to say.’ He seemed to clear his throat to draw her attention to him. ‘I’m rather surprised to find him so effulgent and you so welcoming, after everything that happened.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake.’ They were alone now, or thought they were, and Serena’s tone was less careful. ‘Since the evening you speak of we’ve seen the fall of Communism, the Balkans in flames and the collapse of the British way of life. If we can survive all that, we can surely forget one drunken dinner that got out of hand, forty years ago-’ But by then, Bridget was pulling at my sleeve with a funny look, and I had to come away and out of earshot. If Andrew had more to contribute on the subject after Serena’s outburst it was lost to me. Not for the first time I wondered at how, among the upper classes particularly but perhaps in every section of society, extremely clever women live with very, very stupid men without the husbands’ ever apparently becoming aware of the sacrifice their wives are making daily.
‘That was the greatest treat,’ said Jennifer, as we nudged our way out of the gates and back on to the main road. ‘What luck we had you with us. Wasn’t it, darling?’
I didn’t expect an answer, as I realised that it was almost physically painful for Tarquin to acknowledge another’s superior power at any time. Most of all in his own would-be kingdom. But Jennifer remained looking fixedly at him, driving through the side of her right eye, until he managed a sort of grudging response. ‘Good show,’ he muttered, or something along those lines. I couldn’t really hear.
His envy and Bridget’s misery combined to fill the car with a green mist of resentful, hurt rage, but Jennifer wouldn’t give up. ‘I thought they were so nice. And they’re obviously very fond of you.’
‘Well, he’s very fond of them. Or some of them. Aren’t you? Darling?’ Bridget’s contribution at moments like this was the vocal equivalent of throwing acid. Of course, as I was forced to realise, the downside of remembering what love is came in the form of a clear realisation of what it is not and whatever it was that I was sharing with Bridget was not love. I’d seen this coming. I had hinted as much to my dear old Daddy when I went to have lunch with him. But I don’t think, before that evening at Gresham, I’d appreciated that the buffers were not only in sight but nearly upon us. In fairness, I cannot blame Bridget for feeling cheesed off. She was an intelligent, attractive woman, and she was obliged to accept that, once again, she had wasted several, long years on a dry well, on a bagless hunt, on a dead end. As I have mentioned, she’d made this mistake before, more than once, which I knew well, and until this very evening I’d always taken her line that the men in question were beasts and cads for not releasing her when they must have known it was going nowhere. Instead, they had, as I thought, strung her along until they had stolen her future and her children, who would never now know life. It was at this point, in that darkened car pushing through the Yorkshire lanes, that I suddenly realised that they had not been cads exactly, simply selfish, insensitive, unthinking fools. As I was. And from tomorrow morning I would be sharing their guilt, in the Sad Story of Bridget FitzGerald.
She didn’t speak again until we were in our freezing, damp bedroom. She had started to undress in that angular, vengeful way that I knew so well, talking over her shoulder at me, or through the back of her furious head. ‘The whole thing is so ridiculous.’
‘What thing? There isn’t a “thing”.’
‘Darn right, there isn’t. She’s not at all interested in you. Not in the least.’ She spoke the words crisply with a vivid, sparky relish, as if Serena’s lack of love for me was somehow all her own work, a real achievement to be proud of.
‘No. I don’t suppose she is.’
‘Not in the least.’ The repeat was heightened in volume and acerbity. ‘Anyone can see that. She could hardly remember who you were.’ This was, I thought, a punch below the belt but I decided not to argue. Instead, I settled for looking wounded. I was wasting my time. Bridget, in full flow by now, was unfazed by any perceived sense of injustice. ‘She’d never leave him. You can’t imagine that she would.’
‘No.’
‘And if she did? What makes you think she’d ever want to live with a sad, little depressive like you?’
‘I don’t.’
‘Because she wouldn’t, you know. You can’t believe that would happen in a million light years.’
‘Fine.’
‘Give up all the privileges? All the profile? Go from Countess of Belton to Mrs You? Never.’
For a moment I was going to protest facetiously that she would have been more correctly styled as ‘Lady Serena You’ but thought better of it. I was rather interested by her suggestion that Serena and Andrew had a ‘profile.’ What did that mean? What is a ‘profile’ in this context? I suppose Bridget’s rage had now taken on a life of its own and her editing faculties were impeded. ‘I dare say it is unlikely,’ I said.
‘I’ll say. That type never do.’
‘She’s a “type,” is she? Well, that’s encouraging. I must look out for some more of them.’
‘Oh, fuck off.’ I cannot complain at this since I deserved it.
But by the time I too had undressed and we were both shivering beneath our inadequate coverings in our ugly carved bed, she had calmed down. Up until now her anger had protected me against feeling guilt, but I was not to get off scot-free. Just before I turned out the light she lowered her book and looked over at me. ‘What did I do wrong?’ Her voice was quite gentle again and the soft Irish burr that I always found so beguiling gave it a poignancy that reminded me painfully how much I hate to hurt.
I shook my head and gave what I hoped was a warm smile, which in that temperature was quite a challenge. ‘It’s not your fault,’ I answered her in what I felt was a suitably genuine tone. ‘You’ve done nothing wrong. It isn’t you, it’s me.’ As one mouths these oh so familiar sentiments, and this last, hackneyed sentence in particular, one likes to feel that one is expressing a noble and generous sentiment. That you are ‘taking the blame’ for the failure, ‘shouldering the responsibility’ and so on. In fact, of course, this is dishonest, as any serial love-rat, to lift a title from the tabloids, could tell you, and we are almost all love-rats at some stage. The phrases are a kind of lazy shorthand, designed to deflect the brickbats hurtling at your head and bring all discussion of the topic to a close as quickly as possible.
Bridget, quite rightly, felt she deserved more than this craven and mendacious reply. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘I mean it.’ And her tone was now pulling at my heart strings to an uncomfortable degree. ‘Is there anything I could have done that would have made it better?’
I looked at her and decided on honesty. ‘You could have been happier.’
She bridled. ‘You could have made me happier.’
I nodded with almost military precision. ‘Precisely,’ I said. And with both of us feeling that her words had put us each inalienably in the right, I turned out the light and we pretended to sleep.