Not very surprisingly, after an evening like that I decided I needed some air. Kieran offered to get his driver to take me home but I wanted to walk, just for a bit, and he didn’t insist. So we shook hands in that funny English way, as if we hadn’t been through an emotional trauma together, as though the whole thing hadn’t really happened and the stains of our tears had some other, more banal and more acceptable explanation. We made the usual murmurings about meeting again, which one always says. Unusually, I rather hope it will happen, but I expect not. After that I set off down the Embankment.
It was a long walk home and quite cold, but it did not seem so. I strolled along, both reliving and then laying to rest my memories of Joanna. I was glad to have had a chance to revalue Kieran, even while I knew he was far beyond help, and I felt that I had been allowed to look into a soul that was worth looking into. Filled with these melancholy thoughts, I had just turned off Gloucester Road into Hereford Square when there was a scream, then laughter, then shouting, then the sound of someone being sick. I wish I could write that I was astonished to hear what sounded like a large Indian takeaway being splashily deposited on to the pavement, but these days it would require a Martian, and one only recently arrived from outer space, to be surprised at these charming goings-on. A group of young men and women in their early twenties, I would guess, were loitering on the corner of the square, perhaps recent refugees from the Hereford Arms on the other side of the road, perhaps not. One woman, in a short leather skirt and trainers, was throwing up and another, with suspiciously black hair, was tending to her. The rest just stood around, waiting for the next act in their evening’s entertainment. Foolishly, I paused to study them. ‘Got a problem?’ said a man with a shaved head and a whole array of piercings down the edge of his right ear. I wondered the weight didn’t throw him off balance.
‘My problems seem nothing to yours,’ I said and then rather regretted my clever-clogs answer as he took a menacing step towards me.
‘Leave him, Ron. He’s not worth it,’ the girl with black hair and what looked like four different petticoats swaddling her bottom shouted over her shoulder. Happily he appeared to agree and turned away.
As he moved back, he shouted a crisp ‘Fuck off’ at me, but more as a kind of standard ritual, as one might say good morning in a village street. And so, before he could change his mind, I did.
It’s not often that I walk at night, though more from laziness than fear, but when I do I am amazed at the changes that have come about in London during my adult lifetime, the main one being, of course, not the mugging and the general crime, nor even the dirt and uncollected rubbish that swirls and drifts in piles against the railings and the plane trees, waiting in vain for the men to come. It is the drunkenness that has transformed the streets, not just of London but of almost every town, into a lesser hell for lawful citizens. The kind of drunkenness that in years gone by used to be talked of in Siberia at the height of Stalin’s iron rule as a reflection of the misery of the oppressed, or it was rumoured to be manifest up near the pole, where the long nights of winter drive strong men mad. Why did it happen here? When did it start? I used to think it was a class thing and somehow linked to the ills of social deprivation, but it isn’t. Not long ago I attended a twenty-first party, held in one of St James’s smartest clubs. The birthday boy was clever, charming, tipped for success and linked to half the peerage, and I watched as all the nice young girls and young men cheerfully tossed back the booze until they were staggering or vomiting or both. As I left, I heard a tray of glasses go west amid loud laughter, and a girl in a pretty couture dress of lilac chiffon pushed past me, hand on mouth, hoping to make it just in time. Outside, a fellow with traces of sick on his evening shirt was urinating against the car parked next to mine. I had escaped not a moment too soon.
Certainly some people drank too much in my day, as they always have, but drunkenness was rare and sad, and made men look like fools. Until as little as ten years ago being drunk was a mistake, a regrettable by-product of making merry, a miscalculation which, the next day, required an apology. Now it’s the point. Does anyone out there understand why we let it happen? Because I don’t. Of course I can see the charm of the ‘café culture’ we were said to be encouraging. But how long can a sane person contemplate failure without admitting it? At what point does optimism become delusion? The other day some fat-headed woman on the radio was lecturing her browbeaten interviewer, denying that there was anything wrong with binge-drinking, insisting that the true problem lay with the middle-aged, middle-class drunks, apparently swilling it down in their own houses. He, poor battered fellow, dared not argue that even if this were true, even if all the bons bourgeois were lying flat on the carpet, singing sea shanties every night of their lives, they would still not be a problem, because they would not be a problem to anyone else. Why do modern leaders not grasp that their job is to control antisocial behaviour but not private activity; to regulate our actions as regards others, but not where they only concern ourselves? At times it is hard not to feel that as a culture we are lost, in permanent denial and spinning in the void.
I turned the key and opened the door of the flat on to the darkness of living alone. I walked into the drawing room and switched on a scattering of lamps from the door. I was only beginning to get used to the notion that every time I returned to my home I would find it just as I’d left it. When Bridget went I will say she went most thoroughly. As I waved her off I suspected that she saw the separation as only temporary and that I would soon find telltale signs that she expected to be back, but I would say now that I wronged her, that in some way she had decided she was as glad to be rid of me as I to be rid of her. These things are peculiar. You agonise for months, or even years, on end. Should you finish it? Should you not? But having made the decision, you’re as impatient as a child on Christmas Eve. It is with the greatest difficulty you refrain from packing for them, pushing them into a taxi and shooing them away that very night. You long for them to go, you ache for it, so you can begin the rest of your life. ‘You’ll miss me,’ she said as she walked through the flat, checking for any last-minute items she’d forgotten.
‘I know I will,’ I said, as one must in such a case. There is an etiquette involved and this comes into the same category as ‘It isn’t you, it’s me.’ Actually, I thought at the time that I would miss her. But I didn’t much. Or far less than I expected. I can cook quite well when I put my mind to it and I’m lucky enough to have a woman who cleans a few times a week, so the main change was that I no longer had to spend the long, dark evenings with someone who was permanently disappointed in me. And that was nice. In fact, one of the great gifts of getting older is the discovery that the very thing you feared, ‘being alone,’ is actually much nicer than you thought. I should qualify this. To be old and ill alone, to die alone, is usually a sad thing, and at some point one may want to take steps to avoid this fate if possible. I suppose the prospect of a solitary death is even scarier for the childless, as they have no one they can reasonably expect to get involved with their disintegration, but even for them, and I am one of them, chunks on your own before you hove into sight of the Pearly Gates are simply lovely. You eat what you like, you watch what you like, you drink what you like, whoopee, and all without guilt or the need to hurry in case you’ll be found out. If you feel social you go out, if you don’t you stay in. If you want to talk you pick up the telephone, if not you don’t, and all around is the blessed gift of silence, not the silence of resentment but of peace.
Of course, as a rule this only applies if one has recently come out of a relationship that was less than satisfactory. For the surviving widow or widower of a happy marriage things are obviously different. I will always remember my father, left on his own, remarking that while others might feel released by the death of their spouse to pursue an interest or a hobby or to get involved with some worthy activity that their marriage had prevented, he had personally gained nothing and lost everything, a very moving tribute, even if my mother deserved it more than he knew. But for the man or woman after a longed-for break-up things are quite different. There are missing bits, of course, the sex for one, but for a long time sex between Bridget and me had been more a question of feeling it was expected of one rather than demonstrating any real interest in the other on either of our parts. I won’t deny that the thought of re-embarking on a career of ‘dating’ to fill the gap is a terrifying one to people in their fifties, but even so, freedom is a word that always shines.
The following morning, as I sat at my desk, I reviewed my non-existent progress in the search for the fortunate child, but I felt I must be approaching its conclusion. There were after all only two women left on the list to eliminate: Candida Finch and Terry Vitkov. After that, my task would presumably be done. When I had contemplated these possibilities, before this time, I had assumed that I would check out Candida first since she was in England. If she proved to be the one we were looking for I would not have to go to Los Angeles, which did seem rather a chore, so it was logical to try her next. But when I dialled her number, clearly printed for me on Damian’s list, I was repeatedly treated, for almost the only time in this adventure, to the synthetic courtesies of an answering machine, made worse by my leaving message upon message, so far without tangible result. I wasn’t comfortable any more with my bogus charity excuse, not since Kieran had somehow exposed it without meaning to, and instead of formulating another lie I decided just to make a simple request, stating my name, suggesting she had probably forgotten me but that we knew each other once and asking her to get in touch when she had a moment. I then left my numbers, put the receiver carefully back on to its cradle and hoped for the best. But the best was slow in coming and after three weeks of this, plus an unanswered postcard, I wasn’t quite sure what to do next to serve my master. We did not, after all, have very long to play with.
‘Go to Los Angeles,’ said Damian down the line. ‘Take a break, stay a few days. You can tick off Terry and do yourself some good. Do you have an agent out there?’
‘Only as part of an arrangement with the London ones. I’ve never met him.’
‘There you are, then. Give him a treat. Pick up some girls, take him out for the evening, give him the time of his life. I’m paying.’
Should I resent this attempt to sound generous? Or was he really being generous? ‘My agent here says he’s gay.’
‘All the better. Flirt with him. Make him think he’s the only man you’ve ever found attractive. Ask his advice and tell him how helpful it is when you receive it, then press an unfinished manuscript into his hands and give him a sense of ownership in what you’re doing.’ Comments like this made me painfully aware of how much more Damian knew about the world than I.
I had spoken to him of my evening with Kieran de Yong, not all of it, not the last bit, but enough for him to know that I had liked him and that the dead boy had definitely not been Damian’s child. He was silent at the other end for a minute or two. ‘Poor Joanna,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘She had every gift she needed for the era that was coming.’
‘I agree.’
‘If only she’d been a cynic. She died of optimism, in a way.’
‘Like a lot of Sixties children.’
‘I’m glad you liked him,’ he said in an unusually generous tone. ‘Of course, he can’t stand me.’
‘And we know why.’ I hesitated, wondering whether I wanted to return to that troubling episode, yet conscious that every uncovered detail of this journey insisted on taking me there. ‘Did we all know what you were up to? That time in Estoril? Are the accounts I’m getting truthful? Or are their memories playing tricks on them? Because it’s starting to sound as if you slept with every woman in the world in the space of a few days.’
‘I was young,’ he replied and we both laughed.
I first met Terry, as I have said, at the ball given for Dagmar of Moravia. Lucy Dalton had disliked her on sight and so did some others, but I did not. I don’t mean I was mad about her but, to invert Kieran’s chilling phrase, she wasn’t nothing. She was full of energy, full of what was once called pluck, and I did like her determination, and her mother’s, to have first and foremost a very good time. Her father, of whom we would never see much, had made a killing with an advertising agency, first based in Cincinnati and later on Madison Avenue, at just the hour when the world was discovering quite what advertising could really do. Right through the 1950s, there had been a sense in many quarters that it was enough to say ‘Use this! It’s Good!’ And that would do the trick, launching the product on a grateful public, until the moment, and it was in my teens, that the world of marketing would change forever and begin its remorseless campaign to take over civilisation. Jeff Vitkov spotted this coming era sooner than most. He was a simple, unpretentious soul, brilliant in his way but not, or so we thought, complicated in his wishes or his needs, the last man on earth to wish to climb the social ladder. Even after the move to New York he continued to regard Cincinnati as his home and he would possibly have left the family based there, flying back on the weekends, enjoying vacations in some modest but comfortable resort hotel, if his wife, Verena, had not made the unwelcome discovery that even the vertiginous improvement in their finances had not brought the social recognition she craved and, reasonably enough, felt entitled to. There is a fantasy one often hears voiced in England that America is classless, which, as any traveller will know, is arrant nonsense and never more so than in the provincial towns, whose social arrangements can be impressively resistant to the ambitious newcomer. Someone remarked, not all that long ago, that it would be easier to gain entreè to the King’s chamber at Versailles than to break into the inner gang of Charleston, and much the same could be said in all the cities of the true, US Gratin.
This was always so. One of the main reasons for the great invasion by American heiresses in the 1880s and 1890s, the so-called Buccaneers, was that many of the daughters of those newly rich papas grew tired of having doors shut in their faces back home in Cleveland or St Louis or Detroit, and preferred instead to enjoy the deep and genuine warmth with which the well-born English have always welcomed money. It is hard to deny that the careers of girls like Virginia Bonynge, Viscountess Deerhurst, who began life as the daughter of a convicted murderer from the Middle West, would seem to confirm that things were much easier this side of the pond. Needless to say, this would often lead to sweet revenge, as the mothers of the Duchess of Manchester or the Countess of Rosslyn or Lady Randolph Churchill, or many, many others would sweep home in triumph to the place where they’d been snubbed, to rub their sisters’ noses in it. I suspected at the time that this thinking, or something like it, was behind the plan, forming in Verena Vitkov’s mind towards the end of 1967, to put her daughter through a London Season.
There were options open to mothers, in those days, to defray some of the expense if necessary. Things were already less abundant than they had been before the war, when there were three or four balls in London every night. Until the end of presentation there were half a dozen each week; by my time there were two or three; and fifteen years later it was down to less than ten in the whole Season. Even in ’68, some girls gave only cocktail parties and no dance, others would throw both but share the ball, and there was no shame in this. Serena Gresham shared her coming-out ball with her cousin, Candida Finch, although this was of course because Lady Claremont was funding them both. But from the start, Terry Vitkov was anxious to cover every base and I have no doubt she was more than encouraged in this by her mother, the unsinkable Verena. In the event the drinks party, held early in the proceedings before they’d quite found their feet, was a standard affair at the Goring, but for the ball they were determined to make the evening memorable. This they undoubtedly achieved if not quite in the way they had intended, but that comes later and, to be fair, it was an original location. Mrs Jeffrey Vitkov, so ran the invitation, would be At Home, ‘for Terry,’ on such and such a night at Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks in the Euston Road.
I do not know if you can still hire the waxworks for a private party. Not just a room, or a special chamber set aside for ‘entertaining,’ but the whole edifice and all it holds. I doubt it, or if you can, I imagine the price would be prohibitive to all save the super-rich, but forty years ago you could. There was less danger in it for them, of course, than there would be today. Apart from any other reason we were a more law-abiding lot. We took more care. Crime, as it might touch the middle and upper classes, was rare. People may groan when they hear that houses in the country were not locked, but they weren’t. Not if one had just gone shopping. In central London we walked home alone at night without a qualm. Shoplifting was not considered cool by anyone. It was just stealing. I don’t think mugging was sufficiently common even to qualify for a special name. And again, as I said, we were much less drunk. This did not mean, of course, that every party went without mishap.
I dined very well on the night of Terry’s ball because my hosts for the dinner beforehand, had forgotten all about it. I turned up at the door of a rather smart house in Montpelier Square, joined on the step as I waited for the occupants to respond to my ring of the bell by Lucy Dalton and a man I hardly knew, who later became the head of Schroder’s, or some such spangled operation, although you couldn’t have told his future held such promise then. The three of us stood, shifting our weight from foot to foot, until the door was at last opened by Mrs Northbrook (for that was her name), who stood there in jeans and a jersey, with a gin and tonic in her other hand. At the sight of us the blood drained from her face and we were greeted with the telling words, ‘Jesus Christ, it’s not tonight!’ The result of this was that Mr Northbrook was summoned with a scream and had to book a table for ten at an excellent place just across from Harrods, in that funny little triangle which I think used to have a grass bit in front of it, or have I made that up? As we waited, we all sat in their pretty, untidy and unready drawing room, swilling down some rather good Pouilly Fumé, which Laura Northbrook (we had moved on since the doorstep moment) had providentially found in the fridge before she joined her husband upstairs to struggle into their clothes. After such a welcome they could hardly stint with these frightful strangers wished upon them and the result was one of the best dinners I had eaten all year.
Our group was therefore in a jolly and convivial mood when we arrived at the famous entrance at about eleven that night. I suppose there must have been bouncers or someone similar to admit us, but, as I’ve already said, I have no solid memory of cards to be taken, or lists to be ticked off. The main party space had been arranged in what was then, and maybe is now, known as the Hall of Kings. The wax images of England’s Royalty had been moved back into a circle round the dance floor, cleared at the centre, but the figures were still sufficiently spaced apart for us to be able to stroll among them and photographs would later appear in the press – though not in the Tatler, which had originally been the plan – of debs and their escorts apparently standing next to Henry VIII or Queen Caroline of Anspach. I was myself snapped with a girl I knew from my Hampshire years after my father’s retirement from the diplomatic. It never, mercifully, appeared in print, but for some reason now forgotten I still have a copy of the picture. We look as if we’re talking to a startled and offended Princess Margaret.
As we know, every waxwork ever made appears to be either under sedation, or recently arrested for criminal assault and in this respect almost uniquely, the last four decades have seen little change. Except perhaps in their subject matter. We certainly all knew far more history then, that is the whole nation did, not just the privileged, the educational establishment having not yet broken the link between teaching and the imparting of knowledge; so figures like Wellington and Disraeli and Gordon of Khartoum still had a resonance that spread far beyond the elite, the only group today who might have heard of them. Nor, when it came to waxworks, was there the modern, pusillanimous terror of causing offence and I can bear witness that the Chamber of Horrors in those days was really horrible. That night it had been set aside for a discothèque, and when Lucy and I went downstairs to explore it was quite clear the authorities were a long way from worrying about whether or not someone might get hit by a falling basket of nasturtiums or a stray conker.
There were stone pillars dividing the space and at the top of each, on a little ledge, was a severed head, disfigured with some hideous atrocity. Eyes hung out of sockets, flaps of skin revealed whitened bone, one even had an iron bar thrust right through it, causing the face to look very surprised, as well it might. A long glass case held miniature examples of every torture known to man, some quite new to me, and we walked slowly down it, wondering at human cruelty. Then there were the serial killers, although I don’t believe that term was yet in use, but we certainly had them, if by some other title. George Smith, who drowned several unfortunate brides, presided over a bathtub which, we were told, was the actual one in which he had perpetrated his crimes, Dr Hawley Crippen was there and John Haig, who had met his chief victim in the Onslow Court Hotel, which I knew well since it was just down the street from where my grandmother used to live. Haig selected Mrs Durand-Deacon from among the diners in the restaurant and worked his way into her affections before he took her off to the country somewhere and plunged her into a vat of acid. Lucy and I stood, silenced by the sight of these drab and ordinary men who had caused such untold misery. Today these displays tend to have a comic, even camp, element to them which somehow protects one from the reality that what you are witnessing is true, that all these terrible things did happen, but then there was a counter-impetus, to make it as real as possible and the result was curiously haunting, even remembered now, after so long.
At last, in the very centre of the chamber we came upon a dingy curtain with an instruction not to pull it open without preparing well. I think it was forbidden to anyone under sixteen or something similarly enticing. It was the curtain that fascinated me. It was old, threadbare and dirty, like a curtain in a garden shed to hide the weedkillers from sight, and in a way this made it much more sinister than some self-advertising veil of scarlet satin. ‘Shall we?’ I said.
‘You do it. I don’t want to look.’ Lucy turned away but did not, of course, move. People say things like this, not because they intend not to look but because they do not wish to take any responsibility for the horrors that will be revealed. It is a way of enjoying base pleasures while retaining their superiority.
I pulled back the curtain. The shock was immediate and stark. Even if it was not prompted by the young woman who was hanging from an iron hook that had penetrated her vitals and on which she was apparently writhing in vivid, screaming agony. This, I could handle. What almost made me cry out in pain was the sight of Damian holding Serena in a fierce embrace and quite obviously plunging his tongue so far into her mouth that she must have had trouble breathing. Although I cannot pretend that she looked, even to me, as if she were resisting his advances. Far from it. She clawed at his back, she ran her fingers through his hair, she squeezed her body against his, until she seemed to be attempting somehow to crush the pair of them into one single being. ‘No wonder the curtain carried a warning,’ said Lucy and they froze, then looked across at us. I desperately searched for a phrase that would contain my rage at Damian, my disappointment in Serena and my contempt for the new morality all at once. It was too ambitious. I might have been able to make up a combination word in German, but English has its limitations.
‘You’re busy,’ I said. Which didn’t exactly hit the mark I was aiming at.
They had broken apart by now and Serena was straightening herself up. Her body language told so clearly that she was longing to ask both of us, Lucy and me, not to say anything, but of course she felt the request would be demeaning. ‘We won’t say anything,’ I said.
‘I don’t care if you do,’ she replied with immense relief.
Damian, meanwhile, was carrying on with his usual insouciance. ‘I’ll see you later on.’ He gave Serena a swift hug and wiped the lipstick off his mouth with a handkerchief, which he replaced in his pocket. Without a word to us he slipped through the curtain and was gone.
The sound of an O. C. Smith record, which was much in demand that summer, Hickory Holler’s Tramp, suddenly filled the space, making an odd cultural contrast with all those severed heads and murderers and the luckless victim swinging on her hook, but the three of us still stood there. Until there was a noise and the unwelcome face of Andrew Summersby poked round the curtain. ‘There you are,’ he said, ignoring us, ‘I’ve been looking everywhere.’ He took in our grotesque, waxen companion. ‘Ooh er.’ He laughed. ‘Someone’s going to wake up with indigestion.’ And he gave the figure a push, as if she were in a child’s swing. The hideous thing moved slowly back and forth at the end of its rope.
‘Let’s dance,’ said Lucy, and without another word to Serena we left her to the noble dullard, and made our way to a dark little dance floor in the shadow of a guillotine, on to which a French aristocrat in a jacket of cheap-looking wrinkled velveteen, was being strapped by two burly revolutionaries. From a draped alcove to one side the entire Royal Family of France looked on serenely.
‘Are you all right?’ To my bewilderment, Lucy appeared to be on the edge of tears. I couldn’t imagine why.
She was irritated by the enquiry. ‘Of course I am,’ she said sharply, bobbing fiercely in time to the music for a bit. Then she looked up at me apologetically. ‘Don’t mind me,’ she said. ‘I had some bad news just as I was leaving home and it suddenly came back.’ I looked suitably solicitous. ‘An aunt of mine, my mother’s sister. She’s got cancer.’ This was quite clever of her, I can see now. At the time I am writing of, the English had just about begun to move on from referring to cancer as ‘a long illness bravely borne,’ but there was still something dread in the word, still something, if not exactly shameful, at least to be avoided at all costs. In those days the diagnosis was generally considered a death sentence, and when one heard of people taking treatments one almost despised them for not being able to face the truth, although I suppose logic tells us some of them must have survived, mustn’t they? Anyway, the point is it wasn’t at all like today, when you really do have a reasonable shot, if not quite as reasonable in every case as non-medicos tend to assume. For Lucy to say the word at all was bound to distract me. Still, looking back, I admit I am slightly embarrassed that I completely believed her explanation.
‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘But there are all sorts of things they can do now.’ One mouthed these clichés at the time, they were as routine as ‘How do you do?’ but one never thought they contained a grain of truth. She gave a routine nod and we danced on.
For some reason, an innocent one I am certain, Terry or more probably her mother had decided to cut a cake at the peak of the evening. This was not generally done. As I have observed, in those pre-don’t-drink-and-drive days, we ate before we arrived and we did not generally eat again until the breakfast was served towards the end of the dance. There might occasionally be some sort of speech and a toast, although by no means always, at a mid point in the festivities, but this usually consisted of some old uncle just standing and saying what a marvellous girl so-and-so was, and we would all raise our glasses and that was that. There were dangers involved in this departure from the norm, but quite honestly, when there was no speech, which was usually the case, there were times when the proceedings fell a bit flat. We arrived, we drank, we danced, we went home and there had never been what my mother would refer to as ‘A Moment’ in the evening that really registered. The father of the deb in question would have the bitter knowledge that he had paid out thousands upon thousands for a night that no one would remember. On the other hand the danger of a speech and a toast is always that it may in some way feel rather naff. At least, when the occasion is not a wedding or something where speeches are generally expected. Anyway, on this particular evening, perhaps because neither Terry nor Verena was absolutely at ease with the rules, they decided to have cake and a toast, as if it had indeed been the wedding it was not.
I gather people wandering throughout the waxworks were summoned by a kind of tannoy, which would obviously have been installed in that building anyway for crowd control, but by then Lucy and I were back in the Hall of Kings, seated rather wearily at a table with Georgina Waddilove and Richard Tremayne, an unlikely couple if you like, overlooked by some of the duller members of the Hanoverian dynasty, one of whom was responsible for Richard’s predecessor, the first Duke of Trent, in what I suspect must have been an uncharacteristic night of merriment. I have forgotten why Richard was with us, probably because he was tired and couldn’t find anywhere else to sit. At all events Jeff Vitkov, who had come over from New York especially for the ball and was obviously determined to make his mark, took the microphone from the band singer and announced that he was going to propose a toast to his ‘young and beautiful daughter, and her even younger and more beautiful mother.’ This is the kind of thing that makes the English cringe, of course, and we were only just recovering when he added that we were all going to eat some genuine, American brownies, to mark the ‘debut,’ ugh, of a ‘genuine, American girl.’ Quite apart from the toe-curling sentimentality of all this, to most of us in those days ‘Brownies’ meant young Girl Guides, just as ‘Cubs’ meant young Boy Scouts, so there was a certain amount of hilarity released by the announcement that we were going to eat some, but we listened on as Jeff praised his daughter, Terry, who then seized the microphone for herself, paying tearful tribute to her wonderful ‘Pop and Mom,’ which made us freeze even more solidly in our chairs. Taking up a large knife, she sort of slid it through a mound of the brownies in question, and after that a mass of waitresses appeared, carrying decorated trays full of the little sticky brown cakes we now all know so well but didn’t then. I hate chocolate and I remember so did Georgina, so, alone at our table, we didn’t eat any, but they must have been good, because more or less everyone else did, and across the room I could see Damian absolutely piling in.
The events that followed a little while later seemed to start almost as a rumour, a sense of strangeness spreading through the gathering, before anyone was aware of the source. I recall that I was dancing with Minna Bunting, although our little walkout was over by that stage, and there was suddenly the sound of someone being violently sick. Which, then, was very startling. People on the dance floor began to look at each other, as there were more odd sounds, men and women started to scream with laughter, not ordinary amused laughter, but a shrill cackling like a witches’ coven at work. In what seemed like no time at all we could hear shouting and singing and yelling and crying coming from every corner. I looked at my partner to share my puzzlement, but even she didn’t look too clever. ‘I feel incredibly ill,’ she muttered and walked off the floor without another word. I hurried after her, but at the edge she suddenly clutched her head and ran off somewhere, presumably to a distant but welcoming cloakroom. Somehow the dancers themselves had maintained a kind of order, but once we had left them, the crowd filling the rest of the rooms and swirling around us felt slightly – or, before long, very – mad. One of the mothers rushed past me, with her bosom hanging out of her dress and I saw Annabella Warren, Andrew Summersby’s sister, screaming and lying flat out, with her skirt hitched above her midriff, displaying some thoroughly unusual-looking underwear, possibly recycled by her nanny. Not far away a young man in the corner was in the process of pulling his shirt over his head. In the mêlée I had soon lost sight of Minna, but someone caught my arm.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ Georgina was by my side, her impressive bulk providing me with something to shelter behind. A girl tripped and fell, spreadeagled at our feet, laughing.
‘Come on, everybody! Clap your hands!’ The voice, amplified by the microphone, was only too familiar. We turned and registered that the boy undressing was now revealed as none other than Master Baxter, who had shed the rest of his clothes, and was cavorting wildly round the stage in his underpants and looking in grave danger of losing even those.
By now the ballroom was bedlam. Some people must have escaped at the first signs of trouble, with that marvellous instinct that the British upper classes generally display in such a situation, but those who were not at the exits already were finding it increasingly hard to get to them. Suddenly I caught sight of Terry, in the midst of the demented crowd. Her hair had collapsed and a separate arrangement of ringlets had detached itself from her head and somehow got caught on a zip or hook fastener behind her neck, leaving a kind of mane to sweep down her back, making her look faintly feral as she attempted to claw her way through the ranks of her guests. I reached across a weeping man with his regurgitated dinner down his front and caught her wrist, pulling her through the crowd towards us. ‘What is it? What’s happening?’
‘Somebody spiked the brownies. They were full of hash.’
‘What?’ Is it to be believed that the word was not immediately familiar to me? Or was it just the shock of discovery blocking my concentration?
‘Hash. Marijuana. Dope.’ Terry was altogether more at home with the topic, if angrier than Genghis Khan.
‘Why? Who would do such a thing?’
‘Someone who wanted to ruin my party and pretend to themselves it was a joke.’ This was, I have no doubt, a completely accurate diagnosis. She was rich, she was good-looking, she was an outsider. That was more than enough to ensure enmity in several quarters, although this seemed an unusually unpleasant way of demonstrating it. Then again, the perpetrator may not have been aware of the level of mayhem that would ensue from their jolly prank. We were not all experts then.
‘You seem OK.’
‘I’m OK because I’m on a diet.’ She said it snappily and it was almost funny, if we had not been in the middle of such desolation. At that moment a weeping Verena Vitkov claimed her daughter from the other side. Someone had trodden on her dress, and it had torn away from a seam at the waist, leaving not her legs but her roll-on exposed, which was of course much worse.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said to Georgina and she nodded, but then two things happened. The first was that I could see Serena Gresham had climbed on to the stage with a dinner jacket, presumably Damian’s, which she was trying to wrap round him despite his protests. She also had his trousers over her arm but obviously that task was a bridge too far and she didn’t even attempt it. The second thing to catch at our attention was the sound of a police whistle, which echoed through the chamber like the shrill tolling of Doom. At once, what had already been chaos was transformed into a panicking stampede. It is easy now to think, almost calmly, of the notion of a drugs raid. In the forty years that have elapsed since these events, drugs themselves have ceased to seem extraordinary. Regrettable, I would hope, and something to be avoided for most of us even today, but no longer weird. In those days the vast majority of this crowd were strangers to the very notion. Whatever the impression that pop stars and Channel Four like to give of the Sixties, if their tales are true, which I often doubt, they were operating in a different world from my bunch. Obviously the bad boys among us were starting to experiment and by seven or eight years later a lot of us would have been introduced to the whole trendy culture of drugs and damn-it-all, but not by then. After all, most of what came to be called ‘the Sixties’ happened in the following decade. Yet here we were, debutantes and beaux, plus many of their mothers and fathers, in a full-scale drugs raid, which would provide, as we were only too aware, a perfectly wonderful story for the papers the following day. Out of family loyalty, if nothing else, all those nice, young sons and daughters of earls and viscounts, of high court judges and generals, of bankers and heads of corporations, had to get out of that room unseen and unapprehended, to stop their blameless daddies being soaked in the spray of public ridicule that was even then being loaded up, ready to flow. If the room had been on fire there couldn’t have been a more urgent dash for the door.
I too would have headed in the same direction as the crowd, but Georgina held me back. ‘It’s hopeless,’ she said. ‘They’ll be waiting for us on the pavement.’
‘Where, then?’
‘This way. There’ll be a service exit for the group. And the maids must have been bringing the drinks up from somewhere.’
Together we pushed against the crowd. I glimpsed Candida Finch, green-faced and at the end of her tether, leaning against the opposite wall but she was too far away for me to help her. Some girls were dancing a sort of reel, accompanying themselves with alternating screams, in the middle of the floor between us. Then Candida was swept away and I didn’t see her again. ‘This is a nightmare.’ Serena was nearly upon me when I realised who it was. She had an arm round Damian, who was still ranting and calling out to everyone to clap their hands. ‘I’ll clap your hands if you don’t shut up,’ she said, but it didn’t seem to have much effect. Damian fell, and others surged over him, until I really began to wonder if he would be seriously injured. ‘Help me get him up.’ Serena was down among the lunging feet and I knew I had to do my best. Together we managed to hook our arms under his and literally drag him to the edge of the room.
‘Why are you all right? Didn’t you eat any either?’
Serena wrinkled her nose. ‘I wasn’t hungry.’
‘Here we go!’ The enterprising Georgina had found a service door at the back behind a curtain that a few people, but not many, were taking advantage of. Behind us, the whistles and general shouting had increased in volume, and it was clear that those who had tried to leave in a more orthodox manner were being subjected to hideous humiliations before they were allowed to do so.
‘My God, the press is outside!’ This from Lucy, who had started down the main stair, only to make this unwelcome discovery and beat a retreat whence she had come. ‘If I get in the paper my father will kill me.’ It’s funny. We were so much more governed by these considerations than our equivalents are now.
Following our leader, Georgina, we came to a landing at the top of a stone, service staircase. Guests in various stages of dishevelment were hurrying down it. One girl broke her heel and fell the remainder of the second flight with a scream, but without pausing she scrambled up, tore the shoe off the other foot and plunged on. Unfortunately, Damian seemed to be getting worse. He had now ceased his requests for us to clap our hands and had decided instead simply to go to sleep. ‘I’m perfectly all right,’ he murmured, his chin sinking deeply into his chest. ‘I just need a little shut-eye and then I’ll be as right as rain.’ Down went his chin even further, followed by his eyelids, and he began to snore.
‘We’ll have to leave him,’ said Georgina. ‘They won’t kill him. He’ll just have his name taken, and a warning or something of the kind, and that’ll be the end of it.’
‘I’m not leaving him,’ said Serena. ‘Who knows what they’ll do? And what happens afterwards? If he has his name on a list at a drugs raid, he might never get a passport or a security rating or a job at an embassy or anything.’ This string of words, flooding out as they did, created a rather marvellous contrast to the life we were leading at that precise moment, cowering on a dingy, back stairway, on the run from the police. It conjured up images of embassy gatherings at which Damian would shine, and foreign travel and important work in the City. I found myself wishing that Serena had voiced such fragrant worries about my destiny.
But Georgina was unconvinced. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. He’s not newsworthy. That’s the only thing we have to worry about. You’re a headline. She’s a headline. Even I’m worth a mention. He’s not. Leave him here to sleep it off. Maybe they won’t come up this far.’
‘I’m not leaving him,’ said Serena. ‘You go without us if you want.’
I remembered her defence of Damian at Dagmar’s ball, when she stood up for him alone and all the rest of us were silent. I decided I was not prepared for a repetition. ‘I’ll help,’ I said. ‘If we balance him between us we’ll manage.’ She looked at me. I could tell she was pretty grateful not to have been taken up on her suggestion of facing the Mongol hordes alone. So we did just as I said. Hoisting him up, and against a low chorus of Damian’s mumbled protests about just needing a little shuteye, the group of us somehow got him to the bottom of the stair. We hurried past the ground floor, since we could hear the shouted protests of indignant adults being stopped and questioned, as well as screams and yells and singing coming from the young. Eventually we found ourselves in a basement, searching for a door or window that would open.
We were alone, a little club against the world, in a very murky passage, when a side door opened and a girl stuck her head out. ‘There’s a window here that seems to lead out to an alley,’ she said and ducked back inside the room. I did not know her well. Her name was Charlotte Something and she ended up a countess, but I forget which one it was. Nevertheless, I shall always remember her with real gratitude. She had no obligation to come back and tell us of her useful find, instead of just climbing out and running for it. That kind of generosity, when there is nothing in it for the giver, is what always touches one most. Anyway, we followed her into what must have been a sort of cleaning cupboard because it was full of brushes and dusters and tins of polish, and sure enough there was an unbarred window, which had been forced open for what looked like the first time since the Armistice.
Here, as before, the problem was Damian, almost comatose by this point, and we wrestled with him for a bit until finally Georgina, who was stronger than any of us, bent down and threw her shoulder beneath him in a sort of fireman’s lift and, with an exasperated sigh, flung him at the open space. Serena had already climbed out and was able to grab one arm and his head, and with her and Lucy pulling, while Georgina and I pushed, we did succeed in getting him through, although it was too much like assisting at the delivery of a baby elephant for my taste. There were men’s voices in the passage outside, as Georgina squeezed out, and I would guess I was probably the last to make it to freedom by that route before it was sealed off by the enemy. We pulled down the window as quickly as we could, then raced to the end of the alley, Georgina and I dragging Damian between us. You will understand that to be pulling a largish young man, naked except for underpants and a dinner jacket, was unusual to say the least of it, and we could not consider ourselves out of danger until Serena, waving us into the shadows, had managed to stop an innocent taxi driver, who had no idea what he was letting himself in for.
‘Where shall we take him?’ she hissed over her shoulder and even I could see that this would be a large mouthful for the Claremonts to swallow on an empty stomach. I imagine he had originally planned to drive himself back to Cambridge, after a cup of coffee or two, as I blush to say we did in those days, but clearly that was now out of the question.
‘My flat. Wetherby Gardens,’ I said. My parents were there, but after nineteen years of me they were not entirely unequipped for this sort of escapade. Serena gave the address and, opening the door, she climbed in ready for Georgina and me to rush Damian across the pavement and into the welcoming darkness of the cab. We made it, clambering in with puffing and sighing, and Lucy hurried in behind us. It may sound as if the taxi was overloaded and so it was, but you must understand we thought nothing of that, neither passenger nor driver, and nor did the powers that be. They weren’t concerned with micro-managing our lives, as they are today, and in this I think, indeed I know, that we were happier for it. Some changes have been improvements, on some the jury is still out, but when it comes to the constant, meddling intervention by the state, we were much, much better off then than we are now. Of course, there were times when we were at risk and the smug, would-be controllers will tut-tut at that, but to encourage the surrender of freedom in order to avoid danger is the hallmark of a tyranny and always a poor exchange.
‘Should we put his trousers on?’ Serena had somehow managed to keep the flapping items with her. We all looked down at Infant Damian curled up like an unborn child and the thought of the task defeated us.
‘Let’s not,’ said Lucy firmly.
‘What about your poor parents?’ asked Georgina. ‘Suppose they’re still awake?’
Another glance confirmed the earlier decision. ‘They’re strong,’ I said. ‘They can take it.’ With its distinctive rattle, the taxi started off, but as we came back out on to the Euston Road we could see that the police were still there with a host of cars and vans, and there was that now familiar, but then rare, accompaniment of the popping of cameras, blinding the poor wretches caught in their glare, all destined for unwelcome fame on the morrow.
My parents were philosophical, as they stood, blinking, in their dressing gowns, staring down at Damian slumped in a chair, still in his lively and distinctive costume, but now with his trousers deposited in a crumpled pool at his feet, like a ritual offering. ‘He’ll have to sleep on the floor in your room,’ said my mother, without the possibility of any disagreement. ‘I have a committee meeting in here at ten tomorrow morning, and there is no guarantee he’ll be up and about by then.’
‘No,’ I said. And together we dragged Damian down the passage, depositing him on a folded eiderdown with some blankets on top.
‘Where are the rest of his clothes?’ asked my mother. I looked at her blankly. ‘His shirt and so on.’
‘At Madame Tussaud’s, I suppose.’
‘From where he had better not reclaim them.’ Her voice was, I thought, unnecessarily severe. ‘He could have got you all into a great deal of trouble.’
‘That’s rather unfair,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t his fault.’ But my mother paid no attention to my attempted defence. She was only displaying the behaviour that I have since discovered was absolutely endemic to her and to many like her. When they approve of someone in their children’s lives, and when it is because of the social position of said individual, they will never admit it and will find endless excuses for no matter what bad behaviour. But when, instead, they disapprove, again for social rather than more meaningful reasons, rather than concede this, everything else about the unwanted friend must be condemned. This falls into the same category as when they give directions. If it is desirable that you should attend an event, it is ‘easy-peasy, straight down the M4 and you’re there,’ but when they do not believe you should go, the same journey becomes ‘quite endless. You trudge down the M4 forever and when you get off it there’s an absolute maze of roads and villages to be negotiated. It’s not worth it.’ My mother was not a snob in any normal sense, she would have been shocked at the notion that she might be, but that didn’t stop her being offended when she felt I had been ‘latched on to’ (her phrase), and this is what she felt about Damian. There was some truth in her analysis, of course.
Damian woke in the early hours of the following morning, I would guess at around three. I know this because he woke me, too, by whispering ‘are you awake?’ into my ear, until I was. He was completely sober. ‘I’m starving,’ he said. ‘Is there anything to eat?’
‘Couldn’t it wait? You’ll have breakfast in a minute.’
‘I’m afraid it just can’t. I can go and look for myself if you like.’
This seemed like a worse option, so I pulled myself to my feet, pulled on a dressing gown over my pyjamas, all of which garments date the incident, since, like almost every other male, I have abandoned traditional nightwear at some point during the subsequent decades, and I set off through the flat, with Damian following. With difficulty I persuaded him against a fry-up, and he settled for a bowl of cereal followed by some toast and tea. I joined him in the last, as we sat hunched over the tiny kitchen table. He started to laugh. ‘What’s so funny?’
‘The whole evening. Lord only knows what they’ll put in the papers.’
‘Not us, which is the main thing. Poor Terry.’ Nobody seemed to feel at all sorry for the ruin and waste inflicted on our hostess. I felt it was time someone did.
But Damian shook his head. ‘Don’t worry about her. She’ll get a big story out of it. It’ll probably be the defining moment of the Season before she’s finished.’
‘Perhaps it is.’
‘Perhaps.’ Looking back, that party did come to represent a moment for a lot of us, when the past, present and future fused together in some kind of crazy way. When the anti-authority, destabilising counterculture, which would win eventually (although not in the way we all then thought), swept in through the doors of our safe little, nearly-pre- 1939 world and carried us off with it. Damian put another piece of plastic bread in the toaster. ‘I don’t know why I’m so hungry. Does hash make you hungry?’
‘I’m not really the person to ask.’
He looked at me, hesitating and then deciding to speak. ‘I’m afraid you got quite a shock when you pulled back that curtain.’ I was silent, not exactly through indignation or a sense of being wronged. I just couldn’t imagine what I could say that would convey the right message, because I didn’t know what the right message might be. He nodded as if I’d spoken. ‘I know you’re keen on her.’
‘Does she?’ I couldn’t help myself. Aren’t we sad, sometimes? The odd thing was, and I remember this quite clearly, I wasn’t sure what answer I wanted him to give.
Damian shrugged as he helped himself to butter. ‘If I know, I dare say she does.’
‘What about you?’
My question was oddly phrased and he looked up. ‘What do you mean?’
Of course, the fact was I wanted to hit him. Right there, smack, in the middle of his face, with a great, heavy, wounding punch that would send him over backwards, with any luck cracking his head against the stove as he fell. I’ve often wondered what it must be like to live in a rougher world from the one I have always occupied, in a hit-now-ask-questions-later kind of society. One’s always supposed to say how ghastly violence is, and of course it is ghastly, but there must be compensations. ‘Are you serious about her?’ I asked.
He laughed. ‘Don’t be so fucking pompous.’
‘I just meant-’
‘You meant you are so jealous your face hurts, and you’re only assuming a poncy, pseudo-uncle pose so you can patronise me and put me down, and show me I’m a ridiculous interloper, out of my mind for daring to dream so far above my reach.’ He put a bit more marmalade on to his toast and bit into it. Of course, I had to admit that every one of his words was documentary truth. If kicking him to death would have made Serena love me, I would have done it there and then. Biff, boff, bang. Instead, I opted for underhand fighting. ‘I thought she was going out with Andrew Summersby now.’ I was not without a trick or two of my own.
Damian looked up, sharply. ‘Why do you think that?’
‘He seemed very proprietorial when he came looking for her after you’d gone. Then they went off together.’
He gave a slightly annoyed grin. ‘Andrew was at the dinner she had to go to and it is true that right now her parents think she’s going out with him. Since Andrew seems to share this delusion, she couldn’t be bothered to have it out with him tonight. No doubt, she soon will.’
I thought about this. It sounded to me as if Serena and Andrew were indeed an item, a thought that sickened me, and Damian was trying, for my benefit, to exaggerate his chances with her, when all he had managed was one kiss. We may have been more innocent then, but one kiss didn’t mean much. ‘Are you going to her dance?’ I said.
‘Can you ask? I’m staying at Gresham for it.’
I have never been a very confident person, although I do not really know why this is so. It is true that I was not good-looking when I was young, but I was quite clever and I seemed to get about. My parents loved me, I have no doubt of that, and I’ve always had a lot of friends. Nor were girlfriends an insuperable problem, if a few may have been on the lookout for something better. I even got on well with my sister before her marriage. Yet with all this, I was not confident and I had to admire Damian for that reason. No castle walls could apparently keep him out and I envied him for it. Even at that moment, when I wished him in chains, his feet encased in blocks of concrete, at the bottom of the sea. Even as I imagined his thick hair waving as the tides pushed it to and fro, fishes swimming across his staring, sightless eyes, in some way, malgrè moi, I felt admiration. ‘Has Lady Claremont invited you?’
‘Not yet, but she will. Candida and Serena are sorting it out between them. Serena’s going to tell her mother that Candida fancies me.’ He looked at me as he said it. As an alibi this was perfectly sensible and Lady Claremont would believe it, since Candida fancied everything male that moved, but as well as this there was a meaning in his words which I could see he had not thought through properly before he spoke them. Their echo in the room annoyed him. Because his speech meant that if Lady Claremont had even a whiff of this man’s interest in her daughter he would not be welcome in her house. ‘It’s OK,’ he said in answer to my unspoken query. ‘I understand that type. I know I can make her like me.’ Obviously he did not understand Lady Claremont’s type, nor that of her husband, nor that of any of their world, largely because those people were not then, and are not now, interested in being understood by the likes of Damian Baxter. As a matter of fact I think Lady Claremont might well have liked him under different circumstances. She might have enjoyed his humour and his self-belief, she might even have allowed him into their circle as one of those token Real World Members that such households go in for. But that is all.
I am not an Englishman who hates Los Angeles. I’m not like those actors and directors who insist that every day spent there is drudgery, that it’s all so ‘false’ they cannot besmirch their souls for one more minute and that they shout with joy when the ’plane takes off from LAX. I suppose some of them may be telling the truth, but I would guess not many. More usually, they are just ashamed of their desire for the rewards that only Hollywood will bring, and they disparage the place and all its works in the hope that they will not lose caste among their soulful brethren back in Blighty. I had only been once before the trip in question, many years before, when I was seeking fame and fortune in a fairly disorientated way, but I have visited a few times recently and I always enjoy myself when I am there. It is a resolutely upbeat place and after a long unbroken stretch of British pessimism, it feels good sometimes to look on the sunny side of life. I know the natives take this to extremes. But still, there is something about the up, Up, UP!ness of it all that is a tonic to sad spirits and I am always pleased to be there.
In the forty years that separated my youthful friendship with Terry Vitkov and this, our re-encounter, she had enjoyed what is known as a chequered career. Even her time in London had not gone according to plan. She and her mother had done quite well, all things considered, but Terry had not ended up a viscountess presiding over twenty bedrooms in a house open to the public, which had unquestionably been the target, and they must have been disappointed. Looking back, I think the difficulty may have been that the Vitkovs as a group had made the common mistake of confusing a large salary with having money. A salary may enable you to live well while it’s coming in, very well, but it does not alter the reality of your position and no one knows this better than the British upper class. Just as television fame, while it continues, feels like film stardom but seldom survives the cancellation of the series. Naturally, none of this would have mattered if a nice young man had fallen in love with Terry, but she was an abrasive personality, with her big features and her big teeth, loud in laughter, short on humour, and with a kind of unconcealed greed that was rather off-putting even to the worldly. In short she did not land her fish. There was a moment when she might have had an army major who was probably in line to get a baronetcy from an ageing uncle (although the latter was unmarried and these things are never certain), but the young officer took fright and fell back into the arms of a judge’s daughter from Rutland. In some ways he might have been better off with Terry, as she would at least have filled the house with people who could talk, but how long would she have stood it, that life of rainy walks and discussing horses over plates of summer pudding, once the title had arrived? So, if the path the Major took was duller, it was also probably smoother for him in the long run.
I last saw her, I am fairly sure, around the time of the party in Estoril, but not because she was there. In fact, she was annoyed that she had failed to secure an invitation. If only I had been so lucky. She may already have been pregnant then, but if so, none of us knew it, only that she had a plain but eager American millionaire pursuing her, divorced but not too old, whom she subsequently married in time for the baby’s birth. The millionaire’s name was Greg Something and he had been working in Eastern Europe at the time. After leaving there they had returned together to sun-drenched California where he pursued a career with Merrill Lynch and we’d lost them. I never really knew him but I liked him and, judging by our few meetings, I would have said he was far better suited to her than any of her English beaux, and if I had given it a moment’s thought, I would have hoped for many years of bliss before Abraham saw fit to part them. Unfortunately, or so the story goes, Terry, a decade further down the line, attempted to cash him in for a much richer banker from Connecticut, before the latter dumped her for a model and left her high and dry, her first husband having made his escape while the going was good and settled down in North Virginia with his second family.
So Terry and her daughter had stayed on in Los Angeles, where she pursued a career of some kind as a television presenter, dealing, or so I have been told, in something called the infomercial, where women chat about hair products and kitchen utensils and different types of luggage in a natural, unstudied way, as if it were remotely believable that they would do so were they not trying to sell you something.
I had rung from London, just to make sure she was still there, and she had been quite receptive to the idea we should catch up. I knew she was not one to be touched by charity, so I told her there was some interest in my latest book from a film studio and predictably that caught at her imagination. ‘But that’s wonderful!’ she trilled. ‘You must tell me all about it when we meet!’ I had done a little homework and I suggested we might dine at a restaurant on the shore in Santa Monica the night after my arrival.
I knew her at once, when she came in and stood for a moment by the maître d’s desk, as he pointed me out to her, and I waved. She started to make her way through the tables in that old no-nonsense way of hers. She was dressed as an American, East Coast, rich woman, which is a different costume from the jeans and chains favoured by workers in the Showbiz Industry, more Park Avenue than footballer’s wife, which I found interesting. A neat, beige shirt-waister, a well-cut jacket over her shoulders, good, discreet jewellery. It was all less flashy and in better taste than I’d been expecting, but still unmistakably Terry. And yet, if I knew her, I also did not know her, this woman with the lacquered hair advancing towards me. I could see that the familiar chin was still too prominent, and the eyes and teeth too large, but other elements of her face had changed alarmingly. She appeared to have had her lips stuffed with some kind of plastic filler, in the way that American women often do now. As a practice it fascinates me, because I have yet to meet a man who doesn’t profess to find it quite repulsive. I can only suppose that some of them must be lying or the surgeons wouldn’t do such a roaring trade. Maybe American men like it more than European ones do.
Thankfully, if Terry’s mouth had become bulbous and mildly unsettling, it was not yet actually disturbing. But it wasn’t alone in betraying the telltale signs of tamper. Her forehead was so smooth she might have been dead, since no expression or mannerism seemed to make it move above the eyebrows, and the eyes themselves had become very fixed in their orbit. Of course, more or less all this stuff, carrying with it, as it must, horrible images of the pinning and stretching and sawing and sewing of bloody skin and bruised bone, has come about in my lifetime and I can’t be alone in finding it an odd fashion to have developed alongside the supposed liberation of women. Cutting their faces about, presumably to please men, does not strike one as a convincing mark of equality. In fact, it feels uncomfortably insecure, a Western manifestation of female circumcision or facial disfigurement or some other dark and ancient method of asserting male ownership.
Plastic surgery is better now than forty years ago, when it was largely reserved for actresses and foreign ones at that. But even now, when the results can be spectacular, there is a high and ironic price to pay, because for most men it’s a turnoff to end all. The knowledge that a woman has been sliced about diminishes to nothing one’s desire to see her without her kit. Although here I admit that women pay less high a price than men. Women who have ‘work done’ lose their sexual power over men. Men who resort to it lose everything.
Terry had reached my table. ‘My God! You look-’ She hesitated. I think she had been planning to say ‘exactly the same!’ but, having come nearer and actually seen me, it was obvious that my appearance had altered so completely that I should carry a passport to prove my identity to anyone who has not met me since the Sixties. ‘Fantastic!’ she said instead, which did the work perfectly acceptably. I smiled. I had already got to my feet so I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Now, you do look fantastic,’ I said and we sat, jovial and comfortable in our generous dishonesty.
A bland and pleasant-looking waiter stepped in briskly to tell us that his name was Gary and he very much hoped we were going to have an enjoyable evening, a hope I shared, even if I can never really see why it should matter much to the Garys of this world either way. He poured out two glasses of ice cubes, with a little water, and explained the specials, which all seemed to be frightening and hitherto unknown kinds of fish, and then, after promising to bring us some Chardonnay, he left us to our own devices. ‘So, how is life in California?’ This wasn’t a very original opener, but I had by this stage of the Damian Mission, acquired the habit of going in gently, knowing that I would be investigating the paternity of their young before the night was out.
She gave a bright, generalised smile. ‘Great!’ she said, which was what I expected. I knew that with Californians this first act of any conversation is obligatory, where all decisions they have ever made are the right ones. Later, in some cases, the truth level may improve, but even for those rare individuals who long to unburden themselves of their pain they must still observe this ritual. Rather like having to eat the bread and butter before Nanny will give you cake.
‘You never felt the need to go back to Cincinnati?’
She shook her head. ‘It wasn’t what I wanted. Not really. Greg’s business was here.’ She smiled and waved her hand towards the window. We could just hear the sounds of the sea under the restaurant hubbub. ‘And there are no complaints about the weather.’
I nodded, mainly because one is always supposed to agree with this, but I can’t be the only Englishman who finds those endlessly sunny days rather dull. I like our weather. I like the soft light of its grey days and the smell of the air after rain. Most of all I like the sudden changeability. ‘If you’re tired of the weather in England,’ goes the old adage, ‘just wait for five minutes.’ I know it makes it hard to arrange outdoor events and no hostess with a brain would plan anything that was completely weather dependent, but even so… Anyway, I let it go.
Nice Gary had returned and poured out some wine, while we took a final glance at the menu. ‘Is it possible to have the seafood salad but without the shrimp or the calamari?’ Terry had begun the dismemberment of the official suggestions that is part of eating out with a West Coast resident. ‘And what exactly is in the dressing?’ Gary answered as best he could, but he did not achieve a sale. ‘Is there chicken stock in the artichoke soup?’ He thought not. But did he know? No, he wasn’t completely sure. So he went to the kitchen and returned with the happy news that the stock was vegetarian friendly, but while he was away, Terry had moved on. ‘Is there any flour in the tempura batter?’ I looked at her. She smiled. ‘I’m allergic to gluten.’ It was something that obviously pleased her. Gary, of course, was used to this. He was probably a West Coast boy himself and had grown up in the certain knowledge that only people of low status order off the menu as it is printed. However, I think we were all coming to realise that Terry was approaching the moment when, even in Santa Monica, a decision might be required. ‘I think I’ll start with some asparagus, but no butter or dressing, just olive oil. Then scallops, but hold the mixed salad. I’ll take hearts of lettuce, plain.’ Gary managed to write all this down, relieved no doubt that his release was on the horizon. He turned to me. Too soon. ‘Can I get some spinach?’ Why do Americans say ‘get’ in this context? They are not presumably planning to go into the kitchen and fetch it themselves. ‘Mashed but not creamed. Absolutely no cream.’
She turned to me, but I spoke first. ‘You’re allergic to dairy.’
She nodded happily. Meanwhile, Gary had noted every detail on his little pad. She still hadn’t finished. ‘Is the spinach cooked with salt?’ With infinite and, I thought, admirable patience, Gary ventured that yes, the spinach was cooked with a little salt. Terry shook her head, as if it were hard to believe in this day and age, ‘no salt when they cook it.’ I could not imagine how, even under this provocation, Patient Gary kept his cool. He hoped that would be possible. ‘It’s possible,’ said Terry. ‘No salt.’ By now I could see that even Gary, that laid-back boy from sunny California, was ready to sink his pencil deep into Terry’s neck and stand by, watching, as the blood oozed out around its tip. But he nodded, not trusting himself to give a vocal response.
He turned to me and we exchanged eye contact, recognising our alliance in that strange way that one can befriend a total stranger who has been a co-witness to impossible behaviour. ‘I’ll have the artichoke soup, a steak, medium rare and a green salad.’ He seemed almost bewildered that the process had been so speedy.
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it.’
With the hint of a sigh, he was just moving away, when Terry spoke again. ‘Is there mayonnaise in your coleslaw?’
Gary paused. When he spoke again his voice had acquired the super-softness of a doctor’s when dealing with a potentially dangerous patient. ‘Yes, madam,’ he said. ‘There is mayonnaise in our coleslaw.’
‘Oh. Then forget it.’ She dismissed him with a slight, insulting flick of her hand and picked up her glass for another drink.
In justice, having been a silent witness for so long, I felt the need to intervene. ‘Terry.’ She turned, surprised perhaps that I should have an opinion. ‘There’s always mayonnaise in coleslaw.’
Again that little shake of the head in wondering disbelief. ‘Not in our house,’ she said and Gary made his escape.
Obviously, what this little vignette had told me was that Terry’s life in California was not Great! These bids to be different, this insistence on the power to change, to inflict absolute governance in the captive situation of a restaurant, are the recourse of those who feel no power to change anything elsewhere. Los Angeles is a town where status is all and status is only given to success. Dukes and millionaires and playboys by the dozen may arrive and be glad-handed for a time, but they are unwise if they choose to live there, because the town is, perhaps even creditably, committed to recognising only professional success, and nothing else, to be of lasting value. The burdensome obligation imposed on all its inhabitants is therefore to present themselves as successes, because otherwise they forfeit their right to respect in that environment. How’s the family? Great! The new job? Best decision I ever made! The house? Terrific! All this, when the man in question is bankrupt, facing repossession, his children are on drugs and he is teetering on the brink of a divorce. There is no place in that town for the ‘interesting failure,’ or for anyone who is not determined on a life that will be shaped in an upward-heading curve.
‘So, what happened to Greg? I heard you split up.’
This seemed to buck her up. ‘They talk about me, then? Over there?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said, although it had in fact been thirty years since anyone I knew had mentioned her name – before Damian, that is.
‘I guess they still remember my party.’
They didn’t, but even I could see they might have. ‘Did you ever find out who did it?’
‘Not until a long time later. Then someone said it was that guy who married Lucy Somebody. Your friend. He knew the girl who was making the brownies and he mixed it in when she wasn’t looking. That was her story, anyway.’
Philip Rawnsley-Price. Much good did it do him.
She was back on track. ‘Greg’s OK. I don’t really see him now.’ She shrugged and poured another glass. We were nearly through the bottle and the first course hadn’t arrived. I wondered if she’d like to change to red. She would. My old pal Gary arrived with some food and scuttled away to fetch more wine before Terry could question him about the contents of her plate. She moved some items around disdainfully with her fork. ‘Jesus, I hope they don’t use cornflour on these.’
‘Why would they?’
‘Sometimes they do. The next morning I look like a racoon.’ How tiring it must be to live in an atmosphere of permanent danger. She started to eat with a certain amount of gusto, despite the risks. ‘Greg’s done pretty well, actually. He saw what was coming with the whole silicone thing and left Merrill Lynch to get into it. He understood the potential before most people did. Really. I should have stayed with him.’ She laughed wryly with, I detected, a certain amount of real feeling.
‘Why didn’t you?’ I was curious to know if she would tell me about the flighty millionaire who had tempted her from her vows.
‘Oh, you know.’ She gave me an inclusively immoral grin. ‘I met a guy.’
‘And what happened?’
Terry shrugged. ‘It didn’t work out.’ She shook her hair back with a soft, mirthless laugh. ‘Lordie, lordie, was I lucky to be rid of him!’
‘Were you?’
The glance I received in answer to this told me that she was, in fact, very unlucky to have been rid of the man in question and that in all probability he represented the Big Plan which would never now reach fruition. ‘Let’s not talk about him.’
Of course, I probably shouldn’t have probed this bit of her story. It was, after all, the failed part and therefore anti-Californian. I wondered how often she had regretted leaving Greg, now clearly as rich as Croesus. ‘How’s your daughter?’
‘Susie?’ She seemed quite interested that I had this information. ‘You remember Susie?’
‘Well, I remember you got married and had a baby straight away. And all much sooner than most of the rest of us.’
She was drunk enough by this time to grimace at the memory. ‘Damn right she was born straight away. Boy, I took a gamble there and, I may tell you, I very nearly lost.’ This was rather intriguing, so I said nothing and hoped for more. Which I got. ‘Greg was a big mixture back then. His growing up was completely Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee, going to the prom, dancing to the Beach Boys, you know the kind of thing.’
‘I do.’ In fact, the Americanism of my youth was powerfully evocative of a cleaner, more innocent world, when in Hollywood movies the whole world wanted to be American and the big issue, not only for Greg but for everyone, was who wore your pin. Yes, it was blinkered, but it was also charming in its fathomless self-belief.
Terry continued, ‘His parents were religious, very Midwest, and that was their existence. But Greg was also a Sixties boy, talking the talk, walking the walk. Smoking the dope. You know how it was.’ Of course I knew how it was. A whole generation waiting to see which side of the wall the world was going to jump. And half at least of them pretending that things were no longer important to them, when of course they were. ‘Anyway, he kept saying he was too young to settle down and couldn’t we just have fun…’
And couldn’t you?’
Her eye narrowed for a moment. ‘I needed a life. I needed to move on.’ The alcohol was making her honest. ‘I needed money.’
‘Your father had money.’
‘My father had a salary.’ The distinction, as we know, was not lost on me. ‘And I liked Greg. I thought we’d be happy. And I knew he’d never let his parents find out he had an illegitimate child.’ She paused.
‘That was the gamble.’
‘As I said. We’d been living together for a few months, which was, if you remember, pretty wild at the time. Then Greg’s bank posted him to Poland and he asked me to go with him. So I did. And he still couldn’t make up his mind. So I got pregnant.’
‘While you were there?’
‘Sure. We married and she was born out there. In Warsaw.’
‘How romantic.’
‘It wasn’t as romantic then as it might be now. Believe me.’ I did.
‘What did your parents think about it?’
‘They were glad. They liked Greg.’ She thought for a moment. ‘They split up, you know.’
‘No, I didn’t know. I’m sorry.’
‘It worked out. They’re both fine. Mom got married again.’
‘Give her my love.’ She nodded. ‘What happened to your father? Did he marry?’
She shook her head. ‘Not yet. He’s decided he’s gay. Of course, he could still marry, I guess. These days. But he hasn’t.’
‘Is he happy?’
‘I’m not sure. He hasn’t got anyone… special. But then he hasn’t got my mom yelling at him either.’
We both smiled at our joint recollection of the formidable Verena. But I was struck, for the millionth time, by the personal convolutions required by our new century. Would it have occurred to Jeff Vitkov, nice, boring, old Jeff, the brilliant entrepreneur and family man, to question his sexuality when he had got well into his fifties, in any other period but our own? If he had been born even twenty years earlier, he would just have taken up golf, seen a bit more of the chaps at the club and not given the matter another thought. Would he have been any worse off? I doubt it. Although this is not a topic that supports nostalgia. Even if I am not a fan of change for change’s sake, nor indeed of most change if it comes to that, I am fairly sure that in the end we will all be better off for living in a world where any kind of sexuality is compatible with the twin notions of decency and commitment. But I suppose I just wish the whole subject could drop into the background again where it used to be, and not be compulsorily worn around society’s neck day in, day out.
I didn’t see I could contribute much on the subject of Jeff and his trials, so I just smiled. ‘Anyway, you’re all right. That’s the main thing.’
‘Yeah,’ she also smiled, but hers stopped short of her eyes. ‘Donnie’s OK.’ Donnie was obviously the new husband. I wasn’t sure that ‘OK’ quite sold him with any strength of purpose, but I suppose they’d been together for a few years by then.
‘Does he get on with Susie?’ I was naturally much more interested in getting back to my quarry.
‘Yuh.’ She shrugged. ‘I mean, Susie’s a grown woman now. But yes, they get on, I guess.’
‘I guess’ ranked somewhere alongside ‘OK’ when it came to degrees of ecstatic joy. Try as I might, I couldn’t read this as a household drenched in sunbeams. ‘What does she do?’
‘She’s a producer.’
Of course, in Los Angeles this doesn’t mean much more than ‘she’s a member of the human race.’ Later, after this visit, when Damian’s mission had resulted, perhaps ironically, in my opening up an American career for myself, I would be much more familiar with the ways of the city, but I was an innocent then. ‘How exciting,’ I said. ‘What’s she produced?’ As I have observed, if I had known more I would not have asked this question.
Terry smiled even more brightly. ‘She’s got a lot of very interesting projects. She’s working on something for Warner’s right now.’ She nodded as if this brought the subject to a close, which of course it did.
‘Is she married?’
‘Divorced. And fucked up with it.’ The remark had slipped out, loudly, and now she regretted it. ‘To be honest, we don’t see a lot of each other. You know how it is. She’s busy.’ She shrugged. I can’t imagine that she thought she was concealing her pain, but maybe she did.
‘Of course.’ I know I am sounding increasingly feeble in my report of this interchange, but Terry’s volume was rising and I was becoming uncomfortably aware that the people on both sides of our table were pretending to talk and had in fact tuned into our conversation.
Gary the Wary now returned to our table, bringing huge, Californian, mounded platefuls, draining my appetite away, and Terry ordered another bottle. ‘Do you see anyone now?’ she muttered between sips. ‘Anyone from the old crowd?’ I was not convinced that Terry had ever really been in our old ‘crowd,’ if crowd there had been, but it seemed a good moment to bring up the subject of Damian, so I did. For once, Terry was genuinely interested in what I was saying. ‘How is he?’ I explained and I could see that even her flinty heart had been mildly touched. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ But then her mind flew away from sticky sentiment and back to its natural climes. ‘He made a lot of money.’
‘He did.’
‘Would you have guessed he would? Then?’
I thought for a moment. ‘I was always pretty sure he was going to do well.’
‘Even though you hated him?’
So she had remembered quite a bit about the old days. ‘I didn’t hate him all the way through. Not at the beginning.’ She acknowledged this. I thought we might as well get on with the matter on hand. ‘You had a thing with him, didn’t you?’
The question made her sit up with an amused snort at its impertinence, although I am not convinced one can be impertinent to someone like Terry. ‘I had a “thing” with a lot of people,’ she said. This was, of course, quite true, unusually true for the era we’d lived through, and came better from her than from me. She accompanied the sentence with a sideways glance, as well she might, since one of those no doubt fortunate people who had enjoyed a ‘thing’ with her was me. It had only been a one-night ‘thing’ but it happened. Sensing my moment of recall, Terry raised her glass in a toast. ‘To good times,’ she said with an unnerving, secret smile making me even more aware of that curious, semi-detached sensation, when you are talking to a person you once slept with, but the incident is so far away from your present life that it feels as if you are discussing completely different people. Still, as I say, it did happen.
I was staying at a house in Shropshire and the couple I had been billeted on were in the middle of a furious, poisonous row when I arrived. I’d been sent there for the ball of that same Minna Bunting with whom I had enjoyed my momentary and entirely virtuous walkout. Our time together was over and, since there was nothing to ‘forget,’ we had remained friends. Strange as it may seem, this was completely possible in those days. In 1968, to introduce someone as a ‘my girlfriend’ did not automatically translate as ‘my mistress’ in the way it does today. Indeed now, if she were not your mistress you would feel you were implying a lie. But not then. Anyway, I had received the usual postcard – ‘We would be so pleased if you would stay with us for Minna’s dance’ – and I found myself parking outside a large, pleasant, stone rectory, which I think I remember was somewhere near Ludlow. The card had told me my hostess was a ‘Mrs Peter Mainwaring’ and she had signed herself ‘Billie,’ so I had all the information I needed as I climbed out of the car. That said, those names that are not generally pronounced as they are written can pose a problem. Would she be posh and call herself ‘Mannering’ or not posh and say it as it was spelled? I decided that, rather as it is better to be overdressed than under, I would go for Mannering. As it transpired I needn’t have worried, since she clearly couldn’t have cared less what I called her. ‘Yes?’ she said, glaring at me, as she wrenched open the door. Her face was red with rage and the veins were standing out on her neck.
‘I think I’m staying with you for the Buntings’ dance,’ I muttered.
For a moment I thought she was going to hit me. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ she snarled and turned back into the hall. I confess that even now, older and wiser as I hope I am, I always find this kind of situation pretty trying, because one is hamstrung by being a stranger who cannot respond in kind. In those days, young as I was, I found it impossible. I remember wondering whether it would be more polite and, in truth, better all round, just to get straight back into the car and drive to a local hotel and arrive at the dance from there. Or would that make matters even worse? But Mrs Peter Mainwaring, aka Billie, had not finished with me. ‘What are you waiting for? Come in!’
I picked up my suitcase and stumbled forward into a large and light hall. It was a brilliant, sunflower yellow, which seemed at variance with the cloudy scene being played out in it. The paintwork was white and a really lovely portrait of a mother and child by Reynolds hung against the back wall. A tall man, presumably Mr Peter Mainwaring, was standing halfway up the wide staircase. ‘Who is it?’ he shouted.
‘It’s another one of the Buntings’ fucking guests. How many did you tell them? This isn’t a fucking hotel!’
‘Oh, shut up! And show him to his room.’
‘You show him to his fucking room!’ I was beginning to wonder if she had any other adjective at her command.
Throughout this unloving exchange, I may say, I stood there in the centre of the pretty hall quite still, motionless in fact, frozen with nervous terror, like a cigar store Indian. Then I had the bright idea that I should try to act as a soothing agent. ‘I’m sure I can find my own way,’ I said. This might be categorised as a mistake.
She turned on me like a ravening beast. ‘Don’t be so fucking stupid!’ I could see that Billie’s irritation at my arrival was now developing into an active dislike. ‘How can you find your own way when you don’t know the fucking house!’
At this point, and were I older and more confident, I would probably have told her to keep her anger to herself, basically, to employ her own language, to fuck off, and left. But part of youth is somehow to assume blame, to think that every problem must be in some way down to you, and I was no different. I’m sure most of the young of the late 1930s thought the Second World War was their fault. Anyway, as I stood there, blushing and stuttering while our hosts snarled at each other, by some heavenly miracle Terry Vitkov appeared on the landing above Peter Mainwaring and waved to me. I cannot think of a time when I was ever more pleased to see anybody. ‘Terry!’ I shouted, as if I had been in love with her since I was fourteen, and hurried up the stairs, past my angry hostess, past my host, to reach her. ‘I’ll show him where he’s sleeping. It’s next to mine. Right?’ And before they could do much more than nod I had been rescued.
Terry and I became a unit of mutual support through the hours that followed. Apparently the husband, Peter, had bought a house, or a villa, somewhere in France without telling his wife, and Billie had heard the news for the first time about twenty minutes before Terry had got there. She’d come by train, I can’t remember now why I didn’t give her a lift. Maybe I was driving from somewhere else. The point was she arrived about an hour before me. In that time the fight had apparently escalated from quite a slow-burning start, until Billie was standing in the hall, screaming names that would be shocking even today and threatening a divorce that would cost him ‘every fucking [naturally] penny he owned.’ I never completely got to the bottom of quite why his crime was so terrible. I wonder now if there wasn’t someone else involved. Either that, or Billie had made plans for the money that had been subverted by the very act of purchase.
My room was pleasant enough and much as I had come to expect during these sojourns with unknown hosts in the lesser houses of England: The pretty paper, with a faint, pseudo-Victorian pattern, the interlined curtains in not-quite-Colefax, and some flower prints framed in gilt with eau de Nil mounts. I had my own bathroom, which was by no means standard in those days; better still it did not boast too many earwigs and woodlice, and there was a perfectly decent bed. But no amount of comfort could offset the surreal quality of the shouting that continued below, amplified no doubt by the fact that they were once more alone and free to tear out each other’s throats without interruption.
There were two more arrivals. The first was a boy called Sam Hoare, whom I recall better than I might normally have done because he was going to be an actor, a really extraordinary ambition at the time. In my social group, at least, wanting to go on the stage seemed not so much doomed to failure as requiring treatment. He was a tall, good-looking fellow and ended up, I think I’m right in saying, as quite a big wheel in television production, so in a way he was right to persevere, however annoying it was for his parents. The last guest, who was staying in the house and not just coming for dinner, was a nice girl called Carina Fox, whom I always liked without ever knowing especially well. We heard the dogs barking and some talk in the hall and, as Terry had done earlier with me, we sneaked along the gallery to the top of the staircase and rescued them. The Mainwarings transferred the pair into our custody without a backward look. Not for Peter and Billie any worry about whether their guests were tired after the journey and needed some tea. As we know, these incidents are very bonding. The four of us sat in my bedroom, comparing notes and wondering how we were going to get through the evening ahead, until in some way we felt we were all friends, and not at all the semi-strangers we might have been in more normal circumstances.
Dinner started moderately well. They had, after all, had some time to simmer down, and there were two outside, local couples, nearer our hosts in age, who had been invited to join the party, so, after an uneventful glass of champagne in the garden, the ten of us sat down at about a quarter to nine that night and at first made small talk as if none of the earlier episode had taken place. Indeed, I’m sure the newcomers, an army general with a nice wife and a nearby landowning couple, had no idea that their dear friends, Peter and Billie, had been playing out a touring version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf until just before they broke up to have their baths. The dining room was quite handsome, with excellent china and glass on the table and again, surprisingly good pictures. I would guess that Peter came from a family that had lost its estates but held on to a lot of the kit, which was quite common then. Or now, really. But I’m not sure there was limitless money left and I imagine Billie had cooked the food. In ungrand, rectory-type houses, even where the owners belonged to what used to be called the Gentry, there wasn’t nearly as much pulling in of temporary catering staff in the Sixties as there is today and most hostesses felt compelled, perhaps by some lingering war ethic, to do the work themselves. I have said before that the food was seldom much good and would often depend on ghastly magazine-printed receipts, as women then would cut these out and paste them into kitchen scrapbooks, printed especially for the purpose. The cooking done, it was quite normal to ask a couple of local women to come in and help serve it and wash up and so on, which was exactly what had been arranged on this particular night. We’d got through the first course easily enough, the obligatory salmon mousse that appeared in those days on almost every dinner table with taste-numbing regularity. It was followed by some sort of escalope in a glutinous sauce, covered in sprinklings of this and that, and with carrots cut into terrifying rosettes, which again we survived. But before the pudding made its appearance came the first rumblings of trouble. I was about halfway down the table, in my usual, junior position, when I saw the soldier’s wife, Lady Gregson, turn to Sam Hoare who was sitting on her right, as the maid removed her empty plate. ‘Wasn’t that delicious?’ she said, which could hardly be considered contentious.
Sam opened his mouth to agree, but before he could do so his host, on Lady Gregson’s other side, cut in, ‘It was more delicious than it was original, but that’s not saying much.’
‘What?’ Billie Mainwaring’s voice sliced through the atmosphere, silencing most of the rest of us, even those who didn’t know what was going on.
Lady Gregson, who was a nice woman but not an exceptionally clever one, now took the measure of the situation and spoke before Peter could answer. ‘We were just saying how much we enjoyed the last course.’
But Peter had been tucking into his excellent claret for quite a while by this time and clearly some sort of dam within him had at last given way. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I always enjoy it. Every time you produce it. Which is more or less every time anyone is unlucky enough to dine in this house.’ At which moment, with slightly unfortunate timing, one of the maids arrived at Lady Gregson’s left, which placed her next to Peter’s chair. She was holding a platter of what looked like white cheesecake. ‘Oh God, darling.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Not this again.’
‘I love cheesecake.’ Lady Gregson’s tone was now becoming harder, as if she, sensing a whiff of rebellion, were determined to impose order on the gathering whether we liked it or not. She was the kind of woman who would have been very useful at Lucknow.
‘What about the strawberries?’ Peter was now staring straight at his wife.
‘We’re having cheesecake.’ Billie’s voice had all the animation of the Speaking Clock. ‘I didn’t think we’d want the strawberries.’
‘But I bought them for tonight.’
‘Very well.’ There was a quality of tension in the air that reminded me of one of those films, so popular in that era, about the threat of nuclear war, a universal obsession of the time. The Big Scene was always centred on whether or not the President of Somewhere was going to press the button and start it. Having let the moment resonate, Billie spoke again: ‘Mrs Carter, please fetch the strawberries.’
The poor woman didn’t know what to make of this. She looked at her employer as if she couldn’t be serious. ‘But they’re-’
Billie cut her off with a raised palm, nodding her head like a fatal signal from a Roman emperor. ‘Just bring the strawberries, please, Mrs Carter.’
Of course, there are times when this sort of thing comes as a relief. As most of us know, there is nothing that will cheer a dreary dinner party more than a quarrel between a husband and wife. But this incident seemed to have acquired an intensity that made it slightly inappropriate as guest-pleasing fare. It was all too raw and real. At least we did not have long to wait for the next act. In the interim the rest of the company had taken the disputed cheesecake, but nobody had begun to eat. I saw Sam give a quick wink to Carina and, on my left, Terry’s chair was beginning to shake with smothered giggles. Apart from these slight diversions we just sat there, divining that, in the words of the comic routine, we ain’t seen nothing yet. Mrs Carter reentered the room and went to Lady Gregson’s side with a bowl of strawberries, but as she began to help herself it was absolutely clear to everyone present that the fruit was completely frozen, like steel bullets, and had just been removed from the freezer. The wretched woman dug in the spoon and put them on to her plate, where they fell with a metallic noise like large ball bearings. Mrs Carter moved to Peter, who carefully spooned out a big, rattling helping. Clatter, clatter, clatter, they sounded as he heaped them on to his plate. On went Mrs Carter to the next guest and the next, no one was passed by, no one dared refuse, so the hard, little marbles fell noisily on to every plate in the room. Even mine, although I cannot now think why we didn’t just refuse them, as one might refuse anything in the normal way of things. With a puzzled look Mrs Carter retired to the kitchen and then began the business of eating these granite chips. By this time you may be sure there was no conversation in the room, nor anything remotely approaching it. Just ten people trying to eat small round pieces of stone. At one stage the General seemed to get one lodged in his windpipe and threw his head up sharply, like a tethered beast, and no sooner were we past this hazard than the land-owner’s wife, Mrs Towneley, bit down with a fearsome crack and reached for her mouth with a cry that she’d broken a tooth. Even this did not elicit a Governor’s Pardon from our hosts. Still we crunched on, particularly Peter who bit and chewed and sucked and smiled, as if it were the most delicious confection imaginable. ‘You seem to be enjoying them,’ said Lady Gregson, whose destiny that night was to make everything worse, just when she sought to do the opposite.
‘It’s such a treat to eat something unusual,’ said Peter. ‘At any rate in this house.’ He spoke loudly and clearly into the silent crunching room. Inevitably, all eyes turned to his wife.
For a moment I thought she wasn’t going to respond. But she did. ‘You fucking bastard,’ said Billie, reverting to her standard vocabulary when enraged, although actually this time she spoke quite softly and the words were rather effective despite their lack of originality. Next, she stood and, leaning forward, picked up the bowl holding the remainder of the icy inedibles. With a gesture like throwing a bucket of water on to a fire, she flung what was left of the frozen fruit at Peter, in the process spraying the rest of us, as well as the table and the floor, with sharp, bouncing, painful little missiles. She finished by lobbing the bowl at him which missed since he ducked and shattered against an attractive George IV wine cooler in the corner. In the pause that followed you could hear only breathing.
‘Shall we get our coats?’ said Lady Gregson brightly. ‘How many cars are we taking to the dance?’ In a commendable effort to bring matters to a conclusion she stood, pushed back her chair, stepped on a frozen strawberry and fell completely flat, cracking her head on the edge of the table as she went down, and with her evening frock riding up to show a rather grubby petticoat and a ladder in her right stocking, although that might have been a product of the moment. She lay totally motionless, stretched out on the floor, and for a second I wondered if she were dead. I suspect the others did too, since nobody moved or spoke, and for a time we were enveloped in a positively prehistoric silence. Then a low groan ameliorated this worry at least.
‘I don’t think we all need to drive, do you, darling?’ said Peter, also standing, and the dinner party was at an end.
All of which goes to explain why I ended up in bed with Terry that night. We stayed together when we finally got to the dance, as it felt odd not to be with someone who had witnessed the previous events of the evening. Sam Hoare and Carina seemed to be similarly motivated and were soon dancing. In fact, they began a romance that was to take them through marriage, three children and a famously unpleasant divorce, when Sam ran off with the daughter of an Italian car manufacturer in 1985. At any rate, from our house party that only left Terry for me and I wasn’t sorry. From then, somehow, as the night progressed it all seemed to become inevitable, in the way these things can and do. We jigged away while the music was brisk, but when the lights lowered at around one in the morning, and the DJ put on Honey, a sickeningly sentimental hit of the day, one of those ballads about dead loved ones, we moved into each other’s arms without a question and began the slow, rhythmic clinch that passed for dancing in the last phase of these events.
In a way those mordant, melodic dirges were one of the hallmarks of the period, although the fashion for them has entirely faded long before now. It was an odd phenomenon, when you think of it, songs about husbands, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, all being killed in car crashes and train smashes, by cancer and, above all, on motorbikes, the last scenario combining several pet crazes of the time. I suppose there must have been something in their facile, tear-soaked emotionalism that chimed with our largely false sense of trailblazing and ‘release.’ They ranged from the tuneful and robust Tell Laura I Love Her to those like Terry or Teenangel and, while we’re on the subject, Honey, which were soppy beyond endurance, but the stand-out example, the exception that proved the rule, a song which, like the more recent Dancing Queen, must have been performed in more bathrooms than any other hit of the day, was definitely The Leader of the Pack by the Shangri Las. There is a verse in it, which has always fascinated me: ‘One day my Dad said “find someone new”/ I had to tell my Jimmie we’re through/ He stood there and he asked me why/ All I could do was cry/ I’m sorry I hurt you, the Leader of the Pack.’ No prize for guessing who’s in charge here: Dad. This tough leather biker boy with his shining wheels, this girl in the grip of passion, both know better than to argue when Dad puts his foot down. ‘Find someone new! Now!’ ‘OK, Dad. Whatever you say.’ What would the lyric be changed to were it rerecorded today? ‘I had to tell my Dad to get stuffed’? I cannot think of another vignette that tells of the collapse of our family structure and our discipline as a society more economically yet more vividly. No wonder so much of the world laughs at us.
At any rate on that evening the sad refrain did its work, and by the time Terry and I were helping ourselves to breakfast in the large marquee, rather imaginatively decorated with farming tools and sheaves of corn, we both knew where we were headed and I was glad of it. As most of us can remember, there is something sweet, during the early, hunting years particularly, in the knowledge that one’s next amorous partner has been located and is willing.
I drove us back to the Mainwarings’ house in my car, drunk as I was, with Terry nudging me to keep my mind on the business, and we let ourselves in through the unlocked front door as we had been directed. How would such arrangements work in these more fearful days? The answer, I suppose, is that they wouldn’t. Then we climbed the stairs, attempting to make as little noise as possible. I do not think we even hesitated for form’s sake as we approached our separate chambers. I am pretty sure that I just followed Terry into her bedroom without either explanation or permission, closed the door gently and began.
Of course, one of the problems of being male, which I suspect has never changed nor will it, is that young men tend to operate on an Exocet-type imperative to seek bed larks no matter what. This was perhaps especially true in those days, when a great many of our female contemporaries were having no such thing, with the result that the moment there was a possibility of scoring, the faintest breach in the wall of virtue, one simply went for it without pausing to consider whether this was something one really wanted to do. Unfortunately, that realisation, that questioning of purpose, sometimes came later. Usually, when you were already in bed and it was far too late to back out. My generation was not, including the men (whatever the ageing trendies like to imply), nearly as promiscuous as those who came after us, even before we reached the complete sexual mayhem of today. But it was beginning. The male in his early twenties who was still a virgin, a comparatively normal type for my father’s generation, had become strange to us and the goal of achieving as many conquests as we could was fairly standard. And so from time to time, inevitably, any man would find himself in bed with a woman who might be termed unlikely.
Usually when this happened he would just bang on, and the dazed query, What was I thinking of? did not surface in the front of his brain until the following morning. But inevitably there were occasions when a Damascene moment would suddenly strike mid-action. The scales would fall from your eyes and the whole event would be rendered completely and indefensively insane as you lay there, naked, with another, unwanted, body in your arms. So it was that night with me and Terry Vitkov. The truth was I was not in the least attracted to her; I didn’t even like her all that much in the normal way of things, and without the Mainwarings’ battles and the near hysteria of the evening we had lived through I would never have been in this position. If events had not created a sense of artificial closeness in our hearts I would have gone to sleep, happily alone. But now that I was in bed with her, now that I could smell the faintly acrid scent of her body and feel her wiry hair and spongy waist, and handle the rather pendulous breasts, I knew with an awful clarity that I wanted to be anywhere but there. I rolled back on to the pillow, heaving my body off hers as I did so.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Terry in her now grating voice.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘There’d better not be.’
Which, naturally, sealed my fate. I had a momentary vision of becoming a funny story, a fake who couldn’t deliver, a joke to be sniggered over with the other girls as they wiggled their little fingers derisively, all of which I knew Terry was perfectly capable of delivering. ‘Everything’s fine,’ I said. ‘Come here.’ And with as much resolution as I could muster on the instant I did my duty.
The dinner was not going particularly well. Gary had almost given up on us and Terry was, by this stage, airborne. We were staring at the menus for pudding and when Terry started to heckle over the ingredients of some sort of strudel it was clear from Gary’s expression that we had reached the city limits. ‘I’ll just have a cup of coffee,’ I said in a feeble attempt to push Terry forward to the next part of the evening. Inevitably, this gave her ideas.
‘Come to my place for coffee. You wanna see where I live, don’t you?’ Her drawl was beginning to stretch out to positively Southern proportions. Inexplicably, really, since I knew she came from the Midwest. It reminded me of Dorothy Parker’s description of her mother-in-law as the only woman who could get three syllables out of ‘egg.’
‘Shall I bring the check?’ volunteered Gary eagerly, seizing at the chance of ridding himself of this potential troublemaker before the real storm broke. Not many minutes later we were standing in the car park.
Here we faced a dilemma. I had drunk little, knowing I would be driving back, but Terry had sunk the best part of three bottles. ‘Let me drive you,’ I suggested. ‘You can send someone for your car in the morning.’
‘Don’t be so boring.’ She laughed as if we were engaged on a teenage prank, as opposed to committing an offence that might very possibly include manslaughter. ‘Follow me!’ We then began one of the most hair-raising experiences of my entire life, shooting first up towards Beverly Hills, then skidding round the wide curves of the LA mountain roads, until we had somehow – don’t ask me how – reached Mulholland Drive, that wide ridge, the spine that divides Los Angeles proper from the San Fernando Valley. There is a thriller, A Portrait in Black, a Lana Turner vehicle I think, which involves a woman who cannot drive being told nevertheless to get behind the wheel and follow her lover, i.e. the murderer, in a car. She weaves about and is almost undone when it starts to rain, since she has no idea how to work the windscreen wipers. From side to side she veers wildly, up, down, all over the place, weeping hysterical tears (or is that from The Bad and the Beautiful?). Anyway, this was more or less my experience the night Terry Vitkov took me home. Except that in my version I was following the crazy woman who was out of control of the vehicle, instead of her following me. I do not even now know how we arrived alive.
The house, when we got there, was perhaps a little more modest than I had been expecting, although it wasn’t too bad. A large open hall, a bar that was pretending to be a library on the left and a big ‘living room’ that was glass on all three sides to make the most of the sensational view of the city below, a million lights of every colour, a giant’s jewel box, twinkling below us. It felt as if we were coming in to land. But the rooms had a cheap and dingy feel, with dirty shagpile carpets and long sofas covered in oatmeal weave, going slightly on the arms. A couple of pretend antiques and a sketch in chalks of an artificially slimmed-down Terry by what looked like a pavement artist from outside the National Portrait Gallery completed the decoration. ‘What’ll you have?’ she said, lurching towards the bar.
‘Nothing for me. I’m fine.’
‘Nobody’s fine if they haven’t got a drink.’
‘Some whisky then, thank you. I’ll do it.’ This seemed more sensible if I were not to end up with a tumblerful. Terry poured herself some Bourbon, rummaging for ice in one of those ice-makers that loudly produce their chunky load at all hours of the day or night. ‘Is Donnie here?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Again, her lack of enthusiasm made it hard to feel this was a union where their fingers were permanently on each other’s pulse. I sipped my drink, wondering if I was glad to find we were alone, although whether I was fearful of a sexual advance or alcoholic poisoning I could not tell you. Either way it was time to start inching back to the story of Greg and the woman, Susie, which had to be done by Donnie’s return. ‘So, how long have you been married this time?’
‘About four years.’
‘How did you meet?’
‘He’s a producer. In television,’ she added quickly, to differentiate this man as a working producer as opposed to simply a resident of L A. ‘I make these programmes where we discuss what’s on the market-’
‘I know. Infomercials.’ I smiled, thinking to show how up I was in the jargon of modern television.
Instead, she gave me a look as if I had slapped her across the table. ‘I hate that word!’ But the restaurant food wars had tired her out and she wasn’t looking for another fight. Instead she just sipped her drink and then said in all seriousness, ‘I prefer to think of myself as an ambassador for the buyer.’ She spoke the words with great gravitas, so I can only suppose she expected me to take them at face value. After a suitable pause she continued, ‘I went out with Donnie for a while, and then he proposed and I thought “what the hell”.’
‘Here’s to you,’ I said and raised my glass. ‘I hope you’re very happy.’
She sipped again, leaning back against the cushions. Predictably, her relaxation had brought down her guard and soon I learned that, as I had already surmised, she wasn’t very happy. In fact, I would be hard put to it to testify that she was happy at all. Donnie, it seemed, was a lot older than her and since we were both at the upper end of our fifties, he can’t have been much less than seventy. He also had less money than she’d been led to believe, ‘which I find very hurtful,’ and, worst of all, he had two daughters who wouldn’t ‘get off his back.’
‘In what way?’
‘They keep ringing him up, they keep wanting to see him. I know they’re after his money when he goes.’
This was quite hard to respond to. There was nothing unreasonable in their desire to see their father and of course they expected his money when he went. It didn’t make them unloving. ‘At least they don’t want it before he goes,’ I volunteered.
She shook her head fiercely. ‘You don’t understand. I need that money. I’ve earned it.’ She was extremely drunk by now, as she ought to have been, given how much Chardonnay, Merlot and Jack Daniel’s had passed down her capacious throat that evening.
‘Well, I’m sure he’s planning to give you a fair share. Why don’t you ask him?’
‘He’s planning to give me a life interest in half his money, which reverts to them on my death.’
What made this odd was that it was delivered as if she were describing a crime against nature, when it seemed eminently sensible, even generous, to me. I didn’t dare go that far, reasoning that while I knew Terry, Donnie was a stranger to me so he could not feel justified in relying on my help. I settled for: ‘That’s not what you want?’
‘Damn right!’ She reached across me for the bottle and filled her glass. As she did so, she caught sight of a framed photograph among a group of them arranged on the shelves behind the bar. It was of an elderly, white-haired man with two young women, one on either side. They were all smiling. ‘Those bitches,’ said Terry with soft malignity and reaching out with the hand that was not holding the glass, smashed the picture forward, face down. It hit the wood with a loud smack, but I couldn’t quite tell whether the glass had broken.
‘And you’ve been married four years?’ I asked tentatively, attempting to row for shallower water, but unable by the very nature of my task to leave her private life alone.
‘Yuh.’ More Jack Daniel’s poured down her ever-open gullet.
‘Then maybe he’ll alter things when you’ve been together for longer.’
‘Four years with Donnie is a lifetime, believe me.’ What always fascinates me about people like Terry, and I have known a few, is their absolute control over the moral universe. You and I know that she had been approaching desperation while making her dreadful infomercials and wondering if her life would ever begin again. Then along comes this nice, lonely old man and she decides to marry him, in the hope of inheriting everything to which she had no right whatever, and the sooner the better. She then discovers that he intends to leave his fortune to his two daughters, whom he loves and who are obviously the very people he ought to leave it to. They are affectionate and close to Donnie, and apart from no doubt loathing their new stepmother they are, I’m sure, normal, sensible women. Yet Terry, and others like her, are able to take this kind of simple tale and turn and twist it until, with a glass splinter in their eye and through some kind of tainted logic, they recast the universe making themselves the ones who have the right to complain. They are the deserving put-upon victims of a cruel system. They are the ones to be pitied. I tell myself that they must know they are living a lie, yet they display no sign of it, and usually their friends and associates give in eventually, first by pretending to take their side and often, in the end, by actually believing they are in the right. My own value system had, however, survived the assault and in fact I wanted to write to Donnie with my support there and then.
My ruminations were interrupted when Terry’s shrill voice brought me back to the present. ‘Get this!’ she shouted by way of introduction. Clearly, I was going to be treated to another example of Donnie’s outrageous choices, with most of which I was sure I would agree. ‘He’s even planning to leave a sum to Susie. Outright.’ She paused, to punctuate this unbelievable injustice. ‘But not outright to me. For me, it’s a “life interest”.’ She spat out the words, nodding almost triumphantly, as if at the end of a hilarious anecdote.
I was starting to like Donnie more and more. So much more than I liked his wife. ‘She is his stepdaughter.’
‘That’s funny!’ She rocked with artificial laughter.
‘Where is Susie? Is she in Los Angeles?’ With this question, as I should have seen, I had overplayed my hand. It was late and I was still faintly jet-lagged and perhaps, by this stage, a bit drunk and, anyway, I just wanted to get on. My words seemed to echo in the room, altering its atmosphere.
Terry was many things, but not stupid. ‘Why are you here?’ she said, and her voice suddenly sounded completely sober and absolutely reasonable.
You must understand that I was nearly at the end of my search. There were only Terry and Candida left, and so there had to be a fifty per cent chance that Susie was the Holy Grail Baby. In a way, I confess to hoping, for Damian’s sake, that it would be Candida Finch’s child, but there was no reason why it shouldn’t be this one. I felt I might as well just ask the question, far away from home as we were. I had no intention of telling Terry about the list and after all, Damian wouldn’t be especially newsworthy in this neck of the woods if Terry wanted to make a story about her infidelity to her first husband, which I doubted. ‘You said you’d been with Greg for quite a while when you got pregnant.’
‘Yes.’
‘Damian remembers that he had an affair with you around that time.’
She smiled, not immediately making the connection. ‘We didn’t have an “affair,” not then, not ever. Not what you’d call an affair.’ She had relaxed again and was once more drawling her words. In some way I thought she was rather enjoying herself. ‘We had a funny on-off thing for years. We never quite went out, we never quite broke off. If you’re asking if I was unfaithful, I never felt it counted with Damian.’
‘Anyway, the point is’ – this was it – ‘he wonders if Susie is really Greg’s daughter.’
I had expected at least token indignation but, unpredictably, Terry threw her head back and roared with laughter. This time it was completely genuine. For a while she was quite unable to stop and she was still wiping her eyes before she could answer. ‘No,’ she said at last, shaking her head, ‘she’s not Greg’s daughter.’ I said nothing. ‘You’re right. I had been sleeping with Greg for a long time by then, for quite a long time since I decided to get pregnant. I was taking no precautions and I began to wonder if he could have children. If he was, you know, fertile.’
‘So you revived things with Damian, to see if you could get pregnant that way.’ I could easily see how this had happened. She wanted to bring Greg up to the mark and the whole paternity issue was much muddier in those days. It was a scheme that might easily have worked. Obviously, it did work. It just didn’t quite fit with the original letter that had started all this, given that the whole thing had been planned by her. Damian could hardly be accused of seduction or ‘deceit.’ The charge would more properly be levelled the other way. Still, we could clarify that later.
‘Yes. I guess that’s exactly what I did.’ She was defiant now, made brave and even brazen by the liquor. She tilted her face as if to challenge me.
‘I’m not here to judge you. Only to find out the truth.’
‘And what does Damian want to do about it?’
So, I had reached my goal. We had arrived. With this in mind I thought some modest helping of honesty would not now go amiss. ‘He’s dying, as I have told you. I believe he wants to make sure that his child is well provided for.’ That seemed enough.
‘Would Susie have to know?’
This was an interesting question. I would have thought that Susie would have wanted to know, but would it be a condition? Then again, was it up to her mother? Susie was in her late thirties, after all. ‘That’s something I’ll have to check with Damian. There’ll be a DNA test, but I dare say we can come up with some other perfectly believable reason for that if we have to, or it could be done without her knowledge.’
‘I see.’ From her tone I could tell at once that my words had changed things, but I couldn’t quite understand why, since I was not aware I had made any very stringent conditions. She stood and walked towards the glass wall, taking what I could now see was the handle of one of the panels and sliding it back to let in the night air. For a moment she breathed deeply. ‘Damian isn’t Susie’s father,’ she said.
I hope I can convey how totally inexplicable this seemed. I had sat all evening and listened to a woman who was rapacious for money, other people’s money, any money that she could lay her hands on; a woman disappointed by life and everything it had brought her; a woman trapped in an existence she hated and by a husband she cared nothing for, and now, here she was, on the brink of the luckiest break anyone living has ever heard of, the chance to make her daughter one of the richest women in Europe, and she was turning it down without the smallest argument. ‘You can’t know that,’ I said. ‘You say yourself she isn’t Greg’s. She must be someone’s.’
She nodded. ‘Yes. She must be someone’s. But she isn’t Greg’s and she isn’t Damian’s.’ She paused, wondering, I now realise, whether to go on. I am glad she did. ‘And she isn’t mine.’
For a moment I was too astonished to say an obligatory ‘What?’ or ‘How can that be?’ or even ‘Oh.’ I just looked at her.
She sighed, shivering suddenly in the draught, and moved back into the room towards the dingy sofa. ‘You were quite right. About what I was trying to do. I wanted to be pregnant, because I knew Greg would marry me when I was. I’d been sleeping with Damian every now and then for a couple of years so I was sure he wouldn’t mind. And he didn’t. It was just after you all went on that crazy holiday in Portugal.’
‘I thought he said it was before.’
‘No. I called him and his flatmate said he was out there, so I left a message. He rang me the day he got back and I went round. It’s funny. When we got together for the last time…’ She had become wistful, a nicer person momentarily, in memory of her younger dreams, ‘I thought we might go on with it. He seemed different when he got home, less… I don’t know exactly, less unreachable, and for a day or two I thought that maybe it would be Damian and not Greg after all.’
‘But it didn’t happen?’
‘No. He’d run into that beautiful girl out there, and he met up with her again when she was back in London.’
‘Only once I think.’
‘Really? I thought it was more than that. What was her name?’
‘Joanna Langley.’
‘That’s it. What happened to her?’
‘She died.’
‘Oh.’ She sighed, saddened by the inexorable process of life. ‘The point is that when he got back, Damian was in a strange mood. I heard about what happened.’ I nodded. ‘I think the truth is he was sick of all of us. I lost touch with him after that.’
‘So did we all.’
‘Joanna Langley’s dead. Wow. I used to be so jealous of her.’ I could see that the news had made her stop in her tracks. For anyone, hearing of the death of a person you had thought alive and well is a little like killing them because suddenly they’re dead in your brain instead of living. But with the Sixties generation it is more than this. They preached the value of youth so loudly and so long that they cannot believe an unkind God has let them grow old. Still less can they accept they too must die. As if their determination to adopt clothes and prejudices more suited to people thirty, forty, fifty years younger than themselves would act as an elixir to keep them forever from the clutches of the Grim Reaper. You see television interviews and articles in papers expressing shocked amazement whenever an old rocker pops his clogs. What did they think would happen?
At last, with a philosophical nod, Terry resumed her story. ‘I slept with Damian two or three times before we finished. There were no hard feelings.’ She paused to check that this squared with my information.
‘I’m sure there weren’t. But nothing happened?’
She shook her head. ‘Nothing happened. Then Greg went to Poland and I followed him, and I slept with him, but still nothing happened and nothing happened, and finally I went to see a doctor while I was out there and guess what?’
‘It wasn’t him, it was you.’
She smiled, like a teacher pleased with my attention. ‘It was me. All the time it was me. Some tubes were missing or something…’ She raised her eyebrows, trying to control her delivery. ‘You know the first thing that occurred to me? Why the hell had I wasted so much time worrying about getting pregnant? My late teens should have been a ball.’
‘You didn’t do badly,’ I said.
Which made her laugh. ‘Anyway, I knew that once Greg learned I could never have a child, once his mother heard about it, the whole thing would be over and it’d be back to square one. So I bought a baby.’
It seems strange now, but this sentence took me completely by surprise. Why? I cannot tell you. There was no such thing as surrogacy in those days, or if there was we knew nothing of it. She’d admitted she’d had a baby to get Greg to marry her and she’d told me she couldn’t have children. What did I imagine she had done? Even so, I was flabbergasted. What I came up with was: ‘How?’
She smiled. ‘Are you planning it?’ But she was far too deep in to telling the story to back out now. ‘I was doing some social work then, with a group sponsored by the embassy. This was 1971, long before the end of Communism or anything else. There was no Solidarity. There was no hope. Poland was an occupied country and the people were desperate. It wasn’t hard. I found a young mother who already had four children and she’d just discovered she was pregnant. I offered to take the baby, whatever it was, whether or not there was anything wrong with it.’
‘Would you have?’
She thought for a moment. ‘I hope so,’ she said, which I liked her for.
‘But how did you manage the whole thing?’
‘It wasn’t difficult. I found a doctor who could be bribed.’ I must have looked shocked at this because she became quite incensed. ‘Jesus, most of the time he was prescribing drugs to teenagers. Was this worse?’
‘Of course not.’
‘I didn’t “show” until I was about five months “gone.” I told Greg I didn’t feel comfortable with sex, and with his puritan background he didn’t either. Then I asked if he’d mind not being at the birth, as the thought made me uncomfortable. Boy, you should have seen the relief on his face. These days, if the father isn’t there peering up your flue as the head appears, he’s a bad person, but in 1971 it wasn’t compulsory.’
‘How did you manage the birth itself?’
‘I had a stroke of luck when he was called to New York just before the baby came. The dates I’d given him were three weeks behind the true ones, to leave some room for manoeuvre. I did have a plan of checking into a different room. I think it would have worked but in the end I didn’t need it. She went into labour and I took the mother to the nursing home where, thanks to the doctor, she just gave my name. The baby was delivered and the registration was perfectly routine. When Greg got back, I was waiting for him at home with little Susie. We cried a river. Everyone was happy.’
‘And nobody ever found out?’
‘Why would they? I told him I loved him, but I couldn’t have sex until I got my figure back. He suspected nothing. Nobody was worse off. Including Susie. I mean that.’ Clearly, she did mean it and I would say it was probably true, although one can never be quite sure about these things. Even if I do not endorse the present fashion for leaving babies with mothers who are clearly quite incapable of caring for them, rather than finding them decent homes. Terry was nearly finished. ‘For a while I thought the doctor might blackmail me, but he didn’t, so that was that. Maybe he was scared I’d blackmail him.’
‘And there were never any tests that gave it away?’
‘What tests? They’re both blood group O, which was kind of a relief actually. But who runs a DNA test on their own daughter?’
‘Did Greg have any more children?’
‘None of his own. Two steps. He adores Susie and she adores him.’ She sighed a little wearily. ‘She much prefers him to me.’
I nodded. ‘So he’ll take care of her.’ For some reason I was rather glad of this. Susie had missed a larger fortune which, in my fevered mind, she had possessed for maybe two or even three minutes. It was good to feel she would never know want.
‘Oh yes. She’s safer than I’ll ever be.’
I had to ask. ‘Would you have gone on with it if I hadn’t mentioned the test?’
She thought for a moment. ‘Probably. The temptation was too great. But of course there would have been some hurdle by the end of it, so I’m glad you did. Before I got too excited.’
It was once more the hour to depart and this time I knew for certain we would not meet again. Since, even if I were back in the town, I wouldn’t look her up. But something in the story she had told had won me round a bit. I was reminded of the haunting words of Lady Caroline Lamb: ‘With all that has been said about life’s brevity, for most of us it is very, very long.’ Terry’s life had already been very long and very frustrating, with scant reward to show for it. That this had largely been her fault was no consolation, as I knew well. She had thrown away her only chance of a decent future with Greg and never replaced him with anything like an equal opportunity. Now she had lost even the child she’d invented to be with him. We kissed at the door. ‘Please don’t mention this to anyone.’ She shook her head. I had something more to say. ‘And please don’t ever tell them.’
‘Would I?’
‘I don’t know. If you got too drunk and too angry you might.’
She did not resent this, which was commendable, but she was confident in her denial. ‘I have been drunk and angry many times since we last met and I haven’t told them yet.’ This, I am sure, was true. All of it.
‘Good.’ Now I really was going. But I had a last wish before we parted. ‘Be kind to Donnie,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t sound a bad chap.’
The evening had made me sentimental in my estimation of her. I should have been more clear-sighted. The truth was, with the sole exception of her feeling towards her not-daughter, the old Terry Vitkov was quite unchanged. ‘He’s a bastard,’ she replied and shut the door.