Which only left Candida Finch.
I stayed on a few days in Los Angeles, in Beverly Hills to be precise, at the very comfortable Peninsular Hotel – a haven for the English, since it is the only one where you can actually walk out to the post office or get something to eat without having to stand and wait every time for a crisply suited ‘valet’ to fetch your car. I’d enjoyed meeting my agent who turned out to be charming, and if I did not quite follow Damian’s instructions to the letter, still we got on very well and he sent me round the town to meet a few people while I was still out there. Since I was allowed the untold luxury of first class travel back to London, I felt quite relaxed and invigorated when I got home. How strange it is, the way enough sleep and the resulting physical energy can make one feel as if one’s whole life is going well, while the lack of them has the opposite effect.
However, when I finally returned to the flat, if I was expecting to find a series of messages from Candida answering those I’d left before I went away, I was disappointed. There was nothing. Accordingly, I recorded yet another on her machine which was still not picking up, and settled down to a day or two of work on my latest novel, a tale of middle-class angst in a seaside town, which was approaching what I would hesitate to call its climax and which I had, understandably, recently neglected. It was on the morning of the following day, when I’d finally managed to get some way back into the rhythm of my troubled, marine triangle, that the telephone on my desk started to ring.
‘You called Candida Finch yesterday,’ said a female voice and, for a moment, quite illogically, I thought it must be Candida herself who was speaking. I can’t think why, since it obviously wasn’t.
‘Yes, I wondered if I could see you, which I know sounds odd.’
‘It does sound very odd, and I’m not Candida, I’m Serena.’ A thousand bags of sherbet exploded in my vitals.
‘Serena?’ Of course it was Serena. It was her voice, for God’s sake. What had I been thinking of? But why should Serena ring me? How could that have happened? I pondered the question without speaking, silently wondering, earpiece clamped to my ear.
‘Hello?’ Her voice had gone up in volume.
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, I thought you’d been cut off. It all went quiet.’
‘No, I’m still here.’
‘Good.’
I suddenly worried that I could hear in her voice a querying sound, as if she were afraid that the person she was speaking to was in fact a nutter and it might be dangerous to continue the conversation. I trembled lest she might act on this subconscious warning. All of which illustrates the fevered level of my imagination. ‘How can I help?’
‘I was talking to Candida this morning and she said she’d had a message to ring you, that you wanted to see her.’
‘She’s had more than one message from me, I’m afraid. I thought she must have emigrated.’
‘She’s been in Paris and she only got back last night.’
‘It’s rather wonderful that you’re still in touch.’ As the words left my mouth, I could hear their senselessness. Why did I say this? Why was it wonderful? Why shouldn’t they be in touch? Was I mad?
‘She’s my cousin.’
Which I should have known. In fact, I must have known it. In fact, I did know it. Perfectly well. They gave a ball together, for God’s sake. I was present at it. What kind of fool forgets something like that? What kind of stupid moron? ‘Of course,’ I said lightly. ‘Of course you are. I should have remembered.’ Where was this twaddle leading? To some International Idiots’ Convention? Why couldn’t I say anything that didn’t sound illogical and inane?
‘Anyway, I wondered if it was all part of Damian’s search.’
My heart stopped. What had I said to her? Had I been so surprised by her presence at Gresham that I’d given it all away? Could I have? What had I told her? My thoughts were flying about like a crowd of ravens with nowhere to settle. I couldn’t seem to remember anything about that evening, yet I thought I’d remembered every moment. ‘Search?’ I said, feeling this was the best way to flush out information.
‘You said Damian wanted you to look up some of his old friends. You told me when we met up that time in Yorkshire. I wondered if Candida was one of them, since she couldn’t think of any other reason you’d want to see her again.’
‘She’s rather hard on herself. I can think of lots of reasons.’
‘But was it? Is it?’
‘As a matter of fact yes, it is. I thought I’d buy her lunch and get her news. That’s all he wants, really.’
‘Well, I’ve got a much better idea. She’s coming down here next weekend, so I wondered if you could join her. Join us. We’d love it.’
My despair at my own stupidity was suddenly and totally replaced by a chorus of angels’ wings. ‘That’s incredibly kind. Do you mean it?’
‘Absolutely. Come on Friday, for dinner. And you can leave at some stage on Sunday afternoon.’
‘As long as we’ve got that settled.’
She laughed. ‘Andrew always needs to know he’ll have the house back by dinner on Sunday.’
I’ll bet he does, I thought, the mannerless toad. ‘What about clothes?’
‘He wears a smoking jacket but no tie on Saturday night. Apart from that we’ll be in rags the whole time.’
‘Well, if you’re sure…’
‘Completely sure. I’ll e-mail you directions. We’re very easy to find, but you might as well have them, if you’ll give me your address.’
So I did. And it was settled. I wondered if I ought to ring Candida, but I never heard back from her, so presumably Serena had filled her in.
After this conversation I sat at the desk for several minutes, quite unable to resolve exactly what I was thinking. Naturally, as I have observed, the invitation had set off a peal of chiming, silver bells in my heart, ringing and singing with joy at the prospect of two whole days when I might look upon her face to my heart’s content. But there is also the old proverb that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, and now that I was faced with a real prospect of having the Blessed Serena back in my life, paradoxically, I wasn’t completely convinced it was a good idea. Of course, all this was Damian’s fault. It was Damian’s fault she had left my life thirty-eight years before. At least I dated the beginning of the end from that dinner. Now it was Damian’s fault she had come back. That she had been, would always be, the love of my life, was clearly established, to my satisfaction anyway, and, if I was honest with myself, it was her return to my conscious mind that had spelled curtains for poor Bridget, as I had more or less told my father. The reminder of what love is, of what it could be, made the thin facsimile that I had been living feel rather pointless.
But then Serena was content with the way her life was, and if she wasn’t she would never leave her husband, of that I was quite sure, and if she did it wouldn’t be for me, and if it would I had nothing comparable to offer her, and… so on. I was equally certain she was not the type for any extra-marital activity, and if even this too were wrong, I would certainly not be her chosen co-adulterer. I knew well enough that while maturity and some success had transformed me into a marriage possibility for various, lonely divorcees who were not quite clear as to how they would finance their latter years, still I was not the sort of man who tempts a girl to sin. I had neither the looks nor the chops.
No, the future that was on offer, or at least a possibility since nothing at all was yet on offer, would simply be as a friend, a walker, a companion. The literate ally that fashionable women married to fools or workaholics sometimes need to buy them lunch or carry their coat at the theatre, who might join a party at the villa in Amalfi and make the other guests laugh. Did I want this? I had done enough of it in the past, of course, and sung for my supper a thousand times and more, but did I want it with the added twist of pain? To sit and watch the woman I would have died for, as she chattered on about a weekend in Trouville or a play at the Almeida or her latest purchases? No. A man has his pride, I thought, my mind clearly still running on empty. I would go for the weekend. I had anyway to question Candida, or that was my excuse, but that would finish it. I was nearly at the end of the quest that had taken me through my old stamping ground of long ago. But once the search was done, Candida’s child would get the money and Damian would die, and I would go home and write my books again, and say hello to Serena when I saw her at Christie’s Summer Party. And it would be enough to know that she was well. Or so I vowed.
Waverly Park sounds a little more romantic than it is. The original seat of the Earls of Belton, Mellingburgh Castle, left the family when the senior line died out in an heiress during the 1890s and is now buried beneath the station car park in Milton Keynes, for much of which its walls supplied the hardcore. But the title had jumped sideways to a junior branch and they celebrated its arrival with marriage to a well-endowed American and the purchase of Waverly in Dorset, not far from the Jurassic coast. The estate had shrunk, after both wars and then again quite recently as when old Lord Belton died it turned out his provisions had been drawn up quite wrongly, making it impossible to prevent half the estate being divided between Andrew’s siblings. I believe there was an expectation that they would gamely hand this back to their older brother, but as so often with these things, it didn’t happen. To make matters worse, the sister, Annabella, had turned out a gambler and she sold her share within three years of getting it, leaving a gaping hole in the centre of the farms, and the other son, Eustace, married to an even worse bully than his mother, had divided his between four daughters, none of whom would stay long term. I was told later that the whole mess had occurred because Lady Belton insisted on using the son of a cousin as their lawyer, instead of someone who knew what they were doing. I cannot swear to the truth of this, but it sounds very likely. The net result was that Andrew was left with far too little land to support the house, a situation exacerbated by his almost chemical lack of brainpower, which ensured that no outside income would come to his aid. Serena may have had something to look forward to from her father, but families like the Greshams do not stay rich by enriching all the siblings and it would never have been much.
The house itself was a fairly large but unremarkable pile. There had been a dwelling there since the 1660s but all that remained of this period was the cantilevered staircase, the nicest thing to look at in the place. The entire building had been enveloped twice, well in the 1750s and badly in the 1900s, by the newly arrived and gleeful Beltons. A burst of optimism in the late 1940s on the part of Andrew’s grandfather had swept away the service wing, relocated the kitchens to the site of a former morning room and converted the great hall to a library. The effect of this was to pull the entrance round the corner, away from the main portico, so the existing front door led one through a sort of tunnel towards the stairs, arriving at them from the back, at a slightly peculiar angle. It never works to fight a house’s architecture and Waverly was no exception to the rule. The rooms had been tossed this way and that in the changeover, swapping their roles as they went, ending with dining rooms full of sofas and drawing rooms stuffed with tables and chairs. Huge fireplaces found themselves warming tiny studies, and dainty bedroom detailing adorned the walls of a semi-ballroom. None of which was improved by the timing of the work, during those post-war years when building materials were rationed, so almost everything had been contrived from plywood and painted plaster. Not all of it was bad. The loss of the hall was hopeless and dislocated the whole ground floor, but the library that replaced it was a great success, and the breakfast room was pretty, if too small. In truth, the house had a lost, bewildered feel, like a private home too quickly changed to a hotel, where the rooms have not been allowed a period of adjustment to get used to their new jobs. Naturally, Andrew thought it a palace and every visitor as lucky as a peasant from Nan Cheng allowed entry for a few, sacred moments to the glories of the Forbidden City.
The drive out of London on Friday afternoon was as murderous as ever, and it was after six when I finally arrived and staggered down the passage with my case. Serena emerged from a doorway and stood there in welcome, dressed in a shirt and skirt, casual and marvellous. ‘Dump that there. You can go up later. Come and have some tea.’ I followed her into what proved to be the library and a few faces turned to look at me. There were others besides Candida and what I perceived was an already grumpy Andrew, making a great show of being absorbed in Country Life.
One pair, the Jamiesons, I’d met a few times in London and the others, a sporty couple from Norfolk called Hugh and Melissa Purbrick whose life seemed to consist of farming and killing things and not much else, were some sort of connections of an old friend of my mother, so I didn’t anticipate much trouble. ‘Do you want tea? Or a drink to take upstairs?’ said Serena, but I refused both and sat on the sofa next to Candida.
‘I feel very guilty,’ she said. ‘I came back to my answering machine flashing like the Blackpool illuminations. I thought I must have won the Lottery. Either that, or somebody was dead. But they were all from you.’ She had not aged well, certainly nothing like as well as Serena. Her hair was grey and her face was rough and lined and even redder than it used to be, although I would not speculate as to the cause. On the whole, unlike her cousin she looked her age, but her manner was very different from what it had been when I knew her and at first encounter considerably improved. She seemed much calmer, no, not calmer, calm. As the French say, she was bien dans sa peau, and as a result I found myself warming to her in a way that I never really had done when we were young.
‘I’m afraid I was a bit eager. Sorry.’
She shook her head to free us from the need to apologise. ‘I should switch it off when I go away. At least people would know I hadn’t got the message instead of having to deduce it.’
‘What were you doing in Paris?’
‘Oh, just larking about. I’ve got a grand-daughter who’s mad about art and I persuaded her parents to let me take her to see the Musée d’Orsay. Of course, once we were there we spent about three minutes in the museum and the rest of the time shopping.’ She smiled, curious now to get to the bottom of it. ‘So what’s the big thing? Serena said that you were coming as an envoy of the mighty Damian.’
‘In a way. No, I am.’
‘You’re looking up his friends from the old days.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘I’m rather flattered to be included. Whom have you seen?’ I told her. ‘Now I’m less flattered. What a peculiar list.’ She pondered the names again. ‘Weren’t they all in Portugal that time?’
‘All except Terry.’
She thought for a moment. ‘Of course, that evening was another story.’ She stretched her eyes silently at me, sharing the memory. ‘Have we ever talked about it?’
‘Not properly. We’ve hardly met since we got back.’
‘No. I suppose that’s right.’ Again she thought over what I’d been telling her. ‘Terry Vitkov…’ she grimaced. ‘I’m quite surprised she was a pal of Damian’s. I thought he had better taste.’
‘Ouch.’ I was amused by this as plenty of people from those days would probably have said something similar of her.
‘Is she the same as ever?’
‘She is the same, if you add the effects of forty years of disappointment. ’
Candida absorbed this for a moment. ‘Do you remember her dance?’
‘No one who was there could forget it without medical intervention.’
She laughed. ‘It was the first time I’d been in the papers since the announcement of my birth. My grandmother wouldn’t speak to me for weeks.’ I considered Candida’s subsequent career of sexual profligacy, illegitimate motherhood and the more recent tragedy of 9/11, and pondered what the grandmother in question would have made of any of that. Presumably death had spared her. Candida was still at Madame Tussaud’s. ‘I know she did it. Whatever she said at the time.’
‘She says not. She says it was Philip Rawnsley-Price.’
‘He might have helped her. He was stupid enough. But she must have known. The choice of brownies for a start. We were all so innocent.’
‘Quite innocent.’ I didn’t bother to defend Terry, although I didn’t think the accusation true. I suppose I didn’t care.
Candida was staring at the fire. By this time I knew the process of what I had to put these people through. I’d arrive and suddenly the woman of the week would be plunged back into a world of four decades ago, which she hadn’t thought about in ages. ‘Golly, we had some funny times that year. Do you remember Dagmar’s dance?
‘Who could forget?’
‘When Damian gatecrashed and had a fight with-’ She put her hand to her mouth. She’d suddenly remembered the identity of Damian’s opponent. Our host shook out the pages of his magazine sharply.
‘I remember it well,’ I said. We shared the moment and tried not to look at the bump on the bridge of Andrew’s nose.
Candida sighed. ‘The main thing I recall is just how young we were. How little we knew of what was coming.’
‘I think we were great,’ I said. Which she took no exception to and smiled. ‘What’s your son doing now?’
‘I have two sons and a daughter, in fact.’ She flashed me a slightly defensive glance. ‘But I know you mean Archie.’ Perhaps sensing I meant her no ill, she relaxed. ‘He’s got his own property company. He’s frightfully rich and successful.’
Not half as rich and successful as he’s going to be, I thought. ‘Is he married?’
‘Absolutely. He’s got a wife called Agnes and two kids, the shopaholic daughter, who’s ten, and a son of six. Funnily enough, Agnes’s mother is a girl you used to hang about with, Minna Bunting. She married a chap called Havelock, who was in the army. Do you remember her?’
‘Very well.’
She pulled a slight face. ‘That’s the thing. I don’t. I never really knew her at the time, but of course now we pretend we were terrific friends and we’ve almost convinced each other it’s true.’
Was it comforting or smothering, this constant interlocking of the old patterns? Revolutions in morality might flare up, Socialism in all its indignant fury might come and go, but still the same faces, the same families, the same relationships, are endlessly repeated. ‘I like the name Agnes,’ I said.
‘So do I. Quite,’ she added, telling me more of what she thought of her daughter-in-law than she intended.
‘Was it very hard with Archie?’
Candida was silent for a moment. She paid me the compliment of not pretending she didn’t know what I was asking. ‘It was easier in a way than it would have been for some. Both my parents were dead and so was my grandmother by then. Just. I hated my stepmother and couldn’t have given a monkey’s tiddly what she thought about anything. I was terribly broke, of course. My stepmother wouldn’t give me a penny and by the end she didn’t have much to give, but at least I didn’t have to feel I was letting everyone down. Actually, Aunt Roo behaved very well, given that she thought I was out of my mind.’
‘But?’
‘Same as the earlier answer. My parents were dead and I hated my stepmother. I had no close family, no backup, beyond Aunt Roo and Serena, and they thought I’d gone mad. So did my friends, to be honest, but they were a little bit more circumspect about showing it.’
‘I know you married in the end.’
‘I did. A chap called Harry Stanforth. Did you ever come across him?’
‘His name seems familiar, since I first heard it, so maybe I did, but if so I can’t remember where. I was terribly sorry to hear what happened.’
‘Yes.’ She gave one of those twitchy smiles of bleak acceptance. ‘It is difficult when nothing’s ever found. I always used to feel for mothers of sons killed in foreign wars, who never got a body back to bury, and now I know just what it’s like. I don’t know why exactly, but you need a proper funeral with something there, something more than a photograph, which is what I had, in order to feel it really is the end.’
‘The Americans call it “closure.”
‘Well, I wouldn’t, but I do know what they mean. You keep imagining that he’s in a coma somewhere or struggling with amnesia, or he escaped and had a nervous breakdown in Waikiki. Of course, you tell yourself to accept it, not to believe anything different, but you can’t help it. Every time the doorbell goes unexpectedly, or the telephone rings very late at night…’ she smiled gently at her own foolishness. ‘You do get over it in the end.’
‘Awful.’
‘But you mustn’t think I’m a sad person. Please don’t.’ Candida’s tone had changed and she was looking straight at my eyes. I could see that she was keen to convince me, and I think she was telling the truth. I suppose it was somehow a case of being loyal to his memory. ‘I’m not at all sad. Really. I was sad before I met Harry, and trapped at the end of a cul-de-sac with a boy half my family felt uncomfortable with. I know you all thought me ridiculous in those days.’
‘Not ridiculous.’
‘Ridiculous. A loud, red-faced bed-hopper who was embarrassing to have around.’ This was all true so I didn’t contradict her, but as with almost all of the women I had visited I had that revelation of how much better we would have got on forty years before if we had only known each other’s true natures. Candida shrugged off these memories with happier ones. ‘Then Harry arrived one day and just saved me. He saved us. I don’t know to this day what he saw in me, but we never had an unhappy hour.’
‘He loved you.’ Funnily enough I meant this. I could sort of begin to see what he had loved in her now, which came as something of a surprise.
She nodded, her eyes starting to glisten. ‘I think he did. God knows why. And he took us both on. He adopted Archie, you know, completely legally, and then we had two more, and when he…’ I could see that despite her strictures her eyes were filling, and so were mine. ‘When he died it turned out he’d left some money equally to the three of them. Just split three ways. He made no distinction. And that meant so much to Archie. So very much. Did you know that all their mobiles worked, when they were trapped in the tower?’
I nodded. ‘I read about that.’
‘And what was so extraordinary, what was wonderful really, was that they didn’t, most of them anyway, ring to yell for help. They rang the people who were nearest to them, their wives and husbands and children, to say how much they loved them. Harry did that. Of course I’d turned mine off – typical – and when I tried to call him back I couldn’t get through, but he left a message saying how marrying me was the best thing he’d ever done. I saved it. I’ve got it now. He thanks me for marrying him. Can you imagine that? In the midst of all that fear and horror he thanked me for marrying him. So you see, I’m not sad at all in the greater scheme of things. I’m lucky.’
I looked at her coarse, ruddy face and her brimming eyes, and I knew she was absolutely right. ‘So you are,’ I said. I had arrived prepared to pity her, but in fact the time she’d spent since we last really talked had been infinitely more satisfactory than that same period in Terry’s life or Lucy’s or Dagmar’s or, heaven knows, Joanna’s. By anyone’s reckoning Candida Stanforth, née Finch, was the luckiest of the five on Damian’s list. In all the standard categories reckoned important among these people she had started at the back of the field and ended up way out in front. ‘Did you ever get into publishing? You used to say you wanted to.’
She nodded. ‘I did. But proper publishing. Not the vanity stuff I thought would be my only way in. Harry made me. He pulled a string and got me a job as a reader at a small outfit that specialised in women writers. But I stuck at it and they kept me on. Eventually I edited quite a few books.’
‘But not any more?’
‘Not at the moment. I felt I needed to take time off, when…’ I nodded, anxious not to return her to that dreadful day. ‘But I’m thinking of going back. Actually, I was rather good at it.’ In this simple phrase I knew what her debt to Harry Stanforth was and why she still fought for people to appreciate her luck in finding him. This Candida had self-worth, of which there’d hardly been a trace when I had known her in her ugly, angry, unhappy youth. In those days her childhood was too recent for its ill effects to have been set aside. ‘The fact is I had twenty-three years with a terrific, honourable, lovely, loving man.’ It was a simple, moving tribute and I had no difficulty in liking Harry enormously on the strength of it. She leant towards me and lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘I’d rather be in my shoes than Serena’s.’ And we laughed, which brought things to an end. Not long afterwards, we went upstairs to change.
I was sleeping in a panelled, corner room, painted off-white, with large windows on two sides, and far-reaching views across the well-wooded park. There was a pretty, canopied bed, upholstered in good, if old, chintz and some Audubon prints of birds around the walls. It was all reasonably attractive, if unoriginal, but the faded colours of the material and the bright shocking pink of the mounts on the pictures made the whole effect feel very 1970s, as if no money had been spent anywhere in its vicinity for thirty years at least. I had my own bathroom, with more of the same colour scheme and a hot tap that made distant, gurgling noises full of intent but the water, when it came, was less than tepid. I sponged myself down as best I could and pulled some clothes out of the case.
The posh English love to sound informal. ‘Nobody’s coming,’ they say. ‘It’ll just be us.’ Which it seldom is. ‘You won’t have to do a thing,’ when of course you will. Most of all, when they say ‘don’t change’ they don’t mean it. They do mean you are not to put on a dinner jacket, but not that you are to stay in the same clothes. It’s funny in a way, because all you are doing, for an ‘informal’ dinner in the country is putting on another version of exactly what you wore at tea, particularly the men. But the point is that when you come down it must be another version. The only thing to steer clear of for a weekend is the dark suit. Unless there is some charity function or a funeral or something which has its own rules, a gentleman will get no use out of a city suit in the country, where, increasingly, it seems that there are two costumes for the evening, grand or tatters with nothing in between.
The re-rise of grand is rather interesting in this context as well, or it is to me. Contrary to the expectations of only a few years ago, dinner jackets, having known a lean period, and even more, smoking jackets, are once more on the rise. Of these I am more fascinated by the smoking jacket, a garment whose rules have entirely altered in my own time. Not all that long ago it showed the depth of ignorance to wear one in any house where you weren’t at least sleeping and preferably living. But now that’s changed. More and more country dinners are enlivened by a myriad of velvet shades stretched tight across the broad backs of the chaps. Usually without ties, an unfortunate fad for the middle-aged, whose red, mottled necks do not show to advantage. But having fought the fashion for a time, protesting it was ‘quite incorrect,’ I rather like it now; putting men into colour, as it does, for the first time in two centuries. As for the rag rules, the one imperative, as I have said, is that they should be different rags when you come down the stairs from the rags that you went up in. To me, the business of pulling off a shirt and jersey and a pair of cords, in order to bathe and put on another shirt, another jersey and another pair of cords can be a bit comedic, but there we are. You can’t fight Tammany Hall. Anyway, on this particular evening I did my stuff and I was ready to go down to the drawing room, when I caught sight of a framed photograph on a chest to the right of the carved and painted chimneypiece. It was Serena and Candida, standing side by side in what must have been the receiving line for their Coming Out dance at Gresham. I could make out the portraits in the hall behind them and in the picture Lady Claremont was just turning to one side, as if her attention had been caught by an arriving guest. Then I saw the figure of a young man a few paces back, behind the girls but with his face fixed eagerly on them as if he couldn’t look away. Which I knew at once that he could not. For it was me.
As far as anything can be in this mortal setting, the ball at Gresham Abbey for Serena Gresham and Candida Finch was more or less perfection. For some reason it was held quite late, after the summer break, at a time of the year leading up to Christmas that used then to be labelled ‘The Little Season.’ We were fairly jaded by that stage, having been doing the rounds since the end of the spring and there was not much that a hostess could produce to surprise us, but Lady Claremont had decided, perhaps because she was aware of this, that she would not surprise, she would merely perfect. For some strange reason I kept all my invitations for quite a long time but I have lost them now, so I forget whether it was held in late October or early November. It was definitely a winter ball and we all knew it would be the last really big, private one before the charity balls took over and the whole rigmarole wound up, which in a way gave the evening a kind of built-in romance.
I had stayed at Gresham a few times by that stage and of course I had hoped to be included in the abbey house party, but the competition was predictably stiff and I was not. As it turned out, my host was a fairly dreary one but not insultingly so, a retired general, with his nice, typical army wife, who lived in a small manor house entirely decorated in that sort of non-taste that such people can go in for. Nothing was actually ugly or common, but nothing was charming or pretty either, except for the odd painting or piece of furniture they had inherited through no merit of their own. A couple of the ones who were staying qualified as friends, Minna Bunting and that same Sam Hoare who had featured as another witness to the Battle of the Mainwarings before Minna’s dance, and the others were all quite familiar as well, since we had been performing this ritual together for six months by then. As usual, some local couples came for the dinner, a blameless concoction of salmon mousse (comme toujours), chicken à la king and crème brulée, a menu more suited perhaps to an aged invalid with no teeth than a bunch of ravenous teenagers, but we made the best of it and chatted away quite sociably. There was nothing wrong with any of this, but nor was there anything of much interest in it and it was certainly no distraction from the main purpose of the evening: To get to the dance. Sometimes the dinners and house parties could be so entertaining that one lingered and arrived at the dance a little too late to enjoy it. But there was certainly no chance of that on this occasion. After a polite interval had passed we drank up our coffee, slid away to the loo and clambered into the cars.
There was a kind of general excitement in the air when we entered the hall, though I did not then know why. Serena and Candida and the Claremonts were standing there receiving. ‘I’m so glad you could come,’ said Serena and kissed me, which nearly winded me, as usual. ‘I wish you were staying here,’ she added in a whisper, as a compliment rather than because she meant it. I had become a bit of a Gresham regular by the end of that year, having been billeted with them for a couple of northern dances and staying once on my own on the way down from Scotland, and I was in danger of succumbing to that awful smugness of trying to demonstrate that one is a welcome guest somewhere enviable, but I did not suspect at the time, what I know now, that the welcome I always received was a reflection of Serena’s enjoyment of my being in love with her. I do not mean she was interested in me romantically, not in the least, only that she wanted me to go on being in love with her until it wasn’t fun any more. The young are like that. I can now remember when the photograph was taken. I was still reeling in bliss from her comment and I was unable to make myself move out of the room where she stood, even though I knew I had to give place, so I stepped behind them, where I could linger a little longer; then a flash went off and I was caught forever, like a fly in amber. Lucy Dalton rescued me, taking my arm and walking me away. ‘What’s your house party like?’
‘Dull but respectable.’
‘Sounds like paradise compared to mine. There doesn’t seem to be any running water. Literally. Nothing comes out of the taps except a dirty trickle of what looks like prune juice. Doesn’t Serena look marvellous? But of course you’re not the man to disagree with that. I hear the discothèque is fabulous. It was done by someone’s boyfriend, but I forget who. Come on.’ All this was delivered in one spurt without pause or breath, so I couldn’t hope to come in with a comment.
The discothèque was fabulous. It occupied a large section of what must normally have been a basement servants’ hall or even a section of the no doubt extensive wine cellars. A doorway under the main staircase was surrounded by synthetic flames and a sign read ‘Welcome to Hell!’ While on the other side of the door the entire space, including the walls of the staircase leading down, was covered in foil and flames made of tinsel and satin, blown with fans and lit by a spinning wheel, making them flicker and leap, so they really did feel quite real. At the bottom the hell theme embraced the entire area, with huge copies of the grimmer paintings by Hieronymus Bosch lining the walks with images of suffering, while the fire and flames played over the heads of the dancers. As a final detail the DJ and two of the waitresses had been put into scarlet devils’ outfits, so they could attend to the guests while maintaining the illusion. The only discordant note came from the music, some of which seemed very out of place in Hades. When we came down the steps a popular ballad by the Turtles, Elenore, was playing. Somehow the lyrics, ‘I really think you’re groovy, let’s go out to a movie,’ didn’t quite chime with the Tortures of the Damned.
We danced and gossiped and said hello to other people for a bit until, round about half past eleven or maybe midnight, a sudden rush for the staircase told us that something was happening we wouldn’t want to miss.
Lucy and I struggled up to the hall in our turn and found we were carried along in the crush towards the State Dining Room, which had been designated the main ballroom of the evening. The space had been cleared of furniture and somehow, unlike most of the other houses I had penetrated, the stage erected at one end for the band and, more unusually, the lighting looked entirely professional. This put a spin on the proceedings from the start, even before we knew what was happening. I don’t quite know why, but there was always something satisfactory in dancing inside a great house and not in a marquee with wobbly coconut matting and a portable dance floor, and Gresham Abbey was the very acme of a great house. Stern, full-lengths of earlier, male Greshams lined the walls of the enormous room, in armour and brocade and Victorian fustian, in lovelocks and perukes and periwigs, extending their white, stockinged legs to display the garters that encased them. Above the marble chimneypiece a vast, equestrian portrait of the first Earl of Claremont by Kneller dominated the chamber, a loud, impressive statement of self-congratulation, and the contrast between the rigid splendour of this symbol of high birth and high achievement and the crowd of teenage young writhing away below it was almost startling.
At this precise moment, the door opened that on ordinary days led to the servery and, further below, to the kitchens. Tonight it revealed a group of young men who came bouncing through on to the stage, and started to play and sing. With a kind of group sigh we suddenly all realised that this, incredibly, was Steve Winwood, lead singer of the group formed and named for the man who ran up on to the stage after him, Spencer Davis. This was the real live Spencer Davis. No sooner had this information penetrated our skulls, than they started to play their song of a couple of years previously, Keep on Running. It is hard to explain now what this felt like then. We are a jaded people, these days. We see film stars and singers and every other permutation of fame wherever we go, indeed sometimes, judging by the magazines, it seems that more people are famous than not. But this wasn’t true in 1968 and to be in the same room as a real-live band playing and singing its own hit number, which most of us had bought anyway two years before and played ever since, was to be inside a fantasy. It was astonishing, mind-searing, completely impossible to take in. Even Lucy was silenced, if not for long. ‘Can you believe it?’ she said. I couldn’t. We were so sweet, really.
It was then that I saw Damian. He was standing inside one of the window embrasures and so half in shadow, looking at the world-shaking sight but without any outward sign of excitement or even pleasure. He just stood there, listening, watching, but watching without interest. My own attention was taken back by the band and, to be honest, I forgot all about him until much later on, but I still have that image, a melancholic at the carnival, lodged in my brain. After that, I was back in the party, dancing and talking and drinking for hours, and finally, at about half past two, going off in search of breakfast, which I found in the conservatory. This was a huge glass-and-cast-iron affair, what was once called a winter garden, built for one of the countesses in the 1880s, and on this night it had been cleared and filled with little round tables and chairs, each one decorated with a pyramid of flowers. A long buffet stood against one end, and the exotic climbing flowers on the stone wall behind it formed a kind of living wallpaper. What made it even more unusual was that the whole space had been carpeted for the occasion in bright red, cut close round the stone fountain at its centre, and the route of access, normally a short walk along a terrace from one of the drawing rooms, had been covered in with a passage, fashioned in wood for that one night only, but as an absolute facsimile, in every way, of the room it connected to, with dado, panels and cornice, and the very handles on the windows made as exact reproductions of the originals. In short, there is a level, perhaps in all things, where the object or activity is of so exquisite a standard that it becomes an art form in itself, and for me that little, constructed passage achieved it. Like everything else that evening, it was extraordinary.
I walked down the table, helping myself to the delights, then sauntered around, chatting with assorted clutches of guests. Joanna was there and I talked to her for a bit, and Dagmar, finally alighting at a table with Candida, which was in itself a bit unusual as normally by this stage of the evening she would be laughing like someone with terminal whooping cough and I would give her a wide berth, but on this evening, at her own dance which made it odd, she was curiously piano, so I sat down. I seemed to have shed Lucy by that time and I know I didn’t fix myself up with a partner for the evening, as one usually did at these things, although I cannot tell you why. Certainly it did not in any way lessen my enjoyment. I think, looking back, that maybe it would have felt awkward and dishonest to have had to flirt and concentrate and pretend that some other girl was the centre of my attention for the evening when I was in Serena’s house and at Serena’s party. ‘Have you seen anything of your friend Damian?’ said Candida. Again, she seemed quite unlike her normal self and positively thoughtful, not an adjective she would generally attract at half past two in the morning.
I had to concentrate for a moment. The question had come out of nowhere. ‘Not recently. I saw him in the dining room when we were listening to the band earlier. Why?’
‘No reason.’ She turned to one of the Tremayne boys who had arrived at the table with some pals and a plate of sausages.
I’d finished eating and Carla Wakefield wanted my seat, so I left the conservatory and wandered back through the emptying house. For no reason, I turned into the little oval anteroom, outside the dining room, where the music was still echoing through the rafters. There was a little group of paintings depicting the five senses that I found intriguing and I leaned in to see more of the detail, when an icy blast hit me and I stood to see that a door leading out to the terrace was open and Serena was coming in from the night. She was alone, and while she was, for me, as lovely as anyone can imagine a woman could be, she looked as if she were shivering with cold. ‘What were you doing out there?’ I said. ‘You must be freezing.’
For a second she had to concentrate to work out both who I was and what I was saying, but having regained control of her brain, she nodded. ‘It is a bit chilly,’ she said.
‘But what were you doing?’
She shrugged lightly. ‘Just thinking,’ she said.
‘I don’t suppose you want to dance,’ I spoke cheerfully, but without any expectations.
I quite understand that, in this account of my relations with Serena Gresham I must seem pessimistic and negative to a tedious degree, but you have to understand that at this time in my life I was young and ugly. To be ugly when young is something that no one who has not experienced it should ever claim to understand. It is all very well to talk about superficial values and ‘beauty of character,’ and the rest of the guff that ugly teenagers have to listen to from their mothers, the ‘marvellous thing about being different’ and so on, but the plain truth is you are bankrupt in the only currency with value. You may have friends without number, but when it comes to romance you have nothing to bargain with, nothing to sell. You are not to be shown off and flaunted, you are the last resort when there’s no one left worth dancing with. When you are kissed, you do not turn into a prince. You are just a kissed toad and usually the kisser regrets it in the morning. The best reputation you can acquire is that you never talk. If you are good company and you can hold your tongue, you will see some action, but woe betide the ugly suitor who grows overconfident and brags. Of course, things change. In time, at last, some people will start to see through your face to your other qualities and eventually, in the thirties and forties, other factors come into play. Success will mend your features and so will money, and this is not, actually, because the women concerned are necessarily mercenary. It is because you have begun to smell differently. Success makes you a different person. But you never forget those few, those very few, Grade A women who loved you when no one else did. In the words of a thriller, I know who you are and you will always have a place in my heart. But even the least of these did not come along before my middle twenties. When I was eighteen, ugly and in love, I knew I was in love alone.
‘Yes. Let’s dance,’ said Serena, and I can still remember that strange mixture of butterflies and feeling sick that her answer gave me.
Spencer Davis had left by then. Presumably they were already racing down the motorway, or the equivalent in those days, having more than earned their wedge and made the evening legendary. God bless them all. I hope they know what happiness they gave us. It was three o’clock by this stage and nearly the end of the ball. A disc jockey had taken over again, but you could hear in his voice that he was winding down. He put on a slow record I rather liked, A Single Girl, which had been a hit a year or two earlier, and we moved closer. There is something so peculiar about dancing. You are entitled to slide your arm round the waist of a woman, to hold her closely, to feel her breasts against your chest through your shirt and the thin silk of an evening dress; her hair brushes against your cheek, her very scent excites you, yet there is no intimacy in it, no assumption of anything but politeness and sociability. Needless to say I was in paradise as we shifted our weight from foot to foot, and talked of the band and the party, and what a complete success the evening had been. But although she was obviously pleased to hear it, still Serena seemed thoughtful and not as elated as I had expected her to be. As she was entitled to feel. ‘Have you seen Damian?’ she said. ‘He was looking for you.’
‘Why?’
‘I think he wants to ask you for a lift tomorrow.’
‘I’m going rather early.’
‘He knows. He has to get away first thing, too.’ I was so absorbed in the wonder of dancing with her that I didn’t register this much, although I remember it did occur to me that I should find any excuse to linger, were I lucky enough to be staying at Gresham.
‘Have you enjoyed yourself?’ I asked.
She thought for a moment. ‘These things are such milestones,’ she said, which was an odd answer really, even if it was true. These events were rites of passage to my generation and we did not much question their validity. It may seem strange in our aggressively anti-formal age but then we saw the point of ritual. The girls came out, the men came of age. The former happened when the girl was eighteen, the latter when the man was twenty-one. This was because the upper classes entirely ignored the government’s altering the age of seniority to eighteen for many years, if indeed they recognise it now. These events were a marking of adulthood. After they had been observed you were a fully fledged member of the club, and your membership would continue to be parsed by ceremony: Weddings and christenings, parties for our offspring, more weddings and finally funerals. These were the Big Moments by which we steered our course through life. That’s gone now. There are seemingly no obligatory events. The only thing that really marks an aristocratic upbringing apart from a middle-class one today is that the upper classes still marry before giving birth. Or, when they don’t, it is exceptional. Apart from that many of the traditions that once distinguished them as a tribe seem largely to have melted into the sand.
The song came to an end and Serena was claimed by her departing guests, while I wandered off through the house, reluctant, even now, to call it a day. I left the dancing and crossed the anteroom, where a girl in pink was asleep on a rather pretty sofa, before poking through the half-open door into the Tapestry Drawing Room which lay beyond. At first I thought it was empty. There were only a few lamps lit and the room was engulfed in gloom. The Empress Catherine’s clock caught the eye as one lamp was so placed to make the glass on the face shine, but otherwise it was clearly a room that had done its work for the day. Then I saw that it was not in fact empty, but that one chair beneath a vast tapestry reaching to the cornice was occupied and the sitter was none other than Damian Baxter. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Serena told me you wanted to ask me something.’
He looked up. ‘Yes. I wondered whether you could give me a lift home tomorrow, if you’re driving straight down. I know you’re leaving early.’
I was interested by this, because I had never heard Damian speak of his home before. ‘Where is home?’ I said.
‘Northampton. I imagine you’ll drive straight past it. Unless you’re not going back to London at all.’
‘Of course I’ll take you. I’ll pick you up at about nine.’
That seemed to be the end of it. Mission accomplished. He stood. ‘I think I’ll go to bed,’ he said. There was something curiously unembroidered about his manner, which I had come to see as endlessly calculated. But not tonight.
‘What did you think of the party?’
‘Amazing.’
‘And did you have a good time?’
‘So-so,’ he said.
As promised, I arrived back at the abbey at approximately nine the following morning. The door was standing open so I just went in. As I had expected, the house party might still have been in their rooms, but the place was a whirl of activity. A great house on the day after a party is always rather evocative. Servants were wandering about, collecting missed glasses and things, and carrying furniture back to their proper places. The table was being assembled at one end of the dining room, while the huge carpet was unrolled in front of me, and when I asked after the house party’s breakfast I was nodded through to the little dining room beyond it, a simple room, if not as little as all that, enlivened by some paintings of racehorses, with their riders in the Gresham colours. Lady Claremont had broken her usual rule and there were three tables, a bit jammed in, set for about twenty-four. Damian was alone, finishing off a piece of toast. He stood as I entered. ‘My case is already in the hall.’
‘Don’t you want to say goodbye to anyone?’
‘They’re all asleep and I said goodbye last night.’ So, without further ado, we loaded up his bag and left. He didn’t say anything much as we drove along, beyond a few directions, until we were back on the Al heading south. Then, at last, he did speak. ‘I’m not going to do that again,’ he said.
‘We’re none of us going to do much more of it. I think I’ve only got another two dances and a few charity things, then it’s over.’
‘I’m not even going to them. I’ve had enough. I should do some work, anyway, before I forget what it is I’m supposed to be studying.’
I looked at him. There was something resolute and glum about him, which was new. ‘Did anything happen last night?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You seem rather disenchanted.’
‘If I am disenchanted, it has nothing to do with last night. It’s the whole bloody, self-indulgent, boring thing. I’ve had enough of it.’
‘Which of course is your privilege.’
After that, we drove more or less in silence until at last we reached Northampton. It is not a town I know, but Damian took me safely to a row of perfectly respectable semi-detached 1930s villas, all built of brick with tiles hung above the waistline, and each with a name on the gate. The one we stopped outside was called ‘Sunnyside.’ As we were unloading, the door opened and a middle-aged couple came out, the man in a rather loud jersey and worsted slacks, and the women in a grey skirt with a cardigan over her shoulders, held in place by a shiny chain. The man came forward to take the case. ‘This is my father,’ said Damian and he introduced me. I shook hands and said hello.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Mr Baxter.
‘How do you do,’ I said in return, deliberately blocking his cheerful welcome by not answering in kind, with what I foolishly imagined, in my youthful fatuity, to be good breeding.
‘Won’t you come in?’ said Mrs Baxter. ‘Would you like a coffee?’ But I didn’t go in and I didn’t have any coffee. I regret it now, that refusal of their hospitality. My excuse was that I had an appointment in London at three o’clock and I wasn’t sure I’d make it as it was. I told myself it was important, and perhaps it was, but I regret it now. And even if I couldn’t bring myself to say it, I was pleased to meet them. They were nice, decent people; the mother went out of her way to be polite and the father was, I think, a clever man. I learned later that he was the manager of a shoe factory with a special interest in opera and it saddened me in a way that I had not met them before. That they had not been included in any of the year’s frolics, not even at the university. Looking back, I realise it was a key moment for me, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, in that it was one of the first instances when I came to appreciate the insidious poison of snobbery, the tyranny of it, the meaningless values that made me reject their friendly overtures, that had made Damian hide these two, pleasant, intelligent people because he was ashamed of them.
On the morning in question, I realise now, Damian was making a kind of statement of apology, of non-shame, by bringing me here. He had hidden them behind a barrier because he did not want me to judge him, to look down on him, on the basis of his parents, with whom there was nothing wrong at all, and in this he was right. We would have looked down on him. I blush to write it and I liked them when I met them, but we would have done, without any moral justification whatever. He had wanted to move into a different world and he felt part of that would be shedding his background. He’d managed the transition, but on this particular morning I think he was ashamed of his ambition, ashamed of rejecting his own past. The truth is we should all have been ashamed in having played along with it without question. At any rate, with avowals to meet again the following Monday at Cambridge we parted and I got back into my car.
We did meet again, of course, several times, but we did not meet alone for the rest of my time at university. Essentially my friendship with Damian Baxter ended on that day, the morning after Serena Gresham’s dance, and I cannot pretend I was sorry, even if my feelings for him were less savage then than they would be when we did next find ourselves under the same roof. But that was a couple of years later, when we were out in the world, and quite a different story.
The weekend passed pleasantly enough. We ate, we talked, we slept, we walked. Sophie Jamieson turned out to share my interest in French history and the Purbricks were great friends of some cousins of mine who lived near them, so it all went very smoothly in the way of these things. I must say Andrew had not improved with the years. Having inherited the earldom and the savaged remnant that the family lawyer’s depredations had left of the estate, it was as if the last vestiges of self-knowledge or self-doubt had been flung to the four winds. He was king, and a very angry king at that, raging at the gardeners and the cook and his wife about almost everything. Serena took it all in her stride but once, when I was on my way downstairs before dinner on Friday evening, I found him haranguing her in the hall about a frame that should have been mended or something. I caught her eye as I was on my way to the library door and she did not look away but raised her eyebrows slightly, which he would not have seen and which I took as more or less the greatest compliment an English toff can pay: to include you in their private, family dramas.
After lunch on Saturday, when we’d finished drinking our cups of coffee in the drawing room, Serena proposed a walk by the river and most of us stuck up our hands to join her. ‘You’ll need boots,’ she said, but there were masses of spares for people who’d forgotten them, so we were soon equipped and on our way. The gardens at Waverly were pretty and predictable, the usual Victorian layout that had been calmed down by the restriction of only having two gardeners instead of twelve, and we walked through them, admiring vocally as we went, but they weren’t the main pleasure ground event. Serena led us out of a gate and on down an avenue through a paddock and into a wood, until finally we came out on to a grassy bank, perfectly placed to allow us to walk along the edge of a wide river whose name I now forget. I admired the wonders of nature. ‘It’s totally artificial,’ she said. ‘They rerouted the riverbed in the 1850s and made the walks to go with the altered course.’ I could only reflect on the brilliance of that generation in their understanding of how to live.
We were alone in a comfortable pair by then, as the others had lagged behind. I looked around at the view as Serena slid her arm through mine. On the other side of the water a huge willow leaned over, trailing its creeper-like branches on the surface, making ripples in the flow. Suddenly there was a flurry of movement and a heron appeared above the trees, wide wings beating back and forth, slowly and rhythmically, as it sailed across the sky. ‘They’re such thieves. Andrew says we should shoot them or the river will be quite empty.’ But even as she spoke the words, her eyes followed the great, grey bird on its wondrous journey. ‘It’s such a privilege to live here,’ she said after a minute or two.
I looked at her. ‘I hope so.’
‘It is.’ She was staring me straight in the eye, so I think she was trying to be honest. ‘He’s quite a different person when we’re alone.’
Naturally, this was very flattering, as the lack of names or qualifications implied a kind of shorthand between us which I was thrilled to think might exist, and even more thrilled by the idea that she recognised it, but in another way she was registering her guilt at signalling Andrew’s preposterous behaviour in the hall the previous evening. Her statement is anyway the standard defence of all women who find themselves married to, or stuck with, men who all their friends think are awful. Often this comes as a revelation after quite a considerable period during which they thought people quite liked their mate, and it must be a disappointment to discover that the reverse is true, but I would guess this was not the case where Serena was concerned. Nobody had ever liked Andrew. Of course, it is an effective defence to claim hidden qualities for your other half, because by definition it is impossible to disprove. I suppose logic tells one that it must sometimes be true, but I found it hard to believe that Andrew Belton in private was sensitive, endearing and fun, not least because there is no cure for stupidity. Still, I prayed that it might be even partially the case. ‘If you say so, I believe it,’ I replied.
We walked on for a while before Serena spoke again. ‘I wish you’d tell me what you’re really doing for Damian.’
‘I have told you.’
‘You’re not going to all this trouble just to get some funny stories from four decades ago. Candida tells me you’ve been over to Los Angeles to see the dreaded Terry K.’
I couldn’t be bothered to be dishonest, since we were so near the end. ‘I can’t tell you now,’ I said, ‘because it isn’t my secret. But I will tell you soon, if you’re interested.’
‘I am.’ She pondered my answer for a bit. ‘I never saw him again after that ghastly night.’
‘No. Nor did most of the guests.’
‘Yet I often think of him.’
She had brought it up and so I thought I would try to satisfy something that had been niggling me. ‘When you planned that whole thing with Candida, turning up out of the blue, what were you hoping to achieve? I can remember you now, standing in that vast, sun-baked square, in those terrible black clothes you all had to borrow.’
She gave a snort of laughter. ‘That was so crazy.’
‘But what did you hope would come out of it?’
This was a big question and years before it would have been unaskable. But she did not reproach me, or even look cross to be put on the spot. ‘Nothing, once my parents were on board. I should have given up the whole idea the moment they said they were coming. I don’t know why I didn’t.’
‘But originally. When you first plotted it?’
She shook her head and her hair caught a glint of the sun. ‘To be honest, I don’t really know what I wanted to come out of it, given how I managed things later. I suppose I felt trapped. And angry. I was married and a mother and Christ knows what, all before I was twenty-one, and I felt I’d been lured into a cage and the door had slammed shut. Damian stood for everything that had been taken from me. But it was silly. We hadn’t been honest with each other and that always makes for trouble. It would all have been different if we were young today, but how does that help?’
‘Do you still feel trapped?’
She smiled. ‘Isn’t there a laboratory test where if animals are kept in a trap long enough, they come back when they’re let out, because it’s home?’ We strolled on, listening to the birds. ‘Does he ever talk about me?’ Despite a Pavlovian irritation, this question interested me. More or less every woman I had seen on my quest had asked this and Serena wasn’t even one of the contenders. It was pointless to deny that Damian clearly had qualities that I had been quite unaware of at the time.
‘Of course we talk about you. You’re the one thing we have in common.’ I said it as a joke, although it was truer than I had previously known. I could not tell you how she took it, but she smiled and we walked on.
‘Did you see the picture in your room?’
‘I did.’
‘Classic. I put it out for you. God, weren’t we young?’
‘Young and, in your case, lovely.’
She sighed. ‘I can never understand why you and I didn’t get off together at some point, during the whole thing.’
This made me stop in my tracks. ‘Can’t you? I can. You didn’t fancy me.’ There was no point in beating about the bush.
She looked a little miffed, perhaps because it sounded as if I were reproaching her, which I truly wasn’t. ‘You never pressed your case very hard,’ she said at last. She was apparently attempting at least to share the blame for our non-romance.
‘Because I knew that if I did, our friendship would become untenable and I would drop out of your life. It was fun for you to have me dying for love, as long as it never became embarrassing and I never put you on the spot. You could have had me any day you wished, with a crook of your finger, which you were fully aware of. But you never wanted me, except as a courtier worshipping at your shrine. And I was happy. If that was the best that was on offer, I was glad to oblige.’
She made a slight expression of horror at this perfectly honest account. ‘Did you know all that, then?’
I shook my head. ‘No. Except possibly instinctively. But I know it now.’
‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘You make me sound like such a bitch.’
But this wasn’t right and I was anxious for her to know I didn’t think it. ‘Not at all. It worked well for a long time. I was your parfit knight and you were la belle dame sans merci. It’s an arrangement that has been perfectly serviceable for hundreds of years, after all. It only went wrong because of Portugal and that wasn’t your fault. It became embarrassing after that evening, so we dropped out of each other’s lives, but it would only have happened sooner if I’d made a pass.’
She thought for a time, as we walked on again in silence. There was a rustle of movement in the undergrowth and the distinctive red of a fox’s coat flashed through the browns and greens for a moment. As if recognising him, she spoke, ‘Damian has much to answer for.’
‘The interesting thing is I think he would agree with you.’
The others were closing in on us now and soon the conversation would become general again. But before they reached where we were standing Serena spoke softly. ‘I hope you don’t hate me.’
Her voice was gentle and, I think, sincere, and when I turned towards her, she was smiling. I don’t think she meant it as a serious enquiry, but she was apologising for wounding me in those lost years, when heart pain could be so sharp and was so easily administered. I looked at her and for the millionth time wondered at every feature. A tiny crumb of something from lunch was clinging to the corner of her mouth and I imagined a life where I would have the right to lick it off. ‘What do you think?’ I said.
Dinner that night was the main event of the weekend and I dutifully bathed, putting on evening trousers, a shirt with no tie, reluctantly, and a smoking jacket. I went downstairs feeling rather cheery but, once in the drawing room, things got heavier with the inclusion among the guests for the evening of Andrew’s mother, the now Dowager Countess, who lived not in the real dower house, a smart Georgian villa on the edge of the park, which was let to an American banker, but in a cottage in the village formerly reserved for the head keeper. She was standing stiffly by the chimneypiece when I came in. Lady Belton was a lot older, naturally, than when I had last seen her, but age had done little to soothe her incipient madness. She still stared out of those pale-blue, Dutch-doll eyes, and her hair was dyed to an approximation of the Italianate black it had once been. Nor had her sense of style made much of a leap forward. She wore a curious outfit, a kind of long, khaki nightgown with an uneven neckline. I’m not sure what effect she was aiming at, but it can’t have been what she achieved. Her jewellery, I need hardly say, was excellent.
Serena introduced me, observing that her mother-in-law must remember me from the old days. Lady Belton ignored this. ‘How do you do,’ she said, extending her bony, knuckled hand. Is there anything more annoying than people saying how do you do when you have met them a thousand times? If there is, I would like to know what it might be. I had a recent instance where I was greeted as a stranger by a woman I’d known since childhood, who had grown famous in the interim. Every time I met her for literally years, she would lean forward gracefully and make no sign that we had ever seen each other before. Finally I resolved that if she tried it one more time I would let her have it. But something of my resolve must have shown in my face and all bullies are equipped with an antenna that tells them when the bullying must stop. She read my eyes and held out her hand. ‘How lovely to see you again,’ she said.
Serena had moved off to get me a drink, so I was left alone with the old besom. ‘It’s so nice to catch up with Andrew and Serena after all these years,’ I said feebly by way of an opener.
‘Do you know Lord Belton?’ she replied, without a glimmer of a smile. Presumably this was to show me that I should have referred to him by his proper rank. There was a bowl of avocado dip quite near us on a side table, and just for a second I had an almost irresistible urge to pick it up and squish it into her face.
Instead, I opened my mouth to say ‘Yes, I know them and I know you too, you silly, old bat.’ But there’s no point, is there? She would only have hidden behind my ‘terrible rudeness’ and never have recognised her own. I didn’t draw her at dinner, hallelujah, and instead I watched pityingly as Hugh Purbrick battled through her silences, trying to engage her with talk of people she must have met but of whom she denied all knowledge, or on topics in which she made it clear she had no interest. In short, she gave him no quarter.
The young are often told, or were in the days when I was a child, that parvenus and other rank outsiders may on occasion be rude, but real ladies and gentlemen are never anything but perfectly polite. This is, of course, complete rubbish. The rude, like the polite, may be found at every level of society, but there is a particular kind of rudeness, when it rests on empty snobbery, on an assumption of superiority made by people who have nothing superior about them, who have nothing about them at all, in fact, that is unique to the upper classes and very hard to swallow. Old Lady Belton was a classic example, a walking mass of bogus values, a hollow gourd, a cause for revolution. I had disliked her when I was young, but now, after forty years to think about it, I saw her as worse than simply unpleasant and foolish. Rather, I recognised her as someone who would be almost evil if she weren’t so stupid, as the very reason for her children’s empty lives. There is much that makes me nostalgic for the England of my youth, much that I think has been lost to our detriment, but sometimes one must recognise where it was wrong and why it had to change. Where the upper classes are concerned, Lady Belton was that reason made flesh. She was an embodiment of all that was bad about the old system and of absolutely none of its virtues. I do not like to hate but I confess that, seeing her again, I almost hated her. I hated her for what she represented and because, ultimately, I blamed her for Andrew’s worthlessness. If I were to be merciful where he is concerned, and I find it hard, I would acknowledge that with a mother like the one he had he never stood a chance. Between them, these two pointless people had wasted my Serena’s life. Andrew was in fact Lady Belton’s other neighbour at dinner that night, since she had been placed, in accordance with precedence, on his right. They did not exchange one word from soup to nuts. Neither could be judged a loser by it.
Afterwards, some of the party made up a table for bridge and a few of them sneaked off to watch a late film on television in some chaotic children’s cubbyhole where Andrew had banished ‘the foul machine,’ so after the locals had gone home and the rest of the house party had taken themselves off to bed, I found myself with Candida in a corner of the library, hugging a glass of whisky, gossiping as the fire died. Serena had looked in and made us free with the tray of drinks but she was taken up with settling the others, and for me it was enough just to see her operating her existence, charting her course through the commitments that made her days real. And I was pleased to be left alone with Candida, since it meant that I was able to continue my investigations. I had told Candida about finding the picture in my room the night before, but now we were alone we fell to discussing that party of so long ago, how it went and how it ended. I reminded her that I had driven Damian home in rather a glump, and that it marked the finish of his career as a deb’s delight. ‘Poor Damian,’ she said. ‘I’ve never felt sorrier for anybody.’
This was an unexpected comment, since I had no idea what she was talking about. ‘Why?’
My query was clearly as much of a surprise to her as her statement had been to me. ‘Because of the whole drama,’ she replied, as if this must be quite obvious.
‘What drama?’
She gave me a quizzical look, as if I might be teasing and leading her on, but my gaze was as innocent as a newborn child’s. ‘How amazing,’ she said. ‘Did he really never tell you?’
Then I asked and I listened.
Candida knew Damian well, long before that night. She had flirted with him in her frightening way, she had danced with him, even, I suspected as she talked, slept with him and generally befriended him as the season had progressed. And she had managed to get him included in the Gresham house party, without drawing attention to Serena, and-
‘But I don’t understand. Why did you? I thought you fancied him yourself.’ I remembered that other, different Candida rolling her eyes at Queen Charlotte’s Ball and almost shuddered.
She shook her head. ‘That was all finished long before. And by that time he and Serena were in love with each other.’ Again she spoke as if I must surely have had some suspicion of these things at the very least, and it was precious of me to pretend that I did not. ‘That is, I thought they were in love with each other. Serena was in love with him.’
‘I don’t believe it.’ Of course, I didn’t want to believe it and in truth I hadn’t seen much evidence. They’d kissed. But if we were supposed to be in love with everyone we’d ever kissed…
She shrugged as if to say believe what you like, I am telling you the truth. ‘She wanted to marry him, absurd as that sounds, and as you know, she was eighteen at the time and Damian was nineteen and still at university, so they needed her parents’ consent.’
‘Why? When did the law change?’
‘At the beginning of 1970. It was still twenty-one in Sixty-eight.’
‘But the Claremonts would never have given their consent if he’d been the Duke of Gloucester.’
‘Yes, they would. They did. They pushed her into marrying Andrew the following year, and she was still only nineteen.’ Which was true. ‘Anyway, Serena had got it into her head that if they could only get to know Damian they would fall for him and in time give their permission, which obviously I can now see was a hopeless idea.’
‘Worse than hopeless. Insane.’
My intervention was not soothing to her. ‘Yes. Well, as I say, I know that now, but at the time I had convinced myself, or Serena had convinced me, that it might work. It wasn’t that she wanted to plunge into obscurity with him. She was sure that Damian would do incredibly well in his career and history has, after all, proved her right a thousand times over.’
I nodded. This conversation was having an uncomfortable effect on me. I was feeling numb and strangely tingly, as if I were coming down with ’flu. I am not pretending I didn’t know they were attracted to each other, they were both good-looking and on the circuit and, as I’ve admitted, I’d seen the kissing incident at Terry’s ball. That was enough to make me jealous and angry and indignant, but this… this was something entirely different. This was when I learned a lesson I will not now lose, although it has come too late to do much good. Namely, that just because you start people off, you do not control them thereafter, nor do you have the right to pretend that you do. However Damian began that year under my aegis, however he met those people initially, he was living a life among them, in that world, by the end of it, that was as valid as my own. I had brought him out from under his stone, but at the finish he’d held the promise in his hands of what would have constituted my whole life’s happiness. I was so jealous I wanted to kill almost anybody.
‘Well, somehow her parents got wind of the whole plan. I thought later it might have been Andrew who had tipped off his mother, the dreaded Lady B. Wasn’t she ghastly tonight?’
‘Ghastly.’
‘Well, she was desperate to catch Serena for Andrew and she might have deliberately put a spoke in the works, but we’ll never know. On the day, Damian and Serena drove down together from London. I was coming from somewhere or other, but I got here at about five, after most of the house party, and they were all having tea in the drawing room. Of course, Aunt Roo was being very charming-’
‘Why is she called Aunt Roo?’
She thought for a moment. ‘I’m not completely sure. I think it’s something to do with Winnie the Pooh. Remember the mother kangaroo was called Kanga and the baby was called Roo?’ I nodded. ‘It was some game they used to play at Barrymount, when they were growing up in Ireland. Her real name’s Rosemary, but she was always Roo in the family.’ Somehow Lady Claremont’s nickname only reinforced the iron walls of the culture that Damian, in his youthful ignorance, took on all those years ago.
‘Anyway, when I came in, Damian was trying very hard. Too hard. He smiled and chatted and giggled and flashed and flickered, and Aunt Roo laughed and asked him about Cambridge and so on, but I remember thinking Uncle Pel was very quiet – which he wasn’t usually in those days – and I could tell by the look she gave me, that Serena knew it wasn’t going as well as Damian obviously thought. The guests who were staying did that silent thing, of not quite laughing and not quite letting him in. My other aunt was there, and as Damian was rabbiting on, Aunt Sheila and Roo kept swapping quiet, sisterly glances, which seemed so unkind and disloyal. I can see that’s not terribly logical for me to say, but I felt infuriated for Serena, for both of them really.’ She paused, breathless with the memory. ‘I suppose that was the moment when I realised it wasn’t going to work.’
She stopped for a moment, as if this was the first time she had ever fully registered this salient point. ‘So. We all went up to change and I was sitting at my dressing table, doing my best with my hair. I remember I’d forgotten to have it done, which seems a bit mad for your own dance, but at this precise moment there was a knock and Roo and Pel came into the room. They were already changed and Roo was covered in diamonds, and it should all have been rather merry and gay, but somehow it wasn’t. Then Uncle Pel said, “How long has this been going on?” And we were all quite quiet, as if someone was supposed to ask what he was talking about, but of course we all knew what he was talking about, so there wasn’t any point. Then I started a defence of Serena and Damian, of both of them, but even as I was talking I could hear that it all sounded so childish and ridiculous, as if I were suddenly seeing it through their eyes. I’d never been with Uncle Pel when he was so angry, in fact I’d never really seen him angry at all, but that night he was bulging with anger, blazing with it. “She wants to run off with this smarmy, little oik?” he said. “This greaser, with his oily hair and his dodgy vowels and his ‘pleased to meet you’ and his clothes from Marks and Spencer?” I’ve never forgotten that. “His clothes from Marks and Spencer.” And I looked at Roo and she said “Watson unpacked for him,” and that was that. Then it was her turn. “Of course we want Serena to be happy,” she said. “It’s all we want. Truly.” Which it obviously wasn’t. “But you see, we want her to be happy in a way we understand, in a way that will last.”’
‘I said I thought that this would last, but even as I spoke the words I felt like some little, preppy, Sandra Dee figure asking to be allowed to stay out late.’ Candida sighed. ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t much use.’
‘Did Damian really say “pleased to meet you”?’
‘Apparently. It just shows how nervous he must have been.’
‘Poor chap. Was that it?’
She shook her head. ‘By no means. Uncle Pel hadn’t finished. He was absolutely fizzing and he sort of waved his finger at me, right under my nose, like a teacher in a situation comedy, as if I were the guilty one, which I now think he must have believed, since he knew I’d connived in getting Damian up there. “You tell Serena to get rid of this little social-climbing, money-grubbing shit,” he said. “You tell her to dump him, if she doesn’t want to leave it to me to manage. That kind of chap comes into this house by the servants’ entrance, or not at all.”’
I couldn’t help interrupting. ‘That sounds rather vulgar for the Lord Claremont I remember.’
Candida nodded. ‘You’re right. It wasn’t him at all. I think he was just so angry that his mental, editing machine had switched itself off. In fairness to Roo, it was too much for her, too, and she slapped him down. She said, “Really, Pel, don’t be so idiotic. You sound like a period drama on television. You’ll be telling him to get off your land next.” When she said that I smiled. I couldn’t help myself, but Roo saw it as a breach in the wall and she turned to me in the most coaxing way. “We have nothing against this young man, Candida,” she said, and she spoke very calmly, but in a way her calmness was more deadly to Serena’s hopes than Pel’s fury, as I could tell it was not a mood that might blow away in the morning. “Honestly we don’t. He is making an effort to be nice and he is perfectly welcome as a guest. But you must see it’s out of the question. The whole thing is simply ludicrous and that’s all there is to it.” She paused, I assume to let me nod. Which I didn’t, so she ploughed on. “Just find a way to tell Serena that we don’t think it a good idea. It’ll come much better from you. If we tackle her it’ll blow up into a hideous production. She’s a sensible girl. I’m sure she’ll see the wisdom of what we’re saying when she’s had time to think.’ I asked her if they wanted me to tell Serena that night, but she shook her head. “No. Don’t spoil the party,” she said. “Tell her tomorrow or the next day, before you leave. When you have a quiet moment.” Then she waited for a response and I suppose, by being silent, in a way I’d agreed.’
‘So did you?’
Again Candida shook her head. ‘I didn’t have to. That’s the point. After we’d all stopped hissing at each other we could hear the sounds of the first batch of people arriving for dinner, and Pel and Roo went down to greet them. I was still sitting in front of the glass, feeling a bit bludgeoned to tell the truth, and I heard a voice. “That’s me told.” I looked over and Damian was standing there.’
‘In your room?’
‘Yes.’ She nodded, scrunching up her eyes for a second at the memory. ‘He was next door, which maybe I’d forgotten, if I even knew. There was a pair of interconnecting doors, those doors that were so useful to the Edwardians, with a space between them, a couple of feet wide, which formed a completely effective sound barrier, and neither Pel nor Roo had shouted, so I wasn’t worried. The door was shut and since there was an armchair in front of it I must have assumed that it was locked, that they both were, but they weren’t. I suppose he’d been standing in the space between the two doors and now he’d opened the one into my room and come through it. The whole thing was so terrible I can hardly frame the words to describe it. I remember it now, forty years later, as one of the most horrible moments of my entire life, which, believe me, is saying something. We just stared at each other, then eventually I muttered about their not understanding his feelings, and hoping that he wouldn’t hate them and all that sort of thing. But Damian shook his head with a brisk little chuckle, and said, “Hate them? Why should I hate them? They’ve found me out.” And I didn’t understand him at first, because I’d been so convinced by Serena that he really did love her. So I couldn’t believe that he was telling me it wasn’t true, that all the time he’d been out to catch her for her money and whatnot. I didn’t want to believe him, but that’s what he said. He told Serena later on that night, so I didn’t have to. She and I talked about it, but only once. And I don’t think they saw each other again – except for that one ghastly evening in Portugal, of course. They might have run into each other at some gathering over the years, I suppose, but I never heard her mention it, if they did. He wasn’t at any more of the parties that year. He seemed to give us all up after the incident and I can’t say I’m surprised.’
‘Nor me. When did he tell her?’
‘Right at the end. I’m sure he wouldn’t have wanted to spoil the evening, but he couldn’t have borne for her to hear it from anyone else and I think he’d already decided to leave first thing the next day. I seem to remember that he got her into the Tapestry Drawing Room just before it all folded, but I may have made that up.’
‘And he told her it had all been his plan to advance himself and that he didn’t love her?’
‘I suppose so. I mean yes. Although, even now, I don’t think it was ever the whole truth. He might have seen her as a ladder in some way, but I’m sure he was genuinely fond of her.’
‘I doubt it was true at all. If he said he loved her I’m sure he did.’
She looked at me, surprised. ‘I thought you disliked him.’
‘I hated him. I hate him now, really, if marginally less than before. That doesn’t mean I think him a liar, which I don’t, except under extreme provocation.’
She grimaced. ‘As we know.’
But I didn’t want to drift away to that other, cursed evening. I wanted to stay with the night of the ball. ‘He was lying to you to save face. I wonder that you couldn’t see that. She was never going to have much money anyway. If he was after that, he’d have gone for Joanna Langley.’
She blushed. ‘You don’t think he wanted a grand wife with a title?’
‘He wouldn’t have cared about it. Not then. Maybe at the beginning, but not by that stage. He turned down Dagmar of Moravia. He could have had a princess for a wife if he’d wanted.’
She thought about this. ‘Well, I must have agreed with you at the time, or the whole Portuguese adventure would never have happened. I suppose the years have made me more cynical than I was.’
‘Poor Serena. So she’d made her decision to defy her parents and marry her true love, and then, in one short evening, it was finished and there was nothing left for her to do but to go out on to the terrace for some fresh air and to come up with a new life scheme.’
‘Did she? You know more about it than I do.’
‘Yes, she did. And then she came in again and found me waiting in the anteroom, and we danced together just before I left.’ I thought of Serena’s blank eyes and her muttered ‘these things are such milestones.’ She might have said millstones. It would have been just as true.
‘I see. Well, perhaps you’re right about Damian. I hope so. But he’s had his revenge in a way. He ended up a figure of far greater significance than any of the rest of us. I wonder if Pel and Roo ever think about that.’
‘You did have a soft spot for him, then?’
‘Damian? Oh, absolutely. I adored him. As I told you, we did have a bit of a thing, but it was earlier in the year than all this. Once Damian and Serena got together, I don’t remember him being involved with anyone else in our crowd.’
‘Until after.’
She blushed, slightly. ‘Oh, yes. After. But you know how it is during the lonely years. Before life settles.’
‘Can I ask an impertinent question?’
She smiled. ‘I think after the talk we’ve just had I can hardly prevent it.’
‘Who was Archie’s father? Did I know him? Was he one of the gang from that era? Or was it someone you met when it was over?’
‘It’s hard to say.’
Which seemed a peculiar reply. ‘Do you ever see him now?’
‘I don’t know.’ I stared at her, looking, I imagine, fairly puzzled and she laughed. ‘These days I’m an old, respectable banker’s widow, but it was not always thus. You must know that everyone has some parts of their life that are hard to reconcile with their present.’
I nodded. ‘I know it better than most.’ And I certainly already knew it about her.
‘The truth is I’m not quite sure who Archie’s father was. I bounced around a fair bit at that time. I think my excuse was that I’d lost my way or I was trying to find myself, or some other Sixties cliché that allowed me to do as I pleased without feeling guilty, and I took full advantage of the philosophy. Then, one day I woke up pregnant. Every single entry in my address book wanted me to get rid of it, of course, friends and family alike, but I wouldn’t and I am terribly grateful now.’
‘But you never tried to find out?’
‘I didn’t see the point. What would I have gained? Someone poking their nose in where it wasn’t wanted? Some emotional cripple who felt he had the right to lean on me because I’d carried his child? At one stage I thought it might be George Tremayne. I was pretty sure later that it wasn’t, but imagine what it would have been like having him getting sloshed at the kitchen table.’ I grimaced. ‘So, no. I decided to battle through it alone.’
‘How were you sure? That it wasn’t George?’
She thought for a moment. ‘I heard that he was having trouble getting his wife pregnant. That rather chubby girl whose father made cars. She’d got two children by a first husband, so it couldn’t have been her.’ She nodded, satisfied with her own conclusions. ‘Anyway, having Archie put me back on the straight and narrow. It was a bumpy road for a bit, even if it was straight, and God knows it was narrow. But it led me to Harry.’
‘So there was a happy ending.’
She smiled. ‘That’s so nice. To hear Harry described as my happy ending. These days everyone who says his name bursts into tears. But they’re wrong and you’re right. He was my happy ending. And now,’ she stood, stretching herself, ‘I really must go to bed or I’ll die.’
I was deep in a dream involving Neil Kinnock and Joan Crawford and a woman who used to work for my mother as a cleaner called Mrs Pointer. We were all trying to have a picnic on Beachy Head, but the tartan rug kept blowing up and spilling everything, and for some reason we couldn’t weight it down. Until we decided to lie on it to hold it steady, but how can that have worked and what did we do with the food? Which didn’t seem to matter much, as Joan was squeezing into my back and she slid an arm round my waist, letting her hand slide down as she did so, and… I woke up. Except I hadn’t woken up, because although it was fairly dark and I wasn’t at a picnic any more, I could still feel Joan’s body pressed into mine and a gentle hand enfolding my erect penis, and then a voice said ‘are you awake?’ very softly, and it didn’t sound at all like Joan’s. Not a bit. It wasn’t even American. I thought about this for a moment, because the voice was familiar and I felt I should know it but I didn’t recognise it until it spoke my name, and suddenly I knew beyond any doubt… it was Serena’s. It was Serena Belton’s voice and she was here beside me, with her hand on my penis. And then I still couldn’t believe I wasn’t dreaming, because this, after all, was my lifelong dream, and I began to wonder whether I was in a dream within a dream, when you think you’ve woken up but you haven’t. And I might have gone on thinking this for a bit longer if her lips had not nestled into the side of my cheek and I turned, and she was there.
In the flesh. In my arms. In my bed.
‘Is this really happening?’ I whispered, afraid that if I spoke too loudly the whole mirage would shimmer and disappear. It was very early dawn and the soft, dim, grey light had begun to creep in through the cracks in the curtains, lightening the room just enough for me to make her out, her shining, sacred head on the pillow next to mine.
‘It is if you want it to.’
I smiled. ‘Do you make a habit of stealing into men’s rooms at night?’
‘Only when they’re in love with me,’ she said.
I still could not accept this gift from heaven. ‘But why? I know you don’t love me. We had a long discussion about it this very afternoon.’ Of all things, I didn’t want to frighten her away, but I did want to understand.
‘I love your love,’ she said. ‘I don’t pretend to share it, and when we were young I doubt that I was much more than amused. But as the years went on and bad things happened, I always knew one man in the world at least loved me. And that was you. Seeing you again reminded me of it.’
‘Is that why you got me down here?’
‘You make me feel safe. When we met up in Yorkshire I felt glad to see you and that was why. I am safe in your love. I wish we saw more of you. I don’t know why we drifted out of each other’s lives.’
‘I thought it was because of what Damian said.’
She shook her head. ‘I knew it was nonsense. I knew it straight away but even more as time went on. He was in pain, that’s all.’
‘So was I by the end of that dinner.’ For the first time in my life, I could envisage a day when I would find it funny.
She stroked my hair, or what was left of it. ‘You should have stayed. You both should have stayed on afterwards and laughed.’
‘I couldn’t.’ She did not argue, and together we let the bitter memory go and returned to the glorious present. Suddenly I felt the freedom to touch her surge through me, like a child who finally lets himself believe that it really is Christmas morning. I reached up and traced the outline of her lips with my finger.
She kissed it gently as I did so. ‘You may not know it, but you have seen me through some dark times and this is your reward.’ As she spoke she moved closer and brought her mouth to mine, and we began, as the phrase has it, to make love. And while many times in my life those words have not been an accurate description of the activity they refer to, on that occasion they were as true as the Gospel. What we were making in that bed on that blessed morn was love. Pure love. Nor was there the slightest diminution of passion because the woman in my arms was a matron in her fifties rather than the lissom girl I had hungered for so many years before. She was my Serena at last. I held her in my arms and, for this one time perhaps, I was hers. I had finally arrived at my yearned-for destination. And although I was so aroused by her presence that I thought I would explode at one more touch, still, when I entered her, the sensation that filled me with a hot glow like molten lava was not just sexual excitement but total happiness. It sounds sentimental, which I am not as a rule, but that moment of being inside Serena, of feeling myself held by her body, for the first and presumably the only time in my life, after waiting for forty years, was the single happiest moment I have ever known, the climax, the very peak of my existence, nor do I expect to equal it before the grave claims me.
I do not seek recognition as a skilful lover. I assume I am no better and no worse than most men, but if ever I knew what I was doing that was the day. I dare say I should have felt guilty, but I didn’t. Her husband had the gift of her whole, adult life and he would never know the value of it. I did, and I felt that I deserved my hour without enraging too many of the gods. I am glad and relieved to relate that my tired, fat, flabby body rose to the challenge of the chance of paradise and never have I been so entirely engrossed in the present to the exclusion of all else. For those minutes I had no future and no past, only her. We made love three times before she slipped away, and when I stared at the gathered silk canopy above my head I knew I was a different man from the one who had lain down to sleep. I had made love to a woman I was absolutely and entirely in love with. The woman who held my heart had opened her body to the rest of me. There is no greater joy allowed us. Not on earth. And, in echo of Candida, I knew, because of that single episode, because of this one hour in a life of many years, because I had known real, unconditional bliss I could never again be a sad man. I thought it then, I think it now, and I am grateful. If Damian’s search led me to this, then I was paid in full and far in excess of any mortal man’s deserts.