Past Imperfect

NINE

It was the day after we returned from Yorkshire that I received another call from Damian. I say ‘from Damian’ but in fact Bassett’s modest, unassuming voice greeted me down the receiver. ‘Mr Baxter was wondering…’ He paused nervously and I began to wonder what Damian could be wondering that would give me such offence, but the answer, when it came, was mild, ‘if you might possibly be able to get down to see him at all soon.’

I felt I should confess my lack of progress straight away, not that it was very likely I was concealing a major find. ‘I haven’t much to report yet, I’m afraid,’ I said.

But Bassett did not seem to be expecting anything different. ‘Mr Baxter knows that, Sir. He assumed that he would have heard from you before now if there was anything to hear. But he would like to catch up with you all the same.’

Despite Bassett’s dulcet tones, there was an absolute expectation of my agreeing to this suggestion that triggered an alarm bell in my vitals. I had the uncomfortable feeling that I had somehow put myself in Damian’s power by agreeing to his request, that, in short, far from doing him a favour I had in fact been bought. I was not being paid, of course, but against my better judgement I had accepted the insulting credit card and in a way it made me an employee, which I should have spotted at the outset. I had broken my own rule, viz. that if one is bought, let it be for a high price. This is why no one should ever accept a charity lecture or brief local appearance where a fee is involved, at least in England. The sum is invariably tiny, but the organisers will most definitely feel, once they have pressed a few coins into your hand, that they own you body and soul. If you must do these things, and sometimes one must, then please do them for nothing. Do them out of the goodness of your heart. The money will make no difference to your life, but you will never have to endure the sense of being a purchased hireling, since you retain the whip hand of your generosity. Better yet, donate the fee you might have had to their cause, or to something equally worthy, and add a halo to your head for good measure. But in this instance somehow, by sleight of hand, Damian had tricked me and retained the moral high ground. I was no longer doing a good turn, I was carrying out a commission. It is quite a different matter.

Eventually the plan was settled. I had rather a heavy week coming up, so the decision was made that I would return to Surrey after lunch on the following Sunday. Accordingly, I took the train and was met once more at the station by the flawlessly uniformed chauffeur, but as we arrived at Planet Damian it came as a surprise to see what looked like a village fête going on in the gardens. The cars were parked in a field further down the road, and the booths and general activity were apparently cordoned off from the upper lawn, so the event did not really impinge on the actual house, but even so it was not very compatible with my cherished image of Mr Baxter, being altogether too philanthropic for his tastes. However, in answer to my question as I got out of the car, Bassett confirmed the situation. ‘Yes. It’s held over two days in the summer, Sir. It’s in aid of the local Catholic church, St Teresa’s. In Guildford.’

‘Is Mr Baxter a Catholic?’ The thought had never occurred to me. Not that I mind Catholics. It was just strange to think of Damian subscribing to any religion.

‘I believe so, Sir.’

‘And does he do this every year?’

‘He does, Sir. Since he first came here.’ I attempted to conceal my cynical amazement as I was shown directly to the library. When I walked into the room I realised at once why I had been sent for. Damian was dying. He had of course been dying before, when I was last there on the visit that started it all, but one may be dying without having death written all over one’s face. This time it was not so much that he had a fatal illness. Rather, at first appearance, he looked as if he were already dead.

He lay back, stretched out, on his daybed, eyes shut. Were it not for the faintest movement of his emaciated chest I would have assumed I had come too late. I suppose I must have appeared shocked, as just at this moment he opened his eyes and let out a rasping, little laugh at my expression. ‘Cheer up,’ he snorted. ‘I’m not quite as bad as I look.’

‘That’s a relief,’ I said. ‘Since you couldn’t look worse.’

Naturally this bucked him up. He rang the bell by his chair and when the ever vigilant Bassett put his head round the door suggested, in that diffident way of his, that we might have some tea. ‘Are you staying the night?’ he asked when Bassett had gone off on his commission.

‘I don’t think so. I was planning to continue the search tomorrow, and I don’t believe I should put it off.’

‘No. For pity’s sake don’t put it off, whatever you do.’ But he raised his eyebrows to make this reference to his coming demise, into a sort of joke. ‘So, how have you been getting on?’

I told him about Lucy and Dagmar. ‘They seem very fond of you.’

‘Don’t sound so surprised.’

Of course, that was the point. I was surprised. But I didn’t feel I could word this acceptably so I didn’t try. Instead, I repeated their separate messages of goodwill and felt glad I had delivered them faithfully. ‘I don’t think I was aware how well you knew them.’

‘You weren’t aware of a lot of things about me.’ He waited, perhaps for me to contradict, but I was silent. ‘Poor little Dagmar.’ He gave a semi-comic sigh, inviting me to join in his contemplation of her hopelessness, but after my recent visit I would have felt disloyal so I resisted. He continued, undeterred. ‘She should probably have been born in 1850, been married by proxy to some German grand duke, and just lived out her life observing the rituals. She would have done it very well and no doubt been much loved by all those loyal subjects who would never get near enough to find out how boring she was.’

‘She’s less boring now,’ I said. ‘Less boring, less diffident and less happy.’

He nodded, absorbing my report. ‘I was surprised when she married him. I thought she’d go for dull and respectable, and end up in a farmhouse in Devon, with a lot of huge, Royal portraits looking out of place and filling the half-timbered walls from floor to ceiling. I never expected her to go for nasty and successful, and end up back in a palace and miserable.’

‘Well, she’s got the portraits, anyway.’

‘Did she tell you she wanted to marry me?’ He must have caught my expression on hearing this, as he read it very accurately. ‘I’m past being ungallant. I’m nearly dead. At that point you truly can say what you like.’ Which, on reflection, I feel is probably true.

‘She did, actually.’

‘Really?’ I could see he was surprised.

‘She said she longed for it, but you weren’t interested. She said she had nothing to offer that you wanted or needed.’

‘That sounds rather peevish.’

‘Well, it wasn’t. She was very touching.’

He nodded at this, somehow acknowledging Dagmar’s generosity with a kinder tone than he had used before. ‘I never said she wasn’t a nice woman. I thought she was one of the nicest of all of you.’ He considered for a minute. ‘It was hard for ex-Royals.’

‘I agree.’

‘It was all right for the ones still on thrones,’ he added, thinking more on the topic. ‘After all the nonsense of the Sixties and Seventies was over, they were in an enviable position. But for the others it was hard.’

‘I suppose you didn’t want to take all that on. Not once you knew more about what it would entail.’

‘There were lots of things I didn’t want to take on, once I knew a bit more about them.’ He looked at me. ‘If it comes to that, I didn’t want to take on your whole world, once I knew more about it.’ He returned to the matter in hand. ‘But you’re quite sure she wasn’t my pen pal?’

‘I am.’

‘And it wasn’t Lucy either?’ I explained further about the hereditary condition of the daughter. Thoughtfully, he absorbed the detail that ruled him out. ‘So, how was she?’

‘All right.’ I tipped my head from side to side, in that gesture that is intended to signify so-so.

He was quite curious at this. ‘You don’t seem to be waxing lyrical. I always thought of you two as very thick.’

‘Her life is more her own fault than Dagmar’s.’ The truth is I did feel more tepid about the Rawnsley-Prices. The phrase about people ‘making their own bed’ is not very meaningful, since we all to some extent make our own beds and have to lie on them. We have no choice. Even so, it does have some meaning. Unlike many people, Lucy had enjoyed real options when young and she seemed, to me anyway, to have chosen none of the more creative or interesting ones.

He spoke my thought. ‘Lucy is another Sixties casualty.’

I felt it behoved me to stick up for my old friend a bit. ‘She’s not as bad as some. At least she’s not one of those sad sixty-year-old television executives, wandering around in a leather jacket and talking about the Arctic Monkeys.’

‘Maybe. But she assumed that her act as a madcap baronet’s daughter, embracing the new values, with a zany, whacky sense of fun would run and run. She was mistaken.’ He was right in this so I didn’t defend her further. ‘Besides, that particular routine is only convincing when the player is young. Zany and whacky at fifty-eight is just tragic.’

‘She has our best wishes, though.’

‘If you want. She’ll survive.’ He looked at me as I stared out of the window on to the gathering below.

‘Your fête is very well attended, I must say.’

‘I can see you’re taken aback to find me doing something for charity.’

‘I am a bit.’

‘You’re right. I am not very nice. Not really.’ He spoke quite sharply, unwilling to lie, even by being silent. ‘But I do approve of these people. I admire their ordinariness. When I was young I couldn’t deal with anyone who lacked ambition. I couldn’t see the point of a life that just accepted and had no wish to change. I was at ease with people who wanted to be millionaires and cabinet ministers and movie stars. I sympathised with any vaulting goal, no matter how ludicrous. But those with no desire beyond a decent life, a nice house, a pleasant holiday were quite alien to me. They made me uncomfortable.’

‘But not now.’

He nodded, endorsing my comment. ‘Now, I see the ability simply to embrace life and live it as noble. Not always to drive yourself like an ox through a ploughed field, which is what I used to admire. I suppose, hundreds of years ago, it was the same when people entered convents and monasteries to give their lives to God. I feel these men and women, in just getting on with it, are also in their way giving their lives to God. Even though I don’t believe in him.’ He stopped to enjoy my amazement. ‘I bet you never thought I’d say that.’

I agreed without hesitation. ‘Or anything remotely like it.’ He laughed and I continued, ‘Presumably, this is all reflected in the benefiting Saint, young, innocent and surrounded with pastel-shaded flowers.’

‘No. That’s the other Saint Teresa. Our one is Teresa of Avila. She spent most of her life empathising with Christ’s suffering and having visions of everyone drenched in blood. Then she started a new order and was locked up by the Pope, but she fought like a tigress and won through in the end.’

‘You should have told me that straight away. I would have understood her appeal at once.’

This time he laughed out loud and we had to wait for his fit of coughing to subside. By then his mirth had been replaced by something gentler. ‘I want you to understand that I have changed. It’s important to me.’ He was watching my face all the time for the effect of his words, which was quite disconcerting. ‘At least, one says that. But one never knows if it is really change that one is experiencing, or simply qualities always present finally making their way to the surface. I do think I’m kinder than I was.’

‘That wouldn’t be difficult.’

‘And less angry.’ His words chimed with the dining room conversation in Yorkshire, and I must have somehow acknowledged this in my reception of his comments.

Which somehow he picked up. ‘What?’

‘Only that I ran into Serena Gresham, or Serena Belton as she is now, last weekend, and she said something similar. That you were very angry when she knew you, and that angry people tend either to explode or to achieve great things.’

‘Or both.’ We were interrupted by the arrival of a tray of tea, all laid out like a prop in a Hollywood film, with thin, cucumber sandwiches and a little silver dish of sliced lemon. But I could tell it was all for me. Damian was past eating or drinking anything for pleasure. When Bassett had gone he spoke again. ‘You have been combing through the attics. How is she?’

‘Pretty well. Andrew as awful as ever.’

‘Was he there?’ I nodded with a grimace, which Damian echoed. ‘I always used to wonder how he would keep up through a family dinner in that house. All of them sparking away like firecrackers and Andrew sitting there like a lump of mud.’

‘I think he keeps up by being unaware that he is not keeping up.’

‘And her ladyship?’

‘More or less unchanged. I’m sad to say jolly old Lord C. has been replaced by a carving, stolen from a tomb in the Capuchin Church in Vienna, but she’s much the same as she was.’ I told him about Lady Claremont’s joke at my expense. It was a risky admission, given what came after my love had been revealed all those years ago, but I was in too deep by now to be careful.

He smiled. ‘You should have married her.’

‘Don’t let’s go down that route.’ With all that had happened I was no longer surprised that my rage should be as near the surface as it was.

If I expected him to be chastened I was disappointed. ‘I just meant that I bet Lady Claremont would have been better off with you than Andrew.’ As usual, he made no reference to his own part in the whole business.

‘Or you. Or anyone.’

‘No. Not me,’ he said flatly.

I couldn’t break free of the subject quite yet. Once reopened, the wound felt as if it were freshly cut. ‘Why did she marry him? What was she? Nineteen? And she wasn’t even pregnant. The daughter came along ten months later and was the spitting image of Andrew, so there was nothing untoward. I just don’t get it.’

He nodded. ‘It was a different world then. We did things differently.’

‘How involved were you? With Serena?’ As I spoke, each word was like a lash, leaving a red stripe on my back.

He chuckled. ‘What a wonderfully quaint expression. You sound like Woman’s Hour thirty years ago. In what way “involved”?’

‘You know in what way.’

He was silent for a moment. Then he shrugged. ‘I was mad about her.’

Had I known this or not? It was so hard to decide, after everything that had happened. To hear him say it was still a kind of shock. Rather like the death of a great friend after a long terminal illness. I drank deeper of the poison. ‘Who broke it off?’

I could see I was beginning to annoy him. Once again, we had used up our false friendliness and were getting back to our true feelings for one another. ‘I didn’t want to spend my life being patronised.’ I could see he was back there for a moment, in the place that I had never left. ‘I remember once,’ he said after a moment, ‘when I went to Gresham-’

‘You used to go to Gresham?’ I couldn’t believe it. Where was I all this time? Sleeping in a box in the cellar? Why had I known none of this?

‘You know I did. For the dance.’ He was right. I did know it. ‘She was giving me a lift. So I got myself to their flat. Where was it? Somewhere in Belgravia?’

‘Chester Square. And it was a house, not a flat.’

He looked at me, understanding fully the significance of my exact recollection of the detail. ‘Anyway, we’d loaded up the cases and then, as we set off, Serena said-’ he paused, with a deep sigh, back in that smart little red two-seater that I once knew so well. ‘She said, “Now this is going to have to be very carefully stage-managed” and she started to list what I was to do when I got there, how I was to behave, what I should and should not say to her mother when she greeted me, how I should manage her father’s questions, what I should mention to her brother and her sisters. On and on she went, and as I listened I thought this isn’t for me. I don’t want to go somewhere where I’m a liability, where things have to be monitored so my hosts don’t regret asking me, where I need to take a course before I can get out of the car, where I’m not a welcome member of the party.’ He stopped, out of breath, and waited until he had caught up with himself.

‘I can see that,’ I said. Which I could.

He looked at me as if he suspected me of triumphing in his confession. ‘I didn’t face it at the time but, if I’m honest, I think that was when I knew it wouldn’t work. Not in the long term.’

‘Did you say anything to her?’

The question made him slightly uncomfortable. ‘Not then.’ He had recovered. ‘Later.’

‘But it was the end from that moment?’ What did I want from him?

‘I don’t know. I can’t remember. The point is I realised that if I ever did marry, I wanted it to be into a family that would hang bunting off the balconies, send up fireworks, take out ads in The Times, not roll their eyes in unforgiving silence at my unsuitability. You saw what that guy who married the youngest sister had to go through. He was an unperson by the time they’d finished with him.’

‘Did Suzanne’s family put out the flags?’ This sounds rather unkind and I suppose it was, but I was so filled with jealousy that I felt I could have killed him. I’d say he got off pretty lightly.

His smile became rather wry. ‘The trouble was you lot had spoiled me. I didn’t like you or your world, and I didn’t want what you had, but when I tried to go back to my old crowd I’d lost the taste for their tastes. I had become like mad old Lady Belton, too snobbish, too aware of unimportant differences and needing to be stage-managed, myself.’

‘So we repelled you from our world and spoiled you for your own.’

‘In a nutshell.’

‘Serena must have got married almost straight away? When you and she were finished.’

‘Not long afterwards.’ He thought about this. ‘I hope she’s happy.’

I sipped my tea in a vague, and vain, attempt to soothe my troubled spirits. ‘Not very, I would guess. But with her kind it’s hard to tell.’

Once more he was watching me, with all the care of an anthropologist making a study of a rare and unpredictable beast. ‘Are you enjoying it at all? This Proustian return? It’s your past as much as mine.’

‘Not much.’

‘What does your…’ He hesitated. ‘I hate the word “partner.” What does she make of it all?’

‘Bridget? I don’t think she’s interested. It’s not her scene.’ This last was true, but the statement before it wasn’t completely. Still, I couldn’t be bothered to get into all that. ‘It doesn’t matter either way,’ I continued. ‘We’ve broken up.’

‘Oh dear. I hope it’s coincidental.’

‘Not completely. But it was coming anyway.’

He nodded, insufficiently curious to pursue it. ‘So, who’s next?’

‘Candida Finch or Joanna Langley. Joanna, probably.’

‘Why?’

‘I always had rather a crush on her.’

He smiled at my revelation. ‘Obviously, something we shared.’

‘Do you remember the famous Ascot appearance?’

‘How could anyone forget it?’

‘Were you with her then?’ I asked breezily. ‘I know you weren’t in her party when you got there. Didn’t you come with the Greshams?’ Another crunch, hard down on that loose and aching tooth.

He frowned, concentrating. ‘Technically. But I don’t think I was “with” either of them at that stage. That all came later.’

I winced. ‘I used to think you and Joanna made rather a good pair.’

He nodded. ‘Because we were both common and on the make? And I wouldn’t get in your way?’

‘Because you were both modern and in touch with reality, which is more than you could say for most of us. The big learning curve we were all facing wasn’t going to be necessary for you two.’

‘That’s generous.’ He acknowledged my courtesy with a polite nod from the neck. ‘But we weren’t as synchronised as we must have looked from the outside. I was very ambitious, remember.’

‘I certainly do.’

My tone was perhaps more revealing than I had intended and it made him flick his eyes up at me. ‘And in those early months of the whole thing I still hadn’t decided what I did, or didn’t, want from all of you. Joanna wanted nothing. Except to escape from her mother and hide. She may not have known it, at least not consciously, not then. But it was in her and of course she found out the truth before very long.’

‘As we all know.’

Damian laughed. ‘As we all know.’

‘And when she did, it was clear you weren’t going in the same direction.’

He nodded in acceptance of this, although I could see, each time I interrupted, that it troubled him not to set his own pace. Actually, I fully understand how annoying this can be, those tiresome, unfunny men at dinners who heckle a speaker, destroying the jokes, but not replacing them with anything amusing of their own. Even so, I wasn’t prepared to listen to Damian’s cleaned-up and sanitised account of these events, without the odd comment. He continued, ‘When you do see her and you’ve finished your snooping, I’m interested to learn what she feels about all that time now. I look forward to hearing when you’ve tracked her down.’

This was the question that was troubling me. Of all the women on the list she was the one with the least information. ‘You haven’t given me a lot to go on. To find her.’

Damian accepted this. ‘Her name doesn’t bring up much on the Internet. The Ascot story, of course, and some other early stuff, but nothing after the divorce.’

‘Divorce?’

‘In 1983.’ I must have looked solemn for a moment. He shook his head, clucking his tongue as he did so. ‘Please don’t let’s pretend it’s a shock. The wonder is that they got fourteen years out of it.’

‘I suppose so. What was the husband called again? I forget.’

‘Kieran de Yong. You’ll find there’s plenty about him.’

‘Kieran de Yong.’ I hadn’t thought of that name in so long, but it still had the power to make me smile.

Ditto Damian. ‘I used to get a glimpse of him at the odd city feste, but he always studiously ignored me. And I haven’t seen anything of Joanna, in print or person, since they split.’ He spoke musingly. ‘What do you think his real name was?’

‘Not Kieran de Yong.’

He laughed. ‘It might be Kieran. But I doubt it was de Yong.’

Now I too was trying to remember those headlines and that curious young man. ‘What was he? A hairdresser? A modelling agent? A dress designer? Something that chimed with the zeitgeist of the day.’

‘I think you’ll be surprised. Most people get less from the future than they expected but some people get more. We’ve got an address for him. They should have given it to you.’

I nodded. ‘If they’ve split up, will he know where to find her?’

‘Of course he will. They’ve got a son.’ He paused. ‘Or I have. Anyway, even if he doesn’t he may provide a lead. In any case I should start with him because we haven’t come up with an alternative.’

I was leaving when I had to ask one last question. ‘Are you really a Catholic?’

He laughed. I suppose the wording was rather funny. ‘I’m not sure what you mean. I was born a Catholic. Didn’t you know?’

I shook my head. ‘So you “lapsed”?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

His answer interested me. ‘Why “afraid”? Would you like to believe?’

Damian glanced at me patronisingly, as if I were a child. ‘Of course I would,’ he said. ‘I’m dying.’

The car was waiting patiently outside, but I knew there was a train every twenty minutes and so, with the immaculate chauffeur’s permission, I allowed myself a little wander among the stalls of the fête below. I thought about Damian’s unexpected words as I looked at these tables of old, unreadable books, at the piles of lamps from all the worst periods, at the cakes and jams, painstakingly made and all soon doubtless to be outlawed by the Health and Safety Stasi, at the dolls without their voice boxes and the jigsaws ‘missing one piece,’ and I, too, felt a kind of comfort and balm in the decency they represented. Naturally, it was very old-fashioned, and I am sure that if a New Labour minister could be offended by the Last Night of the Proms, she would be rendered suicidal by the sight of this comic, uniquely English event, but there was goodness here. These people had worked hard at what I would once have judged as such a little thing, yet their efforts were not wasted on me; in fact, they almost made me cry.

It is hard to be certain from this distance, but I think I’m right in saying that Ascot came after Queen Charlotte’s Ball. I had anyway, as I have said, met Joanna Langley several times before the race meeting, but it was on that day that I suppose we became friends, which even now I like to think we were. It was then that I understood she was a creature of her own era, that she was not, like the rest of us, engaged in some kind of action replay of our parents’ youth.

Ascot as a fashionable event is almost finished now. No doubt sensibly, Her Majesty’s Representative has decided the meeting would better earn its keep as a day for racing enthusiasts and corporate entertaining. To this end the Household Stand (their sole remaining perk, poor dears, in exchange for all that unpaid smiling and standing) and various other, arcane sanctums were eliminated from the wonderful, new grandstand, and the famous Royal Enclosure is no longer workable in the altered layout. Once the Court felt unwelcome, many of its members found other things to do and after this retreat it followed as the night the day that first the smart set and next the social aspirants, those who do not live and breathe horses anyway, would start to drop away. Soon, most of them will abandon it, I would guess forever, since once British toffs are given permission to avoid a social obligation it is hard to make them take it up again. Some will say it was high time and the racing crowd will be glad that horses have once again become the business of the day. But whether or not we would agree with this now, in the 1960s we enjoyed it like billy-o.

For some reason, that year I had gone with the family of a girl called Minna Bunting. Her father held some position at Buckingham Palace which I cannot now recall, Keeper of the Privy Purse maybe, or at any rate one of those ancient-sounding titles that brought, among other privileges, a place in the Ascot car park reserved for the use of members of the Royal Household. This was, and is, located across the road from the main entrance to the course and has always been considered very smart, despite consisting of a large but unremarkable ashphalt yard, overlooked by the unfragrant main stables and boasting a single loo more properly reserved for the grooms. A sort of disintegrating Dutch barn provided a bit of shelter on one side and a couple of abandoned pony stalls offered some shade on the other. Otherwise it was lines of cars. But the whole arrangement was supervised every year by the nicest group of men you could hope to encounter, which always gave the place rather a lift, and I do know it was considered quite a feather in my cap to be having my picnic lunch there, even if there were moments when the aroma made swallowing hard.

I think Minna and I were fairly keen on each other, in a moderate way, for a brief while back then. I know we went out to dinner a few times and I could not now tell you why this ended. I am often struck by how hard it is to unravel your own motives when you look back on certain incidents or relationships in the dim and distant past. Why this girl failed but that one broke your heart. Why this man made you smile and that one made your spirits sink. They all seem to have been quite nice, friends and enemies and lovers alike, young and pleasant and, to be honest, all much of a muchness from the vantage point of hindsight. What was it about them as individuals that intrigued or bored me forty years ago?

We had finished our lunch and it was time to make our way over the road and on to the course, so we strolled together down the high, laurel-lined path to the entrance. The police were managing the traffic, as they did even then in those comparatively traffic-free days and we were obliged to pause. ‘What on earth is going on?’ said Minna.

She was right. On the other side of the road, by the main entrance, the gathering of what later came to be called Paparazzi, was going mad. As a rule there were far fewer of them then, not much more than a handful from the fashion magazines and the odd red top, but the public’s taste for what celebrities were wearing was easily assuaged in 1968. On this day, however, you would have thought there was an item of international news being played out before us all. We crossed to the other pavement, passed through the gates and walked into the little courtyard where the disorganised could buy their badges on the day itself, and moved on to the gate into the Royal Enclosure. Something happening at the barrier was what was apparently fascinating the photographers most. Some were resorting to that trick, familiar now but novel in those days, of just holding their cameras above their heads and snapping away blindly, on the off chance that something worth printing might come out.

Armed with our badged lapels and a sense of entitlement, we pushed through the crowd and there was the cause of the riot. Joanna Langley, in an exquisite trouser suit of white lace, a pale hat trimmed with more lace and white flowers setting off her gleaming curls, white gloves on her hands, white bag by her side, was attempting to reason with the bluff ex-soldier in a bowler who sat guard. ‘Sorry, Miss,’ he said, without malice but without hesitation either, ‘no trousers is the rule. And I can’t change it. Even if I wanted to. Skirts only. That’s what it says.’

‘But this is almost a skirt,’ replied Joanna.

‘ “Almost” isn’t good enough, I’m afraid, Miss. Now if you’d like to stand aside.’ He beckoned to us and we started forward.

‘Hello,’ I smiled at Joanna, as we drew near. I may not have known her well by that stage, but all our previous encounters had been friendly ones. ‘You seem to be making news, today.’

She laughed. ‘It’s my mother’s idea. She’s put me up to it. I thought she was wrong, and they were bound to let me in. But it seems not.’

‘Come on.’ Minna pulled at my arm, anxious to dissociate herself from the media throng. As with all these people, then or now, this is not an affectation. They really hate it.

But I was too intrigued. I couldn’t understand what Joanna was saying. If her mother was the one who thought she would be refused entry, how could she have put her up to it? ‘Why did your mother want you to be stopped? Is she here?’

Joanna nodded towards a small group beyond the railings. I recognised the anxious, little woman from Queen Charlotte’s Ball. She was wearing a tailored, fuchsia suit with a socking great brooch on her bosom. She seemed to be quivering with excitement watching her daughter, nudging her companions, sucking at her lower lip, but oddly she made no attempt to come nearer. ‘What’s she waiting for?’ I asked.

Joanna sighed. ‘What they’re all waiting for. This.’ Before my astonished gaze, she reached up under the tunic of her trouser suit and unfastened the waistband of her trousers. With a graceful movement she extracted first one long, shapely, stockinged leg and then the other, until she was standing there in a white micro-miniskirt, with the trousers making a pool of lace on the ground. Predictably, the frenzy of the photographers knew no bounds. They could have been witnessing the last appearance of Marilyn Monroe, the discovery of Hitler’s child, the Second Coming, so excited were they by this coup de thèâtre. ‘I suppose I can come in now,’ she said softly to the astonished, bowlerhatted gateman, who could not pretend to be uninterested.

‘I suppose you can,’ he said and nodded her through.

I was within earshot when Joanna was reunited with her family. ‘Well, that was very silly,’ she said as she rejoined them.

‘Just wait. It’ll be all over the evening papers tonight, never mind tomorrow morning.’ Her mother spoke in short, sharp, chirrupy bursts, like a hungry bird in a hedgerow.

‘I think it was a bloody embarrassment,’ said a large man in a thick northern accent.

‘That’s because you don’t know anything.’ Mrs Langley always treated the man I came to know as her husband and Joanna’s father with an odd and quite unusual mixture of deference and contempt. She needed to keep him in his place, but she also needed to keep him.

‘I quite agree. Now, come and buy me some champagne.’ Joanna slipped her arm through her father’s. She always loved him best and she made no secret of it, but it somehow never empowered either of them to resist her mother’s demands. It was an odd, uncomfortable set-up.

We watched them go. ‘Do you want a drink?’ I wondered.

Minna shook her head. ‘Not yet. Not with them.’

It may have been because she heard these words, even if I hope not, but Joanna turned back once more and called, ‘Come up to the box for some tea. Number five three one. Come about four and watch the next race.’ I waved by way of answer and they were gone.

‘We’re meeting my father in White’s at four,’ said Minna.

‘I’m sure we can do both if we want to.’ We drifted up the steps into that long, faintly lavatorial tunnel at the base of the grandstand, built at such an unfortunate part of the Sixties and yet much missed now that it has been swept away despite its replacement being infinitely superior, and we set off on our way through to the back of the building and the Enclosure lawns. It was at precisely that moment I saw Damian loitering in the arch, looking at his race card, with his left arm casually draped round the waist of the girl standing next to him. He was dressed correctly, for my crowd, in a black morning coat and if his costume stood out it was only because it looked as if it had been made for him, not, as with most of us, like a misfit dragged from an upstairs wardrobe, from clothes discarded by forgotten uncles, which our mothers told us, without irony, would be perfectly all right once the sleeves were let down. I was amused to see that his silk hat was old and black, and wondered for a moment where he’d found it. In the great days of racing before the war, there were all sorts of rules about black and grey coats, and black and grey hats, being worn before the Derby or after the Oaks, or some such thing, but by the time I had begun to put in an appearance the matter had been simplified: If you were a toff you wore a black coat and a black hat, and if you were not you wore grey. The only real qualification to this that happened in my time was that after the early Eighties, again if you were posh or trying to be, you didn’t take a hat to a wedding at all.

Actually, unlike many modern, sartorial adjustments, this was an improvement, as between the church and the reception there was hardly a moment to wear it and one always ending up leaving it in a pile behind a curtain, where it was liable to be taken in error, leaving you with an even worse one. The hat did, however, remain compulsory for race meetings and here there was a complication, because there came a point when they stopped making proper silk hats, I imagine for some politically correct, ecological reason, so the struggle was on to get hold of one before they either vanished completely or soared into the thousands to buy. As a result, you could tell the smart people as half the men were wearing hats that had clearly not been either made or bought for them, and were instead relics of dead fathers or grandfathers, or discards from uncles or cousins of their mothers, slightly bashed, slightly rubbed and either too big or too small. My own, courtesy of my dear old dad, balanced on the top of my head like a wobbly 1950s cocktail hat, but I made do.

‘Goodness,’ I said by way of greeting. ‘Wherever I go, there you are.’

‘Then you must go to all the right places.’ He laughed, as his companion turned at the sound of my voice. It was Serena.

There are few markers of small-mindedness so clear as when people resent their friends becoming friendly with each other. But I am sorry to say that you see it often, a slight biting of the lip when they hear that this couple has met up with that couple and, despite their making the original introduction, they have not been invited. ‘We’re just so grateful to you for giving us the Coopers,’ say the happy ones, and they are greeted with a cold smile and a murmured acknowledgement, but nothing more than this. Of course, some people pay no attention to the new amity that has been born over their own dinner table, others have the largeness of spirit to be pleased that their friends like each other, but there is a depressingly sizeable group that can never get over the feeling they have somehow been excluded, left out, ignored, that they are less loved because the love these men and women can give is going to each other and not, as it once did, to them. As the thinking world knows, this is an ignoble emotion, diminishing, sad, even pathetic, and should be avoided, certainly in public where it is as attractive as picking one’s nose. And yet…

If it is bad enough with friends, it is much worse with lovers, or rather with would-be but never-were lovers. To witness someone you have adored unsuccessfully from afar actually fall in love with another of your so-called friends, so that you must watch this warm, well-suited, reciprocal, relationship bloom, in such sharp contrast to the withered, one-sided, bitter thing you cherished in the darkness of your secret thoughts, to stand by and watch all this is very hard. Particularly as you know you demean yourself by giving so much as a tiny clue as to your true feelings. But you lie in the bath or wait in a queue at the post office, and your inner being is hot with anger, boiling with hatred and destruction, even towards those whom, at one and the same time, you love with all your heart. So it was, I blush to admit, with me and Serena, or rather, with me and Damian since he was the author of all my woes.

That arm, so casually laid across the back of her pink Christian Dior suit, his hand lightly resting on the curve where her hip swelled softly down from her waist, that arm was a grotesque, violating betrayal. I’d touched her arm in greeting as people do; I had taken her hand, even brushed her cheek with mine, but all these privileges were available to anyone she had met more than twice. I had never touched her in any way that might imply intimacy. I had touched her as a friendly human being, but never as a man. I found myself wondering what the texture of her skirt must feel like. Was the slight roughness of the weave in the cotton imprinting itself on the edge of his palm and tantalising his fingertips with the almost undetectable movement of her body beneath? Could he feel its warmth? In my mind I could feel it and yet, unlike Damian, I could not feel it.

‘Any ideas for the two thirty?’ said Damian and I woke up.

‘Don’t ask me,’ I said. ‘I only ever bet on names that remind me of something else entirely.’

‘Wildest Dreams,’ said Serena, speaking into my hidden longings. ‘Fletcher gave me a list and he was sure about Wildest Dreams. Then he says You’ll Be Lucky for the Gold Cup.’ Was there no horse running whose name did not encapsulate the hopelessness of my desires?

‘Who’s Fletcher?’ asked Damian.

‘Our groom at Gresham.’ It was as if that simple sentence, carrying as it did in the few words it was made of the absolute divide between her life and his, flung him away from her side.

‘Joanna Langley’s waving at us.’ He pulled his arm off Serena’s flank, and started to walk across the grass towards the group centred on Joanna’s miniskirted and lustrous form. I took his place, with Minna still loitering rather discontentedly on my other side.

‘Did you see that nonsense at the gate?’ Minna was squinting into the sun to get a clearer view of them.

‘No, but I heard about it.’ Serena smiled. ‘It sounded quite funny but I don’t really see the point.’

‘She’ll be all over the papers tomorrow,’ I said.

I must have sounded like a complete idiot. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘But what does she want from it? What does she get out of it?’

‘Fame?’

‘But fame for doing what? Taking off her trousers? It might make her famous for being famous but what’s the point of that?’ Serena was bewildered by the choice that Joanna had made at the gate that morning, and as far as I recall, Minna and I just nodded and agreed with her. Perhaps it was what we both thought, or if it wasn’t, it was what we all knew we were supposed to think.

The idea of being famous for being famous, a phrase we often used, was a risible and pejorative dismissal in those distant days, but the concept was, of course, a harbinger of our own time. The current fame mania is often mistakenly described as the Cult of Celebrity, but this at least is not new. There were always famous people and they were always interesting to the public. Nor, as again the argument goes today, were they all famous for doing wonderful things. There have always been well-known rakes and showgirls and criminals and worthless stowaways among the great, but as a rule they developed personalities that justified their stardom. What is genuinely new is the Cult of Non-Celebrity, the celebration as if they were famous of men and women who are perfectly ordinary. The oxymoron of the unknown celebrity really is a modern innovation. Maybe it was a sense of this coming fashion, this dawning interest in fame for fame’s sake that would inevitably open the gates of Valhalla wider, that prompted the likes of Mrs Langley to exploit its possibilities. But there was a confusion at the core of her planning and that was in her intended audience. She was playing to the wrong gallery. The upper classes have never been attracted by fame. At least, they may sometimes enjoy famous visitors to their galaxy, but they do not see it as an appropriate attribute among their own kind. Even now, they don’t need it to stand out in the crowd, and they do not, as a rule, see the point of it for any other reason. Maybe the modern heirs will occasionally employ these vulgar methods to promote their interests, but there still remains a moral obligation, even among this younger, savvier group, to pretend that publicity is invariably demeaning and worthless.

Joanna herself understood this fundamental truth, which her mother had not grasped. She saw that the more she became a darling of the press, the more she was invited on to Top of the Pops, or whatever it was in those days, the less welcome she would be in the world to which her mother was so wrong-headedly anxious for her to belong. I am afraid that poor, misguided Mrs Langley genuinely believed that her beautiful daughter was improving her chances of an eligible husband, and a place in Society, by these shenanigans when, in fact, she was diminishing them to the point of invisibility.

I learned this from a conversation I had with Joanna that same day, when I decided to take up her invitation and make my way to the Langleys’ box. This decision came after a slight altercation with Minna, and in the end she went off alone to meet her father for tea while I retreated to the door in the wall, guarded like all the Enclosure entrances by those charming chaps in their obligatory bowler hats. My disagreement with Minna cannot have been sinister as I had dinner with them all later that evening, but perhaps it contributed to the end of our mini-romance. I have never been very good at people who cannot step out of their own setting even for a moment, whatever that setting might be.

Once through the door, I was suddenly propelled into the middle of the other Ascot and in some ways flung forward into the future, into our present day. Toughs in shiny suits, or with no jacket at all, jostled past with their women gaily, if sometimes surprisingly, adorned as I pushed on towards the covered escalator that would take me up to the floor where the boxes could be found in this different and even uglier stand. Here and there, dotted about in the crowd, there were fellow Enclosure members battling their way to and fro, and there was some joshing, wolf whistles and the like, to mark the difference in our costumes. This rapids-running element of journeying from the Enclosure to the boxes would in fact continue until the end of fashionable Ascot, but it grew a little less friendly as the years went on. Various politicians of every hue saw class warfare as so important a weapon in manipulating public opinion that they could not resist inflaming it. Even today, we are constantly encouraged to believe in a capitalist economy, but to despise and revile those who profit from it. It is an odd philosophical position, to say the least, a dysfunctional theory that has contributed to a largely dysfunctional society, but as I say, in the 1960s it was only just starting. Breaking down class barriers was still seen as a happy thing then, so the jokes at one’s expense were, on the whole, good-natured.

The boxes at Ascot have always occupied a kind of limbo position when it comes to the whole event. There are boxes set aside for major trainers and owners, and of course I do not mean these. Their usefulness is logical and credible, but those people were always present at Ascot as part of the racing fraternity and never because of fashion. They will continue to be at the meetings, long after the beau monde has moved on. But for those who only went to Ascot for the fun and frolic, a day out with some horses in the background, the boxes were always faintly unconvincing. To start with it was not necessary to get an Enclosure badge to rent or visit one, and in the old days, when the authorities exerted some control over whom they admitted to the Enclosure, the boxes could become the haven of the socially not-quites, those divorced actresses and grinning, motor dealers who were snubbed by the Old Guard.

The second problem was that most of them were simply minute. You went through a door in a concrete gallery, to be admitted to an itsy-bitsy entrance hall, with a little kitchenette from a 1950s caravan on one side. This led into the space for dining and generally living it up, which was roughly the size of a hotel bathroom, and beyond was the balcony, where two people could just about stand side by side on two or three steps. All in all, the average box was about as capacious and gracious as a lift in Selfridges. But to the mighty ones who are socially insecure, a much larger group than many people realise, they offered a chance to enjoy the race meeting on their own terms, in a place which might be modest but where they were king, instead of spending the day detecting sneers and slights in the behaviour of the Enclosure crowd that surrounded them. I would guess this was the appeal for Joanna’s father, and that Alfred Langley was prepared to accompany his wife and daughter, but only on the condition that he could have a box to hide in for most of the day.

Mrs Langley darted up to me, her eyes flicking round the empty room behind my back, checking that nobody more important needed attention. ‘Joanna’s on the balcony,’ she said, ‘with some friends.’ Then, nervous that she had somehow given offence with this blameless statement, she continued, ‘She told us you were coming.’

‘I’m afraid Minna had to meet her father in White’s, but she sends her love.’

Mrs Langley nodded. ‘Sir Timothy Bunting,’ she muttered, as if I were unaware of the name of my host.

‘Yes,’ I said.

She nodded again. There was something shifty about her that her smooth hair and tailored suit and really rather nice diamond brooch could not mask. She was jumpy, like Peter Lorre waiting to have his collar felt in a black-and-white thriller about the mob. As I got to know her better I found this sense of frightened uncertainty never left her. She couldn’t relax, which I suspect was both part of what turned her daughter against her, but at the same time was the root of her power.

Joanna was leaning against the railing when I went out, attended by Lord George Tremayne and one or two other swains, all a little, but not very, drunk, and all holding empty or near-empty champagne flutes, that new glass that had only recently started to replace the gentle, bosom-shaped cup favoured in the previous decade. But then the Langleys were nothing if not up to the minute. That said, it was a lovely day and the sight of Joanna smiling up at me, her face framed with her own golden hair and the white brim of her lace hat, with the wide sweep of the lush green racetrack behind her, was very cheering.

‘I came,’ I said.

‘So you did.’ She walked up a step or two and kissed my cheek, then turned back to her companions. ‘Push off, will you?’ They protested, but she was quite definite. ‘Go inside. Get some more to drink and bring me one in a minute.’ She touched my sleeve. ‘I’ve got something to tell him and it’s private.’ Naturally, none of this would have been sayable if she had lived even remotely within the rules of the crowd she was running with, but not for the last time I appreciated that the advantage of not being held captive by the need to observe correct form is that you can often get things done far more efficiently. In other words, they left.

I have already written about her beauty and it is probably true that I place physical beauty too high on my list of desirable attributes, but, in this case, it really was spectacular. No matter how closely one looked, Joanna’s face was as near perfect as any I have ever seen not made of plastic, drawn on a page or enshrined on the silver screen. Smooth, evenly coloured skin, without a trace of a blemish; a mouth shaped with the soft curves of a petal, beneath widely placed deep-blue, almost purple, eyes, fringed with thick, long lashes; a statue’s nose; and masses of gleaming born-blonde curls framing her cheeks and cascading to her shoulders. She was, as the song says, lovely to look at. ‘What are you looking at?’ Her voice, with its faint tinge of Essex, caught at my reveries, repeated the phrase and returned me to the present.

‘At you,’ I said.

She smiled. ‘That’s nice.’ There was, in addition to everything else, something particularly charming in the contrast between her ethereal appearance and her absolute normality, her complete next-doorness which is hard to capture in words but was probably the core of the charm that delivered Charles II to Nell Gwynne, or enabled so many of the cockney Gaiety Girls to marry into the peerage in the 1890s. Her cheeriness was in some way the opposite of vanity, yet not self-consciously modest either. Just perfectly natural.

‘What is this private thing you have to say to me? I couldn’t be more fascinated.’

She blushed slightly, not an angry red, but with a soft, warm pink diffused evenly across her features, like someone caught unawares in the dawn light. ‘It’s not really private. That was just to make them shove off.’ I smiled. ‘But I was sorry you saw all that nonsense at the gate. I don’t want you to think badly of me.’ Again the direct simplicity of her appeal was both flattering and tremendously disarming.

‘I couldn’t think badly of you,’ I replied, which was no more than the truth. ‘And anyway, I am fairly sure the world will be reading about it tomorrow morning, so I will, if anything, feel rather bucked to have been an eyewitness.’

I’m afraid this had not made things better. ‘My mum thinks it all helps. To be in the news. To have everyone going on about me. She thinks it makes me…’ She hesitated, searching for the right word, ‘interesting.’ Whatever word she had chosen this was clearly a question and a request for help, even if it was not phrased as such.

I attempted to look encouraging and not judgemental. ‘To quote Oscar Wilde, the only one thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.’

She gave a perfunctory laugh, more as a polite recognition that I had said something supposedly funny than because she found it amusing. Then, after a moment, she said, ‘Yeah, I’ve heard that before, but you don’t believe it, do you? None of you do.’

The trouble was this was true, really, but I didn’t want to be a killjoy, certainly not to kill her joy. Still, she was asking my opinion so I strove to be as honest as I could be. ‘It depends entirely what you want to come out of it. What are you striving for? What is your goal?’

She thought for a moment. ‘That’s the point. I don’t know.’

‘Then why are you doing the Season? What did you hope to gain when you began?’

‘I don’t know that either.’ She spoke with all the hopelessness of a rabbit caught in a snare.

I understand that, theoretically, Joanna should have been freer than this. Her father was a self-made man, so she had not been brought up within the armed enclave, but in other ways her restrictions were even more severe. It was perhaps the last era when the aristocracy had the power to admit the new rich, or to refuse them entry. Later, when the posh way of life was back in fashion and the dream of joining it began again, the recent rich had far more muscle to push in whether the old world wanted them or not, but in the late Sixties the ex-Ruling Class still maintained considerable sway. I distinctly remember one friend of my mother’s threatening a foolish youth, who had made a mess of her flat, uninvited. ‘One more example of this kind of behaviour,’ hissed the exasperated matron, ‘and I will slam the door of every London drawing room in your face!’ It was a meaningful threat because, then, it was a real one. In 1968 she could still have delivered. By 1988 those same doors were swinging free. Of course, today they are off their hinges.

To employ a phrase not actually in use for twenty years after this, I decided to cut to the chase. ‘It is not complicated,’ I said. ‘If your mother and you are hoping for a grand marriage to come out of this year, you and she are going the wrong way about it. If you want to be famous and go on television or marry a film producer or a car manufacturer who is looking for a bit of glamour to invigorate his life, you’re probably doing exactly the right thing.’

She looked at me. ‘It’s silly, really.’ She sighed. ‘You’re right. My mum wants me to be Lady Snotty. That’s what she dreams of night and day. That’s why it’s so sad that she thinks all this stuff is helping when I know, much better than she does, that it isn’t.’

‘Then make her listen. With a little backtracking, I’m sure you can still manage what she’s after and it wouldn’t be so reprehensible. As Lady Snotty, as you put it, with your other very considerable advantages you could do a great deal of good if you were so minded.’ I know I sounded like a bogus prelate from Hymns on Sunday, but at the time I couldn’t quite see what else to say. I even think I believed I was telling the truth.

Joanna shook her head. ‘That isn’t me. I’m not saying I disapprove of it but it’s not me. Sitting on committees, cutting ribbons, hosting a bring-and-buy sale to get funds for the new X-ray machine at the local hospital. I mean-’ she broke off, clearly afraid she had offended me. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I think all that’s very good. But I just couldn’t do it.’

‘And your mother wants you to.’

She shook her head. ‘Actually, I don’t think she’s got that far. She just wants me to have a big, posh wedding, with lots of pictures in the Tatler. She hasn’t thought beyond that.’

‘Then why don’t you think beyond it for her? Maybe it isn’t charity work for you, or standard charity work. Maybe you could get involved with a special school, or local government. All sorts of causes will want you once you have a bit of social muscle. What I’m trying to say is that I’m sure it’s achievable.’ I had a mental image of the Tremayne brother up in the box above us, happy to marry her, without condition, to get the loot. ‘Maybe, if you think of the possibilities you might come round to the idea.’ What interests me now, thinking back to this fruitless, pompous and patronising advice, is that it didn’t occur to me to suggest that she pursue a career instead of this worthless and really rather immoral plan. Why not? There were working women then, and quite a lot of them. Perhaps it just didn’t seem a likely outcome for anyone in my gang, or were we so far out to sea that we had lost sight of land? Whatever the reason, in this, as in so many things, I would turn out to be entirely wrong.

‘You sound like Damian,’ she said, taking me by surprise.

‘Do I?’

‘Yeah. He’s always telling me to capitalise on my looks. To “go for it,” when I don’t know what I’m supposed to go for.’

‘I wasn’t aware that you knew him so well.’ Was I fated to be a grudging camp follower, staggering along in Damian’s trail?

‘Well, I do.’ She looked at me with a cool stare that told me everything. And as I returned her gaze I thought of Damian’s hand, earlier that very day, resting lightly on Serena Gresham’s pelvis, and I wondered what I had done wrong in an earlier life that I should be obliged to hear, in the span of a single afternoon, that Damian had wormed his way into the affections, if not the beds, of these women, both dream goddesses for me in their different ways; that, in short, my toy, my own invention, my action doll was apparently getting all the action. That months, or even weeks, after I had let him into the henhouse, this fox was ruling my roost. Joanna must have seen some of this in my troubled brow. ‘Do you like him?’ she asked.

I realised that this was a proper question and one that I had not addressed until now, and should have. But I chose to answer as if it were neither of these things. ‘I’m the one who introduced him to all of you.’

‘I know that, but you never sound now as if you like him.’

Was this the moment that I realised I didn’t? If so, I did not face it for quite a while after. ‘Of course I like him.’

‘Because I don’t think you’ve got much in common. He wants to get on, but he doesn’t want to fit in, but not like you and not in the way you mean. You think he’ll take advantage of the whole thing and keep in with these people, that he’ll end up marrying Lady Penelope La-dida and send his children to Eton, but you’re wrong. He can’t stand you all, really. He’s ready to break out and say goodbye to the lot of you.’ There was clearly something in the notion that excited her.

Was this news? I can’t pretend I was surprised. ‘Then perhaps you should break out together. You seem rather well suited.’

‘Don’t talk like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘All toffee-nosed and self-important. You sound like a berk.’ Naturally, this silenced me for the next few minutes, while she continued, ‘Anyway, Damian and I, we’re not well-suited, not deep down. I thought we might be for a bit, but we’re not.’

‘You both seem to me to be very up to the minute.’ For some reason I couldn’t stop sounding like the stupid-berk-plonker she’d described. To quote my mother against myself, I was just jealous.

But the comment made her more thoughtful than indignant. ‘He does want to be part of today’s world,’ she admitted, ‘like I do. But he wants to dominate it. He wants to bully it, to take over, to push people like you around in it and be the big, bad cheese.’

‘And you don’t? Not even as a great lady, dispensing warmth and wisdom from the house at the end of the drive?’

Again, she shook her head. ‘You keep going on about that, but it’s not me. And I don’t want to be on television either. Nor married to some big-business boss with a modern flat in Mayfair and a villa in the South of France.’ The world she described so accurately in that single phrase was, of course, one she knew well and presumably also despised, along with County Society, the peerage and Damian’s imaginative vision of himself as a City whizz-kid, which was impressively ahead of its time.

‘There must be something that you do want,’ I said.

Joanna laughed again, mirthlessly. ‘Nothing I’ll find pursuing this game.’ She thought for a while. ‘I don’t mean to be rude’ – always a precursor to rudeness of the most offensive sort – ‘but you lot are all completely divorced from what’s going on around you. Damian’s right about that. You’re just not part of the Sixties at all. The fashions. The music…’ She paused, shaking her head slowly, dizzy with wonder at our irrelevance.

I felt a little indignant. ‘We play the music.’

She sighed. ‘Yes, you play the music and you dance to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but you’re still in evening dress and you’re still in some ballroom or marquee, with hot breakfast being served from two o’clock onwards by a line of footmen. That’s not what they’re singing about. That’s not what’s happening.’

‘I don’t suppose it is.’

‘The world’s changing. And I want to change with it.’

‘Darling!’ I knew Damian’s voice well enough not to need to turn round.

‘Talk of the devil,’ said Joanna.

Which I completed: ‘And there he is.’

Damian came lazily down the steps towards us and enfolded her in a hug when he drew level. ‘Come and cheer us up. You’ve spent long enough with droopy-drawers. He’ll start to think he’s in with a chance and then there’ll be no controlling him.’ He winked at me, as if inviting me to share the joke, which had, of course, as we both knew been intended as an insult. Initially, at the start of the Season he had felt the need to defer to me a little, just to make sure that I was still on side, but the need for that was long gone. He was the master now.

‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll come. But only if you give me a certainty for the next race.’ She smiled and started back up the steps towards the door of the box where her fan club hovered.

Damian smiled back at her, his arm still round her waist. ‘There’s only one certainty for you. And that is me.’

And with a shared laugh they were inside and lost to view.

I have often thought since of my conversation with Joanna on that bright summer’s day in our privileged seats above the crowded racetrack. It was perhaps in some ways my closest encounter with the elephant trap of Sixties fantasy, that would swallow so many of my contemporaries in the following decade. Things were changing, it is true. The post-war depression had been shaken off and the economy was booming, and many old values were being rejected. But they would be back, most of them. Not perhaps white tie or taking houses in Frinton for the summer, but certainly those that governed ambition and rapacity and greed and the lust for power. There would be fifteen years or so of chaos, then most of the old rules would be resurrected. Until now, when there is a richer elite buying houses in Belgravia than at any time since the Edwardians. But these were not the changes that Joanna and her ilk expected.

They thought, they knew, a world was coming where money would be meaningless, where nationalism and wars and religion would vanish, where class and rank and every worthless distinction between people would drift away into the ether like untrapped steam, and love would be all. It was a belief, a philosophy, that coloured my generation so strongly that many still cannot find the strength to shake it off. It is easy to laugh at these infantile notions, mouthed with increasing desperation by ageing ministers and sagging singers as their pension age approaches. Indeed, I do laugh at them since these fools have apparently lived a whole life and learned nothing. But, even so, I don’t mind saying I was touched that day, listening to this lovely, well-intentioned, clever, nice, young woman, sitting in the sun and putting all her bets on Optimism.

Predictably, every paper ran a picture of Joanna Langley removing her white lace trousers to gain entry to Ascot the following day and I seem to remember that either the Mail or the Express printed a whole series of them, like a literal strip cartoon. And we all joked about it and most of us took her even less seriously than we had before and Mrs Langley’s aspirations were crushed still further underfoot. But of course it was soon immaterial. I never did find out whether Joanna tried to talk to her mother about her doubts. If so, it did not have much effect, as the invitation to her coming-out ball in the country, from ‘Mrs Alfred Langley’ arrived not long afterwards. It was printed on white card so stiff it might have been cut from seasoned oak, with lettering sufficiently embossed to stub a toe. I would guess most people accepted. With the ruthless reasoning of the English, we all expected that a lot of money would be spent on the evening’s pleasures and so it would be worth attending, whatever we thought of the daughter. I personally, of course, liked her and I freely confess I was much looking forward to it, and seen from now, when such entertainments are rarer and, to my old and jaded palate, seem pretty indistinguishable, I can only imagine what delights Mrs Langley had ordered for our delectation. I am certain it would have been a night to remember with treats galore.

However, as things turned out we opened the newspaper on a sunny day in early July, to read the banner headline ‘LOVE DASH HEIRESS!’ and the article below explained that Joanna, only child of ‘Travel King, Multi-Millionaire, Alfred Langley,’ had eloped with her dress designer, Kieran de Yong. The couple had not yet married, an added, salacious delight for the journalists of the day, which would hardly merit a mention these days, but they were ‘believed to be sharing Mr de Yong’s flat in Mayfair.’ After Joanna’s comment at the races I could not prevent a slightly wistful wince at the final detail.

Two days later another card arrived from Mrs Langley. On it was printed the sober but straightforward information: ‘The dance arranged for Miss Joanna Langley will not now take place.’