Past Imperfect

TEN

To my surprise, and contrary to my jokey and snobbish expectations, Kieran de Yong turned out to have been a busy boy since last we met. The printout filled me in on what he had been up to, during the intervening years and it was almost alarming. He had been twenty-eight when he ran off with ‘Joanna, daughter of Alfred Langley, of Badgers’ Wood, Godalming in Surrey,’ making him nine or ten years older than most of us, and the following year he married her. After which, presumably putting some Langley gold to work, he’d built up a chain of dress shops by the late 1970s called Clean Cut, which I thought quite clever, and there were various photographs of him at ‘red carpet’ events during this period, clutching Joanna and wearing clothes that were terrible, even by the standards of that terrible time. What kind of blindness struck my generation? What allowed people to leave the safety of their homes wearing white, leather jackets with cowboy studs and fringe, or pale-blue, glistening suits, with black shirts and silver kipper ties? Or Russian peasant shirts or butchered army uniforms? I imagine they must have thought they looked like Elvis or Marlon Brando, when in fact they resembled a children’s conjuror on speed.

But de Yong seemingly calmed down during the decades that followed. Later photographs, with assorted models and finally a striking second wife, showed him in clothes that went from first sleek and finally to good. He sold his chain for millions in the Eighties and turned his hand to property, the god of that era, with a huge stake in Docklands, which must have given him sleepless nights at one point before it proved the doubters wrong and came back sevenfold. Other buildings followed, a couple of famous, City landmarks, a resort in Spain, a new town in Cumbria. He had expanded into drug research and manufacture, and his company led the field in work on arthritis and some of the less bewitching forms of cancer, with profits channelled into education and addressing the problems of social mobility, or rather the lack of it, engendered by the fads of the academic establishment. I was impressed that this baby of the Sixties was sufficiently courageous to challenge a group still so completely enslaved by the Sixties message. In short, this was a brave, full life, and a terrifyingly worthy one. My only surprise was that I, and so presumably the general public, had heard so little of him.

I’d never known Kieran de Yong, really. The one occasion on which we met for any length of time was during that same Portuguese house party that still has a habit of revisiting my dreams, but even then we hardly spoke and after everyone was back at home, most of us never wanted to set eyes on any of the other guests ever again. At least I didn’t, so it was the worst possible start for a friendship. But at the time I had anyway dismissed him as common and uneducated, dull and faintly embarrassing, with his nightmarish outfits and his sad attempts to be cool. Joanna made things worse by being furiously protective, and her aggression injected the atmosphere with awkwardness whenever they appeared. In my defence, you will agree that it is hard to listen closely to a man with dyed hair, even more so when it’s dyed a strawberry blond. But now, staring at this impressive list, I felt thoroughly humbled. What had I done in my life that could even hold a candle to this account? What had my friends done, simply to be worthy of a mention in the same breath?

Of his private life there was little information. He had married Joanna in 1969, so in this case the disputed baby had been born firmly in wedlock and the impending birth had not been the cause of any questionable nuptials. The child was a boy, as I already knew, Malcolm Alfred, but there were no further details of him on the Wikipedia entry. The divorce had come in 1983 and, to be honest, I shared Damian’s amazement that it had taken so long. The striking second wife was one Jeanne LeGrange, wed in 1997, whose name suggested a well-travelled, international life and apart from that, nothing. No more mention of divorces, nor more wives, no more children. My main point of interest was that according to Damian’s account, Joanna had continued their affair well into her marriage. It seemed to confirm that she married de Yong to escape her mama and not because of an unconquerable love, which did not surprise me, since I had never thought anything else.

Damian’s list gave me a number for Kieran’s business which, when I first read it, I assumed would take me more or less directly to him, but now I understood the scale of what we were dealing with I wasn’t so sure. It seemed rather like telephoning Buckingham Palace and asking to speak to the Queen. But in the event I was put through to his office and eventually to his private secretary with very little fuss, and when I had reached her she was quite polite. I explained I was an old friend from many years before, and, employing a similar device to the one used with Dagmar, I explained that I wanted to come in and talk about a new charity I was involved with that I thought might interest him. She sighed, gently but audibly. I was probably the fiftieth applicant that day. ‘Mr de Yong’s charity work is handled by a different department, ’ she said. ‘Would you like me to put you through to them?’

I decided to push my luck, since I had no viable alternative, but my confidence in a productive result was waning. ‘Well, to be honest, I’d rather talk directly to Kieran, if he’s got a spare moment.’ I thought the slightly insolent use of his Christian name would make me sound more convincing, but I am not sure this was correct. She hesitated, then asked me to spell my surname once again, and I was put on hold and forced to listen to a rather bad recording of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. This time I wasn’t sure what I would do if he didn’t want to see me. And in truth, I couldn’t imagine why he would. If he had any memory of me at all it would only be the faintest reminder of a rather stuck-up, spotty youth who had snubbed him at every turn. That, and the dreadful evening when we last saw each other. Of course, one of the great pleasures of success, especially when many people have dismissed you and your chances, is to seek out those same ignorami and force them to retract their earlier opinions. To make them acknowledge, in their eyes if not with their tongues, that they were totally and completely wrong about you. That you, in short, have made them look like fools. I could only hope that the idea of my swallowing humble pie would be amusing.

Then, to my surprise, there was a click and Kieran was on the line. ‘Good heavens,’ he said. ‘To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?’ The words may have been trite, but it was easy to tell from their delivery that he had mellowed. His East London accent had softened but not in a pretentious way, and his tone was, given the facts, unexpectedly warm.

‘I’m surprised you remember me.’

‘Nonsense. I’ve followed your career with interest. I’ve even read some of your books.’

I smiled with relief that my task was once more rendered do-able. ‘Enough of this love talk,’ I said and it was his turn to laugh. But when he asked me what it was about I fumbled as, naturally, I hadn’t thought I would be talking so soon to the man in question and my story was not yet quite straight in my head.

Mercifully, he cut through my maunderings with an invitation. His lunches were taken for months to come, but he wondered if I might be free for dinner. ‘Or is it difficult for you to get away in the evenings?’

‘Not at all, I’m sad to say. What about you?’

‘I’m the same.’ So a dinner was indeed arranged, which, he suggested, might take place at the Savoy Grill since it was about to close for a couple of years of ‘renovation.’ This was unless I had an objection. Which I hadn’t. Like him, I felt that a famous restaurant of our joint youths that was about to vanish forever seemed like a good, even witty, place to revisit the past. We had a date.

The old Savoy has left us now, that illogically impressive mixture of Odèon and Belle Epoque, which has been such a beacon in my life from childhood and growing up, when I would be taken for tea by ancient aunts past debbing days, with balls and cocktail parties in the River Room, and through the intervening years, smiling and cheering at weddings and birthdays and every kind of private celebration, right up to the present, when I have served my time at all those festival lunches and award-giving dinners, with their predictable menus and back-slapping, manufactured gaiety. Not long after my dinner with Kieran the new owner closed its doors and auctioned off the contents, and it would be a long, long time before the revelation of the reconceived hotel. And even if the team has recognised the special place the Savoy has occupied in London hearts for over a century, since Richard D’Oyly Carte first dreamed his dream, even if they have tried to serve its history as honourably as they could, still the stamping ground of Nellie Melba and Diana Cooper, of Alfred Hitchcock and the Duchess of Argyll, of Marilyn Monroe and Paul McCartney, and all the rest of that glittering crew will have joined the palace of John of Gaunt that once stood on the site, and must henceforth trust to history books and memory.

I hadn’t visited the Grill for a while and when I got there, it was to find it had already been much altered from the fashionable rendezvous of my adolescence that lasted well into my adulthood. In the early Sixties, I used to go regularly with a disreputable cousin of my father’s who’d taken a shine to me, and who regarded the place as a sort of private club and would bring the most recent, luckless object of his fancy there for an orgy of oysters and dishonest vows. Naturally, he was a wonderfully dashing role model to an unattractive teenager with bad skin. On leaving the army in his forties, Cousin Patrick chose to live a short-term life, that is, to enjoy himself without putting down any roots or taking on any responsibilities. He was certainly very handsome and very charming, so this was more achievable than it might have been for some. My own mother adored him despite my father’s disapproval, but in the end I suppose the latter’s strictures about reaping what you sew were proved correct since our cousin’s fun-filled years of avoiding commitment left him to face a stroke and early death alone, proving once again, as if we needed any more proof, that we generally end up with lives that are the product of our choices.

Even so, he was an inspiration to me, since he accepted no rules or boundaries and, having been brought up by my very straight and fairly strict pater, this seemed to me like an empowering paradise. I remember once being in a restaurant with him and, finding it difficult to attract the waiter’s attention, Patrick reached round and picked up a stand, one of those whatnots that hold mats and menus and salts and peppers, and flung it the entire length of the room. It landed with a crash like a nuclear explosion that silenced the full, chattering space until you could have heard a pin drop, but instead of being reprimanded or ordered out on to the street, as I fully expected, the only tangible result was that the service improved enormously. There was probably a subversive lesson tucked in here somewhere, which my father would not have wanted me to learn.

As I walked in I thought of Patrick for a moment. I remembered him standing in that same doorway, checking the room with his lazy smile, to see if there were any pretty possibilities seated at other tables. One of the strangest parts of growing older being that ever-increasing Team of the Dead, who stand behind your shoulder and take it in turns to jump in and out of your head. A picture, a shop, a street, a clock that someone gave you, an ornament that came from this dead aunt or a chair from that dead uncle, and suddenly for a second they’re alive again, whispering into your ear. There is a religion somewhere in the world that believes we all die twice; once in the normal way and the second time when the last person who really knew us dies, so one’s living memory is gone from the earth. I subscribe to that and I thought happily of my old cousin that day, if only to note that the place had changed since he was there. The murals had gone and with them much of the atmosphere, while the sleek panelling, pale and smooth, which had been installed in their place gave the sensation of sitting in a giant cigar thermidor. I suppose these things come under the heading of ‘rebranding,’ that twenty-first-century snake oil for every ailment. Kieran was already in his seat when I arrived. We waved at a distance, shook hands when I drew near and sat.

As everyone knows, the ageing process never fails to shock when it has not been witnessed on a daily basis. The Kieran I knew had been a fresh-faced oik, with fake hair and a fake tan, who bore almost no resemblance to the elderly, senior man of affairs sitting opposite me. But if his face was a great deal older, nevertheless, as he approached his seventieth year, it was also finer than it had been in his youth, less blotchy, less puffy and infinitely more secure. The too-red cheeks were gone and the glossy highlights, taking with them the true colour of his hair, whatever it may have been, but leaving him a rather distinguished grey, like a model in an advertisement for Grecian 2000. The hair itself had stayed, the lucky stiff, and his eyes were not, as I recalled, small and piggy but curiously kind for someone who had made such killings in the savage world of property.

‘This is very nice of you,’ I said, as he sent a waiter off in search of two glasses of champagne.

‘It is my pleasure.’ He studied his menu and I studied his face. He had acquired real stature, that is the only word I can think of to describe the change. He had acquired authority and the authority of the genuinely great. He was polite, relaxed and unstudied, but with that expectation of obedience that marks the powerful apart. The waiter returned with our drinks. ‘So,’ he said, when we were alone again, ‘what’s this about?’ I murmured about my charity. It was not quite fictional as I felt that if he did wish to make a donation, there might as well be profit in it for someone, but I could see at once he wasn’t really interested. ‘I might as well cut you off now,’ he interjected with a good-natured hand raised to stop the flow. ‘I only give to about three things. I’ve had to ring-fence my interests as I find I get about a hundred applications a week these days. All of them perfectly worthy causes, of course, but I cannot cure every evil in the world. I’ll give you a cheque if you like, but not for much and that will be your lot.’

I nodded. He was very compelling. I would have accepted this decision even if my request had been a truthful one. ‘Thank you,’ I said, but I was puzzled. His secretary had tried to tell me exactly this when I first rang and he could have finished the job without any rudeness when he came on the line. ‘Then why are we here having dinner?’ The words had not come out quite as I had envisaged and I hurried to qualify them. ‘Of course, I’m terribly pleased that we are and it’s the greatest treat to see you again, but I’m surprised you have the time.’

‘I have time,’ he said. ‘I have a lot of time for things I want to do.’ This was polite, but did not really answer my question, which he saw. ‘I find that I spend most of my time these days thinking about the past, and about what happened to me and the life I have led, considering, in short, how I got to where I am.’

‘So you always make a special case for people from that past?’

‘I like to see them. Particularly if, like you, I have seen very little of them in the meantime.’

‘To be honest, I’m amazed you remember me at all. I thought I was going to be greeted by a big, fat “who?”’

He gave a silent, little puff of laughter and I noticed, by contrast, how very sad his eyes were. ‘I don’t think any living human could forget that dinner.’

‘No,’ I said.

He raised his glass. His years at the top had taught him not to clink it against mine, as he would have done back then. ‘To us. Are we much altered do you think?’

I nodded. ‘Very, I’d say. I may only be a fatter, balder, sadder version of the young man that I was, but you seem to have changed into someone else completely.’

He laughed more heartily, as if pleased by the notion. ‘Kieran de Yong, Designer to the Stars.’

‘That’s the man I knew.’

‘God help you.’

‘He wasn’t so bad.’

‘Drink or depression has made you kind. He was ghastly.’

I did not bother to contradict again since I agreed with him. I could see our waiter lingering nearby, waiting for a break in the conversation to step forward and take the order. Kieran gave him a slight nod and he leaned in, pencil and pad in hand. It is comforting to know that the skill of waiting well is not entirely dead even if these days you have to search, and certainly to pay, for it. I do not in any way dislike the tidal wave of Eastern Europeans whose appointed task is apparently to ask me what I want to eat. They seem cheerful and nice on the whole, and a pleasant contrast to the surly Englishman who always looks as if he is longing to spit in your soup. But I do wish someone would tell them not to barge in when the diner is halfway through a punchline.

The man had garnered all the necessary information and made off to put it into practice. ‘What changed you?’ I asked and he did not need to be reminded of the meaning of the question.

He thought for a moment. ‘Education. Experience. Or are they the same thing? In those days I felt I’d come from nothing, which was obviously not true, as everyone comes from something. I also felt I knew nothing, which was truer but not completely true either, and consequently I felt I had to present myself as the man who knows everything, who is in touch with the universe, embodying the zeitgeist. I imagined that I looked like a giant controlling his destiny and not a saddo with a dye job.’ He smiled at the memory and shook his head. ‘Those jackets, alone. What was that?’ I couldn’t help laughing with him. ‘And there you have the reason for why I hated all of you lot.’ Which was an unexpected change of direction.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I felt you were so much more in charge than I was.’

‘We weren’t.’

‘No, I can see that now. But your contempt for me, and everything about me, made me think you were.’

This made me sorrowful. Why do we spend so much of our lives making blameless people unhappy? ‘I hope we weren’t as bad as that. I hate the word contempt.’

He nodded. ‘Of course, you’re much nicer these days. I knew you would be. Anyone with any brains, gets nicer as they get older. But we were all angry then.’

‘You seem to have harnessed your anger to great effect.’

‘Someone once said to me that when young and clever men are angry, they either explode or achieve great things.’

The weird coincidence of the words made me sit up. ‘How funny. A friend of mine said that about another chap I know, not long ago. Do you remember Serena Gresham?’

‘I remember everyone at that dinner.’ I raised my eyebrows to acknowledge that this must indeed be the case for all the guests who were present. But he hadn’t finished. ‘Actually, I remember her more than that. She was quite friendly with Joanna, even after she’d dropped out to run off with me. It was Serena who warned me not to explode.’

I was simultaneously impressed at Serena’s generosity of vision in going on with Joanna and Kieran when most of the girls had dropped them and slightly disappointed, as one always is, at the realisation that what had seemed a bon mot fashioned expressly for one’s own ears is in fact just a slogan for the speaker. ‘When she said it to me she was talking about Damian Baxter, another member of the Portuguese Dinner Club.’

‘The founder member.’ He took another sip of his wine. ‘In a way, Damian Baxter and I were the two graduates of that year’s output from the University of Life.’

Of course they would know each other, these Masters of the Universe. Damian had told me Kieran avoided him and I was curious as to whether this was really true. ‘I suppose you must run into each other from time to time, at gatherings of the Great and the Good,’ I said.

‘Not really.’ And there was my answer.

‘That evening will obviously be with us to the end.’

He smiled, with a slight shrug. ‘Damian isn’t a friend of mine, but not because of that.’

Naturally I wanted to know the reason but I felt it might have an uncomfortable bearing on what I intended to discover before we parted and it didn’t seem quite the right time to open that can of worms. ‘He’s certainly kept his success less secret than you have.’ In saying this I found that I already admired Kieran very much. There is always something good in knowing you admire someone without reservation. I enjoyed giving him his due. Particularly as it justified my disapproval of someone I had always disliked.

He shook his head. ‘Damian hasn’t courted fame. He simply let it happen. I have spent who knows how much money keeping my name out of everything. Which is the more vain and self-important response?’

‘Why did it matter to you?’

He thought for a moment. ‘A mixture. Part of me believed it was very grown up to avoid a public profile and part of me had had enough. I did quite a lot of first-nighting and glad-handing and the rest of it during my days as a pseudo-posh dressmaker. It was moderately necessary then, though not as necessary as I pretended. But for a property developer, fame gives you nothing that you need and plenty you don’t want.’ The waiter had arrived with a clutch of appropriate equipment and Kieran waited until the man had finished arming us for the delights to come. ‘Fame has its uses. The jumping of queues on to aeroplanes and into hospitals. It gives you good tables in restaurants that were full before you rang. You get theatre seats and tickets for the opera, and even invitations from people you are genuinely interested to know. But money gives you all these things without the hassle. You’re not besieged to open this and support that, because nobody knows who you are and it wouldn’t help if you did. The newspapers don’t comb your background and interview your school friends to see if you kissed someone behind the bicycle shed in 1963. I don’t have to put up with any of that. I get requests for large donations and I give some. That’s all that is expected of me.’

‘Were you surprised when you made money? I mean, proper money?’ This seems an odd question to ask of a slight acquaintance after a forty-year gap. I can only tell you it didn’t feel odd at the time to either of us.

‘Everyone who is very successful will tell you that the initial response is entirely schizoid. One part of you thinks: All this for me? There must be some mistake! And the other greets immense, good fortune with: What on earth took you so long?’

‘I suppose self-belief is a key ingredient.’

He nodded. ‘So they tell us. But it’s never quite enough to prepare you for what’s happening. I made a lot of money when I sold the shops, but even so, when I did the sums for the projected profit on the first development I thought I’d put in too many noughts. I couldn’t believe it would generate so much. But it did. Then there was more and more and more and more. And everything changed.’

‘You didn’t.’

‘Oh, but I did. In those early years I went completely crazy. I was a jackass, a micro-manager to a truly demented degree. My home, my clothes, my cars, everything had to be just so. Looking back, I think I must have been imitating some notion of how posh people behaved but I got it completely wrong. I kept complaining in restaurants, and insisting on different shades of towel and different kinds of water in hotels. I wouldn’t go to the telephone when people I knew rang.’ He paused, bewildered, trying to understand his own remembered lunacy.

‘Why not?’

‘I thought that important people didn’t. It was crazy. Even the President of the United States goes to the telephone if he knows the person at the other end, but I wouldn’t. I had armies of assistants, working from sheaves of messages, with endless lists doled out to all and sundry. And I cancelled; boy, did I cancel. Last-minute duck-out. That was me.’

‘I’ve never really understood why people do that.’ I haven’t. And yet it is an increasingly common phenomenon among the would-be great.

He sucked at his lip. ‘Nor me, really. I think I felt trapped the moment I’d agreed to do anything, because the coming event, whatever it was, wouldn’t be under my control. Then, as it drew nearer I would begin to panic, and on the day I’d decide I couldn’t possibly go, usually for some nonsensical and irrelevant reason, and all the people I paid to kiss my arse would tell me that my host or hostess would understand, so I’d chuck.’

‘When did that end?’

‘When I’d been dropped by everybody. I still thought I was a sought-after guest, until one day I realised I was only ever asked to celebrity stunts, but never to where anything interesting was happening. Politicians, performers, writers, even thinkers, I wasn’t invited to meet them any more. I was just too unreliable.’

This admission fascinated me, since I have known so many film stars and television faces who’ve gradually removed themselves from society, or at least from the society of anyone remotely rewarding who is not a fan. As a rule they are quite unaware of it, and continue to think of themselves as pursued and desired when they are neither. ‘My grandmother used to say that you should never be more difficult than you’re worth.’

‘She was right. I broke her rule and paid. I was much more difficult than I was worth.’ His tone had gone through a kind of exasperation and was suddenly full of real pain. I looked at him. ‘That was when Joanna left me. It was understandable. She’d married me as a protest against the rules of the Establishment and suddenly she was living with a man who thought it was important to have his shirts made with a quarter of an inch difference in the length of the two sleeves, who could only buy his ties in Rome or have his shoes mended by a particular cobbler in St James’s. It was all so boring. Can you blame her?’

I thought it might be time to lighten the mood. ‘From what I remember of your motherin-law, I imagine she rather approved of the change in you. That and the money, of course.’

He looked at me, as the waiter brought the first course. ‘Did you know Valerie Langley?’

‘Not well. I knew her as Joanna’s mother, not as “Valerie”.’

‘She has much to answer for.’ His tone was not jocular. I tried to think of something to add to this, but he hadn’t finished. ‘Did you realise that she only took us out to Portugal to split us up? Can you imagine a mother doing that to her own daughter?’

I could, really, when the mother in question was Valerie Langley, but there wasn’t much point in flinging petrol on to the flames, so I decided to move to different shores for a bit. ‘I gather you married again after you and Joanna split up. Is your second wife still around?’

He almost jumped, as if my words had distracted him from something he was busy with. ‘No. We’re divorced. Years ago.’

‘I’m sorry. It didn’t say that in your biography.’

Again he looked at me as if I were forcing him to discuss a parking ticket that had been issued to somebody else in 1953. ‘Don’t be sorry. Jeanne was nothing.’ Which was a chilling comment, but not just in its cruelty. Perhaps it said too much about his loneliness.

‘How is Joanna?’ He’d already mentioned her, so there didn’t seem to be any reason why I shouldn’t ask. ‘Are you on good terms these days?’

The question seemed to take him by surprise and return him to the present. My words had told him something beyond their content. ‘Why did you want to see me?’ he asked.

Suddenly I felt as if I had been caught shoplifting, or worse, putting a school friend’s torch into my pocket. ‘I’m on an errand, really.’

‘What errand? For whom?’

‘Damian.’ I hesitated, praying for inspiration. ‘You know he’s ill-’

‘And like to die.’

It almost amused me he should quote Richard III in this context. ‘Precisely. And he finds he’s interested in hearing about how his friends from those days…’ I wasn’t at all sure how to end this. ‘How they turned out. Whether life worked for them. You know. Rather as you were saying about your own past and how you like to talk about it.’ This last was a lame attempt to put them into the same boat.

‘All his friends? Or just some of his friends?’

‘Just some at this stage, and he asked me to help because he’s really lost touch with them and we used to be quite close.’

Which wouldn’t wash with Kieran and no wonder. ‘I’m astonished that you, of all people, accepted the brief.’

Naturally, this was a perfectly reasonable comment. ‘So am I, really. I didn’t mean to do it when he first asked me, but then I went down to his home to see him, and I felt…’ I tailed off. What had I felt that overturned a lifetime of dislike?

Kieran answered for me. ‘You felt you couldn’t refuse. Because death was pulling at his sleeve and you had only thought of him as young before you got there.’

‘That’s the sort of thing.’ It was the sort of thing, although that wasn’t the whole reason. Underlying any pity for Damian I may, I admit, have felt I sensed a kind of larger, general sadness growing in me, a sorrow at the cruelty of time. At any rate, Kieran had succeeded in making me feel awkward and undignified with my nosy enquiries and my bogus charity.

‘Which “some”?’

‘Sorry?’ The phrase sounded foreign. I couldn’t understand him.

‘Which “some” of Damian’s friends?’

I listed the women. He listened as he ate his cod’s roe, breaking the toast and pressing the pink squidge on to it with the kind of fastidious neatness that seems to tell of a man living alone. Not camp at all, nor fussy, but disciplined and neat, like a locker in an army barracks. He finished his plate before he spoke again. ‘Has this got something to do with my son?’

Of course, the words were like a punch in the gut. I felt quite sick and for a second I thought I was actually going to be sick. But at least I decided to end the dishonesty at once, since it was clear I was as mysterious to Kieran as a sheet of laminated glass. I took a breath and answered, ‘Yes.’

He absorbed this, seemingly turning it round and round his brain, looking at it from every angle, like a connoisseur unconvinced by the reputed excellence of a highly priced piece of old porcelain. Then he made a decision. ‘I don’t want to talk any more about it here. Do you have time to come back to my home for some coffee?’ I nodded. ‘Then that is what we shall do.’ And before my eyes he threw off the intimate, self-deprecating persona he had demonstrated, and replaced it with a mask of smooth and easy sophistication, chatting away breezily about countries he liked to visit, how disappointing he found the government, whether the ecology movement had got out of hand, until we’d finished and paid and he led the way out of the hotel to a large Rolls-Royce with a chauffeur, who was standing by the open door.

Kieran nodded at the magnificent car. ‘Sometimes the old ways are best,’ he observed lightly and we got in.

We drove to one of those new and, it must be said, unlovely blocks that have recently been built by the side of Vauxhall Bridge. Never having entered any of them, I rather wondered at his choice of dwelling. I think I must have expected him to live in a ravishing manor house in Chelsea, built originally for a cheery gentleman farmer in the 1730s and now on the market for enough to refinance Madrid. But on stepping out of the lift at the top-floor landing, then into Kieran’s flat – I always resist the word ‘apartment,’ but I suspect it would be a more accurate term – I understood at once. At the end of a long, wide hall the whole of one side of the building, about thirty feet deep and who knows how long, was a single, vast drawing room. There were tall windows in three walls, giving a view of London second only to the Millennium Wheel. I looked down at the curling, night-time Thames, with its busy, toy boats, twinkling with coloured lights, at the dinky cars whizzing along the ribbon-roads, at the tiny pedestrian dots, hurrying down the pavements under the lamp posts. It was like flying.

Nor was there less to wonder at inside. The whole place was filled with the loveliest things I have ever seen in a private dwelling. Normally in a family house, even a very grand one, the exquisite pieces are occasionally interlarded with a pair of chairs covered by Aunt Joan and something Daddy brought back from the Sudan. But there was none of that here. Two matching Savonnerie carpets covered the gleaming floor and on it sat furniture so beautiful that it looked as if it had all been removed from one of Europe’s major palaces. The paintings were mainly landscapes rather than portraits and, while I usually find them a trifle dull, I could not say that about these spectacular jewels of the genre. These were landscapes by Canaletto and Claude Lorraine and Gainsborough and Constable and other names I can only guess at. There was one ravishing painting of La Princesse de Monaco, by Angelica Kauffmann, which caught my eye. Kieran saw where I was looking. ‘I don’t like portraits as a rule. I find them sentimental. But I bought that because it reminded me of Joanna.’ He was right. It was very like her. Joanna wearing a wide, flower-trimmed hat and the looser casual fashions of the 1790s, which seemed so carefree until you remembered that the sitter was less than three years from her hideous death. The unfortunate princess had ridden in the last tumbrel of the Reign of Terror. The officers heard the rioting of the Thermidor coup d’ètat break out as they drove towards the guillotine but, unfortunately for their passengers, they decided to complete the grisly journey, reasoning that no one would blame them if the regime was overthrown, but if Robespierre survived in power, they would all die for sparing the victims. They were probably right.

The picture was above an elaborate chimneypiece, which I admired. He told me it was from the scattered trove of a great house that had been demolished in my time, releasing a flood of doorcases and fireplaces and balustrades and other plunder when it bit the dust during the hopeless years of the 1950s. The family are still there, happily ensconced, these days, in a charming converted orangery.

‘Can you burn a fire in a building as new as this? Is it real?’

‘Certainly. I wanted the penthouse, so I could construct a chimney. I hate a drawing room without a fire, don’t you? They weren’t too difficult about it.’ He talked as if he’d installed an extra bathroom.

Not for the first time I wondered what it must be like to be astonishingly rich. Of course, we’re all astonishingly rich when compared to the inhabitants of enormous parts of the globe and I do not mean to sound ungrateful. But what is it like when the only reason not to do something, or buy something, or eat something, or drink something is because you do not want to? ‘It would be so boring!’ one hears people say. But would it? It’s not boring to have hot water every morning, or a delicious dinner every night, to sleep in good sheets or live in pretty rooms or collect a few nice pictures, so why would it be boring to be able to treble all these blessings at a touch? I am fairly sure that I would love it. ‘Have you got a house in the country?’ I asked.

‘No.’ He spoke with a slightly tolerant air, as if I should know better. ‘Not now. I’ve done all that.’ He chuckled. ‘At one point I had an estate in Gloucestershire, another in Scotland, a flat in New York, a villa in Italy quite near Florence, and a London house in Cheyne Row. I’d arrive at each of them, fret about everything that had been done wrongly since I was last there and leave. I never seemed to stay in anywhere for more than three days at a stretch, so I never got beyond the complaining stage. Although I do quite miss the house in the Cotswolds.’ A pink cloud of nostalgia hovered over him for a moment. ‘The library was one of the prettiest rooms I’ve ever seen, never mind lived in. But no.’ He shook his head to loosen these disturbing, self-indulgent images. ‘I’m finished with all that. There’s no point.’

This was an odd phrase, but I let it go. Kieran had ordered some coffee while we were in the car and now a discreet manservant brought it in. Once again, I was on the set of a Lonsdale comedy. I wonder now whether I fully realised what I would see of the modern world when I took Damian’s shilling. Was it a shock that all this way of life, which we were told so firmly in the Sixties was most definitely dying, was instead alive and well, and not even very unusual any more? I consider myself able to move about pretty freely and I have spent a good deal of my time in enviable houses of one sort or another, but I was beginning to grasp that it wasn’t, as it used to be, that there was the odd person still living in an Edwardian way, the occasional millionaire who invented electricity and we should all be grateful to him, dear. Nowadays there is a whole new class of rich people leading rich lives, as numerous as under the Georgians. The only difference is that now it goes on behind closed doors facilitating the dishonest representation of these things that the media go in for. As a result, the vast majority is largely unaware that there is a new and affluent group who live in this way but do not, unlike their predecessors a century ago, take much responsibility for those less blessed. This new breed feel no need to lead the public in public, but only from the shadows behind the Throne.

I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat in a tapestry-covered bergère, fashioned, I would guess, during the middle years of the eighteenth century. I felt we might as well get things started. ‘So, how is Joanna?’ I said, since that was where we had broken off.

Kieran looked at me quite steadily for a moment. Even he must have realised this was why we were here. ‘Joanna is dead,’ he replied.

‘What?’

‘And dead, I’m afraid, in a sad way. She was found in a public lavatory, not far from Swindon, with an empty hypodermic needle beside her. She had overdosed on heroin. When the police got there, they thought she’d been locked in the cubicle for about five days. They were alerted by the smell which, in that setting, as you can imagine, had to be pretty strong before it was noticed.’ It was at this precise moment that I realised Kieran de Yong was a man cursed. This horrible, sordid, tragic image was always with him, of a woman I would guess he had loved much more than he believed he would at the start. It was a picture that hovered an inch or two behind his thoughts unless he was asleep, and then I am quite sure it visited his dreams. I saw that he had agreed to meet me because all he ever really wanted to talk about, or think about, was Joanna and I had known her. But when we did meet, he had found he couldn’t begin the conversation without this account, and, whatever he may have originally planned, he couldn’t give it in a crowded, noisy restaurant. Having acquitted this task, he almost relaxed.

Sometimes one hears or witnesses a thing so shocking that the brain cannot programme it for a second. I remember I was once in an earthquake in South America, and as I watched the ornaments and books jump and leap about, it took a second or two before my brain would tell me what was happening. This was just such a moment. Joanna Langley, enchanting, ravishing Joanna, was dead and in a way more suited to the forgotten, the abandoned and the lost; not to a darling of the gods.

‘Christ.’ For one tiny instant I thought I was going to burst into tears and when I looked over at Kieran it seemed that he might too, but then he recovered. At last he nodded slowly, as if my exclamation had been a comment. The fact is there are some deaths that have a gentle aspect, that bring a kind of comfort of their own to help the survivors bear their grief. This was not one of them. ‘When did it happen?’

‘October 1985. The fifteenth. We’d split up a couple of years before, as you probably know, and we didn’t speak for a bit, except about Malcolm, because we were having…’ he hesitated. What were they having? ‘An argument. A disagreement.’ He was gathering momentum. ‘A fight. But then we got the judgement, which was at least a decision, and I felt we could move on, that we were both getting through it.’ He gave a gesture of hopelessness with his hands.

‘But you weren’t.’

‘Obviously not.’

‘What was the disagreement about?’ Again, on paper this seems intrusive, but we had, as they say now, ‘bonded’ during the evening, or I felt we had, and it didn’t seem to be prying when I said it.

‘Joanna was having a lot of problems. Well,’ he ran his fingers through his enviable hair, ‘you can tell that from the way she died. And I wanted to be Malcolm’s principal carer. I don’t mean I didn’t want her to see him, or anything like that.’ It was clear that guilt for his first wife’s death coursed through his veins so hotly he could still feel it twenty-three years later. ‘I just thought he would be better off living with me, rather than trailing round after his mother. I had more money than she did by then-’

‘Jeepers.’

He shook his head. ‘Alfred went down in a property crash a few years earlier, so there was nothing much left in that quarter. Their whole life had changed from when you knew them. They were really quite broke, living in a flat on the edge of Streatham.’ I had a sudden, vivid vision of Mrs Langley, sparkling with gems and watching from the edge of a ballroom like a shifty ferret to spy any interest in her daughter from Viscount Summersby. I never liked her much but I was sorry all the same. At that time nobody would have imagined the future waiting for her. ‘It wasn’t only the money. Joanna was very disappointed in the way the world had turned out. She thought by then we’d all be living in some kind of spiritual Nepal, smoking dope and mouthing the lyrics from Hair. Not taking out pensions in Mrs Thatcher’s Britain.’

‘A lot of our generation thought that. Some of them are in government.’

But I couldn’t staunch the flow. Kieran had to tell his story. As the television quiz show has it: He’d started, so he’d finish. ‘And of course, looking at it from her point of view I was at the peak of my madness, screaming if there was a crease on my collar, sacking staff because the knives and forks weren’t tidy enough in the kitchen drawer… None of that side of it was her fault.’ His effort to be fair to his late wife was more than commendable, it was heartbreaking. He sighed again. ‘Anyway, we fought about the boy like a couple of cats. She said I’d poison his mind and make him a fascist. I said she’d poison his body and make him an addict. On and on we went, tearing at each other’s throats. Until finally she dropped the bombshell. We were having breakfast one morning in that weird, angry way of two people who are still living together but know they won’t be for long. We were sitting there in silence, until she looked up, preparing to speak. I knew some insult was on its way, so I deliberately made no enquiries. After a bit she got bored and just said it.’

‘What?’

‘That Malcolm wasn’t my son.’

‘How did she say it?’

‘Like that. “Malcolm isn’t your son.”’

He stopped now to let the words sink in. So was this where my quest was to end? It felt strange to have reached my destination, and yet also satisfactory in a way that Joanna’s death should be partially redeemed by the boy’s father at last acknowledging his blood child. Even if there was an anticlimactic element in the thought of Damian’s fortune going to the only family in England who wouldn’t notice it.

Kieran hadn’t finished. ‘You mentioned the house party in Portugal.’

‘Yes.’ I knew Portugal would come into it.

‘She said she’d met up with “the boy’s father” there and that she’d slept with him when we were back in London. That night, in fact. As soon as we got home from the airport we had a row about why we’d gone at all and she walked out…’ He shrugged. ‘It was obvious she was talking about Damian.’ He must have caught and mistaken my response to this news, and hurried to undo any possible hurt. ‘She was always very fond of you, but…’ How was he to phrase it?

I helped him out. ‘She wasn’t interested in me.’

We both knew she wasn’t, so why should he argue? ‘Not like that,’ he said, accepting my own verdict. ‘And Joanna couldn’t have cared less about the Tremaynes. It had to be Damian.’ He paused. However often he went over this territory, it obviously still hurt. ‘So I sat there, with a piece of toast in one hand and a coffee cup in the other, while she blew my life out of the water. And I minded when she told me. I minded very much.’

‘Of course you did.’

‘It wasn’t just the boy. She was unravelling our life. This was retroactive legislation. We’d only been married a year at the time she was talking about and I’d thought we were happy, then. I’d been against the damn holiday anyway, because I dreaded her being pulled back into a crowd that I didn’t believe was any good for her.’

‘But you went because her mother made you. And when you got back she slept with Damian.’ At least I now understood his visceral dislike.

‘That’s about it. And by this stage of the battle she was glad to talk about it, because it was going to save her son from the vile Leona Helmsley world of mad indulgence that I was living in. She thought it would settle matters. That I would give up and back off, and Malcolm would go with her, and I would be left alone to count my money and weep.’

‘But that didn’t happen.’

‘Of course not. My name was on the birth certificate for God’s sake. I was married to her when he was conceived, never mind born. I loved him. He was my son.’ He almost shouted this assertion, back in the grip of the row, but seeing my startled face he recovered, repeating the words in a gentler tone, which touched me as it would have touched anyone who heard him. ‘I loved him. He was my son. I could have made my claim on that basis alone.’ I sat up. I’d assumed he had made his claim on that basis alone, if he’d kept in contact with the boy. Which, from the way he was talking, he obviously had.

‘But you didn’t?’

He shook his head. ‘I had a paternity test done. I wanted to know how tough the battle was going to be.’ He looked at me again quite fiercely, and for a moment I rather sympathised with Joanna when I saw what she’d taken on. I suppose nobody can be as successful as Kieran had been without having some steel in them somewhere. ‘When the results came back they showed Malcolm was mine after all.’

All my sense of matters being resolved deserted me on the instant. ‘How did she take it?’

‘How do you think?’ He rolled his eyes at me. ‘She wasn’t thinking straight by then. She said she didn’t believe me. It was exactly the kind of thing I would fix, blah, blah, blah. You can imagine.’ I could. ‘So we ran another test under her team’s supervision and obviously the result was the same again, and by then she was coming apart at the seams…’ He was standing, staring out of one of the windows, silhouetted against a dark-blue velvet sky studded with stars. He continued talking, facing on to the night, hardly aware I was there. ‘As you might expect, she hadn’t helped her case as a rational woman with all this screaming carry-on, so it wasn’t a huge surprise when the judge gave me full custody, with visiting rights for her, which was much more than I’d asked for. We got the decision in September eighty-five.’

‘And the following month she killed herself.’

‘She killed herself, or she took an accidental overdose. Anyway,’ he sighed, wearily, his remembered rage quite gone, ‘she was dead. That’s how it finished for Joanna. And it was all so unnecessary. Malcolm was fourteen by then. I couldn’t have controlled his seeing her even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t, for more than a year or two at the most.’

Some decisions are so difficult to unravel; decisions made by countries and decisions of private individuals can be impossible to explain. Why did Napoleon invade Russia? Why didn’t Charles I make peace when it was offered? And why did Joanna Langley run away and marry this man when he was an anxious and desperate grotesque, but leave him when he was at the beginning of his triumphs? Why did she try to pull their boy in half when he was old enough to make up his own mind about both his parents and their warring philosophies? Why did she spiral into death-dealing depression when she really had nothing to fear?

‘I don’t understand why we never heard about it. Why isn’t it on the Internet?’

‘Mainly because I have spent an enormous amount of time and money making sure that no one hears about it. I kept the reporting to a minimum at the time, I will not tell you how, and I have one man who spends his working life combing the Web to get rid of any stories that I dislike, including even a whisper of Joanna.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I owe it to her. I ruined her life. I won’t let her be a tabloid item in death.’

I ruined her life. I was so struck by the unvarnished, stark, merciless guilt in this. He allowed himself no defence at all. ‘How sad,’ I said. And I meant it with all my heart. I was truly sad. Sad at the ruin that, in a few short minutes, I’d heard engulf the whole House of Langley. In my sorrowing mind, rich, nice Alfred and his scratchy, ambitious Valerie had been suddenly pulled from their golden pedestal, where they had been secure in my imaginings until now and dashed down, like Don Giovanni, back to the place below, from whence they came. While Joanna, my lifelong standard for how lovely a woman can be, lay desecrated and dead, her scabrous wrist pitted with needle marks, her dirty, tangled hair spread out on a urine-stained, concrete floor somewhere in the Midlands. ‘How very sad.’

I looked at my watch. It was time to leave. I understood now that Kieran had embraced the chance to talk about the wife who had left him against his will, but who would never leave his head. He had simply wanted to talk about her with someone who’d known her and those opportunities must be getting rare, even for him. He noticed me checking the time. ‘I’d like to show you something before you go,’ he said, and leaving the magnificent Chamber of Privilege he led me down the passage, past half-open doors revealing delectable rooms for eating and reading and other delights, until we came to the last door in the row. He opened it and ushered me into what was postulated as a study of some sort, with a desk and a comfortable chair. I could sense that Kieran probably did his actual work in it, as opposed to leafing through papers with a scribbling secretary in the glamorous library along the passage. Certainly he spent a lot of time here, as much as he could I would say, but the reason was not because it was quiet or tidy. In fact, its role as a writing room was not its moral purpose. This was a shrine. All four walls were covered with framed photographs, one consisting entirely of pictures of Joanna, Joanna as I remembered her, young and definitively gorgeous; then Joanna a little older and a little older still, but never Joanna old. Joanna at thirty, looking more harassed and careworn and lined than she should have done; Joanna at thirty-three, pictured leaving the law courts during the divorce, a candid picture of her unhappiness, so generously taken by the snapper of some evening rag but presumably unprinted; Joanna at thirty-five, sitting with her son, laughing. Kieran was looking with me. ‘That was taken by a friend of hers. Malcolm was there for lunch or something and this friend took it. It was the last picture of them together. It’s the last picture of her. She had less than a week to go. You couldn’t have told.’

‘No, indeed.’ I stared at the smiling mouth and the tired eyes. I found myself hoping it had been a really happy day, that last outing with her beloved child. I glanced around for newspaper pictures of the story. Even after all he’d said, I was surprised there weren’t any. ‘And there was no coverage at all? I still don’t understand how you kept it out of the papers completely. Even the local ones?’

He looked uncomfortable. ‘There were a few squibs, but not much.’

‘I couldn’t find anything on Google. There was really nothing about her at all, once you’d separated.’

Kieran knew why. ‘She used my real name after the divorce. That was the name on everything in her bag when they found her. I managed to stop them making the connection.’ He hesitated. ‘You can read the coverage if you punch in Joanna Futtock.’

‘Futtock?’ I was so glad to know that I could still find something funny.

He looked rather sheepish. ‘Why do you think I never gave up “de Yong”?’

‘I did wonder. What was your mother’s maiden name?’

‘Cock.’ He gave a despairing sigh. ‘I ask you.’

‘Some people have all the luck,’ I said. Then we both did laugh.

I’d started to look round the other walls of this little star chamber. There were pictures of Joanna with Kieran, a young Kieran with his awful blond mop and an apparently endless supply of the ugliest clothes in the world. Then grown-up Kieran; Kieran successful; Kieran shaking hands with presidents and kings; even Kieran in better and better suits. And alongside Kieran, everywhere you looked, there were more and more pictures of the boy. Malcolm in the school photograph from pre-prep; Malcolm swimming; Malcolm on a bicycle; Malcolm on a horse; Malcolm the public schoolboy, with both parents, one on either side of the sulking child, resisting his role at some Speech Day celebration. Malcolm skiing; Malcolm at university; Malcolm graduating with a very serious face; Malcolm backpacking. ‘What’s he up to now?’ I asked.

Kieran was silent for a second, then he spoke in as pleasant a manner as he could manage. ‘He’s dead, too.’

‘What?’ I did not know the boy at all and the father only slightly, but I felt as if I were being pistol-whipped.

‘Nothing bad. Not like his mother.’ This time I could see his eyes filling, even while he remained in admirable control of his voice. ‘He was perfectly well, twenty-three, just starting at Warburg’s and he couldn’t shake off a bout of flu, so we thought he should be looked at.’ He stopped to breathe, back in that terrible moment. ‘I took him to hospital for some tests and he was dead seven weeks later.’ He rubbed his nose swiftly with his left hand, trying unsuccessfully to push back the tears. He talked on, more to steady himself than to give me any information. ‘And that was it, really. I didn’t quite take in what had happened. Not at first. Not for a while. A few years afterwards I even married again.’ He shook his head at life’s absurdity. ‘Of course, it was ridiculous and it didn’t last long. I made a mistake, you see.’ He looked back at me. ‘I thought I could still go on living. Anyway,’ he sighed, as if this at least was understood between us, ‘after I’d got rid of Jeanne I sold the houses and everything else, and came here. I did bring a lot of stuff with me, as you can see. I hadn’t signed off completely.’

‘How do you spend your time?’

‘Oh.’ He thought for a second, as if this was rather a curious query and difficult to answer. ‘I’ve still got quite a lot of things on the boil and I take a bit of interest in financing research, into cancer, mainly. I’d like to think that it might help to prevent it happening to someone else. And I do worry about education these days, or rather the lack of it. If I’d been born now, I’d have ended up pulling pints in a bar in Chelmsford. I mind about those kids who’ll never have a chance, the way things are.’ He seemed pleased to think about these issues and glad of his role in them. Which he deserved to be. ‘Apart from that I read. I watch a lot of television and I enjoy it, which nobody admits to. You see,’ he tried to smile but gave up, ‘the thing is, when your only child is dead, you’re dead.’ He paused as if to mark the rightness of this sentence to himself. ‘Your life is finished. You’re not a parent any more. You’re nothing. It’s over. You’re just waiting for your body to catch up with your soul.’

He stopped talking and we just stood there in that holy place of love. Kieran was weeping quite openly by this stage, with tears coursing down his cheeks, leaving a dark trail of water marks on his expensive lapels, and I freely confess that I was, too. We didn’t say anything more and for a few minutes we didn’t even move. It would have been a strange sight if anyone had interrupted us. Two rather overweight men in late middle age, standing motionless in their Savile Row suits, crying.

Terry