Past Imperfect

ELEVEN

Not very surprisingly, after an evening like that I decided I needed some air. Kieran offered to get his driver to take me home but I wanted to walk, just for a bit, and he didn’t insist. So we shook hands in that funny English way, as if we hadn’t been through an emotional trauma together, as though the whole thing hadn’t really happened and the stains of our tears had some other, more banal and more acceptable explanation. We made the usual murmurings about meeting again, which one always says. Unusually, I rather hope it will happen, but I expect not. After that I set off down the Embankment.

It was a long walk home and quite cold, but it did not seem so. I strolled along, both reliving and then laying to rest my memories of Joanna. I was glad to have had a chance to revalue Kieran, even while I knew he was far beyond help, and I felt that I had been allowed to look into a soul that was worth looking into. Filled with these melancholy thoughts, I had just turned off Gloucester Road into Hereford Square when there was a scream, then laughter, then shouting, then the sound of someone being sick. I wish I could write that I was astonished to hear what sounded like a large Indian takeaway being splashily deposited on to the pavement, but these days it would require a Martian, and one only recently arrived from outer space, to be surprised at these charming goings-on. A group of young men and women in their early twenties, I would guess, were loitering on the corner of the square, perhaps recent refugees from the Hereford Arms on the other side of the road, perhaps not. One woman, in a short leather skirt and trainers, was throwing up and another, with suspiciously black hair, was tending to her. The rest just stood around, waiting for the next act in their evening’s entertainment. Foolishly, I paused to study them. ‘Got a problem?’ said a man with a shaved head and a whole array of piercings down the edge of his right ear. I wondered the weight didn’t throw him off balance.

‘My problems seem nothing to yours,’ I said and then rather regretted my clever-clogs answer as he took a menacing step towards me.

‘Leave him, Ron. He’s not worth it,’ the girl with black hair and what looked like four different petticoats swaddling her bottom shouted over her shoulder. Happily he appeared to agree and turned away.

As he moved back, he shouted a crisp ‘Fuck off’ at me, but more as a kind of standard ritual, as one might say good morning in a village street. And so, before he could change his mind, I did.

It’s not often that I walk at night, though more from laziness than fear, but when I do I am amazed at the changes that have come about in London during my adult lifetime, the main one being, of course, not the mugging and the general crime, nor even the dirt and uncollected rubbish that swirls and drifts in piles against the railings and the plane trees, waiting in vain for the men to come. It is the drunkenness that has transformed the streets, not just of London but of almost every town, into a lesser hell for lawful citizens. The kind of drunkenness that in years gone by used to be talked of in Siberia at the height of Stalin’s iron rule as a reflection of the misery of the oppressed, or it was rumoured to be manifest up near the pole, where the long nights of winter drive strong men mad. Why did it happen here? When did it start? I used to think it was a class thing and somehow linked to the ills of social deprivation, but it isn’t. Not long ago I attended a twenty-first party, held in one of St James’s smartest clubs. The birthday boy was clever, charming, tipped for success and linked to half the peerage, and I watched as all the nice young girls and young men cheerfully tossed back the booze until they were staggering or vomiting or both. As I left, I heard a tray of glasses go west amid loud laughter, and a girl in a pretty couture dress of lilac chiffon pushed past me, hand on mouth, hoping to make it just in time. Outside, a fellow with traces of sick on his evening shirt was urinating against the car parked next to mine. I had escaped not a moment too soon.

Certainly some people drank too much in my day, as they always have, but drunkenness was rare and sad, and made men look like fools. Until as little as ten years ago being drunk was a mistake, a regrettable by-product of making merry, a miscalculation which, the next day, required an apology. Now it’s the point. Does anyone out there understand why we let it happen? Because I don’t. Of course I can see the charm of the ‘café culture’ we were said to be encouraging. But how long can a sane person contemplate failure without admitting it? At what point does optimism become delusion? The other day some fat-headed woman on the radio was lecturing her browbeaten interviewer, denying that there was anything wrong with binge-drinking, insisting that the true problem lay with the middle-aged, middle-class drunks, apparently swilling it down in their own houses. He, poor battered fellow, dared not argue that even if this were true, even if all the bons bourgeois were lying flat on the carpet, singing sea shanties every night of their lives, they would still not be a problem, because they would not be a problem to anyone else. Why do modern leaders not grasp that their job is to control antisocial behaviour but not private activity; to regulate our actions as regards others, but not where they only concern ourselves? At times it is hard not to feel that as a culture we are lost, in permanent denial and spinning in the void.

I turned the key and opened the door of the flat on to the darkness of living alone. I walked into the drawing room and switched on a scattering of lamps from the door. I was only beginning to get used to the notion that every time I returned to my home I would find it just as I’d left it. When Bridget went I will say she went most thoroughly. As I waved her off I suspected that she saw the separation as only temporary and that I would soon find telltale signs that she expected to be back, but I would say now that I wronged her, that in some way she had decided she was as glad to be rid of me as I to be rid of her. These things are peculiar. You agonise for months, or even years, on end. Should you finish it? Should you not? But having made the decision, you’re as impatient as a child on Christmas Eve. It is with the greatest difficulty you refrain from packing for them, pushing them into a taxi and shooing them away that very night. You long for them to go, you ache for it, so you can begin the rest of your life. ‘You’ll miss me,’ she said as she walked through the flat, checking for any last-minute items she’d forgotten.

‘I know I will,’ I said, as one must in such a case. There is an etiquette involved and this comes into the same category as ‘It isn’t you, it’s me.’ Actually, I thought at the time that I would miss her. But I didn’t much. Or far less than I expected. I can cook quite well when I put my mind to it and I’m lucky enough to have a woman who cleans a few times a week, so the main change was that I no longer had to spend the long, dark evenings with someone who was permanently disappointed in me. And that was nice. In fact, one of the great gifts of getting older is the discovery that the very thing you feared, ‘being alone,’ is actually much nicer than you thought. I should qualify this. To be old and ill alone, to die alone, is usually a sad thing, and at some point one may want to take steps to avoid this fate if possible. I suppose the prospect of a solitary death is even scarier for the childless, as they have no one they can reasonably expect to get involved with their disintegration, but even for them, and I am one of them, chunks on your own before you hove into sight of the Pearly Gates are simply lovely. You eat what you like, you watch what you like, you drink what you like, whoopee, and all without guilt or the need to hurry in case you’ll be found out. If you feel social you go out, if you don’t you stay in. If you want to talk you pick up the telephone, if not you don’t, and all around is the blessed gift of silence, not the silence of resentment but of peace.

Of course, as a rule this only applies if one has recently come out of a relationship that was less than satisfactory. For the surviving widow or widower of a happy marriage things are obviously different. I will always remember my father, left on his own, remarking that while others might feel released by the death of their spouse to pursue an interest or a hobby or to get involved with some worthy activity that their marriage had prevented, he had personally gained nothing and lost everything, a very moving tribute, even if my mother deserved it more than he knew. But for the man or woman after a longed-for break-up things are quite different. There are missing bits, of course, the sex for one, but for a long time sex between Bridget and me had been more a question of feeling it was expected of one rather than demonstrating any real interest in the other on either of our parts. I won’t deny that the thought of re-embarking on a career of ‘dating’ to fill the gap is a terrifying one to people in their fifties, but even so, freedom is a word that always shines.

The following morning, as I sat at my desk, I reviewed my non-existent progress in the search for the fortunate child, but I felt I must be approaching its conclusion. There were after all only two women left on the list to eliminate: Candida Finch and Terry Vitkov. After that, my task would presumably be done. When I had contemplated these possibilities, before this time, I had assumed that I would check out Candida first since she was in England. If she proved to be the one we were looking for I would not have to go to Los Angeles, which did seem rather a chore, so it was logical to try her next. But when I dialled her number, clearly printed for me on Damian’s list, I was repeatedly treated, for almost the only time in this adventure, to the synthetic courtesies of an answering machine, made worse by my leaving message upon message, so far without tangible result. I wasn’t comfortable any more with my bogus charity excuse, not since Kieran had somehow exposed it without meaning to, and instead of formulating another lie I decided just to make a simple request, stating my name, suggesting she had probably forgotten me but that we knew each other once and asking her to get in touch when she had a moment. I then left my numbers, put the receiver carefully back on to its cradle and hoped for the best. But the best was slow in coming and after three weeks of this, plus an unanswered postcard, I wasn’t quite sure what to do next to serve my master. We did not, after all, have very long to play with.

‘Go to Los Angeles,’ said Damian down the line. ‘Take a break, stay a few days. You can tick off Terry and do yourself some good. Do you have an agent out there?’

‘Only as part of an arrangement with the London ones. I’ve never met him.’

‘There you are, then. Give him a treat. Pick up some girls, take him out for the evening, give him the time of his life. I’m paying.’

Should I resent this attempt to sound generous? Or was he really being generous? ‘My agent here says he’s gay.’

‘All the better. Flirt with him. Make him think he’s the only man you’ve ever found attractive. Ask his advice and tell him how helpful it is when you receive it, then press an unfinished manuscript into his hands and give him a sense of ownership in what you’re doing.’ Comments like this made me painfully aware of how much more Damian knew about the world than I.

I had spoken to him of my evening with Kieran de Yong, not all of it, not the last bit, but enough for him to know that I had liked him and that the dead boy had definitely not been Damian’s child. He was silent at the other end for a minute or two. ‘Poor Joanna,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘She had every gift she needed for the era that was coming.’

‘I agree.’

‘If only she’d been a cynic. She died of optimism, in a way.’

‘Like a lot of Sixties children.’

‘I’m glad you liked him,’ he said in an unusually generous tone. ‘Of course, he can’t stand me.’

‘And we know why.’ I hesitated, wondering whether I wanted to return to that troubling episode, yet conscious that every uncovered detail of this journey insisted on taking me there. ‘Did we all know what you were up to? That time in Estoril? Are the accounts I’m getting truthful? Or are their memories playing tricks on them? Because it’s starting to sound as if you slept with every woman in the world in the space of a few days.’

‘I was young,’ he replied and we both laughed.

I first met Terry, as I have said, at the ball given for Dagmar of Moravia. Lucy Dalton had disliked her on sight and so did some others, but I did not. I don’t mean I was mad about her but, to invert Kieran’s chilling phrase, she wasn’t nothing. She was full of energy, full of what was once called pluck, and I did like her determination, and her mother’s, to have first and foremost a very good time. Her father, of whom we would never see much, had made a killing with an advertising agency, first based in Cincinnati and later on Madison Avenue, at just the hour when the world was discovering quite what advertising could really do. Right through the 1950s, there had been a sense in many quarters that it was enough to say ‘Use this! It’s Good!’ And that would do the trick, launching the product on a grateful public, until the moment, and it was in my teens, that the world of marketing would change forever and begin its remorseless campaign to take over civilisation. Jeff Vitkov spotted this coming era sooner than most. He was a simple, unpretentious soul, brilliant in his way but not, or so we thought, complicated in his wishes or his needs, the last man on earth to wish to climb the social ladder. Even after the move to New York he continued to regard Cincinnati as his home and he would possibly have left the family based there, flying back on the weekends, enjoying vacations in some modest but comfortable resort hotel, if his wife, Verena, had not made the unwelcome discovery that even the vertiginous improvement in their finances had not brought the social recognition she craved and, reasonably enough, felt entitled to. There is a fantasy one often hears voiced in England that America is classless, which, as any traveller will know, is arrant nonsense and never more so than in the provincial towns, whose social arrangements can be impressively resistant to the ambitious newcomer. Someone remarked, not all that long ago, that it would be easier to gain entreè to the King’s chamber at Versailles than to break into the inner gang of Charleston, and much the same could be said in all the cities of the true, US Gratin.

This was always so. One of the main reasons for the great invasion by American heiresses in the 1880s and 1890s, the so-called Buccaneers, was that many of the daughters of those newly rich papas grew tired of having doors shut in their faces back home in Cleveland or St Louis or Detroit, and preferred instead to enjoy the deep and genuine warmth with which the well-born English have always welcomed money. It is hard to deny that the careers of girls like Virginia Bonynge, Viscountess Deerhurst, who began life as the daughter of a convicted murderer from the Middle West, would seem to confirm that things were much easier this side of the pond. Needless to say, this would often lead to sweet revenge, as the mothers of the Duchess of Manchester or the Countess of Rosslyn or Lady Randolph Churchill, or many, many others would sweep home in triumph to the place where they’d been snubbed, to rub their sisters’ noses in it. I suspected at the time that this thinking, or something like it, was behind the plan, forming in Verena Vitkov’s mind towards the end of 1967, to put her daughter through a London Season.

There were options open to mothers, in those days, to defray some of the expense if necessary. Things were already less abundant than they had been before the war, when there were three or four balls in London every night. Until the end of presentation there were half a dozen each week; by my time there were two or three; and fifteen years later it was down to less than ten in the whole Season. Even in ’68, some girls gave only cocktail parties and no dance, others would throw both but share the ball, and there was no shame in this. Serena Gresham shared her coming-out ball with her cousin, Candida Finch, although this was of course because Lady Claremont was funding them both. But from the start, Terry Vitkov was anxious to cover every base and I have no doubt she was more than encouraged in this by her mother, the unsinkable Verena. In the event the drinks party, held early in the proceedings before they’d quite found their feet, was a standard affair at the Goring, but for the ball they were determined to make the evening memorable. This they undoubtedly achieved if not quite in the way they had intended, but that comes later and, to be fair, it was an original location. Mrs Jeffrey Vitkov, so ran the invitation, would be At Home, ‘for Terry,’ on such and such a night at Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks in the Euston Road.

I do not know if you can still hire the waxworks for a private party. Not just a room, or a special chamber set aside for ‘entertaining,’ but the whole edifice and all it holds. I doubt it, or if you can, I imagine the price would be prohibitive to all save the super-rich, but forty years ago you could. There was less danger in it for them, of course, than there would be today. Apart from any other reason we were a more law-abiding lot. We took more care. Crime, as it might touch the middle and upper classes, was rare. People may groan when they hear that houses in the country were not locked, but they weren’t. Not if one had just gone shopping. In central London we walked home alone at night without a qualm. Shoplifting was not considered cool by anyone. It was just stealing. I don’t think mugging was sufficiently common even to qualify for a special name. And again, as I said, we were much less drunk. This did not mean, of course, that every party went without mishap.

I dined very well on the night of Terry’s ball because my hosts for the dinner beforehand, had forgotten all about it. I turned up at the door of a rather smart house in Montpelier Square, joined on the step as I waited for the occupants to respond to my ring of the bell by Lucy Dalton and a man I hardly knew, who later became the head of Schroder’s, or some such spangled operation, although you couldn’t have told his future held such promise then. The three of us stood, shifting our weight from foot to foot, until the door was at last opened by Mrs Northbrook (for that was her name), who stood there in jeans and a jersey, with a gin and tonic in her other hand. At the sight of us the blood drained from her face and we were greeted with the telling words, ‘Jesus Christ, it’s not tonight!’ The result of this was that Mr Northbrook was summoned with a scream and had to book a table for ten at an excellent place just across from Harrods, in that funny little triangle which I think used to have a grass bit in front of it, or have I made that up? As we waited, we all sat in their pretty, untidy and unready drawing room, swilling down some rather good Pouilly Fumé, which Laura Northbrook (we had moved on since the doorstep moment) had providentially found in the fridge before she joined her husband upstairs to struggle into their clothes. After such a welcome they could hardly stint with these frightful strangers wished upon them and the result was one of the best dinners I had eaten all year.

Our group was therefore in a jolly and convivial mood when we arrived at the famous entrance at about eleven that night. I suppose there must have been bouncers or someone similar to admit us, but, as I’ve already said, I have no solid memory of cards to be taken, or lists to be ticked off. The main party space had been arranged in what was then, and maybe is now, known as the Hall of Kings. The wax images of England’s Royalty had been moved back into a circle round the dance floor, cleared at the centre, but the figures were still sufficiently spaced apart for us to be able to stroll among them and photographs would later appear in the press – though not in the Tatler, which had originally been the plan – of debs and their escorts apparently standing next to Henry VIII or Queen Caroline of Anspach. I was myself snapped with a girl I knew from my Hampshire years after my father’s retirement from the diplomatic. It never, mercifully, appeared in print, but for some reason now forgotten I still have a copy of the picture. We look as if we’re talking to a startled and offended Princess Margaret.

As we know, every waxwork ever made appears to be either under sedation, or recently arrested for criminal assault and in this respect almost uniquely, the last four decades have seen little change. Except perhaps in their subject matter. We certainly all knew far more history then, that is the whole nation did, not just the privileged, the educational establishment having not yet broken the link between teaching and the imparting of knowledge; so figures like Wellington and Disraeli and Gordon of Khartoum still had a resonance that spread far beyond the elite, the only group today who might have heard of them. Nor, when it came to waxworks, was there the modern, pusillanimous terror of causing offence and I can bear witness that the Chamber of Horrors in those days was really horrible. That night it had been set aside for a discothèque, and when Lucy and I went downstairs to explore it was quite clear the authorities were a long way from worrying about whether or not someone might get hit by a falling basket of nasturtiums or a stray conker.

There were stone pillars dividing the space and at the top of each, on a little ledge, was a severed head, disfigured with some hideous atrocity. Eyes hung out of sockets, flaps of skin revealed whitened bone, one even had an iron bar thrust right through it, causing the face to look very surprised, as well it might. A long glass case held miniature examples of every torture known to man, some quite new to me, and we walked slowly down it, wondering at human cruelty. Then there were the serial killers, although I don’t believe that term was yet in use, but we certainly had them, if by some other title. George Smith, who drowned several unfortunate brides, presided over a bathtub which, we were told, was the actual one in which he had perpetrated his crimes, Dr Hawley Crippen was there and John Haig, who had met his chief victim in the Onslow Court Hotel, which I knew well since it was just down the street from where my grandmother used to live. Haig selected Mrs Durand-Deacon from among the diners in the restaurant and worked his way into her affections before he took her off to the country somewhere and plunged her into a vat of acid. Lucy and I stood, silenced by the sight of these drab and ordinary men who had caused such untold misery. Today these displays tend to have a comic, even camp, element to them which somehow protects one from the reality that what you are witnessing is true, that all these terrible things did happen, but then there was a counter-impetus, to make it as real as possible and the result was curiously haunting, even remembered now, after so long.

At last, in the very centre of the chamber we came upon a dingy curtain with an instruction not to pull it open without preparing well. I think it was forbidden to anyone under sixteen or something similarly enticing. It was the curtain that fascinated me. It was old, threadbare and dirty, like a curtain in a garden shed to hide the weedkillers from sight, and in a way this made it much more sinister than some self-advertising veil of scarlet satin. ‘Shall we?’ I said.

‘You do it. I don’t want to look.’ Lucy turned away but did not, of course, move. People say things like this, not because they intend not to look but because they do not wish to take any responsibility for the horrors that will be revealed. It is a way of enjoying base pleasures while retaining their superiority.

I pulled back the curtain. The shock was immediate and stark. Even if it was not prompted by the young woman who was hanging from an iron hook that had penetrated her vitals and on which she was apparently writhing in vivid, screaming agony. This, I could handle. What almost made me cry out in pain was the sight of Damian holding Serena in a fierce embrace and quite obviously plunging his tongue so far into her mouth that she must have had trouble breathing. Although I cannot pretend that she looked, even to me, as if she were resisting his advances. Far from it. She clawed at his back, she ran her fingers through his hair, she squeezed her body against his, until she seemed to be attempting somehow to crush the pair of them into one single being. ‘No wonder the curtain carried a warning,’ said Lucy and they froze, then looked across at us. I desperately searched for a phrase that would contain my rage at Damian, my disappointment in Serena and my contempt for the new morality all at once. It was too ambitious. I might have been able to make up a combination word in German, but English has its limitations.

‘You’re busy,’ I said. Which didn’t exactly hit the mark I was aiming at.

They had broken apart by now and Serena was straightening herself up. Her body language told so clearly that she was longing to ask both of us, Lucy and me, not to say anything, but of course she felt the request would be demeaning. ‘We won’t say anything,’ I said.

‘I don’t care if you do,’ she replied with immense relief.

Damian, meanwhile, was carrying on with his usual insouciance. ‘I’ll see you later on.’ He gave Serena a swift hug and wiped the lipstick off his mouth with a handkerchief, which he replaced in his pocket. Without a word to us he slipped through the curtain and was gone.

The sound of an O. C. Smith record, which was much in demand that summer, Hickory Holler’s Tramp, suddenly filled the space, making an odd cultural contrast with all those severed heads and murderers and the luckless victim swinging on her hook, but the three of us still stood there. Until there was a noise and the unwelcome face of Andrew Summersby poked round the curtain. ‘There you are,’ he said, ignoring us, ‘I’ve been looking everywhere.’ He took in our grotesque, waxen companion. ‘Ooh er.’ He laughed. ‘Someone’s going to wake up with indigestion.’ And he gave the figure a push, as if she were in a child’s swing. The hideous thing moved slowly back and forth at the end of its rope.

‘Let’s dance,’ said Lucy, and without another word to Serena we left her to the noble dullard, and made our way to a dark little dance floor in the shadow of a guillotine, on to which a French aristocrat in a jacket of cheap-looking wrinkled velveteen, was being strapped by two burly revolutionaries. From a draped alcove to one side the entire Royal Family of France looked on serenely.

‘Are you all right?’ To my bewilderment, Lucy appeared to be on the edge of tears. I couldn’t imagine why.

She was irritated by the enquiry. ‘Of course I am,’ she said sharply, bobbing fiercely in time to the music for a bit. Then she looked up at me apologetically. ‘Don’t mind me,’ she said. ‘I had some bad news just as I was leaving home and it suddenly came back.’ I looked suitably solicitous. ‘An aunt of mine, my mother’s sister. She’s got cancer.’ This was quite clever of her, I can see now. At the time I am writing of, the English had just about begun to move on from referring to cancer as ‘a long illness bravely borne,’ but there was still something dread in the word, still something, if not exactly shameful, at least to be avoided at all costs. In those days the diagnosis was generally considered a death sentence, and when one heard of people taking treatments one almost despised them for not being able to face the truth, although I suppose logic tells us some of them must have survived, mustn’t they? Anyway, the point is it wasn’t at all like today, when you really do have a reasonable shot, if not quite as reasonable in every case as non-medicos tend to assume. For Lucy to say the word at all was bound to distract me. Still, looking back, I admit I am slightly embarrassed that I completely believed her explanation.

‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘But there are all sorts of things they can do now.’ One mouthed these clichés at the time, they were as routine as ‘How do you do?’ but one never thought they contained a grain of truth. She gave a routine nod and we danced on.

For some reason, an innocent one I am certain, Terry or more probably her mother had decided to cut a cake at the peak of the evening. This was not generally done. As I have observed, in those pre-don’t-drink-and-drive days, we ate before we arrived and we did not generally eat again until the breakfast was served towards the end of the dance. There might occasionally be some sort of speech and a toast, although by no means always, at a mid point in the festivities, but this usually consisted of some old uncle just standing and saying what a marvellous girl so-and-so was, and we would all raise our glasses and that was that. There were dangers involved in this departure from the norm, but quite honestly, when there was no speech, which was usually the case, there were times when the proceedings fell a bit flat. We arrived, we drank, we danced, we went home and there had never been what my mother would refer to as ‘A Moment’ in the evening that really registered. The father of the deb in question would have the bitter knowledge that he had paid out thousands upon thousands for a night that no one would remember. On the other hand the danger of a speech and a toast is always that it may in some way feel rather naff. At least, when the occasion is not a wedding or something where speeches are generally expected. Anyway, on this particular evening, perhaps because neither Terry nor Verena was absolutely at ease with the rules, they decided to have cake and a toast, as if it had indeed been the wedding it was not.

I gather people wandering throughout the waxworks were summoned by a kind of tannoy, which would obviously have been installed in that building anyway for crowd control, but by then Lucy and I were back in the Hall of Kings, seated rather wearily at a table with Georgina Waddilove and Richard Tremayne, an unlikely couple if you like, overlooked by some of the duller members of the Hanoverian dynasty, one of whom was responsible for Richard’s predecessor, the first Duke of Trent, in what I suspect must have been an uncharacteristic night of merriment. I have forgotten why Richard was with us, probably because he was tired and couldn’t find anywhere else to sit. At all events Jeff Vitkov, who had come over from New York especially for the ball and was obviously determined to make his mark, took the microphone from the band singer and announced that he was going to propose a toast to his ‘young and beautiful daughter, and her even younger and more beautiful mother.’ This is the kind of thing that makes the English cringe, of course, and we were only just recovering when he added that we were all going to eat some genuine, American brownies, to mark the ‘debut,’ ugh, of a ‘genuine, American girl.’ Quite apart from the toe-curling sentimentality of all this, to most of us in those days ‘Brownies’ meant young Girl Guides, just as ‘Cubs’ meant young Boy Scouts, so there was a certain amount of hilarity released by the announcement that we were going to eat some, but we listened on as Jeff praised his daughter, Terry, who then seized the microphone for herself, paying tearful tribute to her wonderful ‘Pop and Mom,’ which made us freeze even more solidly in our chairs. Taking up a large knife, she sort of slid it through a mound of the brownies in question, and after that a mass of waitresses appeared, carrying decorated trays full of the little sticky brown cakes we now all know so well but didn’t then. I hate chocolate and I remember so did Georgina, so, alone at our table, we didn’t eat any, but they must have been good, because more or less everyone else did, and across the room I could see Damian absolutely piling in.

The events that followed a little while later seemed to start almost as a rumour, a sense of strangeness spreading through the gathering, before anyone was aware of the source. I recall that I was dancing with Minna Bunting, although our little walkout was over by that stage, and there was suddenly the sound of someone being violently sick. Which, then, was very startling. People on the dance floor began to look at each other, as there were more odd sounds, men and women started to scream with laughter, not ordinary amused laughter, but a shrill cackling like a witches’ coven at work. In what seemed like no time at all we could hear shouting and singing and yelling and crying coming from every corner. I looked at my partner to share my puzzlement, but even she didn’t look too clever. ‘I feel incredibly ill,’ she muttered and walked off the floor without another word. I hurried after her, but at the edge she suddenly clutched her head and ran off somewhere, presumably to a distant but welcoming cloakroom. Somehow the dancers themselves had maintained a kind of order, but once we had left them, the crowd filling the rest of the rooms and swirling around us felt slightly – or, before long, very – mad. One of the mothers rushed past me, with her bosom hanging out of her dress and I saw Annabella Warren, Andrew Summersby’s sister, screaming and lying flat out, with her skirt hitched above her midriff, displaying some thoroughly unusual-looking underwear, possibly recycled by her nanny. Not far away a young man in the corner was in the process of pulling his shirt over his head. In the mêlée I had soon lost sight of Minna, but someone caught my arm.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ Georgina was by my side, her impressive bulk providing me with something to shelter behind. A girl tripped and fell, spreadeagled at our feet, laughing.

‘Come on, everybody! Clap your hands!’ The voice, amplified by the microphone, was only too familiar. We turned and registered that the boy undressing was now revealed as none other than Master Baxter, who had shed the rest of his clothes, and was cavorting wildly round the stage in his underpants and looking in grave danger of losing even those.

By now the ballroom was bedlam. Some people must have escaped at the first signs of trouble, with that marvellous instinct that the British upper classes generally display in such a situation, but those who were not at the exits already were finding it increasingly hard to get to them. Suddenly I caught sight of Terry, in the midst of the demented crowd. Her hair had collapsed and a separate arrangement of ringlets had detached itself from her head and somehow got caught on a zip or hook fastener behind her neck, leaving a kind of mane to sweep down her back, making her look faintly feral as she attempted to claw her way through the ranks of her guests. I reached across a weeping man with his regurgitated dinner down his front and caught her wrist, pulling her through the crowd towards us. ‘What is it? What’s happening?’

‘Somebody spiked the brownies. They were full of hash.’

‘What?’ Is it to be believed that the word was not immediately familiar to me? Or was it just the shock of discovery blocking my concentration?

‘Hash. Marijuana. Dope.’ Terry was altogether more at home with the topic, if angrier than Genghis Khan.

‘Why? Who would do such a thing?’

‘Someone who wanted to ruin my party and pretend to themselves it was a joke.’ This was, I have no doubt, a completely accurate diagnosis. She was rich, she was good-looking, she was an outsider. That was more than enough to ensure enmity in several quarters, although this seemed an unusually unpleasant way of demonstrating it. Then again, the perpetrator may not have been aware of the level of mayhem that would ensue from their jolly prank. We were not all experts then.

‘You seem OK.’

‘I’m OK because I’m on a diet.’ She said it snappily and it was almost funny, if we had not been in the middle of such desolation. At that moment a weeping Verena Vitkov claimed her daughter from the other side. Someone had trodden on her dress, and it had torn away from a seam at the waist, leaving not her legs but her roll-on exposed, which was of course much worse.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said to Georgina and she nodded, but then two things happened. The first was that I could see Serena Gresham had climbed on to the stage with a dinner jacket, presumably Damian’s, which she was trying to wrap round him despite his protests. She also had his trousers over her arm but obviously that task was a bridge too far and she didn’t even attempt it. The second thing to catch at our attention was the sound of a police whistle, which echoed through the chamber like the shrill tolling of Doom. At once, what had already been chaos was transformed into a panicking stampede. It is easy now to think, almost calmly, of the notion of a drugs raid. In the forty years that have elapsed since these events, drugs themselves have ceased to seem extraordinary. Regrettable, I would hope, and something to be avoided for most of us even today, but no longer weird. In those days the vast majority of this crowd were strangers to the very notion. Whatever the impression that pop stars and Channel Four like to give of the Sixties, if their tales are true, which I often doubt, they were operating in a different world from my bunch. Obviously the bad boys among us were starting to experiment and by seven or eight years later a lot of us would have been introduced to the whole trendy culture of drugs and damn-it-all, but not by then. After all, most of what came to be called ‘the Sixties’ happened in the following decade. Yet here we were, debutantes and beaux, plus many of their mothers and fathers, in a full-scale drugs raid, which would provide, as we were only too aware, a perfectly wonderful story for the papers the following day. Out of family loyalty, if nothing else, all those nice, young sons and daughters of earls and viscounts, of high court judges and generals, of bankers and heads of corporations, had to get out of that room unseen and unapprehended, to stop their blameless daddies being soaked in the spray of public ridicule that was even then being loaded up, ready to flow. If the room had been on fire there couldn’t have been a more urgent dash for the door.

I too would have headed in the same direction as the crowd, but Georgina held me back. ‘It’s hopeless,’ she said. ‘They’ll be waiting for us on the pavement.’

‘Where, then?’

‘This way. There’ll be a service exit for the group. And the maids must have been bringing the drinks up from somewhere.’

Together we pushed against the crowd. I glimpsed Candida Finch, green-faced and at the end of her tether, leaning against the opposite wall but she was too far away for me to help her. Some girls were dancing a sort of reel, accompanying themselves with alternating screams, in the middle of the floor between us. Then Candida was swept away and I didn’t see her again. ‘This is a nightmare.’ Serena was nearly upon me when I realised who it was. She had an arm round Damian, who was still ranting and calling out to everyone to clap their hands. ‘I’ll clap your hands if you don’t shut up,’ she said, but it didn’t seem to have much effect. Damian fell, and others surged over him, until I really began to wonder if he would be seriously injured. ‘Help me get him up.’ Serena was down among the lunging feet and I knew I had to do my best. Together we managed to hook our arms under his and literally drag him to the edge of the room.

‘Why are you all right? Didn’t you eat any either?’

Serena wrinkled her nose. ‘I wasn’t hungry.’

‘Here we go!’ The enterprising Georgina had found a service door at the back behind a curtain that a few people, but not many, were taking advantage of. Behind us, the whistles and general shouting had increased in volume, and it was clear that those who had tried to leave in a more orthodox manner were being subjected to hideous humiliations before they were allowed to do so.

‘My God, the press is outside!’ This from Lucy, who had started down the main stair, only to make this unwelcome discovery and beat a retreat whence she had come. ‘If I get in the paper my father will kill me.’ It’s funny. We were so much more governed by these considerations than our equivalents are now.

Following our leader, Georgina, we came to a landing at the top of a stone, service staircase. Guests in various stages of dishevelment were hurrying down it. One girl broke her heel and fell the remainder of the second flight with a scream, but without pausing she scrambled up, tore the shoe off the other foot and plunged on. Unfortunately, Damian seemed to be getting worse. He had now ceased his requests for us to clap our hands and had decided instead simply to go to sleep. ‘I’m perfectly all right,’ he murmured, his chin sinking deeply into his chest. ‘I just need a little shuteye and then I’ll be as right as rain.’ Down went his chin even further, followed by his eyelids, and he began to snore.

‘We’ll have to leave him,’ said Georgina. ‘They won’t kill him. He’ll just have his name taken, and a warning or something of the kind, and that’ll be the end of it.’

‘I’m not leaving him,’ said Serena. ‘Who knows what they’ll do? And what happens afterwards? If he has his name on a list at a drugs raid, he might never get a passport or a security rating or a job at an embassy or anything.’ This string of words, flooding out as they did, created a rather marvellous contrast to the life we were leading at that precise moment, cowering on a dingy, back stairway, on the run from the police. It conjured up images of embassy gatherings at which Damian would shine, and foreign travel and important work in the City. I found myself wishing that Serena had voiced such fragrant worries about my destiny.

But Georgina was unconvinced. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. He’s not newsworthy. That’s the only thing we have to worry about. You’re a headline. She’s a headline. Even I’m worth a mention. He’s not. Leave him here to sleep it off. Maybe they won’t come up this far.’

‘I’m not leaving him,’ said Serena. ‘You go without us if you want.’

I remembered her defence of Damian at Dagmar’s ball, when she stood up for him alone and all the rest of us were silent. I decided I was not prepared for a repetition. ‘I’ll help,’ I said. ‘If we balance him between us we’ll manage.’ She looked at me. I could tell she was pretty grateful not to have been taken up on her suggestion of facing the Mongol hordes alone. So we did just as I said. Hoisting him up, and against a low chorus of Damian’s mumbled protests about just needing a little shuteye, the group of us somehow got him to the bottom of the stair. We hurried past the ground floor, since we could hear the shouted protests of indignant adults being stopped and questioned, as well as screams and yells and singing coming from the young. Eventually we found ourselves in a basement, searching for a door or window that would open.

We were alone, a little club against the world, in a very murky passage, when a side door opened and a girl stuck her head out. ‘There’s a window here that seems to lead out to an alley,’ she said and ducked back inside the room. I did not know her well. Her name was Charlotte Something and she ended up a countess, but I forget which one it was. Nevertheless, I shall always remember her with real gratitude. She had no obligation to come back and tell us of her useful find, instead of just climbing out and running for it. That kind of generosity, when there is nothing in it for the giver, is what always touches one most. Anyway, we followed her into what must have been a sort of cleaning cupboard because it was full of brushes and dusters and tins of polish, and sure enough there was an unbarred window, which had been forced open for what looked like the first time since the Armistice.

Here, as before, the problem was Damian, almost comatose by this point, and we wrestled with him for a bit until finally Georgina, who was stronger than any of us, bent down and threw her shoulder beneath him in a sort of fireman’s lift and, with an exasperated sigh, flung him at the open space. Serena had already climbed out and was able to grab one arm and his head, and with her and Lucy pulling, while Georgina and I pushed, we did succeed in getting him through, although it was too much like assisting at the delivery of a baby elephant for my taste. There were men’s voices in the passage outside, as Georgina squeezed out, and I would guess I was probably the last to make it to freedom by that route before it was sealed off by the enemy. We pulled down the window as quickly as we could, then raced to the end of the alley, Georgina and I dragging Damian between us. You will understand that to be pulling a largish young man, naked except for underpants and a dinner jacket, was unusual to say the least of it, and we could not consider ourselves out of danger until Serena, waving us into the shadows, had managed to stop an innocent taxi driver, who had no idea what he was letting himself in for.

‘Where shall we take him?’ she hissed over her shoulder and even I could see that this would be a large mouthful for the Claremonts to swallow on an empty stomach. I imagine he had originally planned to drive himself back to Cambridge, after a cup of coffee or two, as I blush to say we did in those days, but clearly that was now out of the question.

‘My flat. Wetherby Gardens,’ I said. My parents were there, but after nineteen years of me they were not entirely unequipped for this sort of escapade. Serena gave the address and, opening the door, she climbed in ready for Georgina and me to rush Damian across the pavement and into the welcoming darkness of the cab. We made it, clambering in with puffing and sighing, and Lucy hurried in behind us. It may sound as if the taxi was overloaded and so it was, but you must understand we thought nothing of that, neither passenger nor driver, and nor did the powers that be. They weren’t concerned with micro-managing our lives, as they are today, and in this I think, indeed I know, that we were happier for it. Some changes have been improvements, on some the jury is still out, but when it comes to the constant, meddling intervention by the state, we were much, much better off then than we are now. Of course, there were times when we were at risk and the smug, would-be controllers will tut-tut at that, but to encourage the surrender of freedom in order to avoid danger is the hallmark of a tyranny and always a poor exchange.

‘Should we put his trousers on?’ Serena had somehow managed to keep the flapping items with her. We all looked down at Infant Damian curled up like an unborn child and the thought of the task defeated us.

‘Let’s not,’ said Lucy firmly.

‘What about your poor parents?’ asked Georgina. ‘Suppose they’re still awake?’

Another glance confirmed the earlier decision. ‘They’re strong,’ I said. ‘They can take it.’ With its distinctive rattle, the taxi started off, but as we came back out on to the Euston Road we could see that the police were still there with a host of cars and vans, and there was that now familiar, but then rare, accompaniment of the popping of cameras, blinding the poor wretches caught in their glare, all destined for unwelcome fame on the morrow.

My parents were philosophical, as they stood, blinking, in their dressing gowns, staring down at Damian slumped in a chair, still in his lively and distinctive costume, but now with his trousers deposited in a crumpled pool at his feet, like a ritual offering. ‘He’ll have to sleep on the floor in your room,’ said my mother, without the possibility of any disagreement. ‘I have a committee meeting in here at ten tomorrow morning, and there is no guarantee he’ll be up and about by then.’

‘No,’ I said. And together we dragged Damian down the passage, depositing him on a folded eiderdown with some blankets on top.

‘Where are the rest of his clothes?’ asked my mother. I looked at her blankly. ‘His shirt and so on.’

‘At Madame Tussaud’s, I suppose.’

‘From where he had better not reclaim them.’ Her voice was, I thought, unnecessarily severe. ‘He could have got you all into a great deal of trouble.’

‘That’s rather unfair,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t his fault.’ But my mother paid no attention to my attempted defence. She was only displaying the behaviour that I have since discovered was absolutely endemic to her and to many like her. When they approve of someone in their children’s lives, and when it is because of the social position of said individual, they will never admit it and will find endless excuses for no matter what bad behaviour. But when, instead, they disapprove, again for social rather than more meaningful reasons, rather than concede this, everything else about the unwanted friend must be condemned. This falls into the same category as when they give directions. If it is desirable that you should attend an event, it is ‘easy-peasy, straight down the M4 and you’re there,’ but when they do not believe you should go, the same journey becomes ‘quite endless. You trudge down the M4 forever and when you get off it there’s an absolute maze of roads and villages to be negotiated. It’s not worth it.’ My mother was not a snob in any normal sense, she would have been shocked at the notion that she might be, but that didn’t stop her being offended when she felt I had been ‘latched on to’ (her phrase), and this is what she felt about Damian. There was some truth in her analysis, of course.

Damian woke in the early hours of the following morning, I would guess at around three. I know this because he woke me, too, by whispering ‘are you awake?’ into my ear, until I was. He was completely sober. ‘I’m starving,’ he said. ‘Is there anything to eat?’

‘Couldn’t it wait? You’ll have breakfast in a minute.’

‘I’m afraid it just can’t. I can go and look for myself if you like.’

This seemed like a worse option, so I pulled myself to my feet, pulled on a dressing gown over my pyjamas, all of which garments date the incident, since, like almost every other male, I have abandoned traditional nightwear at some point during the subsequent decades, and I set off through the flat, with Damian following. With difficulty I persuaded him against a fry-up, and he settled for a bowl of cereal followed by some toast and tea. I joined him in the last, as we sat hunched over the tiny kitchen table. He started to laugh. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘The whole evening. Lord only knows what they’ll put in the papers.’

‘Not us, which is the main thing. Poor Terry.’ Nobody seemed to feel at all sorry for the ruin and waste inflicted on our hostess. I felt it was time someone did.

But Damian shook his head. ‘Don’t worry about her. She’ll get a big story out of it. It’ll probably be the defining moment of the Season before she’s finished.’

‘Perhaps it is.’

‘Perhaps.’ Looking back, that party did come to represent a moment for a lot of us, when the past, present and future fused together in some kind of crazy way. When the anti-authority, destabilising counterculture, which would win eventually (although not in the way we all then thought), swept in through the doors of our safe little, nearly-pre- 1939 world and carried us off with it. Damian put another piece of plastic bread in the toaster. ‘I don’t know why I’m so hungry. Does hash make you hungry?’

‘I’m not really the person to ask.’

He looked at me, hesitating and then deciding to speak. ‘I’m afraid you got quite a shock when you pulled back that curtain.’ I was silent, not exactly through indignation or a sense of being wronged. I just couldn’t imagine what I could say that would convey the right message, because I didn’t know what the right message might be. He nodded as if I’d spoken. ‘I know you’re keen on her.’

‘Does she?’ I couldn’t help myself. Aren’t we sad, sometimes? The odd thing was, and I remember this quite clearly, I wasn’t sure what answer I wanted him to give.

Damian shrugged as he helped himself to butter. ‘If I know, I dare say she does.’

‘What about you?’

My question was oddly phrased and he looked up. ‘What do you mean?’

Of course, the fact was I wanted to hit him. Right there, smack, in the middle of his face, with a great, heavy, wounding punch that would send him over backwards, with any luck cracking his head against the stove as he fell. I’ve often wondered what it must be like to live in a rougher world from the one I have always occupied, in a hit-now-ask-questions-later kind of society. One’s always supposed to say how ghastly violence is, and of course it is ghastly, but there must be compensations. ‘Are you serious about her?’ I asked.

He laughed. ‘Don’t be so fucking pompous.’

‘I just meant-’

‘You meant you are so jealous your face hurts, and you’re only assuming a poncy, pseudo-uncle pose so you can patronise me and put me down, and show me I’m a ridiculous interloper, out of my mind for daring to dream so far above my reach.’ He put a bit more marmalade on to his toast and bit into it. Of course, I had to admit that every one of his words was documentary truth. If kicking him to death would have made Serena love me, I would have done it there and then. Biff, boff, bang. Instead, I opted for underhand fighting. ‘I thought she was going out with Andrew Summersby now.’ I was not without a trick or two of my own.

Damian looked up, sharply. ‘Why do you think that?’

‘He seemed very proprietorial when he came looking for her after you’d gone. Then they went off together.’

He gave a slightly annoyed grin. ‘Andrew was at the dinner she had to go to and it is true that right now her parents think she’s going out with him. Since Andrew seems to share this delusion, she couldn’t be bothered to have it out with him tonight. No doubt, she soon will.’

I thought about this. It sounded to me as if Serena and Andrew were indeed an item, a thought that sickened me, and Damian was trying, for my benefit, to exaggerate his chances with her, when all he had managed was one kiss. We may have been more innocent then, but one kiss didn’t mean much. ‘Are you going to her dance?’ I said.

‘Can you ask? I’m staying at Gresham for it.’

I have never been a very confident person, although I do not really know why this is so. It is true that I was not good-looking when I was young, but I was quite clever and I seemed to get about. My parents loved me, I have no doubt of that, and I’ve always had a lot of friends. Nor were girlfriends an insuperable problem, if a few may have been on the lookout for something better. I even got on well with my sister before her marriage. Yet with all this, I was not confident and I had to admire Damian for that reason. No castle walls could apparently keep him out and I envied him for it. Even at that moment, when I wished him in chains, his feet encased in blocks of concrete, at the bottom of the sea. Even as I imagined his thick hair waving as the tides pushed it to and fro, fishes swimming across his staring, sightless eyes, in some way, malgrè moi, I felt admiration. ‘Has Lady Claremont invited you?’

‘Not yet, but she will. Candida and Serena are sorting it out between them. Serena’s going to tell her mother that Candida fancies me.’ He looked at me as he said it. As an alibi this was perfectly sensible and Lady Claremont would believe it, since Candida fancied everything male that moved, but as well as this there was a meaning in his words which I could see he had not thought through properly before he spoke them. Their echo in the room annoyed him. Because his speech meant that if Lady Claremont had even a whiff of this man’s interest in her daughter he would not be welcome in her house. ‘It’s OK,’ he said in answer to my unspoken query. ‘I understand that type. I know I can make her like me.’ Obviously he did not understand Lady Claremont’s type, nor that of her husband, nor that of any of their world, largely because those people were not then, and are not now, interested in being understood by the likes of Damian Baxter. As a matter of fact I think Lady Claremont might well have liked him under different circumstances. She might have enjoyed his humour and his self-belief, she might even have allowed him into their circle as one of those token Real World Members that such households go in for. But that is all.