Past Imperfect

TWELVE

I am not an Englishman who hates Los Angeles. I’m not like those actors and directors who insist that every day spent there is drudgery, that it’s all so ‘false’ they cannot besmirch their souls for one more minute and that they shout with joy when the ’plane takes off from LAX. I suppose some of them may be telling the truth, but I would guess not many. More usually, they are just ashamed of their desire for the rewards that only Hollywood will bring, and they disparage the place and all its works in the hope that they will not lose caste among their soulful brethren back in Blighty. I had only been once before the trip in question, many years before, when I was seeking fame and fortune in a fairly disorientated way, but I have visited a few times recently and I always enjoy myself when I am there. It is a resolutely upbeat place and after a long unbroken stretch of British pessimism, it feels good sometimes to look on the sunny side of life. I know the natives take this to extremes. But still, there is something about the up, Up, UP!ness of it all that is a tonic to sad spirits and I am always pleased to be there.

In the forty years that separated my youthful friendship with Terry Vitkov and this, our re-encounter, she had enjoyed what is known as a chequered career. Even her time in London had not gone according to plan. She and her mother had done quite well, all things considered, but Terry had not ended up a viscountess presiding over twenty bedrooms in a house open to the public, which had unquestionably been the target, and they must have been disappointed. Looking back, I think the difficulty may have been that the Vitkovs as a group had made the common mistake of confusing a large salary with having money. A salary may enable you to live well while it’s coming in, very well, but it does not alter the reality of your position and no one knows this better than the British upper class. Just as television fame, while it continues, feels like film stardom but seldom survives the cancellation of the series. Naturally, none of this would have mattered if a nice young man had fallen in love with Terry, but she was an abrasive personality, with her big features and her big teeth, loud in laughter, short on humour, and with a kind of unconcealed greed that was rather off-putting even to the worldly. In short she did not land her fish. There was a moment when she might have had an army major who was probably in line to get a baronetcy from an ageing uncle (although the latter was unmarried and these things are never certain), but the young officer took fright and fell back into the arms of a judge’s daughter from Rutland. In some ways he might have been better off with Terry, as she would at least have filled the house with people who could talk, but how long would she have stood it, that life of rainy walks and discussing horses over plates of summer pudding, once the title had arrived? So, if the path the Major took was duller, it was also probably smoother for him in the long run.

I last saw her, I am fairly sure, around the time of the party in Estoril, but not because she was there. In fact, she was annoyed that she had failed to secure an invitation. If only I had been so lucky. She may already have been pregnant then, but if so, none of us knew it, only that she had a plain but eager American millionaire pursuing her, divorced but not too old, whom she subsequently married in time for the baby’s birth. The millionaire’s name was Greg Something and he had been working in Eastern Europe at the time. After leaving there they had returned together to sun-drenched California where he pursued a career with Merrill Lynch and we’d lost them. I never really knew him but I liked him and, judging by our few meetings, I would have said he was far better suited to her than any of her English beaux, and if I had given it a moment’s thought, I would have hoped for many years of bliss before Abraham saw fit to part them. Unfortunately, or so the story goes, Terry, a decade further down the line, attempted to cash him in for a much richer banker from Connecticut, before the latter dumped her for a model and left her high and dry, her first husband having made his escape while the going was good and settled down in North Virginia with his second family.

So Terry and her daughter had stayed on in Los Angeles, where she pursued a career of some kind as a television presenter, dealing, or so I have been told, in something called the infomercial, where women chat about hair products and kitchen utensils and different types of luggage in a natural, unstudied way, as if it were remotely believable that they would do so were they not trying to sell you something.

I had rung from London, just to make sure she was still there, and she had been quite receptive to the idea we should catch up. I knew she was not one to be touched by charity, so I told her there was some interest in my latest book from a film studio and predictably that caught at her imagination. ‘But that’s wonderful!’ she trilled. ‘You must tell me all about it when we meet!’ I had done a little homework and I suggested we might dine at a restaurant on the shore in Santa Monica the night after my arrival.

I knew her at once, when she came in and stood for a moment by the maître d’s desk, as he pointed me out to her, and I waved. She started to make her way through the tables in that old no-nonsense way of hers. She was dressed as an American, East Coast, rich woman, which is a different costume from the jeans and chains favoured by workers in the Showbiz Industry, more Park Avenue than footballer’s wife, which I found interesting. A neat, beige shirt-waister, a well-cut jacket over her shoulders, good, discreet jewellery. It was all less flashy and in better taste than I’d been expecting, but still unmistakably Terry. And yet, if I knew her, I also did not know her, this woman with the lacquered hair advancing towards me. I could see that the familiar chin was still too prominent, and the eyes and teeth too large, but other elements of her face had changed alarmingly. She appeared to have had her lips stuffed with some kind of plastic filler, in the way that American women often do now. As a practice it fascinates me, because I have yet to meet a man who doesn’t profess to find it quite repulsive. I can only suppose that some of them must be lying or the surgeons wouldn’t do such a roaring trade. Maybe American men like it more than European ones do.

Thankfully, if Terry’s mouth had become bulbous and mildly unsettling, it was not yet actually disturbing. But it wasn’t alone in betraying the telltale signs of tamper. Her forehead was so smooth she might have been dead, since no expression or mannerism seemed to make it move above the eyebrows, and the eyes themselves had become very fixed in their orbit. Of course, more or less all this stuff, carrying with it, as it must, horrible images of the pinning and stretching and sawing and sewing of bloody skin and bruised bone, has come about in my lifetime and I can’t be alone in finding it an odd fashion to have developed alongside the supposed liberation of women. Cutting their faces about, presumably to please men, does not strike one as a convincing mark of equality. In fact, it feels uncomfortably insecure, a Western manifestation of female circumcision or facial disfigurement or some other dark and ancient method of asserting male ownership.

Plastic surgery is better now than forty years ago, when it was largely reserved for actresses and foreign ones at that. But even now, when the results can be spectacular, there is a high and ironic price to pay, because for most men it’s a turnoff to end all. The knowledge that a woman has been sliced about diminishes to nothing one’s desire to see her without her kit. Although here I admit that women pay less high a price than men. Women who have ‘work done’ lose their sexual power over men. Men who resort to it lose everything.

Terry had reached my table. ‘My God! You look-’ She hesitated. I think she had been planning to say ‘exactly the same!’ but, having come nearer and actually seen me, it was obvious that my appearance had altered so completely that I should carry a passport to prove my identity to anyone who has not met me since the Sixties. ‘Fantastic!’ she said instead, which did the work perfectly acceptably. I smiled. I had already got to my feet so I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Now, you do look fantastic,’ I said and we sat, jovial and comfortable in our generous dishonesty.

A bland and pleasant-looking waiter stepped in briskly to tell us that his name was Gary and he very much hoped we were going to have an enjoyable evening, a hope I shared, even if I can never really see why it should matter much to the Garys of this world either way. He poured out two glasses of ice cubes, with a little water, and explained the specials, which all seemed to be frightening and hitherto unknown kinds of fish, and then, after promising to bring us some Chardonnay, he left us to our own devices. ‘So, how is life in California?’ This wasn’t a very original opener, but I had by this stage of the Damian Mission, acquired the habit of going in gently, knowing that I would be investigating the paternity of their young before the night was out.

She gave a bright, generalised smile. ‘Great!’ she said, which was what I expected. I knew that with Californians this first act of any conversation is obligatory, where all decisions they have ever made are the right ones. Later, in some cases, the truth level may improve, but even for those rare individuals who long to unburden themselves of their pain they must still observe this ritual. Rather like having to eat the bread and butter before Nanny will give you cake.

‘You never felt the need to go back to Cincinnati?’

She shook her head. ‘It wasn’t what I wanted. Not really. Greg’s business was here.’ She smiled and waved her hand towards the window. We could just hear the sounds of the sea under the restaurant hubbub. ‘And there are no complaints about the weather.’

I nodded, mainly because one is always supposed to agree with this, but I can’t be the only Englishman who finds those endlessly sunny days rather dull. I like our weather. I like the soft light of its grey days and the smell of the air after rain. Most of all I like the sudden changeability. ‘If you’re tired of the weather in England,’ goes the old adage, ‘just wait for five minutes.’ I know it makes it hard to arrange outdoor events and no hostess with a brain would plan anything that was completely weather dependent, but even so… Anyway, I let it go.

Nice Gary had returned and poured out some wine, while we took a final glance at the menu. ‘Is it possible to have the seafood salad but without the shrimp or the calamari?’ Terry had begun the dismemberment of the official suggestions that is part of eating out with a West Coast resident. ‘And what exactly is in the dressing?’ Gary answered as best he could, but he did not achieve a sale. ‘Is there chicken stock in the artichoke soup?’ He thought not. But did he know? No, he wasn’t completely sure. So he went to the kitchen and returned with the happy news that the stock was vegetarian friendly, but while he was away, Terry had moved on. ‘Is there any flour in the tempura batter?’ I looked at her. She smiled. ‘I’m allergic to gluten.’ It was something that obviously pleased her. Gary, of course, was used to this. He was probably a West Coast boy himself and had grown up in the certain knowledge that only people of low status order off the menu as it is printed. However, I think we were all coming to realise that Terry was approaching the moment when, even in Santa Monica, a decision might be required. ‘I think I’ll start with some asparagus, but no butter or dressing, just olive oil. Then scallops, but hold the mixed salad. I’ll take hearts of lettuce, plain.’ Gary managed to write all this down, relieved no doubt that his release was on the horizon. He turned to me. Too soon. ‘Can I get some spinach?’ Why do Americans say ‘get’ in this context? They are not presumably planning to go into the kitchen and fetch it themselves. ‘Mashed but not creamed. Absolutely no cream.’

She turned to me, but I spoke first. ‘You’re allergic to dairy.’

She nodded happily. Meanwhile, Gary had noted every detail on his little pad. She still hadn’t finished. ‘Is the spinach cooked with salt?’ With infinite and, I thought, admirable patience, Gary ventured that yes, the spinach was cooked with a little salt. Terry shook her head, as if it were hard to believe in this day and age, ‘no salt when they cook it.’ I could not imagine how, even under this provocation, Patient Gary kept his cool. He hoped that would be possible. ‘It’s possible,’ said Terry. ‘No salt.’ By now I could see that even Gary, that laid-back boy from sunny California, was ready to sink his pencil deep into Terry’s neck and stand by, watching, as the blood oozed out around its tip. But he nodded, not trusting himself to give a vocal response.

He turned to me and we exchanged eye contact, recognising our alliance in that strange way that one can befriend a total stranger who has been a co-witness to impossible behaviour. ‘I’ll have the artichoke soup, a steak, medium rare and a green salad.’ He seemed almost bewildered that the process had been so speedy.

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it.’

With the hint of a sigh, he was just moving away, when Terry spoke again. ‘Is there mayonnaise in your coleslaw?’

Gary paused. When he spoke again his voice had acquired the super-softness of a doctor’s when dealing with a potentially dangerous patient. ‘Yes, madam,’ he said. ‘There is mayonnaise in our coleslaw.’

‘Oh. Then forget it.’ She dismissed him with a slight, insulting flick of her hand and picked up her glass for another drink.

In justice, having been a silent witness for so long, I felt the need to intervene. ‘Terry.’ She turned, surprised perhaps that I should have an opinion. ‘There’s always mayonnaise in coleslaw.’

Again that little shake of the head in wondering disbelief. ‘Not in our house,’ she said and Gary made his escape.

Obviously, what this little vignette had told me was that Terry’s life in California was not Great! These bids to be different, this insistence on the power to change, to inflict absolute governance in the captive situation of a restaurant, are the recourse of those who feel no power to change anything elsewhere. Los Angeles is a town where status is all and status is only given to success. Dukes and millionaires and playboys by the dozen may arrive and be glad-handed for a time, but they are unwise if they choose to live there, because the town is, perhaps even creditably, committed to recognising only professional success, and nothing else, to be of lasting value. The burdensome obligation imposed on all its inhabitants is therefore to present themselves as successes, because otherwise they forfeit their right to respect in that environment. How’s the family? Great! The new job? Best decision I ever made! The house? Terrific! All this, when the man in question is bankrupt, facing repossession, his children are on drugs and he is teetering on the brink of a divorce. There is no place in that town for the ‘interesting failure,’ or for anyone who is not determined on a life that will be shaped in an upward-heading curve.

‘So, what happened to Greg? I heard you split up.’

This seemed to buck her up. ‘They talk about me, then? Over there?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said, although it had in fact been thirty years since anyone I knew had mentioned her name – before Damian, that is.

‘I guess they still remember my party.’

They didn’t, but even I could see they might have. ‘Did you ever find out who did it?’

‘Not until a long time later. Then someone said it was that guy who married Lucy Somebody. Your friend. He knew the girl who was making the brownies and he mixed it in when she wasn’t looking. That was her story, anyway.’

Philip Rawnsley-Price. Much good did it do him.

She was back on track. ‘Greg’s OK. I don’t really see him now.’ She shrugged and poured another glass. We were nearly through the bottle and the first course hadn’t arrived. I wondered if she’d like to change to red. She would. My old pal Gary arrived with some food and scuttled away to fetch more wine before Terry could question him about the contents of her plate. She moved some items around disdainfully with her fork. ‘Jesus, I hope they don’t use cornflour on these.’

‘Why would they?’

‘Sometimes they do. The next morning I look like a racoon.’ How tiring it must be to live in an atmosphere of permanent danger. She started to eat with a certain amount of gusto, despite the risks. ‘Greg’s done pretty well, actually. He saw what was coming with the whole silicone thing and left Merrill Lynch to get into it. He understood the potential before most people did. Really. I should have stayed with him.’ She laughed wryly with, I detected, a certain amount of real feeling.

‘Why didn’t you?’ I was curious to know if she would tell me about the flighty millionaire who had tempted her from her vows.

‘Oh, you know.’ She gave me an inclusively immoral grin. ‘I met a guy.’

‘And what happened?’

Terry shrugged. ‘It didn’t work out.’ She shook her hair back with a soft, mirthless laugh. ‘Lordie, lordie, was I lucky to be rid of him!’

‘Were you?’

The glance I received in answer to this told me that she was, in fact, very unlucky to have been rid of the man in question and that in all probability he represented the Big Plan which would never now reach fruition. ‘Let’s not talk about him.’

Of course, I probably shouldn’t have probed this bit of her story. It was, after all, the failed part and therefore anti-Californian. I wondered how often she had regretted leaving Greg, now clearly as rich as Croesus. ‘How’s your daughter?’

‘Susie?’ She seemed quite interested that I had this information. ‘You remember Susie?’

‘Well, I remember you got married and had a baby straight away. And all much sooner than most of the rest of us.’

She was drunk enough by this time to grimace at the memory. ‘Damn right she was born straight away. Boy, I took a gamble there and, I may tell you, I very nearly lost.’ This was rather intriguing, so I said nothing and hoped for more. Which I got. ‘Greg was a big mixture back then. His growing up was completely Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee, going to the prom, dancing to the Beach Boys, you know the kind of thing.’

‘I do.’ In fact, the Americanism of my youth was powerfully evocative of a cleaner, more innocent world, when in Hollywood movies the whole world wanted to be American and the big issue, not only for Greg but for everyone, was who wore your pin. Yes, it was blinkered, but it was also charming in its fathomless self-belief.

Terry continued, ‘His parents were religious, very Midwest, and that was their existence. But Greg was also a Sixties boy, talking the talk, walking the walk. Smoking the dope. You know how it was.’ Of course I knew how it was. A whole generation waiting to see which side of the wall the world was going to jump. And half at least of them pretending that things were no longer important to them, when of course they were. ‘Anyway, he kept saying he was too young to settle down and couldn’t we just have fun…’

And couldn’t you?’

Her eye narrowed for a moment. ‘I needed a life. I needed to move on.’ The alcohol was making her honest. ‘I needed money.’

‘Your father had money.’

‘My father had a salary.’ The distinction, as we know, was not lost on me. ‘And I liked Greg. I thought we’d be happy. And I knew he’d never let his parents find out he had an illegitimate child.’ She paused.

‘That was the gamble.’

‘As I said. We’d been living together for a few months, which was, if you remember, pretty wild at the time. Then Greg’s bank posted him to Poland and he asked me to go with him. So I did. And he still couldn’t make up his mind. So I got pregnant.’

‘While you were there?’

‘Sure. We married and she was born out there. In Warsaw.’

‘How romantic.’

‘It wasn’t as romantic then as it might be now. Believe me.’ I did.

‘What did your parents think about it?’

‘They were glad. They liked Greg.’ She thought for a moment. ‘They split up, you know.’

‘No, I didn’t know. I’m sorry.’

‘It worked out. They’re both fine. Mom got married again.’

‘Give her my love.’ She nodded. ‘What happened to your father? Did he marry?’

She shook her head. ‘Not yet. He’s decided he’s gay. Of course, he could still marry, I guess. These days. But he hasn’t.’

‘Is he happy?’

‘I’m not sure. He hasn’t got anyone… special. But then he hasn’t got my mom yelling at him either.’

We both smiled at our joint recollection of the formidable Verena. But I was struck, for the millionth time, by the personal convolutions required by our new century. Would it have occurred to Jeff Vitkov, nice, boring, old Jeff, the brilliant entrepreneur and family man, to question his sexuality when he had got well into his fifties, in any other period but our own? If he had been born even twenty years earlier, he would just have taken up golf, seen a bit more of the chaps at the club and not given the matter another thought. Would he have been any worse off? I doubt it. Although this is not a topic that supports nostalgia. Even if I am not a fan of change for change’s sake, nor indeed of most change if it comes to that, I am fairly sure that in the end we will all be better off for living in a world where any kind of sexuality is compatible with the twin notions of decency and commitment. But I suppose I just wish the whole subject could drop into the background again where it used to be, and not be compulsorily worn around society’s neck day in, day out.

I didn’t see I could contribute much on the subject of Jeff and his trials, so I just smiled. ‘Anyway, you’re all right. That’s the main thing.’

‘Yeah,’ she also smiled, but hers stopped short of her eyes. ‘Donnie’s OK.’ Donnie was obviously the new husband. I wasn’t sure that ‘OK’ quite sold him with any strength of purpose, but I suppose they’d been together for a few years by then.

‘Does he get on with Susie?’ I was naturally much more interested in getting back to my quarry.

‘Yuh.’ She shrugged. ‘I mean, Susie’s a grown woman now. But yes, they get on, I guess.’

‘I guess’ ranked somewhere alongside ‘OK’ when it came to degrees of ecstatic joy. Try as I might, I couldn’t read this as a household drenched in sunbeams. ‘What does she do?’

‘She’s a producer.’

Of course, in Los Angeles this doesn’t mean much more than ‘she’s a member of the human race.’ Later, after this visit, when Damian’s mission had resulted, perhaps ironically, in my opening up an American career for myself, I would be much more familiar with the ways of the city, but I was an innocent then. ‘How exciting,’ I said. ‘What’s she produced?’ As I have observed, if I had known more I would not have asked this question.

Terry smiled even more brightly. ‘She’s got a lot of very interesting projects. She’s working on something for Warner’s right now.’ She nodded as if this brought the subject to a close, which of course it did.

‘Is she married?’

‘Divorced. And fucked up with it.’ The remark had slipped out, loudly, and now she regretted it. ‘To be honest, we don’t see a lot of each other. You know how it is. She’s busy.’ She shrugged. I can’t imagine that she thought she was concealing her pain, but maybe she did.

‘Of course.’ I know I am sounding increasingly feeble in my report of this interchange, but Terry’s volume was rising and I was becoming uncomfortably aware that the people on both sides of our table were pretending to talk and had in fact tuned into our conversation.

Gary the Wary now returned to our table, bringing huge, Californian, mounded platefuls, draining my appetite away, and Terry ordered another bottle. ‘Do you see anyone now?’ she muttered between sips. ‘Anyone from the old crowd?’ I was not convinced that Terry had ever really been in our old ‘crowd,’ if crowd there had been, but it seemed a good moment to bring up the subject of Damian, so I did. For once, Terry was genuinely interested in what I was saying. ‘How is he?’ I explained and I could see that even her flinty heart had been mildly touched. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ But then her mind flew away from sticky sentiment and back to its natural climes. ‘He made a lot of money.’

‘He did.’

‘Would you have guessed he would? Then?’

I thought for a moment. ‘I was always pretty sure he was going to do well.’

‘Even though you hated him?’

So she had remembered quite a bit about the old days. ‘I didn’t hate him all the way through. Not at the beginning.’ She acknowledged this. I thought we might as well get on with the matter on hand. ‘You had a thing with him, didn’t you?’

The question made her sit up with an amused snort at its impertinence, although I am not convinced one can be impertinent to someone like Terry. ‘I had a “thing” with a lot of people,’ she said. This was, of course, quite true, unusually true for the era we’d lived through, and came better from her than from me. She accompanied the sentence with a sideways glance, as well she might, since one of those no doubt fortunate people who had enjoyed a ‘thing’ with her was me. It had only been a one-night ‘thing’ but it happened. Sensing my moment of recall, Terry raised her glass in a toast. ‘To good times,’ she said with an unnerving, secret smile making me even more aware of that curious, semi-detached sensation, when you are talking to a person you once slept with, but the incident is so far away from your present life that it feels as if you are discussing completely different people. Still, as I say, it did happen.

I was staying at a house in Shropshire and the couple I had been billeted on were in the middle of a furious, poisonous row when I arrived. I’d been sent there for the ball of that same Minna Bunting with whom I had enjoyed my momentary and entirely virtuous walkout. Our time together was over and, since there was nothing to ‘forget,’ we had remained friends. Strange as it may seem, this was completely possible in those days. In 1968, to introduce someone as a ‘my girlfriend’ did not automatically translate as ‘my mistress’ in the way it does today. Indeed now, if she were not your mistress you would feel you were implying a lie. But not then. Anyway, I had received the usual postcard – ‘We would be so pleased if you would stay with us for Minna’s dance’ – and I found myself parking outside a large, pleasant, stone rectory, which I think I remember was somewhere near Ludlow. The card had told me my hostess was a ‘Mrs Peter Mainwaring’ and she had signed herself ‘Billie,’ so I had all the information I needed as I climbed out of the car. That said, those names that are not generally pronounced as they are written can pose a problem. Would she be posh and call herself ‘Mannering’ or not posh and say it as it was spelled? I decided that, rather as it is better to be overdressed than under, I would go for Mannering. As it transpired I needn’t have worried, since she clearly couldn’t have cared less what I called her. ‘Yes?’ she said, glaring at me, as she wrenched open the door. Her face was red with rage and the veins were standing out on her neck.

‘I think I’m staying with you for the Buntings’ dance,’ I muttered.

For a moment I thought she was going to hit me. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ she snarled and turned back into the hall. I confess that even now, older and wiser as I hope I am, I always find this kind of situation pretty trying, because one is hamstrung by being a stranger who cannot respond in kind. In those days, young as I was, I found it impossible. I remember wondering whether it would be more polite and, in truth, better all round, just to get straight back into the car and drive to a local hotel and arrive at the dance from there. Or would that make matters even worse? But Mrs Peter Mainwaring, aka Billie, had not finished with me. ‘What are you waiting for? Come in!’

I picked up my suitcase and stumbled forward into a large and light hall. It was a brilliant, sunflower yellow, which seemed at variance with the cloudy scene being played out in it. The paintwork was white and a really lovely portrait of a mother and child by Reynolds hung against the back wall. A tall man, presumably Mr Peter Mainwaring, was standing halfway up the wide staircase. ‘Who is it?’ he shouted.

‘It’s another one of the Buntings’ fucking guests. How many did you tell them? This isn’t a fucking hotel!’

‘Oh, shut up! And show him to his room.’

‘You show him to his fucking room!’ I was beginning to wonder if she had any other adjective at her command.

Throughout this unloving exchange, I may say, I stood there in the centre of the pretty hall quite still, motionless in fact, frozen with nervous terror, like a cigar store Indian. Then I had the bright idea that I should try to act as a soothing agent. ‘I’m sure I can find my own way,’ I said. This might be categorised as a mistake.

She turned on me like a ravening beast. ‘Don’t be so fucking stupid!’ I could see that Billie’s irritation at my arrival was now developing into an active dislike. ‘How can you find your own way when you don’t know the fucking house!’

At this point, and were I older and more confident, I would probably have told her to keep her anger to herself, basically, to employ her own language, to fuck off, and left. But part of youth is somehow to assume blame, to think that every problem must be in some way down to you, and I was no different. I’m sure most of the young of the late 1930s thought the Second World War was their fault. Anyway, as I stood there, blushing and stuttering while our hosts snarled at each other, by some heavenly miracle Terry Vitkov appeared on the landing above Peter Mainwaring and waved to me. I cannot think of a time when I was ever more pleased to see anybody. ‘Terry!’ I shouted, as if I had been in love with her since I was fourteen, and hurried up the stairs, past my angry hostess, past my host, to reach her. ‘I’ll show him where he’s sleeping. It’s next to mine. Right?’ And before they could do much more than nod I had been rescued.

Terry and I became a unit of mutual support through the hours that followed. Apparently the husband, Peter, had bought a house, or a villa, somewhere in France without telling his wife, and Billie had heard the news for the first time about twenty minutes before Terry had got there. She’d come by train, I can’t remember now why I didn’t give her a lift. Maybe I was driving from somewhere else. The point was she arrived about an hour before me. In that time the fight had apparently escalated from quite a slow-burning start, until Billie was standing in the hall, screaming names that would be shocking even today and threatening a divorce that would cost him ‘every fucking [naturally] penny he owned.’ I never completely got to the bottom of quite why his crime was so terrible. I wonder now if there wasn’t someone else involved. Either that, or Billie had made plans for the money that had been subverted by the very act of purchase.

My room was pleasant enough and much as I had come to expect during these sojourns with unknown hosts in the lesser houses of England: The pretty paper, with a faint, pseudo-Victorian pattern, the interlined curtains in not-quite-Colefax, and some flower prints framed in gilt with eau de Nil mounts. I had my own bathroom, which was by no means standard in those days; better still it did not boast too many earwigs and woodlice, and there was a perfectly decent bed. But no amount of comfort could offset the surreal quality of the shouting that continued below, amplified no doubt by the fact that they were once more alone and free to tear out each other’s throats without interruption.

There were two more arrivals. The first was a boy called Sam Hoare, whom I recall better than I might normally have done because he was going to be an actor, a really extraordinary ambition at the time. In my social group, at least, wanting to go on the stage seemed not so much doomed to failure as requiring treatment. He was a tall, good-looking fellow and ended up, I think I’m right in saying, as quite a big wheel in television production, so in a way he was right to persevere, however annoying it was for his parents. The last guest, who was staying in the house and not just coming for dinner, was a nice girl called Carina Fox, whom I always liked without ever knowing especially well. We heard the dogs barking and some talk in the hall and, as Terry had done earlier with me, we sneaked along the gallery to the top of the staircase and rescued them. The Mainwarings transferred the pair into our custody without a backward look. Not for Peter and Billie any worry about whether their guests were tired after the journey and needed some tea. As we know, these incidents are very bonding. The four of us sat in my bedroom, comparing notes and wondering how we were going to get through the evening ahead, until in some way we felt we were all friends, and not at all the semi-strangers we might have been in more normal circumstances.

Dinner started moderately well. They had, after all, had some time to simmer down, and there were two outside, local couples, nearer our hosts in age, who had been invited to join the party, so, after an uneventful glass of champagne in the garden, the ten of us sat down at about a quarter to nine that night and at first made small talk as if none of the earlier episode had taken place. Indeed, I’m sure the newcomers, an army general with a nice wife and a nearby landowning couple, had no idea that their dear friends, Peter and Billie, had been playing out a touring version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf until just before they broke up to have their baths. The dining room was quite handsome, with excellent china and glass on the table and again, surprisingly good pictures. I would guess that Peter came from a family that had lost its estates but held on to a lot of the kit, which was quite common then. Or now, really. But I’m not sure there was limitless money left and I imagine Billie had cooked the food. In ungrand, rectory-type houses, even where the owners belonged to what used to be called the Gentry, there wasn’t nearly as much pulling in of temporary catering staff in the Sixties as there is today and most hostesses felt compelled, perhaps by some lingering war ethic, to do the work themselves. I have said before that the food was seldom much good and would often depend on ghastly magazine-printed receipts, as women then would cut these out and paste them into kitchen scrapbooks, printed especially for the purpose. The cooking done, it was quite normal to ask a couple of local women to come in and help serve it and wash up and so on, which was exactly what had been arranged on this particular night. We’d got through the first course easily enough, the obligatory salmon mousse that appeared in those days on almost every dinner table with taste-numbing regularity. It was followed by some sort of escalope in a glutinous sauce, covered in sprinklings of this and that, and with carrots cut into terrifying rosettes, which again we survived. But before the pudding made its appearance came the first rumblings of trouble. I was about halfway down the table, in my usual, junior position, when I saw the soldier’s wife, Lady Gregson, turn to Sam Hoare who was sitting on her right, as the maid removed her empty plate. ‘Wasn’t that delicious?’ she said, which could hardly be considered contentious.

Sam opened his mouth to agree, but before he could do so his host, on Lady Gregson’s other side, cut in, ‘It was more delicious than it was original, but that’s not saying much.’

‘What?’ Billie Mainwaring’s voice sliced through the atmosphere, silencing most of the rest of us, even those who didn’t know what was going on.

Lady Gregson, who was a nice woman but not an exceptionally clever one, now took the measure of the situation and spoke before Peter could answer. ‘We were just saying how much we enjoyed the last course.’

But Peter had been tucking into his excellent claret for quite a while by this time and clearly some sort of dam within him had at last given way. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I always enjoy it. Every time you produce it. Which is more or less every time anyone is unlucky enough to dine in this house.’ At which moment, with slightly unfortunate timing, one of the maids arrived at Lady Gregson’s left, which placed her next to Peter’s chair. She was holding a platter of what looked like white cheesecake. ‘Oh God, darling.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Not this again.’

‘I love cheesecake.’ Lady Gregson’s tone was now becoming harder, as if she, sensing a whiff of rebellion, were determined to impose order on the gathering whether we liked it or not. She was the kind of woman who would have been very useful at Lucknow.

‘What about the strawberries?’ Peter was now staring straight at his wife.

‘We’re having cheesecake.’ Billie’s voice had all the animation of the Speaking Clock. ‘I didn’t think we’d want the strawberries.’

‘But I bought them for tonight.’

‘Very well.’ There was a quality of tension in the air that reminded me of one of those films, so popular in that era, about the threat of nuclear war, a universal obsession of the time. The Big Scene was always centred on whether or not the President of Somewhere was going to press the button and start it. Having let the moment resonate, Billie spoke again: ‘Mrs Carter, please fetch the strawberries.’

The poor woman didn’t know what to make of this. She looked at her employer as if she couldn’t be serious. ‘But they’re-’

Billie cut her off with a raised palm, nodding her head like a fatal signal from a Roman emperor. ‘Just bring the strawberries, please, Mrs Carter.’

Of course, there are times when this sort of thing comes as a relief. As most of us know, there is nothing that will cheer a dreary dinner party more than a quarrel between a husband and wife. But this incident seemed to have acquired an intensity that made it slightly inappropriate as guest-pleasing fare. It was all too raw and real. At least we did not have long to wait for the next act. In the interim the rest of the company had taken the disputed cheesecake, but nobody had begun to eat. I saw Sam give a quick wink to Carina and, on my left, Terry’s chair was beginning to shake with smothered giggles. Apart from these slight diversions we just sat there, divining that, in the words of the comic routine, we ain’t seen nothing yet. Mrs Carter reentered the room and went to Lady Gregson’s side with a bowl of strawberries, but as she began to help herself it was absolutely clear to everyone present that the fruit was completely frozen, like steel bullets, and had just been removed from the freezer. The wretched woman dug in the spoon and put them on to her plate, where they fell with a metallic noise like large ball bearings. Mrs Carter moved to Peter, who carefully spooned out a big, rattling helping. Clatter, clatter, clatter, they sounded as he heaped them on to his plate. On went Mrs Carter to the next guest and the next, no one was passed by, no one dared refuse, so the hard, little marbles fell noisily on to every plate in the room. Even mine, although I cannot now think why we didn’t just refuse them, as one might refuse anything in the normal way of things. With a puzzled look Mrs Carter retired to the kitchen and then began the business of eating these granite chips. By this time you may be sure there was no conversation in the room, nor anything remotely approaching it. Just ten people trying to eat small round pieces of stone. At one stage the General seemed to get one lodged in his windpipe and threw his head up sharply, like a tethered beast, and no sooner were we past this hazard than the landowner’s wife, Mrs Towneley, bit down with a fearsome crack and reached for her mouth with a cry that she’d broken a tooth. Even this did not elicit a Governor’s Pardon from our hosts. Still we crunched on, particularly Peter who bit and chewed and sucked and smiled, as if it were the most delicious confection imaginable. ‘You seem to be enjoying them,’ said Lady Gregson, whose destiny that night was to make everything worse, just when she sought to do the opposite.

‘It’s such a treat to eat something unusual,’ said Peter. ‘At any rate in this house.’ He spoke loudly and clearly into the silent crunching room. Inevitably, all eyes turned to his wife.

For a moment I thought she wasn’t going to respond. But she did. ‘You fucking bastard,’ said Billie, reverting to her standard vocabulary when enraged, although actually this time she spoke quite softly and the words were rather effective despite their lack of originality. Next, she stood and, leaning forward, picked up the bowl holding the remainder of the icy inedibles. With a gesture like throwing a bucket of water on to a fire, she flung what was left of the frozen fruit at Peter, in the process spraying the rest of us, as well as the table and the floor, with sharp, bouncing, painful little missiles. She finished by lobbing the bowl at him which missed since he ducked and shattered against an attractive George IV wine cooler in the corner. In the pause that followed you could hear only breathing.

‘Shall we get our coats?’ said Lady Gregson brightly. ‘How many cars are we taking to the dance?’ In a commendable effort to bring matters to a conclusion she stood, pushed back her chair, stepped on a frozen strawberry and fell completely flat, cracking her head on the edge of the table as she went down, and with her evening frock riding up to show a rather grubby petticoat and a ladder in her right stocking, although that might have been a product of the moment. She lay totally motionless, stretched out on the floor, and for a second I wondered if she were dead. I suspect the others did too, since nobody moved or spoke, and for a time we were enveloped in a positively prehistoric silence. Then a low groan ameliorated this worry at least.

‘I don’t think we all need to drive, do you, darling?’ said Peter, also standing, and the dinner party was at an end.

All of which goes to explain why I ended up in bed with Terry that night. We stayed together when we finally got to the dance, as it felt odd not to be with someone who had witnessed the previous events of the evening. Sam Hoare and Carina seemed to be similarly motivated and were soon dancing. In fact, they began a romance that was to take them through marriage, three children and a famously unpleasant divorce, when Sam ran off with the daughter of an Italian car manufacturer in 1985. At any rate, from our house party that only left Terry for me and I wasn’t sorry. From then, somehow, as the night progressed it all seemed to become inevitable, in the way these things can and do. We jigged away while the music was brisk, but when the lights lowered at around one in the morning, and the DJ put on Honey, a sickeningly sentimental hit of the day, one of those ballads about dead loved ones, we moved into each other’s arms without a question and began the slow, rhythmic clinch that passed for dancing in the last phase of these events.

In a way those mordant, melodic dirges were one of the hallmarks of the period, although the fashion for them has entirely faded long before now. It was an odd phenomenon, when you think of it, songs about husbands, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, all being killed in car crashes and train smashes, by cancer and, above all, on motorbikes, the last scenario combining several pet crazes of the time. I suppose there must have been something in their facile, tear-soaked emotionalism that chimed with our largely false sense of trailblazing and ‘release.’ They ranged from the tuneful and robust Tell Laura I Love Her to those like Terry or Teenangel and, while we’re on the subject, Honey, which were soppy beyond endurance, but the stand-out example, the exception that proved the rule, a song which, like the more recent Dancing Queen, must have been performed in more bathrooms than any other hit of the day, was definitely The Leader of the Pack by the Shangri Las. There is a verse in it, which has always fascinated me: ‘One day my Dad said “find someone new”/ I had to tell my Jimmie we’re through/ He stood there and he asked me why/ All I could do was cry/ I’m sorry I hurt you, the Leader of the Pack.’ No prize for guessing who’s in charge here: Dad. This tough leather biker boy with his shining wheels, this girl in the grip of passion, both know better than to argue when Dad puts his foot down. ‘Find someone new! Now!’ ‘OK, Dad. Whatever you say.’ What would the lyric be changed to were it rerecorded today? ‘I had to tell my Dad to get stuffed’? I cannot think of another vignette that tells of the collapse of our family structure and our discipline as a society more economically yet more vividly. No wonder so much of the world laughs at us.

At any rate on that evening the sad refrain did its work, and by the time Terry and I were helping ourselves to breakfast in the large marquee, rather imaginatively decorated with farming tools and sheaves of corn, we both knew where we were headed and I was glad of it. As most of us can remember, there is something sweet, during the early, hunting years particularly, in the knowledge that one’s next amorous partner has been located and is willing.

I drove us back to the Mainwarings’ house in my car, drunk as I was, with Terry nudging me to keep my mind on the business, and we let ourselves in through the unlocked front door as we had been directed. How would such arrangements work in these more fearful days? The answer, I suppose, is that they wouldn’t. Then we climbed the stairs, attempting to make as little noise as possible. I do not think we even hesitated for form’s sake as we approached our separate chambers. I am pretty sure that I just followed Terry into her bedroom without either explanation or permission, closed the door gently and began.

Of course, one of the problems of being male, which I suspect has never changed nor will it, is that young men tend to operate on an Exocet-type imperative to seek bed larks no matter what. This was perhaps especially true in those days, when a great many of our female contemporaries were having no such thing, with the result that the moment there was a possibility of scoring, the faintest breach in the wall of virtue, one simply went for it without pausing to consider whether this was something one really wanted to do. Unfortunately, that realisation, that questioning of purpose, sometimes came later. Usually, when you were already in bed and it was far too late to back out. My generation was not, including the men (whatever the ageing trendies like to imply), nearly as promiscuous as those who came after us, even before we reached the complete sexual mayhem of today. But it was beginning. The male in his early twenties who was still a virgin, a comparatively normal type for my father’s generation, had become strange to us and the goal of achieving as many conquests as we could was fairly standard. And so from time to time, inevitably, any man would find himself in bed with a woman who might be termed unlikely.

Usually when this happened he would just bang on, and the dazed query, What was I thinking of? did not surface in the front of his brain until the following morning. But inevitably there were occasions when a Damascene moment would suddenly strike mid-action. The scales would fall from your eyes and the whole event would be rendered completely and indefensively insane as you lay there, naked, with another, unwanted, body in your arms. So it was that night with me and Terry Vitkov. The truth was I was not in the least attracted to her; I didn’t even like her all that much in the normal way of things, and without the Mainwarings’ battles and the near hysteria of the evening we had lived through I would never have been in this position. If events had not created a sense of artificial closeness in our hearts I would have gone to sleep, happily alone. But now that I was in bed with her, now that I could smell the faintly acrid scent of her body and feel her wiry hair and spongy waist, and handle the rather pendulous breasts, I knew with an awful clarity that I wanted to be anywhere but there. I rolled back on to the pillow, heaving my body off hers as I did so.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Terry in her now grating voice.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘There’d better not be.’

Which, naturally, sealed my fate. I had a momentary vision of becoming a funny story, a fake who couldn’t deliver, a joke to be sniggered over with the other girls as they wiggled their little fingers derisively, all of which I knew Terry was perfectly capable of delivering. ‘Everything’s fine,’ I said. ‘Come here.’ And with as much resolution as I could muster on the instant I did my duty.

The dinner was not going particularly well. Gary had almost given up on us and Terry was, by this stage, airborne. We were staring at the menus for pudding and when Terry started to heckle over the ingredients of some sort of strudel it was clear from Gary’s expression that we had reached the city limits. ‘I’ll just have a cup of coffee,’ I said in a feeble attempt to push Terry forward to the next part of the evening. Inevitably, this gave her ideas.

‘Come to my place for coffee. You wanna see where I live, don’t you?’ Her drawl was beginning to stretch out to positively Southern proportions. Inexplicably, really, since I knew she came from the Midwest. It reminded me of Dorothy Parker’s description of her motherin-law as the only woman who could get three syllables out of ‘egg.’

‘Shall I bring the check?’ volunteered Gary eagerly, seizing at the chance of ridding himself of this potential troublemaker before the real storm broke. Not many minutes later we were standing in the car park.

Here we faced a dilemma. I had drunk little, knowing I would be driving back, but Terry had sunk the best part of three bottles. ‘Let me drive you,’ I suggested. ‘You can send someone for your car in the morning.’

‘Don’t be so boring.’ She laughed as if we were engaged on a teenage prank, as opposed to committing an offence that might very possibly include manslaughter. ‘Follow me!’ We then began one of the most hair-raising experiences of my entire life, shooting first up towards Beverly Hills, then skidding round the wide curves of the LA mountain roads, until we had somehow – don’t ask me how – reached Mulholland Drive, that wide ridge, the spine that divides Los Angeles proper from the San Fernando Valley. There is a thriller, A Portrait in Black, a Lana Turner vehicle I think, which involves a woman who cannot drive being told nevertheless to get behind the wheel and follow her lover, i.e. the murderer, in a car. She weaves about and is almost undone when it starts to rain, since she has no idea how to work the windscreen wipers. From side to side she veers wildly, up, down, all over the place, weeping hysterical tears (or is that from The Bad and the Beautiful?). Anyway, this was more or less my experience the night Terry Vitkov took me home. Except that in my version I was following the crazy woman who was out of control of the vehicle, instead of her following me. I do not even now know how we arrived alive.

The house, when we got there, was perhaps a little more modest than I had been expecting, although it wasn’t too bad. A large open hall, a bar that was pretending to be a library on the left and a big ‘living room’ that was glass on all three sides to make the most of the sensational view of the city below, a million lights of every colour, a giant’s jewel box, twinkling below us. It felt as if we were coming in to land. But the rooms had a cheap and dingy feel, with dirty shagpile carpets and long sofas covered in oatmeal weave, going slightly on the arms. A couple of pretend antiques and a sketch in chalks of an artificially slimmed-down Terry by what looked like a pavement artist from outside the National Portrait Gallery completed the decoration. ‘What’ll you have?’ she said, lurching towards the bar.

‘Nothing for me. I’m fine.’

‘Nobody’s fine if they haven’t got a drink.’

‘Some whisky then, thank you. I’ll do it.’ This seemed more sensible if I were not to end up with a tumblerful. Terry poured herself some Bourbon, rummaging for ice in one of those ice-makers that loudly produce their chunky load at all hours of the day or night. ‘Is Donnie here?’

‘I don’t think so.’

Again, her lack of enthusiasm made it hard to feel this was a union where their fingers were permanently on each other’s pulse. I sipped my drink, wondering if I was glad to find we were alone, although whether I was fearful of a sexual advance or alcoholic poisoning I could not tell you. Either way it was time to start inching back to the story of Greg and the woman, Susie, which had to be done by Donnie’s return. ‘So, how long have you been married this time?’

‘About four years.’

‘How did you meet?’

‘He’s a producer. In television,’ she added quickly, to differentiate this man as a working producer as opposed to simply a resident of L A. ‘I make these programmes where we discuss what’s on the market-’

‘I know. Infomercials.’ I smiled, thinking to show how up I was in the jargon of modern television.

Instead, she gave me a look as if I had slapped her across the table. ‘I hate that word!’ But the restaurant food wars had tired her out and she wasn’t looking for another fight. Instead she just sipped her drink and then said in all seriousness, ‘I prefer to think of myself as an ambassador for the buyer.’ She spoke the words with great gravitas, so I can only suppose she expected me to take them at face value. After a suitable pause she continued, ‘I went out with Donnie for a while, and then he proposed and I thought “what the hell”.’

‘Here’s to you,’ I said and raised my glass. ‘I hope you’re very happy.’

She sipped again, leaning back against the cushions. Predictably, her relaxation had brought down her guard and soon I learned that, as I had already surmised, she wasn’t very happy. In fact, I would be hard put to it to testify that she was happy at all. Donnie, it seemed, was a lot older than her and since we were both at the upper end of our fifties, he can’t have been much less than seventy. He also had less money than she’d been led to believe, ‘which I find very hurtful,’ and, worst of all, he had two daughters who wouldn’t ‘get off his back.’

‘In what way?’

‘They keep ringing him up, they keep wanting to see him. I know they’re after his money when he goes.’

This was quite hard to respond to. There was nothing unreasonable in their desire to see their father and of course they expected his money when he went. It didn’t make them unloving. ‘At least they don’t want it before he goes,’ I volunteered.

She shook her head fiercely. ‘You don’t understand. I need that money. I’ve earned it.’ She was extremely drunk by now, as she ought to have been, given how much Chardonnay, Merlot and Jack Daniel’s had passed down her capacious throat that evening.

‘Well, I’m sure he’s planning to give you a fair share. Why don’t you ask him?’

‘He’s planning to give me a life interest in half his money, which reverts to them on my death.’

What made this odd was that it was delivered as if she were describing a crime against nature, when it seemed eminently sensible, even generous, to me. I didn’t dare go that far, reasoning that while I knew Terry, Donnie was a stranger to me so he could not feel justified in relying on my help. I settled for: ‘That’s not what you want?’

‘Damn right!’ She reached across me for the bottle and filled her glass. As she did so, she caught sight of a framed photograph among a group of them arranged on the shelves behind the bar. It was of an elderly, white-haired man with two young women, one on either side. They were all smiling. ‘Those bitches,’ said Terry with soft malignity and reaching out with the hand that was not holding the glass, smashed the picture forward, face down. It hit the wood with a loud smack, but I couldn’t quite tell whether the glass had broken.

‘And you’ve been married four years?’ I asked tentatively, attempting to row for shallower water, but unable by the very nature of my task to leave her private life alone.

‘Yuh.’ More Jack Daniel’s poured down her ever-open gullet.

‘Then maybe he’ll alter things when you’ve been together for longer.’

‘Four years with Donnie is a lifetime, believe me.’ What always fascinates me about people like Terry, and I have known a few, is their absolute control over the moral universe. You and I know that she had been approaching desperation while making her dreadful infomercials and wondering if her life would ever begin again. Then along comes this nice, lonely old man and she decides to marry him, in the hope of inheriting everything to which she had no right whatever, and the sooner the better. She then discovers that he intends to leave his fortune to his two daughters, whom he loves and who are obviously the very people he ought to leave it to. They are affectionate and close to Donnie, and apart from no doubt loathing their new stepmother they are, I’m sure, normal, sensible women. Yet Terry, and others like her, are able to take this kind of simple tale and turn and twist it until, with a glass splinter in their eye and through some kind of tainted logic, they recast the universe making themselves the ones who have the right to complain. They are the deserving put-upon victims of a cruel system. They are the ones to be pitied. I tell myself that they must know they are living a lie, yet they display no sign of it, and usually their friends and associates give in eventually, first by pretending to take their side and often, in the end, by actually believing they are in the right. My own value system had, however, survived the assault and in fact I wanted to write to Donnie with my support there and then.

My ruminations were interrupted when Terry’s shrill voice brought me back to the present. ‘Get this!’ she shouted by way of introduction. Clearly, I was going to be treated to another example of Donnie’s outrageous choices, with most of which I was sure I would agree. ‘He’s even planning to leave a sum to Susie. Outright.’ She paused, to punctuate this unbelievable injustice. ‘But not outright to me. For me, it’s a “life interest”.’ She spat out the words, nodding almost triumphantly, as if at the end of a hilarious anecdote.

I was starting to like Donnie more and more. So much more than I liked his wife. ‘She is his stepdaughter.’

‘That’s funny!’ She rocked with artificial laughter.

‘Where is Susie? Is she in Los Angeles?’ With this question, as I should have seen, I had overplayed my hand. It was late and I was still faintly jet-lagged and perhaps, by this stage, a bit drunk and, anyway, I just wanted to get on. My words seemed to echo in the room, altering its atmosphere.

Terry was many things, but not stupid. ‘Why are you here?’ she said, and her voice suddenly sounded completely sober and absolutely reasonable.

You must understand that I was nearly at the end of my search. There were only Terry and Candida left, and so there had to be a fifty per cent chance that Susie was the Holy Grail Baby. In a way, I confess to hoping, for Damian’s sake, that it would be Candida Finch’s child, but there was no reason why it shouldn’t be this one. I felt I might as well just ask the question, far away from home as we were. I had no intention of telling Terry about the list and after all, Damian wouldn’t be especially newsworthy in this neck of the woods if Terry wanted to make a story about her infidelity to her first husband, which I doubted. ‘You said you’d been with Greg for quite a while when you got pregnant.’

‘Yes.’

‘Damian remembers that he had an affair with you around that time.’

She smiled, not immediately making the connection. ‘We didn’t have an “affair,” not then, not ever. Not what you’d call an affair.’ She had relaxed again and was once more drawling her words. In some way I thought she was rather enjoying herself. ‘We had a funny on-off thing for years. We never quite went out, we never quite broke off. If you’re asking if I was unfaithful, I never felt it counted with Damian.’

‘Anyway, the point is’ – this was it – ‘he wonders if Susie is really Greg’s daughter.’

I had expected at least token indignation but, unpredictably, Terry threw her head back and roared with laughter. This time it was completely genuine. For a while she was quite unable to stop and she was still wiping her eyes before she could answer. ‘No,’ she said at last, shaking her head, ‘she’s not Greg’s daughter.’ I said nothing. ‘You’re right. I had been sleeping with Greg for a long time by then, for quite a long time since I decided to get pregnant. I was taking no precautions and I began to wonder if he could have children. If he was, you know, fertile.’

‘So you revived things with Damian, to see if you could get pregnant that way.’ I could easily see how this had happened. She wanted to bring Greg up to the mark and the whole paternity issue was much muddier in those days. It was a scheme that might easily have worked. Obviously, it did work. It just didn’t quite fit with the original letter that had started all this, given that the whole thing had been planned by her. Damian could hardly be accused of seduction or ‘deceit.’ The charge would more properly be levelled the other way. Still, we could clarify that later.

‘Yes. I guess that’s exactly what I did.’ She was defiant now, made brave and even brazen by the liquor. She tilted her face as if to challenge me.

‘I’m not here to judge you. Only to find out the truth.’

‘And what does Damian want to do about it?’

So, I had reached my goal. We had arrived. With this in mind I thought some modest helping of honesty would not now go amiss. ‘He’s dying, as I have told you. I believe he wants to make sure that his child is well provided for.’ That seemed enough.

‘Would Susie have to know?’

This was an interesting question. I would have thought that Susie would have wanted to know, but would it be a condition? Then again, was it up to her mother? Susie was in her late thirties, after all. ‘That’s something I’ll have to check with Damian. There’ll be a DNA test, but I dare say we can come up with some other perfectly believable reason for that if we have to, or it could be done without her knowledge.’

‘I see.’ From her tone I could tell at once that my words had changed things, but I couldn’t quite understand why, since I was not aware I had made any very stringent conditions. She stood and walked towards the glass wall, taking what I could now see was the handle of one of the panels and sliding it back to let in the night air. For a moment she breathed deeply. ‘Damian isn’t Susie’s father,’ she said.

I hope I can convey how totally inexplicable this seemed. I had sat all evening and listened to a woman who was rapacious for money, other people’s money, any money that she could lay her hands on; a woman disappointed by life and everything it had brought her; a woman trapped in an existence she hated and by a husband she cared nothing for, and now, here she was, on the brink of the luckiest break anyone living has ever heard of, the chance to make her daughter one of the richest women in Europe, and she was turning it down without the smallest argument. ‘You can’t know that,’ I said. ‘You say yourself she isn’t Greg’s. She must be someone’s.’

She nodded. ‘Yes. She must be someone’s. But she isn’t Greg’s and she isn’t Damian’s.’ She paused, wondering, I now realise, whether to go on. I am glad she did. ‘And she isn’t mine.’

For a moment I was too astonished to say an obligatory ‘What?’ or ‘How can that be?’ or even ‘Oh.’ I just looked at her.

She sighed, shivering suddenly in the draught, and moved back into the room towards the dingy sofa. ‘You were quite right. About what I was trying to do. I wanted to be pregnant, because I knew Greg would marry me when I was. I’d been sleeping with Damian every now and then for a couple of years so I was sure he wouldn’t mind. And he didn’t. It was just after you all went on that crazy holiday in Portugal.’

‘I thought he said it was before.’

‘No. I called him and his flatmate said he was out there, so I left a message. He rang me the day he got back and I went round. It’s funny. When we got together for the last time…’ She had become wistful, a nicer person momentarily, in memory of her younger dreams, ‘I thought we might go on with it. He seemed different when he got home, less… I don’t know exactly, less unreachable, and for a day or two I thought that maybe it would be Damian and not Greg after all.’

‘But it didn’t happen?’

‘No. He’d run into that beautiful girl out there, and he met up with her again when she was back in London.’

‘Only once I think.’

‘Really? I thought it was more than that. What was her name?’

‘Joanna Langley.’

‘That’s it. What happened to her?’

‘She died.’

‘Oh.’ She sighed, saddened by the inexorable process of life. ‘The point is that when he got back, Damian was in a strange mood. I heard about what happened.’ I nodded. ‘I think the truth is he was sick of all of us. I lost touch with him after that.’

‘So did we all.’

‘Joanna Langley’s dead. Wow. I used to be so jealous of her.’ I could see that the news had made her stop in her tracks. For anyone, hearing of the death of a person you had thought alive and well is a little like killing them because suddenly they’re dead in your brain instead of living. But with the Sixties generation it is more than this. They preached the value of youth so loudly and so long that they cannot believe an unkind God has let them grow old. Still less can they accept they too must die. As if their determination to adopt clothes and prejudices more suited to people thirty, forty, fifty years younger than themselves would act as an elixir to keep them forever from the clutches of the Grim Reaper. You see television interviews and articles in papers expressing shocked amazement whenever an old rocker pops his clogs. What did they think would happen?

At last, with a philosophical nod, Terry resumed her story. ‘I slept with Damian two or three times before we finished. There were no hard feelings.’ She paused to check that this squared with my information.

‘I’m sure there weren’t. But nothing happened?’

She shook her head. ‘Nothing happened. Then Greg went to Poland and I followed him, and I slept with him, but still nothing happened and nothing happened, and finally I went to see a doctor while I was out there and guess what?’

‘It wasn’t him, it was you.’

She smiled, like a teacher pleased with my attention. ‘It was me. All the time it was me. Some tubes were missing or something…’ She raised her eyebrows, trying to control her delivery. ‘You know the first thing that occurred to me? Why the hell had I wasted so much time worrying about getting pregnant? My late teens should have been a ball.’

‘You didn’t do badly,’ I said.

Which made her laugh. ‘Anyway, I knew that once Greg learned I could never have a child, once his mother heard about it, the whole thing would be over and it’d be back to square one. So I bought a baby.’

It seems strange now, but this sentence took me completely by surprise. Why? I cannot tell you. There was no such thing as surrogacy in those days, or if there was we knew nothing of it. She’d admitted she’d had a baby to get Greg to marry her and she’d told me she couldn’t have children. What did I imagine she had done? Even so, I was flabbergasted. What I came up with was: ‘How?’

She smiled. ‘Are you planning it?’ But she was far too deep in to telling the story to back out now. ‘I was doing some social work then, with a group sponsored by the embassy. This was 1971, long before the end of Communism or anything else. There was no Solidarity. There was no hope. Poland was an occupied country and the people were desperate. It wasn’t hard. I found a young mother who already had four children and she’d just discovered she was pregnant. I offered to take the baby, whatever it was, whether or not there was anything wrong with it.’

‘Would you have?’

She thought for a moment. ‘I hope so,’ she said, which I liked her for.

‘But how did you manage the whole thing?’

‘It wasn’t difficult. I found a doctor who could be bribed.’ I must have looked shocked at this because she became quite incensed. ‘Jesus, most of the time he was prescribing drugs to teenagers. Was this worse?’

‘Of course not.’

‘I didn’t “show” until I was about five months “gone.” I told Greg I didn’t feel comfortable with sex, and with his puritan background he didn’t either. Then I asked if he’d mind not being at the birth, as the thought made me uncomfortable. Boy, you should have seen the relief on his face. These days, if the father isn’t there peering up your flue as the head appears, he’s a bad person, but in 1971 it wasn’t compulsory.’

‘How did you manage the birth itself?’

‘I had a stroke of luck when he was called to New York just before the baby came. The dates I’d given him were three weeks behind the true ones, to leave some room for manoeuvre. I did have a plan of checking into a different room. I think it would have worked but in the end I didn’t need it. She went into labour and I took the mother to the nursing home where, thanks to the doctor, she just gave my name. The baby was delivered and the registration was perfectly routine. When Greg got back, I was waiting for him at home with little Susie. We cried a river. Everyone was happy.’

‘And nobody ever found out?’

‘Why would they? I told him I loved him, but I couldn’t have sex until I got my figure back. He suspected nothing. Nobody was worse off. Including Susie. I mean that.’ Clearly, she did mean it and I would say it was probably true, although one can never be quite sure about these things. Even if I do not endorse the present fashion for leaving babies with mothers who are clearly quite incapable of caring for them, rather than finding them decent homes. Terry was nearly finished. ‘For a while I thought the doctor might blackmail me, but he didn’t, so that was that. Maybe he was scared I’d blackmail him.’

‘And there were never any tests that gave it away?’

‘What tests? They’re both blood group O, which was kind of a relief actually. But who runs a DNA test on their own daughter?’

‘Did Greg have any more children?’

‘None of his own. Two steps. He adores Susie and she adores him.’ She sighed a little wearily. ‘She much prefers him to me.’

I nodded. ‘So he’ll take care of her.’ For some reason I was rather glad of this. Susie had missed a larger fortune which, in my fevered mind, she had possessed for maybe two or even three minutes. It was good to feel she would never know want.

‘Oh yes. She’s safer than I’ll ever be.’

I had to ask. ‘Would you have gone on with it if I hadn’t mentioned the test?’

She thought for a moment. ‘Probably. The temptation was too great. But of course there would have been some hurdle by the end of it, so I’m glad you did. Before I got too excited.’

It was once more the hour to depart and this time I knew for certain we would not meet again. Since, even if I were back in the town, I wouldn’t look her up. But something in the story she had told had won me round a bit. I was reminded of the haunting words of Lady Caroline Lamb: ‘With all that has been said about life’s brevity, for most of us it is very, very long.’ Terry’s life had already been very long and very frustrating, with scant reward to show for it. That this had largely been her fault was no consolation, as I knew well. She had thrown away her only chance of a decent future with Greg and never replaced him with anything like an equal opportunity. Now she had lost even the child she’d invented to be with him. We kissed at the door. ‘Please don’t mention this to anyone.’ She shook her head. I had something more to say. ‘And please don’t ever tell them.’

‘Would I?’

‘I don’t know. If you got too drunk and too angry you might.’

She did not resent this, which was commendable, but she was confident in her denial. ‘I have been drunk and angry many times since we last met and I haven’t told them yet.’ This, I am sure, was true. All of it.

‘Good.’ Now I really was going. But I had a last wish before we parted. ‘Be kind to Donnie,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t sound a bad chap.’

The evening had made me sentimental in my estimation of her. I should have been more clear-sighted. The truth was, with the sole exception of her feeling towards her not-daughter, the old Terry Vitkov was quite unchanged. ‘He’s a bastard,’ she replied and shut the door.

Candida