Past Imperfect

THREE

The list, which I found lying on the pillow when I went up to my bed, was not long. But it still included some surprises. There were five names and all of them, it seems, had slept with Damian before he had been sterilised en vacances under the hot Portuguese sun. They had also all given birth to a child within the dictated time span. Lucy Dalton was there, I was a little sad to see. I had hoped for better from her, since she had been one of the first to see through Damian’s disguise. Joanna Langley’s inclusion surprised me less. I had been aware of a romance between them at the time and they seemed to me well matched. I’d wondered then why nothing came of it. No doubt I was about to find out. I was not expecting HRH Princess Dagmar of Moravia to figure among the notches on Damian’s bedpost, nor the red-faced, loud, man-eater of the day, Candida Finch, whom I wouldn’t have thought his type at all. Heavens. There was no denying that he got about a bit. Terry Vitkov, on the other hand, was a routine entry on many lists of that year’s conquests, including mine. An American adventuress from the Middle West, she had less money than she liked to suggest and only came to London after exhausting the social possibilities of Cincinnati. Her sexual mores, which would prefigure the next decade rather than, like most of the girls, harking back to a time before our own, ensured that she would be made welcome. At any rate by the boys.

Each name was neatly typed. Next to it was the woman’s current, married surname and, where clarification was needed, the name of the husband. After that came the name, sex and birth date of the child in question with a brief note of any other children in the family. Finally, there was a column of addresses, in some cases two or even three, with telephone numbers and e-mail contacts, although somehow I didn’t imagine much of this was going to be accomplished via the Internet. A covering note at the top, ‘as far as we have been able to ascertain, the details are as follows,’ meant that I could not be wholly confident about the information and some of the entries were much fuller than others, but most of it looked pretty accurate to me. I no longer ran into any of them, but the little that I did know tallied with the contents of the sheet. Behind the paper, held to it with a small clip, was an envelope. This turned out to contain, as promised, a platinum credit card made out in my name.

I breakfasted alone, with what seemed like every newspaper in the known world neatly arranged at the other end of the long table. The butler asked if he might pack, or was there some reason for him to delay this? There wasn’t. He bowed, thrilled with my permission to be of use, but before he left the room to carry out his task he spoke: ‘Mr Baxter wonders if you might have time to look in on him before you leave for the station.’ I can recognise an order when I hear one.

Damian’s bedroom was in a different part of the house from the one I had occupied. A wide gallery from the top of the staircase led towards a pair of double doors, standing half open. I heard my name called as I lifted my hand to knock and found myself in a light, high chamber, lined with panelling painted in a soft gris Trianon. Perhaps I had been expecting some dark, magician’s lair but no, this was clearly the other place, along with the library, where Damian actually lived. A large Georgian mahogany four-poster stood against a tapestry-hung wall, facing a carved rococo chimneypiece, which was in turn surmounted by one of the many Romneys of the lovely Lady Hamilton. Three tall windows looked out across the gardens to what I saw now was a kind of mini-park, with a tidy and impressive display of, I am sure, rare trees. There were inlaid chairs dotted about, and a desk, and little tables piled with books and precious things, and a rather beautiful day bed, of the type that is called a duchesse brisèe, with a folded rug at the end, waiting to make its master comfortable. The whole effect was charming and delicate and curiously feminine, the room of a finer spirit than I would have credited him with.

Damian was in the bed. I did not see him immediately as the shadow of the canopy blurred him for a moment, hunched and crunched up as he was against the pillows, surrounded by letters and another mass of newspapers. I could not help but feel it would be a black day for the local newsagents when Damian shuffled off his mortal coil. ‘You found the list,’ he said.

‘I did.’

‘Were you surprised?’

‘I knew about Joanna. At least I suspected it.’

‘Our main thing was over long before. But I slept with her one last time the night she got back from Lisbon. She came round to my flat. I suppose she wanted to see if I was all right.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘We went on from there.’

‘But hadn’t you already got the mumps?’

‘I didn’t develop a sore throat until a few days afterwards and, anyway, apparently you store a certain amount of whatsit, which isn’t affected.’

‘A little too much information.’

‘As you can imagine, I am by this point the world’s greatest living expert.’ He gave a wry chuckle. He was wonderfully unbowed by the whole thing. ‘What about the rest of them?’

‘Well, even I slept with Terry and I’m not exactly surprised by Candida, though I wouldn’t have thought she was your type. But I didn’t suspect the other two.’

‘I suppose you’re disappointed in your old pal, Lucy.’

‘Only because I thought she disliked you as much as I did.’ This made him laugh for the first time that morning. But the effort was painful and we had to wait for a second while he recovered.

‘She was only attracted to people she disliked. All the others she turned into friends. Including you.’ This was probably true in its way, so I didn’t interrupt him. ‘Do you see any of them now?’

It was strange to hear him talk so breezily, when I considered how it had all ended. ‘Not really. One bumps into people. You know how it is. They all married, then?’ It seemed odd, suddenly, that I didn’t know.

‘Yes, for better or, in some cases, very much for worse. Candida’s a widow. Her husband was killed in 9/11. But I’m told they were happy before that.’

Moments like this, when friends from a different era of your life are suddenly forcefully connected to the modern world, can be quite shocking. ‘I’m sorry. Was he American?’

‘English. But he worked for some bank that had its New York office on one of the top floors. It was his bad luck that he was summoned to a meeting there on that day.’

‘God, how awful. Any children?’

‘Two with him. But he couldn’t be the father of the baby I’m interested in. The boy was eight when they married.’

‘I remember she was a single mother. Very courageous.’

‘For a peer’s niece in 1971? You bet. But she was courageous. She was a bit rough but she was punchy. That’s why I liked her.’ He paused, a slight smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. ‘Were there any names missing that you expected to find?’

We stared at each other. ‘Not when the list isn’t complete.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s only the girls who gave birth within the time limit.’

Damian nodded. ‘Of course. That’s right. No, in any other sense it’s not complete.’ But he didn’t elaborate and I so didn’t want him to. ‘You got the card?’

‘Yes. Though I don’t think I’ll need it.’

‘Please don’t be English and silly.’ He sighed. ‘You have no money. I have so much that if I spent a million pounds a day for the rest of my life I wouldn’t dent it. Use the card. Have some fun. Do what you like with it. Take it as your payment. Or my thanks. Or my apology, if you must. But use it.’

‘I don’t have “no” money,’ I said. ‘I just don’t have as much money as you.’ He did not trouble to confirm this and I did not protest further, so I must have been convinced.

‘Do you have any preference as to where I should begin?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘None in the least. Start where you will.’ He paused to take a breath. ‘But please don’t delay more than you have to.’ His speech was coarser and more rasping than it had been the previous evening. Was this usual in the mornings? I wondered. Or is he getting worse? ‘Of course, I don’t want to hurry you,’ he added. What made this poignant, even to me, was his striving to achieve a kind of light courtesy, like something out of a Rattigan comedy. ‘Anyone for tennis?’ he might have said in just such a tone. Or, ‘Who needs a lift to London?’ It was brave. I don’t deny that.

‘I imagine it must take some time,’ I said.

‘Of course. But no more time, please, than it has to take.’

‘Suppose I can’t find any evidence either way?’

‘Eliminate the ones it cannot be. Then we’ll worry about who’s left.’

There was logic in this and I nodded. ‘I still don’t know why I’m doing it.’

‘Because if you refuse, you’ll feel guilty when I die.’

‘Guilty for the child, maybe. Not about you.’ I wouldn’t describe myself as a harsh person in the normal way of things, and I do not completely understand why I was so harsh with him on that morning. The crimes I held against him were old crimes by then, forgotten, or if not forgotten then irrelevant, even to me. That said, he seemed to understand.

My words had died away in the silence between us, when he looked at me quite steadily. ‘I have never had a friend in all my life I cared for more than I cared for you,’ he said.

‘Then why did you do it?’ He misjudged me if he thought these nice, saccharine sentiments would somehow cancel out the memory of his behaviour on the worst evening of my, and I would hope anyone’s, life.

‘I’m not entirely sure.’ He seemed to lose himself in thought for a while, concentrating his gaze on the view beyond the windows. ‘I think I have suffered since I was a child from a kind of claustrophobia of the heart.’ He smiled. ‘The truth is I was always uncomfortable with any kind of love. Most of all when I was the recipient.’

Which is how we left it.

It may sound as if I had been obsessed with all these people, and mainly with Damian, since I had walked off the last dance floor over forty years before, but I had not. Like anyone else, I’d spent the time between dealing with the bewildering illogicality of my life and it had been many years since I had taken the time to consider the way I was, the way we all were. The world we lived in then was a different planet, with different hopes and very different expectations and, like other planets, it had simply drifted away in its own orbit. I glimpsed a few of the girls, now lined and greying matrons, from time to time, at a wedding or a charity function, and we smiled and talked of their children and why they’d left Fulham, and whether Shropshire had proved a success, but we did not tear at the changes in the world around us. I had abandoned that world completely in the years immediately after Portugal and, even after it was all forgotten, I never really went back in. Now, when I thought about it, there were some characters from that time I regretted. Lucy Dalton, for example, had been a great ally of mine. Indeed, it was she who sealed my commitment to the Season. I didn’t like her husband, it is true, and I suppose that’s why we drifted apart, but now that seemed a feeble reason to lose a friend and I decided on the spot to begin my investigations with her. The sheet told me she had moved to Kent, not far from Tunbridge Wells, so it would not be difficult to call her and ask myself for lunch, on the pretext of being ‘in the area.’

I say my commitment had been ‘sealed’ by Lucy for the simple reason that it was at her invitation I attended Queen Charlotte’s Ball, then the official launch of the dances and the central ceremony of the whole business. Not to be there meant one was not quite a full player but I had made no plans to go since I had not originally aimed at full membership. In fact, the ball wasn’t far off when, to my surprise, I received a card from Lady Dalton asking me to join their party. I rang her daughter before I answered. ‘We were taking my cousin, Hugo Grex, but he’s chucked,’ said Lucy without any prevarication. ‘Don’t worry if you can’t come, but say now so we can find someone else. Almost everyone who wants to is already going.’ It was not the most flattering invitation known to man but I was quite curious and I had begun to feel that, when it came to the Season proper, if I was going to do it I might as well do it.

‘No. I’d like to come. Thank you.’

‘Write to Mummy or she’ll think you’re odd. Then she’ll tell you where to be and when. You know it’s white tie?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘See you then if not before.’ She had rung off.

Perhaps because I had not originally intended to be at the ball it came as something of a revelation later that day, to discover that Damian Baxter was already going. In those days students at Magdalene, and in many other colleges no doubt, were not provided with anything so simple as a bedsit. Instead, every student had a sitting room as well as a bedroom, which required a certain spread in the accommodation. That year my rooms were to be found in an old converted cottage, which had been swallowed by the new 1950s quadrangle built round it on the other side of Magdalene Street from the college itself. They were rather charming apartments and I still remember them with affection, but they were in separate parts of the building, so it was a surprise to walk back into the sitting room, having gone to my bedroom for a book, to find Damian standing by the chimneypiece, warming his legs in front of the gurgling gas fire. ‘I gather you’re going to Queen Charlotte’s with the Daltons,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance you could put me up? I really don’t want to struggle back here after that one.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Lucy told me. I said I was in the Waddilove party, so she told me she was going to ring you. I’m rather jealous.’ Now, there was a good deal of information in this statement. More, possibly, than he knew. But then again, perhaps not. Clearly, he had been determined to go to the ball and knowing and I am sure nursing the captive Georgina’s crush on him, he had seen that as a route. But what he was also telling me was that he had been Lucy’s first choice as a replacement when her cousin had dropped out. I was only the fallback, and he wanted me to know it.

‘You never said you were going.’

‘You never asked.’ He pulled a slight grimace. ‘Georgina Waddilove. Yikes.’ We shared a smile, which was shamefully disloyal on my part. ‘Where are you hiring your white tie?’

‘I’ve got my own,’ I said. ‘Inherited from a cousin. I think it still fits. Or it did when I went to a hunt ball last Christmas.’

He nodded a little grumpily. ‘Of course you’ve got your own. I wasn’t thinking.’ The mood had altered slightly. He sipped the sour white wine I had provided him with. ‘I don’t know why I’m going, really.’

‘Why are you going?’ I was genuinely curious.

He thought for a moment. ‘Because I can,’ he said.

The history of costume is, as we know, a fascinating subject in itself and I find it interesting that I will almost certainly live to see the death of one outfit, at least, that was significant enough in its heyday, namely White Tie. From early in the nineteenth century, thanks to Mr Brummell, until the middle of the twentieth, it was the male costume of choice for any Society evening, the club colours of the British aristocracy. When, in the late 1920s, the Duke of Rutland was asked by his brother-in-law if he ever wore a dinner jacket he thought for a moment. ‘When I dine alone with the Duchess in her bedroom,’ he replied.

Of course, it was a surprise to some that it survived the war, since six years of dinner jackets and uniforms might have killed it off, but Christian Dior’s revival of an almost Edwardian style of dress, with his bustles and corsets and paddings and linings, had launched a fashion for sumptuous evening clothes that made the short, dull dinner jacket seem quite inadequate as a pair. Then, in the summer of 1950, the Countess of Leicester gave a ball for her daughter, Lady Anne Coke, at Holkham, which was attended by the King and Queen. The following morning yielded two discoveries. The first was a waiter who had fallen into the fountain and drowned, the second that white tie for men was definitely back. Of course, what Dior and so many others failed to understand was that white tie was not just a costume, it was also a way of life, and it was a way of life that was already dead. White tie belonged to the ancient bargain between the aristocrat and those less fortunate that they would spend much of their day in discomfort in order to promote a convincing and reassuring image of power. After all, splendour and glamour had been inextricably linked to power for centuries, until the comparatively recent appearance of Government by the Drab. Before the first war, among the upper classes, five or six changes a day, for walking, shooting, breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner, were de rigueur at any house party and three at least were necessary for a day in London. They observed these tiresome rituals of dress for the simple reason that they knew once they stopped looking like a ruling class they would soon cease to be a ruling class. Our politicians have only just learned what the toffs have known for a thousand years: Appearance is all.

Why, then, did it die so suddenly? Because they stopped believing in themselves. It was not just the loss of the valet that was to prove fatal to the costume; it was a loss of nerve that gripped the Establishment in 1945, and would continue to undermine their confidence until, by the end of the Seventies, for all but a few their role in our National life, and with it the point of their white tie, was gone. My generation saw the last of it. When I was eighteen, all hunt balls were still white tie, as well as all the May balls at Cambridge and the Commem Balls at Oxford. A few coming-out parties still tried for it and one event where it was worn without dispute was Queen Charlotte’s Ball. Now, when, apart from a state banquet at Buckingham Palace or Windsor, or something rich and rare at one of the Inns of Court, it has almost vanished, it seems strange to think that forty years ago we still got enough use out of our tails for it to be worth owning them.

Queen Charlotte’s Ball was not a private party. It was a large-scale charitable event and, as such, did not conform to the normal rules. To start with, it was what was then called a dinner-dance, meaning that we were to eat there and so we would assemble much earlier than usual. Dinner-dances, in those pre-breathaliser days were thought by some to be rather common, I forget now why, perhaps because they had an air of a night out ‘at the club’ in some Imperial outpost, but on this particular evening there was a ceremony to be got through that was considered sufficient to justify it. The plan was to gather at the Daltons’ London flat in Queensgate, to make sure that the group was all present and correct, and then to move on to Grosvenor House almost immediately.

I rang the bell at the Daltons’ front door, the buzzer (for we already had those) admitted me and I knew their flat was on the ground floor, so there was no long climb ahead. The front door must once have been the door into the dining room, when the newly built house had been home to a prosperous late-Victorian family, but by the 1960s that dining room had been carved up into an entrance hall and a medium-sized drawing room. A few good things, as is the wont of such families, had been spared for the flat, in case we might mistake their rank, and what looked like a Lazlo of Lucy’s grandmother, painted as a girl of nineteen, stared down glassily from above the chimneypiece, which, owing to the division of the room, was awkwardly off centre. The oddness of proportion was enhanced by the fashion, then prevalent, for blocking grates with large flat sheets of hardboard, often, as in this case, with an electric fire placed in front. I cannot think of any vogue in my entire life more guaranteed to kill a room stone dead than this blanking of the fireplace, but we all did it. Like the hideous enclosing of banisters on a staircase, which one found in almost every house divided into flats, it was supposed to make the space look modern and streamlined. It failed.

‘There you are.’ Lucy kissed me briskly. ‘Are you dreading it?’ There were four other girls in the room and, counting Lucy, all five were dressed entirely in white, a survival of the custom of wearing white for a girl’s first presentation at Court before the war. It had not, of course, been continued in the last period of Royal Presentation, which had taken the form of garden parties, and the girls would then wear pretty, summer dresses and wide-brimmed hats, but with the end of that and the installation of Queen Charlotte’s as the official start of the Season, the white rule had been revived. They wore long, white gloves, too, but instead of the Prince of Wales feathers that decorate the heads of both mothers and daughters in all those pre-war photographs by Van Dyck or Lenare, this year, at least, white flowers were worn in the hair, tiaras not being considered proper for unmarried girls. Lady Dalton, I was pleased to see, sported rather a good one, which flashed its fire round the room as she walked towards me, smiling pleasantly.

‘You are kind to come,’ she said, holding out her own gloved hand.

‘You’re very kind to ask me.’

‘Lord knows what we’d have done if you’d said no,’ added a bluff, soldier type, whom I took, correctly, to be Sir Marmaduke. ‘Flag down a bus and just collar someone, I suppose.’ One often suspects that a late invitation signifies that a certain scraping of the barrel has gone on. But it is a little depressing to be told it.

‘Pay no attention,’ said his wife firmly and led me away to where the other young stood. The party was more of an age mixture than usual as most of the mothers and fathers of the girls, if not the boys, were to be with us for the evening, so I met a couple of pleasant enough bankers and their wives, together with a rather pretty, Italian woman, Mrs Wakefield, married to Lady Dalton’s cousin, who’d come up from Shropshire to begin the launch of her youngest daughter, Carla. We moved on to the girls themselves. Among them was a plain and russet-faced character, Candida Finch, whom I’d already met. To be honest, I had found her a bit uphill, but we were programmed in those days to make conversation with anybody nearby and so I fell into the small talk demanded of me without much hardship, naming mutual acquaintances, reminding her that we had both been at this drinks party and that one, although we had never spoken more than a few words to each other before now. She nodded and answered, civilly enough but, as always with her, too loudly, too aggressively and, every now and then, with a sudden, stentorian laugh that made you jump out of your skin. Of course, now I can see that she was very angry at what had happened to her life, but one can be so blind and so heartless in youth. I looked at the grown ups sipping their cocktails at the other end of the room.

‘Is your mother here?’

She shook her head. ‘My mother’s dead. She died when I was a child.’ This was, of course, rather more than I had bargained for and her voice, as she said it, was raw. I muttered vaguely about being sorry and how I must have muddled her with someone else as I thought I’d seen a photograph of them together in a magazine. This time she spoke with considerably more authority. ‘You mean my stepmother. No. She is not here. Thank God.’ There was no mistaking the tone and the expletive at the end was presumably intended to bring me, and anyone standing near us, up to date with the way things were between them. I wonder sometimes why people can be so anxious to share their unsatisfactory domestic situation with strangers. It must be because it is often the only arena where they have the power to say what they think of the people concerned and there is some satisfaction in that. Anyway, I grasped the situation. It was not, after all, a very unusual one.

As I later learned, Candida’s was a sad story. Her mother had been the sister of Serena Gresham’s mother, Lady Claremont, making the girls first cousins, but Mrs Finch had died in her thirties, I don’t think I ever knew what of, and her widowed husband, already rather looked down on in the family, had proceeded, once his tears were dry, to make what was referred to as an ‘unfortunate’ marriage to a former estate agent from Godalming, saddling Candida with an unhelpful stepmother, whom incidentally she detested, and the Claremonts with a nearly-sister-in-law from hell. To make matters worse, when the girl was in her early teens, the father, Mr Finch, had also died, of a heart attack this time, leaving Candida entirely in the clutches of his widow, to whom he had left every penny of what remained of his fortune, as well as custody of his daughter. At this point her aunt, Lady Claremont, had stepped in and tried to take the reins. But Mrs Finch from Godalming was no pushover. She was deaf to any advice on schooling and it was only with the greatest difficulty that her permission had been gained for Candida to do the Season, for which, so one gathered, Lady Claremont was footing the bill. Obviously, all this placed the girl in an invidious position, which one might have sympathised with more, had it not been reflected in her loud and awkward manner. Nor was she helped by her appearance, with her dark, unruly, frizzy hair somehow compounding the complexion of a navvy. She had freckles, too, and a nose straight out of Pinocchio. All in all, Candida Finch had been dealt a tough hand.

‘Right. Time to leave, everyone.’ Lady Dalton clapped her hands firmly. ‘How are we going? Who’s got a car?’ Some of the fathers drained their double martinis and held up their hands.

One detail of the different world I once inhabited that is not often referred to, but which affected every minute of almost every day, was the traffic. That is to say, there wasn’t any. Or none to compare with today’s. The cars one encounters now midmorning on a normal weekday in London would only have been seen at six o’clock on a Friday night in late December, as people were leaving town for Christmas. The whole business of parking being impossible simply hadn’t started. The time you allowed for a journey was the time it would take. London, or the London most of us occupied, was still small and it was rare that one left more than ten minutes before any appointment. In terms of the general stress of being alive, I cannot tell you what a difference it made.

Another contrast with today concerned the area we lived in. To start with, in London, the upper middle, and upper classes had not yet strayed from their traditional nesting grounds of Belgravia, Mayfair and Kensington – or Chelsea, if they were a bit wild. I remember my mother driving me past a very pretty Georgian terrace on the Fulham Road, before one gets to the football ground. I admired the houses and she nodded. ‘They’re charming,’ she said. ‘It’s such a pity no one could ever live here.’ And if Fulham was outside the pale, Clapham, or worse, Wandsworth, had no hold in their lives or on their mental map whatever, other than as the place where their daily lived, or where one might get glass cut or rugs mended or find a cheaper saleroom. This would soon change when my own generation started to marry and the gentrification of the south bank of the Thames would begin. But in the late Sixties it had not quite happened yet. I remember distinctly driving with my parents to have dinner with some impoverished friends of theirs, who, faute de mieux, had bought a house in Battersea, just at the dawn of the new era. As my mother carefully read the scribbled directions to my father at the wheel and the location of our destination became ever clearer, she looked up from the paper. ‘Have they lost their minds?’ she said.

One must remember that, until the middle Sixties at any rate, there was fairly cheap housing to be found in any part of the city, so there was no pressing need to move out. One might not occupy a palace but that didn’t mean one couldn’t stick around. We lived at one time on the corner of Hereford Square and, behind the west side, if you can believe it, lay a small field where someone kept a pony. In the corner of this was a cottage, probably originally part of some stabling arrangement, and in my mid-Fifties childhood it was lived in by a not-very-successful actor and his potter-wife. They were delightful and we saw a lot of them but they must have been as poor as church mice. Still, there they were, living in a cottage on the corner of a fashionable square. The next time I entered that building was thirty years later. It had been rented by a Hollywood star who was shooting a movie at Pinewood. Recently it retailed for seven million. The result of the property boom was not just the dispersal of people from their home territory, but the end of the ‘mix’ in London’s population. Struggling painters and penniless writers no longer live in the mews cottages in Knightsbridge or behind Wilton Crescent, where they would once rub shoulders with countesses and millionaires in the local shops and post office. Teachers and poets and professors and explorers and seamstresses and political subversives have all been driven away. They have been replaced by bankers. And we are the poorer for it.

The Great Room at Grosvenor House was an appropriate setting for the formal opening race of the Season. It twinkled with that now distinctive, self-important, 1960s, sub-deco glamour, so memorably christened ‘Euro-Splendour’ by Stephen Poliakoff. One came through the hall of the hotel on to a kind of gallery, where a wide, aluminium-balustered staircase within the room itself led down towards the gleaming floor below. At the sight of it I was suddenly glad that I had come. It was early June, and a warm night, too warm for the boys’ comfort, really, as our tails in those days were made from woollen cloth, but there is something about a party on a warm summer night that always seems to promise much. Usually more than it delivers.

Some years later, before the end of it all, the Season would have to take account of the exam year and cater for career girls sitting their A levels and the like, but not then. For such a consideration to have been raised by anyone in 1968 would have been regarded as quirky, eccentric and very middle class. Looking back, I realise there was hardly a parent there who thought their daughters’ future would be anything more than an extended repeat of their own present. How can they have been so secure in their expectations? Didn’t it occur to them that more change might be on its way? After all, their generation had lived through enough of it to push the world off its axis.

I stood for a moment against the balustrade. There was something very seductive about looking down from above on a ballroom apparently filled with flower-decked swans. At that moment, whatever the rights and wrongs of the ritual, I confess I was happy to be part of it, as Lucy and I descended together, smiling and nodding in the way one does. From across the room, Serena gave me a slight wave, which was gratifying. ‘Whose table is she on?’ I asked.

Lucy followed my gaze. She did not need to be told whom we were discussing. ‘Her mother’s. She’s the one in blue. The couple talking at the end look like the Marlboroughs and I’m pretty sure the fat one next to Lord Claremont is a princess of Denmark. I seem to remember she’s one of Serena’s godmothers.’ I decided not to push in.

Lucy stopped. ‘There’s your friend, making hay while the sun shines.’ A few yards ahead of us Damian was joking merrily with Joanna Langley.

I wasn’t going to let her get away with that. ‘Your friend, too, I gather,’ I said sharply, which earned me an apologetic glance.

Watching the gossiping couple, somewhat sourly, was the tragic figure of Georgina Waddilove. Pitiful Georgina. The style that was so becoming to almost all the others did not show her to much advantage and she resembled nothing more than an enormous, white blancmange. The flowers sewn on to a mountain of artificial ringlets battened to her head looked like scraps of torn paper caught in a tree. I walked up to where Damian was standing. ‘Have you brought your stuff here?’

Damian nodded. ‘It’s all in the cloakroom.’ He smiled at Joanna. ‘He’s putting me up for the night.’

‘Don’t your parents have a place in London?’ By such questions Joanna would occasionally give herself away. At least she would signify that she was not a founder member of this set-up. I am confident, even at this distance, that there was no malice in her, far from it, but she had not learned to spare someone’s feelings by avoiding any subject that might prove delicate. This was partly because, despite her great expectations, she was not really interested in money. If the reason Damian’s parents did not have a London home was because they could not afford one, she would not have thought any the less of them for that. Which is to say she was possessed of a larger generosity of spirit than most of us. Damian, as usual, was unfazed.

‘No, they haven’t,’ he said, without further qualification. I had not yet noticed it in him, but he never gave out any information about himself unless asked a direct question. Even then it was carefully rationed.

‘I think we’d better sit down.’ Georgina had clearly had just about enough of Damian’s being cornered by Miss Langley, as she would have put it.

I smiled at the object of her irritation. ‘Are you in this party?’

‘With my mother? Of course not.’ Joanna shook her head, laughing, and I found myself watching the movement of her lips. To me, her beauty had a mesmerising perfection, as if one were standing close to a celluloid icon projected on to an invisible screen. ‘You don’t think she would have missed out on the chance of hosting a dinner of her own?’ She nodded at a point further up the room and I could see an eager, bustling, little woman, wearing a good deal of jewellery, who was staring anxiously in our direction. ‘Better go.’ She sauntered away.

‘I suppose you’re going, too,’ said Damian, ‘Think of me.’ The last was added in an annoying half-whisper, just audible enough for Georgina to have caught it, although I am not sure that she did.

‘You didn’t have to be in this group. You could have had my seat if you hadn’t taken the first offer.’ I made no attempt to prevent Lucy hearing this, nor had I intended to, so Damian was able to direct his answer at her.

‘To quote Madame Greffulhe: “Que j’ai jamais su.”’ Lucy laughed. But by now people really were starting to sit down, and so we set out on the journey back to her mother’s table.

‘Who’s Madame WhatNot?’ I asked.

‘Marcel Proust used to go to her parties, when he was young. Years later, they asked her what it was like having such a genius in her salon, and she replied: “Que j’ai jamais su!”’

‘If only I’d known.’

‘Precisely.’

I was silent, wondering how Damian knew these things. How did he know Lucy knew them? I learned later it was one of his gifts. Like a squirrel, he would seek out and store any unlikely tidbit, in this case the startling news that Lucy Dalton read Proust, and he would save it for a time when it could be used to create an instant, magic bond that would exclude the others present, making him and whoever his target might be into a cosy club of two. I have seen the trick employed by others, but seldom to such effect. He never misjudged the moment. Lucy smiled. ‘Please don’t tell me you’re surprised.’

‘I am a bit.’ I looked around at the chattering, giggling throng, pulling their chairs up to the tables with their shining, white cloths. ‘I doubt that most of this lot read Proust.’

‘If they did, they wouldn’t tell you. The men here will exaggerate what they know. The women will conceal it.’ I hope these words would not be true now, but I’m afraid they were true then.

She enjoyed my wrong-footed silence, until I was the one to break it. ‘I thought you didn’t like him,’ I said, which seemed a non sequitur, but wasn’t.

She shrugged. ‘I don’t much. Who told you I’d asked him first?’

‘He did. Why? Was it a secret?’

‘No.’ She looked at me. ‘I’m sorry. I should have invited you before him. I must have assumed you’d already be going.’

I nodded genially. ‘That’s all right. Don’t apologise. Why shouldn’t you ask him first? He’s much better looking than I am.’ Which annoyed her as I intended that it should, but the opportunity for rebuttal was gone. We were back with their party and Lady Dalton was pointing us to our allotted chairs. I had been placed between Carla Wakefield and Candida.

During the first course I talked to Carla about whom we both knew and where we’d both studied, about our plans for the summer and the sports we enjoyed, until the half-eaten salmon was taken away and the inevitable chicken was brought in and I turned to my other neighbour. I could see at once that more of the same would not quite answer.

‘You’re very good at this, aren’t you?’ she said and, while it was not exactly voiced in a hostile manner, it wasn’t all that friendly, either.

‘Thank you,’ I replied. She had not, of course, meant it as a compliment, but by taking it as one I hadn’t left her any room for manoeuvre. She glowered at her plate. I tried a more honest approach. ‘If you don’t enjoy it, why are you doing it?’ I asked.

She stared at me. ‘Because my aunt arranged the whole thing before I was given a choice. Because she is the only relative I have who cares whether I live or die. Most of all, because I don’t know what else to do.’ As usual, when discussing her family arrangements she spoke with a kind of ill-repressed fury. ‘My stepmother has had charge of me since I was fourteen, and as a result of her bizarre requirements when it comes to female instruction, I am uneducated, untrained and completely unequipped for any productive work. Now I am supposed to “make a life for myself,” whatever that means. My cousin Serena tells me that things would improve if I knew more people in London. I do not dispute this – only these are not the sort of people I want to know more of.’ With a dismissive snort she indicated the body of the room.

It did seem very hard to have lost both parents by the time she was eighteen, even if Oscar Wilde would have thought it careless. ‘Where were you at school?’

‘Cullingford Grange.’

I had vaguely heard of it. ‘Isn’t that in Hertfordshire?’

Candida nodded. ‘It’s the kind of place where they worry if you’re reading too much, instead of being out in the nice fresh air.’ She rolled her eyes at the strangeness of her stepmother’s choices. ‘I could recite the rules of hockey in my sleep, but unfortunately nothing was taught about literature, mathematics, history, art, politics or life.’ I believed her because her account was only too familiar.

I think, I pray, I come from the last generation of the privileged to pay no attention to the education of their daughters. Even in 1968 there were women’s colleges at Cambridge and Oxford, but they were, as a rule, filled with the daughters of the bourgeois intelligentsia. Posh girls were an oddity and indeed almost the only one I can remember from my own year left after one term to marry a man with a castle in Kent. There were exceptions, but these generally came from families who were known to cherish an eccentric tradition of educating their women, rather than from the run-of-the-mill squireachy. For the rest, parents would scrimp and save to send the boys to Eton or Winchester or Harrow, while their sisters were put into the charge of some alcoholic, Belgian countess, whose main instruction was not to bother the parents.

After leaving, a girl might spend a year at a finishing school where she could polish her languages and her skiing, then another year would pass in coming out, after which she would get a job arranging flowers in the boardroom or cooking lunches for directors or working for her father, until she had discovered Mr Right who, with any luck, would be the heir to Lord Right. And that would be that. Hopefully, the Hon. John Right would be right for Mummy and Daddy, too, since they, like their own parents, would expect to approve the choice. Our mothers may not have been pushed into their marriages in the Thirties and Forties, but they had certainly been kept out of any marriages their parents disapproved of. We all had stories of aunts and great-aunts who had been sent to study painting in Florence, or to live with a grandmother in Scotland, or to improve their French at some mountainous chateau in the Swiss Alps, to break them of a bad love habit and, lest those Barbara Cartland addicts think differently, usually it worked.

I do not mean to imply that all who followed this path were wretched. Lots of them were as happy as clams. They spent the early years of marriage in some part of London their mothers found unlikely, then, if they’d chosen well, they might move into the big house on their father-in-law’s estate (‘Fizzy and I were just rattling around and we thought it was time to let the kids have a go’). For some the father proved stubborn and wouldn’t move out, and for most there wasn’t a house to inherit, so the young couple would generally buy a cottage or a farmhouse or, if things were going really well in the City, a Queen Anne manor house in Gloucestershire or Oxfordshire or Suffolk. After that, he would shoot and complain about politics, they’d both ski and worry about the children, and she would work for charity, entertain and, if things were going less well in the City, sell artificial jewellery to her captive friends. Until the children grew up and it was time first to downsize and then to die. All of which, lest we forget and before we feel too sorry for them, was a lot better than scratching for a living in the dirt of the plains of Uzbekistan.

But where did it leave someone like Candida Finch? She was obviously clever but her appearance and her manner would not help to offset her lack of qualifications to say the least. Nor would I have thought there was any certainty of a husband coming up on the next lift. And there wouldn’t be much money. What were her options? ‘Do you know what you’d like to do?’ I asked.

Again, she rolled her eyes in exasperation. ‘What can I do?’

‘I asked what would you like to do.’

This was enough to soften her a little. It was, after all, a genuine enquiry. ‘I think I might have liked to work in publishing, but I have no degree. And before you suggest I take one now, we both know that won’t happen. It’s too late and I’ve missed it. I thought I might squeeze a few quid out of a godparent and push into a vanity publishing firm, but they’d have to accept they’d lose every penny, and all to buy me the right to talk about publishing at dinner parties. Which is the most I’d achieve.’

‘Be careful you’re not determined to fail in order to annoy your stepmother. It doesn’t sound to me as if she’ll care much either way.’ I nearly didn’t say this, since our very brief acquaintance did not at all justify it, but she laughed.

‘Well, that’s true anyway.’ Her voice was warmer than it had been. ‘You know, you really are quite good at this.’

When dinner was over, by some pre-arranged signal the white-clad debutantes slipped away, leaving the tables occupied only by the parents, the young men and the odd non-deb girl, glum and in colour. It was time for the ceremony that we had come for and while I would not pretend to the ecstasy of anticipation that gripped the mothers throughout the room, the rest of us were quite curious. First, an enormous cake, literally six or seven feet high, was wheeled out on to the centre of the dance floor. Next the Patroness of the Ball arose from her chair with sober grandeur and walked across to stand next to it. I seem to remember that this was always Lady Howard de Walden, but maybe I’m wrong, maybe it alternated with the Duchess of Somewhere. Either way, she was a heavyweight in the scales by which these things are weighed. I don’t actually think the whole thing would have worked if she were not. As it was, her rigid upright posture and the confident dignity of a crowned monarch, which a lot of those women seemed to possess quite naturally then in contrast to so many of their daughters, gave the exercise a certain credibility even before it had begun. The band struck up and we looked towards the head of the staircase, where the Girls of the Year stood lined up in couples, side by side, poised, waiting. Then, slowly, they began to descend at a measured pace, as solemnly as if they were serving at a Pope’s funeral.

Down they came, the lights playing on the white flowers among their gleaming curls, on their long white gloves, on the white lace and silk of their dresses, on their shining, haughty, hopeful faces. Once they had reached the bottom, each pair advanced to where the Patroness stood, dropped into a deep Court curtsey, and moved on. They were not all presented to absolute advantage. Georgina looked like Godzilla in a shroud as she lumbered down towards terra firma. But for most of them there was something almost ethereal in their uniformity. Sixty versions of the Angel of Mons coming down to ease the pain of those beneath.

It may, of course, be with the wisdom of hindsight, but I am fairly sure it was at that precise moment that I first became aware that what we were witnessing did not have long to live. That there would not be many more generations taking part in this performance or, indeed, anything like it. That our parents’ dream of somehow rescuing enough of the old, pre-war world for their children to live in, was a chimera, that I was, in short, witnessing the start of the finish. Funnily enough, and you probably will not believe me, it was an impressive sight. Like all disciplined, synchronised movement, the procession was commanding in its execution, as on and on they came, pair after matched pair, gliding down, curtseying low, moving on. All before a giant cake. Yet it was not ridiculous. It probably sounds ridiculous in the telling. Absurd. Even laughable. I can only say that I was there and it was not.

The display was done. The girls were blooded, their status as this year’s debutantes confirmed and it was time for the dancing to begin. To counter their former solemnity, the band now played a tune at the top of the hit parade of the day, Simple Simon Says, one of those rather exhausting songs, which is full of uninvited instructions for the listener, ‘Put your hands on your head, shake them all about,’ and so on, but, although almost definitively naff, it was quite a good icebreaker. Lucy was already dancing with one of the other men in the party, so I made the offer to Candida and we walked together on to the floor. ‘Who’s that man you were talking to, before dinner?’ she asked. I did not need to follow her eyeline to know the answer.

‘Damian Baxter,’ I said. ‘He’s up at Cambridge with me.’

‘You must introduce us.’ It was at this moment that I first encountered a particularly terrifying part of Candida’s repertoire. Whenever she spotted someone she thought attractive there would ensue a kind of manic, as she thought flirtatious, ritual rather like a Maori dance of welcome, where she would roll her eyes and snicker and rock back and forth with a kind of shouted laugh more suited to a thirsty bricklayer than a young girl coming out. In fairness, I suppose it must have achieved her immediate ends reasonably often, since there could be no doubt as to what was on offer and we were not spoiled for choice in those days, but I do not think, as a routine, it was ever very conducive to long-term commitment, and in fact earned Candida a reputation, by the end of the Season, of being something of a bicycle. I was never treated to this display head on, as she was not at all interested in me, but even for a witness from the stalls it was pretty unnerving.

Following her hungry glance, I looked back to where Damian was standing at the centre of a small but admiring crowd. Serena Gresham was there, laughing, with Carla Wakefield and a couple of girls I did not recognise. Georgina was hanging back in her usual position of resentful witness to the fun of others. I saw now that Andrew Summersby was one of the party and Mrs Waddilove was busily, but ineffectually, trying to draw him into conversation; or, more to the point, she was trying to involve him in a conversation with her own daughter. But neither would play due, I would imagine, to a complete lack of interest on both sides. A friend of mine from Atlanta always called this kind of social interchange ‘Pumping Mud.’ They were watched from the other side of the table by an older woman, presumably another of Mrs Waddilove’s guests, but I did not recognise her. She was an odd specimen, even in that company. Her face was that of a snobbish, Dutch doll, while the weird combination of her unlikely near-black hair, more Benidorm than good old British, with a pair of piercing pale-blue eyes flecked with shades of green and amber, made her look more than slightly mad, half Lizzie Borden, half stoat. She stood very still as she listened to the conversation limping along, but her stillness held a kind of inner threat of danger, a beast of prey, motionless but waiting to spring. ‘Who’s that standing opposite Mrs Waddilove and Andrew Summersby?’

Candida tore her eyes away from feasting on Damian and glanced across. ‘Lady Belton. Andrew’s mother.’ I nodded. I might have guessed since I could now see that his sister, Annabella Warren, was among the girls in the Waddilove group. I looked back at Madame Mère, as she stood surveying the troops. I had heard of Lady Belton but I had not seen her before that night. One glance was enough to endorse the truth of her reputation.

The Countess of Belton was not generally liked, probably because she was not at all likeable. She was stupid, snobbish to the point of dementia and inexplicably arrogant. Admittedly, she was not vain, nor was she extravagant, but she took this to such a degree that it ceased to be a virtue. In fact, that night she was dressed in what looked like the window display of a Sue Ryder shop in West Hartlepool. Later I would come to know and loathe her, but despite all this, in a funny way I cannot quite explain at this distance, she did have something. Perhaps her absolute refusal to bend to her own times gave her a sort of moral conviction. Certainly she stands out vividly in my memory among the mothers of that year, although I had not then met her beleaguered husband, who always seemed to find an excuse to stay away, and I had only chatted, and not much more, to Lord Summersby, the dull and lumpen eldest son and heir. But even without all this information I saw at once that Georgina’s mother was too obvious and her ambition was not realistic.

Watching her flash her smiles between them all and attempt to ensnare her daughter’s interest, Candida spoke my thoughts. ‘Dream on, Mrs Waddilove.’

She was right. This was a hopeless fantasy. It was quite clear to the most casual observer that Lady Belton’s prejudices would never favour a match with the likes of the Waddiloves, however happy she was to dine and drink through that night at their expense. She wouldn’t have dreamed of it, even if the girl had been pretty. That is unless a sum of money had been involved that was roughly equivalent to the combined African National Debt. As for the boy, I already suspected he was incapable of independent thought, in which I would be proved right. But anyway, the sad truth is that Georgina was not the type to inspire reckless love.

We danced on. Like the well-mannered chap I was then, I partnered my hostess, Lady Dalton, a custom universally observed in those days but almost abandoned now. To me, there was always something faintly comic in the practice, as one steered these middle-aged women around the floor, she wishing it were a foxtrot, you longing for it to end, one’s hand resting lightly on the stiffened stays that were usually detectable beneath the fabric of the evening gown, but, funny as I found it, I am not glad the tradition of dancing with one’s friends’ parents has gone. It made a kind of bridge between the generations in our increasingly fragmented society and I suspect we can use all the bridges that are going. ‘Do you know what you’re planning to do when you leave university?’ she said genially, as we stumbled around in our unsyncopated way.

I shook my head. ‘Not really. Not yet.’

‘There isn’t a preordained pattern to be followed?’

Again I answered in the negative. ‘There’s no estate to come, or family business to swallow me up.’

‘What does your father do?’ At the time, in the late 1960s, this question would have bordered on impertinence, since the smart English had not yet abandoned their pretence that one’s professional activity was of minor, and then only personal, interest. But of course Lady Dalton was engaging in research.

‘He’s a diplomat. But the Foreign Office isn’t looking for my type any more, even if I wanted to follow him.’ Which was more or less true. Had I been an exceptional candidate it might have been different, but for the more regular intake the Foreign Office, always a kingdom of its own in Britain, had decided at some point in the sixties that the day of the gentleman ambassador was over, that henceforth the role must be downgraded socially in order, I imagine, to be taken more seriously by the post-war intelligentsia. Either that, or it was a way of shifting their political loyalties. Forty years later, the results of the policy have been mixed, especially since it has not been adopted by the rest of mainland Europe. The British ambassador these days is generally regarded as rather an oddball in the world’s capitals, both by the international brigade and by the Society of whichever city they find themselves in. One would have thought this might have diminished our backstairs influence. But perhaps that was what they were after.

Lady Dalton nodded. ‘It’s going to be so very interesting, seeing which directions you all go in.’ With that the music ended and I walked her back to the table. She was a nice woman and we were friendly for as long as our paths were to cross, but from that moment she had entirely lost interest in me.

Some time around one in the morning the band leader approached the microphone, instructing us to take our partners for the gallop, and by this sign we knew the evening was nearly done. As always, surveying the modern generation, it seems perfectly incredible that we, who were after all simultaneously participating in the swinging sixties, still ended a good many parties with this period romp, but we did. Unlike the Scottish reels that were also part of most of the parties, the gallop was only ever the last dance of the event and it was really just an excuse to show how drunk you were. You seized some luckless girl and raced back and forth across the floor, bumping around, vaguely in time to some loud, rum-ti-tum music, falling over, shouting and generally demonstrating that you were a very good sport. Needless to say there was a rather desperate quality to it, even a sort of lonely sadness, as one watched those shrieking girls up from the country, their ringlets collapsing, their dresses frequently torn, their make-up vanishing beneath a sheen of red jowls and sweat. At any rate for good or ill we, the merrymakers of 1968, danced it and with that, Queen Charlotte’s Ball was over for another year.

My parents’ flat was to be found on the ground floor of a tall house in Wetherby Gardens, a street that runs between South Kensington and Earl’s Court. In those days this was roughly like passing from heaven into hell and it was an important detail to my mother that the flat was considerably nearer the former than the latter. Now, naturally, either end would command a price beyond rubies. Again, much like the Daltons’ London home, the former dining room of the Victorian family for whom it was built had been carved into drawing room, hall and, in our case, kitchen. What had presumably been some sort of library had become a small, dark and rather poky place to eat in, and what must have been a charming morning room, overlooking the small garden attached to the flat and, beyond it, the very large communal garden shared by the block, had been split into two bedrooms, with some unsatisfactory jiggling of the paper wall to get one half of a double door and a reasonable proportion of window into each. Like so many of their generation, my parents were curiously accepting about their accommodation. When, later, in the Seventies and Eighties, we all started pulling down walls and moving bathrooms and converting attics, they watched in semi-horrified wonder, my father, particularly, believing that if God had wanted that shelf in a different place He would have arranged it and who was he to interfere with Providence? It’s odd, really, when one thinks how their eighteenth-and nineteenth-century ancestors thought nothing of pulling down ancient family houses to build something more voguish in their place. Maybe it had something to do with rationing or making do during the war.

I was already in bed and asleep when I was summoned back to the surface by the repeated ringing of the doorbell. For a while this took the form of a church bell being rung, for some strange reason, by William Ewart Gladstone, but then I woke up and the ringing continued.

Damian was hugely apologetic. ‘I’m so sorry. I should have asked for a key. Then I thought you’d probably be going on with the rest of us.’

‘Where?’

He shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Round and about. We looked into the Garrison for a drink and then we went to get a sandwich and a cup of coffee from that hut on the other side of Chelsea Bridge.’ As it happens, we would do this quite often as the year wore on, boys and girls in evening dress, queuing at dawn behind the bikers for a bacon butty from the little wooden kiosk in the shadow of the great power station. They were nice people, those motorcycle men, and friendly as a rule, amused rather than affronted by our pampered appearance. I wish them well.

‘Was that the end of it?’

Damian smiled. ‘Not quite. We wound up at the Claremonts’ house.’

‘On Millionaire’s Row.’

‘Next to Kensington Palace.’

I nodded. ‘That’s the one,’ I said. How cool and ordered he looked. He could have been about to go out, rather than coming in after what could only be described as a long night. ‘You have been busy. How did you manage that?’

He shrugged again. ‘Serena suggested it and I didn’t see why not.’ ‘Did you wake up her parents?’

‘Not the mother. Her dad came down and asked us not to make too much noise.’ He looked round the drawing room vaguely.

‘Would you like a drink?’

‘Just one, maybe. If you’ll join me.’

I poured out two glasses of whisky and water. ‘Do you want any ice?’ ‘Not for me.’ He was learning fast.

‘What happened to Georgina? Was she with you?’

He could barely suppress a laugh. ‘No, thank the Lord. We didn’t even have to lie. They were dropping off Lady Belton and Andrew at their flat, and Mrs Waddilove wouldn’t let Georgina escape.’

There was something slightly unsatisfactory in this. ‘Poor Georgina. I’m afraid she’s a bit in love with you.’

This time he did laugh. ‘There are many who must carry that burden.’ It seemed to me, in that moment, that to have this kind of self-confidence at the age we then were must be a kind of Paradise. He mistook the envy in my eyes for a trace of disapproval and hurried to reassure me. ‘Come on. I chummed her to Queen Charlotte’s. I’ll always be friendly when we meet. You can’t expect me to marry her because she was the first to ask me to her party.’

Which, of course, I could not and would not. ‘Just be nice to her,’ I said. Then I took him down the passage and showed him into what was usually my own, cramped bedroom. But my parents were in the country and I had chosen to sleep in theirs. ‘Was it what you expected?’ I asked, as we were about to close our respective doors. ‘Or did you disapprove?’

‘I don’t know what I expected.’ Damian thought for a moment. ‘And I’m in no position to disapprove of anything.’ He paused. ‘One thing I do notice and even perhaps envy.’ I waited. ‘You all belong to something, even if it’s hard to define quite what. Contrary to myth, you don’t necessarily all know each other and you certainly don’t all like each other. But you do have some sort of group identity, which I don’t share.’

‘Perhaps you will.’

He shook his head. ‘No, I won’t. But I don’t think I’d want to. Not for much longer, anyway. I have a suspicion that before we’re finished I’ll be the one who belongs to something. And you won’t.’

Which, of course, is exactly what happened.