Past Imperfect

FOUR

I cannot tell you with any real exactitude whether it made me laugh or cry when I heard, late in 1970, that Lucy Dalton was going to marry Philip Rawnsley-Price. I do remember it came as something of a shock. It was not only his awkward and unsubtle courtship, of her and every other girl who would stop to listen, that made him so unsatisfactory a character. He was born unsatisfactory. He had one of those flat faces, like a carnival mask that had been dropped in the road and run over by a heavy lorry. His skin was sallow, verging on olive, but this did not, as it might have, give him an exotic quality. Rather, he resembled an ailing Mediterranean lift attendant, with round, moist eyes resting in a pool of wrinkles, two fried eggs in fat. After what seemed a very short engagement I was invited to the wedding and I went, but it was a restrained and slightly bewildering affair. Lady Dalton was not her usual, cheery self, as she kissed and handed us down the line, and while all the usual forms were observed – the ancient village church, the marquee on the lawn, the plates of unappetising nibbles, the rather good champagne – none of it seemed to be celebrated with much brio. Even the speeches were pretty formulaic, the only memorable bit being when Lucy’s aged uncle forgot what he was doing and addressed us as ‘fellow members,’ though quite what he thought we were fellow members of was never revealed.

Obviously, all of the above became comprehensible when Lucy was delivered of a baby girl early the following year. I saw the couple for a bit after that, kitchen suppers with other girls like her and boys like me, but long before the Sloane Ranger Handbook had given that tribe a name and an identity. In my day they were just the girls in pearls and we were the chinless wonders. But I never thought much of Philip, even after the dancing was done and we had all begun to grow up a little. He was one of those who manage to combine almost total failure with breathtaking arrogance and in the end life gently separated us. Besides, they had enthusiastically embraced the Sixties (which, as we know, largely took place during the Seventies) and like many others had to find ways of dealing with the disappointment that set in once it had become clear that the Age of Aquarius was not going to happen after all. They moved out of London while Philip went through a series of jobs or, as he would put it, careers, the last of which, I now learned, was some sort of farm shop that he and Lucy had opened in Kent. By that stage catering, ‘hospitality,’ sportswear and, I think, a variation of property development had all played their part, so it was hard to feel optimistic in the long term and I was curious to learn if the number on the list still worked, when I rang her for the first time in, I should imagine, at least thirty years. But Lucy answered and, after our initial joshing, I explained that I was going to be in her neighbourhood the following week and I thought it would be fun to look in and catch up. There was a slight silence at the proposal. Then she spoke again. ‘Of course. How lovely. What day were you thinking of?’

‘Up to you. I’ll fit my other stuff round whenever you’re free.’ Which was unfair of me, but I suspected that if I had been specific it would have been the one day she couldn’t manage. This way there was no alternative but to give in gracefully.

‘Don’t expect much to eat. I’m no better in the kitchen than when we last met.’

‘I just want to see where you live.’

‘I’m flattered.’ She didn’t sound very flattered but even so, the Thursday after that, I found myself bowling through the Kent lanes on my way to Peckham Bush.

I followed the directions, through the centre and out the other side, until eventually I turned into a gap between two high hedges and drove down a bumpy track into a former farmyard. Large signs pointed me to a brightly lit shop and showed me to a car park with a surfeit of empty spaces, but the old, red-tiled farmhouse lay a little beyond this commercial centre, so I stopped outside that instead. I wasn’t out of the car before Lucy emerged. ‘Well, hello,’ she said. We had not seen each other, as I have explained, for many years, and it is only by such long gaps that we can chart the cruelty of time as well as, in this case, disappointment.

Things were not always so for her. In what I now see was the restrained manner of the days of our youth, she had been a modest darling of the media in her way, an early ‘It Girl,’ a precursor of the celebrity culture that was soon to overwhelm us. The point was that, unlike most of the girls, she had embraced the trendy Swinging Sixties to quite a degree, if not so fiercely as to frighten the mothers. She wore miniskirts that were slightly shorter and eyeliner that was slightly blacker, and she would give quotes to make journalists laugh. She would praise ‘those darling train robbers’ or declare Che Guevara the world’s sexiest martyr. Once she was asked for her happiest moment and she replied it was when P. J. Proby split his jeans which made a headline in the Evening Standard. It was soft rebellion, drawing-room subversion, an endorsement of every value that would destroy her kind, but done with a cheeky grin. It played well and raised her profile and, during the Season, there had been model shoots and photographs on those feature pages in the Tatler, that read today like a message from the Land that Time Forgot: ‘This Year’s Debs,’ ‘Fashions to Watch,’ ‘The Young Trend Setters,’ and so on. Lord Lichfield asked to take her picture and was accepted, and I distinctly recall some now forgotten television ‘personality’ (a concept so new as to be barely dry) inviting her on to his show. She declined, of course, at the insistence of her mother, but even the request had given her a certain cachet.

Of all this fun and bubble there remained not a trace in the sad, tired face before me. She still wore her shoulder-length hair loose, but the bounce had gone, and it was lank, thin and greying. Her clothes, which had once been racy, were now just old: old jeans, old shirt, old scuffed shoes. They covered her nakedness and that was all. Even her make-up was no more than a tired acknowledgement that she was female. She nodded towards the house. ‘Come in.’

After this beginning it was almost a relief to see that time had not converted her to domesticity. In fact, it looked as if a terrorist bomb had just exploded in the hall, blowing every possession of the family into a new and illogical place. There is a kind of messy house that cannot quite be explained by the laziness of the occupants; where a sort of anger, a protest against the values of the world, seems to be involved in its brand of farrago, and I would pay Lucy the compliment of thinking this was one of them. The whole place seemed to have been decorated in the very worst years of the 1970s, with bold, depressing designs in brown and orange, framed posters of over-praised films and a good deal of cane and Indian weave. The kitchen was predictably pine-slatted with terracotta, tiled surfaces, the grouting blackened with filth. Its walls were lined with lots of shelves supporting a jumble of non-matching mugs, pictures of the children, ornaments won at long-ago fairs, pages of magazines torn out for some lost reason. And dirt. Lucy looked around, seeing it all with fresh eyes, as one does when a stranger arrives. ‘Jesus. I’m afraid we’re in rather a pickle. Let me give you a drink and we’ll get out of here.’ She fished about in the large refrigerator, found a huge, half-empty bottle of Pinot Grigio and, grabbing two cloudy, furry-looking glasses from beneath the sink, led the way into what must have been the parlour of the farmer’s wife who lived here once, so tidily, before the world turned upside down.

If anything, the drab, disintegrating chaos was even more dispiriting than in the other rooms I had passed through, with tired, crocheted rugs strewn over the lumpy, disconnected chairs and sofas, and a bookshelf made from planks of wood and bricks. Quite a nice portrait of a young woman in the 1890s hung skew-whiff above the chimneypiece, making an improbable status statement from another time and another place. Two invitations and a bill were jammed into its chipped frame. Lucy followed my eyes. ‘My mother gave me that. She thought it might help make the room more normal.’ She leant forward and straightened it.

‘Who is it?’

‘My great-grandmother, I think. I’m not sure.’ For a second I thought of that earlier Lady Dalton, coming in from riding, dressing for luncheon, deadheading the roses. What would she make of her role in this dustbin?

‘Where’s Philip?’

‘In the shop, I’m afraid. He really can’t leave it. I’m going to give you some lunch, then we’ll walk over together.’ She sipped her wine.

‘How’s the shop going?’ I grinned brightly. In fact, I could feel myself consciously trying to inject a perky quality into my speech, though whether I was attempting to cheer her up, or myself, I could not tell you.

‘Oh, all right,’ she smiled vaguely. ‘I think.’ Obviously yet another of Philip’s ventures was about to bite the dust. ‘The thing is, a shop ties one down so much. Before we started I thought it would be friends coming in all the time for a chat, and having cups of tea and baking cakes and things, but it isn’t. One just stands there, hour after hour, talking to complete strangers who never know what they want. And by the time you pay for everything, you know, the stock and the people who help and so on, there’s only about threepence left.’ She pronounced ‘threepence’ in the old way: ‘Thruppence.’ For a moment, I felt quite nostalgic.

‘What will you do if you pack it in?’

She shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. Philip’s got some idea about renting paintings to people.’

‘What paintings? To which people?’

‘I know,’ she acknowledged my query disloyally. ‘I don’t understand it, either. He thinks there might be quite a lot of money in it, but I can’t see how. Are you OK with pasta?’

I followed her back into the germ-rich kitchen and watched her take small bowls filled with leftover, dark, half-eaten things out of the fridge. She set about shuffling plates and banging saucepans together as she organised our feed. ‘How’s your mother?’ I asked.

Lucy nodded ruminatively, as if somehow this question had already been the subject of a long consideration. ‘Fine. Good.’ She looked across at me. ‘You know they sold Hurstwood?’

‘No, I didn’t. I’m sorry.’

She shook her head firmly from left to right. ‘Don’t be.’ She wasn’t having any of that. ‘Best thing that could have happened.’ Having rapped this out as severely as a Tsarist ukase to get the point of no regret across, she allowed herself to relax and elaborate. ‘It was about four years ago and of course it was terribly boo-hoo when it was going on, but there was no alternative. Not when Daddy did the sums. And the bonus is that they’re completely free now, for the first time in their lives. Johnny was never very interested in taking over, so it really is…’ She hesitated, trying to find a word she had not already employed that would support her argument effectively. She failed. ‘It’s fine.’

This phenomenon, where the losers in a revolution try to demonstrate their support for, and approval of, the changes that have destroyed them, always fascinates me. I suppose it is an offshoot of the Stockholm Syndrome, where kidnap victims start to defend their captors. Certainly, we’ve seen and heard a lot of it over the past few decades, especially among those toffs who are determined to show they are not being left behind. ‘We mustn’t cling on to the past,’ they say cheerily, ‘we have to move with the times.’ When the only movement possible for them, once all their values have been denigrated and destroyed, is down and out. ‘Where are they living?’ I asked.

‘Quite near Cheyne Walk. They’ve got a flat in one of those blocks.’

‘And Johnny and Diana? What happened to them?’ I had got to know Lucy’s brother and sister as the Season went on, not all that well, but enough to smile and kiss when we met.

‘Johnny’s got a restaurant. In Fulham. At least, he had a restaurant in Fulham. When I last spoke to him it sounded as if it was all going a bit off piste. But he’ll be OK. He’s always full of ideas.’

‘Is he married?’

‘Divorced. Two boys, but they live with his ex quite near Colchester, which is a bit trying. Mummy made a terrific effort at the beginning. But you know what it’s like, it meant hours on the train for the kids and all they ever wanted to do when they got to her was go home. So she’s slightly given up at the moment, but she says it’ll be much easier when they’ve grown up a bit.’ Lucy brought over the unappetising plates of yellow-grey pasta, smeared with what looked like the guts of a rabbit, and laid mine reverently before me. The world-weary bottle of Pinot Grigio was back in play.

‘What was his wife like?’ I lifted my fork without enthusiasm.

‘Gerda? Rather dull, to be honest, but not horrible or anything. She wasn’t someone you’d know. She’s Swedish. They met at Glastonbury. I quite liked her, actually, and the whole split was very civilised. They just didn’t have anything in common. She’s married to a neurosurgeon now, which seems to be much more the ticket.’

‘What about Diana?’ I always thought Lucy’s elder sister was the more beautiful of the two. She looked like a young Deborah Kerr and, unlike her more frenetic sibling, she had a sort of serenity unusual in someone of her age. We all thought of her as quite a catch and, to her mother’s unfeigned delight, she’d been heavily involved with the heir to a borders earldom when I knew them, though I had heard since that this hadn’t, in the end, come off. I noticed the question had penetrated Lucy’s armour slightly and I understood before I was told that all was not well here either. Time, it seemed, had been unkind to all the Daltons. ‘I’m afraid Diana’s not too good just now. She’s divorced as well, but hers was pretty grim.’

‘I know she didn’t marry Peter Berwick.’

‘No. More’s the pity, though I never thought I’d say it. He was always so stuck up and tedious when they were going out, but now, glimpsed across the chasm of the years, he seems like Paradise Lost. Her husband was American. You wouldn’t know him either. Nor would I, if I didn’t have to. They met in Los Angeles and he keeps promising to go back there, but he hasn’t so far. Worse luck.’

I had a sudden, vivid memory of Diana Dalton laughing at a joke I had told her. We were next to each other in the dining room at Hurstwood, before going on to a ball somewhere nearby. She was drinking at the time and did a massive nose trick, right into the lap of the Lord Lieutenant, seated blamelessly on her other side. ‘Did she have any children?’

‘Two. But of course they’re grown up now. One’s in Australia and the other’s working on a kibbutz near Tel Aviv. It’s annoying because since she’s been in the Priory the whole thing has landed on me and Mummy.’

One more sentence and I would have cried. Poor Lady Dalton. Poor Sir Marmaduke. What had they done to merit this annihilation by the furies? When I last saw them they were model representatives of the class that had run the Empire. They managed their estates, played their part in the county, frightened the village and generally did their duty. And I knew too well they had dreamed of a future for their children that would have consisted of much the same. Certainly their reveries bore no resemblance to what had actually come to pass. I thought of Lady Dalton at Queen Charlotte’s, gently probing me about my prospects. What splendid marriages she had planned for her two daughters, pretty and funny and well-born as they were. Would it have damaged the universe if just one of her wishes had come true? Instead, in forty years the entire Dalton edifice, centuries in the building, had come crashing down into the street. Their money was gone, and what little was left would soon be gobbled up by a feckless son and a reckless son-in-law. That’s if the Priory fees didn’t drain the pot dry before then. And the crimes that merited this punishment? The parents had not understood how to manage the changes the years would bring, and the children, all three of them, had believed the siren song of the Sixties, and invested everything in the brave new world they were so mendaciously promised.

There was a noise at the door. ‘Mum. Have you got it?’ I looked up. A young woman of about twenty was standing there. She was tall and would have been quite good looking, had she not been encased in an angry mist, irritated and impatient, as if we were needlessly keeping her waiting. Not for the first time I was struck by the phenomenon, another by-product of the social revolution of the last four decades, whereby parents these days frequently belong to an entirely different social class from their children. Obviously, this was Lucy’s daughter, but she spoke with a south London accent, harsh and unlovely in its delivery, and her plaited hair and rough clothes would have told a stranger of long, hard struggles on an under-supported housing estate, not weekends with her grandfather, the baronet. Having known Lucy at roughly the same age, I can testify that they could have come from different galaxies for all they shared. Why don’t parents mind this? Or don’t they notice it? Isn’t the desire to bring up your young with the habits and customs of your own tribe one of the most fundamental imperatives in the animal kingdom? Nor is this restricted to any one part of our society. Everywhere in modern Britain parents are raising cuckoos, aliens from a foreign place.

The newcomer paid no attention to me. She was obviously solely concerned in obtaining an answer to her query. ‘Did you get it, Mum?’ The words hung sharply in the air.

Lucy nodded. ‘I’ve got it. But they only had it in blue.’

‘Oh, no.’ I write ‘Oh, no,’ but, in truth, it was much nearer ‘ow now.’ She sounded like Eliza Doolittle before Higgins has taken her on. ‘I wanted the pink one. I told you I wanted the pink one [i.e. Oi wan’ed ve pink wun].’

Lucy’s even, patient tone never wavered throughout. ‘They didn’t have any left in pink, so I thought blue was better than nothing.’

‘Well, you were wrong.’ The girl flounced off, sighing and stamping her way upstairs.

Lucy looked at me. ‘Do you have children?’

I shook my head. ‘I never married.’

She laughed. ‘Not quite the same thing these days.’

‘Well, I haven’t.’

‘They drive you completely mad. But of course one couldn’t do without them.’

I felt I could do without the recent exhibit pretty easily. ‘How many have you got?’

‘Three. Margaret’s the oldest. She’s thirty-seven and a farmer’s wife. Then there’s Richard, who’s thirty and trying to get into the music business. And that one. Kitty. Our surprise.’

Needless to say, the eldest was the object of my special interest. ‘And Margaret’s marriage has turned out well?’

Lucy nodded. ‘I think so. Her husband’s not very exciting, to be honest, but nobody’s perfect and he is quite… steady. That seems to be what she wants.’ Thank heaven for small mercies, I thought. ‘They’ve got four children and she still runs her own business. I can’t imagine how she manages, but she has sixty times as much energy as any of the rest of us.’ An image of Damian hovered over the table.

‘They’re quite spaced out, then. The children.’

‘Yes. Mad, really. Just when one thinks the days of bottle warmers and carting cots round the country are over they begin again. For twenty years, whenever we loaded the car for a weekend away, we looked like refugees trying to get out of Prague ahead of the Russians.’ She laughed at the memory. ‘Of course, I never meant to start quite so early, but when Margaret-’ She broke off, her laugh tapering to a nervous little giggle.

‘When Margaret what?’

Lucy gave me a shy glance. ‘People don’t mind these days so much, but she was already on the way when we got married.’

‘I hate to shock you, but most of us had worked out that few healthy babies are born at five months.’

She acknowledged this with a nod. ‘Of course. It’s just one didn’t talk about it then. It all got lost in the wash.’ She thought for a moment, then looked up at me. ‘Do you ever see anyone from those days? I mean, what brought on this sudden interest?’

I shrugged as nonchalantly as I could manage. ‘I don’t know. I looked at the map and saw I was passing your front door.’

‘But whom do you keep up with?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m in a different crowd now. I’m a writer. I get asked to publishers’ parties and PEN quiz nights and the Bad Sex Awards. My days of making small talk with countesses from Shropshire are done.’

‘Aren’t everyone’s?’

‘I still shoot occasionally. When I’m asked. That’s when some red-faced major comes staggering across the room and says “Weren’t we at school together?” or “Didn’t you come to my sister’s dance?” I never get over it. I’m always shocked into silence that I could belong to the same generation as this boring, bibulous old fart.’ She did not answer, sensing my evasion. ‘I do run into some familiar faces occasionally. I saw Serena at a charity thing not long ago.’

This seemed to confirm an unraised issue. ‘Yes, I thought you might have stayed in touch with Serena.’

‘But I haven’t. Not really.’ She raised an eyebrow quizzically and so, to move things on, I volunteered: ‘As a matter of fact I saw Damian Baxter quite recently. Do you remember him?’

The last question was redundant. She had changed colour. ‘Of course I remember him. I was there, remember.’

I nodded. ‘Of course you were.’

‘Anyway, even without that nobody forgets the Heartbreaker of the Year.’ This time her laugh had a slightly bitter twinge. ‘I gather he’s terribly rich now.’

‘Terribly rich and terribly ill.’

Which sobered her up. ‘I’m sorry. Is he going to be all right?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Oh.’ This information appeared to put her bitterness back into its cage, and she became more philosophical. ‘It used to make me laugh to think how our mothers steered us away from him. Had they but known at the time, he was almost the only man we ever danced with who could have kept the show on the road. Did he marry?’

‘Yes, but not for long and no one you’d know.’

She absorbed this. ‘I was terribly keen on him.’

I found myself becoming rather irritated by my own apparent ignorance. ‘You wouldn’t have known it,’ I said.

‘That was only because you were starting to hate him by that stage. I’d never have dared tell you. Are you disappointed in me?’

‘A bit. You always pretended to dislike him as much as I did. Even before. Even when he and I were friends.’

She passed easily over my contradiction. ‘Well…’ Her voice had now progressed through philosophical to wistful. ‘It was a long time ago.’ Then, as if ashamed of her momentary retreat, she rallied. ‘I’d have married him if he’d proposed.’

‘What would your mother have said about that?’

‘I wouldn’t have cared what she said. In fact, at one point I thought I was going to have to force him.’ This was accompanied by a little, indignant puff. I looked at her, waiting for an explanation. She smirked. ‘When I started Margaret I wasn’t completely sure whose she was.’ Naturally, this almost made me cry out. Could I have scored a goal with the very first kick? It was with some difficulty that I kept quiet and let her finish her story. ‘I wasn’t really going out with Damian at that stage, but then there was a moment, one afternoon in Estoril.’ She gave an embarrassed giggle. ‘You were all on the terrace and I sneaked off, and…’ I suppose I must have looked disapproving in some way as she gave a little, comic snort. ‘It was the Sixties! Did we use the term “Wild Child”? Had it been invented by then? I can’t remember. Anyway, I suppose I was one. It’s funny, because Margaret is much the straightest of my children. The only one who’s straight at all, really.’

This was a familiar situation to me. ‘Our parents used to talk about the problem child in any family,’ I said. ‘Now, it seems to be more the norm to have one child who isn’t a problem. If you’re lucky.’

Lucy laughed. ‘Well, that’s Margaret in this house. It’s odd, when you think of it, because we had quite a scare with her when she was little.’

‘What sort of scare?’

‘Heart. Which seems so cruel for a child, doesn’t it? She developed something called familial hypercholesterolaemia.’

‘Blimey.’

‘I know. It was about a month before I even learned to say it.’

‘It trips off your tongue now.’

‘You know how it is. At the start you can’t pronounce it and by the end you’re qualified to open a clinic.’ She vanished momentarily into that never quite forgotten, terrible episode in her life. ‘Funny. I can almost laugh about it, but it was unbelievably ghastly at the time. It means you’re making far too much cholesterol, which eventually gives you a heart attack and kills you. Of course, nowadays no sentence is complete without that word but then it was foreign and frightening. And apparently it had always been more or less a hundred per cent fatal. The first doctor who diagnosed it in Margaret, at some hospital in Stoke, thought it still was. So you can imagine what we went through.’

‘What were you doing in Stoke?’

‘I can’t remember now. Oh, I think Philip had an idea of reviving a china factory. It didn’t last long.’ I’d had another glimpse of the tangled odyssey that was Philip’s non-career. ‘Anyway, my mother turned up and scooped us off to a specialist in Harley Street and the news improved.’

‘So it was treatable by the time Margaret had it?’

She nodded, reliving her relief. ‘Completely, thank God. But only just. Literally, it had all changed something like four years before. It took us ages to get over the shock. We were both in the grip of terror for months. I remember getting up one night and finding Philip bending over her cot and crying. We never talk about it now, but whenever I get cross with him I secretly think of that moment and forgive him.’ She hesitated, contradicted inwardly by the Spirit of Honesty. ‘Or I try to,’ she added. I nodded. I could easily see why. The Philip who wept for his innocent child in a darkened nursery sounded not only much nicer but a thousand times more interesting than the ballroom show-off I had known. Lucy was still talking. ‘What we couldn’t understand was that we kept being told it was completely hereditary, but neither of us had any knowledge of its occurring in our families. We questioned our parents and so on, but there was no clue. Still, as I say, Mummy found us a wonderful doctor and once we’d nailed it properly it came right.’ She paused. I would guess she didn’t venture into this territory very often. ‘I always think that Margaret’s passion for normal, ordinary life was probably fostered by that early threat of losing it. Don’t you agree?’

Obviously, this entire speech went straight to the heart of the case that had brought me to Kent, but before I could say another word I was aware of a presence in the door. ‘Hello, stranger.’ The battered, bloated figure of a man who bore only the slightest resemblance to the boy I had known as Philip Rawnsley-Price was standing there. In our salad days Philip had resembled a young and much better-looking, cheeky-chappy actor called Barry Evans, famous then for a film, Round the Mulberry Bush, in which he represented those of us who wanted to be trendy but didn’t quite know how, a large group at any time, which ensured his popularity. Sadly, his stardom didn’t last and the former actor was found dead in the company of an empty whisky bottle at the age of fifty-two, having spent the previous three years driving a taxi in Leicester. I seem to recall there was some pressure on the police to investigate the circumstances of Evans’s death, involving, as they did, cut telephone wires and other peculiar details, which naturally gave his relatives concern, but the police could not be bothered. A decision that might, I imagine, have been different had the unfortunate Mr Evans died at the peak of his fame.

Looking at Philip, framed in the doorway, it was hard not to feel at that moment, that the fate which had engulfed him was almost as bad. He wore ancient, stained cords, scuffed loafers and an open-necked check shirt with a worn, frayed collar. Old clothes were obviously a family uniform. Like me, he had put on weight and his hair was thinning. Unlike me, he had developed the mottled red face of a drinker. More than anything it was the sagging, tired look about those poached-egg eyes, so characteristic of the born privileged who fail, that gave him away. He held out his hand with what he imagined to be a roguish grin. ‘Good to see you, old chap. What brings you to this part of the forest?’ He took hold of my fingers and gave them the ruthless, wince-making squeeze that such men use in a vain attempt to persuade you they are still in charge. Lucy, having waxed so lyrical about him, now seemed put out to be interrupted.

‘What are you doing here? We were coming over as soon as we’d finished lunch. Who’s in the shop?’

‘Gwen.’

‘On her own?’ Her voice was sharp and admonitory. And it was directed to include me. It was obviously her deliberate intention to show me that her husband was an incompetent fool. One minute earlier we had been swept up in the moving pathos of the tear-drenched daddy, but now it was apparently necessary for Lucy to point out that things had not gone wrong in their lives because of her. On the face of it this behaviour was of course illogical and contradictory, but among these people it is not uncommon. Their marriage had clearly reached that stage where she, and probably he, could be generous and gallant about the other when they were apart, but the actual physical presence of their partner would set their teeth on edge. This emotional conundrum often occurs in a culture where divorce is still seen as essentially giving in. Even today, the upper and upper middle classes find personal unhappiness, at any rate the admission of it, tedious and ill-bred, and they must always talk in public, or to close friends for that matter, as if everything to do with their family situation were going tremendously well. Maintaining the legend is the preferred option for most of them, as long as nobody is in the room whose presence undermines the performance. They generally adhere to this, right up to the moment of blow-up. It can be quite odd for members of this social group, as their circle will often contain many couples who appear to be perfectly content, until a call out of the blue, or a scribbled line in a Christmas card, will suddenly announce the divorce.

Philip nodded in answer to her harsh interrogation. ‘She can manage. Nobody’s been in for more than an hour.’ There was a kind of resigned hopelessness in this simple account of the state of his business. In the area of his professional activity Philip had lost the energy required by pretence. He could just about stand behind the counter, but to talk up his drudgery would have been too exhausting. He picked a spoon off the counter and started to feed himself out of the pasta pot. ‘Lucy tells me you’re a writer now? What have you written that I might have read?’

Naturally, this was a defensive attempt to diminish me and my activities, but I do not believe it was malicious. He suspected, rightly, that I was judging him, so he was showing that he reserved the right to judge me. Anyone of my kind and my generation who has chosen to make their living in the Arts will be familiar with this treatment. In our youth the careers we had decided on were considered completely mad, by our parents and by our friends, but as long as we were struggling our more sober contemporaries were happy to encourage and sympathise and even to feed us. The trouble came when we arty folk achieved any kind of success. Then the idea that we should be making money or, worse, making more money than our adult and sensible acquaintance, was akin to impertinence. They had chosen the boring route in order to be secure. To have achieved security but to have enjoyed jokes and larks along the way was nothing short of irresponsible and deserved to be punished. I smiled. ‘Nothing, I should think. Since if you had read anything by me I have no doubt you would have made the connection.’

He raised his eyebrows at Lucy, comically signifying, presumably, that I was a touchy artist who must be humoured. ‘Lucy’s read some of your stuff. I gather she thinks very highly of it.’

I did not point out that this remark meant his earlier question had been entirely redundant. ‘I’m glad.’ My words fell into a silence and we sat for a moment. There was an inertia in the room and we all three felt it. This often happens when old friends get together after an interval of many years. Prior to the meeting they imagine that something explosive and fun will come out of it, but then they are usually faced by a lacklustre group, in late middle age, who have nothing much in common any more. For better or worse, the Rawnsley-Prices had negotiated their journey, I had travelled mine and now we were just three people in a very dirty kitchen who didn’t know each other. Besides, I needed further information before my pilgrimage could be considered complete and I wasn’t going to get it while Philip was with us. It was time to break up the group. ‘Can I see the shop?’ I said. There was a pause, with a sense of the unspoken in the air. I assume this was simply Philip’s male need to present himself as my equal in terms of worldly success which, modest as mine has been, might prove hard when I had actually seen the business. Or maybe it was Lucy’s sudden realisation that for the same reason I was not going to take away from our day spent together the idea that everything was going swimmingly. It is an unspoken ambition for most of us that our contemporaries should see us as successful, but in Lucy’s case she was about to be denied it.

After a pause, Philip nodded. ‘Of course.’

It will come as no surprise that the farm shop was a hopeless place. Fittingly, I suppose, it was housed in a former cattle shed, which had been converted quickly and with insufficient money. There was a cheery, if forced, optimism in the inevitable pine counters and shelves. Above them, brightly coloured cards in faux, red, giant handwriting proclaimed the scintillating array of produce on offer: ‘Fresh vegetables!’ they shouted. ‘Home made Jams and Jellies!’ But in that yawning, unpeopled space they took on a dismal, pathetic quality, like someone eating alone in a paper hat. The floor was cheap and the ceiling had not been properly finished and, as I could have predicted, the whole place was full of items no one in their right mind would ever want to buy. Not just tinned pâté made from wild boar or goose wings, but gadgets to prevent wine losing its flavour in the fridge and woolly things to wear inside your boots while fishing. Christmas stocking presents to be bought and given by someone who knows nothing about it. The meat counter looked particularly unattractive, even to a carnivore like me, and seemed actively to repel further investigation. A single customer was paying for a cauliflower. Other than that the place was deserted. We looked around in silence. ‘The trouble is all these shopping malls -’ Philip drawled the word in a bad, American accent, trying to convert his pain into a joke. ‘They’re building them everywhere. It’s impossible to match the prices without going broke.’ I hesitated to mention that they seemed to be going broke anyway. ‘We keep being told that everyone’s environmentally conscious nowadays, that they care about where their food comes from, but…’ He sighed. What might have been intended as an ironic shrug just turned into a sad sag of his shoulders. I freely confess I felt tremendously sorry for him in that moment. Whether or not I used to dislike him, I had after all known him for a very long time and I did not wish him ill.

It is a fact that in the brutal periods of history, what changes is not the cutting edge of every new market, or the ambition that drives a new factory owner or a new hostess, or a new conquest from the performing stage, or a new triumph in a political drawing room. All that is constant. It is the level of coasting that goes on behind the bright and harsh façade that is different. In a gentle era – and my youth was passed in a fairly gentle era – people of little ability could drift by in every class, at every level of society. Jobs were found for them. Homes were arranged. Someone’s uncle sorted it out. Someone’s mother put in a word. But when things get tough, when, as now, the prizes are bigger but the going is rougher, the weaklings are elbowed aside until they fall back and slip over the cliff. Unskilled workers or stupid landowners alike, they are crushed by a system they cannot master and find themselves ejected on to the roadside. Just such a one was Philip Rawnsley-Price. Subconsciously, he thought his braggadocio would carry him through, that he had the charm and the connections to make it work, however he might choose to live his life. Alas, his connections were the wrong connections and his charm was non-existent, and now he was in his late fifties there was no one left alive who cared much whether he swam or sank.

I had never taken to Philip when we were young, but I pitied him now. He had been defeated by our ‘interesting times’ and he would not rise again. A hand-to-mouth existence lay ahead, of inheriting a cottage from a cousin and trying to rent it out, of hoping he would be remembered when the last aunt bit the dust, of wondering if his children might manage a little something for him on a regular basis. That was what he had to look forward to and it was anyone’s guess whether Lucy would hang around to share it. It rather depended on what alternatives presented themselves. All this we both knew as we shook hands awkwardly outside. ‘Come back and see us again,’ he said, knowing that I never would.

‘I will,’ I lied.

‘Don’t leave it so long the next time.’ And he was gone, back to his vacant counters and his empty till.

Lucy followed me to the car. I stopped. ‘Did you ever get to the bottom of Margaret’s condition?’ She looked at me, puzzled, for a moment. ‘You said it was hereditary but there was no trace of it on either your side or Philip’s.’

‘That was the thing. Of course I had the most nerve-racking suspicions. I kept thinking I ought to be poring through Damian’s medical records…’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘No. I was about to confess and suggest it, with a sinking heart as you can imagine, when we found out that Philip’s aunt, his mother’s eldest sister, had died of it, the very same thing, in childhood. And his mother never knew. Nor did either of her siblings. You can imagine how it was in those days.’ She gave a little grimace. ‘They were all just told that our Father in heaven had taken their sister because he loved her. Basta.’

‘How did you find out?’

‘Total luck. My ma-in-law was talking to her mother, who must have been about a million by then, and for some strange reason she told her all about Margaret. We’d never explained to Granny what was wrong, because we didn’t want to worry her. At any rate this time she finally learned the truth, and right away she started weeping like a fire hydrant and it all came pouring out.’

‘Poor woman.’

‘Yes. Poor old thing. Of course she blamed herself and it more or less finished her off. We all told her that it wasn’t her fault, that it wasn’t a killer any more and so on, but I don’t think it made much difference.’ She smiled sadly. ‘So the mystery was solved. The tragic thing was that the aunt could so easily have been saved with the right drugs but it happened in the twenties, when it was a question of hot drinks and cold compresses and having your tonsils out on the kitchen table. Anyway, as I say, Margaret’s been fine ever since.’

‘Were you at all sorry?’

This time she was genuinely bewildered. ‘About what?’

‘That she was definitely Philip’s and not Damian’s.’ This was unkind of me, since it would hardly help her to dwell on heaven, trapped, as she was, in an outer circle of hell.

But Lucy only smiled and, just for a second, the minxish child-woman she had once been, looked out from behind her wrinkles. ‘I’m not sure. Not at the time, because the whole drama had been explained and that was such a relief. Later, maybe. A little. But please don’t give me away.’

We’d kissed and I was back in the car, when she tapped on the window. ‘If you see him…’

I waited. ‘Yes?’

‘Tell him I remember him. Wish him luck for the future.’

‘That’s the point. I don’t think he’s got a future. Not a very long one, anyway.’

This made her silent and, to my amazement, I thought for a second she was going to cry. At last she spoke again, with a softer and more gentle voice than I had heard from her since my arrival. Or indeed, ever. ‘All the more so, then. Give him my best love. And say that I wish him nothing but good things. Nothing but good, good things.’ She stepped back from the vehicle and I nodded. Her simple encomium spoke more for Damian’s treatment of her than I would have credited him with.

The interview was over. I put my foot on the accelerator and started on the road back to London.

Dagmar