Past Imperfect

FIVE

Her Royal Highness Princess Dagmar of Moravia, despite her name, was a mousy, timid, little character. She had an apologetic, poignant manner, as if she were aware of always being disappointing, which I am sorry to say was usually true where we were concerned, because we all wanted to like her more than we did. You will probably not believe me, or put it down to excessive snobbery on my part, but the tiny Princess and her enormous mother, the Grand Duchess, were immensely impressive to us all in those dim and distant days. Nobody could believe more firmly than I in the miracle of constitutional monarchy, but the years of constant exposure in every branch of the media has inevitably resulted in a certain devaluation of Royal blood, as the public came to realise that for the most part these men and women, often pleasant, sometimes intelligent, occasionally physically attractive, are no more remarkable than any other person one might stand behind at the grocer’s or the bank. Only Her Majesty, by never being interviewed, by never revealing an opinion, has retained a genuine mystery. Of course, we the public love to conjecture what her response to something might be. ‘She must hate this,’ we say. Or ‘How pleased she will be about that.’ But we do not know and it is our own ignorance that fascinates us.

If you can imagine it, forty years ago, we had that fascination for virtually anyone with genuine Royal blood in their veins. I don’t just mean snobs. Everyone. Because we knew nothing, we wondered about everything and the glamour Royals brought into a social gathering is quite unparalleled today. No film star at the peak of her success can confer anything like the excitement of finding Princess Margaret among the dancers in a ballroom in the Fifties or Sixties. Or at a cocktail party, to walk in and discover a ducal cousin of the Queen chatting in the corner was to know that this was the place to be tonight. In my own youth, in 1961 to be exact, my school once bussed all the boys, plus thirty musical instruments, for a bumpy hour across Yorkshire so that we could solemnly stand on the grass verge at the side of the road and cheer the cars carrying the wedding party of the Duke of Kent from York Minster to the bride’s home at Hovingham. Six hundred boys, however many buses, a brass band specially rehearsed, all in order to watch some cars that did not stop nor even, as I remember, slow down. Perhaps the bride and groom did a little, at least my image of the young Duchess is in focus, but not the others. The band played, we waved and feverishly shouted our hip-hip-hoorays, the cavalcade shot past, blurred faces in Molyneux and Hartnell, and then they were gone. The whole thing took five minutes from start to finish, if that. Then we climbed back into the buses and returned to school.

So it was that even a member of a minor, deposed Royal house seemed to confer a favour on every invitation they accepted in those dead days, and Dagmar was no exception. Her dynasty, the Grand Ducal House of Moravia, was not in fact very ancient. It had been one of those invented families, installed by the Great Powers in different Balkan states as the Turkish Empire gradually disintegrated throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. During those years, German and Danish, and in some cases local, princes were pushed on to thrones in Romania and Bulgaria, in Montenegro and Serbia, in Albania and Greece. Just such a one was the mountainous and modest state of Moravia, which bordered on almost all of the above. The Turkish governor having finally retreated in early 1882, a minor princeling of the House of Ludinghausen-Anhalt-Zerbst was selected, largely on the basis of his being a godson of the then Prince of Wales. Whether or not his selection reflected the British Prince’s close friendship with the boy’s mother at the time of his birth I could not say, although Lord Salisbury was asked by Marlborough House, as a personal favour, to suggest Prince Ernst for the post, thereby signalling our government’s approval. Since the territory was not much larger than the estate of an English duke, and considerably less profitable, it was not thought that a kingly crown would be appropriate and at the Settlement of Klasko, in April 1883, the area was solemnly proclaimed a grand duchy.

It must be said that the wife of the new Grand Duke was not enthusiastic. Until then, she had been having quite a jolly time between their home in Vienna and a sporting estate in the Black Forest, and after two years she was still writing to a friend that she thought she lacked an important requirement for the job, namely the smallest desire to remain in Moravia, but the couple persevered with some success. Their new country’s good fortune was to be located at a sensitive crossroads of many of the trade routes. This ensured invitations to every Royal fête around the world, as well as cheering offers for their daughters’ hands in marriage, and before very long a Russian grand duchess, an Austrian archduchess and a princess of Borbon-Anjou had all begun life in the airless, cramped nurseries of the hideously uncomfortable palace in the capital of Olomouc, a building not much larger than the dean’s residence in the close at Salisbury and a lot less manageable to run.

Surprisingly, perhaps, Grand Ducal Moravia made it as far as the Jazz Age, but the forces of Stalin, coupled with a swelling resistance to the monarchist solution, proved the undoing of the dynasty. By 1947 it was over and the ex-reigning Moravian family had taken up residence in a five-storey house in Trevor Square, a pleasant enough location and very convenient for Harrods.

But even easy shopping could not revive the spirits of the defeated Grand Duke and in a matter of months he had given up the unequal struggle. It was at this point that his son, having assumed the grand ducal title, the last of his family to do so, and released perhaps by the demise of his august papa, made a spirited decision that would vastly diminish his chances of regaining the throne of his forebears and vastly increase his chances of living well in the interim. With the dignified, if pained, acceptance of his widowed mother, a princess of a cadet branch of the Hohenzollerns, he contracted to marry the only daughter of a businessman from Leeds, one Harold Swindley, who had made a fortune in self-catering, package holidays. In the following three years, two children had arrived to bless this most sensible of unions, the new, so-called Crown Prince Feodor and his sister, the Princess Dagmar.

But for us, and even more for our parents, the Fall of the House of Moravia was still pretty recent and even the elevation of Miss Marion Swindley could not dim the lustre of a genuine crown. Only twenty years had passed since their deposition when Dagmar arrived at our parties. Besides, the Communist regime that replaced them was not popular, the family was still on the guest list at Buckingham Palace and there was talk at the time of a restoration coming in Spain. In short, forty years ago the Royalist cause didn’t seem hopeless by any means.

The new Grand Duchess had delivered. The Swindley money may not have been particularly fragrant but, for the first years of the marriage at least, there was quite a lot of it. And she learned her part pretty well until, like every fervent convert, she was soon plus Catholique que le Pape. Admittedly, she was not by any standards a beauty but, as the Dowager Grand Duchess was once heard to sigh when watching her daughter-in-law stump across a drawing room looking like a Marine in training, ‘Oh, well. One can’t have everything,’ and nobody could say she was not impressive. Her size alone guaranteed that. Nor was she a fool, having inherited more from her (discreetly invisible) father than she might care to admit in terms of solid, common sense.

For all the bowing and ma’am’ing that still went on in those days, the Grand Duchess understood that no throne awaited her timid daughter in the post-war world. She also knew that she had not anticipated the drain on her capital made by a husband who wished to live en prince but did not intend to do a day’s work, nor earn a single penny. She was, at heart, a sound northern lass and well aware that no fortune can hope to survive when the expenses are limitless and the income nil, and she was anxious to see the girl settled as well as might be, before the gilt had quite gone off the gingerbread. So she decided that, even though British princesses by that stage never ‘came out’ in any normal way and only occasionally appeared at the parties of special friends, nevertheless Dagmar would participate fully in the whole year-long business. The girl would thereby build a position for herself in British Society and, with any luck, land one of its prizes. The Grand Duchess also accepted – unlike many, if not most, Royals – that she would have to put her hand in her pocket to achieve this. By 1968, when the Grand Duke had been spending like a sailor for a quarter of a century, this could not have been as easy as it was once, but she had bitten off the mouthful and she fully intended to chew it. I am happy to say I was on the list to be invited.

The inspiration for the party was the Duchess of Richmond’s Ball, that famous 1815 gathering, given in Brussels on the very eve of Waterloo, and it was held at the Dorchester in Park Lane. Today, one thinks of the hotel as the haunt of film stars and merchants from the East, but in those days it played quite a major part in what was still referred to as ‘Society.’ On the night in question we came in, I think, by the ballroom entrance at the side, situated on Park Lane itself, and the theme of the evening was quite clear the moment one stepped inside, into that long, rather low, hall. Liveried footmen stood to attention, all modern signs, ‘Exit’ and the like, had been hidden behind greenery and there were candles everywhere. None of these last details would be legal today, of course, but nobody cared then. In truth, the party seemed to have taken over most of the ground floor of the hotel. It can’t have, really, can it? But that’s what it felt like on the night. Of course, we didn’t arrive much before eleven, having eaten our dinners elsewhere, and the champagne that greeted us, held out by the whitewigged flunkeys, was not by any means the first drink of the evening. One has to remember that in the late 1960s, while nobody suggested that it was a good idea to drive a car when plastered, it was still long before such considerations had begun to shape our social life. ‘Which of you is drinking tonight?’ would have bewildered the couple arriving at a dinner, since the answer would invariably have been ‘both.’ For this reason no hostess scrupled to ask various friends to provide dinners for her guests before a ball.

Later in the Season, when more dances were given in the country, this would entail putting them up for the night, and essentially meant throwing a house party for strangers, who would drunkenly rattle around the countryside in their cars at all hours. But in London the thing was more easily managed. Sometimes you were flattered to receive an invitation to join the dinner provided by the parents of the deb of the evening, but this didn’t happen (to me, anyway) all that often and usually a pleasant little postcard would drop through the letter box, saying that the writer believed you were going to the dance being given for So-and-So and she would be ‘terribly pleased if you would dine here first.’ At the end of which dinner, fairly far gone or at least merry, we would cheerfully climb into our vehicles and head off for the location of the party proper. This system had obvious advantages. The bonus for the young was that the dances went on forever, because they didn’t really get going much before eleven. While the benefit for the old was plain economy. The parents of the girl in question usually had to hire the place, at least in London, and even in the country marquees would be expected unless the house was vast. Then there was the music, as well as a pretty good breakfast at the end of the event, but by adopting this system the hosts were spared the additional burden of dinner and wines for three or four hundred young and hungry people. No wonder the custom cheered the fathers up no end.

Having taken in the thoroughness of the arrangements, I made my way into the ballroom and here the illusion was impressive. At that time it was customary for a limited number of the older generation to be invited to these gatherings. They would be drawn from the godparents of the debutante, as well as from the relatives and close friends of her parents, and as a rule they would fringe the proceedings, chatting in some other drawing room, watching the children dancing, occasionally venturing on to the floor to demonstrate an adapted foxtrot or quickstep, before retiring fairly early for the night. They were not expected to participate as full guests since, as we all know, the sight of dancing parents is torture for the young and always was. All this was especially true of costume parties, which are rather a bore for anyone out of their thirties, and the adults would simply arrive in evening dress, occasionally with some gay little gesture, worn as a brooch or a hair ornament. None of which applied to this particular event. I do not know if it was respect for the Grand Duchess or terror (probably the latter), but every single attendee, old and young, was in costume. As a particularly witty detail, or possibly after an instruction from on high, several of the mothers and fathers had deliberately chosen outfits of a slightly earlier date than those worn by their offspring. Men in wigs and ruffles, women in high-piled, powdered hair and beauty spots, from the 1780s or ’90s, gave us all the sense that we were indeed back in the Regency and this was the older generation of the day, frowning and disapproving of modern youth. It always amuses me that this particular era, redolent as it is of Versailles and Queen Marie-Antoinette, is such a favourite costume theme with toffs. They seem to have forgotten that it did not as a whole turn out well for the privileged classes, so many of whom would leave their heads, and no doubt wigs, in the basket below the guillotine.

‘What have you come as?’ Lucy was dressed in a Jane Austen, white frock, high-waisted and pure, with a ribbon round her throat and her artificial ringlets sewn with tiny, white silk roses. She looked artful rather than innocent, but charming nonetheless.

‘I’m a hussar,’ I replied slightly indignantly, ‘I should have thought it was obvious.’

‘The trousers are wrong.’

‘Thank you for that.’ The trousers were wrong, as it happens, but the rest of the outfit was perfect, bright scarlet, heavily braided, with a fur-edged jacket slung between my left shoulder and my right armpit. I thought I looked fabulous. ‘They’re only wrong for 1815. They would be right by 1850. Anyway, it was the best I could manage. It was too late to find anything in London, so I had to raid the costume store of Windsor Rep.’

‘It looks like it.’ She stopped and stared round the room, which was beginning to fill up. ‘Where was your dinner?’

‘Chester Row. The Harington-Stanleys.’

‘Any good?’

‘Well, the food was like a shooting lunch that had been brought up to London in a rusty cake tin, but it was quite fun apart from that. What about you?’

She grimaced. ‘Mrs Vitkov. With a group to meet her daughter, Terry. At that new French place in Lower Sloane Street.’

‘The Gavroche?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Lucky you.’

She gave me what used to be called an old-fashioned look. ‘Have you met Terry Vitkov?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Don’t.’

‘Where are they from? The Balkans?’

‘Cincinnati. And believe me, Miss Terry is a piece of work.’ She stopped and nodded with a tight smile. ‘Careful. That’s her.’ I turned to look. I could see at once that we needn’t have worried and that Terry Vitkov was quite happy to be the subject of our discussion. She looked as if she were more than used to being the centre of attention. She was a good-looking girl. Indeed, she would have been very good-looking if it were not for a certain prominence of nose and chin, faintly suggesting a Man-in-the-Moon profile, which, combined with the intensity of her piercing and heavily made up eyes, gave her the air of a prisoner on the run, desperately searching the room for either an enemy or an escape route. Tonight she appeared to be dressed as a Regency courtesan, rather than a great-lady-from-times-gone-by, like every other woman there. Indeed, she was more or the less the only person in the ballroom, who would patently not have figured on the guest list of the real Duchess of Richmond. She walked up to us and we were introduced.

‘Lucy’s been telling me all the dos and don’ts for getting on in London.’ She spoke with a breathy urgency, the voice of one determined to make every human interchange register. I could see at once that despite her flashing frequent smiles, designed no doubt to suggest a spirit of girlish, flirtatious fun and displaying thereby a set of admirably white, if rather large, teeth, Terry Vitkov took herself tremendously seriously.

‘I don’t think I’ve covered them all, have I?’ said Lucy laconically.

Our companion was already training her searching gaze on the other guests. ‘Which one is Viscount Summersby?’ she asked.

Lucy checked the ballroom. ‘Over there. With the blonde girl in green, next to the big looking glass.’

Terry sought him out. Her shoulders sagged. ‘Why do they always have to look like the man from Pest Control?’ She sighed. ‘Who’s that one?’ A tall and handsome young man flashed her a smile as he passed.

‘Don’t bother. No money. No prospects.’ Lucy clearly understood her companion’s priorities. ‘Of course, he’s clever and he’s headed for the City. He may make something of himself.’

But Terry shook her head. ‘That takes twenty years and by the time they’ve got there they’re ready to trade you in for a younger model. No. I want some money from the outset.’

I nodded, sagely. ‘But not Lord Summersby.’

She smiled. ‘Not until I know I can’t get something better.’ What made this amusing, of course, was that she meant it.

We had been moving slowly in a rather sloppy presentation line and by now had nearly reached our hosts, who stood, all four together, posed against a rich curtain erected as a kind of screen for the purpose. The Grand Duke cut a melancholy figure. He was a slight and pasty-looking creature anyway, especially when placed at the side of his massive spouse and, in truth, I do not believe I ever heard him say an interesting sentence. He wore his elaborate costume, which I took to be that of the Duke of Richmond, with an air of surprise, as if he had been put into it while under sedation. Perhaps he was. His son, dressed as an officer of the guard, stared straight ahead stiffly. He could have been posing for an early daguerreotype, when you had to keep your head still for four or five minutes until it was done. His bland, mottled face exuded an air of bored and generalised geniality.

The daughter, Dagmar, technically of course the Star of the Night, looked frightened and if anything a little drab. She was a tiny creature, literally no more than five feet tall and, while one is always being told that Queen Victoria was four foot eleven and managed to run an Empire, still for most of us it is very, very small and means you spend your whole life looking up. Standing there in the shadow of her mother, to paraphrase Noël Coward, she looked like the Grand Duchess’s lunch. Dagmar wasn’t what you would call plain, even if her sallow mini-face was hard to define or at least to categorise. She wasn’t exactly pretty either, but her large eyes were arresting and she had a soft, moist, trembling mouth, usually half open and quivering and seeming to suggest she was always on the verge of tears, which, in a way, touched your heart. But she never appeared to have any idea of how to present herself. Her hair, for instance, was very dark and straight and, with imagination, it might have been effective. But it just hung there, as if it had been washed in a hurry and left to dry. I really did think something might have been made of her on the night of her own ball, but as usual nobody had tried. The dress was from the correct period but it was dull, and only faintly enlivened with a thin blue sash beneath her modest bosom. To be honest, she looked as if she had taken five minutes to get ready for a game of tennis, and so fragile that one good, strong puff of wind would carry her out of the window and down Park Lane in an instant.

Which could not be said of her mother. I cannot be sure, to this day, whether the Grand Duchess was intending to impersonate the original Duchess of Richmond. It would seem logical, given the wording of the invitation, but the costume she had chosen was more suitable for a great empress, Catherine the Great maybe, or Maria Teresa, or any other absolute female monarch. Acres of chiffon blew softly this way and that, while a river, a torrent, of purple velvet, embroidered in thick, gold thread, cascaded from her more than ample shoulders to the floor and lay there in massive hillocks and dunes, its ermine trim forming a kind of plinth to set off the huge, majestic figure above. Her bosom, like a rock shelf beneath the sea, was ablaze with diamonds and a sparkling crown-like tiara rose from her lightly sweating brow. I suppose the display was all that remained of the Moravian crown jewels, either that or they had been rented from the Barnum Brothers for the night. This was a scene-stealing one-woman show and none of the others got a look in, least of all the wretched Dagmar who, knowing her mother, must have expected something of the sort. At any rate, while the crowds spun, buzzing, round her mama, she didn’t seem unduly put out, unlike the Grand Duke and the Crown Prince who both looked as if they were aching to go home. We were announced.

‘Good evening, Ma’am.’ I bowed and she accepted my obeisance gracefully. I moved on to her husband. ‘Your Royal Highness.’ I bowed again. He nodded vacantly, his mind probably on some long-ago Court reception in dark and dusty Olomouc. Leaving him to dream alone, I passed into the body of the room. Looking back, I think that evening was when I first understood what I have now come to recognise all around me, viz. that when it comes to aristocrats, or even royalty, most of the members of those worlds (who have not moved away from the whole performance entirely, that is) fall into separate, apparently similar but in fact quite disparate, groups. The first, made familiar by a million lampoons, have a clear understanding that the world of their youth and their ancestors has changed and will not be coming back, but they continue to mourn it. The cooks and the valets, the maids and the footmen who made life so sweet will never again push through the green baize door, busy with the tasks of the day. The smiling grooms who brought the horses round to the front at ten, the chauffeurs washing their gleaming vehicles, standing in deference when one strolled into the stable yard, the gardeners ducking out of sight at the sound of a house party’s approach, all that army dedicated to their pleasure have left for other climes. These people usually know, too, albeit half subconsciously, that the deference they still receive within their social circle is somehow thin and even false, compared to the real respect accorded to their parents and grandparents, when high birth had solid accountable value. They know these things, but they do not know what to do about them, other than to weep and live out their lives with as much comfort as they can muster.

Into this category one could squarely place the last Grand Duke of Moravia. There was something in his aimless and depressive grace that told of his awareness of the truth. ‘Don’t blame me,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘I understand this is absurd. I know you have no reason to bow and scrape before me, that the game is over, that the band has played, but I have to go through the forms, don’t you know? I have to look as if I take it seriously or I would be letting other people down.’ This was the text permanently hovering in the air above him. Of course, the same group boasts a nastier version. ‘It may be over,’ they flash from their pitiless eyes, ‘but it isn’t quite over for me!’ and they toss their heads and prey on their rich, social-climbing acolytes and sell the last of their mother’s jewels, that the show may struggle on for a few more years at least.

But the other category in this group is different from these and, as a type, is largely undetected by the general public. These men and women also have the status that pertains to them from the old system and they enjoy it. They like the rank and the history that supports them. They are glad to be seen as part of the inner circle of aristocratic Britain. They make sure that one member at least of the Royal Family is present at every major bash they throw. They dress, at least the men dress, to please the diehards. They shoot, they fish, they know their historic dates and other people’s genealogy. But all the time they are pretending. Far from being bewildered as to the workings of the new and harsher century, they understand precisely how it turns. They know the value of their property, just as they knew it would regain it. They fully grasp the intricacies of the markets, how and what to buy, what and when to sell, how to achieve the right planning permissions, how to manipulate the payments from the EU farming policy, in short, how to make the estate, and their position, pay.

They decided long ago that they did not want to belong to some fading club, endlessly nostalgic for better days that will never come again. They wanted to retake a position of influence and even power and if it was not, after the 1960s, to be overtly political power then so be it, they would find another route. They are fakes, really. Despite their lineage, despite their houses and their jewels and their wardrobes and their dogs, despite their mouthing the traditional prejudices of their class, they no longer think like most of their own kind. They belong to today and tomorrow, far more than to yesterday. They have brains and values as tough as any hedge fund manager’s. But then again, they would argue that they are only being true to their own race, truer than the defeatists, because the primal job of any aristocrat is to stay on top. Bourbon or Bonaparte, king or president, the real aristocrat understands who is in power and who should be bowed to, next.

Of course, forty years ago much of this was hidden from us. The old world had taken a swingeing blow during and after the war from which it was deemed unlikely to recover. Everyone lamented the end in unison and it was only much later that we began to realise we were not all in the same boat as we had thought, and that some families had not, after all, trodden the same downward path, whatever they may have said at the time. In many cases it was my own generation, debutantes then, with brothers at university or just starting out in the city, who began secretly to reject the notion of going down with the ship and started looking about for ways to get back to dry land. These would prove the survivors, and this group was the one to which the Grand Duchess of Moravia, in contrast to her fatalistic spouse, was drawn, even before it was truly formed. She wanted to create a beachhead within the new world, from which to re-launch the family. I liked her for it.

The music was starting now, a group had taken up their positions on the modest stage and were performing cover versions of the current top ten. They were not, I think, a very famous group, but at least they had been on television, which seemed considerably more exciting then than it does now, and couples were drifting on to the floor at the end of the long chamber. The ancient parents, sitting in their costumes on sofas against the wall, were less helpful to this part of the evening and several of them, sensing it, rose and moved towards the doorway leading to the sitting-out rooms and the bar. Lucy and I walked forward. As we did so there was a slight murmur of jostling admiration and I caught a glimpse of Joanna Langley surrounded by her customary group of admirers. She was brilliantly dressed as Napoleon’s sister, Princess Pauline Borghese. Her costume, unlike mine or most of the others, was new, copied, presumably for the occasion, from a portrait by David. Of course, the Princess would have been an unlikely guest at a ball given by her brother’s arch enemies and anyway, Joanna’s modern, celluloid beauty made her unconvincing as a period piece, but she was a joy to look at all the same.

The group shifted a little and I was surprised to see the familiar figure of Damian Baxter standing next to her. As I watched, he leaned in and whispered into her ear. She laughed, nodding a hello to me as she did so and thereby drawing me to Damian’s attention. I walked over. ‘You never said you were coming to this,’ I said.

‘I wasn’t sure I would, until this afternoon. Then I suddenly thought “what the hell,” got on a train and here I am.’

‘You never said you’d been invited.’

He fixed me with a look, the corners of his mouth twitching. ‘I wasn’t.’

I stared at him. Did I feel a slight trace of Baron Frankenstein’s terror, when his monster first moved of its own volition? ‘You mean you’ve gatecrashed,’ I said. He smiled covertly by way of an answer.

Lucy had been listening to this. ‘How did you get your costume at such short notice?’ And what a costume. In contrast to mine, with its wrong trousers and slightly rubbed sleeves, Damian looked as if the outfit had been made for him by a master tailor. He was not an officer, as most of the men in the room had chosen to be, but a dandy, Beau Brummell or Byron or someone similar, with a tightly fitting tailcoat hugging his torso, and buckskin breeches and high, polished boots to show off his legs. A dazzling cravat of white silk was wound round his neck and tucked into the brocade waistcoat beneath. Lucy nodded at me. ‘He had to go out to Windsor Rep and that was what they came up with.’

Damian looked at me. ‘Poor you. Never mind.’ Any notion I’d cherished of looking rather good withered and died, as Damian chattered on in his light, unconcerned way. ‘I got a friend to sort one out at the Arts Theatre, in case I wanted to come. She managed to get it ready in time and that’s what decided me.’ I’ll bet she did, I thought. Some wretched girl, pricking her fingers to the bone, standing over the washing machine at midnight, burning her hand on the iron. I’ll bet she did. And what would be her reward? Not to be loved by Damian. Of that I was quite sure.

Today, pushing into such a function would be a good deal harder than it was forty years ago. The endless security consciousness of the present generation, to say nothing of their self-importance, ensures guards and lists and ticking and ‘please bring this invitation with you’ to every gathering more exclusive than a sale at Tesco. But it was different then. There was a general supposition that people who hadn’t been invited to something did not, as a rule, try to attend it. In other words, what the gatecrasher of those days relied on, what he or she required, was only nerve, nothing more, which, naturally, Damian had in plentiful supply. But I had less than he and I did not want to be seen chatting to someone who might be thrown out at any moment. I despise myself now when I think of it, but I took Lucy’s arm and steered her on to the floor.

‘You can’t keep a good man down,’ said Lucy cheerily. But I wasn’t inclined to see the funny side. Drowning in my youthful egotism, I could only fear that Damian’s appearance might in some way damage me.

He, needless to say, was enjoying himself enormously. I could see at once that, like a child who will be naughty until it is smacked or a gambler who must play until he loses, Damian had to promote his uninvited appearance until somehow the law enforcers registered it. He danced first with Joanna, as if to announce his arrival. He was the best-looking man in the room and she was the best-looking woman in Europe, so they made quite a pair. Other couples turned to watch them and admire, parents glanced over and asked each other about the glorious duo. A little while later, the ball now well and truly under way, the band announced an eightsome reel. It may seem curious to a modern reader that we should have danced a Scottish reel in the middle of a perfectly normal party, not at some Caledonian festival or even a Burns Night in Kircaldy, but we did. In fact, we danced it at most of the parties that year and, with the steps demanding a less cluttered and less crowded floor, it was a sure way to be noticed, so it came as no surprise to see Damian walking forward to take his place in one of the sets with Terry Vitkov on his arm. She gleamed and beamed, this way and that, clearly enjoying her newly found status as troublemaker, as she leaned proudly on the arm of the rebel. I wondered later whether it was at this particular party that Damian’s own position began to shift from social observer (or climber, depending on your generosity of vision) to subversive. From admiring student to hostile agent. Am I jumping the gun and did it remain in the balance that night? Or had he already decided he hated us all?

Watching them take their places, waiting for the chord that would start us off, it struck me then that he and Terry were rather a good pair. Both outsiders in their different ways, both with everything to gain from the future and nothing to lose with the vanishing past. I assumed she had money – she did, but less than I thought at the time – just as I assumed that Damian would make money – again, I was right. He did. And much more than I thought at the time. Might they not combine and conquer the world? They were both adventurers. Why should they not join forces?

I was partnering a rather dull girl from somewhere near Newbury and now we set off, marching round in our hand-held circles. Glancing across, I was momentarily impressed by the skills Damian had already acquired in this, so recently foreign, territory. He knew the steps and performed them well; he took his turn in the centre of the ring without a trace of self-consciousness, holding himself erect, executing the different parts of the reel with a degree of grace and dignity I could not have claimed for myself. He chatted to the girls around him and to the other men, part of their crowd now, part of their world, after only a few cocktail parties and dances. We had almost forgotten that we did not know him.

After that the pop group resumed, but Damian showed no sign of flagging. He danced with plenty of the girls, Lucy Dalton and a raucous, ruddy-faced Candida Finch among them. He was about to dance with Georgina Waddilove, who would certainly have betrayed her country to make him stay by her side, but in that instant, just as the music started he seemed to get a stitch and beg her, instead, to join him in a drink. I lost sight of him as they drifted away together into the room serving as a bar. It is hard, looking back, to state with any accuracy my precise feelings at that stage towards this cuckoo I had brought into the nest. As I have said, I’d begun to suspect he had an agenda more complicated than I had first understood, but I still admired his chutzpah, and never more so than when he returned to the ballroom that evening. Somehow, while he was away, a happy conjunction had allowed him to achieve what he came for. To my amazement and the admiration of all those present who knew he was there illegitimately, he reappeared in the open doorway leading the hostess, at least the girl who but for her indomitable mother should have been the centre of the evening, Princess Dagmar herself, onto the dance floor. It was a slow number. The lights were lowered, the band strummed away and, in full view of her guests, Dagmar slipped her arms round the interloper and pressed her tiny face into his chest. Lightly caressing her lank hair as they smooched, Damian noticed me watching him from across the floor. He caught my eye. And winked.

The trouble, which I suppose we all knew would come in the end, happened at the breakfast and in a way it was a miracle it was delayed until then. The custom, at every private dance, was to provide breakfast towards the finish, starting usually at about half past one or so. These repasts varied in quality and were sometimes, frankly, not worth waiting for but the Grand Duchess had clearly invoked the old proverb of ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’ and laid on the best the hotel was capable of, which was very good indeed. We waited in a group, rather than a queue, ready to help ourselves to eggs and bacon and sausages and mushrooms, all laid out before us in silver chafing dishes.

Damian was standing a little ahead of me. He appeared to have resigned his charge of Dagmar, who was nowhere to be seen, but moved on to the equally great, or greater, prize of Serena, who was as animated as I had ever seen her, laughing and chatting, and leaning her head close to his. I remember I was surprised at the time to register how well they appeared to know each other. She had come as Caroline Lamb dressed as a page, taken from the famous portrait by Thomas Phillips and, of course, the trim tailoring of her velvet coat, displaying, as it did, her wonderful legs in stockings and knee breeches, made all the other girls present look stuffy and dowdy by comparison. Damian, at her side, was a convincing Byron and perhaps that had been the original idea behind his costume. In fact, they could almost have planned it, they made so well-matched a pair. Serena was not as beautiful as Joanna Langley – no woman was – but she had a fineness of feature that offset it. In short, they looked wonderful together and once again Damian found himself the cynosure of all eyes. ‘Excuse me, Sir, but do you have an invitation?’ The voice, loud and with a trace of a Midlands accent, transcended the chatter and hung like a seagull in the air above us.

The question had come so entirely out of the blue that it succeeded in silencing everyone present. I saw one girl stop dead, half a fried egg hanging from a spoon until it slipped and fell back on to the plate beneath. A suited man, presumably a manager or something similar, was standing next to Damian. He was standing too close, impertinently close. So close that he was obviously using his closeness to express that he belonged there, in this room, in this hotel, but that in his opinion Damian Baxter did not. Of course, the truth was more complicated. Most of those present knew that Damian did not have an invitation, but he had been present at the party for so long by that stage that for the majority this argument seemed to have become semantic. He had not created a disturbance, he had not got drunk, he had not been rude, all the things that people dread from gatecrashers had simply not happened. Besides, he knew many of the other guests. He had come as a friend and chosen the correct costume. He had danced and talked and even partnered the girl whose ball it was, for heaven’s sake. What more did they want? The answer to this was, apparently, proof of an invitation. He blushed, something I do not believe I ever saw him do again. ‘Look,’ he said softly, laying a placatory hand gently on the man’s grey, worsted sleeve.

‘No, Sir. You look.’ If anything the voice was getting louder and word had spread. Couples drifted into the breakfast room from the dancing next door to see what was going on. ‘If you do not have an invitation I must ask you to leave.’ Ill-advisedly, after shaking Damian’s hand away, he tried to take hold of his elbow, but Damian was too quick for him and almost danced backwards to free himself. At this moment Serena, alone in that company decided to intervene. In my craven silence I admired her enormously.

‘I am perfectly happy to vouch for Mr Baxter, if that would make any difference.’ Judging by the man’s expression it did not look at first as if it would. ‘My name is Lady Serena Gresham, and you will find it on the guest list.’ Now, what was peculiarly interesting about this was Serena’s mention of her rank, something she would normally never have done; not if it meant having her tongue torn out. It is hard to understand for those who were not there, but the years of the 1960s were an odd, transitional period when it came to titles. I mean, of course, real titles, hereditary titles. Because at that precise moment of our history nobody quite knew what their future might be. An unspoken agreement between the parties not to create any more of them seemed to have been reached in about 1963 and the belief at that time, certainly outside aristocratic circles, was that the world was changing into a different place and that, among these changes soon, perhaps very soon, the status of a life peerage would far exceed that of an inherited one. In short, that the prominence of the ancient, great families would be vastly diminished in favour of the new people on their way up. But alongside this official doctrine (promoted by the media at the time and still touchingly upheld today by a few politicians and the more optimistic worthies of the Left), there was nevertheless a sneaking suspicion that despite confident pronouncements from the pundits on the subject, this would not prove quite true and that a historic name would continue to have muscle in modern Britain. It was not unlike Mr Blair’s attempt to rebrand the country Cool Britannia. There was a period when everyone thought it might work, then a second chapter when the media would insist the experiment was working even though we all knew it wasn’t and finally a universal acknowledgement, from Left and Right, that it had been a ridiculous and colossal failure.

But, at the time this contradictory attitude towards hereditary rank meant that as a weapon, titles had to be used circumspectly and that all public display was self-defeating. Just as anyone who shouts ‘Do you know who I am?’ at a hotel or airline employee immediately forfeits what little advantage they might possibly have gained from their position.

Forty years later all this has altered. After half a century, while a life peerage is a perfectly respectable honour, it is only really meaningful in a political context. In smart society it has failed to garner any real aura or kudos beyond that of a knighthood. Mrs Thatcher tried to acknowledge this with a few hereditary creations in the early 1980s, but she was not supported and after that the nobility remained shut, despite continuing to dominate the social pyramid unchallenged. In fact, when toffs are given life peerages they tend to wear them lightly as if anxious to show that they do not take their new rank seriously. ‘We’re just the day boys,’ said one to me recently. Obviously, the old system should either be reopened or abolished, since the present situation should be judged untenable in any democratic society, but there is little sign of reform. Instead, today, up and down the land the descendants of some lucky mayor or banker in the Twenties, reign graciously over us, while the great of our own day, often with far more significant achievements than the forebears of the grandees present, give place and sit forever below the salt.

The point is that today Serena would never question the advantage of her position and using it in this context would almost certainly work. But in those days, forty years ago, it was an act of bravery for her to hold it up and risk a potshot. She was right to be diffident, since it was clear her intervention wouldn’t do the trick. The man stared at her officiously. ‘I’m very sorry, Your Ladyship,’ he started, ‘I’m afraid-’

‘This is absolutely ridiculous!’ Dagmar’s shrill cry rang out across the room. One of her striking and even poignant qualities was the absolute Englishness of her voice, making her foreign name and rank feel even stranger. And it was not just English, but a sound from the England of sixty years before, the voice of a miniature duchess opening a charity bazaar in 1910. She strode towards the table, pushing the crowd apart as she came, like a Munchkin general. ‘Of course Damian does not have to go!’

This complication really flummoxed the man. ‘But Her Royal Highness asked most particularly-’

‘Her Royal Highness doesn’t know anything about it!’

‘Oh, I think I do!’ The vast bulk of the Grand Duchess was now added to the mix. The guests fell back as she swept majestically through the room, a re-enactment of Sherman marching through Georgia, scorching the earth on her journey, accompanied by, interestingly, Andrew Summersby, who hovered beside her like a small and ugly tug in the shadow of an ocean-going liner. ‘I’m very sorry, Mr Baxter, I am sure you did not mean to offend in any way.’ She paused for breath and I saw Damian try to cut in, presumably with a view to improving his chances, but she was not interested in a dialogue, only in a statement of policy. ‘However, I feel there are rules in these things and they must be adhered to.’ She smiled to sugar the pill. ‘We can’t risk Society crashing down about our ears. I hope you won’t think too harshly of me.’

‘No, indeed,’ said Damian waggishly, still hoping to regain his balance.

‘But Damian was invited!’ The cry came from a hideously embarrassed Dagmar. Naturally it made an interesting contribution to the argument. The crowd’s eyes swung towards her, like the audience of the tennis match in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. ‘I invited him!’ I am sure everyone present knew this was a lie, but it was a gallant and generous lie, and it sent her higher in the estimation of her guests, most of whom were not particularly fond of her before that night, despite their readiness to take full advantage of her hospitality. I say this so you may know that her intervention did achieve some good. As an argument against her mother’s decision it was of course completely fatuous.

‘Excuse me, my dear, but Mr Baxter was not invited. Not by you. And, more to the point, not by me.’ The Grand Duchess’s tone brooked no argument. She had not finished. ‘This was something he made quite clear within earshot of Lord Summersby, who was good enough to bring it to my attention. I would go so far as to say that Mr Baxter was boasting of his lack of invitation.’ The shade of the Grand Duchess’s face was darkening and it was not a becoming alteration. Coupled with the primary colours of her costume, she was beginning to resemble a blow-up Santa Claus hovering between the buildings in Regent Street at Christmas; but, as always with her, there was a quality to be reckoned with. I especially enjoyed a slight flavour of Eastern Europe in her voice as her rage intensified, as if her duty towards her people – subjects in a country which, lest we forget, she had never even visited – had somehow infused her with a new and different past, washing away her healthy, early years in West Yorkshire and making her Moravian in spite of herself.

Her words had naturally revealed who was to blame for the incident, which I would like to describe as ‘horrid,’ but which had, of course, completely made the party for most of those present. The sneak responsible was none other than Andrew Summersby. I would guess that this public unveiling was not part of his original plan and he looked uncomfortable as the eyes of the company now turned upon him. He hesitated for a moment before making the decision, which I cannot blame him for, given his situation that, having been uncovered, he had better brazen it out.

Until this point he’d been hovering at the back of the proceedings, but now he strode forward. ‘Come on,’ he said, laying hold of Damian by the upper arm, rather like someone making a citizen’s arrest, which I suppose he was doing, and attempting to guide him away.

In one swift move, and to the amazement of us all, Damian again got free, this time with a thousand times more fury than he had vented on the hotel employee when the man had tried something similar. ‘Take your hand off me this instant,’ he snarled. ‘You stupid, ridiculous oaf!’ Obviously, Andrew was not expecting anything of this sort when he had first decided to betray the uninvited guest, least of all from someone whom he judged to be far beneath him in God’s scheme of things. Andrew unquestionably was an oaf, and a very stupid one, but few people would then have called him such to his face and he was quite unprepared for it. To be honest, I think he just wanted to have a go at Serena or one of the other girls who had been hovering around Damian all evening and he’d got jealous. I’m quite sure nobody was sorrier than he that the whole situation seemed to be spiralling out of control.

He was dressed, like some of the others, as a Death’s Head hussar, with tight, in his case unbecoming, trousers, and a coat slung across his back, all of which may have fatally impeded his movement, but he couldn’t back out now. He lunged forward, making a second attempt to grip the miscreant’s arm. Once more, Damian was too quick for him, stepping back in a sort of pirouette, like Errol Flynn in a Warner Brothers romance, and before anyone could stop him he had swung the full force of his right fist into a punch that met Andrew’s nose with a loud and sickening crunch. Several of the girls screamed, particularly the nearest, one Lydia Maybury, whose white, organza frock, charmingly cut on the bias and embroidered with lilies of the valley, was copiously sprayed with a mixture of gore and snot from Andrew’s smashed proboscis. He himself looked so startled, so astonished by the unbelievable course events had taken, as if the sea itself had suddenly come rushing in through the ballroom windows, that he stood for a moment in a trance, staring through sightless eyes, stock still, blood spouting from his nostrils, before staggering backwards. Watching this, but paralysed with a kind of ecstatic horror, none of us thought to catch and save him, and instead he collapsed full length on to the breakfast buffet, pushing it over as he fell, showering himself and the bystanders with hot plates and sausages and jugs of orange juice and bacon and toast and burners and scrambled eggs and mustard and cutlery and all. The crash was like the Fall of Troy, echoing through the hotel passages, frightening the horses, wakening the dead. It was succeeded by complete and total silence. We all stood there, rabbits caught in the headlights, stunned, amazed, hypnotised, watching the bloody, breakfast-decorated body of the fallen Viscount. Even Dagmar was as still and as silent as a statue.

Then Damian, with one of those gestures that made me forgive him more, and for longer, than I should have done, took hold of the Grand Duchess’s hand, hanging limply by her side as she stood witness to the ruin of a party that had cost a large percentage of her annual income. ‘Please forgive me for making such a mess, Ma’am,’ he raised her unresisting hand to his lips, holding it there for a second, with exquisite elegance, ‘and thank you so much for what, until now, has been an enchanting evening.’ So saying he released her fingers, bowed crisply from the neck like a lifelong courtier, and strode out of the chamber.

I need hardly add that once the story had gone round London, and with the sole exception of the ball given by Lady Belton for Andrew’s sister, Annabella, before very long Damian had received invitations to every other major event of that Season. This was not because of any increased approval on the part of the mothers, all of whom were more terrified than ever that Damian Baxter would ensnare one of their sacred children.

It was at the absolute and unbending insistence of the girls themselves.