Past Imperfect

SIX

The Grand Duchess had been right to make her investment, even if things did not quite turn out as she had wished. In 1968 the family had just enough money and just enough status for Dagmar to have landed a big – or a biggish – fish. That she did not, I attributed at the time to her setting her sights too high and thereby missing whatever chance there might have been of something decent. As I would discover, I was not completely right in this analysis, but I suspect that even so, like many of rank or fortune, Dagmar had grown up with unrealistic expectations. To begin with she had no clear idea of how pallid she really was. She could always assemble (then, anyway) a crowd who would conceal her shyness from herself and she did not seem to appreciate that she would have to make more of the running if things were to go her way. All this the Grand Duchess knew and, in the nicest possible way, she tried to encourage her daughter to make what hay she could before the sun went in completely, but like most young women, Dagmar did not listen to her mother when her mother said things she did not want to hear.

Part of the problem lay in her curious inability to flirt. Faced by a man, she would alternate between nervous giggling or complete silence, her huge semi-tearful eyes wide open, fixed on her partner, while he would flounder in his desperate attempts to find some topic, any topic, that would elicit a vocal response. There wasn’t one. Eventually this helplessness provoked a protective instinct in me, and while I never exactly fancied Dagmar, I began to dislike anyone who made fun of her or, as I once heard, imitated her sad, little laugh. Once, I had to take her away from Annabel’s when her date excused himself to go to the loo, before apparently running up the steps back to street level and jumping into a taxi. She cried on the way home and of course I had to love her a little bit after that.

To correct a popular misconception, I must point out that by my time the London Season was no longer, as it had once been, much of a marriage market. The idea was more to launch your young into a suitable world where they would thenceforth live and in due course find friends, and after a few years a husband or wife. Few mothers wanted this achieved before their sons and daughters had reached their middle twenties at the earliest, but Dagmar’s case was different, as the Grand Duchess knew. They were selling a product in what promised to be a falling market and there was no time to be lost. We all thought at one point she had a reasonable chance of Robert Strickland, the grandson and eventual heir to a 1910 barony, awarded to a Royal gynaecologist after a tricky but successful birth. Robert didn’t have much money and there was neither land nor house, but there was something and he was a kind fellow, if hardly the life and soul of the party. He worked in a merchant bank and had the supreme merit, certainly where the Grand Duchess was concerned, of being slightly deaf. Unfortunately, just as he was coming to the boil Dagmar fluffed it, Robert interpreting her nervous giggle as a lack of interest in his hinted-at proposal, and it was not repeated. By the end of that summer he was happily engaged to the daughter of a Colonel in the Irish Guards. There would be no other opportunities at that level.

Even so, everyone was a little taken aback to read in the gossip columns in the late autumn of 1970 that she was engaged to William Holman, the only child of an aggressive parvenu from Virginia Water. When I knew him William was about to be ‘something in the City,’ an all-purpose phrase beloved of our mothers. He had been a hanger-on at some of the dances in our year, wearing and saying inappropriate, desperate things, according to our youthful, shallow, snobbish yard-sticks, and was not taken seriously by anyone. I suppose, looking back, he was quite clever and perhaps he did seem to be going somewhere. It just wasn’t evident to us that it was somewhere very nice. I missed the wedding. I think I had double booked it with a weekend in Toulouse. But apparently it was perfectly all right, if a bit rushed. They were married in an Orthodox church in Bayswater and the reception was held at the Hyde Park Hotel. The groom’s parents looked ecstatic and the bride’s were at least resigned. In the last analysis Princess Dagmar of Moravia was married, and to a man who could pay the bill for dinner and manage something more than a basement flat. As the Grand Duchess might have remarked, and probably did in the privacy of her bathroom, it was better than nothing. She was also presumably aware that there were other factors at work, rendering the ceremony welcome. Six months later the Princess was delivered of a son, a healthy boy and not noticeably premature.

For obvious reasons I didn’t see much of Dagmar after the Portuguese holiday, and once I’d missed her wedding we lost touch completely. I didn’t like William and he couldn’t see the point of me, so there was not much to build on. To be fair, he did do well, better than I had anticipated, eventually making chairman of some investment trust, and being rewarded with both millions and a knighthood from John Major. When I read about him in the papers, or glimpsed him across the room at some function, I was amused to note that he had become a convincing version of what he had hankered for all those years ago, with suits made by some award-worthy cutter behind the Burlington Arcade and all the loudly mouthed prejudices to match. Someone told me he hunted now and was even a good shot, which made me rather jealous. It never ceases to amaze me the way real money continues to ape the habits and pastimes of the old upper class, in a day when they could afford to call a different tune. This was not widely true during the Seventies, but once Mrs Thatcher was on the throne, secret longings for gentility resurfaced in many a breast. Before long, every City trader exchanged his red braces for a Barbour, and was shooting, fishing and stalking like a middle-European nobleman, while the clubs in St James’s, once desperate for new applicants, had pleasure in reestablishing their waiting lists and toughening again the criteria for membership.

One sign of all this that the sociologists seem to have missed was that from the Eighties onwards, the upper middle and upper classes resumed a different daily costume from those beneath them in the ancient pecking order, which was definitely a return to the way things used to be. A unique phenomenon of the 1960s was that we all dressed in the new, outlandish modes, quite irrespective of background, perhaps the only time in the last thousand years when most of the nation’s youth wore versions of the same costume, though it seems a pity we should choose as our badge of unity those terrible hipsters and kipper ties and velvet suits and bomber jackets and all the other horrors on display. Hideous as the fashions were, nobody was immune. The Queen’s skirts leaped above her knee and, at the Prince of Wales’s inauguration at Carnarvon Castle, Lord Snowdon appeared in what looked like the costume of a flightdeck steward on a Polish airline. But by the 1980s the toffs were tired of this unsuitable disguise. They wanted to look like themselves again, and gradually first Hackett’s and later Oliver Brown and all those others who recognised this secret longing and aspired to supply it, appeared in the high street. Suddenly posh suits were once more of a recognisably different cloth and cut, while country clothes, tweeds and cords and all the rest of that tested uniform, pulled themselves from the dusty wardrobes where they had lain unloved since the 1950s. The toffs were visually different again, a tribe to be known once more by their markings, and it made them happy to be so.

That said, for those of us who witnessed what seemed then to be the end of everything, the 1970s had first to be negotiated before matters would start to improve. Much that was teetering came crashing down and there were dark days to be gone through. It seems strange to write it now, when all is changed, but to us, then, Communism was here to stay. In fact, most of us privately, if silently, believed that world Communism would eventually be the order of the day and we set about enjoying ourselves with no expectation of a long future for our way of life, dancing to the band on the increasingly steep deck of the Titanic. The Sixties had come and gone by that stage, with their promises of free love and hair-worn flowers, but these attractive notions did not, in the event, compose the legacy of that troubled era. The trail that was left was not of peace and rose buds, but of social breakdown, and certainly some people who lost their currency value in those bleak years, never regained it.

So it wasn’t a complete surprise when I dialled Dagmar’s number and asked for the Princess, to be told that ‘Lady Holman’ was in the drawing room. I had prepared what I intended to say. My excuse was a charity ball that I’d been given to chair for Eastern European refugees. Some years before I’d written a moderately successful novel set principally in post-war Romania, which had inevitably taken me into this territory, and I was quite interested by what was happening in that stormy land. At last a voice came on the line. ‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Is it really you?’ She was still the diffident Dagmar of old, but somehow she sounded even more meek. I explained about the cause. ‘I’m supposed to come up with some ideas for the committee and I immediately thought of you.’

‘Why?’

‘Wouldn’t a Balkan princess look rather relevant? So far, all I’ve got is two actors from a soap opera, a TV chef whom no one’s heard of and a bunch of dowagers from Onslow Gardens.’

She hesitated. ‘I don’t really use that name now.’ There was a sorrow in her voice, though whether it was a momentary stab of nostalgia or a general critique of her present existence I could not, of course, tell.

‘Well, even if you’re listed as Lady Holman, everyone will know who you are.’ One says these things and I said this, although, as is often the case in such circumstances, I did not believe it to be true.

‘Well…’ She paused awkwardly. I had hoped that William’s success in the City would have bolstered her confidence, but the reverse seemed to have happened.

‘Can we discuss it? I’m going to be driving very near you next week. Could I possibly look in?’

‘When?’

Once more, as with Lucy Dalton, I sensed a trapped animal searching for a route out, scanning the net for a possible tear, which I firmly closed off with my next speech. ‘It entirely depends on you. I’ve got some stuff to do in Winchester but I can easily fit it round your diary. What day would suit best? It’d be such fun to see you again after all these years.’

She was enough of a lady to know when she was caught. ‘Yes, it would. Of course it would. Why not come for some lunch next Friday?’

‘Will William be with you?’

‘Yes. He doesn’t really like my entertaining when he’s not here.’ This sentence had escaped her mouth before she fully grasped its ugly, bullying significance. The words seemed to reverberate down the line between us. After a silent pause she attempted to round off its sharp edges: ‘He gets so jealous when he finds he’s missed seeing people he likes. I know he’d love to catch up with you.’

‘Me, too,’ I answered, because I had to. I was not quite clear how I would carry out my mission if William was too controlling to allow us a moment together, but there was nothing I could do about that. ‘I’ll be with you on Friday, just before one.’

Bellingham Court was a real house. It was about five miles from Winchester and not perhaps quite far enough from the motorway, but it was a genuine Elizabethan schloss, with high mullioned windows and corbelled ceilings and panelled great chambers and whispering passages, a thoroughly satisfactory ego-puffer of a place. As I turned in through the neatly painted gates, and drove down the long, tended and impeccable drive, it was easy to see it had been the subject of a recent, and massive, restoration programme. I parked in the wide forecourt, bordered by two broad, shallow parterres of water, edged in new and expensively carved stone, and before I had time to ring the bell the door was opened by a middle aged woman in sensible shoes, whom I took, correctly, to be the housekeeper. She led me inside.

The money here was not comparable to Damian’s Croesus-like hoards. The Holmans were very rich, that was all, not super-duper-Bill-Gates-unbelievably rich. Just rich. But they were rich enough, by heaven. The hall was large, stone-flagged, and off-white, with a dark, carved screen at one end and some wonderful furniture. These items had been selected as contemporary with the house, which I later discovered was not the theme in the other downstairs rooms, the designer having decided that Tudor artefacts are easy to admire but hard to live with. The style had therefore been confined to the hall, with a few pieces in the library. There was in this a kind of premeditation, a sort of thought-out pattern that, just as in Damian’s Surrey palace, was oddly undermining to any sense of country living. Proper country houses have a kind of randomness, objects and furniture are deliberately thrown together, survivals of many other houses, which have somehow all ended up there in a kind of chic higgledy-piggledy. Nor is this a skill unknown to many designers who, given ample time and money, can rustle up a house that looks as if the family have owned it since 1650, when in fact they moved in the summer of the previous year. But here, at Bellingham, this casual, comfortable elegance had not been achieved. In fact, there was a slightly disconcerting quality to the whole house that I cannot exactly describe, as if it had been prepared for an elaborate party to which I had not been invited. Had I been told it had been dressed for a photo shoot and I wasn’t to touch anything, it would not have surprised me. The pictures were almost all large, full, or three-quarter- length portraits, over-cleaned and a little too shiny. They had a foreign feel to them and I squinted at some of the name plaques on the most important ones, as I passed. ‘Frederick Francis, 1st Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Shwerin, 1756-1837’ said one, while another announced ‘Count Felix Beningbauer gennant Lupitz, 1812-1871, and his son, Maximilian.’

‘You see we are very pro-Europe in this house.’ The voice startled me and I looked up to see a tiny figure standing at the far end of the hall, looking more like a boy scout on bob-a-job week than a princess in late middle age. Of course, I knew it was Dagmar because her stature meant it had to be, but I could not at first find her in the face I was presented with. Her hair was grey, though as flat and lank as it had always been, and at last I recognised her wobbling, tremulous, anxious lips, but not much else of her youthful appearance had survived. Her eyes were still huge, but sadder now and, despite our luxurious setting, it seemed to me that for her, life had been a bumpy ride. We kissed, a little gauchely, two strangers pecking at each other’s cheeks, before she led me into the main drawing room, a fine, light chamber, but again with a synthetic air. It was the perfect mixture of Colefax chintz and antiques, Georgian this time, beautifully chosen as individual items but with no coherence as a whole. There was more of the splendid, European parade on the walls.

I indicated a couple of them. ‘I don’t remember you having all these in Trevor Square. Or were they in storage?’ We knew, without saying, that they formed no part of the provenance of Squire William de Holman.

She shook her head. ‘Neither.’ Now, at last, she was beginning to come back to me. The moist half-open mouth had firmed up a bit, but she still had that odd, discordant, tearful note in her voice, a faint, sad scrape of the vocal cords grinding together, that reminded me of the girl she had once been. ‘William has scouts in all the auction houses, and whenever there is a picture coming up with the faintest connection to me he bids for it.’ She did not elaborate on quite what this told us about her husband. No more did I.

‘Where is he?’

‘Choosing some wine for lunch. He won’t be long.’

She poured me a drink from a supply concealed in a large, carved, rococo cupboard in the corner which I saw, to my amusement, contained a small sink, and we talked. Dagmar was more aware of what I had been doing with my life than I anticipated and she must have noticed how flattered I was when she spoke of one particular novel that had barely broken the surface of the water. I thanked her. She gave a little smile. ‘I like to keep up with the news of the people I knew then.’

‘More than with the people themselves?’

She shrugged lightly. ‘Friendships are based on shared experience. I don’t know what we would all have in common now. William isn’t very… nostalgic for that time in his life. He prefers what happened later.’ Which did not surprise me. If I were him, so would I. ‘Do you see anyone from those days?’ I told her I’d visited Lucy. ‘Heavens, you are having a time of it. How is she?’

‘All right. Her husband’s got another business. I’m not sure how well it’s doing.’

She nodded. ‘Philip Rawnsley-Price. The one man we were all on the run from and Lucy Dalton ends up marrying him. How peculiar time is. I imagine he’s quite different now?’

‘Not different enough,’ I said ungenerously and we laughed. ‘I’ve seen Damian Baxter, too. Quite recently. Do you remember him?’

This time she let out a kind of giggling gasp that brought the old Dagmar I had known completely back into the room. ‘Do I remember him?’ she said. ‘How could I forget him when our names have been linked ever since?’ My mind running, as it was, on another track, this remark amazed me. Had I entirely missed a romance that everyone else knew about?

‘Really?’

She did a double take. Clearly she was puzzled by my slowness. ‘You remember my party? When he flattened Andrew Summersby? And added about two thousand pounds to the bill? Which was quite a lot of money then, I can tell you.’ But she was not made angry at the recollection. Quite the reverse. I could see that.

‘Of course I remember. I also remember your attempts to pretend he’d been invited. I rather loved you for that.’

She nodded. ‘It was hopeless, of course.’ She smiled like a naughty, little elf at the thought of her long-ago gallantry. ‘My mother was still living in some fantasy kingdom in her own head. She thought if she allowed one young man, who had behaved perfectly all evening, to stay on without an invitation, somehow Rome would fall. Needless to say, her intransigence made us ridiculous.’

‘You weren’t ridiculous.’

She flushed with pleasure. ‘No? I hope not.’

‘How is your mother? I was always so terrified of her.’

‘You wouldn’t be now.’

‘She’s alive, then?’

‘Yes. She’s alive. We might see her if you’ve time for a walk after lunch.’

I nodded. ‘I’d like that.’ There was a lull and I could hear the sound of a bee trapped somewhere against a window, that familiar buzzing thump. Not for the first time I was struck by the strangeness of this kind of talk, with people you once knew well and now do not know at all. ‘She must be pleased with the way things turned out for you.’ In saying this I was perfectly sincere. The Grand Duchess had been so determined on a sensational marriage for her daughter that William Holman must have been a crushing disappointment, however necessary he was at the time. Little did either she, or we, know that he would deliver a way of life that would far outshine the promises of the eldest sons on offer in 1968.

She looked at me pensively. ‘Yes and no,’ she muttered.

Before I could comment further, William strode into the room, right hand extended towards me. He was better-looking than I remembered him, tall and thin, and his greying hair giving him a sort of blond, youthful appearance. ‘How nice to see you,’ he said and I noticed that, unusually after such a time, his voice was more changed than his face. It had become important, as if he were addressing the boardroom of a corporation, or a village hall full of grateful tenants. ‘How are you?’ We shook hands and exchanged the usual platitudes about Long Time No See, while Dagmar fetched him a drink. He looked down as he took it. ‘Isn’t there any lemon?’

‘Apparently not.’

‘Why not?’ Given that I was more or less a stranger to him, despite our protestations of delight in each other’s company, William’s tone to his spouse was oddly and uncomfortably severe.

‘They must have forgotten to buy any.’ She spoke as if she were locked in a cell with a potentially violent felon and was trying to attract the attention of the guards.

‘They? Who are “they”? You mean “you.” You have forgotten to ask them to buy any.’ He sighed wearily, saddened by the pathetic mediocrity of his wife’s abilities. ‘Oh well. Never mind.’ He sipped the drink, wrinkled his nose with displeasure and turned back to me. ‘So, what brings you here?’

I explained about the charity, since I was not, naturally, about to go into the true reason. He looked at me with that face of faux concern that people use when listening to hard luck stories in the street. ‘Of course, this is a marvellous cause, as I said to Dagmar when I first heard about it, and I admire you terrifically for getting involved…’

‘But?’

‘But I don’t think it’s one for us.’ He paused, expecting me to come in and say that of course I understood, but I waited, without comment, until he felt sufficiently wrong-footed to elucidate. ‘I don’t want Dagmar to be held captive by all that. Obviously, the position of her family was a very interesting one, but it’s finished. She’s Lady Holman now. There’s no need for her to cash in on some bogus title from the past, when she has a perfectly good one in the modern world. This kind of thing, vital as it might be,’ he gave a smile but it did not reach his eyes, ‘seems to me to take her backwards, not forwards.’

I turned to Dagmar for a comment, but she was silent. ‘I don’t see her position as bogus,’ I said. ‘She’s a member of a ruling house.’

‘An ex-ruling house.’

‘They were on the throne until three years before she was born.’

‘Which was a long time ago.’

This seemed needlessly ungallant. ‘There are plenty of people living in exile who look to her brother for leadership.’

‘Oh, I see. You think we’ll all attend Feodor’s coronation? I hope he can get the time off work.’ He laughed suddenly, with a kind of sneer in the sound, as he brought his face round to Dagmar’s, that she might fully register his contempt. It was intolerable. ‘I’m afraid I find all that stuff is just an excuse for a few snobs to bow and curtsey and gee up their dinner parties.’ He shook his head slowly, as if he were making a reasonable point. ‘They should pay more attention to what’s going on around them today.’ He sipped his drink to punctuate the finality of his argument. In other words there could be no further discussion on the subject.

I turned to Dagmar. ‘Do you agree?’

She took a breath. ‘Well-’

‘Of course she agrees. Now, when’s lunch?’ I saw then that the real burden of William’s song was that for years he had endured being treated as Dagmar’s moment of madness, the shaming mèsalliance that had overtaken the Moravian dynasty, and now he didn’t have to put up with it any more. Things had changed. Today, he was the one with the money, he was the one with the power and weren’t we going to know about it. Worse than this, having triumphed, he could no longer tolerate Dagmar having any sort of position of her own. She must have no value at all other than as his wife, no podium where she might shine independent of his glory. In short, he was a bully. I understood now why the Grand Duchess’s approval had been equivocal.

Luncheon was a curious event, providing as it did an endless series of opportunities for Dagmar to be publicly humiliated. ‘What on earth is this?’ ‘Is it supposed to taste burnt?’ ‘Why are we eating with nursery cutlery?’ ‘Those flowers deserve a decent burial.’ ‘Shouldn’t there be a sauce with this or did you ask for it to be dry?’ If I had been Dagmar, I would have stood up, broken a large plate over his head and left him forever. And that was before we got to the pudding. But I know only too well that this kind of wife-battering, for that is what we were dealing with, destroys the will to resist and, to my sorrow, she simply took it. She even gave credence to his complaints by apologising for shortcomings that were entirely fictional. ‘I am sorry. It should be hotter than this,’ she would say. Or, ‘You’re right. I should have asked them to seal it first.’ The limit came when William took a bite of the little crêpes Suzette that had been brought in and spat it back onto his plate. ‘Jesus!’ he shouted at the top of his voice. ‘What the hell is this made of? Soap?’

‘I don’t understand you.’ I spoke carefully. ‘It’s delicious.’

‘Not where I come from.’ He gave a merry laugh, as if we were all enjoying a jolly joke.

‘And where do you come from, exactly?’ I said. ‘I forget.’ I stared at him and he held my gaze for a second. Behind his head the housekeeper glanced quickly at a maid who had been helping to serve to check if she’d registered this exchange. I could see them silently acknowledge that they both had. In fact, they were nearly smiling. However, whether or not it was entertaining for the staff to witness the tyrant brought low, it was snobbish and self-defeating of me to do it. William, red in the face with fury, was on the brink of ordering me out of the house, which would have rendered my journey completely pointless. Mercifully, he was never one to allow his anger to undo him. Years of tricky negotiations in the City had made him cleverer than that. And I would guess the thought of the story going round London, coming from someone who was perhaps better known than he (not richer, not more successful, just a little better known) was something he was not prepared to risk. Of course, my chief crime in his eyes wasn’t that I had been rude to him and failed to take his part. It was that I seemed to find his wife more congenial and more interesting than he was, which was even worse than my reminding him of the long journey he had traversed since we first met. I knew he made a point of editing every visitor who entered the house, so presumably this kind of challenge seldom, if ever, happened. He was out of practice when it came to being contradicted.

With a deep and deliberately audible breath, he put down his napkin, painstakingly rumpled, and smiled. ‘The awful thing is I have to run. Will you excuse me?’ I saw, to my amusement, he was trying to be ‘gracious.’ It was not in his gift. ‘I’m at home on Fridays, but it doesn’t mean I don’t have to work. If only it did. Dagmar will see you off. Won’t you, my darling? It’s been such a treat to catch up again.’ I smiled and thanked him, as if I had not just been instructed to leave, and we both pretended everything was fine. Then he was gone. Dagmar and I stared at each other, her little, crumpled face and narrow shoulders suddenly making her look like a picture of some starving child in war-torn Berlin. Or Edith Piaf. Towards the end.

‘Do you feel like a walk after that?’ she said. ‘I don’t blame you if you want to get away. I won’t be offended.’

‘Hasn’t he just told me to get off his land?’

She made a little pout. ‘So?’

‘Don’t make him angry on my behalf.’

‘He’s always angry. What’s the difference?’

The gardens at Bellingham had been tidied, replanted and restored to an approximation of their Edwardian appearance, with a large walled garden and separate ‘rooms’ containing statues surrounded by box hedges or roses in neat and tidy beds. It was all very nice, but the park was something more. Survivors of the original build, the giant oak trees, ancient and venerable, gave the whole place a sober beauty, a gravitas lacking in the quaint gardens or the newly refurbished interior. I looked around. ‘You’re very lucky.’

‘Am I?’

‘In this, anyway.’

She also stared about her, admiring the stately trees and the roll of the hills surrounding us. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am lucky in this.’ We walked on for a bit. ‘How was he?’ she said suddenly, out of the blue. I did not immediately understand her. ‘Damian. You told me you’d seen him recently.’

‘Not very well, I’m afraid.’

She nodded. ‘I heard that. I was hoping you’d tell me it wasn’t true.’

‘Well, it is.’ Again, we were silent as we crested a shallow slope with a wonderful view across the park towards the house.

‘Did you know I was mad about him?’ she said.

I was becoming used to surprises. ‘I knew you’d had a bit of a walkout. But I didn’t know it was the Real Thing.’

‘Well, it was. For me, anyway.’

‘Then you were very discreet.’

She chuckled sadly. ‘There wasn’t much to be discreet about.’

‘He talked of you the other day,’ I said.

At this, her colour altered before my gaze and she raised a hand to her cheek. ‘Did he?’ she whispered. ‘Did he really?’ It was very touching.

I could see we were at last approaching the discussion I had come for, but I wanted to progress it carefully. ‘He just mentioned that you and he had been out together a few times, which I hadn’t known before.’

Released by the knowledge that somehow she was still alive in Damian’s imagination, her words came pouring out. ‘I would have married him, you know.’ I stopped. This was astonishing. We seemed to have gone from nought to a hundred miles an hour in less than two minutes. Damian had given the impression of a one-night stand, but, for Dagmar it was Tristan and Isolde. How often it seems a pair of lovers can be engaged in two entirely different relationships.

She caught my expression and nodded vigorously, as if I were going to contradict her. It was an extraordinary transformation and the first time I had ever seen her take the lead in anything approaching an argument. ‘I’d have done it if he’d asked me. I would!’

I raised my arms in surrender. ‘I believe you,’ I said.

Which made her smile and relax again, knowing by my action I was friend not foe. ‘My mother would have thrown herself out of an upper window, of course, but I was ready for her. And I wasn’t as mad as all that. I knew he’d do well. That was what I loved about him. He was part of the world that was coming.’ She glanced at me. ‘Not the world we thought was coming, all that peace and love and flowers-in-your-hair. Not that. The real world that crept secretly towards us through the seventies and arrived with a bang in the eighties. The ambition, the rapacity, I knew that another rich oligarchy would be back in place before I died and I was sure Damian would belong to it.’

A strange feature of growing older is the discovery that everyone who was young alongside you was just as incapable of expressing their thoughts as you yourself were. Somehow, in youth, most of us think that we are misunderstood but everyone else is stupid. I realised, with some sorrow, that I could have been much, much friendlier with Dagmar than I had been, if I’d only realised what was going on inside her little head. ‘So, what happened? You couldn’t convince your mother?’

‘That wasn’t the reason. She would have given in if I’d screamed loudly enough. After all, in the end she let me marry William who had no background at all, just because she thought he might make money.’

‘What was it, then?’

She sighed, still sorry. ‘He didn’t want it.’ She frowned, anxious to qualify her statement. ‘I mean he liked me a bit and he was quite amused by all the… stuff. But he never fancied me. Not really.’ Of course, the sad truth was that none of us had fancied her. Not, at any rate, what Nanny would describe as in that way, she was too much of a waif, too much the loveless, pitiful child, but at her words I was struck with a wave of pity for our younger selves, bursting with unrequited love, as all we plain ones had been. Aching to tell, somehow believing that if only the object of our passions could be brought to understand the force of our love, they would yield to it, yet knowing all the time that this is not so and they would not.

Dagmar hadn’t finished. ‘There was a moment when I thought I could have him. At one particular point I thought I could promise him everything he was doing the Season to get. Social…’ She hesitated. She had been so carried away that it had led her into territory that made her awkward. Her timid diffidence came flooding back. ‘You know… social whatever… I thought he might want it enough to take me as part of the deal.’ She looked across. ‘I suppose that sounds very desperate.’

‘It sounds very determined. I’m surprised it didn’t work.’ I was. Whether he found her attractive or not, I would have thought the Damian Baxter of those years would have leaped at the chance of a princess bride.

Now it was her turn to look at me pityingly. ‘You never understood him. Even before that terrible dinner in Portugal. You thought he wanted everything you had. More than you had. Which he did, in a way. But at some moment during the year we spent together he realised he only wanted it on his own terms or not at all.’

‘Perhaps that’s what you admire in men. William certainly has it on his own terms.’ Which could have been cruel but she did not take it as such.

Instead, she shook her head to mark the difference in her mind between the two men. ‘William is a little man. He married me to be a big man. Then, when he had made his own money and bought a knighthood, and generally became, as he thought, big, he didn’t want me to be big as well any more. He wanted me to be little, so he could be even bigger.’ I cannot tell you how sad these words were, as I listened to her far-back, 1950s Valerie Hobson voice issuing from her minute frame. She looked so breakable. ‘He thinks as long as he ridicules my birth and criticises my appearance, and yawns whenever I open my mouth, he can demonstrate that I am the one who needs him and not the other way round.’

‘He still buys portraits of your ancestors.’

‘He doesn’t have much choice. If we waited for his to come up we’d have to live with bare walls.’ It was nice to hear her being waspish.

‘Why don’t you leave him?’ It is hard to explain quite why, but this was not as intrusive a question at the time as it seems on the page.

She thought for a moment. ‘I don’t entirely know. For a long time it was the children, but they’re not children now. So I don’t know.’

‘How many are there?’

‘Three. Simon’s the eldest. He’s thirty-seven, working in the City. Gone.’

‘Married?’

‘Not yet. I used to wonder if he might be gay. I wouldn’t mind, but I don’t think he is. I suspect it’s more that he’s been put off the institution by his parents’ example. Then there’s Clarissa, who’s happily married to a successful and very nice paediatrician, I’m glad to say, even if William doesn’t approve.’

‘Why not?’

‘He would have preferred a stupid peer to a clever doctor.’ She sighed. ‘And finally our youngest, Richard, who’s only twenty-four and starting out in corporate entertainment.’ She paused, reflecting on her own words. ‘Don’t the young have funny jobs now?’

‘Not like our day.’

She looked at me. ‘Well, you went into a funny job. None of us thought you’d make a living. Did you realise that?’

‘I suspected it. Just as I always expected you to do something surprising.’ I only said this to cheer her up, but in a way it may have been true. To me, she had been a bit of a wild card, so retiring, so minor key, with her giggles and her long silences, that I used sometimes to have a sense that there was a completely different person living inside this shy and weeny head, even if I never investigated it at the time. I half expected the day to come when she’d break loose. Somehow it didn’t seem possible that she would just slide into that Sloane life of buying school uniforms and cooking for the freezer in some provincial Aga kitchen.

Obviously, Dagmar found the idea of herself as a career girl rather flattering. ‘Really? Very few of us did anything very spectacular. Rebecca Dawnay composes film music now and didn’t Carla Wakefield open a restaurant in Paris? Or am I muddling her with someone?’ She was combing her brain, ‘I know one of the London editors is a former deb, but I forget which one…’ she sighed. ‘Anyway, that’s about it.

‘Even so.’ I had quite recovered from my initial bewilderment at her unfamiliar appearance. Now Dagmar looked like herself again and it brought the memories rushing back. ‘Do you remember in Portugal, on the first night? When we took a picnic to that haunted castle on the hill and talked about life? You sounded like someone plotting a break-out. I expect you’ve forgotten.’

‘No, I haven’t forgotten.’ She stopped walking, as if to punctuate her sentence. ‘I think you’re right and I was planning something of the kind. But I got pregnant.’ We had all known this, of course, in the unspoken way such news was received in those distant days, so I didn’t comment. ‘William asked me to marry him and, whatever you think of him now, I was pretty relieved at the time I can tell you. Anyway, then Simon arrived and that was that.’

We were nearly back at the house by this time and I needed some answers. ‘When did you give up on Damian?’

Her muscles tensed and her face took on the look of a nervous chipmunk. I realised the question, or at least the return to 1968, was not at all easy for her, but there was no way round it. I waited while she composed her reply. ‘I gave up on him when he didn’t propose to me and William did.’ She hesitated. ‘The truth is, though I hardly know how to say it,’ she blushed again, but clearly she had decided that she was too far in to back out now, ‘either of them could have been the baby’s father. I was going out with William at the time, but Damian and I slept together on the night we arrived in Estoril. I remember it very well because it was the last time that I thought I just might get him. Then, later that same night, he told me it wasn’t going to happen. Ever. That he was fond of me, but…’ She shrugged and suddenly the lonely, heartbroken girl of forty years before was there, walking beside us in the park. ‘After that, when my period was late, I knew that it was either William or the abortion clinic. It’s odd to think of it, given how William behaves to me now, but I cannot describe my relief when he did pop the question.’

‘I’m sure.’ I was.

She gave a sudden shiver. ‘I should have worn a jersey,’ she said. And then, with a shy glance. ‘I don’t know why I told you all that.’

‘Because I was interested,’ I said. Actually, this is quite true. Especially in England. Very few Englishmen ever ask women anything about themselves. They choose instead to lecture their dinner neighbours on a new and better route to the M5, or to praise their own professional achievements. So if a man does express any curiosity about the woman sitting next to him, about her feelings, about the life she is leading, she will generally tell him anything he cares to know.

We were passing the stable block, which was a few hundred yards away from the main house. It was much later, perhaps mid-eighteenth century, and the wall of the yard ended in a rather handsome lodge, built for some trusty steward or perhaps a madly superior coachman. Before we’d gone a few more steps the front door opened and an old woman came out with a wave. She was wearing the tweeds and scarf of a standard County mother. ‘Dagmar told me you were coming,’ she called over the grass separating us. ‘I wanted to come out and say hello.’

I stared at the wrinkled, bony creature walking towards me. Could this really be the majestic Grand Duchess of my youth? Or had her head been transplanted on to another’s body? Where was the weight, in every sense? Where were the charisma and the fear she had inspired? Vanished entirely. She approached and I bowed. ‘Ma’am,’ I murmured, but she shook her head and pulled me towards her for a dry kiss on both my cheeks.

‘Never mind all that,’ she said gaily and slipped her arm through mine. This simple action in itself was a marker of how much had vanished from the world in the years since we last met. My sentimental side approved it as a friendly and relaxing alteration. But, all things considered, I suspect that more had been lost than gained for both of us. She looked across at her daughter. ‘Is Simon here yet? He told me he was trying to be with you for lunch.’

‘Obviously he couldn’t get away. He won’t be long.’ Dagmar smiled at her mother, this cosy, easy pensioner who had stolen the identity of the warlord of my early years. ‘We’ve been talking about Damian Baxter.’

‘Damian Baxter.’ The Grand Duchess rolled her eyes to heaven, then smiled at me. ‘If you knew the rows we had over that young man.’

‘So I gather.’

‘And now he’s richer than anyone living. So I suppose he’s had the last laugh.’ She paused. ‘But anyway, whatever she’s told you, it wasn’t my fault that it didn’t happen. Not in the end. You can’t blame me.’

‘Whose fault was it?’

‘His. Damian’s.’ Her voice had the finality of the Lutine Bell. ‘We all thought he was a climber, an adventurer, a man on the make. And so he was, in his own fashion.’ She turned back to me to wave a pointed finger at my nose. ‘And you brought him among us. How we mothers used to curse you for it.’ She laughed merrily. ‘But you see…’ Suddenly her tone was becoming almost dreamy as she clambered back through the lost decades, searching for the right words. ‘He wasn’t after what we had. Not really. I didn’t see that at the time. He wanted to experience it, to witness it, but only as a traveller from another land. He didn’t want to live in the past where he had no position. He wanted to live in the future where he could be anything he wished. And he was quite right. It was where he belonged.’ She looked back at her daughter, now walking behind us. ‘Dagmar had nothing useful to give him that would make life easier there.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Maybe if he’d loved her it would have been different. But without love, there wasn’t enough in it to tempt him.’

I was struck by Damian’s journey in that year of years. At the start he had been thrilled by his first invitation from Fat Georgina. By the end he had turned down the hand of a perfectly genuine princess. Not many can say that. There was a noise of footsteps, and around a laurel-sheltered corner of the drive William came almost goose-stepping towards us in a gleaming new Barbour and spotless Hunter gumboots. He caught sight of me and frowned. By his reckoning I should have been safely back on the road by then. ‘Here’s William,’ I said brightly. His motherin-law looked at him with disdain and in silence. ‘It must have been a relief that he stepped up to the mark when Dagmar needed him.’ Obviously, I had spoken without thinking.

She turned a freezing fish eye upon me. ‘I do not understand you,’ she said coldly. It felt like the return of an old friend.

‘I meant if Dagmar was anxious to marry.’

‘She was not “anxious” to marry. She just felt that it was time.’ Having settled this, the Grand Duchess relaxed and, after her brief outing, vanished back inside the chipper, little pensioner. ‘William wanted what Dagmar could bring him. Damian did not. That’s all there was to it.’ She glanced in my direction. ‘I know you didn’t like him by the end.’ I said nothing to contradict her. ‘Dagmar told me about that business in Portugal.’ Someone told everyone, I thought wryly. ‘But it blinded you to what he was and what he could be. By the time Damian left our life, even I could see he was an unusual man.’ I wonder now if she wasn’t enjoying herself, discussing these events with someone who had been there when they were all taking place. Especially as I was an old friend, or at least I was a person she had known for a long time, which after a certain point is almost the same thing, and in all probability we would not meet again. I had provided her with an unexpected chance to make sense of those years and those distant decisions. I would guess they were not much talked of in the usual way of things and she wanted to make the best use of me. I cannot otherwise explain her next comment. ‘William never had Damian’s imagination,’ she said. ‘Nor his confidence in what the future would bring. Whatever his faults, Damian Baxter was a visionary in his way. William was just a tedious, vulgar social climber.’

‘That doesn’t mean he didn’t love your daughter.’ I saw no reason why we couldn’t give him the benefit of some doubt.

But she shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. She made him feel important, that’s all. That’s why he resents her now. He can’t bear the thought that he ever needed her to flatter his little ego.’ I said nothing. Not because I disapproved of her disloyalty. If anything, I was honoured by the trust implicit in her indiscretion. But I had nothing I felt I could usefully add. She looked at me and laughed. ‘I can’t stand him, really. I don’t think Dagmar can, but we never talk of it.’

‘There’s no point. Unless she’s going to do something about him.’

She nodded. The rightness of this comment made her sad. In fact, the whole conversation had taken her into a strange, uncharted territory and I could see a light coating of glycerine beginning to make her eyes shine. ‘The thing is, I don’t know how we’d all manage. He’d find some way to give her nothing if they separate, some shyster lawyer would savage her claims and then what?’ She sighed wearily, a hard worker in life’s vineyard who deserved more rest than she was getting. There was the distant noise of an engine and her eyes looked up to find it. ‘It’s Simon, at last. Good.’ The distraction had pulled her back from the cliff edge. She was probably already regretting what she had revealed.

A gleaming car of some foreign make was spinning down the drive towards us. As I watched it, I felt a sudden surge of longing. Let this man be Damian’s son, I thought. Please. I cared about it in a way I had not cared with Lucy. In their scatterbrained way, the Rawnsley-Prices would shake out some sort of future, juggling Philip’s demented schemes, surviving on luck and others’ charity, but here, today, I felt as if I had been visiting old friends trapped in some hideous, third world prison for a crime they did not commit. Like all her kind, the old Grand Duchess was more frightened of poverty than it was worth. It would only be comparative poverty, genteel poverty, after all, but at a distance even that seemed unacceptable to her. I suppose she felt she had seen enough change and we must surely forgive her for that. This is always a delicate subject where the British upper classes and most Royalty are concerned, if they are facing poverty when they are used to living well. Most of them dread not only the coming discomfort but the loss of face that attends the loss of income, and they will submit to almost any humiliation rather than have to reduce their circumstance in public. Of course, there is another smaller group among them that doesn’t give a damn either way. They are the lucky ones.

I thought again of the delivery from suffering that might be coming down the drive towards us. A quick DNA test and they would all be free of this horrible despot and their miserable existence. Dagmar and her mother and the other children would escape into a new land, where they would do just as they liked, and William would sit alone at his table, grumbling and fuming and insulting his servants to the end of his days. I wondered how we were going to get Simon to agree to a test. Would he worry about William’s feelings? Did William have feelings? Dagmar had dropped back to stand by me. Her mother and her husband were a little way in front of us, waiting for the car as it drew nearer. ‘It’s been so lovely seeing you again,’ I said. ‘And your much-mellowed mama.’ I wanted her to think of me as a friend. Because I was one.

She acknowledged my words with a quick smile, but then grew serious. Clearly, she’d deliberately manoeuvred a last moment with me out of earshot of the others. ‘I hope you won’t pay too much attention to what I was saying before. I can’t think what came over me. It was just self-pity.’

‘I won’t mention it to anyone.’

‘Thank you.’ The crease of worry faded away. On the sweep before the house the shiny car had stopped and a man in his late thirties climbed out. He turned with a wave to face us.

And in that moment Dagmar’s fate was sealed, as all my fantasies of playing Superman to this lost family came crashing down. But for their ages, he could have been William’s identical twin. There wasn’t a trace of his mother in him. Eyes, nose, mouth, hair, head, figure, manner, gait, they were like two peas in a pod. Dagmar saw me looking at him and smiled. ‘As you can see, he was William’s son after all.’

‘Clearly.’ We had reached my car by this stage and I opened the door.

‘So everything worked out for the best,’ she said.

‘Of course it did. It often does, despite what they tell us on television,’ I replied, climbing into the vehicle, taking her better, happier future with me. For a moment it seemed she was going to say something more, but then she thought better of it. So I said it for her. ‘I’ll give your love to Damian when I see him.’

She smiled. I had guessed right. ‘Please do. My best love.’ She looked round. ‘Are you sure you won’t stay and say hello to Simon?’

‘Better not. I’m late and he’ll be tired. I shall just enjoy you as a loving family group while I drive past.’ Dagmar nodded, with a certain irony in her expression. I know she was glad to see the back of me that day and no wonder. I had committed the sin of reminding her of a happier time. Worse, I had made her admit to truths about her present life that she preferred to keep buried even from herself. I had my reasons, but it was cruel all the same.

At any rate, without further protest she stepped back, politely attending my departure, and a moment later I was on my way.

Serena