Past Imperfect

SEVEN

By the time I had got lost finding the motorway and caught in the evening traffic as I came into London, the whole excursion took longer than I’d planned and I did not arrive home much before eight. Bridget had let herself in some time earlier, and polished off half a bottle of Chablis in the interim. This made her rather sour as she banged around the kitchen making dinner. I cannot now think why I never questioned that she should always cook for me, when she spent her days in an office tussling with important decisions behind a desk, while I lolled around for most of the time, performing needless, invented tasks to fill the daylight hours as I waited for inspiration. In my defence, I don’t remember her ever objecting to the arrangement. If it was my turn we went out. If it was her turn she cooked. Sometimes you just accept things.

‘Your father rang,’ she said. ‘He wants you to call him back.’

‘What about?’

‘He didn’t say, but he tried twice and the second time he sounded rather annoyed that you weren’t here.’

There was a vague but completely unreasonable reprimand buried in this somewhere. ‘I can’t manage my day in case my father might ring.’

‘Don’t blame me.’ She shrugged and went back into the kitchen.

‘I’m just the messenger.’ I was struck, not for the first time, by the tremendous mistake that about half the human race usually finds itself making when it comes to wobbly relationships. The division is not by sex or class or nationality or race or even age, since almost every type is found on both sides of the divide. The mistake is this: When they are in a partnership that is not going well, they attempt to inject a kind of drama into it by becoming moody and critical and permanently not-quite-satisfied. ‘Why do you always do that?’ they say. ‘Now, are you listening because you never get this right?’ Or, ‘Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten again!’

Not belonging to this team, I find it hard to penetrate their thinking. Do they imagine that by being demanding and edgy and cross, they will force you to work harder to make things better? If so, they are, of course, completely wrong. This kind of talk just gives one permission to go. The more dissatisfied they are, the more their gloom will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In fact, the first time you hear that put-upon sigh, ‘I suppose I’m expected to clean this up,’ you know it is simply a matter of time. The irony being that the ones who are truly hard to leave are those who are always happy. To desert a happy lover, to make them unhappy when they were not unhappy before, is hard and mean, and involves guilt of a major kind. To leave a miserable whinger just seems logical.

Of course, this implies it is easy to get up the nerve to end an affair that is past its sell-by date. But for many it is not. They tell themselves they are being nice, or honourable, or adult, in struggling on, but what they are being is weak. I do not mean a bad marriage or when there are children involved. But when we’re only talking childless cohabitation it is plain cowardice to settle for failure. The years spent after we have decided that we will not die and be buried next to this one, are just wasted, so why do we put it off? Is it misguided kindness or false optimism or because we’ve taken a villa for the whole of August with the Grimstons and we can’t let them down? Or even: Where on earth would I put all this stuff? It doesn’t matter. Once the inner voice has spoken and given the verdict, every day spent evading the end is unworthy of you. And when it came to Bridget FitzGerald, I was unworthy.

My father was quite grouchy when he picked up the receiver. ‘Where have you been all day?’ he said.

‘I had to go to Hampshire for lunch.’

‘Why, for God’s sake?’ As any adult child knows, when dealing with an aged parent there is no point in engaging with this stuff.

‘You could have rung me on the mobile,’ I suggested.

‘It’s illegal if you were driving.’

‘I’ve got an ear thing.’

‘Even so.’ Again, silence is the only sensible option. At last, his anger spent, he returned to his topic. ‘I want you to come down and see me. There are some things we ought to talk about.’ In fact, he lived above London on the map, on the border of Gloucestershire and Shropshire, but my father was of that generation where London was the highest point in Britain. So he went ‘up’ to London and ‘down’ to everywhere else. I rather loved him for it. I suppose he went down to Inverness, but I don’t remember trying him on this. I cannot ask him now for he has died since I lived through these events. I miss him every day.

Bridget came out of the kitchen, carrying a plate of food on to which she had already spooned a huge helping of some stew and various vegetables. ‘I’ve served it up in the kitchen. I know you don’t like me to, but we haven’t got all day.’

I always find this kind of talk intensely irritating, draped as it is with self-importance. ‘You are quite right,’ I said coolly. ‘I don’t like having a plate piled up with things I have not chosen since I have been out of the nursery for some years. Nor do I see why we haven’t got all day. What pressing engagement are we racing to meet?’ Having delivered this twaddle, no less self-important than the speech that had provoked it, I sat down at the table.

But Bridget had not quite finished. ‘I’m afraid it’s very overcooked,’ she sighed, as she laid the concoction before me.

It was clearly time to acknowledge that we were having a spat and with that remark she had finally used up the last stock of patience I had kept in reserve. ‘I cannot think why, since I was here before eight,’ I muttered, deliberately using a harsh and frigid tone to combat hers. ‘At what hour were you planning to eat?’ She bit her lip and said nothing.

Of course, as I knew well enough, this was a dishonourable dig. Before meeting me, Bridget had generally tucked into her evening feed at about half past six or seven, and she still found my insistence on dining at half past eight or nine not so much unreasonable as weird. This will be familiar to many who have ventured beyond their home pastures to find a mate. Even in this day and age, even after almost everyone, south of Watford anyway, says ‘lunch’ and when all sorts of foods from avocados to sushi have become ordinary fare, still the time for evening eating can provoke an absolute clash of cultures. To me, early eating can only be explained if food is considered essentially as fuel to strengthen one for the adventures yet to come. So, people will dine at six or six thirty in order to be fuelled by seven, in time to fill the next few hours with fun. This time may be spent in a club or in a pub or keeping fit or studying macramé or learning Mandarin or line dancing or simply watching television while sitting on a sofa. The evening is your oyster and, by eating early, you are free to enjoy every pleasure while it lasts.

The reason this is completely bewildering for the upper middle and upper classes is simply because for them the dinner is the pleasure. It is the apex, the core, the point. If the whole business of feeding is over by half past seven, what on earth is one to do until bed? These people don’t go to self-help groups, or engage in amateur acting, nor do they study art or quilting, or drop into a bar. This is why any role in local government is so difficult for them. It takes place just when they prefer to be sitting at a table for a very different purpose. For those who cross the great social divide, there can be few habits harder to adjust to, whichever direction they have travelled. Certainly, Bridget had found it difficult and now, here I was, deliberately goading her, insulting her, putting her down. I was ashamed of myself. But not, it seems, sufficiently ashamed to regain my good humour. I stared at the plate. ‘And I wish you wouldn’t pile it up like that. It’s so off-putting.’ I whined as I unfolded my napkin. ‘I feel like a tramp being fed before retiring to my cubicle in a Rowton House.’

‘And I feel like the skivvy serving him,’ said Bridget without the trace of a smile, and we let it rest there.

At the time of these events my father lived in a modest village called Abberley, on the Gloucestershire borders. He was eighty-six then and he’d chosen it as his retreat after my mother’s fairly early death ten years before. There was no pressing reason for him to go there, since their marriage had largely been spent abroad and the first years of his retirement had been passed in Wiltshire, but I suppose he wanted a change and our family had been based for the latter half of the nineteenth century at Abberley Park, a rather over-christened large house of negligible architectural merit, situated behind a cobbled forecourt, at one end of the main street of the village. It meant little to me, as it had only been a third-rate hotel in my lifetime; still we would visit it occasionally for lunch or tea, and Pa would pretend a kind of nostalgia for the place. This, I suspect, was to encourage me to take an interest in my family’s history, but I always found his Turgenev-style melancholy fairly unconvincing. The large, dreary hall and the largish dreary drawing and dining rooms on either side of it were all hideously decorated, and any trace of private life had long since vanished from the atmosphere. My father had no memories of the house anyway, since his grandfather had sold it, after the agricultural depression, in the early years of the twentieth century before he was even born. I suppose the staircase, in slightly crude nineteenth-century baroque, was pretty and the dark, panelled library may once have been nice, but its translation into a bar, complete with upside-down bottles on silver holders, had obliterated its fragile charm. However, the seller-grandfather, plus his wife and various other members of the two preceding generations of our clan, lay in the graveyard of the local church and were commemorated with plaques in the nave, and I imagine this gave my papa a sense of belonging, something neither he nor my mother had ever quite achieved in their previous home.

His life in Abberley was pleasant enough but a bit sad, of course, as all old men living on their own are sad, in a way that old women are not. He had a housekeeper called Mrs Snow, who was reasonably civil and would cook him lunch every day and depart after it was washed up and put away. She would leave his dinner in the fridge, in a terrifying array of dishes covered in cling film, with post-it notes carrying strict instructions: ‘Boil for twenty minutes,’ ‘Put in a preheated oven at gas mark 5 for half an hour.’ I could never see the point of this, since she wasn’t a very good cook, to say the least of it, her repertoire consisting entirely of English nursery food from the 1950s, and he could have bought everything at the local Waitrose. It would have been quicker and easier to prepare, as well as much nicer to eat. But, looking back, I think he rather enjoyed the disciplined activity of unwrapping everything and obeying her iron will. It must have taken up quite a bit of the evening and that would have been a real bonus.

On the day that I went to see him Mrs Snow was preparing our lunch when I arrived, but he told me in dulcet tones, as he poured two glasses of very dry sherry, that she was going to leave us as soon as she had brought in the pudding. In other words she was not going to stay to wash up. ‘We’ll have the place to ourselves,’ he muttered out of the side of his mouth as he led the way to a chair in his chilly and unsuccessful drawing room. Why is it that some people can live in a house for twenty years, yet the furniture still looks as if the removal van has just pulled out of the gates? In this, his last house he had copied a few rooms from earlier homes that my mother had decorated, but he never seemed to find a template for the little, irregularly shaped drawing room, so it just waited, with its magnolia walls and disparate collection of furniture, for an inspiration that never came.

‘Good,’ I answered, since that was what seemed to be called for.

He nodded briskly. ‘I think it’s better.’ Years in the diplomatic had made him secretive as a rule, in addition to which he shared the usual prejudice of his kind that it was impossible to have any kind of conversation about money, outside the walls of a bank or a brokers’, were it not serving one of two purposes. These comprised discussing your future son-in-law’s net worth and prospects, and talking about your own will. Since my sister was long married, I gathered at once that the second was what we were in for and so it proved.

We had exchanged bits of family information in a desultory fashion through some unsalted, tasteless shepherd’s pie and we were staring at an uninviting plum duff with custard, when Mrs Snow leant round the door in her coat and hat. ‘I’ll be off, then,’ she said to my father. ‘I’ve put coffee in the library, Sir David, so don’t let it get cold.’ In response to this, he twisted his face into something akin to a wink, signifying that as with all, lonely old people who employ one servant, the relationship was becoming dangerous, and he nodded his thanks. We heard the door bang and he started.

‘I had rather a turn the other day and I went to see old Babbage. He’s run a few tests and it seems I may be cracking up at last.’

‘I thought you said Babbage ought to be struck off.’

‘I never did.’

‘You said he couldn’t diagnose a gunshot wound.’

‘Did I?’ My father was slightly cheered by this. ‘Perhaps I did. Anyway, it doesn’t alter much. I’m going some time and it won’t be long now.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Nothing to bother you with.’

‘I have driven for two and a quarter hours. I deserve details.’

But he could not break the habits of a lifetime. ‘It was all about blood being where it shouldn’t be. Revolting stuff that I have no intention of discussing over pudding.’ There wasn’t much to come back with, so I waited while he got to the point. ‘Anyway, I realised that you and I had never had a proper talk about everything.’

How strange death is. It seems to make such nonsense of the years that have gone before. Here was my father about to die, presumably of some form of cancer, and what had been the point of it all? What had it all been for? He’d worked pretty hard, in the way his generation did work, which was different from, and more sensible than ours, with their late starts and long lunches and getting home by half past six. Even so, he had done his best and travelled the world and stayed in horrible hotels, and sat through boring meetings and listened to heads of state lying, and experts making dire predictions that proved quite unfounded; he had studied worthless reports without number, and pretended to believe government spokesmen when they made ludicrous and mendacious claims for their inadequate ministers, and… for what? He had no money. Or not what my mother would have called ‘real’ money. This house, a few shares, one or two nice things left over from his forebears who had lived better than he did, a pension that would perish with him. My sister and I had been given good educations, which must have set them back, but Louise had largely thrown hers away by marrying a very ordinary stockbroker and bringing up three children, all of whom were dull to the point of genius, while I-

‘I want you to know what I’ve arranged, in case you think I’ve made anything unnecessarily complicated. You’re the executor, so you’ll have to deal with it if I’ve made a nonsense.’

I nodded. My thoughts would not get back in their box. Poor old boy. It had been a good life, I suppose. At least that’s what people would say when his funeral eventually came to pass. ‘He had a good life.’ But did he really? Was it a good life? Was it enough? He met my mother towards the end of the war, when she was working for someone in the Foreign Office. He had been seconded to assist with the settlement of Poland and other places where the British would make the wrong decisions, as a preparatory move to taking up his career again when the fighting stopped. They married in 1946, just before he was appointed second secretary to our embassy in Madrid, and, on the whole, they’d been quite happy. I honestly believe that. She liked travelling and the constant relocation of their home had pleased, rather than annoyed her. Once he made ambassador, I would go as far as to say she had a good time and, while he never got one of the really big ones, Paris or Washington or Brussels, still he did get Lisbon and Oslo, both of which they enjoyed, as well as Harare, which proved a lot more interesting than either had bargained for, and not in a good way. But when it was all over they’d come home to a farmhouse which they’d bought near Devizes, and that was it. He’d been knighted before his second-to-last posting and I was glad, as it helped them to feel they had made their mark, which of course they hadn’t. It was also probably of mild use in getting them started socially in what was, for them, a brand-new part of England. But I never really understood the compulsion to make their home in the country when neither of them was the type to spend their lives walking dogs and working for local causes. Certainly, they were not at all sporty. My father had given up shooting twenty years before, after he spent four days on a grouse moor in the Borders without hitting a single bird, and my mother never cared much for anything that made her cold.

There is a tyranny that forces people of a certain class to insist they are only happy in the country and it is a cruel one. My parents were among its many victims. As everyone but they could see, their natural milieu was urban. They liked varied and informed conversation. They liked to mingle with different social groups. They liked their gossip from its source. They liked to talk politics and art and theatre and philosophy, and none of this, as we know, is much to be found beyond the city limits. Nor were they big local employers and, since their families had no historic connection with the part of Wiltshire they had chosen, they would never have more than a day pass to the County proper, so their egos were doomed to starvation rations as long as they remained there. In short, there was no real chance for them of happiness, or even entertainment, in that society, not as there would have been in Chelsea or Knightsbridge or Eaton Square but they made do, with introductions and dinners and charity functions and signing petitions about local planning and getting cross about the way the village pub was run and all the rest of it. And then my mother died, which was exactly what my father had never expected. But he showed courage as he packed up his life in Devizes and exchanged it for an equally meaningless one in Gloucestershire, and now here he was, after ten years of non-event, telling me about his own approaching death as we tucked into the disgusting splodge on our plates. I have never felt the ultimate absurdity of most lives more strongly than at that moment.

‘It’s all written down, so there shouldn’t be any confusion,’ my father said, producing from somewhere near the table a plastic folder filled with typed sheets. He handed it to me as he stood up. ‘Let’s go through.’

He led the way into the little library, which he used for most of his daily activities, and as usual I was touched by the sight of it. Unlike the characterless drawing room, the library was an exact reproduction, in miniature, of one my mother had designed for the Wiltshire farmhouse, with walls lined in red damask and fluted bookshelves in a soft dove grey. Even the cushions and lamps had been transferred intact after the move. A portrait of her, rather a good one, painted just after their marriage, in a snappy, 1940s suit, hung over the chimneypiece and my father would glance at it from time to time as he spoke, as if seeking her approval for his decisions, which I imagine was exactly what he was doing.

In front of the green corduroy sofa, a table held a tray made ready by the indefatigable Mrs Snow, with coffee equipment for two. He poured himself a cup, nodding at the folder. ‘Funeral, memorial, it’s all there. Prayers, hymns, who should do the address if you don’t want to, everything.’

‘I thought you hated hymns.’

‘So I do, but I don’t think a funeral is a good place for a “statement,” do you?’

‘It’s your last chance to make one.’ Which made him smile. ‘I’ll do the address,’ I said.

‘Thank you.’ He chuckled gently to cover his emotions. ‘I’ve left this house to Louise, since you got the flat.’

His words were perfectly logical and true but, irrationally, I felt a twinge of irritation. Does anyone ever feel content with the way things are arranged at these times? An only child, perhaps. Never a sibling. ‘What about the stuff?’

‘I thought you could split it. But I haven’t really specified.’

‘I wish you would.’

‘What? Every teaspoon?’

‘Every last teaspoon.’ He looked sorrowful at this. He probably wanted to believe that his children got on well, which we did, quite, but we were not really close any more and I knew Louise’s über-tiresome husband would push in and make her take anything decent if he weren’t stopped now. ‘Tom will say that they have children, and I don’t, so they must have all the family things. Then there’ll be a fight and Louise will cry and I’ll shout and Tom will look wounded. That’s unless you just write it down in black and white so there’s no argument.’

‘All right, I will.’ He nodded gravely. ‘In fact, I tell you what. I’ll leave your mother’s jewellery to her and you can have the rest of the contents. If you want to give her a stick or two you can. I suppose it’ll all go back to her sprogs if you don’t have any of your own.’

‘I imagine so. It’s not going to the cats’ home, anyway.’

‘I wish you had a family.’

This was a frequent observation and normally I would have fobbed it off with a joke or an exasperated sigh, depending on my state of mind; but given the topic we were discussing, a bit of honesty felt more appropriate. ‘So do I, really,’ I said.

‘You still could, you know. Look at Charlie Chaplin.’

‘I don’t even need to go back that far.’ Why does everyone over fifty still quote Charlie Chaplin in this context? Every day, there is some demented actor in the news, saying what fun it is to be a parent in his seventies, and how it makes every day bright and new. I sometimes wonder how long they can keep up this fantasy before they succumb to rage and clinical exhaustion.

‘Of course…’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t suppose… what’s-her-name?’

‘Bridget.’

‘Bridget. I expect it’s a bit late for her.’

Since Bridget was fifty-two, this was almost a compliment. I nodded. ‘I expect so. But that doesn’t necessarily…’ It was my turn to tail away. We both knew what I was saying. My father cheered up considerably, which I have to say I found a bit annoying. I’d always known she wasn’t his type, even if I’d pushed it to the back of my mind, but he’d been unfailingly polite to her and by that stage she was quite fond of him. It felt unjust to realise that he had secretly been hoping throughout that eventually she would pass on by.

‘Oh, I see. Well. You’re a dark horse.’ He poured himself another cup from the silver pot of lukewarm, brownish coffee’ish liquid left for our delectation. ‘Do I know her?’

‘There isn’t anyone, in particular.’ I gave a brisk shake of the head.

‘What’s the matter?’

I was unprepared for this, both the question and the tone, which was uncharacteristically warm. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ve been in a funny mood since you got here.’ His comment was clearly directed at far more than my relations with Ms FitzGerald. I was taken aback because my father was not much given to introspection, either for himself or with regard to anyone else. When we were young, whenever a conversation at dinner threatened to get interesting he was inclined to cap it with the proto-English imprecation: ‘now, don’t let’s get psychological.’ I do not mean he didn’t appreciate the importance of other people’s inner life. He just didn’t see that it was anything to do with him. Gossip bored him. He couldn’t remember incidents or personalities well enough to savour the punchlines and he used to get quite impatient whenever anyone tried to intrigue him with some local scandal.

In truth, his stance drained my mother, since she was never allowed to discuss the private affairs and theoretical activities of their acquaintance, and this inevitably made their conversation very arid. ‘What business is it of ours?’ he would say, and she would nod and agree with him, and say of course and how right he was, and thereby be silenced. After I’d grown up, I used to defend her and quote Alexander Pope: ‘The proper study of mankind is man’ and so on. The fact remained he felt uncomfortable and ungenerous delving into the murky waters of others’ personal histories and she gave up trying to change him, retaining these topics to enjoy with her friends and her children. It was all right, but I do give thanks that their later years were spent in the era of television, or the evenings would have been silent indeed. Still, here he was, showing an interest, asking for some sort of private explanation of my mood. It was so rare an event, that I couldn’t waste time on prevarication.

‘I have a feeling that I want to change my life.’

‘What do you mean by that? Get rid of Bridget? Stop writing? Sell the flat? What?’

‘Yes,’ I said. We stared at each other. Then I thought again. ‘Actually, I don’t think I want to stop writing.’

‘What’s brought this on?’

I told him about Damian’s request and how I had fared so far. He thought for a moment. ‘I quite liked him at the time, until you had your falling-out.’ He paused, but I had no comment to make. ‘Even so, I’m rather surprised to find he left such a mark on all those lives.’

‘Far be it from me to defend him after what he put me through, but he is the only member of that gang who went on to be one of the most successful men of his generation.’

‘Yes, you’re right. Of course that’s right. I wasn’t thinking.’ My father spoke as one who feels himself justly corrected. ‘So, what is it?’

‘I’m not completely clear in my own head, but I believe I’m finding it depressing to be obliged to compare what we all thought was coming when we were young with what actually arrived.’

My father nodded. ‘To quote Nanny, comparisons are odious.’

‘They are also pointless, but that doesn’t prevent one from making them.’ For some reason, I felt it was important that he understood me. ‘It’s more than that. I’m not sure what we’re all doing with our lives. Damian may have made his mark, but none of the rest of us has.’

‘Not everyone can be a world-famous billionaire.’

‘Nor should they be, but everyone needs to feel they’re part of something worthwhile. That, in the last analysis, their life has some meaning in a larger context. The question is what am I part of? What have I done?’

But he couldn’t take this very seriously. ‘Don’t you think people have been asking themselves that since Chaucer first sharpened his pencil?’

‘I think there have been times when the majority felt they belonged to a culture that was working, that they had an identity within a worthwhile whole. “I am a Roman Citizen,” “God Bless America,” “The man who is born an Englishman has drawn a winning ticket in the lottery of life.” All that. People have felt their own civilisation was valuable and that they were lucky to belong to it. I’m fairly sure I believed that too, or something like it, forty years ago.’

‘You were young forty years ago.’ He smiled. Clearly, he was not very worried by my soul-searching. ‘So what are you asking? Do you want to sell the flat? If so, then that’s what you must do.’

In a way I could have left then as, if I’m honest, I had really gone down there seeking his permission to do this very thing. I was taken unawares by his swift and open reaction to my complaints, as I had assumed it was all going to take much longer to get his agreement. Because I should be clear, this response on his part was very generous, more generous than an outsider can perhaps immediately appreciate. As I have said, my mother was the one who insisted on their giving me the London flat, thereby cutting down their capital by quite a chunk. He’d resisted it for a time, because he saw their standard of living would suffer, which it did, but he eventually surrendered to her pleading. Now, here I was, proposing to cash in my chips, to pocket the boodle, to take the money and run, and he wanted to make it clear that he did not mind in the least. Some months later I would learn that he’d already known he was much more ill than he had let on and that death could not be long distant, so I suppose he wanted us to be in step at the end, but to me that thought only makes his kindness more moving. ‘That’s so fantastically nice of you,’ I said.

‘Nonsense, nonsense.’ He shook his head at the very notion. Now, what about some more coffee?’

Of course, his instinctive desire to downplay the moment was precisely what made it so poignant. Like too many of his type, my father had an absolute inability to express the love that motivated him, being always far too English to demonstrate his feelings. Even when we were little he hated kissing us goodnight and was visibly thrilled when the custom was allowed to lapse in our early teens. But there was nevertheless a silent unspoken affection in his words at this moment that makes my eyes fill now, months later, when I remember them. ‘I don’t want you to think it was wrong to give it to me when you did,’ I said. ‘It provided me with the perfect base, with a fantastic start. I was, and am, incredibly grateful.’

‘I know. But because something was right for you then, doesn’t mean it’s right for you now. If you want to sell it you must sell it.’

‘Thank you.’

‘And the girl? Isn’t it working?’

I couldn’t help thinking, disloyally, that Bridget would be ecstatic to hear herself referred to as ‘the girl,’ however politically incorrect that might sound. She was very good-looking and had the kind of looks that would last, but she was no spring chicken, if not quite yet an old boiler. I wasn’t sure how to answer him. ‘It’s not that, exactly. It works as well as it ever did.’

‘But?’

‘My problem is that during my searches I’ve been reminded of what it feels like to be in love. I think I’d forgotten.’

‘Again, you are remembering what it feels like to be young and in love. Love at nearly sixty, whatever sentimental American films may try to tell you, ain’t the same.’

‘Maybe not. But I’m fairly sure it’s more than I’ve got now.’

‘Then of course you must move on.’ He nodded slowly. ‘Tell me, do you ever see Serena Gresham in your travels?’

The question came flying out of the blue and almost winded me. On this day my dear old father was full of surprises. Could he really remember Serena? Why would he know what I had felt about her? Unless he’d had some kind of personality transplant? We hadn’t mentioned her name in thirty years at least and anyway I would never have given him credit for taking enough interest in my life to notice my romantic sufferings. ‘No. At least, barely. Sometimes. At the odd thing in London. That’s all.’

‘She married, didn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘And that was satisfactory?’

‘I don’t see enough of her to have an opinion. She’s got two grown-up children and she’s still with him.’

He considered my limp reply for a second. ‘I’m not convinced you would have been happy, you know.’

This sort of thing is hard to take at any age from any parent, but it came so closely upon one of the kindest gestures he’d ever made that I didn’t want to snap. ‘I just wish I’d had the chance to find out’ was all I said.

‘You could never have been a writer. You’d have ended up in the City. To make the kind of money it would have taken to keep her.’

‘Not necessarily.’ At this he gave a little snort. As always with a father, the assumption of superior knowledge, particularly where it concerned people I had been close to and he barely knew, was infuriating. But again, after the earlier exchange I didn’t want a fight. ‘Plenty of people nowadays live completely differently from the way they were brought up. You do for a start.’

‘Maybe. But my generation wasn’t given the option and, believe me, old habits die hard. I should know.’ He saw I was struggling not to join battle on Serena’s behalf and relented. ‘I don’t mean I didn’t like her, but I just never thought you were suited. For what it’s worth.’

‘Yes. Well.’ I spoke and was silent.

An awkwardness had entered the proceedings. My father was suddenly uncomfortably aware that he had ventured into alien, possibly even hurtful, territory. He smiled jocularly to get things back to normal. ‘Well, I hope I’m still around to meet the new girl, when she turns up.’

‘So do I,’ I said and I meant it. I’m very sorry that he won’t be.

We spent the rest of the afternoon discussing his will, which I was now allowed to read. He had, as he said, left his home to my sister and the remainder of his capital was divided between my niece, my two nephews and myself. This wasn’t quite fair, in my opinion, since for these purposes Louise and her children should have weighed as one person, but he telephoned his lawyer while I was there and dictated a codicil that gave me the entire contents of the house, so I didn’t like to cavil. Then it was done. His requests for the church services seemed gentlemanly. In fact, it was all pretty modest, more of a decorous whimper than a bang.

We were in the kitchen, making a cup of tea prior to my departure, before my father mentioned the state of my life again. Mrs Snow had left the things laid out on the kitchen table, complete with cling-filmed biscuits. Obviously, she didn’t believe him capable of instigating even the smallest domestic operation from scratch and she was probably right. ‘I don’t think Damian is behaving correctly in this,’ he said after another silence, as he poured out two cups of builders’ brew. ‘You’ll almost certainly end by disturbing the balance of a perfectly workable life. Some man or some woman will suddenly find themselves a thousand million times richer than their siblings, richer than every relation they have in the world. Their mother will face the task of explaining to her husband that the eldest child is a bastard. It’s not going to be easy.’

‘And if the money should mean that a life encumbered by poverty might suddenly take wing and achieve great things?’

‘You sound like a novel from a railway bookstall.’

‘You sound like an officer from Health and Safety.’

He bit into his digestive. Mrs Snow was not a risk taker, with biscuits or anything else. ‘Nor do I think it fair for Damian to lay this burden on you. It’s not as if he had much credit to call on.’

‘No.’ But I did not want to pretend that I didn’t know why I had been asked. ‘Unfortunately there really wasn’t anyone else who could have undertaken it.’

‘Maybe. But I don’t believe he understood what he was exposing you to.’

This was an odd comment, which I had not anticipated. ‘Why? What have I been “exposed to”?’

‘You’ve been made to go back into your own past and to compare it with your present. You’ve been forced to remember what you wanted from life at nineteen, forty years ago, before you knew what life was. Indeed, you must face what you all wanted from life, those silly, over-made-up girls and the vain, self-important young men you ran around with then. Now, thanks to Damian, you must bear witness to what happened to them. To what happened to you. Eventually, in old age, almost everyone with any brains must come to terms with the disappointment of life, but this is very early for you to have to make that discovery. You’ve been rendered discontented when it’s too late, or nearly too late, to fix, but soon enough for you to have many years ahead to live with that discontent. Damian ought to have spoiled his own life, not yours.’

‘He doesn’t have much of his own life left to spoil.’

‘Even so.’

And of course he was right, really.

Is it serendipity? That explanation for those strange, coincidental happenings that seem, for a moment, to create a sense of planning in our arbitrary lives? Or is serendipity more to do with accidental knowledge of things? Of chance deductions that lead to greater understanding? Either way, I believe it was serendipity that took a hand in the next stage of my Damian-led journey.

We were staying for the weekend, Bridget and I, with a very tiresome architect and his very charming wife at a house he had purchased some years before in Yorkshire. It was an old house, a historical house, a ‘great house’ in a way and, oh boy, didn’t he know it. The architect in question was called Tarquin Montagu. I did not believe that this was a name he, or more probably anyone, would have received at the baptismal font, and I certainly never discovered any link between him and the ducal house of Manchester, a connection that he liked to imply. He came into my life as the husband of a delightful novelist called Jennifer Bond who was also with my publisher. We’d been paired for a book tour one summer a few years before, forging a friendship in the process. I was not then clear about how he came by his money, since he was never associated with any vividly spectacular building, but he lived in a way that Vanbrugh would have envied and some years before our visit he had bought a splendid semi-ruin near Thirsk, called Malton Towers.

A George IV, Gothic confection, abandoned by its family after the war, Malton had followed the sad trail of such places in those years as first a school and then a training college, and after that a home for old people, and I am fairly sure at one point a finishing school specialising in Nouvelle Cuisine. Until finally it achieved a slight, if spurious, fame in the mid 1990s as a ‘World Centre’ for some later version of Transcendental Meditation, which attracted the members of one of the manufactured Boy Bands of the era. This last incarnation was run by a dubious character who claimed the authority and support of, I seem to remember, the Dalai Lama, but I may be wrong in that. At any rate the day dawned when a red-topped Sunday scandal sheet revealed that he was not, in fact, a philosopher in touch with the higher plane, as his earnest pupils had no doubt assumed, but instead an old fraud from Pinner who had previous form for shoplifting, car theft and making false claims on his insurance. His exposure resulted in a mass exodus of the faithful, shortly followed by that of their non-spiritual leader, and for the next eight years the wind had whistled through the dusty galleries and servants’ attics and former drawing rooms of the decaying folly until, at what can only have been the eleventh hour, Tarquin showed up. I am quite sure that from the house’s point of view it was a very good thing that he did. Whether it was quite so beneficial to Jennifer’s quality of life is rather more open to question.

The continuing craving on the part of the successful to reproduce the lifestyle and customs of the nineteenth-century aristocracy must be trying for our Labour masters. They would deny this, as they deny so many aspects of human nature, but I’m sure it is so. And the life these aspirants choose to ape is from a very specific period. Not for them the casual round of the eighteenth-century aristo, sleeping sitting upright, breakfasting at noon on sticky chocolate before a ride; who wore no uniforms for his sporting or social activities, who dined at five in the afternoon, drank three or four bottles of port a night and frequently, when travelling, shared a bed with his manservant, while his wife might hunker down with her maid. This is not an attractive model for the modern millionaire. Nor, certainly, would they copy the altogether more brutish customs of the sixteenth-century toff, whose personal hygiene, to say nothing of his politics, would make a strong man faint. No, their template was developed by the late Victorians, who had such a talent for mixing rank with comfort: Majesty and deference combined with warmth and draught-free bedrooms, splendour with thick carpets and interlined curtains, where the food is hot, but there are still footmen to serve it.

Sadly, to live like this requires much, much more money than most modern copiers ever imagine. They do the sums and there seems to be enough to bring the house up to date, tidy the garden, hire someone nice to help at table and they begin. Alas, these palaces were designed to preside over thousands of rent-producing acres, to be the window display of huge fortunes in trade and manufacturing, which might have been concealed from Society but, like the mole, were working busily all the while in the dark. Because these houses eat money. They gobble it up, as the rampaging giants of the Brothers Grimm eat children and every other good thing in their path.

When the genuinely, very rich buy these palaces I am sure they enjoy them and, even if they do not often stay long, still the houses are the better for their passing. The trouble comes when they are bought by the not-quite-rich-enough, who think they can just about manage. With these, as a rule, there is a pattern. They make their fortune, such as it is. They buy a castle to celebrate. They restore it and entertain like mad for eight to ten years and then they sell, exhausted by their own poverty and the constant effort to stay afloat. While the County, those families whose fortunes were never deconstructed, and whose houses and pretensions are built on solid rock, smile, occasionally with regret, and move on to the next candidates. Tarquin Montagu was about six years into the process.

Reviewing him now, having not seen him for a while, I feel more sympathy for him than I did. That is to say that I feel some sympathy, when before I felt none at all. At that time, when we were staying with him, he must have been worried that his whole self-ennobling adventure would implode, but it was part of his personality not to admit or ever discuss his fears. He would have seen that as weakness and loss of control. In fact, his main problem was his total inability to relax control under any circumstances. I would go as far as to say that his nature was the most controlling I have ever encountered. This made him not only impossible to entertain, or to be entertained by, but also lonely and desolate, for he could not admit to anyone, least of all his wife, that events were slipping out of his grasp. I had known him as a difficult and rather ill-tempered man, who always found any conversation not centred on him, hard to follow and harder still to contribute to. But I had not fully understood the extent of his mania before we arrived at his house, tired from the long drive, at tea time on that summer Friday. We were normal people. All we wanted was to be shown our room, to have a hot bath and generally to recover in order, like the model guests we were, to come downstairs refreshed, changed and ready to eat, or talk about, whatever our hosts might throw at us.

It was not to be. First, apparently, we had to sit and listen to a history of the house and when Jennifer suggested that we might be more in the mood for this lesson after we had rested, Tarquin replied that he did not judge us yet as ‘ready’ to see the rooms he had prepared. Naturally, my almost overpowering instinct was to tell him to piss off and drive straight back to London. But looking at Jennifer’s tired and harassed face, I suspected this was an option taken by more than one guest before now, so in pity and to Bridget’s relief, I allowed myself to be led into the library, to listen to the lecture like a good boy.

‘The thing is,’ said Tarquin, getting into his interminable stride, ‘you have to understand that when Sir Richard decided to rebuild in eighteen twenty-four, he wanted both to be in the height of fashion, but at the same time not to lose the sense of historicity that his ancient blood demanded.’ He took a deep breath and looked at us as if waiting for a response though what this might be I could not fathom.

‘So that’s why he chose Gothic?’ I volunteered eventually, wondering if we were ever going to be offered sustenance. I had arrived wanting a cup of tea, but after twenty minutes of this I was ready for whisky, neat and in a pint pot.

Tarquin shook his head. ‘No. Not exactly.’ The smugness of his tone was enough to make one seize a chair and smash it over his head, like a cowboy in a Mack Sennett comedy. ‘That was why he chose Sir Charles Barry as his architect. Barry was still young then. This was before the old Houses of Parliament burned down. He was known as a designer of churches and a restorer of ancient monuments, not a maker of country houses. To have a servant of God as the master of the works gave the whole project a gravitas that ensured respect from his neighbours.’

‘Because he built it in Gothic,’ I suggested. I wasn’t going to give up easily and my boredom was making me angry. But I felt this was as challenging as I could be while still pretending to listen to Tarquin with respect. In other words I was a living lie.

‘No!’ he spoke, this time, with a harsh edge to the word. ‘The style of the building is not the issue! The style is not important! I am talking of the spiritual background with which he approached the design.’

‘In Gothic,’ I murmured.

‘Can I go to the loo? I’m bursting,’ said Bridget and, as so often in the company of women, I wondered why I hadn’t thought of that myself.

‘Of course,’ said Jennifer. ‘I’ll show you your room.’ With a sharp glance at her husband she led the way out, stopping to allow us to take up our cases in the hall. During all of this Tarquin was so annoyed at having his dissertation interrupted that he remained, still and sulking, in the library, watching us in glowering silence as we made our way up the imperial, double staircase.

‘God Almighty.’ I fell backwards on to the bed, with a loud sigh, which I rather hoped the retreating Jennifer had caught as she crossed the landing. If she did, it cannot have been a novel experience. ‘I don’t think I can manage a weekend of this.’ The bed itself was a large four-poster, at first sight grand and imposing, but in fact Edwardian export, cheap and clumsily carved, and clearly purchased by the Montagus for the overall effect, not for any intrinsic quality, presumably because they couldn’t afford the real McCoy. I had already noticed that the whole house was like this, impressive at a glance but disappointing to any further study, like a lovely stage set to be admired from the stalls but not explored too closely. In fact, the whole thing was a stage set, on which Tarquin could play out his personal fantasies of high-born and literate grace. Oi vey.

That night, matters did not improve as we gathered to eat in the gloomy and under-furnished dining room, Bridget shivering beneath her gauzy shawl. A huge Jacobethan table dominated the centre of the room and as we came in I heard Tarquin remonstrate that the places had all been laid at one end, instead of the four of us being ranged around the vast board like the characters in an Addams Family film. That, or a BBC period drama where a combination of modern prejudice and complete ignorance frequently obliges their fictionalised upper classes to adopt inexplicable customs. ‘If you’re going to give us a sermon, I’d prefer to listen and not just watch your lips move,’ said Jennifer, which brought the exchange to an end. We sat, Tarquin, needless to say, as our master at the head. He glanced at us, toying with a bottle of white wine on a coaster in front of him, a slight smile tweaking at the corners of his mouth. ‘Give them some of that wine,’ Jennifer murmured as she brought round plates of ethnic-looking broth.

‘I’m not sure they deserve it,’ said Tarquin, continuing to favour us with his twinkling, quirky gaze. ‘For better or worse, I’ve chosen this. It’s a fairly unusual Sauvignon, crisp but zingy at the same time, which I tend only to use on very special occasions. Is this one? I can’t decide.’

‘Oh, just give them some fucking wine,’ said Jennifer, voicing accurately my own unspoken response. She sat down heavily on her husband’s left, opposite Bridget, with me on her other side, and started to drink her soup. Tarquin did not answer her. Clearly, these rumblings of revolution had been getting more frequent of late. Like an unimaginative king, he was bewildered by the challenge to his authority and could not quite gauge the appropriate response. For a moment he sat in still and sober silence. Then he stood and poured the hallowed liquid into our glasses.

As he did so, I caught Jennifer’s eye for a moment but she looked away, not quite ready to acknowledge, as one does in just such a glance, that she was trapped in a ghastly marriage to a crashing bore. I sympathised with her decision, not least because I didn’t, for a moment, believe that I knew all the facts. There are many factors in a marriage or in any cohabiting arrangement, and just because someone gets too cross at dinner parties, or hates your best friend, or cannot tell an anecdote to save their life, these are not necessarily faults that outweigh the benefits of the union. That said, Marriage to a Controller is one of the hardest kinds of relationship for the outside witness to understand.

Genuine controllers are anti-life, killers of energy, living fire blankets that smother all endeavour. For a start, they are always unhappy on anyone’s territory but their own. They cannot enjoy any party they are not giving. They cannot relax as guests in a public place, because that would involve gratitude and gratitude is, to them, a sign of weakness. But they are intolerable as hosts, especially in restaurants, where their manner to waiters and fellow diners alike poisons the atmosphere. They cannot admire anyone who is more successful than they are. They cannot enjoy the friends of their partner because these strangers may not agree to accept them for the superior being they are. But since they have no friends themselves, it means they must regard any human gathering with suspicion. They cannot praise, because praise affirms the worth of the person to whom it is given and the process of controlling is built on the suppression of any self-worth in whomever they are with. They cannot learn, because learning first demands an acknowledgement that the teacher knows more than they, which they cannot give on any subject. Above all, they are boring. Boring beyond imagining. Boring to the point of madness. Yet I have known women to espouse and move in with such men, clever, interesting women, good-looking, witty women, hard-working and successful women, who have allowed themselves to be taken in and dominated by these tedious, mediocre bullies. Why? Is it sexy to be controlled? Is it safe? What?

‘Are there any plans for tomorrow?’ Bridget, almost blue with cold by this stage, looked brightly across the table.

‘That depends,’ said Tarquin.

But Jennifer could not wait to learn what it depended on. ‘Nothing until the evening, but then we thought we’d go to a charity fireworks thing at a house not very far from here. We’ve already got the tickets so we might as well. You take a picnic and there’s some sort of concert. It could be fun, as long as it’s not raining.’

‘Are we to be limited by something so slight as the weather?’ Tarquin adopted a dark and supposedly mysterious tone, by which I assume he was attempting to snatch back the conversation, but something in Jennifer’s independent response had empowered us, and we carried on as if he had not spoken.

‘That’d be lovely,’ said Bridget and the matter was settled.

We got through the evening somehow, finishing up back in the library, an apartment that must once have been handsome indeed, with really superb late-Regency mahogany bookshelves, which had somehow survived the depredations of the post-war decades. I was quite surprised that the bogus high priest had not flogged them during his tenure or after his fall. Could the Sunday papers have been unjust? Of course, the original collection of books was long gone and Tarquin had been quite unable to replace it. He had made do with those huge sets, entitled Stories from the Empire, or something similar, bound in red artificial leatherette and machine-tooled, but there were lots of them and they did at least fill the space, creating once again a reasonable impression from a distance. ‘Where is this house? Where we’re going tomorrow?’ asked Bridget, before Jennifer returned with a tray of coffee.

Tarquin raised his eyebrows, hesitating for the maximum effect. ‘You’ll find out.’

My sigh must have been audible.