Past Imperfect (13 page)

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

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

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

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

'Perhaps you will.'

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

Which, of course, is exactly what happened.

FOUR

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

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

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

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

'I just want to see where you live.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Who is it?'

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

'Where's Philip?'

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

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

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

'What will you do if you pack it in?'

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

'What paintings? To which people?'

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

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

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

'No, I didn't. I'm sorry.'

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

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

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

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

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

'Is he married?'

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