Past Imperfect (51 page)

'Pleased to meet you,' said Mr Baxter.

'How do you do,' I said in return, deliberately blocking his cheerful welcome by not answering in kind, with what I foolishly imagined, in my youthful fatuity, to be good breeding.

'Won't you come in?' said Mrs Baxter. 'Would you like a coffee?' But I didn't go in and I didn't have any coffee. I regret it now, that refusal of their hospitality. My excuse was that I had an appointment in London at three o'clock and I wasn't sure I'd make it as it was. I told myself it was important, and perhaps it was, but I regret it now. And even if I couldn't bring myself to say it, I was pleased to meet them. They were nice, decent people; the mother went out of her way to be polite and the father was, I think, a clever man. I learned later that he was the manager of a shoe factory with a special interest in opera and it saddened me in a way that I had not met them before. That they had not been included in any of the year's frolics, not even at the university. Looking back, I realise it was a key moment for me, though I wasn't aware of it at the time, in that it was one of the first instances when I came to appreciate the insidious poison of snobbery, the tyranny of it, the meaningless values that made me reject their friendly overtures, that had made Damian hide these two, pleasant, intelligent people because he was ashamed of them.

On the morning in question, I realise now, Damian was making a kind of statement of apology, of non-shame, by bringing me here. He had hidden them behind a barrier because he did not want me to judge him, to look down on him, on the basis of his parents, with whom there was nothing wrong at all, and in this he was right. We would have looked down on him. I blush to write it and I liked them when I met them, but we would have done, without any moral justification whatever. He had wanted to move into a different world and he felt part of that would be shedding his background. He'd managed the transition, but on this particular morning I think he was ashamed of his ambition, ashamed of rejecting his own past. The truth is we should all have been ashamed in having played along with it without question. At any rate, with avowals to meet again the following Monday at Cambridge we parted and I got back into my car.

We did meet again, of course, several times, but we did not meet alone for the rest of my time at university. Essentially my friendship with Damian Baxter ended on that day, the morning after Serena Gresham's dance, and I cannot pretend I was sorry, even if my feelings for him were less savage then than they would be when we did next find ourselves under the same roof. But that was a couple of years later, when we were out in the world, and quite a different story.

FOURTEEN

The weekend passed pleasantly enough. We ate, we talked, we slept, we walked. Sophie Jamieson turned out to share my interest in French history and the Purbricks were great friends of some cousins of mine who lived near them, so it all went very smoothly in the way of these things. I must say Andrew had not improved with the years. Having inherited the earldom and the savaged remnant that the family lawyer's depredations had left of the estate, it was as if the last vestiges of self-knowledge or self-doubt had been flung to the four winds. He was king, and a very angry king at that, raging at the gardeners and the cook and his wife about almost everything. Serena took it all in her stride but once, when I was on my way downstairs before dinner on Friday evening, I found him haranguing her in the hall about a frame that should have been mended or something. I caught her eye as I was on my way to the library door and she did not look away but raised her eyebrows slightly, which he would not have seen and which I took as more or less the greatest compliment an English toff can pay: to include you in their private, family dramas.

After lunch on Saturday, when we'd finished drinking our cups of coffee in the drawing room, Serena proposed a walk by the river and most of us stuck up our hands to join her. 'You'll need boots,' she said, but there were masses of spares for people who'd forgotten them, so we were soon equipped and on our way. The gardens at Waverly were pretty and predictable, the usual Victorian layout that had been calmed down by the restriction of only having two gardeners instead of twelve, and we walked through them, admiring vocally as we went, but they weren't the main pleasure ground event. Serena led us out of a gate and on down an avenue through a paddock and into a wood, until finally we came out on to a grassy bank, perfectly placed to allow us to walk along the edge of a wide river whose name I now forget. I admired the wonders of nature. 'It's totally artificial,' she said. 'They rerouted the riverbed in the 1850s and made the walks to go with the altered course.' I could only reflect on the brilliance of that generation in their understanding of how to live.

We were alone in a comfortable pair by then, as the others had lagged behind. I looked around at the view as Serena slid her arm through mine. On the other side of the water a huge willow leaned over, trailing its creeper-like branches on the surface, making ripples in the flow. Suddenly there was a flurry of movement and a heron appeared above the trees, wide wings beating back and forth, slowly and rhythmically, as it sailed across the sky. 'They're such thieves. Andrew says we should shoot them or the river will be quite empty.' But even as she spoke the words, her eyes followed the great, grey bird on its wondrous journey. 'It's such a privilege to live here,' she said after a minute or two.

I looked at her. 'I hope so.'

'It is.' She was staring me straight in the eye, so I think she was trying to be honest. 'He's quite a different person when we're alone.'

Naturally, this was very flattering, as the lack of names or qualifications implied a kind of shorthand between us which I was thrilled to think might exist, and even more thrilled by the idea that she recognised it, but in another way she was registering her guilt at signalling Andrew's preposterous behaviour in the hall the previous evening. Her statement is anyway the standard defence of all women who find themselves married to, or stuck with, men who all their friends think are awful. Often this comes as a revelation after quite a considerable period during which they thought people quite liked their mate, and it must be a disappointment to discover that the reverse is true, but I would guess this was not the case where Serena was concerned. Nobody had ever liked Andrew. Of course, it is an effective defence to claim hidden qualities for your other half, because by definition it is impossible to disprove. I suppose logic tells one that it must sometimes be true, but I found it hard to believe that Andrew Belton in private was sensitive, endearing and fun, not least because there is no cure for stupidity. Still, I prayed that it might be even partially the case. 'If you say so, I believe it,' I replied.

We walked on for a while before Serena spoke again. 'I wish you'd tell me what you're really doing for Damian.'

'I have told you.'

'You're not going to all this trouble just to get some funny stories from four decades ago. Candida tells me you've been over to Los Angeles to see the dreaded Terry K.'

I couldn't be bothered to be dishonest, since we were so near the end. 'I can't tell you now,' I said, 'because it isn't my secret. But I will tell you soon, if you're interested.'

'I am.' She pondered my answer for a bit. 'I never saw him again after that ghastly night.'

'No. Nor did most of the guests.'

'Yet I often think of him.'

She had brought it up and so I thought I would try to satisfy something that had been niggling me. 'When you planned that whole thing with Candida, turning up out of the blue, what were you hoping to achieve? I can remember you now, standing in that vast, sun-baked square, in those terrible black clothes you all had to borrow.'

She gave a snort of laughter. 'That was so crazy.'

'But what did you hope would come out of it?'

This was a big question and years before it would have been unaskable. But she did not reproach me, or even look cross to be put on the spot. 'Nothing, once my parents were on board. I should have given up the whole idea the moment they said they were coming. I don't know why I didn't.'

'But originally. When you first plotted it?'

She shook her head and her hair caught a glint of the sun. 'To be honest, I don't really know what I wanted to come out of it, given how I managed things later. I suppose I felt trapped. And angry. I was married and a mother and Christ knows what, all before I was twenty-one, and I felt I'd been lured into a cage and the door had slammed shut. Damian stood for everything that had been taken from me. But it was silly. We hadn't been honest with each other and that always makes for trouble. It would all have been different if we were young today, but how does that help?'

'Do you still feel trapped?'

She smiled. 'Isn't there a laboratory test where if animals are kept in a trap long enough, they come back when they're let out, because it's home?' We strolled on, listening to the birds. 'Does he ever talk about me?' Despite a Pavlovian irritation, this question interested me. More or less every woman I had seen on my quest had asked this and Serena wasn't even one of the contenders. It was pointless to deny that Damian clearly had qualities that I had been quite unaware of at the time.

'Of course we talk about you. You're the one thing we have in common.' I said it as a joke, although it was truer than I had previously known. I could not tell you how she took it, but she smiled and we walked on.

'Did you see the picture in your room?'

'I did.'

'Classic. I put it out for you. God, weren't we young?'

'Young and, in your case, lovely.'

She sighed. 'I can never understand why you and I didn't get off together at some point, during the whole thing.'

This made me stop in my tracks. 'Can't you? I can. You didn't fancy me.' There was no point in beating about the bush.

She looked a little miffed, perhaps because it sounded as if I were reproaching her, which I truly wasn't. 'You never pressed your case very hard,' she said at last. She was apparently attempting at least to share the blame for our non-romance.

'Because I knew that if I did, our friendship would become untenable and I would drop out of your life. It was fun for you to have me dying for love, as long as it never became embarrassing and I never put you on the spot. You could have had me any day you wished, with a crook of your finger, which you were fully aware of. But you never wanted me, except as a courtier worshipping at your shrine. And I was happy. If that was the best that was on offer, I was glad to oblige.'

She made a slight expression of horror at this perfectly honest account. 'Did you know all that, then?'

I shook my head. 'No. Except possibly instinctively. But I know it now.'

'Oh dear,' she said. 'You make me sound like such a bitch.'

But this wasn't right and I was anxious for her to know I didn't think it. 'Not at all. It worked well for a long time. I was your
parfit knight
and you were
la belle dame sans merci
. It's an arrangement that has been perfectly serviceable for hundreds of years, after all. It only went wrong because of Portugal and that wasn't your fault. It became embarrassing after that evening, so we dropped out of each other's lives, but it would only have happened sooner if I'd made a pass.'

She thought for a time, as we walked on again in silence. There was a rustle of movement in the undergrowth and the distinctive red of a fox's coat flashed through the browns and greens for a moment. As if recognising him, she spoke, 'Damian has much to answer for.'

'The interesting thing is I think he would agree with you.'

The others were closing in on us now and soon the conversation would become general again. But before they reached where we were standing Serena spoke softly. 'I hope you don't hate me.'

Her voice was gentle and, I think, sincere, and when I turned towards her, she was smiling. I don't think she meant it as a serious enquiry, but she was apologising for wounding me in those lost years, when heart pain could be so sharp and was so easily administered. I looked at her and for the millionth time wondered at every feature. A tiny crumb of something from lunch was clinging to the corner of her mouth and I imagined a life where I would have the right to lick it off. 'What do you think?' I said.

Dinner that night was the main event of the weekend and I dutifully bathed, putting on evening trousers, a shirt with no tie, reluctantly, and a smoking jacket. I went downstairs feeling rather cheery but, once in the drawing room, things got heavier with the inclusion among the guests for the evening of Andrew's mother, the now Dowager Countess, who lived not in the real dower house, a smart Georgian villa on the edge of the park, which was let to an American banker, but in a cottage in the village formerly reserved for the head keeper. She was standing stiffly by the chimneypiece when I came in. Lady Belton was a lot older, naturally, than when I had last seen her, but age had done little to soothe her incipient madness. She still stared out of those pale-blue, Dutch-doll eyes, and her hair was dyed to an approximation of the Italianate black it had once been. Nor had her sense of style made much of a leap forward. She wore a curious outfit, a kind of long, khaki nightgown with an uneven neckline. I'm not sure what effect she was aiming at, but it can't have been what she achieved. Her jewellery, I need hardly say, was excellent.

Serena introduced me, observing that her mother-in-law must remember me from the old days. Lady Belton ignored this. 'How do you do,' she said, extending her bony, knuckled hand. Is there anything more annoying than people saying how do you do when you have met them a thousand times? If there is, I would like to know what it might be. I had a recent instance where I was greeted as a stranger by a woman I'd known since childhood, who had grown famous in the interim. Every time I met her for literally years, she would lean forward gracefully and make no sign that we had ever seen each other before. Finally I resolved that if she tried it one more time I would let her have it. But something of my resolve must have shown in my face and all bullies are equipped with an antenna that tells them when the bullying must stop. She read my eyes and held out her hand. 'How lovely to see you again,' she said.