Past Imperfect (14 page)

'What was his wife like?' I lifted my fork without enthusiasm.

'Gerda? Rather dull, to be honest, but not horrible or anything. She wasn't someone you'd know. She's Swedish. They met at Glastonbury. I quite liked her, actually, and the whole split was very civilised. They just didn't have anything in common. She's married to a neurosurgeon now, which seems to be much more the ticket.'

'What about Diana?' I always thought Lucy's elder sister was the more beautiful of the two. She looked like a young Deborah Kerr and, unlike her more frenetic sibling, she had a sort of serenity unusual in someone of her age. We all thought of her as quite a catch and, to her mother's unfeigned delight, she'd been heavily involved with the heir to a borders earldom when I knew them, though I had heard since that this hadn't, in the end, come off. I noticed the question had penetrated Lucy's armour slightly and I understood before I was told that all was not well here either. Time, it seemed, had been unkind to all the Daltons. 'I'm afraid Diana's
not
too good just now. She's divorced as well, but hers was pretty grim.'

'I know she didn't marry Peter Berwick.'

'No. More's the pity, though I never thought I'd say it. He was always so stuck up and tedious when they were going out, but now, glimpsed across the chasm of the years, he seems like Paradise Lost. Her husband was American. You wouldn't know him either. Nor would I, if I didn't have to. They met in Los Angeles and he keeps promising to go back there, but he hasn't so far. Worse luck.'

I had a sudden, vivid memory of Diana Dalton laughing at a joke I had told her. We were next to each other in the dining room at Hurstwood, before going on to a ball somewhere nearby. She was drinking at the time and did a massive nose trick, right into the lap of the Lord Lieutenant, seated blamelessly on her other side. 'Did she have any children?'

'Two. But of course they're grown up now. One's in Australia and the other's working on a kibbutz near Tel Aviv. It's annoying because since she's been in the Priory the whole thing has landed on me and Mummy.'

One more sentence and I would have cried. Poor Lady Dalton. Poor Sir Marmaduke. What had they done to merit this annihilation by the furies? When I last saw them they were model representatives of the class that had run the Empire. They managed their estates, played their part in the county, frightened the village and generally did their duty. And I knew too well they had dreamed of a future for their children that would have consisted of much the same. Certainly their reveries bore no resemblance to what had actually come to pass. I thought of Lady Dalton at Queen Charlotte's, gently probing me about my prospects. What splendid marriages she had planned for her two daughters, pretty and funny and well-born as they were. Would it have damaged the universe if just one of her wishes had come true? Instead, in forty years the entire Dalton edifice, centuries in the building, had come crashing down into the street. Their money was gone, and what little was left would soon be gobbled up by a feckless son and a reckless son-in-law. That's if the Priory fees didn't drain the pot dry before then. And the crimes that merited this punishment? The parents had not understood how to manage the changes the years would bring, and the children, all three of them, had believed the siren song of the Sixties, and invested everything in the brave new world they were so mendaciously promised.

There was a noise at the door. 'Mum. Have you got it?' I looked up. A young woman of about twenty was standing there. She was tall and would have been quite good looking, had she not been encased in an angry mist, irritated and impatient, as if we were needlessly keeping her waiting. Not for the first time I was struck by the phenomenon, another by-product of the social revolution of the last four decades, whereby parents these days frequently belong to an entirely different social class from their children. Obviously, this was Lucy's daughter, but she spoke with a south London accent, harsh and unlovely in its delivery, and her plaited hair and rough clothes would have told a stranger of long, hard struggles on an under-supported housing estate, not weekends with her grandfather, the baronet. Having known Lucy at roughly the same age, I can testify that they could have come from different galaxies for all they shared. Why don't parents mind this? Or don't they notice it? Isn't the desire to bring up your young with the habits and customs of your own tribe one of the most fundamental imperatives in the animal kingdom? Nor is this restricted to any one part of our society. Everywhere in modern Britain parents are raising cuckoos, aliens from a foreign place.

The newcomer paid no attention to me. She was obviously solely concerned in obtaining an answer to her query. 'Did you get it, Mum?' The words hung sharply in the air.

Lucy nodded. 'I've got it. But they only had it in blue.'

'Oh, no.' I write 'Oh, no,' but, in truth, it was much nearer 'ow now.' She sounded like Eliza Doolittle before Higgins has taken her on. 'I wanted the pink one. I told you I wanted the pink one [i.e. Oi wan'ed ve pink wun].'

Lucy's even, patient tone never wavered throughout. 'They didn't have any left in pink, so I thought blue was better than nothing.'

'Well, you were wrong.' The girl flounced off, sighing and stamping her way upstairs.

Lucy looked at me. 'Do you have children?'

I shook my head. 'I never married.'

She laughed. 'Not quite the same thing these days.'

'Well, I haven't.'

'They drive you completely mad. But of course one couldn't do without them.'

I felt I could do without the recent exhibit pretty easily. 'How many have you got?'

'Three. Margaret's the oldest. She's thirty-seven and a farmer's wife. Then there's Richard, who's thirty and trying to get into the music business. And that one. Kitty. Our surprise.'

Needless to say, the eldest was the object of my special interest. 'And Margaret's marriage has turned out well?'

Lucy nodded. 'I think so. Her husband's not very exciting, to be honest, but nobody's perfect and he is quite . . . steady. That seems to be what she wants.' Thank heaven for small mercies, I thought. 'They've got four children and she still runs her own business. I can't imagine how she manages, but she has sixty times as much energy as any of the rest of us.' An image of Damian hovered over the table.

'They're quite spaced out, then. The children.'

'Yes. Mad, really. Just when one thinks the days of bottle warmers and carting cots round the country are over they begin again. For twenty years, whenever we loaded the car for a weekend away, we looked like refugees trying to get out of Prague ahead of the Russians.' She laughed at the memory. 'Of course, I never meant to start quite so early, but when Margaret--' She broke off, her laugh tapering to a nervous little giggle.

'When Margaret what?'

Lucy gave me a shy glance. 'People don't mind these days so much, but she was already on the way when we got married.'

'I hate to shock you, but most of us had worked out that few healthy babies are born at five months.'

She acknowledged this with a nod. 'Of course. It's just one didn't talk about it then. It all got lost in the wash.' She thought for a moment, then looked up at me. 'Do you ever see anyone from those days? I mean, what brought on this sudden interest?'

I shrugged as nonchalantly as I could manage. 'I don't know. I looked at the map and saw I was passing your front door.'

'But whom do you keep up with?'

I shook my head. 'I'm in a different crowd now. I'm a writer. I get asked to publishers' parties and PEN quiz nights and the Bad Sex Awards. My days of making small talk with countesses from Shropshire are done.'

'Aren't everyone's?'

'I still shoot occasionally. When I'm asked. That's when some red-faced major comes staggering across the room and says "Weren't we at school together?" or "Didn't you come to my sister's dance?" I never get over it. I'm always shocked into silence that I could belong to the same generation as this boring, bibulous old fart.' She did not answer, sensing my evasion. 'I do run into some familiar faces occasionally. I saw Serena at a charity thing not long ago.'

This seemed to confirm an unraised issue. 'Yes, I thought you might have stayed in touch with Serena.'

'But I haven't. Not really.' She raised an eyebrow quizzically and so, to move things on, I volunteered: 'As a matter of fact I saw Damian Baxter quite recently. Do you remember him?'

The last question was redundant. She had changed colour. 'Of course I remember him. I was there, remember.'

I nodded. 'Of course you were.'

'Anyway, even without that nobody forgets the Heartbreaker of the Year.' This time her laugh had a slightly bitter twinge. 'I gather he's terribly rich now.'

'Terribly rich and terribly ill.'

Which sobered her up. 'I'm sorry. Is he going to be all right?'

'I don't think so.'

'Oh.' This information appeared to put her bitterness back into its cage, and she became more philosophical. 'It used to make me laugh to think how our mothers steered us away from him. Had they but known at the time, he was almost the only man we ever danced with who could have kept the show on the road. Did he marry?'

'Yes, but not for long and no one you'd know.'

She absorbed this. 'I was terribly keen on him.'

I found myself becoming rather irritated by my own apparent ignorance. 'You wouldn't have known it,' I said.

'That was only because you were starting to hate him by that stage. I'd never have dared tell you. Are you disappointed in me?'

'A bit. You always pretended to dislike him as much as I did. Even before. Even when he and I were friends.'

She passed easily over my contradiction. 'Well . . .' Her voice had now progressed through philosophical to wistful. 'It was a long time ago.' Then, as if ashamed of her momentary retreat, she rallied. 'I'd have married him if he'd proposed.'

'What would your mother have said about that?'

'I wouldn't have cared what she said. In fact, at one point I thought I was going to have to force him.' This was accompanied by a little, indignant puff. I looked at her, waiting for an explanation. She smirked. 'When I started Margaret I wasn't
completely
sure whose she was.' Naturally, this almost made me cry out. Could I have scored a goal with the very first kick? It was with some difficulty that I kept quiet and let her finish her story. 'I wasn't really going out with Damian at that stage, but then there was a moment, one afternoon in Estoril.' She gave an embarrassed giggle. 'You were all on the terrace and I sneaked off, and . . .' I suppose I must have looked disapproving in some way as she gave a little, comic snort. 'It was the Sixties ! Did we use the term "Wild Child"? Had it been invented by then? I can't remember. Anyway, I suppose I was one. It's funny, because Margaret is
much
the straightest of my children. The only one who's straight at all, really.'

This was a familiar situation to me. 'Our parents used to talk about the problem child in any family,' I said. 'Now, it seems to be more the norm to have one child who isn't a problem. If you're lucky.'

Lucy laughed. 'Well, that's Margaret in this house. It's odd, when you think of it, because we had quite a scare with her when she was little.'

'What sort of scare?'

'Heart. Which seems so cruel for a child, doesn't it? She developed something called familial hypercholesterolaemia.'

'Blimey.'

'I know. It was about a month before I even learned to say it.'

'It trips off your tongue now.'

'You know how it is. At the start you can't pronounce it and by the end you're qualified to open a clinic.' She vanished momentarily into that never quite forgotten, terrible episode in her life. 'Funny. I can almost laugh about it, but it was unbelievably ghastly at the time. It means you're making far too much cholesterol, which eventually gives you a heart attack and kills you. Of course, nowadays no sentence is complete without that word but then it was foreign and frightening. And apparently it had always been more or less a hundred per cent fatal. The first doctor who diagnosed it in Margaret, at some hospital in Stoke, thought it still was. So you can imagine what we went through.'

'What were you doing in Stoke?'

'I can't remember now. Oh, I think Philip had an idea of reviving a china factory. It didn't last long.' I'd had another glimpse of the tangled odyssey that was Philip's non-career. 'Anyway, my mother turned up and scooped us off to a specialist in Harley Street and the news improved.'

'So it was treatable by the time Margaret had it?'

She nodded, reliving her relief. 'Completely, thank God. But only just. Literally, it had all changed something like four years before. It took us ages to get over the shock. We were both in the grip of terror for months. I remember getting up one night and finding Philip bending over her cot and crying. We never talk about it now, but whenever I get cross with him I secretly think of that moment and forgive him.' She hesitated, contradicted inwardly by the Spirit of Honesty. 'Or I try to,' she added. I nodded. I could easily see why. The Philip who wept for his innocent child in a darkened nursery sounded not only much nicer but a thousand times more interesting than the ballroom show-off I had known. Lucy was still talking. 'What we couldn't understand was that we kept being told it was completely hereditary, but neither of us had any knowledge of its occurring in our families. We questioned our parents and so on, but there was no clue. Still, as I say, Mummy found us a wonderful doctor and once we'd nailed it properly it came right.' She paused. I would guess she didn't venture into this territory very often. 'I always think that Margaret's passion for normal, ordinary life was probably fostered by that early threat of losing it. Don't you agree?'

Obviously, this entire speech went straight to the heart of the case that had brought me to Kent, but before I could say another word I was aware of a presence in the door. 'Hello, stranger.' The battered, bloated figure of a man who bore only the slightest resemblance to the boy I had known as Philip Rawnsley-Price was standing there. In our salad days Philip had resembled a young and much better-looking, cheeky-chappy actor called Barry Evans, famous then for a film,
Round the Mulberry Bush
, in which he represented those of us who wanted to be trendy but didn't quite know how, a large group at any time, which ensured his popularity. Sadly, his stardom didn't last and the former actor was found dead in the company of an empty whisky bottle at the age of fifty-two, having spent the previous three years driving a taxi in Leicester. I seem to recall there was some pressure on the police to investigate the circumstances of Evans's death, involving, as they did, cut telephone wires and other peculiar details, which naturally gave his relatives concern, but the police could not be bothered. A decision that might, I imagine, have been different had the unfortunate Mr Evans died at the peak of his fame.