Past Imperfect (2 page)

'Any time on any day will be convenient,' the letter said. 'I do not go out now or entertain, so I am completely at your disposal. You will find me quite near Guildford. If you drive, it may take ninety minutes but the train is quicker. Let me know and I will either arrange directions or someone can meet you, whichever you prefer.' In the end, after my fake prevarication, I wrote back suggesting dinner on such and such a day, and named the train I would catch. He confirmed this with an invitation for the night. As a rule I prefer, like Jorrocks, to 'sleeps where I dines,' so I accepted and the plan was settled. Accordingly, I passed through the barrier at Guildford station on a pleasant summer evening in June.

I looked about vaguely for some Eastern European holding a card with my name mis-spelled in felt tip pen but instead of this, I found myself approached by a uniformed chauffeur - or rather someone who looked like an actor playing a chauffeur in an episode of
Hercule Poirot -
who replaced his peaked cap after introducing himself in low and humble tones, and led the way outside to a new Bentley, parked illegally in the space reserved for the disabled. I say 'illegally,' even though there was a badge clearly displayed in the window, because I assume these are not distributed so that friends may be met off trains without their getting wet or having to walk too far with their luggage. But then again, everyone deserves the odd perk.

I did know that Damian had done well, though how or why I knew I cannot now remember, for we shared no pals and moved in completely different circles. I must have seen his name on a
Sunday Times
list or maybe in an article on a financial page. But I don't think, before that evening, I understood quite
how
well he had done. We sped through the Surrey lanes and it was soon clear, from the trimmed hedging and the pointed walls, from the lawns like billiard tables and the glistening, weeded gravel, that we had entered the Kingdom of the Rich. Here there were no crumbling gate piers, no empty stables and lodges with leaking roofs. This was not a question of tradition and former glory. I was witnessing not the memory but the living presence of money.

I do have some experience of it. As a moderately successful writer, one rubs up against what Nanny would call 'all sorts,' but I can't pretend this was ever really my crowd. Most of the so-called rich I know are possessed of surviving, not newborn, fortunes, the rich who used to be a good deal richer. But the houses I was passing belonged to the Now Rich, which is different, and for me there is something invigorating in their sense of immediate power. It is peculiar, but even today there is a snobbery in Britain when it comes to new money. The traditional Right might be expected to turn up their noses at it I suppose, but paradoxically, it is often the intellectual Left who advertise their disapproval of the self-made. I do not pretend to understand how this is compatible with a belief in equality of opportunity. Perhaps they do not try to synthesise them, but just live by contradictory impulses, which I suppose we all do to some degree. But if I may have been guilty of such unimaginative thinking in my youth, it is gone from me now. These days I unashamedly admire men and women who have made their pile, just as I admire anyone who looks at the future mapped out for them at birth and is not afraid to tear it up and draw a better one. The self-made have more chance than most of finding a life that truly suits. I salute them for it and I salute their bejewelled world. Of course, on a personal level it was extremely annoying that Damian Baxter should be a part of it.

The house he had chosen as a setting for his splendour was not a fallen nobleman's palace but rather one of those self-consciously moral, Arts and Crafts, rambling warrens that seem to belong in a Disney cartoon and are no more convincing as a symbol of Olde England than they were when Lutyens built them at the turn of the last century. Surrounding it were gardens, terraced, clipped and criss-crossed with trim and tended paths, but seemingly no land beyond that. Damian had not apparently decided to adopt the ancient model of imitation gentry. This was not a manor house, nestling in the warm embrace of farming acres. This was simply the home of a Great Success.

Having said that, while not traditional in an aristocratic sense, the whole thing had quite a 1930s feel, as if it were built with the ill-gotten gains of a First World War profiteer. The Agatha Christie element provided by the chauffeur was continued by the bowing butler at the door and even by a housemaid, glimpsed on my way to the pale oak staircase, in her black dress and frilly apron, although she seemed perhaps more frivolous, as if I had suddenly been transported to the set of a Gershwin musical. A sense of the odd unreality of the adventure was, if anything, confirmed when I was shown to my room without first having met my host. There is always a slight whodunnit shiver of danger in this arrangement. A dark-clad servant hovering in the door and muttering 'Please come down to the drawing room when you are ready, Sir,' seems more suited to the reading of a will than a social call. But the room itself was nice enough. It was lined with pale-blue damask, which had also been used to drape the high, four-poster bed. The furniture was stable, solid English stuff and a group of Chinoiserie paintings on glass, between the windows, was really charming, even if there was the unmistakable tinge of a country house hotel, rather than a real country house, about it all, confirmed by the bathroom, which was sensational, with a huge bath, a walk-in shower, shiny taps on tall pipes coming straight up out of the floor, and enormous towels, fluffy and brand new. As we know, this kind of detail is seldom found in private houses in the shires, even today. I tidied myself up and went downstairs.

The drawing room was predictably cavernous, with a vaulted ceiling and those over-springy carpets that have been too recently replaced. Not the shagpile of the minted club owner, nor the flat and ancient rugs of the posh, but smooth and sprung and
new
. Everything in the room had been purchased within living memory and apparently by a single purchaser. There was none of the ragbag of tastes that country houses are inclined to represent, where the contents of a dozen homes, the amalgamated product of forty amateur collectors over two or three centuries, are flung together into a single room. But it was good. In fact, it was excellent, the furniture largely from the early years of the eighteenth century, the pictures rather later, all fine, all shining clean and all in tip-top condition. After the similar experience of my bedroom, I wondered if Damian had employed a buyer, someone whose job was just to put his life together. Either way, there was no very tangible sense of him, or any other personality really, in the room. I wandered about, glancing at the paintings, unsure whether to stand or sit. In truth it felt forlorn, despite its splendour; the burning coals in the grate could not dispel the slightly clammy atmosphere, as if the room had been cleaned but not used for quite a while. And there were no flowers, which I always think a telltale sign; there was nothing living, in fact, giving a staleness to its perfection, a kind of lifeless sterility. I could not imagine that a woman had played much part in its creation, nor, God knows, that a child had played any part at all.

There was a sound at the door. 'My dear chap,' said a voice, still with the slight hesitance, the suspicion of a stammer, that I remembered so well. 'I hope I haven't kept you waiting.'

There is a moment in
Pride and Prejudice
when Elizabeth Bennet catches sight of her sister who has returned with the dastardly Wickham, rescued from disgrace by the efforts of Mr Darcy. 'Lydia was Lydia still,' she comments. Well, Damian Baxter was Damian still. That is, while the broad and handsome young man with the thick curls and the easy smile had vanished and been replaced by a hunched figure resembling no one so much as Doctor Manette, I could detect that distinctive, diffident stutter masking a deep and honed sense of superiority, and I recognised at once the old, patronising arrogance in the flourish with which he held out his bony hand. I smiled. 'How very nice to see you,' I said.

'Is it?' We stared at each other's faces, marvelling simultaneously at the extent, and at the lack, of change that we found there.

As I looked at him more closely I could see that when he had talked in his letter of being 'a dying man,' he had been speaking the literal truth. He was not just old before his time but ill, very ill, and seemingly past the point of no return. 'Well, it's interesting. I suppose I can say that.'

'Yes, you can say that.' He nodded to the butler who hovered near the door. 'I wonder if we might have some of that champagne?' It didn't surprise me that even forty years later he still liked to wrap his orders in diffident questions. I was a veteran witness of this trick. Like many who try it, Damian imagined, I think, that it suggested a charming lack of confidence, a faltering but honourable desire to get it right, which I knew for a fact he had not felt since some time around 1967 and I doubt he knew much of it then. The man addressed did not seem to feel any answer was required of him and I'm sure it wasn't. He just went to get the wine.

Dinner was a formal, muted affair in a dining room that unsuccessfully crossed William Morris and Liberty's with a dash of the Hollywood hills. High, mullioned windows, a heavy, carved, stone chimneypiece and more of the bouncy carpet added up to a curiously flat and unevocative result, as if a table and chairs had unaccountably been set up in an empty, but expensive, lawyer's office. But the food was delicious, if quite wasted on Damian, and we both got some fun out of the Margaux he'd selected. The silent butler, whom I now knew as Bassett, hardly left us for a minute and, inevitably, the conversation played out before him was desultory. I remember an aunt once telling me that when she looked back to the days before the war, she was astonished at some of the table talk she'd witnessed, where the presence of servants seemed to act as no restraining force at all. Political secrets, family gossip, personal indiscretions, all came bubbling forth before the listening footmen and must presumably have enlivened many an evening in the local pub, if not, as in our more greedy and salacious times, their published memoirs. But we have lost that generation's sublime confidence in their own way of life. Whether we like it or not - and I do like it really - time has made us conscious of the human spirit in those who serve us. For anyone born since the 1940s all walls have ears.

So we nattered on about this and that. He asked after my parents and I asked after his. In actual fact my father had been quite fond of him but my mother, whose jungle instincts were generally more reliable, sensed trouble from the start. She, at any rate, had died in the interim since we last met and so had both of his, so there wasn't much to be said. From there, we discussed various others of that mutual acquaintance of long ago, and by the time we were ready to move on we had covered an impressive list of career disappointments, divorces and premature death.

At last he stood, addressing Bassett as he did so. 'Do you think we could have our coffee in the library?' Again he asked softly, as a favour that might be denied. What would happen, I wonder, if someone so instructed should take the hesitant question at face value? 'No, Sir. I'm afraid I'm a bit busy at the moment. I'll try to bring some coffee later on.' I should like to see it once. But this butler knew what he was about and went to carry out the veiled command, while Damian led the way into the nicest of the rooms that I had seen. It looked as if an earlier owner, or possibly Damian himself, had purchased a complete library from a much older house, with dark, richly shining shelves and a screen of beautifully carved columns. There was a delicate chimneypiece of pinkish marble and in a polished steel basket a fire had been lit for our arrival. The combination of flickering flames and gleaming leather bindings, as well as some excellent pictures - a large seascape that looked like a Turner and the portrait of a young girl by Lawrence among them - gave a warmth notably lacking elsewhere in the house. I had been unjust. Obviously it was not lack of taste but lack of interest that had made the other rooms so dreary. This was where Damian actually lived. Before long we were equipped with drinks and cups of coffee, and alone.

'You've done very well,' I said. 'Congratulations.'

'Are you surprised?'

'Not terribly.'

He accepted this with a nod. 'If you mean I was always ambitious, I confess it.'

'I think I meant that you would never take no for an answer.'

He shook his head. 'I wouldn't say that,' he said. I wasn't completely sure what he meant by this but before I could delve he spoke again. 'I knew when I was beaten, even then. When I found myself in a situation where success was not a possible outcome, I accepted it and moved on. You must grant me that.'

This was nonsense. 'I won't grant you that,' I said. 'Or anything like it. It may be a virtue you achieved in later life. I cannot tell. But when I knew you your eyes were much larger than your stomach and you were a very poor loser, as I should know.'

Damian looked surprised for a moment. Perhaps he had spent so much of his life with people who were paid, in one way or another, to agree with him that he had forgotten not everyone was obliged to. He sipped his brandy and after a pause he nodded. 'Well, be that as it may, I am beaten now.' In answer to my unasked question he elaborated. 'I have inoperable cancer of the pancreas. There is nothing to be done. The doctor has given me about three months to live.'

'They often get these things wrong.'

'They occasionally get these things wrong. But not in my case. There may be a variant of a few weeks, but that's all.'

'Oh.' I nodded. It is hard to know how to respond suitably to this kind of declaration because people's needs can be so different. I doubted that Damian would want wailing and weeping or suggestions of alternative cures based on a macrobiotic diet, but you never know. I waited.

'I don't want you to feel I am raging at the injustice of it. My life has, in a way, come to a natural conclusion.'