Past Imperfect (20 page)

'Well, even if you're listed as Lady Holman, everyone will know who you are.' One says these things and I said this, although, as is often the case in such circumstances, I did not believe it to be true.

'Well . . .' She paused awkwardly. I had hoped that William's success in the City would have bolstered her confidence, but the reverse seemed to have happened.

'Can we discuss it? I'm going to be driving very near you next week. Could I possibly look in?'

'When?'

Once more, as with Lucy Dalton, I sensed a trapped animal searching for a route out, scanning the net for a possible tear, which I firmly closed off with my next speech. 'It entirely depends on you. I've got some stuff to do in Winchester but I can easily fit it round your diary. What day would suit best? It'd be such fun to see you again after all these years.'

She was enough of a lady to know when she was caught. 'Yes, it would. Of course it would. Why not come for some lunch next Friday?'

'Will William be with you?'

'Yes. He doesn't really like my entertaining when he's not here.' This sentence had escaped her mouth before she fully grasped its ugly, bullying significance. The words seemed to reverberate down the line between us. After a silent pause she attempted to round off its sharp edges: 'He gets so jealous when he finds he's missed seeing people he likes. I know he'd love to catch up with you.'

'Me, too,' I answered, because I had to. I was not quite clear how I would carry out my mission if William was too controlling to allow us a moment together, but there was nothing I could do about that. 'I'll be with you on Friday, just before one.'

Bellingham Court was a real house. It was about five miles from Winchester and not perhaps quite far enough from the motorway, but it was a genuine Elizabethan
schloss
, with high mullioned windows and corbelled ceilings and panelled great chambers and whispering passages, a thoroughly satisfactory ego-puffer of a place. As I turned in through the neatly painted gates, and drove down the long, tended and impeccable drive, it was easy to see it had been the subject of a recent, and massive, restoration programme. I parked in the wide forecourt, bordered by two broad, shallow parterres of water, edged in new and expensively carved stone, and before I had time to ring the bell the door was opened by a middle aged woman in sensible shoes, whom I took, correctly, to be the housekeeper. She led me inside.

The money here was not comparable to Damian's Croesus-like hoards. The Holmans were very rich, that was all, not super-duper-Bill-Gates-unbelievably rich. Just rich. But they were rich enough, by heaven. The hall was large, stone-flagged, and off-white, with a dark, carved screen at one end and some wonderful furniture. These items had been selected as contemporary with the house, which I later discovered was not the theme in the other downstairs rooms, the designer having decided that Tudor artefacts are easy to admire but hard to live with. The style had therefore been confined to the hall, with a few pieces in the library. There was in this a kind of premeditation, a sort of thought-out pattern that, just as in Damian's Surrey palace, was oddly undermining to any sense of country living. Proper country houses have a kind of randomness, objects and furniture are deliberately thrown together, survivals of many other houses, which have somehow all ended up there in a kind of
chic
higgledy-piggledy. Nor is this a skill unknown to many designers who, given ample time and money, can rustle up a house that looks as if the family have owned it since 1650, when in fact they moved in the summer of the previous year. But here, at Bellingham, this casual, comfortable elegance had not been achieved. In fact, there was a slightly disconcerting quality to the whole house that I cannot exactly describe, as if it had been prepared for an elaborate party to which I had not been invited. Had I been told it had been dressed for a photo shoot and I wasn't to touch anything, it would not have surprised me. The pictures were almost all large, full, or three-quarter- length portraits, over-cleaned and a little too shiny. They had a foreign feel to them and I squinted at some of the name plaques on the most important ones, as I passed. 'Frederick Francis, 1st Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Shwerin, 1756-1837' said one, while another announced 'Count Felix Beningbauer gennant Lupitz, 1812-1871, and his son, Maximilian.'

'You see we are very pro-Europe in this house.' The voice startled me and I looked up to see a tiny figure standing at the far end of the hall, looking more like a boy scout on bob-a-job week than a princess in late middle age. Of course, I knew it was Dagmar because her stature meant it had to be, but I could not at first find her in the face I was presented with. Her hair was grey, though as flat and lank as it had always been, and at last I recognised her wobbling, tremulous, anxious lips, but not much else of her youthful appearance had survived. Her eyes were still huge, but sadder now and, despite our luxurious setting, it seemed to me that for her, life had been a bumpy ride. We kissed, a little gauchely, two strangers pecking at each other's cheeks, before she led me into the main drawing room, a fine, light chamber, but again with a synthetic air. It was the perfect mixture of Colefax chintz and antiques, Georgian this time, beautifully chosen as individual items but with no coherence as a whole. There was more of the splendid, European parade on the walls.

I indicated a couple of them. 'I don't remember you having all these in Trevor Square. Or were they in storage?' We knew, without saying, that they formed no part of the provenance of Squire William de Holman.

She shook her head. 'Neither.' Now, at last, she was beginning to come back to me. The moist half-open mouth had firmed up a bit, but she still had that odd, discordant, tearful note in her voice, a faint, sad scrape of the vocal cords grinding together, that reminded me of the girl she had once been. 'William has scouts in all the auction houses, and whenever there is a picture coming up with the faintest connection to me he bids for it.' She did not elaborate on quite what this told us about her husband. No more did I.

'Where is he?'

'Choosing some wine for lunch. He won't be long.'

She poured me a drink from a supply concealed in a large, carved, rococo cupboard in the corner which I saw, to my amusement, contained a small sink, and we talked. Dagmar was more aware of what I had been doing with my life than I anticipated and she must have noticed how flattered I was when she spoke of one particular novel that had barely broken the surface of the water. I thanked her. She gave a little smile. 'I like to keep up with the news of the people I knew then.'

'More than with the people themselves?'

She shrugged lightly. 'Friendships are based on shared experience. I don't know what we would all have in common now. William isn't very . . . nostalgic for that time in his life. He prefers what happened later.' Which did not surprise me. If I were him, so would I. 'Do you see anyone from those days?' I told her I'd visited Lucy. 'Heavens, you are having a time of it. How is she?'

'All right. Her husband's got another business. I'm not sure how well it's doing.'

She nodded. 'Philip Rawnsley-Price. The one man we were all on the run from and Lucy Dalton ends up marrying him. How peculiar time is. I imagine he's quite different now?'

'Not different enough,' I said ungenerously and we laughed. 'I've seen Damian Baxter, too. Quite recently. Do you remember him?'

This time she let out a kind of giggling gasp that brought the old Dagmar I had known completely back into the room. 'Do I remember him?' she said. 'How could I forget him when our names have been linked ever since?' My mind running, as it was, on another track, this remark amazed me. Had I entirely missed a romance that everyone else knew about?

'Really?'

She did a double take. Clearly she was puzzled by my slowness. 'You remember my party? When he flattened Andrew Summersby? And added about two thousand pounds to the bill? Which was quite a lot of money then, I can tell you.' But she was not made angry at the recollection. Quite the reverse. I could see that.

'Of course I remember. I also remember your attempts to pretend he'd been invited. I rather loved you for that.'

She nodded. 'It was hopeless, of course.' She smiled like a naughty, little elf at the thought of her long-ago gallantry. 'My mother was still living in some fantasy kingdom in her own head. She thought if she allowed one young man, who had behaved perfectly all evening, to stay on without an invitation, somehow Rome would fall. Needless to say, her intransigence made us ridiculous.'

'You weren't ridiculous.'

She flushed with pleasure. 'No? I hope not.'

'How is your mother? I was always so terrified of her.'

'You wouldn't be now.'

'She's alive, then?'

'Yes. She's alive. We might see her if you've time for a walk after lunch.'

I nodded. 'I'd like that.' There was a lull and I could hear the sound of a bee trapped somewhere against a window, that familiar buzzing thump. Not for the first time I was struck by the strangeness of this kind of talk, with people you once knew well and now do not know at all. 'She must be pleased with the way things turned out for you.' In saying this I was perfectly sincere. The Grand Duchess had been so determined on a sensational marriage for her daughter that William Holman must have been a crushing disappointment, however necessary he was at the time. Little did either she, or we, know that he would deliver a way of life that would far outshine the promises of the eldest sons on offer in 1968.

She looked at me pensively. 'Yes and no,' she muttered.

Before I could comment further, William strode into the room, right hand extended towards me. He was better-looking than I remembered him, tall and thin, and his greying hair giving him a sort of blond, youthful appearance. 'How nice to see you,' he said and I noticed that, unusually after such a time, his voice was more changed than his face. It had become important, as if he were addressing the boardroom of a corporation, or a village hall full of grateful tenants. 'How are you?' We shook hands and exchanged the usual platitudes about Long Time No See, while Dagmar fetched him a drink. He looked down as he took it. 'Isn't there any lemon?'

'Apparently not.'

'Why not?' Given that I was more or less a stranger to him, despite our protestations of delight in each other's company, William's tone to his spouse was oddly and uncomfortably severe.

'They must have forgotten to buy any.' She spoke as if she were locked in a cell with a potentially violent felon and was trying to attract the attention of the guards.

'They? Who are "they"? You mean "you."
You
have forgotten to ask them to buy any.' He sighed wearily, saddened by the pathetic mediocrity of his wife's abilities. 'Oh well. Never mind.' He sipped the drink, wrinkled his nose with displeasure and turned back to me. 'So, what brings you here?'

I explained about the charity, since I was not, naturally, about to go into the true reason. He looked at me with that face of
faux
concern that people use when listening to hard luck stories in the street. 'Of course, this is a marvellous cause, as I said to Dagmar when I first heard about it, and I admire you terrifically for getting involved . . .'

'But?'

'But I don't think it's one for us.' He paused, expecting me to come in and say that of course I understood, but I waited, without comment, until he felt sufficiently wrong-footed to elucidate. 'I don't want Dagmar to be held captive by all that. Obviously, the position of her family was a very interesting one, but it's finished. She's Lady Holman now. There's no need for her to cash in on some bogus title from the past, when she has a perfectly good one in the modern world. This kind of thing, vital as it might be,' he gave a smile but it did not reach his eyes, 'seems to me to take her backwards, not forwards.'

I turned to Dagmar for a comment, but she was silent. 'I don't see her position as bogus,' I said. 'She's a member of a ruling house.'

'An ex-ruling house.'

'They were on the throne until three years before she was born.'

'Which was a long time ago.'

This seemed needlessly ungallant. 'There are plenty of people living in exile who look to her brother for leadership.'

'Oh, I see. You think we'll all attend Feodor's coronation? I hope he can get the time off work.' He laughed suddenly, with a kind of sneer in the sound, as he brought his face round to Dagmar's, that she might fully register his contempt. It was intolerable. 'I'm afraid I find all that stuff is just an excuse for a few snobs to bow and curtsey and gee up their dinner parties.' He shook his head slowly, as if he were making a reasonable point. 'They should pay more attention to what's going on around them today.' He sipped his drink to punctuate the finality of his argument. In other words there could be no further discussion on the subject.

I turned to Dagmar. 'Do you agree?'

She took a breath. 'Well--'

'Of course she agrees. Now, when's lunch?' I saw then that the real burden of William's song was that for years he had endured being treated as Dagmar's moment of madness, the shaming
mesalliance
that had overtaken the Moravian dynasty, and now he didn't have to put up with it any more. Things had changed. Today, he was the one with the money, he was the one with the power and weren't we going to know about it. Worse than this, having triumphed, he could no longer tolerate Dagmar having any sort of position of her own. She must have no value at all other than as his wife, no podium where she might shine independent of his glory. In short, he was a bully. I understood now why the Grand Duchess's approval had been equivocal.

Luncheon was a curious event, providing as it did an endless series of opportunities for Dagmar to be publicly humiliated. 'What on earth is this?' 'Is it supposed to taste burnt?' 'Why are we eating with nursery cutlery?' 'Those flowers deserve a decent burial.' 'Shouldn't there be a sauce with this or did you ask for it to be dry?' If I had been Dagmar, I would have stood up, broken a large plate over his head and left him forever. And that was before we got to the pudding. But I know only too well that this kind of wife-battering, for that is what we were dealing with, destroys the will to resist and, to my sorrow, she simply took it. She even gave credence to his complaints by apologising for shortcomings that were entirely fictional. 'I am sorry. It should be hotter than this,' she would say. Or, 'You're right. I should have asked them to seal it first.' The limit came when William took a bite of the little
crepes Suzette
that had been brought in and spat it back onto his plate. 'Jesus!' he shouted at the top of his voice. 'What the hell is this made of? Soap?'