Past Imperfect (41 page)

The events that followed a little while later seemed to start almost as a rumour, a sense of strangeness spreading through the gathering, before anyone was aware of the source. I recall that I was dancing with Minna Bunting, although our little walkout was over by that stage, and there was suddenly the sound of someone being violently sick. Which, then, was very startling. People on the dance floor began to look at each other, as there were more odd sounds, men and women started to scream with laughter, not ordinary amused laughter, but a shrill cackling like a witches' coven at work. In what seemed like no time at all we could hear shouting and singing and yelling and crying coming from every corner. I looked at my partner to share my puzzlement, but even she didn't look too clever. 'I feel incredibly ill,' she muttered and walked off the floor without another word. I hurried after her, but at the edge she suddenly clutched her head and ran off somewhere, presumably to a distant but welcoming cloakroom. Somehow the dancers themselves had maintained a kind of order, but once we had left them, the crowd filling the rest of the rooms and swirling around us felt slightly - or, before long,
very -
mad. One of the mothers rushed past me, with her bosom hanging out of her dress and I saw Annabella Warren, Andrew Summersby's sister, screaming and lying flat out, with her skirt hitched above her midriff, displaying some thoroughly unusual-looking underwear, possibly recycled by her nanny. Not far away a young man in the corner was in the process of pulling his shirt over his head. In the melee I had soon lost sight of Minna, but someone caught my arm.

'What the hell's going on?' Georgina was by my side, her impressive bulk providing me with something to shelter behind. A girl tripped and fell, spreadeagled at our feet, laughing.

'Come on, everybody! Clap your hands!' The voice, amplified by the microphone, was only too familiar. We turned and registered that the boy undressing was now revealed as none other than Master Baxter, who had shed the rest of his clothes, and was cavorting wildly round the stage in his underpants and looking in grave danger of losing even those.

By now the ballroom was bedlam. Some people must have escaped at the first signs of trouble, with that marvellous instinct that the British upper classes generally display in such a situation, but those who were not at the exits already were finding it increasingly hard to get to them. Suddenly I caught sight of Terry, in the midst of the demented crowd. Her hair had collapsed and a separate arrangement of ringlets had detached itself from her head and somehow got caught on a zip or hook fastener behind her neck, leaving a kind of mane to sweep down her back, making her look faintly feral as she attempted to claw her way through the ranks of her guests. I reached across a weeping man with his regurgitated dinner down his front and caught her wrist, pulling her through the crowd towards us. 'What is it? What's happening?'

'Somebody spiked the brownies. They were full of hash.'

'What?' Is it to be believed that the word was not immediately familiar to me? Or was it just the shock of discovery blocking my concentration?

'Hash. Marijuana. Dope.' Terry was altogether more at home with the topic, if angrier than Genghis Khan.

'Why? Who would do such a thing?'

'Someone who wanted to ruin my party and pretend to themselves it was a joke.' This was, I have no doubt, a completely accurate diagnosis. She was rich, she was good-looking, she was an outsider. That was more than enough to ensure enmity in several quarters, although this seemed an unusually unpleasant way of demonstrating it. Then again, the perpetrator may not have been aware of the level of mayhem that would ensue from their jolly prank. We were not all experts then.

'You seem OK.'

'I'm OK because I'm on a diet.' She said it snappily and it was almost funny, if we had not been in the middle of such desolation. At that moment a weeping Verena Vitkov claimed her daughter from the other side. Someone had trodden on her dress, and it had torn away from a seam at the waist, leaving not her legs but her roll-on exposed, which was of course much worse.

'Let's get out of here,' I said to Georgina and she nodded, but then two things happened. The first was that I could see Serena Gresham had climbed on to the stage with a dinner jacket, presumably Damian's, which she was trying to wrap round him despite his protests. She also had his trousers over her arm but obviously that task was a bridge too far and she didn't even attempt it. The second thing to catch at our attention was the sound of a police whistle, which echoed through the chamber like the shrill tolling of Doom. At once, what had already been chaos was transformed into a panicking stampede. It is easy now to think, almost calmly, of the notion of a drugs raid. In the forty years that have elapsed since these events, drugs themselves have ceased to seem extraordinary. Regrettable, I would hope, and something to be avoided for most of us even today, but no longer weird. In those days the vast majority of this crowd were strangers to the very notion. Whatever the impression that pop stars and Channel Four like to give of the Sixties, if their tales are true, which I often doubt, they were operating in a different world from my bunch. Obviously the bad boys among us were starting to experiment and by seven or eight years later a lot of us would have been introduced to the whole trendy culture of drugs and damn-it-all, but not by then. After all, most of what came to be called 'the Sixties' happened in the following decade. Yet here we were, debutantes and beaux, plus many of their mothers and fathers, in a full-scale drugs raid, which would provide, as we were only too aware, a perfectly wonderful story for the papers the following day. Out of family loyalty, if nothing else, all those nice, young sons and daughters of earls and viscounts, of high court judges and generals, of bankers and heads of corporations, had to get out of that room unseen and unapprehended, to stop their blameless daddies being soaked in the spray of public ridicule that was even then being loaded up, ready to flow. If the room had been on fire there couldn't have been a more urgent dash for the door.

I too would have headed in the same direction as the crowd, but Georgina held me back. 'It's hopeless,' she said. 'They'll be waiting for us on the pavement.'

'Where, then?'

'This way. There'll be a service exit for the group. And the maids must have been bringing the drinks up from somewhere.'

Together we pushed against the crowd. I glimpsed Candida Finch, green-faced and at the end of her tether, leaning against the opposite wall but she was too far away for me to help her. Some girls were dancing a sort of reel, accompanying themselves with alternating screams, in the middle of the floor between us. Then Candida was swept away and I didn't see her again. 'This is a nightmare.' Serena was nearly upon me when I realised who it was. She had an arm round Damian, who was still ranting and calling out to everyone to clap their hands. 'I'll clap
your
hands if you don't shut up,' she said, but it didn't seem to have much effect. Damian fell, and others surged over him, until I really began to wonder if he would be seriously injured. 'Help me get him up.' Serena was down among the lunging feet and I knew I had to do my best. Together we managed to hook our arms under his and literally drag him to the edge of the room.

'Why are you all right? Didn't you eat any either?'

Serena wrinkled her nose. 'I wasn't hungry.'

'Here we go!' The enterprising Georgina had found a service door at the back behind a curtain that a few people, but not many, were taking advantage of. Behind us, the whistles and general shouting had increased in volume, and it was clear that those who had tried to leave in a more orthodox manner were being subjected to hideous humiliations before they were allowed to do so.

'My God, the press is outside!' This from Lucy, who had started down the main stair, only to make this unwelcome discovery and beat a retreat whence she had come. 'If I get in the paper my father will kill me.' It's funny. We were so much more governed by these considerations than our equivalents are now.

Following our leader, Georgina, we came to a landing at the top of a stone, service staircase. Guests in various stages of dishevelment were hurrying down it. One girl broke her heel and fell the remainder of the second flight with a scream, but without pausing she scrambled up, tore the shoe off the other foot and plunged on. Unfortunately, Damian seemed to be getting worse. He had now ceased his requests for us to clap our hands and had decided instead simply to go to sleep. 'I'm perfectly all right,' he murmured, his chin sinking deeply into his chest. 'I just need a little shut-eye and then I'll be as right as rain.' Down went his chin even further, followed by his eyelids, and he began to snore.

'We'll have to leave him,' said Georgina. 'They won't kill him. He'll just have his name taken, and a warning or something of the kind, and that'll be the end of it.'

'I'm not leaving him,' said Serena. 'Who knows what they'll do? And what happens afterwards? If he has his name on a list at a drugs raid, he might never get a passport or a security rating or a job at an embassy or anything.' This string of words, flooding out as they did, created a rather marvellous contrast to the life we were leading at that precise moment, cowering on a dingy, back stairway, on the run from the police. It conjured up images of embassy gatherings at which Damian would shine, and foreign travel and important work in the City. I found myself wishing that Serena had voiced such fragrant worries about my destiny.

But Georgina was unconvinced. 'Don't be ridiculous,' she said. He's not newsworthy. That's the only thing we have to worry about. You're a headline. She's a headline. Even I'm worth a mention. He's not. Leave him here to sleep it off. Maybe they won't come up this far.'

'I'm not leaving him,' said Serena. 'You go without us if you want.'

I remembered her defence of Damian at Dagmar's ball, when she stood up for him alone and all the rest of us were silent. I decided I was not prepared for a repetition. 'I'll help,' I said. 'If we balance him between us we'll manage.' She looked at me. I could tell she was pretty grateful not to have been taken up on her suggestion of facing the Mongol hordes alone. So we did just as I said. Hoisting him up, and against a low chorus of Damian's mumbled protests about just needing a little shuteye, the group of us somehow got him to the bottom of the stair. We hurried past the ground floor, since we could hear the shouted protests of indignant adults being stopped and questioned, as well as screams and yells and singing coming from the young. Eventually we found ourselves in a basement, searching for a door or window that would open.

We were alone, a little club against the world, in a very murky passage, when a side door opened and a girl stuck her head out. 'There's a window here that seems to lead out to an alley,' she said and ducked back inside the room. I did not know her well. Her name was Charlotte Something and she ended up a countess, but I forget which one it was. Nevertheless, I shall always remember her with real gratitude. She had no obligation to come back and tell us of her useful find, instead of just climbing out and running for it. That kind of generosity, when there is nothing in it for the giver, is what always touches one most. Anyway, we followed her into what must have been a sort of cleaning cupboard because it was full of brushes and dusters and tins of polish, and sure enough there was an unbarred window, which had been forced open for what looked like the first time since the Armistice.

Here, as before, the problem was Damian, almost comatose by this point, and we wrestled with him for a bit until finally Georgina, who was stronger than any of us, bent down and threw her shoulder beneath him in a sort of fireman's lift and, with an exasperated sigh, flung him at the open space. Serena had already climbed out and was able to grab one arm and his head, and with her and Lucy pulling, while Georgina and I pushed, we did succeed in getting him through, although it was too much like assisting at the delivery of a baby elephant for my taste. There were men's voices in the passage outside, as Georgina squeezed out, and I would guess I was probably the last to make it to freedom by that route before it was sealed off by the enemy. We pulled down the window as quickly as we could, then raced to the end of the alley, Georgina and I dragging Damian between us. You will understand that to be pulling a largish young man, naked except for underpants and a dinner jacket, was unusual to say the least of it, and we could not consider ourselves out of danger until Serena, waving us into the shadows, had managed to stop an innocent taxi driver, who had no idea what he was letting himself in for.

'Where shall we take him?' she hissed over her shoulder and even I could see that this would be a large mouthful for the Claremonts to swallow on an empty stomach. I imagine he had originally planned to drive himself back to Cambridge, after a cup of coffee or two, as I blush to say we did in those days, but clearly that was now out of the question.

'My flat. Wetherby Gardens,' I said. My parents were there, but after nineteen years of me they were not entirely unequipped for this sort of escapade. Serena gave the address and, opening the door, she climbed in ready for Georgina and me to rush Damian across the pavement and into the welcoming darkness of the cab. We made it, clambering in with puffing and sighing, and Lucy hurried in behind us. It may sound as if the taxi was overloaded and so it was, but you must understand we thought nothing of that, neither passenger nor driver, and nor did the powers that be. They weren't concerned with micro-managing our lives, as they are today, and in this I think, indeed I know, that we were happier for it. Some changes have been improvements, on some the jury is still out, but when it comes to the constant, meddling intervention by the state, we were much, much better off then than we are now. Of course, there were times when we were at risk and the smug, would-be controllers will tut-tut at that, but to encourage the surrender of freedom in order to avoid danger is the hallmark of a tyranny and always a poor exchange.