Past Imperfect (49 page)

'Not ridiculous.'

'Ridiculous. A loud, red-faced bed-hopper who was embarrassing to have around.' This was all true so I didn't contradict her, but as with almost all of the women I had visited I had that revelation of how much better we would have got on forty years before if we had only known each other's true natures. Candida shrugged off these memories with happier ones. 'Then Harry arrived one day and just saved me. He saved us. I don't know to this day what he saw in me, but we never had an unhappy hour.'

'He loved you.' Funnily enough I meant this. I could sort of begin to see what he had loved in her now, which came as something of a surprise.

She nodded, her eyes starting to glisten. 'I think he did. God knows why. And he took us both on. He adopted Archie, you know, completely legally, and then we had two more, and when he . . .' I could see that despite her strictures her eyes were filling, and so were mine. 'When he died it turned out he'd left some money equally to the three of them. Just split three ways. He made no distinction. And that meant so much to Archie. So
very
much. Did you know that all their mobiles worked, when they were trapped in the tower?'

I nodded. 'I read about that.'

'And what was so extraordinary, what was wonderful really, was that they didn't, most of them anyway, ring to yell for help. They rang the people who were nearest to them, their wives and husbands and children, to say how much they loved them. Harry did that. Of course I'd turned mine off - typical - and when I tried to call him back I couldn't get through, but he left a message saying how marrying me was the best thing he'd ever done. I saved it. I've got it now. He thanks me for marrying him. Can you imagine that? In the midst of all that fear and horror he thanked me for marrying him. So you see, I'm not sad at all in the greater scheme of things. I'm lucky.'

I looked at her coarse, ruddy face and her brimming eyes, and I knew she was absolutely right. 'So you are,' I said. I had arrived prepared to pity her, but in fact the time she'd spent since we last really talked had been infinitely more satisfactory than that same period in Terry's life or Lucy's or Dagmar's or, heaven knows, Joanna's. By anyone's reckoning Candida Stanforth, nee Finch, was the luckiest of the five on Damian's list. In all the standard categories reckoned important among these people she had started at the back of the field and ended up way out in front. 'Did you ever get into publishing? You used to say you wanted to.'

She nodded. 'I did. But proper publishing. Not the vanity stuff I thought would be my only way in. Harry made me. He pulled a string and got me a job as a reader at a small outfit that specialised in women writers. But I stuck at it and they kept me on. Eventually I edited quite a few books.'

'But not any more?'

'Not at the moment. I felt I needed to take time off, when . . .' I nodded, anxious not to return her to that dreadful day. 'But I'm thinking of going back. Actually, I was rather good at it.' In this simple phrase I knew what her debt to Harry Stanforth was and why she still fought for people to appreciate her luck in finding him. This Candida had self-worth, of which there'd hardly been a trace when I had known her in her ugly, angry, unhappy youth. In those days her childhood was too recent for its ill effects to have been set aside. 'The fact is I had twenty-three years with a terrific, honourable, lovely, loving man.' It was a simple, moving tribute and I had no difficulty in liking Harry enormously on the strength of it. She leant towards me and lowered her voice to a whisper. 'I'd rather be in my shoes than Serena's.' And we laughed, which brought things to an end. Not long afterwards, we went upstairs to change.

I was sleeping in a panelled, corner room, painted off-white, with large windows on two sides, and far-reaching views across the well-wooded park. There was a pretty, canopied bed, upholstered in good, if old, chintz and some Audubon prints of birds around the walls. It was all reasonably attractive, if unoriginal, but the faded colours of the material and the bright shocking pink of the mounts on the pictures made the whole effect feel very 1970s, as if no money had been spent anywhere in its vicinity for thirty years at least. I had my own bathroom, with more of the same colour scheme and a hot tap that made distant, gurgling noises full of intent but the water, when it came, was less than tepid. I sponged myself down as best I could and pulled some clothes out of the case.

The posh English love to sound informal. 'Nobody's coming,' they say. 'It'll just be us.' Which it seldom is. 'You won't have to do a thing,' when of course you will. Most of all, when they say 'don't change' they don't mean it. They do mean you are not to put on a dinner jacket, but not that you are to stay in the same clothes. It's funny in a way, because all you are doing, for an 'informal' dinner in the country is putting on another version of exactly what you wore at tea, particularly the men. But the point is that when you come down it must
be
another version. The only thing to steer clear of for a weekend is the dark suit. Unless there is some charity function or a funeral or something which has its own rules, a gentleman will get no use out of a city suit in the country, where, increasingly, it seems that there are two costumes for the evening, grand or tatters with nothing in between.

The re-rise of grand is rather interesting in this context as well, or it is to me. Contrary to the expectations of only a few years ago, dinner jackets, having known a lean period, and even more, smoking jackets, are once more on the rise. Of these I am more fascinated by the smoking jacket, a garment whose rules have entirely altered in my own time. Not all that long ago it showed the depth of ignorance to wear one in any house where you weren't at least sleeping and preferably living. But now that's changed. More and more country dinners are enlivened by a myriad of velvet shades stretched tight across the broad backs of the chaps. Usually without ties, an unfortunate fad for the middle-aged, whose red, mottled necks do not show to advantage. But having fought the fashion for a time, protesting it was 'quite incorrect,' I rather like it now; putting men into colour, as it does, for the first time in two centuries. As for the rag rules, the one imperative, as I have said, is that they should be different rags when you come down the stairs from the rags that you went up in. To me, the business of pulling off a shirt and jersey and a pair of cords, in order to bathe and put on another shirt, another jersey and another pair of cords can be a bit comedic, but there we are. You can't fight Tammany Hall. Anyway, on this particular evening I did my stuff and I was ready to go down to the drawing room, when I caught sight of a framed photograph on a chest to the right of the carved and painted chimneypiece. It was Serena and Candida, standing side by side in what must have been the receiving line for their Coming Out dance at Gresham. I could make out the portraits in the hall behind them and in the picture Lady Claremont was just turning to one side, as if her attention had been caught by an arriving guest. Then I saw the figure of a young man a few paces back, behind the girls but with his face fixed eagerly on them as if he couldn't look away. Which I knew at once that he could not. For it was me.

As far as anything can be in this mortal setting, the ball at Gresham Abbey for Serena Gresham and Candida Finch was more or less perfection. For some reason it was held quite late, after the summer break, at a time of the year leading up to Christmas that used then to be labelled 'The Little Season.' We were fairly jaded by that stage, having been doing the rounds since the end of the spring and there was not much that a hostess could produce to surprise us, but Lady Claremont had decided, perhaps because she was aware of this, that she would not surprise, she would merely perfect. For some strange reason I kept all my invitations for quite a long time but I have lost them now, so I forget whether it was held in late October or early November. It was definitely a winter ball and we all knew it would be the last really big, private one before the charity balls took over and the whole rigmarole wound up, which in a way gave the evening a kind of built-in romance.

I had stayed at Gresham a few times by that stage and of course I had hoped to be included in the abbey house party, but the competition was predictably stiff and I was not. As it turned out, my host was a fairly dreary one but not insultingly so, a retired general, with his nice, typical army wife, who lived in a small manor house entirely decorated in that sort of non-taste that such people can go in for. Nothing was actually ugly or common, but nothing was charming or pretty either, except for the odd painting or piece of furniture they had inherited through no merit of their own. A couple of the ones who were staying qualified as friends, Minna Bunting and that same Sam Hoare who had featured as another witness to the Battle of the Mainwarings before Minna's dance, and the others were all quite familiar as well, since we had been performing this ritual together for six months by then. As usual, some local couples came for the dinner, a blameless concoction of salmon mousse (
comme toujours
), chicken a la king and creme brulee, a menu more suited perhaps to an aged invalid with no teeth than a bunch of ravenous teenagers, but we made the best of it and chatted away quite sociably. There was nothing wrong with any of this, but nor was there anything of much interest in it and it was certainly no distraction from the main purpose of the evening: To get to the dance. Sometimes the dinners and house parties could be so entertaining that one lingered and arrived at the dance a little too late to enjoy it. But there was certainly no chance of that on this occasion. After a polite interval had passed we drank up our coffee, slid away to the loo and clambered into the cars.

There was a kind of general excitement in the air when we entered the hall, though I did not then know why. Serena and Candida and the Claremonts were standing there receiving. 'I'm so glad you could come,' said Serena and kissed me, which nearly winded me, as usual. 'I wish you were staying here,' she added in a whisper, as a compliment rather than because she meant it. I had become a bit of a Gresham regular by the end of that year, having been billeted with them for a couple of northern dances and staying once on my own on the way down from Scotland, and I was in danger of succumbing to that awful smugness of trying to demonstrate that one is a welcome guest somewhere enviable, but I did not suspect at the time, what I know now, that the welcome I always received was a reflection of Serena's enjoyment of my being in love with her. I do not mean she was interested in me romantically, not in the least, only that she wanted me to go on being in love with her until it wasn't fun any more. The young are like that. I can now remember when the photograph was taken. I was still reeling in bliss from her comment and I was unable to make myself move out of the room where she stood, even though I knew I had to give place, so I stepped behind them, where I could linger a little longer; then a flash went off and I was caught forever, like a fly in amber. Lucy Dalton rescued me, taking my arm and walking me away. 'What's your house party like?'

'Dull but respectable.'

'Sounds like paradise compared to mine. There doesn't seem to be any running water. Literally. Nothing comes out of the taps except a dirty trickle of what looks like prune juice. Doesn't Serena look marvellous? But of course you're not the man to disagree with
that
. I hear the discotheque is
fabulous
. It was done by someone's boyfriend, but I forget who. Come on.' All this was delivered in one spurt without pause or breath, so I couldn't hope to come in with a comment.

The discotheque
was
fabulous. It occupied a large section of what must normally have been a basement servants' hall or even a section of the no doubt extensive wine cellars. A doorway under the main staircase was surrounded by synthetic flames and a sign read 'Welcome to Hell!' While on the other side of the door the entire space, including the walls of the staircase leading down, was covered in foil and flames made of tinsel and satin, blown with fans and lit by a spinning wheel, making them flicker and leap, so they really did feel quite real. At the bottom the hell theme embraced the entire area, with huge copies of the grimmer paintings by Hieronymus Bosch lining the walks with images of suffering, while the fire and flames played over the heads of the dancers. As a final detail the DJ and two of the waitresses had been put into scarlet devils' outfits, so they could attend to the guests while maintaining the illusion. The only discordant note came from the music, some of which seemed very out of place in Hades. When we came down the steps a popular ballad by the Turtles,
Elenore
, was playing. Somehow the lyrics, 'I really think you're groovy, let's go out to a movie,' didn't quite chime with the Tortures of the Damned.

We danced and gossiped and said hello to other people for a bit until, round about half past eleven or maybe midnight, a sudden rush for the staircase told us that something was happening we wouldn't want to miss.

Lucy and I struggled up to the hall in our turn and found we were carried along in the crush towards the State Dining Room, which had been designated the main ballroom of the evening. The space had been cleared of furniture and somehow, unlike most of the other houses I had penetrated, the stage erected at one end for the band and, more unusually, the lighting looked entirely professional. This put a spin on the proceedings from the start, even before we knew what was happening. I don't quite know why, but there was always something satisfactory in dancing inside a great house and not in a marquee with wobbly coconut matting and a portable dance floor, and Gresham Abbey was the very acme of a great house. Stern, full-lengths of earlier, male Greshams lined the walls of the enormous room, in armour and brocade and Victorian fustian, in lovelocks and perukes and periwigs, extending their white, stockinged legs to display the garters that encased them. Above the marble chimneypiece a vast, equestrian portrait of the first Earl of Claremont by Kneller dominated the chamber, a loud, impressive statement of self-congratulation, and the contrast between the rigid splendour of this symbol of high birth and high achievement and the crowd of teenage young writhing away below it was almost startling.