Past Imperfect (6 page)

I was sitting in the corner, talking about hunting to a rather dull girl with freckles, when Serena Gresham came in and I could tell at once, from the faintest
frisson
that went through the assembled company, that she had already earned a reputation as a star. This was all the better managed as no one could have been less presumptuous or more softly spoken than she. Happily for me, I was near the last remaining empty chair. I waved to her and, after taking a second to remember who I was, she crossed the room and joined me. It is interesting to me now that Serena should have conformed to all this. Twenty years later, when the Season had become the preserve of exhibitionists and the daughters of
parvenu
mothers on the make, she would not have dreamed of it. I suppose it is a tribute to the fact that even someone as seemingly untrammelled as Serena would still, in those dead days, do as she was told.

'How do you know Miranda?' I asked.

'I don't, really,' was her answer. 'We met when we were both staying with some cousins of mine in Rutland.' One of Serena's gifts was always to answer every question quickly and easily, without a trace of mystery, but without imparting any information.

I nodded. 'So, will you be doing the whole deb thing?'

I do not wish to exaggerate my own importance, but I'm not convinced that before this she had fully faced the extent of the undertaking. She thought for a moment, frowning. 'I don't know.' She seemed to be looking into some invisible crystal ball, hovering in mid-air. 'We'll have to see,' she added and, in doing so, gave me a sense of her half-membership of the human race that was at the heart of her charm, a kind of emotional platform ticket that would allow her to withdraw at any moment from the experience on hand. I was entranced by her.

I outlined a little of this to Damian as we ate. He was fascinated by every detail, like an anthropologist who has long proclaimed a theory as an article of faith, but only recently begun to discover any real evidence of its truth. I suspect that Serena was the first completely genuine aristocrat he had ever met and, perhaps to his relief, he found her to be entirely undisappointing. She was in truth exactly what people reading historical novels, bought from a railway bookshop before a long and boring journey, imagine aristocratic heroines to be, both in her serene beauty and in her cool, almost cold, detachment. Despite what they themselves might like to think, there are few aristocrats who conform very satisfactorily to the imagined prototype and it was Damian's good fortune, or bad, that he should have begun his social career with one who did so perfectly. It was clear that for him there was something wonderfully satisfactory in the encounter. Of course, had he been less fortunate in his introduction to that world he might have been luckier in the way things turned out.

'So how do you get on to the list for these tea parties?' he asked.

The thing was, I liked him. It feels odd to write those words and there have been times when I have quite forgotten it, but I did. He was fun and entertaining and good-looking, always a recommendation for anyone where I'm concerned, and he had that quality, now dignified with the New Age term of Positive Energy, but which then simply indicated someone who would never wear you out. Years later, a friend would describe her world to me as being peopled entirely by radiators and drains. If so, then Damian was King Radiator. He warmed the company he was in. He could make people want to help him, which alchemy he practised, most successfully, on me.

As it happened, in this instance I could not deliver what Damian was asking for, as he had really missed the tea parties. These little informal gatherings were very much a preliminary weeding process, when the girls would seek out their playmates for the coming year within the overall group, and by the time of our Cambridge dinner the gangs were formed and the cocktail parties had already begun, although, as I told him, the first I was due to attend was not in fact a deb party as such, but one of a series given by Peter Townend, the Season's Master of the Ceremonies, at his London flat. It may seem strange to a student of these rites to learn that for the last twenty or thirty years of their existence they were entirely managed by an unknown northerner of no birth and modest means, but the fact remains that they were. Naturally, Damian had heard the name and almost immediately, with his hound-like scent for quarry, he asked if he might tag along, and I agreed. This was distinctly risky on my part as Townend was jealous of his powers and privileges, and to turn up casually with a hanger-on, was to risk devaluing the invitation, which he would certainly not take kindly. Nevertheless, I did it and so, a week or two later, when I parked my battered green mini without difficulty in Chelsea Manor Street, Damian Baxter was sitting beside me in the passenger seat.

I say Peter was jealous of his role and so he was, but he was entitled to be. From a modest background, with which he was perfectly content, and after a career in journalism and editing where his speciality was genealogy, he had one day discovered his personal vocation would be to keep the Season alive, when Her Majesty's decision to end Presentation in 1958 had seemed to condemn the whole institution to immediate execution. We know now that it was instead destined to die a lingering death, and maybe simple decapitation might have been preferable, but nobody knows the future and at that time it seemed that Peter, single-handedly, had won it an indefinite reprieve. The Monarch would play no further part in it, of course, which knocked the point and the stuffing out of it for many, but it would still have a purpose in bringing together the offspring of like-minded parents, and this was the responsibility he took on. He had no hope of reward. He did it solely for the honour of the thing, which in my book makes it praiseworthy, whatever one's opinion of the end product. Year by year he would comb the stud books, Peerage and Gentry, writing to the mothers of daughters, interviewing their sons, all to buy another few months for the whole business. Can this really have been only forty years ago? you may ask in amazement. The answer's yes.

Peter's own gatherings were not to select or encourage the girls. That had all been done some time before. No, they were basically to audition those young men who had come to his attention as possible escorts and dancing partners for the parties to come. Having been vetted, their names would either be underscored or crossed off the lists that were distributed to the anxious waiting mothers, who would assume that the cads and seducers, the alcoholics and the gamblers and those who were NSIT (not safe in taxis) would all have been excised from the names presented. They should have been, of course, but it was not entirely plain sailing, viz. the first two young men to greet us as we pushed into the narrow hall of the squashed and ill-furnished flat, at the top of a block built in the worst traditions of the late 1950s. These were the younger sons of the Duke of Trent, Lord Richard and Lord George Tremayne, who were both already drunk. A stranger might have thought that since neither was attractive or funny in the least, Peter would not deem them ideally suited to the year ahead. But this would be to ignore human nature and it was not really his fault that there were those he could not exclude. Certainly, the Tremayne brothers would enjoy a kind of popularity, somehow acquiring the reputation for being 'live wires,' which they were not. The fact is their father was a duke and, even if he could not have held down the job of a parking attendant in the real world, that was enough to guarantee their invitations.

We moved on into the crowded, main room, I hesitate to call it the drawing room, since it had many functions, but that was where we found Peter, his characteristic cowlick of hair falling over his crumpled, pug-like face. He pointed at Damian. 'Who he?' he said in a loud and overtly hostile voice.

'May I introduce Damian Baxter?' I said.

'I never invited him,' said Peter, quite unrelenting. 'What's he doing here?' Peter had, as I have said, made a decision not to pass himself off as a product of the system he so admired and in a moment like this I understood why. Since he had not posited himself as an elegant gentleman, he did not feel any need to be polite if it did not suit him. In short, he never disguised his feelings, and over the years I came both to like and to admire him for it. Of course, his words may read as if his anger was directed towards the unwelcome guest, when it was instead entirely meant for me. I was the one who had broken the rules. In the face of this attack I'm afraid I foundered. It seems odd, certainly to the man I am today, but I know I was suddenly anxious at the thought of all those treats, which I had planned for and which were in his gift, slipping away. It might have been less troublesome if they had.

'Don't blame him,' said Damian, seeing the problem and moving quickly in beside us. 'Blame me. I very much wanted to meet you, Mr Townend, and when I heard he was coming here I forced him to bring me. It's entirely my fault.'

Peter stared at him. 'That's my cue to say you're welcome, I suppose.'

His tone could not have been less hospitable but Damian, as ever, was unfazed. 'It's your cue to ask me to leave if you wish. And of course I will.' He paused, a trace of anxiety playing across his even features.

'Very smooth,' said Peter in his curious, ambiguous, almost petulant way. He nodded towards a bewildered Spaniard holding a tray. 'You can have a drink if you like.' I do not at all believe he was won over by Damian's charm, then or later. I would say he simply recognised a fellow player who might be possessed of great skill and was reluctant to make an enemy of him on their first encounter. As Damian moved away, Peter turned back to me. 'Who is he? And where did he pick you up?' This in itself was curiously phrased.

'Cambridge. I met him at a party in my college. As to who he is,' I hesitated. 'I don't know much about him, really.'

'Nor will you.'

I felt rather defensive. 'He's very nice.' I wasn't quite sure how or why I'd been cast as protector, but apparently I had. 'And I thought you might like him, too.'

Peter followed Damian with his eyes, as he took a drink and started to chat up a wretched overweight girl with a lantern jaw, who was hovering nervously on the edge of the proceedings. 'He's an operator,' he said and turned to greet some new arrivals.

If he was an operator, the operation bore fruit almost immediately. This would not have surprised me much further on in our acquaintance, as by then I would have known that Damian would never be so idle as to waste an opportunity. He was always a worker. His worst enemy would concede that. In fact, he just did. Damian had, after all, made it into Peter's sanctum without any guarantee of a return engagement. There was no time to be lost.

The awkward lantern-jawed girl, whom I now recognised gazing up at Damian as he showered her with charm, went by the name of Georgina Waddilove. She was the daughter of a city banker and an American heiress. Quite how Damian had selected her for his opening salvo I am not entirely sure. Perhaps it was just a warrior's sense of where the wall might most easily be breached and which girl was the most vulnerable to attack. Georgina was a melancholy character. To anyone who was interested, and there were not many, this could be traced to her mother who, with an imprecise knowledge of England and after a courtship conducted entirely during her husband's posting in New York after the war, had been under the illusion at the time of her wedding that she was marrying into a much higher caste than was in fact the case. When they did return to England, in late 1950, with two little boys and a baby daughter, she had arrived in her new country with confident expectations of stalking at Balmoral and foursome suppers at Chatsworth and Stratfieldsaye. What she discovered, however, was that her husband's friends and family came, almost exclusively, from the same prosperous, professional money-people that she had played tennis with in the Hamptons since her girlhood. Her husband, Norman (and perhaps the name should have given her a clue), had not consciously meant to deceive her but, like many Englishmen of his type, particularly when abroad, he had fallen into the habit of suggesting that he came from a smarter background than he did and, far away in New York, this was only too easy. After spending nine years there he came almost to believe his own fiction. He would talk so freely of Princess Margaret or the Westminsters or Lady Pamela Berry, that he would probably have been as surprised as his listeners to discover that everything he knew of these people he had gleaned from the pages of the
Daily Express.

The net result of this disappointment was not, however, divorce. Anne Waddilove had her children to think about and divorce in the 1950s still exacted a high social price. Norman had made quite a lot of money, so instead she resolved to use it to correct for her offspring the deficiencies and disappointments of her own existence. For the boys this meant good schools, shooting and proper universities, but from early on she was determined to launch her daughter with a dizzying season that would result in a dazzling marriage. Grandchildren would then follow, who would do her Royal stalking by proxy. So did Mrs Waddilove plan the future of the wretched Georgina, condemned to live her mother's life and not her own from more or less the moment the child could walk. Which may explain the parent's blindness to a simple truth, so clear to the rest of the world, that Georgina was hopelessly unsuited to the role expected of her. Good-looking and poised as Anne Waddilove was, she had not anticipated that nature would play a joke on her in giving her a daughter who was as plain as a pikestaff, fat as a barrel and
gauche
to boot. To make matters worse, Georgina's shy nervousness invariably gave a (false) first impression of stupidity, nor was she at all, by choice, gregarious. Since she wasn't in line for a major inheritance - the presence of two boys in a family generally knocks that on the head - the match Mrs Waddilove had dreamed of seemed what can only be described as highly unlikely by the time Georgina had completed her first few weeks as a debutante.