Past Imperfect

by Julian Fellowes

  At any rate, to resume, that spring there was a drinks party in the Fellows’ Quadrangle to which I’d been invited for some reason. I cannot now say if it was an official function or a private bash, but anyway there we all were, feeling clever and chosen, and probably still enjoying the college’s reputation for being ‘rather smart.’ How pitiful such mini-vanities seem, viewed from the tired vale of the middle years, but I don’t believe there was much harm in us, really. We thought we were grown up, which we weren’t, and posh, which we weren’t very, and that people would be glad to know us. I say this although, after my painful youth, I still preserved that all too familiar blend of pride and terror, that is so characteristic of the late teens, when nose-in-air snobbery goes hand in hand with social paranoia. Presumably it was this contradictory mixture that made me so vulnerable to attack.

  Oddly enough, I can recall the precise moment when Damian entered my life. It was fitting because I was talking to Serena when he appeared, so we both met him together, simultaneously, on the instant, a detail that seems much more curious on reflection than when I was living it. I don’t know why she was there. She was never a college groupie. Perhaps she was staying with someone nearby and had been brought. At any rate I won’t find the answer now. I didn’t know Serena at all well then, not as I would later, but we’d met. This is a distinction lost on the modern world, where people who have shaken hands and nodded a greeting will tell you they ‘know’ each other. Sometimes they will go further and assert, without any more to go on, that so-and-so is ‘a friend of mine.’ If it should suit the other party they will endorse this fiction and, in that endorsement, sort of make it true. When it is not true. Forty years ago we were, I think, more aware of the degree of a relationship. Which was just as well with someone as far beyond my reach as Serena.

  Lady Serena Gresham, as she was born, did not appear to suffer from the marbling of self-doubt that afflicted the rest of us and this made her stand out among us from the start. I could describe her as ‘unusually confident,’ but this would be misleading, as the phrase suggests some bright and brash self-marketeer, the very last description she would merit. It just never occurred to her to worry much about who or what she was. She never questioned whether people would like her, nor picked at the thing when they did. She was, one might say nowadays, at peace with herself and, in the teenage years, then as now, it made her special. Her gentle remoteness, a kind of floating, almost underwater quality, took possession of me from the first time I saw her and many years would pass before she did not pop into my defenceless brain at least once every half an hour. I know now that the main reason she seemed remote was because she wasn’t interested in me, or in most of us for that matter, but then it was pure magic. I would say it was her dreamy unattainability, more than her beauty or birth or privileges, though these were mighty, that gave her the position she enjoyed. And I know I am not alone in thinking of 1968 as the Year of Serena. Even as early as the spring, I felt myself lucky to be talking to her.

  As I have said, her privileges were great, if not unique, as a member of the select, surviving rump of the Old World. At that time, self-made fortunes were usually much smaller than they would be decades later and the very rich, at least those people who ‘lived rich,’ still tended mostly to be those who had been even richer thirty years before. It was an odd era for them, poor devils. So many families had gone to the wall in the post-war years. Friends they had dined and danced and hunted with before 1939 had tumbled down in the wreckage of their kind and it would not be long before most of the fallen had been engulfed by the upper middle class, never to regain their lost status. Even among those who had kept the faith, still in their houses, still shooting their own pheasants, there were many who gloomily subscribed to the philosophy of après moi le dèluge, and regularly vans would chug away, out through the gates towards the London auction houses, bearing the treasures that had been centuries in the assembling, so the family could stay warm and have something decent to wear for one more winter.

  But Serena was not afflicted by these pressures. She and the rest of the Greshams were part of the Chosen (very) Few and lived much as they had always lived. Perhaps there were only two footmen where once there had been six. Perhaps the chef had to manage on his own and I do not believe Serena or her sisters enjoyed the services of a lady’s maid. But otherwise not much had altered since the early 1880s, apart from their hemlines and being allowed to dine in restaurants.

  Her father was the ninth Earl of Claremont, a mellow, even charming, title and when I knew him, as I would do later, he was himself a mellow and charming man, never cross because he had never been crossed and so, like his daughter, very easy to be with. He too lived in a benign mist, although, unlike Serena, he was not a creature of myth, a lovely naiad eluding her swain. His vagueness was more akin to Mr Pastry. Either way, he never had much grasp of hard reality. Indeed, at times it felt as if the family’s soothing title had generated a placid sense of unquestioning acceptance in the dynasty, for which I now think, looking back, they were to be envied. I did not at that time believe that loving came easily to any of them, certainly not ‘being in love,’ which would have involved far too much disruption, with its horrid, sticky threats of indigestion and broken sleep, but they did not hate or quarrel either.

  Not that acceptance of their lot was very difficult. By dint of judicious investment and far-sighted marriage, the family had more than survived the rocky seas of the twentieth century thus far, with large estates in Yorkshire, a castle somewhere in Ireland, which I never saw, and a house on Millionaires’ Row, the private road running parallel to Kensington Palace, which was then considered quite something. These days, eastern potentates and people who own football clubs seem to have snapped up those vast edifices and made them private again, but at that time they had mostly fallen into embassies, one by one, with scarcely a family left. Except, of course, for the Claremonts, who occupied number 37, a lovely 1830s stone wedding cake, a shade too near Notting Hill.

  As if this were not enough, Serena was also very beautiful, with thick, russet hair and a complexion lifted straight from a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Her features added to her gift of serenity, of real grace, which is an unlikely word to use of a girl of eighteen, but in her case a truthful one. I do not know exactly what we talked about, either at that party in Cambridge or at the many gatherings and house parties where we would meet over the next two years, sometimes art, I think, or maybe history. She was never much of a gossip. This was not a tribute to her kindness so much as to her lack of interest in other people’s lives. Nor would there have been talk of a career, although she is not to blame for that. Even in the late Sixties, serious professional ambition would have marked her out uncomfortably among her contemporaries. That said, I was never bored in her company, not least because I must have been in love with her even then, long before I would acknowledge the fact, but the hopelessness implicit in loving such a star would have been all too obvious to that bundle of insecurities I call my unconscious mind and I shied away from certain failure. As anyone would.

  ‘Can I talk to you?’ said a deep, pleasant voice, just as I was approaching the punchline of a story. We looked up to find we had been joined by Damian Baxter. And we were glad of it which, to me now, is the strangest detail of all. ‘I don’t know anyone here,’ he added with a smile that would have melted Greenland. My impressions of Damian have been so overlaid by what came after that it is hard for me to dredge up my early feelings, but there’s no doubt that he was wonderfully attractive in those days, to men, women and children alike. Apart from anything else, he was so handsome, in a healthy, open-air sort of way, very handsome really, with bright, almost unnervingly blue eyes and thick, dark, wavy hair, worn long and in curls, as we all wore it then. He was fit, too, and muscular but without being sporty, or, worse, hearty, at all. He was just redolent of both health and intelligence, an unusual combination in my experience, and he looked as if he slept ten hours every night and had ne
ver tasted alcohol. Neither of which would be borne out by the facts.

  ‘Well, now you know us,’ said Serena and held out her hand.

  I need hardly say that of course he knew exactly who we were. Or rather, who she was. He gave himself away later that evening, when we ended up squashed into a corner table in a dubious and rather cramped restaurant off Magdalene Street. We had picked up a couple of other students when the drinks party disbanded but Serena was not with us. It would have been unusual if she had been. It was rare for her to drift into that kind of easily accessible arrangement. She usually had a good, if unspecified, reason for not joining in.

  The waiter brought the obligatory, steaming plates of boeuf bourgignon, with its glutinous and shiny sauce, that seemed to be our staple fare. This is not a criticism of the eaterie in question, more an acknowledgement of how and what we ate then, but I must not be ungrateful. Mounds of glazed stew, with rough red wine, was a big leg up, considering what had been on offer ten years before. There is, and should be, worthwhile debate about the merits of the changes the last four decades have brought to our society, but there can be few who do not welcome the improvement of English food, at least until the raw fish and general undercooking that arrived with the celebrity chefs of the new century. There is no doubt about it that when I was a child the food available to the general British public was simply pitiful, consisting largely of tasteless school dinners, with vegetables that had been boiling since the war. Occasionally, you might find something better on offer in a private house, but even smart restaurants served fussy, dainty platefuls, decorated with horrible rosettes of green mayonnaise and the like, that were more trouble in the eating than they were ever worth. So when the bistros began to arrive, with their check tablecloths and melting candles pushed into the necks of green wine bottles, we were glad of them. A decade later they had become a joke, but then they were our salvation.

  ‘Have you ever been to Serena’s house in Yorkshire?’ Damian asked. The other two looked puzzled, as well they might, since there had been no mention of Yorkshire or of the Claremont dynasty at any part of the conversation.

  This should have set off a thousand flashing bells, but, like the fool I was, I made nothing of it. I simply answered the question. ‘Once, but just for a charity thing a couple of years ago.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  I thought for a moment. I hadn’t retained any very precise image. ‘A Georgian pile. Very grand. But pretty.’

  ‘And big?’

  ‘Oh, yes, big. Not Blenheim. But big.’

  ‘I suppose you’ve always known each other?’ Again, as I would come to recognise, this was a clue, had I the sense to read it. From long before that evening Damian had a fiercely romantic view of the golden group from which he felt excluded, but which he was determined to enter. Although, looking back, even in 1968 it was a slightly odd ambition, especially for someone like Damian Baxter. Not that there weren’t plenty who shared it (and plenty who still do), but Damian was a modern creature, motivated, ambitious, strong – and if I say it of him it must be true. He was always going to find a place in the new society that was coming. Why did he want to bother with the fading glories of the blue bloods, those sad walking history books, when, for so many of those families, as with the potato, the best was already in the ground? Personally, I think he must have been cut dead at some gathering in youth, in front of a girl he fancied perhaps, snubbed, ignored and insulted by a drunken toff, until he fell into the cliché’d but very real goal of: ‘I’ll show you! Just you wait!’ It has, after all, been the spur of many great careers since the Conquest. But if this was the case, I never knew the incident that triggered it. Only that by the time we met, he had developed a personal mythology about the British aristocracy. He saw all its members as bonded together from birth, a tiny, tight club, hostile to newcomers, loyal to the point of reckless dishonesty when defending their own. There was some truth in this, of course, a good deal of truth in terms of attitude, but we were no longer living under a Whig oligarchy of a few thousand families. By the 1960s the catchment area, certainly for what remained of London Society, was far wider than he seemed aware of and the variety of types within it was much greater. Anyway, people are people, whoever they may be, and no world is as neat as he would have it.

  ‘No. I haven’t known her long at all, not properly. I might have met her a few times over the years, at this and that, but we only really talked for the first time at a tea party in Eaton Square a month or two ago.’

  He seemed amused. ‘A tea party?’ It did sound rather quaint.

  The tea party had, in fact, been given by a girl called Miranda Houghton at her parents’ flat on the north side of Eaton Square. Miranda was the god-daughter of my aunt or of some friend of my mother’s, I forget which. Like Serena, I’d seen her from time to time but without either of us making much of an impact; still, it qualified me for her guest list when the whole business began. These parties were one of the early rituals of the Season, even if, when recording it, one feels like an obscure archivist preserving for posterity the lost traditions of the Inuits. The girls would be encouraged to invite other would-be debutantes to tea, usually at their parents’ London homes, thereby forging useful friendships and associations for the larks to come. Their mothers would obtain lists of who else was doing the whole thing from the unofficial but widely recognised leader, Peter Townend, who would supply them free of charge and gladly, to those he considered worthy, in his gallant but doomed attempt to stave off the modern world for as long as might conceivably be possible. Later these same mothers would require of him other lists of supposedly eligible men and he would produce these too, although they were required more for drinks parties and dances than the teas, where men were few and normally, as in the case of me and Miranda, actually knew the hostess. Very little, if any, tea was provided or drunk at these gatherings and in my experience the atmosphere was always slightly strange, as each new arrival hesitantly picked their way across the floor. But all the same we went to them, me included. So I suppose we were committed to the coming experience from comparatively early on, whatever we might afterwards pretend.

  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 pro
claimed 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.