Past Imperfect

by Julian Fellowes

  ‘To quote Madame Greffulhe: “Que j’ai jamais su.”’ Lucy laughed. But by now people really were starting to sit down, and so we set out on the journey back to her mother’s table.

  ‘Who’s Madame WhatNot?’ I asked.

  ‘Marcel Proust used to go to her parties, when he was young. Years later, they asked her what it was like having such a genius in her salon, and she replied: “Que j’ai jamais su!”’

  ‘If only I’d known.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  I was silent, wondering how Damian knew these things. How did he know Lucy knew them? I learned later it was one of his gifts. Like a squirrel, he would seek out and store any unlikely tidbit, in this case the startling news that Lucy Dalton read Proust, and he would save it for a time when it could be used to create an instant, magic bond that would exclude the others present, making him and whoever his target might be into a cosy club of two. I have seen the trick employed by others, but seldom to such effect. He never misjudged the moment. Lucy smiled. ‘Please don’t tell me you’re surprised.’

  ‘I am a bit.’ I looked around at the chattering, giggling throng, pulling their chairs up to the tables with their shining, white cloths. ‘I doubt that most of this lot read Proust.’

  ‘If they did, they wouldn’t tell you. The men here will exaggerate what they know. The women will conceal it.’ I hope these words would not be true now, but I’m afraid they were true then.

  She enjoyed my wrong-footed silence, until I was the one to break it. ‘I thought you didn’t like him,’ I said, which seemed a non sequitur, but wasn’t.

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t much. Who told you I’d asked him first?’

  ‘He did. Why? Was it a secret?’

  ‘No.’ She looked at me. ‘I’m sorry. I should have invited you before him. I must have assumed you’d already be going.’

  I nodded genially. ‘That’s all right. Don’t apologise. Why shouldn’t you ask him first? He’s much better looking than I am.’ Which annoyed her as I intended that it should, but the opportunity for rebuttal was gone. We were back with their party and Lady Dalton was pointing us to our allotted chairs. I had been placed between Carla Wakefield and Candida.

  During the first course I talked to Carla about whom we both knew and where we’d both studied, about our plans for the summer and the sports we enjoyed, until the half-eaten salmon was taken away and the inevitable chicken was brought in and I turned to my other neighbour. I could see at once that more of the same would not quite answer.

  ‘You’re very good at this, aren’t you?’ she said and, while it was not exactly voiced in a hostile manner, it wasn’t all that friendly, either.

  ‘Thank you,’ I replied. She had not, of course, meant it as a compliment, but by taking it as one I hadn’t left her any room for manoeuvre. She glowered at her plate. I tried a more honest approach. ‘If you don’t enjoy it, why are you doing it?’ I asked.

  She stared at me. ‘Because my aunt arranged the whole thing before I was given a choice. Because she is the only relative I have who cares whether I live or die. Most of all, because I don’t know what else to do.’ As usual, when discussing her family arrangements she spoke with a kind of ill-repressed fury. ‘My stepmother has had charge of me since I was fourteen, and as a result of her bizarre requirements when it comes to female instruction, I am uneducated, untrained and completely unequipped for any productive work. Now I am supposed to “make a life for myself,” whatever that means. My cousin Serena tells me that things would improve if I knew more people in London. I do not dispute this – only these are not the sort of people I want to know more of.’ With a dismissive snort she indicated the body of the room.

  It did seem very hard to have lost both parents by the time she was eighteen, even if Oscar Wilde would have thought it careless. ‘Where were you at school?’

  ‘Cullingford Grange.’

  I had vaguely heard of it. ‘Isn’t that in Hertfordshire?’

  Candida nodded. ‘It’s the kind of place where they worry if you’re reading too much, instead of being out in the nice fresh air.’ She rolled her eyes at the strangeness of her stepmother’s choices. ‘I could recite the rules of hockey in my sleep, but unfortunately nothing was taught about literature, mathematics, history, art, politics or life.’ I believed her because her account was only too familiar.

  I think, I pray, I come from the last generation of the privileged to pay no attention to the education of their daughters. Even in 1968 there were women’s colleges at Cambridge and Oxford, but they were, as a rule, filled with the daughters of the bourgeois intelligentsia. Posh girls were an oddity and indeed almost the only one I can remember from my own year left after one term to marry a man with a castle in Kent. There were exceptions, but these generally came from families who were known to cherish an eccentric tradition of educating their women, rather than from the run-of-the-mill squireachy. For the rest, parents would scrimp and save to send the boys to Eton or Winchester or Harrow, while their sisters were put into the charge of some alcoholic, Belgian countess, whose main instruction was not to bother the parents.

  After leaving, a girl might spend a year at a finishing school where she could polish her languages and her skiing, then another year would pass in coming out, after which she would get a job arranging flowers in the boardroom or cooking lunches for directors or working for her father, until she had discovered Mr Right who, with any luck, would be the heir to Lord Right. And that would be that. Hopefully, the Hon. John Right would be right for Mummy and Daddy, too, since they, like their own parents, would expect to approve the choice. Our mothers may not have been pushed into their marriages in the Thirties and Forties, but they had certainly been kept out of any marriages their parents disapproved of. We all had stories of aunts and great-aunts who had been sent to study painting in Florence, or to live with a grandmother in Scotland, or to improve their French at some mountainous chateau in the Swiss Alps, to break them of a bad love habit and, lest those Barbara Cartland addicts think differently, usually it worked.

  I do not mean to imply that all who followed this path were wretched. Lots of them were as happy as clams. They spent the early years of marriage in some part of London their mothers found unlikely, then, if they’d chosen well, they might move into the big house on their father-in-law’s estate (‘Fizzy and I were just rattling around and we thought it was time to let the kids have a go’). For some the father proved stubborn and wouldn’t move out, and for most there wasn’t a house to inherit, so the young couple would generally buy a cottage or a farmhouse or, if things were going really well in the City, a Queen Anne manor house in Gloucestershire or Oxfordshire or Suffolk. After that, he would shoot and complain about politics, they’d both ski and worry about the children, and she would work for charity, entertain and, if things were going less well in the City, sell artificial jewellery to her captive friends. Until the children grew up and it was time first to downsize and then to die. All of which, lest we forget and before we feel too sorry for them, was a lot better than scratching for a living in the dirt of the plains of Uzbekistan.

  But where did it leave someone like Candida Finch? She was obviously clever but her appearance and her manner would not help to offset her lack of qualifications to say the least. Nor would I have thought there was any certainty of a husband coming up on the next lift. And there wouldn’t be much money. What were her options? ‘Do you know what you’d like to do?’ I asked.

  Again, she rolled her eyes in exasperation. ‘What can I do?’

  ‘I asked what would you like to do.’

  This was enough to soften her a little. It was, after all, a genuine enquiry. ‘I think I might have liked to work in publishing, but I have no degree. And before you suggest I take one now, we both know that won’t happen. It’s too late and I’ve missed it. I thought I might squeeze a few quid out of a godparent and push into a vanity publishing firm, but they’d have to accept they’d lose every penny, and all t
o buy me the right to talk about publishing at dinner parties. Which is the most I’d achieve.’

  ‘Be careful you’re not determined to fail in order to annoy your stepmother. It doesn’t sound to me as if she’ll care much either way.’ I nearly didn’t say this, since our very brief acquaintance did not at all justify it, but she laughed.

  ‘Well, that’s true anyway.’ Her voice was warmer than it had been. ‘You know, you really are quite good at this.’

  When dinner was over, by some pre-arranged signal the white-clad debutantes slipped away, leaving the tables occupied only by the parents, the young men and the odd non-deb girl, glum and in colour. It was time for the ceremony that we had come for and while I would not pretend to the ecstasy of anticipation that gripped the mothers throughout the room, the rest of us were quite curious. First, an enormous cake, literally six or seven feet high, was wheeled out on to the centre of the dance floor. Next the Patroness of the Ball arose from her chair with sober grandeur and walked across to stand next to it. I seem to remember that this was always Lady Howard de Walden, but maybe I’m wrong, maybe it alternated with the Duchess of Somewhere. Either way, she was a heavyweight in the scales by which these things are weighed. I don’t actually think the whole thing would have worked if she were not. As it was, her rigid upright posture and the confident dignity of a crowned monarch, which a lot of those women seemed to possess quite naturally then in contrast to so many of their daughters, gave the exercise a certain credibility even before it had begun. The band struck up and we looked towards the head of the staircase, where the Girls of the Year stood lined up in couples, side by side, poised, waiting. Then, slowly, they began to descend at a measured pace, as solemnly as if they were serving at a Pope’s funeral.

  Down they came, the lights playing on the white flowers among their gleaming curls, on their long white gloves, on the white lace and silk of their dresses, on their shining, haughty, hopeful faces. Once they had reached the bottom, each pair advanced to where the Patroness stood, dropped into a deep Court curtsey, and moved on. They were not all presented to absolute advantage. Georgina looked like Godzilla in a shroud as she lumbered down towards terra firma. But for most of them there was something almost ethereal in their uniformity. Sixty versions of the Angel of Mons coming down to ease the pain of those beneath.

  It may, of course, be with the wisdom of hindsight, but I am fairly sure it was at that precise moment that I first became aware that what we were witnessing did not have long to live. That there would not be many more generations taking part in this performance or, indeed, anything like it. That our parents’ dream of somehow rescuing enough of the old, pre-war world for their children to live in, was a chimera, that I was, in short, witnessing the start of the finish. Funnily enough, and you probably will not believe me, it was an impressive sight. Like all disciplined, synchronised movement, the procession was commanding in its execution, as on and on they came, pair after matched pair, gliding down, curtseying low, moving on. All before a giant cake. Yet it was not ridiculous. It probably sounds ridiculous in the telling. Absurd. Even laughable. I can only say that I was there and it was not.

  The display was done. The girls were blooded, their status as this year’s debutantes confirmed and it was time for the dancing to begin. To counter their former solemnity, the band now played a tune at the top of the hit parade of the day, Simple Simon Says, one of those rather exhausting songs, which is full of uninvited instructions for the listener, ‘Put your hands on your head, shake them all about,’ and so on, but, although almost definitively naff, it was quite a good icebreaker. Lucy was already dancing with one of the other men in the party, so I made the offer to Candida and we walked together on to the floor. ‘Who’s that man you were talking to, before dinner?’ she asked. I did not need to follow her eyeline to know the answer.

  ‘Damian Baxter,’ I said. ‘He’s up at Cambridge with me.’

  ‘You must introduce us.’ It was at this moment that I first encountered a particularly terrifying part of Candida’s repertoire. Whenever she spotted someone she thought attractive there would ensue a kind of manic, as she thought flirtatious, ritual rather like a Maori dance of welcome, where she would roll her eyes and snicker and rock back and forth with a kind of shouted laugh more suited to a thirsty bricklayer than a young girl coming out. In fairness, I suppose it must have achieved her immediate ends reasonably often, since there could be no doubt as to what was on offer and we were not spoiled for choice in those days, but I do not think, as a routine, it was ever very conducive to long-term commitment, and in fact earned Candida a reputation, by the end of the Season, of being something of a bicycle. I was never treated to this display head on, as she was not at all interested in me, but even for a witness from the stalls it was pretty unnerving.

  Following her hungry glance, I looked back to where Damian was standing at the centre of a small but admiring crowd. Serena Gresham was there, laughing, with Carla Wakefield and a couple of girls I did not recognise. Georgina was hanging back in her usual position of resentful witness to the fun of others. I saw now that Andrew Summersby was one of the party and Mrs Waddilove was busily, but ineffectually, trying to draw him into conversation; or, more to the point, she was trying to involve him in a conversation with her own daughter. But neither would play due, I would imagine, to a complete lack of interest on both sides. A friend of mine from Atlanta always called this kind of social interchange ‘Pumping Mud.’ They were watched from the other side of the table by an older woman, presumably another of Mrs Waddilove’s guests, but I did not recognise her. She was an odd specimen, even in that company. Her face was that of a snobbish, Dutch doll, while the weird combination of her unlikely near-black hair, more Benidorm than good old British, with a pair of piercing pale-blue eyes flecked with shades of green and amber, made her look more than slightly mad, half Lizzie Borden, half stoat. She stood very still as she listened to the conversation limping along, but her stillness held a kind of inner threat of danger, a beast of prey, motionless but waiting to spring. ‘Who’s that standing opposite Mrs Waddilove and Andrew Summersby?’

  Candida tore her eyes away from feasting on Damian and glanced across. ‘Lady Belton. Andrew’s mother.’ I nodded. I might have guessed since I could now see that his sister, Annabella Warren, was among the girls in the Waddilove group. I looked back at Madame Mère, as she stood surveying the troops. I had heard of Lady Belton but I had not seen her before that night. One glance was enough to endorse the truth of her reputation.

  The Countess of Belton was not generally liked, probably because she was not at all likeable. She was stupid, snobbish to the point of dementia and inexplicably arrogant. Admittedly, she was not vain, nor was she extravagant, but she took this to such a degree that it ceased to be a virtue. In fact, that night she was dressed in what looked like the window display of a Sue Ryder shop in West Hartlepool. Later I would come to know and loathe her, but despite all this, in a funny way I cannot quite explain at this distance, she did have something. Perhaps her absolute refusal to bend to her own times gave her a sort of moral conviction. Certainly she stands out vividly in my memory among the mothers of that year, although I had not then met her beleaguered husband, who always seemed to find an excuse to stay away, and I had only chatted, and not much more, to Lord Summersby, the dull and lumpen eldest son and heir. But even without all this information I saw at once that Georgina’s mother was too obvious and her ambition was not realistic.

  Watching her flash her smiles between them all and attempt to ensnare her daughter’s interest, Candida spoke my thoughts. ‘Dream on, Mrs Waddilove.’

  She was right. This was a hopeless fantasy. It was quite clear to the most casual observer that Lady Belton’s prejudices would never favour a match with the likes of the Waddiloves, however happy she was to dine and drink through that night at their expense. She wouldn’t have dreamed of it, even if the girl had been pretty. That is unless a sum of money had been involved that
was roughly equivalent to the combined African National Debt. As for the boy, I already suspected he was incapable of independent thought, in which I would be proved right. But anyway, the sad truth is that Georgina was not the type to inspire reckless love.

  We danced on. Like the well-mannered chap I was then, I partnered my hostess, Lady Dalton, a custom universally observed in those days but almost abandoned now. To me, there was always something faintly comic in the practice, as one steered these middle-aged women around the floor, she wishing it were a foxtrot, you longing for it to end, one’s hand resting lightly on the stiffened stays that were usually detectable beneath the fabric of the evening gown, but, funny as I found it, I am not glad the tradition of dancing with one’s friends’ parents has gone. It made a kind of bridge between the generations in our increasingly fragmented society and I suspect we can use all the bridges that are going. ‘Do you know what you’re planning to do when you leave university?’ she said genially, as we stumbled around in our unsyncopated way.

  I shook my head. ‘Not really. Not yet.’

  ‘There isn’t a preordained pattern to be followed?’

  Again I answered in the negative. ‘There’s no estate to come, or family business to swallow me up.’

  ‘What does your father do?’ At the time, in the late 1960s, this question would have bordered on impertinence, since the smart English had not yet abandoned their pretence that one’s professional activity was of minor, and then only personal, interest. But of course Lady Dalton was engaging in research.

  ‘He’s a diplomat. But the Foreign Office isn’t looking for my type any more, even if I wanted to follow him.’ Which was more or less true. Had I been an exceptional candidate it might have been different, but for the more regular intake the Foreign Office, always a kingdom of its own in Britain, had decided at some point in the sixties that the day of the gentleman ambassador was over, that henceforth the role must be downgraded socially in order, I imagine, to be taken more seriously by the post-war intelligentsia. Either that, or it was a way of shifting their political loyalties. Forty years later, the results of the policy have been mixed, especially since it has not been adopted by the rest of mainland Europe. The British ambassador these days is generally regarded as rather an oddball in the world’s capitals, both by the international brigade and by the Society of whichever city they find themselves in. One would have thought this might have diminished our backstairs influence. But perhaps that was what they were after.