Past Imperfect

by Julian Fellowes

  For all the bowing and ma’am’ing that still went on in those days, the Grand Duchess understood that no throne awaited her timid daughter in the post-war world. She also knew that she had not anticipated the drain on her capital made by a husband who wished to live en prince but did not intend to do a day’s work, nor earn a single penny. She was, at heart, a sound northern lass and well aware that no fortune can hope to survive when the expenses are limitless and the income nil, and she was anxious to see the girl settled as well as might be, before the gilt had quite gone off the gingerbread. So she decided that, even though British princesses by that stage never ‘came out’ in any normal way and only occasionally appeared at the parties of special friends, nevertheless Dagmar would participate fully in the whole year-long business. The girl would thereby build a position for herself in British Society and, with any luck, land one of its prizes. The Grand Duchess also accepted – unlike many, if not most, Royals – that she would have to put her hand in her pocket to achieve this. By 1968, when the Grand Duke had been spending like a sailor for a quarter of a century, this could not have been as easy as it was once, but she had bitten off the mouthful and she fully intended to chew it. I am happy to say I was on the list to be invited.

  The inspiration for the party was the Duchess of Richmond’s Ball, that famous 1815 gathering, given in Brussels on the very eve of Waterloo, and it was held at the Dorchester in Park Lane. Today, one thinks of the hotel as the haunt of film stars and merchants from the East, but in those days it played quite a major part in what was still referred to as ‘Society.’ On the night in question we came in, I think, by the ballroom entrance at the side, situated on Park Lane itself, and the theme of the evening was quite clear the moment one stepped inside, into that long, rather low, hall. Liveried footmen stood to attention, all modern signs, ‘Exit’ and the like, had been hidden behind greenery and there were candles everywhere. None of these last details would be legal today, of course, but nobody cared then. In truth, the party seemed to have taken over most of the ground floor of the hotel. It can’t have, really, can it? But that’s what it felt like on the night. Of course, we didn’t arrive much before eleven, having eaten our dinners elsewhere, and the champagne that greeted us, held out by the whitewigged flunkeys, was not by any means the first drink of the evening. One has to remember that in the late 1960s, while nobody suggested that it was a good idea to drive a car when plastered, it was still long before such considerations had begun to shape our social life. ‘Which of you is drinking tonight?’ would have bewildered the couple arriving at a dinner, since the answer would invariably have been ‘both.’ For this reason no hostess scrupled to ask various friends to provide dinners for her guests before a ball.

  Later in the Season, when more dances were given in the country, this would entail putting them up for the night, and essentially meant throwing a house party for strangers, who would drunkenly rattle around the countryside in their cars at all hours. But in London the thing was more easily managed. Sometimes you were flattered to receive an invitation to join the dinner provided by the parents of the deb of the evening, but this didn’t happen (to me, anyway) all that often and usually a pleasant little postcard would drop through the letter box, saying that the writer believed you were going to the dance being given for So-and-So and she would be ‘terribly pleased if you would dine here first.’ At the end of which dinner, fairly far gone or at least merry, we would cheerfully climb into our vehicles and head off for the location of the party proper. This system had obvious advantages. The bonus for the young was that the dances went on forever, because they didn’t really get going much before eleven. While the benefit for the old was plain economy. The parents of the girl in question usually had to hire the place, at least in London, and even in the country marquees would be expected unless the house was vast. Then there was the music, as well as a pretty good breakfast at the end of the event, but by adopting this system the hosts were spared the additional burden of dinner and wines for three or four hundred young and hungry people. No wonder the custom cheered the fathers up no end.

  Having taken in the thoroughness of the arrangements, I made my way into the ballroom and here the illusion was impressive. At that time it was customary for a limited number of the older generation to be invited to these gatherings. They would be drawn from the godparents of the debutante, as well as from the relatives and close friends of her parents, and as a rule they would fringe the proceedings, chatting in some other drawing room, watching the children dancing, occasionally venturing on to the floor to demonstrate an adapted foxtrot or quickstep, before retiring fairly early for the night. They were not expected to participate as full guests since, as we all know, the sight of dancing parents is torture for the young and always was. All this was especially true of costume parties, which are rather a bore for anyone out of their thirties, and the adults would simply arrive in evening dress, occasionally with some gay little gesture, worn as a brooch or a hair ornament. None of which applied to this particular event. I do not know if it was respect for the Grand Duchess or terror (probably the latter), but every single attendee, old and young, was in costume. As a particularly witty detail, or possibly after an instruction from on high, several of the mothers and fathers had deliberately chosen outfits of a slightly earlier date than those worn by their offspring. Men in wigs and ruffles, women in high-piled, powdered hair and beauty spots, from the 1780s or ’90s, gave us all the sense that we were indeed back in the Regency and this was the older generation of the day, frowning and disapproving of modern youth. It always amuses me that this particular era, redolent as it is of Versailles and Queen Marie-Antoinette, is such a favourite costume theme with toffs. They seem to have forgotten that it did not as a whole turn out well for the privileged classes, so many of whom would leave their heads, and no doubt wigs, in the basket below the guillotine.

  ‘What have you come as?’ Lucy was dressed in a Jane Austen, white frock, high-waisted and pure, with a ribbon round her throat and her artificial ringlets sewn with tiny, white silk roses. She looked artful rather than innocent, but charming nonetheless.

  ‘I’m a hussar,’ I replied slightly indignantly, ‘I should have thought it was obvious.’

  ‘The trousers are wrong.’

  ‘Thank you for that.’ The trousers were wrong, as it happens, but the rest of the outfit was perfect, bright scarlet, heavily braided, with a fur-edged jacket slung between my left shoulder and my right armpit. I thought I looked fabulous. ‘They’re only wrong for 1815. They would be right by 1850. Anyway, it was the best I could manage. It was too late to find anything in London, so I had to raid the costume store of Windsor Rep.’

  ‘It looks like it.’ She stopped and stared round the room, which was beginning to fill up. ‘Where was your dinner?’

  ‘Chester Row. The Harington-Stanleys.’

  ‘Any good?’

  ‘Well, the food was like a shooting lunch that had been brought up to London in a rusty cake tin, but it was quite fun apart from that. What about you?’

  She grimaced. ‘Mrs Vitkov. With a group to meet her daughter, Terry. At that new French place in Lower Sloane Street.’

  ‘The Gavroche?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  She gave me what used to be called an old-fashioned look. ‘Have you met Terry Vitkov?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Where are they from? The Balkans?’

  ‘Cincinnati. And believe me, Miss Terry is a piece of work.’ She stopped and nodded with a tight smile. ‘Careful. That’s her.’ I turned to look. I could see at once that we needn’t have worried and that Terry Vitkov was quite happy to be the subject of our discussion. She looked as if she were more than used to being the centre of attention. She was a good-looking girl. Indeed, she would have been very good-looking if it were not for a certain prominence of nose and chin, faintly suggesting a Man-in-the-Moon profile, which,
combined with the intensity of her piercing and heavily made up eyes, gave her the air of a prisoner on the run, desperately searching the room for either an enemy or an escape route. Tonight she appeared to be dressed as a Regency courtesan, rather than a great-lady-from-times-gone-by, like every other woman there. Indeed, she was more or the less the only person in the ballroom, who would patently not have figured on the guest list of the real Duchess of Richmond. She walked up to us and we were introduced.

  ‘Lucy’s been telling me all the dos and don’ts for getting on in London.’ She spoke with a breathy urgency, the voice of one determined to make every human interchange register. I could see at once that despite her flashing frequent smiles, designed no doubt to suggest a spirit of girlish, flirtatious fun and displaying thereby a set of admirably white, if rather large, teeth, Terry Vitkov took herself tremendously seriously.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve covered them all, have I?’ said Lucy laconically.

  Our companion was already training her searching gaze on the other guests. ‘Which one is Viscount Summersby?’ she asked.

  Lucy checked the ballroom. ‘Over there. With the blonde girl in green, next to the big looking glass.’

  Terry sought him out. Her shoulders sagged. ‘Why do they always have to look like the man from Pest Control?’ She sighed. ‘Who’s that one?’ A tall and handsome young man flashed her a smile as he passed.

  ‘Don’t bother. No money. No prospects.’ Lucy clearly understood her companion’s priorities. ‘Of course, he’s clever and he’s headed for the City. He may make something of himself.’

  But Terry shook her head. ‘That takes twenty years and by the time they’ve got there they’re ready to trade you in for a younger model. No. I want some money from the outset.’

  I nodded, sagely. ‘But not Lord Summersby.’

  She smiled. ‘Not until I know I can’t get something better.’ What made this amusing, of course, was that she meant it.

  We had been moving slowly in a rather sloppy presentation line and by now had nearly reached our hosts, who stood, all four together, posed against a rich curtain erected as a kind of screen for the purpose. The Grand Duke cut a melancholy figure. He was a slight and pasty-looking creature anyway, especially when placed at the side of his massive spouse and, in truth, I do not believe I ever heard him say an interesting sentence. He wore his elaborate costume, which I took to be that of the Duke of Richmond, with an air of surprise, as if he had been put into it while under sedation. Perhaps he was. His son, dressed as an officer of the guard, stared straight ahead stiffly. He could have been posing for an early daguerreotype, when you had to keep your head still for four or five minutes until it was done. His bland, mottled face exuded an air of bored and generalised geniality.

  The daughter, Dagmar, technically of course the Star of the Night, looked frightened and if anything a little drab. She was a tiny creature, literally no more than five feet tall and, while one is always being told that Queen Victoria was four foot eleven and managed to run an Empire, still for most of us it is very, very small and means you spend your whole life looking up. Standing there in the shadow of her mother, to paraphrase Noël Coward, she looked like the Grand Duchess’s lunch. Dagmar wasn’t what you would call plain, even if her sallow mini-face was hard to define or at least to categorise. She wasn’t exactly pretty either, but her large eyes were arresting and she had a soft, moist, trembling mouth, usually half open and quivering and seeming to suggest she was always on the verge of tears, which, in a way, touched your heart. But she never appeared to have any idea of how to present herself. Her hair, for instance, was very dark and straight and, with imagination, it might have been effective. But it just hung there, as if it had been washed in a hurry and left to dry. I really did think something might have been made of her on the night of her own ball, but as usual nobody had tried. The dress was from the correct period but it was dull, and only faintly enlivened with a thin blue sash beneath her modest bosom. To be honest, she looked as if she had taken five minutes to get ready for a game of tennis, and so fragile that one good, strong puff of wind would carry her out of the window and down Park Lane in an instant.

  Which could not be said of her mother. I cannot be sure, to this day, whether the Grand Duchess was intending to impersonate the original Duchess of Richmond. It would seem logical, given the wording of the invitation, but the costume she had chosen was more suitable for a great empress, Catherine the Great maybe, or Maria Teresa, or any other absolute female monarch. Acres of chiffon blew softly this way and that, while a river, a torrent, of purple velvet, embroidered in thick, gold thread, cascaded from her more than ample shoulders to the floor and lay there in massive hillocks and dunes, its ermine trim forming a kind of plinth to set off the huge, majestic figure above. Her bosom, like a rock shelf beneath the sea, was ablaze with diamonds and a sparkling crown-like tiara rose from her lightly sweating brow. I suppose the display was all that remained of the Moravian crown jewels, either that or they had been rented from the Barnum Brothers for the night. This was a scene-stealing one-woman show and none of the others got a look in, least of all the wretched Dagmar who, knowing her mother, must have expected something of the sort. At any rate, while the crowds spun, buzzing, round her mama, she didn’t seem unduly put out, unlike the Grand Duke and the Crown Prince who both looked as if they were aching to go home. We were announced.

  ‘Good evening, Ma’am.’ I bowed and she accepted my obeisance gracefully. I moved on to her husband. ‘Your Royal Highness.’ I bowed again. He nodded vacantly, his mind probably on some long-ago Court reception in dark and dusty Olomouc. Leaving him to dream alone, I passed into the body of the room. Looking back, I think that evening was when I first understood what I have now come to recognise all around me, viz. that when it comes to aristocrats, or even royalty, most of the members of those worlds (who have not moved away from the whole performance entirely, that is) fall into separate, apparently similar but in fact quite disparate, groups. The first, made familiar by a million lampoons, have a clear understanding that the world of their youth and their ancestors has changed and will not be coming back, but they continue to mourn it. The cooks and the valets, the maids and the footmen who made life so sweet will never again push through the green baize door, busy with the tasks of the day. The smiling grooms who brought the horses round to the front at ten, the chauffeurs washing their gleaming vehicles, standing in deference when one strolled into the stable yard, the gardeners ducking out of sight at the sound of a house party’s approach, all that army dedicated to their pleasure have left for other climes. These people usually know, too, albeit half subconsciously, that the deference they still receive within their social circle is somehow thin and even false, compared to the real respect accorded to their parents and grandparents, when high birth had solid accountable value. They know these things, but they do not know what to do about them, other than to weep and live out their lives with as much comfort as they can muster.

  Into this category one could squarely place the last Grand Duke of Moravia. There was something in his aimless and depressive grace that told of his awareness of the truth. ‘Don’t blame me,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘I understand this is absurd. I know you have no reason to bow and scrape before me, that the game is over, that the band has played, but I have to go through the forms, don’t you know? I have to look as if I take it seriously or I would be letting other people down.’ This was the text permanently hovering in the air above him. Of course, the same group boasts a nastier version. ‘It may be over,’ they flash from their pitiless eyes, ‘but it isn’t quite over for me!’ and they toss their heads and prey on their rich, social-climbing acolytes and sell the last of their mother’s jewels, that the show may struggle on for a few more years at least.

  But the other category in this group is different from these and, as a type, is largely undetected by the general public. These men and women also have the status that pertains to them from the old sys
tem and they enjoy it. They like the rank and the history that supports them. They are glad to be seen as part of the inner circle of aristocratic Britain. They make sure that one member at least of the Royal Family is present at every major bash they throw. They dress, at least the men dress, to please the diehards. They shoot, they fish, they know their historic dates and other people’s genealogy. But all the time they are pretending. Far from being bewildered as to the workings of the new and harsher century, they understand precisely how it turns. They know the value of their property, just as they knew it would regain it. They fully grasp the intricacies of the markets, how and what to buy, what and when to sell, how to achieve the right planning permissions, how to manipulate the payments from the EU farming policy, in short, how to make the estate, and their position, pay.

  They decided long ago that they did not want to belong to some fading club, endlessly nostalgic for better days that will never come again. They wanted to retake a position of influence and even power and if it was not, after the 1960s, to be overtly political power then so be it, they would find another route. They are fakes, really. Despite their lineage, despite their houses and their jewels and their wardrobes and their dogs, despite their mouthing the traditional prejudices of their class, they no longer think like most of their own kind. They belong to today and tomorrow, far more than to yesterday. They have brains and values as tough as any hedge fund manager’s. But then again, they would argue that they are only being true to their own race, truer than the defeatists, because the primal job of any aristocrat is to stay on top. Bourbon or Bonaparte, king or president, the real aristocrat understands who is in power and who should be bowed to, next.