‘Excuse me, my dear, but Mr Baxter was not invited. Not by you. And, more to the point, not by me.’ The Grand Duchess’s tone brooked no argument. She had not finished. ‘This was something he made quite clear within earshot of Lord Summersby, who was good enough to bring it to my attention. I would go so far as to say that Mr Baxter was boasting of his lack of invitation.’ The shade of the Grand Duchess’s face was darkening and it was not a becoming alteration. Coupled with the primary colours of her costume, she was beginning to resemble a blow-up Santa Claus hovering between the buildings in Regent Street at Christmas; but, as always with her, there was a quality to be reckoned with. I especially enjoyed a slight flavour of Eastern Europe in her voice as her rage intensified, as if her duty towards her people – subjects in a country which, lest we forget, she had never even visited – had somehow infused her with a new and different past, washing away her healthy, early years in West Yorkshire and making her Moravian in spite of herself.
Her words had naturally revealed who was to blame for the incident, which I would like to describe as ‘horrid,’ but which had, of course, completely made the party for most of those present. The sneak responsible was none other than Andrew Summersby. I would guess that this public unveiling was not part of his original plan and he looked uncomfortable as the eyes of the company now turned upon him. He hesitated for a moment before making the decision, which I cannot blame him for, given his situation that, having been uncovered, he had better brazen it out.
Until this point he’d been hovering at the back of the proceedings, but now he strode forward. ‘Come on,’ he said, laying hold of Damian by the upper arm, rather like someone making a citizen’s arrest, which I suppose he was doing, and attempting to guide him away.
In one swift move, and to the amazement of us all, Damian again got free, this time with a thousand times more fury than he had vented on the hotel employee when the man had tried something similar. ‘Take your hand off me this instant,’ he snarled. ‘You stupid, ridiculous oaf!’ Obviously, Andrew was not expecting anything of this sort when he had first decided to betray the uninvited guest, least of all from someone whom he judged to be far beneath him in God’s scheme of things. Andrew unquestionably was an oaf, and a very stupid one, but few people would then have called him such to his face and he was quite unprepared for it. To be honest, I think he just wanted to have a go at Serena or one of the other girls who had been hovering around Damian all evening and he’d got jealous. I’m quite sure nobody was sorrier than he that the whole situation seemed to be spiralling out of control.
He was dressed, like some of the others, as a Death’s Head hussar, with tight, in his case unbecoming, trousers, and a coat slung across his back, all of which may have fatally impeded his movement, but he couldn’t back out now. He lunged forward, making a second attempt to grip the miscreant’s arm. Once more, Damian was too quick for him, stepping back in a sort of pirouette, like Errol Flynn in a Warner Brothers romance, and before anyone could stop him he had swung the full force of his right fist into a punch that met Andrew’s nose with a loud and sickening crunch. Several of the girls screamed, particularly the nearest, one Lydia Maybury, whose white, organza frock, charmingly cut on the bias and embroidered with lilies of the valley, was copiously sprayed with a mixture of gore and snot from Andrew’s smashed proboscis. He himself looked so startled, so astonished by the unbelievable course events had taken, as if the sea itself had suddenly come rushing in through the ballroom windows, that he stood for a moment in a trance, staring through sightless eyes, stock still, blood spouting from his nostrils, before staggering backwards. Watching this, but paralysed with a kind of ecstatic horror, none of us thought to catch and save him, and instead he collapsed full length on to the breakfast buffet, pushing it over as he fell, showering himself and the bystanders with hot plates and sausages and jugs of orange juice and bacon and toast and burners and scrambled eggs and mustard and cutlery and all. The crash was like the Fall of Troy, echoing through the hotel passages, frightening the horses, wakening the dead. It was succeeded by complete and total silence. We all stood there, rabbits caught in the headlights, stunned, amazed, hypnotised, watching the bloody, breakfast-decorated body of the fallen Viscount. Even Dagmar was as still and as silent as a statue.
Then Damian, with one of those gestures that made me forgive him more, and for longer, than I should have done, took hold of the Grand Duchess’s hand, hanging limply by her side as she stood witness to the ruin of a party that had cost a large percentage of her annual income. ‘Please forgive me for making such a mess, Ma’am,’ he raised her unresisting hand to his lips, holding it there for a second, with exquisite elegance, ‘and thank you so much for what, until now, has been an enchanting evening.’ So saying he released her fingers, bowed crisply from the neck like a lifelong courtier, and strode out of the chamber.
I need hardly add that once the story had gone round London, and with the sole exception of the ball given by Lady Belton for Andrew’s sister, Annabella, before very long Damian had received invitations to every other major event of that Season. This was not because of any increased approval on the part of the mothers, all of whom were more terrified than ever that Damian Baxter would ensnare one of their sacred children.
It was at the absolute and unbending insistence of the girls themselves.
SIX
The Grand Duchess had been right to make her investment, even if things did not quite turn out as she had wished. In 1968 the family had just enough money and just enough status for Dagmar to have landed a big – or a biggish – fish. That she did not, I attributed at the time to her setting her sights too high and thereby missing whatever chance there might have been of something decent. As I would discover, I was not completely right in this analysis, but I suspect that even so, like many of rank or fortune, Dagmar had grown up with unrealistic expectations. To begin with she had no clear idea of how pallid she really was. She could always assemble (then, anyway) a crowd who would conceal her shyness from herself and she did not seem to appreciate that she would have to make more of the running if things were to go her way. All this the Grand Duchess knew and, in the nicest possible way, she tried to encourage her daughter to make what hay she could before the sun went in completely, but like most young women, Dagmar did not listen to her mother when her mother said things she did not want to hear.
Part of the problem lay in her curious inability to flirt. Faced by a man, she would alternate between nervous giggling or complete silence, her huge semi-tearful eyes wide open, fixed on her partner, while he would flounder in his desperate attempts to find some topic, any topic, that would elicit a vocal response. There wasn’t one. Eventually this helplessness provoked a protective instinct in me, and while I never exactly fancied Dagmar, I began to dislike anyone who made fun of her or, as I once heard, imitated her sad, little laugh. Once, I had to take her away from Annabel’s when her date excused himself to go to the loo, before apparently running up the steps back to street level and jumping into a taxi. She cried on the way home and of course I had to love her a little bit after that.
To correct a popular misconception, I must point out that by my time the London Season was no longer, as it had once been, much of a marriage market. The idea was more to launch your young into a suitable world where they would thenceforth live and in due course find friends, and after a few years a husband or wife. Few mothers wanted this achieved before their sons and daughters had reached their middle twenties at the earliest, but Dagmar’s case was different, as the Grand Duchess knew. They were selling a product in what promised to be a falling market and there was no time to be lost. We all thought at one point she had a reasonable chance of Robert Strickland, the grandson and eventual heir to a 1910 barony, awarded to a Royal gynaecologist after a tricky but successful birth. Robert didn’t have much money and there was neither land nor house, but there was something and he was a kind fellow, if hardly the life and soul of the party. He worked in a
merchant bank and had the supreme merit, certainly where the Grand Duchess was concerned, of being slightly deaf. Unfortunately, just as he was coming to the boil Dagmar fluffed it, Robert interpreting her nervous giggle as a lack of interest in his hinted-at proposal, and it was not repeated. By the end of that summer he was happily engaged to the daughter of a Colonel in the Irish Guards. There would be no other opportunities at that level.
Even so, everyone was a little taken aback to read in the gossip columns in the late autumn of 1970 that she was engaged to William Holman, the only child of an aggressive parvenu from Virginia Water. When I knew him William was about to be ‘something in the City,’ an all-purpose phrase beloved of our mothers. He had been a hanger-on at some of the dances in our year, wearing and saying inappropriate, desperate things, according to our youthful, shallow, snobbish yard-sticks, and was not taken seriously by anyone. I suppose, looking back, he was quite clever and perhaps he did seem to be going somewhere. It just wasn’t evident to us that it was somewhere very nice. I missed the wedding. I think I had double booked it with a weekend in Toulouse. But apparently it was perfectly all right, if a bit rushed. They were married in an Orthodox church in Bayswater and the reception was held at the Hyde Park Hotel. The groom’s parents looked ecstatic and the bride’s were at least resigned. In the last analysis Princess Dagmar of Moravia was married, and to a man who could pay the bill for dinner and manage something more than a basement flat. As the Grand Duchess might have remarked, and probably did in the privacy of her bathroom, it was better than nothing. She was also presumably aware that there were other factors at work, rendering the ceremony welcome. Six months later the Princess was delivered of a son, a healthy boy and not noticeably premature.
For obvious reasons I didn’t see much of Dagmar after the Portuguese holiday, and once I’d missed her wedding we lost touch completely. I didn’t like William and he couldn’t see the point of me, so there was not much to build on. To be fair, he did do well, better than I had anticipated, eventually making chairman of some investment trust, and being rewarded with both millions and a knighthood from John Major. When I read about him in the papers, or glimpsed him across the room at some function, I was amused to note that he had become a convincing version of what he had hankered for all those years ago, with suits made by some award-worthy cutter behind the Burlington Arcade and all the loudly mouthed prejudices to match. Someone told me he hunted now and was even a good shot, which made me rather jealous. It never ceases to amaze me the way real money continues to ape the habits and pastimes of the old upper class, in a day when they could afford to call a different tune. This was not widely true during the Seventies, but once Mrs Thatcher was on the throne, secret longings for gentility resurfaced in many a breast. Before long, every City trader exchanged his red braces for a Barbour, and was shooting, fishing and stalking like a middle-European nobleman, while the clubs in St James’s, once desperate for new applicants, had pleasure in reestablishing their waiting lists and toughening again the criteria for membership.
One sign of all this that the sociologists seem to have missed was that from the Eighties onwards, the upper middle and upper classes resumed a different daily costume from those beneath them in the ancient pecking order, which was definitely a return to the way things used to be. A unique phenomenon of the 1960s was that we all dressed in the new, outlandish modes, quite irrespective of background, perhaps the only time in the last thousand years when most of the nation’s youth wore versions of the same costume, though it seems a pity we should choose as our badge of unity those terrible hipsters and kipper ties and velvet suits and bomber jackets and all the other horrors on display. Hideous as the fashions were, nobody was immune. The Queen’s skirts leaped above her knee and, at the Prince of Wales’s inauguration at Carnarvon Castle, Lord Snowdon appeared in what looked like the costume of a flightdeck steward on a Polish airline. But by the 1980s the toffs were tired of this unsuitable disguise. They wanted to look like themselves again, and gradually first Hackett’s and later Oliver Brown and all those others who recognised this secret longing and aspired to supply it, appeared in the high street. Suddenly posh suits were once more of a recognisably different cloth and cut, while country clothes, tweeds and cords and all the rest of that tested uniform, pulled themselves from the dusty wardrobes where they had lain unloved since the 1950s. The toffs were visually different again, a tribe to be known once more by their markings, and it made them happy to be so.
That said, for those of us who witnessed what seemed then to be the end of everything, the 1970s had first to be negotiated before matters would start to improve. Much that was teetering came crashing down and there were dark days to be gone through. It seems strange to write it now, when all is changed, but to us, then, Communism was here to stay. In fact, most of us privately, if silently, believed that world Communism would eventually be the order of the day and we set about enjoying ourselves with no expectation of a long future for our way of life, dancing to the band on the increasingly steep deck of the Titanic. The Sixties had come and gone by that stage, with their promises of free love and hair-worn flowers, but these attractive notions did not, in the event, compose the legacy of that troubled era. The trail that was left was not of peace and rose buds, but of social breakdown, and certainly some people who lost their currency value in those bleak years, never regained it.
So it wasn’t a complete surprise when I dialled Dagmar’s number and asked for the Princess, to be told that ‘Lady Holman’ was in the drawing room. I had prepared what I intended to say. My excuse was a charity ball that I’d been given to chair for Eastern European refugees. Some years before I’d written a moderately successful novel set principally in post-war Romania, which had inevitably taken me into this territory, and I was quite interested by what was happening in that stormy land. At last a voice came on the line. ‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Is it really you?’ She was still the diffident Dagmar of old, but somehow she sounded even more meek. I explained about the cause. ‘I’m supposed to come up with some ideas for the committee and I immediately thought of you.’
‘Why?’
‘Wouldn’t a Balkan princess look rather relevant? So far, all I’ve got is two actors from a soap opera, a TV chef whom no one’s heard of and a bunch of dowagers from Onslow Gardens.’
She hesitated. ‘I don’t really use that name now.’ There was a sorrow in her voice, though whether it was a momentary stab of nostalgia or a general critique of her present existence I could not, of course, tell.
‘Well, even if you’re listed as Lady Holman, everyone will know who you are.’ One says these things and I said this, although, as is often the case in such circumstances, I did not believe it to be true.
‘Well…’ She paused awkwardly. I had hoped that William’s success in the City would have bolstered her confidence, but the reverse seemed to have happened.
‘Can we discuss it? I’m going to be driving very near you next week. Could I possibly look in?’
‘When?’
Once more, as with Lucy Dalton, I sensed a trapped animal searching for a route out, scanning the net for a possible tear, which I firmly closed off with my next speech. ‘It entirely depends on you. I’ve got some stuff to do in Winchester but I can easily fit it round your diary. What day would suit best? It’d be such fun to see you again after all these years.’
She was enough of a lady to know when she was caught. ‘Yes, it would. Of course it would. Why not come for some lunch next Friday?’
‘Will William be with you?’
‘Yes. He doesn’t really like my entertaining when he’s not here.’ This sentence had escaped her mouth before she fully grasped its ugly, bullying significance. The words seemed to reverberate down the line between us. After a silent pause she attempted to round off its sharp edges: ‘He gets so jealous when he finds he’s missed seeing people he likes. I know he’d love to catch up with you.’
‘Me, too,’ I answered, because I h
ad to. I was not quite clear how I would carry out my mission if William was too controlling to allow us a moment together, but there was nothing I could do about that. ‘I’ll be with you on Friday, just before one.’
Bellingham Court was a real house. It was about five miles from Winchester and not perhaps quite far enough from the motorway, but it was a genuine Elizabethan schloss, with high mullioned windows and corbelled ceilings and panelled great chambers and whispering passages, a thoroughly satisfactory ego-puffer of a place. As I turned in through the neatly painted gates, and drove down the long, tended and impeccable drive, it was easy to see it had been the subject of a recent, and massive, restoration programme. I parked in the wide forecourt, bordered by two broad, shallow parterres of water, edged in new and expensively carved stone, and before I had time to ring the bell the door was opened by a middle aged woman in sensible shoes, whom I took, correctly, to be the housekeeper. She led me inside.
The money here was not comparable to Damian’s Croesus-like hoards. The Holmans were very rich, that was all, not super-duper-Bill-Gates-unbelievably rich. Just rich. But they were rich enough, by heaven. The hall was large, stone-flagged, and off-white, with a dark, carved screen at one end and some wonderful furniture. These items had been selected as contemporary with the house, which I later discovered was not the theme in the other downstairs rooms, the designer having decided that Tudor artefacts are easy to admire but hard to live with. The style had therefore been confined to the hall, with a few pieces in the library. There was in this a kind of premeditation, a sort of thought-out pattern that, just as in Damian’s Surrey palace, was oddly undermining to any sense of country living. Proper country houses have a kind of randomness, objects and furniture are deliberately thrown together, survivals of many other houses, which have somehow all ended up there in a kind of chic higgledy-piggledy. Nor is this a skill unknown to many designers who, given ample time and money, can rustle up a house that looks as if the family have owned it since 1650, when in fact they moved in the summer of the previous year. But here, at Bellingham, this casual, comfortable elegance had not been achieved. In fact, there was a slightly disconcerting quality to the whole house that I cannot exactly describe, as if it had been prepared for an elaborate party to which I had not been invited. Had I been told it had been dressed for a photo shoot and I wasn’t to touch anything, it would not have surprised me. The pictures were almost all large, full, or three-quarter- length portraits, over-cleaned and a little too shiny. They had a foreign feel to them and I squinted at some of the name plaques on the most important ones, as I passed. ‘Frederick Francis, 1st Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Shwerin, 1756-1837’ said one, while another announced ‘Count Felix Beningbauer gennant Lupitz, 1812-1871, and his son, Maximilian.’
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