Past Imperfect

by Julian Fellowes

  I knew that in fact the Tapestry Drawing Room opened directly on to the gardens above us, but some trace of late-teen diffidence told me that to push in through the French windows with a crowd of strangers was overplaying my hand, so I devised the plan that at the end of the performance we would deposit our debris in the car, to obviate the need to collect it later, and make our way to the front of the house. The programme of events stated clearly that there was a fifty-minute break between concert and fireworks to allow the night to get properly dark, so I knew we had time. In that way we could come into the house via the front door, like normal people, and not be suspected of springing an ambush on our hosts.

  I was glad of the decision when we got there, as quite a crowd was arriving and it was clear that the Claremonts had cunningly devised this plan to placate those locals who felt they had a right to be acknowledged by the family without the bore of giving them all dinner. The hall at Gresham was vast and high, stone-floored and with a screen of columns completing the square, behind which a graceful cantilevered staircase rose up to the next floor, its steps so shallow that a woman descending in a long skirt, which for our generation meant evening dress, seemed to float down as if her feet barely skimmed the steps beneath. It was a more awkward progress for men, who had to adjust quickly to the fact that each step taken only brought them about an inch nearer their destination, but for women the effect was like gliding, flying, and quite magical to watch, as I remembered so very well.

  The portraits displayed here had been selected by Lady Claremont in a massive re-hang when she and her husband took over the house in 1967, just before my first visit, and which I could see at once had not been altered. They were chosen, as she freely confessed, unashamedly and entirely for their looks, and despite the anguished protests of Lord Claremonts’ surviving aunts, those distinguished Victorian statesmen in undertakers’ frock coats, those fearsome Georgian soldiers, all red faces and stubborn chins, those wily Tudor statesmen with their shifty eyes and avaricious mouths and generally the uglier members of the family, had been banished to anterooms and passages and bedrooms, except the ones by really famous painters, who had wound up either in the library or hung in fearsome double tiers against the crimson, damask walls of the great dining room. Both these chambers, Lady Claremont had explained to me at the time, were masculine rooms and so needed to be impressive but not pretty. Here, in the hall, charming children from every period were interlarded with handsome, nervous, young men in their Eton leaving portraits, trembling with anticipation at the welcoming life ahead, and lovely Gresham girls, painted on their betrothal to other lordly magnates or as part of some series of Court beauties for King Charles II or the Prince Regent, smiled down on their worshippers beneath. Their shining, gilded frames were set off by the apricot walls and the intricate plasterwork, picked out in varying shades of grey and white, while in the centre of the ceiling hung a huge chandelier, like a shower of glistening raindrops, frozen in their fall by a glance from the Snow Queen.

  ‘How perfectly lovely,’ said Jennifer, looking around, provoking a severe look from her husband, which I understood. Anything giving away that they were not regular visitors was to be suppressed. Jennifer grasped this too, of course, but had obviously made the interesting decision not to play along with his self-importance. Bridget, needless to say, was retreating into one of her silent-but-ironic moods, but I couldn’t spare the time to administer to it. I was back at Gresham, which I never thought to be again, and I was determined to enjoy it.

  The Tapestry Drawing Room was on the corner of the garden front, and the easiest way to reach it was through an oval anteroom at the back of the hall, where facing doors led left, to the dining room, and right, to our destination. It was a lovely place. The walls were lined in a kind of dusty blue moiré, with cream panelling edged in gilt up to the dado, and high panelled doorcases with over-door paintings set into them, taking the cream and gilt on up to the ceiling. Against the huge spaces of blue hung a set of Gobelin tapestries, celebrating a series of victories, achieved, I am pretty sure, by Marlborough. I forget precisely why they were here. Maybe an earlier Claremont had been in part responsible for the great duke’s glory; in fact, now I am writing it I think that was why they were upped to an earldom in the 1710s. Beneath our feet was a ravishing Aubusson carpet, with its slight, distinctive wrinkling, and on it sat various magnificent pieces of furniture, most spectacularly a pedestal clock, seven foot high on its plinth, its inlaid case embellished with gilding, which had been presented to the third Earl by the Empress Catherine of Russia in return for some unspecified personal service, which no one had ever convincingly explained. The butler we had spoken to during the interval held a tray of glasses and a couple of maids were wandering about with more wine and bits of food. Lady Claremont, with that amazing eye for detail that had clearly not deserted her, had provided mini-savouries in the form of angels on horseback and tiny, pick-up bits of Welsh Rabbit or mushrooms on itsy bits of toast, all of which would be welcome, even after eating dinner.

  ‘There you are. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we saw you.’ Lady Claremont kissed me swiftly and efficiently on one cheek, not for her the double-kiss import of the 1970s. ‘You should have let us know you were coming.’ I presented my party, who all shook hands. Jennifer alone thanked her for inviting us and Tarquin tried to start a conversation about the famous clock on which, needless to say, he had a great deal of information at his fingertips. But she had spent a life avoiding just such overtures, and soon gave a nod and a smile to indicate she had heard enough. Then she turned to her ancient neighbour, introducing me. ‘Do you remember Mrs Davenport?’ Since the woman did look a bit familiar I nodded as I shook her wizened hand. ‘He was here all the time at the end of the Sixties,’ Lady Claremont explained with a gay laugh. ‘We used to feel terribly sorry for him.’ She looked at me indulgently and I could sense my throat tightening at the prospect of what was coming next, but nothing could stop her as she looked about to gain the maximum audience. ‘He was so in love with Serena!’

  And she and the said Mrs Davenport laughed happily together at the memory of my roiling misery, which could still keep me awake at nights, and which I had thought private and brilliantly concealed from all but me. I smiled by way of response, to show I too thought it a terrific joke that I had wandered through these same charming rooms with my heart actually hurting in my chest. But her steady, even voice served to calm my remembered pain, as she chatted on about this and that, Serena and the other children, the lovely weather, the ghastly government, all standard stuff for a drinks party at a country house. I was interested that she had not mentioned the event we shared, that made an effective end to those dreams of long ago. Of course, it is a relatively modern American import, the notion that we must ‘have these things out,’ while the old, English traditions of letting sleeping dogs lie, and brushing things under the carpet, have been spurned. But who gains from this constant picking at the scabs of life? ‘We have to talk,’ says at least one character in almost every television drama these days, until one longs to scream at the screen, ‘Why? Just let it go!’ But I was not surprised Lady Claremont had avoided the culture of revisiting old wounds. In a way, her asking me up for a drink was her way of saying, ‘It’s all right. Like you, we’ve moved on. After so many years, surely we can have a chat again like normal people without even mentioning it.’ And if she had made fun of my love pangs, still I appreciated her courtesy in this.

  By the time I’d concluded my ruminations the tide of the party had separated us. Tarquin, having listened to the exchange with glee, could not decide whether to turn our hostess’s ribbing into a way to belittle me and thereby derive some fun from my failed romance of long ago, or whether the mere fact that I had been to Gresham sufficiently often for Lady Claremont even to be aware that I was in love with her daughter and to welcome me now as an old friend entitled me to special handling. I left him to his indecisive review. Across the room, Jennifer had uneart
hed somebody they actually knew and seemed to be chatting quite merrily, and Bridget, as usual making a virtue of being out of her depth, was sulking, so I was essentially alone again in this, the haunting, painful setting of my earlier self.

  Clutching my glass, nodding and smiling, I pushed back through the crush into the oval anteroom. We had passed through it quickly on our way in but, as I remembered so well, it was a lovely place, not huge but delicate and inviting, upholstered in a light and feminine chintz, and filled with light and feminine things. In this house it served as the boudoir and Lady Claremont’s desk sat against one wall, a beautifully carved bureau plat, its surface littered with papers and letters and lists of things-to-do. I looked idly at a set of small Flemish paintings depicting the five senses, painted by David Teniers the younger some time in the 1650s. I had always admired them and I greeted them now like old friends. How delicate they were, how fine the detail, how strange that, since the paint first dried, not one, not two, but twenty generations had been born, had planned, had dreamed, had coped with disappointment and had died. I wandered over to the dining-room doors. They were closed but I turned the handle and pushed one open, startling a maid who was finishing laying the table. ‘More than fourteen for breakfast?’ I smiled to show that I came in peace.

  She relaxed a little, answering in a rich, warm Yorkshire accent, ‘We’re nineteen tomorrow. And that’s with two of the ladies staying in bed.’

  ‘I remember the rule was always that fourteen or under ate breakfast in the small dining room. More than that and it was laid in here.’

  I had succeeded in catching her attention. In fact, she was quite curious. She looked at me more closely. ‘Did you used to stay here, then?’

  ‘I did. At one time. It’s reassuring to know that nothing’s changed.’ Actually, this was true. It was reassuring to find so much was still the same here, in this isolated appendix of my life, when almost everything had changed elsewhere. Although I later learned there was an element of illusion in this and that the estate, along with the country, had taken a downturn during the Seventies, successfully reversed from the mid-Eighties onwards in the hands of a new and gifted manager.

  In fact, this happy story was true for many families I had known before their temporary fall. It should have been true for all of them, really, had not too many succumbed to that most dangerous of modern fashions among the born-rich, the desire to prove, to themselves and to everyone else, that their money is a reflection of their own brains and talent. The advantage of this is that it obviates the need to feel grateful to their forebears, or obliged to respect their successful, self-made acquaintance, who might otherwise demand some kind of moral superiority over those whose enviable position owes all to the efforts of others. The disadvantage, of course, is that it is not true. In denial of which, rich but silly aristocrats up and down the land will blithely launch into schemes they do not understand and investments that have no real worth, on the word of advisors without either judgement or merit, until their ignorance inevitably overturns them. I could name at least twenty men of my acquaintance who would be worth many millions more than they are if they had never left their bedrooms and come downstairs. And more than a few who began with everything and ended up with literally almost nothing. In this field I suspect that women, more pragmatic as a rule and less needy of self-worth when it comes to having a ‘head for business,’ have generally proved more sensible. Certainly, Lady Claremont would never have allowed her dearly loved spouse to get his hands on the wheel, or even near it, when it came to steering the Gresham inheritance.

  ‘Mummy shouldn’t have said that. I hope she hasn’t driven you in here.’ Her voice could always unnerve me. ‘If you were even a bit in love with me I find it tremendously flattering.’ That Serena should be so near to me was a joy, that she should have heard her mother’s words was a nightmare, so it was with mixed emotions that I turned to find her looking at me through the door from the middle of the anteroom.

  ‘At the time, I always rather hoped no one had guessed.’

  ‘I didn’t at the beginning.’

  ‘Until Portugal.’

  ‘Before. But never mind.’ Unsurprisingly, she didn’t want to be drawn into that one. ‘Of course, Mummy told me afterwards that she knew when you first stayed here, but I suppose one’s mother is bound to be more aware of these things.’

  ‘Yours is.’ We both smiled. ‘It was kind of her not to bring up the whole Estoril thing, seeing it was the last time I saw them.’

  ‘Was it really?’

  ‘I might have glimpsed them across the room at a summer party at Christie’s or something, but I haven’t spoken to them properly between that night and this.’

  She shrugged gently. ‘Well, it was ages ago.’ I wondered at her. As I have already mentioned, I had run into Serena occasionally over the years, so there was no four-decade gap to be leaped, but the sight of her was always an amazement. To start with, she seemed to have aged one year for every ten that the rest of us had gone through. In fact, she was hardly changed at all. A few fine lines at the sides of her eyes, a shallow crease by her mouth, her hair a slightly paler colour, nothing more. ‘Are you all here for the weekend?’

  ‘Most of us. Mummy made it a three-line whip. In case the whole thing went belly-up and we had to save the show. But the organisers were much better this year than last.’

  ‘Is Mary with you? And Rupert?’

  ‘Mary is. She was in the hall when I last saw her. Poor old Rupert’s in Washington. He’s been posted there for the last three years.’

  ‘Washington? What an honour.’

  ‘An honour and a bore. We’re aching for him to get something in Paris or Dublin or anywhere he can get home from for the weekend.’

  ‘What about Peniston? Have you brought him with you?’ Serena had two children. The elder, Mary, whom I was doubtless about to see again after many years, was now married to the first secretary in the Washington embassy, Rupert Wintour, and was well on her way to being an ambassadress. When a child, she was ordinary in every way, and horribly like her father to look at, so I confess I suspected her husband’s motives when I first heard about the marriage. His father, Sir Something Wintour, was an entrepreneur and his mother a former beautician, so the eldest child of an earl seemed like a suspiciously welcome choice, but once I had met him I felt I’d been unjust to Rupert. He was quite a bright spark. Serena’s other child was the essential boy, Peniston, a little younger than his sister, whom I had seen occasionally in their house in Lansdowne Crescent, just as our friendship was petering out.

  ‘Peniston’s here but he arrived under his own steam, since he’s married and has children of his own. These days I’m a grandmother three times over.’

  ‘I need proof.’

  She smiled pleasantly, used to compliments. ‘Helena’s come with William and the boys. You must say hello. And Anthony. I’m not sure where Venetia’s got to. Mummy says she’s in New York, but I got a card last week from Singapore. You know what she’s like.’ She rolled her eyes ceilingwards, with a tolerant laugh. There were three girls, starting with Serena herself and a brother who was, of course, heir to the kingdom. Helena, the second Gresham sister, had married an amiable landowning banking baronet in a neighbouring county, a union that had satisfied her mother, if it did not send her into ecstasies. However the youngest sister, Venetia, had defied the family by accepting the proposal of a pop impresario, an episode I remember only too well. The Claremonts had absolutely refused to countenance it at first. But to everyone’s surprise, since she was not seen as particularly strong or rebellious, Venetia had stuck to her guns and in the end they caved in rather than endure the scandal of a wedding without their presence. As my own father used to say, ‘Never provide material for a story.’ Venetia was the winner in the end. Her husband made an immense fortune in the music industry and now she was richer than, or at least as rich as, any of them but the family exacted its revenge by continuing to patronise her, as
if her life had been a trivial and wasteful mass of nothing, up to the present day.

  Oddly, the male sibling, Anthony, was the one we all knew least. He came after Serena and before the others. He was still young, not much more than a boy, when Serena and I were running around together, but I can’t say that even when he was grown up we were ever much the wiser where he was concerned. He was polite, of course, and pleasant to talk to at dinner or while having a drink before lunch, but he was always curiously opaque. He revealed nothing. The kind of person who, years later, might turn out to be a terrorist or a serial killer, without causing any great surprise. I liked him though, and I will say that he never demonstrated that supremely tedious habit that some people acquire, of loudly advertising to all and sundry the amount of information they are concealing. He hid everything about himself, but without pretence, mystery or conceit.

  ‘So, how are you?’ she said. ‘Have you got another book out? I shouldn’t have to ask. I feel rather feeble, not knowing.’ There is a way of enquiring into an artistic career, which may sound or read as generous, but which in fact manages to reduce the value of it almost to nothing. The contempt is contained within its enthusiastic kindness, rather as a little girl’s painting will be praised by someone who is hopeless with children. No one can do this better than the genuinely posh.

  ‘There’s one coming out next March.’

  ‘You must let us know when it does.’ Such people often say this sort of thing to their acquaintance in the media: ‘Let me know when you’re next on television,’ ‘Let us know when it’s published,’ ‘Let us know when you’re back on Any Questions.’ As if one is likely to sit down and send off three thousand postcards when a personal appearance is scheduled. Obviously, they understand this will never happen. The message is really: ‘We are not sufficiently interested in what you do to be aware of it if you don’t make us aware. You understand that it does not impinge on our world, so you will please forgive us in future for missing whatever you are involved in.’ Serena did not mean it unkindly, which is the case with many of them, but I cannot deny it is disheartening at times.