Past Imperfect

by Julian Fellowes

  He smiled. ‘You should have married her.’

  ‘Don’t let’s go down that route.’ With all that had happened I was no longer surprised that my rage should be as near the surface as it was.

  If I expected him to be chastened I was disappointed. ‘I just meant that I bet Lady Claremont would have been better off with you than Andrew.’ As usual, he made no reference to his own part in the whole business.

  ‘Or you. Or anyone.’

  ‘No. Not me,’ he said flatly.

  I couldn’t break free of the subject quite yet. Once reopened, the wound felt as if it were freshly cut. ‘Why did she marry him? What was she? Nineteen? And she wasn’t even pregnant. The daughter came along ten months later and was the spitting image of Andrew, so there was nothing untoward. I just don’t get it.’

  He nodded. ‘It was a different world then. We did things differently.’

  ‘How involved were you? With Serena?’ As I spoke, each word was like a lash, leaving a red stripe on my back.

  He chuckled. ‘What a wonderfully quaint expression. You sound like Woman’s Hour thirty years ago. In what way “involved”?’

  ‘You know in what way.’

  He was silent for a moment. Then he shrugged. ‘I was mad about her.’

  Had I known this or not? It was so hard to decide, after everything that had happened. To hear him say it was still a kind of shock. Rather like the death of a great friend after a long terminal illness. I drank deeper of the poison. ‘Who broke it off?’

  I could see I was beginning to annoy him. Once again, we had used up our false friendliness and were getting back to our true feelings for one another. ‘I didn’t want to spend my life being patronised.’ I could see he was back there for a moment, in the place that I had never left. ‘I remember once,’ he said after a moment, ‘when I went to Gresham-’

  ‘You used to go to Gresham?’ I couldn’t believe it. Where was I all this time? Sleeping in a box in the cellar? Why had I known none of this?

  ‘You know I did. For the dance.’ He was right. I did know it. ‘She was giving me a lift. So I got myself to their flat. Where was it? Somewhere in Belgravia?’

  ‘Chester Square. And it was a house, not a flat.’

  He looked at me, understanding fully the significance of my exact recollection of the detail. ‘Anyway, we’d loaded up the cases and then, as we set off, Serena said-’ he paused, with a deep sigh, back in that smart little red two-seater that I once knew so well. ‘She said, “Now this is going to have to be very carefully stage-managed” and she started to list what I was to do when I got there, how I was to behave, what I should and should not say to her mother when she greeted me, how I should manage her father’s questions, what I should mention to her brother and her sisters. On and on she went, and as I listened I thought this isn’t for me. I don’t want to go somewhere where I’m a liability, where things have to be monitored so my hosts don’t regret asking me, where I need to take a course before I can get out of the car, where I’m not a welcome member of the party.’ He stopped, out of breath, and waited until he had caught up with himself.

  ‘I can see that,’ I said. Which I could.

  He looked at me as if he suspected me of triumphing in his confession. ‘I didn’t face it at the time but, if I’m honest, I think that was when I knew it wouldn’t work. Not in the long term.’

  ‘Did you say anything to her?’

  The question made him slightly uncomfortable. ‘Not then.’ He had recovered. ‘Later.’

  ‘But it was the end from that moment?’ What did I want from him?

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember. The point is I realised that if I ever did marry, I wanted it to be into a family that would hang bunting off the balconies, send up fireworks, take out ads in The Times, not roll their eyes in unforgiving silence at my unsuitability. You saw what that guy who married the youngest sister had to go through. He was an unperson by the time they’d finished with him.’

  ‘Did Suzanne’s family put out the flags?’ This sounds rather unkind and I suppose it was, but I was so filled with jealousy that I felt I could have killed him. I’d say he got off pretty lightly.

  His smile became rather wry. ‘The trouble was you lot had spoiled me. I didn’t like you or your world, and I didn’t want what you had, but when I tried to go back to my old crowd I’d lost the taste for their tastes. I had become like mad old Lady Belton, too snobbish, too aware of unimportant differences and needing to be stage-managed, myself.’

  ‘So we repelled you from our world and spoiled you for your own.’

  ‘In a nutshell.’

  ‘Serena must have got married almost straight away? When you and she were finished.’

  ‘Not long afterwards.’ He thought about this. ‘I hope she’s happy.’

  I sipped my tea in a vague, and vain, attempt to soothe my troubled spirits. ‘Not very, I would guess. But with her kind it’s hard to tell.’

  Once more he was watching me, with all the care of an anthropologist making a study of a rare and unpredictable beast. ‘Are you enjoying it at all? This Proustian return? It’s your past as much as mine.’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘What does your…’ He hesitated. ‘I hate the word “partner.” What does she make of it all?’

  ‘Bridget? I don’t think she’s interested. It’s not her scene.’ This last was true, but the statement before it wasn’t completely. Still, I couldn’t be bothered to get into all that. ‘It doesn’t matter either way,’ I continued. ‘We’ve broken up.’

  ‘Oh dear. I hope it’s coincidental.’

  ‘Not completely. But it was coming anyway.’

  He nodded, insufficiently curious to pursue it. ‘So, who’s next?’

  ‘Candida Finch or Joanna Langley. Joanna, probably.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I always had rather a crush on her.’

  He smiled at my revelation. ‘Obviously, something we shared.’

  ‘Do you remember the famous Ascot appearance?’

  ‘How could anyone forget it?’

  ‘Were you with her then?’ I asked breezily. ‘I know you weren’t in her party when you got there. Didn’t you come with the Greshams?’ Another crunch, hard down on that loose and aching tooth.

  He frowned, concentrating. ‘Technically. But I don’t think I was “with” either of them at that stage. That all came later.’

  I winced. ‘I used to think you and Joanna made rather a good pair.’

  He nodded. ‘Because we were both common and on the make? And I wouldn’t get in your way?’

  ‘Because you were both modern and in touch with reality, which is more than you could say for most of us. The big learning curve we were all facing wasn’t going to be necessary for you two.’

  ‘That’s generous.’ He acknowledged my courtesy with a polite nod from the neck. ‘But we weren’t as synchronised as we must have looked from the outside. I was very ambitious, remember.’

  ‘I certainly do.’

  My tone was perhaps more revealing than I had intended and it made him flick his eyes up at me. ‘And in those early months of the whole thing I still hadn’t decided what I did, or didn’t, want from all of you. Joanna wanted nothing. Except to escape from her mother and hide. She may not have known it, at least not consciously, not then. But it was in her and of course she found out the truth before very long.’

  ‘As we all know.’

  Damian laughed. ‘As we all know.’

  ‘And when she did, it was clear you weren’t going in the same direction.’

  He nodded in acceptance of this, although I could see, each time I interrupted, that it troubled him not to set his own pace. Actually, I fully understand how annoying this can be, those tiresome, unfunny men at dinners who heckle a speaker, destroying the jokes, but not replacing them with anything amusing of their own. Even so, I wasn’t prepared to listen to Damian’s cleaned-up and sanitised account of these events, wit
hout the odd comment. He continued, ‘When you do see her and you’ve finished your snooping, I’m interested to learn what she feels about all that time now. I look forward to hearing when you’ve tracked her down.’

  This was the question that was troubling me. Of all the women on the list she was the one with the least information. ‘You haven’t given me a lot to go on. To find her.’

  Damian accepted this. ‘Her name doesn’t bring up much on the Internet. The Ascot story, of course, and some other early stuff, but nothing after the divorce.’

  ‘Divorce?’

  ‘In 1983.’ I must have looked solemn for a moment. He shook his head, clucking his tongue as he did so. ‘Please don’t let’s pretend it’s a shock. The wonder is that they got fourteen years out of it.’

  ‘I suppose so. What was the husband called again? I forget.’

  ‘Kieran de Yong. You’ll find there’s plenty about him.’

  ‘Kieran de Yong.’ I hadn’t thought of that name in so long, but it still had the power to make me smile.

  Ditto Damian. ‘I used to get a glimpse of him at the odd city feste, but he always studiously ignored me. And I haven’t seen anything of Joanna, in print or person, since they split.’ He spoke musingly. ‘What do you think his real name was?’

  ‘Not Kieran de Yong.’

  He laughed. ‘It might be Kieran. But I doubt it was de Yong.’

  Now I too was trying to remember those headlines and that curious young man. ‘What was he? A hairdresser? A modelling agent? A dress designer? Something that chimed with the zeitgeist of the day.’

  ‘I think you’ll be surprised. Most people get less from the future than they expected but some people get more. We’ve got an address for him. They should have given it to you.’

  I nodded. ‘If they’ve split up, will he know where to find her?’

  ‘Of course he will. They’ve got a son.’ He paused. ‘Or I have. Anyway, even if he doesn’t he may provide a lead. In any case I should start with him because we haven’t come up with an alternative.’

  I was leaving when I had to ask one last question. ‘Are you really a Catholic?’

  He laughed. I suppose the wording was rather funny. ‘I’m not sure what you mean. I was born a Catholic. Didn’t you know?’

  I shook my head. ‘So you “lapsed”?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  His answer interested me. ‘Why “afraid”? Would you like to believe?’

  Damian glanced at me patronisingly, as if I were a child. ‘Of course I would,’ he said. ‘I’m dying.’

  The car was waiting patiently outside, but I knew there was a train every twenty minutes and so, with the immaculate chauffeur’s permission, I allowed myself a little wander among the stalls of the fête below. I thought about Damian’s unexpected words as I looked at these tables of old, unreadable books, at the piles of lamps from all the worst periods, at the cakes and jams, painstakingly made and all soon doubtless to be outlawed by the Health and Safety Stasi, at the dolls without their voice boxes and the jigsaws ‘missing one piece,’ and I, too, felt a kind of comfort and balm in the decency they represented. Naturally, it was very old-fashioned, and I am sure that if a New Labour minister could be offended by the Last Night of the Proms, she would be rendered suicidal by the sight of this comic, uniquely English event, but there was goodness here. These people had worked hard at what I would once have judged as such a little thing, yet their efforts were not wasted on me; in fact, they almost made me cry.

  It is hard to be certain from this distance, but I think I’m right in saying that Ascot came after Queen Charlotte’s Ball. I had anyway, as I have said, met Joanna Langley several times before the race meeting, but it was on that day that I suppose we became friends, which even now I like to think we were. It was then that I understood she was a creature of her own era, that she was not, like the rest of us, engaged in some kind of action replay of our parents’ youth.

  Ascot as a fashionable event is almost finished now. No doubt sensibly, Her Majesty’s Representative has decided the meeting would better earn its keep as a day for racing enthusiasts and corporate entertaining. To this end the Household Stand (their sole remaining perk, poor dears, in exchange for all that unpaid smiling and standing) and various other, arcane sanctums were eliminated from the wonderful, new grandstand, and the famous Royal Enclosure is no longer workable in the altered layout. Once the Court felt unwelcome, many of its members found other things to do and after this retreat it followed as the night the day that first the smart set and next the social aspirants, those who do not live and breathe horses anyway, would start to drop away. Soon, most of them will abandon it, I would guess forever, since once British toffs are given permission to avoid a social obligation it is hard to make them take it up again. Some will say it was high time and the racing crowd will be glad that horses have once again become the business of the day. But whether or not we would agree with this now, in the 1960s we enjoyed it like billy-o.

  For some reason, that year I had gone with the family of a girl called Minna Bunting. Her father held some position at Buckingham Palace which I cannot now recall, Keeper of the Privy Purse maybe, or at any rate one of those ancient-sounding titles that brought, among other privileges, a place in the Ascot car park reserved for the use of members of the Royal Household. This was, and is, located across the road from the main entrance to the course and has always been considered very smart, despite consisting of a large but unremarkable ashphalt yard, overlooked by the unfragrant main stables and boasting a single loo more properly reserved for the grooms. A sort of disintegrating Dutch barn provided a bit of shelter on one side and a couple of abandoned pony stalls offered some shade on the other. Otherwise it was lines of cars. But the whole arrangement was supervised every year by the nicest group of men you could hope to encounter, which always gave the place rather a lift, and I do know it was considered quite a feather in my cap to be having my picnic lunch there, even if there were moments when the aroma made swallowing hard.

  I think Minna and I were fairly keen on each other, in a moderate way, for a brief while back then. I know we went out to dinner a few times and I could not now tell you why this ended. I am often struck by how hard it is to unravel your own motives when you look back on certain incidents or relationships in the dim and distant past. Why this girl failed but that one broke your heart. Why this man made you smile and that one made your spirits sink. They all seem to have been quite nice, friends and enemies and lovers alike, young and pleasant and, to be honest, all much of a muchness from the vantage point of hindsight. What was it about them as individuals that intrigued or bored me forty years ago?

  We had finished our lunch and it was time to make our way over the road and on to the course, so we strolled together down the high, laurel-lined path to the entrance. The police were managing the traffic, as they did even then in those comparatively traffic-free days and we were obliged to pause. ‘What on earth is going on?’ said Minna.

  She was right. On the other side of the road, by the main entrance, the gathering of what later came to be called Paparazzi, was going mad. As a rule there were far fewer of them then, not much more than a handful from the fashion magazines and the odd red top, but the public’s taste for what celebrities were wearing was easily assuaged in 1968. On this day, however, you would have thought there was an item of international news being played out before us all. We crossed to the other pavement, passed through the gates and walked into the little courtyard where the disorganised could buy their badges on the day itself, and moved on to the gate into the Royal Enclosure. Something happening at the barrier was what was apparently fascinating the photographers most. Some were resorting to that trick, familiar now but novel in those days, of just holding their cameras above their heads and snapping away blindly, on the off chance that something worth printing might come out.

  Armed with our badged lapels and a sense of entitlement, we pushed through the crowd and th
ere was the cause of the riot. Joanna Langley, in an exquisite trouser suit of white lace, a pale hat trimmed with more lace and white flowers setting off her gleaming curls, white gloves on her hands, white bag by her side, was attempting to reason with the bluff ex-soldier in a bowler who sat guard. ‘Sorry, Miss,’ he said, without malice but without hesitation either, ‘no trousers is the rule. And I can’t change it. Even if I wanted to. Skirts only. That’s what it says.’

  ‘But this is almost a skirt,’ replied Joanna.

  ‘ “Almost” isn’t good enough, I’m afraid, Miss. Now if you’d like to stand aside.’ He beckoned to us and we started forward.

  ‘Hello,’ I smiled at Joanna, as we drew near. I may not have known her well by that stage, but all our previous encounters had been friendly ones. ‘You seem to be making news, today.’

  She laughed. ‘It’s my mother’s idea. She’s put me up to it. I thought she was wrong, and they were bound to let me in. But it seems not.’

  ‘Come on.’ Minna pulled at my arm, anxious to dissociate herself from the media throng. As with all these people, then or now, this is not an affectation. They really hate it.

  But I was too intrigued. I couldn’t understand what Joanna was saying. If her mother was the one who thought she would be refused entry, how could she have put her up to it? ‘Why did your mother want you to be stopped? Is she here?’

  Joanna nodded towards a small group beyond the railings. I recognised the anxious, little woman from Queen Charlotte’s Ball. She was wearing a tailored, fuchsia suit with a socking great brooch on her bosom. She seemed to be quivering with excitement watching her daughter, nudging her companions, sucking at her lower lip, but oddly she made no attempt to come nearer. ‘What’s she waiting for?’ I asked.

  Joanna sighed. ‘What they’re all waiting for. This.’ Before my astonished gaze, she reached up under the tunic of her trouser suit and unfastened the waistband of her trousers. With a graceful movement she extracted first one long, shapely, stockinged leg and then the other, until she was standing there in a white micro-miniskirt, with the trousers making a pool of lace on the ground. Predictably, the frenzy of the photographers knew no bounds. They could have been witnessing the last appearance of Marilyn Monroe, the discovery of Hitler’s child, the Second Coming, so excited were they by this coup de thèâtre. ‘I suppose I can come in now,’ she said softly to the astonished, bowlerhatted gateman, who could not pretend to be uninterested.