‘I suppose you can,’ he said and nodded her through.
I was within earshot when Joanna was reunited with her family. ‘Well, that was very silly,’ she said as she rejoined them.
‘Just wait. It’ll be all over the evening papers tonight, never mind tomorrow morning.’ Her mother spoke in short, sharp, chirrupy bursts, like a hungry bird in a hedgerow.
‘I think it was a bloody embarrassment,’ said a large man in a thick northern accent.
‘That’s because you don’t know anything.’ Mrs Langley always treated the man I came to know as her husband and Joanna’s father with an odd and quite unusual mixture of deference and contempt. She needed to keep him in his place, but she also needed to keep him.
‘I quite agree. Now, come and buy me some champagne.’ Joanna slipped her arm through her father’s. She always loved him best and she made no secret of it, but it somehow never empowered either of them to resist her mother’s demands. It was an odd, uncomfortable set-up.
We watched them go. ‘Do you want a drink?’ I wondered.
Minna shook her head. ‘Not yet. Not with them.’
It may have been because she heard these words, even if I hope not, but Joanna turned back once more and called, ‘Come up to the box for some tea. Number five three one. Come about four and watch the next race.’ I waved by way of answer and they were gone.
‘We’re meeting my father in White’s at four,’ said Minna.
‘I’m sure we can do both if we want to.’ We drifted up the steps into that long, faintly lavatorial tunnel at the base of the grandstand, built at such an unfortunate part of the Sixties and yet much missed now that it has been swept away despite its replacement being infinitely superior, and we set off on our way through to the back of the building and the Enclosure lawns. It was at precisely that moment I saw Damian loitering in the arch, looking at his race card, with his left arm casually draped round the waist of the girl standing next to him. He was dressed correctly, for my crowd, in a black morning coat and if his costume stood out it was only because it looked as if it had been made for him, not, as with most of us, like a misfit dragged from an upstairs wardrobe, from clothes discarded by forgotten uncles, which our mothers told us, without irony, would be perfectly all right once the sleeves were let down. I was amused to see that his silk hat was old and black, and wondered for a moment where he’d found it. In the great days of racing before the war, there were all sorts of rules about black and grey coats, and black and grey hats, being worn before the Derby or after the Oaks, or some such thing, but by the time I had begun to put in an appearance the matter had been simplified: If you were a toff you wore a black coat and a black hat, and if you were not you wore grey. The only real qualification to this that happened in my time was that after the early Eighties, again if you were posh or trying to be, you didn’t take a hat to a wedding at all.
Actually, unlike many modern, sartorial adjustments, this was an improvement, as between the church and the reception there was hardly a moment to wear it and one always ending up leaving it in a pile behind a curtain, where it was liable to be taken in error, leaving you with an even worse one. The hat did, however, remain compulsory for race meetings and here there was a complication, because there came a point when they stopped making proper silk hats, I imagine for some politically correct, ecological reason, so the struggle was on to get hold of one before they either vanished completely or soared into the thousands to buy. As a result, you could tell the smart people as half the men were wearing hats that had clearly not been either made or bought for them, and were instead relics of dead fathers or grandfathers, or discards from uncles or cousins of their mothers, slightly bashed, slightly rubbed and either too big or too small. My own, courtesy of my dear old dad, balanced on the top of my head like a wobbly 1950s cocktail hat, but I made do.
‘Goodness,’ I said by way of greeting. ‘Wherever I go, there you are.’
‘Then you must go to all the right places.’ He laughed, as his companion turned at the sound of my voice. It was Serena.
There are few markers of small-mindedness so clear as when people resent their friends becoming friendly with each other. But I am sorry to say that you see it often, a slight biting of the lip when they hear that this couple has met up with that couple and, despite their making the original introduction, they have not been invited. ‘We’re just so grateful to you for giving us the Coopers,’ say the happy ones, and they are greeted with a cold smile and a murmured acknowledgement, but nothing more than this. Of course, some people pay no attention to the new amity that has been born over their own dinner table, others have the largeness of spirit to be pleased that their friends like each other, but there is a depressingly sizeable group that can never get over the feeling they have somehow been excluded, left out, ignored, that they are less loved because the love these men and women can give is going to each other and not, as it once did, to them. As the thinking world knows, this is an ignoble emotion, diminishing, sad, even pathetic, and should be avoided, certainly in public where it is as attractive as picking one’s nose. And yet…
If it is bad enough with friends, it is much worse with lovers, or rather with would-be but never-were lovers. To witness someone you have adored unsuccessfully from afar actually fall in love with another of your so-called friends, so that you must watch this warm, well-suited, reciprocal, relationship bloom, in such sharp contrast to the withered, one-sided, bitter thing you cherished in the darkness of your secret thoughts, to stand by and watch all this is very hard. Particularly as you know you demean yourself by giving so much as a tiny clue as to your true feelings. But you lie in the bath or wait in a queue at the post office, and your inner being is hot with anger, boiling with hatred and destruction, even towards those whom, at one and the same time, you love with all your heart. So it was, I blush to admit, with me and Serena, or rather, with me and Damian since he was the author of all my woes.
That arm, so casually laid across the back of her pink Christian Dior suit, his hand lightly resting on the curve where her hip swelled softly down from her waist, that arm was a grotesque, violating betrayal. I’d touched her arm in greeting as people do; I had taken her hand, even brushed her cheek with mine, but all these privileges were available to anyone she had met more than twice. I had never touched her in any way that might imply intimacy. I had touched her as a friendly human being, but never as a man. I found myself wondering what the texture of her skirt must feel like. Was the slight roughness of the weave in the cotton imprinting itself on the edge of his palm and tantalising his fingertips with the almost undetectable movement of her body beneath? Could he feel its warmth? In my mind I could feel it and yet, unlike Damian, I could not feel it.
‘Any ideas for the two thirty?’ said Damian and I woke up.
‘Don’t ask me,’ I said. ‘I only ever bet on names that remind me of something else entirely.’
‘Wildest Dreams,’ said Serena, speaking into my hidden longings. ‘Fletcher gave me a list and he was sure about Wildest Dreams. Then he says You’ll Be Lucky for the Gold Cup.’ Was there no horse running whose name did not encapsulate the hopelessness of my desires?
‘Who’s Fletcher?’ asked Damian.
‘Our groom at Gresham.’ It was as if that simple sentence, carrying as it did in the few words it was made of the absolute divide between her life and his, flung him away from her side.
‘Joanna Langley’s waving at us.’ He pulled his arm off Serena’s flank, and started to walk across the grass towards the group centred on Joanna’s miniskirted and lustrous form. I took his place, with Minna still loitering rather discontentedly on my other side.
‘Did you see that nonsense at the gate?’ Minna was squinting into the sun to get a clearer view of them.
‘No, but I heard about it.’ Serena smiled. ‘It sounded quite funny but I don’t really see the point.’
‘She’ll be all over the papers tomorrow,’ I said.
I
must have sounded like a complete idiot. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘But what does she want from it? What does she get out of it?’
‘Fame?’
‘But fame for doing what? Taking off her trousers? It might make her famous for being famous but what’s the point of that?’ Serena was bewildered by the choice that Joanna had made at the gate that morning, and as far as I recall, Minna and I just nodded and agreed with her. Perhaps it was what we both thought, or if it wasn’t, it was what we all knew we were supposed to think.
The idea of being famous for being famous, a phrase we often used, was a risible and pejorative dismissal in those distant days, but the concept was, of course, a harbinger of our own time. The current fame mania is often mistakenly described as the Cult of Celebrity, but this at least is not new. There were always famous people and they were always interesting to the public. Nor, as again the argument goes today, were they all famous for doing wonderful things. There have always been well-known rakes and showgirls and criminals and worthless stowaways among the great, but as a rule they developed personalities that justified their stardom. What is genuinely new is the Cult of Non-Celebrity, the celebration as if they were famous of men and women who are perfectly ordinary. The oxymoron of the unknown celebrity really is a modern innovation. Maybe it was a sense of this coming fashion, this dawning interest in fame for fame’s sake that would inevitably open the gates of Valhalla wider, that prompted the likes of Mrs Langley to exploit its possibilities. But there was a confusion at the core of her planning and that was in her intended audience. She was playing to the wrong gallery. The upper classes have never been attracted by fame. At least, they may sometimes enjoy famous visitors to their galaxy, but they do not see it as an appropriate attribute among their own kind. Even now, they don’t need it to stand out in the crowd, and they do not, as a rule, see the point of it for any other reason. Maybe the modern heirs will occasionally employ these vulgar methods to promote their interests, but there still remains a moral obligation, even among this younger, savvier group, to pretend that publicity is invariably demeaning and worthless.
Joanna herself understood this fundamental truth, which her mother had not grasped. She saw that the more she became a darling of the press, the more she was invited on to Top of the Pops, or whatever it was in those days, the less welcome she would be in the world to which her mother was so wrong-headedly anxious for her to belong. I am afraid that poor, misguided Mrs Langley genuinely believed that her beautiful daughter was improving her chances of an eligible husband, and a place in Society, by these shenanigans when, in fact, she was diminishing them to the point of invisibility.
I learned this from a conversation I had with Joanna that same day, when I decided to take up her invitation and make my way to the Langleys’ box. This decision came after a slight altercation with Minna, and in the end she went off alone to meet her father for tea while I retreated to the door in the wall, guarded like all the Enclosure entrances by those charming chaps in their obligatory bowler hats. My disagreement with Minna cannot have been sinister as I had dinner with them all later that evening, but perhaps it contributed to the end of our mini-romance. I have never been very good at people who cannot step out of their own setting even for a moment, whatever that setting might be.
Once through the door, I was suddenly propelled into the middle of the other Ascot and in some ways flung forward into the future, into our present day. Toughs in shiny suits, or with no jacket at all, jostled past with their women gaily, if sometimes surprisingly, adorned as I pushed on towards the covered escalator that would take me up to the floor where the boxes could be found in this different and even uglier stand. Here and there, dotted about in the crowd, there were fellow Enclosure members battling their way to and fro, and there was some joshing, wolf whistles and the like, to mark the difference in our costumes. This rapids-running element of journeying from the Enclosure to the boxes would in fact continue until the end of fashionable Ascot, but it grew a little less friendly as the years went on. Various politicians of every hue saw class warfare as so important a weapon in manipulating public opinion that they could not resist inflaming it. Even today, we are constantly encouraged to believe in a capitalist economy, but to despise and revile those who profit from it. It is an odd philosophical position, to say the least, a dysfunctional theory that has contributed to a largely dysfunctional society, but as I say, in the 1960s it was only just starting. Breaking down class barriers was still seen as a happy thing then, so the jokes at one’s expense were, on the whole, good-natured.
The boxes at Ascot have always occupied a kind of limbo position when it comes to the whole event. There are boxes set aside for major trainers and owners, and of course I do not mean these. Their usefulness is logical and credible, but those people were always present at Ascot as part of the racing fraternity and never because of fashion. They will continue to be at the meetings, long after the beau monde has moved on. But for those who only went to Ascot for the fun and frolic, a day out with some horses in the background, the boxes were always faintly unconvincing. To start with it was not necessary to get an Enclosure badge to rent or visit one, and in the old days, when the authorities exerted some control over whom they admitted to the Enclosure, the boxes could become the haven of the socially not-quites, those divorced actresses and grinning, motor dealers who were snubbed by the Old Guard.
The second problem was that most of them were simply minute. You went through a door in a concrete gallery, to be admitted to an itsy-bitsy entrance hall, with a little kitchenette from a 1950s caravan on one side. This led into the space for dining and generally living it up, which was roughly the size of a hotel bathroom, and beyond was the balcony, where two people could just about stand side by side on two or three steps. All in all, the average box was about as capacious and gracious as a lift in Selfridges. But to the mighty ones who are socially insecure, a much larger group than many people realise, they offered a chance to enjoy the race meeting on their own terms, in a place which might be modest but where they were king, instead of spending the day detecting sneers and slights in the behaviour of the Enclosure crowd that surrounded them. I would guess this was the appeal for Joanna’s father, and that Alfred Langley was prepared to accompany his wife and daughter, but only on the condition that he could have a box to hide in for most of the day.
Mrs Langley darted up to me, her eyes flicking round the empty room behind my back, checking that nobody more important needed attention. ‘Joanna’s on the balcony,’ she said, ‘with some friends.’ Then, nervous that she had somehow given offence with this blameless statement, she continued, ‘She told us you were coming.’
‘I’m afraid Minna had to meet her father in White’s, but she sends her love.’
Mrs Langley nodded. ‘Sir Timothy Bunting,’ she muttered, as if I were unaware of the name of my host.
‘Yes,’ I said.
She nodded again. There was something shifty about her that her smooth hair and tailored suit and really rather nice diamond brooch could not mask. She was jumpy, like Peter Lorre waiting to have his collar felt in a black-and-white thriller about the mob. As I got to know her better I found this sense of frightened uncertainty never left her. She couldn’t relax, which I suspect was both part of what turned her daughter against her, but at the same time was the root of her power.
Joanna was leaning against the railing when I went out, attended by Lord George Tremayne and one or two other swains, all a little, but not very, drunk, and all holding empty or near-empty champagne flutes, that new glass that had only recently started to replace the gentle, bosom-shaped cup favoured in the previous decade. But then the Langleys were nothing if not up to the minute. That said, it was a lovely day and the sight of Joanna smiling up at me, her face framed with her own golden hair and the white brim of her lace hat, with the wide sweep of the lush green racetrack behind her, was very cheering.
‘I came,’ I said.
‘So you did.�
� She walked up a step or two and kissed my cheek, then turned back to her companions. ‘Push off, will you?’ They protested, but she was quite definite. ‘Go inside. Get some more to drink and bring me one in a minute.’ She touched my sleeve. ‘I’ve got something to tell him and it’s private.’ Naturally, none of this would have been sayable if she had lived even remotely within the rules of the crowd she was running with, but not for the last time I appreciated that the advantage of not being held captive by the need to observe correct form is that you can often get things done far more efficiently. In other words, they left.
I have already written about her beauty and it is probably true that I place physical beauty too high on my list of desirable attributes, but, in this case, it really was spectacular. No matter how closely one looked, Joanna’s face was as near perfect as any I have ever seen not made of plastic, drawn on a page or enshrined on the silver screen. Smooth, evenly coloured skin, without a trace of a blemish; a mouth shaped with the soft curves of a petal, beneath widely placed deep-blue, almost purple, eyes, fringed with thick, long lashes; a statue’s nose; and masses of gleaming born-blonde curls framing her cheeks and cascading to her shoulders. She was, as the song says, lovely to look at. ‘What are you looking at?’ Her voice, with its faint tinge of Essex, caught at my reveries, repeated the phrase and returned me to the present.
‘At you,’ I said.
She smiled. ‘That’s nice.’ There was, in addition to everything else, something particularly charming in the contrast between her ethereal appearance and her absolute normality, her complete next-doorness which is hard to capture in words but was probably the core of the charm that delivered Charles II to Nell Gwynne, or enabled so many of the cockney Gaiety Girls to marry into the peerage in the 1890s. Her cheeriness was in some way the opposite of vanity, yet not self-consciously modest either. Just perfectly natural.
Past Imperfect Page 26