‘Leave him, Ron. He’s not worth it,’ the girl with black hair and what looked like four different petticoats swaddling her bottom shouted over her shoulder. Happily he appeared to agree and turned away.
As he moved back, he shouted a crisp ‘Fuck off’ at me, but more as a kind of standard ritual, as one might say good morning in a village street. And so, before he could change his mind, I did.
It’s not often that I walk at night, though more from laziness than fear, but when I do I am amazed at the changes that have come about in London during my adult lifetime, the main one being, of course, not the mugging and the general crime, nor even the dirt and uncollected rubbish that swirls and drifts in piles against the railings and the plane trees, waiting in vain for the men to come. It is the drunkenness that has transformed the streets, not just of London but of almost every town, into a lesser hell for lawful citizens. The kind of drunkenness that in years gone by used to be talked of in Siberia at the height of Stalin’s iron rule as a reflection of the misery of the oppressed, or it was rumoured to be manifest up near the pole, where the long nights of winter drive strong men mad. Why did it happen here? When did it start? I used to think it was a class thing and somehow linked to the ills of social deprivation, but it isn’t. Not long ago I attended a twenty-first party, held in one of St James’s smartest clubs. The birthday boy was clever, charming, tipped for success and linked to half the peerage, and I watched as all the nice young girls and young men cheerfully tossed back the booze until they were staggering or vomiting or both. As I left, I heard a tray of glasses go west amid loud laughter, and a girl in a pretty couture dress of lilac chiffon pushed past me, hand on mouth, hoping to make it just in time. Outside, a fellow with traces of sick on his evening shirt was urinating against the car parked next to mine. I had escaped not a moment too soon.
Certainly some people drank too much in my day, as they always have, but drunkenness was rare and sad, and made men look like fools. Until as little as ten years ago being drunk was a mistake, a regrettable by-product of making merry, a miscalculation which, the next day, required an apology. Now it’s the point. Does anyone out there understand why we let it happen? Because I don’t. Of course I can see the charm of the ‘café culture’ we were said to be encouraging. But how long can a sane person contemplate failure without admitting it? At what point does optimism become delusion? The other day some fat-headed woman on the radio was lecturing her browbeaten interviewer, denying that there was anything wrong with binge-drinking, insisting that the true problem lay with the middle-aged, middle-class drunks, apparently swilling it down in their own houses. He, poor battered fellow, dared not argue that even if this were true, even if all the bons bourgeois were lying flat on the carpet, singing sea shanties every night of their lives, they would still not be a problem, because they would not be a problem to anyone else. Why do modern leaders not grasp that their job is to control antisocial behaviour but not private activity; to regulate our actions as regards others, but not where they only concern ourselves? At times it is hard not to feel that as a culture we are lost, in permanent denial and spinning in the void.
I turned the key and opened the door of the flat on to the darkness of living alone. I walked into the drawing room and switched on a scattering of lamps from the door. I was only beginning to get used to the notion that every time I returned to my home I would find it just as I’d left it. When Bridget went I will say she went most thoroughly. As I waved her off I suspected that she saw the separation as only temporary and that I would soon find telltale signs that she expected to be back, but I would say now that I wronged her, that in some way she had decided she was as glad to be rid of me as I to be rid of her. These things are peculiar. You agonise for months, or even years, on end. Should you finish it? Should you not? But having made the decision, you’re as impatient as a child on Christmas Eve. It is with the greatest difficulty you refrain from packing for them, pushing them into a taxi and shooing them away that very night. You long for them to go, you ache for it, so you can begin the rest of your life. ‘You’ll miss me,’ she said as she walked through the flat, checking for any last-minute items she’d forgotten.
‘I know I will,’ I said, as one must in such a case. There is an etiquette involved and this comes into the same category as ‘It isn’t you, it’s me.’ Actually, I thought at the time that I would miss her. But I didn’t much. Or far less than I expected. I can cook quite well when I put my mind to it and I’m lucky enough to have a woman who cleans a few times a week, so the main change was that I no longer had to spend the long, dark evenings with someone who was permanently disappointed in me. And that was nice. In fact, one of the great gifts of getting older is the discovery that the very thing you feared, ‘being alone,’ is actually much nicer than you thought. I should qualify this. To be old and ill alone, to die alone, is usually a sad thing, and at some point one may want to take steps to avoid this fate if possible. I suppose the prospect of a solitary death is even scarier for the childless, as they have no one they can reasonably expect to get involved with their disintegration, but even for them, and I am one of them, chunks on your own before you hove into sight of the Pearly Gates are simply lovely. You eat what you like, you watch what you like, you drink what you like, whoopee, and all without guilt or the need to hurry in case you’ll be found out. If you feel social you go out, if you don’t you stay in. If you want to talk you pick up the telephone, if not you don’t, and all around is the blessed gift of silence, not the silence of resentment but of peace.
Of course, as a rule this only applies if one has recently come out of a relationship that was less than satisfactory. For the surviving widow or widower of a happy marriage things are obviously different. I will always remember my father, left on his own, remarking that while others might feel released by the death of their spouse to pursue an interest or a hobby or to get involved with some worthy activity that their marriage had prevented, he had personally gained nothing and lost everything, a very moving tribute, even if my mother deserved it more than he knew. But for the man or woman after a longed-for break-up things are quite different. There are missing bits, of course, the sex for one, but for a long time sex between Bridget and me had been more a question of feeling it was expected of one rather than demonstrating any real interest in the other on either of our parts. I won’t deny that the thought of re-embarking on a career of ‘dating’ to fill the gap is a terrifying one to people in their fifties, but even so, freedom is a word that always shines.
The following morning, as I sat at my desk, I reviewed my non-existent progress in the search for the fortunate child, but I felt I must be approaching its conclusion. There were after all only two women left on the list to eliminate: Candida Finch and Terry Vitkov. After that, my task would presumably be done. When I had contemplated these possibilities, before this time, I had assumed that I would check out Candida first since she was in England. If she proved to be the one we were looking for I would not have to go to Los Angeles, which did seem rather a chore, so it was logical to try her next. But when I dialled her number, clearly printed for me on Damian’s list, I was repeatedly treated, for almost the only time in this adventure, to the synthetic courtesies of an answering machine, made worse by my leaving message upon message, so far without tangible result. I wasn’t comfortable any more with my bogus charity excuse, not since Kieran had somehow exposed it without meaning to, and instead of formulating another lie I decided just to make a simple request, stating my name, suggesting she had probably forgotten me but that we knew each other once and asking her to get in touch when she had a moment. I then left my numbers, put the receiver carefully back on to its cradle and hoped for the best. But the best was slow in coming and after three weeks of this, plus an unanswered postcard, I wasn’t quite sure what to do next to serve my master. We did not, after all, have very long to play with.
‘Go to Los Angeles,’ said Damian down the line. ‘Take a break, stay a few days.
You can tick off Terry and do yourself some good. Do you have an agent out there?’
‘Only as part of an arrangement with the London ones. I’ve never met him.’
‘There you are, then. Give him a treat. Pick up some girls, take him out for the evening, give him the time of his life. I’m paying.’
Should I resent this attempt to sound generous? Or was he really being generous? ‘My agent here says he’s gay.’
‘All the better. Flirt with him. Make him think he’s the only man you’ve ever found attractive. Ask his advice and tell him how helpful it is when you receive it, then press an unfinished manuscript into his hands and give him a sense of ownership in what you’re doing.’ Comments like this made me painfully aware of how much more Damian knew about the world than I.
I had spoken to him of my evening with Kieran de Yong, not all of it, not the last bit, but enough for him to know that I had liked him and that the dead boy had definitely not been Damian’s child. He was silent at the other end for a minute or two. ‘Poor Joanna,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘She had every gift she needed for the era that was coming.’
‘I agree.’
‘If only she’d been a cynic. She died of optimism, in a way.’
‘Like a lot of Sixties children.’
‘I’m glad you liked him,’ he said in an unusually generous tone. ‘Of course, he can’t stand me.’
‘And we know why.’ I hesitated, wondering whether I wanted to return to that troubling episode, yet conscious that every uncovered detail of this journey insisted on taking me there. ‘Did we all know what you were up to? That time in Estoril? Are the accounts I’m getting truthful? Or are their memories playing tricks on them? Because it’s starting to sound as if you slept with every woman in the world in the space of a few days.’
‘I was young,’ he replied and we both laughed.
I first met Terry, as I have said, at the ball given for Dagmar of Moravia. Lucy Dalton had disliked her on sight and so did some others, but I did not. I don’t mean I was mad about her but, to invert Kieran’s chilling phrase, she wasn’t nothing. She was full of energy, full of what was once called pluck, and I did like her determination, and her mother’s, to have first and foremost a very good time. Her father, of whom we would never see much, had made a killing with an advertising agency, first based in Cincinnati and later on Madison Avenue, at just the hour when the world was discovering quite what advertising could really do. Right through the 1950s, there had been a sense in many quarters that it was enough to say ‘Use this! It’s Good!’ And that would do the trick, launching the product on a grateful public, until the moment, and it was in my teens, that the world of marketing would change forever and begin its remorseless campaign to take over civilisation. Jeff Vitkov spotted this coming era sooner than most. He was a simple, unpretentious soul, brilliant in his way but not, or so we thought, complicated in his wishes or his needs, the last man on earth to wish to climb the social ladder. Even after the move to New York he continued to regard Cincinnati as his home and he would possibly have left the family based there, flying back on the weekends, enjoying vacations in some modest but comfortable resort hotel, if his wife, Verena, had not made the unwelcome discovery that even the vertiginous improvement in their finances had not brought the social recognition she craved and, reasonably enough, felt entitled to. There is a fantasy one often hears voiced in England that America is classless, which, as any traveller will know, is arrant nonsense and never more so than in the provincial towns, whose social arrangements can be impressively resistant to the ambitious newcomer. Someone remarked, not all that long ago, that it would be easier to gain entreè to the King’s chamber at Versailles than to break into the inner gang of Charleston, and much the same could be said in all the cities of the true, US Gratin.
This was always so. One of the main reasons for the great invasion by American heiresses in the 1880s and 1890s, the so-called Buccaneers, was that many of the daughters of those newly rich papas grew tired of having doors shut in their faces back home in Cleveland or St Louis or Detroit, and preferred instead to enjoy the deep and genuine warmth with which the well-born English have always welcomed money. It is hard to deny that the careers of girls like Virginia Bonynge, Viscountess Deerhurst, who began life as the daughter of a convicted murderer from the Middle West, would seem to confirm that things were much easier this side of the pond. Needless to say, this would often lead to sweet revenge, as the mothers of the Duchess of Manchester or the Countess of Rosslyn or Lady Randolph Churchill, or many, many others would sweep home in triumph to the place where they’d been snubbed, to rub their sisters’ noses in it. I suspected at the time that this thinking, or something like it, was behind the plan, forming in Verena Vitkov’s mind towards the end of 1967, to put her daughter through a London Season.
There were options open to mothers, in those days, to defray some of the expense if necessary. Things were already less abundant than they had been before the war, when there were three or four balls in London every night. Until the end of presentation there were half a dozen each week; by my time there were two or three; and fifteen years later it was down to less than ten in the whole Season. Even in ’68, some girls gave only cocktail parties and no dance, others would throw both but share the ball, and there was no shame in this. Serena Gresham shared her coming-out ball with her cousin, Candida Finch, although this was of course because Lady Claremont was funding them both. But from the start, Terry Vitkov was anxious to cover every base and I have no doubt she was more than encouraged in this by her mother, the unsinkable Verena. In the event the drinks party, held early in the proceedings before they’d quite found their feet, was a standard affair at the Goring, but for the ball they were determined to make the evening memorable. This they undoubtedly achieved if not quite in the way they had intended, but that comes later and, to be fair, it was an original location. Mrs Jeffrey Vitkov, so ran the invitation, would be At Home, ‘for Terry,’ on such and such a night at Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks in the Euston Road.
I do not know if you can still hire the waxworks for a private party. Not just a room, or a special chamber set aside for ‘entertaining,’ but the whole edifice and all it holds. I doubt it, or if you can, I imagine the price would be prohibitive to all save the super-rich, but forty years ago you could. There was less danger in it for them, of course, than there would be today. Apart from any other reason we were a more law-abiding lot. We took more care. Crime, as it might touch the middle and upper classes, was rare. People may groan when they hear that houses in the country were not locked, but they weren’t. Not if one had just gone shopping. In central London we walked home alone at night without a qualm. Shoplifting was not considered cool by anyone. It was just stealing. I don’t think mugging was sufficiently common even to qualify for a special name. And again, as I said, we were much less drunk. This did not mean, of course, that every party went without mishap.
I dined very well on the night of Terry’s ball because my hosts for the dinner beforehand, had forgotten all about it. I turned up at the door of a rather smart house in Montpelier Square, joined on the step as I waited for the occupants to respond to my ring of the bell by Lucy Dalton and a man I hardly knew, who later became the head of Schroder’s, or some such spangled operation, although you couldn’t have told his future held such promise then. The three of us stood, shifting our weight from foot to foot, until the door was at last opened by Mrs Northbrook (for that was her name), who stood there in jeans and a jersey, with a gin and tonic in her other hand. At the sight of us the blood drained from her face and we were greeted with the telling words, ‘Jesus Christ, it’s not tonight!’ The result of this was that Mr Northbrook was summoned with a scream and had to book a table for ten at an excellent place just across from Harrods, in that funny little triangle which I think used to have a grass bit in front of it, or have I made that up? As we waited, we all sat in their pretty, untidy and unready d
rawing room, swilling down some rather good Pouilly Fumé, which Laura Northbrook (we had moved on since the doorstep moment) had providentially found in the fridge before she joined her husband upstairs to struggle into their clothes. After such a welcome they could hardly stint with these frightful strangers wished upon them and the result was one of the best dinners I had eaten all year.
Our group was therefore in a jolly and convivial mood when we arrived at the famous entrance at about eleven that night. I suppose there must have been bouncers or someone similar to admit us, but, as I’ve already said, I have no solid memory of cards to be taken, or lists to be ticked off. The main party space had been arranged in what was then, and maybe is now, known as the Hall of Kings. The wax images of England’s Royalty had been moved back into a circle round the dance floor, cleared at the centre, but the figures were still sufficiently spaced apart for us to be able to stroll among them and photographs would later appear in the press – though not in the Tatler, which had originally been the plan – of debs and their escorts apparently standing next to Henry VIII or Queen Caroline of Anspach. I was myself snapped with a girl I knew from my Hampshire years after my father’s retirement from the diplomatic. It never, mercifully, appeared in print, but for some reason now forgotten I still have a copy of the picture. We look as if we’re talking to a startled and offended Princess Margaret.
As we know, every waxwork ever made appears to be either under sedation, or recently arrested for criminal assault and in this respect almost uniquely, the last four decades have seen little change. Except perhaps in their subject matter. We certainly all knew far more history then, that is the whole nation did, not just the privileged, the educational establishment having not yet broken the link between teaching and the imparting of knowledge; so figures like Wellington and Disraeli and Gordon of Khartoum still had a resonance that spread far beyond the elite, the only group today who might have heard of them. Nor, when it came to waxworks, was there the modern, pusillanimous terror of causing offence and I can bear witness that the Chamber of Horrors in those days was really horrible. That night it had been set aside for a discothèque, and when Lucy and I went downstairs to explore it was quite clear the authorities were a long way from worrying about whether or not someone might get hit by a falling basket of nasturtiums or a stray conker.
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