Past Imperfect

by Julian Fellowes

  I was starting to like Donnie more and more. So much more than I liked his wife. ‘She is his stepdaughter.’

  ‘That’s funny!’ She rocked with artificial laughter.

  ‘Where is Susie? Is she in Los Angeles?’ With this question, as I should have seen, I had overplayed my hand. It was late and I was still faintly jet-lagged and perhaps, by this stage, a bit drunk and, anyway, I just wanted to get on. My words seemed to echo in the room, altering its atmosphere.

  Terry was many things, but not stupid. ‘Why are you here?’ she said, and her voice suddenly sounded completely sober and absolutely reasonable.

  You must understand that I was nearly at the end of my search. There were only Terry and Candida left, and so there had to be a fifty per cent chance that Susie was the Holy Grail Baby. In a way, I confess to hoping, for Damian’s sake, that it would be Candida Finch’s child, but there was no reason why it shouldn’t be this one. I felt I might as well just ask the question, far away from home as we were. I had no intention of telling Terry about the list and after all, Damian wouldn’t be especially newsworthy in this neck of the woods if Terry wanted to make a story about her infidelity to her first husband, which I doubted. ‘You said you’d been with Greg for quite a while when you got pregnant.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Damian remembers that he had an affair with you around that time.’

  She smiled, not immediately making the connection. ‘We didn’t have an “affair,” not then, not ever. Not what you’d call an affair.’ She had relaxed again and was once more drawling her words. In some way I thought she was rather enjoying herself. ‘We had a funny on-off thing for years. We never quite went out, we never quite broke off. If you’re asking if I was unfaithful, I never felt it counted with Damian.’

  ‘Anyway, the point is’ – this was it – ‘he wonders if Susie is really Greg’s daughter.’

  I had expected at least token indignation but, unpredictably, Terry threw her head back and roared with laughter. This time it was completely genuine. For a while she was quite unable to stop and she was still wiping her eyes before she could answer. ‘No,’ she said at last, shaking her head, ‘she’s not Greg’s daughter.’ I said nothing. ‘You’re right. I had been sleeping with Greg for a long time by then, for quite a long time since I decided to get pregnant. I was taking no precautions and I began to wonder if he could have children. If he was, you know, fertile.’

  ‘So you revived things with Damian, to see if you could get pregnant that way.’ I could easily see how this had happened. She wanted to bring Greg up to the mark and the whole paternity issue was much muddier in those days. It was a scheme that might easily have worked. Obviously, it did work. It just didn’t quite fit with the original letter that had started all this, given that the whole thing had been planned by her. Damian could hardly be accused of seduction or ‘deceit.’ The charge would more properly be levelled the other way. Still, we could clarify that later.

  ‘Yes. I guess that’s exactly what I did.’ She was defiant now, made brave and even brazen by the liquor. She tilted her face as if to challenge me.

  ‘I’m not here to judge you. Only to find out the truth.’

  ‘And what does Damian want to do about it?’

  So, I had reached my goal. We had arrived. With this in mind I thought some modest helping of honesty would not now go amiss. ‘He’s dying, as I have told you. I believe he wants to make sure that his child is well provided for.’ That seemed enough.

  ‘Would Susie have to know?’

  This was an interesting question. I would have thought that Susie would have wanted to know, but would it be a condition? Then again, was it up to her mother? Susie was in her late thirties, after all. ‘That’s something I’ll have to check with Damian. There’ll be a DNA test, but I dare say we can come up with some other perfectly believable reason for that if we have to, or it could be done without her knowledge.’

  ‘I see.’ From her tone I could tell at once that my words had changed things, but I couldn’t quite understand why, since I was not aware I had made any very stringent conditions. She stood and walked towards the glass wall, taking what I could now see was the handle of one of the panels and sliding it back to let in the night air. For a moment she breathed deeply. ‘Damian isn’t Susie’s father,’ she said.

  I hope I can convey how totally inexplicable this seemed. I had sat all evening and listened to a woman who was rapacious for money, other people’s money, any money that she could lay her hands on; a woman disappointed by life and everything it had brought her; a woman trapped in an existence she hated and by a husband she cared nothing for, and now, here she was, on the brink of the luckiest break anyone living has ever heard of, the chance to make her daughter one of the richest women in Europe, and she was turning it down without the smallest argument. ‘You can’t know that,’ I said. ‘You say yourself she isn’t Greg’s. She must be someone’s.’

  She nodded. ‘Yes. She must be someone’s. But she isn’t Greg’s and she isn’t Damian’s.’ She paused, wondering, I now realise, whether to go on. I am glad she did. ‘And she isn’t mine.’

  For a moment I was too astonished to say an obligatory ‘What?’ or ‘How can that be?’ or even ‘Oh.’ I just looked at her.

  She sighed, shivering suddenly in the draught, and moved back into the room towards the dingy sofa. ‘You were quite right. About what I was trying to do. I wanted to be pregnant, because I knew Greg would marry me when I was. I’d been sleeping with Damian every now and then for a couple of years so I was sure he wouldn’t mind. And he didn’t. It was just after you all went on that crazy holiday in Portugal.’

  ‘I thought he said it was before.’

  ‘No. I called him and his flatmate said he was out there, so I left a message. He rang me the day he got back and I went round. It’s funny. When we got together for the last time…’ She had become wistful, a nicer person momentarily, in memory of her younger dreams, ‘I thought we might go on with it. He seemed different when he got home, less… I don’t know exactly, less unreachable, and for a day or two I thought that maybe it would be Damian and not Greg after all.’

  ‘But it didn’t happen?’

  ‘No. He’d run into that beautiful girl out there, and he met up with her again when she was back in London.’

  ‘Only once I think.’

  ‘Really? I thought it was more than that. What was her name?’

  ‘Joanna Langley.’

  ‘That’s it. What happened to her?’

  ‘She died.’

  ‘Oh.’ She sighed, saddened by the inexorable process of life. ‘The point is that when he got back, Damian was in a strange mood. I heard about what happened.’ I nodded. ‘I think the truth is he was sick of all of us. I lost touch with him after that.’

  ‘So did we all.’

  ‘Joanna Langley’s dead. Wow. I used to be so jealous of her.’ I could see that the news had made her stop in her tracks. For anyone, hearing of the death of a person you had thought alive and well is a little like killing them because suddenly they’re dead in your brain instead of living. But with the Sixties generation it is more than this. They preached the value of youth so loudly and so long that they cannot believe an unkind God has let them grow old. Still less can they accept they too must die. As if their determination to adopt clothes and prejudices more suited to people thirty, forty, fifty years younger than themselves would act as an elixir to keep them forever from the clutches of the Grim Reaper. You see television interviews and articles in papers expressing shocked amazement whenever an old rocker pops his clogs. What did they think would happen?

  At last, with a philosophical nod, Terry resumed her story. ‘I slept with Damian two or three times before we finished. There were no hard feelings.’ She paused to check that this squared with my information.

  ‘I’m sure there weren’t. But nothing happened?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nothing happened. Then Greg went t
o Poland and I followed him, and I slept with him, but still nothing happened and nothing happened, and finally I went to see a doctor while I was out there and guess what?’

  ‘It wasn’t him, it was you.’

  She smiled, like a teacher pleased with my attention. ‘It was me. All the time it was me. Some tubes were missing or something…’ She raised her eyebrows, trying to control her delivery. ‘You know the first thing that occurred to me? Why the hell had I wasted so much time worrying about getting pregnant? My late teens should have been a ball.’

  ‘You didn’t do badly,’ I said.

  Which made her laugh. ‘Anyway, I knew that once Greg learned I could never have a child, once his mother heard about it, the whole thing would be over and it’d be back to square one. So I bought a baby.’

  It seems strange now, but this sentence took me completely by surprise. Why? I cannot tell you. There was no such thing as surrogacy in those days, or if there was we knew nothing of it. She’d admitted she’d had a baby to get Greg to marry her and she’d told me she couldn’t have children. What did I imagine she had done? Even so, I was flabbergasted. What I came up with was: ‘How?’

  She smiled. ‘Are you planning it?’ But she was far too deep in to telling the story to back out now. ‘I was doing some social work then, with a group sponsored by the embassy. This was 1971, long before the end of Communism or anything else. There was no Solidarity. There was no hope. Poland was an occupied country and the people were desperate. It wasn’t hard. I found a young mother who already had four children and she’d just discovered she was pregnant. I offered to take the baby, whatever it was, whether or not there was anything wrong with it.’

  ‘Would you have?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘I hope so,’ she said, which I liked her for.

  ‘But how did you manage the whole thing?’

  ‘It wasn’t difficult. I found a doctor who could be bribed.’ I must have looked shocked at this because she became quite incensed. ‘Jesus, most of the time he was prescribing drugs to teenagers. Was this worse?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I didn’t “show” until I was about five months “gone.” I told Greg I didn’t feel comfortable with sex, and with his puritan background he didn’t either. Then I asked if he’d mind not being at the birth, as the thought made me uncomfortable. Boy, you should have seen the relief on his face. These days, if the father isn’t there peering up your flue as the head appears, he’s a bad person, but in 1971 it wasn’t compulsory.’

  ‘How did you manage the birth itself?’

  ‘I had a stroke of luck when he was called to New York just before the baby came. The dates I’d given him were three weeks behind the true ones, to leave some room for manoeuvre. I did have a plan of checking into a different room. I think it would have worked but in the end I didn’t need it. She went into labour and I took the mother to the nursing home where, thanks to the doctor, she just gave my name. The baby was delivered and the registration was perfectly routine. When Greg got back, I was waiting for him at home with little Susie. We cried a river. Everyone was happy.’

  ‘And nobody ever found out?’

  ‘Why would they? I told him I loved him, but I couldn’t have sex until I got my figure back. He suspected nothing. Nobody was worse off. Including Susie. I mean that.’ Clearly, she did mean it and I would say it was probably true, although one can never be quite sure about these things. Even if I do not endorse the present fashion for leaving babies with mothers who are clearly quite incapable of caring for them, rather than finding them decent homes. Terry was nearly finished. ‘For a while I thought the doctor might blackmail me, but he didn’t, so that was that. Maybe he was scared I’d blackmail him.’

  ‘And there were never any tests that gave it away?’

  ‘What tests? They’re both blood group O, which was kind of a relief actually. But who runs a DNA test on their own daughter?’

  ‘Did Greg have any more children?’

  ‘None of his own. Two steps. He adores Susie and she adores him.’ She sighed a little wearily. ‘She much prefers him to me.’

  I nodded. ‘So he’ll take care of her.’ For some reason I was rather glad of this. Susie had missed a larger fortune which, in my fevered mind, she had possessed for maybe two or even three minutes. It was good to feel she would never know want.

  ‘Oh yes. She’s safer than I’ll ever be.’

  I had to ask. ‘Would you have gone on with it if I hadn’t mentioned the test?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘Probably. The temptation was too great. But of course there would have been some hurdle by the end of it, so I’m glad you did. Before I got too excited.’

  It was once more the hour to depart and this time I knew for certain we would not meet again. Since, even if I were back in the town, I wouldn’t look her up. But something in the story she had told had won me round a bit. I was reminded of the haunting words of Lady Caroline Lamb: ‘With all that has been said about life’s brevity, for most of us it is very, very long.’ Terry’s life had already been very long and very frustrating, with scant reward to show for it. That this had largely been her fault was no consolation, as I knew well. She had thrown away her only chance of a decent future with Greg and never replaced him with anything like an equal opportunity. Now she had lost even the child she’d invented to be with him. We kissed at the door. ‘Please don’t mention this to anyone.’ She shook her head. I had something more to say. ‘And please don’t ever tell them.’

  ‘Would I?’

  ‘I don’t know. If you got too drunk and too angry you might.’

  She did not resent this, which was commendable, but she was confident in her denial. ‘I have been drunk and angry many times since we last met and I haven’t told them yet.’ This, I am sure, was true. All of it.

  ‘Good.’ Now I really was going. But I had a last wish before we parted. ‘Be kind to Donnie,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t sound a bad chap.’

  The evening had made me sentimental in my estimation of her. I should have been more clear-sighted. The truth was, with the sole exception of her feeling towards her not-daughter, the old Terry Vitkov was quite unchanged. ‘He’s a bastard,’ she replied and shut the door.

  Candida

  THIRTEEN

  Which only left Candida Finch.

  I stayed on a few days in Los Angeles, in Beverly Hills to be precise, at the very comfortable Peninsular Hotel – a haven for the English, since it is the only one where you can actually walk out to the post office or get something to eat without having to stand and wait every time for a crisply suited ‘valet’ to fetch your car. I’d enjoyed meeting my agent who turned out to be charming, and if I did not quite follow Damian’s instructions to the letter, still we got on very well and he sent me round the town to meet a few people while I was still out there. Since I was allowed the untold luxury of first class travel back to London, I felt quite relaxed and invigorated when I got home. How strange it is, the way enough sleep and the resulting physical energy can make one feel as if one’s whole life is going well, while the lack of them has the opposite effect.

  However, when I finally returned to the flat, if I was expecting to find a series of messages from Candida answering those I’d left before I went away, I was disappointed. There was nothing. Accordingly, I recorded yet another on her machine which was still not picking up, and settled down to a day or two of work on my latest novel, a tale of middle-class angst in a seaside town, which was approaching what I would hesitate to call its climax and which I had, understandably, recently neglected. It was on the morning of the following day, when I’d finally managed to get some way back into the rhythm of my troubled, marine triangle, that the telephone on my desk started to ring.

  ‘You called Candida Finch yesterday,’ said a female voice and, for a moment, quite illogically, I thought it must be Candida herself who was speaking. I can’t think why, since it obviously wasn’t.

  ‘Ye
s, I wondered if I could see you, which I know sounds odd.’

  ‘It does sound very odd, and I’m not Candida, I’m Serena.’ A thousand bags of sherbet exploded in my vitals.

  ‘Serena?’ Of course it was Serena. It was her voice, for God’s sake. What had I been thinking of? But why should Serena ring me? How could that have happened? I pondered the question without speaking, silently wondering, earpiece clamped to my ear.

  ‘Hello?’ Her voice had gone up in volume.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, I thought you’d been cut off. It all went quiet.’

  ‘No, I’m still here.’

  ‘Good.’

  I suddenly worried that I could hear in her voice a querying sound, as if she were afraid that the person she was speaking to was in fact a nutter and it might be dangerous to continue the conversation. I trembled lest she might act on this subconscious warning. All of which illustrates the fevered level of my imagination. ‘How can I help?’

  ‘I was talking to Candida this morning and she said she’d had a message to ring you, that you wanted to see her.’

  ‘She’s had more than one message from me, I’m afraid. I thought she must have emigrated.’

  ‘She’s been in Paris and she only got back last night.’

  ‘It’s rather wonderful that you’re still in touch.’ As the words left my mouth, I could hear their senselessness. Why did I say this? Why was it wonderful? Why shouldn’t they be in touch? Was I mad?

  ‘She’s my cousin.’

  Which I should have known. In fact, I must have known it. In fact, I did know it. Perfectly well. They gave a ball together, for God’s sake. I was present at it. What kind of fool forgets something like that? What kind of stupid moron? ‘Of course,’ I said lightly. ‘Of course you are. I should have remembered.’ Where was this twaddle leading? To some International Idiots’ Convention? Why couldn’t I say anything that didn’t sound illogical and inane?

  ‘Anyway, I wondered if it was all part of Damian’s search.’