Past Imperfect

by Julian Fellowes

  ‘Do you still feel trapped?’

  She smiled. ‘Isn’t there a laboratory test where if animals are kept in a trap long enough, they come back when they’re let out, because it’s home?’ We strolled on, listening to the birds. ‘Does he ever talk about me?’ Despite a Pavlovian irritation, this question interested me. More or less every woman I had seen on my quest had asked this and Serena wasn’t even one of the contenders. It was pointless to deny that Damian clearly had qualities that I had been quite unaware of at the time.

  ‘Of course we talk about you. You’re the one thing we have in common.’ I said it as a joke, although it was truer than I had previously known. I could not tell you how she took it, but she smiled and we walked on.

  ‘Did you see the picture in your room?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Classic. I put it out for you. God, weren’t we young?’

  ‘Young and, in your case, lovely.’

  She sighed. ‘I can never understand why you and I didn’t get off together at some point, during the whole thing.’

  This made me stop in my tracks. ‘Can’t you? I can. You didn’t fancy me.’ There was no point in beating about the bush.

  She looked a little miffed, perhaps because it sounded as if I were reproaching her, which I truly wasn’t. ‘You never pressed your case very hard,’ she said at last. She was apparently attempting at least to share the blame for our non-romance.

  ‘Because I knew that if I did, our friendship would become untenable and I would drop out of your life. It was fun for you to have me dying for love, as long as it never became embarrassing and I never put you on the spot. You could have had me any day you wished, with a crook of your finger, which you were fully aware of. But you never wanted me, except as a courtier worshipping at your shrine. And I was happy. If that was the best that was on offer, I was glad to oblige.’

  She made a slight expression of horror at this perfectly honest account. ‘Did you know all that, then?’

  I shook my head. ‘No. Except possibly instinctively. But I know it now.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘You make me sound like such a bitch.’

  But this wasn’t right and I was anxious for her to know I didn’t think it. ‘Not at all. It worked well for a long time. I was your parfit knight and you were la belle dame sans merci. It’s an arrangement that has been perfectly serviceable for hundreds of years, after all. It only went wrong because of Portugal and that wasn’t your fault. It became embarrassing after that evening, so we dropped out of each other’s lives, but it would only have happened sooner if I’d made a pass.’

  She thought for a time, as we walked on again in silence. There was a rustle of movement in the undergrowth and the distinctive red of a fox’s coat flashed through the browns and greens for a moment. As if recognising him, she spoke, ‘Damian has much to answer for.’

  ‘The interesting thing is I think he would agree with you.’

  The others were closing in on us now and soon the conversation would become general again. But before they reached where we were standing Serena spoke softly. ‘I hope you don’t hate me.’

  Her voice was gentle and, I think, sincere, and when I turned towards her, she was smiling. I don’t think she meant it as a serious enquiry, but she was apologising for wounding me in those lost years, when heart pain could be so sharp and was so easily administered. I looked at her and for the millionth time wondered at every feature. A tiny crumb of something from lunch was clinging to the corner of her mouth and I imagined a life where I would have the right to lick it off. ‘What do you think?’ I said.

  Dinner that night was the main event of the weekend and I dutifully bathed, putting on evening trousers, a shirt with no tie, reluctantly, and a smoking jacket. I went downstairs feeling rather cheery but, once in the drawing room, things got heavier with the inclusion among the guests for the evening of Andrew’s mother, the now Dowager Countess, who lived not in the real dower house, a smart Georgian villa on the edge of the park, which was let to an American banker, but in a cottage in the village formerly reserved for the head keeper. She was standing stiffly by the chimneypiece when I came in. Lady Belton was a lot older, naturally, than when I had last seen her, but age had done little to soothe her incipient madness. She still stared out of those pale-blue, Dutch-doll eyes, and her hair was dyed to an approximation of the Italianate black it had once been. Nor had her sense of style made much of a leap forward. She wore a curious outfit, a kind of long, khaki nightgown with an uneven neckline. I’m not sure what effect she was aiming at, but it can’t have been what she achieved. Her jewellery, I need hardly say, was excellent.

  Serena introduced me, observing that her motherin-law must remember me from the old days. Lady Belton ignored this. ‘How do you do,’ she said, extending her bony, knuckled hand. Is there anything more annoying than people saying how do you do when you have met them a thousand times? If there is, I would like to know what it might be. I had a recent instance where I was greeted as a stranger by a woman I’d known since childhood, who had grown famous in the interim. Every time I met her for literally years, she would lean forward gracefully and make no sign that we had ever seen each other before. Finally I resolved that if she tried it one more time I would let her have it. But something of my resolve must have shown in my face and all bullies are equipped with an antenna that tells them when the bullying must stop. She read my eyes and held out her hand. ‘How lovely to see you again,’ she said.

  Serena had moved off to get me a drink, so I was left alone with the old besom. ‘It’s so nice to catch up with Andrew and Serena after all these years,’ I said feebly by way of an opener.

  ‘Do you know Lord Belton?’ she replied, without a glimmer of a smile. Presumably this was to show me that I should have referred to him by his proper rank. There was a bowl of avocado dip quite near us on a side table, and just for a second I had an almost irresistible urge to pick it up and squish it into her face.

  Instead, I opened my mouth to say ‘Yes, I know them and I know you too, you silly, old bat.’ But there’s no point, is there? She would only have hidden behind my ‘terrible rudeness’ and never have recognised her own. I didn’t draw her at dinner, hallelujah, and instead I watched pityingly as Hugh Purbrick battled through her silences, trying to engage her with talk of people she must have met but of whom she denied all knowledge, or on topics in which she made it clear she had no interest. In short, she gave him no quarter.

  The young are often told, or were in the days when I was a child, that parvenus and other rank outsiders may on occasion be rude, but real ladies and gentlemen are never anything but perfectly polite. This is, of course, complete rubbish. The rude, like the polite, may be found at every level of society, but there is a particular kind of rudeness, when it rests on empty snobbery, on an assumption of superiority made by people who have nothing superior about them, who have nothing about them at all, in fact, that is unique to the upper classes and very hard to swallow. Old Lady Belton was a classic example, a walking mass of bogus values, a hollow gourd, a cause for revolution. I had disliked her when I was young, but now, after forty years to think about it, I saw her as worse than simply unpleasant and foolish. Rather, I recognised her as someone who would be almost evil if she weren’t so stupid, as the very reason for her children’s empty lives. There is much that makes me nostalgic for the England of my youth, much that I think has been lost to our detriment, but sometimes one must recognise where it was wrong and why it had to change. Where the upper classes are concerned, Lady Belton was that reason made flesh. She was an embodiment of all that was bad about the old system and of absolutely none of its virtues. I do not like to hate but I confess that, seeing her again, I almost hated her. I hated her for what she represented and because, ultimately, I blamed her for Andrew’s worthlessness. If I were to be merciful where he is concerned, and I find it hard, I would acknowledge that with a mother like the one he had he never stood a chance. Between th
em, these two pointless people had wasted my Serena’s life. Andrew was in fact Lady Belton’s other neighbour at dinner that night, since she had been placed, in accordance with precedence, on his right. They did not exchange one word from soup to nuts. Neither could be judged a loser by it.

  Afterwards, some of the party made up a table for bridge and a few of them sneaked off to watch a late film on television in some chaotic children’s cubbyhole where Andrew had banished ‘the foul machine,’ so after the locals had gone home and the rest of the house party had taken themselves off to bed, I found myself with Candida in a corner of the library, hugging a glass of whisky, gossiping as the fire died. Serena had looked in and made us free with the tray of drinks but she was taken up with settling the others, and for me it was enough just to see her operating her existence, charting her course through the commitments that made her days real. And I was pleased to be left alone with Candida, since it meant that I was able to continue my investigations. I had told Candida about finding the picture in my room the night before, but now we were alone we fell to discussing that party of so long ago, how it went and how it ended. I reminded her that I had driven Damian home in rather a glump, and that it marked the finish of his career as a deb’s delight. ‘Poor Damian,’ she said. ‘I’ve never felt sorrier for anybody.’

  This was an unexpected comment, since I had no idea what she was talking about. ‘Why?’

  My query was clearly as much of a surprise to her as her statement had been to me. ‘Because of the whole drama,’ she replied, as if this must be quite obvious.

  ‘What drama?’

  She gave me a quizzical look, as if I might be teasing and leading her on, but my gaze was as innocent as a newborn child’s. ‘How amazing,’ she said. ‘Did he really never tell you?’

  Then I asked and I listened.

  Candida knew Damian well, long before that night. She had flirted with him in her frightening way, she had danced with him, even, I suspected as she talked, slept with him and generally befriended him as the season had progressed. And she had managed to get him included in the Gresham house party, without drawing attention to Serena, and-

  ‘But I don’t understand. Why did you? I thought you fancied him yourself.’ I remembered that other, different Candida rolling her eyes at Queen Charlotte’s Ball and almost shuddered.

  She shook her head. ‘That was all finished long before. And by that time he and Serena were in love with each other.’ Again she spoke as if I must surely have had some suspicion of these things at the very least, and it was precious of me to pretend that I did not. ‘That is, I thought they were in love with each other. Serena was in love with him.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’ Of course, I didn’t want to believe it and in truth I hadn’t seen much evidence. They’d kissed. But if we were supposed to be in love with everyone we’d ever kissed…

  She shrugged as if to say believe what you like, I am telling you the truth. ‘She wanted to marry him, absurd as that sounds, and as you know, she was eighteen at the time and Damian was nineteen and still at university, so they needed her parents’ consent.’

  ‘Why? When did the law change?’

  ‘At the beginning of 1970. It was still twenty-one in Sixty-eight.’

  ‘But the Claremonts would never have given their consent if he’d been the Duke of Gloucester.’

  ‘Yes, they would. They did. They pushed her into marrying Andrew the following year, and she was still only nineteen.’ Which was true. ‘Anyway, Serena had got it into her head that if they could only get to know Damian they would fall for him and in time give their permission, which obviously I can now see was a hopeless idea.’

  ‘Worse than hopeless. Insane.’

  My intervention was not soothing to her. ‘Yes. Well, as I say, I know that now, but at the time I had convinced myself, or Serena had convinced me, that it might work. It wasn’t that she wanted to plunge into obscurity with him. She was sure that Damian would do incredibly well in his career and history has, after all, proved her right a thousand times over.’

  I nodded. This conversation was having an uncomfortable effect on me. I was feeling numb and strangely tingly, as if I were coming down with ’flu. I am not pretending I didn’t know they were attracted to each other, they were both good-looking and on the circuit and, as I’ve admitted, I’d seen the kissing incident at Terry’s ball. That was enough to make me jealous and angry and indignant, but this… this was something entirely different. This was when I learned a lesson I will not now lose, although it has come too late to do much good. Namely, that just because you start people off, you do not control them thereafter, nor do you have the right to pretend that you do. However Damian began that year under my aegis, however he met those people initially, he was living a life among them, in that world, by the end of it, that was as valid as my own. I had brought him out from under his stone, but at the finish he’d held the promise in his hands of what would have constituted my whole life’s happiness. I was so jealous I wanted to kill almost anybody.

  ‘Well, somehow her parents got wind of the whole plan. I thought later it might have been Andrew who had tipped off his mother, the dreaded Lady B. Wasn’t she ghastly tonight?’

  ‘Ghastly.’

  ‘Well, she was desperate to catch Serena for Andrew and she might have deliberately put a spoke in the works, but we’ll never know. On the day, Damian and Serena drove down together from London. I was coming from somewhere or other, but I got here at about five, after most of the house party, and they were all having tea in the drawing room. Of course, Aunt Roo was being very charming-’

  ‘Why is she called Aunt Roo?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘I’m not completely sure. I think it’s something to do with Winnie the Pooh. Remember the mother kangaroo was called Kanga and the baby was called Roo?’ I nodded. ‘It was some game they used to play at Barrymount, when they were growing up in Ireland. Her real name’s Rosemary, but she was always Roo in the family.’ Somehow Lady Claremont’s nickname only reinforced the iron walls of the culture that Damian, in his youthful ignorance, took on all those years ago.

  ‘Anyway, when I came in, Damian was trying very hard. Too hard. He smiled and chatted and giggled and flashed and flickered, and Aunt Roo laughed and asked him about Cambridge and so on, but I remember thinking Uncle Pel was very quiet – which he wasn’t usually in those days – and I could tell by the look she gave me, that Serena knew it wasn’t going as well as Damian obviously thought. The guests who were staying did that silent thing, of not quite laughing and not quite letting him in. My other aunt was there, and as Damian was rabbiting on, Aunt Sheila and Roo kept swapping quiet, sisterly glances, which seemed so unkind and disloyal. I can see that’s not terribly logical for me to say, but I felt infuriated for Serena, for both of them really.’ She paused, breathless with the memory. ‘I suppose that was the moment when I realised it wasn’t going to work.’

  She stopped for a moment, as if this was the first time she had ever fully registered this salient point. ‘So. We all went up to change and I was sitting at my dressing table, doing my best with my hair. I remember I’d forgotten to have it done, which seems a bit mad for your own dance, but at this precise moment there was a knock and Roo and Pel came into the room. They were already changed and Roo was covered in diamonds, and it should all have been rather merry and gay, but somehow it wasn’t. Then Uncle Pel said, “How long has this been going on?” And we were all quite quiet, as if someone was supposed to ask what he was talking about, but of course we all knew what he was talking about, so there wasn’t any point. Then I started a defence of Serena and Damian, of both of them, but even as I was talking I could hear that it all sounded so childish and ridiculous, as if I were suddenly seeing it through their eyes. I’d never been with Uncle Pel when he was so angry, in fact I’d never really seen him angry at all, but that night he was bulging with anger, blazing with it. “She wants to run off with this smarmy, little oik?” h
e said. “This greaser, with his oily hair and his dodgy vowels and his ‘pleased to meet you’ and his clothes from Marks and Spencer?” I’ve never forgotten that. “His clothes from Marks and Spencer.” And I looked at Roo and she said “Watson unpacked for him,” and that was that. Then it was her turn. “Of course we want Serena to be happy,” she said. “It’s all we want. Truly.” Which it obviously wasn’t. “But you see, we want her to be happy in a way we understand, in a way that will last.”’

  ‘I said I thought that this would last, but even as I spoke the words I felt like some little, preppy, Sandra Dee figure asking to be allowed to stay out late.’ Candida sighed. ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t much use.’

  ‘Did Damian really say “pleased to meet you”?’

  ‘Apparently. It just shows how nervous he must have been.’

  ‘Poor chap. Was that it?’

  She shook her head. ‘By no means. Uncle Pel hadn’t finished. He was absolutely fizzing and he sort of waved his finger at me, right under my nose, like a teacher in a situation comedy, as if I were the guilty one, which I now think he must have believed, since he knew I’d connived in getting Damian up there. “You tell Serena to get rid of this little social-climbing, money-grubbing shit,” he said. “You tell her to dump him, if she doesn’t want to leave it to me to manage. That kind of chap comes into this house by the servants’ entrance, or not at all.”’

  I couldn’t help interrupting. ‘That sounds rather vulgar for the Lord Claremont I remember.’

  Candida nodded. ‘You’re right. It wasn’t him at all. I think he was just so angry that his mental, editing machine had switched itself off. In fairness to Roo, it was too much for her, too, and she slapped him down. She said, “Really, Pel, don’t be so idiotic. You sound like a period drama on television. You’ll be telling him to get off your land next.” When she said that I smiled. I couldn’t help myself, but Roo saw it as a breach in the wall and she turned to me in the most coaxing way. “We have nothing against this young man, Candida,” she said, and she spoke very calmly, but in a way her calmness was more deadly to Serena’s hopes than Pel’s fury, as I could tell it was not a mood that might blow away in the morning. “Honestly we don’t. He is making an effort to be nice and he is perfectly welcome as a guest. But you must see it’s out of the question. The whole thing is simply ludicrous and that’s all there is to it.” She paused, I assume to let me nod. Which I didn’t, so she ploughed on. “Just find a way to tell Serena that we don’t think it a good idea. It’ll come much better from you. If we tackle her it’ll blow up into a hideous production. She’s a sensible girl. I’m sure she’ll see the wisdom of what we’re saying when she’s had time to think.’ I asked her if they wanted me to tell Serena that night, but she shook her head. “No. Don’t spoil the party,” she said. “Tell her tomorrow or the next day, before you leave. When you have a quiet moment.” Then she waited for a response and I suppose, by being silent, in a way I’d agreed.’