Past Imperfect

by Julian Fellowes

  ‘So did you?’

  Again Candida shook her head. ‘I didn’t have to. That’s the point. After we’d all stopped hissing at each other we could hear the sounds of the first batch of people arriving for dinner, and Pel and Roo went down to greet them. I was still sitting in front of the glass, feeling a bit bludgeoned to tell the truth, and I heard a voice. “That’s me told.” I looked over and Damian was standing there.’

  ‘In your room?’

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded, scrunching up her eyes for a second at the memory. ‘He was next door, which maybe I’d forgotten, if I even knew. There was a pair of interconnecting doors, those doors that were so useful to the Edwardians, with a space between them, a couple of feet wide, which formed a completely effective sound barrier, and neither Pel nor Roo had shouted, so I wasn’t worried. The door was shut and since there was an armchair in front of it I must have assumed that it was locked, that they both were, but they weren’t. I suppose he’d been standing in the space between the two doors and now he’d opened the one into my room and come through it. The whole thing was so terrible I can hardly frame the words to describe it. I remember it now, forty years later, as one of the most horrible moments of my entire life, which, believe me, is saying something. We just stared at each other, then eventually I muttered about their not understanding his feelings, and hoping that he wouldn’t hate them and all that sort of thing. But Damian shook his head with a brisk little chuckle, and said, “Hate them? Why should I hate them? They’ve found me out.” And I didn’t understand him at first, because I’d been so convinced by Serena that he really did love her. So I couldn’t believe that he was telling me it wasn’t true, that all the time he’d been out to catch her for her money and whatnot. I didn’t want to believe him, but that’s what he said. He told Serena later on that night, so I didn’t have to. She and I talked about it, but only once. And I don’t think they saw each other again – except for that one ghastly evening in Portugal, of course. They might have run into each other at some gathering over the years, I suppose, but I never heard her mention it, if they did. He wasn’t at any more of the parties that year. He seemed to give us all up after the incident and I can’t say I’m surprised.’

  ‘Nor me. When did he tell her?’

  ‘Right at the end. I’m sure he wouldn’t have wanted to spoil the evening, but he couldn’t have borne for her to hear it from anyone else and I think he’d already decided to leave first thing the next day. I seem to remember that he got her into the Tapestry Drawing Room just before it all folded, but I may have made that up.’

  ‘And he told her it had all been his plan to advance himself and that he didn’t love her?’

  ‘I suppose so. I mean yes. Although, even now, I don’t think it was ever the whole truth. He might have seen her as a ladder in some way, but I’m sure he was genuinely fond of her.’

  ‘I doubt it was true at all. If he said he loved her I’m sure he did.’

  She looked at me, surprised. ‘I thought you disliked him.’

  ‘I hated him. I hate him now, really, if marginally less than before. That doesn’t mean I think him a liar, which I don’t, except under extreme provocation.’

  She grimaced. ‘As we know.’

  But I didn’t want to drift away to that other, cursed evening. I wanted to stay with the night of the ball. ‘He was lying to you to save face. I wonder that you couldn’t see that. She was never going to have much money anyway. If he was after that, he’d have gone for Joanna Langley.’

  She blushed. ‘You don’t think he wanted a grand wife with a title?’

  ‘He wouldn’t have cared about it. Not then. Maybe at the beginning, but not by that stage. He turned down Dagmar of Moravia. He could have had a princess for a wife if he’d wanted.’

  She thought about this. ‘Well, I must have agreed with you at the time, or the whole Portuguese adventure would never have happened. I suppose the years have made me more cynical than I was.’

  ‘Poor Serena. So she’d made her decision to defy her parents and marry her true love, and then, in one short evening, it was finished and there was nothing left for her to do but to go out on to the terrace for some fresh air and to come up with a new life scheme.’

  ‘Did she? You know more about it than I do.’

  ‘Yes, she did. And then she came in again and found me waiting in the anteroom, and we danced together just before I left.’ I thought of Serena’s blank eyes and her muttered ‘these things are such milestones.’ She might have said millstones. It would have been just as true.

  ‘I see. Well, perhaps you’re right about Damian. I hope so. But he’s had his revenge in a way. He ended up a figure of far greater significance than any of the rest of us. I wonder if Pel and Roo ever think about that.’

  ‘You did have a soft spot for him, then?’

  ‘Damian? Oh, absolutely. I adored him. As I told you, we did have a bit of a thing, but it was earlier in the year than all this. Once Damian and Serena got together, I don’t remember him being involved with anyone else in our crowd.’

  ‘Until after.’

  She blushed, slightly. ‘Oh, yes. After. But you know how it is during the lonely years. Before life settles.’

  ‘Can I ask an impertinent question?’

  She smiled. ‘I think after the talk we’ve just had I can hardly prevent it.’

  ‘Who was Archie’s father? Did I know him? Was he one of the gang from that era? Or was it someone you met when it was over?’

  ‘It’s hard to say.’

  Which seemed a peculiar reply. ‘Do you ever see him now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I stared at her, looking, I imagine, fairly puzzled and she laughed. ‘These days I’m an old, respectable banker’s widow, but it was not always thus. You must know that everyone has some parts of their life that are hard to reconcile with their present.’

  I nodded. ‘I know it better than most.’ And I certainly already knew it about her.

  ‘The truth is I’m not quite sure who Archie’s father was. I bounced around a fair bit at that time. I think my excuse was that I’d lost my way or I was trying to find myself, or some other Sixties cliché that allowed me to do as I pleased without feeling guilty, and I took full advantage of the philosophy. Then, one day I woke up pregnant. Every single entry in my address book wanted me to get rid of it, of course, friends and family alike, but I wouldn’t and I am terribly grateful now.’

  ‘But you never tried to find out?’

  ‘I didn’t see the point. What would I have gained? Someone poking their nose in where it wasn’t wanted? Some emotional cripple who felt he had the right to lean on me because I’d carried his child? At one stage I thought it might be George Tremayne. I was pretty sure later that it wasn’t, but imagine what it would have been like having him getting sloshed at the kitchen table.’ I grimaced. ‘So, no. I decided to battle through it alone.’

  ‘How were you sure? That it wasn’t George?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘I heard that he was having trouble getting his wife pregnant. That rather chubby girl whose father made cars. She’d got two children by a first husband, so it couldn’t have been her.’ She nodded, satisfied with her own conclusions. ‘Anyway, having Archie put me back on the straight and narrow. It was a bumpy road for a bit, even if it was straight, and God knows it was narrow. But it led me to Harry.’

  ‘So there was a happy ending.’

  She smiled. ‘That’s so nice. To hear Harry described as my happy ending. These days everyone who says his name bursts into tears. But they’re wrong and you’re right. He was my happy ending. And now,’ she stood, stretching herself, ‘I really must go to bed or I’ll die.’

  I was deep in a dream involving Neil Kinnock and Joan Crawford and a woman who used to work for my mother as a cleaner called Mrs Pointer. We were all trying to have a picnic on Beachy Head, but the tartan rug kept blowing up and spilling everything, and for some reason we couldn’t weight it down.
Until we decided to lie on it to hold it steady, but how can that have worked and what did we do with the food? Which didn’t seem to matter much, as Joan was squeezing into my back and she slid an arm round my waist, letting her hand slide down as she did so, and… I woke up. Except I hadn’t woken up, because although it was fairly dark and I wasn’t at a picnic any more, I could still feel Joan’s body pressed into mine and a gentle hand enfolding my erect penis, and then a voice said ‘are you awake?’ very softly, and it didn’t sound at all like Joan’s. Not a bit. It wasn’t even American. I thought about this for a moment, because the voice was familiar and I felt I should know it but I didn’t recognise it until it spoke my name, and suddenly I knew beyond any doubt… it was Serena’s. It was Serena Belton’s voice and she was here beside me, with her hand on my penis. And then I still couldn’t believe I wasn’t dreaming, because this, after all, was my lifelong dream, and I began to wonder whether I was in a dream within a dream, when you think you’ve woken up but you haven’t. And I might have gone on thinking this for a bit longer if her lips had not nestled into the side of my cheek and I turned, and she was there.

  In the flesh. In my arms. In my bed.

  ‘Is this really happening?’ I whispered, afraid that if I spoke too loudly the whole mirage would shimmer and disappear. It was very early dawn and the soft, dim, grey light had begun to creep in through the cracks in the curtains, lightening the room just enough for me to make her out, her shining, sacred head on the pillow next to mine.

  ‘It is if you want it to.’

  I smiled. ‘Do you make a habit of stealing into men’s rooms at night?’

  ‘Only when they’re in love with me,’ she said.

  I still could not accept this gift from heaven. ‘But why? I know you don’t love me. We had a long discussion about it this very afternoon.’ Of all things, I didn’t want to frighten her away, but I did want to understand.

  ‘I love your love,’ she said. ‘I don’t pretend to share it, and when we were young I doubt that I was much more than amused. But as the years went on and bad things happened, I always knew one man in the world at least loved me. And that was you. Seeing you again reminded me of it.’

  ‘Is that why you got me down here?’

  ‘You make me feel safe. When we met up in Yorkshire I felt glad to see you and that was why. I am safe in your love. I wish we saw more of you. I don’t know why we drifted out of each other’s lives.’

  ‘I thought it was because of what Damian said.’

  She shook her head. ‘I knew it was nonsense. I knew it straight away but even more as time went on. He was in pain, that’s all.’

  ‘So was I by the end of that dinner.’ For the first time in my life, I could envisage a day when I would find it funny.

  She stroked my hair, or what was left of it. ‘You should have stayed. You both should have stayed on afterwards and laughed.’

  ‘I couldn’t.’ She did not argue, and together we let the bitter memory go and returned to the glorious present. Suddenly I felt the freedom to touch her surge through me, like a child who finally lets himself believe that it really is Christmas morning. I reached up and traced the outline of her lips with my finger.

  She kissed it gently as I did so. ‘You may not know it, but you have seen me through some dark times and this is your reward.’ As she spoke she moved closer and brought her mouth to mine, and we began, as the phrase has it, to make love. And while many times in my life those words have not been an accurate description of the activity they refer to, on that occasion they were as true as the Gospel. What we were making in that bed on that blessed morn was love. Pure love. Nor was there the slightest diminution of passion because the woman in my arms was a matron in her fifties rather than the lissom girl I had hungered for so many years before. She was my Serena at last. I held her in my arms and, for this one time perhaps, I was hers. I had finally arrived at my yearned-for destination. And although I was so aroused by her presence that I thought I would explode at one more touch, still, when I entered her, the sensation that filled me with a hot glow like molten lava was not just sexual excitement but total happiness. It sounds sentimental, which I am not as a rule, but that moment of being inside Serena, of feeling myself held by her body, for the first and presumably the only time in my life, after waiting for forty years, was the single happiest moment I have ever known, the climax, the very peak of my existence, nor do I expect to equal it before the grave claims me.

  I do not seek recognition as a skilful lover. I assume I am no better and no worse than most men, but if ever I knew what I was doing that was the day. I dare say I should have felt guilty, but I didn’t. Her husband had the gift of her whole, adult life and he would never know the value of it. I did, and I felt that I deserved my hour without enraging too many of the gods. I am glad and relieved to relate that my tired, fat, flabby body rose to the challenge of the chance of paradise and never have I been so entirely engrossed in the present to the exclusion of all else. For those minutes I had no future and no past, only her. We made love three times before she slipped away, and when I stared at the gathered silk canopy above my head I knew I was a different man from the one who had lain down to sleep. I had made love to a woman I was absolutely and entirely in love with. The woman who held my heart had opened her body to the rest of me. There is no greater joy allowed us. Not on earth. And, in echo of Candida, I knew, because of that single episode, because of this one hour in a life of many years, because I had known real, unconditional bliss I could never again be a sad man. I thought it then, I think it now, and I am grateful. If Damian’s search led me to this, then I was paid in full and far in excess of any mortal man’s deserts.

  Portugal and After

  FIFTEEN

  As it happened, the fateful invitation to Portugal came right out of the blue. One day the telephone rang in my parents’ flat – where I was, on the principle of Hobson’s choice, still living – and when I picked it up a familiar voice asked for me by name. ‘Speaking,’ I said.

  ‘That was easy. I thought I was going to have to track you down through ten addresses. It’s Candida. Candida Finch.’

  ‘Hello.’ I could not keep the surprise out of my voice entirely, since we had never been all that friendly.

  ‘I know. Why am I ringing? Well, it’s an invitation, really. Is there any chance I could tempt you to join a gang of us in Estoril for a couple of weeks at the end of July? An old friend of mine has got a job in Lisbon, in some bank or other, and they’ve given him this huge villa and no one to put in it. He says if we can all just get ourselves out there, we can stay as long as we like for nothing. So I thought it might be fun to mount a sort of reunion of the Class of Sixty-eight, before we’ve all forgotten what we look like. What do you say?’ My surprise was not lessened by any of this, as I wasn’t aware that I’d ever been a favourite of hers while the Season was going on, let alone why I should be chosen for a special reunion.

  I had not seen Candida Finch much after the whole thing came to an end and by the time of the call almost two years had passed since the events I have been revisiting. It was in the early summer of 1970, when my days as a dancing partner were long behind me. I had left Cambridge that June, with a perfectly respectable if not overwhelming degree, and the perilous career of a writer beckoned. Or at least it did not beckon, because I soon realised that I was trying to push through a solid, brick wall. My father was not hostile to my plan, once he had got over his disappointment that I wasn’t going to do anything sensible, but he declined to support me economically. ‘If it isn’t going to work, old boy,’ he said genially, ‘we’d better find out sooner rather than later,’ which was, of course, in its way, a direct challenge. Eventually I got a job as a kind of super office boy in a publishing group for children’s magazines, which would begin in the following September and for which I would be paid a handsome stipend that would have comfortably maintained a Yorkshire terrier. I did go on to do the job, for three years in fa
ct, finally clambering up to some sort of junior editing post, and somehow I managed to make ends meet. My mother used to cheat, as mothers will; she would slip me notes and pay for clothes and pick up my bills for petrol and car repairs, but even she would not actually give me a regular allowance, as she would have felt disloyal to my father. Let us say that during this period of my time on earth I lived, I survived, but it was essentially a life without frills or extras. All of which harsh reality I knew would be my fate at the end of that summer and it made Candida’s suggestion seem rather inviting.

  ‘That’s incredibly kind of you. Who else is coming?’ Of course, I knew as I said this that I had to accept, because you can’t ask who is coming to some event and then refuse. Inevitably it sounds as if you might have accepted if the guest list had been of a higher standard.

  Candida knew this. ‘I think we’ll have fun. We’ve got Dagmar and Lucy and the Tremayne brothers.’ I wasn’t mad about the Tremaynes, but I didn’t actually hate them, and I was actively fond of the other two, so the idea was growing on me. I knew there wasn’t the smallest chance I would otherwise have a proper holiday that year before I started what I liked to call my ‘career.’ ‘I’ve found a charter airline where they almost pay you, so the tickets will cost about sixpence. Can I definitely include you in?’