Past Imperfect (21 page)

'I don't understand you.' I spoke carefully. 'It's delicious.'

'Not where I come from.' He gave a merry laugh, as if we were all enjoying a jolly joke.

'And where do you come from, exactly?' I said. 'I forget.' I stared at him and he held my gaze for a second. Behind his head the housekeeper glanced quickly at a maid who had been helping to serve to check if she'd registered this exchange. I could see them silently acknowledge that they both had. In fact, they were nearly smiling. However, whether or not it was entertaining for the staff to witness the tyrant brought low, it was snobbish and self-defeating of me to do it. William, red in the face with fury, was on the brink of ordering me out of the house, which would have rendered my journey completely pointless. Mercifully, he was never one to allow his anger to undo him. Years of tricky negotiations in the City had made him cleverer than that. And I would guess the thought of the story going round London, coming from someone who was perhaps better known than he (not richer, not more successful, just a little better known) was something he was not prepared to risk. Of course, my chief crime in his eyes wasn't that I had been rude to him and failed to take his part. It was that I seemed to find his wife more congenial and more interesting than he was, which was even worse than my reminding him of the long journey he had traversed since we first met. I knew he made a point of editing every visitor who entered the house, so presumably this kind of challenge seldom, if ever, happened. He was out of practice when it came to being contradicted.

With a deep and deliberately audible breath, he put down his napkin, painstakingly rumpled, and smiled. 'The awful thing is I have to run. Will you excuse me?' I saw, to my amusement, he was trying to be 'gracious.' It was not in his gift. 'I'm at home on Fridays, but it doesn't mean I don't have to work. If only it did. Dagmar will see you off. Won't you, my darling? It's been such a treat to catch up again.' I smiled and thanked him, as if I had not just been instructed to leave, and we both pretended everything was fine. Then he was gone. Dagmar and I stared at each other, her little, crumpled face and narrow shoulders suddenly making her look like a picture of some starving child in war-torn Berlin. Or Edith Piaf. Towards the end.

'Do you feel like a walk after that?' she said. 'I don't blame you if you want to get away. I won't be offended.'

'Hasn't he just told me to get off his land?'

She made a little pout. 'So?'

'Don't make him angry on my behalf.'

'He's always angry. What's the difference?'

The gardens at Bellingham had been tidied, replanted and restored to an approximation of their Edwardian appearance, with a large walled garden and separate 'rooms' containing statues surrounded by box hedges or roses in neat and tidy beds. It was all very nice, but the park was something more. Survivors of the original build, the giant oak trees, ancient and venerable, gave the whole place a sober beauty, a gravitas lacking in the quaint gardens or the newly refurbished interior. I looked around. 'You're very lucky.'

'Am I?'

'In this, anyway.'

She also stared about her, admiring the stately trees and the roll of the hills surrounding us. 'Yes,' she said. 'I am lucky in this.' We walked on for a bit. 'How was he?' she said suddenly, out of the blue. I did not immediately understand her. 'Damian. You told me you'd seen him recently.'

'Not very well, I'm afraid.'

She nodded. 'I heard that. I was hoping you'd tell me it wasn't true.'

'Well, it is.' Again, we were silent as we crested a shallow slope with a wonderful view across the park towards the house.

'Did you know I was mad about him?' she said.

I was becoming used to surprises. 'I knew you'd had a bit of a walkout. But I didn't know it was the Real Thing.'

'Well, it was. For me, anyway.'

'Then you were very discreet.'

She chuckled sadly. 'There wasn't much to be discreet about.'

'He talked of you the other day,' I said.

At this, her colour altered before my gaze and she raised a hand to her cheek. 'Did he?' she whispered. 'Did he really?' It was very touching.

I could see we were at last approaching the discussion I had come for, but I wanted to progress it carefully. 'He just mentioned that you and he had been out together a few times, which I hadn't known before.'

Released by the knowledge that somehow she was still alive in Damian's imagination, her words came pouring out. 'I would have married him, you know.' I stopped. This was astonishing. We seemed to have gone from nought to a hundred miles an hour in less than two minutes. Damian had given the impression of a one- night stand, but, for Dagmar it was
Tristan and Isolde
. How often it seems a pair of lovers can be engaged in two entirely different relationships.

She caught my expression and nodded vigorously, as if I were going to contradict her. It was an extraordinary transformation and the first time I had ever seen her take the lead in anything approaching an argument. 'I'd have done it if he'd asked me. I would!'

I raised my arms in surrender. 'I believe you,' I said.

Which made her smile and relax again, knowing by my action I was friend not foe. 'My mother would have thrown herself out of an upper window, of course, but I was ready for her. And I wasn't as mad as all that. I knew he'd do well. That was what I loved about him. He was part of the world that was coming.' She glanced at me. 'Not the world we
thought
was coming, all that peace and love and flowers-in-your-hair. Not that. The
real
world that crept secretly towards us through the seventies and arrived with a bang in the eighties. The ambition, the rapacity, I knew that another rich oligarchy would be back in place before I died and I was sure Damian would belong to it.'

A strange feature of growing older is the discovery that everyone who was young alongside you was just as incapable of expressing their thoughts as you yourself were. Somehow, in youth, most of us think that we are misunderstood but everyone else is stupid. I realised, with some sorrow, that I could have been much, much friendlier with Dagmar than I had been, if I'd only realised what was going on inside her little head. 'So, what happened? You couldn't convince your mother?'

'That wasn't the reason. She would have given in if I'd screamed loudly enough. After all, in the end she let me marry William who had no background at all, just because she thought he might make money.'

'What was it, then?'

She sighed, still sorry. 'He didn't want it.' She frowned, anxious to qualify her statement. 'I mean he liked me a bit and he was quite amused by all the . . . stuff. But he never fancied me. Not really.' Of course, the sad truth was that none of us had fancied her. Not, at any rate, what Nanny would describe as
in that way
, she was too much of a waif, too much the loveless, pitiful child, but at her words I was struck with a wave of pity for our younger selves, bursting with unrequited love, as all we plain ones had been. Aching to tell, somehow believing that if only the object of our passions could be brought to understand the force of our love, they would yield to it, yet knowing all the time that this is not so and they would not.

Dagmar hadn't finished. 'There was a moment when I thought I could have him. At one particular point I thought I could promise him everything he was doing the Season to get. Social . . .' She hesitated. She had been so carried away that it had led her into territory that made her awkward. Her timid diffidence came flooding back. 'You know . . . social whatever . . . I thought he might want it enough to take me as part of the deal.' She looked across. 'I suppose that sounds very desperate.'

'It sounds very determined. I'm surprised it didn't work.' I was. Whether he found her attractive or not, I would have thought the Damian Baxter of those years would have leaped at the chance of a princess bride.

Now it was her turn to look at me pityingly. 'You never understood him. Even before that terrible dinner in Portugal. You thought he wanted everything you had. More than you had. Which he did, in a way. But at some moment during the year we spent together he realised he only wanted it on his own terms or not at all.'

'Perhaps that's what you admire in men. William certainly has it on his own terms.' Which could have been cruel but she did not take it as such.

Instead, she shook her head to mark the difference in her mind between the two men. 'William is a little man. He married me to be a big man. Then, when he had made his own money and bought a knighthood, and generally became, as he thought, big, he didn't want me to be big as well any more. He wanted me to be little, so he could be even bigger.' I cannot tell you how sad these words were, as I listened to her far-back, 1950s Valerie Hobson voice issuing from her minute frame. She looked so breakable. 'He thinks as long as he ridicules my birth and criticises my appearance, and yawns whenever I open my mouth, he can demonstrate that I am the one who needs him and not the other way round.'

'He still buys portraits of your ancestors.'

'He doesn't have much choice. If we waited for his to come up we'd have to live with bare walls.' It was nice to hear her being waspish.

'Why don't you leave him?' It is hard to explain quite why, but this was not as intrusive a question at the time as it seems on the page.

She thought for a moment. 'I don't entirely know. For a long time it was the children, but they're not children now. So I don't know.'

'How many are there?'

'Three. Simon's the eldest. He's thirty-seven, working in the City. Gone.'

'Married?'

'Not yet. I used to wonder if he might be gay. I wouldn't mind, but I don't think he is. I suspect it's more that he's been put off the institution by his parents' example. Then there's Clarissa, who's happily married to a successful and very nice paediatrician, I'm glad to say, even if William doesn't approve.'

'Why not?'

'He would have preferred a stupid peer to a clever doctor.' She sighed. 'And finally our youngest, Richard, who's only twenty-four and starting out in corporate entertainment.' She paused, reflecting on her own words. 'Don't the young have funny jobs now?'

'Not like our day.'

She looked at me. 'Well, you went into a funny job. None of us thought you'd make a living. Did you realise that?'

'I suspected it. Just as I always expected you to do something surprising.' I only said this to cheer her up, but in a way it may have been true. To me, she had been a bit of a wild card, so retiring, so minor key, with her giggles and her long silences, that I used sometimes to have a sense that there was a completely different person living inside this shy and weeny head, even if I never investigated it at the time. I half expected the day to come when she'd break loose. Somehow it didn't seem possible that she would just slide into that Sloane life of buying school uniforms and cooking for the freezer in some provincial Aga kitchen.

Obviously, Dagmar found the idea of herself as a career girl rather flattering. 'Really? Very few of us did anything very spectacular. Rebecca Dawnay composes film music now and didn't Carla Wakefield open a restaurant in Paris? Or am I muddling her with someone?' She was combing her brain, 'I know one of the London editors is a former deb, but I forget which one . . .' she sighed. 'Anyway, that's about it.

'Even so.' I had quite recovered from my initial bewilderment at her unfamiliar appearance. Now Dagmar looked like herself again and it brought the memories rushing back. 'Do you remember in Portugal, on the first night? When we took a picnic to that haunted castle on the hill and talked about life? You sounded like someone plotting a break-out. I expect you've forgotten.'

'No, I haven't forgotten.' She stopped walking, as if to punctuate her sentence. 'I think you're right and I was planning something of the kind. But I got pregnant.' We had all known this, of course, in the unspoken way such news was received in those distant days, so I didn't comment. 'William asked me to marry him and, whatever you think of him now, I was pretty relieved at the time I can tell you. Anyway, then Simon arrived and that was that.'

We were nearly back at the house by this time and I needed some answers. 'When did you give up on Damian?'

Her muscles tensed and her face took on the look of a nervous chipmunk. I realised the question, or at least the return to 1968, was not at all easy for her, but there was no way round it. I waited while she composed her reply. 'I gave up on him when he didn't propose to me and William did.' She hesitated. 'The truth is, though I hardly know how to say it,' she blushed again, but clearly she had decided that she was too far in to back out now, 'either of them could have been the baby's father. I was going out with William at the time, but Damian and I slept together on the night we arrived in Estoril. I remember it very well because it was the last time that I thought I just might get him. Then, later that same night, he told me it wasn't going to happen. Ever. That he was fond of me, but . . .' She shrugged and suddenly the lonely, heartbroken girl of forty years before was there, walking beside us in the park. 'After that, when my period was late, I knew that it was either William or the abortion clinic. It's odd to think of it, given how William behaves to me now, but I cannot describe my relief when he did pop the question.'

'I'm sure.' I was.

She gave a sudden shiver. 'I should have worn a jersey,' she said. And then, with a shy glance. 'I don't know why I told you all that.'

'Because I was interested,' I said. Actually, this is quite true. Especially in England. Very few Englishmen ever ask women anything about themselves. They choose instead to lecture their dinner neighbours on a new and better route to the M5, or to praise their own professional achievements. So if a man does express any curiosity about the woman sitting next to him, about her feelings, about the life she is leading, she will generally tell him anything he cares to know.

We were passing the stable block, which was a few hundred yards away from the main house. It was much later, perhaps mid-eighteenth century, and the wall of the yard ended in a rather handsome lodge, built for some trusty steward or perhaps a madly superior coachman. Before we'd gone a few more steps the front door opened and an old woman came out with a wave. She was wearing the tweeds and scarf of a standard County mother. 'Dagmar told me you were coming,' she called over the grass separating us. 'I wanted to come out and say hello.'