Past Imperfect (22 page)

I stared at the wrinkled, bony creature walking towards me. Could this really be the majestic Grand Duchess of my youth? Or had her head been transplanted on to another's body? Where was the weight, in every sense? Where were the charisma and the fear she had inspired? Vanished entirely. She approached and I bowed. 'Ma'am,' I murmured, but she shook her head and pulled me towards her for a dry kiss on both my cheeks.

'Never mind all that,' she said gaily and slipped her arm through mine. This simple action in itself was a marker of how much had vanished from the world in the years since we last met. My sentimental side approved it as a friendly and relaxing alteration. But, all things considered, I suspect that more had been lost than gained for both of us. She looked across at her daughter. 'Is Simon here yet? He told me he was trying to be with you for lunch.'

'Obviously he couldn't get away. He won't be long.' Dagmar smiled at her mother, this cosy, easy pensioner who had stolen the identity of the warlord of my early years. 'We've been talking about Damian Baxter.'

'
Damian Baxter
.' The Grand Duchess rolled her eyes to heaven, then smiled at me. 'If you knew the rows we had over
that
young man.'

'So I gather.'

'And now he's richer than anyone living. So I suppose he's had the last laugh.' She paused. 'But anyway, whatever she's told you, it wasn't my fault that it didn't happen. Not in the end. You can't blame me.'

'Whose fault was it?'

'His. Damian's.' Her voice had the finality of the Lutine Bell. 'We all thought he was a climber, an adventurer, a man on the make. And so he was, in his own fashion.' She turned back to me to wave a pointed finger at my nose. 'And you brought him among us. How we mothers used to curse you for it.' She laughed merrily. 'But you see . . .' Suddenly her tone was becoming almost dreamy as she clambered back through the lost decades, searching for the right words. 'He wasn't after what we had. Not really. I didn't see that at the time. He wanted to experience it, to witness it, but only as a traveller from another land. He didn't want to live in the past where he had no position. He wanted to live in the future where he could be anything he wished. And he was quite right. It was where he belonged.' She looked back at her daughter, now walking behind us. 'Dagmar had nothing useful to give him that would make life easier there.' She lowered her voice. 'Maybe if he'd loved her it would have been different. But without love, there wasn't enough in it to tempt him.'

I was struck by Damian's journey in that year of years. At the start he had been thrilled by his first invitation from Fat Georgina. By the end he had turned down the hand of a perfectly genuine princess. Not many can say that. There was a noise of footsteps, and around a laurel-sheltered corner of the drive William came almost goose-stepping towards us in a gleaming new Barbour and spotless Hunter gumboots. He caught sight of me and frowned. By his reckoning I should have been safely back on the road by then. 'Here's William,' I said brightly. His mother-in-law looked at him with disdain and in silence. 'It must have been a relief that he stepped up to the mark when Dagmar needed him.' Obviously, I had spoken without thinking.

She turned a freezing fish eye upon me. 'I do not understand you,' she said coldly. It felt like the return of an old friend.

'I meant if Dagmar was anxious to marry.'

'She was not "anxious" to marry. She just felt that it was time.' Having settled this, the Grand Duchess relaxed and, after her brief outing, vanished back inside the chipper, little pensioner. 'William wanted what Dagmar could bring him. Damian did not. That's all there was to it.' She glanced in my direction. 'I know you didn't like him by the end.' I said nothing to contradict her. 'Dagmar told me about that business in Portugal.' Someone told everyone, I thought wryly. 'But it blinded you to what he was and what he could be. By the time Damian left our life, even I could see he was an unusual man.' I wonder now if she wasn't enjoying herself, discussing these events with someone who had been there when they were all taking place. Especially as I was an old friend, or at least I was a person she had known for a long time, which after a certain point is almost the same thing, and in all probability we would not meet again. I had provided her with an unexpected chance to make sense of those years and those distant decisions. I would guess they were not much talked of in the usual way of things and she wanted to make the best use of me. I cannot otherwise explain her next comment. 'William never had Damian's imagination,' she said. 'Nor his confidence in what the future would bring. Whatever his faults, Damian Baxter was a visionary in his way. William was just a tedious, vulgar social climber.'

'That doesn't mean he didn't love your daughter.' I saw no reason why we couldn't give him the benefit of some doubt.

But she shook her head. 'I don't think so. She made him feel important, that's all. That's why he resents her now. He can't bear the thought that he ever needed her to flatter his little ego.' I said nothing. Not because I disapproved of her disloyalty. If anything, I was honoured by the trust implicit in her indiscretion. But I had nothing I felt I could usefully add. She looked at me and laughed. 'I can't stand him, really. I don't think Dagmar can, but we never talk of it.'

'There's no point. Unless she's going to do something about him.'

She nodded. The rightness of this comment made her sad. In fact, the whole conversation had taken her into a strange, uncharted territory and I could see a light coating of glycerine beginning to make her eyes shine. 'The thing is, I don't know how we'd all manage. He'd find some way to give her nothing if they separate, some shyster lawyer would savage her claims and then what?' She sighed wearily, a hard worker in life's vineyard who deserved more rest than she was getting. There was the distant noise of an engine and her eyes looked up to find it. 'It's Simon, at last. Good.' The distraction had pulled her back from the cliff edge. She was probably already regretting what she had revealed.

A gleaming car of some foreign make was spinning down the drive towards us. As I watched it, I felt a sudden surge of longing. Let this man be Damian's son, I thought. Please. I cared about it in a way I had not cared with Lucy. In their scatterbrained way, the Rawnsley-Prices would shake out some sort of future, juggling Philip's demented schemes, surviving on luck and others' charity, but here, today, I felt as if I had been visiting old friends trapped in some hideous, third world prison for a crime they did not commit. Like all her kind, the old Grand Duchess was more frightened of poverty than it was worth. It would only be comparative poverty, genteel poverty, after all, but at a distance even that seemed unacceptable to her. I suppose she felt she had seen enough change and we must surely forgive her for that. This is always a delicate subject where the British upper classes and most Royalty are concerned, if they are facing poverty when they are used to living well. Most of them dread not only the coming discomfort but the loss of face that attends the loss of income, and they will submit to almost any humiliation rather than have to reduce their circumstance in public. Of course, there is another smaller group among them that doesn't give a damn either way. They are the lucky ones.

I thought again of the delivery from suffering that might be coming down the drive towards us. A quick DNA test and they would all be free of this horrible despot and their miserable existence. Dagmar and her mother and the other children would escape into a new land, where they would do just as they liked, and William would sit alone at his table, grumbling and fuming and insulting his servants to the end of his days. I wondered how we were going to get Simon to agree to a test. Would he worry about William's feelings? Did William have feelings? Dagmar had dropped back to stand by me. Her mother and her husband were a little way in front of us, waiting for the car as it drew nearer. 'It's been so lovely seeing you again,' I said. 'And your much-mellowed mama.' I wanted her to think of me as a friend. Because I was one.

She acknowledged my words with a quick smile, but then grew serious. Clearly, she'd deliberately manoeuvred a last moment with me out of earshot of the others. 'I hope you won't pay too much attention to what I was saying before. I can't think what came over me. It was just self-pity.'

'I won't mention it to anyone.'

'Thank you.' The crease of worry faded away. On the sweep before the house the shiny car had stopped and a man in his late thirties climbed out. He turned with a wave to face us.

And in that moment Dagmar's fate was sealed, as all my fantasies of playing Superman to this lost family came crashing down. But for their ages, he could have been William's identical twin. There wasn't a trace of his mother in him. Eyes, nose, mouth, hair, head, figure, manner, gait, they were like two peas in a pod. Dagmar saw me looking at him and smiled. 'As you can see, he was William's son after all.'

'Clearly.' We had reached my car by this stage and I opened the door.

'So everything worked out for the best,' she said.

'Of course it did. It often does, despite what they tell us on television,' I replied, climbing into the vehicle, taking her better, happier future with me. For a moment it seemed she was going to say something more, but then she thought better of it. So I said it for her. 'I'll give your love to Damian when I see him.'

She smiled. I had guessed right. 'Please do. My best love.' She looked round. 'Are you sure you won't stay and say hello to Simon?'

'Better not. I'm late and he'll be tired. I shall just enjoy you as a loving family group while I drive past.' Dagmar nodded, with a certain irony in her expression. I know she was glad to see the back of me that day and no wonder. I had committed the sin of reminding her of a happier time. Worse, I had made her admit to truths about her present life that she preferred to keep buried even from herself. I had my reasons, but it was cruel all the same.

At any rate, without further protest she stepped back, politely attending my departure, and a moment later I was on my way.

Serena

SEVEN

By the time I had got lost finding the motorway and caught in the evening traffic as I came into London, the whole excursion took longer than I'd planned and I did not arrive home much before eight. Bridget had let herself in some time earlier, and polished off half a bottle of Chablis in the interim. This made her rather sour as she banged around the kitchen making dinner. I cannot now think why I never questioned that she should always cook for me, when she spent her days in an office tussling with important decisions behind a desk, while I lolled around for most of the time, performing needless, invented tasks to fill the daylight hours as I waited for inspiration. In my defence, I don't remember her ever objecting to the arrangement. If it was my turn we went out. If it was her turn she cooked. Sometimes you just accept things.

'Your father rang,' she said. 'He wants you to call him back.'

'What about?'

'He didn't say, but he tried twice and the second time he sounded rather annoyed that you weren't here.'

There was a vague but completely unreasonable reprimand buried in this somewhere. 'I can't manage my day in case my father might ring.'

'Don't blame me.' She shrugged and went back into the kitchen.

'I'm just the messenger.' I was struck, not for the first time, by the tremendous mistake that about half the human race usually finds itself making when it comes to wobbly relationships. The division is not by sex or class or nationality or race or even age, since almost every type is found on both sides of the divide. The mistake is this: When they are in a partnership that is not going well, they attempt to inject a kind of drama into it by becoming moody and critical and permanently not-quite-satisfied. 'Why do you
always
do that?' they say. 'Now, are you listening because you
never
get this right?' Or, 'Don't tell me you've forgotten
again
!'

Not belonging to this team, I find it hard to penetrate their thinking. Do they imagine that by being demanding and edgy and cross, they will force you to work harder to make things better? If so, they are, of course, completely wrong. This kind of talk just gives one permission to go. The more dissatisfied they are, the more their gloom will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In fact, the first time you hear that put-upon sigh, 'I suppose I'm expected to clean this up,' you know it is simply a matter of time. The irony being that the ones who are truly hard to leave are those who are always happy. To desert a happy lover, to make them unhappy when they were not unhappy before, is hard and mean, and involves guilt of a major kind. To leave a miserable whinger just seems logical.

Of course, this implies it is easy to get up the nerve to end an affair that is past its sell-by date. But for many it is not. They tell themselves they are being nice, or honourable, or adult, in struggling on, but what they are being is weak. I do not mean a bad marriage or when there are children involved. But when we're only talking childless cohabitation it is plain cowardice to settle for failure. The years spent after we have decided that we will not die and be buried next to
this
one, are just wasted, so why do we put it off? Is it misguided kindness or false optimism or because we've taken a villa for the whole of August with the Grimstons and we can't let them down? Or even: Where on earth would I put all this stuff? It doesn't matter. Once the inner voice has spoken and given the verdict, every day spent evading the end is unworthy of you. And when it came to Bridget FitzGerald, I was unworthy.

My father was quite grouchy when he picked up the receiver. 'Where have you been all day?' he said.

'I had to go to Hampshire for lunch.'

'Why, for God's sake?' As any adult child knows, when dealing with an aged parent there is no point in engaging with this stuff.

'You could have rung me on the mobile,' I suggested.

'It's illegal if you were driving.'