Past Imperfect (34 page)

I have already written about her beauty and it is probably true that I place physical beauty too high on my list of desirable attributes, but, in this case, it really was spectacular. No matter how closely one looked, Joanna's face was as near perfect as any I have ever seen not made of plastic, drawn on a page or enshrined on the silver screen. Smooth, evenly coloured skin, without a trace of a blemish; a mouth shaped with the soft curves of a petal, beneath widely placed deep-blue, almost purple, eyes, fringed with thick, long lashes; a statue's nose; and masses of gleaming born-blonde curls framing her cheeks and cascading to her shoulders. She was, as the song says, lovely to look at. 'What are you looking at?' Her voice, with its faint tinge of Essex, caught at my reveries, repeated the phrase and returned me to the present.

'At you,' I said.

She smiled. 'That's nice.' There was, in addition to everything else, something particularly charming in the contrast between her ethereal appearance and her absolute normality, her complete next-doorness which is hard to capture in words but was probably the core of the charm that delivered Charles II to Nell Gwynne, or enabled so many of the cockney Gaiety Girls to marry into the peerage in the 1890s. Her cheeriness was in some way the opposite of vanity, yet not self-consciously modest either. Just perfectly natural.

'What is this private thing you have to say to me? I couldn't be more fascinated.'

She blushed slightly, not an angry red, but with a soft, warm pink diffused evenly across her features, like someone caught unawares in the dawn light. 'It's not really private. That was just to make them shove off.' I smiled. 'But I was sorry you saw all that nonsense at the gate. I don't want you to think badly of me.' Again the direct simplicity of her appeal was both flattering and tremendously disarming.

'I couldn't think badly of you,' I replied, which was no more than the truth. 'And anyway, I am fairly sure the world will be reading about it tomorrow morning, so I will, if anything, feel rather bucked to have been an eyewitness.'

I'm afraid this had not made things better. 'My mum thinks it all helps. To be in the news. To have everyone going on about me. She thinks it makes me . . .' She hesitated, searching for the right word, 'interesting.' Whatever word she had chosen this was clearly a question and a request for help, even if it was not phrased as such.

I attempted to look encouraging and not judgemental. 'To quote Oscar Wilde, the only one thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.'

She gave a perfunctory laugh, more as a polite recognition that I had said something supposedly funny than because she found it amusing. Then, after a moment, she said, 'Yeah, I've heard that before, but you don't believe it, do you? None of you do.'

The trouble was this was true, really, but I didn't want to be a killjoy, certainly not to kill her joy. Still, she was asking my opinion so I strove to be as honest as I could be. 'It depends entirely what you want to come out of it. What are you striving for? What is your goal?'

She thought for a moment. 'That's the point. I don't know.'

'Then why are you doing the Season? What did you hope to gain when you began?'

'I don't know that either.' She spoke with all the hopelessness of a rabbit caught in a snare.

I understand that, theoretically, Joanna should have been freer than this. Her father was a self-made man, so she had not been brought up within the armed enclave, but in other ways her restrictions were even more severe. It was perhaps the last era when the aristocracy had the power to admit the new rich, or to refuse them entry. Later, when the posh way of life was back in fashion and the dream of joining it began again, the recent rich had far more muscle to push in whether the old world wanted them or not, but in the late Sixties the ex-Ruling Class still maintained considerable sway. I distinctly remember one friend of my mother's threatening a foolish youth, who had made a mess of her flat, uninvited. 'One more example of this kind of behaviour,' hissed the exasperated matron, 'and I will slam the door of every London drawing room in your face!' It was a meaningful threat because, then, it was a real one. In 1968 she could still have delivered. By 1988 those same doors were swinging free. Of course, today they are off their hinges.

To employ a phrase not actually in use for twenty years after this, I decided to cut to the chase. 'It is not complicated,' I said. 'If your mother and you are hoping for a grand marriage to come out of this year, you and she are going the wrong way about it. If you want to be famous and go on television or marry a film producer or a car manufacturer who is looking for a bit of glamour to invigorate his life, you're probably doing exactly the right thing.'

She looked at me. 'It's silly, really.' She sighed. 'You're right. My mum wants me to be Lady Snotty. That's what she dreams of night and day. That's why it's so sad that she thinks all this stuff is helping when I know, much better than she does, that it isn't.'

'Then make her listen. With a little backtracking, I'm sure you can still manage what she's after and it wouldn't be so reprehensible. As Lady Snotty, as you put it, with your other very considerable advantages you could do a great deal of good if you were so minded.' I know I sounded like a bogus prelate from
Hymns on Sunday
, but at the time I couldn't quite see what else to say. I even think I believed I was telling the truth.

Joanna shook her head. 'That isn't me. I'm not saying I disapprove of it but it's not me. Sitting on committees, cutting ribbons, hosting a bring-and-buy sale to get funds for the new X-ray machine at the local hospital. I mean--' she broke off, clearly afraid she had offended me. 'Don't get me wrong. I think all that's very good. But I just couldn't do it.'

'And your mother wants you to.'

She shook her head. 'Actually, I don't think she's got that far. She just wants me to have a big, posh wedding, with lots of pictures in the
Tatler
. She hasn't thought beyond that.'

'Then why don't you think beyond it for her? Maybe it isn't charity work for you, or standard charity work. Maybe you could get involved with a special school, or local government. All sorts of causes will want you once you have a bit of social muscle. What I'm trying to say is that I'm sure it's achievable.' I had a mental image of the Tremayne brother up in the box above us, happy to marry her, without condition, to get the loot. 'Maybe, if you think of the possibilities you might come round to the idea.' What interests me now, thinking back to this fruitless, pompous and patronising advice, is that it didn't occur to me to suggest that she pursue a career instead of this worthless and really rather immoral plan. Why not? There were working women then, and quite a lot of them. Perhaps it just didn't seem a likely outcome for anyone in my gang, or were we so far out to sea that we had lost sight of land? Whatever the reason, in this, as in so many things, I would turn out to be entirely wrong.

'You sound like Damian,' she said, taking me by surprise.

'Do I?'

'Yeah. He's always telling me to capitalise on my looks. To "go for it," when I don't know what I'm supposed to go for.'

'I wasn't aware that you knew him so well.' Was I fated to be a grudging camp follower, staggering along in Damian's trail?

'Well, I do.' She looked at me with a cool stare that told me everything. And as I returned her gaze I thought of Damian's hand, earlier that very day, resting lightly on Serena Gresham's pelvis, and I wondered what I had done wrong in an earlier life that I should be obliged to hear, in the span of a single afternoon, that Damian had wormed his way into the affections, if not the beds, of these women, both dream goddesses for me in their different ways; that, in short, my toy, my own invention, my action doll was apparently getting all the action. That months, or even weeks, after I had let him into the henhouse, this fox was ruling my roost. Joanna must have seen some of this in my troubled brow. 'Do you like him?' she asked.

I realised that this was a proper question and one that I had not addressed until now, and should have. But I chose to answer as if it were neither of these things. 'I'm the one who introduced him to all of you.'

'I know that, but you never sound now as if you like him.'

Was this the moment that I realised I didn't? If so, I did not face it for quite a while after. 'Of course I like him.'

'Because I don't think you've got much in common. He wants to get on, but he doesn't want to fit in, but not like you and not in the way you mean. You think he'll take advantage of the whole thing and keep in with these people, that he'll end up marrying Lady Penelope La-dida and send his children to Eton, but you're wrong. He can't stand you all, really. He's ready to break out and say goodbye to the lot of you.' There was clearly something in the notion that excited her.

Was this news? I can't pretend I was surprised. 'Then perhaps you should break out together. You seem rather well suited.'

'Don't talk like that.'

'Like what?'

'All toffee-nosed and self-important. You sound like a berk.' Naturally, this silenced me for the next few minutes, while she continued, 'Anyway, Damian and I, we're not well-suited, not deep down. I thought we might be for a bit, but we're not.'

'You both seem to me to be very up to the minute.' For some reason I couldn't stop sounding like the stupid-berk-plonker she'd described. To quote my mother against myself, I was just jealous.

But the comment made her more thoughtful than indignant. 'He does want to be part of today's world,' she admitted, 'like I do. But he wants to dominate it. He wants to bully it, to take over, to push people like you around in it and be the big, bad cheese.'

'And you don't? Not even as a great lady, dispensing warmth and wisdom from the house at the end of the drive?'

Again, she shook her head. 'You keep going on about that, but it's not me. And I don't want to be on television either. Nor married to some big-business boss with a modern flat in Mayfair and a villa in the South of France.' The world she described so accurately in that single phrase was, of course, one she knew well and presumably also despised, along with County Society, the peerage and Damian's imaginative vision of himself as a City whizz-kid, which was impressively ahead of its time.

'There must be something that you do want,' I said.

Joanna laughed again, mirthlessly. 'Nothing I'll find pursuing this game.' She thought for a while. 'I don't mean to be rude' - always a precursor to rudeness of the most offensive sort - 'but you lot are all completely divorced from what's going on around you. Damian's right about that. You're just not part of the Sixties at all. The fashions. The music . . .' She paused, shaking her head slowly, dizzy with wonder at our irrelevance.

I felt a little indignant. 'We play the music.'

She sighed. 'Yes, you play the music and you dance to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but you're still in evening dress and you're still in some ballroom or marquee, with hot breakfast being served from two o'clock onwards by a line of footmen. That's not what they're singing about. That's not what's happening.'

'I don't suppose it is.'

'The world's changing. And I want to change with it.'

'Darling!' I knew Damian's voice well enough not to need to turn round.

'Talk of the devil,' said Joanna.

Which I completed: 'And there he is.'

Damian came lazily down the steps towards us and enfolded her in a hug when he drew level. 'Come and cheer us up. You've spent long enough with droopy-drawers. He'll start to think he's in with a chance and then there'll be no controlling him.' He winked at me, as if inviting me to share the joke, which had, of course, as we both knew been intended as an insult. Initially, at the start of the Season he had felt the need to defer to me a little, just to make sure that I was still on side, but the need for that was long gone. He was the master now.

'All right,' she said, 'I'll come. But only if you give me a certainty for the next race.' She smiled and started back up the steps towards the door of the box where her fan club hovered.

Damian smiled back at her, his arm still round her waist. 'There's only one certainty for you. And that is me.'

And with a shared laugh they were inside and lost to view.

I have often thought since of my conversation with Joanna on that bright summer's day in our privileged seats above the crowded racetrack. It was perhaps in some ways my closest encounter with the elephant trap of Sixties fantasy, that would swallow so many of my contemporaries in the following decade. Things were changing, it is true. The post-war depression had been shaken off and the economy was booming, and many old values were being rejected. But they would be back, most of them. Not perhaps white tie or taking houses in Frinton for the summer, but certainly those that governed ambition and rapacity and greed and the lust for power. There would be fifteen years or so of chaos, then most of the old rules would be resurrected. Until now, when there is a richer elite buying houses in Belgravia than at any time since the Edwardians. But these were not the changes that Joanna and her ilk expected.

They thought, they
knew
, a world was coming where money would be meaningless, where nationalism and wars and religion would vanish, where class and rank and every worthless distinction between people would drift away into the ether like untrapped steam, and love would be all. It was a belief, a philosophy, that coloured my generation so strongly that many still cannot find the strength to shake it off. It is easy to laugh at these infantile notions, mouthed with increasing desperation by ageing ministers and sagging singers as their pension age approaches. Indeed, I do laugh at them since these fools have apparently lived a whole life and learned nothing. But, even so, I don't mind saying I was touched that day, listening to this lovely, well-intentioned, clever, nice, young woman, sitting in the sun and putting all her bets on Optimism.

Predictably, every paper ran a picture of Joanna Langley removing her white lace trousers to gain entry to Ascot the following day and I seem to remember that either the
Mail
or the
Express
printed a whole series of them, like a literal strip cartoon. And we all joked about it and most of us took her even less seriously than we had before and Mrs Langley's aspirations were crushed still further underfoot. But of course it was soon immaterial. I never did find out whether Joanna tried to talk to her mother about her doubts. If so, it did not have much effect, as the invitation to her coming-out ball in the country, from 'Mrs Alfred Langley' arrived not long afterwards. It was printed on white card so stiff it might have been cut from seasoned oak, with lettering sufficiently embossed to stub a toe. I would guess most people accepted. With the ruthless reasoning of the English, we all expected that a lot of money would be spent on the evening's pleasures and so it would be worth attending, whatever we thought of the daughter. I personally, of course, liked her and I freely confess I was much looking forward to it, and seen from now, when such entertainments are rarer and, to my old and jaded palate, seem pretty indistinguishable, I can only imagine what delights Mrs Langley had ordered for our delectation. I am certain it would have been a night to remember with treats galore.