Past Imperfect (36 page)

I nodded. He was very compelling. I would have accepted this decision even if my request had been a truthful one. 'Thank you,' I said, but I was puzzled. His secretary had tried to tell me exactly this when I first rang and he could have finished the job without any rudeness when he came on the line. 'Then why are we here having dinner?' The words had not come out quite as I had envisaged and I hurried to qualify them. 'Of course, I'm terribly pleased that we are and it's the greatest treat to see you again, but I'm surprised you have the time.'

'I have time,' he said. 'I have a lot of time for things I want to do.' This was polite, but did not really answer my question, which he saw. 'I find that I spend most of my time these days thinking about the past, and about what happened to me and the life I have led, considering, in short, how I got to where I am.'

'So you always make a special case for people from that past?'

'I like to see them. Particularly if, like you, I have seen very little of them in the meantime.'

'To be honest, I'm amazed you remember me at all. I thought I was going to be greeted by a big, fat "
who?
"'

He gave a silent, little puff of laughter and I noticed, by contrast, how very sad his eyes were. 'I don't think any living human could forget that dinner.'

'No,' I said.

He raised his glass. His years at the top had taught him not to clink it against mine, as he would have done back then. 'To us. Are we much altered do you think?'

I nodded. 'Very, I'd say. I may only be a fatter, balder, sadder version of the young man that I was, but you seem to have changed into someone else completely.'

He laughed more heartily, as if pleased by the notion. 'Kieran de Yong, Designer to the Stars.'

'That's the man I knew.'

'God help you.'

'He wasn't so bad.'

'Drink or depression has made you kind. He was ghastly.'

I did not bother to contradict again since I agreed with him. I could see our waiter lingering nearby, waiting for a break in the conversation to step forward and take the order. Kieran gave him a slight nod and he leaned in, pencil and pad in hand. It is comforting to know that the skill of waiting well is not entirely dead even if these days you have to search, and certainly to pay, for it. I do not in any way dislike the tidal wave of Eastern Europeans whose appointed task is apparently to ask me what I want to eat. They seem cheerful and nice on the whole, and a pleasant contrast to the surly Englishman who always looks as if he is longing to spit in your soup. But I do wish someone would tell them not to barge in when the diner is halfway through a punchline.

The man had garnered all the necessary information and made off to put it into practice. 'What changed you?' I asked and he did not need to be reminded of the meaning of the question.

He thought for a moment. 'Education. Experience. Or are they the same thing? In those days I felt I'd come from nothing, which was obviously not true, as everyone comes from something. I also felt I knew nothing, which was truer but not completely true either, and consequently I felt I had to present myself as the man who knows everything, who is in touch with the universe, embodying the
zeitgeist
. I imagined that I looked like a giant controlling his destiny and not a saddo with a dye job.' He smiled at the memory and shook his head. 'Those jackets, alone. What was
that
?' I couldn't help laughing with him. 'And there you have the reason for why I hated all of you lot.' Which was an unexpected change of direction.

'What do you mean?'

'I felt you were so much more in charge than I was.'

'We weren't.'

'No, I can see that now. But your contempt for me, and everything about me, made me think you were.'

This made me sorrowful. Why do we spend so much of our lives making blameless people unhappy? 'I hope we weren't as bad as that. I hate the word contempt.'

He nodded. 'Of course, you're much nicer these days. I knew you would be. Anyone with any brains, gets nicer as they get older. But we were all angry then.'

'You seem to have harnessed your anger to great effect.'

'Someone once said to me that when young and clever men are angry, they either explode or achieve great things.'

The weird coincidence of the words made me sit up. 'How funny. A friend of mine said that about another chap I know, not long ago. Do you remember Serena Gresham?'

'I remember everyone at that dinner.' I raised my eyebrows to acknowledge that this must indeed be the case for all the guests who were present. But he hadn't finished. 'Actually, I remember her more than that. She was quite friendly with Joanna, even after she'd dropped out to run off with me. It was Serena who warned me not to explode.'

I was simultaneously impressed at Serena's generosity of vision in going on with Joanna and Kieran when most of the girls had dropped them and slightly disappointed, as one always is, at the realisation that what had seemed a
bon mot
fashioned expressly for one's own ears is in fact just a slogan for the speaker. 'When she said it to me she was talking about Damian Baxter, another member of the Portuguese Dinner Club.'

'The
founder
member.' He took another sip of his wine. 'In a way, Damian Baxter and I were the two graduates of that year's output from the University of Life.'

Of course they would know each other, these Masters of the Universe. Damian had told me Kieran avoided him and I was curious as to whether this was really true. 'I suppose you must run into each other from time to time, at gatherings of the Great and the Good,' I said.

'Not really.' And there was my answer.

'That evening will obviously be with us to the end.'

He smiled, with a slight shrug. 'Damian isn't a friend of mine, but not because of that.'

Naturally I wanted to know the reason but I felt it might have an uncomfortable bearing on what I intended to discover before we parted and it didn't seem quite the right time to open that can of worms. 'He's certainly kept his success less secret than you have.' In saying this I found that I already admired Kieran very much. There is always something good in knowing you admire someone without reservation. I enjoyed giving him his due. Particularly as it justified my disapproval of someone I had always disliked.

He shook his head. 'Damian hasn't courted fame. He simply let it happen. I have spent who knows how much money keeping my name out of everything. Which is the more vain and self-important response?'

'Why did it matter to you?'

He thought for a moment. 'A mixture. Part of me believed it was very grown up to avoid a public profile and part of me had had enough. I did quite a lot of first-nighting and glad-handing and the rest of it during my days as a pseudo-posh dressmaker. It was moderately necessary then, though not as necessary as I pretended. But for a property developer, fame gives you nothing that you need and plenty you don't want.' The waiter had arrived with a clutch of appropriate equipment and Kieran waited until the man had finished arming us for the delights to come. 'Fame has its uses. The jumping of queues on to aeroplanes and into hospitals. It gives you good tables in restaurants that were full before you rang. You get theatre seats and tickets for the opera, and even invitations from people you are genuinely interested to know. But money gives you all these things without the hassle. You're not besieged to open this and support that, because nobody knows who you are and it wouldn't help if you did. The newspapers don't comb your background and interview your school friends to see if you kissed someone behind the bicycle shed in 1963. I don't have to put up with any of that. I get requests for large donations and I give some. That's all that is expected of me.'

'Were you surprised when you made money? I mean, proper money?' This seems an odd question to ask of a slight acquaintance after a forty-year gap. I can only tell you it didn't feel odd at the time to either of us.

'Everyone who is very successful will tell you that the initial response is entirely schizoid. One part of you thinks: All this for
me?
There must be some mistake! And the other greets immense, good fortune with: What on earth took you so long?'

'I suppose self-belief is a key ingredient.'

He nodded. 'So they tell us. But it's never quite enough to prepare you for what's happening. I made a lot of money when I sold the shops, but even so, when I did the sums for the projected profit on the first development I thought I'd put in too many noughts. I couldn't believe it would generate so much. But it did. Then there was more and more and more and more. And everything changed.'

'You didn't.'

'Oh, but I did. In those early years I went completely crazy. I was a jackass, a micro-manager to a truly demented degree. My home, my clothes, my cars, everything had to be just
so
. Looking back, I think I must have been imitating some notion of how posh people behaved but I got it completely wrong. I kept complaining in restaurants, and insisting on different shades of towel and different kinds of water in hotels. I wouldn't go to the telephone when people I knew rang.' He paused, bewildered, trying to understand his own remembered lunacy.

'Why not?'

'I thought that important people didn't. It was crazy. Even the President of the United States goes to the telephone if he knows the person at the other end, but I wouldn't. I had armies of assistants, working from sheaves of messages, with endless lists doled out to all and sundry. And I cancelled; boy, did I cancel. Last-minute duck-out. That was me.'

'I've never really understood why people do that.' I haven't. And yet it is an increasingly common phenomenon among the would-be great.

He sucked at his lip. 'Nor me, really. I think I felt trapped the moment I'd agreed to do anything, because the coming event, whatever it was, wouldn't be under my control. Then, as it drew nearer I would begin to panic, and on the day I'd decide I couldn't possibly go, usually for some nonsensical and irrelevant reason, and all the people I paid to kiss my arse would tell me that my host or hostess would understand, so I'd chuck.'

'When did that end?'

'When I'd been dropped by everybody. I still thought I was a sought-after guest, until one day I realised I was only ever asked to celebrity stunts, but never to where anything interesting was happening. Politicians, performers, writers, even thinkers, I wasn't invited to meet them any more. I was just too unreliable.'

This admission fascinated me, since I have known so many film stars and television faces who've gradually removed themselves from society, or at least from the society of anyone remotely rewarding who is not a fan. As a rule they are quite unaware of it, and continue to think of themselves as pursued and desired when they are neither. 'My grandmother used to say that you should never be more difficult than you're worth.'

'She was right. I broke her rule and paid. I was
much
more difficult than I was worth.' His tone had gone through a kind of exasperation and was suddenly full of real pain. I looked at him. 'That was when Joanna left me. It was understandable. She'd married me as a protest against the rules of the Establishment and suddenly she was living with a man who thought it was important to have his shirts made with a quarter of an inch difference in the length of the two sleeves, who could only buy his ties in Rome or have his shoes mended by a particular cobbler in St James's. It was all so boring. Can you blame her?'

I thought it might be time to lighten the mood. 'From what I remember of your mother-in-law, I imagine she rather approved of the change in you. That and the money, of course.'

He looked at me, as the waiter brought the first course. 'Did you know Valerie Langley?'

'Not well. I knew her as Joanna's mother, not as "Valerie".'

'She has much to answer for.' His tone was not jocular. I tried to think of something to add to this, but he hadn't finished. 'Did you realise that she only took us out to Portugal to split us up? Can you imagine a mother doing that to her own daughter?'

I could, really, when the mother in question was Valerie Langley, but there wasn't much point in flinging petrol on to the flames, so I decided to move to different shores for a bit. 'I gather you married again after you and Joanna split up. Is your second wife still around?'

He almost jumped, as if my words had distracted him from something he was busy with. 'No. We're divorced. Years ago.'

'I'm sorry. It didn't say that in your biography.'

Again he looked at me as if I were forcing him to discuss a parking ticket that had been issued to somebody else in 1953. 'Don't be sorry. Jeanne was nothing.' Which was a chilling comment, but not just in its cruelty. Perhaps it said too much about his loneliness.

'How is Joanna?' He'd already mentioned her, so there didn't seem to be any reason why I shouldn't ask. 'Are you on good terms these days?'

The question seemed to take him by surprise and return him to the present. My words had told him something beyond their content. 'Why did you want to see me?' he asked.

Suddenly I felt as if I had been caught shoplifting, or worse, putting a school friend's torch into my pocket. 'I'm on an errand, really.'

'What errand? For whom?'

'Damian.' I hesitated, praying for inspiration. 'You know he's ill--'

'And like to die.'

It almost amused me he should quote
Richard III
in this context. 'Precisely. And he finds he's interested in hearing about how his friends from those days . . .' I wasn't at all sure how to end this. 'How they turned out. Whether life worked for them. You know. Rather as you were saying about your own past and how you like to talk about it.' This last was a lame attempt to put them into the same boat.

'All his friends? Or just some of his friends?'

'Just some at this stage, and he asked me to help because he's really lost touch with them and we used to be quite close.'

Which wouldn't wash with Kieran and no wonder. 'I'm astonished that you, of all people, accepted the brief.'