Past Imperfect (42 page)

'Should we put his trousers on?' Serena had somehow managed to keep the flapping items with her. We all looked down at Infant Damian curled up like an unborn child and the thought of the task defeated us.

'Let's not,' said Lucy firmly.

'What about your poor parents?' asked Georgina. 'Suppose they're still awake?'

Another glance confirmed the earlier decision. 'They're strong,' I said. 'They can take it.' With its distinctive rattle, the taxi started off, but as we came back out on to the Euston Road we could see that the police were still there with a host of cars and vans, and there was that now familiar, but then rare, accompaniment of the popping of cameras, blinding the poor wretches caught in their glare, all destined for unwelcome fame on the morrow.

My parents were philosophical, as they stood, blinking, in their dressing gowns, staring down at Damian slumped in a chair, still in his lively and distinctive costume, but now with his trousers deposited in a crumpled pool at his feet, like a ritual offering. 'He'll have to sleep on the floor in your room,' said my mother, without the possibility of any disagreement. 'I have a committee meeting in here at ten tomorrow morning, and there is
no
guarantee he'll be up and about by then.'

'No,' I said. And together we dragged Damian down the passage, depositing him on a folded eiderdown with some blankets on top.

'Where are the rest of his clothes?' asked my mother. I looked at her blankly. 'His shirt and so on.'

'At Madame Tussaud's, I suppose.'

'From where he had better not reclaim them.' Her voice was, I thought, unnecessarily severe. 'He could have got you all into a great deal of trouble.'

'That's rather unfair,' I said. 'It wasn't his fault.' But my mother paid no attention to my attempted defence. She was only displaying the behaviour that I have since discovered was absolutely endemic to her and to many like her. When they approve of someone in their children's lives, and when it is because of the social position of said individual, they will never admit it and will find endless excuses for no matter what bad behaviour. But when, instead, they
dis
approve, again for social rather than more meaningful reasons, rather than concede this, everything
else
about the unwanted friend must be condemned. This falls into the same category as when they give directions. If it is desirable that you should attend an event, it is 'easy-peasy, straight down the M4 and you're there,' but when they do not believe you should go, the same journey becomes 'quite endless. You trudge down the M4 forever and when you get off it there's an absolute maze of roads and villages to be negotiated. It's not worth it.' My mother was not a snob in any normal sense, she would have been shocked at the notion that she might be, but that didn't stop her being offended when she felt I had been 'latched on to' (her phrase), and this is what she felt about Damian. There was some truth in her analysis, of course.

Damian woke in the early hours of the following morning, I would guess at around three. I know this because he woke me, too, by whispering 'are you awake?' into my ear, until I was. He was completely sober. 'I'm starving,' he said. 'Is there anything to eat?'

'Couldn't it wait? You'll have breakfast in a minute.'

'I'm afraid it just can't. I can go and look for myself if you like.'

This seemed like a worse option, so I pulled myself to my feet, pulled on a dressing gown over my pyjamas, all of which garments date the incident, since, like almost every other male, I have abandoned traditional nightwear at some point during the subsequent decades, and I set off through the flat, with Damian following. With difficulty I persuaded him against a fry-up, and he settled for a bowl of cereal followed by some toast and tea. I joined him in the last, as we sat hunched over the tiny kitchen table. He started to laugh. 'What's so funny?'

'The whole evening. Lord only knows what they'll put in the papers.'

'Not us, which is the main thing. Poor Terry.' Nobody seemed to feel at all sorry for the ruin and waste inflicted on our hostess. I felt it was time someone did.

But Damian shook his head. 'Don't worry about her. She'll get a big story out of it. It'll probably be the defining moment of the Season before she's finished.'

'Perhaps it is.'

'Perhaps.' Looking back, that party did come to represent a moment for a lot of us, when the past, present and future fused together in some kind of crazy way. When the anti-authority, destabilising counterculture, which would win eventually (although not in the way we all then thought), swept in through the doors of our safe little, nearly-pre- 1939 world and carried us off with it. Damian put another piece of plastic bread in the toaster. 'I don't know why I'm so hungry. Does hash make you hungry?'

'I'm not really the person to ask.'

He looked at me, hesitating and then deciding to speak. 'I'm afraid you got quite a shock when you pulled back that curtain.' I was silent, not exactly through indignation or a sense of being wronged. I just couldn't imagine what I could say that would convey the right message, because I didn't know what the right message might be. He nodded as if I'd spoken. 'I know you're keen on her.'

'Does she?' I couldn't help myself. Aren't we sad, sometimes? The odd thing was, and I remember this quite clearly, I wasn't sure what answer I wanted him to give.

Damian shrugged as he helped himself to butter. 'If I know, I dare say she does.'

'What about you?'

My question was oddly phrased and he looked up. 'What do you mean?'

Of course, the fact was I wanted to hit him. Right there, smack, in the middle of his face, with a great, heavy, wounding punch that would send him over backwards, with any luck cracking his head against the stove as he fell. I've often wondered what it must be like to live in a rougher world from the one I have always occupied, in a hit-now-ask-questions-later kind of society. One's always supposed to say how ghastly violence is, and of course it
is
ghastly, but there must be compensations. 'Are you serious about her?' I asked.

He laughed. 'Don't be so fucking pompous.'

'I just meant--'

'You meant you are so jealous your face hurts, and you're only assuming a poncy, pseudo-uncle pose so you can patronise me and put me down, and show me I'm a ridiculous interloper, out of my mind for daring to dream so far above my reach.' He put a bit more marmalade on to his toast and bit into it. Of course, I had to admit that every one of his words was documentary truth. If kicking him to death would have made Serena love me, I would have done it there and then. Biff, boff, bang. Instead, I opted for underhand fighting. 'I thought she was going out with Andrew Summersby now.' I was not without a trick or two of my own.

Damian looked up, sharply. 'Why do you think that?'

'He seemed very proprietorial when he came looking for her after you'd gone. Then they went off together.'

He gave a slightly annoyed grin. 'Andrew was at the dinner she had to go to and it is true that right now her parents think she's going out with him. Since Andrew seems to share this delusion, she couldn't be bothered to have it out with him tonight. No doubt, she soon will.'

I thought about this. It sounded to me as if Serena and Andrew were indeed an item, a thought that sickened me, and Damian was trying, for my benefit, to exaggerate his chances with her, when all he had managed was one kiss. We may have been more innocent then, but one kiss didn't mean much. 'Are you going to her dance?' I said.

'Can you ask? I'm staying at Gresham for it.'

I have never been a very confident person, although I do not really know why this is so. It is true that I was not good-looking when I was young, but I was quite clever and I seemed to get about. My parents loved me, I have no doubt of that, and I've always had a lot of friends. Nor were girlfriends an insuperable problem, if a few may have been on the lookout for something better. I even got on well with my sister before her marriage. Yet with all this, I was not confident and I had to admire Damian for that reason. No castle walls could apparently keep him out and I envied him for it. Even at that moment, when I wished him in chains, his feet encased in blocks of concrete, at the bottom of the sea. Even as I imagined his thick hair waving as the tides pushed it to and fro, fishes swimming across his staring, sightless eyes, in some way,
malgre moi
, I felt admiration. 'Has Lady Claremont invited you?'

'Not yet, but she will. Candida and Serena are sorting it out between them. Serena's going to tell her mother that Candida fancies me.' He looked at me as he said it. As an alibi this was perfectly sensible and Lady Claremont would believe it, since Candida fancied everything male that moved, but as well as this there was a meaning in his words which I could see he had not thought through properly before he spoke them. Their echo in the room annoyed him. Because his speech meant that if Lady Claremont had even a whiff of this man's interest in her daughter he would not be welcome in her house. 'It's OK,' he said in answer to my unspoken query. 'I understand that type. I know I can make her like me.' Obviously he did not understand Lady Claremont's type, nor that of her husband, nor that of any of their world, largely because those people were not then, and are not now, interested in being understood by the likes of Damian Baxter. As a matter of fact I think Lady Claremont might well have liked him under different circumstances. She might have enjoyed his humour and his self-belief, she might even have allowed him into their circle as one of those token Real World Members that such households go in for. But that is all.

TWELVE

I am not an Englishman who hates Los Angeles. I'm not like those actors and directors who insist that every day spent there is drudgery, that it's all so 'false' they cannot besmirch their souls for one more minute and that they shout with joy when the 'plane takes off from LAX. I suppose some of them may be telling the truth, but I would guess not many. More usually, they are just ashamed of their desire for the rewards that only Hollywood will bring, and they disparage the place and all its works in the hope that they will not lose caste among their soulful brethren back in Blighty. I had only been once before the trip in question, many years before, when I was seeking fame and fortune in a fairly disorientated way, but I have visited a few times recently and I always enjoy myself when I am there. It is a resolutely upbeat place and after a long unbroken stretch of British pessimism, it feels good sometimes to look on the sunny side of life. I know the natives take this to extremes. But still, there is something about the up, Up, UP!ness of it all that is a tonic to sad spirits and I am always pleased to be there.

In the forty years that separated my youthful friendship with Terry Vitkov and this, our re-encounter, she had enjoyed what is known as a chequered career. Even her time in London had not gone according to plan. She and her mother had done quite well, all things considered, but Terry had not ended up a viscountess presiding over twenty bedrooms in a house open to the public, which had unquestionably been the target, and they must have been disappointed. Looking back, I think the difficulty may have been that the Vitkovs as a group had made the common mistake of confusing a large salary with having money. A salary may enable you to live well while it's coming in, very well, but it does not alter the reality of your position and no one knows this better than the British upper class. Just as television fame, while it continues, feels like film stardom but seldom survives the cancellation of the series. Naturally, none of this would have mattered if a nice young man had fallen in love with Terry, but she was an abrasive personality, with her big features and her big teeth, loud in laughter, short on humour, and with a kind of unconcealed greed that was rather off-putting even to the worldly. In short she did not land her fish. There was a moment when she might have had an army major who was probably in line to get a baronetcy from an ageing uncle (although the latter was unmarried and these things are never certain), but the young officer took fright and fell back into the arms of a judge's daughter from Rutland. In some ways he might have been better off with Terry, as she would at least have filled the house with people who could talk, but how long would she have stood it, that life of rainy walks and discussing horses over plates of summer pudding, once the title had arrived? So, if the path the Major took was duller, it was also probably smoother for him in the long run.

I last saw her, I am fairly sure, around the time of the party in Estoril, but not because she was there. In fact, she was annoyed that she had failed to secure an invitation. If only I had been so lucky. She may already have been pregnant then, but if so, none of us knew it, only that she had a plain but eager American millionaire pursuing her, divorced but not too old, whom she subsequently married in time for the baby's birth. The millionaire's name was Greg Something and he had been working in Eastern Europe at the time. After leaving there they had returned together to sun-drenched California where he pursued a career with Merrill Lynch and we'd lost them. I never really knew him but I liked him and, judging by our few meetings, I would have said he was far better suited to her than any of her English beaux, and if I had given it a moment's thought, I would have hoped for many years of bliss before Abraham saw fit to part them. Unfortunately, or so the story goes, Terry, a decade further down the line, attempted to cash him in for a much richer banker from Connecticut, before the latter dumped her for a model and left her high and dry, her first husband having made his escape while the going was good and settled down in North Virginia with his second family.

So Terry and her daughter had stayed on in Los Angeles, where she pursued a career of some kind as a television presenter, dealing, or so I have been told, in something called the infomercial, where women chat about hair products and kitchen utensils and different types of luggage in a natural, unstudied way, as if it were remotely believable that they would do so were they not trying to sell you something.