Past Imperfect (55 page)

She made a slight mouth movement as she paused in her eating. 'I'm helping a friend with a gallery in Fulham.'

'What does it show?'

'Oh, you know. Stuff.' I wasn't convinced this was the language of complete commitment. 'Our next thing is to launch some Polish guy, whose pictures look to me as if he'd stuck a canvas at the end of a garage and thrown tins of paint at it, but Corinne says it's more complicated than that and they're all to do with his anger against Communism.' Lucy shrugged lightly. I noticed her clothes were more hippie'ish than when I saw her last, with an Indian shirt under a worn, embroidered waistcoat and different layers of shawls or stoles or something, leaking out over her jeans, until it was quite hard to know whether she was wearing trousers or a skirt. Both, I suppose. 'What about you?' I explained the dismal job awaiting me. 'I do think you're lucky. Knowing what you want to do.'

'I'm not sure my father would agree with you.'

'No, I mean it. I wish I knew what I want to do. I thought I might travel for a bit, but I don't know.' She stretched and yawned. 'Everything's such a palaver.'

'It depends what you want from life generally.'

'That's the thing. I'm not sure. Not some boring husband going in and out of the city, while I give dinners and drive to the country on Friday morning to open up the house.' She spoke, as people do when they make this sort of statement, as if her low opinion of the life she outlined was an absolute
donne
among right-thinking people, when the reality is that for women like Lucy to live a very different life from the one she had described is hard. They may do a hippie version of it, with bunches of herbs hanging down from the kitchen ceiling and unmade beds and artist friends turning up unannounced for the weekend, but the difference between this and the arrangements of their more formal sisters, who meet their guests off preordained trains, and make them dress for dinner and come to church, is pretty minimal when you get down to it. Apart from anything else, the guests of both types of parties are almost always closely related by blood. But Lucy hadn't finished. 'I just want to do something different, to live somehow differently and never to stop living differently. I suppose I'm a follower of Chairman Mao. I want to live in a state of permanent revolution.'

'That's not for me.' We had been joined by Dagmar, who settled down on a nearby, paisley cushion and dragged a rug over her knees, before she got down to her food. The night was beginning to hint that it would not stay warm forever. 'In fact, I don't agree with Lucy's definition of the fate to be avoided above all others. I wouldn't mind going to the country to open up the house on Friday. But I want to do something in the world myself, as well. Something useful. I don't just want to be a wife, I want to be a person.' In this one may gauge that the 1960s philosophies had begun to get into their rhythm in the last years of the decade and that they had done their work on the princess from the Balkans. She'd caught the classic disease of the era, that of needing permanently to occupy the moral high ground. As a philosophy it could be exhausting, and it would be for most of us, when every soap star and newsreader would have to prove that all they cared about was the good of others, but here, on that Portuguese night, I didn't see much harm in it.

'What?' I said with fake astonishment. 'A princess of the House of Ludinghausen-Anhalt-Zerbst with a proper job?'

She sighed. 'That's the point. My mother doesn't want me to work, but I've started doing things for various charities, which even she can't object to, and I'm hoping to build from there. And when Mr Right comes along, always assuming that he does, I know he won't fight my having an identity of my own because I won't marry him if he does. I don't want to be a silent wife.' She had been a pretty silent debutante, so I was quite touched listening to her. 'I want to feel . . . well, I'll say it again: Useful.' Then I noticed, to my amazement, that as she was outlining this scenario of modern certainties her eyes were following Damian. I saw that he had managed to unload Candida on to our hosts, John and Alicky, where she was trapped by her own good manners, while he helped himself to some more food at the table under the trees. He finished heaping his plate and turned, surveying the company, and at that moment both Dagmar and Lucy raised their hands and waved. He saw us and came over, making our group into a foursome.

'We're discussing our futures,' I said. 'Lucy wants to be a wild child and Dagmar a missionary. What about you?'

'I just want my life to be perfect,' he replied with complete sincerity.

'And what would make it perfect?' asked Dagmar, timidly.

Damian thought for a minute. 'Well. Let me see. First, money. So I mean to make plenty of that.'

'Very good.' This was a chorus from all of us and we meant it.

'Then a perfect woman, who loves me as I love her, and together we will make a perfect child, and we will live in high state and be the envy of everyone who sets eyes on us.'

'You don't want much,' I said.

'I want what is due to me.' I remember this sentence quite distinctly because, while there are many people who say such things in jest, there are very few who seem really to believe them. In this case time would bear out his pretensions.

'What constitutes a perfect woman?' This again from Dagmar.

Damian thought. 'Beauty and brains, of course.'

'And birth?' I was surprised to hear Lucy ask that.

He considered this. 'Birth, inasmuch as she will have style and grace and sophistication and knowledge of the world. But she will not be hemmed in by her birth. She will not be oppressed by it. She will not allow her parents or her dead ancestors to dictate what she says or does. She will be free and, if necessary, she will break with every human being she has ever loved before me and cleave to my side.'

'I never know what "cleave" means in that context,' I mused. But nobody was interested in my query.

The two girls, both of whom I could now see were vying for the vacant position in Damian's mind, at least as far as this conversation went, pondered his words. 'She certainly should, if she's got anything to her,' said Lucy, which gave her an immediate advantage.

'It's hard to throw off everything of value,' countered Dagmar, but then she faltered. 'I mean, if you think it has value.' Damian seemed to nod, as if giving her permission to continue. 'And it's hard to throw off people you love, people who may deserve your love. Would your perfect woman be true to herself if she broke away from her roots, entirely?'

'I am asking a lot,' he said thoughtfully. By considering his answer, Damian was treating Dagmar with respect and Lucy thereby lost the initiative. 'Nor am I defending my demands, which may be thoroughly unreasonable. But I am telling you what I would need to know she could do if it came to it.'

Then Dagmar said, 'I think she could if she had to, but I'm just pointing out it would be hard.'

'I never said it wouldn't.'

Obviously, I missed the significance of all this at the time because, as we all now know, I was almost completely ignorant of much of what had gone on over the Season two years before, but I have since learned that this interchange was the preamble to Dagmar's last night of fantasy that she could be Damian's dream woman. I hope she enjoyed it.

Over the next couple of days we drifted, getting up late, swimming, eating at long tables set out on the terrace under a line of umbrellas, and going for walks in the village - doing, in fact, what people like us do best: Taking advantage of other people's money. But then, the following Monday, 27th July to be precise, we awoke to hear the startling news that Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, ex-Prime Minister of Portugal, founder of the Estado Novo - which, with Spain, had been the last Fascist state of Western Europe - had died in the night at the age of eighty-one.

'This is incredible,' I said as the party began to gather for breakfast on the terrace, pulling fruit from great piles set out for our delight, pouring coffee, buttering toast. I had thought the announcement would have stilled the table. Not so.

'Why?' asked George Tremayne.

'Because the last of the dictators, who shaped the middle of the century, who fought the war, who changed the world, is dead. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Primo de Rivera . . .'

'Franco's still alive,' said Richard Tremayne. 'So now he'll be the last of them to die.'

Which was, of course, a point. 'Nevertheless, it is extraordinary that we should be in Portugal, just outside Lisbon, when he went.' I was not going to give up easily. 'The newspapers say he's going to lie in state in Lisbon Cathedral for a few days. Obviously, we must all queue up and go.'

'To do what?' said George.

'To walk past his body. This is a historic moment.'

I turned to Damian for support, but he just helped himself to some more milk for his cornflakes.

I am not sure quite what it tells us about the battle of the sexes but in the event all the girls came and none of the other men. Naturally, they didn't have anything suitable to wear, and they borrowed black skirts and shawls and
mantillas
from the furious women in the kitchen, but they all came, including Alicky, despite her continuing complaints throughout the pilgrimage about her swelling and painful throat, of which we had heard more than enough by this point.

That said, the advantage of having Alicky with us was that she was able to be very stern with the driver, one of John's perks from the bank, who deposited us on the edge of the huge
piazza
in front of the cathedral, telling him exactly where he was to wait and, no, she couldn't give him an idea of how long we were going to be. In the lengthening shadows of the late afternoon we took up our positions in the endless line of shuffling, morose men and weeping women. Apart from anything else, I was impressed, or intrigued, or something, by the sorrow on display. I had been accustomed to think of Salazar as the last of the wicked old buffers who had plunged Europe into bloody turmoil, and here was a wide cross section of the Portuguese, from nobles to peasants (the last constituting the people who might have had the greatest right to complain against his rule), all openly sobbing at his departure. I suppose it's always hard to give up what you're used to.

'Candida?' The voice cut through me like a bacon slicer. I knew it as well as I knew my own without turning round, and I could not believe I was hearing it, in this ancient sea capital so far from home. 'Candida, what on earth are you doing here?' At this we all turned to greet Serena as she walked across the square, dragging a rather hot-looking Lady Claremont and the dreaded Lady Belton in her wake. In their party too the men were not interested in politics. Seeing all our faces, Serena let out a short scream. 'My God! What is this? I don't believe it! Why on earth are you all here?' We then embarked on an explanation and it turned out that, by an unbelievable coincidence, her own parents had taken one of the other villas in the development where ours lay, that they had invited Andrew's parents, that they'd arrived the day before and they would be staying for the coming week, and . . . wasn't it
amazing
?

I need hardly tell you that, as it turned out, it was not amazing. It was not in the least amazing. It was not even a coincidence. The scheme, which I did not uncover for some time after this and then only because I ran into George Tremayne at a race meeting three or four summers later, had originated with Serena, who wanted to see Damian again. Even when I heard the truth from George I didn't understand quite why (although I do now), but it was anyway important to her. John had been asking Candida to bring out a group of friends for some time, that bit was true, and they decided that if Candida could get Damian into the group, Serena and Andrew would, by coincidence, take a villa nearby. Obviously, Damian would not come if Serena were to be in the party, nor would Andrew if Damian was, so the subterfuge was necessary, once you accepted the intention. Where the plan might be said to have gone awry was that Serena's parents, perhaps suspicious in some way, had announced they would bear the cost of the trip and join them. This Andrew would not allow Serena to refuse, since it was such a saving. The final button came when Lady Belton suggested that she and her benighted husband also come along, as she would 'welcome the chance to know the Claremonts better.' I never found out what would have happened if Damian had refused when I asked him. I imagine the whole thing would just have been cancelled. However, at the time, I suspected nothing. I thought the chance meeting was genuine chance, a heaven-sent miracle that Serena Gresham - correction, Serena
Summersby -
should be standing in a sun-drenched, southern square, also wearing ill-fitting, borrowed black and waiting to pay homage to a dead tyrant alongside me. I allowed myself to wonder at her properly. 'How are you?' I asked.

'Frazzled and worn out. Take my advice. Don't travel with your parents, your in-laws and your two-month-old baby, in the same party.'

'I'll remember that.' I looked at her. She was quite unchanged. That my golden girl was now a wife and mother seemed more or less impossible to believe. 'How are you getting on?'

She glanced swiftly across at Lady Belton, but the old trout was busily snubbing some tourist who'd attempted to strike up a conversation and enjoying it too much to notice us. 'All right.' Then, sensing that her answer had not sounded like the voice of love's young dream, she smiled. 'My life's terribly grown up now. You wouldn't believe it was me. I spend the whole time talking to plumbers and having things covered, and asking Andrew whether he's done the sales tax.'

'But you're happy?'

We did not need to exchange a glance to know that, with this question, I was pushing my luck. 'Of course I am,' she said.

'Where is Andrew?'

She shrugged. 'Back at the villa. He says he's not interested in history.' 'This isn't history, it's history in the making.'

'What can I tell you? He's not interested.'

To the fury of the people behind us, we stuffed Serena, her mother and her mother-in-law into our group, and together we all staggered up the cathedral steps. From there we passed into the cool, shadowed interior of the great church, where the sounds of crying were more audible and, as they echoed through the aisles and cloisters, curiously haunting. Grief is always grief, whether or not the deceased deserves it. At last we walked past the coffin. The head was covered in some sort of scarf, but the hands, waxy and still, were pressed together as if in prayer, raised and resting on the chest of the corpse. 'I wonder how they do that,' said Serena. 'Do you think they've got a special thing?'