Past Imperfect (17 page)

'Lucy's been telling me all the dos and don'ts for getting on in London.' She spoke with a breathy urgency, the voice of one determined to make every human interchange register. I could see at once that despite her flashing frequent smiles, designed no doubt to suggest a spirit of girlish, flirtatious fun and displaying thereby a set of admirably white, if rather large, teeth, Terry Vitkov took herself tremendously seriously.

'I don't think I've covered them all, have I?' said Lucy laconically.

Our companion was already training her searching gaze on the other guests. 'Which one is Viscount Summersby?' she asked.

Lucy checked the ballroom. 'Over there. With the blonde girl in green, next to the big looking glass.'

Terry sought him out. Her shoulders sagged. 'Why do they always have to look like the man from Pest Control?' She sighed. 'Who's that one?' A tall and handsome young man flashed her a smile as he passed.

'Don't bother. No money. No prospects.' Lucy clearly understood her companion's priorities. 'Of course, he's clever and he's headed for the City. He may make something of himself.'

But Terry shook her head. 'That takes twenty years and by the time they've got there they're ready to trade you in for a younger model. No. I want some money from the outset.'

I nodded, sagely. 'But not Lord Summersby.'

She smiled. 'Not until I know I can't get something better.' What made this amusing, of course, was that she meant it.

We had been moving slowly in a rather sloppy presentation line and by now had nearly reached our hosts, who stood, all four together, posed against a rich curtain erected as a kind of screen for the purpose. The Grand Duke cut a melancholy figure. He was a slight and pasty-looking creature anyway, especially when placed at the side of his massive spouse and, in truth, I do not believe I ever heard him say an interesting sentence. He wore his elaborate costume, which I took to be that of the Duke of Richmond, with an air of surprise, as if he had been put into it while under sedation. Perhaps he was. His son, dressed as an officer of the guard, stared straight ahead stiffly. He could have been posing for an early daguerreotype, when you had to keep your head still for four or five minutes until it was done. His bland, mottled face exuded an air of bored and generalised geniality.

The daughter, Dagmar, technically of course the Star of the Night, looked frightened and if anything a little drab. She was a tiny creature, literally no more than five feet tall and, while one is always being told that Queen Victoria was four foot eleven and managed to run an Empire, still for most of us it is very, very small and means you spend your whole life looking up. Standing there in the shadow of her mother, to paraphrase Noel Coward, she looked like the Grand Duchess's lunch. Dagmar wasn't what you would call plain, even if her sallow mini-face was hard to define or at least to categorise. She wasn't exactly pretty either, but her large eyes were arresting and she had a soft, moist, trembling mouth, usually half open and quivering and seeming to suggest she was always on the verge of tears, which, in a way, touched your heart. But she never appeared to have any idea of how to present herself. Her hair, for instance, was very dark and straight and, with imagination, it might have been effective. But it just hung there, as if it had been washed in a hurry and left to dry. I really did think something might have been made of her on the night of her own ball, but as usual nobody had tried. The dress was from the correct period but it was dull, and only faintly enlivened with a thin blue sash beneath her modest bosom. To be honest, she looked as if she had taken five minutes to get ready for a game of tennis, and so fragile that one good, strong puff of wind would carry her out of the window and down Park Lane in an instant.

Which could not be said of her mother. I cannot be sure, to this day, whether the Grand Duchess was intending to impersonate the original Duchess of Richmond. It would seem logical, given the wording of the invitation, but the costume she had chosen was more suitable for a great empress, Catherine the Great maybe, or Maria Teresa, or any other absolute female monarch. Acres of chiffon blew softly this way and that, while a river, a torrent, of purple velvet, embroidered in thick, gold thread, cascaded from her more than ample shoulders to the floor and lay there in massive hillocks and dunes, its ermine trim forming a kind of plinth to set off the huge, majestic figure above. Her bosom, like a rock shelf beneath the sea, was ablaze with diamonds and a sparkling crown-like tiara rose from her lightly sweating brow. I suppose the display was all that remained of the Moravian crown jewels, either that or they had been rented from the Barnum Brothers for the night. This was a scene-stealing one-woman show and none of the others got a look in, least of all the wretched Dagmar who, knowing her mother, must have expected something of the sort. At any rate, while the crowds spun, buzzing, round her mama, she didn't seem unduly put out, unlike the Grand Duke and the Crown Prince who both looked as if they were aching to go home. We were announced.

'Good evening, Ma'am.' I bowed and she accepted my obeisance gracefully. I moved on to her husband. 'Your Royal Highness.' I bowed again. He nodded vacantly, his mind probably on some long-ago Court reception in dark and dusty Olomouc. Leaving him to dream alone, I passed into the body of the room. Looking back, I think that evening was when I first understood what I have now come to recognise all around me, viz. that when it comes to aristocrats, or even royalty, most of the members of those worlds (who have not moved away from the whole performance entirely, that is) fall into separate, apparently similar but in fact quite disparate, groups. The first, made familiar by a million lampoons, have a clear understanding that the world of their youth and their ancestors has changed and will not be coming back, but they continue to mourn it. The cooks and the valets, the maids and the footmen who made life so sweet will never again push through the green baize door, busy with the tasks of the day. The smiling grooms who brought the horses round to the front at ten, the chauffeurs washing their gleaming vehicles, standing in deference when one strolled into the stable yard, the gardeners ducking out of sight at the sound of a house party's approach, all that army dedicated to their pleasure have left for other climes. These people usually know, too, albeit half subconsciously, that the deference they still receive within their social circle is somehow thin and even false, compared to the real respect accorded to their parents and grandparents, when high birth had solid accountable value. They know these things, but they do not know what to do about them, other than to weep and live out their lives with as much comfort as they can muster.

Into this category one could squarely place the last Grand Duke of Moravia. There was something in his aimless and depressive grace that told of his awareness of the truth. 'Don't blame me,' he seemed to be saying. 'I understand this is absurd. I know you have no reason to bow and scrape before me, that the game is over, that the band has played, but I have to go through the forms, don't you know? I have to look as if I take it seriously or I would be letting other people down.' This was the text permanently hovering in the air above him. Of course, the same group boasts a nastier version. 'It may be over,' they flash from their pitiless eyes, 'but it isn't quite over for
me
!' and they toss their heads and prey on their rich, social-climbing acolytes and sell the last of their mother's jewels, that the show may struggle on for a few more years at least.

But the other category in this group is different from these and, as a type, is largely undetected by the general public. These men and women also have the status that pertains to them from the old system and they enjoy it. They like the rank and the history that supports them. They are glad to be seen as part of the inner circle of aristocratic Britain. They make sure that one member at least of the Royal Family is present at every major bash they throw. They dress, at least the men dress, to please the diehards. They shoot, they fish, they know their historic dates and other people's genealogy. But all the time they are pretending. Far from being bewildered as to the workings of the new and harsher century, they understand precisely how it turns. They know the value of their property, just as they knew it would regain it. They fully grasp the intricacies of the markets, how and what to buy, what and when to sell, how to achieve the right planning permissions, how to manipulate the payments from the EU farming policy, in short, how to make the estate, and their position, pay.

They decided long ago that they did not want to belong to some fading club, endlessly nostalgic for better days that will never come again. They wanted to retake a position of influence and even power and if it was not, after the 1960s, to be overtly political power then so be it, they would find another route. They are fakes, really. Despite their lineage, despite their houses and their jewels and their wardrobes and their dogs, despite their mouthing the traditional prejudices of their class, they no longer think like most of their own kind. They belong to today and tomorrow, far more than to yesterday. They have brains and values as tough as any hedge fund manager's. But then again, they would argue that they are only being true to their own race, truer than the defeatists, because the primal job of any aristocrat is to stay on top. Bourbon or Bonaparte, king or president, the real aristocrat understands who is in power and who should be bowed to, next.

Of course, forty years ago much of this was hidden from us. The old world had taken a swingeing blow during and after the war from which it was deemed unlikely to recover. Everyone lamented the end in unison and it was only much later that we began to realise we were not all in the same boat as we had thought, and that some families had not, after all, trodden the same downward path, whatever they may have said at the time. In many cases it was my own generation, debutantes then, with brothers at university or just starting out in the city, who began secretly to reject the notion of going down with the ship and started looking about for ways to get back to dry land. These would prove the survivors, and this group was the one to which the Grand Duchess of Moravia, in contrast to her fatalistic spouse, was drawn, even before it was truly formed. She wanted to create a beachhead within the new world, from which to re-launch the family. I liked her for it.

The music was starting now, a group had taken up their positions on the modest stage and were performing cover versions of the current top ten. They were not, I think, a very famous group, but at least they had been on television, which seemed considerably more exciting then than it does now, and couples were drifting on to the floor at the end of the long chamber. The ancient parents, sitting in their costumes on sofas against the wall, were less helpful to this part of the evening and several of them, sensing it, rose and moved towards the doorway leading to the sitting-out rooms and the bar. Lucy and I walked forward. As we did so there was a slight murmur of jostling admiration and I caught a glimpse of Joanna Langley surrounded by her customary group of admirers. She was brilliantly dressed as Napoleon's sister, Princess Pauline Borghese. Her costume, unlike mine or most of the others, was new, copied, presumably for the occasion, from a portrait by David. Of course, the Princess would have been an unlikely guest at a ball given by her brother's arch enemies and anyway, Joanna's modern, celluloid beauty made her unconvincing as a period piece, but she was a joy to look at all the same.

The group shifted a little and I was surprised to see the familiar figure of Damian Baxter standing next to her. As I watched, he leaned in and whispered into her ear. She laughed, nodding a hello to me as she did so and thereby drawing me to Damian's attention. I walked over. 'You never said you were coming to this,' I said.

'I wasn't sure I would, until this afternoon. Then I suddenly thought "what the hell," got on a train and here I am.'

'You never said you'd been invited.'

He fixed me with a look, the corners of his mouth twitching. 'I wasn't.'

I stared at him. Did I feel a slight trace of Baron Frankenstein's terror, when his monster first moved of its own volition? 'You mean you've gatecrashed,' I said. He smiled covertly by way of an answer.

Lucy had been listening to this. 'How did you get your costume at such short notice?' And what a costume. In contrast to mine, with its wrong trousers and slightly rubbed sleeves, Damian looked as if the outfit had been made for him by a master tailor. He was not an officer, as most of the men in the room had chosen to be, but a dandy, Beau Brummell or Byron or someone similar, with a tightly fitting tailcoat hugging his torso, and buckskin breeches and high, polished boots to show off his legs. A dazzling cravat of white silk was wound round his neck and tucked into the brocade waistcoat beneath. Lucy nodded at me. 'He had to go out to Windsor Rep and that was what they came up with.'

Damian looked at me. 'Poor you. Never mind.' Any notion I'd cherished of looking rather good withered and died, as Damian chattered on in his light, unconcerned way. 'I got a friend to sort one out at the Arts Theatre, in case I wanted to come. She managed to get it ready in time and that's what decided me.' I'll bet she did, I thought. Some wretched girl, pricking her fingers to the bone, standing over the washing machine at midnight, burning her hand on the iron. I'll bet she did. And what would be her reward? Not to be loved by Damian. Of that I was quite sure.

Today, pushing into such a function would be a good deal harder than it was forty years ago. The endless security consciousness of the present generation, to say nothing of their self-importance, ensures guards and lists and ticking and 'please bring this invitation with you' to every gathering more exclusive than a sale at Tesco. But it was different then. There was a general supposition that people who hadn't been invited to something did not, as a rule, try to attend it. In other words, what the gatecrasher of those days relied on, what he or she required, was only nerve, nothing more, which, naturally, Damian had in plentiful supply. But I had less than he and I did not want to be seen chatting to someone who might be thrown out at any moment. I despise myself now when I think of it, but I took Lucy's arm and steered her on to the floor.