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‘Cambridge. I met him at a party in my college. As to who he is,’ I hesitated. ‘I don’t know much about him, really.’
‘Nor will you.’
I felt rather defensive. ‘He’s very nice.’ I wasn’t quite sure how or why I’d been cast as protector, but apparently I had. ‘And I thought you might like him, too.’
Peter followed Damian with his eyes, as he took a drink and started to chat up a wretched overweight girl with a lantern jaw, who was hovering nervously on the edge of the proceedings. ‘He’s an operator,’ he said and turned to greet some new arrivals.
If he was an operator, the operation bore fruit almost immediately. This would not have surprised me much further on in our acquaintance, as by then I would have known that Damian would never be so idle as to waste an opportunity. He was always a worker. His worst enemy would concede that. In fact, he just did. Damian had, after all, made it into Peter’s sanctum without any guarantee of a return engagement. There was no time to be lost.
The awkward lantern-jawed girl, whom I now recognised gazing up at Damian as he showered her with charm, went by the name of Georgina Waddilove. She was the daughter of a city banker and an American heiress. Quite how Damian had selected her for his opening salvo I am not entirely sure. Perhaps it was just a warrior’s sense of where the wall might most easily be breached and which girl was the most vulnerable to attack. Georgina was a melancholy character. To anyone who was interested, and there were not many, this could be traced to her mother who, with an imprecise knowledge of England and after a courtship conducted entirely during her husband’s posting in New York after the war, had been under the illusion at the time of her wedding that she was marrying into a much higher caste than was in fact the case. When they did return to England, in late 1950, with two little boys and a baby daughter, she had arrived in her new country with confident expectations of stalking at Balmoral and foursome suppers at Chatsworth and Stratfieldsaye. What she discovered, however, was that her husband’s friends and family came, almost exclusively, from the same prosperous, professional money-people that she had played te
The net result of this disappointment was not, however, divorce. A
I have to say that when I got to know her I liked Georgina Waddilove and, while I ca
Was it an instinct for this that took Damian straight to her side, when shining beauties of high rank stood about Peter’s drawing room, laughing and chatting and sipping their drinks? Was it as a fox might scent a wounded bird that Damian surveyed the crowd, locating the ugliest, most awkward girl there, and made for her like a missile? If so, his tactic was completely successful and a few days later he dropped by my rooms to show that the morning’s post had brought his first stiffy, a thick white card bearing the proud, engraved name of ‘Mrs Norman Waddilove, At Home,’ who was inviting him to attend a cocktail party ‘for Georgina,’ on the seventh of June, by the Dodgem Track at Battersea Fun Fair. ‘How can she be “at home” by the Dodgems?’ he said.
Battersea Park has altered its position in London in the decades since the war. It has not moved physically, of course, but it is an entirely different place today from the scene of so many childhood memories of half a century ago. Built by the Victorians as a pleasure ground for the local bourgeoisie, with sculpted rocks and fountains and gentle paths by swan-stocked lakes, the park had cheerfully run to seed by the 1950s and had become instead important to a whole generation of children as the site of London’s only permanent fun fair. Erected in 1951, as part of that icon of lost i
It is more beautiful today, its ponds and waterfalls and glades restored, than when I first walked there, clutching the hand of an aunt or a na