Past Imperfect

‘Hello. How are you getting on?’

‘I’m shaken to pieces. I feel like a cocktail ready to be poured.’

‘I was going to ask if you wanted another go, with me.’

‘Not likely,’ said Serena. ‘What I do want is another drink.’ She looked around and had secured a new glass of champagne before the offer to help her was even out of my mouth.

Leaving her surrounded by would-be gallants, I wandered over to the Dodgem track, where the cars were already fully occupied. Then I heard my name called and I looked round to see Lucy Dalton waving at me. I walked over. ‘What is it?’ I said.

‘For Christ’s sake get in.’ Lucy patted the battered, leather seat beside her. ‘Philip Rawnsley-Price is coming this way and my bottom will be quite bruised enough without that.’ Behind me I could hear the man shouting for us to clear the track. ‘Get in!’ she hissed. So I did. It wasn’t a complete reprieve. Before we could set off, Philip, ignoring the shouts of the operator, had strolled across between the now moving cars – in those days, you understand, ‘Health and safety,’ as a phrase, had yet to be invented.

‘If you’re avoiding me, you can give up now,’ he said to Lucy with a leer that I assume was supposed to be sexy. ‘We’re destined to be together.’ Before she could think of a suitable wisecrack, there was a harsh and sudden jolt. We had been hit broadside by one of the Tremayne brothers with his cackling companion beside him and, with dislocated backs, we were flung into the tangled maelstrom. Philip laughed and moved lazily back to the edge.

Lucy Dalton will figure at some length in these pages and deserves an introduction, although she was not essentially, I think, a complicated character. Like Serena, she was the recipient, unearned, of most of this world’s blessings but at a (slightly) more modest level, which had divorced her a little less from the ordinary human experience. It is always hard for outsiders to perceive the differences in status and possession within an envied, privileged group, but these distinctions exist, whichever ivory tower one is dealing with. Champion footballers, all richer than Midas, know well who, within their crowd, merits envy and who should be pitied. Film stars can easily distinguish among themselves the careers that are going nowhere and the ones that have years more to run. Of course, to most of the public the very suggestion that this millionaire is less to be envied than that one seems pretentious and isolationist, but the gradations are meaningful to the members of these clubs and, if one is to attempt to understand what makes any world tick, they have a part to play in that. So it was with us. The Season in the 1960s, even if the concept was already embattled, still involved a narrower group than it would do today, if anyone were foolish enough to attempt its revival. Looking back, we were a halfway house between the genuinely exclusive group of the pre-war years and the anything-goes world of the 1980s and after. There were certainly girls included who would not have made the grade in the days of Presentation, but they were still made to feel it and the i

Lucy Dalton was the younger daughter of a baronet, Sir Marmaduke Dalton, whose ancestor had received his title in the early nineteenth century, as a reward for pretty routine service to the Crown. The family was still possessed of a substantial estate in Suffolk but the house itself was let in the 1930s and had been a girls’ prep school since the war. I would say the Daltons themselves were fairly happy in the dower house, from which, above the trees, they could just about glimpse the scene of their former splendour, albeit surrounded by prefabricated classrooms and pitches for the playing of lacrosse. In other words, it wasn’t ideal.

As a citizen of the modern world, I am now, in late middle age, fully aware that Lucy’s upbringing was privileged to an extreme degree. But most humans only compare themselves with people in similar circumstances to their own and I would ask the reader’s tolerance when I say that, given the times, to our gang her origins did not seem so remarkable. Her family, with its minor title, in their pleasant dower house, lived much as we all lived, in our rectories and manors and farmhouses, and the important distinction, or so it seemed to us, was between those who lived normally and those who lived as our people had lived before the war. These survivors were our battle pe

At any rate, to me she was a cheerful soul, pretty but not beautiful, fu

‘Who is this fellow you’ve wished on us all?’ she said, steering wildly to avoid another merry prang from Lord Richard.

‘I don’t know that I’ve wished him on anybody.’

‘Oh, but you have. I saw four girls writing down his address before he’d been here twenty minutes. I assume he’s not sponsored by Mr Townend?’

‘Hardly. I took him along to one of Peter’s things last week and I thought for a moment we were going to be thrown out.’

‘Why did you “take him along?” Why have you become his promoter? ’

‘I don’t think I knew that I had.’

She looked at me with a rather pitying smile.

Probably it was a half-subconscious desire to bury my lie to Georgina by making it true that prompted me to organise a group for di