Past Imperfect

Lucy followed my gaze. She did not need to be told whom we were discussing. ‘Her mother’s. She’s the one in blue. The couple talking at the end look like the Marlboroughs and I’m pretty sure the fat one next to Lord Claremont is a princess of Denmark. I seem to remember she’s one of Serena’s godmothers.’ I decided not to push in.

Lucy stopped. ‘There’s your friend, making hay while the sun shines.’ A few yards ahead of us Damian was joking merrily with Joa

I wasn’t going to let her get away with that. ‘Your friend, too, I gather,’ I said sharply, which earned me an apologetic glance.

Watching the gossiping couple, somewhat sourly, was the tragic figure of Georgina Waddilove. Pitiful Georgina. The style that was so becoming to almost all the others did not show her to much advantage and she resembled nothing more than an enormous, white blancmange. The flowers sewn on to a mountain of artificial ringlets battened to her head looked like scraps of torn paper caught in a tree. I walked up to where Damian was standing. ‘Have you brought your stuff here?’

Damian nodded. ‘It’s all in the cloakroom.’ He smiled at Joa

‘Don’t your parents have a place in London?’ By such questions Joa

‘No, they haven’t,’ he said, without further qualification. I had not yet noticed it in him, but he never gave out any information about himself unless asked a direct question. Even then it was carefully rationed.

‘I think we’d better sit down.’ Georgina had clearly had just about enough of Damian’s being cornered by Miss Langley, as she would have put it.

I smiled at the object of her irritation. ‘Are you in this party?’

‘With my mother? Of course not.’ Joa

‘I suppose you’re going, too,’ said Damian, ‘Think of me.’ The last was added in an a

‘You didn’t have to be in this group. You could have had my seat if you hadn’t taken the first offer.’ I made no attempt to prevent Lucy hearing this, nor had I intended to, so Damian was able to direct his answer at her.

‘To quote Madame Greffulhe: “Que j’ai jamais su.”’ Lucy laughed. But by now people really were starting to sit down, and so we set out on the journey back to her mother’s table.

‘Who’s Madame What-Not?’ I asked.

‘Marcel Proust used to go to her parties, when he was young. Years later, they asked her what it was like having such a genius in her salon, and she replied: “Que j’ai jamais su!”’

‘If only I’d known.’

‘Precisely.’

I was silent, wondering how Damian knew these things. How did he know Lucy knew them? I learned later it was one of his gifts. Like a squirrel, he would seek out and store any unlikely tidbit, in this case the startling news that Lucy Dalton read Proust, and he would save it for a time when it could be used to create an instant, magic bond that would exclude the others present, making him and whoever his target might be into a cosy club of two. I have seen the trick employed by others, but seldom to such effect. He never misjudged the moment. Lucy smiled. ‘Please don’t tell me you’re surprised.’

‘I am a bit.’ I looked around at the chattering, giggling throng, pulling their chairs up to the tables with their shining, white cloths. ‘I doubt that most of this lot read Proust.’

‘If they did, they wouldn’t tell you. The men here will exaggerate what they know. The women will conceal it.’ I hope these words would not be true now, but I’m afraid they were true then.

She enjoyed my wrong-footed silence, until I was the one to break it. ‘I thought you didn’t like him,’ I said, which seemed a non sequitur, but wasn’t.

She shrugged. ‘I don’t much. Who told you I’d asked him first?’

‘He did. Why? Was it a secret?’

‘No.’ She looked at me. ‘I’m sorry. I should have invited you before him. I must have assumed you’d already be going.’

I nodded genially. ‘That’s all right. Don’t apologise. Why shouldn’t you ask him first? He’s much better looking than I am.’ Which a

During the first course I talked to Carla about whom we both knew and where we’d both studied, about our plans for the summer and the sports we enjoyed, until the half-eaten salmon was taken away and the inevitable chicken was brought in and I turned to my other neighbour. I could see at once that more of the same would not quite answer.

‘You’re very good at this, aren’t you?’ she said and, while it was not exactly voiced in a hostile ma

‘Thank you,’ I replied. She had not, of course, meant it as a compliment, but by taking it as one I hadn’t left her any room for manoeuvre. She glowered at her plate. I tried a more honest approach. ‘If you don’t enjoy it, why are you doing it?’ I asked.

She stared at me. ‘Because my aunt arranged the whole thing before I was given a choice. Because she is the only relative I have who cares whether I live or die. Most of all, because I don’t know what else to do.’ As usual, when discussing her family arrangements she spoke with a kind of ill-repressed fury. ‘My stepmother has had charge of me since I was fourteen, and as a result of her bizarre requirements when it comes to female instruction, I am uneducated, untrained and completely unequipped for any productive work. Now I am supposed to “make a life for myself,” whatever that means. My cousin Serena tells me that things would improve if I knew more people in London. I do not dispute this – only these are not the sort of people I want to know more of.’ With a dismissive snort she indicated the body of the room.

It did seem very hard to have lost both parents by the time she was eighteen, even if Oscar Wilde would have thought it careless. ‘Where were you at school?’

‘Cullingford Grange.’

I had vaguely heard of it. ‘Isn’t that in Hertfordshire?’

Candida nodded. ‘It’s the kind of place where they worry if you’re reading too much, instead of being out in the nice fresh air.’ She rolled her eyes at the strangeness of her stepmother’s choices. ‘I could recite the rules of hockey in my sleep, but unfortunately nothing was taught about literature, mathematics, history, art, politics or life.’ I believed her because her account was only too familiar.

I think, I pray, I come from the last generation of the privileged to pay no attention to the education of their daughters. Even in 1968 there were women’s colleges at Cambridge and Oxford, but they were, as a rule, filled with the daughters of the bourgeois intelligentsia. Posh girls were an oddity and indeed almost the only one I can remember from my own year left after one term to marry a man with a castle in Kent. There were exceptions, but these generally came from families who were known to cherish an eccentric tradition of educating their women, rather than from the run-of-the-mill squireachy. For the rest, parents would scrimp and save to send the boys to Eton or Winchester or Harrow, while their sisters were put into the charge of some alcoholic, Belgian countess, whose main instruction was not to bother the parents.