Past Imperfect

Mrs Langley darted up to me, her eyes flicking round the empty room behind my back, checking that nobody more important needed attention. ‘Joa

‘I’m afraid Mi

Mrs Langley nodded. ‘Sir Timothy Bunting,’ she muttered, as if I were unaware of the name of my host.

‘Yes,’ I said.

She nodded again. There was something shifty about her that her smooth hair and tailored suit and really rather nice diamond brooch could not mask. She was jumpy, like Peter Lorre waiting to have his collar felt in a black-and-white thriller about the mob. As I got to know her better I found this sense of frightened uncertainty never left her. She couldn’t relax, which I suspect was both part of what turned her daughter against her, but at the same time was the root of her power.

Joa

‘I came,’ I said.

‘So you did.’ She walked up a step or two and kissed my cheek, then turned back to her companions. ‘Push off, will you?’ They protested, but she was quite definite. ‘Go inside. Get some more to drink and bring me one in a minute.’ She touched my sleeve. ‘I’ve got something to tell him and it’s private.’ Naturally, none of this would have been sayable if she had lived even remotely within the rules of the crowd she was ru

I have already written about her beauty and it is probably true that I place physical beauty too high on my list of desirable attributes, but, in this case, it really was spectacular. No matter how closely one looked, Joa

‘At you,’ I said.

She smiled. ‘That’s nice.’ There was, in addition to everything else, something particularly charming in the contrast between her ethereal appearance and her absolute normality, her complete next-doorness which is hard to capture in words but was probably the core of the charm that delivered Charles II to Nell Gwy

‘What is this private thing you have to say to me? I couldn’t be more fascinated.’

She blushed slightly, not an angry red, but with a soft, warm pink diffused evenly across her features, like someone caught unawares in the dawn light. ‘It’s not really private. That was just to make them shove off.’ I smiled. ‘But I was sorry you saw all that nonsense at the gate. I don’t want you to think badly of me.’ Again the direct simplicity of her appeal was both flattering and tremendously disarming.

‘I couldn’t think badly of you,’ I replied, which was no more than the truth. ‘And anyway, I am fairly sure the world will be reading about it tomorrow morning, so I will, if anything, feel rather bucked to have been an eyewitness.’

I’m afraid this had not made things better. ‘My mum thinks it all helps. To be in the news. To have everyone going on about me. She thinks it makes me…’ She hesitated, searching for the right word, ‘interesting.’ Whatever word she had chosen this was clearly a question and a request for help, even if it was not phrased as such.

I attempted to look encouraging and not judgemental. ‘To quote Oscar Wilde, the only one thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.’

She gave a perfunctory laugh, more as a polite recognition that I had said something supposedly fu

The trouble was this was true, really, but I didn’t want to be a killjoy, certainly not to kill her joy. Still, she was asking my opinion so I strove to be as honest as I could be. ‘It depends entirely what you want to come out of it. What are you striving for? What is your goal?’

She thought for a moment. ‘That’s the point. I don’t know.’

‘Then why are you doing the Season? What did you hope to gain when you began?’

‘I don’t know that either.’ She spoke with all the hopelessness of a rabbit caught in a snare.

I understand that, theoretically, Joa

To employ a phrase not actually in use for twenty years after this, I decided to cut to the chase. ‘It is not complicated,’ I said. ‘If your mother and you are hoping for a grand marriage to come out of this year, you and she are going the wrong way about it. If you want to be famous and go on television or marry a film producer or a car manufacturer who is looking for a bit of glamour to invigorate his life, you’re probably doing exactly the right thing.’

She looked at me. ‘It’s silly, really.’ She sighed. ‘You’re right. My mum wants me to be Lady Snotty. That’s what she dreams of night and day. That’s why it’s so sad that she thinks all this stuff is helping when I know, much better than she does, that it isn’t.’

‘Then make her listen. With a little backtracking, I’m sure you can still manage what she’s after and it wouldn’t be so reprehensible. As Lady Snotty, as you put it, with your other very considerable advantages you could do a great deal of good if you were so minded.’ I know I sounded like a bogus prelate from Hymns on Sunday, but at the time I couldn’t quite see what else to say. I even think I believed I was telling the truth.