Past Imperfect

She made a slight mouth movement as she paused in her eating. ‘I’m helping a friend with a gallery in Fulham.’

‘What does it show?’

‘Oh, you know. Stuff.’ I wasn’t convinced this was the language of complete commitment. ‘Our next thing is to launch some Polish guy, whose pictures look to me as if he’d stuck a canvas at the end of a garage and thrown tins of paint at it, but Cori

‘I’m not sure my father would agree with you.’

‘No, I mean it. I wish I knew what I want to do. I thought I might travel for a bit, but I don’t know.’ She stretched and yawned. ‘Everything’s such a palaver.’

‘It depends what you want from life generally.’

‘That’s the thing. I’m not sure. Not some boring husband going in and out of the city, while I give di

‘That’s not for me.’ We had been joined by Dagmar, who settled down on a nearby, paisley cushion and dragged a rug over her knees, before she got down to her food. The night was begi

‘What?’ I said with fake astonishment. ‘A princess of the House of Ludinghausen-Anhalt-Zerbst with a proper job?’

She sighed. ‘That’s the point. My mother doesn’t want me to work, but I’ve started doing things for various charities, which even she can’t object to, and I’m hoping to build from there. And when Mr Right comes along, always assuming that he does, I know he won’t fight my having an identity of my own because I won’t marry him if he does. I don’t want to be a silent wife.’ She had been a pretty silent debutante, so I was quite touched listening to her. ‘I want to feel… well, I’ll say it again: Useful.’ Then I noticed, to my amazement, that as she was outlining this scenario of modern certainties her eyes were following Damian. I saw that he had managed to unload Candida on to our hosts, John and Alicky, where she was trapped by her own good ma

‘We’re discussing our futures,’ I said. ‘Lucy wants to be a wild child and Dagmar a missionary. What about you?’

‘I just want my life to be perfect,’ he replied with complete sincerity.

‘And what would make it perfect?’ asked Dagmar, timidly.

Damian thought for a minute. ‘Well. Let me see. First, money. So I mean to make plenty of that.’

‘Very good.’ This was a chorus from all of us and we meant it.

‘Then a perfect woman, who loves me as I love her, and together we will make a perfect child, and we will live in high state and be the envy of everyone who sets eyes on us.’

‘You don’t want much,’ I said.

‘I want what is due to me.’ I remember this sentence quite distinctly because, while there are many people who say such things in jest, there are very few who seem really to believe them. In this case time would bear out his pretensions.

‘What constitutes a perfect woman?’ This again from Dagmar.

Damian thought. ‘Beauty and brains, of course.’

‘And birth?’ I was surprised to hear Lucy ask that.

He considered this. ‘Birth, inasmuch as she will have style and grace and sophistication and knowledge of the world. But she will not be hemmed in by her birth. She will not be oppressed by it. She will not allow her parents or her dead ancestors to dictate what she says or does. She will be free and, if necessary, she will break with every human being she has ever loved before me and cleave to my side.’

‘I never know what “cleave” means in that context,’ I mused. But nobody was interested in my query.

The two girls, both of whom I could now see were vying for the vacant position in Damian’s mind, at least as far as this conversation went, pondered his words. ‘She certainly should, if she’s got anything to her,’ said Lucy, which gave her an immediate advantage.

‘It’s hard to throw off everything of value,’ countered Dagmar, but then she faltered. ‘I mean, if you think it has value.’ Damian seemed to nod, as if giving her permission to continue. ‘And it’s hard to throw off people you love, people who may deserve your love. Would your perfect woman be true to herself if she broke away from her roots, entirely?’

‘I am asking a lot,’ he said thoughtfully. By considering his answer, Damian was treating Dagmar with respect and Lucy thereby lost the initiative. ‘Nor am I defending my demands, which may be thoroughly unreasonable. But I am telling you what I would need to know she could do if it came to it.’

Then Dagmar said, ‘I think she could if she had to, but I’m just pointing out it would be hard.’

‘I never said it wouldn’t.’

Obviously, I missed the significance of all this at the time because, as we all now know, I was almost completely ignorant of much of what had gone on over the Season two years before, but I have since learned that this interchange was the preamble to Dagmar’s last night of fantasy that she could be Damian’s dream woman. I hope she enjoyed it.

Over the next couple of days we drifted, getting up late, swimming, eating at long tables set out on the terrace under a line of umbrellas, and going for walks in the village – doing, in fact, what people like us do best: Taking advantage of other people’s money. But then, the following Monday, 27th July to be precise, we awoke to hear the startling news that Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, ex-Prime Minister of Portugal, founder of the Estado Novo – which, with Spain, had been the last Fascist state of Western Europe – had died in the night at the age of eighty-one.