Through all this Serena had sat completely still, her head bowed, and I could see now that she was crying. A steady stream of tears ran down from both eyes, leaving dark marks of mascara across her cheeks as it travelled south. ‘And you think he’s in love with you, don’t you?’ He was standing by her now and she did look up, but she did not answer. ‘Your little swain, who sticks by you through thick and thin, and you laugh at him-’ She had made the beginnings of a protest at this, but he silenced her with a raised palm, ‘You laugh at him, you’ve laughed at him with me, but you tolerate him because he loves you and you think that’s sweet.’ Serena now looked across at me. I think she was shaking her head to distance herself from what he was saying, but I had gone into another place, a numb place, a hollow, lonely place, where I tried but failed to hide. ‘He doesn’t love you. He loves what you are, he loves what he can boast about, your name, your money.’ He paused to take a breath, to be fresh again for the final strike. ‘You should hear what he says about you, all of you, when we’re alone. He’s just a regular little toady, a Johnny-on-the-make, creeping and crawling like a bumboy round you, to worm and lick and slide his way into your lives.’
Lord Claremont probably spoke for the rest of them, when he let out a loud and disgusted ‘Good God!’ Damian had chosen well the right mud to throw at me if he wanted it to stick.
He hadn’t finished with Serena. ‘You idiot. You fool.’ He spoke with an undiluted contempt that made the company shudder. ‘You could have escaped. You could have lived a life. And instead, you chose to spend your days with this… oaf!’ He clipped Andrew’s shoulder as he passed. ‘This twerp! This blob! And for what? To live in a big house, and have people you don’t like pull their forelocks and grovel.’ Dagmar was crying out loud by now and Damian stopped when he got to her. Oddly, when he spoke next his voice was momentarily quite kind. ‘You’re not a bad sort. You deserve better than anything that will come to you.’ But by then he had moved on and now he was standing almost next to Joanna, who was watching him with the fascination of a rabbit faced by a stoat. ‘You might have escaped, without your vixen bitch of a mother. Keep trying.’ What made all this so surreal was that everyone was here, all the objects of his attack were sitting in front of him. Mrs Langley let out a yelp, but her husband held her arm to keep her silent.
Damian was starting to run down and you could tell it, because Richard Tremayne rose from his chair and even Andrew looked ready to move. His grip was loosening. ‘I hate you all. I loathe your false values. I wish you ill in everything you say or do. And yet, even now, I pity you.’ The others, sensing from this that the tirade was coming to an end, began fractionally to relax. Maybe he saw this, or maybe he had always planned it, but the fact is that Damian was not quite finished. ‘I’m going now but I must give you a moment to remember me by.’ He smiled.
‘I think we’ve already had it,’ Candida re-entered the fray.
‘No. Something more colourful,’ he said, and in one sharp, astonishing movement he threw down the knife and grabbed the first bowl of fish stew, smashing it over the end of the table where the steaming mass of boiling sea life was sprayed over Lady Claremont and Lucy and Kieran and Richard Tremayne. At this there was anguish and cries of anger and pain as the burning liquid covered them, but there was no real physical reaction beyond shock, and before anyone could move, Damian had snatched up the middle bowl. Crash! Down it went, this time catching Candida, Lord Claremont, Dagmar, George and Joanna. But as he lunged for the third and final bowl the others snapped awake and made a dive for it themselves. Alfred Langley stood with both hands on the rim. Unfortunately for him, Damian had the strength of a tiger and with one wrench it was out of his hands. Seizing it, Damian raised it high above his head, like a pagan priest with an offering for a savage and unforgiving deity, and for a moment everything and everyone was motionless. Then he brought it down hard against an edge, ensuring that the mass of the bowl’s contents covered Lady Belton, who received her anointing with a sickening scream. There was a thick tomato sauce involved in whatever the receipt had been and by now the table looked like the end of the battle of Borodino, with everyone at it covered in a sticky, smelly, steaming mess of fishy gore. The shards of china had shot about, too, and Lucy was nursing a cut on her forehead, while George was bleeding quite heavily from his right cheek. It’s a miracle that nobody was blinded. ‘I’ll say goodnight, then,’ said Damian, and without another word he walked across the terrace, through the open doors into his bedroom and closed them behind him. Once and forever, he was out of their lives.
After he’d gone we sat, all of us, not moving, in total shock. Like victims who have survived an air crash but are not yet sure of it. Then Serena and Dagmar started to cry quite loudly, and Lady Belton, who resembled nothing so much as a red-nosed clown in the Cirque du Soleil, with tendrils of lobster and crab stuck in her hair, began to scream out orders to her dazed and equally fish-festooned husband. ‘Take me away from here! At once! Take me away!’
At this point Valerie Langley cried out that we should call the police, but Alfred did not need the quick, startled looks from the others to know this would never happen. They were not going to finish the evening by providing the press with the best gossip story they had printed in years. With silent understanding and a nod, Alfred steered his wife away from the very idea.
To say the party broke up soon after that would be a significant and major understatement. The party shattered, splintered, exploded, fell into ruins, with the Claremonts and the Langleys running to their different cars as if a gunman were on the loose and training his weapon from a window. Those of us who remained sat, stinking of fish, waiting to see what would happen next. George Tremayne poured himself a drink and brought one over to me, which I thought was decent of him, even if it confirmed the horrid sense that they were all pitying me, pitying and despising me, which they obviously were. They may have varied in the degree to which they believed Damian’s words, but they all believed some of them and I understood what the consequence must be. Others back at home would hear the story, endlessly embellished, and I would thenceforth be tarred in London as a creeping toady, a social climbing greaser, a speck of smarmy, contemptible dirt. I felt my reward for taking up Damian and forcing him upon them had finally arrived. I was finished in the world of my growing-up years. I was an outcast. I was a pariah.
Candida approached, perhaps to offer sympathy, but before she could speak, I took her to one side. ‘I’ll leave tomorrow.’ I spoke in a low voice, because I didn’t want to become a cause cèlèbre, and, worst of all, have others feel obliged to take my side. ‘First thing.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘No. I must. I introduced him to everyone. He’s my fault. I can’t stay. Not after that.’ I was grateful for her attempt at support, but it was true. I couldn’t stay among these people for a minute longer than I had to. Andrew Summersby came alongside and Candida appealed to him to persuade me not to go. He shook his head. ‘I should think it’s the only course open to him,’ he said in his most ferociously pompous manner. It was lucky the maids had removed the knife.
Candida did not argue any more that night. ‘Well, sleep on it,’ she said. ‘See how you feel in the morning. We all know he was talking rubbish.’ I smiled and kissed her, and slipped away to my room.
Knowing Candida better now, I think it’s possible she had genuinely dismissed the charges against me but I did not believe it then. And later that night, when I was bathed and smelling a bit less like a welk stall in Bermondsey Market, I asked myself was Damian truly talking rubbish? In some ways I think he was. Most of all in what he said about Serena. Certainly every word was deliberately chosen to damage me irretrievably among those people. To finish me with them. As he was going to vanish from their sight, so, he vowed, would I. It was a cruel attack, and I am sure the best part of it for him was that it would ruin and diminish me in front of her. He wanted to make my love seem a petty and paltry affectation, a device to get invited to dinner, instead of the engine that turned my life.