‘Is he married?’
‘Divorced. Two boys, but they live with his ex quite near Colchester, which is a bit trying. Mummy made a terrific effort at the beginning. But you know what it’s like, it meant hours on the train for the kids and all they ever wanted to do when they got to her was go home. So she’s slightly given up at the moment, but she says it’ll be much easier when they’ve grown up a bit.’ Lucy brought over the unappetising plates of yellow-grey pasta, smeared with what looked like the guts of a rabbit, and laid mine reverently before me. The world-weary bottle of Pinot Grigio was back in play.
‘What was his wife like?’ I lifted my fork without enthusiasm.
‘Gerda? Rather dull, to be honest, but not horrible or anything. She wasn’t someone you’d know. She’s Swedish. They met at Glastonbury. I quite liked her, actually, and the whole split was very civilised. They just didn’t have anything in common. She’s married to a neurosurgeon now, which seems to be much more the ticket.’
‘What about Diana?’ I always thought Lucy’s elder sister was the more beautiful of the two. She looked like a young Deborah Kerr and, unlike her more frenetic sibling, she had a sort of serenity unusual in someone of her age. We all thought of her as quite a catch and, to her mother’s unfeigned delight, she’d been heavily involved with the heir to a borders earldom when I knew them, though I had heard since that this hadn’t, in the end, come off. I noticed the question had penetrated Lucy’s armour slightly and I understood before I was told that all was not well here either. Time, it seemed, had been unkind to all the Daltons. ‘I’m afraid Diana’s not too good just now. She’s divorced as well, but hers was pretty grim.’
‘I know she didn’t marry Peter Berwick.’
‘No. More’s the pity, though I never thought I’d say it. He was always so stuck up and tedious when they were going out, but now, glimpsed across the chasm of the years, he seems like Paradise Lost. Her husband was American. You wouldn’t know him either. Nor would I, if I didn’t have to. They met in Los Angeles and he keeps promising to go back there, but he hasn’t so far. Worse luck.’
I had a sudden, vivid memory of Diana Dalton laughing at a joke I had told her. We were next to each other in the dining room at Hurstwood, before going on to a ball somewhere nearby. She was drinking at the time and did a massive nose trick, right into the lap of the Lord Lieutenant, seated blamelessly on her other side. ‘Did she have any children?’
‘Two. But of course they’re grown up now. One’s in Australia and the other’s working on a kibbutz near Tel Aviv. It’s annoying because since she’s been in the Priory the whole thing has landed on me and Mummy.’
One more sentence and I would have cried. Poor Lady Dalton. Poor Sir Marmaduke. What had they done to merit this annihilation by the furies? When I last saw them they were model representatives of the class that had run the Empire. They managed their estates, played their part in the county, frightened the village and generally did their duty. And I knew too well they had dreamed of a future for their children that would have consisted of much the same. Certainly their reveries bore no resemblance to what had actually come to pass. I thought of Lady Dalton at Queen Charlotte’s, gently probing me about my prospects. What splendid marriages she had planned for her two daughters, pretty and funny and well-born as they were. Would it have damaged the universe if just one of her wishes had come true? Instead, in forty years the entire Dalton edifice, centuries in the building, had come crashing down into the street. Their money was gone, and what little was left would soon be gobbled up by a feckless son and a reckless son-in-law. That’s if the Priory fees didn’t drain the pot dry before then. And the crimes that merited this punishment? The parents had not understood how to manage the changes the years would bring, and the children, all three of them, had believed the siren song of the Sixties, and invested everything in the brave new world they were so mendaciously promised.
There was a noise at the door. ‘Mum. Have you got it?’ I looked up. A young woman of about twenty was standing there. She was tall and would have been quite good looking, had she not been encased in an angry mist, irritated and impatient, as if we were needlessly keeping her waiting. Not for the first time I was struck by the phenomenon, another by-product of the social revolution of the last four decades, whereby parents these days frequently belong to an entirely different social class from their children. Obviously, this was Lucy’s daughter, but she spoke with a south London accent, harsh and unlovely in its delivery, and her plaited hair and rough clothes would have told a stranger of long, hard struggles on an under-supported housing estate, not weekends with her grandfather, the baronet. Having known Lucy at roughly the same age, I can testify that they could have come from different galaxies for all they shared. Why don’t parents mind this? Or don’t they notice it? Isn’t the desire to bring up your young with the habits and customs of your own tribe one of the most fundamental imperatives in the animal kingdom? Nor is this restricted to any one part of our society. Everywhere in modern Britain parents are raising cuckoos, aliens from a foreign place.
The newcomer paid no attention to me. She was obviously solely concerned in obtaining an answer to her query. ‘Did you get it, Mum?’ The words hung sharply in the air.
Lucy nodded. ‘I’ve got it. But they only had it in blue.’
‘Oh, no.’ I write ‘Oh, no,’ but, in truth, it was much nearer ‘ow now.’ She sounded like Eliza Doolittle before Higgins has taken her on. ‘I wanted the pink one. I told you I wanted the pink one [i.e. Oi wan’ed ve pink wun].’
Lucy’s even, patient tone never wavered throughout. ‘They didn’t have any left in pink, so I thought blue was better than nothing.’
‘Well, you were wrong.’ The girl flounced off, sighing and stamping her way upstairs.
Lucy looked at me. ‘Do you have children?’
I shook my head. ‘I never married.’
She laughed. ‘Not quite the same thing these days.’
‘Well, I haven’t.’
‘They drive you completely mad. But of course one couldn’t do without them.’
I felt I could do without the recent exhibit pretty easily. ‘How many have you got?’
‘Three. Margaret’s the oldest. She’s thirty-seven and a farmer’s wife. Then there’s Richard, who’s thirty and trying to get into the music business. And that one. Kitty. Our surprise.’
Needless to say, the eldest was the object of my special interest. ‘And Margaret’s marriage has turned out well?’
Lucy nodded. ‘I think so. Her husband’s not very exciting, to be honest, but nobody’s perfect and he is quite… steady. That seems to be what she wants.’ Thank heaven for small mercies, I thought. ‘They’ve got four children and she still runs her own business. I can’t imagine how she manages, but she has sixty times as much energy as any of the rest of us.’ An image of Damian hovered over the table.
‘They’re quite spaced out, then. The children.’
‘Yes. Mad, really. Just when one thinks the days of bottle warmers and carting cots round the country are over they begin again. For twenty years, whenever we loaded the car for a weekend away, we looked like refugees trying to get out of Prague ahead of the Russians.’ She laughed at the memory. ‘Of course, I never meant to start quite so early, but when Margaret-’ She broke off, her laugh tapering to a nervous little giggle.
‘When Margaret what?’
Lucy gave me a shy glance. ‘People don’t mind these days so much, but she was already on the way when we got married.’
‘I hate to shock you, but most of us had worked out that few healthy babies are born at five months.’
She acknowledged this with a nod. ‘Of course. It’s just one didn’t talk about it then. It all got lost in the wash.’ She thought for a moment, then looked up at me. ‘Do you ever see anyone from those days? I mean, what brought on this sudden interest?’