‘No, indeed,’ said Damian waggishly, still hoping to regain his balance.

‘But Damian was invited!’ The cry came from a hideously embarrassed Dagmar. Naturally it made an interesting contribution to the argument. The crowd’s eyes swung towards her, like the audience of the tennis match in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. ‘I invited him!’ I am sure everyone present knew this was a lie, but it was a gallant and generous lie, and it sent her higher in the estimation of her guests, most of whom were not particularly fond of her before that night, despite their readiness to take full advantage of her hospitality. I say this so you may know that her intervention did achieve some good. As an argument against her mother’s decision it was of course completely fatuous.

‘Excuse me, my dear, but Mr Baxter was not invited. Not by you. And, more to the point, not by me.’ The Grand Duchess’s tone brooked no argument. She had not finished. ‘This was something he made quite clear within earshot of Lord Summersby, who was good enough to bring it to my attention. I would go so far as to say that Mr Baxter was boasting of his lack of invitation.’ The shade of the Grand Duchess’s face was darkening and it was not a becoming alteration. Coupled with the primary colours of her costume, she was beginning to resemble a blow-up Santa Claus hovering between the buildings in Regent Street at Christmas; but, as always with her, there was a quality to be reckoned with. I especially enjoyed a slight flavour of Eastern Europe in her voice as her rage intensified, as if her duty towards her people – subjects in a country which, lest we forget, she had never even visited – had somehow infused her with a new and different past, washing away her healthy, early years in West Yorkshire and making her Moravian in spite of herself.

Her words had naturally revealed who was to blame for the incident, which I would like to describe as ‘horrid,’ but which had, of course, completely made the party for most of those present. The sneak responsible was none other than Andrew Summersby. I would guess that this public unveiling was not part of his original plan and he looked uncomfortable as the eyes of the company now turned upon him. He hesitated for a moment before making the decision, which I cannot blame him for, given his situation that, having been uncovered, he had better brazen it out.

Until this point he’d been hovering at the back of the proceedings, but now he strode forward. ‘Come on,’ he said, laying hold of Damian by the upper arm, rather like someone making a citizen’s arrest, which I suppose he was doing, and attempting to guide him away.

In one swift move, and to the amazement of us all, Damian again got free, this time with a thousand times more fury than he had vented on the hotel employee when the man had tried something similar. ‘Take your hand off me this instant,’ he snarled. ‘You stupid, ridiculous oaf!’ Obviously, Andrew was not expecting anything of this sort when he had first decided to betray the uninvited guest, least of all from someone whom he judged to be far beneath him in God’s scheme of things. Andrew unquestionably was an oaf, and a very stupid one, but few people would then have called him such to his face and he was quite unprepared for it. To be honest, I think he just wanted to have a go at Serena or one of the other girls who had been hovering around Damian all evening and he’d got jealous. I’m quite sure nobody was sorrier than he that the whole situation seemed to be spiralling out of control.

He was dressed, like some of the others, as a Death’s Head hussar, with tight, in his case unbecoming, trousers, and a coat slung across his back, all of which may have fatally impeded his movement, but he couldn’t back out now. He lunged forward, making a second attempt to grip the miscreant’s arm. Once more, Damian was too quick for him, stepping back in a sort of pirouette, like Errol Flynn in a Warner Brothers romance, and before anyone could stop him he had swung the full force of his right fist into a punch that met Andrew’s nose with a loud and sickening crunch. Several of the girls screamed, particularly the nearest, one Lydia Maybury, whose white, organza frock, charmingly cut on the bias and embroidered with lilies of the valley, was copiously sprayed with a mixture of gore and snot from Andrew’s smashed proboscis. He himself looked so startled, so astonished by the unbelievable course events had taken, as if the sea itself had suddenly come rushing in through the ballroom windows, that he stood for a moment in a trance, staring through sightless eyes, stock still, blood spouting from his nostrils, before staggering backwards. Watching this, but paralysed with a kind of ecstatic horror, none of us thought to catch and save him, and instead he collapsed full length on to the breakfast buffet, pushing it over as he fell, showering himself and the bystanders with hot plates and sausages and jugs of orange juice and bacon and toast and burners and scrambled eggs and mustard and cutlery and all. The crash was like the Fall of Troy, echoing through the hotel passages, frightening the horses, wakening the dead. It was succeeded by complete and total silence. We all stood there, rabbits caught in the headlights, stunned, amazed, hypnotised, watching the bloody, breakfast-decorated body of the fallen Viscount. Even Dagmar was as still and as silent as a statue.

Then Damian, with one of those gestures that made me forgive him more, and for longer, than I should have done, took hold of the Grand Duchess’s hand, hanging limply by her side as she stood witness to the ruin of a party that had cost a large percentage of her annual income. ‘Please forgive me for making such a mess, Ma’am,’ he raised her unresisting hand to his lips, holding it there for a second, with exquisite elegance, ‘and thank you so much for what, until now, has been an enchanting evening.’ So saying he released her fingers, bowed crisply from the neck like a lifelong courtier, and strode out of the chamber.

I need hardly add that once the story had gone round London, and with the sole exception of the ball given by Lady Belton for Andrew’s sister, Annabella, before very long Damian had received invitations to every other major event of that Season. This was not because of any increased approval on the part of the mothers, all of whom were more terrified than ever that Damian Baxter would ensnare one of their sacred children.

It was at the absolute and unbending insistence of the girls themselves.

SIX

The Grand Duchess had been right to make her investment, even if things did not quite turn out as she had wished. In 1968 the family had just enough money and just enough status for Dagmar to have landed a big – or a biggish – fish. That she did not, I attributed at the time to her setting her sights too high and thereby missing whatever chance there might have been of something decent. As I would discover, I was not completely right in this analysis, but I suspect that even so, like many of rank or fortune, Dagmar had grown up with unrealistic expectations. To begin with she had no clear idea of how pallid she really was. She could always assemble (then, anyway) a crowd who would conceal her shyness from herself and she did not seem to appreciate that she would have to make more of the running if things were to go her way. All this the Grand Duchess knew and, in the nicest possible way, she tried to encourage her daughter to make what hay she could before the sun went in completely, but like most young women, Dagmar did not listen to her mother when her mother said things she did not want to hear.

Part of the problem lay in her curious inability to flirt. Faced by a man, she would alternate between nervous giggling or complete silence, her huge semi-tearful eyes wide open, fixed on her partner, while he would flounder in his desperate attempts to find some topic, any topic, that would elicit a vocal response. There wasn’t one. Eventually this helplessness provoked a protective instinct in me, and while I never exactly fancied Dagmar, I began to dislike anyone who made fun of her or, as I once heard, imitated her sad, little laugh. Once, I had to take her away from Annabel’s when her date excused himself to go to the loo, before apparently running up the steps back to street level and jumping into a taxi. She cried on the way home and of course I had to love her a little bit after that.