To correct a popular misconception, I must point out that by my time the London Season was no longer, as it had once been, much of a marriage market. The idea was more to launch your young into a suitable world where they would thenceforth live and in due course find friends, and after a few years a husband or wife. Few mothers wanted this achieved before their sons and daughters had reached their middle twenties at the earliest, but Dagmar’s case was different, as the Grand Duchess knew. They were selling a product in what promised to be a falling market and there was no time to be lost. We all thought at one point she had a reasonable chance of Robert Strickland, the grandson and eventual heir to a 1910 barony, awarded to a Royal gynaecologist after a tricky but successful birth. Robert didn’t have much money and there was neither land nor house, but there was something and he was a kind fellow, if hardly the life and soul of the party. He worked in a merchant bank and had the supreme merit, certainly where the Grand Duchess was concerned, of being slightly deaf. Unfortunately, just as he was coming to the boil Dagmar fluffed it, Robert interpreting her nervous giggle as a lack of interest in his hinted-at proposal, and it was not repeated. By the end of that summer he was happily engaged to the daughter of a Colonel in the Irish Guards. There would be no other opportunities at that level.

Even so, everyone was a little taken aback to read in the gossip columns in the late autumn of 1970 that she was engaged to William Holman, the only child of an aggressive parvenu from Virginia Water. When I knew him William was about to be ‘something in the City,’ an all-purpose phrase beloved of our mothers. He had been a hanger-on at some of the dances in our year, wearing and saying inappropriate, desperate things, according to our youthful, shallow, snobbish yard-sticks, and was not taken seriously by anyone. I suppose, looking back, he was quite clever and perhaps he did seem to be going somewhere. It just wasn’t evident to us that it was somewhere very nice. I missed the wedding. I think I had double booked it with a weekend in Toulouse. But apparently it was perfectly all right, if a bit rushed. They were married in an Orthodox church in Bayswater and the reception was held at the Hyde Park Hotel. The groom’s parents looked ecstatic and the bride’s were at least resigned. In the last analysis Princess Dagmar of Moravia was married, and to a man who could pay the bill for dinner and manage something more than a basement flat. As the Grand Duchess might have remarked, and probably did in the privacy of her bathroom, it was better than nothing. She was also presumably aware that there were other factors at work, rendering the ceremony welcome. Six months later the Princess was delivered of a son, a healthy boy and not noticeably premature.

For obvious reasons I didn’t see much of Dagmar after the Portuguese holiday, and once I’d missed her wedding we lost touch completely. I didn’t like William and he couldn’t see the point of me, so there was not much to build on. To be fair, he did do well, better than I had anticipated, eventually making chairman of some investment trust, and being rewarded with both millions and a knighthood from John Major. When I read about him in the papers, or glimpsed him across the room at some function, I was amused to note that he had become a convincing version of what he had hankered for all those years ago, with suits made by some award-worthy cutter behind the Burlington Arcade and all the loudly mouthed prejudices to match. Someone told me he hunted now and was even a good shot, which made me rather jealous. It never ceases to amaze me the way real money continues to ape the habits and pastimes of the old upper class, in a day when they could afford to call a different tune. This was not widely true during the Seventies, but once Mrs Thatcher was on the throne, secret longings for gentility resurfaced in many a breast. Before long, every City trader exchanged his red braces for a Barbour, and was shooting, fishing and stalking like a middle-European nobleman, while the clubs in St James’s, once desperate for new applicants, had pleasure in re-establishing their waiting lists and toughening again the criteria for membership.

One sign of all this that the sociologists seem to have missed was that from the Eighties onwards, the upper middle and upper classes resumed a different daily costume from those beneath them in the ancient pecking order, which was definitely a return to the way things used to be. A unique phenomenon of the 1960s was that we all dressed in the new, outlandish modes, quite irrespective of background, perhaps the only time in the last thousand years when most of the nation’s youth wore versions of the same costume, though it seems a pity we should choose as our badge of unity those terrible hipsters and kipper ties and velvet suits and bomber jackets and all the other horrors on display. Hideous as the fashions were, nobody was immune. The Queen’s skirts leaped above her knee and, at the Prince of Wales’s inauguration at Carnarvon Castle, Lord Snowdon appeared in what looked like the costume of a flightdeck steward on a Polish airline. But by the 1980s the toffs were tired of this unsuitable disguise. They wanted to look like themselves again, and gradually first Hackett’s and later Oliver Brown and all those others who recognised this secret longing and aspired to supply it, appeared in the high street. Suddenly posh suits were once more of a recognisably different cloth and cut, while country clothes, tweeds and cords and all the rest of that tested uniform, pulled themselves from the dusty wardrobes where they had lain unloved since the 1950s. The toffs were visually different again, a tribe to be known once more by their markings, and it made them happy to be so.

That said, for those of us who witnessed what seemed then to be the end of everything, the 1970s had first to be negotiated before matters would start to improve. Much that was teetering came crashing down and there were dark days to be gone through. It seems strange to write it now, when all is changed, but to us, then, Communism was here to stay. In fact, most of us privately, if silently, believed that world Communism would eventually be the order of the day and we set about enjoying ourselves with no expectation of a long future for our way of life, dancing to the band on the increasingly steep deck of the Titanic. The Sixties had come and gone by that stage, with their promises of free love and hair-worn flowers, but these attractive notions did not, in the event, compose the legacy of that troubled era. The trail that was left was not of peace and rose buds, but of social breakdown, and certainly some people who lost their currency value in those bleak years, never regained it.

So it wasn’t a complete surprise when I dialled Dagmar’s number and asked for the Princess, to be told that ‘Lady Holman’ was in the drawing room. I had prepared what I intended to say. My excuse was a charity ball that I’d been given to chair for Eastern European refugees. Some years before I’d written a moderately successful novel set principally in post-war Romania, which had inevitably taken me into this territory, and I was quite interested by what was happening in that stormy land. At last a voice came on the line. ‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Is it really you?’ She was still the diffident Dagmar of old, but somehow she sounded even more meek. I explained about the cause. ‘I’m supposed to come up with some ideas for the committee and I immediately thought of you.’

‘Why?’

‘Wouldn’t a Balkan princess look rather relevant? So far, all I’ve got is two actors from a soap opera, a TV chef whom no one’s heard of and a bunch of dowagers from Onslow Gardens.’

She hesitated. ‘I don’t really use that name now.’ There was a sorrow in her voice, though whether it was a momentary stab of nostalgia or a general critique of her present existence I could not, of course, tell.